by Ariel Lawhon
“There are worse things to be called,” he says, without looking up.
I have decided that that phrase offends me and that I will stay offended regardless of differing opinions. “We’re the forest terrorists? They’re the ones who have spread their sickness across Europe.”
Hubert lifts his head and surveys our current campsite. “Not much forest here.”
We’ve taken up residence in an open stretch of farmland in the Ygrande river valley with a dozen empty barns that housed dairy cows before the Nazis swept through and confiscated them. Though Hubert hasn’t said so out loud, I’m certain the landscape makes him nervous. There’s nowhere to hide.
After a moment of amiable silence Hubert tells me, “Go on, say it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But you’ve been picking your fingernails for the last five minutes and I can practically hear the wheels grinding in your mind. You ought to grease them more often.” He winks at me then and I am stunned. I didn’t know Hubert could wink. “Whatever it is, spit it out.”
It’s not exactly mind reading, but it’s pretty damn close and we’ve both gotten good at it over the last six months. There is no easy way to approach the subject, so I tell him, matter-of-factly, “I want to strike the Nazi headquarters at Montluçon.”
Now I’ve got his full attention. “Why?”
“Because cutting the head off the snake will do more damage than blowing up the occasional convoy.”
“That snake has a lot of heads, Nance.”
“About four dozen,” I tell him. “But there is one in particular that needs to be severed.”
Hubert straightens. He crosses his arms over his chest. “What are you up to?”
“Just a bit of long-awaited revenge.”
“On whose behalf?”
“Do you remember that man in Mont Mouchet? The one Gaspard and Judex—”
“Yes.” He shudders. “Not a thing I’ll ever forget.”
“His name was Roger le Neveu.”
“Yes. That’s what Gaspard said.” He looks at me, eyes narrow and filled with suspicion. “How did you know him?”
“I didn’t. He was a double agent embedded in a group I worked with.” I wave my arm around. “Before I went to London. Before all of this. He betrayed a friend of mine and sent him to Dachau.”
“And your friend. Is he…?”
“I don’t know.” Garrow survived his imprisonment, but I fear it’s too much to hope that O’Leary will too.
Hubert says nothing. He is giving me the opportunity to make my case. So I continue.
“Neveu came from Montluçon. We know that he was sent to find Gaspard, then locate me. And I have every reason to believe that those instructions came from a German officer named Obersturmführer Wolff. I’ve seen him twice with my own eyes. Once, eight years ago in Vienna. And then again in Termes. Wolff was the one who ordered the gutting and execution of Gabriel Soutine’s pregnant wife.”
I can see the muscles tighten along Hubert’s jaw. “He’s the one I had to stop you from going after?”
“Yes. And he’s the one who shot our radio operator in Bourges.”
“Denis’s lover?”
I nod. “I am certain that he’s the one who sent those scouts to the farmhouse several days ago. It’s obvious there has been a shift in Tardivat’s group. They are growing by the hundreds every week. They are better armed than they were a month ago. They are going on the offensive.”
“Which means that Wolff knows you’re here.”
“Or he suspects it, at least.” I stretch my neck, rolling it from side to side. Sleeping in a barn isn’t all that different from sleeping on the ground, and my body has started to complain. “The attacks won’t stop. Not unless we cut the head off that snake.”
“He’ll just be replaced with a different head.”
“Then we cut the neck off as well.”
Sometimes, being right isn’t as satisfying as I would like it to be. Hubert and I stand beneath the overhang of the barn, quite literally up to our ankles in old manure, looking at all the different pins pushed into the map we have spread out on a makeshift table. We can hear Denis Rake up in the hayloft, listening to the latest radio transmission, tapping out his messages in Morse code.
I watch Hubert’s face as he ponders how we would even pull off such an operation. “We’ll need intel from Tardivat,” he says, and I am about to suggest sending Jacques to collect him immediately when three things happen in quick succession.
There is a distant boom, followed by a momentary silence, then a rumbling tremor that rolls through the ground at our feet. It shakes dust from the barn rafters and rattles the timbers.
After that comes the faint crackle of machine-gun fire and the sound of shouting.
And finally, Louis comes stumbling through an adjacent field, one arm bloody and the other hanging limp at his side. I watch, strangely paralyzed, as he lurches, falls, and is swallowed by the tall grass.
* * *
—
“Where did they come from?” Hubert shouts beside me as he rips the map off the table and heaves Louis’s gangly body onto it.
Louis’s teeth are clenched together. He’s whining, like a dog in pain, and I am grateful for the noise. It means he’s lucid and angry, and that might just keep him alive.
“Montluçon,” I tell Hubert. It may as well be a curse word for the way I spit it into the air between us.
“Status?” Hubert demands as Jacques trots up to the barn, carbine slung over one shoulder.
“We’re s-s-surrounded,” he says.
“And why the hell didn’t we see them coming?”
“We d-d-did.” He nods at Louis. “Just not in t-t-time.”
“How many?” Hubert presses the heel of his hand into the bullet wound in Louis’s shoulder, stanching the flow of blood, and is rewarded with a yelp of pain. Hubert looks at Denis, who has climbed down from the loft, and barks out an order for bandages.
