Two Silver Crosses, page 54
‘Oh, my dear Virginie!’ Hortense said sadly. ‘You were always so sure of yourself, even as a little girl, always so determined.’
‘Then you’ll come.’
Hortense put the blanket down and drew her daughter close so that they sat side by side on the bare mattress. The bombardment was so loud it made the windows rattle.
‘You must understand, my Virginie,’ she said. ‘I cannot come with you, even if I wanted to. I have given my word to stay here.’
‘Then break it. They’ll understand. No one will expect you to stay here now. Not when the Germans are coming.’
‘No, my dear. I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve given my word to God, chérie, and that is not a promise that may ever be broken. I have taken confession. After all this time I have taken confession. This is my penance.’
‘To stay here? With the Germans coming?’
‘The convent is to be a military hospital,’ Hortense explained, ‘the same as it was for the Great War. I am to stay here and nurse the wounded.’
‘You can’t,’ Ginny said, with an anguished face. ‘What if you’re bombed? Maman! Please! Anything could happen to you.’
‘We are in God’s good hands.’
‘Maman!’
‘It’s no good, Virginie, chérie. I’ve given my word. It’s a great consolation to me. I shall be here doing God’s work among the injured.’ And, she was thinking, soldiers were the cause of my sin and soldiers will be my redemption. ‘And besides…’ she said, but then she checked herself.
‘Besides?’
Hortense looked at Ginny’s loving face and thought of her own illness, the thinning hair under the coif, the growing clumsiness, the loss of memory. Now she could see that part of her penance was to keep this awful secret from her daughters. My Virginie is so trusting, she thought, and so entirely without guile. I can’t tell her. It would be cruel to make her share it, especially now. This must be my burden. ‘No. No matter.’
Ginny made her last appeal. ‘If you won’t come home for me,’ she said, ‘then come for Emily. She’s afraid the baby won’t be normal. She said if you could be there it would make all the difference.’
‘All mothers think things like that,’ Hortense said gently. ‘But the truth is, it won’t make any difference whether I’m there or not. We are all in God’s hands. What is to be, will be.’
‘You won’t come back.’
‘No, my dear, much though I love you both. You must lead your own lives now and leave me to lead mine.’
Ginny tried not to cry but, despite her efforts, tears oozed out of her eyes and stung her nose. To have waited so long and come so far, and all for this — the cruellest disappointment. But even as she struggled, she knew she had to accept it. ‘Oh, Maman,’ she said. ‘I love you so much. How can I leave you here with the Germans coming?’
‘With prayer,’ Hortense said, earnestly. ‘That is how it can be done, my chérie. With prayer. Now, you will need something for your journey. Stay here for a while and I will get you a food basket.’
Alone in the dishevelled dormitory, Ginny put her face in her hands and wept with disappointment and the aching misery of loss. Then, clutching her silver cross in her hand, she said a prayer, wiped her face on her handkerchief and set to work to fold the remaining blankets. What else could she do?
Charlie was perched on the running board of a lorry when Ginny emerged. He’d been talking to the lorry driver while he waited for her and had been given the latest news in lurid detail. One glance at her tear-streaked face told him all he needed to know.
‘She’s not coming,’ he said, striding across the drive towards her.
‘No.’
‘Not now, or never?’
‘Never.’ She was close to tears again, but she stayed in control. ‘Where’s the car?’
‘I had to hide it,’ he said, and tried a joke. ‘If I hadn’t the nuns would have knocked me over the head and taken it by force. I never knew nuns were so fierce.’
But the joke fell flat. ‘Where is it?’ she said. ‘The sooner we get out of here the better.’
He led her out of the grounds to the car. ‘Quite right,’ he said, as they climbed in. ‘It’s none too healthy round here. They’ve taken Brussels. They’re across the Meuse.’
‘Yes, I know. Maman told me.’
‘And bombed Boulogne,’ he said as he started the car. ‘Did she tell you that, too? The port’s closed. So we can’t go there.’
‘What about Calais?’
