Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ had bled. Once more, he felt sick with primeval fear.

      He took a large breath and then looked carefully round. Hesitantly, he stepped over the corpses of poor Madame Lefebvre, her father, who had been the village shoemaker, and the three grandchildren. Michel knew the house from many a visit and he went straight to a cupboard at the back of the room. In it, he found a very dry loaf, a jug of milk, which had soured, and some cheese. There was nothing else. He gazed in amazement at the milk, which had, in its heavy pottery jug, survived whatever explosion had killed the family.

      He hesitated again. He was well acquainted with the family lying on the floor and would not, for the world, have stolen from them. Then he told himself not to be a fool; they would never have need of bread again. He picked up the loaf and blew the dust off it. The cheese had been in a covered dish and the milk had several layers of butter muslin draped over it; they were not so impregnated with the all-pervading dust.

      Balancing the milk carefully, he took the food back to his mother. She was still standing in the middle of the street, a lost soul with nowhere to go.

      Afraid of booby traps left by the Germans, they remained standing where they were. They gulped down the whey from the milk and ate the bread and cheese between them.

      The food revived them. Desperate to find some safety, they had a hasty consultation, during which they had to continue to speak loudly to each other.

      ‘We should walk down to Bayeux,’ Michel said. ‘The other day, the postman mentioned that it was taken at the beginning of the invasion – undamaged. I can’t think of anywhere else to get help, can you? And we might find out where Uncle Léon and his boat are.’

      Madame Benion agreed. Anything to get out of the hell so quickly created round them.

      As they walked slowly along the road leading out of the village, they were greeted, with relief, by four other terrified survivors whom they knew by sight, all rather deaf, each with faltering tales of dead children, ruined homes and ruined farms.

      As they proceeded, people emerged, by ones and twos, out of side lanes or from the trampled fields and devastated villages. They were few, most having fled earlier, and fewer still were children. All were bent on reaching Bayeux in an effort to get behind the Allied lines and not be caught again between the opposing armies.

      Apart from personal safety, they sought medical help for wounded relations and friends, who were too badly hurt to be moved or who still lay amid the rubble. This made Michel feel guilty that he had not searched the village for wounded French before he left it. The silence had, however, convinced him that there was nobody there. He forgot his impaired hearing.

      One demented man demanded that they all turn round and go to his village, in order to dig out his family from the ruins of their home. The frightened little group stopped to argue about this for a few minutes, and then agreed that it would be madness to tramp back through the battlefield again; perhaps be blown up by Allied fire if the Germans managed to mount a counteroffensive. It would be better to press on to Bayeux from whence medical help, ambulances and soldiers who understood land mines – les démineurs – might be sent into the countryside.

      They met Allied infantry being moved up to the front in personnel carriers. The procession was closely followed by tanks and Jeeps with a vanguard of motorcyclists, who tried, not always successfully, to push refugees off the roads to make way for the advancing military.

      The weary civilians found it difficult to walk on the verge of the road. They struggled through the long wet grass and, occasionally, flung themselves to the ground at the menacing sound of diving aircraft. Though they were equally afraid of mines lying in the undergrowth of the great hedges which often marked the edge of a property, the greenery did give an illusion of cover, when, in the hope of impeding the Allies’ advance, the few planes the Luftwaffe had available swept low overhead to machine-gun all and sundry.

      The forlorn little group struggled grimly on, trying not to stumble into the roadside ditch, which had several inches of water in it.

      They were twice hastily scattered, however, by a British tank pressing its way through the heavy, deep-rooted hedges and on to the road. They also met a foot patrol of English soldiers with red crosses on their sleeves, which eased its way through the hedgerows from a field behind them.

      A little surprised to find civilians whom, they had imagined, would have earlier fled the area, the medics said briefly, in English, that they were checking for wounded. They enquired of the refugees if they had seen anyone, Allied or German, lying hurt; they did not mention French casualties.

      Seeing the bewilderment of the refugees at being queried in English, Michel appointed himself interpreter.

      Once the soldiers had managed to make themselves understood, they were told sadly in chorus that only the dead had been seen. There were, however, frantic inter-jections that there were French casualties in the villages, for whom the refugees hoped to find help.

      The patrol leader, a lance corporal, obviously shaken by their stories, kindly promised to do his best to inform civilian authorities. ‘They’re probably out there somewhere already,’ he said rather helplessly.

      ‘This is the last call for lunch,’ he added, with an attempt at humour. ‘Most of the wounded has been took in – a few Jerries amongst them.’ And on being asked, he replied cheerfully with all the optimism of a nineteen-year-old that yes, he thought it was true that Bayeux was still standing, undamaged. He turned to his fidgeting patrol and chivvied the men forward. As the group began to move, some of them looked back at the refugees and shouted, ‘Good luck!’

      The little group of villagers, trailing behind three people going slightly faster through a deserted hamlet, were horrified by a sudden explosion which blew up those ahead, spattering their remains on those following them. It was the first time that Michel had seen his tough, silent mother so distressed that she vomited.

      They were further very shocked and frightened at the sight of small, loose groups of British commandos casually looting the remains of homes, and shooting out windows or booting open shut doors. One soldier came out of a wrecked church, brandishing joyfully a glittering cross from the altar. A stranded car formed a great entertainment to the invaders as they reduced it to wreckage. A terrified horse was used as a target. When the frightened owner protested, he was shoved roughly to one side.

      Since there were no officers with any of these groups, Michel assumed that they were deserters. He felt that since they had nothing to lose, they were probably much more dangerous than the more orderly units they had seen.

      The tiny band of refugees, unanimous in their fear of the plunderers, edged in and out of nearby lanes or scattered through the hedgerows to avoid such menaces, and when they had passed, whispered to each other that they had never expected this of the Allies. ‘Worse than the godforsaken Bodies,’ one man said.

      ‘Every army has some criminals in it,’ replied an exhausted elderly man with almost saintly acceptance. ‘Saw it in the Great War.’

      That evening, filthy, blood-bespattered, foodless and footsore, they walked into Bayeux, which looked blessedly normal after what they had seen en route, though there were crowds of civilians as well as military personnel in the streets.

      While shocked passers-by, both troops and civilians, stared at them, Madame Benion looked at her son and mourned, ‘Whatever shall we do?’

      Michel had been thinking about this, as they struggled through the ruined countryside, and he replied, ‘Find a church. The priests will surely be helping refugees. СКАЧАТЬ