Ten Thousand Eyes

Whilst searching the UK National Archives Image Library recently on another quest, I came across an aerial of the radar station at Douvres-la-Délivrande which Dr Jacques Sustendal had gathered intelligence on while making his way home. The link to the NA page is here. I am not sure of the date on which this aerial was taken, but I'm guessing it was in the spring of 1944. Note how extensive earthworks exist on both sides of the road on which Dr Sustendal had traveled the previous August.

More follows...

Pat

 

To continue the book narrative...


For a moment Odette stood appalled. Then, forcing herself to be calm, she opened the street door, and descended the worn stone steps to the pavement. She called, "Monique! Come here a moment, cherie."

Half a dozen pairs of childish eyes watched her with the polite hostility reserved for adults who intrude unwanted into a world of make-believe. Among them, with a sinking heart, Odette recognised the little girl who lived along the street—in the house next door to the Gestapo officers' billet.

Odette said, "Come inside a moment, cherie. I want you to help Mama." Then, smiling with what she knew was false brightness she took the plunge. "What sort of game have you • been playing this morning?"

"We've been playing houses. Our house is the Deuxieme Bureau. I heard Papa say so."

Now was her chance. "Mais non, ma petite, you didn't understand properly." She turned to the other children, sharing the secret: "At home, you see, we have a game—each room is a different bureau. The living-room is the Premier Bureau, the kitchen is the Deuxieme Bureau, the bedroom is the Troisieme Bureau. Each room, you see ... a different bureau . . ." Her voice faltered and died; the children stood and stared, saying nothing. They were not fooled that easily. The deadly significance escaped them, but it was imprinted on their minds now, and they would wonder why Madame Duchez was anxious to pretend that her house wasn't called the Deuxieme Bureau when so obviously it was. Children like to know the reason for things. They might ask their parents. . . .

And Monique was still repeating stubbornly, vexed at being made to look foolish: "But Mama, our house is the Deuxieme Bureau. . . ."

Hastily, inventing some excuse, Odette led the child indoors. For the rest of the day she took care to keep her well within earshot. But the worry obsessed her: for how long? They could not keep her indoors for ever. You could not explain to a little girl of three that the lives of her father and mother hung on her weighing every word she let slip in play.

When Odette confessed her fears, Duchez did not assure her breezily, as he so often had done, that everything would work out right. He, too, saw the need to watch his words, even in front of his children, and from that moment he began to like himself less.


Whichever way you looked at it security was a problem. Some of the part-timers, like Andre Masseron, the big phlegmatic pork butcher, from Bretteville-sur-Laize, preferred to commit nothing to paper, and almost every day Masseron called with fresh information on the bomb stores or the petrol tanks at heavily-guarded air bases like Carpiquet and Fontenay-le-Marmion. (One of the first requirements of the invasion planners was to neutralise all airfields within 150 miles of the Normandy coast, so that the Germans were operating from air bases as far back from the Wall as the English bases used by Allied planes.) Masseron, who held the contract to smoke the Germans' pork, was the most popular man on these airfields, and no one awaited his verbal bulletins more eagerly than Duchez.


But now Duchez told Masseron and other agents like him: "Don't come to my house more often than you can help. Look for me in the Cafe des Touristes and if I'm not there, leave a message with Paul in the boiler."

Maurice Himbert, the courier, was still bringing the weekly questionnaire down from Paris and the queries were piling up on Meslin's desk. It was hard to observe more than average caution in gleaning the information, too, because Dewavrin's questions had an urgent hurry-up quality that brooked neither delay nor argument. For instance, in the last week of August, 1943:

TOP PRIORITY

Information is urgently required on the following defensive positions which you have already reported in the coastal zone:

1. The exact emplacement, and details of the blockhouses at HONFLEUR, particularly surrounding the railway station, the Chamber of Commerce and the Central Quay.

2. What is the limit of the minefields on the beach west of HONFLEUR? Are they anti-tank or anti-personnel?

3. State exactly the calibre of the battery situated at the entry of the harbour at dives.

4. Is Mount Canisy only fortified near barneville, or near touques and south of deauville as well?

5. South of morsalines you have signaled 7 blockhouses. Are these not rather platforms for artillery? Give corrections and precise details.

There were other questions, too, fourteen in all and for Meslin to issue instructions to his departmental heads, for them in turn to prod local agents, was a tedious, nerve-stretching business. The Todt Organisation was building feverishly now: between the Bay of Biscay and North Cape, Norway, Hitler had 300,000 slaves working like beavers on his impregnable Wall—in one year they had shifted almost two million cubic yards of earth! But Dewavrin's scheme to enrol the Secret Army as agents had turned the scales in Century's battle to glean more and yet more detail.


Guns had ever-increasing priority in these questionnaires. To the Allies they counted more than solid concrete: each coastal battery covering the sea approaches held from two to six guns, and some could fire 12-inch shells by radar prediction, with a 360-degree range of fire. Moulines had his agents well planted in the Cotentin peninsula, where the concentration was thickest: the schoolmaster of St. Croix, Monsieur Richard, was reporting on the heavy batteries in the north, round Cap de la Hague, and another schoolmaster, an Alsatian named Unterreiner, kept watch on the batteries at Couville, south of Cherbourg. But all these men reported greater difficulty now in spotting the real thing. The Germans were beginning to camouflage them cannily, tunnelling strongpoints from the soft chalk of the bluffs, masking the telltale embrasures with pine branches and turf.

One that they knew little about—and what they knew they feared—was in the wild heath country at St. Martin-de-Varreville, guarding the seaward approaches to what was later called "Utah Beach." Moulines badly needed more details on that battery, and in the nearby village of Ste. Mere-figlise he singled out an electrician named Antonin Maury, a pink-scrubbed-looking little man, full of old-world courtesy, who seemed more like the dean of a provincial university. Maury still recalls the afternoon he looked up because a shadow had barred his work bench, and there was Moulines, in his old leather jacket, standing in the doorway and announcing rather dramatically: "I am looking for a man loyal to General de Gaulle."


Maury replied with feeling: "Who isn't?" But in a few days he was an accredited Century agent, haunting the road that ran past the gun-sites near the tiny village of Ste. Mere-figlise. Using Thomas's maps, it would not have been difficult for anyone to work out the actual co-ordinates of the sites, but Maury achieved what, even for Century, was a unique thing. He plotted the distance between each site of the six-gun battery without ever leaving his bicycle.

There was never time to linger: pedaling hard, he would pass one battery, two hundred yards distant across the rolling heath, and there were armed Schutzkommandos everywhere, waving him on, but he had no need to stop. He kept pedaling grimly on up the sheer twisting road, between the gorse and the pines, a pink perspiring Frenchman in a beret who could feel his thigh muscles knotting with the strain of the uphill grind. Maury was checking every revolution of the pedals, to achieve the same effect of pacing as if he had walked.

Once, when Moulines dropped in for the night, as he so often did, to find a bed and check results, Madame Maury challenged him mock-severely: "Are you trying to turn my husband into a madman? Whenever I see him now he's rushing into the house muttering numbers to himself and scribbling them down on bits of cigarette paper."


