Spook's Gold (29 page)

Lemele crossed the platform to slide up close to the stationary train and started moving forward, trying to peer through the gaps between the carriages. Unfortunately, however, she could not now see the soldiers because there were two trains between her and the next platform on which the soldiers were walking and the carriages and thus the gaps between them were not aligned. She slowed and began peering through the dirty windows of the train, ignoring the curious glances from those inside. Then she spotted the soldiers again; they were entering the cars of the far train and she could see them milling around in the corridor of the carriage, pushing and bumping and laughing. Lemele could barely imagine the bravado or stupidity or both that would make people headed to war behave in such a way.

Marner appeared beside her. “We need to get onto the train on the other side of this one,” she told him, pointing to the soldiers. Marner nodded and moved forward to the end of another carriage, then motioned to her to follow. This carriage had a landing at the end; they were able to step onto it easily from the platform, but on the far side they had to go down once again onto the tracks. Marner jumped down first and then helped Lemele to descend.  It was incredibly gloomy in the narrow gap between the trains; no light carried from the concourse a hundred metres away and the dirty canopy far overhead was black with soot. Marner walked carefully forward, Lemele following very slowly on the uneven gravel that was crunching and shifting under her feet. They stumbled on past two carriages of the train that they were trying to get onto before Marner found one that had steps up to the landing, intended for rural stations and stops with no raised platform.

They had just gained the landing when a uniformed figure appeared on the platform beside the train and the head turned, aware of their presence on the carriage gangway. Marner pushed Lemele up against the bulkhead of the carriage and clamped his mouth onto hers. Her eyes went wide in alarm, hardening into physical protest as she pushed back and then beat on his shoulder to unclamp him. Fearing the possibility of her panicking and using her knee, he backed off and swivelled to feign surprise at the presence of the figure on the platform, who turned out not to be military at all, but a civilian train conductor peering at them. “No time for that! The train is just about to depart. Come on, back inside now Sir, Madame, if you please.”

The guard stepped onto the gangway and Marner moved back to allow him to open the door into the carriage corridor. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lemele glaring at him, her eyes striking sparks in the few rays of light that were filtering down here. He knew that but for the presence of the guard he would have received a slap. The guard motioned for Marner to enter the carriage and Marner in turn motioned for Lemele to enter first. She stalked past, muttering that he could take the smirk off his face, as they were ushered in.

Inside the carriage it was bedlam. With all of the seats occupied, the corridor was jammed with standing soldiers who were jostling and shoving for extra space. Lemele could have entered one and used her gender to obtain a seat from one of the young soldiers, but she preferred to keep close to Marner. To pass through the corridor it was necessary to step between and on the rows of feet on either side. When Lemele finally found a gap in the throng of bodies in the corridor, up against the outer windows, Marner eased in beside her. “Sorry about that,” he apologised. “I suddenly saw a uniform and it was just an instinctive reaction. You know, to have an excuse for being out there.”

“Okay, no big deal,” snapped Lemele coolly. “Just business after all.”  She stared out of the window at the milling hordes still out there on the platform, officers haranguing the guards and clerks holding clipboards, who seemed lost and bewildered by the task of having to pack impossible numbers of people into carriages that were already full.

They settled into silence, willing the train to get under way and transport them away from Paris and danger. Marner was still concerned about the possibility of being asked for travel permits and in particular what story they could invent for Lemele, if not on this section of the journey, then later as they penetrated deeper into Normandy. After ten more minutes, during which the number of people on board somehow increased further, the train finally jolted, clanked and set off.

“Where is this train going to?” asked Lemele.

“The soldier I talked to told me that they are going to Caen.”

“Caen?  But that’s....”

Marner leaned in closer, “Quieter, please!”

Lemele swallowed, breathed, whispered, “Firstly, Caen is not a direct route to get to where we are going. Secondly, Caen is close to the invasion front, may even now be on it or behind it for all we know. But it is certainly not a good place to be heading for!”

Marner matched her sarcasm, “I know. But firstly, this train is actually moving. Secondly, it gets us out of Paris and thus further from whomever is looking for us. Thirdly, well, at least we are moving in approximately the right direction. We can get off at the first main station and re-orientate ourselves better when we are under less scrutiny.”

Lemele decided not to argue; now that the train was moving it was a
fait accompli
anyway.

After emerging from the great sooty caverns of the station, they made snail-like progress through the inner suburbs of the city. As they rolled out through the north western limits of Paris, Marner enjoyed the sight of the wealthy villas with their large gardens full of shady trees in full leaf, lawns tumbling down to the banks of a backwater of the Seine. He imagined that it would be good to live here, with a small boat or punt for Sunday outings and picnics.

Only once the intermittent remnants of scruffy lower class suburbs had given way to fields and farm land did Marner relax into the swing and sway of the train. Even the raucous songs, ribald jokes and buffoonery from up and down the carriage failed to irritate him. Minutes after passing through Mantes station the train ground to a halt once again. This was not the first stop; there had been others and also periods when they had crawled along, barely at walking speed. He guessed that they had not travelled far during the two hours, that at normal speed it should only have taken twenty or thirty minutes to reach this point. But at least they were moving and he was gaining confidence that they would reach some major town or station by nightfall at the latest, although it would probably be many more hours standing.

After a couple of minutes it became clear that this stop was not temporary. Guards and officers were now on the ground beside the train yelling at the soldiers to get up and out. Lemele and Marner shuffled in line along to the end of the carriage and descended to the ground. There was a line of people moving in file towards the front end of the train and so they joined it, keeping close to the carriages to avoid proximity to the officers who were shouting and coaxing their charges to keep moving, speed it up.

