The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (36 page)

Once both men had been found, Lezzard was handed into the care of a young medical officer. He would be out of action for seven weeks. A congenial liability, he cursed his injury for keeping him away from the gaming in Monte Carlo that would be picking up, he said, once ‘this invasion business’ was over.
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Fielding was brought to a safe house, the home of the local grocer, Monsieur Turrel, who had placed his property at the disposal of the resistance since the start of the war at huge risk to both himself and his family: the penalty for harbouring a British agent was summary execution. And yet, ‘Monsieur Turrel, fat and jovial in a waistcoat three sizes too small for him, looked as carefree and contented as an actor in a documentary film’, Fielding thought, as he gratefully accepted a glass of wine while Turrel’s wife went to wake Francis and Christine.
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‘She and “Roger” were an imposing pair’, Fielding remembered.
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Knowing Francis’s reputation as a heavyweight field agent, Fielding was somewhat surprised to see him bound into the room like ‘a smiling young giant’, with a ‘coltish appearance’.
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It was not long, though, before he realized that Francis’s affability masked great determination, and that he was a natural leader for whom ‘resistance was tantamount to a new religion’.
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Fielding was more immediately impressed with Christine, though, whose reputation had also preceded her, and whose ‘heroic attributes’ he fancied he divined at once beneath her ‘nervous gestures and breathless manner of speech’.
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Despite Christine’s usual modest camouflage of an austere blouse and skirt, Fielding was also quick to divine her ‘glamorous figure’, and decided that her ‘short, careless-combed dark hair and the complete absence of make-up on her delicately featured face, gave her the appearance of an athletic art-student’.
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Christine had learnt to dress so as not to attract attention. ‘It’s enough to pin on a flower’, she once told a friend, ‘for someone to be able to say: “The woman with the flower”.’ And yet Fielding, like so many, thought she ‘was so pretty that she could attract attention just by dint of that’.
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After breakfast the three of them spent the day in the Alpine pastures collecting the heavy containers and packages of supplies that had been dropped with the men that morning. As Francis briefed Fielding about the development and present state of the resistance movement in the region, to Fielding’s mounting embarrassment, and Christine’s amusement, it soon became evident that there was no obvious task for him to undertake, and Francis could only politely suggest he join a tour of his circuit the next day.

That evening, Christine left for the Italian frontier to organize the defection of the Polish unit at the Larche garrison. Once Fielding and Lezzard’s containers had been collected and distributed she saw no point in hanging around. The men also moved on, but only to enjoy an excellent dinner and a comfortable night with Albert, the Jockey circuit’s wireless operator, stationed at a house a few kilometres from the village. The following morning they were collected by Claude Renoir, grandson of the Impressionist artist, in his specially licensed Red Cross car. After picking up the injured French commandant, Christian Sorensen, code-name ‘Chasuble’, who had also trained at Massingham, they set off to meet the local resistance leaders. All the officers had fake identities, ration cards and other false personal papers, and if stopped they were to say that they did not know one another and were simply hitching a lift in one of the few cars on the roads.

It was an idyllic journey and Fielding had to keep reminding himself that he was not on holiday as they toured the dusty villages. Escaping the July sun he sipped wine under plane trees outside cafés while Francis conferred with the local leaders and boasted about the imminent birth of his second child in England. Realizing that he was carrying a suspiciously large amount of money, Fielding doled some out to Francis and Sorensen. His sole concern now was his uncomfortable ‘baggy Charlie Chaplin trousers’, which he had had to borrow from Monsieur Turrel since they had been unable to find the container with his own clothes and personal equipment.
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At about noon the next day the four men heard an air-raid siren as they were approaching the large garrison town of Digne on the return leg of their tour. Knowing that the Wehrmacht tended to man additional roadblocks during a raid, they arranged to meet Renoir at the other side of the town before taking cover with the rest of the local population. With the all-clear they made their way along the busy streets, mingling with the crowds emerging from the shelters, until they met Renoir as agreed. But just a few hundred yards round the next corner they found the road barricaded by soldiers with a sub-machine gun trained on the bridge across the river that they were due to cross. Already sighted, they could not turn back.

