Code Name Verity

Mitraillette and Amélie and I stood like the witches in Macbeth over the ironing board, holding our breath – I was so worried I’d ruin it, burn the scarf, but I didn’t – and after a minute or so Engel’s message began to appear in scratchy brown print among the grey paisley, in the corner opposite the ink stain.

You don’t need to be trained by the Special Operations Executive to know how to use invisible ink. You don’t even need to be a chemist. Me and Beryl learned how to do it in Girl Guides. We used to write secret messages in milk. It’s easy.

I don’t know what Engel used, but she wrote in French, so I don’t remember her exact words. She’s either tipped us off or betrayed us, won’t know which till later tonight. Mitraillette has sent for Paul – they use his courier as the go-between – we don’t actually know where he stays.

This evening there are 19 prisoners from Poitiers being transported to a concentration camp somewhere in the north-east of France. The bus will swing by Ormaie and pick up 5 more prisoners here. Julie will be with them.

If I make it like an Accident Report –

Don’t think I can possibly make it sound like an Accident Report, but I’ve got to write something – I’ll have to remember – there may be a trial. I don’t bloody care if there is. I want to get it right while I remember.

Mitraillette tried to dose me with knock-out drops again a few minutes ago – 30 minutes to oblivion. But this time I’m wise to her and I want to write. Perhaps I’ll take it after.

I think I will. When I’m finished I won’t want to think any more

Incident Report

Attempted Sabotage of Poitou River Bridge on Tours- Poitiers Road, with intention of stopping German military bus carrying 24 French and Allied prisoners – Wed. 1 Dec. 1943

Well, we did stop them.

Made a great big hole in the bridge too, that’ll keep them deporting anybody via the railway station at Tours for a while

I HATE THEM

I HATE THEM

—

Must remember Paul – Paul, who I also hated.

He was marvellous. I have to say it. He planned it all on the fly, made it up as we went along. The carnage wasn’t his fault. Mustered an army of a dozen men and 2 women in about an hour. We left all the bikes and the car hidden – it is the same Citroën Rosalie. I don’t know how the man who owns it avoids being found out or at least having his car impounded, and I think he is too old for this kind of job anyway. We hid the car in a garage, believe it or not, belonging to a lovely and heroic old woman who lives by herself in a riverside villa on the Tours side of the Poitou. She is the rose-grower the circuit is named for. We left our car parked behind her car, which is conveniently a newer and bigger model Rosalie, so it looked like ours had been her previous car, and we hid it under a dust sheet as well. The bikes were hidden in her abandoned stables beneath 20-year-old hay.

Then we borrowed her boats. One beautiful, teak, nineteenth-century rowing boat and two chestnut Canadian canoes. Much too good for us. The bridge is upstream from the house – they’ve disrupted traffic here before, some time ago, and for a while the lady was under strict surveillance. Hope she won’t be in too much trouble again now – though she seems to have got away with it this time. We were careful.

Godless as I am, I pray she’s got away with it. It’s like ripples in a pond, isn’t it? It doesn’t stop in one place.

Anyway we loaded up our fireworks in the boats – don’t think I can give details on the explosives as I wasn’t responsible and didn’t pay attention, and we rowed up to the bridge in the dark. Took about an hour with muffled oars. You read about muffled oars in pirate stories – I’m sure there’s a bit in Peter Pan where they use muffled oars. Perhaps it was Swallows and Amazons. English summer and the school holidays seem dead far away now. It was hard to see – the river was full of fog. But we made it. We wired up the bridge and waited.

What went wrong?

I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t a trap. We weren’t outnumbered, not at first. I suppose we were just playing for higher stakes than the Germans. Shouldn’t we have guessed they’d be more ruthless than us? How could we guess? We were pretty ruthless.

What went wrong – perhaps it was just too dark, night and fog both. The fog was good as well as bad because it hid us, but it was just so hard to see. There should have been a quarter moon, for what that’s worth, but the sky was overcast, and we were blind until the prison bus turned up with its headlights blazing.

That bit went well – within a minute we had thoroughly disabled it. We were pretty well camouflaged in the riverbank scrub – a tangle of willow and alder and poplar full of mistletoe. Lots of tall, withering weeds hiding us, and the fog too. Our small explosion hurt no one except the bridge and the bus. The radiator grille got blown out, but the blast missed the headlights and the battery must have been OK because there was enough light that Paul and the owner of the Rosalie somehow managed to put bullets through three of the tyres.

The driver got out. Then a guard got out. They had electric torches – both men walked up and down the length of the bus inspecting the damage and cursing.

Paul picked them off like ducks at a funfair with his Sten submachine gun. While that was going on I was curled uselessly in a ball with my arms over my head and my teeth clenched, so I missed a bit of the action. Born to be a soldier, my foot. A raid is actually quite a lot like a battle. It is war. It’s war in miniature, but it’s still WAR.

