For King and Country

by David Monnery

  Tobin watched him walk away, wondering what he’d said. He had to admit that he felt pretty drunk, but…

  ‘Why don’t we go outside for some fresh air?’ Megan suggested, appearing at his shoulder. Her face was flushed, and he thought she looked very lovely.

  They went out the back door, and she pulled him through the yard, where several couples were happily groping at each other, and into the alley which had once run along behind a lively street. Despite a clear, starry sky, the night seemed warm, and they walked arm in arm past the strange wilderness of broken houses to the edge of the docks. In the distance the black shapes of ships and the angular silhouettes of the serried cranes were clearly visible in the darkness.

  Megan turned with her back to the wall, pulling him to her, and they kissed for a while, tongues entwining. He cupped her right breast and gently kneaded it, and after a while she undid the front buttons of her blouse, deftly loosened her bra, and let him get his hand inside. Her nipple grew nearly as hard as his cock, which she was rubbing up against as they kissed.

  ‘I can take my knickers down,’ she said breathlessly.

  A sliver of panic cut through his drunken desire, and he searched for its source. He hadn’t got a johnny, and in any case she was drunk. This was Megan – he shouldn’t be taking advantage of her. ‘I haven’t got any protection,’ he heard a voice say, and it was his own.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said softly, and the delicious grinding of her stomach against his cock came to an end. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘but you do want me, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ he murmured. ‘It’s just…’

  ‘That’s why I love you,’ she said, ‘because you take care of me.’ She kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘I think we should be getting back. I don’t want Barry to think we’ve left and go without us.’

  They walked back to the party, which was now pumping Glenn Miller into the air. Quite a few people had left though, and Barry, who now had a redhead in tow, announced himself almost ready to join them. First though, he had some settling up to do, and Tobin saw a large wad of notes change hands.

  Early the following morning, lying in bed and thinking about the long trip back to Ayrshire, his sober brain started making the connections his drunken one had missed. The booze and food had been black market – that went without saying – but Megan’s brother was obviously one of the local kingpins. Tobin had always rather liked Barry, and had felt really sorry for him when he failed his physical back in 1940, but this was something else. And the man who had laughed when asked about his unit – he had to be a deserter. Which explained the ‘no uniform’ thing – probably half the men there had been deserters. Having a good time and making money while others died for them.

  That made Tobin angry. Deserters were worse than conchies, who at least were willing to do dangerous jobs which didn’t involve fighting.

  But what could he do? He felt like reporting the whole business, but he couldn’t do that without shopping Megan’s brother.

  He would talk to her about it, he decided, and later that morning, as they waited on the platform at Swansea Victoria for his train to be brought in from the sidings, he did.

  ‘I don’t like deserters, either,’ she said, ‘but Barry’s not a deserter – he just gets people stuff they want. Most of it comes in from Ireland, so nobody goes short. And he’s my brother.’

  ‘I know he is…’

  ‘So what can I do? If we report the deserters he’ll probably get into trouble, and that’ll break Mum’s heart.’ She looked up at him. ‘Maybe you could talk to him. He likes you.’

  ‘How can I? I’m leaving.’

  ‘Next time you come. And let’s stop talking about him. Let’s just pretend we’re the only two people in the world.’

  He smiled at her, and a pang of desire shot through his groin as he remembered the night before.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Hamish Donegan strolled down Pinner High Street towards the Metropolitan Line station, still savouring the breakfast which his landlady had miraculously put together. There was no doubting the woman could cook, and given the paucity of ingredients available these days, that was no small gift. Donegan could have had a much more sumptuous room at the SAS’s HQ at the Moor Park Golf Club, but Mrs Bickerstaff’s spam omelette was certainly worth a ten-minute train journey twice a day.

  It was a fine spring morning, with fluffy white clouds sailing happily across a blue sky. In his home town, five hundred miles to the north, it would probably still be snowing, but it was harder to think of anywhere in the British Isles less like Inverness than Pinner. There was something so indelibly English about London’s Metroland.

