by Nevil Shute
He bent close again. “There was a mutiny,” he said in a low tone. “A mutiny in the German Army, because the Nazis ordered that the troops should sail again for England. And there was mutiny...it is true what I say. A hundred officers and men were shot in Antwerp at the rifle-range on September the 29th. And after that, and gradually, the troops were moved away.”
They turned and resumed their pacing up and down. “The lesson of the ages has been taught again,” the priest said quietly. “No other weapon purges evil from the earth and rids men from their bondage to the powers of darkness. Only the simple elementals can avail against the elemental foe — faith in the Power of God and in the cleansing power of fire.”
The train came shortly after that. They got into a crowded third-class carriage and travelled together to Douarnenez. At the station their ways diverged; before turning into the Hôtel du Commerce Charles stopped his companion.
“What is your name, father?” he enquired.
“Augustine,” said the old man. “Augustine, of the Church of Ste-Hélène.”
In the hotel Charles went up to his room, washed, and went down to the dining-room for a late meal of tunny fish, garnished with onions and potatoes. As he was eating a steam hooter from a factory near by blew a long blast, taken up all over the town by other sirens. A number of people came hurriedly into the hotel from the street.
Charles asked the waitress: “Is that the air-raid warning?”
She said: “It is the same hooter. But that is for the curfew.”
It was half-past eight. “One has a curfew here?” he enquired.
She nodded. “You must not go outside now, in the street. Or, if you have to go, go very carefully in rope-soled shoes and be prepared to run for it. They shoot if they see you, but they do not shoot well.”
Charles said that he was tired and thought that he would stay at home.
He went down to the café after dinner, bought a book, and settled down to read his paper. The patron and his family were there and a few travellers; presently they turned on the radio and tuned it to the British news in French. They heard of fresh advances by the Greeks into Albania and the news of the British entry into Benghazi. That was before we got chased out again.
Presently the patron came over to the table at which Charles was sitting. He was a heavy man of about fifty-five, but still vigorous. He said: “Monsieur is not from these parts?”
Charles shook his head. “This is the first time I have visited Douarnenez. I come from Corbeil, in Seine et Oise.”
The man said: “Then, possibly, monsieur would drink a glass upon the house to celebrate his first visit to Douarnenez?”
Charles was very pleased, and they settled down together with the Pernod. Presently he told the innkeeper that he had travelled from Quimper with a priest called Father Augustine.
The man said: “So, he has arrived?” His face grew black. “The father told monsieur, perhaps, the reason for the vacancy?”
Charles said gently: “Not in detail. I know that you have had great trouble here, monsieur.”
“And there will be more.” There was a short, grim pause.
“I will tell you about that,” the man said presently. “In Seine et Oise, from all I hear, you are great friends with the Germans, but it is not so here. In August thirty people of this town were shot — thirty, in two batches, in one day. Two cousins of my own and my wife’s brother. What do you think of that?” He bent towards Charles, trembling with anger.
The designer said: “It is terrible.”
“One day, presently, when they are weak and beaten, we shall get at them with axes and with billhooks,” the innkeeper said.
He drew back. “I was telling you. Our children are not very well in hand,” he said. “It is understandable, that. There was a boy of nine — a little boy, monsieur — a bad boy whose father is at Toulon with the fleet. A bad boy, monsieur — but a child still, you will understand. It was his way to go out in the dark night in the curfew and pick up the horse droppings in the street. Then he would creep up in the darkness to a sentry and fling what he had collected in the German’s face and run. Many times he did that.”
Charles nodded. It was not a very edifying tale.
The man said: “One night, as he ran, there was another sentry in the way with a fixed bayonet. He lunged at little Jules as he came running past, monsieur, and he ran him through the chest beneath the left shoulder. Then the two sentries together had to pull his little body off the bayonet. Then, one took each arm and they walked him between them towards German headquarters in the market-place. All the way, monsieur, he was coughing up his blood. We found it on the pavé in the morning. But he was not dead.”
Charles did not speak.
“Father Zacharias was our curé then,” the innkeeper went on. “He also was out that night, but that was allowed, for he had taken the last Sacrament to a sick woman. There was a moon that night, and in the Rue Jean Marat he met the German soldiers as they dragged the little one along between them, and he stopped them and upbraided them, ordering them to take him into the first house and go to fetch a doctor. All this was heard, monsieur, by Marie Lechanel outside whose house they stopped. There was a great pool of blood there in the morning to prove her story, where they stopped and argued.”
He paused. “They would not listen. The father grew angry, and he said: ‘If you do not release that little one and fetch a doctor for him, the Fire of Heaven shall come down and strike you, and you will perish unshrived in your sin.’ But they would not listen. They said: ‘We are taking him to the officer. He will make an example of this one.’
“And Father Zacharias said: ‘I shall come with you, and if that boy dies you both shall be denounced as murderers.’ So he went with them to headquarters of the Gestapo, monsieur. And in the night, there in a prison, the little boy Jules died, monsieur. And they took Father Zacharias away to Rennes in a motor-car, and three days later he was shot for treason, and for inciting the people to revolt. That was the reason that they gave, and there was not one word of truth in it — at least, not that the Germans knew.”
