Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy Page 17

  When they arrived in Aurillac, she climbed awkwardly down from the cart and clomped into the tailor’s shop. For thirty seconds he too failed to recognise his customer of the day before. Then, quite delighted, he gave her a fitting. All the time he tucked and pinned and marked with his chalk, he chuckled to himself.

  ‘ Quelle type , quelle type ,’ he kept on gurgling.

  When he had finished he promised to send the completed suit over to Saint Santin the next day.

  After she had done some more shopping and eaten a fragrant meal of bread and garlic, sitting straddle-legged on a bench in the public square, she got back into her ‘father’s’ cart, helped him sell all his vegetables, repassed the endless German control points and finally returned to Saint Santin. The next day her suit arrived and she was ready to leave for Châteauroux and (she hoped) her radio contact with London.

  As part of their security-tightening process the Germans had called in all identity cards issued in the Cantal. New cards were to be issued. Nancy’s identity card purported to come from a Cantal source, but she did not now accept the German invitation to call on them and obtain a replacement. The only thing to do was to travel to Châteauroux without papers. Also, her men remarked, she would have to travel without a licence for her bicycle.

  This added risk heightened the anxiety felt by the Maquis on Nancy’s behalf. For every minute available before she set off they conferred and exchanged notes, so that finally they could give her a list of contacts and safe houses along the question-mark-like route that seemed most dangerous to them.

  Armed with this information, looking smart in her new suit and riding a brand new bicycle, she set off. It was a fine morning and she felt full of confidence.

  ‘Remember,’ Laurent shouted after her, ‘after the Puy-de-D ȏ me, go by Saint Amand, Bourges and Issoudun.’ She waved gaily back and soon left her anxious men far behind her. The route they had mapped out for her meant a ride of three hundred kilometres to Châteauroux. Then, of course, she would have to ride back again. For the moment, though, she would worry only about getting there.

  Her contacts along the route that first day were magnificent. Whenever the road was safe, they knew it and hastened her on her way. Wherever there was a risk of German control points, they scouted ahead and then waved her on when the danger was over. At each main-road junction a guide would escort her across – and through towns also. Thus she cycled through the mountainous Puy-de-D ȏ me in safety. She was making good time.

  It was getting dark and she needed somewhere to sleep when she came to a country bistro, miles away from all other habitation. She bought a simple meal and a glass of wine and listened to the conversation of two other customers. From them she learnt that the Germans were very quiet in the area, which was all that she wanted to know.

  She left the bistro, loudly announcing her intention of riding much further along the road, and then hid in the bistro barn. Unwilling to crush her suit, she took it off, hung it up on a nail and covered herself with straw. She was woken just before dawn by the sounds of an Allied air raid somewhere nearby.

  She dressed quickly and rode to Saint Amand. There she bought herself a cup of coffee and once more sat down to eavesdrop on her neighbours’ conversation. The coffee was filthy but, from the man behind her, she learnt that Bourges had been raided by the Germans the day before.

  ‘If they were there yesterday, they won’t come again today,’ she told herself, and set off at once for Bourges. Her legs were aching but there was no time to lose. Alarmingly, Bourges was not what she had expected. It was deathly silent, all the shutters were up and the streets were being heavily patrolled by German soldiers. Pedalling as calmly as she could, she rode out of the town again. Finally, she learnt that a group of hostages had been taken by the Germans that same morning and shot. She rode faster than ever after that.

  She carried on along the road to Issoudun until she reached a black-market restaurant where she ordered an excellent lunch. While it was being prepared she seized the opportunity to clean herself up, conscious as ever of the fact that she must not attract attention at any stage by looking like a woman who had cycled two hundred kilometres.

  After the meal she ordered a bottle of brandy and invited the proprietor to join her in it. By the time half the bottle had gone the proprietor, who loathed everything German, had reached a stage of gloriously outspoken indiscretion so that, from him, Nancy learnt everything she needed to know – town gossip, local events of importance over the past few months and the nearest way to the markets. This was the kind of information that enabled a Resistance worker to travel through strange country without appearing to be a stranger – the kind of information that saved lives.

