“Anyone stepping over this trip-wire will be shot”
— SIGN IN POW CAMPS
FATHER LOUIS LARIVIÈRE USES SPECIAL WARTIME PRIESTLY POWERS
On 4 October, Father Larivière did something not covered in any of the theology or canon law courses he took while studying to become a priest. So that the celebrants at the second (5 p.m.) mass he conducted could have communion, which he was required to have with them, he made recourse to the special powers Pope Pius XII had given priests in war zones. Larivière gave himself special dispensation from the rule of Eucharist Fasting, a rule that no longer exists. The rule that communicants must fast for five or six hours before consuming the Eucharist was meant to ensure that the body and blood of Christ would not be mixed with ordure or urine.
The Protestant padres required only Bibles when preaching to or comforting the men; the Anglicans, The Book of Common Prayer; but Catholic priests required more than their missals, Hosts and communion wine. Presumably the German censors, who earlier in the year pondered letters asking for titles such as Apologia Pro Vita Sua, were relieved to find in a June letter a less technical list: New Testaments and hymnals; catechisms; and pamphlets on the Church, the sacraments and mass, social questions and married life.78
Larivière likely referred to this last in early October. For though the details are lost, he had to deal with the morale-crushing receipt of one or more “Dear John” letters. “There is nothing more demoralizing for a soldier, especially if he is a prisoner, than the infidelity of the other,” he wrote to Monsignor Joseph Bonhomme. “I hope that young Canadian wives are made to realize how odious this injustice is toward a conscript.”79
DUMAIS SEEKS HELP FROM THE AMERICAN CHARGé D’AFFAIRES
He expected a warmer welcome from his fellow North American.
A day earlier, just before Dumais left for the station where he was to take the train to Marseilles, the hotelier who risked his life hiding him grasped, then dropped, the Canadian’s hand before hugging and kissing the foreigner who had come to fight for France’s liberty. Now, having just explained to the American consul in Marseilles who he was and that the two Free French soldiers with him wanted to escape to fight under General Charles de Gaulle, Dumais stood dumbfounded as the consul said, “The United States is a neutral country…. There’s nothing I can do for you.”80 Although the United States had been at war for almost a year, it maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy France, as did Canada.
A short while later, believing that they were the reason he’d been given the cold shoulder, Dumais’s companions persuaded him to try again, this time alone. The consul saw Dumais as soon as he entered the consulate but didn’t have time to speak before Dumais said, “You’re American and I’m Canadian. Does that frontier really make so much difference?”81 Set back on his heels, the consul asked, “Where are your French friends?” Dumais told him that he’d left them in a café. Legally this changed nothing, but it changed everything. “Go to this address. There you will find a doctor. Tell him you have a sore throat and a sore right foot. Go at once, and don’t tell your friends. Good-bye and good luck.”
THE DIEPPE SURVIVORS ARE SHACKLED
The ripping sound of the Schmeisser submachine-gun bolts being pulled back seemed but the stuff of another post-Dieppe nightmare. Then, through the pre-dawn darkness, came Sergeant Major Beesley’s call: “Everybody up!” Just a few moments later, the guttural “Raus! Raus!” of armed guards as they slammed doors open could be heard.82 In Grogan’s hut, the goon nicknamed “Dog Man” led five Doberman pinschers, while another guard walked down the aisle with his rifle’s bayonet ominously locked in place.
As the Canadians were marched to the furthest end of Stalag VIII-B, the thought that they had survived the beaches of Dieppe only to be massacred on a field in the middle of a cool German night seemed too horrible to be true, but nothing else seemed to make sense.
Once assembled beyond the barracks, instead of the staccato sound of gunfire drowning out the thud of bullets hitting human flesh, the Canadians heard an interpreter read in halting English a statement that caused equal measures of bewilderment and derision: “The German Government has always shown the utmost clemency to prisoners of war and accorded them the treatment due honourable men captured in battle.”
