Most Secret (37 page)

By then the moon was well up; on the calm water it was very light indeed. It would not do for one ship to strike out alone towards the west while the others turned south and eastwards round La Chèvre for home. The Bretons saw that well enough and were prepared to accompany
Geneviève
till she was off the land. They all left the Anse des Blancs Sablons together heading about south-west, as if returning to the Raz to go on fishing.

“Captain Simon, he was well in with them, sir,” said Colvin. “They’d have done anything for him, they would.”

The eight vessels passed outside the Bouc. It seemed then that they had gone far enough together; there was a good deal of shouting from boat to boat, and then
Geneviève
altered course to west and went on out towards the Atlantic and safety, towards Dartmouth and home.

Ten minutes after they had left the other boats a searchlight blazed out dead ahead of them, not half a mile away, and held them in its glare.

“Properly caught, we were,” said Colvin grimly.

Blinded by the light, they could only see the bulk of the vessel. It was obvious from the height of the light that she was something much bigger than a
Raumboot
. She began flashing at them with a signal-lamp. There was nothing they could do but to hold straight on and try to bluff it out as stupid Breton seamen. As the vessels drew together they prepared for their last action.

All that this preparation could amount to was that Rhodes slipped into the control seat of the flame-thrower and checked his pressures. They could not man the Bren-guns or the Tommy-guns till action had commenced; their deck was flooded with white light and any preparation of that sort would have given them away at once. The Bretons played up well under Simon’s guidance. The gunners stood nonchalantly, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth, staring at the bulk of the destroyer as the vessels closed. They must have looked very like a fishing crew.

They did not answer the flashing signal-lamp; that was not in the part. In a real fishing vessel nobody would know how to read Morse. They just held on towards the enemy, and presently they were lying stopped alongside, about thirty yards away from her, opposite the bridge. She towered above them. She was only a small destroyer, somewhat similar to our V class, but to them she was immense.

The officer of the watch hailed them in bad French through a megaphone. “What ship is that? Where are you from?”

Rollot, the
maître
, was standing by Simon at the entrance to the little wheel-house. They whispered quickly together. Then Rollot called out in rich Breton dialect: “Fishing-boat
Marie et Pierre
, from Douarnenez. We left the fleet and came out here, because of the firing.”

There was a pause. Then: “Come in closer and take a line and come alongside.” It was very calm. “I shall send an officer on board you.”

Simon turned to Colvin in the wheel-house and translated quickly. “This is the end of it,” he said. “Shall we give in to them, or shall we fight it out?”

Colvin said: “I guess we’d better fight it out. The boys would like it better that way. Can Rhodes get his fire down to the stern from here?”

“No. It is too far.”

“Well, let him take the bow gun and the bridge in the first place ’n then train aft. I’ll see if I can work her down that way to help him.”

From the destroyer a voice cried impatiently: “Come alongside, or we open fire on you.”

Simon bent to the speaking-tube. “Rhodes, fire at the bow gun and then the bridge, and then work down the decks towards the stern. We shall go slow ahead. Fire quickly now as soon as you are ready.”

The young man said: “Very good, sir.” Their gun drill was never very formal in that ship.

The fire burst out and lit up the destroyer brilliantly. The jet curved lazily towards the A gun’s crew, landed amongst them and enveloped them in flame. A great fire rose up from the forecastle of the destroyer immediately; they must have had cordite charges open for loading.

From the wing of the bridge a machine-gun opened fire on them. They replied with Bren and Tommy-gunfire, and the flame jet travelled slowly to the bridge. That machine-gun ceased to fire abruptly, but another opened up upon them from the waist of the destroyer and began to spray them. The flame paused upon the bridge, and then began to work along her length towards the gun. There was a sudden clang of gongs, and screams, and shouted orders.

The ships were lying bow to stern side by side. Colvin put on full power to go ahead towards the stern of the destroyer.
He turned to Simon. “We want to get that flame to bear on their aft gun quick as we can,” he said. “Tell Rhodes.”

