Piece de Resistance
Maurice Buckmaster
Watch For Me By Moonlight Evelyn Le Chene (Eyre Methuen £2.75) I tend to shun books that have the word ' moonlight ' as part of their title. I have read too many of them which invest the wartime activities of a relatively small number of brave men and women with a glamour and bravado which they themselves were at pains to avoid.
But, as soon as I had turned a few pages of Evelyn Le Cherie's Watch For Me By Moonlight I realised that this was not one of them. It is, in fact, a scrupulously accurate account of the remarkable wartime exploits of Major Burdett MC, alias Robert Boiteux alias Nicolas and a series of other pseudonyms. It is written in a matter-of-fact style which underplays the difficulties and dangers of his mission and is all the more impressive for that reason.
Nicolas was parachuted into the Lyonnais on May 31, 1942 and immediately started to set up and train small resistance groups. In spite of several set-backs his success was proved by the performance of these groups when they were called upon to undertake active duty. Nicolas had the gift of making himself into a totally unremarkable person when he needed to be unremarked, but his exceptionally strong personality and a certain sharpness of tongue left his subordinates and his helpers in no doubt of his leadership qualities, whether in rebuking careless acts of insecurity or galvanising his group into a final great effort. He made no bones about complaining of his London Headquarters' defi
ciencies, as he saw them, but his loyalty was complete and paramount. The average 'useful life' of an a&ent in one place in Occupied France seldom exceeded one year. Nicolas was in the neigh bourhood of Lyon, an exceptionally difficult area, for fifteen months, during which he had established five totally separate reseaux and supplied them with at least a necessary mini mum of arms and equipment. By September 1943 he was one of the most wanted men in France; his identikit picture adorned the walls of a number of police-stations. A reward of 6 million francs (some £30,000) was offered for his arrest. It says much for the loyalty of the members of his groups that he was never denounced, and, although many of his as sociates were caught, including his faithful and competent ' pianist ' (radio-operator), Gregoire, none gave any clue to their captors as to Nicolas's identity or whereabouts, despite, in some cases, torture. By late summer 1943 it was obvious that Nicolas must be transferred to another part of France. The pick-up operation was successfully completed and on August 20 Nicolas reported to me in London.
For his second mission it was decided that Nicolas should go to the Marseilles region.
Groups formed there by agents sent out previously had all been broken up, although many good patriots, who had obeyed the order to go to ground, remained ready to carry on the fight. The city of Marseille itself was extremely heavily guarded and there was close German surveillance, accompanied by snap-checks, at all times. Obviously, therefore, the base of the new group must be out side the city and the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes offered many suitable areas. More over, recruitment of Frenchmen seeking to join the Maquis and avoid forced labour in Germany gave an abundant source of train ing material. Some twenty miles from Marseilles, in a horseshoe-shaped valley providing plenty of cover, the Maquis of Plan
d'Aups had already attracted some 200 men willing and anxious to fight for the liberation of their country. Over-willing, some of them — indeed, impetuous, and, for that reason, dangerous. It was the task of Nicolas and his second-in-command, Aleric, first of all to arm and train these men and secondly to restrain them from becoming engaged in an all-out attack, where the more powerful arms of the Germans would have turned any such endeavour into a catastrophe. The golden rule of a guerrilla force is to engage in a sudden and violent attack, and to •withdraw as quicklY after the initial foray, before the weapons of the defenders can be brought fully into action. Only thus can men armed with nothing more effective than Sten-guns or perhaps 8 single Bazooka or Piat avoid complete destruction of their force.
Few people understood this more clearlY than Nicolas, and Evelyn Le Cherie describes his anguish when, on one occasion at Plan d'Aups, his small force became inextricably tangled with a German reprisal unit, which inflicted serious casualties and captured their hard-won store of heavier weapons.
By then, however, the war in France was drawing to a close. French Resistance, which, by General Eisenhower's estimation, had shortened the war by some four months, had already liberated by its own endeavour a large number of towns and cities in Southern France and had denied the German Panzer Divisions stationed there access to the Normandy battle-front. It was time for Nicolas to move on to other tasks in other theatres of the war.
Although more than thirty years have passed since he began his clandestine operations in and around Lyon, and in those years many of his former companions have died, the legend of his work lives on. In the verY many village cemeteries throughout the region monuments recall the patriotism of those who fought and lost their lives with the ' Reseau Nicolas.'
It is not easy in the present era to recapture the spirit of those days; in this country patriotism is at best hardly understood; at the worst it is considered a dirty word. Not so in France, where those who fought for libertY, British as well as French, are still equallY honoured. Evelyn Le Chene, herself the wife, of a former member of the French Section ot Special Operations Executive (SOE), has suc. ceeded in capturing precisely and recording Nicolas's outlook on life. The clarity and fi' delity of her interpretation of Nicolas's thing' ing impress me immensely.
Colonel Buckmaster was in charge of one of the sections of SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the war.
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