The Scarlet Impostor

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘I dived into the next shell-hole when that Very light went up. It wasn’t till I heard him fire that rifle that I realised you were in any trouble, and after that the whole thing was over in a couple of seconds.’

  ‘Well, thanks again, God! It’s cold, isn’t it? I’m wet through and half-frozen.’

  ‘Here, have a pull at this.’ De Brissac extended his flask, and Gregory took two large swallows.

  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed as he handed it back. ‘That’s better. I’ll go ahead again now,’ and picking himself up he climbed out of the crater with de Brissac behind him.

  Once more they wormed their way forward on their bellies. As each Very light went up they lay dead still, not daring to lift a finger, their faces flattened against the earth and their bodies forming a portion of the scarred and tortured landscape.

  Ten minutes later Gregory heard the mutter of voices. They were speaking in German and he knew that the enemy’s frontline trench lay just ahead of him. Wriggling along the parapet he covered another twenty yards and then lay silent for a minute, listening with his ear to the ground.

  There was no sound now except the dull booming of the guns shelling the back areas and the occasional crack of a distant rifle shot. He dared wait no longer as another Very light was due to go up soon. Turning in the darkness he felt for de Brissac’s head, and silently patted him on the shoulder, then dragged himself forward for another couple of yards and slid down over the parapet.

  An even more perilous part of his programme had now begun. As long as he had been able to shelter in shell-holes he had been moderately safe except from shell-fire, trench-mortar bombs or hand-grenades, and even when crawling in the open he had de Brissac to support him, but he was alone now, and he did not know the German password for the night.

  As he would be unable to give it the first sentry to challenge him would place him under arrest and take him to the German Company or Battalion Headquarters for questioning. It would soon be discovered that he was not one of their own men although he was wearing the numerical badges of their regiment. They would then examine the canned-fruit box he was carrying and directly they found the S.S. uniform in it the game would be up.

  In consequence he dared not make his way through the enemy trench-system but had to risk being seen crawling over the ground above as well as the possibility of being killed or wounded by a French shell. Wasting not a moment he fumbled round in the darkness against the parados of the trench until he found a foothold, and heaving himself up climbed out of it on the far side.

  There were shell-holes here, too. The ground was pitted with them where the French barrage had checked the reserve troops that the Germans had sent up to support an attack launched in this sector during the previous week. Warily he crawled forward from hole to hole until he reached another trench. Here he paused again to listen, straining his ears for some sound of talking or breathing which would indicate the presence of German troops, but he could hear nothing. Another Very light splashed up into the blackness above him, and as he crouched there holding his breath he saw that the trench below was empty.

  The instant that the light went out he jumped down into the trench, clambered up its far side and, crouching low, stumbled on again as quickly as he could, knowing that he must attempt to cover several miles while the darkness lasted. Twenty yards further on the feel of the ground changed and he suddenly realised that he was crawling over rubble. He had reached the ruined houses on the south-eastern outskirts of Saarbrücken.

  After taking a swig of brandy from his flask to warm himself up he went forward again, going even more cautiously now for fear of falling head-first into some cellar exposed by the blasting-down of the houses under eight weeks of French bombardment.

  As he crept from one heap of rubble to another he occasionally heard voices. Now and again a Very light illuminated the scene of ruin and desolation, showing roofless houses and crumbling walls with shallow communication-trenches running between them. Once he glimpsed the steel helmets of two soldiers protruding from a trench no more than four feet away from him, but the men did not suspect his presence and he was able to make a détour round them in the darkness.

  Although he was making his way not through the centre of the town but through its eastern outskirts, the cross-sections of trench among the ruins seemed endless, and he began to fear that he had lost his way when the flash of a bursting shell some distance to his right lit for a second a sluggish stretch of water directly in front of him and he knew that he had reached the Saar river.

  This, as he had known from the beginning, was the worst obstacle that he had to face. In summer he could have swum it, with his boots tied round his neck and the canned-fruit box into which he could have pushed his soldier’s tunic and trousers supported with one hand on his head; but now with the bitter cold numbing him where he crouched beside the river-bank he knew that he dared not risk it. To plunge naked into the icy water might affect his heart and send him to the bottom before he could reach the other bank. Even if he succeeded in doing so the effect of the cold upon him would be so terrible that he would be near collapse when he got to the other side and quite incapable of facing the additional strain of the miles he had yet to cover before dawn. The only alternatives were to find a derelict boat or a bridge which would enable him to cross the river while keeping his clothes dry.

  With chattering teeth he made his way along the bank stumbling across the uneven ground and ruined wharfs until ten minutes later he caught sight of a faint glow which came from a partially-concealed brazier where several soldiers were sitting in a wooden lean-to. Approaching with the utmost caution he found that they were a picket posted at the head of a pontoon bridge which had been flung across the turgid river. To cross the bridge without being seen by the men on duty there was impossible, so he unstrapped the box from off his back and waited.

