‘Don’t swerve so much,’ Nancy instructed firmly. Her driver gave her a furious glare and then jerked self-righteously at the steering-wheel, which promptly fell off the column and into his lap. Abruptly, they were precipitated, car and all, into the ditch.
The devotion of the Spaniards to their British leader was a touching one. Whilst regarding her as their complete equal as a soldier, they nevertheless protected her with the utmost gallantry because she was a woman.
In the course of journey upon journey, and fracas after fracas, they never lost patience and never failed in their enthusiasm. Riding along the dusty roads Nancy would suddenly order a halt. It would be time to listen for the special messages on the BBC or it would be the scheduled moment for Roger’s transmission of his coded phrases to London. Whilst she listened attentively at her tiny set, or whilst the fair-haired American tapped casually on a wireless that he balanced on his knee, the escorting Spaniards would wait silently and patiently, smoking cigarettes, watching alertly for the enemy.
But it was when a long journey made it necessary for them to eat away from their headquarters that the bodyguard were at their fiercest and gentlest with her.
They would stop at what seemed a safe restaurant and at once all the Spaniards would pour into the building. They would check everyone’s identity – motioning savagely with their Stens – examine each room and interrogate the proprietor. Only when they were convinced that all was entirely safe would they allow their dust-stained Andrée to leave her car and enter the restaurant.
They would seat her alone at the best table, order the establishment’s best food and wine and then stand menacingly around her whilst she ate in solitary splendour, guarding her throughout. Then, replete, she would get back into her car and they would continue their dangerous journey.
She grew to feel that she was never out of her car with its faithful escort of Spaniards. She and Roger seemed eternally either to be sending the message: Hélène to London , or listening for the emergency BBC call: Special for Hélène , or waiting for the code phrases that came after the news that would mean the planes will be over tonight. All the time, using only the weapons of her own personality and her ability to grant or withhold supplies, she controlled, moderated, changed or cancelled action by the Maquis so that it conformed with her instructions from London.
July and the beginning of August were fabulous months for France’s Maquisards. They attacked, sabotaged, killed and raided all over the country. Only occasionally could Nancy spare the time to go out with them. She joined in a few more cheerful ambushes with Tardivat, she led one attack on a railway line and participated in two others and she and a Spanish bodyguard shot her way unhesitatingly out of any German attempt to check her car. But mainly, at this time, she was a chef du parachutage and a leader.
Until the War ended – or she was captured and tortured to death – she would always have to have fields ready, for ten days before the full moon and ten days after it, every month. Twenty days a month her seventeen chosen fields must be manned by a skeleton staff who would hide in trees and watch the area continuously so that, if ever anyone should start snooping, she would be warned at once.
Then, when her message came over, she must have a full reception committee ready, with trucks to carry the containers away and herself in readiness to supervise every detail of the actual parachutage.
And if there was an emergency drop, she would have to make snap preparations – or, if the drop came in a non-moon period, she must go to the field with her Eureka radio set (which was attuned to a sister set in the plane, called a Rebecca, and which would guide the blind navigator to her tiny field that lay invisible in the blackness of all of France below him) and operate the delicate instrument until the plane roared overhead, when fires and torch flashes would indicate their position quite definitely.
The task was unending and remorseless. Yet London showed her repeatedly that she was not unappreciated. Regularly, once a month, amid containers full of grenades, explosives and deadly weapons, there would be personal parcels containing such pleasant surprises as face cream, sweets, lipstick and little notes (often rude but always delightedly received) from her various friends back in the headquarters of SOE in Wimpole Street.
Twenty nights a month, as long as life or the War should last, she had to be ready. Hers was the sole responsibility, but hers also was all the power and authority attached to that responsibility.
The forest of Tronçais is a large forest and it comfortably accommodated many, many groups of the Maquis. In other, rosier days for the Germans, the great Goering himself had once hunted wild pig there. Now Goering was gone and the Maquis hunted instead. But they lived a harsh open-air life because, although these forests provided safety, it was the experience of people who lived in them that they were also the welcoming refuge of every stray thunderstorm in Europe. It was always raining in Tronçais.
There were no houses available, so Nancy lived in her bus, beside which, with a corrugated-iron roof and lean-to walls, there was an officer’s ‘shower room’. The others lived in tents manufactured out of different-coloured parachutes.
Their furniture was logs on which to sit, packing-cases off which to eat. Their recreation was swimming in the lake, submerging whenever enemy planes flew overhead. Their home comforts were, in the beginning, nil.
But this was not allowed to last. Nancy, appreciating the value of good food and good living, soon had supplies of meat, milk, vegetables, wine and tobacco coming in. If her men couldn’t drink wine with their meals, or smoke after them, then neither would she nor any of her officers – until she had acquired a sufficient stock to make possible a general distribution. Usually though, and it was something of which she was proud, her housewifely instincts prevailed to such an extent that cigarette and wine rations were a daily event. She would buy them, or steal them, but she would rarely allow her men to go without.
