by Nevil Shute
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.”
He turned to Charles. “If you were back in Corbeil, in your office,” he said quietly, “could you find out the thickness of the concrete roof, and the amount of reinforcement? Could you get hold of the design of the roof of the shelters, so that we can adapt our bombs to penetrate it?”
There was a silence in the bare little office. The officers sat gazing at the man from France.
“I couldn’t find out anything about that in Corbeil,” he said at last. “I’d have to think up some excuse and go to Lorient. I could tell you at once if I could have a good look at the things.”
“And could you
manage to do that?” the major asked.
There was a long silence. From the next room there came the clatter of a typewriter; from the fields outside the rumble of a tractor on the farm.
Charles said heavily at last: “If I went back to Corbeil I could get to Lorient all right.”
The two officers exchanged a glance The major said softly: “But you don’t want to go back.”
There was another pause.
The brigadier leaned forward. “What do you want to do, Mr. Simon?” he inquired. “Did you come over here to join the forces?”
Charles turned to him gratefully. “I suppose I did,” he said. “You see, I didn’t know what things were like here till I landed yesterday. It was on a sort of impulse that I said they’d better take me from Le Tréport, if you understand. I knew, I knew the sort of things you want to know, and I’ve always been English, when all’s said and done.” He struggled to express himself. “I mean, I was never naturalised French, not in all those years. I’ve got a French identity card, but I made that out myself. I told you.”
The major said: “I know. And there’s another thing. As I understand it, the way is pretty clear for you to go back to Corbeil and take up your work there again, if you want to.”
“If I could get across the Channel.”
“Oh … of course.”
Charles Simon raised his eyes to them. “I was thinking about all this last night,” he said. “I was thinking, I’d like to stay over here and join up, now that I’m here. I’d be of some use to you—in the Royal Engineers. I know quite a lot about fortification works in ferro-concrete.” He hesitated, and then came out boldly: “Do you think I should be able to get a commission?”
The brigadier glanced at the major, and the major at the brigadier, and each waited for the other. The brigadier spoke first. “I think you could get a commission,” he said, “if that was the best way to use you. But quite frankly, I would rather see you go back to Corbeil.”
The major said, a little bitterly: “My job is in the army. I’ve been in the army all my life, and wars don’t come very often I thought this war was my big chance to make a name. In the first week of it I found myself in this job here, simply because I’d worked hard during the peace and learned six languages. All my contemporaries have got battalions. One of my term at Sandhurst is commanding a brigade. And I’m stuck here, and here I’ll stay till the war ends. Then I shall be retired on pension.”
He raised his head. “I don’t want you to think that I’m complaining. But I tell you that, because so few of us get what we want. So few can go and fight. So many have to stay and work.”
Charles pulled out a packet of caporal, extracted one of the last two, and lit it. He blew out a long cloud of smoke. “If I did go back,” he said, “it might be months before I could get down to Lorient. Some very good excuse would have to be contrived, and that would all take time. But when I had secured the information that you want, what then? How should I send it back to you?”
The brigadier said: “We’ll look after that.”
Charles said: “That would be espionage, wouldn’t it? I should be shot if I were caught?” He eyed them narrowly.
The brigadier looked at him straight, bright blue eyes in a tanned, brown face. “Yes,” he said directly. “If the Germans caught you they would shoot you. That’s one of the risks you would have to take.”
The designer said: “I don’t mind so much about that part of it.”
He was silent for a minute, while the officers stared at him. “It’s just the going back that is the worst part. I don’t know if I can explain it.” He dropped his eyes and stared at the thin, dirty smoke arising from the ragged ember of the cigarette. “France is a beastly country now,” he said quietly. “I never realised just how beastly it all was until I got over here. Everything—everybody over there … they go round as if they were in a dream, or tied up in a nightmare. There is a disgusting influence that has sapped their will to work, their will to live. They move about in lassitude, half men. They are tools for evil, in the hands of evil men. And the best of them know it. And the worst of them enjoy it …”
There was a long, long pause.
Charles Simon raised his head. “If I went back and did this job for you,” he said, “could I come back to England afterwards and be a British officer?”
The brigadier said: “Yes, I think you could. In fact, I’d go so far as to promise that.”
“All right,” said Charles, “I’ll go. How are you going to get me back to France?”
They spent the rest of the morning priming him with all he had to know. It was not much to memorise. There was the name and address of a small tailor on the quays of the Port du Commerce at Brest and the simple little phrase: “I want red buttons on the coat.” There was a corn-chandler in the Rue Paul Feval in Rennes down behind the station, and the head waiter in the Café de l’Arcade in the Boulevard de Sévigné in Paris. Through one or other of these friends he would return to England, but how they would not say.
