Pied Piper (10 page)

It came at about half-past eight, when they had been there for an hour and a half. There were a few people on the platform by that time, not very many. It steamed into the station, towering above them; there were two soldiers on the footplate of the engine with the train crew.

To his delight, it was not a crowded train. He made as quickly as he could for a first-class compartment, and found one occupied only by two morose officers of the
Armée de l’ Air
. The children swarmed on to the seats and climbed all over the carriage, examining everything, chattering to each other in mixed French and English.
The two officers looked blacker; before five minutes had elapsed they had got up, swearing below their breath, and had removed to another carriage.

Howard looked at them helplessly as they went. He would have liked to apologise, but he didn’t know how to put it.

Presently, he got the children to sit down. Mindful of chills he said: ‘You’d better put your coats on now. Rose, you put yours on, too.’

He proceeded to put Sheila into hers. Rose looked around the carriage blankly. ‘Monsieur—where is my coat? And my hat, also?’

He looked up. ‘Eh? You had them when we got into the train?’

But she had not had them. She had rushed with the other children to the carriage, heedless, while Howard hurried along behind her, burdened with luggage. Her coat and hat had been left upon the station bench.

Her face wrinkled up, and she began to cry. The old man stared at her irritably for a moment; he had thought that she would be a help to him. Then the patience borne of seventy years of disappointments came to his aid; he sat down and drew her to him, wiping her eyes. ‘Don’t bother about it,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll get another hat and another coat in Paris. You shall choose them yourself.’

She sobbed: ‘But they were so expensive.’

He wiped her eyes again. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t be helped. I’ll tell your aunt when I send the telegram that it wasn’t your fault.’

Presently she stopped crying. Howard undid one of his many parcels of food and they all had a bit of an orange to eat, and all troubles were forgotten.

The train went slowly, stopping at every station and occasionally in between. From Dijon to Tonnerre is seventy miles; they pulled out of that station at about half-past eleven, three hours after leaving Dijon. The children had stood the journey pretty well so far; for the last hour they had been running up and down the corridor shouting, while the old man dozed uneasily in a corner of the compartment.

He roused after Tonnerre, and fetched them all back into the carriage for
déjeuner
of sandwiches and milk and oranges. They ate slowly, with frequent distractions to look out of the window. Sandwiches had a tendency to become mislaid during these pauses, and to vanish down between the cushions of the seats. Presently they were full. He gave them each a cup of milk, and laid Sheila down to rest upon the seat, covered over with the blanket he had bought in Dijon. He made Rose and Ronnie sit down quietly and look at Babar; then he was able to rest himself.

From Tonnerre to Joigny is thirty miles. The train was going slower than ever, stopping for long periods for no apparent reason. Once, during one of these pauses, a large flight of aeroplanes passed by the window, flying very high; the old man was shocked to hear the noise of gunfire, and to see a few white puffs of smoke burst in the cloudless sky far, far below them. It seemed incredible, but they must be German. He strained his eyes for fighters so far as he could do without calling the attention of the children from their books, but there were no fighters to be seen. The machines wheeled slowly round and headed back towards the east, unhindered by the ineffective fire.

The old man sank back into his seat, full of doubts and fears.

He was dozing a little when the train pulled into Joigny soon after one o’clock. It stood there in the station in the hot sunlight, interminably. Presently a man came down the corridor.

‘Descendez, monsieur,’
he said. ‘This train goes no farther.’

Howard stared up at him dumbfounded. ‘But—this is the Paris train?’

‘It is necessary to change here. One must descend.’

‘When will the next train leave for Paris?’

‘I do not know monsieur. That is a military affair.’

He got the children into their coats, gathered his things together, and presently was on the platform, burdened with his luggage, with the three children trailing after him. He went straight to the station-master’s office. There was an officer there, a
capitaine des transports
. The old man asked a few straight questions, and got straight answers.

‘There will be no more trains for Paris, monsieur. None at all. I cannot tell you why, but no more trains will run north from Joigny.’

