Warsaw Concerto, page 11
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
In the beginning they had not realised that the new hordes coming out of the German wilderness – and possibly escaping the devastation of Central Europe also – had been turned back from the coastal ports and channelled south by the British-led re-conquest of Northern France. The first they had known about that, was when marauding fighter jets had made it too dangerous to move by road during the day.
Nevertheless, in chaos there is opportunity and so it had proved for what had become the White Brigade.
War is chaos, and chaos is war…
Other bands fleeing the madness of the South - ‘brigades’ – had withered, dispersed into the countryside, but they had survived, kept just ahead of the Krasnaya Zarya beasts, and now and then they had halted, laid ambushes and inflicted bloody reverses upon their pursuers.
Once word had got around that the women and children of the communities in its path were safe, and that the ‘Whites’ would defend all those who pledged allegiance to them things had, for a while, got out of hand. At their high point last year, the exhausted – former leftist, but not Red Dawn fighters holding the south bank of the Loire either side of Nantes – had actually welcomed the White Brigade with open arms. By last autumn the Brigade had controlled the Loire Front all the way east to Tours, held the provincial capital of Poitiers and had formed a loose network of alliances and understandings with groups from Bordeaux to la Rochelle, stalling the English and their French lackeys along the Loire Valley.
For a while, the Red Dawn true believers in the Auvergne had been too busy fending off encroachments from the ‘German invaders’ from the east to worry about getting even with former Soviet Major General Sergey Akhromeyev and his gang of deserters.
But that was a year ago and, as the British had just proved, all that had saved the Brigade from total disaster in the last few months was the Free-French Army’s lack of ambition and imagination in the upper Loire Valley. Even now while the Free-French were still holed up in their warm winter billets; taking advantage of the hard frosts which had frozen the mud beneath the tracks of their vehicles, the English had crossed the Loire and suddenly driven deep into ‘White’ territory.
‘Always do what your enemy fears the most,’ Sergey had told her back in Vichy when the brigade was impossibly encircled by heavily armed écorcheurs to the north east and Maxim Machenaud’s ravening zealots to the south and west.
He had led a night attack on the Front Internationale’s main depot in the forests south of the city and while Machenaud’s Red Dawn animals had idiotically become embroiled with ‘German bandits’, the Brigade had slipped out of Vichy like thieves in the night. Unfortunately, there was no similar tactical masterstroke, no magical Spetsnaz rabbit out of a hat trick like that Sergey had manufactured in Vichy, which was going to seriously inconvenience, let alone hold up or turn back the British tanks running wild on the south bank of the Loire.
Most of the two dozen or so Spetsnaz troopers who had accompanied Sergey on his original foray up to Vichy were dead now; attrition in the fighting columns was high, remorseless and winter was now upon the land. With the cold came hunger and sickness, and old pestilences which ought to have been consigned to the dustbin of history waited to strike without warning. They had no twentieth century medicines, not even rudimentary anaesthetics to lessen the agonies of those that surgery might otherwise have saved.
‘We may surrender ground, pull back but we always regroup, we never lose faith!’
That was what Sergey told their people when something went wrong. What Vera did not understand, would never understand, was why their people still followed them? Or why so many had died and so many others were prepared to go on fighting and dying?
Sergey would say in that fatalistic Russian way of his: ‘Better to die like a man, to die like a human being than to leave this world on one’s belly in the mud at the feet of one’s enemies.’
Perhaps, he was right about that.
He was right about most other things…
Vera was tired. She had been fighting all her life and a small, insidious voice in her hear was telling her that it was hopeless, to give in, to lie down and to sleep forever.
Not that that was ever going to happen.
She and Sergey were alike in that; it was in their nature to carry on fighting until one could fight no more.
And then to fight on…
Sergey had understood her perfectly the first time he saw her naked. He had recognised the through and through bullet wound to her left hip, and the unsightly knife wound on the back of her neck - which had gone bad on her at the time – for what they were, and that most people would not have survived either, let alone both injuries.
Much to her surprise he was still interested in her sexually; although, that had ceased to be the bond that bound them – if it ever had - together relatively early in their partnership.
For she and Sergey, and the White Brigade, the war in the Poitou had soon turned into an enterprise to simply keep as many, mainly innocent non-combatants and their families, dependents, communities safe, alive for as long as possible. Territory was incidental, military considerations had become secondary to the greater good of their fast shrinking ‘Brigade’.
Most of the people camped in the ruins of Cholet, the still mainly intact village of La Séguinière and in the surrounding freezing fields of what remained of the former, short-lived ‘Kingdom of the Whites’ knew they would have been dead six months or a year since but for Sergey Akhromeyev.
Sergey and in some small way, her also, because she was, after all, the one who had put him ‘up to it’.
Back in Vichy nearly two years ago, he had planned to take his men into the woods and disappear into the country, travelling light, no baggage. She was the one who had persuaded him that there was another way; a second way which was not just about ‘the way of the warrior’.
Sergey had turned out to be a man full of surprises.
