Ormerod's Landing (10 page)

'Haven't done this for years,' he puffed at Marie-Thérèse as the canvas boat moved sluggishly in the uneven water. 'Southend before the war.'

The girl smiled wanly and at about the moment of the smile two German soldiers innocently night fishing off the outer rocks of Chausey turned their small boat around an islet and saw the British submarine lying on the surface half a mile away. While the astonishment was still on their faces they saw the vessel begin to drop into the engulfing sea and within a minute there was only foam to mark the place where she had been.

The two men simultaneously spotted the small canvas boat moving clumsily towards the shore. One of the soldiers was a corporal, who hoped to be a sergeant, and the other was a private. The corporal nodded and they quietly manoeuvred their dinghy around the headland and pulled it into a sharp pebble beach. Their rifles were in the bottom boards of the fishing boat and they took them and went carefully along the shingle to the place where they estimated the canvas boat would come ashore.

The rocks were wet, sharp with shellfish and slippery with weed. When the soldiers reached the highest point of the small island on which they had landed they saw that they had made an error. The canvas boat and its two passengers had come to shore across a channel of water on another outcrop of low-tide rocks three hundred yards away. The two Germans, dropping behind a stony parapet, immediately and prematurely opened fire with their rifles. The first shots cracked through the still early air, the bullets shrieking as they ricocheted from the stone outcrops above Ormerod and Marie-Thérèse.

'Christ - already!' exclaimed Ormerod, pulling the girl out of the boat. 'Get down for God's sake!' They crouched behind the rocks. The girl began swearing in French. Ormerod poked his head out to have a look. 'The Germany army,' he muttered as he saw the soldiers running down the shingle and plunging up to their waists as they crossed the small channel, their rifles

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held above their heads. 'Well, two of them.'

'We will have to kill them,' she said, as though it were merely an inconvenience. 'So soon. It is very bad luck for us.'

'And them,' mentioned Ormerod more surely than he felt. 'How are we going to do it?'

The girl put her head out of their cover so she could see the Germans. They were still struggling to cross the channel, halfway over with the water up to their armpits. 'We will move,' she said decisively. 'Towards the main island. Perhaps we can make an ambush for them. Come.'

It was the first time that Ormerod had fully appreciated that she was actually in charge. He grunted but before he had finished she was climbing away from their hiding place and moving quickly over the rocks, going west. Ormerod followed her heavily, puffing a few yards in her wake. They climbed outcrops, slid down the other side and squelched across flat leads of seaweed-hung water. At the top of one of the small heights Ormerod saw the white cottages and the lighthouse on Chausey a mile away. He wondered if they would ever get there.

It was not difficult to hear the Germans coming in pursuit. They clattered clumsily over the resounding surface, slithering and cursing as they went. They knew that the two people in front had spotted them but they were not worried. Sooner or later they would come to The Sund, the deep trough between the islets and rocks and the main island. That had to be crossed. It could not be avoided for when the tide came back all the outlying surface rocks would be completely covered again.

The corporal was quite a clever young man. Had he lived he might have gone far in the Wehrmacht. He motioned his companion to move to the north while he went southwards, making a model pincer movement, that manoeuvre so beloved of the German army. They moved carefully now, making sure each step was secure and without making a noise. The corporal eventually raised his head and was delighted to see his quarry crouching in a shell-strewn bay looking in the other direction. He glanced up and saw that his compatriot had succeeded in coming around the rear from the other flank. The plan had

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worked well. Where the two people crouched he could see a lobster pot, filled with a catch, wallowing a few yards off shore.

That ought to have told him there were others around but he failed to register the clue. He motioned his comrade to move in. Now he had decided he did not want to shoot the invaders. They would be of much more value as captives. He moved inwards towards the other German soldier. Then, when they were only five yards apart he rose casually above the rocks and shouted to Ormerod and the girl to raise their hands.

