First had come the wild rumors, because the Allied vessels had been seen by fishermen working south of Le Crotoy at dawn. Wild with excitement, they’d come rushing home into the little harbor. Miles long, they said the flotilla was, and miles wide, great and gray, spearing through the dawn like a vast and mysterious horde toward Le Havre. Some said that they feared they’d been dreaming.
I set to work with pen and notebook—I could hold such valuable witness to such a great event. And at that moment too, I understood that this calling of mine would make me safe. Miss Begley had no such protection. I asked questions, made notes, wrote them up at night. To any inquiring soldier I was a war observer.
Once I’d made it clear that I hoped to gather some sort of record, people came to see us. As before, we stayed in the little hotel, with the lanky proprietor, and for a day and a half we listened to reminiscences.
Miss Begley and I had our own to add, specifically of the atrocity that we’d seen in the streets of Saint-Omer, and the locals made us feel that we’d shared in the war as suffered by all of France.
Here is a taste of my collecting—just a few brief examples, all from people who lived in or near Le Crotoy.
A middle-aged spinster was forced to accept ten German officers and civilians as nonpaying lodgers. They lived there for two years and bankrupted her because they insisted that she buy all the food. She received some money from the Occupation authorities in Saint-Omer but never enough.
One woman asked that she tell her tale with nobody local present. She said that the officer billeted in her house raped her night after night for over a year. But she could not and would not take her story to the authorities because she felt they wouldn’t believe her. When she did, the Kommandant in Saint-Omer court-martialed the officer and had him executed.
A man and his wife tried to hide their fourteen-year-old son because he looked much older and would be taken away as slave labor. The dog barked, giving away the boy’s hiding place, and the soldiers shot the boy and the dog.
71
Although she listened with as much care as I did, Miss Begley had a different mission. She had two questions for every speaker: Have you heard of an American officer name of Charles Miller? And, Do you know a farmhouse between here and Saint-Omer with its back to the water? She cracked the matter when she asked about the traveling circus and, in a pattern that I know so well from country people, somebody sent for somebody else to tell us the way.
Next day, they lent us bicycles. With the roasting hot day baking our shoulders, we set out to find the farmhouse. We left Le Crotoy by a small lane, and since some of the road signs had been removed, we needed written directions.
“Why are we doing this?”
“You’ll see,” she said.
On a deserted road we came to a bridge, a flat, inglorious span across a broad neck of water. I made us stop and get off the bicycles, and I walked to one side and then the other, looking for something that I couldn’t name or define. If you travel, as I do, all around a countryside, you can’t avoid déjà vu—and sometimes it’s true. It can be an uncomfortable feeling, as it was when my search for Venetia took me on digging expeditions into woodlands and along seashores. But here? In rural France?
Miss Begley watched and said nothing. Standing beside a shattered pillar, I peered down into wide stands of reeds and sedges. If, all across my life, I could have mapped my own instincts, if I could have harnessed the unspoken in me, the barely conscious impulse that drives me to do the unusual, I’d have solved my problems a long time earlier. I had indeed been here before, without knowing where I was.
One side of the bridge bore the marks of extensive burning, and as the light refracted, I saw the metal in the stream. The British had built fighter planes smaller than I imagined, and the wingspan of this machine scarcely reached into the middle of the river.
I called Miss Begley, and we stood there looking down, in a silent requiem for the pilot.
“D’you think they found his body?” she asked.
I said, “My bet is that we’re the first to see this.”
As we lingered, another cyclist drifted onto the bridge, a woman in her fifties, gray hair cut with a sword, defensive, steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Bonjour, M’sieu-dame”—she spoke it like a prosecutor, and was about to ride by until we pointed. She halted and looked. From her handlebar basket she took a notebook, then told us that her husband, a local coroner, would look into it.
To Miss Begley she said in the tones of a scold, “France is not yet free. Why are you here?”
Miss Begley tried to engage her in conversation. The woman said that no French person would ever speak to a stranger again, and rode off. Miss Begley jumped on her bicycle, rode after her, and made her halt. In a conversation that seemed vigorous, the woman gestured, and Miss Begley rode back—with further and more explicit directions to the farmhouse.
Yet, we didn’t set out. Instead, Miss Begley parked her bicycle against the parapet of the bridge and began to clamber down the bank to the submerged and rusting aircraft. I followed her, under a sun that promised to roast my neck.
“Don’t look,” she said, and began to strip.
I said, “I won’t.” But then, remembering our moments in the past, I said, “What does it matter?”
She replied, “You’re right.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“If it was your brother in that plane,” she said.
And I thought, What you mean is—“If it was my husband.”
Stark naked, she slipped into the water and disappeared. A moment later, her head bobbed up, wearing a coronet of green slimy weed.
“There’s a body in there,” she said. “I can see him.”
By now, though, she had churned up the mud, and I could no longer get a clear look at the downed plane.
“We haven’t got the strength,” I said. “Not even the two of us together,” and she agreed.
