21
No wartime clandestine crossing of the Pyrenees was ever easy. Success depended on luck, good guides and considerable endurance.
Landes and Corbin were fortunate compared with some. Nineteen forty-three ended with a spell of unusually mild weather, which meant more wind and rain, but no snow. Secondly, the point at which they were to cross was at the lower western end of the Pyrenees, where the great ridge finally dips through the Basque country into the Bay of Biscay. The highest point of the Pyrenean range is the Pico d’Aneto at 3,404 metres. The Izpegui pass, through which the two escapees would have to thread their way, was only 690 metres.
The height they had to climb may not have been great, but the terrain here is inhospitable and tough. At this point the Pyrenees rise like a great wave which swells up from Spain, breaks at the crest and crashes down a steep escarpment, rugged, rock-strewn and rough-grassed, into France. For two men used to the comforts of city life, this was not going to be an easy passage, particularly since, being in relatively populated countryside, the main crossing would have to be made at night.
Landes and Corbin stayed for two days in the area of Lake Biscarrosse before being driven south along the Route des Lacs, a little country road which skips from lake to lake just behind the long ribbon of beach and sand dunes that marks the southern end of the Aquitaine coast. On the night of 24 November they reached the home of Fernande and André Bouillar in Tarnos, five kilometres north of the ancient Basque port of Bayonne. It was the first time that Landes had met André Bouillar – known locally as ‘Dédé le Basque’ – and he was impressed by the twenty-six-year-old police inspector-cum-Resistance leader. ‘He immediately inspired my confidence,’ Landes said later. Bouillar was a much-respected figure of courage and resourcefulness who ran a number of escape routes over the Pyrenees. His original intention had been to deliver Landes and Corbin directly to Michael Cresswell’s MI9 escape route, which had an undercover existence in the British consulate in San Sebastián. He probably planned to use a local fisherman who specialised (for a price) in taking escapees off the Aquitaine beaches at night, landing them on the Spanish side of the border. But sometime before their arrival, Bouillar received intelligence warning him not to use this route, but to cross by the Izpegui pass and deliver the two men to the station at Elizondo instead.
Landes, Corbin and Bouillar met their guides in a safe house between Biarritz and St Jean de Luz, finding to their surprise that three other escapees had been added to their party: a Catholic priest, a young woman and an eighteen-year-old ‘deserter’. They stayed in the safe house until, on 26 November, they were driven in an ‘ambulance’ and dropped off just outside the little frontier town of St Étienne-de-Baïgorry. Here they began their ascent of the Pyrenean escarpment, which at this point marks the Franco-Spanish border.
The night was particularly dark and overcast and swept with curtains of heavy, cold rain. Landes’s anorak, recently purchased on the black market, coped reasonably well with the deluges. But Corbin wore a flannel greatcoat, which soon became heavy and sodden. Both had real trouble with their soft city feet and tried to relieve their pain by frequently swapping shoes with Bouillar to ease their blisters. To add to their trials, they had to make a long detour from their intended route to avoid a German patrol. Crossing a bridge just before they started the climb, the guides (known as passeurs) suddenly stopped and refused to go further without more money. The escapees had no choice but to pay up.
The blackness of the night forced the group to snake along in crocodile, holding each other’s clothes to keep in contact. It was normal practice amongst the passeurs to give their escapees white-painted espadrilles so as to be seen better on nights such as this. But, having their own stout walking shoes, Landes and Corbin had no need of these.
At night, and especially on such a night as this, hearing is a far more useful sense than sight. There were regular stops when all had to be totally silent, listening for hostile sounds in the darkness. This was just as well, for between the stops the guides pushed ahead at a strong pace, making little allowance for the Stygian darkness and the unfitness of their charges. Now, at last, they were on the final ascent to the crest. The going was rough and steep. It was hard, lung-bursting, muscle-aching work, but eventually they arrived at the narrow defile of the Izpegui pass.
