The Cost of Courage (12 page)

THREE WEEKS LATER
, on October 15, 1942. Postel-Vinay takes off from Gibraltar in a twin-engine DC-3, which delivers him to an airfield in the English countryside. From there, a bus takes him to a police station in a London suburb, where a charming British officer listens to Postel-Vinay’s unbelievable tale of escape.

The Englishman listens politely — and doesn’t seem to believe a single word Postel-Vinay tells him. Then he dispatches him to Patriotic School for further interrogation.

This is the first stop for every self-described
Résistant
arriving in England during the war. Patriotic School has been created to distinguish between genuine Allied sympathizers (“sheep”) and double agents who are really working for the Germans (“goats”).

The London Reception Centre had been established at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth by the British intelligence agency MI5 at the beginning of 1941. During the course of the war,
thirty-three thousand refugees will pass through the center, where they are “questioned about their methods of escape, the routes they had followed, safe houses, couriers, helpers and documentation. Their statements [are] meticulously indexed and cross-checked against those of their companions and earlier arrivals. Intelligence [is] extracted and circulated to Whitehall departments.”

Those identified as “goats” are shipped off to Camp 020, which oversees 440 prisoners during the course of the war. After an early instance of a violent, unauthorized interrogation, a strict rule against torture is enforced — because the British believe non-coercive interrogations are the ones most likely to produce accurate information. This is also the conclusion of more sophisticated Allied interrogators almost everywhere during World War II.

Patriotic School is an austere place, lightened a bit by a library that reminds Postel-Vinay of a London club. It is filled with refugees from every country invaded by the Nazis, many with escape stories just as implausible as his own. After eight days of waiting, his interrogation by the British finally begins.

The examination lasts five days: two or three hours in the morning and another two or three hours in the afternoon. He has to recount all of his experiences in the Resistance twice — first chronologically, then divided up among the various branches he has served in.

When he describes his escape from the mental hospital in Paris, he mentions the 23 centimes he received from the boys in the street. “And then I took my second left —”

“That’s impossible!” his interrogator interrupts. “The rue Cabanis, where the hospital exit is, ends at the rue de la Glacière. So there is no ‘second left’!”
^†

They agree to examine a map of the neighborhood together.

“Look here,” says Postel-Vinay. “There is another street — the street that starts right in front of the exit of the hospital. When I turned right into the street, I left this other street on my left. So for me, that was my first left. Rue La Glacière was my
second left.
”

“Good answer,” says the British officer. “Quite plausible. We will meet once more tomorrow morning, but it should be brief.”

The Frenchman has climbed over his final hurdle before freedom.

At nine o’clock the following morning, Postel-Vinay walks into his inquisitor’s office. “I have nothing else to ask you,” says the Englishman. “But I have three things to tell you. First, you will leave us this morning. The BCRA is sending a car for you. Second, the head of Patriotic School, Major Y, is waiting to meet you in his office. And third … I am proud to know you!”

Major Y offers a parting glass of champagne — “a good champagne.” Then Postel-Vinay climbs into the waiting car, which delivers him to BCRA headquarters in London at 10 Duke Street. There he meets Pierre Brossolette, and then, Charles de Gaulle himself.

The general asks just one question: “What would the effect be on the French if they learned there was a grave difference between me and the English?”

Postel-Vinay replies that this would be very dangerous, because it would reinforce German propaganda that England is France’s real enemy.

Then de Gaulle tells him that he is making him associate director general of the newly created Central Bank for Free French colonies. Postel-Vinay is not enthusiastic about this, but de Gaulle has made his decision. Although he will no longer be fighting the Germans directly, the young Frenchman comforts himself with the thought that at least he will be working for the greater good of France. And de Gaulle has guaranteed that he will spend the rest of the war out of danger.

L
ESS THAN A MONTH
after Postel-Vinay arrives in London, General Dwight Eisenhower oversees an invasion of North Africa, with 110,000 troops, who land near Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers on November 8, 1942.

Franklin Roosevelt favors the invasion because he thinks it’s a political imperative to engage German troops as soon as possible, and North Africa is the only feasible place to do that at the end of 1942. The big question is whether the French troops in the African colonies will fight the Allied invasion. As Operation Torch begins, Roosevelt issues a statement saying that he hopes it will “prove the first historic step to the liberation and restoration of France.”

As André considers where to go at the end of 1942, he is buoyed by the news that the French troops led by Vichy generals in North Africa have offered only a day or two of token resistance to the American assault. On November 11 — which happens to be Christiane’s nineteenth birthday — Admiral François Darlan, the senior French officer in North Africa, signs a cease-fire ending French fighting in the area.

Hitler reacts to the cease-fire by instantly ordering the German Occupation of the free zone in the south of France — a clear violation of the armistice he had signed in 1940. After that the free zone becomes known as the southern zone. De Gaulle observed that by not firing a single shot to resist the Occupation of the south, the
Vichy regime “dissipated the lying pretense of independence which [it] had claimed in order to justify its capitulation” in 1940.

The arrival of the Germans means that the French fleet at Toulon, commanded by Admiral Jean de Laborde, is now in danger of falling into the hands of the Nazis. It would be a huge prize for the Germans: three battleships, eight cruisers, seventeen destroyers, sixteen torpedo boats, sixteen submarines, and seven dispatch vessels, as well as some sixty transport ships, tankers, mine sweepers, and tugs.

For the next two weeks, Admiral Laborde is lobbied fiercely by the Germans, by de Gaulle, and by Admiral Darlan, who wants Laborde to sail his fleet to North Africa, where Darlan has just reached an armistice with the Allies. But Laborde remains paralyzed, and on November 26, the Germans storm Toulon to seize all of his ships.