She had never expected him to come over to her way of thinking, yet he had done exactly the opposite of what Sergey the soldier had first decided to do, namely to bug out of the Allier Valley and Vichy at the first opportunity and instead, he had seized Vichy - with a little bit of help from its survivors - from a bandit force, the so-called 207th Cavalry which had outnumbered his own Spetsnaz detachment by at least ten, or maybe twenty to one and had had several tanks!
Sometimes it was good to be surprised but maybe, at last their luck had finally run out…
Sergey had taken two-thirds of the Brigade’s surviving fighters north three days ago in a rumbling caravan of ramshackle cars and trucks moving at the speed of the emaciated horses drawing the wagons carrying the ammunition for their field mortars and old Hispano anti-aircraft cannons.
Vera had walked a mile up the road with the column – barely three hundred ‘fighters’ including over forty women – and thrown her arms around Sergey’s neck, unwilling to let him go for an age before she limped disconsolately back to the village with tears in her eyes.
The British had crossed the Loire between Nantes and Angers and sent mechanised columns deep into the Poitou, cutting roads, bypassing and isolating the tripwire garrisons along the southern bank of the river. North west of Cholet the fractious local warlords with whom the White Brigade had co-existed since the summer had melted away before the invaders, leaving the whole Cholet sector horribly exposed, completely outflanked to the east. Tactically, they had run out of good options, so, Sergey had decided that the only thing to be done was to stick his hand in the biggest hole in the dyke. The Free French forces likely to be jumping on the British bandwagon coming down from the north east would, if past experience was anything to go by, stall the first time they met serious resistance and would, anyway, sooner or later bump up against Red Dawn and or gangs of German raiders; meanwhile, Sergey planned to block, or somehow delay – he usually found a way - the enemy’s advance south of the Loire. If they got lucky, really lucky, winter would bite so ferociously that campaigning would stall until the spring.
Not that she actually believed that they would get that lucky!
Sergey Akhromeyev was seven years her junior. His family was dead in Russia, obliterated in the October War and he had been left to his fate in France by one of the ‘great men’ of the new Soviet Union. She had no idea whether he still harboured loyalty, or any sense of duty, towards his former masters or even to the idea of the Marxist-Leninist International.
She knew Sergey despised Red Dawn; that was enough.
The thought that the man she loved had marched away to his death, that she might never see him again had very nearly broken her on that long walk back down the road to La Séguinière.
They had all come a long way in the last two years and now, as she waited for news of the fighting to the north, she found herself reflecting upon her own journey.
Sergey said her life read like the chapters from a great Russian novel, which was rich coming from a man who, as a nineteen-year-old had commanded a detachment of naval infantrymen who had heroically blocked a key road into Leningrad in the face of wave after wave of German assaults.
‘It was my patriotic duty,’ he grinned in the re-telling, ‘and it was either hold up the Nazis or be shot by Stalin.’
Vera had been born in the back room of a bourgeois house in the Rue de l'École in the village of Saint-Germain-des-Fossés some nine kilometres north of Vichy, four months after her father – an officer of the Chasseurs - had died at Verdun. Her mother had lost her mind, killed herself a year later leaving Vera to be brought up by her Aunt Mathilde, a hard-faced woman whom, perversely, had had numerous lovers.
She had run away from Saint Germain to escape an arranged marriage likely to begin and end in grief with a man twice her age, and travelled to Paris when she was barely seventeen. A pretty girl with jet black gypsy hair in those days, she had procured a lover, then a protector, and quite soon, a pimp, and that had been that. Her natural strength of will, feral cunning and in those first years, her bewitching beauty – a passing thing not to be relied upon – had made her indispensable to several powerful men and friends to others. When the German’s had marched up the Champs-Elysees in June 1940, her clientele had changed but little else.
Not at first; at the outset of the occupation of France there was no Resistance, not then nor for a long time afterwards as the Republic was cruelly partitioned between the German-occupied north and the realm of the quisling defeatists in Vichy in the south.
German officers liked to have a pretty woman on their arms, it made them feel like real men not strutting Nazi lickspittles. In the event, it was well over a year after the fall of France before she eventually found somebody interested in the pillow talk of the officers who fucked her and her best girls. In those days the first cells of what later became ‘the resistance’ were amateurish constructs, and it was no surprise that within months the arrests began and she was on the run.
Things were no better in the territory of the Vichy collaborators, contemptible old men with no pride or appetite for the fight, surrounded by cowards who had been the first to beat the drum for war in 1939.
She had joined the Marquis, roamed the countryside as far south as the foothills of the distant Pyrenees, fleeing more than once over the border into Spain where communists like her were routinely shot on sight. By late 1942 she was in Bordeaux, running couriers and co-ordinating the escape of shot down Allied airmen to the south.
She had never stopped being a whore; it was the perfect cover in any big town. How else could she have lived among the traitors and the invaders for so long without being betrayed?
In the years before the October War she had run a very discreet house for the rich and the self-important, faded aristocrats and pretentious civil and regional functionaries, offering the most confidential of services, no questions asked, all tastes satisfied in Vichy. She only employed the cleanest, best girls and never failed to ensure that all the right people’s palms were suitably greased, just to make the world go around a little more smoothly...
