by Douglas Boyd
He was convinced that Pétain’s sacking him cost months of extra captivity for hundreds of thousands of French POWs and that the Germans had been about to reduce the occupation costs from 400 million francs per day to 180 million, had he been left in office.
NOTES
1. P. Webster, Pétain’s Crime (London: Pan, 2001), p. 88.
2. Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 420.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. Pechanski, Collaboration and Resistance, p. 39.
5. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 85–6.
6. Interviewed in Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 250.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. No single source is available. The figures given are from historian Robert Aron and L’Institut National de la Statistique.
9. Burrin, Living with Defeat, pp. 264–7.
10. Ibid., p. 273.
11. Ibid., p. 373.
12. Chronique de la France et des Français (Paris: Éditions Legrand, 1987), p. 1,107.
13. Quoted in Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 75.
14. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains, p. 64.
15. Kernan, France, p. 26.
16. Laval, Unpublished Diary, pp. 86–7.
11
COURAGE OF A
QUIET KIND
While the intellectuals talked, the politicians manoeuvred and the businessmen schemed, a number of ordinary people living less than 15km from the author’s house in south-west France decided independently of each other to do what they could to keep the fluttering flame of freedom from being extinguished altogether.
Georges Chabrier returned home to St-Pey-de-Castets after being demobilised in Pau to find that his home was 300m on the wrong side of the Demarcation Line. Volunteering underage in the First World War, he was twice wounded during three years at the front. Demobilised in 1918 aged 20 and with a leg troubled for the rest of his life by pieces of German shrapnel, his respect for authority survived the hardships of the 1920s and 1930s. Called up again in 1940, he served with a unit of other wounded veterans in Pau until demobbed at the Armistice. Believing that the marshal had saved his life at Verdun, Chabrier supported him as legal head of state, but nevertheless decided that his duties as a patriotic French citizen were not yet discharged, whatever the generals and politicians had decided.
Picking up the pieces of his peacetime life, he spent weekday mornings as an auxiliary postman; in the afternoons he worked as a carpenter and the local road-sweeper and school caretaker. Collecting the mail from the nearby town of Castillon, where it arrived by train, he cycled back with it to the village of Pujols, where there was a sub post office inside the thirteenth-century castle built there on the orders of England’s King John I. After the incoming mail had been sorted, Chabrier set off on his bicycle again with his bag of letters in order to deliver them.
St-Pey and Castillon were in the Occupied Zone, Pujols in the Free Zone, so Chabrier had a pass from the local Kommandantur entitling him to cross the line at any time between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. The first risk he took was to carry across the line letters slipped inside the wrappers of rolled-up magazines for ex-servicemen whom he knew. Most covered family matters too complicated or too intimate for the official printed postcards; others were business correspondence that the writers did not want seen by German censors. If caught, the routine penalty for this was seven days in prison, and two weeks for a second offence but, had any of the letters contained military information, the penalty would have been a firing squad or deportation to a concentration camp.
For a man with a wife and children, whom he was also putting at risk, to take this decision required a very steadfast kind of courage. Twice Chabrier was denounced: on the first occasion, the guards searching him did not think to look inside the magazine wrappers; on the second occasion, the Germans arrived to search his carpentry workshop while he was having his hair cut by the village barber. Luckily, a neighbour secreted the post-bag with a bundle of clandestine mail in a deep pile of wood shavings. The Alsatian sniffer dog sneezed several times at the pungent resin in the pitch-pine shavings, but his handler did not think of digging into the pile. Later, Chabrier told a fellow résistant: ‘The Germans searched everywhere in the house and the barn. They took away all the letters I had written my wife while in uniform, and kept them two weeks before telling me I could have them back. By God, I was frightened that time!’
George Chabrier’s pass to cross the Demarcation Line.