To prevent the ships from falling into the hands of the Germans, Laborde orders what de Gaulle describes as “the most pitiful and sterile suicide imaginable”: Laborde commands his sailors to scuttle the entire fleet. Just one destroyer, one torpedo boat, and five tankers are still intact by the time the Germans gain control of the port.

Now the Allies must decide which Frenchman will be allowed to lead the French overseas territories. De Gaulle is the only general who has sided with the British from the start, but he has been kept in the dark about the North African invasion, and he certainly has no friends among former Vichy officials.

The Americans flirt with General Henri Giraud but then settle on Admiral Darlan. Eisenhower agrees to recognize him as head of the French state in return for committing French troops to the war against the Germans. But de Gaulle’s representative in Algiers reports back that despite the announced collaboration, Eisenhower’s general staff has “stressed their desire to enter into direct relations with General de Gaulle.”

There is an immediate uproar in Britain and the United States over the decision to embrace Darlan, a man who has openly connived with the Germans. “There was a tremendous outcry in the American press,” said Robert Paxton. “Why are we working with these collaborators? That was one of the things that Roosevelt did that was most openly and bitterly criticized” in America.

The conflict is resolved when Darlan is murdered on Christmas eve. His assassin is a passionate young man named Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, acting on behalf of either the Count of Paris or de Gaulle’s allies, depending on which version of events you choose to believe. The killer is almost immediately executed by French authorities, thus guaranteeing a permanent mystery.

In his memoirs, de Gaulle gives such a convoluted description of the assassin’s possible motives that he (perhaps unconsciously) encourages the idea that his allies were responsible for the assassination. That is particularly so when he writes, “If the tragic character of Darlan’s disappearance from the scene could not fail to be condemned by many, the very fact that he was forced from the stage seemed in accord with the harsh logic of events. For history, in its great moments, tolerates in positions of authority only those men capable of directing their own course.”

Suspicion falls on de Gaulle because Darlan’s assassination makes it possible for de Gaulle to immediately outmaneuver Giraud — and seize the reins of French power in North Africa.

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
1944, just over two years after Postel-Vinay’s capture, André Boulloche has landed in the same prison hospital his boss was held in — after he has fumbled his own suicide at the time of his arrest. André has lost a great deal of blood when he is shot, but he survives the drive to l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière. The Germans operate on him immediately. They want him alive — but only so that they can make him talk. After the operation, they put him alone in a prison hospital room, without any postoperative care.

André thinks that the gunshot wound has probably saved his life. At the moment he was fired on, he had the cyanide pill in his pocket. He had always promised himself that he would swallow the pill when he was arrested, a denouement he had expected.

But in the instant after the Germans shoot him, he decides he will not kill himself.

Everything is ruined anyway
, he says to himself.
Let’s see what the next twenty-four hours bring.
Afterward, he remains certain that he would have swallowed the cyanide if he had been arrested unhurt.

Lying in bed, alone in his prison hospital room, André begins to ponder all the peregrinations that have led him to this wretched outcome.

First there was the abortive trip to North Africa, immediately after the armistice, where he found it was impossible to fight against
the Germans. Then his return to France and his civilian job with the government, his recruitment into the Resistance by Postel-Vinay at the end of 1940, and Postel-Vinay’s arrest at the end of 1941.

He had taken over for Postel-Vinay in the northern region after his boss was captured by the Germans. He made contacts with other leaders of the secret army and recruited three more of his government colleagues to fight the enemy. Throughout 1942, he continued to smuggle arms and to collect information about German troop movements to send to London.

Toward the end of 1942, André learns that the Gestapo is about to arrest him. When the news of the Allied invasion of North Africa reaches France in November through the always-jammed transmissions of the BBC, he tells his family that he has decided to return to Morocco.

AFTER SAYING GOODBYE
to his family in Paris on December 1, 1942, André boards a train for Nevers in Burgundy, 150 miles south of the capital. His Resistance colleague Bernard Vernier-Palliez puts him in touch with a sympathetic garage owner who helps him cross the demarcation line into the newly christened southern zone on foot.

André arrives in Toulouse on December third. From there he travels to Pau, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, thirty miles from the Spanish border. Then he makes his way to Tardets-Sorholus, where an inn owner is another Resistance sympathizer.

At seven o’clock in the evening on the day after Christmas, André and twelve others meet up with a guide who leads them through the snow, on an unmarked path, over a six-thousand-foot mountain in the Pyrenees. When they reach the Spanish border seventeen hours later, the guide leaves them.

The Frenchmen continue on their own, finally reaching a hotel in the Irati forest at four in the afternoon. They are arrested almost
immediately by the Spanish authorities. André pretends that he is a Canadian named Nicolas Boulloche. His fellow
Résistant
Vernier-Palliez identifies himself as an American.
*

On January 1, they are transferred to a prison in Pamplona. There André meets other escapees, who convince him that he should try to make it to England, where de Gaulle is, instead of North Africa.

Toward the end of January, two pieces of encouraging war news reach the French refugees: British forces in North Africa have begun an assault on the German troops under the command of General Erwin Rommel (“the Desert Fox”). At almost the same moment, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov is leading an overwhelming force against the German defenses south of Lake Ladoga. Within hours, the 872-day siege of Leningrad is broken.

On March 13, German officers make their first attempt to assassinate Hitler. A bomb disguised as two bottles of brandy is put on board the Führer’s personal Focke-Wulf 200 Condor plane. The detonator activates, but cold temperatures prevent the plastic explosives from blowing up.