That snow-dappled brown and green ahead-that was England. Tears filled Peggy’s eyes. She’d made it! Well, almost. She still had to cross the Atlantic without getting torpedoed. If you were going to worry about every little thing…
More clunks from below said the wheels were going down again. The plane descended toward London. Peggy looked for bomb craters. The Nazis had boasted about blasting the British capital back to the stone age. One more lie from Goebbels, because she saw little damage.
And then she was down. The DC-3 came in with hardly a bounce. She felt like yelling Yippee! again, but she didn’t. No point to making all the other people on the plane sure she was a lunatic. If she was, she could claim she was out of her mind with joy. At last-at sweet last!-she’d got to a place from which she could go straight to the States. She didn’t care if she booked the fastest liner or some wallowing scow. She’d still get there.
Barring U-boats, of course. The Nazis still claimed England had sunk the Athenia to enrage America and drag her into the war. Maybe they believed that in Germany. Peggy didn’t think it was good for anything but making flowers grow.
But the odds were still with her. Most ships traveling between England and the USA got where they were going. She really did figure hers would, too. She had every intention of taking the chance.
Stuffing Gone with the Wind into her purse, she stood up and headed back toward the door at the left rear of the cabin. Down a few steps after that, and then her own personal feet touched English soil. That, too, seemed just about good enough for a Yippee! Again, though, she refrained. Herb would have admired her restraint.
Herb! My God! She’d have to get used to having a husband around again. And she was going to have to keep her big mouth shut forever about a drunken night in Berlin. She’d guessed Constantine Jenkins was a fairy. Wrong! So wrong!
After she got her suitcase, she had to clear customs. The inspector frowned at all the stamps that bore the German eagle and swastika. “You’ve had a busy time of it, what?” he said.
“Buddy, you don’t know the half of it!” Peggy exclaimed.
Something in her voice brought a thin smile out on his face-the only kind he had, she suspected. “I daresay I ought to give you to the matrons for a strip search and slit the lining of your bag here,” he remarked. “I ought to, but I shan’t.” He plied his rubber stamp with might and main. “Welcome to the United Kingdom, Mrs. Druce. Welcome to freedom.”
“Freedom!” Peggy echoed dreamily. “I remember that-I think.” The customs inspector laughed, for all the world as if she were joking.
Now that Alistair Walsh had got to know him, Dr. Murdoch turned out to be a good source of information. “They’re going to extract us,” he told Walsh one freezing night-as if Namsos came equipped with any other kind. “Sounds like dentistry, eh?”
Walsh’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He remembered-painfully remembered-wisdom teeth with which he’d parted company. Army dentists had never heard of the Geneva Convention. Turn them loose on the Fritzes and they’d likely win the war in a fortnight.
“Have you got another fag on you?” the staff sergeant asked. That was the other thing Murdoch was good for: the man was a tobacco magnet. In a place like this, where everything was always in short supply, that made him someone to reckon with. Sure enough, he handed Walsh a packet. Walsh took one-what he’d asked for-and gave it back. He didn’t want the sawbones to think he was greedy. After a long, reverent drag, he asked, “Extracted? How?”
“Ships,” Murdoch answered. “Get in under cover of darkness, be well away by the time the Germans realize we’ve flown the coop. That’s the plan, at any rate-so they tell me.”
What they told him was usually the straight goods. “What happens next?” Walsh wondered out loud. He answered his own question: “The Luftwaffe starts looking for our bloody ships, that’s what. I don’t suppose we’ve got air cover laid on?” He answered himself again: “Too much to hope for. Too far off for fighters to reach.”
“I haven’t heard anything about air cover,” Beverly Murdoch admitted.
“When they find us, then, we’re sitting ducks,” Walsh said.
“Would you sooner be taken prisoner?”
“No-o-o,” Walsh said slowly. “I’d also sooner not drown, though, if it’s all the same to you. And I’d sooner not be blown to smithereens.”
“What the deuce are you doing in the Army, then?”
That was another good question, no doubt about it. Walsh gave a rueful shrug. “I was in in 1918. Didn’t seem to be much work on the civilian side when the last war ended, so I stayed in. They won’t turn loose of me now till I do get blown up, or till I’m too old to soldier any more.”
“The more fool you,” Murdoch said, and Walsh was in a poor position to tell him he was wrong.
Thanks to the doctor’s warning, he had a couple of extra days to ready his men for the planned withdrawal to the harbor. Everything had to seem as normal as possible, so the Germans wouldn’t pursue with all their strength. That would be what the withdrawal needed, wouldn’t it? Machine guns and maybe tanks banging away as Tommies and poilus and Norwegians tried to board ship? Walsh had been thinking what juicy targets they’d make on the water. They’d be even juicier if they got caught like that.
And a few men-volunteers all, and mostly Norwegians- would stay behind, to man Allied machine guns and try to create the impression that everybody was still in the lines. Walsh admired them without wanting to be one of their number. He aimed to go on fighting the war till the enemy was licked. Mooching around behind barbed wire, eating slop and hoping for Red Cross packages, held no appeal. The Norwegians had a chance of getting away and blending in with the scenery. He didn’t.
On the appointed night, he made his way back toward the docks. Engineers often put up white tapes to guide men and machines in the darkness without showing a light. Here, they’d used black ones to stand out against the snow. It was a nice touch. He wondered where they’d got them.
High above the clouds, airplane engines thuttered. Bombs started raining down far behind the German lines. That was another nice touch. Fighters couldn’t make it here from Blighty, but bombers could. And if the RAF pounded the Fritzes, it would make them think the expeditionary force was staying, not going. Walsh hoped like blazes it would, anyhow.
Through the shattered wreckage of Namsos town, a woman’s voice called out, “Good luck, friends! Bonne chance, amis! ” The locals still appreciated what the soldiers from abroad had been doing. That counted for something.
“This way! Step lively! This way!” The authoritative voice could only belong to an MP. Sure enough, the fellow guided traffic with disks on sticks that reminded Walsh of the ones tank crews without radios used to communicate.
He shambled up a gangplank. Only when he was up on deck did he realize he’d boarded another destroyer. It could get in and out faster than a merchantman. It couldn’t carry nearly so many men, though.
Or could it? If they packed people on like sardines going into a tin, maybe it could. They didn’t even have olive oil to grease the works. They did have swearing petty officers. “Keep clear lanes, God damn you!” one of that unpleasant breed shouted. “If the sailors can’t get to the guns, what’re your bloody necks worth?”
That was an interesting question. But the fellows loading the destroyer and the ones trying to keep the ship battleworthy worked at cross purposes. Walsh sympathized with both groups. Everyone was trying to do his own job as well as he could. If everyone succeeded, they might get away yet.
Stranger things had happened. Walsh supposed they must have.