Sample chapters from 'Lauragais'These sample chapters come from one of my favourite sections of 'Lauragais': the German Occupation.
Join me as we retrace the progress of the Resistance in its battles with the Germans, and listen while the owners of the Château de Garrevaques recount how the retreating Germans tried to blow up their home in 1944. You can find more sample chapters on the Amazon website for your country of residence and, of course, you can buy the whole book for a complete experience! |
PART IX – A DEADLY OCCUPATION
Chapter 48 – At Home in the Château
It is two o’clock in the morning and we are celebrating Claude’s seventieth birthday. We are in Le Salon des Ancêtres where portraits of his wife’s family hang on the walls. The air is filled with disco music from – appropriately enough – the seventies, and the parquet creaks under dozens of pairs of dancing feet. I keep half an eye on the dangerously gyrating limbs, but mostly my attention strays to an enormous mirror on the wall, not out of narcissism, but because I keep thinking of the portrait of Hitler that once hung in its place and watched over the men of the eleventh panzer division while they ate their meals in this room. In the mirror I see a forest of raised arms, and momentarily I imagine they are raised in Nazi salutes. Of course I know they are semaphoring the letters Y-M-C-A.
For a moment these celebrations strike me as anachronistic and incongruous, but they also remind me that history in this part of the world is not locked away inside a glass cabinet in the bowels of a dead museum. It is alive through the people and their homes, and my hostess Marie-Christine is the seventeenth generation of the same family to reside in the Château de Garrevaques. Her grandchildren are running around somewhere too.
The music fades and the dancers lower their weary arms. Their respite is brief, and one ever-popular, eternally-irritating song is followed by another tune from the days of glitterballs and feverish Saturday nights. I escape through giant French windows onto the terrace for some air and a look at the grounds. A few hours ago we stood here in the evening sunlight and drank champagne. Now I lean on the balustrade with a glass of red, and from behind me, light spills out through the open doors across the terrace, down the steps and into the park, far enough to reveal the ancient oak tree planted at a time when Columbus was still learning to sail.
Beyond the giant oak, the park is filled with long shadows from an even longer past. The Château de Garrevaques has had a troubled history: first established by Jourdain de Roquefort’s descendants as a defensive home in dangerous times; besieged during the Wars of Religion; destroyed during the Revolution; rebuilt in the nineteenth century with the comforts of central heating and running water; requisitioned during the second world war; and finally, steered towards tourism at the end of the twentieth century.
I am partying in a place that epitomises the history of the Lauragais.
I turn away from the park and look up at one of the towers. Above its dark slate roof the sky is luminescent with stars, and I offer up a prayer of thanks to Jules the gardener.
At the time of the Albigensian Crusade, the Roqueforts were the most powerful family in my part of the Lauragais. From the Castrum de Roquefort and the Château de Montgey, they dominated or owned most of the territory around them. In 1470, one of Jourdain’s descendants built a new château between these two centres of family power. Garrevaques lies on the plain, four kilometres from Montgey and around ten from the Montagne Noire.
Many years ago, I caught my first glimpse of the Château de Garrevaques towards the end of a long bike ride on a hot dusty day. I crossed a bridge over the Sor and something caught my eye through the trees. I propped my bicycle against a wall and peered through wrought iron gates. Although my view was partly obscured by bushes, I could see pink bricks, dark grey roof tiles, and tall windows flanked by bright white shutters. By repeatedly adjusting my position, I managed to piece these fragments together into the shape of an elegantly symmetrical façade. The central body of the château was flanked by two octagonal towers each crowned by a pointed roof, and a decorative outline of creamy stucco marked the intersection between slate and brick. Balustraded ramps led up from the foot of each tower to meet on a wide central terrace in front of three lofty pairs of French windows. Below the terrace, three glazed arches each the size of a double garage door illuminated what I guessed would be the kitchens and store rooms in the sous-sol or basement.
The park was peaceful and there was no sign of human activity. I gave free rein to my imagination, and I populated the terrace with distinguished guests gathered for a birthday party or a wedding. Of course they were drinking champagne, and when the moon came up, the countess or her daughter would play Debussy on the piano.
Riding a road bike on a hot day is fine as long as you keep moving, but without the artificial wind of my forward motion my body began to glow like a furnace. My jersey clung to my flesh and I remembered that men in sweaty cycle clothing acquire an odour which others may find unpleasant. This château was no place for me. I belonged with the unwashed rabble outside the gates of Versailles.
My eyebrows failed to cope with the sweat running down from under my helmet. My eyes stung from the salt, and I turned away and retrieved my bicycle. I pedalled down an avenue lined with plane trees beside the railings of the park. At the far end was a bridge over an abandoned moat, and a little further away I saw a sign: ‘Le Pavillon du Château. Hôtel, Spa & Restaurant’, but the château itself appeared to be private. I paused and leaned on my handlebars and tried to guess what it was like inside, but this time my imagination ran as dry as the moat. This was more than a dozen years before I started writing this book, and although I had paid a fee to visit many a tourist château, I had never entered one which was someone’s home. I shook my head and continued on my way, but I couldn’t stop my mind trying to conjure up images of life inside the Château de Garrevaques.
I have visited dozens of countries and I am ashamed how little I know of them. I have photographed their historical highlights, tracked their wildlife and climbed their mountains, but you cannot even begin to know a place unless you know its people. Of course I have met local inhabitants during the course of my travels, but mainly those involved in the tourist industry, and I would not judge New York by its taxi drivers or London by the baristas working in its cafés. This is one of the reasons I was attracted by the idea of settling in France, of staying somewhere long enough to get under its skin and discover what it is really like.
Now for another opinion: it is almost impossible to know a people and their country unless you live there, permanently. And how can you get to know anyone unless you speak their language? When I first moved to the Lauragais, my conversational French was a work in progress and I was still attuning my ear to the accent of the south-west, but when I met an old lady at a picnic, I was competent enough to understand a good half of what she told me. Ours was a rambling conversation to which I contributed little apart from my ears. I listened carefully in between mouthfuls – hers as well as my own – and it gradually dawned on me that Madame Marguerite-Andrée Barande lived in a château which had been in her family for more than four centuries. It was in a village called Garrevaques.
‘Garrevaques?’ I repeated, and I remembered how I had spied on her home through the bushes like a hot and bothered Peeping Tom. Madame Barande ignored my interruption and I tried to keep up.
The original Château de Garrevaques built by the Roquefort family was a true castle, and its towers, defensive walls and ditches were designed to protect its owners and the population of the village in times of conflict. During the Wars of Religion the lord of the château was Catholic, and his castle’s defences were tested to breaking point. Since my picnic with Madame Barande, I have learned a lot more about that period from contemporary sources, and I shall rely on the memoirs of Monsieur Faurin rather than my own hazy recollections to explain how everyone inside her château came to be killed.
It was May 1580 and the Protestants were trying to cut off the supply routes to Sorèze. After they had captured Lastouzeilles on 20 May, they marched a couple of kilometres down the road and laid siege to the next Catholic château on their list. They had a particular grudge against Antoine de Vesins, lord of Garrevaques: they accused him of mutilating a pastor who was returning to Puylaurens after a service during what was officially a time of peace. The poor pastor made it home alive but without his ears, and presumably short of blood.
At nine in the morning the Protestants started their bombardment, using the inevitable cannons of Puylaurens. They soon made a breach in the walls and rushed inside where they killed ten soldiers, twenty peasants and four priests. To their chagrin, the ear-lopping lord was absent, so they marched off to attack other Catholic forts nearby. Eighteen months later the Château de Garrevaques was ransacked by brigands, and when the Wars of Religion finally drew to a close, one of Madame Barande’s ancestors became its lord. The château has remained in the hands of the Gineste family ever since (Madame Barande’s grandfather was Count Félix de Gineste, but he and his wife produced only daughters so the family name and title disappeared).
The next catastrophe arrived two centuries later: the Revolution reached the Lauragais in 1790 and the Château de Garrevaques was burned to the ground. Reconstruction began a decade later, and the new building incorporated two of the original towers and a stone staircase which had survived the fire.
Madame Barande talked on and on, and paused occasionally to take mouthfuls of a foil-wrapped sandwich which looked surprisingly English. I lost the thread of her story long before we had reached the twenty-first century and the end of our lunch.
This picnic was part of a visit organised by a cultural association I had recently joined. Madame Barande had been a member for decades, and a few months later she invited us to tea. I immediately added my name to the list because I hoped her story would make more sense on a second hearing, and since the picnic I had read somewhere that the Germans tried to blow her up in 1944.
I arrived at Garrevaques on a grey November afternoon, this time by car, and I parked under the plane trees. Their branches were silent and bare, but I was buzzing with excitement. Today I had permission to cross the dried up moat and walk across the park to Madame Barande’s front door and step right inside.
A few minutes later our group was seated in a semicircle around our hostess. She presided regally over the assembly from a red and gold brocaded chair in the centre of a room which she told us was called Le Salon Rouge. She repeated her account of the early history of the château, and I half-listened and allowed my eyes to roam. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling, filled with leather-bound tomes; the piano in the corner was fitted with brass candlesticks to light the pianist’s passage across the keys; either side of the French windows, gold curtains with a red motif shone in the bright light of a crystal chandelier whose candles had long since been replaced by electric light bulbs.
‘This building was ultra-modern for its day,’ said Madame Barande, and I realised she had reached the start of the nineteenth century and the reconstruction of the château after the Revolution. ‘There was a boiler in the sous-sol which provided hot water and hot air central heating. Look!’ She tapped the floor with her foot. ‘You can see the air grilles in the parquet. And the whole château was exquisitely decorated, particularly this room where we have twelve panels of woodblock printed wallpaper in the style “grisaille de Zuber”. It is rare for the full set of panels to have survived.’
I was familiar with the word grisaille from watching the weather forecast. It was perfect to describe the gloomy November sky above the trees of the park, and even under the bright electric lights of the chandelier the wallpaper lived up to its name. I could make out classical scenes in shades of grey, but I was hoping for something more colourful than monochrome wallpaper, however historically significant it might be.
‘Let’s talk about alcohol,’ she said, and I paid attention again. ‘I imagine you will all have heard of phylloxera?’
Everyone nodded. These were the tiny sap-sucking insects that destroyed most of Europe’s vineyards in the second half of the nineteenth century, accidentally brought over from the Americas by careless British botanists.
‘Not only was it a catastrophe for the wine growers, but in those days there were three liqueur producers in Revel. The most famous is still made to this day: Get 27. All three were based on eau de vie which was mainly distilled from grapes, so the death of the vines threatened the future of Revel’s liqueur industry. My great-grandfather, Count Henri de Gineste, spotted an opportunity. He planted sugar beet on the farms around the château and built a distillery in the pavilion where we now have the hotel.’
Before Count Henri, sugar beet was relatively unknown in the Lauragais, and using it to produce alcohol was an innovation. By the standards of its day, the distillery was a modern factory with modern production techniques, and it produced industrial quantities of alcohol. From an annual harvest of 800 tonnes of sugar beet, Count Henri produced 72,000 litres of eau de vie. The liqueur producers of Revel sent their horse-drawn carts to collect the spirit from an enormous vat beside the château.
‘The drivers were often tempted to sample the product, and more than one ended up in the ditch on the return journey. No doubt they swore to the boss that they hadn’t touched a drop and their mishap was due to the fumes they had inhaled while the eau de vie was being transferred from the vat to their containers.’
Madame Barande paused, and thirty people in the room laughed politely and shuffled in their seats. The room was warming up and I sensed her story was too.
‘Now we come to the story of my own life and what happened when the château was occupied by the Germans in the second world war. But first, I must tell you about our gardener, Jules Gasc.’
Why? I wondered. I had already heard enough about vegetables. I wanted Madame Barande to tell us about the Germans.
‘Jules had fought in the Great War and he had been injured in the head by a shell splinter. He was our gardener and he drove my father’s car, the first motor car in the village. His wife Sidonie was our cook, and Jules saved the château.’
