Most Secret

by Nevil Shute

  In the middle of this rather gloomy conference the air-raid sirens went in Dartmouth, and in a very few minutes planes were overhead.

  At that stage of the war a daylight raid in any force was quite unusual, but there were eighteen aircraft in a squadron for this one. It was probably the last raid to be made by Ju.87s upon England. I can’t imagine what the Germans did it for; there was nothing of real value to them in the port at that time and they must have known that they would lose heavily in the attack. It may be that they had wrong information of the movements of our ships.

  Each of the aircraft made two dives on Dartmouth and its shipping; the first they each dropped one five-hundred-kilogramme bomb, in the second dive they dropped a pair of one hundreds. From our position three miles up the river we had a grand-stand seat of the whole thing. We saw them screaming down in almost vertical dives and saw the bombs leave the machines. In the crashing bursts of the explosions they zoomed up again perhaps to about five thousand feet, but a flight of three Hurricanes was there by then.

  There was little we could do to help, but Boden and André, with a couple of men, were tumbling the Tommy-guns on deck. I said to Boden: “Those things aren’t much good. Don’t waste ammunition on anything but a close-range shot.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Nevertheless, he worked on frantically to get the guns ready.

  The second dive was spoilt for the attackers by the Hurricanes. The last German aircraft zooming up from the first dive saw two of his comrades shot down in savage bursts of fire, and saw the Hurricanes turning to attack again. From being a disciplined and planned attack the thing developed into something like a raid of wolves upon a flock of sheep. The Hurricanes seemed to be everywhere at once; a third 87 went down in a trail of flame, and then a fourth.

  It was too hot for them. They made their last dive on the town and did not zoom again; they swept on at a low altitude, hedge-hopping across country and scattering, working round towards the sea. In that way the fighters could no longer dive on them and, coming up behind, would be a target for the rear-gunners in the 87s.

  They scattered across country. One of them came jinking up the river towards us between the wooded hills. Boden said, by my side: “André. Quand j’ai dit ‘Tirez’, tirez en avance par deux longueurs de fuselage. Compris?”

  The Breton said quietly: “Oui, monsieur. Lay off deux longueurs en avance.” The other Bretons nodded, fingering the guns.

  There was a tense wait as the thing swept on towards us, only a hundred feet up, taking cover in the valley between the hills. Then Boden shouted: “Tirez!”

  The Tommy-guns cracked out. I crouched down beside the wheel-house with the naval constructor. I did not think this Tommy-gun fire would do any good, but it was better than nothing. But I was wrong. The Jerry swerved and pulled up violently. He passed very nearly over us, and his rear-gunner gave us a vicious burst of fire. Nobody was hit and presently the Tommy-guns reluctantly fell silent, but as the 87 went away low across the hill towards the east it left behind it a white plume of smoke that was not there before. “Glycol,” I said. “You got his radiator,” and no one disagreed with me.

  Later we heard that one had come down in the sea seven miles south-east of Berry Head. There was no real evidence till the body of a German rear-gunner was washed up ten days later and the surgeon found two little Tommy-gun bullets in it. I claimed the machine then for Geneviève, and it was marked up to the ship.

  After that interlude we turned back to the problem of the gun. In ten more minutes we came to the conclusion that it was impracticable. If her camouflage as a fishing vessel were to be maintained we could not fit her with a cannon; it was not possible. The most that we could do was to give her a few Bren guns in addition to the Tommy-guns she had; I decided to see McNeil about that.

  There was nothing then for me to wait for, and I had to get back to London. It was doubtful if the raid would not have stopped the train service temporarily from Kingswear, but I knew that V.A.C.O. would be interested to hear the state of the town, and so I told the Wren to take me into Dartmouth.

  Rhodes came up just as I was getting into the truck with the constructor. “May I have a lift in with you, sir?” he said.

  I said: “By all means,” and he got into the back.

  We drove to N.O.I.C.’s office through streets littered with broken glass, making a detour once to avoid a great heap of debris and dust strewn across the road. At the Naval Centre I dismissed the truck, and Rhodes drove off in it with the Wren in the direction of the net defence store.

  In the office I got the reports of damage as they came in; I stayed there for about an hour. It was not a very bad account, considering the determination of the Germans. An M.L. had been sunk by a near miss, but it was in shallow water and she could probably be raised. Two lighters had been sunk, and a number of ships slightly damaged. The total of naval casualties was about thirty, of whom ten or twelve were dead. Among civilians the casualty list was heavier. None of the schools had been hit, but there was a fair list of damaged dwelling houses. One bomb had fallen in the almshouses, and some of the old people had been killed. And they had killed one rabbit!

  Blast had burst down the doors of the net defence store yard, and had thrown down the hutch. Within it the little furry body was stretched, hardly cold; it had been very sudden, for a parteaten frond of cow parsley was clenched between the teeth. The body was unmarked, the fur unruffled. A rabbit does not stand blast very well.

  The naval officer took out the body gently, but it sagged limp in his hands; there was nothing they could do. The girl said unevenly: “He couldn’t have known anything about it, Michael. He wasn’t even frightened. Look, he was still eating.”

