WILLIAM RUSSELL meets a remarkable man from Guatemala
FACT can be far stranger than fiction, as Alec Le Vernoy's story of
his war demonstrates. In No Drums -- No Trumpets he outdoes James Bond
when it comes to amazing adventures, and his book contains, as well as
tales of derring-do, a moving account of life in the German
concentration camp at Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen from which he escaped.
Now 70, Le Vernoy lives in Guatemala with his second wife Christine,
his translator, and started writing the book to pass the time in his
retirement. He is not a man who likes to be idle.
After joining the army as a medical student he saw action and was
awarded the Croix de Guerre. Following the fall of France he ended up in
Algeria, then under Vichy rule. He still wanted to fight, and decided to
make for Gibraltar, where he hoped the British would allow him to join
the Free French. He rowed to the Rock in a kayak, only to be told by a
baffled British intelligence officer that he was not wanted and sent
back.
He rejoined his unit, deserted, turned guerrilla fighter in Tunisia,
was incarcerated in a Tunisian prison after another abortive attempt to
get back to Europe, was sentenced to death, fought with the SAS in the
desert outside Cairo, fell into German hands and was shipped to the
Fatherland, his identification papers fortunately being lost en route.
He was put into Sachsenhausen, tortured by the Gestapo, wangled a good
job in the prison hospital, and eventually escaped, made it to Spain,
joined the resistance movement and carried out a series of cross-border
raids against the Nazis. His book is at times incredible. But the
section about Sachsenhausen is so powerful that it makes the Bondish
adventures ring true as well.
Le Vernoy, a charming, elegant man who looks a good 20 years younger
than he is, took me aback when we were talking about the effect his war
had had upon him. One result, he said, was that he never went anywhere
unarmed. Then he fumbled in his pocket.
I sat up rigid in my seat -- I had met him in the cocktail bar of the
soigne White House Hotel in Regent's Park. He produced not, as I had
feared, a gun, but a heavy, bone-handled pocket knife. He said he only
used it on picnics. But he could, as his book makes clear, use it in
other ways.
He holds no grudges against his German captors, and when the West
German Government tried to persuade him a few years back to give
evidence against one of the SS doctors, Heinz Baumkotter, who had worked
in Sachsenhausen, he refused. Some of his comrades in Sachsenhausen
cannot forget what was done to them. But Le Vernoy does not share their
wish for revenge, possibly because after his escape, while leading
missions across the border from Spain into occupied France, he was able
to kill Germans again and again.
''I harmed the Germans much more than they harmed me,'' he said,
sipping his orange juice. ''I have been beaten and tortured, but the
impressions I have kept are positive inasmuch as they kicked me, but I
killed plenty of them. I do not say I won the war, but when it was over
I had the deep satisfaction of knowing I was one of the million men who
helped.''
For a man who was beaten, held in solitary confinement in a Tunisian
prison, tortured by the Gestapo, starved in prison camps, and wounded in
action several times, he looks remarkably fit. But he carries the scars.
''I have no more spleen; a few inches of plumbing less inside; my eyes,
which were burnt, have lost some of their sharpness, but everybody my
age has the same problem; and I have a few splinters of shrapnel in my
ankles and knees, which bother me sometimes,'' he said. But he keeps
fit, trains every morning, and is in good health.
He said, after the war, when documents were a problem in France, he
was tempted to accept a false passport, but had decided against,
realising, if he did, he would always have one foot on the wrong side of
the line.
''During the war you picked up a lot of bad habits,'' he added
disarmingly. ''If you have a problem the first reaction is to kill the
guy, and that is not very healthy under normal conditions.''
He regards his book with some astonishment. It came about because he
has a cousin in London who is a literary agent, and she encouraged him.
He had not written a history book, he insisted. It was a description of
what happened to him, of the mistakes he made and the problems he had to
deal with. He had fought his war as best he could, and he was not
interested in bringing people to book. He could not make a living out of
vengeance.
No Drums -- No Trumpets by Alec Le Vernoy is published by Michael
Joseph at #12.95.
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