Authors: Sven Hassel
The more Meslin pondered the way and means at his disposal, the more he came to the realization that those ways and means were limited indeed. Non-existent, he was tempted to say. Even if he found himself work with the Todt Organization he would see no more than a minute section of the beach. And there were 160 kilometres of shoreline altogether. Plainly it would require, several hundreds, if not thousands, of agents to cover the entire area.
The task was plainly ludicrous. Meslin looked at the situation from every possible angle and decided to pass on this piece of information to London. He couldn't tell them much about the German fortifications but he could tell them what to do with their lunatic requests in the future.
It was at this point that chance intervened, brought about a change of plan. One of the members of the group was a painter and decorator, Rene Duchez, nicknamed 'Sang Froid'. He was walking the streets of Caen, pondering the same problems as Meslin, when a notice pinned outside the police station caught his eye :
'The Todt Organization is looking for an experienced painter.'
For a few moments Duchez stood staring, turning over in his mind the pros and the cons and eventually deciding in favour of the pros. He turned and walked off to the offices of the Todt Organization, where a sentry pushed him roughly away before he had even the time to open his mouth. Duchez stood his ground and demanded to be taken to see an officer. The sentry, speaking no French, also stood his ground, and thus they remained, glowering at each other, until an N.G.O. arrived to sort the matter out. His French was minimal, but it served its purpose, and Duchez found himself led past the sentry box and into an office marked 'Civil Buildings and Works Controller'. The Controller took a note of his name and address and promised to let him know within eight days whether the Organization would be taking advantage of his offer. Duchez was well aware of the purpose behind the eight-day period: during that time the Gestapo would be shaking the details of his life, past and present, through a sieve of the finest mesh. Anything the least questionable, anything that could possibly give them a lead to his Resistance activities, and not only would they turn him down but his life would be endangered.
All, however, went well. On the eighth day Duchez presented himself for work with a range of sample materials and was shown into the office of an Oberbaufuhrer. He had been there only a few seconds when the door opened and one of the engineers walked in. He greeted both Duchez and the Oberbaufuhrer with a pleasantly impartial 'Heil Hitler!' and flung down a roll of blueprints on the desk.
'Not now, for Christ's sake!' The Oberbaufuhrer waved a hand, impatiently. 'Come back later, I'm too busy to bother with them now.'
'Just as you like. I'm in no hurry.'
The engineer hunched an indifferent shoulder and left the room. The blueprints remained on the desk. The Oberbaufuhrer grudgingly unrolled them, and behind him Duchez craned his neck, to see. He was hardly able to believe his eyes: the blueprints were none other than the precious plans, coveted by London, of the German fortifications all along the Atlantic wall from Honfleur to Cherbourg.
The Oberbaufuhrer seemed uninterested in fortification. The very presence of the blueprints was apparently sufficient to anger him. He rolled them up and tossed them into a corner, then turned once more to Duchez and to the question of which paint and which paper he was to use. Seconds later they were again interrupted, this time by an overbearing officer who brushed aside all other claims on the Oberbaufuhrer's attention and ordered him into an adjoining office to talk on 'matters confidential'.
Duchez, left alone in the room, instantly and as a reflex action snatched up the blueprints. Not until they were in his hand did he pause to consider what should be done with them. Useless to attempt hiding them anywhere about his person. His frenzied gaze stopped short at a large painting of Hitler that was fixed to the wall behind the Oberbaufuhrer's desk. It seemed highly unlikely to him that the painting would ever be moved, and equally there seemed no reason for anyone ever to look behind it. Feverishly he stuffed the roll of blueprints between the portrait and the wall and stepped back to his pile of paints and papers as the Oberbaufuhrer returned.
'Idiots! Idiots the lot of them! They're all bloody idiots round here!' He glared at Duchez, as if to imply that he need not consider himself exempt from the charge. 'Some fool's mixed a load of sugar with, the cement. What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Dig the stuff out with my fingernails?' He made a noise of disgust in the back of his throat. 'Let's have another look at those samples of yours.'