The machine guns would not be silent much longer, the Canadians feared, when they heard that both at Dieppe and during a later raid on a Channel island, German soldiers had been found shot with their hands tied behind their backs and that, since the British government refused to provide assurance that such inhumane treatment would not be repeated, Germany had “no alternative but to take reprisals against all the members of the Dieppe Force!”83
The Canadians knew nothing, of course, about the raid on the island of Sark on 3 October. Some may have known that when the commander of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Labatt, had asked Major General Hamilton Roberts, the commander of Operation Jubilee, what to do about prisoners who could not be taken back to England, Roberts is reputed to have reminded his men that they carried revolvers. Roberts’s orders were that prisoners were to be kept in pens if captured before being loaded onto landing craft so they could be taken to England and interrogated. Morever, he also ordered that this written order not be taken ashore. But Brigadier William Southam had brought a written copy ashore, and the Germans had found it. Ron Beal heard one German say that the Canadians were going to be treated like pigs because on the beaches of Dieppe they had taken German POWs to a “Schweinerstall,” a tendentious translation of “pig pen.”
In any event, what mattered now were the machine guns, the curious sight of the guards standing in front of them holding two-and-a-half-foot-long strands of rope and the order for ten men to step forward. Determined to show the Germans that the Canadians were better soldiers than they were, Beesley called out “Marker” and Remi Leroux stepped forward.84 The Germans took no chances and marched Leroux and the nine men who followed him into a building at bayonet point. Once inside, each was ordered to cross his arms in front so hands could be tied together.
Over the next few hours, as groups of men were marched away so that their hands could be tied, the Dominion soldiers quickly found ways to mock the Germans. Some laughingly compared the punishment to childhood games of cowboys and Indians. Others had comrades untie them so they could get back in line, to be tied up all over again.
After the last Canadian hands at Lamsdorf had been tied, the officer leading the operation again spoke through the interpreter. As part of the reprisal, the Canadians were forbidden both from leaving their barracks during the day, except to go to the latrine, and from lying down on their bunks during the day. The cutting off of their Red Cross parcels violated Geneva and, more importantly, threw the Canadians back onto the inadequate German rations. Sentries at Lamsdorf were ordered to shoot anyone outside the barracks who was not in a group of ten tied or shackled men accompanied by a “sanitator,” a medical orderly identified by a white arm band, whose hands were not tied because they were needed to help the shocked men use the latrine. As well, the attack guard dogs that normally patrolled the outside perimeter of the camp at night would now patrol inside the compound during the day.
Shackling struck at the heart of their honour as soldiers. According to the laws of war, POWs are not criminals. Rather, they are prisoners because they belong to a military enemy; they are incarcerated because of international politics, that is, because Canada was at war with Nazi Germany and each of them represented Canada. Even more than the difficulties shackling caused for eating or drinking, shackling was a symbolic attack, making men who had voluntarily signed their attestation papers that made them soldiers in King George’s Canadian Army appear like men on a chain gang and thus as unfree men tout court.
The men were deeply humiliated by the indelicacy of the latrine arrangements. Being unable to unbutton their own trousers meant that several times a day another man had to perform this intimate act. “Worse, both for the ‘sanitator’ and us, was the need to clean us. We did not have toilet paper. Instead, he had to use pages ripped from a softcover pocket book. Before using it, he had to rumple it up and then, of course, clean us in the most degrading manner. And each of us had to stand there while he did this to nine other men,” recalls Darch, who more than seven decades later still cringes at the memory.
The cut to half a biscuit and half a cup of water a day was not unexpected after Gibraltar signalled it could not spare a ship to meet the trawler that had picked up Dumais and 64 other men from a beach near Canet-Plage, a small village on the Mediterranean Sea. As he sweated under the hot sun while his thirst mounted and stomach growled, Dumais could not help but think of the few days he’d spent at the doctor’s in Marseilles, where he became a “parcel” in the care of Patrick Albert O’Leary, the nom de guerre of Albert-Marie Guérisse.
There he’d had his first bath in weeks, slept between starched sheets, been given clean clothes and, before the doctor even came home, had afternoon tea with his wife. During the days he stayed in his room reading, spending the evenings talking with his hosts.
