Voices from the Dark Years (42 page)

An instant hit on the BBC French Service was
The Partisans’ Song
, which everyone thought had been written by a few
maquisards
around a hidden campfire, the chords being plucked out on a guitar. The truth is more prosaic. The BBC wanted a pompous signature tune for the programme
Honneur et Patrie
, but Emmanuel Astier de le Vigerie and a group of other Free French in London disagreed. On 30 May between midday and 4 p.m. somewhere in the London suburbs
The Partisans’ Song
was written by Maurice Druon and his uncle Joseph Kessel – who had escaped together from France at Christmas 1942 – with music by singer-songwriter Anna Marly. It was a call to arms: ‘Come up from the mines, comrades. Come down from the hills …’ There was no ambiguity about its message: ‘We break the bars of our brothers’ prisons … If you fall, a friend will take your place.’

In May, there were 1,284 Allied raids against 793 different towns, with Cambrai bombed eleven times and Douai nine times. In June, 2,307 raids hit 1,572 targets. By the end of August an estimated half-million high explosives and 35,317 incendiary bombs had dropped on French towns. In Le Havre all the water mains had burst leaving the fire service to lay hoses from canals and the sea, until they finally ran out of diesel fuel for the pump engines and had to beg some from passing Germans. Equipment was so worn out now that fire teams borrowed car batteries from garage-owners to feed emergency lighting. Civil Defence trucks toured the devastated areas with food, drinking water, clothing and fuel for heating and cooking. The Red Cross and the Refugee Service also did what they could. Central government could do little except despatch special crisis trains to the worst-hit areas, each with its own operating theatre, a thirty-bed emergency ward, a midwifery section, a kitchen able to provide 14,000 meals and supplies of clothing and bedding for the homeless.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 1, pp. 144–7. Released on probation, the prince joined the maquis, was wounded and finished the war as a lieutenant in the Chasseurs Alpins.

  
2.
  Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 155–6.

  
3.
  E. Paris,
Unhealed Wounds
(NewYork: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 93–7.

  
4.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en Mourir
, pp. 223–4.

  
5.
  Letter of Simone Weill dated 4 February 1943 in
Lettres de Drancy
, ed. A. Sabbagh (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), pp. 297–9.

  
6.
  L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

  
7.
  Diamond,
Women and the Second World War
, p. 83.

  
8.
  There is a commemorative plaque in the firing range outside the camp.

  
9.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, p. 39.

10.
  Quoted by L. Chabrun et al,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

11.
  Ibid.

12.
  Obituary notice in
The Guardian
, 3 December 2005.

13.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, p. 219.

14.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 1, pp. 34, 36.

15.
  Ibid., p. 67.

16.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 1, p. 40.

17.
  L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 6 October 2005.

18

C
ASUALTIES
IN
THE
G
REAT
G
AME

In the northern zone, very little stockpiling of arms had been possible and the Resistance networks were in a desperate need of weapons, explosives and ammunition, which the RAF was ordered to deliver. Weighing 2.5 tonnes, a typical consignment included six Brens, twenty-seven Stens, thirty-six .303 rifles, five automatic pistols, 18,000 rounds of ammunition, Mills grenades and 8kg of plastic explosive with detonators, plus medical kits. Sometimes chocolate, money and cigarettes were stuffed into empty spaces.

Each mission required a reception party on the ground able to hide the materiel quickly. In May 1943 Rodolphe Faytout, a farmer in Pujols-sur-Dordogne persuaded Pierre Mignon and a dozen other friends that ‘it was time to do something’.
¹
None of them knew how he communicated with London, but all were exhilarated by the first drop. Transported in Faytout’s small van, the consignment was dispersed on several different properties. For each subsequent operation, a different small field was chosen in this area of woodland and mixed farming, only 10km from the nearest town where Germans were based. The group undertook no military action, but as the months went by, the hidden stocks mounted steadily, distribution helped by the relaxation of travel restrictions across the Demarcation Line after 2 March 1943.

The BBC’s coded personal messages confirming each ‘shipment’ were listened for by 17-year-old Cathérine Bouchou in the hamlet of St-Antoine-de-Queyret.
²
Her father being the mayor’s part-time secretary, she helped him make false papers with genuine ID card blanks and the Mairie’s rubber stamps. Cathérine’s mother and younger sister knew nothing of this and, like many people unwilling to get personally involved, Mayor Chanut simply turned a blind eye.

On 21 August after the news from London, Cathérine heard, ‘
Jacqueline a une robe rouge. Je répète. Jacqueline a une robe rouge.
’ Jacqueline’s red dress was to be ‘Annette’, a radio operator arriving to replace an arrested predecessor working for SOE officer George Starr, code-name ‘Hilaire’, who was staying in the Bouchou house. ‘Annette’ was Yvonne Cormeau, widow of a Belgian RAF officer killed during the London Blitz when a bomb destroyed their house while he was home on leave. Mother of two young children, she joined the WAAF and volunteered to work for Maurice Buckmaster’s Section F as a way of avenging her husband.

