During the course of the winter Lacroix had been able to improve enormously his underground travel system in both Occupied and Unoccupied France, so that with the aid of his hundreds of new adherents he and his helpers were able to move swiftly and safely between Vichy and Paris, or to most other parts of the country.
For the success of Gregory’s plan it was necessary that he should secure the full co-operation of his friends in London, so it was agreed that he should return there immediately; but there was no longer any necessity for him to undertake a perilous journey, trusting to his own wits and a great deal of luck to get him across the Channel. Lacroix guaranteed him swift transit to the Spanish border, and as he was carrying in the sole of his shoe papers which would ensure him priority on the Lisbon plane to London, he hoped to be back inside a week.
In consequence, he remained with Lacroix, who was returning that night to Vichy, while Kuporovitch, having wished him an affectionate good-bye, left the professor’s house and made his way back across Paris to Luc Ferrière’s house.
Since Madeleine had been doing night duty she had been sleeping each day from her return in the early morning until lunch-time. As soon as she was awake on the day after the meeting Kuporovitch told her that her outburst on the night of Gregory’s arrival had had the effect of really starting something. They had evolved a plan, which, if it were successful, would alter the whole course of the war.
Naturally, she was most eager to hear about this great idea which had been inspired through her own burning desire to exact swift vengeance on the Nazis; but Kuporovitch said that, much as he would have liked to do so, he could not possibly give her any idea of what was intended. As it was, the freedom and lives of many of her friends must be placed in jeopardy, and although he trusted her without limit personally, it had been decided by Lacroix, Gregory and himself that on no account must they let anyone into this secret except Sir Pellinore and the people whose help it would be necessary to have in London.
She at once accepted the situation and pressed him no further; then he told her that, in order to make a start upon the part which had been allotted to him, he needed a typewriter with a special set of characters and as many different varieties of plain and hotel notepaper as she could get for him. She said that she had no idea at all where he could get the sort of typewriter he wanted, but she promised to speak to Madame de Villebois about the paper, as she felt sure that the Marquise and her daughter, who were still able to move freely about Paris in the daytime, would easily be able to obtain a good variety for him.
On discussing the matter of the typewriter with Pierre, Kuporovitch learned that typewriters of any kind were now extremely difficult to obtain in Paris, as none were being imported from the United States, the French factories no longer had the materials to make them, and the Germans had commandeered great numbers for the use of their various departments which controlled the whole national life of the people in Occupied France. However, Pierre told him where he could find several shops which normally dealt in typewriters.
That evening the Russian made a tour of the shops Pierre had suggested. Two of them he now found shut and untenanted; like so many small businesses they had been bankrupted by the Occupation. A third and fourth had nothing to offer him, and it was not until he tried a fifth, the last on his list, that he found exactly the thing he wanted, because it happened to be a type of machine which was of little use to the Germans.
Having carried it home he set to work at once to practice typing and make some rough drafts of various letters. To begin with his efforts were deplorable, but he soon got the hang of the thing, and before the night was over had managed to produce two letters which had only a few minor typing errors in them.
Thereafter he worked away like a beaver. In view of the special business upon which he was now employed it had been decided that until the great coup was either made or had to be abandoned he should give up his co-operation with the sabotage parties; so he worked most of each night and a good part of the day, indefatigably turning out letter after letter and addressing them to a number of people whose names and addresses Lacroix had given him. As the days passed his speed increased, and he rarely made a bad slip in his typing. Madeleine furnished him with all the paper he required and gradually the stack of letters, bearing varying dates as far back as the previous autumn, and done up in separate bundles for each person, grew higher in the locked cupboard where he kept them.
The news continued to be depressing, as the Germans achieved victory after victory in their Balkan campaign. On the 26th April Athens fell. By the end of the month the British had been compelled to evacuate the mainland. The Greek Army had surrendered and the Germans were in possession of the entire peninsula, as well as all the Greek islands of the Aegean from which they could so easily menace Turkey.
Many of Lacroix’s most fearless helpers were Communists, so it was decided that Labour Day, the first of May, should be signalised by some special act of sabotage against the Germans.
The enemy was now taking full advantage of the great canal system of Northern France to transport goods by water from Paris, through Belgium to the German frontier; so plans were prepared for the blowing-up of certain locks which connected the various basins of the terminal barge port in North-Eastern Paris, and the big bridge which carries the Rue de Crimée over them.
