part0015

Everyone involved in that night’s Lysander operation were in different parts of the train. There were seven of them in all: Pierre Dallas, in charge of the landing field with his three assistants, and the prospective passengers, Marie-Madeleine, and two of her agents, Lucien Poulard and Michel Gaveau. Both men were being withdrawn to London for their own security or that of the network. Poulard had narrowly avoided arrest when the Gestapo called at his parents’ house in Brest, and Gaveau, an expert in military intelligence, had become careless, allowing two women with no affinity with the Resistance to share his house. Betrayal and infiltration by German counter-espionage had become the scourge of the network and no one outside its compass could be trusted .

As for Marie-Madeleine, nearly eight months had elapsed since she had sent three Corsican policemen in her place to Tangmere and, until this moment, she had continued to ignore the entreaties of her SIS correspondents to come out of France for a break from the constant threat of capture. Even now, it had taken all the persuasive powers of her second-in-command, Léon Faye, to convince her that face-to-face meetings with British intelligence had become essential if they were to achieve some of their aims. One of his former air force colleagues and a member of their network, Jean Carayon, had just been appointed Secretary-General of Air Defence by Marshal Pétain. While Pétain had consented to Hitler’s plans to use the men under his command as anti-aircraft gunners on German rail transports, Carayon was asking for arms drops from the allies so that the same men could join the British and American forces when they landed in France. The Alliance network had also been approached to act as go-between in an attempt to set up negotiations for peace between a number of disaffected Wehrmacht officers and the British. Although highly sceptical about their ability to dislodge Hitler, Marie-Madeleine had agreed to put the proposals to Sir Claude Dansey in person.

The party left the train at the small town of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, only about twenty-five miles north-east of Paris. Dallas had excelled himself in the eyes of the RAF by identifying a landing site which not only provided a perfect approach over open cornfields, but its proximity to the north coast of France also meant only a three-hour round trip for their pilots, about half the flying time of the network’s two earlier sites. The first operation to this field had gone without a hitch for Bunny Rymills a month earlier, allowing two Alliance agents back into France and extracting three others. This time, it was Peter Vaughan-Fowler’s turn to make the same trip and he, along with Eddie Keyser from the SIS, who had come down to Sussex for the occasion, would be keeping fingers crossed that Marie-Madeleine would be among his returning passengers. It was therefore a great relief for him to see an elegant moonlit figure picking her way across the freshly cut stubble and embracing, one after the other, the three men who had just climbed out of the cockpit behind him. As she and her two companions found space for themselves and their courier in the same cramped compartment, the grinning features of Pierre Dallas appeared beside him. He had climbed to the level of the pilots’ seat and, greeting the man with whom he had carried out his Lysander training in Hertfordshire, presented him with the customary souvenirs of cognac and perfume .

Even as the white cliffs of Beachy Head glowed in the moonlight beneath the returning Lysander, Marie-Madeleine could not feel the exhilaration that a successful escape from France would normally engender in a secret agent. Too many of her friends were suffering at the hands of the Gestapo and, even though she was proud of the information contained in the cases of courier at her feet, courageously gathered by those in her network still at liberty, her sense of deserting them overwhelmed her. There was some comfort in the warm greeting she received from Eddie Keyser as she stepped from the plane. It was more than a year and a half since their meeting in Madrid, and his gentle reproach that she had caused so much worry by staying in France for so long, coupled with the celebratory fug of cigarettes and whisky in the Tangmere Cottage mess, lightened her mood to some extent.

It improved further as the car taking her and her two comrades from the airfield pulled into the drive at Bignor Manor. Instead of the harsh military barrack accommodation she was expecting, they were in a garden that reminded her of the nursery rhyme illustrations of her childhood and the shapely, auburn-haired hostess welcoming them on the doorstep completed the illusion. As they sat in the farmhouse dining room with their 3 a.m. reception pie, they were intrigued to hear the sound of whispering in the hall and several feet on the stairs. Tony Bertram was quick to shut the door, explaining how important it was that separate parties arriving from France should not meet. Such secrecy in these homely surroundings seemed incongruous to Marie-Madeleine and she was even more surprised to be asked by Keyser what name she would choose for her false identity while in England. The risk, apparently very real to the SIS, of her being identified by a spy from Germany or an ill-disposed rival French agent, was laughable to Marie-Madeleine when compared to the dangers she had just escaped.

She awoke the next morning with a start, convinced it was the Gestapo banging on her bedroom door. In fact it was Keyser, trying to wake her from her deep sleep to tell her it was time to leave for London. In the car, there was nothing he could do or say to Marie-Madeleine to stop her tears, which flowed uncontrollably for the entire journey to the capital. Once he had installed her in a flat there, he was at least able to send round a doctor who could prescribe some alleviation from her mental and physical exhaustion in the form of bromide and vitamins. The next day, the newly knighted Sir Claude Dansey called at her flat. Showing none of his renowned cynicism or ill-humour, he was at his most charming with Marie-Madeleine. Taking both her hands in his and calling her ‘Poz’, he said he had always wondered what this ‘terrible woman’ was like who had them all so scared, and expressed his relief at her safe arrival in London.

Marie-Madeleine was swift to make it clear that she intended to return to France at the first opportunity, but her visitor had different ideas. She had, he told her, stayed in the field long past the safety limits. By the law of averages, an underground leader did not last more than six months and she had been operating without a break for two and a half years. He thanked her profusely for what she had achieved, told her that she must rest and that she would have a vital part to play in the network’s operations from the English side of the Channel, at least for a while.

Of the thirty months in the field without respite, it was the last eight, during which the Nazis had taken control of the free zone, that had taken the greatest toll on Marie-Madeleine. Every day had brought new traumas and every night horrifying dreams, too often predictive of the terrors that awaited her comrades. In one recurring nightmare, she would witness a Lysander bringing Léon Faye and her personal radio operator, Ferdinand Rodriguez, back to France and landing in a field surrounded by clumps of heather in full bloom. Unable to warn them, she could only watch as her friends disembarked, unaware of a ring of German soldiers that closed in around them. So vivid was the dream that she forbade Pierre Dallas, to his obvious bemusement, ever to select a landing site in the vicinity of heather .

Ever since her escape from arrest in Marseilles in November 1942, Marie-Madeleine had been on the run, barely a step ahead of the Gestapo as her headquarters moved from one hideout to another in the southern half of France. During a short stay back in Toulouse, she was able to see her son, who was at a Jesuit boarding school and under the protection of one particular priest who had undertaken to hide him from the Gestapo, should they find out that he was there. It was in Toulouse that she also learned Faye had made a daring escape from prison and decided that she needed somewhere more secure and central in France for the two of them to resume their direction of the network. She therefore set off for the upper reaches of the Dordogne, close to the disused aerodrome where the network’s first two Lysander receptions had taken place and where numerous agents could lend protection.

