The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 14: The Correspondent

Jillian considered leaving her codebook behind. Who wouldn't? It was only natural; only human. Her brain came up with all sorts of excuses. Wasn't her life worth more than a codebook? After all, the O.S.S. could always change their codes.

Death was permanent.

But Jillian didn't leave her codebook behind. In the end it wasn't courage that stopped her, but shame. She couldn't abandon her duty when so many brave soldiers were fighting and dying only a few hundred yards away.

Her survival instinct tried to convince her otherwise. It told her she was more important than they were. After all, most of them were probably ignorant peasants. She was a writer, a journalist. She could shape public opinion. She could help change the direction of the war.

But she knew that was nonsense. Just because she had gone to college, just because she wrote for a newspaper, that didn't make her life more precious than the lives of those soldiers. You didn't have to be prosperous; you didn't have to be educated, to value your own life. Those soldiers wanted to live as much as she did.

And yet they fought, and they died.

Jillian didn't even have a family. Her parents would mourn her, but she had no husband waiting for her, no children depending on her. If anything, the lives of those soldiers dying in the train station were worth more than hers.

So, Jillian was shamed into staying. And as she waited, keeping herself company with her own morbid thoughts, she couldn't help but wonder how often courage really was just shame.

How many of those soldiers were giving up their lives because they were too ashamed to run away?

Jillian thought maybe darkness would save her. Maybe night would come, and she could sneak out into the street and the sniper wouldn't see her. Then she could grab her codebook and run away.

But when night did come, darkness did not. They were still fighting in the train station. How long had that battle gone on? Twelve hours? And still the Russians were tenaciously holding on.

But the Germans weren't giving up, either. They were confident. They were the masters of their own destinies. They could will themselves to victory. If night was inconvenient, they could turn it into day.

Or, if not to day, at least they could turn it into a sort of dim dusk. They fired flares one after another, each brighter than the brightest streetlamp. They shot them high into the air where they burst like quiet fireworks, lighting up the sky. They sizzled and fell, their descent slowed by tiny parachutes.

And before one burned out, they launched another to replace it, flare after flare, hour after hour.

There were always three or four flares floating through the air at any one time, each slowly falling, each dancing this way and that on the early autumn breeze. They cast long shadows, shadows that moved as they fell, shadows that disappeared and reappeared as flares winked out and shot back to life.

It was weird and eerily beautiful. That's what war was: beautiful. It was terrifying and it was sad, and it was horrible but Jillian would never deny that it was also beautiful.

She'd recognized that truth during the London blitz. It's what had drawn her here. It's what had convinced her to become a war correspondent, to become a spy.

She told everyone that it was because she wanted to report the truth and the horror. But that was a lie. She just wanted to see it and, if she died, so what? Was her life so precious? And at least she would have died seeing the worst and most beautiful things human beings were capable of portraying. As a species, our true talent wasn't creating.