They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  At that moment there was an imperious ringing at the bell downstairs. Madame hurried away. A few minutes later there were heavy footsteps on the stairs. They halted outside the door of number thirteen. Denis heard Madame say something and then she opened the door with her pass-key. It was the Milice.

  ‘Come on,’ said the officer in charge.

  ‘What is all this?’ Denis demanded.

  ‘He has some friends coming for him,’ the landlady sang out with gleeful subservience.

  ‘To have a drink,’ Denis said. ‘I demand an explanation. What is all this about?’

  ‘Wait here with him,’ said the officer to two of his men. ‘You two come with me. We’ll wait downstairs for the others.’

  Denis was powerless. The officer and his men went downstairs with the landlady to catch Xavier and Alexandre. Half an hour later there was the sound of a brief struggle in the hall and then again the footsteps on the stairs. Xavier and Alexandre were shoved into the room. Denis looked at them and shrugged. To his surprise, they both shot him looks of the greatest hatred. With horror he realised what had happened: they thought that he had betrayed them.

  He could do nothing to disabuse them of this misconception, for they were put in separate cells to wait for interrogation.

  ‘Who are these two men you arranged to meet?’ was the first question that Denis’s interrogator, an Alsatian by the name of Morel, put to him.

  ‘I met them on the train. I arranged that we should have a drink together as I thought they might be useful to me in my business.’

  ‘Why do you have all this money with you?’

  ‘One needs it these days,’ Denis replied lamely. Again he was hoping to be taken for a black marketeer.

  ‘70,000 francs in 10,000 notes,’ the Alsatian said.

  ‘Is it that much?’

  The interrogator looked up suddenly straight into Denis’s eyes. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why are you working for the Germans?’

  Denis blinked: ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Why are you working for the Germans? It’s quite obvious, you know. These notes are unpinned. If they had come from a French bank they would certainly have been pinned together at some date. But these,’ he held them up to the light, ‘have never been pinned. And they say that we paid too much attention to details!’

  ‘I am not working for the Germans.’

  ‘My dear fellow, you cannot trick me. Not that I know of any reason why you should want to. After all, I come from Alsace, you have no need to check up on me.’

  Denis detected something in the man’s voice which suggested otherwise, and he decided to take a chance.

  ‘I don’t work for the Boches—’ he began, and was relieved that the man did not react to his use of the word. ‘I work for the British.’

  ‘The British! That explains another source from which unpinned notes might come.’

  Denis went on. ‘Look, I and my friends need your help. I can see you are not very fond of the Boches. Will you help us?’ Denis’s hunch proved correct, for the man agreed to do what he could. The next day he had Denis taken to his flat for further interrogation and when the Milice escort had left he introduced Denis to his French wife and their son and daughter.

  ‘I will certainly do what I can to get your friends out of jail,’ he told Denis. ‘I’ve also got a plan to get you away. I’ll tell you the exact details tomorrow.’

  The next day Morel told Denis that he had some bad news for him: Xavier and Alexandre had both been transferred to a prison farther south. There was no way of getting them out. Denis’s escape was all set, however, and at once they left the flat for the prison hospital. Here Denis was put into a white gown and shown into a room where a number of out-patients were waiting for X-rays. A door led out to the street. Morel had warned him that he could not allow much time between letting Denis into the waiting room and giving the alarm. He feared for his wife and children if he were suspected. Denis edged his way towards the door and walked boldly out into the street – straight into the arms of two miliciens. He was promptly returned to the jail.

  The next day a Corsican thug, a member of the Milice, came into the cell in which Denis had been locked and told him that he was moving. ‘Like this,’ he added, snapping a handcuff on to Denis’s wrist.

  ‘Here’s the prisoner,’ said the governor. ‘As escorting officer you’d better sign for him.’

  The escorting officer was Morel. Plainly he had not been suspected of engineering Denis’s amateurish escape and now they set off, together with the Corsican, to the station.

