When Colonel Matthew Hammond was posted to the European theater during World War II, he sustained a serious injury on the front lines that cost him a lung. Now he is back in England, unable to fight, but continuing to serve his country by training new resistance fighters in SC2, a specialist sabotage outfit. One of the recruits under his tutelage is the spellbinding Madeleine Dirac, an exotic French-Canadian nurse. Despite protocols discouraging romance, they fall deeply in love.         Matthew is torn about putting Madeleine’s life in danger: he has mixed duty and pleasure before, with tragic results—his former lover, Celestine, was killed in an attempt to assassinate a Nazi doctor. But the Allies are mustering all their resources for crucial beach landings in Normandy, and Matthew knows his unit will be needed to parachute its agents in behind Nazi lines. Vivid and unforgettable,  Madeleine’s War is a gripping tale of love in wartime—and of men and women caught in the sweep of history. “Vibrates with authenticity. . . . A well-told tale that will grip readers from start to finish.” —Kate Alcott, author of  The Dressmaker  “Thrilling. . . . Peter Watson brilliantly captures the tense months in England leading up to D-Day. . . . Madeleine’s War is engaging on every level.” —Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta “[A] mix of romance and risk makes for a heady cocktail sure to be savored by historical-fiction readers.” — Booklist Peter Watson is a well-known and respected historian are published in twenty-five languages. He was educated at the Universities of Durham, London, and Rome, and his writing has appeared in  The New York Times , the  Los Angeles Times , and numerous publications in the United Kingdom. From 1998 to 2007 he has been a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has written two previous novels,  Gifts of War  and  The Clouds Beneath the Sun , under the pen name Mackenzie Ford. 1 I remember that day so well--late May 1944, early evening. As Winston Churchill himself said in another context, it was both the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end. Southwater. A small Sussex village, made up of barely more than one street, with white-painted houses set back from the road, a pebble-faced church, a stone-built school, a pub--the Black Prince, which looked appetizing though we never had time to visit it--and a roped-off cricket field which bordered the road, where play sometimes stopped the traffic on match days, when the ball was hit beyond the boundary. The airfield, which was our only reason for visiting Southwater, was well hidden, beyond the village, off the Chichester road. The lane by which it was approached wound round and dipped through a copse of beech trees--until you were again facing the village, but viewed from behind. The loamy field, flat on its northern reaches, and edged by a line of hawthorn, rolled away to give at its southern limit a fine view of the Sussex Downs, Pevensey in the distance, and beyond that, on a clear day, a very clear day . . . France itself. There was a hangar of sorts at one end of the field. Just brick walls with a corrugated iron roof, and an abandoned concrete bunker, which had, in an earlier era of the war, stood ready to resist invasion. Madeleine and I were lying on the grass, waiting. Waiting for the pilot and waiting for the moon. These were our last hours together, at least for now. She was wearing a blue dress with small white flowers printed across it, a dress made in the French style in our London factory, in keeping with her cover. There was a single row of pearls at her neck, and a leather shoulder bag lay on the grass beside her. She wore flat shoes. Her hair fluttered and flowed out behind her in the wind. Her gypsy hair, as I sometimes called it--her Botticelli hair, long, auburn, and unruly-curly, floating about the goddess in The Birth of Venus--was her most distinctive feature. She was forever pulling it away from her face, or gathering it up to let the back of her neck breathe. She loved her hair, though she knew it was always going to be in the way. She was tall, but not too tall, and when she raised her arms to pull back her hair, whatever blouse or shirt or frock she was wearing tightened over her breasts. Her skin was paper white, and her lips more creamy brown than red. In the early evening light, she stood out--she shone--like a stained-glass figure on a dim church wall. Across the field, to our left, the roofs of Southwater mingled with the trees, soon to be lost in the gloom. Madeleine leant across and kissed my cheek. She had a slender, wispy figure, like those Debenham’s models pictured in the newspapers. She often held her lips slightly open, as if she were out of breath, or having second thoughts about saying something. Her eyes were the burnished brown of whisky (whisky is my main vice). When she was astonished, or amused, or aroused,