Chapter 49 – Resistance is Not Useless
The first three years of the second world war left the Lauragais relatively untouched. After the defeat of 1940 it found itself in Vichy France, the so-called zone libre governed by Marshal Pétain under the watchful eyes of the Germans. This situation changed dramatically in the space of a few days towards the end of 1942. On 8 November, American and British forces invaded France’s North African colonies, governed by the Vichy regime. On 10 November, Admiral Darlan signed a peace deal with the Allies and the fighting stopped almost immediately. As soon as Hitler learned of Darlan’s surrender, he ordered his troops to occupy Vichy France. They crossed the demarcation line on 11 November, and the first troops arrived in Castres, Toulouse and many other towns the following day. All of France was now under direct German control.
To start with, the occupiers were met with a mixture of feigned indifference, bitterness and open hostility, but little violence. Most people simply got on with their lives as best they could. Roger Jullia was a child at the time, and he and his sister lived at Saint-Ferréol with their mother. His father had been a prisoner-of-war since 1940. Roger remembers that during the early days of the occupation, the only Germans he saw were the physically wounded and mentally scarred. Most of them were survivors of the Eastern Front, and several hundred were lodged in the college and hospital of Revel, and in vacant holiday homes around the lake of Saint-Ferréol. Roger’s mother washed the commandant’s laundry, and the commandant’s orderly brought her chocolates. Roger and his sister spent a lot of time with the soldiers during the day because they gave them bread, and down on the tiny beach below the Hôtel du Lac some of the Germans taught his sister to swim, but Roger was too scared of the water. For him, the greatest excitement came from the six planes that used to fly up the valley below the dam and skim the surface of the lake making waves and throwing up spray.
Life was far less relaxed in cities such as Toulouse with its spies and informants, and the dreaded Gestapo headquarters. Small Resistance groups began to form, and at first they mainly concerned themselves with anti-German propaganda. Their activities evolved into more active resistance when the occupiers stepped up their demands for forced labour. Most of the two million French prisoners-of-war captured in 1940 had already been deported to Germany. Men such as Roger Jullia’s father first worked on farms and later in munitions factories, but the German economy was still short of labour. In May 1942 they recruited 250,000 French volunteers to join the prisoners-of-war. In January 1943, they demanded a further 250,000 workers, but by now volunteers were thin on the ground, and to meet this target the French authorities created an organisation called the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), obligatory national service. Those called up faced three unwelcome choices: take the train to Germany; face up to five years in prison and a hefty fine; or go into hiding.
In March 1943 there were violent protests by families in Mazamet, a town huddled against the northern slopes of the Montagne Noire, when the train carrying 116 unwilling workers was about to leave. Similar events occurred in Albi and many other towns. Before long, a growing proportion of those called up chose the third option: some sheltered with relatives in remote parts of the countryside; others hid in the mountains and worked with the foresters; a few joined the Resistance. By June 1943 the prefect of the Tarn estimated that between 400 and 800 young men were hiding in the forests of the Montagne Noire.
Over the next few months the French authorities made increasing efforts to track down these fugitives, and in February 1944 the Germans launched their own operation in the Montagne Noire. They made several arrests in Dourgne and Arfons, and in Durfort they arrested and deported thirteen people including the mayor and the schoolteacher.
On 20 April 1944, a meeting took place in Castres between seven leaders of the local Resistance groups, and a new organisation was born: the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire (CFMN). One of its founders was Roger Mompezat, a forty-five year old accountant from Toulouse who had been involved in the Resistance from its earliest days in 1940. He became the commandant of the CFMN, and for the next six months he kept a journal which provides much of my information about the activities of the Resistance in my neighbourhood.
Towards the end of May the various groups that would make up the CFMN converged on the Montagne Noire, initially around its highest point, the Pic de Nore. In the beginning they numbered perhaps 200 men, but within a week they were inundated with volunteers because, on 6 June 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy, and two days later the rumour circulated that the Germans were about to intern all able-bodied Frenchmen, every single one of them. The ranks of the CFMN swelled to around 800 and they turned away hundreds more because there was a limit to how many men they could train, equip and feed in the mountains.
Two weeks later the CFMN moved west and settled into three main camps on the edge of the mountain around Arfons. This was an ideal place from which to disrupt enemy communications and movements. To the north ran the Castres-Mazamet-Béziers road; to the south lay the ancient route connecting Toulouse to the Mediterranean; at the foot of the western slopes was Revel and the Lauragais. It was less than twenty kilometres from the CFMN camps to any of these points, and the mountainous terrain would give those with local knowledge a great advantage over their enemies when it came to setting an ambush or making an escape. These were some of the same considerations that had attracted one of les Grandes Compagnies to occupy the Castrum de Roquefort six centuries earlier.
Enthused by the Allied landings in the north and excited by talk of an imminent invasion in Provence, Mompezat and his men stepped up their activity in a bid to inflict as much damage as possible on their enemy.
At around the same time, the mayor of Garrevaques received a telegram. The German army was commandeering the château, and the mayor was instructed to evacuate all the inhabitants but none of the furniture. The German troops would move into their new quarters the next morning. The young Marguerite-Andrée was about to move house.
‘At that time, my mother, my sister and I were alone in the château with a small staff,’ resumed our hostess in Le Salon Rouge. ‘I was seventeen, and my father, Dr Lochon, was working on the Côte d’Azur helping refugees and the Resistance. In those days, all the neighbouring farms belonged to us and we called on the farmers and the villagers to help us move our personal possessions. We loaded everything onto their carts and drove the short distance down the road to the Château de Gandels.
‘The Germans gave us strict orders not to come back to our old home, so none of us knew much about life in the château after we had left. Jules carried on living next door, and he told us there were twenty or thirty soldiers stationed here, but he had no idea what they did or where they went. Most of them slept in tents in the park, but we were more worried about the ones inside.’
More recently I have come across oral and documented memories of other villagers. The troops at Garrevaques belonged to the eleventh panzer division, a unit that had fought for two-and-a-half years on the Eastern Front and was nearly wiped out in early 1944 at the Battle of the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. The demoralised survivors were sent to south-west France and the division was rebuilt, mainly with reserve troops, and those stationed at Garrevaques included several Poles who had been conscripted into the German army. During their stay, some of the officers fell into the habit of visiting Monsieur Guiraud’s boulangerie to listen in secret to the BBC from London, but their presence was not without military purpose. They were in the Lauragais to control the local population, and before long something would have to be done about the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire because being the occupier was turning into a deadly occupation.
If you take the mountain road from either Dourgne or Sorèze, you will find yourself on a twisty nine-kilometre climb which will set any cyclist’s heart racing. The two roads meet at the top and then the tarmac descends a couple of kilometres into the village of Arfons where the walls of the houses are protected from the harsh winter weather by slates the size of tombstones. The main CFMN camps lay in a triangle between Arfons, Fontbruno seven kilometres to the north-east, and La Galaube six kilometres to the south-east. The last of these locations lies a few paces from the spot where the Rigole de la Montagne draws its water from the Alzeau. These are the same forests through which Pierre-Paul Riquet tramped with his surveyors and navvies, and these are the roads where many a German soldier met his end.
I too am a frequent traveller through this area, on foot or by bicycle. Even today there are few dwellings, minimal agriculture and virtually no traffic. I rarely meet a soul, except during the hunting season, and that reminds me of an encounter I had one autumn morning during a lonely bicycle ride along the narrow lane between Arfons and La Galaube. I rounded a corner and began to speed down the gentle slope of a long straight. A man stepped into the road ahead of me and waved a hand to slow me down. He was dressed in military fatigues and he held a rifle. Irrational perhaps, but my stomach tightened and I felt a moment of sympathy for the German soldiers who travelled these same roads. I applied my brakes and spotted more armed men lying in the ditch. Reassuringly all their guns were pointing away from me and into the forest.
‘We’re waiting for a wild boar.’ The man’s voice was low. ‘Be careful and please keep quiet.’
‘D’accord!’ I pedalled off and wondered how much noise he expected a lone cyclist to make. Or maybe he thought I would have cried out in alarm if I had spotted his motionless squad at the last minute. But what about the boar? The poor animal wouldn’t even suspect the hunters were there until the first bullet ripped into its flesh. This was an ambush, and it was going to be as one-sided as many of those sprung by the CFMN.
The men in the mountains rarely had to carry out their missions on foot or by bicycle. They acquired a fleet of vehicles – either stolen, requisitioned or brought in by new recruits – and they included motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, and even a dustcart. This turned them into a highly-mobile fighting force.
The day after the D-Day landings, the CFMN drove south and blew up the railway line from Toulouse to Carcassonne. On 9 June they killed six German soldiers in an ambush near Saissac. On 12 June they killed another fifty during a two-hour battle near Les Martyrs on the road from Carcassonne to Mazamet. On quieter days, they waited in ambush but no enemy vehicles came into sight. The CFMN suffered no casualties in these early actions, but despite capturing a few munitions they urgently needed more armaments to sustain their activities. Eventually their requests were answered, and at 13.30 on 24 June they heard the following message repeated five times on the BBC from London: ‘The hermits are no longer alone.’ Presumably this meant nothing to the German officers huddled around the radio in Monsieur Guiraud’s boulangerie at Garrevaques, but Roger Mompezat and his men understood it. At 21.00, the same message was repeated seven times and Mompezat’s men exploded with joy: seven planeloads of equipment were on their way!
That night, several tonnes of weapons were dropped by parachute onto the Pic de Nore, and two more planes came back the following night. The delivery included heavy machine guns, submachine guns, rifles, grenades and explosives. Mompezat’s only regret was that there were no mortars.
On 29 June, the CFMN used its new arsenal to attack a group of thirty German soldiers who were collecting firewood near Saissac. After a deadly exchange of fire, the Germans escaped, leaving behind eight dead, three prisoners, four lorries and numerous weapons. The CFMN mourned two dead and tended the minor wounds of two others.
The next day, Mompezat received an unexpected visitor: Monsieur Jalabert ran the gold mine at Salsigne, hidden in the mountains above Lastours, and some of his miners wanted to join the Resistance. Over the next few days, Mompezat welcomed eighty new recruits who had been born in North Africa. The Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire was now a truly cosmopolitan outfit: around half of them were locals from what is now Occitanie, but other contingents came from Alsace, Paris (mainly fugitive Jews), Georgia, Poland, Spain, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Chapter 50 – Among the Maquisards
Before my French was good enough for me to delve into the wealth of literature written by people who experienced the German occupation first-hand, my image of the French Resistance was largely formed by the television series ‘Allo! Allo!’: most of its members were young women dressed in berets and long beige coats, or were men disguised as onion sellers; idiotic British airmen hid in the wardrobe or hen coop; and the essential link with London was provided by a clandestine radio set hidden under an invalid’s bed. In contrast, the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire was a paramilitary, men-only group trained and run on military lines. Mompezat believed putting his men in uniform would instil discipline, so in early May he had sent a vehicle to Toulouse to steal a lorryload of uniforms. After that, his men were always dressed as soldiers during their operations, never in disguise. Admittedly most of them wore berets, but never beige coats. As for the other comedy clichés, the stories of Richardson and Pagels are perhaps stranger than the televised fiction.
At two-thirty in the morning on D-Day, Roger Pagels took off in his P51 Mustang from Suffolk, England and headed south with the rest of his squadron. Their mission was to patrol central France and intercept any German aircraft that tried to fly north and attack the Allies on the landing beaches of Normandy. At five-forty-five Pagels felt something hit his fuselage. His plane still responded to the controls, but the engine temperature began to climb and Pagels doubted it would get him home. Instead, he headed south, intending to land as close as possible to Spain and escape over the Pyrenees with the help of the Resistance before the Germans could catch him. With the first light of day he saw that the terrain below his damaged plane was too mountainous to risk a crash-landing, so he jumped.[1]
That same morning, Robert Jalbaud was working in his onion field near Villemagne on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire. He saw a parachute in the sky and rushed towards the landing spot to help the man dangling beneath it. The onion farmer took the fallen pilot into the mountains and hid him in a foresters’ cabin while he made contact with the Resistance, and three days later Pagels took up residence with the CFMN near Fontbruno in a village called Laprade. He was desperate to talk about his adventure, but no one spoke any English, and the only French Pagels knew was the word for ‘door’ because that was where he was born: La Porte, Indiana.
