As the Valkyrie is making her way back down the steps and catching her breath she sees Anselm and shouts: ‘Hey, Artist! You next, eh?’
He remains standing to attention as she marches up to him and brings her whip across his face. As he staggers back clutching the welt he looks up to see the Ukrainian approaching. There is blood on Anselm’s hands now and, as he stares at them as if they are not his own, he feels the barrel of a rifle being pressed into his chest. The Ukrainian holds it there for a few seconds as if considering whether to pull the trigger, then he withdraws it and turns the rifle around so that the barrel is in his hand. Anselm can still feel the sharp pressure made by the muzzle. It lingers on his skin like hot wax. Then the butt of the rifle slams into his solar plexus, driving the breath from his lungs. As he doubles up, he feels the butt hit the skin over the bone on his shoulder. Between waves of pain, he is aware of the Valkyrie speaking again, saying through her laughter: ‘No Commandant to protect you now, Artist.’
The landing craft hits the beach with a bang that causes Charles to lose his footing. A crunching sound follows, shingle against metal. But as the door cranks down and he braces himself for a whip of bullets, he sees instead a smiling Frenchman with reddish hair holding out a tray of champagne. The others scramble past him, their boots heavy in the wet sand, but it is soon obvious that there are no targets for them, only wisps of smoke in the treeline, a grove of lolling palms. Apart from an occasional crackle of small-arms fire in the distance, a sound like a dry log on a campfire, it seems the Germans are not putting up a fight.
Sections of the beach are blocked by double rows of barbed wire. Flail tanks are clearing minefields. An old woman, the shape of a bell, now appears with a tray of crepes and omelette. Bewildered, the soldiers take off their heavy packs and bandoliers and throw them on the beach along with their rifles and entrenching tools. Some laugh in relief as they sprawl in the sand and signal the old woman over. Others look around for the red-haired man with the champagne. Charles clenches and unclenches his good hand. His fingertips are remembering the hairy texture of the rope that served as a rail around the side of the landing craft. He had been clinging to it so hard his knuckles still ache.
He takes off the US M1 helmet he has borrowed, tugs the beret from his shoulder strap and puts that on instead, positioning it two fingers above his left eye. He wants the Americans to know he is British.
A command post is being set up on the beach, a folding desk, a radio transmitter and a chair. An officer is pointing and shouting and, at his command, some men begin unreeling telephone wire while others dig foxholes. A line of about a dozen men are on their knees prodding their bayonets in the sand to check for mines.
Charles looks back out towards the Mediterranean and sees, about fifty yards away, what looks like a single uniformed body washing ashore. The ships are shimmering several miles out, firing occasional volleys that are signalled not by a bang but by a puff of smoke. The noise comes moments before the shell arches overhead, its destination a couple of miles inland.
Along the entire length of the Riviera, tens of thousands of men are now pouring ashore unopposed. Charles overhears from a radio operator that the only resistance encountered in this sector has been from two anti-aircraft coastal batteries supported by a German garrison of a couple of hundred men, but they have now surrendered.
He looks around for Major Lehague but, unable to see him, he gets out his sketchpad. Holding his pencil awkwardly because of the bulging wet bandage on his thumb, he sketches a group of GIs who are clearly spoiling for a fight and feeling disappointed not to find one. Behind them a jeep is stuck in the sand. As it grinds its gears, two fighters patrolling low over the beach drown out its noise.
As he is backing down the steps of the scaffold, helping another prisoner carry the body of the homosexual who failed the renunciation test, Anselm slips. For a moment he thinks he has sprained his ankle, but, to his relief, he finds he can still put weight on it. A sprained angle is a death warrant in this place. He turns to see if the Ukrainian has noticed. It’s fine. He takes hold of the wrists again and lifts, but not high enough to prevent the bony buttocks from being grazed as they descend.
The body is light and, as they carry it in the direction of the crematorium, it swings between them like a hammock. There are already two corpses stacked outside it, in differing stages of decomposition, so they add this one to the pile. They are walking away when they hear someone shout at them.
‘You there.’