There was a finality in his tone that brooked no argument. The old man said: ‘I am travelling to St. Malo, for England, with these children. How would you advise me to get there?’

The young officer stared at him. ‘St. Malo? That is not the easiest journey, now, monsieur.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There would be trains from Chartres … And in one hour, at half-past two, there is an autobus for Montargis … You must go by Montargis, monsieur. By the autobus to Montargis, then to Pithiviers, from
Pithiviers to Angerville, and from Angerville to Chartres. From Chartres you will be able to go by train to St. Malo.’

He turned to an angry Frenchwoman behind Howard, and the old man was elbowed out of the way. He retired on to the platform, striving to remember the names of the places that he had just heard. Then he thought of his little
Baedeker
and got it out, and traced the recommended course across country to Chartres. It skirted round Paris, sixty miles farther west. So long as there were buses one could get to Chartres that way, but Heaven alone knew how long it would take.

He knew the ropes where French country autobuses were concerned. He went and found the bus out in the station yard, and sat in it with the children. If he had been ten minutes later he would not have found a seat.

Worried and distracted by the chatter of the children, he tried to plan his course. To go on to Montargis seemed the only thing to do, but was he wise to do it? Would it not be better to try and travel back to Dijon? The route that he had been given through Montargis to Chartres was quite a sensible one according to his
Baedeker;
it lay along a good main road for the whole of the hundred miles or so to Chartres. This bus would give him a good lift of thirty-five or forty miles upon the way, so that by the time he left it he would be within sixty miles of Chartres and the railway to St. Malo; provided he could get a bus to carry him that sixty miles he would be quite all right. If all went well he would reach Chartres that night, and St. Malo the next morning; then the cross-channel boat and he would be home in England.

It seemed all right, but was it really wise? He could
get back to Dijon, possibly, though even that did not seem very certain. But if he got back there, what then? With the Germans driving forward into France from the north, and the Italians coming up from the south, Dijon seemed to be between two fires. He could not stay indefinitely in Dijon. It was better, surely, to take courage and go forward in the bus, north and by west in the direction of the Channel and home.

The bus became filled with a hot, sweating crowd of French country people. All were agitated and upset, all bore enormous packages with them, all were heading to the west. Howard took Sheila on his knee to make more room and squeezed Ronnie standing up between his legs. Rose pressed up against him, and an enormous woman with a very small infant in her arms shared the seat with them. From the conversation of the people in the bus Howard learned that the Germans were still pouring on, but that Paris would be defended to the last. Nobody knew how far the Germans had advanced, how near to Joigny they might be. It was wise to move, to go and stay with relations farther to the west.

One man said: ‘The Chamber has left Paris. It is now at Tours.’ Somebody else said that that rumour was not true, and a desultory argument began. Nobody seemed to take much interest in the Chamber; Paris and the life of cities meant very little to these peasants and near-peasants.

It was suffocatingly hot in the bus. The two English children stood it better than Howard could have expected;
la petite
Rose seemed to be more affected than they were. Howard, looking down, saw that she had gone very white. He bent towards her.

‘Are you tired?’ he said kindly. She shook her head mutely. He turned and struggled with the window at his side; presently he succeeded in opening it a little and letting in a current of warm, fresh air.

Presently the driver climbed into his seat, and the grossly overloaded vehicle lumbered from the square.

The movement brought a little more air into the bus.

They left the town after a couple of stops, carrying an additional load of people on the roof. They started out along the long straight roads of France, dusty and in poor repair. The dust swirled round the heavy vehicle; it drove in at the open window, powdering them all. Ronnie, standing between the old man’s legs, clung to the window, avid for all that he could see; Howard turned Sheila on his lap with difficulty, so that she could see out too.

Beside him, presently, Rose made a little wailing cry. Howard looked down, and saw her face white with a light greenish hue; before he could do anything to help her she had vomited upon the floor.

For a moment he was startled and disgusted. Then patience came back to him; children couldn’t help that sort of thing. She was coughing and weeping; he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped her face and comforted her.

