For King and Country

by David Monnery

  Tobin had been given the western perimeter to check, the sector encompassing the receding brow of the hill which looked out across the open countryside towards St Dié. He was pleased to be back in their first camp – it felt like coming home, and that was a feeling he had always cherished. In the Landore shop it would soon be time for his parents to get up and sort out the morning papers for the delivery boys.

  As he reached the edge of the clearing his eyes were drawn upwards to the star-filled sky, and for several seconds he stood there, trying to remember which constellation was which. There was a breeze ruffling the branches of the trees and perhaps this was what prevented him from hearing the approaching Germans. He did catch a glimpse of movement on the other side of the clearing as he lowered his eyes, but far too late to do anything about it. The pain was as sudden as a heart attack, the clatter of the gun almost an afterthought.

  The Sten slid out of his grasp, and the next thing he knew he was kneeling on the ground. His chest seemed to be on fire and a dreadful pain was rising in his groin. He tried reaching out a hand but nothing seemed to be working.

  Oh Megan, he thought.

  Gravity was pressing down on his head like a ten-ton weight and he finally bowed to it, dropping face first into the damp earth of the forest floor.

  On hearing the first burst of gunfire, Neil Rafferty started off at a run in Tobin’s direction, yelling at Ronnie Hill to come with him and Andy Lynton to get the jeeps ready to go. He had covered about twenty yards when the second burst exploded to his right, from the rough direction of the path where Albert Lowe was standing sentry. Rafferty’s step faltered, but only for a moment – Farnham would be on his way back up the hill to take charge, and Tobin obviously needed help.

  Farnham had left McCaigh and Pogo Young to cover the western path, and they were now squatting down behind two thick-trunked beeches some twenty feet apart. In the dark forest below they could hear a lot of feet and see a lot of vague shadows moving slowly towards them. ‘Time for some discouragement?’ McCaigh called softly, and Pogo’s white teeth flashed in the gloom. ‘Why not?’

  Both men stepped out, aimed the snouts of the Stens downwards, and raked the general area below, stepping back smartly before the enemy returned fire. Bullets zipped through the branches above, and a couple even thudded into the trunks in front of them. On the path below one man was mewling with pain, and another two seemed to be talking in angry whispers. McCaigh took a hand-grenade from his belt, did his best to pinpoint a gap through the trees in front of him, unclipped the pin and launched it out and down. There was a faint ‘phish’ sound as it landed, then a burst of yellow light as it exploded among the suddenly silhouetted Germans.

  There were more than a few of the bastards, McCaigh realized. And since the sound of gunfire now seemed to be coming from just about every fucking corner of the compass they had presumably surrounded the hill.

  Farnham was now back in the centre of the camp, trying to make sense of what his ears were taking in. There was gunfire to the south, west and north, but not, so far, to the east. The Germans had sent parties up the three known paths, he realized, but they hadn’t known about the track his men had made for the jeeps. Which offered the SAS at least the chance of a way out. Any German officer worth his salt would have backed up his assault groups with a cordon of encirclement, but the SAS’s chances of breaking through one of those had to be better than sitting out a siege by superior forces. Especially with daylight only a couple of hours away.

  He thought of sending someone up to check with the southern sentry position, but there was no time. The jeeps were ready to go, and they might as well use them. He turned to the men waiting beside him. ‘Andy, you take the north, Gerry, the west, Brian, the south. Give the order to pull out. Quietly, if possible.’ As those three raced away he rounded on Lennon and Downey. ‘You two head back up the track and keep Pete company. We’ll be picking you all up in a couple of minutes.’

  These two disappeared into the trees, leaving Farnham standing beside the jeeps, Mayles, Armstrong and Simpson waiting behind three of the driving wheels.

  McCaigh and Young needed no second bidding to fall back – the shadows in front of them were slowly turning into the shadows all round them as the Germans worked their way up the slopes to either side of the path. The two men made a parting gift of two more grenades and slipped back up the hill, running the last hundred yards in about twelve seconds flat.

