Most Secret (38 page)

He had a terribly long way to go to get there, seventy or eighty miles, perhaps. He would have to travel eastwards on the peninsula inland into France for twenty miles or so in order to get round the Rade de Brest; after that he would have to turn north. He did not know the country or the people. He knew that the main German concentrations were usually held a few miles inland from the coast; that meant that the farther inland that he went the greater would be the risk of being taken by the Germans.

From that point of view, and because he was a seaman and had memorised the charts, he longed to stay by the coast. He felt safe there; he had knowledge of conditions and localities; the inland parts were unknown, strange, and hazardous. He thought longingly of the north part of Brittany to the west and north-west of Brest, that was in sight across the sea. If he could get there he could go on round the coast until he found what he was looking for, a means of getting back to England. On the coast he would know what he was doing.

It was only just across the way, that part of Brittany. Could he possibly … get there?

It meant swimming again, of course. He concentrated his mind upon the chart and on the tidal streams. It must, he thought, be about five miles across the entrance to the Rade. It was November, and resting motionless in the grey dawn he was beginning to get very cold again. The thought of going into the sea once more was an appalling one. He had just swum about two miles in two hours, and he felt now that he had nearly died of it. Another five hours might well mean the end of everything for him.

But it wasn’t so bad as that. If he picked his time right, the tidal stream that swept north-eastwards in from the Iroise to fill the Rade de Brest would carry him along; it would be pretty well behind him. It ran from two to two and a half knots, that stream did. That would reduce the time a great deal. In theory he would be in the water for no more than two hours; in practice it would probably be three. That made it possible, perhaps.

He would have to enter the water about midnight, by his
reckoning, if he were to take the tide up with him in that way.

“I didn’t see what else there was to do, sir,” he remarked. “I reckoned that the Germans would shoot me if they got me, ’n I thought I might as well die swimming as that.”

He grew very cold and hungry, lying in the bracken. He slept a little, fitfully, from time to time; in his long waking hours his mind became increasingly filled with thoughts of food. And what he thought about was American food, clam chowder that Junie made out of a tin, and waffles that Junie made on the electric cooker in the little kitchen of their Oakland apartment. And Junie herself, in a clean print frock on a warm day … Junie, who was seven thousand miles away from him in distance and two years in time.

It was a still, clear autumn day with a light wind from the north-east. It was sunny most of the forenoon, and that made his long wait tolerable. He was so near to Camaret that he could hear the church clock strike the hours and the quarters. As evening came on he was thankful for that clock. He had resolved to try his luck at swimming to the northern shore, but the whole matter hinged upon the proper use of the tide. If he entered the water too soon he might struggle and exhaust himself in the slack water, or be carried out to sea, and die. If he entered it too late, it might be daylight when he sought to climb the cliffs only a few miles from Brest. His watch had stopped, but now he had the clock to help him, that and the rising of the moon.

When dusk came he began to crawl towards Le Toulinguet. That is a rocky point with an automatic light on it, standing on a point of rocks down by the water’s edge. He got within half a mile of it in the last fight of the day, near enough to see the path that ran down to a little concrete causeway on the rocks that led to the red tower. Between him and that path there was a watch-hut, camouflaged with the heather and occupied by German soldiers. From time to time one of them came out for a natural function and went back inside again.

The dusk merged into starlight and he crept on. He passed behind the watch-hut and about a hundred yards away, moving with infinite care through the heather. “I was proper fussed about them land-mines that they stick about sometimes,” he said. “They might have had some planted back of a little post like that.” But if they had, his luck was with him still.

He lay through the first part of the night at the border of the
heather near the path. When he heard midnight strike and saw the first gleams of moonlight on the water, he crept down to the concrete causeway. He paused to blow up his Mae West and to note the angle of the moon relative to the course that he must swim.

Then he slipped down into the water and swam powerfully from the rocks. A wave lifted him and crashed him down upon an underwater shoal, scraping his left leg painfully. Then he was clear and swimming steadily upon his course.

