EXTRACTS FROM ORIGINAL INTERVIEWS
Henri, what about your social and family origins?
Henri: My family ran a beauty salon, which was in a huge apartment on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I had an extraordinary golden childhood. I had to sweat it out later in life but it didn’t bother me. The beauty business was extremely profitable; we lived in the lap of luxury.
I left school when I was 16. From 1926 to 1930—the year I left for my military service in Tunisia—I worked for my father’s company and learned how to make cosmetics and perfumes. During the day I worked in the laboratory; in the evening I was a delivery boy. But when I returned from Tunisia I was employed with my brother in a factory that manufactured building site lamps and fire extinguishers. In 1938, I started a small business with a friend making liquid carpet-cleaning products.
We were called up for military service in 1939, and I did the same as everyone else; in other words, not a lot. We were waiting for “them” to arrive. I was sent to a place near Sedan, where I played cards, usually belote [a popular French card game similar to bridge], throughout the winter. I was given leave in February 1940, then following the German attack of May 10, my regiment went north almost as far as Belgium—I can’t say if we reached Belgium or not. At least we made the effort to go that far! The Germans gave us a thrashing, so we turned round and headed south. I was imprisoned just south of Verdun.
The first winter in the Ardennes, from 1939 to 1940, wasn’t exactly a piece of cake. I was in the 19th horse regiment. We spent most of our time burying horses that were dropping like flies. To bury a horse you need to dig a big hole, and the ground was frozen solid. Luckily I didn’t have to dig. I had a privileged position; I was a machine-gunner. Can you imagine that, machine guns against airplanes, it’s not exactly good antiaircraft defense—efficiency-wise it was bordering on useless! But we never made any mistakes during that war. Every time we saw a plane, we fired. We were sure they were all German, because the French didn’t have any (laughing)!
Did you often hit them?
German planes would occasionally fly over, but we were never really attacked. We’d set up the machine gun in a field because we had been told always to go behind the hedgerows to keep out of view. When planes flew over—ratatata … fearless we were! We fired away until one day the lieutenant shouted at us, “You just don’t realize, you’re firing like that, but do you have any idea how much each bullet costs?”
“No idea,” I replied.
“Each one costs a franc!”
“Well, each round is pretty expensive then, but after all, we are here to fire.”
We were firing too many rounds and each bullet cost a franc.
I’m not joking, it’s the truth. Then we were surprised we lost the war (laughing).
I have other beauties like that to tell.
It was freezing cold even though we were slightly protected with our uniforms and the rest of our kit. We were in a village called Beaumont-en-Argonne near Vouziers, in the Ardennes. It’s pretty nippy up there in winter and there was snow.
We knew everyone in Beaumont-en-Argonne. They treated us royally. We often went to the mayor’s, who was very kind to us. He kept rabbit hutches, with little rabbits, so you can imagine. Little rabbits are so sweet, all baby animals are. One of his rabbits had a litter of five or six bunnies and one of them, just one, was completely black. I don’t know who she’d been with!
When the Germans attacked, we went up to Belgium, then about a week later we were stopped by the German advance, so we did an about-turn. We retreated the way we had come and got back to the same village where we were forced to spend a night.
There was not a living soul; everyone had evacuated and the village had been completely pillaged. It must have been French soldiers who had done that because the Germans were behind us and hadn’t gotten that far. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was dreadful.
I went to the mayor’s house and noticed that the hutches had been opened. All the little rabbits were running about in the wild. The rabbits that could be eaten had been pinched [stolen], but there were loads that had been killed for the sake of killing. Then I remembered my black rabbit. I decided to try to find it. There were rabbits everywhere. After a while I managed to put my hands on it and said, “Listen mate, you’re coming with me.”
We left the next day and I took my rabbit with me. He was quite small. We continued retreating to Verdun and I still had my rabbit. He was completely spoilt because we were in a horse regiment and had as much oat as we needed for the horses. You can imagine how he stuffed himself. There was no shortage of grass either.
We were in the machine gun section, therefore every time we stationed somewhere we had to take up positions outside the station area, in a field or on a hill—supposedly to attack German planes. I’d take the rabbit every time. He was completely tame. He never tried to escape. He would stay with me even when we were firing the machine gun. He was used to it. He was really cute, my little rabbit.
The other lads in the section teased me. Every time we had to move on, they’d say, “Hey Cornioley, don’t forget the rabbit.” We got to the south of Verdun, where we were dismissed. We knew we were going to be taken prisoners when the Germans arrived in the space of an afternoon. We didn’t keep anything. We even heated some coffee by burning bank notes. I picked up my rabbit and said, “Listen you, my time’s up but you’re a rabbit, you can escape. Now hop along.” And since that day there have been black rabbits in Lorraine.
It’s the only life I saved during the war!
The winter passed and the debacle came. We did the same as nearly everybody else: a lot of running away. It didn’t warm us up very much, but it was a good time of the year. Then came the first winter in Germany, oh-la-la. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable and the food was worse. It wasn’t half cold; it was freezing, awful. The next war I fight will be in Africa; at any rate, it won’t be in a country where it’s so cold in winter. You know it’s one of the main reasons I escaped from Germany.