Had Dumais known that O’Leary, who after escaping at Dunkirk returned to France to run an escape line, had said he was a Canadian airman to explain his accent, the real Canadian would have understood why O’Leary confirmed Dumais’s identity by quizzing him on obscure details about Quebec and Montreal. A few days later, Dumais was surprised when O’Leary led him into a train compartment filled with rough-looking men—and flabbergasted when he started speaking in English to the men, who were also on home runs.
At Canet-Plage, O’Leary placed the French-speaking Dumais in a hotel and the others in a three-room cottage. Four nights later, at 1 a.m., O’Leary led them single file down to the beach, where they waited, scanning the sea, not for a light but for a dark spot that would grow larger as the boat moved closer. After hours of shivering in the darkness, as the first hint of light appeared on the horizon, O’Leary led them back to the cottage. The next night was equally disappointing, as was the next after that. MI9’s standard operating procedure could be summed up in baseball lingo: “Three strikes and you’re out.” O’Leary’s radioman, however, convinced London to try again. Late that night, unsure whether he’d really seen a patch of blackness in the darkness, Dumais shut his eyes for several seconds. When he opened them, “the dark spot was still there and was definitely bigger.”85
Bigger, but not big. Instead of boats like the landing craft that took the Fusiliers de Mont-Royal onto the beaches at Dieppe or like the more than 30-foot-long voyageur canoes that could hold three tons of cargo and 12 men, Dumais saw a couple of dinghies. Concerned about the stability of a dinghy designed for two holding eight standing men, Dumais “gingerly bent down to hold onto the side” of the small craft, only to find about an inch of freeboard.
A few days earlier, Dumais had imagined an escape involving a Royal Navy destroyer whisking him to Gibraltar at 30 knots. Reality was much more prosaic: the dinghies took them to a small trawler, crewed by ex-pat Poles, capable of making only six knots. The heat could be alleviated by a swim, but nothing could be done about the cut in rations, which, when some men were caught queuing up for seconds, the captain enforced with the threat of throwing the miscreants into the sea.
Since the trawler had to look like a working fishing boat, whenever a boat and aircraft came near, Dumais and the others had to scramble under upturned lifeboats or reeking fishing nets. One night, woken abruptly by the sound of shells straddling the trawler, Dumais ran for his lifeboat station and heard from the dark sea a voice calling out through a loud-hailer, “What ship are you?” Since the men knew that the British gunners had their range, each moment seemed endless, until the captain called out the name of his boat. Dumais had speculated about the ship’s allegiance but never imagined that “the smelly old trawler” belonged to the Royal Navy.86
Although his days were filled with ministering to some 500 men or reading philosophy and theology, time and separation from his confrerers wore heavily on Father Goudreau. Letters helped, though the seemingly random sequence in which some arrived made logical exchange difficult. Back in August, he tried to put his best face forward when he told Father Gilles Mousseau that just seeing his “patriarchal beard” in the photo he’d enclosed in a letter made him smile. But the strain soon broke through as Goudreau echoed the psalmist, writing, “Thus, the days pass…. but the months are long. When will our sacrifice end?” In September, an exchange with Father Terragon, in which Goudreau urged his friend to start editing the book he was writing as soon as he could, even though “university presses take such a long time” to publish, took Goudreau beyond the barbed wire.
Just how much life behind the barbed wire influenced Goudreau is evident in a mid-October letter to his sister. “You would not believe the happiness that flashes in our eyes with the receipt of a letter,” he writes before going on to a simile that owes less to Matthew 5:14 (“You are the light of the world”) than it does to what he’d heard from hundreds of downed airmen: “It is like a jet of burning crude oil.”
At the end of the letter, Goudreau turns to a more banal concern. Since he doubts that the latest fix of his watch’s main spring will last, he asks that his brother-in-law contact the Tacy Watch Company for a replacement spring. For without the watch, time moved even more slowly.
HUNGRY CANADIANS WATCH HELPLESSLY AS RUSSIAN POWS DIE
As colder weather set in, morale plummeted.
The Canadian prisoners had not yet received any mail, neither had their families. Indeed many, including Darch’s, did not know if their loved ones were alive. Family lore says that when Darch’s mother learned he was a POW, she fainted.
