‘Big branch straight through the windscreen, sir,’ one of the soldiers at the front shouted. ‘Driver’s dead for sure and the other bloke’s in a right mess.’
The officer turned away and shook his head. ‘Drunks,’ he sneered. ‘Deserters, most likely, and I’m not wasting any more time on them. Let’s move out.’
‘Are you heading to Paris?’ Marc asked. ‘Can I get a ride?’
The officer looked as though his head was going to explode. ‘Piss off,
boy
. This is the French Army, not a bloody taxi service.’
But one of the soldiers was more sympathetic. ‘You’re only a few kilometres out and our horses are tired. You’ll do just as well to walk.’
‘What about the dogs, sir? Shall we bring them along?’ his colleague asked.
‘What the bloody hell do I want with a couple of filthy dogs?’ the officer shouted. ‘Shoot them. Might as well put the other bugger out of his misery too if you don’t think he’s going to make it.’
The soldier alongside the officer pulled up his rifle and shot the Alsatian clean through the head. It was harder to see the second dog inside the truck and the first shot hit it in the gut. It squealed desperately for several seconds before a second blast put it out of its misery.
Marc waited to hear a fourth shot as he staggered back towards the road, shaking with fear. But despite the officer’s suggestion to put the man out of his misery, the bullet never came.
Paul backed up to the side of an apartment block and wrapped his arms over his head as masonry crashed around him. The giant slab of bricks hit the opposite wall of the narrow alleyway and took on a spin before crashing down less than two metres from where he cowered. Pebble-sized chunks pelted his body as the mortar shattered.
‘Dad?’ Paul shouted.
He opened his eyes a fraction, only for them to be forced shut by the dust swirling through the air. The worst of the collapse had passed, but single bricks still chinked down and a woman screamed horribly. At least it wasn’t Rosie.
A second later, Paul felt a tug on his arm. Half blind and his mouth filled with dust, Mr Clarke dragged his son towards the early sunlight piercing the end of the alleyway.
‘Did you see Rosie?’ Mr Clarke asked.
Paul was coughing violently and couldn’t answer.
‘Rosie?’ Mr Clarke bellowed.
She’d sprinted ahead and stood at the end of the alleyway, in better shape than her male relatives. The German planes continued to drone as Paul forced himself to open his eyes and blink out the grit. They’d emerged into a busy square filled with dust, flames and panic. When Paul got some focus he saw the wreckage of market stalls. Every building had shattered windows and a horse thrashed helplessly on its side. Its hind quarters were badly burned and it was pinned down by the charred remains of a cart harnessed to its back.
Rosie looked anxiously at her brother’s torn and blood-spattered shirt sleeve. ‘Show me your hand.’
Paul raised his arm and saw that it was peppered with scratches and cuts. He’d hardly noticed because his grit-filled eyes were much more painful.
‘We’ll have to find some water and get that cleaned up,’ Rosie said. ‘Your head’s cut too.’
Paul was aware of a stinging sensation just above his ear and he felt with his fingertips until he found some hair matted with blood.
‘Oh, that’s clever,’ Rosie said. ‘Stick your filthy fingers in and get it infected.’
‘What can we do now?’ Paul asked, ignoring his sister and looking up at his dad.
But Mr Clarke was in a daze.
A terrible moan went up as a man hoisted an elderly woman on to his back. Her face and torso had been shredded by flying glass. Another man was calling out for a gun to put the burned horse out of its misery.
‘You’ve got a gun,’ Rosie said, giving her father a nudge.
‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ Mr Clarke said irritably. ‘I’m a foreigner walking around with a German pistol. Do you want me to get arrested?’
Rosie backed off and shook her hands furiously. ‘Well don’t just stand there, Dad! What
do
you want us to do?’
‘OK …’ Mr Clarke mumbled. ‘I’m trying to think … Can you remember the way back to the car?’
‘The alleyway’s blocked off with rubble,’ Paul noted.