I’m not joking!
That winter I said to myself, Well mate, you’re not spending another winter here. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’ll not stay here. And that’s just what happened when circumstances made it easy for me—or rather for us, there were five of us who escaped from there.
Did you know someone who could get you the right papers?
Not at all, we left without any papers. We were in a camp, in fact we built the camp. We built absolutely everything, even the barbed-wire fencing. In some places we put up so much fencing that prisoners escaped by throwing two blankets over it. They got across as easy as pie. We reckoned that if we used enough barbed wire when escaping prisoners climbed over, it wouldn’t collapse.
After that, for a while a “commando of barbs” was formed. We were on the Siegfried line and our job was to take down all the barbed wiring along the line. Maybe it was sent to Russia; in any case, it disappeared.
When the spring came, we became a “farming commando”: that was the second phase. We harvested crops. What a comedy! All the lads wanted to stack the sheaves on the cart, but the stacking isn’t that straightforward. As long as the cart’s not moving, it’s easy, but as soon as it sets off, if they aren’t well balanced—crash, bang, wallop! It’s driven three yards, they all tumble down and you have to start all over again.
Another funny thing happened to me. There was a little wood near the camp. After working for a while, I thought I’d had enough—we were allowed to stop briefly when nature called. So I left the others, found myself a nice little spot, and thought I might as well have a snooze. At that time I could sleep anyhow and anywhere. I fell fast asleep.
When I woke up, all the others had gone back to the camp. They hadn’t noticed I was missing because no one counted the prisoners outside; we were only counted when we got back to camp. I wondered what I was going to do; I hadn’t prepared anything for an escape, was wearing clogs and so on. So, I decided I’d better go back to the camp and explain.
I arrived at the camp, asked for an interpreter, told him what had happened, and asked him to get me in. He went to tell the camp commander and came back five minutes later: “You can’t come in. They don’t want you to enter; they’ve had a head count and it was correct (laughing).”
I said, “But, this just isn’t on, I have to enter.” They discussed it for a while, obviously the idiot who had counted didn’t want to admit that he’d got it wrong! I said to the interpreter, “It’s your word and mine against his; you know me, you know I’m in this camp.” What a situation! In the end they let me in.
Sometimes, when we were being counted, we changed places on purpose so they got it wrong and had to start the roll-call again. This meant we started work later.
Pearl: But there are lots of stories about the Germans muddling up their counts. They were hopeless at counting.
Henri: The third phase we were dispersed across the region in small groups to clear up village roads. We collected rubbish, although there wasn’t much of it; people only chucked out real waste. Everything else was used. There must have been about 30 of us in the camp. I can’t remember if there was a guard, maybe. Each morning we all had our work to do. One day a man asked for four or five men to help him. We went with him and he took us to a nearby canal. The same thing happened, the next day and the next. At lunchtime they brought us thick soup, which was very filling, spot on. In the evening he came to take us back to the camp. To start with, we wondered what we were supposed to be doing there, but until the very end we didn’t understand why we were there. It was July, the weather was nice, so we swam and lay in the sun.
During the last days, he didn’t even bother to come and fetch us. We made our own way back to the camp. One day I said, “Listen, for the past two weeks we’ve been well fed and watered, we haven’t lifted a finger, we’ve had a lot of rest. If we want to escape, it’s now or never.” So with two or three other lads from the camp we decided to leave.
One morning, we headed along the track to the canal and escaped. It wasn’t exactly difficult. We followed a road then crossed some fields. We knew that we mustn’t be caught by the camp’s guards—we’d have been beaten up. But the other Germans, the ones who weren’t from the camp, didn’t give a damn. If they caught you, they’d just take you to a camp where they rounded up escapees, it wasn’t nearly as bad.
We walked for 48 hours, not in any old direction we knew roughly where we were. That’s how we escaped.
I was wearing Wellington boots. You can’t imagine how much I suffered in them because of the heat. Luckily I had a needle and thread with me. The thread was black so you could see it—and do you know that the best way of popping a blister is to push in the needle and thread it through, then leave the thread so the liquid can run out. When I got to France the soles of my feet had been completely darned.
There was thread everywhere!
Henri: Yes. Not only was it hot when we set off, but there were tremendous thunderstorms. Our feet got wet, our boots filled up, we had to empty them as we went along. At the Donon Pass we were shattered, tired, completely lost, and we walked bang slap into a check point. Three of the four lads who escaped with me were arrested. I managed to escape with the fourth. We went back to the woodman’s hut from where we’d started. Next morning, we tried again and as we were crossing the road, a German sentry we hadn’t noticed fired warning shots. Instead of stopping we each legged it down different paths towards the plain. I was totally lost; I saw a farmer and asked him where I was. He said, “So, you’ve escaped then? Do you realize you’ve just passed a German post? Go to the house over there, they’ll help you.” It was the mayor’s house and I spent the night in his attic. I was in Raon-la-Plaine [Vosges].
