V for Vengeance Read online

  Such great numbers of people had fled from Northern France before the advancing Germans that it was estimated that only some 18,000,000 remained in the occupied territory, with the result that the smaller half of the country, ruled from Vichy, was now grossly over-populated. Every town and village was crowded with refugees.

  The Compagnons de Jéhu had not escaped, as many of the Baron’s Paris friends had taken refuge with him, but having had warning of Lacroix’s coming he had managed to provide them with a room, and although he was now hard put to it to obtain supplies he promised them a good dinner. Since it was now getting on for nine o’clock they sat down to it right away, and this being the first decent food that Kuporovitch had seen since his arrest he did most noble justice to the meal.

  Afterwards the Colonel disappeared for some twenty minutes to do the business which had caused him to make the journey. Then on his return, the Baron invited both him and Kuporovitch into his office, where he produced some of his now precious coffee and liqueurs for them. They talked mainly of the war and the possibility of various parts of the French Empire re-entering it against the Nazis; but Lacroix did not think that likely any longer. He said that, owing to a reshuffle of the Vichy Government which was in progress, General Weygand had given up the post of Minister of Defence in order to take command in North Africa. The Army there would prove loyal to Weygand, and Weygand to Pétain; while at home the ambitious pro-Nazi General Huntziger, who was to take Weygand’s place in the Cabinet, would exert his influence there to get the Generals in other Colonies, who were of doubtful loyalty to Vichy, removed from their posts.

  At eleven o’clock the two travellers went up to their room, and after Lacroix had given the Russian more detailed instructions as to what he was to say to Gregory when he reached England, they turned in.

  The following morning they were up early, and having partaken of a simple breakfast drove to Lyons. Just before they reached the middle of the town Lacroix produced a packet from his satchel which he handed to his companion. It contained all the necessary papers for passing the frontier, together with French, Spanish, Portuguese and English money, and a passport made out in the name of Ivan Smernov, in which Kuporovitch was amused to see the photograph of himself which had been taken only the day before by the Vichy police. The car pulled up. The little Colonel wished his emissary the very best of luck. They shook hands warmly, and Kuporovitch got out.

  As he had nothing except the clothes in which he stood his first thought was that he must buy himself a few things before going to the station to catch his train. But, as the car drove away, he stood for a moment motionless upon the pavement. It was a lovely morning, and smiling exultantly he drew a deep breath down into his broad chest.

  He was free again—free; and after all these weeks of enforced inaction about to do something which might prove damnably dangerous before he was through with it, but which was well worth the doing. He could have shouted aloud in the sunshine from sheer joy.

  7

  Defiant London

  Kuporovitch’s journey to Lisbon took much longer than he had expected. The trains, like everything else in Unoccupied France, were horribly overcrowded, running only infrequently and at half speed. In normal times, having left Lyons on the morning of the 17th, he would have crossed the Spanish frontier that night, but the train took the best part of a day to crawl as far as Avignon, where, as it was going on to Marseilles, he had to change; and there was no connection which he could catch until the following day.

  He spent the evening wandering round the ancient city; then on the 18th he left the towering Palace of the Popes and the famous broken bridge over the Loire behind, to roll gently through the grey-green olive groves, dotted with lemon-walled, rust-tiled houses, which make up the scene of Provence. It was nine at night before the train eventually pulled up at the little town of Cerbère on the Spanish frontier, and there everybody had to undergo two most rigorous examinations, first by the French police on leaving France, and secondly by the Spanish police on entering Spain.

  As the Russian’s entire baggage consisted of a rucksack and the few items which he had bought in Lyons he had little trouble with the Customs, but he had to submit to being stripped and searched as a precaution against currency smuggling. The French officials detained half a dozen people who were on the train, and the Spanish turned back over a score who for one reason or another did not fully satisfy them; but at last the remaining passengers were allowed through, and shortly after midnight herded into a large waiting-room, where they were told they must remain until the train left for Barcelona in the morning.

