The French War Bride (8 page)

1940

M
aman and Papa continued to exchange sharp words, late into the night. The next day, the radio aired French Prime Minister Reynaud's speech to the Senate that included the ominous phrase, “The country is in danger.”

“Did you hear that, Marie?” Papa demanded. “We are putting Amélie in danger.”

That set Maman to packing. I was told to fill a suitcase with all the clothes that I could carry. Papa sent a telegraph to his brother Roland in Marseilles to tell him we were coming.
Mon oncle
lived with his wife and my paternal grand-père in a small but lovely apartment with large windows, iron balconies, and a breathtaking view of the port.

“I don't want to go there,” Maman grumbled. I didn't blame her; my uncle's wife, Margaux, was a harsh and disagreeable woman. “If we must leave home, let's leave Europe altogether. Let's go to America.”

“With what?” Papa was clearly losing patience. “We spent the bulk of our savings renovating the house. We do not have enough money for a long journey to another continent.”

I packed my clothing. The radio blathered more and more bad news, couching it in such transparently foolish optimism that even I, who secretly believed that everything would work out like a magazine short story, knew it was a lie. Out the window, all of Paris—indeed, all of France!—seemed to be flowing through the streets. I have never seen the
roads so congested, never seen so many faces so grim and distressed. My stomach balled into a hard knot.

Maman insisted on taking sausage, bread, and a couple of jars of canned food. She left a note for Thomas and Pierre, in case they came home before us. She washed every dish and dusted every surface.

“What are you doing?” Papa demanded when he returned from the telegraph office. “If the city is bombed, the entire place will be covered with dust, if anything is left standing.”

“Ah, but if there is no bombing—and I pray to God there won't be—then I want everything clean and sparkling to welcome us home.”

Papa threw up his hands and murmured something under his breath about the irrationality of women. “You have thirty minutes.” At the end of that time period, he turned off all the lights, put all our suitcases outside on the stoop, then took Maman's elbow and firmly escorted her outside. He locked the door behind us. We climbed down the four steps to the street and were swept into the wave of humanity slowly surging forward, the crowd so thick everyone was forced to go in a single direction.

We headed toward the Gare d'Austerlitz, which is close to the Jardin des Plantes, where Joshua and I had been meeting. I kept my eye out for Joshua, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The train station was so packed you could hardly edge sideways toward the ticket office.

“They are overselling the tickets,” a woman complained to Maman as Papa got in line to handle our ticket purchase. “They are selling with no seats. And people are disregarding the dates and times. They are climbing onto the first train they can elbow their way onto.”

Maman relayed this to Papa when he finally returned with tickets for the next day. “We must board the very next train,” she insisted.

Papa, being Papa, refused to break the rules. “I will not participate in anarchy.”

Maman plucked two tickets from his hand. “Suit yourself, Alphonse. Come, Amélie.” Taking my elbow, she started pushing through the crowd toward the tracks, where a train had just arrived.

“This is not right!” Papa sputtered. “It is not fair to the people who purchased tickets for this train.”

“Those people already left on an earlier one,” Maman said over her shoulder.

“I can't believe you would do such a thing!”

“If the situation is so dire that we must leave our home to protect our child, then it is dire enough to do whatever else it takes.”

“But all these people . . .” Papa waved his hand. “They have children, too.”

“You love to quote that English saying, ‘all is fair in love and war.' Well, Alphonse, this is a matter of both.”

“But, Marie . . .”

My mother's face took on a look I recognized from battles at the dressmaker's. When her mouth flattened into that pinched set and her chin tilted to that rigid angle, there was no changing her mind. “You can come with us, or you can stay,” Maman said. “Either way, Amélie and I are boarding this train.”

—

It was a hot, crowded, exhausting nightmare of a trip. It took five hours, and we stood the entire time, squashed beside a family of Belgians that included a crying toddler, an old toothless woman, and a man with one eye. The scent of sweating bodies, dirty diapers, and day-old garlic breath kept me from feeling any hunger, despite not having eaten since breakfast.

The train stopped in Lyon, and the conductor unexpectedly called out, “
Tout le monde débarquent.”

Papa grabbed his arm. “Pardon, monsieur. We have tickets to Marseilles.”

“The army has requisitioned this train to carry troops. Everyone must get off here.”

“When can we catch another train south?”

“I do not know. You will have to talk to the ticket agent.”

