SQUEEZE-PLAY
Some rat-race, Dozulé! Shopkeepers sweeping their sidewalks, refugees hauling-ass out of town, and half the German army stomping belligerently about. Lou and I, cigarettes dangling from our lips, plodded through the lot of them, saying nothing and minding our own damn business as becomes every true fugitive. Catching a glimpse of our reflection in a store window, I was childishly pleased to see for myself that my comrade and I were dead ringers for any other two French hobos. After brushing past a number of burly Wehrmacht types I did, however, begin to feel a bit out of place; and to avoid that very thing we left the sidewalks and walked in the street, only to be driven back by a long string of trucks and ambulances that came racing through Dozulé en route to Caen.
At the edge of town, wondering where to go from there, we paused and puttered around a public well. When a couple of soldiers began to stare at us, we ambled on down the highway that led toward Pont L’Évêque. At a junction, a signpost pointed north, and Houlgate was fourteen kilometers that way. Proceeding along our road for another kilometer, we jumped the ditch and crawled under a fence to head north across-country.
As we neared a range of timbered hills, four RAF Typhoon fighters whined overhead to zoom and peel off on a hilltop target. It was a well-executed attack, with each pilot first firing a long burst of machine-gun fire, then triggering off his rockets that would accelerate out ahead of the diving ship to streak with a sharp crack into the target. I’d never seen fighters using rockets before, and the process was interesting.
Wading a bit of a creek, we wandered into a tiny village and there was a small girl of tender age swinging on a gate. I smiled and asked her if there were German soldiers in her village, and she peeped, “Non, M’sieur!” and scampered into her house; whereupon we poked around town until we found the village bulletin board, from which we acquired some interesting and educational data. One poop-sheet announced that a death penalty would be exacted for any variety of sabotage. Another put out by the German Commandant of this area ordered the evacuation of all citizens by the twenty-fifth day of July, from the area between a line drawn from Dozulé to the Channel and another from Pont L’Évêque to the Channel. After that date all civilians apprehended in that area would be dealt with as partizans. An earlier order told us that right now no civilians were permitted to the east of the Dozulé-Channel line—the line along which we were now walking. Well, it was fair warning. Digging out my pencil stub, I initialed the bulletin: “TPF, 1st Lt., USAAF,” to signify that I’d read and understood the orders. Lou, chuckling, followed suit and when he’d affixed his signature we laughed and laughed “Hee hee hee!” for we thought it to be a dandy joke.
We mushed on northward. The terrain in these foothills was ready and waiting for the British attack. They’d have a hard go, for the Jerries had prepared thousands of foxholes, zigzag trenches, and tank revetments to cover any and all approaches from the west and north. Deciding finally to give up battling the underbrush in favor of walking the riskier Dozulé-Houlgate highway, we intercepted the tar road that slanted up ahead of us to top a high hill. A little way ahead of us two civilians suddenly popped from the brush, and upon seeing us they just as suddenly disappeared. Then one, a bicycle expert, came barreling toward us, his legs a blur of action. As this gentleman sailed past us on the downgrade, we observed that he had all the earmarks of belonging to somebody’s Maquis outfit. The second man reappeared and approached us afoot. A nice-looking lad, dressed as we were, and I took a gander at him and remarked to Lou that here came another “pilote sans avion.” I knew damned well that this guy was one of us, but still I didn’t quite dare to speak to him as he passed. I knelt to tie a shoelace and sneaked a look back. The stranger, too, was kneeling on the pavement peeking over his shoulder at us. After another fifty paces, I again checked back over my shoulder and the stranger, too, was checking back over his shoulder. I just about gave him a long-call, but thought better of it. And we went our way and he went his, a clipped-wing flyboy if I ever saw one.
Up over the brow of the hill we came upon a bunch of Jerries. Tattered and dusty, clutching submachine guns and Mausers, they were milling around and hollering. The air was hazy with smoke and the road was cratered and littered with mud and chunks of dirt and stone and parts of trees, and on either side of the road were scattered remnants of Jerries and 40mm flak guns. It appeared that we had stumbled into the middle of the Typhoons’ target! As of one mind, we reversed our course and started back downhill with the intent of detouring the area; but as four soldiers came around a curve below us, we made another quick turnabout, again heading uphill. A squeeze-play, it was, with us in the middle. Tugging our berets to a more reckless angle, we shuffled through the scene of recent disaster, picking our way carefully around the rocket craters. Twenty or so German soldiers puttered dismally amidst the wreckage, and an officer squatting in the ditch was shrieking into a field telephone. To my ear, it rang like profanity. The Jerry caught me grinning at him and dealt me one long, hard, narrow-eyed stare in which I read sudden death. I was bitterly worried until we’d faded around a bend and out of his view. Breathing again, I noticed that Lou and his inevitable lucky charm were having a go at it.
