by Thomas Wood
After everything, the interrogation, the torture, the sleep depravity, I would be taken outside and shot. Even if I was to give them all the information that they craved, the ending would be the same. Bullet to the head.
I thought of the odd irony of how, when I was with Cécile, I had seemed calm and comfortable, rolling around the Parisian streets as if I was a native, but now, less than forty-eight hours since our separation, I was being driven, at high speed, towards my own grave.
As the car began screeching to a halt, the tyres digging in to the rubble of the track that we were on, I started to deliberate over who or what I would think of when the time came to face that bullet.
There were so many people that I had let down, so many people that I had sorely missed. My parents were the first candidates to my mind. My Dad would have been so proud of me, an officer in the British Army, the same as him and yet, sat in the footwell of that car, I felt like he would have disowned me as his son.
My mother would simply be standing there, her hands on her hips, shaking her head repeating the same phrase over and over again, “I told you so, I told you so.” I couldn’t bear to think of either of them in my last few moments, the pain and disappointment so vividly etched across their faces.
Clarke and Red both popped up as unsuspecting nominees, my two crewmates who I had let down miserably. Clarke had given himself for Red and me, and yet somehow, we had both got ourselves killed or captured, rendering his sacrifice totally worthless. Red was the one that stuck with me the most. I had killed him, he had said so himself, if it wasn’t for me, crawling around that forest as mortars fell, he would probably still be alive, somewhere in France, on the run, just as I was. I wasn’t worthy of making it this far, in some ways I was glad I had been captured, but Red deserved the chance to make a run for it, he would have made it. No doubt about it.
My mind fell on Cécile though, and that is where it stayed. When the time came, and I was peering down the dark abyss of a German pistol, I would think of her. She had got me this far and had done everything that she could for me. She could quite easily have turned me over to the authorities, but she didn’t, she took me under her wing and cared for me completely.
The brakes squealed as we finally came to a halt, just as I began to pine for her sweet, American tones once more, even if she appeared to just tell me everything was alright. I started to long more than ever before to find out where she was, just knowing that small piece of information, even if it was to find out she was dead, would mean the world to me, it would set my soul at ease, no longer being in the purgatory of my mind, not knowing if she was alive or dead, on the run or captured.
I was dragged from the car, feet first, until my man handler could reach my arms, which were yanked forwards as I was bundled from the car, in just as rough and undignified a manner as that with which I had been put in. I was forced down onto a stool and I could feel bodies moving all around me.
The fibres stuck to my face now permanently, suffocating me almost as I tried desperately to make sense of the situation, twitching my head at every little noise that I heard. I tensed my whole body, waiting for the obligatory blow to the head, or the smash from the side with a cricket bat.
But none of it came, except a lone voice, as harsh as a baton wielding German, that spoke in amongst the chaos of my mind.
“Jean Souess?”
I spat, as I tried to get the sackcloth from my mouth in order to reply, but the man was impatient.
“Jean Souess?” he said, this time more forcefully. How had he known my name? Had the Germans known my identity this whole time? Had that German at the barrier taken longer on my pass and ticket to pass some sort of signal to the Gestapo? Was the only reason that I had been allowed on that train to allow me to come here, so that there was no record of my existence?
The questions continued to career through my brain, and I felt an overwhelming disappointment as I realised my friendly train conductor was in on the whole thing as well. He had been instructed to tell me to get off at Angouleme, as he knew that’s where they would be waiting for me. I hoped that they had paid him well for his troubles.
“Oui, Oui, Jean Souess.”
“You know Cécile Brodeur?” It felt weird hearing her surname, but the mere mention of her name sent a warming feeling, right the way around my body, making me feel assured that whatever happens, I might actually be alright.
I dare not answer the last question, for fear of implicating myself in the mess that had occurred, and it could lead to not just my death, but hers as well, if she wasn’t already cold.
“Cécile Brodeur?” he was one of the most impatient men to date that I had met. I hesitated, acting as if I was trying to recall the surname of the woman he was shouting at me.
“Cécile Brodeur!” he shouted, finally whipping off the sackcloth from my head, the bright light blinding me for a few seconds and I blinked strongly, to try to numb the pain.
“She told us to follow you.”
“She’s alive?!” I blurted out, hopeful that at any moment, she would appear from around the corner and all would be well once more.
He shrugged, “She was, when I spoke to her yesterday…but today is a new day.”
I didn’t like his pessimistic attitude, but at the very thought that she was still alive, I felt more hopeful than ever before, surpassing even the anger and fear that I had simmering in my stomach.
“We are friends.” He said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant Cécile’s friends, or whether he was asking for my friendship, which wasn’t going to be particularly forthcoming after what he had just done to me.
He saw the scathing look in my eye and held out his hand, offering to pull me from his chair.