Apparently most of the train's occupants also needed to talk to the
ticket agent. We stood in line for nearly four hours. When we finally got to the window, we learned that the next train to Marseilles would not come until two days later.

“That is ridiculous!” Papa sputtered.

“It is the best we can do,” the agent said.

The hotels were overflowing. Along with many other travelers, we ended up taking refuge in a church for two nights. Maman and I slept on the pews, and Papa slept on the floor beneath. The church was hot and airless, and a child with a horrible hacking cough kept us awake most of the night.

We spent much of the next day in line—to buy bread, to buy cheese, to use a toilet. The toilet situation was the worst! At one point, I had to pee in an alley as Maman stood guarding my privacy. I thought I would die of embarrassment.

After another torturously crowded train trip, we finally made it to Marseilles. The streets were jammed with motorcars, horse- and ox-drawn carts, buses, trucks, and many, many people like us—on foot, carrying baggage, looking tired and bedraggled and displaced. My feet throbbed as we walked more than three kilometers on the cobblestone streets to my uncle's apartment. I was hungry and tired and my shoulders ached from carrying my suitcase. I would have sold my soul for a warm bath.

We climbed three flights of stairs and knocked. My
tante
Margaux opened the door, her eyes red-rimmed, the bags beneath them more creased and puffy than the last time I'd seen her. She wore an apron over a black dress that accentuated her gaunt frame.

“You are too late.” She folded her arms across her chest.

Maman and Papa looked as bewildered as I felt. “Too late for what?” Papa asked.

“The funerals. We buried them yesterday.”

“What?” Maman gasped.

My father's face went white. “Who?”

“Roland and your father.” Margaux frowned with irritation, her tone terse. “Didn't you get the telegram?”

Papa staggered backward.

Mama dropped her bag and put her arm around him to steady him. “This is the first we've heard of this,” she said. “He needs to sit down.”

Margaux stepped aside to allow us into the parlor. Maman and I helped Papa to a sofa.

Papa's face was pale and waxy-looking, his voice was a low croak. “My father. My brother. Both . . . gone?”

“If you did not know, why are you here?”

Maman answered for him. “Everyone is fleeing Paris ahead of the Wehrmacht.”

“What happened?” Papa asked.

“Roland was taking your father to the barber. Your father fell in the street—no one knows why. Perhaps it was his heart, perhaps he stumbled. Roland bent down to help him, and a truck hit them both.”

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” Papa's face was white. He suddenly looked very frail and ill. It rattled me to my core, seeing my strong papa in such a state.

“The doctor said death was instantaneous for them both,” Margaux said.

“So there was no pain,” Maman stroked Papa's arm. “They did not suffer.”

I went into the kitchen and found a decanter of brandy and a glass. I carried both to the living room and poured Papa a drink. His hand was shaking, so Maman helped him tilt the glass to his mouth. Tante Margaux moved to take the decanter away from me. In my first act of open rebellion against an adult, I refused to let her. Instead I refilled the glass and handed it to Maman, who took a tiny sip herself, then helped Papa down the rest. Margaux frowned at me. I cast her a mutinous look and refilled the glass yet again.

“If you came to stay here, I am afraid I have no room,” Tante Margaux said. “My parents, my sister and her family, our daughter and her children are here. My two sons' wives and children are staying in your father's apartment.”

“I—I see.” Papa rubbed his eyes.

“You cannot throw us on the street, Margaux.” Maman's voice was like sharpened steel. “We spent two nights sleeping in a church in Lyon, and Marseilles seems just as crowded. You have just dealt Alphonse a terrible shock.”

“Yes, but I only have limited beds, and . . .”

“We will sleep on the floor tonight and tomorrow.” Maman spoke as if it were already settled. “That will give us time to make other arrangements. I am sure Alphonse's father and brother would not want you to turn us away at such a time.”

“No! No, of course not.” She gave an insincere smile. “You are welcome here.”

—

We did not feel welcome. We slept on pallets in the kitchen. I listened to my father and mother talk softly. I heard Papa's muffled sobs. I cannot tell you what that did to my heart, to hear my father cry.

I was too young to fully comprehend the depth of despair he must have been feeling—to have lost his last living parent and only sibling, to have fled his home against his wife's objections, to not be welcome at the place of refuge he'd counted on. I was also, blessedly, too young to understand the direness of our situation.

