Women of Valor (20 page)

Rosette didn’t hesitate to dive right into action if she was needed. Captain de Witasse recalled a day of fierce fighting near the village of Anglemont, when one of his tanks was hit and called for an ambulance. Nearby, de Witasse could see Rosette, whom he described as “young and ravishing,” but he was reluctant to send her into the middle of the firefight. He didn’t need to. “Rosette heard the call for help on the radio. She headed down the road, crossing the barrage of German artillery encircling Anglemont (that day the artillerymen were firing with heartfelt enthusiasm on both sides), and returned a little while later, under the same conditions, with an ambulance full of wounded.”
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Not everyone in the medical battalion was so stoic. Rosette recalled one doctor whose talent for disappearing at the first sight of danger was well known. He tried to reprimand her for a cracked windshield on the ambulance, which had in fact occurred because of a small accident. Rosette didn’t feel like owning up to yet another accident, so she said a machine gun had done it. The doctor called her on it, saying the crack was nothing like the damage automatic weapons fire makes. “How would you know?” she snapped. The doctor turned pale and left.

The Rochambelles’ tactical group changed commander for the fourth time after Châtel, when Colonel de Billotte was sent to Paris to organize and train a new battalion of Resistants. The new commander, Colonel Jacques de Guillebon, a graduate of the elite Polytechnique School, was quickly characterized by his haughtiness. “Our Rochambelles, in whom the sense of observation was tightly allied to that of humor, awarded him the nickname ‘Bec d’Ombrile (Umbrella Nose),’ which has stuck ever since among us,” Witasse wrote.
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Rosette explained that Guillebon had a habit of standing stiffly, with his nose in the air, and communicated with the lower ranks as little as possible. The nickname was his reward.

Patton and Leclerc were ready to drive straight to the Rhine, continuing the fast-moving momentum that had spelled their success up to now. But the food, munitions, and gasoline supply line had not kept up the pace. They were short on all counts. Patton estimated that his army was lacking 140,000 gallons of gasoline, and he was told that 3,000 tons of supplies were being diverted to Paris on a daily basis to support the civilian population.
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Patton raged and fumed at the Allied command’s inability to furnish his troops with what they needed, but nothing he did had any effect. For most of the month of October, the Allied forces sat in the mud and rain of Lorraine, giving the Germans time to regroup, resupply, and reinforce their defenses. Leclerc was as frustrated as Patton.

“Leclerc spent a month being unbearable,” Danièle recalled. “He was dreadful, all the time at his maps. He strained like a dog on a leash.”

On top of the downtime, Leclerc was ordered to detach from Patton’s Third Army and put his division under the orders of U.S. Major General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army. Leclerc didn’t know Patch, but was reassured by the fact that General Haislip also was transferred to the Seventh Army.

For the long wait, a half-dozen Rochambelles were assigned to stay at a deserted village called Roville-aux-Chênes, but upon arrival they found the tank crews had already occupied all the comfortable housing. Toto requisitioned the combined village hall-school building for sleeping quarters for the women. Some Second Company soldiers, feeling a bit guilty, helped them sweep and clean out the room, and the women worked hard getting it in shape. As they were finishing, a couple of soldiers from the
Austerlitz
tank crew, having found uniforms in the hall attic, disguised themselves as firemen, put on false mustaches and masks, and knocked on the door. “Putting on a ‘gendarme’ accent, they demanded to speak to ‘Madame la Commandante,’” Witasse wrote. “Toto arrived and they explained that the village hall could not, under any circumstances, become a house of ‘working women.’ Therefore they had to leave the premises, right away. Out! Toto exploded with a fury that was in no way pretended. Her girls, upset, formed a circle around the two rogues, and, equipped with brooms, became absolutely threatening. The two fellows pretended to try to escape, and then pulled off their mustaches. It ended in a gigantic burst of laughter.”
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Toto and the women spent several days resting and trying to find food in neighboring villages, and eventually invited some officers and tank crews to dinner. They realized, to their dismay, that the men’s meals were far better than the women’s: the tank regiments had support personnel assigned to forage duty. The foragers hit a wide-ranging territory, buying or stealing—whichever was necessary—chickens, ducks, whatever produce the local farms still had available. The ambulance drivers had no experience in this, and mostly confined themselves to being creative with K-rations. Witasse wrote that the combined lunches and dinners nonetheless inspired the men to clean up a little. “Our ambulance drivers were often invited by the tank crews, who, on those occasions, made a great effort to receive them in a dignified manner. A kind of competition developed, which brought about the happy effect of obliging the personnel to put on clean clothes, and allowed us to establish the bonds of friendship, so precious in combat.”

