Louise was on the tarmac at one a.m., wide-awake, prepared and ready to do whatever was necessary. She was fearless, and one of their best nurses. They sent two other nurses in with her, one of the Australian girls and a British nurse she had worked with before. They were briefed on their mission by an officer on the tarmac. They were going to be parachuted in with two corpsmen, and it was made clear to them how dangerous the mission was. She didn’t hesitate to accept it nonetheless. They headed toward France once they took off. The pilot flew low and made the drop successfully, and all three nurses and the two corpsmen headed immediately toward the agreed-upon meeting point, which was a farmhouse in the Maritime Alps. It took them three hours walking over rough terrain to get there. Louise and the others were quiet along the way. They were carrying nothing that could identify them as British military, and they all knew that they would be shot as spies if they got caught. Only Louise and the Australian nurse and one of the corpsmen spoke French, but none of them well enough to pass as natives.
Louise could feel her heart pound as the farmhouse came into view. It was an old stone house with a barn in the back. There were sheep and goats in the front yard, and a dog barked as they approached. The two corpsmen walked ahead of the nurses, and a youngish man in overalls came out of the house smoking a cigarette and carrying a shovel, which identified him as their contact.
“We’re here to see your grandfather,” the corpsman said in French. They looked like visitors, and each of them was wearing a small backpack with the medical supplies they needed. The nine Resistance fighters they were coming to see had been injured in an explosion when they blew up a train carrying German troops two days earlier. Many of the German soldiers had been killed, along with several officers. Two of the Resistance fighters were gravely injured. They had been supplying vital information to the British, and had to be gotten out of France as quickly as possible, but several of them were too damaged to transport, and would surely be tortured and killed if left behind. Their leader was critically wounded, and he couldn’t be moved.
The young man led the way to a shed behind the barn as the visitors threaded their way through the livestock in the front yard. All of them were on the alert for any unexpected, suspicious movements, but there were none as they walked into the dark, dusty shed, cluttered with rusting farm equipment. The young Frenchman was quick to push away the dirt on the floor, and a trapdoor appeared. The two corpsmen silently helped him, and all of them disappeared below it. The men put the trapdoor back in place over their heads, then descended a staircase down a narrow tunnel, and they found themselves in a well-lit room filled with men. There was another room beyond it. The air was stale and heavy with cigarette smoke and sweat. A generator was keeping the room lit, and there were air vents above them, concealed by bushes on the farm. It was a serious operation, and looked astonishingly efficient. It had been a command post of the Resistance for the southern region for most of the war, and the Germans had never found it, although they had tried.
There were a dozen men in the room, and two women, and one of the women explained in better than adequate English that the most injured men were in the room beyond, and one of them had been unconscious since that morning. They had to be in good enough condition to move on by the next day. Six of the men in the main room and one of the two women were identified as the victims of the explosion. The nurses examined them immediately and found them all to be suffering from severe burns under their clothing—burns that hadn’t been cleaned or tended to, for lack of anything to dress them with. None of them complained as the two nurses and one corpsman treated them. One of the men had lost a finger, which was an ugly wound.
Louise headed quickly into the back room with the other corpsman. There was a man lying unconscious on an old mattress, and a teenage boy lying on a blanket with a nasty abdominal wound. He had been close to the explosion. His wound was infected and he had a raging fever. Louise understood immediately that they were at the heart of the Resistance and the unconscious man on the mattress was their leader. She wondered if he would even survive long enough to worry about the Germans capturing him. But whatever happened, the Nazis would surely kill the others.
She knelt beside the unconscious man and opened the bag she had brought with her. The corpsman was dealing with the boy, who moaned when his wound was dressed, and then the corpsman left the room to join the others. The boy looked a little better by then.
Louise opened the leader’s clothes and saw that there was shrapnel embedded in his chest and arms. While he slept, she removed it with the instruments she’d brought, taking advantage of the fact that he was unconscious. She cleaned the wounds and dressed them, and put antibiotic powder in the wounds. She gave him two injections to help fight the infection, and she started an IV of antibiotics. She examined the rest of his body, and found a bullet wound in his calf, which she dressed as well. The soles of his shoes were bare, and his clothes were tattered from the explosion. He had minor burns as well. Carefully, she cleaned him up, bandaged what she could, and sat silently beside him and waited for him to wake up. One of the men from the Resistance came in to check on him several times and was satisfied with what Louise was doing. She seemed like a very competent nurse and had wasted no time treating him.