The Jackals

To Louis Salve and his sidekick Gaston Lange, who had been a police inspector before the war, the postwar world looked bright indeed. When they dropped into their favorite cafe in the Rue Sorbier, the patron broke out the tricolor as a sign that Heroes of the Resistance were having a drink in his humble place. Lange and Salve spent a lot of time in the courts, where they were recognized as authorities on who had been a collaborator and who had not: again & again Lange and Salve testified that suspected traitors had in fact served with them in the Resistance.

One bright day in 1947 the glory of Lange and Salve reached its peak: a detachment of the Garde Republicaine rode out to an apartment house in the seedy Menilmontant district on the northeastern rim of Paris. The sun glinted on the guardsmen's silvery helmets and on the glossy black hides of their horses. While they held aloft their sabers in salute, while trumpets blared and drums rolled, an officer unveiled a bronze plaque on the apartment house wall: On the fifth floor of this building in July 1940 under the direction of the fervent patriots Lange, called "Alcyn," and Salve, called "Jean de Sylves," was born the first armed resistance movement, the Wolves of France . . . Erected by the Wolves of France to their honorable dead.

About six months after this impressive ceremony, the Paris police arrested a man who, they were sure, had worked for the Germans, found that he was carrying papers issued by the "Wolves of France" certifying him as a genuine Resistant. The police began a long, slow job of unsnarling the mystery. By last week they had the answer: Lange and Salve were not really wolves, but jackals in wolves' clothing.

Arrested last week, Lange blustered,, but Salve grinned and admitted everything. They had never been in the Resistance; they had been jailed by the Nazis as black-marketeers. In the confusion that followed liberation, they had convinced a couple of high military men that they were heroes. Armed with recommendations from the gullible generals, and with other testimonial papers bearing the forged signatures of real heroes killed by the Germans, Jackals Lange and Salve set themselves up in business. By 1947 the word was around in certain circles that very authentic-looking Resistance papers could be bought from them at 400,000 to 600,000 francs a set.

Last week the police rearrested 30 of the bogus heroes who had been cleared on the say-so of Lange and Salve. In Menilmontant, the owner of the apartment building got several bids from masons who offered to take down the bronze plaque, forthwith.

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