Running the village telephone cabin and cooking lunch for sixty-three pupils in the village school, his wife looked after him and their two sons. She was soon pregnant again, but the couple had to move out of their bedroom into the spare room when two German soldiers patrolling the line were billeted on them. One of the lodgers was the driver of the Oberleutnant who had signed Chabrier’s Ausweis. Having been a German teacher in Paris before the war, this officer spoke excellent French, confessing to his involuntary hosts with a conspiratorial wink that he hoped one day to join his wife and children in America. Judging that his consistent under-performance in the Wehrmacht made him a likely candidate for the eastern front after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, he drove the car into the Free Zone one day and was never heard of again.
With two less amenable Wehrmacht men sleeping in the house every night, Chabrier’s next step was even more courageous. Although bona fide refugees were allowed to return home in the summer of 1940, once the controls were tightened up there were many thousands of people who wanted to cross illicitly. The risk of being caught was high and only local inhabitants knew when the mobile patrols were likely to pass a given point, so Chabrier quietly informed his ex-service friends that he was prepared to help people who needed to cross without papers.
French gendarmes and SS troops checked the identity of all passengers alighting at Castillon station because it was the last stop before the frontier. Line-crossers, therefore, left the train at the previous stop, St-Magne, leaving their bags on the train. Railway staff turned a blind eye when Chabrier’s 15-year-old elder son arrived at Castillon station to load the luggage onto his father’s cart pulled by an aged mare and brought them home, where they were hidden until nightfall. While the two Germans slept in the main bedroom, he then reharnessed the mare and drove the luggage quietly through the curfew to a bridge over the stream that ran along the line. There, he loosed the family’s ancient sheepdog to cast about sniffing for anyone nearby. Since the guards had orders to shoot to kill, it was only when the dog was satisfied there was no one around that the boy carried the bags across and hid them on the other side.
Map of the Castillon area.
His father meanwhile rendezvoused with his friends bringing the refugees and led them across the line between patrols. They collected their luggage – sometimes far too much of it – and followed him up to Pujols on its hill, where he discreetly left them with the local café owner before retracing the dangerous route homewards to snatch a few hours’ sleep before dawn.
No one kept a record of how many people father and son helped in this way. All Chabrier would say was that they included women with babies and children, escaped POWs and even an English colonel. Usually, he was warned to expect a group by the Mayor of Libourne or the Procureur de la République, a sort of district prosecutor. Having belonged to no organised group, neither they nor Chabrier received any medals or commendations after the Liberation; nor did he or his elder son ever talk about what they had done.
As to why so many people wanted to cross into the Free Zone, where they were still far from safe, a large part of the reason was simply ignorance of conditions there, due to the unavailability of Vichy newspapers in the Occupied Zone and the frequent attacks on Pétain in the German-controlled press in Paris, which made life in the Free Zone seem attractive. In a sense it was preferable: Simone de Beauvoir noted on a visit to the Free Zone in 1941 the availability of foreign newspapers and American films no longer available in Paris.1 For immigrants at risk there was also a powerful magnet at Vichy in the p
resence of US and other neutral diplomatic missions, from whom a visa might be forthcoming.
On one occasion an attractive and well-dressed woman in her mid-30s with a Parisian accent arrived at Chabrier’s house out of the blue carrying a small suitcase and saying that she worked in the War Ministry and needed to cross the line, but had lost her papers. With his wife still in bed after the birth of their third child, Chabrier played the part of a stupid peasant, ignoring the woman’s show of distress and explaining that all she had to do was go to the German Kommandantur and ask them for a duplicate pass. His instinct was proved right a couple of weeks later when she was seen in uniform at the check-point in nearby Capitourlan, strip-searching women crossing the line there.
Had Chabrier needed any reminder of the penalties for the risks he ran, it came when an old service comrade named Teyssier, living a few kilometres to the north of St-Pey, was caught, tortured and returned dead to his family. His cousin Sabre, who was the butcher in another neighbouring village, died in a death camp crematorium – as did Coupry, another friend caught in August 1944 taking people across. A fourth friend, Darfeuille, was taking some documents across when shot dead by the guards several hundred metres inside the Free Zone.
