by Bodie Thoene
As the autumn weather cooled, the war against merchant vessels at sea heated up. Not a day passed that a German U-boat did not plow a torpedo or two into some unarmed ship carrying goods to France or England. When the Scottish freighter Coulmore was attacked by a U-boat two hundred miles directly east of Boston, it was a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that moved to its rescue.
Vessels carrying British children to Canada or the United States were sunk with loss of life so tragic that evacuation efforts were “regretfully” suspended by the British government.
In the United States Senate the debate on revising the Neutrality Act droned on. What kind of aid could be offered to the Western Allies? How should materials be paid for? Should the arms embargo be repealed? Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, hero to millions, added his voice to the isolationist position: “I do not want to see American bombers dropping American bombs, which will kill and mutilate European children.” In his view, not even Canadians, let alone Americans, should fight in a European war.
Despite the stature of the critic and the intensity of the debate, planes and supplies ordered before the war flowed north from the U.S. to Canada, where they were loaded onto ships bound for England.
At the same time, a handful of young American airmen also headed to Canada. There, at the loss of their American citizenship, they joined the Royal Air Force. Some joined up in the idealistic tradition of the American Lafayette Escadrille, which had flown for France in the Great War. Others came into the RAF with no other motive than the desire to fly the fastest planes in the world. Within days, each man found himself crossing the North Atlantic and in the middle of a real war.
Today foaming green waves burst over the bow of the SS Duchess of Windsor and poured around the lashings that secured the canvas-covered Hurricane fighter planes to the foredeck. As American flyer David Meyer watched from his perch one deck above, the Duchess rode up the crest of another twenty-foot swell and dropped like an elevator into the trough beyond. Each breaker threatened to tear the aircraft loose from the transport ship and sink them in the North Atlantic long before they ever saw combat.
For all the freezing blasts of air, it was still more pleasant up on deck than below. A week out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the convoy seemed no nearer to England. David knew that the course carried them far to the north to avoid the prowling U-boats, but there were times when it seemed that such a prolonged crossing actually exposed them to greater risk.
The night before, the seas around the Duchesshad seemed empty of all other ships, so it was a surprising sight in the early morning to count two dozen laboring freighters. Ahead of and to either side of the convoy, two circling destroyers cast about like hunting dogs after a scent.
The first night aboard the Duchess, the Canadian and American fliers had been instructed to sleep in their clothing, wearing their life jackets because of the likelihood of U-boat attacks. They had all remained dressed, although none had been able to sleep. On the second day out, David had chanced to ask a sailor about the cargo the Duchess carried in addition to planes and men. When he was told that the holds of the freighter were filled with live ammo, David had grinned, shrugged, and thereafter undressed for bed and slept soundly.
Another enormous wave lifted the bow of the freighter and dropped it again. Forty feet of elevation were gained in three seconds and just as quickly lost. A sheen of ice from the freezing spray coated the railings and the safety lines, turning the decks into skating rinks. The fresh air was a nice change from his cramped quarters, but it was time to go below.
A bright flash south of the Duchess caught David’s eye. A dark red flare rose into the sky from the black outline of a ship about a mile distant. A few seconds later the muffled whoom of a large explosion rolled across the seas. It was as if a giant hand lifted the unlucky freighter from beneath its steel belly while its bow and stern bent and drooped. To David’s horrified view, the stricken ship broke in two. The forward section plunged almost straight down into the frigid water, while the aft piece floated dismally, half on its side, like a broken toy thrown down by a petulant child.
Ahead of their route, a blast of smoke erupted from one of the destroyers, and it heeled sharply into the wind as it circled around. On the Duchess, strident alarm bells began to ring. Under David’s feet the freighter groaned and shuddered at the sudden demand for more speed. Sluggishly, unwillingly, the Duchess altered her course to the north and almost imperceptibly accelerated.
There was only a moment to note the tiny bobbing orange dots that were the life rafts from the torpedoed ship, and then the tragic scene aft was hidden by the intervening swells.