“Desole, we had to make it look like we were secret police. Otherwise we would have never got through all the checks at the station.”
“And all the kicking in the car?” He let the silence linger, deciding that only a shrug would suffice as a response.
“We have been following you for hours, and you did not notice us once. You wouldn’t last much longer if you were on your own.” I felt like he was beginning to take great joy from the British soldier in front of him, so desperate for the help of the French in order to get home.
“You were a stain in the landscape, my friend. How do you say it? A sticky sore thumb?”
“Something like that,” I muttered under my breath, in English in the hope that his translation skills were as good as his attempts at humour.
“Anyway…she sent us to you. She wanted us to give you help, so that is what we do.”
He let the silence cling to us for a few moments more, sizing me up and wondering if I would break the quiet first.
“I could really do with a cup of water. I haven’t had a drink in ages.”
He nodded to the man standing in the corner, presumably the one who had grabbed my legs while the more muscular man in front of me took me under my arms.
“We are here to help.” He said, more sincerely this time, as he took a chair, holding out an open palm for me to take the one next to the fireplace.
“We already have a plan for you, to get you into the Zone Libre. But we must move quickly. It will only work for the next day or so.”
I didn’t like the idea of being snuck into the unoccupied area of France, with less than a day to prepare, but, these were Cécile’s friends, she had entrusted them to look after me, so I had to trust them.
31
As I prepared for my journey to and hopeful crossing of, the demarcation line between occupied France and free France, I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t entirely cut out for this sort of thing. I had been reliably informed that a number of my compatriots had gone before me in an attempt to make it home and, so far, the men on the occupied side of the border, had heard shots ring out into the unoccupied side on every single occasion.
There was, according to these men, “no way that they could have survived such a barrage of bullet
s.”
I hated thinking of my own mortality, but in the last few days, I had thought about it more than I ever cared to, each second of every day feeling like it was one second closer to when I would never see the light of day ever again.
This, I discovered, was what being truly scared felt like, not the benign fear of being caught by parents doing something stupid, not even the dread of waiting for an enemy to clip you, but the all-encompassing paralysis of knowing that all of the odds, not just some of them, are against you and that you are living on time that does not belong to you anymore.
The terror and horror of what I was about to put myself through, clung to me, like a pillow being pressed down hard over my mouth and my nose. There was just enough oxygen for my body to fully operate, I could walk, talk and think, but inside, I was dying slowly, my body gradually shutting down as I fought for oxygen, fought for a few more moments of searching for that sanctuary of safety.
Henri, the great big brute of a man who, only a day earlier, had taken great delight in knocking me about and giving me a few swift kicks to the ribs, had now become my best friend. But the bruises and aches of what this man could do were I to cross him in some way, acted as painful reminders of how not to behave in front of this man. Henri continually walked into the room that I was in and pressed a new wad of notes into the palm of my hand, as he continued to seek out those in the village who were willing to help yet another stranded British soldier to safety.
“They all have sons,” was Henri’s simple reply when I queried why so many were giving so much, “they hope that their sons are treated in the same way.”
The money was hastily stuffed into my pockets and would only come out when strictly necessary. Henri had advised me that I would likely need to hop on another train once I was on the other side of the border, and that the Gendarmes in the free zone were prone to handing over known runaways back to the Germans, unless turning a blind eye was made worth their while.
In the space of a few hours, I had gone from a man with no belongings, to surely being one of Angouleme’s wealthiest residents. If Henri was to hand me any more cash I would have to turn it down, there was no way I would be able to run fast enough if I was required to with my trousers so heavily laden with money.
That evening, Henri decided that it would be good for all of those involved in the next day’s events to head out together, to the local pub.
It was a relatively small building, the bare stone walls trapping in all the moisture in the packed-out drinking room. Men drank and laughed together in small groups, not really paying too much attention to those around them, apart from a few other, timid faces that scanned the room, just like Henri’s had done on the train.
I could tell they were other British soldiers, each one of us here to try and alleviate some of the fears that we might have before we made a run for it. All of us could smell the freedom now, as if some lonely French widow had begun cooking it up earlier in the afternoon, and the smell had started to waft through the trees and the streets, gradually making its way to our nostrils. We were so close now.
Every time we locked on to one another, it was a quick look back down towards our pints, not acknowledging one another’s existence and no hint of a welcoming nod or smile. We all seemed to be in groups, led by at least one or two locals it seemed. With me was Henri, his son Stephan and the man who would become all important to me tomorrow, German Frankie. Francois, or ‘German Frankie’ as he preferred to be called by his English counterparts, was the one that would get me over that finishing line, he would be the one that my entire life would depend on in under twenty-four hours. When asked why he was called German Frankie, he and Henri simply chuckled, looked at each other and in unison muttered, “You will see soon.” These two had rehearsed their performance together many times before I arrived.
