The Audrix Plateau, Perigord, 1944
The elderly Lockheed Hudson ground through the night, the engines hammering so loudly that Jack thought every German in France must hear them. He was cold and he knew he was frightened, and wondered if he looked half as calm as Francois and McPhee had done as they pulled themselves easily into the plane ahead of him. McPhee was still cursing good-humoredly at the waste of all his parachute training. Expecting to drop into France, they learned at the briefing that they would land on a makeshift grass strip, then the aircraft would load up with a return group of passengers to fly back to RAF Tempsford. It felt too ordinary, Jack thought, to mark his first foray onto enemy-held soil. Well, the first in Europe, at least. He had been behind Jerry lines often enough in the desert, if anybody was ever really sure where the lines were.
“Three minutes.” The curtain behind the cockpit was flicked back and a head came out to shout the warning. They had been flying for nearly four hours, as calmly and as quietly as if it had been one of those prewar flights from London to Paris. No sudden maneuvers, no hard turns or dives, and not a trace of flak. It seemed almost too easy. Slowly the plane tipped over onto one wing. That meant they were circling, looking for the lights of the landing zone. They had devices these days, he knew. S-phones that let the copilot talk to the reception team on the ground, and Eureka sets that brought the aircraft in precisely to a ground beacon. They were carrying two more Eureka sets on this trip, for delivery to the French, part of the cargo that was strapped down behind him. Guns and radio sets, ammo and grenades and plastic explosives. He knew the stuff was safe enough without a detonator, even in a crash. At least he knew that in theory, but his flesh still crawled at the thought of the potential explosion piled up behind him. Silly, really. In a crash, the cargo would crush him into a pulp long before any explosion. The plane leveled out and then turned again on to the opposite wing. The pilot must have seen the three landing lights, got the right recognition signal showing it was the Digger network waiting down there and not the Germans. The engine note fell back as they lost height and he felt the flaps go down, heard the grinding of the undercarriage as they prepared to land.
“Jean-Marie, the dog has had three black puppies.” Jack bet that was theirs. Among all the usual lists of family messages and snatches of poetry that came with the news bulletins on the BBC French services, he suspected that was the one to prepare the reception committee for this night’s landing. He had felt some unconscious echo of recognition for Jean-Marie’s puppies. It was almost a tradition before the teams flew out, listening to the previous night’s radio messages and wondering which was theirs. He imagined the Germans listening in frustration as they heard these public broadcasts beaming out from the powerful British transmitters, knowing they were hearing coded orders and alerts and confirming drop zones for the secret war in France, and not having the slightest idea what they meant.
The engines were throttled back sharply. A thump, a bounce, and they were down, careering jerkily along some French plateau. And if they were lucky, not a German within miles. Don’t speak too soon, he told himself. A German ambush never opened up when the aircraft was landing, only when it was down and they could bag the lot.
The landing went on, it seemed forever, as the aircraft lurched like a tractor over a plowed field. He tried to look at Francois, give him a thumb’s-up, but he could see nothing in the darkness of the plane’s hold. Then he felt a friendly slap on his knee as the plane slowed, and began its turn. McPhee. He leaned forward, gave a thump on the broad back in return. The engines revved again. The pilot would taxi back all the way to his landing point, ready to take off into the wind with the minimum of time on the ground.
This was the most uncomfortable ride he had ever had in his life, worse than a tank going over ditches. His mouth already dry with tension, he made himself gulp and breathe deeply. The flight hadn’t bothered him at all; it would be too shaming to get travel sickness while taxiing, or to throw up at his first sight of France. Finally, they stopped, the engines just ticking over. The copilot came out to open the hatch and guide them out. The two radio operators went first, each reaching up for the suitcases that held their sets. Then Francois, McPhee, and then him. Francois was already embracing somebody on the ground. Shapes dashed past him, reaching up into the belly of the plane to take out the cargo. Another figure loomed at his side, slapped him on the shoulder, and hustled him away, muttering words of welcome amid gusts of garlic.
