The Devils of D-Day (4 page)

Madeleine said, ‘And ever since it’s been there, the village
has been dead and depressed.’

‘Because of the voices?’

Madeleine shrugged. ‘There have been voices. At least,
that’s what some people say. But more than anything else, it’s the tank itself.
It’s a terrible reminder of something that most of us now would prefer to
forget.’

Eloise said, ‘Those tanks could not be stopped. They set
fire to German tanks all along the river, and then they set fire to the Germans
themselves who tried to escape from them. You could hear the screams all night
of men burning. In the morning, the tanks were gone. Who knows where, or how?
But they came through in one day and one night, and nothing on earth could have
held them back. I know they saved us,
monsieur
,
but I still shudder when I think of them.’

‘Who’s heard these voices? Do they know what they say?’

Eloise said, ‘Not many people walk along that road at night
any more. But Madame
Verrier
said she heard
whispering and laughter, one night in February; and old
Henriques
told of voices that boomed and shouted. I myself have carried milk and eggs
past that tank, and the milk has soured and the eggs have gone rotten. Gaston
from the next farm had a terrier which sniffed around the tank, and the dog
developed tremors and shakes. Its hair fell out, and after three days it died.

Everybody has one story about the evil that befalls you if
you go too near the tank; and so these days nobody does.’

I said, ‘Isn’t it just superstition? I mean, there’s no real
evidence.’

‘You should ask Father Anton,’ said Eloise. ‘If you are
really foolhardy enough to want to know more, Father Anton will probably tell
you. The English priest who said words over the tank stayed at his house for a
month, and I know they spoke of the tank often. Father Anton was never happy
that it was left by the road, but there was nothing he could do, short of
carrying it away on his own back.’

Madeleine said, ‘Please let’s talk about other things. The
war is so depressing.’

‘Okay,’ I said, lifting my hands in mock surrender. ‘But
thank you for what you’ve told me. It’s going to make a real good story. Now,
I’d love some more of that onion soup.’

Eloise smiled. ‘You have a big appetite,
monsieur
. I remember the American
appetites.’

She ladled out more of that scalding brown soup, while
Madeleine and her father watched me with friendly caution, and a little bit of
suspicion, and maybe the hope that I wasn’t really going to bother to do
anything unsettling, like talk to Father Anton about what happened on July I3,
I944, on the road from Le Vey.

After lunch of hare casserole, with good red wine and fruit,
we sat around the table and smoked
Gauloises
and
Jacques told me stories of his boyhood at Pont
D’Ouilly
.

Madeleine came and sat beside me, and it was plain that she
was getting to like me.

Eloise retreated to the kitchen, and clattered pans, but
returned fifteen minutes later with tiny cups of the richest coffee I’d ever
tasted.

At last, at well past three o’clock, I said: ‘I’ve had a
marvellous
time, but I have to get back to work. I have a
whole mess of readings to take before it gets dark.’

‘It’s been good to talk with you,’ said Jacques, standing up
and giving a small bow. ‘It isn’t often we have people to eat with us. I
suppose we are too close to the tank, and people don’t like to come this way.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘Well, it isn’t comfortable.’

While Madeleine helped to take out the last dishes, and
Jacques went to open the farm gate for me, I stood in the kitchen buttoning my
coat and watching Eloise’s bent back as she washed up over the steamy sink.

I said,
‘Au revoir
,
Eloise.’

She didn’t turn round, but she said,
‘Au revoir
,
monsieur
.’

I took a step towards the back door, but then I paused, and
looked at her again.

‘Eloise?’ I asked.

‘
Oui
,
monsieur
?’

‘What is it really, inside that tank?’

I saw the almost imperceptible stiffening of her back. The
mop stopped slapping against the plates, and the knives and forks stopped
clattering.

She said, ‘I do not know,
monsieur.
Truly.’

‘Have a guess.’

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Perhaps it is
nothing at all. But perhaps it is something that neither heaven nor earth knows
anything about.’

‘That only leaves hell.’

Again, she was silent. Then she turned from the sink and
looked at me with those pale, wise eyes.

‘
Oui
,
monsieur
.
Et le
roi
de
l’enfer
,
c’est
le
diable
.’

The priest was very old. He must have been almost ninety,
and he sat at his dusty leather-topped desk like a sagging sack of soft
potatoes. But he had an intelligent, kindly face; and even though he spoke
slowly and softly, as his lungs filled and emptied with the
laboured
aspiration of ancient bellows, he was lucid in his words, and precise. He had
fraying white hair and a bony nose you could have hung your hat on, and as he
talked he had a habit of
steepling
his long fingers
and lifting his neck so that he could see down into the grey cobbled courtyard
that fronted his house.

He said, ‘The English cleric’s name was the Reverend
Taylor,’ and he peered out of the window as if expecting the Reverend Taylor to
appear around the corner at any moment.

‘The Reverend Taylor?
There must be
five thousand Reverend Taylors in England.”

Father Anton smiled, and did something complicated inside
his mouth with his dentures. ‘That is probably so.

But I am quite certain that there is only one Reverend
Woodfall
Taylor.’

It was four-thirty now, almost dark, but I had got so caught
up in the mystery of this decaying Sherman that I had skipped my cartographic
readings for the day, and taken a trip up to the opposite end of the village to
talk to Father Anton. He lived in a huge,
sombre
,
forbidding French house in the severest style, with a hall of dark polished
wood that you could have landed a 747
on,
and
staircase after staircase of chilled marble, flanked by gloomy oil paintings of
cardinals and Popes and other miserable doyens of the church. Everywhere you
looked, there was a mournful face.

