Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 5

"Under those conditions, I and others at Mot, the entire top echelon, couldn't help but resist," said Mot's commercial director, Claude Fourmon.

De Voge himself headed the political wing of the Resistance in the eastern region of France. In the early stages of the war, he had argued against an armed resistance that could endanger innocent lives. As the war ground on, however, his feelings began to change and he welcomed the Resistance into Mot's twenty-four kilometers of cellars. "At the very least," said his son Ghislain, "my father turned a blind eye to sabotage and subterfuge, and to tampering with champagne and its s.h.i.+pment."

On November 24, 1943, Robert-Jean de Voge asked his cousin Rene Sabbe to serve as translator for a meeting he and Claude Fourmon were scheduled to have with Klaebisch. Because the recently completed harvest had been so small-and so good-they were hoping to persuade Klaebisch to reduce the amount of champagne he was planning to requisition.

Shortly after they arrived, the telephone rang in an office next to Klaebisch's. A young officer interrupted the meeting to tell the weinfhrer that the call was for him. Klaebisch excused himself. Within minutes he was back and sat down at his desk, crossing his arms over his potbelly.

"Gentlemen," he said, "that was the Gestapo. You are all under arrest." On cue, several officers with pistols drawn burst through the door and took the three men into custody.

"We were completely stupefied," Fourmon later recalled. "De Voge had just persuaded Klaebisch to let houses sell more champagne to French civilians. I don't know exactly what triggered the call but I think the Gestapo wanted to take de Voge out of the line of command."

De Voge's first reaction was "Let Fourmon go; he knows nothing." He also pleaded for the release of Sabbe, saying he was there only to translate. De Voge's appeals were to no avail.

All three were charged with obstructing the trade demands of the Germans and imprisoned. Sabbe was released a few days later because of his age, but Fourmon was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany.

De Voge was sentenced to death.

The sentence sent shock waves through Champagne. For the first time in history, the entire industry-growers and producers, labor and management-went on strike. Klaebisch was stunned and, at first, did not know what to do. He branded the strike an "act of terrorism" and warned that force would be used unless it ended immediately. The Champenois ignored him and stepped up their protest.

In the face of such unprecedented action, Klaebisch seemed paralyzed. Calling out troops, he feared, could result in even greater unrest and force the Germans to take over the production of champagne, something he knew they were ill prepared to do.

There was something else Klaebisch feared as well: the spotlight. The last thing he wanted to do was to call attention to himself, especially now when everything seemed to be falling apart. To make matters worse, his brother-in-law and mentor, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had fallen out of favor, and Klaebisch could all too easily picture himself suddenly freezing with other German soldiers on the Russian front.

After more fruitless appeals to the Champenois to end their protest, Klaebisch and the Germans gave in. They agreed to "suspend" de Voge's sentence but said they were only doing so because he had five children. Instead, he was put in prison.

Despite his clashes with de Voge, this was not what Klaebisch had expected or wanted. "I can well imagine Klaebisch was uncomfortable with my father's arrest," Ghislain de Voge said. "I suspect he was just obeying orders he had been given."

But punishment of the champagne industry had only begun. Champagne houses which had supported the strike were hauled before a military tribunal and given a choice. They could pay a heavy fine, 600,000 francs (about one and a half million francs in today's currency), or the head of each house could spend forty days in prison. Nearly all paid the fine.

Mot & Chandon suffered the worst. "They decapitated Mot," Claude Fourmon later said. Nearly all of the top management was sent to prison or concentration camps.

Hoping to discourage further disobedience and justify their crackdown against Mot, Klaebisch and other German authorities produced a propaganda film. It showed faked cases of Mot & Chandon champagne being seized and opened, all of them filled with rifles and other weapons. The film was distributed to movie theaters throughout France and Germany. The Germans also forced French newspapers to run an article saying de Voge had been helping "terrorists."

Within a few months, the German Occupation Authority had completely taken over the running of Mot. The man they put in charge was Otto Klaebisch.

