‘Bien. Allons-y. Vite!’
Already was she weaving her way back through the forest – towards the meadow. Mick struggled to keep up with her, having to tear his morass of fabric off one low branch as he went, then off another. Up ahead he saw she’d stopped, and was crouched down, just about near, he thought, where he’d entered just minutes earlier. Crouching awkwardly beside her he saw she was spying out of the forest, out over the meadow. As he himself then managed a meagre view out over it, what he saw, from about only 30 yards off but extending as far as he could make out further on, was the weirdest scramble of junk: some pieces burning, smoke rising from them high and black. The girl seemed to be scanning past it all, if anything, out towards the furthest hedgerows of the field.
But then she was up and off again, out of the forest and running hard. As Mick shambled madly along behind her, he saw the grass over which they were running was ripped up here and there, as if roughly ploughed – It hadn’t been when he’d landed on it… There a sheep lifeless on its side. The brass of an empty cannon shell casing. A motorcycle wheel. A German Army helmet. A severed hand.
Drawing up to the burning objects, he saw the girl had stopped again, and was hefting her own bundle onto the nearest largest flames that she dared, yet suddenly stopping and turning to him, waving him off like mad, her eyes completely wild: ‘ Non-non-non!!’ she cried. ‘Ton blouson d’aviateur! C’est trempé de pétrole!’ Frantically was she motioning him to take off his flying jacket, give it to her. He did so, slinging it onto the grass some yards before her.
No sooner had she grabbed and laid it on the nearest flames than it was burning fiercely, in an instant wholly ablaze.
‘Et ton parachute! Ton para- chute!’ she pleaded.
Moving closer now, Mick handed this over too and it was fuel for the growing inferno. Yet even now feeling the icy, petrol-soaked wetness of his trouser legs, he took a few steps right back. To one side he saw a motorcycle sidecar thrown upside down. Greenish grey in colour, on one panel was a jet-black cross, white outlined, the spokes of an upturned wheel hanging on to the end of a spin. Beyond this a rag doll sprawled on the grass.
Life-sized.
Garbed in the same greenish grey. With half a man’s face. Its single eye as if in bulging surprise.
Between Mick and the girl the wreck of a heavy machine-gun lay on the grass, a belt of unused ammunition snaking out of it, in the air, the smell of burning meat. The girl spun back towards him. ‘Bien. Allons-y! ’
As they fled across the meadow, the black smoke and radiant heat of the fires now behind them, for Mick it was a relief to be freed of the parachute at last, also lightened of his hefty flying jacket, just his battledressed self whipping along behind the girl, his flying boots now the heaviest thing he wore.
Reaching the far hedgerow, she ducked directly into it, Mick after her, emerging to see they were on a narrow country lane, her pace slowing to a very fast walk.
‘Our farm,’ she panted, ‘it is not far… Papa will soon be home… Then… then you shall tell us all.’
Mick scanned behind as they went, the road clear, forward again, same. ‘Jeee-sus-Mary-an-Joseph,’ he exhaled to her. ‘I swear I dunno how t’… Bloody hell, what’s y’name?! … Fron-say…?’
‘Française?’
‘Frohn- sayes.’
‘Non-non,’ she managed. ‘Française is what I am… My name, it is Jacqueline.’ Suddenly she stopped, tensed, as if straining to hear.
Mick only heard the oncoming motorcycle once he’d torn clean through the bushes lining the road, as one with his guide now, dropping flat on his stomach beside her. Together they peered through the lower foliage for any view of the machine that, by the sound of it, was approaching at break-neck speed. Its threat built, and built, and roared past, a glimpse of sidecar, machine-gun, goggles and helmets.
‘C’est nor-mal,’ she released in its wake. ‘They hurry to reach the downed flyers before we do.’
‘They won’t see us?!’ Mick craned to the meadow now behind them: at its far left-hand corner a pyre of black smoke had risen to the cloud layer, the burning wreckage obscured from view by the line of hedgerow bordering, as it did on all sides.
‘Non,’ she replied. ‘Not from here.’ She lifted herself up and, with her back to the hedge that had hidden them, sat facing out over the meadow, regaining her breath.