He tripped over something metallic and noisy, hurting his leg, Barbed wire! No, bicycles. Then came a whiff of warm engine oil and he saw the shape of a farm tractor. At the far side of the bicycles, a group of people in coats began walking toward the Hudson for the long flight back. One of them was a woman. Perhaps he should warn her not to bother taking back French perfume. The girls back at Tempsford and in Baker Street got so much that they used it in their cigarette lighters.
Apart from the pitch darkness, the field was like a busy station platform when the express was about to leave. There seemed to be people everywhere, a whole village turned out for the event. He heard children’s laughter. Men rushed about with trolleys, calling to one another. The tractor started up. He was pushed aside as women picked up bicycles. The plane’s engines built into a roar. Another push on his shoulder, and then he saw the glow of the cigarette and recognized Francois. McPhee was with him and a man with his arm around Francois’s shoulder led them away from the bicycles, through a gap in a hedge into a field that was heady with the rich stench of manure, and where there was a small truck. They were all piled into the back, banging into milk churns and trying to untangle their legs as the truck moved off, gears grinding. He no longer heard the plane, but it must be off by now. England was a long way back, and his nausea had passed, although his stomach was tight. And suddenly, as if on a signal, they all began to laugh, great gusts of it as they pounded each other’s shoulders and backs. The Jedburgh team was down safely and racketing along some country lane. Somewhere in France in a truck that stank of sour milk and dark French tobacco. All according to plan.
The barn was dry but cold, the straw banked against the walls, their rucksacks leaning against them. The man who had led them to the truck reached behind one of the straw bales and pulled out a bottle of cognac and a small, thick glass. Francois drank it first, and then the Frenchman, and they embraced again.
“My brother Christophe,” said Francois, introducing them. “We call him Berger, the shepherd.”
Berger stood back, looked at his brother in khaki, his hand stretching out to finger the Cross of Lorraine on one sleeve, and then looked at Jack in his English battledress, at McPhee in his olive drab. He was dressed like a farmer, in a flat cap and moleskin trousers, a patched old overcoat that was held together with string. His hands were dirty, but Jack noticed that the nails were well cut. And when he spoke, it was the French of an educated man.
“My God, what are we to do with three men in uniform?” he asked. Jack thought it was a fair question. But that was policy for the Jedburgh teams. They were not spies, to skulk around pretending to be Frenchmen. They were not meant to go near towns, but to stay out in the countryside with the Maquis. Their uniforms were deliberate, to boost the morale of the cold and hungry French boys who had taken to the hills and woods rather than be conscripted to go and work in German factories, to remind them that they were soldiers. It should also mean, with any luck, that if Jack or McPhee were captured they would not be shot as spies.
“You put us to work, Christophe,” said Francois kindly. “You take us to every group of Maquis you know from here to Limoges and down to Cahors, and we call in the arms drops and we show them what to do.”
“So the invasion is that close?” his brother asked eagerly.
“I doubt it, not this early in the year. But we need time to teach them, time to organize, time to rebuild. The Gestapo has been busy. Apart from you and Hilaire, there are not many networks left.”
“You know Hilaire is coming up to see you?”
“And you know these suspicious Allies of ours,” Francois grinned. “The gentlemen of Baker Street want to make sure their star agent keeps a close eye on dangerous Gaullists like you and me. The same with our two Anglo-Saxon friends here. Baker Street needs you and me to set up the network, Christophe, but they send these two Francophones along to watch us.” Francois winked, to take the sting out of the remark, but Jack didn’t think he was joking. Nor, from the level way he looked at Jack and McPhee, did Christophe.
“But equally you can keep an eye on us, Francois,” said the Englishman. “Make sure we don’t call in any arms drops for those Communists you’re always grumbling about.”