In many ways, the weinfhrers accomplished exactly what the Third Reich wanted. They helped stop the pillaging, restored order and supplied Germany with an extremely lucrative product. More than two and a half million hectoliters of wine, the equivalent of 320 million bottles, were s.h.i.+pped to Germany each year.

More important, the weinfhrers mitigated a situation that could have resulted in far worse consequences for France. They served as a buffer for a battle that raged within the German leaders.h.i.+p over how to deal with France, between n.a.z.is like Gring who wanted to "smash and grab" and treat France like a conquered country and those who favored a less ruthless approach, incorporating France into a German-dominated new Europe and "providing it with a little fodder" so it could be milked for all it was worth.

Above all, the weinfhrers recognized the economic and symbolic importance of France's wine industry and did all in their power to make sure it survived. It was for their benefit too, for they realized that when the war ended and they returned home to their businesses, it was essential to have someone-namely, the French-to do business with again.

While the war continued, however, and especially as it began turning against Germany, most people in France became convinced that the best guarantee of survival was to rely on themselves, not on the weinfhrers and certainly not on Petain's Vichy government, which was becoming more fascist by the day. That meant finding unconventional methods and having the courage to bend or break established rules.

As Janet Flanner predicted when the war first began, "Owing to the Germans' mania for systematic looting-for collecting and carting away French bed linen, machinery, Gobelin tapestries, surgical instruments, milk, mutton, sweet champagne-the French will have to become a race of liars and cheats in order to survive physically."

FOUR.

Hiding, Fibbing and Fobbing Off STATIONMASTER HENRI GAILLARD WAS sweating.

For nearly a year he had put up with the German occupation, and it had caused him one headache after another. His salary was late; money for his staff never got to the station of St. Thibault on time; one package after another was getting lost. He dutifully filled out the forms the Occupation Authority in Dijon sent him, and answered their never-ending questions about what his train station was doing.

But now he faced a lot more than a bureaucratic headache: his job was on the line-and maybe more than that.

This morning, when he came into work at his station in Burgundy, he heard the bad news. A train had derailed in his section because a switch had been thrown the wrong way, and now the entire contents of that train were missing. And not just any contents. The train had been filled with the best wines of Burgundy, all of it destined for Germany and for people Henri shuddered to think about-Gring, Himmler, maybe the Fhrer himself. What was he going to do?

Only days before, Henri had confidently asked his German boss in the Occupation Authority, the commandant of the 3rd Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt of Dijon, for a pa.s.s to cross the Demarcation Line to visit his daughter in Lyon, who was about to have a baby. He had hoped to get permission so he would be there right after the baby's birth. It was his first grandchild, after all, and he had reminded the commandant that he still had one week of vacation remaining. He also pointed out that he was a World War I veteran who had been decorated (perhaps not the best thing to say to someone who was on the losing side of that conflict).

What would the Germans do now? Henri wondered. Would he get to Lyon? Lose his job? End up in prison?

Dipping his pen in the official brown ink, Henri Gaillard nervously began his report: STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION, CTE D'OR, BURGUNDY: I have the honor to inform you that there has been an accident on the St. Thibault railroad line. This is the first time anything like this has ever happened since I was placed in charge several years ago. I have absolutely no idea what could have happened to the contents of the cars. I apologize most humbly for the inconvenience and sincerely hope this will not reflect badly on my character or career. Your most respectful servant, Henri Gaillard.

If Gaillard did not know what had happened to the wine, he was probably the only one who did not. All along the railroad lines of France, farmers, winegrowers, and especially railroad workers, or cheminots, were systematically stripping railway cars full of goods bound for Germany.

"It was almost a sport," said Jean-Michel Chevreau, a Loire Valley winemaker. "Our favorite amus.e.m.e.nt was cheating the Germans."

Chevreau's "cheating" began in July 1940 after a troop of German soldiers, pa.s.sing through his village, insisted on spending the night in his wine cellar. The next morning, after they were gone, Chevreau discovered that more than a hundred bottles were missing. He decided to get even.

