Four Times Peggy and Susan Did Not Shoot Things (and the one time they did)
Susan Pevensie, Peggy Carter and the four times they did not shoot fascists, and the one time they did. A relationship spanning decades that is marked by lipstick, cabbage, coffee, spying, and scotch
Written for the Narnia Fic Exchange for guardyangel
Inspired by Narnians Assemble!, Rat And Sword Go To War, and Susan And Peggy Go Shooting (Again), all by Rthstewart.
Rating: Teen
Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Crossover: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia; Agent Carter (TV) Captain America (Movies) Marvel Cinematic Universe
Characters: Susan Pevensie, Peggy Carter, Edmund Pevensie, Original Characters
Additional Tags: World War II; Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence; Crossovers & Fandom Fusions; Alternate Universe-rthverse Original Character Death(s); Spies & Secret
Words: 11146 Chapters
Live links to research are in the version of this story posted to Archive Of Our Own
Chapter 1: 12 June 1944, somewhere between Oradour-sur-Glane and Saint-Amand-Montrond.
There is cabbage, lipstick and spying but no coffee or scotch (but there is wine).
On 12 June 1944, somewhere between Oradour-sur-Glane and Saint-Amand-Montrond, Mademoiselle Marguerite Bernard and Mademoiselle Jeanne-Louise Lambert take a ride in a mule cart on 12 June 1944.
From the seat of the mule-drawn cart loaded with onions and cabbages, Marguerite waved to the soldiers as their armored column lumbered by. She mimed smoking, hoping for a cigarette. Next to her in the cart, Jeanne smiled, waved at the jeering, flirting soldiers of the 2nd SS-Panzerdivision Das Reich and then gestured to her pregnant stomach. The soldiers perched atop their tanks waved back. The flags and armbands made clear who they were - Das Reich was an armored division of the military arm of the Schutzstaffel - the SS.
"They are so good at killing," Marguerite - Codenamed Dancer - muttered quietly to Jeanne - Codenamed Rat. Das Reich was heading north to the Normandy beaches to slaughter Allied troops that had landed barely a week ago.
"I hope they don't notice that you aren't actually pregnant, Jeanne." Marguerite's French was with a heavy Provençal accent.
"Or that you do not actually smoke, Marguerite?" Jeanne's own accent had become more difficult to pinpoint after so many months in northern France. She thought it was still some part Pays de la Loire with a recent sheen of Normandie.
"Au revoir!" they called at the retreating backs of the last of the column. A staff car with many men with SS armbands and flags honked and roared by.
Still, they waited long enough by the side of the road that the mule, Amélie, stomped her foot and shook her long ears. They were fortunate the Nazis hadn't requisitioned her and hauled her off to starve to death in Belgium. At least mules could eat grass. The French weren't so fortunate.
Slowly, the sounds of engines, treads on gravel, and grinding gears faded and the trees around them ceased quivering. They were again by themselves on a French country road.
"Did you get the armored numbers?" Marguerite asked.
"I was too busy flirting with butchers," Jeanne replied, lifting her skirt to show where she had been keeping a tally of the tanks and armored cars on the inside of her leg with a grease pencil. "Did you get the number of men?"
Marguerite opened the hand that had not been waving to show a clicker.
Jeanne gently slapped the reins on Amélie's rump and the stolid mule stepped back on to the track. She clicked her tongue, "Hut! Hut!", and the mule plodded forward.
Marguerite scooted over on the benched seat of the cart and rapped it with her knuckles. "Toc, toc Lieutenant!"
A hinge in the seat of the cart slowly opened and the Lieutenant's head popped out from the compartment. "They gone?"
"They are," Marguerite replied, in British English.
Jeanne moved to the other side of the seat so that the American flyer could unfold himself from the hiding place, built into the front of the cart and part of the undercarriage.
He was thin enough that they'd padded his hips and chest and dressed him in a skirt, blouse, wig, colour on his lips, and long scarf. They couldn't keep him shaved long enough for the disguise to be especially effective but it had passed muster at night and at a distance.
