As he knelt down beside the still body the little Colonel sadly shook his head. He knew that Madame la Baronne Noire was not destined to die by Gregory’s hand that night and he felt that it might be many days—vital days—before Gregory was again fit to strike a blow at the enemy. Standing up, he rang his bell, and when it was answered, gave swift instructions for Gregory’s removal in a police ambulance to his hotel.
Gregory came out of his faint before they reached the Saint Regis and by the time he was carried up to his room he had recovered sufficiently, in spite of his anger with himself at his own weakness, to be faintly amused at the reception accorded him by his pretty nurse.
‘Méchant, méchant!’ she upbraided him, wagging a slim finger in his face before proceeding to help him back to bed. ‘What children men are! They think there is no limit to their strength, and that however ill they are the world will cease to turn if for one moment they must give up the new games with which they amuse themselves when they are too old any longer to play with their lead soldiers and their model aeroplanes, if women ruled the world your nasty dangerous toys would be taken from you for good and all, then there would be some peace and happiness for a change.’
For a moment Gregory wondered if there was not a great fundamental truth in what she said. Women ask very little of life except a mate and security in which to bring up their offspring. It is men who are the dreamers for good or ill, and for every outstanding male who lifts the human race by some great scientific or artistic achievement there is always an Attila, a Napoleon or a Hitler whose visions lead him to inflict untold misery upon his fellow-men. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better if, like the ants or bees, the human race were content to live under a matriarchy, where there was no progress, no ambition, but work and food for all; yet somehow he could not believe that, because if one rejected all hope of advancement as the price of permanent peace it meant the death of the spirit, by the possession of which alone man differs from the insects and the animals.
He slept well and woke the following morning still weak but better and with the knowledge that work lay before him which must be done.
Even with dissension rife among France’s War Cabinet and a defeatist spirit in the very person of her Commander-in-Chief, that spirit had not yet spread to her junior Generals, her regimental officers or her soldiers, who were still fighting gamely; so France might yet be saved.
Reynaud had given in to the Baroness on the previous afternoon, but only after many days of constant pressure from her associates. It was quite on the cards that he might change his mind once again when the Government was removed from the atmosphere of Paris, which was now flooded with the defeatism brought by a million refugees from France’s northern provinces. It needed only a slight weakening of the German effort—which by all reasoning was already overdue—a small counter-offensive launched with success in some sector by a Corps Commander, or even a Divisional General, to make the fighting spirit of de Gaulle once again paramount in the counsels of the wavering Premier; but as long as the Black Baroness lived she was a constant menace to any such last-moment recovery. She had to die, and it was Gregory’s business to bring about her death.
After he had breakfasted he told Sister Madeleine quietly but firmly that his good night’s rest had really given him the strength to carry on, this time, and that he meant to get up; but he was not destined to do so. With a superior air she lifted the receiver of his bedside telephone and asked for the agent de ville to be sent up.
‘Come, come,’ Gregory laughed. ‘The law doesn’t give you power to keep a sick man in bed against his will, so it’s no good sending for the police.’
‘They’re here already,’ she smiled, ‘and what powers they have you will soon learn for yourself.’
When the agent de ville arrived he was very tactful, but it transpired that he was acting under the orders of Colonel Lacroix. He had been instructed to tell Gregory that the Colonel did not consider him in a fit state to operate for the time being and that if he attempted to leave his bed he was to be placed under arrest; also that Paris was in no immediate danger, but should the capture of the city become imminent the invalid would be evacuated before there was any risk of his becoming a prisoner. In the meantime, Lacroix sent his best wishes for Gregory’s speedy recovery and a promise that he would be allowed his freedom the moment that the doctor’s reports showed him well enough not to abuse it.
This was a state of things against which it was difficult to take counter-measures. Gregory knew Lacroix too well to believe that the Colonel would succumb to pleas or argument, and he realised that he was really not yet up to tackling the job of evading both Sister Madeleine and the agent de ville. In his heart of hearts he knew, too, that Lacroix’s decision had been a wise one; so he resigned himself to accept it, but he sent for a war map and followed every fresh bulletin with the greatest anxiety.
