by Clare Mulley
All three men knew that the Allies should now have landed on the Riviera, and that Digne, so near the coast, might be liberated within days. They also appreciated that this meant they were more likely to be shot quickly, perhaps after being tortured to find out what they knew about the invasion plans. Fielding particularly resented the prospect of dying under a false identity, and began to envy the American prisoners in the cell opposite, with their ID tags round their necks. But Francis resolutely refused to think about such things. ‘Hours away from execution,’ he later recalled rather prosaically, ‘all I felt was – what a pity.’28
By the time that Christine had arrived back at base, Francis, Fielding and Sorensen had all been condemned to death. She spent the next few days at Monsieur Turrel’s house with John Roper, who had just arrived from Briançon, desperately trying to persuade members of the local resistance to form a small commando group and raid the garrison. Christine offered to lead them, and Roper tried to round up what gold coins and other bribes he could find, but the French commandant reluctantly decided that the risk was too great. It would probably have meant the death of the prisoners anyway, there was neither time nor transport, and, besides, the network was fully focused on preparations for the landings.
Christine was distraught, but never so distracted that she forgot her raison d’être in France. As soon as she arrived back at Seyne she had sent messages to the ten new agents dropped during Francis’s absence to help subvert the remaining foreign troops within the German army. At a remote chalet the next afternoon she announced that following Roger’s arrest she had taken over his work, and had arranged for a lorry to take the latest Jedburgh team to Gilbert Galletti’s base at Bramousse, with their heavy kit to follow the next day. She then waited while the equipment was loaded, briefed the guide and the driver and, in view of recent events, passed on details of her key contacts to the new mission’s leader in case she herself should be arrested. Christine was a little curter than usual, the new agents reporting that she was clearly working under great difficulties and had had very little sleep and yet, they stressed, ‘it is impossible to speak too highly of Pauline’s conduct at this time’.29
Francis’s wife, Nan, nursing their young children alone in Britain, was at least spared Christine’s more informed anxiety. ‘Very recent news of him is still good’, the latest SOE note she had received told her – three days before he was due to be shot.30
It was then, learning that Francis and the others were due to be executed on the night of 17 August, that Christine had to decide not only whether to risk her own life, something she had never baulked at, but whether – as a key SOE agent – that risk was justified by the slim likelihood of her plan succeeding. The importance of Francis to the Jockey circuit tipped the balance. ‘Roger had the whole organisation at his fingertips’, O’Regan agreed. ‘His presence was essential.’31 Christine could rest assured she was acting out of duty, and not just on impulse. Mastering her fear of bicycles, she set off on the twenty-five miles to Digne to check exactly where the men were being held. At first she wobbled and rose heavily on the pedals to climb the hills, before flying down the other side with the wind whistling past her ears. She would get to know the route, and her calf muscles, very well over the next few days.
Once at Digne, Christine slipped through the prison gates among the daily crowd seeking news of their relatives inside. Circling the inner walls she loudly, if somewhat unharmoniously, hummed the tune of ‘Frankie and Johnny’, the hit song that she and Francis had often sung together to keep their spirits up. Inspired by the real story of Frankie Baker, who shot her man dead for making love to another woman, Frankie is arrested in the song, and in some versions executed, an irony that is unlikely to have escaped Christine as she paced round Digne prison. She soon heard an echo from Francis inside. ‘As far as I was concerned,’ he wrote, ‘Christine was simply saying “I love you”.’32 But Christine had bigger ambitions.
That afternoon she managed to secure an interview with an Alsatian gendarme called Albert Schenck, who flirted as a double agent while using his languages to act as a liaison officer for the Gestapo, and therefore knew nearly everyone. Christine was aware there was a price on her head, and yet she strode straight into the Gestapo offices at the prison to meet Schenck. It was the sort of encounter that would turn most mouths dry. But it was exactly the kind of situation in which Christine naturally flourished and, almost revelling in the moment, she nearly overdid it.
