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Charles Simon was almost exactly half French and half English. He spoke both languages perfectly, and he spoke both with that faint trace of a foreign accent which betrayed him as a foreigner in either country to the discerning.

His father had been a British wine merchant who did a good deal of travelling in France, and liked the country. His mother was a girl from Lyons. Though technically English by her marriage she was never anything but French in fact. They called their son Charles because that could be pronounced in either language, making it easy for the relatives upon both sides.

They lived in Surbiton from 1904 to 1911, not very happy years for the girl from Lyons. Simon then died, and within a fortnight she was back in her home town, taking the boy with her. She had not been happy in the strange land across the Channel to the north, but she had loved her husband and respected him. Within a few years she had shaken off her British nationality and had become French again in law, but it had been his wish that the boy Charles should be brought up as an Englishman. In spite of the protests of her parents, she sent him to a preparatory boarding school near Oxford, and later on to Shrewsbury, his father's school. She knew that the English valued this peculiar form of education.

Simon grew up an odd mixture. He spent all his holidays with his mother and his relations in Lyons, but made few friends there of his own age. The French boys and girls he came in contact with regarded him as a foreigner, and a queer fish. His time in England was spent in the monastic society of a British public school; he made a few close and enduring friendships with English boys, but he never met an English girl at all, nor spent more than a single night at a time with any English family.

He left school at eighteen. He had shown some aptitude for drawing and for architecture, and with the help of his mother's family he became apprenticed as a draughtsman to an architect in Lyons. For some years he worked hard, and liked his work.

Those were the years from 1923 to 1930, when France was leading the world in the technique of ferro-concrete bridge construction. Charles Simon mastered this technique, and having an eye for line became something of a bridge designer. He changed his firm two or three times, each time with a rise in salary; before long he was sent on his first business trip to England.

He was passionately fond of England. He knew little of the country beyond the unreal idealism of his public school, so that for him everything English was rose-coloured. He was English by nationality and to that he clung; his work was in France, but he thought of himself as a foreigner working in a foreign land. Whenever he got a holiday he went to England, and in 1930, when he joined the Société Anonyme des Fabricants de Ciment, the great organization at Corbeil, he began travelling to England as a technical representative.

He married soon after that, in 1931, when he was twenty-six years old, an English girl from Tunbridge Wells. Within a year she left him.

I don't know why that happened. It was ten years before the time of which I am writing, and it had no bearing on his war-time occupations, so there was no reason why any of us should know much about it. But thinking back, one can string together a few contributory facts which throw a little light on it, perhaps.

As I have said, he was a queer fish. His only real interest outside his work in ferro-concrete was his enthusiasm for England and for all things English, but his knowledge of England was confined to his own public school. It was a queer, limited, ignorant enthusiasm. He made occasional short business trips to England, but his work lay in Corbeil. Corbeil is a small manufacturing town rather to the south of Paris, a desperately dull little place unless you happen to be deeply interested in ferro-concrete.

She must have found it hard to bear, that girl from Tunbridge Wells. It may have been the ferro-concrete that got her to the stage of breaking up their marriage, or it may have been the endless, uninformed prattle of England, or it may have simply been Corbeil. But whether it was one of those, or some quite different trouble, she left him and went back to Tunbridge Wells. He never lived with her again.

He gave up his business trips to England after that. It may have been from choice, but by that time the work was falling off. Britain and America knew quite as much as France about concrete bridges. Moreover, fortification work was growing and absorbing the attention of French concrete firms, and there was less need for them to seek for foreign contracts. Simon from that time on spent much of his time in fortification work upon the Maginot Line.

What was he like? He was a lean man, fairly tall, with dark hair that hung over his forehead. He was quite a merry chap who liked to grease his work with a salacious joke. People liked working for him; he never had any trouble with his staff. In peace-time that was all that one could say about him; it never became apparent till the war was two years old that he was a natural leader of men.

He did not change his way of life much after his marriage had collapsed. He went on living in Corbeil, went on with his work. His trips to England ceased and he became more French to all appearances; he wore French clothes and stopped buying English newspapers and magazines. Gradually the people of Corbeil and of the factory forgot that Simon was in fact a British citizen; only the police knew that, and the director of the firm who dealt with military business.

And yet, there was one thing. Charles Simon—pronounce the name in French or English as you like—Charles Simon kept a boat. He kept a little four-ton cutter at St. Malo, fitted with an auxiliary engine, and in the summer when he took his holiday he used to make timid adventures in this thing, to the Channel Islands or to Lesardrieux, picking his weather with the greatest care. I know a naval officer who met him once before the war in St. Peter Port and spent the evening with him. This chap said that he was quite alone. The ship was reasonably clean, as well she might be, because Simon had been swinging at his anchor for ten days of summer weather waiting for the perfect day, the day of days when there would be a dead calm sea, a cloudless sky, a rising glass, and a very gentle breeze from the north to waft him safely back to St. Malo.

Did he do that because he liked it, or because he felt that it was English to go yachting, or just for some hereditary urge towards the sea that had to be obeyed? I don't know. I only know that it seemed to me when I heard about it to be a typically English way to take a holiday, rather uncomfortable and rather frightened.

He did not get his yachting holiday in the summer of 1939; the work upon the fortifications was too intense. The Société Anonyme F.C. de Corbeil was working night shift by that time, and all the staff were working twelve hours a day in a wishful endeavour to make ferro-concrete serve as substitute for an offensive strategy. They laboured through the winter and on into the spring of 1940; they went on working till the refugees were streaming through the town and the Germans were within thirty miles. Then they stopped, and Corbeil joined the throng of refugees.

Charles Simon stayed behind in the works, together with the managing director, M. Louis Duchene, and a foreman or two. Duchene stayed because he had built most of the factory, and because he could not visualize a life away from it for more than a short trip to Paris; his wife and family had left for Pau a week before. The foremen stayed because the factory was their livelihood, and because they shrewdly thought that whether France was ruled by Germans or by French, concrete would be needed and their jobs were safe unless they ran away from them. Charles Simon stayed because he felt himself to be an officer, and because he was ashamed to go while old Duchene still sat on in his office.

He went up to the old man in his room. "It seems that the Germans will be here within an hour now," he said nonchalantly. "You will receive them, monsieur?"

"But certainly," said monsieur le directeur. "Watch for the first officer to come in at the gate, and have him brought up here with courtesy. And, Simon, get out the general arrangement plan of the works, and bring it to me. No doubt the officers will wish to see it."

It never crossed their minds that they should destroy any of the buildings or equipment to prevent them falling into German hands. Such a course had never even been suggested, and would have been ridiculed if it had been. One did not throw good money down the drain.

Simon hesitated. "I will bring the plan." He coughed. "May I raise a personal matter, monsieur?"

"Assuredly." The old man looked at him with curiosity. "These are difficult times, Simon. You need not stay here if you wish to go."

The designer said: "I would like to stay with you, monsieur. But you will remember that legally I am an Englishman, a foreigner. That may make difficulties for me with the Germans when they come."

Duchene said: "I never think of you except as French."

Simon said: "Most people think of me as French, but I am still a British citizen. Would it be possible for you to forget that I am not a Frenchman, Monsieur Duchene? If the Germans did not know, I could stay on working here. They will need all of us to run the factory."

The old man stared at him. "Does anybody else know—who would betray you?"

"I do not think so. It is many years now since I went to England."

"But your papers—your carte d'identité?"

Simon said: "At this moment, monsieur, that perhaps can be arranged."

He left the office, and went out of the factory into the town. Corbeil was singularly empty. A car or two with dry, empty tanks were parked by the roadside, and a cart with a broken wheel stood abandoned in the main street, the mule still in the harness. The place was still, empty, and desolate that hot summer afternoon, as if it waited breathlessly for the coming of the Germans.

He went to the Mairie. The door stood open, all the office doors were open. Everyone had fled. He passed on to the Gendarmerie; one door was locked. He withdrew a few steps and ran at it and stamped it in. There was nobody about at all.

He had lived so long in France, had visited the Mairie so many times, that he knew just what he wanted. First he extracted his card from the little card index of foreigners, burnt it with a match, and scattered the ash outside the window. He found the blank identity cards. He found the register of births, and made a hurried parcel of four volumes; later in the afternoon he thrust these into the furnace of the steam plant at the factory. He made himself a new birth certificate. He was at the Mairie barely twenty minutes and he left it a French citizen, proof against any superficial investigation.

Later that afternoon the Germans came. There was no fighting near Corbeil. They rode in on their motor-cycles first, followed by armoured cars and a few tanks, and streams of motor-lorries full of infantry. They occupied the railway station and the Mairie and the waterworks and the power-house and the gasworks; in the late evening three officers and thirty soldiers drove in to the factory to find Duchene still waiting for them, gravely courteous, with Simon by his side.

In three days the factory was working on a much reduced basis. A month later, fortified by fresh supplies of troubled and bewildered labour drafted by the Germans, it was in its stride again.

The Maginot contracts were a thing of the past now. The German Commission of Control dictated their activities; aerodrome runways, new strategic roadways to the Channel ports, and above all air-raid shelters formed the new work of the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil. Duchene and Simon worked like Trojans to satisfy their new masters, and for a time they were too busy in the work to appreciate the implications of the new regime.

It was only slowly that they came to realize their true position. At first everything seemed to go on normally; the German troops were civil and even ingratiating. There was plenty of money in the town, for the soldiers spent freely, and there was plenty of work. All the evidence of prosperity was there—for the first three months. If you did not think too hard about the position of France, or read too many newspapers, it was quite a good time. Duchene and Simon were too busy to do either.

The first real shock they had was when Paul Lecardeau was arrested, tried, taken to the barracks, and shot, all within an hour and a half.

Simon knew Paul quite well, and had often played a game of dominoes with him at the Café de l'Univers. Paul ran a fair-sized draper's shop in the route d'Orleans, and he was a notable spitter. In the café he could hit a cuspidor at any range up to three metres with accuracy, and he was gifted with what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ammunition.

Paul discovered, when his shop was all but empty, that fresh goods were unobtainable. His business was mostly in household linen and women's clothes. The German major who now sat in the Mairie brushed aside his plea for a permit to buy stock in Paris, but displayed a good deal of interest in Paul's own capacity for work upon the roads. It was with difficulty that Paul evaded immediate conscription as a labourer.

With little left upon his shelves to sell, Paul took to sitting in the Café de l'Univers hour after hour, gloomily smoking and staring at the Germans as they passed upon the pavement. Presently he took to spitting when a German came into the café; it was an amusing game, because the big brass cuspidor rang like a gong to each impact. A German Feldwebel stalked up to him and warned him—once. Next day, the brassy note of the gong was the signal for his arrest. Ninety minutes later, Paul was dead.

Simon faced old Duchene across the table of the office which they now shared. "It is intolerable, that," he said uncertainly. "Paul was an honest man. He was jocrisse, that is all."

Duchene stared at him in bewilderment. "But why did they do it? All Corbeil is co-operating with the new regime, as the Marshal has said. There is not a de Gaullist in the town. Why must the Germans do a thing like that?"

It was, of course, because they were Germans, but neither Simon nor Duchene had yet come to appreciate that point.

