War in the Shadows

Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France

Patrick Marnham

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786078100
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

'One of our very best writers on France.' Antony Beevor After publishing an acclaimed biography of Jean Moulin, leader of the French Resistance, Patrick Marnham received an anonymous letter from a person who claimed to have worked for British Intelligence during the war. The ex-spy praised his book but insisted that he had missed the real 'treasure'. The letter drew Marnham back to the early 1960s when he had been taught French by a mercurial woman – a former Resistance leader, whose SOE network was broken on the same day that Moulin was captured and who endured eighteen months in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Could these two events have been connected? His anonymous correspondent offered a tantalising set of clues that seemed to implicate Churchill and British Intelligence in the catastrophe.Drawing on a deep knowledge of France and original research in British and French archives, War in the Shadows exposes the ruthless double-dealing of the Allied intelligence services and the Gestapo through one of the darkest periods of the Second World War. It is a story worthy of Le Carré, but with this difference – it is not fiction.'A melange of Le Grand Meaulnes and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is unforgettable.' Ferdinand Mount, TLS, Books of the Year'A masterly analysis, impeccably presented.' Allan Mallinson, Spectator 'Fascinating… Marnham has a vast and scholarly knowledge of this often treacherous world.' Caroline Moorehead, Literary Review

PART I

THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER

1

Summer of ’62 – The Lost Domain

I am looking for something still more mysterious: for the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth whose entrance the weary prince could not discover . . . As you brush aside a tangle of branches you suddenly catch a glimpse of a dark tunnel of green at the far end of which there is a tiny aperture of light.

from The Lost Domain (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier¹

It was towards the end of April that I first saw the house by the river. It stood some distance below the road behind a line of tall trees, the grey slate roof of a large house just visible and before it the narrow river, glinting in the light of evening. A stone bridge led across the stream to the entrance of a park which was closed off by heavy iron gates. This was the house that would become part of my life, first a place of friendship, then a pleasant memory. Until the day, many years later, when I received an anonymous letter offering the solution to a mystery – and a clue that led me back over the years, to that house – and the summer of ’62.

The summer of 1962 had not gone quite as expected. In London, in April, my father had handed me a road map of France, an envelope containing some French banknotes and a set of car keys. He said that he had cancelled my plans to join an archaeological dig in Greece (‘far too hot at this time of year’) and arranged for me to learn French instead. I was between school and university and was now to spend some months with a family in the Touraine. He had never met these people. As far as he knew they did not speak English. There was an address inside the envelope. He wrote out some directions on how to reach the house from Blois. Blois was on the map. The journey should take two days he said. I was to find a hotel on the way for the first night. A GB sign had been attached to the car which he would not need again until the autumn. I made it clear that I was displeased by this rearrangement, but to no avail. My room in this house was ready. I was expected to arrive during the course of the week.

The first day had passed quite smoothly. I drove to Folkestone and took the car ferry to Boulogne. In the late afternoon I passed through Moitié Brulé and then Neufchatel. There were no motorways at that time. If you wanted to cross France you took the route nationale and followed the signposts from town to town.

Even today I am surprised by my father’s decision. I had held a driving licence for barely six months, I had never ‘driven on the right’ and, since I was travelling alone, overtaking lorries involved leaning across the empty passenger seat and craning round the moving obstruction – while keeping one hand on the wheel of the Austin Mini and one foot on the accelerator, hoping by this contortion to catch a glimpse of the road ahead. Not that there was much danger of a collision with oncoming traffic. The towns and villages of northern France were linked by a system of straight, empty highways that ran directly through the centre of almost every settlement. There was little sign of the people who lived in these villages. Sometimes a bent figure in a dark grey or black dress would appear on the pavement and regard the car, unsmiling, apparently resentful of the brief intrusion. I had been told that if the women were dressed in black, they were widows. There seemed to be a high number of widows in northern France.

At some point I must have taken a wrong turn because I found I was no longer heading for Rouen but for somewhere called ‘Dreux’. It looked as dreary as it sounded. The land on either side of the road flattened out, the horizon retreated, the villages and farmhouses vanished. It was as though I was crossing an uninhabited plain, a desert of unripened corn. I began to wonder if there would be any hotels before night fell.

And then towards evening a shape appeared in the extreme distance, two spires and a grey roof, very far away. I stopped the car and pulled over between the poplar trees, not realising that this was the emblematic view, the pilgrims’ first sight of the cathedral at Chartres.