The topic of discussion, having been diverted momentarily from aircraft and sex, now swung to a critique of each other’s acting ability. Lou’s bucolic, sagging-jawed, blank-eyed shuffle was so cockeyed phony, I claimed, that the next Jerry we met was very likely to holler: “Achtung, Yank!” and lob a grenade our way. Lou, stung to the core by my unkind remarks, yelped, “You got no room to squawk, fer chrissake! Ya swing yer skinny arms like a goddam Limey soldat!”
Since we had touched upon the delicate subject of capture, I remarked, “Monsieur Lynch, guess where we stand if the bastards catch us up here, and us making like civilians?”
Lou ventured that we’d either stand under a scaffold or in front of a stone wall, he wasn’t sure which. He gave his lucky charm another rub or two. We both knew that capture in this neck of the woods meant that we’d be classified automatically as spies and dealt with accordingly.
More kilometers. We taxied through an artillery outfit where the master race was earning its pay, sweatily and profanely throwing great camouflage nets and boughs over their tractors and guns. We trudged past a bunch of troopers who were queued up for chow. Ladling out the slop was a four-eyed, slick-haired Jap in Jerry uniform.
More kilometers. We hit the dirt in an instinctive reaction to a deafening explosion, to lurch foolishly to our feet upon the realization that an artillery gun had cut loose from just behind the hedge paralleling the highway. All along the road now, guns began sending stuff over toward the beachhead, and the godawful racket kept me jumping like a one-legged man at a fanny-kicking contest.
When we came to a “Y” in the road, we flipped a coin and so took the left turning. It proved to be correct, because pretty soon we rounded a bend to behold a high dune beyond which lay the English Channel. A half-kilometer to the west lay Houlgate, with Cabourg a bit farther along. Well, we were here, and we’d been coming so fast we couldn’t stop. A bit of reconnaissance was in order: a prowl to the top of the dune for a looksee.
These dunes would be well patrolled and apt to hold various concealed defenses, so we proceeded with maximum stealth, seeking out a fence line that ran straight up the side of the dune. A heavy growth of wiry grass afforded fair cover during our hands-and-knees climb, and when we came to the top and poked up our heads to look out over the choppy Channel, the brisk breeze whipped much sand into our jaundiced eyes, making observation very trying. A glance at the beach and we abandoned all hope of further operation in that direction, for soldiers in quantity strolled to and fro amidst a formidable collection of ingenious obstacles: mines, sinuous coils of snarled wire, fences, and a multitude of iron stakes all connected by well-worn guard posts. Our projected regatta, it seemed, had been the hastily conceived product of two desperate minds. To hell with the Channel. We withdrew from the dune as cautiously as we’d made entry.
I wasn’t discouraged. I hated cold water anyway. We’d dream up another angle. But first, having walked through half the German army to get here, I thought we might as well poke around in the resort towns. We might just panhandle a square meal at somebody’s back door. Maybe we could find a cozy little waterfront bistro and have a quick jolt or two. Or maybe we could find a boat. So we headed for town to see what we could see. Our expedition came to another grinding halt upon approaching an underpass that was the entrance to Houlgate; for lurking therein were two sentries who, as we watched, dutifully checked the papers of all who entered. With our minds a blank, we sat down at the edge of the road and smoked. Then with a cry of delight I said to Lou, “So here comes our lunch!”
My hungry eyes had focused upon a milk can. The can was slung on the handlebars of a bicycle and the bicycle was being propelled through the underpass by a woman. As she neared us, I intercepted her. Waving a hundred-franc note under her nose, I propositioned: “Vous avez du lait, Madame?”
I drew a blank look, and the woman watched Lou blow a few smoke rings. Then she cased me, from GI shoes to borrowed beret. I smiled sweetly, and she in return forced a sickly grin. She was pondering my unique accent.
“You are Germans, no?”
“Hmp-mm.” I shook my head.
“You are not Frenchmen, yes?”
“That is the truth, Madame.”
“Ha! Then you are Polish and your comrade there is a Spaniard!”
“Ha-ha-ha! No, Madame, you are mistaken, for we are two Americans. We have beaucoup thirst. Now, have you some milk for us?”
A group of soldiers passed us by on their way up the hill, and the woman waited for them to get out of earshot. “Hmmmm!” she said. And the good woman refused my money, handed us a tin cup, and told us to drink our fill. Since more soldiers were approaching, I thanked the woman and walked away, intending to seek out another route into town. I was alone, however, for I saw that Lou still was standing beside the woman. He was patting his belly, pointing to his mouth, and with a pitiful expression on his face he was hollering at our harried hostess: “Faim! J’ai faim!” And the woman motioned for me to return: we should follow her at a distance. In reply to the triumphant look cast me by Lou, I muttered that he’d better not let Franco catch him begging like that.
