Women of Valor (12 page)

Edith sat on the edge of the road for a few minutes, waiting for the ringing in her ears and the shaking in her hands to stop. She had been shot twice that day, and had had the amazing luck to have no injury more serious than a piece of shrapnel lodged behind her ear. She also had been taken prisoner by the enemy, talked her way free, and turned over two German prisoners, leading to Toto’s Rule No. 34:
Know how to spend a few hours with the Germans without deserving to have your head shaved.
It had been enough to unsettle any soldier, but Edith did not scare easily. And at the moment, her main concern was finding Micheline.

Born Marie-Louise Charbonnel, nicknamed Maryse, using the nom de guerre of Micheline, she was twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful. The daughter of a career army officer, she had driven an ambulance on the eastern front in 1940 and then worked for the Resistance during the occupation under the code name of Scarabee. She married another Resistant, Jean-Marie Grimprel, and became Maryse Grimprel. She was the only Rochambelle to take a nom de guerre, a tactic sometimes used as a measure of protection against reprisals on families. It is quite a stretch to imagine that the Nazis would identify the medical battalion’s ambulance drivers and then seek to punish their families. But the clandestine and the imaginary had been the tools of Micheline’s previous career, and perhaps she did not notice that the terrain had changed.

While a Resistant, Micheline’s network had been broken up by the Gestapo and she was forced to flee to avoid arrest. She was airlifted from Angers, France, to London in March 1944, along with an injured British pilot and a French Resistant carrying the seventeen-meter-long map of the Normandy coast and Nazi gun emplacements that became a key to D-Day planning. In London, she argued heatedly with the Resistance group leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade that she should be sent back into France, and Fourcade refused.
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Micheline quit the Resistance in a pique, worked in the Free French offices in Covent Garden for several months, and then joined the Rochambelles in England in July 1944, just before they crossed over.

Now Micheline was missing, and Edith was getting very worried. With her ambulance out of action, she got a ride with an army Jeep into Ecouché and found three ambulances parked outside the hospital. She ran over to ask a couple of stretcher-bearers if they had seen Micheline Grimprel. They hadn’t, but before the conversation could continue, a blast of mortars slammed down around them. Edith dove under an ambulance and waited for it to end. She slid out and found the two stretcher-bearers she had spoken to moments before dead on the ground. Later she learned that the bombardment was from the Americans, shooting over the heads of her Spahi unit to dislodge the Germans still occupying Ecouché. She had driven too far into town.

She eventually found her unit, but no Micheline. She worried through the night. Micheline should have been back, should have hooked up with the unit, or at the least, been seen by someone by now. At dawn, Edith set out on foot, tracing the route Micheline might have followed. Argentan was four kilometers away. Finally, off the side of the road, she saw a dark shape with a red cross visible on the side. It was an ambulance, destroyed, the hood smashed, the interior partly burned. A dead man was on a stretcher in the back. No sign of Micheline. She walked into Argentan and knocked on the doors of empty houses. A group of old men hiding in a cellar told her all the women and children had left town, and that in the night they had heard tanks. The village priest said the Germans had pulled out in the night, but that he had not seen any uniformed women. She walked back to the Spahi bivouac in yet another apple orchard, and sat down in a corner to cry. She was starting to fear the worst.

Florence Conrad went out and interrogated every villager she could find, and ended up with two possible versions of what happened to Micheline: The first story was that an armored car attacked the ambulance, she got out, hands in the air, and was taken away by the Germans. The second story was that she was taken dead from the ambulance and buried on the spot, but no one knew where. The second story made no sense, as the Germans were not taking the time to bury anyone.

Micheline had told Edith that she was carrying papers for the Resistance, and Edith suggested that that was unwise. Edith thought Micheline was impulsive and rash. “She didn’t think, she just acted.” During the attack on the orchard near Ducey, Edith and Micheline were a couple of fields over, and Micheline tried to run right into the bombing. Edith told her to wait until the attack was over to go help. Edith said she felt older, wiser, more experienced than Micheline, and she regrets not having insisted that Micheline get rid of those papers. But were the papers her downfall? At that point in Normandy, Resistants were joining the Second Division and action was overt rather than covert. Edith also felt a little guilty that they had separated, against the rules. Micheline might not have run into trouble had she stayed with Edith.

Micheline may have gotten wrong directions on where to take her patient, or may have gotten lost and wandered into enemy territory. The distinction between German and Allied turf was changing all the time. On the afternoon she disappeared, August 13, a squad of Spahis sneaked into Argentan and hung the French flag at the town hall, but then had to pull a quick retreat, outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans. Did Micheline drive into the retaken town unknowingly? Two days later, U.S. troops took the town. “It all went so quickly,” Edith said. “One didn’t know where the Germans were.” The fluidity of possession created great peril.

