Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

  Then they started to cheer.

  61

  Over the next twenty-four hours Tardivat drove her between the scattered camps and she gave the same speech, or versions of it, a dozen times. By the time the men started to gather at a chateau on the hill just outside Cosne-d’Allier, they were back to full strength.

  Denden brought them the latest intelligence from London while they were eating canned rations round the fire in the Great Hall. They’d left the farmhouse the day before, and designated this chateau, a fine seventeenth-century building still hung with tapestries, their headquarters and rallying point.

  The Germans who’d looted the place had done a half-hearted sort of job, taking down some of the pictures and smashing up some of the chairs, but the massive oak dining table had been too heavy to move.

  Denden paused as he came in, looking around at the fluttering shadows in the high-beamed ceiling, the elaborate carvings around the fireplace. “Got to say, this is much nicer than that buggy little hovel of yours on the plateau, Fournier,” he said.

  Fournier smiled and shook his head.

  “What have you got, Denden?” Nancy asked, and he walked over to her and handed her the papers.

  She scanned them briefly then put them on the table so the others—Juan, Gaspard, Fournier and Tardivat—could all see.

  Gaspard sniffed. “Tomorrow then.”

  Nancy nodded. “Brief your lads, gentlemen. And try and make them get some rest.”

  Denden found her in her chamber at three in the morning, looking out from the leaded windows down the hill toward Cosne-d’Allier.

  “My lady!”

  “Not a bad billet, is it?” she replied, turning away from the moonlit view. “But I can’t sleep. The bed is too soft.”

  Denden sat on it, bouncing up and down so the springs squeaked. “Fancy a drink? I hear rumors the Germans couldn’t get into the wine cellar, and you and I are rather good at locks. I’m sure the owner wouldn’t mind.”

  “Not tonight, Denden. Though if you want to find some charming young man to party with, don’t let me stop you.”

  He made a huffing noise, then fell backward on the bed.

  “Does terrible things to my libido, knowing there’s an action coming in the morning. Can’t really enjoy the curious young men if I keep thinking of them getting shot the next day.” He folded his hands behind his head. “Is this plan of yours going to work?”

  She leaned against the window and crossed her arms. “I don’t know, Denden. It’s a long shot. You haven’t forgotten your role, I hope.”

  “No, darling. I’m all set to be utterly heroic. Then, if any of us survive I’ll break open the cellar and find a nice new friend all flush with victory.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed him. She’d noticed how he still looked at Jules when he thought no one could see him. She lay down on the bed next to him, and he put his arm around her shoulder, gathering her onto his chest.

  “Nancy?”

  He was stroking her hair.

  “What is it?”

  “There was something else in the intelligence, something I kept to myself,” he said, then hesitated.

  She bit her lip. “Major Böhm,” she whispered.

  “Yes, dearie. Seems this battalion is the remains of a number of units and the word from London is that all the local Gestapo officers are traveling back to Germany with them.” He drew in breath to say something more, but she put her hand on his chest, stopping him.

  “It’s all right, Denden. I won’t run off again. Not until this is done. Then I’ll find him.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Good. We need you.”

  They didn’t say any more and eventually she could tell by his breathing he had fallen into a doze. Nancy could not, and watched the soft shadows cast by the moon chase each other around the room until it was time to get up. To begin.

  62

  It was the German people who had failed. They had not had the necessary will, had not deserved the leader that had been sent to them. Böhm was crushed into the back of a Kübelwagen, rattling back toward his thankless country, surrounded by exactly the sort of spineless generals and other senior officers who had betrayed the Führer. It was cruel that decent military men like Commander Schultz were killed while soft-bellied, soft-minded men like these survived. Their medals clinked as the wagon jolted slowly along the road.

  Ridiculous to travel in this way. He might be of some assistance in Berlin, but he was stuck with the survivors of two ragged battalions and they were forced to move at the crawling pace of the men and the half-dozen Panzer tanks. How had the Allies won? How could the British and Americans not see that their interests and Germany’s were aligned? It was obvious they had to join together to defeat the Jewish-Marxist conspirators who had taken over Russia, and instead those nations, full of decent racial stock, had joined hands with a bunch of semi-human Slavs. It was disgusting, disappointing, outrageous. How had they managed to survive, to fight when they were forced to scavenge for weapons among their own dead? Nothing he had learned studying psychology at Cambridge with the brightest minds of his generation had prepared him for their capacity for suffering. Everything he knew told him that they should have broken months ago, that the French, whom they had treated with forbearance as long as possible, should have accepted and celebrated them; that the English, with their respect for good breeding and advanced thinking on eugenics and racial purity should have joined hands with them from the start. Yet they had not.

  He imagined what he would do if he ever met one of the German generals who had command in the east: spit in his face, tear off his epaulets, splatter his pathetic unworthy brains all over the road.

  He was staring at a colonel on the facing bench, imagining this image with a pleasing quiver—his rage at least distracted him from the cheek wound Wake had given him which refused to heal—when the man suddenly coughed and blood began to run from the corner of his mouth. He looked surprised, then hurt, as if the victim of some small social slight, then he slumped forward and Böhm saw the bullet hole in the canvas.