They looked up and knew they had to obey. Standing helplessly they put their hands above their heads. The German corporal said something to his companion and at that moment an amazing thing occurred. Something pushed them from behind and, shouting in fright, they both stumbled and came flying over the top of the parapet of rock.

Slack-jawed, Ormerod watched them, spread-eagled as they flew, their faces disfigured with horror and astonishment. It was only a drop of twenty-five feet or so but both Germans struck outstanding rocks and bounced flamboyantly before hitting the shingle and the sand and lying grotesquely still.

The eyes of Marie-Thérèse and Ormerod travelled up from the recumbent grey figures to the ledge where they had been standing. Like a comic actor coming forward on cue to take his bow a young man appeared. He was wearing a Breton blue jersey the arms of which were spread out as if acknowledging applause. He was leering strangely.
'Moi,'
he said briefly.
'C'est moi.'

A group of other men, all fishermen, appeared on the surrounding outcrops of rocks, and silently looked down on the scene. They began clambering down to the group. The oldest of them, once square, now rotund, looked at the youth who had done the damage and then to Ormerod and the girl.

'You must understand he is mad/ he said. 'His head is mad.'

"Thank God for mad people,' answered Marie-Thérèse.

'There will be trouble,' said the fisherman. He stared at the youth who smiled weakly and performed a pushing movement to demonstrate what he had done. The others said nothing. Marie-Thérèse moved forward and turned both Germans on their backs.

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'They are not dead,' she said in her businesslike way. 'It is no use shooting them. It will show. We must drown them.'

She had spoken to the fishermen and they regarded her with horrified amazement. She turned to Ormerod. I think we must persuade them.' She produced her pistol and, after hesitating, Ormerod did likewise. 'We must drown them,' repeated Marie-Thérèse in French in the direction of the fishermen.

'Put your weapons away,' replied the old man calmly. 'Because of what the boy has done we are in this matter just as much as you. He may be mad but he is still one of us. We will do as you say.'

Dumbly the fishermen picked up the Germans and carried them along the gulleys. They reached a point poised about twenty feet above the sea. The girl, her face hard as a pebble, said something else, almost barking at the fishermen. They hesitated, then obeyed. They scrambled over the shingle and returned with a large seine fishing net. The two soldiers were wrapped in this and then, while Ormerod stood as in a stupor, two large boulders were attached as weights and the Germans rolled down the short cliff and into the sea. They sank horribly.

'Thank you,' said Marie-Thérèse to her countrymen. 'You did a great service for France.'

'Jesus help me,' muttered Ormerod. 'That was terrible.'

'Terrible?' asked the girl practically. She looked at Ormerod gazing at the place where the net and the bodies had gone below the green surface of the early morning sea. 'Have you never seen men die before?' she asked.

'Yes. But I've never
watched
them die,' he said. 'There's a difference.'

Marie-Thérèse shrugged. 'The way anybody dies makes no difference to them,' she said. 'To them it was no different to being shot. In fact better. Water is soft. Bullets are hard.' Now she turned and spoke to the French fishermen, explaining who she and Ormerod were, and instructing them what to do next. She again went back to Ormerod. 'Killing is what war is all about, Dodo,' she said almost happily, using the codename for the first time. 'I have told these men to make a hole in the Germans' boat so that it seems it may have struck a rock and sunk. Also to sink our boat. They say that the two Germans

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came from the mainland to fish. We are lucky. There are no Boche on the island.'

'That's good news anyway,' said Ormerod. For them as well.'

She laughed at him outright. 'It is much easier to kill when they do not look like other men. If they had taken your country as they have taken mine then perhaps you would have found it easier.'

He nodded and said: 'Yes, I suppose I would. Why do you think there aren't any Germans on Chausey?' They had begun to walk down to a small beach where, Ormerod now saw, a long fishing boat was drawn up. Two of the Frenchmen, who had scarcely spoken a word during the whole episode, had gone to find the two boats at the far side of the rocks. Two of the others carried the German rifles. These they now took to a blunt piece of rock overlooking the place where they had dropped the enmeshed bodies and, simultaneously, they threw the rifles into the sea. Marie-Thérèse tried to stop them by shouting but they took no notice. The rifles sank and she berated the men in French. Their reply was in a sulky monotone. She turned away and bit her lip.

