Warsaw Concerto, page 31
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
The Soviet demonstration in Berlin would have wonderfully re-concentrated the Supreme Commander’s thoughts on the precarious position of his forces in Northern France; for all Hunt and Bramall and the rest of the BEF knew, that had been one of, if not the, reason the Soviets had gone to the trouble of mounting the Tempelhof and Checkpoint Charlie demonstrations in the first place.
The Commanding Officer of the BEF coughed, clearing his throat.
“All right, Edwin,” he decided, “there’s no harm in you seeding the battlefield, scouting the lay of the land in front of you, that sort of thing. Carry on doing that, as aggressively as you think fit. In the meantime, I’ll discuss matters with the CDS.”
Edwin Bramall quirked an involuntary grin.
“Yes, sir.”
“But discreetly, Edwin. Discretion is the word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put together some plans and let me have sight of them soonest. We shall speak again soon.”
Chapter 27
Friday 16th December 1966
Joint Interrogation Centre, Pirbright, Surrey
Once they had had time to reflect, both Sergey Akhromeyev and Vera Bertrand recognised that they had been more than a little unnerved, by the way they had been treated by their British ‘captors’. They had, after all, surrendered in hope, rather than expectation that their former enemies would feed the surviving women and children of the White Brigade, with little or no regard to their own fates. At the very least they had assumed that they, with their last loyal fighters, would be imprisoned, possibly indefinitely. Neither had discounted the idea that they might be tried for any number of trumped up atrocities or crimes they had never committed, possibly executed. Akhromeyev, was reconciled to the possibility that he might be exchanged for westerners still in Soviet hands; or perhaps, as a diplomatic bargaining chip, things he knew would be a death sentence. As for the other leading figures in the brigade; they lived in a world in which the well of pity had run dry in late October 1962…
‘If we carry on fighting, the British will roll over us in a week or two; our people – those who can - will have to flee into the country, take their chances with the cold and the bandits outside the towns,’ the man had confessed resignedly. ‘I have no idea if the British are to be trusted when they speak of honourable terms.’
Even several days later it was all a little surreal.
They had been ushered into a big tent in a field outside Beaupréau, a town some seventeen kilometres north of Cholet where the 2nd Royal Tank’s Battle Group had established its main headquarters.
To Akhromeyev’s and Vera’s astonishment everybody, absolutely everybody in the tent had jumped to their feet, and a clear-eyed, stern-faced man in a spic and span battledress wearing the crown and three-star insignia of a brigadier had stepped forward, crisply saluted the Russian – who had looked like a dirty vagabond, and stunk like a proverbial skunk – and unhesitatingly stuck out his hand in greeting.
“It is good to meet you at long last General Akhromeyev,” the Englishman had said in French, smiling ruefully. Next, he had turned to Vera, nodding a very respectful bow, and again extending his hand which, after a nonplussed moment, she shook, somewhat bemusedly. “And you must be Madame Bertrand? I am delighted to meet you both. I’m Edwin Bramall, I’m the fellow in charge here.”
The British had had fresh bread, tinned meat and fruit and…butter. That evening Vera’s and Akhromeyev’s hunger-shrunken stomachs had cramped as they ‘dined’ with their ‘hosts’.
It transpired that most of Bramall’s officers spoke fluent French and several, ‘Muscovite’ Russian, too. Throughout that first evening in the hands of the British they had listened to the sound of tank tracks rumbling, heavy equipment on the move and countless vehicles moving through the town and realised, with sinking hearts, that the White Brigade had been doomed the moment the British had got across the Loire in force.
Their pointedly civil battlefield interrogation, had begun the afternoon they arrived in Beaupréau – over coffee and ‘medicinal’ Brandies – and intensified the following morning.
‘They will want to de-brief you properly back in England,’ Bramall had explained. By then it was apparent that his, and his officers’ bonhomie, of the previous evening had been entirely genuine. ‘Arrangements are being made for your transfer as we speak.’ Turning to Sergey Akhromeyev: ‘I’m interested in the local tactical situation.’ And then. Looking to Vera: ‘If you are amenable, Madame Bertrand, I would very much like you to brief my logistics people about the condition and the ongoing humanitarian needs of the people under your protection. Obviously, that must be our immediate priority. We’re readying emergency medical and other supplies as I speak, but it would be good to have the best possible feel for what we are up against before my chaps charge in.’
Later, Vera and Sergey had bidden each other farewell, and she had been driven back down to La Séguinière, in a convoy of Land Rovers carrying a dozen machine-gun toting British SAS men. Where, on arrival, she had briefed Sebastien Betancourt and as many of the other, surviving members of the brigade, on what had happened, and what would happen in the coming days. Sebastien and the rest of her audience had been very nearly struck dumb at first.
However, by that second evening the first convoy, escorted by White Brigade guides and several Ferret armoured cars was on the road down to La Séguinière, where refugees from the surrounding countryside had already swamped the aid and emergency medical teams initially despatched to the Cholet district. There would have been absolute chaos had not Vera and Sebastien Betancourt been able to deploy their own people to marshal the influx of sick, hungry, desperate, wet and freezing humanity. That the British had simply reacted to the new situation by emptying their stores of food and medicine and organising fresh relief convoys, had reduced Vera to tears.
