Return to the Field

by Alexander Fullerton

  ‘Let’s have your story.’

  ‘All right. There’s not much of it, though. It was all in signals, Baker Street know everything except for the very end. The two things that matter are the safe-house in Fougères that’s blown – at least, if I could get that news to them now it might save a life or two – and about that shit of an informer. One, some detail so they can pin it on him – he deserves to hang – and two, to have them know it wasn’t any blunder of Alain’s. I’ll start with that…’

  * * *

  The train’s first stop came after about four hours – or three, or five – at a station in a sizeable town which wasn’t identifiable. No name-boards on the platform, and on the signal boxes it had been painted over. Bomb-damage had been visible, apparently, during the approach, but Rosie didn’t see it. Edna thought the place wasn’t big enough to be Reims; she thought earlier that they’d been on a more easterly or south-easterly route than the Reims direction, which would be north of east. Rosie had been dozing when the train was pulling in, only came properly awake when the Belgian woman began shouting and banging on the window to get the attention of soldiers on the platform. They’d swarmed out almost before the train had stopped; it seemed they were travelling in the other compartments of this carriage, and some had been sent forward at the double to patrol around the cattle-trucks up front. The Belgian woman was yelling through the quarter-open window – there was a stop preventing it from opening any further – that her daughter had to get to a toilette, the poor child was in agony. Rosie murmured to Lise, ‘Does she think the SS care if their prisoners suffer agonies?’ Surprisingly, the SS sergeant did come along, heard what she wanted and went away again. Mother and daughter were both in tears then, but he came back, unlocked the compartment door and detailed two soldiers to escort them to the lavatory. Others who wanted to go too were told to shut up. Edna grumbled, ‘One law for the rich…’ Rosie sat back and shut her eyes: she’d been having a dream in which Ben had featured, and wanted to get back into it. She heard Daphne saying how dreadful it must be for the women in the cattle-trucks – no one was escorting them to any damn toilette. Edna commented, ‘You’re quite right. We should count our blessings,’ and added, ‘count our blessings and just let rip!’ There was some laughter, then Maureen’s tearful-sounding, ‘But it’d be so uncomfortable…’ Muttering under her breath, ‘Please, please come and take me?’

  Compared to being made to kneel and then shot in the back of the head, it seemed a small thing to worry about, Rosie thought. But she’d always had excellent control in that department. What concerned her much more was hunger. Thirst too, but mainly hunger. Partly through awareness of how weak she was already: so it was partly psychological, easier therefore if one could keep the mind off it. Sleep was the best thing: if one could get back into it.

  ‘Must say, they’re taking their time about it!’

  That had been Daphne. Then Lise was nudging Rosie. ‘Some commotion out there. Rosie – look…’

  A mêlée of soldiers: some kind of disturbance. The SS sergeant appeared suddenly amongst them – with a gun – machine-pistol – in his fist, other arm waving men back towards the train, and the scene resolved itself into the Belgian woman being frog-marched back to the compartment with one soldier behind her and one on each side with an arm each, and the daughter following with another trooper holding her by the scruff of her neck.

  ‘Must have tried to get away.’

  ‘Maybe. Crazy…’

  ‘There go our chances of a pee!’

  The sergeant wrenched the door open, his men shoved the mother up and the one with the child lifted her in too. The sergeant still held the door: he was holstering his pistol. His officer arrived then, pink with anger. He climbed in, stood glaring down at the panting, weeping woman, told her in his laboured French: ‘You are fortunate not to have been shot!’

  Glancing around: a hard look at each of them in turn. Rosie, who was opposite the Belgians and therefore behind him, was the last to be inspected. She’d seen it coming and by that time was looking down, at her handcuffed wrists.

  Try never to look them in the face. A stare returned can be taken as a challenge…

  ‘Here.’ He handed the sergeant a bunch of keys. ‘Take the leg-irons off this one, and—’ gesturing towards Edna – ‘that pair of handcuffs. Put them on this stupid bitch.’

  Leg-irons from Rosie, handcuffs from Edna. Rosie blessed that SOE lecturer for his advice on looking weak and inoffensive.

  ‘Excuse me, sir…’

  Lise. The SS captain paused, scowled at her. ‘Well?’

