Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  I grabbed the rope, freed it, and pulled at the horse’s head.

  The train sounded its whistle. I could hear its regular pounding sound quite clearly now.

  I pulled the horse again.

  It came towards me, then baulked.

  Madeleine had led the woman back through the gap in the gates, all the while keeping a firm hold on the tourniquet. Seeing the difficulty I was having with the horse she held the gate further open with her free hand.

  I pulled the horse again.

  The train was now very close and the horse must have sensed it. Suddenly it rushed forward as it had done earlier.

  I got out of the way, fast, and the horse rushed through the gap between the gates. The train hurtled past us, the driver using the whistle for all it was worth. We were enveloped in steam and soot. The steam was hot and the soot smelled. There was a mangling, cracking, wrenching sound, on top of which the locomotive’s wheels screamed as they skidded and sparked as the driver tried to stop the train.

  As the horse rushed by me, I managed to hold on to the halter, though it felt for a moment as though my shoulder was going to be yanked from its socket. The hold I had on the halter caused the horse to wheel round. It slipped on the road with its metal-shod hooves and lashed out with one of its legs. The leg missed Madeleine by a fraction, but a hoof came down full square on the nearside front mudguard of the Lagonda and ricocheted on to the nearside headlamp, that beautiful bulb of gleaming chrome.

  The glass shattered, and the metal pod was dented and knocked out so that it faced down, like a drunk man on a lamp post.

  “Winston!” shouted the woman whose arm Madeleine was holding.

  Amazingly—but a bit late in the day—the horse calmed down.

  I took the opportunity to glance over my shoulder at the level crossing.

  Half the horsebox was missing—lengths of splintered wood and twisted ribbons of metal lay all across and around the railway lines. The train was stationary at last, about a hundred yards further on, hissing and oozing steam, like an irritated dragon.

  I looked at Madeleine. She was covered in blood.

  She eyed me. “It’s a good job you didn’t tell your mother we were coming,” she said, wiping some clots off her cheek. “She won’t be disappointed that we didn’t make it. She wouldn’t have wanted to see you dressed like that.”

  Her eyes got larger and rounder as she grinned.

  I looked down. My trousers were just sliding beyond my underpants.

  —

  “CLOSE THE DOOR. I’VE HAD a pot of coffee made—want some?”

  Hilary’s office was bigger than mine—naturally, since he was the top dog. He had a window looking towards Baker Street, more elaborate wallpaper, two chairs for visitors to sit in, and a standard lamp for winter days. He also had a lavatory en suite and a door in one wall which gave directly on to his secretary’s office, a secretary he had all to himself. There was a small lamp on his desk which he lit when the weather was gloomy, as it was now, giving the whole room an intimate glow. He had the same railway posters on the wall as I did.

  I nodded and he poured the coffees from an enameled jug. From the smell that began to seep into the room, it was the real stuff, not the dreary chicory substitute that most of us had to put up with. I wasn’t going to ask him where he got it. That might embarrass him.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this but I got it on the black market. Not bad, eh?”

  “It’s a long time since I tasted anything like this, sir. Are we celebrating?”

  “Yes, sort of.” He raised his eyes towards the ceiling. “We’ve got the go-ahead from upstairs. To start misleading the Gestapo, I mean.” He nodded and smiled at the same time. “I’ve not been told any more than I knew before—not the date or the place of the invasion, except that it is soon. But I have been told where to send the next batch of agents. They are not to know anything, of course. They are to conduct sabotage wherever they are sent—sabotage is sabotage. But upstairs has examined our code traffic and is as satisfied—as you are, and as I am—that some of our circuits have been compromised, and that that can be turned to our advantage. We can send fake messages about the invasion in code. Upstairs will do the coding, we send them to the compromised circuits.”

  He stood up, lifted the coffee jug again, and refilled both our cups.

  “What I tell you now, here, in this office, goes no further—do you understand?”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “Not even Madeleine, Matt. She must know no more than she would be told if you and she were not…were not…you know what I mean.”

  “We are living together,” I said. “At least we are for the next few weeks. Until she goes to France. But you have my word that I won’t tell her any more than I am supposed to tell her. Is that sufficient? Does that do the trick?”

  “Of course, of course,” he said quickly. “I wish you weren’t under one roof together, but I know you’re not a security risk, Matt, so I trust you.” He grinned slightly. “Although I can’t say I approve of your tact or timing, I can’t fault your taste. And it’s a free country, and freedom is what we are fighting for.

  “Here’s what I’ve been told. In the next weeks we are going to drop quantities of sabotage equipment, invasion currency, and fake Wehrmacht uniforms into several areas of northern France, together with several tons of incendiaries and explosives. These will all be in the Amiens region—places like Rainneville, Saisseval, and Dommartin. These are near the river Somme, which, as you know, reaches the Channel in a big, marshy bay at St. Valery. Amiens is also a railhead, where lines from Rouen, Paris, and Reims converge. The town is very well defended—it basically governs the approaches to the Pas de Calais, and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this plan, as no doubt the Germans will do, if they really have penetrated our circuits.”

  He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I took it and leaned forward with a lighted match.

