Above the city of Grenoble, at Saint-Nizier-du-Moucherotte, the sun rose into a perfect sky at 04.48 on the morning of 13 June 1944. For the 700 young men who had spent the previous night under the summer stars, strung out along a 3-kilometre defensive line on the Charvet ridge, it bought a welcome warmth against the damp early-morning chill. Bees hummed among the flowers and grasses and everywhere little birds darted from clump to bush, seeking out insects. High above the early lark let down her string of liquid notes. Below them, the Grésivaudan valley, bounded by the Chartreuse massif on one side and the Bauges and Oisans ranges on the other, glowed with the colours of high summer. And in the distance, like a great white whale, the snow-covered hump-back of Mont Blanc sparkled in the sunlight. In normal times this would have been good day for lovers – and country walks – and family picnics. But this was not a normal time – and this would not be a normal day.
Modern-day soldiers almost always fight and die miles from home. But these young men – many little more than boys – looked down that morning to see their home city laid out as plain as a street map. They knew its every nook and cranny. There was the park where they had played football with friends. There the school they had attended. There the square in which they had hung around, watching the girls go by. There the café where they had met a lover. And there the rented flat where wives and children still slept this summer morning, as they lay out in the dew-soaked grass, waiting for the enemy to come.
Whatever politicians say, soldiers do not die for their country. They die, mostly, for the man next to them – the comrade they know will lay down his life for them. And for whom they, too, will lay down theirs in their turn – if required to do so. But most of these young Maquisards lying out this warm summer’s morning on the Charvet hill, in the same clothes – even the same white shirts – in which they had left home only days previously, were different. Young, naive, unpractised in the use of arms, inexperienced in the terrors of war, they had come to the plateau out of a genuine sense of patriotism mixed with romance and adventure. Their youthful enthusiasm remained undimmed by the dull, mind-numbing routines of the professional soldier. How were they to know that their proudly acquired Sten guns would be little more than pop-guns against the steel-clad might and majesty of the world’s finest army, now massing invisibly below them? How were they to know, plucked so suddenly out of comfortable city lives, what it would be like to watch a friend cough out his life’s blood on the grass next to them? These things were literally beyond their imaginings.
And so, in ways unknown to the common soldier, they lay there, waiting for their enemy – apprehensively of course – but in their innocence also proudly, bravely, determinedly, ready to carry out what they believed was a glorious duty on behalf of their long-oppressed country. ‘It’s the morning of Austerlitz!’ declared one, referring to Napoleon’s great victory over the Austrians in 1805.
Suddenly, there was a new noise punctuating the early-morning hum of the city, drifting up to them on a light summer breeze. It was the insistent thump of a German heavy machine gun somewhere in the woods and meadows below them. Little flowers of dirt started sprouting among them in the long grass where they lay. Looking to the foot of the hill, they could make out tiny dots of field grey spreading out as they started to move slowly up towards them.
‘They’re coming!’ someone shouted.
1
THE VERCORS BEFORE THE VERCORS
For those who live around the Vercors massif – from the ancient city of Grenoble lying close beneath its north-eastern point to the vineyards of Valence scattered around its south-western slopes – the forbidding cliffs of the plateau are the ramparts of another country. To them, this is not just a mountain. It is also a state of mind. Even when hidden behind a curtain of summer rain or with its summits covered by the swirling clouds of a winter tempest, the great plateau is still there – offering something different from the drudgery and oppressions of ordinary life down below. Best of all, on still, deep-winter days, when the cold drags the clouds down to the valleys, up there on the Vercors looking down on the sea of cloud, all is brilliant sunshine, deep-blue skies, virgin snow and a horizon crowded with the shimmering peaks of the Alps.
Today, this is a place of summer escape and winter exhilaration. But its older reputation was as a place of hard living and of refuge from retribution and repression.
The historical importance of the Vercors lies in its strategic position dominating the two major transport corridors of this part of France: the Route Napoleon which passes almost in the shadow of the plateau’s eastern wall and the valley of the River Rhône, which flows through Valence some 15 kilometres away from its south-western shoulder.
The Romans came this way fifty years before the birth of Christ. Pliny, writing in AD 50, referred to the people of the plateau as the Vertacomacori, a word whose first syllable may have been carried forward into the name ‘Vercors’ itself. Eight centuries later, the Saracens followed the Romans, implanting themselves in Grenoble for some years. According to local legend, they even sent a raiding party towards the Pas de la Balme on the eastern wall of the plateau, but were beaten back by local inhabitants rolling rocks down on the invaders. Less than a hundred years later, towards the end of the tenth century, the Vikings came here too, but from the opposite direction – south down the Rhône in their longships. And 400 years after that, the Burgundian armies followed them on their own campaign of conquest and pillage. Then in March 1815, Napoleon, after landing on the Mediterranean coast from Elba, marched his growing army north along the route which still bears his name under the eastern flank of the Vercors, towards Grenoble, Paris and his nemesis at Waterloo.
Napoleon excepted, what is most significant about these invaders is that, though there are signs enough of their passing in the countryside below, there are few on the Vercors itself. It is as though these foreigners were content to pass by in the valleys without wishing to pay much attention to the cold, poverty-stricken and inhospitable land towering above them. One consequence of this passage of armies and occupiers is, however, more permanent. The historian Jules Michelet, writing in 1861, commented: ‘There is a vigorous spirit of resistance which marks these provinces. This can be awkward from time to time; but it is our defence against foreigners.’
The plateau itself is shaped like a huge north-pointing arrowhead some 50 kilometres long and 20 wide. It covers, in all, 400,000 hectares, about the same size as the Isle of Wight. An Englishman who will play a small part in this history described it, in his prosaic Anglo-Saxon way, as a great aircraft-carrier steaming north from the middle of France towards the English Channel.
This extraordinary geological feature is the product of the the shrinking earth and the faraway press of the African continent, whose northward push against the European mainland generates the colossal pressures which wrinkle up the Alps and squeeze the Vercors limestone massif straight up in vertical cliffs, 1,000 metres above the surrounding plain.
No concessions are found here to accommodate the needs of man. The Vercors offers nothing in the way of easy living. Extreme difficulty of access made the plateau one of the poorest areas, not just of France, but of all Europe, until new roads were blasted up the cliff faces in the nineteenth century. The forbidding bastion of the eastern wall of the plateau, stretching from Grenoble to the plateau’s southern extremity, is accessible only by goats, sheep and intrepid walkers. For vehicles, there are just eight points of access to the plateau, one on its southern flank, five spread out along its western wall and two on its north-eastern quarter. Of these, all bar one involve either deep gorges into which the sun hardly ever penetrates or roads which rise dizzily through a tracery of hairpin bends to run along narrow ledges and through dark tunnels blasted from vertical rock faces.
Only the road on the plateau’s