So keeping a wide interval, we tailed the woman on up the hill and she turned along a farm road and gave us an all-clear from the house. Playing in the yard was a score of children for it was, explained the woman, a Red Cross refugee pool. To comply with the orders of the local German Commandant, evacuation was to be accomplished within a day or two.
Two giggling girls fried us up a batch of eggs, and as we ate we were hard put to preserve our dignity. People around here found our appearance to be highly amusing and I couldn’t blame them, for we looked as though we’d hatched out from under a rock: stubbled faces streaked with soot, hands grimy and scratched, clothes matted with mud and hanging in shreds. But what the hell, I was happy. It was again a fine day, for we’d hiked our fifteen or twenty kilometers and ended up with full bellies.
Two lads led us to the barn and up a flight of rickety steps that led to the loft. They fetched us a bucket of water and a dull razor and a scrap of soap, and in a few minutes we were pretty again. I asked the boys if they could find us a petit bateau: a canoe, raft, or rowboat, anything floatable. They replied that there were no boats and even if there had been, it would be impossible to cross the beach to the Channel. I asked if it were possible for one to journey along the coastline to banks of the Orne, and they cried in unison, “C’est impossible!”—for between Cabourg and the Orne were 100,000 Boches, and in that zone no civilians were permitted to remain alive. Six kilometers of perilous swamp and several rivers with quicksand would we have to cross. And the lads advised that we latch onto the trickle of refugees and get the hell out in that manner. But that I couldn’t see. We were just a few kilometers from the British lines, and I was willing to creep the distance at night if that’s what it would take to swing the deal.
So with no plans whatsoever, we lay on the floor of the loft and slept, only to be rudely awakened by a mighty blast and accompanying jolt that bounced us a foot off the floor. Peering worriedly through a crack in the wall we saw, in a haze of gun smoke that hung in the faint moonlight, a crew of Jerries milling around the great-granddaddy of all cannon. So there was a coastal artillery battery some fifty paces from our barn, and from then on, every half-hour or so, the boys would crank their goddam gun up out of a hole, tilt up the barrel, and lob a charge right close over the roof of our inn, with a fine bead pulled on the Limeys. Each shot liked to’ve scared us out of our wits, and along with each blast there fell upon our weary heads a shower of twigs and straw from the thatched roof overhead. All this tended to make sleep a rather precarious thing at best. Some hotel. Now all along the line other cannon joined in on the fun, and the hellish racket was fortified by an occasional different-sounding blast, which we assumed to be incoming stuff. We hoped sincerely that the RAF would stay home tonight. All we needed was a stick of bombs across our neighboring gun battery.
We’d know what to do with our expedition if only we knew whether or not the British had followed up the morning’s attack. Providing that the breakthrough had been a success, then our best bet would be to swipe a sackful of chow and dig in a nearby forest to sweat out the liberation: on the other hand, if the British attack had failed, then it would be necessary for us to clear out of the Channel Coast. The new stalemate at the front would no doubt be in effect for quite a while, and within this very week the zone we were now in would be off-limits for everybody but Wehrmacht types. As we sat nervously anticipating the next round out of the big gun behind us, the whole danged Channel Coast expedition seemed in retrospect like a hare-brained idea, and we both wished fervently that our efforts had been expended in the opposite direction out of Dozulé.
At midnight there appeared in our barn a young Frenchman who acted as though we were his duty and he wanted to get us done. Jumpy as a cat was he, and scared: darting his eyes continually to the shadows, he whispered repeatedly that we were encircled by many Boches. Dazed, flak-happy, melancholy, angry; I couldn’t quite dope out his state of mind. After sharing a cigarette, we stepped out into the night and an overcast had blanketed the sky, with resulting inky blackness. Circling the coastal batteries, we tiptoed through a meadow where our guide, halting at the edge of a half-dozen huge bomb craters, kicked at the splinters of what had once been a house. “When the bombs fell,” he whispered softly, “all my family was in this house.” The RAF, he added, had done the job. Squeezing my arm until it hurt, he asked, “Why?”
There was no answer to that question except to tell him that the bombs had been intended for the guns but had fallen short. The Frenchman rubbed a sleeve across his eyes and whispered, bitterly, “Oui . . . c’est la guerre . . .”
The tragedy of this poor man’s life had been wrought by Allied airmen, and now, at the very scene of the extermination of his clan, he was engaged in the completely dangerous act of taking a pair of such aviators through an area alive with German soldiers. Of such spirit I could feel only deep admiration.