What always presented a bigger problem was discovering the calibre of the guns: even a man on the spot needed luck for that if the sites were some way off the public highway. Usually Girard confined his men to finding out the artillery regiment, before unearthing the kind of guns they used from sources close to the Germans. But Maury managed it all on his own at Varreville, pausing for breath on his bicycle to say: "Big guns," appreciatively, every time they checked his pass. He employed this ruse a good many times without success, until an unusually dim-witted sentry, prompted by patriotic pride, answered: "Ja, ja, gut—155s—Tommies; kaput." After that he may have wondered what became of his little friend, the electrician, whose rides became noticeably fewer.


For the record Maury was in the train on the way to the office of Harivel, the insurance agent, on the Place St. Sauveur, Caen, wearing a disreputable belted leather jacket whose lapels were frayed beyond repair. Tucked securely inside the rents were rolled wafers of cigarette paper inscribed with the battery co-ordinates and the relative distances.


Where one man asking too many questions in the district would have quickly aroused suspicions, the presence of Girard's Secret Army troops in the Manche spread the risk evenly. Few except Colonel Nobody and his checkers in Paris could see the final picture building. At Varreville another agent, unknown to Maury, reported that the 150 men manning the battery were housed in a stone building on the east of the village of Mesieres; a third, working on the site, helped distinguish the battery dining-room from the iron equipment hut.

The checking was so precise that when Dewavrin in London pressed impatiently for details on a small sinister concrete structure that had sprung up on site, Moulines's men had the answer within days. It turned out to be a shower bath!


Just east of the village of Grandcamp-les-Bains, perched on the rocky spur of Pointe du Hoe, the Todt Organisation had got busy on what later proved to be the most lethally-sited battery in the whole Normandy sector of the Wall. Obviously something would have to be done about those guns, perhaps even a task-force raid in advance, so what mattered most, as urgent questionnaires informed Century's organiser, Andre Farine, were the defences surrounding the defence on this isolated bluff. Farine got to work with a team of forty men—twenty Century agents, twenty Secret Army men—but the first results were disappointing.


A strange man, Farine, and a contradiction in terms. Close to forty, an ex-sailor with a brick-red face and a clipped moustache who still walked with a nautical roll, he took a perverse pride in being totally unamenable to discipline. "I, Andre Farine," he would growl, "have seen the inside of the lock-up in every port in the world. The Navy could do nothing with me!" The discipline and patience he exercised to plumb secrets of the Pointe du Hoe battery earned him the Croix de Guerre, though Farine would have knocked down the man who laboured that point unduly.


Near Grandchamp, Farine kept the Cafe de l'Etanville, a cheerful crowded brasserie that could accommodate a hundred covers. Holding this trump card, he began to use his ingenuity. First he applied for a licence for baking bread; then for permission to travel inland and buy wood to fire his bread ovens. Presumably nobody lost sleep over why he bought all his wood from one farmer named Fouche, but it was more than coincidence that Fouche's farm was perched on the top of a high hill called La Perruque (The Wig). From here, with the aid of binoculars, Farine had a perfect view of the orchards and the gentle green fields sloping up to Pointe du Hoe.

Now, using maps and binoculars and compass, crosschecking with the church spire at St. Pierre-du-Mont, he could work out the co-ordinates of the six-gun battery—but not the calibre of the guns, they were too far away. There was a double network of barbed wire, too, superficially camouflaged to resemble hedges. The ghost of a smile creased Farine's brick-red face as he knelt in the coarse grass. A fine hedge that glittered like tinsel when the autumn sun caught it! The local gossip had it that those "hedges" were mined. The gun emplacements were very close to the cliff-edge, seeming to crouch above the naked rock, and Farine shook his head, troubled. He knew that beneath the cliffs the smooth tan sand stretched a long way, almost fourteen miles from Port-en-Bessein to the lies St. Marcouf. If these guns were like some others of which he had heard tell, all those beaches would lie well within their range.


The questionnaires gave Farine no clue as to why the guns were important. No one, in any case, had yet christened those beaches "Omaha" or "Utah." With him, as with the others, it was a question of faith, and although he got the information that counted, after six months' patient inquiry, it would have covered no more than a page of typescript. Like Dr. Sustendal, he had to win the confidence of the reluctant young labourers of the S.T.O. On Sunday nights his cafe grew crowded and noisy, with a big iron stove in the centre of the room glowing almost red-hot, an accordion squealing jauntily from the bandstand as the labour corps youths and the village girls shuffled cheek-to-cheek in the murky twilight of the dance floor. German edicts forbade dancing, but there were few Germans in the area to enforce them, so Farine defied them cheerfully—to prove himself "beyond discipline" and to win the confidence of his customers.

Sometimes they formed a group round the shirt-sleeved proprietor and fed him information. It was as bad as he had feared—the guns were 155s with a blasting 25,000-yard range. Rumour had it that the batteries were to be stoutly manned—a guard of 125 shock troops and 85 gunners. As for the distance from the water's edge to the cliff base, that was easy, they had walked it many times—twenty yards— but what troops could scale cliffs over a hundred feet high, as high as a nine-storey building? The batteries and cliffs had been photographed many times, confirming this intelligence, before the 5oth U.S. Rangers settled down to solving that problem on similar cliffs at Swanage and in the Isle of Wight. [NOTE: this appears to be an error – the cliffs were stormed by the 2nd Ranger Battalion on D-Day]


What caused Century even greater concern were the mobile guns. Behind the coast the Germans were building up a force of ultra-mobile 170s, with a range that even outdistanced the 155s—32,370 yards. Eight of them were spotted by Moulines's agents in the Cotentin peninsula and Jean Chateau reported a whole concentration of them not far from Caen, east of the Orne. One of which the Germans were particularly proud lived on a truck mounting in a railway tunnel behind Houlgate. It took malicious pleasure in sneaking in again whenever the R.A.F. came over to look for it.

In cafes the Germans boasted that these guns handled so easily that they need fire no more than two rounds from the same position. Two rounds! This was Duchez’s area, and the painter knew enough gunnery to realise that this made effective counter-battery fire almost impossible.

Eventually, after he had thought about the problem, he came up with a partial solution smacking strongly of psychological warfare. Long observation had taught him that one of the noisiest bees in the German bonnet was fitness—above all, the fitness of youth.

Doling out faked passes and papers he and Odette began recruiting large mixed parties of youngsters in their 'teens, owning cycles. At week-ends, when they put on track-suits and pedalled rhythmically along the sheltered lanes east of the Orne, the sentries tended to eye them benevolently and not ask too many questions. The sections of control-map hidden inside their handlebars helped them check weekly changes of position, the news being transmitted from one permanent radio set that Century then possessed in Caen. Post Office workers had made it secretly to "Third Fool's" specifications and so far it had escaped detection in a unique hiding-place: the chimney stack on Arsene the plumber's roof.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

Nobody, least of all Duchez, was getting much sleep now. For one thing Dewavrin was asking too many questions, and Girard, who received the questionnaires first, added some of his own. Troops were coming more and more to occupy his attention, for, given that "Third Fool's" map was the German defence plan, the location and quality of troops was the factor deciding any Allied estimate of strength. No sooner was there a hint of fresh troops being drafted to the coast than no cell along the Wall received any peace. What village were they in ? How many were there, and what branch of the service? What transport did they have available and what kind of arms ? What was the size of the unit and where had they fought ? How, above all, was morale?

