Liberation

  “Captain,” Jean-Clair said, his voice desperate.

  “Wait!” she hissed.

  More orders, swiftly given in German and small groups of men, rifles held across their chests, began to run up the northern slope to the west of Rodrigo’s position, ready to flank him and his squad from above.

  Time to mess things up.

  “Now!”

  Mateo and Juan sprang to their feet and hurled grenades from the ditch across the pasture and into the road among the rifle men behind the half-track, as Nancy, Jean-Clair and Jules concentrated their fire on the mortar teams. Time moved very slowly and way too fast. She could feel each bullet from the Bren as if on her own body as it pierced the heavy tunic of the corporal steadying the mortar, one two three across his back in a diagonal from shoulder blade, spine, kidneys, throwing him forward. The tube went over sideways sending its charge into the slope and a great plume of earth and rock was driven up into the air.

  That shook them.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Nancy screamed, and followed Mateo and Juan west along the ditch in a low crouch while the Germans were still trying to work out where the new attack was coming from.

  She grabbed another grenade from her belt as she ran, pulled the pin with her teeth and threw it underarm across the field. It exploded against the wall, sending a blast of rock fragments spinning into the troops.

  Rodrigo’s men had stopped firing, melting into the depths of the woods the second Nancy’s squad had piled in. Jules turned back and fired his Bren again, then staggered back, his arm over his eyes as a mortar round exploded at his feet. Jean-Clair grabbed hold of his jacket and dragged him, blind and shrieking along the drainage way. It was deeper here, better cover but muddy as hell, and Nancy’s boots began to stick. The bullets whipped past her head, then they were in cover again, a thin copse between them and the woods.

  “Break for the trees!” she shouted. Jean-Clair was trying to lift Jules in his arms. Mateo shoved him aside and lifted the blinded boy over his shoulder.

  “Captain! To the west!” Mateo yelled as he turned.

  Nancy spun round to see a squad of Germans clambering over the wall on the far side of the copse, trying to outflank her now.

  She fired short controlled bursts as Juan threw the last of his grenades and it exploded in a haze of earth and blood in the first team.

  “Go on!” She shoved Jean-Clair hard in the back until his stupor broke, and he and Juan dashed up the slope to the tree line. She followed them at a sprint. As they threw themselves into the shelter of the dense foliage, Nancy heard the sound of the first German bombers rumbling overhead toward Gaspard’s camp.

  38

  Denden had made his transmission and was helping to treat their wounded when Nancy and her squad got back to camp.

  Mateo had carried Jules, stunned and bleeding, for a mile through the forest, but he had managed the rest of the trek back to camp on his own two feet, a rough bandage round his eyes with Jean-Clair at his elbow to guide him over the uneven ground. Nancy sent off the rest of the squad to eat and rest, then led Jules into the tent, a structure made of pine logs and tarpaulin that was serving as their field hospital. Denden was there, preparing to receive their wounded, and Nancy noticed a look of shock and fear flicker across his face as he recognized Jules, and then it was swiftly concealed.

  Denden led Jules to a cot and Nancy followed.

  “No word from Fournier yet,” Denden said over his shoulder, as Jules sat down. Nancy nodded; they couldn’t expect him back before nightfall. “But two of Tardivat’s patrols managed to panic a convoy with grenades and Brens into an hour of immobility at that bottleneck near Paulhac-en-Margeride.”

  “SS troops?” Nancy asked, watching him unwind Jules’s bandages. The boy flinched, and Denden rested his hand on his shoulder.

  “No! You ran into the SS?” Denden said.

  “A thousand of them, Denis!” Jules said, with deep satisfaction. “Captain Wake took out a tank!”

  Denden snorted, and gently examined Jules’s eyes. “Yes, with a nail file and a stern talking to, I’m sure. Now shush.”

  “I used a Hawkins and an oak tree, as it happens,” Nancy said. “Any news from Mont Mouchet itself?”