Close to the steaming engine the passengers were directed left, away from the train. They traversed the edge of the field bordering the train track; fortunately the ground was dry and hard and easy to walk on and after a hundred metres they emerged through a gap in a hedge onto a road, where they were directed to turn right. Fifty metres further on the road became a bridge spanning the Seine and as they crossed the reason for the stop was revealed: the rail bridge had been entirely destroyed. All that remained of the bridge were the jagged stumps of the concrete support pillars and between them a tangle of twisted metal and iron-laced concrete half immersed in the wide muddy river. Marner judged that that this was aerial bombing, not explosives laid under rails by the Resistance.

“Is the front this close?” asked Lemele in disbelief as she stumbled over the rubble on the road. The bridge that they were walking on had also been partly damaged, possibly by debris thrown from the destroyed rail bridge. At least it was sufficiently intact for them to cross on foot.

“No. The enemy are systematically destroying key bridges and junction points to prevent us moving our reinforcements and armour up to the Front. Bridges over large natural obstacles like this river are a high priority target for them.”

She considered disputing his use of the terms ‘them’ and ‘us’, but let it go. At the other end of the bridge they were forced to walk another half a kilometre along the road. There were residential buildings here on the roadside and in the garden of the first house, closest to the river, was a jagged lump of concrete approximately a metre long and deep in size. It could only be a piece of the destroyed bridge that had been thrown here by the force of the bombs, where it had felled a tree in the garden, the shredded trunk testimony to the immense inertia and force that the projectile had carried. Incredibly the structure of the house was untouched and it seemed that only the tree had prevented the concrete missile from tumbling on into the side of the dwelling. All of the windows in the house were shattered and this was also true for many of the other dwellings as they trudged on along the road, away from the river.

At the end of the row of houses they were directed onto a side road to the right that led them back towards the train track. After a hundred metres they could see a column of people coming towards them and the origin of this group soon became clear: a train headed towards Paris that had been forced to stop for the same reason as theirs. As they drew close and passed the group, they saw that most of them were wounded soldiers, bloody bandages wrapped around heads, upper torsos, arms, a few struggling along on crutches. The soldiers with Marner and Lemele fell silent except for a few who called encouragement to the shattered and defeated injured, “Did you give them hell?”, “We’ll pay them back for you.”  But all they received in response were a few shaken heads.

Then a worse sight: the more critically wounded on stretchers were being offloaded from the train and laid upon the ground along the trackside. A few nurses moved back and forth supervising those doing the offloading, chiding them to be more gentle and careful with the injured, who were being induced to new heights of pain or agony by the buffeting. It was not clear if those entirely still and silent on their litters were unconscious or dead, such was the dreadful pale colour of most of them. Lemele was inured to the sight of wrecked human flesh, but this mass-suffering of so many young people, amputees amongst them, sickened her and she looked away.

Whilst they waited for the train to be completely unloaded, an argument broke out amongst the nurses and the military personnel trying to organise something out of this chaos. One of the younger nurses, perhaps only eighteen years old, made the point clear, “We do not have enough able bodies to carry the wounded. So tell me how you plan to get all of these,” she made a sweeping gesture along the line of stretchers that had now grown to perhaps fifty, “to the other train?”

The adjutant whom she had singled out for her wrath did not consider himself to be responsible for this situation or the logistics. He stated that he was simply charged with the safe passage and return of the military transport. He could only propose the possibility of sending someone into town to find trucks or ambulances, an idea that the nurse just laughed at derisively.

“You have plenty of able young men here,” observed Lemele. Everyone turned to look at her and she took a half step back, startled to find that she had become the centre of attention, surprised to find that her mouth had spoken the words without consideration or approval by her brain. However, she was now committed and spoke up with conviction, “There are enough men here to carry these injured.”  She pointed to the soldiers who were now clambering aboard the vacated train.

“Exactly!” exclaimed the nurse, and turned back to the adjutant. “Come on, get them organised.”

“But...but this train needs to get moving. We need to get it back to Caen before nightfall,” he retorted, turning to make it clear to Lemele with his frosty look that he did not approve of her butting into the subject. “And who are you anyway?  What business is it of yours?”

“We are on military business,” interjected Marner. He stepped forward between Lemele and the adjutant who, while not intimidated by Marner’s uniform, recognised his superior rank. Marner continued, “If you are responsible for this ‘military transport’ as you call it, then you are responsible for the delivery of its military cargo to its destination. Is that not so?”

“Well, if you put it like that, then. . . . yes.”

“Good. So this train goes nowhere with its new military cargo until you have despatched your full duty regarding the delivery of the current one.”

The adjutant nodded. This minor administrator could relate to logic when it was couched in such bureaucratic terminology. He turned towards the nearest of the officers who was getting his men loaded into the carriages and explained the situation. The officer tried to object but the adjutant had now made up his mind and stated that he could not allow this train to move until the wounded had been delivered to the other one. The officer clearly felt some empathy for the victims and so agreed, organising his men into groups to start gathering up the stretchers.

The nurse thanked Lemele for her support and then turned to move amongst the wounded now being lifted, urging the bearers to go carefully, with minimum shock or sudden movement. The number of soldiers meant that they could muster four to each stretcher, and two to each wounded man who was ambulatory but required support to stagger along. And so they set off at a reasonable pace along the road, a bizarre sight accompanied by a constant background noise of men groaning in pain, interspersed with terrible shouts and screams.

Marner and Lemele joined those not involved, a few civilians and senior officers travelling alone, to get aboard the train and find the best places possible. The conditions in the carriages were truly squalid; puddles of unidentified fluids, blood, discarded soiled bandages, the interior of the train buzzing with flies. Eventually they found a compartment that was in reasonable condition. Marner and the other officers threw out the bags deposited by the soldiers who had boarded earlier and settled themselves gingerly into their seats, avoiding as best they could the stains and damp patches.