by Sharon Maas
‘Yes. I suppose that deep inside I was hoping I could be posted to the Alsace but I know that is an illusion. If Alsace is now German…’
He nodded. ‘Work as a nurse in Alsace would be unlikely, impossible, in fact, even after an invasion. The field hospitals would be near to where the fighting is. The work you are being considered for is not in the field of nursing, unfortunately.’
‘I see. Well, I would welcome any opportunity to use my skills, to help the war effort – please tell me more! I suppose it would be translation work?’
‘Sort of. Perhaps a bit more than that. Unfortunately, I cannot reveal the details at this time – but I’m sure you’ll be called for a second interview. Forgive the secrecy, any questions you may have you can ask at the next stage of the process. That is, if we both decide to take this further.’
‘It’s all so mysterious!’
‘I’m afraid so. But if you can bear the mystery for a while, if you can be patient…’
‘Yes. It sounds intriguing. I’d love to be of service.’
‘I’m happy to hear that. It has been most interesting getting to know you. I think that’s all for now. I’d be grateful if you had a word with Miss Eaglesham outside: there are papers to be signed, confidentiality documents – the Official Secrets Act and so on. You will be taking the train home, I presume?’
She nodded. ‘I will take the train from Victoria.’
‘I wish you well. We may meet again.’ They shook hands, and the interview was over.
Chapter 11
Sibyl was called for a second interview with Mr Smith, this time in a different location, in the north of London, again in a rather run-down district.
‘So – we meet again! This time, Miss Lake, I’d like to tell you a little more about the work we have in mind for you.’
Sibyl took a deep breath. At last. He spoke in English again.
‘The first thing you need to know, before we go any further, is this: the work is extremely risky. Dangerous, in fact. You will be putting your life at risk. If that puts you off, we can stop right now.’
‘As a nurse I treated soldiers who had risked their lives. Some of them died. I felt so inadequate; so unworthy. As if I should be doing the same. So no, it does not put me off.’
He nodded, and a ghost of a smile played on his lips.
‘Wonderful. You also need to know that it is absolutely secret. You may tell no one. Not your mother, nor your stepfather, nor your sister, nor your fiancé.’
‘I do not have a fiancé. And I am good at keeping secrets.’
‘Excellent. Now, if we send you to France we will keep in touch with your family from time to time. If anything should happen to you they will be informed. But on no account may they know the details of where you are and what you are doing.’
‘You said that. I understand. But… what exactly are the risks?’
‘I would say the survival rate is fifty-fifty.’
She gulped. Why, it was the toss of a coin whether she would return alive or not! But the soldiers – those soldiers. Their risk was as high, or even higher. They knew it, and still they had gone; whether following orders, or as volunteers, they had done it.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Not so hasty. I’d like you to take a few minutes now to consider what I have just explained before I continue. If you can say here and now that no, you have absolutely no interest in such work, that you would rather serve your country as a nurse – I understand you have been accepted into the Queen Alexandra outfit as a military nurse, congratulations – you can stand up right now and walk out of this room and you’ll never hear another word from us. If, however, you are interested…’
‘I’m interested,’ said Sibyl without a second thought.
‘… if you are interested I would like you to go home, back to your hospital, your ward, and think about it for another week. Don’t rush into this. Take time to consider. Just as we, too, still have matters to consider where you are concerned.’
‘I thought you had singled me out because you wanted me?’
‘Indeed we do. However, there is one concern. The only reason why we have hesitated, Mademoiselle Lake, is that you do have one little flaw…’
‘Oh Mr Smith, I have several flaws…’
‘As far as we are concerned, just one. When I first listed your qualities, compassion was among them. Now, compassion in a nurse is a highly desired virtue. For a person assisting in secret work for the liberation of France, not so much: or at least, that compassion must be one-sided, biased and enormous. You must love your friends, your Allies, and be capable of dying for them, because this is war.