‘I have no intention of taking your fighters prisoners,’ Bramall had assured his ‘guests’. ‘Frankly, I would much rather they volunteered to join our cause.’
‘Our cause?’ Vera had queried, in retrospect, gracelessly.
‘Yes. We’re here to liberate France so that your country and all its people can be free.’
‘What if a liberated France chooses to be a Soviet Republic?’
The Englishman had grimaced.
‘I’m a soldier, Madame Bertrand,’ he had chuckled softly. ‘More than that, I am a soldier married to an avowed socialist who was, and presumably, still is a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,” another wry grin, “who contrarily, for such are the times in which we live, presently finds herself a member of a moderately populist, rightist, nationalist government in Oxford, and on convivial first name terms with our esteemed Prime Minister. That said, she and I seem to knock along together swimmingly. Hopefully, one day the people of your great country will do likewise. But first we must liberate it, preferably without completely destroying it in the process.’
With promises that the ‘situation around Cholet’ was ‘well in hand’, the former Red Army man and his partner, formerly the madam of the best – and only – bordello in Vichy had departed for England.
With all aircraft grounded by the hurricane blowing up the English Channel they had eventually boarded a destroyer at Cherbourg for a perilous nine-hour one-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre crossing to England.
They had both been very seasick.
It had been dark, with the rain from the tail end of the storm which had been flailing at Western Europe and the British Isles for nearly a week, very nearly defeating the frantically swishing wiper blades of the big car which had collected them at the quayside at Southampton.
That morning they were required to undergo medical examinations and issued new clothes. At mid-day they were re-united.
The Russian looked a little uncomfortable in his British Army battle dress. When he filled out again, he would grow into the uniform, but already Vera could tell he was a man unburdened from carrying a too-heavy load overlong and, that he was beginning to feel like a ‘proper’ soldier again.
“You look very fine, Sergey Fyodorovich,” she decided, fondly patting his chest over his heart.
“And you look like a real lady,” the man retorted, grinning broadly, obviously liking what he saw. “As always, my dear.”
Actually, Vera considered the trousseau she had ‘drawn’ from the base’s general stores as positively ‘old and frumpish’. A calf-length pleated skirt, a cream blouse, a thin cotton cardigan and a blueish jacket which almost but not quite matched the skirt was hardly her style.
Despite herself, she blushed.
If Sergey was temporarily a little worn down, prematurely aged a few years by their odyssey she had faired much worse. Women always did! Her hair was turning grey, the lines were collecting around the corners of her mouth and eyes, and all the things which had pained her only now and then two years ago, ached fiercely most days.
Their minders at Pirbright were politely, respectfully uncommunicative; deferring or side-stepping any questions of substance although when Sergey had asked: ’What is this place?” a youthful subaltern had briefly, been forthcoming.
“This used to be the Guards Regiment Depot, sir. Well, it still is, I suppose. However, since the unpleasantness of 1962 it has been much expanded. The facility we are in today, was built last year, and earlier this year the England football team stayed here for the duration of their successful World Cup soccer campaign. There’s a rifle range nearby, so, we apologise in advance for the racket most afternoons!”
It was mid-afternoon before the couple were escorted into a white-walled sparsely furnished ground floor room where two microphones, a large reel-to-reel tape recorder and several unopened official files sat on a table around which there were five hard-backed chairs. There was a metre-square mirror in the middle of one wall and the interviewees assumed there was an observation chamber behind it.
Two middle-aged men had been deep in conversation when they were shown in. They got to their feet and shook hands with the newcomers, smiling sternly.
Vera thought she recognised one of the ‘interrogators’; it infuriated her not to be able to put a name to him. And then he opened his mouth and she recognised him instantly.
As the war-time spokesman of General Charles de Gaulle in London, Maurice Schumann had become the London-based ‘voice of France’ throughout the Nazi occupation.
Fifty-five-year-old Schumann introduced himself and turned to his companion.
“This is Monsieur Furnival Jones of the British Secret Service,” he declared solemnly.
“For my sins the acting Director of MI5,” the fifty-four-year-old intelligence officer half-smiled. He had only been brought out of internal exile – in Scotland overseeing the Security Service’s most ‘incurable’ incurables, men and women who needed to be kept safe who could never, in the current international circumstances, be allowed to roam free with their secrets in general society – a couple of months ago.
Having been considered rather too close to the discredited regime of Sir Roger Hollis back in 1964, with which he had had his own strongly felt and stated ‘issues’ at the time, and subsequently, unfairly he still felt, been tarred with the same broad brush which had purged the upper echelons of the service after the conspiracy of silence about the parlous state of GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, had come to light, the last two years in the wilderness had been a sore trial.
“I happened to be in the area so I thought I’d sit in on the first session,” he went on. “It has been agreed between my government and the Free French authorities that everything that is said in this room will be recorded.”
