Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  “You’ll see,” I replied. “Not far.”

  I bent down and spoke quietly. “I’ve sent a message to one of our circuits in Paris. They are going to check up on your brother—”

  “Oh, sir! That’s wonderful! I’m so—”

  “Wait till we get the answer,” I said quickly. “Let’s hope it’s the answer we want.”

  Katrine had a brother who was mentally disabled. We had heard rumours that the Nazis had some pretty ugly policies regarding the mentally ill inside Germany itself, but we didn’t know if that extended into France. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my job to involve myself too much with the private lives of our recruits, but Katrine was clearly worried, which might affect her performance on the course. And in any case I could rationalise an inquiry on the grounds that it might throw light on what could become war crimes.

  Our “train” passed a small loch, little more than a pond really. Then the line led over a stone bridge and a little hut by a switch.

  “Hang on,” I shouted above the wind and the hiss of rain that was generated by our movement. The wagon started to rock.

  We passed another small bridge with a fast-flowing brown, peaty stream beneath it.

  Madeleine was manoeuvreing herself across the wagon towards me. Her features were all but hidden beneath the many layers of clothing she was wearing. It was almost comical.

  Suddenly the wagon began to buck more violently and a terrible screeching broke into the damp afternoon air. The wailing continued. There was a smell of burning of some kind, scorching. Then the engine slowed, the rocking of the wagon lessened, the screeching died down a few tones, smoke came from the bowels of the flatbed, and our little “train” juddered to a halt.

  “Jesus!” hissed Madeleine. “What was all that?”

  “I know!” cried Ivan Wilde. “I know!” Almost as wide as he was tall, Ivan Wilde had been a croupier in the casinos of Monte Carlo before the war. He had very deft hands—all those card tricks, no doubt—which made him a very fast radio transmitter. And he had plenty of experience at working fast under pressure. His parents lived in Morocco.

  “It’s obvious. The wheels have seized up, haven’t they? They stopped turning—that was the screaming sound we heard, and it’s why the wagon was bucking like a demented bull.” He looked at me triumphantly.

  “Yes,” I said, holding up the oil tin I had used earlier, so all could see it. “After I drained the collar of its oil, I replaced it with this, which isn’t just oil: it contains carborundum powder, silicon carbide if there are any chemists among you. The powder does the damage, and pretty quickly as you can see.” I pointed through the floor. “The ball bearings in the collar that we ‘adulterated’ will now be one big congealed mass of molten metal, like a massive dental filling; the axle and the wheel will be baking hot and this wagon won’t be going anywhere without a new collar and bearings.”

  I held up the tin again. “It doesn’t look much, does it? But, used secretly at night, a few of these cans will immobilize a train in a matter of minutes. When the invasion comes, once the Germans know where our forces are concentrated, all their units will converge in that direction. By then all of you will be in France. We will have dropped thousands of these tins for Resistance groups. Some will get lost, some will break open when they hit the ground. But enough will survive intact for you, wherever you are, to play your part in stopping Hitler getting his trains where he wants to send them. I don’t need to stress how important it is that you get the hang of opening the collars, evacuating the oil—quietly and without leaving any telltale signs—and replacing it with these little beauties. All in a very few minutes, so you don’t get caught.”

  I smiled at them. “So you are all going to remain here for the rest of the day, getting wetter still, and dirtier, and oilier, and opening and closing the collars that are still intact until you can do it in your sleep. There’s no moon tonight, so I want you to stay here with Major Kennaway, and practice your skills in the dark. That’s how you’ll be doing it in France. Are you ready, Duncan?”

  “Aye, sir,” he said, jumping off the wagon and standing by one set of wheels.

  Duncan Kennaway had served two tours of duty in France and was just as good at sabotage as I was. He had lost two of his brothers as pilots in the Battle of Britain and was now stationed at Ardlossan because his mother was twenty miles away and he was her only child left alive.

  The others followed him down off the wagon.