  The truck jolted to a full stop and Böhm heard the mewl of bullets in the air. Outside orders were being shouted. He ignored his companions and pushed his way to the back of the wagon and jumped down onto the road.

  “Take cover, men!” he shouted at the confused infantry, only now in a haze of exhaustion realizing they were being fired upon. They began to scatter off the main road, but the banks were steep, the ditches shallow.

  “Use the vehicles for cover! Watch for where the shooting is coming from before you return fire.”

  Three feet from him a sergeant leading his squad out of the firing line took a bullet in the throat and staggered past Böhm, trying to stop the wound with his hand. Böhm stepped aside to avoid the arterial spray.

  A hundred yards behind him he heard a burst of light machine-gun fire and saw three men writhing in the ditch. He jogged up to the very front of the column where the tank commander and the colonel supposedly in charge of this shit show of an operation were fighting, yelling at each other in full view of the men.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Böhm said sharply. “Why have we stopped?”

  The tank commander saluted. “The colonel insists we counter-attack, sir, and assist the wounded.”

  Böhm turned on the colonel. Weak chin, dark hair. Poor stock. He’d never be allowed in the SS.

  “This is an ambush, Colonel. Do not let the enemy choose the ground on which to fight. Push on into the town at once. The Allied forces are a day behind us; we must cross this bridge before the Maquis blow it if we have any hope of taking part in the defense of the Fatherland.”

  The colonel grew red in the face. “I will not run from a bunch of peasants who have got their hands on a few light arms!”

  Just behind them they heard a sudden roar and the flatly echoing clap of a rocket being launched. They spun around, shielding their eyes, as the wagon in the center of the column
exploded into flames.

  “It seems the peasants have bazookas too, Colonel,” Böhm snapped.

  The colonel turned away from him. “Forward! Forward at once! Into the town!”

  The tank commander scrambled back into his Panzer and Böhm heard him screaming the same order into his radio. The column jerked into urgent motion. One of the tanks in the middle of the column behind them began shouldering the flaming wagon out of the way as men, their clothes and hair aflame, still struggled out of it. As the other wagons moved forward, the infantry jogged at their sides.

  Böhm followed the colonel into his staff car. The colonel shot him a foul look, but waited until Böhm had slammed the door before he ordered his man to drive on.

  Denden had been up in the bell tower since before dawn, gazing down on the quiet square below him. It was a pretty enough place: the road from Montluçon wound up to it through wooded valleys to the south, disgorging into a market place surrounded by solid three-story buildings in a mix of stone and half-timbering. The ground floors were the shopfronts of the little town, the grocer’s store and the butcher’s, the ironmonger’s and the bars. All shuttered today. The modest, classical frontage of the town hall watched from the northern edge of the square, the steps worn by generations climbing them to register births, marriages, deaths, fetch their papers and ration cards. The door today was locked.

  Back from the square, the artisans and textile workers had their workshops and homes, and then the houses began to thin, turning into small farms. The town was fringed with orchards. The church, rebuilt in pale stone a hundred or so years earlier by a local pig-farmer-turned-railway entrepreneur, occupied the north-east corner of the square. The religious authority of the town watched over its people in respectful partnership with the secular town hall, shoulder to shoulder with the main road passing between them and then over the bridge.

  When Denden swung his binoculars to the north, he could see Gaspard and Rodrigo checking the charges along the handsome stone bridge which crossed the river. It was wider than most of the river crossings in the region. The pig farmer had built this too, his gift, to replace the ancient narrow crossing which had served the little town for three hundred years. It was the only bridge within twenty miles left that would allow a tank to pass. The pig farmer had, in his forward-thinking generosity, painted a target on the place.

  Nancy had sent men into the town to evacuate the civilians as soon as she’d got the final information from London. Not everyone had gone though. The mayor, who had been turning a blind eye to Maquis activity in the area for two years, had insisted on being given a rifle and a place to stand, and had bought half a dozen gendarmes with him. He was under Tardivat’s command behind a row of sandbags at the corner of the town hall. Some other inhabitants had stayed to guard their property, and a number of young women had volunteered to care for the injured at the chateau or in the town hall. The rest of the population, though, had gathered up their children, taken what food and water they could carry and walked up into the hills, not knowing what would be left of their lives when the day was over.

  Denden saw the column first as a glint of light on a windshield farther down the valley. Gradually the great fat snake of it came into view. He counted tanks, and swallowed. Five of the bastard things. Shit. The infantrymen looked to be marching in good order too. He had hoped they’d look a bit more beaten up. Christ, there were a lot of them.

  He took out his hip flask and took a long pull.

  “Jules, give Field Marshal Wake the following details, will you?” He rattled off his estimates of troop numbers, the wagons and tank count. “Then you’d better find your place.”

  It was like Nancy to have assigned Jules the role of messenger between them. They had not spoken much while waiting for the convoy to appear in the valley, just slightly awkward nonsense. But Denden had felt Jules beginning to soften, heard the note of regret in his voice. It helped even as it hurt, and Denden was thankful to him and to Nancy for it.

