Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 15

All day and all night, General Laffargue stayed in his grand office with its heavy Empire desk in the Hôtel de la Division on one side of the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The date was 10 November 1942, two days after the Allied landings in French North Africa, and the General was expecting a telephone call from his superior which would set in train the plan already drawn up by Vichy military headquarters for mobilization of the Armistice Army against a German invasion in the south. All through the long day and night, into 11 November (the anniversary of the German surrender in 1918), the General waited. But the call never came.

The truth was that the government of Vichy had been thrown into complete confusion, not to say panic, by the Allied invasion of North Africa. The Vichy leaders knew what would come next, but should they oppose, or acquiesce? Anticipation and indecision came to an end at dawn on 11 November 1942, when Hitler’s personal emissary arrived in Vichy and delivered a letter from the Führer to Marshal Pétain informing him that Axis troops were taking control of Vichy France. In fact, the Germans had already launched Operation Attila. Some hours previously Italian units had stormed across the French/Italian frontier with orders to occupy Grenoble. Meanwhile German columns under Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, the newly appointed German Army commander for southern France, pressed at full speed towards Lyon where they swung south heading for the Mediterranean coast.

Early on the morning of that same day, 11 November 1942, a young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer, received orders to man the Pont de la Boucle in Lyon and maintain public order when the Germans arrived.

The thirty-year-old Geyer, known as ‘Narc’ to his friends, was in many ways a man born out of his time. Small in stature, dapper in dress, never other than a soldier, never out of uniform, ever impetuous of spirit, courageous to the point of folly and always in search of la gloire, he would have been far more at home among Dumas’ Three Musketeers than in the dull, gloryless existence of a junior officer in a defeated army. He was the scion of a military family: his father’s last words to the priest who comforted him as he lay dying of wounds in October 1918 had been ‘It is a terrible shame that my son is too young. He could have replaced me.’ Geyer, true to the family tradition, had fought with distinction under the then Colonel Charles de Gaulle before the fall of France, earning himself a Croix de Guerre for his bravery.

But it was not only the man who represented what was seen at the time as the forever vanished days of France’s military glory. The unit he commanded in Lyon that day was itself one of the most illustrious of France’s cavalry regiments. The 11th Cuirassiers (motto ‘Toujours au chemin de l’honneur’ – ‘Forever the path of honour’) was founded by Louis XIV in 1668, still carried the French royal insignia of the fleur de lys on its regimental standard and had fought with distinction in all the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

To ask such a man and such a regiment to guard a bridge in order to facilitate the entry of a hated occupier was too much for Geyer to bear. Wilful as ever and largely on a whim, he ignored his orders and, leading a troop of fifty-six of his troopers, mounted on horses and accompanied by eight machine guns and four mortars, headed north out of the city towards the forests of the Savoie. A few kilometres out of Lyon, Geyer appears to have had second thoughts – or at least to have concluded that going underground with his troops required more preparation than a spur-of-the-moment canter through the streets of Lyon. He turned his troops round and, rather ignominiously one imagines, led them back to barracks.

A few days after the occupation of Grenoble by the Italians, General Laffargue called his senior commanders together in the Mairie of Vizille, a small town south of Grenoble, to discuss what should be done. The meeting broke up in indecision. Aimé Pupin, one of the Café de la Rotonde plotters, rushed to Vizille and did his best to persuade Laffargue’s men not to hand over their weapons to the Germans. But the officer in charge refused even to see Pupin and ordered his regiment to disarm, leaving Pupin to comment: ‘We Resistants were left with just empty hands.’ At Christmas 1942, Pupin listed the arms at his disposal as a revolver and a rubber hammer.

On 27 November the Germans disarmed the remaining French units, disconnected their telephones and emptied the French barracks in Lyon and Vienne.

