in the fall of 1941, he had been betrayed, arrested, and tortured at Avenue Foch, and later imprisoned at Fresnes. After a month in solitary confinement there, he was put aboard a train—a cattle car, more like—bound for one of the German death camps. He had managed to escape from that train in the chaos of an air raid, and despite a shattered kneecap he’d made his way across France mostly on foot (though he had once been rolled up in an oriental carpet and stuck in the boot of an old roadster).
He had finally returned to England in a fishing boat in March of 1942, and among his SOE colleagues he was rightfully regarded as a miracle man. Robbins was the obvious person to instruct us in the art of keeping alive by the seat of one’s pants, and so he accompanied us to Mallaig in the Scottish highlands, where SOE had a paramilitary school.
The men training at Mallaig were all adventurers and opportunists whose brains would otherwise have been squandered in the military, and the women were generally educated abroad and spoke at least four languages apiece. Something else you would have noticed is this: although they were seldom beautiful in the conventional sense (cleft chins, mousy hair, frog eyes), they each possessed that je ne sais quoi that prevented any man from ever refusing them anything. If one of these girls asked a man for a fag and he was down to his last he’d hand it to her without hesitation, even with the knowledge that his ration was up for the week. Their brains were essential, of course, but their charisma was even more valuable. Charm is not a virtue—I’d learned that the hard way long ago—but for once I could put my own to work for a worthy cause.
To call the first day of training “grueling” would be a hideous understatement. I pretended not to notice the resentful glances of the other women recruits, who saw that I was not scratched, bruised, and breathless after a daylong slog through the mountains like they were. I often caught Major Robbins looking at me too—in open admiration. No nettles in my hair, no dirt or blood on my elbows.
Over the following days we were shown how to dump sugar in the Nazi gas tanks and how to deploy an exploding candlestick without losing a hand. We scaled walls and fences and had target practice for hours on end. Much of what we were learning was already familiar to me, stealth tactics and suchlike, but even the boys grimaced at the prospect of using wire garrotes and street-fighting like a pack of rogue Chinamen. We were also presented with a prototype of the infamous truth drug and taught the various means of administering it. I didn’t think I’d be needing any of that, but the knowledge still proved useful in the end.
I sailed through those three weeks. After all, my instincts were sharper and my aim surer than any ordinary recruit’s. The other women agents began to grumble to our instructors that I was getting special treatment, which was perhaps to be expected—for success, quoth Mr. Bierce, is the one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Our instructors merely answered that they would do well to follow my example—if they could.
They told us stories that were meant to keep us vigilant, if only to avoid providing them with yet another horror story to tell future recruits: the man who ordered a café noir when café noir was all they served, what with milk being rationed; the unfortunate agent who hid in a madhouse in Kraków, only to find that all the inmates were scheduled for euthanasia.
Other anecdotes were meant to inspire us: the American agent with a wooden leg who had already parachuted into Lyons and had quickly proved herself one of the SOE’s greatest assets, or the ultimate determination of the Jewish agent who got plastic surgery to make his features appear more Aryan. And of course there was Major Robbins, whose bravery and razor wit had proved his salvation.
Robbins gave lectures nearly every day, and he often assisted the
He had finally returned to England in a fishing boat in March of 1942, and among his SOE colleagues he was rightfully regarded as a miracle man. Robbins was the obvious person to instruct us in the art of keeping alive by the seat of one’s pants, and so he accompanied us to Mallaig in the Scottish highlands, where SOE had a paramilitary school.
The men training at Mallaig were all adventurers and opportunists whose brains would otherwise have been squandered in the military, and the women were generally educated abroad and spoke at least four languages apiece. Something else you would have noticed is this: although they were seldom beautiful in the conventional sense (cleft chins, mousy hair, frog eyes), they each possessed that je ne sais quoi that prevented any man from ever refusing them anything. If one of these girls asked a man for a fag and he was down to his last he’d hand it to her without hesitation, even with the knowledge that his ration was up for the week. Their brains were essential, of course, but their charisma was even more valuable. Charm is not a virtue—I’d learned that the hard way long ago—but for once I could put my own to work for a worthy cause.
To call the first day of training “grueling” would be a hideous understatement. I pretended not to notice the resentful glances of the other women recruits, who saw that I was not scratched, bruised, and breathless after a daylong slog through the mountains like they were. I often caught Major Robbins looking at me too—in open admiration. No nettles in my hair, no dirt or blood on my elbows.
Over the following days we were shown how to dump sugar in the Nazi gas tanks and how to deploy an exploding candlestick without losing a hand. We scaled walls and fences and had target practice for hours on end. Much of what we were learning was already familiar to me, stealth tactics and suchlike, but even the boys grimaced at the prospect of using wire garrotes and street-fighting like a pack of rogue Chinamen. We were also presented with a prototype of the infamous truth drug and taught the various means of administering it. I didn’t think I’d be needing any of that, but the knowledge still proved useful in the end.
I sailed through those three weeks. After all, my instincts were sharper and my aim surer than any ordinary recruit’s. The other women agents began to grumble to our instructors that I was getting special treatment, which was perhaps to be expected—for success, quoth Mr. Bierce, is the one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Our instructors merely answered that they would do well to follow my example—if they could.
They told us stories that were meant to keep us vigilant, if only to avoid providing them with yet another horror story to tell future recruits: the man who ordered a café noir when café noir was all they served, what with milk being rationed; the unfortunate agent who hid in a madhouse in Kraków, only to find that all the inmates were scheduled for euthanasia.
Other anecdotes were meant to inspire us: the American agent with a wooden leg who had already parachuted into Lyons and had quickly proved herself one of the SOE’s greatest assets, or the ultimate determination of the Jewish agent who got plastic surgery to make his features appear more Aryan. And of course there was Major Robbins, whose bravery and razor wit had proved his salvation.
Robbins gave lectures nearly every day, and he often assisted the
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