For many SOE agents who had returned in 1945, the experience of working for months under the constant threat of capture, deportation and death in occupied territories made a return to everyday civilian life seem empty and without meaning. In some cases this sense of dislocation profoundly affected their ability to integrate back into society; yet those who had endured the camps faced challenges of an altogether different magnitude. Yeo-Thomas, Burney, the Newtons and many of their fellow agents had been left physically and mentally crippled by their ordeals, and were gradually forced to take disability pensions and early retirement over the following years. If anything can be said of Peulevé, it is that he refused to give up in the face of such obstacles and his efforts to overcome them were as valiant as any of his wartime exploits. The determination he showed to try and lead a normal life in spite of his torments is a struggle few of us can imagine, but not even a man of his fortitude could carry such a burden indefinitely.
Eva was anxious to see her son's life recorded for posterity, but discussions with Cyril Watney and George Millar, another of Buck-master's agents who had already written about his own experiences in France, soon petered out. A further attempt was made in 1967 when a family friend at the Special Forces Club approached popular SOE writer E.H. Cookridge, but a year later he too turned down the offer, being unable to find a publisher to support the project. After briefly moving to stay with Arthur Larking at Menton, Eva returned to England and spent her last years in a nursing home, plagued towards the end by imaginings of Harry's torture and incarceration. Her daughter Annette died in November 2007. Marie-Louise Peulevé did not remarry but remained in Denmark, where she, Madeleine and Jean-Pierre still live today.
Stéphane Hessel, the last survivor of the thirty-seven Buchenwald agents, went on to pursue a diplomatic career, serving as French representative to the UN in New York and Geneva. Now living in Paris, he remains a keen supporter of humanitarian causes and has recently published an anthology of his favourite poetry. George Hiller also rose to become a respected diplomat before his death from a serious illness in 1972. Cyril Watney lives quietly in Essex. Maurice Arnouil turned his engineering talents to manufacturing washing machines in his later years, but he died unhappy and penniless in 1967. The last remaining member of AUTHOR, Jean Melon, continued to aid the Resistance after the circuit's collapse and ended up marrying Madame Hohenauer's daughter, Suzanne; they still own the Moulin du Breuil in Meymac. Following a long career with Shell, Jacques Poirier became an active supporter of France's Resistance associations and was president of Libre Résistance, which remembers those who were part of F Section's ‘Buck’ networks, when he died in Paris during October 2005, at the age of eighty-three.
Much has changed in Brive-la-Gaillarde since the war, although it's still possible to spot fading hotel signs and old street names from that time. Discreet plaques mark the houses of Resistance leaders and where the first clandestine meetings were held, while a memorial stands opposite the lycée where Poirier and his comrades accepted the German garrison's surrender, though it sits uncomfortably in the middle of a car park. This might suggest that reminders of the occupation have been neglected, yet the town has not forgotten the sacrifices that were made. In 1969 a plaque was unveiled at 171, Route du Tulle (now Avenue du Président Kennedy) to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrest of Peulevé and his comrades in spring 1944. Today, hardly anyone stops to notice the dull black tablet as they walk along this busy highway, but every year the mairie still sends flowers to place underneath it on 15 August, the anniversary of Brive's liberation. For a man often too modest to recognize his own achievements, perhaps such an unassuming tribute is one Harry Peulevé would have approved of.