White Mouse

by Nancy Wake

  With Germany fighting in Russia, and the United States of America declaring war on Japan and the Axis Powers after Pearl Harbor, new hope came to the French. Even some of the pessimistic ones admitted that there could be a chance. Understandably, it is hard to remain optimistic on an empty stomach. People tried to cheer themselves up by saying it could not get worse. They were wrong. It did get worse. 1942 turned out to be long, hard and bitter.

  When we next saw O’Leary he informed us that Garrow had been arrested. He was to serve three months’ solitary confinement in Fort Saint-Nicolas in Marseille, after which he would be sent to the Mauzac concentration camp in the Dordogne for ten years. We were also advised to sever our link with Garrow’s organisation temporarily, his place having been taken by O’Leary.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We were having our midday meal one day when Xavier appeared at our front door. We guessed it was urgent. His two right-hand men were in serious trouble. Could we help? The three of us put our heads together and it was decided I would take them to our chalet in Nevache. This way I could kill two birds with one stone.

  I wanted to see the farmer who kept an eye on our chalet and ask him to fatten up a pig which we two would share. This was a normal custom in France but first of all I had to find a suitable piglet. Also I had to buy a little bit of land so that he could grow the potatoes needed to fatten the pig.

  Next morning, I caught the train to Nice and in the afternoon our contact gave me two sets of papers, not only identity cards but every other paper the police would demand. We encountered no trouble when we left Marseille. The men showed the identity cards at the station and during the journey in the train. We separated when we reached Nevache. I went directly to the chalet while the others circled the village in a round-about way before joining me.

  I found a little piglet in Briançon and after a very underhand sale it was delivered to the farmer in the dead of night. A block of land was available for sale and all I had to do now was to wait for the pig to grow up and become nice and fat. Leaving my guests with a long list of do’s and don’ts I returned to Marseille feeling very pleased with my purchases, having arranged to return during the summer months with a family I had met in Marseille, the Ficetoles.

  When France had still been fighting, it was customary for people to adopt a filleul de guerre if their circumstances permitted. Henri agreed with my proposal that I should have a filleul, a poor soldier to send food parcels to, but stipulated that he would be the one to select a worthy case. He sent me the names of three of his fellow privates. I chose the one from Marseille. And so the Ficetole family came into our life.

  Ficetole had been a tram conductor in Marseille before the war; he was married with two young daughters. During the war he had been called up as a soldier, and soldiers were notoriously underpaid in France. Every week I religiously sent him food parcels which he always acknowledged until one day he wrote to tell me how guilty he felt eating all the goodies I sent him knowing his family was in need of food, and begging me to send the parcels to his wife instead. I called on the family immediately and could see that they were very undernourished. Poor Madame Ficetole was trying to earn a little extra money by machining garments for the army. She received a pittance for all the hours she spent at the machine, sometimes until well after midnight. From then on she received a food parcel every week and so did Ficetole. When Ficetole returned from the front Henri helped him buy a horse and cart so he could start a little transport service. Horses were in vogue now that cars were restricted, so he did quite well. The horse was named Picon in my honour. Later, both Ficetole and the horse were to help me out of a tight spot.

  In June 1942 the Germans demanded 350,000 French workers to help man their industries. They were to be taken peaceably or by force. Perhaps Laval, Pétain’s vice-president, wanted to soften the blow; in any case the relève was introduced. This meant that for every three workers going to Germany one French prisoner-of-war would be repatriated. Only 50,000 young men responded to the call; thousands of others left their homes to live in small groups in woods and forests, where they eventually formed the anti-Nazi outlaw groups known as the Maquis.

  The failure of the Dieppe raid by the Allies in the following August afforded the Germans and the Vichyites another golden opportunity to further lower the morale of the population. Their efficient propaganda service issued pamphlets and posters deploring this action by the British, whom they stated had sent the 5,000 Canadians to a certain death as they themselves were too cowardly to fight. However, as the year went by we had some exciting news to listen to on the radio concerning events in North Africa as the results in that campaign began to favour the Allies.

  One morning I found a letter from Garrow in our mail-box; it had been posted from the prison at Fort Saint-Nicolas. He said he was starving, and begged for food. He’d completed three months of solitary confinement and was anxious to have news of the prison sentence which was due to follow. According to him, O’Leary had promised to engage a good lawyer to defend him. All this was news to me, and although I knew exactly where O’Leary’s Marseille headquarters were, I certainly was not foolish enough to endanger that address. Besides, we were not supposed to be associating with one another.

  Henri had seen the letter in the mail-box when he left in the morning and at lunchtime he tackled me about it. He forbade me to answer it. I suppose I should have listened, but I didn’t. I slept on it before making my decision, and the following morning I told my husband I could not ignore a plea from a starving British subject in prison. As usual when he could see how serious I was, Henri said that I could count on him for anything I needed, although he disapproved of my involvement. His family were being compromised by my activities, but Henri was on my side.

  In my reply to Garrow I made him understand that our mothers were sisters and therefore we were cousins. I took my letter to the Fort and asked to see the man in charge. A close girlfriend of mine came with me and waited outside in case they kept me! They would not let me see Garrow but said I could deliver food parcels which subsequently I did, three times a week.

