Behind Enemy Lines by Marthe Cohn

Author:Marthe Cohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419880
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

An Unlikely Spy

My work as the most unlikely of spies officially began on January 20, 1945. I was assigned to the Commandos d’Afrique, the first French unit to land on the Mediterranean coast. It was a legendary unit, which had fought the Germans throughout North Africa under General Bethouart and had participated in the liberation battles throughout Tunisia, Italy, and France. I was deeply honored.

On a bitingly cold January night when temperatures dropped below zero, Lieutenant Verin took me to Cernay in the Vosges Mountains, where the commandos were holed up in the basement of the abandoned St. André mental hospital after a day of heavy fighting. During the course of that day alone, 189 of their men had been killed and 192 wounded. They were shattered.

Lieutenant Verin, who was in much thicker clothes than I, drove me there in a jeep. The blackout meant that he couldn’t use his headlights, so he had to have the windshield down to see the road in the pitch-dark. I was in civilian clothes, with the labels removed for security, half frozen, my little suitcase at my feet. I had no idea where we were heading or whether I’d be going straight across enemy lines. My brain was so numb with cold, I couldn’t even produce enough energy to be afraid.

Arriving at the asylum, we stumbled our way down into the huge basement in the dark. Verin had no flashlight, so he struck some matches and picked our way through hundreds of exhausted commandos sleeping on the floor. Waking a few and asking for Major Marcel Rigaud, we were directed to a large man laid out cold on a stretcher. Verin shook him by the shoulder and he sat up and blinked at us.

“I’ve brought you Mademoiselle Lenôtre,” Verin informed the major.

Rigaud looked at me vaguely, said, “Find somewhere to sit,” and promptly fell straight back to sleep.

Verin found two metal chairs and we sat side by side, waiting for the morning. I don’t think I’d ever been so uncomfortable in my life. There was nowhere to escape the cold. My teeth were chattering and spasms of shivering racked me. I had a bad chest infection and was coughing repeatedly above the cacophony of heavy snoring all around. The chairs were hard, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down. Slowly, in the darkness, I shuffled around and felt a thin mattress on which I put my feet to lift them off the icy floor. Gradually, as I became increasingly tired, I shuffled nearer and nearer to the mattress, until I was so exhausted I just slid off my chair and lay down upon it.

I knew there had to be a soldier asleep on the rest of the mattress somewhere in the darkness, but I didn’t care. I put my head where his feet were and my feet where his head was and I lay there, shivering. With my numb fingers I reached out and found that he also had a thin horsehair blanket over him.

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