by James Philip
The man’s eye’s blinked open.
“We can talk later…”
“What makes you think there will be a later?” She asked, ignoring his pathetic attempts to penetrate her.
His fingers were pressing into her flesh and he was becoming urgent, breathless.
“There’s always later,” he grunted irritably.
“No, that’s where you’re wrong.”
That was when she lurched forward onto her elbows with such force her deadweight expelled the air from Maxim Machenaud’s lungs.
Suddenly he was staring, transfixed at the polished blade of the knife.
She jerked upright, clasping the haft in both hands.
Maxim Machenaud opened his mouth to speak as the blade descended in a short, savage, unstoppable arc.
“My name is not Comrade Agnès,” his executioner said, spitting contempt.
In her head the knife stabbed down in slow motion, and each exquisite millimetre of its inexorable fall, and jerking penetration, juddering briefly as it encountered bone on its unstoppable downward path was beatifically elongated.
Actually, the moment of stabbing happened so fast her conscious mind registered nothing other than the motor command to bring the blade, its haft gripped in two hands, straight down to earth, and the aftermath.
The blade was buried in Maxim Machenaud’s chest, all the way to the hilt. She had stabbed him in the right torso, level with his heart, or rather, what passed for a heart in the sad, sick, demented little shit’s chest cavity.
She twisted the blade, wanted to gut the beast but the blade grated on bone and briefly, it was stuck.
The man attempted to cry out.
There was an obscene, sucking sound as air and blood bubbled around the half to the wicked hunting knife.
More blood filled the dying man’s mouth; he began to choke, drown in his own blood. She watched, knowing that if she pulled out the knife that death would come faster and that was not at all what she planned.
She looked down at her groin.
“What’s the problem, little man? Can’t you get it up today?”
She had seen a lot of people die very, very bad deaths and had learned to tell from their eyes when they were starting to slip away.
His journey was close to its end but that end was not quite yet.
She gathered her wits.
“My name is Jacqueline Faure and I am nobody’s fucking comrade.”
It ought to have been a revelatory moment. It was not. She would have been sick if there had been anything in her painfully cramping stomach.
She dry-retched painfully.
Maxim Machenaud was trying to say something.
She clamped her left hand over his mouth, the blood instantly foaming between her fingers.
“Enough,” she muttered.
The knife would not come out.
She pulled once, there was a sick sucking, squelching noise and the man’s body twitched in a spasm of agony. She tried again, now there was blood everywhere.
Jacqueline Faure had no idea if the man who had tormented and butchered tens of thousands of his fellow French men and women, whose wanton cruelty and neglect had depopulated whole tracts of the South of France, wasted and ruined a once beautiful, fertile land beyond measure, was already dead when she finally got the blade out of his chest.
She shrieked and plunged the knife into his Godforsaken heart.
Once, twice, three times…
On and on.
Until with one last final insane cry of existential angst she buried it in him and collapsed, exhausted on top of the wrecked torso of the dead man.
Epilogue
Chapter 75
Saturday 18th February 1967
Toulon, France
Captain Dermot O’Reilly, RN, did not care to be the Military Governor of Toulon. He simply was not the stuff of which dictators or imperial pro-consuls were made, and frankly, he was far too busy to worry about little things like how he fed the starving people of the city and the surrounding countryside.
He had actually been a little irritated when a delegation from Marseilles had come into his makeshift headquarters in the old Dockyard Superintendent’s Office, to formally surrender that city.
Mercifully, the assault ship HMS Fearless had docked an hour after daybreak that morning and would soon start landing three hundred Royal Marines, their vehicles, and having flooded down her stern dock launched her four twenty-five-ton LCVP – Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel – to be employed for general harbour duties. Fearless’s arrival could not have been better timed, overnight, his people had finally locked down most of the port area, secured weapons and munitions stores and set up safe landing and assembly areas. Presently, every available man, over three-quarters of the crews of the Campbeltown, Stirling and the Galatea – leaving only skeleton complements aboard - were ashore in policing, administrative or humanitarian roles, and an emergency field hospital and a communal soup kitchen had been set up inside the dockyard perimeter.
If nothing else, his people had begun to address the city’s most pressing ills. The problem was that there was so much still to be done and only so much a few hundred Royal Naval personnel could, even with the best will in the world, achieve.
People were starving to death in the war plague-wracked streets of parts of the city, too weak to call out for help; and because there were still Red Dawn, or Front Internationale diehards, or just plain maniac enclaves holding out all along the coast, preventing Task Force V1 switching its main effort from war-fighting to civil-assistance, Dermot O’Reilly was being forced to operate with one hand tied behind his back.
Once ashore, the manpower on board either the Kent or the Belfast would make a huge local difference, there was enough oil on the RFA Orangeleaf and a second tanker shortly scheduled to join Rear Admiral Henry Leach’s fleet in the Bay of Lions, to fuel the generators needed to restore the electricity supply to parts of Toulon, Marseilles, Nice and a dozen other towns and cities.
Yet, while the diehards fought on, people would go on dying…
The two middle-ranking French naval officers standing in front of O’Reilly’s desk wanted to know what had happened to the ‘Villefranche Squadron’.
