The Best of Our Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  ooo000ooo

  They left Jean’s house between nine and ten o’clock the next night.

  Lucien’s information was that a supply train would be leaving Boulogne just before eleven, heading towards Lille. He was unsure of what was on the train, it didn’t do to ask too many questions, but the important thing was that they had an opportunity to blow up the track with a train on it. As Lucien pointed out, if they could blow up the track when it went through the woods, it would be even harder to remove the train. With any luck, it would put that line out of action for three or four days at least, quite possibly a week.

  The night before, Jean and Geraldine had retrieved the explosives and the detonation equipment from where it was hidden in the forest and had concealed it in a culvert under the Calais–Paris road. They left the house one by one, at ten minute intervals. Jean went first, heading due north and then working his way round anti-clockwise to Mourlinghen. It was a long route, potentially hazardous, but Jean knew the countryside so well that he could take the risk. Pierre also headed north from the back of the house, taking a clockwise route to the woods. The other three fanned out in a southerly direction.

  By ten thirty they had all crossed the River Liane as it flowed across the gently sloping countryside and were at their meeting point in the Bois du Quesnoy. They crouched close together as Pierre carefully went through the instructions one more time. The railway line cut through the top of the woods, most of which was on the southern side of the railway track. Pierre and Françoise would guard the north east and north west corners, Jean would look after the south. Lucien would go down with Geraldine to the track. If all went well, four of them would be north of the track at the moment of detonation. From the position they had chosen, it was a relatively short distance across the fields back to their village, although it was uphill. Hopefully they would be back in the village before the Germans appeared on the scene. The real danger would be if the Germans billeted in the village heard the explosion and came out to investigate. There was no discernible wind that night and Pierre was concerned that the sound of the explosion would carry to Hesdin. They would just have to be very careful when they returned.

  As Geraldine scrambled down the steep bank to the track, she remembered her training in Lincolnshire. It had been much colder then but strangely, she felt calmer now. Then she had been concerned that the training was a trap, that maybe they would discover her true identity.

  If tonight’s explosion worked, then the SOE and the resistance would be pleased, if it failed, then the Germans would be pleased. She still had no idea what to do, she would have to wait and see what opportunities were presented to her. In a strange way, it seemed to sum up her predicament; increasingly she felt that she had slid into a state of limbo. She knew which side she was meant to be on, but she was no longer convinced how distanced she was from the other side.

  There was little cloud in the sky, but the tall trees made it difficult to see. She and Lucien waited by the side of the track, scanning up and down the line with their binoculars to see if there was any movement. They waited five minutes, listening carefully for any warning signals from the other three. All clear. Lucien crossed the track, crouching down by the southern side of the line. Geraldine got to work from the north side. Scooping the gravel away with her hands she pushed the explosives in and then attached the wire. Until that moment, she was not sure which course of action to take. She thought of what Lange had said. She imagined what the reaction of the group would be. Lucien seemed more concerned with scanning up and down the track than with what she was doing. Once she had made her decision she finished her preparations, smoothed the gravel back over the wire and then ran it back towards the siding, taking care to scatter some stones on top to keep it in place. Lucien joined her and together they climbed up the bank and back into the woods. Geraldine had taken care to bring plenty of wire to enable them to reach the far edge of the woods. They had chosen a position that gave them a view of the line, so she could see the train as it was about to enter the woods. Two seconds after that, she would press the charge.

  They had only just settled into position when they heard the first distant rumble. It was hard to work out where it was coming from at first, but within a minute it was the unmistakable sound of a train coming down the line from the direction of Boulogne. They heard the clatter as it slowed down and crossed the points at Hesdigneul-lès-Boulogne and seconds after that the dark mass loomed into sight. As the train entered the woods, they counted, ‘one, two ...’ together and Geraldine pressed hard on the detonator. Instinctively, they all covered their heads, not so much because of the noise they were anticipating, but more because of the danger of any flying metal or exploding ammunition.

  But there was nothing. Just the rush of wind as the train sped through the woods and the noise of the birds disturbed by it. In front of them, a small creature scurried through the undergrowth.

  Pierre looked at Geraldine. What happened?

  ‘I don’t understand. It makes no sense. What do we do now?’ she asked.

  Pierre looked shocked. ‘It’s too risky to stay. We can’t even risk getting the explosives back. We must try to pull in as much of the wire as possible and then go. There must have been a faulty connection, I don’t understand. Did you check it, Geraldine?’

  ‘Of course I checked it! What do you think I was doing down there, Pierre? We checked it, didn’t we, Lucien?’

  The railwayman nodded.

  Pierre shook his head. This was close to a disaster.

  ‘Lucien. You go down and recover as much of the wire as you can. I’ll cover you. You two, back to the village. Jean will guess something has gone wrong, he’ll make his own way back.’ He was clearly angry and was muttering to Françoise in the local patois, something which he had avoided doing in her presence since her first night back in France. He shaking his head and saying ‘dinon’.

  Jean arrived back just after midnight. Geraldine was already in her bed when he silently entered the house. He came into her room, leaning exhausted against the doorframe.