Only unnatural sounds were in the wind tonight: no songs of night birds but just the stupid blasting of guns, some near and some distant. As we stood silently by the funereal craters on the hillside, we suddenly caught the snarl of a fighter engine overlaying the throb of a twin-engine ship, and directly overhead was drawn across the black skies a short and brilliant line of tracers. A brief rattling of machine guns hit our ears and an aircraft exploded and slid down the sky, silhouetted starkly against its own flames. A Junkers 88 it was, and it went in with a resounding thud but a few kilometers from us. A cheery thing to see, that, and in better humor we set out again. Creeping up the hill and through a grove of trees, we scrunched along the gravel drive of a chateau. We would, said our guide, sleep in the small building ahead of us: a garage or servants’ quarters, perhaps. Pussyfooting closer to it, we blundered into several small trucks and a staff car parked in the deep shadows of a hedge. The Frenchman muttered an explosive “Merde!” and we took out of there like three scalded cats, for the Jerries had beaten us to the draw. Soon we stood before a little cottage: our guide’s house, and we would stay with him tonight.
The RAF was over the front now, and the skies flickered merrily as sticks of heavy bombs rumbled in. Crisscrossing arcs of tracers lashed the low horizon and deadly Roman-candle columns of heavy flak sailed leisurely skywards: and the violent scenery over the front decided me then and there to keep the hell out of such furious doings. The constant angry flashes and the solid, incendiary mass of hot steel that flew about in that neighborhood gave me a quick insight into the weather one could expect should he venture out into no-man’s land.
A gypsy girl with her castanets had nothing on that Frenchman when he played his key in the lock in the kitchen door, and when it finally swung open we stumbled into pitch blackness. Fearful of lighting even a match, our friend rummaged around and came up with three bottles of champagne, but he trembled so that Lou and I took over—Lou popping the corks and me filling our glasses by the simple blackout expedient of dangling a thumb inside the glass and pouring until the wine level approached a top knuckle. So we sat in the dark for an hour, whispering and clinking glasses, and when the bottles were dry we lurched up a ladder and into a bedroom where our friend indicated a double bed and said, “Bonsoir.” We tumbled onto a feather quilt, fully dressed and ready for any emergency takeoff, but in expecting sleep to overtake us without delay we were wrong, for now the fun began.
Having given us his own bed, the Frenchman now set about fixing himself a place to sleep. With a load of blankets in his arms and a load of champagne under his belt, he journeyed from a chest of drawers in our room to a bare mattress in the room adjoining. On his first trip, he staggered a bit off course and tripped over a little tin thunder-mug, which sat expectantly in the center of our room. As it clattered across the floor, the Frenchman let out a muffled curse; then all was quiet but for a squeak, squeak, squeak as he headed across the room for another load of bedding. Whang! Another direct hit on the animated pissoir, followed by a much less muffled string of violent curses. We tried not to laugh, out of politeness, but twice again he crossed the room and twice again he stumbled over the same item, and then at last, invisible in some corner, with the final shreds of his control snapped, the Frenchman stood shrieking dreadful imprecations down upon the mischievous pot. Our hysterical guffaws added to the hullabaloo.
Awake before dawn, we lit a smoke and by match-light snooped around the attic. Amidst gloomy old family portraits was a tiny wedding statuette with its wee bride and groom standing patiently, hand in hand, beneath a tall glass dome. Spread on the floor were apples and onions and from a string of drying tobacco leaves I requisitioned a handful for future reference. Then our hung-over friend joined us, and as we left the attic he grinned sheepishly and booted the malicious little pot across the room. With an apology, he explained that it was necessary we leave without delay, for every morning German officers came to have breakfast in his kitchen. Handing us a little packet of food and litre bottle of cider, he bade us adieu.
An eerie shroud of wet and chilly fog swirled over the dark countryside, and the visibility was a scant ten paces. With an hour before sunup, we made our way to a shed where we wolfed down our little breakfast. Then with a piece of wrapping paper and a leaf of tobacco I constructed a fine cigar upon which we puffed, blowing smoke rings while formulating a rough plan of action.
First off, to hell with the English lines. In this mess, discretion seemed far the better part of valor. Wedged against the beach as we were, we were in a tight spot with damned little maneuverability permitted us. We’d had phenomenal luck in bluffing our way from Dozulé to the Channel, and to squirm our way out of the fire and back into the frying pan would require equally good luck. Backtracking ran against my grain, but there was little else to do. We’d retrace our painful steps to Dozulé, then cruise southward for a couple or three days. Then a trek to the west for a hundred or so kilometers should position us for a stab at the American lines, wherever they might be. There really being nothing much to discuss, we set foot upon a strange highway that, we calculated, would lead us to the Dozulé-Houlgate road.
A few minutes later, the bleak dawn was made warm and cheery by the appearance of two German officers who emerged from the fog ahead of us and halted to observe the strange sight of a pair of early-rising French bums who mounted the hill below them.
