Page 73 of The Paris Agent
“There,” Romilly whispered, pointing with her free hand. She’d spotted a cattle trough just a few dozen feet from the train line.
“But how do we bring it back for them?”
“Take this,” one of the women in the carriage muttered reluctantly, and the women worked together to pass her empty canteen to Romilly and me at the door. “Take some water to the men then refill it and bring it back. I will share it with you as we travel.”
“If we get shot doing this...” Romilly muttered uneasily, as we began the exceedingly awkward process of climbing down from the carriage, still shacked at the ankles and wrists.
“Then we will die knowing we were doing our best,” I said flatly. I heard the sigh she tried to swallow, but soon we were scrambling toward the trough, our footsteps in sync so the shackle didn’t slow us down any more than it had to. We quickly drank a few handfuls of water ourselves, then filled the canteen and made our way back up the slope to the other carriage. The women from our carriage were pouring out now, making their way down to the water.
“Please go as quickly as you can,” I called to them anxiously. They ignored me, continuing down to the trough, and I was relieved by the sound of more planes overhead. The Allies were unlikely to shoot at innocent civilians, and the soldiers were unlikely to return while the air raid was still active. Would this be my chance to escape? Perhaps. But first, I had to help those men.
“Sir?” I called, as we approached the other carriage. “I have water—”
The door slid open, and I couldn’t hide my shock at what was inside. There were only eight of them, but these were airmen—American and British by the looks of their tattered, bloodstained uniforms. The men were filthy. Their faces were marked with dirt, their eyes sunken and hollow...their lips cracked and bleeding. Two men were unconscious or worse, and the other six were shackled to the ground. They leaned toward us anyway, as if so desperately thirsty that they just wanted to be as close to the water as they could get.
“Here,” I said urgently, passing the canteen to the man at the front. “Just a few sips, then pass it on. When it runs out, we’ll refill it and bring it back. As long as we have the time, you’ll get a second turn.”
But by the time the canteen was empty, other women from the carriage had their fill of water. Romilly and I stood beside the open door of the men’s carriage to talk to Captain Jock Mendleson, the man who’d called for help, while other women went down to refill the canteen for the men a second time.
“We’re done for,” he said heavily, staring at the floor of the carriage. “This isn’t how you treat a prisoner of war. This is how you treat someone you’re going to execute.”
“You can’t know that, Captain,” I scolded him. “If they were going to execute you, you’d most likely be dead already. Hasn’t the war brought twists and turns to your life already? Perhaps the next twist will bring the end of it. Perhaps you’ll be home with your loved ones before you know it.”
Now that the men had been able to have a few sips from the canteen, the urgency was gone when the woman from my carriage returned with it a second time. The men savored the water now, sipping it slowly, sighing with contentment as the moisture drained over their parched throats. Jock took his second pass at the canteen, then handed it to one of his companions as he looked to me again.
“What did you do to get yourselves captured?”
“Resistance work,” Romilly said.
“I’m a spy,” I told him, and his eyes widened in surprise. “France is riddled with British spies—men, women—all ages, all backgrounds. The war is far from over, and you are far from doomed.” And then I told him about the success at D-day, and the circumstances of my own capture at Salon-La-Tour...my regret at the decision to travel by car.
“But it is what it is,” I said, shrugging, as I tried to keep the conversation positive. “And now we just have to get through each day until we can escape or the Allies liberate us.”
“The guards are coming back!” one of the women shouted. I looked around—wondering if it was too late for Romilly and me to make a run for it, but she was standing beside me staring at the ground. If I were on my own, perhaps I could have run. My ankle still ached sometimes but was healing.
But I could never escape shackled to another woman if she weren’t in the right frame of mind to accept the risk, and I didn’t need to ask Romilly to know that she wasn’t.
I gave the American men one last determined look and a whisper of good luck, before they slid the door closed. Slow as we were, Romilly and I were still the fastest on our feet, so we rushed back to refill the canteen one last time. When I handed the full canteen back to its rightful owner, an older woman who seemed far too frail to have run down the hill herself, she caught my hand.
“My mother used to say that even in the worst of times, we must look for ways to do good,” she said quietly. “I think I had forgotten until just now. So thank you.”
I felt Giles with me in that moment. This was the spirit with which he’d lived his entire life, and it was how I too could find meaning, whatever came next, even with all of my fear for my son and my uncertainty about my own future.
C?H?A?P?T?E?R23
JOSIE
Pforzheim Prison, Germany
September, 1944
I tried not to mark the passing of time, but that window meant that I had no way to ignore it. I had seen the end of spring from that cell and had watched summer pass.
One day, a guard came to my door. They usually changed over my waste bucket in the morning so I pushed myself off the bed and picked it up to hand it to him, following the same routine I’d had for months. This time, the guard shook his head in and motioned for me to follow him. Stunned, I took a wobbly step out the door.
“What is the date?” I blurted.
“13 September,” he said curtly.