It was known that the Germans were now within twenty miles of Paris. By mid-day news came in that their armoured divisions had smashed through on the Lower Oise to Persan and Beaumont. To the East they were now endeavouring to drive a spear-head behind the Maginot Line; around Rheims the pressure was increasing hourly, and they succeeded in forcing the Passage of the Marne at Château-Thierry. West of Paris the situation was equally critical; between Rouen and Vernon the Germans had established bridge-heads across the Lower Seine and by evening it was learnt that Le Havre was in peril.
This last piece of news seemed to Gregory especially grave. Le Havre was the main British war base and there stocks of millions of shells, thousands of lorries, hundreds of guns and colossal quantities of other equipment had been steadily built up during the whole nine months of the war. As long as Le Havre remained in our possession these could be used to re-equip fresh units sent from home; but their quantity was far too great for them to be moved, so if the Germans succeeded in forcing their way down the coast this incalculably valuable accumulation of brand new war material must be either destroyed or captured.
There had been little movement on France’s Italian front, so it looked as though Mussolini was chary of testing out the valour of his Fascists, but the R.A.F, had bombed Turin, Genoa, Milan, Tobruk and Italy’s Abyssinian bases, with good effect. Spain had made a formal announcement of nonbelligerency in favour of the Axis, so evidently our new Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, had cut little ice with General Franco as yet.
On the Thursday Gregory telephoned a store for some ready-made clothes on approval and from them selected an outfit to replace his clergyman’s gear. The morning papers said that the French had made counter-attacks at Persan and Beaumont, winning back five miles of ground, but that further west, at Rouen, the situation was worsening hourly. The Germans were now throwing in their unarmoured infantry with utter recklessness and their troops were pouring over their bridge-heads across the lower Seine. East of Paris, Rheims had fallen and the new German thrust to outflank the Maginot Line was making rapid progress.
During that day the enemy were steadily closing in on the western, northern and eastern approaches to Paris, and General Weygand formally declared it an open city. At night Reynaud broadcast a last desperate appeal to President Roosevelt while the B.B.C. proclaimed that Britain’s factories were now working night and day without cessation to equip a new army, the advance units of which were sailing hour by hour as rifles and gas-masks could be placed in the hands of the mea who had been saved from Dunkirk.
On the Friday, Gregory had so far recovered that even Sister Madeleine agreed that he was sufficiently well to get up, and after breakfast he was just about to do so when, having left the room for a moment, she returned to announce a visitor. To Gregory’s surprise and delight Kuporovitch walked in.
The Russian was in gigantic spirits. He had flown from England that morning and at last achieved his ambition of reaching Paris again after twenty-six years of exile from his beloved holiday resort.
Even the sound of the battle which was raging outside the city, and the sight of the streams of refugees passing through it, could not altogether rob him of his joy. From his taxi he had seen many of the old familiar landmarks—the Opéra, the Madeleine, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysées and the Petit Palais. Central Paris as yet had not suffered sufficient damage for the effect of the German air-raids to be apparent and the cafés, the crowded pavements and the gardens had seemed to him little altered, except for the change of fashion and the great increase in motor traffic, since he had seen them over a quarter of a century before.
To Gregory’s anxious inquiry about Erika he replied at once: ‘Be of good cheer. For some days after we reached London her state was again critical, but she turned the corner on the Friday after we left Dunkirk and this last week has made a vast difference. At last she is able to talk a little and she says that it was her will to live for you which brought her through the dark places when she so nearly died; so you may be certain that she will not slip back now.’
‘Thank God!’ Gregory sighed. ‘And I’m eternally grateful to you, Stefan, for the way in which you looked after her.’
Kuporovitch shrugged. ‘It was a joy, my friend. The good Sir Peliinore, to whom I took her immediately we reached London, has entertained me in a most princely fashion. To live in that great house of his is, except for some slight differences in national custom, to be back again in the mansion of a Prussian nobleman as we lived before the Revolution. I had no idea that even in England such a state of things still survived outside the story-books, and London, too, is a revelation. In spite of everything the people lunch and dine in the crowded restaurants and go about their business as if there were no threat to their security at all; yet things are being done there now. Churchill, Beaverbrook, Bevin and some others are cutting the red tape at last and underneath the casualness one senses the iron will of the people to defeat Hitler whatever it may cost them.’
