The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  Halsey and Roper arrived at the garrison with around fifty maquisards on 19 August, less than a week after Christine had done the groundwork, and four days after the Allies landed in southern France. There was a short exchange during which a German soldier in charge of some Polish work crews trying to repair the pass road was wounded. Halsey and Roper then informed the garrison commander that his communications were cut off, he had no guarantee of reinforcements from Italy, half of his men were mutinous, and he needed a doctor for his wounded soldier. They then gave him an ultimatum to the effect that ‘to avoid useless bloodshed, we advise you to give orders to your troops to surrender. Terms will be conveyed to you.’39

  At first the commander refused to countenance surrender but instead, with surprising courtesy, he accepted Roper’s suggestion of inviting them for dinner. ‘We went up by bike’, Halsey later reported and, after their unlikely meal, ‘the commander assembled practically the whole garrison … and we argued’.40 As the evening wore on the Polish troops deserted en masse, first rendering the German heavy weapons useless by removing the breech-block firing pins, as specified by Christine, and then abandoning the garrison, bringing as many mortars and machine guns as they could carry back down to the French and Italian partisans. Christine had already ‘persuaded the Polish troops to steal all the arms of the garrison and … hand them over to us’, Francis wrote with obvious admiration.41 At half past two in the morning, with his men fast deserting, the garrison commander finally accepted terms. ‘It was a Hollywood scene,’ one of the men later remembered with evident delight, ‘with general handshaking, flag-raising and conducted tours of the spacious German quarters’.42 The German officers were then moved under guard to a local château, their commander and his dog being led away personally by Halsey.

  ‘Both Christine’s personality and the enormously rapid series of “happenings” in the area’, Francis later recorded, made the surrender of the Larche garrison ‘the subject of divergent and even contradictory reports’.43 But whether or not Christine had stood beside the flagpole on the platform and, ‘fingering the rope … started to pull down, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, the black Swastika sprawled indignantly on its red background’, as she did in one version of the story, she was certainly responsible for securing the garrison.44 It was by Christine’s ‘own personal efforts’ that she achieved ‘the complete surrender of the LARCHE garrison’, Francis reported to SOE.45 Her work ‘has not been short of remarkable’, General Stawell added in his later citation for her, ‘and of the greatest value to the Allied cause’.46

  Christine’s clever and courageous action at the garrison had not only cost no lives but had seriously impacted on German plans for an attack over the Alps. The sixty-three Polish officers were all brought into the FFI as a heavy machine-gun company, and later fought with the Maquis to prevent the Larche pass from being reoccupied. The Maquis were also left free to blow up the main road with the Germans’ own explosives, so helping to prevent the possibility of motorized troops crossing over from Italy and down to Digne to attack the advancing American columns in the weeks that followed.

  Francis had long recognized that Christine had extraordinary qualities. What struck him most now was what he called the ‘inevitability’ of the Poles deserting and changing allegiance once Christine had set her mind to it. It was not just that she spoke their language. She shared the motivations, fears and aspirations of her countrymen, forcibly ‘recruited’ to serve an enemy who was at that moment razing Warsaw to the ground. Like highly trained frontier dogs, indeed like most men, ‘they were amenable to her charm’, Francis commented, but, more importantly, when they deserted they did it with immense enthusiasm. For the Poles, Francis said, Christine ‘was an avenging angel’.47

  13: OPERATION LIBERTÉ

  On the day of the Larche garrison surrender, Sunday 13 August 1944, Christine heard that Francis had been arrested by the Gestapo. She set off at once to see how she could best attempt to secure his release.

  Two days earlier, and just three days before the long-awaited Allied landings on the south coast, Francis had organized a reception committee at the small village of Seyne-les-Alpes, to meet new two agents being parachuted in. Xan Fielding, code-named ‘Cathédral’, short, dark and athletic, was an experienced British officer recently returned from helping to organize the resistance in Crete. His second-in-command, a ‘suave, silent man with greying hair, neat dark features and a tired, urbane manner’, was a South African gambler called Julian Lezzard. Xan had first met him across a baccarat table in Alexandria, and Christine had briefly coincided with him in Cairo. Lezzard was to operate under the code-name ‘Eglise’ (‘Church’) – though given that he was partly Jewish he joked that he should perhaps have been called ‘Synagogue’.1

  ‘Lizzie’, as Lezzard was popularly known, cracked two vertebrae on landing. Fielding, who had braced his legs to receive the first shock, was lucky to avoid a fracture. Both of them had been dropped too high, got caught in the wind and were blown two kilometres off course onto a rocky outcrop. During his descent Fielding had kept his eyes firmly on the reception committee’s landing lights, weak beams from four-volt torches with fading batteries, but even so, ‘the only landmarks visible in any direction or dimension’.2 As he was blown off course he watched these lights retreating diagonally across his field of vision, until they finally and abruptly vanished, leaving him alone ‘in the dark unchartered sky’ [sic].3 The reception committee was just delighted to watch them fall at all, having spent the previous two nights waiting in the cold as the Lysander pilot, unable to pick out their faint lights, was forced to turn back with his uneasy passengers trussed up in their harnesses throughout the eight-hour round trip.

