Secret Letters

by John Willis

  Their second meeting, during what was later called the Phoney War, was in Guignicourt itself. It was strictly against RAF rules for outsiders to be there – indeed, Margot was not even supposed to know where her husband was posted – but one of Geoffrey’s friends, an American called Sam Jocelyn who lived in Guignicourt, smuggled her into the local hotel. Myers was concerned that Margot, who was pretending to be his niece, would be discovered, but for nearly three weeks Margot and their son Robert stayed out of sight in the hotel. From time to time, Geoffrey invited officers he liked and trusted to meet them.

  When the family finally said a tearful goodbye, Myers had absolutely no idea when they would meet again. He could see that the RAF’s defences, armed with old-fashioned aircraft like Battles and Blenheims, were flimsy against the might of a well-equipped Luftwaffe, battle-hardened in the Spanish Civil War. The pilots at Guignicourt called their Fairey Battle fighter-bombers ‘flying coffins’. He was already fearing the worst.

  After his family returned south, Myers was dispatched back to England to be trained at Hendon as an intelligence officer. He was pleased to be back in England, actually learning something that might be useful in the war, but his thoughts were often with his half-Jewish children in France. When his training at Hendon was completed, he was surprised to be sent back to France where he was attached to a section in Arras that dealt with photographic intelligence, mainly related to Holland and Belgium. He took up the story again in his letters to his family.

  My love,

  I have not told you what happened before I got back to England. I was immediately sent to Arras where I was attached to the intelligence section. At that time the only work being done in the section was photographic intelligence. My close companion there, Philip March, refused to take the work seriously. Completely forgetting the task in hand, he would spend half an hour admiring the beauty of one or other of the photographs he was supposed to be classifying. When we had been working together for a couple of weeks he looked at me earnestly one morning and said, ‘Your efficiency annoys and distresses me, Geoff. You should do the work with grand inefficiency as I do.’

  But Philip March was not lazy. He just wanted to fight.

  ‘Oh, why am I not fighting in Norway? I could get to grips with the Germans there instead of doing this nonsense.’ March’s jovial eyes and genial manner won for him many friends among the waitresses and hotel servants of Arras. He had a kind word for each of them, and always a good joke. They liked his handsome head of hair, his neat moustache and the panache which accompanied all his gestures. If it had not been for the war, March would have been riding over the fields of his Norfolk farm and writing about the yeomen of England.

  ‘The trouble about England,’ he said, ‘is that we have forsaken the land. We are no longer of tough yeoman stock… It was the workman, the Cockney, the offspring of the peasant that won the last war for us… I think he is still tough enough to win this war, but if the town goes on sapping our strength, we shall not be capable of withstanding another onslaught.’

  The section for photographic intelligence was run by a university lecturer called Belmonte, and his assistant had been a draughtsman before the war. They both had remarkable memories and a flare for interpreting photographs, but neither believed in basic classifying or filing.

  In a special disorder of their own, both could find all the photos they wanted. Peter Crane, a young lieutenant, tried to put things in order but there was chaos. When he failed to persuade his chiefs to keep the section tidy, Peter lost most of his interest, finding instead plenty of amusement in the town after office hours. When Philip called him a licentious young man and teased him about his wife in England he listened indifferently.

  The fourth member of the team was Paul, a French furniture dealer who had somehow talked his way into the section as an interpreter.

  Paul was not usually communicative about his brothel experiences but he made up for this with a vengeance when he had had too much to drink. On these occasions, his eyeballs, which at all times protruded, appeared to stick right out and touch his thick glasses. Paul’s particular assets were a magnificent American car and a thorough knowledge of all the restaurants, inns and cabarets in northern France. His contributions to the war effort were all in this sphere.

