Return to the Field

by Alexander Fullerton

  Not a happy thought. More than anything, because of Ben; exactly as in Lise’s case it would have been because of Noally. Otherwise the fear was less of whether it happened than of how.

  In the exercise yard, Lise had been one of a group just finishing their parading round, Rosie and her two cell-mates – the women who’d stolen Army rations – just arriving. She and Lise had looked at each other with no sign of recognition or mutual interest. That had been June 26, a Monday. One of the less unpleasant wardresses was prepared to confirm dates, days of the week, what the weather was like outside, and so forth. She’d also told them that morning, with apparent relish, that London’s civilian population was being evacuated, as a result of the constant and heavy bombardment by ‘reprisal weapons’. The Allied invasion, she gave them to understand, wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Could be that ‘Hector’ – Marchéval – hadn’t been so wide of the mark about that?

  Every morning she’d been expecting to be called to another session in Rue des Saussaies, and when on the thirtieth she was ordered out she assumed this was what was happening. The summons came earlier than on the last occasion, before the general réveillé; while she was getting her ‘coffee’ and piece of bread she’d heard a few other cell doors slamming, but on her way out with a wardress’s meaty hand on her arm hadn’t thought of others being called out too. Torture was one’s own affair, no one else’s. Emerging into the courtyard, however, she saw that instead of the prison van it was a military truck waiting – tail-flap down, armed soldiers standing around and three women prisoners already on board, perched in a row on one of the side benches. A guard pointed, gestured with his submachine-gun, and another reached from inside to haul her up. One of the three women on the bench she immediately recognized: a girl by name of Maureen Dennison – round-faced, with brown hair like a bird’s nest – who at the age of nineteen or twenty had left on her first deployment when Rosie had been working in Baker Street, earlier in the year. She smiled at her, murmured, ‘Hello, Maureen’, and saw first the start of surprise, then that all three were in chains. Leg irons, shackles on their ankles with a short chain linking them, and handcuffs. The guard pushed Rosie on to the bench facing these three, and crouched to equip her in the same way. Rosie said, in English – the bastards obviously knew they were all SOE, there couldn’t be much to lose – ‘This is really a bit much, isn’t it?’ and a pretty but battered-looking redhead sitting between Maureen and an older woman nodded agreement, told the German haughtily, ‘I should warn you, my good man, I have every intention of writing to my MP!’ He didn’t even know he was being addressed: he was checking Rosie’s cuffs – that they were tight enough, she wouldn’t be able to pull her rather small hands out of them – and now moved to the rear end, to haul Lise up.

  She flopped down, sat expressionlessly watching him fitting her with leg-irons. Commenting in French then with a glance at Rosie, ‘He’s terrified of me. Hands shaking so much he can’t get the key in.’ She asked her, ‘Where have you been, the last few days?’

  ‘Oh – you know. Around.’

  ‘Busy, eh?’

  ‘Madly.’

  ‘It’s a whirl, isn’t it?’

  ‘What I’d like to know—’ the exhausted-looking woman with grey-streaked hair, this was – ‘is where are we being whirled off to now?’

  ‘Yes. In all this finery.’ Maureen jingled her chains. ‘Wouldn’t be Ascot – d’you think?’

  The redhead smiled. ‘Wouldn’t we wow ’em!’

  Laughter: looking at each other, imagining it, and the guards – two inside with them now and two outside, slamming the tail-gate up and bolting it – glancing round at them in surprise. Lise murmured into Rosie’s ear, ‘To be boringly serious, I’d say it might be Germany. Clearing us out before the troops get here?’

  Chapter 21

  At Gare d’Est, they were roughly helped out, Lise murmuring, ‘Guessed right, eh?’ The two guards who’d come with them had lowered the canvas flap at the rear before they’d started, but even travelling blind it had been obvious they’d been heading into and through Paris. The grey-haired woman, who’d told them her name was Edna and that in her pre-SOE life she’d taught French and German at a particularly famous girls’ school, supplemented Lise’s remark with: ‘Destination Fürstenberg, what’s the betting?’