At Roville, the women also had frequent musical evenings of singing popular songs and duets. Marie-Thérèse remembered Lucie, Michette, and Raymonde as having particularly good voices. Some of the division officers also would join in.

One October day Florence Conrad arrived to summon Toto back to Paris. The army was trying to organize its women’s corps and had decided to cut Conrad’s four stripes of a major to the two stripes of a lieutenant, and take Toto from two stripes down to one. Conrad had assigned herself and Toto their ranks at the beginning of the Rochambeau project, and they had sewn their own stripes on. Neither of them were about to take any off. Toto went to Krementchousky, who sent her to Leclerc. Leclerc sent a blistering letter to Paris confirming their ranks in the division. Florence and Toto went to the A.F.A.T. headquarters and were sent from office to office until they finally ended up in front of the commandant, Hélène Terré, who had received Leclerc’s opinion. Their stripes were reluctantly confirmed, and Toto returned to the front.

When she got back, she found Edith asking for a change of partner. Edith later said she had finally figured out what the rest of the Rochambelles already knew: Lucie was a lesbian. “It took me a long time to understand. I just didn’t get it,” Edith said later. Lucie did not try to hide her sexual orientation, and the other Rochambelles said it had never caused any conflict in the group. Lucie had been married and had left her husband after an affair with another woman. When she wasn’t having near misses with death or being reprimanded by her commanding officers, she was a lot of fun, and Edith missed her afterward. “She was terrifically cultivated. I missed her because she was so funny,” she said.

Lucie also was fast, and the faster you got the soldiers onto the stretcher and out of combat, the safer you were. Edith found she was pretty quick, too. “I had discovered that I was quick, that I wasn’t afraid, and that I managed to do my work well.”

At Roville, the Rochambelles were assigned a new driver who had tried to join the war as a regular soldier. Michelle “Plumeau” Mirande had worked with the Resistance during the occupation, and when her group joined the division, so did she. One day, she was on guard duty when Leclerc happened to walk by and ask her a question. She responded, and he jumped and said that that was a woman’s voice. “But I am a woman, General!” she replied. She was sent directly to the Rochambelles, furious to be sidelined as a driver. Plumeau, so nicknamed because of her feathery hair, didn’t want to join a women’s unit. “But when she understood our work, she accepted it,” Raymonde said.

With little to do to fill the days, Rosette went shopping. In Nancy, the nearest big city, she bought some fur-lined gloves, socks, and insoles for her army boots, which were too large for her feet. She and everyone else in the division complained that the GI-issue boots absorbed water like a sponge. She also got a plaid scarf, but Toto didn’t like it and Rosette wasn’t allowed to wear it when Toto was around. Toto could be overbearing about the women’s personal appearance: she told Janine Bocquentin that she wasn’t feminine enough, and to make more of an effort. Janine shrugged her off.