There was a hotel in the main square large enough to have its own dining room and next morning I crossed the place and for the first time entered that vast stone tank and found myself immersed in the blue-stained air, plunged into an underwater light so thick that you felt you were swimming through it, as though over seven hundred years it had solidified with the weight of dead piety and vanished generations – the better to protect the vision of its creators. A bell tinkled in the depths and on a distant side altar a huddle formed, the black dresses and grey scarves once again, the first Mass of the morning. Back on the road I dawdled, looking for a picnic site outside Châteaudun and distractions in Vendôme.

By mid-afternoon I had reached Blois, which was already a mythical place in my mind. There was the liquid sound of the spoken name, and its mediaeval history. The Counts of Blois had played an important part in the dynastic struggles of England and France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which I had studied for several years at school. Here, not trusting my father’s directions, I stopped to ask the way.

The instructions I received led me out of the city and across the bridge over the Loire, the longest river in France. It rises in the southern mountains, near the Mediterranean, runs north and then, at Orléans, turns abruptly south-west and sets off for the Atlantic. The area enclosed by the river’s elbow, which I now entered, is the Sologne, a region of forests and étangs, or shallow lakes, that was for centuries the hunting ground of the kings of France. On the edge of the forest, in yet another deserted village, I came to the house by the river. The grey iron gates were closed and there was a sign by the enamel bell-pull – ‘Attention: chien méchant’. Since the bell was broken I pushed the gates open rather cautiously and prepared to meet the dog. This turned out to be an affectionate young boxer, not méchant at all, and by the time I had parked the car an elderly woman had emerged from the house to greet me. She was rather stout with a functional hair-style that looked as though it had been sheared rather than cut, and she was not dressed in black but in a practical sort of flowery smock with a rather faded pattern. She wore thick, rimless spectacles, I am not sure why since she always looked at one over the top of the lenses. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Nanny. I’m just pouring tea. It’s the only time that you and I are allowed to speak English.’

On that first visit I stayed for three months and I returned many times in the years that followed. I was always given the same room on the second floor, the Green Room, the only bedroom with windows overlooking both the river and the park. On the night of my arrival I fell asleep for the first time to the murmur of the water sweeping over the weir. Early next morning I was woken by the reflections rippling across the ceiling. From the terrace below my window came the scratching of a rake across the gravel. Before breakfast there was a knock on my door and a girl from the village entered carrying a large pitcher of hot water which she set down beside a washbasin. This happened every morning. I do not recall any conversation during this ritual. ‘Bonjour, m’sieu’, ‘Bonjour, Françoise.’ That was the limit of our relationship throughout my visit. From the washstand by the window, where I shaved, I could see a groom exercising a tall chestnut hunter on a long rein in the shade of the trees that surrounded the paddock. There was no noise during this performance. The horse moved quite silently. It could have been an optical illusion from a more leisurely past.

Downstairs I found breakfast waiting in the empty dining room: coffee, fresh bread, butter and apricot jam. Suzanne, the cook, served the butter in small portions. She regarded butter for breakfast as a wild extravagance and thought that the English guests consumed far too much of it. She had grown up in the village and spent her entire life there. She had started out as a maid. The war and the poverty that followed were still fresh in her memory. She was not the only person in the house who considered that wasting food was a criminal shame.

I had breakfast alone for the first two weeks, no other students had arrived. Some company was provided by the two stags’ heads that dominated the dining room, mounted high on the wall on either side of the marble fireplace. I was to spend a great deal of time with those two heads. Their gentle faces were curiously alive, patient and watchful. Something in their non-committal expression – a glint of reproach in their yellow glass eyes – suggested that they noticed and remembered far more than they were prepared to say. A lot was left unsaid in that house. Our hostess had a powerful personality and very little small talk. Her chief recreation was hunting. In winter, she hunted stag and wild boar through the forest, riding side-saddle to hounds.

There were two framed photographs in the dining room, on the mantelpiece above the open fireplace. One – rather blurred – showed a pretty woman with delicate features who was half-smiling at the camera. She had dark hair with a prominent grey streak. We were told that during the war they had known her by her code name which was ‘Jacqueline’ and that she had been a resistance agent sent from London who had often been in the house and who had died at German hands. The other photograph was that of an army officer in uniform. It was signed, but even without reading the signature I recognised the face of Charles de Gaulle. He still looked quite young, a wartime portrait. Apparently, after the war, he had called on this family and dined at this table.

Four years before, as an old man, he had become the president of France.