The next day someone cycled with me to another village where I took three more escapees under my wing: two Polish men and a North African. None of them could speak any French. I guided them until September 1, 1941, when we arrived in Bourg-en-Bresse and had really escaped. Two days later I was discharged and went to Mâcon to join a “national manpower group” [discharged soldiers].
I didn’t leave it until April 1943, when Maurice Southgate managed to send me the following message: “I can give you news about your fiancée whose name is a precious stone.” I met Maurice in Tarbes; he told me that Pearl wanted to make sure that I was in France before starting her training to be parachuted. As for the fifth escapee, I only got news from him much later in Marseilles. You should have seen the welcome he gave me, nothing was too much.
Pearl: Before Maurice Southgate left London for France, he asked me to describe in detail the military background of a Frenchman. He needed a cover story for an agent who would use the story if he were captured by the police or the Germans. I gave him the only real-life story I knew, which was that of my fiancé.
When Henri first met Amédée Maingard, Maurice South-gate’s radio operator, they started chatting. Henri asked him questions about his military background and Amédée told his story. Henri was so surprised, he kept asking, “Why did we never meet?” because he had been in all the places Amédée gave, which was hardly surprising because it was Henri’s military background!
Were you always confident, or were there moments when …
P: I never had any doubt about the outcome of the war, never. I went to help, persuaded that everything would turn out for the best. I did not know how it would end, I did not know where “they” were going to fall, be beaten. We lived from one day to the next and couldn’t do otherwise.
It’s strange the questions young people ask. You ask that, but you must realize that everything that was happening to us was so enormous; we just had to find a way through. If we hadn’t been convinced that we would succeed, we would never have managed! We were in it up to our necks. We had to say “no, no, no” to the very end.
H: Germany couldn’t have won that war because we were sure that one day America would join in, and even if they didn’t, they would have given such arms support to the English and the Allies that Germany would have had too many fronts to defend. It was impossible. For starters, the German army was spread over far too wide a territory. Do you realize the extent of their occupation at that time? It was horrifying.
P: Can you try to explain exactly what you want to know?
If Hitler had not attacked the U.S.S.R. can it be sure that he would have been beaten? After all, there have been other enemies who have conquered nations, moved in and remained there—
P: We didn’t think about it as deeply as that.
Or, should the situation be compared to someone who has a serious illness and only has one choice; either he considers that he is lost and gives in, or he fights continuously, with all his strength to beat the illness. Maybe in those circumstances you don’t weigh up the chances of success. You just say to yourself there is one aim, one objective—
P: That’s the answer. You know, when it comes down to it, we couldn’t foresee much. Everything was in the hands of the army. Everything went very badly for a long time: in Africa, the situation started changing after General Koenig had done his Bir-Hakeim [an important and successful delaying action staged by the 1st Free French Army against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa]. Then, little by little, things improved. We felt very strongly that “it was going to happen,” there was no alternative.
H: As the Germans had not managed to neutralize England, it became a fixed obsession of theirs, an abscess.
P: England was determined—that’s for sure. The English, all of them, were in it up to their necks. When I arrived in England in July 1941, I saw Londoners go down into the tube [subway] stations in the evenings to shelter from the bombing. In London the stations are very deep underground. Three tiers of bunk beds had been built along the platforms. People would go down every night with their belongings and rest between the last night train and the morning one.
To come back to your “work” as a courier, by arming the Maquis you were also giving them the means to attack.
P: Maquis were something very new, they hadn’t existed before.
H: Don’t say they never existed; there were Francs-Tireurs in 1870 who were maquisards.
P: Yes but the Francs-Tireurs were soldiers
H: They were still clandestine.
P: We weren’t soldiers. Even today, the French Resistance has kept this image: seen from the outside, it was not part of the army, it wasn’t part of anything official—except at the end when the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur came under General Koenig’s command.
When you say “from the outside” do you mean from the army’s point of view?
P: From the army’s point of view or from any other constituted body. We were not a constituted body. We were invented with a single goal in mind, “Set Europe ablaze,” as Churchill said, and when the war was over, SOE was disbanded. For a long time SOE was forgotten and ignored—it is still widely unknown in England. You know, SOE was invited to the Festival of Remembrance—a festival where there are representatives from all the British armed forces—for the first time in November 1994. I received an invitation for this commemoration, which takes place every year on November 11 at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
H: In England very few people know the meaning of SOE; it’s even less well known than in France.
P: Exactly.
In France people can still remember the radio “Ici Londres” (“This is London”), the parachute drops.
H: Also there are people who lived with SOE agents. For example in the Loir-et-Cher, there were people “in the know”; they knew about SOE.
P: Yes, but why? It’s because we formed the Amicale and talked about our work. What I also try to make people understand is that SOE didn’t only exist in one region. You know, there were 92 SOE networks in France, formed between 1941 and 1944. The south of the Loire was liberated thanks to these networks; the Allies didn’t even need to cross the Loire River.
