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

by Sharon Maas

  ‘The second objective is to strain their manpower resources to the maximum. We have now been at war for almost five years. They are running out of fighting men! They are getting desperate. You have seen this happening in the Alsace, all your best young men taken at their prime to fight for the Wehrmacht. All of you gathered here: the Nazis would have recruited you too but you are here, resisting. That is good. Try to get as many young Alsatian men out of their hands as you can. And remember the first objective, destruction of property? Well, they are forced to divert manpower to protect their machines and buildings so there again we are weakening them.’

  She took a deep breath. A sense of mission, of wave of energy, swept through her. She was getting into the swing of this, and she knew, now, what she must say:

  ‘The third objective is to crack the morale of the enemy. This is already happening. In the first years of war the Boche were a proud and aggressive power, winning by brute force. They thought they were invincible. They are not. You may not know this yet but the Allies are going to win and slowly this fact is filtering though right down to the common German soldier. They have seen their comrades dying: that wasn’t supposed to happen: Hitler had made them believe in the invincibility and indestructability of the German forces but that is clearly not true. They have eyes to see, ears to hear.

  ‘And guess what, the common German soldier, who is as reluctant to fight as you are, who has been conscripted just as you have, is learning that he might die for nothing more than a myth. That Hitler has stolen his future. He is beginning to doubt. He is doubting the story fed to him that Germany will rule the world. He is doubting the invincibility of the Third Reich. He is beginning to understand that Hitler’s system has cracked and is about to tumble. This undermines the will to fight in the common soldier. He is wondering why he should give his life to a losing war. This loss of morale and will to fight is vital. Part of this moral struggle is that you – every Alsatian man and woman – must show him that you disdain him and do not want him in your country. YOUR country. See, the Boche is an emotional creature and does not want to be disliked. Your hostility is a potent weapon against the aggression he likes to display. Know that it is only show! Behind every bully is a snivelling child! Stand up to his bullying by knowing you are the moral victors!

  ‘Because, fourthly, that is your strength just as his doubt is his weakness. Every Alsatian must stand tall and believe in the moral victory. Inner conviction is half the battle. Know that we are in the right, and that from inner strength comes outer victory. Know this with every fibre of your body, with every figment of your soul. Feel that certainty rise up in your heart and fill you with power. You must feel this, know this, so that it becomes your very life. Vive la victoire!’

  The last word was a shout, a battle cry of the heart with a fist shot high; and to her great satisfaction the maquisards caught the spark.

  ‘Vive la victoire!’ the shout went up. Fists raised, men jumped to their feet; they laughed and cheered and relief flooded through Sibyl. She had done it: caught the flagging hope in their beings, raised it up, elevated it into a force that would give them the passion and the strength for the weeks and months ahead. Something to build on. For it is not possible to build a movement with men who are dead inside, as these men had been up to this moment.

  She had been terrified of this initial speech; she had never taught anyone before, much less a gaggle of battle-weary guerrillas, and she had balked at the idea of giving them a lecture. She had planned to keep to the words of the SOE manual, words she had learned by heart, but by the end of the hour she had found her own words, words that simply billowed from her, words filled with excitement and confidence and pride, and now, as she paused and let her glance travel from face to face, she saw that very passion reflected and she knew that she had won. She had disarmed them, and armed them anew with revived vigour and confidence; armed them with something even more valuable than the hardware concealed in the piled-up supply boxes behind her.

  Henri came forward, his hand stretched out.

  ‘Merveilleux!’ he exclaimed. ‘Lucie, I am glad that you have joined us.’

  * * *

  After that it was fairly plain sailing.

  In fact, it was easy from now on because Sibyl was able to unpack what she called ‘Churchill’s Toybox’, and she didn’t need much more to hold the men’s attention. They plainly enjoyed this. Their eyes lit up when the boxes were prised open and they finally saw the Sten guns that would be theirs, the bazookas, the hand grenades, the detonators. They touched the equipment with pure love, the way a young mother might touch her baby, their eyes soft with delight. The scowls that had seemed engraved on their faces melted into smiles as the magic of hope began to take hold.