Century already knew the answers to many of these questions. They reflected the big problem haunting von Rundstedt, who also knew that the combat value of most Atlantic Wall units was non-existent. No matter what priority the Wall rated on paper, in practice trained and eligible men were needed on the Russian and Mediterranean fronts. The bulk of those left were a mixed batch of Mongols, Czechs, Poles and Austrians who had little stomach for the defence of Festung Europa. Most of the Germans were throw-outs from the Russian campaign with third-degree frost-bite— sixteen plus or hovering on fifty—and Mercader, who sold bicycles to them in Bayeux, estimated that there were no more than 1500 of these in the twenty-five miles of coast between Courseulles and Grandcamp.

To the observant French, small signs, viewed from a national standpoint, provided big clues. At Grandcamp, the "undisciplined" Farine watched a small group sipping their aperitifs in sombre silence while his wife cooked Sunday dinner in the kitchen. That afternoon he submitted a classic report: "The morale of the troops is low. They are not well-fed, reacting almost with anguish to the smell of kidneys stewing in cream."

The steadiest and most valuable information on troop dispositions and movements was coming from Aloyse Schultz. A big gangling man with prominent eyes, Schultz spoke French and German with equal fluency in the harsh accents of Alsace. The proprietor of a small radio shop in Vaucelles, a working-class suburb south of the Gare Centrale at Caen, he had been recruited by Chateau, the electricity-board inspector, because his basement seemed a likely place for a transmitting post. After a few weeks, Chateau asked Schultz how he got along with the Germans. Schultz said he got along so well that they came in parties to his basement to listen to the radio.

Chateau said incredulously: "To the radio? Can't they listen to the radio in their barracks?" And the big ungainly man replied seriously: "Well, yes, old friend, put that way, no doubt they can, but I don't suppose they can listen to the B.B.C."

Many Germans passed through Caen on leave. Some came from as far afield as Cherbourg—to see girl-friends, to look up old comrades in other units, or merely on their way to the fleshpots of Paris. Now, by word of mouth it was spread that a Frenchman in Caen who spoke German "like one of us," did a marvellously cheap and efficient job of repairs on portable radios.

Of course you had to wait your turn, so many other Germans went there, and the cursed Anglo-American raids meant that delivery of spare parts was slow but all the same . . .

"I'd like to promise it'll be ready by the time your leave's up," Schultz was saying a dozen times a day, "but if you're only here another two days . . . Tell you what, why don't you let me send it? Give me more time and I can do a better job." "Well ... yes ... all right, I will. I can rely on you?"
"Never yet, mein Herr, have I let a German officer down. Now let's see, it's Leutnant Keppel, of course, and you're at------?"
"La Riviere, just up the coast."
"La Riviere, of course. And I'd better have the unit, Herr Leutnant, just in case ..."
"Why, yes. Stupid of me to overlook it. 4415! Ost Battalion will find me, Monsieur."

In this way Schultz was able to deliver a score of radio sets each week—and a score of unit locations for onward transmission to London. Franck, the Alsatian schoolmaster, secure in his job as interpreter at the Prefecture in St. Lo, or Jean Auge, the bald dapper little stationmaster at Caen, did their bit too, but with greater difficulty. Auge, for instance, knew how many wagons were taken up by a division of infantry, but with forty troop trains rattling through Caen daily, he was bound to miss a good deal. Movement orders were one check but later, to create a false show of strength, the Germans issued false movement orders for the benefit of railway Resistants.

But in such humble cases as Leutnant Keppel's radio, Century had the surest check of all. Either he gave Schultz the right address or he never saw his radio again.

No one could quite explain it, but despite the triumphs there was fear in the air. The fear was infectious, though hard to analyse. A man afraid for his life finds many fears blending violently into one. The fear of the knock at the door, a daily fear, prompting the unspoken racing questions. The milkman? The leather inspector, calling to check how many shoes you had? Or the men you feared more than death, who wore neither black nor field-grey, but gentlemanly raincoats and green pork-pie hats.

Often enough they searched your home, defiling it systematically in the process. You were too numb, too sick with hatred, to know fear then, but if they found nothing, the fear worsened. They could so easily have stumbled on it— so now you feared the next time. There would be a next time. You knew that. When it came, you feared the torture, but supposing you survived the torture, bleeding and outraged, the worst fear mocked you in the cattle trucks on the journey to the concentration camp. The hollow twisting fear that it had all been for nothing, that you would never survive to share in the better life which had made the shock and the agony endurable.

No doubting now, in the autumn of 1943, that the Gestapo suspected something. They were putting out feelers. Three times they came to SustendaFs little surgery behind the wind-swept promenade at Luc-sur-Mer. Each time the interrogation, conducted by the infamous Einst, dragged on for hours. Sustendal, startled, found they remembered more of his journeys than he could. For instance:

"Four times between the 1st and the 5th September you visited Courseulles-sur-Mer, Doctor. Why?"

And Sustendal would look vague, tugging his scrubby moustache. "Well, gentlemen, you know more than I do. I shall have to check. . . ." He had been gauging the length and depth of the minefield along the seashore, of course, but luckily the alibi was there in the big leather day-book: an old lady with suspected bronchial complications.

Einst knew all about that, and knew, too, that the prescription had been delivered to the pharmacy on the evening of the first visit. So why three further visits? And why such frequent visits to Colleville-sur-Mer.

Always the day-book was the staunch friend, cloaking the real motive; always, too, the Gestapo had checked the prescription at the pharmacy. By a stroke of luck they did not search the house, but the questions were too near the bone to reassure.

"You're up to something, Doctor," said Einst unpleasantly, when they left. "I wish I knew what."

Within days Arsene, the argumentative plumber, was searched—perhaps because an officer at the Kommandatur unwisely asked his views on current events. With the Germans Arsene rarely smiled like Duchez or feigned camaraderie. His hate was violent and uncompromising. The lank black hair flopping across his forehead, that unsubmissive man answered:

"If every Frenchman thought like me, there'd be one German hanging for every cider apple ripening in Normandy."

A long shocked silence followed his words. Next day the Gestapo searched his house.

They searched three times in as many weeks. They tore up the parquet with chisels and almost wrenched apart the lavatory cistern. His wife and children were terrified. But Arsene stood there smiling maliciously, unafraid. He dispised the "thoroughness" of their searches because they stopped short of real intelligence. They tore up his parquet but left his roof alone; their pigeon-hole minds could not envisage a man transmitting from behind a chimney pot. They knew so little plumbing that they never spotted the false compartment close to the spigot in which he hid his maps.

In those days the burly Torres, Century's security officer, was coming often to Meslin's office. To make Century's security watertight, they held long discussions. Agents were warned afresh to use the dictionary system of memorising names. Fierce ingenuity went into plotting new hiding places for control maps.

Roger Deschambres, the melancholy red-haired plumber, packed his into a lead pipe and sealed it, before attaching it to a windlass and letting down into his well. Maury, the electrician of Ste. Mere Eglise, scraped the cement bindings from the stones in his rockery, lining it with maps instead; Gresslin, the Cherbourg grocer, buried his in flower-pots. From police headquarters Leblond, the young inspector, supplied a list of collaborators for guidance. It was guaranteed authentic, since the Gestapo themselves had compiled it.

If some on the list died suddenly and violently after making contact with Century they had themselves to blame for picking a risky profession.

Torres issued fresh instructions: beware of using any new cafes as rendezvous. The Gestapo were wiring some with concealed microphones. Distrust friendly "priests" who claimed to shelter Allied aviators: this, too, was a favourite way of infiltrating a stool-pigeon into a group. Beyond a certain point, trust of anyone was at a premium.

