‘And quite well, from the look of things. We have heard some unpleasant stories about those camps. It is a great relief to know that they aren’t true.’
She gazed at him. ‘They are true, Fergus.’
‘But...’
‘There, too, was constant humiliation. I do not speak of being shaved, every hair removed from my body — to prevent my infestation with lice, you understand. Or beaten at the whim of any guard. But a woman who is young, and reasonably good-looking, is treated better than the rest. Because she is a woman, and the Gestapo are also men.’
Now her eyes seemed to be impaling him. ‘My God!’ he muttered. Then she had been raped by a hundred men. No, a thousand.
‘For two years I had nothing to do but sun myself, eat, and lie on my back,’ Monique said, her voice toneless. ‘And then...it seems they arrested someone here in Caen, only a few days ago, and he mentioned my name. So they brought me back here to confront this man. I think they were going to shoot us both. But then the bombers came, and I think they forgot about the prisoners. We were left alone, until the British broke in.’
‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘Monique...when you leave here, where will you go? I mean, obviously you will have to spend some time in hospital, until you are quite well again. And then, if I confirm your story, you will technically still be in my father’s employ...’
‘They cannot send me into German territory again. They cannot.’
‘They will not. But they will wish to know all that you have suffered, people you have met, names and places...’
‘I will tell them that. But I will not work for them again. Not even for your father, Fergus.’
‘I understand that. And when they have questioned you, they will probably give you extended leave of absence until you can be discharged.’ He smiled at her. ‘They also owe you two years’ salary. There will be quite a lot of money, waiting for you, in London. Have you any money?’
‘I haven’t needed money, for two years.’
He had hoped for a responding smile. ‘Well, you won’t have to worry about that,’ he said. ‘But afterwards...when they give you your leave...are your parents still in Cairo?’
‘I do not know. I presume so.’
‘I will try to find out, and then arrange for you to go there.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not want to go to my parents.’
‘Ah. Well...’ he took a long breath. ‘Would you like to go to my home, in England?’
‘Why should I go there?’
‘Well...you would be safe there, and you could regain your health there. My mother would be delighted to look after you. And then, when the fighting is finished, I...well...’ her eyes were like steel shutters, trying to block the flow of words. Because she knew that he did not know if they would be true: she had spent two years in a Gestapo brothel.
‘You are very kind,’ she said. ‘But if I start to accept pity, I will have no more life. Besides, why should you be kind to me, and not all of the others?’
‘It is not pity,’ Fergus said. ‘Or even kindness. I...’ once again he was looking into her eyes.
‘You do not believe what I have told you,’ she said.
‘I do. Of course I do.’
‘Then you do not understand it. I have been a whore, Fergus. For the Gestapo.’
‘Yes, I understand that. But...’
‘But you do not care!’ Suddenly her voice gained strength. ‘At this moment, you do not care. You remember how once we had a good time together, and you think such a time will come again. It can never come again,’ she shouted. ‘Never! If any man ever touches me again I will scratch out his eyes.’
‘Are you all right, sir?’ Lamming called through the peephole.
‘Go away, Captain, there’s a good fellow,’ Fergus said.
Monique’s shoulders sagged, and her voice dropped. ‘I am sorry. You were trying to help me. I am sorry.’ She raised her head. ‘I cannot be your mistress, Fergus.’
‘I...ah...I wasn’t actually thinking of that.’
‘I cannot be your wife, either. You must understand that. I cannot be anything, except what I am.’
He stood up. ‘I think you need time. Where will you go?’
‘Are the Germans really defeated?’
‘They are in the process of being defeated. They are certainly being driven out of France.’
‘Then I will go to Paris. When it is liberated.’
‘Paris?’
‘I have friends there. I even own an apartment. My husband and I lived in Paris before the war.’ Almost she smiled. ‘We were married in Paris.’
‘You had friends there, Monique. You had an apartment. Do you think you will still find them, after four years.’
‘I will find something.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If, when I have the opportunity, I were to come to Paris, would you care to see me?’
‘You have been very kind,’ she said.
‘Then will you give me the address?’ He took his notebook and pencil from his breast pocket, held it out.
She hesitated, then took it and wrote the address, handed the book back.
‘Then I will say au revoir, instead of goodbye,’ Fergus said.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Au revoir.’
*
Fergus wasn’t sure whether he wanted to burst into song or not. She was alive, and he had found her. She had been hurt, and misused, thus she was bitter. But surely she would get over that. And he would find her again. Even if the Paris apartment had been destroyed, he would find her again. And love her again? He did not think he had stopped doing that, from the moment of their first meeting. No matter how many men she had been forced to service.
But before he could do that, it was necessary to win the war. He wrote out a full statement of what Monique had told him for Captain Lamming, requested her immediate transfer to hospital for a thorough checkup before she was released, and then rejoined the regiment.
