Das Reich (11 page)

Yet when his brother Roland was captured – his other brother Claude was also working for SOE – Malraux presented himself to the Resistance of Dordogne and Corrèze, quite without
humility, as a man ready to take command. He was forty-two. It is a remarkable tribute to his force of personality that ‘Colonel Berger’, as he styled himself after the hero of one of his novels, quickly persuaded Poirier, Hiller and others to treat him as an equal in their counsels. He began to travel with them around the region, addressing
maquisards
and attending conferences. He created the notion of a joint Anglo-French (and later, with the coming of OSS agents, American) council to bring together the Resistance groups of the region, with himself at its head. Malraux had left behind the mood of 1941, when he wrote that ‘a German defeat would be a victory for the Anglo-Saxons, who will colonize the world and probably France . . .’ But he was still Red enough to give the clenched fist salute. Chain-smoking English cigarettes from
parachutages
(a status symbol among
maquisards
), he would talk offhandedly yet at breakneck speed about ‘old man Churchill’, ‘that chap De Gaulle’, Chinese art, the acoustics of a château dining-room, ‘occasionally interjecting “Your turn now!”, which it was as well not to take too literally as an invitation to reply’. When later captured, he claimed to have declared himself to the Germans as ‘the military chief of this region . . . I have nothing to confess. I have been your opponent since the day of the Armistice.’ He also convinced himself that his captors were of the notorious Das Reich Division, although by then they were a month gone from the department.

The FTP regarded Malraux with withering scorn and took no notice whatever of his opinions, and even the AS had their reservations about him. But Malraux visibly enjoyed the confidence of the F Section officers, and encouraged the
résistants
to believe that he himself was an SOE-trained officer with important influence on
parachutages
and weapons and money supplies. By the summer of 1944, he had become a familiar figure to the
résistants
of the region.

Asked many years later about the lack of substance in Malraux’s claims and achievements as a
résistant
, Jacques Poirier paused for a moment. Then he said: ‘There are a few people born
in every century who are important not for what they do, but for what they say. Malraux was one of those.’ All of them were mesmerized by his obsessive fluency, the torrent of ideas that flooded over their heads in conversation. Visiting the camps of bored young
maquisards
in the torrid heat of the summer woods, Poirier knew how to talk pragmatically to their leaders. But he watched fascinated as Malraux leaped on to the roof of a
gazogène
and harangued the guerillas about the glory of France, the dignity of struggle, the nobility of sacrifice. It was irresistible, and it brought tears to their eyes. Poirier quoted a favourite word of Malraux’s –
un farfelu
, a compulsive activist who is also half-crazy. Malraux had for years been obsessed with the story of Lawrence of Arabia, and had himself always been a compulsive role-player. There is no doubt that while other Frenchmen in the woods of the Corrèze in 1944 thought of the next
parachutage
, the next cigarette, Malraux saw himself acting out a great heroic drama.

Some
maquisards
joked about his unsoldierly appearance – a certain physical clumsiness, one eye chronically weeping, Basque beret tilted, the constant sniffing. Poirier admitted that it was difficult to concentrate Malraux’s attention on practical military problems. The SOE officer would urge: ‘André, we must discuss the blowing of that bridge.’ But Malraux would say: ‘No, tonight I think I would prefer to hear Casimir play the piano.’ And in the château that was now their headquarters, in the failing summer evening light Malraux would sit lost in thought, gazing at the ceiling, while their wireless operator played his brilliant repertoire of classical music surrounded by a little group of half-naked, half-literate
maquisards
lying beside their weapons.

But Malraux’s personal courage was beyond question. One day, he and Poirier were driving together down a road when they were hailed by a
maquisard
who warned them of German vehicles ahead. Neither man wished to be the first to suggest turning back. Poirier drove nervously but defiantly onwards, until inevitably they rounded a bend to meet a German tank. Poirier desperately swung
the car in a screaming turn. Malraux seized the small automatic pistol from his belt and absurdly – yet to Poirier, also nobly – stood up and emptied it at the tank. Miraculously they escaped to tell the tale, although later that summer Malraux was less fortunate. He was with George Hiller in a car that ran headlong into a German column. Malraux was slightly injured and captured. Hiller was terribly wounded and was rescued, close to death, by Cyril Watney and a group of
maquisards.
He was operated upon under the most primitive circumstances in an abandoned presbytery high in the hills of the Lot, and narrowly survived. Malraux was delivered unscathed from imprisonment at the liberation of Toulouse, not without incurring the scepticism of some
résistants
who inquired acidly how he had ‘conned’ the Germans out of a firing squad.