They turn and see an SS doctor standing next to a handcart stacked with crates that are about two feet square. He is signalling them over with impatient hand gestures.
‘You are to take these to the Commandant’s house,’ he says.
Anselm and the other prisoner take one shaft each and, as they pull, the iron-tyred wooden-spoked wheels make a crunching sound against the small rocks hidden in the dirt.
Half a dozen prisoners are shuffling in and out of the château as they load more of these crates into the back of a three-ton truck. A guard sees Anselm and barks an order for him to take his crates inside.
Coming from the kitchen there is a distinct smell of meat being boiled. Anselm is directed through to the drawing room. All the paintings, records and Persian rugs have gone. The only evidence that the Commandant was ever here is one of the photographs of a Fräulein holding a baby. It is lying flat, the glass in its frame broken.
‘Bring them here!’ Anselm follows the voice. It belongs to another SS doctor. He places the two crates he is carrying on the desk as instructed. The doctor takes two handfuls of sawdust from a bag on the floor and uses them to line one of the crates.
When Anselm returns with the next two crates he sees the doctor carefully placing something that looks like a large egg in the crate packed with sawdust. As he moves closer he sees it is a skull. The doctor is now removing odd small chunks of flesh and gristle from it with tweezers.
By the time Anselm has returned with his last two crates, another skull is being delivered from the kitchen. Steam is rising from it and he realizes it has been boiled, presumably to remove its skin and hair. The first crate has now been nailed shut and the doctor is writing a number across its lid.
Anselm lowers his eyes, as if to persuade the doctor he has not witnessed this scene. He notices the ink stain on the wooden floor.
The residents of Saint-Tropez have come out on their balconies to stare. Chairs have been arranged and parasols opened so that the events below can be followed by entire families, from children in striped swimming costumes to elderly men resting their chins on walking canes.
To Charles, as he sits sketching them from a café on the promenade, it is as if they dare not take their eyes off the thousands of American troops occupying their boulevards and squares, for fear that, if they do, these invaders will slip away to their landing craft and head back out to sea.
Some of the soldiers, leather-faced men from the 45th Infantry Division, are marching, to where and what purpose it is not obvious. Others have stripped off their shirts to enjoy the sunshine, sitting on low walls, dangling their legs like bored teenagers. Others still are shaving, smoking, listening to bebop on their radios, chewing gum, or dealing cards as they lounge in doorways. Most are milling in a directionless way, unsure what to do next, now that they are here.
The soporific clank of halyards against masts, audible even above the noise of engines, seems especially inappropriate to Charles.
As his gaze shifts to the chaos of the beach, he has a sense of déjà vu. A bulldozer is churning out bluey-black smoke as its driver, an engineer stripped to his waist, tries to rescue a tank abandoned in the sand. German prisoners are being herded on to the beach for removal by ships. They have pieces of card tied around their necks as if they are items of luggage. Two cranes on caterpillar tracks are gathering jeeps and artillery equipment in their nets and unloading them from a barge docked in the bay. Not far away from this there are yachts moored, and, an eve
n stranger sight, fishermen selling their catches to American soldiers, while herring gulls circle, mewling as they wheel.
In front of them, a hundred-foot pontoon causeway is being dragged on to the beach. Further out, a second one is being lowered into the water. They remind Charles of the makeshift jetty he saw at Dunkirk. Two events five years apart, one at the top of France, the other at the bottom. The main difference between them, he thinks, between an evacuation and an invasion, is the expressions on the faces. The Thunderbirds, as the US veterans of Sicily, Salerno and Anzio are known, look relaxed. Relieved.
Having had a decent night’s sleep in a hotel, Charles, too, is feeling calm. He smiles to himself, takes a sip of black coffee that tastes of chlorine and then frowns. The caffeine has made his thumb start throbbing again. He searches for the bottle of antibiotics the doctor had given him, but cannot find it.
As his thoughts return to Dunkirk, his positive mood changes and he feels a tug of melancholy. This war has been grinding on for too long, he thinks. All those years of hoping, of convalescing, of painting, of running to stand still, of pretending to be things he isn’t, of making promises to himself, of waiting to get here, gun in hand, within touching distance of Anselm … all these things have left him feeling exhausted and frustrated.
