The Devils of D-Day Read online

  But Eloise raised her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter This young man wants to know about the tank, then why shouldn’t he?’

  I said: ‘How were they different? It looks like a regular tank to me.’

  ‘Well,’ explained Eloise, ‘they were painted black all over, although you cannot see that now, because the rust and the weather have taken away the paint. There were thirteen of them. I know, because I counted them as they came along the road from Le Vey. Thirteen, on the thirteenth day of July. But what was most strange, they never opened their turrets. Most American tanks came with their tops open, and the soldiers would throw us candy and cigarettes and nylon stockings. But these tanks came and we never saw who drove them. They were always closed.’

  Madeleine had finished her soup and was sitting upright in her chair. She looked very pale, and it was clear that all this talk about the strange tanks disconcerted her.

  I said, ‘Did you talk to any Americans about them? Did they ever tell you what they were?’

  Jacques, with his mouth full of garlic bread, said, ‘They didn’t know, or they wouldn’t speak. They just said “special division”, and that was all.’

  ‘Only one was left behind,’ put in Eloise. ‘That was the tank which is still there, down the road. It broke a track and stopped. But the Americans did nothing to take it away.

  Instead, they came along next day and welded down the turret. Yes, they welded it, and then an English priest came and said words over it, and it was left to rot.’

  ‘You mean the crew was left inside?’

  Jacques tore off some more bread. ‘Who can say? They wouldn’t let anyone near. I have talked many times to the police and to the mayor, and all they say is that the tank is not to be moved. And there it stays.’

  Madeleine said, ‘And ever since it’s been there, the village has been dead and depressed.’

  ‘Because of the voices?’

  Madeleine shrugged. ‘There have been voices. At least, that’s what some people say. But more than anything else, it’s the tank itself. It’s a terrible reminder of something that most of us now would prefer to forget.’

  Eloise said, ‘Those tanks could not be stopped. They set fire to German tanks all along the river, and then they set fire to the Germans themselves who tried to escape from them. You could hear the screams all night of men burning. In the morning, the tanks were gone. Who knows where, or how? But they came through in one day and one night, and nothing on earth could have held them back. I know they saved us, monsieur, but I still shudder when I think of them.’

  ‘Who’s heard these voices? Do they know what they say?’

  Eloise said, ‘Not many people walk along that road at night any more. But Madame Verrier said she heard whispering and laughter, one night in February; and old Henriques told of voices that boomed and shouted. I myself have carried milk and eggs past that tank, and the milk has soured and the eggs have gone rotten. Gaston from the next farm had a terrier which sniffed around the tank, and the dog developed tremors and shakes. Its hair fell out, and after three days it died.

  Everybody has one story about the evil that befalls you if you go too near the tank; and so these days nobody does.’

  I said, ‘Isn’t it just superstition? I mean, there’s no real evidence.’

  ‘You should ask Father Anton,’ said Eloise. ‘If you are really foolhardy enough to want to know more, Father Anton will probably tell you. The English priest who said words over the tank stayed at his house for a month, and I know they spoke of the tank often. Father Anton was never happy that it was left by the road, but there was nothing he could do, short of carrying it away on his own back.’

  Madeleine said, ‘Please let’s talk about other things. The war is so depressing.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, lifting my hands in mock surrender. ‘But thank you for what you’ve told me. It’s going to make a real good story. Now, I’d love some more of that onion soup.’

  Eloise smiled. ‘You have a big appetite, monsieur. I remember the American appetites.’

  She ladled out more of that scalding brown soup, while Madeleine and her father watched me with friendly caution, and a little bit of suspicion, and maybe the hope that I wasn’t really going to bother to do anything unsettling, like talk to Father Anton about what happened on July I3, I944, on the road from Le Vey.

  After lunch of hare casserole, with good red wine and fruit, we sat around the table and smoked Gauloises and Jacques told me stories of his boyhood at Pont D’Ouilly.