Torre's security was good on his own account, so good that Meslin offered his congratulations. That morning, talking to another of the network, Pierre Faure, head of the Premier Bureau, responsible for screening personnel, Meslin had asked: "What do you think about Torres?" Faure, a neat greying little man like a well-groomed mole, hedged, "What do you mean, what do I think of him?" "Well, where do you think his interests lie?"

Faure knew Torres only slightly, but his girth and gargantuan appetite were a local source of wonder. (The Germans' greatest drawback, he complained, was that they ate too many vegetables and not enough meat.) "Apart from eating and talking," said Faure frankly, "I don't imagine his interests lie anywhere at all."

Meslin never forgot it. But so complex is the mind of man that Torres was torn between pride in his own camouflage and indignation at the slight on his war effort.

From London Dewavrin had urged the whole of the French Resistance to concentrate on planned decentralisation. The arrests of General Delestraint and Jean Moulin had made that need plain, and there was no sign of "Operation Grand-Duke" slackening up. Early September had seen a heavy wave of arrests in Paris, and the overall morale of the Resistance was perilously low.

If Century's Intelligence work, backed by the Secret Army, was going smoothly, this was because the agents along the coast were not yet compromised. Brossolette, that dark dynamic man, was sent back to Paris with Yeo-Thomas to put the whole organisation on a business footing. Central control would remain vested in Paris, but sabotage and shock-troop organisation would now be controlled regionally, and have independent contact with London.

As yet there had been few arrests in Caen, but Girard was worried. In the first week of September the Gestapo unearthed an arms dump at Falaise, twenty miles away, and twenty-two members of the Secret Army were arrested. Then, at Lisieux, too, an arms dump was discovered, and the arrests snowballed. Comby, the coal merchant, reported that the office on the Place Saint-Sauveur was being watched: Normandy Peat-Cutters Inc. was under suspicion. Through Meslin, Girard sent instructions that Comby and Robineau, the rather rash young man who had charge of the arms dumps, should disappear.

To plan the decentralisation scientifically, Girard held long discussions with Brossolette, Berthelot and Colonel Touny. The work that Century alone was performing—the mountains of maps, papers, and weekly reports on morale— was now awesome to contemplate. Colonel Personne estimated that Himbert, the courier, brought him about 7 Ib. of papers—a pile three and a half inches high—from Caen each week.

Through his contact with the Post Office, a man named Ernst Prouvost, Touny arranged that after checking by Per-sonne and his aides, Century's reports should now merely be passed to the C.N.D. for addition to their dispatches and collected by a Post Office van. Travelling under the blameless cover of Post Office sacks they would be routed as ordinary mail to an agent called Troalen, at Concarneau in Brittany. There, under the supervision of the gruff Alex Tanguy, they were loaded aboard the Deux Anges, and brought in the manhole of the fishing boat to its rendezvous with the N51 trawler. The despised little Deux Anges, which began her war service with Renault, had now completed about seventeen voyages for Century.

There was urgent need to revise more than the courier service. So much information filtered through Caen that if Meslin's headquarters was hard hit Century and Secret Army work would suffer badly. Touny gave Girard urgent instructions to create new Secret Army cells at Rennes, Angers and Le Mans which could not only recruit local agents but serve as alternate transmission centres between the Wall and Paris. The headquarters would be sited if possible at Le Mans. The gay Moulines was to take charge of all intelligence work in these areas, with Dany acting as liaison agent between Girard and the local heads. Meslin would continue as head of the Caen cell, with Gille as his deputy on military matters and "Third Fool" Duchez handling intelligence.

On Wednesday, 8th September [1943], Girard and Dany were booked to depart for Le Mans and set this ambitious programme in motion. But at the last minute a conference was called in Paris with two Secret Army delegates who had just arrived from London, Abielle and Kemerer. Touny had arranged the meeting in the "safe" apartment of Madame Wastel, an imperious old lady who was also one of Farine's agents at Grandcamp.

At two that afternoon, on the fifth floor of No. 29 rue Claude-Bernard, the meeting began. Touny was presiding and Girard, Berthelot and Moulines had also been called to the discussion. The subject under review was D-Day; all of them were convinced now that next spring must bring positive results, but a close observer might have detected that on this mellow afternoon Girard seemed to have little interest in "The Green Plan" or "Operation Turtle." At intervals his eyes half-closed and his thick fingers beat a slow, soft tattoo on the arm of his chair—a sure sign that he was ill at ease or bored or angry.

Watching him, Moulines wondered idly which. Suddenly, almost rudely, Girard's voice cut harshly across Touny's words. "Moulines! Get downstairs and check with Dany. I have a hunch that something odd is going on."

The young count felt faintly rebellious. Between Madame Wastel's apartment and the street level where Dany was keeping watch were five flights of steep dark stairway and the building had, moreover, no lift. Hazarding that Girard would scorn premonitions, he tried to laugh him out of it. He said: "Come on, patron—you've never believed in hunches before." Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, "I still don't."

Girard rasped, "Young man, I am not asking your advice. I am giving you an order. Check with Dany. You'll find her on the street somewhere."

It was an odd trait in the prosaic Girard, one he rarely discussed, but he knew when something was wrong. Call it a gift, call it sixth sense, but often, like a dog, he could sense the footfall of danger long before a human ear could register the sound. Time and again, in war and peace, it had saved his life: this sense that everyone in the room or street had receded, and all time had ground to a halt, waiting. ... Like the afternoon in 1917, when the battlefield was quiet and the trenches were full of small relaxed jokes, but something kept urging him, move, find cover, the shell landing three minutes later, just where he stood, and it was not him but a man he had known well who was now a pulp of blood and bone and hair.

But Moulines had never known of this and a score of other incidents. Cheeks burning, he strode from the apartment, and all the way down the steep stairway, he smouldered. "Man Dieu! But he'd have a word with the chief later—calling him to order like that in front of strangers. Since when had he taken to believing in hunches?"

From the doorway he surveyed the wide sombre street which linked the Latin Quarter with the working-class district of Gobelins, but nothing strange was in sight. Only Dany would be loitering somewhere. He set off briskly up the pavement, arms swinging, and suddenly there was a light patter of heels and seemingly from nowhere Dany came running.

The encounter was not quite what he had expected. Suddenly her arms were round his neck, the cool grey eyes were looking into his, and as she kissed him, the delicious subtle scent of her perfume was in his nostrils. "Darling," he heard her cry. "Oh, but you were naughty to keep me waiting so long." And the susceptible Moulines felt his blood stirring. For a moment he thought, Why, I'd never thought of Dany in that way before.

But only for a moment, because the level sympathetic voice he knew better murmured, "Thank God you've come. Any moment now something's going to happen. Walk, but don't look behind."

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

The location of the meeting held on Wednesday 8th September 1943 at 29 Rue Claude Bernard in Paris is shown below:

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I assume the fifth floor is the one marked with the red arrows, having the full balcony.

To continue the story...

Her words registered then, and dazedly Moulines was walking beside her, fighting a gnawing curiosity to peer over his shoulder. The full implication was still hard to grasp: Dany still snuggling against his arm, talking loudly and (he thought) convincingly of how much she had missed him. Suddenly she tugged at his sleeve.

"Darling, look! I've tried all over Paris, but that's the one I want you to buy me."

