Liquidate Paris (9 page)

A man wearing a farm labourer's smock rode slowly past on a bicycle. Hanging from his cross bar was a dead chicken. Our host pointed excitedly.

'See that man? That's Jacques. Brother's in the local police force. Jacques's in the .Resistance. I know it for a fact. Not only that, if the truth were out he's responsible for all the crimes ever committed in this place... And I shouldn't be surprised if his brother weren't hand-in-glove with him. In fact I'm pretty sure of it.' He refilled our glasses, 'You ought to be made aware of these things. I'm only trying to be helpful.'

His wife nodded vigorously, her pale, pinkish eyes suddenly gleaming with satisfaction. We set down our wine glasses and took our leave, '1st Section, 4th Group' was chalked up on the door.

'Slimy sods,' growled Porta. 'Anything to save their own precious skins.'

'None of our business, anyway,' decided the Old Man. 'We're not here on Gestapo business. I couldn't care if they'd knocked off a round dozen of 'em! '

Further on in the village we came across Pierre, the suspect brother of Jacques. He had a soiled
kepi
pushed far back on his head and as he caught sight of us he at once leaped to his feet, almost emerald green with fear, knocking off his
kepi
and tumbling a bottle of calvados to the floor. The calvados was retrieved and reverently offered to us. Pierre himself drank our health several times in quick succession, shouted a few enthusiastic Heil Hitlers! and began to pour out a flood of incoherence.

'German soldiers are the best in the world, let me refill your glasses, gentlemen, I always say so and besides it's been proved, everyone knows it and you will win the war.' Here he giggled nervously, slapped the Old Man on the shoulder, gave vent to a few more Heil Hitlers to relieve his feelings and showed us a picture of his wife and family. 'Have another drink... your health, gentlemen! You will win the war. The war was engineered by the Jews. Here----' He pulled out a sheet of paper and earnestly pressed it upon us. 'This is a list of all those I have arrested. If I had my way, the whole country would be cleared of Jews. They bring us nothing but trouble. Look at Dreyfus!'

'Dreyfus was innocent,' protested the Old Man. 'It was a legal error.'

'Ah, but it doesn't alter the fact that he was a filthy Jew!'

'A Jew, at least,' I muttered.

Porta suddenly jerked up his gun in a way that terrified even me. Pierre stared at him with saucepan-lid eyes.

'They tell us,' said Porta, menacingly, 'that you work for the Resistance and that a great many rather peculiar things go on in the village. What do you have to say about that?'

'Say? Say?' cried Pierre, wildly. 'What should I say? It's a pack of filthy lies! I've been pro-German from the beginning and everyone knows it! '

'They don't know it down there,' said Porta, jerking a thumb towards the house we had recently left. 'If I were you, pal, I'd keep an eye on them. They don't seem over-fond of you.'

'But that woman's my cousin!'

'Cousins can be as vindictive as anyone else.'

We left Pierre to chew his fingernails and marked up '2nd Section, 1st Group' on the door. I smiled, happily, and wondered if Pierre would still love the Germans as much when he'd met Little John. Pierre saw me smiling and came reeling to the door to promise us the best of food and drink for the men who were to be billeted with him. We looked back as we left and saw him polishing off the Calvados at a quite astonishing rate.

'Almost shit himself with fright,' observed Porta, in disgust. 'Bloody cardboard heroes, the lot of 'em!'

'Not so easy,' murmured the Old Man, 'living in an occupied country.'

In the next house, an old peasant with the Croix de Guerre pinned to his chest gave us a very glacial welcome. As we looked over the house we could feel his little cold eyes glittering malevolently upon us.

'Hah! A bath!'

Porta pulled his find clattering and banging into the middle of the room. An old tin bath, small and a bit battered, but a bath nevertheless. Baths of any description were rare in the smaller villages.

'Better chalk it up for some of the brass,' advised Porta. 'They're the ones that seem most addicted to water.'

We moved on to visit the Mayor, a round man with a big hairy moustache. He greeted us most cordially and straightway informed us that he was a member of the Party.

