by Nevil Shute
“She just came to pieces, sir,” Colvin said. “One minute she was there all right, and next thing that I knew there was a sort of flash and all the planks and timbers were all separate, and we were in the water.”
He thought there was a third shell, but he was not sure of that. He did not know how he got into the water; probably he was blown clean out of the wheel-house. All he knew was that he was in the water ten or fifteen yards from the wreckage that had been Geneviève, and that there was nobody else near him.
“That happened at two-sixteen in the morning,” he said carefully. “I know that must have been the time, because my watch stopped, because the water got in it. And it said two-sixteen.”
I nodded. “That agrees with what the M.G.B.s reported,” I said. He had been talking for a quarter of an hour, and I wanted the whole story, if possible, before I was turned out. “What happened next?”
He turned his head wearily and nervously upon the pillow. “It’s on the chest-of-drawers there with them other things,” he said. “The watch.” His eyes were turned to a small pile of personal belongings, grey with salt. “Could you get it for me?”
I got up and gave it to him. It was a silver pocket watch with a very big white dial. There was still water inside the glass. He took it gratefully.
“What happened next?” I asked again.
He said: “I’ll tell you.” And then his eyes dropped to the watch in his hand. “I was wondering, would you do something for me, sir? It’s had the water in it for a week now, ‘n I wouldn’t like to think that it’d never go again. Would you take it up to London to be cleaned? It was given me by somebody I thought a lot of one time.”
“Of course I will,” I said. “I’ll take it up this afternoon and get it seen to right away.”
He gave it to me gratefully. “You can see where it says on the back,” he murmured in a burst of confidence. “‘Jack Colvin from Junie, September 17th, 1935.’ That’s what it says, isn’t it?”
I glanced at the engraving. “That’s right,” I said. I slipped it into my pocket. “I’ll get it put right for you.
“What happened after that?” I asked for the third time.
He said that he had begun to swim away from the wreckage. That was panic — instinct — call it what you like. There was a lot of light from the fires in the destroyer and from her searchlight, and he wanted nothing more than to get out of it. It was only when he had swum furiously and blindly for a hundred yards or so that he regained his senses. What brought him to himself was M.G.B. 268, which passed within a few yards of him after dropping her depth-charges at the bow of the destroyer.
He saw her bearing down on him, and saw the great wave of her wash sweeping towards him. In a quick glance around before he went down in the wash he saw the men upon the M.G.B. quite close to him as she swept past at forty knots. He saw the upturned keel of Geneviève with two men on it firing with a Tommy-gun. He did not know who they were.
He saw the shapes of fishing vessels in the background half a mile or more away. Then the wash came to him and he was smothered by it, clutched and spun round under water by the swirl, and thrown up gasping to the surface. He threw himself on his back for the concussion; immediately the depth-charges went off by the destroyer not more than two hundred yards away, and a great mass of water came down on him, carrying him under again.
He had his inflated life-belt on, his Mae West, as they all had; otherwise he would certainly have been drowned. But presently he came up to the surface, feebly spluttering and gasping, and it was now much darker, for the searchlight had gone out. He lay floating and winded, supported by the Mae West and recovering his senses, for perhaps ten minutes.
And presently it seemed to him that he was farther from the scene. He was farther from the destroyer. Probably she then had stern way on her to ease the forward bulkheads; in any case, she was much farther off. He could see the coast clearly in the moonlight between La Chèvre and the Anse de Dinant; it was not more than two miles away. The tide was still carrying him northwards, and would be for another two hours; from his recollection of the tidal streams he knew that it would sweep him closer to the land as it filled up into the Rade de Brest.
And with that his guts came back to him. “I didn’t fancy swimming to them fishing-boats,” he said. “I reckoned if the Germans got any of us we’d be scuppered out of hand, with having put the flame on them and that.” It seemed to him that he could reach the coast quite easily on that calm, moonlit night. So he began to swim.
