It was the German people who had failed. They had not had the necessary will, had not deserved the leader that had been sent to them. Böhm was crushed into the back of a Kübelwagen, rattling back toward his thankless country, surrounded by exactly the sort of spineless generals and other senior officers who had betrayed the Führer. It was cruel that decent military men like Commander Schultz were killed while soft-bellied, soft-minded men like these survived. Their medals clinked as the wagon jolted slowly along the road.
Ridiculous to travel in this way. He might be of some assistance in Berlin, but he was stuck with the survivors of two ragged battalions and they were forced to move at the crawling pace of the men and the half-dozen Panzer tanks. How had the Allies won? How could the British and Americans not see that their interests and Germany’s were aligned? It was obvious they had to join together to defeat the Jewish-Marxist conspirators who had taken over Russia, and instead those nations, full of decent racial stock, had joined hands with a bunch of semi-human Slavs. It was disgusting, disappointing, outrageous. How had they managed to survive, to fight when they were forced to scavenge for weapons among their own dead? Nothing he had learned studying psychology at Cambridge with the brightest minds of his generation had prepared him for their capacity for suffering. Everything he knew told him that they should have broken months ago, that the French, whom they had treated with forbearance as long as possible, should have accepted and celebrated them; that the English, with their respect for good breeding and advanced thinking on eugenics and racial purity should have joined hands with them from the start. Yet they had not.
He imagined what he would do if he ever met one of the German generals who had command in the east: spit in his face, tear off his epaulets, splatter his pathetic unworthy brains all over the road.
He was staring at a colonel on the facing bench, imagining this image with a pleasing quiver—his rage at least distracted him from the cheek wound Wake had given him which refused to heal—when the man suddenly coughed and blood began to run from the corner of his mouth. He looked surprised, then hurt, as if the victim of some small social slight, then he slumped forward and Böhm saw the bullet hole in the canvas.
The truck jolted to a full stop and Böhm heard the mewl of bullets in the air. Outside orders were being shouted. He ignored his companions and pushed his way to the back of the wagon and jumped down onto the road.
“Take cover, men!” he shouted at the confused infantry, only now in a haze of exhaustion realizing they were being fired upon. They began to scatter off the main road, but the banks were steep, the ditches shallow.
“Use the vehicles for cover! Watch for where the shooting is coming from before you return fire.”
Three feet from him a sergeant leading his squad out of the firing line took a bullet in the throat and staggered past Böhm, trying to stop the wound with his hand. Böhm stepped aside to avoid the arterial spray.
A hundred yards behind him he heard a burst of light machine-gun fire and saw three men writhing in the ditch. He jogged up to the very front of the column where the tank commander and the colonel supposedly in charge of this shit show of an operation were fighting, yelling at each other in full view of the men.
“What the hell are you doing?” Böhm said sharply. “Why have we stopped?”
The tank commander saluted. “The colonel insists we counter-attack, sir, and assist the wounded.”
Böhm turned on the colonel. Weak chin, dark hair. Poor stock. He’d never be allowed in the SS.
“This is an ambush, Colonel. Do not let the enemy choose the ground on which to fight. Push on into the town at once. The Allied forces are a day behind us; we must cross this bridge before the Maquis blow it if we have any hope of taking part in the defense of the Fatherland.”
The colonel grew red in the face. “I will not run from a bunch of peasants who have got their hands on a few light arms!”
Just behind them they heard a sudden roar and the flatly echoing clap of a rocket being launched. They spun around, shielding their eyes, as the wagon in the center of the column exploded into flames.
“It seems the peasants have bazookas too, Colonel,” Böhm snapped.
The colonel turned away from him. “Forward! Forward at once! Into the town!”
The tank commander scrambled back into his Panzer and Böhm heard him screaming the same order into his radio. The column jerked into urgent motion. One of the tanks in the middle of the column behind them began shouldering the flaming wagon out of the way as men, their clothes and hair aflame, still struggled out of it. As the other wagons moved forward, the infantry jogged at their sides.
Böhm followed the colonel into his staff car. The colonel shot him a foul look, but waited until Böhm had slammed the door before he ordered his man to drive on.
