The Black Baroness (14 page)

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘It was old Sandvig who fathered the collection of Norwegian peasant arts. He went in for the gaily-printed chests and cupboards that they have in their houses, and for silver-work and embroidered costumes, but his interest didn’t stop there. He also collected the most interesting specimens of the ancient Norwegian log-houses with their oriental-looking gables and had them re-erected round the shores of a small lake on his estate at Maihaug, outside Lillehammer. Elvdalen learnt from his informant that there has been great activity going on out there all this morning and that they are fitting up these old show-houses with beds, wash-basins, etc. As the houses are fairly well scattered over the estate the people who occupy them will naturally be much safer from air-raids than they would be if they were concentrated in two or three large buildings in the town, so it looks to me as if the King intends to house his Ministers and staff in them while he stays with the family who own the place.’

‘I see. And what do we do now?’

Von Ziegler yawned. ‘First I must try and get through to Oslo to make fresh arrangements, but the lines must be terribly congested so that may take some time. While Elvdalen is getting me my number we’ll have a bath and a shave.’

This was welcome news to Gregory as, although the good meal had appeased his hunger, he was still feeling stale from a night spent in his clothes and his bristly chin was begrimed with
dirt from the ditch in which they had sheltered from the airraid and with smuts from the burning buildings.

While they bathed, the maid cleaned up their soiled garments and when they were dressed again the fatigues and discomforts of the past night were forgotten, but they found that Elvdalen had failed to get through to Oslo. He reported that the bombing of Hamar had destroyed the telephone exchange there and had cut direct communication with the south, so calls to Oslo could be got through only via Lillehammer and a long circuit of village exchanges; the delay reported was at least five hours.

‘We can’t wait all that time,’ said von Ziegler impatiently; ‘I’ll have to use other methods. As the line to the north is still functioning we ought to be able to get through to Ringsaker. It’s only about ten miles north along the road and I’ve got a man there who could do the job for us.’ Turning to Elvdalen he told him to get a Ringsaker number and in less than five minutes the call was put through. Taking the instrument von Ziegler himself spoke. When he put it down he was smiling.

‘That’s fixed,’ he told Gregory. ‘My man there has a secret wireless so my new instructions will reach our Oslo Air Headquarters in the course of the next few minutes.’

‘Fine,’ laughed Gregory, but inwardly he was cursing. These damned Germans seemed to have a hundred strings to their bow. How could any ordinary army put up a prolonged resistance against a people who had secret agents established in almost every hamlet?

Von Ziegler led the way out to the hall and began to take a swift leave of the Professor, who expressed the honour he felt at their having made use of him. Gregory would have liked to smash in the face of the treacherous Norwegian who was selling his country and stood there fawning on its enemies; but he had a better plan. He had purposely left his cigarette-case in the sitting-room and, leaving the others in the hall, he went back to fetch it.

Elvdalen had been smoking a heavy pipe and he had laid it down in an ash-tray on his desk. Taking from his waistcoat pocket a small phial of cyanide, which he always carried, Gregory inserted a little of the deadly powder into the hoie of the pipe-stem. No human court was needed to convict the Professor; a higher court had decreed that when he betrayed his King it should be before a witness who was also prepared to act as judge and executioner. Gregory’s act was carried out with
cold deliberation and when he rejoined the others he only felt a mild gratification at the thought that Elvdalen was now most unlikely to live to enjoy the rewards of his treachery. Five minutes later the two cars were descending the winding track to the village.

On the main road there was still a long line of vehicles streaming north but this time they had no great distance to go and they arrived at Ringsaker at half past two. The place was a fair-sized country town and it stood on a long, narrow arm of the great Mjose Lake, which ran all the way from Hamar to Lillehammer.

Von Ziegler drove straight through the town and some way beyond it until they reached a point where the foothills of the mountain range rose sharply to the right of the road but on its left was a mile-wide strip of flat, cultivated land between it and the Lake. Driving through an open gateway into a meadow, he pulled up and got out. Gregory followed suit and they sat down on a near-by bank to smoke some cigarettes that Elvdalen had pressed upon them.

There was no reason at all why von Ziegler should not have taken Gregory into his confidence as to what the next move was to be, but the adventurous airman evidently derived considerable pleasure in producing one rabbit after another out of the hat for the edification of his companion, who was technically his senior officer, and by now it had become more or less accepted between them that Gregory should ask no questions but only offer useful advice if they got into any difficulty; so he controlled his impatience to know why they should have halted outside Ringsaker instead of going straight on to Lillehammer.

As they were still many miles from King Haakon’s new headquarters it seemed pointless to halt here if another air attack on the King had been ordered, and he could only assume that von Ziegler had made a rendezvous at that spot with the man who had the secret wireless-station in the town. But once again he proved wrong.

Just before three o’clock von Ziegler got to his feet and began to pace restlessly up and down. Gregory noticed that he kept glancing at the sky to the southward until, after a few moments, he suddenly gave a whoop of joy and cried: ‘Here they come!’

Following the German’s glance Gregory could just make out a number of tiny black specks in the sky, which were growing in size with considerable rapidity, and a second later the droning
note of the aeroplanes was quite clear. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘they’re going to bomb the King again after all, but, if so, why should we have pulled up in a spot where we have no possible chance of seeing the effect of the attack and it will take us at least an hour to reach the scene of the raid to find out if it has proved successful?’

Then the shape of the planes became perceptible and he saw that they were not dive-bombers but troop-carriers of the JU 52 pattern. As he watched six of them roared over and out of each tumbled a succession of what looked like large black parcels. For an instant he thought that they must be some new type of bomb, but there seemed no point whatever in bombing these quiet fields and meadows on the lake-shore. A second later the parcels burst and a wavy object billowed out above each. They were men descending from the aeroplanes by parachute.

