16 AMBUSH

It took Nancy three days to recover from her ordeal by cycle and by that time it was clear that everyone had escaped the Nazi net at the plateau of Chaudes-Aigues. All they had to do was listen in every day to each of the BBC’s special message periods and wait for the one that would mean that a new set of codes and more arms and money would be parachuted down to them.

Among the new arrivals at Saint Santin was a strange Frenchman who claimed that he was a colonel. As such he was certainly the most senior officer in the area, but that did not entitle him to speak the way he did. He was arrogant and dictatorial and Nancy encountered him for the first time one day at lunch. The colonel was busy telling Hubert that he was going to assume command of everyone in the area. Very quietly and very ominously Nancy interrupted him.

‘ Mon colonel ,’ she said, ‘I don’t know your name because no one has introduced us and because I’ve never seen you before in my life. But if you’ve finished giving us your orders, perhaps you would now explain to us just how exactly you are going to get arms and money when you have assumed command. You see,’ she explained, ‘I am the chef du parachutage for this Maquis and I can assure you that you will get nothing from me!’

Denis and Bazooka took no pains at all to conceal their joy at the colonel’s consequent discomfiture, nor did the French. Everyone suspected that Monsieur le Colonel was a fake, anxious only to jump on the bandwagon now that the Allies were coming; but no one had so far dared to challenge a person of his alleged exalted rank. In cases such as these, however, Nancy always felt quite confident that a chef du parachutage could, if necessary, outrank even a field marshal.

She took Hubert, Denis and Bazooka for a long walk in the forest that afternoon. ‘If this bloke is typical of the sort we’re going to get down here,’ she told them, ‘then I’ve had enough. There’s nothing but complications with these bloody politicians like our friend the colonel. We’re not having any more of it.’

‘What do you want us to do, Gert?’ Bazooka asked. ‘How about Denis and I shoot him?’

‘I can only shoot people when I’m drunk, Bazooka,’ Denis announced with dignity. ‘And Gert hasn’t got any more eau-de-cologne. Have to think of some other solution.’

‘The Allier, that’s the solution,’ Nancy told them. ‘Hubert, you and I will drive up there and see Tardivat. We’ll find a new base and move our headquarters there. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Bazooka, you’ll have to take over while we’re away. And, Den, probably your codes and radio will come then, too. If they do, you’ll have to receive the parachutage yourself.’ Their minds made up, they returned to their house in the village.

Publicly snubbing the colonel, Hubert then announced formally that he and Nancy were going to find a new headquarters in the Allier and that, in the meantime, Bazooka would be in command. Immediately after that, the two leaders left Saint Santin by car.

Tardivat welcomed them with open arms and was delighted that Nancy should have decided to move into his area. She was as delighted to be moving her group so near to him, and when he showed her a possible forest site for a camp, she at once accepted it. Tardivat also told her that a group of anti-Fascist refugees from Franco’s administration formed a Spanish Maquis nearby in the forest. She was introduced to them and found them a most impressive body of men.

‘We’ll bring our people up here,’ she announced decisively.

‘Good,’ said Tardivat. ‘Then we can fight together.’

Hubert remained in the forest to make arrangements whilst she returned in the car to Saint Santin to collect her men.

There she found that the message warning her of the parachutage had already come through on the BBC and that Denis and Bazooka had gone out in her absence to receive the ‘packets’. It turned out that as well as the arms and the radio and the codes she had requested, London had also sent her a radio operator – a young American Marine called Roger. He was about nineteen years old, fair, tall and good-looking, and he spoke very little French. Henceforth he was to be Nancy’s personal operator. Denis, who had recovered his buried set, became personal operator to Hubert, using the same codes as Roger, and Bazooka was ordered to go to another Maquis near Clermont-Ferrand to instruct in weapons there.

They parted with Bazooka sadly and then, about two hundred strong, they set off for the Allier. Arriving there, the men camped in the forest whilst Roger, Hubert, Denis and a handful of others set up their headquarters in a farmhouse near Ygrande. Nancy commandeered a bus, had it converted into an office and living quarters for herself and parked it alongside the house. In a few days they became an efficient fighting unit once again.

July 1944 arrived and Tardivat, now regarding Nancy as an equal comrade-in-arms, took to inviting her to accompany him on ambushes laid against German convoys heading for the Normandy front.