  Once both men had been found, Lezzard was handed into the care of a young medical officer. He would be out of action for seven weeks. A congenial liability, he cursed his injury for keeping him away from the gaming in Monte Carlo that would be picking up, he said, once ‘this invasion business’ was over.4 Fielding was brought to a safe house, the home of the local grocer, Monsieur Turrel, who had placed his property at the disposal of the resistance since the start of the war at huge risk to both himself and his family: the penalty for harbouring a British agent was summary execution. And yet, ‘Monsieur Turrel, fat and jovial in a waistcoat three sizes too small for him, looked as carefree and contented as an actor in a documentary film’, Fielding thought, as he gratefully accepted a glass of wine while Turrel’s wife went to wake Francis and Christine.5

  ‘She and “Roger” were an imposing pair’, Fielding remembered.6 Knowing Francis’s reputation as a heavyweight field agent, Fielding was somewhat surprised to see him bound into the room like ‘a smiling young giant’, with a ‘coltish appearance’.7 It was not long, though, before he realized that Francis’s affability masked great determination, and that he was a natural leader for whom ‘resistance was tantamount to a new religion’.8 Fielding was more immediately impressed with Christine, though, whose reputation had also preceded her, and whose ‘heroic attributes’ he fancied he divined at once beneath her ‘nervous gestures and breathless manner of speech’.9 Despite Christine’s usual modest camouflage of an austere blouse and skirt, Fielding was also quick to divine her ‘glamorous figure’, and decided that her ‘short, careless-combed dark hair and the complete absence of make-up on her delicately featured face, gave her the appearance of an athletic art-student’.10 Christine had learnt to dress so as not to attract attention. ‘It’s enough to pin on a flower’, she once told a friend, ‘for someone to be able to say: “The woman with the flower”.’ And yet Fielding, like so many, thought she ‘was so pretty that she could attract attention just by dint of that’.11

  After breakfast the three of them spent the day in the Alpine pastures collecting the heavy containers and packages of supplies that had been dropped with the men that morning. As Francis briefed Fielding about the development and present state of the resistance movement in the re
gion, to Fielding’s mounting embarrassment, and Christine’s amusement, it soon became evident that there was no obvious task for him to undertake, and Francis could only politely suggest he join a tour of his circuit the next day.

  That evening, Christine left for the Italian frontier to organize the defection of the Polish unit at the Larche garrison. Once Fielding and Lezzard’s containers had been collected and distributed she saw no point in hanging around. The men also moved on, but only to enjoy an excellent dinner and a comfortable night with Albert, the Jockey circuit’s wireless operator, stationed at a house a few kilometres from the village. The following morning they were collected by Claude Renoir, grandson of the Impressionist artist, in his specially licensed Red Cross car. After picking up the injured French commandant, Christian Sorensen, code-name ‘Chasuble’, who had also trained at Massingham, they set off to meet the local resistance leaders. All the officers had fake identities, ration cards and other false personal papers, and if stopped they were to say that they did not know one another and were simply hitching a lift in one of the few cars on the roads.

  It was an idyllic journey and Fielding had to keep reminding himself that he was not on holiday as they toured the dusty villages. Escaping the July sun he sipped wine under plane trees outside cafés while Francis conferred with the local leaders and boasted about the imminent birth of his second child in England. Realizing that he was carrying a suspiciously large amount of money, Fielding doled some out to Francis and Sorensen. His sole concern now was his uncomfortable ‘baggy Charlie Chaplin trousers’, which he had had to borrow from Monsieur Turrel since they had been unable to find the container with his own clothes and personal equipment.12

  At about noon the next day the four men heard an air-raid siren as they were approaching the large garrison town of Digne on the return leg of their tour. Knowing that the Wehrmacht tended to man additional roadblocks during a raid, they arranged to meet Renoir at the other side of the town before taking cover with the rest of the local population. With the all-clear they made their way along the busy streets, mingling with the crowds emerging from the shelters, until they met Renoir as agreed. But just a few hundred yards round the next corner they found the road barricaded by soldiers with a sub-machine gun trained on the bridge across the river that they were due to cross. Already sighted, they could not turn back.

  Francis was not overly concerned. The soldiers were some of the more than one million ‘non-Aryans’ – Armenians, Georgians, Mongols, Bosnians, and other men from the Caucasus – that the Nazis had reluctantly enlisted after suffering huge losses on the Russian front in 1942, and who now formed the Oriental Legion Against Communism of the Wehrmacht. None of them seemed to speak either German or French. They ordered Francis and the others out of the car, but after a cursory glance at the proffered identity cards, labour permits and ration coupons, they waved them on.13 Renoir was just letting go of the clutch when a second car arrived, and Francis breathed ‘Gestapo’.