  None of this jollity appeared to have touched Geoffrey Myers. He was a serious man, thoughtful and introspective. While the younger men still thought that war was a game or that nothing would ever happen to them, Myers, always the journalist, took a sharp interest in wider events. He seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  I was billeted with a railwayman who had brought the sun with him from Rodez. The warmth of the south shone on his face. His dark hair was brushed straight back over his head. The sun of the south was also in his bushy eyebrows and in his dark, brown eyes. ‘Just a little drop with us, Monsieur, before going up into that small room.’ And he would bring out something dark and red, sweet and warming, which the family had brought back from South West France.

  Madame Louis, the wife of the railwayman from Rodez, had survived the Great War in Arras and believed she would survive this one too.

  Her father, a postman, had stayed at Arras after the authorities had ordered its evacuation. He had remained in his cellar when his house crumbled under the artillery pounding. He was the last man to move out of the town.

  The railwayman’s wife had great confidence in the Maginot Line and other French defences.

  ‘We shall never see the Boche14 here again,’ she said. ‘We shall keep him outside our Maginot Line and then we will show him, in his own country, what war is like. My friends advised me to send my belongings to Rodez and be ready to go down there. I did nothing of the kind. There will be no move this time. The Maginot Line… have you seen it, Monsieur? We saw bits of it on the films. Wonderful!’

  Myers tried hard to gently prepare his landlady for the worst and, as a precaution, to send some possessions back south to Rodez.

  ‘You know, I would not call it cowardly or anything like that if you were to send a trunk of belongings to Rodez, just a precaution against air warfare. It could do no harm just to send off a trunk…’

  Madame Louis remained unmoved, her confidence in France unshaken.

  That evening, I walked out of Arras and over the barren fields towards the river. In an enclosed field at the top of a gentle slope, I saw the signpost of the Imperial War Graves Commission. Hundreds of British soldiers had been buried there in a common grave. The grass had been allowed to grow. Poppies would soon be blowing their petals. Around the enclosure the ground had been tilled. I passed by and stumbled over a rusty shell which had been ploughed up and thrown on the path. Old shells were still exploding in unexpected places, sometimes killing small boys who played with them. Now we were at war again.

  It looked peaceful enough there. A few miles away in the cafes of Arras, British soldiers were drinking Allies’ beer, playing their mouth organs and singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ or ‘Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’. Others were in the municipal theatre attending an all-British musical.

  Officers were in the Café de l’Univers, passing away their time over gins and champagnes, reading war news out of the London newspapers which had been flown over by passenger mail plane to a peacetime schedule. Some complained when the newspapers were late.

  As I walked on, the orange sunlight splashed over the clay-filled sand and gave a touch of richness to the barren uplands. I tripped down a little path towards the river. I came across a trench, which was overgrown and dated from the last war… at the bottom of the hill was another signpost pointing to Happy Valley Cemetery.

  Soon after his peaceful but disturbing walk to the cemetery, Myers was told that a German invasion of Holland and Belgium was expected at any time.

  Major Chase convoked us. He was a highly strung, conscientious man with a kind, understanding smile… He quietly told each man what his duties would be in the cella
rs of the Episcopal Palace where the emergency headquarters had been established.

  At dawn the next day, May 10, Arras aerodrome was heavily bombed and at 6.30am the German invasion of Holland and Belgium was announced on Brussels Radio, as the Luftwaffe attacked scores of airfields. On the same day, Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister. The Battle for France had begun.

  Pilot Officer Myers went to the palace cellars to sort out the intelligence photographs to find that only two of the many telephones worked, despite being tested every day. There, he was confronted by an unpleasant and lazy French officer nicknamed Monsieur le Comté who was abusive to his subordinates. Myers was pleased when he later met an altogether more admirable French lieutenant, fresh from fighting on the Maginot Line.

  The lieutenant, who had a sense of values, remarked drily, ‘Perhaps Monsieur le Comté will have to fight one day. Even the Maginot Line is not as comfortable as all that.’

  Major Chase soon relayed to the other officers that the Belgians had failed to hold the line as planned. In the operations room in British military HQ, Geoffrey could see from the map of Belgium, with flags representing troop movements, that the Germans were advancing rapidly.

