Despite the frigid temperature, torrents of water called gaves gushed downward from fissures in the cliffs, the noise like that of hundreds of fire hoses turned on at once.
The pass continued upward, the track forcing every man to lean forward with all his weight on his walking stick. The energy expended in climbing just a few feet was harder than any of the physical tests Arthur had endured during pilot training. The freezing air made every breath a torment.
Except for the guide, everyone battled vertigo, the heights so disorienting that the men constantly felt that they were lurching to either side. The mental strain was as bad as the physical. The realization that even one slip or stumble could send you plunging down into ravines or the valley caused hesitation with every step. As Arthur inched along, his fingers and toes on fire, the likelihood of frostbite grew.
Arthur and his companions listened during every step of their route for the unmistakable drone of the Henschel 126 scout plane. With no sense of time, he was not sure if the clatter of the plane’s single engine came an hour or several hours into the trek. As the noise grew louder and the plane’s beacon flashed across the pass, he dove behind a boulder as instructed. The scout plane buzzed no more than fifty feet above them with its light sweeping the trail. The men lay flat in the snow or behind the boulders and waited for the craft to make another pass, with no way of knowing if they had been spotted. If Henschels had not been too lightweight to carry a cumbersome machine gun, Arthur and the others might have already been cut down.
At least ten minutes passed. The plane was apparently not coming back. The guide pushed himself off the trail, brushed the snow off his clothes, and took a step. Suddenly he flung himself back down, and the others, who had just started to climb back to their feet, flopped back into the snow as well. The Henschel swooped back above the trail, the beacon illuminating the pass, and vanished again. The party lay in the snow for a short time, and as soon as the guide stood up again, they followed his lead. Whether or not they had been discovered, they had to move out again immediately. If the German pilot was already radioing their position, their only chance was to reach the safe house before German troops searched the pass in daylight.
They stayed on the pass, having lost at least a half hour because of the scout plane, leaving no time for the guide to escort them to the safe house by circuitous back trails before sunrise.
Fear sent a rush of adrenaline through Arthur and the other men, and while he could not completely ignore the pain in his hands and feet, he kept pushing forward, keeping Cleaver’s back in sight and fighting the impulse to look down at the sheer drops from the pass.
The sky began to lighten. Emil veered from the pass and through a fissure nearly invisible to the naked eye but just wide enough for a man to push through; behind the fissure and shielded by a granite outcrop stood a small stone lean-to known only to local mountain climbers.
They had made it after what Arthur would call “one of the worst days in my life.” 1
They staggered inside the windowless shelter to find the Belgians and their two guides shouting at each other. As the Belgians yelled and pointed fingers at the guide, one of the guides explained to Taillandier that the pair did not want to go on and that if they did want to continue, the guides were demanding more money than the Resistance had agreed upon.
The Belgians declared that they wanted to turn back to hide and wait for warmer weather. Taillandier argued that they were halfway to Spain and that the distance was roughly the same in the cold either way. Still, they were determined to turn back at nightfall the following day.
For a time, Taillandier tried to persuade them to reconsider, warning them that the Gestapo had already begun an unprecedented crackdown on the Resistance and escapees. They were as good as dead if they turned back now, he warned.
The debate stopped for a few minutes as the Frenchman and his guide stumbled into the hut just as the horizon lightened. Then the Belgians went at Taillandier again and utterly refused to continue into Spain.
The Belgians tried to convince the rest of the group to turn back with them, insisting that the journey was suicidal with so many Germans in the mountains and too many dangers posed by the snow and the cold. Although Arthur could commiserate about the cold—his fingers and toes were grotesquely swollen—there was nothing anyone could say to make him turn back. He knew without asking that Cleaver felt the same. From the scornful expression on Taillandier’s face, it was clear that he agreed wholeheartedly with Arthur.
Cleaver wrote: “The Belgians did not want to continue and wanted to turn back. They refused to change their minds. I thought them utter fools. We were closer to freedom, so why go back when we were getting close to Figueres?” 2
Though neutrality in World War II Spain was an ambiguous term, Figueres was the closest major town to the French border, which was roughly twenty-four miles away. It was also a place whose population had fiercely battled Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War and loathed his ties to Hitler. The townspeople sympathized with the Allies and aided the Resistance and Allied escapees.
Arthur, Cleaver, and the Frenchman bluntly declined the offer to head back with the Belgians. Enraged that no one supported them, the two men cursed Taillandier and stepped toward him in an aggressive way. Arthur and Cleaver moved immediately to his side.
As one of the men lunged at Taillandier, Arthur stepped in front of him and drove a hard right hand into his face. The man staggered to his knees, but quickly got back up and swung at Arthur. Arthur blocked the punch with his left arm, stepped closer to the Belgian, and delivered a short and swift right to his stomach. The Belgian gasped and sank to his knees. This time he did not get up, with Arthur standing over him with both fists clenched.
Cleaver had grabbed the other Belgian and pinned his arms.
