Women of Valor (21 page)

After their work there, the commander of the Spahis’ regiment gave Christiane and Ghislaine the honor of permission to wear the Spahi’s red cap, citing “courage admired by everyone.” They also received citations for their evacuations “under particularly violent fire” at Nonhigny. Christiane enjoyed wearing the cap a little more than Toto thought she should, and this led to Toto’s Rule No. 41:
When sent temporarily to another unit, do not insist on wearing that regiment’s headgear when the lieutenant is patrolling nearby.

Another day, Christiane and Ghislaine were called to take Raymond Fischer, a division soldier, to the hospital. He was suffering from hepatitis and was badly dehydrated. Fischer, who had signed up with the division in Paris at the age of eighteen, became obsessed with getting some tea. He wrote in his memoirs that Christiane and Ghislaine tucked him into a stretcher between their two twin beds for the night before leaving for the hospital, and brought him some tea. “Divine nectar, sublime brew, served by the Graces, and though it did not render me immortal, as the Greeks would have wished, it revived my will to live. And in that feminine barracks, I was filled with bliss.”
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Fischer, a native of Alsace who had hidden in Normandy to escape conscription into German ranks, drove one of the medical battalion’s armored halftracks, which picked up wounded soldiers in conditions under which the Rochambelles’ nonarmored ambulances should not go. He said in an interview that he heard about the Rochambelles before he met any of them, as they had a tall reputation in the division. “Their name ended in ‘belles’ and they often were. The officers liked them a lot, and the Rochambelles had a slight favoritism toward the officers,” Fischer noted with the wry resentment of an enlisted man. Having women in the division was “marvelous,” he said. “If anything happened to us, we knew we had devoted women by our sides.”

The attack on Baccarat signaled a return to the roar of pounding artillery, shells smashing down for hours on end, bullets zinging past any rounded corner. But the division was delighted to get moving again, and so were the ambulance drivers. One day Toto and Raymonde picked up a wounded soldier from a field and then saw that the German gunners who had hit them also were dead, except one, who was injured. They put the wounded German in the ambulance with the wounded Frenchman, who immediately started protesting that he wasn’t going to share his ambulance with the enemy. Toto gave him a generous shot of morphine and he passed out.

The Rochambeau Group often took German wounded to hospitals. “The poor kids, fifteen, sixteen years old, shot full of holes…” Jacotte remembered. However, some were not poor kids at all, but dedicated Nazis, as Jacotte discovered. One day she was asked to transport a dozen German prisoners in her ambulance to the rear of the American lines. She didn’t like the look of one of them, and though the prisoners had been searched by the French soldiers, she checked his pockets again, and found a grenade. “Then, we had the feeling they were the enemy. Then, they could go jump on a mine and I wouldn’t care,” she said.

Marie-Thérèse picked up some German teenagers, sixteen and seventeen years old, outside Badonviller. “They were blond, they were young, you would have called them children. And they cried, calling ‘Mother, Mother…’”

And sometimes, in the back of an ambulance, the French soldiers were able to overlook their differences with the Germans. Anne Hastings recalled having several wounded French and one injured German with her one day. She asked if they were hungry, and the French men said they were, so she gave them food. And the French soldiers said, “What about the
Fritz?
”
“Fritz”
was a slightly less rude way of referring to the Germans than
“boche.”
“I gave them cigarettes—as though that were good for their health!—and again they said, ‘What about the
Fritz?
’ And I thought that was quite nice. It made things less nasty,” she said.

Baccarat was at last liberated on October 30, and Leclerc was pleased with both the speed of the campaign and low number of casualties the division had suffered. With the town in friendly hands, Edith and Anne went to visit its renowned crystal factory, tramping in with their muddy boots and bloodstained uniforms, and felt the intensity and fragility of beauty in a way they never had experienced before. Edith recounted the piercing contrast between the filthy horror of the war and the brilliant fineness of the vases and goblets around her. “Here, all was light, beauty, creativity, while outside, all was ugliness, ruin and suffering,” she wrote.
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Marie-Thérèse bought her family a seventy-six-piece service of Baccarat glassware at the factory and had it shipped to Paris.

