“They are gone, M’sieu! They are satisfied that you were either shot or drowned! They are now searching the river banks downstream below the bridge. Tonight we shall bring a doctor to dress your wounds. They are not serious wounds but you lost much blood on the way here!”
I digested this for a moment, scouting for courage to ask him the question that tormented me.
“Where am I? How far from the railway bridge?”
He shrugged. “Four or five kilometres, M’sieu. They would have searched the cottage more thoroughly but they do not suspect me. I have never worked for the Resistance, I have been employed on the maintenance of the bridge ever since the Boche came, you understand?”
His eyes searched out my reaction to this statement and I could see that it cost him a considerable effort to admit to having worked for the Germans for years. Perhaps because of my own misery I was sorry for him.
“I heard that the British and Americans had landed,” I said. “Can you tell me how the invasion is going?”
“They say it is a big success and that the Boches are already on the run.”
“Who says this?”
“The Resistance groups but the German railway police say otherwise. They say Churchill has been thrown into the sea in Normandy!”
“Which do you believe?”
“I believe the Resistance, M’sieu! The Boche is clearly very much frightened and cannot hide his fear!”
I lay quite still for a moment, licking my lips and mustering my entire mental and physical resources like a man preparing to jump from a high wall into darkness.
“Where is the woman agent I left on the island?” I said finally. “Did they kill her?”
He answered me casually, “No M’sieu, they took her alive! She was driven to the Maine in Buzot Vernay and will probably be taken on to Tours, or perhaps to Orleans!”
I tried to sit up and he raised his hand, prohibitively.
“Where is Buzot Vernay? How far from here?”
“Ten kilometres, a small place. A Boche railway unit is based there, not more than a dozen men and some of them older than I am.”
“Was she wounded in the fight?”
“I think not, Henri says not!”
“Who is Henri?”
Suddenly the woman spoke from immediately behind him. I had not noticed that she was still there.
“Henri is a fool who will get us all shot!” she snapped.
The man shrugged again, implying the futility of reasoning with a woman.
“My wife is against it! My good sense is against it also but I think it is now time we did something to protect ourselves! When the British get here we will be denounced, they will shoot all the people who have worked for the Bodies!”
He said this not so much to me as to his wife and I had a conviction that they had discussed this subject often and with plenty of give and take.
The pain in my leg became active again and the spasm made me gasp. When it receded I said, slowly:
“What is it that your wife is against?”
She shouldered him aside and approached the aperture talking directly down at me.
“Henri wishes to organise an attack on the Maine and rescue this woman!” she said, bitterly. “I say that is suicide for all of us! The Germans have guns and bombs and all we have are a few rabbit-guns and some bottles filled with paraffin. The men would be killed and afterwards the Germans would come and shoot all of us on our own hearthstones. In any case it would be useless, the woman will have been moved to Tours by now. She will not even be in Buzot Vernay!”
Somebody whistled from the yard and they left. I tried to ponder their information calmly and usefully. Diana had been taken alive, though how I could not begin to guess. She had then been driven to this place Buzot Vernay, the nearest market town perhaps, and there the Germans would interrogate her pending a report to the nearest military post. She had been captured with arms in her hands and the penalty for this was death, never less. She might be dead now, lying in a shallow grave near the wall under which she had been shot, or she might be hanging from a tree as a warning to other partisans. There were rules in this game we had been playing since she had climbed into the jeep beside me after Alison’s funeral. If you broke one of the rules, like getting caught for instance, you lost your stake, every farthing of it. Sometimes, when the game was absorbing, you forgot this but sooner or later you were sharply, reminded of it and now was such a time. This was total war and there were no qualifying verdicts for the losers. You struck and ran away, as on the occasion when we had killed Rance and Yves, or you struck and got caught and were eliminated from the contest. Diana had known this when she followed me back to France and I too had known it and had accepted it but remembering did not help now. It did nothing at all to sweeten the bitterness of defeat.
I thought back on the final rally in the creek where we had spent our last hours together. She could have made a bid for it and jumped into the punt as it swung out into midstream. We could have plunged into the river together and struggled for the bank but she had rejected this choice and done so deliberately. Instead she had braced herself against the mooring stump and pushed with her foot, giving the sinking punt enough impetus to carry it into the current so that when it did go down I had a chance of evading the searchlight beam. She had done much more than this. She had stood in the open firing at the searchlight, drawing both beam and bursts in order to increase whatever chance I had of getting clear. She had done all this, coolly but instinctively, because this was what she had returned to France to accomplish and all for what? Because she had a crazy notion that this was my due because, in her eyes, she was unable to fulfil herself as a wife.
The harder I sweated out a reconstruction of the final scene the more snugly all the pieces fitted together and the picture that resulted from the assembly was a hideous one, that of a bruised and battered woman hanging from a tree with open wounds fouling her body.
The peasant returned to the chink and pushed his head between the billets.