That April with Poirier in Paris, Malraux had been as flamboyant as ever. He took him to dine at Prunier, relishing his immediate recognition by the head waiter. He introduced the young Frenchman to Camus as a British officer. Poirier began to be infected by the other man’s style. One morning, walking up the Champs-Elysées, he saw a huge German shepherd dog in the window of a pet shop, and knew instantly that he had to possess it. Ten minutes later and 10,000 francs of SOE’s money the poorer, he was leading it past the Arc de Triomphe when he met Malraux. Even the
farfelu
’s sense of discretion was appalled: ‘Jack, you’re crazy – you’re in Paris to
hide
.’ But Poirier would not be parted from the dog. He arranged for it to be taken down to the Dordogne, and all through that wild summer of 1944, Dick the dog rode with him on the wing of his car, trotted behind him through the camps in the woods, and slept in his room at the château where, with increasing confidence in their own power, the
maquisards
made their headquarters.

‘I was always a château type at heart,’ said Poirier wryly. In the weeks before D-Day, he and a band of Soleil’s
maquisards
took over the lovely Château le Poujade, set high on a hill above Urval, overlooking the great river and its irregular patchwork of fields
and vineyards in the distance. Only once were they disturbed by the Germans. Early one morning, a
maquisard
guard burst in to report that a German column led by armoured cars was crawling up the long, narrow road towards the château. Hastily they seized their weapons and took up position covering the approaches, conscious that their situation was desperate. But to their astonishment, halfway up the hill the Germans halted, paused, and then turned their vehicles and drove away. It seemed almost certain that they had seen the
maquisards’
movements. Yet by that phase, the Occupiers had become less than enthusiastic about meeting them head on, in battle. A large part of the contempt with which crack units such as the Das Reich regarded local garrison troops stemmed from the tacit enthusiasm of most security regiments for a policy of ‘live and let live’ with the Resistance. To German fighting units and to the zealots of the Gestapo, local German commanders often appeared absurdly anxious to placate French opinion, and contemptibly preoccupied with shipping produce and loot back to the Reich.

Poirier survived a dozen narrow escapes that spring.
Maquisards
in their camps in the woods were comparatively safe except in action. It was organizers and couriers, who were compelled to travel, who constantly risked capture. Meetings of any kind were a deadly risk: in November 1943, eleven local Resistance chiefs had been captured at a single conference in Montpazier.

There was a delicate balance to be struck between the need for speed and that for security. To walk or cycle was safer, but much too slow for the huge area Poirier had to cover. He generally employed
gazogènes
, which were designed by a Brive engineer, Maurice Arnhouil, who was one of the
maquis
’s most enthusiastic – although also least discreet – supporters. Even the
gazos
were maddeningly sluggish, often needing to be pushed uphill by the combined efforts of every passenger except the driver. Once, stopped at a German roadblock, Poirier fed all his incriminating papers into the charcoal burner under the pretext of filling it with fuel. Although the Germans seldom now ventured far from main
roads and towns unless in punitive columns, as the aggressiveness of the Resistance increased, so did the enemy’s nervousness and ferocity. ‘From February 1944 onwards,’ said Poirier, ‘it became highly dangerous for anyone to fall into the hands of the German Army.’ Racing through the sunlit hills, among the chickens scratching in the dust, the enchanting creeper-clad villages, it was easy to forget the terrible nature of their war. But when Poirier’s friend and comrade Raymond Maréchal was seized by the Germans, they forced his hands into the charcoal furnace of a gazogène and held him against the burner until he died. They burned a hotel which they searched in vain for Poirier a few hours after he left it, on an inexplicable impulse, at 5 am one day.

The romantic aura surrounding Resistance, together with Poirier’s gift for laughter, made it easy for him to attract girls but only very rarely did he sleep with those who were deeply involved in Resistance and utterly secure, ‘more or less for health reasons, you know’. George Starr, his F Section counterpart further west, had no sexual relationship with any woman during his two years in Gascony, because he considered the security risk too great.

