† At Valençay, now the site of a memorial to the 104 members of F Section, 13 of them women, who gave their lives for the liberation of France.
Chapter 2
Matchbox
Benoit’s report contained much valuable information, both about the oil installations which he had been sent to reconnoitre and about the conditions in France. He himself had been over the demarcation line which at this time still existed between occupied and unoccupied France and he gave us details of petrol stores and oil dumps all along the French coast from Marseilles across and up to Bordeaux, Le Havre and Dunkirk. Benoit had contacts of his own in France (as I said, he had worked there for many years) and he managed to proceed on his business with great freedom and confidence. Furthermore, to our immense delight, he reported that nearly every Frenchman to whom he had spoken was almost recklessly willing to help our organisation and had hardly been restrained from indulging in some act of foolish defiance to prove his eagerness. This was precisely the fillip we all needed so badly and it gave us tremendous zest for our work. The reason we had not heard from him for so long was that he had had difficulty in getting back to Marseilles and a certain house in the Vieux Port where a wireless operator had now been installed in an attic above a brothel.
By now we had landed, by devious means, several more agents on the coasts and lonely plateaux of unoccupied France. I called in my briefing officer, Major de Guélis.
‘At last things seem to be happening,’ I observed. ‘Benoit’s report is pretty encouraging. I thought things would be far tougher than they are.’
He glanced through the report. ‘He seems to have got across the demarcation line easily enough. What I can’t understand is why we haven’t heard from any of the others.’
‘It takes time for them to find their feet, you know. We must be patient. At least we know the Marseilles house hasn’t been blown.’
‘How many men have we got in the field now?’ de Guélis asked.
‘Ten, including Georges and Benoit.’
‘Well, we should hear something more soon.’
The house in Marseilles was the vital link with us. At the scheduled times (skeds) our operators listened, gave the call signal and listened again. At Baker Street we waited, day by day, for the information which should be coming in.
Meanwhile our recruiting officer, Major Lewis Gielgud,† was busy detecting more bilingual British of the right calibre for our work. De Guélis, the briefing officer, went through Benoit’s thin report to glean as much information as he could about conditions on the other side. I went down with him to the blacked-out airport where our next batch of agents were to leave from and saw them vanish into the night, bound for Gibraltar whence the trusted feluccas (Portuguese coasting vessels) would ferry them to the deserted Côte d’Azur.
About this time we extended our premises to include a flat in Orchard Court which, among other amenities, sported a black tile bathtub which was to become a legend in the service. Here we conducted our briefing operations under Major de Guélis, taking care to segregate the various agents (they were more numerous now) the one from the other so that, even if they knew each other – they had probably been at training school together – they would have no idea of the nature or region of each other’s mission.
In early October I called in one of them, Harry Morgan, and explained the particular task I wanted him to do.
‘How are you feeling, Harry?’
‘Pretty good, sir.’
‘All set to go?’
‘Rather.’
‘Look, apart from the things briefing have told you, I want you to pay particular attention to finding out what’s happened to communications from Marseilles. We haven’t heard a word from anyone for over two weeks. Go slowly, but if something has gone wrong or the equipment’s got captured or something, let me know as quickly as ever you can. I can’t believe there can have been trouble in Marseilles. After all, it’s in the unoccupied zone.’
That night Harry, having checked his orders, was on the plane bound for Gibraltar. Already Pierre de Vomécourt had been parachuted into the Loir et Cher with his wireless operator, and taking into account Jacques Poulain, Harry Morgan and those others whom we had already landed, we should be getting some news shortly. Like a man who has backed many horses, we were confident that one of them would come up. Each day I looked up hopefully as my secretary came into the room. Each day she came empty-handed. I remained calm (there was no point in being anything else), yet anxious for results.
