by Nevil Shute
Presently the Germans arrested M. Chavaigne, headmaster of the boys’ school, and tried him for complicity in these affairs. The evidence was inconclusive, so they sentenced him to ten years’ forced labour and sent him away to Germany to work it out. With the removal of that restraining influence the sabotage increased, and even adults began secretly to listen to the British radio and to talk about de Gaulle.
Soon after that the cross of Lorraine made its appearance daubed in paint or clay upon the walls of the factory. The German Commission of Control, visiting the works one day, demanded furiously that these signs be removed and Simon, with apologies, set labourers to work.
“I am desolated that this should have happened,” he told the Germans. “It is the boys who do it — the irresponsibles, who do not think. Boys are the devil.”
The Hauptmann Pionier in charge of the Commission stared at him arrogantly. “Boys do what their parents do. In Germany the boys work hard, and do not insult the Government. It is not so here. If I see this again, I will have this town of Corbeil taught a lesson.”
Simon said: “I will attend to the matter personally. This will not happen again.”
The German turned away, and they went on with the work.
Simon reported the matter to Duchene as soon as they were gone. “There will be trouble before long, monsieur,” he said. “The people are becoming restless.”
The old man said: “I will not have trouble in these works. We do not mix with politics here, in the factory. See that the walls are cleaned each day, and the lavatories also. It is there that they write things.”
“I will see to that, monsieur.”
“Why must they do these things? It can only lead to trouble. What is the matter with the men?” the old man asked.
Simon shrugged his shoulders. “It is the war,” he said. He glanced over his shoulders at the closed door. “You listen to the English radio, perhaps, monsieur?”
The old man said: “I have no patience with the English since they ran away. As for the radio, it does not amuse me, and there is no news. Is it that that is the reason for the trouble?”
Simon said: “It is the stories of the German losses in the air that the men hear upon the radio that makes the trouble. That, and the speeches of that man de Gaulle.” He bent to the directeur. “A hundred and eighteen German aeroplanes were shot down yesterday,” he said in a low tone. “And seventy-one the day before.” He paused. “That is the real trouble with the men.”
Duchene stared at him. “Somebody told me something about that, but I did not believe him. The figures are too big. It is an English lie.”
“I do not think it is a lie, monsieur. When I was at Caen on Tuesday the foreman said that nearly a hundred aeroplanes took off on Sunday, but less than seventy came back. The officers there have become very surly, and they will not talk to me, or to any civilian. It is quite different from what it was a month ago.”
The old man said: “Sacred Mother of God! If the English can shoot down Germans in that way, why did they not do it when they were fighting with us? They are playing their own game. They have betrayed us.”
Simon shook his head. “I cannot understand the turn the war has taken,” he said soberly. “If they betrayed us, we are now betraying them in turn. These runways we are doing for the aerodrome at Caen — they are to make it possible for Heinkels to take off with double bomb load to drop on English towns. But we were allies, once.”
Duchene said: “It was they who began it....” He turned back to his desk. “No more of politics — that is not our affair.” He picked up a paper. “This invoice from Mensonnier — I will not pay for crates. Mensonnier knows that. See the accountant, and have that crossed off.”
It was not altogether easy for Duchene to free his mind from politics, in spite of his preoccupation with the factory. He had lived and worked in Corbeil for over forty years, since he had come into his father’s business as a lad. In that forty years, inevitably since he was the managing director of the largest business in the town, he had become associated with a variety of local charities and enterprises, most of which were now in difficulties and troubles. He cared little enough for most of them; in the changed times they must adjust themselves. He could not free his mind, however, from the affairs of the St. Xavier Asile des Vieux at Château Lebrun.
Château Lebrun was a village about five miles from Corbeil, and Duchene was a trustee of the Asile des Vieux. The asylum was an organization with a religious flavour, partly supported by a subsidy from the municipality of Corbeil, partly by local charity, and partly by small sums extracted from the relatives of the occupants. The Vieux were of both sexes and many of them were feeble-minded, all being sixty years old or more. It was a useful and on the whole a kindly institution, which collected destitute and unwanted aged people from a wide area of country and saw them unhurried to the end.
About seventy of them were accommodated in wards in a big, rectangular stone building on the outskirts of the village. The land was flat about Château Lebrun, and suitable for a dispersal aerodrome: a fact that the Germans were quick to grasp. They took the building as a barrack for the air mechanics. The Maître d’Asile came early to the Maire and to Duchene for help, and Duchene rang up the Commission of Control, only to get a short answer. The building was required for military purposes. The inmates would be moved by the German Field Ambulance Service; it was not permitted for civilians to accompany them. All asylums in the occupied zone were to be cleared, and the inmates would be accommodated in the Vichy area. Relatives would be told the new address in a few days.