All the approaches to the wharves were now strongly guarded at night by German sentries, and they had to be lured away from their posts in order to avoid the reprisals which would follow if any of them were killed. As a general rule the women of Paris showed their antagonism to the Nazis much more strongly than the men, and except in the brothels, which were now under German police supervision, it was extremely difficult for a German soldier to get a French girl even to talk to him. In consequence, the saboteurs had developed a practice of using attractive girls who were in the movement to occupy the attention of the sentries while the freedom-fighters crept past them in the darkness and laid their charges of explosives.
Several of these brave women had recently been caught, and at a meeting which Madeleine and Madame de Villebois’s daughter, Jeanne, attended, fresh volunteers were asked for. As it was not possible to carry out these major acts of sabotage in which many freedom-fighters were employed very frequently, Madeleine and Jeanne did not feel that an occasional night devoted to acting as decoys would greatly interfere with their duties at the nursing-home; so they both offered their services.
Pierre was most unwilling that Madeleine should undertake such work, not only from its danger but from its nature, as it was quite on the cards that she would have to submit to being cuddled and kissed in some dark corner by a German sentry for a quarter of an hour or more. Much as she herself loathed the thought of that, she declared her determination to go through with it, as it was the best contribution which she could make to this blow against their oppressors.
The day started off badly as there were a number of labour demonstrations against the Germans. These had nothing to do with Lacroix’s secret movement, and, while they were of value as showing the growing hatred of the population, they served no useful purpose at all, but led to clashes with the police in which a number of the demonstrators were injured. These minor riots, too, although easily suppressed, had the unfortunate effect of putting the Germans on their guard against graver disturbances; but it was too late to cancel the orders of the sabotage parties, and when Madeleine and Pierre set out that night they both felt an uneasy foreboding that special measures might have been taken which would jeopardise the success of the intended operation.
They formed two of a party that had been allotted the bridge, and Madeleine left Pierre and the other men who had gathered at a small café about three hundred yards from it to go forward with Jeanne de Villebois.
The two girls sauntered along as though out for an evening stroll and willing to indulge themselves in any amusement that offered. At the end of the bridge they were challenged by two German sentries. Halting there, they proceeded to poke fun at the men, asking if they thought that two pretty girls were likely to rush upon them and disarm them.
One of the soldiers who spoke a little French said: ‘So you think yourselves pretty, do you? Come here, and let’s have a look at you.’
The girls moved up nearer, and, as Jeanne was also something of a beauty, the Germans at once displayed a lively interest in them.
‘Perhaps you’d like to search us for weapons,’ Madeleine laughed, and her invitation immediately provoked a little horse-play. The Germans were not rough, because they thought they were on a good thing, and they chipped the two girls just as any other young men might have done in a similar situation; but soon the affair took a more serious turn.
Heinrich, as the taller of the two was called, sought to lead Madeleine away from her friend to the other side of the bridge, and after a pretence of being unwilling she gave way to him. Leaning his rifle against the railings he immediately tried to kiss her, and she thought the next few moments were as hateful as any that she had ever spent in her life.
It was not that the young man himself was at all unpleasant, and in that she was fortunate, but the whole time that he was holding her tightly to him and kissing her she could not get out of her mind the things he represented. She knew that underneath he was just a soulless brute who would not have scrupled for one second to kill her if he had been ordered to do so, because for many years past he had been educated in the belief that any sort of brutality was absolutely justified, provided it was committed in the interests of Germany and the Fuehrer.
Soon, with his hot breath on her neck, he began to explore her person. She was almost sick with shame and rage, but she managed to fob him off and began to talk of their meeting again when he was off duty, and they could find a more comfortable place in which to make love.
‘That’d be fine,’ he grinned, ‘but there’s no time like the present; and you’re a peach of a girl—the prettiest I’ve seen in all Paris. Come now!’ And he pushed her roughly, for the first time, against the stone coping at the end of the bridge.
She was wondering wildly now if Pierre and the others had had time to plant their mine so that she might break away and run for it, but if she did so prematurely she might endanger their lives. The sounding of a horn had been agreed upon as the signal which they were to give when they were ready. She had not heard it but might have missed it while she was struggling with the amorous soldier, and he was muttering loud endearments in her ear.
She was grappling with him now, but even in the midst of her distress and confusion she caught a faint cry from the other side of the road. Jeanne, too, was evidently in difficulties, and Madeleine knew that her friend must be near the limit, or she would never have cried out. To do so might bring an N.C.O. or other soldiers running out of the guardhouse, which was a shed about fifty yards away along the canal bank.
Her own situation was now near desperate, as the young German had her pinned up in an angle of the stonework at the bridge’s end, but Jeanne’s cry gave her a second’s respite. Heinrich heard it too, and stiffened suddenly, evidently fearful that he might be caught by his N.C.O. and suffer the most rigorous penalties of the iron Prussian discipline for his flagrant neglect of his duties.
