We’ve been talking about the essential qualities of a resistance leader. Let’s look at another one today: decisiveness.

A gentleman who worked for Dutch-Paris as a young man once told me that he sometimes missed how simple making a plan had been during the war. As a resister he was told to meet someone at a particular place and time. He showed up. The other resister, often one of the line’s leaders, showed up. He reported how many fugitives he wanted to bring over the border from the Netherlands to Belgium and when he could be ready. The leader gave him instructions from what they’d discussed at their last meeting and told him when and where they would meet again. That was it, no back and forth or changing of plans.

Of course there was a bit of nostalgia coloring that image. The reason they had to make their plans in that way is that they could not use the telephone or the mail because the authorities kept watch on both. There was no way to change the time of a meeting other than not showing up.

Nor did he mention the preparation that would have gone into getting those two resisters in the same place at the same time. Someone needed to find a secure meeting place to begin with, perhaps by recruiting a café owner. Someone needed to make sure that such a café had multiple exits and had enough customers that two more would go unremarked.

And it goes without saying that any such meeting had to cause anxiety or least tension for all the resisters who knew about it. You wouldn’t necessarily know if the person you’d met with last time had been coerced into betraying your meeting this time. You could always be walking into a trap. You couldn’t even know for sure that you had not been followed, let alone that the person you were meeting had not been followed. Resisters who survived the war knew the risks, took precautions and acted anyway.

But the gentleman’s point, really, was that resisters had to act with decisiveness. Once they got to the meeting place, there was no time for hemming and hawing. Second guessing only prolonged their exposure and increased their risk of betrayal or arrest. They shared a drink or a meal, made a plan and went their separate ways to execute their part of the plan. Most of the time, it worked.