Henri caught me looking around the room and leant in to me and spoke gently into my ear. “There’s a lot of them, isn’t there?” I didn’t know if he was talking about the British soldiers that so blatantly stuck out to me, like a “sticky sore thumb,” but I simply nodded, sipping at my beer, letting him continue.
“It was important for you to see them all. This is how many soldiers that are around these parts at the moment.” He was right, there were a lot of them, a heck of a lot of them. They were all bundled around tables, far too many for them to really fit but they somehow seemed to make it work. They raucously laughed and ogled at the landlord’s daughter as she replenished their drinks and I wondered if they had been on the same train as me down to Angouleme.
I supposed that these were the men that Henri had warned me about, the ones that manned the checkpoints in and out of the free zone, but also the ones who would not hesitate in firing into the unoccupied zone if I was found out. I also assumed that they formed part of the very large contingent that patrolled the woods about ten miles from here, the forest that housed the invisible demarcation line between the two zones. Henri had warned me that they were dangerous areas, and several locals had already fallen foul and been wounded after drifting too far during their Sunday afternoon walks.
As I stared at them all, I couldn’t quite help but think that the task I was faced with, was a mammoth one, borderline impossible.
“You see your friends also?” he queried, chuckling.
“Yes,” I snorted, “I see them all. Sticky sore thumb eh?”
Henri banged the table loudly, guffawing in a manner that even the Germans couldn’t keep up with. A group of them turned to look at Henri, and an icy chill shot up my spine as they did, before each one of them descended into a clap of laughter themselves, screaming in one another’s faces at the crazy local on the table behind.
This was all becoming a bit too much for me. I’d heard of hiding in plain sight, but it wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds of staring at me to realise that I wasn’t a local, neither were the four other boys dotted all around this pub. It really wouldn’t take much to sniff us out and we’d probably be lined up against the wall of this very pub and shot.
Henri leaned in to me again, taking us out of the conversations of the other men on our table, and murmured to me, breathing a heavy concoction of beer and bad breath on my unassuming nostrils.
“So, what actually happened with Cécile? Who went to the Germans?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, hoping to sound convincing enough. If I didn’t fool him, he could have easily stood up and told the Germans exactly who I was, or worse, told them where and how I was planning to cross the border.
“It’s weird,” he said, shaking his head despondently, “how would they have known?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated again, allowing him to wallow in the bottom of his third glass of beer. As he began muttering and whispering to himself, it set my train of thoughts off again. I had been careless in who I spoke to, especially the priest in the church, but even still, I hadn’t told him who was helping me if anyone at all. As far as he was concerned, I was an overconfident British officer, on the run in the middle of Paris and staying in a nearby hotel. If he had gone to the Germans, or if they had come to him, he would have had no knowledge of Cécile, he wouldn’t have been able to give her up. And if he somehow had worked it out who it was, why didn’t the Germans have me lifted in one fell swoop? Why did they allow me to carry on?
Throughout the whole course of these thoughts, I could not shake the dream; my mum, Cécile and Red. They had all been there in the house waiting for me, as if this had all been some kind of big joke.
I rebuked myself for getting so hung up on what was just a stupid dream, made more vivid and striking by the intense tiredness that I had still failed to shake off completely. I had barely been able to sleep since Henri had laid the plan out in front of me and told me of all the security measures that were in place across the border.
There was no physical line to mark out the differentiation between occupied and unoccupied France, no wires or fences, not even a line of
daisy chains to tell you when you were a free man. But what there was a lot of, which more than made up for the lack of a physical barrier, was soldiers, heavily armed ones.
Henri had specified the types of weapons that they had at their disposal; rifles, pistols, submachine guns, machine guns, even an armoured vehicle or two had been spotted a couple of days ago. Henri had also been reliably informed that all the soldiers were strictly on a shoot to kill order, no one was to survive if they got too close to the border. None of which was the morale boosting speech that I so desperately needed to hear so close to coming face to face with these men.
There was, according to Henri and Frankie, only one way to make it into the unoccupied zone. That was through one of the heavily manned checkpoints that were sited across the main byways into the free zone.
But there was more than one glaringly obvious problem to this plan. One of which was that my identity papers simply wouldn’t be up to scratch here. My cover story was shot to pieces and even if I came up with a new one it would be unlikely to stand up to the scrutiny of the Germans, who only allowed essential travel into free France. Even if I did have a watertight cover story on why I had travelled all the way down from the Pas-de-Calais, I still wouldn’t have the necessary paperwork to make the crossing. To get over, I would need an Ausweis, a specially approved pass from the Germans that said I was granted permission to cross, including all the accompanying paperwork including photographs of myself, addresses that I would visit on the other side and my reason for crossing.