  ‘What happened? Why was there no explosion?’ He was angry, his tone almost accusing.

  ‘I cannot explain, Jean. How do you think I feel? When I was training in England, sometimes it happened, the explosives didn’t work. Maybe a rat got to the wire, maybe Lucien or I pulled it by mistake with our feet –I just don’t know. It’s possible that the explosives got damp when it was stored. I did my best, I checked the connection carefully. I don’t understand either.’

  ‘Such a wasted opportunity. We cannot risk getting those explosives back.’

  He stood there shaking his head.

  ooo000ooo

  The thirteenth of June was a Tuesday, exactly one week after D-Day. Lange had left instructions in the usual place under her saddle telling her when and where she was to meet him. She had wheeled her bike up a narrow alley just beyond the old town and came across a shop with a dusty façade, improbably squeezed between two larger shops. She paused there, exhausted. She was getting tired these days and after the exertions the other night, her back was hurting. The shop sign said ‘Levy – Chapellerie’. There had been a clumsy attempt to scrub out the word ‘Levy’ , but the outline of the name remained visible, like a ghost haunting the new owner. Geraldine was looking at the tired display of just a few men’s hats when a man materialised on her right. When he was sure no one was around, Lange spoke quietly in the direction of the window.

  ‘Do they believe you?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your comrades, who do you think I mean,’ Lange said sarcastically. ‘Do they believe you? About Sunday night?’

  ‘What do you know about Sunday night? I was going to tell you about it.’

  ‘Do not forget that I am an intelligence officer. I am trained to deduce matters. Yesterday morning a patrol found some loose wire by the track in Mourlinghen. They are aware of my interest in any matters relating to railway sabotage so I was called in. We
found the explosive. You had not connected the wire to the explosive. It was not even subtle, was it? If one of them had gone back to check the connection that would have been obvious to them too.’

  ‘Of course, I didn’t connect it. Did you want me to blow up the train?’

  ‘Absolutely not! All I’m saying is that you need to be careful. You did the right thing, but what I want to know is this: do they suspect you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Pierre is angry, but I think he just believes I was either incompetent or unlucky. Lucien was near me but he never saw the actual connection being made, he was too busy watching the track.’

  ‘Just so long as they don’t suspect you. They’ll kill you, you know. We infiltrated a man into a cell near the Belgian border. He was useful for a time, very useful. But he must have made a mistake. At the end of May he was found hanging from a tree. His ears and nose were not the only parts of the body they had cut off. Before they hanged him.’

  ‘I am sure they don’t suspect me.’

  ‘The minute you think they do, you come to me and we’ll get you out of the area. The Gestapo will be very keen to get their hands on your “friends”.’

  Geraldine looked shocked.

  ‘Don’t worry. You will be well out of the way. It won’t matter to you, will it? It won’t be long now. Soon we ought to know for sure whether there is going to be an invasion in this area. Once we know that, your job is done.’

  The shopkeeper opened the door and gave them an unctuous smile, hopeful that their lengthy spell at his window might result in some much needed business. No one was interested in hats these days. All they were interested in buying was food. He thought it had been too good to be true when he was offered the chance to take the shop over when the owner was sent away. His wife told him it was a mistake. ‘It can only bring bad luck,’ she had said. He regretted it now, of course, but it was too late. Even his own brother wouldn’t talk to him. The neighbours crossed the road when they saw him. All these rumours he was hearing. He had nightmares about what would happen to him when the war ended. What about if the old owner returned? He shook his head sadly as the couple walked down the alley in the direction of the cathedral. It was a pity. They would have been his first customers that week.

  ooo000ooo

  Boulogne and the whole of the Nord Pas de Calais region continued to be battered by the RAF. One night just over a week after D-Day three hundred RAF aircraft took part in a raid on the Boulogne area. Geraldine and Jean watched the sky turn black with swarms of Lancaster and Halifax bombers. By 20 June Boulogne was barely recognisable as a town, with its identifiable infrastructure of roads, traffic signs, shops, houses and places of work all but destroyed. Its landscape now took on a strange dimension, with the rubble resembling mountains formed over thousands of years.

  Even hours after a bombing raid, the air would still be heavy with dust and the streets running with water where the drains or sewers had burst. Geraldine was no longer going into work; the factory had been blown up in the big overnight raid. Half the remaining population of the town now seemed to be homeless. Many were living in cellars or the ruins of their houses. Food was in short supply. Any illusion of normality that the Germans had been so desperate to encourage during the occupation was now gone. Children were seen begging in the streets for food. Lucien told them that when he was leaving work one day he had seen a young Wehrmacht soldier slip a piece of bread to a young boy who could barely stand. A few minutes later, he saw a passing SS officer kick the same boy into the gutter.

  There was a sense that law and order was breaking down. There were reports of looting in some areas and some German soldiers no longer appeared to be quite as rigorous as before, though no less brutal. The Germans weren’t stupid. They would have an idea of what was going on, they would gossip in their barracks, rumours would be rife. They would know that the invasion of Normandy had not been repelled. They would suspect that defeat might not be long coming.

