During their early stages, the underground movements existed mainly to help political refugees or young men called up for service in Germany to escape their unenviable fate. At this time I felt that I was doing my duty to the full in revictualling the Maquis and in sheltering various ‘wanted men’ at my house. By the time the military side of the resistance became more prominent I must confess I was put off by the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, and also by the petty rivalries between the various personalities and parties. No doubt I would have joined enthusiastically in any open rebellion, as I subsequently showed, but as there was nothing to impel me towards underground activity I never went in for it. I had however assured a number of the leaders that on the day when the fighting came out into the open they could count on me. I must admit, finally, that I was so taken up with the work on my farm and with my climbing, that I completely failed to realise that the resistance could play an important part in the liberation of France. I went blindly on my way without troubling myself too much with national affairs.
After the 6th June 1944 the resistance got tougher and things began to happen more quickly. In Haute-Savoie the Germans remained in control only of the main towns. They were firmly in possession of Chamonix, where most of the big hotels had been turned into hospitals for the wounded, but the other villages in the upper Arve valley were virtually in the hands of the Maquis. It was obvious that open revolt was about to break out, and I asked one of my friends, Captain Brissot-Perrin, a regular officer in command of part of the local resistance, to let me know when I should be needed to take part in the fighting. It was not long before he sent word, and I went at once to his headquarters in the hamlet of Chavand. They were short of weapons for newcomers, so I became a dispatch carrier maintaining lines of communication with another group posted above the village of Servoz. The situation was confused; the heads of the different factions of the resistance seemed unable to agree, and my friend’s authority was not recognised in all quarters. Two days after I had joined up I was standing in the sun waiting for orders in front of the old farm which served as headquarters, when a group of armed men suddenly appeared. They asked me excitedly if the captain was there, and when I replied in the affirmative they pushed me aside and rushed in. There followed the sound of a violent discussion and then they came out again. Soon afterwards Brissot-Perrin told me that he had been forced to resign. He advised me to go home, which I did at once. The Maquis now proceeded to surround Chamonix. In the face of this threat the Germans dug themselves in around the Majestic Hotel, and after much parleying surrendered without firing a shot.
France was now practically freed, but the Germans drew back to the Italian frontier which they held in strength, and from which they launched dangerous raids on the higher French valleys. The resistance was over but the war went on. The ex-Maquis were turned into military units, more or less directly linked with the First Army which had disembarked from Africa. In the Chamonix region the period of transition was highly confused, and the rivalry between various personalities and parties gave rise to positively music-hall incidents.
Like most of the Parisian climbers, among them Pierre Allain and René Ferlet, Maurice Herzog had gone to ground in the upper Arve valley and had requested a command appropriate to his rank as a lieutenant in the Reserve. As a newcomer he was not treated with any great respect by the leaders of the Armée Secrète.[1] He was so annoyed by this that, although he had no affiliations with the Communist Party, he turned, on the rebound, to the Francs Tireurs et Partisans. They were short of men, and Herzog was received with open arms and made a captain. Almost all the non-Chamonix climbers joined Herzog’s company except Rébuffat, who after a few days in its ranks went back to the A.S., judging it more politic not to compromise himself with any group bearing the least taint of communism. Herzog was one of my climbing friends, and only a few days before the liberation of Chamonix we had been the first to climb the Peuterey ridge of Mont Blanc via the north face of the Col de Peuterey. He therefore asked me to join his troop, but I was not very impressed by all the muddles and internecine quarrels of the new army. I shut myself up in my farm and got on with the potato harvest, encouraged by my wife in no uncertain terms.
Around the beginning of October I had a visit from an old J.M. friend called Beaumont. He was in a Maquis group in Val d’Isere which had become famous for its exploits under the name of ‘Compagnie Stéphane’, this being the pseudonym of its commander, the regular Captain Étienne Poiteau. Stéphane had a lot of ex-J.M. mountain instructors in his troop, as well as amateur skiers and climbers from the Dauphine. He now proposed to form a company able to take on the Germans on the high alpine ridges, and perhaps to dislodge them. In order to get more trained mountaineers he had sent Beaumont off to Chamonix with the mission of recruiting local professionals.
Beaumont had a smooth tongue – he has since done brilliantly as a representative. Using every trick of argument he sang the praises of the Compagnie Stéphane, its glorious past, its sound military organisation, its terrific spirit, and the key post I would find waiting for me. His master-stroke was to assure me that all my oldest mountain friends such as Michel Chevallier, Pierre Brun, Robert Albouy and J.-C. Laurenceau were already in the troop and asking for me to join them.
Captain Stéphane’s fine reputation and the fact that his unit was a serious military organisation, containing many of my best friends, combined with my old love of adventure to tear me away from my wife’s affection and the farm life that so much absorbed me. When I think about it today, I am lost in admiration for Sergeant Beaumont’s recruiting talents. Not only did he succeed in getting me into the army at a time when I had a horror of all things military, but he lured back to Grenoble three other Chamoniards, notably my friend the guide Laurent Cretton who was not only married but the father of three children.