  “At the same time,” he said, “we will send much the same, plus underwater explosives, to the Nantes region. That is also a railhead, governing the approaches to two bays on the Atlantic—the Bay de Bourgneuf, near Nantes itself, and the Breton and Antioche channels at La Rochelle. The first has landing beaches and La Rochelle has coastal forests. Again, I can’t stop you from drawing your own conclusions about what this means. Obviously, it is partly designed to induce the Germans to spread their resources over two areas, but we won’t know ahead of time if they have been taken in.”

  He squashed his cigarette stub, hardly smoked, in his coffee cup saucer.

  “I want you to organise all this, Matt. We can’t afford to let this overall plan be known about except for you and me. Not even Toby Sheldrake is to know—is that clear? I’m pulling rank here—don’t let me down.”

  I nodded. “I understand, sir.”

  “Hmm,” he said gruffly. “Here’s the difficult part. We need to know, once and for all, whether our circuits have been penetrated by the Gestapo and, if so, which ones. The only way that upstairs can think of to do that is to send two people into the field—one in the Amiens region, the other in Nantes—without telling anyone they are coming—”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. If some of our circuits have been penetrated, then we can’t be sure that we aren’t in a clever game of bluff and double bluff. The Gestapo think we have been taken in; we think they are being taken in. Since so much is at stake, with the invasion, we have to at least assume that they suspect a double bluff. We must know, therefore, whether the Germans have been fooled, after we send the equipment into Amiens and Nantes. That means we need people on the ground, people who we can be one hundred per cent certain the Germans don’t know about, who are acting as our eyes and ears. We have to send in some of our people—our best people—who will know about the circuits in Amiens and Nantes. But the circuits won’t know about them.”

  “You mean they are going to be dropped in all by
themselves, with no one to meet them, no local support, no one to offer them cover, food, or protection?”

  He nodded. “That’s about it.”

  He looked at me hard and breathed out. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  I delayed before adding, “That’s almost certainly sending them to their deaths.”

  He adopted his poker face for a moment, but said, “It’s imperative we know whether the Germans have been taken in. That comes first—there’s no arguing with that.”

  “Who do you have in mind?”

  “We may need to send more than two, depending on what happens to the first pair. But, in the first instance, Albert Rondin to Amiens…and Captain Dirac to Nantes.”

  I crushed out my own cigarette on the saucer between us. My insides were churning.

  “Why her?”

  “Come on, Matt. She’s good, very good—that’s enough. Her French is perfect, she’s bright, innovative, resourceful. She was ranked the best of her group at Ardlossan—you know that. She’s good-looking, so she’s got more self-confidence than some of our other agents and that’s always an important factor. She’ll stand a better chance than the others of staying out of trouble and of doing the job for us.”

  He paused. “I chose her myself.”

  He stared at me. He didn’t blink.

  I don’t know whether he was daring me to question his judgement. He sat very still.

  I had told Madeleine that the odds of an agent’s staying alive for six months in the field were fifty-fifty. In this new situation—a situation I had myself done so much to bring about—the odds were a good deal shorter.

  But Hilary hadn’t finished. “There’s also the fact that, since you know Madeleine so well, if she were to get caught, and the Germans were to ‘turn’ her, she would almost certainly be able to let you know by some detail that would show she had been captured. That was also a factor in my decision.”

  “You told them upstairs about Madeleine and me?”

  He sat up straight in his chair. “We live in a small, closed world, Matt. There’s no way your…your affair with Madeleine could not be known about. The war comes first, you know that. I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”

  He still didn’t blink or move. “I don’t want you challenging my authority on this, Matt. It’s an important evolution in SC2’s role. I want a united team under me. Is that clear?”

  I shook my head but said nothing. Not then. I took out my own cigarettes, handed him one, although I didn’t feel like it. He did the honours with the matches.

  “It was your idea in the first place, Matt, this double-bluff scheme, I mean.”

  “But it doesn’t follow that Madeleine should—”

  “Do you want special treatment for her? Would she want that herself?”

  “No.”

  “She’s good, Matt. I repeat: the best of her group. She speaks French as well as Rondin, who’s from the Channel Islands, by the way; she’s faster on the wireless transmitter and as a woman she’ll be able to travel around more easily.” His gaze was unflinching. “My decision is non-negotiable. The subject is closed.”

  I said nothing for a moment. I knew that I had to accept what he said.

  But I didn’t have to like it. Madeleine and I had been sharing my flat for only a few days, but those few days had seemed so natural, so full, so rich in different kinds of detail, so dense with promise and variety, a world away from living on my own. Even Zola liked it, I could tell.

  For the briefest of moments, it occurred to me to try to stop Madeleine going. I wanted her all to myself. I wanted the flat-sharing to go on and on.

  But I knew I couldn’t do that. And I knew that Madeleine wouldn’t want that either.

  “What will her cover be? She’ll have to meet up with the Resistance eventually.”

