The Hanged Men of Nîmes

Fifty boys from the Cévennes maquis go by truck to Aigoual, where they would like to set up a camp. In the morning they scout out the terrain, make their plans and around two o'clock in the afternoon prepare to leave. But fifteen of them, who are from Saint-Hyppolite du Fort, plan to go, in passing, to kiss their parents. We therefore telephone the Saint-Hyppolite post office: “are there no occupants in the area?” — “Not one” replies the postman. But another postman who heard everything, warned the German post office to [work]. When the maquis trucks arrive, an hour and a half later, they fall into an ambush set up at the entrance to the village. The resistance fighters defended themselves, killed two enemies, lost five of their own, then scattered among the houses of the lower town. That’s when the manhunt begins. More than two hundred Germans, who had arrived in the meantime, visited Saint-Hyppolite, house by house. Twenty-one boys from the maquis are taken prisoner. All were to be hanged in Nîmes three days later.
A friend of French Letters attended the executions on the Lassalle road bridge: one of the condemned, seriously injured, had to be given two morphine injections so that he could walk: a rope broke, and the hanged man crashed onto the dry bed of the river. A non-commissioned officer finished him off with a bullet in the back of the head, then he was brought back onto the deck and hung again.
The Prefecture of Nîmes announced, two days later, that the commander responsible for the execution had been arrested and shot. Nobody believed any of it.

(Text published in Les Lettres françaises n° XVI, May 1944, n. p.)