Which changed the balance of power.
P: After the war Eisenhower and Montgomery said they had saved 15 Allied divisions.
H: Some Maquis in Brittany did a substantial amount of work. I don’t mean the big ones, the big ones were disastrous.
P: It was better not to be too big.
H: There were the Maquis of the Vercors, Glières, and Mont-Mouchet.
P: There is a great difference between a member of a Maquis and a soldier. In my opinion, you can’t make a maquisard out of a soldier.
P: You have to remember that when you had something to do with a service working for the war, you didn’t even try to understand it. I never set foot in the office of the section for which I worked. I didn’t even know if there was an office. We went to a flat that was kept especially for us in the centre of London, near Oxford Street, then “they” organized visits so that we would never meet each other. It was all for security reasons. In fact, I only knew the boys and girls with whom I trained.
I wasn’t allowed to say why I was leaving and what I was doing, and nobody mentioned it. That is a big difference between the French and the English.
Are the English much stricter?
P: No. When you ask the English not to repeat something, they don’t. Try asking a French person the same thing he will tell his best friend, who in turn tells his best friend and it goes on forever.
That could cause problems for an organization such as yours.
P: Definitely. But you cannot change people’s natures.
Do you think it’s a boastful streak in the French?
P: No…. I don’t know. In fact I don’t really understand why a French person must talk. It was one of the biggest problems between Churchill and de Gaulle. I’m sure that’s why they never told de Gaulle the exact date of D-Day. They wanted to keep it a secret!
H: There were a lot of differences between France and England. I lived in both. I saw London in September 1944, in the middle of the war, and when I arrived in England, it was paradise compared to here.
Let me give you an example of the English mentality. One day we went into a department store in London. I had a ration card, I showed it—
P: No, first of all you almost fainted when you saw the displays of soap, there was such a lot of it, whereas in France we had no soap.
H: Anyway, I handed over my card, the girl took a pencil, and ticked the soap box. I didn’t say a word, then I said to Pearl, “Did you see that? She used a pencil; I can rub that out in a second.”
You see that’s the wangling French mentality. The girl used a pencil because she was sure that people wouldn’t rub it out; they had a big enough soap ration.
The English liked us all the same. Once, we were with a group of French people in a London restaurant and an English girl heard us talking in French. When we were on our way out, she turned round and shouted, “Vive la France!” It gave us a lump in our throats.
Radio operators were the crucial link of communication between the SOE offices in London and the agents in France. The work of the radio operators enabled London to send orders to the agents and allowed the agents to inform London as to their needs and welfare. Because the Germans understood that these radio communications were the lifeline of the Resistance networks, they were constantly on the lookout for radio operators, making it a highly dangerous and stressful job.
P: The worst job was being a radio operator.
Why?
P: Because there were radio cars [radio detectors or “gonios”]. You had to move the radio set as often as possible so that you weren’t traced, and code and decode the messages coming in and going out. It was an awful job, really stressful. Amédée did it for over a year. It was incredible that he held out in the same place for such a long time. Eventually, he asked to change jobs and became Maurice’s second in command.
Amédée was born in Mauritius, but his family originated from Brittany. There were several agents from Mauritius in the SOE because they were bilingual, French-English. He lived in an apartment owned by a milliner and hid the radio set in the false bottom of an old wardrobe. One day the Germans came to the apartment. They were intrigued by the painted eggs—Amédée painted them in the Chinese way. He had learned how to do that in Mauritius.
And all the time the radio was in the wardrobe!
P: They didn’t find it, but it was there all right.
Amédée was a gentleman, brought up in French bourgeois traditional fashion. The landlady thought he was an accountant working from home. One of the funniest things happened. It was after the incident of my luggage falling in the water. When it was retrieved three weeks later, Maurice took it to Amédée and asked him to dry my clothes. He hung them on lines put up in his room. He said he was very worried in case the landlady came into his room, saw my knickers drying on the line and could have thought he was having girlfriends! (laughing) He had such a charming way of telling that story.
The SOE radio operator near Toulouse, Yvonne Cormeau, was lucky. She lived in the countryside and could move around more easily to transmit messages. I don’t know how Amédée managed for over a year in Châteauroux.
André [the son of the farmers of Doulçay, Monsieur and Madame Henri Trochet] remembered that when we were at their farm, he could see the “gonio” car driving around trying to find our radio set.
Monsieur Mardon, the mayor of Dun-le-Poëlier, first took us to Doulçay. When Amédée met him, he introduced him to Tutur, who was going to be our radio operator. We couldn’t pick and choose our colleagues, we took whoever was willing. You had to trust the person who was introducing you to new contacts.
Were the radio operators technicians, people who did that professionally?
P: Most of them weren’t. Mine, Tutur, was a technician because he was radio operator in the French overseas army. Amédée probably recruited him in the region of Châteauroux. He was my operator and what a character. He told such tall stories!