  ‘Where are they going?’ Denis asked as their car pulled away from the curb.

  ‘Lyons,’ was the reply.

  As soon as they were on the train Morel explained to the Corsican that Denis was a British Officer. Denis looked anxiously to see what the reaction would be. It seemed reasonably favourable, for the Corsican at once produced a bottle of wine and they all drunk happily to Britain as the train rolled east.

  At Lyons they drove straight to the central prison. Denis was taken away from Morel and the mellowed Corsican, and led along a row of cells. At last a door was unlocked and he was pushed inside. There were two men in the cell already: Xavier and Alexandre.

  III

  For four days they refused to have anything to do with him. They behaved as if he were not there. Again and again Denis went through the story of what had happened, of how powerless he had been to warn them both. It was futile. By neither word nor gesture did they acknowledge that they had heard or believed him. They talked to each other, but never to him; they played card games which they did not even allow Denis to watch. Convinced that he had betrayed them, they were furious not only at being caught but also at having all their plans disrupted and their circuit left leaderless. None of them felt in danger of death, unless they were extradited to the Germans. The Vichy men were not vindictive and allowed them cards and books. Neither Xavier nor Alexandre shared either of these with Denis. Again and again he tried to explain his innocence. Nothing convinced them.

  On the fourth day, a Red Cross parcel addressed to Xavier was thrown into the cell. Somehow the others had managed to contact some friends outside prison, presumably before Denis joined them. By now Denis was sunk in the depths of depression, for to be suspected of treachery was the final straw. Xavier and Alexandre enjoyed the contents of the parcel with the greatest relish, chocolate, tinned meat, cigarettes, condensed milk, dried fruit and so on. Their consciences were picked by Denis’s reproachful expression and derisively they allowed him a teaspoonful of condensed milk, for he had only the roughest food. They continued to keep him in Coventry.

  Meanwhile, Alexandre had managed to get on friendly terms, with the aid of the Red Cross cigarettes, with one of the guards who promised to bring a file in a piece of bread. This old-fashioned deception was discovered by the guard’s superior officer and Alexandre was hauled off to solitary confinement in the next cell to his erstwhile guard.

  Xavier, even on his own, continued the unremitting silence, though it must have got him down as badly as it did Denis.

  A week passed and then both Xavier and Denis were transferred to another prison, still Lyons. Here they were shackled by the feet and left in a dark cell. Denis feared that their treatment would worsen, even that they would be returned to Paris and the Gestapo, but suddenly they were taken up to the Commandant’s office and asked to sign a declaration saying they had been well treated. Denis looked at Xavier, wondering whether to sign. Xavier read the piece of paper and then glanced at Denis and nodded contemptuously. Both men signed. A change of attitude now occurred in their captors and both men were treated as escaping British officers. They were given a lavish meal to which Alexandre was brought, released from solitary. Still the other men refused to speak to Denis. It was a sad celebration. For another month they were kept in the same quarters and still the other men refused to pay even the smallest attention to Denis’s presence. In the last days of October
they were taken to the Commandant’s office.

  ‘We have decided to let you go,’ he said in a tired voice, that of a man who had had many conflicting orders and could not guess what would happen next. Denis could scarcely believe what was being said. By now he was almost too depressed to care. ‘Get out of France as quickly as you can,’ were the Commandant’s last words.

  The three Britons were given a small amount of money and railway warrants to take them south. On 1 November 1942, the prison gates shut behind them. They were free. Xavier turned to Denis and said the first words he had addressed to him for the four months they had been together: ‘Push off.’

  Denis stared at him, tears in his eyes. By now he hated them for their cruelty as much as they loathed him for his supposed treachery.

  ‘Go on,’ Alexandre added. ‘Get out.’

  Denis turned from them and walked away without a word.

