by Nevil Shute
I smiled a little. “Who thought of that idea?”
“The young man I was speaking of. Captain Simon.”
I said: “Is he one of the ones who go over to the other side?”
“Yes. It was he who gave us most of this information.”
I paused for a moment, and fixed the name in my memory. “He’s an Army captain, I suppose?”
The brigadier hesitated. “Well, yes. We had to regularise his position. He holds the rank of Captain in the Royal Engineers seconded for special duties, of course.”
I thought about that answer for a minute, then put it on one side and reverted to the operation. “It seems to me,” I said thoughtfully, “that it’s going to be pretty difficult for your sardine Q-ship to get away. The noise of gunfire will attract the other Raumboot, and any other German ships that there may be about.” I eyed him, and then said more positively: “I shouldn’t think your ship would have a chance of making her escape, even if she should sink her Raumboot. And quite frankly, sir, I’m not at all convinced that she would sink it. What armament would you propose to give her for the job?”
He said: “A flame-thrower—one of the big ones. A flame-thrower and a few Tommy-guns.
I was silent for a minute re-arranging my ideas. When I had spoken I had been thinking of a conventional sea battle, an ill-considered venture, a desperate affair of young fools in a fishing-boat with little guns attempting to engage a powerful, well-armed motor vessel twice their size. I had been ready to veto anything so suicidal. But there was more behind this thing than that. There was some thought behind it—genius, perhaps.
I knew about these modern flame-throwers. I had been to a couple of Staff demonstrations, and had seen them belch out their disgusting fury in a violent, cherry-coloured spout enormous in diameter, ploughing and devastating the bare earth far, far from the gun. I had seen them smother and envelop a tank in a furnace. I had seen the sickening effect upon a dummy man.
I stared at him. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said very quietly. “There might be something in that one.”
He smiled. “I must say, it attracted me,” he said candidly. “It’s something different, you see. I think that they would get their Raumboot all right, and I don’t think that the other ships would interfere with them. You see, it’s something new.”
“It would light up the whole sky,” I said.
“It would. But from a distance it might well look like a spontaneous explosion of the petrol-tanks. In any case, it would be … puzzling. And in the general confusion, I think our ship would get away.”
“I think she might,” I said. “It would certainly be devastating if it came as a complete surprise.”
“Well, yes, I think it would. We’re really getting quite keen on it over in our office.”
I asked: “Have you worked out any tactical plan of how it would be used?”
He said: “We thought of mounting it amidships, with the fuel-tanks in the bottom of the boat. The flame gun would stick up above the bulwarks, camouflaged as a heap of nets.” He paused. “In action, the first thing to do would be to get rid of the forward flak—open up first upon the forecastle of the Raumboot and burn up the gun crew. Then traverse aft and give the bridge a good dose to get rid of the officers, and then train aft to the machine-guns, and the flak crew at the stern. It ought not to be very difficult.”
“It should not be,” I said. “I imagine that you’d clear the decks all right. But you’d still have the crew within the hull to cater for, and the Raumboot would still be under way. What would you do next? Would you board?”
He said cheerfully: “Oh, I don’t think so. There’d be no need to run that risk, you see. You’d treat her like you treat a tank.”
I glanced at him in enquiry.
“Give her a good hosing with the oil unlit. Get it well down into the cowls and ventilators and hatches, and let it drip down well inside. Then give her a burst of flame, and light her up.”
All war is a grim business and we had had two years of it, but I shivered a little.
“That ought to work all right,” I said mechanically.
“I think so, too,” he said. “I can’t see any flaw in it. In fact, over at our place we think it’s worth a trial.”
There was a pause. I sat in silence for a little time, trying to think up some fresh argument against this thing. I did not want to stop it now, but I wanted to bring all the possible difficulties up for discussion before I put it to my chief.
He said: “You see, it’s something new. That is of value in itself. And it’s something rather horrible to happen to the German crew, exactly what the French would wish to happen to them.” He leaned towards me. “That’s what concerns us most, of course. A thing like that will have a wonderful effect in Douarnenez as soon as it becomes known.”
I said: “If it’s successful, if you destroy your Raumboot without survivors, it may never become known.”
“Oh yes, it will,” he said, and smiled a little. “We’ll see they get to know about it on the other side.”
That was his business and not mine, and my mind swung to another aspect of the matter, one which was really more my concern. “This sardine-boat that you want to use as a decoy,” I said. “You’re thinking of using one of the ones at Falmouth, I suppose.”
He shook his head. “Not one of those. There’s another one at Dartmouth.” He paused, and then he said a little diffidently: “As a matter of fact, we’ve already requisitioned her.”
I thought to myself: “Oh, you have, have you?” It was not the first time that the Army had displayed an inclination to set up a private Navy, and I knew that my admiral held strong views upon that subject. But I kept my own counsel, and all I said was:
“What’s her name?”
“Geneviève,” he said. “She was a Camaret boat really, but they’re all very similar.”
“What about manning her?” I asked. “Have you thought about that?”
He said: “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk over with you. Simon himself has a fair knowledge of the sea—yachting, you know. I suppose that’s what turned his mind to an adventure of this sort. It was he who discovered this boat at Dartmouth, the Geneviève. And as a matter of fact, he’s been in touch with two of your young officers down there. He wants to work them in.”
I said aloud this time: “Oh, he has, has he?”
The brigadier said: “I really felt, when I heard that, that it was time I came to see you people.” He smiled charmingly. “I didn’t want you to feel that we’d been trespassing outside our territory.”
I smiled back with equal charm. “Oh, not a bit,” I said. “Who are these naval officers?”
“They’re both of them lieutenants in the R.N.V.R.,” he said. “One of them, Boden, is in a trawler that goes mine-sweeping from Dartmouth. The other one is in some technical shore job down there—Boom defence, or something of the sort. His name is Rhodes. He’s in the Special Branch, I think. He has a green stripe between the wavy rings.”
“That’s Special Branch,” I said. “He’s probably some kind of a technician.”
The brigadier said: “He’s the one who knows about the flame-thrower.”
I made a note of the names on my pad. “If this thing should go forward,” I said carefully, “I see no reason why we shouldn’t loan those officers to you, if you really want them. Was it your idea that Captain Simon should go in command?”
“That is what we should like,” he said. “The proposal came from Simon, he’s the man who knows the local conditions over on the other side, and we have confidence in him. But since this has to be, in its small way, a combined operation, we should want to agree the commander with you people.”
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 an 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 organisation 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 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 lea
n 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 the factory forgot that Simon was in a 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 file 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 frightening.
* * * * *
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.