'Good,' said Porta. 'Let's give him Hauptfeldwebel Hoffmann. I doubt if anyone could stay in the Party after meeting him.'

Further up the street, set on a slope a fair way back from the rest of the village, was a small house that seemed at first glance to be deserted. We approached it cautiously but no one answered our hammering at the door and we finally abandoned it and went on with the search for billets elsewhere.

Late in the afternoon the battalion arrived with all its usual fuss and bother and noise and clouds of dust. We'd managed to fix everyone up, but fortunately we'd been at the game long enough to know that we should not expect any gratitude. Just as well, because we had none--except from Little John, who was met by a beaming Pierre and the sight of a well-stocked cellar.

Leaving the rest of them, I slipped back to take another look at the deserted house at the top of its lonely slope. I had a curious feeling about that house, and I approached it cautiously, not by the gate and the front path but through a gap in the thick hedge, round at the side. It was like an enchanted garden in there. Flowers grew in unregimented masses, scarlets and blues, golds and purples; the grass was ankle deep, a bright wet green, slightly darker beneath the apple trees. Half overgrown with moss and ivy was an old well with an upturned bucket and a broken chain. I stood for a few moments mesmerized.

'What do you want here?'

At the sound of the voice, floating imperiously towards me from the flowery depths of the garden, I instinctively wrenched out my revolver and took cover behind the thick trunk of a nearby tree. It was an automatic reaction, but the voice was a woman's and it was not unfriendly. It came from the far end of the garden, where I now saw a young girl, about twenty-five years old, lying in a hammock that was slung between two apple trees. She raised herself on an elbow and stared at me out of suspicious, almond-shaped eyes.

'What are you looking for?'

'Nothing,' I said, moving towards her but keeping the revolver in my hand. 'I thought the place was deserted. We called here this morning and got ho reply ..'. "We were finding billets for the troops down in the village.'

'I see.'

The girl swung her legs gracefully out of the hammock. She was wearing a Chinese-style tunic with a high neck, two slits up either side revealing well-shaped thighs.

'I'm about to have a cup of coffee. You want to join me?'

'You live here?' I demanded.

A stupid question, really. At the time I was rather knocked sideways by the sight of so much leg and could think of nothing more intelligent to say. She gave me a slow smile, as if realizing my confusion.

'Sometimes I live here. Sometimes I live in Paris... Do you know Paris?'

'Not yet. I hope to soon!' I laughed, and then thought that perhaps I was being tactless. 'Are you married?' I asked, maladroitly.

'In a manner of speaking. My husband is in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in Indochina. I last heard of him three years ago.'

'I'm sorry,' I muttered.

She shrugged.

'Why be sorry? Where else is there for a man to be, these days? Either behind barbed wire or behind a machine-gun. You don't get much choice, do you?'

I remained silent. What she said was so obviously true that there seemed little point in even agreeing with her.

'Do you think,' she said, suddenly, 'that the war will finish soon?'

I lifted an apathetic shoulder. Of course I thought the war would finish soon. I've been thinking it for some years now. Ever since it had started. It was the only way I could manage to keep sane.

'It's marvellous up here,' she told me. 'You can almost forget what's happening in the rest of the world. But at the same time it scares me. It's
so
isolated from people. It's so cut off from reality... I'm going back to Paris tomorrow. It's better there. Conditions are worse but you're not so much alone... Do you suppose they'll make Paris an open city, like Rome?'

I had no idea. I wasn't even aware that Rome was an open city. No one ever told us anything, in the Army. We were only soldiers; machines that obeyed orders. Why should we be told what was going on?

The girl moved up dose to me. One of her hands touched mine. It was soft and gentle, and a tremor of excitement ran through me as forgotten senses came suddenly to life. She raised her other hand and removed my dark glasses, but the light was so obviously painful to me that she promptly replaced them.

'I'm sorry,' She smiled at me, apologetic and uncertain. 'I didn't realize... I thought you were just wearing them for show. To make yourself look interesting----'

'I wish I were,' I said, bitterly. 'I spent three months lying in bed as blind as a bat and working out ways of killing myself after I copped this lot."

'Where did you----' She waved a hand. 'How did it happen?'