When he arrived at the Trochets we scattered because we thought the Gestapo was coming. He was all excited and told us how he had met Germans, shot at them and thrown hand grenades…. It might have been true because it was just after D-day, but all the same it was too tall a story. Listening to him I thought, Who on earth is this chap?
One of the Maquis members, Robert Knéper, caught him once, in uniform, in the middle of a tale about how the car in which he had arrived had been parachuted with him. “You see,” he said, “they know how to do things properly.”
He also said that his wife and children had been arrested by the Gestapo. He exaggerated so much that the people listening were in tears! Henri was a witness to that.
H: According to him, the Germans had massacred his whole family, his wife, his children … the chaps listening cried. In any case … he was a damned good operator, he knew how to do his job.
P: He became friendly with the farmers’ daughters who took care of him and he decided to stay even though, for security reasons, we had to have move on. He was a danger for the Steegmans and the farm. I had to tell him off, which was a bit much because he was a professional soldier.
Also, he found decoding the messages he received boring. For a time he got other people to do it for him, even though this was forbidden for security reasons. One day one of the boys said to me, “That was an interesting message.” He had decoded it himself!
H: He also got the farmers’ daughters to decode messages. Tutur was never cold at night.
Radio messages, communicated via Morse code, were deliberately phrased in an obscure way so that the Germans wouldn’t be able to easily decipher their meaning if they found them. Still, radio messages were supposed to be treated with a high level of security and destroyed after being read, but that didn’t always happen: Henri kept some and shared them with M. Larroque decades later during an interview.
“Mimi says thank you for her lovely present”: to announce Pearl’s arrival by parachute.
“The Marshal has swallowed his francisc”: to announce a drop of arms. [The francisc was a small double-headed axe, the symbol of Marshall Pétain and the name of a decoration awarded by the Vichy government.]
H: When there were no messages left we invented them.
“Venus de Milo is knitting.”
“The Victory of Samothrace is cycling.”
“Rodin’s Thinker is constipated.”
Look at this coded message: the numbers are there. They started with one, two, three, four, five. When the message arrived, it was in that order. But line one for us was line 8; line 4 was line 13. The real message was revealed, but if you didn’t have the code it was impossible to understand.
What language were they written in?
H: French.
Didn’t the Germans manage to decode the messages?
P: They couldn’t; there were two successive codes. Every radio operator had his codes printed on a silk handkerchief. They copied the sentence on top then filled in the numbers.
H: We weren’t the only people sending messages. They’d have had a lot of work to do, to decode and understand thousands of messages. Even if they had managed to understand, they’d also have had to know to whom the messages were sent.
How did you know the messages were for you?
P: The messages were numbered, so I could make sure none were missing, and were addressed “To Marie.”
For Marie meant it was for the Marie-Wrestler network?
H: Yes; look, this is a good message.
P: The day that one was sent I broke the “never touch intelligence work” rule. The message was so important I thought, I can’t sit on this, I’ll take the blame for breaking the rules. One of the intelligence networks had lost radio contact with London and had asked me to do them a favor.
H: We sent the information we had received via Paul Vannier. It concerned a trainload of petrol tanks that were on the Vierzon-Bourges line. The train was soon bombed. All 60 wagons were blown up; you could see the fire for miles. Later they sent us the following message: “Thank you for your n°47 [the number of the message]. Happy to tell you the RAF found 60 petrol wagons on the Vierzon-Bourges line, target bombed next morning with good results. Supreme commander asks us to congratulate you for all information sent in 47.” In other words, all the information we had sent.
It was headquarters congratulating us because the petrol in those 60 wagons was destined to move German troops to Normandy. They couldn’t leave and were blocked in the region for at least a week.
H: Let me show you some of the radio messages.
P: We shouldn’t have those.
Didn’t he tell you he had kept those messages?
P: No.
Where did you hide them?
P: I don’t know where he hid them, but you can see what a state they’re in.
Who kept them, you?
H: Tutur, the radio operator.
P: It wasn’t Tutur, it was you.
H: No it wasn’t.
P: I received the decoded messages from Tutur and I didn’t return them to him. You kept them.
H: Do you think I’d ever do such a thing as that?
P: Well then … (Henri laughs)
You don’t seem to be sure about it.
H: I can’t remember if I kept them or not. I’d be surprised if I had, seeing as I’m so disciplined.
P: Oh no. It just isn’t true. (laughter)
H: [Reading messages aloud] “Quasimodo is a fête,” “Don’t play about in the morning,” “Sherry is a Spanish wine,” “A badly dressed woman.” These four messages meant “Intensify guerrilla warfare,” “Cut telephone communications,” “Block the roads,” and “Sabotage railway lines.”
P: These four messages arrived just before D-Day; they were sent on the evening of June 5.