  Day and night, weary old men, officers of the last war who had been called up from the reserve, pushed the flags deeper and deeper into Belgium. Signals came in with pathetic appeals from the British missions with the French and Belgian forces for more aircraft to oppose the German onslaught.

  A day later, the Germans had overrun most of Belgium and their tanks were pouring across Luxembourg into France. Our missions signalled that the allied troops were becoming demoralised by the incessant dive-bombing. Then came a signal that Brussels was in flames… the black lines and arrows showing the German advance were rubbed out and redrawn from hour to hour. Like ripples of the incoming tide approaching a child’s sandcastle, they came, little by little, nearer to Arras. The signals from our missions became more desperate.

  The Belgian defence was overcome in just seventeen days. In some ways, the war still seemed unreal. Rumours flew of German parachutists landing in Arras itself but no parachutes were seen. Every few hours, Myers and his fellow servicemen would surface from the basement for some fresh air.

  Outside, the palace gardens were drenched in brilliant sunlight. The sky looked as if it had been painted blue. It seemed curious that such things as clouds could exist. We looked up to watch some planes circling high above the city. We imagined they were ours until a few anti-aircraft guns hurled up little white puffs around them.

  Then came news that German tanks were sweeping along the road north of Reims, close to Guignicourt where, until recently, Geoffrey had been stationed. He immediately thought about the men and women he knew at the chateau near Guignicourt during the uneventful months of the Phoney War.

  I thought of the villagers of Guignicourt who had grown to like the men of our two RAF squadrons stationed there during the Phoney War for the first eight months. A good many of us had begun to feel quite at home there. Not long ago, the Mayor had shown me his orchard. ‘Your pilots will enjoy the fruit this summer,’ he’d said.

  I thought of the innkeeper’s wife who the airmen had called Grandma, who had taught the RAF cooks to make French dishes. I could imagine her gathering up her most precious belongings, hustling her elderly husband into their car and joining the stream of refugees moving south. I thought the inn had probably been reduced to ruins already, just as it had been smashed up by the German advance during the last war.

  The ironmonger, who was called up months ago, was probably a prisoner of war by now. His wife and their four pretty daughters must have driven off in the ironmonger’s van to a place of little safety. But the workers in the sugar beet factory had no cars and nowhere to go.

  Geoff also thought of Madame Louis, the railwayman’s wife, who had shown such faith in the strength of the French defences, ‘I wonder what has happened to Madame Louis and those jolly little children of hers. I have the key to the front door. She had a trunk which contained my books and other belongings.’

  Myers sat by his telephones waiting to pass on vital information, but the telephones did not ring. German tanks had crossed the Marne. He realised that all the phones had been cut off and that signals were the last remaining means of communication.

  By dawn the next day, panic had seized the whole of northern France. The refugees were pouring through Arras on their way south. An unending stream of cars, with mattresses on their roofs, and packed out with worn-out women, frightened children and old men, was crowding along the road to the south.

  Bill Simpson from 12 Squadron, who’d been stationed with Geoffrey Myers during the Phoney War in Guignicourt, recalled the horrendous escape from the airfield. ‘The roads were chaotic, blocked by refugees. As we went along, we were strafed and bombed. The railways were full of cattle trucks and the wounded.’15

  The German advance swiftly ripped through northern France reaching Arras by May 21. At British Headquarters the situation was chaotic and confusing.

  Soon there was a regular flow of soldiers through the cellar passages to and from the car park. The stokers were handed piles of papers to burn. There were only two boilers. One was out of action… an urgent signal came through from the British Air Forces Headquarters to arrange for intensive bombing of the road to Bohain, along which a column of 200 German tanks was reported to be advancing. The British bombers were swiftly dispatched.

  Half an hour later, after many frantic signals, it was revealed to Major Chase that the tanks were, in fact, French forces in retreat.