Each officer was armed with Luger pistol and bulging briefcase, and I put myself in their shiny boots; what the hell would two honest Frenchmen be doing on the highway at this ungodly hour of the morning? We shifted into low gear and the Jerries watched us as we took ten slow paces toward them. Then with one last sharp look, they crossed the highway and went about their business and we went about our own, sweating freely despite the chill of dawn.
And an eventful four or five kilometers later, we realized that we’d missed the Dozulé road in the fog; but since our highway was beamed roughly in the right direction, we continued along it. The sun blinked up and burned away the mists just in time to enable us to spot up ahead of us a cluster of German sentries and Vichy gendarmes who stood at a major crossroads. In the process of circumnavigating this dangerous junction, we blundered upon a bivouacked wagon train, which forced us into a detour of our original detour. Fading in haste to the brush, we dodged again to remain unseen by a squad of Jerries who puttered about in the woods stringing wire. So times was gettin’ tough again, and we were getting ourselves quite well lost, what with the continual backtracking and circling and dodging around the whole countryside. Unable to orient ourselves with the map, we picked up a compass course of a shade east of south and trudged off across-country. We walked through rugged, timbered hill country, and the sun was hot in a cloudless sky. The wild perfume of the humid pine woods filled me with the joy of living. I was having a dandy time. A steady pace we held until midmorning, when we paused to quench our thirst at a charming little mountain spring. After a long, long drink of cool, clear water, a smoke.
Now we trod a little dirt road that followed along a twisting, gurgling creek at the bottom of a deep ravine. Each bend in the road was hidden from the next by the heavy forest, and I shortly rounded a sharp bend to bump squarely into an item that instantly caused my morale to take a turn for the worse: a German armored reconnaissance truck, an open-air job wherein sat eight soldiers, rifles poised militaristically upon their knees. Talking into a radio transmitter was an officer, and the whole lousy crew of this machine turned their heads to regard me.
With a frantic wriggling of fingers behind my back as a warning to Lou, I came to a shuddering halt, knowing instinctively that a bluff would not take us past this patrol unchallenged. A few highly pregnant seconds passed. A camouflaged retreat was the only way out. So meeting the hostile glares from the armored car with a disinterested glance, I whipped out the old ruse and took a nonchalant leak, then turned and walked back around the bend and out of sight. After logging a record-breaking one-kilometer sprint, Lou remarked that as long as my kidneys behaved so admirably, we’d be all right.
Away to hell and gone off-course now, we left the woods in favor of a pretty country road. From the forest we’d just left there cracked out a flurry of rifle shots: a couple of Jerries hunting rabbits, we hoped. As it seemed that the forests and roads were equally hazardous, for the sake of easier walking we kept to the roads for a while.
Pair after pair of soldiers cycled past, and as each patrol eyed us we did our level best to convince them that what they looked upon with suspicion was only a pair of legitimate citizens of Normandy: a couple of ragged yokels out for a stroll and engaged in a furious, gesturing discussion of crops and weather. Had any one of these cruising patrols overheard our arguments they would, perhaps, have been a bit bewildered. With a hand stuffed into a jacket pocket and the other describing grand circles, I would sputter to Lou: “Hey! Janvier, Fevrier, Mars, Monsieur Lynch! Avril, Mai, Juin, n’est ce pas?” When I’d pocket my waving hand, my comrade would take over for a while: “Ah oui, Monsieur Tayo! Un, deux, trios! Ou est le vin rouge? Voici le vin rouge! Ha ha ha! Cinq, six, sept. Wisht I wuz in Joisey City! Un deux trios, M’sieu!”
And unchallenged we stood again at the edge of the coastal hills to gaze down into Dozulé. Aiming now to detour the troop concentration there, we set course to the southeast and sauntered down the slope feeling pretty cocky. Nothin’ to this racket! In four or five hours we’d covered any number of crooked, zigzag kilometers and slipped through the most dangerous zone. We made happy haste along a good gravel road at the foot of the range of hills, whistling and chatting and now and then flinging a rock at a rabbit or bird just to see him scamper. And we cruised blithely into the middle of a German infantry outfit that, as we neared an innocent-looking stretch of country road, popped from a deep ditch to clamber onto the highway where they milled around, forming ranks. Since they’d all had one good look at us, we cruised ahead to push our way through, walking along behind their rear rank. Upon passing them safely, however, our silent shrieks of joy dwindled to audible moans of frustration as an officer barked out a guttural command—whereupon every last one of the bastards did a snappy right-face, forward-march and fell in behind our outnumbered American spearhead. They were soon hot on our heels and closing the interval rapidly, for the deliberately lazy shuffle we were forced to assume was no match for the pounding German army stride. About to be overtaken, we proceeded with undignified haste along a convenient tree-lined side road. The clomp-clomp-clomp of boots faded in the distance.
