plunged like a blind bull into the crushed ruin of what had been the last carriage of the armored train.
The shriek of escaping steam almost drowned out the sounds of firing and Manners saw rather than heard the flashes of grenades being tossed down onto the train as its carriages seemed to bounce and then sag their way off the tracks. But the Germans were fighting back, the machine gun post at the rear of the train spraying the ridge of the cutting through the great spray of sand and dust that showed Malrand’s Spandau was trying to suppress their fire. More grenades dropped, and Manner’s saw one of Marat’s men beside him tumbled back with his jaw torn away by a bullet, the moistened towel around his Sten suddenly soaking bright with blood.
Manners ducked beneath the skyline and darted along to the trench where Lespinasse and three of Berger’s men were waiting to ambush any flank attack that might come from the troops who had been in the front of the armored train. The fools, they were out of the trench and over by the tree stumps, craning their necks to see the damage. He pushed them angrily back into position behind the Bren. He had to be sure this flank was secure.
Back to what was now a firefight, and it was getting time to leave. Earth was kicking up constantly from the edge of the cutting as the Germans began to reorganize, and there was too much dust to see where the third train might be. He looked around desperately for his detonator boxes. The ground that had come to seem so familiar in the hours of waiting was now unrecognizable after the disappearance of those landmark trees. He clenched his eyes shut and concentrated. The tree stumps were there, so he had been here. He edged to his right and looked again. He was on the lip of the little hollow where he had waited. The boxes were less than a yard from his hand. He scurried down and pressed the handle on the second detonator to fire the charge that would blow the tracks behind the ambush, half expecting a failure. Any stray bullet or excited boot could have cut the wire. But no, a crashing explosion that even his ringing ears could hear.
He took the whistle from his pocket and began blowing long, regular-blasts, the signal to disengage. No firing from Lespinasse’s team on the right. No sounds of battle from McPhee’s post back at the track half a mile behind him. Still blowing his whistle, he bent to the crumpled man with the shattered jaw whose hand clutched at his throat, trying vainly to stop the pumping jets of blood from his artery as he stared in dying desperation at the English captain. Manners turned away and trudged along the line, blowing his whistle and telling his men to pull back and disperse. He could count on Malrand’s Spandau to hold off any counterattack from the third train. He could always count on Francois.
Sybille’s gramophone served the useful purpose of blanketing the sound of the radio, when he listened to the personal messages that were read over the French service of the BBC. And at six-thirty one evening, as he strained to hear over the sound of Maurice Chevalier’s “Valentine” from the parlor, Manner’s heard the alert message.
“The invasion. It’s coming,” he said, beaming at her and kissing her boisterously. “That’s our alert.”
“What? Tonight?” she gasped, squeezed too tightly in his arms.
“A week, ten days. But it’s coming. They’re on their way.” He threw his head back and closed his eyes, hardly aware of her stiffening.
“If they are on their way, then so will you be,” she said quietly, not looking at him. Her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. Up half the night at Boridot’s farm for a dying sow, and then out again to St-Alvere tending two boys with stomach wounds who had been shot when the Germans raided a training camp. She looked as if she had not slept for days.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she said, almost angrily. “I am out of my hibernation, out of my little sheltered space where I could tell myself there was no war, no Germans, no great drama sweeping us all away into causes and passions. You pulled me back to this anguish we call living, living for the moment.”
“Berger pulled you back, Sybille. I only met you when the war had already pulled you back to life,” he said in a tone so reasonable that he knew it was a mistake as soon as he spoke. Her eyes blazed and she pulled back her hand as if to slap him, then her shoulders slumped and she seemed to soften, turning the threatened blow into a nervous plucking at his arm, and then lifted her hand to stroke his cheek.
“Soon you will go,” she said dully, and came into his arms.
“But then will come the Liberation, and I’ll be back,” he said. He looked at the room, the heavy furniture and faded carpet, a little Godin stove that glowed almost red in winter, the chaise longue where they had made urgent love when Francois brought him back from the kennels. The scent of lavender was familiar to him now, mixed with the antiseptic from her surgery. And he wondered whether he would see it all with the same fond eyes after the war.
“Another soldier promised me that he would come back,” she said against his chest. “In this very room. I don’t want to lose a second man. I have given enough to this war already.”
“It’s almost over, Sybille. The invasion is coming. The war will be over by Christmas.”
“They said that in 1939. And they said it in 1914. They always say it and it’s never true. Your invasion could be thrown back, or frozen in four more years of trench warfare.”
“That’s why I have to go now. Down here in Perigord, all over France, people like us listened to the radio tonight and are getting ready to make sure the invasion doesn’t fail. The more Germans we fight here, the fewer there will be on the beaches.”
Dry-eyed and unsmiling, she took him up the stairs to her bed and took off her clothes as if she were undressing for a bath. He watched her fold them carefully and lay them on a chair. And then with more determination than passion, she took him to her, and for once her eyes remained closed throughout. With so little response from her, he felt wooden and almost mechanical, his flesh urgent and pumping but his mind remote and concerned. He slowed and kissed her neck, her cheek, her closed eyelids.
“I cannot leave you like this, Sybille, but I cannot stay,” he murmured.
“Don’t go,” she said, her arms tightening around him, and she began to move beneath him, her hips rising gently to press him in a rhythm that she controlled. It was slow and insistent, like the rocking of a boat in the tug of the tide, and it surprised him with her strength. A part of his mind was still detached, observing, as she seemed to make love to him and to pleasure herself by an act of pure will. Her urgency released a great wave of tenderness in him that swept him almost peacefully away, until his breathing slowed again and the room came back into focus and he saw that her face was wet with tears.
“I’ll come back, Sybille,” he said. “I’ll always come back. This is my home now, with you.” With a final, lingering kiss, he rose and dressed and was washing his face at the kitchen sink when the soft rapping came at the back door.
It was Lespinasse, looking grim and frightened. “There’s bad trouble at Terrasson,” he said. “Young Francois has a car.”
This was a strange new period for Resistance work, both safer and more dangerous at the same time. The Germans and the Vichy forces had both started concentrating their troops in order to mount big sweeps and searches to attack the growing numbers of Maquis bands. But it meant they had withdrawn posts from the smaller towns, and there were hardly any small patrols, so it was safer for the Resistance to move around and to steal and requisition cars and trucks. The gendarmes who remained at their small local posts were siding, more or less openly, with the Resistance. So Manners, who had started on foot and then progressed to a bicycle, was now accustomed to racing around the countryside by car. If they did meet the enemy by accident, it probably spelled disaster because the Germans now traveled in big and well-armed columns. And there were no more soft targets on the rail networks.
“It’s that bastard Marat with those guns you let him have,” Francois spat, when Manners joined him on the road above the cemetery. “He took his men into Terrasson last night, probably with the agreement of the gendarmes. He blew down their door, took their pistols and rifles, robbed the post office, and then shot the local legion chief and some woman they accused of informing.”
“So?” said Manners. “This must be the ninth or tenth time he’s pulled something like this. That’s the FTP strategy. What’s the fuss? And did you hear the message from London, the alert?”
“Yes, I heard about the invasion. I’ll believe it when I see it. But I’m angry because Marat told the townspeople that he was acting on your orders, and the English
