by Nevil Shute
I nodded. “Who’s going to do the navigating?”
“Couldn’t Boden look after that part of it?” he asked. “He’s in a trawler now.”
I made a slight grimace. “It’s better to be safe than sorry. Getting to the right place at the right time on a strange coast in the middle of the night takes a bit of doing. Especially with the tides that run round there.”
He said: “We should want help from you upon a point like that. But Simon wants to work in those two if he can. He says they’ve got the right idea about fighting with fire.”
I stared out of the window at the bricklayers for a moment. I did not notice them much; my mind was on V.A.C.O., Admiral Thomson. This thing did not conflict with anything that we had going on. It was obviously in tune with Cabinet policy. There was no reason why the old man should obstruct it. It seemed to me that my job, pending the decision of V.A.C.O., must be to try and help the thing along.
“I think you want a Sailing Master,” I said slowly. “A really good professional navigator.”
I picked up the telephone and asked for the Second Sea Lord’s office. “Lovell,” I said. “This is Martin here, speaking from V.A.C.O.’s office. Tell me, do any of your temporary officers want to use fire against the Germans? Do you get anyone like that? Or wouldn’t you know?”
He said: “Oh, yes, we get one or two of those. It’s cropped up a good bit in the last few months — five or six times, perhaps. They usually put it in the column for ‘Preferred Employment’ when they join.”
“Do you think you could find a really good navigator who wants to do that?” I asked. “Somebody we could depend upon. First or second officer from a merchant ship, or someone of that sort?”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Those chaps are pretty busy in these times. I’ll get my girl to have a look through the card index, and give you a ring back if you like?”
“I wish you would,” I said.
I put back the receiver and turned again to the brigadier. “What about ratings, sir?” I asked. “Would you want us to provide those too?”
He shook his head. “From every point of view, we should prefer to use Free French. I’ve been in touch with the de Gaulle headquarters. I think we could pick out half a dozen Breton lads of the right type, and lads who are accustomed to that sort of boat.”
“I see.”
He glanced at me across the table. “How do you think your admiral will take it?” he enquired. “You know most of it now.”
I paused before replying, wondering how to put it when I saw him. I had to tell my admiral that the Army had proposed a naval expedition, to be commanded by a pseudo-Army officer of curious past history, sailing in a fishing-boat manned principally by foreigners, armed with an unconventional and utterly disgusting weapon, with the object of stiffening morale over on the other side. It was certainly an unusual proposal.
I said slowly: “I’ve really got no idea how he will take it. It may be that he will like it and let it go forward.” Privately I was pretty certain that he would.
The brigadier leaned forward and tapped the table. “Look,” he said. “We may be starting something bigger than we think. There are queer streaks in the German character, and one of the things that they can’t stand is fire. That’s why they were the first to think of Flammenwerfers.”
“That’s fairly common knowledge,” I said thoughtfully. “The Germans don’t like fire.” I smiled a little. “Nor do I.”
I glanced across the table at him. “There’s just one matter that we haven’t touched upon,” I said. “Are you in a hurry, sir? Or may I ask a few more questions?”
“By all means,” he replied.
I said: “What sort of people are the men who want to do this thing?”
2
CHARLES SIMON WAS almost exactly half French and half English. He spoke both languages perfectly, and he spoke both with that faint trace of a foreign accent which betrayed him as a foreigner in either country to the discerning.
His father had been a British wine merchant who did a good deal of travelling in France, and liked the country. His mother was a girl from Lyons. Though technically English by her marriage she was never anything but French in fact. They called their son Charles because that could be pronounced in either language, making it easy for the relatives upon both sides.
They lived in Surbiton from 1904 to 1911, not very happy years for the girl from Lyons. Simon then died, and within a fortnight she was back in her home town, taking the boy with her. She had not been happy in the strange land across the Channel to the north, but she had loved her husband and respected him. Within a few years she had shaken off her British nationality and had become French again in law, but it had been his wish that the boy Charles should be brought up as an Englishman. In spite of the protests of her parents, she sent him to a preparatory boarding school near Oxford, and later on to Shrewsbury, his father’s school. She knew that the English valued this peculiar form of education.
Simon grew up an odd mixture. He spent all his holidays with his mother and his relations in Lyons, but made few friends there of his own age. The French boys and girls he came in contact with regarded him as a foreigner, and a queer fish. His time in England was spent in the monastic society of a British public school; he made a few close and enduring friendships with English boys, but he never met an English girl at all, nor spent more than a single night at a time with any English family.
He left school at eighteen. He had shown some aptitude for drawing and for architecture, and with the help of his mother’s family he became apprenticed as a draughtsman to an architect in Lyons. For some years he worked hard, and liked his work.
Those were the years from 1923 to 1930, when France was leading the world in the technique of ferro-concrete bridge construction. Charles Simon mastered this technique, and having an eye for line became something of a bridge designer. He changed his firm two or three times, each time with a rise in salary; before long he was sent on his first business trip to England.