H: After receiving one, Robert Knéper and I spent all night outside cutting telephone lines. At the same time, other lads were felling trees across the road in La Taille de Ruine. Then there was this one, completely incredible, sometimes London didn’t have a clue about our work in France. “For Marie: can you tell us where the 11th Armoured Division is, we think it is in your region Stop. Tell us how many bogies there are on each tank in your region, as well as the distinguishing marks and indications concerning the division.”
Why didn’t they ask us to get hold of a tank and send it in spare parts while they were at it? They didn’t realize the danger for us; you have to stick your head under a tank to know how many bogies there are—assuming you knew what a bogie was. I didn’t know. Where are bogies?
P: Bogies are wheels inside the traction band.
H: You have to get very close to be able to count them.
P: Or to see soldiers’ distinguishing badges.
H: Yes. “Excuse me sir, where are you from, can I see your badge please?” There were some far-fetched messages.
Do you think that during the war you had to set yourself certain challenges, do extraordinary things, counting only on yourself?
P: Partly, but I don’t consider I did anything extraordinary. Even today when people say, “You know, you did some incredible things, they weren’t easy,” I still don’t believe it’s true. I did it because I wanted to, because it was useful, because it had to be done.
Did you want to prove something?
P: To myself, yes, because I was very shy and always suffered because of it.
It’s hard to believe you were shy.
P: I still am. But whereas Henri is shy with individual people, I’m shy in a group. With one person, I’m not shy at all. But I hate being in meetings, or receptions, or going into cafés or restaurants on my own. Even now I don’t like it.
Do you think it is shyness or just reticence about certain types of human relationships, in public?
P: I don’t know what it is, I’m paralyzed.
So you don’t feel at ease, but you’re not really frightened?
P: Yes, I’m frightened of groups.
H: Yet for some time now you have been making speeches to groups of people.
P: But can you remember when I first had to do it? Even though it was in front of people I knew, it was dreadful. You can’t imagine what I went through.
H: Yes, I’m sure it wasn’t easy.
P: Now it’s easier for me, because …
Because you have slowly gotten used to it.
P: No. I’m still not used to it. On June 12, 1994, [at the inauguration of the Les Souches monument at La Chapelle-Montmartin in the Loir-et-Cher], I didn’t want to prepare a written speech, but when I was there I didn’t say half the things I’d planned because I just couldn’t. First I have to make a big effort to control myself, to push all my problems back inside, before I can say anything.
Maybe these events bring back bad memories?
H: Yes.
(It’s tea-time. Pauline points out her “jumbo cup” saying she only takes one cup of tea, when in fact it’s equal to at least three.)
P: There, I have an elephant cup. Do you know my mother always called me “the elephant” when I was little; she would always say “you great big elephant.”
H: But you weren’t fat.
P: No, but I was the eldest child and I was taller than the others. I was always fairly tall. But, in fact I am like an elephant; I have the memory of an elephant. I’m also slightly, what shall I say, clumsy. I’m not very dexterous.
And when you go forward…
P: I go straight forward, like an elephant. I have always been fairly slow, except for packing: I can pack a suitcase in no time; I did it so often during the clandestine period.
At the outset I’m not someone who criticizes people or things automatically, I tend to criticize later. It is an attitude that has caused me to be disappointed several times in life. If I like someone very much, I put them on a pedestal. Then one fine day they fall off and I’m horribly disappointed. It’s my own fault; I shouldn’t put people on pedestals because human beings are what they are. They have good as well as not so good sides to their characters. To start with I only see the good side, and sometimes it can last for a long time.
Do you think one can foresee things clearly?
P: No. Maybe it’s part of being British; if I give my affection to someone, I give wholly. I don’t hold anything back. Then if all of a sudden the person lets me down, I have difficulty forgetting. But I don’t hold it against them, it’s finished. Amen.
When I started working for the Resistance, I threw myself into it as I would have done with a friend whom I love. When I say “love” it isn’t anything physical, it’s completely psychological. I threw myself into the work because I wanted to do it and I enjoyed doing it. I build psychological, not physical, relationships with people. I have had some very, very good friends, I mean real friends—both male and female—but that’s all. There are people I liked enormously, for example my boss before the war, Douglas Colyer. He was an extraordinary person, very humane, very warm, and very understanding. One day I said to an officer who knew him that I liked Dougie a lot. He replied, “Yes, well, he is very attractive.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I could have hit him.
While I was with all those men in the Maquis, there was never anything between us. Obviously there were times in the course of my life when some of the chaps made a pass. But pals are pals; that’s all. Someone said to me recently after seeing a photograph of me when I was young—the photo had been set up in a studio, I wasn’t as pretty as that—”Well, I’m not surprised so many men followed you.”
H: You are always demeaning yourself physically: “I wasn’t as pretty as that.” Yes you were, you were like that.
P: I could have hit him as well. I don’t like such comments. Why does everything have to be centered around that subject? Something that really annoys me today is that physical aspects are all-important. What has happened to feelings? In my opinion it’s a disaster.
How did you put up with the stress and anxiety during the clandestine period?… It could have gone wrong at any time.