From then onwards things grew worse. The shortage of goods and even of foodstuffs became general, and the tempers of the people of Corbeil grew short in sympathy. They became critical of the Marshal's new order; the old confusion, they said bitterly, was more tolerable. Before long young people of both sexes became hostile to the Germans. It was good fun, if you had no responsibilities, to creep out in the night and let down the tyres of their bicycles, or pour a little water in a petrol-tank and watch the car stall half-way down the road. Once or twice a German officer, infuriated, whipped out his automatic and took a shot at the dim figures giggling in the shadows. This was great fun and gave the young people a sense of importance. They began to talk about de Gaulle, and to dignify their little exploits with the name of sabotage.

Presently the Germans arrested M. Chavaigne, headmaster of the boys' school, and tried him for complicity in these affairs. The evidence was inconclusive, so they sentenced him to ten years' forced labour and sent him away to Germany to work it out. With the removal of that restraining influence the sabotage increased, and even adults began secretly to listen to the British radio and to talk about de Gaulle.

Soon after that the cross of Lorraine made its appearance daubed in paint or clay upon the walls of the factory. The German Commission of Control, visiting the works one day, demanded furiously that these signs be removed and Simon, with apologies, set labourers to work.

"I am desolated that this should have happened," he told the Germans. "It is the boys who do it—the irresponsibles, who do not think. Boys are the devil."

The Hauptmann Pionier in charge of the Commission stared at him arrogantly. "Boys do what their parents do. In Germany the boys work hard, and do not insult the Government. It is not so here. If I see this again, I will have this town of Corbeil taught a lesson."

Simon said: "I will attend to the matter personally. This will not happen again."

The German turned away, and they went on with the work.

Simon reported the matter to Duchene as soon as they were gone. "There will be trouble before long, monsieur," he said. "The people are becoming restless."

The old man said: "I will not have trouble in these works. We do not mix with politics here, in the factory. See that the walls are cleaned each day, and the lavatories also. It is there that they write things."

"I will see to that, monsieur."

"Why must they do these things? It can only lead to trouble. What is the matter with the men?" the old man asked.

Simon shrugged his shoulders. "It is the war," he said. He glanced over his shoulders at the closed door. "You listen to the English radio, perhaps, monsieur?"

The old man said: "I have no patience with the English since they ran away. As for the radio, it does not amuse me, and there is no news. Is it that that is the reason for the trouble?"

Simon said: "It is the stories of the German losses in the air that the men hear upon the radio that makes the trouble. That, and the speeches of that man de Gaulle." He bent to the directeur. "A hundred and eighteen German aeroplanes were shot down yesterday," he said in a low tone. "And seventy-one the day before." He paused. "That is the real trouble with the men."

Duchene stared at him. "Somebody told me something about that, but I did not believe him. The figures are too big. It is an English lie."

"I do not think it is a lie, monsieur. When I was at Caen on Tuesday the foreman said that nearly a hundred aeroplanes took off on Sunday, but less than seventy came back. The officers there have become very surly, and they will not talk to me, or to any civilian. It is quite different from what it was a month ago."

The old man said: "Sacred Mother of God! If the English can shoot down Germans in that way, why did they not do it when they were fighting with us? They are playing their own game. They have betrayed us."

Simon shook his head. "I cannot understand the turn the war has taken," he said soberly. "If they betrayed us, we are now betraying them in turn. These runways we are doing for the aerodrome at Caen—they are to make it possible for Heinkels to take off with double bomb load to drop on English towns. But we were allies, once."

Duchene said: "It was they who began it...." He turned back to his desk. "No more of politics—that is not our affair." He picked up a paper. "This invoice from Mensonnier—I will not pay for crates. Mensonnier knows that. See the accountant, and have that crossed off."

It was not altogether easy for Duchene to free his mind from politics, in spite of his preoccupation with the factory. He had lived and worked in Corbeil for over forty years, since he had come into his father's business as a lad. In that forty years, inevitably since he was the managing director of the largest business in the town, he had become associated with a variety of local charities and enterprises, most of which were now in difficulties and troubles. He cared little enough for most of them; in the changed times they must adjust themselves. He could not free his mind, however, from the affairs of the St. Xavier Asile des Vieux at Château Lebrun.

Château Lebrun was a village about five miles from Corbeil, and Duchene was a trustee of the Asile des Vieux. The asylum was an organization with a religious flavour, partly supported by a subsidy from the municipality of Corbeil, partly by local charity, and partly by small sums extracted from the relatives of the occupants. The Vieux were of both sexes and many of them were feeble-minded, all being sixty years old or more. It was a useful and on the whole a kindly institution, which collected destitute and unwanted aged people from a wide area of country and saw them unhurried to the end.

About seventy of them were accommodated in wards in a big, rectangular stone building on the outskirts of the village. The land was flat about Château Lebrun, and suitable for a dispersal aerodrome: a fact that the Germans were quick to grasp. They took the building as a barrack for the air mechanics. The Maître d'Asile came early to the Maire and to Duchene for help, and Duchene rang up the Commission of Control, only to get a short answer. The building was required for military purposes. The inmates would be moved by the German Field Ambulance Service; it was not permitted for civilians to accompany them. All asylums in the occupied zone were to be cleared, and the inmates would be accommodated in the Vichy area. Relatives would be told the new address in a few days.

So the old people were removed, feebly protesting, in a convoy of field ambulances. Thereafter nothing happened. Most of the relatives dismissed the matter from their minds; they had seldom been to see Grand'mère and had more important matters now to think about. A few became insistent and began to bother the Commission of Control with demands for the new address. One by one these received an intimation, with regrets, that the person in question had succumbed to the fatigue of the journey.

One by one they came to Duchene, at his house or in his office at the factory.

Worried, he went to the Commission and got a sharp rebuff. Such things were apt to happen, in their view. They could not tell him the location of the new asylum yet; in due course an information would come through. In the meantime, he would kindly not waste the time of German officers with trivialities, but attend to the manufacture of cement.

Anxious, and a little frightened, he began to make enquiries of his own. The manager of a large industry invariably has ways of getting information which are not available to ordinary men, and in the concrete business Duchene's influence spread wide. Gradually, in bits and pieces, the truth came to him. The old people had got no further towards Vichy than the German hospital at Sézanne. There all had died by hypodermic as they lay strapped upon the stretchers in the cars, and had been thrust into a common grave with lime, on the same night.

Shamefaced, white, and shaken, the old man blurted it out to Simon in the office late one night. "One does not know how to behave now," he muttered. "One does not know how to address a German officer. It is the act of barbarians, that. Even the beasts, the animals, do not do things like that."

Simon was silent.

Duchene's voice rose a little. "But it was murder! Seventy-two people."

Charles Simon said: "I know that, monsieur. They are murderers, every one of them, if it will serve their end. They did not want to feed these old ones, or to care for them. That is all."

The old man said, distressed: "But that is not civilized. That is what savages would do, in the black jungle."

Simon smiled sourly. "I think that we are now in the black jungle, in Corbeil. And only now have we begun to realize it."

That was all that was said that night, and Duchene went back to his empty appartement in the town. He did not even go to bed that night. He sat primly in a gilded, plush-upholstered chair all night, his hands resting on the table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring unseeing at the ornate wall before him. At dawn he got up, pulled aside the black-out, and opened a window to let air into the stuffy, smoke-filled room. An hour later he went down to the works.

Simon came early to his room that day. "The Commission comes at eleven o'clock," he said. "Lunch as usual?"

M. le directeur drummed nervously upon the table. "I will not see them," he said irritably. "You must tell them I am ill."

Simon looked at the old man for a moment, silent. Then he said quietly: "It is understandable, that. But they will know that you are here, monsieur, and that may make a difficulty. Perhaps you could go home till they have gone."

Duchene raised weary eyes, clouded with doubts, to his designer. "I am going to close down the factory," he said, but there was irresolution in his voice. "I will not have my people working for those German swine."

Simon said gently: "Leave it for to-day, monsieur. Let the car take you to your house when it goes in to fetch the Germans." They still had a tiny drain of petrol for the works car for station trips.

The old man flared out: "I will not work for them, myself, not after this. Not one more kilogramme of cement shall they have from me."

Charles Simon dropped down on to the chair before the desk, and leaned towards the older man. "You are tired now," he said. "You do not look well at all. Did you sleep badly, monsieur?"

The old man said: "I did not go to bed. I was thinking of...all sorts of things."

They had worked together for ten years, and Simon knew his chief very well. "Listen, monsieur," he said. "We cannot do that, now. It would not help at all for you to close the factory. It would be open within the hour with Germans in control, and all that would be gained would be one hour of our production lost to them. And you would be held in a concentration-camp. That would not benefit Corbeil, or France."

Duchene passed a weary hand across his eyes.

"One must go on working for the present," said the younger man.

M. le directeur said: "I have been thinking over what you said the other day about the runways at the aerodrome at Caen. Each ton we send out is a blow at England, and although I do not like the English, at any rate they are still fighting in a way against these German swine. How do you feel about that, Simon?"

"I do not like it, monsieur."

"I do not like it either. The English are still fighting in their way against these filthy murderers, and you and I are fighting in our way against the English. Does that make sense to you—you who are an Englishman yourself? Hey? Does that make sense?"

"No, monsieur. It does not make sense. But there is nothing we can do about it."

Duchene sat brooding for a time, in silence. "I would rather that the factory had been blown up and stood in ruins than that it should be used like this."

"That is what we should have done," said the designer. "It is too late now, but we should have blown it up ourselves, before the Germans came."

The old man stared at him. "Who could have guessed these Germans were not people like ourselves?"

"We were told often enough," said Simon grimly. "All the world told us that the Germans were a murderous and an uncivilized people, without decent codes of conduct. But when they conquered us, we thought they would be people like ourselves."

There was a long silence. When Duchene spoke again his voice had lost all its vigour; he spoke as a very tired old man.

"I do not know what happened to France," he said wearily. "I have been thinking and thinking, and I cannot understand. We knew that the Germans were like this in the old days—we knew it, and we fought them with the British as our allies, and we beat them down. And then we lost our faith...."

He stared at the designer with tired eyes. "It is as if all France had lain under a spell," he said slowly. "From that place at Berchtesgaden there has spread an influence, malign, like a miasma, that has sapped our will. So that we laid down our arms, and never fought at all, and so became mere tools for evil in the hands of evil men...."

He got up wearily from his chair, swaying a little as he stood. "One thing alone saved the English from our lot," he muttered, half to himself. "Running water—twenty miles of it, salt running water of the sea. That is why the English are still brave to fight, as we were once. No spell, no sucking weakening influence sent out by evil people can cross running water. When I lived in the country as a boy, everybody knew that much."

Presently Simon got him downstairs to the car. He took him to the appartement and gave the old man over to his housekeeper, before he went on to the station in the car to meet the Germans coming down from Paris on the midday train.

At that time there was construction work of every description going on along the whole length of the Channel coastline of France. The little watering-place of Le Tréport, amongst others, was undergoing a radical reorganization of its harbour under German supervision, with a view to making it more suitable for barge traffic. A fortnight later, Simon was summoned to a conference at Le Tréport, to deal with certain engineering problems at that port and at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme.

It was not the first time that the Germans had used him in this way; indeed the vast extent of their conquests made it necessary for them to use technicians from the countries they had overrun. Simon went with mixed feelings. He disliked open work on military matters; it did not seem so bad when one was working in the office at Corbeil, when he could forget the use to which the product would be put. On the other hand, the trip to the sea coast was a change and something of a holiday; he could spin it out over three days.

He went on a Tuesday in late October, and spent the first afternoon walking round the watering-place and studying the little docks. Wednesday was spent with the Germans. They made a quick tour of the harbour in the morning, then settled to a conference on material supplies. They finished about four o'clock.

