Then we borrowed her boats. One beautiful, teak, nineteenth-century rowing boat and two chestnut Canadian canoes. Much too good for us. The bridge is upstream from the house – they’ve disrupted traffic here before, some time ago, and for a while the lady was under strict surveillance. Hope she won’t be in too much trouble again now – though she seems to have got away with it this time. We were careful.
Godless as I am, I pray she’s got away with it. It’s like ripples in a pond, isn’t it? It doesn’t stop in one place.
Anyway we loaded up our fireworks in the boats – don’t think I can give details on the explosives as I wasn’t responsible and didn’t pay attention, and we rowed up to the bridge in the dark. Took about an hour with muffled oars. You read about muffled oars in pirate stories – I’m sure there’s a bit in Peter Pan where they use muffled oars. Perhaps it was Swallows and Amazons. English summer and the school holidays seem dead far away now. It was hard to see – the river was full of fog. But we made it. We wired up the bridge and waited.
What went wrong?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t a trap. We weren’t outnumbered, not at first. I suppose we were just playing for higher stakes than the Germans. Shouldn’t we have guessed they’d be more ruthless than us? How could we guess? We were pretty ruthless.
What went wrong – perhaps it was just too dark, night and fog both. The fog was good as well as bad because it hid us, but it was just so hard to see. There should have been a quarter moon, for what that’s worth, but the sky was overcast, and we were blind until the prison bus turned up with its headlights blazing.
That bit went well – within a minute we had thoroughly disabled it. We were pretty well camouflaged in the riverbank scrub – a tangle of willow and alder and poplar full of mistletoe. Lots of tall, withering weeds hiding us, and the fog too. Our small explosion hurt no one except the bridge and the bus. The radiator grille got blown out, but the blast missed the headlights and the battery must have been OK because there was enough light that Paul and the owner of the Rosalie somehow managed to put bullets through three of the tyres.
The driver got out. Then a guard got out. They had electric torches – both men walked up and down the length of the bus inspecting the damage and cursing.
Paul picked them off like ducks at a funfair with his Sten submachine gun. While that was going on I was curled uselessly in a ball with my arms over my head and my teeth clenched, so I missed a bit of the action. Born to be a soldier, my foot. A raid is actually quite a lot like a battle. It is war. It’s war in miniature, but it’s still WAR.
Two other guards came out of the bus and fired random shots into the bushes at us in the dark. Mitraillette had to sit on me to stop me blowing our cover, I was in such a flap. Finally Paul gave me a clout over the head.
‘Get a grip on yourself, Kittyhawk,’ he hissed. ‘We need you. You’re a crack shot, but no one’s expecting you to kill anybody. Focus on tools, all right? They’ll start trying to fix things in a moment. Try to disable their equipment.’
I gulped and nodded. Don’t know if he saw me nodding, but he shifted back to his own position beneath the gently rustling willowherb and hemlock alongside the Rosalie driver, and they bagged another guard.
The surviving guard leaped back into the bus. There was an ominous silence – not a thing happened for a minute or two. Then the four remaining soldiers ushered every single one of the prisoners out of the bus and made them lie down side by side on their faces in the middle of the road. It was all done by the glancing light of electric torches and we didn’t dare fire at anyone now, for fear of hitting one of ours.
Couldn’t see any individual faces – couldn’t tell anything about the captives, not their age or their sex or how they were dressed, but you could tell by the way they moved that some of them were scared and some were defiant, and some were chained together by their feet. The chained ones had a hard time getting down to the road, tripping each other up as they climbed off the bus. When everybody was lined up on their faces in the mud like sardines, one of the guards shot six of them in the head.
It happened SO FAST.
This dreadful man shouted at us in French. Mitraillette whispered all the English words she could come up with in my ear – ‘Revenge – two for one – their own dead. If we kill – ’
‘I know, I know,’ I whispered back. ‘Je sais.’ For every one of them we murdered they would murder two of us. Disposable hostages.
Three guards kept their guns trained on the prisoners while the fourth set off on foot back down the road – to find a telephone, I think.
Then we waited. Stalemate. It was bitterly cold.
Paul and a couple of other men had a quick, whispered council and decided to work their way beneath the bridge and try to attack the guards from behind. There really were only three guards left, plus the one who had gone for help – it seemed impossible we shouldn’t be able to get the better of them.
But they had 18 hostages lying helpless and chained at their feet.
And one of their hostages was Julie.
Or perhaps, I worried then, perhaps she’d already been shot. Impossible to tell at first. But then the guards set up a portable floodlight attached to the bus’s battery, and got the prisoners spotlit, and you could see now that only a few of them were women, and that everybody looked half-starved. And among them, right in the middle of them, was the one I was looking for – a mound of blonde hair and a flame-coloured pullover. Her arms were bound tightly behind her back, with wire it looked like, so she really was lying flat on her face more than the others who were resting on their forearms. But she wasn’t at the end of the row; she wasn’t one of the six that had just been killed. She was breathing quietly, waiting. Shaking with cold like the rest of us.
