by Thomas Wood
I knew the route back to the Gare du Nord like the back of my hand now, and every time I walked past it, I thought of our encounter with the blue bereted girl and how she had led us so expertly to the Hotel La Romaine. As I got closer to the station, I hoped desperately that I would soon see her blue beret bobbing around and the newspaper tucked faithfully under her arm. I hoped that she would help me.
But I knew it was unlikely. I wondered if she had helped any other soldiers out of the capital by now, or if I had been her sole outing as a guide. I trusted that she was still alive, but then again, I told myself, her fortunes may have changed in a matter of hours and could well be face down in a ditch somewhere behind a Gestapo headquarters by now. I banished the thought of her lifeless body lying eternally in a hole from my attentions almost immediately, disgusted at myself that I was even able to conjure up such an image.
Distracted by my never ending, embellishing thoughts, I took a wrong turn, but by the time I had realised my mistake, it was too late.
The German soldier had spotted me as soon as I had rounded the corner, as he took a cigarette break from pillaging one of the apartments above a shop that his friends continued to bang and crash around in. I half-wondered whether it was the Priest’s abode that they were smashing up.
He stole my gaze, hypnotising me and drawing me into him. I had no idea where this street went or if I would have to turn back anyway and walk past him again. I took no chances though, I had to pretend I knew where I was going, or he would be suspicious.
His cigarette bobbed up and down and it was only as he took a few steps towards me that I realised he was speaking.
“Zigarettenanzünder?” He repeated his question again, sounding more like an accusation of some horrific crime than an innocent request for a light.
I responded in French, pretending to be the hapless occupied civilian, in the hope that he would give me a free pass. Clearly, he didn’t speak French and began motioning for a cigarette lighter to get him started. I whipped one from my pocket and duly lit it.
“Danke, Danke.”
“Parles Francais?”
He shook his head violently, as he sucked in the first few lungs of cigarette smoke.
“Anglais?” I asked, immediately regretting what I had said and preparing myself to run away in a hail of screaming and bullets.
“Yes.” He replied in a heavily accented, gruff voice, choking slightly on his own smoke.
“Which way is the train station from here?” He must have been concentrating so much on regurgitating his English, that the importance of the question must have completely slipped his mind. What made me ask him the question I’ll never know, but it might have just saved my life.
“Back there. Left. Second right and it’s straight after that.”
“Thanks awfully,” I said, growing rather too cocky about how easy it was to fool a German soldier. Nevertheless, I made off in the direction he had pointed me rather quickly, just in case he soon realised that he had, in fact, been chatting quite casually to a British evader, even pointing him in the direction of the train station!
Off I went, amused, slightly more confident than before and with a renewed sense of purpose.
29
The Gare d’Austerlitz was a large, gothic like building, with stone statues of famous Frenchmen littering the entire building, celebrating the victories of France and Napoleon, something the Germans hadn’t quite got round to censoring just yet. I doubted that Napoleon would have approved of the two, large, obligatory Swastikas that now flew on the roof of the station, presumably placed there as soon as the occupation took place, to assert their authority over one of the main transport hubs in Paris.
Like all other stations, a clock was its most prominent centre piece, but the hanging tannoys that fell from the ceiling like baubles on a Christmas tree were another source of spectacle in this large, decorative station.
I was free to walk about the station, which I did, observing all the train timetables and maps, as well as taking note of where the German sentry boxes were located and where they would check papers. They had ceased to be the enemy for a while now, they were merely German soldiers. An enemy is someone who viciously attacks you and, for the last month or so now, since I had been on the run anyway, the last person who had tried to kill me had been a British officer. I saw them as men, as boys who were further away from their home than they would have liked, enjoying themselves for the most part, visiting parts of Paris they wouldn’t have otherwise seen, but I doubted their enthusiasm for the occupation would last too much longer, especially when they spent Christmases and Birthdays away from their family.
Through the main body of the station, and past the crowds who were jostling with each other to make the next train, I could see the platforms of the terminus itself. There were only two platforms from what I could see, one on the far left, the other on the far right, the intervening section entangled with twisted iron that overlapped with one another but somehow made sure that the right carriages were at the right platform, at the right time. The room filled with smoke as one train pulled away from the station, just as the tracks were changed in order to let a waiting train in to unload its cargo.
I took a brief look at the board. There was one train, destined for Bordeaux, due to leave in the next ten minutes or so. From my own knowledge of France, I knew that Bordeaux was further south than Paris, and so selected it as my train that I would try to board to get out of the capital.
The woman looked at me suspiciously as I waddled over to her to buy a ticket. I knew she was uneasy about serving me as soon as I opened my mouth, completely forgetting that I had a distinct accent, obvious to any native French speaker. She stared at me with petrified eyes as I asked for a one-way ticket to Bordeaux and hoped that she would be so fearful for her life that she didn’t whisper her suspicions to the German soldier permanently stationed outside her kiosk.