In the late afternoon he was driven to an aerodrome to meet his pilot had to learn his parachute. With the pilot and a large-scale map of France he planned the flight. “That’s where I mean,” he said. “Ten miles north-east of Lyons, by that little place Montluel. Anywhere just round there, within a mile or two.”
The squadron-leader who was to pilot him drew a pencil circle big and black around the place upon the map. “That’s quite okay,” he said. “We’ll take a Blenheim. If you come over with me now we’ll get you fitted for the parachute, and then we’ll go and have a look at the machine.”
The flight-sergeant fitted and adjusted all the heavy webbing straps around his body. “Now when you come to jump,” he said, “you just counts one—two—three after you starts falling. Not onetwothree quick—but deliberate, like; one—two—three. And then you pulls the ring and be sure you pull it right out, wire and all, case any of it’s holding up. And don’t go thinking that you’ve bust it when it comes away in your hand, because you haven’t.”
His manner robbed the business of all fear. Simon had little difficulty in grasping the technique of landing. There were obvious risks of injury, but those did not distress him. He passed on with the squadron-leader to the aircraft where they met the young sergeant who was to serve as navigator with them, and for half an hour longer he examined the machine and the means of getting out of it.
“I shall pull her back to about ninety-five,” the pilot said. “You won’t have any difficulty.”
With the major from the interrogation centre, he had tea in the Air Force mess. Then they went back in the car and he met the brigadier again in the bare little office that had seen all their business. McNeil had not been idle.
“Fix things up with the Air Force?” he enquired. “It’s all right for to-night, is it? Fine. The sooner you’re back in France the better. Here are your papers.”
He passed an envelope across the table. It contained a pass made out in German and in French, signed by the Oberstleutnant Commandant of Le Tréport authorising the bearer, M. Charles Simon, to pass into Vichy territory for the purpose of visiting relatives, and to return into the occupied zone within ten days. An oval rubber stamp in purple ink defaced it—“Vu à l’entée, Chalon”, and the date.
Charles studied it carefully. “Is that the real signature?” he asked.
The major smiled. “We got a good deal of his correspondence in the raid.”
There was no more to be done, and no more to be said. Charles dined with the major in the mess, and then went up and lay down, fully clothed but for his boots, upon the bed. He lay awake for a considerable time, wondering what lay before him. Presently he grew drowsy and slept for an hour or two.
At one o’clock in the morning they came to wake him. He got up and put on his shoes and went down to the mess; they had thoughtfully prepared for him a drink of hot coffee laced with rum and a few sandwiches. Then he was driven to the aerodrome. On the tarmac the Bl
enheim was already running up, the exhausts two blue streaks in the blackness of the night.
“All ready?” said the squadron-leader. “Well, let’s go.”
Charles turned to the major and held out his hand. “I’m terribly grateful for all you’ve done for me, sir. Don’t worry if you don’t hear for a month or two. It’s going to take a little time.”
The other said gruffly: “Wish I was going with you, ’stead of sticking in this blasted job. All the very best of luck.”
The pilot and the navigator were already in the Blenheim. Charles was assisted up on to the wing, clumsy in his parachute harness, and settled into the small seat behind them. The hatch was pushed up behind him and snapped shut. The Blenheim moved to a burst of engine, and taxied out into the darkness of the aerodrome.
A few faint lights appeared ahead of them; the engines burst into a roar, and they went trundling down the field. The lights swept past them, the motion grew more violent, then died away to a smooth airborne rush as the lights dropped away beneath them and behind. The pilot bent to the instrument panel and juggled quickly with his massed controls. They swept round in a long gentle turn and steadied on the course for France, climbing as they went.
Charles remembered little of that flight. He sat there for two hours, gradually getting cold, watching the computations and the plotting of the navigator in the dim, shaded cockpit light. In the end the sergeant turned to him. “About ten minutes more,” he said. “Are you all ready to go?”
Charles said: “All ready.”
The pilot swung round in his seat. “You’ll see to land all right,” he said. “The moon’s just coming up.” Charles had watched it rise over the pilot’s left shoulder.
The pilot and the navigator conferred together for a moment. Then the sergeant got up from his folding seat and turned round to Charles. “He’s going to slow her down,” he said. “We’ll open the hatch, and I’ll help you get out on to the wing. Then when it’s time I’ll give you a clap on the back … and just let go.”