‘Stop!’ Madeleine gasped. ‘Let me go! That fellow over there is hurting my friend.’ But the door of the guardhouse was not flung open, and reassured, the lusty young German, now wrought up to a terrific state of excitement, set upon her, throwing caution to the winds, determined to overcome her by brute force.
Suddenly a shot rang out from the centre of the bridge. There came the sound of shouts and running feet. On account of the demonstrations earlier in the day the Germans had placed sentries there as well as at the two ends so that if anyone should pass the latter without calling out that all was well the person concerned would fall straight into a trap. Madeleine and Jeanne had done their part, and Pierre and his friends had succeeded in getting past the two sentries the girls were engaging unseen, but they had run straight on to the others.
Next moment everything was in wild confusion. Heinrich grabbed his rifle with one hand and struck Madeleine violently in the face with the other, as he snarled: ‘So you were acting as a decoy, you filthy little bitch! I’ll teach you. As soon as we’ve sorted this I’ll turn you into the guardhouse and pull your clothes off. Then the whole lot of us will take turns at having some fun with you.’
A man raced by in the darkness. Heinrich lifted his rifle and fired. The man let out a strangled scream and pitched headforemost in the roadway. There were more shouts from the centre of the bridge. The guard was now tumbling out of the shed, and an N.C.O. was bawling orders. Half-stunned by the blow she had received Madeleine swayed and fell to her knees.
At that second there was a violent explosion about two hundred yards away. Another gang of saboteurs had succeeded in blowing up one of the canal locks. The ground shook, and pieces of debris came whistling through the air.
For an instant the light of the flash made everything as bright as day. Madeleine saw Jeanne running head down twenty yards away. A belated cart had pulled up right at the entrance of the bridge. Its driver, a burly workman, was staring down at Madeleine and Heinrich, who had grabbed her just as she had staggered to her feet. The German was too intent on preventing Madeleine from getting away to take any notice of the carter. Suddenly the burly man sprang down from his seat, and raising his whip brought it cracking down in the sentry’s face.
The German let out a yell and staggered back, releasing Madeleine. The cart hid them from the other soldiers. Before Heinrich could recover, its driver had seized him by the neck and, forcing him back against the railings of the bridge, slung him into the canal.
‘Run, Mademoiselle, run, or these devils will get you!’ cried the carter; and as he scrambled up again to his driver’s seat Madeleine raced away after Jeanne.
Fear lent her new strength, and she dashed down the street, her legs flying under her. A soldier sent a bullet after her which ripped her beret from her head. At the shock she tripped and almost fell, but recovered herself and raced on again. A moment later the shouting and firing were dying away behind her. She saw Jeanne ahead, still running, and putting on a fresh spurt caught her up.
The two girls dived down a side turning and dropped into a walk. Both were panting as though their lungs would burst, and Jeanne was sobbing bitterly.
‘It’s all right,’ gasped Madeleine. ‘They won’t follow us as far as this—they’d lose themselves in the darkness.’
‘That brute!’ sobbed Jeanne. ‘That filthy brute! I don’t think I’ll ever feel clean again.
Madeleine took her arm. ‘Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever hated anything so much, but we had to do it, and it’s all over now.’
After a few minutes they had more or less recovered themselves. A late bus took them to the Opéra, and they parted there to make their respective ways home.
Madeleine waited up anxiously for Pierre, wondering whether he had been one of the men who had been shot, or if he had managed to get away. To her great relief he reached Ferrière’s house about three-quarters of an hour after herself, and he was unwounded.
Kuporovitch was upstairs in his room typing, and Luc Ferrière had gone to bed, so they had the sitting-room to themselves, and Madeleine used some of their precious supply of coffee to make them a cup apiece so as to warm them up before they went to bed.
Pierre reported that two of their squad had been shot, and one, he thought, captured, but the other two had managed to escape unharmed with him. He was in a restless mood and would not sit down, but walked about the room. Madeleine made light of her own unpleasant experiences, as she knew that it would only infuriate him to know what she had been through; but suddenly he burst out:
‘I won’t have you do this sort of thing again. It makes me positively sick to think of it. I expect you’ll say that I have no right to interfere, but I have got a right. I’ve loved you for years—you know that! And any man who loves a girl as I love you has every right to protect her from such beastliness.’