  ‘Mickie, I want you in front,’ Farnham told McCaigh, pointing towards the jeep which already contained Lynton and Lowe. ‘Pogo, take the last,’ he added, his eyes scouring the darkness for Rafferty, Hill, Tobin and Chadwick. ‘Where the fuck are they?’ he murmured.

  Rafferty had spent the last couple of minutes crawling forward through the grass on the forest’s edge while Hill offered sporadic covering fire from behind a large oak tree. Eventually he got close enough to satisfy himself that Tobin really was as dead as he looked, and he was still squirming back, German bullets scything through the air inches above his back, when the order to pull out arrived. ‘Not a minute too soon,’ he murmured to himself, getting to his feet behind a suitable tree. ‘Get going,’ he told Hill and the recently arrived Chadwick. ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he added, firing a burst round the trunk in the general direction of the enemy. Take that, you miserable fuckers, he thought, and took off in a crouching run after the others.

  As he approached the jeeps all six engines burst simultaneously into life, giving the impression they had all been wired to the same ignition. McCaigh’s swung out in the lead, and the others jerked into motion one by one. Rafferty jumped aboard the back of the already moving last jeep and swung the mounted Browning round to cover the column’s rear.

  Now that they were all moving forward in line the drivers followed Farnham’s order to turn on their headlights. The noise of the engines was giving them away in any case, and a speedy ascent of the winding track seemed essential. The jeeps roared along, shaking and jolting their occupants, who clung grimly to gun grips and steering wheels, and then suddenly the headlights picked out the backs of the three men holding the eastern path – each of whom was standing behind a tree – and beyond them a scattering of Germans in the forest. In the seat next to McCaigh, Lynton opened up with a fusillade from the Vickers, causing the Germans to dive for cover. Once past the SAS men on the ground he took the left side of the track, leaving the right to Hill on the Browning behind him, and both men raked the forest with continuous fire. A similar division of labour was enacted in the jeeps behind them and the column roared on uphill like a line of miniature battleships delivering broadsides.

  The last two jeeps slowed slightly to pick up the sentries, allowing Downey and Lennon to jump aboard the fifth in line and McLaglan to unceremoniously throw in his lot with Rafferty and Pogo. He was still muttering ‘Jesus Christ’ and rubbing his shins when the front of the column debouched on to the dirt track half a mile from the camp, to find their chosen route to the left blocked by a small troop carrier. The two Germans in evidence bolted from sight, but there was no time to move the carrier, and several seconds were wasted while McCaigh turned the lead jeep round. ‘Lights off,’ Farnham yelled, and the order was shouted back down the waiting column.

  The lead jeep took off again, quickly gathered speed round a long curve in the narrow track, and almost ran over a group of Germans who had innocently stepped out of the trees to flag it down, presumably in the belief that it was one of theirs. Lynton’s Vickers opened up, knocking at least one man to the ground and causing the others to scatter, and as the other jeeps roared by the mounted guns swivelled to rake the surrounding undergrowth.

  The track in front of them was now empty, but in a mile or so they would reach the small road down to Fraize, which the enemy would probably have blocked. The next couple of minutes were anxious ones, but the intersection was empty, and Farnham was still breathing a sigh of relief when an armoured car appeared round the first bend in the road
below. The jeeps accelerated away up the hill, and it looked as though the Germans had neither seen nor heard them.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that the sixth jeep in line, the one containing Rafferty, Pogo and McLaglan, was no longer riding shotgun at the rear of the column. And with the armoured car now sitting astride the intersection below, there was no chance of going back to look for them.