To justify her interest in Francis without revealing his strategic importance to the resistance, Christine pretended to be his wife. This had always been a possible cover story, and came naturally to her now. Moreover, remembering the impact that being able to reveal she was related to General Horthy had once had in Hungary, she now also claimed, entirely spuriously, to be the niece of Field Marshal Montgomery and, for good measure, a relation of Lord Vansittart as well, whom she had at least met once, in London, in 1939.* As such, she said, she could reliably inform Schenck that the Allied landing was imminent, and that he was due to be ‘handed over to the mob’.33 It was, she later confessed, ‘a shot in the dark’, but it worked.34 Schenck told her that the one person who might be able to help was Max Waem, a Belgian who acted as an interpreter for the Gestapo. Waem was the young milicien, a Vichy-French paramilitary officer, who had first arrested Francis, Sorensen and Fielding, so it did not look promising. Schenck demanded a huge ransom of two million French francs, more than he would have earned in twenty years of gendarmerie service, ostensibly to bribe Waem. Christine agreed, coolly telling him that if he reneged on the deal she would shoot him, personally. She then cycled back to Seyne. Radioed by Albert that evening, Brooks Richards in Algiers arranged to deliver the money within forty-eight hours; it would be ‘the quickest response to a request ever’.35 Then he updated London. ‘You could have heard a pin drop’ in the British SOE office the next morning, one of the secretaries remembered.36
Two days later, and this time bringing some alcohol for the guards, Christine again cycled to Digne to meet Schenck, who, she recalled contemptuously, ‘had done nothing’.37 As the Allies had finally landed she was able to enjoy terrifying him with exaggerated stories of their rapid advance up the Rhône valley, bluffing about the proximity of American troops and the imminence of heavy bombardments, and successfully playing on his fears about retribution after German defeat. Only when she was confident of his emotional commitment did she hand over the money, ten bundles of rolled banknotes still in their rubber pouches from the drop. Schenck then quickly arranged the meeting with Waem for that afternoon.
As agreed, Christine arrived at Schenck’s flat first, masking her impatience with some difficulty until she heard a car roar up outside at about four o’clock. Hearing the men shouting in German, she suddenly considered throwing her bag out of the window and making a run for it, but she kept her nerve. Waem then joined her, dressed in his Gestapo uniform.
‘When he came he at first covered me with his revolver’, Christine wrote in her official report, but it was not long before Waem put the gun down on the table between them.38 As Schenck’s wife brought coffee, real coffee, not even mixed with ground acorn, Christine openly told Waem that she was a British officer, parachuted in two years earlier. From her pocket she then produced some (broken) wireless crystals, the carefully calibrated pieces of quartz that make a radio resonate on a particular personal frequency, as evidence that she could make immediate contact with Supreme Allied Command. In sharp contrast to the Wehrmacht, which was increasingly isolated, she clearly had access to both money and communications. ‘I began to work upon his fears by telling him of the extreme danger in which he and other collaborators were’, Christine continued. Because every line of retreat was blocked by resistance forces, she argued that the garrison at Digne would have to surrender. Waem was well aware that no great number of German troops remained between Digne and the approaching Allied forces. He also knew that Wehrmacht soldiers would be sent to POW ca
mps, to be freed once the war was over. Collaborators like Waem, however, Christine now made clear, would be handed over to the Maquis authorities, who knew that he was ‘the chief of the Gestapo and one of the principal torturers’, and who ‘had a peculiar way of dealing with those found guilty of treachery’.39
By now Waem’s hands were shaking so badly that he could not pour coffee without spilling it, and at one point he pathetically apologized, suggesting Christine tip the contents of her saucer back into her cup. Pressing home her advantage she quietly continued that Schenck and Waem could only enjoy enemy protection for a few more days at most, but that engineering the release of Francis and his fellow officers would guarantee them safe conduct to the nearest Allied base outside France. ‘After three hours of that kind of talk,’ she reported bluntly, ‘he became obviously terrified.’40 Finally Waem told her categorically that he would get all three men released. It was seven in the evening. The execution was set for nine, just two hours away.