‘We’ll meet again, Don’t know where, don’t know when …’
Vera Lynn’s words are drifting up from a radio somewhere and they seem to be directed at him. The sensuous memories they evoke flow unresisting through him, teasing him, weakening his resolve. All he has had to keep himself going is a photograph, and a couple of letters, and a few memories. And now all of these things have worn thin, to the point of irritation.
He is not irritated with Anselm but with himself, with his own company, with the crushing pointlessness of his personal crusade. He takes out Anselm’s letters and starts to re-read them, only to be distracted by the sound of someone running. He looks up. A soldier has a jerrycan in each hand and, with an awkward, rocking motion like that of a penguin, is hurrying away, as best he can, from the scene of his crime. Two GIs notice what he is doing and sidle over to the fuel depot, apparently to do the same. An MP sees them and blows a whistle.
The rumours are true, then. The large German garrison at Marseille is putting up a token fight only. And because the Allied invasion plan assumed that German resistance would be tougher at the ports, lasting weeks rather than days, the immediate need for transport and fuel has been woefully underestimated. Already VI Corps has secured a beachhead twenty miles long and nine miles deep. And Charles has overheard two American officers talking about an advance on Grenoble by ‘Arrowhead’, the 36th Infantry Division. It has been so rapid that they have run out of fuel and have had to halt. The ships carrying new supplies, meanwhile, are not expected for several days.
At midday the American uniforms in the port are joined by Free French ones, a steady stream from the French First Army, which is only now, on D-Day plus one, coming ashore. Charles keeps scanning the faces to see if he can see Lehague.
Half an hour later he does see him, but coming from the opposite direction to the troops arriving from the azure water. He is wearing tank goggles over his kepi and is behind the steering wheel of a green, open-top jeep, one that has a large white encircled star on its bonnet. When he sees Charles he waves and, with a crunch of gears and a brake squeal, comes to a halt.
‘Bonjour, Artist!’ Lehague says. ‘Had your fill of champagne yet?’
‘The locals do seem pleased to see us.’
‘Get in. Vite!’ He taps the steering wheel. ‘I have liberated this in the name of the French Republic.’
The two men look conspicuous as they join a convoy of ten-ton trucks, amphibious craft, ambulances and Sherman tanks leaving the town past the hanging baskets filled with Mediterranean flowers, past the blur of terracotta roofs, past the cannons that line the crumbling mellow stone of the Citadelle.
A French uniform. A British uniform. A stolen American jeep.
The chinstrap on Lehague’s kepi is dangling and, when they swerve for potholes, it whips up like a spaniel’s ear, making him look, for the first time since Charles met him, frivolous.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Charles asks.
‘I’ve done all I needed to do here. My priority as liaison now is to get to Nancy as quickly as I can. Try and keep up with the advance. You will join me for the ride, won’t you?’
The pastel-coloured shutters on the tall seafront houses are being closed and the tricolours that were flapping lazily below the balconies are being gathered in. Siesta time. Charles breathes in deeply, enjoying the blue skies and the briny smell of the sea. His pleasure is short-lived. The bumps in the road jar and aggravate his thumb, making him curse under his breath each time they mount one.
As they head north-west towards Digne, they see evidence of the airborne assault that preceded the amphibious one: parachutes and gliders abandoned in meadows. And pushed to the sides of a lane lined with cypresses there are the parachute-borne dummies that were dropped by Allied planes, as well as tons of radar-obscuring chaff.
As they drive, Lehague points out with pride the sabotage work done by the partisans in the hours before the invasion: destroyed bridges and rail lines, telegraph poles blown in half, their wires tangled on the ground. There are also the vehicles which the retreating Germans abandoned as they ran out of fuel, their tyres shot or engines burned so that they cannot be used by the Americans. Some have careened over on their sides, or been tipped that way.
About thirty miles out of Saint-Tropez they see a column of hundreds of German prisoners, some wounded. They look old and tired: veterans, Volksdeutsche, relieved that the war for them is over.