It is only human nature that, after the war, these men forgot the months of chronic tension, the habit that dogged Poirier for months after the Liberation of watching his back everywhere that he walked. They remembered the absurd moments. An excited
résistant
who had been a French air force pilot came to Poirier one day and reported that he had found an abandoned and forgotten Maubussin light aircraft at the nearby Belvès flying club. One extraordinary spring day, the two men took off in the aircraft and circled over Périgueux, hurling out propaganda leaflets. They returned to Belvès with the exulting pilot leapfrogging the Dordogne bridges. The terrified Poirier demanded to get out, and was duly landed. The pilot took off again and made a dramatic swoop upon the river bridge. Poirier heard the terrible noise of the crash, and raced miserably to the scene to drag out the pilot’s body. Instead, he found the nonchalant young man
sitting on the bridge, smoking a cigarette and surveying the ruins of the aircraft: ‘The Dordogne air force had made its first and last sortie.’

All the months that he had been in England and with Peulevé, Poirier had assumed that his father Robert, another dashing spirit who became a racing driver for a time after leaving the air force, was somewhere working for Resistance. But the two had no contact until one day Poirier was informed that he was to meet a man at the
bloc-gazo
works in Brive whom local
résistants
thought could be helpful. To his utter astonishment, he walked into the room to find himself face to face with his father. His first thought was to mutter urgently: ‘Say nothing about our relationship!’ He had concealed his real French identity very closely, even from Malraux. The two talked earnestly. Poirier’s last words that night, before they went to bed, were: ‘Father, if you stay to work with me, you must accept that I am the boss.’ The next morning his father’s first words were ‘
Bonjour, mon capitain
.’ For the rest of the war Robert Poirier acted as secretary and administrative assistant to his son, without either man betraying a hint of the relationship to their colleagues.

As he toured the
maquis
, Poirier was indifferent to the political allegiances of each camp. Unlike some SOE officers, who would arm only those who would accept a measure of direction, and above all those who were not communist, Poirier cared only about how energetically they seemed likely to fight Germans. He overlooked the banditry by which some
maquis
existed, unless it appeared to threaten their security. Indeed, he was appalled one day to visit a
maquis
of Spaniards high in the hills – there were thousands of refugees from the Civil War all over southern France – and found them attempting literally to live off the land. They seemed to exist chiefly on nuts and wild plants. They were desperately hungry and passionately eager to fight fascists. At the end of the war, Poirier was deeply moved when their commander said to him: ‘And now,
mon commandant
, will you ask Baker Street to begin their
parachutages
to us in Spain?’ He loved the Spaniards,
and went so far as to relay their doomed request to London, deadpan.

‘For a long time, those who had least were the best
résistants
,’ said Poirier. The poor and the radical, those whom respectable citizens dismissed as troublemakers and drifters, sowed the seeds of Resistance. If there was a hierarchy of courage, those who came to Resistance in 1942 or 1943 – above all, before the great flood of recruits after D-Day – were at its summit. It may seem cynical or trite to remark that it is easier to abandon a workman’s flat or a peasant cottage than a château, in order to become a
maquisard
, but it proved overwhelmingly true. Those who possessed most had most to lose from German revenge. Many of the aristocrats who owned the châteaux of the Dordogne detested and feared the Resistance. Many of the bourgeoisie, deeply frightened by the Popular Front government of 1936, the 1½ million votes cast for the communists, the coming of such revolutionary spectres as paid holidays for workers, feared the
maquisards
as the harbingers of revolution. And indeed many
maquisards
themselves – not all of them communists – regarded Resistance as a revolutionary act, the spur to radical change in their society: ‘After the war, it will all be different . . .’ In French bourgeois terms, as Poirier remarked wryly, Robin Hood had been a dangerous bolshevik. Many small businessmen passionately believed that the experience of the 1930s had shown democracy to be a failure in France, a path to anarchy. German occupation was perfectly acceptable if it produced social and economic stability. Anti-semitism had always been deeply rooted in French society. Hatred of the British remained very strong among a significant number of Frenchmen throughout World War II, especially in French naval circles after the destruction of their fleet at Mers-El-Kebir. Beyond even those who were ideologically sympathetic to the Germans – a significant minority – a much larger number profited financially from coming to terms with the Occupation – the contractors, the black marketeers. Great landowners with estates held in their families for generations were passionately committed to preserving them,
even at some small moral cost. Unjust as it may seem, those among the aristocracy, the professionals, the bourgeois, the factory owners and the officials who supported Resistance must be awarded greater moral credit than their humbler countrymen, because they were few, and because they acted against the spirit and inclination of their class.