Women of Valor (7 page)

Raymonde, by her own account, was shy but stubborn. She was twenty-one years old, with enormous blue eyes and a cloud of dark hair, soft-spoken and self-effacing. When Toto arrived, Raymonde said simply that she had been transferred to the Rochambeau Group. Toto, irritable as ever, told her she could go back where she came from, because the Rochambeau Group picked its own recruits. Raymonde recounted her travels to get to the houseboat and said she wasn’t going anywhere. Toto relented. They ended up being ambulance partners and friends. Raymonde developed great respect for Toto and didn’t mind her blasts of fury. “She was terrific,” Raymonde said. Her temper was natural and not an affectation or manipulation. “She was not afraid of anything. She was commanding, intelligent, she argued with everyone, she was always at ease.”

Toto was not universally loved, however. Others described her as difficult, ambitious and petty. Laure de Breteuil, who, along with her mother, was a target of Toto’s disdain, said she had nothing to say about Toto. In her memoir, Toto wrote that Elisabeth de Breteuil had had her army overcoat lined with mink, which Laure termed “pure fiction.” While in Rabat, Laure married a cousin who had also joined the division, Jean de Breteuil. She chose to stay in Rabat with him when the Rochambeau Group moved on. “Suzanne Torrès was so glad to get rid of me,” Laure said. She found a job in the social services branch of the army, teaching new recruits to drive. “It was terrifying. Some of those girls didn’t know left from right.” Later she became pregnant and took maternity leave from the army. She and her husband lived in a hotel in Rabat that had been requisitioned by the U.S. military.

More recruits from Morocco, having heard about the women’s unit, started coming in, curious to see if they could join. They were of varying ages and backgrounds, and were in Morocco for different reasons, but they had in common a certain boredom with their current horizons, and a strong desire to help with the war effort.

Christiane Petit’s father, a French army colonel who had been in charge of Port Lyautey (now Kénitra), when Allied troops landed there in 1942, met Florence Conrad in February 1944 and suggested that his daughter sign up. She had a driver’s license, if no medical training, and she was eager to join the war effort. She was twenty-four years old, the eldest of nine children, and tired of working in a women’s support center at Meknès. Jacotte and “You” Courou-Mangin went to pick her up two days later. As the daughter of an army officer, Christiane did not feel as uncomfortable in a military setting as did some of the other women. She knew many of the younger division officers; they had been students at the St. Cyr military academy when her father taught there. “We learned to dance together,” she recalled. Christiane, a devout Catholic, was so intensely spiritual that Toto called her “the Mystic.” In her clear blue eyes was an unwavering religious passion, and she got down on her knees every night on the houseboat to pray.

Rosette Trinquet had moved to Morocco with her parents in 1938, at the age of eighteen, and got her driver’s license in 1940. In Morocco she drove a pickup truck that ran on
“gazogène,”
gas produced by burning charcoal. She noted that at her age, she wouldn’t have been allowed to take a train from Paris to Rouen unchaperoned, but her parents thought it would be fine for her to drive an ambulance in the war. Circumstances were introducing contradictions into previously indelible lines of social etiquette. Nonetheless, Rosette, whose long legs and blonde good looks attracted many an admirer, needed little more defense than her blunt manner, steely nerves and sense of humor. Rosette also had the gift of certainty, and stepped as sure-footedly into the war as she did everything else.

If Rosette’s parents did not see the risk in driving an ambulance, Captain Jacques Guerin did. He fell for “You” Courou-Mangin the first time he saw her, talking on the telephone at the houseboat. Her decisive, confident manner and statuesque elegance impressed him deeply. Captain Guerin had fought across Africa with Leclerc, but his first personal campaign of the war was to get “You” to agree to marry him. After the two had taken a day trip to Marrakesh, he succeeded, and on March 2, 1944 they were married by the division chaplain. They held a reception afterwards on the houseboat with the Rochambeau Group and some division officers.

Jacques would have carried her across the gangway, but at nearly six feet, she stood ten inches taller than he did. She called him her “little man,” and they began a long and happy marriage in separate living quarters. They took opportunities for private time when they could, and “You” got pregnant right away, but miscarried, and kept driving ambulances. Guerin later said he wanted to get “You” pregnant to get her out of the ambulance corps; he thought it was going to be too dangerous.

