Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

Then she looked up; the morning had come, and the birds sang. She tried the main door again but it was still locked; she crossed to the window, looking for the signs of life which morning always brings to the countryside, the movements of peasantry, the barking of dogs. But still the fields stretched into the distance, unbroken by hill or valley, uninhabited even by a cow or a sheep.

  She had no idea how long she had been awake when she heard her first man-made sound. It was the sound of a cold motor somewhere on the other side of the schoolhouse, beginning to rev, and it was the signal for other engines to join. They sounded heavier than ordinary automobile engines, more like those of trucks, with an occasional harsh, staccato motor-cycle bark. Then shortly afterwards came a sight which stripped her of whatever shreds of hope she had and jerked her at the same time out of her amnesiac past and into the present. A soldier, carbine over his shoulder, walked past the window and stopped to look in at her. But it was a soldier such as she had only seen before in the cinema, in newsreels and war pictures, and the uniform struck her like a blow: the grey forage cap, the open collar, the speckled tin buttons, the heavy belt low slung over the loins, with the dreadful words on the buckle — Gott Mit Uns.

  He was a young fellow, a boy, very pale, with long hair falling over his ears, and he stared insolently with pale blue eyes into Amanda's horrified face. Casually, he rolled on his tongue a gobbet of phlegm which he spat neatly, with bullet force against the pane, before her eyes. Amanda shrank precipitately as though it had hit her in the face, until her back thudded against the farther wall. The soldier, his face turned into a blur behind the spittle, laughed and continued on his way.

  Amanda was a prisoner of war. She remembered everything. She remembered the Lysander with its dragonfly wings coming in to land in the darkness. She remembered the longing, the fear she felt as it taxied away and took off for home; then the good-looking young Frenchman who talked like a Communist, dying with a smile on his face, the blood gushing out of his mouth. The next thing she remembered was the fear; O'Donovan and Mazursky preceding her, their hands in the air, her hands too, hands held high until they ached, and green luminous faces weaving around her, and then… this, the spittle like a sunburst against the windowpane and trickling glaucously downward. She was a prisoner of the Germans. She sank onto the bed and gave way to blank despair. It was so unfair, so unfair. She was so terrified. She longed for England and the arms of her father.

  "Courage," she said to herself all at once. "This is real, Amanda." She forced herself to estimate her situation rationally and at the same time the wider implications of her capture. Lucien as head of the circuit would hear about it shortly, even if he had not done so already. To begin with he would busy himself snipping off all contact with the arrested men so that their capture would not lead to the capture of others. He would then order an investigation and set up a watch on the schoolhouse; watching the captors even as the captors watched her. As long as Lucien was at large, she had reasonable grounds for hope.

  After a while she noticed that the sounds of the engines had risen to a roar. It seemed to be some kind of military convoy, perhaps the same convoy as the dead Maquisard, Riri, had mentioned the night before. She wondered whether they would be coming to take her away, and in a sense she hoped they would because her longing for a cigarette was becoming a madness, and somebody surely would have the compassion to offer her one.

  Amanda stared out of the window through the blur of spittle but the soldier did not return. There was no life outside. The sun had risen fully now and she estimated that it must be close to noon, but still the hours passed and the sun began to set.

  She was uneasily and vividly aware that in her civilian clothes and with her forged documents, all of which had been removed with her watch and cigarettes, she might not be treated simply as a prisoner of war, but as a franc-tireur, or even a spy. She had not thought of torture before. In training the subject was specifically avoided. She knew that the great «Max», former head of the entire Resistance in France, had been tortured literally to death, without telling what he knew. She had an idea that the Gestapo used all sorts of psychological measures to persuade women to talk, strange fetishist measures, like making them remove their shoes and stockings and interrogating them while they were on their bare feet. Someone told her that sometimes the prisoner was ordered to stand on a chair while she was being questioned. Neither of these two measures sounded terribly frightening. But she did fear being beaten. Sometimes, she thought she had been told, they did not interrogate at all, but handed the prisoner to the military authorities for transfer to an ordinary prison camp. In the middle of her contemplation of the unpleasantness to come, she was aware that the engines were growing fainter, and fading away. The convoy seemed to be leaving. But was it leaving without her? And if so, why? In the name of heaven where were O'Donovan and Mazursky?