It is one of my principles never to regret anything I have done: but if there is one act of madness on which I have never ceased to congratulate myself, it is having joined the Compagnie Stéphane. The eight months I spent in it were among the most wonderful in my whole life. Naturally it wasn’t as perfect as Beaumont had painted it. It was a human institution, and as such had many minor faults. But it was a most extraordinary troop, and above all its leader was an exceptional man who could communicate his enthusiasm and his belief in the cause to a degree I have never known in another human being. At the outset the company had been a simple Maquis with headquarters at Prabert, in the heart of the Belledonne range. Instead of letting his men go to pieces in the comparative idleness which was the besetting vice of so many of the Maquis, Stéphane put them through an intensive military training. They became a veritable commando with a special ability to melt away into the landscape and move from place to place under the most difficult conditions.
After the 6th of June, his team being in a state of perfect readiness, Stéphane went over to the offensive, putting into practice his personal theories about guerrilla warfare. Divided into ‘sticks’ of six or a dozen, each with a high firepower, his men moved virtually only at night and had no contact with the local populace under any pretext whatever. In this way they were for practical purposes invisible. Thanks to this method and great physical fitness, these sticks were able to carry out quick raids sometimes as far as sixty miles from base. Their objective might be to ambush a German supply column or attack a strongpoint. This done they would disappear, only to deal another blow five or ten miles farther on. The system rendered them almost uncatchable, so that they harassed the enemy to the maximum with minute loss to themselves. By their speed of movement and the number of their attacks they seemed to the enemy to be everywhere and nowhere, giving the impression of a small army.
At the time I joined the Compagnie Stéphane it was fresh from several months of intense activity and little diluted by the new elements which had come to it after the liberation. It was trained to perfection and animated by a tremendous esprit de corps. The prevailing atmosphere
was one of enthusiasm, comradeship and human warmth, recalling the best days of the J.M. I need hardly add that I found these psychological conditions ideal, and from the outset I took to them like a duck to water.
For all that, my first few days were a bit disappointing. The Compagnie was in the process of being incorporated into the 15th Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, then being formed, and as a result it had to be enlarged and reorganised along more conventional military lines. A certain amount of confusion ensued; discipline was relaxed, and apart from a few hours of military instruction per day, I spent the best part of my time listening to the heroes of the Maquis relating their adventures. Luckily this did not go on for long. We were posted to quarters a few miles above a small spa called Uriage for intensive training before going into the front line. The ‘taming’ of the company turned out to have been no more than superficial. In the event this rather special unit remained very largely independent, and the traditions of the Maquis were maintained.
Stéphane was fair-haired and very tall, with a school-girl complexion. Candid grey eyes lit up his slightly plump face. Under the exterior of a shy, clumsy young man, he hid the energy and courage of a condottiere, together with an abundance of intelligence, psychological insight, and humanity. He now sought to preserve in his company the virtues which had made it famous: iron morale, toughness, and mobility. To this end he led us a hard life. We slept in bivouac tents whatever the weather, and quite often on manoeuvres we would simply lie down fully dressed under a tree. We had no transport and no cookhouse. Each section of a dozen men was an independent unit which did its own cooking over an open fire.
Apart from firing practice, map reading and Morse code, the training mainly consisted of incessant manoeuvres among the mountains and forests of the Belledonne massif. Exercises of varying size and complexity succeeded each other uninterruptedly. One time it might be a section attack on a given map reference, another time it might be on company or even battalion scale against a supposed enemy unit of comparable magnitude. The main principle behind it all seemed to be to get us used to living in a state of perpetual readiness for action, whether by day or night.
The manoeuvres were often carried out with live ammunition and hand grenades. Naturally we were told to aim well over the heads of our ‘enemies’, and not to throw grenades actually among them. Nevertheless some of our old guerrillas took a malicious pleasure in sending bullets whistling about our ears, or, worse still, letting off grenades only a few yards away; all of which was quite impressive to a raw recruit like myself. I particularly remember how, one day while crossing a glade, I was caught in the fire of a light machine gun hidden somewhere above. A first burst tore up the turf a few paces in front of me. I sprinted to the left, but the whizzing of bullets forestalled me at once; and when I fled back to the right I was quickly brought up short by other bursts in that direction. Finally, in despair, I threw myself to the ground and lay still until my tormentors should see fit to leave me in peace. All this playing around with real bullets may seem rather stupid, but in fact there were no serious accidents, and there is no doubt that it quickly hardened us to war. If we had had to go straight from our training into heavy fighting, many lives would have been spared simply because we were relatively used to being under fire.