  IV

  He made for Perpignan. There he stayed in a brothel near the station. I may say that this was not from inclination but because if you stayed in brothels you were not, naturally, expected to fill in a fiche. This is the reason for the frequency with which they were used. Denis was anxious to shake off the Vichy police lest they change their minds and re-arrest him. Already there were rumours that the Boches were going to occupy the whole of France and he knew he must get out before that happened. He had no contact in Perpignan and therefore gambled on the fact that most of the gendarmerie were ready to help the Resistance whenever possible (the gendarmerie were quite distinct from the Milice and in fact despised them); he approached a gendarme officer in a café and asked for his help.

  He struck lucky: the Commandant Fette was a man of firm patriotism. He took him back to his flat where two men on the run were already hiding, sharing the limited accommodation with the Commandant’s wife and their nine children. He was cheerfully greeted by the other two fugitives (a happy change from his treatment at the hands of Xavier and Alexandre) and soon they were all enjoying a huge meal, procured at great expense by the Commandant. There was no room for Denis to sleep at the Commandant’s, so that evening the latter said in a jovial tone, ‘You’d better come along with me.’ He took Denis to the Police Station. Here he was introduced as the cousin of the Commandant and given a comfortable cell. Each morning he went back to the flat and remained there all day, eating the massive meals which the Commandant insisted on providing. Apart from forming a refuge for escapers, this flat was also an arsenal; the Commandant’s daughters had a chicken coop on the roof which was packed with contraband arms brought across from Spain at the end of the civil war.

  After a week’s stay with the Commandant and his family, Denis and his two companions moved down the coast towards the Spanish border. For safety’s sake, the Commandant arranged for them to travel in a Black Maria.

  On the night of 10 November they crawled across the bleak frontier near Portbou. The next morning, as they walked through the town of Figueras, they were arrested by the Spanish police. Tedious weeks of internment followed during which fate played Denis another strange trick: his hut-mate in the concentration camp at Miranda was a man named George Wilkinson; he turned out to be Alexandre’s brother. He and Denis became firm friends. Denis was still very depressed at what he considered the failure of his mission. He had an attack of dysentery which further weakened him and he was a very sick man by the time our embassy in Madrid was able to get him released. He was told, when he reached Madrid, that the Ambassador would see him.

  ‘I should like to thank you, sir, for all you’ve done,’ Denis said. ‘I really do appreciate it more than I can say.’

  Sir Samuel Hoare regarded the sad figure before him with dapper disdain. ‘Really,’ he observed, ‘I sometimes think you people are more trouble than you’re worth.’

  † Field name of Richard Heslop, organiser of the MARKSMAN Circuit.

  Chapter 6

  First Flames

  The Bordeaux area was one especially suited to our purposes. Just inside the occupied zone, a group operating from there could have ready access both to the north and to the unoccupied zone. We landed Claude de Baissac there late in July 1942. By the middle of 1943 Claude had recruited a small and efficient organisation including a Frenchman named Fragonard who was the leader of his subsection within the group. His code name was Le Chef. He had already canvassed likely resisters in the district and he was therefore a valuable aid to Claude in the early days.

  Claude was soon anxious to establish permanent contact with us in London and we decided to drop him a wireless operator. After our successes in destroying the engine sheds at Troyes the RAF listened to our requests for help with more readiness and it was agreed that they would drop Harry Peulevé to the Bordeaux group during the next suitable moon period.

  Harry was another of those who came to us very much on their own initiative. Having heard that French-speaking Britons were at a premium, he phoned the War Office and asked to be put in touch with us. He was a sergeant in the BEF at the beginning of the war, having acquired British citizenship by some legalistic fluke, although his father was a French consular official in North Africa. He was told by our selection board that his French was not really good enough, but his name went forward and he was trained as a wireless operator.

  He was very keen to get to the field and when Claude’s need for a wireless operator became acute we agreed that he should go. De Guélis and I went with him to the airfield from which he was due to take off. Although the moon was right, it did not seem a very pleasant night, for the wind was gusty and the RAF seriously considered scrapping the whole thing. ‘I hope they don’t, that’s all,’ was Harry’s comment, ‘this is the bit I want to get over.’ The jumping was never a thing that our agents particularly relished, less because they feared the actual drop (they would never have got this far had that been the case) than because, dangling on the end of a parachute, you never knew what to expect when you hit the ground and there was the risk of being picked up even before you got your harness off.