Whether it was Taillandier’s contemptuous, chilling glare or the obvious intent of the American and Englishman to protect him, the Belgians stopped struggling. Arthur let the man get up off the floor. Cleaver released the other. The Belgians backed away to a corner and sat on the earthen floor against a wall. Two of the guides agreed to take them back down the way they had come.
For Arthur and Cleaver, the choice was simple. They preferred to die attempting to escape than to return to Nazi-infested Toulouse or the countryside.
Later, Emil, through Taillandier, told Arthur and Cleaver that if they were not spotted and if they maintained their nightly pace, they could reach Figueres in a day and a half, two at the most. Of course, that depended on the weather and the “roadblocks” they encountered.
As Arthur lay against a wall and tried to close his eyes, he realized he had not sipped his brandy even once yet. Hoping that the liquor might warm up his hands and feet at least a little, he drank just a tiny shot, reveling in the fiery warmth that slid down his throat and into his growling stomach. For a few welcome minutes, the liquor did seem to help. He sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 24
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PARTING WAYS
Near ten o’clock on the morning of June 1, 1944, Taillandier woke up Arthur and Cleaver with a gentle shake of their shoulders. The only sounds inside the lean-to were the snores and groans of the other men, who were scattered across the floor in deep, weary sleep. Wispy clouds of frost swirled above each man with every breath.
Crouching in front of the American and the Englishman, Taillandier told them in a hushed tone that he would not be accompanying them on the final leg of the journey. He had kept this to himself. Matters in Toulouse required his immediate presence, but he assured them that in Spain, arrangements to receive the “Marcel-Jeno party” had been made. 1
Still, simply reaching Spain did not ensure freedom, Taillandier warned them again. Even though the country was technically neutral, the Fascist regime of General Francisco Franco identified with Hitler’s Germany. Spanish autho
rities not only turned the other way when Gestapo agents kidnapped Allied escapees and took them back to Occupied France, but also aided them directly by arresting airmen and pilots and turning them over to the Nazis.
The “matters” that Taillandier had mentioned had to do with the coming Allied invasion, and he and Morhange were undoubtedly receiving orders from London right up to the eve of what would be the largest amphibious landing in recorded history. Arthur wished that he could be on a B-24 softening up Nazi targets before the strike, and Cleaver likely wanted to be dropping munitions for the Resistance rather than sitting in a freezing hut high in the Pyrénées.
Although Taillandier did not need to do so, he reminded Arthur and Cleaver that they had to watch out for and protect each other not only across the mountains, but also in Spain.
Cleaver, unable to keep his eyes open any longer from exhaustion, clasped Taillandier’s hand. Neither man said anything more. They didn’t have to.
Taillandier moved next to Arthur and leaned back against the wall. Both men craved a cigarette but could not light up out of fear that even the tiniest spark of flame or telltale puff of smoke might reveal their hiding spot.
For an hour or so, Arthur and Taillandier reminisced about their months together, now coming to an end. From Thoulouse, Arthur knew that the Nazis were mounting a savage and desperate manhunt for “Ricardo.” Just one slip of the tongue by anyone associated with Taillandier or a torture-induced confession by someone in Toulouse would mean the end of the Morhange leader. For Taillandier, the safer course would have been escape to Spain with his friends. He never even entertained that thought. He intended to continue his personal reign of terror against the Gestapo and the traitors in Toulouse.
Taillandier uncorked one of his flasks and handed it to Arthur. Arthur took a sip of brandy and returned it to him. Smiling almost imperceptibly, the leader of Morhange nodded and drank. He clutched Arthur’s shoulder for a moment, smiled, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes.
Arthur did the same.
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Arthur was awakened by Cleaver rustling around and gathering his scanty supplies. Despite the endless pain in his back, Arthur was ready to get going.
As he sat up and started to stretch, he suddenly realized that he, Cleaver, and Emil were the only ones left. The other guide had just set out with the French escapee, and Taillandier, the two guides, and the two Belgians had also departed.
Arthur was hit with an array of emotions as he quickly grabbed the knapsack with his remaining food and his flasks. He made sure that his pistol was still in his coat pocket; he wouldn’t have put it past the Belgians to have rifled through his and Cleaver’s belongings.
The only way to truly thank Taillandier was to make it home safe and to make sure Cleaver did the same.
The American and the Englishman started to follow Emil to the thin wooden door. All three men suddenly stood still as the jarring tone of a scout plane’s engine vibrated overhead. The sound ebbed as fast as it had approached, but it served as a warning that they were nowhere near out of danger. Ahead, somewhere across the snow and crags, if their luck held, lay Figueres, the first stop for any hope of escape through Spain.
CHAPTER 25
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A PERILOUS TREK
The guide led Arthur and Cleaver up another steep, snowy trail in the early evening of June 1, 1944, and halted at a gap exposing a path that twisted downward at a dizzying angle. As the three began their descent, the knee-deep snow slowly decreased in height. Within a few hours, it rose barely over their ankles.
Approaching the semicircular peaks of a cirque, the men spied lights along the opposite rim of the yawning chasm beneath the crags. They flattened themselves on the trail and waited, inclining their heads just high enough from the snow to trace the lights. They were flashing in a downward direction and eventually disappeared. The Germans had no qualms about revealing their presence as they searched for Resistance fighters or escapees.
