It all started with an unassuming roadside monument, discovered six years ago by husband and wife writing team Donough O’Brien and Liz Cowley near their home in southern France.

Backed by lush cypress trees, it bears a plaque with the following inscription: “On August 25th 1944, in this place, 32 Spanish guerrillas and 8 French partisans stopped a German column of more than 1,000 men.”

The writers’ subsequent investigation unearthed the facts of an extraordinary battle - one which highlights the largely unknown role of Spaniards in the French resistance and which inspired their latest novel, From One Hell To Another, published last month.

Refugees

The 32 Spanish men who helped defeat the German troops in the Battle of La Madeleine (named after the village in southern France where the fighting took place) originally came to Spain as part of the “retirada” in early 1939.

An estimated half a million Spaniards crossed the Pyrenees that winter, fleeing the advancing troops of Francisco Franco at the close of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War. At the time, it was one of the greatest refugee movements in history and one for which the French authorities were completely unprepared.

The majority of the newly arrived Spaniards were dispatched to camps lacking any kind of sanitation, where daily nourishment consisted of one loaf of bread to share with several others and a glass of water in the afternoon. According to Civil War experts, the most brutal compounds were on the beaches of Argelés, Saint-Cyprien and Le Barcarés, where violent winds, sandstorms and extreme temperature variations caused many deaths.

Survivors

Eighty-six-year-old Otilia Casales (Juanita in the book) proved crucial to the authors’ research.

“As a little girl, [she] had memories of the last days of the Civil War and came over with the ‘retirada’… This gave us an insight into what a Spanish family went through,” O’Brien told me via email.

Further assistance was provided by 73-year-old Joachim García, president of the Veterans’ Association for Spanish fighters in the Gard area of southern France. García’s father “Villacampa”, the political commissar of the Spanish Republicans during Spain’s Civil War, was one of the Spaniards who fought at La Madeleine

in August 1944.

O’Brien and Cowley also met the last two survivors of the battle, 93-year-old Ange Alvarez and 95-year-old Paco Laroy: “The only thing they said was that they were very frightened!”

Not that it showed at the time. The thousand-strong Nazi column trooping though the Cévennes region of southern France in August 1944 was heading for Nimes - but Laroy, Alvarez and their Spanish and French comrades were there to block its path.

First blowing up a railway bridge to trap the Germans, the “guerrilleros” then changed their firing spots at rapid intervals, giving the impression that there were many more than 40 men concealed in the surrounding Countryside.

Backed by four British bombers strafing the Nazi trucks from above, the French and Spanish troops’ cleverly- coordinated rifle fire prompted their enemy to surrender.

The German general, humiliated by his column’s improbable defeat, shot himself on the spot. In total, the Nazi unit suffered eight killed, 165 wounded and over 800 surrendered.

By remarkable contrast, just one “guerrillero” was wounded in the battle and that was by a bullet to the thumb. Invigorated by their success at La Madeleine, the Spanish fighters headed home to take on Franco’s forces, for which many of them were captured and executed.

“Villacampa”, García’s father, was spared the same fate in 1950, when the French threatened to close their Spanish border (vital for Spain’s emerging tourism industry) if Franco had him shot.

Civil War starters

Toby O’Brien, Donough’s father, was friends with two men who were instrumental in starting the Spanish Civil War.

In 1936 Toby was working for The Telegraph and often invited Luis Bolín, London correspondent for the Spanish daily ABC, and pro-fascist publisher Douglas Jerrold, over for sherry. Together with the spy Hugh Pollard, it was Jerrold and Bolín who hatched a plan to charter a plane and fly Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, from where he would invade Spain and trigger the Civil War.

By all accounts a shady character, given to firing his revolver wherever and whenever he felt like it, Pollard navigated the flight (with Captain Cecil Bibb as pilot), taking his daughter Diana and her friend Dorothy along as cover.

From One Hell To Another is currently being translated into French and Spanish and O’Brien says that a film or TV series based on the book is “likely”.

One imagines that the battle of La Madeleine - the classic tale of a brave underdog beating a much stronger enemy - will lend itself to the screen just as much as it does to the novel.