  And it was not just the Germans that knew that. Françoise met a woman from the factory in a bread queue who told her about a young woman in her street who had done very nicely out of her relationships with a succession of German soldiers. People had been frightened of her, but recently they had started to laugh at her. Two nights ago she had thrown herself from the roof of an abandoned ruin.

  One of the teachers at the school where Pierre taught had bumped into an official at the Hôtel de Ville. Before the war he had been a minor official, but his eagerness to co-operate with the occupiers had seen him promoted to a senior position. ‘Rising like scum,’ they said. He had been particularly efficient in carrying out their orders. In the autumn of 1942 the Germans decided to round up all the Jews in Nord Pas de Calais. He had been especially assiduous in tracking down the few Jewish families in Boulogne, a role he repeated in January 1944 when the Germans rounded up the Gypsies.

  Now, according to Pierre’s colleague, he was acting like a man condemned: pleading to be understood, desperate to assure anyone he met that he had acted in the best interests of France, that he was only doing what he was told.

  Françoise did find the factory manager. He was telling any workers that he could find that they should stay put. He did not know if the factory was going to reopen. So the people who still had homes stayed in them.

  And that was the pattern for the remainder of June and into July. People trying to survive, the air raids, the anarchy of the occupiers and the rising fear of the collaborators.

  They were still getting messages from London that they were to prepare for the landing: very soon now. It was always, very soon. Lange continued to be encouraged by this and told her that in order to maintain her credibility she needed to carry out some limited but successful acts of sabotage. They successfully blew up some points and a branch line. The damage did not seen to be enormous to the group at the time and Pierre was disappointed, but Lucien reported that according to the Germans at the station the damage was far worse than at first appeared to be the case.

  By the end of June, the BBC was reporting that half a million Allied troops had landed in Normandy. The coded messages were still telling them that the Pas de Calais was the main target. Soon. Very soon. But a month after D-Day and with such a bitter battle still raging in Normandy, even from where they were it seemed hard to conceive that the Allies would be holding even more men in reserve to invade the Pas de Calais.

  One night in the second week of July, Geraldine and Jean were eating at the table in the front room. Food was in short supply in the whole area and although Jean usually brought a bit extra back from the farm, he insisted on giving most of it to the family next door, where the children were noticeably hungry. Geraldine was toying with a watery stew that mostly consisted of thin carrots and turnips, with only a gristly hint of the rabbit that Jean had caught the previous night.

  It was an unusually quiet night. The group had not been out for a night or two, they were very low on explosives and Pierre had decided that they should keep what they had until the invasion. For a few days now it had not been a matter of ‘when’ the invasion comes, but ‘if’. She wondered if it was her they disbelieved or the British. She was no longer sure who to believe herself.

  ‘Pierre does not think that there will be an invasion here, you know,’ Jean told her. He was staring at the plate, moving a piece of carrot around in the watery gravy with his fork.

  Geraldine shrugged. ‘None of us know, do we? We only know what the British tell us. The Germans must still think that there will be something going on. Otherwise, they wouldn’t still have so many troops in the region, would they?’

  Jean’s turn to shrug now. ‘I just know that Pierre is suspicious. About everything.’

  He was trying to avoid eye contact with her, instead glancing uncomfortably around the room.

  Silence.

  ‘What will we do after the war?’

  Geraldine was shocked at the question. ‘Who?’

  ‘Us. You and me. A
fter the war. Will you go back to Arras?’

  ‘I will have to. My family. They... what will you do?’

  ‘I would like to go to college. Pierre always said I had the ability. I would like to be an engineer. I will wait until my father returns from Germany. I don’t know...’

  ‘You are assuming the Germans will be defeated, Jean!’

  ‘Don’t you think they will?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They went to bed after that. Geraldine could not sleep. It was not the heat, nor the silence. Jean had said something that she could not get out of her mind: ‘I just know that Pierre is suspicious. About everything.’ She knew that he was. She had seen the glint of suspicion in Pierre’s eyes. He now openly used the local patois in front of her and she suspected that he was often talking about her. She had seen his lack of trust in her on the night that the explosives failed and she had seen it since, when she kept reassuring them that the invasion would come. She knew that the moment they realised who she was she was finished. The best she could hope for would be enough time to make her escape. She thought of the man hanging from the tree near the Belgian border with most of his extremities hacked off. Maybe one of them had seen her with Lange? Could she have been followed from the factory one lunchtime?

  That night she made up her mind.

  ooo000ooo

  For some reason she decided that a Monday would be best, though she was not sure why. The others would be at work and not back in the village until the evening. Lange had started worrying about how to contact her and had taken to leaving messages under some bricks by a farm gate between the village and the town. The last time she had seen him he was tense and blaming her. He was talking about having to go back to Paris. He was no longer even sure whether he was supposed to be working for the Abwehr or the SD. She was almost as afraid of him now as she was of Pierre. She was unsure of whom she was really escaping from, the Germans or the resistance. The very fact that she was so uncertain only made her more confused.