Pierre Boulain
Lily, Tante Go, and Max all knew something must have happened. It was now early February 1944 and Franco had not returned to Bayonne. The three had been waiting for his return for several weeks, following a trip that should have taken him only a few days to complete.
In the meantime, in Madrid, Michael Creswell of MI9 had been planning to discuss a new course of action by the Allies with Franco when Creswell received word from Airy Neave, the MI9 head of the escape division in London, that Franco had been arrested.
News of his arrest could not have come at a worse time. Creswell had heard from Neave that the Allies were stepping up activities in preparation for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe. The Allies would be increasing bombing operations throughout the spring, which would clearly result in more men needing help to escape. To reduce the number of airmen fleeing via the Comet Line, secret camps were to be established in rural areas of France and Belgium where downed pilots would be protected and hidden until after the invasion, assuming the invasion was successful and the liberation followed.
Three weeks after Franco’s arrest, Creswell sent word to Tante Go, Max, and Lily, the longest surviving members of the escape line, to come to Madrid for an emergency meeting.
Lily was furious at the news of betrayal again in the Comet Line and was determined to find the infiltrator once and for all. She had done so before in identifying Prosper Dezitter, and she would do it again.
“You must stay focused,” Creswell told the trio. “We are sending our own man to take over the Paris section. He is a Belgian army officer, Jean de Blommaert, code-named Thomas Rutland. Here is a photo of him so you know what he looks like. He will pick up where Jerome left off. We have no further word on where they have taken either Jerome or Jean Francois after Fresnes prison.”
“So you don’t know if they are still alive?” Lily asked.
“The last news we have is that they are no longer in Fresnes, period,” answered Creswell.
“Max, you will continue to run the train connections from Paris to Dax. Lily, you will work with him in Paris and then handle getting the men from there to the border. Tante Go, you and your husband will continue to coordinate the Basques guides from Kattalin’s house. We expect Florentino to not only guide these men over the mountains, but to separately carry messages and maps to Spain when he’s not transporting men.”
With renewed enthusiasm, the trio headed back to Bayonne. In the third week of February 1944, Lily received word from Creswell that Thomas was already under surveillance by the Gestapo in Paris. Lily, upon hearing the news, immediately boarded the next train to Paris.
“You are Thomas? I am Lily,” she said as she shook his hand and introduced herself. “You are already being watched by the Gestapo, and Creswell has asked me to take you to Bayonne tomorrow for safety. You cannot stay here.”
“Wow! That was quick. I’ve only been here less than a month. I guess I won’t be helping you from here, will I?” Thomas replied.
“You can be of great help to us, even if it’s from London,” Lily answered.
“Before leaving tomorrow, we are meeting tonight with other members of the line to go over our next moves.”
“I’m aware of that meeting,” Thomas answered. “I actually thought I would only meet you there for the first time. I don’t think the others need to know that I am leaving with you tomorrow.”
“I agree. I have a friend here in Paris, Madeleine Noel, a dentist in the city who goes by the code name of Martine. She will be helping me run things here in Paris. I stay with her when I am in the city. She has been living alone since the Gestapo arrested her husband months ago.”
That night, February 24, Thomas and Lily entered the restaurant which Martine had chosen. Lily was very uncomfortable at the thought of discussing escape strategies in a public restaurant in Paris. She reflected on how this would have never happened in Belgium. But then again, she thought, the cafes in Paris have much more food available than in Belgium.
Among the members that were there was the Abbé Beauvais, who hid pilots when they first arrived in Paris. He was accompanied by a sandy-haired young Belgian named Pierre Boulain.
“I don’t know you,” she uttered as she introduced herself to him. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so. I have been helping Abbé Beauvais at the church, and I worked on identity cards for Franco,” Boulain answered.
He was wearing a purple coat and had a polka-dot tie that really stood out in the crowded restaurant.
“Pierre has offered to bring in some fliers from Belgium, but he needs about 2500 francs for each flier to cover his expenses. I told him we’d think about it and let him know. Abbé Beauvais says he’s helped him on several occasions with men staying at the church,” Thomas told Lily.