Briefly based at Ussel, the headquarters then moved westward down the main Clermont-Ferrand to Bordeaux road to a hotel at Terrason before the local sector head, Colonel Edouard Kauffmann, found Marie-Madeleine and her entourage a more permanent base in a draughty château outside the town of Sarlat. They moved in just after Christmas 1942, but were on the road again a few weeks later when Marie-Madeleine became uneasy that too many people in the local sector had become involved with the headquarters’ activities and they were threatening each others’ security. Her instincts saved her, but only just; the Gestapo, pistols at the ready, arrived at the château ten minutes after her departure, asking the locals for a ‘Mrs Harrison’, a dangerous spy. Clearly, they had been given only her code name, Hérisson (Hedgehog) and leapt to the conclusion that they were looking for an Englishwoman.

After Sarlat, the next headquarters were established in a house in the centre of Cahors on the River Lot. This proved ideal because the house was on a hill and all the roads leading to it could be watched. There was also an escape route through the back into the countryside if a car caught them unawares. But it was still January when Marie-Madeleine took the decision to decamp once again. This time, it was at the shocking news that the German police had pounced on three of the network’s sectors: Toulouse, Nice/Monaco and Pau. With so many agents undergoing torture, however much she believed in their courage, she could forgive any of them if they were to divulge her whereabouts and so another move, this time to Tulle, was essential.

By now, as news reached London of the Gestapo’s inroads into the network, Eddie Keyser of the SIS was sending urgent messages, demanding that Marie-Madeleine take the Lysander flight planned for the February moon. If his belief that her arrest would effectively end the Alliance’s operation in France, Marie-Madeleine sensed that the network could only survive its recent body blows if she remained in France and, all the time, the Gestapo were at her heels. Only Kauffman had survived a swoop on the Sarlat sector and, on the day the headquarters party had decided to leave Tulle, this time for Lyons, the local priest had enabled the local sector leader to flee from a German raid on his house by stirring up a mob of angry inhabitants who had forced the policemen into a temporary withdrawal.

In spite of its size, Lyons was hardly an ideal hiding place. By February 1943, Klaus Barbie, in his pomp, was flushing out agents with ruthless efficiency in a city that had become the unofficial capital of the Resistance, and Fort Montluc prison was filling rapidly with battered, emaciated prisoners. In the very week of Marie-Madeleine’s arrival in Lyons, six key members of the local sector walked into a Gestapo trap and it was only because of her widespread and well-to-do connections that she was able to find refuge with a friend for herself, her assistant Hermine Bontinck, and radio man Ferdinand Rodriguez.

After a few days, a larger flat was found in Lyons to serve as headquarters but eventually that, too, had to be abandoned when Marie-Madeleine discovered that a former leader of the network’s Paris sector had become an Abwehr double agent and was the likely cause of all the recent arrests. Still in Lyons, Marie-Madeleine took refuge in a private clinic while the rest of her team carried out their work in another part of town. It was while she was here that her two children, Christian (twelve) and Béatrice (ten), were brought to Lyons. They believed their mother was in London, as did many of her agents in the provinces, as she had asked that the BBC put out a message to that effect to throw her German pursuers off the scent. True to their word, the Jesuits in Toulouse had refused to hand over Christian when the Gestapo came to claim him as a hostage and hid him instead in a mountain refuge run by the Christian Friendship organization for Jewish children. Béatrice had been with her grandmother, who was at a loss to know how to ensure her safety.

Feeling it would be unfair to let her children see her, Marie-Madeleine asked her assistant Hermine to look after them in Lyons while a route was devised for their escape into Switzerland. On one occasion, Hermine led the malnourished and bewildered pair past a window so that their mother could see them — an experience that Marie-Madeleine likened to ‘being buried alive’. The children made it into Switzerland even though they had to be left entirely on their own, miles from anywhere, to crawl through the rows of barbed wire between the two countries.

Lyons finally became too dangerous after a bungled operation by the Vichy police in which nearly all of Marie-Madeleine’s staff were arrested but then allowed to escape through various means. The police superintendent in charge was tortured and deported for his incompetence by the furious Gestapo, but they were unable to prevent an evacuation of the headquarters team to Paris at the end of May. The growing pressure both from London and her closest colleagues in France that it was time for Marie-Madeleine to leave the country was intensified on the Metro one day when she found herself sitting opposite the official of the Vichy government who had once issued her with a marked Ausweis . Although she fled from the train, he had clearly recognized her, and his inevitable subsequent report to the German police would explode any enduring myth that she was in England. The time had finally come to turn the myth into a reality.

If such a restive trail from Marseilles to Paris appeared merely a means of avoiding capture, it did, in fact, achieve much more than that. In spite of innumerable soul-destroying setbacks, it allowed the Alliance network to continue to supply London with an abundant and uninterrupted stream of essential military intelligence. While a growing number of its men and women were paying dearly for their cause through torture, deportation and the firing squad, others, thanks to materials and means from London distributed via Marie-Madeleine’s headquarters team, continued to work silently, pinpointing precise enemy targets for the RAF and the Royal Navy along the Atlantic coast and returning detailed questionnaires about German anti-invasion defences.

To run her headquarters effectively, Marie-Madeleine leaned heavily on a number of individuals. Although he was away for more than two months during this period, first in London, then in Algeria dealing with General Giraud who had taken over control of French troops in North Africa after Admiral Darlan’s assassination, Léon Faye was a mainstay. As her chief of staff, he ensured the network continued to function in its adversity and, with his air force connections, continued to recruit new, motivated agents to take the place of others who had been captured. The sangfroid and ingenuity of Rodriguez ensured, even when they were moving rapidly from one town to the next, that transmissions to London were as regular as humanly possible. While Marie-Madeleine and Hermine worked feverishly on the courier reaching them from the four corners of France, encoding the information for transmission that was too urgent to await the next Lysander, Rodriguez would scour the surrounding area for suitable sites to set up his aerials, never exceeding twenty minutes in any location to avoid the detector vans.

The link with London was not only vital in the supply of intelligence, it also served to relay communications between Marie-Madeleine and all her regional teams, who were each supplied with their own radios for contact with British Intelligence. Another man whom she came to rely on was Georges Lamarque, a brilliant mathematician, who she had put in charge of all radio operations for the network. He spent months on end in transit across France and was often the first to find out and report to Marie-Madeleine the details of a Gestapo raid after a sector’s radio had fallen silent.

Even before Marie-Madeleine arrived in Lyons herself, there were two other essential arms of her central operation already established there. One was a policeman, Ernest Siegrist, originally part of her Marseilles headquarters, whose speciality was forging new identity documents for new agents or those whose cover had been blown. The other was her Avia team, who ran all the parachute and Lysander operations for the network. All these people, along with the liaison agents who would carry reports back from the sectors, comprised a dogged machine which, although backfiring occasionally, continued to serve the allied cause in an extremely hostile environment.

Examples of its success were particularly marked on the west coast of France. Lucien Poulard, arriving from his native Brittany at Marie-Madeleine’s Sarlat hideout with a suitcase full of reports, had just avoided catastrophe. In order to avoid a search at the demarcation line, he had got out of the wrong side of the train but found himself face to face with a German officer. He sat on the suitcase while being interrogated at the station and was astonished to find his explanation for wanting to cross the line illegally accepted. He had claimed that he was a student eager to visit the prehistoric caves at Les Eyzies and he had not the documentation to allow him to do so. One of his agents in Brittany was a policeman who would set up road blocks in order to be certain of Nazi regimental insignia for precision in his reports of enemy troop movements. Another, supplied with a radio, was able to give accurate information to London every time a U-boat set sail from Brest, making it a sitting target for the British. The information would come from a dressmaker employed in the lifebelt repair shop of the submarine base who, when crews came to collect their lifebelts, would glean which boats were about to depart.