He said that the water was not very cold, although it was November. He was in the flood-tide up from the Bay of Biscay for one thing, and that was likely to be fairly warm. He was a strong swimmer. “Living in Oakland, like I did,” he said, “we used to spend a lot of time down on the beach. Besides, I been swimming all my life, one place or another. It wasn’t nothing, that.”
And so he swam for shore.
The tide bore him northwards faster than he swam, hampered as he was with his clothes and his Mae West. He kept his clothes on for their warmth, even in water, and because he knew that he would want them when he got on shore. He finally landed, after being in the water for about two hours, in a little rocky cove just north of Anse de Dinant, under the shadow of the island rocks that they call Tas de Pois. That must have been at about four or four-thirty in the morning. Immediately he got out of the water he began to feel the cold.
The moon was still high in the sky, flooding the coast with light. Because he was so cold he began to clamber along the rocks looking for a way up the cliff. The cliffs in this part of Brittany are usually very high and rugged; where he landed he had to climb nearly two hundred feet before he got on level ground. Oddly enough, this gave him confidence to go on. “I knew there wouldn’t be none of them minefields top of a place like that,” he said. “There wasn’t even any barbed wire.” The Germans do not waste material in the defence of places which can never be invaded. Simon had found the same when he climbed up the cliffs near Goulin.
He found his way up the cliff at last, and wormed his way cautiously forward over the bare, short grass. He knew just where he was; from long study of the chart he held every feature of the coast firm in his memory. He was about two miles due south of the little fishing village of Camaret; he was on a small peninsula jutting westwards from the big peninsula between the Rade de Brest and the Bay of Douarnenez. The land that he was on was covered with heather, with occasional clumps of gorse and bracken. There were no trees.
Very soon he came to a footpath, well worn, running through the heather parallel with the cliff. He crossed it and went on away from the sea, still crawling on his hands and knees. The moonlight was still so bright that he was afraid to stand up; in that bare country he felt that he would be visible a mile away. When he had passed the footpath by about twenty yards he heard the tramp of feet; he curled up and lay still among the heather. A German soldier came in sight, marching along in tin-hat, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He was an oldish man, with rather a slovenly appearance. He went straight down the path, looking neither to the left nor the right. After a time Colvin crawled on again.
He went on for the best part of a mile, crawling all the way because of the lack of cover. This was not a bad thing, as it happened, because the effort and the use of his limbs that it entailed made him warm; his arms and legs regained their normal feeling and his clothes began to dry upon him. He had let the air out of his Mae West, but still wore it for warmth.
Presently, in the first light of dawn, he came to a stone wall dividing the moor from fields. He reached up cautiously and looked over, and found that he was looking down into the village of Camaret, a mile to the north of him. In the grey light he could see the entrance to the Rade de Brest beyond, and beyond that again the rocky coast of the north part of Brittany.
“I didn’t know what was best to do,” he said, fingering the sheet. “It seemed to me that I was in a jam.”
On that peninsula it was dangerous to
go crawling about in broad daylight with no plan. There was a big clump of bracken growing up against the wall not very far away. He made for this and crawled into the middle of it and lay down, safe from any observation but from the air. And lying there he set to work to make a plan.
He had no need for any further survey of the country; he knew exactly where he was. As he crawled there had been growing in his mind the idea that if he could get on to the north coast of Brittany, the south coast of the English Channel, some opportunity might arise for getting back to England. He might somehow get a boat; he might even make a raft and try to blow back on the south-west wind. In any case, the north coast was where he ought to be.
He had a terribly long way to go to get there, seventy or eighty miles, perhaps. He would have to travel eastwards on the peninsula inland into France for twenty miles or so in order to get round the Rade de Brest; after that he would have to turn north. He did not know the country or the people. He knew that the main German concentrations were usually held a few miles inland from the coast; that meant that the farther inland that he went the greater would be the risk of being taken by the Germans.