  Eventually, through sheer determination and perseverance, I succeeded in my request to see my ‘cousin’. He looked absolutely ghastly. Goodness knows what he had looked like before he received the food. I remember he kept me waiting for ages. Sometime afterwards a cell-mate of his told me he had been trying desperately to tidy himself up before facing me. As for the mysterious lawyer, there was nothing I could do; but as luck would have it O’Leary came to our home round about midday when he knew Henri would be there. He needed money and stayed for a meal.

  Over coffee I told him exactly what I thought of the Garrow affair. He defended himself by saying that a good lawyer, allegedly a member of the Resistance, had been engaged through a third party to reopen the case and defend Garrow. The organisation had also sent food parcels through the British official who remained in Marseille up until the time the Americans entered the war. Understandably, O’Leary could not approach the lawyer or the British official, who was more or less under the protection of the Americans, so I went in his place.

  First of all I rang up the lawyer and made an appointment. He was indeed a well-known Marseillais. It was a stormy interview but he had to be careful of how he dealt with me because my husband was known to him. I was in my most aggressive mood and he was forced to admit that he had done absolutely nothing for Garrow.

  This lawyer was a member of a certain French Resistance group. He is now an important figure in France so I would be foolish to refer to him by name. Nevertheless, I would dearly love to meet him in a lonely spot one dark night.

  From there I went to see the British Official. I was so cross at the time I would have approached a lion in his cage. The second interview was just as unsatisfactory as the first one. The food parcels had been left to rot, along with similar parcels for other people, in a huge cupboard in the entrance hall. Yet all this man had to do was to contact the Red Cross, who w
ould have completed the formalities. Years after the war, when I was with my second husband, John Forward, then stationed in Malta, we were invited to lunch at Government House. I sat between the Governor, Sir Robert Laycock, and the envoy extraordinary, the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Vatican, who asked me if I had ever come across this particular British official in Marseille. My reply made him slap his hands on his knees and roar with laughter. We were both of the same opinion. I now had three men on my black list—Hitler, a French lawyer and a British official.

  The entrance bell rang one day. I ducked behind a door and peered through a crack while Claire opened the front door. She didn’t know the Frenchman there, neither did I. That was exactly the way we all lived in those days—always with those feelings of apprehension at the arrival of an unknown or unexpected visitor. He obviously knew Claire was on her guard when he asked to see me, as he immediately said he came from Garrow.

  When I greeted him in the hall he took me in his arms and gave me a kiss from Garrow and one from himself, explaining they had shared my food parcels and the whisky I used to put in a bottle of cough mixture.

  His name was Frank Arnal and we became staunch friends. He had appealed against his prison sentence, and had been acquitted, and he was sure that, in the hands of a good lawyer, Garrow would also have a good chance. Frank then told me that if the appeal failed he would give me a few details of a prison guard at Mauzac who was open to bribery.

  In the meantime I went ahead with the holiday plans and we were soon on our way to the mountains, Madame Ficetole, her two daughters, a girlfriend of mine and last but not least, Picon. It was a long, dreary journey. The train was filthy and the engine kept breaking down, but at last we reached Briançon just in time to catch the one and only bus which was to take us to our destination. As expected, my two previous guests had departed. They had managed to hide there for a long time without being discovered and they had left the chalet in perfect order. And the farmer had good news. The potatoes were thriving and the piglet was growing bigger and bigger and fatter and fatter.

  Towards the end of our holiday I got the shock of my life. Three Frenchmen appeared at the chalet. They had come from Nice via Briançon where they had taken the bus for Nevache, not realising that it was a dead-end route and that everybody knew everything going on in the village. They lived in Toulon but the Vichy police had traced them to their homes and, fortunately for them, they had been alerted at Nice by a mutual friend of ours.

  I was not worried about the villagers in Nevache. The mayor was a distant cousin of the Fioccas, so was the one and only gendarme, and the priest liked me because I made donations to the church (which the Fioccas did not) and always sent him some tasty dish when I could as the poor man did not have much in the way of food.

  However, I was worried about the authorities in Briançon. We all remained very much on the alert that night. From the first floor of the chalet we could see if any cars came up the mountains towards Nevache, but all was calm.

  The young people in the village had been trying to get me to let them have a dance in the chalet, because dancing was strictly forbidden in those days. I had always refused because of the mess I thought they would make on the white wooden floors. Now I decided they could have their dances and when they left the rest of us would scrub the floors clean again. I calculated that with so many teenagers coming and going their parents would squash any rumours that might crop up. Our uninvited guests did not stay long but they enjoyed the unorthodox holiday, and the dancing, and some months later they reached North Africa. We left the chalet the day after they did and returned to Marseille.

  Garrow lost his appeal. Henri and I, plus the girlfriend who used to wait for me outside the prison, went to the Gare Saint-Charles to see him being transferred from the prison truck on to the train with the other prisoners. They were all manacled together and dragging leg-chains. It was a miserable sight and the three of us found it hard to hold back our tears. We had seen many shocking and disturbing things since the beginning of the war, machine-gunned children included, yet these depressed-looking underfed prisoners, one of whom we’d known as a healthy man, affected us deeply. Everything was getting worse, and it was hard to keep our optimistic outlook.