Some were just unlucky, but who betrayed the others? Chabrier answered:
It wasn’t just the vigilance of the guards and German customs officers. Other passeurs who worked for profit – ten francs for a letter and as much as 10,000 francs for taking a person across – denounced those of us who did it for free. Nobody will ever know how many bodies of rich Jews who had been carrying all their wealth with them were fished out of the Lidoire [a tributary of the Dordogne, along which the Line ran] after being killed by these people.2
At the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997, an old lady whose parents, grandmother and younger brother were deported, recalled being entrusted to a passeur, who raped and abused her.3 Another veteran of 1914–18, who had spent time in a German POW camp, was Raoul Laporterie, Mayor of Bascons in Les Landes living on the Vichy side of the Line, but with four clothing stores to manage on the other side, which required him to cross and re-cross it every day. Like Chabrier, he also began by taking a few letters across for people he knew. Because this sector of the line was near the strategic Mont-de-Marsan airfield, thousands of trees were chopped down to make it more difficult for people to slink across. Laporterie decided that the best way to get people out of the Occupied Zone was to do it openly by abusing his powers as mayor and using blank identity cards and genuine rubber stamps in his office to create new identities for them.
As the Germans were suspicious of any obviously new cards, Laporterie had the brilliant idea of resurrecting the population of the cemetery to make new identities that would stand up to scrutiny. In one year, the population, on paper, of Bascons thus grew from 450 to 1,850, to the benefit of Édith Piaf’s husband Jacques Pills and André Malraux’ wife Clara, among others. It was easy enough to scuff and crease the cards Laporterie made, but an apparently old card in a new wallet attracted attention, so the ‘price’ he demanded from line-crossers was the old Cellophane wallet in which their genuine ID card had been kept.
On 10 October 1940, Laporterie’s help was sought by ‘Col Olivier’, a Free French officer parachuted back into France the previous night on a mission to survey the airfield, from where the Luftwaffe’s long-range Focke-Wulf Condors flew missions to attack Allied shipping and vector U-boats based in French ports onto convoys far out in the Atlantic. With the neighbouring race track taken over to extend the runway for Condors with drop-tanks that gave them the range to bomb Canada and the US, constant updates were required in London, the biggest scoop coming when a friend of Laporterie was handed detailed plans of the base by an anti-Nazi Austrian officer on the airfield.4
As the first winter of the occupation drew nearer, country folk were better off than townspeople because their heating and cooking was mostly by wood from the forests hauled home, sawn and split by hand. Town dwellers faced a bleak, coal-less winter, Simone de Beauvoir recounting how it was so freezing in their apartment that she went early each day to the Café Flore to grab two little marble-topped tables near the stove, on which Sartre and she worked by the light of acetylene lamps.5
It was for most people a sad Christmas that marked the end of the first half-year of the occupation, summed up by a rhyme parodying a Christmas carol. No one knows where it originated and there were several versions, but all went something like this:
Christmas has been cancelled, the Virgin and Child evacuated.
St Joseph is in a concentration camp and the stable has been
requisitioned.
The angels have been shot down. The Wise Men are in England.
The cow is in Berlin, the ass in Rome,
and the star has been painted blackout blue6 by order of the Blockleiter.
Governments depend on the fact that most citizens quickly accept new rules and regulations. Already France was effectively two countries: to the west and north of the Demarcation Line the population was subjected daily to the sight of armed German soldiers and the rhythm of life was set by the occupation authorities; in the predominantly agricultural Free Zone, most people had yet to see their first German soldier.
In Paris and other main cities, not only was the pre-war roar of traffic absent on the first day of 1941, but so were pedestrians: the French service of the BBC had asked every patriot to keep off the streets from 3 p.m. From five minutes to the hour Germans sobering up after their Sylvesternacht celebrations found themselves in a ghost city during this uncanny demonstration that actually broke no laws and therefore could not be punished.