‘I’ve never doubted that,’ said Gregory. ‘It seems always to take a frightful knocking about really to rouse the fighting spirit in us; but once it’s there woe betide the enemy. Things are in a pretty bad way here, though.’
‘So I have gathered. But who is to blame for that? The British were responsible for holding a great sector of the Allied line; instead of doing so they went home with little but their shirts. That left a great gap which the British could have filled again if they had broken through, or counterbalanced if they had dug themselves in on the coast as a threat to the German rear. But they did neither, and the French were left to get out of the mess as best they could, alone.’
‘I thought that too,’ Gregory agreed, ‘until I learned that the British had good reason for going home when they did. The French High Command is rotten, Stefan. Weygand is not the great man we thought him. There is treachery right up at the very top. I’ve now come to the conclusion that our Government must have known that and decided to get our men out alive, before the French ratted on them and they were left to face the whole weight of the German Army on their own, which would have meant absolute annihilation.’
Kuporovitch shook his head. ‘No, Gregory; you are wrong there. The evacuation from Dunkirk was ordered on May the 29th and it is now June the 14th. As you and I sit here, the British Government is shipping troops back to France as hard as it can go. Do you believe for one moment that they would be doing that if they had already formed the conclusion sixteen days ago that the French meant to throw their hand in?’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Gregory sighed. ‘If they brought the men off from Dunkirk because they feared the French were going to do a “Leopold” on us they could hardly be sending them back again while the situation remains so uncertain.’
‘A “Leopold”, eh?’ Kuporovitch’s dark eyebrows went up with a quizzical expression. ‘I hope you realise, my friend, that when the history of this war comes to be written Leopold and the people responsible for Dunkirk are going to be lumped together. Whatever the English school-books may say, the school-books of the rest of the world will record that after seventeen days’ fighting the Belgians ratted on the British and that after nineteen days’ fighting the British ratted on the French. What other word can be applied to the fact that, while still whole and undefeated, one of the finest armies that your country has ever put into the field gave up any further attempt to wage war upon the enemy and abandoned its Ally?’
‘I suppose one can’t blame the French for looking at things that way,’ Gregory admitted. ‘The retreat and evacuation has certainly given Hitler’s Fifth Column in France just the ammunition they required for their work of severing the Allies, and it’s quite on the cards now that within a few days France may make a separate Peace.’
‘True. But there is still hope that they may be induced to carry on the fight. Even now our good Sir Pellinore is with Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook, who are on their way to Bordeaux to see if they cannot bolster up the shaking edifice.’
‘Is that what you came to tell me?’
Kuporovitch nodded. ‘Now that Erika is out of danger I at last felt justified in appeasing my desire to see Paris again, and when I told Sir Pellinore that he said to me: “Find Gregory, if you can, and tell him how uncertain things are now with the French. If they decide to fight on—well and good; but if they surrender there is a risk that he might be caught in France. Tell him to make his way to Bordeaux and to join me at the Hotel Julius Caesar; then I shall be able to get him safely out of the country should France collapse.”’
‘And what view does Sir Pellinore take of things?’
The Russian hunched his shoulders. ‘He is by no means optimistic. The loss of Paris will be a grave blow to France and he gave me the impression that he felt that only a miracle could save her now.’
Gregory frowned. ‘I believe I might have pulled off that miracle three nights ago, but that little fiend, La Baronne Noire, poisoned me when I was in Italy and I’ve been laid by the heels ever since.’
‘Poisoned you, eh? Tell me about that.’
Gregory gave a resumé of what had befallen him since he had parted from Kuporovitch on the beach at Dunkirk, and when he had finished, the Russian said:
‘There is only one thing for it; we must get this woman, Gregory, and those papers of which Lacroix spoke. They are becoming of more importance every moment, now that with each hour there becomes more likelihood of France going out of the war.’