Denden had been up in the bell tower since before dawn, gazing down on the quiet square below him. It was a pretty enough place: the road from Montluçon wound up to it through wooded valleys to the south, disgorging into a market place surrounded by solid three-story buildings in a mix of stone and half-timbering. The ground floors were the shopfronts of the little town, the grocer’s store and the butcher’s, the ironmonger’s and the bars. All shuttered today. The modest, classical frontage of the town hall watched from the northern edge of the square, the steps worn by generations climbing them to register births, marriages, deaths, fetch their papers and ration cards. The door today was locked.
Back from the square, the artisans and textile workers had their workshops and homes, and then the houses began to thin, turning into small farms. The town was fringed with orchards. The church, rebuilt in pale stone a hundred or so years earlier by a local pig-farmer-turned-railway entrepreneur, occupied the north-east corner of the square. The religious authority of the town watched over its people in respectful partnership with the secular town hall, shoulder to shoulder with the main road passing between them and then over the bridge.
When Denden swung his binoculars to the north, he could see Gaspard and Rodrigo checking the charges along the handsome stone bridge which crossed the river. It was wider than most of the river crossings in the region. The pig farmer had built this too, his gift, to replace the ancient narrow crossing which had served the little town for three hundred years. It was the only bridge within twenty miles left that would allow a tank to pass. The pig farmer had, in his forward-thinking generosity, painted a target on the place.
Nancy had sent men into the town to evacuate the civilians as soon as she’d got the final information from London. Not everyone had gone though. The mayor, who had been turning a blind eye to Maquis activity in the area for two years, had insisted on being given a rifle and a place to stand, and had bought half a dozen gendarmes with him. He was under Tardivat’s command behind a row of sandbags at the corner of the town hall. Some other inhabitants had stayed to guard their property, and a number of young women had volunteered to care for the injured at the chateau or in the town hall. The rest of the population, though, had gathered up their children, taken what food and water they could carry and walked up into the hills, not knowing what would be left of their lives when the day was over.
Denden saw the column first as a glint of light on a windshield farther down the valley. Gradually the great fat snake of it came into view. He counted tanks, and swallowed. Five of the bastard things. Shit. The infantrymen looked to be marching in good order too. He had hoped they’d look a bit more beaten up. Christ, there were a lot of them.
He took out his hip flask and took a long pull.
“Jules, give Field Marshal Wake the following details, will you?” He rattled off his estimates of troop numbers, the wagons and tank count. “Then you’d better find your place.”
It was like Nancy to have assigned Jules the role of messenger between them. They had not spoken much while waiting for the convoy to appear in the valley, just slightly awkward nonsense. But Denden had felt Jules beginning to soften, heard the note of regret in his voice. It helped even as it hurt, and Denden was thankful to him and to Nancy for it.
Jules stood up. “Good luck, Denis,” he said. It had been Captain Rake up to now.
“And to you, Jules,” Denden replied. “Be well.” Jules dashed down the winding stairs from the belfry without saying anything more, and Denden found he had to blink a couple of times to clear his vision.
He was just in time to see the column shudder to a halt, half a mile outside town.
“No, no…” he said softly. “Run to Mummy and Daddy, dear hearts.”
A sudden blur of flames. René had managed to get into first position with his toys. Good.
“Come on, into town,” Denden said again. “Not nice out there, is it, my dears? Come on.”
A minute passed, then the column jerked forward, faster this time. Denden put down the glasses and picked up a flag—well, the tattered remains of Nancy’s red satin cushion salvaged from the bus and now tied to a stick—and stuck it through the louvered windows.
Nancy had been staring at that bloody bell tower for an hour even before they heard the boom of the explosion and the distant rattle of gunfire. Then the red flag.
“Showtime, boys,” she shouted.
The exit from the square between the church and town hall was blocked by a wall of sandbags—on the west guarded by a troop under Tardivat, on the east by Nancy’s men. She rested her Lee-Enfield on top of the sandbag wall and wet her lips, tasting the soft tang of V for Victory by Elizabeth Arden.
