Marie-Thérèse picked one up and admired its warm gloss. 'It is a pity they cannot be eaten,' she said. 'They look very good to the appetite.'
'Eaten? Oh God, where's your soul?' he sighed. 'Conkers are for playing conkers. Hold it by the lace and I'll show you.' She did as he said, standing small and smiling while he took a pace away and considered the target. He drew back his conker on its string and aimed. He looked up and grinned at her. 'This takes me back, I can tell you,' he said. "Way back. I had a conker once at school - a hundred-and-oner. That means it had beaten a hundred and one conkers.'
'Conquered them,' she said, pleased with the joke.
'Very good. Right, ready...'
He drew the brown nut back and struck at her suspended conker. He missed, the lace becoming entangled with hers. 'Now your turn,' he said. 'Take it steady, aim carefully.'
Mare-Therese put her tongue between her teeth, her eyes narrowing. With great precision she drew back her conker and swung it quickly. It caught the target beautifully, with a clear crack, splitting it into four or five pieces which scattered to the earth. Ormerod stared at her, disconsolate.
'Beginner's luck,' he muttered.
'My killer instinct, as you say,' she smiled. Her eyes wandered for an instant and she saw the German soldiers moving
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against the treed skyline. 'Boche!' she hissed. 'Quick!'
Ormerod turned and saw them too. He swore. 'In the pipe,' he said. 'Get everything from the hut.'
She was already on her way. Running at a crouch through the trees, up the slope to the woodman's hut. He was right behind her. Fortunately there was little to collect, a haversack with some food, two tin mugs, and two small boxes of ammunition. They gathered them quickly. They had slept in their clothes on the two bare mattresses, part of the equipment of the hut, so there were no blankets to give them away.
Ormerod got to the door again first. The skyline seemed clear, then the flat cap of one of the armoured cars appeared, moving gracelessly against the woods. Ormerod crouched. The vehicle rumbled on. Now he could hear its ungainly engine. But the horizon was blank. 'Right - now,' he whispered to Marie-Thérèse behind him. 'Run.'
At a crouch they scampered across the open ground around the hut, half running, half tumbling down the grass slope and into some firs beyond the horse-chestnut trees. The lack of laces in his boots made Ormerod's descent both difficult and comic. There was a wide-mouthed drainage pipe half buried in the ferns and brambles down there. He reached it, turned and helped the girl to wriggle into its aperture. She went in feet first. He could hear her panting breath echoing from within the tube.
'Voilá,’
she whispered. Ormerod flattened himself and wriggled in backwards.
It was dank and full of smells in there. He pulled some of the dying ferns across the opening at his end and lay face down against the curved bottom of the pipe. They waited. There was nothing else they could do. He could hear the girl breathing near his heels.
It took the Germans another half an hour to reach the hut. Throughout that time the forest sighed and stirred above the culvert and the tube and the air within the enclosed space became fetid. Insects of various sorts promenaded in front of the fugitives' noses. Then they heard a bird call out in alarm and the sounds of the soldiers' steps and voices coming through the woods. Someone called an order when they spotted the hut and the troops clumsily surrounded it, taking cover while a sergeant
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and two men approached and first looked cautiously through the window before kicking in the door and entering with a great deal of dramatic noise.
Ormerod heard the sergeant shout that the hut was clear. He felt the soldiers moving again. A pair of German boots appeared almost at the opening of the pipe, so near that he could have tied the laces together. First the heels were pointing in his direction. Then the man began to urinate. Ormerod grimaced horribly and tried to turn his head. He could not. The urine ran in a river into the pipe, flowing right past the nose of the hiding man.
The sergeant gave an order for the men to take a five minute break and they sat around the hut in the striped autumn sunlight, smoking and talking. Another man relieved himself against the pipe. It was amazing that they had to find somewhere vaguely lavatorial when they had the entire forest at their disposed. Ormerod, lying in the pipe almost below their feet, was all but overcome by the stench of urine. Because his body almost blocked the pipe it had soaked into his jersey. He closed his eyes and tried to think of happier times.
