The Devils of D-Day Read online

  Along the road, it was silent and soaking and dark. I kept my hands shoved deep in my overcoat pockets and my scarf pulled up over my mouth. Way over to my right, I could hear the Orne rushing over the brownish granite rocks of its shallow bed, and on my left, just beyond the hedge, reared the slabby blocks of the cliffs that gave this part of Normandy its name—Swiss Normandy. The rocks were jacketed in slime and moss, and laced up with hanging tree-roots, and you could just imagine strange and malignant creatures lurking in their crevices and cracks.

  I hadn’t realised how far I’d walked along the road with Madeleine. It took me almost five minutes before I saw my yellow car by the verge, and the huddled black bulk of the abandoned tank. The drizzle was turning into large wet flakes of half-melted snow now, and I pulled my coat collar up and walked more quickly.

  Who knows what odd tricks your eyes can play in the snow and the dark? When your eyes are tired, you can see dark shadows like cats slipping away at the corner of your field of vision. Shadows can seem to stand on their own, and trees can seem to move. But that evening, on the road to Pont D’Ouilly, I was sure that my eyes weren’t playing up, and that I did see something. There’s a French road sign which warns that the night can deceive you, and possibly it did, but I still think that what I glimpsed wasn’t an optical illusion. It was enough to make me stop in the road, and feel a tight chill that was even colder than the evening air.

  Through the tumbling snow, a few yards away from the derelict tank, I saw a small bony figure, white in the darkness, not much taller than a child of five, and it seemed to be hopping or running. The sight of it was so sudden and strange that I was momentarily terrified; but then I ran forward through the snow and shouted, ‘Hey! You!’

  My shout echoed flatly back from the nearby rocks. I peered into the dark but there was nobody there. Only the rusting bulk of the Sherman tank, woven into the brambles of the hedge. Only the wet road, and the noise of the river. There was no sign of any figure; no sign of any child. I walked back across to my car and checked it for damage, in case the figure had been a vandal or a thief, but the Citroen was unmarked. I climbed thoughtfully inside and sat there for a minute or two drying my face and hair with my handkerchief, wondering what the hell was going on around here.

  I started the Citroen’s engine, but just before I drove off I took one last look at the tank. It gave me a really peculiar feeling, thinking that it had been decaying by this roadside since I944, unmoved, and that here at this very place the American Army had fought to liberate Normandy. For the first time in my map-making career, I felt history was alive; I felt history move under my feet. I wondered if the skeletons of the crew were still inside the tank, but I decided that they’d probably been taken out years ago and given a decent burial. The French were beautifully and gravely respectful to the remains of the men who had died trying to liberate them.

  I released the Citroen’s brake and drove down the gloomy road, across the bridge, and back up the winding hill to the main highway. The snow was crowding my windshield, and the car’s tacky little windshield wipers were having about as much success in clearing it away as two geriatrics sweeping up the ticker-tape after Lindy’s parade through Wall Street. When I joined the main stream of traffic, I almost collided with a Renault which was bombing through the snow at eighty-five. Vive la velocite, I thought to myself, as I crawled back towards Falaise at twenty.

  Next day, in the high-ceilinged hotel dining room, I ate a solemn breakfast of croissants and coffee and confitures, watching myself in the mottled mirrors and trying to decipher what the hell was happening in the world today from a copy of Le Figaro on a long stick. Across the room, a rotund Frenchman with waxed whiskers and a huge white napkin tucked in his shirt collar was wolfing down breadrolls as though he was trying to put up the price of shares in the bakery industry. A waitress in black with a pinched face rapped around the black-and-white tiled floor in court shoes and made sure you felt you were lonely and unwanted, and that you only wanted breakfast because you were an unpardonable pest. I thought of changing hotels, but then I thought of Madeleine, and things didn’t seem too bad.

  I spent most of the morning on the new curve of road that comes into Clecy from the south-east. A dry wind had lifted away most of the snow during the night, but it was still intensely cold, and the village lay frosted in its valley, with the broad hump of the hills far behind it, and tiny villagers came and went from its doors, tending their gardens or their washing, or fetching in logs, and the hours rang from the tall church spire, and New York seemed a very long way away.

