Conquistadors of the Useless (14 page)

In order to fire a few shots at the rearguard of an army worn out by five years of war, our officers on the Alpine Front did not hesitate frequently to expose their men to dangers far greater than those of Mont Blanc at the beginning of 1957. Early in April the Compagnie Stéphane was withdrawn from the Bonneval-Bessan sector in order to take up positions in Lanslebourg and in the woods below the Col du Mont Cenis and the Tura fort. This pressure on a sensitive spot caused the Germans to react with artillery fire and with commando raids which were sometimes very daring. I found this campaign of cannons, booby-traps and ambushes among the woods rather depressing, but I little guessed that I was about to see another and more horrible aspect of war.

Down in the Italian peninsula the allied armies were now striking giant blows at the Wehrmacht in order to effect a break-through if they could, or at least to divert the maximum possible number of German troops from farther north. Our high command ordered a strong general offensive. The First Army detached us considerable artillery support, while farther to the south bodies of infantry were sent to reinforce the alpine units. The first objective in the Maurienne area was to be the Col de Sollières and the rocky pinnacles that commanded it, Mont Froid and the Pointes de Bellecombe and de Clairy. If we could occupy these positions we would thereby render the plateau and Col du Mont Cenis indefensible.

On the night of the 5th April Scouts of the 11th Chasseurs Alpins surprised and captured the positions on the Pointe de Bellecombe and Mont Froid, but on the Pointe de Clairy a company of the 15th Battalion got involved in difficult ground and had no success. Ill-supported, outnumbered and untrained in the right sort of techniques, the conquerors of Bellecombe and Mont Froid finally gave way to German counter-attacks after a heroic defence. The Germans now threw off their previous sloth and gave proof of all the warlike qualities for which their race is famous, together with all the cunning acquired in five years of unremitting warfare. Only the most perfectly organised of defences would have stood any chance of holding them, instead of which the inexperienced troops who were supposed to be supplying and relieving the Scouts got bogged down in the deep snow on the lower slopes, or slipped and fell in the gullies higher up, which had been turned into veritable ice-chutes by the cold at that altitude. Either these columns never arrived at their destinations or, when they did make it, they were so exhausted that they could not fight properly. Lacking any worthwhile support, the courageous Scouts were forced to give way, and Bellecombe was retaken by the enemy only the day after its original capture. On the 11th a new attempt to seize the Pointe de Clairy was beaten back after heavy fighting. Finally, on the 12th, Mont Froid was also lost to the enemy. This last was a real tragedy. The ridge, which was about half a mile long, was defended by three pill-boxes at the east and west ends and in the centre. On the 6th and 7th of April the eastern pill-box had already been the scene of some bloody fighting. Captured on the 6th after a fierce hand-to-hand combat, it had been lost on the 7th but recaptured by our side the same day.

All this fighting at close quarters had cost a great deal of blood, but that was only the beginning. On the 12th the Germans launched a heavy attack on the two ends of the ridge, which fell with the loss of almost all their defenders. The central pill-box finally surrendered after a desperate resistance.

As the 15th Battalion did not take part in this affair, I was lucky enough to be spared the butchery on Mont Froid; but to make up for this I was involved, albeit from some way off, in the second attack on the Pointe de Clairy, which was also exceedingly hard fought. The Pointe throws down a long, spiky, but not particularly steep ridge to the Col de Sollières. The Germans were firmly installed at several places along this ridge, so that to become fully master of the situation it was necessary to deal with all these as well as the summit itself. The attack was commanded by Lieutenant Édouard Frendo, who a few months later made the second ascent of the Walker spur on the Grandes Jorasses. His force consisted of three sections from the 11th Battalion the Chasseurs Alpins, the 3rd Scouting Section from the 15th, and also on the extreme left, a combat group from the 1st Company of the same battalion, under my command.

The lie of the land was against us. The three platoons from the 11th had to crampon up a steep open snow slope which led to the ridge, without any shelter until they reached it. Similarly the section from the 15th, which was to attack the summit, had to crampon up a steep couloir containing no cover at all. During the night these four sections, entirely made up of sure-footed mountaineers, climbed so silently that they were not noticed by the sentries until they had almost reached the crest, where they charged with such skill and dash that they won a foothold among the rocks.