  She could sense by the sounds that the convoy was on its way. She could imagine a long line of trucks, and half-tracks, with staff cars for the officers, and outriders crackling in front and behind, trailing off into the distance. After about half an hour, the noise was reduced to little more than an occasional burst of exhaust, or the lackadaisical revving of a motorcycle. Finally even this stopped, and there was just silence. Not even the birds sang. They had been frightened away by the noise. All that remained was the sound of water. What did it mean? Why was she being left behind? There must be some explanation, and it would probably be a simple one, if she could only deduce what it was.

  Amanda tried to make sense of what little she knew. The silence oppressed her. The noise at least indicated people, and people after all included O'Donovan and Mazursky with whom she could communicate. But this vacuum, this total absence of life in any form, gave her a sense of unreality in which no logic seemed to apply. The only evidence of what might for want of a better word be called civilization was the drying spittle on the windowpane.

  She walked up and down, pulling her face and biting her lips, trying to understand what it all meant. Facts, Amanda, facts. There was a soldier but he had gone. There were a lot of vehicles but they too had gone. Those were facts. It was also a fact that she was there and they had not taken her away with them. Now the schoolhouse seemed to be wholly deserted. She seemed to be alone. Could it perhaps be that they had forgotten her? Impossible. Perhaps they had just abandoned her, decided to keep the big fish, O'Donovan and Mazursky, and figured she was not a fish worth landing. In that case, sooner or later the French would come back, when they knew that the Germans had gone. And the French meant the Maquis. And the Maquis meant Lucien. Amanda dared herself to think of such a comforting fact as Lucien. He was out there somewhere, coming to her. Her spirits rose. This was the only explanation that made any sense whatsoever to her. They had simply left her behind. She was reassured enough to start feeling aggrieved. They might at least have had the courtesy to leave her some cigarettes.

  The time on her hands became a problem. She solved it for a while by trying to remember the poems of Lewis Carroll. She paced up and down the room, repeating to herself quietly, in rhythm to her footsteps.

  Twas brillig and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  From there she ventured to:

  The sun was shining on the sea,

  Shining with all its might.

  He did his very best to make

  The billows smooth and bright.

  And this was odd, because it was

  The middle of the night.

  The moon was shining sulkily,

  Because she thought the sun

  Had got no business to be there

  After…

  And at that moment, in the early evening of the lovely spring day, her flimsy shell of hope cracked into splinters and left Amanda naked in her terror. The sound she heard could not have been more commonplace, but its implications were horrendous. Somewhere in t
he schoolhouse she heard, very faintly, a typewriter tapping.

  That could mean only one thing, the Germans were still there. The building had clearly not been used as a school for a long time but seemed to be some sort of transit stage for the Wehrmacht. Even when it was used as a schoolhouse she doubted whether bucolic French schoolmasters allowed themselves the luxury of typewriters. A typewriter meant organization, foreign organization, German organization. All Amanda's hopes of rescue were gone. She was still a prisoner. They would send for her in their own good time and they were in no hurry.

  The typewriter that so effectively tapped away all of Amanda's hope was followed by another sound, sudden, stupefying. Amanda had read in melodramas about sounds that made the blood freeze. All at once she knew what it meant. The typewriter tapping urbanely in the pool of silence was drowned by a scream. A man's scream uttered through the film of a pain beyond enduring, prolonged until it died away in a long shuddering sob.

  That was all. It was not repeated. The typewriter continued to click, but Amanda was now uncontrollably terrified. Whether the scream came from O'Donovan or Mazursky she did not know, but she understood her endless solitary wait. They were taking their prisoners in turn.