With their hands tied, everyday tasks became impromptu ballets for the POWs. Rolling a cigarette required three men: one each to hold the paper, pour the tobacco and provide a wet tongue against which to rub the gummed side of the rolling paper.
Neither the daily rations nor the twice-weekly restaurant-sized pat of margarine or one-ounce slice of stinking fish or cheese filled stomachs, though they did cause hundreds of cases of dysentery, which both the men and the sanitator faced with admirable stoicism. Sometimes the meat in the soup was easily identified by the rat’s skeleton found in the broth. Yet despite their hunger, the Canadians would stand by the fence that divided their compound from the Russians’ and throw their emaciated allies what food they could.
Nothing the Canadians could do, however, could stem the typhus epidemic that killed hundreds of Russians. Every morning, human skeletons, barely able to walk themselves, somehow summoned up the strength to carry dead comrades on anything that would serve as a stretcher out of the camp. The soldiers, universally known as Ivans, took step after exhausting step until, without a word from a minister let alone the traditional volley for a soldier, they dumped their comrades, not yet stiff from rigor mortis, into an open pit.
PROVOST MARSHAL A. ROBERT PROUSE LEARNS TO CUT WOOD
The doctor in Rouen told Private Robert Prouse that even though his legs were numb, he must keep them moving, so he spent hours sweeping the floor and bringing food to those more badly wounded than he was. One day, he graduated to being an “anaesthetist”—one of four who held a patient down while a German doctor operated without the aid of anaesthesia. In early September, he was among those shipped to the hospital at Stalag IX-C, 150 miles southwest of Berlin, arriving just in time for the typhus epidemic.
In an effort to staunch the outbreak of diseases carried by lice and fleas, the POWs were shaved from head to toe; Prouse never forgot the moment that a German orderly held his penis in one hand and with a straight razor swiped away his pubic hair. Mercifully, the doctor at the nearby hospital used anaesthesia when he operated on Prouse’s infected calf. The hospital staff were less fastidiousness about the ward’s toilet, “a filthy mess, with the floor, walls and seat completely soiled.”87
Prouse arrived at the POW camp to find his comrades’ hands tied with cord used to bind Red Cross parcels. The camp authorities knew he was Canadian but ignored this, and the fact that, since he was an NCO, he could not be made to work. Assuming that because he was a Canadian he was also a lumberjack, Prouse was assigned to Arbeitskommando 1049, a plywood factory. For piling and cutting logs with a power saw (something he’d never seen before) and later as a carpenter’s helper, reichsmarks were credited to his account, which he could have spent at the camp’s canteen had there been one.
While camp authorities could and did issue orders directly to POWs, most of the time orders were transmitted through a chain of command, at the top of which was the camp’s Man of Confidence, who was either elected by the POWs or chosen by the senior officer to liaise with the Kommandant or the Senior British Officer. At the work camp, the factory’s manager and effectively its Kommandant had been well-treated during his stint as a POW in England during the last war and was amenable to the Man of Confidence’s requests for wood and other supplies to winterize the drafty bunkhouse.
POWs, however, have their own code of honour. Thus, as they lined their bunkhouse’s walls, ceiling and floor, they built in secret trapdoors, providing secret storage spaces. The Germans knew Prouse built a small suitcase but not that it had a secret bottom. Not until a stool pigeon inserted into the barracks reported it did the Germans know that bunkhouse boards were being used to shore up an escape tunnel.
JOHN RUNCIE ESCAPES
After a few nights of dodging patrols and skirting roadblocks, Runcie decided to risk travelling by day. On the roads from Paris through Fontainebleau to Orléans, Blois, Tours and beyond, he found to his surprise bridges and other natural places for roadblocks unguarded. His beret and heavily accented French provided enough cover for two German truck drivers to each give the “Basque worker” a lift. The French were not fooled but were willing to help, though some farms were so stripped of food that all the farmer could offer was his barn to sleep in.
Some 500 miles from Paris, the very terrain of France seemed to turn against the escaper. In the forest of Landes, between Bordeaux and Bayonne, he could find neither people to help him nor shelter from the cold of night. Though hunger made him light-headed, he knew he could go weeks without eating. Water, however, was vital, and as his thirst worsened, he looked desperately for any sign of water where once the ground was once so wet peasants used stilts to get around. But the French hydrologists and agronomists who designed the man-made pine barrens did their job well, and as each breath expelled more water, Runcie’s thirst gave way to dry mouth, headaches and exhaustion.
