by Nevil Shute
The roof hatch dropped down, and the night air blew a keen, cold gale around him. With the assistance of the sergeant he clambered slowly out. The wind tore round him, dragging his legs from the slippery surface of the wing. Far, far below him he could see the dim line of a river and the faint shadow of the woods upon the patterned fields. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he thought: “This is death. I have only a few minutes left to live.”
The sergeant, standing in the hatch helping to support in the violence of the rush of air, shouted with his mouth against his ear: “Just take it easy and count one, two, three after you go. Put your hand upon the ring—that’s right. Wait, now …”
They both stared at the pilot, intent on the instruments. They saw him glance at his watch, and back to the instruments again. Then at his watch.… He turned in his seat and nodded, smiled at Charles, and said something which was never heard. The sergeant shouted in his ear: “Okay, and the best of luck. Off you go.”
Charles felt the grasp upon his arm released and a heavy clump upon his shoulder. He dared not show his fear. He turned his body to face aft and the wind took him; he slipped, lost his hold, and bumped heavily upon the trailing edge. A dark shadow that was the tail-plane swept over him, and then he was head downwards and rotating slowly, seeing only the dim earth below as the wind rose about him, tearing at his clothes. The fear made an acute pain in his throat.
He forced himself to think, and counted slowly. Then desperately, with all his strength, he pulled the ring. It came and something snapped behind his back; he pulled at the wire following the ring with both his hands. For a sickening moment he went on falling; then came a rustling rush and the harness plucked violently at his shoulders, hurting him with the buckles of the straps. He came erect and saw the sky again; the wind had gone and he was hanging there suspended in the quiet peace of the night. For a few moments he hung limp and shaken, exhausted by his fear.
Presently he regained control of himself, and set to steering the parachute gingerly away from the woods and into open country.
He fell into a pasture field close by a hedge. He fell down heavily on knee, thigh, and shoulder as he had been told to do and got badly shaken up again. The parachute collapsed beside him on the grass. He stayed there for a quarter of an hour, gradually calming down. He was not hurt at all.
Presently he got up, made the parachute and harness into a bundle, and did with it what he had been told to do.
An hour later he walked into his mother’s house, with a story that he had walked from Lyons, having come from Paris by the night express.
* * * * *
He got back to Corbeil after a few days and settled down to work again. Duchene took his absence as a matter of course, and no word of the raid upon Le Tréport seemed to have penetrated to the factory. Charles fell back easily into his humdrum daily round, and for a time everything went on normally.
Three weeks later he appeared one morning in the office of M. le directeur, bearing certain test samples of cement, odd-shaped little twin bulbous bricks. “I regret, monsieur,” he said, “that there is trouble with the samples.”
They bent over the fractures; they were granulated and short. “These are the figures,” said the designer. “See for yourself, monsieur.” The failing load of the test-pieces was forty per cent below the specification strength.
Duchene glanced at the figures. “This is very bad,” he said. “What is the reason?”
Simon produced a paper bag of powdered cement. “This is the sample.” They dipped their fingers in it; the powder was rough and gritty to the touch. “It has passed once only through the kiln,” said Duchene. He fingered it again, with forty years’ experience behind the touch. “Or—some of it. Half—more than a quarter and less than half—has passed once only. Has any of this stuff gone out?”
Simon said: “This is from Batch CX/684, monsieur. I regret infinitely that much of it has been already shipped. I trust that this is not a true sample of the rest.”
The old man bit his lip. “Where did the shipment go to?” he enquired. This was a serious matter for the prestige of the company.
Charles said: “It was sold through Brest. Much of it was shipped to Lorient, and some to Audierne, Douarnenez, and Morgat. It has all gone to the same district.”
They discussed the distribution for some little time. It was a major crisis, and most serious to them commercially. “I will ring up the Commission of Control,” Duchene said in the end. “They must know about this first of all, and quickly, in case they think that we have made a sabotage. Then they must arrange at the ports that every sack is put in quarantine till we have made a test-piece from that sack and broken it. Every sack is to be tested. I will not take a risk in matters of this sort.”
The designer nodded. “I will go and see to it myself,” he said. “They cannot say that we are taking this lightly if I go myself to do the tests.”
The old man beamed his approval; he was fond of Charles. “That is a very good suggestion,” he said. “I will tell the Commission that I am sending my chief engineer to make this inspection. You must be ready to start immediately, and make my apologies to all the commandants concerned. Telegraph immediately what replacements are required.”
The Commission were annoyed, and naturally so, but somewhat mollified by the suggestion that the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil proposed to send their chief engineer in person to inspect the defective batch. Half a dozen telegrams were sent without delay isolating the material, and Charles was given all the necessary permits for his journey and told to get off at once. He travelled up next morning to Paris, a city of desolate, dirty streets and closed shops. He lunched sadly in a little restaurant and took the afternoon train for Brittany.
He went first to Brest. At the station he took the common hotel bus, an ancient horse-drawn vehicle, and asked to be put down at the Hôtel Moderne. The driver looked at him curiously. “Monsieur has not visited Brest recently, perhaps?” he said. “The hotel is closed.”