“Henri has come,” he said briefly, “and the doctor will be here soon. My wife was right, the woman has been taken to Tours! She went there this afternoon by ambulance. You are very lucky, M’sieu, they have abandoned the search of the banks and are now sure you were drowned!”
That was all. Diana had gone to Tours by ambulance and they had stopped looking for me. I was very lucky.
Chapter Thirteen
WRITE IT down they said. That was the thing to do, take pen and paper and write it all down. Start at the beginning and don’t stop until you’ve got it out of your system like tainted food. Then you’ll start living again and only remember the good times.
But there are some times I can’t remember at all, whole days and weeks when a kind of greyness wraps itself round the memory like summer evening mists over Nun’s Head when the only thing that reminds you of the sea is the dolorous clang of the bell-buoy offshore.
It was this way after Diana’s capture. I stayed in the shed until I was moved on to a more permanent hideout and then, when I could get about with a stick, to a series of hideouts in farms, tradesmen’s houses and once a disused brewery. I met a great many people, most of them anxious to impress themselves on my memory, either because they were proud of the risks they were taking or because they regarded me as a form of insurance against a speedy Allied victory. But I do not recall the face or personality of a single one of them. They are like figures in the background of an impressionist painting, suggested by a few strokes of the brush.
I know by the calendar that this lost period lasted almost nine weeks, and that during the latter part of it I took an active part in the upsurge of partisan activity south-west of Paris. I must have proved a morose and rather frightening oddity for here and there, when the fog shreds for a few moments, I can remember hitting out at the enemy like a blinded savage and killing without thought, pity or pleasure. Up to then I had killed but two men, Rance and the young soldier in the railway
cutting. Both killings had robbed me of human dignity and left scars on my spirit that are still capable of producing an ache but this is not true of the men I killed afterwards.
I was sure that Diana was dead or about to die. Every time I thought of her standing before a Gestapo examiner I had the urge to smash and destroy, and sometimes the means to find this release were at hand.
There was the time I had taken part in an attack on a mobile flak battery near Chartres where the guns were successfully halted and blown up with mines. One lorry driver survived, a boy of about nineteen, who pleaded that he was a pressed Hungarian. I shot him through the head whilst the leader of the local Resistance group was interrogating him. A few days later another group-leader came to me with a story that they had captured four S.S. men during a reprisal raid on a farm. The men were tied to trees in the forest of Maintenon and I went there by truck and emptied a magazine into them. I noticed then that my savagery shocked the partisans and that they ceased to contact me or seek my advice, but I could operate without them. There was a Vichy policeman in a village who my hostess said had been an active Fascist before the war, and had been responsible for selecting local hostages in 1942. I did not check her story. I waylaid him on his way home one night and clubbed him to death with a pick-handle.
As I say, these killings left no scars. I can only remember them as one might recall blood-curdling illustrations seen in a book during one’s childhood. I daresay I was partly insane with rage and misery and shame, shame at having left Diana alone on the islet, humiliation at being free and alive when she was dead or under torture in Tours gaol.
Then Raoul found me and shocked me out of this coma. On the seventh of August, the day of the abortive German counter-attack at Mortain, he sought me out to tell me that Diana was not dead and that she was not in Tours but in the Gestapo prison at Le Mans and that the discovery of her identity had saved her life. He said that she was being held as a possible hostage against the surrender of the Nazis in France.
I suppose he expected me to show delight, but my spirit was far too bruised and battered for this. I could only gape at him as he told me all he knew, that the break-up of telegraphic communications during successive waves of air attacks had delayed recognition until her dyed hair grew out and someone inside the prison had recognised her as the woman who had driven a Mercedes into her husband and run away with her English lover. By that time the German hold upon France was tenuous and all prisoners with any claim to importance were being set apart as bargaining counters. They would not kill her, Raoul said, but would almost certainly convey her to Germany when they pulled out or perhaps before. Every day political prisoners were being taken away to places like Dachau and it was generally known that they were guarded by special squads of fanatically loyal S.S. who had orders to kill them en masse if and when orders came from Hitler’s headquarters.
I suppose I should have been relieved to have news that Diana was still alive but in some ways her new status increased the hopelessness of reaching her. Raoul was not much help, not on that occasion, for he was all but breaking under the terrible strain of holding the enthusiasm of the partisans in check. He was now a grey ghost of the trim young man who had enlisted me eighteen months before. His hair was white and his eyes, red-rimmed and permanently narrowed, held in them the expression of a man driven to the edge of physical and mental exhaustion. Notwithstanding this he had compassion for me and said there was a possibility that he might get advance information of a mass transfer of prisoners to the east. If this took place and convoys bypassed Paris, using second-class roads, there was the prospect of a successful ambush. In the meantime, there was nothing either of us could do but wait and maintain contact with his source of information inside the gaol. He parted from me with a stern warning not to spread this news among the local partisans.