  Madeleine came and sat beside me, and it was plain that she was getting to like me.

  Eloise retreated to the kitchen, and clattered pans, but returned fifteen minutes later with tiny cups of the richest coffee I’d ever tasted.

  At last, at well past three o’clock, I said: ‘I’ve had a marvellous time, but I have to get back to work. I have a whole mess of readings to take before it gets dark.’

  ‘It’s been good to talk with you,’ said Jacques, standing up and giving a small bow. ‘It isn’t often we have people to eat with us. I suppose we are too close to the tank, and people don’t like to come this way.’

  ‘It’s that bad?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t comfortable.’

  While Madeleine helped to take out the last dishes, and Jacques went to open the farm gate for me, I stood in the kitchen buttoning my coat and watching Eloise’s bent back as she washed up over the steamy sink.

  I said, ‘Au revoir, Eloise.’

  She didn’t turn round, but she said, ‘Au revoir, monsieur.’

  I took a step towards the back door, but then I paused, and looked at her again.

  ‘Eloise?’ I asked.

  ‘Oui, monsieur?’

  ‘What is it really, inside that tank?’

  I saw the almost imperceptible stiffening of her back. The mop stopped slapping against the plates, and the knives and forks stopped clattering.

  She said, ‘I do not know, monsieur. Truly.’

  ‘Have a guess.’

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Perhaps it is nothing at all. But perhaps it is something that neither heaven nor earth knows anything about.’

  ‘That only leaves hell.’

  Again, she was silent. Then she turned from the sink and looked at me with those pale, wise eyes.

  ‘Oui, monsieur. Et le roi de l’enfer, c’est le diable.’

  The priest was very old. He must have been almost ninety, and he sat at his dusty leather-topped desk like a sagging sack of soft potatoes. But he had an intelligent, kindly face; and even though he spoke slowly and softly, as his lungs filled and emptied with the laboured aspiration of ancient bellows, he was lucid in his words, and precise. He had fraying white hair and a bony nose you could have hung your hat on, and as he talked he had a habit of steepling his long fingers and lifting his neck so that he could see down into the grey cobbled courtyard that fronted his house.

  He said, ‘The English cleric’s name was the Reverend Taylor,’ and he peered out of the window as if expecting the Reverend Taylor to appear around the corner at any moment.

  ‘The Reverend Taylor? There must be five thousand Reverend Taylors in England.”

  Father Anton smiled, and did something complicated inside his mouth with his dentures. ‘That is probably so.

  But I am quite certain that there is only one Reverend Woodfall Taylor.’

  It was four-thirty now, almost dark, but I had got so caught up in the mystery of this decaying Sherman that I had skipped my cartographic readings for the day, and taken a trip up to the opposite end of the village to talk to Father Anton. He lived in a huge, sombre, forbidding French house in the severest style, with a hall of dark polished wood that you could have landed a 747 on, and staircase after staircase of chilled marble, flanked by gloomy oil paintings of cardinals and Popes and other miserable doyens of the church. Everywhere you looked, there was a mournful face.

  It was as bad as spending the evening at a Paul Robeso
n record night in Peoria, Illinois. . Father Anton said, ‘When he came here, Mr Taylor was a very enthusiastic young vicar. He was full of the energy of religion. But I don’t think he truly understood the importance of what he had to do. I don’t think he understood how terrible it was, either. Without being unkind, I think he was the kind of young cleric who is easily seduced into thinking that mysticism is the firework display that celebrates true faith.

  Mind you, the Americans paid him a great deal of money. It was enough to build himself a new steeple, and a church hall. You can’t blame him.’

  I coughed. It was wickedly cold in Father Anton’s house, and apart from saving on heating he also seemed to have a penchant for penny-pinching on electricity. The room was so shadowy and dark that I could barely make him out, and all I could see distinctly was the shine of the silver crucifix around his neck.