Gathering together his papers, the German chairman of the conference said to Simon: "You are going back to-night?"

The designer shrugged his shoulders. "I will go to the station and find out about the trains. I do not think I can get through to Corbeil to-night, and it is cheaper to stay here than in Paris. I shall only go to-night if I can get home."

The German nodded. "As you like."

Simon went back to his hotel, the one beside the station, and decided to stay the night. He had dined the previous evening in the hotel and had not cared for the dinner. That night he went out and found a café-restaurant upon the little front, and settled down to spend the evening there.

It was not very full. He sat for an hour over a Pernod reading his paper and listening to the wireless, and passing a word now and again with the man on the other side of the marble-topped table, an engineer from the power station. Then he dined, and sat for a long time with a cup of coffee, running over his notes of the day's business, planning the work involved.

He was sitting so when the swing doors burst open with a crash. There was an instant's stunned silence as the people at the tables turned to the interruption. Then, in a deafening clamour in the narrow room, the fire from a couple of Tommy-guns burst out. A group of four German non-commissioned officers seated together at a table rose half to their feet. One of them spun round and collapsed backwards with a crash. The others dropped where they sat. Their bodies shook and quivered with the impact of the bullets pumping into them.

An officer, an Oberleutnant, sitting with a French girl at a table at the end of the room, ducked down behind a little wooden table fumbling for the automatic at his wrist. He never got it out. The wooden splinters flew from the table and bright holes spread in a pattern over it; one of the splinters gashed the girl across the eyebrow as she stood screaming with her hand up to her mouth. Behind the table the officer fell forward as a sodden weight, and a thin stream of blood ran out on to the floor.

Suddenly the firing stopped. With a little brassy tinkle the last shell rattled to the floor.

One of the men at the door shouted in French: "Don't any of you move!" Then, to the white, terrified proprietor behind the bar: "Any more Germans in this place?"

The man shook his head, unable at first to find words. Then he gulped, looked at the bodies, and said: "Only those."

The man at the door said in English: "Go right through the place, lads. Ben, stay with me."

Three men rushed in, and made their way through into the back quarters. They were hard, violent young men in British battle-dress. They each carried a sub-machine-gun; they had two revolvers each, worn on light webbing harness from the shoulders; the same harness supported a belt with pockets for Mills hand-grenades. A large electric torch hung at the waist. They wore British tin hats.

The other two, one of whom wore sergeant's stripes, came forward from the door, their guns at the ready. The sergeant said again, in accented, ungrammatical French: "Don't any of you move! Put your identity cards out upon the tables."

The man called Ben stayed by the door. The sergeant began to move methodically from table to table looking at the cards displayed, his gun always at the ready.

There was silence in the café, broken only by the tramping of the men upstairs as they ransacked the house, and by the noise of light gunfire intermittently outside in the night. Once there was a heavy, thunderous explosion, as of a demolition. The girl who had been sitting with the dead officer had stopped her screaming and stood motionless, her back against the wall, her hands pressed palms against the wall behind her, staring at the devil with the sergeant's stripes advancing slowly down the room, his gun held at the ready.

To Charles Simon, in that tense moment, came the realization of what he had to do. This was an English raid, this violent gangster-like affray. This was his chance. With sudden, utter clarity it came to him that this was the turning-point of his whole life, and he must take the turning.

He did not produce his card, but turned out letters, bills, receipts, all the contents of his pockets on the table before him as if he searched desperately, but the card stayed in his hip pocket. The man with the gun came to the table and paused, merciless, thrusting his gun forward.

Charles Simon raised his head, and said in a low tone, in English: "I seem to have lost my card. You'd better arrest me and take me to your officer."

The man said: "Are you English?"

Simon said: "Don't be a fool. Arrest me, and take me outside."

The man lunged forward, thrusting the barrel of the Tommy-gun against his chest. "Outside, you!" he said in French. "Get up!" He swung round to the man at the door. "Here's one, Ben," he said in English. "Take him outside, and keep him till I come."

Simon walked the length of the room, most conscious of the guns directed at him. Outside the night was full of rifle fire; from the small docks the red glow of a fire was growing bright, the street seemed full of British soldiers, heavily armed, purposeful, intent. Overhead there was the noise of many aeroplanes, and the dull thunder of their bombs upon the roads that led into the town mingled with the rumble and crash of demolitions at the docks. The place was rapidly becoming an inferno.

The man Ben stood Simon up against the wall outside the door, covering him with his gun. The tension, in the half-light of the growing fires, was intense. It was a night of murder unprovoked, of arson and rapine: a night of war.

Simon said to his guard: "Look, I'm an Englishman. You must take me to your officer."

The man thrust his face up close. "How do I know you're not a mucking Jerry?"

"If I was one I couldn't hurt you," Simon said. "You've got all Woolwich Arsenal to back you up. I tell you, I am English. You've got to take me back with you; they'll want to question me."

His guard was a sharp, intelligent young man, picked and trained for this work. The sergeant came out with the other three men; in a few moments Simon was at a mustering point, a busmen's shelter on the front. There was a subaltern there, a dark figure in battle-dress indistinguishable from the rest but that he carried no gun. The sergeant reported his prisoner in terse, short sentences; the officer flashed a shaded torch on Simon.

"You are a British citizen?"

"Yes, sir. I've been working in France."

"What at?"

"Concrete construction work. Bridges, aerodrome buildings and runways, things of that sort. I came here for a job upon the docks."

"What is your Company?"

Simon told him.

The subaltern said: "I am taking you to England as a prisoner. Do you come with us willingly?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Stand over there."

Simon said: "May I write a letter and post it?"

The torch flashed into his face again; he felt suspicion rising up against him in the darkness. "What sort of letter? Who to?"

"I want to write to the head of my firm. It's just possible that you may want me to come back here when you've heard what I have to say. I want to write to the firm and say that I have gone for a week's holiday to the south of France, to see my mother in the Vichy territory."

There was a short silence. The officer made up his mind with a quick decision that Simon could not but admire. "You may write a letter like that," he said. "Have you got paper and an envelope?"

"Not here."

The subaltern called one of the men, a sharp, keen-faced lad, and gave Simon over to him. The boy took him to an empty, deserted café, where they found stationery behind the bar, and there Simon wrote his letter while the guard made a light for him to write by with his torch and kept him covered with a heavy black revolver.

Simon said:

Dear Monsieur,

It is with pleasure that I can inform you that the Commandant in Charge has been so kind as to grant me a permit to visit my mother, who as you know lives in the neighbourhood of Lyons. It is now nearly a year since I saw her, and as this permit to pass into the Vichy territory is for ten days only from to-day I am leaving at once for Lyons, and trust that I may be allowed this short vacation. I will write particulars of the contracts that I have to-day negotiated from there; in the meantime we should keep up deliveries of the fifty tons a week to Tréport provisionally demanded.

Accept, dear monsieur, the assurance of my deepest respect.

Charles Simon.

The guard took the letter from him and read it slowly, now and then asking the meaning of a word. He passed it and Simon sealed the envelope; then they went together through the firelit darkness to the Bureau de Poste. He slipped his letter in the box. A naval officer in blue pressed by them; he wore a white scarf around his neck and a revolver in a belt at his waist. In his hand he carried a tin bedroom utensil, white-enamelled. Painted on it roughly was A PRESENT FROM TRÉPORT.

Simon and his guard stopped and turned to watch. The lieutenant went to the counter where the scared postmaster was handing over a sack of registered mail to a couple of desperate-looking thugs in battle-dress. The officer said, in bad French:

"Pardon, monsieur. I have a parcel to despatch." He slammed the enamelware down upon the mahogany slab and pulled the revolver from his belt. "I will pay the postage, and you will put it in the mail."

The man looked at it uncertainly, and then at the revolver, now pointing at his belly. "For the mail?" he said.

"For the mail," said the naval officer. "Be quick; we have not long to waste. How much is it?"

The postmaster put it on the scales, then looked at the label tied to the handle. Then he laughed. "Adolf Hitler, Bierhalle, Munich," he said. "Seventeen francs, monsieur."

The officer threw down half a crown. "English money," he said. "Is that all right?"

The man shrugged his shoulders. "I will keep it as a souvenir." Under the levelled guns he stamped the label and dropped the pot into a mail-bag.

Simon and his guard left the Post Office and hurried back to the mustering-point through rose-coloured, firelit streets. The fires had got firm hold upon the town, especially in the region of the docks. From somewhere in the outer darkness machine-guns were firing down the lit streets, enfilading them; the range was great and the fire scattered and inaccurate. Outside the town, again, the noise of battle had grown; there was more happening now on the outer roads than bombs from aeroplanes. It was quite clear to Simon as they hurried to the sea-front that unless the British meant to hold the town, it was time to go.

He landed in England in the earliest light of dawn, having crossed the Channel in pitch darkness in a strange, small boat with fifty other men. There were seven wounded in the boat with him, lying upon the bare deck, uncomplaining; one died in the middle of the night. In that boat there were no other prisoners, but he had reason to believe that ten or twelve Germans and civilian French crossed in another boat. It occurred to him that he was being segregated.

They landed in a muddy, tidal creek between fields. He never learned where it was. There was a wooden jetty and a few brown corrugated iron sheds; it might have been a little yacht-yard in peace-time, or something of that sort. The men with him stretched stiff, tired limbs, unloaded Tommy-guns and pistols, and passed soldiers' jokes about ham and eggs and a good kip.

They landed at the pier and the men formed up in a rough order and were marched away towards a wood; there seemed to be a camp among the trees. Simon was ordered by the subaltern to wait; he was taken into a little hut by a guard, and stayed there till a small lorry with a canvas-covered back drove up.

He rode in this for half an hour with the subaltern to a large military camp. Here he was shown into an office, where he was interrogated shortly by a major. They were kind enough to him, and after ten minutes' questioning took him to a room and offered him a bath and a shave. Then he had breakfast, English breakfast that he remembered from his schooldays, where you were expected to eat porridge as well as meat or fish, and then very thick toast, and the orange conserve that they called marmalade. Already he was feeling that his English was a little rusty.

In fact, it was. It was grammatically correct and the accent was not very noticeable, but his schoolboy slang called attention to his speech and then you noticed his accent. It is not natural to hear a man of thirty-five in serious conversation use the word "topping" to express appreciation of the treatment that he had received, nor does he generally refer to his food as "tuck." Charles did both because his English was like that, and then you noticed him and wondered who he was.

They put him in a car again after breakfast, and by noon he was disembarked at a large, rather dilapidated country house, full of soldiers. It was not very far from London, but Charles had no means of knowing that; he never learned where it was. And here he came before a major in the British Army and a capitaine of the Free French, and he talked to them freely for three hours.

In the middle of the afternoon the major said: "I'm going to call a halt for to-day, Mr. Simon, and have some of this transcribed. I may want to have another talk with you to-morrow."

Simon said: "Right-oh, sir. I'll stay here, shall I?"

The British officer said gravely: "It would be very kind of you if you would stay with us to-night. We can make you comfortable." In fact, Simon was as much a prisoner as if he had been German, but he did not care to realize it. He was too happy to be back in England.

"I'd like that ever so much," he said.

The major smiled slightly. "Tell me, Mr. Simon," he said. "Have you got any relatives or friends in England?"

Charles said: "Not very many. There are my wife's people, of course..." He had told them about her. "But I don't much want them to know that I'm over here."

"Of course not," said the other easily. "Whom do you know best—whom would you go and stay with when you leave here?" He smiled with disarming frankness. "You see, you've come to England rather—unconventionally. We may have to help you to make up a story to tell."

