Cherbourg was cold, grey, windswept and generally miserable when they walked down the gangway from the destroyer and past the Gare Maritime at just after seven o’clock the following morning, but at least the trip across to France had been uneventful, as far as they knew. They hadn’t heard any of the ship’s weapons firing, and it hadn’t even been a particularly rough crossing. They’d had a hot breakfast on the ship about half an hour earlier, Michaels in the wardroom and Dawson in a junior ranks’ mess, and they’d both had a reasonable sleep on the destroyer, so they were ready – they hoped – for whatever the day decided to throw at them.
The first problem was fairly obvious. Although Michaels had the appropriate documentation and authorization to obtain a car from the British forces based near the harbour, that probably wasn’t going to be easy, vehicles being in short supply. They obtained a steer to the transport depot from a junior officer in the British forces’ headquarters, located near the harbour in the local casino, and reached the parking area in a few minutes. And judging by the military traffic on the roads in the town, most of the vehicles available were going to be lorries rather than cars. That was confirmed very quickly when they walked into the military transport compound, probably around a quarter of a mile from the harbour, where there appeared to be only about half a dozen trucks.
‘Where’s the transport officer?’ Michaels asked as he offered his identification to the armed sentry standing guard near the entrance to the parking area, Dawson just behind him, pay book in hand.
‘We don’t have an officer in charge, sir,’ the man said. ‘But the sarge should be in that ’ut over there.’ He pointed at a small wooden building, the size of a biggish garden shed, over to one side of the parking area.
Michaels thanked him, and the two men strode over to the building, where he rapped smartly on the door, then opened it and they both walked inside. The interior was illuminated only by the early morning light coming in through the window and appeared to be more chaos than organized.
The long wall opposite the door had been turned into a kind of giant noticeboard, with notices, printed forms and typed documents pinned to it in a haphazard fashion devoid of any apparent order. There were two desks in the room, both piled with papers and folders and documents of all sorts, and behind the bigger of the two sat a grizzled sergeant, the skin of his face wrinkled from prolonged exposure to the elements, and what hair he had left white against his tanned complexion. He looked about fifty years of age, with deep-set dark brown eyes and a nose that appeared to have been flattened on more than one occasion and then allowed to heal without medical intervention. His expression suggested that he had been everywhere, seen everything and done most of it. He was leaning back in his chair and drawing a lungful of smoke from the burnt-down stub of a hand-rolled cigarette he was holding between two nicotine-stained fingers.
When he recognized Michaels’ rank from the badges on his uniform, the sergeant mashed out the cigarette on a discoloured china plate he was apparently using as an ashtray and stood up, offering a rather limp salute.
‘Sah,’ he said, then lapsed into silence and waited expectantly.
‘Good morning,’ Michaels said. Then gestured at the chair, ‘At ease, Sergeant.’
The NCO sat down again and regarded the two new arrivals warily.
‘How can I help you, sir?’ he asked.
‘We need a car,’ Michaels began. ‘No driver, just a suitable vehicle, because my corporal here is a qualified driver.’
Dawson didn’t challenge that statement, although it was factually inaccurate. He could drive, certainly, but had never got around to taking any driving test, either as a civilian or within the military. And, in fairness to the corporal, nobody had ever actually asked to see his licence. The question he was normally asked was, ‘Can you drive?’ Which he could, obviously.
‘Cars are a problem,’ the sergeant replied, shaking his head. ‘Now, if you’d come in ’ere asking for a lorry, sir, that would ’ave been easy.’
‘A lorry will do,’ Michaels replied. ‘Anything with wheels and an engine. My corporal can drive anything short of a tank, and he could probably have a go at one of those if he had to.’
‘Ah.’ The sergeant clearly hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, we’re a bit short of trucks as well at the moment.’
‘You just said,’ Michaels reminded him, ‘that a lorry would have been easy. Those were your exact words. And there are about six trucks parked outside this building, so why don’t you just give us one of those?’
‘Well, you need a proper authorization, see.’