‘Pierre darling,’ she laid a hand on his arm as he paused beside her chair, ‘I know you love me, and, of course, you hate it. The thought of that German messing me about tonight must have been even worse for you than the actual experience was for me. But try not to think of it. Every one of us must be prepared to give everything we’ve got for France, and if a girl like myself can be useful that way, then it would be plain cowardice for her to shirk her duty.’
‘No one can accuse me of being unpatriotic,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve proved my love of France with the risks I’ve taken night after night all through this winter. You know that.’
‘Of course I do,’ she murmured.
‘But there’s a limit,’ he went on quickly. ‘You and I have been lucky so far—extraordinarily lucky—but our luck can’t hold for ever. The British and the Germans have reached a stalemate, so it’s absolutely impossible now to foresee any ending to this damned war at all. If we carry on as we’ve been doing we’re bound to be caught. I don’t mind that for myself so much, but the thought of you in a German concentration camp drives me simply crazy. You must agree that I’ve been patient, but it’s getting on for a year now since Georges’ death, and I’ve been watching you pretty closely. You’ve got over that, I’m certain of it; so I’m not going to keep silent any longer. I love you. I want to marry you. Madeleine, let me take you out of this to safety.’
‘But, Pierre,’ she protested, ‘you couldn’t even if you wanted to.’
‘Oh yes, I could. I ran into my cousin, François, only yesterday. He got a special permit to come to Paris on business. His mother—that’s my Aunt Eugénie—has a house at Limoges, and he said that they’d be delighted to have us live with them. It’d be easy enough for us now to cross the frontier into Unoccupied France, and …’
‘But we couldn’t, Pierre!’ she exclaimed. ‘We couldn’t! It would mean throwing up our work here.’
‘That’s true,’ he agreed quite mildly. ‘But hasn’t it occurred to you that we’ve done our share? We were in this thing practically from the beginning, and there are scores of other people now to carry on.’
‘But Lacroix needs all the help he can get.’
Pierre shook his head. ‘Try to look at it as though we were in the Air Force—any Air Force that you like, because they all follow the same plan. The airmen go in as fighter pilots, and for several months they do their stuff. Either they’re killed or put out of action, or if they’re lucky they score a number of victories to their credit. Then they’re promoted and given jobs on the ground to instruct others. They’ve earned that, you see—and it’s probably the knowledge that if they can shoot down enough planes and survive for a number of months, after which they’ll be safe, or reasonably safe, for good and all, which helps them through their tougher spots. Well, we’ve done our stuff and brought down a good bag of the enemy, so there’s nothing cowardly now in our leaving it to others. In Limoges we’d keep in touch with the movement, of course, and continue our work, but on safer ground. I’m not suggesting that we should chuck in our hands altogether.’
Overwrought as he was, Madeleine did not wish to excite him further, so she said: ‘You’re wrong about Georges, dear. His memory is still very close to me. It’s hard on you, I know, but I’m not ready yet to think of anyone else that way. As for leaving Paris, I’m certainly not prepared to at the moment. I can’t tell you why yet, because I don’t even know myself, but I have real grounds for believing that plans are on foot to do something really big which will break the deadlock into which the war seems to have drifted. If that happens conditions may be so altered in Paris that I might feel really justified in leaving it; but until then I’m afraid we must just go on being patient.’
He grumbled a little but made no further strong effort to persuade her, and shortly afterwards they went upstairs to turn in.
Madeleine had purposely refrained from telling Stefan about the job which she had been given to do in the attempt to blow up the bridge over the canal, and when he heard about it on the following day he was gravely perturbed. Ruthless as he was in all other matters, his deep love for Madeleine made him take a very different view of sabotage activities where she was personally concerned. Apart from not asking her to marry him, he took much the same line as Pierre, suggesting that as one of the earliest workers in the freedom movement she had now done more than her share, and that arrangements should be made for her to be got out of Paris to live somewhere in Unoccupied France.
On her flatly refusing to agree he took a much stronger line and said: ‘Vefy well, then. God knows I should hate to be deprived of your company, Madeleine, but I have much more influence with Lacroix than you. If you attempt to take on any further work with the sabotage parties I shall get him to transfer you to some job in Unoccupied France, whether you like it or not, and I’m quite sure that you would not refuse to obey his orders.’
‘But surely that’s unfair, Stefan,’ she remonstrated. ‘You would be abusing your powers in order to shield me out of a personal fondness, and that simply means that some other girl would have to do the dirty work.’
‘Exactly,’ he replied with a cynical smile. ‘I have never hesitated to abuse anything when it suits my book; but since you have already done your part, and others have not, I don’t feel that in this case I should be acting unfairly. The point is that I love you, and having made up my mind that I will not have you expose yourself to greater dangers than need be, or further unpleasantness, that is the end of it.’