  Rhodes turned to her, and she was shocked at his expression. He was dead-white, and tears were streaming down his face.

  “They had to pick this street, of all the streets,” he said.

  There was a pause; the girl did not know what to say to help him. Very carefully he laid the body down upon the grass and stood erect, thoughtful. Mechanically he got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  The problem of burial occurred to her. She looked up at him. “What had we better do, Michael?”

  “I’ll have to go to Honiton,” he said. “I’d better go to-morrow. I’m going to do something horrible to them for this.”

  8

  I MET McNeil in his office a few days later, at his request, and he told me the arrangements he had made for Simon’s journey to Douarnenez. “There is this family, Le Rouzic,” he said. “Once he gets to the farm he should be quite all right.”

  I asked: “What name did you say?”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll look after him, and take him in with them to Douarnenez. They go in every Sunday morning. Most of the farmers go into Douarnenez on Sundays. I’m told that as many as fifteen hundred strangers from the country go in in fine weather.”

  “We don’t want that,” I said, thinking of the approach to the coast.

  He agreed. “What we want is a nice wet, misty Saturday night.”

  “What does the fishing fleet do on Saturdays?”

  “Goes into harbour, late at night. They never go out on Sunday. They sail again on Monday morning, very early, before dawn.”

  “The Raumboote go in too?”

  He nodded. “The coast should be quite clear around the Saints late on Saturday night. It would be sheer bad luck if they ran into anything.”

  We discussed the arrangement for a little; given the right weather, it seemed pretty safe. The weather had broken up nicely, and it looked as if we were in for a good long spell of rainy, unsettled stuff coming in from the Atlantic.

  Presently he said: “I saw Major Carpenter, from Honiton, on Tuesday. They’re very busy with the new stuff for the flame-thrower.”

  I said: “What’s that?”

  He grinned. “I thought you knew about it. They’re going to run the thing on Worcester Sauce.”


  I stared at him. “What’s Worcester Sauce? I thought they ran on oil.”

  He said: “Well, oil is still the basic part of it, of course. But they’ve got this sort of cocktail now—oil with a lot of solids in solution in some way. Carpenter was giving Rhodes a pretty good boost over it, as a matter of fact. Making solid things dissolve in oil is what he knows about, it seems.”

  I thought about the perfumes and the soya oil. “That’s true enough,” I said. “That is his line in peace-time.”

  “It all sounds very complicated,” he said. “They do it during the cracking process. I didn’t understand, but the result is Worcester Sauce.”

  “How does it differ from oil?” I asked.

  “It’s hotter, and it leaves a nice warm glow behind,” he said. “That’s why they call it that.”

  I did not smile. “What’s it got in it?” I enquired. “What are the solids that they put into the stuff?”

  He told me.

  I sat in silence for a minute. I am no chemist, and I don’t know much about what those things do to you. “That’s pretty nasty stuff,” I said at last.

  “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t like to get a burn with it myself.”

  “It’s all right—internationally—is it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not gas and it’s not an acid. But anyway, if the Boche had thought of it first he’d have used it against us fast enough.”

  There was no denying that. All I said was: “Well, they’ll have to be damn careful in handling it that they don’t burn themselves.”

  I went away soon after that, but I was troubled about Worcester Sauce. I went down to the club for lunch and there I saw Margeson, the surgeon-commander. I got him on one side in the smoking-room. “Look,” I said. “There’s something I want to ask you. Keep it quiet, though.”

  “What’ll you have to drink, old boy?”

  “I’ll have a gin.”

  They came, and then I told him about the oil and the other things. “Suppose you got a little splash of that on you,” I said, “burning. Would it be very bad?”

  He stared at me, gin in hand. “You mustn’t do that,” he said. “You’d be better off if you drank it.”

  “It makes a very nasty burn?”

  He laughed shortly. “That’s putting it mildly. I don’t believe that it would ever heal at all.”

  “I mean, just a little splash, about the size of—that,” I said.

  “Small or large, it’d go septic right away. And it would go on going septic for a very long time. It’s horrible stuff, that.”

  “It’d heal in the end?”

  “It might do, if it didn’t start a cancer.”

  We went in to lunch.

  I went up to the library that afternoon, still troubled in my mind, and got a copy of The Hague Convention, and took it down to my office. I read it through that evening. But in those far-off days before the last war nobody had even thought about flame warfare, so it seemed. Certainly they had never visualised the use of Worcester Sauce against the enemy, and there was nothing in the wording to prevent the use of it. There was no paragraph to say that if you hurl a jet of blazing oil against the Germans you must use clean oil.

  I took the Convention back to the library and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep very well. I suppose I had been doing too much work.

  About a week after that we sent Geneviève out again, one Saturday. The weather forecast was fairly promising, and she left Penzance about midday as before. She had definite instructions to avoid the enemy this time; all she had to do was to land Simon and stand out to sea, returning the next night to pick him up. McNeil went down to see her off; I did not go.

  By midday the next day she was back again. The weather had cleared up off Ushant and turned into a fine starry night, with visibility unlimited after the rain. It only lasted a few hours, but it spoilt their game. If Simon had been ashore already Colvin would have risked going in for him to take him off; as things were they abandoned the venture and came home. I was very pleased with them for that. It was the proper thing to do, and sensible.