The drop was to take place in the meadow behind the Bouchou home at 1 a.m. on 22 August. Cathérine recalls a full moon that night, and the aircraft flying in so low on its first pass that Faytout’s little group thought it was going to hit her house. Anxious not to drop ‘Annette’ in the surrounding woods, the RAF pilot over-corrected, landing her in the Bouchous’ vineyard, where she lost a shoe and tore her skirt on the stakes before recovering the transmitter and a suitcase of money dropped with her. Beneath each of nine other parachutes blossoming in the moonlight swung a man-size container. With their contents hidden in the Bouchous’ barn, Faytout’s group split up and returned home. The original intention to disperse the weapons next day was prevented by repeated over-flights of an ancient Heinkel HE 46 biplane used as a spotter plane.

Determining the position of a transmitter requires only two direction-finding vans: spaced apart: their bearings intersect at the source of the transmissions. In an alarming lapse of security, ‘Hilaire’ kept ‘Annette’ transmitting his backlog of messages from Cathérine’s bedroom for five days. Her SOE set was so large and cumbersome that on one occasion when stopped at a German checkpoint, ‘Annette’ convinced the bored soldiers that it was X-ray equipment, in keeping with her cover identity as a district nurse. With a combination of nerve and luck, she went on to make a record 400 transmissions over thirteen months without being caught, not seeing Cathérine again until they met during a
This is Your Life
programme devoted to Yvonne Cormeau’s life on 8 November 1989.

Faytout’s group received several other drops, unaware that SS-Officer Helmut Demetrio, based in the former savings bank adjacent to the Hôtel des Voyageurs in Castillon, had them in his sights. Slender build, spectacles and habitual slight smile did nothing to soften Demetrio’s face, marred by duelling-type scars on upper lip and chin. With his interpreter Heinrich – called ‘Cosh’ because of the way he punctuated questions – Demetrio had already tortured many suspects and would-be line-crossers.

The fatal drop took place on 20 October at the farm of Lucienne Beaupertuis and her husband near Pujols, after which the ammunition and weapons were hidden in a woodshed for dispersal when fog grounded the spotter-plane. The arrest next day of Faytout, followed by that of Pierre Mignon and several others, made it plain that Faytout had talked. As to how much he had given away, the answer came swiftly. Lucienne’s husband was arrested while she was out shopping. At his trial post-Liberation, Heinrich the Cosh said proudly, ‘That one I played with, like a cat plays with a mouse.’ Four days after his arrest, a black Citroën drove up to Lucienne’s farm. Faytout got out and indicated the shed where the arms had first been hidden. French-speaking SS men jumped down from the truck behind the Citroën and started hunting for them, but they had already been buried elsewhere, despite the spotter-plane. When Demetrio and ‘Cosh’ came into the farm kitchen, the latter’s first words to Lucienne were, ‘Your husband has spilled the beans. He said you would tell us where the arms now are.’

She knew that was a lie, because if he had cracked they would already know. Seated on the kitchen table with a loaded pistol pointed at her, she was roughed-up and questioned for four or five hours. Knowing that one of her arrested friends had been found hanged in his cell with an eye torn out of its socket after interrogation by these two men, she was so traumatised that her throat dried up completely and she could neither speak, nor move hand or foot. Faytout was called in to break the deadlock, but could only stare at the floor in silence until told to ‘piss off back to the car’ by Heinrich the Cosh.

The arms were soon found using a mine detector and dug up. At dusk, everything was loaded on to the truck. Some time after the Germans’ departure, Lucienne’s paralysis wore off and her voice returned. Realising that she had forgotten all about her daughter, who should have been home from school long since, she ran to a neighbour’s house, hoping she was there. Without opening the door, they warned her to keep away, in case she was being watched, so she spent the night anguished for her husband and child, only learning next morning that other neighbours had heard about the raid on the farm and taken her daughter home with them.

One by one all the friends were arrested, including Cathérine’s father Marius Bouchou. There were not many cars on the road in that rural area, so she clearly remembers the black Gestapo Citroën taking him away. A few days later, her mother heard the distinctive
gazogène
engine returning and told her two daughters to run across the field behind the house and hide in the woods. Concealed there, they saw her taken away too, leaving the old grandmother alone in the house. That day marked the end of family life: Marius had been working hard to buy the rented house, but with both parents gone and no income, the sisters and their grandmother had to spend all their savings on rent. The families of the arrested men, who included Mayor Chanut, received no news of them, as they were designated NN (
Nacht und Nebel
, meaning Night and Fog) prisoners existing only as numbers, their identity and whereabouts unknown outside the camps’ administration. What follows is taken from Pierre Mignon’s notes, written as a record for his children and grandchildren.
³

On arrival at Fort du Hâ prison in Bordeaux, all were facially unrecognisable after beatings from ‘Cosh’, which turned out to be an apprenticeship for the constant, senseless violence of
kapos
and guards and the degradation of slowly starving in the filth of the death camps at Neue Brem, Buchenwald, Nauengamme, Mauthausen and finally Dora. During one transfer in cattle trucks, Marius Bouchou died in Mignon’s arms, worn out by beatings, overwork and starvation.