by Clare Mulley
But perhaps the most repeated story is that Christine was once stopped by two Italian conscripts while she was guiding one of their partisan compatriots to the nearest Maquis group. Ordered to put her hands above her head, she slowly raised two live grenades, threatening to blow everyone up. Then she retreated into the trees, momentarily losing her partisan charge, who, fearing she had lost her nerve, was unsure whether to join her. Later Christine would cheerfully claim that she always preferred grenades to a gun. ‘With a pistol you can defend yourself against at most one person, with a hand-grenade – against five, perhaps ten’, she bragged when in the mood. ‘I always had hand-grenades.’14 Whether or not the story is true, and different versions have her giving her ultimatum in Italian or even German, neither of which she spoke with any fluency, it is clear that Christine had become an expert in the valuable art of bluff.
Throughout this period, Christine was sending back information on troop movements to Galletti and Francis, and identifying the partisan bases to receive arms drops and be linked up with the new ‘Jedburgh teams’: groups of specially trained British SOE, American OSS and French resistance leaders, being dropped in under Operation Toplink. She also arranged to provide what supplies she could by mule to local Maquis who were harassing those German convoys that ventured along the vulnerable mountain roads. She was in her element. ‘We need as many Jedburghs and Missions as possible, and for God’s sake do not wait until the war is over’, she signalled to Brooks Richards in late July, her familiar tone conveying both her natural inclination to command and her renewed belief in the importance of her role. ‘Send at least one Jedburgh … to each department and instruct them all to listen to “Roger’s” orders.’15
The Toplink Jedburgh teams started arriving over the next few days. The first, Leonard Hamilton and Paddy O’Regan, parachuted in on 1 August. The naturally good-humoured O’Regan had been given false papers identifying him as a pig dealer, and had deliberately frowned for his photograph, hoping that it would make him ‘as fascist looking as possible’.16 Hamilton, who looked twenty-five although he was in fact forty, towered over him, and as he tended to stand assertively, with his hands on his hips, O’Regan felt that he never seemed like anything other than a resistance fighter. With them came a French wireless operator, and two Italians, lieutenants Ruscelli and Renato. ‘One a little Sicilian with the heart of a lion, the other a large Neapolitan Teddy Boy with the courage of a consumptive mouse’, O’Regan commented after Renato had drawn his revolver on the Frenchman who ran to gather him in.17
As Christine was in the Alps, Francis, ‘smiling, slim, competent, alert and energetic’, came to welcome the men himself.18 All of them were detailed to support Paul Hérault. Sitting together in a farmhouse kitchen that evening, with large cups of milky coffee that had been warmed over the fire, O’Regan thought how strange the moment was, ‘a world within world’.19 The next morning he, Hamilton and their team were woken early, piled into an old truck fuelled by a log-burning stove, covered with a tarpaulin, and driven to the Italian frontier with a gendarme ahead on a motorbike, and occasionally a couple of bicycles hitched behind. Eventually they arrived at Galletti’s base. After a few hours of drinking they set off on what they thought would be half an hour of light climbing up to the Maquis camp. Four hours later O’Regan began to stumble, and Galletti had to carry his jacket, equipment, and eventually the humiliated new officer himself, into the camp.
O’Regan was not just tired; he had contracted dysentery. When he woke he found that Hamilton and the Italian officers had gone ahead up the Col-de-la-Croix, a high Alpine pass, leaving him behind to recover. He borrowed a shaving kit, washed in a stream, and caught a lift down to Bramousse, where he was delighted to meet not only Francis, but Christine. ‘I jumped off my motor cycle and we kissed enthusiastically’, O’Regan remembered.20 For him, Christine was ‘the gayest and most alive person I have ever met’. She was also an inspiration. ‘With women like that around,’ he said with an inward sigh, ‘there was nothing to do but bottle up one’s incompetence and go through with it.’21
Christine was delighted to see O’Regan, but she was ‘dead tired’ herself. She had come straight from La Rosière, in the heart of the Alps, where she had been trying to track down the elusive Italian partisan leader, Marcellini, to arrange for him to coordinate plans with the Toplink teams. Walking over the Mont Genèvre pass, and through German lines, she had heard sustained gunfire. The Nazis had been forced north through Italy by the Allies pressing up past Rome, and they were now conducting an effective clean-up operation in the Alpine area with the aim of securing the mountain passes. Realizing that Wehrmacht troops must be facing significant resistance close by, Christine followed the noise and quickly found herself in the middle of a major skirmish as a large Wehrmacht division laid siege to Marcellini’s temporary base. This time the Italian partisans held their ground triumphantly. As the enemy retreated Christine clambered down from her vantage point. The partisans welcomed her by shooting into the air. She had succeeded in making the first Allied contact with Marcellini.