“Why are you wearing a polka-dot tie?” Lily asked.
“What kind of a silly question is that?” Martine chimed in. There was a sudden silence at the table.
Something about the polka-dot tie just didn’t feel right. Then Lily remembered what her father said before the Nazis arrested the whole family. The next time you see anyone standing out with a tie like that, be careful, because it could be a signal to someone.
“Okay, I’m just talking out loud, that’s all.”
Pierre Boulain felt uneasy at this attention to his necktie. Does she really know that this tie is a signal to undercover Gestapo agents of who I am?
There was no further conversation between the two for the rest of the evening, and the atmosphere and food at the restaurant kept the overall dinner in a pleasant manner, although Lily did not discuss any Comet Line plans at the table that evening.
The next day, February 25, Lily left for Bayonne with Thomas and an MI9 radioman that needed to get back to London. For some reason, perhaps the uneasiness at meeting Pierre Boulain the night before and not trusting him, Lily decided to take a new route across the mountains to reach the British consulate in San Sebastian. She bid Thomas good luck after she had rested for a while, and started the journey back to Paris.
When she was about to board a train for Paris several days later, the train had recently been bombed by American planes earlier that week, and she had to take a bus, arriving quite late in the evening. She decided to call her friend Martine. Lily knew Martine would be worried since she had not contacted her in nearly two weeks since the meeting in the restaurant the night before she left with Thomas.
A woman answered the phone.
“Ah, it’s you, Micheline. Martine has been so worried about you. Please come on over.”
“Who is this? Is Martine there?” Lily asked very suspiciously.
“I am a friend of Martine. She just stepped out, but will be back very shortly, Micheline.”
“Fine, I’ll be right over,” she replied in a normal voice, trying not to sound unconvincing.
Something was drastically wrong. Lily had not used her real name in over a year, and certainly Martine didn’t know Lily’s real name either. There was no way she would return to Martine’s apartment. Instead, she decided to go to Martine’s dental office on the outskirts of Paris. She approached the building very carefully until she neared the entrance doorway. Suddenly, a voice from within shouted.
“I would not go in there if I were you,” the concierge to the building blurted as she appeared in the doorway. “The Germans have been here and everyone in Martine’s office was arrested. Here is the address of Diane, Martine’s good friend. She can probably tell you more.”
Her heart started pumping very rapidly as she walked away, looking frequently behind her to see if anyone was following. Thirty minutes later and two Metro stops away, she rang the doorbell at Diane’s house, a small cottage on a quiet street nearly out of the city.
“I am Lily, Diane, perhaps Martine has spoken to you about me?”
“Come in, quickly. You were at the restaurant with the others a few weeks ago, correct?”
“Yes, there were nearly ten of us there.”
“Everyone else who was there was arrested,” she said. “They were all taken to Fresnes prison.”
“That’s it, we’re going to Fresnes,” Lily said. “If I can get in there somehow to visit, I have people on the inside who can tell me what happened.”
“Are you crazy? No one just goes to Fresnes and asks to visit a prisoner. Lily, they’ll throw you in a cell too.”
“You don’t understand. Two years ago my parents and my sister were arrested because someone betrayed them to the Germans. This has to stop. It was bad enough when we found out about Prosper Dezitter, another traitor. I need to know. I have an idea who it is, but I can’t prove it yet.”
On March 13, in Diane’s car, the two of them drove to the outskirts of Paris and faced the stone fortress several hundred yards in front of them. Lily got out of the car, took a deep breath, and started walking toward the prison gate. Once she crossed over a railroad bridge, she headed directly for the main gate.
“I am here to visit Abbé Beauvais. He is my parish priest and a friend, and I believe he is a prisoner here,” she demanded.
“Go away, little girl, this is not a place you want to visit anyone,” the French guard at the gate shouted.
“He is my priest. I have a right to see him.”
Dumbfounded, the guard picked up the telephone at the gatehouse and spoke to his superior.
“Wait here. Someone will come out shortly.”