On the contrary, Captain Georges Ratard suggested that his girlfriend join the Rochambeau Group, and taught her how to drive so that she could. Ratard had met Arlette Hautefeuille, a twenty-three-year-old with a sporty stride and an open face, when he rented a room from her family in Rabat. They became friends, though Ratard was an intellectual, fascinated by Latin and Greek, and Arlette was ever active, preferably outdoors. Arlette signed up with enthusiasm and her parents’ approval. “I hated the Germans and I could not fight,” she said. Driving would at least be a contribution to the war. First, Ratard asked her to marry him, she accepted, and they agreed to wait until he had news of his family in Brittany, with whom he had not had contact for more than a year. Arlette moved onto the houseboat in the Bou Regreg.

Arlette already had experienced the war in her hometown of Calais, in 1940, when screaming Stuka bombers struck in nightly raids, sending the family to sleep in the coal cellar for safety. They had two cats, both of whom would dive for the cellar two minutes before the air raid siren would sound. Arlette’s mother put a mattress in the cellar, and every night they carried down a bucket, some toilet paper and a bottle of water to drink. Arlette remembered spending her twentieth birthday in the dark of the cellar. Ever after, she slept with her shutters open at night and avoided closed spaces.

Arlette’s father had served in the First World War, and took away with him a virulent hatred for Germans. A reserve officer in the army, he was captured in the 1940 surrender and escaped, making his way to Morocco, where his mother and brother lived. Arlette’s mother was left alone in France with no income. The army stopped paying her husband’s salary at the surrender, saying there was no evidence that he was alive, and the bank refused to allow a withdrawal from their savings account without her husband’s signature. As a woman, she had no legal right to their money. Broke and hungry in a German-occupied town, Arlette and her mother did what only desperate women would do: they got on their bicycles and pedaled south, direction Marseille, a thousand kilometers away through German-held territory. They were caught and escaped several times, and eventually reached Marseille and the boat to Morocco. Arlette remembered standing on the quay crying, not from fear or relief or fatigue, but from hunger.

The women from Morocco had not suffered the German invasion and occupation, but nor had they entirely escaped the war up to that point. The year before, when the Allies invaded her hometown of Safi (Morocco), Madeleine Collomb went to help at the hospital and found herself assisting a surgeon who was amputating a young man’s damaged leg. The electricity failed in the middle of the operation, and Madeleine ran home and got two lanterns so that they could continue.

“After the first operation, I left the room and sat down on the ground outside; I nearly passed out,” Madeleine said in an interview. “The doctor came and tapped me on the knee and said, ‘Come on, there’s another one.’” They worked through the night, and she got used to the blood.

Madeleine was born in 1917 in Morocco to French parents; her father worked in the civil administration at Safi. While the Vichy French government was still in power in Morocco, she had taken a Red Cross emergency care course and was told that if “anything” happened, she should go to the hospital. “We knew something was going to happen,” she said.

As a young woman, Madeleine sailed her own boat, rode horses, drove, and enjoyed sports. After the Allies took over, she had to request permission from the U.S. Army to go sailing in the bay off of Safi. She was given permission, and she and her family became friends with a couple of French-speaking American officers. Madeleine’s first idea of helping in the war effort was to fly a plane, but her father wouldn’t let her. When she heard about the women’s ambulance group, she thought her father would nix that idea as well, but to her surprise, he didn’t say no. “He thought they’d never take me,” she said. He was wrong.

Conrad and Toto also were weeding out recruits they didn’t believe would hold up in the war, such as a young blonde who jumped on a chair and screamed every time she saw a mouse on the houseboat, which unfortunately was often. Toto much preferred Lucie Deplancke’s attitude: a rat started running across the clothesline she was hanging clothes on, and both of them stopped suddenly when they saw each other. Lucie, without missing a beat, snapped at the rat: “So, are you going or am I hanging?”
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Lucie was a native Parisian who had been running a clothing boutique in Rabat. She was witty, high-spirited, and unabashed by military authority: if there was fun to be had, Lucie would find it and carry everyone along with her, laughing joyfully. She had been married to a young aviator, but the marriage had ended over Lucie’s affair with a ballet dancer.