The embattled Captain (D) of the 21st Destroyer Squadron was tempted to have his visitors summarily ejected from the building.
Instead, he sighed, and looked up from his cluttered desk.
“Jean Bart, Clemenceau and several other vessels,” he explained in terse, impatient Quebecois French, “including the cruiser De Grasse were safely escorted to Malta where Contra Amiral Leguay formally surrendered the fleet…”
Suddenly, there was something half-way between horror and shame on both the other men’s faces. Neither man bore rank insignia but they were of O’Reilly’s generation.
He quickly shook his head.
“No, no, it was nothing like that. The surrender business was just a formality. The C-in-C Mediterranean immediately handed the ships back to Rene Leguay. He now commands the French Mediterranean Fleet at Malta. Naval surveyors and engineers are currently inspecting the ships and all personnel are being cared for, and by order of the British Government, being treated like honoured allies by the people on the Archipelago.”
“We heard that the Russians sank the fleet?”
“No, that’s a lie.”
Dermot O’Reilly decided that he needed to rediscover his sense of humour and stop acting like a grumpy old man. He waved the other men to pull up chairs. Around them the whole building was a constant hive of activity.
“Rene Leguay and his people successfully fought off a Front Internationale attempt to seize the fleet, and together, my ships and his, fought off a Russian bombing raid. After that, we patched up the surviving ships and escorted them to Malta. I say again, until somebody tells me differently, Amiral Leguay is C-in-C all French Naval Forces in the Mediterranean. Once we’ve got things ship shape here, the plan is to fly him up from Malta to take control. We,”
he shrugged, spreading his hands, “are here as liberators. We, the British, have no desire whatsoever to be running things a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Obviously, the majority of the task force out at sea must remain focused on subduing the remaining ‘hostile’ pockets of resistance along the coast before we bring all the available resources ashore to help your people.” He thought about it. “Our people, now. As in the north, Frenchman in the south will soon be governed by the Provisional Administration of the Free French under the leadership of General Alain de Boissieu. Hopefully, he will nominate a Governor of this city, district, whatever, in the next few days, so that I can get back to being a destroyer captain again!”
The two French officers stared at him, speechless.
“If that was all, I must get on, gentlemen,” O’Reilly said. As an afterthought he added: “On your way out please identify yourselves to my officers. If you inform them of your service specialisations and general technical backgrounds, they will assign you both to appropriate roles within the temporary administration.”
Wintery sunshine was filtering into the room.
The windows, cracked and dirty rattled gently as the boom of distant guns fell across the city like the threat of an approaching spring storm.
That would probably be the Kent hurling eight-inch two-hundred-and-sixty pound high-explosive rounds fifteen miles inshore with one of the Victorious’s Fairy Gannets doing the artillery spotting.
The people of Toulon had turned on the few remaining FI fanatics around the port area in the hours before Campbeltown nosed into the great, mostly derelict port. That had not been pretty. Bodies still hung from lamp posts, other unfortunates had been beaten to death in the streets, or agonisingly, slowly incinerated with a burning tyre around their necks or torso.
It was gruesome, inevitable and in those now lost, halcyon days before the cataclysm it would have shocked and scarred the liberators. But actually, these days such atrocities were water off a duck’s back to most of O’Reilly’s men. They had survived the war to end all wars, lived in its aftermath, only to fight more battles, each one not for any great cause, rather, simply to go on living and to ensure that the curse of war was held back from wherever they called home.
O’Reilly had sent patrols into the streets to try to stop the ongoing blood-letting, to little avail. Thankfully, this morning the shore patrols were reporting an exhausted calm and a communal sigh of relief that at last, the darkness might be lifting.
Of more concern were the booby traps, usually grenades triggered by tripwires which the departing Revolutionary Guards had hurriedly planted.
The bastards had attempted to sabotage the dockyards fuel pumps, and in one, intact shell store containing several hundred rounds, including to everybody’s astonishment, nearly a hundred 380-millimetre reloads for the Jean Bart’s main battery, they had laid demolition charges which thankfully, had failed to explode.
Periodically, there was a faraway detonation as O’Reilly’s people, hopefully, disarmed or remotely, safely triggered the booby traps in the streets around the port.
Commander Brynmawr Williams knocked at the open door as the two French officers departed and walked in.
“All the former Navy-types are coming out of the woodwork, now, sir,” he reported wryly. “Not all of them are very popular with the locals, I’m afraid.”
O’Reilly got to his feet, stretched his stiff limbs.
“I don’t care, that’s not our problem. If they can help us get this city back on its feet and set up a working food distribution system, they get a free pass. It can’t have been much fun for anybody trying to get by with those Krasnaya Zarya zealots.”
“That’s true,” Campbeltown’s Executive Officer agreed. He looked meaningfully at his wristwatch. “Fearless will be expecting us aboard for the mid-day sitrep,” he reminded his Captain.
The assault ship’s commanding officer had volunteered to come ashore; Dermot O’Reilly had told him that he would come to him. Fearless had the most modern C-I-C and communications rig in the Task Force, and he badly needed to know what else was going on around the Toulon-Marseilles ‘liberated’ zone.