A rhythm that haunts the sound-track of every film set in wartime France was first heard two weeks later when Victor de Laveleye of the BBC Belgian service used the Morse code for the letter V, which is dot-dot-dot-dash, in his programme of 14 January, asking listeners to display next day a letter V – standing for victoire in French and vrijheid meaning ‘freedom’ in Flemish. The same rhythm being also the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the BBC adopted this, played on timpani, to begin its broadcasts to Occupied Europe from 22 March onwards.
On 3 January 1941 Paris University reopened after its two-month closure. Two days later the sound of clogs on pavements rang out once again all over France. With most leather requisitioned for boots, belts and harness for the Wehrmacht’s hundreds of thousands of draught horses, shoe rationing came into force on 5 January, after which storekeepers attempted to convince customers that wooden-soled shoes were actually quite fashionable, with compressed cork a quieter alternative for those who could not stand the noise of wood.
At the top end of the fashion market, in the haute couture salons, the spring collections were sparse, each designer being limited to seventy-five patterns. Rochas’ idea of economising on cloth was a daring long-sleeved dress in black taffeta with one shoulder provocatively bare. Belts were limited to a maximum width of 4cm to save cloth. Germaine Grès’ audacity in exhibiting a jersey dress using far too much material for Vichy’s austerity measures cost her license to trade – which was restored only after the personal intervention of Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and a host of other luminaries.
To ease the shortages by recycling, a decree dated 23 January forbade throwing out old metal, paper, skins, rubber, feathers, bones, animal skin and leather, which had to be put out for collection by municipal employees driving horse-drawn carts. Made from traditionally secret and presumably unrationed ingredients, perfume continued to be the luxury present always obtainable by those who had the money: Schiaparelli, Guerlain and the other great names knew a boom after the arrival of the Wehrmacht.
The success of the Compagnons – by January 1941 membership had risen to 20,000 – attracted the attention of the taxman: Dhavernas was detained in Paris for several weeks to explain to the Inspection des Finances where all the money had gone. The coming spring was to see a split in the movement, reflecting the inappropria
teness for town life of a daily timetable designed for tents and campfires. The emphasis on physical work in the rural chantiers was replaced for the town-dwelling compagnon by service to his neighbours, with urban companies renamed companies normales – in whose curriculum physical education, amateur dramatics, choral singing and organisation of morale-raising events for the population replaced labouring in the fields and forests.
Depending on the instructors, the level of achievement could be high: producer Michel Richard took his ‘gang show’ on tour with sixty-six performances in the Free Zone and also to Angers, Le Mans, Tours and Paris in the Occupied Zone and 6,000 copies of the Compagnons’ songbook were sold. With vocal training taken as seriously as the other activities, the movement’s most popular choral ensemble was named Les Compagnons de la Musique in September, eventually becoming world-famous after the war, when it toured the world initially under the patronage of Édith Piaf as ‘Les Compagnons de la Chanson’.
January also saw the first flyers produced on a child’s printing set by a group of young people who sought to rebut the political and religious differences dividing the population. For the name of their network of protest they chose the place where an unexpected victory over the Prussians had unified the French people 150 years earlier. The Valmy network’s first slogan to mushroom on walls all over the capital was, ‘We have one enemy: the invader’. More successful was the the second, more snappy slogan: ‘Hitler’s Hoover is emptying our country faster than you know.’
On 24 January Paris Prefect of Police Roger Langeron was arrested by the Germans for his unco-operative attitude, and divested of his office. His two successors were to suffer the same fate, because it was virtually impossible to exercise the functions of the office without becoming either a lackey or an enemy of the SD. Yet Marcel Déat, who had been a close associate of de Gaulle in 1935–36,7 was not alone in wanting larger doses of Hitler. On 1 February he launched the far-right National Populaire (RNP), accusing the Vichy government of being ‘in the pay of the Judeo-Anglo-Saxon conspiracy’.