As did Mick. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Oui, I am sure,’ – her cheeks struck a pout. ‘…I learned to walk in these fields.’ Pondering on them for a moment, then on the pyre of black, she turned to him. ‘Alors: What news of l’Invasion?’
‘Eh?’ he returned, preoccupied by a staggered paff – paff sound echoing from the direction of the smoke – unused ammunition going off in the fires, he guessed.
She faced him gauntly, hesitated. ‘The Invasion. …At Dieppe.’ Her eyes were luminous. ‘The one that commenced this morning…!’
Holding her stare, though it seemed long, long ago he remembered the morning’s mission briefing – Cover the Canadians back over the Channel by lunchtime. And here, right now, this brave and beautiful girl must be thinking her country was being liberated.
‘Look, I…’ he strained, ‘…It didn’t look good.’
‘That is all you can tell me?!!’ she pleaded.
‘Alright…’ he swallowed, ‘it looked bad. …Real bad.’
Her face drained of colour, stilled as if turned to stone, and lowered.
This girl who had just risked her life to save his and he couldn’t even tell her the truth; Security. A truth that mightn’t be worth shit – dummy-run invasion – but it could have been a diversion for a real landing, couldn’t it; that’s what Feliks had reckoned… Something big happening just up or down the coast right now.
‘C’est-pas-vrai,’ she uttered.
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to… But he couldn’t. Couldn’t take the risk: He could be caught, she could be caught and have whatever he’d told her beaten out of her. He couldn’t tell her. He just couldn’t. And it stank.
‘Look,’ he managed, ‘I’m sorry… I am, and that’s the truth… but there’s nothing more I can tell you. I was just ordered to give air cover.’
‘Papa will know more,’ she said softly, her face lifting a degree. ‘He will tell us: When word we received this morning, he headed for the coast. As also would be many others, he said; for this day we have all been waiting. For two years…’
Mick remained silent. Until a thought struck him. ‘…An’ I swear I’m sorry about the…’ – he made a pointed gun gesture with his hand – ‘…earlier.’
‘De rien.’ She looked up fully at him now. ‘C’est la guerre… You did not know that you could trust me.’ After a moment she spoke again, her voice somehow lifted: ‘It is said that the first casualty of war it is “truth”…’
Her use of the very word galled him.
‘As for me,’ she continued, ‘I say it is trust.’
When it hit him. ‘Christ. …The pistol.’
He heard her utter something well after her head had dropped and stuck between her knees.
‘Merde.’
*
Unterfeldwebel Klaus Steinhoff had loved motorcycles since a boy. The German Army had given him a BMW. As he stood on the grass of the meadow surveying the wreckage of one just like his, and the carnage its crew, it wasn’t for the first time that Klaus said it to himself: At least he was no longer on the Eastern Front. Back there, at first it used to make him throw up: seeing body parts, sizzling corpses like that, his vomit steaming then freezing solid on the ice and snow. No longer. Klaus had seen sights like this one too many times now. In Russia. Where the German Army was winning. Of course, you would not think it so at the sight of German soldiers scrambling onto the clapped-out JU-52 tri-motor transport aircraft revving up to fly them out of there. Klaus, like many, had bribed his way onto one.
And made it out of there. To here. To the peaceful Western Front.
Dream posting. Where his job now was two-pronged: Either (1) to nab downed RAF flyers before the French ‘Résistance’ got to them first and rescued them – No matter that the Nazi Party insisted there was no ‘Résistance’, on his BMW Klaus mostly got there before them. Or (2) to take detailed account of and report on the crash-scenes of RAF aircraft – Dr Goebbels’ Ministry of Information ever keen to pass on to the German people reports of RAF ‘terror-flyers’ falling out of the sky.
What Klaus and his sidecar machine-gunner had beaten the Resistance to this morning wasn’t a crashed RAF aircraft but a ‘get-there-first’ crew from a neighbouring regiment who looked to have been shot-up by an RAF aircraft – going by the 20mm Hispano cannon shell casings scattered in a broad swathe through the whole area. Standing orders being standing orders, Klaus had to take detailed account of and report on it, Soldat Beck on his radio-telephone set right now.
