A Good Place to Hide

by Peter Grose

  London asked Fayol to look at the best way to put the railway out of action between Le Puy and Saint-Étienne. There was also the related business of harassing the Germans as they tried to move about, and in particular preventing them from breaking out of the Haute-Loire and reinforcing those resisting the Allied invasion. All in all, there was plenty to do.

  On 1 August, Lieutenant Alfred Morel, the most senior gendarme in Yssingeaux, made an important decision. He could no longer serve the Vichy government. He joined the Resistance. It was a sign of the times.

  • • •

  Pierre Fayol soon had a plan for blocking the railway line between Le Puy and Saint-Étienne. The railway was single track only, making it a comparatively simple target. Fayol’s plan would involve two teams. One would sabotage the track itself at the Chamalières bridge, about twenty kilometres northwest of Yssingeaux, where the railway line crossed the Loire. The other team would then set about derailing the locomotive as it arrived at the bridge. That should leave the line well and truly blocked.

  On the night of 2 August they struck. The first team used explosives to rip a huge chunk out of one side of the stone arch bridge, leaving the track unsupported. When the ancient Mikado-type steam locomotive tried to cross the bridge, its massive weight would do the rest.

  The second team boarded the train before it reached the bridge. The plan included—at some risk to the maquisards—making sure the French train crew suffered no harm. So the maquisards took over the driver’s cabin and prepared to stop the train at the right moment. The crew were one thing: the passengers were another. As far as the maquisards knew, the passengers were Germans. (In fact they were Milice, but that would do as well.) The passengers could take their chances in the subsequent train wreck. When the train came to the bridge, the Resistance team stopped it at the weak point and threw two Gammon anti-tank grenades into the cabin to immobilise the engine, then got themselves and the crew out of the way of the explosion.

  The broken locomotive crashed through the weakened bridge and sat jammed in the gap in the arch left by the earlier sabotage work. In Fayol’s words, the railway line between Le Puy and Saint-Êtienne was now ‘indisputably cut’.

  Fayol’s success did not pass unnoticed. Although he had been appointed head of the Yssingeaux sector on 24 June, the formal letter of appointment must have sat on somebody’s desk for over a month. On 8 August, the author of the letter, Lieutenant-Colonel Vanel, the Canadian who had parachuted into the Plateau and who now controlled the Resistance for the Ardèche, had added a handwritten PS at the end: ‘Allow me to congratulate you on your successful sabotages in the last few weeks.’

  A week later, on 15 August, the regular French Army began its first serious assault on the European mainland. A massive Allied force, mostly French and under French command, landed on the Mediterranean coast of France on a 150-kilometre front from Nice to Marseille. The Americans arrived first, on 15 August, while the Free French forces landed next day. They then pushed north, through Provence. The occupying Germans were now being squeezed from both sides.

  • • •

  The second tragedy affecting the Plateau began on 4 August. Two Resistance fighters, Jean Mercy and Edmée Debray, had been imprisoned in Le Puy for some three months. In the feverish atmosphere of the time, there was a real risk that the two men might be summarily executed at any moment. Dr Roger Le Forestier decided to go to Le Puy to plead their cause. Everyone advised him against it: Le Puy was the last piece of German-held territory in the entire Haute-Loire, so he would be crossing the ‘front line’ between the very jumpy Germans and the equally jumpy Resistance. His chances of being shot at by either side were high. Both his wife, Danielle, and André Trocmé begged him not to go. However, Le Forestier was not one to change his mind easily. He prepared a makeshift Red Cross flag, which he draped over the roof of his car to brand it as some sort of ambulance. That would protect him, he believed.

  On his way to Le Puy, Le Forestier gave a lift to two maquisards. That in itself was foolhardy, given that they were headed for the local German headquarters. Worse, he failed to ask them if they were armed, or to check them for guns.

