by Thomas Wood
As it came closer to earth though, it became more like some sort of comet as it collided with the earth, making the whole ground shake enormously as it did so. The tremors of the ground seemed to grumble on for about a minute as the earth tried to accommodate the burning wreckage.
I raced towards it, not really caring for who I was to bump into, but suddenly being overwhelmed with guilt for the crew and a breath-taking desire to try and get some of them out alive if I possibly could.
I tripped over a series of brambles that took me down better than an international football defender, leaving me with cuts and thorns all over my face and hands. I wiped away the slow trickle of blood that started to fall from my eyebrow, as I leapt over one final small barbed-wire topped fence, ripping my trousers in the process, and stared at the burning wreckage before me.
I stood, staggered for a moment or two, swaying in the midnight darkness that had been rapidly replaced by a replica sun, albeit on a much smaller, more intimate scale. The orange of the flames as they continued to lick and crack in the silence burned my face, but it was a heat that I got used to incredibly quickly, especially as I started to canter my way towards it like an inquisitive horse.
The heat intensified until it felt as though my skin was simply going to give way, but it was then that I thought I saw a figure crawling from the ruins of the Whitley. I knew that I was wrong to believe it, but the figure of Ray was the one that was dragging himself towards me, the one who had plotted my arrival back into France. He had pulled his flying helmet off and, lit up by the brilliant light of the fire, I could see that he had a large gash to the side of his head, which had poured blood right the way over his face. Whoever the figure was, he possessed an incredible amount of perseverance, his legs stained red with the same blood that dripped from his skull, apparently completely paralysed from the waist down by whatever force he had taken to his limbs.
Foolishly and with a renewed vigour, I began calling out to the man, steaming towards him, only for my vision to be enveloped in a blindingly bright orange explosion that robbed me of my gift of sight.
For the third time in the space of twenty-four hours, I felt like I was in freefall, experiencing what it would be like to have jumped out of a plane without a parachute altogether. My fall was savagely broken by the concrete-like ground of the field and I felt as if all my insides were barbarically given a good shaking, while my head connected with the ground like a cricket ball to a bat. At which point I blacked out.
As I slowly came round, I could tell that I was still near the wreckage; the heat like a summer’s midday sun still burning into my cheeks and the huge orangey hues still managing to penetrate my eyelids. But now, I could hear voices all around me, multiple voices.
I kept my eyes clamped shut for a few moments more, as I tried to determine which nationality they belonged to and so, if I was about to have a bullet popped between my eyes, I wouldn’t have to watch it coming.
The noises that I could make out were airy and guttural and they spoke in such a way that it seemed almost rhythmic, softly but urgently whispering to one another about the body that they had in their possession.
As my ears slowly caught up with the rest of my senses, I realised that they were most definitely French voices. I couldn’t quite work out what they were saying exactly, but I was certain that these people would be friendlies.
I went to open my eyes but, as I made the first flutterings to do so, I felt a pair of hands grip me under my armpits, and begin dragging me, away from the fire as I soon felt the coolness of the night begin to attack my cheeks with as much vigour as the flames had done. I was pulled along the ground for a few metres, collecting all sorts of memorabilia on the heels of my boots until a second pair of hands joined in, grabbing me at my ankles and beginning to move much quicker than I had done before.
I made a conscious effort to keep my eyes shut, fighting the natural instinct to look around and find out what was happening. I decided that my life was, quite literally, in these people’s hands and if they had been willing to risk their own lives by getting incredibly close to the downed bomber, then I must trust them in their attempt to save mine.
The voices suddenly stopped, and they turned to grunts as I was pulled vertically upwards for a few moments, until I was dragged across what must have been a wooden flooring of some sort. I heard a pair of boots thudding down what could only have been a ladder, while my boots scraped along the floor and onto a bed of hay or something similar. From the smell of the place, I was on a farm of some sort and I took a pretty good guess at where I was right now.
I was in a barn of some description, up in the loft where they kept all the hay for the time being and they were preparing to hide me in amongst it all, for however long it would take for all of this to die down.
Almost immediately after I came to a stop, my arms thumped back down at my side and a cool, damp cloth began to drag itself across my forehead, trying to mop up some of the blood that was still gushing from my eyebrow.
I must have taken a piece of debris from the wreckage into my cheek too as it started to feel like I was being marked with a branding iron, as my invisible carer began dabbing on the side of my face. Unable to take the pain any longer, I winced, throwing my eyes wide open as I did so.
I took the young child by surprise, who suddenly leapt over to the other side of the loft, picking up a small kitchen knife and shakily waving it in my direction.
“It is okay,” I said, soothingly in my clearest and most carefully thought out French that I had ever spoken, “I am a friend. English. I am English.”
He seemed to buy my story immediately, probably grabbing the knife more out of shock than out of any real intention to use the thing.
“What’s your name?” I asked, trying to set the young boy at ease in what must have been his first encounter with an Allied soldier.