Madeleine felt that she should be angry at his taking such a dictatorial tone with her, but somehow she was not. Her pride made her say that she should continue to do as she liked, but they were not called upon to have an actual showdown, since as a result of the attack on the canal locks the Germans decreed a curfew. No citizen of Paris was allowed out in the streets between eight o’clock and dawn without a special pass, and squads of police and troops patrolled the streets all night.
The order had the effect of confining the saboteurs to their homes, so for the next fortnight Pierre hardly went out at all, but Madeleine went early, just about dusk, to the nursing-home, so the other two saw comparatively little of her.
During the first week of May fresh negotiations between Darlan and Abetz, with the slimy Laval acting as a middleman, resulted in the announcement that the German levy for the cost of maintaining an Army of Occupation was to be reduced by 25 per cent., and that the frontier between Occupied and Unoccupied France would now be opened to certain merchandise and some civilians; but it was not stated what further help Vichy had agreed to give the Germans against Britain as the price of these concessions. In the same week Imperial Forces advancing from Basra succeeded in nipping the Iraqi revolt in the bud, and the situation was restored there. Then, on the 10th, came the extraordinary tidings that Deputy Fuehrer Hess had secretly left Augsburg in a Messerschmitt 110 specially equipped for a long-distance flight, and, after making a parachute descent, landed near Glasgow.
With intense interest the world waited to hear the reason for the blood-stained brigand having voluntarily placed himself in the hands of his Fuehrer’s enemies; but, apparently scorning the unrivalled opportunity given to them for effective propaganda, the British Government maintained a complete silence on the matter.
The curfew was lifted after a fortnight and two days later Gregory appeared again, having made a safe and speedy journey from Paris to London and back via Lisbon, during which, between trips, he had put in eight days of frantic work with Sir Pellinore and the P.I.D. people. He arrived with two big suitcases which had been smuggled through with him, and both were crammed with documents that had been forged in accordance with his suggestions in London.
He brought one piece of bad news in which Kuporovitch was interested because he knew the man concerned and hated him as much as Gregory did. Herr Gruppenfuehrer Grauber, the dreaded Chief of the Gestapo Foreign Department U.A.-l, whom Gregory had captured in the South of France the preceding June, had escaped from a concentration camp in England.
However, Kuporovitch took the news that their old enemy was free again quite lightly, simply remarking: ‘It’s a pity that you tender-hearted British didn’t shoot the swine when you had him, but I see no reason to be upset about his escape, as that sort of thing is one of the pulls which Britain has through being an island. In the last war plenty of Germans managed to escape from the prisoner-of-war camps, but not one of them ever succeeded in getting out of the country. Scotland Yard has the reputation of being very efficient, so I don’t doubt that Grauber will be behind the bars again within a week or two.’
‘Don’t you believe it!’ said Gregory bitterly. ‘Grauber’s not like any ordinary German—he speaks English as well as I do, and French, and Dutch, and probably several other languages as well. He’s as cunning as a serpent and as slippery as an eel. If he once reaches a big port he’ll manage to get out of the country somehow and back to Germany via Spain, or even America and Russia, if need be. He’s Himmler’s right-hand man and has fifty times the brain of a fellow like Hess, so you can take it from me, Stefan, that his escape is a damn’ bad business.’
On the 18th Lacroix was again in Paris, and they had a long secret session with him, during which he was able to give them the good news that the Duke of Aosta was now surrounded with the bulk of the Italian forces at Ambaalgi and had asked for terms of surrender; so the Abyssinian campaign was as good as over.
On the 20th the Germans launched their blitzkrieg against Crete by sending hundreds of dive-bombers to attack the British naval base at Suda Bay and landing two thousand paratroops in its neighbourhood. In the succeeding days Gregory and Kuporovitch were both frantically busy sorting and arranging their masses of documents, but both followed the new campaign with intense interest.
It was the first occasion in history that an attempt had been made to invade and conquer an island by air power alone, and the outcome of the battle might have an extraordinary influence upon the Germans’ future operations. Quite apart from that, the holding of Crete by the British was of the first importance, since the loss of it would be a great blow to British sea-power in the Mediterranean. As long as the British could hold Crete they were within easy striking distance of Italy and the coast of Cyrenaica, and could render the passage of the Sicilian Channel extremely hazardous to Axis transports carrying supplies from Italy to North Africa; but if Crete were lost the British Navy would be forced back to its bases at the extreme eastern end of the Mediterranean.
