Andrée's War (24 page)

Martial de la Fournière joined the Orion group in 1941; in 1944 he was still working at the Ministry of Colonial Affairs where, because France had been cut off from her overseas dependencies, he found himself with little to do. Instead he used his time and the
ausweiss
he could obtain to infiltrate other ministries, where he networked with a group of like-minded people who supplied him with information from other Vichy ministries, intelligence
they thought might be useful to the Resistance. Once again Andrée and her colleagues were there to take it to Orthez.

Within six weeks of Alain's return to Paris, Orion was running more successfully than ever before. With the money from OSS they were able to use informants more widely and pass on to other agents the skills Alain had learnt during his training.

 

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Guy Mangenot was awarded two Croix de guerre – one for the dangers he ran while running the Cauderon group and the other while serving in the army under General Leclerc in 1945.

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He may have been using a different type of pill, however, as when his guards realised what was happening, the prison doctor was instructed to pump the substance out of his stomach so that he could face death by firing squad.

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Verneau was arrested after the Gestapo managed to infiltrate the ORA. He died while awaiting deportation to Buchenwald. Alain felt Verneau and his ORA colleagues took far greater risks, with less security, than the Orion Group. In his memoirs he described his horror at discovering after the war that de Rochefort had carelessly kept a note (a ‘pneumatique') from Verneau, cancelling a meeting between the two men.

I
n May 1944, on what proved to be yet another delayed journey, Andrée arrived in Biarritz late in the evening. She had some ‘post' stitched into her suitcase as usual and nowhere to stay, as she hadn't intended to have an overnight stop. She tried three hotels near the station, none of which was able to give her a room, and (unusually for her) she started to worry. She knew no one in the town, curfew was about to fall and she was carrying incriminating material. Desperate times called for desperate measures, as she later recorded in her diary:

I finally arrived at a brothel, ‘Chez Denise'. I was so relieved to have found somewhere to stay, I did not even begin to start thinking about the dreadful smell. I undressed, washed, got into bed and fell asleep but, at around two in the morning, I woke up scratching. I turned on the light and saw that I had been badly bitten by some sort of insect and there were several large red spots on my legs and then what did I see? A flea, sitting on the sheet; it was huge. I did not give it the benefit of the doubt and killed it instantly. It oozed blood. I then saw two more fleas and they were subject to the same fate. Had I been able to walk out of the house there and then I would have done so but I had to wait until after curfew had been lifted. So I had to sit for the next three hours upright in the most uncomfortable chair because there was no way I was going to go anywhere near the bed. Needless to say I did not sleep a wink.

Andrée had ended up at the brothel thanks to an unlikely source of help: the local police station. Trying to batten down a rising feeling of panic, she decided to take refuge there – reasoning that her job at Police Headquarters
in Paris might cause them to take pity on her. The duty sergeant – overweight, middle-aged and friendly – expressed concern at her plight. Briefly she hoped he might invite her to stay with his family, but to have invited in a stranger (even a charmingly naive young woman) was perhaps too great a risk for anyone to take. Instead he made a surprising suggestion.

‘I have an idea, Mademoiselle. You will not like what I am going to say, but there is no choice. There is a brothel near here and I think that is where you should go and stay the night. I will give you a letter of introduction to its owner, Madame Denise. Please do not worry: we know Madame Denise well and she will take good care of you. She allows travellers to stay in her rooms occasionally and there is never a problem.'

Andrée was initially shocked that he would suggest such a thing. But she was a pragmatic young woman; the hotels were full and she had to be off the streets within fifteen minutes. She considered asking the sergeant whether she could stay in one of the cells, but then thought better of it: the Germans often visited police stations in the early morning and she did not want to risk an encounter. She would go to the brothel and see what happened. Her mind made up, she walked briskly out of the police station and to the address the sergeant had given her. She knocked on the door, which was opened by a peroxide-blond woman wearing a low-cut dress who looked at her sharply and asked her what she wanted.

Trying to conceal her hesitation and unusual shyness, Andrée told her: ‘The sergeant at the gendarmerie gave me your address and said you might be able to put me up for the night. I have here a letter of introduction.'

Madame Denise looked at Andrée suspiciously as she opened the envelope, but after reading it her attitude changed. She ushered her visitor in. ‘Yes, I can give you a room on the top floor; you won't find it very comfortable but you will be safe. I want twenty-five francs for it and I need you out by 5.30 in the morning.'

Andrée took the key, picked up her case and made her way slowly and somewhat hesitantly up the stairs. As she reached the first floor, she was quite taken aback by the huge number of mirrors hanging from all available surfaces. She was quickly brought back to reality as she came face to face with a couple of Wehrmacht officers flirting outrageously with two
of the girls of the house. It appeared, however, that Andrée was totally invisible to them; they were off-duty, having a great time and uninterested in a shy-looking young girl who wore no make-up and was dressed in simple clothes.

She reached the second floor and unlocked her room, closing the door behind her in relief. There was no point in panicking; she was in a whorehouse, by herself, in a town with no friends or contacts. The most important thing to do was to get some rest so that she could leave early in the morning and get to Orthez as quickly as possible.

Andrée opened her little case, undressed and put on her nightdress. She hadn't paid attention to the room's decor until now but, as she looked around, she saw herself from every angle on a series of mirrors – covering not just the walls but the ceiling. She recoiled with surprise, but then suddenly started to giggle as she thought back to her smart English friends and wondered what they would have thought about the situation she now found herself in. She felt sure that an English brothel would not have been quite as opulent as this one. She looked at the bed with its silk sheets and started to laugh all over again.