Charles laughed. "I would like to see the Beak," he said. "He was my housemaster at Shrewsbury. I think I'd go and stay with him for a bit, at the school."

The major asked: "What's his proper name?"

"Mr. Scarlett. He's retired from the House, but he lives just opposite the cricket-ground."

The major handed him over to a subaltern, who took him and gave him tea in the mess. Charles was immensely pleased. He had never before had a meal in a real mess, with officers just like grown-up versions of the boys that he had been at school with. It was all very, very good.

The mess waiter was just bringing him his second cup of English tea when, two hundred miles to the north, a camouflaged army car drew up before the little house opposite the cricket-pitch. Three minutes later a young officer was explaining his errand to a white-haired old gentleman.

The old man said: "Oh, dear me, yes. I remember Charles Simon very well. He was a good oar, a very good oar; if he had gone up to the Varsity he might have done very well. Not the Blue, you know, but I think he would have got into the College Eight." The young officer listened patiently; his job was to listen. "He rowed three in my First Eight in 1923, the year that we made three bumps and finished up third boat on the river. It was a good year, that."

Mr. Scarlett paused thoughtfully. "He was French, you know, but a nice boy all the same."

The subaltern said: "Would you know him again?"

"Know him again? Whatever do you mean? Of course I'd know him again! Besides, he came to see me here in this very room only nine years ago, after that unfortunate business with his wife."

The subaltern said: "He's over here now, sir. I understand that he is in confinement."

The old man looked at the boy searchingly over his spectacles. "What for?"

"I don't know. I had to tell you that we want you to come down to London to identify him."

"When?"

"To-night, sir. Right away."

Charles Simon had a game of billiards with his companion, and he had several glasses of English gin and bitters, and he had dinner in the mess and talked to the colonel about France, and he listened to the nine o'clock news with the officers, and he listened to them talking about the war. He was staggered at their nonchalant assumption that they were going to win the war. It was obvious that their country was being terribly battered; he had driven that morning through one blitzed city that he fancied was Southampton, and the desolation of it, and the stillness, had seemed to him to be the hall-mark of defeat. In dumb amazement he listened to the officers discussing what should be done with Germany when the war was over; the words "if we win the bloody thing" passed as a joke. It was an eye-opener to Charles.

About ten o'clock there was a raid warning, and most of the officers went out to their duties. His guide stayed with Charles Simon. "We don't sleep on the top floor in a raid," he said. "But you'll be all right—you're on the first floor. There's a shelter if you'd like to go down there."

He said: "Are you going?"

The other said: "Not unless they start to drop stuff round about. We all used to go at first, but we don't now. I'd go to bed, if I were you. I'll call you if it gets hot."

"I think I will."

He went upstairs to bed, and by the light of a candle got into the pyjamas they had lent him. He lay awake for a long time, tired though he was, listening to the drone of German bombers passing overhead, the distant concussion of the bombs, and the sharp crack of distant gunfire. And as he lay, a wonderful idea formed in his mind. He was a British subject, an Englishman for all his long years in a foreign country. He had been at a good English school. If he played his cards right he might become a British officer like all these other officers, and be made one of them, with military duties and a khaki tunic with patch pockets and a beautiful Sam Browne belt, deep brown and polished, with a revolver holster buckled on to it. And with that uniform he felt there would come peace of mind, the calm assurance of the future unaccountably possessed by these young men.

Presently, dead tired, he fell asleep.

He had breakfast in the mess next morning with his guide, and at about ten o'clock he was taken back into the office where he had been interrogated on the previous day. The British major was there alone; he got up as Charles came in, unobtrusively pressing a bell button on his desk.

"'Morning, Mr. Simon," he said cheerfully. "Sleep all right? Raid didn't keep you awake? That's grand."

Behind Charles the door opened, and an old man came in. Charles Simon turned and stared. "Mr. Scarlett!" he said. "I say—whatever brought you here, sir?"

The old man said: "The soldiers brought me here. Well, Simon, been getting into trouble? What have you been up to?"

"I've not been up to anything, sir." He spoke as a small boy.

"Well, what have they got you here for? You're under arrest, aren't you?"

The major interposed. "I think there is a misunderstanding," he said. "Mr. Simon is not under arrest. But he arrived in this country in a peculiar way, and we had to get a positive identity for him. You know him well, I take it?"

"I was his housemaster for four years," the old man said. "If that's not knowing him well I'd like to know what is."

There was little more to be said. Simon was allowed a quarter of an hour with his old housemaster; then the old gentleman was politely put into an army car and taken back to London to his club, slightly bewildered at the rapid, curtailed meeting. Simon was taken back into the major's office, but this time there was a brigadier with him, a smartly dressed officer with red staff tabs, with greyish hair and china-blue eyes. That was the first time Simon met McNeil.

For half an hour they went over his information of the previous day. He had told them a good deal about the aerodromes at Caen and other places, and about the coast defences around Calais, so far as he had knowledge of them from the concrete contracts. To-day they wanted to pursue the matter further. They wanted information about Lorient in Brittany.

He wrinkled his brows. "Yes," he said. "There is a good deal of cement going there. And steel reinforcement, although we don't handle that."

"How much cement a week?"

"Oh, a good deal. Two hundred tons a week, I dare say, sir."

"What do they want with all that in a little place like Lorient?"

Simon said: "I really couldn't tell you. You see, most of our Brittany contracts pass through our sub-office in Brest. We have an agent there who takes the orders and passes them to us in bulk at Corbeil. We only know the destination of the trucks."

The brigadier leaned forward. "I can tell you what that cement is used for, Mr. Simon. Would you like to know?"

Charles stared at him.

"The Germans are building shelters for their U-boats operating from Lorient. Did you know that?"

He shook his head. "I knew that they had U-boats there. But—shelters?"

"Bomb-proof, ferro-concrete shelters over the submarine docks," said the brigadier. "That's what they're doing there. They plan to make those docks completely safe from our attacks by air. Then with their submarines they plan to close the English Channel to our shipping—and they may do it, too. It's really rather serious."

He turned to Charles. "If you were back in Corbeil, in your office," he said quietly, "could you find out the thickness of the concrete roof, and the amount of reinforcement? Could you get hold of the design of the roof of the shelters, so that we can adapt our bombs to penetrate it?"

There was a silence in the bare little office. The officers sat gazing at the man from France.

"I couldn't find out anything about that in Corbeil," he said at last. "I'd have to think up some excuse and go to Lorient. I could tell you at once if I could have a good look at the things."

"And could you manage to do that?" the major asked.

There was a long silence. From the next room there came the clatter of a typewriter; from the fields outside the rumble of a tractor on the farm.

Charles said heavily at last: "If I went back to Corbeil I could get to Lorient all right."

The two officers exchanged a glance. The major said softly: "But you don't want to go back."

There was another pause.

The brigadier leaned forward. "What do you want to do, Mr. Simon?" he enquired. "Did you come over here to join the forces?"

Charles turned to him gratefully. "I suppose I did," he said. "You see, I didn't know what things were like here till I landed yesterday. It was on a sort of impulse that I said they'd better take me from Le Tréport, if you understand. I knew I knew the sort of things you want to know, and I've always been English, when all's said and done." He struggled to express himself. "I mean, I was never naturalized French, not in all those years. I've got a French identity card, but I made that out myself. I told you."

The major said: "I know. And there's another thing. As I understand it, the way is pretty clear for you to go back to Corbeil and take up your work there again, if you want to."

"If I could get across the Channel."

"Oh...of course."

Charles Simon raised his eyes to them. "I was thinking about all this last night," he said. "I was thinking, I'd like to stay over here and join up, now that I'm here. I'd be of some use to you—in the Royal Engineers. I know quite a lot about fortification works in ferro-concrete." He hesitated, and then came out boldly: "Do you think I should be able to get a commission?"

The brigadier glanced at the major, and the major at the brigadier, and each waited for the other. The brigadier spoke first. "I think you could get a commission," he said, "if that was the best way to use you. But quite frankly, I would rather see you go back to Corbeil."

The major said, a little bitterly: "My job is in the army. I've been in the army all my life, and wars don't come very often. I thought this war was my big chance to make a name. In the first week of it I found myself in this job here, simply because I'd worked hard during the peace and learned six languages. All my contemporaries have got battalions. One of my term at Sandhurst is commanding a brigade. And I'm stuck here, and here I'll stay till the war ends. Then I shall be retired on pension."

He raised his head. "I don't want you to think that I'm complaining. But I tell you that, because so few of us get what we want. So few can go and fight. So many have to stay and work."

Charles pulled out a packet of Caporals, extracted one of the last two, and lit it. He blew out a long cloud of smoke. "If I did go back," he said, "it might be months before I could get down to Lorient. Some very good excuse would have to be contrived, and that would all take time. But when I had secured the information that you want, what then? How should I send it back to you?"

The brigadier said: "We'll look after that."

Charles said: "That would be espionage, wouldn't it? I should be shot if I were caught?" He eyed them narrowly.

The brigadier looked at him straight, bright blue eyes in a tanned, brown face. "Yes," he said directly. "If the Germans caught you they would shoot you. That's one of the risks you would have to take."

The designer said: "I don't mind so much about that part of it."

He was silent for a minute, while the officers stared at him. "It's just the going back that is the worst part. I don't know if I can explain it." He dropped his eyes and stared at the thin, dirty smoke arising from the ragged ember of the cigarette. "France is a beastly country now," he said quietly. "I never realized just how beastly it all was until I got over here. Everything—everybody over there...they go round as if they were in a dream, or tied up in a nightmare. There is a disgusting influence that has sapped their will to work, their will to live. They move about in lassitude, half men. They are tools for evil, in the hands of evil men. And the best of them know it. And the worst of them enjoy it..."

There was a long, long pause.

Charles Simon raised his head. "If I went back and did this job for you," he said, "could I come back to England afterwards and be a British officer?"

The brigadier said: "Yes, I think you could. In fact, I'd go so far as to promise that."

"All right," said Charles, "I'll go. How are you going to get me back to France?"

They spent the rest of the morning priming him with all he had to know. It was not much to memorize. There was the name and address of a small tailor on the quays of the Port du Commerce at Brest and the simple little phrase: "I want red buttons on the coat." There was a corn-chandler in the Rue Paul Feval in Rennes down behind the station, and the head waiter in the Café de l'Arcade in the Boulevard de Sévigné in Paris. Through one or other of these friends he would return to England, but how they would not say.

In the late afternoon he was driven to an aerodrome to meet his pilot and to learn his parachute. With the pilot and a large-scale map of France he planned the flight. "That's where I mean," he said. "Ten miles north-east of Lyons, by that little place Montluel. Anywhere just round there, within a mile or two."

The squadron-leader who was to pilot him drew a pencil circle big and black around the place upon the map. "That's quite okay," he said. "We'll take a Blenheim. If you come over with me now we'll get you fitted for the parachute, and then we'll go and have a look at the machine."

The flight-sergeant fitted and adjusted all the heavy webbing straps around his body. "Now when you comes to jump," he said, "you just counts one—two—three after you starts falling. Not onetwothree quick—but deliberate, like: one—two—three. And then you pulls the ring and be sure you pull it right out, wire and all, case any of it's holding up. And don't go thinking that you've bust it when it comes away in your hand, because you haven't."

