Women of Valor (24 page)

Hostility between de Lattre and Leclerc was heartfelt. The two men detested each other, and their rare meetings were marked by closed-door arguments. Leclerc went up the American chain of command trying to halt his transfer, even getting Patton and Haislip to appeal for a reprieve from the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, but Eisenhower said that the request had come from de Gaulle, and that the Allies were bound to respect it. The more Leclerc struggled to get out of it, the louder de Lattre insisted that he report immediately for his orders. Leclerc and his staff expressed their great regret to their U.S. commanders. “If our relations have been, at moments, a little tense, which is normal during operations, we have in the end gotten along very well with the XVth Corps,” Girard wrote.
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The Rochambelles, like every other soldier in the division, were only vaguely aware of the changes of command. It was not their problem; their commanders were captains, not generals. “We were at grasshopper level,” Jacotte said. Nonetheless, leadership at the top set the tone for morale in the lower ranks, and more important, assigned the division’s position in the campaign. Their fate would now be in de Lattre’s hands.

As the division moved out of Strasbourg southward into the Alsatian countryside, the weather turned dead cold. It was the end of November; darkness fell early and lifted late. Leaving the comforts of Strasbourg with slight regret, Edith nonetheless was eager to get to her hometown, Colmar, and see her family.

Edith and Anne followed their Spahi reconnaissance unit in a slow crawl to Erstein, twenty kilometers south of Strasbourg, on November 27. It was dark by the time they reached the outskirts. No one was in the streets, no lights were on, and clouds obscured the moon. Edith was tense; it didn’t feel right. Where were the Germans? When the convoy halted, the ambulance came to a stop just in front of a cemetery. It didn’t add to the mood.

They checked with the artillery soldiers in front of them. No one thought that they would move or attack that night, but just stay in place and wait for daylight. The men were checking out the village to make sure it was clear. Edith and Anne knocked on the door of a little house, whose owner said they could sleep there, and that there was a restaurant just up the road. They thought they would try to get a quick sandwich. Edith pushed the restaurant door open a crack and surveyed the room: no German uniforms. They walked in and felt every eye upon them, as do strangers in a village café even in ordinary times. Edith said in Alsatian that they were ambulance drivers with the Leclerc division, and the place exploded with joy. They were passed from embrace to ample embrace and showered with questions. The Germans were gone, they said, but where were the French? In Alsace, it was always one or the other. Edith and Anne tried to wolf down their sandwiches while answering questions and telling what they knew, and then someone started to sing the Marseillaise, and that was it. Edith felt tears in her eyes. Someone put on an old Alsatian folk song, they grabbed the women in a dance, and sentiment was getting the better of the evening, when suddenly Edith saw a Spahi at the door signaling her to come. “The Germans are back,” he whispered.
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The moonlight was back as well, and they ran as close as possible to hedges and houses to get back to the ambulance, and as they did, rocket fire opened with full force in their direction. Edith listened for the French response and heard none. Then, finally, the French artillery answered, and she began to breathe again. She and Anne dashed to the house where they had left their toiletry bags, and found the owner on the steps outside, bags in hand. He put his finger to his lips. “Two Germans have taken the room,” he said. They slipped silently back to the ambulance and watched the fireworks in the distance. One of the Spahis came to their window to deliver a succinct disciplinary lecture on their absence. Edith listened without resentment; she knew they deserved it. They waited in the night, Edith watching the tombstones in the cemetery and imagining a German behind every one. Anne tried to reassure her that nothing had moved.

Finally the column started to inch forward, and Edith was relieved to get out of there. At an intersection, the Spahis turned north to return toward Strasbourg, but an officer stopped the ambulance. There were wounded soldiers to transport. As they maneuvered the ambulance in the other direction, a mortar slammed into an armored vehicle that had stopped to let them pass. The young men occupying it were splayed across the truck, broken, smashed, bleeding. They loaded the ambulance rapidly and turned toward Strasbourg. Erstein had a fine hospital, but it wasn’t in French hands, so they began the long ride north, guided by the light of a flashlight only, with at least one soldier who was bleeding so heavily that they knew he wouldn’t survive the trip. A short way along, they saw a guardhouse for a railroad crossing and decided to take a chance that help might be found there. The guard came out and told them to bring the soldier in and put him on the kitchen table. His wife ripped up a bedsheet and they worked quickly, got the bleeding under control and a dose of morphine in the soldier, and returned to the ambulance. The guard warned them to be careful: they had a choice of crossing a bridge or going through a forest. The bridge had been badly damaged by mortar fire, and the forest was surely full of Germans.