On the second day of the attack the Germans captured the airfield of Maleme and also succeeded in establishing forces in the neighbourhood of Candia and Rethymno; but the Navy had done its part with its usual efficiency and sunk with appalling losses to the Germans all the seaborne troops despatched from the mainland. Candia and Rethymno were recaptured, but by the end of the week the Germans still held Maleme and had established themselves in an area for ten miles round it.
Gregory knew then that the game was up and cursing long and bitterly. As long as the captured airfield had remained within range of our field batteries the Germans could not land great quantities of troop-carriers and heavy war material on it; but now they had succeeded in pushing back our forces so far they would be able to bring over limitless quantities of reinforcements and arms. As the place was an island far removed from our main bases in Egypt and Palestine the Germans could now throw into it more men and weapons than we could, so it must be only a matter of time before our forces were overcome.
Attention was temporarily diverted from the terrific battles raging in Crete by the appearance of the Bismarck in the Atlantic. On the 24th H.M.S. Hood was sunk, and for the next three days the world followed with bated breath the chase of the giant German battleship, which ended with its total destruction on the 27th; but this news was heavily offset by the Admiralty announcement that Britain had lost two cruisers and four destroyers in the fighting round Crete.
By the end of the month the position in Crete was desperate, and on June the 1st it was announced that 15,000 British troops, the remnants of a gallant Army, had been safely evacuated.
That night Gregory and Kuporovitch again sat staring at the map of Europe.
‘We’ve got to work fast, Stefan,’ Gregory said. ‘It’ll be a race now—between us and Hitler mounting his next offensive, and you can guess where that will be.’
The Russian nodded. ‘Turkey, and a break-out into Asia. Now he’s secured himself from a flank attack there’s nothing to stop his going right ahead. If only the British had put every man they could spare, with all their tanks, into Crete and the other big Greek islands in the Aegean, in the first place, they might be holding them still, and we’d have had longer to make our preparations. As it is, we’ll have to go ahead and chance it.’
‘Exactly,’ Gregory agreed. ‘The tanks that should have smashed up those first German concentrations on the Cretan airfields had already been lost on the Greek mainland. It absolutely passes my comprehension how they can have failed to realise that in the Grand Strategy of the War the mainland was of no real significance, and that they couldn’t hold it anyhow; whereas the retention of Crete and the Greek islands was absolutely vital. Now we’ve lost them the whole of the Aegean will be a nest of German air and submarine bases. We’ll never be able to get any convoys through to help Turkey if she’s attacked, or send the Navy through the Dardanelles and the Marmara to help her defend her long northern coast in the Black Sea against invasion. Turkey is completely isolated, and now the Germans have got those damned islands they’re less than twenty miles from the Turkish coast in several places, and could blitz hell out of Smyrna any night they chose. We can’t blame the Turks if they give way to Axis pressure, and if they do, instead of fighting on the Dardanelles and the Bosphoros, where we would have stood a good chance of holding the Hun in the narrow gate, we’ll have to take the whole weight of the German Army in Syria and Iraq. It’s going to be sheer murder, Stefan, unless we can create some diversion.’
Kuporovitch poured himself another go of cognac. ‘You’ve said it, my friend. The Imperial Forces will have to meet the weight of at least a hundred German divisions in open desert country which is perfect for tank operations. I wouldn’t give a brass button for their chances of stopping the Nazis from getting to Suez and the Persian Gulf. Once that happens they’ll have all the oil they want and southern Asia for the taking.’
Gregory laughed cynically. ‘I reckon your estimate of a hundred divisions is too modest, Stefan. The Nazis know that we’re still far too weak to land a new B.E.F. on the Atlantic coast of Europe. They’ll fling everything in and use the troops of all the jackal nations—Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and the Vichy men in Syria—into the bargain. At least five million German-led troops will come thundering down into Mesopotamia, and I doubt if we’ve got even half a million to oppose them. I just shudder when I think what this Greek adventure may yet cost us.’
‘Well, ours is a forlorn hope,’ Kuporovitch made a grimace; ‘but I agree that we should delay no longer.’
‘All right then,’ Gregory nodded. ‘All the arrangements for planting the stuff are made, and Ribaud had better warn two or three of his people to get out tomorrow. After that, we’ll do a few more every day, then put the balloon up on the 7th.’
On the following afternoon Kuporovitch got Madeleine on her own and said to her: ‘Listen, my loveliness. In a few days now we shall be making our bid to alter the whole course of the war. As you know, I cannot even hint at the form our blow will take, but I can tell you that from now on every member of Lacroix’s organisation will be in extreme danger. You know how, for weeks past, I have been typing night and day, and that Gregory brought back with him from London hundreds of other forged documents. Since his return we have been sorting and addressing them to various members of the organisation.