“Christ almighty!” said Lou, giving his lucky charm a rub or two. We had a pow-wow and a smoke and came to the conclusion that our luck was wearing well. By nightfall, we calculated, we’d be out of the trap and into less warlike territory. For the remainder of the morning we trudged boldly along the least important highways, picking our merry way unchallenged through an amazing variety of Wehrmacht units that cluttered the countryside.
We called a halt outside a village, for ahead of us at the dead end of our road was a little group of gendarmes and sentries. As we watched, a girl escorting a pony cart full of milk cans left the village and came our way. I slipped her a friendly smile and a line of chatter and twenty francs and she gave us all the milk we could hold at one sitting. When I asked her if those folks ahead of us were inquisitive as to the papers of passing pedestrians, the girl assured us that such was the case.
Which way should we detour the village—east or west? A coin landing heads-down in the dirt gave us our answer, so we headed west down a muddy little trail. Foot-deep hoof prints showed where weary mules had labored to haul overloaded wagons through the soggy low places; and it hadn’t been too long before our arrival, as evidenced by the blades of grass and weeds that were just now beginning to spring erect from the wagon ruts. A little pile of smoldering twigs and a profusion of cigarette butts marked a place where the Jerries had called a halt, perhaps to wait out the departure of strafing Thunderbolts. We paused there while Lou made up a bundle of his extra clothes. Despite the streams of sweat that trickled and tickled and ran into my shoes, I preferred to wear all my clothes rather than be bothered with carrying a parcel. The sun was extremely hot, but thinking of the chilly nights to come I hung onto my flying jacket, which was nicely covered by the tattered black suitcoat. At the end of the muddy trail we crossed over a concrete highway and headed along a tar toad, galloping when the way was clear and shifting down to a stroll whenever patrols cycled toward us. As one particular two-man patrol whizzed past us, I sneaked a look at the soldiers’ faces and thought that I’d seen them before someplace. It would be risky to be seen by the same patrol more than once, for then we would no longer appear to be local boys but would instead seem to be a pair of young Frenchmen who were clocking off a helluva lot of kilometers in an obvious hurry. Curiosity would lead to suspicious thoughts, and those were two things we would rather keep out of the picture. So it became necessary that we leave this good tar road.
As we stood discussing the advisability of following a little lane we’d come upon, from an unlikely patch of weeds there arose the head of a German soldier. As he talked into a field telephone he kept a glassy eye focused on Lou and me, and we ceased our laughing and joking, changing the subject quickly to a recitation of disjointed bits of French. As we walked away, the Jerry faded back into his dugout and we went to seek out a less populated side road.
As a long, front-bound column of bicycle troops whirred past us, we made a second attempt to abandon this busy thoroughfare. After a few paces down our second-choice road, we saw a sentry who stood like a totem pole at the barbed-wire gate to some sort of prison or guardhouse. Retreating again to the blacktop highway, we carried on for four or five kilometers with a swinging, easy stride which gradually put behind us the mountains and brought us to more level country. On either hand was just a rolling spread of brushland and scrub pine, and there were far fewer soldiers to harass us. For a full half hour not one patrol came along, and we saw not a sign of the enemy.
We’d soon be southbound, and I hummed a gay little tune; hungry I was, but feeling no pain. For we were a hot-shot pair of agents! We’d just strolled up to look over the situation on the Channel Coast and, finding it to be an unpleasant place, we’d strolled away again. We had just jumped out of the fire, climbed out of the lion’s mouth, removed our heads from the chopping block, and tested the noose for size. What the hell, if we weren’t right now traveling in the right direction, we were at least covering a lot of country. At the rate we were making tracks we’d soon be safely away and poised for another whack at the lines, this time from a different angle!
And as we walked gaily along, patting each other on the head and telling each other what smart boys we were, a mounted patrol of two bicycle troopers rolled into view from over the crest of a hill ahead of us. We cut our long-legged pace back to a casual saunter, hung cigarette butts from our lips and shoved hands in pockets. With berets draped jauntily over ears, an innocent pair were we. Fifty paces between us: and we were being looked over, but that was normal. The interval narrowed and closed and, at the last moment before passing us, the leader of the patrol swerved sharply to our side of the tar road. Swinging from the saddle, he stood blocking our way.
“Aussweiss!” barked the sergeant, accosting Lou. Lou fumbled in his jacket pocket and came up with his passport and identity cards, all skillfully counterfeited by the Amiens Underground.
The sergeant: professional, shrewd-faced, tough, and definitely a suspicious bastard. His partner was a reluctant-draftee type: middle-aged, paleeyed, dull-faced, and I recognized the pair as having looked us over earlier in the day.