Nanny was apologetic about the absence of other students during those first two weeks. A young man called ‘Ranulph’ something – it sounded like ‘Vines’ – had left two days before my arrival, after a stay of only three weeks. Gilly had made a tour of inspection with her father, who was our military attaché at the Paris embassy, but he had switched her to another family – the Frobervilles in Blois. Gaya, Louise, Emma and Miss Scrymgeour-Wedderburn from Fife had preferred to stay during the previous winter’s hunting season. ‘Theodora Brinckman’ sounded vaguely familiar, but she too had departed, as had Zoe and Emmeline. It seemed to be an awful lot of departures. Nanny said there had also been several last-minute cancellations. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said. ‘All the trouble has been in Paris. It’s always quiet in Blois.’ ‘Trouble, Nanny?’ That sounded interesting. ‘Yes. Some people panicked in the métro and got crushed. But that was in February. There’s been nothing since.’

Nanny was not really doing justice to the situation. France was in fact, though I was quite unaware of it, on the verge of civil war. Eventually, after two weeks I was joined by Angela and Elizabeth, and two weeks after that by Neil, on his way from Nairobi to join the Grenadier Guards.

The house and the park bordered the north bank of the river. There was a sunny terrace beside the house, overlooking the mill stream, but most of the park was wooded with oaks, chestnuts and sycamores. Some way into the wood the riverbank overlooked a deep pool into which we could dive on hot afternoons. A six-foot man could sink to the bottom with his arm stretched above his head and only his fingertips would be visible. That was how we measured the depth – ‘three metres’. It was quiet on the river when we were not swimming, and I used to watch the fat water voles plopping into the stream and crossing to and from their burrows on either bank. And there were vipères in the park, quite large, and not to be confused with English adders. In summer they came down to the river to doze – or watch for voles. Nanny said they were to be avoided. She seemed to be rather more concerned about the dog stepping on one than she was about us. Away from the river, at the top of the park, there was a walled garden where I would sit and read in the evening.

During those months at the château the hours spent in the garden were my favourite time of day. There is nowhere as peaceful as a walled garden on a cool evening after a hot day. It was a classic French potager, large enough to produce all the vegetables and fruit and herbs needed by the house. The soil was sandy, as it was in the asparagus fields outside the park. There was a rabbit run in one corner and a deep stone well near the centre. During the daytime the garden was the domain of Jean, a young-looking man, dark-skinned, from the Midi. This made him a complete foreigner as far as the villagers were concerned. Jean always wore a beret. He even wore it in bed. I knew this because one afternoon, bored and curious, I explored the series of lumber rooms at the end of my corridor, behind the door leading to the back stairs. One of these rooms turned out to be Jean’s bedroom where he was taking a siesta. He was up early and worked through the heat of the day. It was his rake that could be heard on the gravel in the early morning. But by evening, for an hour or so before supper, I had the potager to myself. I would take a book with me, there was a bench on one of the walks and a low stone wall that rimmed the well. Curious red beetles, larger than ladybirds, ran along the sandy paths and socialised like ants.

At about 8 o’clock Suzanne would tell Nanny that dinner was ready, and Nanny would summon us to the table by ringing the bell that was attached to the wall above the kitchen door.

Dinner was served by Camille, an amiably tipsy butler, who poured a dark red wine from a heavy decanter. It was local wine, sour and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for War in the Shadows
• Other Books by Patrick Marnham
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Maps
• List of Principal Characters
• A Note on Noms de Guerre, the BCRA and SOE(RF)
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Introduction: An Anonymous Letter
• PART I: THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER
• 1 Summer of ’62 – The Lost Domain
• 2 The Visitors’ Book
• 3 The Fugitive
• PART II: A CHILDISH AND DEADLY GAME
• 4 ‘Setting Whitehall Ablaze’
• 5 The Swamps and the Forest
• 6 A Network Called Adolphe
• 7 Dreaming Up a Second Front
• 8 ‘That Jeanne d’Arc in Trousers’
• 9 The Fall of PROSPER
• PART III: SETTLING SCORES
• 10 The Purge
• 11 The Jurors of Honour
• 12 Questions in Parliament
• PART IV: THE MYSTERY OF CALUIRE
• 13 Inside 84 Avenue Foch
• 14 The House of Doctor Dugoujon
• 15 A Resistance Legend Is Born
• 16 The Trial of Commissioner Aubrac
• PART V: THE SECRET WAR
• 17 The Remarkable Immunity of Madame Delettraz
• 18 Setting History Ablaze!
• 19 The Last Mission of Jack Agazarian
• 20 Colonel Dansey’s Private War
• 21 The Depths of Deception
• Afterword: The Level Sands
• Postscript
• Casualty List
• Image Section
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Imprint Page