And we waited, I think, for an hour.
The guards made sure they were hard to aim at. They kept moving and flashing their electric torches into our faces – or where they thought our faces were – occasionally blinding us. I discovered later that I’d bitten my thumbnails down to their bleeding nailbeds waiting for Paul’s planned assault from behind. It never came. The three German soldiers organised themselves so that they were always facing in different directions, and one of them always kept a gun trained on the prisoners. We just couldn’t get to them. One of the women lying in the road began to weep – I think it was just because she was so cold – and when the man next to her tried to put his arm round her, a guard shot him in the hand.
That was when I realised that we weren’t going to win this battle – that we could not win.
I think Mitraillette knew it then too. She squeezed my shoulder lightly. She was also weeping. But silently.
The fourth guard came back and began to chat casually with his mates. We waited. It was not quiet any more because as well as the soldiers talking and the woman crying, the man with the hurt hand was groaning and gasping. But there wasn’t much other noise – only the little noises of night on a riverbank, wind in the bare branches, the hollow rush of water beneath the damaged stone bridge.
Then Julie lifted her head and said something to the soldiers that made them laugh. I think – I swear, we couldn’t hear her, but I swear she was chatting them up. Or something like it. One of them came over and prodded her here and there with the end of his rifle, as though he were testing a piece of meat. Then he squatted down by her head and took her chin in his hand. He asked her a question.
She bit him.
He pushed her face down into the road, hard, and scrambled to his feet, but as he lowered his rifle at her one of the other guards laughed and stopped him.
‘He says not to kill her,’ Mitraillette whispered. ‘If they kill her there will be no – fun.’
‘Is she crazy?’ I hissed. ‘What the blazes did she bite him for? She’ll get herself shot!’
‘Exactement,’ Mitraillette agreed. ‘C’est rapide – fast. No Nazi fun.’
Then the reinforcements arri
ved. Two military lorries with canvas sides, with half a dozen armed guards in each. Even then we still weren’t badly outnumbered. They began to unload sandbags and planks and managed to lever the bus up out of the hole it had landed in, reversed it and laid planks over the damage so they could try to get the lorries across.
But then when they were ready to load the lorries, they got resistance. Not just from us. A few of their captives came to life – a handful of the men who weren’t chained just ran for it, dived into the ditch at the opposite side of the road and lucky for them, it turned out, ran straight into Paul and his men, who hustled them under the bridge and back to the boats by the river path. More shooting as a couple of soldiers went after them and Paul’s men pounded the soldiers. Go for the equipment, Paul had ordered, and for a minute the gunfire was so fierce I knew two shots from my small revolver would go unnoticed. I aimed at the chains. The Double Tap, two quick shots at the same target. The chains I was aiming at burst apart like a toy balloon – could hardly believe my luck. And the two men I’d managed to free also ran.
When another man tried to run, the soldiers mowed him down like bank robbers in an American gangster film.
When the first men had fled, the guard Julie had attacked held her down with his heel dug into the back of her neck – he wasn’t giving her a chance. She fought hard and got kicked for it by the one who had said not to kill her. So now, with a few of the hostages dead and a few loaded up in the lorries and a few escaped, there were only 7 living people left lying on the ground – Julie with the guard’s boot against the back of her neck, and two other women. Two of the remaining men were chained ankle to ankle. And now the German corporal or whatever he was, the fellow in charge who had arrived with the reinforcements, decided to teach everyone a thorough lesson – us for trying to free their prisoners and the prisoners for wanting to be freed –
He picked on the men, mainly, the two who weren’t chained, and hauled them to their feet. And seeing that Julie was getting special treatment from the man who was holding her in place with his foot, he hauled her to her feet as well and pushed her over to stand next to the two other standing prisoners – one of them a sturdy workman and one a handsome lad my own age, both ragged and battered.
Julie was ragged too. She was still wearing exactly the clothes she’d had on when she parachuted into France, grey wool flannel skirt and Parisian chic pullover the burnt scarlet-orange of Chinese lanterns, with holes in the elbows now. Her hair shone brassy gold in the artificial light, falling loose and wild down her back. Her face was skin over bone. As though – as though she’d aged fifty years in eight weeks – gaunt, grey, frail. The dead spit of Jamie when I first met him in hospital. But thinner. She looked like a kid, a head shorter than the shortest of the men standing around her. Any of those soldiers could have picked her up and tossed her in the air.
Three prisoners in a line. The soldier in command gave an order, and the guard who’d been holding Julie down took aim at the younger of the captive men and with one bullet maimed him low between his legs.
The lad shrieked and collapsed and they fired at him again, first blowing apart one elbow and then the other, and then they hauled him to his feet again, still shrieking, and made him walk to the lorry and climb in and then they turned to the next man and fired on him low in the groin also.
Mitraillette and I both knelt wheezing with horror, side by side under cover of the undergrowth and darkness. Julie stood cowering, white as paper in the harsh glare of the floodlight, staring straight ahead of her at nothing. She was next. She knew it. We all knew it. But they weren’t finished with their second victim yet.
