The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  The mass mobilization of 6,000 men into the Margeride highlands – to posts on Mont Mouchet, Venteuges, Chamblard, La Truyère, Le Plomb du Cantal – began around 15 May 1944, right under the noses of the Germans and the Milice who were on red alert, and was no simple matter. We had left the château and were scattered in various billets to wait, which made it easier for us to muster and load into trucks. We were dispersed among the huts in the vineyards overlooking the Brioude–Vieille-Brioude road; the trucks were supposed to pick us up at nightfall and take us towards the foothills of the massif via Vieille-Brioude, Saint-Ilpize and Lavoûte-Chilhac, following the twists and the hairpin bends of the Allier Valley. I was waiting with my group when I received the order to go back to my father’s house in town, to help move some equipment. There I found my father, ready to set off and very busy, finishing loading a huge bicycle-trailer crammed with munitions and grenades covered by clothes and other innocuous-looking objects, which was to be taken to the hut from where I had just come. A man of about thirty called Bagelman was there, I’d seen him before, he was obviously Jewish, the personification of gentleness and non-violence, sheer terror etched on his face. I don’t know what prompted my father to make such a foolish decision, whether it was Bagelman’s age or his determination to protect me at all costs, but whatever the reason it was to Bagelman, not to me, that he entrusted the loaded revolver that was meant to keep us safe or to help us escape if anything were to happen. We would have to double back all the way through Brioude, which was spread across several kilometres, making it extremely dangerous. Bagelman slipped the revolver, like a wallet, into the inside pocket of his jacket. We set off; I feared the worst.

  Everything went without a hitch until we were about a hundred metres from the edge of town, when suddenly a sort of gnome wearing a hat appeared, very agitated, leaping around us as though surrounded on all sides by enemies. ‘Milice!’ he shouted. ‘Hands up!’ He pulled an automatic pistol from the holster on his hip and screamed, ‘Where are you going? What have you got there?’ and started pulling at the tarpaulin on the trailer and rummaging around, all the while waving his gun in the air. Now was the moment to kill him, the only moment; to kill him on the spot was the only way out. If we did not, we were doomed. Bagelman was literally green with fright, paralysed, incapable of taking action. I cursed my father for giving him the gun. Twice I kicked him in the shins and whispered, ‘Do it! Do it!’ But he stubbornly kept his hands in the air; I had lowered mine, ready to run when the milicien discovered the grenades. He hurled himself at me, jabbed his gun into my belly, shouting, ‘Get your hands up!’ as he frisked Bagelman with his free hand, taking the revolver. We could already see the plane trees on the Vielle-Brioude road, but he forced us to turn round and go back, the two of us in front pushing the trailer, him in the rear threatening us with his pistol and the revolver. He was yelling, trying to alert the other miliciens whom he knew must be close by: it was a good arrest, he was proud of himself, he wanted to show off. My father – this was my last hope, and it came true – suddenly appeared on a bicycle around the corner of the last street and, realizing immediately what was happening, dropped the bicycle, drew the Colt .45 he loved so much – and which I still have – and began to fire. Everything happened quickly. The stupefied milicien ducked behind a plane tree and fired back, missing my father and missing Bagelman, who ran off into the vineyards shitting his pants. I dodged from behind one plane tree to the next, trying to get to my father. The firing continued until the milicien, discouraged, retreated. By this time it was dark and we managed to recover the trailer and its contents. Had my father not arrived we would either have been executed on the spot, tortured and then killed, or deported to a concentration camp. In fact, the centre of Brioude was burned to the ground by the Nazis only a few weeks later, and many of those captured were lined up and shot, while others were sent to the camps. I saw Bagelman once after the war. He had dropped the ‘man’ from his name and was calling himself Bagel, but this did not expunge his criminal lack of courage, his inability to act and save our lives, the responsibility with which he had been formally entrusted. He tried to strike up a conversation; I couldn’t bring myself to utter a single word. I have never been able to forgive him.

