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the strong desire to show in some way the heartfelt greeting silently offered by the Chief of State.’ When the Mass ended, Pétain went to the Hôtel de Ville nearby and mounted its balcony. For the first time during the occupation, the French flag was flying atop the main gable of Paris’s city hall. Below the 88-year-old Chief of State, thousands of Parisians were cheering. If critics saw Pétain’s first appearance in occupied Paris as a cynical ploy to demonstrate his popularity to the Americans and the Free French, Clara did not. As a loyal American, she yearned for an Allied victory, but her memoirs betray no comprehension of the reasons the victors would not share her enthusiasm for Vichy’s collaborators.

The clamour from the Hôtel de Ville attracted Alice-Leone Moats, who followed the throng to its source. ‘I imagine that since no one knew the Marshal was coming to Paris,’ she wrote, ‘a couple of hundred people were undoubtedly planted to attract the rest of the crowd. But the ovation was completely spontaneous.’ Moats thought most people had been drawn by the sight of the French flag and the singing of La Marseillaise, both verboten under German rule. German war losses in the East and the impending Allied invasion of France were, she observed, emboldening the Parisians. The next day, she heard music in the street and

tracked it down to a ragged old man who was working hard on a wheezy concertina. At first I couldn’t believe my ears, but as I listened I recognized the unmistakable strains of ‘The Marseillaise’. Playing the national anthem was absolutely forbidden, and yet he seemed to be getting away with it. No French person passed him without giving him some money. Similar old men were to be found in most of the metro stations, picking up a few francs by playing either ‘The Marseillaise,’ ‘God Save the King,’ or Sousa marches.

FORTY-TWO

The Maquis to Arms!

IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Dr Sumner Jackson and other résistants were sending more airmen and escaped prisoners back to Britain to fight the coming battle. American, British and Free French agents parachuted secretly into France to mobilize and train the Resistance for what the US army’s Plan Neptune called ‘wide-spread guerrilla activity by small bands of lightly armed Frenchmen operating in the enemy’s back areas’. In the countryside, diverse groups of communists, socialists, royalists, Catholics and petty criminals were fighting in the maquis. Maquis is a Corsican word, originally from the Italian macchia, meaning bush or scrubland. In Corsica, those who hid in the maquis were outlaws. In France, the maquis or maquisards called themselves patriots. To Vichy and the Germans, they were terroristes. Their operations included sabotaging rail lines, assassinating suspected collaborators, attacking German troops and, on occasion, mutilating their corpses. Whatever their politics or their methods, which were often brutal, they were being absorbed into the strategy of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to drive the Germans from France. They were the Allies’ fifth column behind German lines.

In common with many other members of the Resistance, Sumner and Toquette Jackson were helping to satisfy London’s growing appetite for information. In advance of a hazardous invasion, providing data on the enemy’s forces contributed more to the war effort than minor attacks on German outposts. Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and General Eisenhower pressed the Resistance for more and better intelligence on German air and coastal defences, train timetables, supply lines, weapons depots, fuel dumps and air bases. An urgent priority was to find Hitler’s ‘secret weapon’. The first inkling the Allies had of it came in a telegram from the Office of Strategic Services’ man in Berne, Allen Dulles, on 5 February 1943: ‘From German sources he considers reliable, [OSS Agent] 490 [German industrialist Walter Bovari] reports that the Germans are producing a secret weapon whose exact nature was not disclosed to him with the exception that [it] is a flying