* * *
Three conditions were attached to Waem’s compliance. He was to be saved from the vengeance of the French population; be treated as a free man and not put in a prison or camp; and would be actively rehabilitated by the British government informing the French or Belgian authorities that he had rendered the Allies an important service. He went on to claim that after the war he wished to return to France to convince people of his innocence, and even that he wanted to undertake some dangerous solo mission for the British that might take him into Germany or occupied Holland or Belgium. All of this, Christine could not resist suggesting, he might find difficult. The exact terms of the deal that was struck will never be known but, crucially, in the name of the British authorities, Christine gave her word that once the Allies arrived she would make sure he was protected. Waem nodded his agreement.
On the evening of 17 August, having had ‘an ominously good meal’ of vegetable soup and brown bread, Francis, Sorensen and Fielding were marched across the prison courtyard in a thin drizzle of rain by Waem, who again had his revolver at the ready.41 Francis was the last in line and thought, ‘this is it. It’s something you’ve looked in the eye ever since you started on this lark. If it’s going to be now, it’s going to be now.’42 Then, to his ‘silent amazement’, Waem complimented Francis on his wife, saying, ‘what a wonderful woman you have’.43 Nonetheless all three men were still sure that they were walking to their execution, especially as Waem now wore a Wehrmacht tunic over his civilian trousers, investing him with the same air of formality and ceremonial gravity, Fielding felt, ‘as the black cap on the head of a judge delivering the death sentence’.44
Outside the prison gates, expecting to turn towards the football ground, the place used for executions by firing squad, they were surprised to be herded the other way. As the summer sky darkened with an evening storm, Francis realized that now, if ever, was their chance to escape, but after three days with little food or sleep and under the constant threat of death, they lacked the strength to make a coordinated effort. Certainly for Fielding, events even seemed to be happening outside of himself, as though he were ‘a disinterested spectator’.45
At last they reached a Citroën, and were sharply ordered to climb in. Slamming the door behind them, Waem got in beside the driver, and at once they were lurching round the nearest corner and heading straight for the roadblock on the edge of Digne. Seeing an official car approaching at high speed with Waem in his uniform leaning out of the front window, the sentries automatically drew back, and the car flashed past into the open countryside. Once round the first bend the Citroën stopped to collect a solitary figure standing silhouetted against the white wall of an isolated farm building. It was Christine. From her harassed expression as she squeezed into the front seat, combined with her lack of eye contact, Francis thought for a moment that she too had been caught and was trying not to betray knowledge of them by the slightest word or gesture. When the car next stopped it was at the edge of a muddy embankment, and here Waem got out and beckoned Fielding to follow him, slithering down to the riverbed. It was only after Fielding had helped to bury Waem’s uniform jacket, and Christine turned to smile at him as they returned to the car, that it dawned on him too that this was a rescue.
