Henderson's Boys: Scorched Earth

  ‘There’s going to be a vote,’ the policeman said. ‘But the mood is militant. I’d be astonished if it wasn’t overwhelmingly in favour of a strike.’

  Maxine, Henderson and Hawk gathered into a huddle as the police representative left. Apart from the projectionist and the boys up the back, the only people left in the cinema were five deputy leaders of the Ghost Circuit – and Maxine had seen at least two of them clapping the walkout.

  Maxine smudged out a tear and addressed them. ‘If I give orders now, will you follow them?’

  To Maxine’s surprise the five leaders all nodded.

  ‘There wouldn’t be real resistance in Paris if you hadn’t nurtured and protected it,’ one of the men said.

  ‘That’s appreciated,’ Maxine said, before pausing to think. ‘I don’t want an uprising. But it seems there’s going to be one and I give you free rein to support it in any way you wish.’

  Hawk sounded shocked. ‘Maxine,’ he blurted. ‘You can’t support—’

  Maxine turned to the colonel. ‘Get a message to Allied command. Tell them what’s about to happen and beg them not to bypass Paris.’

  At the other end of the cinema, Paul stepped back into the projection booth. He had to shout over the whirring dynamos.

  ‘Good news, bad news,’ he yelled. ‘The good news is, you can stop pedalling. I don’t think they’ll be showing the film.’

  ‘Are you bloody kidding?’ PT said, gasping for air as he stopped his bike.

  ‘And the bad news?’ Marc asked.

  Paul took a deep breath. ‘It looks like the resistance is about to start a war with the Germans.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Thursday 17 August–Saturday 19 August 1944

  Thursday was a day for rumours. Henderson ordered his team to stay out of the city centre, so the boys climbed up on the apartment block’s roof with binoculars to try and see if there was anything exciting going on. Heat made the city shimmer, but they could only speculate on the pillars of smoke and the odd bang in the distance.

  Had the uprising kicked off, or were the Germans setting things on fire as they continued their evacuation?

  A neighbour who’d phoned a friend in the city told Henderson that the police had taken control of the central prefecture; railwaymen hadn’t reported for work and resistance groups had begun shooting at German patrols.

  At the bottom of the hill by the bridge, Edith got hold of an underground news sheet. It backed up the information from their downstairs neighbour, but led on a cry for the whole of Paris to rise up and start killing Germans.

  At 7 p.m., BBC Radio France confirmed widespread strikes and a minor uprising in central Paris. It also reported that Allied troops were less than 15 kilometres from the city’s western suburbs.

  As night fell there were gunshots and German convoys rumbling across the bridge near the bottom of their street. Reassuringly, there were no signs of large-scale fighting, or heavy artillery. Nobody in the apartment could sleep because of the heat and tension, so they sat up through the early hours playing low-stakes poker and talking about what they all planned to do when the war ended.

  Friday morning brought even hotter weather and more gunfire. Luc asked if he could take a sniper rifle into town and kill some Germans. Henderson said he wouldn’t stop him, but not to bother coming back if he did. Luc stayed, because for all his tough-guy act, Henderson and his team were the closest thing he had to a family.

  ‘So we spend another day sunbathing while it all happens without us?’ Luc asked sourly.

  Luc was always the boldest in confronting Henderson, but Marc, Sam and Joel didn’t like being cooped up in the apartment either, and shared most of his feelings.

  ‘You can train an infantryman in four weeks,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ve been training you lot for four years. I’d rather wait until we can do something that makes a real difference, than to risk your lives taking a few pot-shots at a German patrol.’

  Everyone understood Henderson’s logic, but that didn’t make sitting around while momentous things happened a few kilometres away any less frustrating.

  Paul tried to kill off Friday afternoon by sketching the city from the roof, while PT sunbathed next to him. Luc went downstairs to Laure’s place, Edith read a novel and Joel, Sam and Marc headed out on to the street for a kick-about.

  You had to go downhill to the riverbank to find ground flat enough for football. Kids were all on summer holidays, so they joined a game with a group of youths ranging from twelve up to about sixteen.