  Eyes literally bulged with delight as she unpacked one ‘toy’ after the other, lifted them out of their boxes one by one, held them up, described them and in some cases passed them around. Hand grenades. Pencil fuses. Plastic explosives. And guns, guns, guns.

  She showed them tricks that were simple but so very effective. Lighting a cigarette, she waved it at them. ‘A factory worker,’ she said, ‘can create havoc with this. Watch.’

  She stuck the unlit end into a half-filled matchbox and closed the box so that the cigarette was jammed.

  ‘All the worker has to do now,’ she explained, ‘is throw the box into a pile of rubbish – paper-rubbish, cardboard, anything that burns – just before he goes home. The cigarette acts as a low fuse. The worker has left the building – but he has just committed arson. A crime in peacetime, a method of clandestine warfare in times like this. Now,’ she said, letting her gaze move across the rapt faces, ‘none of you are factory workers. You have gone underground. But there are hundreds of little tricks like that you can employ. You can drop a handful of sand into the axle of a railway waggon: if you get it into the correct part of the box, the axle will seize up. Bam. You have disabled a train the Boche is depending upon.

  ‘And then this.’ She held up a metal can. ‘This is ordinary axle grease but it has finely ground carbondrum mixed into it. Replace the axles’ lubricant with this doctored stuff and –voilà! You’ve ground the transporter to a stop. You’ve messed up the enemy’s plan. He’s delayed, he’s angry, his whole military planning is in disarray.

  ‘Smuggle yourselves into railway yards, into the siding offices. I’ve heard you’re good at that sort of thing. Well, once you’re there, jumble up the destination dockets and cards. The next day the Boche is going to connect engines with the wrong waggons. He’ll send an urgently required tank track to Lyon instead of to Normandy. Anyone here know anything about machine tools? You, Gaston? Good. Slip the wrong-sized cog into a chain of gears – jam up the whole thing.

  ‘This little toy here’– she held it up – ‘is called the Clam. It’s a limpit mine, packed with explosive, and it’s magnetic. You attach it to magnetic enemy property and it will damage or even destroy, say, an electric motor.

  ‘But my own favourite toy is this: plastic explosive, PE. It’s like plasticine. You can use it anywhere, even under water. You can stuff it into dead rats and leave them lying around in a Boche factory and they will dispose of them by shovelling them into a furnace and –BOOM! Destruction, another waste of production time. You can leave the dead rats in the coal stocks of railway yards. You can stand on a bridge and drop them into the tenders of engines passing beneath you, for the fireman to shovel into his fire box.’

  The maquisards listened and watched with rapt attention. Men! She thought. Where does this fascination with blowing things up, destroying things come from? Because this was not just about the war, not just about sabotaging the enemy. They enjoyed these lessons for their own sakes; as if the very act of destroying objects – or people – gave them satisfaction, and learning about the ways and means of destruction came as second nature. They listened, they asked questions, they were eager to learn: because the subject itself was fascinating.

  By the second
week it was plain to see that the maquisards had had enough of theory. They wanted practice. They moved on to the use of the various guns; target practice followed.

  After a day of that Sibyl decided it was time for some real-life explosive practice. Jacques had told her about the Freiburg-Colmar railway line, of strategical importance to the Wehrmacht as it brought troop reinforcements across the Rhine bridge that separated Alsace from Germany proper.

  ‘We will blow it up,’ said Sibyl. ‘We will destroy this line. Now, just this line. We will use plastique.’

  ‘One day,’ said Jacques, ‘We will blow up the bridge itself.’

  They exchanged a glance, and a grin. Sibyl nodded.

  ‘Later. First the railway line, and the supply trains.’

  It was a dangerous mission; it meant leaving their hideout at nightfall and making their way surreptitiously, by foot, to one safe house after another throughout the following three nights; it was too dangerous to travel by day.