  Against the odds, the trio arrived safely in Le Puy. At about 3 pm Le Forestier parked his car in the main square, and all three men got out. Their timing could not have been worse. The Resistance had chosen this particular moment to rob a bank in Le Puy, grabbing several million francs. The Feldgendarmerie swooped on the area, sealing it off and searching everything and everybody that moved. When Le Forestier returned to his car, the police had already searched it and found two pistols, carelessly and unforgivably left there by the maquisards. They promptly arrested Le Forestier. Possessing guns was a capital offence. The machinery of tragedy had been set in motion.

  On the same day that Le Forestier made his ill-fated trip to Le Puy, the Resistance carried out another execution. Jean Rambaud, a student from Tence, was taken to a disused quarry between Tence and Le Chambon, and shot. He was accused of being an informer.

  • • •

  Jean-Pierre Trocmé peers out of his photographs as the spitting image of his father. He was the oldest of the three Trocmé brothers, a rather serious young man who was also a good scholar, talented pianist and promising poet. On the evening of Saturday, 12 August, he went to a poetry reading in Le Chambon given by the established French actor Jean Deschamps. The reading included a powerful and haunting rendition of ‘Balade des Pendus’ (’Ballad of the Hanged Men’), the most famous work by the fifteenth-century poet François Villon.

  Villon had been convicted of killing a priest, and he is reputed to have written the poem in prison while awaiting his own execution. In the poem, Villon visualises himself as one of a group of hanged men swaying in the wind.

  Now here, then there, as the wind changes

  It tosses us around to its pleasure…

  While he read this, Deschamps swayed back and forth in imitation of a body moving at the whim of the wind. It was a compelling performance. The whole poem is a plea for forgiveness and understanding. It concludes with the lines:

  Prince Jesus, who is Lord of all,

  Keep us from’the tyranny of hell:

  Let the devil have no claim over us.

  Men, make no mockery here,

  But pray that God absolves us all.

  Nobody can say with certainty what led Jean-Pierre to tie a piece of cord around his neck the next day and attach the other end to the toilet tank lever high on the bathroom wall. The most probable explanation is that he wanted to discover for himself what it felt like to have a noose around his neck and to sway in the wind. ‘Balade des Pendus’ was part of his school curriculum, and he might have been asked to recite it, or comment on it, at any time. Perhaps he could match the power of the Jean Deschamps reading if he knew the feeling at first hand?

  Whatever the explanation, André and Magda Trocmé returned from a Sunday afternoon walk to find Jean-Pierre dead, his body suspended in a crouching position above the lavatory, his feet touching the floor, with the noose still in place. They tried to revive him, but it was too late. When Dr Riou examined the body, he was in no doubt as to the cause of death: Jean-Pierre’s neck was broken, probably as a result of falling while still wearing the noose. There seems to be little question of suicide: there was no note, no history of depression and the bathroom door was not locked. He had been facing the bathroom mirror, probably studying his efforts to reproduce Deschamps’ powerful performance, when he slipped.

  The Trocmés were distraught. There is no account of Jean-Pierre’s death in Magda’s memoirs. She left it to her husband to speak for them both. André Trocmé even lost his faith in God, however briefly.

  I could no longer pray because my prayer sometimes bounced against an angry God who told me: It is because you went into hiding and because you have been afraid of death. I took your son instead of taking you.’At other times my prayer simply disappeared into nothingness and I stopped praying because
I could not have a dialogue with a God who did not say anything, who was elsewhere, in another world.

  For the second time in little more than a month, the Plateau was called on to mourn the death of an innocent child. Jean-Pierre was buried alongside Manou Barraud.

  • • •

  Danielle Le Forestier went to Le Puy in the hope of visiting her husband and perhaps pleading on his behalf. She was refused. She made a second trip, this time accompanied by André Trocmé and Auguste Bohny, the Swiss Red Cross representative on the Plateau. This time she was led to the office of Major Schmahling, the most senior German officer in Le Puy.

  To this day there is controversy over what exactly happened, and what was said at the meeting. However, it is uncontroversial to say that Danielle, together with Trocmé and Bohny, was told that a military court had sentenced Roger Le Forestier to death. That sentence had been commuted after Le Forestier had agreed to be deported and to work as a doctor in German factories. He had already left for Germany.

