Résistance Horizontale
by
A. P. Doyle
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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COVER ART BY:
A. P. Doyle
Copyright © 2012 by A. P. Doyle
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Introduction
Summer 1940. Nazi Germany controls most of Europe. Only the British defy their evil hegemony. Bloodied but unbowed the nation stands behind its charismatic Prime Minister, Winston Churchill as he defiantly declares; “We will fight them on the beaches……….We will never surrender.”
Mere defence is not enough, Churchill is determined to take the fight to the enemy, but the depleted British armed forces are ill equipped to do so. The British instead do what comes naturally; they fight dirty.
Ordinary men and women, preferably of dual nationality are trained to return to their home countries. They work for a new clandestine organisation called the Special Operations Executive. SOE’s mandate is “To set Europe ablaze.” What unites them is tenacious bravery. If captured they can expect torture and slow death in a concentration camp.
Helen MacLeod is different from her fellow agents. She is an officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. A small determined woman from the wild Scottish islands, her family has served the nation since records began. At sea. Helen’s war is to be fought on dry land with all the ferocity of her Viking ancestors.
In occupied France a German Jew is determined to survive the Nazi tyranny at any cost. She has fled Berlin following the murder of most of her family. She flees Paris with twelve Jewish young women and hides them right under the Nazis’ noses.
This is a work of fiction woven into real historical events. The French Resistance aided and abetted by Allied secret agents played a key role in harassing the German army before and after the D-day landings in 1944.
CHAPTER 1
June 21st 1919.
The Commander gazed out and watched his mistress as she rolled and twisted; her infinitely variable form in constant motion. It had been many a year since he had spent a night with her and yet her siren pull was as intense as ever. The day had been warm but the south-westerly wind was slowly stiffening and was mussing his lover’s hair. The line of clouds on the horizon would arrive at dusk and bring light rain. The next day would see a full-blown Atlantic storm rolling in. A small boat worked its way along the shore. It was one of his, crewed by three of his nephews who would be checking their lobster pots.
The Commander was devoted to his young wife, but like most men on the island, the sea ran in his blood. Most island women accepted that one day the sea would lock their loved one in her icy embrace and never let go. Some brought bitter curses down upon the unyielding Atlantic Ocean; most set their faces as hard as the granite walls behind which they grieved.
Morag, his sister-in-law was a case in point. Frazer, the Commander’s twin brother, slept somewhere off the Danish coast. The Commander had no hesitation in taking the widow under his roof and she was an excellent aunt to his boys, who were at that moment running around the small walled garden. Their excited shrieks mingled with the screams of the two pairs of herring gulls who shared the roof of the old stone house. Each pair seemed to think that there was only room for them, despite their nests being thirty feet apart.
From the open window above the Commander’s head came a scream that silenced the gulls for a few seconds, followed by a string of expletives that the Commander was more used to hearing at sea. Rory, his oldest, looked worried and climbed up on the man’s lap. The Commander may have been born in the Victorian age to distant and cruel parents but he was a doting father. He had not heard his wife labour before, having been away at sea.
The Commander hugged Rory hard and sang to him one of the ancient Gaelic ballads that he had learnt on his grandfather’s knee. Most were unsurprisingly about the sea.
Viking blood ran thickly through the MacLeods, who had been seafarers since time immemorial and had served in the Royal Navy since records began. Iain MacLeod had died with Nelson at Trafalgar. The Commander and his twin were the first to see action since Trafalgar, something that rankled with their father, the vice-admiral who sailed a desk in London.
As the oldest sons, the twins were sent off to Dartmouth Naval College as teenagers. Frazer loved the Navy; David did not, despite being the better sailor. They both did well and at the outbreak of war found themselves on separate battle cruisers. David considered them death traps. Designed to combine the speed of a cruiser with the guns of a battleship, they lacked a battleship’s armour or a cruiser’s manoeuvrability. Frazer saw action first, on HMS Invincible at the Battle of the Falklands, followed by David on HMS Lion at the Battle of Dogger Bank. The Lion sustained considerable damage.
Finally they found themselves in the same battle line at the Battle of Jutland. It was supposed to be another Trafalgar; the decisive clash between two mighty fleets. The Germans ran away but not before they had mauled the British severely. The British battle cruisers outgunned their opponents but gave away the advantage by getting too close. The British shells burst upon the German armour plate rather than penetrating it. The British strategy emphasized rapid fire and so they kept bags of cordite in ready rooms between the magazines and main gun turrets. This was a recipe for disaster and one by one accurate German gunnery penetrated the inadequate roof armour of the British gun turrets. The subsequent explosions detonated the underlying magazines. The British battle cruisers did not merely sink; they were blown apart. First to succumb was HMS Indefatigable, then Queen Mary and finally the ill-named Invincible. Six of the Invincible’s crew were pulled from the water. Frazer Macleod was not one of them.
HMS Lion received a direct hit on her Q turret. The blast peeled the roof off like the lid on a tin of sardines. The Q, or X turret on Royal Navy warships was traditionally crewed by Royal Marines. The officer of the turret, Major Francis John William Harvey, RMLI, despite having lost both legs, had the presence of mind to order the Q magazine to be flooded, thereby saving the ship. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. The subsequent fire, however threatened to engulf the ship. Commander Macleod, the executive officer was excused from the bridge and took charge of the effort himself. Cordite bags burst into flames and exploded. Red hot lumps of steel flew about the hull killing numerous sailors and slicing David Macleod’s right leg off below the knee. He felt surprisingly little pain, until an hour later. A rating fashioned a decent tourniquet and the Commander stayed at his station until the blaze was brought under control. David was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
The wound later became infected and David spent an uncomfortable six months in a naval hospital in Aberdeen. He returned to the Isle of Lewis with his beloved Nicolette in early 1917. She was soon pregnant with their second child. The Commander had fought his war and was happy to be pensioned off. He had some family money, which allowed him to take over the running of the modest family estate, and bought four small inshore fishing boats for a song. He was soon able to crew these with family members and their income kept the growing family quite comfortable. The Commander’s wooden leg was little impediment to skippering a fishing boat, even in a storm. They were day boats and restricted themselves to the coastal waters where there were plentiful catches of cod, herring and crustaceans.
