by Nevil Shute
To Charles Simon, in that tense moment, came the realization of what he had to do. This was an English raid, this violent gangster-like affray. This was his chance. With sudden, utter clarity it came to him that this was the turning-point of his whole life, and he must take the turning.
He did not produce his card, but turned out letters, bills, receipts, all the contents of his pockets on the table before him as if he searched desperately, but the card stayed in his hip pocket. The man with the gun came to the table and paused, merciless, thrusting his gun forward.
Charles Simon raised his head, and said in a low tone, in English: “I seem to have lost my card. You’d better arrest me and take me to your officer.”
The man said: “Are you English?”
Simon said: “Don’t be a fool. Arrest me, and take me outside.”
The man lunged forward, thrusting the barrel of the Tommy-gun against his chest. “Outside, you!” he said in French. “Get up!” He swung round to the man at the door. “Here’s one, Ben,” he said in English. “Take him outside, and keep him till I come.”
Simon walked the length of the room, most conscious of the guns directed at him. Outside the night was full of rifle fire; from the small docks the red glow of a fire was growing bright, the street seemed full of British soldiers, heavily armed, purposeful, intent. Overhead there was the noise of many aeroplanes, and the dull thunder of their bombs upon the roads that led into the town mingled with the rumble and crash of demolitions at the docks. The place was rapidly becoming an inferno.
The man Ben stood Simon up against the wall outside the door, covering him with his gun. The tension, in the half-light of the growing fires, was intense. It was a night of murder unprovoked, of arson and rapine: a night of war.
Simon said to his guard: “Look, I’m an Englishman. You must take me to your officer.”
The man thrust his face up close. “How do I know you’re not a mucking Jerry?”
“If I was one I couldn’t hurt you,” Simon said. “You’ve got all Woolwich Arsenal to back you up. I tell you, I am English. You’ve got to take me back with you; they’ll want to question me.”
His guard was a sharp, intelligent young man, picked and trained for this work. The sergeant came out with the other three men; in a few moments Simon was at a mustering point, a busmen’s shelter on the front. There was a subaltern there, a dark figure in battle-dress indistinguishable from the rest but that he carried no gun. The sergeant reported his prisoner in terse, short sentences; the officer flashed a shaded torch on Simon.
“You are a British citizen?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been working in France.”
“What at?”
“Concrete construction work. Bridges, aerodrome buildings and runways, things of that sort. I came here for a job upon the docks.”
“What is your Company?”
Simon told him.
The subaltern said: “I am taking you to England as a prisoner. Do you come with us willingly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Stand over there.”
Simon said: “May I write a letter and post it?”
The torch flashed into his face again; he felt suspicion rising up against him in the darkness. “What sort of letter? Who to?”
“I want to write to the head of my firm. It’s just possible that you may want me to come back here when you’ve heard what I have to say. I want to write to the firm and say that I have gone for a week’s holiday to the south of France, to see my mother in the Vichy territory.”
There was a short silence. The officer made up his mind with a quick decision that Simon could not but admire. “You may write a letter like that,” he said. “Have you got paper and an envelope?”
“Not here.”
The subaltern called one of the men, a sharp, keen-faced lad, and gave Simon over to him. The boy took him to an empty, deserted café, where they found stationery behind the bar, and there Simon wrote his letter while the guard made a light for him to write by with his torch and kept him covered with a heavy black revolver.
Simon said:
Dear Monsieur,
It is with pleasure that I can inform you that the Commandant in Charge has been so kind as to grant me a permit to visit my mother, who as you know lives in the neighbourhood of Lyons. It is now nearly a year since I saw her, and as this permit to pass into the Vichy territory is for ten days only from to-day I am leaving at once for Lyons, and trust that I may be allowed this short vacation. I will write particulars of the contracts that I have to-day negotiated from there; in the meantime we should keep up deliveries of the fifty tons a week to Tréport provisionally demanded.
Accept, dear monsieur, the assurance of my deepest respect.
Charles Simon.
The guard took the letter from him and read it slowly, now and then asking the meaning of a word. He passed it and Simon sealed the envelope; then they went together through the firelit darkness to the Bureau de Poste. He slipped his letter in the box. A naval officer in blue pressed by them; he wore a white scarf around his neck and a revolver in a belt at his waist. In his hand he carried a tin bedroom utensil, white-enamelled. Painted on it roughly was A PRESENT FROM TRÉPORT.
Simon and his guard stopped and turned to watch. The lieutenant went to the counter where the scared postmaster was handing over a sack of registered mail to a couple of desperate-looking thugs in battle-dress. The officer said, in bad French:
“Pardon, monsieur. I have a parcel to despatch.” He slammed the enamelware down upon the mahogany slab and pulled the revolver from his belt. “I will pay the postage, and you will put it in the mail.”
The man looked at it uncertainly, and then at the revolver, now pointing at his belly. “For the mail?” he said.
“For the mail,” said the naval officer. “Be quick; we have not long to waste. How much is it?”
