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Nothing about Operation Torch had gone according to plan. General Giraud, whom Murphy was relying on to persuade his fellow officers not to resist, was still in Gibraltar with Eisenhower. A British destroyer steamed into the port of Algiers, accidentally blowing up petrol reservoirs, and retreated without disembarking any American troops. The British failed to deliver the weapons Murphy had promised the Resistance. One of the OSS vice-consuls, Donald Coster, was under arrest in Scotland, and the other eleven waited uselessly on the landing beaches as guides for troops who never arrived at the assigned rendezvous points. Yet Operation Torch, which Murphy admitted had been ‘a partial bluff’, worked. ‘Only a few hours after the first American and British troops hit the beaches near Algiers,’ Murphy wrote, ‘two of the highest-ranking French officers in Africa had personally arranged a local ceasefire, and this had been imposed almost without incident. They also had tentatively promised to arrange similar cease-fires throughout French Africa.’

With Algeria and Morocco in American hands, the politicking began among French officers–Generals de Gaulle and Giraud and Admiral Darlan–for control of the liberated French territory. The crucial consideration for the French was that they retain sovereignty in North Africa, which ruled out an American military government. The Americans lacked local expertise and had no personnel who spoke Arabic or Berber and only a few who knew French. The administration continued as before, with Vichy officials governing the Arab and Berber inhabitants. Commerce resumed, and Charles Bedaux saw no reason to abandon the pipeline. It would be just as useful to the Free French and the Americans as it would have been to Vichy and the Germans. When the battle ended, the first thing Bedaux did was to lobby Robert Murphy to give his scheme the full support of the American government.

The Allied invasion of Algeria and Morocco was not the only good news that Drue Tartière received in her Vittel hospital bed on 8 November. Later that afternoon, Dr von Weber told her, ‘I am sending word to Berlin that I think it advisable you be sent to Paris.’ He would discharge her in three or four weeks. ‘Aren’t you happy?’ ‘Not especially, ’ she said. When he asked her why not, she responded, ‘Well, I am sorry for you, because now you are kaput.’

Dr. Lévy and Dr. Pigache, who were standing at the foot of the bed, looked as if they would collapse. The red-haired English sister giggled. Von Weber looked at me in surprise and answered, ‘That’s where you make a big mistake. This war has just reached its normal plane, and it can go on now for five years.’

When von Weber left, the red-haired nun said, ‘Five years, the old fool.’ Dr Lévy reprimanded Drue for taunting the Prussian and reminded her, ‘He is a very dangerous man.’ Lévy protected Drue, putting blood-soaked rags in her bed before von Weber’s visits.

A few nights later, Drue and the other patients in the hospital heard the thunder of engines streaking across the sky. When the internees realized that RAF bomber squadrons were flying over Vittel on their way to targets in Germany, they turned on all the lights in their hotels, waved to the planes overhead and cheered wildly. From the British women’s rooms came the strident singing of ‘God Save the King’. Prison guards shouted and fired into the air to make the women turn out the lights and be quiet. The English and American internees hurled pots and pans down at the Germans while cheering the bombardiers. In the hospital’s corridor, Dr Monteith danced a Highland fling with Mother Mary de la Providence. Dr Lévy was also celebrating, until he saw Drue rushing around in her nightgown. He ordered her back to bed. If Dr von Weber saw her on her feet, she would never get to Paris. Finally, the Germans turned off the electricity, and the women went to bed. But, at one o’clock in the morning, the planes cruised overhead on their way home. The women celebrated again. ‘We were sadder now, though,’ Drue