Nicolette MacLeod, nee Etienne came from the French town of Sedan, which lies near the Belgian border. She was due to start her first job as an English teacher in Liège when the German army invaded Belgium in August 1914. Nicolette fled with just the clothes on her back and ended up a month later in a refugee hostel in Plymouth. At a dance a few weeks later, Nicolette was swept off her feet by a tall, quiet, Royal Navy officer. They were married within a month and she began life as an officer’s wife in the wet and windy base of Scapa Flow. Nicolette was a natural linguist and soon mastered Gaelic.
After the Jutland debacle, Nicolette followed her wounded husband to the military hospital at Aberdeen. She volunteered as an auxiliary nurse to be close to him and finally took him home to the family house on Lewis where she nursed his battered body and mind back to health. The Commander eventually confided to Nicolette the horror that he had witnessed in that steel hell. The burnt bodies, the headless corpses and the screams of the disembowelled young lad, whose mother could not hear him calling for her and was not there to console him as he died.
The Commander had been born in Alexandria but Nicolette gave birth to her second son in the old cast iron bed in which three previous generations of Macleod’s had been born. It was from the same bed, that midsummer’s eve, that soon was heard the triumphant cry of another newborn. The Commander hugged his son and smiled at his widowed sister-in-law. The Commander knew that he could not go and see his wife until invited but within a few minutes, the midwife appeared in the garden with a small, blanketed bundle pressed to her ample bosom. She was a little surprised when the Commander put out his arms; she was used to men who were uninterested in the mechanics of childbirth.
“Congratulations, Commander,” she said respectfully. “You have a beautiful wee girl.”
The Commander peered at the pink bawling bundle, then lifted her up high, and showed her the sea. Turning, the heather clad mountain came into view as he sang a traditional song of greeting. The child’s great grandmother had come from Shetland and the Commander had learnt a number of songs and poems in the ancient Norse dialect of Norn. The baby’s tiny nostrils caught the salty tang on the breeze and it was imprinted upon her brain as much as that of the gulls who shrieked above her. The little thing was clearly more in need of physical welcome to the world and shortly after the midwife went into the house, the child stopped crying.
The Commander hugged his brother’s widow as she tried not to cry, knowing that she was thinking of Frazer who had died before he could give her a child.
After an hour, the Commander was allowed into the house and clattered up the old oak stairs to the bedroom. He kissed Nicolette lightly on the forehead as Helen suckled eagerly.
“She is tiny but strong,” Nicolette stated.
“But of course,” her husband affirmed. “Just like her mother.”
Nicolette was the teacher at the tiny village primary school. The children of the island did not learn English until they started school at five and few would forget the kind but firm Madame MacLeod.
Helen was named after her maternal grandmother and was always known as Hélène at home. She was followed by two more brothers. Helen was loved and doted upon but grew up a level headed, intelligent tomboy. She could swim before she could walk and could sail a dinghy before she rode a bicycle.
Helen did not speak her first word of English until the age of five, taught in the tiny village school by her own mother. She was already bilingual in Gaelic and French. At fifteen, Helen and her brother Alexander had sailed to Norway in an open dinghy.
The storm clouds gathering over Europe, at the end of the 1930s, even touched the little Hebridean village and in 1934, Rory, the oldest child followed the ancient family tradition and took a commission in the Royal Navy, followed two years later by Alexander.
CHAPTER 2
20th July 1919
Kurt Hassell sat at the back of the stuffy classroom. He was miserable and disillusioned. He had returned from a French prisoner of war camp and found himself in the large barracks just outside his native Munich. Not that the young soldier had much to return to. He had joined up at the age of sixteen; lying about his age. He was a tall lad and his father had vouched that he was seventeen. The elder Hassell was a Munich policeman. Kurt was no more or less patriotic than his peers but the army allowed him to escape his father’s reign of terror. Hassell Senior was a violent, drunken bully who existed always on the verge of dismissal from the police. He was glad to be rid of his son who was getting too big to be totally controlled. Little did Kurt realise that his father had given him syphilis.
Basic training was short but at least Kurt had a full belly. He was sent to the front after eight weeks and joined the Second Bavarian Division at Verdun in November 1916. The battle was drawing to a close. The Germans had failed in their attempt to ‘bleed the French dry’ and barely contained the French counter-attack in December. Private Hassell was taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in a French POW camp.
The German prisoners were repatriated early in 1919 and returned to a country in ruins. The troops were not demobilised immediately but had to endure a period of re-integration. Then came the day when Hassell listened to an impassioned speech by a small man with piercing blue eyes. The German army had not lost the war. They had been stabbed in the back by politicians who were Marxists and above all Jews. Only decent patriots could save the country and return it to glory. Hassell was swept away and took up the invitation to join the fledgling German Workers Party, which soon morphed into the German National Socialist Party. The fiery orator was called Adolf Hitler.
Kurt prevailed on his uncle for a job in the police. Uncle Franz did not even suggest that Kurt speak to his father instead. The Hassell’s were a police family and only a few strings had to be pulled. Kurt’s membership of a right wing political party was technically illegal but the police were not that fussy and were hardly neutral in the orgy of political violence that racked Weimar Germany. Hassell was useful to the party in his infiltration of the police. He was invited to join the Sturm Abteilung (the Storm Section; SA or brown shirts). Ernst Röhm, their leader was reputed to be gay and Hassell was violently homophobic as a result of his treatment by his own father and refused to have anything to do with ‘the shitty shirted poofters’.