  Maybe my mind was distracted, but I only managed to finish half the readings that I’d hoped to take, and by eleven o’clock, as the church tolled its hour, I was wrapped up and ready to drive across to Pont D’Ouilly. I’d taken the trouble to stop at a store in the village and buy a very reasonable bottle of Bordeaux, just in case Madeleine’s father needed a little appeasing. I also bought, for Madeleine herself, a box of crystallised fruit. They’re very big on crystallised fruit in Normandy.

  The rented Citroen coughed and choked, but finally found its way down the twisting road to the bridge. The countryside didn’t look very much more hospitable by daylight than it had by night. There was a cold silvery haze over the fields, and mist was hanging under the elms like soiled net curtains. The cows were still there, standing patiently in the chill, chewing the colourless grass and breathing out so much steam they looked like roomfuls of heavy smokers. I drove over the stone bridge, with the Orne gargling beneath me, and then I slowed down so that I could take a look at the tank.

  There it was—silent and broken—wound in brambles and leafless creeper. I stopped the car for a moment and slid open my window so that I could see the corroded wheels, the collapsed tracks, and the small dark turret with its scaly sides. There was something deeply sinister and sorrowful about it. It reminded me of the abandoned Mulberry harbour that still lies off the shore of Arromanches, on Normandy’s channel coast, a grim memorial to June 6, I944, that no stone monument or statue could ever adequately replace.

  I looked around at the dank hedgerow for a while, and then I started the car up again and drove along to Madeleine’s farm. I turned into the gate and splashed across the muddy yard, with chickens flapping and skittering all around me, and a flock of grubby geese rushing away like athletes on a cross-country run.

  I stepped out of the car, being careful where I put my feet, and reached in for my presents. A door opened behind me, and I heard someone walking my way. A voice said, ‘Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’

  A short Frenchman in muddy pants, muddy boots and a muddy brown jacket was standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets. He had a long Norman face, and he was smoking a Gauloise that appeared to be permanently stuck to his lip. His beret was pulled well down to his ears, which made him look pretty rural, but his eyes were bright and he looked like the kind of farmer who didn’t miss a trick.

  ‘My name’s Dan McCook,’ I told him. ‘Your daughter Madeleine invited me for lunch.

  'Er—pour dejeuner? ‘

  The farmer nodded. ‘Yes, monsieur. She tells me this. I am Jacques Passerelle.’

  We shook hands. I offered him the bottle of wine, and said, ‘I brought you this. I hope you like it. It’s a bordeaux.’

  Jacques Passerelle paused for a moment, and reached in his breast pocket for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He hooked them around his ears, and scrutinised the bottle closely. I felt as if I’d had the down-right effrontery to give a vacuum pack of A&P bacon to a Kentucky hog farmer. But the Frenchman nodded again, put away his spectacles, and said, ‘Merci bien, monsieur. I save this for Dimanche.’

  He ushered me through the stable door into the kitchen. The old woman Eloise was there, in her dark grey dress and her white lace cap, boiling a huge copper pan full of apples. Jacques introduced me, and we shook hands. Her fingers were soft and dry, and she was wearing a silver ring with a miniature Bible on it.
She had one of those flat, pale, wrinkled faces that you sometimes see staring out of the windows of old people’s homes, or from the windows of buses on old people’s outings. But she seemed to be independent and strong around the Passerelle home, and she walked with a straight back.

  She said, ‘Madeleine told me you were interested in the tank.’

  I glanced at Jacques, but he didn’t seem to be listening. I coughed, and said, ‘Sure. I’m making a map of these parts for a book about D-Day.’

  ‘The tank has been here since July, I944. Mid-July. It died on a very hot day.’

  I looked at her. Her eyes were washed-out blue, like the sky after a spring shower, and you didn’t quite know whether she was looking inwards or outwards. I said,

  ‘Maybe we can talk after lunch.’