Moulines looked and as he did so the panic gushed through him and the reality of the danger took on paralysing shape. They had stopped in front of the electricity showrooms at No. 45, and Dany was pointing and he was looking at the glossy refrigerator in the window, but across the street, mirrored in the window glass like an image in water, was the sight that really held him. A thick-set man in a raincoat and a green pork-pie hat with a small feather tucked jauntily in its brim, leaning in the optician's doorway, paying no attention, face half-screened by a copy of Paris-Soir. Too studiedly careless, too still.

Moulines felt his knees turn to jelly, but to give credence to the charade he bent to examine the price-tag. As loudly as possible, hoping there was some way out, he said, "Forty thousand francs is a lot of money," and then, "How long has he been there?" Her reply was so soft he could scarcely catch it: "About half an hour. I was worried to death; there was no way to make contact." The drawback of the meeting place, as both knew, was that it lacked a phone, but Resistants could not afford to quibble over the shortcomings of gift apartments.

"But how, Dany—howl" Still bending to the shop window.

"It was the chief. The man was waiting for him outside the Cluny Metro station. He tracked him all the way here. He would have gone for reinforcements long ago, but he's been hoping I'd give him a lead."

Moulines straightened up. Ostentatiously he checked the money in his wallet: a newly-wed husband half-persuaded by the little woman's blandishments. "We'd better split up," he said. "Somehow you must lead him off and give him the slip while I get back and warn the others."

But Dany was more practical. "How do we know which one of us he'd follow? If he follows you, the others' will be worse off than they are now." The Gestapo had tried so hard to escape notice, she explained, that he had walked ahead of Girard. When he turned around, Girard had disappeared. Unless the man had seen Moulines leave the building he was still uncertain where Girard had gone to ground.

"All right," Moulines decided wryly. "We'll go to the bank and draw out our savings for that refrigerator. Somehow we've both got to draw him away from here."

Arm in arm, strolling like lovers, they ambled along the rue Claude-Bernard. Several times, woman-like, Dany evinced a desire to peer into shop windows and make sounds indicative of feminine cupidity. Each window told the same tale: the strategy was working.

The man in the green hat was following, only now the distance separating them was growing less. He was not losing the advantage.

They turned left (I think that should read 'turned right' from following along on Google Maps) into the long slatternly rue Gay Lussac. At mid-afternoon the queues were still sluggish outside the food shops, shuffling in voiceless apathy for a stale haunch of rabbit or a withered lettuce. This was too slow, Moulines decided; stepping from the pavement he began urging Dany along the gutter, past the silent crowds.

He glanced back. A hundred paces behind, the Gestapo man was in the gutter too, stepping out doggedly, keeping pace.

They walked more quickly now, fear mounting. Once, taking advantage of a sudden shining stream of bicycles, they dodged across the pavement into the Boulevard St. Michel. Outside the Capoulade (famous cafe) and the Luxembourg crowds of students argued passionately over books and the commis whisked the first leaves of autumn from the green painted iron tables. Green Hat crossed the street, too, negotiating the bicycles without difficulty.

For the first tune there was anxiety in Dany's voice; "How are we going to get rid of him ?"

"We'll have to head for a quiet neighbourhood where there aren't crowds," Moulines said. "Then he'll fall back."

By common instinct they turned right along the rue Soufflot, making for the grey mushroom dome of the Pantheon. From the quiet square surrounding the temple, the poor cobbled streets of the rue St. Jacques quarter, with the little tainted bah and the one-night hotels, drop between high houses to the river. In these narrow streets they would have a chance.

They began to hurry, half-running. The agent was only a few yards behind now; there was no more pretense. They turned into the great square under the lee of the Pantheon, and the thought jumped into Moulines's mind: it's a trap.

Fifty yards ahead a large black covered wagon was drawn up by the kerb. Looking back, they saw that Green Hat was no longer hurrying. As they watched he stopped short, pulled a whistle from his pocket and blew. The shock was like a physical blow: the whistle shrilling, the door of the van flinging open and men in plain clothes, half a dozen of them, jumping to the ground.

"Save yourself, Jacques," Dany shouted. "Don't mind me." And as she spoke and the men came at them in a spaced, dangerous line, she turned and ran. Without hesitation, Moulines dived into a side-street, his long legs eating up the distance. He saw a startled cat fleeing, and a dustbin rocked and crashed aside in his path. Rotting cabbage leaves, wadded newspaper and coffee-grounds cascaded across the cobbles.

Down the rue Valette Dany was running for her life. She was a tall girl running fleetly, but once as she rounded a corner, she skidded and almost fell; her high heels were betraying her. Behind her the background music of the hunt bayed into life; the frantic clattering of feet, the shouting, the wailing crescendo of the whistle. Run as if all your life depended on it, because it does, it does. Another corner now, the nightmare closing in. Ahead of her the street slept in September sunshine: shutters drawn back, the pastel shades of washing strung on roof-top lines, no one in sight. Fear shapes the wits beyond analysis, or why, of all the shops in that street, did she choose a dry-cleaners? She never knew, but she dived in.

The shop was empty, a bell jingling faintly in the back region, and then, somewhere in the plunging panic of her mind, the old ingenuity was resurgent. Stripping off her coat and turban she tossed them over the counter. Outside on the cobbles the hard thunder of feet sounded. God grant, she thought, that the owner doesn't come. She lifted the barrier, passing behind the counter. Again the bell jingled: a man, hatless and sweating, dangerously flushed, his breath coming in painful bursts.

Trim in blouse and skirt, Dany smiled inquiringly.

"Mademoiselle, have you seen a young woman in a green coat and red turban?"

Try to look unconcerned now. "Mais non, monsieur—no one at all." The door crashed to with his departure, and then the colour flooded to her cheeks as the back door of the shop opened. A hunched elderly woman was watching her in silent inquiry.

Dany said quickly: "I'm so sorry—forgive my clumsiness. I dropped my hat and coat over the counter and I came round to pick them up."

She thought the woman eyed her curiously before saying:

"Ce n'est pas trap grave, mademoiselle—but cleaning nowadays takes six weeks."

"Any time," Dany said. "Any time at all." And it was all she could do to stop herself from shaking.

Leaving the shop, she turned away at right angles, back into the anonymous bustle of the Boul' Mich'. By devious means she made her way back to the rue Claude-Bernard, this time approaching from the east. Once in the street she realised that unless Girard and the others had read a swift warning from Moulines's absence it was too late. A black Citroen with German police markings was parked outside No. 29. So the Gestapo had seen Moulines leave the building. They had found the house.

From a doorway farther down she watched, too numb to feel the grief that she knew would follow. The few people who passed took one look at the car, then hurried on, heads bent, as if ashamed that they were powerless to help. An hour dragged by, but the Gestapo did not emerge, and as evening drew closer Dany shivered. At last five men came out, got brusquely into the car and drove off. God be praised, there were no prisoners; the concierge had kept silent. If they had found the right apartment they would at least have taken Madame Wastel. She felt sick with reaction and incredulous joy.

She rang the three-in-one apartment from a cafe to find Girard in good humour. All had gone well. Scared by Moulines's sudden absence they had vacated the flat in a hurry, and while Dany and Moulines had played their dangerous game of hide-and-seek, Girard and the others had continued the meeting safely beneath the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens. Moulines, too, had lost his pursuers after a helter-skelter chase.