Hassell found himself in an unusual and awkward position in 1923. Hitler’s abortive ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ was a dismal failure and ended with a brief but bloody fire fight between the SA and the police. Hassell was firing from the police line.
Hitler spent a rather brief time in prison and on release re-launched the German National Socialist Party. Hassell re-joined and continued his undistinguished police career. The Nazis finally came to power in 1933 and everything changed. The Bavarian police came under the control of Heinrich Himmler and Hassell, as a loyal party member was promoted, his violent anti-Semitism a most valued attribute. On the 30th of June, Hassell gladly joined in the arrest of prominent SA leaders in the purge known as the night of the long knives. Whilst he killed no one, he was promoted again and joined the Secret Police, a.k.a the Gestapo. Hassell was well regarded by the leader of the Bavarian Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler.
CHAPTER 3
September 5th 1939.
The Commander stood to attention on the dockside at Stornoway and watched the ferry pull away as it headed to Ullapool. It carried his beloved Helen, aged twenty and Stuart aged eighteen, plus four of the Commander’s nephews. Nicolette stood granite faced by his side and squeezed his hand hard. Her other hand was held by Donald, still too young to go to war. Helen had been due to return to the University of Glasgow to finish her degree in History and German. She was the brains of the family. She was also a superb shot and the MacLeods had feasted on venison and rabbit all summer. Leaner times were clearly ahead.
The six cousins had announced their intention to enlist, the day after war was declared, at a hastily convened family meeting. Their parents had them wait outside and then gave them their collective blessings. Although saddened, not one of the older MacLeods even considered asking their child to reconsider. They were a family that quietly did its duty, no matter how painful.
Helen joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), more commonly known as the Wrens. She had no illusions about her lowly status; the Wrens were intended to take over shore jobs and release men to go to sea and fight. Like countless other millions of women, she became a cog in a huge machine that would out manufacture the Axis powers. It was called total war. Only the Soviets allowed their women to fight on the front line, which they did with demonic ferocity.
Helen’s talents were quickly appreciated and she was sent for officer training and then an intensive language course, which transformed her German from good to fluent. Although the Phoney War saw little happen on land or in the air, on the western front, the war at sea quickly heated up as the German U-boat fleet attacked British merchant shipping. All of the services had an acute shortage of linguists and Helen was snapped up by Naval Intelligence. Helen had to keep this secret but allowed herself a smile when she thought about her father’s reaction had he known.
“Naval and Intelligence, Hélène,” he would have roared, “Are two words that sit very uncomfortably beside each other.”
Helen was quite shy and was moved around between different headquarters, so she was never able to make close friends. Five foot tall, slightly built with sandy blonde hair and deep blue eyes, Helen drew male attention wherever she went. Helen had grown up surrounded by boys and then young men who were mainly family. Helen had been one of the boys and was unused to the amorous attention. She did not take to it kindly and became expert in delivering put downs and the occasional slap.
In May 1940, the Phony war abruptly ended as the German Blitzkrieg swept up through the Ardennes forest outflanking the French defensive line and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Helen was sent to Paris, as a liaison officer. The French military had no tradition of women officers and Helen was viewed equally with disdain and amusement. Her physical charms could not be hidden totally by her heavy serge uniform and bets were passed as to who would bed her first. Helen had spent several summers with family in France and understood French men all too well. The French and British generals did not trust one another and very quickly Helen’s unflappable skills as a diplomat became evident. The French were won over and most of them thought that she was French anyway.
The Battle of France went badly and whilst a large part of the BEF and French army retreated towards Dunkirk, Helen stayed in Paris until the government and high command fled to Bordeaux. On June 17th, Helen squeezed onto a transport aircraft with Brigadier General De Gaulle and his staff. Fortunately, the young woman took up little space. The aeroplane came perilously close to being shot down by the Luftwaffe before landing at RAF Tangmere.
De Gaulle was surprisingly reluctant to give Helen up. He had discovered that she was Scottish and was prone to lecturing Helen about the historic bonds between their two nations. Helen did not disabuse him that the Isle of Lewis had closer historic links to the Kingdom of Norway. Nor did she reveal how much time she spent spying on the Free French as they had now become.
September 20th 1939
SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Hassell took a long swig from the bottle of pear schnapps; his favourite. He handed the bottle to his batman and stood up and stretched, before strolling over to check his men’s progress. The stench of sweat was overwhelming, but the thirty half naked gravediggers were nearly finished. The thick black earth yielded readily to the men’s shovels and they dug as if their lives depended on it.
Soon the trench was ready; four metres long, two metres wide and two metres deep. A ladder was lowered and the men clambered out. They were made to line up in front of a barrel of water. Each man was allowed a ladleful; enough to release their tongues from the roofs of their mouths but not to quench their thirst. Next they were made to line up shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the pit. Most guessed what was coming but they were outnumbered two to one by the armed Germans. The men were ‘intellectuals’ from a small town south of Warsaw; lawyers, teachers, doctors and priests. Their names appeared on a long list which had been prepared by Nazi spies just before the war and they had all been scheduled for liquidation.
Hassell lead a company of Einsatzgruppe III and had already gained a reputation for bloodthirsty efficiency. His predilection for sadism and sexual violence were not considered to be a problem and his near permanent state of intoxication was tolerated as long as he got the job done. The Einsatzgruppen were paramilitary death squads under SS leadership. Their membership was largely drawn from the police; military, civilian and secret. They wore the black uniform of the SS. Each Einsatzgruppe was attached to a regular army division and followed closely behind the fighting formations as they invaded Poland. The Wehrmacht afforded the paramilitary thugs all the help that they needed; a fact that they seemed to forget once they had lost the war.