‘I have a proper authorization,’ Michaels said, stepped forward and showed the sergeant a typed letter. ‘This order was sent to me by the Director of Military Operations at the War Office in London before I left England. Note the last sentence, which states that “all units are requested to provide suitable transport and any other assistance requested by the bearer without delay”. That seems clear enough to me, Sergeant. So which lorry do you want us to take?’
The sergeant read the passage in the order twice, apparently looking for some get-out clause, but he was beaten, and he knew it.
‘Very well, sir. Give me half an hour and I’ll see if I can find a tilly for you. Them lorries is none too comfortable.’
It actually took almost three quarters of an hour, but eventually a somewhat battered Morris staff car did appear outside the wooden building, driven by a corporal who stopped the vehicle, slammed the door and then strode into the sergeant’s den. He emerged a couple of minutes later and walked away without a backward glance.
The sergeant stepped out of the building right behind him, crossed to the car and peered inside it, presumably checking that all was in order, and then turned to Michaels and Dawson, who had also walked over to the vehicle.
‘Here you are, sir. I’ve told the corporal to fill the tank to the brim, and it looks clean enough inside.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Michaels replied, opening the passenger-side door and sitting down.
Dawson went to the opposite side of the car and got in as well, putting his Lee-Enfield on the back seat. The sergeant looked askance at this somewhat unusual seating arrangement – usually the officer or officers would travel in the rear of the vehicle, not sitting up front beside the driver – but it was none of his business.
‘How long do you need the vehicle for, sir?’ the sergeant asked, as something of an afterthought. ‘What time will you be bringing it back?’
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Michaels replied, ‘but probably no more than a week.’
‘A week! I thought you needed it just for the day.’
‘If you’d asked, Sergeant, I would have told you. Anyway, about a week. Drive on, Dawson.’
‘I don’t think you’ve made a new friend there,’ Dawson said, watching the sergeant in his rear-view mirror. The man was standing outside the wooden building, his hands on his hips and glaring at the departing vehicle, the expression on his face clearly showing his irritation.
‘I’m not here to make friends,’ Michaels said, ‘only to get this job done. Right, we need to start heading south or south-east, but we can’t really get lost because Cherbourg is tucked away at the end of a peninsula with the sea on both sides. Just remember that they drive on the wrong side of the road over here, and keep your eyes open for any signs of a town named Valognes or maybe Carentan, because on this map they seem to be the first two biggish places we’ll be passing through.’
‘You said they drive on the wrong side of the road,’ Dawson said as he negotiated his way around a small group of civilian refugees heading in the same direction, and who had presumably decided to leave the Cherbourg area before the Germans arrived, because if they didn’t they would have nowhere to go. ‘Who says the left-hand side is correct?’
‘Logic and common sense, Dawson. Most people are right-handed, and when we shake hands we do so to prove that neither of us are armed, that our right hands are empty. That’s how the handshake evolved. So if you’re going to use a weapon like a sword when you meet a potential enemy, you want him to be on your right side, because that’s where the point of your weapon will be once you’ve drawn it. If he was on your left, it would be much more awkward to engage him. Extend the argument to two men on horseback. You absolutely need to have your enemy on your right, because you’ll have your lance or sword in your right hand. That’s why driving on the left makes absolute sense, and driving on the right doesn’t.’
‘That makes sense to me as well,’ Dawson admitted. ‘Though I’ve never really thought about it before. So why do the French drive on the right?’
‘Probably because we drive on the left. Whatever the British do, the French normally do the exact opposite, just out of sheer bloody-mindedness.’
The road Dawson was driving along paralleled a river that Michaels informed him was called La Divette, and which drained into Cherbourg harbour, but the road soon left the riverbank and angled over towards the south-east. Once they cleared the outskirts of the town, they saw only scattered houses and small groupings of properties that could barely be described even as hamlets.
They started seeing quite large numbers of civilians, most of them walking in groups and carrying bundles of their possessions – everything from small packs they could hold in one hand or slung over their shoulders up to quite large carts piled high with boxes and bags and unidentifiable packages – being pulled either by horses or simply by human power, by groups of men and women tugging and pushing and walking alongside.
‘The French authorities apparently don’t think the Germans will reach Cherbourg, because their armies will stop them,’ Michaels said. ‘That’s according to a briefing I was given just before I left England. It doesn’t look to me as if most of the French civilians who live around here share that optimistic point of view.’
