Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

  The shots struck sparks from the iron that flew up into her face and almost blinded her. She fell sideways. Franc cried out, fell heavily onto the walkway and rolled. Nancy grabbed hold of his belt, yanking him back. The pressure switch bounced on the iron and spun into the empty air. Franc’s hand shot out, just brushing it as it spiraled out into the river and disappeared. It was too far for them to even hear the splash.

  “Mon colonel…” Jean-Clair said, and something was wrong with his voice.

  She twisted round toward him as another spatter of gunfire sparked and clanged around them. Jean-Clair was gripping one of the central struts with one arm, slumped in the V of a crosspiece. His shirt was already soaked with blood, and Nancy could see the pulse of another wound in his thigh.

  She abandoned the walkway and scrambled out toward him on her hands and knees along a foot-wide beam, keeping her eyes on his face.

  “Jean-Clair, we can get you down.”

  “The pressure switch?” he panted, each word an effort.

  “It’s gone, forget it. The Nazis get to keep this bridge. Give me your hand.”

  He shook his head. Stared at her. “Give me a grenade, mon colonel.”

  She understood. A grenade would do nothing to the bridge, but exploded here, right here, it would be enough to set off the charges.

  “No.”

  “Mon colonel,” he said, “please.”

  He couldn’t say any more. She pulled one from her belt. Put it in his hand, closed his fingers around it.

  “Take out the pin.”

  She took out the pin and brushed his knuckles with her fingertips.

  “For France,” she said, and he managed to smile, his eyes half open.

  “For freedom,” he whispered.

  “Nancy!” Franc was screaming, reaching for her.

  She inched backward across the beam until he grabbed her, dragging her away over the last couple of feet, then shoved her down the walkway in front of him.

  There was no need to look at her watch now; they could feel the earth shaking as the train bore down on them. Above their heads they could hear the desperate warning shouts of the guards, but they were lost in the thunderous metallic roar of the approaching train. She ran. The bridge shook as it took the weight of the engine, and she looked up as the bridge became a flashing nightmare of clattering metal.

  Franc shouted her name again and she realized they were at the rappel point. Not enough time. Franc had already anchored his rope and started his descent. She wove her rope around her as another burst of gunfire came from the bank, then she stepped out into the air and looked up—the train was already nearing the other side of the bank.

  Her fall was too fast, not fast enough, the rope hot and tearing at her fingers. They had fucked it up, the train was going to make it over before the charges…

  Everything happened at once. She hit the water hard, and fumbled to release herself from the rope as the current turned her upside down and above her the charges blew. One, two. One, two. Grenade, middle charge, west side, east side. The world was noise and water. She was deaf and blind, turned over in the river, a wave of heat and light striking her as the rocks and roots grabbed at her legs. Her lungs began to ache. Then she felt a hand pulling at her wrist, hauling her out, and she took a great shuddering breath of air.

  Tardi was dragging her ashore. She shoved him away and staggered upright in time to see Franc being pulled out of the water by Mateo. Then they stood there, mute and staring.

  The smoke plume began to clear and Nancy saw the rip they had made in Eiffel’s beautiful ironwork. The rest of the bridge groaned and swayed, but the train was still there, not moving. Why hadn’t it raced away? She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the river water out of her vision. No. The last carriage had been above the site of the explosion, now it hung between the twisted bars. It was jerking downward, pulling the train back.

  Her hearing began to come back, the high whistle fading. Through the shrieking of the metal she could hear other sounds: screams, the screams of the soldiers in the last carriage. Too amazed to move, Nancy watched men from the train still on the bridge trying desperately to uncouple it and the pleading cries of the men suspended in the air who realized what they were doing.

  Other soldiers were smashing the windows of the carriages nearer the engine and scrambling out, running north over the bridge, a panicking mass. One fell, or was shoved out of the way, his greatcoat flapping, arms flailing as he struck the water. The train shifted back again, the bridge swayed and more men went tumbling into nothingness.

