by Nancy Wake
When he discovered we were going to Cannes one weekend he asked us if we would take an envelope for him which would be picked up at our hotel. We were only too happy to oblige. We continued to help him in this way whenever it could be arranged. Sometimes it would be papers, sometimes a suit case with a radio transmitter. Through him we learned that there were already people trying to organise resistance groups. This was heartening news just at a time when we needed cheering up.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Hôtel du Louvre et Paix almost became our second home—we knew all the staff from the manager down to the lowest paid kitchen boy—and they knew us. We would meet there almost every night for the aperitif. The front foyer was often full of German officers in mufti, so I preferred to use the back entrance which led into the little bar; not elegant enough for the ‘Fridolin’, as we called the Germans. In any case if they did venture into the bar, Antoine, the Corsican barman, would take their orders but serve them at one of the tables in the foyer.
I always sat on the corner of the bar facing the hall where I had an excellent view of the entrance, and Antoine and I would exchange rude remarks about the Boches. On this particular evening I found my usual stool was occupied by a blond stranger whom neither Antoine nor I knew. To my surprise he was reading an English book. Naturally, I went to the other side of the bar as I suspected he could be an agent provocateur, either German or in their employ—I couldn’t believe an Englishman would be foolish enough to risk drawing attention to himself. He had only consumed one small beer although he had been there for some time, so I suggested Antoine should offer him a drink and see if he could get into conversation. The man accepted the drink, and returned to his book immediately.
Just then Henri arrived. Although he was a little hesitant he went over and talked to the man. After a few minutes he returned, saying the man claimed to be an Englishman from Newcastle-on-Tyne, and that furthermore, he was an officer interned on parole by the French at the Fort Saint-Jean. Antoine, who disliked most foreigners except the British, immediately offered a round of drinks. One drink led to another and by the time the evening had come to a close, I had promised the internees a radio, cigarettes and food. We arranged to meet the next morning at Basso’s on the Vieux Port, and our new friend was to bring two other internees to help carry the radio.
Waking up in the morning we had to admit that we didn’t even know if we had been fraternising with our ex-allies or playing into the hands of the Boches. Nothing daunted, I went to Basso’s a few minutes before my appointment, taking the cigarettes but leaving the radio behind. I confided in Albert the barman and related the events of the previous night, and gave him my English cigarettes for safe keeping.
Right on time we saw a small group of men outside the café—the Englishman and his friends. To our amusement one of them was sporting a big ginger moustache. He looked so ridiculously British I put my fears in the background and retrieved my cigarettes. After the introductions were made I took them to a place where I could obtain a few little luxuries for English tastes, and in the afternoon they collected the radio.
The man with the moustache was a British Army captain, Leslie Wilkins. We always called him Wilkie and it was the beginning of a lasting friendship. He was a little older than the others, and he and Henri got on well together. He had not been married long and whereas the younger men used to rag him about his wife, Henri was sympathetic and listened attentively whenever he mentioned how much he missed her.
The three of us became very friendly. Wilkie spoke excellent French and gradually we found we had a lot in common. Wilkie and I used to meet nearly every morning, go shopping and, after an aperitif on the Vieux Port, join Henri for lunch.
One day Wilkie mentioned how much he loved leg of lamb. He’d been so hungry on his long walk from the south of France to Marseille that he’d dreamed of eating a whole leg all by himself. I determined to surprise him.
Some time later my doctor friend gave us two legs of lamb. The meat was delicious as the lambs were running free on the most succulent mountain pastures. We invited our British friends to lunch. While Henri was carving one leg I placed the other one in front of Wilkie. His face was a picture. A young RAF pilot called Bob Hodges said he hoped Wilkie wasn’t going to eat it all, but he did!
Forty years later the same Bob Hodges, by then Air Chief Marshal Sir Lewis Hodges, introduced me to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace garden party.
It was enlightening to hear first-hand information about Dunkirk and other events that had happened in the north both before and after the fall of France. In the south we were already being filled with German and Vichy propaganda in the newspapers and on the radio. We became friendly with several of these internees and they were all given an open invitation to our home. Then we met a charming and good-looking Canadian who had been stranded in the south of France while on holiday. My young friend Micheline met him at our Christmas party in 1940. She fell in love with him and they were married when she turned eighteen.
Another Australian, Bruce Dowding from Melbourne, joined the organisation. We fell upon each other like a lost brother and sister, and Henri took us out to dinner to celebrate. Bruce had been studying in Paris, but couldn’t get back there from his summer holidays in the south of France when the Germans occupied the capital. Bruce was proud of being Australian, but he’d acquired the polish of a sophisticated European. He was later betrayed by a member of the organisation who turned traitor, and his death was a particularly nasty one.
Henri and I began to make plans for Christmas, which we were going to celebrate in our home so that we could invite a few of the British officers. Six of our close friends in Cannes were coming over and we had all determined to enjoy ourselves. This may appear to have been an irresponsible attitude but my philosophy was ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’. Our Christmas dinner was a huge success. The menu was strictly French, except for the plum pudding, which is one British tradition I refused to eliminate even for France.