Richardson was the man with the radio. His real name was Henri Marcel Despaigne, but he preferred ‘Harry’ to ‘Henri’, and he was even fonder of his code name, Major Richardson. He was born in London to a French father and Belgian mother, and his fluent French soon earned him a posting to the Special Operations Executive. He had been working with the Resistance since June 1942, and his was a nomadic existence: he and his radio never stayed in the same place for long because the Germans were trying to track him down using ground-based and airborne detection equipment. They had also put a price on his head. Richardson had been a part of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire since its inception, and he was itching to meet Pagels, but it was not until 13 June that he came to Laprade. Mompezat relates their first encounter.
‘This meeting in a French forest between an English soldier and an American soldier could not have been more moving. Pagels turned pale, then bright red, and he started to talk without stopping and ignoring any interruptions, as if he were in a hurry to get out all the words which since several days he had been unable to speak. As he spoke one could sense an almost physical relief take hold of him; his face, full of nervous tension at first, gradually relaxed, and his eyes filled with joy and his mouth broke into a smile.’[2]
From that day on, Roger Pagels dropped his idea of escaping to Spain and instead became an active member of the CFMN. Unlike his fictional counterparts, there was nothing comical about his stay in France. Over the next three months he would be bombed by the Luftwaffe and participate in some of the most violent combats with the enemy.
France’s national holiday is 14 July, Bastille Day, and it had been erased from the official calendar since the capitulation of 1940. For Roger Mompezat, it represented, ‘the victory of the young French Republic over the European coalition; it was the desire of man to break free from servitude’,[3] and for him this symbolism seemed as pertinent in 1944 as it had been in 1789. After his string of successful attacks and the recent airdrop, Mompezat vowed that 14 July 1944 would not pass unnoticed. He planned to boost the morale of his men, show his compatriots that France still had an army despite the occupation, and demonstrate to the Germans just how powerful the Resistance had become. The best place for this display of strength, he decided, was Revel.
On the morning of 14 July, Mompezat and a handful of men occupied the police stations, and outside the mairie they flew the tricolore from the flagpole by the war memorial. The comings and goings of these men in unfamiliar uniforms alerted the townsfolk that something unexpected was about to happen. By the time a convoy of twenty lorries rolled into town, an excited crowd had gathered. Four hundred soldiers formed into columns behind their standards and marched through the streets towards the mairie, and the message was passed from house to house: ‘The French soldiers are here!’ The garden of the mairie was too small to hold everyone and the spectators spilled out into the neighbouring streets. Mompezat recalls that at the end of the ceremony everyone sang ‘La Marseillaise’, and the women cried and the men were overcome with emotion.
The crowd followed the men of the Resistance back towards their vehicles and begged them to stay for lunch, and Mompezat remembers how, ‘the bronzed faces of our volunteers bore the traces of the kisses they had received from their young admirers’.[4] He also observed that Pagels was one of the favourite targets for those lipstick lips. But it was too dangerous to linger, too dangerous for the Resistance and too dangerous for the people of Revel. The uniformed men climbed back into their lorries and trundled up the road to Dourgne where they repeated the ceremony. After that, they returned to their camps in the Montagne Noire and at two o’clock they tucked into a celebratory lunch of French fries, chicken and rabbit. The day had been so well-planned that on 12 July a team had made the 150-kilometre round trip to Gaillac, running the risk of being stopped by German patrols, for the sole purpose of purchasing a generous supply of sparkling wine. At the end of the meal, the members of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire toasted their success in style and enjoyed a show put on by some of their more artistic members.
Chapter 51 – Dawn Attack
Despite their military triumphs and the symbolic statement of Bastille Day, a sense of unease had taken hold of the CFMN commanders. Instead of small cells of Resistance fighters who could carry out guerrilla actions and then melt away into the countryside, they had created an army with permanent camps and an unquenchable appetite for weapons, ammunition, food, drink and tobacco. There was enough wild game in the mountains to provide target practice and meat, but other staples such as potatoes, flour and oil were all rationed and therefore had to be raided from shops and depots on the plain. But not everything was stolen. The sparkling wine for the 14 July dinner was paid for in cash, and so were purchases of many other non-rationed goods, and the men received a small monthly salary which covered modest personal expenditure. Most of this money came from London, and the rest from bank loans granted to the CFMN thanks to the professional contacts of Mompezat and a wealthy CFMN member. Larger items were acquired in other ways. For example, on 8 June the CFMN requisitioned two cows in Saint-Amans-Soult. One – belonging to the farmer – was paid for with a numbered IOU which was reimbursed by the new government after the Liberation; the other – belonging to the boss of the local pro-Nazi militia – was taken with the help of a quick burst from a submachine gun. Petrol was another problem: it was essential to their operations, but the only way to acquire sufficient quantities was to capture or steal it.
An even more serious drawback of such a large group was its vulnerability to attack, particularly from the air. On several occasions Mompezat’s men had watched reconnaissance planes flying over the Montagne Noire, and there was no doubt the Germans knew the precise location of all the Resistance camps. The enemy would not continue to ignore the CFMN indefinitely, not after the deadly ambushes of recent weeks and the provocation of Bastille Day. And indeed, alarming messages began to arrive the day after the parade in Revel. How did they reach Mompezat? With the help of a girl on a bicycle.
Some young women did more than merely kiss the heroes of the Resistance. Some, such as Adrienne Albert, played an active and dangerous role. Her family ran the Café Albert in Laprade where Mompezat, Richardson, Pagels and other CFMN leaders used to congregate in the kitchen to enjoy grandma’s cooking and listen out for messages on the radio from London. It was perhaps inevitable that one day they would ask her to be a messenger. She accepted, and from then on she made a weekly journey, using combinations of bicycle, lorry and bus, to Castres and Carcassonne where she delivered letters to CFMN agents and brought back their messages.
On 15 July, one of these intelligence reports warned of impending airstrikes. Two days later, another agent announced the aerial bombardment would be supported by a powerful infantry contingent and armoured vehicles. On 18 July, agents in Toulouse and Carcassonne repeated the same warnings.
But nothing happened, so on the night of 19 July Mompezat reduced the state of alert and allowed his men a full night’s rest. He authorised them to sleep inside their buildings, but to remain fully dressed and ready for action.
I have seen a photograph of the camp at La Galaube taken before the events of 20 July. It shows a cluster of wooden buildings with windows, doors and chimneys standing in a large clearing in the forest. Neither this camp nor the others had been built by the Resistance. In June 1940, the French authorities found themselves with around 100,000 twenty-year-olds on their hands who had been overlooked by the terms of the armistice. These young men had been called up, but defeat had come before they could be incorporated into the army. The minister of war decided to divide them into groups of 2,000 under the control of the military and send them off into the depths of the countryside to live a life that has been described as a cross between a soldier and a Boy Scout. Their first job was to build their own accommodation – usually from wood – and then they were tasked with carrying out public works such as road building and forestry. The CFMN took over several of these chantiers de jeunesse at the start of June 1944, and they made frequent raids on the organisation’s depot at Labruguière, a few kilometres down the mountain from Fontbruno, to steal everything from shoes and bedding to surgical instruments and medical supplies.
These ready-made camps in the mountains came with one main disadvantage: they made easy targets from the air. Mompezat’s journal entry for the 20 July starts like this: ’06.45. It was scarcely daylight. The men were rubbing their eyes before getting up. A noise in the sky grew louder and then became deafening. Eight aircraft, six Junkers 88s and two reconnaissance planes, flew over La Galaube. In the tight valleys of the Montagne Noire the roar of their engines was terrifying. The planes were at around 200 metres and there was no doubt about their identity or the intentions.’[5]
Pagels was at La Galaube, the first camp to be hit, and throughout the morning the German aircraft bombed and strafed the three largest camps. La Galaube lost most of its vehicles, and four men were killed, but the camps at Riedgé and Plo del May were emptied of personnel and most of their equipment before the first bombs fell.
Between missions, the Junkers returned to their base to load more bombs. The CFMN fired back as best they could, and Mompezat claims his men either shot down or disabled three of the bombers because they emitted smoke and flames and only three aircraft returned for the last raid.
By this time, German ground troops were destroying what was left of La Galaube. The CFMN launched a counter-attack but they were facing around a thousand heavily-armed men supported by armoured cars and half-tracks, so they withdrew. Towards midday, Mompezat received reports that eighty German vehicles were rolling along the road from La Galaube to Arfons, the same road where I met my hunters. Towards midday, they were on the outskirts of Les Escudiès where they were held up for several hours in a fierce firefight until the CFMN fighters began to run out of ammunition.
Around four o’clock, two civilians demanded to speak to Mompezat in his command post near Laprade. They had spotted fifty more German lorries approaching from the south near Fontiers-Cabardès. Mompezat estimated he was now facing 1,500 German troops who had already blocked his escape routes to the west, south and east. Many of his own men were by now exhausted and the CFMN was at risk of being surrounded and wiped out.
In his journal, Mompezat observes, ‘The Corps Franc had been given a precise mission to carry out guerrilla action against the enemy, but not an order to hold a fixed position at all costs’.[6] He ordered a retreat to the Pic de Nore before it was too late, while he still had most of his vehicles and material, while he still had nearly all his fighters. They had fought the enemy for twelve hours and had lost only four men, all in the first air raid on La Galaube. By Mompezat’s calculation, as well as the three downed bombers, his enemies had lost two half-tracks, two armoured cars and around a hundred men.
The first CFMN vehicles left Fontbruno at five-thirty and headed down the northern slopes of the Montagne Noire to Aiguefonde, and then followed the twisty road that skirts around the foot of the mountain. When they reached Mazamet, cheering crowds lined the streets and shouted, ‘Long live the maquis! Long live the Montagne Noire!’ Mompezat had feared he would find the route blocked by the town’s German garrison, but inexplicably there was no sign of them. The convoy headed up the valley towards Pradelles-Cabardès and found temporary safety near the summit of the Montagne Noire.
Over the next few days, Mompezat and his lieutenants gathered intelligence and considered what to do next. The news was alarming in the extreme: German tanks had arrived in Labruguière on the north side of the mountain, more tanks were gathering in Castres, large numbers of troops had been seen around Montolieu in the south, and the Germans had established a new headquarters at Saint-Ferréol. The enemy was encircling the Montagne Noire in preparation for a decisive assault aimed at destroying the CFMN, and even if the Resistance fought off the armed attacks, they would quickly run out of food now they were surrounded. Finding three meals a day for 800 active young soldiers had been a logistical challenge at the best of times.
Mompezat still hesitated. One option was to take refuge in the Monts de Lacaune to the north, but they were so remote it would be impractical to carry out any further attacks on the enemy. On 24 July, representatives arrived from several nearby villages and begged the CFMN not to stay in the Montagne Noire. They feared brutal reprisals against their populations, and this argument proved decisive.
Reluctantly the CFMN decided to disperse. Mompezat went back to Toulouse, Pagels and Richardson hid in a shelter they had built in the forest above Mazamet, and the fortunate few who had nothing to fear from the Gestapo went home. The rest of the men split into groups of fifty or sixty and scattered themselves around the Tarn and the neighbouring departments.
The Germans maintained a heavy presence in and around the Montagne Noire and sought to track down the fugitives. During the next three weeks, a dozen members of the CFMN were killed – three times the death toll suffered on 20 July. Others were arrested and some were interrogated in a temporary prison in Revel.
On 12 August Mompezat called his commanders together for a meeting in the Café Albert at Laprade. Their short period of hiding was over and the CFMN was about to reform. In three days’ time, events elsewhere would force the Germans to evacuate all of south-west France.
Chapter 52 – Homecoming
On 19 August, members of an unidentified Resistance group machine-gunned a German vehicle and killed two of its occupants on the road between Garrevaques and Revel. The wreck was towed back to the Château de Garrevaques, and Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska were buried in the park. The villagers feared reprisals, but by now the Germans had more pressing business to occupy them. On 15 August the Allies had begun landing 50,000 troops on the coast near Marseilles. Over the next few days, all German units in south-west France received orders to march east and re-group in the Rhône Valley. The occupiers were about to leave Garrevaques, and now is the time to rejoin Madame Barande in Le Salon Rouge for the story of her homecoming.
‘Late in the afternoon [on 19 August], Jules was wandering around in the grounds between his home and the château when a German soldier stopped him. “Tomorrow, there will no longer be anyone living in the château.” That was all the man said. During the evening, Jules mulled over the soldier’s words. Did it mean the Germans were about to depart? Would madame and her children be able to return to their home?