  ‘Fürstenberg?’

  A guard shouted, ‘Silence!’

  ‘Rail terminus for Ravensbrück. Fifty miles north of Berlin.’ Edna looked scornfully at that guard: ‘All right, keep your wool on.’

  Rosie whispered, ‘Careful…’

  ‘What else can they do to us?’

  She thought, They’ll think of something…

  They were an inventive people, in their own spheres of expertise. At Ravensbrück for instance they either worked you until you dropped or killed you out of hand; either way you ended up in the incinerator. One report had come out, from a Dane who’d had the luck to be extricated by the Swedish Red Cross, of a group of eight English-speaking women prisoners who on the morning after their late-night arrival had been taken out to a gravelled yard, made to kneel in pairs – they’d been allowed to hold hands – and shot in the backs of their heads. And you could say they’d had it easy, at that. Compared to the strangulations, bludgeonings, injections of Phenol in the spine, all of which one had heard of. But now, Rosie told herself – getting the hang of the shuffle-step, the constriction and drag of the chain on her ankles – one’s hope had to be to stay alive long enough for liberating forces to arrive.

  OK – fat chance, maybe. Recalling the rhetorical question her interrogator had put to her: ‘Do you really think we’d want people like yourself left here – left anywhere?’

  A new guard had taken over from the Fresnes lot: neither Gestapo nor SS, ordinary soldiers in drab, greenish uniforms; a corporal signed for them and was given the keys to their chains. Two went ahead, clearing the way – the station was quite crowded – then the five women in single file with guards on both sides and the corporal behind. Shuffling, chains clanking and scraping on stone. Steam hissing deafeningly from an engine. Scared, shocked faces of civilians pausing to let the cortege pass by. As if they could read the placard which in Rosie’s grim imagination those in front might have been carrying: EN ROUTE TO SLAUGHTERHOUSE. A railwayman surreptitiously gave them the ‘V’ sign: Rosie smiled at him. Thinking, with the tune suddenly in her head, The last time I’ll see Paris… What a way to leave: and what a shame not to be here to see these savages with their hands up, whining their surrender. It would come, mightn’t even be long in coming, unfortunately one wouldn’t be around to see it. This had to be their destined departure platform now: up ahead the only view she had was of cattle-trucks, one with its doors open, the rest maybe already loaded. So that one awaited this little party. Until this moment she hadn’t thought about it, but she did now: envisaging the kind of journey one had heard about, long-distance transportation in a space designed for forty men or eight horses but into which they’d cram a couple of hundred deportees, usually Jews, in the certain knowledge that a number of them would be dead on arrival.

  You knew the risks, Rosie, nobody pushed you into it.

  Then Ben’s voice, urgent in the night: Pete’s sake, WHY do you bloody have to?

  A female English voice cut in then, pitched high over surrounding noise: ‘Crikey – proper carriage!’

  Daphne – the redhead, who was next-ahead of Lise. Amazingly, it seemed she was right – they were being halted here, opposite what might be the only passenger carriage in the train. Having had her focus mostly on the still open cattle-truck, that dark rectangle through which she’d been steeling herself shortly to file into the truck’s gloomy, cavernous and probably foul-smelling interior, she hadn’t looked to her right, where in any case one guard had been keeping level with her. She did now, though, facing a carriage of the sort that had separate compartments in it and no corridor. And an SS officer up on the step of this neare
st one, watching some activity on the other side of the platform; looking that way over her shoulder Rosie saw a surge of movement, a herd of people flowing by. All women, some clutching children. Long curve of platform, men’s shouts, steam blasting: silent, frightened women thronging past.

  Heading for that cattle-truck, she realised. Suppressing an urge to scream: steadying herself, feeling dizzy and almost staggering: for a second or two she’d seen herself as in that crowd, with a small child’s hand in hers…

  ‘Suzanne!’