Runcie’s report does not say where he found water. But he did, for he made it through the forest and into Biarritz, where a friendly waiter sketched out the map of the French-Spanish frontier, which he crossed on 22 November. The intelligence officer who briefed Runcie after he arrived in Britain wrote how impressed he was with Runcie’s solo home run.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SARDINE-CAN KEYS
The Canadians at Stalag VIII-B did not know that, after he had been “selected for ‘escape’” by a pliable Vichy official in Fort de la Duchère, Captain Masson had reached freedom in Spain. Nor did they know of the public debate that exploded after word of their shackling reached Canada. After a few days of calls to shackle the 16,000 German POWs in Canada, cooler heads prevailed, with the Globe and Mail ultimately declaring on 14 October, “Let us not … embark upon a contest which we cannot hope to win.” Still less did the Canadians POWs know of the toing and froing between Ottawa and the Dominion Office in London, of Churchill’s direct appeal to Mackenzie King to approve shackling German POWs or of the riot that ensued when Canadian guards tied to shackle U-boat men in Bowmanville, Ontario.88
What they did know was that the guards in front of them were carrying handcuffs to replace the rope that had been used to tie their hands. Though heavier, the handcuffs were somewhat more comfortable than the ropes, though many found the stamp “Made in Birmingham, England” rudely ironic.
Just before Appell, the cry “Chains Up!” would ring out and the men would line up, a guard putting the handcuffs on them. They did not, however, stay on long. For the men realized that the key that opened a Klim (powdered milk) or sardine can did the same for the handcuffs, which meant that the cuffs could be surreptitiously taken off when in the barracks.
One day, the men in Jack Poolton’s barracks used their ability to open the handcuffs to get back at their Blockführer, the hated “Spitfire” who once kicked a pot of water Poolton was boiling for tea over onto a prisoner, scalding him. After being shackled, each man would unlock the cuffs, place them back in their box, go to the back of the line, and then appear again in front of Spitfire for cuffing. After some four hours, a not-too-happy officer arrived and asked what Spitfire had been doing. His sputtered answer, “Chaining up the prisoners,” amused the Canadians but not Spitfire’s superior officer. Another time, Spitfire saw a man washing himself outside the barracks unchained and naked. “How did this man remove his clothing?” the hapless guard demanded. “He’s a magician,” someone called out.89
Spitfire, however, got his revenge. The penalty if caught without your hands cuffed was having them cuffed behind your back and being made to stand with your nose and toes against an outside wall for eight hours, no matter what the weather. “If you moved,” says Darch, “you got a rifle butt in the back.”
GEORGE BROWNE WONDERS WHOM HE CAN TRUST
Fifteen days in solitary confinement after an unsuccessful attempt to break out of Fort de la Duchère did little to dull George Browne’s ardour to escape.
He had Operation Torch to thank for the fact that the guards on the buses taking him and the other internees to Grenoble were Italian and not French; in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa, Germany occupied Vichy, though Hitler allowed Mussolini to grab a piece of southeast France. The guards may have been insensitive to the POWs’ bladders, but they couldn’t ignore the need to fill the buses’ radiators and so stopped on a bridge in a village about 40 miles northwest of Grenoble to do so. To provide light, the drivers arranged the buses in a semicircle, which gave Browne his chance to slip out the back door of his bus.
A guard noticed something, for just moments after Browne bolted into a nearby street, he heard yelling and saw flashlights. The street turned out to be a cul-de-sac, and upon reaching the dead end, Browne turned right. After jumping two fences, he reached the river, which he ran through for about 30 yards before climbing back onto the same side of the bank he’d started from, then hid in a row of hops. Twice, flashlight beams shone mere inches away. When the searchers moved on, he crossed the river and went through some parkland to the main road so that he was now behind the convoy.