  It had happened at the point where the forest track emerged on to the dirt road. As the five jeeps in front of them accelerated away one of the Germans with the troop carrier had opened fire with his rifle, and either great skill or cruel fortune had driven the single bullet straight through the back of Pogo’s head, splashing blood and brains across the armoured windscreen and killing him instantly. Bereft of control, the jeep had veered violently right, miraculously finding several gaps in the trees before crashing down a short bank and jolting skywards over a fallen trunk, at which point both Rafferty and McLaglan had been lucky enough to lose their grip on the careering vehicle. No sooner had they taken flight than the ground rose to hit them, and neither of them had heard the jeep’s swan song as it crunched head-on into a large beech. Nor had they been conscious of the boots crashing down through the trees towards them, or the hands which had grabbed their own feet and started dragging them back up to the dirt road.

  About three miles south of their last contact with the enemy the five jeeps burrowed into the forest once more and set up a defensive laager. The Germans couldn’t have enough men to mount more than selective sweeps, and Farnham wanted to stay within reach of his missing men and the Maquis camp. It was possible that the latter had also been attacked, but all the gunfire they’d heard that night had been distressingly close to home, and he was betting that Yves and his men were still there.

  A brief radio call confirmed as much – brief because a longer conversation would have given the German D/F operators time to fix their locations. Farnham desperately wanted information from Yves, not least about his missing men, but a visit to the Maquis camp in the hours before dawn, while the woods were no doubt crawling with Germans, seemed far too risky. He told the French radio operator that he would make the journey after dark that evening, and cut the connection.

  The next step was to contact Group B and let Phil Hoyland know that the Germans had invaded their camp. A fall-back location for their rendezvous had already been arranged, and the time was now put back seventy-two hours – Farnham wanted to at least investigate the possibility of rescuing his three missing men. Two of Hoyland’s men had already been killed in a fire-fight with a German patrol, and Tobin’s death had raised the squadron’s toll to three. Farnham was damned if he’d let it rise to six.

  The day went by slowly, but no sign of the enemy disturbed the men in their forest lair, and soon after dusk Farnham set off alone for the Maquis camp. The usual practice would have been to take at least one companion, but he knew the area so much better than anyone else, and two men made twice as much noise.

  The journey took about an hour and a half, and in that time he saw neither hide nor hair of the Germans, who had apparently returned to the low ground. His most dangerous moment came at the approaches to the Maquis camp, where a recruit he had never seen before gave them both a shock and seemed perilously close to pulling the trigger of his British-donated Sten. He wasn’t the only one who looked jumpy, and several familiar faces seemed perilously worn by anxiety and lack of sleep.

  Even Yves looked more serious than usual, and Farnham soon found out why. After his unit’s attack on the prison train two nights earlier the SS in both St Dié and Schirmeck had executed twenty hostages, seized another twenty and taken about eighty people into custody for questioning. It was suspected that one of the latter had been tortured into giving the location of the SAS camp. ‘He probably chose yours rather than ours for patriotic reasons,’ Yves added with a faint trace of a smile. ‘Though for all we know he may have given up both, and the Germans are heading towards us at this very moment.’

  That explained the jumpiness. ‘What happened to the Jews?’ Farnham asked.

  Another faint smile. ‘The Germans are having more trouble than they expected rounding them up. As of this morning there’s still a couple of hundred unaccounted for.’

  ‘Thank God for François,’ Farnham said, and explained what had happened.

  Yves was obviously pleased. ‘But two of your own men were captured last night,’ he went on.

  ‘Two? I hoped it was three.’

  ‘Two men were killed, according to the Germans. And the other two are to be executed tomorrow morning. At precisely nine o’clock.’

  Farnham’s heart sank. ‘Where? In St Dié?’

  ‘No. In Fraize. The Germans want to teach the town nearest to your camp a lesson in humility. They also have two of our people whom they picked up without papers. We don’t know who they are – probably just a couple of kids who hopped a train into the country to join us.’

  Farnham was hardly listening. ‘Tell me about the town,’ he said.

  Yves looked at him. ‘There’ll be at least a hundred Germans down there,’ he said. ‘More likely two hundred.’

  ‘I know, it’s probably out of the question. But tell me about the town.’

  Yves sent for a Maquisard named Charles whom Farnham hadn’t met before. He had lived all but the last two months of his life in Fraize, where his father was the postmaster, and at Farnham’s instigation he managed to produce a painstakingly detailed map of the small town.