II
Pierre de Vomécourt and his wireless operator Gaston† had landed in France in August. They had instructions to proceed to Paris and pick up certain personal contacts there. At the beginning we were forced, in order to create our system of safe houses and trustworthy co-operators, to recommend those friends we possessed upon whom we knew we could rely. This was risky but the risk had to be taken.
Pierre and Gaston buried their parachutes with some trepidation, wondering what they might meet in the way of security police or German troops – for their landing-point was very near the demarcation line.
‘Everything seems to be quiet,’ Pierre observed as the aircraft zoomed away from them back towards England.
‘So far,’ agreed Gaston.
‘Come on.’ They picked their way across the fields in the direction which de Guélis had told them in their briefing and soon found a deserted hut in which they were able to clean up their shoes and check their equipment. The heavy wireless set was disguised – in so far as it could be disguised at all – as a suitcase.
Pierre carried a large sum of money in another cheap fibre suitcase. To look at, the two men were shabbily yet respectably dressed as two petits bourgeois; you might have taken them for commercial travellers and it was as such that their papers (carefully forged in a grey stucco house on the Kingston bypass) revealed them to be.
It was dawn by the time they walked into Tours. No one paid them the smallest attention. They saw no Germans. Soon they were inextricably mixed with the crowds in the centre of the city on their way to work. De Guélis had told them to catch the 8.48 to Paris. They still had an hour before the train was due to go, so they went into a café and ordered coffee, croissants and butter.
‘No butter, messieurs,’ said the waiter, looking at them curiously.
Gaston laughed. ‘You don’t have to tell us.’ It was against this sort of mistake that our men had to guard incessantly – the tendency to let things slip out so automatically that they were said by the tongue before the mind had time to check them. They ate their dipped croissants and gulped their ersatz coffee and left the café for the station. They still had over half an hour to waste and they had no desire to loiter around the station where there were certain to be Germans and Milice (members of the Vichy police), so they lingered on the quai along the Loire until it was time to go to the station.
At 8.40 they presented themselves at the booking office and Pierre said: ‘Two to Paris, please, third class.’
‘But, Monsieur, the Paris train has left.’
Pierre said. ‘But 8.48—’
‘That train is cancelled, Monsieur. It has been for several months.’
‘My timetable is out of date,’ Pierre said. ‘When is the next train?’
‘The next rapide is not till 4.21 this afternoon,’ the man replied.
This was typical of the sort of snag into which our first agents were continually running; certain foods were unobtainable on certain days, others had vanished altogether, trains were cancelled and timetables altered. An agent required to keep his sangfroid if he was to avoid betraying himself by a detail so trivial as almost to be laughable were not the penalties for capture so dreadful.
Gaston and Pierre reached Paris at ten that night, only one hour before curfew. They had only one address, in the Rue des Sts Pères.
‘If we have any difficulty in getting there,’ Pierre said as they left the station, ‘we may find ourselves out after curfew. I th
ink it would be safer to find a hotel and get on to our contact tomorrow.’
‘I don’t like walking around the streets with this sewing machine,’ Gaston said.
‘Come on, we can’t waste time. Let’s try the hotels.’
‘Perhaps we should separate?’
Two German officers in their smart, arrogant uniforms swaggered past. The streets were beginning to empty as people hurried home before curfew. Pierre saw there was no time to lose and quickly set off across the boulevard into a maze of side streets where many hotels, some of them highly disreputable, clustered about the approach to the station.
‘I still think we should separate,’ Gaston said. ‘It looks so obvious – two of us—’
‘What’s obvious?’ Pierre snapped.
‘I insist on separating,’ Gaston said.
There was no time to argue. ‘Meet me at the entrance to the métro Rue du Bac at ten tomorrow morning. Failing that I shall be there every hour on the hour till one. Be punctual. Good luck.’ Pierre clapped his friend on the shoulder and left him. He himself hurried on and went into a small dingy hotel where a sign pointed up the tile stairs: Bureau – Premier étage.