If they had managed to do that, if they had burnt the Z gun’s crew as they had burnt the A gun’s, I believe they might have got away with it. The destroyer then would have had nothing but small arms and machine-guns to fight them with, unless perhaps some A/A cannon. But as it worked out, they never got the aft gun. As they went ahead she went astern; she gained speed more quickly than they did and her stern kept well out of range of their fire.

Then the Germans opened fire with their stern gun, probably about a four-inch gun, loaded H.E. There was never any doubt about it after that. The range was only about two hundred yards. The first shell pitched over them and burst behind. The second was a direct hit somewhere near the bow, and the ship disintegrated.

“She just came to pieces, sir,” Colvin said. “One minute she was there all right, and next thing that I knew there was a sort of flash and all the planks and timbers were all separate, and we were in the water.”

He thought there was a third shell, but he was not sure of that. He did not know how he got into the water; probably he was blown clean out of the wheel-house. All he knew was that he was in the water ten or fifteen yards from the wreckage that had been
Geneviève
, and that there was nobody else near him.

“That happened at two-sixteen in the morning,” he said carefully. “I know that must have been the time, because my watch stopped, because the water got in it. And it said two-sixteen.”

I nodded. “That agrees with what the M.G.B.s reported,” I said. He had been talking for a quarter of an hour, and I wanted the whole story, if possible, before I was turned out. “What happened next?”

He turned his head wearily and nervously upon the pillow. “It’s on the chest-of-drawers there with them other things,” he said. “The watch.” His eyes were turned to a small pile of personal belongings, grey with salt. “Could you get it for me?”

I got up and gave it to him. It was a silver pocket watch with a very big white dial. There was still water inside the glass. He took it gratefully.

“What happened next?” I asked again.

He said: “I’ll tell you.” And then his eyes dropped to the watch in his hand. “I was wondering, would you do something
for me, sir? It’s had water in it for a week now, ’n I wouldn’t like to think that it’d never go again. Would you take it up to London to be cleaned? It was given me by somebody I thought a lot of one time.”

“Of course I will,” I said. “I’ll take it up this afternoon and get it seen to right away.”

He gave it to me gratefully. “You can see where it says on the back,” he murmured in a burst of confidence. “ ‘Jack Colvin from Junie, September 17th, 1935.’ That’s what it says, isn’t it?”

I glanced at the engraving. “That’s right,” I said. I slipped it into my pocket. “I’ll get it put right for you.”

“What happened after that?” I asked for the third time.

He said that he had begun to swim away from the wreckage. That was panic—instinct—call it what you like. There was a lot of light from the fires in the destroyer and from her searchlight, and he wanted nothing more than to get out of it. It was only when he had swum furiously and blindly for a hundred yards or so that he regained his senses. What brought him to himself was M.G.B. 268, which passed within a few yards of him after dropping her depth-charges at the bow of the destroyer.

He saw her bearing down on him, and saw the great wave of her wash sweeping towards him. In a quick glance around before he went down in the wash he saw the men upon the M.G.B. quite close to him as she swept past at forty knots. He saw the upturned keel of
Geneviève
with two men on it firing with a Tommy-gun. He did not know who they were.

He saw the shapes of fishing vessels in the background half a mile or more away. Then the wash came to him and he was smothered by it, clutched and spun round under water by the swirl, and thrown up gasping to the surface. He threw himself on his back for the concussion; immediately the depth-charges went off by the destroyer not more than two hundred yards away, and a great mass of water came down on him, carrying him under again.

He had his inflated life-belt on, his Mae West, as they all had; otherwise he would certainly have been drowned. But presently he came up to the surface, feebly spluttering and gasping, and it was now much darker, for the searchlight had gone out. He lay floating and winded, supported by the Mae West and recovering his senses, for perhaps ten minutes.

And presently it seemed to him that he was farther from the scene. He was farther from the destroyer. Probably she then had stern way on her to ease the forward bulkheads; in any case, she was much farther off. He could see the coast clearly in the moonlight between La Chèvre and the Anse de Dinant; it was not more than two miles away. The tide was still carrying him northwards, and would be for another two hours; from his recollection of the tidal streams he knew that it woud sweep him closer to the land as it filled up into the Rade de Brest.

