Warsaw Concerto, page 58
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
The Free French now estimated that as many as five to six million people had died on the night of the October War, and perhaps another two million from their injuries, starvation and disease in the following months. A conservative estimate of the death toll from mid-1963 to date was that at least ten million – possibly, horrifyingly, many more – had perished, the majority from sickness, neglect and hunger due in no small measure to the deliberate wasting of the countryside by the warring factions, and as a result of the constant predations of the invaders from Germany which had made the traditional agricultural cycle untenable everywhere except, in the last two years, the Languedoc, sheltered from the madness of the north by the barrier of the Massif Central.
‘We’ve got to stop thinking that we and the French are in the same boat,’ the Prime Minister’s husband had told General Sir Michael Carver, the Chief of the Defence Staff, shortly before leaving for France. “We’re not. We, here in England, somehow held onto our national identity, our pride, we were, in a very real sense, in it all together and we still are. By the time we started evacuating French refugees from the Channel Ports in the winter of sixty-four to sixty-five, and later, somewhat inadvertently, liberated the north, there was no France. Until then France was that country that used to exist before October 1962; most French people had given up hope by then. So, don’t go getting carried away by dear old Alain de Boissieu’s temper tantrums, the poor fellow knows exactly which side his bread is buttered and deep down he is incredibly grateful to us, the British, for what we have done for him and his country.’
Back in the mists of time, part-mislaid in that now mythical, blurred pre-1962 world, Michael Carver and the former SAS man had fallen out - by any standards in a middlingly conclusive fashion – but that was then and this was now. Their rapprochement had started in Carver’s command truck at Abadan, the hatchet had been buried and in the two-and-a-half years since, they had struck up an unlikely friendship. In Oxford, members of the Government and senior military officers quirked that they were the ‘odd couple’, two men utterly unalike in personality, temperament and yet united in their loyalty to ‘the Lady’, and to their country. The one a cerebral, private man, the universally acknowledged master battlefield tactician-strategist of the age in the wake of the Al Faw-Basra, Khorramshahr-Abadan Campaign; the other the suicidally heroic, throwback eccentric, a man who seemed to court publicity with the insouciance of a born celebrity who had, improbably, wooed and wed the most remarkable woman in Christendom.
Both men felt a little guilty about going behind the Lady’s back to concoct the plot to put ‘their man’ at the beating heart of the Free French movement. Neither man was prepared to claim all the credit for coming up with the idea of placing the SAS man by Alain de Boissieu’s side. They both knew he was the best man for the job; that was not the problem.
‘Look, my dear,’ the old soldier had eventually put to his wife, fortified by a couple of stiff drinks while they were in Oxford the night before they travelled down to that fateful meeting at Dover, ‘we can’t go on this way with the French…’
‘No? Why not?’ The ex-SAS man’s wife was not an easy person to gainsay at the best of times and his fortitude had very nearly failed him. ‘Edwin Bramall’s boys seem to be fighting a completely different war over there! We might as well be on our own!’
Frank Waters had gathered every fibre of his moral courage and hoped he was putting his foot down, not just ‘in it’ with the Lady.
‘Between ourselves, my dear,’ he had suggested with no little trepidation, ‘in the privacy of our home…may I take a liberty…and mark your card on one or two things,’ he had shrugged that that point, grimacing apology, ‘that only an old, and somewhat disreputable old soldier can speak to with…unimpeachable authority…’
His wife had taken pity on him.
Albeit, in her inimitably forthright fashion.
‘What on earth are you talking about, Frank?’
‘You and Alain de Boissieu don’t like each other…’
‘Granted,” the Lady had concurred, with feeling.
Frank Waters had hesitated, then plunged in.
‘It gives me no pleasure to say this,” he had blurted. “But most of it is your fault, my dear.’
His wife had looked at him as if he was an idiot.
‘Nonsense!’
‘The bloody man took part in the last cavalry charge against German tanks, Margaret!’