‘Judging by the map you showed me when we were on that destroyer, sir,’ Dawson replied, ‘this place is a death trap. The Germans could easily put a cordon from one coast to the other, and nobody inside it would be able to escape unless they had a boat or were sodding good swimmers.’
‘And don’t think they wouldn’t if they thought it was necessary,’ Michaels said. ‘The Germans under Hitler are utterly ruthless and very competent. They’ve demonstrated that already, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and they’ll certainly get here, to this part of France. Make no mistake about that, no matter what the bloody French high command believes its military can do to stop them.’
They reached the town of Valognes about half an hour after leaving the lorry park at Cherbourg. It was only about 10 miles away, but the crowded roads had forced Dawson to drive quite slowly. However, once they cleared the southern outskirts of the place, which seemed largely deserted, with few signs of life, the human traffic diminished noticeably and they were able to increase their speed.
‘Pretty straight roads they’ve got around here,’ Dawson commented.
‘That’s one thing the French do well,’ Michaels replied. ‘They normally build straight roads, much straighter that you usually find in England anyway. Mind you, France is a much bigger country, and largely empty, so in most cases they can put a road wherever they want to. In Britain there are villages and towns and other stuff that stop us doing that.’
They were still seeing signs of a hasty departure by most of the local residents, some properties being boarded up, others clearly just abandoned, and frequent groups of refugees on the road, all heading south. Other French families had clearly decided to stay, because they saw several clusters of people doing very little apart from watching the traffic on the roads. In the main, they were men, some reading newspapers or talking together, but the majority were simply sitting or standing and staring in front of them at what was happening, almost all of them smoking cigarettes.
Michaels didn’t know for sure, but he guessed that the human tide would continue moving in the same direction, making for the southern part of the country to try and put as much distance as possible between themselves and the invading German forces.
‘If these people are heading for Spain,’ he commented as Dawson steered around yet another group of walkers, ‘they’ve got a hell of a long way to go, and most of them probably aren’t going to make it. No doubt you’ve heard about the blitzkrieg tactics Adolf’s men are using. The German word blitzkrieg translates as “lightning war”, and it means they use their armour, their tanks and so on, to break through enemy defensive lines as quickly as possible. Then they can isolate enemy troops into small pockets and destroy them in what the Germans call a Vernichtungsschlacht, or a “battle of annihilation”. They’ll do that in France to break through the French armies and then they’ll occupy the whole country in a matter of weeks, maybe a month at the most, all the way down to the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. These refugees really are just walking out of the frying pan and straight into the flames of the fire.’
Once they’d cleared the eastern outskirts of Valognes, the road passed through a heavily wooded area where they saw very few houses, though they still passed numerous groups of refugees, all heading in the same direction.
A mile or so beyond Carentan, the road they were following forked, the right-hand arm continuing due south while the other road turned quite sharply to the east. They took the east fork, to continue heading toward Rouen, and both men quickly noticed the almost complete absence of refugees. The road in front of them was virtually empty.
‘That’s not too surprising,’ Michaels said. ‘This road more or less follows the coast, and anyone living here who wanted to leave the area wouldn’t travel along this route. They’d be heading south because no other direction would make sense. West would take them towards the Cherbourg cul-de-sac, and going east would mean they’d be heading straight towards the advancing Germans.’
The road was in reasonably good condition, and Dawson was able to keep the staff car moving at a decent speed. They reached the outskirts of Caen a little under three hours after they’d left Cherbourg and took a road that skirted the town to the north, rather than trying to drive straight through it. That seemed a safer option to both of them, because it would avoid them either getting lost in a tangle of narrow streets in the town centre or finding themselves in a traffic jam they couldn’t find an easy way to get out of.
‘This is about the halfway mark to Rouen,’ Michaels said, as they drove east and away from the town, ‘and it’s more or less lunchtime. Let’s find somewhere off the road where we can see what culinary delights they prepared for us back at Cherbourg.’
