Atonement (28 page)

Downstream of
the bridge was a line of poplars whose tops fluttered brilliantly in the last
of the light. The soldiers turned in the other direction and soon the track was
a path again and was leaving the stream. They wound and squeezed their way
through bushes with fat shiny leaves. There were also stunted oaks, barely in
leaf. The vegetation underfoot smelled sweet and damp, and he thought there
must be something wrong with the place to make it so different from anything
they had seen.

Ahead of them
was the hum of machinery. It grew louder, angrier, and suggested the
high-velocity spin of flywheels or electric turbines turning at impossible
speed. They were entering a great hall of sound and power.

“Bees!”
he called out. He had to turn and say it again before they heard him. The air
was already darker. He knew the lore well enough. If one stuck in your hair and
stung you, it sent out a chemical message as it died and all who received it
were compelled to come and sting and die at the same place. General
conscription! After all the danger, this was a kind of insult. They lifted
their greatcoats over their heads and ran on through the swarm. Still among the
bees, they reached a stinking ditch of slurry which they crossed by a wobbling
plank. They came up behind a barn where it was suddenly peaceful. Beyond it was
a farmyard. As soon as they were in it, dogs were barking and an old woman was
running toward them flapping her hands at them, as though they were hens she
could shoo away. The corporals depended on Turner’s French. He went
forward and waited for her to reach him. There were stories of civilians
selling bottles of water for ten francs, but he had never seen it. The French
he had met were generous, or otherwise lost to their own miseries. The woman
was frail and energetic. She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild
look. Her voice was sharp.

“C’est
impossible, M’sieur. Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.”

“We’ll
be staying in the barn. We need water, wine, bread, cheese and anything else
you can spare.”

“Impossible!”

He said to
her softly, “We’ve been fighting for France.”

“You
can’t stay here.”

“We’ll
be gone at dawn. The Germans are still . . .”

“It’s
not the Germans, M’sieur. It’s my sons. They are animals. And
they’ll be back soon.”

Turner pushed
past the woman and went to the pump which was in the corner of the yard, near
the kitchen. Nettle and Mace followed him. While he drank, a girl of about ten
and an infant brother holding her hand watched him from the doorway. When he
finished and had filled his canteen he smiled at them and they fled. The
corporals were under the pump together, drinking simultaneously. The woman was
suddenly behind him, clutching at his elbow. Before she could start again he
said, “Please bring us what I asked for or we’ll come in and get it
for ourselves.”

“My
sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.”

He would have
preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his
shoulder, “I’ll talk to them.”

“And
then, M’sieur, they will kill you. They will tear you to shreds.”

Corporal Mace
was a cook in the same RASC unit as Corporal Nettle. Before he joined he was a
warehouseman at Heal’s in the Tottenham Court Road. He said he knew a
thing or two about comfort, and in the barn he set about arranging their
quarters. Turner would have thrown himself down on the straw. Mace found a heap
of sacks and with Nettle’s help stuffed them to make up three mattresses.
He made headboards out of hay bales which he lifted down with a single hand. He
set up a door on brick piles for a table. He took out half a candle from his
pocket.

“Might
as well be comfy,” he kept saying under his breath. It was the first time
they had moved much beyond sexual innuendo. The three men lay on their beds,
smoking and waiting. Now they were no longer thirsty their thoughts were on the
food they were about to get and they heard each other’s stomachs rumbling
and squirting in the gloom, and it made them laugh. Turner told them about his
conversation with the old woman and what she had said about her sons.

“Fifth
columnists, they would be,” Nettle said. He only looked small alongside
his friend, but he had a small man’s sharp features and a friendly,
rodent look, heightened by his way of resting the teeth of his upper jaw on his
lower lip.

“Or
French Nazis. German sympathizers. Like we got Mosley,” Mace said.

They were
silent for a while, then Mace added, “Or like they all are in the
country, bonkers from marrying too close.”

“Whatever
it is,” Turner said, “I think you should check your weapons now and
have them handy.”

They did as
they were told. Mace lit the candle, and they went through the routines. Turner
checked his pistol and put it within reach. When the corporals were finished,
they propped the Lee-
Enfields against a wooden crate and lay down on their beds again. Presently the
girl came with a basket. She set it down by the barn door and ran away. Nettle
fetched the basket and they spread out what they had on their table. A round
loaf of brown bread, a small piece of soft cheese, an onion and a bottle of
wine. The bread was hard to cut and tasted of mold. The cheese was good, but it
was gone in seconds. They passed the bottle around and soon that was gone too.
So they chewed on the musty bread and ate the onion.

Nettle said,
“I wouldn’t give this to my fucking dog.”

“I’ll
go across,” Turner said, “and get something better.”

“We’ll
come too.”

But for a
while they lay back on their beds in silence. No one felt like confronting the
old lady just yet.

Then, at the
sound of footsteps, they turned and saw two men standing in the entrance. They
each held something in their hands, a club perhaps, or a shotgun. In the fading
light it was not possible to tell. Nor could they see the faces of the French
brothers.

The voice was
soft. “Bonsoir, Messieurs.”

“Bonsoir.”

As Turner got
up from his straw bed he took the revolver. The corporals reached for their
rifles. “Go easy,” he whispered.

“Anglais?
Belges?”

“Anglais.”

“We
have something for you.”

“What
sort of thing?”

“What’s
he saying?” one of the corporals said.

“He
says they’ve got something for us.”

“Fucking
hell.”

The men came
a couple of steps closer and raised what was in their hands. Shotguns, surely.
Turner released his safety catch. He heard Mace and Nettle do the same.
“Easy,” he murmured.

“Put
away your guns, Messieurs.”

“Put
away yours.”