  Blessing the proprietor for his drunkenness and his loose tongue, Nancy, sober as ever, set off on her bicycle for the Issoudun market. There, like any other good Issoudun housewife, she shopped briskly and stowed her purchases in a string bag which she slung from the handlebar of her bicycle. Then she rode out of the town, threw away her weighty groceries and headed boldly for Châteauroux, which she reached late that afternoon, thirty-nine hours after she had left Saint Santin. She had travelled two hundred kilometres, slept six hours, talked and eaten for three. Thirty hours’ riding then. That meant an average of ten kilometres an hour and over mountains as well. No wonder her legs and backside were on fire.

  She was delighted to find Châteauroux very peaceful. She rode round and round looking for the bistro Denis had described with such typical vagueness – the bistro where he had said she would find a contact who could give her the address of the hunch-shouldered district leader. Would a hunched shoulder be sufficient description? And would the contact in the bistro, if now she found it, give the man’s address to a strange woman anyway?

  On her third circuit of the town she was beginning to feel both conspicuous and worn out. She still had not found the bistro. Full of pessimism she started yet another circuit – and then, suddenly, she saw the place for which she had been searching, right under her nose, looking exactly as Denis had described it. She parked her bicycle and went inside.

  She had to wait quite a time, and drink quite a few Pernods, before the patron allowed her to be included in the general conversation. Gradually then she won his confidence. Finally she asked if the man who had the hunched shoulder was still around. Expressionlessly the patron admitted that he was and later told her where he could be found.

  As she was mounting her bicycle a young Frenchman passed her. He looked familiar. ‘Hey,’ she shouted, ‘Bernard.’

  He turned round. ‘Andrée!’ he exclaimed in delight. ‘What are you doing here?’ She had met him once in the Maquis of Corrèze – a good memory was a necessity in her calling.

  She explained to him why she was there. He then told her that his group had also been attacked. Their wireless operator had been killed and he too was looking for an operator to send a message for him. He knew of a Free French operator in Châteauroux and planned to contact him now.

  ‘Then we both want the same thing,’ she said. ‘Look, you come with me while I send my message, then I’ll go with you while you send yours, then we’ll ride back to the Creuse together. Agreed?’ The Creuse was a department between Châteauroux and Saint Santin and she had now grown so weary that she wanted desperately not to be alone.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said, and escorted her to within two blocks of the address given to her in the bistro. This building also agreed with the graphic but unlocated description Denis had given of it.

  Cautiously she climbed the staircase and approached the door of what she now knew must be the SOE man’s flat. She heard voices inside but, when she knocked, the voices stopped and no one answered. After three attempts she gave up and rejoined her friend, who still waited for her two blocks down the road.

  ‘No good,’ she told him.

  ‘Perhaps my friend would send your message also,’ the Frenchman suggested. They cycled across Châteauroux and reached a bar tha
t faced the flat in which, Bernard declared, the French operator lived. Nancy’s companion left her looking after their two bicycles and went inside the bar, but when he gave the password he was at once warned to stay away from the house opposite. The Gestapo had raided it. The French team had escaped but they had had to abandon their radio, and two members of the Gestapo were still waiting in the flat, hoping that someone like Bernard would call.

  Night was approaching fast by now and neither Nancy nor her comrade had anywhere in Châteauroux to sleep so they determined to try her contact again and once more rode through the town.

  This time they approached the building together and found the front door firmly closed.

  ‘Ring the bell,’ the Frenchman suggested. Nancy pulled the cordon de sonnette , but not for her contact’s flat: she rang for the flat below, remembering that the SOE agent had already refused to open his door to her once. The main front door opened and Nancy then explained to the lady who confronted her that she had made a mistake – that she actually wanted one of the neighbours.

