Marie-Madeleine Fourcade is recruiting anti-Nazi compatriots for a spy network to feed information to the English after the Germans invaded France. One of Fourcade’s lieutenants encourages a prospect by “describ[ing] her in glowing terms, saying she had ‘the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance of a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.’”
That’s quite a package. Perhaps it influenced Fourcade’s decision to assign animal code names to everyone in The Alliance. Or it was the other way around?
In any case another name was given to the spy network when the Germans captured and interrogated one of its members. The prisoner does not or is unable to reveal the real names of the leaders, only offering up “Aigle (Eagle) and Herisson (Hedgehog).” (Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was Hedgehog. A man was Eagle. That may seem sexist, but Fourcade had starry eyes for Eagle, I think.) How many more animal names did they get out of their prisoners before “the Germans began referring to the group as Noah’s Ark”?
Noah’s Ark — an ironic appellation? The animals on the ark were being saved from a disaster overtaking the entire world. If there were a Noah in this metaphor he wasn’t Adolph Hitler.
source:
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: the daring young woman who led France’s largest spy network against Hitler
by Lynne Olson
2019. Random House, New York
1 comment:
Possibly they weren't thinking about why Noah made the ark. They probably thought they were being clever. Maybe they were thinking that the ark was made by a Jew?
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