Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 14

The notion that the Vercors might become a citadel of liberty against France’s invaders began to take root in several places, among very different people and in very different ways, during the first half of 1941. According to Vercors legend it was first discussed one early-spring day in March 1941 when two old friends, both mountaineers, both writers and both members of France’s intellectual elite, were cutting down a dead walnut tree in a meadow above a small villa called La Grande Vigne, near the town of Côtes-de-Sassenage, a few kilometres north-west of Grenoble.

La Grande Vigne, which lies so close under the northern flank of the Vercors that the plateau’s slopes and woods seem to look in at every window, was – and remains still – the family home of the Dalloz family. In 1941, its occupants were the forty-one-year-old architect, writer, one-time government servant and ardent mountaineer Pierre Dalloz and his painter wife, Henriette Gröll. On this March day, the couple were entertaining two of their closest friends – and frequent visitors to La Grand Vigne – Jean Prévost and his doctor wife, Claude. Prévost, a year younger than Dalloz, was a startlingly handsome man with an arresting gaze and a character which combined love of action with a sturdy intellectual independence. A pacifist, an early and enthusiastic anti-fascist, Prévost had fiercely opposed the Munich settlement but had nevertheless heavily criticized the pre-war anti-German mood in France. He was best known as one of the foremost young writers in France, having written several well-received books, along with articles in the prestigious French magazine Paris-soir. Indeed it was writing which formed one of the major bonds between the two men – at the time of their tree-cutting exploit Dalloz was working on a translation of St Bernard’s Treatise on Consideration, while Prévost was preparing a study on Stendhal which would be published to widespread acclaim in Lyon on 9 November 1942, just two days before the German invasion of France’s ‘free’ southern zone.

According to Dalloz’s account, the two men were busy cutting down the old walnut tree – with Prévost offering his friend unsolicited advice on the best way to accomplish the task – when Dalloz stopped, leant on his axe and looked up at the cliffs of the Vercors rising above them into the blue March sky. ‘You could look at that up there as a kind of island on terra firma,’ he said, ‘a huge expanse of Alpine pasture protected on all sides by these vast Chinese walls of rock. The gates into it are few and carved out of the living rock. Once closed, paratroopers could be dropped clandestinely. The Vercors could then explode behind the enemy lines.’

There the conversation ended and the thought seemed to die. ‘I thought that the idea was probably a bit naive,’ Dalloz was later to explain. ‘This was more the kind of thing that the military would be considering, rather than me.’ It would take eighteen months, disillusion with the military leaders and a France more ready for resistance to bring it back to life.

A few kilometres away in Grenoble, General André Laffargue, a divisional commander in the Armistice Army, was also desperate to return to the struggle and spoke of the Vercors as ‘a vast closed Alpine fortress protected by a continuous solid wall of limestone rock’. He even drew up plans to protect the plateau against all comers with fixed defences made up of a ring of 75mm mountain guns sunk into concrete casements – a sort of Alpine Maginot Line, as though the recent failure of the first one had not been enough.

Some of Laffargue’s junior officers had a more realistic notion about what should be done to plan for the day when they would again take up their fight against the occupier and had begun to stockpile hidden weapons for future use. From late 1940 right through to the German invasion of Vichy France in November 1942, arms, ammunition and a wide range of matériel, including vehicles, fuel, optical equipment, engineering material, radios and medical stores, were spirited out of the city and into the surrounding countryside, and in particular on to the Vercors. All sorts of imaginative methods were used: lorries with false floors, carts loaded with hay, empty water and petrol bowsers, accumulator batteries emptied of acid and reserve petrol tanks on vehicles. They also made use of forged travel permissions so that the arms could be transported in official vehicles.

One of the chief smugglers who would in due course lead a local Resistance group in his own right, later described one of their hiding places: ‘An office of one of the Justices of the Peace in Grenoble became a veritable arsenal: heavy, medium and light machine guns, rifles, revolvers, munitions, explosives and aircraft incendiary bombs were hidden under the protection of the sword of Justice. The Court clerk, assisted by his men, buried the ammunition and concealed the arms in the walls. The judges of the police tribunals never guessed that under the defendants’ bench were hidden light machine guns, while sub-machine guns were piled up underneath the floorboard on which they sat holding court.’

