Close Quarters

by Thomas Wood

  “That’s fine,” started Mike, as Georges was bundled up in his father’s arms lovingly. “But make sure you come back down here when the bombers make the return journey. They could drop their spares anywhere. I’d hate for it to be on your home.”

  “Thank you,” Jules breathed, as he stepped from the trench and retreated down the garden, carrying his precious cargo.

  A few seconds passed, before Christopher, the nervous-looking agent, spoke.

  “Do you really think they would bomb us on their way home?”

  “They wouldn’t do it intentionally,” I responded, looking to Mike. “But they have to get rid of all their ordnance if they want to make it home. They can’t afford to waste precious fuel like that.”

  “It is better that those two are safe and come back down here,” Mike confirmed, as Christopher began shuffling around on his perch.

  “I’m going to go and watch what’s happening,” I announced, standing up. “Anyone else?”

  “W-what do you mean, watch?” asked Christopher.

  Mike dusted himself down, “We can see from up here into Sochaux, we can work out where they’re targeting.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” chimed in Andrew, the other newcomer to our fold.

  “Because we’re working on a plan. Come on, we’ll explain.”

  Mike and I left first, not really caring if the other two were to come with us, but they did, more to save face than out of a genuine desire to watch the destruction of a French town.

  The sound of exploding bombs filled the sky almost immediately, nothing more than dull thuds from where we stood, but still a faint tremor vibrating through the landscape. The horizon was awash with oranges and dull glows, as incendiaries fell onto the town below and lit it up as if it was daylight.

  So prominent were the lights that I could see the outline of silhouetted buildings as they defiantly stood tall to the falling bombs.

  Within minutes, the whole horizon was burning a deep orange, as if the sun was rising earlier than planned, as the whole town of Sochaux was ablaze.

  “How can anyone survive such an awful thing?” muttered Christopher, dejected.

  “Because they have to,” replied Mike, forcefully, perhaps slightly annoyed that a man who had not experienced the war to date was making such a comment.

  “And you say you have a plan for this place?” Andrew asked, growing in confidence as that of his comrade waned significantly.

  “Yes, you tell them, Mike.”

  He nodded, proud that he was going to be the one to deliver the good news, puffing his chest out as he spoke.

  “The target down there isn’t the civilian population, that’s what some of them might think, but that is certainly not the case. Nor is the target even the Germans that are stationed there, if they were the target then our bombers would only ever bomb the coastlines…a shorter journey, it means less risk,” he said, looking at the confused faces that stared at him.

  “The targets are the factories. Tonight, my guess would be the automobile plant that is down there. That seems to be the only one that they haven’t tried yet. But, as you can probably see, they can’t get close, and they’re more likely to kill civilians than the machines.”

  “So, what is your plan?” Christopher asked, pushing his spectacles up his nose, never taking his eyes away from the glowing horizon.

  “Our plan,” Mike continued, “is to get inside the factory ourselves. Plant explosives on the most important machinery and get out. I can guarantee that after tonight all those machines will be back in working order by the end of the week. If we can get up close to them, we can make sure they’re irreparable.”

  Neither of the two faces looked all that keen, as the orange reflected on their faces as the fires began to make ground in the town.

  “A lot of people will die tonight. Through no fault of their own. They have to live there so that they can feed their families, but instead they will be killed by the bombs of the people meant to be liberating them. We could save a lot of lives if we could pull this off. But we would need your help. We wouldn’t be able to do this alone.”

  They both shuffled around nervously, thinking over both the morality of the issue as well as their own desire for self-preservation. I looked to Andrew, who came across to me as the likelier of the two to concede that we were right. But I got nothing in response.

  A few more minutes passed by in which we were forced to watch the burning inferno that had started to rage, with the ongoing rumble of falling bombs. No one spoke, until the barrage was almost totally over.

  Christopher, as wary and nervous as ever, was the only one to speak.

  “Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work. I am of course sorry for the people down there, but we are too precious. We could do a lot more to end their war if we just stay alive. If we try and do what you suggest, there is no way we would survive.”

  8

  I knew that hell awaited us.

  It wasn’t a sense of happiness that I was drawing from my presence in the bombed-out remnants of Clerval, but a sense of dampened pride was apparent that I was able to get there, so that I could help.

  We had left early, shortly after the all-clear had wailed out across the mourning landscape, as everyone had felt every single ground tremor and quake as if it had rocked their morale as much as it had their physical world.

  My legs ached as they continued to pedal the ancient bicycle that had been sourced for us, towards the small village on the outskirts of Sochaux. For some unknown reason it had seemed more pertinent to allow Andrew and Christopher an easier journey, taking the newer, better oiled two-wheeled vehicles, and Mike and I the older variants.

  Andrew rode straight-backed and confident, albeit in a silence that was more than a little curious. Christopher on the other hand, wobbled about all over the place as he began gesticulating, almost forgetting that he was relying on his own balance to prevent himself from colliding with the ground.