Arthur pushed himself back onto his feet, ignoring the pain in his back, fingers, and toes, and with Emil in the lead and Cleaver in front of him, continued the descent. Another hour or two into the trek, the snow no longer came over their shoe tops and bare patches of earth and rock peeked through the trail.
Emil was piloting Arthur and Cleaver southeast, the granite and limestone peaks of the central Pyrénées giving way to granite walls colored by gneiss, multicolored mineral formations that gave the appearance of stripes on the rocks. The three men were now traversing a wild, barren maze of mountains that were lower elevation than they had seen before. Trudging below the snowline, which started at roughly 8,800 feet above sea level, they welcomed the absence of snow but strained not to slip on the loose little rocks that seemed to be everywhere. Every step downward and eastward brought subtle drops in the icy temperatures.
The men kept walking, sipping water and munching bread and cheese on the move. When they entered a wide-open valley surmounted by another series of peaks that were not as high as the earlier ones the three men had crossed but were still daunting, the trail leveled out. The terrain turned barren except for patches of scrub grass and wizened gray trees. The guide was hiking toward several foothills fronting a peak at the left edge of the valley.
Occasional flashes of lights from the crags above them signaled that the alpine units were patrolling in force that night. Despite this, the guide did not appear too concerned, likely because the Germans were too high up to spot him and his two charges.
No one relished the prospect of traversing such a long, open valley even with the night providing cover, but Emil, pointing at the valley, confirmed that they had no choice.
The sudden drone of a Henschel 126 froze all three men in place. They hurled themselves onto the dirt and sharp little rocks of the path, holding their collective breath, straining not to move at all.
With ample room to operate between the peaks and gaps above the broad valley, the scout plane came in low, the pilot throttling down to a near glide less than a few hundred feet above Arthur and his companions. The Henschel appeared to literally hover above them, its beacon illuminating the ground in all directions around them. The plane banked away a short distance and then turned to pass over them again. Finally it climbed and faded away over the peak toward which the three men were traipsing.
After a few minutes went by without the plane’s return, they resumed the trek. They would know soon enough if they had been spotted. Emil picked up the pace, Arthur and Cleaver’s sore, stiff legs straining to keep up.
White and violet cistus flowers (rock roses) filled the foothills, wild green thyme peeked out from the rocks, and rows of vines stretched up to the edge of the peak. The climb grew steeper.
With the stark granite face of the mountain looming directly above them, Emil suddenly seemed to vanish. On his heels, Arthur and Cleaver followed him into a passage barely wide enough for one man to wriggle through; a ripple of claustrophobia gripped Arthur momentarily. Again, he took several deep breaths. He squeezed through the opening into another, much wider gap.
Across a sheer-walled ravine, a second peak faced the one on which Arthur stood. Similar in height and mass, the two peaks looked identical. Like diminutive, demonic eyes, yellow lights flared along the upper reaches of the opposite crag. More alpine troops had appeared, perhaps alerted by the scout plane that someone was trying to cross the valley.
The hike across the lower elevation of the valley had allowed Arthur and Cleaver to catch their breath despite the appearance of the scout plane. Now, as they climbed higher and higher again, their lungs began to burn in the thinning air. Stretches of snow greeted them the higher they hiked, but nowhere near what they had already experienced. Snowfall in the eastern Pyrénées, which were closer to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean Sea, was less than the rest of the range.
Still, there was enough to make every step treacherous.
Several hundred feet from the summit, Emil turned onto a hiking trail that curled around the northern slope to the southern wall, which faced Spain. The view was breathtaking. At that height, a chain of foothills far below undulated toward a massive plain dotted with vineyards, fields, and trees. The Spanish border lay just beyond where the foothills met the plain.
To Arthur’s and Cleaver’s horror, the horizon was already tinged with gray. Unless Emil was leading them to a cave or another hut, the American and the Englishman had to wonder if they were going to make the final leg of their journey in daylight. Across the ravine, lights still flared on the adjoining slope—and were moving downward, in the same direction as the three men.
Leaning back, using his walking stick as both a support and a brake, Emil began to half step, half slide in the thin blanket of snow. Cleaver and Arthur followed.
The sun began to rise, and still the three men snaked their way down the trail. Perhaps a quarter of the way down the jagged slope, the roar of an engine all too familiar to Arthur and Cleaver pealed from the direction of the adjoining mountain. An Me 109 with tan and white camouflage paint, one of the many German fighter planes that patrolled both the northern and southern passes and trails of the Pyrénées as soon as dawn broke, ripped past the first mountain just a few hundred yards in front of the trio. The pilot raced past them, banked away from the mountains, and bore right back at them for another look.
Emil did not press himself against the rock wall or fling himself facedown onto the path; if they had scattered for cover, the German would have opened up immediately on them. They could only pray that the pilot could not get a close enough look to decide if they were Germans, mountain dwellers, or escapees. Arthur and Cleaver emulated their guide by staying upright, too.
The Lost Airman Page 22