Another sector head, Philippe Koenigswerther, whose region included Bordeaux and La Rochelle, provided information that enabled the famous Royal Navy Operation Frankton to take place. Known as the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, ten Royal Marines launched two-man canoes from the submarine HMS Tuna near the mouth of the Gironde Estuary. Their mission was to plant limpet mines to the hulls of blockade running ships of the German merchant navy docked in Bordeaux. Five ships were severely damaged on the night of 11 December 1942 as a result, although eight of the ten commandos lost their lives, two when their canoe capsized soon after its launch and the rest by execution after they had been captured making their escape overland towards the Spanish border.

The Alliance network also benefited during this period from its friends in high places in Vichy. Marie-Madeleine’s most senior contact there was General Camille Raynal who, among other useful sources close to the Pétain government, turned up a naval specialist, Joël Lemoigne, who had ready access to all the ports occupied by the Germans. One of his agents in the Brittany port of Lorient who could speak fluent German, thanks to his Alsace upbringing, had won the confidence of the Germans to the extent that he was the only Frenchman allowed into the Keroman U-boat base, built by the Todt organization. Loathed by his fellow French workers for his apparent avid collaboration, this engineer was entrusted with a job which gave him access to all operational orders, boat movements and the effects of their activities. British Intelligence became party to every detail. Through Lemoigne, the network was also the conduit of information about the Italian and German attempts to salvage parts of the French naval fleet of seventy-seven vessels which had been scuttled by their own crews at Toulon just after the allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.

There was a growing tendency among some in the network to look for more active ways of undermining the German occupation, especially after the invasion of the southern zone. This was understandable, as so many of the agents were trained soldiers and airmen, but Marie-Madeleine was sometimes compelled to remind the more belligerent that theirs was an intelligence-gathering outfit and, as soon as they became involved in operations outside their normal function — such as the seaborne evacuation of General Giraud — the risk to their security became too great. Therefore, when one of her Vichy agents came up with an audacious plan to kidnap either Pétain or Laval by persuading the apparently complicit pilot of the French government’s official plane to re-route a Paris-bound flight to London, Marie-Madeleine resisted the temptation to give the venture her blessing.

There was, after all, enough risk attached to the routine task of receiving the monthly Lysander flights. Her Avia team, headed by Pierre Dallas, successfully despatched Léon Faye to London on the night of 14 January from the tried and tested Thalamy airfield in the Auvergne (see Chapter 9), and received some much-needed funds for the network, their first supply since the November debacle in Marseilles. A parachute drop around the same time provided a consignment of handguns for agents to carry and accumulators that would allow radio operators to transmit in the open air, independent of mains power supplies and out of the reach of detector vans.

John Bridger, the pilot who had flown the January Lysander mission to Thalamy, complained on his return to Tangmere that the airfield was no longer ideal because it had been colonized by clumps of heather which made for a very bumpy landing and take-off. Marie-Madeleine never saw the Thalamy site herself so it is unlikely that the heather of her nightmare was drawn from this. Certainly, it did not deter either the Avia team or the RAF from planning another operation to this field for the March moon when Faye was to be returned to France. They were both deterred, however, when news arrived that the Germans were driving stakes into the field. Worse still, the Gestapo had raided the house of the local sector leader in nearby Ussel, where Rodriguez, in charge of this particular air operation (Dallas was to fly out for Hudson landing training), had installed a radio to co-ordinate the reception.

Although her master was fortunately absent when the German police descended on his house, the elderly maidservant of Jean Vinzant, the sector head, knew only too well how incriminating the radio would be for the household. She successfully smuggled it out of the house in her voluminous apron under the noses of the Gestapo agents, who were too busy searching for papers to pay her any attention. Rodriquez was therefore able to retrieve the radio and contact London to cancel the mission.

With Thalamy no longer available, the network needed another landing site and located one much nearer to Lyons, which had by now become the centre of its operations. The field lay beside the Saône, to the north of Lyons, about three kilometres upriver from Villefranche-sur-Saône. Therefore, only a few days after the aborted operation in the Auvergne, Flying Officer Bunny Rymills was taking off from Tangmere with a hunchbacked man with snow-white hair and steel-rimmed spectacles installed in his rear cockpit. This was, in fact, Léon Faye, heavily disguised, courtesy of the SIS make-up department. It turned out to be a hugely frustrating flight, especially for Faye, who, with his airman’s eye, realized, as they flew over France, that Rymills’s course was too far to the east. The intercom was either switched off or out of order and, although he thumped hard against the fuel tank which separated him from the pilot, Faye was unable to make himself heard. It was only when the Swiss Alps came into view that Rymills understood that he had dramatically missed his target and that the only thing to do was to return home before his fuel ran out. There was no mistake by Wing Commander Pickard on the following night and, much to Marie-Madeleine’s relief, her right-hand man was returned to her after his two-month absence.

If the Villefranche landing field was convenient in its proximity to Lyons, it turned out to have a severe drawback. Although Rymills completed the April operation there without any of his earlier difficulties, soon afterwards, Marie-Madeleine was shocked to have the field pointed out to her by a talkative taxi driver who assured her that everyone locally knew what went on there. A new site was duly identified for the May exchange far away from Lyons, close to the River Cher, to the east of Issoudun in central France. It was provided with the willing co-operation of a wealthy local farmer, who plied the reception team and outgoing agents with champagne while they awaited the Lysander’s arrival. After the plane had come and gone, the farmer offered to keep the documents and several million francs sent from London in his safe until the network’s treasurer arrived the next day to collect them. To his consternation, when the treasurer asked for the money and reports, the farmer denied all knowledge of them and threatened to call in the Gestapo.

Desperate to save the arms and radio sets that had also been delivered by the Lysander, the leader of the operation, Henri Courmouls, fled the scene with his team and the empty-handed treasurer. When a report of what had happened reached Marie-Madeleine, she judged that the farmer was more of a crook than a traitor and ordered that an armed team return to the farm. They waited until nightfall, then cut the telephone wires and forced the doors of the house. It did not take much to persuade the farmer to open his safe and hand back his ill-gotten gains. It was following this incident and Marie-Madeleine’s move to Paris that the field from which she eventually made her own escape to Tangmere during the July moon was chosen by the Avia team.

It must have seemed remarkable to Eddie Keyser back in London that the Alliance was continuing to produce such copious and valuable reports and still arranging regular Lysander and parachute operations while, nearly every week, he was receiving news of devastation to the network’s ranks or another near miss for the headquarters team. It was little wonder that they had so much concern for Marie-Madeleine’s morale and safety; her comrades seemed to be falling like flies. While she was still at the château outside Sarlat, she was distressed by the physical state of Maurice Coustenoble, one of her first and dearest agents, who had come to deliver reports from the forbidden zone in the north. It was not the bullets that had passed through his coat as he was fired at crossing the demarcation line that ailed him, but an advanced state of cancer which had him coughing blood as he spoke. His region had been devastated after the arrest of the former leader of the Paris sector, Commandant Verteré, who had apparently fallen for the Gestapo ploy of placing a stool pigeon in his cell to whom he told everything. Coustenoble’s illness did not prevent him returning to his post in the north, but Marie-Madeleine would never see him again. He died nine months later from his cancer just at the moment when the ambulance in which he was being taken to safety was overhauled and stopped by the Gestapo.