His manner robbed the business of all fear. Simon had little difficulty in grasping the technique of landing. There were obvious risks of injury, but those did not distress him. He passed on with the squadron-leader to the aircraft where they met the young sergeant who was to serve as navigator with them, and for half an hour longer he examined the machine and the means of getting out of it.

"I shall pull her back to about ninety-five," the pilot said. "You won't have any difficulty."

With the major from the interrogation centre, he had tea in the Air Force mess. Then they went back in the car and he met the brigadier again in the bare little office that had seen all their business. McNeil had not been idle.

"Fix things up with the Air Force?" he enquired. "It's all right for to-night, is it? Fine. The sooner you're back in France the better. Here are your papers."

He passed an envelope across the table. It contained a pass made out in German and in French, signed by the Oberstleutnant Commandant of Le Tréport authorizing the bearer, M. Charles Simon, to pass into Vichy territory for the purpose of visiting relatives, and to return into the occupied zone within ten days. An oval rubber stamp in purple ink defaced it—'"Vu à l'entrée, Chalon," and the date.

Charles studied it carefully. "Is that the real signature?" he asked.

The major smiled. "We got a good deal of his correspondence in the raid."

There was no more to be done, and no more to be said. Charles dined with the major in the mess, and then went up and lay down, fully clothed but for his boots, upon the bed. He lay awake for a considerable time, wondering what lay before him. Presently he grew drowsy and slept for an hour or two.

At one o'clock in the morning they came to wake him. He got up and put on his shoes and went down to the mess; they had thoughtfully prepared for him a drink of hot coffee laced with rum and a few sandwiches. Then he was driven to the aerodrome. On the tarmac the Blenheim was already running up, the exhausts two blue streaks in the blackness of the night.

"All ready?" said the squadron-leader. "Well, let's go."

Charles turned to the major and held out his hand. "I'm terribly grateful for all you've done for me, sir. Don't worry if you don't hear for a month or two. It's going to take a little time."

The other said gruffly: "Wish I was going with you, 'stead of sticking in this blasted job. All the very best of luck."

The pilot and the navigator were already in the Blenheim. Charles was assisted up on to the wing, clumsy in his parachute harness, and settled into the small seat behind them. The hatch was pushed up behind him and snapped shut. The Blenheim moved to a burst of engine, and taxied out into the darkness of the aerodrome.

A few faint lights appeared ahead of them; the engines burst into a roar, and they went trundling down the field. The lights swept past them, the motion grew more violent, then died away to a smooth air-borne rush as the lights dropped away beneath them and behind. The pilot bent to the instrument panel and juggled quickly with his massed controls. They swept round in a long gentle turn and steadied on the course for France, climbing as they went.

Charles remembered little of that flight. He sat there for two hours, gradually getting cold, watching the computations and the plotting of the navigator in the dim, shaded cockpit light. In the end the sergeant turned to him. "About ten minutes more," he said. "Are you all ready to go?"

Charles said: "All ready."

The pilot swung round in his seat. "You'll see to land all right," he said. "The moon's just coming up." Charles had watched it rise over the pilot's left shoulder.

The pilot and the navigator conferred together for a moment. Then the sergeant got up from his folding seat and turned round to Charles. "He's going to slow her down," he said. "We'll open the hatch, and I'll help you get out on to the wing. Then when it's time I'll give you a clap on the back...and just let go."

The roof hatch dropped down, and the night air blew a keen, cold gale around him. With the assistance of the sergeant he clambered slowly out. The wind tore round him, dragging his legs from the slippery surface of the wing. Far, far below him he could see the dim line of a river and the faint shadow of the woods upon the patterned fields. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he thought: "This is death. I have only a few minutes left to live."

The sergeant, standing in the hatch helping to support him in the violence of the rush of air, shouted with his mouth against his ear: "Just take it easy and count one, two, three after you go. Put your hand upon the ring—that's right. Wait, now..."

They both stared at the pilot, intent on the instruments. They saw him glance at his watch, and back to the instruments again. Then at his watch.... He turned in his seat and nodded, smiled at Charles, and said something which was never heard. The sergeant shouted in his ear: "Okay, and the best of luck. Off you go."

Charles felt the grasp upon his arm released and a heavy clump upon his shoulder. He dared not show his fear. He turned his body to face aft and the wind took him; he slipped, lost his hold, and bumped heavily upon the trailing edge. A dark shadow that was the tail-plane swept over him, and then he was head downwards and rotating slowly, seeing only the dim earth below as the wind rose about him, tearing at his clothes. The fear made an acute pain in his throat.

He forced himself to think, and counted slowly. Then desperately, with all his strength, he pulled the ring. It came and something snapped behind his back; he pulled at the wire following the ring with both his hands. For a sickening moment he went on falling; then came a rustling rush and the harness plucked violently at his shoulders, hurting him with the buckles of the straps. He came erect and saw the sky again; the wind had gone and he was hanging there suspended in the quiet peace of the night. For a few moments he hung limp and shaken, exhausted by his fear.

Presently he regained control of himself, and set to steering the parachute gingerly away from the woods and into open country.

He fell into a pasture field close by a hedge. He fell down heavily on knee, thigh, and shoulder as he had been told to do and got badly shaken up again. The parachute collapsed beside him on the grass. He stayed there for a quarter of an hour, gradually calming down. He was not hurt at all.

Presently he got up, made the parachute and harness into a bundle, and did with it what he had been told to do.

An hour later he walked into his mother's house, with a story that he had walked from Lyons, having come from Paris by the night express.

He got back to Corbeil after a few days and settled down to work again. Duchene took his absence as a matter of course, and no word of the raid upon Le Tréport seemed to have penetrated to the factory. Charles fell back easily into his humdrum daily round, and for a time everything went on normally.

Three weeks later he appeared one morning in the office of M. le directeur, bearing certain test samples of cement, odd-shaped little twin bulbous bricks. "I regret, monsieur," he said, "that there is trouble with the samples."

They bent over the fractures; they were granulated and short. "These are the figures," said the designer. "See for yourself, monsieur." The failing load of the test-pieces was forty per cent below the specification strength.

Duchene glanced at the figures. "This is very bad," he said. "What is the reason?"

Simon produced a paper bag of powdered cement. "This is the sample." They dipped their fingers in it; the powder was rough and gritty to the touch. "It has passed once only through the kiln," said Duchene. He fingered it again, with forty years' experience behind the touch. "Or—some of it. Half—more than a quarter and less than half—has passed once only. Has any of this stuff gone out?"

Simon said: "This is from Batch CX/684, monsieur. I regret infinitely that much of that has been already shipped. I trust that this is not a true sample of the rest."

The old man bit his lip. "Where did the shipment go to?" he enquired. This was a serious matter for the prestige of the company.

Charles said: "It was sold through Brest. Much of it was shipped to Lorient, and some to Audierne, Douarnenez, and Morgat. It has all gone to the same district."

They discussed the distribution for some little time. It was a major crisis, and most serious to them commercially. "I will ring up the Commission of Control," Duchene said in the end. "They must know about this first of all, and quickly, in case they think that we have made a sabotage. Then they must arrange at the ports that every sack is put in quarantine till we have made a test-piece from that sack and broken it. Every sack is to be tested. I will not take a risk in matters of this sort."

The designer nodded. "I will go and see to it myself," he said. "They cannot say that we are taking this lightly if I go myself to do the tests."

The old man beamed his approval; he was fond of Charles. "That is a very good suggestion," he said. "I will tell the Commission that I am sending my chief engineer to make this inspection. You must be ready to start immediately, and make my apologies to all the commandants concerned. Telegraph immediately what replacements are required."

The Commission were annoyed, and naturally so, but somewhat mollified by the suggestion that the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil proposed to send their chief engineer in person to inspect the defective batch. Half a dozen telegrams were sent without delay isolating the material, and Charles was given all the necessary permits for his journey and told to get off at once. He travelled up next morning to Paris, a city of desolate, dirty streets and closed shops. He lunched sadly in a little restaurant and took the afternoon train for Brittany.

He went first to Brest. At the station he took the common hotel bus, an ancient horse-drawn vehicle, and asked to be put down at the Hôtel Moderne. The driver looked at him curiously. "Monsieur has not visited Brest recently, perhaps?" he said. "The hotel is closed."

He found that it was closed indeed, or rather that it stood wide open to the sky. There was much bomb damage in the town; he was fortunate to get a room in the Hôtel des Voyageurs.

He went to the agent next day, and sat in conference with him for an hour. Monsieur Clarisson was much concerned about the defects of Batch CX/684, and said he could not believe that there was really much wrong with it. He himself had taken samples and had tested them as soon as the news reached him, and all his samples had come out in strength well above specification. The two engineers drank several cups of coffee in the office, bitter stuff tasting of acorns, and gloomed over the samples that Simon had brought with him from Corbeil. Monsieur Clarisson gave Charles the names of all the local German commandants that he would have to see, and expressed his irritation that he would not be able to accompany Monsieur Simon on his trip from town to town along the coast. The German regulations in that part were very strict.

"I should warn you, monsieur," he said confidentially, "that here in Brittany it is necessary to be most discreet." He hesitated. "You will not mind if I say this? Coming from Corbeil, you may not know quite how things are here with us."

Charles nodded. "There are difficulties here?"

The man said: "Not here in Brest. Here we are business people, and we understand that circumstances change. But in the country districts people are more stupid. They are always trying to do things against the Germans, and that makes trouble. In the café, monsieur, they are always talking. You will hear the English radio quite openly." Charles drew in his breath; this was asking for it. "You must be very careful not to get involved in their stupidity. It is trouble—trouble—trouble all the time."

Charles said: "I am deeply grateful, monsieur, for the warning. These places I am going to—Lorient, Audierne, Douarnenez, and Morgat—are they bad?"

The agent said: "Not Lorient, nor Audierne. Morgat is too small for much to happen there. But in Douarnenez, monsieur, it is most difficult. Those fishing people will not understand the new regime. Each week there is some new trouble, each week there is an execution by the Germans, sometimes several. And it has no effect... But for the fishing industry and for the food that they bring in, the town would have been bombarded by the Germans from the air, and razed down to the ground. I have heard German officers say so."

"It is as bad as that?"

"It is bad as it could be, monsieur. Life is terrible for people in Douarnenez just now. You must be very, very careful there."

Charles went that afternoon to Lorient, put up at the Hotel Bellevue, and reported himself next morning to the German commandant. He was coldly received, and was informed that work of great importance was completely stopped. He was questioned sharply about the day that he had spent in Brest; it did not seem to the Germans necessary at all that he should have wasted time in visiting his agent. They gave him a good dressing down, then took him to the harbour in a Renault van.

The cement was stacked in heaps in its sacks in a shed overlooking the estuary. He set to work with one Breton lad to help him, numbering the sacks, making a sample briquette in a little mould from each sack, and leaving it to dry. He worked all day. Once or twice, when nobody was looking, he mingled a little of the sample powder from Corbeil into a briquette.

In the late afternoon he was taken down to see the sacks upon the job. He passed along new quays and under arches of new concrete, stepped over piles of girders and steel reinforcement, walked round great heaps of wooden shuttering. He dared not glance in each direction more than once; that one glance was sufficient, if he could remember. His mind was crowded with the detail he observed. He must, must keep it clear. With each glance he tried to memorize the picture of what lay before him so that he might reconstruct it in the night.