‘Risky. If they’ve bombed Boulogne, they’ll have bombed Calais, too.’
‘Dieppe?’
‘That’s risky, too. I think our best bet would be to go back to Le Havre.’
‘All that way!’ she sighed.
‘We’ll take the south road.’
‘What about the convoys?’
‘They’ll be going in the opposite direction now. We ought to have a clear road. What’s in the basket?’
‘Food for the journey,’ Ginny said, lip quivering. ‘Oh Charlie! In all this, she thought of giving us food for the journey.’
‘Get the map,’ he said. Something to do. Something to keep her mind off it. ‘You’ll have to navigate. Avoid Amiens.’
They drove south-west, following farm tracks and minor roads, planning to join the main route at Poix or Aumale. Towards midday they came to a railway line and the road curved to follow it. The road was deserted and the track empty, and that was how it remained for several kilometres. From time to time, there was a sound of distant gunfire and twice, they heard the roar of planes, but they were driving through woodland and couldn’t see them. Apart from that, it was incredibly peaceful. They ate their picnic as they drove and told one another they couldn’t believe their luck.
‘Perhaps we’re going to get through without any trouble,’ Ginny said, as they negotiated a sharp bend. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t seen any trains.’
‘There’s one ahead of us,’ Charlie replied.
It was a troop train and appeared to have come to a halt on the ridge just ahead. There was no smoke issuing from the engine and no sign of life in any of the grey-green wagons.
‘We’ll leave the car here,’ Charlie said, ‘under these trees, just in case we need cover. You stay here, and I’ll go up and see what’s going on. I don’t like the look of it.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Ginny said. ‘If we’re going to be shot, I’d rather we were shot together.’
They abandoned the car, squeezed through a gap in the hedge and, ready to dash for cover at any time, made their way around the edge of the field until they reached the train.
Like something from a ghost town, abandoned years since, it was completely empty.
‘Where have they all gone?’ Ginny whispered. She felt too exposed to speak aloud.
Charlie was more concerned with why they’d all gone.
They walked along the foot of the embankment, gazing up at the silent wagons. And there, suddenly and horrifically, was their answer. The end wagon had been riddled with machine-gun fire and what was worse, oh much, much worse, its sides were streaked red with blood.
For a few seconds Ginny was so shocked that she couldn’t speak. She stood beside Charlie holding on to her cross for protection and comfort. ‘My Jesus, mercy! Mary, help!’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Charlie said, seizing her by the hand.
‘There might be somebody still in there.’
‘If they are, they’ll be dead,’ Charlie replied brusquely. This was no time for delicacy and he was too horrified to be gentle. ‘It’s a troop train, Gin. The survivors will have taken their wounded and gone. Come on. There’s nothing we can do here.’ Except get caught in the next attack and killed ourselves.
‘We ought to check,’ she said, allowing him to lead her away. ‘Oh, Charlie, this is awful! I thought Old Joliot’s death was bad, but this is ten times worse. Twenty times worse. Oh, I can’t bear it. Why do they do such things?’
There was a plane approaching. ‘Run!’ he said frantically. ‘Keep your head down! Run like hell.’
Ginny obeyed, and they ran, dodging under branches and hurtling past brambles. By the time they reached the car, the plane and the danger had passed.
‘What are we going to do now?’ Ginny asked, when they had recovered their breath.
‘Get back on to the main road and drive like lunatics. Where’s that map?’
The next turn-off took them to a minor road which led directly to the junction of two major roads, one from Abbeville and the other from Amiens.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, jabbing his finger on the map and starting up the engine. ‘Even if there’s more traffic, it’ll be better than being a sitting target here.’
Neither of them was prepared for what they found when they got to the junction.