So the old people were removed, feebly protesting, in a convoy of field ambulances. Thereafter nothing happened. Most of the relatives dismissed the matter from their minds; they had seldom been to see Grand’mère and had more important matters now to think about. A few became insistent and began to bother the Commission of Control with demands for the new address. One by one these received an intimation, with regrets, that the person in question had succumbed to the fatigue of the journey.
One by one they came to Duchene, at his house or in his office at the factory.
Worried, he went to the Commission and got a sharp rebuff. Such things were apt to happen, in their view. They could not tell him the location of the new asylum yet; in due course an information would come through. In the meantime, he would kindly not waste the time of German officers with trivialities, but attend to the manufacture of cement.
Anxious, and a little frightened, he began to make enquiries of his own. The manager of a large industry invariably has ways of getting information which are not available to ordinary men, and in the concrete business Duchene’s influence spread wide. Gradually, in bits and pieces, the truth came to him. The old people had got no further towards Vichy than the German hospital at Sézanne. There all had died by hypodermic as they lay strapped upon the stretchers in the cars, and had been thrust into a common grave with lime, on the same night.
Shamefaced, white, and shaken, the old man blurted it out to Simon in the office late one night. “One does not know how to behave now,” he muttered. “One does not know how to address a German officer. It is the act of barbarians, that. Even the beasts, the animals, do not do things like that.”
Simon was silent.
Duchene’s voice rose a little. “But it was murder! Seventy-two people.”
Charles Simon said: “I know that, monsieur. They are murderers, every one of them, if it will serve their end. They did not want to feed these old ones, or to care for them. That is all.”
The old man said, distressed: “But that is not civilized. That is what savages would do, in the black jungle.”
Simon smiled sourly. “I think that we are now in the black jungle, in Corbeil. And only now have we begun to realize it.”
That was all that was said that night, and Duchene went back to his empty appartement in the town. He did not even go to bed that night. He sat primly in a gilded, plush-upholstered chair all
night, his hands resting on the table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring unseeing at the ornate wall before him. At dawn he got up, pulled aside the black-out, and opened a window to let air into the stuffy, smoke-filled room. An hour later he went down to the works.
Simon came early to his room that day. “The Commission comes at eleven o’clock,” he said. “Lunch as usual?”
M. le directeur drummed nervously upon the table. “I will not see them,” he said irritably. “You must tell them I am ill.”
Simon looked at the old man for a moment, silent. Then he said quietly: “It is understandable, that. But they will know that you are here, monsieur, and that may make a difficulty. Perhaps you could go home till they have gone.”
Duchene raised weary eyes, clouded with doubts, to his designer. “I am going to close down the factory,” he said, but there was irresolution in his voice. “I will not have my people working for those German swine.”
Simon said gently: “Leave it for to-day, monsieur. Let the car take you to your house when it goes in to fetch the Germans.” They still had a tiny drain of petrol for the works car for station trips.
The old man flared out: “I will not work for them, myself, not after this. Not one more kilogramme of cement shall they have from me.”
Charles Simon dropped down on to the chair before the desk, and leaned towards the older man. “You are tired now,” he said. “You do not look well at all. Did you sleep badly, monsieur?”
The old man said: “I did not go to bed. I was thinking of...all sorts of things.”
They had worked together for ten years, and Simon knew his chief very well. “Listen, monsieur,” he said. “We cannot do that, now. It would not help at all for you to close the factory. It would be open within the hour with Germans in control, and all that would be gained would be one hour of our production lost to them. And you would be held in a concentration-camp. That would not benefit Corbeil, or France.”
Duchene passed a weary hand across his eyes.
“One must go on working for the present,” said the younger man.
M. le directeur said: “I have been thinking over what you said the other day about the runways at the aerodrome at Caen. Each ton we send out is a blow at England, and although I do not like the English, at any rate they are still fighting in a way against these German swine. How do you feel about that, Simon?”
“I do not like it, monsieur.”
“I do not like it either. The English are still fighting in their way against these filthy murderers, and you and I are fighting in our way against the English. Does that make sense to you — you who are an Englishman yourself? Hey? Does that make sense?”
“No, monsieur. It does not make sense. But there is nothing we can do about it.”
Duchene sat brooding for a time, in silence. “I would rather that the factory had been blown up and stood in ruins than that it should be used like this.”
“That is what we should have done,” said the designer. “It is too late now, but we should have blown it up ourselves, before the Germans came.”
The old man stared at him. “Who could have guessed these Germans were not people like ourselves?”
“We were told often enough,” said Simon grimly. “All the world told us that the Germans were a murderous and an uncivilized people, without decent codes of conduct. But when they conquered us, we thought they would be people like ourselves.”
There was a long silence. When Duchene spoke again his voice had lost all its vigour; he spoke as a very tired old man.
“I do not know what happened to France,” he said wearily. “I have been thinking and thinking, and I cannot understand. We knew that the Germans were like this in the old days — we knew it, and we fought them with the British as our allies, and we beat them down. And then we lost our faith....”
