Another Spy for Paris

By Robert J. Young

While Canadian history professor Andrew Stanhope is doing research in Paris on the German invasion of France, he stumbles upon an odd and long-lost exchange between Colonel Marius Michel, principal deputy in France's counter-intelligence agency, the Deuxieme Bureau, and the Directeur-general of the Val de Grace military hospital. The Colonel wants Chastenet to warn the incoming Prime Minister, Philippe Petain, that there is an active spy in the French war ministry and that Petain's own ring of advisors includes at least one Nazi sympathizer. In flashbacks to 1940, the story of Marius Michel unfolds as he attempts to track down the traitor, whose passing of military secrets surely contributed to the swift and ignominious defeat of France. Working undercover in occupied Paris, Working undercover in occupied Paris, Michel discovers a puzzling connection to the high fashion house Ariege, and its treasonous owner, Louis Loriot. Michel is convinced that the recent deaths of Ariege employees were anything but accidental, and he knows his own life is in peril.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Dec 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773240350

Robert J. Young

Saskatchewan-born, Robert J. Young received his doctorate from the London School of Economics, and is currently Emeritus Professor of History and Fellow of United College at the University of Winnipeg. He is a recipient of the University's principal award for Excellence in Teaching, and its principal award for Excellence in Research. He was also named Canadian Professor of the Year by the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The first of his 10 books was published by Harvard University Press, the most recent by the Winnipeg Free Press. His biography of one 20th century French statesman was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Ferguson Prize for the best book in non-Canadian history; and another biography of a French diplomat and historian received the Manitoba Writers Guild's Isbister prize for the best work of non-fiction.

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Cover: Another Spy for Paris by Robert J. Young.

Another Spyfor Paris

ROBERT J. YOUNG

Doug Whiteway, Editor

logo: Signature Editions.

© 2018, Robert J. Young

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Doowah Design.

Photo of Robert J. Young by Stafford Studios.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Young, Robert J., 1942-, author

     Another spy for Paris / Robert J. Young.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77324-034-3 (softcover).

--ISBN 978-1-77324-035-0 (EPUB)

     I. Title.

PS8647.O77A83 2018      C813’.6     C2018-905158-2

        C2018-905159-0

Signature Editions

P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

www.signature-editions.com

For Kathryn

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Acknowledgments

About The Author

1

1940

THE NIGHT SKY threatened every man, not the dark but the light. Nearly midnight, nearly the fourteenth of May, the dirt road was brighter and more exposed than was healthy for soldiers in cautious retreat. In tacit alliance the stars and full moon conspired to make the way ahead easier, but more dangerous — easier to see, and be seen. Only periodic flashes from a cloudless northern sky interrupted nature’s silent silver glow, flashes accompanied by the rumblings of distant heavy weapons and tremors underfoot. All five kept to the unkempt grassy margins, their boots brushing up clouds of flying insects, their ears tuned solely to the frequency of explosions, deaf to the concerts of crickets and northern cicadas or the reedy bass solo of an occasional frog, eyes intent on the shallow ditch on either side of the rutted track and on the next best place to drop in the face of sudden fire. Best of all, 100 yards beyond the ditch and a narrow strip of rough-wired pastureland, a dense forest of oak and poplar arose, a promised safer haven for the quick of foot and the lucky.

It was still warm. All were in sweat-stained, badly soiled shirts. All were unshaven. All but one wore a khaki-coloured steel helmet, and every helmet bore the distinctive deflector crest of the French Army. That much they had in common. There the resemblance ended. One walked with a slight limp inflicted by a stone sent flying on the impact of a mortar shell. Another had a left arm lightly bandaged to cover a flesh wound left by a grazing round from somewhere. Only two had managed to come away with their knapsacks. Only three were armed, one with a German pistol tucked into his belt, the two others with older-style, bolt-action Berthier rifles. The last two, whose helmets bore the grenade insignia, had been part of the 55th Infantry Division. The helmets of the two unarmed men bore the crossed-cannon insignia of an artillery unit that had been positioned in the Marfée woods just behind the town of Sedan. The man with the Luger, bearing the two bars of a lieutenant, was all that remained of a machine-gun platoon that had been assigned to help defend the gunners, his two dozen comrades captured or dead.

This handful was exhausted after a day’s hard fighting, and embittered, humiliated, silenced by their defeat. Talk now would only invite excuses and therefore, by silent consensus, was ruled out of order. Besides, talk could have given away their exposed position, would have required too much effort, and assuredly would have been an exercise in futility. They had been brushed aside by a better led, better equipped enemy who had enjoyed the element of surprise, and who had taken full advantage of troops stunned and demoralized by hours of Stuka dive-bomber attacks. Three days were all it had taken for Hitler’s forces to reach and cross the river Meuse. Twelve hours later they had at least one panzer division fully across the water. That meant 500 tanks, supported by mobile artillery and motorized infantry. A little more than 100 miles from the outskirts of Paris.