The three-in-one flat itself seemed safe. The concierge, who was reliable, had seen no suspicious strangers loitering nearby. But thereafter Girard never returned home without first phoning Dany to check that the coast was clear.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

I have traced as best I can the route taken by Dany and Jacques Moulines in trying to shake off the Gestapo agent trailing them on the 8th September 1943 below:

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I would have loved to find the dry cleaners where the chase ended but unfortunately, there is not enough detail in the narrative to find which side street Dany was on when she rushed into the shop.

Moving on with the narrative...

So far, so good, but Girard saw the need for decentralisation as more urgent than ever, and on the morning of 10th September [1943] he and Dany travelled by train to Le Mans. Saussaye, the tall scholarly head of the Le Mans sector of Century, had given him the name of a contact there who he thought might be useful in starting a Secret Army cell: an ex-Army Intelligence officer named Colonel Becker, who had agreed to a rendezvous in a cafe near the station.

After the first twenty minutes' discussion, Girard felt his heart sink. Even in Le Mans you could feel the miasma of fear and suspicion, and from the frosty reserve with which he greeted them it was plain that Colonel Becker distrusted them on sight. A forceful, strongly-built man with iron-grey hair, he cut short Girard's arguments, saying: "I know nothing about you, Monsieur, nothing at all. And you can offer no satisfactory proof of your identity. I shall need something more than that to convince me that you're not working for the Gestapo."

And yet, Girard thought, it was only his own attitude of empiricism recoiling on him. "Make up a simple sentence," he told the Colonel. "Anything you like. For example, 'The sky is blue'." Becker thought and said finally, "The snow is melting fast."

Girard said: "Right. In forty-eight hours listen to the 9 p.m. news bulletin by the B.B.C. from London. Afterwards the announcer will read a list of personal messages for the French. Yours will be amongst them."

The sentence was relayed without delay and the day afterwards, 12th September [1943], Becker joined the Secret Army. Now his first task was to build up an organisation akin to Meslin's in Caen, and under the cover name of "Baron" he set inquiries on foot through the Underground. The search presented one unforeseen problem. Nine days later, when Girard returned to Le Mans, impatient for results, Becker was bewildered.

"It's much harder than I thought," he complained. "I made half a dozen discreet inquiries—all to people who only know me as 'Baron'—and they promised to scout around and find me a good deputy. Now all of them have come back and told me the best man to get in touch with is some fellow called Colonel Becker."

Despite such setbacks, Girard's re-organisation went on. He shuttled between Paris and Le Mans and Caen, busier than ever, adding fully-staffed auxiliary cells in Rennes and Angers under the leadership of an ex-regular officer, General Audibert. A military adviser, General Robert Marasse, cover-name "Surlaut," was appointed to keep Secret Army plans in step with the strategy of Allied invasion headquarters. Lamoureux de la Saussaye was given the job of co-ordinating all their activities on a civilian level. The primary responsibility of all these men was organising Secret Army troops for D-Day in Normandy and Brittany, but due to their efforts, details on troop movements, factory output and munition depots eighty miles inland from the Wall were steadily pipe-lined to London.

Girard held conferences with each of them as often as he could, exhorting, encouraging, pressing for more information. The head of his Argentan cell, a cheerful electricity board inspector named Robert Aubin, recalls: "Because he had to be everywhere at once, you didn't see Girard often, but he only had to visit occasionally to make you feel that he was always there backing you up. It was as if he passed on to you something of his strength and his sense of humour and helped the job to go along more smoothly."

And the meticulous Jacquemin, in Le Havre: "I'd been waiting a long time to get into the Resistance, but I'd made up my mind that when I did get in, it would be under a chief I could rely on. When Pierre Faure. approached me at the end of '42, the first thing I asked was, who ran the network. 'Girard,' he said. 'I'll tell you more about it. . . .' But I said, 'That's good enough for me, I'm in.' When you'd known Girard as long as I had, you knew you could give him your trust."

Everyone felt this quality of leadership, though none could pin it down more precisely. Part of the clue, perhaps, lay in the simple fact that although Girard travelled almost everywhere in a rumpled sports coat and flannel trousers he saw himself always as a soldier in uniform, under orders. Outwardly he scoffed at himself as a "mothball soldier," but secretly, perhaps, he found comfort in being a link in a chain of command, and sometimes to Dany and Moulines he talked wistfully of the glories of being a Commando. "Stepping ashore in a battle with a hail of fire all round you. . . . What a war that would be." Because he, who led the secret Resistance of 7000 men, hated the secrecy. He, who in business broke through the tangled skein of verbiage and got results, hated the slowness, the uncertainty—"never seeing the end of the work I was doing."

If he drove others hard, he drove himself harder, sleeping uneasily, often, when money was short, making do with little food. As he saw it, the way to a planned Resistance capable of administering a stunning shock-punch on the day of reckoning was to live as a soldier, single-minded, ascetic, with the Atlantic Wall as your own front line—an almost Teutonic view and that was part of his secret, too. But if he was quick to blame, he was quick to praise, and a brusque word was soon forgotten. The one thing he stamped on utterly was when an agent began nourishing fancies about the romance or gallantry of his job. To one such he boomed furiously: "You see some men down the road putting up a blockhouse and then come and tell me about it. What is supposed to be difficult or romantic about those simple facts?"

The transmitting facilities, too, came under his eagle eye. With "Operation Grand-Duke" focused on Paris and arrests swelling weekly, Dewavrin's former conception had outlived its usefulness. There was now little point in concentrating the transmitters in the Paris suburbs when it was Century-cum-Secret Army units receiving arms drops or observing troop and shipping movements along the Wall who needed the sets on the spot. If they could radio London that a drop was "on" or that a battalion had moved within a few hours, that gave the Allies time to act on the information whenever necessary.

That autumn he appointed a new transmission chief for the region, Jean Chibeau, and the stock of transmitters along the Wall began to build up. Four in the Caen area alone—on Arsene's roof; in the cellar of Schulz, the radio merchant; in the house of one of Duchez's workmen, and in the hayloft of a farmer called Roger Savard, seven miles out at Anisy. Westwards towards Cherbourg other transmitters were housed, at Bayeux, Grandchamp and Ste. Mere figlise, in the attics or cellars of Mercader the bicycle merchant, Farine the cafe proprietor and Maury the electrician. Only Gresselin, in Cherbourg, was without transmitters: the neck of the Cotentin peninsula was too narrow, an easy target for detectors, and the ever-present radar created an insuperable barrage of static.

For Girard's men the tension did not slacken. There were small incidents, unimportant at the time, which seen in retrospect were like the first faint twinges of pain that betray the fatal sickness.

There was the incident of the Typewriter, when the Germans almost stripped aside the protective camouflage of security which Meslin's work as Government engineer gave the Caen cell. As usual, Jeanne Verinaud was typing the dispatches whenever she could sandwich the job into office hours. Drawn blinds, a light glowing late, only built up suspicion. One afternoon, when Meslin was away, she was alone working on a dispatch which Gresselin had sent through from Cherbourg a week earlier. Her fingers raced over the keys of the Underwood.

"Electricity Supply, Cherbourg Arsenal.

Following an inspection by a German Admiral, the French engineer in charge of supply has been warned that it would be fatal for this post to run short of coal. It is the only one to furnish distilled water to five Atlantic submarine bases...."

The door opened and Karl Hoefa walked in.