Francis wrote that Christine ‘realized at once the possibilities of Marcellini as a leader, and did all she could to help him’.22 He in turn informed her about German troop movements across the mountain passes, showed her his groups’ positions and, as he prepared for a strategic retreat, implored her for help in the form of arms and reinforcements. Christine then hurried back to Galletti’s base, having to pass German lines under fire, with several small bits of paper hidden around her person detailing Marcellini’s news, positions, and urgent need for ammunition, shoes, uniforms and ‘packed meat’.23
Perhaps prompted by this last request, Francis insisted they eat steak for lunch before asking Christine to hike back through the pass with him and O’Regan, to pass her strategic information on to Hamilton and his team. A driving mist had by now blown in across the valley. Halfway down they met two Italians coming up who warned them that the Germans were not far behind. Francis didn’t believe it, and they pressed on. When they were the best part up the other side they found Hamilton and his officers haring back down, having been forced to retreat by approaching Wehrmacht soldiers. Unlike Christine, Hamilton had not found Marcellini, only scattered pockets of Italian partisans in retreat. Together they now climbed wearily back, Christine and Francis ‘almost passing out’ according to O’Regan.24 While they rested in a ruined ski hut, depressed and cold, the impressive Hamilton, who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy on a previous mission, before walking 600 miles to rejoin Allied lines, went off and returned with some meat and rice. Christine then briefed the whole team on the news from Marcellini. Eventually they made it to an Italian village at one o’clock in the morning.
By now Christine, who was still in skirt and sandals, was soaked and shaking. She changed into some dry trousers donated by a villager, and joined the others to eat potatoes and eggs in front of a blazing fire. O’Regan sat so close that he singed his beret. It was here that Christine learned that on the first of August, the same day that Hamilton and O’Regan had been dropped into France, the civilian population of Warsaw had risen up with the underground Polish Home Army in a courageous attempt to drive out their Nazi occupiers. Their aim was to free the city ahead of the advancing Russian troops, so as to be able to welcome them as Allies and equals rather than as liberators to whom they would be indebted. For a moment the courage of her countrymen, and the real possibility of Polish liberation, filled Christine with unspeakable hope. What little news she heard of the desperate turn of events in her home country over the next few weeks only heightened her determination to share the fight and help rout the common enemy in France.
The next day they set off again, climbing up past the snowline to the deserted village, high in the Alps, that Galletti had recommended both for their HQ and as a possible site for arms drops. The calm and beauty of the ruins in the snow made a deep impression on Christine, who spent some time in the little c
hapel while the others set up camp. Seeing them together that evening, O’Regan decided that Christine was in love with Francis. They almost certainly shared a bed again that night, in one of the ruins. The following morning O’Regan set off with his wireless operator, and a note of introduction from Christine to Marcellini. ‘Commander, I present to you the English Commander who works with me and is head of the British Mission’, Christine scrawled in blunt pencil across a sheet of the squared notepaper they carried for coding. ‘I regret I cannot keep working for you myself as my work calls me elsewhere. I hope you meet and get all the help … you desire. Goodbye and “in bocca al lupo”, Pauline’; the last literally meaning ‘in the mouth of the wolf’, a pleasingly appropriate idiom for ‘good luck’, given their surroundings.25
Aware that more Jedburgh teams were due to be dropped into the fields below, Francis and Christine now returned to Galletti and his group at Bramousse. On 4 August, Havard Gunn, still proudly kilted beneath his flying suit, had been parachuted in with a French officer, Christian Sorensen, and the teddy-bear Christine had given him in Algiers. After a short reunion, during which he discreetly showed Christine the flattened remains of the bear that had taken the full impact of his landing, Gunn set off to work further south at Colmars. Sorensen, however, had injured his leg on landing, and was forced to stay in Seyne. Three days later John Roper arrived. Roper had fallen for Christine in Algiers and had last seen Francis as a schoolboy on the rugby pitch at Harrow, making him one of the few people in France who knew ‘Roger’s’ real name. The two men now embraced each other in a mountain valley in occupied France, and Francis was delighted to see his old friend’s ‘engaging smile’ again.26 With Roper came John Halsey and Robert Purvis. Christine ‘was on top of the world’, Purvis noted, thriving on her work and forming great friendships wherever she went.27 ‘The work done by all this personnel was invaluable,’ Francis later added, ‘but in most cases they only had a fortnight or so in which to do it.’28 The Allied landings in the south of France were now scheduled for 15 August, so the pressure was on.