We were going to spend the New Year in the mountains in the Alpes Maritimes with our friend the doctor and passing through Cannes we delivered some papers for our French Army friend. Now we were involved in two separate subversive activities: supplying the Allied prisoners at the fort with a radio, cigarettes, and food; and smuggling papers for a French Resistance group.
Commander Busch’s two colleagues from the French Resistance group were in trouble with the local police but after a quick phone call to our host we took them with us. They stayed with the doctor until, through him, they obtained new identity cards enabling them to leave the area. Several months later these two men were denounced to the police and I offered to take them to our own chalet in Nevache, where they remained safely hidden for several months.
Ever since the British had been interned in the Fort Saint-Jean most of them had been trying to find a way of escaping from France and returning to England. Others were organising an escape route. They were headed by Ian Garrow, a Scottish officer. Sometimes I acted as his courier, ferrying messages and later ferrying men. I used to wish I could meet someone who would give me a less boring task. I was at a stage when I longed to do something really constructive against our enemy, yet I was unable to find a good contact. I seemed to be on the edge of everything. I talked it over with Henri but he begged me to be patient. He was sure that when the majority of French people recovered from the initial shock of their defeat we would witness more reaction to the Vichy Government. I could see that he was right—after all, none of us knew who we could trust.
The latter part of the 1940–41 winter saw the departure of most of our British friends from the fort. After informing the French officials in charge of the Fort of their intention to revoke their word of honour not to escape, they disappeared from Marseille, hoping to regain England.
Very soon the remaining internees were transferred to Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, some distance from Marseille. Garrow had rescinded his parole and was hiding
in Marseille. From there, he organised the escape route and contacts for other British officers. He was soon to be joined by a Belgian who had escaped from his country after its capitulation and joined the Royal Navy as a crew member of the Q. ship HMS Fidelity. Owing to a series of mishaps, including extremely rough seas, they were intercepted by a French Navy cutter and towed at gun point to the nearest port, where they were arrested. This Belgian masqueraded under the name of Patrick O’Leary. Eventually he escaped and came to Marseille, where he was to work with Garrow. Meanwhile, I was still travelling regularly to Cannes and Toulon as a courier for Garrow’s group. We smuggled men out of the country and back to England, with a series of contacts, safe houses, and a lot of trepidation as we showed our false papers to the authorities.
Life in the Côte d’Azur began to change for although it was in the so-called Free Zone, racist measures were being introduced. But as long as they were solely anti-Semitic, far too many people remained apathetic to the plight of the Jews. We were able to buy a very good radio set and now that we could receive ‘Ici Londres’ and hear authentic news broadcasts we did not feel so isolated. We had to be careful, as the man on the opposite side of our floor was a true-blue Vichy commissioner of police, so we always had our old radio switched to the Vichy news, and we always had to remember to switch the dial on the other radio to a French programme when the London news was finished.
Greece and Yugoslavia were both invaded by the Germans in April but several weeks later, just when the morale of the Anglophiles was at a standstill, ‘Ici Londres’ broadcast an exciting news flash. The magnificent German battleship Bismark had been sunk by the Royal Navy. There was much silent rejoicing. On 22 June German troops entered the Soviet Union. Most French people were amazed by this news. Russia is such a vast land and they had never forgotten Napoleon’s defeat. On the other hand, Hitler’s armoured divisions were advancing quickly and, to the surprise of everyone, the Red Army appeared to be retreating.
Unfortunately we had to endure many an argument between the left- and right-wing supporters. The Anglophiles remained silent. Secretly we hoped the invasion of the Soviet Union would give the British breathing space. After all, we told ourselves, Germany couldn’t cope with a war on two fronts.
When I returned home from shopping one morning, Claire, our maid, greeted me with the news that Captain Garrow and another man were sitting in our little American bar. Furthermore, the stranger had kicked Picon out of the big leather armchair he loved to sleep on whenever I left him at home.
We kept three bottles on our bar—an Armagnac, a kirsch and a whisky. They were enormous bottles and sold only to important establishments for display purposes. We had obtained them from a barman, intending to open them on Victory Day and not before. When I went into the room I found Garrow sitting down writing and the other man in the leather armchair. I took an instant dislike to him. He looked, and was, very common, and did not bother to stand up when we were introduced. To my utter astonishment he had opened the huge bottle of whisky and was imbibing. His name, Paul Cole, did not mean a thing to me that day and I ordered him out of my home in no uncertain terms. My outburst obviously surprised Garrow. This was a side of me he had not witnessed before, and he left soon after Cole.
Cole continued to work for the network. He denounced many people and he stole from the helpers, all the time being a double agent. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and disappeared as soon as he realised he was about to be exposed. His name was really Sergeant Harold Cole. At the beginning of the war while his unit was stationed in France he had absconded with the funds of the Sergeants’ Mess. He had a criminal record in England before the war yet the authorities in London had seen fit to keep this information to themselves. He was also wanted in France for con-man activities before the war.