  Jules stood up. “Good luck, Denis,” he said. It had been Captain Rake up to now.

  “And to you, Jules,” Denden replied. “Be well.” Jules dashed down the winding stairs from the belfry without saying anything more, and Denden found he had to blink a couple of times to clear his vision.

  He was just in time to see the column shudder to a halt, half a mile outside town.

  “No, no…” he said softly. “Run to Mummy and Daddy, dear hearts.”

  A sudden blur of flames. René had managed to get into first position with his toys. Good.

  “Come on, into town,” Denden said again. “Not nice out there, is it, my dears? Come on.”

  A minute passed, then the column jerked forward, faster this time. Denden put down the glasses and picked up a flag—well, the tattered remains of Nancy’s red satin cushion salvaged from the bus and now tied to a stick—and stuck it through the louvered windows.

  Nancy had been staring at that bloody bell tower for an hour even before they heard the boom of the explosion and the distant rattle of gunfire. Then the red flag.

  “Showtime, boys,” she shouted.

  The exit from the square between the church and town hall was blocked by a wall of sandbags—on the west guarded by a troop under Tardivat, on the east by Nancy’s men. She rested her Lee-Enfield on top of the sandbag wall and wet her lips, tasting the soft tang of V for Victory by Elizabeth Arden.

  They weren’t stupid. A tank rumbled into the square first, the growl of its engine deafening, the scale of it in the market square impossible. In its shadow came a flood of infantry. One of René’s protégés stood up to the west of the bridge and fired his bazooka into its tracks while the rest of them laid down covering fire, picking off the infantry and driving them back into cover.

  The charge exploded, throwing two of the infantry into the air, but the tank trundled forward.

  “Shit!” Juan was firing and reloading steadily beside her. “How is it still moving?”

  A second tank rumbled into the square and came alongside the first. For a moment the two monsters paused in the center of the square around a hundred feet in front of them. Behind them surged a fresh swarm of infantry. They pushed forward again. Nancy was betting they wouldn’t shell their positions and risk making the road and bridge impassable. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t just roll over them though.

  René’s protégé stood up again.

  “Good luck,” Nancy whispered. Reload, pick your target, fire. Reload, pick your target, fire. She brought down one NCO, waving his men forward just in front of the tank. He went down and the tank rolled over him.

  A rush of air and the explosion of the bazooka. She watched the charge bounce under the tank and explode, blinding her. When she could see again, it was stopped, and black smoke was pouring from the turret, the hatch opened and two of the crew struggled out, choking. She took down one. The first tank was still coming straight at them, and the square was still filling with infantry, firing at them from behind the tanks, the market cross. No matter how many they took down, more surged from behind and the main body of them, led by the first tank, bore down inexorably on their position. Holes were appearing in their ranks.

  “Fall back!” Nancy yelled, swapping her rifle for her Bren and firing short, controlled bursts. The Germans would be sending flanking parties through the back streets and round to their rear by now and she’d only got a few scattered guns hiding in houses off the square to hold them off.

  Juan stumbled and fell, his shoulder shot through.

  Nancy looked to the west. Tardivat was pulling back too. The Germans were swarming over his sandbag defenses and the Maquis were fighting hand to hand, the stubborn bastards. Nancy grabbed Juan’s collar, pulling him backward, still firing from her hip, cutting down the men in front of her. Everything was training now. Sound and light, instinct serving her, her conscious mind blanked out by noise. The tank was almost on them, and the third was lumbering into the square.

  Juan was sho
uting at her. “GO!”

  She released his collar and headed for the corner of the church without looking back. Damn, they were coming through the side streets. She pulled at the door of the bell tower. A sergeant, his face pocked with scars, came up suddenly on her blind side, and the machine gun jammed. He charged her. She allowed the Bren to swing on its strap, pulled her knife and sidestepped, letting him run onto its slashing edge as she twisted it across his throat.

  Then through the door and up the tight spiral stairs. She slipped, her boots wet with Juan’s blood, her hands with the German’s, then threw herself forward again. The noise was deafening; the tank coughed out a shell and it exploded among the sandbags, sending clouds of earth into the sky and shaking the foundations of the tower.

  She scrambled through the trapdoor and into the belfry, her lungs screaming and her muscles on fire. Denden was waiting for her, binoculars in hand. He turned.

  “Down!”

  She didn’t think, just flattened herself on the dusty and ill-fitting planks. Denden pulled his side arm and fired, one, two. She heard a gasp and twisted round in time to see a soldier standing above her, the front of his tunic blossoming with a dark damp stain. Her heart lurched and she kicked out, catching his shin and sending him back down the stairs, then slammed down the trapdoor. How had she not heard him?

  “Seal it!” Denden shouted at her.

  Move, Nancy. She grabbed the waiting sandbag Jules and Denden had dragged up the tower at dawn and shoved it on top of the trapdoor.

  “Alone at last,” Denden said with a crooked smile.

  She took the binoculars from him. “Thank you.”

  He didn’t reply. Just nodded and looked back out into the square. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes, trying to take it all in. Below her she saw the bodies of the Maquis slumped over the sandbags.