‘Did we say anything to each other?’ Francis later looked back at that moment with Christine. ‘I don’t remember any conversations. Just holding her hand. It was part of the relationship … I think she was very much in love with me. And I felt as much for her.’ But like Johnnie in the song, Francis had another woman – his wife in England had just given birth to their second daughter. As Christine already understood, and Francis now realized, ‘it was, and is possible to be totally in love with two people at one and the same time’. Knowing this, talk was superfluous. They simply shared ‘very strong feelings, deep emotions…’46
There were huge celebrations when Francis, Christine, Sorensen and Fielding arrived back at Seyne, with Waem and Schenck in tow. ‘We all hugged her in turn’, Fielding related proudly, while Francis praised her ‘courage and wisdom’.47 Not only were they alive and free, but the Allied landings had taken place in the south of France, and American troops now controlled huge stretches of territory moving in from the coast. Francis was euphoric, and immediately threw himself back into finding the best use for the new teams of officers that had parachuted in during his absence. Even so, they all tuned into the stream of BBC personal messages that evening, which, among the many coded calls to action across the south of France – ‘There’s a rabbit in the garden’, ‘Jean loves Thérèse’, ‘My mother is not well’ – still managed to fit in the wonderful words, ‘Roger est libre; félicitations à Pauline’ (‘Roger is free, congratulations to Pauline’).48
Christine concluded her official report with the earnest request ‘that my promise to Waem is honoured’, adding, ‘I feel very strongly about this as Waem undoubtedly saved the lives of Roger, Chasuble and Cathédral’.49 But her request for an amnesty caused difficulties. Waem ‘was one of those most wanted by the Allies’, Douglas Dodds-Parker tried to explain, at which point, he noted, ‘Christine … understandably, blew up’.50 Unable to meet the conditions she had agreed, Dodds-Parker told her the best he could do was put Waem as top priority for the daily shuttle to France and give him forty-eight hours, a decision for which Christine never forgave him. There are various stories as to what happened to Waem. One account had him ‘probably executed by the French’. In another he was handed over to the British Parachute Brigade and sent to Bari in southern Italy, where he reportedly offered to take part in action in the Far East, before being repatriated to Belgium after the war. Other accounts had him ‘taken over by the Americans’, or being flown to Cairo for interrogation under secret orders from Major General Stawell, head of Special Operations Mediterranean.51 The French Communists even accused Christine of having engineered Waem’s escape, and though this goes too far she was certainly very bitter about his treatment. She had given him her word and it had been betrayed.
Schenck was found murdered shortly afterwards, it was widely presumed for the money, although Christine suspected it was really for his role in ‘giving up’ people to the Gestapo.52 Interestingly Christine made no reference to the two million francs in her official report, perhaps wishing to conceal the payment of the bribe, or the failure to later recover it. The following year however, Vera Atkins, Maurice Buckmaster’s ‘invaluable assistant’, traced Mme Schenck, who apparently had no idea of her husband’s many roles in the war, but was having difficulty cashing some large notes in post-war banks while being unable to explain how she came by the money. Francis had warned Schenck not to return to his home, advice which it turned out he had ignored, resulting in his prompt execution by members of the resistance. With typical honour, Francis and Christine helped Mme Schenck to return to Alsace with her family, and some money, so she would avoid ‘persecution’, as Christine put it, for her husband’s work first with the Germans and then with the British.53
Th
e story of Christine’s courageous rescue operation rapidly became the stuff of SOE legend. ‘Good reading’, one SOE officer hand-wrote on the cover note of Francis’s report. ‘I am going to make sure that I keep on Christine’s side in future.’ ‘So am I’, another scribbled. ‘She frightens me to death.’54 Despite Christine’s own quite modest official report, she did allow herself to dress the story up a little for her friends. At first Waem was ‘outraged’, she told Bill Stanley Moss, ‘then threatening, then simply scared stiff’!55 Soon General Stawell was convinced that Christine had faced eight armed Gestapo officers, all ‘fully intending to arrest her’.56 Francis proudly had her telling the Germans that the Allies would be ‘shortly shooting up the whole area, and that they and their families would be bombed to pieces’.57 Douglas Dodds-Parker had her claiming to speak for the king, and as Brooks Richards told it, Christine had claimed that Francis was Winston Churchill’s nephew.* Brooks Richards put the rescue down to a combination of the money and Christine’s ‘presence and her female charms’.58 Maurice Buckmaster eulogized officially about both Francis’s ‘sterling example of courage and reliability’ and ‘the daring ruse’ of his ‘lady courier’, praising Christine’s ‘magnificent service’ and ‘brilliant performance’ in securing Francis’s release within a few hours through her ‘initiative and dogged determination’.59 He later included a romantic version of the events in one of his published SOE histories. In this telling Christine witnesses Francis’s arrest as he leaves a café. Later the two are able to catch a glimpse of each other through an open door at Gestapo HQ. ‘“My dear Colonel”, Christine said shyly,’ in Buckmaster’s account, ‘“Everyone knows. If you don’t release your prisoner, it will be your funeral. And I mean exactly that…”’60