He was passionately fond of England. He knew little of the country beyond the unreal idealism of his public school, so that for him everything English was rose-coloured. He was English by nationality and to that he clung; his work was in France, but he thought of himself as a foreigner working in a foreign land. Whenever he got a holiday he went to England, and in 1930, when he joined the Société Anonyme des Fabricants de Ciment, the great organization at Corbeil, he began travelling to England as a technical representative.
He married soon after that, in 1931, when he was twenty-six years old, an English girl from Tunbridge Wells. Within a year she left him.
I don’t know why that happened. It was ten years before the time of which I am writing, and it had no bearing on his war-time occupations, so there was no reason why any of us should know much about it. But thinking back, one can string together a few contributory facts which throw a little light on it, perhaps.
As I have said, he was a queer fish. His only real interest outside his work in ferro-concrete was his enthusiasm for England and for all things English, but his knowledge of England was confined to his own public school. It was a queer, limited, ignorant enthusiasm. He made occasional short business trips to England, but his work lay in Corbeil. Corbeil is a small manufacturing town rather to the south of Paris, a desperately dull little place unless you happen to be deeply interested in ferro-concrete.
She must have found it hard to bear, that girl from Tunbridge Wells. It may have been the ferro-concrete that got her to the stage of breaking up their marriage, or it may have been the endless, uninformed prattle of England, or it may have simply been Corbeil. But whether it was one of those, or some quite different trouble, she left him and went back to Tunbridge Wells. He never lived with her again.
He gave up his business trips to England after that. It may have been from choice, but by that time the work was falling off. Britain and America knew quite as much as France about concrete
bridges. Moreover, fortification work was growing and absorbing the attention of French concrete firms, and there was less need for them to seek for foreign contracts. Simon from that time on spent much of his time in fortification work upon the Maginot Line.
What was he like? He was a lean man, fairly tall, with dark hair that hung over his forehead. He was quite a merry chap who liked to grease his work with a salacious joke. People liked working for him; he never had any trouble with his staff. In peace-time that was all that one could say about him; it never became apparent till the war was two years old that he was a natural leader of men.
He did not change his way of life much after his marriage had collapsed. He went on living in Corbeil, went on with his work. His trips to England ceased and he became more French to all appearances; he wore French clothes and stopped buying English newspapers and magazines. Gradually the people of Corbeil and of the factory forgot that Simon was in fact a British citizen; only the police knew that, and the director of the firm who dealt with military business.
And yet, there was one thing. Charles Simon — pronounce the name in French or English as you like — Charles Simon kept a boat. He kept a little four-ton cutter at St. Malo, fitted with an auxiliary engine, and in the summer when he took his holiday he used to make timid adventures in this thing, to the Channel Islands or to Lesardrieux, picking his weather with the greatest care. I know a naval officer who met him once before the war in St. Peter Port and spent the evening with him. This chap said that he was quite alone. The ship was reasonably clean, as well she might be, because Simon had been swinging at his anchor for ten days of summer weather waiting for the perfect day, the day of days when there would be a dead calm sea, a cloudless sky, a rising glass, and a very gentle breeze from the north to waft him safely back to St. Malo.
Did he do that because he liked it, or because he felt that it was English to go yachting, or just for some hereditary urge towards the sea that had to be obeyed? I don’t know. I only know that it seemed to me when I heard about it to be a typically English way to take a holiday, rather uncomfortable and rather frightened.
He did not get his yachting holiday in the summer of 1939; the work upon the fortifications was too intense. The Société Anonyme F.C. de Corbeil was working night shift by that time, and all the staff were working twelve hours a day in a wishful endeavour to make ferro-concrete serve as substitute for an offensive strategy. They laboured through the winter and on into the spring of 1940; they went on working till the refugees were streaming through the town and the Germans were within thirty miles. Then they stopped, and Corbeil joined the throng of refugees.
Charles Simon stayed behind in the works, together with the managing director, M. Louis Duchene, and a foreman or two. Duchene stayed because he had built most of the factory, and because he could not visualize a life away from it for more than a short trip to Paris; his wife and family had left for Pau a week before. The foremen stayed because the factory was their livelihood, and because they shrewdly thought that whether France was ruled by Germans or by French, concrete would be needed and their jobs were safe unless they ran away from them. Charles Simon stayed because he felt himself to be an officer, and because he was ashamed to go while old Duchene still sat on in his office.
He went up to the old man in his room. “It seems that the Germans will be here within an hour now,” he said nonchalantly. “You will receive them, monsieur?”
“But certainly,” said monsieur le directeur. “Watch for the first officer to come in at the gate, and have him brought up here with courtesy. And, Simon, get out the general arrangement plan of the works, and bring it to me. No doubt the officers will wish to see it.”
It never crossed their minds that they should destroy any of the buildings or equipment to prevent them falling into German hands. Such a course had never even been suggested, and would have been ridiculed if it had been. One did not throw good money down the drain.
Simon hesitated. “I will bring the plan.” He coughed. “May I raise a personal matter, monsieur?”
“Assuredly.” The old man looked at him with curiosity. “These are difficult times, Simon. You need not stay here if you wish to go.”