Verteré was, in fact, the cause of far more damage than that reported by Coustenoble. As a senior air force colleague of Faye’s, he had been given the Paris sector in the spring of 1942 with much confidence that his influence and connections would be of great value to the network. He proposed an extraordinary cover as a member of the Nazi-sympathizing rassemblement political group led by the arch collaborationist Marcel Déat. It was not long, however, before his conduct began to make Marie-Madeleine uneasy. He would not take orders from Faye because he was senior to him in the air force, and showed a marked reluctance to set up radio communications with London and little interest in seeking out military intelligence. Furthermore, he showed no concern at all when a close acquaintance of his and leader of the network’s Lille sector was arrested by German police, refusing to change his address or post office boxes in Paris, which the Lille man could easily have betrayed under torture.

Because of these shortcomings, Marie-Madeleine decided to dispense with Verteré’s services, but maybe she should have suspected him of duplicity even then. If he was not in the pay of the Abwehr at that time, he certainly became so after his arrest. Claiming to have escaped from German captivity, he wrote a letter to General de Gaulle asking for his help in forming a new network. It was the Abwehr who sent the letter to London via one of their Lisbon channels which, fortunately, was well known by British Intelligence to be in the service of the Germans. Even if that plan had been thwarted, it did not prevent Verteré from handing over all his old contacts, which led to the execution of all the network’s principle agents in Lille and a wholesale rounding up of the southern sectors.

Many of the network’s longest-serving recruits, such as Colonel Bernis in Monaco and Marc Mesnard in Marseilles, were arrested along with several others, and whole regions were put out of action. As Marie-Madeleine made her frantic progress across southern France, setting up one headquarters after another, the devastation seemed to follow her. Pau fell; so, too, did Toulouse. Only Edouard Kauffman, head of the Sarlat (Dordogne) sector, escaped to join the headquarters team as head of its security. There was nothing he could do to prevent the raid at Tulle and, on the very day they arrived in Lyons, an ambush was awaiting the local sector there where, among others, two of the network’s most courageous and effective female agents were led away for interrogation at Klaus Barbie’s dreaded Hotel Terminus. Both women, Madeleine Crozet and Michèle Goldschmidt, endured humiliation and torture as their breasts were burnt with cigarettes and electric shocks applied to their naked bodies while they remained utterly silent. Even the German officers who signed their death warrant at the ensuing military tribunal were moved sufficiently by their courage to submit an appeal to Hitler for mercy — although the women themselves refused to add their signatures to it.

A further act of treachery put paid to another hugely valuable arm of the network, the Vichy sector run by General Raynal. The general had hatched a plan to spring Navarre, the network’s founder, from the prison where he was being held in the Massif Central. When he explained to Marie-Madeleine that he intended to pay 100,000 francs to the prison van driver to smuggle Navarre out under a pile of poultry cages, she was immediately suspicious of the driver’s motives because of the high price he demanded. She was also shocked that he had been allowed to deal directly with the sector head. She decided to meet him herself and was immediately put off by his voluminous girth, a sure sign of black-market dealing at the very least in a malnourished nation. When he boasted to her that his mistress was friendly with the Germans, Marie-Madeleine became convinced of the man’s duplicity but, in order to buy time to warn the Vichy team of the danger they faced, gave him a bundle of twenty halved 5,000 franc notes, saying he would receive the other half when Navarre was free.

Tragically, before her warning could get through, one of the Vichy agents found himself surrounded by the Gestapo at a station while in the company of the van driver. He drew his revolver but was shot dead through the throat. For some reason, General Raynal refused to flee his house when news of the shooting reached him and he was arrested a few days later along with nearly all his Vichy team. The outcome for Navarre was no better, as the planned escape persuaded Marshal Pétain to hand over the responsibility of his imprisonment to the Germans.

Blows landed even closer to home for Marie-Madeleine while she was in Lyons. Her radio operator, Rodriguez, had an extremely narrow escape when, having just finished a transmission from a house in a small town outside the city, found himself face to face with a detector van crew as he stepped out of the front door. By throwing the case containing his radio straight at the head of the German policeman who accosted him, he gained just enough time to make a dash for it on foot, successfully dodging the hail of bullets which followed him. With the help of his comrades back in Lyons, he managed to thwart the manhunt by escaping on a train to Paris, but his departure was a major loss to Marie-Madeleine, who had drawn great strength from his unflappable assistance.

It was only because of the incompetence of the French police in Lyons that all the activities of the Alliance did not come to an abrupt halt for good in May 1943. Events began with a serious car crash in which three members of the Avia team, including Dallas, were badly hurt when their car hit a wall on the way to a parachute drop. They were taken to hospital, where one of them, in a delirious state, talked about his team’s headquarters and the police who were investigating the accident pricked up their ears. The trail they were able to follow led to a house in Lyons, where Faye was conducting a meeting of senior network agents who were compiling a report to send to General Giraud in Algeria to help him in his plans to attack Corsica and the Mediterranean coast. While the four apparently most senior at the meeting were taken to a nearby police station, Hermine Bontinck, Marie-Madeleine’s courier and assistant, and another female agent were kept under guard in the house. In spite of the guard, Hermine was able to make a surreptitious telephone call to Marie-Madeleine to warn her of the arrests and was also able to hide some very incriminating reports in a rubbish bin. Later, she managed to give her guards the slip and escape from the apartment building, but not before asking the doorman at the street entrance to salvage the reports and keep them until a messenger arrived for them. (The female comrade she left behind ended up in prison and was eventually shot in the back of the neck by the SS at Schirmeck concentration camp).

Meanwhile, Léon Faye and the three others, which included Colonel Kauffman and an air force general, René de Vitrolles, who had taken on the task of rebuilding the network’s south-east region, baffled their police captors with their indignant reaction to their arrest. The police were clearly impressed by their rank and by their assertion that they were working with the backing of Pétain’s intelligence service. While the superintendent waited for orders about how to deal with them, the four men simply walked out of the police station, telling their bemused guard that they were off to find something to eat.

The guard on the three hospitalized Avia team members was no tighter. Their fellow agent, Henri Courmouls, had found a way to visit them by disguising himself as a male nurse. Although they were all still very groggy (Dallas had earlier actually been given extreme unction), he persuaded the sister in charge that they needed fresh air and took them outside in their pyjamas — never to return to the hospital.

The Gestapo backlash which followed all these escapes necessitated the headquarters’ final hurried decampment to Paris, and it was here that Marie-Madeleine received the last piece of bad news before her flight to London. It would have been bad enough if it had been only that the last of her team left in Lyons, the document forger Ernest Siegrist, had been arrested along with all his equipment. This included three transmitters, a large supply of seals and blank identity forms, as well as a dagger, two revolvers and a stock of high explosive. He also had in his possession a duplicate of Faye’s personal encoded notebook, which contained hundreds of addresses, passwords and codes.

