World War Two Fighter Pilot 1.Blue Man Falling by Frank Barnard

Author:Frank Barnard [Frank Barnard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

It was three hours into 1940. It looked the same as 1939. They knew it wasn’t. They wondered, as they walked to their billets, if they would see 1941.

Part three

‘I see a blue man falling.’

Fifteen

Saturday, 11 May 1940

It was four hours since Ossie had crouched in the ditch by the bodies of the French infantry officer and the English corporal, four hours since he had heard laughter as the Oberschutze who hailed from Chicago clicked the safety catch of his hot Schmeisser MP-44 machine pistol, returned to his comrades and the volume on a wireless set had been turned up. Lucienne Delyle. ‘Sur Les Quais du Vieux Paris.’ Four hours since Ossie’s thoughts had flown back to La Vosgienne with Dinghy, long-dead Dinghy sitting beside him and Kit Curtis pushing his way between the tables, angry, accusing; Bébé with that damned Una Westcott, provocative, like maybe something special would happen later. Four hours since he had been snapped back to reality by the Wehrmacht troopers beyond the ditch humming to Delyle’s refrain, thinking of Paris and pleasures to come.

Sur les quais du vieux Paris

Le long de la Seine

Le bonheur sourit

Sur les quais du vieux Paris . . .

Yeah, and four hours since he’d reflected that he’d had himself some pretty damned good bonheur on the quais of old Paris an age ago, back in ’39 . . .

Now he carried on along the ditch on his belly, pushing through nettles and reeds, gasping with the effort and trying to suppress the noise of the gasps, his open mouth taking in gritty liquid, pungent with the ordure of beasts and whatever else the goddammed peasants spread across their God-forsaken hectares. He pictured again the hunched forms of the Frenchman and the Englishman, blood, piss and faeces running into the mud round their bodies but a long way back now.

He risked raising his head above the bank. A few hundred yards away a thin new moon rose behind a copse of sessile oak, its feeble light glimmering through a tracery of branches. The ditch curved to the right and Ossie kept the moon behind him, to the east, as he worked his way, yard by yard, further west.

An oppressive silence hung over the countryside, as though the machine of war had paused for breath. It seemed to magnify the slightest sound marking his progress; the suck of a flying boot pulling out of mire, the splash and wash of water where the channel deepened, the grunt of pain and an involuntary curse as he stumbled into it and lost his footing and fell, or half fell, his fingers clawing into the earth of the bank, jarring his shoulder, still numb but working fine. It made him think about the Feldwebel: the schoolmaster with the fat wife, the comfortable home and the small heads bent over arithmetic books; the schoolmaster who knew about playground misfortunes and how to pop a shoulder joint back into place, and had died under the machetes of the Senegalese tirailleurs.

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