  “Come on then, Captain Wilde.” Duncan almost sang the words in his Scottish-flavoured French. “You’re the clever clogs who spotted what had happened, so you can go first. Kneel down here and feel for the spigot.”

  The rain was still easing down in a fine drizzle. I looked at my watch—it was nearly four. They would be at it for a good time yet; it was nearly dark already.

  I put the empty oil can in the bag I was carrying, adjusted my tweed hat, and prepared to tramp back up to the sidings, to where we had left the Land Rovers. Duncan was going to run the show for the rest of the day, as I had administrative chores back at the manse.

  Madeleine came up to me. “You’re leaving us,” she said.

  I loved the French-Canadian lilt in her voice, its sing-song loamy quality.

  “Uh-huh. Only for now. I’ll see you in the mess later. We can have a drink in the bar after dinner, if you want.”

  Staff and recruits, all ranks, messed together at Ardlossan.

  “I shall be shattered, like I have been every night so far,” she replied, pushing a wisp of hair back under the brim of her hat. “But if I can stay awake—yes, I’d like that.”

  I marvelled at the raindrops that were caught on her eyelashes.

  “Maybe tonight you could wear something a bit more…I mean a bit less…I mean, at the moment, you look like a Highland sheep.” I grinned.

  She pretended to be put out. “People with one lung ought to be very careful, you know. We agents in SC2 are trained to kill with our bare hands.”

  “Not yet you’re not. We haven’t got to that part.”

  I nodded towards Duncan. “Major Kennaway’s itching to get on. And he’s killed more than one person with his bare hands. Don’t get on his wrong side.”

  She turned to Duncan, then turned back. “I’ll go quietly, Colonel. For now. But be warned—sooner or later, I get on everyone’s wrong side.”

  —

  THE EVENING HAD STARTED in the way that all evenings started at Ardlossan—drinks in the bar, with its stable of stags’ heads staring down at us, a few caps and lanyards festooning the more accessible antlers. Alongside the plentiful whisky there was beer and sherry but little else. Around the room, most of the young men belonging to the different sections—Holland, Greece, North Africa, among others—were making overtures to the few females present.

  Dinners at Ardlossan were hardly romantic affairs, however. Tables seated eight or ten, so were scarcely intimate. We always began with some sort of soup, always some sort of brown, followed by “white fish,” as the cook—a lugubrious Glaswegian with a drinker’s nose—called it, as though that conferred taste and delicacy on what was often a gooey mass, from which the bones, and any other attributes that might have given it flavour, had been removed.

  With intimacy a non-starter, conversation at dinner was mostly “shop,” about the technicalities of the job. General war talk was discouraged—we were surrounded by so much news, much of it grim, that dinner had become a sort of DMZ as far as fighting talk was concerned.

  Drinks in the bar afterward were a different matter. There was a snooker table and a darts board, and by then whisky had been consumed over the white fish, and tongues had loosened. One of the very few perks of being stuck in the northern wilds of Scotland was that, amid all the other rationings—of meat, butter, milk, coffee, sugar—whisky was plentiful. We all knew how lucky we were and no one asked questions. For some reason our supply was a consignment of half-bottles, but nobody was about to complain. Scotch was
Scotch.

  Noise levels in the bar rose after dinner, collars were unbuttoned, the cigarette smoke grew thicker. The beginnings of a snooker competition were in progress and people gathered round the table.

  Madeleine and I stood close to the fire. “After you left this afternoon, the rain got worse.”

  “You make it sound as though it was my fault.”

  “Hmm,” she sniffed. “When I look back on my life, after this war is over, and if I survive, and if I have children, and they ask me what I did, I’ll be able to say I changed the oil on some railway wagons.” She leaned into me and our shoulders touched. She was wearing a blue dress, shiny, with matching earrings and a pair of high-heeled wedge shoes.

  I was silent. Although I was several years older than Madeleine, I was not confident with women. We suffer our failures in life more than we enjoy our successes. Where women were concerned, I’d had rather more of the former than the latter.