On the evening of 9 August, Francis and Christine arranged for the Jedburgh officers to meet the local FFI resistance leaders at a safe house in the forest near Gap. Here Paul Hérault outlined his detailed plans for the liberation of the region. These were approved unanimously. Francis then proposed a vote of confidence in Hérault’s leadership, and everyone left, inspired, and clear about the role that each must play.
The next morning Hérault learnt that one of the local leaders who had been at the meeting had since been arrested. Leaving a message for Galletti, he left Gap at midday on the back of a local gendarme’s motorbike to see if he could secure the man’s release. Half an hour later they were stopped by a Wehrmacht convoy that was, unusually, travelling on a minor road. Hérault immediately sprinted into a wood near the road, making it to safety only because the troops were not expecting anyone to run. There he lay, face down, as bullets shredded the bushes around him, and one was fired at point-blank range into the skull of the gendarme he had left with the convoy on the road. Frantically, Hérault started tearing up all the incriminating papers still on him from the night before. Having pressed them into a tight ball, he lobbed them away among the trees. He then crawled to the edge of the wood, waited until some time after the firing had stopped, and made a second run for it. He was brought down in a hail of bullets. His ball of paper was later retrieved by the resistance.
Hérault’s death threatened to rupture the precarious alliance between the various local resistance groups, but his legacy – the regional liberation strategy – proved strong enough to ensure effective action. Hamilton’s team assisted in blowing up the strategic bridges between Briançon and Gap, and at Prelles. He then moved on to fight at Briançon until he was forced out of action when his leg was broken in a car accident. O’Regan eventually met up with Marcellini and his men, whom he described as ‘young, nervous, and bearded’.29 But before support could be dropped the Italians were forced to temporarily disband after ‘putting up determined resistance against several thousand German and Fascist troops for a fortnight’.30 As so often, Allied offers of help seemed too little, too late. Undeterred, and supported by Hamilton in France, O’Regan used forty mules to ferry a huge amount of ammunition through the Col-de-la-Mayt pass to the Italian partisans. He also took part in several unsuccessful engagements, at one point leading a group of 150 men, only to have all but three desert into France overnight. Marcellini did regroup, however, for a while setting up his command post in the old barracks at the Col-de-la-Mayt. Francis later credited him as being ‘the only leader capable of stopping the Italian partisans from running away immediately they are attacked’.31 By then O’Regan had moved on into the area around Turin where his work in the last weeks of the war made him a local ‘figure of legend’.32
Like Francis, and so many others, Christine was deeply affected by Hérault’s death and, taking her last conversation with him as an unofficial order, she decided to now prioritize securing the defection of key foreign troops conscripted into the Wehrmacht locally. She had already sent a note to Brooks Richards in Algiers, brought out in person by Zeller, in which she told him that ‘there are very few Serbians and Checks [sic], some Ukrainians, Russians and Armenians’, but ‘the only important groups are Poles’.33 On several occasions she had even managed to contact these units of foreign conscripts. However, this work became increasingly difficult after the Wehrmacht was alerted to the strategy.