P: Well I have a very British character. I knew that I had to pay attention. But I’m sensitive to everything around me, I think it helped to keep me going for so long. I’ve always had my antennae turned on, but particularly at that time.
Could you tell when there was danger?
P: I could feel it. It didn’t stop me having two or three horrifying frights, but I didn’t live in a state of permanent anxiety. It was a bit stressful because we had to keep on the move, we didn’t use telephones, we didn’t write, we traveled mostly by train—usually at night. We didn’t sleep very much and it was extremely solitary work. We never knew if we were going to be arrested and interrogated, or if Germans were going to be waiting for us when we went into a house.
At the time I do not remember being very anxious, but it marked me all the same. I felt it for a long time afterward. Eight years after the liberation of France, I was walking in the Trocadéro gardens and I nearly fainted, which is something I never do. I was with my young daughter, one Sunday afternoon. She said something to me. I bent down toward her, stood up, and found myself facing three Germans in uniform. What a shock, my daughter still remembers it today.
Have you ever inexplicably felt danger and trusted your intuition?
P: No. The only time I woke up in the middle of the night was when I dreamed about policemen. It happened twice, once the night before Maurice Southgate was arrested and once the night before June 11 [the Battle of Les Souches]. But I can’t say I have any intuition about what is going to happen, like a clairvoyant for instance.
Do you believe some people have a sixth sense when they are facing danger?
P: Yes. Philippe de Vomécourt [“Saint Paul”] was like that. One day he told me a story that really struck me. During the war he was with someone in a hotel. He woke up in the middle of the night and he went to wake up the other agent, saying, “We have to leave immediately, do you hear?”
“No, I don’t want to, I’m staying here.”
“It’s an order, get out.”
A few hours later the police raided the hotel. He could feel it was going to happen.
He spent many years in Africa. He told of things that happened there that make your hair stand on end. There were cases of people arriving by car at a village, who couldn’t enter because the villagers didn’t want them. They just couldn’t move, impossible, even though there was no one there; just was an invisible wall. He once gave a message to a man who set off to walk through a deep forest and one hour later the same man handed over the message 30 km away. There’s no doubt about it, it exists.
Do you think the culture or sensitivity he developed in that environment was useful to him during the war?
P: Definitely. How can it be explained, it is so intangible. Waves exist that we cannot control, that’s the mystery.
P: I believe in destiny.
What do you mean by that?
P: There’s no doubt about it, your destiny is written, mapped out—call it what you like. There are certain things you have to face. They may come when you are young, middle-aged, or elderly. If you really observe people around you, you ask yourself, “Why is it they lead such a life?”
My cousin, the one whose mother sent me her old clothes, said to me one day, “I never understood why you weren’t jealous of me.”
“Why should I be jealous of you?”
“Because things were so much easier for me than they ever were for you.”
“No, I wasn’t jealous. Quite the opposite, I benefited by it.”
She always had an easy life, until one day, because her husband and her mother had both died, she suddenly found herself alone. She was completely lost because everything had been so easy for her. I believe your destiny is mapped out when you set off in life. If you know how to steer it, you may be able to direct it slightly, but not always and never completely.
Do you think you are born with a plan for your life?
P: I’m sure of it.
There are ordeals to get through, things to take advantage of, help that may come your way.
P: Unfortunately, we don’t know what they are from the start, but it’s certain they are there.
H: You’re talking about destiny, but that’s another unfair thing in life. Because there are great destinies, and then people who have bad ones.
P: Some people have dreadful destinies that improve. Others begin well, then, in the middle, things go wrong and it is back to square one. It is a movement, a tide that ebbs and flows. What can help you? That is the mystery.
I was brought up as a Protestant. There was no question of missing church on a Sunday. Just we four girls went. Mummy never accompanied us, probably because she had hearing problems. We went to church but we weren’t christened, that was something to do with my father again.
When I was 16 the only person I could confide in was the vicar. Mummy must have seen him on several occasions about our financial problems. One day I went to see him, to talk to him about my troubles with Mummy; I needed his advice. He must have thought I was coming about money problems because he hadn’t time to see me.
I took it very badly. I thought, If I cannot find help in religion, who else is going to help me? It was a turning point for me. I didn’t want anything to do with religion until I met Henri. He, too, was raised a Protestant. The question was brought out in the open again. Henri gave me lectures, saying it wasn’t possible to go through life without a religion.
When I arrived in England in 1941, I thought maybe Henri was right. I was staying at the Young Women’s Christian Association in London. The matron told me that a minister came every Tuesday evening to talk about religion and if I was interested I would be welcome. I said I would go if I didn’t leave work too late.
My sisters and I were christened in 1939. My mind opened to religious questions, and one day when the minister told me I ought to make my confession [in the Anglican church], I replied, “What, me? It’s out of the question.”
“You can make your confession to someone else; you don’t have to do it with me.”
“That’s not the point. The person to whom I confess may have done something worse than me. I don’t agree with that.”
