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was given a rare interview with three Resistance leaders in a small Left Bank apartment, ‘which smelled strongly of cabbage’. One was a lawyer, one a professor and the third a writer. She was not told their names. ‘The lawyer was quite extraordinary looking,’ she wrote. ‘He had a very young, strong face topped with a thick head of white hair. His skin was as white as paper and his eyes were such a light shade of gray that they made scarcely any contrast with his face. I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I first saw him; there was something uncanny about him, an air of sadness and weariness such as I had never seen before. I thought, he’s been hunted.’ The Germans were offering a reward of four million francs for his capture. Her Resistance contact assured her that the three middle-aged men ‘were more adventurous and fool-hardy than any young hotheads he knew’. She asked them whether Charles de Gaulle would take over France when the liberation came. ‘We all admire what he did in 1940,’ the writer said. ‘He was the one who came to the fore and raised the tricolor in the name of freedom. That can never be forgotten, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is the right man for France in peacetime. Even the greatest army officers seldom make good statesmen. It doesn’t follow that because a man is a genius on the battlefield, he will be a genius on the floor of parliament.’

What, she wondered, did younger résistants want after the war? ‘They will want a big share in the country they helped liberate,’ the lawyer said. ‘When it’s refused them, as it no doubt will be for practical reasons, they will, of course, turn to communism.’ Her last question was about the propaganda that the Allies sent daily into France by radio and on leaflets dropped from the sky. The lawyer responded wearily that ‘the only propaganda that gets results is a victory’.

That night, Alice-Leone Moats left Paris on the train to Toulouse. On 5 May, she was back at the border for her return hike into the Spanish mountains. She reached Madrid on 8 May and the next day filed the first American journalist’s story from Paris in two and a half years. But the Spanish censor blocked it. She went to the Foreign Ministry, where four Spanish diplomats politely explained that, while they admired her courage, they could not allow her to send her report from Spain. The Germans would object. She offered to file the story from Lisbon, and they agreed that would be the perfect solution. While she waited for a Portuguese visa, a British Embassy military attaché invited her to brief him on the pilots’ escape routes and what might be done to improve them. The American Embassy was not interested. When she reached Lisbon and sent her stories to both the New York Herald Tribune and Collier’s Weekly, the US Embassy there demanded the right to censor a broadcast she was about to make for CBS Radio. It also confiscated her American passport. Exhausted by her dangerous journey to Occupied France, the long treks over the Pyrenees and her battle with her own embassy, Alice-Leone Moats took the Pan Am Clipper home to New York. In the book she wrote immediately on her return, she called her last chapter, ‘It Was Worth It’.

FORTY-THREE

Résistants Unmasked

GENERAL KARL OBERG intensified the hunt for the networks sending information to the Allies. If losing the secret plans for the V-1 was a defeat for German intelligence, the Gestapo had successes to offset it. Oberg’s agents had captured Jean Moulin, the incorruptible leader of Charles de Gaulle’s Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. In June 1943, Moulin was betrayed, tortured and executed. Oberg had decapitated not one Resistance network, but the umbrella under which almost every network was fighting. Immediately after Moulin’s capture, the OSS was forced to order that ‘all general meetings even among [Resistance] section groups should be forbidden’. German penetration was disrupting the Resistance and reducing its usefulness to the Allies. A month after Moulin’s execution, the Germans broke up the Oaktree escape network that