All around the Duchess, other ships of the convoy were steaming northward, their churning wakes evidence of their panicked flight. But like wolves, the rest of the U-boat pack waited across the line of the fleeing ships. The guns of the second destroyer boomed as the knifelike form of a submarine’s bow appeared on the waves ahead. Another freighter exploded with a shattering blast that knocked David’s grip loose from the rail and temporarily deafened him.
Two fleeing ships, both seeking to avoid the path of a torpedo, turned into each other’s course and collided. The arrival of the torpedo tore the bow off of one and left a gaping hole in the side of the other.
Then it was time for the Duchess to receive the attention of the subs. The cries of three lookouts shrilled, “Torpedo in the water! Torpedo on the port quarter!”
David watched with fascinated horror as the Duchess began an agonizingly slow turn toward the torpedo’s path.
“More to port!” a lookout screamed. “Come on, Duchess, move your bloomin’ arse!”
The torpedo streaked into view, a lethal fish seeking to destroy the freighter and her cargo and crew. The Duchess swung sideways, the arc of its turn barely seeming to move.
David braced himself and ducked below the rail, anticipating the hammer blow of the torpedo’s warhead on the far side of the freighter. When a few seconds passed like hours and no explosion ripped through the ship, David cautiously raised his head.
Racing away aft, the torpedo’s trail of bubbles was inscribed on the waves and led back toward the unharmed Duchess like an exclamation point.
Three hours and eighteen course changes later, the freighter made its way back across the stretch of ocean where the original attack had occurred. At a cry from the lookout, the Duchess altered direction one more time to intercept a floating life raft.
Aboard the scrap of safety were four men. Two were freezing and comatose from exposure. The third had bled to death. And the remaining occupant had been blinded in the explosion.
It was that single moment, more than any other, that made David realize he could actually get himself killed in a war that was supposed to be none of his business.
2
The Stinking Garlic
Rusted iron rings were set in the algae-covered bridges of Paris and in the fortified stone of the Seine’s riverbanks. A flotilla of boats and freight barges was moored to the ancient tethers and to one another. There, within the shadow of the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the opulent homes of wealthy Parisians, lived other citizens of the French Republic. Prostitutes, thieves, malcontents, and impoverished artists populated decrepit hulks that were berthed close to the motor yachts of the rich.
Beneath Pont Neuf, between a garbage scow and an ancient tug, was a narrow Dutch péniche that had hauled freight through the canals of Holland for fifty years. No one could remember how or when the barge had mysteriously appeared on the Seine. It seemed to most that she had always been there. Her masts and sails had long since been lowered and tied off to the eighty-foot-long deck. The giant rudder was secured to her starboard side. In those rare times she moved along the river, it was by the power of a gasping diesel engine.
The smoke from the exhaust had nearly covered over the once brightly painted name of some Dutch captain’s favorite lady. Now only the letters AIL remained visible through the grime. In French, AIL meant “garlic.” Thus s
he was known along the Left Bank as the Stinking Garlic. The English interpretation of the word ail also seemed appropriate to the appearance of the craft. The AIL had obviously fallen very sick indeed. The final degradation had come when, during a game of cards, she became home to an infamous Communist clochard by the name of Jardin and his two ragged children. Hardly a day passed without some kind of racket rising from the Stinking Garlic.
Today was no different.
“Jerome! Jerome, I say! Come here at once. You also, Marie. It is time for your lessons.”
“Yes, Papa,” came a small girl’s treble from belowdecks. Six-year-old Marie appeared through the hatch near the helm station.
“Coming,” agreed ten-year-old Jerome as he propped his fishing pole against the stern rail of the AIL and clambered over heaps of discarded rigging to sit on the stump of the mast.
Monsieur Jardin, in cast-off dungarees tied around with a length of rope and a threadbare sweater and black beret, did not look like a famous philosopher. However, neither that small matter nor his alcohol-fuddled brain kept him from thinking highly of his store of accumulated wisdom. Not in the least.