What made the matter worse still was the manner of Siegrist’s arrest. It happened during an operation by two members of Kauffmann’s security team to move Siegrist to a new hideout, and the conduct of one of these two agents, a young Alsatian student by the name of Jean-Paul Lien, was at best incompetent and at worst suspicious. While acting as lookout, when he saw Siegrist’s house surrounded by the Gestapo, instead of warning his opposite number as he went to collect him, he fled the scene, allowing both his fellow agents to be caught. There was another reason Marie-Madeleine had doubts about Lien; he had earlier been one of the two messengers sent to the house where Faye and the others had been arrested to collect the reports which Hermine had hidden before she made her escape. They had contained documents and films but, when they were returned, only the films were there. Neither incident involving Lien was enough to persuade Marie-Madeleine to take summary action against him, but she would soon bitterly regret that she did not.

If Marie-Madeleine had known that she would not set foot in France for an entire year once she had landed in England in July 1943, it is doubtful if she would ever have agreed to leave her country in the first place. It became clear to her soon after her arrival in London that the only man who could prevent her return, Sir Claude Dansey, would exercise that power, albeit with kind words and assurances that it was for her own good and that of the network. He argued that with such a huge organization — there were some 5,000 agents now involved from all over France — an overall view away from the immediate firing line would put her in a better position to direct operations. He also strongly believed that the Germans’ counter-espionage machine was now so efficient that her chances of avoiding capture were non-existent if she returned and the value to the Gestapo of what she knew was inestimable.

Realizing that there was some truth in what Dansey said, particularly about the size of the network and the security problems posed by expecting all regions to report to a single headquarters in the field, Marie-Madeleine asked Léon Faye to come over with the August Lysander flight. Her aim was to discuss with him ways to decentralize the organization, which had just received a further blow with the arrest of a number of agents, including Henri-Léopold Dor, all of whose names had appeared in Faye’s notebook found with Siegrist.

When Faye arrived in London, she found that Dansey was equally loath to let him return to France and suggested that they hand on-the-spot control to Paul Bernard, a Parisian banker and economist who Marie-Madeleine had for some time earmarked as a future chief should anything happen to her or Faye. By then, Marie-Madeleine had become convinced that Faye would be in great danger if he returned, but she succumbed to his furious protest that he could not desert the men and women he had persuaded to fight alongside him and she gave him permission to go.

Although Marie-Madeleine enjoyed a far easier relationship with Dansey than those who worked with him or for him in the SIS, there were still some considerable obstacles which, if not deliberately put in her way, nonetheless made the task of monitoring and directing her network problematic. It was not helped by the officious attitude of the officer who had taken the place of Eddie Keyser as her link with the SIS. Known to her only as ‘Tom’, he may well have been the same individual as Gilbert Renault’s Major ‘J’ and Passy’s ‘Crayfish’. Marie-Madeleine got the impression he was withholding information radioed to London from her own agents, and his insistence on repeatedly searching the cases of two newly recruited agents due to fly into France annoyed them so much that they resigned from their mission.

Worse still, as her time in London wore on, Dansey began to give the distinct impression that the Alliance was losing its importance to him. Excuses about bad weather and a scarcity of pilots were given to Marie-Madeleine to explain the lack of available Lysander operations throughout the autumn and winter. Records show, however, that 161 Squadron continued its service to other intelligence networks and the SOE with unprecedented frequency during those months. It was possible that, with the betrayals that continued to devastate the Alliance , Sir Claude felt that any contact with its agents in France was too risky even for the RAF. Marie-Madeleine had to be content with increasingly intermittent radio contact from her agents and a house at 10 Carlyle Square with a direct telephone link to British Intelligence. Dansey did listen to her protests about the obstructive ‘Tom’ and replaced him with a far more sympathetic officer, code-named ‘Ham’, but it was only when Kenneth Cohen returned from a posting overseas in the early days of 1944 that Marie-Madeleine found someone within the SIS who was willing to re-open her physical links with France. Up until then, her life in London had been largely one of perpetual impotent anguish, punctuated occasionally with moments of immense pride at the continuing achievements of her beleaguered network.

Among the impressive quantities of courier that arrived with them and which Marie-Madeleine and Faye wasted no time in opening and examining was one meticulously detailed report which had them both transfixed. It had been compiled by Jeannie Rousseau, a female agent of the Alliance’s sub-network, the Druids , which their indefatigable radio chief, Georges Lamarque, had formed using disaffected members of the disbanded Vichy youth organization, Les Compagnons de France . Rousseau, who spoke German like a native, had an officer contact who worked in the island laboratories of Usedom in northern Germany, where new weaponry was developed. Her resulting report was the first in-depth intelligence available to the allies about the development and deployment of the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket — both of which would prove to be lethal barbs during Nazi Germany’s death throes.

If Faye’s arrival had brought such valuable information to the allies and such comfort to Marie-Madeleine, his and Rodriguez’s return to France would bring nothing but despair. To her horror, and in her firm belief in the power of premonition, Marie-Madeleine caught a glimpse of a vast expanse of heather as she travelled through the Surrey heathland on her way from London to Bignor Manor to see the two men off. Her recurring dream about Faye’s arrest had become real, yet she knew everyone would think she had finally cracked if she were to try to stop the operation.

In fact, the moon on the night of 13 September was so bright that Flight Lieutenant Robin Hooper failed to see any of Pierre Dallas’s signals at the field and had to return with his outward bound passengers. This did nothing to dispel Marie-Madeleine’s certainty that she was sending her friends to their doom and, two nights later, the BBC broadcast the message that ‘whale fishing is a dangerous occupation’ to denote that the operation was on again.

Tony Bertram’s call from Tangmere to say, ‘tea for our new friends’ must have given her at least some hope, as it meant that the exchange had taken place and that Maurice de McMahon, who had fled the Gestapo in Paris and had been hiding in Switzerland, and Philippe Koenigswerther, head of the still-functioning Bordeaux sector, were on their way to Bignor. When they arrived, they were far from euphoric. The three-night wait for the plane had played havoc with their nerves, especially as they had the feeling all the time that they were being watched.

And, of course, they were right. Jean-Paul Lien, alias ‘Lanky’ and one of the network’s Lysander reception committee that night, had another code name that was much more precious to him. To Oberleutnant Merck of German counter-espionage, he was V-Mann E 7226. Lien did not only have a code name conferred on him by his Abwehr masters — he would soon be receiving the Iron Cross with Sword and two million francs in return for the betrayal of his countrymen. It was a small price for Oberleutnant Merck to pay considering the riches in arrests that it had afforded him, ensuring his own safety from a winter posting to the Russian front whence so many of his fellow officers would never return.

The Gestapo waited until Faye, Rodriguez and the entire Avia team were on the train to Paris early in the morning of 16 September before they moved in for the arrest. Meanwhile, another team of plain-clothes men were swooping on the Alliance’s headquarters in the capital. If not for a botched operation where the German police thought they had mistaken the number of the apartment after they had rung the bell and descended to the floor below, the entire headquarters staff, including its acting head, Paul Bernard, would have been caught. As it was, they escaped down a drainpipe at the back of the building, but could not stop the arrest of all the Paris radio operators and security team.

