by Nevil Shute
“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 fight 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 pill-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 further 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.
There was nothing he could do about it, short of coming out and pelting it with stones. He lay there and it went on barking. And then he heard a footstep, and a voice, a woman’s voice, calling off the dog.
“Qui est?” she cried sharply. “Qui est là-dedans?”
There was nothing for it; slowly he dragged himself from his concealment and looked up at her. She was a peasant woman of thirty-five or forty, roughly dressed and dirty; from the look of her hands, covered in soil, she had been p
ulling beets. She stood there looking down at him, sarcastic. “Et à qui les betteraves?” she said.
He spoke a moderate Quebec French, but he did not understand her accent. He lay there on the ground looking up at her, puzzled. And then she looked at him again and took in his sodden clothes, his draggled hair and his torn hands. She said quickly:
“Vous êtes un échappé?”
He understood that one. “Suis officier anglais,” he said, and his old charm came back to him.
“II y avait un naufrage.”
She caught her breath. “Ah …” And then she said in her Breton dialect: “Where do you want to go?”
He said simply: “To England, madame.” He smiled up at her. “I have important business to attend to there.”
“Business?” she said. “What do you mean?”
He said: “I have to get another ship and come back here again to kill more Germans.”
She stared at him, and he smiled back at her. “There was firing and a battle down in the Iroise the night before last,” she said. “Were you in that?”
He nodded.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked uncertainly.
There was no uncertainty in his reply. “I want to eat a very large hot meal,” he said, “and to drink beer. And after that I want to find a boat. Any sort of boat will do, so long as I can steal it and escape.”
She stared at him with wonder in her eyes. “You are a strange man,” she said at last. “Stay there and I will tell my husband. Do not come out at all; get right inside again. There is a German post within a kilometre of us here.”
She went away, and he crept back into the bush, wondering what was going to happen. He had not long to wait. Within an hour she was back again, this time without the dog. She bent down to his hole beneath the bush and thrust in a large, blackened tin dixie. It was hot to his touch.
“There is food, Englishman,” she said urgently. “There is no beer. Now listen to me. Stay here till it is quite, quite dark; do not come out at all. Then, when it is very dark, you can come out, but leave the can under the bush; I will get it to-morrow. Follow the wall to the west till you come to the lane. Two fields down the lane, to the north, there is our farm on the right. Knock three times on the door quietly and we will let you in.”
He repeated her instructions.
She said: “If you have bad luck and the Germans take you, do not betray us.” Then, before he could answer, she was gone.
He lifted the lid off the dixie. There was about half a gallon of a thick fish soup in it, stiffened with potatoes and vegetables, and with a wooden spoon floating on the top. Lying in the bramble bush he got down every drop of this; no food had ever seemed to him to be so good. And then, warm again, he fell asleep once more.
It was very nearly dark when he woke up. He lay and watched the last of the daylight fade, and presently he scrambled from the bush and made his way along the wall. At about seven o’clock in the evening he was knocking at the door of the farm.
It opened to him, and he went through a black-out curtain into the farm kitchen. The woman was there, and there was a man about fifty years of age, in shirt-sleeves and unshaven. They were a decent enough pair.
The man said: “Did you meet anybody in the lane?”
Colvin said: “Nobody at all.” He paused, and then he said: “Thank you for the food; I left the dixie under the bush. I had eaten nothing for a day and a half.”
The man approached, and laid a hand upon his arm. “She said that you were wet,” he remarked. “Are you dry now?”
“Aye,” said Colvin. “I don’t want any clothes.” All this was carried on in halting French, Breton on their side and Quebec on his.
The man said next: “She says that you are looking for a boat to steal. That is now very difficult, because of the Germans. They put a guard on boats with motors, and even upon boats with sails. You will not be able to steal a boat, in these parts.”
“I don’t want a big one,” Colvin said.
“You cannot cross La Manche to England, rowing.”
He said: “I can that.”
“You must be mad.”
“Sure I’m mad,” he said. “So would you be, in my place.”
There was a momentary pause.
“Is there a rowing-boat that I can take?” he asked.
The man said slowly: “At Le Conquet, when the fishing-boats are out at night, they leave a boat upon the mooring—a very small, old boat, you understand, that they can get to shore in when they have moored the fishing-boat. But since the Germans came the boats, even the little ones, are padlocked to the mooring chain, and the oars are taken away. Each night the German soldiers go to see that all the boats are properly secured.”