  Denden began to wash the earth and gravel from Jules’s eyes. “A little. Whatever he said to your face, Gaspard must have done something to prepare. I keep hearing the words ‘fierce resistance.’” He lifted Jules’s chin. “You’re going to be OK, my lad. Soon you’ll be able to see my handsome face again.”

  Jules’s shoulders relaxed.

  “Nancy,” Denden said. “Go and rest. We won’t know any more until tonight. I’ll look after Jules.”

  She was tired to her bones come to think of it. She squeezed Jules’s shoulder. “You did well, Jules,” she said. “You and Jean-Clair.”

  Then she went in search of a corner to sleep in. It was nearly dark already.

  The next twenty-four hours were a blur of reports, orders, lightning raids to harry the German troops as their attack continued. Fournier found her in the bus at 2 a.m. and talked for forty minutes straight about his successes on the northern approach, then they worked through a half-bottle of brandy, making their plans for the next day. The Germans had pulled back as darkness fell, but they pushed back up the slopes of Mont Mouchet as soon as dawn broke, slowed by booby traps and the occasional burst of machine-gun fire from Nancy’s men in the woods. When the Germans reached the summit, only the dead remained to greet them in the smoldering ruins of the camp. As the afternoon light began to soften, Jean-Clair found Nancy with the news that Gaspard himself had escaped and Tardivat was bringing him to camp.

  Gaspard had asked, not demanded, to see her, Tardivat said, so she gave orders for him to be shown into her bus and treated with every civility. Then she made him wait. She’d have made him wait anyway, but she still had wounded men to see to and informers to talk to. She made sure that Gaspard’s men saw her, moving among them, and her Maquis made sure every one of them knew that Gaspard had been warned, that they owed their lives to Nancy’s Operation Ungrateful Bastards and that the brandy they were drinking and the food they were eating were her gift.

  It was clear Gaspard’s men had fought like lions though. She wouldn’t take that from him, or them. She learned that after her visit he had set up booby traps, doubled patrols and sent scouts toward the town, so they had had some warning. The planes shot up their camp ground, all their comfy barracks and stores, but the men were already in position in the woods. Their evacuation had been slow and improvised, but they’d retired in good fighting order and reached the guides and the safety of Fournier’s camps. They were bloody, tired and ragged, but they’d made it. Most of them. Seventy men were dead, and fifty others injured too badly to be of use in the fight to come for a good few weeks. The scouts told her more than two hundred SS men had been killed, and they would be busy all tonight and tomorrow carrying the dead and wounded down the slopes.

  Tardivat was waiting for her by the bus, and followed her inside. Gaspard was sitting awkwardly among the cushions. Tardivat sat next to him, and leaned back, the picture of masculine ease and a vague smile on his lips. Nancy didn’t sit or speak; instead she picked up her hairbrush, balanced her compact on the shelf and arranged her hair, then took her lipstick from the pocket of her fatigues and carefully painted her lips. She’d never be allowed into the Café de Paris in these shoes, but her face would pass.

  Only when she was good and ready did she sit down opposite Gaspard.

  “Do you know the real difference between men and women, Gaspard?” She smiled. “And please don’t say tits.”

  “Fuck you,” he hissed.

  Tardivat dealt him a single blow backhanded across the side of his head. He stared daggers at him, but didn’t return the strike. That told her everything she needed to know.

  “See?” She kept her voice soft. “Men solve problems with violence. The Germans were violent to you, which brings you here. An
d you were violent to me, which makes my men want to hang you from the highest tree.”

  Tardivat snorted in agreement, and Nancy could see a flicker of doubt on Gaspard’s face.

  “But lucky for you, Gaspard,” she continued, “I’ve been thinking about how women solve problems. We do it by talking—talking about our dreaded feelings. Right now, you feel fear. Anger, of course. Pride in your men too, and rightly so, but beneath that, shame. We both know that acid churn. Exactly as you feel now, you made me feel. And I could’ve stayed in your camp, puffing my chest, until some man murdered me. I could’ve died of shame. But that would be a shamefully stupid way to die, don’t you agree?”

