Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mathilde was a little apprehensive, meeting Madame Bertrand for the first time; they’d be sharing a home and life would be difficult if they didn’t get along.
She was instantly reassured. Lucienne Bertrand was a tall, quiet woman in her fifties, with a weathered face and grey hair wound in a plait around her head, German-style.
She moved calmly through the world, tending to her animals, the house and land with practised efficiency.
Her home on the hillside above Grenoble was sparsely furnished, but everything in it was scrubbed, polished and mended to within an inch of its life, from the fraying rag rugs to the battered copper saucepans.
Downstairs consisted of a kitchen with a stove, a small table and three chairs, and a front parlour where Madame Bertrand sat to do her sewing in the evening.
There were two bedrooms upstairs, looking out over the forest to the mountains beyond, and an outside privy at the end of the garden.
Madame Bertrand had obviously been living alone for some time and Mathilde was careful not to tread on her toes.
She only ventured downstairs in the morning after Madame Bertrand had finished her barley coffee and was outside, calling the chickens as she started her morning chores.
Once she’d had a crust of bread and a bowl of warm milk herself, Mathilde would bottle-feed the kids, collect eggs and help with any other jobs that needed doing before setting off on her rounds by bicycle.
She called on the Chapuys at Les Deux Copains at least once a week for the latest news and any potential assignments, often meeting runaways there whom she would escort to an appropriate safe house.
In the depths of that winter, they heard the wonderful news that the German troops occupying Stalingrad had surrendered to the Soviets.
Suddenly Hitler didn’t seem so invincible after all.
Could this be the turning point they’d been longing for?
Now that German soldiers were occupying the whole of France, the Allies frequently bombed railway lines and bridges in the south to disrupt their supply lines, and consequently, more pilots were being shot down who needed help to escape, or time to recover from their injuries before they left.
The British would generally do as they were told, Mathilde found out, but the Americans could be a handful; they questioned everything and were prone to speaking English loudly in public.
As the weather became warmer and spring arrived, it became possible for them to make the dangerous trip over the Alps into Switzerland, and she got to know the passeurs who would guide them part of the way; both men and women.
One of the most active was a petite, fragile-looking girl of sixteen who, according to Chapuy, climbed the mountain paths with the agility of one of Madame Bertrand’s goats.
Mathilde spent the rest of her time liaising with farmers, picking up any supplies that might be needed by the Maquis, ferrying them into the mountains, and passing on messages as required.
Sometimes she collected orders from a dead-letter box in the church where she and Stefan had sheltered on arriving in Grenoble: a hassock in the front pew with a torn lining, behind which notes could be slipped.
She had a few narrow escapes, once being stopped and searched by a gendarme when she had just picked up twenty packets of black-market cigarettes to take into the mountains, but he didn’t bother to check beneath the layer of soaps in her bicycle basket.
She didn’t attempt to find a more attractive wig; the dowdier she looked, the better.
The Italians didn’t pay her any attention and the French police could hardly be bothered with her either – not even the Milice, the thuggish paramilitaries newly empowered by Vichy to fight the Resistance.
Mathilde tied a headscarf over her mousy hair, wore layers of shapeless clothes and walked with her shoulders hunched and head down, peering through her spectacles.
It was liberating to pass by unnoticed, to watch without being seen.
In the evenings, she and Madame Bertrand would often listen to Radio Londres on the wireless as they worked.
There were always jobs to be done: clothes to be mended, floors to be swept and washed, soap to be made and poured into moulds, accounts kept up to date.
They didn’t talk much, though Mathilde gradually learned the widow’s story.
She had lost her husband in the previous war and her son had recently been sent to work in a factory in the Ruhr.
Work service overseas had been made compulsory in February of that year, which had resulted in more and more young people coming to hide out with the Maquis to avoid it; according to Sanglier, several groups of fifty or so were now dotted throughout the Vercors mountain range.
The plateau was the perfect spot to receive supplies dropped by parachute and soon, he said, they’d be sent weapons from overseas, and later maybe even men. For the first time, Mathilde could imagine an end to the war – though not what she would do then.