A few nights later, he and some friends armed with jerry cans and rubber hoses slipped out after curfew and made their way to the railway station in nearby Amboise where the Germans were loading barrels of wine destined for Germany. When the guards were looking the other way, they quickly and quietly siphoned all the wine from the barrels, an exercise they repeated over the course of several weeks until authorities in Berlin began complaining that the barrels arriving there were empty. Officials in Amboise promptly posted more guards around the loading area of the train station. They also put floats in the barrels so they could tell if they were full.

But that did not stop Chevreau and his friends. "We continued siphoning, then filled the barrels with water," he said, laughing.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: Please let me know what you would like me to do with the large container of wine barrels that has arrived here. The barrels are all empty. I remain your most respectful servant, Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.

Chevreau and others throughout the country were engaged in a special kind of resistance-not the Resistance but one that Janet Flanner called "hiding, fibbing and fobbing off." Not only were enormous quant.i.ties of wine hidden from the Germans, but the French, according to Flanner, also "patriotically lied about the quality of the stuff they delivered to the enemy who ordered vintage Burgundies and ignorantly accepted piquette (thin, tart wine unfit for sale)." They also "fobbed off" watered-down wines and brandy to their conquerors, selling them diluted grands crus, watery champagne and "60-proof eau-de-vie in place of the 80-proof cognac they had paid for."

In Champagne, producers bottled their worst wines and marked them "Special Cuvee for the Wehrmacht." They then added insult to injury by using poor-quality corks that normally would have been thrown away. When the Germans arrived to investigate a firm they thought was cheating them, the management, according to writer Patrick Forbes, "would be terribly, terribly sorry, but a pipe had burst or the river Marne had risen, and not wis.h.i.+ng to mess up their beautiful s.h.i.+ny jackboots in a flooded cellar, the Germans-with luck-would go away. Not that they ever displayed much enthusiasm for visiting the enormous chalk and limestone caves where champagne houses stored their wine: they were afraid of meeting the fate of Fortunato, the hero of Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado,' who was walled up alive in the eerie catacombs of the Montresors."

Much of the "hiding, fibbing and fobbing off" was the result of lessons learned from earlier wars. After the battle of Waterloo, Prussian troops pillaged cellars throughout Champagne. Before they left, some scratched their names and a few dankeshn as well as some less polite graffiti on the walls.

In World War I, it happened again, but this time the Germans were not the only culprits. French troops en route to the front also helped themselves to numerous cases of champagne. Among them was a young soldier who would later become one of France's most famous performers. When Maurice Chevalier later recalled that moment, he laughed about it. "It was almost a patriotic act," he said. "We felt, 'That's a few less for the Prussians!' "

Often, the Germans made it easy for the French to cheat. "They were incredibly sloppy when they placed orders for wine," chuckled Alsace's Johnny Hugel. "We'd get a piece of paper saying send ten thousand bottles to such and such a place, but they never designated precisely which wine they wanted, so we would always send our worst, like the 1939, which was absolute rubbish. If the Germans hadn't arrived, we would still have that vintage unsold in our cellars."

Some winegrowers and producers deliberately misread and misdirected orders so that the Wehrmacht's wine, for instance, ended up in Homburg instead of Hamburg.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I have the honor to inform you that I have received several large wine containers with unreadable labels. Although the destination appears to be St. Thibault, it does not specify which St. Thibault. No merchant in the area recognizes the name of the sender. Waiting for a useful response from you, I am your servant, Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.

One of the most unusual examples of how winegrowers tried to protect their wines from the Germans during World War I took place in Bordeaux. The owner of a chteau, upon learning that the Kaiser's troops were heading in his direction, elected to hide his precious bottles in a pond on his property. All went smoothly until the following morning, when one of the officers billeted at the chteau decided to go for a stroll around the pond. Peering across the ornamental water, he suddenly stopped, his eyes widening in amazement. There, on the surface of the water, was a sea of floating labels.

