Agent of Fortune by Kurt Magenta

Author:Kurt Magenta [Magenta, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Fire Watch

They had been planning for the bombs, waiting for them – and then in the space of a few hours the long uneasy summer went up in flames.

On the day the Blitz began, the Germans didn’t wait until dark: the first wave came over at five in the afternoon. The weather was, once again, inappropriately glorious. The sun flashed on the undersides of the bombers. Hundreds of them, flying in formation, with a tooth-setting sound like a bow being dragged across cello strings. The smaller shapes of escorting fighters zithered around them.

Most of Passy’s team were at headquarters that Saturday, simply because it had become home to them, a combination of office, mess and club room. They worked, they joked, they smoked, they listened to the wireless and occasionally they retired to the pub nearby.

And so they were all standing in the square to watch the raiders fly over, as open-mouthed and shivery as the rest of London.

‘Well,’ said Roché, craning his neck, ‘would you look at that.’

Sounds and sensations were stacked one upon the other. The lingering wail of the siren, the harsh bark of the anti-aircraft guns – ‘ack-ack’, they were called – so close that it vibrated in the hollow of your chest; followed by the rolling boom of exploding shells, which stitched the blue sky with white puffs. And then the shriek and thump as the first bombs were dropped. The sky began to redden. Lucien could smell burning.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said.

‘There’s never been anything like it,’ responded Duquesnoy, beside him. ‘This doesn’t happen.’

At just after six the all clear sounded and they returned to the pub, which seemed the only sane response. The place was as packed as Christmas Eve. At eight the warning sounded again. The raiders were back for a another round.

In the morning Londoners felt sick and dazed, as if waking in the ruins of a party trampled by drunks. As they emerged from homes and shelters, they discovered a city humbled but by no means vanquished. In some streets entire buildings had disappeared, leaving ragged gaps like the bite-marks of passing dragons. Then turn a corner and everything was pristine.

Still, there was movement. Families whose homes had been vaporised carted any belongings they could find, in wheelbarrows and prams, to the houses of relatives, or to safe havens in church halls and empty schools. The clean-up began, and those involved in it did not speak of what they found, from time to time, in the rubble.

Some had become inured overnight. The screeching of the bombs had terrified them at first, but after a while the constant explosions had left them numb, even contemptuous. They wrote in their diaries that if they could survive that first terrible night, they could survive anything.

For every raid, two men would be stationed on the roof, watching for incendiaries. These stick-shaped combustible bombs had the double effect of setting the city ablaze while lighting the way for the next wave of bombers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.