She continued glaring at me, her eyes widening as soon as she realised how fine I would be cutting it to actually make it on to the train. All the while, she didn’t let on about who I was, even though she must have known, and as I walked away from the plump woman’s kiosk, I thanked her from the bottom of my heart and hoped that she would one day be repaid for the kindness that she showed to me.
By the time I had left her, I realised I had less than six or maybe seven minutes to make my train, so began sliding myself in between people, hoping to get to the train in time. As I pushed my way past another French woman obviously disgruntled at my rudeness, I thought how bizarre it truly was, I was racing to try and get to see a German as quickly as I could. Making it to the front of the queue, I was faced with a stony faced private, who looked so angry about being there that I almost expected him to grab his pistol and begin firing into the crowd. As he looked at my papers and at my ticket, he must have realised how much of a hurry I was in and began taking his time to check and double check my credentials. Some disgruntled murmurs wobbled their way towards his ears and, obviously wanting the easiest journey possible through this posting, he curtly stamped my ticket and I was let through the barrier.
As I stumbled through the crowd and onto the platform, I caught eyes with the conductor, as he blew his whistle and began clambering aboard the train. Throwing his door open wide, he hauled me up, just as the train started moving off.
I almost kissed him as I realised that I was finally taking an almighty step towards freedom. As I released his hand, he pulled me in closer to him, and whispered urgently in my ear.
“Get off at Angouleme. You will have friends there. Bordeaux is too dangerous.”
As I looked back up into his face, he turned, and staggered his way down the train, which started to rock gracefully from side to side as we picked up speed.
I found my way to my seat without the help of any Frenchmen, feeling quite accomplished all of a sudden. My carriage was rammed full of German soldiers, presumably the ones who had done all the fighting a couple of months ago a
nd now finally being let out on leave. I felt quite comfortable in the carriage with them, hoping that if there was a German inspector on this train, that he would leave this carriage well alone, owing to the amount of Wehrmacht uniforms he could see.
I decided that now would be the best time to get my head down, as I had now not slept properly in two days and the permanent red glow that was behind my eyes, must have been getting slowly more prominent to the point where a blind man would have been able to know how tired I was.
As I let my eyes drift together, I caught sight of another figure, on the opposite side of the train to me. He wore a long, dark coat, like that worn by the men at the hotel on the night the poor bloodied man was pulled from his room. It was tightly wrapped around him, even though the amount of bodies on the train were making the windows steam up quite quickly. He was on his own, with no one sitting next to him and not even a newspaper to keep him company. I watched as his eyes danced around the cabin, keeping an eye on everyone in the carriage, willing one of them to make some sort of mistake. Confident that his eyes never fell on me for more than a second, I let my own eyes rest peacefully, and before long I was getting some much-needed shut-eye.
I dreamt of home for the first time in a long time, picturing a landscape that had not changed in the slightest since I had left, my father still working happily out in the fields, and my mother waiting patiently at home for him. As I made my way through the door, she was standing there, her arms outstretched, as if that’s how she had been waiting when I had left the year before.
We embraced for ages, and the smell of her skin felt amazing, and I instantly forgot about everything that had happened to me, instead being transported back to my childhood, when I had a grazed knee that felt like it would be the end of my life.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated gently, instantly warming my thoughts as I hugged and laughed with her.
“Come with me. I have some people here, waiting for you.”
Cécile was the first face I saw, and we launched ourselves at one another, hugging and kissing each other as if nothing else mattered.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” I panted, “I’m so sorry that I messed it all up for you.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said as we embraced, echoing my mother’s words of only a few moments before.
But there was one other figure, one that filled me with such a fear and a contempt that I almost threw up. I began quaking, looking at both my mother and Cécile for some kind of reassurance.
“It’s okay,” they said in unison as I began to turn back to the figure. He had his back to me, but the darkness of his skin and his outline, against the brightness of the kitchen, told me everything. This was the figure that had sat in the front of the car, the one that had left so soon after being at the farm. This was the figure that had been to the Germans, I was so sure of it.
He began to turn his whole body towards me, my legs knocking together so violently that I felt like I might faint. As his face slowly revealed itself to me, I began to recognise features, certain characteristics. The perma smile that had always been stitched into his face, was still there, grinning a horrid, incessant smile at me that I had come to both loathe and hate.
“Red? But you were killed, I saw you die…what?”
“Yes.” He said, the smile disappearing from his face quicker than he had died, “You killed me. I would be alive if it were not for you.”
I woke with a start, great beads of sweat dripping from every crevice in my body. I had no idea how long I had been asleep, but I was grateful that the soldiers were continuing to be rowdy, that way no one would have heard my mutterings, if there had been any, especially that they would have been in English.
I looked over towards the man with the long coat, but he had vanished. We must have made several stops already as numerous chairs were now empty. I only hoped that we hadn’t gone past Angouleme.
I couldn’t believe that I had dreamt about the figure in the front of that car. What had triggered that? He hadn’t seemed to be of any consequence to me when we had been in the car and had more than likely just been hitching a lift to the farm. But the others hadn’t made any mention of him, hadn’t even acknowledged his presence while we had been talking. I instantly began rebuking myself, telling myself that I should have asked them who he was, and pressed them until I had an answer.
