Women of Valor (3 page)

In the spring of 1940, she and a Swiss office-mate called Ellen Gautier rented an apartment together, “furnished” with a sad couch and two twin beds, but a large empty living room that suited them perfectly. Their first move was to rent a baby-grand piano and put it in the center. They struck a deal: the first one home from work got an hour, not a minute more, on the piano, and then it was the other’s turn. They had musician friends as well and got together to play as often as possible. Around Jacqueline, music was always in the air.

“I liked my life there,” she said. She walked and walked the streets of the city, discovering it bit by bit. She ice-skated at Rockefeller Center and played tennis at a friend’s apartment-house courts. She and Ellen met a fellow who took them water-skiing and horseback-riding. Sports and music kept her from missing her family too much, or feeling too alone in the big city. “I loved New York. I still have it under my soles,” she said years later.

The Nazis invaded France in May 1940, and with the French surrender in June, the consulate in New York closed. Jacqueline had “government official” stamped on her passport because of her work there, and needed a civilian visa in order to find another job. It wasn’t easy. She had to go to Montreal to apply for entry into the U.S. as a civilian. She managed to accomplish that by October 1940, and through friends, found work at Roger & Gallet, the cosmetics company. But back in New York at last, Jacqueline discovered that the French were now being treated as “enemy aliens” because of the Nazi occupation of their country and the Vichy government’s collaboration. French friends with pleasure boats suddenly had their licenses confiscated; American friends in the U.S. military suddenly could no longer see them. Not only were the French in exile, they found themselves isolated socially and treated with mistrust.

The reports from France were bleak. She had no more news of her family, and could only imagine their suffering. In fact, her father’s export business had been closed by the Nazis, leaving the family with no income. Her maternal grandfather, who had lived through the German occupation of France in 1870, and had lost both his sons in the First World War, now lost his family home in Herblay to Nazi occupation. Going to collect his sons’ portraits and military medals from the house, he collapsed suddenly and died. Jacqueline’s sister Suzanne said he died of chagrin, that he simply could not face a third round of tragedy. Many in France felt the same way. The devastation of the First World War was not yet in the past, but an enduring sorrow in every village, in nearly every family. The rapidity of the French surrender in 1940 was in large part due to this legacy of loss.

Jacqueline would not hear of her grandfather’s death until four years later. Once the Nazis occupied France, she was cut off from her family. Through a friend in Lyon, they managed to send her a Red Cross postcard, limited to twelve words and censored by the Nazi authorities. It arrived in New York in August 1943, fourteen months after it was mailed. Jacqueline’s reply on the back of the same card, again limited to twelve words, took eighteen months more to get back to Paris. In the end, she got there before it did.

In November 1942, the Allies invaded North Africa, the first step in staging an assault on the European continent. In response, the Nazis took over all of France, eliminating the previous demarcation line that had left the south of the country relatively undisturbed by the occupation. Now the fig leaf of Vichy’s autonomy was removed, and the entire nation was being pressured to produce for the German war effort. Conditions slid from bad to worse, and there was nothing to be done about it from the other side of the Atlantic. Jacqueline began to feel trapped and helpless, far from those she loved, cut off from contact. Trying to overcome the feeling of despair, she searched for a way to contribute to the war effort. She had no training as a nurse, and did not want to spend three years in nursing school. She thought of learning to drive an ambulance, as many young women had done in the First World War. She signed up for a First Aid course, and then a U.S. Army Motor Mechanics’ course. She was allowed to take the classes and learn the skills, but as a French citizen, she was barred from working with U.S. troops in military installations.

In
The New York Times,
Jacqueline read a few lines about a Colonel Leclerc, whose skeletal column of soldiers had wrested much of the French African empire over to the cause of the Free French, the political and military arm of those who opposed the Vichy collaboration and fought for an independent government. As the Allied campaign continued to roust the Germans from North Africa and the former French empire cast off its Vichy chains, the possibility of liberating France began to seem within reach.

