All of this helped a continuing commemoration of the guides and helpers who’d risked their lives. It also contributed to the sense of Ariège being wild and untamed, resistant to the decrees of the central powers, and as a form of tourism it was seen as something to encourage. In the spring of 2017 there had been a call by the National Office of War Veterans and Victims in Ariège to develop more of what they termed commemorative tourism, asking for suggestions of lesser-known places and routes that might have potential. The Freedom Trail and its related museum were held up as exemplars of the kind of activity relevant to young and old, visitor and local, bringing more visitors to the Ariège but also satisfying the need to remember victims of conflict and war veterans.19 At the same time I couldn’t help wondering whether these reminders were helping to maintain the open wounds within the towns and villages where not everyone had been on the same side. I noted that in Rimont there had been an association set up in 1996 to create a museum relating to the Resistance and the Liberation, again to attract visitors but also to make a more substantial commemoration. The museum had yet to see the light of day.
It’s true that there were other Ariège routes used by evaders to flee to Spain, and they had been overlooked in the attention given to that other famous trail. Gradually, and unwittingly at first, I began to build up clues that built up a picture of events much closer to my own doorstep. It all began when I zigzagged up a section of the long distance GR10 path to the summit of Mont Ceint, at 2088m. Expecting the usual iron cross on the summit, I was surprised to see instead a contraption that looked more like a parking meter. It was actually a notice, crudely painted in red with a protective hood and a glass jar containing a visitors’ notebook, all of this held together by a lot of wire. The spidery red handwriting marked the 2014 ascent by an 85-year-old – Jean-Marie Claustre – but it also went back in time to tell how, in 1943, as a 14-year-old shepherd he would climb the peak to survey the land for German patrols. Any information would be passed on to help the passeur (smuggler) using the escape route via Pic des Trois Comtes. Claustre had actually placed the crude plastic sign on the summit back in the mid 1990s, regularly ascending the mountain to replace the visitor notebooks as they filled. Back then I had no idea that I’d already spent time walking along the same escape route that Claustre had been helping to protect.
The passeur in question turned out to be one of the most well-known of the Ariège smugglers: Jean Bénazet, a Varilhes mechanic who went by the codename Piston. Benazet successfully smuggled 61 evaders in the earlier part of 1943, recording them as “trout” in his logbook, until his group was apprehended by a German ambush within the Garbet valley on the 13th June. Bénazet himself managed to escape and continued to assist local efforts, before he made his way to Toulouse and joined the Resistance. After the war he took up his job as a mechanic but also became a councillor, and died in 1991 at the age of 87.
The escape route used by Bénazet had passed through my own commune, which itself had been a centre of resistance. The maquis group, known as Le Port-Ezes, had used the village of Ezes on the opposite side of the valley as a base. A tiny hamlet strung out high up the valley, Ezes nowadays is a place where the children “live wild”, according to Juliette, perhaps mindful of a catastrophe back in 2001 when one of two four-year-olds playing in a barn had died when it caught fire. I’d wandered up there one sunny winter’s day, feeling chilled by the loss of the sun’s rays as the encircling ridge had blocked them out by lunchtime. It was a place tinged with tragedy. Back in September 1943 the maquis group had come to a bloody end after being infiltrated by a “comrade” who turned out to be a member of the Milice. The subsequent arrival of 80 Germans to the hamlet led to arrests, deportations and the murder of the mother of one of the maquisards. This apparently was what led Piston to believe that he was under suspicion, prompting his relocation to Toulouse.
With the call for more commemoration activities to be organised, I wondered why more had not been made of this route, particularly with its connection to one of the more celebrated passeurs. After talking to locals and reading the odd online account, I began to piece parts of the route together. According to Fred Sabourin,20 Piston would pass though Massat and then take a mule track, looking out for certain washing lines; if clothes were hanging, then it was safe to pass. The route then went up to the lake at étang de Lers and then crossed down to Coumebière, where evaders would ascend the Garbet valley, after which the climb became steep and dangerous up to the frontier.