Nevertheless, in early August, Christine made contact with the Polish garrison at Briançon. Initial talks with the 400 conscripted troops convinced her that they would be willing to surrender to the Maquis if certain conditions were fulfilled. Unfortunately one of these conditions was the liberation of Poland. ‘I cannot promise them a free Poland’, she wrote sadly to Brooks Richards, before asking for ‘authoritative propaganda in Polish language’, to help press her case.34 Encouraged by the willingness of the Poles in Briançon to at least engage in talks, she now broached discussion with other Polish strongholds, both in France and further into northern Italy, to try to influence Poles and Russians serving in the Oriental Legion of General Friedrich Wiese’s 19th Army. Again many of these troops had been forcibly conscripted to protect their wives and children, or as their only livelihood. Was she to ‘demand’ immediate action from them, she questioned Brooks Richards with typical aplomb, or just get information so a specialist could follow up? Already hundreds were beginning to desert, often joining local resistance units. But Christine was soon presented with an opportunity of particular strategic value.
One of the key German frontier garrisons was at Col-de-Larche, a 2,000-metre pass that dominated the surrounding terrain and effectively controlled the military route down to the large French garrison town of Digne. Marcellini had informed Christine that the fort was manned mainly by Poles, ‘recruited’ from forced labour camps or on the strength of threats to their families. Uncertain of the loyalty of these troops, particularly in the light of the growing number of piecemeal desertions, Wehrmacht officers had redeployed any French speakers, and moved the rest of the men around regularly to try to avoid their subversion. They had not reckoned on a Polish speaker in the mountains.
After Hérault’s death, Christine had agreed with John Halsey, the senior Toplink officer at Barcelonnette, that she would make a preliminary approach to the Poles at Col-de-Larche on 11 August. Unfortunately the new local FFI commandant was unwilling to cooperate with the operation. Unsupported, it took her, and the local gendarme who offered to serve as her guide, the best part of two days to climb the steep goat tracks through the forests up to the Col-de-Larche garrison, often slipping back on the swathes of dry needles that covered outcrops of sharp rock. Because she was slight, Christine often surprised her friends with her physical fitness and what Gunn referred to as her ‘reserves of strength’.35 But despite the weeks she had recently spent trekking through the mountains, her muscles were soon aching and h
er legs were swollen and covered in cuts.
Christine knew that the Germans were now extremely nervous and on the lookout for local partisans aiming to subvert their troops. Dressed in sturdy army boots and uniform trousers, albeit rolled up above her knees, and with a loudhailer slung over one shoulder, she was clearly no longer going to pass as a local peasant. But her experience in moving about in hostile country proved invaluable, and they reached the huge concrete, stone and strengthened steel garrison undetected, carried out a careful recce and made contact with one of the Polish guards. Having got the information she needed, most specifically the place and time of roll-call, their partial descent to a village further down the Col was much faster.
Two days later the order came through to block the passes on the Italian frontier, soon followed by a warning that Wehrmacht troops were approaching quickly from the south. Christine now climbed up to the garrison again, this time alone. ‘Working entirely on her own…’, Francis later reported, ‘this was work of extreme danger’.36 Once directly below the first fort platform she used the loudhailer to address the sixty-three Poles who were among the 150 officers at the garrison. To win their confidence Christine carried a red and white scarf, the colours of Poland, and even revealed her true identity, greatly adding to the likelihood of her being shot as a spy should she be caught. In the more colourful versions of the story she ‘jumped over the iron fence’ that surrounded the platform and was lifted shoulder-high by her compatriots, who ‘knocked the revolver from the Major’s hand as he aimed it at Christine’.37 Whether or not a German revolver clattered on the concrete, in less than an hour Christine had persuaded the Poles that, when the time was right, they should sabotage the military installations, desert, and join the FFI. She then gave them a pre-typed A4 note with instructions to remain at their posts until they received the order to move, how to then descend in groups of ten behind white flags, what to do should their Nazi or fascist commanders order them to leave the zone before the order to desert came, and finally assuring them that if any were unwilling to join the resistance they would be treated honourably as prisoners-of-war.38 Then she returned to report back to Halsey.