Though excruciating, the waiting for the second stanza of the poem to announce D-Day’s commencement is filled with energy and excitement, like a child’s anticipation of Christmas. HQ orders Virginia to wait to travel to Chambon until after invasion. Eager though she is to fold Chambon into her network, her fondness for the people here and the work they have before them keeps her satisfied.
They spend their days assembling, cleaning, and loading Sten submachine guns. The weapons are simply and cheaply constructed, easy to use, and able to shoot either Allied or German magazines. The group prepares railway explosives and studies the maps and timetables of their targeted bridges and lines. Though the weather remains rotten, they come together each night, disappointed when they don’t hear the words but also relieved in the small, secret places in their hearts. For they know, when it starts, the fires of France will grow into a mighty, terrible conflagration that will consume without discernment.
On the night of June 5, they gather around the radio holding hands.
How strange that we can feel one another’s heartbeats in our palms, Virginia thinks.
It’s not the fists alone that win the fight.
In these weeks, they’ve all become new. They are all strong fists. All fierce guts. Intelligent brains. Blazing, pounding, loving hearts.
Virginia imagines rooms like this in places all over the country. Little shelters before the storm. She imagines the faces of those she’s loved and lost, and makes a silent wish for the safety of those who’ve survived, especially Louis. She longs for the redemption of the dead and for full, swift Allied triumph.
It’s this night, holding heart-pounding hands, when their wait is rewarded. They hear the final words announcing D-Day.
Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone.
My heart is drowned in the slow sound, languorous and long.
After the words, they are quiet, breathing heavily.
She wants to tell them she loves them—that they are putting her broken heart back together—but she can’t speak over the lump in her throat.
The next day, June 6, the Nazi soldiers contract to their barracks and stations, leaving the streets empty of patrols while they learn of the arrival of 155,000 Allied troops at Normandy.
The banging of hammers rings from village to village, hanging notices for the inhabitants of the area:
the hour has arrived. it’s time to rise and to fight.
That night, Virginia and a small team of Lavi and two of his men creep to a site along the railway linking Cosne with Sury-près-Léré. One of the men—the one she christened “the explosives expert”—works with another who looks especially lethal. He has the aura of one who has lost much and wants to take even more.
While Virginia stands guard, they prepare the explosives, warming and shaping the material in their hands, inserting the fuses, and running the wires to detonators placed farther along the track. On the first morning ride, when the train hits the detonators and passes over the main devices, the engineers will evacuate the locomotive before it tips off the fuses and explodes. Virginia and her group won’t see it, but they’ll be able to hear it loud and clear from a nearby safe house. Then they’ll make like hell for the forest.
The night is so still, it’s hard to imagine what rages on a few hundred kilometers from them. Hard to imagine the arrival of the Nazi panzer divisions coming from the south to meet it. Hard to imagine the bloodshed that will touch even this field. She savors the sacrament of the present moment and tries not to be anxious about what waits coiled in the dark.
When their task is complete, they hurry across the meadow to the safe house.
She doesn’t know how any of them will sleep that night, but somehow they must have, because they are awoken at six in the morning by the blast. With wide smiles they look out the window to the horizon and see the black smoke rising.
That night, back in Estelle’s garret, in her first wire to HQ after D-Day, Virginia reports on the success of her team and three others on the severing of the rail lines around Cosne. One Nazi nerve center amputated. Hundreds to go.
—Reports panzers on the move to reinforce Normandy bases. South to north. Delay them as much as possible.
—We’re on it, Virginia taps.
—Keep skirmishes to a minimum. Sten guns no match for German artillery.
—Copied.
—Jed team for your Maquis will drop soon. Await date. You’re needed elsewhere.
And Lavi and his men are in fine fighting shape, and the Jed team will have not only military officials but also a pianist. She will miss her people here, but she knows they can stand on their own. Her only hesitation is getting farther from Louis, but deep down she knows she must press on. He survived a Spanish prison for seven months. Like he told her, captured doesn’t mean dead. Not today, anyway.
Virginia gives HQ the field coordinates for the Jed drop and signs off.
Knowing how badly her body needs rest, she takes a downer and allows it to pull a black curtain over her consciousness, where she sleeps a blessedly dreamless sleep.