Setting out from Massat, I followed a narrow track beside the River Arac before coming out onto the road that ran parallel. I stayed close to the verge to avoid the hundreds of bikes racing down the hill through the rain puddles towards me. It was La Casartelli and the road had been closed to vehicles for the duration of the race; convenient for the cyclists, but tiresome for the hitchhiker walking ahead of me, whose bare brown legs paced out from beneath the waterproof cape that was stretched over the hump of a rucksack, a cape that was dripping despite the shelter of his umbrella. As I drew up alongside he turned to greet me, offering me a share of the umbrella. He was making his way to visit a friend, starting with a low-cost bus from the north of France – “dix euros de Lille à Toulouse!” – followed by the kindness of drivers once the public transport options ran out. Now, with the road closed, he could only complete the last few miles on foot, in the rain. I offered sympathy but he shook it off, reminding me that the land was finally getting the rain that it needed.
Once we’d parted ways I carried on, losing sight of the cluster of houses up at Ezes and looking out for a track leading away from the road up to Courtignou. Nothing was marked but I took my chances and scrambled down a bank to follow a path along the stream, through the beech woods until the ground opened out into a clearing on the slope. By this time the rain had stopped and the sun began to shine through a gap in the low cloud, my route up the valley now a golden beam.
The next section that I walked began at the plateau de Coumebière, a starting point for many walks, including sections of the GR10. “Plateau” had initially seemed an incongruous name for a spot halfway up the winding pass road and encircled by ridges. It was only when I looked down onto Coumebière from above that I saw it as a wide, treeless ledge that plunged towards the valley of the Garbet, the void met by ridge after mountainous ridge that ran parallel to the horizon.
One could spend a week just walking the paths that radiate out from Coumebière, with the most visible being the zigzag of the GR10 carved like a single shoelace into the hillside. Once at the Port de Saleix there’s an option to walk up to the panoramic summit of Mont Ceint, or continue south along the GR10. A third option is a rollercoaster of a long, long ridge that rises and falls as it switches through changing terrain, starting with a steep rocky climb and the narrow arête of the Cabanatous ridge, where I once temporarily lost my nerve and sat overlooking the drop to try and talk myself back. The next minute you’re running along a grassy ridge overlooking the string of blue lakes at Bassiès to the left, before the path switches back to a scramble over faintly pink boulders, with a final stiff limb to the half-dome summit of Pic Rouge de Bassiès.
Today, however, I was following a lower route in the direction taken all those years ago by Piston and his “trout”, along a narrow path that led to the tiny étang de Labant. There I overtook a woman stepping over rocks wearing the kind of neoprene fabric shoes worn by surfers. I guessed she was planning to swim and hadn’t thought about needing something more appropriate and less painful for the 40-minute hike to get there. Ascending the ridge behind the lake, the landscape opened out to a heart-stopping panorama high above the Garbet valley, with the town of Aulus les Bains huddled down on the right, and on the left a mesmerising view deep into the glaciated valley head of the Garbet. The path to the étang du Garbet – the lake that feeds the river – is a little-marked track that runs parallel, and at times a thousand feet above, the valley floor, crossing the
truncated spurs cut by glaciers. The lake gets its share of visitors, including families out for a day’s fishing or a swim in the icy water. Yet I’ve never seen anyone else on that upper path. Most walkers prefer to start lower down and tackle a longer but less exposed climb up through the woods.
The first time I walked it was in November, when the first snowfall lay melting on the ground and the encircling walls of glaciated rock were ribboned with white. The path was narrow and I had to keep reminding myself not to plant my hiking pole as there was nowhere for it to go; a slip on the path would almost certainly result in a long tumble down to the Garbet. The snow made it difficult to even be sure that there was a path ahead, with only a faint stretch to be made out skirting along a kind of natural balcony formed by the truncated spurs. I reluctantly turned around, returning at the end of summer when the mountain grasses had bathed the slopes in a warm orange glow.
