The Way Ahead (30 page)

‘Come out, for God’s sake,’ he said.

‘We can’t, the door’s locked.’

‘The window, man, the window. Climb out. I’ll help. Hand me your children.’

‘No, there’s our luggage, anyway, everyone’s luggage, in the guard’s van.’

A woman, becoming hysterical, brought about a
greater
reluctance to leave the train. But a young man suddenly shouted.

‘We’re fools. Of course we must get out. I for one will.’

He pushed his way through to the window and levered himself out. Bobby helped him down.

That impulsive act was repeated elsewhere, by those passengers who had voiced doubts and suspicions. Within minutes, two middle-aged men and their wives, three young men, one young woman and a family of five, had also left the train via windows. That, however, amounted to only fourteen people out of what Himmler would have called a consignment of over three hundred subhumans, including fifty-one children.

Roget, who had expected all of them to jump at the chance of escape, had planned for the children and their mothers to be taken aboard the large truck, and for the men and other women to follow on foot, the whole under the escort of his group, the temporary destination a remote mountain monastery, the permanent refuge Switzerland. He had thought the freeing of the trainload of Jews would be a blow struck for the tarnished honour of France, and it shocked him that only a few chose freedom.

Arguments, warnings and appeals could not break down the attitude of the men and women whose trust in promises was so fixed. Helene was dismayed and even angry. She saw acceptance of resettlement as stupidity. Bobby said to her that in a way he hoped the trusting believers were right and
he
was wrong, that European Jews really were being resettled somewhere. Otherwise, he said, he would always bitterly regret not pulling every man, woman and child forcibly off the train, never mind their beliefs.

‘I’ve a feeling we’ll both have to live with that regret,’ said Helene, watching partisans escorting the fourteen refugees into the forest to face a trek through to the far side, where the truck was hidden and guarded.

Roget, now impatient to get away, spared a moment to point out to an elderly man that the train wasn’t going to be able to move until the track was repaired.

‘We will wait,’ said the venerable Jew from his compartment window.

‘More fool you, all of you,’ said Roget in disgust, and whistled up his band. Down from the last coach came the two men who had been keeping watch on the jammed inner door of the guard’s van.

Inside the van, Sergeant Hoenloe and his men, directed by the Gestapo officers to a mountain of luggage and boxes, succeeded in uncovering a sealed crate containing submachine-guns and a cache of ammunition. They smashed it open. Sergeant Hoenloe grabbed one gun, peeled off its oily wrapping and loaded it from the cache.

‘Arm yourselves,’ he hissed, and his men and the Gestapo officers snatched at the weapons. He moved to the communicating door and sprayed it with bullets. The bullets burst through but struck no targets. Still firing, Sergeant Hoenloe applied a
savage
kick to the splintered door and it crashed open, despite the wedge. He was out in a flash, rushing to the landing step of the coach, from where he saw the running figures of the swinish insurgents. Alerted by the sound of gunfire, Roget and a number of men and women were going headlong for the shelter of the massed pines.

Sergeant Hoenloe fired again, and roared for his men as he gave chase. They followed with their loaded weapons, the Gestapo duo with them. All eight Germans spread out, went down on one knee and searched for targets among the disappearing partisans. They fired.

Helene ran, Bobby ran, they all ran. One man, hit in the leg, went down on the very edge of the forest. Roget stopped, and with the help of a comrade, took hold of the wounded man’s arms and dragged him fast over the ground into shelter. The rest of the men and women disappeared amid the pines, although not before the sickening disaster of a bullet through the back of his head killed one man outright, and a second fell dying, his body riddled with bullets.

Sergeant Hoenloe, a man of action furiously set on a need to take prisoners, ran forward, his men on his heels. Reaching the foremost trees, they sprayed fiery lead into the forest. The prey, however, had gone quickly to ground and were flat on their stomachs. Bullets passed above them, smacking and thudding into tree trunks, or whining through gaps to smash into undergrowth. Bobby knew the band had to stay for a while to hold off the opposition long enough to give the escaping Jews
and
their escort time to reach the truck. From the ground, the partisans returned fire for a few moments, then fell silent, Bobby inwardly cursing a ricocheting bullet that had struck his left arm above his elbow.

