The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  If they were challenged in the daylight—as they probably would be—Jeno and Fontes would bluff that Arthur, Cleaver, and the rest of the passengers were informers leading them to suspected safe houses near the border. If the bluff failed, the three Morhange men would have to try to shoot their way out of it. Arthur would not hesitate to use his pistol against the Germans.

  In the “evasion classes” in which he had learned what measures to take while attempting to escape the Nazis, Arthur and the others had been instructed that if they were captured in civilian clothes, they were to identify themselves as Allied airmen and invoke the Geneva Convention for treatment of POWs. They were strongly warned, however, that if the Gestapo seized them in civilian clothes and they were holding or concealing a gun, they would probably be executed on the spot.

  As Arthur lay beneath an oily, rancid wool blanket that made every exposed part of his hands and neck itch, he reflected on those classes and the warning about a gun. No matter what, he decided, he would hang on to the pistol. If things went bad tomorrow, the Germans would probably kill them all anyway, and if that were to happen, he intended to take as many Nazis with him as he could.

  Alongside him, Cleaver did not say a word that night, lost in his own thoughts, shifting his position against the stone wall and atop the dirt floor from time to time. The Frenchman and the four guides were propped against the wall, a few of them snoring. The two Belgians whispered and muttered to each other all night, one of them a sallow-looking man with an almost feral face, the other a thin man whose unkempt, gaunt appearance testified that he had been through some grim ordeal.

  Arthur was tempted to tell both of them to shut up or even smack the one with the pallid face, but finally ignored them.

  A loud engine and grinding gears alarmed everyone in the cellar around 4:30 a.m. The Belgians began shouting, and this time Arthur hissed at them to shut their mouths. In French, one of the guides growled the same at the pair.

  Arthur waited for the crunch of hobnailed Nazi boots outside and the sound of the bulkhead doors being pried open. The doors did in fact open, but all that came down the steps of the cellar was Taillandier’s voice, telling them to come outside quickly and to leave any baggage in the cellar.

  Arthur sprinted for the stairs with only his coat, his identification papers, and his pistol. Cleaver was right behind him, his presence a reassuring one. As the men spilled from the cellar, Taillandier pointed to a large, mud-stained, open-backed truck with wooden posts and rails on each side. They ran to the back and climbed into it. One of the guides took the wheel, next to Fontes and Jeno. Taillandier sprang into the back and sat next to Arthur against the rails. On his other side was Cleaver.

  The truck lumbered into motion, a dark, oily puff of smoke rising from the engine, and clattered off down a rough dirt road whose every bump sent the men in the back banging against each other. They were scarcely a few minutes on their way toward the foothills when one of the guides, a short, square-shouldered man whose weather-burnished face made it impossible to tell if he was thirty or sixty, asked Taillandier something in French. In an almost annoyed tone, Taillandier replied.

  Whatever he said caused the two Belgians to erupt in a torrent of words, pointing at the thick, fur-lined boots the guide was wearing and at a satchel he was carrying. The guide had asked Taillandier where the boots, walking sticks, and heavy hiking socks, hats, and sweaters for the escapees were. Taillandier had told him that they should be stockpiled at the safe house in the foothills where they would spend the evening.

  One baleful look from Taillandier silenced the Belgians, but they still whispered back and forth, shooting furtive glances at Taillandier and shaking their heads.

  Arthur glared at the two men.

  As the truck pitched along one dirt and rock-strewn road after another, the route was not directly toward the foothills ahead of them, but appeared to track alongside the mountain range, never turning directly to the peaks. Several times German fighter planes passed high overhead but did not swoop down. The planes were only tracking vehicles or parties on foot if they were moving straight at the foothills, not along them. After several hours, the truck still had not made that turn.

  CHAPTER 22

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  MISERY IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Around 1 p.m. on May 31, the farm truck rattled to a stop some eight hours after setting out to the west of Perpignan. A highway viaduct rose from the rim of a forested valley and toward the craggy foothills of the Pyrénées. Taillandier jumped from the truck’s open bed, and the rest of the men followed.