Even when the battle was over, explosives buried in the mud remained treacherous. A soldier stepped on such a mine, and Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne were called to take care of him. The American field hospital was set up in a high school at Lunéville, northwest of Baccarat, but the Rochambelles were not supposed to go there. They were required to take the injured to the treatment center closer to their lines. Marie-Thérèse decided to ignore that rule and take the soldier straight to the hospital at Lunéville. He was badly wounded in both arms and legs, and the women had could not stop the hemorrhaging. At the hospital, the American nurses—all men—carried him directly in to surgery, but the doctor was not optimistic about his chances for survival. The women left and had no news of the soldier afterward. They believed he had probably died, but that they had done their best for him.

The war also had its lighter side, and for Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne, it was a moment of warmth and respite in an old farmhouse outside Baccarat. It had an old-fashioned fireplace in the middle of the large common room, and the inevitable stack of fertilizer in the courtyard. The Lorraine farmers measured their wealth in the size of their stack, and this one was stinking large. The farmhouse owners apparently had fled the Nazis, and had tried to hide their stores before leaving. Some division soldiers did not take long, however, to find the entrance to the cellar hidden under the stack of fertilizer. Along with some fine bottles of wine, they found urns full of butter and goose lard and sacks of potatoes. They caught a dozen or so chickens, wrung their necks, plucked their feathers and put them on a roasting spit over a big fire. They fried the potatoes in a big washtub full of fat, a treat the French hadn’t had in the lean years of occupation. It was a veritable feast, and Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne were the only Rochambelles around to enjoy it.

At the end of the meal, the men brought out some mirabelle brandy they had found, and poured shots for everyone. Just then, a couple of soldiers burst in the room: a patrol had been hit, and there were wounded to evacuate. One of the men at the table said that since women don’t down their brandy in one shot, they could pass theirs over to him. Naturally, Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne stood up and shot the potent brandy. Then there was work to be done, and Marie-Thérèse, who was utterly unaccustomed to heavy drinking, insisted on carrying out her duty.

“Marie-Anne,” she pronounced carefully, “open the barn door.” She drove the ambulance out of the barn and picked up a doctor to accompany her, as Marie-Anne sensibly bowed out of the mission. The doctor shouted as Marie-Thérèse drove over an anti-tank ditch and straight on without blinking. They got the soldiers, who were not too seriously wounded, and drove them to the treatment center. The doctor hopped out of the ambulance at the center and requisitioned some strong coffee for Marie-Thérèse. He wasn’t risking the ride back on the fumes of mirabelle brandy.

Toto had a bad cold and a worse case of the blues one afternoon in mid-November, stuck in a convoy held up between Baccarat and Badonviller, and decided to go sit in a rare patch of sunshine on a village square. She took out her jackknife and sat on the edge of a wall, cleaning her fingernails, when an infantry soldier approached, laughing, with a fashion magazine he had found in the ruins of a house. He opened it and pointed at a photograph: there was Toto, in a long white evening gown and gloves, perfectly coiffed, bejeweled and elegant. “It was very funny to see Toto in such a different life,” Raymonde said. They laughed over it, and Toto kept the magazine.

In fighting around Vacqueville, a village northeast of Baccarat, Jacotte and Crapette’s ambulance was shot straight through. Crapette caught some fragments, but wasn’t seriously injured. They were glad the back of the truck was empty at the time. A few minutes later, the back windows of the ambulance were blown out by the percussion of antitank cannons shooting from their side. The women covered the windows with cardboard. The following day, the
Malmaison
tank crew member Jacques Salvetat came round to the infirmary and squatted quietly in the corner, smoking his pipe, and Crapette said, “So, Salvetat, what can we do for you today?” He replied, “Umm … we were worried about you yesterday.” He wanted to be reassured that they were fine. Crapette and Jacotte smiled and told him not to worry. They were touched by his concern, but felt they were in no more danger than anyone else in the division. The next evening, they were asked to take a woman about to give birth to the hospital in Baccarat, and upon their return, found the house where they had been staying flattened by a mortar.

As the division liberated villages along their path, village residents returned to their homes. Marie-Thérèse, writing in a November 7 letter home, remarked that she felt tremendous sympathy for them. “I will never forget the scenes we are now seeing, these poor people returning to their villages, pushing their poor little handcarts, and finding nothing, or almost nothing, and yet thinking to hang a flag on what remains of their houses.”