The postmaster put it on the scales, then looked at the label tied to the handle. Then he laughed. “Adolf Hitler, Bierhalle, Munich,” he said. “Seventeen francs, monsieur.”
The officer threw down half a crown. “English money,” he said. “Is that all right?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “I will keep it as a souvenir.” Under the levelled guns he stamped the label and dropped the pot into a mail-bag.
Simon and his guard left the Post Office and hurried back to the mustering-point through rose-coloured, firelit streets. The fires had got firm hold upon the town, especially in the region of the docks. From somewhere in the outer darkness machine-guns were firing down the lit streets, enfilading them; the range was great and the fire scattered and inaccurate. Outside the town, again, the noise of battle had grown; there was more happening now on the outer roads than bombs from aeroplanes. It was quite clear to Simon as they hurried to the sea-front that unless the British meant to hold the town, it was time to go.
He landed in England in the earliest light of dawn, having crossed the Channel in pitch darkness in a strange, small boat with fifty other men. There were seven wounded in the boat with him, lying upon the bare deck, uncomplaining; one died in the middle of the night. In that boat there were no other prisoners, but he had reason to believe that ten or twelve Germans and civilian French crossed in another boat. It occurred to him that he was being segregated.
They landed in a muddy, tidal creek between fields. He never learned where it was. There was a wooden jetty and a few brown corrugated iron sheds; it might have been a little yacht-yard in peace-time, or something of that sort. The men with him stretched stiff, tired limbs, unloaded Tommy-guns and pistols, and passed soldiers’ jokes about ham and eggs and a good kip.
They landed at the pier and the men formed up in a rough order and were marched away towards a wood; there seemed to be a camp among the trees. Simon was ordered by the subaltern to wait; he was taken into a little hut by a guard, and stayed there till a small lorry with a canvas-covered back drove up.
He rode in this for half an
hour with the subaltern to a large military camp. Here he was shown into an office, where he was interrogated shortly by a major. They were kind enough to him, and after ten minutes’ questioning took him to a room and offered him a bath and a shave. Then he had breakfast, English breakfast that he remembered from his schooldays, where you were expected to eat porridge as well as meat or fish, and then very thick toast, and the orange conserve that they called marmalade. Already he was feeling that his English was a little rusty.
In fact, it was. It was grammatically correct and the accent was not very noticeable, but his schoolboy slang called attention to his speech and then you noticed his accent. It is not natural to hear a man of thirty-five in serious conversation use the word “topping” to express appreciation of the treatment that he had received, nor does he generally refer to his food as “tuck.” Charles did both because his English was like that, and then you noticed him and wondered who he was.
They put him in a car again after breakfast, and by noon he was disembarked at a large, rather dilapidated country house, full of soldiers. It was not very far from London, but Charles had no means of knowing that; he never learned where it was. And here he came before a major in the British Army and a capitaine of the Free French, and he talked to them freely for three hours.
In the middle of the afternoon the major said: “I’m going to call a halt for to-day, Mr. Simon, and have some of this transcribed. I may want to have another talk with you to-morrow.”
Simon said: “Right-oh, sir. I’ll stay here, shall I?”
The British officer said gravely: “It would be very kind of you if you would stay with us to-night. We can make you comfortable.” In fact, Simon was as much a prisoner as if he had been German, but he did not care to realize it. He was too happy to be back in England.
“I’d like that ever so much,” he said.
The major smiled slightly. “Tell me, Mr. Simon,” he said. “Have you got any relatives or friends in England?”
Charles said: “Not very many. There are my wife’s people, of course...” He had told them about her. “But I don’t much want them to know that I’m over here.”
“Of course not,” said the other easily. “Whom do you know best — whom would you go and stay with when you leave here?” He smiled with disarming frankness. “You see, you’ve come to England rather — unconventionally. We may have to help you to make up a story to tell.”
Charles laughed. “I would like to see the Beak,” he said. “He was my housemaster at Shrewsbury. I think I’d go and stay with him for a bit, at the school.”
The major asked: “What’s his proper name?”
“Mr. Scarlett. He’s retired from the House, but he lives just opposite the cricket-ground.”
The major handed him over to a subaltern, who took him and gave him tea in the mess. Charles was immensely pleased. He had never before had a meal in a real mess, with officers just like grown-up versions of the boys that he had been at school with. It was all very, very good.
The mess waiter was just bringing him his second cup of English tea when, two hundred miles to the north, a camouflaged army car drew up before the little house opposite the cricket-pitch. Three minutes later a young officer was explaining his errand to a white-haired old gentleman.
The old man said: “Oh, dear me, yes. I remember Charles Simon very well. He was a good oar, a very good oar; if he had gone up to the Varsity he might have done very well. Not the Blue, you know, but I think he would have got into the College Eight.” The young officer listened patiently; his job was to listen. “He rowed three in my First Eight in 1923, the year that we made three bumps and finished up third boat on the river. It was a good year, that.”
Mr. Scarlett paused thoughtfully. “He was French, you know, but a nice boy all the same.”