They would prepare their plans and choose their position with scrupulous care. Also they would manufacture large numbers of home-made bombs – plastic explosive wrapped in socks or stockings. Then their party would drive to the chosen spot which was usually not closer than twenty miles from their camp. The drivers of their trucks and cars would wait in their vehicles on the far side of the vineyards, away from the road, whilst the Maquis lay in the drains immediately alongside the road.

Soon the convoy would rumble towards them. They always allowed the whole column of vehicles to enter the trap. Then they would destroy the first two or three armoured cars and the last two vehicles in the column.

Toss their bombs, fire from the hip as they withdrew across the vineyards, into their vehicles and away – leaving behind them twenty or thirty German dead and a mounting Nazi dread of the forest terrorists.

Half a dozen times Nancy and Tardivat fought together thus, so that she grew to admire him as she had seldom admired anyone and he, describing his regard for her to the Spanish Maquis colonel, said, ‘She is the most feminine woman I know – until the fighting starts! Then’ – and he kissed his fingers – ‘she is like five men.’

On the other hand, Nancy, explaining her somewhat unladylike actions to Denis, declared, ‘If I’m to keep the respect of these camps, Den, I’ve got to keep up with them. I mustn’t panic and I must seem as game as they are. And when you’re with a man like Tardivat, that isn’t easy. After all, he is a man and I am a woman.’

It was their lookout up on the hill who warned them of the coming German attack. Swiftly but calmly they collected all their gear and left in cars and trucks and on foot along the inevitably prepared line of withdrawal. Three thousand Germans attacked, and their fire was heavy, but the Maquis group had had plenty of warning and when the attackers finally closed in they captured only an empty farmhouse.

London’s recent orders had been that Nancy should concentrate her attentions primarily on those Maquis groups in the Allier, although she would still be at liberty to provide such help as was required by a few other groups in the Puy-de-Dȏ me, groups like Gaspard’s and Laurent’s. Therefore, she moved camp now only into another nearby forest.

Moreover, she had to stay in the area, Germans or no Germans, because the next night it had been agreed that two more weapons instructors were to be dropped to them – unfortunately in a field close to the scene of that day’s attack at Ygrande. London advised that these instructors were Americans.

Late the following night she, Hubert and a few others prepared their field. Fires were stacked, torches were held ready, sentries watched anxiously for enemy patrols and about eighty men circled the clearing to fight off any attack.

In silence they waited and softly the dew wet the grass. For the hundredth time in her career the thought struck Nancy that nothing was more symbolic of the Resistance than this evening dew. When darkness fell, it would suddenly appear, wrapping the whole of France’s mountains and fields and forests in its heavy, pallid hand. It was silent. It was everywhere. And then, as daylight dawned, it evaporated magically into thin air – until nightfall, when it would appear again. So it was with the Resistance. A force of the forests and of the night; silent, ubiquitous, mysterious. And yet, when the sun rose, gone; leaving only the ashes of a fire or the wreckage of a bridge to mark its furtive descent.

So it had been through the months and years of occupation and right up to the present time. Now, of course, its nature could change. With the Allies back in Europe, the Resistance movement could become less a heavy dew and more an avalanche, fearfully poised, unsuspected and yet ready at any moment of the day or night to crash on to the enemy who lay below.

It had been a long road that the spirit of France had trod. Nancy remembered the first milestone along that road. She had been standing in a crowded tram just as the Germans marched into Marseille. Two German officers crossed the road in front of the halted tram at the Boulevard de Gambetta. Their boots gleamed, their uniforms were brutally smart, their whole bearing was unshakably confident. Nancy had happened to glance at the tram driver behind whom she was standing. She saw two tears trickle down his cheeks. Just two. Then the Frenchman’s eyes had grown hard and he had carried on with his work, his face grim but no longer grieving.

And the second signpost on the way to victory? What had that been? Undoubtedly Madame Sainson, her intelligent brown eyes gleaming with the joy of battle and laughing at the irony of being photographed in the joint company of three American evaders and three soldiers of the Axis.

The next milestones, it seemed to her, had been Judex’s raid on the sports store, then the battle on the plateau, and now these final preparations – not just for small ambushes or for fighting their way frantically out of enemy encirclements – but for full-out Maquis attack. She glanced back at one of her devoted Spanish bodyguards, past him then towards a sentry, away from him to a crouching Maquisard – none of these were any longer mere hunted outlaws: they were all confident fighting men who were certain that they would win.

‘ Advise whether the Maquis D’Auvergne is suitable to be financed, equipped and instructed for use on and after D-Day . . . ’ That had been the initial reason for her visit to France.