They weren’t stupid. A tank rumbled into the square first, the growl of its engine deafening, the scale of it in the market square impossible. In its shadow came a flood of infantry. One of René’s protégés stood up to the west of the bridge and fired his bazooka into its tracks while the rest of them laid down covering fire, picking off the infantry and driving them back into cover.
The charge exploded, throwing two of the infantry into the air, but the tank trundled forward.
“Shit!” Juan was firing and reloading steadily beside her. “How is it still moving?”
A second tank rumbled into the square and came alongside the first. For a moment the two monsters paused in the center of the square around a hundred feet in front of them. Behind them surged a fresh swarm of infantry. They pushed forward again. Nancy was betting they wouldn’t shell their positions and risk making the road and bridge impassable. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t just roll over them though.
René’s protégé stood up again.
“Good luck,” Nancy whispered. Reload, pick your target, fire. Reload, pick your target, fire. She brought down one NCO, waving his men forward just in front of the tank. He went down and the tank rolled over him.
A rush of air and the explosion of the bazooka. She watched the charge bounce under the tank and explode, blinding her. When she could see again, it was stopped, and black smoke was pouring from the turret, the hatch opened and two of the crew struggled out, choking. She took down one. The first tank was still coming straight at them, and the square was still filling with infantry, firing at them from behind the tanks, the market cross. No matter how many they took down, more surged from behind and the main body of them, led by the first tank, bore down inexorably on their position. Holes were appearing in their ranks.
“Fall back!” Nancy yelled, swapping her rifle for her Bren and firing short, controlled bursts. The Germans would be sending flanking parties through the back streets and round to their rear by now and she’d only got a few scattered guns hiding in houses off the square to hold them off.
Juan stumbled and fell, his shoulder shot through.
Nancy looked to the west. Tardivat was pulling back too. The Germans were swarming over his sandbag defenses and the Maquis were fighting hand to hand, the stubborn bastards. Nancy grabbed Juan’s collar, pulling him backward, still firing from her hip, cutting down the men in front of her. Everything was training now. Sound and light, instinct serving her, her conscious mind blanked out by noise. The tank was almost on them, and the third was lumbering into the square.
Juan was shouting at her. “GO!”
She released his collar and headed for the corner of the church without looking back. Damn, they were coming through the side streets. She pulled at the door of the bell tower. A sergeant, his face pocked with scars, came up suddenly on her blind side, and the machine gun jammed. He charged her. She allowed the Bren to swing on its strap, pulled her knife and sidestepped, letting him run onto its slashing edge as she twisted it across his throat.
Then through the door and up the tight spiral stairs. She slipped, her boots wet with Juan’s blood, her hands with the German’s, then threw herself forward again. The noise was deafening; the tank coughed out a shell and it exploded among the sandbags, sending clouds of earth into the sky and shaking the foundations of the tower.
She scrambled through the trapdoor and into the belfry, her lungs screaming and her muscles on fire. Denden was waiting for her, binoculars in hand. He turned.
“Down!”
She didn’t think, just flattened herself on the dusty and ill-fitting planks. Denden pulled his side arm and fired, one, two. She heard a gasp and twisted round in time to see a soldier standing above her, the front of his tunic blossoming with a dark damp stain. Her heart lurched and she kicked out, catching his shin and sending him back down the stairs, then slammed down the trapdoor. How had she not heard him?
“Seal it!” Denden shouted at her.
Move, Nancy. She grabbed the waiting sandbag Jules and Denden had dragged up the tower at dawn and shoved it on top of the trapdoor.
“Alone at last,” Denden said with a crooked smile.
She took the binoculars from him. “Thank you.”
He didn’t reply. Just nodded and looked back out into the square. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes, trying to take it all in. Below her she saw the bodies of the Maquis slumped over the sandbags.
“Come on, Gaspard, you son of a bitch,” she muttered, squeezing the field glasses until her knuckles turned white. His men were spread on both sides of the close approach to the bridge on the town side. The last line of defense.
“Do it. Blow the charge.”
Böhm and the colonel had abandoned the car and taken up a position on a high slope to the west of the town. Junior officers scrambled up the banks toward them, or away with the colonel’s orders.