Life had been good in those years.
And then the Yankees and the Russians had fucked up everything...
She had met Maxim Machenaud shortly after the fall of Paris but the Reds had not recruited her until 1943.
Machenaud was one of those men a wise madam never left her girls alone with, not that he had ever shown the least interest in any of her girls. She and Maxim had always enjoyed an ambivalent relationship, possibly because she had understood that so long as she was useful to him, that no harm would befall her…
Back in the Second War, shortly after George Duclos’s people had recruited her she had fallen in with a guerrilla band of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français – the FTPF – the armed resistance movement created by the French Communist Party. The FTPF regarded the so-called ‘Free French’ forces as ‘runaways’, deserters who ought to have stayed behind and fought the invaders. The proud so-called ‘free’ Frenchmen were under De Galle’s thumb in London, well out of the war. It was one of her country’s dirtiest little secrets that when De Galle had demanded the British support ‘his kind of resistance fighters’ ahead of the Normandy landings, many of the brave men and women of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français were betrayed. Like her few surviving comrades from those days, Vera Bertrand spat whenever she heard the name ‘Churchill’.
After the ‘great betrayal’ she had known that socialism was the only way for France. Not that she had ever had much time for the Aube Rouge – Red Dawn – zealots down in the Auvergne…
There was a quiet knock at the door behind her.
With a sigh she snapped out of her brooding reverie and turned to face Sebastien Betancourt as he stepped, painfully, into the room.
Her friend had almost died a month ago.
He still looked like death warmed up.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, Madam Bertrand,” the man grimaced. “I spoke to Sergey on the radio about twenty minutes ago. I came straight over because Sergey’s news is not a thing I could readily communicate to a runner.”
Much to Betancourt’s chagrin, Sergey had left his trusted second-in-command behind in Cholet with the rest of the Brigade’s walking wounded.
‘Somebody must command the garrison,’ he had decided in a half-hearted attempt to ameliorate the dishonour of being left behind in La Séguinière, ahead of what might well be the Brigade’s last stand, somewhere to the north.
Now the thirty-seven-year-old former Sorbonne professor who had briefly become a soldier of fortune in the chaos of post-October War France, been captured at Vichy and subsequently sworn allegiance to the White Brigade removed his battered forage cap. A handsome man – his scarred left cheek notwithstanding – with almond eyes often filled with wry amusement whatever the circumstances, with his mop of hair tousled, his face a little hollowed out by the pain of his wounds and the privations of sickness, there was still something defiantly debonair, roguish about Sebastien Betancourt that in any kind of rational world would have allowed him to charm the knickers of any woman he wanted…
Vera caught herself threatening to break into a smile.
Sergey was still alive!
Nor would Sergey have risked radio communication unless it was important, really important. The enemy listened for broadcasts and in the recent fighting had shown a talent for triangulating their source and sometimes, within seconds, for zeroing in their artillery, or calling down one of their seemingly ever-present fighter bombers.
“It is good news,” Vera’s visitor said as concern twisted at her lips. “I think it is, anyway.”
“What has happened?” She demanded breathlessly.
Chapter 10
Wednesday 7th December 1966
Penshurst Place, Kent
“We lunched at the US Embassy yesterday,” the Prime Minister prefaced as the plates from the main course began to be cleared away by Royal Marine stewards, to a man, members of her personal protection detail.
A forward detachment of her legendary AWPs – the acronym stood for ‘Angry Widow’s Protection’ squad, a throwback to those days, hopefully passed, when it seemed that somebody or other was intent on murdering her most days of the week – had descended on Penshurst the previous weekend, in a ‘recce in force’. Royal Marines had been patrolling the grounds and corridors of the house without pause ever since.
In fact, although the AWPs led by the redoubtable Major Sir Steuart, 10th Baron Pringle of Stichill, never let down their collective guard, leading political and military figures no longer went everywhere in fear of their lives. Four years after that dreadful period in the aftermath of the October War when the rule of law had effectively broken down, the wave of – it was now assumed Red Dawn inspired - assassinations and attacks on infrastructure, industrial targets and transportation links had threatened the very cohesiveness of what was left of the nation were things half-consigned to a dark, past era.
Not that the killing of William Whitelaw and his wife during the spring 1965 election campaign and other, less headline-grabbing but none the less brutal outrages perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army mainly in Ulster – significantly less so on the mainland in the last year - and general levels of greatly heightened post-war criminality in many areas of the country did not still give constant cause for concern.
The Prime Minister’s own party had fired a mild, warning salvo over the ‘law and order issue’ at her only six weeks ago at the inaugural National Conservative Conference held in Manchester’s historic Free Trade Hall. Several speakers had suggested that the war had driven a cart and horses through traditional standards of behaviour. Moreover, that there was a ‘disturbing break down in civility’ and ‘young people are too often allowed to run wild in our towns and cities’. There had been a call for the re-introduction of National Service; mostly by ill-informed, out of touch backwoodsmen from the shires because presently, the armed forces had no problem recruiting men – and women - to fill their ranks.
