The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  The Allies landed in North Africa, and Stalingrad burned. But it all seemed far away. English words on a sputtery wireless, Polish words on grey-typed bulletins pinned to a board, reached us as dry news, drained of fresh hopes and fears. Nothing evoked that June morning when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, when we had crowded round the radio gasping, shouting, sometimes even laughing. That electric sense of erupting history had long left us.

  So we sought distractions. Football championships gave our men a chance to meet other soldiers, and often to fight them. Several officers bought a racehorse on credit, and we all had to put money on Kaszanka until she broke a leg at Musselburgh. The chaplain’s art classes on Polish Madonna paintings were instantly popular: his hut was well heated and dim enough to allow undisturbed sleep.

  And I took up distilling. I knew nothing about chemistry, but my casual remark one evening – ‘What we need is vodka!’ – enchanted several comrades who claimed that they did know. The battalion storeman had worked for a French pharmaceutical company before the war and instructed me what to look for in Edinburgh on my language-learning visits. In a Boy Scout shop I found a pre-war chemistry set complete with glass retorts and worm – ‘Made in Germany’, as it happened.

  The old man behind the counter considered me. ‘Mister, is this you telling me you’re a Boy Scout?’

  ‘Once a Scout, always a Scout. The pass, I forgot to bring it.’

  ‘Who d’ye think I am – an eejit? Take a look at yourself.’

  There was a long mirror on the wall beside the counter. How many years since I saw my own reflection in civilian clothes? The light in there was odd: weak and yet searching. I saw a small, broad-shouldered man wearing a suit too tight for him. There were new furrows on that face around its wary, greenish eyes. Brown hair cropped so short that the cheekbones jutted. Skin a bit olive, ‘foreign-looking’. Where did this fellow belong?

  ‘Ach, take it then. You’re the third Pole that’s been in for such-like kit, and it’s the last set in the store. And watch the hooch disnae leave ye blind.’

  *

  Back at Pitnechtan, the vodka team set to work in a shed next to the coal bunkers. But after weeks of trial and error, fermenting potatoes with yeast and beet sugar and distilling the liquor, we only produced clouds of giddily scented steam and a few jars of oily rotgut. We pretended that it was authentic Polish homebrew – ‘bimber’ – and drank some to rescue our self-respect. The rest I poured away. What remained with me was the dark stare of that man in the mirror. For a moment I had not recognised him. Had he recognised me, and what did he think of me now?

  *

  One heavy morning, as I promised myself never to touch that stuff again, a travel-worn envelope reached me. Addressed only to ‘M. le commandant Chousky, Maurice, auprès forces polonaises libres’, it had travelled round Britain for many weeks, accumulating in-tray stamps, sealing wax and scribbles. At one point it had reached our Supreme Commander in London, whose minions had redirected it to Fife.

  It contained a typed letter, a handwritten note from Commandant le Gallois, and a travel warrant from Edinburgh to Gourock. The letter summoned me to give supplementary evidence to a reconvened enquiry into the loss of the destroyer Fronsac, off Greenock on 30 April, 1940. The note said: ‘Mon cher Chousky! This is a big bore, but something new has come up which indirectly concerns you. It could become a nuisance if you don’t clear it up. It would be good to see you, if you get this letter. But perhaps you are far away in Tunisia, charging M. le général Rommel’s panzers on horseback at the head of your Uhlans! Amitiés.’

  I got off the train at Fort Matilda, and set off to walk the few hundred yards up to the Free French base. Rounding the corner, I found my way blocked by a bus, more of a dilapidated charabanc, slewed across the roadway. Inside, through grimy windows, I could see Scottish policemen packed into the narrow seats, some sleeping, some smoking.

  I walked past. ‘Hey, youse in the black beret, get back there! Naebody gets through here, naebody, back wi’ye now!’ I showed the excited inspector my typed letter in French, and my military pass. He scanned my papers, and then, baffled, stood back. Beyond him was an extraordinary, carnival sight. A roll of barbed wire blocked the street from one side to another, decorated with a row of tricolour flags, and behind the wire stood a rank of French marines in full battle order with glittering bayonets.

  ‘Where is the Commandant? I have to see him. What is going on?’

