The Saboteur

by Paul Kix

  Now, to La Rochefoucauld, and a bit fastidiously, he asked: “Can I help you, Sister?”

  Robert got up, walked over to him, and patted him forcefully on the back. He dropped his voice to its natural register. “You don’t recognize me?” he asked. “You were waiting for me.”

  Landes’s face changed. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, amazed. “Your disguise—they didn’t warn me you would be in a disguise.” He said that when he heard a nun had demanded to see him, he was convinced that the sister brought news of La Rochefoucauld’s catastrophic end.

  The two laughed and embraced. The noise caused Lady Landes to reenter the room, even more puzzled now by the nun Aristide had his arm around. Landes introduced his guest, “explaining that I was indeed the boy he was waiting for,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. She let out a half shriek and ran to him, hugging him.

  When the impromptu celebration ended and she left, the two set themselves to business. La Rochefoucauld said he hoped to return to London, but Landes scoffed. That was impossible, he said. Because of the European landing, the English did not have the time or spare planes to get a French agent to SOE headquarters. Aristide instead offered refuge with a certain Monsieur Demont, a forester in the wilderness to the south of Bordeaux, not far from where Robert had parachuted that spring, in the department that shared Landes’s name. Thick stands of maritime pines covered roughly four thousand square miles of the Landes department, and La Rochefoucauld would work for Demont as a lumberjack. There, he would be safe from Dohse. And from there, when the time was right, he could contact London. “My orders,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “were to hide and wait.”

  Aristide kept the meeting brisk because he worked twenty-hour days that summer, losing nearly thirty pounds in the process, the stress of the war culminating that month when he gave the order to execute André Grandclément. Landes reached out to Grandclément and told him and his wife that a plane was coming to take them to England. On the fateful night, an associate of Landes’s, Dédé la Basque, walked Grandclément on a tarmac, Aristide walking Grandclément’s wife, Lucette, in the opposite direction. Basque killed Grandclément execution-style, and Landes did the same with Lucette, shooting her in the back of the neck with his .45 automatic, the bullet exiting through her throat and spurting a trail of blood over four-feet long. For the rest of his life, Landes would maintain that killing Madame Grandclément was necessary: She had known and conspired with the Germans in the same manner as her husband. Few in the military would disagree. After the war, Landes was highly decorated by the French and English.

  La Rochefoucauld knew none of this, of course. Landes remained circumspect around him, revealing only what was necessary so the young fighter might make his escape. Robert said good-bye, thanking Landes again. Landes flashed him his classic sardonic smile.

  A few days later, as instructed, La Rochefoucauld biked on seldom-traveled roads to the edge of Bordeaux, where one of Landes’s vehicles waited for him. The driver was impressed with Robert’s story but, when they reached Demont’s camp deep in the forest, introduced him not as a résistant but a defector from the Nazis’ mandatory work order. Even here, among friends, Aristide and his men favored discretion.

  Demont welcomed Robert warmly and said he specialized in selling lumber that became pit props: the shafts of wood that prop up mines. La Rochefoucauld soon found himself in a demanding if monotonous routine: cut wood, stack wood, repeat. There was a restorative, comforting quality to the work; Dohse could not find him here, in the pine’s long shadows. But as his shifts ended he began to almost miss the streets that had threatened him. Yes, he had escaped prison and his own death sentence three times, and, yes, because of that, he had been ordered to this exile, but he was twenty and impetuous and carried the belief—and not an unfounded one—that this was the defining season of his life. He wanted it to shape his future. He wanted to shape his country’s future. It would be hard, but he could try to forget the terror of imprisonment; that could haunt him later. If he could just rejoin the fight now, he could perhaps even expunge his suffering, sanctify himself, really, in the glory of a lasting victory.

  He tried and failed to contact his London handlers, growing impatient and then angry by the silence. He began to see Demont’s camp as another imprisonment. If London did not want to let him out, then, as in Fort du Hâ, La Rochefoucauld would go in search of the keys to liberation.