“Louis,” he stuttered, still shaking whilst simultaneously putting down the completely unthreatening weapon.
“Louis…” I repeated, trying to think of my next question that would calm him down.
“How long will we be here, Louis? Do you know?”
“Papa is coming back in the morning. He has some friends for you.”
“Good. Good.” I repeated a couple of times, trying to hide the overwhelming excitement that was currently bubbling up in the pit of my stomach. Unless this man was a Nazi informer, it was likely that I would be in the hands of the resistance in the next few hours. I became increasingly buoyant, especially when I had the thought that, if he had been a collaborator with the Germans, why had he gone to such great trouble to drag me from the wreckage and hide me here, with his son?
Surely, if he had left me there, then the very next people that would have appeared at the site of the crash would have been the Germans themselves?
All I would have to do would be to sit and wait to be picked up, a time that I spent revelling in the success of the first part of my operation. I only hoped that the rest of it would continue to go as smoothly as it had done so far.
6
I took another look at my watch. It was four minutes past four in the morning. Exactly two minutes since I had looked at the watch face last. Time was ticking by incredibly slowly, letting me grow more and more nervous with every second that flicked by.
Why were they leaving it so long? It would soon be dawn which meant that the Germans would be swarming the area, attempting a clean-up operation of the downed bomber from the night before. I realised that if none of the crew had got out, then I would have been relatively safe as no one would be alive to disown me. But if just one of them had managed to crawl away, or if the resistance had got that figure out, or even if someone had bailed out while it was still airborne, then I could be in quite a bit of trouble.
The barn would have been the first place for a search party to look through upon realising that someone was missing. It was the only shelter in the midst of all the fields and was the most obvious place for
an airman to hide up until morning, particularly if he was injured.
The longer the resistance left me sitting in this barn with this young boy, who was no older than twelve or thirteen, the more they ran the risk of us both being found, whereupon the child, would almost certainly be executed. The SS had no minimum age limit on who was lined up in front of a wall and shot.
For all I knew, I would be killed too, for forcing a child to assist by hiding me in the barn.
What was taking so long?
I began to hear footsteps as they scuffled their way along the floor of the barn, kicking hay in all sorts of directions as they did so. I looked at my watch again. Five minutes past four in the morning. I risked pulling my torso over the top half of the barn loft, and saw a man pacing round below the ladder for a moment, before gripping it and making his way up.
“Louis, wait here until dawn. Then make your way home. Mama will be waiting for you.”
Louis acknowledged his father, as he tucked his legs up under his chin and rested his head on them in a moment of contemplation. I suddenly felt sorry for the young boy as it dawned on me that he hadn’t wanted any of this. He was too young to understand the gravity of the situation, especially when he had flippantly waved his knife at me in the most childlike fashion possible. It was unfair on him to be put in a situation such as this, and I suddenly felt very angry with his father for doing so.
I could kill a man and, with my developed, adult brain, could reason as to why I had done it, why I thought it necessary to end someone else’s life. But, as a child, his reasoning thought processes wouldn’t have developed properly and so, if he had plunged that knife into me the night before, or anyone else for that matter, then he would have years ahead of him, spent in an excruciating depression as he tried to recall just why he had stabbed that man in the barn. And why did his memories seem to think that he was a British airman? Surely, they were on the same side?
After what felt like an eternity, his father seemed to reluctantly turn to me to direct some attention my way.
“I suppose you have been introduced to my son. My name is Louis also, I am here to help you.”
He held out his hand, which I duly took, forgiving him altogether for what I had deemed to be severe parental misconduct in allowing his son to become involved in resistance activities. But, this war was doing funny things to people, I eventually reasoned.
“Andrew,” I replied as he gripped my hand with his free one, “Andrew Lambert.”
“I am afraid that most of your crew are still in the wreckage, Monsieur Lambert.”
“Most?” I said, picking up on his slight discrepancy in his speech, for a moment wondering if it was my poor translation skills that had caused the confusion.
“Yes…” he said with a melancholic tone, “one man was still alive, we dragged him out. But he was far too wounded and we had to leave him for the Germans. They would have taken him to the nearby hospital to care for him.”
If it was Ray that was now lying in a German hospital bed, I hoped that he would forgive me for not pulling him out of the wreckage myself, and for getting the rest of his crew killed in the process.
“We must leave now,” Louis Senior said, looking across at his son who still had his head in between his knees, “you have some people that want to talk to you. I am afraid that it will not be easy.”
I wondered if he meant that the journey to wherever we were going would not be easy, or whether the chat I was due to have with his friends would be the troublesome part. But I became concerned by the relative ease of which we were able to walk through the fields and various village roads, before we turned up the garden path of a small house.
I was expecting the walk to the house to be littered with German checkpoints, all scrutinising people’s passes, especially as an enemy bomber had gone down in the near vicinity overnight. But, it seemed that all the Germans were either at the crash site already, or were all still tucked up in bed, as we didn’t see a single soul on our gentle stroll to the house.