“You see, Christophe? You must be careful of this man,” smiled Francois. “You might think he looks and sounds like just another stupid English cavalry officer. Don’t be fooled. They sent us a brainy one.”
“Jesus, now I know why the Krauts have been winning this war,” said McPhee wearily. “They just had to walk in while you French were sniping at each other and spending the rest of your time watching the British. Let’s stop this shit and get on with killing Germans, like we’re supposed to. Let’s start with you, Christophe. Is this barn meant to be our base? Because if it is, it’s too damn near the landing ground. And what happened to our radio operator?”
Christophe was older than Francois, in his early thirties, and he looked like a civilian. Whatever military service he might have done was a long time ago. Thicker-built than his brother, with the same dark complexion and oddly light, gray eyes, he took his time before answering the American. He turned to his brother first. “Another cavalryman, Francois?” he asked.
“Parachutist,” said his brother.
“You have my sympathies, Monsieur,” Christophe said to McPhee. “Your great skill is to drop in from the skies, and we poor squabbling Frenchmen have somehow managed to organize ourselves well enough that we can hold an airstrip so you just fly in and walk out of the plane. We have not spent all our time fighting each other and being suspicious of the English. But then we have known the English for a long time around here. All this land used to belong to them, though it has been ours now for five hundred years. And I don’t think the Germans will last here nearly as long as the English did.”
“If you know the land that well, I sure hope you have found us a better-base than this,” said McPhee.
“We have indeed. But this is where we stay until we are sure the Germans are not sending out patrols to look for you. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But they always hear the planes, and they always mark the area where it came down. So we never use the same field twice, and we never use the same barn twice. You have learned security in a schoolroom, my dear American ally. We have learned it in a harder school. So never think of me as Christophe again. I am known as Berger.”
Jack found himself nodding in understanding as Christophe spoke. He had heard that tone of bitter, undisguised resentment before, when the British spoke of the American troops and airmen flooding into their country. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here. That was the phrase. And the British still had all the pride that came from never have been invaded, from never having given up. For a Frenchman, living with the defeat of 1940 and the shame and guilt of surrender, and seeing German troops occupying their land, it must be a thousand times worse.
“McPhee,” he interrupted. “Calm down. Remember what these chaps have been through, what they put up with day after day. To have survived this long, they know what they’re doing.”
Christophe didn’t even glance at the Englishman, nor did he seem to notice McPhee’s half-apologetic shrug. He just carried on talking with cold control, like a teacher handing out punishments to a schoolboy.
“From here, you will be taken to a house where there is the meeting with your man Hilaire. Then you will go east, into the hills of the Massif, to meet your first Maquis. Your radio operator is already on his way there, as you would have been except I was ordered at the last moment to arrange security and facilities for your meeting. This has not been easy. I have not slept for three nights because of this. And if you think I am suspicious, wait until you meet those frightened young scarecrows who have just wanted to escape this war. I don’t think many of them are going to be too eager to use those weapons of yours, at least not until the invasion comes and they can see that you mean it. What you will find is a handful of men that I trust, and who will listen to you and train with you because I tell them to and they trust me. Most of them have known our family and me all our lives. Most of them are old soldiers, some from the Great War and a few from 1940. They know the country and they know how to fight. They need you only to bring them weapons and explosives, and to show them how to use them. As far as they are concerned, and as far as I am concerned, this is a French battle, with French leaders, French blood, and French objectives. You may think we are all on the same side. In my view, we simply happen to share a common enemy.”
“Lest an impure blood pollute our thresholds,” mocked McPhee, half-singing the line from the “Marseillaise.”
“Shut up, McPhee, and grow up. Please,” Jack interrupted. He was feeling sick again. He also felt that all McPhee’s protests had missed the most important single feature of the night’s events. The flurry of activity and unloading as they had landed had left all the guns and all the explosives in the hands of Christophe’s men. And he knew that they would stay under Christophe’s control, with carefully rationed items made briefly available for educational purposes only. Any shooting or demolition that would take place would be at Christophe’s behest. So what? — so long as they killed Germans. And he was going to have to learn to call the man Berger. The American was looking at him aggressively. Jack reached across for the brandy bottle. “This war’s going to last a long time.”