Two other guards came out of the bus and fired random shots into the bushes at us in the dark. Mitraillette had to sit on me to stop me blowing our cover, I was in such a flap. Finally Paul gave me a clout over the head.

‘Get a grip on yourself, Kittyhawk,’ he hissed. ‘We need you. You’re a crack shot, but no one’s expecting you to kill anybody. Focus on tools, all right? They’ll start trying to fix things in a moment. Try to disable their equipment.’

I gulped and nodded. Don’t know if he saw me nodding, but he shifted back to his own position beneath the gently rustling willowherb and hemlock alongside the Rosalie driver, and they bagged another guard.

The surviving guard leaped back into the bus. There was an ominous silence – not a thing happened for a minute or two. Then the four remaining soldiers ushered every single one of the prisoners out of the bus and made them lie down side by side on their faces in the middle of the road. It was all done by the glancing light of electric torches and we didn’t dare fire at anyone now, for fear of hitting one of ours.

Couldn’t see any individual faces – couldn’t tell anything about the captives, not their age or their sex or how they were dressed, but you could tell by the way they moved that some of them were scared and some were defiant, and some were chained together by their feet. The chained ones had a hard time getting down to the road, tripping each other up as they climbed off the bus. When everybody was lined up on their faces in the mud like sardines, one of the guards shot six of them in the head.

It happened SO FAST.

This dreadful man shouted at us in French. Mitraillette whispered all the English words she could come up with in my ear – ‘Revenge – two for one – their own dead. If we kill – ’

‘I know, I know,’ I whispered back. ‘Je sais.’ For every one of them we murdered they would murder two of us. Disposable hostages.

Three guards kept their guns trained on the prisoners while the fourth set off on foot back down the road – to find a telephone, I think.

Then we waited. Stalemate. It was bitterly cold.

Paul and a couple of other men had a quick, whispered council and decided to work their way beneath the bridge and try to attack the guards from behind. There really were only three guards left, plus the one who had gone for help – it seemed impossible we shouldn’t be able to get the better of them.

But they had 18 hostages lying helpless and chained at their feet.

And one of their hostages was Julie.

Or perhaps, I worried then, perhaps she’d already been shot. Impossible to tell at first. But then the guards set up a portable floodlight attached to the bus’s battery, and got the prisoners spotlit, and you could see now that only a few of them were women, and that everybody looked half-starved. And among them, right in the middle of them, was the one I was looking for – a mound of blonde hair and a flame-coloured pullover. Her arms were bound tightly behind her back, with wire it looked like, so she really was lying flat on her face more than the others who were resting on their forearms. But she wasn’t at the end of the row; she wasn’t one of the six that had just been killed. She was breathing quietly, waiting. Shaking with cold like the rest of us.

And we waited, I think, for an hour.

The guards made sure they were hard to aim at. They kept moving and flashing their electric torches into our faces – or where they thought our faces were – occasionally blinding us. I discovered later that I’d bitten my thumbnails down to their bleeding nailbeds waiting for Paul’s planned assault from behind. It never came. The three German soldiers organised themselves so that they were always facing in different directions, and one of them always kept a gun trained on the prisoners. We just couldn’t get to them. One of the women lying in the road began to weep – I think it was just because she was so cold – and when the man next to her tried to put his arm round her, a guard shot him in the hand.

That was when I realised that we weren’t going to win this battle – that we could not win.

I think Mitraillette knew it then too. She squeezed my shoulder lightly. She was also weeping. But silently.

The fourth guard came back and began to chat casually with his mates. We waited. It was not quiet any more because as well as the soldiers talking and the woman crying, the man with the hurt hand was groaning and gasping. But there wasn’t much other noise – only the little noises of night on a riverbank, wind in the bare branches, the hollow rush of water beneath the damaged stone bridge.

Then Julie lifted her head and said something to the soldiers that made them laugh. I think – I swear, we couldn’t hear her, but I swear she was chatting them up. Or something like it. One of them came over and prodded her here and there with the end of his rifle, as though he were testing a piece of meat. Then he squatted down by her head and took her chin in his hand. He asked her a question.

She bit him.

He pushed her face down into the road, hard, and scrambled to his feet, but as he lowered his rifle at her one of the other guards laughed and stopped him.

‘He says not to kill her,’ Mitraillette whispered. ‘If they kill her there will be no – fun.’

‘Is she crazy?’ I hissed. ‘What the blazes did she bite him for? She’ll get herself shot!’

‘Exactement,’ Mitraillette agreed. ‘C’est rapide – fast. No Nazi fun.’

Then the reinforcements arrived. Two military lorries with canvas sides, with half a dozen armed guards in each. Even then we still weren’t badly outnumbered. They began to unload sandbags and planks and managed to lever the bus up out of the hole it had landed in, reversed it and laid planks over the damage so they could try to get the lorries across.