  I went to Toulon the next morning and saw Frank Arnal. Armed with more details about the prison guard in question, I confronted O’Leary. I felt I had him at a distinct disadvantage. His choice of a lawyer, or rather the advice he had accepted in this regard, had been a complete failure. He accepted my suggestion. I would do all the preliminary work and his organisation would take over the escape from the prison and France. It was useless to go to Mauzac until I heard from Garrow. We needed to know the precise whereabouts of the camp, the exact days and hours for visiting the inmates, plus the availability of accommodation for me in the immediate area.

  The day before I was due to leave on one of my regular trips along the south coast on an errand for Xavier, he asked if I would mind taking a personal message to a friend of his who had just been released from prison. He added that it would not present a problem as his friend had a chemist shop in Toulon, and therefore I would appear to be a customer. I nearly fell over backwards when he gave me the name—Frank Arnal.

  Some courier work was boring but I used to enjoy my coastal run. I took a train from Marseille to Toulon where I spent a few hours before taking another one to Cannes or Nice, staying two nights in either of these towns before returning home via Toulon. In Toulon, Henri had introduced me to a retired professional fisherman who ran a little bistro down by the port. If he ever had any goods for me, edible or otherwise, he would put them aside until I called in on my return. His bar was a hive of activity and nearly always full of interesting and amusing people. In Nice and Cannes I had plenty of friends where I could stay for a few days and catch up on all the local news and gossip.

  When I walked into Frank’s shop he assumed it was something to do with Garrow. He was speechless when I gave him the message from Xavier, then laughed and said how delighted he was to find I was involved with such a reliable and dedicated man. Frank and I were staunch friends from the time we met, but now we had an extra special bond.

  Eventually I received a letter from Garrow. Mauzac was a Vichyiste concentration camp situated on the Dordogne River about twenty-four kilometres from the little town of Bergerac. From Marseille it was a long, tedious journey by train. I would take the Bordeaux express as far as Agen, then the Perigueux train to a little place that connected with the Sarlat-Bergerac line. Frank had not been given the name of the guard I wished to contact and he advised me to make myself as conspicuous as possible in the hope that he would make himself known.

  I left Marseille on 11 November 1942, intending to stay in the area of the camp for the weekend, which meant I could visit Garrow on Saturday and Sunday. Henri had been able to reserve me a return seat on the Bordeaux train. Although he had not wanted me to be involved with this affair, once I had made my own decision he always did everything to make my task easier. Conflicting rumours were flying all over the city. Henri suggested I put my trip off until the following week but I had organised my accommodation and decided to risk it. By the time the train reached Toulouse I knew that the Germans had entered the Unoccupied Zone.

  The camp was within walking distance of my lodgings. As I approached I could see groups of men standing talking to each other behind the barbed wire surrounding the enclosure. I had to walk right past them to get to the entrance and I could feel all the eyes following me. Suddenly they shouted out loud, and Garrow appeared. They had been on the lookout for me. Garrow had not heard any whispers about ‘friendly’ guards, so when the visiting hours were over I strolled around the area and on to the village, hoping for a contact which did not eventuate. I knew I had to be patient, however, and that it would be only a matter of time. I booked my room for the following week and made tracks for home.

  When I took my seat in the train at Agen I was disagreeably surprised to f
ind I was sitting beside a German officer in uniform. By the time I reached Marseille they were all over the place.

  I continued my trips to Mauzac until one fine day a man on a bicycle passed me, at the same time throwing down a note wrapped around a stone. I was to meet him on the bridge at La Linde at midnight. I kept the appointment. He did not. I felt very disgruntled as I made my way back to my room in the middle of the night, especially as there had been an early curfew. I left as usual the following week for Mauzac. I was having a drink in the bistro in the village when a man came over and got into conversation. It was the guard I had been seeking. He wanted 500,000 francs and a guard’s uniform. But he wanted 50,000 francs deposit and I only had 10,000 with me.

  We arranged a convenient and discreet meeting place for that night and immediately I phoned Henri for the extra money. He telegraphed it urgently; I collected it at the post office and handed it over to the guard, promising the balance when I returned. The next day at the camp I was taken to the Commandant’s office and he asked me why I had received a large sum of money from Marseille. Of course I guessed what had happened, but I pretended I had not received a large sum of money. He gave himself away by saying that the post office had informed him of the details of the transfer. He was a supercilious-looking man and I think he was, or had been, an army officer. Giving him a scornful look, I pointed out that whereas 40,000 francs was probably a large sum for a man on his salary, it was nothing for me. With a deadpan face I added that I needed the money for drinks at the bistro. He gave me a scathing look and ordered a guard to take me to the visitors’ room.

  Before I returned to Marseille I made an official complaint to the local post office with regard to their indiscretions and followed it up with a very strong letter to the main post office in the department of Dordogne. This is what an innocent Frenchwoman, wrongly accused, would have done, and I always managed to believe wholeheartedly in the part I was playing.