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a long time with a cup of coffee, running over his notes of the day’s business, planning the work involved.
    He was sitting so when the swing doors burst open with a crash. There was an instant’s stunned silence as the people at the tables turned to the interruption. Then, in a deafening clamour in the narrow room, the fire from a couple of Tommy-guns burst out. A group of four German non-commissioned officers seated together at a table rose half to their feet. One of them spun round and collapsed backwards with a crash. The others dropped where they sat. Their bodies shook and quivered with the impact of the bullets pumping into them.
    An officer, an
Oberleutnant
, sitting with a French girl at a table at the end of the room, ducked down behind a little wooden table fumbling for the automatic at his wrist. He never got it out. The wooden splinters flew from the table and bright holes spread in a pattern over it; one of the splinters gashed the girl across the eyebrow as she stood screaming with her hand up to her mouth. Behind the table the officer fell forward as a sodden weight, and a thin stream of blood ran out on to the floor.
    Suddenly the firing stopped. With a little brassy tinkle the last shell rattled to the floor.
    One of the men at the door shouted in French: “Don’t any of you move!” Then, to the white, terrified proprietor behind the bar: “Any more Germans in this place?”
    The man shook his head, unable at first to find words. Thenhe gulped, looked at the bodies, and said: “Only those.
    The man at the door said in English: “Go right through the place, lads. Ben, stay with me.”
    Three men rushed in, and made their way through into the back quarters. They were hard, violent young men in British battledress. They each carried a sub-machine-gun; they had two revolvers each, worn on light webbing harness from the shoulders; the same harness supported a belt with pockets for Mills hand-grenades. A large electric torch hung at the waist. They wore British tin hats.
    The other two, one of whom wore sergeant’s stripes, came forward from the door, their guns at the ready. The sergeant said again, in accented, ungrammatical French: “Don’t any of you move! Put your identity cards out upon the tables.”
    The man called Ben stayed by the door. The sergeant began to move methodically from table to table looking at the cards displayed, his gun always at the ready.
    There was silence in the café, broken only by the tramping of the men upstairs as they ransacked the house, and by the noise of light gunfire intermittently outside in the night. Once there was a heavy, thunderous explosion, as of a demolition. The girl who had been sitting with the dead officer had stopped her screaming and stood motionless, her back against the wall, her hands pressed palms against the wall behind her, staring at the devil with the sergeant’s stripes advancing slowly down the room, his gun held at the ready.
    To Charles Simon, in that tense moment, came the realisation of what he had to do. This was an English raid, this violent gangster-like affray. This was his chance. With sudden, utter clarity it came to him that this was the turning-point of his whole life, and he must take the turning.
    He did not produce his card, but turned out letters, bills, receipts, all the contents of his pockets on the table before him as if he searched desperately, but the card stayed in his hip pocket. The man with the gun came to the table and paused, merciless, thrusting his gun forward.
    Charles Simon raised his head, and said in a low tone, in English: “I seem to have lost my card. You’d better arrest me, and take me to your officer.”
    The man said: “Are you English?”
    Simon said: “Don’t be a fool. Arrest me, and take me outside.”
    The man lunged forward, thrusting the barrel of the Tommy-gunagainst his chest. “Outside, you!” he said in French. “Get up!” He swung round to the man at the door. “Here’s one,