  He crossed the road, nodded his usual greeting to the two old women who were seated on the same bench every morning, and wondered when he’d get back home again. The last time had been almost three months ago, and on that occasion his two boys could hardly have been more awkward with him if he’d been a complete stranger. And he knew Jean was feeling the strain of separation – he could hear it in her voice during their weekly telephone calls.

  Well, he thought, showing his pass to the ticket collector and heading up the stairs to the platform, there was some way to go yet. These days everyone seemed to assume that the war was as good as won, but the Germans still held most of Europe, and getting a foothold in France was going to be neither easy nor cost-free. Donegan suddenly remembered one of the staff instructors at Sandhurst telling his class that any fool could win a battle if the odds were overwhelming enough – the sign of a great general was to do it without losing a man.

  SAS casualties, in both Africa and Italy, had been horrendously high, and the reason, in Donegan’s mind, was as clear as day. The SAS was not being used in the intended manner.

  He knew. He had been involved from the beginning, had sat in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo on more than one occasion, hammering out the new unit’s raison d’être with David Stirling and Jock Lewes. Independent strategic missions were the name of the game, small groups of fast-moving, lightly armed men operating way behind enemy lines, disrupting communications, diverting supplies, keeping the enemy on the hop. There had been teething problems in Africa, but overall the theory had proved workable, and on the few occasions it had been applied in Italy the success rate had been high. But most of the powers that be seemed determined to use the SAS as either shock troops or reconnaissance forces operating just ahead of the main armies, and they were not equipped for either role, as a series of costly failures had amply demonstrated.

  The strange thing was that the SAS had not only survived these débâcles of others’ making but actually prospered. There were now five regiments which bore the SAS name, two British, two French and one Belgian. A group of ‘Phantom’ signallers had been permanently attached, and a whole raft of staff officers, supply units, clerks and sundry others had swollen the brigade into an empire-builder’s paradise. The good news was that most of the surviving originals, like Donegan himself, were now in influential positions; the bad news was that the feeling of camaraderie which went with a small, tight-knit unit had virtually disappeared.

  Which was probably inevitable, Donegan thought, as the Metropolitan Line train slid into the platform behind one of the company’s elegant electric locomotives. ‘Benjamin Disraeli’ was this one’s name. He’d have to tick it off the list which his elder son Alistair had copied from a train-spotter’s book.

  Donegan climbed into an empty compartment, thankful that his journeys each day went against the rush hour, and re-established his train of thought. The very fact that the SAS had been expanded following its poor record in Italy suggested that the top brass hadn’t learnt much from the experience, and their plans for using the Brigade in France merely confirmed as much. Small parties would be dropped just ahead of an Allied bridgehead – and later the advancing Allied armies – for the purposes of tactical reconnaissance. Which meant dropping lightly armed groups into the area between the German front-line di
visions and their armoured reserves. The SAS teams would either spend their whole time in hiding or suffer the sort of losses associated with medieval suicide squads.

  One of the regimental COs had already resigned in protest, and there might well be more. Donegan sighed, stepped down on to the platform at Moor Park and walked through the sunlit spring foliage to his office. Once seated behind his desk he ordered two cups of tea, glanced briefly through his in-tray and summoned his number two, the unflappable Major Spenner, whose account of his weekend at home with the family filled Donegan with envy.

  ‘Lieutenant Farnham will be here in twenty minutes,’ Spenner said, looking at his watch.

  ‘Captain Farnham,’ Donegan corrected him, rummaging around in the in-tray for the relevant piece of paper. ‘Now explain to me why he’s being sent. This sounds like an SOE job to me. Or one for a Jedburgh team, come to that.’ The Special Operations Executive had been sending agents into occupied France since 1941, initially to establish escape routes, then as a means of funnelling money and supplies to the rapidly blossoming French resistance groups. The Jedburgh teams, which comprised one French, one British and one American officer, were a more recent innovation; their task was to contact and help organize those resistance groups.

