That night, the taxis of Marnes delivered four thousand reinforcements who turned the tide and saved Paris and, for all anybody knew, France.
Odile wanted Luc to know.
After that night, Odile stayed at the front for weeks, helping the nurses, doing whatever she could for the wounded boys. She stayed until some kind of fever almost killed her. Exhausted and shocked by the calamities of war, she limped back to Ruac and allowed her mother to tuck her into her old bed, where under the soft covers she sobbed for the first time in years.
Her father came to talk to her when he was assured she wouldn’t break down. He wasn’t one for feminine emotions. He had only two gruff questions for her: ‘Are you ready to join us now? Are you prepared to take the initiation?’
She’d seen enough of the outside world to last a lifetime. Ruac was far from the madness of the trenches.
‘I’m ready,’ she answered.
War came again soon enough.
This time the Germans were more successful invaders and as occupiers of all of France the villagers of Ruac couldn’t avoid them. Bonnet was now the mayor. His father, the previous mayor, had passed away as the Second World War began.
The new mayor wrote out his father’s death certificate with the old man’s thick fountain pen, falsifying the date of birth, as the previous mayor had done for generations. And his father was duly buried in the village plot, which had surprisingly few stones considering its antiquity.
Furthermore, comporting with their custom, the stones had the name of the deceased only. There were no chiselled dates of birth or death, and since the plot was tucked away, down a lane through a private farm, no one seemed to notice the oddity.
Ruac village formed its own maquis group, which was under the Resistance umbrella but loosely so. De Gaulle’s staff in Algeria tried to inject some order into the effort and assigned the code name Squad 70 to Bonnet’s gang and passed coded messages to them from time to time. In the dead of night, they would meet in their underground hideout where the mayor would preside and Dr Pelay would act as his deputy. Bonnet would always repeat: ‘These are our priorities: Ruac first, Ruac second, Ruac third.’ And one person would always draw a laugh by concluding, ‘And France fourth.’
Odile’s experience in the previous war put her in good stead with the maquisard and her father reluctantly allowed her to participate in some of their raids alongside her brother, Jacques. Both of them were strong and healthy, quick and athletic. And if Bonnet hadn’t given his permission, Odile would have run off and joined another maquis band anyway.
Bonnet and Dr Pelay made a good pair. Bonnet was a man of few words, but decisive. Pelay was more of a talker, and the people in the village knew that when they went to his surgery he’d chew their ear off. Their maquis soon had a reputation for effectiveness and complete ruthlessness. They were said to engage the boche with an almost superhuman ferocity and cruelty. Squad 70 was known to turn their Nazi victims into unrecognisable hunks of bloody flesh and the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which was tasked with suppressing the Dordogne, feared this particular maquis group above all the others.
In one of their more notable escapades, Bonnet got it in his head that his band would be responsible for the retaliation for a massacre of French civilians from the nearby village of Saint-Julian. A Panzer unit had surrounded the town looking for maquis elements suspected to be hiding in the surrounding forests. All the men in the village were rounded up and gathered into the grounds of the village school. Information on collaborators was demanded. When none was given, all seventeen men, including a fourteen-year-old boy holding his father’s hand, were executed with bullets to the back of their heads.
Two weeks later, a group of eighty-two Germans were captured by the maquisard fifty kilometres west of Bergerac and were transported en masse to the Davoust Military Barracks in Bergerac, a Resistance stronghold.
On a Sunday, Bonnet and Pelay entered the barracks and under false pretenses took seventeen German prisoners from their cells. They were loaded into trucks driven by men from Ruac who snarled and verbally tortured their prisoners with what was going to happen to them during the trip from Bergerac to Saint-Julian.
By the time the Germans were assembled in the same schoolyard where the civilians had been massacred, the prisoners knew their fate and were incontinent with terror. The presence of Odile, a pretty woman, did nothing for their spirits because she was, like the men, wielding a long-handled axe. Bonnet personally addressed the condemned men, raging at them for their crimes and told them they were going to suffer before they died.
And in an orgy of axe blows, starting with arms and legs, all seventeen men were summarily hacked to death.
Word eventually came to Bonnet that Squad 70 had attracted the attention of the leadership of the Free French Army and General de Gaulle himself. A personal audience was desired. Bonnet hated to travel. He sent Dr Pelay to Algiers and the man spent a giddy time being feted by the co-presidents of the French Committee of National Liberation, Generals de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, who lauded the work of the Ruac Squad, the fiercest of the maquisard in France.
Pelay came back with a medal, which Odile thought ought to go to her father, but instead Pelay wore it proudly on his vest every day of his life.
In July 1944 Bonnet and Pelay disappeared for a week to liaise with a group of maquisard commanders in Lyon and when they returned they informed the group of a big action planned for the night of 26 July. If all went well, a lot of boche would be killed and a lot of money could be made.
First Bonnet told them what their role in the attack was supposed to be.
Then he told them what they’d be doing instead.
Odile and the Ruac gang hid in the woods by the railway track. To this day she remembered the pounding in her chest as the train approached. It was only early evening, still light. She and everyone would have preferred the cover of darkness but they had no control over Nazi train schedules.
Ahead, sixty kilos of picratol had been placed under an aqueduct. The Ruac squad had one machine gun and two automatic rifles among them. Everyone else, including Odile, had pistols. Hers was a Polish Vis, an old nine-millimetre handgun that jammed with regularity. Her father and brother had grenades.
The locomotive, on its way from Lyon to Bordeaux, passed their position and Odile started counting box cars. She got to five when the explosion ripped through the locomotive. The train came to a macabre halt, cars buckling against each other. A sliding door opened in front of their position and a trio of dazed German soldiers, bruised and confused from the impact, stared into her eyes. She began to fire her entire eight-shot magazine at them from no more than ten paces. She saw her bullets strike home and felt a frisson of excitement each time an exit wound splashed blood.
She heard her father say, ‘Good work.’
The Ruac squad secured the last two box cars while other bands hit the front cars. The plan was to offload all the contents to heavy lorries standing at a lay-by which would transfer the loot to Resistance headquarters in Lyon.
Bonnet had other ideas. The Ruac box cars were filled with bank notes, gold bars and one thin crate stencilled with a provocative notation: FOR DELIVERY TO R EICHSMARSCHALL G OERING.
He and Pelay lobbed grenades into the woods to give the impression there was a pitched battle going on at the rear. In the confusion, every blood-spattered box and crate from those two cars found their way to transport vans driven by members of the Ruac maquis.