This book, Rosemary Bailey’s Love and War in the Pyrenees, is a rare treat: a moving and well-written history book/travelogue, from a writer with a considerable personal knowledge of the area she writes about and an intimate acquaintance with the people who live there. Although my knowledge of these events was scanty to say the least, I was immediately interested in the book and soon found myself engrossed in this record of the social and military crises that hit this corner of France.
Rosemary Bailey has lived in the French Pyrenees for several years and has been able to lace her book with many personal accounts of visits to elderly survivors of the war years and their relatives. This gives the book a unique perspective on the effects of a World War on a remote, underpopulated area of Europe which found itself on a vital escape route which saw hundreds of thousands of people pass through as they fled from a tyranny coming from the south and later the north.
The story starts with the Spanish Civil War, when in 1939 huge numbers of Republican Spanish saw that their only hope of survival (after the victory of the army of General Franco) was to cross the mountains into France. Rosemary Bailey describes the impact on this area as the initially hospitable French peasants did their best to cater for the vast crowds arriving on their doorstep, but rapidly found their civil leaders adopting repressive methods of containing the tide.
My wife and I have visited Argeles Sur Mer several times (my sister has a holiday home there) and I have noticed the information boards on the promenade describing the camps set up for refugees from the Spanish Civil War in 1939. At that time, Argeles was a place of sand-dunes bordered with swamps and was only just beginning to be developed as a resort. But the facts are staggering: by February 1939, the arrival of 500,000 refugees had doubled the population of the Pyrenees Orientale region. It was impossible for this largely rural population to cope with such a tidal wave of starving, distressed people and the response of the authorities was to set up barbed-wire bounded camps on the beaches.
Conditions at Argeles and its neighbours were initially dreadful. Families had to camp on the sand, digging channels and burrows to shelter from the wind and rain. There were no sanitation facilities and food was thrown over the fences for them to fight over. By the following summer, more camps had been built and tents and wooden huts at last protected the people from the elements. But it is estimated that 15,000 people perished in the appalling conditions of the first few months of the camps.
Interestingly, the great cellist Pablo Casals escaped to the region and remained there after the war, saying, “Prades felt like my own country. It was still Catalonia”. The author turns up several personal anecdotes about Cassals which any admirer of the musician will want to read.
There is renewed local interest in these events and it is gratifying to read of the annual commemorative walk which takes place each winter retracing the route across the mountains from Spain. The author writes movingly of her journey in warm anorak and boots while remembering “the desperate families carrying children, dragging animals and carts, struggling to hang on to precious bags and suitcases”.
The author moves on to describe the impact of the fall of France in 1940, when the whole nation fell to the German forces within a period of six weeks. The Pyrenees region was largely allowed to continue as it always had, and in some ways, the traditionalist policies of the Vichy government (family values, return to the land and love of nation) matched the values of the people rather well. However, refugees soon began travelling from the north in an attempt to escape Nazi rule via Spain or Portugal and were helped by the French Resistance in the region who put them in touch with guides who would escort them across through the bewildering complexities of the mountain tracks.
A couple of years ago I drove the mountainous road from Collioure to the Costa Brava and noticed the now-deserted border post between Cerbere and Port Bou with the railway running at the bottom of the rocky slope below. Rosemary Bailey recounts several stories of daring escapes in this region when people jumped off the train before the passengers were checked and walked around the rocky coastline, managing to avoid the border guards.
We read much about life under the Vichy government and also about the Free French goverment in London who broadcast every night from Radio Londres. I was pleased to read of one adolescent boy who copied out messages broadcast from the radio and sent them through the post to a variety of people including the director of the postal services. This exactly mirrors the actions of Otto Quangel in Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada which I reviewed on A Common Reader only last week.
Rosemary Bailey and her husband lived until recently in an old Abbey which they purchased some 20 years ago when it was largely ruined. They soon became aware of the history of their new home, and were lent a collection of letters sent between a husband and wife during the war years. Pierre was a doctor and was conscripted into the army, while his wife Amalie remained at home to care for her baby and to tend the family’s small-holding. These letters from a fascinating section of the book where we read of the hardships of a loan woman tending a plot of land in this mountainous region while Pierre is close to the action in Northern France and returns home, walking the final section through the forests and pastures of the Pyrenees.
It is interesting to read about the major contribution of British Quakers to the task of caring for refugees. At a time when the British Quaker movement has gone into steep decline due to an ageing membership, and as a Quaker myself, it is good to be reminded of the brave stance taken by so many Quakers who suffered imprisonment for their conscientious objection and then carried out tasks which could have resulted in their imprisonment or death at the hands of the Nazis.
The book moves on through the liberation and the inevitable reprisals that followed. In a helpful epilogue the author brings things together explaining the importance of what happened in the Pyrenees region and recording the contributions of those who resisted the Nazis, whether the Resistance, the Spanish partisans, the Quakers, the priests who defied the Church hierarchy and the countless citizens and officials who carried out small acts of defiance to interfere with German progress in the region.
This is a rewarding and humane read for anyone who is interested in how the War affected Britain’s nearest neighbour, and is a stark reminder that the peaceful south-west region of France knew a time of immense turmoil a mere 70 years ago.