  Then the void won. Slowly, then very fast, the last carriage swung free and the whole train was pulled backward in a rush, the metal work sighed and twisted sideways as if trying to shrug it off and the train plunged four hundred feet into the water. Eiffel’s masterpiece did not quite fall, but it sagged and twisted sideways, the line cut, the arch pulled low. It groaned, like an animal in pain.

  Someone was shouting her name. “Nancy! Now!”

  Tardi, shaking her shoulders.

  “Fall back!” she said, and they raced together back into the woods, making for the rendezvous point, just as the fixed machine gun on the opposite bank found its range and began spattering the shingle under their feet with bullets.

  43

  Fournier had organized two field hospitals on the plateau, and half a dozen safe houses where a nurse, or a teacher who had some medical training, or a priest might do what they could to help the injured.

  One of Rodrigo’s boys had taken a bullet through the shin and Tardivat insisted Nancy drive him up to the plateau hospital and get herself seen to at the same time. She hadn’t even noticed her own wound, a bullet straight through the flesh of her upper arm, until she noticed the blood mixed in with the water dripping from her sodden clothes. Tardi would gather reports from the other teams active that day and get back to her. He swore he would as he bandaged her arm.

  The boy was pale with loss of blood, and dozed fitfully against the window while Nancy drove. The charcoal-powered cars were painfully slow, but they could take the climb. Three miles from camp, a Maquisard, his Bren across his chest and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, stopped them. He approached the window with his gun raised, but as soon as he recognized Nancy, dropped it and ground out his fag on the gravel road.

  “Colonel Nancy! We have two wounded. Can you take them?”

  “Hop in.”

  He waved his arm and a cluster of men emerged from the woods, carrying two boys between them, one unconscious, the other awake and gibbering with pain. He screamed when they set him down in the back.

  “You were taking out the rail tracks west of here, weren’t you? What went wrong?”

  The man who had stopped her shrugged. “Nothing. Bad luck. Doing the tracks was easy, then we walked straight into a patrol on the way home.”

  Probably too pleased with themselves to be paying attention.

  She didn’t say that. “Get in the back. Try and keep them alive until we get help.”

  He looked like he’d rather go and take on the patrol again, but he clambered up, folded his jacket and stuck it under the head of the man who was screaming. The others they left in the road to make their own way back to their camps.

  The field hospital was overflowing. Two doctors, three nurses and anyone who could stand it were helping out where they could. Outside the boys clustered around Nancy, shoving each other aside in their eagerness to talk of their successes—bridges burned, telephone and telegram wires brought down. Inside no one had any time to speak.

  Nancy was there for hours, first to get her wound washed and dressed, then to help. She held down one whimpering boy as the doctor pulled a bullet from his shoulder. The morphine was reserved for gut shot and severe burn cases. An older recruit, a farmer in his forties, thought she was his wife. He talked to her calmly about the harvest, then squeezed her hand, said, “I have to go now,” and died.

  When she finally left
the building the plateau was in darkness. Far below them in the valley a church bell was ringing. Gaspard, Denden and Tardi were standing, heads bowed, by a fresh row of graves. The priest from Chaudes-Aigues was standing over them, saying his prayers, his voice exhausted.

  Nancy waited a little way off until he had finished, then went to join them. Gaspard’s leg was bandaged and he leaned on a pale shepherd’s crook—pilfered from one of the abandoned farms, no doubt. Between that and the eyepatch he looked more like a pirate than ever. It wasn’t funny.

  “The bells are ringing for our victories, mon colonel,” he said as she approached. “France is rising.”

  “Victory?” Nancy said, staring at the graves. The gut shot boy in the back of the wagon hadn’t made it. He’d stopped screaming about a mile before they reached the plateau. His friend was weeping when they finally stopped. He jumped off, head down, and strode toward the woods without looking at her.

  “They knew the risks going in, Nancy,” Denden said.

  “Brave words from a fairy who didn’t even fight,” Gaspard spat out.

