Review: Love and War in the Pyrenees; A Story of Courage, Fear and Hope, 1939-1944 — Rosemary Bailey

“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless”.

Walter Benjamin

“Every person I knew who was saved during the war was saved solely by the grace of someone who, at a time of great danger, extended a hand to him. It was no God that we saw in the camps, but good people. The old Jewish saying that the world continues to exist only by the virtue of a few righteous people is as true today as it was back then.

Aaron Applefield, The Story of a Life

For well over thirty years now I have been a regular visitor to the South West of France, sometimes rambling over mountains and pathways and sometimes, well, just rambling. Spend any time in this part of the world and you will get fascinated by the Second World War and by the role played by the Resistance — or the Marquis — in the struggle for freedom and for the subsequent liberation.

The trouble is that it is very difficult — and I mean very difficult — to get people to talk about those times. Everywhere around you evidence of the struggle remains. There are the war memorials dedicated to those who fell in the insurgency for freedom. There are the bars and cafés associated with the struggle, and sometimes called Resistance or Marquis, but that’s often it.

While local people may still not want to talk about things that much the tourist often comes up against the most monumental of reminders. For example, high in the South West, near to Limoges, is the village of Oradour sur Glane. In the dying months of the war Nazis rolled into town, rounded up the population in the local church and machine gunned them all (save for a few witnesses who managed to escape). No one is really sure of the reasons for this massacre. It might have been a reprisal for the work of the Resistance bands who hid in the caves of the limestone hills of the area or there might have been some problem with stolen treasure. Or Oradour might simply have been mistaken for somewhere else. Events like this happened during the last years of the war. What makes Oradour special is that the village has been left just as it was the moment that the Nazis strolled into the village. The Doctor’s car lies exactly where it was, outside of the building to which he was making a house call. Everywhere there is evidence of time stopping. Oradour has been preserved as a memorial to war and is worth visiting. In its own way it is every bit as powerful as a visit to the more famous concentration camps.

I made my first visit to Oradour while staying with a friend who was then living in the heart of the sleepy Domme valley. That night I talked to his farming neighbours. This old couple could remember the war. This part of the SW was under the control of Vichy France. They really were reluctant to talk about things. “Life around here really was no different”. In this part of La France Profonde you don’t have to go back to far to find a time when les etrangers .was used to describe people from the next valley. But even so it seemed odd to find the Resistance so badly remembered. In all of my French travels I have only really found one place that paid proper tribute to this struggle — a museum to the Resistance hidden away deep in Brittany.

While much of the South West was in the hands of the Vichy government this was the one area of France that liberated itself. While the allies made their way from the North it was the bands of Resistance men and women of the mountains who liberated their own homeland and I’ve always been fascinated by them. There’s not even that much written about the era and what there is around is heavy and historical, often plagued with the major differences between Gaullist, Communist and other bands of Resistance fighters.

Readers of this blog have met Rosemary Bailey before. Twenty years ago Bailey came to live in the Eastern Pyrenees, under the shadow of the Canigou mountain, buying and restoring an old monastery. She wrote about the project — and of those who had lived in the monastery in her book Life is a Postguard. Next she produced a great history of the romantic Pyrenean explorer Henry Russell-Killough which chartered the origins of the present day love for walking the mountains of the Pyrenees. Bailey was not a mountain walker and yet in Russell she recognised something special and in writing his history has given those of us that are mountain fanatics something of wonder and pleasure.

Bailey is no historian, but she too has been fascinated by the history of the area and the reluctance of people to open up about their true experiences. She was sensitive enough to realise that even many years later the memories and experiences of the area are too raw to talk about. Yet Bailey was still able to live in a time where there were many who had lived through — and could well remember — these days.

Bailey’s Love and War project began with the discovery of a box of letters, written by the young Doctor Pierre and his wife Amélie who had bought the monastery that she herself lived in. Like Bailey and her partner this young couple had dreamed of carving out an idyllic life in this most magnificent of spots. They would grow their vegetables, herd their livestock and raise their family in the shadow of the great Canigou. Unlike the Baileys this families life was torn apart by the war. Pierre was called up to work behind the maginot line but was soon walking south again after the Nazi invasion. Pierre did manage to return home and to build something of a reasonable life but was sadly killed, doing his rounds, when his motorbike flew off the side of a mountain path.

Bailey was fascinated by the letters. The war was the context in which most of them was written and yet still they didn’t really give a great insight into life at that time. So Bailey set out to do more research on her predecessors and — luckily for us — these developed into a full scale history of the Pyrenees during he war years.

There is much here to read and admire not least because Bailey’s style is not that of an academic historian, rather one of an interested and caring human being.

The account starts with the Spanish Civil War, the first important part of the forgotten story. As Franco’s forces pushed east the communists and anarchists of Catalonia were forced over the mountain passes to seek sanctuary in France. The exodus represented a true refugee crisis, the largest that had been seem in Western Europe during the twentieth century. The refugees were not always welcome indeed many of them were forced to live in ‘concentration camps’, poor, sub standard buildings that were built on the long flat beaches of Argeles and the surrounding area. Conditions were harsh and terrible and men, women and families separated, the men being sent North to work as a source of cheap labour.

As war proper descended on France the camps continued to ‘flourish’ although now with other purposes. Many of the Spanish were considered still to be dangerous as they were communists and fighters against fascism. Their numbers in the camps were joined by Jews and other political opponents of both Petain and the Nazis. New, frightening, camps were built including the infamous Rivesaltes prison near Perpignon.

Bailey charts the struggles well. There are the Jewish communities and intellectuals fleeing south aiming to find sanctuary in Spain. Then there is the wonderful humanitarian work done by pacifists such as the Quakers, many of the German, who looked to create sanctuary and community in the relative protection of the mountains. As the war deepens Bailey traces the escape routes and the operations that aimed to smuggle both the oppressed and allied troops out of the country. The Spanish Guides who led their compatriots out of Spain and across the Pyrenees to freedom were now guiding the escapees back over those same paths back towards the relative neutrality of Spain.

There is so much here all of it written with a humanity that is often rare in true works of history. There are those who risked their lives to build the escape routes, others who covertly built up the escape networks and those of subsequently became the insurgents. Their are people such as the Catalan musician Casals living in constant danger but cared for by his Catalan neighbours. There are the Resistance heroes, those who liberated their land and others who have never forgotten the evils that were done there.

Bailey, then, covers the full ‘war’ from the Spanish War to Liberation. In her own words she was lucky to be embarking on this project at a time when many of those who had lived through the turmoil were ready to put down their experiences on record. But while Bailey was in the right time and place to produce this book there is nothing lucky about its achievement.

I could go on and on but that would be to impact on the experience of taking in the full scope of the work. If you are interested in the war, or just curious about the area and the people’s who live there, then this is a book that should not be missed.

In some ways Love and War reminds me of the work of Gillian Tindall, particularly the bookCelestine — also written after the chance discovery of letters between ordinary people made anonymous by the passing of time. Tindall’s historical works are made all the more powerful by their connection with real people and the telling of their life stories. With ‘Love and War’ Bailey is producing work that is equally as powerful as Tindall’s and in my book I can make no greater compliment!

After years of wandering — and wondering — Bailey has given me what I’ve been searching for. Thank you Rosemary. I look forward to the next book with eager anticipation.