The girl went on typing almost by instinct, knowing that the worst thing was to betray either fear or surprise. With any luck, seeing that Meslin was absent, the Port Commandant would only pass the time of day before leaving. But Hoefa didn't. He sat down in a chair facing her, a little to her right, and lit a cigarette. She did not think he could see the paper in her machine. But she wasn't sitting where he was, so she couldn't be sure.

She did her best to seem polite and helpful. M. Meslin was in Honfleur. (Thank God Gresselin's scribbled notes were on the desk to the right of her machine.) Was there no chance he would be back? She made a dubious secretary'st face. "Well, I'm very doubtful. . . . He didn't seem to think . . ." She had almost eased the paper from the roller when the tall blond young man craned forward. "But Mademoiselle------"

"Yes, Commandant." Her heart was beating so fast that it hurt her.

"I am disturbing your work. Please, please go on with your typing."

Jeanne Verinaud thought, "I can't say I've finished it, even from there he can see the sheet is only half-filled. . . ." Reluctantly she ratcheted the paper into the machine. Would he notice it was a different make? Or ask her what she was typing? In either case she would not know what to say. She could only keep typing and hope.

Smoking and chatting Hoefa sat on. Apparently he was intent on nothing more than enjoying the society of a pretty girl and a chance to relax. He was not, she knew, a very ardent Nazi; before the war he had been National Skating Champion of Germany, Meslin always said you could talk to him like a human being, but that afternoon, conscious that he was a German and a patriot, she did not seem able to talk to him at all.

He would not go. He talked and smoked and would not go - She began to hate the sound of her own voice, absurdly stumbling and faltering. Supposing he got up and looked over her shoulder? Sometimes in the past he had done that, but only when she had been typing office minutes. He lit another cigarette. He would not go. She had to type twenty-nine lines that afternoon. It seemed like ten times the number. Towards four o'clock Hoefa got up, bowed slightly, pressed her hand in farewell, then turned and went out. She sat there for some time before she could go on working. She knew that it was all right. Nothing was going to happen; they were safe. But it had been close—very close.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

There was the incident of the Transmitter at Ste. Mere-figlise. In that village Madame Maury, the charming, self-possessed wife of the electrician, had always felt safer than the wives of some Resistants. She had a Gestapo man billeted in her house. (After he had gone to bed each night, Georges, her small son, made a solemn ceremony of spitting in his boots.)

But his presence was comforting, because it seemed to afford protection from neighbours' gossip. The man went to bed early, too early to witness the stealthy midnight arrivals of Moulines on his old bicycle, and he was away from the house all day. He was unaware of Maury's twice-weekly transmissions on the training programmes and daily doings of the 2nd Battalion of the 191st Artillery Regiment. Or so they had thought.

Madame Maury was the schoolmistress in the nearby village of St. Marcouf. One day that autumn, during mid-morning break, she saw the children huddled on the low wall of the playground watching something across the road. There was a wagon drawn up and peasants were being hustled brutally from their cottages; German troops and French milice were making a house-to-house search. The Sergeant of the Milice often exchanged jokes with the children and she called to him: "What's the trouble, Sergeant?"

"No trouble, Madame." He came trotting importantly over the road. "Tell the little ones not to worry." He tugged his big cavalry moustaches, strong and protective, a devil of a fellow. "Confidentially, Madame, there are terrorists in the neighbourhood, but do not fear. We shall soon have them."

"Terrorists?" The quaver was not entirely assumed.

"Indeed, yes—terrorists who have somehow gained possession of a wireless transmitter. The devils are cunning—it's almost impossible to find them on a house-to-house search. But don't worry—in a few days' time they are sending one of the R.D.F. vans from Cherbourg and then"—he cracked his knuckles triumphantly—"we shall have them."

Suddenly the sergeant and the children and all of them trembled in a wave of nausea, but with an effort she pulled herself together. Two hours from now Maury would be climbing the wooden stairs to the attic above the workshop for the midday transmission. She imagined the panic glazed on his face if the soldiers suddenly crashed in, tearing him from the set and trampling it, setting on him with their boots and clubbed fists. . . . But she could not leave the school before twelve-thirty. To disappear suddenly, when the children had heard the conversation, would set village tongues wagging. At her desk all the rest of the morning there was only a cold coiled lump of sickness where her stomach had been. She was obsessed with the thought: Is it our turn now?

Nothing had happened when she reached home and that same afternoon Monsieur Laurence, the Mayor, accepted temporary responsibility for the transmitter. It would have to be shifted after each emission now. They had just gained a breathing space.

Now the first yellow leaves shivered from the trees, and at night a wet opaque bandage of mist hung above the waters of the Orne. In the orchards the mistletoe berries glowed white among the apple branches, a promise of Christmas. Workmen with good contacts drank a hot grog in their favourite cafe of a morning to guard against the pinching frosts. At home in the evening men thumbed surreptitiously through calendars and tide-books and argued and discussed endlessly. How could they glean yet more information? How could they throw off the German yoke? And when would the longed-for invaders come?

All of them felt it could not be long.

There was the incident of the First Arrests, which were so nearly the worst.

The reason for them was rooted in the visit that a priest, named the Abbe Luc, paid to the Thomas household in the last week of September, 1943. His was a routine request: an R.A.F. flyer, sheltering under his roof, needed identity papers. Like most others in the network, the Thomases held a stock of papers, not only for agents entering the zone, but for aviators and young men escaping to the Maquis. They gave the priest the papers he needed, but this time, when he left their house, the Abbe was followed by Helmut Bernard's Gestapo agents, arrested and searched.

The second day of October [1943] began like any other Saturday morning. Robert had gone early to work at the potato controller's office. The soignee, vivacious Marthe was at her desk in the Caen Prefecture and Jeanne was busy in Meslin's department. Both Papa Louis and Madeleine, the tallest and most outspoken of the daughters, had the morning off. At No. 22 rue Montaigu, breakfast was over. The old man roamed placidly round the living-room. Madeleine and Mama Thomas were busy in the kitchen.

At 10 a.m. came the thundering at the door. "Aufmachen!" (Open up!)

No one moved. Papa Louis stood rooted to the ground. In the kitchen, Madeline and her mother consulted in frantic whispers. At last Madeleine went slowly to answer the door. She was half-way across the living-room to the hallway when Mama Thomas saw the maps.

They were lying on the scrubbed wood of the kitchen table, about half a dozen of them—copies of those that had already passed to Meslin's office for collection by the courier.

Mama took in the situation at a frantic glance. Robert must have tossed them down when he left for work, having no time to burrow beneath the soiled linen in the laundry hamper and store them in the two attache-cases that served as "box files." Bernard would give the Thomas family no quarter if the Gestapo found them. They would reveal the rambling old house for what it was: the branch office of an espionage service whose willing agents were numbered in thousands.

The old lady moved faster than she had ever done in her life, Madeleine was in the hallway now. The Gestapo was still pounding at the door. Trembling with emotion, she seized a box of kitchen matches. A yellow blade of flame sprang into life, but with anguish she saw that the tough cartographic paper only buckled at the edges, turning brown. The footsteps of the Gestapo were in the hallway. No good, no good....

She grabbed the maps and ran to the coal range. A vegetable soup was bubbling gently in a big copper saucepan. Lifting the lid she plunged the maps into the pulp of cabbage and turnips, mashing them down with the ladle. For a moment the maps floated obstinately on the surface. Then they bubbled and sank from sight.