  She sat listening intently but the scream was not repeated. Her aloneness oppressed and obsessed her. She wanted to scream herself, run to the window and scream for help. Since her awakening there had been nothing, but nothing, to take her mind off her plight. The Germans were succeeding in breaking her without even talking to her. Amanda thought that unless there was some interruption in this monotony, she would break down and beat her head against the wall.

  It was not to endure forever. Amanda heard steps approaching from outside and froze. The key pressed into the lock, the doorknob turned. And then Amanda was not alone any more.

  He was a big square man, stripped to the waist; curly black hair seemed in a way to soil his chest like soot. The brow was low, simian and moronic, the eyes small and round like marbles. He wore the inevitable Gott Mit Uns belt, and jackboots. He contemplated her for a while, chewing what seemed to be tobacco, totally devoid of expression, and Amanda looked back at him, making no attempt to hide her terror.

  "Komm," he said pointing with his finger; turned his hairy back to her and walked out of the room, leaving the door open. Breathlessly Amanda followed him up a dark corridor; his great shoulders swayed like a boxer's, his boots clacked on the bare tiled floor. Sweat trickled uncomfortably down Amanda's back and her terror was laced with bitterness. She noticed that he did not turn around, almost defying her either to stab him with some knife she might have hidden, or to turn and flee. He was too conscious of her helplessness and his power over her to bother to look around. As they walked, the typewriter's sound became louder. He opened a door and after she had followed him in, he closed it behind her and locked it ostentatiously. She saw a scene that plunged the horror into her hilt-deep. It was another schoolroom, larger, with the inevitable blackboard on the wall and chairs and desks piled in a corner. In another corner was a brazier, glowing red, into which were thrust irons almost transparent with heat. From the roof hung a system of pulleys with handcuffs at the end, and on a table nearby an array of whips.

  In the corner was a pool of fresh blood. The mise en scène that Amanda took in with one horrified look produced an unexpected reaction in her. One thought beat in her head. It was ghastly, hideous. It was also… corny. It was the Spanish Inquisition of the history books of Protestant children. It should not have been like that. Could they think of nothing subtler? Amanda's terror was mixed with rage, as though in some way they had insulted her intelligence.

  In addition to the man at her side there were two other people in the room, a man and a woman. The man was in civilian clothes, a sports jacket in the style Europeans affect when they want to look like Englishmen. He was seated at a desk, studying documents. At an adjoining desk, a woman wearing the ugly Wehrmacht jacket buttoned to the neck, worked at the typewriter. She was dark, aquiline, with thick glasses, and hair pulled back in a bun.

  Without looking up, the man in civilian clothes said, "Bring her over, Sergeant." The sergeant pushed her, not hard, towards the desk and indicated that she sit down. He himself sat his great butt on a corner of the desk and regarded her unblinkingly, his nude torso ominous because it seemed so out of place in the atmosphere of office efficiency that reigned in this particular corner of the room.

  The seated man was lean and, Amanda noticed, good-looking, but with eyes too close-set, like a Modigliani, and his dark hair was too long. Amanda noticed something else that surprised her. The hands of both men were well manicured. She longed for one of them to offer her a cigarette but dared not open her mouth.

  Finally, after what seemed like half an hour, the man in civilian clothes left off contemplating his papers and looked at her. "What's the matter?" he asked in French.

  "What do you mean?" Amanda asked, her voice shaking.

  "You are sweating like a pig."

  The ungraciousness of the remark dismayed her. "Oh, please," she cried, "am I supposed to pretend I'm not frightened, among you people?"

  "You have nothing to be frightened of, if you tell the truth. What is your name?"

  "Yvette Angelvin."

  "Profession?"

  "Schoolteacher."

  "Age?"

  "Twenty-five."

  The man turned to the sergeant. "Bimbo!" he said.

  Bimbo! What kind of a clown's name was that? But Amanda, was rudely stunned as the man called Bimbo reached across and hit her, hard, openhanded, across the mouth, jerking her face sideways. She made no sound. She was too shocked and dazed, but the trickling sweat became a gush, soaking through both her blouse and her cheap tweed jacket under the arms.