By World War II, French winegrowers had come up with a few new twists. Andre Foreau, a winemaker from Vouvray, buried his best bottles under the beans, tomatoes and cabbages of his vegetable garden. Foreau's brother-in-law Gaston Huet used the natural caves of the Loire Valley to hide his stocks of wine. Then he planted weeds and bushes in front of the caves to conceal their entrances.

Nevertheless, the winemakers of Vouvray were worried when they learned a contingent of German troops was headed their way and planning to spend the night. But Mayor Charles Vava.s.seur, himself a winegrower, had an idea. He went to an artist friend and asked him to try his hand at forgery. Together, they produced some very official-looking papers, saying all the wine of Vouvray had been "reserved for the Wehrmacht." When a representative of the Occupation Authority arrived to make the arrangements for the German soldiers, Vava.s.seur showed him the "official" doc.u.ments and explained that the only places large enough to hold all the troops were the wine caves. "Of course you can put them there," Vava.s.seur said, "but, well, I cannot guarantee that the soldiers will not touch the Wehrmacht's wine. I can only hope they will emerge sober in the morning." The German official decided it was best to find another place for the men to sleep.

Such foresight did not prevail in Aloxe-Corton, where another contingent of soldiers stayed overnight. "They helped themselves to a lot of bottles from my cellar," recalled Daniel Senard, a Burgundy winegrower, whose house had been requisitioned by the Germans. Senard had hidden most of his better wines but purposely left a few in plain sight. "We couldn't hide everything," he said. "If we did, the Germans would have become suspicious. As it was, they probably would have taken more of my wine if they hadn't discovered something else." That "something else" was a cache of stoneware bottles filled with a clear liquid, which the soldiers thought was gin, bottled in the traditional Dutch manner.

"They began consuming it with great enthusiasm," Senard recalled with a chuckle, for it was not gin the Germans were drinking, but purgative water, eau-de-Santenay, a powerful laxative. "It was the sort of thing everyone's grandmother kept on hand 'to clear the system.' " That night, the courtyard was unusually full of soldiers coming and going, exchanging the goose step for the green-apple quick step.

According to an American writer who was in France at the time, the Germans "had the feeling that they were constantly being tricked and laughed at."

In Alsace, for instance, when the Germans heard that the Hugels owned a pig named Adolf, they dispatched several soldiers to the family's house. When the soldiers arrived, they found the gardener at work and the pig dozing nearby. The officer in charge approached. "You," he said menacingly, "what were you thinking about when you named this pig Adolf?" The old gardener, however, was not intimidated and did not miss a beat. "Why do you ask?" he replied. "What are you thinking?" The officer, embarra.s.sed, was at a loss for words. He turned and led his men away.

Even in Paris, when the Germans went out to dinner in the poshest restaurants, they often felt something was being put over on them. Were they getting what they ordered? Was that vintage bottle of wine the real thing? Although the Germans were suspicious, they had no way of knowing that a number of restaurants had indeed hatched a deal to disguise their wine. It was done with the help of a very special carpet company.

Chevalier's was a chic carpet firm that had been in business for generations. It bought and sold only the finest carpets, such as antique Aubussons and high-quality Persians. When a valuable carpet needed cleaning, even one from a museum, it usually went to Chevalier's. Although no one seems to remember who came up with the idea, someone decided the dust was too good to throw away. Some of it came from carpets that were centuries old and had never been cleaned. Before long Chevalier's was bundling up sacks of ancient dust and distributing it to some of Paris's best restaurants. There, it would be sprinkled on bottles of cheap young wine to make them look old and rare. The bottles would then be presented to German clients who thought they were getting something extraordinary.

Like restaurant owners in Paris, Madame Gombaud of Chteau Loudenne in Bordeaux was determined that the Germans would not get what they wanted. When she learned that the Germans were planning to use part of the chteau for a brothel, she was furious. She rushed outside to the farm buildings and began gathering rat droppings, which she then distributed liberally throughout the chteau, particularly in the bedrooms.

A few days later, a German inspection team arrived to make a final a.s.sessment. It did not take long for them to decide that the brothel idea was not a good one, and it was soon dropped.