Well, she had advised and they had been equipped, financed and instructed, and D-Day at last had come. She felt passionately proud of the France she saw today and of her own Britain that had never lost its confidence in the spirit of Frenchmen.

Hubert broke the trend of her thoughts: he could hear planes. They lit their fires, alerted all their men and flashed their torches. The cars and lorries on the field’s perimeter, facing inwards, turned on their headlights. Then the planes roared overhead and the parachutes came tumbling down, out of the moon-drenched sky into the flaring field.

The first instructor landed on the wrong side of the hedge and was appalled to see the area now seething with running men, vehicles of all types, three bonfires and flashing torches. Then he heard hoarse shouts of ‘ où sont les americains? ’ so he shouted back across the hedge.

He saw (vaguely, because he had jumped without his thick glasses) a young woman running confidently towards him. She had black hair and a cheeky, white-toothed grin. With one hand she dragged along a laughing man, in the other she held a bottle of champagne. Reaching him, Nancy and Hubert introduced themselves, using their pseudonyms, as Hubert and Madame Andrée. The American’s name was Reeve Schley.

‘Call me Gerty,’ Nancy said. ‘Everyone does. Here . . . have a drink and welcome to France.’ Whilst Schley gulped good, dry champagne out of her proffered bottle, Hubert asked the vital question.

‘Do you speak French?’

‘No.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ replied Hubert. ‘Does your friend?’

‘Only a little.’

‘God Almighty,’ quoth Hubert. He now had a mission in the centre of France in which his American wireless operator and his two American instructors spoke either very little or no French at all. It was a trifle perplexing. Nancy, on the other hand, seemed to find the tall American cavalry officer a perfect recruit to their organisation. Quite apart from the fact that she approved of the guts of anyone who would risk parachuting into France when he could speak no French, she was delighted to observe that Schley was in uniform. Very shrewdly she realised just what a magnificent boost to morale it would be for all her men at last to see an Allied officer boldly wearing his proper uniform instead of skulking round in civilian clothing. Such boldness could only mean, to anyone who observed it, that the day of Liberation was close at hand.

On the other side of the field the second American officer, also in uniform, had been located and identified by two of Nancy’s men. His name was John Alsop and he had spent the last twenty minutes searching for Schley’s bag which contained his glasses, because without his glasses, Schley was quite blind. Alsop was led to the middle of the field where, already, much of the gear that had been dropped, including bazookas, was being loaded on to trucks. There he met Nancy and Hubert, was offered a drink, and exchanged glances of consternation with Schley. Never had they seen so much chaos. But the woman, Gertie, seemed self-possessed and confident, so they left themselves in her hands.

They were bundled into cars and driven away, and to the mechanically minded Americans their convoy of assorted French automobiles and trucks was the most ludicrous collection of vehicles they had ever seen.

Surprisingly soon they arrived at the Maquis’ new forest-shrouded headquarters and there promptly adjourned with Nancy and Hubert to her converted bus to eat and talk and drink several bottles of excellent wine. Vastly relieved, Schley found his spare glasses in the one suitcase that had been brought back with their convoy from the field. He put them on at once and examined his hosts with new-found interest. He found that his hosts were examining himself and Alsop just as shrewdly.

The two British pumped them first for news of England. Wittily and amusingly, for both were cultured men, the Americans filled in the gaps left by the BBC’s excellent news service.

The Americans inquired searchingly about their duties for the future and the attitude of the Germans at the moment.

‘No need to worry about them,’ Nancy stated.

‘Don’t they ever try to round you up?’

‘Oh, yes! They attacked yesterday. But we always have a way out.’ The Americans gulped at this casual assessment of what, to them, sounded highly dangerous – and then carried on with their questioning.

‘How many Maquis are attached to your mission?’ Schley asked, surveying Nancy curiously as he spoke. He observed a young woman who slouched a little to identify herself with her men and to disguise her own quite unmasculine charms, who coped with the roughness of endless male conversation by assuming a mask of amiable vagueness, whose eyes gazed at him with unfailing politeness but also with an occasional blankness which perhaps indicated that mentally she had withdrawn to a gentler mental environment and whose lips were constantly parted in a cheerful and slightly crooked grin. Here, unmistakably, was one who lived fully and equally the life of her fighting men but who remained always a woman.

‘Difficult to say exactly,’ Nancy replied, ‘but it would be more than seven thousand.’ (Actually it was 7,490). This information impressed the Americans profoundly. Gradually Nancy then dug out the story of how they themselves had come to land in Europe as agents of the Allies.

