Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 17

‘So you do not wish to go and work in Germany?’ Eugène Chavant asked abruptly, pulling his pipe out of his mouth for a moment.

‘No, M’sieu.’ The young man, no more than twenty or so, nervously twisted his beret between his fingers.

‘Who told you to contact me about this?’

‘My boss at the shoe factory, M. Blanc, told me you would be a good person to talk to, M’sieu.’

‘So you want to join the Maquis?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘Are you aware that life in the Maquis is very hard?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘Do you understand the risks involved – great risks?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘And you know how to keep your tongue, do you?’

‘Absolutely, M’sieu.’

‘OK. Go to the Fontaine halt on the tramway which takes you up to Villard at five o’clock tomorrow evening. Ask for one of the Huillier brothers and tell him discreetly that you have come to see “Casimir” – that’s the password. He will tell you what to do next. Follow his instructions closely and without any questions. Take a rucksack with what you need. But be careful. Don’t take too much. You must look like a casual traveller.’

The young man nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Eugène Chavant took out a small piece of paper and wrote a message for his friend Jean Veyrat: ‘There will be one colis [package] to take up to Villard tomorrow evening.’

The following evening a Huillier bus set the young man down in the main square of the town of Méaudre on the northern half of the Vercors plateau. Here, following his instructions, he went to a café in one of the town’s back streets where he found he was among a number of young men who likewise seemed to be waiting for something – or someone. A short time later an older man arrived. He was wearing hiking clothes and boots and carried a small khaki rucksack.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and led the way out of the café and into the darkness.

The little group walked north along back roads for forty minutes or so and then took a short break before starting to climb steeply up the mountain. Half an hour later they entered a forest and five minutes after that their guide stopped in the darkness and gave three low whistles. Out of the night came three answering whistles. A guide emerged from the trees and led the little group of newcomers to a shepherd’s hut in a clearing in the forest. Though it is doubtful that any of them realized it, they had all taken an irreversible step out of normality, into the Maquis and a life of secrecy and constant danger. One way or another, their lives would never be the same again.

As German demands for manpower increased, the trickle of réfractaires turned into a flood. The numbers at the Ambel farm quickly rose to eighty-five. There was no more space. In Eugène Samuel’s words, ‘The young men coming up the mountain became more and more numerous. Now it was not just the specialists who were being called away, but whole annual intakes of young men whom Laval wanted to send to help Hitler’s war effort. There was a mood of near panic among the young men, and the resources of the Gaullist resistance organizations were very soon swamped. We needed new camps; we needed more financial resources; we needed food; we needed clothes and above all we needed boots. We needed to organize some kind of security system to search out the spies who we knew the Milice were infiltrating with the réfractaires. We needed arms.’

New camps were soon found. And not just in the Vercors. Elsewhere in the region, other early Resistance groups were also establishing camps for fleeing réfractaires in the remote areas of the nearby Chartreuse Massif and the Belledonne and Oisans mountain ranges which bordered the Grésivaudan valley. Between February and May 1943, eight new réfractaire camps – housing some 400 men in all and numbered consecutively from Ambel (C1) – were established across the Vercors plateau under the direction of Aimé Pupin. To this total must be added two military camps, one set up in May by an ex-Military School in Valence, another established in November under the control of Marcel Descour.

Map 3

Those who joined the camps between March 1943 and May 1944 (that is before the Allied landings in Normandy) were of differing ages and came from a wide area. In a sample of forty-four réfractaires in the initial influx between March and May 1943, almost half were over thirty years old, many of them married. As might be expected, the majority (60 per cent) were from the immediate locality (the region of Rhône-Alpes), but among the rest almost 10 per cent were Parisians, a further 10 per cent were born out of France and nearly 15 per cent came from the eastern regions of France. There was similar diversity when it came to previous employment. In C3, above Autrans, nearly half the camp members had been ordinary workers, almost a third technicians of one sort or another, some 12 per cent were students and nearly 10 per cent had been regular soldiers. Politically, too, there was a broad variety of opinions and views. The fact that the great majority of the Vercors’ civilian camps were loyal to de Gaulle meant that the organized presence of the Communists and the French far right was almost non-existent on the plateau. Individually, however, the camps included adherents to almost every political belief (except of course fascism). Political discussions round evening campfires were frequent, varied and at times very lively.