Swimming alone was not sufficient amusement for men like Schley and Roger – so she bought them a horse. Thereafter the cavalryman (expertly) and the marine (enthusiastically) were, in turn, regularly to be seen galloping off into the woods.
She also encouraged the Americans to use their cameras. Time after time they sneaked off to a main road and then – from ten feet away – took photographs of German convoys or staff conferences, amusing themselves with the thought that they held the lives of these gentlemen in their hands if they chose to throw a grenade instead of clicking a shutter and refraining from doing so only because they were too close to home. Often, on these expeditions, Nancy liked to go with them. They were not so violent as ambushes, though the technique was the same, and she had always hated violence, but they were exciting, and she loved excitement.
It had been intended by the Maquis to welcome the first Americans to land in their midst with a huge banquet as soon as they arrived. The German attack at that time had changed their plans. But now it was put into effect.
Tardivat went into the nearest town and there kidnapped the chef of the leading hotel. Complete with tall white cap, this chef then prepared a magnificent outdoor meal with a menu that ran to eight courses. Hundreds of men sat down to it on planks and logs, and the Americans were toasted in every sort of wine. Right through until one in the morning this party raged and then, inevitably, it began to rain.
The storm was one of fierce tropical intensity and it broke up the celebrations completely. Nancy retired precipitately back to her bus. The men withdrew to their tents.
Soon, though, Nancy began to feel very sorry for Schley’s horse. Not even a horse, she considered, a little alcoholically, should be out in such a downpour. So she ran out into the rain and led the horse into the ‘bathroom’ beside her bus.
The horse, however, was not accustomed to bathrooms, still less to a galvanised-iron bathroom roof which, a foot above its head, was thundering under the rain. It became extremely unhappy and started neighing and kicking, so Nancy opened the bus window to inquire after its hea
lth. ‘How are you, Horse?’ she said. Promptly the horse poked its agitated head through the window and into the bus.
Nancy now felt very sad for the horse. She had had a great deal to drink and she was exactly in the mood to feel sad for somebody – the horse was nearest at hand! She spent most of what was left of the night talking to the horse, feeding it an entire month’s supply of sugar and trying to look into both its eyes at once whilst she spoke to it. Because horses’ eyes are so wide apart, and because she was so close, she found this impossible. Also it was dark. Very politely, then, she would light match after match and change from side to side, whilst they had their long conversation, so that she could look into each of her guest’s eyes in turn. Finally, just before dawn, she said good night to her equine friend and went to sleep.
The horse then became most agitated and kicked the bathroom to pieces, but everyone was so tired and the rain was so loud that no one heard him doing it, or came to console him, so eventually he bolted frenziedly out and vanished into the forest.
When Schley and Alsop had gone to bed hours previously, Alsop, who always died the second he hit the pillow, fell asleep with his head hanging under the eaves of their coloured parachute-silk tent. In the morning, when Schley woke him up, Alsop’s face was stained a brilliant yellow – the night’s torrential rain having stripped even the dye out of their tent’s fabric and then dropped continuously on to the heedless head below.
Having at last got the jaundiced Alsop out of bed, Schley wandered across to the bathroom. There he found an indescribable scene of devastation. Shaving cream, toothbrushes, razors, horse manure, cartons, soap and towels had all been mashed together under the terrified hoofs of Nancy’s guest. Schley woke Nancy and invited her to survey the wreckage.
‘Ah, that poor darling horse,’ she said at once. ‘He was so lonely and frightened. Somebody should’ve come and talked to him when I went to sleep.’
Denis wandered over, took one look at the chaos and withdrew again, quoting loudly from his theatrical digs’ days, ‘Please leave this bathroom as you would wish to find it.’ Alsop arrived two minutes later, looking quite transformed since the previous evening.
‘Well,’ he commented, summing up the events of the banqueting night, ‘at least we got through it all without any loss of life.’
Rake returned. He looked at Alsop’s dyed face, moaned gently to himself and clasped his head in his hands.
‘Gertie, I’m ill,’ he declared.
‘Are you, Den? What’s wrong?’
‘My eyes,’ he informed them. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, m’dear, but to me Alsop looks bright yellow! I think I’ll go and lie down again.’
Such was the social life of the Maquis in 1944. They sent out search parties to retrieve their errant steed and they searched all day. But they never found him again – he had obviously had a bellyful of service in the Maquis.
That night, when Roger asked her what phrase she wished him to transmit to London (as the code message they would hear back from the BBC to warn them of their next parachutage) Nancy looked at him with a dead-pan face and said, ‘Tell them to send the message “ Andrée has a horse in the bathroom ”.’
18 OPERATION GESTAPO
Before Nancy had finished dressing, the early morning atmosphere of comedy was cruelly dispelled. A report was brought to her which alleged that three women, one of whom had some time earlier been captured and convicted of espionage against the Maquis, were being held captive in shocking conditions and were being continuously and viciously used for the satisfaction of the group that held them.
Nancy made prompt inquiries. She found out that two of them had been arrested simply because they had not been able to give the Maquis a satisfactory explanation of why they were in the area, and that the third had, as reported, confessed defiantly to espionage and was a German.