  Heat and hunger meant long sprints and hard tackles were off the cards and players dropped out and joined teen girls sitting on the kerbs when they got knackered. Little kids played skipping, chasing and fighting games on steeper ground at the base of the hill, while grandmothers on apartment balconies kept an eye out for grazed elbows and tantrums.

  Sam had the ball 10 metres from goal when the lad marking him caught his heel on an uneven cobble and hit the deck. Sam neatly rolled the ball back from the kid’s outstretched legs and flicked it across to a shirtless thirteen-year-old making a run on goal.

  The kid brought the ball down nicely, but scuffed his shot and kicked it limply at the keeper. Since they were playing on cobbles, the goalie punted the ball with an outstretched foot rather than diving to scoop it up.

  Marc saw the ball coming and flung his leg out, more in hope than expectation. The resulting volley arced through the air, glanced off the keeper’s shoulder and passed between goalposts marked by rusty buckets.

  ‘Genius!’ Marc roared, as cheers broke out among his teammates.

  A couple of younger lads slapped Marc on the back, while a kid on the other team moaned that Marc shouldn’t be playing because he was too old.

  ‘Aww, go cry to your mummy,’ Marc said. ‘You’ve got two players bigger than me.’

  ‘They went home!’

  ‘And how’s that my fault?’ Marc said, backing off as he realised that he was acting more like he was ten than sixteen.

  Kick-off got delayed because the keeper Marc volleyed was getting abuse from his teammates and didn’t want to stay in goal. When nobody volunteered to replace him the keeper headed home in a strop.

  The game was about to resume with Joel in goal, when everyone got distracted by a tiny, ruby-red Peugeot coming down the hill with its horn blasting. The engine was misfiring and judging by the thick plume of exhaust it was running on black-market petrol of less-than-premium quality.

  At the bottom of the hill the car turned so sharply that it almost rolled before stopping on the edge of the football pitch by the main doors of Saint Cloud’s municipal building. By some extraordinary act of contortion, six young men emerged from the tiny two-doored car. Two carried aged revolvers, while the other four were armed with fire axes and garden tools. All wore white armbands with the handwritten initials FFI, which stood for Forces of the French Interior.

  Judging by their youth and unkempt hair the men were Maquis. Three were local enough to get recognised and kissed by some of the girls, while one found two younger brothers and had a tearful reunion.

  It was a jubilant scene, but Joel, Marc and Sam all worried that things could turn nasty if the Germans turned up and tried to arrest the young draft dodgers.

  A crowd of thirty kids and youths watched as the leading Maquis tried getting into the government offices. He’d expected to find the door open and looked disappointed as he read the opening times and discovered that it closed at 1.30 p.m. on a Friday.

  He rattled the door, then made a fairly feeble shoulder charge.

  ‘Shoot the lock,’ one of the watching kids suggested.

  One of the Maquis seemed to consider this, until his mate reminded him that they only had fourteen bullets. Eventually, one of the Maquis lads forced a small window and lifted an eleven-year-old boy through the opening. The boy opened the door from the inside, and bowed theatrically as the crowd gave him a cheer.

  Five Maquis charged in, while
a sixth rushed back to the car to grab a flag. Within a minute they were all up at a second-floor window. There were more cheers as one lad unfurled a grubby-looking French tricolour with FFI painted across it. There was no flagpole, so he tied it to the balcony and shouted.

  ‘Long live France, long live the resistance!’

  Exuberant youngsters cheered and clapped. Some had begun a charge into the building and tore Hitler’s picture off the wall and took turns stomping on it.

  Marc looked nervously across the river, then at Sam and Joel. ‘One shot from a tank on the opposite embankment would kill the lot of ’em.’

  As Sam nodded, an elderly lady stood below the hanging flag and started yelling. ‘Yves Raimond, stop being an idiot and take that flag down.’

  Yves identified himself with a wave from the balcony. ‘Hello, madame. Do you still teach at the primary school?’

  The teacher wagged her finger angrily. ‘Yves, this is not a game! All of you kids get out of there before the Germans see what you’ve done.’