"It was the SS Panzers?" the airman asked.
"Das Reich," Jeanne replied.
"Nazi cocksuckers," he gritted out, then looked a little embarrassed. "Excuse me, ladies."
"The reports are that that division hung nearly 100 men in Tulle on Tuesday and the next day went to Oradour-sur-Glane and killed hundreds of civilians. They burned a church down with women and children in it. You may call them whatever you like," Marguerite said.
"One woman made it out of the church," Jeanne added, clutching the reins tightly in her hands. "We're still searching for any survivors among the men and trying to count the dead."
"It looked like to me to be about 500 dead. I was on a bicycle and got close enough to see a crucified baby," the flyer said soberly. He muttered another, even more vile, and wholly appropriate, curse.
There was war. And then there were war crimes. There was no question in Jeanne's mind which these atrocities in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane were. Whether there could be any justice against an entire division of the Waffen-SS was… something for Edmund to ponder, she supposed.
"Just make it out of here, Lieutenant," Jeanne said. "You'll be debriefed when you get back, probably in Dover. Tell them what you saw. The only way the dead can tell their story is through the living."
"Any idea how I'll do that? Get back?"
"The Maquis you're going to have ongoing contacts with British intelligence," Marguerite replied. "They'll arrange something, though it will take some time. They'll communicate through messages personnels in BBC broadcasts with instructions. My guess is someone will fly a Lizzie down, drop off supplies for the Maquis and take you back. Whether you stay here or get a flight out, it's not going to be safe."
"Neither's flying daytime sorties over Avord. Or hiding in woods and haystacks or under cabbage. I'll try to make myself useful. Any idea how long it might take?"
Jeanne did some quick figuring in her head. "They won't try to extract you until at least the next full moon period. Probably be the end of July or beginning of August."
"Maybe we'll be in Paris by then, drinking champagne."
"Göring stole most of the champagne from the châteaux of France and took it back to the Kehlsteinhaus," Marguerite said.
"I'd settle for a drop of good American whiskey."
"Scotch," Jeanne said at the same time Marguerite did and they both laughed.
"I'll take your ladies' word for it."
They went another few kilometers and Amélie stopped at a meandering track that went off to the east. Jeanne was very glad the mule couldn't talk for all the secrets of the Resistance she would be able to reveal.
"This is your stop, Lieutenant," Jeanne said.
Marguerite pointed. "Follow that path about 2 kilometers. There's a farm. You're expected. Tell them Dancer and Rat sent you."
The flyer shucked off the scarf and wig, jumped down from the wagon and slid out of the skirt and blouse. He handed the clothes back to Marguerite. They'd burned his uniform days ago and he was now wearing a very shabby, far too-laundered pair of trousers and shirt. He'd kept his boots, which was necessary but also a fatal giveaway that he was no French farmer. No one ever was able to change their shoes.
"Go carefully, Lieutenant. Despite the clothes, you'll not fool a German, and certainly not a member of the Milice," Marguerite warned.
Jeanne had herself worried about encountering a member of that dreaded French paramilitary, and she was fluent and far less suspicious than the downed American flyer. "If you see or hear anyone, hide."
"Understood. Thank you. If I do make it back, want me to send word to anyone? Your families? Anyone in your command?"
"That assumes we have command we're reporting to, Lieutenant. Thank you, but no," Marguerite said.
"The less we know of one another, the better."
He nodded. "Right then. One thing. I couldn't help noticing when I was crammed into that compartment in the wagon. Who's using a crossbow against Nazis?"
"That would be me, Lieutenant," Jeanne replied. "It was a gift." It was so tempting to give the Lieutenant a message that might get back to Tebbitt but she didn't dare risk it. She and Marguerite were alone here.
He grinned. "Well, thank you, Ladies. Give 'em hell for me."
"And you, Lieutenant."