She still missed Esmé desperately, but now she was resigned to their separation.
When her baby was born, she’d been consumed by a visceral urge to protect her, but she felt differently now.
Her daughter was being well looked after and she knew it would have been impossible to work for the Resistance with a baby in tow.
She might sometimes dream of returning to the chateau, scooping up Esmé and whisking her away to live peacefully in Switzerland, but this was only a fantasy.
Her every waking moment had to be devoted to saving lives and fighting the Nazis.
She loved her daughter but she loved her country, too.
If France were ruled by Hitler, what sort of future would Esmé have?
Spring turned to summer and she was busier than ever.
In the mountains, British agents arrived by aeroplane to help train the Maquis, whose numbers in the area had swelled from hundreds to thousands.
In the city, the Milice were constantly on the prowl, checking papers in their search for Communists and Jews, both foreign-born and French.
Mathilde was glad to think of Stefan hidden safely away on the plateau for the moment.
She saw him sometimes on her occasional trips into the mountains and already he seemed different: tougher, preoccupied, serious.
Her wedding anniversary arrived in September; yet again it was too dangerous to contemplate a trip to Paris.
Days later, the war took another encouraging turn: Italy surrendered to Allied forces.
Grenoble became alive with movement as the Italian soldiers left, with tanks and Jeeps tearing through the streets and police milling about, looking for people to arrest. On her way to Les Deux Copains, Mathilde ran into a phalanx of German troops marching towards the Place Victor Hugo.
She pulled her bicycle to the side of the road and stared after them, horrified.
‘We’ve got the Boche in control of us now,’ Madame Chapuy told her later, ‘and God knows what that will mean.’
Her husband was more ebullient. ‘But don’t you see? They’re rattled. That’s why they’ve taken over: to try and wipe us out. But we won’t stop till they’re on the run, too.’
It was true that these soldiers were different from the ones she’d encountered in Paris over three years before; different, too, from those she’d left behind in Provence.
They were jumpier, quick to wave their guns around and, on occasion, use them.
A week after they’d arrived, she saw a man in the street put down his briefcase and reach into a jacket pocket for his keys – only to be shot dead by a passing patrol.
No doubt they’d say he’d been armed, should anyone care to ask.
As soon as she could, Mathilde left for the mountains to see what Sanglier had to say about the situation.
He was invigorated, full of news and plans for the future.
The Vercors Maquis had a new overall military commander, and would soon be receiving regular parachute drops of weapons and supplies at various mountain airfields.
‘When the liberating forces arrive, we’ll be ready to fight alongside them,’ he told Mathilde, his eyes shining. ‘And in the meantime, we’ll make life as difficult as possible for the Boche.’
When Mathilde returned to the city, she had a companion with her: Stefan.
He was going to work as a cleaner at the German barracks, listening out for information and passing on anything of interest. He’d be living in a hostel nearby, communicating with Mathilde or one of the other couriers via messages left in various dead-letter boxes or at the café, whichever seemed safer.
‘Do you really think you can pull this off?’ Mathilde asked, as they scrambled down the rocky paths towards the city, scree sliding under their feet. ‘It’s one hell of a risk.’
‘Come on, you’ve seen my act,’ Stefan replied. ‘Pretty convincing, no?’
She worried for him, though; he’d once told her he was circumcised, and if that were to be discovered, he’d be arrested straight away.
Yet they were all treading a dangerous line, and she was learning to live with fear every minute of the day.
She kept a red headscarf in her pocket to wear as a wordless signal if a mission had to be aborted for any reason; beyond that, all she could do was pray.
As the next winter approached, the Maquis were true to their word, constantly raiding German supply depots, sabotaging their vehicles and taking pot shots at their convoys before retreating into the mountains.
Stefan reported the Boche were becoming increasingly irritated – also that they were reluctant to penetrate too deeply into the Vercors because they didn’t know the terrain and could be easily picked off from above.