Here they were met by a fierce wind blowing up from Navarre. Heads down now, as the incessant rain lashed their faces, they skirted along the crest above the pass in order to give a wide berth to the red-tiled, single-storey building which served as the frontier checkpoint, manned jointly by German police and Spanish guards. Its lights shone blearily, flickering through scudding clouds and the unrelenting downpour. Blundering across the steep hillside in single file through the darkness, the party loosed stones which tumbled down the hillside like little avalanches, causing a rattling that seemed loud enough to wake the dead.
Around six in the morning they were finally through, over the border and on their long descent into Navarre and Spain. As the first signs of dawn began to lighten a leaden sky, the passeurs stopped again, demanding yet more money if the group wanted a farmhouse for shelter. Again they paid up. After sixteen hours’ solid walking they finally found refuge in a hay barn and a little comfort in a rough meal of milk, bread, sheep’s cheese and dried meat.
Landes took Bouillar to one side and asked him if he would like to return to England with them. The Basque leader replied that his place was with his men. He would return to France with the guides. He told Landes and Corbin to get some sleep and press on the following day. He had been assured that the way was clear to Elizondo, fifteen kilometres away. Before parting, Landes gave Bouillar the BBC signal which would announce his safe arrival in England (‘Le beurre est cuit’ – ‘The butter is done’) and the phrase which would indicate his return to France (‘Roger reviendra manger des cèpes’). He added that any messenger he sent to Bouillar after his return would say that he came ‘on behalf of Stanislas’ and show him a gold sovereign identical to the one Landes gave Bouillar before they parted. It was only after Bouillar left that Landes discovered he was still wearing his Basque friend’s shoes – and would now have to wear them all the way back to London. If he made it.
The next morning the little group of fugitives woke to find that their rucksacks had been rifled and their valuables stolen while they slept. They didn’t know whether the thieves were the rapacious passeurs, or their hard-pressed Spanish hosts trying to eke out a living from meagre ground which was difficult enough to live on even in peacetime. Fortunately, all of Landes’s and Corbin’s funds were in money belts safely secured around their bodies.
At three that afternoon, they set off through drizzle on the last leg to the small Basque town of Elizondo – neat, with its cream-fronted, ornate iron-balconied houses, magnificent church adorned with twin cupola-topped towers, and its wide square boasting a magnificent old traveller’s inn. The town was, at the time, the terminus for a small single-tracked mountain railway which connected with Madrid, making Elizondo a destination of choice for those fleeing France.
That evening, as dusk was falling, the little party, bedraggled, footsore and weary, walked up the hill from the centre of Elizondo to the station. To their delight they saw the embassy car waiting for them, as planned, outside the station café. But to get to it they had to pass a Guardia Civil post in the station square. Here, several Spanish policemen lounged, smoking cigarettes. One of them stopped the travellers and asked, in Spanish, where they came from. The young deserter replied in French, accompanied by energetic hand gestures. They were swiftly arrested.
As they were led off, the British embassy car pulled quietly away and disappeared into the distance.
Under questioning, Landes and Corbin stuck to their cover story: they were French-Canadian commandos who had escaped from captivity. But the fact that Landes was carrying 32,620 French francs and Corbin 30,000 and six gold sovereigns in their money belts did not enhance their credibility. The five escapees were placed under guard in the attic of a local hotel that night and sent to Pamplona, the capital of Navarre, the following morning. Before they left Elizondo, Landes managed to bribe a guard to slip a postcard into the town letterbox informing the British consulate in San Sebastián of their arrival and arrest, the details of which were also reported back to the Madrid embassy by the military attaché on his return from Elizondo.
Landes and Corbin were processed in Pamplona and then incarcerated in a single small room, where they spent almost two weeks ‘under house arrest’. On 8 December, they were moved into a cramped cell in a military prison, which they shared with six other captured escapees of various nationalities and an uncertain regard for personal hygiene. The following day they were dispatched by train to the infamous internment camp of Miranda de Ebro.
While Landes and Corbin rattled across Spain to their new captivity, tied together with rope, Mary Herbert was giving birth to a baby girl in a nursing home in Bordeaux. She called her daughter Claudine, after her own nom de guerre.
