Army of Shadows: an RP of Occupied France

[Saint Michel]

Army of Shadows

Find the OOC here

The officer at the checkpoint held up his hand, and though Emile couldn't hear the soldier's voice over the roar of the Peugot's engine, the message was clear.

Halt.

Emile put his foot on the brake pedal and the Peugot ground to a halt a few feet before the red- and white-striped barrier lowered across the road. The automobile's window crank was half broken, and Emile had some trouble lowering the side door window as the officer made his way over from the sentrybox.

"Papieren."

Emile already had his identity card and traveling papers ready, and passed them now through the window. The officer studied the documents closely, glancing between the picture on the identity card and Emile's face. Emile smiled placidly back -- the card was genuine, as were the travel papers, so why worry? He forced himself to ignore the soldier standing behind the officer with his machine pistol held ready to spray the rust-colored Peugot with bullets.

"Everything seems to be in order," the officer -- a Leutnant, to judge from the insignia on his shoulder tabs -- said in passable French. He started to pass the papers back, but then paused. "This travel permit is for only one person, not two." The German gestured at the person sitting in the front passenger seat of the Peugot.

"Oh." Emile looked surprised. "I did not think it would be any trouble to bring mon amie with me on business." The Leutnant leaned forward onto the door and stared in past Emile to the other side of the auto. Emile fought back a smile as the German's mouth fell open slightly.

In the passenger's seat was a woman, a beautiful redhead with a sharp and pretty face and cornflower blue eyes which twinkled mischieviously as they regarded the officer. "Is there a problem, mon officier?"

The German recovered himself sufficiently to ask, "Your papers, madamoiselle?"

The woman extended a lily-white hand, the nails expensively manicured, and delivered her identity card. The officer gave the document a brief examination before returning it. "Have a good trip," he said, "And next time you must have travel permits for everyone."

