Graham Masterton: The Devils of D-Day

Madeleine said, “Please let’s talk about other things. The war is so depressing.”

“Okay,” I said, lifting my hands in mock surrender. “But thank you for what you’ve told me. It’s going to make a real good story. Now, I’d love some more of that onion soup.”

Eloise smiled. “You have a big appetite, monsieur. I remember the American appetites.”

She ladled out more of that scalding brown soup, while Madeleine and her father watched me with friendly caution, and a little bit of suspicion, and maybe the hope that I wasn’t really going to bother to do anything unsettling, like talk to Father Anton about what happened on July 13, 1944, on the road from Le Vey.

After lunch of hare casserole, with good red wine and fruit, we sat around the table and smoked Gauloises and Jacques told me stories of his boyhood at Pont D’Ouilly. Madeleine came and sat beside me, and it was plain that she was getting to like me. Eloise retreated to the kitchen, and clattered pans, but returned fifteen minutes later with tiny cups of the richest coffee I’d ever tasted.

At last, at well past three o’clock, I said, “I’ve had a marvellous time, but I have to get back to work. I have a whole mess of readings to take before it gets dark.”

“It’s been good to talk with you,” said Jacques, standing up and giving a small bow. “It isn’t often we have people to eat with us. I suppose we are too close to the tank, and people don’t like to come this way.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Well, it isn’t comfortable.”

While Madeleine helped to take out the last dishes, and Jacques went to open the farm gate for me, I stood in the kitchen buttoning my coat and watching Eloise’s bent back as she washed up over the steamy sink.

I said, “ Au revoir , Eloise.”

She didn’t turn round, but she said, “ Au revoir, monsieur .”

I took a step towards the back door, but then I paused, and looked at her again. “Eloise?” I asked.

“ Oui, monsieur? ”

“What is it really, inside that tank?”

I saw the almost imperceptible stiffening of her back. The mop stopped slapping against the plates, and the knives and forks stopped clattering.

She said: “I do not know, monsieur. Truly.”

“Have a guess.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Perhaps it is nothing at all. But perhaps it is something that neither heaven nor earth knows anything about.”

“That only leaves hell.”

Again, she was silent. Then she turned from the sink and looked at me with those pale, wise eyes.

“ Oui, monsieur. Et le roi de l’enfer, c’est le diable. ”

The priest was very old. He must have been almost ninety, and he sat at his dusty leather-topped desk like a sagging sack of soft potatoes. But he had an intelligent, kindly face; and even though he spoke slowly and softly, as his lungs filled and emptied with the laboured aspiration of ancient bellows, he was lucid in his words, and precise. He had fraying white hair and a bony nose you could have hung your hat on, and as he talked he had a habit of steepling his long fingers and lifting his neck so that he could see down into the grey cobbled courtyard that fronted his house.

He said, “The English cleric’s name was the Reverend Taylor,” and he peered out of the window as if expecting the Reverend Taylor to appear around the corner at any moment.

“The Reverend Taylor? There must be five thousand Reverend Taylors in England.”

Father Anton smiled, and did something complicated inside his mouth with his dentures. “That is probably so. But I am quite certain that there is only one Reverend Woodfall Taylor.”

It was four-thirty now, almost dark, but I had got so caught up in the mystery of this decaying Sherman that I had skipped my cartographic readings for the day, and taken a trip up to the opposite end of the village to talk to Father Anton. He lived in a huge, sombre, forbidding French house in the severest style, with a hall of dark polished wood that you could have landed a 747 on, and staircase after staircase of chilled marble, flanked by gloomy oil paintings of cardinals and Popes and other miserable doyens of the church. Everywhere you looked, there was a mournful face. It was as bad as spending the evening at a Paul Robeson record night in Peoria, Illinois.

Father Anton said: “When he came here, Mr. Taylor was a very enthusiastic young vicar. He was full of the energy of religion. But I don’t think he truly understood the importance of what he had to do. I don’t think he understood how terrible it was, either. Without being unkind, I think he was the kind of young cleric who is easily seduced into thinking that mysticism is the firework display that celebrates true faith. Mind you, the Americans paid him a great deal of money. It was enough to build himself a new steeple, and a church hall. You can’t blame him.”

I coughed. It was wickedly cold in Father Anton’s house, and apart from saving on heating he also seemed to have a penchant for penny-pinching on electricity. The room was so shadowy and dark that I could barely make him out, and all I could see distinctly was the shine of the silver crucifix around his neck.

I said, “What I don’t understand is why we needed him. What was he doing for us, anyway?”

“He never clearly explained, monsieur. He was gagged by your oaths of secrecy. Apart from that, I don’t think he truly understood himself what it was he was required to do.”

“But the tanks—the black tanks—”

The old priest turned towards me, and I could just make out the rheumy gleam of his eye.

“The black tanks were something about which I cannot speak, monsieur. I have done all that I can for thirty long years, to have the tank taken away from Pont D’Ouilly but each time I have been told that it is too heavy, and that it is not economical to tow it away. But I think the truth is that they are too frightened to disturb it.”

“Why should they be frightened?”

Father Anton opened his desk drawer and took out a small rosewood and silver snuffbox. He asked, “You take snuff?”

“No, thanks. But I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.”

He passed me the cigarette box, and then snorted two generous pinches of snuff up his cavernous nostrils. I always thought people sneezed after they took snuff, but all Father Anton did was snort like a mule, and relax further into his creaky revolving chair.

I lit my cigarette and said, “Is there something still inside that tank?”

Father Anton thought about this, and then answered. “Perhaps. I don’t know what. The Reverend Taylor would never speak about it, and when they sealed down the turret, nobody from the whole village was allowed within half a kilometre.”

“Did they give any kind of explanation?”

“Yes,” said Father Anton. “They said there was high explosive inside it, and that there was some danger of a blast. But of course none of us believed it. Why should they need a vicar to sanctify the sealing of a few pounds of TNT?”

“So you believe that tank has something unholy about it?”

“It’s not what I believe, monsieur. It’s what your Army obviously believed, and I have yet to meet anyone more sceptical than a soldier. Why should an Army call in a cleric to deal with its weapons? I can only assume that there was something about the tank that was not in accordance with the laws of God.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but the slow and lisping way in which he said it, the way the words came out in that freezing and sepulchral room like dead flowers, that was enough to make me feel chilled and strangely frightened.

I said, “Do you believe in the voices?”