  Gaspard licked his lips, nodded.

  “Good. Because D-Day is imminent, and I need every fighting man I can get. I have instructions from London on what to hit and when. I need your men to carry out those missions. I need you. Together we’re going to stop the Germans moving their troops and give the Allies coming into France every chance we can to gain a foothold and push in. That’s our role. That’s the part we—you and me—are going to play in liberating France. Not pitched battles, no heroic stands. Clever, surgical sabotage. Because this isn’t about us. This is about the whole fucking war.”

  He didn’t say anything. That was a good sign. Now to lock it up nice and tight.

  “All you have to do is accept that I’m now your commanding officer. Since you’re a major, let’s say I’m… colonel? Do what you are told, and you will get all the guns and ammo you need. Enough plastic to blow every bridge and railhead within twenty miles and enough money to feed yourselves like little kings while you do it. Now, do we have a deal?”

  He stared at her, and Nancy wondered what he saw. Yesterday, when she had gone charging into the camp, he had seen her just as he had on her first day in France—a girl, an English amateur playing games over his country. Now he had to see that she wasn’t that girl. She’d killed a man with her bare hands since then, won the faith and loyalty of a band of fighting men just like him, and planned and led the operation which had saved his men.

  “Yes, you have a deal.”

  He didn’t look her in the eye and she didn’t like that. She got to her feet and grabbed the hair at the back of his head, yanked hard, so he was staring up at her with his one good eye, reading her crimson lips.

  “Say that again, you son of a bitch. And say it better.”

  The fight left him. “Yes, mon colonel.”

  She released him, smoothed his hair back into place and patted him on the shoulder before returning to her seat. She thought of the reports she’d heard of how he’d fought, inspired his men. She needed him to do what she said, but she didn’t want to knock all the fight out of him.

  “Then I think we should celebrate, don’t you?”

  39

  The party was to mark their escape from the SS, honor their fallen comrades and affirm the union of Fournier’s and Gaspard’s men. Booze and food was funded by Uncle Buckmaster and the Bank of England. The SS men had returned to barracks in Clermont-Ferrand, so the teams who went out through the villages paying over the odds for booze and bread and whatever cheese they could get their hands on were also sending a message to the locals that it would take more than the SS to dislodge them. With that confidence and with wads of Nancy’s francs in their hands, they were greeted like heroes, and came back stumbling under the weight of their purchases.

  Nancy slept on her satin pillow in the bus for a couple of hours, and when she emerged into the dusk of the evening she could hear the laughter and chat of the main camp from the bus. She brushed her hair, put on her lipstick and walked up the hill. They cheered her. The Australian Angel, Mother Nancy, Voice of God, and my colonel, my colonel, my colonel greeted her from every side.

  The day’s battle had already grown in the telling, and changed from a near defeat to a total victory. You’d have thought Nancy and Gaspard had been working together the whole time to draw the Nazis into a trap.

  Fine. Believing that did them no harm, and if Gaspard’s men decided she was some sort of tactical savant, the witch and soothsayer at Gaspard’s side, that could work for her.

  She took her place at one end of the banks of tables between Denden and Tardi, with Gaspard down the other end, but once someone had put her drink in her hand, she stood up and called for quiet.

  “Enjoy, lads, because this may be your last supper.” They laughed. “I drink to the men who didn’t make it off the mountain! Sons of France!”

  She raised her glass and they toasted with her, but she stayed standing and they hushed down again quickly enough.

  “Very soon, we’ll get our orders, and we’ll begin the real fight to take back our home. So I suppose, in a way, that makes us family.”

  “To family!”

  “But remember, boys, just because I’m a bitch, doesn’t make me your mother, so if I ever hear one of you calling me Mother Nancy again, I’ll shoot you myself. To victory!”

  “Victory!”

  Damn, the drink was rough. Toasts rippled round the fires, then there was singing, then more toasts. The fires seemed to have been banked very high. Someone put down a bowl of meat and vegetable stew in front of her, and when she tasted it she was surprised to discover it was actually pretty good. Tardivat saw her expression and laughed.