The patron was a fat, heavily jowled man with a half-inch of black whisker. He was very sleepy and allowed Pierre to fill in his fiche without even bothering to inspect his papers. At this time the Germans were confident of their ability to control France and were not jittery enough to bother about using their troops to check papers and peruse hotel registers. The time was to come when they were to be made so: that was our job, or part of it.
The next morning Pierre rose early and left the hotel before any inquisitive official should come round. The patron was still dozy and still unshaved, and Pierre left without yet having to put his forged Carte d’Identité to the test. He decided to make his way to within striking distance of the Rue du Bac so that he could make his rendezvous with Gaston at precisely ten o’clock; he had been impressed during training with the vital importance of punctuality. No agent was allowed to loiter at a rendezvous; loiterers were always likely to be picked up, perhaps on suspicion of being black marketeers, and there could be nothing so harmful to the organisation as the running of senseless risks.
At one minute to ten Pierre, having had his coffee and rolls in a café in the Boulevard St Germain, turned into the Rue du Bac and walked down towards the métro entrance. Two German field police walked incuriously past him. A man in a beret emerged from the métro, stared at him and strolled away down a side street. It was exactly ten o’clock. A girl came up from the métro. A man in a blue mackintosh and with a brief-case went quickly, confidently, down the grey stone steps. A bus stopped at the red light and the conductor allowed two men to descend from it; neither of them was Gaston. It was five past ten. Pierre walked quickly down the street, crossed it and came back up the other side, keeping the métro in sight. It was ten past ten.
At a quarter past Pierre left the Rue du Bac, walking confidently as if he had somewhere definite to go; but if his steps were certain his mind was not: he wondered whether he should go straight to the address in the Rue des Sts Pères and deposit his suitcase which contained, among other things, over £2,000 in French notes. If he should be stopped, that might not be so easy to explain. On the other hand he wanted to be at the Rue du Bac at eleven when Gaston was due; obviously for some reason he had been unable to make the ten o’clock rendezvous. Probably he had overslept.
Pierre bought a newspaper and sat down in a café to read it. Of course the press was controlled by the Germans and it was full of assurances to the French about the speed with which the war would be finished; further it assured Parisians that France had never been more contented or more honestly managed than it was now under the Marshal. At one minute to eleven Pierre turned once again into the Rue du Bac. A man was waiting at the top of the métro steps. But it was not Gaston. Pierre walked straight past him. A girl ran up to the man and they walked off briskly together. Abandoning his circumspect approach, Pierre ran down the métro steps to see whether Gaston had perhaps misunderstood his instructions. The white tiled corridors leading down to the trains were deserted. Now, at ten past eleven, Pierre could no longer restrain the fear which earlier he had suppressed: something had gone wrong. Unless Gaston had made his way for some reason straight to the address in the Rue des Sts Pères.
Pierre hurried to the Rue des Sts Pères. He buzz-clicked the front door of the tall, narrow apartment building in which his contact lived. The concierge came out and looked at him: ‘Monsieur?’
‘Monsieur Arpiège?’
‘The third floor, monsieur, number ten.’
Pierre bounded up the stairs. A small white-haired woman in an apron opened the door of number ten in answer to his ring. ‘Monsieur Arpiège?’
‘What name shall I say?’
‘Monsieur Germain.’
Monsieur Arpiège was a distinguished looking man with a goatee. He had been a solicitor and was now retired on a small pension; he had been a friend of de Guélis, our briefing officer, before the war. Pierre quickly explained who he was and how he had got the lawyer’s name. ‘I must confess to you, monsieur,’ Pierre continued, ‘that my friend also has your address and may possibly arrive here during the morning.’
‘I understand.’
‘Your housekeeper, monsieur, is she trustworthy?’ Pierre asked apologetically.
‘She has been with me many years. She has no reason to love the Boches. Her husband was killed in 1917.’