  At dawn on 6 June 1944, I was at Venteuges – or maybe Chamblard, I don’t remember – in a trench where I had spent the night manning a Bren gun. We were waiting for the Germans, who in recent days had launched a number of attacks using tanks, artillery and even air cover, sustaining heavy losses in spite of their overwhelming superiority in weaponry, manpower and experience. My brother Jacques, who had joined us, was in a trench in the second line. Towards five o’clock, Papa came over to me, clearly in high spirits and said, ‘The Allies are landing in Normandy right now.’ After the Normandy landings, all German troops in southern France received orders to begin marching to Normandy by any means necessary – which meant making a breach through the ‘liberated territory’ of La Margeride. On 10 June, they launched a three-pronged attack from the west, north and east and, after savage fighting, were forced to retreat. The following day, they attacked again, this time with considerable reinforcements, and my company was told to fall back before we could fight. The journey back to Saint-Beauzire, the designated rallying point, through Monistrol-d’Allier, mostly on foot with a few short kilometres by train, was an odyssey. There was further battle on 20 June in the enclave of La Truyère, but the battle at La Margeride was over, the consequences less tragic than at Vercors, though, as there, villages had been destroyed, villagers shot in reprisals at Ruynes-en-Margeride, at Clavières, at Pinols, at Auvers, hostages killed in cold blood like those on the Soubizergues bridge, just outside Saint-Flour. In the retreat, it was every man for himself. I remember two skinny Corsican boys, the Leandri brothers, who were scared of nothing and had impressed me with the flick-knives they had brought from their Île de Beauté. The companies that had fought at La Margeride had fractured into twenty or so autonomous guerrilla units, forced to be self-sufficient through the rest of June and all of July, raiding bureaux de tabac, threatening farmers at gunpoint and forcing them to hand over food in exchange for receipts that were of no value whatsoever now. From our base at Saint-Beauzire we laid crude ambushes for SS units, which, being attacked on all sides, turned in circles around the treacherous roads of the Auvergne. It’s true that we did not have the luxury of thinking out and planning these traps as we should have because we had very little advance warning of the enemy’s arrival – in fact, they sometimes appeared unexpectedly. We worked in small, informal elective groups with no real leader. Some of the ambushes went against the nature of true guerrilla actions: harry the enemy, then withdraw before they have time to react – the Germans, professional soldiers, were incredibly swift, after their initial losses taking up positions from which they could spray us with machine-gun fire and mortars – and always protect the rear, or fall back. I remember a hastily organized ambush on a level stretch of the Limagne plain: we lay, barely camouflaged, in the ditches along Route Nationale 102, without so much as a hillock behind which we might shelter, armed only with submachine guns and grenades, waiting for a convoy that appeared prepared for all eventualities, with outriders up front, a calculated distance between the vehicles. At the last minute, our sense of our weakness and amateurishness prevailed; lying flat against the ground, praying we would not be spotted, we watched the long German convoy drive slowly past. On the way back, some of the group vented their anger by throwing grenades into the rivers as we walked: only fish died that day.

  After the La Margeride units had scattered, my father was called away, so he was no longer with us. One fine day my brother disappeared, and we would not see him again until much later, after he had survived incredible life-threatening experiences that he has related in a number of his books. In mid-July, I and a handful of survivors from Blaise-Pascal decided to go up into the hills of Cantal, between Aurrilac and Saint-Flour, to meet up with those whom Marcovici had
poached. This maquis was run by the Armée secrète, but that didn’t matter, there had been many favourable reports about their organizational skills and their command. After three days’ uninterrupted march, we eventually found them high up in the mountains. The reunion, for both sides, was warm and friendly. We all lived together in burons – stone shepherds’ huts – high in the mountains equipped with racks for maturing rounds of Cantal. We gorged ourselves on this delicious cheese, which, together with steaks from freshly killed dairy cows, was the only food we had: over time this diet led to spectacular outbreaks of boils that were incurable until the Americans arrived bringing penicillin. Later, I almost died of an anthrax infection inside my nostrils, my face was completely deformed, bloated to twice its usual size. I was only saved when it was decided to inject massive doses of antibiotics directly into my nose.

  Finally, the day came when we pulled off a genuine, textbook, meticulously planned ambush. It is the one I remember best: I have, as you will see, good reasons never to have forgotten it. As soon as dusk fell, we trekked down the slopes of the mountain to take up positions overlooking the winding curves of the Aurillac–Saint-Flour road. A major Wehrmacht convoy some two kilometres long, comprising several thousand men, was due to leave Aurillac at dawn and make its way through the Lioran tunnel. We would be waiting for them by the entrance, at a spot known as Pas de Compaing, perfectly chosen since at that point the rising road – almost a gorge – would considerably slow the vehicles. Several carefully spaced positions were set up from which we could fire on the German trucks either from in front or from behind. I have forgotten how many posts there were, but I remember that mine was the last. There were two of us manning a Bren gun; my companion, someone I had never met before moving up to the burons, was a man of about thirty-five who wore a beret and never said a word. He had had experience under fire, having served in 1939–40, and he was to man the Bren gun, my job that day being to feed it, ejecting the empty magazine and quickly screwing in a full one so that he could continue to fire almost uninterruptedly. The ambush was perfect, methodically thought out; we would inflict losses on the enemy. Throughout the night, infantrymen moved from one post to the next issuing orders: we were not to shoot until the first position opened fire; until then we were to allow the German trucks to drive past unmolested, even if it felt as though we were letting them get away. These orders were scrupulously observed and everything played out as envisaged. Unfortunately, the span of the ambush positions was much shorter than that of the German convoy!

