Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  After the evacuation of Dunkirk, a Special Operations Executive, SOE, had been set up to coordinate subversion and sabotage against the Germans and, if necessary, to initiate it. Major Maurice Buckmaster, former manager for Ford in France, was put in charge of the French, or F, section. At odds with de Gaulle and the Free French, subject to endless internecine rivalries, SOE operated much like a club, to which membership was by invitation only. In 1941, it was looking for recruits, strong, cool-headed French speakers, with a bent for improvisation and organisation. Though women were not their preferred choice, there were not many candidates who knew as much about France as Virginia did, nor who were able to master weapons training and radio transmitting so quickly. What was more, with the US not at war with France, she could be sent in openly, under the guise of a journalist accredited to Vichy, researching articles for the New York Post. Having decided to set up an advanced F base in Lyons, SOE asked her to become its first ‘resident’, in order to coordinate and look after their agents in the field.

  Calling herself Mlle Germaine Le Contre, Virginia reached Lyons via Madrid in August 1941, the first female SOE field officer into France. She started to write articles about food shortages, about Vichy, about the Statut des Juifs. ‘I haven’t seen any butter and there is very little milk,’ she wrote. ‘Women are no longer entitled to buy cigarettes and men are rationed to two packets a week.’ Under cover of the bland and innocent articles, Virginia met the SOE agents dropped into her area, found them lodgings and ration books and supplied them with transmitters. When necessary, she hid them in a convent and got them out to Spain. Officially with an SOE circuit called Heckler, she also acted as liaison with other circuits, yet maintained her independence and worked with a local doctor called Jean Rousset. Still pursuing her cover as an American journalist, she held her meetings openly, in cafés and restaurants, and took care to be on good terms with Vichy officials, from whom she learnt many interesting things. To her colleagues, she referred to her wooden leg as Cuthbert, but most would later say they had never known about her accident; they called her ‘the limping lady’, on account of her slightly rolling gait. From time to time, she used the aluminium puppy to store compromising documents.

  Having entered into a secret deal with Laval to send Gestapo officers south ahead of the occupation of the whole of France, the Germans had soon picked up traces of SOE activity. One by one, a third of the 24 agents in Virginia’s area were caught; many were tortured, some were shot. ‘We age very quickly out here,’ Virginia wrote to Buckmaster. ‘I and all the others are about a hundred years old. We’ll never be the same again.’ It was not long before an informer, a double agent posing as a French priest and calling himself Abbé Alesch, got wind of the existence of a female organiser, going variously by the name of Philomène, Isabelle or Diane. Orders went out from the Gestapo to capture the ‘woman who limps’ and who ‘is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. We must find and destroy her.’

  Dr Rousset was caught and tortured, but gave nothing away. With very little time to spare, Virginia managed to make her way to the Pyrenees. ‘Cuthbert is being tiresome, but I can cope,’ she cabled to her superiors in London. The man who took her message had no idea who Cuthbert was. ‘If Cuthbert tiresome,’ he wired back, ‘have him eliminated.’ Virginia got across the border, but was arrested; having no papers, she was held in Figueras prison for six weeks, until a prostitute with whom she was sharing a cell smuggled out a letter to the American consulate in Barcelona.

  On reaching London, Virginia requested to be dropped back into France. Aware that the Gestapo had posted a fairly accurate description of her, supplied by the false abbé, SOE refused and sent her to Spain instead, where, once again posing as a newspaper reporter, she filed stories to the Chicago Times, while arranging safe houses for agents and running the network from Madrid. She was bored. ‘I’m not doing a job,’ she wrote to London. ‘I am living pleasantly and wasting time . . . after all, my neck is my own. If I am willing to get a crick in it, I think that’s my prerogative.’ By 1943, she was back in London.

  The Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the American organisation set up in June 1942 ‘to plan and operate special services’ of intelligence and sabotage in Europe, had entered into a loose partnership with SOE, and was looking for recruits to drop into France to make contact with the Resistance and prepare for the Allied landings. If SOE was a club, full of oddballs and eccentrics, so OSS had also attracted a remarkable mixture of men and women who somehow did not fit naturally into the fighting forces: Wall Street bankers, academics, missionaries, professors, jockeys, philanthropists, big-game hunters and steely and ambitious young women. ‘All those first OSS arrivals in London,’ wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, who was working for MI6. ‘How well I remember them, arriving like jeunes filles en fleur . . . all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frosty old intelligence brothel.’