When they’d visited the casino that housed the British headquarters in the port town, Dawson had been dispatched to rustle up some supplies for the journey while Michaels looked into the provision of a staff car. He’d found the cookhouse quickly enough by just following his nose and the sound of clattering pots and pans, and had walked back out of the building ten minutes later carrying a small cardboard box inside which glass had chinked musically as he’d walked.
They found a suitable spot just before they reached the village of Troarn, and Dawson pulled the car to a stop at the edge of an oblong patch of rough ground just off the road. He turned off the engine, and both men got out, grateful for the opportunity of stretching their legs after being cramped in the seats of the staff car for so long. Dawson took the cardboard box from the back seat where he’d stowed it, placed it on the bonnet of the car and then opened it.
Inside were two bottles of British beer, presumably part of the supplies shipped out with the British forces a few weeks earlier, a couple of bottles of red wine and two packets of sandwiches that he had watched one of the cooks prepare. So it wasn’t any great surprise to him when Michaels opened one of the packets and looked slightly disappointed with what he found inside.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Dawson said apologetically, ‘but cheese was all they had. They’d finished breakfast, see, but not started lunch.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Dawson. It’s food, and that’s what’s important. So get stuck in.’
But the corporal hadn’t quite finished his explanation.
‘The other thing is the wine, sir. When the cook gave it to me, he said it wasn’t the best vintage, whatever that means.’
‘Ah.’ Michaels picked up one of the bottles and looked critically at the label. ‘Not very helpful,’ he said. ‘About all it tells me is that it’s red wine, ordinary red wine – vin rouge ordinaire – and I could have guessed that from just looking at it.’
He opened the rear door of the car and rooted around in his kitbag which he’d placed alongside Dawson’s on the back seat. After a few seconds he walked back to the bonnet of the car holding a tin mug and a metal gadget that looked like a large penknife. He pulled open one of the blades to reveal that it was actually a corkscrew, and with the deftness born of long practice he screwed it into the cork and eased it out of the neck of the bottle, the cork coming free from the tight embrace of the glass with a loud pop.
Michaels lifted the neck of the bottle to his nose and gave a cautious sniff.
‘It doesn’t smell too bad,’ he said hopefully, then poured a couple of inches of wine into his mug and took a sip. Immediately, his face contorted into a grimace, and he shook his head. ‘God, that’s rough,’ he said. ‘It tastes more like vinegar than wine, and vinegar that was only bottled yesterday. Still, it might take the edge off the taste of those cheese sandwiches. Or vice versa. Do you want some of this, Dawson?’
Michaels proffered the bottle, but Dawson shook his head firmly.
‘Thanks, sir,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ll stick with the devil I know, rather than that rotgut. This is British beer, so it shouldn’t be too bad.’
‘Good decision.’
Michaels unscrewed the cork from the end of his gadget, snapped it shut, and then opened a different blade, at the end of which was a bottle opener. He passed the tool to Dawson, who levered the cap off one of the bottles and then passed the tool back to the captain.
‘Useful gadget, that,’ he said. ‘I normally whack the cap off with a bayonet, or just snap the top off the bottle.’
‘I’ve had it for years. I think it was made in France, oddly enough.’
They ate the rest of their snack meal in virtual silence, Michaels taking small and cautious sips of red wine from his tin mug, while Dawson drank his liquid refreshment straight from the bottle.
‘We should save one sandwich each,’ Michaels suggested, ‘because we don’t know if we’re going to find anywhere in Rouen where we can get a meal tonight. I don’t know how close the Germans are to the city, or what the situation is there. I know we’ve got our standard ration packs, but eating anything out of those really has to be a meal of last resort.’
‘Are you taking the wine with you, sir?’ Dawson asked, gesturing towards the opened bottle that was still over half full.
‘Might as well, I suppose. It seemed to get better after the first few mouthfuls,’ Michaels said, pushing the cork back into the neck of the bottle. ‘Probably because it has completely anaesthetized my taste buds. And we can always try running the car on it if we get short of fuel.’
Dawson put the unopened bottle of beer and the two bottles of wine back in the cardboard box, along with the packets of sandwiches, both now much smaller because of what they had eaten.
Then they got back on the road again, making the best time they could towards Rouen, which would be where they would start their surveillance operation of the tank farms and refineries that lined the north bank of the River Seine.