  The truth was different. The question is whether Major Schmahling believed his story, or knew it was a lie. In the confusion, chaos and anarchy of France in August 1944, with decisions taken and countermanded on an hourly basis, it is simply impossible to judge what he knew, or even what he believed. But we do know the outcome. Roger Le Forestier was transferred to Fort Montluc prison in Lyon, and hence into the care of Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’.

  On 20 August, on Barbie’s orders, 120 Montluc prisoners, including Le Forestier, were taken to the village of Saint-Genis-Laval on the southwestern outskirts of Lyon. While Barbie himself supervised, the prisoners were marched, two by two, into an empty house. First they filled the upper floor of the house, then the ground floor. When all the prisoners were inside, the Germans systematically machine-gunned them all. They then set the house on fire with petrol and phosphorus so that the bodies could not be identified.

  16

  Victory

  The Allied landing on the Mediterranean coast introduced a new element into the conflict. The Normandy landing had involved mostly American, British and Canadian troops. The Mediterranean landing, for the first time, brought the Free French Army as well as the Americans into the fight for France. Led by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, known to his men as ‘King John’, the Sixth Army Group had already taken the French island of Corsica. Now it marched triumphantly north on the French mainland, absorbing members of the Resistance into its ranks as it advanced. The Germans were now in full retreat.

  On the evening of 17 August 1944, two days after the Allied landing, the German forces in the Haute-Loire were told by senior officers in Lyon that their position was, in effect, hopeless. Captain Ernst Coelle, who was in charge of the Russian contingent of Wehrmacht troops in the Haute-Loire, made contact with Lyon for the last time that afternoon. He was told to move his troops out of Le Puy and to head north to join up with the remaining German forces in Lyon. Colonel Metger, the senior German officer based in Saint-Étienne, appears to have been in Le Puy at the time, because the order was repeated to him there. Major Schmähling, who was in command of the Le Puy garrison, discussed the next moves with Metger, his superior officer. The two men agreed they would move the Le Puy garrison out the next day, to link up with Metger’s troops in Saint-Étienne, before moving on to Lyon. A motorised column would set out from Le Puy before dawn to secure the road as far as Bellevue-la-Montagne, about twenty kilometres north of Le Puy. That would open an escape route for the main body of troops, who would set off at midday. This first convoy would consist mostly of German troops, together with some civilians. As Schmähling did not have enough trucks, some of Coelle’s Russians would have to wait at the Le Puy barracks until the next day.

  • • •

  All wars produce strange coincidences, bizarre misunderstandings and chance events. This process was now about to sweep up both the Resistance and the German forces in the Haute-Loire. Pierre Fayol’s men had been told that Dr Le Forestier and two members of the Resistance were to be taken in a convoy from Le Puy to Saint-Étienne. Sadly, by then Roger Le Forestier was already in Fort Montluc prison awaiting his fate at the hands of Klaus Barbie, and therefore beyond the reach of Fayol’s well-intentioned rescue efforts. However, the Resistance was not to know this. As far as they were concerned, any German convoy leaving Le Puy would very likely include Le Forestier. They would attack it. They could not know that the German convoy leaving Le Puy on 18 August was not a prisoner escort but the beginning of a full-scale retreat of the Germans from the Haute-Loire.

  Fayol knew there was only one open route north towards Saint-Étienne out of Le Puy. All other roads were blocked by the Resistance, as was the railway line. The Germans would have to take a narrow departmental road, the D906, through Bellevue-la-Montagne, then probably turn right onto the even narrower and twisting D498 through the mountains to Saint-Étienne. The Resistance set off in a convoy of no fewer than 54 vehicles to set up an ambush. They chose Saint-Geneys, a village on the road north out of Le Puy, about six kilometres short of Bellevue-la-Montagne. Any German convoy setting off for Bellevue would necessarily pass through Saint-Geneys.

  The terrain suited Fayol well. Just beyond the northern exit from the village, there was flat land leading to a forest on one side of the road, while on the other side the land was steep but covered with grass. Fayol placed the Yl Company from Yssingeaux on the edge of the forest, and his own Section on top of the grassy hill. There they waited. Nothing came. After a long wait, one of the officers sent a motorcyclist to scout the village and report. Ominously, the motorcyclist did not return.