The colonel was in an increasingly good mood. “A rather ragtag attempt to hold the bridge,” he said. “A lucky shot with the bazooka, and brave men, of course, but under-supplied and under-manned. I think we have you to thank for that, Böhm, do we not?”
Böhm did not reply, continuing to watch the action through his binoculars.
“I understand,” the colonel continued as if Böhm had simply not understood, “that you laid the groundwork for a very successful raid near Chaudes-Aigues. Marvelous. Scattered them to the four winds. I hear they were so desperate for resupply a woman went to Châteauroux for a new radio!”
Böhm lowered his glasses, looked at him. “Did she get it?”
The colonel shrugged. “I believe so, but the locals were quite sure she never made it out of town again. Hadn’t you heard?”
“Communications have been somewhat disrupted since the Allies invaded the south,” he replied. Could it be her? She was quite mad when he saw her in Montluçon. Too crazed to charm her way through the countryside with a radio on her back. It could not be her.
“They will blow the bridge,” Böhm said.
The colonel laughed politely. “No, no. If they had sufficient explosives they’d have blown it before we arrived! This little defense is proof they can’t take it down.” He tilted his head to one side. “Though even if they had, we’d have been able to construct an adequate crossing in half a day. Heaven knows we have enough men, and enough timber available! The river is relatively shallow here.”
The thoughts began to turn in Böhm’s head. If it had been her who fetched the radio…
“When did the woman get the radio?”
“The report came in a week ago. Ha!”
“What?” Böhm shifted his view.
“That little puff on the bridge, just clearing. Poor bastards only had enough explosive to open an envelope. The bridge is intact and they’re running for their lives.”
Böhm watched as a small group of men ran across the bridge, the German forces swelling behind them. One Frenchman fell forward onto the road.
The colonel raised his voice. “Get everyone moving please, I want the whole column across that bridge in half an hour. Push on. See if the damaged tank is repairable and report back to me.”
Böhm could feel it in his blood. This unease. He scanned the square, the lightly defended sandbag emplacements, the pathetic charge on the bridge. They hadn’t even managed to set it in the place where it had the best chance of doing some real damage. It was like they weren’t even trying. The raid on Wake’s camp had been a success, a great success, but he’d been sure there were a thousand men in those hills, and they’d found fewer than a hundred bodies.
They weren’t even trying…
Something caught his eye, a flag stuck through the louvers of the bell tower.
“It’s a trap!”
The colonel’s face twisted into an expression of polite skepticism. The Germans poured into the middle of the town, no longer firing, their guns at their sides. Two tanks were on the bridge itself, the three others waiting their turn in the square. A squad of engineers were already examining the damaged one. In the square. Böhm felt his stomach clench. The tanks could fire round 180 degrees, but if there were men on the upper stories of those buildings with more bazookas they were vulnerable.
“Get your men out! Withdraw!” he screamed in the colonel’s face.
It was already too late.
Nancy watched Gaspard blow the fake charge and then run; the man next to him went down. Damn. Damn. Damn.
“Nancy! It’s working!”
Denden pulled on her arm and she swung her binoculars back to the square. It was crushed with troops now. Two tanks were pulling out onto the bridge, infantry surging around them.
“Wait!” she said.
“But Nancy…”
“Wait, Denden.”
The second tank ground its gears and pulled out over the water as the fifth and final Panzer entered the square. The Kübelwagens were backed up behind it, blocking the road.
“Now!”
Denden launched himself onto the bell rope and the deep-throated clang rang out across the town.
All hell broke loose.
The third-floor windows all around the square burst open and the Maquis who had been waiting inside started pouring fire down onto the crowd of German soldiers below. At the same moment the bridge exploded, a chain of blasts that shook the tower, showering dust down on them. Denden yelled with delight. A great fountain of dirt and stone rocketed skyward, and a choking cloud was blown back into the square.
As the dust cleared over the river, Nancy saw that the bridge was gone. In the riverbed the two tanks lay on their sides in the fast-flowing water, surrounded by struggling men. From his redoubts on the far side of the bank, Gaspard fired down at the Germans in the water. The few who had made it across had already dropped their weapons and were standing on the bank, too scared to help their drowning comrades, their hands in the air.