Browne was by no means the only man on the roads of southern France. But demobilized Vichy soldiers and even tramp workers had papers; Browne didn’t. And they weren’t wearing RAF battle dress under their civilian clothes, which he was. Nor did they speak French with an English accent. Browne could do nothing about this last, but with some help, he might cover the other two bases.
Had he known that the man who would answer the door was the engineer of the local power station, Browne might have sought help elsewhere. Despite being a civil servant, the engineer accepted Browne’s battle dress in exchange for food and a much-needed pair of dry socks before sending him off with explicit directions on how to pass checkpoints on his way to Sassenge, where he could expect to find sympathetic railwaymen.
In the darkness, Browne erred by staying to the right at a fork in the road and near dawn found himself near the village of l’Albenc, once again not knowing whom he could trust.
The farmer’s dog sniffed around the haystack Sydney Smith had burrowed into around at 5 a.m., after parachuting from his Vickers Wellington bomber. The farmer looked kind, but Smith decided to wait before revealing himself. By dusk, thirst and hunger forced his hand, and when the farmer again came close to the haystack, Smith slid down from the top. The unexpected appearance of a man in flying dress stunned the farmer, but he quickly recovered, asking, “Anglais? RAF?”90 before taking Smith’s arm and walking him briskly to his house, where he was fed and given a clean bed.
The next day, 11 December, the farmer took him to Madame Brunel de Serbonnes’s house. A few hours later, as the aroma of what de Serbonnes called “habbet stew” filled the ornate house, a doctor working for the Resistance arrived bearing news that the police had captured three of Smith’s crewmates. The doctor decided Smith would be safer in Paris, where he could be hidden by de Serbonnes’s daughter, Catherine Janot.
Smith, whose idea of excitement when he was growing up was going to Sudbury for a movie and a lunch at Woolworths, was smitten by the radiant Parisian blonde with an aquiline nose and smouldering eyes who arrived the next day. Janot’s accented English as she repeated his name, “Sydney Percival Smith,” enchanted him.
The next day, after dropping into the river his watch, the metal buttons from his uniform (which had been burned) and anything else that would tell the Germans that a Canadian airman had been near the village 20 miles southwest of Paris, Janot and he boarded a train for the city. During the 45-minute ride, he ached to ask why she was ignoring the sign that stated women who helped downed Allied airmen would be sent to concentration camps in Germany. Later, he learned that Janot’s husband had suffered the fate she was determined to keep Smith from: being a prisoner in Germany.
In Janot’s apartment, Smith found himself, as if in a dream, looking out the window at the Seine, the Eiffel Tower and the rest of Paris, defaced as it was by the huge swastikas. At about the same time that the RCAF casualties officer in Ottawa sent a telegram telling Smith’s family that he was missing, Janot got Smith past a row of Waffen-SS troops by the simple expedient of walking haughtily, as if she were reviewing the troops. Later he joined Janot, who played her cover as an haute bourgeoise to the hilt, at a performance of Macbeth in French, in an audience studded with German officers in dress uniform.
BROWNE ENTRUSTS HIMSELF TO SMUGGLERS
A century earlier, escaped slaves knew to “follow the drinking gourd,” for the Big Dipper pointed to the North Star and freedom in Upper Canada. For Browne, who was freezing while walking above Pic de Peyrot’s snow line of 8,500 feet, on the French-Spanish border, seeing Polaris in front of him beckoned disaster. He had taken a wrong turn and was heading north, away from Spain.
Five days earlier, after missing the turn to Sassenge, he’d been lucky. The farm family he gambled on fed him, gave him a bed and put him in contact with a Gaullist, who took him to Grenoble, where he was given money, an identity card and a train ticket to Toulouse. Through six more towns and villages, one person after another helped him. The man on the road to Auzat warned Browne that the village he planned to stop in before making his way into the Pyrenees was full of Germans and suggested another, where a farmer fed him and urged him to find a guide to lead him over the mountains. Browne didn’t miss his watch or the 3,000 francs he paid the three young men he met on the road to Goulier-et-Olbier to lead him to the top of the mountain. As the sub-zero wind whisked away precious body heat, Browne regretted having paid his guide with his extra set of clothes.