  ‘I’ll fight the Germans!’ Yves shouted, managing to sound brave and pathetic at the same time.

  Marc shook his head and spoke to Sam. ‘They’re sure to hold ’em off with fourteen bullets and two old revolvers.’

  Joel had just spotted Laure’s two boys jumping around in the crowd. ‘Go home, right now,’ he ordered.

  The older lad shook his head. ‘Mummy said I can stay out until she calls me,’ he said firmly. ‘Unless the Germans come.’

  Joel pointed at the French flag. ‘If the Germans see that, they’ll come all right. Now run straight home before I boot the pair of you up the arse.’

  A few adults had come down the hill to see what was going on and the little Peugeot’s horn blasted as kids jumped about on the driver’s seat.

  ‘Bloody idiots!’ a man in a vest was shouting. ‘This is a peaceful neighbourhood. Why invite trouble?’

  ‘Take that flag down!’ the elderly teacher repeated.

  ‘We’ll fight and die for Paris!’ one of the Maquis shouted. ‘We’re not scared.’

  Marc looked at Sam and Joel. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m getting out of here.’

  Joel spotted Laure’s boys hiding in a doorway. ‘What did I just tell you?’ he shouted, as he grabbed both boys by their wrists and started marching them uphill.

  ‘If this is the standard of the resistance fighters, we’re really in the shit,’ Sam said.

  *

  By Saturday morning the outbreaks of gunfire had spread from central Paris to the suburbs. From apartment roofs you could see French tricolour flags and bursts of gunfire erupt every ten or fifteen minutes. Henderson and Edith walked downhill to see what was going on and found the six lightly-armed Maquis had been bolstered by several Maquis colleagues and a couple of elderly locals.

  As a military man, Henderson saw little point in setting yourself up to be shot inside a building that was of little strategic value. But there was a festive atmosphere amongst the Maquis and the young people hanging around in front of the municipal building. For all their foolishness, Henderson couldn’t help but feel roused by the young Frenchmen, standing under their own flag with the confidence to shoot at Germans.

  Henderson was halfway back up the hill towards the apartment when he heard vehicles crossing the bridge. After four years of not being allowed to drive, it was remarkable how many resistance fighters had taken cars out of mothballs and found a few litres of illicit petrol to get them running.

  The two cars speeding across the bridge had FFI painted on the doors and the lead driver blasted his horn when he saw the French flag draped off the building. The atmosphere changed a minute later when a medium-sized Panzer tank started rattling across the bridge.

  Girls and younger boys poured out on to the cobbles and started running home. Henderson took cover in a doorway 50 metres up the hill, with Edith gripping his arm nervously.

  ‘I doubt he’ll shoot,’ Henderson said, as they were joined in their hiding spot by a pair of teenaged sisters.

  ‘Why?’ Edith asked.

  ‘No need to get this close,’ he explained. ‘Tanks can strike accurately from half a kilometre.’

  But as the tank neared the end of the bridge it slowed down and swung its turret towards the municipal building. One of the Maquis hurled a rock off the building’s roof. He missed by several metres, but a few more got thrown and at least one plinked harmlessly off the side of the tank before it moved off without firing.

  Henderson smiled at Edith as the tank rumbled away. ‘Told you,’ he said.

  Edith laughed. ‘Your brow’s awfully sweaty for someone so confident.’

  ‘It’s a warm day,’ Henderson said, smiling as he stood up to start walking again.

  Edith spoke more seriously as they neared the apartment. ‘If the Germans attack, are we really going to sit in our apartment and let them kill everyone?’

  Henderson avoided a direct answer. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, eh?’

  *

  The BBC’s 7 p.m. bulletin announced that Allied troops were now within 12 kilometres of Paris. It also warned that large-scale German reinforcements were on their way, and that heavy fighting could be expected either in or around Paris in the coming days.

  The Germans deliberately switched all electricity off during the BBC’s evening broadcasts, but it came back on at ten to eight, so that people with mains-only radios could listen to the news on German-controlled Radio France.