  Very obligingly the lady offered to call her neighbour and padded upstairs to knock at his door. He opened it just as Nancy and her companion arrived behind her. Cautiously – unable to do anything else – he invited them inside. He had a hunched shoulder.

  Once again without any password or means of identification, Nancy laid her cards on the table, talking fast and authoritatively to the elderly man who stood before her.

  ‘I don’t expect you to introduce me to your friends,’ she concluded, ‘but I would appreciate it if you would take them a message to send to London for me. If you don’t want to receive the answer on your set, a BBC message to me will be perfectly satisfactory.’

  He questioned her closely and eventually convinced himself that she was not a Gestapo agent. Mention of Denis’s name concluded the matter and he agreed to pass on her message. At that moment, a voice called him from the next room. Leaving Nancy and her friend, he withdrew. They heard a murmur of conversation. Then he returned.

  He proceeded to deny everything he had said, told Nancy he didn’t know what she was talking about and asked her to leave the flat. Obviously the people in the room beyond had decided that she was from the Gestapo.

  ‘You idiots,’ she blazed. ‘If I had been Gestapo, I’ve got a witness here of everything you’ve said and you’d all be under arrest by now. God preserve me from ever having to work with fools like you again.’

  She and Bernard then rode out of Châteauroux, heading for a Maquis group in the Creuse, forty kilometres away. They slept a few hours that night in a haystack and next day the Maquis leader told Nancy that she could, if she liked, visit his operator and, if this man agreed to send her message, he would not object.

  He told Nancy where to contact the Free French operator and she then drove across to him in a borrowed Maquis car. She explained that her own countryman had not trusted her and that she must get a message through to London. ‘I know there’s a lot of friction between your headquarters in London and mine,’ she admitted frankly, ‘but will you do it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ the operator agreed at once. He sent off a message asking that his headquarters, in Algiers, should cable London to tell them that Nancy’s group had no radio and no codes and needed replacements of both.

  Straight away she drove back to Creuse, collected her bicycle and then set off alone again, through a series of completely German-controlled towns, on the shortest route back to Saint Santin. No detours now. She travelled direct.

  She chose the shortest route, in spite of its dangers, because she was rapidly approaching that stage of exhaustion where not only did every mountain-choked mile count, but also she doubted that she could ever last the distance.

  However strong she was physically, she had led an exhausting, near-sleepless life in the past three and a half months. In the last fortnight she had done a forced march of a hundred and fifty kilometres and now – unaccustomed to cycling – had ridden almost continuously for four hundred kilometres more. She still had another hundred to go before she reached Saint Santin.

  Her legs were in agony and her seat was so sore that she no longer dared to dismount. She was distressfully aware that, if she did, she would never again get back into the saddle of this machine that had become nothing less to her than an instrument of torture. She ignored the torments of tiredness, thirst, cramp and all the calls of nature, rather than submit to the ordeal of re-mounting her cycle once she had given herself the exquisite pleasure of parting from it.

  So, panting, and even occasionally moaning, she flogged herself on. Short distances became nightmares. The final goal of Saint Santin became a sort of lunatic obsession. Sometimes she cursed dully, sometimes her mind wandered and she returned to reality only just in time to avoid plunging off the road and into the gorge below, but most of the trip was just relentlessly determined slogging.

  And then, at last, it ended. Her face greasy with sweat, her eyes deep in sockets drained white by sheer physical exertion, and every nerve in her body shrieking for the sort of comfort which nothing, except perhaps death, could have provided, she ground the cycle up to the headquarters in Saint Santin and clumsily tottered off it.

  A roar of greeting surged down and around her from the veranda of the house where her men were eating their midday meal. Wild with excitement they swept towards her and gathered her to them. Whereupon, to their utter astonishment, Madame Andrée burst into tears.

  She wept chokingly like an exhausted and terrified child and the men stood awkwardly round her, wanting only to comfort her but not knowing what to do.