From that point of view, and because he was a seaman and had memorized the charts, he longed to stay by the coast. He felt safe there; he had knowledge of conditions and localities; the inland parts were unknown, strange, and hazardous. He thought longingly of the north part of Brittany to the west and north-west of Brest, that was in sight across the sea. If he could get there he could go on round the coast until he found what he was looking for, a means of getting back to England. On the coast he would know what he was doing.
It was only just across the way, that part of Brittany. Could he possibly...get there?
It meant swimming again, of course. He concentrated his mind upon the chart and on the tidal streams. It must, he thought, be about five miles across the entrance to the Rade. It was November, and resting motionless in the grey dawn he was beginning to get very cold again. The thought of going into the sea once more was an appalling one. He had just swum about two miles in two hours, and he felt now that he had nearly died of it. Another five hours might well mean the end of everything for him.
But it wasn’t so bad as that. If he picked his time right, the tidal stream that swept north-eastwards in from the Iroise to fill the Rade de Brest would carry him along; it would be pretty well behind him. It ran from two to two and a half knots, that stream did. That would reduce the time a great deal. In theory he would be in the water for no more than two hours; in practice it would probably be three. That made it possible, perhaps.
He would have to enter the water about midnight, by his reckoning, if he were to take the tide up with him in that way.
“I didn’t see what else there was to do, sir,” he remarked. “I reckoned that the Germans would shoot me if they got me, ‘n I thought I might as well die swimming as that.”
He grew very cold and hungry, lying in the bracken. He slept a little, fitfully, from time to time; in his long waking hours his mind became increasingly filled with thoughts of food. And what he thought about was American food, clam chowder that Junie made out of a tin, and waffles that Junie made on the electric cooker in the little kitchen of their Oakland apartment. And Junie herself, in a clean print frock on a warm day... Junie, who was seven thousand miles away from him in distance and two years in time.
It was a still, clear autumn day with a light wind from the north-east. It was sunny most of the forenoon, and that made his long wait tolerable. He was so near to Camaret that he could hear the church clock strike the hours and the quarters. As evening came on he was thankful for that clock. He had resolved to try his luck at swimming to the northern shore, but the whole matter hinged upon the proper use of the tide. If he entered the water too soon he might struggle and exhaust himself in the slack water, or be carried out to sea, and die. If he entered it too late, it might be daylight when he sought to climb the cliffs only a few miles from Brest. His watch had stopped, but now he had the clock to help him, that and the rising of the moon.
When dusk came he began to crawl towards Le Toulinguet. That is a rocky point with an automatic light on it, standing on a point of rocks down by the water’s edge. He got within half a mile of it in the last light of the day, near enough to see the path that ran down to a little concrete causeway on the rocks that led to the red tower. Between him and that path there was a watch-hut, camouflaged with the heather and occupied by German soldiers. From time to time one of them came out for a natural function and went back inside again.
The dusk merged into starlight and he crept on. He passed behind the watch-hut and about a hundred yards away, moving with infinite care through the heather. “I was proper fussed about them land-mines that they stick about sometimes,” he said. “They might have had some planted back of a little post like that.” But if they had, his luck was with him still.
He lay through the first part of the night at the border of the heather near the path. When he heard midnight strike and saw the first gleams of moonlight on the water, he crept down to the concrete causeway. He paused to blow up his Mae West and to note the angle of the moon relative to the course that he must swim.
Then he slipped down into the water and swam powerfully from the rocks. A wave lifted him and crashed him down upon an underwater shoal, scraping his left leg painfully. Then he was clear and swimming steadily upon his course.
He said that the water was terribly cold, much colder than the night before, he thought. It probably was just about the same, but he had had no food and very little sleep. Very soon he was swimming mechanically and numbly, his mind dazed and far away from Brittany.
