Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (31 page)

7
His curious family name, which means ‘year’s end’, was due to his grandfather being found newborn and abandoned on 29 December 1850.

8
Todorov, p. 40.

A COUNTRY IN CHAOS

Francis Bout de l’An was awoken in his Paris hotel on the morning of 7 June with the news that his wife and children were held hostage by the FFI. Darnand, also in Paris, authorised him to use all necessary German and French forces to re-take the town and liberate his family. Telephoning the sub-prefecture in St-Amand in the hope of getting an update from a Vichy official, Bout de l’An found himself talking instead to van Gaver, sitting in the sub-prefect’s chair. The conversation rapidly degenerated into an exchange of insults that became threats. After collecting thirty
miliciens
in Vichy, Bout de l’An stopped at Moulins, where the local Wehrmacht commander promised to attack St-Amand in force the following morning. Meantime, throughout the afternoon of 7 June, he was receiving intelligence on enemy strength from the pilot of a light observation aircraft, who reported that the town was in a holiday mood, with people thronging the streets and only a few makeshift barricades here and there.

The FFI, having neither camouflaged their transport nor even parked it under cover, panicked at the sight of the small aircraft with Maltese cross markings flying low overhead, believing that it meant German troops would arrive imminently. A few prudent people in the crowds took it as an evil omen and hurriedly packed a suitcase, to leave town as soon as possible. Towards 1500hrs Simone was allowed briefly to visit her children in the hospital and then forced to clamber aboard one of the FFI trucks with the
miliciens
’
girlfriends. Although her captors knew exactly who she was, and rightly considered her more valuable than all the other prisoners put together, she alone among the hostages showed no sign of fear, openly despising the anguished girlfriends of the
miliciens
– or ‘little sluts’ as she called them – with characteristic lack of tact. With the male prisoners in another truck, the FFI then left town after posting warning notices in prominent places:

We have taken thirty-six men and women of the Milice prisoner. This is to warn you that, if miliciens from elsewhere take reprisals in St-Amand, the hostages will be shot.

The notices were signed ‘The Committee of the Resistance’.
¹

An hour later the trucks returned, Lalonnier having failed to find a safe house in which to detain his prisoners. They were again locked up in the town hall, while their captors took stock of the situation, which was not all as they had hoped. A sympathetic gendarme at Charenton, only 8 miles to the east of the town, telephoned to say that a large German force was on its way. The news compelled a move out of St-Amand, but not during daylight, when they could be tracked by the spotter plane. Those who had not slept for forty-eight hours were sent home to grab a few hours’ shut-eye. The signal to report back and leave town was to be the traditional roll on the town crier’s drum.

For the most part roused in time – three were left behind, sleeping – they returned to the Rex cinema, where various groups were allocated to different trucks. A number of the prisoners were released for reasons about which no one seemed clear: friendship, probably. Finally, Simone and the six girlfriends were placed in one truck with eighteen
miliciens
in another. As to how they were selected to be taken, while ten others were left in the town hall, to be liberated by the Germans, most survivors claimed that those taken along for the ride were the ones guilty of excesses, not that there was anything like a trial; everything was done on hearsay. Apart from Simone, the tearful girlfriends in the first truck were thought to be a useful bargaining counter, if and when one was needed. There was also a masculine desire to punish them for ‘sleeping with the enemy’ – a ‘crime’ for which so many thousands of Frenchwomen would be punished by public humiliation in the months to come.

The trucks departed at various times between 2200hrs and 0100hrs. In the confusion and darkness one man was shot dead after being mistaken for a German. At Châteaumeillant, only 4 miles away, the convoy assembled, to hear that the warning of the Germans’ proximity was apparently a false alarm. Unbelievably, they turned round again and headed back to St-Amand. Just outside the town limits two civilians warned them that a battalion of the von Jesser brigade had already cordoned off the other side of the town and was making its way through the south-eastern suburbs.

Soon after the convoy had finally left, at about 0500hrs von Jesser’s troops headed into the town centre, wearing camouflage smocks and with blackened faces. Guided by two
miliciens
– one was the man who had been badly beaten up at the post office – they arrested anyone incautious enough to be in the streets and all those identified by their two guides as having been involved in the uprising until they had 200 people to lock up in the sub-prefecture. There, they also released some of their own men left in the cells by the Maquis.

On Thursday 8 June, André Sagnelonge woke up at 0700hrs. Whoever was supposed to have awoken him for the departure with the other
maquisards
had forgotten to do so. Hearing the sound of firing in the streets, he hurriedly dressed and, with a young neighbour, went outside, his jacket sleeve still bearing the FFI armband. Surrounded by German troops after only a few paces, he threw down his rifle and put his hands up. Ordered to stand facing a wall with several other men, he awaited the command, ‘
Feuer!
’

Instead, he heard an argument behind his back, after which the local Gendarmerie captain Cholet told the men to put down their hands and attempted to release those whose guilt was in any doubt. Thanks to his armband, Sagnelonge knew he could not be one of them. A man of unusual initiative, who had escaped from German POW camps five times and been recaptured each time before making his successful run home in 1942, he waited until the nearest soldier was looking the other way and then leapt over the wall, followed by his young neighbour. Cholet attempted to place himself between the soldiers and the running men. Two shots rang out. Both men fell. A third shot, missing its target, hit Cholet instead, and killed him.

The next victims of the day were seven FFI men who had not departed with the others because they were still looking for fuel for their
gazogène
truck. Recognised by the
miliciens
accompanying the German soldiers, they were arrested and shot, with one other man, their names recorded to this day on the
mur des fusillés
.

