Women of Valor (25 page)

At Witternheim, Jacotte found the polar opposite of Edith’s warm kitchen, spending the better part of December in a cold cellar. When they arrived, the Germans were trying to take the steeple—a handy observation post—off of the village church, bombarding it with artillery through the day, as Jacotte and Crapette hunkered down as best they could. At nightfall, they made acquaintance with the Katyushka multiple-rocket launcher, commonly known in French as the
“train bleu,”
and in English as the “Stalin organ.” Incoming rockets had a particular whine that gave a three- to four-second warning before they hit. After a particularly violent night, a homeowner went to complain to the company commander that the ambulance drivers had had a rowdy party the night before and had broken all her windows. She was sent back to her cellar.

The next day a mortar hit the roof of the house and broke some tiles, but didn’t explode. The house nonetheless was starting to fall down around them because of percussion damage alone, and that night a nearby blast blew out the candles they were reading by. They checked by flashlight that everyone was okay, and they started looking for a cellar. There was a cellar across the street, and while a soldier accompanied some civilians there, Jacotte went to check on the ambulance. It was intact, but she noticed a fire starting in the barn, and called the others to help put it out—they didn’t want it to draw more shelling, or provide more visibility for enemy gunners. It also gave them something to do. There was nothing to be done against mortars and rockets except to get out of the way, but the flames they could try to extinguish. They dug shallow trenches and passed buckets of water, but the fire spread too quickly. They loaded up and left, and as they pulled away, two mortars smashed into the house and destroyed it.

Jacotte and Crapette drove, trying to get out of the line of fire, past several farms in flames, the livestock panicking, farmers leading pigs to safety by their ears. They noticed that an ancient carriage of a fire engine, with a hand pump and a thin canvas hose, was being pulled to a farm by four men. It was hopeless; flames were shooting up into the sky. They found a cellar to sleep in, and the next morning, moving about above ground, they heard the warning screech of the Stalin organ. Crapette dove back into the cellar. Jacotte was too far from the cellar door, so she threw herself against a master wall. Afterwards, brushing off the debris and bubbling with joy at the fact of being alive, Jacotte heard a voice cut through the dust: “The General!”—and ran to put on her helmet, knowing she should have had it on all along. But Leclerc only briefly addressed the officers and did not notice the ambulance crew.

Jacotte realized that the gas tank of their ambulance had a hole in it, most likely having been hit by a piece of shrapnel. A soldier made a quick repair: he measured the hole, and then carved a wine-bottle cork to plug it. It got them to nearby Matzenheim, where they had a more permanent repair done. She and Crapette had a twenty-four-hour break there from the nonstop bombardment of Witternheim, and it was lovely to escape the constant pounding and tension. Upon their return, they were directed to stay in the cellar of the presbytery, the village priest’s house, with the tank regiment soldiers. The presbytery was between the church hall and the church tower, which was still being shelled by the Germans. Jacotte noted in her journal her days’ work: “Day 1: 17 wounded.” “Day 2: 2 wounded.” “Day 3: 1 appendicitis.” She also noted the temperature. It was –10°C (14°F) inside the presbytery cellar. The tank crews briefly debated whether or not they should dip into the priest’s stock of wine. It was resolved in favor of the argument that it would be better if they drank the wine than if the bottles were smashed by a shell. They also made use of the church’s large supply of votive candles, which provided their only light. Every few hours, Jacotte and Crapette took turns running to the ambulance, head down and doubled over, to start the engine so that it wouldn’t freeze.

Friends in the snow of Alsace. L-r, Michette de Steinheil, Anne-Marie Davion, Raymond Worms (a nurse) and Crapette Demay.

Jacotte and Crapette were still in the Witternheim presbytery cellar on Christmas Eve. It was clear and cold; the temperature hovered at –14°C (6.8°F). At 5:00 P.M., the shelling stopped, a precious gift of silence against the rolling thunder that had rung in their ears for the past week. They were invited to Christmas dinner, along with several infantry officers, by the
Austerlitz
tank crew. Another tank crew member with a talent for making pastry had worked hard collecting the ingredients for a Christmas cake. Everything was simmering along nicely when a mortar came through the roof, blew out the windows, and left the meal covered in dust and plaster. No one was injured but the goose. Naturally, they cleaned it up and served it: Oie farcie aux miettes de plâtre avec sa sauce poussière (goose stuffed with plaster crumbs in dust sauce). Better than K-rations, just the same.

After dinner Jacotte, Crapette and the soldiers held an impromptu Christmas mass in the church cellar, and found that prayers were more fervent than usual. When they emerged, the moonlight cast a reflective light on the snow that made the house façades look whole again, a ghostly dream that the destruction was not real, that the devastation was an illusion. Sylvain the troubadour came with his guitar and played for them, lifting spirits as he knew how to do so well, and someone delivered a Red Cross gift package to their cellar. And the nurse attached to Jacotte’s company, Raymond Worms, had returned from leave in Paris with gifts for everyone. He brought Jacotte a bottle of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue perfume, and as scent alone can conjure up another place and time, she was instantly transported back to a world of society balls and opera, of innocence and joy. It was a gift from heaven in that damp, dark cellar.