‘He was woken at five in the morning by the noise of engines. Voices shouted orders he could not understand. He tiptoed outside and watched them drive out of the grounds. He realised that the previous day the Germans had parked their vehicles in the dried-up moat. Safely hidden from Allied aircraft by the trees of the park, they had loaded all their equipment ready for a dawn departure. As soon as the noise of the engines faded away, Jules crept into the château to check everyone had gone and to see what damage had been done. He started his inspection downstairs in our kitchen, which the Germans had transformed into a workshop. He opened the door to the big pantry cupboard, which I shall show you later, and recoiled in horror. He knew about explosives from the Great War and he could see that the mine in the cupboard was set to explode in less than an hour!
‘He ran out of the building and sprinted towards the gendarmerie. Minutes later he was back with the gendarmes. There were now forty-seven minutes left on the timer. While one of the men started to defuse the bomb in the kitchen, the others searched the rest of the château. They discovered a dozen more mines, all wired together, enough to bring down the whole building.’
Madame Barande paused for effect, and I had time to wonder if this was what they meant by working against the clock. It also crossed my mind that the departing Germans may have mined the château to avenge the two comrades they had just buried in its park.
‘Shortly before six they had disarmed all the explosives. Jules had saved the château.’
There were gasps from the audience and someone started to clap. Madame Barande graciously acknowledged the applause and then she continued, because this was neither the end of her château nor the end of her story.
‘What else did we find when we returned to our home? Luckily for us, the damage was not too severe. The soldiers had stolen all the mattresses and bedding, apparently to provide extra protection inside their armoured vehicles. They had carried our billiard table down from the first floor and left it under the old oak tree in the park. All our crockery lay smashed in a heap on the floor. And they had left us two copies of “Mein Kampf”, which I still have. By this stage of the war perhaps even they had lost faith in the words of their Führer.
‘As well as turning our kitchen into a workshop, the soldiers had swapped things around on this floor as well. The room where we are sitting became their office. Through the doors behind me is my dining room, but they turned that into their kitchen. And if you look through the doors to my right, you will see portraits of my ancestors hanging on the walls. We call it Le Salon des Ancêtres and the Germans used it as their dining room. They had taken down the valuable old mirror that hangs above the fireplace and replaced it with a picture of Adolf Hitler, but my family portraits remained on the walls to keep an eye on him.’
Madame Barande rose from her seat and we followed suit. We inspected the grey wallpaper of Le Salon Rouge, and the portraits in Le Salon des Ancêtres, and then she led us down the worn steps of a spiral staircase in one of the towers. She opened the door to a walk-in cupboard in her kitchen, and I peered inside at the place where Jules had discovered the first mine.
Two days after the Allied landings of 15 August, the CFMN reassembled, not in the Montagne Noire but further east in the department of the Hérault near the village of Agoudet. A few kilometres to their south lay the town of Saint-Pons-de-Thomières where five roads meet in the valley of the Jaur.
On 20 August, the commander of the 4,000-strong garrison at Castres was persuaded to surrender without firing a shot[7], but most of the other German troops in south-west France obeyed orders and headed east to combat the Allies in Provence. Mompezat was sure some of these retreating columns would pass through Saint-Pons.
For the Germans, it was a chaotic and perilous retreat. Allied aircraft controlled the skies, and every Resistance group along the way was itching to attack them. Even former collaborators were out to save their skins by claiming a German scalp or two. Columns ranging from a couple of hundred to six thousand men criss-crossed the countryside, often seeking minor roads through the forests and mountains where they would be less visible from the air and where they had more chance of finding cover if they were attacked.
The column that passed closest to Garrevaques came from Montauban. Caught by a storm on 21 August, the troops stopped for the night at Verfeil, and the next day they marched south-east across the Lauragais through Lanta and Caraman, and by early afternoon they reached the village of Le Vaux on the Revel-Toulouse road. In the words of a report by the gendarmes of Saint-Félix-Lauragais, ‘a German column of around 3,000 men…composed principally of Georgians and Mongols traversed part of the commune of Le Vaux causing panic along its route’.
Compared with the exactions committed elsewhere by other columns, Le Vaux got off lightly: a young man was shot dead while he was tending his cows, and a doctor was wounded by several bullets. When the soldiers had finished pillaging the houses and farms, they continued on their way towards Carcassonne with the help of twenty stolen bicycles, and two horses and a pair of mules complete with their carts. The column was destroyed somewhere on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire.
Did the troops from Garrevaques join this column, or had they already tagged onto one of the many other columns traversing the countryside a few kilometres further north? All I can say for certain is this: at least one of the soldiers stationed at the Château de Garrevaques made it home safely, as Madame Barande would discover a quarter of a century later.
The first column to cross the CFMN’s field of fire came from an unexpected direction: Narbonne, which lies to the south of Saint-Pons. Late in the afternoon of 20 July, this column was ambushed by Mompezat and his men, and early the next morning the survivors surrendered. Later the same day the CFMN attacked another column; this one came driving along the road from Mazamet and it was much stronger. Mompezat’s men withdrew at dusk, and six thousand enemy troops pillaged Saint-Pons during the night and continued their journey east the next day.
On 22 August, a column of 400 men with artillery marched through the CFMN’s old haunts in the Montagne Noire and descended into Mazamet. After a two hour fight with local Resistance fighters, they surrendered.
The next day, the Corps France de la Montagne Noire fought its last and bloodiest battle in the mountains to the north of Saint-Pons. An anti-aircraft battalion with nearly 2,000 men and 150 vehicles had left Toulouse on 20 August. They were attacked on the Pont Vieux in the centre of Albi, but the column forced a passage, joined up with troops from elsewhere and continued into the mountains. Twenty kilometres after Lacaune they were brought to a standstill by a broken bridge in a hamlet called Pont de la Mouline. While they tried to repair the crossing, Mompezat and 120 of his men launched an attack. The fighting lasted for several hours, but eventually the CFMN was forced to retreat carrying nine dead. Mompezat was among the fifteen injured; Pagels was unharmed. After that, they lay in wait for another week but no more columns appeared.
By now, all the towns in south-west France had been liberated, and in the middle of September the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire broke up. Some of its younger members joined the French Forces of the Interior and fought in Alsace and Germany until the end of the conflict. Pagels and Richardson caught a plane back to England and carried on with the war. Before long, Roger Mompezat began transforming his journal into a book. It was published in 1945 and the proceeds helped fund the construction of a memorial at Fontbruno, built by eight German prisoners-of-war.
This monument lost in the forest provided me with my first introduction to the story of the Resistance in my part of France. Thirteen members of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire lie buried in an underground crypt, and a fourteenth tomb awaits Louis Fourcade who was last seen alive in a temporary prison in Revel on 6 August 1944. Above the fallen fighters stands a concrete signpost as tall as Riquet’s obelisk at Naurouze, and its fingers direct the traveller towards the places where the men of the Resistance fought their battles. At the base of the obelisk, a bronze plaque shows the bust of Mompezat, and twelve slabs of granite record the names of all the CFMN fighters killed in action. Mompezat himself is buried in Terre-Cabade, the giant cemetery where I lost myself when I was researching the Battle of Toulouse.
If one day you choose to wander along the roads and paths between Arfons, Fontbruno, La Galaube and Laprade, you may not be as lucky as Jean-Paul Calvet who, in the 1980s, discovered three parachute containers which Mompezat and his men had failed to locate, but you will find numerous other memorials to the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire. Granite steles mark the locations of the main camps, and plaques like the one on a corner near Les Escudiès commemorate specific feats of arms. In the tiny cemetery of Laprade, three CFMN leaders lie next to one another: Henri Sévenet, who was decapitated by shrapnel in the bombing raid on La Galaube, and two others who died more peacefully after the war but requested to be buried with their fallen comrade. In the village itself, what was once the Café Albert is easy to identify: ‘Chez Leon Hotel Café Tabacs’ is marked in white lettering above the front door, but today neither the Alberts nor the Leons are in business and the building is a private home.
Should you be tempted to hunt down these memorials, I shall add a word of warning for those of a nervous disposition: armed men patrol these forests looking for wild boar between the second Sunday of September and the end of January.
During the years that followed my visit to the Château de Garrevaques and its terrifying kitchen cupboard, my wife and I became acquainted with three more generations of Madame Barande’s family. We met at mutual friends, or we dined or listened to concerts in Le Pavillon du Château, the beautifully restored building next door which had once housed servants, horses, carriages, Count Henri’s distillery and, of course, Jules and Sidonie at the time of the German occupation. On these occasions, the stories of the château were always on my mind. My eyes would be drawn across the dried-up moat and I would spot fragments of a tower or a turret peeping through the trees like pieces in an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
By the time I begin work on this chapter, I find that my memories of Madame Barande’s tales are similarly fragmented. Sadly, she died in 2013, and when I try to picture her sitting in Le Salon Rouge I see only her eyes. They jog my memory about something else she told me, something that happened long after the war. I telephone her daughter, Marie-Christine, and ask if I can pay her a visit to refresh my memory.
A few days later, I make myself comfortable once again in Le Salon Rouge. Marie-Christine disappears to make tea, and her husband, Claude, shows me bits and pieces he has found over the years in the moat: ammunition clips, parts of a submachine gun and other less identifiable military objects. Outside, the November evening is dark; inside, the lighting is subdued. Our voices sound unnaturally loud and they break an eerie silence.
Marie-Christine returns with a teapot. She pours me a cup and we run through the story of the château from the beginning and I note down a few points I had forgotten or misunderstood. By the time I start my second cup of tea, we arrive at the point where Jules and the gendarmes have finished defusing the mines.
Life returned to normal surprisingly quickly once the Germans had left. The family returned to its ancestral home, the young Marguerite-Andrée Lochon became Madame Barande, and before long Marie-Christine was born.
‘When I was old enough to run around in the grounds of the château my grandmother used to tell me never to play in one particular corner of the garden. A pair of iron crosses marked the graves of two German soldiers. When I was twelve or thirteen, the German army came and took them away.’
These, I realise, were the graves of Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska. Between 1958 and 1961, nearly 20,000 German soldiers were disinterred all across southern France and reburied together in the cemetery at Dagneux near Lyon. Most of them were killed after the Allied landings of August 1944.
‘Twenty-five years after the war, maman was offering bed-and-breakfast in the château. She also provided dinner, and one particular evening some of her guests were German. They were very polite, charming even, but there was one man who made her uncomfortable. They were all standing here in Le Salon Rouge enjoying an aperitif before dinner when this particular man started talking about Auvezines. “Isn’t that the village up the road where the Cathars massacred the crusaders?” He knew far too much and she began to suspect he had been here before. And then, when maman announced dinner he marched straight into Le Salon des Ancêtres where the portrait of Hitler had watched over the German troops while they took their meals. “That’s not my dining room,” said maman. The man laughed, but if he was one of the officers billeted here in the war, why didn’t he say so?
‘After dinner she telephoned me and I could tell she was uneasy. “Do you want me to come over?” I asked. “Yes, I would prefer it if you were here to do breakfast.” At that time I was living in Toulouse with Claude and our children, but I drove over right away and stayed the night. At breakfast, the gentleman asked me if I was the daughter. He was very polite. Later, he was standing on the front steps ready to leave and he addressed me again “Won’t we be seeing your mother this morning?” “No, she is resting; she is tired after last night.” He gazed far beyond the trees of the park. “Please will you tell her she still has the pretty blue eyes of her youth.” ’
I put down my tea and suppress a shiver. I remember with perfect clarity how Madame Barande had sat here in Le Salon Rouge and widened her eyes to show us that, even in her eighties, they still shone with a startling blue.
[1] Pagels knew his plan would work because three weeks before D-Day, another pilot from his squadron had returned safely to England in this way. It had taken him two months, slow by his standards, but Chuck Yeager had taken time out to teach the Resistance how to make bombs. Three years later he became the first man to break the sound barrier.
[2] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger. Le Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire Journal de Marche (Avril – Septembre 1944). 4th edition. Castres: Les Anciens du Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire, 1994 (pages 52-53).
[3] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 89).
[4] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 93).
[5] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 96).
[6] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 118).