  “Tardi, who made this?”

  “Look over there.”

  In the gloom beyond the firelight she could see figures moving round the cook house. One was in the pristine whites of a chef.

  “We’ve got a real cook?”

  “He’s a cousin of Gaspard’s. He volunteered to be ‘kidnapped’ for the evening to make us something worth eating.”

  She shook her head and took another spoonful of the stew, savoring it.

  “Everything’s changing, Nancy. The people are with us now,” Tardi said.

  She grinned. “It’s helped that you’ve stopped stealing their chickens.”

  The drinking went on after the food was finished, the chef unkidnapped himself and his helpers and the fighters congregated round the fires again. Nancy went into the woods for a piss, and by the time she got back, humming the song of the Partisans under her breath, something new was going on. The men were beating out a rhythm on the rocks and Gaspard was standing by the fire, his shirt open to the waist and a heavy knife in his hand.

  “Why don’t they just fuck already?”

  Nancy glanced round to see who had spoken. Denden of course, glowering at them all in the darkness.

  When she turned back, Gaspard was cutting a line across his bare chest; it beaded immediately with blood and he roared. The rhythm of the stones increased as one after one the men approached him, wet their fingertips with his blood and painted it in stripes across their faces, whooping as they did. Those not drumming on the rocks were on their feet now, dancing in a stamping, staggering, wide-legged roar of a dance, each shouting their own war cries.

  “Now that’s just nasty,” Denden added, then he saw Nancy moving toward the fire. “Nancy? What the hell?”

  She ignored him, and stalked across to Gaspard, pushing a waiting acolyte out of the way so he stumbled into the grass. Gaspard grinned and Nancy wet her fingers with the fresh blood seeping from his wound, then she painted a line across her face and, eye to eye, face to face, they screamed at each other. The men whooped and hollered in chorus, the rock orchestra increased in tempo and volume. Nancy grabbed a bottle out of the hand of the man nearest her and spun out into the dark again.

  She saw Denden watching her and tried not to notice the expression of disgust and surprise on his face.

  PART III

  JUNE 1944

  40

  Whatever had gone before was forgotten. The returning moon meant more drops responding to Denden’s flow of requests tapped out and transmitted from the high places around the base on the plateau. The bounty of London knew no bounds, but Nancy had to balance the scale of her requests with the time it would ta
ke to gather in the packed cylinders and disappear with them into the night before the German patrols caught up with them. Then the guns had to be degreased and Gaspard’s men trained to assemble and strip them. Denden helped teach the men on how to use the explosives and Tardivat tested the new time pencils and pronounced darkly about their reliability. The list of targets to be attacked on D-Day was regularly updated by London, and Nancy sent messages back via Denden’s quick fingers, suggesting changes and additional targets.

  The men weren’t content to wait though. Gaspard’s men in particular wanted to avenge their friends killed in the SS raid, and Nancy could see she’d have to give them some release or waste all her energy holding them back.

  So she continued to sanction regular raiding parties, small groups of men traveling in one or other of the little charcoal-powered trucks they now had stowed in barns and stables across the region, who lay in wait for isolated patrols. Tardivat trained the men to run tripwires between the trees along the road when they knew a patrol was approaching. The explosion would take out the first vehicle, then the group would fire down on the rest of the patrol with their brand-new Bren guns before melting back into the endless countryside.

  They came back from each successful outing wild with victory, and the Germans stayed clear of the back roads.

  Nancy slept when she could, feeling the temperature of the air change around her.

  On the first of June, Denden shook her awake after she’d had twenty minutes of the deepest, most perfect sleep, dreaming of her bed in Marseille. She threw her satin pillow at him, but he caught it, damn him, and threw it straight back at her.

  “Hold your temper, witch! We’ve got the call!”

  “I don’t care. Tell the Germans to come back tomorrow, I have to sleep.”