  She came to: closed up towards Lise. Thinking that no scream would help unless it was loud enough to reach heaven. Even if it did – who’d hear it? Two of the soldiers were standing by to help them into the train: in the leg-irons it would otherwise have been impossible. Daphne was pushed up first: Lise followed, then it was her own turn. Then Maureen, finally Edna. The seats were wooden, slatted, hard enough for what promised to be a very long journey but a lot better than the floor of a cattle-truck. She wondered vaguely, Why us? Presumably because they were active enemies of the Reich. Adding to that thought: And proud to be. How could one not be? One of the soldiers climbed in after them and pushed through to check that the door on the other side was locked.

  ‘What do we do for a pee – or anything?’

  ‘Perhaps there’ll be stops?’

  ‘Wouldn’t count on it. Even though it is a heck of a long haul.’ You could imagine Edna at a blackboard, chalk in hand. Not looking quite as she did here and now, of course, but with the same glint in those small blue eyes. Smiling at Daphne: ‘One benefit of not being over-fed, eh?’

  Rosie sat beside Lise. ‘Better than it might have been. Favoured-nation treatment?’

  ‘They’d call it Special Category. Anyway, my nation’s France, Suzanne.’

  ‘So’s mine, really. My real name’s Rosie, by the way.’

  ‘Rosie…’

  ‘Rosalie, I was christened.’

  ‘Pretty name… Listen – if it is Ravensbrück we’re going to – have to face this, Rosie.’

  ‘They’ll kill us when we get there. I know.’ It was the fact one did have to face. You could resolve to hang on, grit the teeth, cling to life at all costs, but when the time came you couldn’t argue with a bullet. She told Lise what the Gestapo interrogator had said, and concluded, ‘It must be what they’ve been doing all the time, but in present circumstances they surely would want to sweep us under the carpet – don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He actually said, It’s policy.’

  ‘I was going to say, we have to face that as – well, not at all improbable, but – for instance, with our troops from the west, and the Russians from the east – they might – mend their ways? Depends how they look at it. Get rid of us, as you say, or – well, sort of start trying to ingratiate themselves. Like – you know how some dogs learn to smile – like pretending to be human beings?’ She’d relapsed into French. Her English was good enough but it was still a foreign tongue to her, an effort. Insisting, ‘I think it’s very important some of us should survive, Rosie. If only so there’ll be some who can tell what happened to the ones who don’t.’

  Precisely what the Boches would be determined to prevent, Rosie thought. But there was an interruption at this stage: the SS officer she’d seen earlier – a heavy-set, white-faced creature with a Luger holstered on his belt and what looked very much like a dog-whip in his hand – climbing in with another SS man behind him. A sergeant: a machine-pistol hung loosely in his left hand.

  ‘Attention!’

  Glaring round at them as if he loathed them. Rosie thought he probably did. She certainly loathed him. He began to read out a statement in gutturally accented French, from a typed half-sheet of paper. Rations, if they arrived before the departure of the train, would be distributed. If they did not, a meal would be provided at destination. If time allowed, when the train stopped for other purposes, prisoners would be given an opportunity to alight for ‘natural functions’. Any prisoner attempting to escape would be shot: the escort under his command had orders to open fire even on suspicion of any such attempt. ‘Heil Hitler.’

  He jumped down to the platform, with the sergeant following at his heels. Lise observed: ‘Won’t be doing without his rations, the fat swine… Rosie, listen – on that subject—’

  The subject of survival, getting back to tell the tale: suggesting they should fill in some of the hours that lay ahead of them by telling each other everything that might interest Baker Street. Like ‘Hector’, for instance.

  * * *

  It was about an hour before the train pulled out. Ten a.m., maybe. Nobody had a watch: watches were gaolers’ or arresting officers’ perks. Towards the end of the waiting period two other prisoners were dumped in with them: a comparatively well-dressed French-speaking Belgian woman of about forty and her daughter of about fifteen. They looked too well fed to be anything but collaborators, Rosie thought. Or black-marketeers. They wore no chains or handcuffs; were pushed in by the SS sergeant, and within minutes the train started – as if it might have been waiting just for them. The daughter was obviously terrified, looked as if she’d been crying for a week, sat huddled against her mother. Occasionally they whispered to each other. On arrival the woman had stared around at the SOE prisoners with a look of shock and obvious distaste, then she was taking care not to look at them at all, concentrating rather unnaturally on the view from the window as the train pulled out.