  “Remind me, would you, of why it is that we are heading towards this? I see no reason to involve ourselves in such matters. Surely the locals are able to sort out this kind of mess themselves.”

  I did not understand why, but neither of our two new comrades had wanted to head towards the destruction. In fact, it seemed as if they had both expected to have avoided the war altogether out here, only being called upon to pick up messages and provide weapons to cooped up resistors.

  “How can any of the locals sort out that kind of mess?” Mike said, pointing towards a large cloud of depression that hung over the town like a demented star of Bethlehem. “There are no locals left.”

  There was a pause, that was crying out to be filled.

  “We are the locals, now,” I muttered, cycling as close as I dared to the man to make sure that he heard me. I was determined to make it the last time that he asked such a question of us.

  Cycling towards the bombed-out towns and villages of Eastern France was not something that Mike or I had been trained to do, but it was something we felt compelled to do.

  “We have to help,” Mike stuttered, his throat catching on something as he did so. “It is not something that we can just think about, we have to do it.”

  I noticed both of the newcomers looking to us, trying to read the emotions that were stained onto our faces. Similarly, Mike and I locked eyes with one another, as the connection that we shared deepened dramatically.

  Tears had rushed to his eyes and, for a brief moment, he was standing before me, in his royal blue uniform, the new stripes on his sleeve denoting his freshly achieved rank, a Flying Officer.

  The uniform, as everything else around us, was covered in a grey dust, as if the ash from a nearby volcano had erupted and spewed its contents all around us.

  I pictured the bodies that were recovered from under several feet of rubble, most of them not even perishing as a result of the impact of a falling bomb, but because of a lack of oxygen. It was something that had always stuck with Mik
e, in particular.

  Neither of us had wanted to help especially, we were quite able to have made some sort of suitable excuse to return back to our billets just outside of our airfield, but something had compelled us both to do it.

  Wave after wave of enemy bomber had appeared overhead, a new, fresh drone coming every couple of minutes, as the fires from incendiaries took hold to guide the rest of the force in.

  Entire streets had been flattened, schools and cinemas destroyed without prejudice. Homes lay ruined, in nothing more than piles of rubble, bodies strewn everywhere, with some sitting atop a pile of bricks that had once been a marital abode, a child—

  I blocked out the nightmares that inevitably tried to come to the fore, the fear that if I was to think about it too much during my waking hours, then it would flow over into my unconscious times, when the screaming and cursing in a language foreign in this land could not be controlled.

  Instead, I focused on what had been important to me on that night. There had been people there almost immediately, people there who were willing to venture out when it was still unsafe to do so, to make sure that the corpses of my loved ones were retrieved as soon as possible. There had been people there to help, and I needed to repay that favour, even if it was to people who had no knowledge of what had happened to me back in London.

  Shortly after our correction of Christopher’s mindset, we began to see the first victims of the previous night. Abandoning our bicycles, we started to walk the last half a mile or so to the epicentre of the destruction, offering only sympathetic looks to those people who were able to walk away from the devastation. It was the people unable to do so that needed our assistance the most.

  People were walking around in a daze, quite as if they had recently been woken from some sort of hibernation that was taking its time to subside. Every person who staggered around the town did so as if they had been given new limbs, unsteadily stumbling like a newborn calf as it found its feet.

  Some had managed to muster up a change of clothes, others had not. A few wore nothing more than their undergarments of nightwear, ripped and torn as they looked to the sky, awaiting a final flurry of bombs to finish off the job. One or two looked as if they were even praying for it to happen. I could not blame them in the slightest, they had lost everything but their lives and, in many ways, that made it even worse.

  A man, dressed in the crisp black uniform of the police, stepped towards us, as he had done so on many a previous occasion. He was a good man, so we thought, a helpful and friendly fellow who had always been appreciative of our efforts to assist in any way that we could. Although, we were wary about how much he was working with the authorities, and so maintained the strictest cover possible in his presence.

  “Ah, Michel, Jean. It is good to see you both here, with help also, I see.”

  “Oui, Christophe et André,” I said, as the two gripped the man’s hand and shook it firmly.

  “Can you believe that not a single bomb hit any of the factories around here? Almost all fell onto populated streets. A few, mercifully, landed in the fields around but there has been a great loss of life.”

  “I’m sorry that we could not be here sooner,” I said, looking around at the recovery operation already underway.

  “No matter, you are here now. That is more than we can say for some.”

  It was remarks such as this that had led to discussions between Mike and me about whether we could ask him for his help in harassing the Germans, and it was something that would no doubt come up again now that he had said it.

  “Can I trust you to show your friends what to do?”

  “Of course, Philippe.”

  “Merci.”

  There was a noticeable increase in the crunch underfoot as we walked, chunks of debris and shrapnel unavoidable and threatening to roll an ankle or two as we stumbled along. It was impossible to look at what it was we were stepping on, as the unfathomable scale of desperation all around was enough to draw anyone’s unrestricted attention.

  Huge chunks of walls were missing, where deadly debris had become a weapon, catapulting itself into the nearest solid structure that it could find.

