by Allan Massie
Agents from within France sent us several reports of American overtures to Laval. There was still a clique in the State Department sympathetic to Vichy, and we knew that, for many influential parts of the American war machine, the favoured French solution was a purified Vichy, which would contrive to exclude both Communists and Gaullists from the Administration. That was not our only problem. We also knew of Communist plans to take over full control of the Resistance in order that the German expulsion should be followed by a coup or revolution which would establish in Paris a government closer to Moscow than to London or Washington. We of course had no desire to be close to any foreign capital, for in the circumstances of the time, such closeness could only mean inferiority and subservience. Therefore, we Gaullists of the first hour sought a means whereby France could be re-established, free, independent and entire.
All this is common knowledge, but it is a necessary preliminary to the story I must now tell you.
One morning that month I arrived late in the office on account of a vile London fog. Such fog no longer exists, but it caught you by the throat, made your eyes red, and chilled the bones. I was told by my secretary that Colonel Pelissier, my immediate superior, wished to see me.
Pelissier was a man for whom I had little respect. He had been serving in Syria in 1940 and had not joined La France Libre till late in ’42. He was however a man of considerable acumen.
‘There’s been an interesting development,’ he said. ‘It affects you personally.’
He stood with his back to me and gazed into the fog. There was silence in the street below, and, without visibility, we might have existed in limbo. I knew he didn’t like me, and was on my guard.
‘One of the problems concerning you, Captain, has always been the fact of your brother’s adherence to Vichy.’
‘He was a Junior Minister from the beginning of the regime till the winter of 1942,’ I said. ‘It was a time when many who are now with us were against us. Since his resignation he has taken no part in public life.’
‘Are you in communication with him?’
I saw the trap. ‘Not directly,’ I said, ‘but, as you know, through our various sources of information, it’s easy to know most things about people of any prominence.’
‘He went to see Laval at Châteldon last month.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘in November.’
‘Well,’ Pelissier said, ‘The General is curious about that meeting.’
That evening, when I was pondering this conversation, I received a telephone call at home. It was a young man who refused to give his name. He insisted that it was necessary that we meet. He mentioned the names of people whom I knew to be in the Resistance, which would serve, he said, as a form of reference. And then he said, ‘It concerns your brother, too.’
We arranged to meet in the Café Royal. He assured me that he would ‘make the contact’.
I wondered if I should report this approach to Pelissier, and concluded that could wait. In doing this, I neglected the old military advice that one should always protect the flanks and rear.
The Café Royal was still in those days like a Parisian café. I’m told this hasn’t been true for a long time. I chose it precisely because it was public, for I was convinced that I was being followed, and was ready to guess that my mysterious caller might also be an object of interest to both our security service and the British one. It seemed a good idea therefore to avoid anything clandestine.
I ordered a glass of beer and sat down at one of the marble-top tables with a good view of the door. There were many soldiers in the bar, some of them intellectuals whom I knew at least to say good evening to. After half an hour I was beginning to think that my telephone caller was not going to turn up, and was amusing myself by trying to catch and hold the eye of a very attractive blonde girl whose companion seemed to be approaching a stage of tiresome inebriation. I was just calculating that when he had had one more drink she would welcome my approach, when a young man in a belted raincoat and a slouch hat – looking absurdly like a figure from an American gangster movie – paused at the doorstep, scanned the room and came directly to my table. He wore a cigarette in the right corner of his mouth. He made no apology for being late, but sat down and clapped his hands to summon a waiter.
‘That’s not how it’s done here,’ I said, but, to my irritation, one at once came to take his order for two glasses of beer.
‘You have the advantage of me,’ I said, ‘for I don’t know your name.’
I expected him to be evasive, probably for no reason beyond the love of mystery which afflicted so many then, but he at once replied:
‘Hervé Querouaille.’
‘I see.’
I knew of course of his sister’s liaison with your father. He smiled, throwing off his absurd look of an American gangster and letting me see only a charming boy who had dressed up for play. ‘You could have come to the office,’ I said. ‘Since you’re in London, you can have nothing to fear.’
‘I’ve been a member of the Resistance for the last nine months,’ he said, ‘and in that time I’ve come to see that I don’t like everything about it. That’s why I’m here really. But that’s also why I have thought it a good idea to meet you away from your headquarters. Do you love your brother?’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘I am devoted to my sister.’
He began to talk. Words tumbled out with inconceivable rapidity, which would have defeated any stenographer, and with a turbulence which blurred my understanding and quite dulls my memory. No matter. The gist of his rhetoric was simple.
He began by insisting that he was a Breton; a Breton first, and a Frenchman second. (I let that pass without comment; it seemed to me merely the romanticism of youth; and now I reflect that all political activity is a form of romanticism. But his was diseased, perhaps.) However, this wasn’t the point, he said; everyone had deceived the Bretons, always. He accepted that for a moment. The question was, how to save the peace which was surely coming.
‘You haven’t brought me here to listen to some half-baked political philosophy?’