Francis was not overly concerned. The soldiers were some of the more than one million ‘non-Aryans’ – Armenians, Georgians, Mongols, Bosnians, and other men from the Caucasus – that the Nazis had reluctantly enlisted after suffering huge losses on the Russian front in 1942, and who now formed the Oriental Legion Against Communism of the Wehrmacht. None of them seemed to speak either German or French. They ordered Francis and the others out of the car, but after a cursory glance at the proffered identity cards, labour permits and ration coupons, they waved them on.
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Renoir was just letting go of the clutch when a second car arrived, and Francis breathed ‘Gestapo’.

Francis had often dismissed the Wehrmacht rank and file in France as ‘extremely incapable’.
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Officers who could be spared to preserve order in the French countryside were never going to be among the most able of the German ranks, and he had noticed that many were chiefly out for their own financial gain – each arrest meriting ‘prize money’.
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Once, at Avignon station, when some officers were spending rather too long studying his papers, Francis had bitten his lip and spat out some blood on to the platform ‘My papers were returned very quickly and I was sent on my way’, he later laughed.
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Indeed there were numerous stories of Nazi incompetence, some more reliable than others, but the occasion that really tickled Francis was when he and a circuit member were stopped for fifteen minutes by specially trained SS troops. An American bomber had been shot down nearby, the soldiers told them, and they were on the lookout for the crew. Francis’s car was comically overloaded, and one of the soldiers now leaned in to poke at the back seat with his bayonet. ‘You don’t think we’ve sewn the bomber crew into our seats do you?’ Francis’s friend had joked. Within minutes they were on their way, the soldiers having failed to notice that the boot was in fact ‘so full of arms and explosives that it was weighing down the whole back of the vehicle’.
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With this in mind, Francis now remained pretty cool. He later claimed that he had never been able to ‘identify fear’ within himself, and in any case took the hugely practical approach that ‘usually it’s an advantage not to be moved by anticipation, by something that
might
happen’.
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Fielding, however, had not spoken French for several years, even though it was his mother tongue, and was not confident of his ability to bluff the
milicien
collaborator and trained interrogator who now descended from the car. In fact the Gestapo man was not French, but Belgian, and very precise. Horribly aware of an uncontrollable tremor in his right leg, Fielding handed over his wallet again, but was unable to explain why his Algiers-forged work permit, as a clerk at the electricity works in Nîmes, had not been stamped for the current month. As he was escorted to the Gestapo car, the soldier next to the driver turned and covered him with his machine-pistol. Fielding now felt his fear ‘take the form of abject loneliness’, and he realized to his shame that he was almost consciously longing for his companions to be arrested with him so that he would not have to face whatever was to come entirely alone.
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Francis, Sorensen and Renoir appeared completely unconcerned as they showed their documents and emptied their pockets, Francis ‘with an expression of surprised amusement on his face’, Sorensen ‘with a look of contempt’.
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But the
milicien
was diligent, and noticed that, despite the three passengers’ claim that they did not know one another, the banknotes in their wallets were all from the same series. Two minutes later Francis and Sorensen had joined Fielding, leaving Renoir, whose papers were in order and who had not taken a share of the money, to drive back alone and report their arrest.

The three men were taken to Digne prison, ‘a dreary barracks of a place’ according to Francis, who was finding plenty to fuel his contempt for the Nazis.
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Having stood for some time facing the courtyard wall with their hands above their heads, they were pushed into a stinking basement cell with four dirty bunks, one already taken, and a small barred window high in the stone wall, with a bucket of excrement and stale urine beneath it. Their cellmate had a heavy German accent, and Francis, insulted by the clumsiness of this attempt to flush them out with a ‘
mouchard
’, or stool pigeon, simply suggested that they try to sleep instead of discussing their situation. After twenty-four hours with no food or water, and – for Francis – as bad if not worse, no cigarettes, they were woken by the metal door scraping open and orders to move.