At five-foot-two, Zizon Sicco inherited the uniform and equipment of a departed recruit who was nearly six feet tall. She also was given a left boot size seven and a right boot size eight, while she wore a size six. What Zizon wore, didn’t wear, and had to wear would be her personal demon throughout the war. She went into Rabat and had some suede boots made to fit her, and got the uniform tailored. An avid de Gaulle supporter, she had moved to Morocco with her parents at the occupation, and they had opened their house to Allied and Free French soldiers who needed a place to stay.

The night she was accepted into the Rochambeau Group she had a dream rooted in her childhood worship of Joan of Arc. “I dreamed that Charles VII was waiting for me, but I was looking fruitlessly for a suit of armor and a standard on the black market, since those articles did not appear on my ration card.” Was she prepared to go to war? It was a question many of the women were asking themselves. She crossed the gangplank to go live on the houseboat feeling that she was walking into a new life. “I left behind my past as a civilian to enter into an adventure that transformed me with happiness.”
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Zizon was tiny, but tough. She’d been driving for twelve years and had completed a cross-desert road race, but Toto nonetheless sent her out with an army monitor to check her skills. She thought she had done well, but when they got back, the monitor told Toto that Zizon needed a lot more lessons, and winked at her before she could protest. The next day he explained that if they went out driving they didn’t have to spend the day taking apart the motor and cleaning every piece of it. She considered it a valuable lesson in military ways.

Zizon was invited to dinner one night with Conrad and conservative leader General Giraud, and wore a Lorraine Cross insignia, the symbol of the upstart Free French, despite Conrad’s rebuke that it would offend Giraud. Instead of being offended, Giraud placed her by his side at dinner and wanted to hear all about the French in Morocco. Breaches were closing in the coalescing effort to oust the common enemy.

Recruits continued to arrive at the houseboat. The tragic loss of her young husband in an airplane accident had left Edith Schaller adrift and devastated, and she decided to go to nursing school to try to move on. When the war began in 1939, she left her native Alsace to join her brother, who was living in Marrakesh. She got a job in social services at the Casablanca Air Base and then, because she was fluent in English as well as German and French, she was hired by the American officer’s club at Marrakesh to organize social activities. She was bored with the job, tired of Coca-Cola and sandwiches, and particularly annoyed at having to entice young, married women to attend the American dances without their husbands. She heard about the Rochambeau Group in early 1943, quit her job, and went straight to the houseboat. She stood on the deck in a brightly colored dress in the midst of busy women wearing olive-green fatigues, and felt like she was entering another world. She was thirty-four years old, with neither husband nor child to define her path, and going to war might at least offer an outlet for all the fury and despair she had stored up since her husband’s death.

Michette de Steinheil had grown up in Rabat, daughter of a French military officer who, with impeccable timing, retired from the Vichy-led forces one week before the Allied invasion of Morocco. She was twenty-four years old and separated from her husband when her brother told her about the women’s ambulance corps. He had met a Rochambelle, Anne-Marie Bonnel Davion, and thought Michette would fit in with the group. Michette was delighted to find a way to contribute to the war effort, and also put some distance between herself and her wandering husband, a baron who was ten years older than she when she married him at age nineteen. Anne-Marie also was separated from her husband, and had moved to Morocco to stay with relatives, who, it turned out, were good friends of Toto’s. Anne-Marie and Michette liked each other immediately, and became ambulance partners for the duration of the war. Their fellow drivers (and more than a few veterans) still talk about how stunningly pretty the two of them were, with their sparkling eyes and disarming smiles. They left a trail of wistful hearts in the wake of their ambulance.

For some of the recruits, the route to Morocco had been a hazardous and rugged hike across the Pyrénées Mountains dividing France from Spain. Marguerite Marchandeau had been active in the Resistance, and when the secrecy of her cell was broken by the Gestapo, she and her boyfriend fled to the Pyrénées and the relative safety of Spain. She hiked for twenty-four hours, wearing espadrilles in the snow, to get across the border.
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After a brief stay in Spain, they were sent to Morocco with other French exiles, and there, they joined the Second Division. Denise Colin and her husband André also had sneaked across the Pyrénées, on Christmas Eve of 1942, and lived clandestinely in Barcelona until they were able to reach Casablanca in July 1943. Both of them joined the Free French there, and Denise, a fourth-year medical student, was assigned to the Thirteenth Medical Battalion as an ambulance driver (François Jacob, with two years’ less schooling, was named an assistant doctor). André, a chemical engineer, was attached to the baking unit, underscoring the French belief in Napoleon’s dictum, that an army marches on its stomach.