It was as bad as spending the evening at a Paul Robeson
record night in Peoria, Illinois. . Father Anton said, ‘When he came here,
Mr
Taylor was a very enthusiastic young vicar. He was full
of the energy of religion. But I don’t think he truly understood the importance
of what he had to do. I don’t think he understood how terrible it was, either.
Without being unkind, I think he was the kind of young cleric who is easily
seduced into thinking that mysticism is the firework display that celebrates
true faith.

Mind you, the Americans paid him a great deal of money. It
was enough to build
himself
a new steeple, and a
church hall. You can’t blame him.’

I coughed. It was wickedly cold in Father Anton’s house, and
apart from saving on heating he also seemed to have a penchant for
penny-pinching on electricity. The room was so shadowy and dark that I could
barely make him out, and all I could see distinctly was the shine of the silver
crucifix around his neck.

I said, ‘What I don’t understand is why we needed him. What
was he doing for us, anyway?’

‘He never clearly
explained,
monsieur
. He was gagged by your oaths of
secrecy.

Apart from that, I don’t think he truly understood himself
what it was he was required to do.’

‘But the tanks – the black tanks-”

The old priest turned towards me, and I could just make out
the rheumy gleam of his eye.

‘The black tanks were something about which I cannot
speak,
monsieur
. I
have done all that I can for thirty long years, to have the tank taken away
from Pont
D’Ouilly
but each time I have been told
that it is too heavy, and that it is not economical to tow it away. But I think
the truth is that they are too frightened to disturb it.’

‘Why should they be frightened?’

Father Anton opened his desk drawer and took out a small
rosewood and silver snuffbox. He asked, ‘You take snuff?’

‘No, thanks.
But I wouldn’t mind a
cigarette.’ He passed me the cigarette box, and then snorted two generous
pinches of snuff up his cavernous nostrils. I always thought people sneezed
after they took snuff, but all Father Anton did was snort like a mule, and
relax further into his creaky revolving chair.

I
lit
my cigarette and said, ‘Is
there something still inside that tank?’

Father Anton thought about this, and then answered.
‘Perhaps.
I don’t know what.

The Reverend Taylor would never speak about it, and when
they sealed down the turret, nobody from the whole village was allowed within
half a
kilometre
.’ ‘Did they give any kind of
explanation?’ ‘Yes,’ said Father Anton. ‘They said there was high explosive
inside it, and that there was some danger of a blast. But of course none of us
believed it. Why should they need a vicar to sanctify the sealing of a few pounds
of TNT?’

‘So you believe that tank has something unholy about it?’

‘It’s not what I believe,
monsieur
. It’s what
your
Army obviously
believed, and I have yet to meet anyone more
sceptical
than a soldier. Why should an Army call in a cleric to deal with its weapons? I
can only assume that there was something about the tank that was not in
accordance with the laws of God.’

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but the slow
and lisping way in which he said it, the way the words came out in that freezing
and sepulchral room like dead flowers, that was enough to make me feel chilled
and strangely frightened.

I said, ‘Do you believe in the voices?’

Father Anton nodded. ‘I have heard them myself. Anyone brave
enough to go near the tank after dark can hear them.’

‘You heard them yourself?’

‘Not officially.’

‘How about unofficially?’

The old priest wiped at his nose with his handkerchief.
‘Unofficially, of course, I made it my business. I last visited the tank three
or four years ago, and spent several hours there in prayer. It didn’t do my
rheumatism a great deal of good, but I am sure now that the tank is an
instrument of evil works.’

‘Did you hear anything distinct? I
mean,
what kind of voices were they?’

Father Anton chose his next sentence with care. ‘They were
not, in my opinion, the voices of men.’

I frowned at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Monsieur, what can I tell you? They were not the voices of
human spirits or of human ghosts.’

I didn’t know what to say after that. We sat in silence for
a few minutes, and outside the day grew grainier and darker, tinged with that
corroded green that always threatened snow. Father Anton seemed to be deeply
buried in thought, but after a time he raised his head and said, ‘
Is
that all,
monsieur
?
I have studies to continue.’

‘Well, I guess so. The whole thing seems like a real
mystery.’

The ways of war are always a mystery,
monsieur
. I have heard many stories of strange and inexplicable
events on battlefields, or in the concentration camps.

Sometimes, holy miracles occur, visitations by saints. I
have a parishioner who fought at the Somme, and he swears he was visited every
night by Saint Therese.

Then again, monsters and agents of hell have been seen,
seeking out the cowardly and the vicious. It was said that Heinrich
Reutemann
, the SS commandant, kept at Dachau a dog that was
possessed by the devil.’

‘And this tank?’

The pale withered hands formed their reverent steeple. ‘Who
knows,
monsieur
?
It is beyond my comprehension.’

I thanked him, and got up to leave. His room was like a dark
musty cave. I said, ‘Do you think it’s dangerous?’

He didn’t turn his head.
‘The
manifestations of evil are always dangerous, my friend.

But the greatest protection from evil is a steadfast belief
in Our Lord.’

I stood by the door for a moment, straining my eyes to see
him through the gloom.

‘Yes,’ I said and then went down the cold and silent marble
staircases to the front door, and out into the wintry street.

I didn’t drive straight there, partly because I was waiting
for the late afternoon to grow darker, and partly because the whole thing made
me unusually nervous. By seven o’clock, though, after a roundabout tour through
the muddy shuttered villages of the Route
Scenique
of
the
Orne
Valley; past farmyards and peeling houses
and roadside shrines where pale effigies of Christ crucified leaned mournfully
into the evening frost; past inkblot trees and cold whispering fields; I
arrived at the
Passerelle’s
farm, and drove into the
yard.

The evening was bitter and still when I climbed out of the
Citroen and walked across to the farmhouse door. A dog was yapping at some
other farm, way across the valley; but here everything was quiet. I knocked on
the door and waited.