As for what they’d found and what would go in Klaus’s report, it was all there: exactly what you would find when 20mm cannon shells hit petrol-filled metal and human flesh. All except for one single thing: Today something they’d found amongst the plethora of burned and ruined objects didn’t sit quite right… No, it did not…
As motorcycle and sidecar crews were below officer rank, neither of the deceased had been entitled to wear a side-arm. And even if one of them was carrying an unauthorized pistol, it would be a German automatic: a Luger… a Walther P38… even a PPK.
Half melted and still way too hot to touch, the object at Klaus’s feet was no automatic.
It was a revolver.
As for the deceased, Klaus guessed they’d go scarcely noticed this day: Even now he could hear the excited, even jubilant voices coming over the airwaves on Beck’s radio-telephone: Initial reports from out at Dieppe said the Canadians had walked right into it. Right into the trap set for them weeks ago. Two dead Germans in a meadow? Forget it; this day the home-team score was off the scale.
Klaus signaled to Soldat Beck for his water canteen, Beck lobbed it, Klaus caught it, unscrewed its cap. And trickled some of its contents onto the blackened thing at his feet.
It sizzled. And steamed.
No, it certainly wasn’t a German pistol.
*
Mick peered through the crack in the shutters of the upper floor loft of the barn. Across the yard below he saw the stone farmhouse of the girl and her father, shuttered windows in its high pointed roof, beyond this and on all sides as far as he could make out the lines of trees of their apple orchard. The sun was lowering over it now, and still ‘Papa’ hadn’t returned.
The gun, Mick seethed. That bloody gun… The girl, God-love-her, a few times on their way here she’d insisted it was her fault as much as his. If a squad of Germans turned up looking for the wretched thing’s owner, Mick had drummed into himself over the last few hours, he would simply give himself up to them – He was still in RAAF uniform, and would give them an account of exactly what had happened minus the girl: He’d landed and made his own way to right here and hidden himself. What else could he do but smartly surrender? His sole remaining armament consisted of the standard-issue ‘commando’ dagger strapped inside a pilot’s flying boot. A German search party would have multiple machine-guns and rifles that could blast through walls. At least the farm was isolated, or so it had seemed on the way, a sign they’d passed proclaiming the nearest town as ‘ST-SAËNS’ – pronounced Sahn Sohn by the girl – some 5 ‘kilomètres’ distant.
He’d used the dagger to cut the bread she’d left with him – He certainly hadn’t felt hungry, though determined the very least he could do was ‘eat the evidence’ of her further aid to him. Plus she’d insisted he should eat now as who could say when he might next get the chance; he could this very day, she’d said, be passed to people Papa knew in the town who would arrange his escape to who knows where – It had been done for many downed flyers in this region since the war began. In any event the simple food she’d left had provided a distraction during the long wait, and an undeniably pleasant one at that: The bread, unlike rectangular loaves, the only way he’d ever seen bread, was in a tube shape about as thick as your arm, as well as being tasty all by itself. There’d been cheese too, once again, unlike any cheese Mick had ever seen: not hard and yellow, but soft and pearly-white in a sort of ‘heart’ shape. Creamy on the inside and just a bit salty, this was also delicious and went well with the red-green apples – He could have as many of these as he liked, she’d vowed; better than them going to les sales Boches, which, from the way she spat the words, he assumed meant the Germans.
Yet now he spied her riding her bicycle into the yard, leaning it against a wall and walking directly but calmly across the yard towards the barn entrance beneath him.
Hearing the ladder in the barn below squeak as she climbed it, he pulled the heavy crate back off the trap door, which creaked open. Holding it up with one hand, with the other he helped her up onto the wooden floor, onto which she sat straight down. As he closed the trap door, she drew her knees up to her chin, her coat sleeves wrapped tightly round her boots. The second time this day he’d seen her face turned to stone, upon it her eyes were glistening orbs.
‘Les pauvres Canadiens,’ she breathed. ‘…C’était un désastre.’
She seemed to be staring towards the wooden crucifix on the far wall.
‘They’ll be back,’ Mick said softly.
‘I know it,’ she whispered. As a tear ran down her cheek, her eyes flickered towards Mick’s shoulders, and the white lettering upon them. ‘As will you Australiens,’ she said, her words as if straining through physical hurt. ‘You have been here before…’ Her stare drifted back to the far wall. ‘In the last war.’
Mick nodded. ‘Yeah. My dad was here.’
‘Oui,’ she breathed. ‘And now here are you.’