‘Each of these carefully varied sets of paper is to be planted in his own dwelling by the person to whom it is addressed. Then they will leave Paris with their families and be smuggled out into Unoccupied France, or Belgium, or Switzerland. On the last day of the operation our key-members will also plant their special documents, and arrangements are being made to get them away in a body. Then one of us will tip off the Germans that a vast conspiracy exists and turn in the addresses of our friends after they have gone. The Nazis will raid their homes and find all these incriminating papers which vary slightly, but tell the same story.
‘While Gregory was in London he made arrangements with the British Secret Service for a similar policy to be pursued upon a smaller scale in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium; so that when it is uncovered the Germans will believe that this conspiracy has its ramifications throughout the whole of their occupied territories. Upon their reactions to what we are leaving for them to discover depends the success or failure of our enterprise; but the next few days will be a period of extreme danger.
‘There is no way in which we can prevent individual members of our organisation reading the documents that we give them before they put them away in their secret files and leave their homes. If there is a traitor among us we are undone, since he might not only turn over the documents prematurely to the Nazis himself, but consider the time ripe to blow our whole movement sky-high. You know how dearly I love you. Will you, for my sake, agree to leave Paris?’
She smiled up at him. ‘No, Stefan, not even for you. It isn’t fair to ask me. I don’t know what you mean to do, but, whatever it is, you’re doing it because of that outburst of mine the night that Gregory first returned to us. This is my party—my vengeance—and nothing in the world will persuade me not to be with you and Gregory when the blow is struck.’
It was so plain that her mind was absolutely made up that he forbore to argue, but he looked very grave as he went upstairs to work, for he knew the extreme risk that they were all now running.
For the next few days there was a great tenseness in the house, and Gregory and Kuporovitch talked very little. They were constantly on the move and held innumerable guarded telephone conversations from a call-box some way along the street with Ribaud and various other members of the organisation.
On July the 4th it was reported that German air-borne troops were already landing in Syria, and even Gregory was surprised and disturbed by this indication that within three days of their conquest of Crete the Germans were already so far advanced in the mounting of their next offensive.
On the night of the 5th a last conference was held at the Professor’s house, in which Lacroix gave special instructions to his most intimate followers. They were not allowed into the main secret but were told that the night of the 7th had been agreed upon to stage a major blow upon the enemy, and this would necessitate their abandoning their homes with their families. With their relatives and with only such luggage as they could carry in their pockets they were to assemble at the Professor’s house during the course of the day—each individual being given a special time so that the seventeen of them who were concerned should not arouse suspicion by arriving in a body.
Lacroix had decided that to endeavour to smuggle seventeen people and their families over the frontier into Unoccupied France, at one time was too great an undertaking, but Ribaud had devised a plan for getting the whole company safely out of the country altogether. He alone was to remain in Paris, as his contacts in the heart of the enemy police system were too valuable to be jeopardised for the sake of one additional person planting some of the faked documents. Lacroix, too, would not be present, as it was important that he should be at his own headquarters in Vichy to get the first reactions of the Germans to the conspiracy when it was unmasked. In consequence, Léon Baras, the bull-necked Communist Deputy, was placed in charge of the arrangements for evacuating the main party.
During the past few days the patients in the Marquise de Villebois’ house had been quietly evacuated one by one in Madame Idlefonse’s ambulance, and the Marquise herself was to leave Paris with her daughter on the following morning, so on the 6th, for the first time in many weeks, Madeleine found herself without any night duty to perform.
As was his custom, almost immediately after supper Luc Ferrière went up to his room. Pierre, who was in the middle of an interesting book, said that he was going up to bed, and Gregory went out to make some last minute arrangements; so Stefan and Madeleine were left alone.
For a few moments they sat in silence, then he said: ‘Time’s getting short now, my beautiful. Have you decided what you mean to do when the balloon goes up?’
She looked at him in some surprise. ‘Why, stay here with you and Pierre, of course. As there’s no question of planting any documents in this house, we shan’t have to leave Paris like the others, and we’ll be able to see the results of our great coup at first hand.’
He shook his head. ‘But no, Madeleine, that is impossible. I thought I made that clear the other day when I urged you to leave for Unoccupied France well before the party started.’
‘You asked me to go, and I said I wouldn’t. But you didn’t say anything about its being impossible for me to stay here after you had sprung your mine.’
