Women of Valor (11 page)

Jacotte wasn’t the only one who had a difficult first night. Florence Conrad had gotten lost as well and had driven sixty kilometers out of the way trying to find the field hospital. Crapette Demay, returning to the orchard in the dark, had run over four Moroccan stretcher-bearers who were sleeping on the ground. Fortunately, none was seriously injured.

When Zizon returned to the campsite at dawn, she found her ambulance a smoldering wreck and her clothes and possessions strewn around the muddy ground. Her suede boots had been run over by a tank. Shrapnel had ripped up the interior of the ambulance and sliced through their fatigues. Christiane’s ambulance also had taken a beating, and shrapnel had cut through her sack of clothing as well. She unfolded her army pajamas and found a hole run through them from top to bottom, like a paper cutout. She sewed them up and wore them for years after. It was a costly lesson for the group, but one they applied to future operations. They never parked their ambulances in one place again. “It was a mistake to have put all the ambulances in line,” Arlette said in an interview. “It was a target.”

That night near Ducey, Conrad handed over command to Toto. Conrad was tired, her usual energy flagging. She retreated to serving as liaison with the military bureaucracy and let Toto run the show, which was easier for everyone. The women all had enormous respect for Conrad, but most of them felt she was out of touch, still living in the era of the First World War and insisting on an anachronistic formality of manner. Toto had been running interference between Conrad’s old-fashioned ideas and the day-to-day possibilities for several months. Taking charge officially would be simpler for her as well.

“You” Courou-Mangin Guerin also left the Rochambeau Group in Normandy. She was pregnant again, and didn’t want to lose the baby. She most likely joined the Army’s social services programs being set up to help civilians behind the lines. She was disappointed to leave the ambulance corps, but pleased to be expecting a baby, according to her team partner, Rosette.

The division moved out the next day. The Rochambelles were assigned to the tactical unit commanded by Colonel Louis Warabiot, heading in a southeasterly direction toward Le Mans, with the division’s 4,000 vehicles in two columns. The way south wound through fields of dread and horror. Bodies of dead German soldiers lay rotting in the summer sun, no one willing to bury them for fear of booby-traps. Dead cows and horses, their bodies swollen, their legs stiff in the air, dotted the fields like a harvest of the macabre. The odor of death hung in the air, suspended in dust clouds kicked up by the tank convoys and commingled with the black fumes of their exhaust. Not a single house along the road was left undamaged; families shoveled out the rubble and patched the holes as best they could. Peaceful, verdant Normandy had been shattered in the struggle of the two colossal armies.

Toto and Raymonde were first in a line of ambulances when they came upon a motorcycle soldier who had hit a mine. He had been blown up into a tree, and was hanging there, his legs smashed and bleeding. Raymonde said they put the ambulance under the tree and climbed on top to get him down, but the maneuver blocked the progress of the convoy. Leclerc himself came striding up the line to see what was causing the delay, and poked Toto on the rear with his walking stick. They quickly got the soldier down—he lived, but lost both his legs—and moved the ambulance. “Toto said, well, if he’s given me a bruise, I think I’ll keep it!” Raymonde recalled. The incident led to Toto’s Rule No. 50:
When one sees the General nearby, in operations, do your best to warn the lieutenant, so she can get her ass out of the way of his walking stick!

Ahead of the French were the Seventy-Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and the Fifth U.S. Armored Division. In a parallel move to the east, the First Canadian Army and the First Polish Armored Division were moving south from Caen, where the long and devastating battle for possession of that city was finally over. The French and Americans were ordered to maneuver in a fishhook, coming up from the south between Alençon and Carrouges, to create a pincer movement and trap the German Army Group B, with its eleven Panzer divisions and forty infantry divisions. It was Patton’s plan, and it had the signature of his style, requiring speed, audacity and several good armored divisions. “We are having a hell of a war here.” Patton wrote in his diary.
5

The Second Division targeted a handful of villages on the outskirts of the Ecouves Forest, a 25,000-hectare (10,000-acre) nightmare for the tank regiments. The Ninth Panzer Division had come up from the south of France and hid, camouflaged in the forest, waiting for the 116th Panzer Division to push the French troops into range of its guns. On their western flank, the Second Panzer Division blocked the town of Carrouges. The French edged warily into the woods, with their Second Company tanks leading. Suddenly shells burst straight-on into the first tank in line. Two of its crew were killed and two were badly burned. Company Captain Jacques de Witasse came running, but could not tell who they were, so badly were their faces burned. Jules Boddaert, the gunner, wrote an account of that day. “It was only by saying my name that he recognized me, and his last words were, ‘Quickly, old Boddaert, go get yourself fixed up.’ I was immediately transported in an ambulance. First aid was given by Madame Torrès, known as ‘Toto.’ With a great deal of tenderness and gentleness, she reassured me. Afterwards, for me it was a complete blank.”
6

It took seventeen operations in an American military hospital to give Boddaert back a human face. He had third-degree burns over most of his body. Unfortunately, his injuries were not unusual. If a tank was hit, it burned, and the men inside often burned with it. It was perhaps a miracle that any of them survived. The Rochambelles were working night and day to give them that possibility. And not all the injured were French.

Arlette, carrying the torch of her father’s hatred for the Germans, found herself taking care of a wounded German soldier through the warm night of August 12. He was the first patient she didn’t simply transport, but sat up with and got to know. He showed her photographs of his family, and she had studied enough German in high school to understand what he was saying. “I took care of him. He talked to me all night about his wife, and his little children, and at dawn he died. It broke my heart, and all the hatred, that was gone,” she said. “Hate cannot stand in the face of suffering.”