  The guides took them to a tiny clearing beneath one of the viaduct’s mammoth steel and concrete arches. They were told that they must all wait there till nightfall because German patrols and aircraft scoured the area between the valley and passes through the foothills to the mountains from dawn to dusk.

  As they sipped water from canteens and munched on hard cheese and bread, all they could do was wait for darkness. Throughout the long day, they tensed up every time a fighter plane droned overhead or the road atop the viaduct shook from approaching troop carriers. The guides instructed the escapees to try to rest as much as they could; any hope they had of eluding the Germans hinged upon reaching the foothills under cover of darkness and making it as far as the mountain approach the guides had selected.

  While the weather had been warm in the early afternoon, the air began to change within a few hours. The temperature was dropping close to the mountains. To pass the time before nightfall, the men began to talk in low voices and to swap stories. The guides listened, sometimes chuckling at a joke or anecdote, but the two Belgians said nothing, frowning.

  Arthur, able to follow French conversations enough to get the gist of what was being said, had Cleaver translate anything he had a hard time understanding. When Taillandier and the others turned to Arthur, he relied upon Cleaver’s fluent, finishing-school French to regale the Frenchmen with descriptions of the colorful characters and incidents from his Bronx neighborhood. Street-hardened Andrés and Jeno, who both might have deemed Cleaver a snob before the war, were now mesmerized as he told not only Arthur’s stories, but also described nail-biting flights to aid the Resistance. The Frenchmen’s eyes glinted with respect for the RAF pilot and American airman who had put their lives in jeopardy for the French people.

  Even the reserved Cleaver was captivated by the stories of Taillandier’s daring missions and narrow escapes. On one of Morhange’s most audacious ambushes, Taillandier and a handpicked hit team had donned stolen police uniforms, stopped a three-car Gestapo motorcade several miles outside of Toulouse, and in a flurry of submachine-gun and shotgun fire cut down a notorious SS colonel named Wilhelm Messack, his French mistress, Paulette Bordiet, and several Gestapo agents and collaborators. It was a “message assassination” that made “Ricardo” the most wanted man in Toulouse—but one whose identity remained a mystery to the Nazis.

  One thing in which Taillandier, Fontes, and Jeno all evinced pride was that no Morhange operative captured and tortured by the Gestapo had ever given up their comrades. Several had killed themselves before the Gestapo could break them.

  Left unsaid was that the tough Frenchmen trusted Arthur and Cleaver to uphold the same Morhange credo.

  As night came on and the growls of the Germans fighters’ engines ceased, the guides rose at the same time. Jeno and Fontes walked up to Arthur and Cleaver and embraced them. Without a word, they stepped out of the sheltered clearing when a Citroën pulled up along the adjoining dirt road and flashed its headlights. Fontes, who turned briefly to meet Arthur’s eyes, nod, and flash a tight, approving smile—the first hint of anything except taciturn toughness he had ever shown the airman—got inside with Jeno. They were gone in seconds.

  The guides led Arthur, Taillandier, Cleaver, and the other three men onto a woodland path only wide enough for the men to walk single file. E
ach guide had reached into his knapsack and put on a hat, a sheepskin coat, thick socks, and mountain boots; from those bags, each had pulled out a small carbine and slung it over a shoulder.

  In complete silence except their own breathing and the crunch of their shoes against dirt and leaves, the procession wound higher and higher until the viaduct was far beneath them, a distant sliver in the moonlight. Already Arthur’s lungs were starting to burn; Cleaver was also breathing hard. If these were just the foothills, how bad would the mountains be? Every pilot and airman who had attempted the climb had asked the very same question. All came up with the same answer—a nightmare that could only be worse if the Germans spotted them.

