Andrée's War (14 page)

Alain was relieved that Andrée had not encountered any problems and as she discreetly passed him the ‘post', they arranged to meet later that day for lunch with his friend, Jean-Baptiste Biaggi. The three of them enjoyed themselves over the next few days, but all too soon Andrée had to make her way back home to Paris.

Between June 1941 and Christmas 1941, she made several further trips down to Marseilles. For obvious reasons, no records were kept of these trips nor of their exact dates. Like SOE, the Orion Group kept few records,
*
but well after the war Andrée often spoke to her children about her adventures during the war years. She always claimed ignorance as to the contents of what she carried though, saying: ‘I had no idea what information I was carrying. It was far safer for everyone involved.'

 

*
Many of the records that were kept of SOE's activities in France during the Second World War were mysteriously burnt at the end of the war – possibly explained by the fact that so many members of SOE continued to work for the British intelligence services after the war had ended.

I
n 1941, a new member joined the group: Paul Labbé, a small-built, thin and highly intelligent twenty-year-old whose family lived in the Béarn area of France, in the Basque country. He and his family, and their home, Le Château d'Orion, would play a vital role in the group's work.

Paul was a staunch monarchist, descended from a long line of devout Protestants, and had been studying law at the Sorbonne. Another member of the group, Yves de Kermoal, described him in 2012 as ‘a small chap who looked like a monk who had walked straight out of the middle ages into the twentieth century'.

On 9 February, 1941 Andrée wrote in her diary:

Alain brought his friend Paul Labbé to my party. He asked me to dance with him several times.

Alain, meanwhile, was sounding out Paul's political views to see if he could be trusted. As their friendship grew, Paul invited Alain to stay at his home, only thirty kilometres away from the Spanish border and a couple of kilometres away from the demarcation line into the Free Zone.

The château was a seventeenth-century manor house covered in thick ivy, situated on the edge of the small hamlet of Orion and surrounded by an overgrown formal garden overlooking the Pyrenees. It had been in Paul's mother's family for several generations. Madame Labbé had suffered more than most at that point: her husband had recently died; she had lost a son, Jacques, killed in battle at the beginning of the war; and another son, Jean, was an officer serving in the French navy. Although Paul was technically
still at university, his mother knew it would not be long before he too would be fully immersed in the war.

Nonetheless she gave her son's new friend a warm welcome upon his arrival. The boys spent many hours walking in the hills surrounding Orion, soaking up the clean air of the Pyrenees and planning their collaboration. Paul's family was well known throughout the area and he was confident his mother, his sister Ninon, the château retainers and other locals would help them with their plans.

Madame Labbé had met and married her husband before the First World War – a Parisian doctor whose successful hobby as a watercolour painter had earned him a strong following in the area. After her husband's death at the beginning of 1939 and the outbreak of war once again, she left Paris and returned to her family home in the Basque country. She allowed her house to be used for Resistance meetings and as a drop-off and collection point for the couriers relaying intelligence documents, and she invited many of the Orion agents, particularly Alain and Andrée, to stay at the château. The whole group was hugely fond of Madame Labbé, whom they called Tante Marie – an unusually informal term of address in France at that time.

One of Henri d'Astier's directives had been to find a way of helping men escape France so that they could join the army and, in 1941, Alain and Paul set up a system which would ultimately allow over 1,000 Frenchmen to use the Orion escape route to leave France. The people of Orion and the surrounding region knew the Pyrenees well, and the best routes across the border and over to Spain. Smuggling had been a way of life for some of the local families for centuries and during the war years they familiarised themselves with the German patrol times and the number of border points.

Given Orion's rural location so close to the occupied zone, the locals regularly crossed between the two zones carrying out their errands – anyone crossing was required to carry an
ausweiss
and there were regular inspections by the local police or Wehrmacht. But according to Gandy, residents weren't always subject to full checks; this was a tiny community close to the demarcation line, and procedures may have been more relaxed on occasion. Paul was presumably hopeful that getting across the line in the
surrounding area might be easier than elsewhere, whether with false papers or by crossing illegally, away from the checkpoint. That is not to say that it was risk-free, particularly as the war progressed. Moving between the zones became increasingly dangerous as the demarcation line began to be policed more heavily and escapees without the right permits were picked up and arrested.

Once would-be escapees had managed to get across the demarcation line, they were matched with a local
passeur
. The
passeurs
were local Basque men who lived in the foothills of the Pyrenees and whose job it was to know the best ways of crossing the mountainous range. Between 1940 and 1944, it is estimated they helped over 33,000 men escape France to gain their freedom. In winter the paths could be dangerous, but during the rest of the year the weather was generally clement and posed no problem.

Back in Paris, Biaggi met two men who would prove central to Orion's plans. Xavier Escartin was a deeply patriotic Basque whose business activities led him to travel regularly between Paris and south-western France. Michel Alliot was an energetic and enterprising young man from a small village near the Jura: at sixteen, he graduated from one of France's leading schools, the Lycée Louis le Grand. Aged only sixteen, Alliot had established his own Resistance group, Vaudevir, focusing on producing false documents, but also helping men to escape France through the Jura to Switzerland. Based initially in the rue Honoré Chevalier, Alliot's extraordinary operation, Vaudevir, had collected over a million false documents by 1945, including christening certificates, food and tobacco coupons, and even school reports. The group started by making stamps out of sculptured potatoes to forge ID cards, but later became a repository for thousands of genuine ID cards stolen from Parisian town halls. Vaudevir went on to supply Orion with additional ID cards and certificates, as their ‘clients' sometimes needed as many as seventeen sets of false papers to travel from Paris to the Pyrenees.
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Biaggi introduced his new contacts to Alain and Paul, and the five of them discussed their escape route plans and how they would recruit men in the capital who wanted to leave France. As Orion's reputation developed, Frenchmen from all over Paris started to approach them for help. Detailed conversations would then take place to discuss on what basis Orion would provide assistance, and after their credentials had been carefully checked, their names would be passed on to Orion's agents in the Basque country, who would organise their departure.

