War Bonds: A Novel of World War Two, page 18
“Is it true?” she mouthed, and he nodded. Mouth wide in a silent squeal, she hugged him, then returned quickly to the stove to resume her task.
At that moment, Annalise appeared in the kitchen, face red and blotchy, strands of hair escaping from the ribbon tied at her neck. When Friedrich emerged from the lavatory, she asked him and the staff to leave the kitchen, as she had important instructions to give the lieutenant for house repairs she needed him to complete.
“We must make our plans to leave, Gordon, soon,” she whispered once they were alone.
“What is it, Annalise? What has made you so upset?”
“The Allies. They have come ashore in France. How long before they are at our doorstep? We must not wait for this.” She grabbed his hands in hers. “We must go.”
“But how? I have no papers, no standing.”
“I can get these for you. Reinhard has access to documents that will get us out. We will take a car and drive to Switzerland, where the children are. I will tell Reinhard I am going to visit them and hide you. You can drive a car, yes?”
Gordon’s mind raced. “Yes, but Annalise, I doubt your husband would release a car to you and…” She moved close to him, reaching her arm around his back, pulling herself to him. He felt the moist warmth of her breath on his neck. She did not wish to hear his objections.
“The driver will accompany me,” she whispered. “You will have to dispose of him.” Her eyes searched his. “Can you do that?”
“Probably—yes. When? When are you planning to go? There are arrangements I will have to make to allow us as much time as possible before we are discovered. I will be missed at the camp and they’ll blame your husband. I need to think how to make this work.”
“Do that, then. How quickly will the Allies move across Europe? That will determine our departure. We must stay ahead of them and I will learn as much as I can of their progress from Reinhard.”
Gordon knew the BBC broadcasts the POWs tuned in to each day would be much more reliable than anything Reinhard would admit to Annalise.
“A year perhaps? They have a lot of ground to cover before they get as far as Poland, Annalise.”
At this, she relaxed a little. “Then we will have enough time to ensure we can do this without discovery. Perhaps I can convince Reinhard I wish to spend Christmas with the children in Geneva.”
. . .
From that moment, Annalise concentrated on two things, and two things alone.
The first was devising a detailed plan of escape, along with fallbacks for every eventuality that might confront them. She collected and hid the civilian clothes Gordon would need to make the escape, along with a uniform jacket of Reinhard’s—a cast off that had grown too tight. Her unexpected visits to Reinhard’s office, ostensibly to surprise him with a picnic lunch or a mid-afternoon walk in the forest, pleased him immensely. As he set about notifying his staff that he would be off campus with his wife for an hour or so, Annalise examined the maps strewn about his office and rifled through his files for documents that could help her and Gordon cross the border into Switzerland.
Her second priority was keeping the house staff occupied so she and Gordon could pursue their affair. After years of managing Reinhard, she trusted her sexual aptitude—her creativity, her relentlessness—to cement Gordon’s commitment to build a life with her away from all he had known before. She dispatched the staff—along with Friedrich—to the market in the staff car each time Gordon was at the house, all but instructing them to stay away for the bulk of the afternoon, making arcane requests for things she knew they would never find. Once the car was safely away, it became her custom to discover new ways and places to please her lover. They improvised on the staircase, in various rooms across the house, the risk of their discovery heightening her pleasure. Her favorite setting became the music room, with its the thick carpets and the sunlight that streamed through the tall windows, because afterwards, while he lay contentedly, she could move to the piano bench and play—Schumann, most often, with its emotional, minor key melodies, that for her, captured their liaison in all its complexity. She loved the smile that played on his lips as he listened, how he followed the movement of her naked body, her talented fingers, and how often the music moved him to take her a second time.
. . .
As the staff undertook one particular shopping expedition, the driver declared the Frau was up to something. He had a sense.
“Indeed, it’s true,” responded Helene. “I’ve heard them.”
“As have I,” said Clara. “Such a surprise. The Frau is tutoring the lieutenant in German.”
Even Friedrich bought the story the women peddled. The Englishman, he said, parroting what Clara had fed him, had developed an affinity, a love even, of Germany and the German people. Clara and Helene had overheard him discussing this with the Frau. The secretiveness came about because the prisoner was rather shy. So deep was Friedrich’s commitment to the notion of Aryan German superiority, that he could not conceive the Frau found a weak, captive Englishman even remotely attractive. Helene wondered aloud if the lieutenant would stay in the Reich after the Germans won the war. Not completely convinced, the driver observed that the lieutenant had spoken German fairly well when he’d arrived—why the shyness now? He and Friedrich mused about the irregularity of the circumstances as the women exited the car and began their shopping. The driver opted not to tell Friedrich about the thing that had really raised his suspicion, the reason he had brought this up in the first place, because he wished not to forfeit the benefit he’d derived from cooperating with it.
It was the height of the summer growing season and Clara was delighted to see tomatoes and carrots, along with a variety of fruits for sale. As she stood considering which potatoes to add to her basket, a man drew alongside her, selected a firm, large one and suddenly handed it to her.
“This looks like an excellent candidate for the lieutenant’s soup, does it not, Clara?”