At the end of July the Americans broke through the German defences in front of Avranches, and sweeping east and south on a broad front were in Rennes in Brittany on 3 August. Two days later the British, also moving east, recaptured Vilars-Bocage, from which their advanced units had been driven before the battle for Caen. By now Eisenhower had arrived in Normandy, and had taken over supreme command of the Allied forces, with the result that Montgomery’s strategic plan was immediately jettisoned. Instead of a direct thrust to Paris, leaving the German armies south of the Seine cut off and helpless, followed by a drive on a narrow front for the Rhine, the Supreme Commander elected to advance on a broad front right across France. That this decision chose to ignore any logistical problems seemed obvious to every soldier, but Eisenhower would have his way; the two American armies were removed from Montgomery’s command and made into a single Army Group Twelve, under the orders of General Bradley.
Of course the Germans could not hope to stop such an immense force as was now advancing on them, but they, and the inevitable waits for the arrival of sufficient fuel to enable the tanks and trucks to continue moving, could certainly. delay it. Thus the day following the capture of Villars-Bocage the panzers launched a counter-attack on the First Canadian Army outside Caen. The regiment was called to action, but long before they reached the scene the Germans had been blasted by rocket-firing Typhoons, and the panzers had melted away. Meanwhile the Americans, sweeping through Brittany and thence to the south, had taken Brest and Lorient and St Nazaire, famous names —but places which were bound to fall anyway, while in the East the Russians were already at the Vistula, although they were delaying crossing the river while the Polish Home Army fought it out with the Germans in Warsaw.
This looming situation, with the probability that, at the present rate and direction of the two advances, the Russians could be at the Rhine from the East, having ‘liberated’ all of Europe east of Switzerland while the Allies were still messing about in France, appeared to worry the British commanders and pol
iticians far more than it did the Americans. Eisenhower and his chief, Roosevelt, regarded the Russians as their most powerful allies in the fight against Hitler, and were concerned solely with killing and capturing every German soldier they could discover; post-war arrangements would be taken care of by the United Nations Organization, in an atmosphere of fellowship and good will. The British, with their vastly greater experience of European history and politics, knew that where the Russian armies penetrated, they would carry their political commissars with them and they would take care that only those prepared to obey orders from Moscow would survive to form post-war governments, as indeed they were blatantly doing in Poland, as they sat across the river and watched the Home Army, which was violently anti-Communist, being systematically liquidated by the German troops, while doing absolutely nothing to help them — they would not even let the Allies use Russian-held airfields as staging posts to fly in supplies to the beleaguered Poles. It therefore seemed logical to British minds that wherever possible, the penetration and liberation of occupied countries should be accomplished by Allied troops, or Great Britain could find herself looking across the Channel at a Communist Europe.
The Americans regarded this as merely an aspect of British imperialism, and came close to saying so in public: obviously, they suggested, England was looking forward to dominating the Continent following the defeat of Germany, and was therefore jealous of the looming Russian rival.
Montgomery was not the sort of man to criticize his superiors, at least to his own inferiors, but when he paid a visit to the regiment, which was temporarily bogged down for lack of fuel, Fergus could tell he was deeply concerned, and totally fed-up with events in the south, where the Americans had landed yet another army, the Seventh, on the Riviera, about as far removed from any critical centres of fighting as could be imagined.
Meanwhile the advance continued, slowly. On 17 August the British and Canadians took Falaise while the Americans surged through Dreux, Chartres and Orleans. This left the Germans with no option but to retreat through the Falaise Gap, a narrow salient, in which their crowded forces presented the Allied air forces with the perfect target: the enemy were cut to pieces by repeated sorties. Feeling that their hour had at last arrived, the French Underground now staged a rising in Paris. Unlike what was happening in Warsaw, the Allies were not going to let a massacre happen here, and five days later the capital fell, troops of General de Gaulle’s Free French Army being, appropriately, the first to enter the city.
Now once more Montgomery reiterated his plea to be allowed to launch an all-out drive for the Rhine and North Germany, the objective being to get to Berlin before the Russians — Eisenhower refused. Montgomery’s disappointment was hardly diminished by his being promoted Field Marshal at the beginning of September.
*
The advance plugged on throughout the autumn. The British proved what could be accomplished by smashing through three hundred and sixty kilometres in four days to reach Brussels on the fifth anniversary of the declaration of war, 3 September. Fergus rode in his lead tank through cheering crowds, and drank champagne from the necks of the bottles that were thrust at him and his exhilarated men.
‘Good to be back, eh, sir?’ asked RSM Manly-Smith. ‘When you remember the last time.’
‘Yes,’ Fergus agreed. He remembered the last time only too well, as in the spring of 1940 the British and French armies, suddenly abandoned by their Belgian allies, had fallen back on the coast. How long ago that seemed, and it was only four and a half years. But they had been different men, then. The regiment had been composed almost entirely of veterans who had been in India, the officers as well. Ian had been the adjutant, soon to become colonel, and Bert had been a very youthful corporal. And Dad had, literally, dropped out of the sky as he escaped from Holland, and had taken command in that glorious melée with the German armour.
But then had come the disaster of Dunkirk. And now, out of all those who had once trodden this way, only himself and Bert remained, at least still wearing this uniform. Two men, bound together by a link stronger even than comradeship, even if they were not both aware of it. But Annaliese’s time must be very close, now. He would have to tell Bert the true situation then. Arid now, with Monique so strangely returned into his life, he did not think he would find any difficulty in doing that.
