Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (30 page)

BOOK: Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass

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This was particularly likely to be the case at St-Amand. After the disbanding of the Armée de l’Armistice on 27 November 1942, Pétain’s Secretary of State for War, General Eugène Bridoux, started lobbying for a military force of some kind by arguing that it could be usefully deployed against the Maquis and Resistance groups. Six months later, in a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 30 April 1943, Laval obtained the Führer’s agreement for a new and smaller Vichy army to be created for this purpose and placed directly under his control.

On 23 July 1943 Bridoux authorised the formation of the Premier Régiment de France (1RF), a force of three battalions, maximum total strength fixed at 2,760 officers and men. General Antoine Berlon, an officer whose pro-German sympathies were punished with five years’ deprivation of civil rights after the liberation, was given overall command. The 1st Battalion of 1RF was stationed at Le Blanc, 70 miles south-west of Bourges, but 3rd Battalion was stationed at Dun-sur-Auron, only 15 miles south-east of Bourges and therefore within a short drive of St-Amand. Even more to the point, 2nd Battalion was actually stationed in St-Amand-Montrond, which meant that the best part of 1,000 officers and men owing allegiance to the government in Vichy were within a few minutes’ march of Sochet’s planned uprising. Knowing that, in this confusing time, many 1RF officers were anti-German despite the task they were supposedly fulfilling, Colonel Bertrand did the only thing possible in the circumstances. He unofficially sent a message through mutual friends to Major Ardisson, the officer commanding the 1RF troops in St-Amand, to do everything possible to prevent or at least retard any intervention by the battalion, no matter what happened in the town on D-Day.

The stage was nevertheless set for a tragedy, of which the unlikely heroine was a powerful woman named Simone Bout de l’An, whose husband Francis
⁷had taken over as national head of the Milice after its founder Joseph Darnand was promoted to the post of Secretary of the Interior at the beginning of 1944. Like many Vichy politicians, Bout de l’An had flirted with the left during the 1930s and even visited the USSR. It was that visit which persuaded him to abandon communism and head right. Spells of teaching history and geography in Teheran and Damascus were followed by a return to France in 1941, just in time to be in at the beginning of Service d’Ordre Légionnaire that became the Milice.

In April 1944 Bout de l’An had come to St-Amand for a political meeting. Looking for a safe place to leave his wife, their two sons and his ageing mother – partly because he enjoyed the pleasures of a bachelor life away from them – he had chosen St-Amand because it lay as far as possible from any French coast that might be invaded and because it enjoyed the reputation of being ‘the sort of town where nothing ever happens’. With its own Milice headquarters and the presence of 2nd Battalion of 1RF, what could be safer?

In an endeavour to minimise civilian casualties after the first landings in Normandy, German-controlled Radio Paris broadcast repeated warnings that the occupying forces would have to take ‘exceptional measures’ in the combat zones and that the population should ‘not allow itself to become involved in the fighting’.

Blanchard and Sagnelonge, pumping adrenalin and with a sense of mission, took de Gaulle’s broadcast on the evening of 6 June as a blessing on the local initiative they were planning. Thirty minutes later, some seventy men gathered at the lock-keeper’s cottage on the Canal du Berry at Clairins, just outside St-Amand. The Renseignements Généraux (equivalent of British MI5) attempted to justify the lack of action by local forces of law and order by alleging there were ‘between 700 and 800 individuals armed with sub-machine guns and automatic rifles’. Communist historians also exaggerated the numbers threefold in an effort to prove the popular support for the uprising. However, survivors of those at Clairins on that evening are definite that they numbered no more than seventy.

They were a mixture of young
maquisards
from various bands in the region and older
sédentaires
living at home, apparently normally, while they awaited the call to arms. Most of the younger ones were simply out to seize what they thought would be a good opportunity to prove their courage and manhood after four years of submitting to German occupation. Others went along with the rest because they were afraid of being called cowards if they did not. Because there had been little open contact in the past between the different Maquis bands, introductions at Clairins were made at the same time as Sten guns and automatic pistols parachuted by the RAF to COMBAT were handed out to men with no military training. Most of them had never previously handled anything more lethal than a shotgun. The immediate result was that one man was shot dead accidentally before they learned how easy it was to loose a burst of fire from a Sten.

Even at this stage the ultimate tragedy could have been averted, save for the instruction received by the minority of PCF members present, who had been secretly briefed to ‘exterminate all the German garrisons and … kill without mercy all the murderous rabble of the Milice’.
⁸The second part of the order was effectively a declaration of civil war. There was a fail-safe plan decided on at the meeting of 31 May: should it prove impossible to hold St-Amand after its ‘liberation’, the various elements would flee into the nearby Massif Central, where it would be difficult for German anti-terrorist troops to track them down. Since many French towns and villages had been punished for Resistance and Maquis operations with which they had nothing to do, what did van Gaver, Blanchard, Sochet and the others think would happen to the civilian population of St-Amand after their withdrawal? Nobody knows.

The unfamiliar, but obviously lethal, British weapons in their hands made all the men at Clairins very gung-ho. In trucks, private cars and on motorbikes they drove back into town. The time was now 1830hrs. Hubert Lalonnier took command, splitting his forces into three groups. The first, under van Gaver and Sochet, occupied the sub-prefecture without meeting any resistance. Van Gaver installed himself in the sub-prefect’s office.