He found that it was closed indeed, or rather that it stood wide open to the sky. There was much bomb damage in the town; he was fortunate to get a room in the Hôtel des Voyageurs.
He went to the agent next day, and sat in conference with him for an hour. Monsieur Clarisson was much concerned about the defects of Batch CX/684, and said he could not believe that there was really much wrong with it. He himself had taken samples and had tested them as soon as the news reached him, and all his samples had come out in strength well above specification. The two engineers drank several cups of coffee in the office, bitter stuff tasting of acorns, and gloomed over the samples that Simon had brought with him from Corbeil. Monsieur Clarisson gave Charles the names of all the local German commandants that he would have to see, and expressed his irritation that he would not be able to accompany Monsieur Simon on his trip from town to town along the coast. The German regulations in that part were very strict.
“I should warn you, monsieur,” he said confidentially, “that here in Brittany it is necessary to be most discreet.” He hesitated. “You will not mind if I say this? Coming from Corbeil, you may not know quite how things are here with us.”
Charles nodded. “There are difficulties here?”
The man said: “Not here in Brest. Here we are business people, and we understand that circumstances change. But in the country districts people are more stupid. They are always trying to do things against the Germans, and that makes trouble. In the café monsieur, they are always talking. You will hear the English radio quite openly.” Charles drew in his breath; this was asking for it. “You must be very careful not to get involved in their stupidity. It is trouble—trouble—trouble all the time.”
Charles said: “I am deeply grateful, monsieur, for the warning. These places I am going to—Lorient, Audierne, Douarnenez, and Morgat—are they bad?”
The agent said: “Not Lorient, nor Audierne. Morgat is too small for much to happen there. But in Douarnenez, monsieur, it is mos
t difficult. Those fishing people will not understand the new regime. Each week there is some new trouble, each week there is an execution by the Germans, sometimes several. And it has no effect … But for the fishing industry and for the food that they bring in, the town would have been bombarded by the Germans from the air, and razed down to the ground. I have heard German officers say so.”
“It is as bad as that?”
“It is bad as it could be, monsieur. Life is terrible for people in Douarnenez just now. You must be very, very careful there.”
Charles went that afternoon to Lorient, put up at the Hôtel Bellevue, and reported himself next morning to the German commandant. He was coldly received, and was informed that work of great importance was completely stopped. He was questioned sharply about the day that he had spent in Brest: it did not seem to the Germans necessary at all that he should have wasted time in visiting his agent. They gave him a good dressing down, then took him to the harbour in a Renault van.
The cement was stacked in heaps in its sacks in a shed over looking the estuary. He set to work with one Breton lad to help him, numbering the sacks, making a sample briquette in a little mould from each sack, and leaving it to dry. He worked all day. Once or twice, when nobody was looking, he mingled a little of the sample powder from Corbeil into a briquette.
In the late afternoon he was taken down to see the sacks upon the job. He passed along new quays and under arches of new concrete, stepped over piles of girders and steel reinforcement, walked round great heaps of wooden shuttering. He dared not glance in each direction more than once; that one glance was sufficient, if he could remember. His mind was crowded with the detail he observed. He must, must keep it clear. With each glance he tried to memorise the picture of what lay before him so that he might reconstruct it in the night.
They took him to the ready-use cement store, and he set to work again to make briquettes of the sacks there. As he performed the simple job he indexed in his mind what he had seen. Seven bays each holding two U-boats, held up on columns one metre twenty-five square section, each with two I beams in the centre, each I beam forty-five by fifteen centimetres, wrapped round with twenty-kilogramme reinforcement. Each bay a hundred metres long and twenty metres wide, and six columns to each bay. The weight of roof could be deduced from that alone. But keep that detail in his mind, treasure it. God, let him not forget!
His task finished, he was free to go till the next day; it took twenty-four hours for the briquettes to dry. He walked back up the quays. Fifteen-metre girders, each one metre twenty deep—they would be the longitudinal horizontals between columns. Each girder built of webs and angles, each angle twenty centimetres by twenty, each web twenty-two millimetres thick. Mary, Mother of God, help him to remember!
Shuttering for the arches of the twenty-metre bays—radius of arch thirty to thirty-five metres, each arch about one metre eighty wide. He glanced up casually to the half-completed job, and looked down at the quay. Say two tons eighty of forty kilogramme reinforcement to each arch. Fifty by twelve I beams for the purlins between arches, ten or eleven purlins to each arch. Over the purlins, six layers of twenty-kilogramme reinforcement buried in the concrete of the roof, the layers separated by about fifteen centimetres. Jesus, give him a clear head to sort out and disentangle all that he had seen!
He did not dine that night because food dulls the brain. He went up to his room in the hotel and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling in the hard light of the one unshaded lamp. He would not, must not think of anything except design. This was no amateur erection that he had seen. He knew that at a glance. Whoever had designed it had had much experience in structures of that sort. That made Charles Simon’s job more possible, for everything would have a reason. Each girder and each column would be made sufficient for the loads imposed upon it and no more; the strength of one part would show him the strength of the rest, when he had understood the matter rightly. And all in turn would lead him to the weight and thickness of the roof, as yet unbuilt, if he could keep a clear mind and remember all that he had seen.
