The Soldier's Girl: A gripping, heartbreaking World War 2 historical novel

by Sharon Maas

  Without warning, almost mid-sentence, he switched language back to German.

  ‘The trouble is that the French intelligence service in Occupied France and especially in the Alsace is in disarray. Essentially what has happened is that the Free French government-in-exile in London under General Charles de Gaulle had to create its own intelligence service – very difficult from abroad, as you can imagine. It’s called the Bureau central de renseignements et d’action.

  ‘Initially, it consisted of a single section, Renseignement, which works closely with the British intelligence agency MI6. Subsequently, other sections were added, including the Action militaire which works with us. The Alsatian maquisards leader was able to make contact with Action militaire, which in turn – reluctantly, for they are proud – contacted us. In a nutshell, they urgently need an agent for the Alsace to support and organise their work. And you can now guess where this is going. We would like to send you to the Alsace. Can you imagine yourself in such a role?’

  Sibyl nodded. She had already come to this conclusion and saw no need to beat around the bush. It was hard to believe – they were sending her not only to France but to Alsace!

  ‘I told you: yes and yes and yes, of course! But I’m curious. You refer to yourselves as ‘we’ – does this we actually have a name? Who are you? Who would I be working for?’

  He smiled. ‘We do, a rather unspecific name. We call ourselves Special Operations. Or Special Operations Executive, SOE. We select suitable agents, train them. I represent the division F – for France.’

  ‘I am surprised that you would choose a woman, a young woman, for such work, and especially an amateur, someone with no experience in agent work. I always thought agents, spies, were men? With years of training behind them?’

  ‘Indeed not. During the Great War there were several women spies, all heroines. Have you heard of Louise de Bettignies? A heroine of that war, and there were several others who helped us win. To date there have been thirty-nine SOE female agents active in France – you would be the fortieth. They come from all walks of life and our experience is that they are excellent in their role; in fact, being female often gives them an advantage a man would not have. They evoke less suspicion, particularly with the Germans. They have a rather exalted view of womankind.

  ‘But there’s actually a specific reason why we need a woman in this particular case. The thing is: in the Alsace, all men up to the age of thirty-five are being conscripted for the Wehrmacht. So we needed either an older man or a woman. But after the age of thirty-five, all SOE agents are retired. So, you see, it has to be a young woman.

  ‘Previous experience in agent work is not a prerequisite. We are looking for fluency in French or better yet, French and German, and a knowledge of and love for France and a passion to set her free. And, of course, intrinsic qualities are required; courage, calmness under extreme pressure, level-headedness, the ability to think on one’s feet. We know that you possess those qualities – reports say that during the bomb raid you had no thought for your own safety but in perfect calmness set about saving your patients and colleagues; you acted as a leader during the crisis. That’s the kind of agent we want.’

  Not knowing what to say to that, Sibyl said nothing. A chaos of emotions seized her heart and mind: patriotism, enthusiasm, fear, pride, courage, anxiety, all mixed up and grappling with each other all at once. She nodded slightly and held Mr Smith’s gaze.

  ‘How would I get there? And what would I be doing, specifically?’

  ‘We would parachute you in, at night. Naturally you would be meticulously trained in advance. We would set up your contacts for you, give you a new identity, a cover name. You would join this Resistance group and instruct them in the use of weapons and sabotage. You would organise the drop locations and the delivery of supplies. You would be at the hub of a network of couriers. Planning the sabotage is the job we require of you.

  ‘It is not an easy job. Usually we would place a new agent in the hands of a more experienced one in occupied France for further on-the-job training; our networks in Occupied France and in Vichy are by now quite widespread and interlocked with one another, supporting each other.

  ‘This time we cannot do that. For one thing, there is no time. Secondly, we cannot spare any of our working agents, take them off for work in Alsace. This is not an ordinary peacetime job where you can simply transfer employees from one branch of a business to another. Thirdly, few of them speak German as well as French, and none of them speak Alsatian, and we regard this as an important aspect. Though most of the Alsatian Resistance fighters speak French and German, they do all speak Alsatian and so do the local people, and it is important for our agent there to be able to communicate with the locals. So we needed someone who speaks all three languages. You. So, once again: are you sure?’

  She nodded. ‘I would like to do this work. I would like to help free Alsace.’

  ‘You understand that it is dangerous work. You could get killed.’

  ‘You said so already. Fifty-fifty. The toss of a coin. I said yes. I could get killed as a field nurse in France, and still I volunteered.’

  ‘You would be basically on your own, with no-one to help you if you get into trouble. If the Gestapo finds you – well. Their methods are not kind. They would torture you in order to get information out of you. We would however provide you with a suicide pill which you would swallow in such an event. Death would be instant.’

  A wave of fear rose in Sibyl’s gorge. She swallowed it and nodded.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You must not breathe a word of this to your family. Or your colleagues, your young man. What I have told you this far is highly confidential.’

  ‘You said this already. I understand.’

  ‘Then you should go home and sleep on it for a while before making a final decision.’

