Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (2 page)

After the 1940 armistice the vast majority of French people were simply relieved that the fighting was over with no more bloodshed and no more loved ones’ lives to be pointlessly lost by France’s inadequate generals and wavering politicians. Numbed by the speed at which their nation had been defeated and its British allies driven out of the Continent, people spent hours every day in the long queues outside the few bakeries and food stores still open. The problem was not so much shortage of food as disruption to food production and distribution caused by 8 million refugees being far from home, butchers, bakers and other shopkeepers among them.

Once the fighting stopped, most French people were surprised at the good behaviour of the German soldiers. Taking refuge with friends in the Loire valley after fleeing the capital, Simone de Beauvoir wrote of their arrival there:

To our general surprise, there was no violence. They paid for their drinks and the eggs they bought at farms. They spoke politely. All the shopkeepers smiled at them.

Further north in Cherbourg, General Erwin Rommel wrote home to his wife:

The war is turning into a peaceful occupation of the whole of France. The population is calm and in some places even friendly.

Likewise, they were in the British Channel Islands, where the Wehrmacht landed on 30 June without opposition, the islands having been judged impossible to defend and demilitarised a week earlier.

Even Hitler’s ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, commented upon the apparent apathy of the general population. Like all German officials and civilians in France, Abetz was well fed – as were some privileged or dishonest French people, but the majority of the population was preoccupied with getting the next meal, or extra clothing coupons, or ‘grey’ market food at the weekends. The diary of a Parisian housewife for October 1942, when commerce was far more stable than just after the defeat and prices were controlled by the government, goes some way to explaining this:

At 4 p.m. she had to be back at the tripe shop. At 5 p.m. came the dilemma: a small portion of cheese or a handful of vegetables? And so it went on, day after day. In addition, there were effectively three price levels for food and most other things: the official price decreed by Pétain’s government in Vichy, which only applied to purchasers who possessed the right number of coupons; the ‘grey’ market where peasants could be persuaded to sell a few eggs or some meat; and the black market, where everything could be obtained – at a price. If the housewife keeping the diary was rich enough, she had the following choices:

On some items the mark-up was grotesque: farmers sold potatoes for cash at 3F per kg; in Paris they cost five times as much. With average wages frozen at 1,500F per month for men and 1,300F for women, shopping around was time-consuming and exhausting.
³

The chaos immediately after the defeat was unbelievable. In many areas under no military threat from the German advance, the population had been ordered by local authorities, the police or Gendarmerie officers to leave their homes, taking only three days’ provisions with them. In many of the half-empty villages and towns German soldiers set up for the hungry stay-at-homes and returnees a soup kitchen and distributed bread to them. German railwaymen were driving the few trains that enabled the first refugees to return home. On the bandstands in public parks and in front of town halls, Wehrmacht musicians played afternoon concerts, whose programmes included a token French composition like an extract from Bizet’s
Carmen
to calm the population and show them what German
Kultur
was all about.

Compounding the confusion, France was now divided in two. Hitler did not wish to occupy the whole of France, because this would have required keeping hundreds of thousands of men there on garrison duty, men he needed for his planned invasion of the USSR. Under the June 1940 armistice, he therefore annexed the industrial north-east
départements
rich in mineral deposits and heavy industry and declared the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, also known by their historic German names of Elsass und Lotharingen, to be part of the Reich. For strategic reasons, the coastline from the Belgian border to the Pyrenees was occupied, and this Occupied Zone stretched so far inland in the north as to absorb more than half of France. The remaining two-fifths of the country, governed from Vichy, was known euphemistically as the Free Zone, with the exception of some pockets in the south-east that were occupied by Italian forces as a result of Mussolini’s ‘stab in the back’ incursions after
Il Duce
had waited to make sure that the main French armies had been beaten by the Wehrmacht.

France divided by the armistice agreement.

On the hoardings all over the Occupied Zone, the tattered general mobilisation notices from the previous September had been covered by more recent posters boasting, ‘We shall win because we are the stronger’. These, in turn, were now covered up by thousands of German posters showing a valiant Wehrmacht soldier holding a grateful small child in his arms above the message, ‘Abandoned by your leaders, put your trust in the German soldier’.
For many French civilians, there was no one else they could trust, with their civil servants, police and even the local firemen far away and uncertain when they could return.

An acting brigadier named Charles de Gaulle, who had briefly served as Minister of Defence in Paul Reynaud’s government that handed power to Marshal Pétain on 16 June, disagreed. On 18 June he issued over the BBC French Service from London a call to arms that was heard by very few French listeners, but swiftly reproduced clandestinely in print all over France. It read:

To the people of France

France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war!

Unworthy leaders have capitulated through panic and delivered the country into servitude. However, nothing is lost! Nothing is lost because this war is a world war. The immense forces of the free world have not yet come into play. One day, they will crush the enemy.

On that day, France must share in the victory to recover her liberty and her prestige.