Reeve Schley, a lawyer on the outbreak of America’s war, had volunteered for the Navy. They rejected him because of his eyesight. Always an enthusiastic equestrian, he had then enlisted with the Horse Cavalry as a private. Eventually he got his commission – whereupon the powers-that-were took away the Cavalry’s horses and scattered the cavalrymen all over.

Schley then pulled strings and was shipped to America’s saboteur group in London – the OSS. There, after the past two years of what he himself described as ‘intensive training, creeping and crawling, etcetera’, he found himself doing a ‘twelve-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in the city of London’.

‘Found all sorts of folk, who’d only been my juniors in the legal profession, were now majors and colonels in OSS – and I was a mere lieutenant.’

Meantime Alsop had had similar experiences. Both the Army and the Navy rejected him for service as a volunteer and eventually he was drafted into the Military Police. ‘Not exactly the thing I wanted to do,’ he explained wryly to Nancy.

He was later transferred to England as a second lieutenant in the Police Corps. On leave in London one day, he met his brother Stewart, who had for a long time been a member of the British Army. ‘Stewart suggested we should go and jump into France,’ he related. ‘This seemed a novel sort of idea so I went round to OSS and suggested that they might like to put it into effect.’

Apparently OSS approved of the suggestion that they might employ Alsop and accordingly they secured his transfer to the office of their Western Europe Section. There he met Schley.

‘And then,’ Schley explained, ‘instead of one twelve-dollar-a-week clerk doing a desk job, there were two!’

They had nothing to do in their respective jobs, except sit with their feet on the desk and smoke cigars. Eventually they made themselves so persistently troublesome to authority that they were shipped off to Scotland, trained and parachuted, in late July 1944, into the Allier.

‘Talking of cigars,’ Schley said. ‘I’ve got a boxful with me in this suitcase. My father sent them to me in London. But I don’t seem to be able to find my other bag and that’s got my best pair of glasses and most of my personal kit in it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Hubert urged. ‘It’s probably still down on the landing field. I’ll have a look for it for you in the morning. As it’s nearly four o’clock now – how about some sleep?’

They were shown to a farm outhouse which Nancy had had scrubbed clean for them. There were two mattresses on the floor and these Nancy had herself made into neat beds. Between them, also on the floor, was a jar of forest flowers. Not much of a welcome, Nancy had reflected when she had finished preparing it for her guests, but better than nothing.

As they crawled into their beds and felt the soft smoothness of parachute-nylon sheets, and remembered the night’s good conversation and superb wine, Alsop turned toward Schley.

‘Hey, Reeve,’ he whispered. ‘After all those buzz-bombs and what else in London, these silk sheets will do me. G’night.’

At about eight that morning the peace of the sleeping camp was rudely shattered by long bursts of machine-gun fire.

Schley woke under the violent shaking of Alsop’s hand. ‘Listen, listen,’ Alsop said.

‘Go back to bed,’ Schley urged, ‘it’ll only be the Maquis practising.’

Out in her bus Nancy heard Denis’s voice come startled to her from his tent.

‘Gert, what’s that?’

‘The Germans, you twerp,’ his Gert snapped back, shedding her pink nightie with the embroidered neckline and donning slacks and revolvers instead as she spoke.

The camp burst into furious life, men deploying in all directions to meet the attack. In the farm shed, Schley and Alsop dressed frantically. Schley jammed on his beautiful cavalry boots first and then couldn’t get his equally beautiful trousers over the top of them, so he hacked off the narrow bottoms and emerged from the shed curiously clad in ragged shorts.

Nancy called Denis to her. ‘Where’s Hubert?’ she asked.

‘Don’t know, Gert.’

‘Well, no use worrying. Look, find young Roger and put him in a truck with all our records and the codes. Send him out to wait for us in the forest.’ It was essential that wireless operators be protected and the codes saved. Without them, cut off from London, a Maquis was crippled. ‘You go with him,’ Nancy ordered.

‘No,’ Denis refused. ‘One operator is all you’ll need. I’ll stay here with you.’

Some wounded were brought back to the headquarters, many of them seeming to be only children, mostly with abdominal wounds. Schley and Alsop rushed over, horrified at the fate of these eighteen-year-old forest fighters.

‘Here,’ they said, ‘use this for the kids,’ and offered their brandy flasks. Nancy found some pure alcohol and then again spoke to Rake.

‘Den, darling, will you look after the wounded?’

‘Me?’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘Why me?’

‘’Cos I’ll only faint and there’s no one else.’