  ‘This is French territory. It is closed. Go away!’ I thrust my letter across the wire to the marine officer, a tough-looking Polynesian with a face scarred by smallpox. Presently le Gallois appeared. He was wearing a helmet, and apparently bursting with high spirits. ‘Shoosky, bon Dieu, so you got my letter, but what a moment to choose!’

  Round the corner, the guards dragged the wire aside and le Gallois led me into his office. A coloured portrait of General de Gaulle on one wall, flanked by a copy of the General’s proclamation of 18 June 1940 – these were new. Otherwise, nothing much had changed in the dim, shabby room. The ashtray was still overflowing, but the stolen table-lighter had been replaced with a larger silver one.

  The Commandant hung his helmet on the back of the door. He had grown heavier since I had last seen him.

  ‘What...?’

  ‘We are in a state of siege. Let me explain. Six seamen, from the French merchant ships out there which have been rotting at anchor for two years, come to me. They declare that they wish to fight, to join the naval forces of Free France. But the ships’ masters demand their return. And lamentably, yes lamentably, the British insist that the masters are correct in international maritime law. Of course, I refuse. So they send the police to arrest the seamen. I refuse again. And now, can you imagine – les Anglais – they inform me that they intend to use military force to take these men!’

  I had never seen le Gallois so blithe. He offered me a glass of cognac, which I declined, and poured himself one. ‘I have responded decisively, correctly. I have declared this base to be sovereign French territory, an overseas department or dependency which foreigners may enter only with French permission. As its military governor, I have proclaimed a state of emergency, état de siège, in this territory and taken steps to defend it. The surrounding streets – I have provisionally annexed them and closed them with barricades, as integral to the defence of France. If they violate our frontiers, we will open fire.’

  He paused, and began to laugh. ‘I know what you are thinking, Shoosky. You think: my God, Commandant le Gallois has turned into a Pole!’

  I was thinking exactly that. Our own recent history wasn’t free of theatrical confrontations, but some of them had ended in bloodshed, the blood of poor peasant soldiers and of civilians caught in cross-fire.

  ‘Commandant, this could become a tragedy. I can’t believe you would order French troops to fire on British troops.’

  ‘Why not? We killed each other just the other day in Syria, in Lebanon.’ But he looked uneasy. ‘No, there is a way out. I am up against stupid civil functionaries, against stupid soldiers. But, Shoosky, there is such a thing as the fraternity of the sea. The Admiral here is a decent old Scot. I have appealed to him. I wrote to him: “Admiral, let us understand one another as seamen. You know that to give these men up would be a crime against the unwritten laws of naval brotherhood, the trust between comrades which holds men at sea to their duty. Send me your men, your Royal Marines! Send them to stand beside us at the barricades and prevent this disaster.”’

  ‘That’s a fantasy!’

  ‘Not at all. It worked. Listen, the Admiral received my letter, and this morning he presented himself. He stood at the wire – wouldn’t come inside – and we talked. He kept laughing. “My home is up this street. Do I have to show a passport to cross French territory and go to bed with my own wife?” He said: “There are some bloody fools involved in this who can’t see further than their own shiny army boots. But I know how to go over their heads. I think I can get yo
u a guarantee that your six seamen can stay and join your navy. If I do – it could take a day or so – would you promise to take down the barbed wire and give Gourock back its streets?”’

  ‘You accepted?’

  ‘I think I must accept,’ said le Gallois. He seemed suddenly tired and melancholy. ‘For the sake of the Admiral, for two good navies. For the fraternity of the sea.’

  ‘What does General de Gaulle think about what you have done?’

  ‘Officially, he has said nothing. Unofficially, I have heard that he is not at all displeased. Anyway, his visit to us next month is still being organised. My little daughter Françoise will give him a bouquet; he will embrace me... He doesn’t forget people who stand up for our dignity, Shoosky. Especially those who stand up against les Anglais.’

  He brooded, pushing his empty glass back and forth across his desk. ‘Remember the last time we met? When I was being arrested, after Mers-el-Kébir? I told you then that you Poles, too, would one day pay a price for trusting the British. They are so nice, so generous, such noble words. Then one day – when their national interests are at stake – you wake up to find a noose round your neck.’

