Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (32 page)

The Maquis convoy was still only at Boismoreau-les-Mines, 15 miles south-east of Guéret, taking stock of their situation and deciding what to do next – something they should have thought about before starting their insurrection. When told that the convoy was splitting up and given the choice of going with the communist FTP or the right-wing COMBAT fighters, most of the men had no political preference. The question had to be simplified: ‘Do you want to go with Lalonnier or Blanchard?’ Blanchard made certain to keep control of most of the weapons, since they had been dropped to the COMBAT network, to which he belonged.

On Sunday 11 June the fatal split took place – fatal for the hostages, that is. Lalonnier wanted nothing more to do with them, so they had to depart with Blanchard’s group. But they were cheerful enough, little guessing what the future held. Coming from the same town, it was not surprising that, in the five days since being taken prisoner on 6 June, cautious moves had been made between captors and captives to renew old friendships, for these were men who had been to school together, played football in the same teams, got drunk together and, in some cases, courted the same girls.

On the same day, back in St-Amand Lécussan embarked sixty-five hostages in motor-coaches, escorted by carloads of armed
miliciens
, destination Vichy. There the men were beaten – some to insensibility – in front of their wives. Bout de l’An arranged mock executions and shouted that everyone in St-Amand would die if Simone was not returned within the time limit. It was pure terrorism, since the hostages could do nothing to assist or accelerate the return of his wife. One of the female prisoners was 16-year-old Thérèse Lamoureux, whose father and brother were in the Maquis. Shown coshes and whips to be used on her if she did not talk, she was told that she would be forcibly undressed for her beating, and she replied defiantly, ‘You won’t see anything new. My body’s just the same as other girls.’ In reluctant admiration, a
milicien
whispered, ‘We need chicks like that in the Milice’.
⁴

The original limit expired and was extended by twenty-four hours. But everything possible went wrong for Sadrin and his companions: their car broke down and had to be pushed through a rainstorm to re-start it; Sadrin, in his mid-sixties, sprained an ankle while pushing it; the windscreen wipers would not work; they repeatedly lost their way.

Just before the two groups went their separate ways from Boismoreau-les-Mines, a messenger from Sadrin who had come all the way from St-Amand by bicycle caught up with them, giving the latest news. This was the first time Sochet, Lalonnier and Blanchard learned that the hostage ploy meant to protect their families and friends had misfired and put those very people and many more at risk in St-Amand. But they were not free to make their own decision, being subordinate to ‘Francois’ so long as they were in Region R5 – the Creuse and the southern half of the Cher. He refused even to contemplate giving up the
miliciens
or the women, no matter what happened. However, to gain time, Sochet persuaded Simone Bout de l’An to write a letter to her husband. It read as follows:

My dear Francis,

I am in the hands of the liberation army. I am being well treated. Spare the hostages to avoid the worst happening. I put my trust in God. I am worried about what’s become of the children. Give them a hug for me.

Fondest kisses, Simone

Notes

1
Delalande, B.,
De la milice au maquis
(self-published), St-Amand, 1945, p. 19.

2
Sadrin, R., ‘Souvenirs d’un maire’, published as an annexe in Todorov, T.,
Une tragédie française
, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 180.

3
Todorov, pp. 64–5.

4
Ibid., p. 76.

NO TIME TO WASTE

It sounds unbelievable, but Sochet took the letter himself by bicycle all the 80 miles back into the Cher
département
, intending to confide it to the mayor of a neighbouring commune to forward to Bout de l’An since he could not risk entering St-Amand with it in his possession. From commune to commune he cycled, without finding any mayor willing to risk delivering the letter and be suspected of having links with the Maquis. Late at night, Sochet at last found a mayor’s secretary not far from St-Amand who had the courage to telephone the Milice in St-Amand with the news of the letter.

By that time, a German detachment had tracked down the
maquisards
hiding in Boismoreau-les-Mines, who succeeded in breaking off contact and slipped away towards the village of Sardent, where a column of SS Division Das Reich had just shot sixteen local men in passing through. Even before that, the local Maquis had experienced a hard time, living under hidden tents or semi-dugouts deep in the woods. A guarded truce between them and the newcomers was made more uneasy by Lalonnier’s men stealing a considerable number of weapons. With no intention of living rough any longer than necessary, Blanchard, van Gaver, Georges Chaillaud and half a dozen other bosses installed themselves comfortably in the Château de Mérignat with one of the hostages and a German prisoner preparing their meals for them. Their men were left to bed down in nearby barns. The prisoners, too, were confined in a guarded barn with a rough partition between the
miliciens
and the women, where Simone took to lecturing her guards that they were wrong to regard the Milice as enemies because they too were working for the liberation of their country.

Surprisingly, at this time of undelineated battle lines many Maquis groups were living similarly, with the bosses enjoying privileges and comfort denied to the rank and file. One such man, who is now a neighbour of the author, openly criticised the leadership of his FTP group over the hypocrisy of communists behaving in this way. They offered him the bribe of coming to live in the château with them, if he would shut up. Disgusted and disillusioned, he chose instead to walk 200 miles home and took no further part in the Maquis.

Life at the Château de Mérignat was comfortable, if not luxurious. Opinions are divided as to where all the funds came from, but money there was, sufficient to pay a butcher to come and slaughter a requisitioned calf every day. There was little coffee, which was in short supply everywhere, but always hot chocolate and plenty of milk. One of the survivors recalls never eating so much meat each day in the rest of his life, although the menu was boring: veal stew twice a day. A semblance of discipline was enforced by Blanchard. He obliged one of his men, who had taken tobacco from a local shop against a promise of payment after the war, to return the tobacco and apologise to the shopkeeper. Similarly, when a silver plate disappeared from the château, Blanchard assembled everyone who had access and threatened to refer the theft to ‘François’, who had already had a man shot for cowardice during an attack. The threat was enough to see the plate returned the next day.