We didn’t see Garrow for some time and once O’Leary came into the network we saw him less and less. By that time I realised they only came to see us when they needed the money, food or ration cards they could not obtain through their other friends and contacts. Henri was unfailingly generous with his money once I had made it clear I would help the escape network as much as I could.
Some time later I was told that several members of the organisation had been afraid I might become a security risk owing to my exuberant nature and British birth. Remembering Cole and the blockheads in London, I could afford to laugh. Their irresponsible assessment of the knowledge they had at their fingertips had allowed a petty thief to pursue his life of deception in France to the detriment of men and women in the field, and with such dire consequences.
Nevertheless, I did not laugh later on when in September 1944 I was told of my husband Henri’s arrest and death. O’Leary had been arrested and he sent a ‘friendly messenger’ to my home asking Henri to warn certain people. He was not a ‘friendly messenger’, and my poor husband was doomed. So much for their security.
In the summer of 1941 Henri collapsed at his factory and was rushed to hospital, where they diagnosed uraemia. I had never known him to be ill or even off colour, but he brushed aside my concern and said everything would be fine, especially as the doctor treating him was an old school pal he had known all his life.
In the meantime, our French Army friend the Commander had succeeded in forming a very good little organisation, comprising mostly friends he had known for a long time and whom he felt he could trust. He wished to be known as Xavier (not to be confused with the SOE agent of the same code-name). Although his organisation printed and distributed anti-German pamphlets, their main goal was to be in readiness for the day when General de Gaulle would call for their assistance in liberating France from the enemy. However, from experience, I knew that on numerous occasions they assisted Allied airmen and Jews who were evading the authorities.
I was delighted to be taken on as their courier, especially as I would be working mainly in Provence, an area which I knew well from pre-war days. I did not believe anyone who knew me would be unduly surprised to see me travelling, as I had friends all over Provence with whom I had never lost touch.
About the middle of 1941 Xavier gave me a packet to deliver in Grenoble. I was walking from the station and to my astonishment I ran into Stephanie and a good-looking Frenchman, whom she introduced as her husband Paul. Knowing Stephanie I did not enquire whether the liaison was legal or otherwise.
We were both in a hurry, but we had time for a quick ersatz coffee in a bistro where we exchanged news. Apparently Stephanie and Paul were trying to escape to Switzerland as the Germans were looking for Paul. If they couldn’t do that, they were going to return to Paris where they’d just heard of a doctor who helped people escape from France. That was the last I ever saw of either of them.
When Henri came home from hospital we went to our chalet at Nevache in the Alps for a little holiday. It stood high on a hill outside the village itself; it was always such a peaceful place, except when British planes flew overhead on their way to bomb Turin.
The transport services were practically nonexistent now in Marseille. The trams were always breaking down and it was not always easy to procure a taxi, so I bought a bicycle and learnt to ride it. From then on I went all over Marseille on my bicycle, dashing in and out of the traffic as if I’d been riding one all my life. Conditions were getting harder every day in Marseille, although I could not complain as I had plenty of money to buy food if it was available; but thousands of people were existing on a starvation diet. Pétain told us that France had lost the war because the people drank too much, so for three days a week alcohol could not be served in the bistros or cafés. On the other four days we could only be served drinks with a low percentage of alcohol. Then the Pétainists started denouncing the non-Pétainists and others denounced perfectly innocent people just to get even for past disagreements. It was sad to see human beings sinking so low, and with no compassion at all for their compatriots. I was lucky. When I travelled around the countryside I could always pop in and see old friends, and in Marsei
lle I had plenty to keep me occupied.
For months Xavier and his team had been working hard trying to assemble an old printing machine, but just as they obtained the spare parts needed to put it in order, the local police raided the house he had been using. To their surprise, instead of finding the expected black-market goods they found the press, so it was back to square one for Xavier.
For a while he used to go to Henri’s office to type his literature which someone copied for him, but the warehouse was situated in an over-populated area full of Italians and other curious people, and he was obliged to find a safer place. Out of the blue an old army colleague of his, who was leaving France to join the Free French in England, offered him his little house on the Corniche road in Marseille. It was ideal for subversive work as it was isolated from the adjacent houses, but it was also on a busy road which made it easier for visitors to come and go. It was perfect for me as it was near a rock swimming-hole where I had been used to bathing for some time.
For months I collected his pamphlets, putting them in my shopping basket on the back of my bike and delivering them safely to various addresses. If we happened to meet Xavier in the Hôtel Louvre we would have a drink and sometimes dine together, but we never discussed his activities in front of anyone. As far as the hotel staff were concerned we were just casual acquaintances who had met in their bar.
By autumn 1941 the morale of the people had deteriorated noticeably. Most of them were filled with despair, and for many unfortunate ones a gloomy winter lay ahead. There was not enough fuel for domestic heating; food rations were not being honoured on time and frequently not at all; clothes and shoes were almost impossible to buy with coupons and were too expensive on the black market for the majority of people.