He stared at the designer with tired eyes. “It is as if all France had lain under a spell,” he said slowly. “From that place at Berchtesgaden there has spread an influence, malign, like a miasma, that has sapped our will. So that we laid down our arms, and never fought at all, and so became mere tools for evil in the hands of evil men....”
He got up wearily from his chair, swaying a little as he stood. “One thing alone saved the English from our lot,” he muttered, half to himself. “Running water — twenty miles of it, salt running water of the sea. That is why the English are still brave to fight, as we were once. No spell, no sucking weakening influence sent out by evil people can cross running water. When I lived in the country as a boy, everybody knew that much.”
Presently Simon got him downstairs to the car. He took him to the appartement and gave the old man over to his housekeeper, before he went on to the station in the car to meet the Germans coming down from Paris on the midday train.
At that time there was construction work of every description going on along the whole length of the Channel coastline of France. The little watering-place of Le Tréport, amongst others, was undergoing a radical reorganization of its harbour under German supervision, with a view to making it more suitable for barge traffic. A fortnight later, Simon was summoned to a conference at Le Tréport, to deal with certain engineering problems at that port and at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme.
It was not the first time that the Germans had used him in this way; indeed the vast extent of their conquests made it necessary for them to use technicians from the countries they had overrun. Simon went with mixed feelings. He disliked open work on military matters; it did not seem so bad when one was working in the office at Corbeil, when he could forget the use to which the product would be put. On the other hand, the trip to the sea coast was a change and something of a holiday; he could spin it out over three days.
He went on a Tuesday in late October, and spent the first afternoon walking round the watering-place and studying the little docks. Wednesday was spent with the Germans. They made a quick tour of the harbour in the morning, then settled to a conference on material supplies. They finished about four o’clock.
Gathering together his papers, the German chairman of the conference said to Simon: “You are going back to-night?”
The designer shrugged his shoulders. “I will go to the station and find out about the trains. I do not think I can get through to Corbeil to-night, and it is cheaper to stay here than in Paris. I shall only go to-night if I can get home.”
The German nodded. “As you like.”
Simon went back to his hotel, the one beside the station, and decided to stay the night. He had dined the previous evening in the hotel and had not cared for the dinner. That night he went out and found a café-restaurant upon the little front, and settled down to spend the evening there.
It was not very full. He sat for an hour over a Pernod reading his paper and listening to the wireless, and passing a word now and again with the man on the other side of the marble-topped table, an engineer from the power station. Then he dined, and sat for a long time with a cup of coffee, running over his notes of the day’s business, planning the work involved.
He was sitting so when the swing doors burst open with a crash. There was an instant’s stunned silence as the people at the tables turned to the interruption. Then, in a deafening clamour in the narrow room, the fire from a couple of Tommy-guns burst out. A group of four German non-commissioned officers seated together at a table rose half to their feet. One of them spun round and collapsed backwards with a crash. The others dropped where they sat. Their bodies shook and quivered with the impact of the bullets pumping into them.
An officer, an Oberleutnant, sitting with a French girl at a table at the end of the room, ducked down behind a little wooden table fumbling for the automatic at his wrist. He never got it out. The wooden splinters flew from the table and bright holes spread in a pattern over it; one of the splinters gashed the girl across the eyebrow as she stood screaming with her hand up to her mouth. Behind the table the officer fell forward as a sodden weight, and a thin stream of blood ran out
on to the floor.
Suddenly the firing stopped. With a little brassy tinkle the last shell rattled to the floor.
One of the men at the door shouted in French: “Don’t any of you move!” Then, to the white, terrified proprietor behind the bar: “Any more Germans in this place?”
The man shook his head, unable at first to find words. Then he gulped, looked at the bodies, and said: “Only those.”
The man at the door said in English: “Go right through the place, lads. Ben, stay with me.”
Three men rushed in, and made their way through into the back quarters. They were hard, violent young men in British battle-dress. They each carried a sub-machine-gun; they had two revolvers each, worn on light webbing harness from the shoulders; the same harness supported a belt with pockets for Mills hand-grenades. A large electric torch hung at the waist. They wore British tin hats.
The other two, one of whom wore sergeant’s stripes, came forward from the door, their guns at the ready. The sergeant said again, in accented, ungrammatical French: “Don’t any of you move! Put your identity cards out upon the tables.”
The man called Ben stayed by the door. The sergeant began to move methodically from table to table looking at the cards displayed, his gun always at the ready.
There was silence in the café, broken only by the tramping of the men upstairs as they ransacked the house, and by the noise of light gunfire intermittently outside in the night. Once there was a heavy, thunderous explosion, as of a demolition. The girl who had been sitting with the dead officer had stopped her screaming and stood motionless, her back against the wall, her hands pressed palms against the wall behind her, staring at the devil with the sergeant’s stripes advancing slowly down the room, his gun held at the ready.