When they shot him in one elbow and then again rapidly in the same place to shatter it, my not-very-reliable control just went and I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it, something snapped, like when we went to help the gunner at Maidsend and found the dead boys. I burst into loud, gulping sobs, bawling like a baby.
Her face – Julie’s face – her face suddenly lit up like a sunrise. Joy and relief and hope all there at once and she was instantly lovely again, herself, beautiful. She heard me. Recognised my fear-of-gunfire blubbing. She didn’t dare call out to me, didn’t dare give me away, Ormaie’s most desperate fugitive.
They fired at the second man again, destroying his other arm, and he fainted dead away. They had to drag him to the lorry.
Julie was next.
Suddenly she laughed wildly and gave a shaking yell, her voice high and desperate.
‘KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!’
Turned her face away from me to make it easier.
And I shot her.
I saw her body’s flinch – the blows knocked her head aside as though she’d been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.
Gone. One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.
I’ll just keep writing, shall I? Because that wasn’t the end. It wasn’t even a pause.
The officer pulled another woman up from the ground to take Julie’s place. This doomed girl screamed at us in French: ‘ALLEZ! ALLEZ!’ Go! Go! ‘Résistance idiots sales, vous nous MASSACREZ TOUS!’
FILTHY RESISTANCE IDIOTS, YOU’RE KILLING US ALL
I knew what she was saying even with my rubbish schoolgirl French. And she was right.
We ran. They fired at our backs and came after us. Paul and his men fired at THEIR backs, swarming over the bridge walls, and they turned to face this rear attack. Carnage. CARNAGE. Half of us, Paul with them, were torn to bits on the bridge. The rest of us made it back to the boats and set off down the river with the five fugitives we’d managed to save.
When we were away from the bank and someone else was rowing and there was nothing more for me to do, I bent over with my head on my knees, my heart in pieces. It is still in pieces. I think it will be in pieces forever.
Mitraillette gently unlocked my fingers from the Colt .32 and made me put it away. She whispered, ‘C’était la Vérité?’ Was that Verity?
Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours real?
‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘Oui. C’était la vérité.’
—
Don’t know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.
The original idea, when we hoped we’d have 24 extra people to move and hide, was to ferry them to the opposite bank where we’d divide them into smaller groups of 2 or 3. Then we were going to split up our own team to guide them cross-country towards various sheds and cow byres for the night before the more complicated task of smuggling them safely out of France across the Pyrenees or the English Channel. But now we only had 5 fugitives to hide and there were only 7 of us left so there was room for everybody to make a single trip back to the riverside villa. Mitraillette made the decision to keep us together. Don’t think I’d ever noticed – so absorbed in my own fears and worries – but she was Paul’s second in command.
Not sure we’d have pulled it off without her either. We were all just so dazed. But she drove us like a demon. ‘Vite! Vite!’ Quickly! Orders whispered sharp and quiet – boats hauled back on to their racks, oars put away, all of it carefully dried off with dust sheets which we hid beneath the floorboards afterwards. You can work in a daze. If someone gives you a mindless job to do you can do it automatically, even if your heart is in pieces. Mitraillette thought of everything – perhaps she’s done it before? We brushed the oars and hulls lightly with handfuls of ancient straw from the stables, leaving a fine layer of dust over everything. The 5 men from the prison bus worked silently and willingly alongside us, anxious to help. The boathouse was perfect when we left – looked like it hadn’t been used in years.
Then the Nazi search party arrived and we spent an hour lying in the mud along the riverbank, hiding in the bulrushes like Moses, waiting for them to leave. Could hear them chatting with the groundskeeper. He came back later to lock up the boatho
use and give us the all-clear – such as it was – now there were Nazi guards posted on the front drive, so we’d not be getting the Rosalie out any time soon. But the groundskeeper thought it would be safe for a couple of bicycles to leave by the river path on the opposite bank. Benzedrine handed out all round. Got one of the canoes out again and ferried 2 of the bikes, 2 of us and 2 of the escaped prisoners over the river, and saw them off into the fog.
At this point one of the remaining lads from the bus collapsed in a shivering heap and Mitraillette sort of stalled.
‘Nous sommes faits,’ she said. We’ve had it.
We bedded down in the stables with the bicycles. Not the safest place in the world.
I wonder where that is right now – the safest place in the world? Even the neutral countries, Sweden and Switzerland, are surrounded. Ireland’s stuck with being divided, they have to mark the neutral bit ‘IRELAND’ in big letters made of whitewashed stones hoping the Germans won’t drop bombs there thinking it’s the UK side of the northern border. I’ve seen it from the air. South America, perhaps.
We were all still wide awake when it grew light. I was sitting with my arms wrapped round my knees, side by side with one of the lads who’d escaped when I shot his chains apart. The men who’d been chained had to stay with us because they’d got to get rid of the fetters on their ankles before they could go anywhere.