  The Commandant stared at me, his eyes dilated. I looked away. This was a thought I didn’t feel like pursuing. Instead, I asked him: ‘There’s something new about the Fronsac? I don’t see how it can concern me. But of course I will help if I can.’

  ‘Yes, well. Something disturbing, a bit mad. Our intelligence people think they have found a Nazi agent. He was one of the Fronsac survivors, who has been working on a depot ship with our submarines. There is a Vichy spy here in Greenock – but yes, it’s normal, what do you expect? They know perfectly well who he is, not dangerous, a self-dramatising imbecile who doesn’t even know how to operate his radio properly. So they leave him alone, listen to his telephone, watch his contacts. But a month ago they picked up this sailor lurking outside the spy’s house in the blackout – a policeman had taken him for a burglar. He was carrying a list of the shipping in the river, the list of the next convoy to leave.’

  Le Gallois got up, grunting a little over his belly, and unlocked a filing cabinet. From a green cardboard folder, he pulled a sheet of paper, a smeared carbon copy.

  ‘Have a look. I mean, it’s a confession but it’s daft. I suppose he said this to make them stop hitting him.’

  I read. ‘My name is Kellerman, Albert,... born in Alsace... blah, blah...’. Then: ‘In 1937, I joined a secret youth cell within the Parti Populaire Français, in touch with the Sicherheitsdienst in the German Embassy in Paris. On a visit to Germany, several of us were recruited to join a cycling tour of western Scotland, a cover for intelligence-gathering about naval bases. In Greenock, in the summer of 1938, I was introduced to a certain Melville, Johnston, a probationary youth member of the British Union of Fascists, an admirer of the new Germany and a militant against the growing Jewish–Bolshevik threat to Scotland. In 1939 I was conscripted into the navy. I served on Fronsac in the Norwegian campaign. I met Melville again in April 1940, when Fronsac arrived at Greenock.

  ‘We agreed to carry out a symbolic act of sabotage. I was under training as a torpedo rating, while Melville, now a reserve officer in the British navy, had an excuse to board the ship. The agreement was that we should disable the safety and firing locks on all the torpedo tubes. Before this action, we wrote an account of our motives and put it in a steel cashbox, which we hid in a cabinet in the chartroom under the bridge. Our intention was to confess when the damage was discovered. We would come forward and appeal to the British nation: end this absurd war, make peace with Germany! Then we would face our punishment together. Unfortunately, for reasons I cannot understand, disconnecting the first group of locks led to the torpedo launch with the well-known consequences.

  ‘I suspect now that Melville deceived me. Recalling his repeated instructions to use more force on all the locks, I believe that he was aware that there was a firing charge in the tube and that he intended the torpedo to be launched. I cannot exclude that he was a double agent, working for the British Secret Service. Although he was posted missing and presumed dead after the explosion, this is not true. I saw him alive on the quay and, later, making his escape into the town. I have had no contact with him since. I have heard a rumour that he was seen in another part of Scotland in the company of a Polish officer, but I do not know the source of this rumour.’

  At the foot of the sheet, under the signature, someone had written in pencil: ‘A Major M. Szczucki was lodging in Melville’s house, Union Street, at the time of the explosion. Present whereabouts not known.’

  Gently, le Gallois pulled the sheet of paper out of my fingers and laid it face down on the desk. ‘You are not supposed to have seen that. But I mean, it’s like the Moscow Trials. I confess to meeting Trotsky on a tricycle in Monte Carlo and promising to blow up the Dnieper dam. That sort of thing.’

  ‘But why didn’t Kellerman take his chance to escape, to return to France after the Armistice? If he was a fascist, why did he stay here and join the Free French?’

  ‘Evidently he wanted to go on spying. They are still interrogating him in prison. But it still doesn’t quite add up. This confession is comedy, senseless.’

  ‘None the less, they are going to reopen the enquiry.’

  There was a silence. The Commandant seemed to be waiting for me to say something more. Then he shook his head, and glanced sharply at me.

  ‘Shoosky, old friend, be very careful. Fine, fine, you know nothing about it, it’s all nonsense. Yes, but it’s poisonous nonsense. Get your name off it. Go abroad, find a nice war, but get your name off it.’