  It meant they lost another week, however. We had planned the whole thing for a Saturday night, so that Simon could go into the town with the peasant crowd on Sunday; I was unwilling to consent to a fresh plan to save the week. I kept them where they were, kicking their heels in Dartmouth for that week. Rhodes, I know, spent a good deal of that week away with the Honiton organisation and at the refinery, so that when they finally did sail they had Worcester Sauce for fuel in the flame-thrower tanks. I shut my eyes to that. If she had been a proper naval vessel I should have had to have taken notice of it, but a fishing vessel requisitioned by the Army was another matter, and I let it go.

  They sailed again on the next Saturday, this time from Dartmouth. Three weeks had elapsed since they had destroyed their Raumboot and the nights were much longer; it was the second of October. It was a nuisance going to Penzance, and another possible source of leakage of information; they were all in favour of sailing direct from their base over to the other side.

  The lapse of three weeks had both favourable and adverse features. It would be more difficult, perhaps, to find out after that time whether the loss of the Raumboot was considered to be accidental—or it might be easier, because there had been more time for gossip to get out. If the Germans were suspicious, as it seemed to me they must be, it was clearly a good thing to go over on a night when the fishing fleet would be in harbour and the Raumboote too; Geneviève would be less likely to run into trouble on the other side, especially after three weeks. Time would have elapsed for things to simmer down a bit, and vessels which had been urgent on patrol for a week might have gone back to other duties.

  The forecast for the region between Ushant and the Saints was wet mist and fog, probably lasting over the week-end. I was down at Dartmouth to see them off that time with McNeil. Simon was wearing a dirty, torn blue suit of poor cloth and a continental cut, with pointed yellow shoes, a yellow celluloid collar, and a vivid orange-and-blue tie, rather torn. He had a very old black felt hat on his head with a blue band. He looked like nothing that you ever see in this country; I hoped he knew his stuff for Brittany.

  The rest of them were in their fishing clothes; as usual it was raining when they went. There was no ceremony or leave-taking. I stood on the hard at Dittisham with McNeil and watched them cast off the mooring; the little truck was close behind us with the Wren. They passed a warp from the mooring to the transom and let her swing to that as they cast off because the tide was on the ebb; then they let go and went away between the wooded hills, down past the town, out past the harbour mouth on their way over to the other side.

  We turned back to the truck; they would be gone more than two days and I was going back to London. The Wren opened the door for us to get in, and I noticed she was looking tired and worn. She looked as if she wasn’t sleeping well.

  I said: “You don’t look so grand, Miss Wright. When did you have your last leave?”

  “About six months ago, sir.”

  “About time you had some more,” I said. “I’ll mention it to N.O.I.C.”

  She turned to me. “Please don’t do that. I’m quite all right, and I couldn’t go on leave just now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not in the middle of all this, sir. I’m quite well, really. I don’t want to go away.”

  I thought before I spoke again. She was quite calm and not hysterical or anything like that, but she was looking rotten. The officers were used to her, of course, and that went for something; a strange driver would be just a little bit more burden upon them. And then there was security to think of too—and Rhodes.

  I turned to McNeil. “We’ll have to think of leave,” I said. “It might do the whole outfit good if they had a spell off between this and the next operation.”

  * * * * *

  That was on Saturday morning. I worked on Sunday at my office in the Admiralty because with all the time that
I was spending upon Geneviève my normal work was getting in arrear. I had arranged with McNeil that we should meet at Paddington next day and go down on the midday train to Dartmouth; the ship could not arrive before Monday evening at the earliest. But at about ten o’clock on Monday morning, when I still had an hour and a half more office time before I went, McNeil rang me up.

  “Martin,” he said urgently. “Look. We’re talking on an outside line. Something has happened in the town we know about. It happened last night or early this morning. Can you come over right away?”

  I said: “I suppose I can. Is it good or bad for us?”

  “Good for the war. I don’t know anything about—about our closer interest.”

  “I’ll come round,” I said.

  I was with him in his office about ten minutes later. He had a flimsy on his desk marked in red MOST SECRET. He passed it over to me. It said:

  DOUARNENEZ. October 4th. Two Raumboote lying alongside the west harbour jetty have been destroyed by a violent fire commencing about 01.00. The fire involved two 75-cm. HA/LA guns mounted in emplacements on the jetty. German casualties are believed to be considerable. Allied action is suspected, and the civil population are greatly excited. Germans have been attacked and murdered in the streets. Ends.

  I read this through a second time without speaking. Then I said: “This is to-day’s date. This all happened only a few hours ago.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It was early this morning.”

  I waved the flimsy at him. “Where did this come from?”

  He said a little shortly: “We get these reports.” He screwed the flimsy into a spill and lit it with his lighter, held it until it burned down to his fingers and dropped it in the ash-tray.

  “What do you think it means?” he asked. “Did they go right inside the harbour in the middle of the night to do their stuff?”

  I sat there brooding for a minute or two. “If they did that, I don’t see how they possibly could get away,” I said at last. It was better to face the facts. “Do you?”