Alarmed by a burst of fire released accidentally by a
milicien
, the Germans set fire to six buildings in the town centre, using flame-throwers and phosphorous grenades. They then prevented the fire service from doing its job. It was a day of terror for everyone in the town, a total of nineteen men being shot and six homes burned to the ground. As one of the survivors bitterly remarked: ‘On 7 June, the Maquis bought drinks all round and left us to pay the bill next day.’
²

The only German casualty was the pilot of the spotter plane, who misjudged clearance over a treetop and crashed in flames. Finding their three civilian compatriots unharmed, the Wehrmacht withdrew in good order, handing the town over to the Milice, who plundered and burned the homes of the departed FFI men, arresting people at random and locking them up temporarily in the 1RF barracks. And there the sorry episode would have ended, but for the hostages.

Arriving about noon, Bout de l’An visited his sons and mother at the hospital and had them driven to safety in Vichy. He then interrogated Major Ardisson as to why 2nd Battalion of 1RF had not intervened the previous day. Ardisson replied that he was not there to fight the Maquis – a reply that saw him arrested and sent to the prison in Bourges. Bout de l’An then took a posse of
miliciens
and scoured the nearby countryside for traces of the men holding his wife. Apart from beating up a few people who could tell them nothing useful, it was a waste of time.

Bout de l’An now returned to Vichy, showing no concern for the
milicien
hostages because, in his view, they should have died fighting. The thought of a bunch of
maquisards
having the temerity to keep his wife hostage, however, sent him into a fit of rage. After St-Amand’s mayor René Sadrin negotiated the release of some of the townspeople locked up in the barracks, Bout de l’An was furious and decided that the local Milice was too soft or too involved with local people to be entrusted with reprisals in the town.

One Milice officer who would go all the way was Joseph Lécussan, a tall, heavily built ex-naval officer whose hair-trigger temper matched his red hair. A chronic alcoholic, Lécussan was rarely sober, and had indulged his hatred of Jews and communists while director of Jewish Questions in Toulouse by brutal interrogations that killed at least one detainee and by extorting money and valuables from many others in return for promises of leniency that were never kept. After joining the Milice in 1943, this record was enough to see him swiftly appointed its regional head in Lyon.
³

An uncertain progress saw the FFI convoy still only 50 miles away, arriving in Guéret, capital of the neighbouring
département
of Creuse, to find the town in a state of civil war with roads barricaded and many buildings on fire. After the regional FFI under its tyrannical 34-year-old commander Albert Fossey, using the
nom de guerre
‘Major François’, had besieged the Milice and the German garrison, both groups had surrendered and been locked up without ill treatment. Some
miliciens
were still at liberty, however, and three of the prisoners were shot in reprisal for their continued resistance.

The hostages from St-Amand were herded into the town’s prison, their captors grabbing the chance to sleep wherever they could find a bed. The early risers among them were taking breakfast on a cafe terrace when a German aircraft flew in at rooftop height and machine-gunned the centre of town. ‘François’ – as commander of all FFI forces in zone R5 – ordered an immediate evacuation, conveniently forgetting to advise the local FTP fighters as a way of settling an old score with them. The straggling convoy of trucks – all the
gazogène
wood-burners had run out of fuel by now and had to be towed – made off towards the south and were strafed several times by German planes, but miraculously without casualties.

In the early afternoon the trucks were hidden beneath trees while a council of war was held. Lalonnier took the view that the convoy was too big and far too visible from the air, and therefore had to be broken up. Preparing to spend the night there and travel on in the morning, the FFI had an unforeseen problem. One of the ‘little sluts’ was having a miscarriage, brought on by all the bumping on the hard wooden seats of the trucks. Simone took charge, despatched two men to fetch clean water and looked after the terrified girl.

Posters printed in Vichy were displayed all over St-Amand, warning that the 200-odd hostages would be executed and the whole town burned down if Simone Bout de l’An was not liberated within forty-eight hours. To avoid the destruction of his town and the massacre of its inhabitants, Mayor Sadrin undertook a seemingly impossible task: to catch up with the Maquis convoy and negotiate an exchange of hostages.

So, on that awful Saturday morning when Oradour was about to be destroyed and almost all its inhabitants massacred, 150km to the north-east he and two other mediators from St-Amand were stacking up the miles hunting for the FFI and their hostages taken from St-Armand. Their deadline had already been extended several times. On one occasion they missed a rendezvous with the
maquisards
by less than a kilometre due to a misunderstanding.

Drinking heavily from the moment he arrived in St-Amand, Lécussan ordered a number of houses to be blown up and a curfew to be imposed, starting at 1800hrs. Returning exhausted from his fruitless hunt for the Maquis, Sadrin met Lécussan for the first time. Armed with a pistol and several hand grenades and rapidly emptying looted bottles of fine wine, he was holding twenty terrified additional hostages in the sub-prefecture. Arguing that they had nothing to with the events of 7 June, Sadrin offered to be shot in their place. Lécussan refused.

People with hidden radios, on which they had listened to the BBC against a background of explosions from the
miliciens
’ demolitions, passed on in whispers the warning broadcast by General Koenig, C-in-C of the FFI, in an attempt to defuse the several premature uprisings in France, that it was impossible for the Allies to supply the food, arms, ammunition and military support for any guerrilla activity. His advice was, in short, to cease guerrilla activity, to stay in small groups and not to band together. If only, the terrified inhabitants of St-Amand must have thought.