  “Move over, I need to stand by the fire. I was rained on all afternoon, thanks to you; the bathwater was more tepid than ever; and my bedroom faces north. If the world was flat I’d be able to see Iceland.”

  I moved so she could warm her legs.

  “Major Kennaway said today, after you had abandoned us, that you’d saved his life. Is that true? How come?”

  I shrugged. “It depends on how you look at it.”

  “That’s what he said. Did you or didn’t you?”

  I paused. “His two brothers were killed in the Battle of Britain, within a month of each other—they were Spitfire pilots. He was in France, undercover. I was sent to find him and bring him home safely to his mother—he was the only son left.”

  I drank some whisky.

  “I found where he was. Near Nancy, but he had been captured. The Germans were moving him east, by plane, where he would have been interrogated, tortured—and then…You can guess the rest. We managed to sabotage his plane—a little carborundum in the engine, so it seized up on the runway just before take-off. The runway was a good distance from the airport buildings but was close to some trees at the edge of the field. Three of us overwhelmed the pilot and the guard and snatched Duncan away, into the forest. It was dark and the Germans never found us.”

  “How did you know which plane he would be on?”

  “The Resistance had people at the airfield.”

  “How did he get home?”

  “We were both picked up by Lysander at the next full moon.”

  “Do we do that for everyone whose brothers have been killed?”

  “No, not at all. But Duncan knew a lot about SC2—he devised some of our codes. We couldn’t risk him revealing what he knew.”

  “So it wasn’t really about his mother and his brothers?”

  “That was an added bonus.”

  She was silent for a while as the flames flickered behind her. “That’s not how Duncan sees it. He says you saved both his and his mother’s life.”

  I smiled. “People in the field have to know that everything will be done to support them. That’s why Duncan told you—to ink it into your mind.” I gestured to her frock.

  “I like your dress.”

  “All I have with me is two pairs of slacks, two blouses, two skirts, and this frock. It was the frock’s turn.” She gave a slight shiver. “I’m thawing out at last.”

  “When you’ve finished here, and move down to London, we shall fit you out in French-style clothes, with French labels, in French sizes—centimetres, not inches. Inches would be a giveaway.”

  “I can’t wait. I’m tired of looking dowdy.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure French wartime styles are any better than ours. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “A girl’s not going to be seen in Paris without…without showing a bit of…flair.”

  “How do you know you are going to Paris?”

  She made a face. “Spoilsport! Bordeaux, then, or Lyon, or Louzac, for that matter. All French women are fashion-conscious.”

  “Louzac?”

  “Where my father came from. Have you forgotten already?”

  Madeleine looked up at me and smiled. Skin as smooth as eggshell, brown eyes as I said before, a brown-gold that reminded me of whisky (a lot of things remind me of whisky), and a furrow between her eyebrows, making it look as if she was always about to break out in a frown. But, after her hair, the fringes of which glinted in the light from the fire, it was her neck that caught the eye. It was long, curved, like that of a newborn foal. It carried her head like a swan’s—the way she held herself she reminded me of a ballet dancer.

  “I’ve never been to Paris,” she said sadly. “I love the Paris scenes in that new film, Casablanca, where Bogart and Bergman begin their affair, driving around in an open-topped car before the Germans invade. But maybe I’ll never go.”

  “Of course, you will. If you didn’t have such eye-catching hair, you’d look a bit like Ingrid Bergman, so it’s only fitting that you go. You’ll love it, the cobblestones—especially when they are wet—the street lights, the smell of the Métro, the Grands Boulevards, with their chestnut trees, and the sidewalk cafés with their waiters in long black aprons, the way they wash their streets with running water that disappears into gutters. Not even the Germans can have ruined Paris.”

  “Are you always so nice about the Germans?”

  “I can be, yes. Are all Germans Nazis, do you think? I don’t.”