‘Similarly you must hate your enemies and be capable of killing them. The person who was your patient noted that you were equally compassionate to your German patients, our prisoners of war, as you were to the English and French patients. While other nurses and orderlies shunned the Germans and treated them with contempt, you treated them with the very same kindness as you did your other patients. You chatted with them in German about their families. You attended to them and made sure they were comforted. You held their hands, held water bottles to their lips, wiped their foreheads. Other nurses would ignore them when they were in pain; you eased that pain. Miss Lake, why is that? Warum hassen Sie nicht die Deutschen? Es ist doch Ihre Pflicht, sie zu hassen? Why do you not hate the Germans? Isn’t it your duty, to hate them?’
And there it was, mid-sentence, back to German. Perfectly on cue, Sibyl replied in German.
‘I am a nurse, Mr Smith. As a nurse I do not see nationalities, but only my patients and their needs. I would not be a good nurse if I did not care first for the basic humanity of my patients, if I did not treat them equally, regardless of race or religion or nationality. These men, these Germans who end up as my patients: many of them are hardly more than boys. They were conscripted into war. They are not Nazis. They are just doing their job. Somewhere they have mothers who are thinking of them and praying for them. I cannot help thinking of those mothers. I cannot help but see their pain. I do not think of them as Germans, but only as humans. As people in pain.’
‘Could you kill a German? With your bare hands? Because the job we are considering you for might just require that. Or would you, in the moment of killing, remember his mother and let yourself be killed instead?’
Sibyl hesitated. She considered the question for several minutes. Mr Smith waited. At last, she spoke, slowly, deliberately.
‘As a nurse, I learned to obey orders, to do things I did not like doing, things I disagreed with. Much as a soldier has to. It seems you are offering me a job as a sort of soldier?’
‘You could call it that, yes. Do go on.’
“I have never been in a position where it is necessary to kill. My profession at the moment is to save life, not to end it. If I am to assume another profession, a profession that requires me to kill for the sake of freedom, for a higher cause, I assume that I would act –professionally. If you say I might need to kill professionally then I assume I would be trained to – to kill professionally. So that is your answer. If you train me to do it, I can. I would. I would not think of that man’s mother. I would think of the freedom of France.’
Yet even as she spoke the words, doubt shivered through her. Was what she had just said with such confidence nothing but empty bravado? Could I really kill? In self-defence, yes, of course. But in cold blood? As an assassin? Isn’t that what he’s suggesting? Could I?
Mr Smith must have read her thoughts. ‘We are not training you to be an assassin,’ he said, ‘but you must be prepared to kill if that is necessary. It is collateral damage in the grand scheme of subterfuge. It is inevitable. Sometimes it will happen at a distance, anonymously. Sometimes it will be close up, personal. That can be… upsetting.’
‘As a nurse I have had to work in many upsetting circumstances. I have worked in operating theatres with horribly mutilated bodies. I have learned to be dispassionate in such situation
s.’
Mr Smith nodded, somewhat vaguely, as if he had not properly heard what she had said and observed her in silence for a full five minutes. When he replied, it was still in German, but it was a change of subject.
‘I notice that you speak German with an Austrian accent?’
‘Ja – as I told you last time, my grandmother is Austrian, and it was she who taught me. She simply spoke to us children in German, always.’
‘I see. Now to return to your last reply: as you say, it is your professional duty to be compassionate. Does this mean that your compassion is not genuine, that it is only a professional act? That your kindness is false, a mask that you wear to observe your duty as a nurse?’
She shook her head. ‘No, Herr Smith. I am a naturally kind and caring person. I like being that way; it makes me happy to help people, to relieve pain. But I think in a combat situation, in which I was face to face with an enemy eager to kill me or my colleagues, compassion would not be appropriate. I think you are confusing genuine Mitgefühl – just like its English counterpart, the word Mitgefühl says it all, with-feeling, com-passion – you are confusing it with sentimentality. Compassion is not sentimentality, which is a very weak distant cousin. Compassion is strong. But it is selective; it is granted only to those deserving of compassion. The Germans I would encounter would not, I think, be deserving of compassion. Their job is to kill.’