In a village near Roville, they found a public shower, and Rosette was in line behind a soldier whose boots and socks gave her pause. “I confess I was a little afraid when I saw the state of his feet. He hadn’t taken off his socks since Paris!” But for a shower, that rarest of comforts, she braced herself and went ahead. While at Roville, Rosette and Nicole named their ambulance
Bessif
(The Force) to stay in keeping with the other “Moroccans,” whose ambulances bore Arab names such as
Baraka
(Blessing) and
Mektoub
(It is Written). Rosette said she never followed through with painting the name on the ambulance. She felt part of the “Moroccans” because she had joined from there, but she was not an Arab speaker and had only lived in Morocco for three years before the war.

The rain did not stop falling, the ever-present stacks of fertilizer left a permanent odor in the air, and everything, everywhere, was muddy. Jacotte said that one night her boots were so caked with mud she couldn’t get them off, so she hung her feet off the edge of a bed and slept on her stomach. They began putting snow chains on the ambulances to get them out of the muck. Marie-Thérèse remembered gathering branches and small logs to build a wooden platform behind the ambulances so that they could arrange their blankets on the stretchers to sleep at night. Without the platform, the stretchers sank into the mud. Once wrapped, with one blanket on the bottom for insulation and two blankets on top for warmth, they slipped the stretchers back in the ambulance and climbed inside to sleep.

Anne Hastings (standing) and Anne-Marie Davion checking the oil in their ambulance.

“It is so wet that we have to winch the tanks up hill,” Patton wrote. He was bivouacked to the north of the Second Division, waiting for the rain to clear so that the bombers could flatten the fortress at Metz. “Metz, the strongest fortress in the world, is sticky but we will get it as soon as we can get the air.”
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Finally, at the end of October, Leclerc got the green light from Haislip for an attack on Baccarat, home of the crystal factory and core of a German command center that defended Alsace to the east. Leclerc decided to attack through the Mondon Forest, north of the town, and his unexpected approach coupled with extra heavy artillery crushed the Germans there. Marcelle Cuny, a young woman Maqui fighter, rode in the commander’s Jeep to lead the tactical group into Baccarat by the back roads, mortars falling all around them.

Edith was now partnered with Anne Hastings, the French Harvard student who was married to an American. One day they were driving on a narrow track in the Mondon forest toward Brouville, expecting an ambush at any moment, wondering where the Germans had gone. A couple of tank soldiers on a rise at the edge of the forest signaled to them, and they tried to drive over, but the grass was too wet and the tires slid. They got out and climbed up on foot. The soldiers were part of a tank unit, and their lieutenant had taken a direct hit by a shell. His torso was hanging out the top of the tank and his legs were in the bottom. They helped get him out and laid him on the ground, which ran red with blood. Edith and Anne wiped their hands on the wet grass, shaken and upset, and returned to their ambulance. There were men still living who would need them, and all their concentration had to be funneled in that direction.
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They found the fighting centered on Brouville, where the German and French troops dug in to pound each other with shells through the rain and mud. For several days, the ambulance drivers slipped up and down the dark forest roads, carrying the wounded to treatment centers, and the mortars fell in the incessant rhythm of the rain.

Christiane Petit and her partner Ghislaine Bechmann, who had joined the group in England, were attached to the Spahi reconnaissance unit along with Dr. Benjamin Moscovici, a Romanian, who referred to his female ambulance drivers as
“drôles de cocos,”
or funny kind of guys. Because they did reconnaissance, the Spahis were far in front of the rest of the division, and after one mission at Nonhigny, the ambulance drivers had to take wounded soldiers through a no-man’s-land to an American field hospital. An undefined space between the lines was the worst place to be. They could as easily be shot by their own troops as by the enemy. In the darkest parts, Ghislaine walked in front of the ambulance with her fingers muting the glow of a flashlight to give minimal guidance. Christiane was relieved when they reached the hospital, where they surprised the U.S. Army staff. “The American who met us, I can still see his face,” Christiane said in an interview. “Two girls, twenty-five years old, who arrive out of the middle of the battle with all our wounded. He said, ‘We don’t have any girls here.’ There weren’t any anywhere.”