  “Upstairs have that worked out. She’ll be a bookbinder, a member of the French Guild of Bookbinders, with a forged guild membership card—no one will bother to double-check that at all carefully. She’ll say she’s travelling around the second-hand bookshops of the country, offering to repair very old, very valuable books. It’s the kind of area most Germans will know nothing about; it’s dry and arcane and so it is unlikely anyone will bother her. And yes, she’ll make contact with the Resistance eventually, but not until we know whether the Germans have been taken in—whether they have increased security in the Nantes area. She—and Rondin, of course—will have to stay underground and anonymous until after the invasion. Then it will be easier for them to ‘emerge,’ as many more people will come out of the woodwork, once the assault is under way.”

  “And how long will that be?”

  He looked at me through the smoke of his cigarette. “I can’t say, Matt. I can’t say because I don’t know—I swear. All I have been authorised to say—and this is something we can tell Rondin and Madeleine—is that it will be weeks, not months.”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Don’t hold me to this—and I shall deny it if you ever repeat the conversation—but…from something I heard upstairs—and no, I’m not going to say what or who it was—I got the impression that the invasion is not a matter of weeks rather than months away, but a matter of days.” He smiled thinly. “Look at it this way: Madeleine doesn’t have to stay alive undercover for very long.”

  —

  THE RED ANCHOR WAS JUMPING. The place was crowded, standing room only—you had to fight your way to the bar, and cigarette smoke made the air blue. But no one seemed to mind. The piano made all the difference.

  On Saturday nights the Anchor had music and people came in for a form of entertainment they couldn’t get at home. They would stand with a glass of beer or a gin or a whisky in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and sing their hearts out. And the Anchor wasn’t alone: as you walked up Marylebone High Street, or along Euston Road, or Oxford Street, or anywhere in the West End (and the East End too, for all I knew), as you approached the pubs you were welcomed by the sounds of singing.

  I think the practice must have begun in the Blitz, in the very dark days, when people were frightened, when our losses were high, when an invasion the other way round seemed imminent, and they discovered it was a cheap and easy way to keep up their spirits.

  The men sang just as lustily as the women—everyone knew the words even if they couldn’t keep exactly to the tune, and in any case no one minded. Being together was what counted and the pianist in the Anchor was rusty anyway. No one minded that either.

  I usually enjoyed the sing-alongs but that night was tinged with an inevitable sadness. There were four of us—Katrine Howard, Ivan Wilde, Madeleine, and me. We had arrived too late to get a table so we all stood, leaning on the bar, where we didn’t have to fight too hard for a drink. Ivan, as part French, part Moroccan, was the only one not too sure of the words, but he manfully did his best.

  We bellowed out “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and the Andrews Sisters’ “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time.” Singing at the top of your voice while inhaling cigarette smoke is thirsty work and the bar was under siege the whole time. Barry, the landlord, looked on with a satisfied eye.

  Then the pianist took a break—it was difficult to play and drink and smoke all at once—and the four of us turned away from the piano and huddled together as best we could, surrounded by so many others.

  “This happens every Saturday?” said Ivan.

  I nodded. “It’s London’s equivalent of the Scottish ceilidh.”

  Ivan smiled. “But no test, eh?”

  I grinned, shaking my head.

  “No test,” said Madeleine, “but a ceremony.”

  “Oh yes?” I looked down at her. Her hair sparkled in the overhead lights of the bar.

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “As we all know, Katrine and Ivan have got their orders, and are off to you-know-where in a couple of days. This is a farewell party.”

  “The last meeting of the �
�Ardlossan Three,’ ” said Katrine, with a chuckle.

  “And, as I am the one being left behind,” Madeleine said, pulling a face, “I am the one presenting the farewell trophies.”

  We all looked at her.

  She delved into her bag and took from it two slim packages in plain brown paper. She gave one each to Katrine and Ivan.

  “What’s this?” said Katrine.

  “Maddie!” said Ivan. “I haven’t got anything for you.”

  “Open them!” said Madeleine, softly urgent. “Pron-to! The pianist will be back any minute and we won’t be able to hear ourselves speak.”

  Katrine handed her gin and tonic to me to hold, while Ivan found a spare space on the bar for his beer glass. They both tore at the paper.

  Each had been given a slim book.

  Katrine held it up in front of her. “Friedrich Schiller, La Demoiselle d’Orléans. What’s this?”

  “Part of your disguise,” said Madeleine. “Ca-mou-flage. It’s a French translation of a German classic. In case you don’t know, Schiller is, with Goethe, the greatest of the German classic writers, and this is one of his masterpieces, about that great French heroine, Joan of Arc.”

  She downed part of her own whisky and soda. “I found them at the back of a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road—they’re second-hand, knocked about, and I’ve bought one for me, too.” She helped herself to one of the cigarettes that Ivan was offering around.

  Still speaking quietly, she went on, “My idea is this: say you or I get stopped at a roadblock and, for one reason or another, the Germans are suspicious. They go through our things, your things, my things…and what do they find? They find that we—you and me—are reading a German classic. In translation, yes, but the fact that the author is German might well make them more sympathetic to us, to you and me. In a tight situation, where they are trying to work out whether they believe us, believe our cover stories, a book like this might just make all the difference.” She drank more gin. “It’s a good story, I don’t think the ploy is too obvious, the book isn’t bulky…so—who knows?—it might save our lives.”