  ‘I know my final decision, Mr Smith.’

  ‘We will be in touch.’

  A week later Sibyl had her third and final interview.

  This was not with Mr Smith, and not in some run-down London district; it was in Baker Street, with a woman who introduced herself as Vera Atkins, which was, it appeared, not even a code name.

  The neat black plaque outside the building at number sixty-four announced the offices of ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’, an innocuous camouflage for the Special Operations Executive headquarters. Miss Atkins was entirely different to Mr Smith; she was warm, friendly and almost motherly towards Sibyl. It was almost as if she truly cared about Sibyl and was concerned on her behalf, like a parent whose child was to sit an important exam. Except, of course, this was not an exam. It was life or death. Vera made quite clear once again the danger involved in the Alsace mission; as if she assumed a certain responsibility and needed reassurance that Sibyl held no illusions that what she was being asked to do was not a matter of glamourous adventure but was seriously dirty work. But Sibyl had long ago made her final decision; she knew very well what war could do and held no prettified notion of the life of a secret agent.

  Her training began. There was no time to lose; it was by definition a short training, considering the seriousness of the job, lasting only six months, but intensive and extremely thorough.

  * * *

  Sibyl was sent to Wanborough, near Guildford, for preliminary training in a mixed group of men and women, with the aim of improving physical fitness. It involved cross country runs, but also basic weapons training and unarmed combat. French was spoken all the time. Sibyl was aware of being watched and assessed constantly, as were all the students. One woman was removed from the group for speaking English in her sleep. A man was removed for speaking English while drunk. But Sibyl spoke only French, in her dreams and in her waking state.

  The second phase of her training was guerrilla warfare. It took place in Arisaig, in the extreme north of Scotland, where the weather was wild and nature magnificent. Here she learnt the methods and tricks of sabotage: how to make and use explosives
– for they were far enough away from civilisation to practice the setting off of bombs, the blowing up of bridges and buildings. She learnt the art of invisibility, of stalking, of picking locks, of seeing without being seen. She learnt navigation skills, and how to manage a small boat, and swim for great lengths underwater. She learnt how to live off the land, with little to sustain her.

  She learnt about codes, about Morse and ciphers necessary for wireless operations. What was normally a very long and complex course had to be compressed as time was running short.

  * * *

  Sibyl was given a weekend’s leave to return home to Three Bridges to say goodbye to her family.

  Kathleen now lived a life of quiet domesticity, relatively safe from German bombs in the Sussex countryside; her son Eric was now five. Elena, married to an RAF pilot, had trained as a bilingual secretary, like her mother. She lived in London and had found work at the Foreign Office. Her two-year-old daughter was looked after by her mother-in-law while she worked.

  The reunion with both was short but intense on Sibyl’s part. It was hard, not being able to share the details of what she was really about to do. But utmost discretion was required, and straight out lies. Sibyl told her mother that she was enlisted in FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a British independent all-female registered charity active in France; her family accepted the confidentiality of her mission.

  She returned to her training with a heavy heart, for perhaps she had seen her family for the very last time. In wartime, survival was never a guarantee.

  * * *

  She learnt to kill silently. She learnt to use a knife as delicately as an artist uses a paintbrush; here her nurse’s training, her knowledge of anatomy and the uses of a scalpel came in extremely handy. She learned about the variety of knives at SOE agents’ disposal: the dagger called in French a cran d’arrêt, whose two-sided blade fixed with a catch when opened; daggers that fitted into pipe stems, or tiny knives that fitted behind lapels, or inside fountain pens and lipstick cases and shoe heels. Then there were all kinds of guns: rifles, machine guns, lugers and revolvers. She learnt to differentiate between German, French, American and British weapons; how to handle them in the dark, or when they were slippery, by touch alone.

  Yet killing was the one skill she could not actually put into practice during training. It was all simulation. Could I do it, in real life? she asked herself. Could I? I am a woman; biologically programmed to give life, not take it. Added to that: I am a nurse, whose every reflex to date has been to save life, prevent death. Could I really kill? In cold blood, and not in self-defence? Kill for my country, for France, for freedom? There was no answer.

  * * *

  For the next part of her training Sibyl was dispatched to Tatton Park, near Manchester, to Ringway Airfield where all the troops trained in parachuting. She was allowed only three practice jumps, all at night, before being sent off for her final polish at Beaulieu, in Hampshire’s New Forest.

  Here at Beaulieu, students were taught the true nature of their mission; final points of security and espionage. She learnt how to live in Occupied France – in her case, how to live in the Alsace, an area officially German but French through and through. She learnt how to communicate through silent signs and signals; a coloured headscarf, a shirt hung up to dry, a curtain drawn or opened, a flowerpot on a window ledge. Once she was roused in the middle of the night by men dressed in Gestapo uniforms, Nazi symbols on their sleeves; they were rough and loud and shone dazzling torches into her face and threw her out of bed screaming ‘Raus, Du Schweinehund!’ They marched her along a corridor to an interrogation room where they threatened her with torture if she did not divulge her secrets. She didn’t.