Eventually there came the sound of further orders and the German soldiers, grumbling, prepared to move away. Ormerod and Marie Therese lay stiffly while they heard the boots moving through the ferns and trees. The forest fell to silence. They remained imprisoned in the pipe, shifting only an inch one way or another, for a further two hours. They were aware of the daylight seeping away. The birds began their final chorus before darkness came down. Then, when they thought it was safe, the man and the woman emerged like animals from their burrow.
I wonder if they were looking especially for us,' said Ormerod when they were in the hut again, the blank black night closed in all around them. 'Or was it just routine?'
'Does it matter?' she shrugged in the shadows. 'We are caught here and in some way we must move. But before we move we must wait for Jean Le Blanc. Let us hope he gets here soon, Dodo. We need him.'
It was thirty hours later that a forest worker on a bicycle came bumping down the forest path. They heard him a good
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distance away and as a precaution concealed themselves again in the pipe. He stood in the clearing and imitated the call of the turtle dove. The fugitives emerged from their concealment.
'Jean Le Blanc,' said the man dully, as if he did not want to
show enthusiasm for the message, 'has arrived in Villedieu. The Germans are quieter now. Tonight you will make your way to the road at the top of the forest, by the crucifix, and
you will be met by a man who will take you to Villedieu. His
signal will be the call of the dove.'
seven
Villedieu-les-Poëles was, in 1940, a town of just under four
thousand inhabitants, noted for its copper utensils (Poëles
means pots and pans) and its milk churns, used throughout the dairy country of Normandy. It also had, and indeed still has, a bell-foundry, in the Rue du Pont Chignon, which was first
established in the twelfth century. When the Germans occupied
the town in the summer of 1940 three large bells were being cast for a church in the Pyrénées-Orientales
département
of France.
The German commandant of the area which included Ville
dieu, General Wolfgang Groemann, was, by chance, a campanologist, and took much interest in the casting of the three bells in the long barn-like building. When the church in the
eastern Pyrenees, in the Unoccupied Zone of France, decided
that, because of the national situation and the lack of funds, they could not after all take delivery of the bells, General
Groemann contacted the ecclesiastical authorities in his home
town, the cathedral city of Minden, and arrived, very pleased,
at the bell-foundry one morning in his staff car to personally
purchase the bells (at a bargain price it should be said) for a church in the German city. The work on the casting and fin
ishing was completed in September and a date in early October
was fixed for their transportation by rail to Germany.
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For hundreds of years it had been customary for bells cast in
the foundry to be blessed in the centre of the little town and to be carried off in procession on the first part of their journey
to the church where they were to hang. Because of the circumstances in October 1940, it was doubted in Villedieu that this
ceremony would take place, in fact a great number of the townspeople were against it; but General Groemann was insistent that it should be as always, with a religious ceremony and a colourful procession through the narrow streets. And
this time he and his soldiers would take part. (A photograph of
the bells being taken away, incidentally, appeared in a Free French newspaper and a number of British newspapers under the heading 'Nazis Loot Bells from French Town'.)
When the killing of the German officer, the sergeant, arid the French policeman took place in the police station at Le Mesnil des Champs, it was thought in Villedieu, the nearest
town of any size, that the bells ceremony would be postponed.
Large numbers of troops were deployed over a wide area of the Normandy countryside but had failed to pick up the assassins. Roads were still being watched and there were systematic searches in the surrounding towns, but it was felt by the French authorities and the Germans themselves that the man and the woman they were hunting had gone in the direction of Paris. In any case, General Groemann had promised the bells to his bishop. He wanted them delivered.
The first Sunday in October was designated as a suitable day
for the ceremony. The great bells would be carried by cart from the foundry, blessed in the square, and then borne in
procession to the Villedieu railway station where they would be
loaded on special wagons for their journey to Germany.