The subaltern said: “Would you know him again?”
“Know him again? Whatever do you mean? Of course I’d know him again! Besides, he came to see me here in this very room only nine years ago, after that unfortunate business with his wife.”
The subaltern said: “He’s over here now, sir. I understand that he is in confinement.”
The old man looked at the boy searchingly over his spectacles. “What for?”
“I don’t know. I had to tell you that we want you to come down to London to identify him.”
“When?”
“To-night, sir. Right away.”
Charles Simon had a game of billiards with his companion, and he had several glasses of English gin and bitters, and he had dinner in the mess and talked to the colonel about France, and he listened to the nine o’clock news with the officers, and he listened to them talking about the war. He was staggered at their nonchalant assumption that they were going to win the war. It was obvious that their country was being terribly battered; he had driven that morning through one blitzed city that he fancied was Southampton, and the desolation of it, and the stillness, had seemed to him to be the hall-mark of defeat. In dumb amazement he listened to the officers discussing what should be done with Germany when the war was over; the words “if we win the bloody thing” passed as a joke. It was an eye-opener to Charles.
About ten o’clock there was a raid warning, and most of the officers went out to their duties. His guide stayed with Charles Simon. “We don’t sleep on the top floor in a raid,” he said. “But you’ll be all right — you’re on the first floor. There’s a shelter if you’d like to go down there.”
He said: “Are you going?”
The other said: “Not unless they start to drop stuff round about. We all used to go at first, but we don’t now. I’d go to bed, if I were you. I’ll call you if it gets hot.”
“I think I will.”
He went upstairs to bed, and by the light of a candle got into the pyjamas they had lent him. He lay awake for a long time, tired though he was, listening to the drone of German bombers passing overhead, the distant concussion of the bombs, and the sharp crack of distant gunfire. And as he lay, a wonderful idea formed in his mind. He was a British subject, an Englishman for all his long years in a foreign country. He had been at a good English school. If he played his cards right he might become a British officer like all these other officers, and be made one of them, with military duties and a khaki tunic with patch pockets and a beautiful Sam Browne belt, deep brown and polished, with a revolver holster buckled on to it. And with that uniform he felt there would come peace of mind, the calm assurance of the future unaccountably possessed by these young men.
Presently, dead tired, he fell asleep.
He had breakfast in the mess next morning with his guide, and at about ten o’clock he was taken back into the office where he had been interrogated on the previous day. The British major was there alone; he got up as Charles came in, unobtrusively pressing a bell button on his desk.
“‘Morning, Mr. Simon,” he said cheerfully. “Sleep all right? Raid didn’t keep you awake? That’s grand.”
Behind Charles the door opened, and an old man came in. Charles Simon turned and stared. “Mr. Scarlett!” he said. “I say — whatever brought you here, sir?”
The old man said: “The soldiers brought me here. Well, Simon, been getting into trouble? What have you been up to?”
“I’ve not been up to anything, sir.” He spoke as a small boy.
“Well, what have they got you here for? You’re under arrest, aren’t you?”
The major interposed. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” he said. “Mr. Simon is not under arrest. But he arrived in this country in a peculiar way, and we had to get a positive identity for him. You know him well, I take it?”
“I was his housemaster for four years,” the old man said. “If that’s not knowing him well I’d like to know what is.”
There was little more to be said. Simon was allowed a quarter of an hour with his old housemaster; then the old gentleman was politely put into an army car and taken back to London to his club, slightly bewildered at the
rapid, curtailed meeting. Simon was taken back into the major’s office, but this time there was a brigadier with him, a smartly dressed officer with red staff tabs, with greyish hair and china-blue eyes. That was the first time Simon met McNeil.
For half an hour they went over his information of the previous day. He had told them a good deal about the aerodromes at Caen and other places, and about the coast defences around Calais, so far as he had knowledge of them from the concrete contracts. To-day they wanted to pursue the matter further. They wanted information about Lorient in Brittany.
He wrinkled his brows. “Yes,” he said. “There is a good deal of cement going there. And steel reinforcement, although we don’t handle that.”
“How much cement a week?”
“Oh, a good deal. Two hundred tons a week, I dare say, sir.”
“What do they want with all that in a little place like Lorient?”
Simon said: “I really couldn’t tell you. You see, most of our Brittany contracts pass through our sub-office in Brest. We have an agent there who takes the orders and passes them to us in bulk at Corbeil. We only know the destination of the trucks.”
The brigadier leaned forward. “I can tell you what that cement is used for, Mr. Simon. Would you like to know?”
Charles stared at him.
“The Germans are building shelters for their U-boats operating from Lorient. Did you know that?”
He shook his head. “I knew that they had U-boats there. But — shelters?”
“Bomb-proof, ferro-concrete shelters over the submarine docks,” said the brigadier. “That’s what they’re doing there. They plan to make those docks completely safe from our attacks by air. Then with their submarines they plan to close the English Channel to our shipping — and they may do it, too. It’s really rather serious.”