The big problem was boredom. Even though ammunition was in plentiful supply, each man now having 150 rounds for his weapon, it was impossible to train with live ammunition in case the noise alerted any Germans passing nearby.

With the extended deadline expiring in the evening of 12 June, it had become more urgent than ever for Mayor Sadrin to arrange the exchange of prisoners. As the go-between in a climate of extreme mutual mistrust, his own position was far from enviable: some in the FFI regarded him as a Milice stooge and Lécussan made no bones about letting him know that he considered the Mayor of St-Amand a closet
résistant
, to be liquidated after he had served his purpose. Six days after the departure of the Maquis and their prisoners, Sadrin was still without any real news of their whereabouts.

Simone’s letter having at last reached St-Amand, its contents were relayed by telephone to her husband in Vichy. Although use of the term ‘liberation army’ and the mention of being well treated implied that part of the message had been dictated, the letter proved to Simone’s husband that she was still alive … unless she had been executed by her captors after writing it. He opted for the sane course, despite Lécussan’s impatience to kill someone – anyone – and agreed to a further prolongation of forty-eight hours in the deadline.

It was ironic that Simone had now become the one person who could save the lives of the hostages in the hands of the Milice, considering that they had been arrested in order to force her return safe and sound. Nobody had time to appreciate the irony of that, nor to reflect that the Maquis decision to take the hostages when they left St-Amand as a way of preventing reprisals by the Germans was itself the cause of the reprisals by the Milice.

Sadrin now being immobilised by his damaged ankle, the office manager of the sub-prefecture, Bernard Delalande, was lent a car by the Milice and set off with the two remaining negotiators to a rendezvous with some local
maquisards
,
including one man who had been with the men from St-Amand. Although initially only offering to drive the others, Delalande was to play an increasingly important part in the negotiations. Driving into the Creuse
département
, contact was made with a local
maquisard
whose
nom de guerre
was ‘Roger’ and who took their message to ‘François’. He refused to consider any exchange of hostages, saying, ‘Tell those middlemen from St-Amand to piss off, unless they want trouble with me. Madame Bout de l’An is staying where she is. We’re keeping her, come what may.’
¹

At a loss of what to do next, the negotiators returned to St-Amand, where Sadrin was trying to secure the release of the arrested families by persuading five other local notables to join him as substitute hostages. Equally as stubborn as ‘François’, Bout de l’An would hear none of this, adding, ‘Even if they call me Bout de l’An the Butcher, the hostages will be shot and the town burned down, if my wife is not released’.
²

Desperate, Sadrin even wrote an appeal to Prime Minister Pierre Laval, begging him to intervene, but received no reply. Archbishop Lefebvre of Bourges was also brought into the act, to plead for the hostages, even offering himself in their place, but Bout de l’An was unmoved – until the prelate simplified the issue: if the hostages were killed, Simone would never be seen again and her children would grow up motherless. Bout de l’An at last gave way and agreed to stop ill treating the hostages and to send back three of them who had not even been in St-Amand during the premature ‘liberation’. However, running out of patience at 1700hrs on 17 June, he again threatened Sadrin that, if the negotiations did not swiftly end in success, he would cut off the gas, electricity and water supplies to St-Amand and, when the town was burned down, only the hospital would be spared because it had cared for his children.

A bizarre convoy then set off for Vichy to see him in person, consisting of Delalande and the other negotiators with a Milice escort, which saw them through one German roadblock after another. Meeting Bout de l’An in the Milice HQ, they were able to obtain the terms of a possible settlement: so long as Madame Bout de l’An and the women were released, all the hostages would be freed, with the exception of those arrested while carrying weapons. As to the
miliciens
involved, he said, ‘They are soldiers. Their job was to fight. They should have died defending the woman they were supposed to protect.’
³
To the end of this convoluted tale, he never showed the remotest interest in their fate. The negotiators also got the clear impression that he would rather know his wife had been killed than submit to any blackmail using her as a pawn.

He also spelled out the consequences of any refusal of the other side to negotiate Simone’s release: the hostages at Vichy would be shot, the families of the leading ‘terrorists’ would be arrested and their property declared forfeit. In other words, whatever the Maquis did, he would reply by escalating the violence to another level. As a favour, the team from St-Amand was allowed a brief visit to the female hostages. After a few hours’ sleep, they drove back to St-Amand to try again to pick up the trail of the elusive
maquisards
holding Madame Bout de l’An. Passed from one contact to another, the negotiators finally met ‘François’ in pouring rain in the morning of 17 June at a rendezvous on a country road near Sardent.

A tall man in uniform, with a large black Basque beret tilted over one ear, he was at pains to impress on them that he held the reins of power in Resistance zone R5. Recently promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was on his way to arrest a female spy and had just had five of his own men shot ‘for unworthy conduct’ during the fighting. He appeared unable to understand why the negotiators had been chasing round the country on their quest, since they had no personal motive to do so. The idea of a humanitarian gesture seemed as foreign to him as to Lécussan. So far as he was concerned, doing a deal with the traitors of the Milice was out of the question and, if a town of 10,000 people was destroyed as a result, that was not his fault.