Emile smiled. "Thank you, Herr Offizier.

~~~~

It was only when the checkpoint was out of sight behind did Emile breathe out a long sigh of relief. "That never gets easier."

SOE operative Marie Fitzhugh-Doumont laughed softly. "That was easy. It's when there's a radio in your suitcase or rifles hidden in the boot that things get that much more interesting."

Emile gave her a sidelong glance. "I suspect you'd find a way to be a distraction."

The woman smiled. "You sound jealous the Boche aren't drooling over you."

"Heaven forbid." Emile made a show of shivering fearfully, and Marie laughed. "I swear," Emile said, "you could see that officer thinking, 'How did a fellow like him get a girl like her?'"

"Oh, I don't think we make that poor a couple," the woman replied. "We've certainly made a good show of it."

They certainly had, Emile thought. He'd made contact with Marie in Paris two weeks before. He'd gotten a message from Remi with a time and place, and so at precisely quarter past noon Emile had sat on a certain bench in the Jardin d'Luxembourg and waited. Their first meeting had been brief: Marie needed a ride to Bordeaux, where she was to meet a contact and return with 'goods'. What exactly the 'goods' were Emile didn't ask.

He had other friends who he could count as reliable couriers, but his position at the Ministry gave Emile the excuse to travel as well as enough of the severely rationed gasoline to fill his tank. So he'd agreed to take Marie to Bordeaux, and for the next thirteen days they'd gone to the cinema, took long walks in the Jardin, and talked idly over wine and the music from Emile's scratchy old Victrola. They became a couple, and so no one asked when Emile took Marie along with him on a seemingly dull trip to inspect generators in the Gironde department.

"Well, we'll just have to keep it up until we reach Bordeaux," Emile said, throwing an arm over Marie's shoulder.

Marie grinned and shrugged his arm off. "And how much farther will that be?"

Emile's smile faded. "Far enough that we'd better not get careless or our luck might run out."

Her face likewise growing serious, Marie nodded. The ride passed by in silence.

(OOC I'll post something for my other character tomorrow -- I'm exhausted)

[Guest]

"You're sure?"

"Positive. We had surveillance on him for three weeks; his visits to the police contact are coincidental with activity afterward. We also found out information that his daughter is held by the Germans."

Yves rubbed his head warily even as he considered things. It was hard to blame a man to not turn when his actual family were threatened -- no doubt the Boches had the man's daughter and told him that if he didn't cooperate, she'd be sent to a brothel on the Eastern Front, or otherwise made to do horrible things. The Germans understood the lever of brutality quite well, and their threats, when made, were not idle.

Unfortunately, there was a greater cause at work, endangered by this man's terrible plight, and it required the hardest of choices.

"It's quite simple then, isn't it? We have to kill him. The only question is how."

Only a brute would take joy or even feel angry at such a thing. Indeed, quite the opposite reaction came out of most resistance members faced with the choice of assassinating a comrade in such a fashion; Yves learned a while ago that you had to harden your heart and get on with it, just like ordering an attack on an enemy trench. The guilt would come later, he knew, after the deed was done.

It was a cold sort of realism that had to decide on what kind of guilt and how much of it would weigh on one's shoulders. There was no gain in this situation.

He stared off into the distance, feeling the weight of all these heinous acts of patriotism pressing upon his soul. These days, it was one of his existential woes, to contemplate the idea that he would die in the middle of all this unconfessed.

And now, another murder would be added to the tally. Yves-Marie Auguste de Saint-Palais would not be pulling the trigger, but he would be ordering deaths, same as during the years of the Great War, when he sent so many young men to their premature and violent deaths in the trenches.

Duty to one's homeland was a cold comfort, these days.

--

Henri Brisbois was a man who was morally unsettled; placed in his own set of unenviable circumstances, he nonetheless brave. He would have endured torture of himself without a peep and was a good patriot. But what parent could endure the torment of their children, or carry on knowing that their acts would harm their children. Not speculation, not potentially, but as a direct consequence, as a certainty.

Henri Brisbois was a brave man, thrust into things he had no control over, and had to make a brave choice. He knew that if this war ever ended, he would endure the condemnation of some, those without much to lose or imagination, but hoped that other comrades would consider him in a sympathetic light, understand why he had to turn on them.

It wasn't terribly comforting but it was all he had.

He hoped he was suspected by his own organization, whose contacts failed to show up a few times already. However, the Germans were pressing him harder for information that they thought he might have. Inevitably, he would have to give it up.

Today, as many days of late, he was using a route of alleys and small streets as he brought home his groceries, in hopes of luring resistance fighters in; not so they could be caught by the Germans, but so they'd finish him off in the only way that would allow his daughter to go free and avoid giving up everything he knew.

