Most Secret (6 page)

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He landed in England in the earliest light of dawn, having crossed the Channel in pitch darkness in a strange, small boat with fifty other men. There were seven wounded in the boat with him, lying upon the bare deck, uncomplaining; one died in the middle of the night. In that boat there were no other prisoners, but he had reason to believe that ten or twelve Germans and civilian French crossed in another boat. It occurred to him that he was being segregated.

They landed in a muddy, tidal creek between fields. He never
learned where it was. There was a wooden jetty and a few brown corrugated iron sheds; it might have been a little yacht-yard in peace-time, or something of that sort. The men with him stretched stiff, tired limbs, unloaded Tommy-guns and pistols, and passed soldiers’ jokes about ham and eggs and a good kip.

They landed at the pier and the men formed up in a rough order and were marched away towards a wood; there seemed to be a camp among the trees. Simon was ordered by the subaltern to wait; he was taken into a little hut by a guard, and stayed there till a small lorry with a canvas-covered back drove up.

He rode in this for half an hour with the subaltern to a large military camp. Here he was shown into an office, where he was interrogated shortly by a major. They were kind enough to him, and after ten minutes’ questioning took him to a room and offered him a bath and a shave. Then he had breakfast, English breakfast that he remembered from his schooldays, where you were expected to eat porridge as well as meat or fish, and then very thick toast, and the orange conserve that they called marmalade. Already he was feeling that his English was a little rusty.

In fact, it was. It was grammatically correct and the accent was not very noticeable, but his schoolboy slang called attention to his speech and then you noticed his accent. It is not natural to hear a man of thirty-five in serious conversation use the word “topping” to express appreciation of the treatment that he had received, nor does he generally refer to his food as “tuck”. Charles did both because his English was like that, and then you noticed him and wondered who he was.

They put him in a car again after breakfast, and by noon he arrived at a large, rather dilapidated country house, full of soldiers. It was not very far from London, but Charles had no means of knowing that; he never learned where it was. And here he came before a major in the British Army and a
capitaine
of the Free French, and he talked to them freely for three hours.

In the middle of the afternoon the major said: “I’m going to call a halt for to-day, Mr. Simon, and have some of this transcribed. I may want to have another talk with you to-morrow.”

Simon said: “Right-oh, sir. I’ll stay here, shall I?”

The British officer said gravely: “It would be very kind of you if you would stay with us to-night. We can make you
comfortable.” In fact, Simon was as much a prisoner as if he had been German, but he did not care to realise it. He was too happy to be back in England.

“I’d like that ever so much,” he said.

The major smiled slightly. “Tell me, Mr. Simon,” he said. “Have you got any relatives or friends in England?”

Charles said: “Not very many. There are my wife’s people, of course …” He had told them about her. “But I don’t much want them to know that I’m over here.”

“Of course not,” said the other easily. “Whom do you know best—whom would you go and stay with when you leave here?” He smiled with disarming frankness. “You see, you’ve come to England rather—unconventionally. We may have to help you to make up a story to tell.”

Charles laughed. “I would like to see the Beak,” he said. “He was my housemaster at Shrewsbury. I think I’d go and stay with him for a bit, at the school.”

The major asked: “What’s his proper name?”

“Mr. Scarlett. He’s retired from the House, but he lives just opposite the cricket-ground.”

The major handed him over to a subaltern, who took him and gave him tea in the mess. Charles was immensely pleased. He had never before had a meal in a real mess, with officers just like grown-up versions of the boys that he had been at school with. It was all very, very good.

The mess waiter was just bringing him his second cup of English tea when, two hundred miles to the north, a camouflaged army car drew up before the little house opposite the cricket-pitch. Three minutes later a young officer was explaining his errand to a white-haired old gentleman.

The old man said: “Oh dear me, yes. I remember Charles Simon very well. He was a good oar, a very good oar; if he had gone up to the Varsity he might have done very well. Not the Blue, you know, but I think he would have got into the College Eight.” The young officer listened patiently; his job was to listen. “He rowed three in my First Eight in 1923, the year that we made three bumps and finished up third boat on the river. It was a good year, that.”