It was several days before Marie-Madeleine got to hear the news that she had been dreading, when Bernard succeeded in passing a message to a radio operator in the Le Mans sector. Over the next few days, the news only got worse. Colonel Kauffmann in the Massif Central and his team were arrested along with many other agents based in the Lyons area. Transmitters were falling silent in all parts of France — Autun, Brest, Rennes and Normandy had fallen into Gestapo hands. By now, it was very obvious that all the arrests could only have happened with the assistance of an infiltrator with access to the heart of the network. When Marie-Madeleine was briefing Philippe Koenigswerther about the devastated network he was due to rejoin after his course in England, he immediately told her who he believed was the traitor. Lien had apparently been pumping him for information about his sector during their three-day wait for the Lysander. Koenigswerther was sufficiently suspicious then to give him false information; the fact that the Bordeaux sector was one of the few still intact was proof enough to him that Lien was the informer.

It was only in late November when Marie-Madeleine herself accepted that Lien was a double agent. Until then, the only thing she knew for sure was of the arrests in the train and that Lien had been picked up with all the others. She was still even hoping that Faye was not among them, having followed her instructions to make his way from the landing site separately from the others. Her hopes were finally dashed when one of her former agents, now working in London as the archivist for the BCRA , handed her a radio message he had come across in the files. It had come from a small Lyons network more than a month previously and gave definite news of Faye’s capture and confirmation that Lien had been freed soon after the arrest. It is not clear why the message was sent by a separate network, but it appalled Marie-Madeleine that it would have been seen by both the SIS and de Gaulle’s secret service and yet no one had thought of passing the information on to her. Certain knowledge of Lien’s duplicity a month earlier might well have saved a number of her agents now behind bars .

In spite of such administrative shortcomings, Marie-Madeleine was able to disperse much of the bitterness which existed between de Gaulle and her organization during her time in London. Not only did the General object to the fact that all the Alliance’s intelligence was fed directly to the British, who were selective about what they passed on to the BCRA , he also believed that the Alliance was working for his arch rival, General Giraud, who had been put in command of all French forces in North Africa after Darlan’s assassination. It was true that Faye had negotiated with Giraud when he was in Algeria and set up a communication link with him in return for official French military status for the network. But Marie-Madeleine understood quite well that her agents in France, like so many others in the resistance movement, were Free French at heart and that de Gaulle was the more able leader.

She abhorred the rivalry between the Gaullists and the Giraudists and the lack of unity among those fighting the occupation. One of her own agents in France had sacrificed himself to the Gestapo by overrunning his radio transmission to London to pass on details of planned police raids on Communist Resistance fighters. When she discovered that the communist representative in London had not been provided with any radio link with France to warn his men, she was mortified that her agent’s courageous act had been in vain. For all these reasons, when de Gaulle assumed overall command of French Forces at the end of 1943, Marie-Madeleine willingly agreed to a suggestion by British Intelligence that they arrange a legal agreement for the Alliance to become part of the BCRA while maintaining its direct links to the SIS.

From the SIS point of view, direct links with the Alliance proved still to be extremely valuable in spite of Dansey’s apparent waning faith in the network’s viability after the damage wreaked by Lien. Paul Bernard, now properly in charge since Faye’s capture, soon made it clear to Marie-Madeleine that they were carrying on in spite of there being no regular means of delivering courier and exchanging personnel and material. Everything now depended on the radio operators who were still free and, throughout November and December of 1943, the airwaves were busy with news of German shipping movements from Bordeaux, the effects of allied bombing on Toulon, aircraft strength at Tours airfield, the numbers of submarines in dock at Saint-Nazaire and the size of infantry reinforcements stationed at the mouth of the Rhône. A number of the sectors, all now acting more or less autonomously, were also getting wind of Hitler’s planned assault on London with V-1 missiles and sending information about launching installations along the English Channel coast.

Late in November, Philippe Koenigswerther did eventually make it back to France, but only by threatening to shoot the commander of the Royal Navy launch that had brought him to Cap Fréhel on the north coast of Brittany if he did not let him swim ashore. It had been the second attempt to land him in France and, as with the first time, there was no sign of the reception committee’s signals. Utterly frustrated by the prospect of returning again to England, he drew his revolver and was allowed to plunge into the sea. Koenigswerther made it to shore and discovered when he found his comrades that the navy had been half a mile to the north of the agreed rendezvous and that he had just swum and waded through a minefield. This was the network’s only successful exchange of any type between August 1943 and late January 1944 (another sea operation near Saint-Raphael on the Riviera), but at least it meant that Bernard received a much-needed package of two-and-a-half million francs and all the details of Lien’s treachery.

By now, though, through infiltration, torture and improving radio detection, the Germans had broken down nearly all the network’s defences. Koenigswerther’s activities back in France lasted less than a week before he was captured after a shoot-out with a detector van crew in Bordeaux. The hugely informative Nantes sector was overpowered at the same time, with the Germans capturing the entire consignment of the only successful parachute drop of late 1943. These two coups effectively silenced the network’s entire flow of information from the Atlantic side of France. By the end of the year, Marie-Madeleine was all but ready to give Paul Bernard the order to cease all undercover work, such was the dearth of equipment and money getting through to him. Finally and crucially, however, a successful parachute drop of transmitters and money was able to take place on the night of 6 January 1944. It was recovered by agents from one of the few remaining functioning sectors, run by the former French air force captain, le Comte Helen des Isnards, based at Aix-en-Provence. An attempt a few days earlier had failed when the RAF Whitley involved was lost with all its crew.

March saw the resumption of Lysander operations on the Alliance’s behalf, thanks to the direct involvement of Kenneth Cohen. The first nearly killed the pilot, Flying Officer Duggie Bell, and the two returning agents when the plane’s engine failed and nosedived into a field within a mile of the Normandy coast. With pilot and one agent badly injured, the trio managed somehow to avoid detection in a highly fortified part of France and made it to a railway station and the eventual comparative safety of Paris. A further Lysander exchange, not far from Angers close to the Loire, not only gave Flying Officer Bell a passage home, it re-established human contact between London and the Alliance in France, which had been lacking for six months.

Among the reams of hitherto undelivered courier that had arrived with this flight — the payload can scarcely have been safe, as there were four passengers as well — was information from the still-intact Normandy sector, which must have delighted those planning D-Day. The art master at the lycée at Caen, Maurice Dounin, had travelled the entire Normandy coast from the mouth of the river Dives eastwards of Caen to the beginning of the Cotentin peninsula on his bike and on foot, and sketched an extraordinary map. When unrolled, it reached fifty-five feet in length and depicted every fortification, gun battery and beach obstacle the Germans had constructed.

Any joy that Marie-Madeleine felt for such productive reconnection with her comrades in France was very soon dispelled by the next piece of harrowing news. Only two days after the Lysander operation, Paul Bernard was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris and began a session of beatings and half-drownings by interrogators at 84 Avenue Foch. He had been denounced by a newly recruited agent and, although he showed an extraordinary ability to stay silent before his torturers, it seems they had already acquired much of the information they required by other means. Most of the principal agents in the northern sector of France had been captured in a massive swoop, which included the map-maker and twenty others from Normandy, all of whom were summarily shot on the day after the D-Day landings of 6 June.