By autumn 1943, every community of any size on the plateau had a secret camp of one sort or another near by – and every inhabitant on the plateau would have been aware of the unusual nature of the new young visitors in their midst. For Samuel, Pupin, Chavant and their colleagues, the administrative burden of all this was immense. Pupin later said: ‘We didn’t have a moment of respite. Our eight camps occupied our time fully.’ The biggest problem by far, however, was finding the money to pay for all this. Collections were made among family, well-wishers and workplaces – two Jewish men contributed between them 20,000 francs a week which they had collected from contacts. But it was never enough.

London started providing huge subventions to support the réfractaire movement. During Jean Moulin’s visit to London in February 1943, de Gaulle charged him with ‘centralizing the overall needs of the réfractaires and assuring the distribution of funds through a special organization, in liaison with trades unions and resistance movements’. On 18 February, Farge delivered a second massive subvention amounting to 3.2 million francs to be used for Dalloz’s Plan Montagnards alone. And on 26 February Moulin’s deputy sent a coded message to London containing his budget proposals for March 1943. This amounted to a request for no less than 13.4 million francs for all the elements of the Resistance controlled by de Gaulle, of which some 1.75 million francs per month was designated for the Vercors. This was in addition to the private donations pouring into Aimé Pupin’s coffers by way of a false account in the name of a local beekeeper, ‘François Tirard’, at the Banque Populaire branch in Villard. This level of support made the Vercors by far the biggest single Resistance project being funded by London at this point in the war.

Despite these significant sums, money remained an ever-present problem for those administering the Vercors camps through 1943 and into the following year. A British officer sent on a mission to assess the strength and nature of the Maquis in south-eastern France visited the Vercors later in 1943 and reported that those in the camps ‘have to spend much of their time getting food etc. They have to do everything on their own and are often short of money. In one case they stole tobacco and sold it back onto the Black Market to get money.’

Not surprisingly this kind of behaviour, though by no means common, caused tensions between the réfractaires and local inhabitants. With food so short, the proximity of groups of hungry young men to passing flocks of sheep proved to be an especially explosive flash-point. On 14 June 1943, the réfractaires of Camp C4, fleeing to avoid a raid on their camp by Italian Alpine troops, arrived on the wide mountain pasture of Darbonouse where they were met by a flock of sheep numbering some 1,500. Their commander told them: ‘If there is any thieving I will take the strongest measures against the perpetrators. Remember that it is in our interests to make the shepherds our friends. Remember too that it is through our behaviour that the Resistance is judged.’

On the other hand, not far away at the Pré Rateau mountain hut above Saint-Agnan, another band of young réfractaires who had absconded from their original camp enjoyed a merry summer of pilfering and theft, to the particular detriment of the flocks of sheep in the area.

Tensions between local farmers were considerably eased when spring turned into summer and some camp commanders offered their young men as free labour to cut and turn grass and bring in the harvest. It was very common during the summer days of 1943 to see small armies of fit and bronzed young men among the peasant families in the fields and pastures of the Vercors. The easy habits of city living were being replaced by the calloused hands and sinewed bodies necessary for survival as a Maquisard.

This was not so everywhere. There was considerable variation between camps according to how and by whom they were run. By the middle of 1943, many camps had ex-military commanders and were run on military lines. Here, by and large, there was good order, effective security, discipline and good relations with the locals. In other camps, however, things had ‘the appearance of a holiday camp [with] young men taking their siestas in the shade of the firs after lunch or lying out in the sun improving their tans’.

One feature dominated the daily routine of all the camps, whether well run or not – the routine of the corvées, or camp chores. There were corvées for almost everything from peeling potatoes to gathering water (which in some camps had to be carried long distances from the nearest spring), bringing in the food, collecting the mail, chopping and carrying the wood (especially in winter), cooking, washing up and much else besides. Some camps – the lucky ones – were able to use mules for the heavy carrying, but many relied for their victuals, warmth and water on the strong legs and sturdy backs of their young occupants alone.