Gregory was intensely interested. He knew that the Russians had formed parachute battalions years ago and it had seemed to him then that the idea was an excellent one. Such troops could land far behind an enemy’s lines and seize aerodromes or strong points and cut communications almost without interference. He had spoken of the idea with considerable enthusiasm to a Staff Colonel of the British War Office, but the Colonel had poured cold water on the scheme. He had said that the Russian experiment had not proved at all a success, as many of the men had injured themselves on landing, and that Britain could not afford to risk that sort of thing happening to her fellows; also that the parachutists landed so far apart from one another that they afterwards had great difficulty in forming up into a coherent unit and therefore could be picked off or rounded up and captured separately before they had time to do any serious damage.

Those arguments had not seemed to Gregory to hold water, for he considered it part of a soldier’s business to risk being injured in training just as an R.A.F. pilot has to risk his neck while learning to fly, and he felt that it must be possible to reduce the number of casualties on landing to an insignificant proportion if the parachutists were given proper trainings Moreover, if they floated down on to a patch of peaceful countryside, far from any troop concentrations, who was going to capture or kill them before they succeeded in joining up, however widely they were dispersed on landing?

The Colonel had not attempted to argue the matter further,
but had implied that the whole thing was rather the sort of comic-opera business that one might expect from people like the Russians, and that it did not really come into the sphere of serious soldiering.

Gregory had again heard of parachute troops being used in the Polish Campaign; this time by the Germans. But the reports about it were rather vague and, whatever British Military Intelligence may have known about the actual facts, the Press had inferred that most of the Germans who made parachute descents in Poland were spies, dressed in civilian clothes, whose business it was to spread false reports and sabotage communications. It was, therefore, with positive fascination that he now saw for himself that the Germans had adopted the new technique and actually had companies of fully-equipped troops specially trained to make parachute-landings.

The spectacle was the most charming thing to watch. The planes had circled round and were on their way back to Oslo, but the whole sky to the west of the road was dotted with the green hemispheres of the wind-filled parachutes as they floated gracefully down carrying either a man or a big, tubular drum. The drop was not a great one, as the planes had passed over at about five hundred feet, and in a few minutes the soldiers were landing all over the fields for a mile or more either side of the place where Gregory stood. Even the refugees streaming along the road, who had at first been terrified by the approach of the German aircraft, had now, in many cases, halted as though spellbound at the sight of this manœuvre which seemed more like a number in a military tattoo than an act of war.

A few of the parachutists were dragged as they landed or became caught up in trees and bushes, but after cutting themselves free from their parachutes most of them remained where they had fallen for about a minute, as though acting on a routine drill, to recover from the shock of landing. Then the officers’ whistles sounded and, springing up, they began to run at full speed towards the drums which had been landed with them.

One of these had fallen into a ditch quite near Gregory and he saw some of the men fling themselves upon it. Ripping open its zip fasteners they pulled out an amazing variety of items, including automatic rifles, leather ammunition-carriers, two heavy machine-guns and a squat, fat-barrelled affair that looked like a cross between a trench mortar and a small howitzer.
Within five minutes the platoons had assembled and were numbering off so that the officers could make certain that none of their men had been stunned in his fall and was missing. The second that this check-up had been completed the officers gave an order and the men dispersed again in little groups to take up positions behind the most advantageous shelter immediately available from which they could cover the road against any possible attack.

Von Ziegler then went forward and introduced himself to the nearest platoon commander, upon which the officer gave a signal by whistle and a few moments later they were joined by two other officers; a major who commanded the parachute troops and his second-in-command. Introductions were made all round and although, technically, Gregory was the senior officer present and the paratroop commander, Major Helder, the second senior, it was clear that von Ziegler was still to be regarded as the director of the whole force. After informing Major Helder that the capture of Lillehammer and the person of King Haakon was the objective of the expedition he gave him certain orders which were rapidly carried out.

Having recovered from their astonishment at seeing German troops descend from the air most of the refugees were hurrying on again, though some of them in a panic had abandoned their vehicles and were taking to the hills on the far side of the road; but the column halted again, as the parachutists who had landed a mile farther to the north had drawn a cordon across it. The hundred-and-forty–odd troops turned the Norwegians out of the best cars available in the traffic jam, made all the other vehicles drive into ditches or fields and formed up in a long, unbroken column. For the time being Gregory decided to go with von Ziegler and the Major. They drove along to the head of the column and it set off for Lillehammer.

Among the commandeered vehicles were three motor-cycles and German soldiers mounted on these now went ahead to clear a way for the column. Soon they caught up with the last refugees who had got through before the road was closed and, waving their automatic pistols with threatening shouts, they drove all stragglers right into the roadside so that the German column was able to pass with a minimum of delay.

Gregory wondered why the parachutists had not been dropped nearer Lillehammer, but as they advanced the reason became obvious. The strip of flat meadow-land to the left of
the road gradually narrowed until it gave place to a steep bank with pine trees, running down to the water, and on the right-hand side the slope rose, even more steeply, towards the mountains. Evidently von Ziegler had chosen the site as the only one suitable for a parachute-landing south of the town he meant to attack.

At first Gregory hoped that someone who saw the Germans might telephone a warning of their approach to Lillehammer but he soon saw that precautions were being taken against this. Every few hundred yards one of the motor-cyclists dismounted and, swarming up a telephone pole, cut the cables so that no one in the scattered houses which they passed could get through to the north. News of their approach could not be carried by word of mouth, either, as they were moving faster than the procession of refugees. Within an hour of landing the motorcyclists reached a sharp curve in the road. Two of them again cut the column of refugees and the third rode back to report to Major Helder that Lillehammer was in sight a mile farther on round the bend.