Free Das Reich by Max Hastings Page B

the end of the most difficult and nerve-racking period of Resistance. The British agent George Hiller exulted in the sense of release that D-Day brought: ‘The beauty of life, the joys of spring, the stream of men and cars, the relief of being armed.’
    Hiller was French Section’s officer in the Lot, the region dominated by high limestone plateaux thick with scrub oak and sheep grazing that lies between the Dordogne and the Tarn, on the Das Reich division’s direct route north. With his twenty-one-year-old wireless operator, Cyril Watney, he had been parachuted into France in January 1944 to make contact with a socialist Resistance organization named the Groupes Vény. Its tentacles were reported to extend through southern France from Marseille and Toulouse to the Lot and Limoges. Hiller’s business was first to assess their potential, then to organize and arm the résaux – the networks – in the Lot.
    He was born in Paris, the son of an English father and French mother, educated at lycées in Paris and London, then at ExeterCollege, Oxford. He had planned a career as a diplomat when the war intervened. Like a significant number of future French Section recruits, in 1939 he was a near-pacifist, and he joined the medical corps because he disliked the idea of killing people. Only in 1942 did he modify his opinions sufficiently to pass through Sandhurst and become an army officer. Then SOE’s recruiters found him. He told his parents that he was being posted to the Middle East, but on the night of 7 January 1944, at the age of twenty-eight, this highly intelligent, sensitive, rather reserved young man landed near Quatre Routes high in the hills of the Lot to begin his career as a secret agent.
    Like most F Section officers, Hiller and Watney suffered a severe shock of disorientation and bewilderment when they landed. Only moments after the reception committee had greeted them, the two Englishmen were appalled to see the headlights of a car approaching up the road. They flung themselves into a ditch as it passed, then were bemused to see the little group of résistants still standing nonchalantly by the roadside in its headlights. Sten guns under their arms. The two Englishmen agreed that there was a wide gulf between security as taught at their tradecraft school at Beaulieu and as practised in France. From the dropping zone they were driven to Quatre Routes. They spent their first nights in a creamery at the edge of the little village, until Watney was moved to a safe house from which he could transmit, and Hiller began his travels among the résistants of the Lot.
    Like many men who found themselves behind enemy lines in World War II, Hiller was profoundly moved by his experience in the spring and summer of 1944. In the timescale of those days, Liberation still seemed far away and the German command of France still appeared unshakable. Many Frenchmen and women – especially among the business and official classes – had long since come to terms with their Occupiers, and feared and hated the Resistance as communist bandits who threatened the peace and stability of their communities. By no means all the girls who slept with the men of the Das Reich and others of the occupying armydid so for money. Since the end of World War I, France had been a bitterly divided and fragmented society. ‘Her position’, Sir Denis Brogan has written, ‘was unique. She was a victor, but she had in many ways the psychology of a defeated nation.’ Many, perhaps most, French bourgeois in the 1930s feared fascism, far less than communism. Peasants were profoundly embittered by the ceaseless betrayals of their politicians. Their distaste for authority extended from contempt for Paris to hatred of their local landlords and parish priests. Religion was a waning influence in much of southern France by the 1940s. Most peasants, phlegmatically ploughing the fields and driving the oxen on their meagre farms, seemed to have set themselves apart