[7] A large proportion of the ‘German’ troops occupying south-west France were prisoners-of-war who had been captured on the Eastern front. Nearly all the garrison of Castres came from areas such as the Caucasus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Turkestan. When they heard about the Allied landings in Provence, these men grew restless and the seventy German officers barely prevented a mutiny. Doubting his ability to control his men, the commandant was persuaded to surrender after a long night of negotiations with the Resistance.
Chapter 48 – At Home in the Château
It is two o’clock in the morning and we are celebrating Claude’s seventieth birthday. We are in Le Salon des Ancêtres where portraits of his wife’s family hang on the walls. The air is filled with disco music from – appropriately enough – the seventies, and the parquet creaks under dozens of pairs of dancing feet. I keep half an eye on the dangerously gyrating limbs, but mostly my attention strays to an enormous mirror on the wall, not out of narcissism, but because I keep thinking of the portrait of Hitler that once hung in its place and watched over the men of the eleventh panzer division while they ate their meals in this room. In the mirror I see a forest of raised arms, and momentarily I imagine they are raised in Nazi salutes. Of course I know they are semaphoring the letters Y-M-C-A.
For a moment these celebrations strike me as anachronistic and incongruous, but they also remind me that history in this part of the world is not locked away inside a glass cabinet in the bowels of a dead museum. It is alive through the people and their homes, and my hostess Marie-Christine is the seventeenth generation of the same family to reside in the Château de Garrevaques. Her grandchildren are running around somewhere too.
The music fades and the dancers lower their weary arms. Their respite is brief, and one ever-popular, eternally-irritating song is followed by another tune from the days of glitterballs and feverish Saturday nights. I escape through giant French windows onto the terrace for some air and a look at the grounds. A few hours ago we stood here in the evening sunlight and drank champagne. Now I lean on the balustrade with a glass of red, and from behind me, light spills out through the open doors across the terrace, down the steps and into the park, far enough to reveal the ancient oak tree planted at a time when Columbus was still learning to sail.
Beyond the giant oak, the park is filled with long shadows from an even longer past. The Château de Garrevaques has had a troubled history: first established by Jourdain de Roquefort’s descendants as a defensive home in dangerous times; besieged during the Wars of Religion; destroyed during the Revolution; rebuilt in the nineteenth century with the comforts of central heating and running water; requisitioned during the second world war; and finally, steered towards tourism at the end of the twentieth century.
I am partying in a place that epitomises the history of the Lauragais.
I turn away from the park and look up at one of the towers. Above its dark slate roof the sky is luminescent with stars, and I offer up a prayer of thanks to Jules the gardener.
At the time of the Albigensian Crusade, the Roqueforts were the most powerful family in my part of the Lauragais. From the Castrum de Roquefort and the Château de Montgey, they dominated or owned most of the territory around them. In 1470, one of Jourdain’s descendants built a new château between these two centres of family power. Garrevaques lies on the plain, four kilometres from Montgey and around ten from the Montagne Noire.
Many years ago, I caught my first glimpse of the Château de Garrevaques towards the end of a long bike ride on a hot dusty day. I crossed a bridge over the Sor and something caught my eye through the trees. I propped my bicycle against a wall and peered through wrought iron gates. Although my view was partly obscured by bushes, I could see pink bricks, dark grey roof tiles, and tall windows flanked by bright white shutters. By repeatedly adjusting my position, I managed to piece these fragments together into the shape of an elegantly symmetrical façade. The central body of the château was flanked by two octagonal towers each crowned by a pointed roof, and a decorative outline of creamy stucco marked the intersection between slate and brick. Balustraded ramps led up from the foot of each tower to meet on a wide central terrace in front of three lofty pairs of French windows. Below the terrace, three glazed arches each the size of a double garage door illuminated what I guessed would be the kitchens and store rooms in the sous-sol or basement.
The park was peaceful and there was no sign of human activity. I gave free rein to my imagination, and I populated the terrace with distinguished guests gathered for a birthday party or a wedding. Of course they were drinking champagne, and when the moon came up, the countess or her daughter would play Debussy on the piano.
Riding a road bike on a hot day is fine as long as you keep moving, but without the artificial wind of my forward motion my body began to glow like a furnace. My jersey clung to my flesh and I remembered that men in sweaty cycle clothing acquire an odour which others may find unpleasant. This château was no place for me. I belonged with the unwashed rabble outside the gates of Versailles.
My eyebrows failed to cope with the sweat running down from under my helmet. My eyes stung from the salt, and I turned away and retrieved my bicycle. I pedalled down an avenue lined with plane trees beside the railings of the park. At the far end was a bridge over an abandoned moat, and a little further away I saw a sign: ‘Le Pavillon du Château. Hôtel, Spa & Restaurant’, but the château itself appeared to be private. I paused and leaned on my handlebars and tried to guess what it was like inside, but this time my imagination ran as dry as the moat. This was more than a dozen years before I started writing this book, and although I had paid a fee to visit many a tourist château, I had never entered one which was someone’s home. I shook my head and continued on my way, but I couldn’t stop my mind trying to conjure up images of life inside the Château de Garrevaques.
I have visited dozens of countries and I am ashamed how little I know of them. I have photographed their historical highlights, tracked their wildlife and climbed their mountains, but you cannot even begin to know a place unless you know its people. Of course I have met local inhabitants during the course of my travels, but mainly those involved in the tourist industry, and I would not judge New York by its taxi drivers or London by the baristas working in its cafés. This is one of the reasons I was attracted by the idea of settling in France, of staying somewhere long enough to get under its skin and discover what it is really like.
Now for another opinion: it is almost impossible to know a people and their country unless you live there, permanently. And how can you get to know anyone unless you speak their language? When I first moved to the Lauragais, my conversational French was a work in progress and I was still attuning my ear to the accent of the south-west, but when I met an old lady at a picnic, I was competent enough to understand a good half of what she told me. Ours was a rambling conversation to which I contributed little apart from my ears. I listened carefully in between mouthfuls – hers as well as my own – and it gradually dawned on me that Madame Marguerite-Andrée Barande lived in a château which had been in her family for more than four centuries. It was in a village called Garrevaques.
‘Garrevaques?’ I repeated, and I remembered how I had spied on her home through the bushes like a hot and bothered Peeping Tom. Madame Barande ignored my interruption and I tried to keep up.
The original Château de Garrevaques built by the Roquefort family was a true castle, and its towers, defensive walls and ditches were designed to protect its owners and the population of the village in times of conflict. During the Wars of Religion the lord of the château was Catholic, and his castle’s defences were tested to breaking point. Since my picnic with Madame Barande, I have learned a lot more about that period from contemporary sources, and I shall rely on the memoirs of Monsieur Faurin rather than my own hazy recollections to explain how everyone inside her château came to be killed.
It was May 1580 and the Protestants were trying to cut off the supply routes to Sorèze. After they had captured Lastouzeilles on 20 May, they marched a couple of kilometres down the road and laid siege to the next Catholic château on their list. They had a particular grudge against Antoine de Vesins, lord of Garrevaques: they accused him of mutilating a pastor who was returning to Puylaurens after a service during what was officially a time of peace. The poor pastor made it home alive but without his ears, and presumably short of blood.
At nine in the morning the Protestants started their bombardment, using the inevitable cannons of Puylaurens. They soon made a breach in the walls and rushed inside where they killed ten soldiers, twenty peasants and four priests. To their chagrin, the ear-lopping lord was absent, so they marched off to attack other Catholic forts nearby. Eighteen months later the Château de Garrevaques was ransacked by brigands, and when the Wars of Religion finally drew to a close, one of Madame Barande’s ancestors became its lord. The château has remained in the hands of the Gineste family ever since (Madame Barande’s grandfather was Count Félix de Gineste, but he and his wife produced only daughters so the family name and title disappeared).
The next catastrophe arrived two centuries later: the Revolution reached the Lauragais in 1790 and the Château de Garrevaques was burned to the ground. Reconstruction began a decade later, and the new building incorporated two of the original towers and a stone staircase which had survived the fire.
Madame Barande talked on and on, and paused occasionally to take mouthfuls of a foil-wrapped sandwich which looked surprisingly English. I lost the thread of her story long before we had reached the twenty-first century and the end of our lunch.
This picnic was part of a visit organised by a cultural association I had recently joined. Madame Barande had been a member for decades, and a few months later she invited us to tea. I immediately added my name to the list because I hoped her story would make more sense on a second hearing, and since the picnic I had read somewhere that the Germans tried to blow her up in 1944.
I arrived at Garrevaques on a grey November afternoon, this time by car, and I parked under the plane trees. Their branches were silent and bare, but I was buzzing with excitement. Today I had permission to cross the dried up moat and walk across the park to Madame Barande’s front door and step right inside.
A few minutes later our group was seated in a semicircle around our hostess. She presided regally over the assembly from a red and gold brocaded chair in the centre of a room which she told us was called Le Salon Rouge. She repeated her account of the early history of the château, and I half-listened and allowed my eyes to roam. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling, filled with leather-bound tomes; the piano in the corner was fitted with brass candlesticks to light the pianist’s passage across the keys; either side of the French windows, gold curtains with a red motif shone in the bright light of a crystal chandelier whose candles had long since been replaced by electric light bulbs.
‘This building was ultra-modern for its day,’ said Madame Barande, and I realised she had reached the start of the nineteenth century and the reconstruction of the château after the Revolution. ‘There was a boiler in the sous-sol which provided hot water and hot air central heating. Look!’ She tapped the floor with her foot. ‘You can see the air grilles in the parquet. And the whole château was exquisitely decorated, particularly this room where we have twelve panels of woodblock printed wallpaper in the style “grisaille de Zuber”. It is rare for the full set of panels to have survived.’
I was familiar with the word grisaille from watching the weather forecast. It was perfect to describe the gloomy November sky above the trees of the park, and even under the bright electric lights of the chandelier the wallpaper lived up to its name. I could make out classical scenes in shades of grey, but I was hoping for something more colourful than monochrome wallpaper, however historically significant it might be.
‘Let’s talk about alcohol,’ she said, and I paid attention again. ‘I imagine you will all have heard of phylloxera?’
Everyone nodded. These were the tiny sap-sucking insects that destroyed most of Europe’s vineyards in the second half of the nineteenth century, accidentally brought over from the Americas by careless British botanists.
‘Not only was it a catastrophe for the wine growers, but in those days there were three liqueur producers in Revel. The most famous is still made to this day: Get 27. All three were based on eau de vie which was mainly distilled from grapes, so the death of the vines threatened the future of Revel’s liqueur industry. My great-grandfather, Count Henri de Gineste, spotted an opportunity. He planted sugar beet on the farms around the château and built a distillery in the pavilion where we now have the hotel.’
Before Count Henri, sugar beet was relatively unknown in the Lauragais, and using it to produce alcohol was an innovation. By the standards of its day, the distillery was a modern factory with modern production techniques, and it produced industrial quantities of alcohol. From an annual harvest of 800 tonnes of sugar beet, Count Henri produced 72,000 litres of eau de vie. The liqueur producers of Revel sent their horse-drawn carts to collect the spirit from an enormous vat beside the château.
‘The drivers were often tempted to sample the product, and more than one ended up in the ditch on the return journey. No doubt they swore to the boss that they hadn’t touched a drop and their mishap was due to the fumes they had inhaled while the eau de vie was being transferred from the vat to their containers.’
Madame Barande paused, and thirty people in the room laughed politely and shuffled in their seats. The room was warming up and I sensed her story was too.
‘Now we come to the story of my own life and what happened when the château was occupied by the Germans in the second world war. But first, I must tell you about our gardener, Jules Gasc.’
Why? I wondered. I had already heard enough about vegetables. I wanted Madame Barande to tell us about the Germans.
‘Jules had fought in the Great War and he had been injured in the head by a shell splinter. He was our gardener and he drove my father’s car, the first motor car in the village. His wife Sidonie was our cook, and Jules saved the château.’
Chapter 49 – Resistance is Not Useless
The first three years of the second world war left the Lauragais relatively untouched. After the defeat of 1940 it found itself in Vichy France, the so-called zone libre governed by Marshal Pétain under the watchful eyes of the Germans. This situation changed dramatically in the space of a few days towards the end of 1942. On 8 November, American and British forces invaded France’s North African colonies, governed by the Vichy regime. On 10 November, Admiral Darlan signed a peace deal with the Allies and the fighting stopped almost immediately. As soon as Hitler learned of Darlan’s surrender, he ordered his troops to occupy Vichy France. They crossed the demarcation line on 11 November, and the first troops arrived in Castres, Toulouse and many other towns the following day. All of France was now under direct German control.