She nervously paced outside the high fence which surrounded the entire prison. What will I say next? she pondered.
A second guard appeared from inside the prison and escorted Lily to the prison warden’s office.
“Who are you? Where do you come from?” the warden asked. “No one ever visits anyone in here, no one,” he emphasized.
“My name is Jeannette Larouche. Here are my papers. I just wanted to see if Abbé Beauvais is alright. He is my friend,” she answered in a tone like any fifteen-year old would, dressed in a blazer and skirt, and wearing white knee socks. No one would ever believe this was a twenty-four year old nurse, a leader of an escape line.
The warden ordered her to be detained in a holding cell while he checked her identity and the prisoner she said she was there to visit. The holding cell was part of other cells built in a circular design very similar to the spokes on a bicycle, and all the cells came together in the center.
Across from the cell Lily was placed in, another prisoner faced her once the guard had locked her in and left.
“Mademoiselle, what is a child like you doing in a place like this? What could you possibly have done wrong?”
“I need to speak to Dr. Martine Noel. Can you help me, please?” she asked. “She is a prisoner here also.”
As if by instinct, the prisoner looked both ways from his cell, picked up his metal drinking cup from the floor, and began tapping at the wall closest to the next cell. Another prisoner appeared in the front of his cell near the first prisoner’s cell, separated only by a solid wall.
“Martine Noel has a visitor. Find her. Tell her it’s a young girl.”
As if like a chain reaction or a game of dominoes, the message was passed along from cell to cell. Fifteen minutes later, the first prisoner looked back toward Lily across the hallway and said.
“We found her. She is not so far away that a good shout will catch her attention. You must do it now before the guards return, or you may not get a chance again.”
At the far end of the cells furthest away from her cell, there was a cell holding all those arrested at the restaurant, including Martine. Her face was drawn, her clothes tattered, and she showed bruises on her face and arms. Her look was sullen, almost like being in a trance as she just sat there.
“Martine! Martine!”
Martine jumped to her feet, walked as fast as she could to the bars of the cell where the sound came from.
“Martine! Martine!”
“Who is it? Who are you?” Martine yelled back.
“It’s me, Martine, you know who I am. Who is the traitor? Who betrayed us?”
Martine recognized Lily’s voice. Was she a prisoner too? Had they finally caught her as
well? Maybe not, she thought. Then she shouted.
“It’s Pierre, Pierre Boulain!”
I knew it, she thought. I didn’t like him from that day at the restaurant. Then suddenly she remembered having met him before in Brussels. He called himself Jean Masson back then. It was at a safe house in Brussels where Comet Line members met in June 1943. She remembered he was providing false identification papers for Frederic de Jongh, Dedee’s father, in Paris. She also remembered seeing Masson in a plaza talking to a man in a trench coat, with two other men close by. Although she had paid little attention to that meeting at the time, she now realized those other men were likely Gestapo agents also.
Fresnes prison was run by French guards, not by Germans. So Lily thought she had a better chance of convincing them that she was nothing more than a local schoolgirl visiting her parish priest. Three days later, she was brought before the warden, also a Frenchman.
“You are only seventeen years old,” the warden said as he tossed her identity card on the desk. “The Gestapo are on their way here to interrogate you. Go. Get her out of here right now.” He ordered the guard to set her free immediately. As Lily was leaving the warden’s office, she could not help but notice a family picture of the warden’s family on a file drawer near the doorway. She guessed he had a daughter of his own, perhaps also a teenager. He never realized, however, this teenager was twenty-four years old.
Within minutes, Lily was led out the front gate of the prison, and she began casually walking across the railroad bridge, the same bridge she had crossed nearly four days earlier. Naturally, Diane’s car was nowhere to be found, but approaching the bridge was a German staff car making a beeline for the prison gates. Fortunately for her, they didn’t even give so much as a glance Lily’s way. Once they had passed, she stepped up her walk and disappeared out of sight.
She quickly found two Comet Line members and told them of her visit to the prison and Martine’s admission about Pierre Boulain, alias Jean Masson. They were not convinced despite Lily’s efforts to do so.