Denden yelped again. Bazooka rounds exploded round the three Panzers. The gun turret of one swung round and fired into the ground floor of the butcher’s shop. A shattering, tumbling, punching of falling masonry and the house crumbled into the square, collapsing onto the German troops packed below. They started screaming at the tank commander. Then, as two more bazooka rounds from the opposite side of the square hit the tank, they rolled back from it like a wave. Smoke poured through the slits in the armor. René had got to his second position, then.
The screaming was getting louder. Infantrymen were throwing themselves against the walls, flinging their rifles down as if they had burned their hands. Others launched themselves forward on the ground. Nancy looked south. Fournier was folding up the rear of the column, gathering the stragglers and wagons who hadn’t yet made it into the town. She could see it was him by his walk. His Bren was held loosely across his chest, his rifle on his back, and he was chatting to the man beside him. The stragglers all had their hands in the air, and their weapons littered the roadside.
“That’s enough.” She whispered it. Then blinked, and shook her head. “Denden, that’s enough. They are done.”
He held the rope and the tolling ceased. The gunfire turned from a storm to an occasional ripple. A final scattering of cracks. Then silence. They shifted the sandbag off the trapdoor, and Nancy walked down the spiral stairs slowly, awkwardly. She’d started bleeding from her ankles again and only now did the pain find a way to get through the fog of her brain. She hadn’t spotted any men she recognized as Gestapo in the square. Perhaps they were in the wagons? Or perhaps the intel was wrong. God, this hellish pull and push of doubt and hope.
Denden followed her. They ignored the body on the stairs and the other by the door and stepped out into the square, their backs to the river. Tardivat was already separating out the officers, tasking his boys to collect the Germans’ weapons. The Maquis poured out of the houses, their guns trained on the cowering troops. Tardivat strolled over to them.
“Congratulations, Field Marshal Wake,” he said.
Nancy’s eyes traveled over the bodies, some Maquis, many, many more German infantry caught in that killing field. She still couldn’t spot any Gestapo men. How long had it lasted? Three minutes? Five?
“Once they are disarmed, organize burial parties,” she said. “Did the mayor make it?”
Tardi nodded.
“Good. Talk to him about where they should be buried. Put the officers in the police cells or take them to the chateau—”
“Nancy! Behind you!” Fournier’s voice.
She spun round. A major. He had reared up from the river like an ugly ghost, his side arm raised, ten feet from her. So this is where I die then, Nancy thought. Thank God I got to see these bastards beaten first.
A single shot. Nancy flinched but felt no pain. Had the idiot managed to miss from this range? No. His right eye had disappeared. He fell forward, dead before he hit the ground. Nancy heard the sound of a hundred weapons being lifted, bolts sliding back—the Maquis were aiming their guns at the trembling prisoners, and she ran forward, arms raised.
“No!” Nancy shouted. “Lads, I’m fine! Look at me! We did it!”
Everything was on a knife edge. Their blood was up and there wasn’t a man among them who hadn’t seen a friend’s farm burned, had a relative disappear. They all knew the stories of the women and children killed, the wild brutality of the Gestapo in these last months. But no. Not now. They couldn’t beat the Germans and then become them.
She clambered on top of a tank where they could all see her. Come on, Nancy. Just once more. Find the words. She spread her arms wide.
“Men of the Maquis! Listen to me! These men are your prisoners. You have won, you have won your liberation. France is free. The troops who took your country are at your feet, begging for mercy. Be men!” Please listen. Please, please, by all that is holy, please listen. This day had to be a victory, a day to celebrate, not a massacre of prisoners to shame them in the years to come. “Listen to me! Be better than ordinary men! Be men of the Maquis.”
One. Two. Then slowly, one at a time, they lowered their guns. To her right, a German private, a boy of seventeen at most, started to cry, and another older man looking up at a Maquis gun next to him put his arm around his shoulders. The muzzle was pointed away from him again.
She looked around, to the other side of the river, where the shot that had saved her life had come from. There was Gaspard, rifle at his side. He raised his hand in greeting.