It was arranged that Pierre should leave his suitcase with Monsieur Arpiège while he returned to the Rue du Bac in the hope of meeting Gaston. It seemed to him, as he walked quickly to the métro St Germain, that Gaston was certainly in some sort of difficulty and he cursed his luck that such a misfortune should have occurred so quickly.
‘Vos papiers, monsieur.’
Pierre looked up to see that he had walked into a control. There was nothing for it: he produced his forged Carte d’Identité, not knowing whether it would be convincing or not. At this stage we were not too well informed of the regulations in force in the occupied zone.
‘This is no longer valid, monsieur.’
Pierre looked the policeman in the eye and shrugged. The gendarme stared at him. After a moment he handed the carte back to him. ‘I should get a new one,’ he suggested.
Gaston was not at the Rue du Bac at noon.
At 12.30 Pierre, dispirited and apprehensive, returned to the flat in the Rue des Sts Pères. All seemed quiet. He hurried upstairs to Monsieur Arpiège.
‘There is no sign of my friend in the Rue du Bac,’ he reported.
‘He has not been here,’ the lawyer replied, tugging at his goatee with a nervous thoughtfulness.
‘It looks as if he must have been picked up by the police – or the Germans. In which case the sooner I get out of here the better; they may force him to say where he was making for.’
‘Yes,’ said the lawyer, ‘you’d better leave now.’
Pierre saw that there was no point in hesitating; equally there was no point in asking Monsieur Arpiège to recommend him somewhere to go, since if the Germans were to arrest him they would surely extract from him the address to which he had sent Pierre.
‘Goodbye, monsieur. I’m sorry to have caused you this trouble.’ Pierre shook the lawyer’s hand, snatched up his suitcase and quit the flat in the Rue des St Pères. It was now nearly one o’clock. In spite of his fears, Pierre made his way once more to the Rue du Bac, in case Gaston should make their last rendezvous. He waited till twenty past and then gave up. He was not the sort of man to lose his nerve in the situation in which he now found himself, yet he could not but curse the luck which had deprived him so suddenly of Gaston and, with Gaston, of his only link with London. He went to a restaurant in the Boulevard St Michel where, at an inflated price, he was able to enjoy a meal of almost pre-war standard.
Pierre’s cover story made him out to be a traveller in stationery and penc
ils and he had been carefully briefed on some of the aspects of the business before he left England, yet he had never been intended actually to earn his living by this means and his instructions were (this was standard) that he should furnish himself with up-to-date papers as quickly as possible, preferably genuine ones. His first aim was to make contact with people who might help him to attain this object; the memory of the gendarme’s ‘This is no longer valid’ remained with him.
On the left bank at this time there were marooned a large number of people of various nationalities, students, writers, artists and intellectuals, whom the fortunes of their countries and the fall of France had first exiled and then trapped; Pierre decided to go to earth among them; in the honeycomb of rooms and studios of the Quartier Latin there were so many shifting and shiftless people that it was safe to assume that the authorities could not keep track of them all. Pierre had the advantage over these people of having plenty of money and accordingly he had no trouble in finding temporary accommodation in a student hotel in the Rue Grégoire de Tours. He silenced all questions by paying a week’s rent in advance. He went straight up to his room, pushed the bolt across the door and lay down on the bed. He lit a cigarette and took stock; being the first of our agents in the Paris area he had no organisation into which to integrate himself: it was his job to lay the foundations of just such an organisation. There was little hope of getting news of Gaston, for if he was captured that was an end of him, while if he was free the odds were a thousand to one against meeting him now. There was only one thing to do – to proceed with his mission as far as he could. But first he would contact his old friend, Bertrand, who lived near the Jardins du Luxembourg; Bertrand might be able to give him a safe address where he could live undisturbed as long as he was in Paris. Pierre felt uneasy about staying for longer than absolutely necessary in this hotel; he did not know how trustworthy the patron was nor could he tell when the police or the Gestapo might elect to make a sweep through the Latin quarter.
They Fought Alone Page 3