‘Didn’t I—are you sure?’ He raised his heavy black eyebrows in well-simulated surprise, since he knew perfectly well that he had intentionally misled her, and went on: ‘I thought I’d made it plain that I was only asking you to go a few days earlier than you would have to in any case. That certainly was my intention.’
‘But why should we not stay on here?’ she asked. ‘As I’ve just said, since Luc Ferrière is not one of us, you won’t be planting documents on him, so there’s no reason why the house should be raided.’
Kuporovitch looked away a little uncomfortably. He had no wish to discuss with her the matter of Luc Ferrière, as having lived in the Mayor’s house for so many months a subtle change had gradually taken place in their relations with him. At first they had regarded him with open hatred, as the man who had betrayed a number of their friends to death and torture; but with the course of time, since they never talked politics with him, they had developed first an indifference and then a semi-friendly tolerance of their host, who from fear and dislike had slowly come to accept them as members of his household. Madeleine was completely merciless as far as the Nazis were concerned, but the Russian feared now that her natural compassion might lead her to make the strongest protest and all sorts of difficulties if he confessed to her that Ferrière was to be made a scapegoat for their enemies.
He had even been a little loth himself to agree to planting documents on the Mayor and leaving him there to be hauled in by the Gestapo, but Gregory had insisted. He had pointed out that the one weakness of their conspiracy was that, as they could not bring themselves to sacrifice any of their own people deliberately, when the raids were made no arrests would follow, which might make the Nazis suspicious.
To counter this they had succeeded in planting documents on a few of their enemies, who would naturally deny all knowledge of the conspiracy when they were arrested; but these were few, and people of no particular importance, whereas Ferrière was a French official of high standing, who ever since the fall of France had been acting in collaboration with the Germans. As Gregory argued, it was the Mayor who had caused the nursing-home to be raided, and the fact that many months had elapsed since then should not be allowed to save him from an appropriate recompense; and just because they had been able to make use of him since was no reason at all why he should be spared when by turning him in they could so materially further the great plan upon which they were engaged.
Looking back at Madeleine, Kuporovitch simply shrugged his shoulders. ‘I do not myself know all the details of what has been arranged. I can only tell you that it is by Colonel Lacroix’s orders that all of us are to leave this house. I have already spoken to Madame Chautemps, and she will leave in the afternoon to go and stay with her relatives at Rheims. Pierre, of course, knows nothing of the inside of the conspiracy, but will receive his orders to leave by an underground channel for Occupied France in the morning.’
‘I see,’ she said slowly; ‘and where do you and Gregory intend to go?’
‘Arrangements have already been made for us to leave the country. Pierre has been given the impression that when the balloon goes up the four of us are leaving together for Unoccupied France, because we did not wish him to know that any arrangements had been made for the principal members of the movement to leave France altogether. As you were unwilling to go when I urged you before, I arranged matters so that you could make your choice at the last moment. You can come with us if you wish, but if you insist on remaining in France, for a time at all events, Lacroix wishes you to move into the unoccupied territory, so I shall fix up for you to leave with Pierre first thing tomorrow.’
He did not add that whatever she decided would also settle his own movements, and that if he could not persuade her to come with Gregory and himself he meant to join her in Unoccupied France as soon as possible. He was taking a big gamble, having intentionally left her in the air until the last moment with the belief she would be able to stay on in Paris with both Pierre and himself. For him everything now hung upon her answer.
It came quickly.
‘But, Stefan,’ she exclaimed, ‘except for those few weeks when you were in England, we’ve been together now for a whole year. I—I simply don’t know what I should do without you.’
He suddenly stood up and took her hand. ‘Do you mean that, Madeleine?’
‘Of course I do. I couldn’t bear to be parted from you, after all this time.’
Looking down into her eyes, he said very gravely: ‘A year’s a long time, isn’t it? Georges has been dead for a year. I know very well that you haven’t forgotten him. You never will. But answer me one question: which means more to you now—Georges’ memory or myself?’
She came to her feet and faced him. ‘Georges was very dear to me, but I never lived under the same roof with him for months on end, and even he could not have given me greater devotion and affection than you have, Stefan. I know you far better than I ever knew him. I don’t know where you’re going, but wherever it is will you—will you take me with you?’
He knew then that he had won, and his face was radiant. She knew, too, that, although she had refused to admit it to herself, she had loved him almost from the beginning, for his courage, and his chivalry, and the sweetness of his nature.
‘You’ve waited a long time, Stefan,’ she whispered. ‘I only hope you’ll find me worth it.’ And as she put her arms round his neck, turning up her face for his kiss, they both knew a glorious moment of great happiness.
One moment later the door opened, and Pierre stood in the doorway, his face a mask of furious anger.