I took off my shirt and helped to towel her dry. She found a piece of calm grass and stretched out naked, saying, “The sun will finish the job.” A moment later, with eyes closed, she said, “I’m glad I couldn’t see his face.”
72
The farmhouse door stood wide open. We rode by and back again, and then down a lane at one side to ascertain that the building did stand with its back to the water. Nothing from the roadway suggested it, yet there we saw it—the finger of lagoon, trees overhanging. Miss Begley’s cheeks flashed up the doll’s red spots of excitement.
We knocked and we called. I think we were timid; Miss Begley suggested that they might be asleep. As ever she got it right—a warm afternoon, just after three o’clock.
“But the door is open?” I argued.
She said, “That’s only their newfound freedom.”
We moved back and sat on the grass of their perfect little lawn. From time to time one of us would rise and knock on the door again, wait for a moment—and then return to sit on the grass.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Charles was in this house last week.”
“What?”
“I told you.”
I said, “But how can you be so sure?”
“The woman on the bicycle confirmed it,” she said. “She met Charles last week.”
In an hour we heard the voices and we rose, called out, and knocked on the door. Husband and wife recognized us immediately with hugs and kisses and, in the husband’s case, tears.
I had long feared for them. We sat in the same room as we had that first night, and again when we brought Herr Seefeld back. They asked about him—more kindly than I expected.
When we’d exhausted that topic, I asked about Hugo Barrive from the maquis. I did so to open a path for Miss Begley’s inquiry, which she now made.
“He was here last week—full of energy and delight.”
I asked, “Was he alone?”
Miss Begley butted in. “Was there was an American with him??
??
They looked surprised. “How do you know?”
“If his name was Charles Miller—”
“We didn’t hear his name.”
“What did the American look like?”
We could have had no doubt.
“A big man,” they said.
“A scar,” they said.
“A wound healing on his neck,” they said.
“How would we go about finding him?”
They shrugged. He is with the Americans, they said, or the British, they weren’t sure. Hugo had said that they were going down to Étretat, south of Dieppe.
They invited us to stay for dinner, which in that part of France takes place around six o’clock in the evening. We ate some piquant stew. All the talk remained focused on the war—what happened to such-and-such a farm; who died and how; what became of the two Jewish families in Le Crotoy who were taken away one morning in a truck; they didn’t know. Where did the local Resistance hide the German officer that they kidnapped last year and recently handed over to the Americans? In the priest’s house, they said.
Miss Begley assisted my French as I asked if things seemed different since the Allies had invaded. Here, recorded by me, is the reply they gave interpreted by Miss Begley:
For many weeks we had bad turmoil. Guns and explosions day and night, and vehicles roaring past our gates. The dog almost died of fright. Now you can step outside our door any time and not hear a sound. It has been as if we are all holding our breath to see if the war truly has gone away. And the sleep—we all say how much we are sleeping. Our neighbors tell us they also sleep like drunken people, nothing would awaken us. That is why we think the war has gone away from here, and we hope it has gone forever. We hear that the fighting south of us is very bad. There will be bodies in the fields, and other places, you will be frightened and made sick, maybe. And be careful if you meet the Germans, they may think you are Americans or Canadians. We feel we are still not fully liberated.
All during these days, my mind was shouting at me. We’ve given too little thought to this journey; we’ve had no discussion; we didn’t assess what it might be like. And that, so often, was Miss Begley’s style. Did this woman, whom, as you know, I’ve already described as “relentlessly real”—have no fear?
I knew, for example, that I got to terror quicker than she did. In bombed London her feelings went to victims, not her own safety or mine. All through the Seefeld incident, while I quivered, expecting death or worse—for him, for all of us—she never showed a tremor. Now, in France, she seemed as eager as a schoolgirl, impatient, pressing forward, and unaware of the magnitude, the difficulty of the task she had begun—and with no thought to what might lie ahead.
73
We returned to Le Crotoy at nine o’clock, ahead of nightfall. Two people waited for us, and they of necessity depended upon each other—Bawn Buckley, who wished to know if we would be returning to Ireland, and the woman whose presence would keep us in France, Madame Larbaud, our juggler boatwoman with the curly hair.
She thought she knew where to find Hugo; he was working his way down the coast to be with the Canadians, she said, at Rouen. The battles were moving across the country toward the German border—or so she hoped, how could anybody be sure? Étretat, she said, was likely—or one of the inland towns, Goderville or Fauville.
Bawn Buckley said that he could catch a tide if he hastened. He wished us luck, but behind Miss Begley’s back he shook his head in a worried fashion. With which I agreed.
We said our good-byes and made our arrangements. Madame Larbaud would pick us up in the morning and take us down the coast. An argument broke out, between Madame Larbaud and the owner of the little hotel, and despite the furious pace of their speech I gleaned enough to know that he too questioned the safety of our plan. The bombers, he said, still came over; the armies still faced each other at Dieppe, and all across northern France. In essence he was saying, What do these two lunatics think they’re doing?
When I asked Miss Begley for a clearer version she said, “It didn’t sound important.”
I said, “But they seemed heated.”