The Rochambelles understood early on that suffering was not confined to the Allied forces, and that many of the German soldiers were conscripts forced to fight for the Nazis. Nonetheless, they were the enemy, struggling desperately against the tightening Allied vise, in a terrain that favored defense. Where it wasn’t forest, it was cleared fields, but the fields were divided by thick, raised hedges, a Norman system called
“bocage”
in French. The tank divisions kept getting stuck in the fields and attacked by squads of bazooka-armed Germans.

The ambulance drivers weren’t having a much easier time of it. On the back roads of the
bocage,
it was vital that the drivers find their way without getting lost, and it was nearly impossible to do so. They had to find where the triage-treatment centers had been set up, while driving in the dark, on unmarked country roads, along invisible borders of German or liberated territory. Directions often conflicted or led straight into enemy lines. Signposts had been removed or reversed: confusion to the enemy resulted in chaos for the Allies as well. Jacotte and Crapette, now ambulance partners, took turns driving, but Jacotte’s night vision was better, and she usually took the wheel after dark. They had to remember the way there, and then the way back, and an error in either direction could spell the end not only for them, but also for the wounded soldiers they carried. Jacotte said she searched constantly for landmarks to remember(a white rock by the roadside, an unusual bush, a tree. It was tense and tiring driving.

Jacotte Fournier in her ambulance.

Sometimes Crapette would sleep on a stretcher in the back while Jacotte drove. Crapette could fall asleep anywhere, and did. Even back at their bivouac, Jacotte would lie awake, listening to not-so-distant artillery. Sleep was in short supply. Either they were in service, or airplanes were buzzing or artillery falling or later in the war, it was just too cold. “That was the worst,” Jacotte said. “I was always anxious.” But she pushed past it, and kept going.

From August 12 to 15, the Second Division concentrated on pushing the Nazi forces out of the Argentan area toward the north, into the trap being laid by the Allied forces. The German commanders pleaded with Hitler to allow them to slip out of the noose, but he refused, and ordered them to fight on.
7
For a thirty-kilometer radius south of Argentan, the towns were a patchwork of occupation forces. Whose army held which village was life or death information for the ambulance drivers.

One night Edith, now partnered with Micheline Grimprel, who had joined the group in England, were taking a wounded soldier to Carrouges, and were held up by a long column of American tanks. Edith waited to cross, and at one point thought a tank driver had slowed and signaled them to go. She inched out and then heard a loud crunch, and the ambulance was shoved back off the road. The tank didn’t stop or give any sign of having noticed the encounter. The ambulance’s front right bumper was twisted and the wheel bent. After the tanks passed, an army Jeep stopped and the driver agreed to take Micheline back to their unit while Edith tried to get the soldier to the hospital. Micheline stood and waved goodbye as they sped off. Edith limped into Carrouges, turned the soldier over to the hospital, and went looking for a garage.
8
She found one with a promise of an overnight repair, and checked into a small hotel (a bed!) and had a big omelette for dinner (no rations!). Edith’s love of comfort and good food would lead her into trouble time and again during the war, and she didn’t regret a moment of it.

The next morning, the ambulance repaired, she stopped at the hospital to pick up bottles of rubbing alcohol, ether, and other medications. Then she set off to find Micheline and their reconnaissance unit, called “the Spahis” from their formation in North Africa. A motorcycle soldier had a map and tried to help, but wasn’t up to date on the latest troop movements. She continued on, feeling the emptiness of the streets like a shiver down her spine, but an occasional pedestrian assured her that Allied troops had been through that way. Then, at the entrance of a village, she felt a deafening blast. She floored it to get into the village and stopped at the first house, where an old man sat on a stoop, and asked if the French soldiers were around. He turned and went into the house without answering. She continued into the village square, and German soldiers poured out of a building, guns drawn and pointed in her direction. She ducked her head out of instinct and a shot rang off her helmet. She jumped out of the car.

“Ach, es ist eine Frau.” The lieutenant who had just shot at her became positively polite and agreed to take her to the commandant when she unleashed a torrent of German at him. Raised in Alsace, Edith was fluent in French and German as well as English. The three would serve her well in the war. She argued to the German officers that she belonged to the International Red Cross, was not a belligerent party, and should be released immediately. After a short discussion, they agreed to let her go, escorted by two soldiers who would take her beyond the German lines, if she promised not to reveal that they were there. “I promised. A German promise is not a French promise,” she wrote. Edith and the officers returned to the ambulance, which had been stripped of its equipment and the bottle of ether smashed, an event they could smell from several meters away.
9

The lieutenant asked for two soldiers to accompany Edith, and an older one stepped forward right away, followed after hesitation by a younger one. Ten kilometers down a tiny, winding road, the older German leaned over and pointed out three American soldiers on the edge of a wood. They were part of the Fifth U.S. Armored Division. Edith got out, arms held high, and ran to them, shouting her unit identification as she approached. They told her the French troops were on the other side of the forest. They all turned as the two Germans came running toward them, arms in the air, to surrender. The Americans didn’t want them, they were going on an attack. They suggested that the Germans run back to their lines, and said they wouldn’t shoot until after twenty paces. Edith, translating from English to German and back again between the men, stopped, horrified. She said she could take them to the rear lines of the American troops and turn them over as prisoners there, and they all agreed to that. The younger one scowled a bit and got an elbow in his ribs from the older one. It seemed to Edith that being taken prisoner was the older German’s hope and desire all along. She dropped them off in a prairie full of Americans and wished them luck, then slipped back into the French troop convoy just as a whistle sounded the departure. With barely a moment to let out her breath, boom! Her windshield went flying, shattered from inside out. She was hit by a bit of shrapnel behind her right ear, and the back of the ambulance was shot to pieces. The soldier in the vehicle behind her had accidentally stepped on the firing pedal of his 37mm mortar launcher when he jumped in to go.
10