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Alex happened to be the colonel’s daughter’s couturier and when she introduced him to her father in the mid-1930s, his eyes must have lit with the same kind of excitement as when he met Chagall or Piaf: here was someone whom he respected, certainly, but who could also be useful to him in his ongoing project to establish himself in France. A large, barrel-chested man, Colonel Perré was an old-fashioned French military man, the kind who believed in France’s sovereignty above all. He was anti-Semitic in the way a lot of his demographic was: it wasn’t that he specifically hated the Jews, but he didn’t want France’s innate French character to be altered by a load of suspicious outsiders. But a Jew like Alex, who wrote letters to the government begging to be allowed to defend ‘French soil’? Well, that was the kind of Jew a military patriot like Colonel Perré could support.
Back in the First World War the colonel was widely seen as the equal and rival of Charles de Gaulle, and the two competed for command of the same regiment. De Gaulle won that contest, but Perré made a name for himself as a skilful tactician with tanks, and in 1919 he went to Poland to command a tank battalion of the first Polish armoured units against the Russians. He had a further connection with the Poles: he was in the command staff of the 1st Armoured Polish Brigade and was one of the French advisers introduced in the Polish high command. He was a tough man who respected other tough men, and when he met Alex, an almost aggressively masculine Polish fashion designer, the two formed an immediate bond. Colonel Perré, who was by this point in the high command of the French Army, wrote a letter endorsing this young Jew’s bid to join the Legion. Doors were swiftly opened and, at last, one of Alex’s applications was successful. Just as Alex had always suspected, what mattered in life wasn’t what you knew but who.
On 2 October 1939 Alex assigned a manager to look after his salon and he said goodbye to his workers, his mother, his brothers, his cousins and his friends. ‘Courage,’ he said to his cousin Josek. ‘I will see you after the war.’ He took his favourite pieces of art by two of his oldest Parisian friends off the wall in his living room – a small drawing by Pascin of a young woman and a painting by Kisling of a little boy – and he packaged them up and sent them to the Tel Aviv Museum, in what was then still Palestine. He wrote in his memoir:
I felt I was doing my duty as an Israeli soldier, as a member of the Resistance, as a pioneer, donating to Tel Aviv. I added my brick to the building. I was certain that we would emerge victorious from this struggle. And I was confident that Israel would be born. No one – other than Helena Rubenstein – had ever before made a gift of two paintings to the Tel Aviv museum.
This story certainly fitted in with Alex’s character, but when I read it in his memoir I wondered how much self-mythology was going on here. Could he really have owned museum-worthy art as early as 1939? I called up the museum to ask if Alex and Helena Rubenstein were the first people to donate paintings to the museum and the museum’s archivist firmly denied it. I sighed, and was about to cross out the paragraph in his memoir. Typical Alex, I thought, trying to make himself sound like a bigshot and celebrity by proxy. But the archivist then casually added, ‘But Monsieur Maguy did send those paintings to us in 1939.’
‘Those particular paintings? In 1939?’
‘Oh yes, absolutely. In 1939. Other people donated several paintings before him, but those two he sent are still in our permanent collection.’
This was to be the first of many instances when I learned not to underestimate Alex and his claims. Because the story was correct, and he had indeed left his stamp behind him before going off to war. He had just given the tale a brush of showman’s pizzazz.
UNSURPRISINGLY, a short, heavily perfumed couturier with a taste for the finer things in life found the Foreign Legion a bit of an adjustment. The French Foreign Legion was and is notoriously tough, even by military standards, and because it, uniquely in the French military, allowed in foreigners, it was filled with the dispossessed from around the world – refugees, vagabonds and flat-out criminals. German intelligence gleefully exploited the Legion’s rackety admissions practice by stuffing it full of Nazi spies during the 1930s, hoping to destroy the Legion by infiltrating it. Once their ruse was discovered the German legionnaires were shipped out, but the French authorities retained long-held suspicions about the Legion, and therefore wouldn’t let it fight in Europe when France finally entered the war.