Louis lifts his head from the table and speaks between clenched jaws. “A few hundred. With six thousand more…ggggrrrr…on the way.”
Hubert snarls. “Then it should have been easier to spot them!”
“They were already in position,” he pants, grinding out the words. “I think the scouts came ahead and—merde that hurts!—” he screams as Hubert presses harder into his shoulder.
“—the bullet’s still in there—”
“—they’ve been narrowing down…” Louis takes a deep breath, eyes rolling back. “Our location…since we retreated…from…the…farmhouse.” He drops his head to the table with a thump, unconscious.
Our group of maquisards, with Anselm in the lead, has wasted no time setting up a perimeter around the barn and field where we are camped. Eighty men, in groups of two, each armed and ready to fire a bazooka at the first German they see. The line won’t hold against cannons or tanks, but it will buy us several hours against infantry.
Hubert has his fingers pressed to the side of Louis’s throat, searching for a pulse.
“How much time do we have?” I ask.
Hubert glances at me. At the perimeter. At Louis. “I don’t know.”
The machine-gun fire is growing closer, and directly to the west I hear the first rumbling bang of a bazooka go off, followed by a plume of dirt exploding airborne at the far edge of the field. It is followed by the shrieking of men, though I can’t be certain whose.
I take the bandages and medic pack from Denis when he returns. Hubert helps me roll Louis onto his side and I tell him, “We need reinforcements.”
“We’re on foot. And Tardivat is an hour away,” Hubert says.
We work in silence for a moment. I dig through the pack, looking for a pair of surgical tweezers. Nothing. “Dammit,” I cuss. “How am I supposed to f
ind that bullet?”
Hubert uses his free hand to grab a knife from his pocket. He hands it to me without comment and I unfold the utensils. Because it belongs to Hubert, it is clean, oiled, and sharpened.
I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a nurse. I don’t know the names of any muscle, ligament, or tendon in the shoulder. But I do know that I shouldn’t go digging around in the human body with a folding Sheffield knife.
Hubert pulls his hand away from the wound and points. “It isn’t deep. You can see part of it, right there, lodged in the muscle. Be quick.”
I decide on the marlinespike, then spread Louis’s bullet wound open with two fingers. He groans on the table but doesn’t wake up. My fingers are slick with blood, but I hold the spike steady as I insert it into his shoulder and set the pointed end beneath the lead slug. I flick upward, and the bullet dislodges. We pack the wound, then wrap it with bandages.
Once the crisis is averted I tighten my belt, wipe my bloody hands on my trousers, grab my pack, and turn to the north.
“What are you doing?” Hubert demands.
“Going for reinforcements.”
I am yanked back before I can take two steps.
“N-n-no,” Jacques says. “My turn.”
I am about to argue but Hubert nods. “Let him.”
Without a word Jacques slings his carbine over his shoulder. Tucks revolvers into the holsters at either side of his belt. Grabs four extra cartridges and shoves them into his pocket. Then he is bounding to the edge of the field like a deer. In one fluid movement he crouches and disappears into the tall grass.
“He didn’t like it last time,” Hubert tells me. “The entire three days you were gone on that bike he paced the camp and cursed himself. The stuttering drove me crazy. I can’t take it again.”
I hold a finger in his face. “Don’t make fun of him.”
“I’m not! Just telling you how it was. Jacques feels it’s his job to keep you alive.”
I listen to the distant rat-tat-tat of gunfire. “How long do you think before the remaining troops reach us?”
“Not long enough.”
“And Jacques won’t get to Tardivat for at least an hour?”
“Right. And then he’ll have to bring reinforcements.” Hubert scans the field, looking for our men. Occasionally Anselm pops up and runs to another location, then dissolves into the grass. “They’ll need more ammunition.”
“So let’s get it to them,” I say.
Denis Rake is standing beside Louis, eyeing him cautiously.
“Do you have your pistol?” I ask him.
Denis pats the Welrod in the holster at his thigh. “Yes.”
“You shoot any German who comes near this barn. Understand?”
His face turns red and he whispers, as though confessing some mortal sin, “I don’t think I could shoot a man unless I was drunk, Duckie.”
I have no brandy. I have no bourbon or whisky or scotch. Not even any rotgut bathtub gin. All I have is a bottle of pure rubbing alcohol in the medic’s kit. I dig around in the bag and give the bottle to Denis, along with two warnings. “Only a few sips. Much more than that and you’ll go blind, then die.” I point at Louis. “If he wakes up, pour that into his wound. He’ll hate you for it, but he’ll stay conscious.”
* * *
—
Hubert and I have carried seventeen cases of ammunition—mostly AT116 rockets, each filled with three and a half pounds of explosives, for the bazookas—to various groups along the perimeter, when we hear the rumble of motors, the static of machine guns, and artillery shells to the southeast.
“Tardivat?” I ask.
“Did he come in from their rear?”
He nods. “Trying to draw them away, I think. Give us time to retreat.”
“Then let’s not disappoint him.”
I bolt for the barn.
“What are we going to do with him?” Denis asks, pointing at Louis, who, though now conscious, looks as though he might not be for long.
