A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) Read Free Page A

outbuildings – and then covered with straw, wood and petrol and set on fire while they were dead or dying. Once again, there were few bodies that were identifiable – just trunks of carcasses with bones sticking out, a grotesque reminder of Sunday roasts. Catesby felt more and more numb. It was too much to take in.
    At the time, it was impossible to find out exactly what had happened. Some said there were only two survivors; others said there were twenty. It seemed certain that a few boys had escapedby running into the woods – and a woman had jumped from a church window and hidden in a patch of garden peas. But she was badly injured and had been taken to a hospital in Limoges. Confusion in the wake of chaos.
    Catesby knew it was important to identify the troops who had carried out the atrocity. A boy of about eight, probably one of those who ran away, said the soldiers were dressed in greenish-brown camouflage smocks. Another survivor turned up – a male of about nineteen. He said that he and five others had fled a burning barn after hiding under dead bodies, but one of his companions had been shot and killed. There were rumours that many of the soldiers spoke good French, but with strong Alsatian accents. It turned out to be true. The revelation that former French citizens, from German annexed Alsace-Lorraine, had taken part in the massacre rocked France for years afterwards. There was always a twist.
    The people were more talkative now and Catesby took notes with a shaking hand. The entire population had been ordered into the marketplace to have their identity papers checked. But once they were there, the Germans didn’t bother to check their papers at all. Following a brief conversation – oddly polite – between the commanding officer and the mayor, the men of the village were led into outlying barns to be questioned. The women and children were ordered into the church and the doors locked behind them. The executions soon followed. The village was then looted – someone showed Catesby a few dozen empty champagne bottles – and set on fire.
    Catesby later found out that the atrocity had been carried out by a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, also known as Das Reich , under the command of Otto Diekmann. The battalion had been involved in other war crimes – in Russia as well as France. Diekmann was killed in Normandy two weeks later.
     
    The ruins of the U-boot bunker weren’t the ideal place for a clandestine rendezvous. The bunker was dark, massive and echoed every footstep. And Catesby didn’t like being dressed as a Roman Catholic priest either. It brought back too many childhoodmemories. His Belgian mother had brought him and his sister up as Catholics in an East Anglia where Catholics were an oddity and minority. Children don’t like feeling different. It wasn’t so bad speaking Flemish and French in the home, because that was hidden and private – and when school friends came around they always reverted to English. But being marched down Lowestoft High Street to Our Lady Star of the Sea on Sundays and holy days of obligation was public and humiliating. By the age of fourteen Catesby was a sceptic; by the age of sixteen, he was a militant atheist. As he used to explain to his smart new friends at Cambridge: ‘I lost my faith as soon as I found my brain.’ During visits home he used to humour his mother by going to Mass, but it soon became apparent that she didn’t care what he did – and he stopped going all together. He began to realise that his mother didn’t do things out of faith, but out of habit. But perhaps habits, however empty, give people a moral centre. Maybe, thought Catesby, if I hadn’t lost the habit of Mass and confession I wouldn’t be waiting in the ruins of a submarine pen with a greasy pistol in my pocket. But the priest disguise was, for a lad who had grown up among East Anglian fishermen, amusing and ironic. The wooden club that Lowestoft fishermen used to knock out