  Through a friend, William Grell, former manager of the St Regis Hotel in New York, Virginia was introduced to OSS; they offered her the rank of second lieutenant, and sent her for further training in radio transmission and to observe parachute operations at Milton Hall, near Peterborough. Occasionally, she carried her aluminium puppy in a bag. New recruits were urged not to indulge in prejudice or fads when it came to the food in France, and to eat whatever came to hand, even, if need be, mice, rats, dogs and cats. The best way to deal with a hedgehog, they were told, was to turn it on to its back, tickle its tummy, and when it poked its head out, chop it off.

  Unable to parachute into France on account of her leg, Virginia was landed off the coast of Brittany in a torpedo boat. She was accompanied by a second OSS operative, a man going by the name of Artemis, and they travelled up to Paris together by train from Brest. She had reluctantly agreed to age herself, dyeing her hair a shade of dirty grey-black and pulling it back in a wooden clasp. She wore a long skirt to conceal her wooden leg. Posing as Mlle Marcelle Montagne, a Parisian social worker with Vichy’s welfare organisation, she went to lodge with an old friend in the Rue de Babylone, Mme Long, taking Artemis with her. Both women soon took against him, Mme Long saying that he was too indiscreet, and Virginia that he was arrogant and physically feeble, always complaining about his health and refusing to carry anything heavy.

  Leaving Artemis in Paris, Virginia went off to the Creuse, where she lodged in great discomfort with a farmer and his elderly mother, for whom she cooked meals over an open wood fire and took the cows to pasture, checking out possible parachute sites along the way. She had become, she said, a ‘milkmaid’. But she had been instructed to keep moving, and was soon in Nièvre, where she lived in a garret in another farmer’s house, tending goats along roads conveniently used for German troop movements. She wore a faded kerchief, a full skirt with a peplum, an ample woollen blouse, and a baggy sweater, and she carried a staff. Delivering goat’s milk and messages to her colleagues in the Resistance nearby, she used her attic as a transmission post. When parachute drops were announced, she arrived at the site with a donkey and cart. In one drop came a pair of medical stockings with which to cushion Cuthbert.

  And then, in the late spring of 1944, Virginia was posted to the Haute-Loire. SOE had received information about the local groups of maquisards from a dealer in lentils, Jean Joulians, whom Virginia had happened to meet before the war in Boston. She was to pose as a Belgian journalist doing research on children, and had an introduction to August Bohny of Secours Suisse. She made her way to le Chambon.

  The first that Pierre Fayol and his maquisards knew of Virginia’s arrival was when he got a message from Bohny to say that there was a strange American woman asking for contacts in the Maquis. He had little opportunity to be wary. When they met, she wasted no time on pleasantries. How many men did he have? What were their weapons? Which were the best places for parachute drops? Desperate for weapons, money and supplies, Fayol fell into line, though he did take the precaution of contacting Algiers, to be told that Virginia was a ‘lieutena
nt colonel’ with considerable authority. Later he observed that his first impression of her had been her ‘atrocious accent’.

  The thinking behind OSS–SOE was that their agents in France would act as counsellors and instructors. Virginia saw herself more as a leader. Next day, despite the awkwardness of her leg, she set off on a bicycle to identify good open fields for drops, covering miles on her own, criss-crossing the high pastures. Unsure at first of Fayol’s trustworthiness, she set him a little test, handing over a sum of money and seeing how wisely he spent it. He passed, and she cabled London that le Chambon was ‘good’. She had discovered two areas for the drops, one at Villelonge, the other near Tence. In Villelonge, it was the job of the baker, Alphonse Valla, to recharge the batteries for the lamps needed to light the field for the pilots. When they were ready, he hid a message under a tree on the road to le Chambon. Virginia concocted codes of her own. Villelonge was ‘bream’. Yssingeaux became a shark and the phrase for transmission ‘le requin a le nez tendre’ (the shark has a tender nose).