"We knew certain things were going on," one German officer later recalled. "We knew, for instance, that winemakers were building walls and hiding their wine behind them. We absolutely knew they were being built, but we didn't have time to check everyone's cellar."

Clearly, they did not have time to knock down the cobwebs that disguised the new wall in Maurice Drouhin's wine cellar. Nor did they have time to dismantle the woodpile that concealed the freshly built wall at the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. And it certainly would have been impossible for them to pore over all the papers and doc.u.ments that obfuscated the true owners.h.i.+p of certain wine properties.

No one did a better job of clouding the picture than the Bartons, an Anglo-Irish family with interests in Bordeaux since the 18th century and which owned Chteaux Langoa- and Leoville-Barton. When World War II broke out, Ronald Barton, who ran the two estates but had never taken out French citizens.h.i.+p, realized he was living on borrowed time. Nonetheless, he was determined to look after his interests as long as possible. Every night when he sat down for dinner, Barton made it a practice to drink one good bottle of Langoa or Leoville, his own private toast echoing that of Maurice Chevalier. "Here's one less for the Germans if they win, one less for my heirs if we do."

When Marshal Petain signed an armistice with the Germans that June, Barton, who was British, knew he had to flee and barely managed to catch the last s.h.i.+p out of Bordeaux. It was an emotional departure, with Barton wondering aloud to friends "whether he would ever see his beloved Langoa again."

His fears were well founded. Soon after Barton arrived in England and joined the British army, the Germans announced they were seizing his chteaux and vineyards as enemy property. But then something unusual happened. Barton's business partner, Daniel Guestier, went to the Germans in Bordeaux and argued that the seizure was illegal because Barton was Irish. He reminded the Germans that Ireland was neutral in the war and that, therefore, the Germans had no right to confiscate the property. Barton's sister in Dublin, who was, in fact, a true citizen of the Republic of Ireland, launched a letter-writing campaign. Friends, business a.s.sociates, even total strangers bombarded German authorities with mail, all bearing Irish stamps and postmarks and stressing Ronald's Irish background. Even the Irish amba.s.sador to Berlin joined the conspiracy, underscoring Ireland's neutrality and claiming that Ronald Barton was indeed Irish.

The ploy worked. Although the Germans did use Chteaux Langoa- and Leoville-Barton to billet their troops, they did not confiscate the two properties as they had intended.

The Bartons were not the only ones to thwart the Germans in this respect. France's Vichy government surprisingly played a role as well.

It was no secret that Field Marshal Gring was a lover of the great wines of Chteau Lafite-Rothschild and had long coveted the famous estate. Hitler reportedly planned to grab Lafite as "spoils of war" and present it as a gift to his chosen successor. To prevent that from happening, Vichy, which had no desire to see choice French property fall into German hands, employed a piece of legal cunning and sequestrated the chteau and its vineyards. With Lafite now officially the property of the French State, the Germans were unable to confiscate it as a Jewish a.s.set.

But, as with Langoa-Barton, the Germans did set up a headquarters in the chteau and housed some of their troops there. That made Lafite's bookkeeper, a woman named Gaby Faux, very nervous. Madame Gaby, as she was called, lived at Lafite and had agreed to do her best to watch over the property after the Rothschilds fled France. She had even accepted the most sacred objects of Paris's Great Synagogue from Robert de Rothschild, who was head of the Consistory of the synagogue, and hid them under her bed and in her bathroom to protect them. She was sure the Germans would never enter the private quarters of a single lady. But she was not so sure about Lafite's wine cellar.

Just before the troops arrived, Madame Gaby enlisted the help of several other people who worked at Lafite and began moving some of the more precious bottles, including the cla.s.sic 1797s, to the cellars of neighboring chteaux who agreed to hide it among their own wine. As an added precaution, she did something even more extraordinary: she began "cooking the books." Night after night, she sat in her little apartment on the Lafite premises, carefully transferring owners.h.i.+p of Lafite's wine away from the older generation of Rothschilds, which had escaped from France, to the brothers Alain and Elie. The two Rothschilds, who were in the French army, had been taken prisoner when the Germans overran France. She knew that because they were prisoners of war, their property was protected under the Hague and Geneva Conventions and could not be touched by the Germans.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: You contend that there was cattle missing from my last s.h.i.+pment. Were they bulls or cows? Your servant, Henri Gaillard.