She turned off the light, closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep, but it was difficult; she hadn't eaten and was hungry, but worse than that she could hear the sound of a couple making love in the adjoining room. What really upset her was knowing that the prostitute was French and the man was German.

The final straw – as her diary entry above records – was when she fell asleep at last, only to be woken a few hours later by fleas biting her. Once she realised, she scrubbed herself all over in disgust, and waited in a chair until she heard the church bells chime 5.30 a.m. As she came downstairs, she walked into the middle of a heated argument between Madame Denise and a German officer complaining about his bill. He had obviously had a bad night and was in a filthy temper. Andrée considered returning to her room, but it was too late; she had been seen. The officer wheeled round and asked Madame Denise who she was and what she was doing in the brothel. Madame Denise calmly explained that her guest had stayed the night with her because all the Biarritz hotels had been booked up the previous night
and the gendarmerie had sent her to them. In typically abrupt fashion, the officer turned to Andrée and demanded to see her identity card.

Andrée put down her case, opened her handbag and took out her ID card. The card gave her occupation at Police Headquarters in Paris and upon reading that the officer's body language changed instantly. Possibly concerned that if he pursued his line of questioning she might have friends in high places and report him to a senior officer in Paris, he clearly thought it best to let her on her way. He returned the card without a word as Andrée thanked her host and left the building.

Relieved to have escaped a difficult situation, she made her way to the station where she ordered some breakfast and waited for her train. It wasn't due for a couple of hours and so it was not until the late afternoon that she arrived at Orthez and made her way towards the address that François had given her. As she approached, she saw a man working on a car on the side of the road. She greeted him politely and he replied without hesitation: ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle, and how is life in Paris?' This was her contact.

Within minutes she was inside the house, opening her case and handing over the documents. She was now desperate to get back to the bus station for the last leg of her journey to Salies-de-Béarn. Stepping off the bus in the small Bearnais town, she headed straight to a café to place a call through to the château. The housekeeper was delighted to hear Andrée at the end of the line, and told her she would be picked up within the hour.

Andrée sat down in the late afternoon sun and thought about the warm welcome awaiting her, along with a bath, the possibility of some soap, hopefully a dinner of fresh food and a good night's sleep. There was only one question in her mind. Should she tell Madame Labbé about the brothel?

T
he largest military operation in history began on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 – codenamed Operation Overlord. Approximately 150,000 men landed or parachuted into the area and thousands lost their lives. As the liberating troops advanced, the RAF and US air forces increased their bombing campaign, leaving much of the French railway network destroyed. Communication and travel throughout France became more difficult, compounded by many acts of sabotage, and for twenty-four hours after the D-Day landings the trains were at a complete standstill. In a recording made some twenty years ago, Andrée spoke of the difficulty in getting around during this time: often she had very little notice before a trip and she frequently didn't know how she would reach her destination. She recalled once having to go to Bordeaux by way of Marseilles, a huge detour.

Between 6 June and 17 July 1944, Andrée made four trips from Paris to Orion. Each time she stopped in Bordeaux to link up with a Cauderon Resistance agent who gave her the Bordeaux post, which she then took down to Orthez or Orion. At other times she left the post she had brought down from Paris in Bordeaux for a Cauderon agent to take on to Orthez, in case anyone might have followed Andrée from Paris. One diary entry referred to a train journey back from Bordeaux to Paris where she said she was ‘joined in the carriage by members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. They had been playing in Spain. They were such fun but I will not admit this to anyone.'

The intensity of Andrée's travelling during this period proved exhausting – she was still working at Police Headquarters while obtaining permission to travel and coping with the unavoidable delays. The tracks
were damaged so the trains were overcrowded, subject to air attacks and very hot due to the summer temperatures. Carriages were often requisitioned by the Germans. It was a punishing schedule and she was feeling the weight of her responsibilities. Her diary entries from this period were torn out of her journal and weren't always dated, making it difficult to assess exactly where she was at any one time. They are surprisingly – even shockingly – detailed (though without, of course, referring to the real purpose of her travel), full of information about her journeys, including first names of people she was due to meet. Given everything Andrée had absorbed from her brother about the need for discretion and secrecy, it seems incredible that she should have written so much down: her journals would have been potentially damaging evidence, had they been found, but possibly her whirlwind activity and subsequent exhaustion meant she was not fully on her guard. And, of course, she was not a professional agent: she was a twenty-three-year-old young woman, charged with huge responsibility. On one trip to Orthez, undated but most likely sometime during the first half of June, she described the difficulties she had in returning to Paris:

I had been travelling all day and as we waited for a train heading for Paris, we were told that the only one coming through was now only going to Poitiers. I was about to give up when some of my fellow passengers suggested we go and look for a lorry or car heading for Paris, which might give us a lift. As we went in search of one there was an air-raid alert. As we walked, we met a group of people who had recently arrived from Paris. They told us the city was besieged and that the Germans were shooting indiscriminately on the streets. I did not believe it but we were so worried that we stopped for a drink – first one glass, then another, till we finished several bottles of wine.

Finally we found a driver taking a lorry to Paris. He was prepared to take us if we paid for the petrol. After four hours we got only as far as Orléans, and we were packed in the back like sardines, but at least we were 200 kilometres closer to Paris. Orléans was completely deserted due to the intense bombing. We stopped and found a hotel but I could not sleep; I could not get the bombs out of my mind. There was another air-raid
warning after midnight; if I had been alone I would not have had the strength to get up, but my new friends and I went together to the shelter. The temperature in the shelter was below zero and the bombing lasted half an hour. We went back to bed but within half an hour we were back in the shelter. Finally, back in bed for the third time, I got to sleep, only to be woken at 7 in the morning.