During the whole of that month of October 1944 the weather throughout the Alps was truly frightful. It rained non-stop and snowed down to five and a half thousand feet, a height we sometimes passed in the course of manoeuvres. We were continuously soaked and it was almost impossible ever to get our clothes dry. In such conditions our existence, which was already hard enough, what with forced marches, heavy loads, night watches and insufficient rations, became trying in the extreme. This was particularly so for the new recruits, who had never known anything like it. But in spite of everything our hardened veterans gave such an example of infectious enthusiasm that the troop’s morale remained high, and we played soldiers with unabated zest. Everyone took these operations as seriously as if they had been real warfare. Personally, although I found it quite hard going, this fraternal life of intensive action in contact with nature suited me perfectly, and I gave myself up to it unreservedly.
About the middle of November, the 6th, 11th and 15th Battalions of Chasseurs Alpins went forward to take the place of the somewhat diverse units which had been holding the line for more than two months in the Maurienne sector, from Mont Tabor to the Col du Mont Cenis. The mountains were white with snow, the thickness of which made any military activity difficult, so that not much was going on. The greater part of our battalion was detailed off to guard villages and works of art, while the specialised skiing sections held the advanced outposts. Captain Stéphane instituted a series of raids of varying size, acting on the theory that attack is the best method of defence. His idea was to give the Germans a healthy respect for our fighting abilities. Together with several of my friends I was given the responsibility, in my capacity as a mountain specialist, of helping the officers to plan and carry out these attacks.
I rather doubt if Stéphane had any great faith in the strictly military value of these commando raids. No doubt he rightly sought to avoid any tendency to sink into apathy, and reckoned that these small exchanges would keep us on our toes and maintain our confidence. By the same token it should be mentioned that, apart from the occasional bombardment or burst of machine gun fire, the Teutons who faced us showed so little spirit of aggression that there was a real risk of boredom. It seems likely that if we had been content to leave them alone the whole winter would have passed by without a drop of blood being spilt, but this sort of passivity was in no way to the liking of our braves, who were on the lookout for scalps. Since the Germans would not come to us, Stéphane had no alternative but to seek them out in order to appease our thirst for action. This he proceeded to do with the greatest of intelligence and humanity, only involving us in affairs which were really more sporting than dangerous.
My first operation was a good example. I was detailed to assist the ‘Ops’ group, under Captain Bouteret, to study the possibility of harassing the Germans on their Col de la Roue flank. For a normal sort of unit this narrow saddle, situated between two very steep summits, would have been quite out of the question as an objective: but it was obvious that if a group of mountaineers could succeed in climbing the Grande Bagne (a summit of some ten thousand five hundred feet which overlooked the col) by a face hidden from the enemy’s view, they would be able to fire on him. He could hardly fail to be surprised and shaken by such an attack, coming from a quarter which would normally be judged inaccessible at this time of year.
From a purely mountaineering point of view the plan was not lacking in daring. It was now winter, the cold was severe, and the steep face which would have to be climbed was plastered with snow. But fortunately my section included a number of guides and skilled climbers, and I knew that with men like this it was possible to do things that would otherwise be out of the question. I assured the captain that we could get to the summit of the Grande Bagne and fire on the Germans from a range of about seven hundred and fifty yards, and although our chances of actually hitting anyone were pretty slim in the circumstances he gave the order to proceed. The climb went more easily than we had expected, thanks to a steep gully of hard-frozen snow and a slightly dicey corniced ridge. The most difficult part in the event was to persuade Bouteret to come with us along this last bit, which was admittedly very exposed.[2] He was a jovial, likeable southerner, fonder of hunting skirts than climbing mountains. In his inimitable Bordeaux accent he called out to us: ‘You’ll do me in with all this bloody climbing. You can shoot Huns just as well without my help – I don’t wish the poor bastards any harm.’ Our brave adjutant was cut short by several disrespectful pulls on the rope which soon brought him up to us, and eight or ten of us reassembled on the narrow summit.
The Germans were clearly visible almost directly below us. They seemed without a care in the world. Some were
sun-bathing, others practising their skiing. At a range of seven hundred and fifty yards, and downhill at that, a light machine gun is of very limited efficiency. We had little real chance of hitting anybody, but Bouteret, once more conscious of his position as our commander, ordered us to fire a few bursts. The effect was spectacular. The enemy had no idea where the fire was coming from, and was thrown into complete disorder. Men ran in every direction in the snow, but no one seemed to be hurt. After a few minutes of this cruel game we grew weary of shooting at men who were unable to defend themselves and withdrew, satisfied at having carried out our mission.
During the course of the winter I took part in a number of other operations of the same kind, some of which were, however, rather more dangerous. One of these has been described by the writer-mountaineer Jacques Boell in his excellent book A Ski-scout at War.[3] Boell was at this time attached to our brigade staff, and his account is evidently based on conversations with a number of those who took part. It is largely accurate as to fact, but interprets the tactical and psychological motivations behind our actions in rather a personal way. In effect he has made a serious military enterprise, intended to crack the enemy’s will to attack, out of an escapade more sporting than warlike, mainly designed to relieve the boredom of life in the advanced outposts. To each his own version. From the headquarters in Modane it probably did look like that. To us who lived the adventure it seemed quite otherwise.
Conquistadors of the Useless Page 10