  Pyrénées guides taking men through the passes preferred moonless nights, trusting their own knowledge of every twist, every turn, every fissure along the route. German alpine troops camped throughout the mountains and, when the moon shone, scanned the passes and peaks with binoculars for any sign of men or movement.

  Arthur, Cleaver, and the other escapees were growing more concerned with how ill prepared they were for the climb. They had been whisked in such haste from Toulouse that there had been no time to properly outfit them with warm attire, hiking boots, or even gloves. Although they were still far below the actual mountains, their feet and hands were stinging from the gathering cold and starting to go numb. They kept moving, laboring for each breath the higher they climbed and hoping that the mountain gear and clothing Taillandier had promised would be at the first shelter.

  Taillandier shared their misery, knowing that it was not the guides’ job to provide clothing and footwear for escape parties. That was the task of the Resistance, but with the crackdown in Toulouse, there had been no time.

  Arthur lost all track of time. He just kept one foot moving in front of the other as the group inched up narrow paths stretching ever higher into the foothills. At some point—he was not even sure when—every step was into deepening snow. The air grew colder and thinner.

  Arthur’s hands had gone from a painful throb to complete numbness, and his fingers were swollen and a deep shade of scarlet. Below the snowline, icy groundwater had seeped through his work boots; now ankle-deep snow filled them. One thing did not change, except to intensify: despite the cold, the pain that ripped through his back felt like flames.

  His hatred of the Nazis and a desire for the chance to kill more of them prodded Arthur up the frigid trails. So, too, did loyalty and love for the French who were helping him. Along with all that was his determination to return to Esther and his family.

  The guides did not allow them to halt even once. Canteens filled with water were passed up and down the line from time to time with a warning that each man take only a sip. Gulping it could cause already oxygen-deprived lungs to expand and contract so violently that a climber could suffer a seizure or worse.

  As they trekked through shin-deep snow up paths discernible only to the guides, streaks of gray began to pierce the inky night sky. The guides stopped as the gray tinges turned lighter. Grateful to stand still even for a moment, Arthur and the other hikers spotted a long, gabled farmhouse with an ancient barn just ahead. One of the guides pointed at the structure and headed toward it. The others trudged behind him. They had reached their first safe house just minutes before sunrise.

  Once they were inside the abandoned farmhouse, the guides told the men that they could not light the fireplace for fear of attracting squads of German alpine troops searching for escapees and Resistance members in the passes. Smoke from a vacant old home was a dead giveaway. They could not even dry out their sodden clothes with a fire. Even worse, there were no mountain boots, warm clothes, caps, or any gear except walking sticks.

  All the furniture in the house was long gone, but several thick wool blankets were strewn across the floor. Several of the guides disappeared for a few minutes and returned with armfuls of dry hay from the barn. They laid the piles on the floor. Arthur, Cleaver, Taillandier, the Belgians, and the other Frenchman stripped off their coats, shirts, trousers, and socks. Then they wrapped themselves in the blankets, made makeshift mattresses with the hay, used the remainder to place their clothes atop in the hope that it would absorb some of the wetness, and slumped on the floor on top of their “beds.”

  In French, with Taillandier translating for Arthur, a guide told them that even though the group had traveled as a unit so far, the next day they would split up into pairs, with two men per guide. They would travel by night along trails hopefully not used by the Nazis, and reassemble at the next resting place the following morning. Taillandier nodded at Arthur to let him know that he would travel with him and Cleaver, the only group with three instead of two per guide.

  CHAPTER 23

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  “ONE OF THE WORST DAYS IN MY LIFE”

  When Arthur awoke in the afternoon, every muscle in his body ached. The party rested until just before dusk, and while the guides had no heavy clothing to offer the escapees, they did have several days’ portions of hard biscuits, equally hard cheese, and dried fruit for each man. Though the portions were scanty, they would have to suffice. They were also handed two leather flasks, each one smeared with sheep fat to prevent cracking or freezing in the mountain chill. One flask contained water and could be refilled along the way by simply scooping snow into the opening.