Husband and wife had frowned, then scowled at each other.
‘And your point is?’ The Prime Minister had inquired icily.
‘Look, the man isn’t a second Richelieu; he’s bloody latter-day d'Artagnan, Margaret!’
This had clearly been a little too elliptical for his wife’s marvellously linear mind.
Hurriedly, he had gone on: ‘We keep wanting him to be Montgommery or Marlborough. He’s never going to be that. He’s a fighting soldier. A Devil may care up and at them chap, like me. The trick is to remind him who and what he is and frankly, he’s surrounded by staff wallahs and politicos who are more worried about hanging on to what they’ve got – and defending their own interests, having a quiet life, basically – than fighting the bally enemy. The poor chap is in a dreadful fix. What he needs is a real friend at court. Your court, to be specific. Somebody to egg him on with the clout to get him at least some of the tools he needs to get things moving!”
Now Frank Waters was in the heart of Champagne, at the headquarters of the Eastern Corps of the Free French Army in the somewhat knocked about, still intact city of Châlons-sur-Marne, newly re-connected by railway with the west and the Channel ports of the north, and presently, the busy decampment depot for thousands of troops moving east and south into their jumping off positions for the coming offensive.
That evening, it was bitterly cold as Frank Waters smoked a cigarette on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, City Hall, and eyed the five Char 13t-75 Modèle 51 light tanks on parade in the square. The Modèle 51 was no match for a former US Army M-48 or M-60, it only weighed in at around thirteen tons, less than half the tonnage of the relatively small number of American battle tanks salvaged by the invading looters, or by those Krasnaya Zarya bastards, but its 75-millimetre gun – mounted in an oscillating, or ‘nodding’ turret - packed a fierce punch, and the machines themselves were mechanically robust, hardy.
“I wish they were Centurions!” Alain de Boissieu declared, separating himself from his entourage to join his friend in the perishingly cold night as he viewed the dark steel silhouettes in the gloom.
The lights from buildings around the Place de Ville blinked harshly bright in the night.
Together the two men planned to inspect the latest troops disembarking, in the name of security and secrecy, at the nearby station in the darkness. Among them would be detachments who had been training in the Welsh Marches and on Dartmoor with British Special Forces and Royal Marines; in exercises designed as a final trial by fire – and due to the season, by ice – against the most formidable soldiers in the British arsenal. Until lately, this ‘hardening up’ training phase had been wasted because few of the troops returning to France had actually seen action.
Prior to Frank Waters’s arrival by his side it had been de Boissieu’s practice to go everywhere with a large retinue and numerous bodyguards. In the last few days the two men had eschewed caution, freely moved about with no more than a couple of staffers or protective Foreign Legionnaires.
Each man carried a holstered automatic pistol on his hip and Frank Waters had got back into the habit of strapping his old scalping knife to his right calf, just to be on the safe side.
“French tankers in French tanks, old boy!” The Englishman guffawed. “The way it is supposed to be, what!”
THE ARMY WILL PREPARE TO ADVANCE IN STRENGTH TO THE SOUTH AND TO THE LINE OF THE RHINE IN THE EAST.
That was as complicated as the command directive that Alan de Boissieu issued to his forces on his return from the Dover conference needed to be!
By design, everything was going ahead at an unholy rush with impossible deadlines. Nobody was going to be given pause for breath, or a single moment in which to contemplate the inadvisability of mounting major military operations ‘on the hoof’. Nothing was to be allowed to detract from the coming ‘big push’.
The British had smashed the Loire Line in the west and seized the Biscay coast all the way down to the north bank of the Garonne a few miles north of Bordeaux; now it was time for the rest of the ‘Army of Liberation’ to strike a similar blow in the centre and the east of the line.