  Houses were nothing more than a criss-cross of wooden beams and bricks, some retaining a vague structure that could be seen to have been a building once upon a time, while others were merely a mound, nothing but a pile of red brick and mortar.

  I tripped on something, as I took in the ragged curtains that hung at glassless windows and realised that a hand had reached out to me and gripped my ankle. I sucked in a sharp breath of air, as I realised that the hand, itself covered in a faint layer of dust, was attached to a body, that had been covered with a blanket, but otherwise left where it had been found.

  A small boy, no older than six or seven years of age, ran around, his eyes glued to the ground, leaping every now and then onto something that only he could see. As he scarpered across our feet, I noticed something moving in amongst the brick, a pair of large beady eyes keeping watch on his predator.

  The boy continued to chase and provoke the rabbit from its various hiding places, trying to clamp it in his grasp to bring a faint ray of hope to his family.

  “Over here, Jean,” I felt Mike breathe towards me, as the sobs of a desperate woman began to reach my ears.

  She was kneeling on the floor looking through a suitcase of clothes and meagre possessions, her tears falling into the fabric of socks and skirts that could only have been hers. The clothes on her own back were ripped and torn, scorched in some places, and had she been of the right frame of mind, I was certain that she would have been encompassed by quite a chill.

  She was muttering something under her breath, as beads of blood joined the mix of tears falling onto her possessions. Her face a mess of blood and dirt, she continued to scrabble around in the case, jumping as Mike gently touched her on the shoulder.

  She looked at him, her eyes full of terror, speaking of a fear that her sanity would never be intact again.

  “My keys,” she muttered, repeating herself, “my keys. To my home. I cannot find them. I cannot find them.”

  “Here,” Mike spoke softly, moving her hands away from the suitcase and encompassing her in an embrace. “We can help.”

  I began rummaging through her possessions, as she sobbed into Mike’s shoulder uncontrollably. I moved what little possessions she had around, until I found what she had been looking for.

  “Got it.”

  “Which house is yours, Madame? We can help you get your things.”

  She broke off the embrace with Mike, her body shaking as if possessed by a demon. She pointed, a tremulous, broken finger, before throwing herself back into Mike’s arms.

  I followed her instruction to the other side of the road.

  “Mike,” I stated, getting his attention and angling my head so that he would look in the direction that the woman had pointed. There was nothing there, apart from the back wall of a building that seemed to sway precariously in the early morning air.

  The front of the house was non-existent, many of the materials used to build the house having disappeared into a crater somewhere below the house. It had been a direct hit. The front door was somewhere in amongst the pile of rubble, a small fire flickering away beneath the surface somehow.

  “Right then. Let’s see if we can get someone to patch you up first, shall we? We can come back later and sort out your house.”

  Mike guided her down the road, her head buried in his shoulder as they walked, the sobs not subsiding in the slightest as they retreated.

  I looked towards Christopher and Andrew, who were dumbfounded, the same look on their faces that I had possessed on that night in London where everything had been ripped from me.

  “Do something,” I growled at them. “Help someone.”

  There were plenty of people for them to help and instantly Andrew sprang into action, his tall muscly frame standing taller and prouder than some of the remaining buildings.

 
Christopher, on the other hand, stood stock still, staring at a lifeless body of a young girl, dried blood having set around her chin as she had given up her final breath.

  At first, I felt anger, which soon morphed into an overwhelming guilt, a deep sympathy for the man, as he stood without emotion over the body of the girl. It was not hard for me to place myself in his shoes.

  I tripped and fell over the bricks as I staggered towards him, sending an avalanche of debris onto the street below.

  I whipped my coat off and threw it over the girl. As if it had been holding him in some sort of trance, the unwavering stare of the girl that had encapsulated him vanished, and he stared at me with a hollow, harrowing look of a man more broken than the skeleton of the village that was left.

  I knew it then, but did not need to say, but Christopher would now be one of the strongest proponents of our plan. Anything to stop the bombs from falling on children like that.

  9

  It was taking some getting used to, being back in the comfort of a warm home, with no threatening dust to stick at the back of one’s throat. Every limb groaned as I pushed my back into the chair, wanting to take the strain off every part of my body possible. The burning pain in my limbs was constant, although not too debilitating, but the hours of crouching as I pulled bodies from devastated homes had really taken its toll on my exhausted body.

  We had been out for a number of hours, so long that I had stopped keeping track, but I could barely remember waking up or approaching the bombed-out town, it had seemed so long ago. The only reason that we had stopped in our attempts was because we had been told to do so by the police, believing that everyone that could have been saved had been by then, anyone else who was still trapped under the rubble was likely to have perished already.

  All four of us had scoffed down some hastily prepared food, some of which was not cooked through, which only added to the pains of my body. But now, I was able to sit down, in the comfort of an upholstered chair, that was positioned so that the occupant could glance out of the window, down the garden and look down on the spectacular sight of Clerval, now all the more spectacular for the wrong reasons.