“It was half-moon,” he said. “It got me all muddled because Half Moon Bay, that was the beach Junie ‘n me used to go swimming at Sundays. We used to swim a long way those times— ‘most as far as I was trying to swim that night. But that was in the day-time and all sunny, ‘n much warmer, too.”
Half-moon, Half Moon Bay, and swimming with Junie. The thoughts rolled slowly round in his numbed brain as he ploughed on, hampered by the clothes that he dared not abandon, held up by his Mae West, borne forward by the tide. He kept the moon over his right shoulder in the endless, mechanical cycle of his motions. And presently the California sunshine was more real to him than the dark water he was swimming in, and Junie swimming by his side was more to him than just a memory.
“She used to tan a sort of goldeny brown, like her hair,” he said, and his hands moved restlessly upon the sheet as he lay in the iron cot. And then he said unexpectedly: “If I’d ha’ died that time, swimming across, I don’t think I’d ha’ minded much.”
But he didn’t die. He swam right across the entrance to the Rade de Brest, and he got to the other side.
He landed on the north coast at a point about due north of Toulinguet. He landed on a point of rocks and clambered slowly along it to the shore, stumbling and falling on the seaweed in the darkness. He was so numb that he could hardly stand; he fell, over and over again, before he got to firmer ground. He was so cold that his mind worked very slowly.
He came to a little beach beneath an earthy cliff after a time and rested there. The weather had deteriorated during the night; the wind was now from the south-east and it was beginning to cloud over. He sat resting for some time in a stupor that was half sleep; then he grew so cold that he had to get up and move about, infinitely weary.
The coast that he had landed on was lower and more easily scaled than the cliffs that he had left. The earth cliff he was resting up against was barely thirty feet high; above that the fields began. He knew what that would mean: barbed wire and land-mines, and a greater intensity of German sentries. He got up presently and began to make his way westwards along the rocks and beaches underneath the cliff.
After a time he came to a larger beach where a cart-track ran down from inshore. It seemed to him that the cart-track, the low fields beside it, would make a focus for defence; there would be a pi
ll-box somewhere near-by manned by a picket of Germans. In the low fields there would be land-mines and barbed wire. He turned and went back for a quarter of a mile to a point where the cliff was thirty or forty feet in height, banking upon a paucity of defence in the more difficult locality.
He scrambled up the cliff without great difficulty and wormed his way forward over the grass. There was barbed wire ahead of him, but only a few strands of it on low, triangular supports. He lay watching for ten minutes and then negotiated it without great difficulty, and crawled on inland. Presently he came to a stone wall and began to walk upright, finding his way from field to field, heading about north-west.
Dawn came, and found him three or four miles inland from Le Conquet. Under a grey cold sky he saw a country of small fields surrounded by stone walls, with a few scattered cottages and farms built of grey stone. It was a country just like Cornwall over the sea a hundred and ten miles to the north, Cornwall, where he longed to be.
He was desperately cold and weary, and tormented with hunger and thirst. He found a little stagnant pool and had a long drink in the growing light. Then he found a field of sugar-beet and grubbed up three or four of them. Carrying them in his arms he skinned one with his knife and began to eat it, wandering on from field to field seeking for a place where he could lie hidden.
In that windswept country, cover was very scarce. He found a clump of blackberry bushes growing up against one of the stone walls; fearing immediate detection if he went on, he pressed himself feet first into concealment under this beside the wall. The thorns tore his skin and his clothes, but he dug farther into it till he was well concealed. And all the time he went on munching at his beets.
Presently, cold and numb and tired, he fell asleep.
When he awoke it must have been about the middle of the forenoon. He stirred and rolled around, tearing himself again among the brambles. And immediately he did that, all Bedlam was let loose. A dog began to bark and clamour at his bush. He lay dead-still, but the row continued. It ran round barking and snuffling at various points of the bush till presently it found where he had gone in. There it stayed barking at him, just out of his reach. It was a mongrel, black and white, he said, about the size of a collie.