  ‘We would all – please – like to visit the toilette.’

  ‘Would you?’ He edged to the door around the sergeant, who was crouching, trying different keys in Rosie’s ankle-cuffs.

  * * *

  They were stopped for about an hour, and each in turn was escorted to the toilette. Rosie had a suspicion that in Maureen’s case it might have been too late. Edna had said to Lise, ‘Pity you didn’t tell him we’d like a meal too, while you were at it.’ The Belgian woman had gone into a daze, and the child was having trembling fits. Edna had tried to talk to her, but the mother had snapped at her to leave them in peace.

  Rosie thought, Some peace… She couldn’t get back to sleep; sat watching the passing scenery and thinking about Ben. Wondering whether Marilyn Stuart would have told him she’d come to grief. They’d have no detail of what had happened – unless of course Prigent had managed to get out – but they’d know she was in trouble; having had no responses to signals, and no report on ‘Mincemeat’, or further requests for paradrops. Except possibly phoney ones, if either of her transceivers had fallen into Boche hands. In fact the radio left chez Peucat would be safe enough, in his hands, only the one they’d dropped with the ‘S’ phone and which she’d left in that weapons cache might be less so – if the cache was unearthed, as so many had been.

  She hoped – not for the first time – that Lannuzel and Brigitte had come through all right. If they had it would be thanks entirely to Messieurs Prigent and Peucat. But one wouldn’t know until it was all over, or at least until the Boches were cleared out, and she could go back and visit them. Taking Ben with her: showing him off to Sara de Seyssons, finding Henri Peucat then – please God. And touching wood, knowing that even dreaming of such things was purely wishful, never-never land. Except you couldn’t say it was totally impossible: who could know anything with total certainty, in this kind of situation? She glanced at Lise, who was dozing: getting back to that dream then, recognizing that even if some magic wand did wave and make any of it possible one would definitely not be visiting Pont Aven. It would have been the peak of everything, but it would be out of bounds now. Unless Lise decided otherwise: which she wouldn’t, surely. She was marvellous, Rosie thought. Stricken by her deprivation, but keeping it resolutely to herself. One saw that stricken, devastated look from time to time – when she was lost in her own thoughts and unaware of being observed – but she didn’t let it show.

  * * *

  ‘That’s a great story.’

  She’d been telling Lise about her first meeting with Ben and the highlights of their subsequent relationship: including the fact that after that first alcoholic and tempestuous night she’d hidden herself from him for about a year, only met him again by chance when she’d been leaving for France in the Dartmouth gunboat of which he’d been navigating officer. And something that hadn’t been mentioned before – that Lise must at least have seen him, on that beach on Guenioc island. To her he’d have been just one of about a dozen dark figures busy around the dinghies in that boil of surf: and she, Rosie, an unknown, faceless fellow-agent who’d approached her and wished her luck.

  ‘And I was so stand-offish, eh?’

  The train’s whistle had shrieked: now there was the roar of a goods train thundering past. All closed trucks. Gone, then: doubtless full of munitions for the front in Normandy. Its passing left a contrasting quiet, only thi
s train’s pounding rhythm… The Belgian woman had her head back and eyes shut, but wasn’t sleeping. Her daughter hadn’t woken though, was still folded against her, fast asleep with her tousled head on Mama’s shoulder.

  Lise sighed. ‘Must be – what, eight, eight-thirty?’

  ‘Nearer nine, I’d have thought. Oh, we’re slowing…’

  For another stop? The surroundings had become suburban and industrial: she hadn’t noticed until now. Light beginning to fade, too. Estimates of time had been the subject of general discussion an hour or so ago, each of them giving her own notion of it, and arriving at an average of the guesses. There might be a check of sorts, before long, based on Edna’s estimate that sunset would be at about nine-fifteen.

  This was a large town coming up.

  ‘Where are we, Edna?

  ‘I was wondering.’ Blinking at rows of houses without gardens, and beyond them the rectangular bulk of factories. ‘Could be anywhere.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be.’ Daphne, smiling at her. ‘Anywhere, I mean. With a free choice, where would one choose? London? Tunbridge Wells?’

