Unlikely Soldiers by Jonathan Vance

Author:Jonathan Vance [Jonathan F. Vance ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443403269
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

EIGHT

PROSPER

In the early fifth century, an obscure layman from the south of France rose to prominence in the church on the strength of two letters he wrote to St. Augustine of Hippo, “On the Predestination of the Saints” and “On the Gift of Perseverance.” Prosper of Aquitaine would become secretary to Pope Leo the Great, a poet and historian of some ability, and, eventually, a saint. Fifteen hundred years after his death, his name would be adopted by one of SOE’s most important agents.* Frank Pickersgill would have been quite familiar with Prosper from his research on Augustine, but Francis Suttill, thanks to a solid classical education at Stonyhurst College in the north of England, also knew of St. Prosper. He may have been attracted to him because of his defence of perseverance. Ironically, predestination would become the defining characteristic of Suttill’s work in France.

In many ways, Francis Suttill was exactly what F Section was looking for in an agent. He was born in 1910 near Lille, a rough-and-tumble cloth city in northern France, to a French mother and an English father who was managing director of a large textile firm and president of the city’s chamber of commerce. His parents sent him to England for a public school education, but he took a degree in law at l’Université de Lille and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn (the same inn with which Ken Macalister was affiliated) in 1936, with a specialty in international law (again, Ken’s great passion). When war broke out, Suttill was commissioned in the East Surrey Regiment but soon came to the attention of SOE and was brought into The Firm in 1941. Suttill was an impressive man—charismatic, good-looking (perhaps a little too good-looking to blend in with a crowd), intelligent, strong-willed, and ambitious. And he was given an important task, perhaps the most critical that faced F Section in 1942: rebuilding the shattered remains of its first forays into covert operations.

F Section’s great empire in France had begun with a single circuit, Autogiro, led by the formidable Pierre de Vomécourt. If ever there was a man with reason to hate the occupiers, it was de Vomécourt. He came from a distinguished military family that had suffered heavily at the hands of Germany: his great-grandfather had been tortured and murdered by the invaders during the Franco-Prussian War and his father, despite being over-age, enlisted at the beginning of the First World War, only to be killed in action within weeks. The shock of the loss sent his mother to an early grave, leaving the five de Vomécourt children orphaned. The eldest, Jean, joined the Royal Flying Corps and was grievously wounded in 1918; the other two boys, Pierre and Philippe, were too young to serve. Their chance to exact revenge on the Germans would come in the next war.

Only one of the brothers escaped from occupied France and, after extremely rudimentary training with SOE—“no one’s very sure what sort of training we ought to

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