The Poles were lined up in three rows. Ten SS-men stood twenty metres behind. The SS sergeant raised his hand and the men took aim. Hassell raised his arm and fired a round from his Luger. The ten riflemen fired. Each bullet passed through two men who died instantly and penetrated the men in the front row variably. They were pushed forward by the weight of the men behind and fell into the pit. Hassell walked over to the trench and looked down. There was an untidy heap of still bodies and moans issued from the bottom of the pile. Hassell nodded to his senior NCO who had his men fill in the trench.
When the men had finished they were rewarded; beer for the ranks and vodka for the NCOs. SS-Oberscharführer Müller handed Hassell a tin mug full of Schnapps, preferring that the boss not swig from the bottle. He sipped his own schnapps whilst completing the report of the successful anti-Bolshevik action, then Müller showed Hassell where to sign.
CHAPTER 5
June 9th 1940.
Madame Reuben shivered inside as she pulled the doorbell of no 24, Rue de Braque. Like many houses in the Jewish quarter, it was old and large and had seen better days. It was, in fairness, in a better state of repair than most of its neighbours. The heavy oak door bore the number 24 in small brass figures with no other indication of what lay behind. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew that it was a brothel, not as famous as Le Chabanais, but it fit in its own niche. It was affordable to men like Madame Reuben’s husband who valued discretion and clean girls. Clients never used the front door. Madame Reuben was an upstanding member of the community and here she stood, having to beg before a common whore.
Madame Maria Latouche was a most uncommon whore and definitely not what she seemed. Her identity card and birth certificate stated that she was thirty-two years old and had been born in Mulhouse, in Alsace. It was merely a coincidence that the town hall was blown to pieces in 1914 and so the official birth register destroyed. Madame Latouche was an excellent linguist but could not hide her slight German accent, which was easily explained by her Alsatian origin. Maria Latouche was not her real name but it suited her not to remember the name she had been born with. Nor was there a Monsieur Latouche.
Madame Maria had been born in a whorehouse just off of Unter den Linden, in Berlin. Her mother was also a most uncommon whore with only five clients.
Maria’s father was a Prussian aristocrat and scholar. He had marched off to war boldly in 1914 at the head of one of the fabled university battalions who had attempted to roll over the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium. The Kaiser had dubbed the BEF a ‘contemptible little army’ and indeed they were ill equipped for the war in which they found themselves. The BEF consisted largely of regular soldiers and at the first battle of Ypres, the idealistic German students learnt something unpleasant. Tommy had virtually no machine guns and paltry artillery. But Tommy could shoot straight. Tommy could fire twenty rounds a minute with his Lee Enfield rifle. The student soldiers sang as they walked into the British hailstorm and were cut down like late summer wheat. Maria’s father, sword in hand was first to fall.
Maria had a tough childhood but was educated privately and like her sisters, she accepted her place in the world. In 1936 Maria and her younger sister, Delphine left Berlin in some haste the day after the rest of their family was murdered. Maria had made preparations but was still shocked by the savagery unleashed by her neighbours.
The sisters moved quickly and Maria’s cache of uncut diamonds opened doors and turned attention elsewhere.
The pair arrived in Paris equipped with physical charms, excellent French, feminine wiles and some unsold diamonds. The brothel on Rue de Braque had seen better days and the madam was an alcoholic fool. Her death six months after Maria’s arrival was no surprise, nor did anyone suspect arsenic as the cause of her demise. Maria and Delphine set about re hiring and raising prices, so attracting a better clientele. In 1937, Maria sent Delphine to a spa town in the west to take over another brothel in need of dynamic management.
Madame Latouche was a woman possessed of considerable talents and was quite a few years younger than her birth certificate suggested. Like her mother she entertained a small group of wealthy, influential men and was a frequent visitor to the opera and ballet. She never drew attention to herself. All the men had private apartments where Maria would do things that their wives would not. The men told her things that they dared not tell their wives and via the deputy Foreign Minister and the chief of the General Staff, Maria had acquired a painfully clear knowledge of the likely outcome of the German invasion.
After an age the door was opened by a demure looking teenage maid. She ushered the party into Madame’s office. The house was deathly silent. Even whores had to sleep and they did night work. Madame Latouche stood up and smiled coldly at her erstwhile neighbour. To her right sat Monsieur Albert who did not move as much as a whisker on his moustache. Three empty chairs had been laid out. Madame Reuben sat down and her daughters sat mutely behind her. She scowled at Madame Latouche who sat in a comfortable chair framed by a huge crucifix behind her and on either side a statue of the Virgin Mary and St Denis, the patron saint of Paris. The symbolism was not lost on Madame Reuben but the deceit was.
The first transaction was simple. Madame Reuben handed over a large bag of gold jewellery to Monsieur Albert who inspected it and weighed it. He whispered to Madame Latouche who offered Madame Reuben an obscenely low price. Madame Reuben tried to haggle but was merely handed back her gold. She blustered and conceded. Madame Latouche nodded and handed over the cash.
Then Madame Reuben sold her nineteen-year-old twin daughters.
Madame Latouche made it as easy as she could but the girls’ mother did not help. She lacked Madame Latouche’s intimate knowledge of the Nazi’s profound evil but had the innate mother’s instinct to do anything to protect her children.
Madame Latouche listened patiently as the woman worked her way from threats to pleas to begging. Finally Madame Latouche spoke.
“Take your daughters and flee today. Buy a passage to America.”