Why Red? Why had my mind linked the blacked-out figure with one of my dead friends? Was it because I had forgotten him for so long? Was I punishing myself?
What if…what if it had been Red in that car, what if he had been the one sitting there in silence, staring, our whole way to the farm? Maybe it was him and maybe, just maybe, I had been the only one to see him and that’s why the mysterious figure wasn’t mentioned.
I distracted myself from my wild opinions and ruminations, by watching the landscape as it slowly became less of a blur as the train lost power. We were coming into a station.
The conductor appeared in the small gangway between the carriage door and the seating compartments. He glared at me with wide eyes for half a second, before weaving his way down the carriage, screaming.
“Angouleme! Angouleme! Angouleme!” His voice disappeared down the carriage, just as the train slowed to a complete halt. I went to pick up my belongings, before realising I had none so, checking my pockets for the small amount of cash I did own, I hopped down out of the carriage and onto the solid concrete of the platform.
I didn’t have a chance to look around the platform as I had been hoping, all I got was one last look at the train as it slowly puffed its way from the station, the ominous sound of metal grinding on metal as it squealed away.
The sackcloth that was forcefully pulled over my head was rough, and as I sharply breathed in, the fibres of it got caught in my mouth, wanting to wrap themselves around my teeth. My legs buckled as a leg was pushed into the behinds of my kneecaps, forcing them to give way and sent me crashing into the concrete below.
The pain quickly subsided as I felt two pairs of hands, one under my arms and another set down by my ankles, quickly pull me up and clear of the floor and began running, presumably out of the train station.
My ears now pricked, I began making out noises that I was certain I never would have done had I been able to see. I focused in on the sound of a small car starting up its petrol engine, before idling as we got closer and closer to the noise.
For the second time in a short space of time, I was thrown into the back of a car, this time far more forcefully and causing an almighty pain in my chest, as we sped off in an unknown direction. I wriggled and kicked as I lay in the footwell of the car, a boot of some sort forcing its way into my shoulder to try and keep me subdued.
I dared not speak a word, of any language, for fear that I give away my true identity in one fell swoop. Instead, I limited myself to grunts and groans as I had the wind kicked out of me completely.
I managed to flip myself over in a swift motion that an Olympic gymnast would have envied. As I did so, my hood came loose, and I was able to get a fleeting look at one of my captors, before it was violently yanked back down over my eyes.
It was the man in the long coat from the train.
30
How on earth had they known? What had I done to give myself away? This was it, surely this was the end of my journey now, the evader who is no longer able to evade. I was captured. I was in the bag.
I almost chuckled at my situation, I had been on the run in one of the busiest, if not the busiest, city in the whole of France, and it seemed like as soon as I had taken one pace outside of its boundaries and I had been caught. I had spent weeks dining in restaurants that were used by German high command, I had even spoken to one of them in English and yet, I couldn’t make one simple train journey work in my favour.
The boot thumped into my chest to shut me up, as the car slowed down momentarily. The force was so great that it felt like it might simply stamp through my c
hest, so I kept my noise to a minimum until I recovered. I was determined to resist my capture by any means possible, even if that did mean just winding up my captors by making strange noises as gases passed over my vocal chords.
I debated whether or not I had been sleep talking, uttering sentences from my dream which this Gestapo man had picked up on. Maybe, I thought solemnly, my dreams had given me up involuntarily. But then I wondered how the man would have had a kidnap team ready, as well as a car, engine idling and all. How would he have got word to them about me? If he had known when we left the station in Paris, surely, he would have picked me up then? It would have saved him a four-hour long train journey that much was certain. As I wriggled around in the footwell of the car, resisting as much as I could to succumb to the cramp that was now knocking at the door, I began to notice holes in my theory and for a moment, my heart was uplifted by the fact that these men may not have been Gestapo.
But, then again, his eyes had been darting all over the place, one-minute scowling at the German soldiers next to him, followed by a quick scan of the French civilians that littered the carriage. He must have been German secret police, no one else would have been that bold to have been overtly checking everyone out like that. As he delivered a quick blow to my head, I concluded that this man was not messing about, he was the real deal.
Blood and phlegm now clung to the inside of the sackcloth, sticking to my mouth each time I tried to breathe in through the fibres. The moisture inside my new headgear was reaching breaking point, the humidity from my own breath now forming up on the end of my nose and dribbling off pathetically.
I felt every single bump and groove in the road as we picked up speed and raced along the road once more, but I knew the pain that I felt as a single pebble struck the underside of the car, would be nothing compared to what was about to come. I would be beaten black and blue, I would be deprived of my sleep for however long and there had been several instances where newsreels had revealed that people had been cooked alive by the feared Gestapo. I didn’t know if I should have believed all the stories that I was told about them, but my treatment at their hands so far was in line with a lot of the rumours that circulated.
