ABSTRACT
SOE agents in France needed to keep themselves safe from several overlapping police jurisdictions, some German and some French. We live in a comparatively free society, removed by some distance in time and space from the immediate urgencies of war, hunger, occupation and repression. It is easy for us to forget what life was actually like for SOE’s agents in occupied territory, or even for the ordinary inhabitants of France. Every step in their everyday existence might be reported, considered, commented on by one secret police force or another. Unless wealthy, they were often short and sometimes very short of food; if they were men of anywhere near military age, they were in constant danger of being sent off east in a forced labour convoy. Moreover they were contending with enemies of exceptional savagery.