Alex had always prided himself on being a tough foreigner, but even he was taken aback by how tough and foreign his fellow soldiers in the Legion were. Largely made up of Spanish Republicans who fled Franco and Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe, the Legion was regarded by officers as an unpromising mix of communists and intellectuals.[8] Alex described them as ‘a mob of rough and tough guys’ and, in a rare moment of vulnerability in his memoir, admits he was bullied relentlessly.
Alex, far left, in the Foreign Legion, 1941.
‘I found it hard to break with Parisian life,’ Alex wrote. And initially, he barely broke with it at all. Stationed in Barcarès in the southern corner of France, Alex would train during the day and then sneak out to the local nightclubs when the rest of the men were in bed, enjoying a social life that wasn’t all that different from his life back home. Alex took lifelong pride in getting the better of authority figures around him, but he was remarkably bad at doing so. Just as Nina Ricci had caught him re-selling designs, and his mother had caught him stealing meatballs in Chrzanow, Alex’s night-time excursions were quickly exposed when he failed to make it back to the camp in time for reveille, and he turned up reeking of booze at the start of inspection. He was promptly put in the stockade and in his memoir he describes his humiliation at length: ‘The Legion getting too much for you, Glass? Sorry you enlisted?’ his fellow soldiers jeered at him, walking past.
Others would have been cowed into obedience. But Alex felt only defiance and a determination to be tougher than ever. He never felt any embarrassment about describing his falls to others, because they were a chance to show how he rose up and fought back.
From then on, he trained more intensely than anyone else. And he still went out most nights, too – but as a concession he started wearing a watch so he always got back in time.
Eventually, even Alex had to give up the nightclubs. The training got harder and he was put on night manoeuvres as the so-called Phoney War, which lasted from September 1939 to May 1940, neared its end. ‘We are being toughened up for war,’ he later recalled writing to Kisling, who was too old to join the French Army this time so was whiling away the war by painting in his studio in Marseille.
‘I hope you’ll get leave to come eat a good bouillabaisse here with me in the south,’ Kisling wrote back. ‘But for now, forget about Paris. After the victory, knowing you as I do, you’ll restart [your business] in no time. For the moment, make war.’
On 17 April 1940 Alex had no choice: he and his fellow soldiers were sent to Cherbourg where they were armed with equipment and packed onto ships. None of them knew where they were going, but they knew it wouldn’t be Europe, because French authorities still weren’t allowing the Legion to fight on the Continent. The dropping temperature told them that they weren’t heading southwards either: they were going towards the Arctic Circle.
Alex was part of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, a unit that had been set up only the month before and would soon gain legendary status. It still has a reputation as ‘one of [the French Army’s] most honoured units’[9] and it was later described by de Gaulle
as being ‘at the heart from the very beginning of the forces of Free France for the liberation of our homeland honourably and victoriously’.[10] Formed initially to help the Allies in Finland and Norway, it was put under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Raoul Magrin-Vernerey, a tough military eccentric who personified the Foreign Legion itself: battle-scarred from the First World War and saddled with disabilities that should have disqualified him from military service. Various head wounds, and crude attempts to operate on them, had left him with a notorious temper and, either because of or despite that, he was a formidable fighter. Alex worshipped him.
According to Alex’s memoir, one night in early May he was keeping watch on the bridge of the ship, the Ville d’Alger, when he saw Magrin-Vernerey walking towards him. Above them, they could hear enemy planes circling, and Magrin-Vernerey thought he saw fear in the inexperienced soldier’s face.
‘Don’t worry. The planes can’t see you. And even if they could, what would they do? Make a big hole in you and you would be dead. Your friends and family would mourn you but for you it would be over,’ he said with a smile.
But Alex was not one to be teased, even by a lieutenant colonel. ‘I don’t agree. I came here to fight for my country!’ he replied.
Magrin-Vernerey grew serious then, his moods always changing as swiftly as the Nordic sky. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll fight. We’ll win.’