To start with, the occupiers were met with a mixture of feigned indifference, bitterness and open hostility, but little violence. Most people simply got on with their lives as best they could. Roger Jullia was a child at the time, and he and his sister lived at Saint-Ferréol with their mother. His father had been a prisoner-of-war since 1940. Roger remembers that during the early days of the occupation, the only Germans he saw were the physically wounded and mentally scarred. Most of them were survivors of the Eastern Front, and several hundred were lodged in the college and hospital of Revel, and in vacant holiday homes around the lake of Saint-Ferréol. Roger’s mother washed the commandant’s laundry, and the commandant’s orderly brought her chocolates. Roger and his sister spent a lot of time with the soldiers during the day because they gave them bread, and down on the tiny beach below the Hôtel du Lac some of the Germans taught his sister to swim, but Roger was too scared of the water. For him, the greatest excitement came from the six planes that used to fly up the valley below the dam and skim the surface of the lake making waves and throwing up spray.
Life was far less relaxed in cities such as Toulouse with its spies and informants, and the dreaded Gestapo headquarters. Small Resistance groups began to form, and at first they mainly concerned themselves with anti-German propaganda. Their activities evolved into more active resistance when the occupiers stepped up their demands for forced labour. Most of the two million French prisoners-of-war captured in 1940 had already been deported to Germany. Men such as Roger Jullia’s father first worked on farms and later in munitions factories, but the German economy was still short of labour. In May 1942 they recruited 250,000 French volunteers to join the prisoners-of-war. In January 1943, they demanded a further 250,000 workers, but by now volunteers were thin on the ground, and to meet this target the French authorities created an organisation called the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), obligatory national service. Those called up faced three unwelcome choices: take the train to Germany; face up to five years in prison and a hefty fine; or go into hiding.
In March 1943 there were violent protests by families in Mazamet, a town huddled against the northern slopes of the Montagne Noire, when the train carrying 116 unwilling workers was about to leave. Similar events occurred in Albi and many other towns. Before long, a growing proportion of those called up chose the third option: some sheltered with relatives in remote parts of the countryside; others hid in the mountains and worked with the foresters; a few joined the Resistance. By June 1943 the prefect of the Tarn estimated that between 400 and 800 young men were hiding in the forests of the Montagne Noire.
Over the next few months the French authorities made increasing efforts to track down these fugitives, and in February 1944 the Germans launched their own operation in the Montagne Noire. They made several arrests in Dourgne and Arfons, and in Durfort they arrested and deported thirteen people including the mayor and the schoolteacher.
On 20 April 1944, a meeting took place in Castres between seven leaders of the local Resistance groups, and a new organisation was born: the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire (CFMN). One of its founders was Roger Mompezat, a forty-five year old accountant from Toulouse who had been involved in the Resistance from its earliest days in 1940. He became the commandant of the CFMN, and for the next six months he kept a journal which provides much of my information about the activities of the Resistance in my neighbourhood.
Towards the end of May the various groups that would make up the CFMN converged on the Montagne Noire, initially around its highest point, the Pic de Nore. In the beginning they numbered perhaps 200 men, but within a week they were inundated with volunteers because, on 6 June 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy, and two days later the rumour circulated that the Germans were about to intern all able-bodied Frenchmen, every single one of them. The ranks of the CFMN swelled to around 800 and they turned away hundreds more because there was a limit to how many men they could train, equip and feed in the mountains.
Two weeks later the CFMN moved west and settled into three main camps on the edge of the mountain around Arfons. This was an ideal place from which to disrupt enemy communications and movements. To the north ran the Castres-Mazamet-Béziers road; to the south lay the ancient route connecting Toulouse to the Mediterranean; at the foot of the western slopes was Revel and the Lauragais. It was less than twenty kilometres from the CFMN camps to any of these points, and the mountainous terrain would give those with local knowledge a great advantage over their enemies when it came to setting an ambush or making an escape. These were some of the same considerations that had attracted one of les Grandes Compagnies to occupy the Castrum de Roquefort six centuries earlier.
Enthused by the Allied landings in the north and excited by talk of an imminent invasion in Provence, Mompezat and his men stepped up their activity in a bid to inflict as much damage as possible on their enemy.
At around the same time, the mayor of Garrevaques received a telegram. The German army was commandeering the château, and the mayor was instructed to evacuate all the inhabitants but none of the furniture. The German troops would move into their new quarters the next morning. The young Marguerite-Andrée was about to move house.
‘At that time, my mother, my sister and I were alone in the château with a small staff,’ resumed our hostess in Le Salon Rouge. ‘I was seventeen, and my father, Dr Lochon, was working on the Côte d’Azur helping refugees and the Resistance. In those days, all the neighbouring farms belonged to us and we called on the farmers and the villagers to help us move our personal possessions. We loaded everything onto their carts and drove the short distance down the road to the Château de Gandels.
‘The Germans gave us strict orders not to come back to our old home, so none of us knew much about life in the château after we had left. Jules carried on living next door, and he told us there were twenty or thirty soldiers stationed here, but he had no idea what they did or where they went. Most of them slept in tents in the park, but we were more worried about the ones inside.’
More recently I have come across oral and documented memories of other villagers. The troops at Garrevaques belonged to the eleventh panzer division, a unit that had fought for two-and-a-half years on the Eastern Front and was nearly wiped out in early 1944 at the Battle of the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. The demoralised survivors were sent to south-west France and the division was rebuilt, mainly with reserve troops, and those stationed at Garrevaques included several Poles who had been conscripted into the German army. During their stay, some of the officers fell into the habit of visiting Monsieur Guiraud’s boulangerie to listen in secret to the BBC from London, but their presence was not without military purpose. They were in the Lauragais to control the local population, and before long something would have to be done about the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire because being the occupier was turning into a deadly occupation.
If you take the mountain road from either Dourgne or Sorèze, you will find yourself on a twisty nine-kilometre climb which will set any cyclist’s heart racing. The two roads meet at the top and then the tarmac descends a couple of kilometres into the village of Arfons where the walls of the houses are protected from the harsh winter weather by slates the size of tombstones. The main CFMN camps lay in a triangle between Arfons, Fontbruno seven kilometres to the north-east, and La Galaube six kilometres to the south-east. The last of these locations lies a few paces from the spot where the Rigole de la Montagne draws its water from the Alzeau. These are the same forests through which Pierre-Paul Riquet tramped with his surveyors and navvies, and these are the roads where many a German soldier met his end.
I too am a frequent traveller through this area, on foot or by bicycle. Even today there are few dwellings, minimal agriculture and virtually no traffic. I rarely meet a soul, except during the hunting season, and that reminds me of an encounter I had one autumn morning during a lonely bicycle ride along the narrow lane between Arfons and La Galaube. I rounded a corner and began to speed down the gentle slope of a long straight. A man stepped into the road ahead of me and waved a hand to slow me down. He was dressed in military fatigues and he held a rifle. Irrational perhaps, but my stomach tightened and I felt a moment of sympathy for the German soldiers who travelled these same roads. I applied my brakes and spotted more armed men lying in the ditch. Reassuringly all their guns were pointing away from me and into the forest.
‘We’re waiting for a wild boar.’ The man’s voice was low. ‘Be careful and please keep quiet.’
‘D’accord!’ I pedalled off and wondered how much noise he expected a lone cyclist to make. Or maybe he thought I would have cried out in alarm if I had spotted his motionless squad at the last minute. But what about the boar? The poor animal wouldn’t even suspect the hunters were there until the first bullet ripped into its flesh. This was an ambush, and it was going to be as one-sided as many of those sprung by the CFMN.
The men in the mountains rarely had to carry out their missions on foot or by bicycle. They acquired a fleet of vehicles – either stolen, requisitioned or brought in by new recruits – and they included motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, and even a dustcart. This turned them into a highly-mobile fighting force.
The day after the D-Day landings, the CFMN drove south and blew up the railway line from Toulouse to Carcassonne. On 9 June they killed six German soldiers in an ambush near Saissac. On 12 June they killed another fifty during a two-hour battle near Les Martyrs on the road from Carcassonne to Mazamet. On quieter days, they waited in ambush but no enemy vehicles came into sight. The CFMN suffered no casualties in these early actions, but despite capturing a few munitions they urgently needed more armaments to sustain their activities. Eventually their requests were answered, and at 13.30 on 24 June they heard the following message repeated five times on the BBC from London: ‘The hermits are no longer alone.’ Presumably this meant nothing to the German officers huddled around the radio in Monsieur Guiraud’s boulangerie at Garrevaques, but Roger Mompezat and his men understood it. At 21.00, the same message was repeated seven times and Mompezat’s men exploded with joy: seven planeloads of equipment were on their way!
That night, several tonnes of weapons were dropped by parachute onto the Pic de Nore, and two more planes came back the following night. The delivery included heavy machine guns, submachine guns, rifles, grenades and explosives. Mompezat’s only regret was that there were no mortars.
On 29 June, the CFMN used its new arsenal to attack a group of thirty German soldiers who were collecting firewood near Saissac. After a deadly exchange of fire, the Germans escaped, leaving behind eight dead, three prisoners, four lorries and numerous weapons. The CFMN mourned two dead and tended the minor wounds of two others.
The next day, Mompezat received an unexpected visitor: Monsieur Jalabert ran the gold mine at Salsigne, hidden in the mountains above Lastours, and some of his miners wanted to join the Resistance. Over the next few days, Mompezat welcomed eighty new recruits who had been born in North Africa. The Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire was now a truly cosmopolitan outfit: around half of them were locals from what is now Occitanie, but other contingents came from Alsace, Paris (mainly fugitive Jews), Georgia, Poland, Spain, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Chapter 50 – Among the Maquisards
Before my French was good enough for me to delve into the wealth of literature written by people who experienced the German occupation first-hand, my image of the French Resistance was largely formed by the television series ‘Allo! Allo!’: most of its members were young women dressed in berets and long beige coats, or were men disguised as onion sellers; idiotic British airmen hid in the wardrobe or hen coop; and the essential link with London was provided by a clandestine radio set hidden under an invalid’s bed. In contrast, the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire was a paramilitary, men-only group trained and run on military lines. Mompezat believed putting his men in uniform would instil discipline, so in early May he had sent a vehicle to Toulouse to steal a lorryload of uniforms. After that, his men were always dressed as soldiers during their operations, never in disguise. Admittedly most of them wore berets, but never beige coats. As for the other comedy clichés, the stories of Richardson and Pagels are perhaps stranger than the televised fiction.
At two-thirty in the morning on D-Day, Roger Pagels took off in his P51 Mustang from Suffolk, England and headed south with the rest of his squadron. Their mission was to patrol central France and intercept any German aircraft that tried to fly north and attack the Allies on the landing beaches of Normandy. At five-forty-five Pagels felt something hit his fuselage. His plane still responded to the controls, but the engine temperature began to climb and Pagels doubted it would get him home. Instead, he headed south, intending to land as close as possible to Spain and escape over the Pyrenees with the help of the Resistance before the Germans could catch him. With the first light of day he saw that the terrain below his damaged plane was too mountainous to risk a crash-landing, so he jumped.[1]
That same morning, Robert Jalbaud was working in his onion field near Villemagne on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire. He saw a parachute in the sky and rushed towards the landing spot to help the man dangling beneath it. The onion farmer took the fallen pilot into the mountains and hid him in a foresters’ cabin while he made contact with the Resistance, and three days later Pagels took up residence with the CFMN near Fontbruno in a village called Laprade. He was desperate to talk about his adventure, but no one spoke any English, and the only French Pagels knew was the word for ‘door’ because that was where he was born: La Porte, Indiana.
Richardson was the man with the radio. His real name was Henri Marcel Despaigne, but he preferred ‘Harry’ to ‘Henri’, and he was even fonder of his code name, Major Richardson. He was born in London to a French father and Belgian mother, and his fluent French soon earned him a posting to the Special Operations Executive. He had been working with the Resistance since June 1942, and his was a nomadic existence: he and his radio never stayed in the same place for long because the Germans were trying to track him down using ground-based and airborne detection equipment. They had also put a price on his head. Richardson had been a part of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire since its inception, and he was itching to meet Pagels, but it was not until 13 June that he came to Laprade. Mompezat relates their first encounter.