  One day, La Rochefoucauld decided to simply walk out of Demont’s camp. He was on his own now, a freelance commando, a trained specialist, in search of a great and final battle.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Landes department was a strange and dichotomous place that summer. The sabotages increased—one hundred to the railways alone in July, to aid the approaching Allied troops—and yet even with the British and American advance, the Germans remained unquestionably the occupiers, ordering the populace to equip the Nazis with supplies in case of a military retreat. People obeyed, but at the same time they could feel the power shifting, France beginning to redeem itself, a palpable but not quite visible reclamation. Résistants multiplied and those new to the cause and the ones who had been there, as the French said, “from the first hour,” began to identify each other, openly and in broad daylight, as if they were fellow soldiers and not underground agents.

  And yet that esprit de corps didn’t unite the groups fighting the Germans. The Communist résistants, isolated in the north of the department, refused to speak with their SOE counterparts in the south, who denied them arms. The SOE groups weren’t even talking among themselves; petty squabbles and competing aims kept them apart. The Gaullist cell refused to recognize anyone who was not a follower of Le Grand Charles. The best way to cleanse southwest France of Nazis was for each man to give himself to a cause greater than his self-interest. But one’s self-interest, after four years of deprivations, seemed the primary reason to join the cause. The Landes was like so much of France that summer: Yearning for liberation yet begrudging the path to it.

  Robert de La Rochefoucauld walked into this wild and coarse landscape. Eager to fight and to avenge his own pain, he saw the region only as he wanted to see it, which is to say in a blinkered, almost monochromatic light: The Nazis were bad and any group that fought them was good. So he rejoined his old group, Charly.

  The size of the troop, nearly one thousand men, protected La Rochefoucauld and many others from René Cominetti’s ultimate betrayal. After the war Cominetti—aka Charly, the leader of the eponymous group—would be convicted by the English for turning eight British aviators over to the Nazis, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. He was dubbed a collaborator, but during that summer of 1944, one would never have known it. Charly ordered his men to fight fiercely: seventy résistants raided a munitions factory in Saint Hélène on July 23, killing one hundred Germans; seven Charly men ambushed a German post on August 16 in Le Moutchic, taking guns and three Nazis prisoner.

  La Rochefoucauld found himself in many skirmishes that would never be named, ephemeral battles of rifle reports and fiery sabotages through a forested and surreal southwest France, the Germans on the run and the Allied objectives back at headquarters too slow to form to be effective. The fighting took on a tribal quality. He was part of Charly, and oversaw a small group of men as its sergeant, but he gathered with fighters from other groups, too, most notably a Jewish one whose men had joined the cause after an administrator in Bordeaux secretly warned them of a roundup. La Rochefoucauld’s summer of war was “simultaneously intense and limited,” he wrote, bursts of fire followed by hours or days of boredom. His weeks “essentially consisted of increasing skirmishes with [Nazi] troops at the borders of the zone they occupied.” One day, for instance, carrying out a patrol near a German line, La Rochefoucauld approached an abandoned building. As he opened the door, someone else swung wide the back entrance. Across the poorly lit expanse neither man could immediately make out the other, but when Robert’s eyes adjusted he saw he stood opposite a German�
��just as the Nazi realized he faced a Frenchman. La Rochefoucauld shot five rounds from his revolver as he ducked the German’s fire. Not one bullet, however, hit its intended target. When the last reports echoed off the wall, each man found he had no other gun on him, and no more ammunition.

  An awkward moment passed between them: What was called for here? A run at the other man? A run away from him, looking for more ammo? Finally, “as if in a properly settled duel,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, each soldier decided with no fanfare to leave through the door he’d opened. The two never saw each other again.