Charles Simon said gently: “I am desolated, monsieur. This is very, very bad.”
“Aye,” said the man heavily. “It is bad indeed here in Douarnenez.”
A quarter of an hour later, after another glass of Pernod, the innkeeper said: “I was in Brest, monsieur, when the English left. It was incredible to us, you understand — unreal. I had stopped for a glass down in the Port du Commerce at the Abri de la Tempête. There were still English ships in the harbour, and two officers of the Royal Navy came in also to drink a glass. And I went and asked them, monsieur, if it was true that the English were going away and leaving us.
“And one of them said: ‘It is true indeed. It is now three days since you have signed an armistice with the Germans and we must go, for we are going on with this war even if you are not.’ And three women in the café began sobbing, monsieur... That was the start of our bad time.”
Next day Charles reported to the German commandant, and was taken to the cement store, where he worked all morning taking samples from about fifteen tons of cement in stock. He discovered that there was no cement at Morgat, since all distribution took place through Douarnenez; this meant that when he left the fishing port he would be able to go back to Corbeil.
He returned to the hotel for déjeuner and was free for the rest of the day; his samples took twenty-four hours to set hard. He wandered down to the harbour in the afternoon; it was a warm, sunny day of early spring. He was very fond of ships and shipping, and deeply interested in fishing-boats. For a time he stood and watched the sardine-boats and tunnymen from the quay. Presently, with a chance word and a cigarette, he was down in one of the sardine-boats helping a deft-fingered, gruff old man called Bozellec to find the holes in a blue gossamer net.
He stayed there for two hours, and in that time he learned the whole operation of the sardine fleet. A German Raumboote came in from th
e sea, turned the end of the sea wall, and came alongside, just astern of them; Charles studied her with all the interest of an amateur yachtsman. The old fisherman looked at her for a moment, saw that a German officer was noticing him, and spat ostentatiously into the sea before resuming his work. The sun beat down upon them on the boat, pleasantly warm. As they worked on, Charles learned the tactics of the Raumboote. Presently he awoke to the value of what was being told to him and set to work to memorize the facts, and to fill in the gaps in his information by direct questions.
The job finished, they strung their net up to the mast-head to dry and air. “A little glass, perhaps?” Charles said.
A little glass, the old man thought, would be a very good idea. They got up on to the quay and walked to the Café de la République overlooking the harbour.
They went in and sat down, and Charles ordered Pernod for them both. He told his old companion a little of himself, and of the defects of the batches of cement. And presently he said casually:
“Do you have much trouble with the Germans here?”
“No more than any other lice,” the old man said.
There was a short silence. “Lice,” the old man said again, “and as lice we treat them. I have told them so.”
Charles said: “Is it...wise to say things of that sort to them?”
The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. “The other night,” he said, “in the boat we had a Bootsmannsmaat, a German, as a guard, and so we had the shade over our lamp. And this man said to me, what would I do when the war ended? Would I go on fishing? So I told him what I would do, in memory of my dead brother who was murdered. I said that I would put on my best clothes and go to watch the young men tie the Germans up in bundles and pour petrol over them and light the petrol. That is the way to deal with lice, I said. With a blow-lamp.”
Charles stared at him. “Does one talk so to the Germans in Douarnenez?”
“He started it,” the old man said. “He asked me what I was going to do, and I told him.”
There was nothing to be said to that, and Charles sat on in the café, smoking and talking, till the hooter sounded for the curfew. He heard all that he wanted of the life of the town. It was a sad, pitiful tale, of desperate insults on the one side, of mass executions and torture on the other. It was a town in which the Germans seldom ventured out alone or without arms, a town in which each glint of light in the black-out received an instant shot from rifle or revolver. It was a town of sullen hate and brooding superstition, a town turning in despair to the old country spells and witchcraft for help against the oppressor. They did not hesitate to let the Germans know of these activities, moreover. Charles heard a story of a little waxen figure of the German commandant, finished and painted with the greatest care, found on the Oberstleutnant’s desk one morning. The feet of the little image were partially melted away, and the bowels were transfixed with a pin; it was common knowledge that the Oberstleutnant suffered from gout and from an internal disorder.
The truth of what he had been told in Brest was evident to Charles. This town continued to exist simply and solely because the Germans could not do without the food that it produced. But for that fact the Germans would have wiped out every house. The people of the town knew this quite well. They played their cards up to the limit, venting their scorn and hate upon the Germans in a thousand ways and purchasing immunity with the loads of tunny and sardines that they brought in.
At curfew Charles went back to his hotel. He slept little that night; once or twice he heard the sound of shots that echoed down the streets. There was an atmosphere of brooding evil over all the place that left him utterly appalled; in his experience of France after the occupation he had come on nothing similar to this in any way.
Next day he broke his samples of cement and condemned four sacks, made his report and the apologies of his firm to the commandant, and left for Paris on the midday train. He got there very late at night, turned into a small hotel, and slept heavily and well.
