Night Soldiers

life and roared against the downpour for only a few moments before the flame turned blue and danced pointlessly along the boughs, burning up the last of the fuel.

But that was enough. The Lancaster pilot must have seen the orange smudges beneath the clouds and signaled his dropmaster, thus the crates with parachutes attached were manhandled out the cargo doors and floated down through the darkness, one of them hanging up in the branches of a tree until Vigie scampered up and cut the shrouds. They loaded the crates into the truck, their excitement obscuring-until Gilbert attempted to start the engine-the fact that the precious gasoline had been burned up. The Vau brothers hiked back to Cambras. At midmorning there were schleuh patrols down on the road-someone else had heard the bomber-but it was raining too hard for the Germans to come up into the forest. Nonetheless, the maquisards waited most of the morning in ambush by the trail, having voted to defend the arms no matter the cost.

Just before noon, as the rain turned to snow, four of the Cambras women appeared at the edge of the field, pushing bicycles. They had traveled all morning, trading the heavy metal petrol cans back and forth, exposing two extra people to risk in order to make better time.

The entry into Cambras was triumphal. The entire population stood out in the wet snow and applauded l’Americain, les Anglaises, and themselves.

Four days later, his Limelight message was broadcast, setting the first attack on the night of November 25. Seven days! That was no time at all, but he did what he could. Which meant preparing for the operation-doing the necessary intelligence background-and training his maquis in the new equipment simultaneously. To that point, he had followed the Triangle camp teachings meticulously. His instructors and briefers had shown him that the path through danger lay in knowledge of the situation, caution, objectivity, secrecy, planning, and, above all, scrupulous attention to detail. But suddenly he was at war, so he found himself improvising, doing six things at once, making decisions quickly, in the heat of the moment. All the wrong things. But something was up, he could feel it in the air-they all could-and he was carried along in the rhythm of it. There were Lancasters overhead every night, the Epinal searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the schleuh patrols were everywhere on the roads. Rumors reached them of stepped-up questioning in the basement of the Epinal Mairie-the town hall, now a Gestapo interrogation center.

The new guns were a matter of great excitement to the Cambras maquis. The Mark II Sten, properly a machine carbine, was the special operations weapon of the clandestine war. It was simple: a few tubular components that screwed together quickly once you filed the burrs off the threads. It was light, six pounds, essentially a skeletal steel frame carrying the most elemental bolt-and-spring firing mechanism. And it was fast, putting out rounds in a staccato spray. “Beau Dieu!” Gilbert gasped after he had riddled a tree stump with one magazine-consuming burst.

The Stens were less exciting to Eidenbaugh. It came to him, in an idle moment, that the weapon was manufactured by the same armaments industry that produced the Purdey shotgun-a masterpiece. But the reality of the war called for hundreds of thousands of simple death machines to be placed in willing hands. The OSS, in a perfection of that logic, manufactured the Liberator, a single-shot pistol with one bullet and cartoon instructions overcoming literacy and language barriers, then spread thousands of them throughout occupied Europe. It was the perfect assassination weapon, meant for the man or woman whose anger had outdistanced caution to the point where he or she would kill up close.

For Eidenbaugh, the Sten was the least prepossessing of his available tools. It was, for instance, cheaply made-costing around $12.50 to produce. The primitive firing mechanism tended to jam, thus the thirty-two-round magazine was better loaded with thirty rounds of 9 mm parabellum (ball) ammunition to reduce pressure on the magazine spring. In this instance, a special filling device was to be used, but these had not been included in their arms shipment and they had to improvise.

And it was “short.” That is, the fixed sight was set for a hundred yards. Infantry war tended toward engagement at the extremity of the rifle’s efficiency-about a thousand yards, three fifths of a mile. With the Sten, however, you operated at the length of a football field and could see the enemy quite clearly. In essence, a streetfighting weapon. The implicit message was clear to Eidenbaugh: if, as guerrillas, you had the misfortune to engage the enemy on his own terms, the best you could do was to get close enough to burn him badly before he killed you-which he would, simply drawing back out of your range to give himself total advantage.