The Germans sensed the stalling and subterfuge but could do little about it except to step up their security and surveillance. Even Henri Gaillard felt the pressure. As wine, food and cattle continued to mysteriously disappear from trains pa.s.sing through his station, Gaillard was bombarded with posters from German authorities reminding him that he was being watched closely. "The Country Has Its Eyes on You, Cheminot," warned one. Gaillard was ordered to hang the poster in his office and keep it there for one month.

But subterfuge and obfuscation were not what worried the Germans most. It was the increasing sabotage, especially along railway lines. In retaliation, the Germans began forcing the French themselves to help improve security. What they failed to realize was that many of the people they enlisted to help them were the very ones causing the problems, people like Jean-Michel Chevreau, who had been siphoning their wine.

"It was a time of high drama relieved by moments of high jinks," Chevreau said.

Some of those high jinks occurred during nightly patrols that Chevreau and others were forced to conduct. "We had to go out every night between our village and Amboise and report any incidents," he said. "The Germans also gave us wooden sticks which we were supposed to poke at suspicious objects."

In an effort to make sure Chevreau and others did their work, authorities in Chevreau's village of Chanay would stamp their papers, noting the time they began; the papers would be stamped again in Amboise to note when they had finished. "But we never did any work," Chevreau said. "All we did was calculate the time it would take to walk along the tracks between our village and Amboise; then we would get on our bikes and go to Amboise and hang around for a while before getting our papers stamped there. Then we rode home."

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I am responding to your query as to the whereabouts of a missing wine s.h.i.+pment. There has been no wine s.h.i.+pped by my station this month. Your respectful servant, Henri Gaillard.

Gaillard was not surprised to receive another poster, this one admonis.h.i.+ng him to remember the slogan of Marshal Petain's National Revolution: "Work, Family, Fatherland." It was a slogan Gaillard and many French were becoming increasingly cynical about. Work? That was for the benefit of Germany, people scoffed. Family? With one and a half million Frenchmen now prisoners of war in Germany, many families were without fathers, husbands and sons. Fatherland? Nothing more than a milk cow for the Germans.

Despite Petain's promises, most French realized that a peace treaty with the Germans was not about to be signed, that prisoners of war were not coming home and that the occupation was not going to end anytime soon.

With each day that pa.s.sed, the occupation, with its rationing, roadblocks and curfews, seemed to infect another aspect of French life. Authorities routinely opened private mail to check on public opinion. Cinemas were required to show German-made newsreels. American films were banned and listening to American jazz was prohibited. But as rules and restrictions increased, so did genuine resistance.

It manifested itself in subtle ways at first with what historian H. R. Kedward called "minor gestures of defiance, made to look accidental or unthinking: knocking over a German's drink, misdirecting a German tourist, pretending not to hear or understand orders given in the street, or wearing combinations of clothes which made up the forbidden tricolor of blue, white and red."

The wife of one winemaker remembers walking down the street of her town on July 14, Bastille Day, arm in arm with her mother and sister-in-law. All celebrations of France's national holiday had been forbidden by Vichy, but the women had their own way of celebrating right under the noses of the authorities. She wore a blue dress, her mother was in white, and her sister-in-law wore red.

In Champagne, a young manicurist also found a way to protest the German presence. Seeing an officer who came regularly for a manicure enter the shop where she worked, she got up, put on her coat and walked out. "I couldn't bring myself to touch his hands," she said.

Such "gestures of defiance" followed a speech almost no one heard. On June 18, 1940, just a day after France agreed to surrender, a forty-nine-year-old French army general went on the radio from London to urge his countrymen to fight on. His name was Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle said France had not lost the war, only a battle. "I call upon French men and women everywhere to resist and continue the struggle." Very few, at first, answered his call.