Besides, he needed to get out and about.
His people needed to see him.
And so, probably, did the survivors of the city.
“It’s a funny old world,” Brynmawr Williams chortled as the two men walked down the quayside towards the towering bulk of the Fearless as a Westland Whirlwind helicopter lifted noisily off her flight deck, a cargo of stores boxes slung beneath her belly in a big net at the end of a three fathom line.
Several Land Rovers had been driven down a broad ramp onto the dock, and men were dragging fuel lines from the assault ship to fill the tanks of a motley collection of rusty cars and lorries pushed and wheeled into a long line.
Getting the city moving again was the number one priority; anything with wheels and an engine that might be pressed into service was being brought down to the harbour, hurriedly resuscitated even if it was only for a few precious hours. There had been no petrol, hardly any diesel in Toulon for months. On the nearby berths both of Dermot O’Reilly’s Fletchers had pumped hundreds of tons of bunker oil into the two undamaged tanks of the old Naval Base’s oiling ‘tanker farm’.
Frustratingly, there were no road tankers to carry the priceless black gold deep into the city, and no way to pipe it to the nearest power station. Worse, all – well, most – of the people who knew how to work and maintain the city’s essential services, were gone so with every passing minute the Royal Navy men ashore became ever more dispersed, pulled this way and that.
It was ever thus…
“Funny?” Dermot O’Reilly objected. “I don’t know about that, Bryn!”
“In a hundred years all that the history books will remember was that Napoleon stopped the British capturing Toulon in 1793, and another damned Frenchie captured it for the Brits in 1967!”
Dermot O’Reilly gave his Executive Officer a hard look.
Then, unable to contain himself, he laughed.
Loudly.
Chapter 76
Saturday 18th February 1967
Verdala Palace, Malta
Aurélie Faure had followed the Governor’s wife, a charming, cultured elderly lady out onto the veranda into the late afternoon sunshine - while Rene Leguay, looking splendid in his newly tailored whites, had gone into conclave with Field Marshal Lord Hull, the Governor of the Maltese Archipelago - where the women were partaking of tea and biscuits in the privacy of the residence’s walled garden.
Lady Antoinette had suggested that they converse in French, once her own native language, for she too was a daughter of La belle France, borne Antoinette Labouchére de Rougement, into a banking family. Her husband, then only Sir Richard Amyatt Hull, had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff, a post now re-classified as Chief of the Defence Staff in this decidedly post-imperial era, at the time of the Cuban Missiles War, a disaster the Hulls had only escaped by dint of ‘being in the country’ at the time.
Aurélie still felt a little over-awed by all the attention she had attracted in the short time since the Villefranche Squadron had arrived in Malta. Oddly, now that she had obtained a couple of new frocks that actually fitted her, and she had been blissfully bathed, clean for several days, she was starting to believe again that the world was her oyster. She had almost forgotten how good it was to be able to wash one’s hair – properly – every day, or to find a stylist, a delightful woman from somewhere in the English ‘Black Country’, who had emigrated to the Mediterranean eighteen months ago with her husband and two young children when he was recruited to work in the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta, to magically ‘tidy up’ her hopelessly unruly auburn-blond ‘mop’.
Rene had just stared at her – open-mouthed, basically – the first time she had presented herself in the modest, grey-green dress with a hem dancing around her calves, and with her hair ‘under control again’ two days ago.
H
e said she looked like Audrey Hepburn’s sister!
Men were so ridiculous!
The two women sipped their teas, nibbled biscuits, and chatted about Maltese fashions. Soon the conversation moved on. Lady Antoinette was quietly, nevertheless immensely, curious about Aurélie’s story.
“My husband had travelled to Paris to stay with some friends,” she recollected, knowing that she had put a dishonest gloss on those days just before the cataclysm. “We were living in Lyon. I was teaching, I loved it. And I loved our little cottage just outside the city; we had such nice neighbours. Pierre wanted to go back to Paris; to return to the Sorbonne or if he couldn’t get an assistant professor’s post, any job would do, just so that we could move back to the north.”
“How did you feel about that, my dear?”
Aurélie shrugged, abandoning all the little white lies she had told herself in the last four years.
“I wanted children; Pierre always said ‘wait until we are in Paris’. It was different for him, he had family in the north. Me, after the Second War there was only me and my sister, Jacqueline, and we were never that close. She was eight years older; you see. Her father was killed in a flying accident before the Second War. My mother re-married, a sweet man, she said, I never knew him because he was killed in May 1940. A few months after I was born…”
Aurélie explained that her brother, Edward, ‘Eddy’ had been killed in Algeria soon after their mother’s death. He had had been her hero…
“I was miserable for a long time; I think that drove Pierre away in the end…”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She passed away in 1960, before Eddy was killed, thank God. She was not always unhappy; she did not brood about things until near the end. At least, not in front of Jacqueline or I. Jacqueline thinks she had many lovers; that may have started when she was in the Resistance. She never talked about it very much but I think she was in a group which helped British flyers who had been shot down to escape over the border to Switzerland or Spain. She died of a cancer, like we all will, I suppose…”