  Fayol decided to take a look for himself. Two front-wheel-drive Citroëns set off towards the village, with Fayol in the lead. In the car with Fayol was a Dr Grunefeld, who had insisted that he wanted to take part in a military operation. The second car was occupied by three officers, Captain Hulot, Lieutenant Kaufman and Lieutenant Gaudelette. At the edge of the village they came under heavy fire from machine guns and rifles. It is impossible to know whether the fire was coming from the advance party sent off by Schmahling to clear the route as far as Bellevue-la-Montagne, or the main convoy itself, though from other testimony about timing it seems certain that it was the advance party. Either way, Fayol was in trouble. His car was hit. The occupants of both cars decided to make a break for it. Fayol continues:

  When we got out of the car, we were greeted by bursts of machine-gun fire. Dr Grunefeld and I were able to escape to the left of the road. My only thought was to get back to my Section, but this meant crossing 800 metres of steep open fields, keeping well to the left to stay out of the field of fire. I could hear bullets whistling all around me. When I turned round, I saw Dr Grunefeld lying flat in the grass. I thought I’d never see him again. The people in the second car took off on foot in the direction of the small wood very close to the other side of the road. In that short distance, Gaudelette was killed and Hulot wounded.

  When I got back to the Section, the first person to welcome me was Abbé Volin, in full uniform. ‘Ah, it’s you,’he said to me. ‘I didn’t know who it was, but I thought: this one’s still standing.’ I told my Section to open fire again. We had M16 rifles and a Remington light machine gun, and we were able to block the convoy for quite a long time. Then they started firing mortars at us, and they were getting a bit too accurate! So I gave the order to pull back. When it was all over, the Germans had to slow right down, with forward scouts and flank guards in position while they moved. That was the moment we started harassment operations to sap the morale of the German troops.

  A few days later, Dr Grunefeld reappeared amongst us, hale and hearty. On the day of the battle, he was the only one wearing civilian clothes. He told us he had lain down in the grass and pretended that he had been taken by surprise by all the shooting. A French lorry driver picked him up and brought him to safety.

  Major Schmahling kept a diary, so it is possible to see these events from the German point of view also.
According to his journal, the night of 17 August had been a busy one in Le Puy. Files had to be destroyed. Various tradesmen and shopkeepers kept arriving at the barracks, demanding to be paid. There was also the ‘heavy responsibility’, as he put it, of taking with them all the civilians who had been placed under German protection. This was largely a euphemism for the various Vichy French miliciens and their families, who tagged along with the Germans because they could expect swift retribution from the maquisards if they stayed. At midday on 18 August, Schmahling informed the prefect of the Haute-Loire, André Bousquet, that they were leaving. However, there were more delays and the convoy did not get away until 6 pm. When it set off, the convoy was several kilometres long.

  There were more interruptions on the way. Vehicles broke down. Some of the convoy appeared to be stuck back in Le Puy, but a scout sent back to find out what was happening did not return. By 9 pm it was getting dark. Schmahling ordered the convoy to stop for the night. In three hours, they had advanced only a miserable five kilometres from Le Puy. Schmähling’s diary records their discomfort.

  18 August: It was impossible to pass the night in peace. We continually heard explosions, machine-gunfire, and grenades going off.

  19 August: Daylight finally came, bringing a morning of bright sunshine. If the situation had not been so serious, it might have been possible to enjoy this adventure. The men and women, still a bit drowsy, got out of their cars. Mothers fed their children. The soldiers had their breakfast by the side of the road. It seemed peaceful everywhere. When the sun started to warm us up, our unscheduled halt didn’t seem too bad. We were still there at eleven o’clock, waiting for Coelle and his Russians to join us. Then Lieutenant Heitz arrived. We had sent him to Le Puy to take a look around. He told us what had happened to Coelle: the Russians announced that they had had enough of the sound of guns. They weren’t moving. The barracks was probably now in the hands of the Resistance. At this point Colonel Metger gave the order to advance.