The question now arose about who was to command what remained of the network in the field and, as a temporary solution, Marie-Madeleine divided the network into four independent commands, splitting southern France between two existing sector leaders and giving the shattered north to a Normandy agent, Jean Sainteny, who had missed the Gestapo swoop while on a Lysander course in England. Meanwhile, Georges Lamarque would continue to lead his nationwide sub-network, the Druids . Now, more strongly than ever, however, Marie-Madeleine was determined to return to France to resume overall control. All was not yet lost, as every time the Nazis struck, more volunteers seemed to be stepping forward, buoyed perhaps by the expectation of an imminent allied invasion. Both the April and May moons had seen successful Lysander operations for the network and there was still a regular radio exchange with the Mediterranean and south-west regions. The only major recent setback had been the arrest of four valuable agents, including Jeannie Rousseau of the Druids , in the north Brittany town of Tréguier, prior to an attempted sea evacuation to England.

By June, Marie-Madeleine had been able to use the Alliance’s newly forged association with the BCRA to lobby for her to return to France. Although agreement reluctantly came in time for the June moon, with all attention focused on the momentous Operation Overlord of 6 June, it was not until the following month that she was destined to set foot once again in occupied France. Dansey was still certain her chances of survival were minimal and insisted she wore a convincing, if unflattering, disguise with a hairnet, spectacles and false teeth. He even gave her a rabbit’s foot mascot and told her that, if she were caught, she was to tell the Germans that the Alliance was dead and that she was now working for him, sending back reports about the communists in France. They would know who he was and it might just save her.

On the night of 5 July 1944, as Marie-Madeleine stumbled through the darkness somewhere just to the east of the forest of Fontainebleau, she stooped to pick up a small handful of French soil and fondled it between her fingers. Her last sight of England had not been the familiar surroundings of Bignor Manor and the Tangmere cottage but the headquarters of 161 Squadron at RAF Tempsford. Both Kenneth Cohen and ‘Ham’ had been there to wish her well and see her board a Hudson with seven other passengers, including her fellow Alliance agent Raymond Pezet, to whom Marie-Madeleine was married according to her false identity papers. The plan was for the pair to find their way southwards through France and make contact with Capitaine des Isnards, whose relatively intact south-eastern sector had become the powerhouse of the network, keeping up a stream of information from its transmitters while so many others had fallen silent.

The journey from just south of Paris to Aix-en-Provence took more than three days, some of it on foot, some by hitching lifts in a variety of road vehicles and some by trains severely disrupted by Resistance sabotage and allied bombing. They were welcomed by des Isnards with the news that the letter box he had been using for getting written reports to London had just been blown. Once Pezet had taken his leave — he was to join the Avia team — des Isnards took Marie-Madeleine to the hideout he had prepared for her, a flat in a small house not far from the Cours Mirabeau. He assured her that no one but he and the proprietor knew of the place and showed her some sixty pounds of correspondence and reports that had accumulated and been stored there awaiting her attention.

He also reported that Georges Lamarque had been in Aix, hoping to see her to give details of recent disasters in Paris. Most of the agents of the newly re-activated sector had been rounded up, including its leader, Jean Sainteny. The allied invasion had only increased the ferocity of the Gestapo interrogation methods. Probably as much through fear as through vengefulness, the Nazi secret police had shed all vestiges of justice, executing many of their prisoners as soon as they had extracted all they could from them. The only ray of light was that Sainteny himself had, despite the effects of torture, managed to saw through an iron bar in his prison and escape.

For the next week or so, Marie-Madeleine worked feverishly at sorting and encoding the mountain of reports due for transmission to London. Among them, she came across details of the Wehrmacht plot to assassinate Hitler which, only a few days later on 20 July, would so narrowly fail in its execution. She wondered if Dansey and his superiors would treat the report with as little credence as they had the previous Wehrmacht proposal she carried with her from France a whole year earlier. Nearly every day of that week, des Isnards collected Marie-Madeleine from her apartment and drove her in his car to his farm, just outside Aix on the road leading towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, where he directed his operations. Here, Marie-Madeleine would have lunch, hand over the messages for transmission and meet many of the Alliance’s newest recruits, who were preparing for the imminent allied landing in the south. She did not intend to be among them for long. Once a parachute drop of arms and supplies she had arranged with London had taken place, she would head north again to help her beleaguered comrades in Paris.

But fate, in the shape of a dozen heavily armed Germans bursting through the unbolted door of her apartment one evening, was to intervene. They had come in search of des Isnards who had just left, having warned Marie-Madeleine that the town was to undergo a thorough search the next day and arranging to pick her up with all the mail in his car in the morning. With convincing indignation, she persuaded the Germans that it must have been another apartment in the building that he had visited and, while all but a single guard went to knock on other doors, she managed to throw a pile of messages that had been on a central table under a nearby divan. The posse soon returned to Marie-Madeleine’s flat having found nothing elsewhere, but her continued play-acting eventually convinced their leader that she was genuinely scared of the maquis terrorists of whom this man was reportedly one. When a search of the flat revealed nothing, the men were about to take their leave until one of them, for no apparent reason, stooped to look under the divan.

The effect of his discovery was electric. Suddenly, the men began attacking every fixture and piece of furniture in a frenzy to uncover more evidence. They finally succeeded in their search when they tore apart some carpet hassocks into which Marie-Madeleine had sewn all the sheaves of mail that she had been processing. Their fury and indignation, fuelled by some cognac they had found, was such that Marie-Madeleine was convinced she was about to be lynched or shot. Fortunately, their leader restrained the men by force and dragged her into a corner of the room. Her refusal to say who she was and cool insistence that she would only answer to the senior Gestapo officer in the region had made him wonder if she were, in fact, a double agent and that there might be a share for him in the rewards she was due for penetrating a French network.

While refusing his proposition to that effect, Marie-Madeleine played along with the suggestion that she might be on the Germans’ side, still insisting she needed to see the man in charge. This would buy her time, especially as the man in question was out of town and would not be back until 9 o’clock the next morning. It meant she had until that time to think of a way to avert the disaster that otherwise awaited her and the entire network, as the Gestapo chief would have no doubts as to her identity the moment he set eyes on her.

She was taken by her captors to the local Miollis military barracks, where she was locked into a soldiers’ punishment cell on the ground floor of the gatehouse and left there for the night. Allowed to keep her bag, she felt inside for the cyanide. Was that the best solution? It would prevent her giving anything away under torture, but it would not save des Isnards or countless other agents. What else could she do? Escape? There was a large window to the cell, whose glass casements had been replaced by a horizontal thick wooden board which blocked four fifths of the opening, leaving a narrow space at the top. By putting her slops bucket upside-down on her bed and standing on it, she could see out into the street through protective vertical bars which were set a few inches beyond the board.