They took the bridge. Edith walked ahead with the flashlight, Anne inching along behind her with the ambulance. Edith bounced the light off the red cross on the ambulance from time to time, in case the Germans were watching. She imagined them laughing at the folly of trying to cross that bridge. The supporting beams were cracked and holes had been shot through several sections, leaving the dark, rushing river visible below. They went slowly, steadily, and finally found solid ground on the other side. They passed silently through a small wood, and then rejoiced when it opened onto a meadow. Edith climbed in the back to explain to the wounded soldiers what was taking so long, while Anne drove on. At the Strasbourg hospital, Edith found the same nun she had met previously and gave her a big hug. They unloaded the wounded. Edith thought a very young man with a simple shoulder wound had dropped off to sleep, but when she touched his face she had to stop herself from screaming. How could he have died? She should have checked him more thoroughly, she should have at least held his hand as he died; she was full of self-reproach, and every bit of it was futile.
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Near dawn, another run completed in the city, the nun led them to the kitchen, where the merry chef, creating a world of warmth around his stove, gave them steaming bowls of milk-laced coffee and croissants and Alsatian brioche topped with almonds. Then the nun commandeered the empty contagion ward for the exhausted women, and they slept through what remained of the night.

Further south, at the village of Herbsheim, the artillery was pounding down when Marie-Thérèse turned a corner in her ambulance, and found Raymonde standing in the street, directing Toto in a tight turn of the ambulance. Mortars were falling, wrecks of bombed-out tanks and jeeps littered the road, the soldiers had taken cover in roadside ditches. “And there was Raymonde, imperturbable, making gestures to Toto so she could maneuver to turn the ambulance around,” she said, laughing.

Edith and Anne were sent by their Spahi unit to stay a night in a farmhouse near Herbsheim, the Spahis thinking they’d be safer there, behind the front lines. The farm’s family, an older couple and their daughter-in-law (the young man having been conscripted by the Germans), welcomed them with hot soup and baked potatoes and plum tart. They offered them a choice of upstairs bedrooms, one with a large double bed and fine mahogany furniture, the other with narrow twin beds. They took the twin beds, and dropped off to sleep happily full and warm, for once.

A terrifyingly loud blast awakened Edith and Anne in the night, and they felt their way to the door in the dark and opened it. A cloud of plaster and dust poured into the room, blinding them. They stood there, waiting for the smoke to clear, and finally saw that they were on the edge of a crater. A heavy mortar had pierced the roof and cut the house in two, smashing the bedroom of fine mahogany furniture into splinters on the floor below. They started wondering how to get down, as the stairs had gone with the explosion. The family came up from the cellar and called out, happy to see them alive. They inched down by the supporting studs for the stairs, hugging the remaining wall. At dawn they left, and thanked the Spahis ironically for their restful night. The soldiers had been worried; they had seen the mortars going over their heads in the direction Edith and Anne had taken. It was the last time the women were sent “to safety” for a night. They stayed with their unit from then on.
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Nearby at Erstein, Rosette celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday on December 6. She and Madeleine went rabbit hunting with a couple of officers, she with a carbine and Madeleine with a rifle, and enjoyed the walking. She was stiff from too much sitting, most of it behind the wheel. The women fired off a couple of shots to pretend they were there for the sport, and the officers managed to get a couple of hares. Dinner was in view. Near Erstein, the division requisitioned a stock of rabbit-fur vests that had been made for the German army. Orders called for them to be worn fur side in, for greater warmth, but the officers and Rochambelles like to wear them fur side out, for greater style. Leclerc came through one day and saw an officer wearing his vest fur side out and asked curtly, how was he wearing his vest? The officer saluted and said “Like the rabbits, general!” A glimmer of a smile was detected under the general’s mustache.
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One afternoon Rosette was walking through the treatment center at Erstein when a wounded artillery lieutenant lying on the floor grabbed her by the ankle. “I’m suffering too much, kill me!” he pleaded. “My revolver is on my hip. Take it and kill me.” She went to the doctor and asked him to do something for the man, but the doctor said his leg had been blown off at a point where he could not stop the hemorrhage. The man was going to die. Rosette asked the doctor to give him some morphine so he could go in peace. They were out. The lieutenant died, eventually, in agony. Rosette did not take his gun. “He had his own two hands,” she said. “There are services one does not render.”