When his troops asked him why they were there anyway, Magrin-Vernerey treated the question with the same nonchalance with which he first spoke to Alex: ‘Why? Because my orders are to take Narvik. Why Narvik? For the anchovies, for the Norwegians – I haven’t the faintest idea.’
In fact, it was for the iron ore. After the Soviets took Finland, the Germans and Allies were both determined to seize Norway, because both sides realised it was the way to gain control of the iron ore, which was transported out of Sweden and through the Norwegian port, and was so important to the German war machinery. Hitler also saw Norway as a potential naval base, while British forces saw it as a way to open up the Baltic for the Allies. The French saw it as a possible second fighting front a safe distance from France, thus allowing the Legion to battle the Germans without risking harm to France itself or its civilians. The Narvik campaign would turn out to be one of the biggest battles since the invasion of Poland.
On 13 May the 13th Demi-Brigade landed on the Bjerkvik beaches, close to Narvik. As the British battleships and destroyers started firing on the German defenders, and the Luftwaffe fought back, bombing and strafing the beaches, the French Foreign Legion soldiers were ordered to jump overboard, in the middle of the battle, and swim through the freezing North Sea to shore. Weighted down by his artillery, Alex swam in water so cold it felt as if it were burning him, and he watched many of his fellow soldiers drown around him, either shot by the Germans or sunk by their own equipment, their terrified faces illuminated by the house fires fringing the coast as civilians’ homes were bombed. It was like dying at the edge of the world.
‘À moi, la Légion!’ Magrin-Vernerey cried, the Legion’s version of ‘Follow me!’, and the soldiers who survived the frightening landing pressed onwards up the beach.
The Norwegian Army was an allied troop but Magrin-Vernerey never really trusted them: ‘The Norwegian Army is nothing more than a bunch of dull farmers. They are useless. Half of them are paid German spies anyway,’ he was reported to have said.[11] The Norwegians weren’t entirely sure about the legionnaires either. In one book my father bought in Narvik, when retracing Alex’s steps, the historian describes them as ‘not like other soldiers. Many of them were pure bandits, feared and hated by the inhabitants of Bjerkvik and Narvik.’[12] Their terror was understandable: thirteen adult civilians and a five-year-old boy were killed during the fighting on the beach, and afterwards the legionnaires tore through the few houses still standing near the beach to see if they could find any German soldiers hiding inside, shooting down doors and breaking windows to gain entry, heaping fear on top of trauma for the inhabitants. The French Foreign Legion was not known for its manners.
Fighting alongside them for Narvik was a scrappy patchwork of other international allied troops, and together they became known as the 1st Light Infantry Division, which was put under the command of the extremely formidable General Émile Béthouart. This included the 5th Demi-Brigade of Chasseurs Alpins, the 27th Demi-Brigade of Chasseurs Alpins, a mountain troop made up of Polish refugees called the Polish 1st Carpathian Demi-Brigade and various Norwegian units. Also fighting with them was the now legendary Captain Marie-Pierre Koenig, a man who had acted with enormous bravery in the First World War and would become an essential part of the allied resistance in this war, too. Between them all, they managed to take Bjerkvik, overcoming the Germans and their firepower. But the 13th Demi-Brigade’s battle against the Nazis, and the elements, had only just begun.
Alex and his men were ordered to pursue the retreating Germans up into the barren hills north of Bjerkvik. Even though it was spring, the temperatures were freezing and the mountains covered in snow, making it even harder to spot the Germans, who were wearing white uniforms. Alex was still determined to prove himself and show that he was not the precious couturier the legionnaires initially thought. And so, one night when the men were all resting around a frozen lake in the half-light of the midnight moon, Alex got up, stripped in front of his commanding officers, got a sharp rock, broke through the thick ice on the lake, and dived in, to show these old legionnaire war dogs he was as tough as them. It worked: several of these legionnaire officers would become Alex’s lifelong friends.