Twenty-four hours before the Free French burst from their lines in the north at a few minutes before midnight on 1st February, Royal Navy ships, Royal Air Force fighters and bombers, and Royal Marine raiding parties would strike targets in the Bay of Lions and along the old Riviera. The enemy would be trapped between the jaws of a two-pronged assault.
It sounded good, even if the forces available to the Allies were a mere fraction of those employed by the last such double assault on an ‘Occupying Power’ back in 1944. Then the Allies had struck with massive fleets of ships, thousands of aircraft and two million men, over fifty divisions.
Today the Free French and the BEF combined had the equivalent of seven or eight partially mechanised brigades, possibly as many as eighty to ninety thousand combat effectives, perhaps a hundred RAF and naval Fleet Air Arm aircraft variously available, twenty warships, less than a hundred tanks on the ground and supplies for perhaps a month of limited operations.
Privately, de Boissieu and Frank Waters had communicated relatively conservative expectations for the coming offensive to Oxford. It was inconceivable that the Krasnaya Zarya zealots in the Auvergne would simply melt away; in fact, rather they fell back into their mountainous redoubt than continue to infest the rest of France. As to the campaign against the so-called ‘Naval wing’ of the Front Internationale along the southern coast, well, that was a tidying up exercise, mainly to eliminate whatever was left of the old French Mediterranean Fleet to obviate the possibility of it falling into the hands of Soviet sympathisers, or worse, those maniacs in Clermont-Ferrand, and hopefully, to force Krasnaya Zarya to withdraw forces from elsewhere to prop up the ‘backsliders’ in Toulon and Marseilles. Anything which weakened the FI’s hold on Central France and the Atlantic south west coast was grist to the mill. Front and centre, was the crying need for the Free French to achieve, and to own, a significant victory of some kind.
Otherwise, the United Kingdom was going to have to carry on carrying the strain and that, in the longer-term, was politically and economically unsustainable for a nation beginning at last to emerge from the nightmare of the October War. It was one thing for those airheads in the Labour Party to talk about Britain First, and of ‘carrying on’ cutting the ties of Empire; the reality was that the country would still be in a very sorry state other than for the largesse of the United States, and its rejuvenated trade and diplomatic links with the New Commonwealth.
Underpinning everything, the reality was that the ‘special relationship’ with Washington came at a price. That was not to say a British Prime Minister had to religiously tow the Nixon Administration’s line – the two countries were diametrically opposed over China, and at variance over South East Asia policy, for example – but undeniably, there were ‘red lines’ that could not be crossed. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the US during the Midwest War had healed the breach but there was still a lot of scar tissue to be repaired, particularly in areas of global commerce impacted by the New Commonwealth’s latter-day version of the defunct Imperial Preference regime, the Commonwealth Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement’ (CMAFTA).
This Treaty was not going to go away any time soon because it was not just Britain who saw it, as its one effective defence against what was now viewed as US pre-war, and immediate post-October War, economic imperialism and aggrandisement at their expense. In Africa, and to a lesser extent in Australasia many politicians had come to power since October 1962 openly accusing ‘US interests’ – huge American conglomerates and banks acting with the tacit support of the Kennedy Administration and Congress – of ‘economic rape’ in the immediate aftermath of the October War.
The re-establishment of military and intelligence links with the United States, the general thawing of US-British and Commonwealth relations, and the resurrection of pre-war trade, the restoration of the freedom of global navigation and the growing number of Anglo-US and other bilateral scientific and technological transfer compacts, were all to the good but things were a long way from being anything like ‘normal’ when viewed across the broad spectrum of the post-Second War ‘Western Settlement’, now so commonly debated by academic historians – who obviously had nothing better to do with their time - back in Oxford.
