Maquis

The maquis shrubland is thick.

The older man claims to find a measure of peace in Corsica’s wild landscape, and as Mitchell explores the foothills of maquis, fragrant with “the sharp resinous smell of laurel rose and thyme,” he too succumbs.

By this time O.S. membership numbered some 4,500, and many of those who escaped imprisonment either fled abroad or formed the nucleus of a growing maquis in the more inaccessible parts of the country.

For many weeks after I finished Bodyguard of Lies, Alan Turing stuck in my mind. He seemed so incongruous a figure to be mixed up with the cut-throat maquis and sinister double-agents who populated the rest of the book.