She knew that there was no alternative to the sentence imposed on this woman. She must be shot. The Maquis had no convenient jails in which to keep spies; and, if the woman should escape, the information she could carry back to the Germans would be unthinkably dangerous. So, militarily, the verdict did not worry Nancy.
Nor, as an individual, did she any longer have any great revulsion against the thought of a firing squad. It was the penalty that had hung over her own head for four years and it was the fair rule of war for people who played the game she and this woman had played. She had long since decided that what she hoped for most, if ever she were trapped, was a swift and certain execution before a firing squad. She had also long since appreciated that such a mercy would be, for her, a most improbable one. Much more likely, months of torture and then the ovens of an extermination camp – unless she could get at the button on her sleeve first. In that she carried a tablet that would kill her.
Therefore, she had no argument of any kind against the sentence imposed on this convicted woman. On the contrary, in all humanity, she thought it should be promptly put into effect. First, though, she determined to interview the woman and see for herself that the sentence had been just. She gave orders that the prisoner should be brought to her and then sat down in her office in the bus, smoking a little distractedly as she waited.
When the woman arrived, Nancy was horrified by what she saw. For a moment all thoughts of the military considerations involved vanished – she was simply one woman overcome with distress at the condition of another.
The German was practically naked, wild-eyed and filthy dirty. She had quite obviously been savagely misused. At once Nancy passed her some of her own clothing and said simply, ‘Here, put them on.’
Sullenly she dressed.
‘How long has this been going on?’ Nancy demanded.
‘All the time.’
‘You were not willing?’
‘Never.’
‘Where are you kept prisoner?’
‘In a pig pen.’
‘Is it clean?’
‘No.’
‘Are you being fed?’
‘No.’
Nancy paused to crush back her own instincts of pity and revulsion. She had a soldier’s duty to perform – this was not a woman before her, it was a spy; an active enemy spy.
‘You know you’ve been convicted of espionage?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know the penalty? It would be the same if your people had caught me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a spy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you must pay the penalty. But I promise you,’ she said earnestly, ‘that this torture will stop. Is there anything you want to say? Any message I can send to anyone for you when France is free?’
‘Nothing.’
She was defiant, sullen and unafraid. Nancy called the escorting guard.
‘Tell your leader,’ she instructed, ‘that either the sentence on this woman must be put into immediate effect or I personally shall come over and set her free. I will not allow women to be tortured by the Maquis.’ The man nodded. ‘You must go,’ she said gently to the other woman. ‘I’m sorry.’
She spat and tore off the clothes that Nancy had so recently given her. Flinging them on to the floor of the bus, she stepped, half-naked and contemptuous, out into the wet morning air of the forest. Nancy watched her as she was marched away, but she didn’t look back; and, in a group twenty yards distant, the British and American officers watched their leader anxiously, knowing the torment she was enduring.
She sat down and soon her breakfast was brought to her. Mechanically she began to eat, knowing that she must give no sign of weakness. A volley of shots rang out in the distant shade of the forest. Only for a second did her eyes flicker up from her plate, then she continued eating stolidly until all the meal was gone.
After breakfast she summoned the other two captives to her. One, she discovered, had told an unsatisfactory story because she was having an illicit love affair with a married Frenchman in Montluçon and wished to protect him. She was innocent of any cause for d
etention. The other, a very beautiful nineteen-year-old, was equally innocent and had been seized and held only because some of the Maquis had wanted her body – and had taken it.
Savagely Nancy ordered the immediate release of both and restored to them all the money that had been stolen from them when they were caught. The nineteen-year-old wept with gratitude and asked could she remain to look after her rescuer. Thereafter she slept on the floor of the bus and became Nancy’s personal maid. Chivalry was not entirely dead in the Maquis.
The targets assigned to the Maquis d’Auvergne for D-Day had all long since been destroyed – except one. This was the small synthetic petrol plant at St Hilaire.
The plant had not been destroyed for the very good reasons that its entire output of fuel at the end of May had been seized and used by Tardivat’s group of Maquisards and that there would not be another consignment ready till early August.
Nancy had contacted London, advised them of Tardivat’s most profitable coup before D-Day and obtained permission to leave the factory intact, rather than destroy it, so that the coup could be repeated. The plant would be an invaluable asset to the Maquis, whose cars now ran mainly on alcohol – a fact which hurt the feelings of the cars and the Maquis equally, and now there was another stock of synthetic petrol ready. It had been decided that the Germans should not take delivery of the fuel. On the contrary, the Maquis would seize it and would themselves even take over the administration of the factory!
Nancy, Schley, Alsop, Hubert, Denis, Roger, Tardivat and a powerful force of men therefore called on the home of the plant manager. To his great consternation and terror, they informed him that henceforth they were in control.
‘But how,’ he moaned, ‘shall I ever explain to the Germans that I have given my petrol to the Maquis?’
‘How, if you don’t,’ Nancy retorted threateningly, ‘will you ever explain to us that you have given your petrol to the Germans? Now – enough. We, in the future, shall run your plant.’
Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy Page 20
