In Europe

communists reinforced the groups in the Gard and Lozère. A British agent sent to help the Resistance at Villefranche-du-Périgord reported that his French was of no service to him there: the members of the group spoke only Spanish or Catalan.
    The growing hostility – in which the clergy played an important role – towards anti-Semitic measures provided a major stimulus for the Resistance. In many other ways the Catholic Church remained loyal to the Vichy regime, but in summer 1942 a bitter conflict arose concerning the treatment of the Jews. On 23 August, the elderly Bishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard Saliège, had a pastoral missive read aloud from the pulpits of his diocese, in which he roundly condemned the hounding of Jews: ‘Jews are men. Jews are women. They are a part of humanity. They are our brothers, like anyone else. A Christian may not forget that.’
    The letter caused a chain reaction: dozens of other bishops and church leaders followed his lead. An ecclesiastical resistance group began smuggling Jewish children out of Vénissieux, one of the worst transit camps, close to Lyons. A totally new source of resistance arose in this way: Catholics who sympathised in principle with Pétain but could no longer reconcile their consciences to the burgeoning manhunt by Vichy and the Germans. They arranged countless hiding places for Jews and others on the run, they provided food and protection, and gradually many of them came to join the armed resistance. The Protestants, who enjoyed a long tradition of resistance, had gone into action much earlier. Many Jewish families were given shelter in Protestant villages in the Cevennes, often with the tacit approval of the entire community.
    During that same summer of 1942, André Gaillard and eight others set up their own combat group. They destroyed German lines of communication, took in Allied pilots who had been shot down and kept watch on all German activities in ‘their’ zone. ‘Almost everything happened in this house,’ Lucienne Gaillard told me. ‘Pilots, weapons, the wounded, everything.’ Wasn't she ever afraid? ‘Not at all. It was an ecstatic time, we all found it equally exciting.’ She gave me an overview of what their group did; I cite here only those actions which took place between August and December 1943.
    On 3 August, her father and his men blew up a rocket launcher.
    On 23 August, they derailed a German transport train; the Germans in their zone were always busy reinforcing the coastline in connection with a possible invasion.
    On the night of 23 October they blew up a troop transport headed to Russia, causing great losses of men and equipment.
    On 28 October they sabotaged the Paris-Calais line, causing a train full of troops and war materials to fly off the rails at top speed.
    On 11 November – using pinpoint information from French railway personnel – they derailed another military train on the same line. They were pleased with the effects of these attacks, because they blocked German reinforcements for days and produced quite a few casualties and a permanent loss of German materials.
    On 16 November, a huge load of flax that had been confiscated by the Germans was burned.
    On the night of 10 December, with the help of the local police sergeant, they freed two Resistance fighters from the gendarmerie in Gamaches, just before they were to be transferred to the Gestapo prison at Abbeville.
    On 16 December, they blew up a munitions train; when a German backup train arrived the next day, they pulled the engineer out of the engine, set full throttle and let the unmanned train crash at full speed into the wreck of the artillery transport they had derailed the day before.
    On 28 December they blockaded the rails again, causing the crash of an engine and four carriages.
    By 1944, André Gaillard's little group of amateurs had developed into an experienced guerrilla company of the
Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur
(FFI), with 7 officers, 22 non-commissioned officers and 160 soldiers. They now formed part of one large army: the Free French Forces, who fought alongside the Allies in Africa and Italy and the various Resistance groups, of the left and of the right, within France itself.
    In the end, eighteen men and women from this group in Picardy – a group likes hundreds of others in France – were killed. Two of them died before the firing squad, six others were killed in skirmishes and fifteen were sent to concentration camps. Only ten