Lieutenant Maurice Auriol, the sole officer, led the way, forcing the pace south and west, in the general direction of Rethel and the Ardennes Canal. Somewhere along this unplanned route he hoped to join up with other French units, hopefully some that were still intact and capable of resistance. In fact, he was busier than he looked — keeping one eye ahead and one behind for any sign of German troops, constantly fingering the Luger he had removed from a fallen German officer, a young captain from the 1st Panzer Division, and wondering if he would ever live to be reunited with the woman he had married the previous July. Behind him, ever silent, trailed his band of dejected followers, each of them thinking similar thoughts, knowing they had fought well, wondering why it had not been enough, and what was to become of them.

At dawn they had abandoned the road for the comparative safety inside the forest margin, which slowed their pace considerably. Auriol had permitted an hour’s rest at noon, during which they had heard tank engines to the north and east. That afternoon, they had passed through two villages whose residents had offered them food and water, but little to boost their morale. Some German units, the villagers reported, were already ahead of them — armoured cars and motorcycles, their drivers evidently scouting the terrain and demanding information about the condition of any roads leading north. It seemed odd, so one mayor remarked to Auriol, that the Boches seemed less interested in getting to Paris than in advancing north toward the English Channel.

Auriol understood at once. The Germans intended to take the left flank of the British and French armies from behind, rolling them back toward the sea. If successful, there would be precious little left with which the Allies might halt an ensuing advance into Paris. In all probability, he thought, the German command was conducting a similar manoeuvre to the southeast, hoping to separate the capital from the divisions that the French high command still held in reserve behind the fortresses of the Maginot Line. That meant that his own progress, southwesterly, sooner or later, was likely to take his pitiful little squad into the gun sights either of a secondary German assault force or those of a hastily formed, feverishly contrived French line of defence.

They pushed on. A few miles to the south of Rethel they encountered a French armoured column heading toward Neufchâtel in billowing clouds of dust. A mix of light H35 and H39 tanks, one or two brand new, twenty-ton SOMUA S35s, and a dozen twenty-eight-ton models of the B1 bis. By nightfall, Auriol and his men had been debriefed and accommodated in an army encampment two miles to the west of Neufchâtel. Within twenty-four hours each of them had been reassigned to new units. He and the two riflemen were to join an infantry division within General Touchon’s 6th Army.

The French armies along the Aisne were given a brief respite as the primary German push north to the Channel gathered steam. For the next two weeks day-by-day intelligence from land and air confirmed the German success in bottling up the Allied armies in the shrinking pocket around Dunkirk, and eventually the evacuation of the surviving forces in late May. And then the juggernaut turned west, and south. The main assault began on June 5. A day later the French 6th Army was forced to retreat to the south bank of the Aisne. Two days later the Germans took Soissons and forced the battered 6th further south, this time to take up new defensive positions on the Marne. Lieutenant Auriol found himself with a makeshift company of machine-gunners in a stronghold to the west of Château Thierry. About thirty miles from Paris.

On the twelfth his luck changed — for the worse. Two days earlier the Germans had renewed their pressure across all the sectors to the east of Paris. In the space of those two days Auriol’s detachment sustained heavy casualties, most of them inflicted by German field artillery. By the afternoon of the twelfth, there was nothing left to fight with. Shell holes marked the positions where hours earlier the heavy Hotchkiss machine guns had been positioned: holes, helmets, shattered gun barrels and shattered bodies. He could count three mortally wounded men. The rest were already dead, including all of the officers. He alone was unscratched. Incapable of doing anything more, he sat and pondered the miracle. Beside him lay his captain, faceless but otherwise unscathed, not a mark elsewhere. In a state of shock, his own face the colour of flour, his cheeks tear-soaked, Auriol began to chuckle at war’s absurdity. And the chuckle turned to a giggle, the giggle to a laugh, the laugh to a roar — not a sound of which he heard or comprehended. He resigned himself to silence and the dark.

It had been a mortar shell, the last to be delivered before German infantry had stormed the makeshift defences. He came to on a stretcher outside a field hospital, his right arm bare, except for a temporary dressing, blood still caked around the wrist. The pain was moderate. He looked up, above the black leather boots, the field grey trousers, the fastened pistol case at the hip, the binoculars dangling from the neck, the Boche helmet, the smoke rising above it. It was another faceless figure, a dark silhouette against a setting sun. Then the body turned, the face illuminated, and with it the cigarette and the suggestion of a smile.

Your men fought bravely, Lieutenant.