And so when he felt the cord slide around his neck in that Bordeaux alley and jerk tight, he was relieved and quite grateful, at least until his survival instincts kicked in, a final betrayal of the flesh, and struggled against death. But the rope-man, experienced at this sort of work through the years, knew that even the most willing soul had to be forced into death. The human animal did not give up very easily.

--

"It's done." Neither man took much satisfaction in the report.

"Do you think God will understand, Guilliame? Understand that there was no choice, that we had to murder a man to prevent him from giving the Boche what they needed to murder others?"

"I don't know." Gulliame did not share the same religious convictions as the compact little aristocrat, but was still bothered.

"Sometimes, I wonder how I shall ever explain this to the families, after, if after ever happens and if I live..."

[Rittermeister]

Night jumps are always dangerous, occasionally successful, and never fun.

Roy Urquhart stood in the open door of the C-47, hands braced against the frame, and peered out and down at a vague dark shape that, he was told, was France. The prop blast buffeted his face, pierced his baggy peasant clothes so that he was chilled and numb; the noise was incredible, like being on a firing range, only no one ever stopped to reload. It was a moonless night, and what little light came from the few stars that weren’t covered by banks of cloud. He could make out little of the particulars of down below. They were far from the cities, in the rural west country of France. It was farm country, a land of cattle and apple orchards and no streetlights. Occasionally he would see a pinprick of light, from a farmhouse or a country inn. But not the one he was waiting for.

There! Dot-dot-dot-dash, done with a light, and repeated over and over again. The signal for the drop zone. It was coming up fast.

Roy ducked back into the blacked-out plane. Corporal Brown, the wireless operator who was jumping in with him, sat on the jump seat. The supply bundles, containing everything from Sten guns to American C-Rations to wireless sets, were next to him. Lighted by the cigarette he was nervously smoking, his face was pale, with a greenish tinge. Airsickness, Roy thought, though he himself had never had it or seasickness or anything like that. Born with a cast-iron stomach, his mother used to say, though he knew it had nothing to do with his stomach.

“Brown, get ready to start pushin’ that bloody shit out the plane,” Urquhart said, his accent so thick it took Brown a moment to puzzle it out.

Urquhart dashed up to the cockpit and threw open the door. The co-pilot turned to look at him.

“You see it?” Urquhart asked.

The co-pilot nodded. “We saw it. You and your chap start pushing the bundles out when we put the green light on, then get yourselves the hell out or you’re going to wind up with a broken neck.”

The waiting was the worst. Urquhart did a last mental equipment check, just to keep his mind occupied. A straying mind was not a good thing, when going into action. If you allowed it to run free, there was no telling where it might go or what damage it might do.

He had a Sten Mk. II machine carbine, hand-picked and tested for reliability, and seven spare magazines on a bandolier; a High-Power HDM, a .22-caliber silenced pistol that he bribed an OSS man for; and a Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife for close work. He wore civilian clothes of rough wool, workman’s shoes, and a hiker’s haversack stuffed with ammunition, food, and sensitive and difficult to replace demolitions equipment he didn‘t trust to the randomness of the bundles. Besides the equipment, he was tall, strong, fit, young, and ready to fight. He also had a very bad feeling about this mission that he couldn‘t seem to shake.

The green light blinked on with a suddenness that startled even Urquhart. The co-pilot leaned out of the cockpit and shouted “Go go go!”

“All right, Brown, jump to it!” Urquhart roared. “Out the door!”

They seized the bundles, attached them to the static lines, and as they weighed a couple hundred pounds each, dragged them to the door. Urquhart kicked them out, one, two, three, four, and saw by the dim starlight their camouflaged silk parachutes blossom and catch the air. Urquhart and Brown hooked their own chutes to the static line and prepared to jump. Brown paused in the door.

“You first, lad,” Urquhart said.

“I’m scared, Captain,” Brown said.

Urquhart laughed. It didn’t reassure Brown. There was something cynical and dangerous in it. The captain had a bad reputation. Before he could decide what exactly it was, Urquhart had seized his wrists, kicked him in the small of the back, and knocked him out the open door. If you had to force a man to jump, it was always better to do it sooner rather than later; give them time, and they’ll brace themselves so tightly you’ll never get them through the door. Urquhart was only a moment after him.

The first second or two of a jump is a most disconcerting experience. There is a delay between you jumping and the parachute opening - or if it’s been packed sloppily, it may not open at all. So you free fall for a bit, and you’re not sure if your parachute is going to open, and your hand hovers by your reserve cord, and it takes every ounce of mental fortitude to keep from pulling it immediately, for if both chutes are deployed, you will surely die.