Did I say that, or merely think it? I drank my beer, which was already warm. Possibly I said it, for I remember that he flushed. My brother had asked him to come. I looked up. He nodded his head. I couldn’t doubt his honesty, his sincerity. Lucien, he said, remembered our last conversation in Bordeaux: how we were each seeking to serve France, in different ways.
‘He says to tell you that the parallel lines are converging. He says you will know what he means.’
That was proof at least that he had spoken to Lucien, for I remembered his fancy that frequently courses which seem opposed have nevertheless the same goal and may be represented by converging parallel lines. (It is curious, Etienne, that this theory was later advanced by that other opaque metaphysician, the Italian Aldo Moro.)
‘He has authority to indicate how this can be achieved. And he said to tell you that Rupert has plans to control the east wind. Does that make sense?’
‘Did he mention the wolf-pit?’ I said.
‘How did you know?’
The drunk man at the further table was now twisting the girl’s arm. She gave a little yelp of pain and tried to take it away. I got up and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘The lady doesn’t enjoy that, you know.’
Absurd to remember that. It was so direct in comparison with our conversation. He tried to hit me. I cuffed him across the cheek with the back of my hand, and he subsided, blubbering. The incident caused little stir, but, instead of thanking me, the girl began to comfort him.
‘Why don’t you go away?’ she said. ‘You foreigners. Bloody foreigners.’
We went into the blackout. Knowing my way, I took the boy’s arm to guide him.
‘You will have to come to Carlton Gardens,’ I said.
I keep, Etienne, being side-tracked by detail: the feel of the damp mackintosh, and the bony elbow I held between my thumb and forefinger. And all th
e time the boy’s voice throwing waves over me like the tireless sea; it was impossible to believe either that he could keep a secret, or that anyone could recognise one in the stream of rhetoric. He still didn’t want to come to Carlton Gardens, but I insisted.
They were suspicious there, naturally. Exiles inhabit a house full of dark twisting corridors, where the air is heavy with resentment, fear, envy and doubt. Whatever someone proposes must be read every way: through a magnifying-glass, before a mirror, tested for invisible ink. It was eventually the General himself who summoned me:
‘So, they tell me you want to go to France to see your brother, Laval’s friend.’
‘He has sent a message by way of a young man in the Resistance.’
‘There is not one Resistance. There are many differing acts of resistance. And there are different people to be resisted. Some day we shall have to be friends with the Germans. This is true enough even though Monsieur Laval now enunciates the same sentiment.’
‘And who knows? Even the Germans themselves may change direction, sir.’
‘I understood that was one point which you were going to ascertain.’
‘Our mission has been approved,’ I said to Hervé. ‘You will have to say your affectionate farewells to that girl you have been seeing.’
There were delays. There always were. Hervé was able to postpone his goodbyes to his little blonde. As for me, I spent evenings, homesick, in the Café Royal. The thought of France was enough to make me tremble; the conviction that I would not be able to see either Berthe or the children dismayed me.
The way young Hervé talked of his sister made me feel happier for Lucien. He made her seem a girl of the utmost sympathy. No doubt, in the private life of the family, she was as he said. We can never tell how we shall behave in extremity, and in her case it was to be a question of loyalties. There is nothing I have found more perplexing and morally confusing than loyalties. They destroyed your life, didn’t they, when Berthe told you how your poor Freddie – yes, Etienne, I still attach that possessive adjective to her when I think of her, and always with a little stab of pain – how your poor Freddie, I say, was broken on the wheel of loyalties.
There were a number of us, mostly Gaullists of the first hour, who made a habit of meeting in the Café. I shan’t trouble you with their names, for only one is relevant. But a few nights before I was at last, it seemed, about to go, we were discussing just this question: to what should a man be loyal unto death?
Four of us would have called ourselves Catholics, but none suggested the Church, or even God.
‘The Protestant vice of private judgement has infected us.’
‘France?’
We had all abandoned home, risked much for France, but there was only a raising of glasses and sipping of drinks at the suggestion.
‘Naturally we would die for our idea of France, but one has to confess that one would have only a precarious hold on the cliffside of meaning.’
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that each of us has his own France, and that it is impossible to recognise an identity. Would you die for a Communist France? Or for Laval’s?’
‘Wives and families?’
‘Haven’t we all abandoned them to the mercy of the Germans?’
One whom you will recognise, though you have never met, Etienne, Freddie’s father Guy, raised his head, which in moments of emotion never failed to make me think of a self-consciously weary buffalo – if you can grant the conceit of a self-conscious buffalo – and said:
‘I would die for revenge.’
‘For an idea?’
‘For the fact of satisfaction.’
‘You mean you would die content, having achieved revenge? Or that you would be content to die failing to exact it?’
‘I mean it is what I want, and I shall put my life at risk to obtain it.’
It was at that moment that I looked across the room and saw your mother. She was with a young officer of the Royal Air Force. Naturally I abandoned metaphysics, leapt up and embraced her. Her young man, from sheer embarrassment, as I thought, made himself useful, bustling around to obtain drinks. Polly reproached me, ‘You never come to see me, Armand darling.’
