But when Ernest glanced in the mirror, the colonel’s eyes were closed again. They shouldn’t have brought such a comfortable car. “Colonel von Sprecht,” he called, “are you warm enough back there? Would you like a rug?”
“No,” he said without opening his eyes.
“It’s rather cold for May,” Ernest said, and when the colonel didn’t answer, Cess asked, “Do you have this sort of weather in Germany?” Still no answer.
“What part of Germany do you come from?” Ernest asked, and the colonel began to snore.
You can’t fall asleep, Ernest thought. We’re doing this for your benefit. He drove into a large mud hole, but even the jolt didn’t wake the colonel. Stopping would, but every field they passed was full of soldiers—drilling in formation, doing calisthenics, loading supplies, standing in line outside mess tents. One of them was bound to come over and ask them if they needed directions, so Ernest had no choice but to keep driving. Straight past everything the sleeping colonel was supposed to be to come over and ask them if they needed directions, so Ernest had no choice but to keep driving. Straight past everything the sleeping colonel was supposed to be seeing.
There was a village up ahead. Good. If there’s a garage there, I’ll stop for gas, he thought, but there wasn’t one on the village’s single street, and just ahead was, oh, Christ, a signpost. He wasn’t close enough to read it, but he could make out letters and arrows pointing in opposite directions. And there was no side lane he could turn off onto.
He glanced in the rear-vision mirror, hoping to God the colonel was still asleep. He wasn’t. And in a minute he’d see the signpost. “Look!” Ernest said, pointing off to the other side of the road. “Parachutists!”
“Where?” Cess said. He leaned across him to look, and the colonel followed his gaze.
“There,” Ernest said, pointing at nothing. “I hear the Americans are planning to land twenty thousand parachutists in the Pas de Calais area the night before they invade,” and while Cess and the colonel were gawking at the sky, he shot past the signpost.
He needn’t have panicked. Next to one arrow it read, “Berlin” and next to the other, “Good Old USA.”
He almost wished the colonel’d seen it, but when he glanced back, his eyes were closed again.
Ernest drove on another mile and then pulled the car to a jolting stop opposite an aeroplane-filled field. “I don’t think this is the right road,” he said. “We passed these planes before.”
“No, these are Hurricanes,” Cess said. “The ones before were Tempests.”
“No, they weren’t. I think we should have turned left at that last crossroads.” When Cess still didn’t catch on, he said, “We’re lost.”
“Oh,” Cess said, the light dawning. “No, this is the right road.” He opened the map out. “Look, here’s where we are. We came through Newchurch, and Hawkinge’s that way.”
“Here, let me see the map,” Ernest said, snatching it away from him and holding it so the colonel could see it. “Where did you say we are?”
“Here, just north of Newchurch,” Cess said, pointing. “See, here’s Gravesend, where we picked the colonel up. We came across to Beckley and then took the Oxney Road.”
Ernest sneaked a glance in the mirror. The colonel was looking intently at the map as Cess traced their route.
“And this is the road we’re on now. It takes us through Dover, and then we take the Old Kent Road to London.”
“You’re right,” Ernest said. He started the car and yanked on the gear stick. The gears ground. He jiggled the knob back and forth, trying to get it to shift, and it finally slid into reverse. He backed the car out onto the road and went on, past more camps and storage dumps and so many airfields he lost count, full of P-51s and DC-3s parked wingtip to wingtip.
“Good Lord, will you look at all this?” Cess said, sounding awed, and Ernest wasn’t sure that that was just for the colonel’s benefit. He’d known the D-Day invasion had been a massive project, but the sheer magnitude of the undertaking was impossible to get one’s mind around—thousands upon thousands of planes, tanks, and trucks, and tons of equipment.
As they drove, the colonel seemed to grow more and more ashen and to sink into himself, deflating like one of their dummy tanks.
He knows there’s no way they can win against this, Ernest thought. He wondered if that was part of the plan, if the purpose of this trip was not only to fool von Sprecht into believing they were invading at Calais, but also to show him the overwhelming might of the Allied invasion force and convince him of the hopelessness of the Germans’ resistance. If so, the plan was succeeding. He looked more defeated with every passing mile.
