Nuns, a maquisard and the Devil’s Own Rum: a Provençale pilgrimage

Avid Spectator reader Mr Brown had endured the very strictest of lockdowns for family health reasons in Tunbridge Wells. Since March he had interacted only with delivery drivers, his wife and their two children. He was therefore quite unsocialised when he stopped with us for a night on his journey from Kent to the Pongo Delta in Guinea, where for the next 12 months he will be organising the security for a mining company trucking bauxite 200 miles through bandit country. I found him standing outside a village bar looking at his watch because I was an hour late. He heaved a shopping bag for life filled with booze and groceries into the boot of my car, urging that it must go into a fridge as soon as possible.

The previous evening I’d met an English expat from our village who had spent the confinement period wandering about in the vast communal forest behind his house. He told me that in the course of his wanderings he’d come across the remote and lonely grave of a maquisard and local hero called Léon Gérard, who in July 1944 was gunned down and left for dead by the Nazis in a forest glade. The Englishman and I discovered that the Nazi occupation of the village and district was of absorbing interest to the both of us, and he offered to show me his exciting find. I thought that Mr Brown — a former paratroop officer — might also be interested to visit a maquisard’s grave, and so I arranged for our pilgrimage to coincide with Mr Brown’s brief visit.