On 20 December, three weeks after Landes and Corbin’s arduous journey across the Spanish frontier, and thirty kilometres to the northwest, Friedrich Dohse, Louis Joubert and Colonel André Thinières also crossed into Spain, but by a far more congenial route.
At around eleven that day, Joubert and Thinières stepped down from the Bordeaux train at Hendaye, the French seaside resort and rail terminus on the Franco-Spanish border. Outside the station entrance, they found Dohse, Claire Keimer and Kunesch waiting for them in Dohse’s black Cadillac. After the Germans were introduced to Thinières – who they had never met before – the party drove into the Basque hills and up to the picturesque hilltop town of Biriatou, where they lunched at the ancient wooden-beamed, flagstone-floored inn, the Auberge Hiribarren. Looking down from the dining room, they could see the turbulent white water of the Bidasoa river marking the frontier. Beyond, the hills of Spain, covered in oak woods and dotted with little farms and open pastures, rolled away into the distance under a cold December sky.
After lunch the group drove a little way down the hill to a quiet spot. Here Joubert and Thinières were taken out of Dohse’s Cadillac and locked into the boot of a second Gestapo car, which was waiting for them. The convoy then snaked its way down the hill to the outskirts of Hendaye. Here they turned left and crossed a rickety bridge perched on concrete pylons which led over the Bidasoa river, to the checkpoints on the Spanish border.
This was a moment of high danger for Dohse, for though his superiors in Paris were aware of his plans to approach de Gaulle’s government through Joubert, they knew nothing of his decision to send Colonel Thinières with him. The Bordeaux Gestapo chief was, in short, illegally smuggling two men – one of them a senior member of the French Resistance under sentence of death – out of France in the boot of a Gestapo car. ‘At this moment I was taking a very great risk,’ Dohse said later. ‘If the Spanish customs men had arrested me that would have been it. No one in Paris knew what I was doing – not even [Machule in Bordeaux] … If anything had gone wrong it would have been straight to the Russian front for me.’
Normally, at this point, German officials without diplomatic papers, such as Dohse, would have been stopped and questioned – and, on occasion, even searched. But Dohse had previously arranged for a friend and colleague, who was the local German–Spanish liaison officer, to be engaged in deep conversation with the Spanish frontier guards as the illicit convoy approached. Distracted, the guards waved the cars through.
From Irun, Dohse led off along the back roads towards San Sebastián. Once in open countryside the two Frenchmen were released and transferred, in pouring rain, to the comfort of the Cadillac, where they joined Dohse in the back seat, chatting amiably with him for the rest of the journey. At San Sebastián, Joubert and Thinières were handed a couple of hundred pesetas – which Dohse insisted on exchanging for francs – and dropped at a café in the centre of the city. Here Dohse said his farewells, instructing his emissaries to send him a message (‘Louis et Charles sont bien arrivés’) through the BBC French service when they arrived in Algeria.
Suddenly out of occupied France and alone in a strange city, the two Frenchmen felt uncomfortable and exposed. ‘In our heavy boots and rucksacks, we felt very out of place amongst all the fine buildings and décor,’ Joubert noted in his diary. They caught a taxi to the British consulate, where, just as Dohse had predicted, they were welcomed as French fugitives by the MI9 escape organisation, who passed them on to the French section in the consulate, charged with getting escaped French citizens out of Spain. Joubert later complained that the resources of the French section were ‘very limited and their contacts almost non-existent … too much bureaucracy and too little secrecy’, adding in a tone of mild disapproval: ‘they sent us in a taxi to a travellers’ hostel [back] in Irun’.
Here they were told they would have to wait in the company of assorted other impecunious and desperate refugees of all nationalities, until further notice. After the heady drama of lunch with the Gestapo and a clandestine passage of the Franco-Spanish frontier in the boot of a Gestapo car, it was all rather an anticlimax.