Compared with the long slog up through the forest taken by other walkers, this upper route forces you to gaze down into the valley head and its textbook illustration of glacial geography. There are no less than three cirques or corries poised one above the other. The lowest, blocking the head of the wide u-shaped valley with a characteristic triangle of alluvial fan, is the amphitheatre of the Garbétou cirque. Above that, the cliffs of the second cirque, most of them typical glacial arêtes, or knife-edge ridges, encircle the étang du Garbet. A lip of rock conceals the water until you are almost upon it, although the water’s roar as it tips over the rim marks its presence. Looking up it’s possible to make out a third, miniature version of all of this: another cirque with another lake – étang Bleu – that lies suspended yet hidden above.
When I finally arrived at the étang du Garbet, it was early enough in the day for the lake to be in full sun, throwing up a reflection of the surrounding ridges and peaks that wavered little from the motion of ripples cast by a single fishing line. It wasn’t until a young woman wearing a white bikini dived into the image that it became fractured. Yet by the time I was walking back the sun had passed over and the dense shadow cast a dark and sinister feel to the valley head. Thinking back to Piston and his charges, they would have had to negotiate their way up here under nightfall, with whatever belongings they were carrying, and then continue along a route that became ever more strenuous, continuing to the frontier at the Port de Montecourbas, where they would descend into Spain.
The first time I’d walked along this section of the escape route, I’d been puzzled by some red graffiti on the rocks here and there; P 1943, and, at one point, Piston 1943, along with an arrow, in large red letters on a rock. Now I understood that this was someone’s attempt to mark the route and highlight its wartime significance with reference to the passeur. It seemed surprising that, to date, there was little obvious commemoration apart from an informal and casual attempt using red paint, and it was poorly signposted, with only a few markers and the odd cairn to show the way. Might the entire route ever be promoted as another freedom trail – Piston’s path? It felt unlikely. The latter portion from here up to the frontier is probably too dangerous for all but the most experienced mountain hikers.
Every time I walked there I couldn’t help remembering one of Scott Goodall’s stories as told by Lancaster Bomber Fred Greenwell, who’d escaped to Spain via this route. Among the civilian escapees were a Polish man and his teenage daughter who were finding it difficult to keep up, weighed down by a heavy suitcase. When faced with crossing a raging torrent, presumably the Garbet, the father threw the suitcase down into the ravine to give them a better chance, but the daughter, scared rigid, refused to budge. Eventually the passeur escorted them back down to an undocumented fate. Of course this is simply one story among many; evaders did not always make it into Spain, with so many caught by the enemy or simply not having the strength to go on, but I found myself remembering this story every time I walked the Garbet valley. It was the thought of getting that far along a journey of desperation and hope for a future, and then having to live with the decision to turn around, for however long you had left in the world. And who knew what had been in that suitcase, carried wearily for perhaps months, just to be jettisoned in a futile attempt to keep up.
Despite the decades of emigration and dwindling population from this part of the Couserans, the family names seen on the lists of those deported, killed or aiding in the raid on Ezes were still the same ones adorning the post boxes nailed to the gates of so many of the houses around. So any continuing remembrance would clearly resonate with local families who had a direct connection with the events of the war. Yet I had also noticed that commemorative activities had significance on a broader, more general level with the public. Claustre’s hand-made sign on the summit of Mont Ceint might give the impression that he made the climb alone to relive his memories, but in fact there was significant local appreciation of the wartime contribution from that barefoot teenage shepherd. Well into his eighties, Claustre continued to accompany hiking groups, pointing out the huts and mazucs he’d used all those years ago and encouraging acknowledgement of the passeurs and their helpers. A report of the trek he accompanied along Piston’s route tells how the hikers stopped to read aloud from accounts of the ambush of Piston’s group in 1943.21 And the hikers were not just older people who might have remembered the war; there were plenty of younger faces present, which indicated a rising interest among the younger generations.