Jardin stretched upward with an elaborate contortion, broke wind loudly, and proclaimed himself ready to begin the day’s lesson. At his feet was a bottle of vinegary red wine which he said had bravado, and which he could get for twenty-five centimes a gallon.
“Now,” he said, waving an instructive finger so dirty that the nail could not be distinguished from the rest, “who remembers the name for the vilest and most flatuous of earthly villains?”
Jerome knew the answer, but he liked to give Marie a chance to go first. It pleased her when she got it right and did no harm to his standing with his father if he was called upon to help out.
“Cuttlefish,” she said with a slight lisp.
Jardin laid his face sideways in the palm of one hand and stared reflectively into the gray Parisian sky. “Almost right,” he allowed. “Jerome?”
“Capitalists,” Jerome corrected.
“Bon! You both have the makings of scholars. But appearances are, as they say, discerning, so we must continue the lesson. Jerome, what is the greatest, most magnanimous fault man can possess?”
Jerome answered at once. “Greed, Papa.”
“Even so. Greed is a source of much triplication in the world. It is a whip hand held over the brow of the poor and downtrodden, never forget.”
After one of these profound statements, Jardin often helped himself to a swig from his bottle. Sometimes the length of the lesson depended on how much self-congratulation went on. Meanwhile the volume of the instruction got louder and louder.
Jardin took a drink and wiped his mouth on his arm through a hole in his sleeve. Then he turned again to Marie. “Here is a tough one for you, ma chèrie. What is another name for the wicked people who want to keep the poor always poor, in order to have them around to fight their wars?”
“Missionaries?”
“Well, that is a very fine answer, Marie. But I was looking for something else,” explained Jardin grandly, taking another swallow of wine.
“Re-act . . . react-something,” Jerome piped up.
Jardin snapped his fingers. “Bravo, Jerome. Reactionaries. Also known as warmongerers. They are so busy looking backward that they cannot see the future when it hits them between the eyes.”
Jerome was still trying to work out this metaphor while his father was already on to the next question. Such inattention was dangerous, to say the least, since a clout on the ear might result.
“ . . . who ever lived?” Jardin was concluding.
Jerome breathed an inward sigh of relief. He not only knew what the question had been, he knew the answer as well. “Stalin,” he said promptly.
Jardin removed his beret with respect at the pronunciation of the Soviet leader’s name. “Leader of the most processive nation on earth,” he proclaimed loudly.
“You mean progressive,” shouted a passerby from the quai. “Or, more truthfully, repressive.”
Jardin gestured angrily in the direction of the speaker and smiled proudly when Jerome and Marie both repeated the same arm movement.
“Papa,” Jerome asked, raising his hand, “on the street they are saying that Monsieur Stalin has made a deal with Hitler. Did you not tell us that Hitler was the archfiend incarcerate?”
Jardin scratched his scraggly beard, then beamed as the proper response came to him. “Monsieur Stalin knows what is best. Perhaps he has converted this Hitler fellow to see the error of his ways.” This last observation made Jardin reflective. There was a slice of sun streaming through the clouds. Just enough for Jardin to sit and warm himself. “Now, that is all the lesson for today, I think.”
“What are we to do for food, Papa?” Marie asked. “We have nothing left in the cupboard.”
“Jerome will go to the usual places . . . as usual . . . and catch something that might fall from the pocket of a capitalist. Or perhaps I will catch a cuttlefish.” Jardin snapped his fingers in silent command for Jerome to fetch the fishing pole. “Now, Marie, go below and finish your chores. Jerome, I need to have a word with you.”
Jerome wondered what sort of trouble he was in, or if the gendarmes had been around asking questions about too many handbags mysteriously disappearing on the boulevard. But this time it was his father who was in trouble.