  I said, ‘What I don’t understand is why we needed him. What was he doing for us, anyway?’

  ‘He never clearly explained, monsieur. He was gagged by your oaths of secrecy.

  Apart from that, I don’t think he truly understood himself what it was he was required to do.’

  ‘But the tanks—the black tanks—'

  The old priest turned towards me, and I could just make out the rheumy gleam of his eye.

  ‘The black tanks were something about which I cannot speak, monsieur. I have done all that I can for thirty long years, to have the tank taken away from Pont D’Ouilly but each time I have been told that it is too heavy, and that it is not economical to tow it away. But I think the truth is that they are too frightened to disturb it.’

  ‘Why should they be frightened?’

  Father Anton opened his desk drawer and took out a small rosewood and silver snuffbox. He asked, ‘You take snuff?’

  ‘No, thanks. But I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.’ He passed me the cigarette box, and then snorted two generous pinches of snuff up his cavernous nostrils. I always thought people sneezed after they took snuff, but all Father Anton did was snort like a mule, and relax further into his creaky revolving chair.

  I lit my cigarette and said, ‘Is there something still inside that tank?’

  Father Anton thought about this, and then answered. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know what.

  The Reverend Taylor would never speak about it, and when they sealed down the turret, nobody from the whole village was allowed within half a kilometre.’ ‘Did they give any kind of explanation?’ ‘Yes,’ said Father Anton. ‘They said there was high explosive inside it, and that there was some danger of a blast. But of course none of us believed it. Why should they need a vicar to sanctify the sealing of a few pounds of TNT?’

  ‘So you believe that tank has something unholy about it?’

  ‘It’s not what I believe, monsieur. It’s what your Army obviously believed, and I have yet to meet anyone more skeptical than a soldier. Why should an Army call in a cleric to deal with its weapons? I can only assume that there was something about the tank that was not in accordance with the laws of God.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but the slow and lisping way in which he said it, the way the words came out in that freezing and sepulchral room like dead flowers, that was enough to make me feel chilled and strangely frightened.

  I said, ‘Do you believe in the voices?’

  Father Anton nodded. ‘I have heard them myself. Anyone brave enough to go near the tank after dark can hear them.’

  ‘You heard them yourself?’

  ‘Not officially.’

  ‘How about unofficially?’

  The old priest wiped at his nose with his handkerchief. ‘Unofficially, of course, I made it my business. I last visited the tank three or four years ago, and spent several hours there in prayer. It didn’t do my rheumatism a great deal of good, but I am sure now that the tank is an instrument of evil works.’

  ‘Did you hear anything distinct? I mean, what kind of voices were they?’

  Father Anton chose his next sentence with care. ‘They were not, in my opinion, the voices of men.’

  I frowned at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Monsieur, what can I tell you? They were not the voices of human spirits or of human ghosts.’

  I didn’t know what to say after that. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and outside the day grew grainier and darker, tinged with that corroded green that always threatened snow. Father Anton seemed to be deeply buried in thought, but after a time he raised his head and said, ‘Is that all, monsieur? I have studies to continue.’

  ‘Well, I guess so. The whole thing seems like a real mystery.’

  The ways of war are always a mystery, monsieur. I have heard many stories of strange and inexplicable events on battlefields, or in the concentration camps.

  Sometimes, holy miracles occur, visitations by saints. I have a parishioner who fought at the Somme, and he swears he was visited every night by Saint Therese.

  Then again, monsters and agents of hell have been seen, seeking out the cowardly and the vicious. It was said that Heinrich Reutemann, the SS commandant, kept at Dachau a dog that was possessed by the devil.’

  ‘And this tank?’

  The pale withered hands formed their reverent steeple. ‘Who knows, monsieur? It is beyond my comprehension.’

  I thanked him, and got up to leave. His room was like a dark musty cave. I said, ‘Do you think it’s dangerous?’

  He didn’t turn his head. ‘The manifestations of evil are always dangerous, my friend.