  Francis had often dismissed the Wehrmacht rank and file in France as ‘extremely incapable’.14 Officers who could be spared to preserve order in the French countryside were never going to be among the most able of the German ranks, and he had noticed that many were chiefly out for their own financial gain – each arrest meriting ‘prize money’.15 Once, at Avignon station, when some officers were spending rather too long studying his papers, Francis had bitten his lip and spat out some blood on to the platform ‘My papers were returned very quickly and I was sent on my way’, he later laughed.16 Indeed there were numerous stories of Nazi incompetence, some more reliable than others, but the occasion that really tickled Francis was when he and a circuit member were stopped for fifteen minutes by specially trained SS troops. An American bomber had been shot down nearby, the soldiers told them, and they were on the lookout for the crew. Francis’s car was comically overloaded, and one of the soldiers now leaned in to poke at the back seat with his bayonet. ‘You don’t think we’ve sewn the bomber crew into our seats do you?’ Francis’s friend had joked. Within minutes they were on their way, the soldiers having failed to notice that the boot was in fact ‘so full of arms and explosives that it was weighing down the whole back of the vehicle’.17 With this in mind, Francis now remained pretty cool. He later claimed that he had never been able to ‘identify fear’ within himself, and in any case took the hugely practical approach that ‘usually it’s an advantage not to be moved by anticipation, by something that might happen’.18

  Fielding, however, had not spoken French for several years, even though it was his mother tongue, and was not confident of his ability to bluff the milicien collaborator and trained interrogator who now descended from the car. In fact the Gestapo man was not French, but Belgian, and very precise. Horribly aware of an uncontrollable tremor in his right leg, Fielding handed over his wallet again, but was unable to explain why his Algiers-forged work permit, as a clerk at the electricity works in Nîmes, had not been stamped for the current month. As he was escorted to the Gestapo car, the soldier next to the driver turned and covered him with his machine-pistol. Fielding now felt his fear ‘take the form of abject loneliness’, and he realized to his shame that he was almost consciously longing for his companions to be arrested with him so that he would not have to face whatever was to come entirely alone.19

  Francis, Sorensen and Renoir appeared completely unconcerned as they showed their documents and emptied their pockets, Francis ‘with an expression of surprised amusement on his face’, Sorensen ‘with a look of contempt’.20 But the milicien was diligent, and noticed that, despite the three passengers’ claim that they did not know one another, the banknotes in their wallets were all from the same series. Two minutes later Francis and Sorensen had joined Fielding, leaving Renoir, whose papers were in order and who had not taken a share of the money, to drive back alone and report their arrest.

  The three men were taken to Digne prison, ‘a dreary barracks of a place’ according to Francis, who was finding plenty to fuel his contempt for the Nazis.21 Having stood for some time facing the courtyard wall with their hands above their heads, they were pushed into a stinking basement cell with four dirty bunks, one already taken, and a small barred window high in the stone wall, with a bucket of excrement and stale urine beneath it. Their cellmate had a heavy German accent, and Francis, insulted by the clumsiness of this attempt to flush them out with a ‘mouchard’, or stool pigeon, simply suggested that they try to sleep instead of discussing their situation. After twenty-four hours with no food or water, and – for Francis – as bad if not worse, no cigarettes, they were woken by the metal door scraping open and orders to move.

  Their next stop was the elegant Villa Marie-Louise on the outskirts of Digne – Gestapo HQ, and notorious as the place where resistants were taken to be tortured. Here their photographs were taken before they were locked into a first-floor room with another ‘inmate’. Some hours later the door was flung open with ‘intentional violence’ to reveal the man who had arrested them, ‘Herr Max … standing on the threshold with a theatrically menacing attitude’. He was ‘a perfect young Nazi’, according to Fielding. ‘Blue eyes, fair hair, fresh skin, breeches and jackboots: not a single essential feature was missing from this typical example of Stormtrooper.’22 In contrast, their interrogator, ‘with his grey hair, dark suit and almost benign expression … looked rather like a provincial bank-manager’.23 Francis soon had him down as ‘not a very bright chap … his questions were stupid, not sharp at all’.24 First he, then Sorensen, and finally Fielding were interrogated by this violent but inept individual, who hoped to loosen their tongues by punching them in the face and kidneys.

  When they found themselves finally alone in their cell, Fielding still shaking, they discovered that all three had ‘confessed’ to smuggling contraband, a story helped by Fielding’s stash of hundreds of the cigarettes that had been dropped with him. The Gestapo had no idea that Francis was British, let alone the notorious ‘Roger’, the major res
istance leader in the region, for whom a generous reward was offered. ‘They were badly informed, no doubt about that’, he would later recall. However, he was also aware that they could still be caught out by a call to any of their non-existent employers, and they decided to attempt an escape that evening.25 The plan was to throttle their room-mate if he returned, break open the shutters and jump from the window – hoping that at least one of them would evade the guard dogs and get away. But before they could act they were moved back to a large cell in the central prison and knew, without being told, that this was the death cell. ‘They simply decided that … it was better to execute us, and get rid of us’, Francis realized. Even though no definite evidence existed, ‘we were to be shot as spies … That was determined.’26

  ‘I kept thinking of the poison tablet sewn into the lapel of the suit I should have been wearing’, Fielding later confessed, ‘and wondering at what stage of the proceedings I would have nerved myself to swallow it.’27 Francis did not carry a cyanide pill. He had somewhat recklessly lost the one he was issued with, and had never asked to replace it. As with capital punishment, he was opposed to suicide on principle.