I remember thinking,
How can an old man fall in the street when the Nazis are invading? How can everyday tragedies still happen, while our country is under attack?
The very least God could do, it seemed, was to grant a reprieve on non-war disasters.

1940

T
he next day, we bought flowers and went to the church graveyard. I did not have a close relationship with either my uncle or grandfather—I hadn't seen them in several years—but Papa's grief was a noose around my heart.

After talking with the priest, Papa wanted to visit the graves alone. Maman and I stayed in the church and said prayers for their souls and the safety of Thomas and Pierre. I prayed for Joshua, as well—as well as for comfort for Papa.

Maman encouraged Papa to call a professor he knew at the university at Aix-en-Provence, about thirty miles away. There was no work for Papa, but the professor arranged for us to stay in a dormitory.

Once there, I thought I would go crazy; I was living quite literally on top of my parents in a bunk bed. There was no kitchen; we ate fruit and vegetables we purchased in town, and had one meal a day at a pension for the elderly. It was hot, it was miserable, and I thought things couldn't get any worse.

In about a week, they did. On June 10, as Maman and I were coming out of a patisserie, we heard planes overhead. A few minutes later, we heard several distant blasts.

A crowd gathered on the street to stare at the sky. Several separate plumes of smoke were spiraling upward from the direction of Marseilles.

“What is happening?” Maman asked.

“It looks like Marseilles has been bombed,” responded a woman in a blue and white dress.

“It's further east,” said a man in a stylish suit. “Looks like Hyères.”

We hurried back to the dorm and waited for Papa to come home from the library. Maman grabbed him the moment he entered the room. “The Germans are bombing us!”

“No.” Papa sank heavily on the bed. Fatigue and grief were etched on his face. He looked, I realized with alarm, like an old man. “The Italians are.”

—

Maman and I gaped like a couple of fishes.

“That makes no sense,” Maman said.

Papa heaved a sigh. “Mussolini has been waiting to attack a weakened country. Everyone thought it would be Yugoslavia, but he is an opportunist, and . . . well, France is about to fall.”

“Has the whole world gone mad?” Mama wailed.

“So it seems.”

“I told you we should have stayed in Paris!”

“Alas, Marie—the Wehrmacht are advancing on the city even faster than anyone feared.”

“Well, we can't remain here. We must join the Chaussants in the country. We were invited, and they have plenty of room.”

Papa nodded. I don't know if he really agreed or just conceded. This was the first time I had seen grief up close. On Papa, it looked like a serious illness.

And so we began another long and arduous train journey, this time toward Dijon. Since we were now heading north, the crowding was not as bad.

As the train rattled down the track, we learned from the gentleman seated next to us that the French government had fled Paris for Tours.

The
government
had fled? I could scarcely take it in. All of my life, I had believed that my country was an immutable force—one of those things that was absolute, that could not fail, that was the bedrock of
existence. God and country—the words went together. And now . . . the government, the very heart of my country, was running? I felt as if the sky were falling.

We were bone-tired when we pulled into the station at Dijon. M. Chaussant's farm was several miles beyond the city, near the small town of Arcy-sur-Cure. Papa found a taxi driver who had just relocated from Paris to give us a ride. On the drive, he told us about
l'exode.

“You were fortunate to travel out of Paris by train,” he said. “The roads were virtually impassable. Not only Parisians, but refugees from northern France and Belgium, people with terrible stories of bombed-out homes—many on foot, others in trucks or cars or on bicycles, or carts pulled by horses and mules and even oxen. People ran out of gas and just abandoned their vehicles. My taxi, fortunately, has two gasoline tanks.

“The first day, it took fifteen hours to travel five kilometers. A regiment of French troops was trying to move north, and we couldn't even clear the road to let them pass.”

“Mon Dieu,” Maman murmured.

“Many of the travelers were French soldiers heading home, some wounded, others full of despair. Oh, the tales they told!” He lifted his hands from the steering wheel and clasped his cheeks until I feared he was about to veer off the road. “It was enough to raise the hairs on your head.”

Maman leaned forward, her eyes anxious. “What did they say?”

“They said that the Germans are fighting with weapons that we're not prepared to defend against. Their tanks are unassailable. And the airplanes . . . the German Luftwaffe flies very high, then suddenly swoops low, many planes darkening the sky all at once. They are bombing the roads without regard for civilians.
C'est terrible. C'est vraiment terrible!
”

Maman kept wadding up the fabric on her dress, leaving big blotches of wrinkles. It was so unlike her that I feared she was losing her mind.