They took him to the ready-use cement store, and he set to work again to make briquettes of the sacks there. As he performed the simple job he indexed in his mind what he had seen. Seven bays each holding two U-boats, held up on columns one metre twenty-five square section, each with two I beams in the centre, each I beam forty-five by fifteen centimetres, wrapped round with twenty-kilogram reinforcement. Each bay a hundred metres long and twenty metres wide, and six columns to each bay. The weight of roof could be deduced from that alone. But keep that detail in his mind, treasure it. God, let him not forget!

His task finished, he was free to go till the next day; it took twenty-four hours for the briquettes to dry. He walked back up the quays. Fifteen-metre girders, each one metre twenty deep—they would be the longitudinal horizontals between columns. Each girder built of webs and angles, each angle twenty centimetres by twenty, each web twenty-two millimetres thick. Mary, Mother of God, help him to remember!

Shuttering for the arches of the twenty-metre bays—radius of arch thirty to thirty-five metres, each arch about one metre eighty wide. He glanced up casually to the half-completed job, and looked down at the quay. Say two tons eighty of forty kilogramme reinforcement to each arch. Fifty by twelve I beams for the purlins between arches, ten or eleven purlins to each arch. Over the purlins, six layers of twenty-kilogramme reinforcement buried in the concrete of the roof, the layers separated by about fifteen centimetres. Jesus, give him a clear head to sort out and disentangle all that he had seen!

He did not dine that night because food dulls the brain. He went up to his room in the hotel and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling in the hard light of the one unshaded lamp. He would not, must not think of anything except design. This was no amateur erection that he had seen. He knew that at a glance. Whoever had designed it had had much experience in structures of that sort. That made Charles Simon's job more possible, for everything would have a reason. Each girder and each column would be made sufficient for the loads imposed upon it and no more; the strength of one part would show him the strength of the rest, when he had understood the matter rightly. And all in turn would lead him to the weight and thickness of the roof, as yet unbuilt, if he could keep a clear mind and remember all that he had seen.

He set himself to find the gaps, the links in the chain of the structure that he had not thought to look at. The list of points that he must memorize to-morrow, his last visit to the quays. Then he got up and wrote in pencil on a little ivorine tablet all the dimensions he had noticed, and set to work to learn what he had written off by heart, as he had learnt poetry when he was a boy at Shrewsbury. Finally, at about midnight, he expunged what he had written from the tablet with a wet corner of his towel, and lay down on his bed, still repeating his lesson to himself. Presently, in the middle of his repetition, he dropped off to sleep. When he woke up at dawn, alert and desperately hungry, he was still repeating it.

He went down to the main cement store later in the day and started to break his briquettes with a little shot-weighing machine that he had brought with him. A German officer of Pioneers was there to watch him as he worked. Of about two hundred sacks, seven proved to be defective, with fractures much below the specification strength for the briquette. Charles had the offending sacks sorted out and opened one at the neck. He took a handful of the cement, rubbed it between his fingers, smelt it, and nodded.

He turned to the German officer. "I regret this infinitely, Herr Oberleutnant," he observed. "But there it is. See for yourself."

The German rubbed some in his hands and nodded wisely.

"Such things happen in any factory from time to time," said Charles apologetically. "But all the rest may now be cleared for use."

Seven sacks of perfectly good cement were sent down to the breakwater to form part of the sea wall, sacks and all. Charles was taken down to the ready-use store again.

Footings for the columns seven metres by seven metres, apparently on sand or gravel bottom. A squad of carpenters knocking up one-metre-eighty shuttering—would that be the depth of the roof? Great boxes full of thirty-millimetre bolts—where did they go, what members did they join? And what were all these tons and tons of angles, all fifteen-centimetre angles? Where did they come in? And all those seven-millimetre strips?

In the ready-use store every briquette passed its test well above specification strength, possibly because Charles had been under close supervision the previous afternoon, down there upon the job. The German officer was very pleased, and genuinely cordial as they walked back along the quay.

One last look round. An indication of something similar in a very early stage of construction upon the other side of the river, exactly in a line between the church of Plouarget and the tall chimney at the gasworks. A boom across the entrance to the river between Plouarget and Creusec, turned back for ships to enter, and with one guard-ship. What seemed to be an oil-tanker beside the quay two hundred metres down-stream from the bridge. Five naval motor-launches. Two large twin-engined float seaplanes moored out to buoys. Two salvage ships...

He left Lorient that afternoon and went to Audierne. He must go through with his trip in all sincerity, for on the coast of Brittany he was under observation the whole time. There was only a matter of five tons or so to test at Audierne. He condemned three sacks, apologized to the commandant on behalf of the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil, and left for Douarnenez two days later.

It was February, and though the days were beginning to get longer, it was still quite dark by six o'clock. From Audierne to Douarnenez is not much more than fifteen miles, but the direct railway line was closed to all civilian traffic, and Charles had to make a long detour through Quimper. Here he had a long, indeterminate wait upon the station platform for a train that was indefinitely late.

He went into the buffet and drank a cup of bitter coffee. The place was ill-ventilated, smelly and cheerless; outside the night was mild, even warm. It was fine and starry. He went out on to the platform and began walking up and down.

Presently he fell into conversation with a priest, a man perhaps fifty years of age, in shabby black canonicals.

They talked as they walked up and down. The priest, Charles learned, was travelling to Douarnenez from a seminary at Pontivy; he was on his way to take up a new cure in the great Church of Ste-Hélène in the middle of the town. He told Charles quite simply the reason for the vacancy that he was to fill. His predecessor had been executed by the Germans.

"You understand," he said ingenuously, "that in my calling one is sometimes in a difficult position, more difficult than I anticipated when as a young man I joined the Order."

In the dim light of the stars Charles glanced curiously at his companion. Was this just the folly of an unworldly old man, or was it—courage? He could not resist the endeavour to find out.

"A middle course is usually possible," he said. He was mindful of the warning that he had received in Brest. "The Germans, after all, are men like ourselves. It is not necessary always to be finding means to irritate them."

The priest said very quietly: "The Germans are not people like ourselves. They are creatures of the Devil, vowed to idolatry, and followers of Mithras. If you deny that, you deceive yourself, my son."

Charles did not wish to argue; they walked a few paces in silence. Then the priest spoke again.

"I am not one of those who consider matters of the earthly sphere," he said. "Our life and our hope of things to come lie not in this world. I do not think it matters very much who exercises dominion over these fields of France, whether our race, or the Germans, or even the English, who in bygone times ruled here for a century. The Church does not concern herself with conquests of that sort. We fight against the conquest of the soul."

Half-heartedly Charles tried to turn the conversation into safer channels. "The Germans have their Lutheran religion," he said. "The English also, and the Americans, and the Dutch. I do not see much difference."

The man said: "The English are not members of the true Church. They worship Jesus Christ in a foolish and misguided way, and as a social usage rather than a true belief. Yet they do worship, and they have no other gods. And so it is with all the other countries that you name. But not with Germany."

"So much the worse for them, father," said Charles.

"You do not understand, my son," the priest replied. "To gain their temporal ends the Germans first destroy the souls of men. The Church thinks little of the temporal end. The Church will fight to save the souls of men from everlasting torment, and by the Grace of God she will emerge victorious."

There was no turning him, Charles thought. There were few people on the platform in the night, and none at all the far end beneath the signal lights, where they were pacing up and down under the stars.

"Lies and deceit in every form," said the old priest. "Sexual immorality weakening the body, bribery, false witness, selfishness, corruption, sloth, and all the petty minor sins that weaken character. These are the things that Germany has sown in Frenchmen, save in small corners of the country such as we have here. These are the weapons with which Germany fights wars. First they destroy the souls of men and then they occupy the country. Against that we are set; against that we will fight.

"And do not think," he said, "that these things come from facile cleverness called Propaganda. All in this world, my son, descends from God, or it ascends from Satan in the Pit. These things that I have spoken of, these things that Germany has put into the souls of Frenchmen, do not come from God, whose servant I have been for forty years. They come from Satan and his messenger at Berchtesgaden."

They walked on in silence for a minute. Charles was deeply impressed, yet with shrewd realism it seemed to him that there might be another vacancy at Douarnenez before so very long.

"These things are bred of sheer idolatry and witchcraft," the priest said presently. "They have cast out and persecuted their own Lutherans. They make sacrifices of living goats to Satan on their hill-tops in the night; they bow down to the false gods of war, to Mithras and to Moloch. In their unholy Sabbaths they sit down in conference, and from their conference is born the sins and infamies that they now call political warfare. But these are works of Satan; black magic, and the products of the Pit."

A little wind swept past them in the starry night. Charles said: "But, father, what can simple people do?"

"Pray to Almighty God in all humility," the old priest said. "Turn to the Faith, and watch that you fall not into the pit that has been digged for you."

They paced up and down in silence for a few minutes. A cool, fresh wind blew inland from the sea; the stars were very bright and quiet above. "Mother Church," the old man said at last, "has given us no guidance upon the matter temporal. Yet age by age the wisdom of the Church remains unaltered, my son. There is not one truth in one century, and then another in a later age. Truth and the Laws of God endure through all the ages of the world. That is so, is it not?"

Charles said quietly: "That is true. If it were otherwise we should be lost indeed."

The old man nodded his agreement. "Each one of us must seek for his own guidance, and at Pontivy in my retreat I have spent many, many days and weeks praying to God for guidance on the road that I must tread. And presently, my son, it was revealed to me that since Truth must endure it is not necessary for guidance to be given more than once. Mother Church speaks once, and that truth then endures through all the ages of the years for those who seek in humbleness to find it."

They paced on. Charles did not speak.

The priest said: "So humbly, and in long, long hours of prayer I sought for guidance in the matter temporal, where evil men are dominant, perverting the souls of men for their own ends by sorcery and the black arts that they have studied to perform. And presently I saw that this was no new thing, this struggle against heresy arising from the East. Black magic and the foul infamies of Satan have arisen in past ages, and in past ages Holy Church has called up spiritual powers, and weapons temporal, to beat them down. It is all in the old books, for those to whom faith gives the faculty of understanding."

Charles said: "I have not gained that faith, father, nor that understanding." He spoke very quietly. "Is there a weapon temporal for me?" As he spoke there came a fleeting image of the man in Brest and of the warnings that he had received. He knew himself to be venturing among great risks, and he dismissed them from his mind.

The old man said: "I do not know, my son. Yet in past centuries the Church wielded one great cleansing weapon against heresy and infamy and all idolatry, a weapon that sweeps all before it, before which Anti-Christ and all the devils of the Pit recoil. That in past ages was the wisdom of the Church, my son. It is the wisdom still."

"What is this weapon temporal, then, father?"

The priest said: "It is fire."

He turned and faced Charles Simon. "So in the past the Holy Inquisition fought the battle against heresy, idolatry, and witchcraft, with faith in God and with the weapon temporal of fire. With that faith and that weapon they beat down the devils seeking to destroy the souls of men. Through that faith and that weapon men's souls may again be saved from all the dangers that beset them now."

The priest, facing him, laid his hand upon the designer's arm. "That is the truth of God," he said. "For the weak in faith there is an evidence." He dropped his voice and glanced round furtively. "Listen, my son, and I will tell you what I know."

In the dim light they bent together. "There was a brother of my Order," said the priest. "He was in Belgium, at Ostend, in September last, four months after the Occupation. For those four months he watched the Germans as they trained their troops to sail in barges for the invasion of England—men and guns and motor-bicycles and cars and tanks, and men again, all entering and disembarking from the barges. And finally, my son, the day arrived—September the 16th."

Charles said in a whisper: "What happened then?"

