Toward Morning

WAITING IN THE NIGHT--George Millar--Doubleday & Co. ($2.75).

When the last boatload of valiant fugitives pushed off from the beach at Dunkirk, they left, among the prone bodies, the carcasses of horses, the discarded rifles and smashed cannons, a historical deposit undistinguishable from the sands that the tide washed in & out. It was the remains of the faded Victorian Age, whose shibboleths of family security, personal freedom, humanity, honor, greatness of purpose, faith, liberalism and the intangible called decency had so long stood between civilized society and those forces within itself which are always at war with it. At one stride, a new age, The Age of Violence, had invested Europe from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean.

By the time the war had been pushed back violently toward the dark heart of Europe, there was scarcely a peaceful family, particularly in France, which had not shared the new experience of violence and conspiracy. Sharing it with them was a new type of European leader, the violent, simple, purposeful man of action typified by the Resistance leaders and the British and American officers who lived with them and helped them. In one of the most exciting and intelligent books produced by World War II, one of these British officers, Captain George Reid Millar, has described his experiences as an area leader of the French Resistance. Captain Millar has the face of a fanatic without a dogma (this made it possible for him to lead a forlorn hope). He also has a sense of the absurd, which makes it difficult for him to take seriously the politics of the Right or the Left. This helps to keep his report of the Resistance in focus as a patriotic (rather than a social) uprising.

In the Aquarium. The year was 1944. The place was a vast, dirty, cobwebbed "aquarium" of a room in a London house, which served as the British headquarters of the French Resistance. Here George Millar was interviewed as a candidate to be parachuted into France. Millar believed that he was being offered death. "And I wanted a useful death and then peace. . .. I was thirty-three and so unhappy that life was almost sense-free, almost sensation-free."*

Millar was accepted for Resistance work. At first he was just barked at by his superiors or kept cooling his heels in the dirty waiting room filled with dated copies of the Daily Express and France Libre. But if he was not on time, he was barked at louder: "Handsome Mrs. Pollock would glower at me from behind her flower-and-chocolate-laden desk, and her pneumatic Jane, the American secretary in uniform, would pretend to be engrossed in her typing, so that she could spare no sympathy." A major warned him: "Please be careful, my friend. You must not give a false impression of slackness you know. You are being trained for a position of great responsibility. Punctuality is considered most vital in this organization. We demand the most absolute discipline and obedience."

Submarine & Water Lilies. Then, when they got tired of seeing him around headquarters, they shipped him off "to school" in a country house. "It was exciting to hear strange noises in the night; to see senior officers who had burned themselves playing with fire between tea and dinner; to watch strange weapons (which occasionally worked) being tried out with live ammunition beside the wallflower beds on the lawn; to glimpse the colonel in something between a duck punt and a one-man submarine among the water lilies on the ornamental pond."

Sometimes heroes of the Resistance, "quiet, tired and irritable," filtered back from France for "refresher courses." Most of them just waited "with a doomed passiveness" to be sent back to France.

After the school came the "cover-story," the bogus life history that Millar must memorize to go with his false identification papers. He was to be an insurance publicity agent. Then he passed through "the phony-Continental-clothes-and-accessories department" which issued everything from "summer underwear to a 'housewife.' " Millar dumped his disguises somewhere in the "aquarium" as quickly as possible; they scared him.

Senators & Hairdressers. Then he went up for final briefing. "Kindly sign your field name twenty times on this sheet of paper," said the interviewer, a British officer who spoke with a strong French accent.

"What is my field name?" asked Millar. He had never bothered to find out.

"Desire," said the officer.

"Would you mind repeating that?"

"Desire," he said, a little sharply.