What followed was a nervous and uncomfortable period full of bureaucratic problems, worrying rumours and inexplicable delays. Christmas came and went without movement or merriment, or prospect of anything different. Finally, on 27 December, Joubert and Thinières, now equipped with the necessary identity cards and travel documents, took the Southern Express for Madrid, where they reported to the French mission in the Spanish capital. The following day, at Malaga, they boarded a French ship which was waiting to take them to Casablanca. On board they were made a fuss of and invited to dine with the ship’s officers. ‘The talk was full of tales of the Resistance; the eyes were full of emotion; the conversation was full of politics, the Allies and the rivalries of French power … this is indeed the age of adventurers!’ Joubert exuberated to his diary.
On New Year’s Eve 1943, Joubert and Thinières landed at Casablanca.
The following day, as the two men were preparing for their journey to de Gaulle’s headquarters in Algiers, Dohse got the news he had been waiting for. Reading the morning summary of the local German radio surveillance section, he saw, among the messages sent by BBC Algiers the previous night: ‘Louis et Charles sont bien arrivés.’
Roger Landes and Charles Corbin also had a New Year’s present that day. They had their first hot baths since leaving France, more than a month previously.
Whatever the Christmas discomforts suffered by Thinières and Joubert at the travellers’ hostel in Irun, they were nothing to what Landes and Corbin had to endure at Miranda de Ebro. Filthy, lice-ridden and riddled with corruption, Miranda was a byword for casual neglect by the Spanish authorities, disease and hopelessness for its inmates and violence perpetrated by criminals, desperadoes and the intelligence services of all the main wartime combatants. The camp had its own brothel, a casino run by some Chinese inmates, an active black market from which anything could be bought for the right money, 200 more prisoners than it could accommodate (or would feed), its own currency-exchange market, the foulest kitchen in Spain, untouchable food (except for the bread), very little running water, a sewage system ‘which would have been inadequate for a cat’s toilet’, and a highly active spy ring made up of so-called ‘German deserters’.
It took the British authorities in Madrid three weeks (which included Christmas) to get their two secret agents released from the camp. Finally, Landes and Corbin were allowed to travel on to the British embassy in Madrid, arriving in the early evening of 31 December 1943, the day after Joubert and Thinières had left the city.
The following morning, after completing administrative procedures, Corbin and Landes were moved into the Morar Hotel (it must have struck Landes as ironic to have escaped France, only to be put up in a hotel named after the Scottish loch at which he had done his SOE training!). The Morar was the British embassy’s hotel of choice for those bound for London, and its delights, even under wartime constraints, were almost too much for the two escapees. ‘[The bath] was truly delicious, but the bed was so soft and the room so overheated that neither of us could catch a wink of sleep,’ Landes complained after the war.
Over the next ten days, Landes and Corbin wrote lengthy debriefing reports, which they were required to leave behind in the embassy when, eventually, they left Madrid for the sixteen-hour journey to the British fortress island of Gibraltar.
Entering Gibraltar, Landes got into some difficulty with a British customs official because a magazine he was taking back to Baker Street, as an example of Nazi propaganda, was misconstrued as evidence that he was a smuggler of pro-German literature. It was not his only problem. For reasons he would not understand until later, an MI5 security officer at his first interrogation seemed highly suspicious of a gold watch he was wearing, which was taken away for examination.
Finally, on 16 January 1944, Corbin and Landes left Gibraltar by separate planes, arriving at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall in the middle of a violent storm. From here, after more difficulties with a disbelieving immigration officer which had to be resolved by a call to Baker Street, the pair took a plane to Swindon, where they were met by Maurice Buckmaster and the SOE operations officer, Gerry Morel. They spent that night in Morel’s Kensington flat before reporting to Orchard Court the following morning, to begin their proper debriefing.
That night, André Bouillar, listening to the Messages personnels on the BBC French Service, heard the words ‘Le beurre est cuit’ – and knew that the two footsore friends he had helped over the Pyrenees that rainy night six weeks earlier had made it (along with the pair of shoes he had forgotten to retrieve before bidding them farewell).
Many of Landes’s erstwhile colleagues in the Scientist network were not so lucky. Between July 1943, when the great unravelling began, and the end of that year, seventy-eight Scientist agents were arrested. Four of them were shot and the remainder deported to the concentration camps of Nazi Europe. Forty-seven never saw France, or their loved ones, again.