  What a thrill! We heard them long before we saw them. The first truck slowly came into view around a bend like an apparition and we had time to study it: the tarpaulin was down, there were four benches with soldiers in helmets sitting facing each other, the butts of their rifles on the floor held between their knees. Then came the second truck, the third, and another; all the while my companion, eye glued to the backsight adjuster, tracked the convoy with the barrel of the Bren gun; his excitement as each new vehicle appeared was so intense that I thought he might disobey orders and begin firing. In front of me, I had a haversack stuffed with magazine cartridges. Then, all of a sudden, from up ahead came the loud, deep roar of a Gammon grenade exploding over the first truck, stopping it dead, followed by similar explosions and by furious, deafening bursts of fire from the battery of machine guns at the various posts. My marksman, until now so calm, so taciturn, suddenly revealed himself to be a very different man: firing relentlessly as I fed the gun as quickly as he fired, he screamed, ‘Take that, you fucker! That’s for Papa! And that’s for Papa!’ His father, I later learned, had been killed in 1914: this was his vengeance. Many of the Germans were lying dead in the trucks or on the road, while others, with a calm that attested to unfailing courage and training, had hurtled down the ravine and were already climbing up the other side, from where they began to return fire with unerring accuracy. They were not alone: the whole back section of the convoy, which had not been involved in the ambush, sprang into action, scaling the slopes of the mountain and setting up machine guns and mortars.

  The order to fall back, as always in such circumstances, came too late and my marksman, who thought he was there for eternity, was too keyed up to pull back even after the order was screamed at us. Carrying our weapons, we breathlessly climbed the steep hillside as bullets whistled and mortars exploded all around us, some of our numbers falling as they ran. We reached the first ridge, about one hundred metres above the road, and set up our machine gun again. But two bodies lay below us on the slope. One of those in the shelter of the ridge above – his name was Schuster – shouted, ‘That’s Rouchon!’ and rushed down to help him. He too was mown down after only a few metres. A third man, Lheritier, leapt to his feet, only to be shot where he stood. The whole hillside was a lethal hornet’s nest. I should have gone myself, I hesitated for a second, for a second too long. I was fond of Rouchon, he had been in my philosophy class at Blaise-Pascal, a boarder like me, we had shared a prep room. His mother always sent him brioches and clafoutis from Riom, which he kept in his locker and shared with us. He was heavy-set and a little chubby, with the smile of a cherub; we called him Gaz, because the cakes his mother sent were too rich for him and gave him wind. I should have tried to help him. There was no way I could have succeeded and come out alive, but I should have tried, I should have rushed to him without thinking, like Schuster and Lheritier. I have blamed myself my whole life for not doing so. Was it cowardice? Perhaps. But it was not of the same scale or the same kind as that of Bagelman. I would have killed the milicien – of that I am certain.

  The German gunfire continued to swell, heavy artillery and long-range guns joined the fray and other machine-gun posts began to sweep the hillside behind the ridge where we had taken shelter. We had to change tactics, switching from a guerrilla ambush to a pitched battle for which we were neither prepared nor armed. The retreat was a mad and dangerous escapade that lasted the whole day and night, as we tore up and down steep slopes, constantly afraid of being followed or even surrounded by the Germans. We were forced to leave our dead on the battlefield, but we took turns carrying the wounded on makeshift stretchers. I remember one stop in the middle of the night, deep in the valley, near a cool river. We were hungry and had nothing to eat save for a little Cantal and we slaked our thirst – made all the more keen by the cheese – by plunging our faces into the small waterfall to drink. One of the wounded – his name was Faubert – asked for something to drink and the medical student with the company agreed that we could give him water. Then Faubert, who had been shot in the stomach, said, ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to drink if you got a bullet in the stomach.’ The medical student shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Of course you can, it’s fine.’ At that moment Faubert realized that he was doomed. He died that night. At first light we came within sight of Salers, completely shattered, having walked for twenty-four hours and covered sixty kilometres of mountainous terrain. You only have to look at a map to imagine the extreme difficulties we faced. We collapsed almost where we stood in deserted stables with no hay or straw, without even thinking about eating or drinking, and slept until evening. Exhaustion won out over everything.