He said that the water was terribly cold, much colder than the night before, he thought. It probably was just about the same, but he had had no food and very little sleep. Very soon he was swimming mechanically and numbly, his mind dazed and far away from Brittany.

“It was half-moon,” he said. “It got me all muddled because Half Moon Bay, that was the beach Junie ’n me used to go swimming at Sundays. We used to swim a long way those times—’most as far as I was trying to swim that night. But that was in the day-time and all sunny, ’n much warmer, too.”

Half-moon, Half Moon Bay, and swimming with Junie. The thoughts rolled slowly round in his numbed brain as he ploughed on, hampered by the clothes that he dared not abandon, held up by his Mae West, borne forward by the tide. He kept the moon over his right shoulder in the endless, mechanical cycle of his motions. And presently the California sunshine was more real to him than the dark water he was swimming in, and Junie swimming by his side was more to him than just a memory.

“She used to tan a sort of goldeny brown, like her hair,” he said, and his hands moved restlessly upon the sheet as he lay in the iron cot. And then he said unexpectedly: “If I’d ha’ died that time, swimming across, I don’t think I’d ha’ minded much.”

But he didn’t die. He swam right across the entrance to the Rade de Brest, and he got to the other side.

He landed on the north coast at a point about due north of Toulinguet. He landed on a point of rocks and clambered slowly along it to the shore, stumbling and falling on the seaweed in the darkness. He was so numb that he could hardly stand; he fell, over and over again, before he got to firmer ground. He was so cold that his mind worked very slowly.

He came to a little beach beneath an earthy cliff after a time and rested there. The weather had deteriorated during the night; the wind was now from the south-east and it was beginning to
cloud over. He sat resting for some time in a stupor that was half sleep; then he grew so cold that he had to get up and move about, infinitely weary.

The coast that he had landed on was lower and more easily scaled than the cliffs that he had left. The earth cliff he was resting up against was barely thirty feet high; above that the fields began. He knew what that would mean; barbed wire and land-mines, and a greater intensity of German sentries. He got up presently and began to make his way westwards along the rocks and beaches underneath the cliff.

After a time he came to a larger beach where a cart-track ran down from inshore. It seemed to him that the cart-track, the low fields beside it, would make a focus for defence; there would be a pill-box somewhere near-by manned by a picket of Germans. In the low fields there would be land-mines and barbed wire. He turned and went back for a quarter of a mile to a point where the cliff was thirty or forty feet in height, banking upon a paucity of defence in the more difficult locality.

He scrambled up the cliff without great difficulty and wormed his way forward over the grass. There was barbed wire ahead of him, but only a few strands of it on low, triangular supports. He lay watching for ten minutes and then negotiated it without great difficulty, and crawled on inland. Presently he came to a stone wall and began to walk upright, finding his way from field to field, heading about north-west.

Dawn came, and found him three or four miles inland from Le Conquet. Under a grey cold sky he saw a country of small fields surrounded by stone walls, with a few scattered cottages and farms built of grey stone. It was a country just like Cornwall over the sea a hundred and ten miles to the north, Cornwall, where he longed to be.

He was desperately cold and weary, and tormented with hunger and thirst. He found a little stagnant pool and had a long drink in the growing light. Then he found a field of sugar-beet and grubbed up three or four of them. Carrying them in his arms he skinned one with his knife and began to eat it, wandering on from field to field seeking for a place where he could lie hidden.

In that windswept country, cover was very scarce, He found a clump of blackberry bushes growing up against one of the stone walls; fearing immediate detection if he went on, he pressed himself feet first into concealment under this beside the wall. The thorns tore his skin and his clothes, but he dug further into it
till he was well concealed. And all the time he went on munching at his beets.

Presently, cold and numb and tired, he fell asleep.