  The second flask held brandy, and they were urged to use it sparingly, only when the cold seemed unbearable. They were warned that drinking any of it before sleeping was a complete waste, as the liquor was meant to be used on the trail.

  Each man was provided with a walking stick for support wherever the trails narrowed and one misstep could send a climber hurtling thousands of feet into a valley or a ravine.

  The route the party was to follow cut from the central Pyrénées to the eastern edge of the range, from the Aran Valley, above which the old farmhouse was perched, to the Col du Somport pass. One of only three major passes across the mountains to Spain, Somport would not have been the guides’ first choice under normal conditions. The easiest route would have been directly across the eastern edge of the chain from Perpignan to Figueres, the closest Spanish town to the border crossing, but the Germans had choked off virtually all chances of escaping that way, forcing the Resistance to attempt escapes on a hazardous course winding eastward from the central Pyrénées.

  If escape parties could have stayed on the pass for the entire journey, their odds would have increased; however, the Germans patrolled the trail day and night with alpine troops who carried skis and long-range sniper rifles. Henschel 126 scout planes, whose narrow wingspan and small fuselage made them ideal for maneuvering through breaks between the peaks, flew less than fifty feet above the trails. Even worse for Arthur and the others, the aircraft were equipped with powerful lights that allowed them to scout the passes in the darkness. The guides would have to rely on their knowledge of little-used paths off the main trail for any hope of getting Arthur, Cleaver, and the rest of the party to safety in eastern Spain.

  As dusk neared, the guides imparted final instructions to their charges. They were not to stop unless ordered to do so by their individual guide. If they had to relieve themselves, they were to find a rock to go behind. No matter where they were in the pass or on a side path, the line had to keep moving. If a man did find a boulder behind which he could urinate or defecate, it was his job to catch up with the rest. The guides warned them not to leave their extremities exposed for too long in the bone-chilling night air.

  Their route was to take them up and down some of the Pyrénées’ highest peaks, some as high as eleven thousand feet. The moment they heard a Henschel scout plane—whose drone sounded like a loud washing-machine, they were told to fling themselves into the deep snow on the trail, behind a boulder, or flatten themselves against a rocky wall.

  The guides knew the likeliest spots where alpine troops encamped along the pass, and t
ried to lead the party along goat paths and hidden routes known only to locals. Some of these paths, the guides warned, were less than two feet wide. The snow would be deep everywhere until they approached the eastern edge of the Pyrénées, and tonight’s passage would pose constant hardship because the northern-facing French slopes of the chain were blanketed by snow deep enough for skiers until late June.

  The last warning from the guides was the most sobering. If they did not reach the next safe house by sunrise, the Germans would undoubtedly spot them in the daylight.

  Shortly after dusk, the first party, that of the two Belgians, set out with two guides. With Jeno and Fontes gone, there was one more guide than was needed. Taillandier, having mulled over the Belgians’ difficult behavior, decided that two guides might be necessary to keep them moving.

  Arthur, Cleaver, and Taillandier went out next, a half hour later, with their guide, a small, compact man named Emil. His movements were quick and sure, inspiring confidence that he knew every inch of the route. Snow was falling heavily, an ominous obstacle in their quest to reach their next stop before daybreak. Their first steps proved slow and difficult. No matter how much Arthur and Cleaver wished that they had boots, gloves, a hat, and a thick coat like Emil, it did not matter. They headed up a trail one behind the other, Emil at the head, Cleaver next, Arthur third, and Taillandier at the rear. The moon lay hidden behind glowering dark skies.

  As the path steepened, an opening a few hundred feet ahead loomed between two jagged peaks. They needed nearly an hour to plod through knee-deep snow to reach the gap, and when they did, a stunningly beautiful and terrifying panorama greeted them. The pass itself, though covered in snow, was wide. At one edge, however, was a “cirque,” a sheer drop of several thousand feet to a tree-lined valley that was framed by a semicircle of near-perpendicular cliffs.