And with that his guts came back to him. “I didn’t fancy swimming to them fishing-boats,” he said. “I reckoned if the Germans got any of us we’d be scuppered out of hand, with having put the flame on them and that.” It seemed to him that he could reach the coast quite easily on that calm, moonlit night. So he began to swim.

He said that the water was not very cold, although it was November. He was in the flood-tide up from the Bay of Biscay for one thing, and that was likely to be fairly warm. He was a strong swimmer. “Living in Oakland, like I did,” he said, “we used to spend a lot of time down on the beach. Besides, I been swimming all my life, one place or another. It wasn’t nothing, that.”

And so he swam for shore.

The tide bore him northwards faster than he swam, hampered as he was with his clothes and his Mae West. He kept his clothes on for their warmth, even in water, and because he knew that he would want them when he got on shore. He finally landed, after being in the water for about two hours, in a little rocky cove just north of Anse de Dinant, under the shadow of the island rocks that they call Tas de Pois. That must have been at about four or four-thirty in the morning. Immediately he got out of the water he began to feel the cold.

The moon was still high in the sky, flooding the coast with light. Because he was so cold he began to clamber along the rock looking for a way up the cliff. The cliffs in this part of Brittany are usually very high and rugged; where he landed he had to climb nearly two hundred feet before he got on level ground. Oddly enough, this gave him confidence to go on. “I knew there wouldn’t be none of them minefields top of a place like that,” he said. “There wasn’t even any barbed wire.” The Germans do not waste material in the defence of places which can never be invaded. Simon had found the same when he climbed up the cliffs near Goulin.

He found his way up the cliff at last, and wormed his way cautiously forward over the bare, short grass. He knew just where he was; from long study of the chart he held every feature of the coast firm in his memory. He was about two miles due south of the little fishing village of Camaret; he was on a small peninsula jutting westwards from the big peninsula between the Rade de Brest and the Bay of Douarnenez. The land that he was on was covered with heather, with occasional clumps of gorse and bracken. There were no trees.

Very soon he came to a footpath, well worn, running through the heather parallel with the cliff. He crossed it and went on away from the sea, still crawling on his hands and knees. The moonlight was still so bright that he was afraid to stand up; in that bare country he felt that he would be visible a mile away. When he had passed the footpath by about twenty yards he heard the tramp of feet; he curled up and lay still among the heather. A German soldier came in sight, marching along in tin-hat, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He was an oldish man, with rather a slovenly appearance. He went straight down the path, looking neither to the left nor the right. After a time Colvin crawled on again.

He went on for the best part of a mile, crawling all the way because of the lack of cover. This was not a bad thing, as it happened, because the effort and the use of his limbs that it entailed made him warm; his arms and legs regained their normal feeling and his clothes began to dry upon him. He had let the air out of his Mae West, but still wore it for warmth.

Presently, in the first light of dawn, he came to a stone wall dividing the moor from fields. He reached up cautiously and looked over, and found that he was looking down into the village of Camaret, a mile to the north of him. In the grey light he could see the entrance to the Rade de Brest beyond, and beyond that again the rocky coast of the north part of Brittany.

“I didn’t know what was best to do,” he said, fingering the sheet. “It seemed to me that I was in a jam.”

On that peninsula it was dangerous to go crawling about in broad daylight with no plan. There was a big clump of bracken growing up against the wall not very far away. He made for this and crawled into the middle of it and lay down, safe from any observation but from the air. And lying there he set to work to make a plan.

He had no need for any further survey of the country; he knew exactly where he was. As he crawled there had been growing
in his mind the idea that if he could get on to the north coast of Brittany, the south of the English Channel, some opportunity might arise for getting back to England. He might somehow get a boat; he might even make a raft and try to blow back on the south-west wind. In any case, the north coast was where he ought to be.