He muttered mutinously but he agreed.

‘Den,’ she called back again, ‘look after the bus and Roger first, will you?’

Rake straight away took command of the evacuation. He was pushing a bicycle up on to the bus roof when Schley appeared in his raggedly chopped-off shorts.

‘Very fetching indeed,’ Denis murmured . . . and the next second was shrieking with terror. The local electricity wires hung low over the bus and, in passing up the bicycle, he had placed the metal frame in contact with the cables. A stream of current was charging through him.

Yelling and jerking, Rake gave every indication of being electrocuted. In the middle of the battle the whole headquarters group gathered round to help – and then, realising that the wireless operator would not die, began to laugh. Whilst Schley and Nancy held a conference to try to work out the interesting electrical problems of disentangling Denis from his high-voltage bicycle, the rest of the Maquis rolled round the ground in helpless mirth.

Eventually Rake freed himself and joined in the general hilarity. He succeeded in stowing the bicycle on top of the bus without further hitches and then Roger, enigmatic as ever, although furious that he was not allowed to join in the fighting, drove out of the area along a woodcutter’s track which, although the enemy did not know it, led to safety.

A runner arrived to tell Nancy that the Germans were entrenched at the junction of the main road and the road that led down to the camp and that they had armoured cars there as well. At once a Maquis captain, whose knowledge of things military was as small as his courage was high, suggested that a party of twenty men should go up to the crossroads with les deux américains and there, simultaneously, be instructed in how to use the bazookas that had arrived the previous night, and, with bazookas, attack the German armoured cars and machine guns, thus relieving the group of its most immediate danger.

Nancy translated to Schley and Alsop, who first registered immediate dismay and then quickly agreed. For a second she wondered what was wrong. Neither Schley nor Alsop were the type to be afraid, so why the dismay? But, of course! Pitched battle is hardly the time to give weapon instruction to men whose language one can’t speak. On the other hand, the Frenchmen were now clamouring to go, and the Americans would not consider backing down.

‘I’ll go with you,’ she told them, seeing the quick gratitude that spread over their faces as soon as she spoke. She looked very matter-of-fact about it all and they decided that probably the battle was not as serious as it sounded.

Actually the battle was just as serious as it sounded. Reports that had reached Nancy indicated that they were being attacked by between six and seven thousand Germans, and with her there were only two hundred Maquis. Still, this was no time to show any panic and there was a job to be done.

Leaving Denis to command the headquarters and look after the wounded (however reluctantly) she chose twenty men and they then set off up the curving road towards the crossroads. Each man carried a Bren gun or a Sten; Nancy and the Americans carried carbines, revolvers and grenades; also they had four bazookas and an ample supply of rockets.

Several hundred yards up the road Schley suggested tentatively that their progress might perhaps be more militarily correct if they were to deploy into the cover of the forest. Nancy gave this order and thirteen of the men at once obeyed her but seven of them deplored this cowardly technique and continued to walk brashly along the road.

No sooner had Nancy and the rest reached cover than there was the sound of fierce machine-gun fire. All seven men on the road toppled to the ground and stayed there.

The thirteen other Frenchmen were only seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds and their nerves failed them when they saw the gruesome fate suffered by their friends. So they dropped their arms and ran.

Nancy sprang to her feet at once, infuriated by this display of cowardice, and bellowed after them. Rage had an extraordinary effect upon her. The customary vague amiability of expression, the slightly crooked grin, the slouch with which she had for months camouflaged her own femininity all vanished from her. Except for her cheekbones, her complexion paled whilst her eyes flared with green fury, her features tautened into porcelain smoothness and her body straightened until she achieved a posture of statuesque fury. Anger and danger seemed to stimulate her. There was no fear in her face nor in her mind. Rather her brain worked with the speed and smoothness of skates on ice and her casual acceptance of authority crystallised into a full-blooded instinct to command and to lead. Wholly feminine, transformed by the catalyst of her own anger into an astonishingly erect and fine-drawn beauty, she stood there, feet apart, hands on hips, head flung back and surveyed her fleeing men. Then, like a whip, lashing them through the forest trees and ringing out savagely even above the sound of machine-gun fire, her voice pursued them.

‘My God,’ exclaimed Alsop, ‘who’d have thought it? You could hear her across the Rhine. Wonder what she’s saying?’

‘Whatever it is, doesn’t sound like it’ll ever be quoted in a drawing room,’ observed Schley laconically.