  The Spanish train which started at six o’clock reminded Kuporovitch of his native Russia, as both the Russian and Spanish railways have a broader gauge and carriages than those of the rest of Europe. On it he had looked forward to a slap-up breakfast, but Spain was now little better off for food than Occupied France, so to his disappointment he had to make do with rolls, some very wishy-washy coffee and an orange.

  By 8.30 they reached Barcelona, where he had to change again, but this time the connection was a good one, and he spent the rest of the day travelling at a moderate speed through the arid, sparsely-populated Spanish countryside towards Madrid. It was dark when he reached the capital, and once again there was no connection to take him farther on his journey until next morning.

  As the train did not leave until ten o’clock he had an opportunity of driving round the Prado district before catching it, and was by no means cheered by what he saw. The city still showed many traces of the Civil War, as much of the damage from shelling and bombs remained unrepaired. It was clear, too, that the population was very far from having recovered from the effects of its bitter and long-drawn-out struggle. An air of want and hopelessness pervaded everything. There were queues outside the food-shops, and most of the poorer people were dressed in clothes that were little better than rags.

  He was sorry for the Spaniards, but felt that, although they could not appreciate it at the moment, their present poverty might stand them in good stead. Any hope of a Dictator country such as Spain coming into the war on the side of Britain had been remote from the beginning, as her rulers had much more cause to feel gratitude to Hitler and Mussolini for the assistance they had rendered in establishing the régime; but at any time pressure might be exerted on Spain to join the Axis. Kuporovitch considered that no country which was already in such a state of destitution could possibly afford a war, so there seemed a good chance that General Franco, who had never been a member of the Fascist Party and was by no means rabidly anti-British, might continue to use that as an excuse to save his people from being dragged into the conflict.

  All that day the train carried the Russian westward. There were further rigorous examinations on the Spanish and Portuguese frontiers, then at last, on the evening of the 20th, he reached Lisbon.

  Next morning, he went at once to the French Consulate in accordance with Lacroix’s instructions, but they told him that it would take a week at least before they could get him a seat on the plane leaving for England, so he had to resign himself to kicking his heels about the Portuguese capital.

  Lisbon proved the exact antithesis of Madrid. Where the one had been half-dead from depression the other was hectic with a strange restless life. From the beginning of the war people of all nations had been flocking there as a safe spot to dig in for the duration. Escapists of all nations, including English, French, Germans, and particularly huge numbers of rich Jews, had made it their headquarters. When the blitz had come another hundred thousand people at least, from Holland, Belgium and France had fled to Lisbon in the hope of getting away to America; but passages were at an enormous premium and accommodation extremely limited. In consequence, the great bulk of them were still marooned there and now forced to live precariously upon the proceeds of the jewels, furs, and other objects of value that they had managed to bring with them and had intended to sell for their passage money.

  It was a city of ext
raordinary contrasts, as the scarcity in certain commodities had already caused prices to rise to fantastic levels. The Government was doing what it could to check inflation for the protection of its own people, but the huge foreign element presented a special problem, over which it was almost impossible to exercise control. Great fortunes were being made and spent with the utmost recklessness by unscrupulous speculators on the one hand, while on the other scores of suicides were taking place each week among the unfortunates who were driven to it through utter despair and virtual starvation.

  Each day Kuporovitch went to the French Consulate in the hope of expediting his chances of a seat in an outward-bound plane, but the British were adhering most strictly to their own system of priorities, and there was nothing he could do to bring influence to bear in that direction. A week passed, and his prospects seemed little better than when he had arrived.

