The Girl You Left Behind

‘I think this means we are being singled out. I think this is the
Kommandant
’s doing.’
    ‘That is what I don’t
     like,’ she said.
    ‘Also – listen – I cannot hear the
     guns. We must be moving away from the Front. This is good, surely?’
    We limped to the back of the truck, and I
     helped her aboard, scratching the back of my neck. I had begun to itch, detected lice
     beneath my clothing. I tried to ignore them. It had to be a good sign that we had been
     removed from the train. ‘Have faith,’ I said, and squeezed her arm.
     ‘If nothing else we have room to move our legs at last.’
    A young guard climbed in at the back, and
     glared at us. I tried to smile, to reassure him that I was unlikely to attempt to
     escape, but he looked at me with disgust, andplaced his rifle
     between us like a warning. I realized then that I, too, probably smelt unwashed, that
     forced into such close proximity my own hair might soon be crawling with insects, and I
     busied myself with searching my clothing and picking out those I found.
    The truck pulled away and Liliane winced at
     every jolt. Within a few miles she had fallen asleep again, exhausted by pain. My own
     head throbbed, and I was grateful that the guns seemed to have stopped.
Have
     faith,
I willed us both silently.
    We were almost an hour on the open road, the
     winter sun slowly dipping behind the distant mountains, the verges glinting with ice
     crystals, when the tarpaulin flipped up, revealing a flash of road sign. I must have
     been mistaken, I thought. I leaned forward, lifting the edge of the flap so that I might
     not miss the next, squinting against the light. And there it was.
    Mannheim.
    The world seemed to stop around me.
    ‘Liliane?’ I whispered, and
     shook her awake. ‘Liliane. Look out. What do you see?’ The truck had slowed
     to make its way around some craters, so as she peered out I knew she must see it.
    ‘We are meant to be going
     south,’ I said. ‘South to Ardennes.’ Now I could see that the shadows
     were behind us. We were driving east, and had been for some time. ‘But
     Édouard is in Ardennes.’ I couldn’t keep the panic from my voice.
     ‘I had word that he was there. We were meant to be going south to Ardennes.
     South.’
    Liliane let the flap drop. When she spoke,
     she didn’tlook at me. Her face had leached of the little
     colour it had had left. ‘Sophie, we can no longer hear the guns because we have
     crossed the Front,’ she said dully. ‘We are going into Germany.’

24
    The train hums with good cheer. A group of
     women at the far end of Carriage Fourteen bursts into peals of noisy laughter. A
     middle-aged couple in the seats opposite, perhaps on the way home from some celebratory
     Christmas trip, have bedecked themselves in tinsel. The racks are bulging with
     purchases, the air thick with the scents of seasonal food – ripe cheeses, wine,
     expensive chocolate. But for Mo and Liv the journey back to England is subdued. They sit
     in the carriage in near silence; Mo’s hangover has lasted all day, and must
     apparently be remedied with more small, overpriced bottles of wine. Liv reads and
     re-reads her notes, translating word by word with her little English–French dictionary
     balanced on her tray-table.
    The plight of Sophie Lefèvre has cast a
     long shadow over the trip. She feels haunted by the fate of the girl she had always
     thought of as glowingly triumphant. Had she really been a collaborator? What had become
     of her?
    A steward pushes a trolley down the aisle,
     offering more drinks and sugary snacks. She is so lost in Sophie’s life that she
     barely looks up. The world of absent husbands, of longing, of near starvation and fear
     of the Germans seems suddenly more real to her than this one. She smells the woodsmoke
     in Le Coq Rouge, hears the sound of feet on the floor. Every time she closes her eyes,her painting morphs into the terrified face of Sophie
     Lefèvre, hauled by soldiers into a waiting truck, disowned by the family she
     loved.
    The pages are brown, fragile and draw
     moisture from her fingertips. There are early letters from Édouard to Sophie, when
     he joins the Régiment d’Infanterie and she moves to St Péronne to be
     with her sister. Édouard misses her so much, he writes, that some nights he can
     barely breathe. He tells her that he conjures her in his head, paints pictures of her in
     the cold air. In her writings, Sophie envies her