He set himself to find the gaps, the links in the chain of the structure that he had not thought to look at. The list of points that he must memorise to-morrow, his last visit to the quays. Then he got up and wrote in pencil on a little ivorine tablet all the dimensions he had noticed, and set to work to learn what he had written off by heart, as he had learnt poetry when he was a boy at Shrewsbury. Finally, at about midnight, he expunged what he had written from the tablet with a wet corner of his towel, and lay down on his bed, still repeating his lesson to himself. Presently, in the middle of his repetition, he dropped off to sleep. When he woke up at dawn, alert and desperately hungry, he was still repeating it.
He went down to the main cement store later in the day and started to break his briquettes with a little shot weighing machine that he had brought with him. A German officer of Pioneers was there to watch him as he worked. Of about two hundred sacks, seven proved to be defective, with fractures much below the specification strength for the briquette. Charles had the offending sacks sorted out and opened one at the neck. He took a handful of the cement, rubbed it between his fingers, smelt it, and nodded.
He turned to the German officer. “I regret this infinitely, Herr Oberleutnant,” he observed. “But there it is. See for yourself.”
The German rubbed some in his hands and nodded wisely.
“Such things happen in any factory from time to time,” said Charles apologetically. “But all the rest may now be cleared for use.”
Seven sacks of perfectly good cement were sent down to the breakwater to form part of the sea wall, sacks and all. Charles was taken down to the ready-use store again.
Footings for the columns seven metres by seven metres, apparently on sand or gravel bottom. A squad of carpenters knocking up one-metre-eighty shuttering—would that be the depth of the roof? Great boxes full of thirty-millimetre bolts—where did they go, what members did they join? And what were all these tons and tons of angles, all fifteen-centimetre angles. Where did they come in? And all those seven-millimetre strips?
In the ready-use store every briquette passed its test well above specification strength, possibly because Charles had been under close supervision the previous afternoon, down there upon the job. The German officer was very pleased, and genuinely cordial as they walked back along the quay.
One last look round. An indication of something similar in a very early stage of construction upon the other side of the river; exactly in a line between the church of Plouarget and the tall chimney at the gasworks. A boom across the entrance to the river between Plouarget and Creusec, turned back for ships to enter, and with one guard-ship. What seemed to be an oil-tanker beside the quay two hundred metres down-stream from the bridge. Five naval motor-launches. Two large twin-engined float seaplanes moored out to buoys. Two salvage ships …
He left Lorient that afternoon and went to Audierne. He must go through with his trip in all sincerity, for on the coast of Brittany he was under observation the whole time. There was only a matter of five tons or so to test at Audierne. He condemned three sacks, apologised to the commandant on behalf of the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil, and left for Douarnenez two days later.
It was February, and though the days were beginning to get longer, it was still quite dark by six o’clock. From Audierne to Douarnenez is not much more than fifteen miles, but the direct railway line was closed to all civilian traffic, and Charles had to make a long detour through Quimper. Here he had a long, indeterminate wait upon the station platform for a train that was indefinitely late.
He went into the buffet and drank a cup of bitter coffee. The place was ill-ventilated, smelly and cheerless outside the night was mild, even warm. It was fine and starry. He went out on to the platform and began walking up and down.
Presently he fell into conversation with a priest, a man perhaps fifty years of age, in shabby black canonicals.
They talked as they walked up a
nd down. The priest, Charles learned, was travelling to Douarnenez from a seminary at Pontivy; he was on his way to take up a new cure in the great Church of Ste-Hélène in the middle of the town. He told Charles quite simply the reason for the vacancy that he was to fill. His predecessor had been executed by the Germans.
“You understand,” he said ingenuously, “that in my calling one is sometimes in a difficult position, more difficult than I anticipated when as a young man I joined the Order.”
In the dim light of the stars Charles glanced curiously at his companion. Was this just the folly of an unworldly old man, or was it—courage? He could not resist the endeavour to find out.
“A middle course is usually possible,” he said. He was mindful of the warning that he had received in Brest. “The Germans, after all, are men like ourselves. It is not necessary always to be finding means to irritate them.”
The priest said very quietly: “The Germans are not people like ourselves. They are creatures of the Devil, vowed to idolatry, and followers of Mithras. If you deny that, you deceive yourself, my son.”
Charles did not wish to argue; they walked a few paces in silence. Then the priest spoke again.
“I am not one of those who consider matters of the earthly sphere,” he said. “Our life and our hope of things to come lie not in this world. I do not think it matters very much who exercises dominion over these fields of France, whether our race, or the Germans, or even the English, who in bygone times ruled here for a century. The Church does not concern herself with conquests of that sort. We fight against the conquest of the soul.”
Half-heartedly Charles tried to turn the conversation into safer channels. “The Germans have their Lutheran religion,” he said. “The English also, and the Americans, and the Dutch. I do not see much difference.”
The man said: “The English are not members of the true Church. They worship Jesus Christ in a foolish and misguided way, and as a social usage rather than a true belief. Yet they do worship, and they have no other gods. And so it is with all the other countries that you name. But not with Germany.”