At Kertzfeld, just across the national route from Benfeld, Danièle’s unit stopped for the evening with the Germans 150 meters away, rockets at the ready, everyone on edge, mortars slamming down around them precisely every seven minutes. Danièle and Hélène had to evacuate a wounded soldier, and the other soldiers said they would dig a trench for them while they were gone. When they got back, the trench was half-full of rainwater. The soldiers pointed to a shepherd’s hut in a field nearby; they could go there. They opened the door and found several officers already occupying the hay on the ground. The officers moved over and made room for the women. The mortars kept falling, and when one hit particularly close, one of the men muttered “Son of a bitch!” The lieutenant snapped that there were Rochambelles in their presence and if he couldn’t watch his language he could leave. Afterwards the swearing was muffled in the hay. But no one was sleeping. They could hear footsteps, coming closer and louder, it seemed. Soon they were all lying there listening and waiting for the door to be thrown open and the Germans to start shooting them. Finally the lieutenant got up to check it out. He left quietly, and came back laughing. A gravel quarry behind the hut had filled with rainwater, and the wind had picked up, driving small waves to slap against the gravel. “We laughed out loud, but we had been pretty scared,” she said.

In the same area, near Osthouse, an artillery lieutenant they were friendly with asked Danièle and Hélène to accompany him and a friend to dinner at his aunt’s house, nearby. They agreed, and the lieutenant drove them in a Jeep, pulling up a long drive to a lovely chateau, classic style, with two wings flanking the central building. “We got there, I wouldn’t say with mud-caked boots, but we were dressed like soldiers on campaign. He didn’t tell us!” Danièle recalled. They rang the bell, and a uniformed servant led them into the salon. His aunt was there, elegant in an Oriental-style robe and trousers, and they were welcomed to dinner. “The front was five or six kilometers away, no more. And we were in a castle straight out of a fairy tale. We were served on silver trays, with a valet behind us. It was as though the war didn’t exist. It was extraordinary.” After dinner, they drove back to their ambulances and spent the night on their stretchers, as usual, Danièle wondering if in fact she had dreamed the entire evening.

One day, Danièle went on a reconnaissance mission with a light tank, Jeep, half-track, and ambulance, a dozen soldiers altogether. Danièle said she was always ready to go on missions like that; she enjoyed the edge. They set off at dawn, in a thick early morning fog. At a fork in the road stood a tiny house. The lieutenant called a halt to wait for the fog to lift, as they couldn’t see where they were going. They parked on the side of the house and went inside. It was a rustic one-room shack. Suddenly they heard German voices, German conversations, all around.
“Mon Dieu,”
Danièle thought, “We’re going to be trapped like rats.” They stayed quiet and the Germans went on by, apparently never seeing the French vehicles. “That was close. That was throwing oneself into the middle of the wolf-pack.”

The Germans had their backs to the Rhine in December, and the fighting there took on the desperation of a last stand. The division battled for every village and many a crossroads in weather that plummeted to - 20°C (-4°F) and stayed there for a month. Shells striking the snow-covered ground kicked up sprays of black dirt against the white backdrop, like a reverse negative. As the ground froze hard, shells exploded with increasing lethality, instead of sinking partly into the earth before bursting. The Rochambelles started treating cases of frostbite and letting soldiers take turns sleeping in the back of their ambulances. The inside of the ambulances was covered in ice, but the temperature was up to zero (32°F).