To Millar the name seemed almost as awful as the Gestapo. "Visions connected with this ghastly name flashed through my head. I saw stalwart foresters laying back their heads until the neck cords showed like bared intestines, but their voices came in a shallow unison pipe: 'Oh, Desire.' I saw the German questioners in Gestapo headquarters. Their leader aid: 'We give you one last chance, Captain Er, Captain Um, Captain Desire.' I aw a woman with gold teeth and dirty hair who came towards me asking: Qu'est-ce que tu desires, Desire?' 'I refuse,' I shouted. 'I will not go with that name.' "

The officer looked down at his papers and beside a red "Secret" carefully drew a pig. "Nerves," he was thinking. Then he began to draw a second pig.

"What kind of people are called Desire?" Millar asked him.

"Certain senators and a few hairdressers," he said gravely.

At this point they were interrupted by one of those female officials whom Millar always called "Intelligent Gentlewomen." Their voices "reeked of the Tightness of life, of tea in the nursery and snowmen with pipes in their mouths and Struwelpeter and Jemima Puddleduck. . . ." "It is rather a dreadful name," she agreed. 'Perhaps I might manage to get it changed." It was changed to Emile on that last day when, "like any important murderer, I could get anything I wanted."

Unorthodox Conspirator. Millar, the unorthodox conspirator, also refused to be burdened down with weapons and routine equipment. "No weapons," he said to an officer who offered him a carbine. "Please don't thrust weapons or equipment upon me. If go I must then I will attempt to conquer more by charm and example. . . . Gandhi is the greatest general today. He may carry off a permanent victory. He fights without arms, he fights with the will and the suffering smile. Christ taught the genius of counterattacking by turning the other cheek. Christianity persists today. We shall win this war against Germany. But how long will our victory of arms persist? Perhaps twenty years. That is why it is important, even though we are committed to a war of arms, to fight according to the rules of civilized battle, to show the Boche that there exists among his enemies, even while they fight, a flowering of these softer and more charming qualities which he secretly so greatly admires."

Said a Frenchman: "If I thought you were going to talk like that in France, Captain Millar, I would kill you now before you could leave."

Said an Englishwoman: "Now, now. You know that Captain Millar is quite mad. . . ."

Forty-five Seconds. Millar made the trip to France in a big U.S. Liberator. Below he saw faint lights--four of them in the required shape, with one flashing an erratic "K," the code letter. Twelve parachuted containers filled with weapons aric other useful material were already floating down through the moonlit sky. Captain Millar jumped: "Next moment I was lying on my back in the air watching the fat round camouflaged belly of the aircraft passing above me. My parachute opened." He knew that he had 45 seconds to descend in: "Forty-five seconds between free America and France in chains."

In the moonlight, "three figures, in line appeared ahead of me, like figures in a wheatfield in a Russian film. . . . They came on without caution, shouting to each other." Millar called: "Good morning." Instead of replying, the three Frenchmen threw themselves flat in the wheat. At last one of them asked: "Who are you?" Said Millar: "Who are you?" Then one of them had an idea: "Perhaps he's a parachutist. I thought the last tube was a man. Not a tube." "Perhaps," one of them shouted in the quiet night, "you are a British officer?" At last Captain Millar satisfied the Frenchmen of his identity. At that moment he did not know that these three unconspiratorial conspirators were, a few months before Dday, a substantial detachment of the Resistance in his area of the Franche Comte. The Maquis, resoundingly called the Equipes Boulaya, consisted of two groups of four and twelve men respectively, living in hog-like filth in the woods.

How he organized these wretched bands into an effective organization, sharing with them their raw, uncomfortable, dangerous life and breathless escapes, leading them on hazardous sabotage expeditions until, by the time of liberation, they had inflicted formidable damage on the Germans, and how in the process he himself became a leader and cunning man of action, is the substance of Captain Millar's remarkable first-hand report. Millar's role is stated but never strutted. His account is studded with more obviously fascinating figures--like Paincheau, the French leader who organized his maquis on big U.S. racketeering lines, with fleets of stolen automobiles and motorcycles. But if Millar organized as well as he writes, France has reason to be grateful to him.

* The reason for Author Millar's undisclosed unhappiness is the subject of his next book, Horned Pigeon, which his publishers announce will appear shortly.

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