“Wait a
little moment.”

The figure
who spoke was reaching into his pocket. He brought out a torch and shone it not
at the soldiers, but at his brother, at what was in his hand. A French loaf.
And at what was in the other hand, a canvas bag. Then he showed them the two
baguettes he himself was holding.

“And we
have olives, cheese, pâté, tomatoes and ham. And naturally, wine.
Vive l’Angleterre.”

“Er,
Vive la France.”

They sat at
Mace’s table, which the Frenchmen, Henri and Jean-Marie Bonnet, politely
admired, along with the mattresses. They were short, stocky men in their
fifties. Henri wore glasses, which Nettle said looked odd on a farmer. Turner
did not translate. As well as wine, they brought glass tumblers. The five men
raised them in toasts to the French and British armies, and to the crushing of
Germany. The brothers watched the soldiers eat. Through Turner, Mace said that
he had never tasted, never even heard of, goose liver pâté, and
from now on, he would eat nothing else. The Frenchmen smiled, but their manner
was constrained and they seemed in no mood to get drunk. They said they had
driven all the way to a hamlet near Arras in their flatbed farm truck to look
for a young cousin and her children. A great battle had been fought for the
town but they had no idea who was taking it, who was defending it or who had
the upper hand. They drove on the back roads to avoid the chaos of refugees. They
saw farmhouses burning, and then they came across a dozen or so dead English
soldiers in the road. They had to get out and drag the men aside to avoid
running over them. But a couple of the bodies were almost cut in half. It must
have been a big machine-gun attack, perhaps from the air, perhaps an ambush.
Back in the lorry, Henri was sick in the cab, and Jean-Marie, who was at the
wheel, got into a panic and drove into a ditch. They walked to a village,
borrowed two horses from a farmer and pulled the Renault free. That took two
hours. On the road again, they saw burned-out tanks and armored cars, German as
well as British and French. But they saw no soldiers. The battle had moved on.

By the time
they reached the hamlet, it was late afternoon. The place had been completely
destroyed and was deserted. Their cousin’s house was smashed up, with
bullet holes all over the walls, but it still had its roof. They went in every
room and were relieved to find no one there. She must have taken the children
and joined the thousands of people on the roads. Afraid of driving back at
night, they parked in a wood and tried to sleep in the cab. All night long they
heard the artillery pounding Arras. It seemed impossible that anyone, or
anything, could survive there. They drove back by another route, a much greater
distance, to avoid passing the dead soldiers. Now, Henri explained, he and his
brother were very tired. When they shut their eyes, they saw those mutilated
bodies.

Jean-Marie
refilled the glasses. The account, with Turner’s running translation, had
taken almost an hour. All the food was eaten. He thought about telling them of
his own single, haunting detail. But he didn’t want to add to the horror,
and nor did he want to give life to the image while it remained at a distance,
held there by wine and companionship. Instead, he told them how he was
separated from his unit at the beginning of the retreat, during a Stuka attack.
He didn’t mention his injury because he didn’t want the corporals
to know about it. Instead he explained how they were walking cross-country to
Dunkirk to avoid the air raids along the main roads.

Jean-Marie
said, “So it’s true what they’re saying. You’re
leaving.”

“We’ll
be back.” He said this, but he didn’t believe it.

The wine was
taking hold of Corporal Nettle. He began a rambling eulogy of what he called
“Frog crumpet”—how plentiful, how available, how delicious.
It was all fantasy. The brothers looked at Turner.

“He
says French women are the most beautiful in the world.”

They nodded
solemnly and raised their glasses.

They were all
silent for a while. Their evening was almost at an end. They listened to the
night sounds they had grown used to—the rumble of artillery, stray shots
in the distance, a booming far-off explosion—probably sappers blowing a
bridge in the retreat.

“Ask
them about their mum,” Corporal Mace suggested. “Let’s get
that one cleared up.”

“We
were three brothers,” Henri explained. “The eldest, Paul, her
firstborn, died near Verdun in 1915. A direct hit from a shell. There was nothing
to bury apart from his helmet. Us two, we were lucky. We came through without a
scratch. Since then, she’s always hated soldiers. But now she’s
eighty-three and losing her mind, it’s an obsession with her. French,
English, Belgian, German. She makes no distinction. You’re all the same
to her. We worry that when the Germans come, she’ll go at them with a
pitchfork and they’ll shoot her.”

Wearily, the
brothers got to their feet. The soldiers did the same.

Jean-Marie
said, “We would offer you hospitality at our kitchen table. But to do
that, we would have to lock her in her room.”

“But
this has been a magnificent feast,” Turner said.

Nettle was
whispering in Mace’s ear and he was nodding. Nettle took from his bag two
cartons of cigarettes. Of course, it was the right thing to do. The Frenchmen
made a polite show of refusing, but Nettle came round the table and shoved the
gifts into their arms. He wanted Turner to translate.

“You
should have seen it, when the order came through to destroy the stores. Twenty
thousand cigarettes. We took whatever we wanted.”

A whole army
was fleeing to the coast, armed with cigarettes to keep the hunger away.

The Frenchmen
gave courteous thanks, complimented Turner on his French, then bent over the
table to pack the empty bottles and glasses into the canvas bag. There was no
pretending that they would meet again.

“We’ll
be gone at first light,” Turner said. “So we’ll say
goodbye.”

They shook
hands.

Henri Bonnet
said, “All that fighting we did twenty-five years ago. All those dead.
Now the Germans back in France. In two days they’ll be here, taking
everything we have. Who would have believed it?”

Turner felt,
for the first time, the full ignominy of the retreat. He was ashamed. He said,
with even less conviction than before, “We’ll be back to throw them
out, I promise you.”