The paint and the paper were finally settled. Duchez was told to report for work at eight o'clock on the Monday morning, his task to be the redecoration of the Organization's offices. Duchez took himself off, after a fervent salute and a knowing smile at the portrait of the Fuhrer.
It was then Friday. He spent the entire weekend in a state of ferment, suddenly appalled by the idiocy of the thing he had done, expecting the Gestapo to drop down oh him at any moment. It seemed quite, obvious to him now, in cold retrospect, that the blueprints were certain to have been missed within at the most twelve hours and that the Oberbaufuhrer would very naturally have laid the blame at his door. Not only was he a Frenchman, and therefore automatically suspect, but inescapably he had spent several vital seconds alone in the room with the wretched blueprints. He was as good as dead already.
Sleep was impossible. He roamed the apartment from wall to wall while his wife lay snoring in happy ignorance. Fear, the damp, sweating fear of anticipation, drove him almost mad. He cursed himself and he cursed the English, smug in their island across the Channel. The crashing of heavy boots on the pavements took him with a puppet-like jerk to the windows. A police-patrol, armed with light machine-guns. The beam of a powerful torch lit up the flat and he shrank back into the shadows by the curtains. The patrol went on its way. Duchez snatched up a bottle and passed the rest of the night in a drunken haze, racked with waking horror dreams of the Gestapo.
But the Gestapo never came. And in any case, by Monday morning Duchez had grown almost indifferent to his fate. He set off for the Organization with his paint pots and his brushes and he found that he had grown accustomed to his fear and that it no longer troubled him so much. He showed his pass, was searched by the man on guard and sent on his way. The Oberbaufuhrer had been transferred over the weekend to a different service. No one else, apparently, had the least idea what was going on, and Duchez found himself greeted by gaping mouths and raised eyebrows when he presented himself, whistling, in the first office to be decorated. Finally they dug up a Stabsbaufuhrer who confessed vaguely to having heard of the project. However, the Stabsbaufuhrer was at that moment occupied with heavy artillery and with shelters, both of which he found a great deal more interesting than office decoration.
'Just get on and do the job as you were told,' he said, loftily. 'Don't come pestering me about it. I have other things on my mind, I can't be bothered with petty matters of this nature.'
For two days Duchez worked hard at his painting. People grew used to seeing him about the place and for the most part ignored him. Not until the afternoon of the third day did he risk a look behind the portrait of the Fuhrer. The blueprints were still there. He had not expected them to be, and the sight of them threw him into a state of renewed panic. He decided to leave them there, but at the last moment he snatched them up and hid them in a roll of wallpaper.
As he was leaving the building, he was called to a halt by the sentry. It was a new man, one he hadn't met before; one who didn't know him and didn't trust him. Duchez felt suddenly, violently sick. The man patted his pockets, looked inside his canvas bag.
'O.K., you can go.'
Duchez walked out of the gates.
'Wait a minute I What have you got in those buckets?'
'Paste,' said Duchez, meekly.
'Paste?'
'For the wallpaper.'
Duchez jerked his head at the paper, rolled up beneath his arm with the blueprints hidden in the centre.
'Ah-huh?' Suspiciously the sentry stirred the thick mess in the buckets with the tip of his bayonet. 'O.K., I just wanted to make sure. Can't always trust Frenchmen, unfortunately.'
Duchez gave an unhappy laugh and walked away on tin legs. As soon as he could, he presented himself at the Cafe des Touristes, the headquarters of the Resistance in that area, and handed over the wallpaper and the blue prints. He was heartily glad to be rid of both: by now even the wallpaper had come to seem incriminating.
From Caen the blueprints were smuggled to Paris, to a Major Toumy in the Champs-Elysees. Major Toumy, on realizing the full: significance of the coup, declared himself to be both stunned and staggered. He added almost immediately that that was an understatement but that words failed him.
'Fantastic! Brilliant!' he declared, when speech returned. He tapped the blueprints with one finger, rather nervously, as if they might crumble to dust. 'This man-- what's his name? Duchez?--this man has brought off the most magnificent coup of the whole war... And that,' he added, thoughtfully, 'is another understatement.'