  Out of the steamy, apple-aromatic kitchen, we walked along a narrow dark hallway with a bare boarded floor. Jacques opened a door in the side of the hall, and said,

  ‘You would care for an aperitif?’

  This was obviously his front parlour, the room he kept only for visitors. It was gloomy, heavily-curtained, and it smelled of dust and stale air and furniture polish. There were three chintz armchairs in the style you can see in any large French meubles store, a copper warming-pan hanging on the wall, a plastic madonna with a small container of holy water, and a dark-varnished sideboard with photographs of weddings and grandchildren, each on its own lace doily. A tall clock ticked away the winter morning, weary and slow.

  ‘I’d like a calvados, please,’ I told Jacques. ‘I don’t know anything better for warming yourself up on a cold day. Not even Jack Daniels.’

  Jacques took two small glasses from the sideboard, uncorked the calvados, and poured it out. He handed one over, and lifted his own glass solemnly.

  ‘Sante,’ he said quietly, and downed his drink in one gulp.

  I sipped mine more circumspectly. Calvados, the apple-brandy of Normany, is potent stuff, and I did want to do some sensible work this afternoon. ‘You have been here in summer?’ asked Jacques. ‘No, never. This is only my third trip to Europe.’ ‘It’s not so pleasant in winter. The mud, and the frost. But in summer, this is very beautiful. We have visitors from all over France, and Europe. You can hire boats and row along the river.’

  ‘It sounds terrific. Do you have many Americans?’ Jacques shrugged. ‘One or two. Some Germans sometimes, too. But not many come here. Pont D’Ouilly is still a painful memory. The Germans ran away from here as if the devil himself were after them.’

  I swallowed some more calvados, and it glowed down my throat like a shovelful of hot coke. ‘You’re the second person who’s said that,’ I told him. ‘Der Teufel.’

  Jacques gave a small smile, which reminded me of the way that Madeleine smiled.

  ‘I must change my clothes,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to sit down for lunch looking like a mud man.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I told him. ‘Will Madeleine be down.’

  ‘In a moment. She wanted to put on cosmetics. Well.. . we don’t have many visitors.’

  Jacques went off to clean himself up, and I went over to the window and looked out across the orchard. The fruit trees were all bare now, and pruned, and the grass was white with cold. A bird perched for a moment on the rough fence of silver-birch at the far end of the garden, and then fluttered off. I turned back into the room.

  On the sideboard, one of the photographs showed a young girl with a wavy I943 hairstyle, and I guessed that must have been Madeleine’s mother. There was a colour picture of Madeleine as a baby, with a smiling priest in the background, and a formal portrait of jacques in a high white collar. Besides all these was a bronze model of a medieval cathedral, with a ring of twisted hair around its spire. I couldn’t really work out what that was supposed to mean, but then I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, and I wasn’t really into religious relics.

  I was just about to pick up the model to take a better look when the parlour door opened. It was Madeleine, in a pale cream cotton dress, her dark-blonde hair brushed back and held with tortoiseshell combs, her lips bright red with lipstick.

  ‘Please—' she said. ‘Don’t touch that.’

  I raised my hands away from the tiny cathedral. ‘I’m sorry. I was only going to take a look.’

  ‘It’s something of my mother’s.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. Don’t think about it. Did father give you a drink?’

  ‘Sure. A calvados. It’s making my ears ring already Are you going to join me?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t drink it. They gave it to me once when I was twelve and I was sick. Now, I only drink wine.’

  She sat down, and I sat opposite. ‘You shouldn’t have dressed up specially for me,’ I told her. ‘But all the same, you look beautiful.’

  She blushed. Not much, just a small tinge on the cheeks, but it was a blush all right. I hadn’t come across that kind of modesty for years.

  I said, ‘I had a real weird experience last night. I was walking back to my car, and I could have sworn I saw something on the road.’

  She looked up. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Well, I’m not too sure. It was like a small child, but it was too thin and bony for a small child.’

