The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando

“The concept of enemy,” Sartre continued, “is only entirely firm and clear when the enemy is separated from us by a wall of fire.”

It was no easy task to hate your neighbor all the time. That was the simple truth of 1940.

He began to see that, even as the Germans tried to break him, he was in fact breaking them. “Every hour of silence I won from Dr. Haas’s henchmen,” Semprun wrote, “made me realize with ever greater certainty that I was at home in the world.”

French sovereignty in the south would keep political and military leaders from fleeing the country and establishing a central government in the French colonies of Africa, countries that Hitler had not yet defeated and where the French could continue to fight German forces.

By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty . . . to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler.”

Chamberlain said that, on the authority of the prime minister, “a new organization shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas . This organization will be known as Special Operations Executive.”

It wasn’t just the invasion people saw that forced them out of their homes. It was the invasion they’d replayed for twenty years, the invasion they’d remembered. World War I had killed 1.7 million Frenchmen, or 18 percent of those who fought, a higher proportion than any other developed country.

Across the estuary, a fleet of 350 British planes dropped 800 tons of bombs on Royan. They fell primarily in the city center, and not on the Axis garrisons at its border, killing 442 civilians and only 35 Germans. Robert saw the fiery collapse of almost every building in Royan with a mix of confusion and horror.

There, nine Norwegian SOE agents raided the heretofore impenetrable grounds high atop a mountain, found the heavy-water cells in the basement of one building, and set their timed bombs against them.

Piquet-Wicks wrote. He was a man who abided by the SOE adage, “He that has a secret should not only hide it but hide that he needs to hide it.”