Sergeant Hoenloe gestured to his men with a flailing hand, signalling the need for a flanking manoeuvre.

‘Get round them before they start moving again,’ he hissed.

Four soldiers divided into two pairs. One pair darted to the left, the other to the right. Each pair covered thirty metres before entering the forest. But Roget, no fool, had men waiting for just such a move, the obvious one. The Germans encountered continued silence as they crept forward left and right. It was a silence that made them wonder if the partisans had managed to melt away unheard.

From the train the confused passengers watched and listened. They saw two German soldiers and two plainclothes men flat on the ground facing the forest, their weapons sighted. What they did not see for the moment was the small group responsible for immobilizing the driver, fireman and German corporal. These men and women, on the blind side of the train, began to edge quietly round the guard’s van, the nearest point to Sergeant Hoenloe and the three Germans with him.

In the forest, the two left-flanking soldiers, easing slowly and carefully forward, froze as a woman’s voice, speaking German, came softly to their ears.

‘Stop. Drop your guns and turn.’

They stopped, yes, but did not drop their weapons, and their turn was calculated. A man and a woman confronted them, each with a levelled Sten gun, unfriendly fingers curled around triggers. Other men were backing them up from various points.

‘Drop, drop,’ said Helene, attired in beret, leather jacket, trousers and sturdy boots. Beside her, Bobby, similarly clad, eyed the Germans like a man who’d be happy to blow their heads off. Not only was his left arm hurting like hell, but he was remembering something Colonel Buckmaster of SOE had told him, that a company of Waffen-SS troops had massacred scores of British soldiers taken prisoner during the fighting retreat to Dunkirk.

The two Germans, tight-lipped, flung down their weapons, and at that moment their right-flanking comrades were downed fifty metres away. Three partisans, rising up from cover, simply leapt on their backs and sent them crashing. Roget wanted no killing, if possible. There were bloody reprisals for the killing of German troops by the Resistance.

Sergeant Hoenloe, cooler now, was waiting for the sound of fire that would tell him his flanking men were attacking the swines who had sabotaged the railway line. He and his men would then go in, firing as they went. From the train, the watching Jewish passengers held their breath as they saw several men and women suddenly appear at a run, a run that brought them speedily at the backs of the grounded Germans.

‘
Achtung! Kaput!
’

Attention. You’re finished. The warning and the
message
came from a Resistance man. The two Gestapo officers and the soldier rolled over to stare up the small group of insurgents, all armed. Sergeant Hoenloe did not roll over. He came calmly to his feet, still facing the forest, and he lifted his submachine-gun and let go a burst that emptied the magazines. The bullets whined and smacked into the forest. It was to let his flanking men know he wanted immediate action. He did not get it. There was no response at all, neither from his men nor the skulking partisans. Nor did the swines at his back take any action. Or so he thought until something heavy struck the back of his head. He blacked out.

Not long after, he and his men, together with the bitter-faced Gestapo officers, were back in the guard’s van, tied hand and foot. The corporal up with the driver and fireman remained trussed, and the latter men, tied to the controls, were left like that.

The passengers, heads out of windows, saw exactly what happened to the sergeant, his men and the two Gestapo officers. One man, withdrawing his head spoke urgently to the people in his compartment, telling them that if nothing was done to help their German guards, everyone on the train would suffer. That led to a number of men climbing out of windows as soon as the partisans had disappeared. They opened up the guard’s van and released the Germans.

Thirty minutes later, Sergeant Hoenloe and one of his men caught up with the trekking Resistance group. He had had to leave four men behind to
ensure
the Jews remained on the train. The Gestapo officers had insisted. He was a good soldier, a competent sergeant and wholly in favour of Hitler’s Reich, and that sent him pounding in pursuit of the Resistance group, along with only one man. The moment he saw a lone figure flitting ahead of him, he and his sole companion opened fire with their submachine-guns. Ahead, the partisans scattered. The two Germans swept the area with bursts of fire. The partisans melted away fast. The Germans rushed and came upon a man lying on his back, a woman and another man down on their knees beside him. Sergeant Hoenloe glimpsed the face of the wounded man. It was deathly white beneath its darkness. That’s one dog on his way to hell, he thought. The others are what I need for handing over to the Gestapo.

