Denden had made his transmission and was helping to treat their wounded when Nancy and her squad got back to camp.
Mateo had carried Jules, stunned and bleeding, for a mile through the forest, but he had managed the rest of the trek back to camp on his own two feet, a rough bandage round his eyes with Jean-Clair at his elbow to guide him over the uneven ground. Nancy sent off the rest of the squad to eat and rest, then led Jules into the tent, a structure made of pine logs and tarpaulin that was serving as their field hospital. Denden was there, preparing to receive their wounded, and Nancy noticed a look of shock and fear flicker across his face as he recognized Jules, and then it was swiftly concealed.
Denden led Jules to a cot and Nancy followed.
“No word from Fournier yet,” Denden said over his shoulder, as Jules sat down. Nancy nodded; they couldn’t expect him back before nightfall. “But two of Tardivat’s patrols managed to panic a convoy with grenades and Brens into an hour of immobility at that bottleneck near Paulhac-en-Margeride.”
“SS troops?” Nancy asked, watching him unwind Jules’s bandages. The boy flinched, and Denden rested his hand on his shoulder.
“No! You ran into the SS?” Denden said.
“A thousand of them, Denis!” Jules said, with deep satisfaction. “Captain Wake took out a tank!”
Denden snorted, and gently examined Jules’s eyes. “Yes, with a nail file and a stern talking to, I’m sure. Now shush.”
“I used a Hawkins and an oak tree, as it happens,” Nancy said. “Any news from Mont Mouchet itself?”
Denden began to wash the earth and gravel from Jules’s eyes. “A little. Whatever he said to your face, Gaspard must have done something to prepare. I keep hearing the words ‘fierce resistance.’” He lifted Jules’s chin. “You’re going to be OK, my lad. Soon you’ll be able to see my handsome face again.”
Jules’s shoulders relaxed.
“Nancy,” Denden said. “Go and rest. We won’t know any more until tonight. I’ll look after Jules.”
She was tired to her bones come to think of it. She squeezed Jules’s shoulder. “You did well, Jules,” she said. “You and Jean-Clair.”
Then she went in search of a corner to sleep in. It was nearly dark already.
The next twenty-four hours were a blur of reports, orders, lightning raids to harry the German troops as their attack continued. Fournier found her in the bus at 2 a.m. and talked for forty minutes straight about his successes on the northern approach, then they worked through a half-bottle of brandy, making their plans for the next day. The Germans had pulled back as darkness fell, but they pushed back up the slopes of Mont Mouchet as soon as dawn broke, slowed by booby traps and the occasional burst of machine-gun fire from Nancy’s men in the woods. When the Germans reached the summit, only the dead remained to greet them in the smoldering ruins of the camp. As the afternoon light began to soften, Jean-Clair found Nancy with the news that Gaspard himself had escaped and Tardivat was bringing him to camp.
Gaspard had asked, not demanded, to see her, Tardivat said, so she gave orders for him to be shown into her bus and treated with every civility. Then she made him wait. She’d have made him wait anyway, but she still had wounded men to see to and informers to talk to. She made sure that Gaspard’s men saw her, moving among them, and her Maquis made sure every one of them knew that Gaspard had been warned, that they owed their lives to Nancy’s Operation Ungrateful Bastards and that the brandy they were drinking and the food they were eating were her gift.
It was clear Gaspard’s men had fought like lions though. She wouldn’t take that from him, or them. She learned that after her visit he had set up booby traps, doubled patrols and sent scouts toward the town, so they had had some warning. The planes shot up their camp ground, all their comfy barracks and stores, but the men were already in position in the woods. Their evacuation had been slow and improvised, but they’d retired in good fighting order and reached the guides and the safety of Fournier’s camps. They were bloody, tired and ragged, but they’d made it. Most of them. Seventy men were dead, and fifty others injured too badly to be of use in the fight to come for a good few weeks. The scouts told her more than two hundred SS men had been killed, and they would be busy all tonight and tomorrow carrying the dead and wounded down the slopes.
Tardivat was waiting for her by the bus, and followed her inside. Gaspard was sitting awkwardly among the cushions. Tardivat sat next to him, and leaned back, the picture of masculine ease and a vague smile on his lips. Nancy didn’t sit or speak; instead she picked up her hairbrush, balanced her compact on the shelf and arranged her hair, then took her lipstick from the pocket of her fatigues and carefully painted her lips. She’d never be allowed into the Café de Paris in these shoes, but her face would pass.
Only when she was good and ready did she sit down opposite Gaspard.
“Do you know the real difference between men and women, Gaspard?” She smiled. “And please don’t say tits.”
“Fuck you,” he hissed.
Tardivat dealt him a single blow backhanded across the side of his head. He stared daggers at him, but didn’t return the strike. That told her everything she needed to know.
“See?” She kept her voice soft. “Men solve problems with violence. The Germans were violent to you, which brings you here. And you were violent to me, which makes my men want to hang you from the highest tree.”
Tardivat snorted in agreement, and Nancy could see a flicker of doubt on Gaspard’s face.
“But lucky for you, Gaspard,” she continued, “I’ve been thinking about how women solve problems. We do it by talking—talking about our dreaded feelings. Right now, you feel fear. Anger, of course. Pride in your men too, and rightly so, but beneath that, shame. We both know that acid churn. Exactly as you feel now, you made me feel. And I could’ve stayed in your camp, puffing my chest, until some man murdered me. I could’ve died of shame. But that would be a shamefully stupid way to die, don’t you agree?”
Gaspard licked his lips, nodded.
“Good. Because D-Day is imminent, and I need every fighting man I can get. I have instructions from London on what to hit and when. I need your men to carry out those missions. I need you. Together we’re going to stop the Germans moving their troops and give the Allies coming into France every chance we can to gain a foothold and push in. That’s our role. That’s the part we—you and me—are going to play in liberating France. Not pitched battles, no heroic stands. Clever, surgical sabotage. Because this isn’t about us. This is about the whole fucking war.”
He didn’t say anything. That was a good sign. Now to lock it up nice and tight.
“All you have to do is accept that I’m now your commanding officer. Since you’re a major, let’s say I’m… colonel? Do what you are told, and you will get all the guns and ammo you need. Enough plastic to blow every bridge and railhead within twenty miles and enough money to feed yourselves like little kings while you do it. Now, do we have a deal?”
He stared at her, and Nancy wondered what he saw. Yesterday, when she had gone charging into the camp, he had seen her just as he had on her first day in France—a girl, an English amateur playing games over his country. Now he had to see that she wasn’t that girl. She’d killed a man with her bare hands since then, won the faith and loyalty of a band of fighting men just like him, and planned and led the operation which had saved his men.
“Yes, you have a deal.”
He didn’t look her in the eye and she didn’t like that. She got to her feet and grabbed the hair at the back of his head, yanked hard, so he was staring up at her with his one good eye, reading her crimson lips.
“Say that again, you son of a bitch. And say it better.”
The fight left him. “Yes, mon colonel.”
She released him, smoothed his hair back into place and patted him on the shoulder before returning to her seat. She thought of the reports she’d heard of how he’d fought, inspired his men. She needed him to do what she said, but she didn’t want to knock all the fight out of him.
“Then I think we should celebrate, don’t you?”