  The liberations came in August. Gen. George Patton and his U.S. Third Army had swept through the German forces in Normandy, moving southeast to the Loire Valley and Orleans, and then due east toward the Seine, south of the capital. They reached the boundaries of Paris on August 23, so close that Parisians heard the blistering squeals and thunderous reports of modern war, a sweet sound now, the city thrumming with anticipation. The police who worked for the Germans had fled, and those who’d passively resisted refused their patrols. There was almost no law enforcement presence. No Vichy broadcasts either: The collaborationist Radio Paris had been off the air since the seventeenth. The French Forces of the Interior called for a mobilization of all Resistance groups in the city. Soon, in the Latin quarter, 35,000 FFI fighters battled roughly 20,000 German troops. The Nazis had tanks and the FFI soldiers inadequate arms; the guerrillas’ advantage in men fell away, the fighting fierce. Meanwhile, skirmishes flared in other neighborhoods, barricades of chairs and mattresses and tables rising on the streets, like an insurrection out of Les Misérables. By 6 p.m. on August 23, after pleas from de Gaulle that the French liberate Paris, the Allied high command ordered Gen. Jacques Leclerc’s Second Armored Division to march on the capital. Leclerc’s forces arrived on August 25 and met a weary and even disenfranchised German army—Hitler’s order to blow up the Eiffel Tower had been ignored—and Leclerc’s men moved quickly down the thoroughfares. Everywhere now the French reclaimed state buildings and hotels. Ernest Hemingway “liberated” the Ritz, either returning enemy fire from the roof or spending that increasingly celebratory day drinking in the bar, depending on the account one chooses to believe.

  By the afternoon, the Germans surrendered at Gare Montparnasse, where Leclerc had set up his headquarters. De Gaulle himself arrived there at 4:30 and then moved to the Hôtel de Ville to meet representatives of his Free French forces and to make the first of what would be many speeches as the country’s leader. “Paris!” he said. “Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But now Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, by her own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France.”

  The following day de Gaulle organized a procession to move down the Champs-Élysées. “Behind him,” one observer noted, “a human herd dances, sings, enjoys itself utterly; from it there stick out tank turrets sprinkled with soldiers and with girls whose destiny does not seem likely to be a nunnery.” De Gaulle later estimated the crowd at two million, the throngs shouting “Vive la France!” and “Vive de Gaulle!” He was a long way now from the country’s most junior general.

  By the month’s end the Germans’ Western armies had lost 500,000 men, half of them as prisoners, and the Allied liberation of other French cities followed. Bordeaux was freed August 28, Dohse fleeing just before the Bordelais made a bonfire on the streets of whatever the occupiers left behind.

  La Rochefoucauld was in Bordeaux that day. He tried but couldn’t really share in the joyous mood. He sensed disingenuousness. Just weeks ago, after all, “I’d taken the same streets and crossed the same squares,” he wrote. “Then, they were abundantly filled by the enemy army; you could barely make out any civilians. This time, you might have believed the entire French army, crushed by the heat, had besieged Bordeaux. Soldiers were everywhere, in full uniform on café terraces, heroically drinking their aperitifs, while others in battle dress, pistols in plain sight, patrolled through the city with a menacing eye. The heroes were surely tired, but why were there so many of them here, when the danger had disappeared?” This scene replicated itself so often across newly freed cities—French soldiers emerging when the Nazis vanished—that the natives found a word for it: Napthalenes, after the smell of mothballs that clung to a man’s uniform. Even in liberation, then, there was shame for the French.

  But not all of France was freed that summer. On the same day Parisians celebrated the Nazi surrender, the people of Maillé, twenty-five miles south of Tours, witnessed horror. A group of German soldiers, angry over résistants who’d bombed a car of Nazis, descended on the small town and lined up and shot dead disabled grandmothers and six-year-old girls and women who held children in their arms. The Germans bayoneted babies in their cribs and put guns to retirees’ foreheads. The Nazis killed everyone they found, 124 people in all. They then razed the town and scrawled on pieces of paper near the murdered: “A punishment for terrorists and their assistants.”