Mr. Scarlett paused thoughtfully. “He was French, you know, but a nice boy all the same.”

The subaltern said: “Would you know him again?”

“Know him again? Whatever do you mean? Of course I’d know him again! Besides, he came to see me here in this very
room only nine years ago, after that unfortunate business with his wife.”

The subaltern said: “He’s over here now, sir. I understand that he is in confinement.”

The old man looked at the boy searchingly over his spectacles. “What for?”

“I don’t know. I had to tell you that we want you to come down to London to identify him.”

“When?”

“To-night, sir. Right away.”

Charles Simon had a game of billiards with his companion, and he had several glasses of English gin and bitters, and he had dinner in the mess and talked to the colonel about France, and he listened to the nine o’clock news with the officers, and he listened to them talking about the war. He was staggered at their nonchalant assumption that they were going to win the war. It was obvious that their country was being terribly battered; he had driven that morning through one blitzed city that he fancied was Southampton, and the desolation of it, and the stillness, had seemed to him to be the hall-mark of defeat. In dumb amazement he listened to the officers discussing what should be done with Germany when the war was over; the words “if we win the bloody thing” passed as a joke. It was an eye-opener to Charles.

About ten o’clock there was a raid warning, and most of the officers went out to their duties. His guide stayed with Charles Simon. “We don’t sleep on the top floor in a raid,” he said. “But you’ll be all right—you’re on the first floor. There’s a shelter if you’d like to go down there.”

He said: “Are you going?”

The other said: “Not unless they start to drop stuff round about. We all used to go at first, but we don’t now. I’d go to bed, if I were you. I’ll call you if it gets hot.”

“I think I will.”

He went upstairs to bed, and by the light of a candle got into the pyjamas they had lent him. He lay awake for a long time, tired though he was, listening to the drone of German bombers passing overhead, the distant concussion of the bombs, and the sharp crack of distant gunfire. And as he lay, a wonderful idea formed in his mind. He was a British subject, an Englishman for all his long years in a foreign country. He had been at a good English school. If he played his cards right he might become a British officer like all these other officers, and be made
one of them, with military duties and a khaki tunic with patch pockets and a beautiful Sam Browne belt, deep brown and polished, with a revolver holster buckled on to it. And with that uniform he felt there would come peace of mind, the calm assurance of the future unaccountably possessed by these young men.

Presently, dead tired, he fell asleep.

He had breakfast in the mess next morning with his guide, and at about ten o’clock he was taken back into the office where he had been interrogated on the previous day. The British major was there alone; he got up as Charles came in, unobtrusively pressing a bell button on his desk.

“ ’Morning, Mr. Simon,” he said cheerfully. “Sleep all right? Raid didn’t keep you awake? That’s grand.”

Behind Charles the door opened, and an old man came in. Charles Simon turned and stared. “Mr. Scarlett!” he said. “I say—whatever brought you here, sir?”

The old man said: “The soldiers brought me here. Well, Simon, been getting into trouble? What have you been up to?”

“I’ve not been up to anything, sir.” He spoke as a small boy.

“Well, what have they got you here for? You’re under arrest, aren’t you?”

The major interposed. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” he said. “Mr. Simon is not under arrest. But he arrived in this country in a peculiar way, and we had to get a positive identity for him. You know him well, I take it?”

“I was his housemaster for four years,” the old man said. “If that’s not knowing him well I’d like to know what is.”

There was little more to be said. Simon was allowed a quarter of an hour with his old housemaster; then the old gentleman was politely put into an army car and taken back to London to his club, slightly bewildered at the rapid, curtailed meeting. Simon was taken back into the major’s office, but this time there was a brigadier with him, a smartly dressed officer with red staff tabs, with greyish hair and china-blue eyes. That was the first time Simon met McNeil.

For half an hour they went over his information of the previous day. He had told them a good deal about the aerodromes at Caen and other places, and about the coast defences around Calais, so far as he had knowledge of them from the concrete contracts. To-day they wanted to pursue the matter further. They wanted information about Lorient in Brittany.

