Women of Valor (15 page)

“What I find really strange about this war is that everywhere there’s a mix of civilians and military,” Rosette wrote her mother. “As soon as the shooting stops, you see the kids come out of the hedges, the guys start weeding their cabbages. We feel like we’re the band of crazies who despite their insanity cannot prevent normal life from continuing on its parallel course. The tanks gathered at the Boulevard St.-Michel, ready at that moment to charge on the Luxembourg, were covered with children as though they were going on parade.”

Further north, at the Place de la Concorde, a pitched tank battle went on for over an hour until the German tanks in the Tuileries gardens surrendered. One division commandant, Jean Fanneau de La Horie, joked afterward that at one point, only he and the obelisk were still standing, that everyone else in the plaza had hit the ground when the firing began.

Aiming at the Hotel Meurice, where the German high command was headquartered on the Rue de Rivoli, Captain Jacques Branet’s Third Company was moving carefully up the street, infantrymen hugging the sides of the buildings, dashing across the exposed arches. Grenades tossed from upper windows landed inside several tanks in the street. One crew threw a grenade back out before it exploded; another wasn’t so lucky. As Branet and his men advanced, a grenade suddenly burst in front of them, showering them with shrapnel and deafening them with the blast. Branet’s ear was bleeding and he had bits of metal sprayed into his body. He was taken to a Red Cross infirmary at the Comédie Française, where he stayed for about an hour, when he decided that he was fine and got up to return to the fighting. Branet had promised Anne-Marie a captured German helmet for a hood ornament after she had complained to him about the Germans using French
kepis
as vehicle trophies. When Branet was wounded, he ordered his driver to follow through on the mission.

Anne-Marie Davion with German officer’s hat on radiator grill, in Paris

The German commander of Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, was taken at his headquarters in the Hotel Meurice and agreed to call a cease-fire at 3:30 P.M. He surrendered officially to Leclerc. Anne-Marie got her helmet, the highest-ranking hat Branet’s driver could find. She stuck it on the radiator grill of her ambulance. Jacques and Anne-Marie didn’t try to keep their romance a secret, but nor did they flaunt it in front of the others. Jacques would lean back, smoking his pipe, while Anne-Marie chattered vivaciously around him. He was quiet, solitary by instinct and structured by preference, while she was sociable, creative, and joyful. It was an attraction of opposites, but the attraction ran deep.

With von Choltitz’s surrender, Paris was back in French hands, and the city erupted in joy and celebration. The liberation of Paris had not been without cost, however: the division counted 71 dead and 225 wounded in the fighting. Among the wounded was Marianne Glaser, a Rochambelle who, with her fluent French, English, and German, had been requisitioned as a translator by the Americans since Utah Beach. She was shot in the arm while walking in the city. It was not a serious injury, but it sidelined her from continuing with the army. On the German side, the division reported 3,200 dead and 12,500 prisoners. The American infantry brought in another 5,000 German prisoners.
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Underneath the surface exhilaration, postliberation political wrangling had already begun. At the Montparnasse train station where Leclerc and de Gaulle had established headquarters, the two men found themselves pulled in many directions at once. U.S. Army General Leonard Gerow ordered Leclerc to take the Second Division out of the city and start cleaning out the northern suburbs. At the same time, FFI leader Rol-Tanguy stuck his name on subsequent copies of the official surrender document, next to Leclerc’s, as though von Choltitz had surrendered to him. The FFI, with its large communist base, was claiming the liberation for itself—with no mention of the Second Division—in posters and broadsheets. The FFI certainly had been instrumental in the city’s liberation, and had seen about a thousand members killed in the process, but they were not alone. De Gaulle decided to stake out his own territory by holding a parade of the Second Division down the Champs-Elysées the following day. When Gerow forbade participation by Leclerc and his troops, Leclerc sent him to de Gaulle, who asked to “borrow” Leclerc back from the Americans for a day. Gerow was furious.

The sniper fire that interrupted, but did not halt, the August 26 parade was a metaphor for the political scene at hand. The Gaullists were trying to recover and claim France’s national glory, and there were many, of different political stripes, who did not want them to have it. And there were others whose first thoughts focused on revenge, on punishing those who had not suffered during the occupation, on eliminating those who had actively supported the Nazis. Now that Paris was liberated, long-harbored resentments burst to the surface.