I had a feeling that much of this was a reaction to what was happening in other parts of France, and indeed the world. Sometimes we try to make sense of current events by relating them to the past. An account22 of another Claustre-led walk ends with an acknowledgement that although Nazism and Stalinism are gone, the latest enemy – capitalism – is causing global suffering. Another wartime crosser of the Pyrenees – the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin – was quoted to tie up the ends by reminding us of his call for people to “defeat capitalism by walking”. It was therefore surprising to hear that Claustre’s ugly yet poignant sign had been removed in the autumn of 2017 as it was deemed an environmental hazard. Local press reports showed Claustre holding the retrieved sign, claiming defeat by the ecologists but adding a face-saving claim that at 88 he was too old to continue the ascents anyway. Face to face with the unimpressive cairn that had been erected where the old plastic sign had stood, I felt sadness on behalf of the old man. Someone had made the effort to start building a summit cairn, and it wouldn’t have taken much more to replace the plastic with a more natural, permanent reminder.
Pic Rouge De Bassiès
That was as far as I walked in the steps of Piston and his escapees. Driving home from my trek along that part of the route, I pulled off the side of the road at the Col d’Agnes for a last look at the land that Claustre had surveyed to do his bit for the resistance. The succession of cirques at Garbet were darkened and yielding nothing but shadow, and the chain of peaks were in silhouette – all apart from a smooth golden dome rising above the jagged black ridge. It was Pic Rouge de Bassiès, a bulge on the horizon that the sun illuminated with a last burst of gold as it slid behind the chain to the west. Its distinctive profile popped up everywhere I went. Rising up smoothly on one side, the dome breaks off abruptly on the other where its eastern side has been chiselled away, no doubt by long-ago ice action. Walking through the woods in winter, I’d spotted it on the horizon rearing up in white like a petrified breaking wave, the only hint that there was a mountain chain there at all. At 2676m it was higher than anything else I’d reached apart from Mont Valier, but it wasn’t a technical climb, just a very long ridge walk that included the exposed section where I’d previously lost my nerve.
The ridges, summits and paths were all beginning to fit together like a 3D jigsaw as I began to realise that today’s route offered an easier way up to the mountain, one that would avoid the unnerving section. It would still be a long day, but I knew that I could do it if I really tried. From then on it felt like the mountain was taunting me
every time I glanced at it: still here, see? Climbers preparing for an attempt on Everest acclimatise by getting closer in stages; walking to a camp, retreating, then walking further the next time and so on. I followed a similar pattern, getting further and further up the long ridge on increasingly longer day walks. Finally, one autumn day I sat at the foot of the dome, wondering if I was really pushing it to climb the final 200m of height and get down before dark. I knew that a lot of it had to do with mindset, and I’d passed a few hikers energetically making their way down, feeling awkward and clumsy in comparison as I moved out of their way. I’d also passed an older couple sunning themselves on a slope above the path and had asked them if they’d been to the summit. ‘Non,’ they smiled, it was too late in the day. Nonetheless another couple overtook me while I was dithering, and I watched the woman take her partner’s rucksack while he slipped off to make a solitary summit bid.
Disappointed with myself, I turned around to descend and was startled to find myself face to face with a large bank of cloud that had crept up silently behind me. It had been hovering for most of the day over the plains stretching towards Toulouse, seemingly stationary. Clearly it had decided to get a move on. Within minutes I was walking through its fine haze and I looked behind to see that the summit was now completely veiled by the cloud. The male walker emerged from the mists, running to rejoin his partner to retrace their steps. The cloud thinned as it passed by, but it remained in some of the ravines and gullies where the ridge dropped away vertically, its white drapes giving an eerie sensation of void just a few steps away. In the middle distance it brought some of the tooth-like pyramidal peaks out of hiding and into sharp perspective as black silhouettes against the shifting cloud.
A House at the End of the Track Page 12
