Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (16 page)

At a crossing of unpaved logging roads beyond the back of beyond, stood a rudimentary memorial to the two thousand fighters once based here. There were no barracks or physical reminders of Maquis Socrate. I wondered if any of the Résistants were still alive.

With our surveyor’s map we navigated unmarked forest paths, re-crossed the Bibracte-to-Alésia Gallic trail, and picked up the GR-13 secular trekking route on a picturesque hillside cloaked in native deciduous beeches, their branches about to bud. Another fountainhead gave rise to a rivulet called the Chênelet. It grew as we followed it downhill, merging with other creeks to form an entrancing stream.

Across the valley south of us, a hillside appeared to have been painted with green letters spelling “NAUDET.” The word meant nothing to either of us. As we pondered the mysterious message, a young Frenchman carrying a bridle came along, whistling.

“Naudet?” he laughed. “You’re not the first to ask. It’s the last name of a tree-farmer from Anost, the village around that bend in the road.” He pointed. “Look carefully and you’ll see the letters aren’t painted. They’re formed by two species of fir tree. One type provides the background, the other the letters.” And reflect a large ego, I was about to add.

With our eyes fixed on NAUDET, we tramped a mile or more into Anost thinking of Benito Mussolini and his self-aggrandizing, propagandistic use of trees. Back in the 1930s in the Italian Apennines, Mussolini’s followers felled pines to spell out D-U-X, Latin for
Duce
, Fearless Leader. Fearless Mussolini may have been, but not eternal. Italian
Resistenza
fighters strung the dictator up by his heels in Milan in 1945 and filled him with eight hundred rounds of lead. However, DUX was still legible on the Apennine hillside, the trees maintained by Fascist zealots.

Some things die hard in Old Europe, I mused. Fascism is one of them. Smoking is another. Despite anti-smoking campaigns and laws, the rules are bent and broken in many clever ways. The key to our hotel room in Anost was hidden in a bluegray cloud of tobacco fumes. It hung behind the counter of the Sherlock Holmes Pub on the sloping main street of the village. The lanky young Gauloise-puffing bartender did not look remotely like Holmes or Watson. As he handed us the key, he at 1,700 feet above sea level st said. told us the owners of the hotel, bar, pizzeria, restaurant, and B&B, and much else in Anost, had imported the Sherlock Holmes Pub from England.

That the town’s first family would be admirers of Sherlock Holmes seemed elementary. Like almost everyone else in Anost old enough to remember World War Two, they were grateful to
les Anglo-Saxons
in the guise of the RAF and USAF, the angels of the skies who’d parachuted supplies to the Résistance.

Our room appeared to have been furnished in the 1890s. It was unusually large and comfortable by French standards. Outside on the main drag, tractors pulling wagonloads of manure thundered past the hotel. It was the season for mucking out the stables. Apparently the cows had been busy.

After several days in the wilderness, pocketsized Anost felt like a real town, with a church and cemetery, two mini-markets, a post office, restaurants and lodging, and a movie theater open twice weekly. Every stone in the tilting streets offered a view over tiled roofs to the surrounding forested hills and NAUDET.

We stocked up on chocolate, candy, fruit, band-aids, and bottles of water at the grocery before contemplating a visit to the church. Part of the landmark edifice went back to the 12th century, said our
Topo Guide
. But there was good reason to suspect something older lay underneath. As we poked around the aisles, we spotted two life-size effigies of a knight in armor, clutching a sword, and his consort in a long, straight dress. A sign identified them as Girart de Roussillon and his noble wife, Berthe, the founders of Vézelay.

What were they doing here? Girart and Berthe died in the late 800s AD, the sign reminded visitors. That meant the church, or part of it, was over 1,100 years old.

The news was disconcerting. It should not have come as a surprise. Had I done my math correctly, I would’ve realized Girart was a century too young to have died with Roland at Roncevaux in 778 AD, as
The Song of Roland
purports. It meant that the bone in my backpack could not belong to Vézelay’s noble founder. Girart’s mortal coil never made it north of Anost.

“The bone?” Alison asked with a crocodilian smile.

“The good news is we’re hiking on the trail they used, the real pilgrim’s trail, not the one those zealots in Vézelay concocted for tourist-pilgrims,” I countered.