The most visible targets were women who had consorted with the enemy. They were stripped naked and had their heads shaved, then were daubed with tar and marched through the streets. The national humiliation thus could be personified, fault could be laid at a feminine door, and the rest of the country could proceed with a clear conscience. For the male collaborators, humiliation was not part of the punishment formula. Many of them, men in powerful positions who had used the occupation to profit financially or socially, were simply shot dead. The FFI acted with impunity against its targets. Not all of the victims were in fact collaborators, and there were errors of identity as well as personal vendettas carried out under political cover. There was also an element of class warfare in some of the attacks: chateaux pillaged in the countryside, luxury apartments looted in the city under pretext of “collaboration.” Historian Robert Aron estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 French were killed in acts of vengeance after liberation.
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That was the backbite, the chilling hangover that followed the liberation. Joy was the order of the day itself. On August 25, people in the streets jumped on every vehicle they saw. When Zizon and Denise’s ambulance broke down in the middle of a crowd, they thought they would never get out of there. The ambulance had not been running smoothly, and when it quit altogether, it was immediately swallowed up by the masses, while Zizon tried to explain that they were broken down and that they needed to hurry to keep up with their convoy. A young man finally understood and got the crowd to move, opened the hood, and pulled out the carburetor, jammed full of mud. They cleaned it, the ambulance started up, and off they went. At every stop men were jumping on the running boards. It was early morning, no one had shaved, and all the whiskery kisses they were getting were raking their skin raw. Both Zizon and Denise had one red cheek, on the window side.

The chaos in the streets had not yet begun when Marie-Thérèse Pezet, a dark-haired, thirty-one-year-old law student, was walking to mass at Notre Dame on the morning of August 25. The streets were empty and quiet. When she reached rue Saint Jacques, she looked in amazement at a vehicle rolling slowly up the street. “What kind of toad is that?” she wondered. It was the first Jeep she had seen. A column of tanks and vehicles continued up the street behind it, and Marie-Thérèse stood transfixed. People started pouring into the street, shouting that Leclerc had arrived! Leclerc had arrived! The column stopped for a few minutes, and soldiers were shouting out family telephone numbers to the crowd, could they call and let them know that Jean, Pierre, Georges, was in Paris. Just in front of Marie-Thérèse, an ambulance came to a halt, the driver’s window rolled up despite the heat. She walked up to the truck and tapped on the window, asking if there was someone she could call for them. The window opened slowly, and Marie-Thérèse was astounded. The driver and her partner were women! It was Jacotte and Crapette. Jacotte declined, politely, and closed the window. But that was it for Marie-Thérèse. If women could be in Leclerc’s division, she was doing nothing else until she joined.

Most of the Rochambelles gathered at the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Rosette and Arlette went over to the Préfecture and saw von Choltitz escorted in. Walking along the quay, they were stopped by a car full of Resistance members, who said they wanted to kiss an American. “I told them I was French. They left, saying, ‘
Merde!
Just our luck!’” Rosette recounted. Rosette later went on a tour of the city with one of the division doctors in a Jeep, “with Paris barely liberated, where there was still shooting going on, where we passed German tanks burning. The boulevards were practically deserted. FFI cars were tearing around at insane speeds. In the Tuileries a bunch of cars had been abandoned. Anyone could take them, and soldiers, Resistants and civilians were helping themselves,” she wrote. A young woman wearing a Red Cross uniform approached Rosette with a single question: How could she join? She was Tony Binoche Rostand, married to the grandson of the writer Edmond Rostand. When she joined the group, the women called her Cyrano’s granddaughter.

Rosette Trinquet (l) and Arlette Hautefeille, in Paris

Arlette, meanwhile, had been hanging around Notre Dame when a striking young woman approached and asked if she could do something for her. “I’d really like to take a shower,” Arlette told her. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she was Elina Labourdette, a glamourous young film star at the time. She took Arlette to her parents’ apartment on the Ile de la Cité to get cleaned up. The elegant apartment had a rooftop terrace overlooking the Seine and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” Arlette said. She chattered happily to Elina, explaining that she and her fiancé wanted to get married but didn’t have a clue how to get it done in the middle of a war. Elina volunteered to help.

Florence Conrad took charge of the legal details, and Elina and her parents arranged to hold the reception at their apartment. Conrad took Arlette to see General Koenig, who gave his permission, then to the archbishop of Paris, who refused to marry them at Notre Dame, saying it was reserved for royalty. Conrad offered to lend Arlette her daughter’s wedding gown, and took her to an apartment she had kept in Paris to try it on. The building’s concièrge hemmed the dress, Elina Labourdette’s mother loaned Arlette a veil, and the outfit was complete. Georges found a white shirt to wear with his dress uniform, and Arlette went with a police officer to open a jewelry store so that they could buy rings. The tank brigade’s command staff organized the music, the church, and the priest. “I didn’t do a thing,” Arlette recalled. “I was on a little cloud.”

The night before the wedding, on August 27, Rosette, Arlette, Georges, and a few other division officers were invited to the Labourdettes’ for dinner. Rosette and Arlette arrived in their fatigues, just slightly blood-stained, and found themselves seated with Jean Cocteau and Robert Bresson, the celebrated directors of French cinema, as well as the actor Jean Marais and the painter Christian Bérard. Cocteau stood, lifted his champagne glass, and proposed a toast to the division soldiers, comparing them to archangels at the barricades, untouchable by bullets, heroic in history. Cocteau later referred to the division as “that team which sees with but one eye and beats with but one heart.”
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Bresson promised to make a star of Rosette in a film after the war, but it wasn’t her ambition. She assured him that she could not act. Georges Ratard talked Marais into signing up with the division, and he drove an army tanker truck for the rest of the war.