By the light of the quarter moon, he saw a half-constructed dam and a deserted hut. His boots soaking by this time, he entered the hut. But since neither the building waste he crawled under nor the little bit of dry and cold bread he ate could break what he recognized to be a dangerous shivering, Browne soon left the hut. A few minutes later he saw another cabin, its lights signalling both the promise of not freezing to death and the threat of being captured.
The benumbed Canadian didn’t feel the sting of knocking on the door. Through chattering teeth, he told the engineers who opened it that he was an escaped POW, and with blue fingers took out his fake identity card. Recognizing his desperate state, they gave Browne food and hot red wine, then covered him with blankets.
The next morning, the engineers placed Browne’s life in the hands of smugglers who carried contraband wireless sets to a village about two miles from the border of the postage stamp–sized principality of Andorra. A few days later, a second group of smugglers took him from the neutral principality’s capital, Andorra la Vella, to the village of Martinet, five miles north of the Spanish border, from where he contacted the British consul in Barcelona. The consul arranged for Browne’s transport to Madrid and thence to Gibraltar; Browne reached London on 26 January 1943.
SMITH REACHES BORDEAUX
As he boarded the train from Paris to Bordeaux, accompanied by the pretty Janine De Greef and Tante Dédée, the nom de guerre of Andrée de Jongh, co-organizer of the famed Comet Line, Smith could not help but note the irony of an officer and a gentleman putting his life in the hands of women between 18 and 25. Yet despite numerous warnings from German officers about feminine wiles, Wehrmacht soldiers were routinely befuddled by these women. As their train clattered toward the southwest, Smith’s home run unfolded with cinematic order. Smith, Janine, Dédée, two Belgian soldiers and a British one had their own compartment; the British soldier was forbidden to speak and Smith, the mute grocer, “couldn’t.” At Bordeaux, they transferred to the train to Bayonne.
When they stepped onto the platform in Bayonne, a young woman came running up to Dédée and kissed her on the cheeks. Like her father, the teenaged Lucienne was part of the Comet Line, and that afternoon her task was to bring word of German movements in the town. German boots were on the bridge they had to cross, she whispered to Dédée, which prompted Dédée to play the envy card. She took one man in each arm, sent one with Janine and Smith with Lucienne, telling the two other women, as she was going, to make a show of intimacy with their “parcels.” Just before starting off, Dédée told the escapers that, since they were taller than the average Bayonnoise, they should bend a bit, one of the many examples Smith remembered of her life-saving attention to detail. This was in stark contrast to his momentary lapse on the Paris Métro when after jostling a woman he said “Excuse me” instead of “Excuse-moi”—and just feet away from two SS guards who mercifully didn’t notice.91 Like other “parcels,” he surely would have been told as well to, when in a restaurant, keep his fork in his left hand even when lifting food to his mouth.
A few hours later, after a short train ride to a town ten miles southwest of Bayonne, Smith’s party was met by a couple of women who replaced Janine and Lucienne. As the sun began to set, the four Allied servicemen and their three guides reached a large white farmhouse, where Madame Usandizaga welcomed them warmly. Smith’s question of how the escapers were going to climb the rugged Pyrenees was lost in the excitement generated by the arrival of the guide, Floretino Goicoechea, a smuggler who had turned his skills over to the Allies. A short while later, Dédée said her goodbye and, despite her “ever-present intensity,” Smith heard in her voice the emotion of the moment in her words: “Prenez garde”—Be careful—“my brave boys.”92
THE LEAD UP TO CHRISTMAS
The days before Christmas were especially difficult, recalls Darch. “We put up some silver paper that our cigarettes had been wrapped in, but it didn’t help much. The barracks were dismal and lit only by a few weak bulbs, so the silver paper didn’t twinkle much.” Memories of Christmas dinners amid the warmth of families and roaring fires made the ever-present cold and gnawing hunger all the more difficult. Nor did singing Christmas carols help; the absence of women’s and children’s voices underlined the men’s distance from home.
At his Arbeitskommando, Prouse too found Christmas depressing because it “started me thinking too much of loved ones and home.”93 The arrival of Christmas crackers brightened the mood. Prouse doesn’t record if anyone thought it strange that these crackers came from an organization other than the Red Cross, but once they started eating them, they quickly realized that the crackers were not their only Christmas present. Because the food contained in Red Cross parcels was so important for survival, MI9 never used those parcels to send escape gear such as the rice-paper maps of Germany and adjoining countries that were baked into the Christmas crackers.