Unhappily only one enemy pocket of resistance was overcome by this first assault, and all along the spine of the ridge the Germans remained in their chosen positions, protected by stone walls and well supplied with ammunition. The job of my own group, on the left, was simply to cover the ground over which the enemy might have effected a flanking movement and so taken our men from the rear. Thus we played only a small part in the proceedings, and I contented myself with keeping my men under cover of some rocks from which we were able to fire on a few German attempts to send reinforcements from the Tura fort.

From my position I had a ring-side view of the battlefield. Both sides were putting down a heavy barrage, and I would go so far as to say that the French were probably deploying up to eighty or so field guns of various calibres, and the Germans about the same. The reader can imagine the racket produced by some hundred and fifty cannon all trained on an area of a few hundred square yards. It was like hell on earth. Up till then I had not had much to do with artillery, and I don't mind admitting I was terrified. Without knowing a lot about these matters, it seemed to me that on both sides the object of the bombardment was to reduce points of resistance on the ridge and to make their reinforcement impossible: but, whatever its cause, the shooting was remarkably inaccurate, and I was unable to see that it had any effect at all on the course of the fighting. Shells landed all over the place, and some of the French ones, intended no doubt for the other side of the mountain or at least for the summit, went off only a few yards from where I was lying. The deafening sound of the explosions, and the disagreeable feeling of being at the mercy of blind forces, threw me into a state of confusion such as I had never known in my life.

During all this time the scouts of the 11th and the 15th were fighting heroically on the ridge, trying to dislodge the Germans from their strongpoints. Several were killed, others gravely wounded. Jacques Boell tells vividly of their plight: ‘It was impossible to evacuate the wounded, so that they were forced to save themselves by sliding down the hard snow-slopes into the Combe de Mont Froid. By lying down in deep furrows in the snow they were able to get most of the way under cover from the enemy snipers, who, whether out of humanity or being too busy elsewhere, did not in fact pay them much attention. Their sufferings can be imagined as they slipped and sprawled in the snow, losing blood and in certain cases even limbs that had been half sliced off by machine-gun fire. At the bottom of this agonising descent the victims fortunately found stretcher-bearers, led up under enemy fire by the chaplains of the engaged battalions'.

But despite all the courage and sacrifice of our troops, the enemy remained in command of the Pointe de Clairy and the greater part of the Arête de Sollières. It was becoming obvious that we would not only fail to dislodge him, but that as our men ran short of ammunition there would be a serious risk of counter-attack, which might be fatal. Faced with this desperate situation Lt.-Col. Le Ray, who was in touch with Frendo by radio, gave the order to retire in spite of the obvious dangers attaching to the descent of a snow slope under enemy fire.

This Battle of the Pointe de Clairy, in which I took part more as a spectator than as a fighting man, made a profound impression on me, and I went back down to the valley through the peaceful forests full of disgust. Spring was beginning to burgeon. Creamy snowdrops speckled the ground, and the air was full of odours evoking peace and love. As I descended through this poetic landscape I realised that the hell I had just left, in which so many men had meaninglessly lost their lives, could never again have anything in common with the naively sporting game I had played through the winter months. The whole abomination of war was suddenly and overwhelmingly apparent to me.

Faced with the foolhardiness of some young (frequently German) climbers, quite a lot of French mountaineers are apt to say ‘it's not playing the game: climbing isn't war'. Yet it must be admitted that for many people it is a way of satisfying the primaeval aggressive instincts which find so little outset in modern life. I am one of these myself. If I had been born in another age I would probably have been a soldier or a buccaneer, and it may be, therefore, that climbing has been for me a kind of fighting. For five months fighting had even seemed a new kind of mountain challenge; but all that had nothing in common with the sort of warfare I had just witnessed in which man, far from raising himself above the material by his physical and moral virtues, was reduced to the level of a beast hunted by blind forces of iron and fire. No, climbing is not war: because war is no longer anything but an immense murder.