Her stomach fluttered. She held her breath as she considered how to respond. She did not recognize him and if he knew her name, he was most surely a collaborator. His dress was unremarkable, that of a farmer, which confused her. He did not look like one who benefited from Gestapo favor. He spoke impeccable Polish, highly cultured, with the accent of someone from Warsaw.
“Przepraszam?” she stalled. Excuse me?
The man continued to survey the potatoes, reaching across the bins for the best ones, extending his arm in a way that brought him close to her and ensured he could to continue to speak without drawing attention.
. . .
At the end of August, the BBC trumpeted the liberation of Paris, reporting the German army was scrambling east, the retreat in disarray. Embedded in the broadcast were strings of greetings, oddly worded coded messages that indicated the Allies crossing France and would soon press into the Reich—that the POWs would see freedom in a matter of months. But as summer turned to autumn, the Allied offensive in Holland stalled, troops failing to gain purchase in Germany. The Red Army, now blasting its way into Poland, would certainly arrive before the Americans and the Brits. Conditions at the camp deteriorated, each prisoner subsisting on two meals a day of a barely flavored broth, plus one small piece of bread every other day. The provisions Gordon smuggled from the manor house proved life-saving for many, doled out to the weakest man first. Still, prisoners died every day.
Wishing to get out of Sagan before the thick of winter set in and before the Red Army arrived, Gordon and Annalise agreed to a day and set their plan in motion. Their conspiracy became more and more obvious, Clara and Helene wondering what the commandant would say if he were to witness the brazen way his wife looked at the lieutenant, making jokes, touching him, signaling things had fundamentally shifted in ways that could imperil them all. Annalise no longer planned to craft a story for her husband that she wished to visit their children. Any travel was risky now, and he would most certainly forbid it. She planned to simply leave him, acknowledging to Gordon that this would take him by surprise—shock him—which, she said, was precisely why she must leave. In her carefully constructed rationale, it was he who had wronged her, bringing her so near a war zone, not at all the life promised her when she left the Conservatoire for him. Far from extending her horizons, Reinhard had limited her prospects. That he was unaware of this, verified their unsuitability, she concluded. The ill-suited marriage was the reason she must leave. It was unrecoverable, she insisted, even without Gordon’s intrusion. Just as she had learned to cope with life’s vicissitudes, her husband would have to find a way to confront his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Scatter thou the people that delight in war.
–Psalms 69:30 (KJV)
France, 1944
In military vernacular, it’s called “clearing,” a purposeful camouflage of the violence involved in sweeping acre upon acre of French soil of steadfast German troops. Clearing the cities and towns of France of the enemy, including pockets of collaborators who had much to lose with the Allied advance, was a brutal if fairly swift endeavor, initiated with Operation Overlord at Normandy and reinforced with Operation Dragoon, as the Allies came ashore in the South of France. Aided by tens of thousands of Resistance fighters, the Allies eventually pushed the Germans back to the Vosges, the low range of mountains between France and Germany which had only now recovered from the battles fought there during The Great War. But weeks of aerial bombing, artillery and cannon fire, and finally, house-to-house fighting in which soldiers looked one another in the eye before pulling their triggers, proved costly. To retake each street, each block, each tavern cost thousands of lives, with homes, churches—entire villages—regularly blown to pieces in the crossfire.
The escape lines would soon be rendered obsolete. Wills emerged from his long-shrouded existence and proceeded to Avignon, making himself known to a captain in charge of a group of British paratroopers moving north. As he attempted to explain his identity—his capture at Calais, his work with the Resistance—the platoon sergeant raised his machine gun and held it steady. He believed this man, who looked French but spoke perfect English, was most likely a German spy.
“Identification, please,” said the captain.
“I have none, sir. My name is William Hughes. Second Lieutenant William Hughes. I have worked with the French Resistance since 1940. Codenamed Carlos. My area of operation was south of Bordeaux, through the Pyrenees.”
This rang a few bells with the captain, but it was information anyone could have cobbled together as the conflict neared its pivotal moments and practical men abandoned long held loyalties in favor of keeping themselves alive. “Hands up, on your head, then. We’ll take you with us and run down your serial number to see who you might be.”
Had Wills opted to traverse the well-worn path to Spain—a path much safer with the Germans in retreat, he’d have been welcomed as a hero at the British Embassy—fed and cleaned up, his country and his family joyously notified that another young British soldier feared lost was in fact, safe and well. Instead, he placed his hands on his head as instructed, a prisoner of war again, of the Allies this time. They placed him on a truck bound for Paris with a German platoon that had been overrun in vicious fire at Toulouse. Seated directly across from him, a face he knew in an instant: the Unteroffizier from Calais, the very man who had trained his machine gun on the surrendered soldiers in the British garrison so long ago. Wills would never forget the terror of those moments, the soldier’s finger playing over the trigger, the intensity in his gaze, his anxiety exposed in the way he ran his tongue across his lower lip again and again. That ferocity had abandoned him in the months since, his eyes tired now, vacant. He slumped on the bench, the ruts in the road bouncing him into the bodies of his fellow detainees. One took umbrage and pushed him hard, causing him to tumble from the bench and strike his head. He stayed there in a heap on the floor of the truck bed for the rest of the trip, eyes closed, blood dripping from a spot on his head, not a single one of his compatriots interested in learning the extent of his injury. Wills knelt next to him long enough to make sure he saw the chest rise and fall, the heart beating. Nearly comatose, the soldier fell into his deepest sleep in months, flinching now and again, moaning at some unseen horror. Wills wondered if the images that floated behind the soldier’s eyes still included a glorious German victory.