Narcisse Geyer’s second opportunity for a more considered escape came that day when the Germans burst into the Cuirassiers’ barracks in the Lyon suburb of Part-Dieu and began to drive the regiment from their quarters. Geyer grabbed his unit’s regimental standards and took them to the barracks guardroom, from where they were passed over the wall to a party waiting outside. Geyer’s initial intention had been to leave Lyon for the forests by bicycle. But how could a cavalryman leave without his horse? So that night he led a small group back to the barracks where, having muffled his horse Boucaro’s hooves to deaden the noise, he walked his mount to a nearby lorry and drove out of the city and into life as a Maquisard.

Geyer, his horse and two or three of his Cuirassiers took refuge in a fortified farm with thick walls and a massive iron-studded gate, attended by stables and substantial outbuildings in the Forêt de Thivolet, 8 kilometres west of the Vercors. It was from this farm that Geyer took the nom de guerre Thivolet by which he would from now on be known. Over the next months, Geyer, who had a disparaging view of non-military Maquisard units, referring to them as ‘as civilians playing at soldiers’, returned several times to see his old troopers, eventually persuading some fifty of them to join him. The 11th Cuirassiers was reborn as a clandestine unit of the French Resistance under a courageous but headstrong young officer, complete with its standards, its insignia, its uniforms, its ranks and its proud customs, such as the habit of saying the regimental grace before every dinner: ‘Gloire et honneur à ce cochon de popotier’ – ‘Glory and honour to the pig of a cook (who made this)’.

On 28 November, another much loved commander of one of France’s best Alpine units gathered his men in the square of the little town of Brié-et-Angonnes, 5 kilometres south-east of Grenoble, and asked them to sing the regimental song for one last time. Then he told them, with tears in his eyes, that he had just received the order for the battalion to be disbanded. But, he reassured them, ‘one day soon the bell will toll again to call us to action … no power on earth can break the bonds which bind us together as a fighting unit’.

Another French officer central to this story was among the many who chose the clandestine life during these turbulent days of November 1942. The forty-three-year-old Marcel Descour, one of the earliest organizers of secret resistance within the old Armistice Army, was, like Geyer, a decorated and courageous cavalry officer. Tall, and spare of build, Descour had a thin angular face adorned with a small military moustache and topped with carefully coiffed, lightly oiled, swept-back black hair. With an air of command that indicated that he expected instant obedience, Descour, conventionally military in his ideas, decidedly right wing in his political views and strongly Catholic in his beliefs, was always accompanied by his ‘religious counsellor’ and éminence grise, a Benedictine monk called Dom Guétet. Guétet’s omnipresence, reinforced by a cadaverous frame and sombre monk’s habit, made him look, according to one observer, ‘A bit like one of those holy soldier monks of the Middle Ages who accompanied their feudal masters on the Crusades’. Descour’s view of himself may be guessed at by his choice of alias, Bayard – after the fifteenth-century knight Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier de Bayard, famous as ‘The knight without fear and without reproach’.

Pierre Dalloz, in his house at La Grande Vigne in Côtes-de-Sassenage, watched all the farce and tragedy of the days after 11 November with despair. He confided his fears and his concept of the Vercors as a guerrilla base behind enemy lines to a young friend, Jean Lefort, who was not only an enthusiastic caver, with a deep knowledge of the Vercors, but was also a decorated officer in a French Alpine regiment. Lefort was as enthusiastic about the idea as Dalloz, and encouraged the older man to put the concept down on paper.

That mid-December night in 1942, Dalloz made the first three-page draft of his plan. ‘The project had ripened in me over the time [since he had first discussed it with Jean Prévost] and my thoughts flew easily off my pen on to the paper. After I had finished, I opened the door and breathed in the cool night air. The highest branches of the almond tree in the garden swayed in the wind, as though trying to sweep the stars from the sky, and the clamour of the local stream filled the silent darkness. The Vercors was there, very close – almost alongside me. I thought for a long moment. Secrecy suddenly seemed my co-conspirator; the moment was heavy with responsibility, resolution and hope.’