Auriol said nothing, struggling to regain full consciousness and to place the accented French.

After the last month of fighting we never know what to expect. Sometimes resistance has been halfhearted. Other times you’ve fought like lions. Today was such a time. A cigarette?

Auriol nodded, and was offered a Gitane from a familiar French package. I’m Captain Fritz Kunsel, he said as he lit the offering. Infantry, 86th Division. I was the one who found you. Tried to patch you up. There’s some shell fragments just below the shoulder, but our medical people will look after you. You were lucky. Your war’s over. They’ll probably ship you to a hospital for a week, then a camp. But I can’t think that’ll last longer than it takes your government to sue for peace. We should be in Paris within a day or two.

Auriol winced, mainly at the thought of Paris in German hands. Don’t be too sure of yourself, Captain, he said, more out of frustration and a natural obstinacy than conviction.

We’ll be there soon enough, Lieutenant, Kunsel replied, as he flicked away the remains of his cigarette. No more than three days, from the north, west, and east. Fact is you and the British didn’t stand much of a chance. Not against our panzer divisions and the Stukas. My God, don’t they howl! I swear they were dropping their bombs from 300 feet. No wonder a few of your units broke and ran. And I’ve got to admit that our intelligence was pretty good, for once. Word down here is that our HQ had a pile of inside information courtesy of a traitor in your defence ministry.

At that moment a doctor emerged from a nearby tent and approached the man on the stretcher. Doctor, Kunsel said, let me introduce you to a French lieutenant. Don’t know his name. We haven’t got around to that. Not much of a talker, I’m afraid. But he and his men fought as hard as any I’ve seen in France. They’re all dead but him. Look after him, will you? Good luck, Lieutenant. With that, Kunsel turned on his heel and moved off toward an eight-wheeled armoured command vehicle.

Two days later, on June 14, Captain Kunsel was among the first German soldiers to enter the French capital from the east. They encountered no resistance. On the orders of Paul Reynaud’s government, so recently moved to Bordeaux, the French Army had abandoned Paris in the hope of saving the exposed capital from merciless artillery and aerial bombardment. Two days later, Marshal Philippe Pétain replaced Reynaud as head of government. And on June 22 the new government agreed to an armistice. For most French men and women, the end of June 1940 marked an end to the war, for some permanently, for others temporarily, until new ways and new resources could be found to reverse the defeat and drive the Germans from the soil of France.

FRITZ KUNSEL HAD been relieved by the French decision not to make Paris a battleground, and not only because the decision would save the lives of his comrades. He had been a student on the Left Bank in 1932, at the venerable Sorbonne, and had revisited the city several times in the years running up to the war. He had once felt at ease here, but no longer. He had seen the shuttered windows all across the city, a passive but unmistakable signal that German soldiers were not welcome, that Parisians did not want to look upon them. And he had seen their faces when contact, even eye contact, could not be avoided. Not all felt this way, of course, not those who believed they had been saved from the Communists, not the dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites, not the bar owners or the brothel keepers who knew an opportunity when they saw one. But in those early weeks, when more than one military parade had been staged on the Champs-Élysées, he had seen too many looks, too many tears, too much disgust, not to know that he was seen as a conqueror. And hated for it.

2

1974

IT WAS MID-JANUARY and Paris had been bracing itself against a winter rainstorm. Two days of leaden skies, strong winds, and heavy showers had chilled and dampened whatever and whomever had been caught outdoors. Including virtually every Métro traveller, most of whom seemed moody as well as dishevelled. Occasionally, it was true, even underground there were flash reminders of sun, someone who had spent a Christmas vacation skiing in the Alps or Pyrenees, another whose bronzed features suggested two weeks on beaches in Tunisia. But everyone else in the swaying carriage had obviously stayed behind, neither warmed nor heartened by some stranger’s recent encounters with the sun, their own complexions pallid, their hair awry, their soles soaked, and their noses — many of them — buried in Le Figaro or Paris-Match or Le Canard enchaîné or yesterday’s Le Temps. Concentration, boredom, resolute self-isolation: it was hard to say what was behind the look. But it was not mirth or enthusiasm and it did not invite interruption.

Andrew Stanhope was content to speculate. Every day of the year, and at almost any hour, the Métro forced strangers together, in rush hours crammed them together, then in due course permitted them to leave, as strange to each other as when they had arrived. And in the early morning hours, before nine, even the more sociable guarded their privacy, constrained by the bleak weather above, by the bleak moods below, and by the prospect of yet another day’s dull labour. The truth was that he was a kindred spirit, perfectly content to remain insular, detached. He preferred the evening return, partly because it marked the end of another long day in the archives, but partly because he saw more elderly travellers at that hour, people who had to have been eye witnesses to a time which he could not remember and never knew. Never