Free Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd

less than fifteen people, so that any one member could betray under torture only the others in his or her cell. When 40-year-old Irish yachtswoman Cecily Lefort, who had been acting as his courier, was arrested in Montélimar and tortured by the Gestapo, this damage control system ensured that she could give away no one except Cammaerts, for whom the Gestapo was already searching all over France.
    Starting from scratch, after six months’ hard work by Cammaerts, JOCKEY comprised fifty cells, which he visited at irregular intervals, never telling anyone where he was going or when they would see him again. He refused to stay in hotels because they were under routine surveillance and made a point of never spending more than a couple of consecutive nights in any of the safe houses recommended and checked out in advance by a trusted member of his network. These hideaways ranged from mountain refuges to farms, middle-class town houses and luxurious châteaux. After the war, one of his typically modest understatements was:
Individual agents were dependent for every meal and every night’s rest on people whose small children, aged parents, property and livelihood were continually put at risk by our presence. Their contributions involved a much greater sacrifice than ours. 7
    Their houses could be burned down or blown up, fields of crops set afire and whole families subjected to torture and transported to concentration or death camps, never to return – and the helpers were well aware of this.
    For security, Cammaerts never made a phone call or wrote a letter all the time he was in occupied France. Learning of the birth of his second daughter from a BBC message, ‘ Joséphine ressemble à son grand-père ’ – Josephine looks like her grandfather – Cammaerts gave way for once to the loneliness of his clandestine existence with no home and no one to confide in or share the news with. ‘For the first and only time in my life,’ he said, ‘I sat down on my own and got drunk.’
    How close he came to disaster time after time is illustrated by the night when the car in which he was travelling was stopped at a roadblock near Senas manned by Waffen-SS troops. Getting out of the car, he realised that it was heavily overloaded and visibly weighted down on the rear suspension by all the weapons and ammunition hidden in the boot. His travelling companion was a German-speaker, who overheard that the roadblock was part of a hunt for the crew of an American bomber shot down nearby. When one of the SS men started sticking his bayonet through the rear seat cushions, he made a joke: ‘You surely don’t think we’ve sewn the crew of a bomber into the seats, do you?’ He laughed, the SS men laughed and sent them on their way, the boot unsearched. ‘It was,’ said Cammaerts, ‘my closest piece of luck.’ 8
    That sounds very swashbuckling, but Cammaerts usually avoided obvious risks. He was also very sanguine about the tensions between his own people working for SOE, other networks owing allegiance to BCRA and those with their own agenda, like the communists, who acknowledged neither. The stress of the clandestine life was such that agents were flown back to Britain at intervals for debriefing but also for a short period of home leave. In November 1943 it was Cammaerts’ turn after nine months in the field. As he remembered:
Virtually every day was a working day, catching the tube from South Harrow to the blacked-out offices in Baker Street. There were frequent debriefings. I talked to a few future agents about rationing, identity permits. I went on a course for S-phone use, 9 which proved useless. I was invited to meet about a hundred aircrew who were going to be used on special operations. They needed to hear someone who had been there to tell them what it means to be down on the ground as opposed to being in the aircraft.
    Time and again, he pressed home the dire need of deliveries to JOCKEY’s carefully selected seventy drop zones