  One day, Miss Maber was visited by two young boys asking whether they might borrow her car, long since sitting idle in the garage for lack of petrol, for ‘Diane’, also known locally as La Madonne, to carry out a more distant reconnaissance. When it was returned to her a few days later, it came with a packet of English tea and a note of thanks.

  Twenty young men – there were no armed women among the maquisards on the plateau – were recruited to assist at the drops, announced over the BBC in coded sentences. One of these was Jean Nallet, the orphaned boy who had been taken in by Bohny, and who was doing his baccalaureat under Darcissac while serving with the Maquis. Nallet would always remember Virginia as ‘seductive’ in her American military jacket and trousers. He told her that he planned to become a doctor, and she enrolled him as her medical assistant, gave him the medical supplies to look after and called him her ‘infirmier’ – nurse. The parachute drops started. ‘La soupe est chaude’ – the soup is hot – brought 300 kilograms of guns, ammunition, clothes, chocolate, vitamins, radio receivers, money and cigarettes; ‘Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage’ – he who wants to drown his dog accuses him of rabies – a further 10 enormous containers of provisions. What the teacher Olivier Hatzfeld later remembered was that after a drop, when everything had gone off all right, when the canisters had been retrieved and brought back, and their contents examined, the young Frenchmen felt a sense of recognition, of status, of being brothers in arms with strangers many miles away; they were no longer terrorists, or dodgers of STO service, but part of a liberating army, and recognised as such.

  In the canisters there was invariably a packet of English tea with Virginia’s name on it, sent by Vera Atkins, assistant to Buckmaster and in charge of the recruitment and deployment of female agents. Jacqueline Decourdemanche and Mme Fayol helped gather up the parachutes, which were much prized by the women in le Chambon, who made them into blouses, and the mottled khaki silk was soon on display all over the village. One drop, code name ‘the big Indian smokes his pipe’, brought a Scottish captain in a kilt, who, having extricated himself from his parachute and climbed down from the fir tree in which he had landed, solemnly shook everyone’s hand, then got out a flask of whisky and passed it around before disappearing off into the night. Another brought German soldiers, who had intercepted the message; they were rapidly killed and their bodies buried in the banks of the Lignon.

  Once she thought the structure was securely in place, Virginia decided to move on again, this time in the direction of Burgundy. Fayol and his men, increasingly impatient for more Allied support, afraid that without better weapons they would be overrun by the Germans stationed at Le Puy, sent Jacqueline and the bookseller Eric Barbezat to look for her. They tracked her down and she agreed to return to the plateau with them. When their train was briefly halted by an Allied bombing raid, she told the others to remain calm; the pilots knew that she was on board and would not bomb the train itself. They did the final leg of the journey up the mountain in an ambulance. Virginia went to live with the Fayols, spending her days sitting at the kitchen table working out codes. The Germans had spotter planes and she was forced to keep changing her transmission site. She moved to Camus’ former home, Le Panelier, then to a barn near Villelonge close to Valla’s boulangerie, which had become the headquarters of the local Maquis. She acquired a helper, a 22-year-old Alsatian teacher called Dédé Zusbach. Virginia bought bicycles for her team, and thought of herself as an elder sister to them. Jean Nallet powered her transmitter by pedalling on a stationary bicycle.

  Some of the young Frenchmen found Virginia secretive and distant. As the weeks passed, waiting for messages that did not come and for drops that failed to be made, her temper frayed; she became hard and intransigent, quick to swear at anyone who made mistakes. To keep herself going, she had a small supply of Benzedrine and amphetamines. Later, people would say that they could not help resenting her assumption that she was somehow in charge; they had not much cared for taking orders from a woman, and there was anger when only light weapons were dropped instead of the mortars and bazookas they had requested. Later, too, no one would be able to agree on her accent, how foreign she sounded, how fluent her command of French. For her part, Virginia would say that the young maquisards, though very willing, were undisciplined and badly trained, and far too greedy and competitive. In theory, most of the various forces of the Resistance were now united under the banner of the MUR, but fierce jealousies persisted.

