Liberation by Ellie Midwood

Author:Ellie Midwood [Midwood, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-06T07:00:00+00:00

Lyon, May 1943

Philippe nudged Marcel slightly with his elbow when their new “superior,” René Hardy, who everyone knew under the name of Didot, a gaunt red-haired man of about thirty years old, demonstrated to the group to which they now belonged how to derail a train without using explosives.

“Now, just like you, comrades, I’m an ordinary working man, and I don’t care for all that British fancy-pancy work with bombs and detonators. We don’t have access to them most of the time anyway. But what we can do is derail a few trains and kill a few Boches just with a few skillful movements of our own two hands, and I say, it’s the best way to do it.”

He proceeded to quickly sketch something right on the wall with chalk, as the men peered at his sketch eagerly. They were gathered in a small repair shop near the Perrache railway station – not too far from the local Gestapo headquarters, and such blatant insolence seemed to fill every single member of the group with gleeful joy. They were all ordinary cheminots – railway workers, with a few résistants on the run – communists like Philippe and Marcel mostly, for Hardy didn’t trust anyone who didn’t belong to the working class.

Hardy was a true patriot and a Resistance hero, according to their comrade Patrice at least, who vouched for the couple before Hardy. Hardy had built the entire network of “railway résistants” and soon became a veritable thorn in the side of the Germans, who kept losing their men to stupid accidents, and their freight trains in the wrong direction.

“All you have to do is switch labels on them,” Hardy explained with a canny grin. Philippe took an instant liking to the man.

Hardy also took an instant liking to Philippe after he learned that Philippe’s cell was behind quite a few train sabotages in Dijon a year ago, even though he did scoff at their affiliation with the SOE.

Marcel and Hardy also got along rather well after Marcel commented that the sabotage in the form that Hardy had proposed would be much more beneficial for the French people than bombing, which the allies had seemed to adopt lately. Hardy nodded several times with great enthusiasm and thoroughly shook Marcel’s hand.

“I was just speaking with General Delestraint about this,” Hardy started in an impassionate voice. Philippe scowled slightly, revealing his disbelief. He had already realized that Hardy was a bit of a fabulist and had a habit of prescribing himself qualities and attributes which he didn’t always possess. For instance, not only did Hardy proclaim himself the leading saboteur of the whole of France but claimed that he had graduated from the Saint-Cyr top of his class and that he had engineered railroads, no less. For some reason, all these tall tales made Philippe seriously doubt that Hardy had access to anyone remotely as important as General Delestraint who, he knew from Etienne, had been recently put in charge of the whole Secret Army.

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