BILLETING
The little amphibious V.W. lurched past the first few straggling houses that marked the start of the village, and Gregor pulled her to a halt with an unpleasant squealing of brakes. Sub-machine-guns at the ready, we peered out at the apparently deserted street. The least sign of a suspicious movement in the shadows, from a doorway, at a window, and we were fully prepared to shoot. We were beasts on the prowl. We could not afford to take any chances. Too often you took a chance only to discover that quite suddenly the tables had been turned and it was you the prey and the unknown the hunter.
The silence was thick and unnatural. It hung over us like a heavy blanket. Porta was the first to leave the car, followed by the Old Man and by me. Gregor stayed behind the wheel, his gun resting against the windscreen, his finger resting on the trigger.
The road was rough and winding, meandering through the village between the sad grey houses and the devastated gardens and finally disappearing in the distance into fields and woods. The village itself was little more than an obscure cluster of dwelling-houses, marked on only the smallest scale maps. Thirty kilometres away, few people had ever heard of it.
With guns at the ready we bore down upon the nearest houses. We knew from experience that people would protest, and sometimes quite violently, against these incessant demands for billets for the German troops. We sympathized with them, but you couldn't afford to waste time arguing or explaining: it was our job to arrange billets for the companies now on their way to the village, and if the job wasn't done by the time they arrived we should find ourselves in the dog house with both officers and men.
Stealthily, with shifty eyes and padding footsteps, the village was returning to life. Doors half opened, curtains crept back. We went from house to house, checking up on rooms and deciding how many men it was practicable to quarter there. On the whole, the village had come through the war pretty well unscathed. Convoys had churned up the road and made a mess of the gardens, but otherwise it was undamaged: not a single shell had landed there.
As we left one house and prepared to cross the street to the next, a small girl, perhaps seven or eight, came rushing towards us and flung her arms round the Old Man's waist.
'Papa! You've come back! I knew you would! I said you would!'
She pressed herself hard against him and the Old Man stood there, awkward and helpless.
'Helene!' A woman's voice came harshly from inside a cottage. 'What is it? What are you up to?'
'It's Papa! He's back! Come and see, grandmere, he's back!'
An elderly, large-boned woman, her black hair pulled hard back from her thin face, her eyes deep down in their sockets, appeared at the cottage door. She barely glanced at the Old Man.
'Don't be foolish, Helene. It's not your father. Come back indoors.'
'It is, it is! This time it really is!'
With what seemed to me unnecessary brutality, the woman jerked out a sinewy arm, tore the child away from the Old Man and tossed her through the cottage door. I noticed she was wearing mourning, like so many French women at that time. She spoke stiffly and ungraciously.
'You'll have to excuse her. She's mentally unbalanced. Her father fell at Liege in 1940 but she persists in thinking he's still alive. Her mother's dead, too. Killed by a Stuka. It's not easy to know how to cope.'
'Of course not,' muttered the Old Man. Rather timidly, he held out the piece of chalk we used for marking the houses. 'I have to decide about .billets... Do you mind? I'll write it up on the door... 1st Section, 3rd Group...'
'Do what you like,' said the woman, sourly. 'You always do, don't you?'
In the cottage next door, we were offered wine to drink. The lady of the house was wearing a long silk dress that must have been in vogue half a century earlier. The room smelt strongly of naphthalene. Our host hovered at our elbows, replenishing our glasses each time we took so much as a sip, reiterating over and over that we were welcome, always welcome, very welcome, and all the time, eyeing our uniforms with a manic gleam in his eye. They were the ordinary black uniforms of the tank corps, with the death's head insignia on the collars.
'I see you are the Gestapo,' observed the man, at last. 'There are things I should tell you about this village. Peculiar happenings take place here. For instance, and for a start, it's swarming with Communists. With the Maquis... Call them what you will, they're all tarred with the same brush.' He bent down, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed through the window at a neighbouring house. 'Over there--see it?--right over there? Well, that's where five of your Gestapo men were murdered. Murdered! You understand me? They did it in cold blood.' He straightened himself up. 'I just thought you ought to know.'