They knew that Hilaire’s network was a legend, one of the biggest of the SOE’s networks in France and one of the most productive. They had been told no more by Baker Street, for what they did not know they could not betray. But there was always gossip at the training camps, where someone had said that the agent known as Hilaire had been promoted again, to lieutenant colonel, the highest rank of any SOE officer in France. And there was more loose talk from the RAF boys at Tempsford, who told them of two RAF aircrew from a downed bomber walking in uniform into a certain bar in Toulouse and asking a stunned waiter in schoolboy French for help. The waiter dropped the tray in astonishment on top of a table occupied by plainclothes Gestapo, and Hilaire himself had spirited them out and away in the confusion, and got them over the Pyrenees. It was one of the RAF pilots who had dropped the name Starr. And it had been Francois who had said casually one evening that Monsieur le Maire had originally landed by boat in southern France, and got to Lyon just as the circuit known as Spruce was being broken up by the Gestapo, and decided to move to Gascony.
“Monsieur le Maire?” Jack had asked.
“Starr’s cover is so good that that he has been made deputy mayor of some little commune,” Francois had said, shrugging as if everyone knew that. Jack had shivered at the looseness of SOE’s security.
Just after dawn, they had left the barn and driven south in the small truck over a country road, crossed a larger road when the coast was clear, and darted across a small bridge and railway line into a thick apple orchard. They left the truck hidden, and walked half a mile through wooded country until they reached what had once been a formal garden, laid out with gravel paths, with a small chateau at the end of the drive. The shutters on the narrow turret windows were all open, which Berger said meant all was well. They went into a side door, which led to the cellars smelling of oak and long-spilled wine, where a middle-aged man with a mustache and Sten gun nodded deferentially to Berger, and gave a vast grin when he saw Francois. He gestured at a table where a bottle of wine and some water stood beside a big loaf of country bread, some apples, dry sausage, and a large cheese.
“Strange bread,” said Jack, swallowing a mouthful of the yellow-brown dough.
“Made from chestnuts, which is the flour the peasants used around here for centuries,” said Francois. “Now there is a shortage of wheat again because the Germans take it. So people have gone back to the old ways. Try the sausage. It’s sanglier, wild boar.”
Another door opened and a woman came in quickly, tall and gaunt with gray hair and a distracted look. Francois leaped to his feet and hurried across the room to embrace her. She began to cry quietly as she looked at him, patted his cheek, rubbed the rough British serge of his uniform. Berger joined them and kissed her on both cheeks. Jack suddenly realized that this chaeau was Francois’s family home, a frightening risk to take however little time Berger had been given to set up the meeting.
“My mother,” Francois introduced her. Jack stood, somehow constrained to bow. But then a short, squat man with a round head and a dimple in his chin followed her into the cellar, moving fast but lightly on the toes of his feet like a boxer. His hair was short and neat, his gray trousers pressed, and his shoes polished. But for the open collar, he looked like a prosperous lawyer. Behind him, another man came in wearing a dark suit and carrying a revolver. He closed the door and leaned against it.
“Hilaire,” said the short man, putting out his hand to the woman. “Madame, I thank you for the hospitality.” His French was good, but with an accent that Jack could not place. Very northern, perhaps Belgian. He moved to the table, took an apple, and sat down.
“You ought to know I was against your coming so soon,” he said to Jack and McPhee, his eyes swiveling to take in Francois. “But since you’re here, we have to make you useful.” He turned to the man leaning against the door and beckoned him over.