  The man in civilian clothes resumed without any change of tone. But this time he spoke in English. "I hate liars," he said. "But I grant you the honesty of giving me your true age, Commander Nightingale.

  "For your information," he continued, "my name is Scappini. You will call me Captain." His English was so faultless it increased Amanda's sense of foreboding rather than reassured her. "Do not be misled by my name. Scappini is an old Piedmontese name, and the Piedmonts intermarried frequently with the Prussians. I am a Prussian, which is the nearest thing Germany possesses to an Englishman. The most diabolical achievement of the British in the Great War was to persuade the world that the Prussians have no sense of humour. The Prussians have a sense of humour that is indistinguishable from that of the British, as you may be fortunate enough to discover if you behave correctly. First of all, however, you must realize that I have complete power over you. I am the court of first and last appeal, like cunning old Fury in Alice in Wonderland. It is up to me whether you suffer or do not suffer pain, whether you live to see your husband Guy and the two children again, whether you die quickly or slowly. The news from Cassino is bad by the way — for you. The Seventh Armoured Division, your husband's, tried to storm the monastery again and was badly mangled. We cross-checked with the B. B. C. which said something about 'local advances', corroboration enough."

  Amanda sat slumped, sickened.

  Scappini smiled at her with lips as thin and sharp as a paper edge. "I should explain that I, like everyone else, have certain flaws in my personality. One of them is that I am wholly lacking in romanticism. In many ways I am a Frenchman rather than a German, a realist rather than a romanticist. I lack patience, and I cannot stand cant, conceit, or futile gestures. We are fully briefed on your mission here. We know you have a rendezvous near here in three days' time with our old friend Lucien…"

  "Oh no!" Amanda could not stop herself.

  "Oh yes. Needless to say we shall assist — I use the word in the French sense, assister — at the ceremony. From you," he smiled again, less thinly this time, a smile almost of absolution, "we seek nothing, nothing at all."

  Amanda realized she should say nothing, but continued to be outmatched. "You don't?"

&
nbsp; "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We have taken full statements from Captain O'Donovan and Captain Mazursky. The only thing we are faced with is an irritating problem of military bureaucracy which is as old as war itself. All armies carry the same burden. The British Army refers to it as the Chairborne Brigade, and in the United States Army they have an expression, the 'cookie pushers'."

  The conversation was not making the remotest sense but it gave Amanda the chance to be quiet, simply because she had no idea what to say.

  "Some old colonel at our H. Q. in Paris, who left an arm on the Somme, an eye at Verdun and a leg at Caporetto, will look through his monocle and say, 'How is it that we have two statements when we caught three spies? Regulations stipulate one statement per spy. The fact that the two statements tell everything there is to know is irrelevant to the report he has to draw up. Do you see what I am getting at?"

  Amanda did, and did not reply.

  "So we would be obliged if you would dictate slowly to Miss Sass, in English or German as you will, a general rundown of your organization at 64 Baker Street — 'the Firm', you know. We know it all but it is simply for the files. The training system at Arisaig, near Inverness — what gorgeous country that is, by the way, isn't it? I knew it well in the old days. Finally, just a few words about the airfields from which you take off to land in France. After that it is all over. You can relax for the rest of the war. I am told that the libraries in the prisoner-of-war camps are extremely well stocked. You are not, of course, a prisoner of war. You are a franc-tireur, a captured spy, which is different and the consequences of capture can be extremely unpleasant. But we can be lenient. We will wait for Fräulein Sass to put a clean sheet of paper in the typewriter and then we will start. Are you ready, Fräulein Sass? Very good. Commander Nightingale, begin. In your own words."

  Amanda had no handkerchief to mop the sweat from her face, so she drew her sleeve over it. The sergeant offered her a cigarette at last and she almost tore it from the packet. Her hand trembled so much she could hardly put it into her mouth and it took Bimbo three matches to light it. She dragged so deeply on the first puff she went dizzy.