Jacqueline was determined to be an active part of the cause. She wrote a letter to General Marie Béthouard, chief of the Free French mission in Washington, stating that she wished to serve as an ambulance driver in the Free French army. She carefully avoided saying she was a qualified and experienced bilingual secretary, looking to avoid the trap of office work. Nonetheless, Jacqueline received a response from his office saying that any volunteers would have to be men. Time and again, she hit nothing but brick walls, as the newspapers piled up in her apartment and another winter set in.

And then, like a bolt from the blue, a dynamic woman named Florence Conrad called her on the telephone. Conrad was organizing a women’s ambulance corps to help the Free French. Was Jacqueline interested?

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Florence Conrad made a strong impression on everyone she met. She was tall, imposing, strong-willed, and attractive. She had been widowed twice and had a surfeit of both money and energy. She was American, and though she had been raised in France since childhood, she retained a strong American accent when speaking French. Her accent threw people off balance, and that, in turn, helped Conrad get what she wanted. Conrad was an artist of persuasion, a master of verbal combat.

She also had seen real combat. Conrad had married at age nineteen and had a daughter, but was widowed early. When the First World War began, she went to work as an army nurse, serving three kilometers behind the front at Saint Quentin. She was not alone; the war had interrupted France’s
Belle Epoque,
and many French women of the upper classes devoted their energies to support services. Conrad was among the 25,000 American women who joined them, serving in France as ambulance drivers, nurses, and social workers.

“We were all young women of a time and a world of insouciance and gaiety,” Conrad wrote in 1942. “We had relegated our riding skirts, our tennis rackets and evening gowns to the back of closets that wouldn’t be reopened until after victory. Immaculate poplin blouses, hard on the skin, had replaced silks and muslins. We put our good will to the service of the doctors who battled death for the existence of young men wounded while fighting, our dancing and sporting partners themselves perhaps wounded as well, and cared for by still-inexperienced nurses like us.”
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After the war, she married again and was widowed again. But her second husband, Henry Rosenfeld, left her wealthy. In the 1930s, the widowed Conrad lived in a mansion in Paris and led a very social life, until the next war awakened her sense of duty. She didn’t wait for the hostilities to begin. From the declaration of war in September 1939 to the German invasion of May 1940—a period of tension and uncertainty that became known as the Phony War—Conrad was a whirlwind of action.

She had a car, a rare enough possession in Depression-era France, and a deep sense of the value of France’s cultural treasures. Conrad badgered friends among the conservators at the Louvre until they agreed that she could help move precious artworks to safety, in case Paris was bombed. She was assigned to lead a convoy of trucks to a chateau in the countryside, carrying no less than the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

The convoy departed smoothly and all was proceeding apace when, on the outskirts of Paris, Conrad spotted a line of army artillery trucks heading toward the city. The army had the right of way on all roads, but she was afraid that if the Louvre trucks were forced to the side, they would slide into the drainage ditch and the statues would be broken. She also knew that explaining to army drivers that art should take precedence over artillery would be a waste of breath. So she “lost control” of her car and came to a halt in front of the army column, which abruptly ground to a halt, and the Louvre trucks kept going forward. She played the incompetent woman driver the soldiers expected to see, and did not manage to get her car back in gear until after the Louvre trucks were safely by. “In war, as in love, anything goes,” she noted.
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In that long pause between September 1939 and May 1940, the French believed their Maginot Line of eastern defenses would hold against the Germans. The army was installed along the line, ready to defend the nation, but no invasion came, and autumn turned to winter, winter to spring. An idle army is a depressed army, and Conrad found in the soldiers’ lack of occupation an opportunity to get involved. She got permission from a friend at the Préfecture of Paris to drive to the restricted zone in the east, and went from general to general until she found one who allowed her to set up a canteen where off-duty soldiers could gather. She chose Etain as its location, as it was closest to the front, and wrote a check for 10,000 francs to get it going. She said she made her money back in a month. By December, an army general invited her to lunch to find out why her canteen worked so well and the army-run centers did not. As usual, Conrad wasted no words. Men didn’t know how to look after men, she told the officer. The soldiers needed mothers, sisters, and friends to listen to them. Boredom was their biggest enemy of the moment: waiting for the worst to happen was more agonizing than living through it.