  She shrugged. “When I was a young girl, I wanted to be a dancer. I had a few lessons, got accepted by a dance school, then a small ballet troupe. I loved it but then I twisted my knee—badly—I tore all sorts of ligaments and muscles, and it never recovered completely. It ruined my hopes and I had to give up dance. I was heartbroken.”

  She moved further from the fire. “I’m telling you this because we are talking about Germans and I once read that Leni Riefenstahl started out as a dancer; then she too damaged her knee and had to give up. And look what happened to her—she turned to acting, then made those documentaries. Is she a Nazi, or not? They say she was—and maybe still is—Hitler’s lover. She fascinates me.”

  “I wonder what the Germans think of us.”

  “I have no idea. Does anyone? I was once in love with a German.” She sipped some whisky.

  “You were? When? What was his name?”

  “When I lived in Louzac, in 1933—I was fourteen. He was called Rolfe and I thought he was very dashing.”

  “And…? Did he break your heart? Did you break his?”

  She smiled, but before she could answer, Duncan Kennaway butted in. “Sir, the forecast for tomorrow is not good, not good at all. Instead of doing more fieldwork training, why don’t we switch to codes?”

  “And use the room overlooking the pines…?” I asked, nodding. “Good idea—yes. Thanks, Duncan. Make sure the one-time pads are available, will you, please?”

  “Sure. We’ve had a couple of messages from Roland Kemp in Paris, by the way. A list of current French phrases doing the rounds, and a list of collaborationist restaurants and cafés that our agents should steer clear of.”

  He handed over a few decoded telegrams.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked.

  “As well as can be expected, sir. Arthritis doesn’t go away.”

  “I can probably do without you tomorrow, if that helps.”

  “That’s very kind, sir, but my mother is well looked after—and she’ll bark at me if I turn up at home when she knows I should be here. A Presbyterian with arthritis is never easy-going and, to be frank, sir, I’m more frightened of her than I am of you.”

  I laughed and so did Madeleine.

  “I’ll leave you laughing, if I may, sir. I’m off to bed now, so I’ll wish you both goodnight.”

  He turned and was gone. All either of us could do was call out “Goodnight” to his back.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s—”

  “Gone eleven, I know.”

  She turned and looked down at the coals in the firep
lace. “And this fire’s going out.” She bent down and kicked some of the few remaining coals with her shoe. They flared into life, but it wouldn’t last.

  She turned back to me. “We were interrupted and I never finished telling you about Rolfe. Rolfe didn’t break my heart, nor I his,” she said softly. “He was a dog, my first pet, a German shepherd, who howled at the moon. He was a bit like you in one way—he looked ferocious, a bit knocked about, as if he’d been in a few fights, but he was really an old softie.”

  “I think you are about to get on my wrong side.”

  “Relax, Colonel. You’ll know when that happens.”

  She swallowed some whisky and I watched as her throat moved. “Have you ever seen any of Riefenstahl’s films?”

  “I saw both of the well-known ones, the one about the Nazi Party rally, and the one about the Olympic Games.”

  “And?”

  “The Nuremberg rally film was—well, it was impressive and scary all at the same time. They say there were a million people who turned out for that occasion.”

  “She shot two hundred and fifty miles of film for the Olympic Games—isn’t that a-ma-zing?”

  I raised my glass to Madeleine. “You’re impressive, too—knowing all those details.”

  I’d never met anyone quite like Madeleine before, a bundle of talents and surprises, who was as easy on the ear as she was on the eye, and who seemed to grow more beautiful by firelight, when flickering shadows moved over her skin like clouds on a hillside.

  “Why does Riefenstahl fascinate you so much?”

  She shrugged. “I like the way she breaks all the rules. When she started out as an actress, she toured with Max Reinhardt. He was the best director of his day, in 1920s Germany, but he was Jewish. It didn’t matter then, not to her. But then she read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book, and she fell for him, intellectually and emotionally. She wrote to him, asking to meet him—and he agreed! Think of that. Now she makes Nazi Party propaganda, and that includes anti-Semitic propaganda.”