  ‘It’s too late. We’ve bombed them by now,’ Major Chase said.

  Stories of more bombs being dropped on Arras were flowing. Myers was asked go out onto the streets to try to establish what was happening.

  In the town, all the streets were blocked with refugee traffic. Shopkeepers were hastily pulling down their shutters. Some had already left town. The salvage corps were removing from the streets the debris from the first bombing.

  In the town, Myers saw the self-important French liaison officer who had been dubbed Monsieur le Comté.

  He was perspiring with fear. He scarcely stopped to speak. He just shouted, ‘We’re off! We’re off,’ as he jumped into his car and disappeared with the French liaison officers.

  Myers told the brave and determined French officer who had fought at the Maginot Line what he had seen.

  ‘The cowards!’ he said. ‘One day they will remember this. France will make them remember. We are not like that.’

  The main gates of the British HQ at the Episcopal Palace were locked when Myers returned.

  Major Chase, who had scarcely slept since the German offensive began, seemed to have gathered every ounce of his nerve to carry on. His face became troubled as he thought for the first time of all the documents in the house up the road which had been our main office until the offensive began.

  Myers volunteered to go back to retrieve or destroy the vital documents that had been left at the Intelligence Headquarters.

  Before I left, I realised that I had not got a pistol so I borrowed one from a friend. I tried to think things out. ‘If I get caught in the house,’ I said to Major Chase, ‘should I shoot myself?’

  ‘I can’t really advise you about that, Geoff,’ he said.

  I replied, ‘I’m wondering what to do because I am a Jew and I don’t know how things are.’

  Major Chase said, ‘Oh, that makes things different,’ and he gave me a look of such kindness that I thanked him inwardly.

  I decided that, if I was overtaken, I would try to shoot those who entered the house but not at myself. I told Major Chase. I also wrote down your name and address on a slip of paper and handed it to him in case he got out and anything happened to me. At the time I did not expect to get out of Arras and nor did he.

  13Interview with Janet Willis

  14Shortened from French slang alboche, a portmanteau derived from Allemand (Germa
n) and caboche (cabbage)

  15Interview with Janet Willis

  CHAPTER THREE

  The German advance had been frighteningly rapid. In the chaos that followed, Geoffrey Myers feared the worst. He could not see how he could possibly escape, trapped by the Germans on one side and the Channel on the other. But he had to just get on with the job at hand.

  Major Chase had told Myers to remove or burn all the secret documents and photographs that were held at Intelligence HQ in Arras. When he arrived, three of his colleagues had already started the flames.

  I went out into the blazing sun and made my way to our old office. There I found Belmonte, Peter and Paul sitting over a bottle of champagne, cursing the whole organisation of the general staff and wondering what was happening. In the back garden, a big bonfire was consuming air photographs and documents.

  After some more burning of less essential documents it was decided that Paul, the Frenchman, would drive his car full of the most secret documents to a safe place further north. Myers, although reluctant to leave Arras, was ordered to accompany him.

  A half an hour later we were winding in and out of streams of cars trying to find a way out of Arras to the south. Soon, we were alone going westwards on the road to Montreuil, near Boulogne. As we speeded through the still air, the smell of hay came in puffs through the windows. I noticed a horse walking lazily in a meadow to some choice clump of grass. The dark green shadows of the trees on the glistening fields were becoming longer. The intense blue of the sky was softening. The setting sun dazzled Paul as he drove on. It was nightfall when we reached Montreuil.

  The local French commander, a reserve captain who before the war had been a dentist, welcomed us like a monarch receiving royalty in his capital. He gave us a room for the night and helped us pile our documents into a cupboard. The next morning, he read us passages from both his diaries and his love poems. He was a stout little man with a big round head of closely cropped white hair. During his three months in Montreuil he had achieved his secret ambition: he had become a Napoleon. To assert his authority, he walked round with a riding whip which he frequently lashed against his breeches.