A Future Arrived (43 page)

He shook his head and forced a grin. “Not a darn thing—now.”

They walked to the pub, crossing a bridge into Westwick Street, moonlight shimmering on the little river. A full moon and a dappled sky. The bombers would be out tonight, he was thinking, holding her hand tightly, heading out across the North Sea and over Germany bearing their bundles of leaflets. There was a paper shortage in Germany. They were probably grateful for the shower of printed material fluttering down from the night sky. Grateful or not, it didn't stop them from aiming their flak guns or sending up the night fighters. Good training for the crews. There was a joke going the rounds:

RAF interrogation officer to bomber pilot: “You scattered your leaflets over Berlin very quickly.”

“Oh, we didn't scatter them, sir, just tossed the bundles out.”

“Good God, man! You might have hurt someone.”

Not all the crews were flying. There were quite a few men in the pub from the Bomber Command field at Newton Heath, playing darts and making a large dent in the beer supply. There had been some bitter grumbling from some of the locals who resented the RAF taking over their favorite drinking spots. One of the small prices to be paid in the war.

If most of the men kept glancing at Kate, Colin kept glancing at them. His age, most of them … a few veterans with weathered faces and thick mustaches. He had lifted the first body out of the raft himself, expecting dead weight, shocked by the lightness—just bones and mummified flesh in the bulky flying clothes. Dead from the cold, the icy winds of February howling down from the Arctic. He wondered if they had watched the keening gulls before they died. Circling … knowing.

“You were very quiet,” Kate said as they walked slowly back across the bridge to Finch Grove.

“Was I? Just thinking, I guess.”

“Penny for your thoughts.”

He pressed her hand tightly. “I was thinking of you. That's worth a thousand bucks.”

“I wouldn't sell my thoughts about you for any price.”

She asked him in and made coffee on the hot plate while he slouched on the sofa and leafed through one of her biology books. Glancing at him, she could tell that he was staring through it, not seeing anything printed there.

“You have an expressive face, Colin.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Eloquent. You'd make a terrible liar. I know something's wrong. I can see it.”

“And what do you see … or think you see?”

“Oh, pain, anger … a gamut of emotions. When we were in the pub I watched your face while those chaps were playing darts. You had a haunted look in your eyes.”

“Pretty smart, aren't you?” He closed the book and dropped it on the floor.

“Care to tell me? I'm a good listener.”

“Okay.” He sat forward, hands clasped between his knees. “We picked up some dead men this afternoon … a bomber crew that had ditched two months ago. All we should have done when we saw they were beyond saving was to take their identity disks if possible and get the hell back in the air. I had them loaded aboard. Took time … hauling them out of the raft … stowing them in the stern. God protects fools, I guess. If a Jerry floatplane had been on the prowl we would all have been dead men. Allison should have chewed my butt off, but he didn't say a word—not yet, anyway.”

“I think you did the right thing. You couldn't just leave them.”

“Could—and should. The dead have no priority. We were a sitting duck for damn near twenty minutes.”

She sat beside him and rested a hand on his arm. “How do you feel about it, Collie?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, seeing the eyeless masks in the raft … the pink, smiling faces in the pub. A crew at rest … a crew at play. “I had to bring them home, Kate. I just wasn't tough enough to take off and leave them there.”

Her hand touched his face and he turned to her and held her fiercely, face pressed against her breasts.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. “Let me hold you.”

“Sleep on the couch,” he said. “So … damn tired.”

She smiled and stroked the back of his head. “Have to take your legs off to make you fit. We can share the bed. And one day we'll share each other … for ever and ever.”

I
N THE EARLY
morning hours of May 10, the sports editor of a Dutch paper awoke to the sound of planes. He was spending a few days on his parents' farm near Nijverdal, and the sound of the planes made the walls of the farmhouse tremble. He ran out into the dawn to see wave after wave of aircraft flying low from the direction of Germany. There was no telephone at the farm and so he jumped into his car and drove to the village where he phoned his paper in Amsterdam from the police station. He need not have bothered. Even as he was speaking Junkers and Heinkels were over the city, bombing the airport and strafing the roads.

W
HAT CAME OVER
the wires in the Paris office of INA during the course of the day was ominous and confusing. Trying to separate fact from panicky fiction was a guessing game that Martin, preparing his midnight broadcast to the U.S., was loath to do. He made endless telephone calls to his various sources of information and received nothing but wild speculation, darkest rumor, or euphoric wishful thinking for his pains. By six in the evening he had very little written. Then Albert called and asked him to meet him at the Café Alma in the rue Tronchet as soon as possible.

Albert was pacing the sidewalk in front of the café when Martin pulled up in a taxi. “About time,” Albert said, opening the door for him. “I have a very nervous witness.”

“A witness to what?”

“You'll find out. Just don't press him too hard or the bird will fly.”

It was an appropriate allusion. The young man waiting nervously at a corner table on the terrace was a lieutenant in the French air force. He would not give his name, he said. His superiors had warned him to say nothing of what he had seen on patrol that day—not that they had believed him, he added bitterly. The war is a farce. We are going to be sold out by the Fascists!

Martin persuaded him to have a double cognac and quietly calmed him down. The pilot glanced around the nearly deserted terrace, swallowed his brandy neat, and began to talk. He had taken off that morning from his base near Châlons-sur-Marne for a reconnaissance flight over the German lines from Saarburg to the Rhine. He flew at fifteen thousand feet, but in the early light of morning he saw fleets of German fighter planes, an umbrella of them, about ten thousand feet above him. He dove quickly for the deck as his observer spotted Messerschmitts beginning to peel off. He flew on at treetop level, his twin-engine Breguet going flat out, nearly three hundred miles an hour. It was then that they saw the troop movements. Mile after mile of narrow roads clogged with German tanks and trucks, all heading into Luxembourg.