The designer said: “I would like to stay with you, monsieur. But you will remember that legally I am an Englishman, a foreigner. That may make difficulties for me with the Germans when they come.”
Duchene said: “I never think of you except as French.”
Simon said: “Most people think of me as French, but I am still a British citizen. Would it be possible for you to forget that I am not a Frenchman, Monsieur Duchene? If the Germans did not know, I could stay on working here. They will need all of us to run the factory.”
The old man stared at him. “Does anybody else know — who would betray you?”
“I do not think so. It is many years now since I went to England.”
“But your papers — your carte d’identité?”
Simon said: “At this moment, monsieur, that perhaps can be arranged.”
He left the office, and went out of the factory into the town. Corbeil was singularly empty. A car or two with dry, empty tanks were parked by the roadside, and a cart with a broken wheel stood abandoned in the main street, the mule still in the harness. The place was still, empty, and desolate that hot summer afternoon, as if it waited breathlessly for the coming of the Germans.
He went to the Mairie. The door stood open, all the office doors were open. Everyone had fled. He passed on to the Gendarmerie; one door was locked. He withdrew a few steps and ran at it and stamped it in. There was nobody about at all.
He had lived so long in France, had visited the Mairie so many times, that he knew just what he wanted. First he extracted his card from the little card index of foreigners, burnt it with a match, and scattered the ash outside the window. He found the blank identity cards. He found the register of births, and made a hurried parcel of four volumes; later in the afternoon he thrust these into the furnace of the steam plant at the factory. He made himself a new birth certificate. He was at the Mairie barely twenty minutes and he left it a French citizen, proof against any superficial investigation.
Later that afternoon the Germans came. There was no fighting near Corbeil. They rode in on their motor-cycles first, followed by armoured cars and a few tanks, and streams of motor-lorries full of infantry. They occupied the railway station and the Mairie and the waterworks and the power-house and the gasworks; in the late evening three officers and thirty soldiers drove in to the factory to find Duchene still waiting for them, gravely courteous, with Simon by his side.
In three days the factory was working on a much reduced basis. A month later, fortified by fresh supplies of troubled and bewildered labour drafted by the Germans, it was in its stride again.
The Maginot contracts were a thing of the past now. The German Commission of Control dictated their activities; aerodrome runways, new strategic roadways to the Channel ports, and above all air-raid shelters formed the new work of the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil. Duchene and Simon worked like Trojans to satisfy their new masters, and for a time they were too busy in the work to appreciate the implications of the new regime.
It was only slowly that they came to realize their true position. At first everything seemed to go on normally; the German troops were civil and even ingratiating. There was plenty of money in the town, for the soldiers spent freely, and there was plenty of work. All the evidence of prosperity was there — for the first three months. If you did not think too hard about the position of France, or read too many newspapers, it was quite a good time. Duchene and Simon were too busy to do either.
The first real shock they had was when Paul Lecardeau was arrested, tried, taken to the barracks, and shot, all within an hour and a half.
Simon knew Paul quite well, and had often played a game of dominoes with him at the Café de l’Univers. Paul ran a fair-sized draper’s shop in the route d’Orleans, and he was a notable spitter. In the ca
fé he could hit a cuspidor at any range up to three metres with accuracy, and he was gifted with what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ammunition.
Paul discovered, when his shop was all but empty, that fresh goods were unobtainable. His business was mostly in household linen and women’s clothes. The German major who now sat in the Mairie brushed aside his plea for a permit to buy stock in Paris, but displayed a good deal of interest in Paul’s own capacity for work upon the roads. It was with difficulty that Paul evaded immediate conscription as a labourer.
With little left upon his shelves to sell, Paul took to sitting in the Café de l’Univers hour after hour, gloomily smoking and staring at the Germans as they passed upon the pavement. Presently he took to spitting when a German came into the café; it was an amusing game, because the big brass cuspidor rang like a gong to each impact. A German Feldwebel stalked up to him and warned him — once. Next day, the brassy note of the gong was the signal for his arrest. Ninety minutes later, Paul was dead.
Simon faced old Duchene across the table of the office which they now shared. “It is intolerable, that,” he said uncertainly. “Paul was an honest man. He was jocrisse, that is all.”
Duchene stared at him in bewilderment. “But why did they do it? All Corbeil is co-operating with the new regime, as the Marshal has said. There is not a de Gaullist in the town. Why must the Germans do a thing like that?”
It was, of course, because they were Germans, but neither Simon nor Duchene had yet come to appreciate that point.
From then onwards things grew worse. The shortage of goods and even of foodstuffs became general, and the tempers of the people of Corbeil grew short in sympathy. They became critical of the Marshal’s new order; the old confusion, they said bitterly, was more tolerable. Before long young people of both sexes became hostile to the Germans. It was good fun, if you had no responsibilities, to creep out in the night and let down the tyres of their bicycles, or pour a little water in a petrol-tank and watch the car stall half-way down the road. Once or twice a German officer, infuriated, whipped out his automatic and took a shot at the dim figures giggling in the shadows. This was great fun and gave the young people a sense of importance. They began to talk about de Gaulle, and to dignify their little exploits with the name of sabotage.