She said, “The French are very passionate—l’amour, l’amour.” Which had nothing to do with anything.
Next morning, she sat in front beside Madame Larbaud, and I sprawled in the back, among the Indian clubs, colored balls, and trampolines of the Cirque Larbaud.
The women talked nonstop, and Madame Larbaud seemed so moved by Miss Begley’s words that I tried to listen closer and determine their content. It seemed that they discussed Captain Miller, and it soon became one of those conversations of an intimacy that men never achieve. Both wept, both waved their hands, both laughed, both giggled—and I rattled from side to side, jolting my shoulder against the edges of the van’s metal stanchions.
Trying to hug the coast, attempting to get around Dieppe unnoticed, we ran into many bomb damage detours. But we saw no military—Madame Larbaud had achieved her objective. After what seemed much too long a journey given the distance on her map, she pronounced us clear of Dieppe and, heading south, took us back onto the coast again.
Not for long. With roads impassable from barbed wire, craters, or destroyed bridges, we had to turn inland. As all the historians have since told us, France didn’t return to the Allies in a soft bundle. The German army fought like tigers, yielding no more than a square yard at a time. For the regiments who landed in Normandy on June’s great D-Day, Berlin in August 1944 still remained thousands and thousands of bodies away.
The van lurched through villages. We skirted the masonry from buildings in ruins, their walls charred and still smoking. The number of dead animals astounded me—horses, cattle, goats. Churches with lopsided spires, houses with holes ripped clean through from back to front—you’ve long been familiar with these photographs, newsreels, and films. Yet no matter how factual or realistic those images, I’ve never seen anything that conveyed the force, the devastation, the depressed gloom as those animal corpses—a white pony sprawled in the road, his stomach burst like a rotten fruit; a headless black and white cow; three sheepdogs lying dead side by side on the street, as though they’d had a suicide pact.
Madame Larbaud continued to negotiate deep holes, fallen gables, splintered and leaning trees. She sometimes opened her window for a closer view of the road, and dreadful smells caught us.
In one last place, whose name I’ve never known because it had no signs or name posts, she halted the van and got out. She crossed the road—such as was left of it—and entered a lone house that no longer possessed a front door. When she came back, our jig was up, but we didn’t grasp it.
Hugo, she said, was in a house at the far end of the village that lay just ahead. The Germans had barely gone, they were being pushed back, back all the time; they were shooting the dogs as they left. Madame Larbaud kissed us good-bye and turned her van back the way we’d come. I thought, There goes our last chance of common sense.
I took Miss Begley’s valise, and we began to walk through the debris of war. At our feet, a series of craters on the roadway became deeper and wider, as though successive shells had exploded while the gunners found their range. How incongruous did we look—a couple of foreign tourists, one with her handbag, one carrying his luggage, walking in a war zone? My mind snarled: ludicrous, ludicrous, ludicrous, LUDICROUS!
Of the buildings up ahead, we could see little in detail. The nearest houses of the village stood a hundred yards away, with nothing behind us except the dusty winding road, the departing circus van, the autumn fields—and the safety we’d left.
Miss Begley said, “I suppose we’d better walk on,” and I said, “Yes, I suppose so”—it was as banal as that. Fear began to pound through me like a regimental drummer; I couldn’t breathe.
When we reached the first house in the village, a man stood at his ajar front door. We nodded friendly greetings, and he shouted. Miss Begley waved and we walked on. He made a contemptuous gesture with his hand.
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br /> “What was that about?” I asked.
“He called us crazy people.”
“Why?”
She said, “That’s all he said—‘crazy people, crazy people.’ He said it twice.”
I said, “What does he know that we don’t?”
Miss Begley shrugged and kept walking.
“Kate—do you truly believe you’ll find Charles here? In this town?”
“We have to start somewhere.”
“In God’s name, Kate, think about this.”
She said, “Ben, I know I’m going to be with Captain Charles Miller very soon. I’m going to be with my husband.”
“I doubt if armies like wives turning up during combat.”
She said, “He needs me.”
Such a triangle, I thought. She’s doomed to him. He’s doomed to this war. I’m doomed to them both.
Now we began to hear the noise—far distant from us, on the other side of the town, but mighty. At first sound the word thunder crossed my mind, but soon the pattern told us that thunder never echoed like this—these rumbles were shorter and at once softer and harder.
“We might be walking into a battle,” I said.
At the beginning of a street, the first building, an agricultural feed store, had all its windows boarded and showed no sign of life.
“Can we get some directions?” I said, and tried to open the door. It didn’t open and nobody answered my knocking. In a wide yard beside the feed store stood a truck, and something about it seemed so bizarre that I went to look. From its tail to its headlights, a necklace of holes ran through it. And the same row of holes started far behind it in the ground and continued far beyond it. The truck had been machine-gunned from the air. I climbed up to look in at the driver’s door; nobody inside.
Next, we reached empty houses. One had part of its roof drilled with the same pattern of holes as the truck. When I followed the perforations I could trace the path of the aircraft’s gun, across the street, into the gardens and open spaces behind the house.