‘This meeting in a French forest between an English soldier and an American soldier could not have been more moving. Pagels turned pale, then bright red, and he started to talk without stopping and ignoring any interruptions, as if he were in a hurry to get out all the words which since several days he had been unable to speak. As he spoke one could sense an almost physical relief take hold of him; his face, full of nervous tension at first, gradually relaxed, and his eyes filled with joy and his mouth broke into a smile.’[2]
From that day on, Roger Pagels dropped his idea of escaping to Spain and instead became an active member of the CFMN. Unlike his fictional counterparts, there was nothing comical about his stay in France. Over the next three months he would be bombed by the Luftwaffe and participate in some of the most violent combats with the enemy.
France’s national holiday is 14 July, Bastille Day, and it had been erased from the official calendar since the capitulation of 1940. For Roger Mompezat, it represented, ‘the victory of the young French Republic over the European coalition; it was the desire of man to break free from servitude’,[3] and for him this symbolism seemed as pertinent in 1944 as it had been in 1789. After his string of successful attacks and the recent airdrop, Mompezat vowed that 14 July 1944 would not pass unnoticed. He planned to boost the morale of his men, show his compatriots that France still had an army despite the occupation, and demonstrate to the Germans just how powerful the Resistance had become. The best place for this display of strength, he decided, was Revel.
On the morning of 14 July, Mompezat and a handful of men occupied the police stations, and outside the mairie they flew the tricolore from the flagpole by the war memorial. The comings and goings of these men in unfamiliar uniforms alerted the townsfolk that something unexpected was about to happen. By the time a convoy of twenty lorries rolled into town, an excited crowd had gathered. Four hundred soldiers formed into columns behind their standards and marched through the streets towards the mairie, and the message was passed from house to house: ‘The French soldiers are here!’ The garden of the mairie was too small to hold everyone and the spectators spilled out into the neighbouring streets. Mompezat recalls that at the end of the ceremony everyone sang ‘La Marseillaise’, and the women cried and the men were overcome with emotion.
The crowd followed the men of the Resistance back towards their vehicles and begged them to stay for lunch, and Mompezat remembers how, ‘the bronzed faces of our volunteers bore the traces of the kisses they had received from their young admirers’.[4] He also observed that Pagels was one of the favourite targets for those lipstick lips. But it was too dangerous to linger, too dangerous for the Resistance and too dangerous for the people of Revel. The uniformed men climbed back into their lorries and trundled up the road to Dourgne where they repeated the ceremony. After that, they returned to their camps in the Montagne Noire and at two o’clock they tucked into a celebratory lunch of French fries, chicken and rabbit. The day had been so well-planned that on 12 July a team had made the 150-kilometre round trip to Gaillac, running the risk of being stopped by German patrols, for the sole purpose of purchasing a generous supply of sparkling wine. At the end of the meal, the members of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire toasted their success in style and enjoyed a show put on by some of their more artistic members.
Chapter 51 – Dawn Attack
Despite their military triumphs and the symbolic statement of Bastille Day, a sense of unease had taken hold of the CFMN commanders. Instead of small cells of Resistance fighters who could carry out guerrilla actions and then melt away into the countryside, they had created an army with permanent camps and an unquenchable appetite for weapons, ammunition, food, drink and tobacco. There was enough wild game in the mountains to provide target practice and meat, but other staples such as potatoes, flour and oil were all rationed and therefore had to be raided from shops and depots on the plain. But not everything was stolen. The sparkling wine for the 14 July dinner was paid for in cash, and so were purchases of many other non-rationed goods, and the men received a small monthly salary which covered modest personal expenditure. Most of this money came from London, and the rest from bank loans granted to the CFMN thanks to the professional contacts of Mompezat and a wealthy CFMN member. Larger items were acquired in other ways. For example, on 8 June the CFMN requisitioned two cows in Saint-Amans-Soult. One – belonging to the farmer – was paid for with a numbered IOU which was reimbursed by the new government after the Liberation; the other – belonging to the boss of the local pro-Nazi militia – was taken with the help of a quick burst from a submachine gun. Petrol was another problem: it was essential to their operations, but the only way to acquire sufficient quantities was to capture or steal it.
An even more serious drawback of such a large group was its vulnerability to attack, particularly from the air. On several occasions Mompezat’s men had watched reconnaissance planes flying over the Montagne Noire, and there was no doubt the Germans knew the precise location of all the Resistance camps. The enemy would not continue to ignore the CFMN indefinitely, not after the deadly ambushes of recent weeks and the provocation of Bastille Day. And indeed, alarming messages began to arrive the day after the parade in Revel. How did they reach Mompezat? With the help of a girl on a bicycle.
Some young women did more than merely kiss the heroes of the Resistance. Some, such as Adrienne Albert, played an active and dangerous role. Her family ran the Café Albert in Laprade where Mompezat, Richardson, Pagels and other CFMN leaders used to congregate in the kitchen to enjoy grandma’s cooking and listen out for messages on the radio from London. It was perhaps inevitable that one day they would ask her to be a messenger. She accepted, and from then on she made a weekly journey, using combinations of bicycle, lorry and bus, to Castres and Carcassonne where she delivered letters to CFMN agents and brought back their messages.
On 15 July, one of these intelligence reports warned of impending airstrikes. Two days later, another agent announced the aerial bombardment would be supported by a powerful infantry contingent and armoured vehicles. On 18 July, agents in Toulouse and Carcassonne repeated the same warnings.
But nothing happened, so on the night of 19 July Mompezat reduced the state of alert and allowed his men a full night’s rest. He authorised them to sleep inside their buildings, but to remain fully dressed and ready for action.
I have seen a photograph of the camp at La Galaube taken before the events of 20 July. It shows a cluster of wooden buildings with windows, doors and chimneys standing in a large clearing in the forest. Neither this camp nor the others had been built by the Resistance. In June 1940, the French authorities found themselves with around 100,000 twenty-year-olds on their hands who had been overlooked by the terms of the armistice. These young men had been called up, but defeat had come before they could be incorporated into the army. The minister of war decided to divide them into groups of 2,000 under the control of the military and send them off into the depths of the countryside to live a life that has been described as a cross between a soldier and a Boy Scout. Their first job was to build their own accommodation – usually from wood – and then they were tasked with carrying out public works such as road building and forestry. The CFMN took over several of these chantiers de jeunesse at the start of June 1944, and they made frequent raids on the organisation’s depot at Labruguière, a few kilometres down the mountain from Fontbruno, to steal everything from shoes and bedding to surgical instruments and medical supplies.
These ready-made camps in the mountains came with one main disadvantage: they made easy targets from the air. Mompezat’s journal entry for the 20 July starts like this: ’06.45. It was scarcely daylight. The men were rubbing their eyes before getting up. A noise in the sky grew louder and then became deafening. Eight aircraft, six Junkers 88s and two reconnaissance planes, flew over La Galaube. In the tight valleys of the Montagne Noire the roar of their engines was terrifying. The planes were at around 200 metres and there was no doubt about their identity or the intentions.’[5]
Pagels was at La Galaube, the first camp to be hit, and throughout the morning the German aircraft bombed and strafed the three largest camps. La Galaube lost most of its vehicles, and four men were killed, but the camps at Riedgé and Plo del May were emptied of personnel and most of their equipment before the first bombs fell.
Between missions, the Junkers returned to their base to load more bombs. The CFMN fired back as best they could, and Mompezat claims his men either shot down or disabled three of the bombers because they emitted smoke and flames and only three aircraft returned for the last raid.
By this time, German ground troops were destroying what was left of La Galaube. The CFMN launched a counter-attack but they were facing around a thousand heavily-armed men supported by armoured cars and half-tracks, so they withdrew. Towards midday, Mompezat received reports that eighty German vehicles were rolling along the road from La Galaube to Arfons, the same road where I met my hunters. Towards midday, they were on the outskirts of Les Escudiès where they were held up for several hours in a fierce firefight until the CFMN fighters began to run out of ammunition.
Around four o’clock, two civilians demanded to speak to Mompezat in his command post near Laprade. They had spotted fifty more German lorries approaching from the south near Fontiers-Cabardès. Mompezat estimated he was now facing 1,500 German troops who had already blocked his escape routes to the west, south and east. Many of his own men were by now exhausted and the CFMN was at risk of being surrounded and wiped out.
In his journal, Mompezat observes, ‘The Corps Franc had been given a precise mission to carry out guerrilla action against the enemy, but not an order to hold a fixed position at all costs’.[6] He ordered a retreat to the Pic de Nore before it was too late, while he still had most of his vehicles and material, while he still had nearly all his fighters. They had fought the enemy for twelve hours and had lost only four men, all in the first air raid on La Galaube. By Mompezat’s calculation, as well as the three downed bombers, his enemies had lost two half-tracks, two armoured cars and around a hundred men.
The first CFMN vehicles left Fontbruno at five-thirty and headed down the northern slopes of the Montagne Noire to Aiguefonde, and then followed the twisty road that skirts around the foot of the mountain. When they reached Mazamet, cheering crowds lined the streets and shouted, ‘Long live the maquis! Long live the Montagne Noire!’ Mompezat had feared he would find the route blocked by the town’s German garrison, but inexplicably there was no sign of them. The convoy headed up the valley towards Pradelles-Cabardès and found temporary safety near the summit of the Montagne Noire.
Over the next few days, Mompezat and his lieutenants gathered intelligence and considered what to do next. The news was alarming in the extreme: German tanks had arrived in Labruguière on the north side of the mountain, more tanks were gathering in Castres, large numbers of troops had been seen around Montolieu in the south, and the Germans had established a new headquarters at Saint-Ferréol. The enemy was encircling the Montagne Noire in preparation for a decisive assault aimed at destroying the CFMN, and even if the Resistance fought off the armed attacks, they would quickly run out of food now they were surrounded. Finding three meals a day for 800 active young soldiers had been a logistical challenge at the best of times.
Mompezat still hesitated. One option was to take refuge in the Monts de Lacaune to the north, but they were so remote it would be impractical to carry out any further attacks on the enemy. On 24 July, representatives arrived from several nearby villages and begged the CFMN not to stay in the Montagne Noire. They feared brutal reprisals against their populations, and this argument proved decisive.
Reluctantly the CFMN decided to disperse. Mompezat went back to Toulouse, Pagels and Richardson hid in a shelter they had built in the forest above Mazamet, and the fortunate few who had nothing to fear from the Gestapo went home. The rest of the men split into groups of fifty or sixty and scattered themselves around the Tarn and the neighbouring departments.
The Germans maintained a heavy presence in and around the Montagne Noire and sought to track down the fugitives. During the next three weeks, a dozen members of the CFMN were killed – three times the death toll suffered on 20 July. Others were arrested and some were interrogated in a temporary prison in Revel.
On 12 August Mompezat called his commanders together for a meeting in the Café Albert at Laprade. Their short period of hiding was over and the CFMN was about to reform. In three days’ time, events elsewhere would force the Germans to evacuate all of south-west France.
Chapter 52 – Homecoming
On 19 August, members of an unidentified Resistance group machine-gunned a German vehicle and killed two of its occupants on the road between Garrevaques and Revel. The wreck was towed back to the Château de Garrevaques, and Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska were buried in the park. The villagers feared reprisals, but by now the Germans had more pressing business to occupy them. On 15 August the Allies had begun landing 50,000 troops on the coast near Marseilles. Over the next few days, all German units in south-west France received orders to march east and re-group in the Rhône Valley. The occupiers were about to leave Garrevaques, and now is the time to rejoin Madame Barande in Le Salon Rouge for the story of her homecoming.
‘Late in the afternoon [on 19 August], Jules was wandering around in the grounds between his home and the château when a German soldier stopped him. “Tomorrow, there will no longer be anyone living in the château.” That was all the man said. During the evening, Jules mulled over the soldier’s words. Did it mean the Germans were about to depart? Would madame and her children be able to return to their home?