‘Flatten yourselves, you swines, on your dirty faces!’ he hissed in guttural French.

Bobby and Helene looked up at him, pain in their eyes.

‘Your turn to crow,’ said Bobby. ‘Perhaps,’ he added.

From high in the pines men dropped on the two Germans, who folded like sacks beneath the weight of plunging bodies. They smashed, faces and stomachs, into a thick carpet of needles.

Bobby and Helene could do nothing for the man who had caught the best part of a burst of fire. Roget, leader of the group, died quietly, however, speaking not a word from the moment the burst
had
felled him. He, Bobby and Helene had formed the protective rear of the retreating partisans, but at a distance from each other. That had saved Bobby and Helene, and they found it bitterly painful to watch Roget, the best of men, die, to hear the long shuddering sigh that came from him seconds before he stopped breathing amid a silent grieving circle of his men and women. Roget was a man of the old France, the France of liberty, fraternity and honour, not the France of the defeatist Pétain and Weygand, or the corrupt France of Laval and other pro-Nazis. There were regrettably many such people, all of whom had come out of the rotting fabric of 1940. The rehabilitation of the country was in the hands of General de Gaulle, his Free French and partisans of the same breed as Roget. Bobby and Helene desperately hoped they would succeed.

The partisans hammered a stake into the ground where Roget had fallen, and carried his body away with them to bury it in the ground adjacent to his family’s vineyard. They left Sergeant Hoenloe and the other German soldier tightly lashed together, and the lashed bodies further lashed to a tree. It would take them hours to release themselves.

The group finally caught up with the truck, previously reached by the Jewish refugees and their escort. Everyone went aboard, and space was found on which to place the body of Roget. Before Bobby climbed up with the driver, however, Helene, as adept at First Aid as any FANY officer, took the bullet out of his arm and dressed the wound.

‘Thanks,’ he said, sweating a bit.

‘See, it isn’t so bad, no,’ she said, ‘just a flesh wound. But—’ She grimaced.

‘It’s nothing compared to our losses?’ said Bobby. ‘You’re right, you sweet woman, it’s a large empty nothing. Three dead men, including Roget, by Christ.’

‘I know, Bobby, I know,’ whispered Helene.

‘Time to go home again, Helene.’

‘How bitter,’ said Helene that night.

‘God, yes,’ said Bobby. They were bivouacking, along with everyone else, under the starry sky. They were, however, very much by themselves. ‘How the hell did those two Germans get free quickly enough to tail us as they did?’

‘Bobby, could some of the Jews have released them?’ asked Helene.

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Bobby, ‘could they have been indirectly responsible for the death of a man whose single purpose had been to engineer their escape?’

‘If so, how fortunate for them that they’ll never know,’ said Helene. ‘Ah, those poor people, so passive, so resigned. At first, I was angry with them. Now I am sad. Who could not be sad for people who believe resettlement is Himmler’s idea of being kind to them? Himmler is the world’s filthiest specimen of a diseased pig on two legs. I say that knowing only what his Gestapo swine are doing to France. What are they doing, I wonder, to other countries?’

‘And to the Jews,’ said Bobby. ‘All these rumours
of
concentration camps. I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight.’

‘Is your arm hurting?’ asked Helene.

‘No, just a bit stiff and sore,’ said Bobby, lying on his back, head pillowed on his folded right arm, new moon a bright crescent high above him. It had been a bad and sad day, the operation only minutely successful, and the Resistance leader gone, shot to pieces in the space of a second. The death of a brave man who’d become a fine friend and comrade was bloody bitter.

‘Ourselves, we have been lucky, yes?’ said Helene.

Yes, they had, thought Bobby, lucky in all their missions so far. The missions had made them act as one, think as one, and he could not visualize life without his fearless French love. He wondered if he should put aside his belief that a wartime marriage was fraught with too many uncertainties to be fair to a woman. Perhaps he ought to marry Helene. He knew it was what she wanted, and that she would like to tell her parents through the help of the Resistance. Messages had been sent periodically to Jacob and Estelle Aarlberg in that way, to let them know he and Helene were alive and well.