  ‘And all these roads run downhill into Fraize?’ Farnham asked him, pointing them out on the map.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is the steepest?’

  ‘This one,’ Charles said without hesitation. ‘In winter that is the one we use for our sleds.’

  ‘You have a plan?’ Yves asked Farnham.

  ‘That’s rather a grand word for it,’ the SAS man replied. He explained what it was, and what role a chosen few of the Maquisards could play if they so wished.

  Yves smiled and shook his head in wonderment. ‘Now I know they are right when they say the English are mad,’ he said. ‘And yes, some of us will be there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Farnham said, getting to his feet. He hesitated for a moment, then smiled to himself. ‘Have you seen Madeleine?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, she is fine. But at the moment it is safer for her to stay in St Dié.’

  ‘Of course,’ Farnham agreed, half of him wishing that she was right there beside him at that moment, the other half wishing she was as far from the war as someone could possibly be. In Timbuktu perhaps, or on the moon.

  ‘Until tomorrow morning,’ Yves said with a smile.

  Farnham nodded, returned the smile and started off on his return journey. By midnight he was back in his own camp, with all but the sentries gathered in a circle around him to hear the information which Yves had passed on.

  ‘Do we know which two they’ve got?’ Lynton asked.

  ‘No,’ Farnham admitted. ‘But it seems that the third man is definitely dead.’ He outlined his plan, thinking as he did so how reckless it sounded. He had no idea how many Germans would be in Fraize, and any advantage they gained from surprise would only last for a short while. It might be a death-trap for all of them. He knew the men would follow him, but he wasn’t at all sure he had any right to ask them.

  ‘I don’t like people who come visiting at night without an invitation,’ someone was saying.

  ‘Aye, it’s time we saw the bastards in the daylight,’ Hill agreed.

  ‘Let them see how beautiful we all are,’ McCaigh said lightly. He supposed it was unkind to the other two, but he was hoping that Rafferty was still alive. He’d grown quite fond of the big oaf over the past few months.

  As basements went it wasn’t particularly damp, and the single bare light-bulb offered more than enough illumination. Rafferty could make out every strand of the cobwebs which covered the empty wine rack, so he had no trouble making out the brui
ses and contusions on Pete McLaglan’s sleeping face.

  Both men had been questioned, but to say they’d been tortured would have been something of an exaggeration. Beaten up perhaps, but not much more than that – the Milice man who’d stubbed out his cigarette on Rafferty’s arm had seemed more interested in impressing his Gestapo counterparts than eliciting information. The latter had seemed peculiarly apathetic, for reasons that Rafferty could only guess at. It was possible that the presence of regular French police, SS and Wehrmacht officers had cramped their style, or maybe the realization had finally struck home that retribution would be waiting at the war’s end. If so, it had struck only as regards torture – the execution of uniformed prisoners was apparently still considered ultimately pardonable. ‘You have one night to make your peace with God,’ one of the SS officers had told Rafferty in passable English.

  Or to make peace with himself. It was a strange thing, knowing you were going to die. Rafferty’s brain found it hard to believe, but the knot of panic in his stomach was a measure of his body’s conviction. Just one of millions, he told himself, but that didn’t make the prospect any more inviting. He had never believed in God, and there was no fear of hell inside him, so what was he worrying about? It wasn’t as if life had been that wonderful lately, and no one would really miss him. It would solve Beth’s problem for her, and as for his son…well, Dad could be a dead hero. Nothing upsetting in that, nothing awkward.

  But there was no sense pretending he wanted to die – he didn’t. All his anger with Beth seemed so beside the point. People did what they had to, and sometimes that included breaking someone else’s heart. She hadn’t wanted to – he knew that. It had just happened, and for the first time he found himself hoping that her new life would work for her. He wanted one of his own, to see the war ended, to build up his car business with Tommy. He wanted – he realized for the first time – to kiss Mary Slater.