‘He was woken at five in the morning by the noise of engines. Voices shouted orders he could not understand. He tiptoed outside and watched them drive out of the grounds. He realised that the previous day the Germans had parked their vehicles in the dried-up moat. Safely hidden from Allied aircraft by the trees of the park, they had loaded all their equipment ready for a dawn departure. As soon as the noise of the engines faded away, Jules crept into the château to check everyone had gone and to see what damage had been done. He started his inspection downstairs in our kitchen, which the Germans had transformed into a workshop. He opened the door to the big pantry cupboard, which I shall show you later, and recoiled in horror. He knew about explosives from the Great War and he could see that the mine in the cupboard was set to explode in less than an hour!
‘He ran out of the building and sprinted towards the gendarmerie. Minutes later he was back with the gendarmes. There were now forty-seven minutes left on the timer. While one of the men started to defuse the bomb in the kitchen, the others searched the rest of the château. They discovered a dozen more mines, all wired together, enough to bring down the whole building.’
Madame Barande paused for effect, and I had time to wonder if this was what they meant by working against the clock. It also crossed my mind that the departing Germans may have mined the château to avenge the two comrades they had just buried in its park.
‘Shortly before six they had disarmed all the explosives. Jules had saved the château.’
There were gasps from the audience and someone started to clap. Madame Barande graciously acknowledged the applause and then she continued, because this was neither the end of her château nor the end of her story.
‘What else did we find when we returned to our home? Luckily for us, the damage was not too severe. The soldiers had stolen all the mattresses and bedding, apparently to provide extra protection inside their armoured vehicles. They had carried our billiard table down from the first floor and left it under the old oak tree in the park. All our crockery lay smashed in a heap on the floor. And they had left us two copies of “Mein Kampf”, which I still have. By this stage of the war perhaps even they had lost faith in the words of their Führer.
‘As well as turning our kitchen into a workshop, the soldiers had swapped things around on this floor as well. The room where we are sitting became their office. Through the doors behind me is my dining room, but they turned that into their kitchen. And if you look through the doors to my right, you will see portraits of my ancestors hanging on the walls. We call it Le Salon des Ancêtres and the Germans used it as their dining room. They had taken down the valuable old mirror that hangs above the fireplace and replaced it with a picture of Adolf Hitler, but my family portraits remained on the walls to keep an eye on him.’
Madame Barande rose from her seat and we followed suit. We inspected the grey wallpaper of Le Salon Rouge, and the portraits in Le Salon des Ancêtres, and then she led us down the worn steps of a spiral staircase in one of the towers. She opened the door to a walk-in cupboard in her kitchen, and I peered inside at the place where Jules had discovered the first mine.
Two days after the Allied landings of 15 August, the CFMN reassembled, not in the Montagne Noire but further east in the department of the Hérault near the village of Agoudet. A few kilometres to their south lay the town of Saint-Pons-de-Thomières where five roads meet in the valley of the Jaur.
On 20 August, the commander of the 4,000-strong garrison at Castres was persuaded to surrender without firing a shot[7], but most of the other German troops in south-west France obeyed orders and headed east to combat the Allies in Provence. Mompezat was sure some of these retreating columns would pass through Saint-Pons.
For the Germans, it was a chaotic and perilous retreat. Allied aircraft controlled the skies, and every Resistance group along the way was itching to attack them. Even former collaborators were out to save their skins by claiming a German scalp or two. Columns ranging from a couple of hundred to six thousand men criss-crossed the countryside, often seeking minor roads through the forests and mountains where they would be less visible from the air and where they had more chance of finding cover if they were attacked.
The column that passed closest to Garrevaques came from Montauban. Caught by a storm on 21 August, the troops stopped for the night at Verfeil, and the next day they marched south-east across the Lauragais through Lanta and Caraman, and by early afternoon they reached the village of Le Vaux on the Revel-Toulouse road. In the words of a report by the gendarmes of Saint-Félix-Lauragais, ‘a German column of around 3,000 men…composed principally of Georgians and Mongols traversed part of the commune of Le Vaux causing panic along its route’.
Compared with the exactions committed elsewhere by other columns, Le Vaux got off lightly: a young man was shot dead while he was tending his cows, and a doctor was wounded by several bullets. When the soldiers had finished pillaging the houses and farms, they continued on their way towards Carcassonne with the help of twenty stolen bicycles, and two horses and a pair of mules complete with their carts. The column was destroyed somewhere on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire.
Did the troops from Garrevaques join this column, or had they already tagged onto one of the many other columns traversing the countryside a few kilometres further north? All I can say for certain is this: at least one of the soldiers stationed at the Château de Garrevaques made it home safely, as Madame Barande would discover a quarter of a century later.
The first column to cross the CFMN’s field of fire came from an unexpected direction: Narbonne, which lies to the south of Saint-Pons. Late in the afternoon of 20 July, this column was ambushed by Mompezat and his men, and early the next morning the survivors surrendered. Later the same day the CFMN attacked another column; this one came driving along the road from Mazamet and it was much stronger. Mompezat’s men withdrew at dusk, and six thousand enemy troops pillaged Saint-Pons during the night and continued their journey east the next day.
On 22 August, a column of 400 men with artillery marched through the CFMN’s old haunts in the Montagne Noire and descended into Mazamet. After a two hour fight with local Resistance fighters, they surrendered.
The next day, the Corps France de la Montagne Noire fought its last and bloodiest battle in the mountains to the north of Saint-Pons. An anti-aircraft battalion with nearly 2,000 men and 150 vehicles had left Toulouse on 20 August. They were attacked on the Pont Vieux in the centre of Albi, but the column forced a passage, joined up with troops from elsewhere and continued into the mountains. Twenty kilometres after Lacaune they were brought to a standstill by a broken bridge in a hamlet called Pont de la Mouline. While they tried to repair the crossing, Mompezat and 120 of his men launched an attack. The fighting lasted for several hours, but eventually the CFMN was forced to retreat carrying nine dead. Mompezat was among the fifteen injured; Pagels was unharmed. After that, they lay in wait for another week but no more columns appeared.
By now, all the towns in south-west France had been liberated, and in the middle of September the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire broke up. Some of its younger members joined the French Forces of the Interior and fought in Alsace and Germany until the end of the conflict. Pagels and Richardson caught a plane back to England and carried on with the war. Before long, Roger Mompezat began transforming his journal into a book. It was published in 1945 and the proceeds helped fund the construction of a memorial at Fontbruno, built by eight German prisoners-of-war.
This monument lost in the forest provided me with my first introduction to the story of the Resistance in my part of France. Thirteen members of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire lie buried in an underground crypt, and a fourteenth tomb awaits Louis Fourcade who was last seen alive in a temporary prison in Revel on 6 August 1944. Above the fallen fighters stands a concrete signpost as tall as Riquet’s obelisk at Naurouze, and its fingers direct the traveller towards the places where the men of the Resistance fought their battles. At the base of the obelisk, a bronze plaque shows the bust of Mompezat, and twelve slabs of granite record the names of all the CFMN fighters killed in action. Mompezat himself is buried in Terre-Cabade, the giant cemetery where I lost myself when I was researching the Battle of Toulouse.
If one day you choose to wander along the roads and paths between Arfons, Fontbruno, La Galaube and Laprade, you may not be as lucky as Jean-Paul Calvet who, in the 1980s, discovered three parachute containers which Mompezat and his men had failed to locate, but you will find numerous other memorials to the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire. Granite steles mark the locations of the main camps, and plaques like the one on a corner near Les Escudiès commemorate specific feats of arms. In the tiny cemetery of Laprade, three CFMN leaders lie next to one another: Henri Sévenet, who was decapitated by shrapnel in the bombing raid on La Galaube, and two others who died more peacefully after the war but requested to be buried with their fallen comrade. In the village itself, what was once the Café Albert is easy to identify: ‘Chez Leon Hotel Café Tabacs’ is marked in white lettering above the front door, but today neither the Alberts nor the Leons are in business and the building is a private home.
Should you be tempted to hunt down these memorials, I shall add a word of warning for those of a nervous disposition: armed men patrol these forests looking for wild boar between the second Sunday of September and the end of January.
During the years that followed my visit to the Château de Garrevaques and its terrifying kitchen cupboard, my wife and I became acquainted with three more generations of Madame Barande’s family. We met at mutual friends, or we dined or listened to concerts in Le Pavillon du Château, the beautifully restored building next door which had once housed servants, horses, carriages, Count Henri’s distillery and, of course, Jules and Sidonie at the time of the German occupation. On these occasions, the stories of the château were always on my mind. My eyes would be drawn across the dried-up moat and I would spot fragments of a tower or a turret peeping through the trees like pieces in an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
By the time I begin work on this chapter, I find that my memories of Madame Barande’s tales are similarly fragmented. Sadly, she died in 2013, and when I try to picture her sitting in Le Salon Rouge I see only her eyes. They jog my memory about something else she told me, something that happened long after the war. I telephone her daughter, Marie-Christine, and ask if I can pay her a visit to refresh my memory.
A few days later, I make myself comfortable once again in Le Salon Rouge. Marie-Christine disappears to make tea, and her husband, Claude, shows me bits and pieces he has found over the years in the moat: ammunition clips, parts of a submachine gun and other less identifiable military objects. Outside, the November evening is dark; inside, the lighting is subdued. Our voices sound unnaturally loud and they break an eerie silence.
Marie-Christine returns with a teapot. She pours me a cup and we run through the story of the château from the beginning and I note down a few points I had forgotten or misunderstood. By the time I start my second cup of tea, we arrive at the point where Jules and the gendarmes have finished defusing the mines.
Life returned to normal surprisingly quickly once the Germans had left. The family returned to its ancestral home, the young Marguerite-Andrée Lochon became Madame Barande, and before long Marie-Christine was born.
‘When I was old enough to run around in the grounds of the château my grandmother used to tell me never to play in one particular corner of the garden. A pair of iron crosses marked the graves of two German soldiers. When I was twelve or thirteen, the German army came and took them away.’
These, I realise, were the graves of Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska. Between 1958 and 1961, nearly 20,000 German soldiers were disinterred all across southern France and reburied together in the cemetery at Dagneux near Lyon. Most of them were killed after the Allied landings of August 1944.
‘Twenty-five years after the war, maman was offering bed-and-breakfast in the château. She also provided dinner, and one particular evening some of her guests were German. They were very polite, charming even, but there was one man who made her uncomfortable. They were all standing here in Le Salon Rouge enjoying an aperitif before dinner when this particular man started talking about Auvezines. “Isn’t that the village up the road where the Cathars massacred the crusaders?” He knew far too much and she began to suspect he had been here before. And then, when maman announced dinner he marched straight into Le Salon des Ancêtres where the portrait of Hitler had watched over the German troops while they took their meals. “That’s not my dining room,” said maman. The man laughed, but if he was one of the officers billeted here in the war, why didn’t he say so?
‘After dinner she telephoned me and I could tell she was uneasy. “Do you want me to come over?” I asked. “Yes, I would prefer it if you were here to do breakfast.” At that time I was living in Toulouse with Claude and our children, but I drove over right away and stayed the night. At breakfast, the gentleman asked me if I was the daughter. He was very polite. Later, he was standing on the front steps ready to leave and he addressed me again “Won’t we be seeing your mother this morning?” “No, she is resting; she is tired after last night.” He gazed far beyond the trees of the park. “Please will you tell her she still has the pretty blue eyes of her youth.” ’
I put down my tea and suppress a shiver. I remember with perfect clarity how Madame Barande had sat here in Le Salon Rouge and widened her eyes to show us that, even in her eighties, they still shone with a startling blue.
[1] Pagels knew his plan would work because three weeks before D-Day, another pilot from his squadron had returned safely to England in this way. It had taken him two months, slow by his standards, but Chuck Yeager had taken time out to teach the Resistance how to make bombs. Three years later he became the first man to break the sound barrier.
[2] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger. Le Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire Journal de Marche (Avril – Septembre 1944). 4th edition. Castres: Les Anciens du Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire, 1994 (pages 52-53).
[3] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 89).
[4] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 93).
[5] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 96).
[6] Translated from: Mompezat, Roger (page 118).
[7] A large proportion of the ‘German’ troops occupying south-west France were prisoners-of-war who had been captured on the Eastern front. Nearly all the garrison of Castres came from areas such as the Caucasus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Turkestan. When they heard about the Allied landings in Provence, these men grew restless and the seventy German officers barely prevented a mutiny. Doubting his ability to control his men, the commandant was persuaded to surrender after a long night of negotiations with the Resistance.
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