By these means and many others, some thirty-five secret arms depots were established during the first months of 1941. At the time of the German invasion of Vichy, this number had increased to 135. These depots contained, it is estimated, 300 light and heavy machine guns, 3,000 revolvers together with a variety of other light arms, thirty 75mm mountain guns, four 81mm mortars, 4 tonnes of optical instruments such as binoculars, 5 tonnes of explosives, eight full petrol tankers and more than 200 vehicles of all types.

Another clandestine Armistice Army unit, meanwhile, forged false papers for military personnel imprisoned for breaking Vichy laws and those who had already gone underground.

On a fine August afternoon in 1941, five men sitting round a table in a working-class café behind Grenoble station took a decision which, though they did not know it, would link their fate indissolubly to the young military arms smugglers just up the road, even though their motives were entirely political and not military.

The Second World War had taken a surprising turn in June 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of Russia. Until this point, Hitler’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin had meant that the war had been largely located in the west. Now the full force of his armies would strike east. Widely recognized as the key military turning point (and Hitler’s biggest mistake) of the early years of the war, Barbarossa had an effect on the populations of occupied western Europe that is often overlooked. Before Hitler’s invasion, the fact that Russia had stood aside from the struggle against fascism had constrained the attitude of the Communists in particular and the European left in general. Now, however, there was a common front against a common enemy. The French Communists and (though for very different reasons) their partners on the left, the French Socialist Party, shifted from an attitude of wait and see to one of activism – a process which greatly accelerated later in 1941 when, on 5 December, the Germans were beaten back from the gates of Moscow and, three days after that, following Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war.

The five conspirators sitting in the Café de la Rotonde on the Rue du Polygone would have felt the ripples of these faraway events and would have known what they meant. Now there was hope; now there was a distant, dangerous possibility of liberation.

The Café de la Rotonde, set slightly back from the main thoroughfare, was a pink-stuccoed building on whose front façade three brown-shuttered windows functioned as a permanent prop for sheaves of bicycles. The area, just behind Grenoble freight station, was a working-class district, grimy with the soot of trains and permanently resonating with the clash of shunting engines, the hiss of steam and the day-round passage of lorries to and from the loading quays of the great station. Though graced by the name of café, La Rotonde was more like a bistro which depended for its custom on the railway workers at the station, the drivers of goods lorries and the workers at a nearby gas works, all of whom knew they could get a good cheap lunch here, washed down with the rough white wine of the nearby Grésivaudan valley.

At first sight, the five conspirators, all of whom held strong left-wing views, had nothing in common with the two intellectuals who had cut down a walnut tree at Sassenage four months earlier. They had even less in common with the young Army officers who, for months past, had been smuggling lorryloads of arms and ammunition past the front door of the café. But all three groups were in reality bound to a single purpose that would, in due course, bring them together in a common enterprise which would transcend their political differences: the distant but now growing possibility that some time – some time soon perhaps – their country might be free again.

Among those seated at the table that afternoon was a figure of medium height, round shoulders and powerful build whose face was underpinned by a sharply etched chin and enlivened by eyes which missed little that went on around him. Aimé Pupin, the patron of La Rotonde, was normally to be found behind its dark wooden counter, chatting to his customers and overseeing the service at the tables. Passionate about rugby – he had been a formidable hooker in his youth – Pupin had received, like so many of his class in pre-war France, only the bare minimum of education. But he had a force of personality, matched by firm opinions and a propensity for action, which made him a natural if at times obstinate and impetuous leader. He also had a marked sense of idealism for the brotherhood of man and the Socialist cause, and this was ardently shared by the four men sitting around him, all of whom were not only fellow members of the Socialist Party but also Masons.