As ever, it delighted me to see her. I have never known a woman who aroused in me such a strong desire to protect her. It was absurd, for none needed protection less. She wore the armour of immaturity preserved in champagne that never lost its sparkle. It had been proved to her time and again that life wasn’t a game or a society dance; she acted as if she thought such proofs ridiculous. Whenever I saw her I felt a soberly responsible eighteen, and was possessed by a powerful desire to enter into her world of fixed and naive assumptions.
‘I’m going to marry Roddy,’ she said, pointing at the young officer, ‘as soon as things can be fixed up.
‘I’ll never stop being fond of Lucien,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t live with him again. He asks too much of everyone and everything. He stopped being fun a long time ago.’
I would like to think she shed a tear as she said that, but actually she laughed.
‘I often think I should have married you, darling, instead.’ And do you know, if we had, we would have been happy. Lucien wasn’t made for happiness.
At that moment Hervé entered the Café. I made excuses to Polly. As we left I reflected that once I would have found a keen pleasure in introducing the brother of Lucien’s mistress to his wife. Now it seemed things were sufficiently complicated already.
Two nights later we were parachuted into France from a Lancaster bomber. Our reception was well prepared. The local Maquis took charge of us, with that rough suspicion which they reserved for visitors from London. However, Hervé’s credentials were satisfactory: one of the reception committee was his mistress of the previous autumn. The eagerness of her greeting made me jealous.
This cell of the Resistance was run by the local landowner, which was unusual. He escorted me to the château.
‘Isn’t this a bit risky?’ I said.
‘It’s just as risky to hide you in the forest. Besides, though I used to be a playboy, I’m neither a fool nor an amateur at this business. There’s a perfectly respectable identity awaiting you. And papers, of course. You’re from the Ministry of Agriculture.’
‘Is that credible?’
‘Perfectly. They keep sending me circulars about natural fertilisers. I’ve requested an expert. You.’
I was never for the next ten days quite sure where we were. That was a measure of the distrust which the Resistance on the ground felt for us in London. We travelled by night, though it seemed to me that that made our journeys more dangerous, for anyone moving after dark was likely to attract the attention of the Germans. However, I didn’t raise the point; I did our colleagues the courtesy of supposing that they should know what was safest. They were avid for news of the direction of the war, reluctant to offer anything in exchange.
‘You mustn’t be offended,’ Hervé said, ‘it’s best for everyone that we know only what is necessary about our friends.’
I did not argue, though I thought that their reticence scarcely augured well for us Gaullists. But then Hervé was hardly one of us.
There were delays. I remember three days holed up in a mountain farmhouse. The peasant who owned it disliked having us there, grudged everything we ate, and would have preferred us to remain in the loft above his barn, if he hadn’t also been reluctant to let us out of his sight. We had three companions there, young men, whom I would have taken for criminals if they hadn’t assured me of their patriotism. One of them had secured himself a bottle of armagnac; as the level sank, he whispered to me that his colleagues had only joined the Resistance in order to escape the labour draft for Germany. Probably this was true. I wondered what his motive was. This dismal trio dampened even young Hervé’s ebullience.
On the third evening, as we sat over a cabbage soup, in which a muttonbone had been perhaps perfunctorily dipped, and a little flas
k of flabby white wine, we were alerted by the roar of a motorbike down the valley.
‘It’s the boss.’
One of the young men slipped out; the others stood by the door. The old man continued to spoon soup into his mouth without looking up, and Hervé and I sat, listening.
Hervé said: ‘When you hear motorbikes you usually think of the Boches.’
The motorbike engine coughed and was silent. We heard footsteps. The door opened, and a thin man with a black beard entered. The thin nose and the beard made him look like an illustration from the Bible. He greeted Hervé with a nod, shook my hand: ‘Simon Halévy,’ he said.
The three young men who had been looking after us exchanged glances: they had been careful to preserve anonymity.
As if aware of their disapproval, he said:
‘Of course, it’s necessary for you to know who I am. We have serious matters to discuss, serious negotiations to be undertaken, and it’s both ridiculous and insulting to pretend that this can be satisfactorily done if we play games with our identities. You have no reason to trust me if I won’t trust you with my name. Besides, there are strands which bind us. You know my cousin and her husband, Guy Fouquet.’
I nodded.
‘And,’ he said, ‘I know your brother myself, who is – what shall I say? – the object of our mission. So, you see, it is quite a family party.’
The family party, as Halévy ironically termed it, congregated two days later, again in a farmhouse, high in the south Auvergne. We were all nervous lest Lucien should be followed, and so the arrangement was that he should arrive there the day before us. The approaches to the farm had been watched two days previously, which was an elaborate precaution, for in fact Lucien had made a rendezvous with the Resistance, some fifty miles away, and had been brought, blindfolded and ignorant of his destination, to our meeting-place. His willingness to entrust himself to those whom he had reason to fear seemed to me irrefutable proof of his sincerity and desperation.