Urquhart felt the reassuring jolt as his main chute deployed and jerked him back like a roped calf in a western film. His hand relaxed, strayed from the reserve cord. They were jumping low, to avoid the radar, and the ground was but a second or two away. It was so dark he couldn’t see the earth rushing up to meet him. He hoped it wasn’t a stone wall topped with glass or a swamp or a stand of close-set pine trees, or he was truly fucked.

Urquhart struck hard, and instinctively rolled backwards so as not to break his legs. He sprawled ass-over head and staggered to his feet. Thankfully, he had landed on clear, mostly flat, and not-too-hard ground, and though he would be sore and bruised in a few hours, he was all right. He unsung the Sten, cocked the bolt, and set it on automatic fire. Unlike many of the other men, he didn’t carry a silenced machine carbine; automatic weapons were rather too inaccurate to trust in for a one-shot stop, and the integral silencer made the weapon prone to overheating. No, if he had to use the machine carbine it was because things had gone very bad, and he was probably fucked anyway. For mundane tasks like sentry removal, well, that’s what the .22 and the knife were for.

Now to find that bloody idiot Brown, he thought darkly.

As he walked, the Sten riding on his hip, he determined that he had landed in the midst of a large open clearing, either pasture or hay-field. He dared not call Brown’s name, not even this deep in the country. The resistance groups leaked like sieves, and there was always the strong possibility that one had been infiltrated. Coupled with his bad feeling, he was unwilling to take any unnecessary risks. The chances that he could make his way to the channel or the Pyrenees were slim, but he preferred slim to none.

After a couple minutes walk, he found Brown. He was wandering aimlessly, looking for Urquhart, his Sten slung. Urquhart locked the bolt and slung the Sten, then came up behind him, trapped Brown’s gun-hand at his side, put a hand over his mouth to keep him from crying out. Brown convulsed wildly, panicking. Urquhart could smell his fear. Brown wasn’t cut out for this sort of work, but he was all he had.

“It’s Urquhart, you bloody fool. Come on, we have to get out of here.”

Urquhart readied his machine carbine and set off, walking fast. Dawn wasn’t so very far off. Brown fell in behind him. They found an eight-foot-tall hedgerow, the stone-and-shrub barriers that the French had been using to enclose their fields since time immemorial. Following it, they came to a cut that led out of the field. The cloud cover had thinned, and by starlight Urquhart could make out a farmhouse and some outbuildings. There was a lighted lantern on the porch, beckoning them in.

Brown started straight for the farmhouse. Urquhart seized his rucksack and pulled him backwards, with force enough to lift him off his feet.

“You want to get us both caught, you stupid son of a bitch?” Urquhart hissed. “Not like that; you go around, and come in from the flank. Stay close to me and don’t make any noise.”

The outbuildings provided some cover for their approach. Urquhart skirted around behind them, bent low to the ground, the Sten cradled against his chest. It would take a sharp-eared sentry to hear them. They were running over soft, dew-damp grass, and they were traveling light, without entrenching tools or bayonets or half-empty canteens to rattle and clash and give them away. Where the outbuildings ran out, a drainage ditch started. Urquhart dashed the few exposed yards to it and skidded down into the ditch. There had been rain recently, the bottom of the ditch was mud, and his shoes were now soaked, but it was a good spot; when he bent low, only the top of his head protruded. Brown dropped down beside him, and they went off.

When they were beside the house, and perhaps twenty yards away, Urquhart paused.

“Wait until I’m at the house before you start over,“ he said. “Then run like bloody hell.”

Urquhart levered himself up and out of the ditch and raced to the side of the house. He collapsed against it, flattened himself against the fieldstone wall. He heard the shorter, less muscular Brown grunting and struggling to get over the lip of the ditch, was afraid for a moment he might be stuck, then that he might be overheard, but Brown managed it at last and came racing over to him. He was breathing heavily, and Urquhart had to tell him to be quiet.

“I‘m going around,” Urquhart said. “If you hear shooting, get the fuck out of here, I’ll meet up with you later. If I don’t, you know what to do. Escape, evade, and all that rot.”

Urquhart went around to the front of the house with his Sten at the ready. An old man and a young woman were sitting on a bench on the porch. The old man held the lantern and smiled as Urquhart came closer.

“Hallo, mon capitan,” the old man said.

“Bonjure,” Urquhart said.

The old man looked quizzically at him, and Urquhart knew he had mispronounced the word. It wasn’t that he didn’t know French, it was that his Scots accent tended to get in the way.

“The boys are bringing in the supplies,” the old man said in French. “We won’t be long.”

Urquhart blew out a long, deep sigh. The moment of greatest danger had passed.

“Take me to Monsieur de Saint-Palais."

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