On the following morning he went for coffee to the Café de l’Arcade in the Boulevard de Sévigné. The head waiter served him, an elderly man with a drooping grey moustache. He wore a faded green dress suit.
Charles said: “That is a handsome suit that you have on to-day. It only needs one thing to set it off. If I wore that I should want to have red buttons on the coat.”
The man shot a quick glance around the room. Then he said quietly:
“Monsieur Simon, I presume.”
Charles Simon landed in England forty-eight hours later. He had spent part of the intervening time in the cellar of the Café de l’Arcade, and he had spent part of it beside the driver of a German ammunition lorry, going north. In the dark night he had commenced his flight and had landed shortly before dawn at an aerodrome in Berkshire, a very frightened man.
A subaltern was there to meet him with a car. He was given a light meal of sandwiches and coffee in the mess, and in the early light of dawn they started on the road. It was February, and a wet, windy dawn; the air was cold and raw. They spoke very little in the car. Once the subaltern passed him a silver hunting-flask of whisky and they both took a long drink; the neat spirit heartened him, and he felt better for it.
At about ten o’clock they drove up to the same dilapidated old country house that he had been taken to before, full of the same soldiers. It seemed to him that he had hardly been away a day, though it was a full two months since he had been there. He was taken into the same mess and given breakfast. Then he was shown into the same bare little office, and interviewed by the same major and the same capitaine of the Free French.
The major rose and shook his hand; the capitaine rose and bowed stiffly from the waist. The major said: “Did you get to Lorient?”
The designer nodded. “I was there on Thursday of last week.”
“And did you see the shelters?”
He said: “I saw the shelters.” Very briefly he outlined to them an account of his journey around Brittany. “I think I saw all that you want to know,” he said.
The major passed a sheet of paper across to him, with a pencil. “You’d better sit there quietly, and put down the details of the structure.”
The designer demurred. “I cannot think like that,” he said. “Even if I could, that way would not be useful to your engineers. Get me a drawing-board and a T-square, and a good roll of tracing-paper. In twenty-four hours you shall have proper working drawings of the thing that any engineer can understand.”
They got him these things in an hour or two, and gave him a table in a quiet office. He took the tools of his profession eagerly; they made him feel at home. He spread the backing-paper with a light heart and pinned it down, spread the thin tracing-paper, and began to work.
He worked on till he was called to lunch, snatched a quick meal, and went back to the board. He was happy as he worked that afternoon, unburdening his memory and putting it all down on paper. As the lines of the structure grew before him the pieces of the puzzle fell together; it was quite clear now to him what the fifteen-centimetre angles did and where the seven-millimetre strips came in. They filled the missing links of structure, evident now that it was down in hard, neat pencil lines, in black and white.
From time to time the officers came in and stood behind him, watching the drawings growing under his neat fingers. They brought him tea and pieces of cake to the drawing-board: he would not stop again to eat. In the early evening Brigadier McNeil came in and Simon had to stand up at the board to answer a few questions and expound the drawing; it irked him to interrupt the currents of his thought, but he did not dare to offend the man who had promised to secure him a commission as a British officer.
The brigadier looked critically at what he had done. “The Air Ministry must have a print of this immediately...” He paused, running his eye over the unfinished details. “You make a beautiful drawing, Mr. Simon.”
The designer smiled faintly. “Is it good enough,” he asked anxiously, “to get me a comm
ission in the Royal Engineers?”
The hard, china-blue eyes of the brigadier looked at him, noting the lean, intelligent face, the straight black hair, the quick, rather nervous movements of the artist hands. “I think it is,” he said. “I’ll get a paper going about that to-morrow, Mr. Simon.”
“Thank you, sir.” He hesitated. “I really do know a good bit about coastal fortifications that might be useful to you.” He turned again to the drawing and became immersed in it; the officers watched him for a time and then left him to his work.
He worked on far into the night. At about two in the morning he finished the third and last sheet of details, drew a border round the edge, and handed in the lot to the British major. Together they put them in an envelope and gave them to the despatch rider; then Charles was taken to a bedroom. In a quarter of an hour he was deeply asleep, exhausted and relieved of the burden of his work.
They left him to sleep late. At about ten o’clock in the morning he awoke and lay for a few minutes staring round the darkened room, till he remembered where he was. Then he got up and went down to the mess, and managed to secure a cup of coffee. It embarrassed him to find that he had no money whatsoever, barring unnegotiable francs, as he discovered on asking for a packet of cigarettes. He went to find the major in his office.
An hour later they had him in for another interview, the major and Brigadier McNeil. This time they wanted a complete account of everything that he had seen and done in France since he had made his parachute descent. He told them everything that he could remember.
At the end the brigadier said thoughtfully: “Douarnenez seems to be in a queer state.”
Charles said: “It is a town that is going mad.”
The major said: “What do you mean by that?”
The designer shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know that that’s the right word to use. But they don’t seem like ordinary people there, at all. They don’t seem to think in the same way, even.” He paused, noticing that neither of the soldiers really understood what he was driving at. “I mean, like when that old man said you had to deal with lice with a blow-lamp....” His voice tailed off into silence.