“That’s unfair,” Alison said. “They told us all trails were pilgrimage routes. The important thing is to set out and get there, wherever you’re going. This route may be more historically valid than theirs, that’s all. Everyone knows pilgrims have been passing through Anost for over a thousand years.”

“Everyone? Really? Shall we phone my brother in Las Vegas and ask him if he knows that?”

Anost, world famous? Before becoming a martyr village and center for the French Résistance, Anost was known in France from the mid-1500s to late 1800s as the capital of the Morvan’s
galvachers
and
flotteurs de bois
. They were, respectively, lumberjacks with oxteams that dragged trees from the forests down riverbeds or flumes to lakes, and the raftsmen who lashed the logs together and floated them to Paris. There were thousands of them and they supplied the capital with its burning wood for about four hundred years. Like the modern timber multinationals currently cleaning out Siberia and the Amazon, however, the Morvan’s loggers also chopped themselves out of business. The environmental damage they wreaked must have been spectacular rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and . A by-product of their hack-and-drag logging technique was the legion of colorful, Paul Bunyan characters who had lived in Anost.

That was why we wanted to visit the Maison des Galvachers museum. It stands behind the monument to the Maquis Socrate and is the town’s main attraction. With dusk approaching, we hurried to enter the building just as a group of seniors was stepping out. One of the party broke away, introduced herself as Michelle Desmoulin, the mayor of Anost, and apologized that the museum was closed. We asked if she had any literature to give us on the timbermen of Anost and the Maquis Socrate.

“Better,” she said; “I happen to have a live
maquisard
you can meet. He fought with the Résistance up there.” She introduced us to a handsome, upright, blue-eyed octogenarian gentleman named Robert Ducreux.

Here was Doctor Watson, by Jove, complete with gray fedora. The more I studied Ducreux, the more I thought not of Watson but of Jean Gabin playing Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, or Burt Lancaster in
From Here to Eternity
. How Hollywood failed to import a man as handsome and dignified as Robert Ducreux after the war, I do not know.

IN THE END, WE CREATED EUROPE

During the Great War of 1914–1918, about a fifth of the male inhabitants of Anost died under arms. One of them was Robert Ducreux’s father. When in 1940 the Nazis occupied France, the young Ducreux, like thousands of others, was faced with the prospect of collaborating, being deported to a forced-labor camp in Germany, or joining the Résistance. Many French families were torn apart at the time, with one son buckling, another standing firm.

“It was war,” Ducreux told us. “You had to do it.” He downplayed his courage.

We asked about Maquis Socrate, the secret camp in the hills. “Socrates” was the codename for Georges Leyton, a National Forestry Officer. Leyton headed to the hills northwest of Anost in February 1944. His right-hand man was also a Forestry Officer, Marel Gey, who knew every path through the woods. With the help of sympathetic locals, the members of Maquis Socrate set up a camp several miles away from the nearest road. Back then, only a handful of paved roads crossed the Morvan.

“The monument you saw in the woods is where the Nazis parked their trucks when they came looking for us,” Ducreux explained with a wry smile. “We could see them, but they couldn’t see us. They never found the camp.”

Only a few now remember where the Résistance camp stood. “We should preserve it,” the mayor commented, bustling around. “It’s a
lieu de mémoire
—a place of historic significance.”

Ducreux said softly, “There’s nothing left.”

We talked for what seemed a very long time, and were joined by Ducreux’s wife, Solange. She remembered how the Nazis had swept into farmhouses, like the one where she’d lived with her parents. The Nazis stole supplies, slaughtered animals, and bundled off the bloody meat in the bedsheets, she said, adding insult to injury. They also murdered and tortured anyone suspected of aiding the maquisards. They were not alone in their work. A special branch of the Vichy-sponsored French paramilitary Milice, called
Gardes Mobiles de Réserve
or GMR, worked closely with the Gestapo. They tracked down deserters,
réfractaires
who refused to collaborate, and maquisards. It was the French GMR that ambushed the
maquisard
Marel Gey, tortured and killed him. Saint-BrissondCh “He didn’t talk,” Ducreux said grimly. “He didn’t lead them to our camp.”

For Ducreux and his wife, every street in the village, and every turn in each forest road, still had a memory attached. There, in the field of wildflowers above town, the Nazis had shot François Basdevant, a seventeen-year-old, and his friend André Feffer, eighteen. The boys had been sent to Anost on “holiday” to escape battle zones in the north.