‘Pauvre petite chou,’
he said awkwardly. ‘You will be better now. It is the heat.’

With some struggling he moved Sheila over and lifted Rose up on his knee, so that she could see out and have more air. She was still crying bitterly; he wiped her eyes and talked to her as gently as he could. The broad woman by him smiled serenely, quite unmoved by the disaster.

‘It is the rocking,’ she said in soft Midland French,
‘like the sea. Always I have been sick when, as a little girl, I have travelled. Always, always. In the train and in the bus, always, quite the same.’ She bent down.
‘Sois tranquille, ma petite,’
she said. ‘It is nothing, that.’

Rose glanced up at her, and stopped crying. Howard chose the cleanest corner of his handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Thereafter she sat very quiet and subdued upon his knee, watching the slowly moving scene outside the window.

‘I’m never sick in motor-cars,’ said Ronnie proudly in English. The woman looked at them with new curiosity; hitherto they had spoken in French.

The road was full of traffic, all heading to the west. Old battered motor-cars, lorries, mule carts, donkey-carts, all were loaded to disintegration point with people making for Montargis. These wound in and out among the crowds of people pushing hand-carts, perambulators, wheelbarrows even, all loaded with their goods. It was incredible to Howard; it seemed as though the whole countryside were in flight before the armies. The women working in the fields looked up from time to time in pauses of their work to stare at the strange cavalcade upon the highway. Then they bent again to the harvest of their roots; the work in hand was more important than the strange tides that flowed upon the road.

Half-way to Montargis the bus heeled slowly to the near side. The driver wrestled with the steering; a clattering bump, rhythmic, came from the near back wheel. The vehicle drew slowly to a stop beside the road.

The driver got down from his seat to have a look. Then he walked slowly back to the entrance to the bus. ‘
Un
pneu
,’ he said succinctly. ‘
Il faut descendre—tout le monde
. We must change the wheel.’

Howard got down with relief. They had been sitting in the bus for nearly two hours, of which an hour had been upon the road. The children were hot and tired and fretful; a change would obviously be a good thing. He took them one by one behind a little bush in decent manner; a proceeding which did not escape the little crowd of passengers collected by the bus. They nudged each other.
‘C’est un anglais …’

The driver, helped by a couple of the passengers, wrestled to jack up the bus and get the flat wheel off. Howard watched them working for a little time; then it occurred to him that this was a good opportunity to give the children tea. He fetched his parcel of food from the rack, and took the children a few yards up the road from the crowd. He sat them down upon the grass verge in the shade of a tree, and gave them sandwiches and milk.

The road stretched out towards the west, dead straight. As far as he could see it was thronged with vehicles, all moving the same way. He felt it really was a most extraordinary sight, a thing that he had never seen before, a population in migration.

Presently Rose said she heard an aeroplane.

Instinctively, Howard turned his head. He could hear nothing.

‘I hear it,’ Ronnie said. ‘Lots of aeroplanes.’

Sheila said: ‘I want to hear the aeroplane.’ ‘Silly,’ said Ronnie. ‘There’s lots of them. Can’t you hear?’

The old man strained his ears, but he could hear nothing. ‘Can you see where they are?’ he asked, nonchalantly.
A cold fear lurked in the background of his mind.

The children scanned the sky.
‘V’là,’
said Rose, pointing suddenly.
‘Trois avions—là.’

Ronnie twisted round in excitement to Howard. ‘They’re coming down towards us! Do you think we’ll see them close?’

‘Where are they?’ he enquired. He strained his eyes in the direction from which they had come. ‘Oh, I see. They won’t come anywhere near here. Look, they’re going down over there.’

‘Oh …’ said Ronnie, disappointed. ‘I did want to see them close.’

They watched the aircraft losing height towards the road, about two miles away. Howard expected to see them land among the fields beside the road, but they did not land. They flattened out and flew along just above the tree-tops, one on each side of the road and one behind flying down the middle. A little crackling rattle sounded from them as they came. The old man stared, incredulous—it could not be …