Jacotte considered Worms himself a treasure. He was French, but had been living in Brazil and returned there after the war. “He was very nice, very sensitive, and I had a lot of sympathy for him,” she said. “He was afraid. When the artillery fell, that’s just the way it was: he was afraid. And he never let it show; he always did what had to be done.” Worms overcame his fear, a task far more daunting than not being afraid in the first place. His personality was soothing on the medical group. “It was very difficult to live packed into a group like that,” Jacotte said. Conditions were generally terrible, no one was comfortable, and tempers flared. “Personalities also could become difficult. He always knew how to calm irritated tempers. He was a true friend to us all.”

Jacotte and Crapette spent another week at Witternheim, and when they left, the church and the presbytery were crumbled stone, but the tower, the target of all that raging firepower, stood tall.

Christmas was also a special occasion for Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne, staying in a house with a woman and her daughter at Herbsheim. The woman roasted a goose with potatoes and made an Alsatian cake, and Marie-Thérèse made a quiche lorraine and a chocolate mousse. Three captains and some soldiers joined them, and they rousted the local priest from his cellar and went to the church for midnight mass. The church had been bombed, and as they sang, they could see the stars through the remains of the vaulted ceiling. “It was really nice, very calm, and we felt far from the front, because the Germans respected the Christmas holiday and we weren’t bombarded,” she wrote in a letter home.

Marie-Thérèse’s letters home were full of concern about whether her family in Paris was getting enough to eat. While the women were living in terrible conditions of cold and destruction, they now managed to eat fairly well. At Witternheim, Jacotte said they ate chicken almost every night, free-range fowl abandoned to its fate and snatched up daily by the cook.

Rosette was back in Erstein for Christmas, but her partner Nicole was transferred to a medical company in Paris to be near her fiancé, who had been slightly wounded and was recuperating at Val de Grace Hospital. Rosette met her fourth partner of the war, an eighteen-year-old called Amicie Barnaud. Rosette, feeling like a grizzled veteran next to her rosy-cheeked freshness, agreed to try her out. Along with Amicie, Toto brought Tony Rostand from Paris to join the group. She had worked for the Resistance in Paris, and had lied about being a mother when she signed up to join the ambulance drivers, as Toto wouldn’t take anyone with children. Tony became a daring ambulance driver and solid member of the team, and only later admitted, under the influence of a few glasses of wine, that she was the mother of five.

Along with a Red Cross Christmas package of candy and cigarettes, the city of Strasbourg sent the ambulance drivers presents of powder and perfume. Rosette was touched by the gesture. On Christmas Eve she went to midnight mass at the Erstein cathedral. There, amid the choir pews, stood Leclerc and de Gaulle. The local residents and the division members felt blessed by their presence. De Gaulle had come to spend Christmas with the Second Division as partial compensation for placing it under de Lattre’s wing. De Gaulle appreciated Leclerc on a personal level, but kept his eye on a broader view of the political horizon. After the war Leclerc remarked that his best operations were precisely when he had not followed orders. This was repeated to de Gaulle, who smiled and said that Leclerc had never disobeyed orders, he simply had carried out some orders that hadn’t yet been given.

The Germans, meanwhile, decided to try in December 1944 what had worked so well in May 1940: they attacked through the Ardennes. And, again, the defense was missing just there, where the forest provided thick cover from airborne attack. Four U.S. Army divisions were stretched thinly across a ninety-mile front when the Germans launched their attack on December 16. Leclerc’s division was called to come north and lend a hand to what become known as the Battle of the Bulge, named after the bubble in the Allied front line the Germans had managed to create. The Allies had a terrible time, encircled by the Germans and having to fight their way out, but they eventually succeeded and the Germans were pushed back eastward. Part of the Leclerc division stood defense on the Lorraine border of that campaign for nearly a month, but as the fighting was going on further north, they didn’t have much to do. Some Second Company tank crewmen found an abandoned German anti-aircraft gun and tried it out on passing flocks of ducks. The men were having a great time, and the ducks were not the least disturbed in their flight. An officer came running from the headquarters nearby to say the flak was exploding beautifully, just over the heads of the unappreciative command staff. Another day, Captain de Witasse took some Rochambelles sledding behind a Jeep. Colonel de Guillebon happened to see them go merrily by, and de Witasse was reprimanded.

The last day of 1944 saw the Rochambelles scattered up and down the eastern border of France. At Kertzfeld, Jacotte and Crapette and three other drivers—Anne-Marie, Michette, and Hélène—had a New Year’s Eve dinner at the officers’ bivouac. After music and midnight kisses, the officers and the Rochambelles went outside and had a rousing snowball fight. It was the end of a tumultuous year, a time of marvelous highs and tragic lows, and everyone in the division, women and men, had come further and done more than they ever expected. They lived for the moment on the border between beauty and horror, on the edge between now and forever. It was an exhilarating place to be.

The Rochambelles in the Colmar Pocket, January 20-February 9, 1945

CHAPTER SEVEN

Grussenheim: The End of Winter

The handful of villages sprinkled across the Alsatian plains between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine River were quiet in peaceful times, some of them little more than a crossroads and a church, connected to one another by narrow country lanes. But this was a time of war, and together, Elsenheim, Grussenheim, Jebsheim, Ohnenheim, Illhauesern, and Ostheim became part of the “Colmar Pocket,” where the snow-draped innocence of country villages was stained crimson with the highest casualties since D-Day. Some of the villages had stood for more than a thousand years. When the soldiers left in February 1945, most of them were reduced to rubble and cinder, ashes and dust.