Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  It was the same Diana down to the last smothered chuckle behind a barrage of impudence, gaiety and cheerful contempt for all male prejudices.

  “It’s the most outrageous piece of idiocy I’ve ever heard of!” I protested, but as I said it I was conscious of a glow of pride in her courage and enterprise, and a delight not far removed from smugness to have proof that her love for me was strong enough to take such a risk.

  “Do you know what I’d like to do right now?” I added.

  “Yes I do! Drag me off to the nearest despatching unit and throw me into a Lysander marked ‘Returned Unopened’?”

  “No,” I said, “you’re only half-right! I ought to turn you upside down and tan your behind as it should have been tanned years ago, regularly, at least once a week and with the broadest slipper available! I remember my Uncle Reuben gave your mother that advice years ago!”

  She laughed, tossing her ruined hair over her shoulders.

  “That’s your privilege, Jan, now that we’re respectably married but postpone it until after the real strike! You’ll need to conserve the strength of your sword-arm and I don’t suppose I could run as fast after you’d done with me!”

  She got up slowly and looked ruefully at her shoe.

  “Just look what you’ve done to my heel, popping out on me like that! God, I thought my number was up! How long were you playing hide-and-seek before I came in?”

  “I got a glimpse of you from the alley beyond the yard,” I told her. “You were sitting at a table with Porthos, or Cyrano de Bergerac, or whatever lunatic you talked into bringing you here!”

  Her eyes opened wide. “You saw me and didn’t recognise me?”

  “I only had a back view squint at a range of twenty yards. Have I got Sam Weller’s ‘hextra-special-gas-lamps’?”

  “But great heavens, you ought to have known by instinct! This is dreadfully humiliating and when we get home I’ll pop a strange girl in bed with you one night and see if you can tell the difference in the dark!”

  “If we get home!” I said, heavily for fear was returning to my heart.

  “Oh pooh to that!” she said, becoming a boisterous schoolgirl again, “We’ll make it all right! We’ve only used up about seven of our lives and once the invasion begins it should be a piece of cake! Jerry will be running around like a hen wired up with a fox! As a matter of fact, Perry and I have already worked out a plan. Some of his men are taking part in your raid, so when it’s over come straight here and leave the getaway to me!” She suddenly became serious, or serious for her: “That bunch you’re working with is a suicide squad, Jan! If you join up with them you’ll be in the bag in twenty-four hours!”

  “Now let’s get this straight, Di,” I said, fending her off as she came closer and tried to rub herself against me like a cat, “and let’s get the business sorted out before you start your phoney Delilah tactics! You’re not coming on this strike and to show you that I mean what I say I swear to you that I’ll resign from it myself unless you stay under cover until I get back!”

  “I’ll settle for that,” she said promptly, “I’m only interested in getting you clear!”

  “That promise isn’t good enough,” I told her. “You said the same thing and in precisely the same tone of voice when I thought I’d talked you out of coming here in the first place!”

  “Jan,” she said, sitting down beside me, shooting out her legs, turning in her toes and letting her hands rest limply on her lap in an attitude I remembered, “now that I’m with you again I don’t want to take any active part in the business. I only want to be sure that you get off safely and that’s the absolute truth! I tried to get that across to you at home but you shouted me down, so I decided to make a demonstration of loyalty-cum-independence and that’s the reason I’m here! Life just wouldn’t have any meaning without you and if anything did happen I’d want most desperately for it to happen to both of us, within call of one another or better still touching hands. I know you won’t have any patience with this but it has to do with my not being able to give you a son! If I was carrying one for you now, or had any hope that I would be soon, then I should have accepted your decision and stayed on in Sennacharib, waiting and praying for you; as things are I can’t afford to take the least chance of having something final happen to you all that distance away! Do you believe this, Jan? I wish you’d try anyway, I wish that more than anything, except perhaps that we win through in the end and have each other for the rest of our lives!”

  How could I resist that kind of declaration? It was impossible not to believe her, not to worship her for her gallantry and deep, abiding loyalty to the past and future. I took her in my arms as gently as if we had been sitting before our log fire in our home above Teasel Valley. Perry and his wife, Lucille, left us alone until late afternoon and in the evening we went over our escape plans. At dusk I made my way back to the base where I told Simon of Perry’s offer to bring eight well-armed men into the field. Simon’s hatred of the Boche was strong enough to overcome his distrust for the De Gaullists and he sent a message through the grapevine accepting the offer and naming the rendezvous.

  “Eight you say? Okay! Maybe we rub out eight more Bodies!” he grunted. “We do not need their popguns but who am I to refuse more dung for French fields?”

  I was only half listening to him, I was wondering how long it would take Diana’s tarty-looking hair to grow out and whether it would ever regain its lustre.

  Perry, the De Gaullist with whom Diana had returned to France, paid us a courtesy call the following morning and I was thankful that Diana had not taken it upon herself to accompany him. He and Simon took an instant dislike to one another. Perry was a gracious, spirited little man but he talked too much for Simon’s taste and I think the rival groups would have quarrelled on the spot had not Perry’s party brought along a plentiful supply of ammunition and distributed it without political discrimination.