Beside Pupin sat Eugène Chavant, forty-seven years old, stocky, pipe-smoking, taciturn, the haphazardly trimmed moustache on his upper lip complementing an unruly shock of hair greying at the temples. Chavant’s quiet demeanour hid an iron will and unshakeable convictions. As a young man he had followed his father into the shoe-making trade. During the First World War he had been quickly promoted to sergeant and platoon commander in the 11th Dragoons and received the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with four citations for bravery. When the First World War finished, he returned to Grenoble, became a leading member of the French Socialist Party and was elected on the first ballot with the entire Socialist list in the 1936 elections. For this he was summarily sacked from his post as foreman in a local shoe factory, forcing him to go into the café business in order to pursue his political convictions. He had later been elected Mayor of the Grenoble suburb of Saint-Martin-d’Hères and was now, like Pupin, the patron of a restaurant in a working-class district of the city.

Others round the table included a railway worker at the station, a garage owner and Léon Martin, who practised as a doctor and pharmacist in the city. At sixty-eight, Martin was the oldest of the five, a past Socialist Mayor of Grenoble city and a strong opponent of the Vichy government. He told his co-conspirators that he believed the time had come to set up a Resistance cell in the Grenoble area. The others enthusiastically agreed, and the meeting broke up – but not before the conspirators marked their passage into the shadows by distributing aliases. Chavant’s clandestine name would henceforth be Clément and that of Pupin, Mathieu. Slowly, over the following months, the little group drew more and more supporters to their meetings in the back room of Dr Martin’s pharmacy at 125 Cours Berriat, which lies under the rim of the Vercors at the western edge of the city.

Although the daily lives of those who lived on the Vercors itself were less affected by the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy government than those in Grenoble, the plateau was by no means immune from its consequences.

On 28 September 1940, the prestigious Polish school in Paris, the Lycée Polonais Cyprian-Norwid, which had decamped from the capital shortly after the Germans arrived, formally re-established itself in Villard-de-Lans on the northern half of the plateau. A month later, on 28 October, it opened its doors to students – chiefly the children of Polish refugees from the north – in the Hôtel du Parc et du Château, a famous pre-war skiing establishment in the town.

On 23 May 1941, a trainload of French refugees, driven out of their homes in Alsace-Lorraine by incoming German families, arrived in the station at Romans, below the western edge of the Vercors. They were kept on the station for three days while the Vichy authorities found houses in the region, many of them in the Villard-de-Lans area. To add to these new arrivals, Jewish families soon started to arrive as well, fleeing the early round-ups in the northern zone, later replicated by the Vichy government in the south as well. Even by the standards of a town used to the annual influx of winter-sports visitors, life in Villard was becoming unusually cosmopolitan.

Some time during the late summer or early autumn of 1941, a quite separate group of conspirators, also Socialists and Masons, started meeting in secret in Villard-de Lans. The moving spirit of this group, who were initially unaware of their Grenoble co-conspirators, was another doctor/pharmacist called Eugène Samuel. A Rumanian by origin, Dr Samuel, who had come to Villard to join his wife after the fall of France in 1940, held his meetings in the back room of his pharmacy under the cover of a Hunting Committee. The Villard group was as varied as its Grenoble equivalent, consisting, apart from Samuel himself, of a hotelier, the local tax inspector, the director of the Villard branch of the Banque Populaire and the three brothers, Émile, Paul and Victor Huillier, who ran the local transport company. Not long after their formation, the Villard group began searching for other organized Resistants in the area. Through the good offices of one of their number they were put in touch with Léon Martin in Grenoble.

On Easter Monday (6 April) 1942, ‘the day the history of [the Resistance] in the Vercors started’, according to Léon Martin, the two groups met together in Villard and agreed to form a single organization to promote the Socialist cause and foment resistance in the area. The journey had begun that would take this handful of idealistic plotters from furtive meetings in the back rooms of local pharmacies to a fully fledged, 4,000-strong partisan army ready to take on the full might of the German Wehrmacht.

Marcel Malbos, one of the teachers at the Polish school in Villard, summed up the mood of these early resisters: ‘When the life of a whole people is mortally threatened, when the tyrant sets out to destroy a whole civilization along with both its culture and its people, when the shipwreck is upon you – then, just when all seems lost, suddenly a conjunction of events occurs, as is so often found in history, which offers the possibility of hope. [In our case] it was the creation on our mountain plateau of a patch of dry land above the flood – above the tumult – where a few men came together to create a kind of rebirth. And soon this tiny plot above the waves would become a rock, a refuge, a home and a fortress …’