Madame Latouche knew well of what she spoke but her strategy relied on subtlety and lies. There was also a determination to defeat the bastards by producing Jewish children who would wreak vengeance. She was not a good Jew by any measure but she felt the weight of countless generations upon her shoulders as well as the feral desire for revenge. Madame Latouche had played the long game before and would play it again. She did not however feel sufficiently in control and that frightened her.
Madame Reuben explained that she spoke excellent German and had read Goethe and could even play Mahler and Wagner on the piano. Madame Latouche listened with growing despair. She was not going to blow her cover and explain that the men in jackboots had likely read no Goethe at all. She refused to guarantee that the twins would only serve as maids, but did promise to look after them and she kept her word. Madame Latouche rose and concluded the meeting. She bade Madame Reuben kiss her girls goodbye. She would not see them again. Madame Latouche showed the older woman to the door herself and then returned to her office. The older woman hesitated for a moment, then with a sob hurried back down the street.
Instinctively the girls stood up. Madame Maria walked around them slowly. They were very average looking young women with dark brown hair, brown eyes and clear complexions. They looked like typical French girls. That was good. The girls jumped when Madame Maria barked her order.
“Strip naked and put your clothes on the chair behind you.”
The girls just stared at her and then their facial expression changed subtly. Rebecca, the slightly taller one evinced a look of horror and began to cry. Her sister’s eyes burned with hatred but she slowly removed her clothes, never taking her eyes off Madame Maria’s face. Martha had an average looking body, quite adequate for the task it would have to perform. Madame Maria said nothing as she squeezed the girl’s breasts and buttocks and inspected her teeth.
She told Martha to kneel and then clicked her fingers. Monsieur Albert stood up and walked slowly towards the young woman. Martha’s eyes dilated in horror.
“Wait,” Maria commanded. “You are lucky. Monsieur Albert had a bath last night. Open your mouth, relax your tongue and breathe slowly through your nose. Don’t fight and certainly don’t bite.”
The young woman did as she was told and screwed up her eyes. Monsieur Albert held her head in both hands. He withdrew when Madame Maria clapped her hands.
“Stand up girl, and put your clothes back on. You are both going back to your mother.”
Martha finally spoke. Madame Maria smiled at her defiance.
“You bitch,” Martha spat, “After what you just made me do!”
“You are not the problem,” Maria replied patiently. “I agreed to take both of you.”
She walked over to Rebecca, undressed the mute shivering girl herself, and pushed her to her knees. Rebecca closed her eyes and opened her mouth. She gagged slightly. Monsieur Albert alternated between the two girls.
Madame Latouche clapped her hands again. “Stand up. You performed well but you have much to learn. Follow Eloise up to the bathroom. You are to be showered and shaved. I will speak to you again in an hour. Leave your clothes here. I will return them to you later and you need to get used to strangers seeing you naked.”
Eloise was the petite teenage maid who had opened the door for Madame Reuben. Like Madame Maria she was not what she seemed. Eloise, aka Ellie the knife, was twenty four years old although she looked barely fourteen. She was Madame Latouche’s closest confidante and maintained discipline in the brothel. The girls gulped as Eloise idly played with an open straight razor.
The girls mutely followed the older woman out of the office and Madame Maria and Monsieur Albert set about examining their belongings. As instructed, each had brought very little baggage. Monsieur Albert took their identity papers and disappeared to the cellar where he would subtly alter their identities. Madame Maria cut out all their clothing name tags and burnt their diaries and family photographs. Two small battered ragdolls went on the fire as well.
Monsieur Albert returned in an hour. Madame Maria was happy with his handiwork and sent him off to the town hall to register the twins as prostitutes as required by law. ‘Hide in plain sight’ was one of Madame Maria’s axioms. A tame clerk at the town hall would not look at the identity cards very closely and would record that the women had attended in person. If the police ever did an identity check, they could search the prostitute record in a fraction of the time it took to search the full identity registries.
The twins reappeared an hour later dressed in thin short cotton shifts; the unofficial uniform of 24 Rue de Braque. Martha’s lips were swelling, indicating that she had given Eloise some cheek. They did not hesitate this time when told to strip. Madame Maria noted a couple of small nicks that were still bleeding. Ellie would have done that deliberately as a warning not to step out of line. Each of Madame Maria’s girls was kept hairless from the neck downwards. Aesthetically, Maria preferred this but the main reason was that pubic lice need hair to hang on to. Most clients understood this as well.
Early summer sunlight was streaming in through the high windows, which provided plenty of illumination for Maria and Ellie to examine the twins’ nether regions. In turn, each girl draped herself over Madame Maria’s desk. Eloise kicked the girls’ feet apart and then parted her labia and buttocks. Madame Maria pronounced herself satisfied that both girls were virgins and made a mental calculation of their commercial value. They were allowed to put their shifts back on and sit down.
Madame Maria began their lessons. Each girl was handed a small silver cross on a chain and a tiny book.
“Your name has been changed to Robbin. You were born in Lille to a prostitute. You moved to Paris when you were three and have never attended school. Your mother took you to church once a month. You had to sit at the back. You each have a pocket catechism in your hand. Learn it by heart. You do not have to believe what is written. If you insist on hanging on to your faith, do it in complete silence. Now go to the kitchen and help Cook with the vegetables. It is going to be a long day.”
At midday a solemn hatchet faced man arrived from the Ministry of Hygiene and closed the brothel down on the grounds that one of the girls had smallpox. Madame Maria tearfully produced the girl’s forged death certificate and the official stiffly announced that she could not reopen for ten days.
Thirty minutes later a young woman arrived at the back door via the alleyway from Rue d’Archives. This was the business entrance. The woman was about the same age as Maria and they hugged like sisters. Madame Paula Ferrier was going to be the new madam at no 24. She had bought the franchise off her old friend and had a new stable of tough young girls ready to move in as soon as Madame Maria had moved out. There would not be a Jew amongst them.