Schley was right. Nancy was using every foul oath she had ever heard in the days of her black marketing in Marseille, the days when Henri had taught her the correct responses to the vile abuse of the market traders.

Some of the fleeing men were only speeded on their way by this fearful blast of language, but some, after a particularly ripe reference to a lavatory brush and what each of them might do to himself with it, halted and returned, shamefaced, to the fray. Fiercely then she ordered them to provide cover for her own attack.

Alone, she and the Americans advanced, leaving the others to guard their rear, to within firing distance of the crossroads and delivered a sharp volley of bazooka rockets at both armoured cars and the machine-gun posts. With devastating violence, the rockets burst – first in front of the crossroads trench from which the Germans fired straight down into the heart of the Maquis camp and then, with awful finality, in the trench itself. Abruptly life in that enemy trench died. Next the armoured cars were destroyed. Nancy peered for a long minute towards what had been, seconds before, a group of living men firing machine guns. Then, certain that the threat to her camp had been obliterated, she allowed her eyes to drop and shrugged a little at the ugliness of what had happened. The two Americans saluted her ironically and instantly she grinned mischievously, allowed her body to sag into its customary slouch and started walking back to the camp. As Shakespeare might have said, Nancy was herself again. She rounded up the few Frenchmen who had returned to support her and ordered them to collect all the weapons abandoned by the fleeing men. Then, in good order, they withdrew a quarter of a mile back to their headquarters.

There they found Denis attending to the wounded. His head averted, he was deliberately swabbing their wounds with a pad soaked in pure alcohol. In between swabs he took a regular sip of the alcohol for himself. He was very drunk and armed to the teeth. From his belt hung a terrifying array of grenades, suspended only by their rings, over his shoulder was a carbine, in his holster was a .32 Colt with a bullet up the spout and the safety catch off! He was certainly the most hostile-looking medical orderly the Americans had ever seen.

‘Can’t stand all this mess,’ he explained as he dabbed gently but blindly at a stomach wound. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Not too well,’ Nancy replied. ‘I must get word through to Tardivat. If he could counter-attack from the rear for a while, we could get out. Otherwise we’ve had it.’

‘Anything I can do?’

‘No, you stay here with the wounded.’ Rake groaned but stayed on the job. Now that he was drunk he would much rather fight.

Nancy called over Schley and Alsop and told them, a little untruthfully, that everything was under control. Then she ordered a scout to accompany her and set off towards the Spaniard’s camp. It was two miles away on her flank. Tardivat, on the other hand, was well away from the area under attack and at its rear.

For much of the way she was under fire and for the final stretch she had to crawl the entire distance through long grass on her stomach. But eventually she found an outpost of the Spanish camp.

‘Tell your colonel I’m in trouble,’ she ordered him urgently. ‘Ask him to contact Tardivat for me and see if he can counter-attack from the rear.’ The Spaniard repeated the message and then Nancy and her scout returned to their besieged headquarters.

‘We hold out till Tardivat relieves us,’ she explained to the Americans. So a tight perimeter was formed round their position and Schley (deciding that there seemed to be very little chance of his ever using them in the future, and determined that they should not fall into the hands of the Germans) distributed his boxful of cigars. Cheerfully smoking a fine Havana, Nancy now blazed away in the direction of their attackers.

There was a slight interruption when some of the Spanish Maquisards entered the camp and delivered the bodies of the seven men killed on the road. Each man had, whether dead or still living, been shot again by the Germans, very deliberately, in the middle of the forehead and all the faces had been cold-bloodedly mutilated.

‘Put them in there,’ Nancy said, indicating the shed in which Schley and Alsop had slept. ‘I’ll come back for them tomorrow.’

At that moment sounds of a terrific onslaught against the Germans’ rear were heard.

‘Tardivat,’ said Nancy. ‘Quick – let’s get out.’

The Germans, unsure of the extent of the attack on their flanks and rear, turned to fight off this new enemy. After a short time the attack subsided and then ceased. Turning round to resume their battle against the first group, the Germans found that Nancy and her men, in cars and trucks, had vanished. At the same time Tardivat’s force melted away from behind them.

At their agreed rendezvous all her men met again. Roger was there as arranged. Soon Tardivat, grinning hugely, a vital, athletic figure, also joined them.

‘I got your message,’ he said, ‘when we were having lunch. I just shouted to my men, “Come quickly, Madame Andrée is in trouble”, and so they all stopped eating and we fought the Germans.’

‘Frenchmen stopped eating?’ she queried.

‘For you, yes,’ Tardivat laughed. ‘A special exception.’