Both roads were entirely blocked, and this was no ordinary road traffic. This was a population on the move, and with any kind of vehicle that could be begged, borrowed, bought or thrown together — farm carts pulled by huge chestnut horses, and battered wagons packed to bursting with bedding and children; small children hauling prams on lengths of rope; dogs pulling orange crates on wheels, even a goat cart with three small children packed into it as tightly as peas in a pod. There were hundreds and hundreds of people on foot; old men in cloth caps and patched coats bent double under the bundles on their backs; old women in black, laden like beasts of burden; young women carrying their babies in shawls slung across their backs; families, hand in hand; solitary individuals with walking sticks, peasant farmers with ruddy cheeks and town dwellers with pallid faces. Many were poor and humble. All of them were dirty, weary and afraid and on the run.
For a few minutes, Charlie and Ginny sat in the car and simply watched in amazement.
‘They’re getting out of the way,’ Charlie said at last. ‘You’ve got to admire them. Just to up sticks and go.’
‘Where are they all going?’ Ginny wondered.
‘God knows. Le Havre probably.’
‘But then where?’
‘I’m going to inch forward,’ Charlie said, suiting the action to the word. ‘See if we can get into the mainstream. We’re all going the same way, so it shouldn’t be impossible.’
It wasn’t impossible, but it was extremely difficult, and the arrival of a car among so many weary pedestrians provoked a lot of abuse. It upset Ginny so much that she got out and walked along with everyone else. Soon she was talking to the family who were trudging beside her.
They’d come from Belgium, one man told her. The Germans were everywhere. ‘They come in great tanks, Madame, Panzers they’re called, terrible things and they blow everything up first. They bombed all the towns. I’ve never seen so many planes. The sky was black with them.’
‘The Stukas are the worst,’ the man’s wife said.
At that there was a growl of agreement from those nearest in the line. ‘They dive out of the sky. Terrible. They dive out of the sky and shoot us all to pieces. They attacked us when we were crossing the border. So many killed. It was terrible. Terrible.’
‘They won’t come here,’ the woman said. ‘We are too far away now. Right into France, n’est-ce pas?’
After ten minutes or so, one of the children stumbled and fell. ‘She could ride in the car,’ Ginny suggested. ‘She and her brothers. There’s room for four or five.’
In the end, the car was packed with nine exhausted children, and after they’d had an hour’s rest, another weary group was gathered and given a chance to ride and sleep, too.
‘You have our eternal gratitude, Monsieur,’ their father said to Charlie.
‘We shall run out of petrol before we get to Le Havre,’ Charlie said to Ginny in English.
‘What does it matter?’ Ginny answered. ‘We must help them.’
‘I know,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I thought I ought to warn you, that’s all.’
‘Just so long as we’re out of range of the dive-bombers,’ Ginny said. ‘They’ve been making my blood run cold with some of the things they’ve been telling me about them.’
It was a vain hope.
Presently the column came to a halt in order to give horses and walkers a much-needed rest, and Charlie and the children got out of the car to stretch their legs. Suddenly the air filled with an excruciating sound. Ginny looked up and saw a plane diving out of the sky straight towards them — a squat, dark plane with its undercarriage down and the Nazi swastika clear on its tail fin. Her heart jumped in terror at the sight, but the noise it was making screwed her terror into agony. The nearer it got the louder it screamed in a constantly rising pitch that froze her blood.
Stop it, stop it! she screamed inside her head. Make it stop! People were screaming and scrabbled to get off the road and into the ditch. Charlie grabbed Ginny by the waist and pulled her down. The plane screamed over their heads and spat red fire. Bullets hissed through the air and pinged and thudded on to the road. Then the plane was gone, leaving screaming and sobbing in its wake.
‘How dare they do that!’ she shouted to the sky. ‘How dare they!’
The colour had drained from Charlie’s face, leaving him grey and haggard. Ginny felt so sorry for him that she stopped shouting and stood up, horrified to find that her legs were shaking and that she couldn’t control them.
Minutes passed. Charlie was being sick. Somebody was groaning. Time seemed to have stopped altogether.
Then voices were warning. ‘Down! Down! Take cover! He’s coming back!’ Sure enough the Stuka had turned, and that terrible engine was screaming towards Ginny all over again.