The second group headed for the town hall. There also, there was no resistance. At the Gendarmerie, it was the same story because the senior officer there was a clandestine member of OAS. Two German civilian administrators of the STO – some reports say three – were arrested, but not maltreated. At the post office a
milicien
in the wrong place at the wrong time was so badly beaten up that he was left for dead. Barrages were set up on the principal roads into the town. At the barrage on the road to Bourges a car was stopped in which two
miliciens
were travelling, their automatic weapons out of reach on the rear seat. Arrested and led to the war memorial, the two prisoners were shot and their bodies left lying there all night.

The third group of insurgents, led by Lalonnier and Blanchard, surrounded the Milice headquarters in St-Amand at 1900hrs and opened fire at will. An impressive hail of bullets struck the building without hitting anyone inside. Nor did the return fire or the few hand grenades thrown by the
miliciens
score a hit until a stray shot – no one knew whose – killed an incautious passer-by. Having no overall command, each
maquisard
kept in touch only with comrades from his own group. In the resultant confusion a
milicien
with more guts than the others decided to act.

Clément Marchad was a Parisian waiter who had joined the Milice to save himself from the STO. He now took off his uniform jacket and slipped on a civilian coat, jumped out of a window at the rear of the building and was surprised to find no one there. Grabbing a motorbike, he rode off to a public telephone, where he called the Milice HQ in Bourges with a vivid account of Allied parachutists dropping on St-Amand and attacking the town. Whether he made this story up to justify any accusations that he had deserted his post or simply because the general confusion made it hard to know exactly what was going on, no one is sure. In either event, his news was swiftly relayed from Bourges to Vichy.

Inside the building still under attack, Simone’s younger son was suffering from bronchitis and needed to be taken to hospital. Furious at the incompetence of the men supposedly protecting her and her children, and who were plainly unable to drive off what she called ‘the rabble outside’, she gave them all a good tongue-lashing, on the lines of, ‘Call yourselves men?’ She then ordered the senior
milicien
to inform the FFI by telephone that they were prepared to surrender for the sake of the women and children in the building, provided they were guaranteed their lives. On the other end of the line, Lalonnier agreed to this, without any intention of keeping his word to men, some of whom had arrested and beaten up his comrades in the past. After Simone thrust a white sheet out of a window about 2300hrs the firing stopped. Eight
miliciens
walked out, hands on their heads, followed by several women and the two children. Lalonnier wanted to kill the men there and then in compliance with the PCF directive, but gave way to Blanchard and van Gaver, who insisted they be treated as POWs and locked up in the sub-prefecture because the
miliciens
were, after all, in uniform.

Since one of the Bout de l’An boys was visibly ill, it was decided to send the two of them and their grandmother to the hospital. The male prisoners were locked up in the cellar of the town hall and the women, including Simone, who protested that she should be with her children, were put into the office where the mayor normally officiated at marriages.

Because no one in the Milice had the presence of mind to destroy their files of informers and sympathisers before surrendering, the
maquisards
now used these to launch a witch hunt in which many people were dragged out of their houses and marched off at gunpoint to be locked up in the town hall, where the German STO administrators were also interned.

Lalonnier, meanwhile, had driven off in a truck to inform all the local villages of St-Amand’s ‘liberation’. As dawn approached, villagers eager to join the celebrations mingled with those who would anyway have come into town for the market. Most of the shops stayed closed. At the sub-prefecture a cask of wine was broached with free drinks for everyone who looked in. Tobacco being normally scarce, a chest of it was also made available to anyone who smoked. Rumours flew from mouth to mouth: the Allies had landed in the south of France too; Bourges was besieged by the FFI. Hastily printed posters suddenly appeared on walls announcing a general mobilisation for males of military age to join the FFI.

The Rex cinema, owned by van Gaver, was turned into a recruiting depot, where the general euphoria produced a sudden flood of volunteers wanting to enlist. Their enthusiasm was somewhat dampened when they could only be issued with three cartridges per man and a hunting gun from the store of those confiscated after the defeat. Slowly the numbers of men in St-Amand armed with some kind of firearm mounted until they approached 300 maximum. One of them is worthy of note. Jewish, but identified only as ‘the traitor’, he had been arrested by the Gestapo and released shortly before members of the LIBERATION-SUD movement had been betrayed. Suspected of being responsible for the betrayal, ‘the traitor’ was shunned by everyone. Coming out of the cinema with the gun he had just been issued, he announced grandly: ‘They didn’t want me in the Resistance, but now I am.’

The police tried to keep some kind of order and prevent pillaging of property belonging to known supporters of Vichy. In the general confusion, the chief
milicien
, who had not been in the headquarters building at the time of the attack, put on civilian clothes and caught the early train to Bourges. In the sub-prefecture, van Gaver was working the phones and finding that none of the neighbouring towns had risen up against the occupation. There was some fighting in Guéret between local FFI and mixed Milice/German forces, but that was 80km distant and no help could be expected from that quarter. From a patrol of 1RF, who did not otherwise intervene, he also learned the disquieting news that the Allies were still bottled up in a few square miles of Normandy beachhead and fighting desperately not to be pushed back into the sea. When he expressed his concerns, Sochet brushed them aside, stating with the blitheness of ignorance that it must be possible to hold St-Amand for the few days it would take the Allied spearheads to reach them.

Notes