  At Beaulieu, too, she met Maurice Buckmaster, head of the F Section of Special Operations; but Vera Atkins was undoubtedly the brains behind the business.

  It was Vera who schooled her in her own specific cover. She was to become Jeanne Dauguet, a young woman of Alsatian heritage who had grown up partly in Alsace and partly in Paris (this to account for her slight Parisian accent) and had returned to Colmar for work.

  The circuit’s name was Acrobat, which also served as password for all agents in the circuit. There was, in fact, only one agent, herself. ‘Normally our agents work in teams of three; the coordinator, the wireless operator, the courier. You will be alone. You will be your own wireless operator – we call them pianists – and your own courier. It cannot be helped. Alsace is different. We have not even been able to thoroughly investigate the situation there. We cannot give you much advice. You must work things out on your own. You are Acrobat One, and there is only one.

  ‘Your supervisor in London is also Acrobat,’ said Vera. ‘That is all you need to know; he does not have a name or a number. You will report back to him through your wireless transmitter at pre-arranged times which you will learn by heart; you will diverge from those times only in emergencies. When meeting anyone new you must use the codeword. At all times. No real names are to be used. No surnames.’

  ‘What happens if I am caught?’ Sibyl asked, ‘how will you know? What shall I do?’

  ‘If you are ever contaminated – which is what we call an agent who has fallen into the hands of the Gestapo – you are on your own. We do not know you, you do not know us. You have your suicide pill: you must put it in your mouth and bite it. Death will be instant. If you cannot do that, and they torture you, there is one good thing as far as we are concerned: you know nothing of the wider network and what is going on there, and so you have no secrets to spill. The only people you will know are the maquisards, and only by their first names, which are not their real names.

  ‘You will know their hideouts, their safe houses, and if you are tortured in the end you will be forced to reveal these. We only beg of you that you hold out for forty-eight hours, to give the others time to flee. But all in all you are not a high risk and I think the Gestapo also will not consider you of high importance. You are isolated from the other networks in France. They will know this. There is no communication. That makes everything much less complicated, for you and for us and for them. For everybody.

  ‘In fact you are very fortunate. Your job is very specific: to prepare Alsace for the coming of the Allies who will drive out the Germans. Not easy, but nothing you cannot manage. The Resistance fighters you will supervise are already doing good work in sabotage and subterfuge; not one of them has been caught yet by the SS, not since the execution of Marcel Weinum in 1942. They have all matured through experience. All that is needed now is, first of all, someone to keep them supplied with weapons, ammunition, explosives, and, just as essentially, with money – these men have to eat. Secondly, someone to train them in the use of weapons and explosives. Finally, someone to organise and coordinate their work: to manage air drops – times and places, and keep in touch with us through wireless so that we know – and to coordinate attacks and acts of sabotage. That someone is you.

  ‘You will possibly also help coordinate the passage of Jews to a safe house in Alsace, from where they will be sent on their way; it could be that all Jews have already left Alsace. This we do not know.’

  ‘But you will find out the details once you are there. You can do it. You know how to keep a cool head in times of stress and you are extremely efficient and reliable. This is not advanced Intelligence work. We are not MI6. Although…’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Although there is one Secret Intelligent Services agent working in the Nazi headquarters in Colmar and he will be in touch with you. As you know, the SIS doesn’t hold Secret Operations in high regard – in fact there’s been a small rivalry going on, as we are sort of a pet project for Mr Churchill. So traditional spies tend to look down their noses at us. Yet when they – the SIS – need us… well. But you’ll find out more when you get there.’

  ‘And these people I’ll be working with, the Resistance? I suppose they are all men? How will they take to being led by a y
oung woman with no experience whatsoever?’

  Vera chuckled. ‘Indeed – there might be some resentment there, but I think because of who you are, you will overcome that. There is something disarming about you which will work well on male vanity. I have every confidence that you will put them in their places with charm, diplomacy and dignity. Just be yourself. You will win them over – trust your intuition. And it’s not true that you have no experience. You excel in the use of explosives, the laying of plastic bombs and the use of weapons. These are things young men are fascinated by and you will be giving them some very valuable tools and skills – they will respect you for that. They need you. You are putting guns into their hands! They will be overjoyed, and eternally grateful! So there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll be fine. One of the skills we selected you for is that you have a way with people. You can connect to others in a manner that is innate, that cannot be taught, and so is very valuable in this work. You emanate trust. That’s a rare thing.’

  Nevertheless, as Sibyl went to bed that night, the main impression she had gleaned from Vera’s reassurance was that Alsace was more of an afterthought in Secret Operations’ plans for France. An outlier, a place of lesser importance, to be considered only now when all the major networks were in place, and the invasion was in sight; and that she was a junior agent for a task not essential enough for a valuable seasoned agent.

  This conclusion did not offend her. It filled her with determination and resolve; This mission in Alsace might be of minor strategic importance but they had chosen her for it because she was the best person; and she would give her all, throw herself into it, do everything she could to rescue it from Nazi claws.