. . .
They arrived in Paris at dusk, the city bustling and animated after the repression of occupation, the long, blood-red Swastika banners gone from the erstwhile Nazi headquarters at the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kléber. Prisoners were processed here, then taken to the coast where waiting transports would take them to England. The pall had lifted from the city, replaced variously with jubilation and outrage—emotions vigorously suppressed during occupation that insisted, now on a full hearing. Loud, laughing, exuberant Parisians filled the sidewalk cafés—the restaurants finally free of the hated Germans. As the truck paused at a stoplight, passersby shouted epithets at Wills and his fellow captives, their explicit gestures needing no translation. Suddenly, a group of people coalesced into a shouting, furious mob. At the center, two women, forced to kneel before men with shears. Les tondues, Wills learned: women whose hair was shorn to humiliate them, to make clear they had collaborated with the occupiers. The purges had already begun. He thought about the many women with whom he had worked, those who decided early in the occupation that risking death was preferable to bending to the Nazis’ evil. Some, like Sylvi, ran the escape lines in and out of southern France aided by countless observers—farmers, bakers, schoolteachers—who gathered vital intelligence on troop movements that they passed to couriers who relayed it to the Allied command. Wills knew of young women who had plied themselves in physics and chemistry, mastering the art of explosives they repeatedly used to sabotage German communication and transportation links. Many of these brave resisters had been caught and very publicly executed, their leaders appearing to take each loss matter-of-factly—but, in truth, they suffered, absorbing each life lost like a body blow. And there were some, Wills knew, who lived a double life, who seduced their way into the beds of German officers to gain crucial information that aided the Allies and the Resistance. The uninformed called them whores: to Wills, they were heroes of France.
The truck came to a stop outside the provisional headquarters of the rapidly reforming French government. Wills and the others were directed to exit and form a cue at makeshift tables arranged across a courtyard; clerks would take their names and serial numbers to compile the POW lists. An American colonel supervised the proceedings. When Wills reached the head of the line, a British corporal handed him a form. Once again, he tried to explain himself.
“Corporal, may I speak with the officer in charge?” he asked.
The corporal lifted his head, surprised. “I’ve heard about you blokes,” he said, “looking and sounding like a Brit. Your spyin’ days are up, mate.”
“That’s just it. I’m from Elsworth. I’m a British lieutenant, name of Hughes, William. I served with the 30th Infantry Brigade of the BEF at Calais where I was taken prisoner. I escaped outside Lille with the help of a farmer and his family and made my way to the south of France. I have worked with the French Resistance since then, getting men through Spain with the support of the Special Operations Executive.”
“That’s quite a story, old man. Nice the way you worked all the details in there. You did this for four years, you’re saying?”
Wills scribbled his serial number and thrust it in front of the clerk. “Look it up. Please. You’ll see when I was captured and when I was declared MIA.”
The corporal summoned an assistant.
“Take this bloke for a debrief,” he whispered to the private. “Maybe he’ll cough up something that can help us find other German spies or collaborators lurking about.” The private asked Wills to step out of line and follow him.
“Good luck, mate,” called the corporal. “Hope you get home… to Berlin, I mean… real soon.”
Wills grimaced and followed the private through the foyer of the building and into a converted ballroom. There, he found an odd array of ostensibly German soldiers claiming special circumstances, like British or American citizenship. Overseeing this was an assemblage of Allied officers and top leaders of the Resistance who were being assimilated into the FFI—the French Forces of the Interior—in improvised ways. They surely deserved the recognition and respect, Wills thought. The Maquis he had worked alongside were as valiant as any British soldier he knew and they had accomplished immeasurably much, tying up German units that would have otherwise engaged the Allies. But Wills wondered just how successfully these men who fought with a ruthless gut instinct could be engrafted into a regular army with its firm set of rules and protocols.
As he scanned the room, he saw a young man looking intently in his direction, a vaguely familiar face, leaner and more mature now, but still recognizable. Gilles, from the farm in Lille. He wore the uniform of a private in the French army. He nodded to Wills, then headed out of the ballroom, returning sometime later with the American colonel Wills had seen in the courtyard. They approached. Gilles extended his hand, then began the introductions.
“Guillaume, I am so happy to see you,” he began before turning to the colonel. “There is a mistake. This man is British. My family rescued him after Calais.”
The colonel’s eyebrows arched skeptically. “As you can imagine, this is a fraught time, Private, not a moment to take anybody’s word for much of anything. How can you be sure of this?” He turned to Wills. “Where have you been, then? Roaming about the French countryside?”
“No, sir. I chose to stay and help the Resistance. I worked near Bayonne, sometimes over to Toulouse. I took soldiers and families across the Pyrenees. My code name was…”