“We’ll have to carry him.”
* * *
—
I wonder if it is possible to crack open my chest and pour the bottle of pure rubbing alcohol directly onto my heart. It’s not that I want to die, but rather that I never want to feel anything again. I don’t know how to get through the rest of this damn war while caring for so many people.
The surrounding fields are quiet now, thanks to Tardivat and his ferocious strike on the German battalion. They dissolved shortly after his reinforcements arrived, expecting a group of less than one hundred and being ambushed on three sides by over a thousand.
Hubert and Tardivat find me sitting on the ground beside Louis, whom I have wrapped in a blanket because he’s shivering uncontrollably. Beside him are the bodies of seven other maquisards who were killed during the skirmish. Two of them are mine. Five are Tardivat’s.
“It is time to go,” Tardivat tells me.
“We have to bury them first.”
He peers at the sky and scratches his head. “It will be sundown in an hour.”
“So?”
“There is a churchyard a few kilometers from here. We can sneak in once it’s dark.”
* * *
—
We bury the seven maquisards along the high wall of a small, Protestant churchyard in Les Cernes. The little cemetery has only one exit, and we place Anselm at the gate, Sten gun at the ready, to ensure that we’re not ambushed by a passing German patrol. We give them rocks for headstones and all the military honors that we can under the circumstances.
I am quiet as Tardivat drives Hubert and me to our next camp in the Forêt de Tronçais—a well-hidden area, closer to Tardivat, and protected by one of his groups. The car is so quiet I can hear his stomach rumble.
“Jacques arrived with your message,” Tardivat tells me, patting his belly, “while I was eating lunch.”
I lift an eyebrow and try not to smile. It feels wrong to smile with grave dirt still on my hands. “Was it good?”
He shrugs. “It was food.”
“A Frenchman walked away from a meal? I’m astonished.”
“It is a thing that would only happen for you, Madame Andrée.”
* * *
—
I sent Denis ahead, with Jacques and two of Tardivat’s men, to get Louis to a small hospital in Ygrande that is run by a religious order and does not ask too many questions. By the time we reach our new camp in the Forêt de Tronçais Denis Rake is waiting for us, an enormous grin on his face.
“Good news, Duckie!” he shouts the moment I step out of Tardivat’s Renault. “I’ve just been on the radio. The Allies landed in Toulon and Cannes this morning! Three hundred thousand troops! Americans. Brits. Canadians. This is what we’ve been waiting for!”
This changes everything. The first Allied landing at Normandy was meant to put the Germans on the defensive. The second landing, in the south of France, is meant to end the occupation entirely, cutting off their reinforcements and avenues of retreat. Now it is time for the Maquis to nail the coffin lid shut.
Anselm trots over to join us, grinning like a bona fide madman. “You know our targets?”
“Yes,” I tell him. I carried them with me, in the lining of my purse, all the way from London. Two sets of targets: the first to be destroyed immediately after D-Day in order to cripple supply lines and infrastructure, and the second to cut off any means of retreat for the Germans. We intend to hunt them down one by one.
Anselm is bouncing on the balls of his feet, wanting nothing more than to put his explosives to use. “When do we start?”
* * *
—
I spend most of the night assigning targets for Tardivat’s men to raid. There are bridges, roads, tunnels, and railroad tracks that must be destroyed. Of particula
r importance are a number of potential escape routes near the garrison in Montluçon that must be demolished so the German troops cannot move north. Fifteen different groups are sent out with land mines and mortars to render these routes impassable by vehicle. Anselm I send, along with forty Maquis on the Allied team, to take control of a synthetic petrol plant in Saint-Hilaire. Originally we were instructed to destroy it. But Tardivat suggested we seize it instead as a source of fuel for ourselves.
“And for me, Madame Andrée?” Tardivat asks. “Surely I won’t be left out of the fun.”
I look at Hubert and he nods.
“Non. Of course not. You and your team are coming with Denden, Hubert, Jacques, and myself to Montluçon.”
MONTLUÇON
Hôtel d’Orcet, August 16, 1944
Montluçon is secluded and beautiful. It was, I am told, built on the slope of a dormant volcanic hill and is home to a medieval abbey and the somewhat infamous Dukes of Bourbon Castle. It is skirted by the River Cher, which empties into a large reservoir nearby. It is the largest town in the area, home to over forty thousand people, and given that we have come on market day, is bustling. But the crowds provide good cover and give us an opportunity to survey our target.
Hubert and Tardivat flank me on either side of the market while Denis follows three paces behind. We are scanning the market for German officers wearing civilian clothes. For snipers. Checkpoints. Any form of trouble at all. Jacques is tucked away on the top floor of a post office across the square from the Nazi-occupied hotel. He is my best sharpshooter and I am relying on him to protect us from capture should this ambush go wrong. We left one maquisard near the truck to guard our escape route, and several others are stationed at the rear exits of the hotel to prevent any German officers from slipping away.
“Remember, Nance, this is not a full-on military assault, but rather a precision strike. We’ll have one shot, and then it’s a hasty exit,” Hubert tells me.