  The Belgian had her eyes open, but her daughter still slept. Squinting down at her, having to move both linked hands, using a forefinger to fold her collar down. Then meeting Rosie’s eyes, and glancing quickly away, her expression tightening. The train’s rhythm was slowing even more.

  ‘I don’t think we are going to stop.’

  Maureen, peering out as a signal-box swam by on that side. Then on this side a platform, station buildings, unreadable notices in French and German, a group of Veldpolitzei and a scattering of waiting passengers.

  ‘Aren’t stopping. Big place, though. Come on, Edna, make a guess!’

  The rhythm in Rosie’s brain spelt out Ra-vens-brück, Ra- vens-brück, Ra-vens-brück. Places en route didn’t seem to have much to do with anything.

  L’enfer des femmes. Which had been a nightmarish concept in her more sombre thinking throughout three deployments now… Looking round at the others, she was struck by how weirdly minds could, for at any rate brief periods, shut out reality. A disparate bunch of women, some in chains, chatting together like a bunch of tourists discussing their itinerary.

  Notionally, were they so to speak holding hands? An ostensibly crazy reflex with a purpose, therefore?

  Edna called out suddenly – in French pronunciation – ‘Nancy!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The town is Nancy! I saw it – on that signal-box, they’ve painted it over but the paint’s worn thin!’

  ‘So what does that tell us?’

  The Belgian met Rosie’s glance, and for the first time held it. ‘Did she say that was Nancy?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled at her: and saw the girl’s eyes were open. ‘Your daughter’s awake now.’ To the child: ‘Nice sleep, you had.’ The rhythm was changing again – shorter, faster: Ravensbrück, Ravensbrück… Edna telling them – estimating how long it might be before they crossed the frontier into Germany – ‘I suppose – if it’s nine o’clock now, say – which going by the light it might be – well, depends where we’re aiming for. Strasbourg, Karlsruhe – that would be more in the right direction.’

  ‘Right direction?’

  Daphne – shaking her head, ‘Honestly…’

  * * *

  Dozing, half remembering and half dreaming. She was in the naval hospital at Haslar, the first time she’d been allowed to visit him since he’d brought his gunboat back from the French coast smashed up and near-sinking, full of dead and wounded, the wounded including himself. He’d been encased in bandages and plaster and had been due to have a second operation on his knee next morning. When she’d first had the news it had sounded as if things were touch-and-go, whether he’d survive or not; she’d had to wait four days before they’d let her see him, and they’d been about the worst four days of her life. She’d told him so, he’d pointed at her with the arm that didn’t have a drip-feed connected to it, and rasped, ‘Liar!’

  ‘Ben, I am not—’

  ‘How about when the bastard Gestapo had you?’

  ‘Oh.’ Relaxing, shrugging. Pervaded through all of this by a feeling of huge relief because half an hour earlier a doctor had told her Ben was going to be OK; he was extremely lucky that the damage to that knee was repairable and that he wouldn’t have to lose the leg. Smiling at him. ‘That was different.’

  ‘I bet it was!’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve been through it, it can’t happen again.’

  ‘Can’t?’

  ‘Odds heavily against. Ben, you take your chances – right, and end up like this? Well, I take mine.’

  ‘Hell of a bloody difference!’

  Laughing: reaching to hold that hand. ‘I love you, Benjamin.’

  ‘Bloody better. Same here, though. Couldn’t do without you, Rosie. Don’t know how I ever did.’

  ‘You won’t have to again.’

  ‘Huh? Changed your mind? God’s truth, Rosie?’

  ‘No – that’s not what I’m saying. I mean long-term – the rest of our lives. No, Ben, I’ve got to – I’ve told them, I can’t back out.’

  ‘Wish to God you would.’

  ‘I’ll see this one through, then I’ll be back and that’ll be it. I swear.’

  ‘I love you. Listen, soon as I get out of here—’

  Howl of the train’s whistle: juddering of brakes or wheels, that rhythm breaking up. She was awake – or coming awake: seeing the others’ faces, expressions of alarm, the whole compartment shaking and the screech of iron braking on iron. Fading light out there: a wide river on the right, open pasture this near side. In front of her the Belgian girl was bolt-upright, clutching her mother’s arm.