"God in His mercy laid His hand upon the English," the priest whispered in the dark. "They are not of the true Faith, but the Lord God is generous to all sincere misunderstanding, and He led them to the weapon temporal. The barges were three hours from land when British bombers of the Royal Air Force came upon them and dived on the barges, dropping upon them drums of oil and small incendiary bombs. Wave upon wave of aeroplanes came out from England strong in the power of the Lord, oil and incendiary bombs, oil and bombs. And the drums burst on the barges and the oil flowed into them, and the bombs set all on fire so that they blazed fiercely on the water, and the English dropped more oil into the flames."

Charles drew in his breath sharply.

The priest drew back a little. "For ten whole days the bodies came ashore upon the beaches," he said in a low tone. "Choked in the blazing oil, burned, suffocated, and drowned in their vile sins and infamy. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, every day, and the Germans buried them among the sand-hills of the beaches like dead animals, that none might know how they had met their end. Yet it was known all over Belgium and all through the German armies of the Netherlands within a day."

There was a short silence. "Before that power of fire all powers of heresy, idolatry, and witchcraft must recoil," the old man said. "It is not given to us to understand the choice of the Lord's instruments, why He revealed His mercy to the English rather than to us, any more than it is given to us to understand His choice of the Hebrew race in ages past. I only know that by that temporal power the Germans suffered a defeat, the first that they have suffered in this war. Before that power the powers of Mithras were thrown back."

He bent close again. "There was a mutiny," he said in a low tone. "A mutiny in the German Army, because the Nazis ordered that the troops should sail again for England. And there was mutiny...it is true what I say. A hundred officers and men were shot in Antwerp at the rifle-range on September the 29th. And after that, and gradually, the troops were moved away."

They turned and resumed their pacing up and down. "The lesson of the ages has been taught again," the priest said quietly. "No other weapon purges evil from the earth and rids men from their bondage to the powers of darkness. Only the simple elementals can avail against the elemental foe—faith in the Power of God and in the cleansing power of fire."

The train came shortly after that. They got into a crowded third-class carriage and travelled together to Douarnenez. At the station their ways diverged; before turning into the Hôtel du Commerce Charles stopped his companion.

"What is your name, father?" he enquired.

"Augustine," said the old man. "Augustine, of the Church of Ste-Hélène."

In the hotel Charles went up to his room, washed, and went down to the dining-room for a late meal of tunny fish, garnished with onions and potatoes. As he was eating a steam hooter from a factory near by blew a long blast, taken up all over the town by other sirens. A number of people came hurriedly into the hotel from the street.

Charles asked the waitress: "Is that the air-raid warning?"

She said: "It is the same hooter. But that is for the curfew."

It was half-past eight. "One has a curfew here?" he enquired.

She nodded. "You must not go outside now, in the street. Or, if you have to go, go very carefully in rope-soled shoes and be prepared to run for it. They shoot if they see you, but they do not shoot well."

Charles said that he was tired and thought that he would stay at home.

He went down to the café after dinner, bought a book, and settled down to read his paper. The patron and his family were there and a few travellers; presently they turned on the radio and tuned it to the British news in French. They heard of fresh advances by the Greeks into Albania and the news of the British entry into Benghazi. That was before we got chased out again.

Presently the patron came over to the table at which Charles was sitting. He was a heavy man of about fifty-five, but still vigorous. He said: "Monsieur is not from these parts?"

Charles shook his head. "This is the first time I have visited Douarnenez. I come from Corbeil, in Seine et Oise."

The man said: "Then, possibly, monsieur would drink a glass upon the house to celebrate his first visit to Douarnenez?"

Charles was very pleased, and they settled down together with the Pernod. Presently he told the innkeeper that he had travelled from Quimper with a priest called Father Augustine.

The man said: "So, he has arrived?" His face grew black. "The father told monsieur, perhaps, the reason for the vacancy?"

Charles said gently: "Not in detail. I know that you have had great trouble here, monsieur."

"And there will be more." There was a short, grim pause.

"I will tell you about that," the man said presently. "In Seine et Oise, from all I hear, you are great friends with the Germans, but it is not so here. In August thirty people of this town were shot—thirty, in two batches, in one day. Two cousins of my own and my wife's brother. What do you think of that?" He bent towards Charles, trembling with anger.

The designer said: "It is terrible."

"One day, presently, when they are weak and beaten, we shall get at them with axes and with billhooks," the innkeeper said.

He drew back. "I was telling you. Our children are not very well in hand," he said. "It is understandable, that. There was a boy of nine—a little boy, monsieur—a bad boy whose father is at Toulon with the fleet. A bad boy, monsieur—but a child still, you will understand. It was his way to go out in the dark night in the curfew and pick up the horse droppings in the street. Then he would creep up in the darkness to a sentry and fling what he had collected in the German's face and run. Many times he did that."

Charles nodded. It was not a very edifying tale.

The man said: "One night, as he ran, there was another sentry in the way with a fixed bayonet. He lunged at little Jules as he came running past, monsieur, and he ran him through the chest beneath the left shoulder. Then the two sentries together had to pull his little body off the bayonet. Then, one took each arm and they walked him between them towards German headquarters in the market-place. All the way, monsieur, he was coughing up his blood. We found it on the pavé in the morning. But he was not dead."

Charles did not speak.

"Father Zacharias was our curé then," the innkeeper went on. "He also was out that night, but that was allowed, for he had taken the last Sacrament to a sick woman. There was a moon that night, and in the Rue Jean Marat he met the German soldiers as they dragged the little one along between them, and he stopped them and upbraided them, ordering them to take him into the first house and go to fetch a doctor. All this was heard, monsieur, by Marie Lechanel outside whose house they stopped. There was a great pool of blood there in the morning to prove her story, where they stopped and argued."

He paused. "They would not listen. The father grew angry, and he said: 'If you do not release that little one and fetch a doctor for him, the Fire of Heaven shall come down and strike you, and you will perish unshrived in your sin.' But they would not listen. They said: 'We are taking him to the officer. He will make an example of this one.'

"And Father Zacharias said: 'I shall come with you, and if that boy dies you both shall be denounced as murderers.' So he went with them to headquarters of the Gestapo, monsieur. And in the night, there in a prison, the little boy Jules died, monsieur. And they took Father Zacharias away to Rennes in a motor-car, and three days later he was shot for treason, and for inciting the people to revolt. That was the reason that they gave, and there was not one word of truth in it—at least, not that the Germans knew."

Charles Simon said gently: "I am desolated, monsieur. This is very, very bad."

"Aye," said the man heavily. "It is bad indeed here in Douarnenez."

A quarter of an hour later, after another glass of Pernod, the innkeeper said: "I was in Brest, monsieur, when the English left. It was incredible to us, you understand—unreal. I had stopped for a glass down in the Port du Commerce at the Abri de la Tempête. There were still English ships in the harbour, and two officers of the Royal Navy came in also to drink a glass. And I went and asked them, monsieur, if it was true that the English were going away and leaving us.

"And one of them said: 'It is true indeed. It is now three days since you have signed an armistice with the Germans and we must go, for we are going on with this war even if you are not.' And three women in the café began sobbing, monsieur... That was the start of our bad time."

Next day Charles reported to the German commandant, and was taken to the cement store, where he worked all morning taking samples from about fifteen tons of cement in stock. He discovered that there was no cement at Morgat, since all distribution took place through Douarnenez; this meant that when he left the fishing port he would be able to go back to Corbeil.

He returned to the hotel for déjeuner and was free for the rest of the day; his samples took twenty-four hours to set hard. He wandered down to the harbour in the afternoon; it was a warm, sunny day of early spring. He was very fond of ships and shipping, and deeply interested in fishing-boats. For a time he stood and watched the sardine-boats and tunnymen from the quay. Presently, with a chance word and a cigarette, he was down in one of the sardine-boats helping a deft-fingered, gruff old man called Bozellec to find the holes in a blue gossamer net.

He stayed there for two hours, and in that time he learned the whole operation of the sardine fleet. A German Raumboote came in from the sea, turned the end of the sea wall, and came alongside, just astern of them; Charles studied her with all the interest of an amateur yachtsman. The old fisherman looked at her for a moment, saw that a German officer was noticing him, and spat ostentatiously into the sea before resuming his work. The sun beat down upon them on the boat, pleasantly warm. As they worked on, Charles learned the tactics of the Raumboote. Presently he awoke to the value of what was being told to him and set to work to memorize the facts, and to fill in the gaps in his information by direct questions.

The job finished, they strung their net up to the mast-head to dry and air. "A little glass, perhaps?" Charles said.

A little glass, the old man thought, would be a very good idea. They got up on to the quay and walked to the Café de la République overlooking the harbour.

They went in and sat down, and Charles ordered Pernod for them both. He told his old companion a little of himself, and of the defects of the batches of cement. And presently he said casually:

"Do you have much trouble with the Germans here?"

"No more than any other lice," the old man said.

There was a short silence. "Lice," the old man said again, "and as lice we treat them. I have told them so."

Charles said: "Is it...wise to say things of that sort to them?"

The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. "The other night," he said, "in the boat we had a Bootsmannsmaat, a German, as a guard, and so we had the shade over our lamp. And this man said to me, what would I do when the war ended? Would I go on fishing? So I told him what I would do, in memory of my dead brother who was murdered. I said that I would put on my best clothes and go to watch the young men tie the Germans up in bundles and pour petrol over them and light the petrol. That is the way to deal with lice, I said. With a blow-lamp."

Charles stared at him. "Does one talk so to the Germans in Douarnenez?"

"He started it," the old man said. "He asked me what I was going to do, and I told him."

There was nothing to be said to that, and Charles sat on in the café, smoking and talking, till the hooter sounded for the curfew. He heard all that he wanted of the life of the town. It was a sad, pitiful tale, of desperate insults on the one side, of mass executions and torture on the other. It was a town in which the Germans seldom ventured out alone or without arms, a town in which each glint of light in the black-out received an instant shot from rifle or revolver. It was a town of sullen hate and brooding superstition, a town turning in despair to the old country spells and witchcraft for help against the oppressor. They did not hesitate to let the Germans know of these activities, moreover. Charles heard a story of a little waxen figure of the German commandant, finished and painted with the greatest care, found on the Oberstleutnant's desk one morning. The feet of the little image were partially melted away, and the bowels were transfixed with a pin; it was common knowledge that the Oberstleutnant suffered from gout and from an internal disorder.

The truth of what he had been told in Brest was evident to Charles. This town continued to exist simply and solely because the Germans could not do without the food that it produced. But for that fact the Germans would have wiped out every house. The people of the town knew this quite well. They played their cards up to the limit, venting their scorn and hate upon the Germans in a thousand ways and purchasing immunity with the loads of tunny and sardines that they brought in.

At curfew Charles went back to his hotel. He slept little that night; once or twice he heard the sound of shots that echoed down the streets. There was an atmosphere of brooding evil over all the place that left him utterly appalled; in his experience of France after the occupation he had come on nothing similar to this in any way.

Next day he broke his samples of cement and condemned four sacks, made his report and the apologies of his firm to the commandant, and left for Paris on the midday train. He got there very late at night, turned into a small hotel, and slept heavily and well.

On the following morning he went for coffee to the Café de l'Arcade in the Boulevard de Sévigné. The head waiter served him, an elderly man with a drooping grey moustache. He wore a faded green dress suit.

Charles said: "That is a handsome suit that you have on to-day. It only needs one thing to set it off. If I wore that I should want to have red buttons on the coat."

The man shot a quick glance around the room. Then he said quietly:

"Monsieur Simon, I presume."