“Call this man Yves. He’s a foreman at an aircraft propeller factory in Figeac. They turn out three hundred variable-pitch propellers each week for the Luftwaffe. It’s a small plant, so the RAF haven’t much of a hope of hitting it. Yves reckons he can do the job with some small explosive charges on a couple of key machine tools they brought in from Germany, but sometimes they are searched going in and coming out. I want you to give him some plastic, some detonators, and show him how to use them. Today, just as soon as we are done.”
He finished his apple, sipped at some water, and took out a clean white handkerchief to pat his lips. “I suppose I should have said welcome to France. And thank you for bringing me in another radio operator. My own is getting tired and I’m worried about her security,” he went on. “Then I want you out of those uniforms today. We can’t have you wandering around dressed like that. It’s insane, whatever London might say.” He gestured at Christophe. “Berger here-and I want you to call him nothing but Berger from now on, because that’s how I know him and London knows him-is taking you on first. He’ll get the uniforms back to you when you start training his boys. Then you’ll be shipped back down to my area to do the same. Again, you must travel in civilian clothes.”
“In the meantime, we’ll be sending people to you for special explosives training. We’re going to cut every railway line and every telephone line between Toulouse and Paris in the course of this spring, and keep them closed until the invasion. Berger has the list of targets, and the sooner you hit them the better. I want the first two taken out within the next twenty four hours. The Germans get edgy if a plane lands and nothing happens-they like to think there’s logic to things. Blow something up and they’ll feel they know what’s going on.
“We are going to demolish as many bridges as we can to stop the Germans sending reinforcements from the south. We have a whole German army based down here, including one SS panzer division, and that’s where we want to keep it. And that’s where you chaps come in. Blowing bridges will slow them down, but armored divisions carry their own bridging equipment. So you’ll be training the boys with the bazookas and the mortars who will be ambushing those tanks and their soft-skinned transport every time they move. An armored division covers forty miles of road when it moves, so there’ll be no shortage of targets. Under normal circumstances, they could use road and rail and get those tanks from here to the bridges over the Loire in a day, maybe a day and a half. I don’t think we can stop them, but I think we can keep them stuck down here for a week or more. An SS unit is half as big and strong again as a conventional panzer division. If we slow them down, it could make the difference between the invasion succeeding or getting thrown back into the sea.”
He stopped, looked up at the woman, and then rose courteously to ask her to leave. He gestured Yves to follow her and the man with the Sten gun, until just the five of them were left.
“Right, end of pep talk,” he said. “Two things I want to raise. First with you, Berger. These three chaps are a team and I want them to stick together. I know your brother can be useful in your network and I know you have jobs lined up for him. Don’t do it. I know your men and mine want to see British and American soldiers on the ground here working with them, but most of all they want to see the Free French in uniform. He may be a brother to you, but for my chaps he’s a symbol of de Gaulle and a French army. You lose him on some freelance operation and I’ll never forgive you.
“Second, for you two. Consider me now to be putting my military hat and badges on, and I outrank you so this is not advice. This is an order. You will accept all orders from Berger as coming directly from me. Is that clearly understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack at once. McPhee followed a moment later.
“And you will make no remark to anyone at all about French politics. You will doubtless hear about politics, even be asked about it. You will meet and train Communists, socialists, Catholic militants, and even people who until recently were Vichy sympathizers, and you will treat them all alike. You will realize that there can be a certain tension between them. You should know the difference between the FTP, the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, as the Communists call themselves, and the Gaullists. They are FFI, the Forces Francaises de l’Interieur. This is none of your business, and whenever the matter comes up you will say so and that is all you will say. SOE has no political ax to grind here in France, and if the French ever thought we did, our usefulness here would end at once. If I hear that you have broken this order, I will send you back if I can. If I must, I will have you shot here in France. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” they chorused.
“Right, good luck, and I’ll probably see you down south in a month or so. Berger will let you know. Now off you go and show Yves how to blow up his factory.” He took another apple from the table, and dismissed the three of them, remaining behind with Berger in the cellar, the door firmly closed.
“Looks like we finally ran up against the grown-ups,” said McPhee.