“Jerome,” Jardin said in a blast of vinegary breath, “I must tell you something in complete competence. The gendarmes are very angry that Hitler and Monsieur Stalin have made up their quarrel. It may be necessary for me to go away for a while, without saying good-bye. You are not to worry, but you must promise to take care of Marie.”
“Of course, Papa.”
Jardin held up his finger to emphasize the importance of his instruction. “Beware the gendarmes and the priests. If ever I am away, you must not let on that I am away and you are still here even though I am not.” He paused for breath and squinted at the water of the Seine. “They would lock you in an orphanage. Think of the disgrace if your sister grew up to be a nun.”
Jerome solemnly shook his head in horror at the image. “I will not let that happen, Papa.”
“My son, I knew I could depend on you.”
American journalist Josephine Marlow was somewhat of a celebrity since her return to Paris. Men of the press corps who had known her before as Danny Marlow’s widow looked at her with new respect since she’d been in Warsaw when it fell to the Nazis.
Then there were others who proclaimed that a woman had no place in the war.
“Stick to human-interest stories!” ordered Frank Blake at the Asociated Press when Josie expressed a desire to interview the French prime minister, Daladier. It had been Daladier who, with British prime minister Chamberlain, had handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler in exchange for the promise of “peace in our time.” She simply wanted to ask the diminutive French politician what his thoughts were on the matter since the fall of Poland.
The Paris AP chief left little doubt that such questions were the domain of the male journalists. As some recognition of her ordeal, however, Josie had been given a raise of five dollars a week and sent out to interview dressmakers about the scarcity of French silk. She took the story an extra lap by tracing the sale of French-made silk to neutral Belgium, which in turn sold it to Nazi Germany to be made into parachutes.
Was it possible that the German Reich intended to return the silk to France one day? The question and the reply were cut from the story. The conclusion was that in the French textile industry, it was business as usual.
This morning Josie finished her work in the gloomy AP office. Most of the masculine staff, resplendent in newly tailored military press uniforms, had headed for another guided tour of the Maginot Line. Alma Dodge, who had traveled with Josie to work in Paris, manned the switchboard and gathered up the tape streaming from the wire.
Josie was just wrapping up a story about the care and feeding of millions of soldiers. T
rue to its national stereotype, the French army had drafted civilian pastry chefs first. This army of bakers, equipped with mobile stone bake ovens, filled the trenches daily with the aroma of fresh-baked French bread. Nothing like it. Josie had toured the mobile kitchens this morning and had come back with ravishing hunger. No doubt this was some sort of new mental warfare against the German troops. The Wehrmacht was, by now, faced with the threat of mass defection unless the German bakers could learn to make French baguettes.
Since an army was only as good as its food supply, Josie presumed that this was meant to be evidence of the superior quality of France’s divisions. It was, as Frank Blake reminded her, clearly a human-interest piece. Such a story would have no difficulty getting through the tribe of French government censors who had taken over an entire floor at the Hotel Continental on Rue de Castiglione.
“I’m taking this to the Continental,” Josie called to Alma as she gathered her coat and handbag. “You want to meet someplace for lunch?”
Alma glanced at the clock. “Café Deux Magots? One?” Then her eyes widened as the door to the AP office swung open and a tall, handsome man entered.
It was the French colonel they had met on their journey to Paris. Dressed as a civilian today in an expensive double-breasted brown suit, he held a brown fedora in his hand as he leaned against the counter and smiled at Josephine.
“Madame Marlow?” he began. “You probably do not remember me. We met—briefly—on the train from Boulogne to Paris some time ago. Colonel Andre Chardon. I need to speak with the AP station chief, Monsieur Frank Blake. Is he in?”
Of course Josie remembered the colonel. The awkward conversation in the dark compartment. The doll in his possession. The volume of Paradise Lost over his face as he slept.
“No, sorry, he’s out. But of course I remember you,” she replied. “I have something of yours. A volume of Milton. I did not have your name or I would have . . .”