But Rosie nodded. ‘I’m sure I can find another way back towards the river.’
‘Good,’ Clarke said, pointing across the square towards a post office. ‘You take Paul back to the car and use my first aid kit to clean up his cuts. I’m going over there to see if I can get a call through to Henderson in Paris and maybe pick up some bread if the queues aren’t too bad.’
Mr Clarke got out his wallet and gave his daughter a ten-franc note. ‘In case you come across a place selling bread, or some other kind of food that you fancy.’
‘What if we end up buying the same thing?’ Rosie asked.
Mr Clarke shrugged. ‘With the Germans smashing up the roads and bridges, supplies are going to get short. I’d rather we end up with too much food than not enough. Now start heading back and I’ll meet you back at the car in twenty minutes or so.’
‘Maybe we should stick together,’ Paul said. ‘My arm doesn’t hurt much.’
As Paul was speaking his sister realised that the aircraft had dropped out of sight, whilst the sound of their engines was getting louder. This could only mean that the pilots were coming in over the rooftops for a machine-gun attack. People in the square started running for cover and a few screams went up as a fighter cleared the flag post on top of a small civic building and let rip.
Travelling at two hundred kilometres an hour, the line of bullets crossed the square in under three seconds. Most pulsed off the cobbles and ricocheted widely, retaining enough force to kill. Direct hits pounded market stalls, tore up cars and occasionally hit human flesh.
Paul’s heart slammed as he dived into a doorway between two shop fronts with his father and Rosie bundled on top of him. He looked up, but his father forced his head down.
‘There’s more coming,’ Clarke explained.
Over the next half minute three more fighters skimmed low over the square, firing their machine guns and causing a wave of screams. There were more injured and some dead, but at least the horse got finished off.
After the fighters came a taut, dusty silence. Paul looked up and saw a fresh bullet hole in the masonry less than thirty centimetres above them.
‘Too close,’ Rosie gasped, close to tears and with her hands shaking.
A few metres ahead, a boy of about six cowered under the rusted frame of a market stall.
‘This square is too open,’ Mr Clarke said. ‘It’s a shooting gallery. Keep to the side streets as you walk back to the car.’
Another blast of machine-gun fire ripped off in the distance and an elderly refugee with his coat over his head kept rocking back and forth yelling, ‘
I can’t stand it
,
’
over and over.
‘There’s a dot of blood on your shirt, Dad,’ Rosie noted.
Mr Clarke looked down and saw a coin-sized circle of blood just below his nipple. ‘Shrapnel,’ he explained. ‘Just a nick.’
High above them, an aeroplane was going into a dive.
‘Stuka,’ Mr Clarke yelled, as he grabbed Rosie’s hand.
The risk of falling masonry in a bomb blast made Clarke avoid the narrow alleyway they’d emerged from minutes earlier. He led his kids across the cobbles and made it into a side street as the first of three bombs exploded. The first two hit the marketplace, slaughtering many who’d already been shot, along with those struggling to drag them out of harm’s way. The third bomb hit the front steps of the civic hall, demolishing the front porch and tearing a hole in the façade that exposed desks and filing cabinets on the upper floors.
The Clarkes moved briskly into the side street, chased by dust and the sickly smell of burned meat. Rosie realised it was human flesh, but knew she had to keep the thought out of her head if she wanted to avoid breaking down.
‘What about the little boy under the table?’ Paul asked anxiously. ‘Did either of you see him after—’
Before Paul could finish his father stopped moving, to the consternation of a woman running behind with a pram who had to swerve out of his way. Mr Clarke had grabbed his handkerchief and began coughing into it.
‘Are you OK?’ Paul asked.
‘It’s the dust,’ Rosie said, shielding her eyes with a hand.
But as Clarke pulled the handkerchief away from his face, he spattered his daughter with blood.
‘Oh god,’ Rosie gasped. ‘Dad!’