  All now, maquisards and hidden Jews alike, were waiting for a liberation that never seemed to come.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Today, I have nothing to say

  When Pastor Trocmé came home in the early summer of 1944, le Chambon was not the village he remembered. He had been away ten months. For a man so devoted to his children, so mindful of his responsibilities, his exile had been long and hard. He reached the village towards evening, to find a reception committee of his family and parishioners, and on Sunday he preached to a packed temple. Magda, he thought, looked thin and tired, but Nelly, Jean-Pierre, Jacques and Daniel were lively and affectionate. His parishioners found him quieter, less assertive.

  When he had left, le Chambon had been a place of hiding, of silence and waiting and never saying more than was absolutely necessary. Now, the young maquisards strolled boldly around the village carrying an assortment of weapons, dressed in bits and pieces of more or less military uniform. Trocmé had no choice but to accept that many of his friends and colleagues, who previously had tacitly accepted his pacifism, had become openly in favour of armed struggle.

  He had, he said, no difficulty in accepting Léon Eyraud’s bellicose talk, saying later that Eyraud had in any case long since abandoned his Christian faith; nor did he worry about the overexcited demeanour of the local boys, including his own sons, wielding their new weapons, swaggering proudly down the main street. What he minded was a visit by a group of the student theologians, the futhéos, who told him that they were starting a Christian Maquis and wanted to borrow a plate and chalice from the temple, so that they could celebrate Communion every day in the mountains. Trocmé refused. How, he asked them, could they reconcile the taking of Communion with a desire to kill Germans? We are convinced, the young men replied, that ‘God is ordering us to do this’. Later, Trocmé described, not without a certain smugness, that this same group of futhéos had stolen a bicycle belonging to the curé of Tence, telling him that they needed it for the ‘defence of the nation’, and that he had been able to calm the enraged curé before summoning the boys and ordering them to return the bicycle. They obeyed. Even now, his authority could prevail.

  Aware that his pacifism – to which he remained fervently committed – was unlikely to win him followers any longer, Trocmé appeared to be relishing a new role as peacemaker. When the volatile Dr Le Forestier refused to hand over the keys to his ambulance to a group of maquisards, who wanted it to ‘go to the front’, on the sensible g
rounds that as a Red Cross vehicle it fell under the Geneva Conventions, and one of Virginia Hall’s agents threatened to shoot him as a traitor, Trocmé was on hand to intervene. If the doctor promised not to stir, would they allow Trocmé to shut him up in the presbytery? The maquisards agreed; Dr Le Forestier promised. Later, Trocmé was furious when he discovered that the doctor had not kept his word, but had slipped out of the presbytery and gone home, where Trocmé discovered him surrounded by his wife and two boys, saying that he was through with the Maquis, if that was how they chose to treat him.

  The hidden Jews, against all the odds, remained undisturbed. In the ten months Trocmé had been absent, not one had been arrested; there had been no raids on any of the children’s homes and no visits by the Gestapo. The German convalescents in le Chambon seemed anxious and unsure; many of them now were boys of no more than 16 or 17, and the girls from Roanne, coming into the village from time to time from their distant farmhouses, laughed at their gauche manners and childish looks. ‘We strutted before them,’ one of them would say. ‘They were like frightened children.’ Though some of the Jewish families, grimly fearing the worst, had buried themselves even deeper into their hiding places, the months of inviolability had given them a little confidence. They felt spared. It was now, they told each other, simply a question of holding on. With every reported Allied advance, their spirits rose.

  What made their apparent safety all the more extraordinary was that throughout the rest of France, the arrests and deportation of the Jews had not let up. In November 1943, a reshuffle in the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives had carried off Darquier de Pellepoix and brought in a career colonial officer, Charles du Paty de Clam; when he proved too passive, his place was taken by another staunch anti-Semite, Joseph Antignac, who would later say that he only took the job to ‘prevent the worst’ for the Jews. How these men chose to persecute the Jews, however, was no longer of much concern. The Germans had decided to take overall control, and a concerted drive, meticulous and efficient, had been launched to find and deport France’s remaining Jews in a race against the clock and the arrival of the Allies, now recognised to lie not far ahead. In recent months, they had become skilled at distinguishing forged documents from real ones. Helped by the Milice, the Gestapo redoubled their efforts at identifying schools, convents and families in which children were held, raiding prisons, labour camps and farms for adults. Ever more generous rewards were offered to informers. Letters of denunciation poured in.