When he awoke it must have been about the middle of the forenoon. He stirred and rolled around, tearing himself again among the brambles. And immediately he did that, all Bedlam was let loose. A dog began to bark and clamour at his bush. He lay dead-still, but the row continued. It ran round barking and snuffling at various points of the bush till presently it found where he had gone in. There it stayed barking at him, just out of his reach. It was a mongrel, black and white, he said; about the size of a collie.

There was nothing he could do about it, short of coming out and pelting it with stones. He lay there and it went on barking. And then he heard a footstep, and a voice, a woman’s voice, calling off the dog.

“
Qui est
?” she cried sharply. “
Qui est là-dedans
?”

There was nothing for it; slowly he dragged himself from his concealment and looked up at her. She was a peasant woman of thirty-five or forty, roughly dressed and dirty; from the look of her hands, covered in soil, she had been pulling beets. She stood there looking down at him, sarcastic. “
Et à qui les betteraves
?” she said.

He spoke a moderate Quebec French, but he did not understand her accent. He lay there on the ground looking up at her, puzzled. And then she looked at him again and took in his sodden clothes, his draggled hair and his torn hands. She said quickly:

“
Vous êtes un échappé
?”

He understood that one. “
Suis officier anglais
,” he said, and his old charm came back to him.

“
II y avait un naufrage.
”

She caught her breath. “Ah …” And then she said in her Breton dialect: “Where do you want to go?”

He said simply: “To England, madame.” He smiled up at her. “I have important business to attend to there.”

“Business?” she said. “What do you mean?”

He said: “I have to get another ship and come back here again to kill more Germans.”

She stared at him, and he smiled back at her. “There was firing and a battle down in the Iroise the night before last,” she said. “Were you in that?”

He nodded.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked uncertainly.

There was no uncertainty in his reply. “I want to eat a very large hot meal,” he said, “and to drink beer. And after that I want to find a boat. Any sort of boat will do, so long as I can steal it and escape.”

She stared at him with wonder in her eyes. “You are a strange man,” she said at last. “Stay there and I will tell my husband. Do not come out at all; get right inside again. There is a German post within a kilometre of us here.”

She went away, and he crept back into the bush, wondering what was going to happen. He had not long to wait. Within an hour she was back again, this time without the dog. She bent down to his hole beneath the bush and thrust in a large, blackened tin dixie. It was hot to his touch.

“There is food, Englishman,” she said urgently. “There is no beer. Now listen to me. Stay here till it is quite, quite dark; do not come out at all. Then, when it is very dark, you can come out, but leave the can under the bush; I will get it to-morrow. Follow the wall to the west till you come to the lane. Two fields down the lane, to the north, there is our farm on the right. Knock three times on the door quietly and we will let you in.”

He repeated her instructions.

She said: “If you have bad luck and the Germans take you, do not betray us.” Then, before he could answer, she was gone.

He lifted the lid off the dixie. There was about half a gallon of a thick fish soup in it, stiffened with potatoes and vegetables, and with a wooden spoon floating on the top. Lying in the bramble bush he got down every drop of this; no food had ever seemed to him to be so good. And then, warm again, he fell asleep once more.

It was very nearly dark when he woke up. He lay and watched the last of the daylight fade, and presently he scrambled from the bush and made his way along the wall. At about seven o’clock in the evening he was knocking at the door of the farm.

It opened to him, and he went through a black-out curtain into the farm kitchen. The woman was there, and there was a man about fifty years of age, in shirt-sleeves and unshaven. They were a decent enough pair.

The man said: “Did you meet anybody in the lane?”

Colvin said: “Nobody at all.” He paused, and then he said: “Thank you for the food; I left the dixie under the bush. I had eaten nothing for a day and a half.”

The man approached, and laid a hand upon his arm. “She said that you were wet,” he remarked. “Are you dry now?”

“Aye,” said Colvin. “I don’t want any clothes.” All this was carried on in halting French, Breton on their side and Quebec on his.

The man said next: “She says that you are looking for a boat to steal. That is now very difficult, because of the Germans. They put a guard on boats with motors, and even upon boats with sails. You will not be able to steal a boat, in these parts.”