'They don't want to know, do they?' guessed Ormerod. He was surprised to hear the satisfaction in his own voice.

'They are crazy,' muttered the girl. 'Already they have killed two German soldiers, so why not keep the rifles? They will need them to kill more.'

'I think that you're probably going to find that a lot of your countrymen have had enough,' he forecast. 'They don't want to go on with the war. After all that's why they surrendered.'

She looked at him angrily. 'They are already involved in it. They will always be at war until the last German is dead or out of France. And these men are now deep in it - whether or not they like the idea.'

They began to walk along the shingle towards the fishing boat. The sun was rising with its customary assurance, flooding the sea and the islands with a fine green light. The water lapped along the shingle and Ormerod had a feeling that it would be nice to paddle his feet. 'How did these people know?' he asked, nodding at the fishermen.

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'They spotted the submarine,' she said. 'There is not much
they do not see. They saw us come ashore and they knew the
Germans were fishing in the area. The Germans went to the island last night for food and drink. They come from the
garrison at Granville. The fishermen came over to their lobster
pots and perhaps to warn us.'

'And they end up resistance fighters,' smiled Omerod grimly.
'I expect that is how a good many heroes are made. Just by poking their noses in. Still, if this lot had not got to us, we'd now be in irons, I expect.'

'Rubbish,' said Marie-Thérèse vehemently. 'I would have killed those fools anyway. As it was the job was done for me.'

Ormerod's eyebrows went up. 'You're a really violent lady, aren't you?' he said.

'If they had needed a woman who was good at sewing they
would have sent her,' she answered sullenly.

They climbed into the fishing boat. The September day was
growing confidently all around them. Ormerod unhappily
studied the five fishermen. Apart from the man who had done
the talking, two were middle-aged, grey and with silent faces.
Another was a younger man with an injured arm, probably one
of those returned from the war. The fourth was the simpleton,
a puzzled smiler, strongly made, but with the helpless look of
one who is never sure of anything. They all wore the thick Breton jerseys and hard blue trousers.

They waited for ten minutes after getting into the boat, nobody speaking, until the other two men, both in their
twenties and with more eagerness about them, returned around
the rocks. 'It is done,' they said to Marie-Thérèse. 'The boats
are now also under the sea.' They climbed aboard and the slim vessel started across the two hundred yards or so of deep water
that was called The Sund.

'These men say that the Germans have not put any men on
Chausey,' said Marie-Thérèse to Ormerod. 'They only come over from the mainland to fish or to buy some lobster.'

'Buy some?' said Ormerod. I thought that conquerors always
took what they wanted. Food, women, everything.'

She made a face as if sniffing the salt morning air. 'They will,'

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she said. 'When the time comes. At the moment they do not
want to make trouble for themselves. They are not sure of their
feet. Once they are sure they will begin to take what they wish
to have. You will see.'

Ormerod did not argue with her. 'It beats me why they haven't got troops on the island though,' he grunted. 'An antiaircraft gun at least.'

'They will come, too I expect. But the men here say it is
because the Germans are in great strength in Jersey and Guern
sey in the English Channel Islands. They are making them
fortified. So Chausey is of no importance yet. Later it may be.
It seems we are lucky, Dodo. Very lucky.'

The boat turned into an enclosed anchorage. Ormerod looked
out on the most peaceful of scenes, a row of serene stone cottages with boats pulled up almost to their doors, a larger house, like a farm, standing back, creepers on its walls and
dogs about its wide archway. There was a small church on the
promontory, some further houses in the distance and a lighthouse standing like a daytime ghost at the southern extreme. In the middle of the island, where the land dipped into a
sheltered meadow, some full trees were growing, and at the northern end he could see the shoulders of a substantial house.