  Presently voices caught his ear and a little squad of about a dozen Germans appeared out of the shadows, heading for the bridge. Silently Gregory rose, and putting his box on his shoulder so that he would look like an officer’s servant or a fatigue man carrying stores from one place to another he waited until the squad had passed him and then fell in about twenty yards behind them.

  At the bridge-head the leader of the squad was challenged by the picket, but evidently gave the password as the straggling bunch of shadowy figures trudged forward on to the bridge of boats. With his heart in his mouth Gregory hastened his step a little, and looking neither to right nor to left plodded boldly on towards the picket.

  The man on duty there thought, as Gregory had hoped, that he was a straggler in the squad that had just gone by, and allowed him to pass without a challenge. Two minutes later he was across the river.

  On the far bank he struck a road which led in the direction for which he was heading. There would be patrols and sentries along that too, he knew, so he dared not take it. Even if he were to follow the ditch at its side he would be running the risk of being challenged greater than that which he had run while crawling through the ruins, but on the other hand he might get hopelessly lost unless he stuck to the road now that he had found it, so he crossed the ditch. The time that he had spent in crossing the outskirts of the ruined town and crouching by the bridge-head seemed endless, but on looking at the luminous dial of his watch he found that it was only an hour and twenty minutes since he had entered the first German trench, and cheered a little by the thought that dawn was still a long way off he pressed on along the border of the grassland and ploughed fields on the far side of the ditch.

  The road seemed quite deserted, but after half an hour he came to a group of colliery buildings, the tall shafts of which stood out against the night sky, and the sudden opening of a side-door in one of them disclosed the silhouettes of soldiers carrying stretchers.

  Almost as soon as the door was opened a loud voice cried from the road: ‘Screen that light, damn you! D’you want us all to be blown to hell?’ Someone inside the building drew a heavy cu
rtain across the doorway but Gregory had seen enough to realise that it was a field dressing-station from which ambulances would collect the wounded, so this was evidently the furthest point to which the Germans were still using the road for motor transport.

  Moving round the backs of the buildings he found the road again, but a little further on his path was barred by other cottages and a factory. He knew that he was now in the highly-industrialised Saar basin with its iron foundries and coal mines and he was reasonably confident that he had reached St. Johann, a biggish village which, he knew, lay just to the northeast of Saarbrücken and contained the railway junction that served the town.

  This impression was confirmed when, having climbed several fences in the course of a detour of the village, he came out of a backyard to find a railway track cutting right across his route. After crawling over the metals he turned left and went on until he struck the road again, finding that another railway lay on its far side and ran north-east parallel with it.

  The road sloped gradually upwards and at its side a long line of vehicles was parked. In the darkness it was impossible for Gregory to identify them individually as small tanks, motor-tractors or cars, but a murmur of voices told him that there were troops among them, probably halted for a spell before making their last trek forward to some concealed position nearer the battle-front. Gregory knew that owing to the constant aerial activity of the Allies all German troop movements were taking place as far as possible under cover of night, so that from this point on the road would now probably be as crowded as Oxford Street at its busiest, whereas had he been there in daylight he would have found it naked and empty.

  He could see the glow of the men’s cigarettes as they had a last smoke before advancing through the village and would himself have given anything for a cigarette but he dared not have one as long as there was still any risk of his being challenged.

  The road was easy to follow now as there was constant movement on it but he kept about twenty yards to its right and trudged on, his boots now heavy with clay, across the fields, occasionally stumbling into a ditch or being brought up short by the edge of a slag heap near one of the coal mines. A short distance further on he came to wooded country and knew that he had entered the Kollerth Wald.

  The trees in his path now made the going even more difficult and although it seemed to him that he had been crawling, scrambling and trudging for the whole night long he doubted whether he had as yet put more than three miles between himself and the Boche front line. A glance at the luminous dial of the German wrist-watch which had been given him with his kit showed him that it was a quarter-past two in the morning, so it was now about two and three-quarter hours since he had gone over the top with Lieutenant Gautier.

  The wood ended abruptly. He crossed an open field and scrambled over the hedge that bounded its far side. Suddenly a challenge rang out directly in front of him.

  From faint noises in the darkness ahead he realised that he had stumbled into a field which was being used as a bivouac, and knowing that if he answered the challenge his game would almost certainly be up he ducked down beside the hedge and began to make his way towards the road on all fours.

  The challenge came again but this time the voice held an uncertain note. The sentry had probably seen his head and shoulders outlined against the skyline as he had climbed the hedge but had decided, on receiving no answer to his shout, that his imagination had played him a trick.

  Gregory headed for the road, knowing that if he turned the other way he might strike another section of the forest and lose himself in it; he had now no alternative to crawling over the ditch and up on to the highway although, once there, he would be compelled to mingle with the troops which were constantly moving along it to front or rear.