  On the train, I decided that I must take time off to find Johnston at Rosyth and bully the truth out him. But when I arrived at Pitnechtan I found my kit piled in the hall, my books and papers spilling out of an open orange crate.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been? The truck from the signals school waited all afternoon for you. Now we will have to borrow the Colonel’s staff car. Where is your movement order – still lying on your office table? Shameless!’

  In the army, you learn not to say: ‘But nobody told me...’ By nightfall I was unpacking my stuff in a draughty girls’ school at Polmont, near Falkirk. Men were running about, orders were yelled, heavy boxes of equipment screeched along the stone floors of corridors. My life jerked into high gear as one strenuous course followed another: signals and clandestine radio operation at Auchtertool and Polmont, parachute training at Largo, tradecraft at the ‘spy school’ in Glasgow. Conditions were often grim, the food was often terrible, but the other trainees were good company. I let Johnston Melville and the Fronsac slide to the back of my mind, and if the French sent me another summons to testify, it never reached me. I became very fit.

  14

  The house was still. Jackie had it to herself. The vibrations from the main door closing, the chatter of Granny’s heels going down the steps, had passed into silence.

  Jackie became a bat. She rose from her chair and flew noiselessly about the house, arms outstretched, back and forth from one room to the next. When her arms grew tired, she steered herself through the kitchen door and alighted on the window ledge. With a little gasp of breath, she broke the quiet. The bat was thirsty.

  Her tea was out on the table. Corned beef, some lettuce and tomato, the bottle of salad cream. Two slices of bread and butter: Mrs M always kept her own butter ration for her granddaughter. A glass of milk. But Jackie didn’t feel like eating just now, did not even like drinking the milk. Bats didn’t drink milk, which was disgusting anyway, even if you could forget about it spleetering out of a cow. Eech! Sliding off the ledge, she went to the sink and filled a glass of water.

  She carried the glass back to the front room, where her drawing book was spread out on the table facing the big window. The view was full of ships, but before she sat down, Jackie took up the binoculars and trained them on the far side of the estuary, where she could pick out three black dots in a neat
row. High tide! When the tide was really in, that was all you could see of the Fronsac: the tips of her remaining funnels just breaking the surface. When it was out, specially at low-water springs, then the whole scorched hull could be seen, and the stumps of the masts. Everyone in Greenock and Gourock and Port Glasgow had learned to glance out to the Fronsac when they needed to know the state of the tide.

  Jackie sat down, selected an HB pencil and turned the closely written pages of the drawing book until she reached a blank sheet. ‘High water, Saturday, 1943.’ The date could come later. She looked up and out of the window, pausing every few moments to consult the tome of Jane’s Fighting Ships borrowed from the library. She wrote: ‘Battleships: King George V class:? Duke of York?, Ramillies. Battle cruiser: Renown. US battleship (v. big): Iowa or New Jersey? Heavy cruisers: 2 County class, Dido, 1 City class (HMS Glasgow), USS Pensacola. Light cruisers: Curlew, Coventry, Hawkins. Sloop: de Brazza (France). Destroyers: Blyskawica (Poland)... Aircraft carriers:’ When she had finished listing the warships she could see, she drew a line in red pencil and began to write again under it: ‘Liners. Queen Mary (black and grey camouflage)...’ Jackie sucked her pencil briefly, then added: ‘NB: bows mended after accident.’ Last year, the Queen Mary had anchored out there with a huge buckle in her stem, as if a sea monster had taken a bite out of it. This was because, after crossing the Atlantic carrying fifteen thousand American soldiers, she had sliced straight through a British cruiser off Northern Ireland.

  The Queen Mary did not stop to look for survivors, but steamed on to Greenock: live soldiers mattered more than drowning sailors. Jackie knew all that from Françoise le Gallois, who was at St Columba’s with her. Françoise, who was exciting and French but not always to be trusted, had got it from her father.

  Next, Jackie took out of her pencil case a mapping pen, uncorked a small bottle of specially black ink and drew a sketch of the Tail of the Bank with the positions of the important ships marked in. The pen was narrow and had a disagreeable sputtery nib, but Jackie had been adding a plan to each entry she had made over the past two years and had learned how to prevent blots. Sometimes, if she felt like it, she made a pencil drawing of a ship – the Queen Mary with the bite out of the bow, for instance – but drawing wasn’t her strong point, as Miss Coutts had told her right out, in front of the class.