Their next stop was the elegant Villa Marie-Louise on the outskirts of Digne – Gestapo HQ, and notorious as the place where resistants were taken to be tortured. Here their photographs were taken before they were locked into a first-floor room with another ‘inmate’. Some hours later the door was flung open with ‘intentional violence’ to reveal the man who had arrested them, ‘Herr Max … standing on the threshold with a theatrically menacing attitude’. He was ‘a perfect young Nazi’, according to Fielding. ‘Blue eyes, fair hair, fresh skin, breeches and jackboots: not a single essential feature was missing from this typical example of Stormtrooper.’
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In contrast, their interrogator, ‘with his grey hair, dark suit and almost benign expression … looked rather like a provincial bank-manager’.
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Francis soon had him down as ‘not a very bright chap … his questions were stupid, not sharp at all’.
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First he, then Sorensen, and finally Fielding were interrogated by this violent but inept individual, who hoped to loosen their tongues by punching them in the face and kidneys.

When they found themselves finally alone in their cell, Fielding still shaking, they discovered that all three had ‘confessed’ to smuggling contraband, a story helped by Fielding’s stash of hundreds of the cigarettes that had been dropped with him. The Gestapo had no idea that Francis was British, let alone the notorious ‘Roger’, the major resistance leader in the region, for whom a generous reward was offered. ‘They were badly informed, no doubt about that’, he would later recall. However, he was also aware that they could still be caught out by a call to any of their non-existent employers, and they decided to attempt an escape that evening.
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The plan was to throttle their room-mate if he returned, break open the shutters and jump from the window – hoping that at least one of them would evade the guard dogs and get away. But before they could act they were moved back to a large cell in the central prison and knew, without being told, that this was the death cell. ‘They simply decided that … it was better to execute us, and get rid of us’, Francis realized. Even though no definite evidence existed, ‘we were to be shot as spies … That was determined.’
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‘I kept thinking of the poison tablet sewn into the lapel of the suit I should have been wearing’, Fielding later confessed, ‘and wondering at what stage of the proceedings I would have nerved myself to swallow it.’
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Francis did not carry a cyanide pill. He had somewhat recklessly lost the one he was issued with, and had never asked to replace it. As with capital punishment, he was opposed to suicide on principle.

All three men knew that the Allies should now have landed on the Riviera, and that Digne, so near the coast, might be liberated within days. They also appreciated that this meant they were more likely to be shot quickly, perhaps after being tortured to find out what they knew about the invasion plans. Fielding particularly resented the prospect of dying under a false identity, and began to envy the American prisoners in the cell opposite, with their ID tags round their necks. But Francis resolutely refused to think about such things. ‘Hours away from execution,’ he later recalled rather prosaically, ‘all I felt was – what a pity.’
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By the time that Christine had arrived back at base, Francis, Fielding and Sorensen had all been condemned to death. She spent the next few days at Monsieur Turrel’s house with John Roper, who had just arrived from Briançon, desperately trying to persuade members of the local resistance to form a small commando group and raid the garrison. Christine offered to lead them, and Roper tried to round up what gold coins and other bribes he could find, but the French commandant reluctantly decided that the risk was too great. It would probably have meant the death of the prisoners anyway, there was neither time nor transport, and, besides, the network was fully focused on preparations for the landings.

Christine was distraught, but never so distracted that she forgot her
raison d’être
in France. As soon as she arrived back at Seyne she had sent messages to the ten new agents dropped during Francis’s absence to help subvert the remaining foreign troops within the German army. At a remote chalet the next afternoon she announced that following Roger’s arrest she had taken over his work, and had arranged for a lorry to take the latest Jedburgh team to Gilbert Galletti’s base at Bramousse, with their heavy kit to follow the next day. She then waited while the equipment was loaded, briefed the guide and the driver and, in view of recent events, passed on details of her key contacts to the new mission’s leader in case she herself should be arrested. Christine was a little curter than usual, the new agents reporting that she was clearly working under great difficulties and had had very little sleep and yet, they stressed, ‘it is impossible to speak too highly of Pauline’s conduct at this time’.
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