  Once on the metalled surface he drew himself upright, waited until a column of infantry had passed on its way down from the line and crossed it as quickly as he could with the intention of taking to the fields beyond the railway on its far side. These, however, were also occupied by reserve troops bivouacking for the night so he had to return to the road once more.

  The going was easier here, but against that was the constant fear that at any moment he might run into a barrier at which an Area Commandant’s Military Police were controlling the troops going up and down the road. The Germans had such a system, he knew, because they were faced with the problem of preventing the many desertions that were always taking place from Regiments in the line, and by this means they could check up on everybody entering or leaving any given area.

  He had proceeded for about half a mile along the road, the sides of which had now become wooded again, but so thickly that he could not have moved at any pace among the trees, when he heard the drone of planes overhead. Somewhere in front of him a whistle blew, and the shadowy figure near-by ran for cover, disappearing into the blackness. Gregory jumped into the nearest ditch. He did not need to be told what was happening. Neither side was yet using its Air Force to bomb munition-plants or back areas where civilians might be injured, but both were supplementing their artillery bombardments by occasional bombing-raids on points actually within the battle zone. These were French or British planes overhead and they were about to strafe some German strong point or road junction.

  He lay there listening to the threatening hum that beat down from the dark clouds above but after a minute it grew fainter. The planes evidently intended to drop their deadly cargoes further inside the German lines. The whistle blew again—two blasts this time—and the shadowy figures emerged once more from their hiding-places to climb into their light lorries and tractors.

  Dodging in and out among them he started off again along the road, which was now quite straight and sloped upwards, but he had not gone twenty yards before a bright flash, closely followed by a loud explosion, pierced the darkness about a mile ahead of him. The night-bombers were flying on a carefully-calculated course, their objective some cross-roads, bridge or railway siding up there in the distance. For about five minutes the bombs rained down, blotting out the drumming of the more distant gunfire as they crashed on to the hillside. The flames which sprang up from fires started by the bombs showed him that there were factory buildings there on which the airmen had secured some direct hits, and he could see their tall chimneys against the light of the flames.

  Gregory trudged on with more confidence now, since he had not yet encountered one of the expected Military Police barriers. He had constantly to dodge in and out among the traffic, but he nevertheless kept a wary eye upon any halted groups ahead in case they were troops that were being passed by the Area Commandant’s people, although he now considered that if there were such a post on this road it would be up in the burning village.

  It was close on three o’clock when he reached the first house of the village, which showed up in silhouette against the fires which were still burning. He was just debating with himself whether to take to the fields again and work round the village or to go boldly forward with his box on his shoulder in his guise of a fatigue carrying a case of stores when he suddenly heard once again the ominous droning of aeroplanes.

  A second later the whistle blew and running to the side of the house he flung himself down under the shelter of one of its walls. For what seemed an eternity the Allies’ planes droned round and round overhead. They were searching by the light of the flames for the near-by railway-station or bridge which formed the bulls-eye of their target, but to Gregory, waiting there in the darkness, it seemed as though they were searching for him.

  Suddenly there was an ear-splitting roar, then another and another until the very ground seemed to quiver. There was the sound of falling masonry followed by a scream of pain, and an anti-aircraft battery blazed into action close at hand.

  In the few minutes that followed it seemed to Gregory that no-one but himself could have remained alive in that hell of monstrous detonations; then they ceased as abruptly as they had begun. The house by the side of which he had sheltered was still s
tanding and apart from being half-deafened by the noise he found himself quite unharmed.

  Realising that he now had at least a chance of getting through the village unchallenged during the confusion following the raid, he humped his box on his shoulder again and plunged forward on to the road.

  Other men, also unharmed, were emerging with him from the shadows and as he advanced he was amazed to find how little harm the bombs had done. The tanks and tractors began to move again, and although he saw another fire that had been started, a tank turned turtle by the violence of the explosions and several dead and wounded men who were being picked up by their comrades, the raid did not seem otherwise to have had very much effect.

  Nobody took the least notice of him as he pressed on as quickly as he could. Within ten minutes he had left the village behind and had discovered that the raid had been to some purpose after all. There was a huge gap in the road where a bomb had fallen exactly in its centre and further on a good half of its metalled surface was destroyed for several yards where two bombs had fallen in the ditch beside it. The columns of mechanised units going up and down had been compelled to halt but some of the men were already busy with their shovels, filling the craters with stones from heaps that had been dumped at the roadside for that purpose.

  As he went on the traffic diminished and Gregory realised that the village through which he had passed must have been the German advanced rail-head for that sector and he was almost certain that it was Dudweiler. If he was right in this assumption, he knew from his recent, intensive study of the maps he had bought in Paris that he must be on the Saarbrücken-Neunkirchen road and that the next place along it of any importance was Sulzbach.