In the farmhouse across the way, a sixteen-year-old girl named Huguette Pahin was killed. “From the terrace of your hotel—the Sherlock Holmes Pub nowadays—they took potshots,” said the mayor. “Huguette was looking out of the window of her parents’ farm.…”

Ducreux explained the modus operandi of fellow Résistants at Maquis Socrate. Attacks on Nazi convoys, infrastructure, and trains could only be executed far from inhabited areas, he said, or reprisals would be immediate and devastating. So the maquisards were often on the move, at night. They walked for miles in the woods, down hunters’ paths and dirt roads not marked on maps. Recruitment was tricky. Candidates were somehow directed by word of mouth to Résistants working undercover in cities, towns, and villages. These operatives were known as
Indicateurs
, because they indicated the route the vetted recruits would take to find their way to the Maquis. Later, in colloquial French the term
Indicateur
came to mean stool pigeon or police informant. Each maquisard did nightwatch several times a week. They worked in pairs, posted along a perimeter two kilometers around the camp.

“That was the most dangerous work,” Ducreux recalled. “You were exhausted, hungry, sleepy, but you had to stay alert. You were carrying a heavy machine gun and waiting for the Nazi trucks to drive up. We wrapped ourselves in old parachutes to keep warm.” He paused, becoming thoughtful. “The Allied planes flew low sometimes. When they’d heard one of our farmhouses or villages had been attacked, they’d tip their wings in salute.” He paused again, his eyes glistening. “We were very glad to have America on our side in 1914 and 1940,” Ducreux added quietly. “I’m honored to meet the children of Americans whose fathers fought in the Pacific.”

We weren’t sure where he got the idea of the Pacific, but didn’t have the heart to correct him. My father had fought in Italy, Alison’s in the Atlantic. It didn’t matter. As Ducreux said, it was war, and, I suppose, our fathers, like him, had felt they’d had to sign up. I couldn’t help wondering what young German tourists felt when they saw war and Résistance monuments in each and every French village, testimonials to the barbarity of their Nazi forebears.

“It’s a point we’re debating,” the mayor answered. “Some think we should remove ‘Allemands’ and put in ‘Nazis,’ because it wasn’t the Germans but the Nazis who committed atrocities.”

“We hold no grudge,” Ducreux said. “A few years ago my wife and I traveled around Germany and found the people very hospitable. Those days are over. We created Europe out of that hateful war.”

I had one last question. What about François Mitterrand? Was he a collaborationist spy who reinvented himself, or a real freedom fighter? Ducreux looked askance. He tipped his fedora back and said,
En politique, y’a à boire et à manger
. Literally, it meant “in politics, there’s food and drink to be had.” I took it to mean that every politici to someone at the mayorwe was an has his snout in the trough, and his actions are determined by pork-barrel considerations and power. “Mitterrand got going the wrong way, then he saw the way the wind was blowing,” Ducreux continued. “He changed course in time. And he married an authentic Résistante, Danielle,
une vraie maquisarde
. She was in Cluny.”

Whether Mitterrand’s marriage to a bona fide Burgundian Résistance figure had been driven by love and revelation, or was another calculated move on the part of the wily Sphinx, history will probably never know. Similarly, the mystery of François Mitterrand’s lifelong loyalty to war villains such as René Bousquet, the notorious Milice officer and war criminal who for decades escaped arrest, is sure to remain unanswered. Too much still rides on Mitterrand’s legacy. Too many active French politicians, bureaucrats, and political commentators made their careers in the Sphinx’s shadow. What’s even more mysterious is, despite the many damaging revelations about his past, Mitterrand remains a hero to millions of Frenchmen, including current French president François Hollande.

LET IT COME DOWN

Everyone knows Henri Contet was born in 1904 and wrote the songs that Edith Piaf and Yves Montand crooned. Well, a few music buffs know this obscure fact, which we learned that evening. Contet lived in a humble two-story house facing the church and butcher shop of Anost.

Another Anost resident who was authentically famous is composer Francis Poulenc. His wet-nurse came from here and, perhaps in search of the milk and honey of youth, he returned each summer in his sunset years. A plaque on a village house also states that Poulenc’s music was “inspired by the wild woods” of the Morvan. That sounded accurate in a paradoxical way. “Wild” hereabouts means tamed by millennia of civilization and logging.