Soon it was realized that work in the fields was not going to be enough to keep the minds of intelligent young men occupied – or prepare them for what everyone knew would come in due course. One of the organizations established by the Vichy government – and then dissolved shortly after the German invasion of the south – was a school to train ‘cadres’ or young professionals to run Vichy government structures. The École d’Uriage, many of whose students came from the Army, was located some 15 kilometres outside Grenoble. Following the lead of its commander, the École soon became a hotbed of Resistant sentiment. When the École d’Uriage was dissolved in December 1943, most of the students and staff swiftly reassembled in the old château of Murinais, just under the western rim of the Vercors. It was from here, at the suggestion of Alain Le Ray, who had by now become the effective military commander of all the camps, that flying squads, usually of three or four students and staff, were sent out to the camps to provide training for the réfractaires. Typically a Uriage flying squad would spend several days in a camp, following a set training programme which provided military training, cultural awareness and political education. The curriculum included instruction in basic military skills, training exercises, weapon handling, physical exercise, map reading and orientation, security, camp discipline, hygiene and political studies covering the tenets of the Gaullist Resistance movement and a briefing on the aims of the Allies and the current status of the war. One camp even received instruction in Morse code. In the evenings there were boisterous games and the singing of patriotic songs around the campfire. Study circles were established which continued to meet after the flying squad had moved on. In many cases camp members were required to sign the Charter of the Maquis, which laid out the duties and conduct expected of a Maquisard. The Uriage teams even produced a small booklet on how to be a Resistance fighter with a front cover claiming it was an instruction manual for the French Army.

There was also some less conventional training given by one of the Vercors’ most unusual and remarkable characters. Fabien Rey was famous on the plateau before the war as a poacher, a frequenter of the shadowy spaces beyond the law, an initiate into the mysteries of the Vercors’ forests and hidden caves and an intimate of the secret lives of all its creatures. During the summer and autumn months of 1943, when not striding from camp to camp to share his knowledge with the young men from the cities, his latest crop of trapped foxes swinging from his belt, he could always be found sitting in his cabin invigilating a bubbling stew of strange delicacies such as the intestines of wild boars and the feathered heads of eagles, which he would press on any unwary visitor who passed. He also wrote a small cyclostyled handbook on how to live off the land on the plateau. It too was widely distributed and eagerly read.

In February 1943, Yves Farge, who had by now become the chief intermediary between Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s emissary, and the Vercors Resistants, made the connection between Pierre Dalloz and Aimé Pupin’s organization. From now on, the two organizations, which were soon joined by their military co-conspirators, were fused into a single Combat Committee which directed all Resistance activity on the plateau.

On 1 March 1943, at a meeting in the Café de la Rotonde, Yves Farge handed Aimé Pupin the first tranche of the money London had sent by parachute to pay for the camps. Farge stayed the following night with Pupin and then, on the morning of 3 March, the two men set off on a day’s reconnaissance of the southern half of the plateau in a taxi driven by a sympathizer. They went first to La Grande Vigne to collect Pierre Dalloz and then continued their journey up the mountain to Villard-de-Lans, where they collected Léon Martin. From there the little group pressed on to Vassieux: ‘What I saw in front of me was the wide even plain around Vassieux … The aerial approaches to the plain from both north and south were unencumbered by hills, especially to the south. Somehow I had known that we would find an airstrip and here it was – and even better than I could have dreamed of … all around were wide areas which appeared specially designed to receive battalions parachuted from the sky.’

The little group stopped for a drink in a small bistro in Vassieux, pretending that they were looking to buy a piece of land on which to construct a saw-mill. But according to Dalloz, no one in Vassieux was deceived and the whole town, from that day onwards, believed that General de Gaulle himself was about to descend from the sky at any moment. The impression that secrets were impossible on the Vercors was further reinforced at lunch when, despite their attempts to appear discreet, the waiter at the Hôtel Bellier in La Chapelle announced their entry into the hotel dining room with the words ‘Ah! Here are the gentlemen of the Resistance.’

That afternoon, the party returned to Villard where they dropped off Léon Martin before taking a quick detour to look at Méaudre and Autrans in the next-door valley. Crossing back over the Col de la Croix Perrin, they were surprised to see Léon Martin standing in the middle of the road flagging them down urgently. It was bad news. The Italians had raided the Café de la Rotonde and arrested Pupin’s wife and fourteen other core members of the Grenoble organization.

Pupin immediately went to ground in Villard but not before taking two precautions. He dispatched Fabien Rey to Ambel to tell the réfractaires to decamp until the coast was clear. And he sent a friend down to Grenoble to try to prevent his records from falling into the hands of the Italians (whose soldiers had often frequented La Rotonde). He needn’t have bothered. The quick-witted Mme Pupin had burnt the records before they could be found. In the absence of any evidence, the Italians had to release all the detainees a few days later.

Aimé Pupin and his co-conspirators should have realized that they had been given two warnings that day. First that their activities were no longer secret. And second that keeping centralized records was dangerous folly. Sadly neither warning was heeded.