Louis showed me into the house, walking straight into what must have been the living room, but it was hard to tell because of the sheer number of bodies that were crammed in there. They all turned to stare as I walked in, one by one putting out their cigarettes or putting down the books they had been reading. Not one of them looked particularly happy.
“Would you like something to drink?” Louis said, apparently the only friendly one in the room.
“Yes, please.” I replied, looking at him directly in the eyes and trying to ignore all the burning glares that I was currently receiving.
He returned with a large glass of milk that I made short work of, throwing it down my neck and passing it back to Louis, who scurried away to swiftly refill it.
“Please,” he said upon handing me the refilled glass, “this way, follow me.” He led the way, his arm outstretched for the entire movement from the living room and into the kitchen. Tapping the back of one of the chairs, he beckoned for me to sit down in it, and a few of the faces that had stared at me a moment ago, slowly filtered into the room and stood on the opposite side of the table, watching me nurse my dwindling glass of milk.
I felt isolated, vulnerable when Louis scuttled from the room, pulling the door in tight behind him, until it was just me and the three men on the other side of the table, who looked more prepared to kill me than Louis junior had done with his shaking knife.
“Who are you?” The shortest one of the three asked, breaking the uneasy silence. He was an older gentleman, with almost vague facial features, as if his bottom lip moulded into his chin and his chin into his neck. His eyes were bland and quite unremarkable, the kind of man who would be almost impossible to describe to police if you saw him commit a crime. He was completely average.
“Flight Sergeant Andrew Lambert.” I replied, trying to sound as courteous and respectful as possible, for fear of antagonising them in some way. When the silence indicated that they were none too happy with my inadequate response, I added my serial number on the end, “656031. Navigator with number 78 Squadron, Royal Air Force.”
They seemed slightly happier with my latest response, I got some sense of acknowledgement anyway, as each of them looked at one another, silently debating whether they thought I was spouting the truth or not.
Then, finally, the tallest of the three spoke, with a voice so soft it could have been my mother’s own, which could not have been more mismatched to his rugby player type frame.
“How did you get out alive?”
It was the simplest of questions, but one that was so unexpected that it nearly knocked me from the chair that I was perched on. I hadn’t prepared an answer for it at all, no explanation as to how I made it out relatively unscathed, while everyone else was being burnt to a cinder in the wreckage, bar one man who was now the German’s guinea pig for all of their medical experiments no doubt.
I didn’t know how to answer, I had nothing going through my mind. I had drawn a complete blank. I had to say something though, as the three of them continued to stare at me, expecting an answer.
“I-I honestly don’t know,” I tried to sound as pathetic and childlike as I possibly could, hoping that they would offer me a slight hint of sympathy, which I didn’t get.
“You don’t seem to be too upset about the rest of your friends. They are all dead.”
Again, I found myself rebuking the way in which I had prepared, they were all reasonable questions that anyone could have guessed would have been asked and yet I had spent my time wondering how my parents were or where Cécile was, when I should have been more focused on the job that I had been sent to do.
As I went to utter an explanation as to why I was not in a state of mourning, Average Man didn’t give me the chance to speak, as he suddenly exploded into a tirade of abuse, opting to switch between French and English, causing me a whole host of problems, as I flicked between translating his native tongue and trying to decipher his very bad attempts at my national
dialect.
“Why us?! Why are you bombing us?! Don’t you think we’ve already put up with enough?! We should be in an armistice, not having our so-called Allies blowing us up!” He finished his flurry of aggression with a solid fist into the surface of the table, making one end of it rise up like a see-saw. The crockery laid out on the table hopped about a foot into the air, as if it was petrified of the man’s anger.
He turned away from me and leant on the worktop on the other side, bowing his head as if he was in the middle of a prayer.
“Forgive him,” the tall man said as the third, as yet silent man, turned to comfort his compatriot, “his wife was killed last week by a British bomb. He is still grieving.”
“He is right though,” spoke the silent man, finally, “it does not make sense for you to be bombing us in this way. You are supposed to be helping us.”
I bit my tongue hard as I attempted to explain that we were trying to help them. The bombs were falling to stop the Germans from getting their hands on precious materials or valuable factories, so that one day we would be able to liberate their land on their behalf.
I needed to distract them from their current trains of thought, which coincided neatly with the increasing burning sensation that refused to shake itself from my cheek. The blood had clotted nicely, and a crispy, flaky layer had formed brittlely on the side of my face, which instantly disintegrated the moment I touched it. Blood began gushing from the wound once again, sending the rest of my face into a bright red flush as I gave the hole even more liquid to drain out of me.
“Would somebody be able to take a look at this for me? A bandage maybe?” They stared at me blankly for a few minutes more, as if they would have been quite happy to watch me bleed out all over their floor.
“Please,” I begged, hoping to come across as submissive as possible. I wanted these men to feel like they were the ones in control, that they were my superiors and that I wanted no trouble other than that associated with getting my sorry self back to Britain.