Paris would soon be awash with randy young men with money in their pockets and bulges in their trousers. 24 Rue de Braque would be perfect for middle ranking officers. Madame Maria had explained to her old friend how she was playing the long game. She was moving her girls to Biarritz, knowing that the occupying power would have difficulty in resisting the lure of sun, sea and sex. She did not add that the best time to flee a city was just as it fell and that any Jews who stayed would be hunted down by the Germans who did not wear uniforms. Neighbour would betray neighbour. It usually proved much better to appear in a new town and be shunned by your neighbours.
There was a knock on the door and four pretty girls entered the office, dressed in day clothes. They were the last of Madame Maria’s regular girls and understood that they had been sold on to Madame Ferrier and would work at her small brothel near Notre Dame until the little inconvenience of the quarantine had been sorted out and they could return to no 24. Maria hugged them, thanked them for their hard work, and bade them goodbye.
At a quarter to one, Eloise laid into the gong in the hall and slowly ten yawning partially dressed young women appeared. Lunch was always served at one and was a leisurely affair. The girls worked hard and Madame Maria had a reputation for taking good care of them. She now had twelve scared Jewesses, most of whom were barely broken in and two of whom were still virgins. All but two were sisters. The oldest girl was twenty one.
Cook had virtually cleared the pantry and had produced a feast. The twins initially baulked at the pork knuckle but soon realised that it was a test. Madame Maria had told each pair of sisters that they were the only Jews in the house and that the gentile girls were liable to betray them if they found out.
After lunch the girls busied themselves cleaning, tidying and packing. At five O’clock, twelve demurely dressed young women followed Madame Maria, Monsieur Albert, Eloise and Cook out the back door, down the alley and across the street to the Metro station at Rambuteau. An hour later they were settling themselves onto the night sleeper from Gare de Lyons.
The train to Bordeaux was packed and was carrying most of the French government and General Staff, who knew that Paris would fall in the next few days. Madame Maria had secured berths for her girls, although they would have to double up. Madame Maria herself would spend the night with General Maxime Weygand, chief of the General Staff.
Cook had made sandwiches for the girls but most were too frightened to eat. They sat nervously in their seats, holding hands under the hard watchful stair of Cook and Ellie the Knife. Monsieur Albert escorted Madame Maria to the restaurant car. The train moved off with an almighty jolt and Madame Maria temporarily lost her balance. She bumped into a petite woman in military uniform, knocking her to the floor. Madame Maria had bedded plenty of officers and knew her uniforms well, but this woman was clearly foreign. She was wearing a long navy blue double-breasted suit and a small white tricorn hat. On each sleeve was a thin light blue stripe with a diamond above it. The woman was helped to her feet by a general and she scowled at Maria. As the woman adjusted her hat, a lock of corn coloured hair fell loose. The woman had an elfin face and her eyes were exactly the same colour as the stripe on her uniform. Madame Maria nodded imperceptibly at the woman and beamed at the general who was an old “friend”. Madame Maria noted that Monsieur Albert was mentally undressing the female officer, no doubt assessing her commercial value. If her body was anything like her face, Madame Maria mused she could make a fortune.
The young officer was far too junior to warrant a couchette but managed to sleep huddled in a seat using her suit jacket coat as a blanket.
The train arrived in Bordeaux just after dawn. The military passengers were greeted by a line of staff cars for the important and trucks for the lesser so. The flourish of strumpets obediently followed their leader to another platform where they would catch a different train to Royan and a new life.
CHAPTER 6
The summer of 1940 saw Great Britain and her empire facing invasion from France. The Germans needed air superiority to cross the English Channel. The Luftwaffe failed to destroy the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and Hitler turned his attention towards his ideological enemy in the East, Josef Stalin. The British were not spared though and German bombers pounded British cities night after night, whilst U-boats sank hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and killed thousands of seamen. The British had little means of striking back, especially as they had left so much heavy equipment behind in France. The RAF bombed German ports and cities. One in ten bombs landed within ten miles of its target and nearly one in ten of the air crewmen were killed or captured. The Royal Navy fought bravely against the U-boats and the British army gave ground slowly in North Africa, as they struggled to maintain a presence on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Winston Churchill was desperate to take the fight to the enemy and had a secret organisation created to foment resistance and general mayhem in occupied Europe. The organisation was named the Special Operations Executive and their headquarters was at 64 Baker Street. SOE was very secret indeed and operated separately from the Secret intelligence Service, who employed proper spies. Ironically, SOE was created largely by Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s much derided predecessor.
SOE was given a simple task of ‘setting Europe ablaze’. No easy task as it turned out. There was no shortage of exiles willing to take the fight back to their homelands but they needed organisation and training. The established intelligence organisations, of course, wanted control of SOE. Naval Intelligence kindly offered the services of a pretty young officer who spoke fluent French and would be an ideal liaison between SOE’s nascent F (French) section and the French government in exile’s RF (République de France) section which was housed at 1 Dorset Square, just down the road from Baker Street.
For most of the winter of 1940-1941, the pretty blonde Wren was a familiar figure walking up and down Baker Street and disappearing in and out of apparently private offices. Her reports to Naval Intelligence were somewhat dull but the Baker Street irregulars took increasing interest in her. Colonel Buckmaster, in charge of F section was most taken by Helen’s ability to blend into the background and her resistance to his gentle attempts to woo her.
Things changed on May 24th 1941 when HMS Hood was sunk by the battleship Bismarck. An old battle cruiser, her magazine explosion was a horrific reminder of the fate of the British battle cruisers at Jutland. Hood went down with all but three of her crew. Lieutenant- Commander Rory MacLeod was one of those lost. On May 29th HMS Calcutta, an anti-aircraft cruiser was sunk in the Mediterranean. Lieutenant Alexander MacLeod was lost with her.
