Alias Shelley

THE WHITE RABBIT (262 pp.)--Bruce Marshall--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

"Monsieur Thomas," a customer wondered out loud one day to her Paris couturier, what was "your experience as a civilian in England during the war?" Monsieur Thomas, otherwise known as Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, a director of the famous Atelier Molyneux in Paris, took a moment's thought before he answered.

No, Yeo-Thomas could not precisely say that he had been a relatively safe civilian. He had, in fact, been far from safe in Buchenwald a good bit of the time, and before that he had been known to the Gestapo, under the alias of Shelley, as one of the most dangerous British agents in Europe, a kingpin in the intricate machinery of French resistance.

As Shelley, Yeo-Thomas committed a series of exploits that have made him a legend in his own lifetime, a classic case of heroism under the rose. In The White Rabbit, the case is related by British Novelist Bruce (Father Malachy's Miracle) Marshall in the sharp, quick, vivid style of a battle report.

When war came, Couturier Yeo-Thomas, 38, a British citizen though he had lived most of his life in France, joined the R.A.F.; after France fell, he was transferred to Air Intelligence as a lieutenant. There he was assigned to work with the Gaullists in bringing the ferment of French resistance into a single movement.

In February 1943, Yeo-Thomas made his first parachute mission to France. He found the underground in a chaotic state, the left hand against the right, informers everywhere. In six or seven weeks of dogged work, largely by naked force of character, he and two Gaullists managed to set up a central Resistance HQ.

A Peg in the Heel. A few weeks after Yeo-Thomas was flown back to England, the Gestapo threw a force of 32,000 agents into Paris, concentrated on the task of breaking the Resistance. Yeo-Thomas was rushed back to France. The Gestapo found out he was there. For eight wild weeks "The White Rabbit" (as he was known to his home office) scuttled about France from rendezvous to rendezvous, with the German police breathing down his neck.

Once the Gestapo got advance word of a rendezvous, and lay in wait for him, but Yeo-Thomas spotted a police car in the neighborhood, and shied away. Several times a day he changed his hat, his scarf, or put a peg in his heel to alter his manner of walking. Yeo-Thomas and his associates managed to keep the Resistance from collapse.

Back in England, Yeo-Thomas sold Churchill on his plan to drop enough arms and equipment to the Resistance forces to raise up a formidable fifth column in France, and in February 1944 he was flown to France again to supervise the new program. A little more than three weeks later, Yeo-Thomas was betrayed by a liaison agent, and captured.

"Wir haben Shelley!" screamed the Gestapo agents, and as they threw their prisoner into a police car, began to smash their fists into his face. The treatment continued at Gestapo headquarters; it was refined to a point where Author Marshall drops the subject. To his own amazement, and to the complete confusion of the Gestapo, Yeo-Thomas did not once break down. When he felt himself near collapse, he tried to throw himself out of a window, but one of the torturers caught his legs and hauled him back in.

"Don't Shoot!" The Gestapo gave up first--after three days of constant torture --and Yeo-Thomas was sent to Fresnes Prison. Condemned to death, he was spared at the last moment; one of his friends in the Resistance had traced him down, and offered the Gestapo officer in charge of his case 4,000,000 francs to lose the Shelley file. Yeo-Thomas was shipped to Germany as a common criminal.

Before he got there, the double-dealing of the Gestapo officer was discovered, and the White Rabbit was again condemned to death. He was sent to Buchenwald with 36 other Resistance workers, for execution. For some reason, sentence was delayed. Yeo-Thomas tried to bully and bribe two of the camp's Gestapo officers into a plot to save the 21 who were still alive, but they refused to save more than three--one of the three to be Yeo-Thomas, who was to tell British Intelligence who had delivered him, and how.

The plan worked. Yeo-Thomas and his friends were given the identity cards of three Frenchmen who had died in the camp hospital. Yeo-Thomas was shipped to another camp, Gleina, as Maurice Chouquet. There he worked in the hospital, and watched his chance to escape. It came only when the whole camp was moved eastward, into Czechoslovakia, for extermination. On the way he bribed another Gestapo officer and, during a halt to bury some dead prisoners, led a mass flight across the fields to a nearby wood.

For the next eight days, in scanty clothing and with almost no food, Yeo-Thomas wandered westward across the Saxon plain. Broken by torture, starvation and a chronic case of dysentery, his body somehow kept going, even when his mind was delirious. At last, just as he was about to make contact with the advancing U.S. forces, a German patrol picked him up. Weak as he was, Yeo-Thomas promptly organized another mass escape. One day later he staggered with his companions into an American outpost. "Don't shoot!" he shouted. "Escaping prisoners of war!" Said an American soldier: "Well, you guys are goddam lucky; you've just crossed a minefield."

The war ended shortly, and having thus neatly disposed of the Gestapo, Yeo-Thomas went back to handling the customers of Molyneux. "Madam," he replied with tactful understatement to the lady who had wondered about His war experience, "I was in the Royal Air Force."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.