With each cough Clarke wheezed desperately for air but his throat was clogged with blood, and the coin-sized patch on his shirt had turned into a soggy red dinner-plate.
‘What’s happening?’ Paul asked, as Rosie grabbed her father’s arm and helped him to sit on the kerb.
‘Deeper,’ Mr Clarke croaked, as he looked desperately at the wound in his chest. ‘Must be …’
‘It’s right where his heart is, or his lung … or something,’ Rosie said, glancing around desperately. As legs swept by she realised that theirs was just one crisis amidst a hundred.
‘Henderson,’ he croaked, as the blood-soaked handkerchief fell away from his face. ‘Find him. Give him the papers.’
‘You’re not going to die, Dad,’ Paul said, more out of hope than conviction.
Mr Clarke used the last of his energy to look at his son and mouth the word
Sorry
with his bloody lips.
‘Dad!’ Rosie screamed, shaking him as she glanced all around. ‘Just hang on, there must be someone …’
But suddenly there was no resistance and Mr Clarke’s head flopped backwards. Unmoving eyes stared at her, glazed and still, like a pair of marbles.
It’s hard to grasp when something so big happens. Paul and Rosie felt like some giant magnet held them in place. They kept looking at each other, then back at their father, to confirm that he was really dead.
Several minutes passed. The dust from the explosions settled and the aeroplanes retreated into the surrounding countryside, but neither Paul nor Rosie spoke. Their first sentence had to capture the enormity of what had happened and they couldn’t find the words.
Normally there would be a safety net – police, ambulance, telephones – but they’d seen enough of the evacuation to know that normal rules didn’t apply. They’d stepped over death and looked away from pain and now it was their turn to be the ones sitting at the roadside while the world passed by.
‘I’ve lost my mummy,’ a small boy said.
It was the lad Paul had seen hiding under the market stall. He was stocky, no more than six, and so dusty that he could have been a statue of himself. Part of Rosie wanted to tell him to scram because she had enough problems, but he was a cute little thing and it was a relief to have something else to focus on.
‘Where did you last see her?’ Rosie asked gently. ‘Maybe she ran to the other side of the square.’
‘I don’t know,’ the boy said, after which their faces took up the conversation. The boy’s eyes asked if it was OK to sit down beside them on the kerb and Rosie’s nod indicated that it was.
‘I’m Hugo,’ the boy said.
‘Are you from Tours?’
‘Hugo Charmain. Seventh arrondissement
3
, Paris,’ the boy said grandly. As he spoke he pulled a piece of string out from inside his shirt. A label with his name and address was attached to the end.
‘Were you just with your mummy?’ Paul asked.
Hugo nodded sadly, before looking at Mr Clarke. ‘My daddy is fighting for France. Is that yours?’
‘Yes,’ Rosie said.
‘Why did he die?’ Hugo asked, but neither Paul nor Rosie gave an answer.
The entrance to the bombed square was less than thirty metres away. A number of small fires had turned into one inferno now and refugees were wading into the smoke to gather handcarts and suitcases abandoned in the rubble.
Paul looked gravely at his sister. ‘What can we do now?’
‘I …’ Rosie said, before pausing to think. ‘We have to stay calm. We’ll have to leave Dad here, but take his money and all of his valuables so that they’re not stolen. Then we’ll go back to the car and get the documents.’
‘Have you ever driven the car?’ Paul asked. ‘Do you think we could?’
Rosie shook her head. ‘I’ve watched Dad, but I’ve never worked it out.’
‘So how do we get south?’ Paul asked anxiously.
‘We’ll have to improvise. Maybe we can walk. It might take days, though, and those documents weigh a tonne. Or maybe we could find another refugee who can drive but doesn’t have a car. Then they can drive us.’
‘That might work,’ Paul agreed. ‘But we should try calling Henderson first.’
Rosie nodded. ‘Although Dad couldn’t track him down yesterday, and I’m not even sure if his number is written down anywhere.’