“The victory will be too late when it comes,” he said, gloomily, “far too many good men have died already and if the general uprising is premature most of the survivors will follow them. These people would do well to remember what happened in Warsaw recently!”
His visit did not do much to uplift my spirits, but it did help me to get a grip on myself and nurse the small spark of hope he left behind. I stayed inactive in the Chartres area for a few days and was there when the Germans began their retreat over the Seine. When that happened it would have been easy for me to have slipped through to the Allied lines but I did not even think of doing so. If I preserved my own life then I wanted it to be of some use to me, to have turned my back on Diana and left her survival to chance would have increased my self disgust to a point where I should probably put my revolver in my mouth and pull the trigger.
On the night of August the eleventh I, got a message from Raoul asking me to meet him at a rendezvous not far from Rambouillet. I went there at once and found him installed in a disused quarry. Round about him, armed to the teeth, were some thirty or forty partisans and it was clear that a major strike was in preparation. He said that news had arrived that a large convoy of political prisoners was being moved from Le Mans to Germany and travelling through Belgium to Holland via road or rail. Little more was known except that the convoy was unlikely to cross Paris. The capital was now on the point of rising, communications were bad and the German garrison unreliable since the failure of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July. The Germans in charge of the convoy, he was informed, would almost certainly be S.S. who could be relied upon to obey their instructions to the letter. If the convoy came by road arrangements had been made to waylay it not far from its point of departure. If it went by rail the job of attempting to stop it would be taken over by the Belgian partisans, who had already freed one trainload near Malines.
This was the best news I had had in a long time and I felt immensely grateful to Raoul. He smiled thinly at my enthusiasm.
“Ah my friend,” he said, “for you this has become a personal war!”
“It always was,” I told him and offered him some Pernod I had brought along. He shook his head.
“That’s no use to me any more Jan,” he said and slouched off to make contact with his telegraphist lower down the wood.
He returned an hour or so later and had got himself thoroughly in hand. He was no longer tired and dispirited but issued his orders crisply. His lieutenant, a fugitive Jerseyman, followed him about, reiterating his commands and enjoying reflected authority.
“We move at once,” Raoul said, “they are coming by road.” Then, to me, “I am putting you in the charge of Paul to prevent your enthusiasm running away with you! You are concerned only with one inmate of those trucks, my responsibility is spread somewhat wider, you understand?”
He indicated his squat little lieutenant who was encumbered with a home-made bazooka and the man stepped up to me as if I had been a prisoner.
We heard the convoy grinding up from the valley a few minutes before its masked headlights showed in the scrub country at the foot of the escarpment. From our ambush-point it looked like a segmented glow-worm, writhing up the long gradient, and beside it pin-points of light moved to and fro as though marshalling its progress. Word regarding the convoy’s composition reached us by field telephone. There was an armoured car at each end of a string of six lorries, and the pin-points of light were motor cyclists acting as mobile flank guards. Raoul made his plans accordingly. We split up, some twenty men on each side of the road with a forlorn hope to deal with the motor cyclists and bring them to action before they could sweep the road with their light machine-guns.
Raoul took charge of the party on the bank whose orders were to concentrate on the forward armoured car. The Jerseyman and I were in the rearward party, lying on open ground in advance of the bazooka which we hoped to bring into action when Raoul’s group opened fire on the leading car.
We were aware that each lorry would have its complement of guards, armed with automatic weapons but we dared not fire on the lorries without endangering the lives of the prisoners. We could only hope tha
t the detached guards would engage us the moment battle was joined and thus give us a wider field of fire.
We set up no road blocks. Any kind of obstruction would be spotted by the motor cyclists at a distance and give the gunner of the leading car time to sweep the hedges. There was practically no cover here and everything depended upon a swift, overwhelming stroke. That was the reason Raoul had chosen such an unlikely place for an ambush.
I felt almost elated now. Perhaps the nearness of Diana improved my nerve or perhaps the prospect of immediate action gave me a genuine physical release. I knew that some of us were certain to be killed in the returning fire and that as I was attacking from the more open side of the road it was more than likely that I would be among that number but the prospect of dying here on this bare stretch of upland did not depress me. If it happened it would be an atonement for a great deal more than my failure to rescue Diana on the Cher, it would be a kind of grand cancelling-out of all my failures in her respect, the failure to win her in the days long before anyone had ever heard of Nazis and extermination camps. If this was to be the end then it was a fitting climax to everything that had gone before and if she survived and I died then at least I could claim to have caught her up in the last stride and she, being Diana, would credit my account accordingly. This silly, vainglorious thought steadied me as I lay in the coarse grass listening to the steady whine of the approaching convoy and the stutter of the motor cycles. Around me was complete silence but behind each clump of grass men were waiting and sweating with the image of death in their eyes, each perhaps exploring some secret dream such as mine and wondering about the girl who had given it singularity.
Diana Page 68