by Nevil Shute
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 visualise 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 realise 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’Orléans, and he was a notable spitter. In the café 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.
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 Bri
tish 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 organisation 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 farther 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 civilised. 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 realise 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 u
sual?”
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.”