“Aussweiss!” the sergeant had said to Lou. Keerist! He would next ask to see my papers. My saddened heart flopped about like a gasping bullhead in the dry bottom of a rowboat. The rusty machinery in my head picked up a few hundred rpm’s and ground out an astoundingly unsatisfactory pile of reckless plans, wild ideas, subterfuges, angles, and deals; all produced at top speed and discarded as rapidly as they appeared.
The German sergeant was going over Lou’s papers with thoroughness, and Lou watched the process with an air of injured innocence. The sad expression on his face and the gaping mouth would have done credit to any old village idjit. The Jerry examined the photograph on Lou’s aussweiss; glanced from the picture to Lou’s face and back again, and finally he nodded, returning the hot papers. He asked Lou what he had in the parcel. “Vetements civiles, Monsieur!” mumbled Lou in a humble tone, and he knelt on the pavement to unwrap his bundle. To stall off the inevitable demand for my papers, I knelt alongside him and we began fiddling with the knots. We goofed around for so long that the sergeant shouted, “Vite! Vite!” at us, and reaching down ripped the package from our palsied fingers. Breaking the twine with a savage jerk, he dumped Lou’s Sunday duds carelessly upon the highway.
Snatching up a tan trench coat and waving it in our faces, the irritable sergeant shouted triumphantly, “Englander! Das ist Englander!”
That I interpreted correctly to mean he thought it to be of English origin, and I corrected him: “Non, M’sieur! C’est français: regardez la goddam label!” Dame Fortune, with remarkable foresight, had sewn into the tan coat a label that read “Deauville, France,” and the sergeant, scowling because he had been in error, went over the rest of the clothes. Satisfied at last, he then turned to me. He was going to be awfully angry.
But I had taken heart. The sergeant had examined Lou’s papers on every one of which was inscribed in bold, black script: “Sourd et Muet!” Deaf and dumb, that is; and Lou and the two soldiers had been carrying on a merry parley. Figuring that both the sergeant and the corporal were little slow on the uptake, I prepared to run a bluff until the last dog was hung.
The stony-eyed sergeant shoved his pointing finger into my puny chest: “Vos papiers!!”
I compounded an angelic expression and fastened it to my face. I felt around in my inside coat pocket, fumbling for nonexistent papers: and as I clawed around under my coat I wished fervently for my Colt pistol, which now hung in its shoulder holster in a far distant parachute locker in England. We were in open country, and the Jerries’ rifles were still slung over their shoulders.
I pulled out an empty hand, slapped a few more pockets, and without half trying, assumed a worried look. I snapped my fingers. “Merde!” I exclaimed, “Today I have forgotten my papers! They rest in the pocket of my other coat, back at the old homestead!” Not the most original alibi, but fast if not good.
The sergeant’s eyebrows jerked upwards a suspicious notch or two and he grilled me, luckily speaking a brand of French two stages less fluent than mine.
“Where is this house of yours?” “Just at the edge of Dozulé, M’sieur. I am a poor country boy and I live with my old maw and paw on this little farm. My papers, they are in the other coat. Merde!”
“Why are you so far away? Where are you going so fast?”
“I go to visit my old grandmaw, who is ailing.”
“This grandmere, she lives where?”
“Sixteen kilometers thisaway, then four kilometers thataway. I will leave now to find mes papiers, eh?”
I had all the answers, and where they came from I don’t know. I was straining my French to the limit, but I still had this character outnumbered. After a most sincere song-and-dance had been wrung from me, the tired old corporal peevishly suggested to the sergeant that these two Frenchmen were all right: let them alone. Quit pickin’ on ‘em and leave us be on our way. My spirits gave a joyous surge, for I thought that Lou’s correct papers and my propwash had convinced the patrol of our innocence.
I was playing my role so wholeheartedly that I’d begun to believe all the crap I was laying out, and I felt a flash of righteous indignation when the nosy sergeant flipped his Mauser from his shoulder and nuzzled me with the muzzle of it.
“We’ll see,” he remarked. “Start walking.” I gave him a long look and he poked me again with his rifle. I shrugged and started walking, Lou at my side. Ten paces. I looked around hoping to see the Jerries pedaling in the opposite direction; but they were trudging along behind us, pushing their bicycles. Their rifles were laid over the handlebars and pointed, one each, at Lou’s back and mine, and fingers were curled around triggers. The sergeant grinned a foxy grin and I nodded and we clumped along the highway. I had a kind of lynched feeling.
The way it looked to me, Lou was in the clear: and the sergeant, with nothing better to do, was forcing my story and making me lead the way to grandmother’s house. I whispered to Lou that at the first crossroads we came to we would stop, shake hands, and he should take off on his own while I led the Jerries around for a while. I figured to lead the sergeant and his partner around the backwoods country until perhaps an opportunity for escape might present itself. I started doping out a line of chatter to hand my captors when I would finally come to the end of my rope, unable to locate the house of my imaginary grandma. We marched steadily for an hour under the blazing sun, and not one crossroads did we come to.