  She looked at me for several silent seconds. Then she said, ‘I don’t know. It must have been the snow.’

  ‘It scared the hell out of me, whatever it was.’

  She picked absentmindedly at the braiding on the arm of her chair. ‘It’s the atmosphere, the ambience, around the tank. It makes people feel things, see things, that aren’t there. Eloise will tell you some of the stories if you want.’

  ‘You don’t believe them yourself?’

  She shrugged. ‘What’s the use? All you do is frighten yourself. I’d rather think of real things, not of ghosts and spirits.’

  I put down my glass on the small side-table. ‘I get the feeling you don’t like it here.’

  ‘Here, in my father’s house?’

  ‘No— in Pont D’Ouilly. It’s not exactly the entertainment centre of northern France, is it?’

  Madeleine stood up and walked across to the window. Against the grey winter light, she was a soft dark silhouette. She said, ‘I don’t think so much of entertainment. If you’ve lived here, in Pont D’Ouilly, then you know what sadness is, and anything at all is better than sadness.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you loved and lost.’

  She smiled. ‘I suppose you could say that. I loved life and I lost my love of life.’

  I said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’ But at that moment, a gong rang from across the hall, and Madeleine turned and said, ‘Lunch is ready. We’d better go in.’

  Today, we had lunch in the dining room, although I suspected that they usually ate in the kitchen, especially when they had three inches of mud on their boots and appetites like horses. Eloise had set out a huge tureen of hot brown onion soup on the oval table, with crisp garlic bread, and I suddenly realised that I was starved of home cooking. Jacques was already standing at the head of the table in a neatly-pressed brown suit, and when we had all taken our seats, he bowed his thinning scalp towards us, and said grace.

  ‘Oh Lord, who provides all that we eat, thank you for this nourishment. And protect us from the conversations of evil, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.’

  I looked across the table at Madeleine, and tried to put the question in my eyes. The conversations of evil? What was that all about? The voices in the tank? Or what? But Madeleine’s attention was fastened on the large tureen, as Eloise dished up piping-hot platefuls of transparent brown soup, and whether she intended to avoid my gaze of not, she didn’t look up again until her father had started to talk.

  ‘The upper field is frozen,’ he said, dabbing his lips with his napkin. ‘I ploughed a hectare this morning, and there was ice coming up with the soil. It hasn’t been so cold here for ten years.’

  Eloise sa
id, ‘There are worse winters to come. The dogs know it.’

  ‘The dogs?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s right, monsieur. When a dog stays close to home, and when he calls in the night, that’s when the nights will grow cold for three years, one after another.’ ‘You believe that? Or is that just a French country saying?’

  Eloise frowned at me. ‘It is nothing to do with belief. It is true. I have seen it happen for myself.’

  Jacques put in: ‘Eloise has a way with nature, Mr McCook. She can heal you with dandelion broth, or send you to sleep with burdock and thyme.’

  ‘Can she exorcise ghosts?’

  Madeleine breathed, ‘Dan—‘ but Eloise was not put out. She examined me with those watery old eyes of hers, and almost smiled.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m impertinent,’ I said. ‘But it seems to me that everybody around here is kind of anxious about that tank, and if you could exorcise it. ..’

  Eloise slowly shook her head. ‘Only a priest can exorcise,’ she said gently, ‘and the only priest who will believe us is too old and too weak for such things.’

  ‘You really believe it’s haunted?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by “haunted”, monsieur. ‘

  ‘Well, as far as I can make out, the dead crew are supposed to be heard talking to each other at night. Is that it?’

  ‘Some say that,’ said Jacques.

  I glanced at him. ‘And what do others say?’

  ‘Others will not talk about it at all.’

  Eloise spooned up her soup carefully. ‘Nobody knows much about the tanks. But they were not like the usual American tanks. They were different, very different, and Father Anton, our priest, said they were visitations from L’enfer, from hell itself.’

  Madeleine said, ‘Eloise—do we have to talk about it? We don’t want to spoil the lunch.’