He had no intention to engage. Their target-identified in code by the courier-was the railroad yards at Bruyeres, about fifteen miles from Epinal. Sable had a cousin who worked in the roundhouse and, on the Tuesday before the attack, it was La Brebis and not the cousin’s wife who, at noontime, brought him his lunch of soup and bread. Eidenbaugh found a vantage point on a hill overlooking the yards and watched her ride in on her bicycle, napkin-covered bowl in the crook of her right arm, half a baguette balanced across the top of the bowl. The German sentry waved her through. Later, Eidenbaugh was ecstatic to learn there were fourteen locomotives in the roundhouse. He would, he knew, get them all.

It didn’t, on the night of November 25, sound like very much. A single, muffled whumpf in the roundhouse and some dirty smoke that dribbled from a broken window. That was all. But it would be three months at least before these particular locomotives went anywhere. Eidenbaugh and Vigie watched it happen from the vantage point, then retreated casually, by bicycle, back to the village.

Eidenbaugh went in alone, with the graveyard shift. They were the brave ones, for they were the ones who would suffer German suspicion after the sabotage. These interrogations would not, Eidenbaugh knew, be of the most severe category, for no occupying power can easily afford to sacrifice skilled railroad workers. The men gathered around him as they trudged into the railyard. To them he was a weapon, a weapon against those they loathed beyond words, and they protected him accordingly. He wasted no time in the roundhouse, simply formed the malleable plastique explosive into a collar around the heavy steel and wedged a time pencil into the claylike mass. Then he tied up the two roundhouse workers with heavy cord and moved them behind a wall. He snuck out the back way, through a well-used dog tunnel in the wire fence. The whole business took less than twenty minutes.

For a mere thud of an explosion and a little smoke. The yard sirens went off almost as an afterthought, the firemen appeared, the French police followed, a few German officers ran about-but there was little to be done. One fireman, reducing the water pressure to the volume of a garden hose, soaked down the area for ten minutes while a yard supervisor nailed a board across the single broken window. A pursuit unit showed up, and the German shepherds went right for the dog tunnel in the fence, picked up a scent that led to the edge of an empty hill above the yards, accepted their biscuits and pats, peed, and went home. A Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer took the rope that had bound the workers as evidence and put it in a leather pouch with a tag stating time, place, and date. Then they all stood around for an hour smoking and talking- bored, more than anything else. It was so insignificant.

Apoplectic rage was reserved for the German transport officer, who had chosen that night to occupy a French feather bed rather than a German army cot and thus arrived late. He was the only one there who understood what had happened, for it was, after all, rather technical. It had to do with the way locomotives are turned around in a railroad yard.

In the center of the roundhouse was what the French called a plaque tournant, simply a large iron turntable with a piece of track on it that allowed the crew to turn a locomotive around and send it back out into the yard once it had been serviced. In the interim, locomotives rested in a semicircle around the turntable, which could meet underlying track by being rotated. What the saboteur had done was to blow up the midpoint of the plaque tournant. The damage to the electrical system was meaningless- any electrician could wire around that in an hour. However, the explosion had also damaged the central mechanism of the plaque, a large iron casting, and that would have to be reforged. With French and German foundries pressed beyond extremity by demands of the war, replacement would take at least three months. Thus, for that period, fourteen locomotives weren’t going anywhere-the plaque had been blown in a position directly perpendicular to the outgoing service track.

The transport officer stared at the mess and said scheiss through clenched teeth. The gap was less than fifteen feet. It might as well have been fifteen miles. His transportation mathematics were, by necessity, quite efficient. Each locomotive pulled sixty freight cars and, in a three-month period, could be expected to make nine round trips to the coastal defense lines in the west and north. He multiplied by fourteen