Gregory nodded. ‘Lacroix can’t keep me here much longer, because the Germans are at the gates, and I’m expecting to have a word from him at any time telling me that I can go. I’m quite fit enough again now to have another crack at the Black Lady and it will help a lot to have you with me; but it’s rotten luck that you should have to leave Paris because the Germans are about to enter it the very day that you get here.’
Kuporovitch smiled ruefully. ‘Yes; it is hard indeed. Perhaps now I shall never again see Montmartre, or the Luxemburg Gardens, or the Bois; but one thing I shall regret above all—and that is, not to have taken my apéritif with a pretty girl on a sunny morning outside Wagner’s on the pavements of the Rue Royale.’
‘Well, that at least is not impossible,’ Gregory laughed. ‘It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, you could hardly have a sunnier day, and I imagine that the cafés are still open. As for the pretty girl—why not ask my nurse, Sister Madeleine? You can get there in ten minutes in a taxi. Take her out and give her a drink while I telephone Lacroix and get dressed.’
The Russian beamed; Sister Madeleine smilingly accepted his invitation when she learned how far he had travelled for the pleasure of once more visiting her native city, and they set off together while Gregory got up to have his bath.
When he had finished he was just about to telephone Lacroix; but he had no need to do so as a messenger arrived for him at that moment with a letter from the Colonel, which read:
‘I hear from your doctor that you are now fit enough to travel, which is good news indeed at such a time of grief. Our troops have now completed their withdrawal and only armed police to prevent looting are left in the capital. The salle Boche will once again pollute the Champs Elysées by a formal entry at three o’clock this afternoon. Therefore, you should leave at once.
‘The lady of whom we spoke when I last saw you left Fontainebleau on Wednesday morning. Perhaps she feared that the sight of an expensive car might attract unwelcome attention from the more desperate of our refugees; or it may be that she had another reason. In any case, she left, with her chauffeur only, on the box of a blue Ford van lettered in gold “Maison Pasquette—Blanchisserie”.
‘It is virtually certain that she will have followed the Government to Tours and Bordeaux but she has a villa in the South of France. It is called Les Roches and is at Pointe des Issambres between Saint Maxime and Saint Raphael, so later she may go there with her baggage.
‘May the good God have you in his keeping in these difficult hours and grant that in happier times we may meet again.’
The bare facts in the letter would have conveyed little to a casual reader, but to Gregory they conveyed a lot. The reason that the Black Baroness had elected to journey south by van instead of by car was plain enough. A Ford van could move just as quickly as a car on a road choked with refugees, and she had no intention of leaving her most valued possessions to be destroyed by shell-fire or looted in her absence. In the van there would be much more room to take pictures, furs, jewels and letter-files than in a car, and the underlining of the word ‘baggage’ clearly inferred that Lacroix hoped that now Gregory was fit again he would go after those letter-files; and that, quite definitely, was what he meant to do.
Leaving message for Kuporovitch that he would be back by half-past one, he went out to make his arrangements. Paris was a sad sight that morning. Half the shops were already shut and those inhabitants who had decided to remain were pulling down their blinds in anticipation of the triumphant entry of the Germans that afternoon. All the main streets were crowded with sorrowing, gesticulating people packing bag and baggage on to their cars in preparation for making the journey, in most cases, into the unknown. Refugees had now been streaming south for many days, but there were still tens of thousands who had hung on until the last moment hoping against hope that they would not have to go after all, and these were now working at frantic speed lest they had left it too late and should be caught by the on-coming enemy.
He found it impossible to hire or buy a private car but at a garage with which he had done business in the past he managed to make what amounted to a hire-purchase arrangement with the owner-driver of a taxi-cab. The garage proprietor was no longer observing petrol restrictions as he was only too anxious to unload as much of his stock as he could before the Germans arrived; so Gregory was able to have the taxi’s tank filled and to buy a dozen spare bidons in addition. He told the driver to run over the engine as thoroughly as possible in the short time available and to bring the cab round to the Saint Regis at half-past one: then he made a few purchases and, returning to the now almost empty hotel, ordered a large picnic basket to be made up.