By his side the woman said suddenly: “There are oars here in the loft, but they are not a pair.”
Colvin said: “That don’t matter. Let me have a look at them?”
The man said: “Would you swim out to the boat, in the black night?”
Colvin showed them his Mae West, which he still wore beneath his jacket, and they fingered it with interest. “Such thick rubber!” said the man, “in time of war!”
The woman turned away to the fire, lifted a pot and poured out a great bowl of the same fish soup. She set it on the table with a length of bread. “Eat this,” she said. “I will fetch the oars.”
He sat down gratefully to the meal, and she went out. The man followed her, but returned after a minute. In his hand he carried a small, rusty hacksaw. He laid it on the table in silence.
Colvin took it up, smiling. “Say …” he said. He felt the serrations with his thumb; they were well worn, but it was sharp enough. “You got everything.”
The woman came back with the oars. They were worn half through by the thole-pin and one was a foot longer than the other. “They’ll do,” he said. “Now, how do I find this boat?”
“Finish your meal,” the man said. “I will guide you there.”
Colvin ate every morsel that he could; he ate on steadily for half an hour. Then he leaned back and pulled out a wet, stained pocket-book and searched in it. He found two sodden one-pound notes.
He got to his feet and laid the notes upon the table. “You folks been pretty nice to me,” he said in halting French. “Oars and a hacksaw, they cost money, and not easy to get. And then there’s the food, and that. I’m real sorry that it’s only English money I’ve got, but maybe you’ll get change for it one day.”
The man shook his head, and pushed the notes back towards him. And then he did what seemed to Colvin a queer thing. He stood straight up, as straight and serious as a priest at the altar, and he made the V sign with two fingers.
Colvin stared at him. He had seen the V sign in England chalked on walls by little boys, ad nauseam. He had seen it in the newspapers, in advertisements for motor-cars, salad cream, and tooth-paste. He had seen a red-nosed comedian in a London theatre chalk it on the backside of a young woman who happened to be bending over. Never before had he seen it used by people who believed in it.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stood up straight himself and repeated it self-consciously. Then he turned to the woman.
“Madame,” he said, “the British Admiralty will repay me this money, and you have children to think of. There are children, are there not?” A little enamel pot standing in the corner had not escaped his notice.
She said: “I took them to my mother to-day, in case they should talk.”
He said: “When next you go to Brest, buy them a present from the British Admiralty. Perhaps a ship would be most suitable.”
They both laughed at that, and she took the money and stuffed it in the pocket of her dress.
Ten minutes later he was standing in the darkness with the man, the oars over his shoulder and the thole-pins in his pocket. Wrapped round the oars there was a sheet of canvas that had covered a leaky pigsty roof, and once had been a portion of a sail. It was all the fabric that they had to give him. He stood
with the man while their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the echoes of the woman’s ‘Bonne chance!’ ringing in his ears.
“I will go first, and noisily,” the farmer whispered. “Follow me at a hundred metres, and as quietly as you can. If I meet Germans I will make sufficient noise that you will know.”
The wind was still south-east, but it had strengthened; the sky was mostly obscured by cloud, though here and there patches of starlight showed. It was about half-past eight when they left the farm. The man led Colvin by roads and lanes for nearly two hours, strolling ahead, singing or muttering to himself.
They met one German picket. Colvin heard the challenge, and a long incoherent argument commence, and he got over the hedge into the field. He made a detour round the argument, and when he heard the man proceeding on the road he followed on beside him in the field. Presently they were going on upon the road as before.
They walked for about two hours in that way through the night. Then the lane that they were following petered out into a grass pasture, and here the man was waiting for Colvin.
“This is the place,” he whispered. “You must go very quietly now. Upon the other side of this field is the sea, the north side of the little bay that is Le Conquet. The village is on the other side, the south. Over there,” he pointed to the west, “is Kermorvan. I do not think that there are any Germans here, but there are land-mines in places. In those places there is one strand of barbed wire, on posts.”
They went on towards the water over the field. They found a patch of land-mines and followed the wire along until it ended; then they came to a formidable hedge of wire. They threw the piece of sail on this and negotiated it without great difficulty; then they were on the shore with water lapping on the rocks at their feet.
The man pointed over the water at a dim mass, seen very faintly in the thin starlight when you put your head down very near the surface. “There is one boat,” he said. “There may be others, but I cannot see.”
He stood up. “There you are,” he said. “This is all that I can do for you. You have boat and oars now; may the good God be with you.”