The general said the army wanted to avoid letting private efforts get in the way of the war as they had in World War I. The canteen would have to become part of the army system in order to continue, but Conrad would have a free hand to set up others and operate them as she liked. She opened another canteen at Verdun for Christmas, and then at Charny, calling in friends to help run them. One friend, Georgette Bentley Mott, arrived from Biarritz driving an ambulance full of gifts for the soldiers. Conrad learned that the soldiers were freezing at night because of a lack of blankets, that pneumonia had already killed several of them before the war had even started. She sent Mott to Paris with a blank check and told her to buy as many blankets as she could. When Mott questioned whether Conrad should spend her own money, Conrad replied that she was taking a page from Saint Theresa: “Do immediately what needs to be done, and find the means later.”
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Conrad and her friends opened their sixth and last canteen at Aumetz, just across the Belgian border, in the spring. Shortly afterward, Conrad was named “godmother” to an army regiment—complete with a red, white, and blue ribbon and medal—and given the honorary rank of corporal by the new regimental commander and her old friend, Captain Gustave Gounouilhou, in civilian life the owner of the
Petite Gironde
newspaper in Bordeaux. The ceremony happened to take place square on the Maginot Line, northeast of Etain. Conrad laughed out loud when she realized it.

On May 3, 1940, an army doctor asked if Conrad could take care of the local Aumetz clinic when the offensive began, because he would be working on the front lines. She and her friend Françoise Verhille, who had helped set up the string of canteens, drove up there and spent the following nights with one ear cocked for the sound of artillery. It came soon enough. Conrad awoke on the night of May 11 to the doctor’s wife pounding on her door with news that the long-awaited invasion had begun. She made sure her car, and those of her friends, had full tanks of gas, and then ran to the clinic.

The first soldier was carried in by his comrades, his intestines spilling out. She gave him a shot of morphine so that he would die peacefully, and then she went outside. She tripped over a body, a young man who’d been shot through the eye. There, in the chilling night, she felt the echo of the damage and destruction she had lived through twenty-five years before. Once again, eastern France would be soaked with the blood of a generation of young men. On the eve of the Debacle, as the French collapse came to be called, Florence Conrad knew she would see hell twice in a lifetime.

In the first night of fighting alone, 900 wounded arrived at the hospital in Sedan. Conrad decided that driving an ambulance would be more useful than assisting in a clinic, but the one ambulance at her disposal, a rattletrap Renault with no shock absorbers, starter, or brakes, wasn’t going to go far. She sent Françoise Verhille to Paris with a blank check to buy another ambulance, meanwhile persuading the Defense Ministry and the newly organized Service Automobile Féminine Française, or S.A.F.F, to approve her addition to the corps. The Citroën car factory agreed to furnish some more ambulances, and Conrad was named liaison for ambulance services.
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There were other ambulance groups, including the Assistance Sanitaire Automobile, with 180 women drivers and nurses working along the Maginot Line until June 1940, and several private individual efforts. During this hectic opening episode of the war in France, individuals wanted to help, and the army attempted to fit them into an official structure, but it was all happening far too quickly. The Germans were pouring across the Maginot Line as though it were made of sand rather than stone. On May 20 Saint Quentin fell, and on the following day Péronne was taken. In the first two weeks of the war, the S.A.F.F. lost six ambulances: three without trace, a fourth taken prisoner, a fifth blown up by a mine, and the sixth bombed in a convoy just behind Conrad and Verhille.

“I suppose we should be afraid,” Verhille said flatly.

“Afraid of what?” Conrad asked. “Afraid to leave this dirty world, as rotten as it is? We’ve had more than our share of good times. Women like us don’t want to die of old age, so why not here and now?”
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