“And did you radio back what you had seen?”

But instantly! He had kept up a running comment for nearly three hours as they flew back and forth, inches above the trees, flying under high-tension wires and zooming up and over small hills. The columns of tanks, trucks, infantry, and horse-drawn transport stretched back farther than the Rhine … a hundred miles at least! Sluggish columns, jamming the few roads. On the way back to France they flew over the southern tip of Belgium and the Germans were there, heading for the Ardennes.

“Are you certain of that?” Martin asked.

The pilot nodded and asked for another cognac. Of course he was certain, and if his observer were here he would be just as certain. The tank columns were entering the forest. They flew low over them and were fired on for their pains.

“And when you landed in France?”

But nothing! He was in the reconnaissance section of Groupe d'Assaut I/52 and none of the bombers were even sent up until that afternoon, and then only to shift them to Montdidier for operations against
northern
Belgium some time tomorrow. A farce! A scandal! All those fat targets … all those juicy Boche columns jammed nose to arse on narrow roads. It was all too much for him. He was quite distraught.

“Well?” Albert asked after the pilot had gone. “What do you make of it?”

Martin swirled a dollop of cognac in his glass. “A clear light. It was what I expected they would do. The strategy according to Fenton Wood-Lacy. They'll push through the Ardennes and by-pass the Maginot line between Longwy and Sedan.”

Albert reflectively chewed his bottom lip. “They'd have to cross the Meuse to do that.”

“Hitler won't lose sleep over it.” He swallowed his drink and shoved the glass across the table. “They know what they're doing. A high-risk plan, Albert … dependent on the Allies doing nothing for a few days—or doing it badly. They lobbed three pitches straight down the middle today and we just sat back and looked at them. One out … top of the first.”

Albert shook his head. “You and your baseball analogies. I really must see a game one of these days to know what the bloody hell you're talking about.”

Scott Kingsford was pleased, talking over the feedback from New York. “Good broadcast, Marty. No interference to speak of. It looks like Winston took over at just the right time. Poor sap. One day in office and now this!”

The French military censor, a gaunt staff colonel, had let the broadcast proceed without interference. It was, he told Martin and Albert, the orders of General Georges that had kept the French bombers on the ground … to avoid hitting civilian targets in Luxembourg. General Gamelin would soon rectify that error in judgment.

“Christ,” Albert said as he left the radio station with Martin. “There's more animosity between the French generals than there is toward the enemy.”

“A lot of old feuds and clashes in philosophy. What they need is another Foch to pull them all together, but there's no such man on the horizon.”

They walked toward the Hotel Crillon where Martin was staying. Paris that early May morning had never looked lovelier. A great many people wandered the streets or strolled through the gardens of the Tuileries as though seeking to impress this tranquil beauty on their memories forever.

The RAF liaison officer to the French High Command was walking his fox terrier in front of the Hotel Meurice. The gray-haired wing commander fell into step beside them. “Monitored your broadcast, Rilke. Quite accurate, as far as it went. Can't tell you this on the record, or you either, Thaxton … not that you could get it by the censors if I did. The RAF put up bombers yesterday afternoon. Sent over thirty Battles to hit the roads and bridges. Only nineteen came back, and those so shot up I doubt if any of them will fly again. Simply appalling losses and not a bloody thing to show for it. A complete washout.”

“How do you see it, Peterson?” Martin asked.

The wing commander paused and looked down at his dog which was straining against the leash, eager to cross the road and romp in the gardens. “That we are in the wrong place with all the wrong things. I hate to play Cassandra, but I have the most awful feelings of doom.”

They walked on in silence after the officer and his dog had left them. Moonlight flooded the Place de la Concorde.

“Care for a nightcap, Albert?”

“No, thanks. I want to get packed. See if I can catch some transport to the Ardennes.”

“I don't think that's going to be a very healthy place to be.”

“I think you're right. But an old war correspondent once told me that to write about war one must go where the war is.”

Martin smiled ruefully. “I was afraid those words might come back to haunt me. Take care of yourself … and never be too proud to duck.”

D
EREK
R
AMSAY MOVED
his canvas deck chair out of the shadow of the dispersal hut and into the sun. He was in his shirtsleeves, his jacket with the new rings on the sleeves hung on the chair behind him.
Flying
Officer Ramsay—and a section leader now that Jolly Rodgers had been declared too old to fly fighters. The three Hurricanes of Green Section were dispersed across the flat, dry grass, engines warmed and ready to go. He eyed them with a sense of frustration. It was the 18th of May and all hell was taking place across the Channel. The squadron that had shared Kentish Hill with them had been sent to France the previous week and grim reports had drifted back. Eighteen aircraft had flown over and now only five were left—and nine pilots dead or prisoners of war. Half of Fighter Command was across the pond and here sat 624 Squadron on its duff with sixteen new Hurricanes. Not even an intruder scramble in the last few days. Jerry keeping his planes tight to the vest at the moment, like a winning poker hand.

They stood down at dusk, the ground crew pushing the planes into the antiblast revetments. Jolly Rodgers, raised in rank and made station commander as compensation for being grounded, came up to him in the mess.

“Met someone this afternoon who knows you, Ramsay.”

“Who?”

“Stand me a whisky and I might say.”

“All right, you blackmailing bastard.”