On the Friday before the event, Ormerod and Marie-Thérèse
were brought into Villedieu concealed in a cavity made
under a pile of logs in the back of a cart drawn by two dray horses. The man who had met them on the high forest road
with the call of the dove took them straight to a small house. It
was here for the first time that they met the fanatic, Jean Le Blanc.
During Ormerod's years as a policeman, he had cultivated, as 142
policemen do, a nose for a villain. It was not the size, not the
shape of a man; not what he said, nor, often, what he did. A
man could be a criminal without being a villain. Ormerod al
ways considered that the eyes had something to do with it. And
there was a sort of aura, an atmosphere, a smell about a villain.
In all his life, he had never seen a more natural-born villain than the man who called himself Jean Le Blanc.
He was thick and tall, very powerful, with a big, domed, bald head. His hands were fleshy. The skin on his arms and face and
head was as white as if he had never been out in the fresh air in the whole of his life.
Ormerod and Marie-Thérèse had been taken to a house
near the bell-foundry in the town. At his briefing and instruc
tion at Ash Vale, although Villedieu had been one of the towns detailed, no one had mentioned the bell-foundry. From a guide
book, Ormerod had learned that the town gave its name to
vaudeville, because of a comic actor who once lived there. Or
merod remembered thinking at the time that this information, while not generally useful in war, might turn out to be appropriate in the circumstances. And so it was.
The 'safe' house, where they were to hide, had a loft fitted like a room. They had climbed directly from the log cart up through a trapdoor and into the concealed place.
There were three men and a woman waiting for them. One
of the men was Jean Le Blanc. He was wearing a pair of blue
overalls. On a box in front of him was a German tommy-gun, which he was dismantling, and several detonators and sticks of explosive. Also on the box was a wad of something that Omerod took to be putty. The other men were also in their working blue; the woman was silent and lined with worry. She went off to get some food and drink. Le Blanc picked
up the putty-like material and began to work it around in his
fingers.
'You have met with the plastic explosive, monsieur?' he in
quired, his sleepy eyes making the effort to look up at Ormerod.
'Oh, that's it,' said Ormerod. 'I thought you were making a model of Hitler. To stick a few pins in.'
The joke was not appreciated. 'Well, it just looked like that,'
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he mumbled. 'Should you be rolling it around in your hands?' he asked. 'Explosive?'
Le Blanc smiled dryly. 'It is safe to do this.' He threw the
handful of plastic straight at Ormerod's chest. Ormerod jumped
apprehensively and he caught it. Carefully he returned it to Le
Blanc who dropped it on the table. 'It is like a magic toy,' he
said. 'It can be easy and without harm, it can be fixed into any
space and in any form. But when it explodes it is very, very
big.' He looked around at the four faces in the lamplight. 'This,
my friends, is what the Nazis will come to fear in France. It is our greatest weapon.'
Ormerod half turned to Marie-Thérèse and was not surprised
to see her eyes shining in the half-light. 'If we had this at Granville,' she said, 'there would have been no accident.'
Her expression was not merely for the explosive, however,
Ormerod could see that. Her admiration was also for the man.
Afterwards, when the others had gone and he and Marie-Thérèse
were left alone in the dark loft, she said, as if she felt
compelled to explain: 'This man is from my region in Normandy. He is from the Perche. Jean Le Blanc, the famous Percheron stallion, was also powerful.'
'What does he do for a living?' asked Ormerod grumpily in the dark. 'Bend iron bars with his teeth?'
'Like me, he also was a schoolteacher,' sniffed Marie-Thérèse. 'But he was the head of a big school.'
'I bet the kids loved him,' muttered Ormerod. 'Fancy him swinging a cane.'
'He is what we need now,' she said solemnly. 'He is what France needs. Strength, what you in English call guts. Someone who is not afraid. In this country we have had enough of
our cowards.' He could hear her sneer in the dark. 'They were going to defend Paris to the last corner, to the last lamp-post.
Instead they gave up at the gates.' She shifted alongside him. 'Did you see the poster they have put on this wall?'