  ‘Breakdown?’

  ‘Something on the line ahead, more like.’

  As it turned out, that was it. The train was sliding to a jerky stop, and there was a roar of escaping steam. Rosie, on her feet then at the window – thanks to not having leg-irons on now – saw soldiers jumping down on to the track and running up towards the engine. The SS captain was out there too, shouting after the sergeant as he too trotted off in that direction.

  Edna’s voice behind her: ‘What’s cooking, Rosie?’

  She described it, as much as she could see. The SS man had posted riflemen to watch these doors – or this door – and strutted off after the rest of them. Maureen said wishfully, ‘Perhaps we’ll be stuck here for the night.’

  ‘Big deal. With not a damn thing to eat?’

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me…’

  ‘Anyway, it’s a lovely evening for it!’

  Jocular: on the count-your-blessings principle. But it was a lovely evening. Pinkish sunset glow, deep-green meadowland with a wood beyond it, and on the train’s other side a placid stretch of river curving away southward. Definitely southward because the line behind them pointed near enough into the sunset: the direction of travel at this point had been just north of east.

  Soldiers led by the SS officer were coming back now.

  ‘Our lord and master’s returning to us.’

  Returning without his sergeant, she noted. Trying to understand what was going on. The window was as far open as it would go, and she’d been hearing what she now guessed must have been cattle-trucks’ doors crashing open.

  The Belgian woman asked her, ‘What is there to see?’

  ‘Nothing much. But the officer’s on his way back, might condescend to tell us something.’

  He was issuing orders – which seemed to amount to leaving some men here and sending the rest up front where he’d just been. Taking his cue from the grand old Duke of York, maybe… Glaring round then, seeing Rosie standing at the window watching him, he pointed at her with his stick, bawled in crude French, ‘Sit down! Sit, wait!’

  She sat. Lise had seen some of it from where she was sitting.

  Rosie told the others, ‘He said sit and wait. I think they’re disembarking the people from the trucks. Sounded like it – an
d he’s sent most of the soldiers up that way.’

  Maureen murmured, ‘Beautiful light, out there.’

  ‘Quite soon be dark, though—’ Daphne, that had been. She was right; the landscape had the depth of colour that invariably precedes summer dusk. Lise murmured very quietly, ‘You don’t think it could be—’ She’d paused, glancing round; finished cryptically, ‘What it might be?’

  ‘Hardly think so. Why bring us here for it?’

  ‘Another question might be why all the way to Ravensbrück?’

  ‘Because that’s one of the places where they do such things. Unseen and unheard-of by the outside world, they hope.’

  She looked out to the other side, at the luminous glow on the river’s surface. ‘Would you like to paint that, Lise?’

  ‘No. It’s too pretty. For me, that is. Maybe your man – Ben, is it?’

  ‘Good memory.’ She hadn’t mentioned him since the night she’d spent in Rennes, in Noally’s house. ‘But I doubt it. He goes for – more dramatic scenes. Movement—’

  ‘Drama.’

  ‘Right.’

  Edna, Maureen and Daphne all had their eyes on the river. Edna admitted she didn’t know the names of any in this part of the country except for the Moselle, which couldn’t be far from here but she thought would be a lot wider.

  ‘Moselle.’ Daphne sighed. ‘Evocative, eh?’

  ‘Germans call it Mosel.’

  ‘Germans don’t know their arses from their elbows.’

  The door in Rosie’s side was unlocked, pulled open: a soldier of some kind – corporal, maybe – shouted, ‘Raus!’

  Edna translated, ‘They want us to get out. I wonder why.’

  Lise glanced at Rosie with an eyebrow cocked, asking the same question.

  ‘Well…’

  The Belgian was on her feet, pulling her daughter up with her. Edna had begun to move too, but no one else had. As if the compartment had become some sort of refuge, safe haven? The soldier shouted again, more angrily. Two others were standing back with their rifles more or less levelled; the one who’d shouted, and another, their own weapons still slung, seemed to be waiting to help the women down. The chained ones anyway. She went out first, slightly handicapped by the handcuffs, and one of them grabbed her arm to steady her: before she could stop herself she’d muttered, ‘Merci…’