“Bees!” he called out. He had to turn and say it again before they heard him. The air was already darker. He knew the lore well enough. If one stuck in your hair and stung you, it sent out a chemical message as it died and all who received it were compelled to come and sting and die at the same place. General conscription! After all the danger, this was a kind of insult. They lifted their greatcoats over their heads and ran on through the swarm. Still among the bees, they reached a stinking ditch of slurry which they crossed by a wobbling plank. They came up behind a barn where it was suddenly peaceful. Beyond it was a farmyard. As soon as they were in it, dogs were barking and an old woman was running toward them flapping her hands at them, as though they were hens she could shoo away. The corporals depended on Turner’s French. He went forward and waited for her to reach him. There were stories of civilians selling bottles of water for ten francs, but he had never seen it. The French he had met were generous, or otherwise lost to their own miseries. The woman was frail and energetic. She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild look. Her voice was sharp.
“C’est impossible, M’sieur. Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.”
“We’ll be staying in the barn. We need water, wine, bread, cheese and anything else you can spare.”
“Impossible!”
He said to her softly, “We’ve been fighting for France.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“We’ll be gone at dawn. The Germans are still . . .”
“It’s not the Germans, M’sieur. It’s my sons. They are animals. And they’ll be back soon.”
Turner pushed past the woman and went to the pump which was in the corner of the yard, near the kitchen. Nettle and Mace followed him. While he drank, a girl of about ten and an infant brother holding her hand watched him from the doorway. When he finished and had filled his canteen he smiled at them and they fled. The corporals were under the pump together, drinking simultaneously. The woman was suddenly behind him, clutching at his elbow. Before she could start again he said, “Please bring us what I asked for or we’ll come in and get it for ourselves.”
“My sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.”
He would have preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his shoulder, “I’ll talk to them.”
“And then, M’sieur, they will kill you. They will tear you to shreds.”
Corporal Mace was a cook in the same RASC unit as Corporal Nettle. Before he joined he was a warehouseman at Heal’s in the Tottenham Court Road. He said he knew a thing or two about comfort, and in the barn he set about arranging their quarters. Turner would have thrown himself down on the straw. Mace found a heap of sacks and with Nettle’s help stuffed them to make up three mattresses. He made headboards out of hay bales which he lifted down with a single hand. He set up a door on brick piles for a table. He took out half a candle from his pocket.
“Might as well be comfy,” he kept saying under his breath. It was the first time they had moved much beyond sexual innuendo. The three men lay on their beds, smoking and waiting. Now they were no longer thirsty their thoughts were on the food they were about to get and they heard each other’s stomachs rumbling and squirting in the gloom, and it made them laugh. Turner told them about his conversation with the old woman and what she had said about her sons.
“Fifth columnists, they would be,” Nettle said. He only looked small alongside his friend, but he had a small man’s sharp features and a friendly, rodent look, heightened by his way of resting the teeth of his upper jaw on his lower lip.
“Or French Nazis. German sympathizers. Like we got Mosley,” Mace said. They were silent for a while, then Mace added, “Or like they all are in the country, bonkers from marrying too close.”
“Whatever it is,” Turner said, “I think you should check your weapons now and have them handy.”
They did as they were told. Mace lit the candle, and they went through the routines. Turner checked his pistol and put it within reach. When the corporals were finished, they propped the Lee- Enfields against a wooden crate and lay down on their beds again. Presently the girl came with a basket. She set it down by the barn door and ran away. Nettle fetched the basket and they spread out what they had on their table. A round loaf of brown bread, a small piece of soft cheese, an onion and a bottle of wine. The bread was hard to cut and tasted of mold. The cheese was good, but it was gone in seconds. They passed the bottle around and soon that was gone too. So they chewed on the musty bread and ate the onion. Nettle said, “I wouldn’t give this to my fucking dog.”
“I’ll go across,” Turner said, “and get something better.”
“We’ll come too.”