  The pro-Nazi broadcast began with a bombastic report, explaining how trainloads of soldiers, tanks and artillery had already begun pouring into Paris to defend the city. This propaganda lacked credibility because everyone knew that the railway workers were on strike and that the lines between Germany and France had been repeatedly cut by the resistance and blasted by Allied bombs.

  The second report was more intriguing. Radio France had never previously mentioned the three-day-old resistance uprising, but it now announced that the administrators of Paris had ‘… generously offered a midnight ceasefire with troublemakers within the capital.’ It then went on to say that leaders of the troublemakers had agreed to stop all anti-German activity. In return, the Germans agreed that there would be no reprisals.

  Henderson and his team were all gathered around the radio as the broadcast ended and the apartments’ electricity supply flickered and died.

  ‘Why a truce?’ Edith asked.

  Marc looked at Henderson as he struck a match for paraffin light. ‘Why would either side agree to a ceasefire?’

  ‘Have you spoken to Maxine about this?’ PT added.

  ‘I haven’t heard from Maxine since she left the news theatre on Wednesday night,’ Henderson said. ‘I’m sure she’ll be busy and she’s probably not keen to use us for anything after your little freelance operation to kill Commander Robert.’

  Paul spoke thoughtfully. ‘Remember how Maxine said that neither the resistance nor the Germans went after the telephone network, because they both found it useful? I guess this is similar. Both the Germans and the resistance need a truce at the moment – all the resistance groups are scared of German reprisals with heavy weapons.’

  Marc nodded. ‘And if the Allies are only a few kilometres from the city, the Germans want to focus their attention on fighting them, not getting bogged down with pockets of resistance.’

  ‘I doubt the ceasefire will hold for long,’ Henderson said. ‘But our food situation is getting critical and this could be our chance to resupply. Marc, have you got the energy for a ride out to Beauvais tomorrow?’

  A loud artillery boom sounded from the Allied lines to the west.

  ‘Doesn’t sound any closer than it did last night,’ Marc said.

  Henderson nodded. ‘Supply lines will be holding the Allies back, as much as anything. They’ve got plenty of men and machines, but the food and the fuel has to make a long voyage across the Channel to Normandy and then trek halfway across France to the front lines.
’

  ‘Tanks drink a lot of fuel,’ Paul agreed.

  Marc returned to Henderson’s question about making a food run to Beauvais. ‘We’ll know the ceasefire’s working if the gunfire stops at midnight. If it does, three of us can ride out to Morel’s farm. We’ll put baskets on the bikes and we’ve got that little tow cart.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Monday 21 August 1944

  Marc opened one eye. The sun was up and he could hear bodies moving around the apartment, but his legs were stiff from the previous day’s seven-hour bike ride and an all-too-brief reunion with Jae. He’d have liked to go back to sleep, but he was stuck to the sheets and it was way too hot.

  Marc was careful not to wake Paul as he stepped over his mattress. Deep thuds rumbled out from central Paris as he entered the kitchen.

  ‘Morning,’ Marc said. ‘That sounds ominous.’

  Edith had boiled some of the eggs they’d picked up from Morel’s farm the day before. Marc joined Luc and Henderson at the dining table and began peeling a speckled eggshell.

  ‘The ceasefire gave both sides a breather,’ Henderson said. ‘But judging by the noise, the Germans have taken their big toys out of storage.’

  ‘Any word from Maxine?’ Marc asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Henderson said. ‘I expect she’s busy.’

  ‘I think she’s forgotten all about us,’ Edith said. ‘Either that or she’s been arrested.’

  ‘Speculation’s pointless,’ Henderson said, his voice dismissive but his face unable to hide deeper concern.

  Shouting erupted in the street as Marc bit the top off his egg. Edith dashed out of the kitchen and crossed to the living-room to see what was going on. The room shuddered as she peered downhill.

  ‘They’re getting shot at down by the river,’ Edith reported.

  By the time Marc, Luc and Henderson reached the window a cloud of white dust was billowing up the street. There was also some kind of megaphone announcement being made. It was too distant to catch every word, but the gist was that the Germans had fired warning shots and given the Maquis inside the municipal building one minute to surrender.