They both turned away so as to not see the direction he went in. Jeanne brought Amélie about and the mule began plodding back to their camp, a little more eagerly. There was dinner waiting for her. A better one that we shall have, Jeanne thought wearily. Another meal of wine, with little else.
"Jeanne? I have been thinking about something."
"Yes?"
"The baby belt you wear. I know you used it with Madame Vion to fool the Nazis in Bénouville but you've been getting some very grim looks from some of the French we are supposed to be liberating."
"Collaboration horizontale," Jeanne replied, suddenly feeling very angry and knowing what Marguerite was hinting at. "I've been working in a maternity hospital, Marguerite! For those women, it was sex with their occupiers, or starvation. They did not have a choice." She'd had her own Nazi admirer who had provided her with a steady supply of sausages, batteries and wilted flowers and all she'd done was bicycle by Leutnant Becker's checkpoint - and use his distraction with her to smuggle messages to their Resistance contacts in Caen.
"I'm not arguing the point, Jeanne! But the Nazis are gunning down children and burning them alive in churches. What might be done in retaliation to suspected collaborators, I can't imagine but you can be sure no one will be waiting for an airing of facts or a trial. You could - no, would - be dragged into the street and beaten or worse by partisans and never even have the opportunity to plead your innocence."
Jeanne hated it but also knew Marguerite was correct. She'd heard some of the mutterings herself, that women who collaborated should be publicly humiliated, stripped, shaved, tarred and paraded through the streets. There was a long, ugly history of it. She wondered what Edmund would say, or even Peter. She knew what Lucy would say.
"'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first–verdict afterward.'"
"Is that from Alice's Adventures?"
"It is," Jeanne replied wearily. She set the reins down, drew her hand up under the baggy skirt, undid the contraption and tossed the belt into the back of the cart with the cabbages and onions.
Maybe the men who had burned women and children alive in the church and murdered a million Jews didn't deserve a trial or a verdict. Did the women who had collaborated with them deserve the same fate? Or the hated Milice who would have turned her over to the Gestapo in a moment if they'd suspected she was really a British spy and not a skinny, sad, French girl working at a maternity hospital?
Justice had never been her province. So, win the War first.
She lifted the reins and clucked to Amélie. "Come on, girl. Let's get home and get you some supper."
"Supper," Marguerite said wistfully and glanced behind her at their load of vegetables. "I imagine boiled cabbage is best with white wine, rather than red."
"Do you suppose all the champagne of Paris is gone, Marguerite?"
"I imagine we'll find a bottle or two when we get there."
Liberation seemed further away than it had ever been. She had somehow thought that the Allied landings would yield a miraculous, swift victory. Instead, every mile was being paid for in more blood. And there was still the long, slow crawl to Berlin.
"Do you think we'll do it, Peggy? Can we really win against all this evil?"
Peggy put an arm over her shoulders. "I do Susan. It feels overwhelming. It's hard to see now, but it is coming. And there's Scotch and real coffee at the end of this road for us both."
"Lipstick," Susan decided. "I'd like a nice, new lipstick."
The Massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane are documented in many places - Wiki is a start.
Bearing Silent Witness: A Grandfather's Secret Attestation to German War Crimes in Occupied France, American Intelligence Journal (AIJ), Vol. 32, No, 1, 2015, Florida Journal of International Law (FJIL), Vol. 25, No. 1, 2013
The Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, An American lawyer finds new evidence about one of World War II's most notorious war crimes, seven decades after D-Day, Foreign Policy June 5 2014
Murphy, Raymond J. (2nd Lt.) , Escape and Evasion Report No. 866, War Department. U.S. Forces, European Theater. Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Escape and Evasion Section (MIS-X). Administration Branch. 7/1/1945-3/10/1947 (maintained in the U.S. National Archives Catalog)
About horizontal collaboration and the épuration sauvage (wild purge) or more polite épuration légale(legal purge) are documents in many places, including Wiki as a start.