Some people have vehemently criticised these attacks, so costly in human lives, launched at a time when they could no longer have any valuable effect on the inevitable outcome of the war. I do not wish to set myself up as a judge. If in some cases the ambition of high-ranking officers must surely have weighed in the balance, I am sure that the great majority of the generals who took the decisions to attack the Alpine Front and the Atlantic Wall did so for patriotic reasons. Only, on looking back, it seems that the sacrifices involved were out of all proportion to any results that could have been obtained. Jacques Boell, an officer of the Reserve and beyond any question a patriot, ends his book dedicated to the glory of those who fought in the Alps with words in which we feel the distress and disquietude: ‘I must confess myself haunted by doubt. All those young lives cut down before their time, all those wounds and sufferings … were they strictly necessary only one month before the end of the war, and for this heap of sterile schists?'

One can understand that, to those who carried the actual burden, the gains did not compensate for the sacrifice. But some action had to be taken, or at least attempted. For the sake of honour the country had to take a hand in liberating its own soil in Alsace, the Alps, and along the Atlantic. By holding down as many enemy units as possible in this way, we kept them from the Italian Front. And most important of all, it was vital that when the time came for the making of peace treaties our leaders should be able to say: ‘France, as a peaceful nation, needs a protective wall along the Alps. You cannot refuse her this barren ground for which so many of her sons have given their lives. We must have a juster boundary line at Mont Cenis, Chaberton, the Saint Bernard, Vésubie, Tende and La Brigue.'

Even as I ponder these matters I seem to feel the friendly presence of the dead around me, and hear them murmuring: ‘We have not died in vain if we have succeeded in winning a little safety for our country.' Yet this justification of so much bloodshed and pain, inspired as it is by the noblest feelings, seems to me to have lost most of its validity today. Let the reader judge for himself.

The Battle of the Pointe de Clairy was not the last of the fighting as far as I was concerned, and indeed I very nearly had to take part in another contest of the same kind. The Col du Mont Cenis is protected on the French side by the Fort de la Tura de Lanslebourg. This ancient and massive fortress dates from the time of Vauban.
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Built like an Inca citadel from enormous and meticulously-fitted blocks, it has withstood all the ravages of time and is still intact. In September 1944 the Germans were sitting comfortably behind its mighty walls and as long as they were there it was impossible to get possession of the Col du Mont Cenis. The high command decided that they must be winkled out.

The operation began with a heavy bombardment, and for over twenty-four hours a deluge of fire descended on the fort. After this it was considered that not a single occupant could survive, despite the fact that the walls themselves were virtually undamaged. It only remained to walk in and take over. Accordingly, a company of the 15th Chasseurs came out of their cover in the woods and advanced on the glacis, some of them getting blown up by mines in the process.

When the French were nice and close, the enemy, who was very far from being wiped out, opened up with machine-gun fire. In the ensuing rout a good many dead were left on the ground. After this mortifying reverse our brass-hats decided to use more up-to-date methods. It now seemed to them that the only way of getting into the Tura was to blow off the heavily armoured doors with charges of plastic explosive and bazooka shells. The 1st Company of the 15th was entrusted with this difficult mission, and a number of us were withdrawn for special training behind the lines. But Stéphane, a fervent patriot and born fighting man, was also a most humane leader and a convinced Christian. He seemed in no way inclined to get his men minced up for the sake of a few old walls when it was obvious that the war might end any day. He spoke of the mission without enthusiasm and openly criticised the way the spring offensive had been conducted. Our special training was dragged on as long as possible, and one fine morning the observation posts suddenly noticed that there were no signs of life in the fort.

Down on the plains of Italy the overwhelmed Wehrmacht was fleeing northwards, hoping to form new lines in the Austrian mountains or even to ask for asylum in Switzerland. The units on the Alpine Front, not wishing to be cut off from the main body of their forces, had suddenly abandoned their positions. Without waiting for any orders, Stéphane launched his company in pursuit. Marching far in advance of the rest of the French army and fighting side by side with the Italian partisans, we managed to keep contact with the enemy almost as far as the outskirts of Turin. The war ended for me a few kilometres outside it, or to be precise at the village of Robasomero.