Badonviller was one such town, and the fighting there was fierce. Zizon and Denise were near Badonviller one afternoon when a soldier on a motorcycle asked them to evacuate a badly wounded member of General Leclerc’s guard unit. The route was still under fire, but they raced behind the motorcycle through the bombing and found the soldier. He had been shot in the heart and both arms, caught by a horizontal spray of machine-gun fire. They got him into the ambulance, and Zizon sat behind the wheel, with him holding desperately onto her hand. She was trying to maneuver the ambulance around craters in the road to avoid aggravating his injuries, and it wasn’t easy to do with just one hand, but the soldier would not let go. “Let me hold it, you know very well that I’ll never hold a woman’s hand again,” he said. Eight kilometers down the road, they unloaded him into a treatment center, and the doctor on duty yelled at them for having run the risk of picking him up. “Can’t you see that he is going to die?” the doctor said. Denise responded with vehemence that their job was to pick up the wounded wherever they were, not to make life-and-death judgments in advance. The bitter exchange ended cordial relations with that doctor for the rest of the war. The ambulance was so bloody that Zizon and Denise had to wash it down with buckets of water and throw out the stretcher before returning to their post. “On the way back, I cried like an idiot, collapsing under the weight of so many deaths. Denise just said to me calmly, ‘How many will you have to see die before you can manage some serenity?’”
16

Newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, de La Horie led his troops into Badonviller on November 17 in a surprise attack on two German battalions there, killing 200 men and taking 600 as prisoners. The next morning he stopped his Jeep to speak briefly to Marie-Thérèse. They often had conversations on literature or history, the kind of talks that were food for the soul for intellectually starved Marie-Thérèse. De La Horie was “charming, cultivated, and good-looking, and also married and a good husband,” she said later. That morning he told her that things were heating up nearby, and that he had to go. Jacques Branet was among the soldiers in a Jeep behind him, and they drove off to the village of Brémentil, three kilometers north. The officers were standing in a house, discussing plans, when a mortar blasted through the window and exploded at their feet. Branet got up, dazed, and found de La Horie unconscious. Krementchousky happened to be there, and he threw de La Horie into his Jeep and raced for the infirmary at Badonviller. On the way he passed Leclerc’s car, en route to a meeting with de La Horie. They were all too late. The colonel was dead; a piece of shrapnel had pierced his heart. Leclerc and de La Horie had been classmates at the St. Cyr military academy, and they had made the long march across North Africa together. Leclerc went to say goodbye, kissing his old friend on the forehead before turning heavily back to the war.

The news flew rapidly through the division, and Anne-Marie ran into the infirmary, crying and shouting. “De La Horie is dead, and Jacques is, too! I have to go see Jacques!” A couple of ambulance drivers calmed her down. Branet was not dead; he was fine. It was the only public display Anne-Marie ever made over Branet, whose discretion in her regard was extreme. “He was a little cold, even with her,” said Marie-Thérèse. “I never saw any gesture that could be translated into tenderness or affection. He was a good-looking man, very old France, from the Parisian bourgeoisie, very distinguished.”

Anne-Marie and Marie-Thérèse had attended the same Catholic school and had belonged to the same Scout troop when they were teenagers, and now by coincidence were in the Rochambeau Group together. But Anne-Marie never confided anything about Branet to Marie-Thérèse. She did talk to Toto, however, and Toto tried to help her. Anne-Marie wanted very much to marry Branet, but his ultra-Catholic family opposed the match, as she would be a divorcée.

The same morning that de La Horie died, a battle erupted at Petitmont, the next village up the road from Brémentil. Michel Phillipon, radioman on the
Montereau II
tank, wrote that he was in a convoy of tanks, followed by a couple of ambulances, when they fell under attack. The lead half-track (HT) was hit, with one man dead, three badly wounded, and the vehicle on fire. Then shells hit the tank
Iena,
killing three men and injuring two. The tank also started to burn. “Courageously, the Rochambelles went to get the wounded from the HT. They wrapped them in blankets, and placed them provisionally on the grass, waiting to be able to evacuate them. Then they came to load up Dornois and Dollfus [crewmen from
Iena
].”
17
The remaining tanks opened fire, and by nightfall the village was theirs, and the wounded soldiers were recovering in a field hospital. Fighting in the area cost the division nearly 300 casualties.