Code Name Verity(94)

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.

But then when they were ready to load the lorries, they got resistance. Not just from us. A few of their captives came to life – a handful of the men who weren’t chained just ran for it, dived into the ditch at the opposite side of the road and lucky for them, it turned out, ran straight into Paul and his men, who hustled them under the bridge and back to the boats by the river path. More shooting as a couple of soldiers went after them and Paul’s men pounded the soldiers. Go for the equipment, Paul had ordered, and for a minute the gunfire was so fierce I knew two shots from my small revolver would go unnoticed. I aimed at the chains. The Double Tap, two quick shots at the same target. The chains I was aiming at burst apart like a toy balloon – could hardly believe my luck. And the two men I’d managed to free also ran.

When another man tried to run, the soldiers mowed him down like bank robbers in an American gangster film.

When the first men had fled, the guard Julie had attacked held her down with his heel dug into the back of her neck – he wasn’t giving her a chance. She fought hard and got kicked for it by the one who had said not to kill her. So now, with a few of the hostages dead and a few loaded up in the lorries and a few escaped, there were only 7 living people left lying on the ground – Julie with the guard’s boot against the back of her neck, and two other women. Two of the remaining men were chained ankle to ankle. And now the German corporal or whatever he was, the fellow in charge who had arrived with the reinforcements, decided to teach everyone a thorough lesson – us for trying to free their prisoners and the prisoners for wanting to be freed –

He picked on the men, mainly, the two who weren’t chained, and hauled them to their feet. And seeing that Julie was getting special treatment from the man who was holding her in place with his foot, he hauled her to her feet as well and pushed her over to stand next to the two other standing prisoners – one of them a sturdy workman and one a handsome lad my own age, both ragged and battered.

Julie was ragged too. She was still wearing exactly the clothes she’d had on when she parachuted into France, grey wool flannel skirt and Parisian chic pullover the burnt scarlet-orange of Chinese lanterns, with holes in the elbows now. Her hair shone brassy gold in the artificial light, falling loose and wild down her back. Her face was skin over bone. As though – as though she’d aged fifty years in eight weeks – gaunt, grey, frail. The dead spit of Jamie when I first met him in hospital. But thinner. She looked like a kid, a head shorter than the shortest of the men standing around her. Any of those soldiers could have picked her up and tossed her in the air.