Remembering stories from her childhood in the Far East of burglars who broke into houses naked and covered in oil to slip through the tightest gaps, Marie-Madeleine set about her desperate plan of escape. Removing all her clothes and with a few banknotes and a flimsy, rolled-up dress clenched between her teeth, she pulled her meagre frame up and over the board until she was standing on the windowsill, tightly pinned between board and bars and totally exposed to the darkened street outside. Hoping that if her head would fit through the bars, the rest of her would follow, she tested the nearest gap, but it was too narrow. Praying that there might be some inconsistency in their spacing, she tried again further along the window. This time, with much pain, she was able to force her head through. At this precise moment, a German motor convoy swept into the street and screeched to a halt right in front of her window. With excruciating pain to her ears, Marie-Madeleine jerked her head back inside the bars and stood there pinned, naked and utterly vulnerable. The military convoy had lost its way and the man at its head began demanding directions from the sentry to the barracks, which stood a few yards to Marie-Madeleine’s right and which she had not even noticed before. When the convoy eventually moved off again, she once more squeezed her head through, but this time it was followed by her neck, her right shoulder and her right leg. Her hips were the most painful of all but, with them free, she found herself on the pavement. The sentry had heard something, though, and shouted and flashed his torch in her direction. Its beam missed her lean frame flattened on the ground beneath the window and, in a few seconds, she took off into some rough ground across the street and, hearing no sound of a pursuer, put on her dress .

Marie-Madeleine now had only one thought: she must make it to des Isnards’ farmhouse before he set out to collect her from her flat where the Gestapo would undoubtedly have set a trap. In the rapidly growing dawn light, she first made her way to a stream on the eastern edge of Aix to wash as much scent from herself as possible, in case they came looking for her with dogs. Then, on a route that took her straight back past the barracks and the sentry, she began her barefoot journey to the farmhouse. On the outskirts of the city, she found German soldiers putting up road blocks — her escape would by now have been discovered — but she managed to skirt round the checkpoint by joining peasants gleaning in the fields beside the road. To her utter relief, when she finally staggered in through the front door of the farmhouse, des Isnards and his wife were still in bed. Bursting into their bedroom and announcing that she had saved them, she promptly collapsed.

Although Marie-Madeleine would never again come quite as close to her death as she did in Aix-en-Provence, her dangerous fight against the German occupation of her country continued right up to the moment that American forces finally pushed the German army back across its own borders in late December 1944. With des Isnards’ sector well and truly blown by Marie-Madeleine’s arrest, he and his team escaped into the hills to the east of the city to join the maquis. Here, he and Marie-Madeleine (once she and her lacerated feet had recovered from the flight out of Aix) re-established contact with London and thus a flow of intelligence from the south of France.

Still determined to get to Paris, where she hoped to assist with its speedy liberation, Marie-Madeleine assumed first the identity of a local peasant to escape from the hills, then of a widow in full black mourning clothes to allay suspicion on a Paris-bound train from Marseilles. It was Georges Lamarque’s Druids who facilitated her return to the capital, as their sub-network still had active headquarters in both Marseilles and Paris.

By the time she arrived after another tortuous journey through the chaos of devastated roads and railway lines, General Patton’s army was not far from the outskirts. One of the first of her old comrades she came across was Jean Sainteny, brandishing the prison bar he had removed to gain his freedom. She was keen to see him safely delivered out of the reaches of the Gestapo and agreed that he should attempt to breach the battle lines to the west on a motorbike, taking with him courier for London and details of the enemy’s positions for the American commander-in-chief. So delighted were the allies with Sainteny’s intelligence when he reached their lines that he agreed to return to Paris to come back with more information about the Germans’ resolve to defend the capital or to lay waste to it. Soon after his second successful mission, bringing news that most of the Wehrmacht forces were making a rapid retreat eastwards towards the Rhine, the Second French Armoured Division made its triumphant entry along the Champs Elysées on 24 August.

Still Marie-Madeleine kept up the fight. She now travelled east towards Verdun in an ambulance with a fellow agent, their story being that they were collaborators following the German withdrawal and offering medical help to the wounded. The more intelligence she could supply the advancing allies, the sooner she hoped they would be over the German border. So many of her captured comrades who were still alive were incarcerated somewhere in Germany, and their only hope of survival was a rapid advance on Berlin. Verdun proved to be a fertile sector for newly recruited agents and, although she could not gain radio contact with London via the radio hidden in the ambulance, Marie-Madeleine was able to send a number of couriers back through enemy lines with information about which roads were mined and where the machine-guns were installed.

News that Verdun had finally been liberated came to Marie-Madeleine early in September, after she and her team had been forced to retreat from their village hideout to an open-air headquarters in the Hesse forest. But if she was happy to be caught up in the hysteria of victory celebrations that immediately ensued in a nearby village, she could not but ask herself, ‘What is victory to us when those who won it are missing?’ Victory, in any case, was still a long way off and the last eight months of war would prove fatal to so many of her missing friends. It would be Christmas before the Germans were forced out of eastern France and, all the while, agents of the Alliance continued to operate ahead of the advancing American lines, sending back reports of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Marie-Madeleine remained on the front line herself for most of that time, returning on several occasions to Paris where she was delighted to meet up with Kenneth Cohen and ‘Ham’. On one of these occasions, a ceremony was organized by the British when Cohen proudly presented her with the OBE; on another, she was reunited with her children, brought back from Switzerland.

With the armistice eventually signed on May 8 1945, far from any scene of jubilation, Marie-Madeleine embarked on a final sombre duty to her lost comrades. This was a tour of all the prisons in Germany where records showed that members of the Alliance had been imprisoned. There had been a few blessed reprieves for individuals such as Ferdinand Rodriguez (who accompanied her on her grim tour), Navarre, Paul Bernard, Colonel Charles Bernis, Marc Mesnard, Henri-Léopold Dor, Madeleine Crozet, Michèle Goldschmidt and Jeannie Rousseau. But the further she ventured into Germany, the more the heavy toll of executions became apparent. At the fortress of Bruchsal, she came across the cell where her beloved Léon Faye had been imprisoned and saw the chains that had been used to lash him to the foot of his bed. Faye was later taken to Sonnenburg (now Słońsk) across the Polish border, where he was killed in a massacre of 800 prisoners.

In some places Marie-Madeleine visited, the bodies of her friends were still lying at the spot where they had been shot. For those where the executioners had not succeeded in reducing the evidence of their deeds to ashes, Marie-Madeleine undertook to return the remains to their families in France. In all, of the 1,000 agents in her network who had fallen into the enemy’s hands, 438 were never seen alive again. Among these were Lucien Poulard, Pierre Dallas, Ernest Siegrist, Joël Lemoigne, Camille Raynal, Philippe Koenigswerther, Georges Lamarque and Edouard Kauffman.

I ask you to serve our unhappy country so that it may enjoy peace again and happiness, songs, flowers and flower-covered inns. Close the prisons, drive out the executioners. Like so many other countries, France will have to tend, cleanse and heal cruel wounds and rebuild vast numbers of ruined places. But she is the only one whose moral unity was broken. Pulled and torn in all directions, she is a dyke bursting under the weight of water. That is the most serious and urgent task. Everything must be done to get out of this impasse. Later, historians will judge. For the moment, the important thing is union, not reprisal, work and not chaos. Act to this end, my dear friends, that is my last wish.