Martin Furnival Jones had studied law at Cambridge. A graduate of Gonville and Caius College, he brought a forensic legal mind to his work for MI5. Not that many, if any, of his pre-October War fellow actors in the Play and Pageant Union, or the Speedwell Players had known, or guessed, that the popular member of the Hampstead tennis set and well-known local ornithologist had been a professional ‘spook’ most of his adult life.
Not even his late wife, Margaret, had really known the half of what he did when he disappeared into the city every day; the proto-typical commuter, his hat, usually a Homberg on his head, an umbrella and an attaché case jauntily swinging from his hands as he whistled a number from one of the shows currently in rehearsal, with a copy of The Telegraph neatly furled under his arm, every inch the most unremarkable, anonymous of civil servants.
Of course, unlike Sergey Akhromeyev, Furnival Jones’s fellow players and commuters, lacked the advantage of having regularly rubbed shoulders with KGB and Soviet military intelligence operatives for the last twenty years, and unsurprisingly, the Russian had recognised the Secret Service-man’s type straight away.
Behind the charm and perfect courtesy, the man’s eyes gave him away; if one knew what one was looking at one could not help but identify the tell-tale signs for what they were.
“History repeats,” Maurice Schumann remarked as he gestured for the participants to take chairs around the table, “in 1940 I found myself working for General de Gaulle, now I find myself liaising with our British Allies on behalf of General de Boissieu.”
Schumann had met Charles de Galle before the Second War when he was working as a journalist for the Havas news agency in Paris. Escaping after being captured in the fighting in 1940 he had sought out the great man in London and the rest, was history. The founder of the Popular Republican Movement, a right of centre Christian Democrat party he had served for many years as a deputy in the National Assembly. Back in the day he had had no qualms about calling for the execution of collaborators from his exile in London and been as bellicose, on occasions, in his radio broadcasts in the last year as he had ever been in the 1940s.
Vera had listened to some of those broadcasts, wondering if she was listening to a man who still honestly believed he was fighting a ‘black and white’ war, a war of the kind fought against the Nazis when knowing who one’s enemies was a relatively simple matter. Admittedly, she was biased, her communist affiliations in the old days had eventually made her an enemy of the ‘Free French in exile’ and their runaway prince-pretender, Charles de Gaulle, the great hero who had left them all in the lurch during four years of increasingly cruel and oppressive Nazi occupation.
“Perhaps, Monsieur Schumann,” she retorted tartly. “I was indeed an enemy of your kind once. I still remember the betrayals of 1943 and 1944, and,” she concluded with quiet despite, “the way you people in London started writing us, the true patriots who had stayed behind and actually fought the Nazis, out of your history books.”
Maurice Schumann bristled with sudden anger.
Martin Furnival Jones sighed wearily, although his expression an impassive mask.
“Nobody emerged smelling of roses from the years of the occupation, Madam Bertrand,” he offered in French. He glanced to Sergey Akhromeyev and spoke in Russian: “We all have enemies enough today, let alone those of the past.”
“Da,” the man murmured. Then, in French, addressing Schumann: “In 1943 Madame Bertrand was hunted like a dog, tortured, and left to die from her wounds in a Gestapo cell while all you Gaullists were living the good life in London. She is permitted her anger; just as I am for what was done to the Motherland four years ago. However, none of that changes the fact that you must speak for all Frenchmen, not just the one’s who dream of a new Fifth Republic. If you had been in the regions of your country that we have seen these last two years, or seen some of the other things that we have seen, you would know that there would be no France anymore but for the British. As for ideology,” he shook his head, “the people will follow whoever can feed them, and whoever can protect them because that is what your country has come to. Are you and Monsieur de Boissieu living off ‘the ration’ the people in the North must survive on? I think not, I think you are living like princes and your armies in France will never defeat the brigades coming out of the east, or that madman Maxim Machenaud and his Red Dawn maniacs down in the South until their leaders, people like you, re-find your hunger!”
Schumann had gone red-faced.
Martin Furnival Jones had opened one of the files on the table between Akhromeyev and Vera Bertrand. His gazed flicked across the top pages while the other man fulminated.
He had no intention, or the remotest interest, in defending his fellow interrogator, or his comrades from what he considered to be self-evidently just criticism. Although, unlike many in England, he did not blame Alain de Boissieu – not entirely, anyway – for the stalemate in France, it was his considered opinion that the Free French in England, mostly a gang of political hangers-on with nothing better to do than try to stab the military men in the back and whine, constantly, to their hard-pressed hosts about how they, not the Home Office, ought to be running the refugee and transit camps in which some three hundred thousand people still lived.
The problem was that de Boissieu, the de facto leader of the Free French, was away in France most of the time and there was no recognisable ‘political’ figurehead in England. This had created a situation in which the majority of the refugees from the continent had already been integrated into British society; while French men and women in England were hardly disinterested in what was going on across the Channel and many longed to return home, few engaged in the politicking of the self-appointed Free French ‘government in exile’. The upshot of this was that men like Schumann – whom nobody had voted for – was effectively, one of many lieutenants without portfolio, none of whom the Thatcher regime in Oxford took overly seriously.