  ‘I can’t take all of you,’ Sibyl said. ‘We will split the group. Jacques, you will come, and you, you, you and you.’ She pointed out six men from the north and south divisions. ‘Henri, you stay here and the rest of you can continue target practice while we are gone – it will be a few days. When we return we’ll swap: I’ll take Henri and the others – hopefully you will all have perfect aim by then – will go on another mission, blow up something else. Henri, you can choose the target.’

  They set off down the hillside. She realised, now, how thoroughly Jacques knew his area. He led them through forests and vineyards, over fields and across rivers; he had friends everywhere, farmers who put them up in barns, farmer wives who fed them, places of refuge where they would be safe during the daytime. She realised, too, just how strong the support was for their work; Jacques had told her that ninety per cent of all Alsatians regarded themselves as French and wanted to see the backs of the Germans, and the other ten per cent collaborated only out of fear and self-interest.

  ‘The Boche regard us as terrorists, and we will be worse terrorists once we are properly armed,’ said Jacques, ‘but for us, it is only self-defence. It is David against Goliath.’

  Jacques impressed her with his knowledge of the exact timings of the troop-carrying trains. They aimed to blow up the six-thirty a.m. train on the third night, coming from Germany over the Rhine bridge and down to southern France via Colmar.

  It was a moonlit night; Jacques led them all down an embankment to the railway line, and there Sibyl unpacked the PE – a soft, buttery substance that smelt faintly of almonds – and attached it to the cord, connecting it to the detonator. Detonating it would be Jacques’ task.

  They slunk back up the embankment and crouched beneath the trees and among the bushes. Jacques squatted behind a bush closer to the railway line, with the detonator. Sibyl was as animated as the rest of them; it was, after all, a first for her too. This was no longer practice, but a real-life bombing. The night was still and seemed to breathe with them. The moon was long gone; darkness enveloped them. They spoke only in whispers, or not at all. They waited. An owl hooted into the silence, as if announcing the imminent drama. Doubt flooded through Sibyl. What if the train was early? Then it would pass by undamaged. What if it was late? Then it would be stalled for a few hours while the line was repaired, but the dramatic impact of the bomb would be lost.

  Had Jacques really got the timing right? The Germans were said to be perfectly precise, immaculate in their calculations – but still. They were human – or were they? – and subject to human error. She prayed that night, of all nights, for German meticulousness.

  ‘Shhhh!’ whispered Jacques. ‘Here it comes.’

  Sibyl heard nothing at first and then, from the distant east, she picked up the rumble of the approaching train. Every cell in her body tensed. Dawn had started its approach; the landscape was veiled in grey, through which the straight lines of the track could be seen. Then, to the east, movement. It looked like a toy, at first, moving steadily towards them through the half-light. There it was. A thing of menace, bringing death to Alsace. It was a long, long train, with an engine, two carriages, and then multiple open carriages carrying panzers. Heading for the South, into France, into the enemy’s hands. It had to be stopped.

  If everything went according to plan, then some of the soldiers in that train would die. And she would have killed for the first time. Could she kill Germans, they had asked her, and tonight, the answer was, categorically, resoundingly, yes. But it was a soulless kind of killing, impersonal. The thrill she felt, the anxiety, was not so much for these deaths but for the one tiny victory they would achieve that day.

  It was time. She gave the signal. Jacques plunged down the detonator. There was a huge bang; the line heaved up, the engine and its carriages buckled and toppled and chaos lay before them. Some of the men let out a cheer; Sibyl shushed them, and signalled for them to run into the copse behind them; but once they were clear and certain of concealment they whooped and laughed and hugged each other.

  They were now, officially, plastiquers, bombers.

  It was only afterwards, on the way back, that Sibyl fully grasped the meticulous attention Jacques had invested in the planning of this attack, resting in the faith that one day he would have the means. Night after night in the preceding months he had gone to the embankment, lain in wait, timed the train, convincing himself of its punctuality.