And then the plan went all to hell when the sergeant hollered, “Halt!” and motioned us into a farmyard. A score of grey-uniformed soldiers were tinkering about the neat white house, and I protested:
“Mon sergeant! This is not the farm of my grandmere! Her place is down the road a piece!”
By way of reply he dug the muzzle of his excellent fusil into my starboard kidney, whereupon I willingly accompanied him to the rear of the farmhouse. Peering through an open doorway, I perceived a room full of radio equipment where a number of perspiring Jerry GI’s pounded typewriters, turning out great quantities of poop in quadruplicate, all in the best rear-echelon fashion. The corporal guarded us almost sheepishly while the sergeant stomped into the house to return in a moment with a haughty Oberleutenant who, with an exaggerated air of boredom, flicked through Lou’s papers and returned them. In miserable French, he then asked a few simple questions, to which Lou responded remarkably well for a deaf-mute. Satisfied, the lieutenant turned to me to ask why I had been walking the highway without my aussweiss. I explained to the lieutenant as I had explained to the sergeant, and as my desperation mounted my French improved proportionately. When I’d had my say, there was a moment of silence, until the lieutenant—cautious type—politely invited us into the house for an interview with the Commandant.
Twiddling our thumbs, Lou and I stood amidst the clacking German-made typewriters while the young snot went out to round up his C.O. I espied on a windowsill a half-dozen egg-sized black plastic concussion grenades; and for a moment I entertained few wild ideas, all of which I let slide. In the first place, I didn’t know how to work the damned things: secondly, being no Jesse James, I would have most likely just made a mess with me as the principle ingredient: and lastly, our bluff was working.
The lieutenant returned with a bald-headed old retread in tow. A major he was, some sixty years old and heavy-jowled. A few fancy ribbons decorated his class-A uniform, and damned if the old bastard didn’t have a monocle stuffed into one eye! He motioned us outside where the malevolent sergeant clicked his heels and saluted. I knew no German, but from his inflections I thought that he was going out of his way to build up a case against us.
Fumbling, the major started in on me, and his French was so atrocious that I don’t think I’d have much trouble with him.
“Votre nom?” he queried.
“Jean Pierre Beaupre, mon General!” I replied in fine accents. That was the French-est sounding name I could dream up on the spur of the moment, and when I humbly boosted the major three full grades he smirked at his lieutenant as though to say: “See there! This ignorant yokel at least realizes my true value to the cause!”
“Monsieur Beaupre,” said the major, childishly pleased with his promotion, “why do you walk so far and so fast?”
I did an involuntary double-take before realizing that he’d addressed me. “As a good Frenchman,” I replied, “I am only doing my level best to comply with the orders from German high command, which has demanded that all civilians evacuate the Dozulé area by the twenty-fifth day of July.” Explaining further, I added that I had departed from my little farm in such a hurry that I had foolishly forgotten my aussweiss. The major, seeking a flaw in my story, cagily asked me the name of the mayor of Dozulé. Figuring that this fathead didn’t any more know the name of the mayor of Dozulé than I did, I told him that surely everyone knew the good citizen Andre Dubois!
With that pat answer, the major let me alone and I hooked my thumbs into my pockets and watched him give Lou a going-over. Examining Lou’s counterfeit papers, he too found them to be in order. My sourd-et-muet comrade answered all questions courteously, and that amazing fact lay in my mind and tickled until inside I was grinning like a cat eating spit.
Turning again to me the major asked, in even worse English than had been his French; “Speak you the English, Monsieur Beaupre?”
I made a maximum effort to sound like a Frenchman talking broken English with a French accent: “Oui, mon General! I spik ze leetle I have learn in l’ecole!”
Lou’s extremely shaky sense of humor was touched off by that corny statement and he suffered a sudden fit of coughing, through which I could detect a strange strangling sound. He recovered hastily and we stood there with such dumb, pleading faces that the major decided that such a pair of stupid farmers could never entertain a thought hostile to the mighty War Machine. Turning to his sergeant, he made a guttural remark that had all the earmarks of being a nasty crack: we could give any town dummy in the Reich a run for his money! With a warning to me that it was dangerous to walk without papers, the old major gestured to us: “Allez! Raus mit uns!” Get out, now, and don’t bother me any longer.
My heart was pounding as we walked toward the gate. Hot damn! We’d run the one and original whizzer on these characters! Heh heh heh! I was already chuckling to Lou as I reached out to lift the latch on the gate. And then the sergeant’s voice lanced out: “Halt! Halt! HALT!”
I froze in my tracks and turned slowly around.