  We all three got down to business and picked a team of twenty men, twelve from Simon’s party, including myself, and the remainder from Perry’s group. It was agreed that the actual ambush should be left to Perry and that Simon’s men should act as covering party on both sides of the track for the repair train would have an escort of some thirty riflemen and at least one machine-gun team. We set up pickets to advise us on the results of the R.A.F attack and others to warn us of the departure of the train from the depot. Perry passed me a personal message from Diana who was based on his shop in the town. He told me that Diana had made arrangements for me to link up with the De Gaullists after the strike and I was to make my way there the moment the attack was over. She promised to have reliable transport waiting to take us both due west to the coast and was arranging hideouts en route as far as Quiberon, where Perry’s local group would do their utmost to get us taken off by submarine.

  I checked once more with the telegraphist but no further orders had arrived from London. This did not surprise me, the lines were grossly overloaded and there was a general air of nervous expectancy among all the Resistance groups. Oddly enough this was not reflected among the Germans. During my previous stay in France, when the prospects of invasion were remote, the enemy had shown far greater tension. The few Germans that I saw in and about this area seemed to be taking things very calmly but there was probably a good reason for this. Information coming in from the north and east pointed to the fact that they were preparing to make every effort to repulse any attempts on the part of the Allies to get ashore in France. I did not know then that the German High Command was convinced that the main attack would fall much further north, and had grouped its defences accordingly. Down here, in the Loire area, they had only second-rate troops and very little armour.

  We took up our ambush position at twenty hundred hours. The day had been overcast, with rain threatening all afternoon, so that twilight did not linger and we were able to make our way to the point of attack in twos and threes, some by bicycle and others on foot, depending upon our several plans for withd
rawal.

  Simon was in excellent spirits. He had his men well in hand and although he carried a flask of spirits himself he sternly forbade drinking among the others. Perry, whom we met in the wood above the track, was rather jittery but the men who accompanied him seemed tough, truculent types, four of them dependable village tradesmen and a fifth a huge blacksmith who carried a long-handled sledge hammer, presumably to use upon those parts of the repair train missed by our bombs and explosives. We had already set up a field telephone connecting our posts and now there was nothing to do but wait for word to come from the picket keeping watch over the depot. We estimated that the repair train would start out an hour or so after the air strike and would therefore pass our ambush point shortly before daybreak.

  Shortly after midnight we heard the wail of the town air-raid syren, soon relayed by the syrens in outlying districts. At a quarter to one we heard the distant drone of aero-engines and the bark of flak batteries. A goods train clattered through the cutting but we let it pass and when it had gone Perry’s team went to work on the line with his own and my dwarf mines, while Simon posted his men along the lip of the embankment.

  Presently the sky became quiet again and although the alert was still on in the town I decided that the flak battery we had heard must have been firing at bombers passing on their way to a target further east. Then, at about ten minutes to two, the flak started up close at hand and this time the presence of bombers in the immediate area was unmistakable. The growl rose to a steady roar as the Lancasters and Halifaxes made their preliminary bombing runs and suddenly there was an almighty crump as a stick exploded some three or four miles north-west of our wood.

  Tension broke along the line and the men began to exchange comments, to be cursed by Simon into an uneasy silence. Then the raid began in earnest and a dozen or more bombs exploded, culminating in a final one that sent prolonged echoes rumbling in the valley like peals of thunder. I decided that this must be the bomb we had been awaiting for it was clearly a block-buster and I told Simon to check with his patrols. He came back after a brief interval in high glee.

  “The bloody tunnel kaput!” he bellowed, forgetting his own wrathful injunctions for strict silence, “I get the word from Maurice! The bloody bombs they bash the bugger right in, you hear?” and he executed a little jig of triumph that drew a harsh chuckle from the phlegmatic blacksmith standing nearby. I told him that we needed confirmation that news had reached the repair depot and he shot off to the nearest phone picket again. Half-an-hour passed and the sky began to lighten in the east. I waited impatiently, for the men had been promised a night attack that would give them some advantage over machine-gunners.

  It was after three o’clock when one of Simon’s men reported that the locomotive at the depot had steamed up and a few minutes later Simon, breathing confidence and brandy in equal proportions, hurried over to my bush and said that the train had started and was carrying as escort a platoon of infantrymen and two light machine-guns, one on the engine-tender and one on the rear truck.

  “Then we must concentrate on both, ends the minute she goes up,” I told him and we split our covering party, Simon taking charge of the rearward squad and leaving me and my half-dozen to cope with the machine-gun on the tender.

  It was almost daylight when I heard the train clanking up the incline. At that moment the all-clear wailed in the valley below and the men relaxed, relieved that the ordeal of waiting was over. When the train rounded the furthest bend I was surprised not only by its size but by its appearance of strength. An armoured box-car was coupled to the tender and behind this was a string of flat-topped wagons bearing the lifting gear, grabs and tackle, five trucks in all, each with its quartet of steel-helmeted soldiers aboard. At the tail of the train was another armoured box-car, with a searchlight on top of it and a squad of soldiers ringing the light, their rifles at the ready.