  ‘The Boche operate like machines,’ he explained on the more leisurely return march. ‘Their confidence rests on precisely structured processes. They cannot abide chaos; they can’t abide the slightest deviation from a plan. They love order. This might be just one train bombed, but it is a cog in a huge machine. Yes, the line will be repaired as soon as possible and the daily trains will recommence but think of the disruption to the machine further down the line!’

  ‘We have created havoc in the machine today. We have removed one little cog that keeps the whole thing running. It is something to rejoice in.’

  ‘My boys are rejoicing too much. They are angry, and angry men enjoy smashing things. It’s not good to smash things in anger.’

  ‘That’s why we have the SOE. Why I’m here. To teach them the art of smashing things calmly, not angrily. Professional smashing. A matter of training.’

  She had deliberately not included Jacques in the men who needed such training. It was Jacques who had first taught her the art of calmness. He needed no further training; when he smashed things it would be with studied deliberation. He’d proven it today.

  But when they returned to the camp they saw that Jacques’ worry was well-founded. Two of Henri’s men had absconded, and they had taken twenty hand grenades with them, and two rifles. Henri himself was sleeping off a drunken night. The wine was finished.

  ‘Merde!’ said Jacques. ‘But I will find them and they will be punished.’

  Chapter 15

  Sibyl had set up the transmitter soon after their arrival at the camp and sent a first coded message that she had arrived safely. The arrangement was that, at first, she would make contact once a week at prearranged times, different each week. In the third contact, the message from Acrobat contained a cryptic sentence: The geese have flown south.

  Sibyl gave out an exhilarated yelp.

  ‘They’ve done it! They’ve invaded France! It’s happening!’

  That night, the maquisards celebrated as never before: their regular gentil wine was just not good enough. Jacques opened five of his most prized bottles, Laroche-Gauthier riesling, 1938.

  For the first time, the men laughed; they joked, and once they had downed a glass or two, raised their voices in rowdy songs; they teased Sibyl, flirted, asked her to dance (she refused) and the night ended with a rousing, if somewhat off-tune, rendering of ‘La Marseillaise’.

  That night, Jacques whispered into Sibyl’s ear: ‘Maybe, maybe there is a future for us.’

  ‘We must believe in that future,’ she whispered back.

  * * *
>
  The month was almost over, and the men were trained as well as they could be in the limited time. They had practised one further major bombing, this time a power station near Strasbourg, and this time Jacques had led the expedition, taking the men who had been left behind the last time, and leaving Sibyl to guard the supplies and supervise the others as they practised.

  They had tamed their spirits considerably since that first day. With the money she had brought Jacques had slipped down to a nearby farm and purchased food: cheese, eggs, bread, potatoes. He shot and killed two rabbits and cooked a simple stew. The men now looked, if not exactly well-fed, at least not half-starved. The one thing they never ran out of was wine. Perhaps not the best quality, or even the second best, but an excellent blend from the Domaine Laroche-Gauthier.

  And then Jacques was back, and there was just one week left, and it seemed to her a last week of freedom; a holiday, in fact, wrenched from the horrors of war, and though the living was rough and hunger gnawed at her belly every day, every night seemed precious, each moment a radiant jewel of time to be lived with the utmost of intensity.

  Between Sibyl and Jacques had grown a communion that was almost mystical in its depths, nourished, no doubt, by the roots they shared, roots firmly planted in those halcyon bygone years. Now, that former youthful intimacy and joy returned, mellowed, matured, like good wine. They lived as one. A glance, a moment of silence, a slight gesture: they knew what the other was thinking, feeling, living. The balled power that came with living on the edge, the knowledge that great danger and even death waited in the wings, that this was a respite torn from the hideous war machine and that soon, very soon, Sibyl would plunge deep into that very machine, vulnerable and alone, lent both sharpness and beauty to their communion. Theirs was a unity so deep, a beauty so pure, their souls so utterly fused that the word ‘love’ was never once mentioned; it was superfluous. They simply knew. At night they slept in each other’s arms, their bodies two halves of a whole.