Charles Simon landed in England forty-eight hours later. He had spent part of the intervening time in the cellar of the Café de l'Arcade, and he had spent part of it beside the driver of a German ammunition lorry, going north. In the dark night he had commenced his flight and had landed shortly before dawn at an aerodrome in Berkshire, a very frightened man.

A subaltern was there to meet him with a car. He was given a light meal of sandwiches and coffee in the mess, and in the early light of dawn they started on the road. It was February, and a wet, windy dawn; the air was cold and raw. They spoke very little in the car. Once the subaltern passed him a silver hunting-flask of whisky and they both took a long drink; the neat spirit heartened him, and he felt better for it.

At about ten o'clock they drove up to the same dilapidated old country house that he had been taken to before, full of the same soldiers. It seemed to him that he had hardly been away a day, though it was a full two months since he had been there. He was taken into the same mess and given breakfast. Then he was shown into the same bare little office, and interviewed by the same major and the same capitaine of the Free French.

The major rose and shook his hand; the capitaine rose and bowed stiffly from the waist. The major said: "Did you get to Lorient?"

The designer nodded. "I was there on Thursday of last week."

"And did you see the shelters?"

He said: "I saw the shelters." Very briefly he outlined to them an account of his journey around Brittany. "I think I saw all that you want to know," he said.

The major passed a sheet of paper across to him, with a pencil. "You'd better sit there quietly, and put down the details of the structure."

The designer demurred. "I cannot think like that," he said. "Even if I could, that way would not be useful to your engineers. Get me a drawing-board and a T-square, and a good roll of tracing-paper. In twenty-four hours you shall have proper working drawings of the thing that any engineer can understand."

They got him these things in an hour or two, and gave him a table in a quiet office. He took the tools of his profession eagerly; they made him feel at home. He spread the backing-paper with a light heart and pinned it down, spread the thin tracing-paper, and began to work.

He worked on till he was called to lunch, snatched a quick meal, and went back to the board. He was happy as he worked that afternoon, unburdening his memory and putting it all down on paper. As the lines of the structure grew before him the pieces of the puzzle fell together; it was quite clear now to him what the fifteen-centimetre angles did and where the seven-millimetre strips came in. They filled the missing links of structure, evident now that it was down in hard, neat pencil lines, in black and white.

From time to time the officers came in and stood behind him, watching the drawings growing under his neat fingers. They brought him tea and pieces of cake to the drawing-board: he would not stop again to eat. In the early evening Brigadier McNeil came in and Simon had to stand up at the board to answer a few questions and expound the drawing; it irked him to interrupt the currents of his thought, but he did not dare to offend the man who had promised to secure him a commission as a British officer.

The brigadier looked critically at what he had done. "The Air Ministry must have a print of this immediately..." He paused, running his eye over the unfinished details. "You make a beautiful drawing, Mr. Simon."

The designer smiled faintly. "Is it good enough," he asked anxiously, "to get me a commission in the Royal Engineers?"

The hard, china-blue eyes of the brigadier looked at him, noting the lean, intelligent face, the straight black hair, the quick, rather nervous movements of the artist hands. "I think it is," he said. "I'll get a paper going about that to-morrow, Mr. Simon."

"Thank you, sir." He hesitated. "I really do know a good bit about coastal fortifications that might be useful to you." He turned again to the drawing and became immersed in it; the officers watched him for a time and then left him to his work.

He worked on far into the night. At about two in the morning he finished the third and last sheet of details, drew a border round the edge, and handed in the lot to the British major. Together they put them in an envelope and gave them to the despatch rider; then Charles was taken to a bedroom. In a quarter of an hour he was deeply asleep, exhausted and relieved of the burden of his work.

They left him to sleep late. At about ten o'clock in the morning he awoke and lay for a few minutes staring round the darkened room, till he remembered where he was. Then he got up and went down to the mess, and managed to secure a cup of coffee. It embarrassed him to find that he had no money whatsoever, barring unnegotiable francs, as he discovered on asking for a packet of cigarettes. He went to find the major in his office.

An hour later they had him in for another interview, the major and Brigadier McNeil. This time they wanted a complete account of everything that he had seen and done in France since he had made his parachute descent. He told them everything that he could remember.

At the end the brigadier said thoughtfully: "Douarnenez seems to be in a queer state."

Charles said: "It is a town that is going mad."

The major said: "What do you mean by that?"

The designer shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "I don't know that that's the right word to use. But they don't seem like ordinary people there, at all. They don't seem to think in the same way, even." He paused, noticing that neither of the soldiers really understood what he was driving at. "I mean, like when that old man said you had to deal with lice with a blow-lamp...." His voice tailed off into silence.

The brigadier said: "Their minds seem to run on fire. The priest at the railway station and your fisherman both talked of fire."

"And the little waxen image of the commandant," said the major. "That had its feet melted away—by fire."

There was a little silence. The brigadier said: "Can you imagine anything behind this talk of fire?"

Charles shook his head. "I think it's simply hate," he said. "Burning and scorching are the most painful, the most horrible things that they could do to Germans, so their minds are running in that way. And in the background of their minds that thought of fire, subconscious, colours everything they do or say. I tell you, sir, they aren't like ordinary chaps."

The brigadier nodded. "That's probably the truth of it. We'll just have to leave it at that."

I do not know a great deal about the next three months of Charles Simon's life. He was commissioned almost immediately into the Royal Engineers as a first lieutenant, and shortly afterwards he was promoted to captain. He worked for a time at Chatham upon coast-defence projects, but the next thing I really know about his movements is that he was sent down to Dartmouth, at the beginning of May.

He had a job of work to supervise there on the foreshore, just outside the mouth of the harbour. What it was I do not know. It kept him down there for about a month, and for that time he lived in a billet half-way up the hill towards St. Petrox.

He was still slightly uneasy in his uniform, though desperately proud of it. He knew that he was foreign in his ways and he sought out the company of other officers to study them. Dartmouth at that time was stiff with officers, mostly young naval officers who came into town each evening from trawlers and M.L.s. The Royal Sovereign on the quay was the hotel they favoured most, and Simon was usually to be found in a remote corner of the bar, sipping a pint of heavy English beer, watching, and learning. He did not very often talk to anybody.

He was there after dinner one warm summer night, sitting in his usual corner. The bar was nearly empty and a little group of R.N.V.R. officers near him were chatting about their work. One of them came from a destroyer, fresh from a sweep over to the other side.

"Never saw a Jerry plane the whole time," he said. "I don't know what's become of them."

"Got them all over in the East," somebody said. "He's going to go for Russia."

"Wouldn't be such a fool."

The first speaker said: "We went right close in shore, east of the Île Vierge. You could see the people working in the fields and everything. Broad daylight, it was."

"See any Jerries?"

"Not a sausage."

Somebody said: "Did the people you saw look downtrodden and oppressed beneath the Nazi heel, like it says in the Times?"

The first speaker took a drink of beer. "They looked just like any other people in the fields. I don't believe the occupation means a thing to them. Not to the ordinary run of people in France."

The Army captain in the corner stirred a little, but he did not speak.

"I don't suppose it does," another said. "I don't suppose they know there's a war on—any more than our farm labourers over here do."

"Ours know it all right," said another. "And how! Three quid a week I see they're going to get."

Somebody said: "It'll be just the same over on the other side. Farm labourers always do well in a war. Win, lose, or draw—they get their cut all right."

"So does everybody else. Look at the chaps in the aeroplane factories. They're the ones that make this shortage of beer."

The barmaid pushed half a dozen brimming tankards to them across the bar. One of the naval officers threw down a ten-shilling note, and harked back to the subject.

"I wish one knew what it was really like over there," he said thoughtfully. "Tantalizing, just seeing it and coming away."

Probably it was the beer; he had already had two pints. Charles Simon stood up suddenly. "I'll tell you what it's like upon the other side," he said vehemently. "It is terrible, and horrible. You cannot know how terrible it is."

They all turned to stare at him, a little startled at the queer choice of words and at the foreign accent, always more noticeable in moments of excitement.

One said: "I suppose it must be pretty bloody for them." He thought the Army chap had had quite sufficient beer, and wanted to conciliate him.

Simon said: "Even so, you fellows do not understand. It is...simply foul. I will tell you." He stood there before them, the dark hair falling down over his forehead, deadly serious and rather embarrassing to them. "In Douarnenez, in January of this year, only four months ago. Only just across the sea from here—a hundred and thirty miles, no more. There was a little boy of nine called Jules that used to pick up—what you call it?—droppings of the horse, and throw them at the German sentry in the night." There were faint smiles all round, and somebody said: "Red hot!" Simon went on: "And they ran him through the body with a bayonet, but he did not die, and the priest who came by told them to fetch a doctor, but they would not. And in the night, in prison, the little boy, he died. And three days later they shot the priest also, because he would not keep quiet."

In the bar, dim with cigarette smoke, the impact of this story left a silence. Somebody said: "Who told you that?"

"It is true," said Charles. "I tell you—cross my heart. I was there only a month after. I heard everything."

Another said curiously: "Are you French, sir?"

Charles said: "I am a British subject. But I have worked in France for many, many years—oh, the hell of a time. I was at school at Shrewsbury. And I tell you chaps, if you think that things go easily there, over on the other side in Brittany, you are making the hell of a mistake. It is not Vichy, that."

They clustered round him. "Will you have a drink, sir?"

"Did you say that you were over there in February?"

He said: "Oh, thank you. Half a pint of beer."

"Did you mean February of this year?"

Charles said: "My French tongue slipped away with me. What I said was true, you chaps, but we will now forget it. Excuse me, please...."

He stayed with them for half an hour, but resolutely refused to talk about the other side. He talked to them about the war in France, and about the French Army and the French Fleet, and enjoyed their evident pleasure in him as a mystery man. And then, feeling that he had drunk as much beer as he could carry satisfactorily, he left them and went out on to the quay.

There was still an hour and a half before dark, in the long daylight hours of war-time England. He strolled on idly beside the river, and presently turned to a step behind him. It was a lieutenant in the R.N.V.R., one of the officers who had listened to him in the bar.

This was a tall young man, not more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, with red hair and the pale skin that goes with it, and a strained, puckered look about his face.

He said: "Look, sir. I want to have a word with you. I was in the pub just now, and I heard what you said about the other side. Do you mind if we have a chat some time?"

There was an urgency in his manner that compelled attention. Charles said: "Right-oh. I do not think that I can talk very much myself, you understand. But if you wish to talk to me, I am entirely at your service."

They turned and strolled along together. "I want to say first that I know what you said is true," said the young man. "The Germans do that sort of thing. They do it for a policy, because they think it makes people afraid. And if we mean to win this war we must do horrible, beastly things to them. Torturing things, like they have done to us."

Charles glanced at the strained face of the young man beside him, interested. He had not heard that sort of talk since he had come from France.

"So..." he said quietly.

"There's a thing going on down here," the young man said in a low tone, "that one or two of us are trying to work up. But we've never been able to find anyone who could tell us what things are like on the other side. If we let you in on what we want to do, will you keep it under your hat?"

"Of course. And I will give what help I can. But there are matters that I cannot talk about, you understand."

The naval officer hesitated. "Look," he said. "It won't take more than half an hour. I want you to come across the river with me and see a boat. Would you do that? And then we can talk over there, where it's quiet."

They went down to the ferry close at hand. As they were crossing the young man said: "My name is Boden, sir—Oliver Boden. I'm in a trawler here."