If I have done something wrong, I punish myself; I take care of the consequences. But I don’t need to be punished by someone else. After that, he started talking about eternal life, but I told him I didn’t believe in it. He was rather taken aback and very troubled by my lack of belief.
“Would you convince someone else that there is no life after death?” he continued.
“Not at all. One is free to believe whatever one chooses.”
All this is just to explain that I am a believer but I don’t practice. I go to church on my own, where I want and also where I can find one open. I would be very happy to discuss religion one day with a theologian. But for me, religion is something really personal. Apparently that’s not how it should be perceived. It should be viewed collectively as something universal.
The basis of religion is, as far as I’m concerned, the Ten Commandments. After that, I don’t see….
But do you not think that meditating in a church is something beyond the Ten Commandments?
P: To whatever or whomever one is addressing, whether it’s Christ—I think I prefer to address God directly—we had to create an image of him, because otherwise people wouldn’t understand, but as far as I am concerned, he is a spirit. There is no doubt about it, we are surrounded by something.
Human beings need something to cling on to. You have it, for instance, when you are a Christian and you go to church. When you stop going, how do you replace it? The physical, material part has nothing to do with what you feel in aspiring to do something, deep inside you, to help give you the moral strength to cope with life’s difficulties.
You may say you can always have a drink, then a second, then a third, that’s a very easy thing to do! From the moment I realized that my father was an alcoholic, with all the misery it brought us, I swore to myself I would never drink. When first I met Henri, I warned him I would never accept it if he started drinking.
Have you ever thought that although you did not have a good father, it wasn’t altogether by chance? That somehow it prepared you and helped you succeed during this important period of your life when you were working for the Resistance? Don’t you see some sort of meaning in all that?
P: Definitely.
Do you think that during difficult times we find things to support us?
P: Yes, I’m sure of it. But I’m glad to have done what I did, rather than starting life now. I feel sorry for youngsters today.
P: Because we haven’t given them the means to defend themselves. Life when you are an adult always holds problems in store and you need self-discipline to cope with them. We no longer teach children they need discipline.
Children are undisciplined. Listen, the other day I was in the metro, but I felt as if I were in a cage full of monkeys. They don’t have any respect for anyone. They push and shove to get in the carriage, they talk loudly, laugh at you, they even say rude words—it is madness. It is mostly the parents’ fault. If you don’t have any discipline in your life, how can you expect to manage? You cannot solve a problem for yourself if all your life you have been told “yes” and “amen” to every request you have made.
For discipline you had no choice, you absolutely had to—
P: Mummy told me to do something, I did it. I never questioned it.
But you realized that if you didn’t solve some of the family’s problems, the whole family ran the risk of a catastrophe.
P: Maybe.
If the worst came to the worst you could have ended up in an orphanage or somewhere similar.
P: I didn’t think about orphanages because I didn’t know what they were. If we pulled through as well as we did, it was thanks to my mother, because she did cope, even if she did have some help from me. I started to work to meet my family’s needs. It was common in those days. Henri started working for his father for nothing; André Trochet worked for his father without being paid.
Let me tell you something strange that happened when I was trying to change jobs, I mean when I wanted to join SOE. I had a colleague in the Air Ministry who virtually lived with clairvoyants—she spent her lunch hours visiting them. She would come back saying that I absolutely had to go to see one or the other. My first reaction was to ask how much. She would tell me the price and I always replied it was too expensive; I’d rather go to the cinema.
One day she came back saying the clairvoyant she had seen was sensational. I asked her how much and she said it was two shillings and six pence, so I said I would go. It was to keep her quiet more than anything else. At lunchtime we both went to see the clairvoyant.
She was in Oxford Street in a sort of amusement arcade. She was in a small hut and she looked into a crystal ball. I’d never experienced that. First she gave me the “virgin” ball and she made me hold it for a while. Then without touching it, she put it in a purple handkerchief. She turned the ball round and told me all about my past life, but in every little detail! I was a very taken aback. She continued, then suddenly, with urgency she said, “You want to change jobs. What do you want to do?”
“I want to change jobs; that’s all I can say.”
“Give me your hand.”
I gave her my hand and she said, “You will get through it all right.”
I asked her for information about Henri, because I didn’t know exactly where he was but she couldn’t say anything about him. Finally, at the end of the séance, she announced, “At the end of the war, you will go to the United States.”
I thought she was completely mad; I could see no reason why I should go to the States. I went to see the clairvoyant believing and disbelieving at the same time, and yet really I did pull through and did go to the States.
H: In any case, she couldn’t very well say “you will not come through it.”
P: She knew that it was dangerous. She didn’t tell me that, but she made me sense it. I was in the midst of talks about joining the SOE …
Did that make an impression on you, did it encourage you?
P: It comforted me. I told myself it may be true or may not be true, I didn’t know. I cannot say that I do not believe at all, because there is something there. Against all logic, there is something. But I’m incapable of saying what, exactly. I’m not saying I’ve never been to a séance, but I’m very wary of it because I know it’s dangerous. But there is something there, no doubt about it.