  In Lisbon he was able to get the English news as well as the German with equal ease, and he heard all that the public ever learned of the extraordinary affair at Dakar. On September the 23rd it was announced that General de Gaulle had arrived off the West African port with a force of Free French troops and an escort of British warships. Apparently he had expected to be welcomed by the French garrison with open arms, but it proved quite otherwise. It seemed that the cat had got out of the bag before the expedition had sailed from England, so that the Vichy Government had been able to take adequate precautions. They had even had so much time to spare that they had been able to replace the Governor with a man who was rabidly anti-British and to reinforce the garrison with reliable troops taken out in six French warships which, for some inexplicable reason, the British had allowed to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar.

  When General de Gaulle had arrived his compatriots had simply made rude noises at him, and when he had sent an emissary ashore to parley with the Vichy French they had promptly shot at, and wounded, the officer. Whether any landing in force had been attempted was not clear, but the British Admiral had bombarded the harbour until his ammunition was exhausted, and the expedition had to sail away again, having accomplished nothing except to provide the Germans with fresh propaganda material for widening the breach between Britain and Vichy France.

  Afterwards General de Gaulle declared that he had withdrawn his Free French Forces because he could not bring himself to see his compatriots killing one another; but why he had been allowed to go to Dakar if he were not prepared to fight was a great mystery, and the British Admiral appeared to have been badly let down by his superiors at home. Kuporovitch, who, largely owing to his friendship with Gregory had become intensely pro-British, felt ashamed and disgusted about the whole affair, as it had the effect of making the British a laughing-stock throughout Lisbon, and some Fifth Columnist revived the ancient tag concerning the Duke of Buckingham’s ill-considered expedition in the time of Charles I, which now ran round the Lisbon bars: ‘There was a Fleet that sailed to Spain, and when it got there it sailed home again.’

  Meanwhile the strafing of the British cities by the Luftwaffe continued unabated; yet now that Lacroix had assured him that the figures of planes destroyed, as given by the B.B.C., were correct, Kuporovitch waited for them to be given out each night and morning with the acutest interest and anxiety. How the comparatively small R.A.F. managed to continue their magnificent resistance to the huge air armadas sent against them he still could not understand, but as a fighting man it filled him with the profoundest admiration, and on the evening of the 28th he got gloriously drunk to celebrate the news that the previous day the British had scored another outstanding success by destroying 133 enemy planes for the loss of 34 of their own, and only 18 pilots.

  At last, on October the 6th, and then only because another passenger was detained at the last moment, he managed to get a seat on the plane for England. The journey was disappointing, since, even at the risk of being shot down, he had hoped that he might see something of one of the air battles; but the windows of the aircraft had all been blacked out in order that none of the passengers should have any chance of learning military secrets when over the English coast on the last lap of their journey.

  The flight also took much longer than he expected, as the plane went far out into the Atlantic to avoid enemy aircraft before turning northward, but late that afternoon the Russian was safely landed at a West of England port. Once more he had to undergo a critical examination by Customs and Immigration officials, but at last he was allowed out through the gates.

  It was then for the first time that he saw some of the bomb damage—ruined buildings and gaunt rafters projecting from burnt-out roofs—but the people of the town did not seem particularly concerned and were going about their business as usual. To his joy he found that the English Madeleine had taught him was sufficient for him to make himself understood and long sessions of listening to the B.B.C. broadcasts had enabled him to understand the language considerably better than he could talk it. He spent the night in the depressing atmosphere of a railway hotel, but there was no air raid, and the following morning he was on the train for London.

  In view of the intensive air attack which the Germans had maintained against England for the past two months, he had naturally expected that the railways would be seriously disorganised and that he would meet with even greater delays than those with which he had been faced while travelling through France and Spain; but to his amazement the express carried him with peace-time swiftness through the heart of England, made lovely now with autumn tints. His surprise was increased when the steward in the restaurant-car served him with an excellent meal, at which, compared with Continental standards, there appeared practically no limit to what he could eat; and during the whole journey he saw only one partially-destroyed building which could be attributed to enemy action. By the time he reached London he had come to the conclusion that the accounts of the blitzing of Britain must have been grossly exaggerated.