  But the greatest protection from evil is a steadfast belief in Our Lord.’

  I stood by the door for a moment, straining my eyes to see him through the gloom.

  ‘Yes,’ I said and then went down the cold and silent marble staircases to the front door, and out into the wintry street.

  I didn’t drive straight there, partly because I was waiting for the late afternoon to grow darker, and partly because the whole thing made me unusually nervous. By seven o’clock, though, after a roundabout tour through the muddy shuttered villages of the Route Scenique of the Orne Valley; past farmyards and peeling houses and roadside shrines where pale effigies of Christ crucified leaned mournfully into the evening frost; past inkblot trees and cold whispering fields; I arrived at the Passerelle’s farm, and drove into the yard.

  The evening was bitter and still when I climbed out of the Citroen and walked across to the farmhouse door. A dog was yapping at some other farm, way across the valley; but here everything was quiet. I knocked on the door and waited.

  Madeleine came to the door. She was wearing a blue check cowboy shirt and jeans, and she looked as if she’d just finished changing a wheel on a tractor.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. ‘You left something here?’

  ‘No, no. I came back for you.’

  ‘For me? Je ne comprends pas. ‘

  I said, ‘Can I come in? It’s like the North Pole out here. I only wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Of course,’ she told me, and opened the door wider.

  The kitchen was warm and empty. I sat down at the broad pine table, scarred from a hundred years of knives and hot saucepans, and she went across to the corner cupboard and poured me a small glass of brandy. Then she sat down opposite, and said, ‘Are you still thinking about the tank?’

  I went to see Father Anton.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘Am I that easy to read”

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she smiled ‘But you seem like the kind of man who doesn’t like to leave puzzles unsolved. You make maps, so your whole life is spent unravelling mysteries. And this one, of course, is a very special enigma indeed.’

  I sipped my brandy. ‘Father Anton says he’s heard the voices himself.’

  She stared down at the table. Her finger traced the pattern of a flower that had been scorched into the wood by a hot fish-kettle. She commented, ‘Father Anton is very old.’

&
nbsp; ‘You mean he’s senile?’

  ‘I don’t know. But his sermons ramble these days. Perhaps he could have imagined these things.’

  ‘Maybe he could. But I’d still like to find out for myself.’

  She glanced up. ‘You want to hear them for yourself?’

  ‘Certainly. I’d like to make a tape-recording, too. Has anyone ever thought of doing that?’

  ‘Dan—not many people have ever gone to listen to the voices on purpose.’

  ‘No, I know that. But that’s what I want to do tonight. And I was hoping you’d come along with me.’

  She didn’t answer straight away, but stared across the kitchen as if she was thinking of something quite different. Her hair was tied back in a knot, which didn’t suit her too much, but then I guess a girl doesn’t worry too much about the charisma of her coiffure when she’s mucking out cows. Almost unconsciously, she crossed herself, and then she looked back at me. ‘You really want to go?’

  ‘Well, sure. There has to be some kind of explanation.’

  ‘Americans always need explanations?’

  I finished my brandy, and shrugged. ‘I guess it’s a national characteristic. In any case, I was born and bred in Mississippi.’

  Madeleine bit her lip. She said, ‘Supposing I asked you not to go?’

  ‘Well, you can ask me. But I’d have to say that I’m going anyway. Listen, Madeleine, there’s a fascinating story in this. There’s some kind of weird thing going on in that old tank and I want to know what it is.’

  ‘C’est malin,’ she said. ‘It is wicked.’

  I reached across the old table and laid my hand over hers. ‘That’s what everybody says, but so far I haven’t seen anything that proves it. All I want to do is find out what the voices are saying, if there are any voices, and then we can go from there. I mean, I can’t say that I’m not scared. I think it’s very scarey. But a whole lot of scarey things turn out to be real interesting once you take the trouble to check them out.’

  ‘Dan, please. It’s more than simply scarey.’