  All over the country in that season of liberation many French towns felt only savagery and oppression: nineteen résistants assassinated in Carcassonne; thirty hostages executed in Rodez; more than one hundred prisoners shot in Montluc, their bodies burned. The road to freedom descended through a grotesque anarchy.

  The liberators themselves struggled to impress onto the bloody land a rule of law. Resistance leaders refused to recognize de Gaulle’s officer corps—where had they been for four years?—and many guerrillas became de facto mayors in the towns where Germans had fled. The Vichy officials who remained were often dragged into public squares to face the threat of firing squads. These purges, as they were soon called, drew crowds who had little patience for jurisprudence. Many suspected collaborators were denounced in the manner in which résistants had been: without supporting evidence and with grave consequences. Some cities attempted to stage makeshift trials, but people wanted revenge—they mailed collaborators miniature coffins—and Frenchmen killed their own quickly, and rashly, and with the full support of rebel leaders who reigned “like feudal lords,” as one historian wrote. The number of French killed in the purges of August and September reached nine thousand. Some people who weren’t executed were publicly shamed. Women thought to have slept with Germans had their heads shaved or their bodies tarred and feathered and painted with swastikas. All the while the waging of war continued, the battalions sometimes far more orderly than the cities they freed. On September 1, FFI fighters outside Lyons staged a “textbook battle” alongside U.S. troops, one historian wrote, pinning back the 11th Panzer Division and opening the road for U.S. forces. The FFI men looked “proud when you compare them to the green-uniformed [Nazi] cowards who fled,” reported a local newspaper.

  In theory Charles de Gaulle should have been grateful to the fighters who won his battles and accelerated his political ascent. But the haughty de Gaulle saw in each liberated city a threat to his power; many résistants, Communists in particular, wanted a revolution, freedom from the Germans and then the Third Republic, whose systemic rot had corroded France. De Gaulle hated such dissent. He planned to shape the state to his liking. He treated the résistants who angled for postwar authority with “lofty coldness,” in the words of one of them, taking every opportunity to diminish their significance. In his “Paris liberated” speech, for example, he didn’t acknowledge the role the Resistance played in the city’s liberation. In Bordeaux, after its return to sovereignty, de Gaulle told the SOE boss Roger Landes he had two hours to leave the city.

  Town by town, de Gaulle forced the Resistance to kneel before him. A short time after the first French cities’ independence, the general ordered the dissolution of the French Forces of the Interior and other national groups that had organized sabotages before, during, and now after D-Day. If these résistants still wanted to fight, de Gaulle reasoned, they could join his Free French army. By November, more than 200,000 ré
sistants had, La Rochefoucauld among them.

  He enlisted that fall in a reserve officers’ school in Bordeaux, École des Cadres de Quellec. La Rochefoucauld scribbled down the lessons of army officers while in neighboring cities Frenchmen still bore the Occupation’s weight. One of La Rochefoucauld’s superiors noted his “natural sense of command,” an aspirant who had “already acquired the experience” and the “incontestable qualities” of a leader. For Robert, the officers’ school epitomized the surreal illogic of that fall. He was there to learn the skills he’d already gained in two years of fighting, from staffers who out of humiliation preferred to act as if La Rochefoucauld was not their better. He had fought these last dark years while they had lost in 1940. “Will be an excellent reserve officer,” his superior wrote, the line a patronizing sneer.

  His military records from this period, page after page, seemed to praise La Rochefoucauld in a way that also belittled him. But one remark suggested how even a jeering command corps recognized his true gift: “very ‘cavalier,’” the note read. So adventurous, in fact, that the twenty-one-year-old wasn’t long for the École des Cadres de Quellec. By November 1944, not two months after enlisting, he left the officers’ school, having received orders to join a commando troop. “I was tasked with instructing my men and instilling in them the basics of commando combat that I’d acquired myself in England,” he later wrote. He would not sit in classrooms or walk on manicured firing ranges while people very much like himself settled the last of the war in nearby woods or marshes. He would join one of the most selective strike forces in France.