  His only previous visit to London had been between his arrival in England after Dunkirk and his departure for France again less than a fortnight later, so he did not know the city well; but as he set off in a taxi from Paddington to Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust’s mansion in Carlton House Terrace he began to revise his estimate as to the weight of the German attacks.

  Although Paddington Station itself still remained unharmed at that time many buildings in its neighbourhood had suffered severely. In practically every street there were great gaps in the rows of houses, as though they had been large slabs of cake out of which some giant had hacked a complete slice. Many of the roads were roped off for short sections, so that the taxi had to wind about continually instead of taking a direct route, and on peering down the roped-off sections Kuporovitch saw that many of them were half-filled with rubble from collapsed houses, or had great craters, out of which huge broken drainpipes reared on end, and masses of wood-paving had been flung about. Here and there, still-standing frontages with blank, empty windows gaped roofless to the skies, having been burnt out with incendiary bombs; and even in the streets which were still free for traffic enormous numbers of windows had been shattered by the blast of high-explosive bombs.

  At first he thought that the area through which he was passing must have suffered with particular severity from the Germans having attempted to put the railway terminus out of action, but only having succeeded in plastering the streets all round it; yet, as his taxi progressed, turning and twisting alternately through main thoroughfares and side-streets across the great shopping centre of the West End, he saw that the bombing had been entirely indiscriminate, and that the whole of central London appeared to have suffered equally from the sustained savagery of the attacks.

  He noticed too that the streets were almost empty compared with when he last saw them. There was now little traffic, and the people, although still going about their work with a dogged look, were showing the strain in their faces.

  On arriving in Carlton House Terrace he saw with some relief that Sir Pellinore’s house was still s
tanding, although two others quite near it had dissolved into a great heap of rubble and twisted metal, which overflowed into the roadway. The elderly butler remembered him at once, but informed him that Sir Pellinore was out and would not be back until dinnertime. He thought, however, that Mr. Sallust was still living at his flat in Gloucester Road and rang up to find out.

  As so many of the telephone exchanges and cables had been damaged it took the best part of twenty minutes to get through, but at last the butler secured the number. Gregory was not in, but his faithful henchman, Rudd, took the call and said that his master was expected back quite shortly; so Kuporovitch decided to go down there right away.

  His second taxi-ride gave him a further opportunity to assess the damage which had been inflicted on inner Southwest London, and he now decided that the reports of the bombing had not been exaggerated at all. It was only the vast size of the capital, with its scores of square miles of buildings, streets, squares and parks, together with the fact that the Germans did not appear to have concentrated upon any particular area, which had enabled the population to carry on. Had the thousands of bombs which had been dropped been directed upon a smaller city it must inevitably have been wiped out.

  At Gloucester Road Rudd received the Russian, and having installed him in a comfortable chair with a large whisky-and-soda proceeded to give him some account of the blitz.

  ‘Well, it ain’t exactly a picnic, as yer might say,’ he remarked cheerfully, ‘speshully when Jerry’s dropping them things abaht, and yer’s aht in the street, as me and Mr. Gregory is nah, every night—’im and me belonging to the Fire-Fightin’ Service; but it ain’t nuffin compared wiv what we ’ad to put up wiv in the hold war when we was at Ypres. Yer see, it’s this way, sir. London’s the ’ell of a big place, when yer comes to think of it, and I reckons little hold ’Itler bit off more than ’e could chew when ’e started in to knock it dahn. O course, I ain’t saying ’e ain’t done a tidy bit o’ damage, and it makes us just screamin’ mad when we ’as to pull what’s left o’ wimmen and kids aht from underneath great ’eaps of rubble; but I reckons that there American journalist ’it the nail on the ’ead when ’e wrote ’ome to ’is paper. ‘E said that at the rate the Nasties are going now it’d take ’em two thousand weeks to destroy London, and ’e don’t reckon ’Itler’s got another forty years ter live!’