‘Ah, but what if you are required to kill in cold blood. Do you have the guts for that?’
‘Herr Smith I am a nurse. Do you think a nurse is gutless? Do you think she breaks down in tears when she is in theatre, assisting at an operation, when a surgeon has to saw through a man’s bone, amputate a leg? Do you think she faints at the sight of a man whose entire skin has been ripped to ribbons, or burnt black and peeling off his whole body, or whose face has been blown off? Do you think that just because she does the dirty work in a hospital – cleaning up faeces and vomit and blood, bodily things that a normal person shrinks from in disgust, and does this without so much as a twitch of her nose – that she is somehow a weak person, unable to control her emotions? Do you think that the putrid smell of gangrene when a man’s leg is rotting away is perfume to her, and this is why she can perform her job with good humour and sometimes even with grace and elegance?
‘No, Herr Smith. Control of emotions is one of the first things a nurse has to learn, and perhaps this is why our training is so strict, our matrons such dragons: we must learn to control our natural inclinations of mutiny and disgust and sheer loathing, because that is required of us in our job. We cannot let ourselves be ruled by natural human reactions, which would scare away a normal person. We must ignore our moods and our own wishes. We are taught to do what is right, not what we want, and that is our strength.
‘In my case, being a naturally kind person, I enjoy helping to ease another person’s pain and it happens to coincide with the work I perform. It is a happy coincidence. In a military situation compassion is not required so I would shut off that compartment of my mind just as I have learnt to shut off the compartment of my mind that induces nausea when required to clean a man’s backside of caked faeces or dress his genitals which are in a bloody mess because they have been shot away. I can slam shut the mental door on compassion just as I can shut it on the abhorrence and loneliness and sheer exhaustion that come with my job. So please do not dismiss us nurses as sweet, soft kind-hearted angels of light. We are tough, inside and out. And yes, if I were taught the methods of killing and my job required it of me these hands could kill as well as they can heal.’
She held out her hands to him, palms forward, and stopped for breath. Her next words were in English and spoken with far less passion than had been needed for her outburst.
‘I am sorry. That was a rather impassioned speech which perhaps contradicts the message I was trying to convey. It does annoy me when nurses are dismissed as kind little saints.’
Mr Smith also reverted to English. ‘I think that even saints have far more spunk than is generally recognised, Fräulein Lake. Being genuinely good is not for the fainthearted and I think you are wrong: we all admire and in fact revere nurses and the work you do and I only wish our gratitude towards you would be more apparent. You are heroines, and the fact that you are almost always invisible heroines does not detract from that fact.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you would really rather be an agent in this work, with the risk of being killed, or killing, than be a nurse in the field, and save lives? Surely nursing is the more noble of those professions?’
‘Noble? Who cares about nobility in war? I was a nurse during the Blitz. I nursed hundreds of war-wounded. I am at the moment all set to become a nurse at the Front, in a field hospital. I know what the work there is like, what I would have to do. The more damaged ones are evacuated and returned to England; but the bulk of them – we nurses and doctors just patch them up and send them right back into the field. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of healthy young men, sent out to fight to the death! Where is the nobility in that, in enabling them to die! To die for their country – noble? Pah! My heart breaks for them, and they are indeed heroes, but what kind of a society are we, that we value the lives of our men so low? War is a politician’s game, Mr Smith. There is nothing noble about war. There is nothing noble about fixing a broken body just so that it can go out and get broken again. It is despairing work. It does not lift the spirits. It breaks the heart. The job you are offering: it seems to make more sense to me.’
Mr Smith nodded. He looked pleased. He switched to French.
‘Good. Then I can be more specific, tell you more about us and our work. It involves a bit of a history lesson. You like history?’