None of the four evaders had any doubt what their guide, Goicoechea, meant when he “pressed his slab of a hand over his mouth” moments after they walked out the door and started toward the Pyrenees. A short time later, as they climbed in almost pitch blackness “over narrow overgrown paths and at an almost vertical incline,” and made their way along ledges just a few inches from drops several hundred feet high, the Canadian from Ontario’s mining country found the cold bearable.94 As the sky to the east began to lighten, they began climbing down, which required finding handholds to keep from falling down the mountain.
Goicoechea didn’t allow any rest until they staggered into a safe house several hours from the border. Yet Smith breathed easier as he shivered while wading across the river Bidassa, during which he could not help comparing the former smuggler to Moses leading his people out of bondage.
CHRISTMAS DAY
“The Germans were human after all,” Poolton wrote acidly decades later about the order that allowed the Canadians to remain unshackled for two days, beginning on Christmas Eve.95 Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Christmas message neither inspired nor warmed the hearts of men like Fusilier Jacques Nadeau, who had been captured at Dieppe and desperately wanted word from his family, not Ottawa. The delivery of British Red Cross parcels, albeit one for every four instead of two men, was, however, welcomed.
After weeks of living on filthy food—the Germans didn’t waste water washing the cabbage before making the weak soup, which caused hundreds of cases of dysentery—chocolate, Spam, sugar, tea and coffee made for a feast. “The making of sauce for Christmas pudding from the butter in the can took us out of the moment and transported us back to … to our mother’s kitchens or where we first tasted it,” says Darch.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Christmas services organized at Stalag VIII-B by Chaplain John Foote, and by the Oblates in seven different camps. Armies grant padres special powers; for example, they can conduct funeral rites in religions other than their own. On this holy night, Foote conducted a joint service with the Anglican padre. A week earlier, Father Juneau had celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception with “pomp” and assisted by several Protestants.
The year before, les religieux conducted Christmas services in a makeshift chapel. This year would be different. Just a few weeks earlier, Father Bergeron rejoiced in telling his Provincial that the very letter he was writing was “from the feet of Jesus-Hostie. Because, thank the Lord, our camp now has its own modest chapel.”96 Les religieux credited Mary with ensuring that they received the materials necessary to build the chapel, Étoile de la mer or Stella Maris (Star of the Sea), which they dedicated to the Virgin Mother. Bergeron told his family that the toil with tools and brushes was worth it, for it provided them with a holy place to host Milag Nord’s Catholics for services during the year and, especially, the commemoration of Jesus’s birth.
In a letter written home after Christmas, Juneau told of celebrating Christmas mass in Stalag XVIII-A’s theatre. That midnight mass was held five hours early mattered less than the gathering of the faithful in the chapel, complete with a crèche, the statues of Mary, Joseph, the three kings and the shepherd boy made from plaster of Paris.
At the POW camp near Blechhammer, in south-central Poland, Father Charbonneau conducted mass in a sanctuary that was a feast for the eyes. With the help of materials smuggled into the camp, he turned a 25-by-12-foot corner of the barracks into what a Red Cross official called “the most beautiful chapel in a prison camp.”97 A Gothic arch, made from Red Cross boxes, framed the altar. Both were painted to look like stone. On each side of the arch were pieces of stained glass, one with Mary’s monogram framed in flowers and one with Joseph’s, a sleigh handmade of paper and cardboard by an English soldier.
Mass began with the familiar Latin words that not only told the believers that their faith and Church lived on but also connected them to their families back home, as they too soon would be hearing the same words and praying the same prayers. The two paintings and a memorial that decorated Charbonneau’s humble chapel were the manifestation of the Church in the milieu of the prison camp. “One is of Calvary, the other of Christ coming to the prisoners, with this inscription: ‘I will refresh you (sic), je vous referai.’”98 To the left of the altar, in another Gothic arch, was a memorial for the soldiers who had disappeared.