But for a while they lay back on their beds in silence. No one felt like confronting the old lady just yet. Then, at the sound of footsteps, they turned and saw two men standing in the entrance. They each held something in their hands, a club perhaps, or a shotgun. In the fading light it was not possible to tell. Nor could they see the faces of the French brothers. The voice was soft. “Bonsoir, Messieurs.”
“Bonsoir.”
As Turner got up from his straw bed he took the revolver. The corporals reached for their rifles. “Go easy,” he whispered.
“Anglais? Belges?”
“Anglais.”
“We have something for you.”
“What sort of thing?”
“What’s he saying?” one of the corporals said.
“He says they’ve got something for us.”
“Fucking hell.”
The men came a couple of steps closer and raised what was in their hands. Shotguns, surely. Turner released his safety catch. He heard Mace and Nettle do the same. “Easy,” he murmured.
“Put away your guns, Messieurs.”
“Put away yours.”
“Wait a little moment.”
The figure who spoke was reaching into his pocket. He brought out a torch and shone it not at the soldiers, but at his brother, at what was in his hand. A French loaf. And at what was in the other hand, a canvas bag. Then he showed them the two baguettes he himself was holding.
“And we have olives, cheese, pâté, tomatoes and ham. And naturally, wine. Vive l’Angleterre.”
“Er, Vive la France.”
They sat at Mace’s table, which the Frenchmen, Henri and Jean-Marie Bonnet, politely admired, along with the mattresses. They were short, stocky men in their fifties. Henri wore glasses, which Nettle said looked odd on a farmer. Turner did not translate. As well as wine, they brought glass tumblers. The five men raised them in toasts to the French and British armies, and to the crushing of Germany. The brothers watched the soldiers eat. Through Turner, Mace said that he had never tasted, never even heard of, goose liver pâté, and from now on, he would eat nothing else. The Frenchmen smiled, but their manner was constrained and they seemed in no mood to get drunk. They said they had driven all the way to a hamlet near Arras in their flatbed farm truck to look for a young cousin and her children. A great battle had been fought for the town but they had no idea who was taking it, who was defending it or who had the upper hand. They drove on the back roads to avoid the chaos of refugees. They saw farmhouses burning, and then they came across a dozen or so dead English soldiers in the road. They had to get out and drag the men aside to avoid running over them. But a couple of the bodies were almost cut in half. It must have been a big machine-gun attack, perhaps from the air, perhaps an ambush. Back in the lorry, Henri was sick in the cab, and Jean-Marie, who was at the wheel, got into a panic and drove into a ditch. They walked to a village, borrowed two horses from a farmer and pulled the Renault free. That took two hours. On the road again, they saw burned-out tanks and armored cars, German as well as British and French. But they saw no soldiers. The battle had moved on. By the time they reached the hamlet, it was late afternoon. The place had been completely destroyed and was deserted. Their cousin’s house was smashed up, with bullet holes all over the walls, but it still had its roof. They went in every room and were relieved to find no one there. She must have taken the children and joined the thousands of people on the roads. Afraid of driving back at night, they parked in a wood and tried to sleep in the cab. All night long they heard the artillery pounding Arras. It seemed impossible that anyone, or anything, could survive there. They drove back by another route, a much greater distance, to avoid passing the dead soldiers. Now, Henri explained, he and his brother were very tired. When they shut their eyes, they saw those mutilated bodies. Jean-Marie refilled the glasses. The account, with Turner’s running translation, had taken almost an hour. All the food was eaten. He thought about telling them of his own single, haunting detail. But he didn’t want to add to the horror, and nor did he want to give life to the image while it remained at a distance, held there by wine and companionship. Instead, he told them how he was separated from his unit at the beginning of the retreat, during a Stuka attack. He didn’t mention his injury because he didn’t want the corporals to know about it. Instead he explained how they were walking cross-country to Dunkirk to avoid the air raids along the main roads. Jean-Marie said, “So it’s true what they’re saying. You’re leaving.”