Helen had idolised her older brothers and was devastated by their loss. She was overdue leave and returned to the Isle of Lewis for a week to grieve with her family. Helen was glad to spend some days at sea with her father, as her mother’s grief was too intense. Helen was of the sea and knew that if her brothers had to die, they would have wanted to lie in her ancient embrace. Helen took long walks with her mother and promised that somehow she would exact revenge. Nicolette’s hatred was almost uncontainable and she listed each family member who had died at German hands since the war of 1870. Her rage was infectious and Nicolette was forever to blame herself for Helen’s transformation from baby-faced tomboy to baby-faced killer.
Helen returned to London exhausted and changed. She was promoted to Second Officer and showed her lack of gratitude by applying to join SOE. Her CO was a sensitive man and felt her need. Reluctantly he acceded to her request. Colonel Buckmaster and his redoubtable assistant, Vera Atkins welcomed Helen with open arms.
Helen sailed through the SOE selection process.
CHAPTER 7
March 23rd1942
The night was cloudy with no moon at all. The cars were barely visible and could only be located by the low mumbling of their drivers who stamped their feet to keep warm. Occasionally a glimpse of an impartially shielded cigarette could be seen. The man and woman had lain in wait for four hours and were frozen stiff. At last they moved, stealthily as cats.
They had met the day before at a small station. The man had arrived by train and the woman by bus. The man bought some cigarettes and matches. As he lit his cigarette, he dropped two unlit matches on the floor. Cursing quietly he knelt to pick them up. He walked out of the station and stopped to look at a bus timetable on the station wall. A minute later, a young woman walked up and also looked at the timetable. The man tipped his hat and asked the woman why she was carrying a bunch of daffodils.
“I am going them to lay them on my mother’s grave,” the woman replied shyly. She walked down the road into the still graveyard and knelt by a gravestone, laid out the daffodils and prayed for a while. Then she returned to the station and caught a train to the nearby city. The man sat at the back of the carriage and when the woman disembarked, he walked along the carriage and snatched a tiny piece of paper that had been left on a seat.
There were police outside the station, doing a random identity check. The man walked up to them casually after he had swallowed the piece of paper. He was quite happy to open his case of carpet samples and the young policemen did not notice that the case was smaller on the inside than out. The man ate a simple but decent meal at a nearby communal restaurant. A stranger sat next to him and asked for a cigarette. The man offered the stranger his packet and the stranger took two, lighting one and putting the other behind his ear. They discussed the travails of the local football team for a while and then left the restaurant a few minutes apart.
The man with the suitcase followed the stranger down an alleyway, through a door and into a darkened kitchen. The light came on and the man was confronted by a scruffy lad who appeared to have fallen down the chimney.
“Bernard,” the man said.
“Sabine,” replied the urchin who was clearly not a boy. “You took your time.”
The man thought about giving the woman a slap but wisely did not. He opened his suitcase, fiddled with the bottom and handed the woman a package. She inspected the contents and without commenting, she stuffed them into her pockets.
A shadowy figure emerged from beneath a car and silently opened the door of its neighbour. A second shadow slipped into the car and the vehicle started to slowly roll down the hill. It was as if a swarm of fireflies had appeared as cigarettes fell from mouths and men turned to the departing vehicle. Then there was a series of flashes and bangs from beneath the remaining cars. Chaos ensued.
At the bottom of the hill, the man dumped the clutch and the big V-8 throbbed into life. He floored the accelerator and the heavy car skidded around a corner. Although the man drove like a maniac down empty streets, he did not put his lights on. The woman navigated from a memorised map and casually asked him if he held a driving licence. His answer neither surprised nor reassured her. A lamppost removed one front wing and soon the car was out in the country. It was even harder to navigate and one of the rear passenger doors was ripped off by a dry stone wall.
The woman reminded the man that a car driven at normal speed attracts a lot less attention and he slowed down a little, which was just as well. After an hour the car rounded a bend and drove straight into a roadblock. The man was thrown hard against the steering wheel and winded. The woman had thrown open her door and dropped into the well in front of the passenger seat. A huge cloud of steam erupted from the car’s radiator and the woman rolled out of the car and into a ditch.
Slowly she crawled backwards through the freezing mud until she was close enough to a small copse to make a run for it. Somebody fired a flare and the woman was caught in silhouette. Shots rang out and bullets cracked about her ears. She kept running but was snagged by a substantial barbed wire fence. Like a rabbit in a trap, the harder she struggled the tighter she became ensnared. Soon she was rudely pulled off the fence.
Despite the pain she did not cry out.
The woman was held tightly by several men and a torch shone in her eyes.
“You’re a rather young spy, my lad,” said an arrogant voice. “I’m not sure whether to shoot you on the spot or pull down your britches and spank your bare bottom. Sergeant. Check him for weapons.”
The elderly sergeant did as instructed and then stood up sharply.
“Begging your pardon sir,” he spluttered. “The lad‘s got tits. I mean he’s a lass! Sir.”
“Well, well, “the officer sneered as he pulled off the woman’s cap. Her long blonde hair tumbled out. “What do we do with girl spies, sergeant?”
The old man’s reply was unequivocal.
“We take them back to headquarters. Sir.”
There was a mumbling of agreement from behind him and the woman relaxed a little. She was duly hauled into the back of a truck where she sat, her hands and feet bound. She was duly delivered to ‘headquarters’ and found herself thrust into a chair in a bare room with harsh lighting and a heavy table fixed to the floor. Two men appeared, one in police uniform and the other in plain clothes. She refused a cigarette and gave as little away as possible while she was interrogated. She stuck to her story that she had been picked up in a bar by the man called Bernard. He seemed sweet and had a really big car. No, she was unaware that it was stolen. No, he had not paid her for sex; she was not that sort of girl.
