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Ausweis of 1 October 1942, a letter from Fernand de Brinon supporting the pipeline and his cadre de mission from Laval. Murphy forwarded all three to the State Department. A few days after this interview, Bedaux invited Murphy and American Consul General Felix Cole to the Hôtel Aletti for lunch with his engineers and project managers. Among those who discussed the pipeline with the diplomats were Fernand de Brinon’s Jewish stepson, Pierre-Jérôme Ullmann, Charles Emile Bedaux, purser Georges Rimailho, a former French African military governor named Colonel Pivain and Albert Giran, until recently an official of the Trans-Saharan Railway. They explained that the survey was divided into two groups: one from Marrakesh to the River Niger along the proposed pipeline route, the other into the Sahara to study the best means of conveying water to the men who would build the line. Murphy did not, in any of his correspondence to the State Department, indicate that he attempted to dissuade Bedaux from the endeavour.

Bedaux had the impression that French and American officials supported him. ‘Here opinions are divided as to our real purpose,’ Bedaux wrote to Fern, who was waiting for him at Candé, ‘but it seems to become clear that a pipeline is so logical to wipe out the Sahara as an obstacle that Algiers should now commit suicide for not having thought of it forty years earlier–it takes time for all babies to learn to walk.’ He also cabled his New York secretary, Isabella Waite, ‘I am on the right side. Doing good work. Why isn’t Ledebur here?’ Although his son was with him, he and the boy he had hardly known as a child were still not close. Frederic Ledebur remained the son he wished he had, and he wanted him on his greatest adventure.

Murphy saw Bedaux again on 5 November. Bedaux passed along a message from the French director of Port Etienne in Mauretania that he would welcome the arrival of the American fleet in West Africa. He also gave him marine charts of the coast around Port Etienne, which could be of use to American ships. If Vichy and the Germans had known Bedaux provided Murphy with this intelligence, they could legitimately have accused him of spying for the United States.

In France, Gaston awaited news of his brother: ‘The last word we received from him was a telegram that protested against the late supply of certain deliveries.’ Bedaux, with his son and his engineers, finalized the plans in his suite at the Hôtel Aletti. They set the start date of their Saharan expedition for 15 November.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Americans Go to War

DRUE TARTIÈRE WAS RECEIVING HELP from the Vittel camp gynaecologist, a Jewish physician named Dr Jean Lévy, in convincing the Germans that she had ovarian cancer and needed treatment in Paris. Dr Lévy had been reluctant at first, telling Drue, ‘You must realize the position they have me in, with my old father locked up, and the rest of my family potential hostages.’ As Dr Lévy fell in with her plan, he gave her drugs to increase haemorrhaging. Heavy bleeding would help to convince the other doctors she was gravely ill. While examining her in the presence of his Scottish assistant, Dr Monteith, he said, ‘Very bad, very bad.’ The key was to persuade the camp’s chief physician, Dr von Weber, that she was not faking. ‘He’s a brute,’ Dr Lévy explained, ‘a regular Prussian, but he knows absolutely nothing about a woman’s insides and he asked for my diagnosis.’ When von Weber examined Drue, she wrote, ‘He treated me politely, but he treated Dr. Lévy, because he was a Jew, as if he were some kind of reptile. It was hard to keep my temper in his presence, but I did, for I would lose everything if I lost that.’ They told von Weber that Drue needed X-ray treatments, which were not available in the camp. But von Weber wanted to operate and insisted she remain for more observation.

Jean Fraysse, Drue’s friend and Resistance commander, came all the way across France from Barbizon to visit her at Vittel. Tired from a long journey that he made without papers and in constant danger of arrest, Fraysse sobbed