I kept working my way past farmhouses with thatch-roofed barns and a shadowy castle draped in fog along a river. It felt like I’d marched through centuries, back to some barbaric age. I imagined kings, with fur caps and dark beards, who hunted in the woods along the river, wandering the castle’s firelit hallways. I ate what little food I could scavenge and rooted around for snails on the forest floor, digging the meaty parts out with the tip of my dagger. They tasted like diluted salt and slipped down my throat like hunks of phlegm. After eating, I doctored my feet, changing the bandaging, which soaked through from all my walking. My bare feet showed the charred nubbins where my toes had been, each pinched off like the end of a sausage link.
I crossed into Belgium and made my way to Bruges. There were people in the streets of the city: a French mountain man in a full-length bear-fur coat; an old man with a Lord Kitchener mustache; and a small girl in a shabby smock of a dress, holding one handle of a bag tethered to a tired-looking woman with greasy, brown hair. The bulbous end of a baguette stuck out of their bag, and the little girl’s dark eyes watched the bread as she was dragged along by the woman’s grip. Around them was the rubble of buildings left in the wake of the Allied bombings. The old couple had given me a change of clothes, farmer’s clothes, but the city people eyed my hobbled gait with suspicion anyway.
There were posters on the walls: Nazi propaganda intended for Belgians and Frenchmen, as the British at the time were sinking French naval ships in the Mediterranean to keep them from falling into German hands. The posters said thirteen hundred French sailors had been killed by the RAF. So the Nazis wanted the French and Belgians to take up arms against the RAF. The posters helped me decide on an escape route through northern Europe. I figured the less time in France the better, as the country would likely have every kind of displaced person, and the allegiances would be too varied to navigate safely.
My first night in Bruges, as I slept in the main square of town, prisoners were roped together and shuffled through the streets to the train station. Floodlights filled the air overhead, sweeping back and forth. If I watched the lights long enough, they turned into stars that had become mobile, swirling around in space.
23
The Knight’s Cross was now sewn into the canvas lining on the inside of my backpack. The orders of a soldier, Hedrick Sherman, were in my right cargo pocket. Hedrick was due to report to guard detail on the islands out in the English Channel, which the Germans had taken over. The orders were dated for two months ago, but I took ink and carved a potato with a relief of the new date and pressed it onto the forms. At the train station in Brussels, the guards glanced at the papers, my uniform, and then let me board a train to France. It was filled with immigrant workers, other soldiers, and civilians who looked like this was part of their quotidian lives. It was easier to blend into the crowd than I’d anticipated.
In Rouen, where the tracks would have crossed the Seine River, the bridge had been destroyed. Everyone unloaded from the train, and were ferried across on a small barge to the other side, where we boarded another train and kept on going west and then north to Cherbourg.
When the train got to Cherbourg, I’d intended to steal a boat and work my way across the Channel, but all the small passenger boats in the harbor had been sunk, and soldiers even took axes to the hulls of the little dinghies. My only other option was to wait in a military compound for a boat out to the island of Jersey to take me to my fake post and try to steal a boat from there.
I spent the night debating whether I’d made a huge mistake staying to the north to try to cross the Channel as opposed to going south, through the Pyrenees Mountains, and trying to work my way to Gibraltar. Though there was no way of knowing if I could have made it such a distance. I decided to start practicing a story about being late arriving to my post.
In the morning, with the identity of Hedrick, whom I decided had been delayed after having his feet wounded in a bombing raid in Utrecht, I boarded the boat to Jersey. It was a fisherman’s boat, not that different from Uncle Martin’s. The boat’s owner was a Frenchman who had also been conscripted into service. His name was Fabien. Fabien’s face was narrow and rigid, and he wore a thick bird’s nest of a beard. In the wheelhouse with Fabien, we spoke English because Fabien’s German and my French were both poor.
“This is a good boat,” I said to him after we pushed off.
“She’s been good to me.” Fabien eyed the water ahead of him.
The only other person onboard was another soldier, who had gone belowdecks to sleep. I asked Fabien about how he’d come to be a ferryman, and told him my family had done the same thing. I shared that I was a Dutchman and couldn’t wait for the war to be over. “I would like nothing more than to jump the Channel and travel to Britain,” I said, watching Fabien’s reaction. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Dangerous talk,” he said.
“Profitable though, I imagine.”
The two of us sailed in silence for a while. Belowdecks, the other man slept. From Cherbourg to Southampton across the Channel it was a mere hundred miles, and I contemplated pulling my gun and making the two men blow by Jersey and sail closer to England. But in the end, I took a gamble, and was frank with Fabien.
“In here, I have papers,” I said, kicking at my bag.
“What kind of papers?” he asked.
“Papers for the other side.”
“I see. Both lucky and dangerous for you,” he said.
“It is, but it could be a big advantage for you.”
“How so?”
“I can pay you to take me closer to the shore, I’ll row the rest of the way.”
“We’ll get blown to hell before we get close, and what would you row on?”
“I can pay you for trying. Get me close enough for an honest shot at fighting the currents with your inflatable life raft.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I have money. A lot of money. You could take care of your family through the rest of the war.”
“You’re a crazy kid, now be quiet.”
“Fabien. Listen to me. All you need to do is get me close enough to row the rest of the way.”
“Even if we didn’t take fire, the rocks on shore would cut you to ribbons, and if that didn’t happen, the British would eat you whole.”
“Get me close. I’ll deal with those things.”
I leaned into Fabien and begged him. “Drop the other soldier off, wait until dark, and we’ll run without lights. I’ll help you navigate. When we’re within sight of land, any land in Britain, I’ll pay you, and you can turn back.” I pulled a stack of francs from my backpack. “This offer expires as soon as I see land on Jersey.”
“What about the other soldier? He’ll know something’s not right.”
“You wake him up and tell him I’ve already gone ashore. I’ll hide in your steering hold until night when you push off again. I’m going to be paying somebody to help me get there, might as well be you. It’s a lot of money. Consider it.”
When Fabien pulled his boat up to Jersey, I ducked down below the wheelhouse console and hid with my backpack in the slimy bilge tank. My Luger was stuffed in my jacket pocket, ready to draw if Fabien changed his mind.