—

It was dusk when we pulled up to the farm. Yvette was working in the garden when the taxi squealed to a stop. I jumped out of the vehicle and
flew toward her. She shaded her eyes, then started running toward me. We fairly crashed into each other's arms.

“Is Pierre with you?” she asked when we pulled apart.

“Non.” The question hurt my feelings—or maybe it was the way her face fell at my answer that crushed my heart. It was probably both. I feared that she would have preferred to see Pierre instead of me.

“We haven't heard from him,” I said. “Have you?”

“Non. But then, the mail is not getting through very well.”

Neither were telegrams. Nothing seemed to work as it was supposed to. So many people had fled their homes, leaving their jobs unattended.

I tried to push aside my dismay about Yvette's greeting. I did not want to let Yvette's infatuation with my brother ruin our reunion. “Pierre will know to look here for us,” I said.

We linked arms and walked toward the farmhouse.

At dinner, the war was all anyone could talk about. “The BBC says Paris has been declared an open city,” Yvette's father said.

“What does that mean?” Yvette asked.

“It means that an enemy can just walk in and no one will lift a finger in defense.” Papa's voice was bitter.

Yvette's father took a gentler tone. “It is saying to the Germans, ‘Don't bomb us. We won't fight you.'”

Yvette and I looked at each other. “So now France will be part of Germany?”

“Never!” Her grandfather's eyes blazed out of his weathered, sunken face. “France will never cease to be France.”

“But . . . what does this mean? Will the soldiers still fight?”

“Not in Paris,” Yvette's father said.

“Elsewhere?”

There was a long silence. “We do not know,” M. Chaussant said softly.

“So . . . if the army stops fighting, will Pierre and Thomas come home?” Yvette asked.

“How can they?” Maman asked. “They can't go to Paris if it's occupied.”

“If Paris falls, all of France falls,” Papa announced.

“Is that true?” Yvette asked.

She was looking at her father, but Grand-père's hand banged hard on the wooden table. “France will fight. We always have, we always will.” His tone was stern, the kind of tone that said,
Do not dispute my word
.

No one did.

—

The next morning, a family—a large blond man, his dark-haired wife, and their two sweet-faced daughters, aged seven and nine—stopped and asked for water. They introduced themselves as the Morans. They had owned a
boulangerie
in the seventh arrondissement, and they had fled Paris just two days before. They were traveling the back roads when their car had broken down. They were now afoot, trying to get to a family member's home in Dijon.

Maman and Mme Chaussant insisted that they join us for lunch. As they ate, M. Moran told us what had been happening in Paris.

“We could hear bombings as early as June third—Orly, Bourget, and even some buildings in the fifteenth and sixteenth arrondissements. The newspapers and French radio said we should stay and wait, that if an evacuation was necessary, we would be told to leave. I believed them.” His voice trembled. “I figured, the girls' public school was still in session. Surely the government would not still hold school if it were unsafe.” He shook his head, his mouth tight, his eyes bitter. “I was such a fool.”

His wife covered his hand with her own. “You only did what you thought was right.”

“I was a fool! On June eighth, with no notice, the schools closed. That evening, the BBC said the Germans were just 122 kilometers north of Paris. The
Boches
were at our very door, yet French radio said everything was fine! On June tenth, we learned that the government had fled the day before.”

Grand-père uttered a low oath.

M. Moran's eyes blazed with outrage. “When I learned that the government had run away like cowards in the night, I felt so betrayed!”

“You were,” Grand-père said bluntly. “We were all betrayed.”

The roads were so congested that it had taken the Morans two days to travel a distance that normally would have taken two hours. To conserve gasoline, M. Moran turned off the engine whenever traffic hit a standstill. He had prudently brought extra gas cans and they might have made it to their destination, but the engine had stalled and would not restart.

After lunch—and after offering them an opportunity to clean up and change clothes—Grand-père gave them a ride in his old truck into Arcy-sur-Cure, where they could telephone their relatives for a ride into Dijon.

That night, French radio announced that all men aged eighteen to fifty should leave Paris immediately to keep from being forced to labor for the Germans. I wondered, of course, about Joshua. At every turn, I wondered about him.