Within a few weeks, however, an underground pamphlet ent.i.tled Advice to the Occupied urged people to obey the curfew as this would enable them to be at home in time to listen to the BBC. Everyone, it said, should "display a fine indifference but keep alive the flame of your anger; it will become useful."

Many heeded the advice and listened to the BBC, not to receive secret messages or commands but to obtain accurate news to counter the official German and Vichy propaganda. "There was a special aura about it and whispering all the news," said May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. "When the broadcasts were finished, everyone re-set their radios to a French station or Radio Vichy. It was something all of us did automatically just in case the Germans came snooping."

On November 11, 1940, there was a special bulletin: students in Paris had clashed with German police at the Arc de Triomphe while trying to commemorate France's victory over Germany in World War I. According to the broadcast, shots were fired and students fell bleeding to the pavement. When their comrades rushed to pick them up, police with riot batons charged.

The clash sparked a "palpable change" in the atmosphere. "Only a short time ago, public opinion was weak and soft, prepared to agree to anything," wrote one French diarist. "Vichy and Berlin have now contrived to make the entire country aware of this servitude."

And awareness gave way to biting cynicism.

"If we had been 'occupied,' to use the polite term, by the Swedes," commented one Parisian, "we would at least have been left with a dance step, a taste for blue and yellow ribbons; if it had been the Hottentots, or the Italians, or the Hungarians, we would have had a song, a smile, a certain way of shaking the head . . . But as for them, everyone knows only too well that they'll leave us nothing. Not a melody, not a grimace. Even street kids wouldn't dream of imitating the goose step."

Despite his fears of repercussions, stationmaster Henri Gaillard was also becoming annoyed, and his messages to German authorities in Dijon reflected it. They had become clipped and more cynical. Most telling, he was no longer using the formal, stylized endings-the so-called patisseries, or pastries, beloved by the French-to close his communications with the Germans. Gaillard was now merely signing his name.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: You would do well to remember that wine s.h.i.+pments cannot arrive as quickly as your demands do. You will not get your s.h.i.+pment until you send me the correct papers. I've told you this before. There is one additional matter as well. My toilet is broken. It would be nice to have it fixed before winter, especially since it is now leaking into my wine cellar! Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.

By 1941, Gaillard's disillusionment was shared by nearly everyone in the country. Clandestine newspapers calling on the French to defy the Germans had appeared. So had active Resistance groups in both the occupied and unoccupied zones.

One of the first groups was Combat, started by a group of French military officers and reservists. Jean Monmousseaux, a winegrower and negociant from the Touraine, was one of its members. Monmousseaux had served in de Gaulle's tank regiment and was one of the few who had heard his broadcast from London. He was extremely moved. "My father found it very hard to accept France's defeat," his son Armand said.

Monmousseaux met frequently with his former army buddies, saying "We ought to be doing something, but what?" One day, the answer appeared at his door in the person of one of his old comrades. "Come along Jean, we are going to need you," he said.

Because Monmousseaux lived close to the Demarcation Line, he had become a familiar sight to the Germans as he crossed from one zone to another with his barrels of wine. Those barrels, his friends pointed out, were big enough to hold a man. Jean understood immediately, and enthusiastically agreed to help.

Putting a person in a barrel, however, is not easy. Wine barrels are made to be watertight. Both ends of the barrels are firmly sealed and fixed beneath the curved ends of the staves, and each of the staves is made to fit perfectly to its neighbors. Putting someone in a barrel requires first removing the metal rings around the barrel and then taking it completely apart, stave by stave, and finally putting it back together again in the same way, around the person. "That is the only way," Armand said. "You can't just pour him through that little hole."

Jean and his cooper, the barrelmaker, tried a few dry runs. The best time they could make on each end of the run was two hours, two hours to take the barrel apart, get a man into it, and then put it back together again around him. Then there was the trip itself and the wait at the Demarcation Line, which could take hours more. It was a long time for a man to be confined in such a tiny, nearly airless place, but it was possible.

"It's worth the risk," Monmousseaux reported to his colleagues. "Let's do it."