Despite the reinvention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the creation of the Anglo-American Joint Strike Polaris Force – due to become operational that spring – and the ongoing generosity of US aid to the United Kingdom, the Nixon Administration had thus far shown no real interest in re-engaging in the US’s former guarantor role in the framework of European security. True, US Air Force units had re-established a presence at a couple of Spanish air bases and reactivated abandoned early warning radar stations in the Portuguese mountains. However, otherwise, until the shock of Warsaw Concerto had begun to concentrate minds in Washington, the Administration’s focus had been elsewhere, irritated without being remotely vexed by Soviet posturing east of the Rhine…
If anybody had told Frank Waters that he would have been worrying about all this ‘strategic guff’ before the October War he would have thought they were drunk.
Nowadays, his mind often stumbled down such troubled paths.
As his beloved wife was wont to say: it was a funny old world…
“It is a good morning for a walk?” Alain de Boissieu mused contentedly.
“Absolutely, old man.”
Two Land Rovers had been waiting to carry the two friends and their minders through the city, down the Rue de la Marne, past the exquisite Gothic edifice of the Cathedral Saint Etienne, across the river to the Gare de Châlons-en-Champagne to meet the morning’s first troop transport.
Both men were attired in battledress: de Boissieu in the fatigues of a lieutenant general of the Chasseurs, the Prime Minister’s husband proudly wearing the winged dagger badge of his old regiment on the breast of his major general’s rig. Each man wore a beret, of the distinctive Legionnaire style.
The crews of the Char 13t-75 Modèle 51 tanks crashed to attention as the two generals approached. Studiously, solemn salutes were returned, stern eyes briefly run over the parade and their dazzle-camouflaged mounts.
“Carry on!” Alain de Boissieu grunted, in cheerful satisfaction.
Chapter 56
Wednesday 25th January 1967
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Lady Rachel French had not anticipated how hard it would be to psychologically, emotionally leave Amesbury, or how hard it would be to get used to the reality of being separated from her husband. But then a part of her also understood that while she was with Dan, she could not be the woman she needed to be right now. Morphing back into her former persona had actually been a lot easier than she had anticipated: it was like slipping back into a familiar dress eighteen months after one had discarded it and discovering that now, with one’s mind and body refreshed, it fitted better than ever.
Officially, she had met Richard Helms twice in the 1950s, on both occasions chaperoned by senior members of MI6: once in Berlin, another time in Paris. It had been shortly after that second encounter that Helms – well, his people - had ‘paired her up’ with Kurt Mikkelsen.
‘They call me Billy the Kid,’ her new partner had said to her that first time they were alone. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’
Rachel had found herself repeatedly replaying that scene in that dingy apartment in Montmartre, as she waited to be ushered into the presence of the latest master of Central Intelligence. This was her first, and probably, it would be her last visit to Langley.
She had never visited Millbank, MI5’s lair in London, or until a couple of years ago never actually had an official, acknowledged meeting with either the head of MI5 or the of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). That was the way of things in her line of work.
So far as she knew, Kurt had never been invited to tea at Langley, either.
Rachel thought that putting her into an observation room masquerading as the ante chamber to an office suite, was a nice move. It allowed her would be interlocutors – she was not about to start thinking of CIA-folk as allies or friends any time soon – to watch her awhile, and to satisfy themselves that they had not just welcomed a ravening wild animal into their quiet, well-ordered little menagerie.
Having guessed they would make her wait at least a quarter-of-an hour, she was a little surprised when a couple of minutes after she had been left alone a door opened and a slim, attractive middle-aged woman with short, off the shoulder platinum hair entered the room and stuck out a welcoming hand.
“How do you do, Lady Rachel,” the other woman said with smooth, professional assurance. “When Director Helms asked me to work with you, I was, well, let’s not beat about the bush, very excited. In fact, the reason you’ve been kept waiting, I do apologise for that, was that I was still putting on my face when you arrived. One has to worry about these things at my age.”
None of this was said in any kind of gushing fashion. The older woman, smiling, seemed genuinely pleased to meet Rachel, albeit she was clearly appraising her in exactly the same way that the younger woman was her.
The women shook hands.
Rachel read the other’s woman’s identity badge.