  The De Gaullist team allowed the engine and the first two wagons to pass their point of ambush. Then the blacksmith pressed the plunger and we tensed ourselves, expecting to see the crane-bearing wagon rise in the air, dragging forepart and hindpart of the train from the tracks. Nothing like this happened. The charge exploded with the reluctance of a damp rocket, fizzing and coughing with just sufficient power to lift the central wagon from the tracks but not enough to topple it on its side.

  The train did not buckle and disintegrate as we had hoped, it merely shuddered along the whole of its length and ploughed on for a few yards, grinding over the sleepers and coming to an uncertain halt. The entire operation was such an anti-climax that it was almost laughable.

  The interval between the time the blacksmith pressed his charge and the wheels of the locomotive stopped revolving was about seven seconds, fortunately too brief for the escorting troops to understand what had occurred. At the end of that period I detonated the smaller, subsidiary charge, located towards the rear of the train between the last wagon and the searchlight car and this was far more effective than its predecessor. With a blinding flash the fifth wagon heaved itself up and partially disintegrated, hurling the load twenty feet in the air and upending the searchlight car so that it stood balanced on its forward coupling looking like a squat, smoking tower. The coupling links of the fourth and fifth cars snapped under the strain but the two cars behind the crane did not even leave the rails. The shock, however, was sufficiently violent to spew most of the soldiers into the cutting where some of them, shaken but otherwise unhurt, scrambled up and ran in all directions.

  For a minute or so we had it all our way. The machine-gun in the hindmost box-car was out of action and the twenty or so men flung from the wagon were too dazed and shaken to offer much resistance. Firing broke out on both sides of the line and half-a-dozen Germans dropped as they scurried round the wreckage or ran directly against the muzzles of the saboteurs. One man, helmetless and half-crazy with terror, ran up the embankment straight at me. I shot him twice with my Colt, the second man I had killed. I hit him first in the cheek and then in the stomach. He ran on to within three yards of me and then went down on his knees staring at me stupidly and making vague protests with his hands.

  Then, and with deadly precision, the machine-gun in the forward section of the train opened fire on my side of the line. A stream of bullets whipped into the foliage and three of my party were hit, one of them the blacksmith, who pitched forward and rolled head over heels down the embankment. I heard Simon’s whoop from lower down the train and in one more minute the battle was fully joined, the forward machine-gun pumping bullets into our part of the woods and effectively pinning us down with our faces pressed into the earth.

  As I crouched there a bullet whipped the length of my back and broke the skin of my behind but I did not know this until later for I felt no pain and only realised that I had been hit when I made a dash to get into better cover. Then my half-severed belt snapped, dropping away and depriving me of my spare ammunition pouches. As I ran I had to leap over three bodies and fire from the rallied troops on the far side of the line was now whacking into the branches about my head.

  By this time Simon had launched his attack, jumping down on to the line and roaring like a bull as he hurled hand-grenades at the knots of men who had scrambled up the far bank. He seemed to have forgotten all about his precious sub-machine gun but was obviously enjoying himself. It was not until he was across the line, and preparing to rush the bank, that he unslung his gun and raked the bushes in which the fugitives had taken refuge. We had posted a small party on this side but either they had fled or been accounted for by riflemen taking cover under the derailed wagon. The party of Germans on the bank faced front and fought like demons, holding on to the escarpment to the last man but Simon’s dash won the day. There was a wild outcry of yells and then all the escort troops at his end of the train were shot down.

  While this little battle was being fought I rallied four or five men behind the upended searchlight car and was on the point of advancing against the forward machine gun when sud
denly I realised that it had ceased firing and that its team, together with half-a-dozen stragglers, were now beating a retreat into open country up the line.

  There was no time to pursue them. Our job was to wreck the train and after posting flank guards on both sides of the track we placed charges under each of the wagons. In ten minutes or so it was done and all four of the trucks went up, Simon himself attending to the locomotive and tender.

  It was now broad daylight and the battlefield was a shambles. The reek of cordite set everyone coughing and the little cutting was blocked with splintered wagons and twisted machinery. The crane, buckled in the centre, lay like a footbridge between the embankments and down at the front of the train wounded men were screaming behind a thick pall of smoke. We could do nothing for them and did not even turn aside to discover whether they were German or French. Simon made a hasty count of the German dead within the immediate area and told me that we had killed fourteen, not counting the wounded, two of whom were still lying beside the track. Just then the flank guards came in with three prisoners, the eldest of them not more than twenty. They stood in a row with their hands raised and Simon shot them down almost absentmindedly. Of our party, eight were dead and we had three wounded. Among the dead was Perry, the De Gaullist agent, shot between the eyes during the rush down the bank and now lying beside the upended truck, his automatic still in his hand.

  “Now we vamoose, bloody quick!” grunted Simon, snatching up German rifles and hitching them to his shoulder. “You, Roger!” he bawled to a guide, who was trying to staunch the flow of blood from the thigh of a man on the track, “Don’t you play bloody nursemaid to Baptiste! Collect all the guns lying around! Take them back to the hut and bury the bloody things! This is bloody war, ain’t it?”