  “The radio is my weapon,” Denden said back, his voice haughty.

  Oh, not this again. The more she worked with Gaspard, the more Denden seemed to go out of his way to provoke him. Fournier seemed to find their spats amusing and Tardi didn’t care.

  Nancy brushed the hair off her face with a trembling hand. “Not today, boys. Not here.” Then she walked away.

  44

  The day after the disaster, Böhm walked out onto the stunted remains of Eiffel’s bridge, and the guards he had been questioning, unsure what to do, scuttled after him.

  They should have sent for him sooner. It was despicable, traitorous even that his superiors had delayed dispatching him to the Auvergne for so long. The fact that half the local mayors and a good number of the gendarmerie were working hand in hand with the Maquis had been clear for months. If they had sent him here during the winter, when the snow made it easier to track the Maquis, when the bare trees allowed them to see their pathetic encampments from the air, then all this could have been avoided. The Führer would have been able to move the pieces of his army at will, and the Allies would already have been kicked back into the Atlantic, defeated and sniveling and begging for the chance to join with Germany against Russia.

  He turned to the guard closest to him. “You saw her, didn’t you?”

  “Only for a moment, sir! As she was repelling down from the bridge.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  The boy looked confused. “I don’t know… so much was happening, it was just as the train…”

  They both looked down into the water where the twisted carcass of the train still lay the bodies caught in the wreckage moving like weeds with the flow of the river four hundred feet below them.

  Böhm sighed. “It’s understandable that your mind would block such a painful memory. I have a technique which might help, if you are willing.”

  The guard smiled, reassured. “Of course, sir!”

  Böhm came up to him, close. “Very well.”

  Böhm grabbed his lapels and forced him toward the torn iron at the edge of the bridge, overbalancing him, holding on. The guard’s boots clanged on the metal as he struggled to keep them on the brittle bars.

  “I won’t let you fall. Feel. Please, just feel.” The man looked as if he was going to be sick. “The Jew Freud theorizes that inducing the emotions of a repressed trauma brings it back. Now think.”

  The guard nodded and Böhm pulled him back. He staggered sideways and backward till he was on solid ground again. Böhm followed him.

  “Now close your eyes and return to the attack. What do you see?”

  The guard did much better this time. It was her. No doubt about it. He’d wondered, having heard rumors of a woman leading the Maquis and helping thwart the attack on Mont Mouchet, but now he was certain. Madame Fiocca, the White Mouse, now at the center of all this trouble in the Auvergne. Providence moved in mysterious ways, indeed. If it had been some other agent, Böhm would have needed time, too much time, to get to know his quarry—watch for her hiding holes, learn her habits and weaknesses. But Nancy he knew. All was not yet lost.

  He walked back toward the car, where Heller was waiting, polishing his eye glasses. The younger man was unnerved to see his boss was smiling.

  45

  The blaze of sabotage was a beginning, not an end. London kept sending new targets and the campaign to snarl the Germans as they tried to reinforce their troops at Normandy became a battle to harry them, tie them down, exhaust and demoralize them. That meant more drops, more ambushes and a continual round of regular supply runs to the smaller groups of Maquis dotted around the region, all of them on the move to keep out of reach of the Germans.

  The days bled one into another as Nancy catnapped in fields waiting for supply drops, or let one of the Spaniards drive and allowed her head to droop, her Bren still on her lap as they bounced through the back roads. The Allies had gained a grip in Europe, and it was their job to make sure they kept it. Once they had ticked off the lists from London, they made their own, working with railway crews to blow engines and tracks, cratering every road wide enough to carry armored trucks, forcing troops into smaller, more vulnerable wagons and then ambushing them in lightning raids and disappearing back into the woods when the road was ablaze with burning vehicles and filled with the screams of injured men. When the guns were blazing, she was alive, absolutely awake. The moment the immediate danger passed, her body shut down and she went through the intervening hours in a daze.