  The routine of the drop was more or less invariable. The plane flew low over the dropping area, at about 600 feet, and the agent hung ready over the aperture. At the dispatcher’s shout of ‘GO’ he let himself fall; the static lines snatched at and opened his parachute and within about fifteen seconds he was on the ground.

  ‘GO.’

  Harry let himself go. He fell and then the webbing of his chute caught him up like a netted fish. Yet he seemed to be falling much too fast. He yanked frantically at the lines of his chute, realising that somehow it was twisted and had not opened properly. He had only a few seconds to straighten it out. Now he seemed to be falling less fast but still the rigging lines were tangled. He knew he would hit the ground with a tremendous crack. Branches snapped and then the ground smashed into him. He rolled over with a groan and groped for his pistol. Silence. He banged the release mechanism of his chute and the harness fell away from him. He tried to pull himself to his feet and the pain cut him like a knife. He fell again. Still there was silence in the wooded field into which he had dropped. He put the pistol on the ground beside him and reached for his Thermos flask; there was tea in it, well laced with rum, and he took a long gulp. He knew he had broken his leg. He dared not feel it with his hands.

  He looked around. Silhouetted against the skyline in the middle distance was a farmhouse. He started to crawl towards it, dragging himself forward inch by inch over the stony ground, with the undergrowth pulling at his fractured leg, leaning back again and again to disentangle it from brambles and hawthorn. Inch by inch, forcing himself with gritted teeth, he advanced on the farmhouse, his forearms raw with the effort of pulling him forward.

  He reached the farmyard and dragged himself across the caked mud of it. A dog howled in the back somewhere. Harry thumped feebly on the door of the house. There was a long silence, so with a piece of stick he tapped again. An old lady answered the door.

  ‘Help me, madame,’ Harry said. The pain was co
ming now, growing and growing, faster and faster.

  ‘What is happening? Who are you?’ She bent down and whispered to him. ‘Are you – a Gaullist?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied, ‘a Gaullist.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Hide me,’ was all Harry could groan.

  The old lady went and fetched her son, a strong and bronzed farmer. Harry at once saw that he had struck lucky. The farmer said that he would hide Harry in a disused part of the house where no one ever went. He hurried off to get a wheelbarrow. Harry fainted with the agony as they tried to lift him into it. They forced some brandy down his throat and gave up the attempt. At length they improvised a stretcher on which they carried him into a cobweb-filled annexe. They lit a candle and examined his leg. When he saw the extent of the injury he passed out again. The bone was sticking through the torn flesh like a knitting needle through wool.

  They gave him a bottle of brandy to drink and said they would send for a doctor next morning. Obviously the people at the farm must have had a pretty shrewd suspicion who Harry was, but they did not bother him with questions though they did ignore his delirious demand that no doctor should be called.

  ‘How did this happen?’ was the doctor’s first question.

  ‘I fell out of a tree,’ was the reply. ‘A fig tree.’

  The doctor looked at the farmer and shrugged and said sorrowfully, ‘But there are no figs at this time of year, monsieur.’

  Harry had to go to hospital. He fought the suggestion fiercely when it was first made, but the doctor said in a meaningful voice that he would take care of the staff. If he did not go to hospital gangrene was almost certain. He would die.

  Harry gave the farmer a message to take to a certain address in Bordeaux in order that Claude might know what had happened. The wireless set which had been dropped with him had to be located with the greatest speed. Claude would see to it. Harry half hoped that Claude would come and see him in hospital, for that loneliness which so afflicted agents in the field was already affecting him. He knew that the farmer could be trusted, for if he had not betrayed him yet it was unlikely that he would do so in the future.