After about four hours the men left and two stern heavily built policewomen entered the room. The woman was made to strip and her clothes were put into a bag. She was allowed to wash. She had deep grazes on her arm, legs and face from the barbed wire and the salty water stung terribly. She bit her tongue hard. She was given a non-descript blue dress to wear and was taken to a cold bare cell. She curled in a corner and slept fitfully.
The bolt was slammed back after a few hours and the lights blinded her. She was ordered to her feet and marched back to the interrogation room. The two policemen and the female sergeant were standing next to an army officer. He saluted the woman and all three men smiled.
“Well done, Second Officer,” laughed Colonel Buckmaster. “A most excellent performance, although you were not supposed to get yourself nearly killed. The Chief Constable of South Yorkshire does not send his regards. He has seen the remains of his official car. He would like to shoot you personally.”
Helen saluted her commanding officer. One of the policewomen handed her a large package and led her off to get properly washed and dressed.
The inspector turned to the Colonel.
“It would have been nice to have been warned. The local home guard thought she was a spy. Just as well, they are such lousy shots. She’s pretty damned tough, I’ll say that. Had me fooled.”
“Indeed, Inspector,” replied the Colonel. ‘She’s going to need to be,’ he said to himself. Then paraphrasing Wellington, ‘I don't know what effect this woman will have upon the enemy, but by God, she frightens me.’
Ten minutes later the immaculately dressed Wren emerged. She shook hands with the policemen and gave each one a peck on the cheek.
“Good luck, lass,” said the inspector, “Wherever you are going.”
Helen was unaccustomed to travelling in staff cars and got in the front next to the uniformed female driver. Over her shoulder she glimpsed Vera Atkins, who liked to keep an eye on her girls.
“Is she ready?” Vera asked the Colonel.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, “Once those grazes have healed.”
So ended Helen’s training. It had been conducted at breakneck speed; after all, there was a war on. Still it took nine months, during which time Second Officer MacLeod “disappeared.” She was officially posted to the British Embassy, in Washington. They of course had never heard of her.
Helen was almost ready. She needed her photograph taken. Vera took her to a rather exclusive hairdresser. Helen’s long wavy hair was cut into a neat bob as befitted her new identity. Whilst out of place in London, Chloë Martin, gamine eighteen year old from Calais would barely warrant a glance in Paris. Rather, she would attract no more attention than every other pretty French girl.
SOE had a number of ‘schools’ that were actually requisitioned country houses, well out of the way of prying eyes. Helen started off at Beaulieu, in the New Forest. There she learnt the dark arts of concealment and subterfuge. She learned to become her character, codename Monique. Every agent had a codename and an alias. They were not to get the two confused. SOE had a very special school at Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands where students learned how to live off the land and hide. They were taught all sorts of dirty tricks including the even darker arts of sabotage and assassination. Helen took a guilty pleasure in the training and felt at home, particularly during the sea training. Students needed to learn how to embark and disembark from small boats in rough seas. Helen could have done it in her sleep. Several instructors were impressed with her weapons handling and unarmed combat skills. Most were combat hardened Royal Marines and felt no shame at being thrown around by a mere slip of a girl. Helen did not show off, which impressed them even more. Helen showed promise as a w/t (wireless telegraphy) operator and was sent to SOE’s special ‘school’ at Thame Park in Oxfordshire for extra intensive training.. There she learned all about short wave radio and how to encrypt messages and send and receive them using high speed Morse code. Helen was a most able student and in particular could key with both hands and produce a different signature with each. For some time, the Germans who listened to Helen’s messages thought that she was two people.
Leo Marks, SOE’s top cryptographer was much taken by Helen, a fairly common reaction. SOE was, at that stage, using poem codes. These could be decrypted if the poem was relatively well known and the Germans had a number of well-educated English speakers, whose sole job this was. Marks had refined this by writing the poems himself and having the agent memorise them. There would only be two copies; one on a desk in London and the other in an agent’s head somewhere in Europe. Helen casually asked if her poem could be the Lord’s Prayer in Norn. Marks had heard of Norn but never met a Norn speaker. Helen sang him one of the ancient ballads in her reedy siren voice. She confessed that she could not translate it accurately into English, but it was about Viking warriors fighting over a beautiful woman. She had learnt it by heart on her father’s knee. Helen had inherited her mother’s love of languages and her father’s love of the ancestral tongues. Very little Norn had ever been written down. Helen typed it out and Marks smiled at her.
Favor
i ir i chimrie, Helleur ir i nam thite,
gilla cosdum thite cumma,
veya thine mota vara gort
o yurn sinna gort i chimrie,
ga vus
da on da dalight brow vora
Firgive vus sinna vora sin vee Firgive
sindara mutha vus,
lyv vus ye i tumtation, min delivera vus fro
olt ilt, Amen.
Marks knew some Norwegian but this was much different. Within a week Helen was producing securely encrypted messages. Just to be sure, Marks found a brilliant Norwegian cryptographer from the Norway section and got him to try and break Helen’s code. He failed until Marks showed him the text. The man guessed that it was the Lord’s Prayer but did not understand the language.
There was some debate as to whether Helen’s skills would be better served in training and development, but she had made her decision. Buckmaster would not stand in the way of anyone willing to risk life and limb for their country. Helen, like most agents, was fighting for two countries. Women also had particular qualities that made them blend in, in occupied Europe.
She had a parachuting course at Ringway, in Manchester, which hurt a lot. Helen was of the sea not the air. Then some live training which cost SOE a Ford staff car and finally a second mock interrogation where Helen played Chloë from Calais to perfection.