Her rage was so intense that she lost control, and acted blindly, without thought or caution. She pulled Old Joliot’s pistol from her bag and ran into the road cocking it as she ran, and began firing wildly into the air, screaming abuse, tears running down her cheeks. ‘Assassin! Boche! Espèce de salaud! Foutez-nous la paix!’
And then the plane was gone for a second time and her legs gave way under her and she sat down in the middle of the road and burst into tears.
She cried for a very long time, too exhausted by terror to do anything else. It wasn’t until Charlie appeared beside her with a lit cigarette in his hand that she was aware of anything except her own anger and fear. She took the cigarette and smoked it gratefully, drawing the smoke down into her lungs, glad of its harshness. The two of them sat silently, side by side in the road, smoking. When they finally hauled themselves upright, she had recovered enough to notice that some of the people in the ditch were injured, and that there was a horse on its side in the road, still alive, but with foam flecking its mouth and blood pumping from its neck. Then, the horror of what had happened began to seep into her senses.
Charlie was talking nonsense. ‘You’re injured, Gin.’
‘No, I’m not,’ she said crossly.
He was insisting. ‘Let me see.’ She looked down at her skirt and saw that he was right. There was a long gash in the skirt and blood was seeping through the edges of the cloth. But she felt no pain and no emotion. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘So I am.’
It was a short deep graze on her outer thigh, nothing more serious. But she didn’t feel any emotion about that, either. There was the horse frothing on the road and an old lady straddled half in and half out of the ditch with two children beside her weeping. ‘We must see to them,’ she said. She walked across to the horse and, surprised by her own calm, fired her last bullet into his head to put him out of his misery. Then, because the gun was useless and tainted, she hurled it into the ditch.
Charlie took her hand, led her to the roadside, made her sit down, and began to attend to her wound, stolidly practical. ‘I’ll make a pad with my other shirt,’ he said. ‘If I can tear a strip from your petticoat, I could bandage it. Stay there.’
She didn’t have the energy to move. It was as if her life had been reduced to slow motion, by brutality and death and her own necessary violence. She watched listlessly as he climbed into the car to retrieve his shirt. She sat listlessly as he padded the wound and tied the pad in place with a strip of petticoat, knotting the ends clumsily. Then they sat and shared their last cigarette, drenched in the most evil-smelling sweat.
The car was peppered with bullet holes, a long line of them from the bonnet end to the boot. People were crawling out of the ditch, groaning and weeping. The injured were calling for water. Was there any water? There were two children standing in front of them saying something they couldn’t understand.
‘Gran’mère. Gran’mère.’
Then a man appeared, grey with shock. ‘It’s my mother,’ he said. ‘Could you come?’
It was the old lady in the ditch.
‘We must help,’ Charlie said, getting stiffly to his feet, and they went across to see what they could do for her.
They could see at a glance that she was very badly injured. She lay in a pool of blood, deathly pale. But she was alive, conscious and trying to speak.
‘What are we to do, Monsieur?’ the man asked Charlie. ‘We can’t leave her here and we have no transport.’
‘Can you get a blanket?’ Charlie said. ‘She needs warmth. We’ll carry her into the car. She can lie on the back seat. It’s all right. We won’t leave her.’
Trying hard not to hurt her, they carried her to the car, dripping blood all the way, and laid her on the back seat, while the other refugees attended to their wounded and grieved over their dead. Gradually, the convoy got under way again. They left their dead by the roadside and their blood on the road.
‘I shall hate the Germans for this for as long as I live,’ Ginny said.
They journeyed on, too shocked to say much. They passed through hamlets and villages, and people offered them water, but there was no food — not that they could have eaten, if there had been. It was a long hot afternoon and full of suffering. After an hour the old lady lost consciousness, but she was still bleeding and groaned at every bump in the road.
‘She ought to be in hospital,’ Charlie said. ‘Is there a hospital in Le Havre?’
‘A hospital couldn’t help her,’ Ginny said sadly. ‘She’s dying.’