He wrinkled his brows. “Yes,” he said. “There is a good deal of cement going there. And steel reinforcement, although we don’t handle that.”

“How much cement a week?”

“Oh, a good deal. Two hundred tons a week, I dare say, sir.”

“What do they want with all that in a little place like Lorient?”

Simon said: “I really couldn’t tell you. You see, most of our Brittany contracts pass through our sub-office in Brest. We have an agent there who takes the orders and passes them to us in bulk at Corbeil. We only know the destination of the trucks.”

The brigadier leaned forward. “I can tell you what that cement is used for, Mr. Simon. Would you like to know?”

Charles stared at him.

“The Germans are building shelters for their U-boats operating from Lorient. Did you know that?”

He shook his head. “I knew that they had U-boats there. But—shelters?”

“Bomb-proof, ferro-concrete shelters over the submarine docks,” said the brigadier. “That’s what they’re doing there. They plan to make those docks completely safe from our attacks by air. Then with their submarines they plan to close the English Channel to our shipping—and they may do it, too. It’s really rather serious.”

He turned to Charles. “If you were back in Corbeil, in your office,” he said quietly, “could you find out the thickness of the concrete roof, and the amount of reinforcement? Could you get hold of the design of the roof of the shelters, so that we can adapt our bombs to penetrate it?”

There was a silence in the bare little office. The officers sat gazing at the man from France.

“I couldn’t find out anything about that in Corbeil,” he said at last. “I’d have to think up some excuse and go to Lorient. I could tell you at once if I could have a good look at the things.”

“And could you manage to do that?” the major asked.

There was a long silence. From the next room there came the clatter of a typewriter; from the fields outside the rumble of a tractor on the farm.

Charles said heavily at last: “If I went back to Corbeil I could get to Lorient all right.”

The two officers exchanged a glance The major said softly: “But you don’t want to go back.”

There was another pause.

The brigadier leaned forward. “What do you want to do, Mr. Simon?” he inquired. “Did you come over here to join the forces?”

Charles turned to him gratefully. “I suppose I did,” he said. “You see, I didn’t know what things were like here till I landed yesterday. It was on a sort of impulse that I said they’d better take me from Le Tréport, if you understand. I knew, I knew the sort of things you want to know, and I’ve always been English, when all’s said and done.” He struggled to express himself. “I mean, I was never naturalised French, not in all those years. I’ve got a French identity card, but I made that out myself. I told you.”

The major said: “I know. And there’s another thing. As I understand it, the way is pretty clear for you to go back to Corbeil and take up your work there again, if you want to.”

“If I could get across the Channel.”

“Oh … of course.”

Charles Simon raised his eyes to them. “I was thinking about all this last night,” he said. “I was thinking, I’d like to stay over here and join up, now that I’m here. I’d be of some use to you—in the Royal Engineers. I know quite a lot about fortification works in ferro-concrete.” He hesitated, and then came out boldly: “Do you think I should be able to get a commission?”

The brigadier glanced at the major, and the major at the brigadier, and each waited for the other. The brigadier spoke first. “I think you could get a commission,” he said, “if that was the best way to use you. But quite frankly, I would rather see you go back to Corbeil.”

The major said, a little bitterly: “My job is in the army. I’ve been in the army all my life, and wars don’t come very often I thought this war was my big chance to make a name. In the first week of it I found myself in this job here, simply because I’d worked hard during the peace and learned six languages. All my contemporaries have got battalions. One of my term at Sandhurst is commanding a brigade. And I’m stuck here, and here I’ll stay till the war ends. Then I shall be retired on pension.”

He raised his head. “I don’t want you to think that I’m complaining. But I tell you that, because so few of us get what we
want. So few can go and fight. So many have to stay and work.”

Charles pulled out a packet of
caporal
, extracted one of the last two, and lit it. He blew out a long cloud of smoke. “If I did go back,” he said, “it might be months before I could get down to Lorient. Some very good excuse would have to be contrived, and that would all take time. But when I had secured the information that you want, what then? How should I send it back to you?”