It was during Alain's first stay at the château that Paul had proposed a name for their organisation: le réseau Orion (the Orion Resistance Group). He told Alain, ‘No one will ever think of the château or the village. They will think you are referring to the constellation.'
⁹
After the war the group was officially recognised by the Ministry of Defence as the Réseau Orion, in operation from April 1941. Between April 1941 and October 1942, its couriers delivered thirty-one pieces of intelligence from different parts of France to Marseilles, from where they were passed on to Henri d'Astier in Algeria and ultimately to the British and American intelligence services.

 

*
In 2013, Economica published a book on the definitive list of Resistance groups active in France, titled
Les réseaux de résistance de la France combattante
. In it Vaudevir is listed as a sub-group of Orion, though that was not how any of Orion's members described it to me.

A
fter Alain and Paul set up the Orion escape route through the Pyrenees, Andrée began to travel down to the Basque country, carrying some of the gathered intelligence which needed to be taken through the Pyrenees to the US consulate in Santander or to Algeria by boat via Marseilles. She was now travelling as a courier between Paris and Orthez, as well as down to Marseilles. The latter route was becoming increasingly important as new agents were drawn into the Orion network in northern France.

Sometimes Andrée received dictated notes (in code of course) via telephone and sometimes they were given to her in note form. Once in Marseilles, ‘the post' was taken by the sailors of the Société Hôtelière de Ravitaillement Maritime (a private company that operated in a similar fashion to the Merchant Navy's food supply ships) or by couriers of the Banque Nationale de Commerce et d'Industrie to Algeria.

As day-to-day life in occupied France became increasingly depressing and difficult, Andrée was intrigued when she returned home one evening from a music recital at the German Institute to find a letter addressed to her from her Belgian uncle, advising her that one of his friends would be arriving in Paris and would be inviting her out to dinner. She had not eaten a good meal since Christmas and Andrée's love of good food was legendary, so she was very excited at the thought of dinner at Prunier's, but curious as to why a friend of her uncle would invite her to join him in one of the city's best restaurants.

Andrée's diary entry for 14 May 1941 refers both to the daily problem of finding food and the luxury of a good meal out – a rare pleasure for the majority of Parisians by this point:

Maman is leaving for St James at the end of the month. She is fed up with not having any food. She intends to find some food there and send it home so that we have something to eat.

I had dinner with a friend of l'oncle Auguste who was in Paris for a couple of days. He invited me to join him at Prunier's where we had a bottle of 1918 Bollinger, some excellent oysters, a delicious steak tartare and some frites.
*

On the evening of her dinner date, Andrée left the flat in the early evening and made her way to the
métro
. As she walked into Prunier's and took in the atmosphere, she could see a large number of Wehrmacht officers dining. She approached her host's table and was careful to respond to his welcome appropriately, as he stood up and kissed her three times on the cheek in accordance with Belgian custom.

As they finished eating, her companion quietly explained that he was carrying a number of documents which he had brought from Brussels and which he was going to hand over in a bag also containing a box of Belgian chocolates from Wittamer and a couple of historical novels for her mother. Over the last year Andrée had collected intelligence from many Resistance colleagues, but never so openly in a public place, and in full view of so many officers. She casually took the bag and placed it by her side. Basic common sense told her that her host might have been followed from Brussels and, although her brother's security rules did not allow meeting in public places, it was safer to stay away from the family flat. A meeting like this one, taking a young lady out to dinner, would seem perfectly normal.

As curfew was about to fall, Andrée and her host left the restaurant and said
au revoir
. They wouldn't meet again until long after the war.
^†

When she arrived home, she was met by Alain, who asked his sister how she felt about going on a trip to the Pyrenees to deliver some intelligence. He and Paul had worked out a new route from Orion to the US consulate in Salamanca. There was always danger, of course, but he was confident that they had a reliable channel in place. Andrée was to travel down to the Basque country to stay at the Château d'Orion, where Madame Labbé and her friends would ensure the onward delivery of the material she brought with her. Alain was keen for her to go as soon as possible; he was sure the material she had been given was valuable and wanted to get it to Salamanca swiftly.

Yvonne had been listening to her son and daughter's conversation from the adjoining room. She couldn't keep quiet any longer. ‘You had both better be very careful,' she warned them, anxiously.

At Police Headquarters early the next morning, Andrée requested the application forms for an
ausweiss
. She had examined the map and the train timetables and asked permission from her department head to travel to Orthez via Bordeaux.

Her request went through without a hitch and soon the day arrived. Andrée was looking forward to meeting the Labbé family; she had come across Paul several times at parties in Paris, but knew little about the rest of his family. Alain had told her that Madame Labbé was the kindest, most generous and welcoming person she could meet, and that Paul's sister was around her age.

She stepped off the bus into the quiet Basque village of Salies-de-Béarn and looked around to see whether anyone from the château had come to meet her. As she held her little suitcase with her ‘post' hidden within, she could sense the nearby group of German soldiers observing her. She stood quietly where the bus had left her and tried to look relaxed and naive as she soaked up the warm sun. She had put through a call to the château from Orthez that morning to let them know she was coming, but still no one arrived. She took refuge in a nearby café and sat with a tisane for a while until at last an old man approached her and asked in a strong Basque accent, ‘Are you expected at the château?' Not waiting for an answer, he continued, ‘I am Monsieur Flandé.'