That is my sole aim, and the reason why I invite all Frenchmen, wherever they may be, to join me in action, in sacrifice and hope.

Our fatherland is in danger of dying. Let us all fight to save it.

Vive la France!

The writer François Mauriac, later a strong supporter of de Gaulle, remarked at the time: ‘Purely symbolic, his obstinacy. Very fine, but ineffectual.’
⁴
The reaction of most of his audience to the radioed call to arms, or its clandestinely printed copies, was bafflement. They reasoned that France’s two most famous soldiers President Philippe Pétain and Chief of Staff General Maurice Weygand must have considered all the possibilities and have a better grasp of the situation than this unknown renegade in London. There was also the worrying thought that, should de Gaulle lose his solitary gamble – which seemed only too likely at the time – his supporters could legally be condemned to death for high treason by the French government, as was de Gaulle himself shortly afterward.

It was one thing for a career soldier like him, safely across the Channel in London, to call upon his countrymen to resist the German invader, but what could ordinary people at the mercy of Hitler’s victorious war machine do about it? The first individual acts were limited to disobedience of German proclamations, which invited reprisals to serve as lessons to the general population, and a scattering of acts of unthinking desperation. In Rouen, Epinal and Royenne lone protesters cut German telephone lines and were executed by firing squad. In Bordeaux a distraught Polish refugee shook his fist at a military band, for which he too was shot on 27 August.

At the time, most French people were saying that the British Expeditionary Force had ‘fought to the last drop of French blood’ before running away in the Dunkirk evacuation, although a few resolute souls in the north-eastern
départements
, who recalled the Tommies fighting alongside their fathers in the previous war, did shelter and help British servicemen on the run out of humanitarian instinct. They took this risk in defiance of ubiquitous German posters warning that the penalty for doing so was death.

A few patriots and political activists opposed to fascism braved the dangers of duplicating and distributing anti-German tracts bearing news from abroad, especially the BBC French Service, but most people considered this sort of activity to be
un refus absurde
– a ridiculous refusal to face the facts. In the larger towns of the Free Zone exiled Alsatians and Lorrainers who could not return home and intellectuals from the north whose political reputations made it inadvisable to return to the Occupied Zone – as well as Jews and others with good reason to fear German racial policy – all formed their own groups where resistance was talked about, but little of their hopeless frustration was translated into action in the early months of the occupation.

One of the very few people to respond immediately to de Gaulle’s call by thinking in terms of espionage that could be used against the Germans was
Catholic farmer Louis de la Bardonnie, who lived in an elegant château above the sleepy Dordogne village of Le Breuilh. A pre-war member of the far-right Action Française party, whose members supported the collaborationist government in Vichy headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, Bardonnie’s personal sense of honour obliged him to resign from Action Française after the defeat, stating in writing that he withdrew his support from Pétain, whom he regarded as a traitor for capitulating to Hitler. There was little else that Pétain could have done, except leave France and continue the war from French North Africa, as a minority of officers and politicians – the latter mainly Jewish – urged him to do.

With the aim of collecting intelligence that could be used against the forces occupying his country and transmitting it somehow to de Gaulle’s intelligence service in London, then known as
le deuxième bureau
, Bardonnie contacted a small group of trusted friends who shared his patriotic feelings. De Gaulle’s
deuxième bureau
was commanded by André Dewavrin, who took the
nom de guerre
of ‘Colonel Passy’. One of his first recruits inside occupied France was Gilbert Renault, a thickset, balding, dynamic 35-year-old film producer with a prodigious memory, whose alias was ‘Colonel Rémy’. He regularly crossed the Demarcation Line from the Occupied Zone carrying military intelligence collected by a network of informers in Brittany and along the Atlantic coast. Once in the Free Zone, Rémy gave this to Bardonnie, who passed it to the guard of a train leaving Pau for Canfranc in Spain. From there, a French customs official took it to Jacques Pigeonneau, the Vichy consul general in Madrid, who forwarded the vital envelope to London.

While Rémy risked only his own life, Bardonnie and his friends of both sexes had families to worry about. By keeping in his house a transmitter furnished by Rémy, plus weapons and 10 million francs in secret funds at times, and by allowing his home to be used as a safe house by two other Gaullist agents, Bardonnie was placing at risk his wife Denyse and their nine children. Among his group was Paul Armbruster, a refugee from Alsace who had lived through the German occupation of the province in 1914–18, later studying in Germany and working there for French Intelligence undercover as a journalist. He persuaded Bardonnie to go underground using false identities after initiating proceedings for divorce with the aim of protecting Denyse and their children from guilt by association – as would have been the case because the Nazi code of
Sippenhaft
made all members of a suspect’s family equally guilty. Armbruster also assured Louis and Denyse that their children would be left alone by the Germans because of their blue eyes and blonde hair. On several nail-bitingly terrifying occasions, his advice was proved right.