Building concrete fortresses at strategic centers and storing smuggled arms in them.
Military training of secretly organized troops.
Getting the money to carry on these extensive activities.
Extreme care was, and still is, taken to conceal the identities of the ordinary members and especially the leaders. For instance, one of the leaders known to his subordinates as "Fontaine" is in reality Georges Cachier, director of a large company in Paris and chief of the Cagoulards' "Third Bureau," which is in charge of military movements. Cachier is an Officer of the French Legion of Honor and a reserve Lieutenant-Colonel in the French Army.
The Cagoulards are still very active. Members are being recruited with leaders pointing out to the fearful ones that there is nothing to worry about--almost all of those arrested in the early days of the investigation are free, out on bail or kept in a "gentleman's confinement" where they can do virtually as they please. "Our power is great," new members are told.
As is customary in secret terrorist societies, the members are sworn to silence with death as the penalty for indiscretion. The penalty when it is employed is usually administered in American gangster fashion. Each member is allotted to a "cell," the basic unit of the military organization, and assigned to a secretly fortified post for training. One of these posts discovered by the _Sûreté Nationale_ was in an old boarding house run by two ancient spinsters with equally ancient guests who spent their time in rockers, knitting and reading and not dreaming that underneath the porch on which they sat so tranquilly was a fortress with enough explosives to blow the whole street to smithereens. Into this particular fortification, the cell members would steal one by one after the old maids had retired, entering by a concealed door three feet thick and electrically operated.
There are two different kinds of cells in the Cagoulards, "heavy" and "light" ones. They differ in the number of men and the quantity of armaments assigned to them. The "light" cell has eight men equipped with army rifles, automatics, hand grenades, and one sub-machine gun; the "heavy" one has twelve men similarly armed but with a machine gun instead of a sub-machine gun. Three cells form a unit, three units a battalion, three battalions a regiment, two regiments a brigade and two brigades a division of two thousand men. The battalions (one hundred and fifty men) are subdivided into squads of fifty to sixty men with ten to twelve cars at their disposal for quick movement throughout the city. These automobile squads are given intensive training.