  They thrust her into a chair – at which kindness she emitted a shriek of pain and sobbed more loudly than before. Then her men looked so bewildered and distressed that she found herself hysterically laughing as well as sobbing.

  ‘She must lie down,’ ordered Fournier, convinced that her iron nerve had at last failed her and that she was suffering from a nervous emotional storm.

  ‘No! No! No!’ she bellowed.

  They gave her a drink and she drained the brandy as if it were tap water and imperiously indicated that she needed more. Anxiously they gave her more – and slowly she began to regain her composure.

  Soon she was sufficiently self-possessed to admit the main cause of her distress.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s just that damned bicycle. I’m so saddle-sore I could die.’

  Everyone then explained to her how it was that there had been no one on the road to meet her. They hadn’t expected her back for at least another twenty-four hours. Many had felt gloomily certain that she would never come back at all. It was incredible to them that, in less than seventy-two hours she should have completed her mission and cycled more than five hundred kilometres as well. It was almost as incredible, knowing the region she had traversed, that she was still alive.

  Typically, it was Denis who restored her equanimity.

  ‘What you need, Gerty dear’ – and he gently massaged his rump as he spoke – ‘is a good rub down with eau-de-cologne!’

  ‘Denis, for that I could kill you,’ Nancy told him emphatically. He took her arm and led her in the friendliest possible way to a chair.

  ‘Try sitting on one side at a time,’ he urged. Gingerly she let herself down. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘what happened? How did you do?’

  With great gusto Nancy told them the story of her trip to Châteauroux and back to Saint Santin. She spoke particularly forcefully about radio operators.

  ‘Don’t ever,’ she commanded, ‘let anyone tell me again that the Free French won’t cooperate with the British. Without the Free French I would never have got my message through. They were wonderful. Don’t worry, Den-Den. Any day now London will be sending you more codes and another wireless set.’

  Now they could think about fighting again.

  16 AMBUSH

  It took Nancy three days to recover from her ordeal by cycle and by that time it was clear that everyone ha
d escaped the Nazi net at the plateau of Chaudes-Aigues. All they had to do was listen in every day to each of the BBC’s special message periods and wait for the one that would mean that a new set of codes and more arms and money would be parachuted down to them.

  Among the new arrivals at Saint Santin was a strange Frenchman who claimed that he was a colonel. As such he was certainly the most senior officer in the area, but that did not entitle him to speak the way he did. He was arrogant and dictatorial and Nancy encountered him for the first time one day at lunch. The colonel was busy telling Hubert that he was going to assume command of everyone in the area. Very quietly and very ominously Nancy interrupted him.

  ‘ Mon colonel ,’ she said, ‘I don’t know your name because no one has introduced us and because I’ve never seen you before in my life. But if you’ve finished giving us your orders, perhaps you would now explain to us just how exactly you are going to get arms and money when you have assumed command. You see,’ she explained, ‘I am the chef du parachutage for this Maquis and I can assure you that you will get nothing from me!’

  Denis and Bazooka took no pains at all to conceal their joy at the colonel’s consequent discomfiture, nor did the French. Everyone suspected that Monsieur le Colonel was a fake, anxious only to jump on the bandwagon now that the Allies were coming; but no one had so far dared to challenge a person of his alleged exalted rank. In cases such as these, however, Nancy always felt quite confident that a chef du parachutage could, if necessary, outrank even a field marshal.

  She took Hubert, Denis and Bazooka for a long walk in the forest that afternoon. ‘If this bloke is typical of the sort we’re going to get down here,’ she told them, ‘then I’ve had enough. There’s nothing but complications with these bloody politicians like our friend the colonel. We’re not having any more of it.’

  ‘What do you want us to do, Gert?’ Bazooka asked. ‘How about Denis and I shoot him?’

  ‘I can only shoot people when I’m drunk, Bazooka,’ Denis announced with dignity. ‘And Gert hasn’t got any more eau-de-cologne. Have to think of some other solution.’