  ‘Because the cupboard’s bare,’ was Spenner’s answer to his question. ‘Every man and woman they have seems to be accounted for. So they asked us if we had anyone fluent in French with experience of working behind enemy lines. Farnham seemed the best bet.’

  ‘He did a good job in Italy,’ Donegan agreed.

  ‘And it won’t hurt us to have someone with experience of working in France. Once the balloon goes up we’ll probably be sending over most of the Brigade, and they won’t just have the Germans to worry about. The French resistance groups are an awkward bunch of sods.’

  ‘And then there’s the Americans,’ Donegan added facetiously.

  In the ante-room down the corridor Farnham could find nothing else worth reading in the sadly shrunken Times. He sat back in the chair, thinking that whatever the reason for this summons to Moor Park it had been nice to have the extra time with Eileen. The previous day she had taken him to the Shelter on the Isle of Dogs, and it had been abundantly clear how much she was appreciated, by both co-workers and those they were looking after. The East End itself had been more of a shock. He had known how much the area had suffered from German bombing, but the reality of so much desolation was still mind-numbing.

  Remembering his promise to Eileen that he would talk to their father on her behalf, Farnham had been on his best behaviour with both the old man and his stepmother, studiously ignoring outrageous remarks about the Jews’ responsibility for provoking the war. It had all been to no avail, of course: when he eventually broached the subject his father had claimed he already regretted letting Eileen work at the Shelter over the Easter holiday, and certainly wouldn’t countenance the thought of her leaving school to work there permanently. Not because he was worried about her education, but because the East End was full of Jews, Chinks and communists, and he didn’t want his daughter contaminated.

  Eileen had taken this news calmly. Almost too calmly in fact, as if she already had Plan B up her sleeve. And then on Friday night the call had come from Moor Park, requesting his attendance in the CO’s office at nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning. On Saturday morning, wondering if the others were involved, he had called Rafferty’s home number in Cambridge. Getting no answer, he had tried the McCaigh household in Stoke Newington. Mickie, according to his mother, had left for Scotland that morning, and hadn’t received any messages from anybody.

  So it seemed to be just him. And indeed, there didn’t seem to be anyone else waiting in the ante-room for an audience with the CO. Farnham had known Donegan since the summer of 1942, when the two men had been involved in the raid on the Sidi Haneish airfield in western Egypt, and had come to both like and respect the hulking great Scot.

  ‘The CO’s ready for you,’ the adjutant almost bellowed in his ear, before leading him down the corridor and ushering him through a door. Donegan was looming like a minor mountain behind his desk, and Bill Spenner was grinning a welcome from one of the chairs opposite.

  ‘Sit down, Robbie,’ Donegan said. ‘Want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Farnham was eager to hear the reason for his summons.

  Donegan seemed to realize as much. ‘We’ve got a job for you, or at least the War Office has. I’m not sure exactly who’s in charge of this particular caper. Anyway, it’s France. The Vosges,’ he added, swinging round in his chair and pointing a large finger at the line of mountains which separated Alsace and the Rhine from the rest of France.

  ‘Alone?’ Farnham asked.

  ‘That’s the idea. This is a fact-finding mission, and one man has a better chance of blending in. The local Maquis group will be expecting you, and Bill here will fill you in later on what we know about them.’

  ‘What sort of facts am I looking for?’ Farnham asked, though he already had a pretty good idea.

