and an under-skilled workforce, so mostly he was crabby and miserable.
Kuefer worked late nights and weekends and his young translator was expected to be available at all times. Marc often fell asleep on the way home and he even spent one night on the sofa in Kuefer’s hotel suite when his boss demanded a five a.m. start for a meeting in Paris.
Most days they travelled between dockyards, supervising barge construction along a three-hundred-kilometre stretch of coastline running from Le Havre in the west and as far east as Ostende in Belgium.
The thing that most irked Marc was that Kuefer and his German driver, Schroder, would make arrangements for lunch in a decent restaurant, leaving him to his own devices. While the Germans had three courses with wine and cigars, Marc found himself wandering around a strange town with nothing but a sweaty sandwich from home, or left at some dockyard or in the draftsman’s office to eat whatever was served to the prisoners.
Each port had a slightly different atmosphere. The huge dry docks at Dunkirk were as miserable as the watery broth served for lunch. At Le Havre nobody spoke to Marc in case he snitched to his boss; Calais was OK because Henderson wangled him a pass to eat with the Germans at headquarters; but Marc found himself in Boulogne on this drizzly Wednesday.
Twenty small boatyards were situated along a broad canal behind the harbour. A few had gated dry docks for big boats, but most work was done on sloping concrete embankments. Although Germans gave the orders and prisoners did all the unskilled work, the yards remained in the hands of family businesses that had run them for decades.
Most of the owners were making good money from the conversions and treated their unpaid labour force in a decent fashion that extended to a proper lunch and safe working conditions.
Marc sat on a bollard close to the canal’s edge. The lunch ladies seemed to like him and his plate was stacked with fresh rolls, roasted vegetables and a huge slice of pork. He ate with fingers that were grubby from a morning spent clambering around boatyards.
Although conditions were better in Boulogne than in the other ports, there was still a hierarchy amongst the prisoners which determined what work they did and who they sat with at lunch.
Skilled labour was at the top of the pile. The Germans had advertised for welders, electricians, riveters and carpenters to come into the area, and these free men earned good wages. Next came the largest group, regular French prisoners of war. These men worked alongside tradesmen, carrying lumber, making repairs and painting. They worked twelve-hour shifts, but they were all volunteers who preferred hard work to being bored and hungry in the prison camps.
At the bottom of the pile were Poles and North Africans. The Nazis hated all Poles, but Polish prisoners in these parts were particularly disliked because they were fanatics who’d volunteered to fight for Britain or France after their own army surrendered.
The French Army had recruited more than a million fighters from North African colonies. According to Hitler’s racist theories, people with dark skin were little better than animals. White French soldiers were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, but the Africans were regarded as subhuman and suffered great brutality. In some areas, surrendering African troops had been moved into holding pens and machine-gunned by the SS.
In the dockyards the Africans and Poles got the least pleasant jobs, from hauling the barges up and down the embankment, to scraping barnacles off hulls and steam cleaning engine parts inside the workshop.
After half an hour for lunch the dock foreman rang a bell and more than six hundred men went back to work at the various yards along the embankment. Marc had nothing to do until Kuefer got back from a restaurant in town so he helped the lunch ladies to stack up the enamel mugs and plates. His reward was a big slice of the fruit flan reserved for the foremen.
As Marc ate he sat at the top of the nearest embankment and watched as six Africans began to haul a small cargo barge up the embankment.
To begin with four men crossed a bridge to the opposite bank and caught ropes thrown from the back of the boat. They pulled the back out until the bow faced the embankment. As they rushed back over the bridge, their colleagues jumped aboard and looped a metal chain through the mooring holes in