The first meeting between Geyer and Chavant at a saw-mill near Saint-Julien-en-Vercors in the weeks before Christmas went as badly as might have been predicted. Chavant took an instant and intense dislike to his haughty new military partner, refusing to permit him to have any contact with the camps or give training to the Maquisards. Geyer reciprocated by making plain his distaste at having to discuss military matters with a civilian. This deep schism was widened by the different strategies followed by the Maquis fighters on the one hand and the professional military on the other. The military pursued a ‘wait and see’ policy whose aim was to avoid drawing German attention to themselves in order to gain the time and space to build up their units and train their men for the ‘big moment’ (D-Day) – when they could come out into the open and play a major part in the liberation of their country. The Maquisard leaders, however, pursued an activist policy which concentrated on small raids and sabotage designed to harry the Germans, make them feel insecure and deny them freedom of movement. This policy had the double advantage of hardening and professionalizing their guerrilla forces through action, while at the same time encouraging other young men to the cause.
The difference between these two approaches became evident in December 1943 when there was a sudden and sharp increase in the raids carried out from the Vercors plateau and the area around it. On the night of 1/2 December there was an attack on high-tension electricity lines near Bourg-de-Péage. At 08.20 the following day, an explosion rocked the Borne Barracks in Grenoble, killing twenty-three German and Italian soldiers and wounding 150 French civilians. In reprisal, the Germans shot thirteen hostages. On 10 December, railway locomotives were sabotaged at Portes-lès-Valence and, the following day, the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble were attacked, causing an estimated 30 million francs’ worth of damage. On 15 December the Maquis group in the Malleval valley in the north-west corner of the plateau sabotaged the Valence-to-Grenoble railway. On the 20th, the Mayor of Vilnay was assassinated for collaboration and, two days later, another train was sabotaged at Vercheny. On 27 December, in what it is tempting to think of as an attempt to make the old year go out with a bang, there were raids and reprisals at Vercheny, Sainte-Croix, Pontaix and Barsac.
This increased level of sabotage and raids seems not to have been set back by the early and ferocious arrival of ‘General Winter’* on the plateau. On 6 November, unseasonably early, the first heavy snow fell on the Vercors. Two weeks later, there was an even covering of 30 centimetres of fresh snow, right down to the mid-levels of the plateau. By Christmas, the snow was a metre deep at the Ferme d’Ambel.
This was the first winter which most of the young réfractaires had spent away from home and they found it very hard. Even the simplest chores required super-human effort. Almost worse than the cold was the sheer unrelieved, bone-numbing boredom, with nothing to do but get on each other’s nerves as the snow swirled outside their mountain refuges, while the days shortened and the nights, lit only by a single oil lamp, lengthened interminably. Morale plummeted and young men started slipping away for the comforts of their homes in the valleys. Of more than 400 réfractaires estimated to be in the camps in September, only 210 of the hardiest were left by Christmas. The camps at C8 and C11 fused together and descended to take refuge in the old, now deserted eleventh-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron under the eastern ramparts of the plateau. Christmas, when it came, was celebrated by the young men in their mountain refuges and forest huts as best they could, given their conditions and heterogeneous beliefs. In Camp C3 above Méaudre, Christians gave readings from the Bible, the Jews from the Torah and the Communists from the texts of Karl Marx.
As early as October the camp at C2 had been abandoned when its inhabitants descended from the plateau to winter quarters in empty houses in the village of Malleval, nestling in a steep little bowl to which the only easy access was through the narrow gorge at Cognin, off the north-western quadrant of the plateau. Here the Maquisards under the leadership of Pierre Godart had an excellent relationship with all the local villagers, who despite the wartime restrictions still managed to organize a sumptuous Christmas for their young visitors. Godart sent one of his most devout men to Grenoble to ask the Bishop if he could provide a priest to take Christmas mass for the Maquisards in the little village church. But the answer was an abrupt no – ‘those who put themselves outside the law, are also outside the law of God’, as one later observer summed up the great churchman’s response. Eventually, however a priest was found to take confession and mass. On Christmas Eve, a French traditional réveillon de Noël* began.
The little Malleval church was first decked out in full winter finery. Then, soon after dark, processions of torches started to wind their way down the tracks leading from the outlying farms where each Maquis section of sixteen was housed. Soon their voices could be heard carrying across the valley and the little dots of men’s figures could be picked out against the whiteness of the snow. In due course, each column arrived and filed into the church, Christian and Jew and Communist and atheist alike. ‘It seemed as if all the world was there, in the little white church lit by carbide lamps which cast a flickering glow, making the shadows dance and shooting their beams into even the darkest corners. The old people sat quietly, their walking sticks between their knees, as others squeezed up to make room for the new arrivals. Even the women joined us, including the mothers, wives and some fiancées of the Maquisards, giving our little ceremony some of the sweetness of home.’
Then the feasting began: ‘The menu would have dignified a prince … the food seemed to have come from every corner of the land. The baker at Cognin brought breads and cakes. A veal calf had been carried down from Rencurel and all the fish and fowl of the area seemed to have been gathered together in our church, especially to grace our Christmas. There were even two cases of champagne freshly arrived from Reims. The feasting went on all the night. Songs were sung; an accordion was brought out – then more songs and more songs until finally the dawn burst in among us. On this night, for us, the men of the Maquis, life was wonderful.’
Surely, next year – 1944 – the Allies would land and France would be free again. And then life would be wonderful every year.
* The phrase is a Russian one which is used to account for the fact that so many winter invasions of the country have failed. Russians also refer to ‘General Snow’ and ‘General Mud’.
* Festivities at Christmas.
10
As the men of the Malleval Maquis were celebrating the Christmas season waist deep in snow, Winston Churchill, dressed in his famous silk dressing gown emblazoned with a red dragon, was lying in bed in an airy room in General Eisenhower’s villa in Carthage (prophetically called La Maison Blanche), recovering from pneumonia and a heart attack. Denied his customary cigar and restrained in his consumption of alcohol, he was tetchy and fulminating against ‘the scandalous … stagnation’ of the Italian campaign.
It is tempting to believe that his complaints about the slow progress in Italy might have been a displacement activity for the much bigger personal setback he had just suffered at the hands of his ‘friend’ President Roosevelt at the Tehran Tripartite Conference which had just ended. At Tehran, the American President had blindsided Churchill by teaming up with Stalin to defeat one of the Prime Minister’s most ardent and long-favoured schemes, the invasion of what he called the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ on a line which began on the Pisa–Rimini axis in Italy and ran through the Balkans to the oilfields of Rumania. Churchill had invested hugely in arms, supplies and support for Tito’s Yugoslav guerrillas as a preparation for this assault, which was now, thanks to the US/Russian alliance, to be abandoned in favour of a simultaneous double invasion of France, one from the north across the Channel (Overlord) and the second