‘Seems that way,’ he said. ‘Look,’ he squatted down beside her,
‘I’ve gotta get outta here real quick; you’re taking such a terrible risk me being here.’
‘It is the least we can do,’ she replied. ‘Once again have you come from the other side of the world… pour la liberté de la France.’
He attempted a determined smile. A failed attempt she never saw. ‘Thank you for the food,’ he managed.
She took so long to reply that at first he thought she hadn’t heard him.
‘De rien,’ she finally returned. ‘I only wish it could have been more.’
‘I’ve never had cheese like that. It was very nice.’
After another pause she spoke again, yet there was a lift in her voice. ‘It should be nice… This cheese they have been making in a valley close to here for…’ a beam of the sunset touched her cheekbone as she looked up into his eyes, ‘…for a thousand years.’
*
Bournemouth
‘Morning, RAF Redhill? Oh, jolly good, look, my name’s Squadron Leader Crispin Jessop – Aircrew Centre, Bournemouth – and I know it’s most sinfully early in the day but I’d like to speak if I may to your Squadron Adjutant… Yes, I’ll wait…
‘Hello? Hello there? Is that Squadron Leader Bistle speaking? …Bistle, it’s Crispin Jessop here – sorry if I’ve roused you from slumber… Yes, I phoned you the other week about one Flying Officer O’Regan, a most deserving young Australian on y’books… Oh, Flight Lieutenant now? Splendid, a promotion t’boot… Yes indeed. Look, ah, the thing is, old boy, I’ve just had the carbon copy of young Michael’s most recent transfer request come back across my desk… Yes, that’s right: with a fresh stamp on it: Approved. …Yes, and mum’s the word, m’dear fellow – especially as this is an open line – but I just wanted to thank you personally, given the, ah, well, the jist of our recent chat. …Yes, I’m holding the form in my hand at this moment! …Bloody marvellous news. Yes! Young Michael is going home. Yes, home. A wonderful turn-up for the books, I say, and eminently well-deserved… Yes, as I said to you the other week, I saw him, well, do something rather remarkable… t’say the least… Go
t me thinking about, well… about things, y’know how it is. Quite.
‘Oh and he’s got some mail… Yes, from Australia, and naturally I was wondering whether best to forward it to you or keep it here for him for when he passes back through Bournemouth on his way out… What’s that? Oh I see: Your chaps in yesterday’s big show, yes? …Operation, what, ‘Jubilee’, wasn’t it? …Yes, I’ve heard it didn’t go too well for the Canadians. …No. …No, terrible business… In any case, as to young Michael’s mail… Wh… What’s that? …What, he’s… he’s overdue… …Yes, I see. …Tell me, old boy, if you can, how long overdue? …Nine-teen hours… Oh hell…
‘What’s that? …Bailed out, y’say?! You’re sure of this? …His leader saw him… Well that’s something, I suppose. Oh, Christ, not into the Channel?! …No; over France, confirmed sighting, yes I see…’
Jessop peered to ensure the vent above his office door was shut, listened out for any sound in the corridor, and lowered his voice.
‘Look, ah, m’dear chap, I know this is an open line so indeed one never knows who’s listening in, now does one. …No; little birds everywhere, so it seems… So clearly I cannot ask you to specify where in la belle France our young friend has bailed out. …No, of course, for you to tell me in plain language would be frightfully insecure, now wouldn’t it. …Yes, quite; have the whole bally Gestapo down upon him in a trice. …Quite.’
Jessop strained once again for any sound in the corridor. Hearing none he lowered his voice even further.
‘But you could wire it to me, couldn’t you. In ciphered form, naturally. …Just a name. …The nearest town. …You could wire it direct to my first assistant. …Oh you would? My dear fellow, that’s jolly decent of you. …Yes, my assistant – She’s in the usual directory. …What’s that? …Miss Haimes? …No, I’ve a new girl now. …Yes, Miss Haimes, she ah… she moved on.’
*
As they wafted in through the external window of his office, Werner Gruber caught the strains of the piano teacher’s shop down across the street. Werner drained the first coffee of his working day, got up from his desk and shut the window. Sitting back down he tried to stamp from his mind, as he had to most days, the ambition of his youth.
Ghosts of the Empire Page 16