And if there were only two veterans of Dunkirk, he yet commanded a regiment of veterans, who had fought their way right across France. That was a thought to make the heart swell.
*
There was no time to stop and enjoy the pleasures of Brussels, for the Germans were in full retreat and the drive was ordered to continue. Antwerp was reached the next day, and they entered eastern Holland — the islands and river mouths being by-passed for the time being owing to the danger of the armour becoming hogged down as the Germans opened the dykes — to continue their dash for the Rhine. Thus it was the Americans who first crossed the German border, just north of Trier.
The passage of the Rhine now began to occupy the thoughts of every commander, especially as the many mouths of that great river had each to be negotiated, and the enemy defence was clearly hardening up. Montgomery’s dream remained that gallop across the North German plain, before winter set in, arid with this in mind he planned to force the Rhine in Holland, inside of the Dutch water defences, but outside of the Fatherland itself. The key question was how to cross the river in strength; obviously the Germans were not going to leave any bridges intact when the Allies got too close. A plan was therefore formed to seize three of them by a coup de main carried out by the First Allied Airborne Army, which was to be dropped in the Arnhem-Nijmegen area, seize the vital bridges, and hold on there until the main armies could come to them. It was a bold concept, and had it worked, the idea of a drive across North Germany might also have come off, despite all. Unfortunately, unknown to the planners, the Germans had a panzer division in the area, recuperating, and this, and reinforcements, were hurled into the battle. Resistance stiffened in front of Arnhem, and the Allies were unable to penetrate and link up with the paratroopers. After a week of bloody and bitter fighting, the remnants of the Airborne Army were pulled out; some seven thousand men of the British division did not come back.
The push for the Rhine continued for some weeks. The main part was taken by the Americans besieging Aachen, for which the Germans fought with the utmost tenacity; it did not surrender until 21 October. Meanwhile news had filtered through of Rommel’s death. He had been badly wounded when Allied fighters had strafed his command car in Normandy, and had been recovering at his home in Germany. Now he appeared to have suffered a relapse which he did not survive. It was not until after the war that the true story emerged, that he had been forced to commit suicide because of his implication in the Hitler assassination plot during the summer.
Fergus was far more interested in the news, received the day Aachen fell, that in Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans had linked up with the advancing Russians and had captured Belgrade. He had heard nothing of his father now for some time, did not even know if he was still alive — but Father would always survive. And now, it seemed, he had triumphed again.
*
With the Germans still fighting with the utmost desperation on the west bank of the Rhine, determined to keep the Allies from reaching that true boundary of the Fatherland, and the weather now definitely showing signs of breaking, the British were diverted at last into cleaning up Holland. This was really not the country for tanks, and for the regiment it was a matter of waiting and watching, in increasingly unpleasant conditions, as the rain poured down and turned even the best of roads into quagmires.
This was the final straw as regards the concept of reaching the Rhine, galloping across North Germany, and finishing the war by Christmas, and the Allies went into winter quarters, rather as their forefathers had done in previous centuries, in this same part of Europe; it was a salutary thought that the only European war in which fighting had gone on the year round had been
the Great War.
The regiment was encamped just outside the village of Bassenge, actually in Belgium, although equidistant between Liege in the south, and Maastricht, close to the German border, in the north, and only a few miles west of the River Meuse, which formed a boundary between the British and US armies to the south. The vicinity of the two large towns was convenient from the point of view of overnight passes to keep the troopers contented. Here they could only wait for the weather to improve, when the river could perhaps be challenged, and the advance resumed. No one expected this to be a problem, militarily. The Allied advanced units, mainly Americans, had already crossed the river without meeting much German opposition; the retreating enemy had apparently been so demoralized they had not even blown the bridges. Thus once the ground became firm enough for armour the drive for the Rhine could continue.
For Fergus it was also a case of waiting for news from England. This finally arrived in the last week of November, and when he read his mother’s letter, Fergus knew that the moment he had both feared and anticipated for several months could no longer be delayed. He sent for the Sergeant-Major.
Obviously he had to proceed with some caution. ‘You know, Sergeant-Major,’ he said, ‘why don’t you apply for a commission? I’m damned sure you’d get one. I mean, you’re Ralph Manly-Smith’s son, you’re a veteran soldier, you’re a sergeant-major, and you’re only twenty-two years old. You could wind up a brigadier.’
‘Me, sir? I’m happy where I am,’ Bert said.
He was an odd fellow, Fergus thought, not for the first time. It was almost as if he didn’t want to be an officer just because his father had been one.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the decision must be yours, of course. But...you might wish to change your mind. I want to have a chat with you, Bert. This is not about army business, and it is therefore between two men, not between the colonel and the sergeant-major. Take a seat.’
Bert gazed at him for several seconds before obeying. Hastily he took off his beret and rested it on his knee. Certainly he had an idea what was coming: Fergus almost thought he could see his mind racing.
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