She stood trembling inwardly but very unbending and dignified, in the manner of the French matriarch whose privacy has been violated, while Gestapo men in raincoats trampled through kitchen and living-room, spilling the contents of drawers on the carpet. Probing, rending and sorting. They looked briefly at the wicker hamper, then, with a gesture of distaste, turned away. They found bundles of identity cards and several stamps, including the stamp of the Chief of Police at Trouville. But no maps.

The senior Gestapo man said stiffly to old Papa Louis: "You and your daughter will come with us to the rue des Jacobins. Where are your other daughters and your son?" The old man lied that they were out for the morning, shopping in the town. It was obvious that a blanket order had gone out to arrest la famille Thomas, but as yet the thugs had not checked up on where the children worked. In any case, they would be found and brought to headquarters before the day was out.

To Mama Thomas the agent said: "Your presence is not required, madame. You will stay here and not attempt to leave the district."

Mama Thomas knew, of course, what the Gestapo intended. They were counting on the fact that human nature would rule out prudence and that, as soon as she thought the coast was clear, she would leave the house to warn others in the network. Bernard gauged correctly that few people are braver than the women of France. His mind failed to grasp that it is sometimes braver to do nothing at all.

It worked out a little differently.

Someone from the rue Montaigu—a woman neighbour, whose name they had never known—had already set off to alert Marthe Thomas at the Prefecture. When she heard the news the plump self-possessed Marthe lost no time. Leaving her outraged boss gasping, she ran through the city to Meslin's office by the Pont de la Fonderie. There she warned Jeanne, her sister. Jeanne went on to the potato controller's office to warn Robert.

But to persuade Robert that he would benefit neither the network nor do his duty as a son by giving himself up— that was a harder job. All morning Marthe and Jeanne sat miserably in a little cafe trying to reason with him. "You know so many people in the network," Marthe argued, "supposing they made you talk? We hardly know anyone important, and even the few we do know are helping the airmen, not the maps. I'm sure it's because they think we're helping airmen that all this has happened."

But Thomas sat there, pale and determined, disputing it. All his instincts revolted at the idea of leaving his family in the lurch. All right, he said at last, he'd go, but first he had to get those maps out of the house. It took them another half-hour to talk him out of that. Somebody else must get them, Jeanne said. It would be suicide for him to go near the house again.

As it turned out, Jeanne was right. At the rue des Jacobins just then, the Gestapo were opening a dossier on the Thomas family and in the dossier, still extant, one sentence stands out clearly: "It would appear that these people have been manufacturing false papers on an extensive scale, possibly with the complicity of the man Paul Berthelot." The Cafe des Touristes was also suspect, though Paul was never questioned; better to wait and watch, Bernard thought, and then to pounce. The Gestapo chief knew that he was dealing with amateurs but it never occurred to him that amateurs were other than clumsy.

"This," demanded a Gestapo official when Madeleine Thomas was led in for questioning. "Where did you get this!" Looking down, Madeleine saw the rubber stamp that she had stolen from her boss at Trouville. Without hesitation she lied: "I made it." The man tossed it contemptuously aside. "Just as I thought. . . and a clumsy forgery at that."

As for Robert, he had a lot to do and little enough time to do it in. Early that afternoon he rapped cautiously at the door of the small fisherman's cottage that Girard, who had given up the rue St. Jean apartment, now rented near the river, and Girard, by a stroke of luck, was there to let him in. His face was very grave when Thomas finished; he started to say, "Mon petit, I don't know what to say. . . ." And that was true, because for once in his life Girard didn't. Thomas had never seen the tough practical Girard so strangely moved, and when the big man just stood there with his face working, patting him rather absently on the shoulder, he didn't know what to say, either.

For the first time he had the strange thought that he loved Girard like his own father, and Girard, too, had a soft spot for Thomas. The cartographic service would go on, but it was Thomas who had nurtured it and improved on it and sapped his strength in its service. Now the boy looked sallow and ill and without the force to fight any further because in eighteen months he had drawn or collaborated on and supervised close to 4000 maps—almost fifty a week.

After a spell Girard blew his nose violently, then said with his old energy: "But you've done enough, you know, Robert. I don't know how many maps you've done, but you've done marvels. But you won't be safe now, you know, wherever you go, and it worries me. I think you'd better go to England— I can arrange in Paris for a Lysander pick-up."

But on all counts Thomas rejected this violently. He said stubbornly: "I won't have that, chief. I'll go anywhere here you want me to but not England. I started my war in France and I'm going to finish it here." It was a brave and oddly moving little speech. Soon Thomas left and Girard urged him to quit Caen before nightfall.

Half an hour later, Thomas was knocking on Arsene's door in the narrow working-class rue d'Auge. Arsene listened with glinting eye, because this promised action. "You stay here until after dark," he said. "I'll look after you, but first I'll look after your maps." Then, leaving his camionet parked outside the door, he walked out of the house.

For ten minutes he trudged steadily uphill, past the great grey cupola of St. Michel-de-Caucelles, until he reached the rue Montaigu. The afternoon was still, with the sullen smell of rain in the air. The street looked grey and sombre, paint peeling from the shutters, few people about. The door of the Thomas's house stood half-ajar and Arsene hardly paused to see if anyone was watching. He walked in, through the hallway, through the deserted parlour until he reached the kitchen. Sunk in her private grief Mama Thomas heard a sound and swung round to see him standing there. His finger was at his lips, enjoining silence, and the cry of surprise choked in her throat.

Neither said a word. Quietly, grinning to himself, Arsene opened up the laundry hamper, burrowing beneath until he located the two attache-cases. His one eye winked farewell, then with his beret set at a jaunty angle, he swung away down the rue de la Porte. Reaching the Cemetery of Vau-celles, he walked cheerfully with his attache-cases among the white crosses and the rank grass of the graveyard until he came to the door of the crypt. Inside an empty tomb he found a safe repository for 400 of Century's maps.

It was then approximately 3 p.m. but the Thomas family saga was not quite complete. As Frenchwomen, Marthe and Jeanne had decided that they must surrender looking their best. After leaving Robert they went home to change into their smartest outfits, paying particular attention to cosmetics and hair style. Then, as gaily as if they were setting off to a dance, they waved to the gawping neighbours, strolled unhurriedly down to the rue des Jacobins and gave themselves up. All the Thomas family save Mama and Robert were now held in custody for further questioning.

That night, after dark, Arsene got out his camionet and drove fast between steeply wooded ravines to the village of Bretteville-sur-Laize, nine miles away. There he delivered Robert to the care of Andre Masseron, the big, phlegmatic pork butcher, whose plump pink face and relaxed air were so welcome on all the local airfields.

Masseron agreed to hide the young draughtsman in an upper room, and Arsene drove home again without incident. It had been quite a day.

A month passed. The men and women of Century had almost permitted themselves the luxury of forgetting to be afraid. Then came the incident of the Telephone Call.

Some time in the mid-afternoon of 3rd November [1943] the phone rang in Girard's Paris apartment and he answered it Dany understood that Harivel was talking from Caen, but she could not gather much from what Girard was saying. He said: "I see ... I see.... Yes, I see.... Thank you for letting me know." When he hung up he was very quiet, but after a minute, he said: "Harivel. Odette Duchez has been taken to hospital."

That was the cover-phrase the Underground used when they talked about a Gestapo arrest.

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Regards,

Pat