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One of the few Americans to see the network first-hand was Alice-Leone Moats, the New York Herald Tribune’s correspondent in Madrid. In late April 1944, contacts in the French Resistance took her over the mountains on foot and donkey into occupied France with the same guides who were taking Allied airmen out. She discovered that the Resistance operations chief along the border was a French customs police captain whom his colleagues called ‘Monsieur Frontière’. His colleagues were the smugglers he would have arrested in peacetime. ‘Nothing, of course, could have been more incongruous than a customs guard working hand in glove with smugglers,’ Moats wrote. ‘Monsieur Frontière’ had pockets filled with French identity cards and gave one to her ‘that someone with very poor eyesight might possibly have mistaken for a picture of me. It described me as a “Marchande de frivolité .”’

The customs captain took her to Pau, where she saw her first German soldier. ‘I stopped short, staring at him,’ she wrote. ‘He wore a grayish green uniform that looked as though it might have been taken off a dead man. His blouse was open at the collar to display a red, weather-beaten neck. All the German soldiers I saw went without shirts, and their clothes were invariably of bad quality. Only their boots were good.’ In Pau, she met two remarkable women, whom she identified only as Jane and Rosemary. Jane was English, and Rosemary was an American married to a Frenchman. Both ‘were directly connected only with the section of the Underground which made the arrangements for the Allied flyers to escape’. They told her that, in Paris alone, 500 airmen were waiting to leave.

Usually the men traveled in groups of four with a Frenchman or -woman acting as convoy. When a foursome left Paris, word would be sent ahead. That was where Rosemary and Jane came into the picture. Their job was to find somewhere to put the flyers up in Pau and see that they got out as quickly as possible. Getting quarters for them was the real problem. Jane’s flat was too small and too centrally located to be of any use. Rosemary’s house was out of the question … her husband knew nothing about her connection with the Underground.

Rosemary took Alice-Leone to a small hotel, ‘run by two extraordinary old maids’, where American airmen were hiding in the attic. ‘Not daring to knock,’ Miss Moats recalled, ‘we just opened the door. Three men lying in bed sat up, eyes popping with terror. “It’s all right,” Rosemary said. “We’re Americans.”’ The ‘boys’, as she called them, were wary, because police had raided the hotel that morning. They had not moved from the attic since. The women gave them Lucky Strike cigarettes.

‘Gee,’ one of the boys exclaimed. ‘I didn’t even know they made these things any more! We’ve been rolling our own ever since we’ve been in this country. None of us is very good at it’ … We asked them if they had had any narrow escapes. One, a snub-nosed kid from Texas, answered, ‘Well, at Toulouse there were police at the station asking everybody for identification papers. We just showed them our American cards, and they handed them right back without batting an eyelash. They were French, of course. Still, it was a terrible moment. I don’t like these French trains. I tell you, I’d rather go on ten bombing missions over Berlin than to take that train ride from Paris to Toulouse again.’

Jane and Rosemary told Alice-Leone about a downed fighter pilot named Carlow, whom they suspected of being a German spy. When Carlow arrived in Pau, he told Jane he had flown 100 missions. ‘To begin with,’ Rosemary explained, ‘they’re never supposed to go on more than twenty-five, and although I’ve passed about seventy flyers, I’ve never had one who had been on more than thirteen missions.’ Carlow was the first airman who claimed to have flown a fighter plane. All the others had been on bombers, usually B-17s. Having been out of the United States for many years and uncertain of contemporary American