'A phosphorus grenade got me when I was jumping out of a blazing tank. I suppose I'm a lot luckier than some. There are thousands of men back home who've been blinded in the war. I at least haven't lost my sight. It's just that I can't stand any sort of light in my eyes.'

'I shouldn't have thought you'd still be asked to go on fighting!' she said, indignantly. 'It's disgusting!'

'One arm, one leg, one eye... that's all you need for this war,' I said.

She looked at me a moment.

'How long are your soldiers staying here?'

'I should know! A few hours, a few days... Only the officers are told things like that.'

'Of course,' she said, as if realizing it for the first time, 'you're not an officer, are you? I never notice these things... Where do you come from, in Germany?'

'The barracks, in Paderborn... Actually I'm from Denmark.'

'Ah, so you're not a German?'

'I am now, yes. If I still had Danish nationality I'd be serving in the Waffen S.S. Sort of foreign legion.'

She leaned against a tree trunk, solemnly regarding me.

'Why on earth did you join up?'

'To earn myself a daily meal and a roof over my head, basically. There didn't seem any other way of doing it at the time--and besides,
All Quiet on the Western Front
was my bedside book when I was a kid. I thought your actual ordinary German soldier the most romantic figure in the whole world. I never quite got over it.'

'Really? But I always thought the book was
anti
all that sort of thing?'

'Maybe it is. Try telling that to a small boy! No one's ever going to convince
him
that peace is more exciting than war, or that a man out of uniform can ever be as heroic as a man dressed up with a rifle over his shoulder and a helmet on his head... And then there's no getting away from the fact that there's a great camaraderie in the Army. You know what I mean? You're all in it together, in peace or in war; it gives you somewhere to belong, it makes you feel a part of something.'

'But why the German Army?' she persisted. 'Why not the Danish Army?'

I laughed.

'Because there hardly was one! And soldiers weren't popular in Denmark. People used to spit on them in the street. Officers as well as men. Even the police used to turn a blind eye.'

'I suppose that was why Denmark fell so quickly in 1940?'

'They couldn't have done anything, anyway. Germany's the biggest military force in the whole of Europe. Even the French Army couldn't hold out for very long.'

The almond eyes narrowed.

'France hasn't given up the fight yet, don't you worry! As long as England stands we shall go on fighting. And England won't fall, you can depend upon that; and she won't let us down, either!'

I laughed, genuinely amused by her naivete.

'You want to know who England's fighting for? She's fighting for herself, and only for herself. She couldn't give
a
damn about France. She already let you down once. Remember Dunkirk? You remember what happened there?' I shook my head. 'Nations never do anything for other nations. Only for themselves.'

'That may be,' she said, 'but you know quite well that Germany's as good as lost the war. Why don't you get out while you've still got the chance?'

'Desert, you mean?'

'Why not? Others have done it. The Maquis would look after you if you worked for them over here.'

'I couldn't desert. I may be fighting for a lost cause, but that's beside the point. If I backed out now I'd be letting down the friends that were left behind. They count on me, just as I count on them. None of us could ever desert in cold blood. We've been together far too long.'

Growing enthusiastic, I placed my hands on the tree trunk, one on either side of the girl's shoulders, leaning towards her and looking down at her as I spoke.

'The five of us, we've lived through hell together... in the trenches, in tanks, under fire... When you've done that you can't just walk out on people.'

'But the war is lost! '

I made an impatient clicking sound with my tongue.

'Of course it is! We've known that for months. Long before the politicians knew it.'

'Then why don't you all desert? All at the same time?'

How simple she made it sound! I shrugged my shoulders.

'Why didn't they desert in the First World War? It's something to do with companionship, I suppose. Even if you all deserted you'd have lost that sense of--of belonging. You'd be out on your own again. I can't explain it too well... Remarque does it a damn sight better in his book. Try reading it again and perhaps you'll understand a bit better, though it's difficult to have the same sort of feelings when you don't know what it's like to have been totally alone in the world.'

She stretched up her arms and locked her hands behind my neck.

'I'm alone in the world,' she said, 'I know how you feel.'