  Reprisals against the civilian population had been talked about, of course. Long before Nancy had even got back to England, the Nazis’ habit of shooting hostages in revenge for covert enemy action was well known. At first they had made a pretense of executing political prisoners, couriers and communists they had on hand in their jails, but now all pretense of order, control or justice was gone. Perhaps the French thought the SS wouldn’t behave like that in France. Even when, after the assassination of the Gestapo leader Heydrich, rumors reached them of two Czechoslovakian villages wiped out—men, women and children—they thought no. They only do that in the east.

  Now they had their answer. That useless rage the SS men felt when they found their enemy had disappeared into the mountains and valleys was turned on the people, those tied to their land and their families who could not run.

  “Shit…” Nancy blinked and lifted her head.

  They were traveling down through Védrines-Saint-Loup, and the road was a familiar one. They’d bought supplies from the farm here from time to time. A ragged plume of smoke was rising straight up into the air round the next bend in the road. She rubbed her eyes, peered through the windscreen.

  “Shall we go round?” Mateo asked.

  Nancy examined the smoke again. “No, if that’s the Boyer farmhouse, it’s been burning a while and it’ll cost us two hours and a ton of fuel to detour. Keep going.”

  They saw the first body before they turned the corner. An old man, a worker on the farm who’d sold them cheese from the back barn. The Germans had strung him up in one of the chestnut trees whose heavy branches shaded the road. Nancy felt her mouth go dry. Mateo turned the corner, slowing down.

  Two more bodies, the farmer and his wife. Boyer had lost an arm in 1918 so had been spared the call up and worked like a battalion to keep his animals fed and his storehouses full. The couple had been hanged side by side from the door to the loft of the hay barn. Their children were trying to get them down.

  The girl, twelve maybe, was up in the loft, trying to saw through the ropes with a penknife while their son, a little younger, was waiting below, his arms raised, ready to catch the bodies. Behind the loft the farmhouse continued to smolder.

  “Stop,” Nancy said.

  “Nancy, there’s nothing we can do,” said Mateo.

  “Stop the fucking car, and take Jules and help those kids get their parents down.”

 
He knew not to argue when she spoke in that tone of voice. He stopped the pickup, climbed out and through a sort of fog Nancy heard him giving his orders to the boys riding in the back.

  Now two of her men were holding the legs of the man and woman, while another pair sawed through the ropes up top. The bodies fell like ripe fruit. It reminded her of that time Henri took her to see the harvest in Bordeaux, how the thick purple bunches fell into the waiting baskets, full of juice, the dusty purple of their skins.

  The boy and girl circled round the men, mewling. The girl was pawing at her dead mother’s skirts as the man who had caught her carried her across the yard. They didn’t have time to stop and help bury them. Mateo told them to lay them down under the slope of the woodpile. He closed their eyes and worked the ropes off their necks while the girl sat on the ground between the bodies, still keening wordlessly, turning right and left touching them, holding their hands and dropping them, picking them up again.

  Nancy got out of the car, took an envelope from her tunic, counted out a fistful of notes. What was a parent worth? Two parents, a home? She didn’t have enough for that. Enough for food for a few weeks. Should she give it to the boy? Where was the boy?

  He came at her fast, with a roar of hatred, his little pocketknife, the knife his sister had been using to try and saw through the ropes, held out in front of him. When did he get hold of that? He was screaming. That it was her fault. That he would kill her. She just watched him come. Didn’t move. Mateo turned from the bodies, raised his gun, but Jules was too quick—he jumped down from the gatepost where he’d been sitting and caught the boy with his rifle butt. The kid went down like a sack of oats, his knife spinning away from him across the dry mud of the yard. Jules bent down, examined the boy, then stood.

  “He’ll live.”

  Nancy still didn’t move. Jules took the money from her hand then jogged across to the girl and gave it to her. She didn’t understand. You could see that. Her mind was scattered with the horror of it all. Perhaps it would come back. She didn’t even seem to notice her brother laid out on the ground by the gate. Jules pushed the money into the pocket of her pinafore and left her.