  Lise asked the mother, ‘Are you prisoners, Madame?’

  A sharp, unfriendly glance: ‘Would we be here, if we were not?’

  ‘Perhaps not. But by the look of you, you haven’t been long in Boche hands.’

  ‘I prefer not to discuss it. And my daughter is – unwell – so if you don’t mind—’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  Lise shrugged, met Rosie’s eyes and raised her eyebrows. The train was picking up speed. Edna was telling Daphne, ‘The direct route, I suppose, would be through Reims and Luxembourg. As well as I can visualize the map, that is. Then I suppose Frankfurt and either Hannover or Leipzig. But with the amount of bombing that’s going on – or was going on—’

  ‘Might be diversions.’

  ‘Indeed. Might go a long way round to stay clear of it.’

  ‘Crikey – could take bloody ages!’

  Rosie murmured, ‘Lise…’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I want to say – haven’t had much of a chance until now – I’m desperately sorry about Noally – Alain.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’ She shook her dark head. ‘But—’

  ‘Sooner not talk about it.’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  * * *

  She told Lise later, in the course of swapping information for Baker Street – and having reverted to English, because of the strangers in their midst – ‘Where I went badly wrong was with this François le Guen. I should have told Baker Street the Trevarez operation wasn’t on. Just to let the RAF have a crack at it, if they liked. But le Guen, when the Boches were already taking an interest in him – that was insane, really. How it came about was that Count Jules proposed it – partly for the obvious reasons, the hope of killing Doenitz and company and at least discomforting the U-boat people, and partly to enhance his own standing with communist elements in the Maquis. Baker Street then looked into it, realized it would depend on getting a tip-off well in advance, and asked SIS whether they had any ideas – which was a bit rash, really.’

  ‘Very unusual, surely.’

  ‘One reason was I’d done a job for them, last year, and it had turned out quite well. And I was in line for this deployment.’

  ‘Crafty old Buck!’

  ‘Well… SIS referred the question to their man on the spot, who produced le Guen. It looked like a gift, and we jumped at it. Then when I was there and the complications set in – the ball was rolling by that time, my reaction was to find a way around the problem. Not to pull out. In fact I shou
ld have pulled out. Count Jules even suggested it, in one conversation we had. I didn’t take it seriously; there’s a certain amount of rivalry between him and the other man I mentioned, Lannuzel – who was confident we could make a go of it.’

  ‘So you went ahead.’ Lise nodded. ‘I would have, too.’

  ‘Well – if I’d taken the hint from Count Jules—’

  ‘You’d still be there, organizing parachutages and flirting with your old doctor. But that’s hindsight, Rosie.’

  ‘I did not flirt with him!’ She smiled. ‘Nice old man though he is. Please God, still is. I think he must have got away, all right. Either to the Maquis – who knew him, would have welcomed him I’m sure – or he could have done a bunk through the good offices of his sister Marthe.’

  ‘Who operated an escape line.’

  ‘Safe-house as part of an escape-line. I’m fairly sure she was also connected to the man I told you I saw being arrested. Timo Achard. I’m pretty sure he was hand-in-glove with both the Peucats. Well, I’ve told you all that – a lot of it’s speculation, but there were a lot of wheels within wheels, in that community. Incidentally, Henri Peucat would have taken my Mark III transceiver with him – he knew where I’d hidden it, I’m sure he would. That’s the point, really – he certainly merits “F” Section’s thanks.’

  ‘All right.’ Lise had her eyes shut. ‘I’ll remember. If I have to, which please God I won’t. The important thing’s “Hector”, of course. But the Trevarez business, I really don’t think you should blame yourself for it. I’m sure they wouldn’t. If you had called it off, they’d have said, “Oh, Rosie’s got cold feet.” We’ve all taken chances, haven’t we – wouldn’t have got anywhere if we hadn’t. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t.’