Moving through agricultural land now, Charles takes in the threshing machines working in fields of wheat, and the dozens of dust-covered labourers stooking sheaves of straw. It strikes him as an incongruously bucolic sight in the middle of a war.
By the late afternoon, the convoy has slowed to a crawl as it negotiates narrow lanes flanked by high hedges. By nightfall it comes to a stop. Seeing the lights of a farmhouse, Lehague heads for it, cutting across a small vineyard. Charles waits in the jeep as Lehague strides up to the front door, knocks, enters. Five minutes later, he comes outside to inform Charles that they have beds for the night.
As they dine on bread and vegetable broth, and drink vinegary table wine, Charles enjoys listening to Lehague regale the farmer and his wife with stories of London. His French, he realizes with satisfaction, is just about good enough for him to keep up with the conversation.
The next morning they are woken at dawn by the sound of the convoy trundling past. While the farmer’s wife changes the dressing on his thumb, Charles hears Lehague outside trying to get a signal on his wireless transceiver.
By the time Charles joins him, Lehague has packed the radio set away and is sharpening a double-edged commando dagger on a stone as he waits in the shade of an avocado tree. The dagger is twelve inches long and has a serrated edge and a black foil grip. Charles eyes it apprehensively as he lowers himself into the passenger side of the jeep. ‘Any luck?’ he asks.
‘I could hear them,’ Lehague says, slipping the dagger into a sheath strapped to his belt and thigh, ‘but I’m not sure they could hear me. From what I could make out, the Germans are planning to withdraw as far as Lyon, then make a stand there. They are calling in reinforcements from Strasbourg to the east. The Resistance are going to try and blow up the bridges to stop them.’
By driving at speed they catch up with the tail of the convoy within ten minutes, but feeling frustrated by its lumbering pace they decide to make their own way to Grenoble. Though all the signposts have been taken down, Charles tries to work out from their map which towns they bypass over the next five hours – Sisteron, Veynes, La Mure. He is starting to suspect that they are lost.
As they move up the Rhône valley they contemplate the rippling fields and huge skies. They also witness th
e damage caused by the roaming American fighters that have strafed the roads and bridges. Long German convoys have been destroyed and the entire zone is covered with a mass of burned vehicles, trains and the bloated corpses of cattle and horses. Lehague slows down when he sees a civilian dangling from a roadside tree like a piece of rotting fruit. ‘Vichy,’ he says with a shrug, before speeding away.
When next they stop for a break, an hour later, Charles records the sights he has seen in his sketchbook. While he does this, Lehague crumbles oatmeal blocks into water and cooks them over a biscuit tin filled with earth and soaked in petrol. When the porridge is ready he serves it with hardtack biscuits, powdered egg and margarine. They eat in silence using their hands and afterwards Lehague lights up a cigarette and slips some headphones on as he tunes in his transceiver. ‘The Germans are in full retreat,’ he announces excitedly, speaking too loudly. ‘We’re chasing them in a great arc. If we don’t hurry up, the war will be over and we won’t have fired a single damn bullet!’
About ten miles from Grenoble, the jeep begins to make a crunching noise, as if trying to clear its throat. ‘Don’t like the sound of that,’ Lehague says. He pulls to the side of the road as the jeep lurches to a halt. He taps the fuel gauge. ‘Empty.’
Charles lights a cigarette. ‘What do we do?’
‘We could wait here for the next convoy. See if anyone has any spare cans; which they won’t have.’ Lehague studies a map and takes a compass bearing. ‘Do you fancy a walk? Grenoble isn’t far.’
Charles looks up as he hears bombers droning high overhead. He shields his eyes and sees they are American B-24s leaving a trail of white vapour. ‘Well, it looks like the war is that way,’ he says, slinging the map tube containing his art materials over his shoulder.
A mile down the road they come to a fork. As Charles watches Lehague consult their map again and take a sighting on his compass, he feels a sense of camaraderie with him that he hasn’t felt before. The diminutive Lehague seems to have grown in stature since returning to his homeland. His eagerness to fight the enemy is infectious.
The Road Between Us Page 26