  Donegan swung round to face the map again. ‘Wherever we land in France,’ he said, ‘whether it’s the Pas de Calais or Normandy or anywhere else, the German supply lines will stretch back across the Rhine into Germany itself. If they want to bring reinforcements from the Eastern Front – if they have any to spare, that is – they’ll have to travel across Germany and the Rhine to get to France. So these roads and railways’ – he tapped each with his finger, starting at the Channel coast and finishing at the Swiss border – ‘are absolutely bloody vital to the buggers. And, as you can see’ – the finger tapped twice more – ‘several of the railway lines go through the Vosges. We want to know how good a job the locals are capable of doing when it comes to denying those lines to the Germans, both on specific occasions, like the day before the invasion, and on a week-by-week basis. We’d also like an assessment of whether this would be a suitable area for an SAS operation after the balloon goes up, and how the Maquis would feel about a bunch of our lads driving their jeeps with the usual care and consideration through their peaceful villages.’

  Farnham smiled. ‘How are we going to cooperate with the Maquis? I mean, are we going to form integrated battle groups, just team up on an ad hoc basis, or just leave each other to get on with it and hope we don’t attack the same German column from different sides at the same time?’

  Donegan grunted. ‘That’s another question we’d like an answer to. Some of the French resistance groups are getting a bit touchy about taking British or American orders.’

  ‘The communists?’

  ‘No, not particularly,’ Spenner told them. ‘In fact, De Gaulle’s lot seem to spend just as much time worrying about slights to the honour of France, if not more. The communists tend to take their decisions on purely practical grounds. This particular group seems a mixed bag, by the way.’

  ‘Make it more interesting for you,’ Donegan said generously. ‘They’ll no doubt ply you with demands for equipment, and we’ll do our best to get them whatever it is you think they need. After you’ve been on a few jaunts with them you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of what they’re made of.’ He paused for a moment, then turned to the map for the last time. ‘And there’s one other thing. Just here, outside a village called Struthof, the Germans have built a concentration camp. It’s the only one on French soil as far as we know, and the government – our government – would like to know what’s going on there. Presumably they think it might give them an idea of what’s going on in all the others, in Germany and Poland and God only knows where else.’ He looked straight at Farnham. ‘Since this isn’t strictly an SAS operation, and you won’t be wearing uniform, I should…’

  ‘I volunteer,’ Farnham interjected, and immediately felt a slight pang of guilt. Such eagerness was a little hard to square with his promise to be careful.

  3

  France, May 1944

  The Halifax droned on its east-south-easterly course across no
rthern France. It had been airborne for about an hour, and was now, according to Farnham’s calculations, somewhere above Champagne. He and Catherine had spent the second half of their honeymoon there, driving round the beautiful countryside by day, making love in gorgeous inns by night. All of which seemed several lifetimes away.

  Feeling cramped, he stretched first one leg and then the other. On the other side of the bomb bay doors the H-type container was waiting, its static line already hooked to the plane’s fuselage. The container’s five separate cylinders were held together by metal rods in the shape suggested by the name; once on the ground they would be separated for easier portage. Inside the various compartments were a dazzling array of gifts for the local Maquis – Sten guns, ammunition, money, some plastic explosive with the necessary detonators – and the means by which they could order and accept delivery of more, namely a radio set with spares, an S-phone and a Eureka-Rebecca set.

  Or at least, this was what Farnham hoped had been packed inside the container. One agent of recent memory had been parachuted into central France with a canister full of lampshades, and his hosts had not been particularly impressed.

  There couldn’t be much more than twenty minutes to go. The Vosges, though certainly tall enough to qualify as mountains, were a range of rounded summits, and for centuries many of these had been cleared for pasture, shaved of their growth like the crowns of monks. The weathermen had forecast clear skies in the area, favouring an accurate drop, and for that Farnham was grateful, for his one great fear as a parachutist was landing in a tree and breaking his neck.

  Thinking about that reminded him of a story he had heard at Moor Park only a couple of days before. An SOE agent had fallen into a tree, ending up suspended in thin air. It had been too dark to see the ground, and the things he had dropped from his pockets had soundlessly disappeared, so he had hung there until dawn arrived and revealed the humiliating truth – a thick bed of moss lay not three inches below his toes.