René Bordelon, like Eve, is a fictional character based on a tiny scrap of historical truth. Profiteers like him certainly existed, and he became my bridge between the two wars and the two timelines. He also became the historically-nameless informer who passed the name of Oradour-sur-Glane to the Milice, and thus to the Nazis during World War II.
The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane’s inhabitants remains a mystery as well as a tragedy. Confusion and conflicting reports abound: an informant apparently reported to the Milice that French Resistance activity centered in the area had resulted in the kidnapping and execution of a German officer, but it isn’t known if the Resistance activity was centered in Oradour-sur-Glane or in nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres, or if it existed at all. It will probably never be known why the SS officer who handled the matter decided to massacre an entire village in reprisal (he received considerable censure from his German superiors afterward), or if a complete massacre was even his intent in the first place—there is some conjecture that Resistance explosives were already being stored in the Oradour-sur-Glane church, resulting in the explosion and fire that killed so many. The only thing certain in the fog of war is that the men of Oradour-sur-Glane were mostly rounded up and shot in barns and surrounding village buildings, while the women and children were herded into the church and killed. The outlying execution sites had some survivors, but only one survived the inferno at the church: Madame Rouffanche. I lifted the story of her escape almost word for word from her testimony at the 1953 trial where the surviving known SS officers who took part in the massacre were tried and condemned for their crimes. It is true that a young mother and her baby attempted to climb through the church window after Madame Rouffanche, and that they were killed by gunfire—it was, however, a local woman named Henriette Joyeux and her infant son, not the fictional Rose Fournier. The town of Oradour-sur-Glane stands empty to this day as an eerie ghost-town memorial: roofless bullet-scarred buildings, burned clocks permanently stopped at four in the afternoon, the rusted-out Peugeot permanently parked by the fairground. Madame Rouffanche lived nearby for the rest of her long life.
Finn Kilgore is fictional, though his experiences liberating the concentration camp at Belsen are lifted directly from the testimony of soldiers of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery who took part in the liberation. Charlie St. Clair and her family are also fictional, though the bleak situation faced by unmarried pregnant girls was nearly as dire in her day as it was in Eve’s. Abortions were illegal, but obtainable for women who were rich enough (like Charlie) to pay for a safe operation, or desperate enough (like Eve) to risk death rather than pregnancy. Many women in German-occupied territory faced such harsh choices in World War I—Aurélie le Four’s letters, begging God and her family to forgive her for choosing not to bear the child of her rapists, are heart-breaking. Eve would have faced even more disastrous consequences than unwed motherhood, given the historical double standard for women in the intelligence world. Spying at that time did not have the glamorous gloss it later achieved thanks to James Bond and Hollywood; it was not seen as a gentleman’s profession, much less a lady’s. If a woman had to dirty herself in spying she must keep her reputation intact, and great pains were taken to emphasize that female sources like Louise de Bettignies were still virtuous. “Coquettes they may have been, but prostitutes never,” a biographer of Louise wrote earnestly of the women in the Alice Network. “[They] never resorted to the customary feminine wiles to obtain information.” Women like Eve and Louise lived with harsher realities, but would have known very well that female spies were seen either as Madonnas or whores: stainless visions of purity like the martyred Edith Cavell, or sultry untrustworthy harlots like Mata Hari.
As always, I have taken some liberties with historical record, shifting some events and compressing others to serve the story. Car ferries like the one that transported Finn’s precious Lagonda to France existed in 1947, though I wasn’t able to verify there was such a ferry from Folkestone to Le Havre. Louise de Bettignies and Marguerite le Fran?ois were driven to Tournai for their interrogation before Marguerite’s release and Louise’s official arrest. There was a lapse of a few days after the trial in Brussels before the women were told their death sentences had been commuted to prison terms.
The matter of Louise’s conviction and what evidence the Germans had on her remains debatable. She refused to give away anything during her months of imprisonment; the Germans finally got her cellmate Mlle. Tellier to pass on some letters Louise had written, but it’s difficult to say if they got anything incriminating from those letters. I have arranged the existing conflicting reports to make a clearer climax, but Louise de Bettignies may have been convicted on very little hard evidence at all besides being caught with multiple identification cards while trying to sneak past a checkpoint on a borrowed pass.