‘It is interesting but I fear I did not pay much attention at school. And now – now, history just seems to be sweeping us all along. I would indeed like to know more about the background to this job you are considering me for.’
‘Well, it is this: your languages skills are impressive, and your training as a nurse has given you a certain maturity. Most especially, though, it’s your love for France, and specifically your allegiance to the Alsace, that attracted our interest. The Alsace is a headache for the Allies, and I’m afraid, rather neglected in the general scheme of things.
‘The thing is: as I told you in our last interview, the Alsace was annexed by Germany as soon as the war began. That’s far more serious than being occupied. It means that that the previous French citizens of the Alsace became automatically German citizens. Non-Alsatians were evacuated, and a Germanisation of the annexed area began; German taught in schools, French language banned and so on. Young men were called up to fight for the Wehrmacht. To refuse was to put their whole family into jeopardy; perhaps their parents would be sent to concentration camps. These men go with great resentment, calling themselves the malgré-nous, “in spite of us”. It’s an impossible situation for them. Some have nevertheless deserted, set up guerrilla units of their own.
‘You have surely heard of the Resistance movement all over France. They are active in cities, in villages, in the countryside; the rural groups are known as maquisards throughout France. But the Alsatian Resistance could not in any way be a part of the greater movement, because the Alsace is now actually Germany, separated from Occupied France by an area called Zone Interdite, the Closed Zone. That Zone is swarming with Gestapo and impossible to pass through without special permission; the demarcation line is even tougher than the one into Vichy. Still, separated as they were, the Alsatian boys – for boys they were – did their best. They organised themselves.
‘In September 1940 the first Alsatian Resistance movement was led by someone called Marcel Weinum; it was centred in Strasbourg and was composed of twenty-five very young men, all under the age of eighteen. Their activity was mainly the disruption and sabotage of German works wherever and whenever they could. The climax was an unsuccessful attack against the highest German commander, Gauleiter Robert Wagner. In the end
Marcel Weinum was caught. He was sentenced to death by the Gestapo and executed in Stuttgart in 1942. He was eighteen at the time of his execution.
‘I’m telling you this so that you know how very inexperienced the Alsatian Resistance was and still is, how young its members, how – shall we say – amateurish. Still, these men are heroes and on their shoulders rests so much if we are to win this terrible war. Their work is vital but extremely dangerous and requires the utmost in passion and dedication. Weinum’s last words before his execution were: “If I die I shall die with a pure heart.” Shall I continue, Fräulein Lake, or does that story dampen your enthusiasm?’
‘Please continue.’
‘This brings us actually right into the work we do. It was basically Winston Churchill’s idea: that we, the British, should help these Resistance fighters; send in agents with logistics help, training, hardware such as explosives and weapons, money. The aim is to disrupt and hinder the enemy by all possible means. Once they are trained, our agents are dropped behind enemy lines; they work in a clandestine network – in fact, in several networks – throughout Occupied France and Free France, in collaboration with the French Resistance network. Now hopefully we are nearing the end of this terrible war, but we are still constantly on the lookout for new agents.
‘The final goal is to prepare for the invasion of Europe by Allied forces and for the liberation of France. The role is sabotage and subversion behind the enemy lines – basically a secret battle in the shadow of the official one.
‘To return to the Alsace: at present another Resistance movement has developed, scattered throughout the Alsace. They have a strong and highly competent leader, with superior local knowledge and the maturity to lead his men properly and command their respect.
‘However, because of the peculiar situation of Alsace this disorganised group is cut off from the regular Resistance networks in Occupied France and Vichy. Because of this isolation communication is extremely difficult if not impossible. We cannot support them as we do the other groups in France. They have hardly any equipment: no radio, few weapons, no explosives. They are basically on their own, doing good work but with primitive methods, slashing enemy tyres, felling trees across access roads, cutting telephone lines. They have absolutely no training in guerrilla tactics, and we cannot reach them through the usual channels.’