At twenty to two he paid his bill, said good-bye to the sad-faced manager and went out on to the doorstep. The taxi was there but there was no sign of Kuporovitch. With considerable annoyance, Gregory assumed that the Russian amorist had found little Sister Madeleine so responsive to his blandishments that he had forgotten all about the time; but ten minutes later he had grave reason to regret his unworthy suspicions.
Sister Madeleine drove up in a taxi. As she jumped out he saw that tears were streaming down her face. Running down the steps he asked her with a sudden sense of alarm what had happened to bring her back in such a state.
Grasping his arm she sobbed out: ‘It was an accident. Just as we were leaving he stepped off the pavement too soon and a car knocked him down. Oh, how tragic—how tragic! To think that for all these years he had longed for Paris and that he should come back only to die.’
Gregory moaned. For a moment he could hardly realise that the amiable Russian, who had been so full of life only that morning, would never laugh again. For over two months now he had been an almost constant witness of destruction and death in Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, so that the corpses he had seen in the blasted villages and on the roadsides in his recent journeys had come to mean little to him, but the thought that his friend had died in an ordinary street-accident had a peculiar bitterness all its own.
There was only one small consolation—Stefan Kuporovitch had at least achieved his ambition before he died. Just for an hour or so he had seen again the Paris with which he had fallen in love when he was young. He had even drunk his Vermouth-Cassis with a pretty Parisienne in the sunshine on the pavement of the Rue Royale. Then he had stepped off that pavement into oblivion as far as the things of this world were concerned. Gregory knew only too well that there were many less pleasant circumstances in which a man could die, and after a moment he pulled himself together to ask Sister Madeleine for particulars.
Although she was a nurse the tragedy had so upset her that she was bordering on hysteria, and it was only towards the end of her account that Gregory realised that Kuporovitch was not actually dead. His skull had been fractured in two places and she had no doubt at all that his injuries were fatal, but he had still been alive when they had taken him in an ambulance to the Hôpital Saint Pierre.
Gregory paid off her taxi and grabbing her by the arm led her towards his own, as he said: ‘Quick! We must go there at once and hear the doctor’s report.’
She warned him that the Russian’s case was hopeless and when they reached the hospital a white-coated doctor confirmed her view. Kuporovitch had not regained consciousness but might last a few hours, though the doctor considered it most unlikely that he would live through the night.
Although he would have liked to stay, Gregory knew that it was of the utmost importance that he should go south after the Black Baroness with the least possible delay; so he asked Sister Madeleine if she intended to remain in Paris during the occupation.
‘Yes,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I have an old mother who is too infirm to travel, and with the train-loads of wounded that are constantly arriving there will be plenty of work for me to do.’
Taking some bank-notes from his wallet he asked her if she would come to the hospital on the following day and make the necessary arrangements to provide Kuporovitch with a decent funeral. She took the money and agreed at once; then he thanked her for her care of him and, still half-dazed by the tragedy, sadly walked out into the sunny street.
April the 8th to June the 14th. It was just sixty-seven days since Hitler had swooped by night on unsuspecting Norway, and Gregory was thinking of the hideous chapters of history that had been made in that short time.
King Haakon and Queen Wilhelmina had been driven from their thrones. Leopold of Belgium was now branded for ever as a traitor. A million soldiers and civilians had died and another million lay wounded in the hospitals. Ten million people had been rendered homeless and another twenty million had fallen under the brutal domination of the Nazis. Paris had fallen and the enemy were in possession of the Channel ports, which brought their bombers within twenty-five miles of England. It had been one long nightmare tale of incompetent leadership, disaster, treachery and defeat.
Even in his own small world, Erika had only narrowly escaped death, Paula had died before his eyes. Lacroix had become virtually a fugitive. And now poor Kuporovitch was dead.
He, too, had suffered three major defeats at the hands of the woman who was his enemy, and one of them had very nearly cost him his life. He was very tired after these weeks of stress and now quite alone. But he knew that there could be no giving-up until he was dead or his battle was won.
Stepping into the taxi he said: ‘Drive to Bordeaux.’