There was some indication that Micheline joined the 10,000 French women held as political prisoners at the Ravensbruck concentration camp north of Berlin, but none of her names was recorded there on the Germans’ meticulous lists. She supposedly then was taken to the Soviet Union by the Russian troops who liberated the camp. More than 50,000 French men from Alsace and Lorraine who were conscripted into the German army also were missing at the end of the war, fate unknown. Many thousands were believed to be held in prison camps in the Soviet Union, but the Stalin regime left little room for discussion of the issue. Raymond Dronne, a division veteran and assembly member after the war, brought up the possibility of Micheline Grimprel being in Russia to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during a 1950s visit to France, but Khrushchev denied the existence of prison camps. Reports of a French nurse meeting Micheline’s description in Soviet camps surfaced in the 1950s, and a note in her handwriting slipped under her mother’s door in Paris in 1961 fueled the belief that she was still alive, but she never was found.

Zizon Sicco (l), Denise Colin

Micheline’s disappearance and Polly’s terrible injuries put a somber and frightening frame around the ambulance drivers’ activity from the start of the war. Some of them had thought long and hard before joining the group about whether they would be able to face the fear; others found out about it when fear was sitting on their shoulder, making their hands shake and their imaginations run wild. It was at that moment that all of them found the essence of courage.

“When I was ignorant of the real dangers of the war and when I willfully abstained from thinking about it and focusing on it, I imagined that fear had no place in an honest character. I would willingly class warriors into two categories: the ‘good guys’ who were never afraid, and the others, the cowards, worthy of all scorn,” Zizon wrote. “Now I know that fear is not incompatible with the greatness of a soul, and that heroism and the composure of the brave often mask some hard-repressed trembling.”
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Zizon discovered the insidious onset of fear and panic, alone one night in an apple orchard. “At night there were so many real and imagined dangers. At night you dreaded everything, even on a night as lovely as when we arrived at Ecouché.” It was a beautiful, clear evening: Denise was sound asleep in the ambulance, and Zizon was trying to fall asleep outside. Then she saw four men in the field next to theirs, creeping strangely toward the company’s camp. Why were they acting so oddly? If they were French, they had nothing to hide. And if they were not French, they must be German! She must alert the doctors. But the men would see her if she moved. She was slipping into a state of panic, heavy breathing, heart pounding, reason fleeing. The light was fading; she couldn’t see them anymore. Where had they gone? She slid off the stretcher onto her stomach and began crawling toward the doctors’ tents. A rocket burst in the sky and she took advantage of the brief glow to try to spot the men. They had not moved from their initial position. They had not moved because they were not four German soldiers trying to sneak an attack on the medical company. They had not moved because they were apple trees, cut to strange shapes by the bombing and silhouetted in the darkening sky. She crawled back to her stretcher, mortified, glad she had not arrived at the doctors’ tents, grateful for the rocket burst, and hoping she would not hallucinate like that again.
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Fear, she realized, was just another state of mind.

Summer days were long, with daylight fading between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M., but once it was gone, there was no illumination at all. They had to drive without lights at night to avoid drawing enemy fire, and a twelve-kilometer corridor between Sées and Le Cercueil (French for “the coffin,” and for many, it boded ill) was particularly hazardous. The carcasses of burned-out tanks, half-tracks and Jeeps littered the shoulders and sometimes the middle of the road, and driving through it in the pitch night was a blind man’s bluff. Zizon and Raymonde were each driving with stretcher bearers one night as Toto and Denise had set up a medical station to treat the many wounded from intense fighting there. Raymonde said she was driving slowly in the dark, with an ambulance full of burn victims, when suddenly Zizon came barreling down the middle of the road and ran smack into her. Zizon was a little near-sighted. “She only saw me at the last moment,” Raymonde said. The collision jammed Raymonde’s gears, and she couldn’t get the truck moving again. “The wounded soldiers started complaining like crazy.” Finally she got it going in third gear and roared off down the road.

But Zizon’s ambulance was immobile. She and the stretcher-bearer, Henri, would have to wait for help to come. She was getting jumpy sitting like a target on that road. Crack, crack—what was that? Only Henri chewing gum. He told her not to worry, and pulled out a revolver. It only has two bullets, he said, so if the Germans approach, I’ll shoot you first and then myself. She explained the Geneva conventions on medical personnel being unarmed, that they could be shot just for having that gun.

She became more worried that Henri would panic and shoot her than she was over the possibility of Germans in the area. Finally Raymonde returned to pick them up, and Zizon took the wheel, as Raymonde was exhausted. Before they could move, something smashed hard into the ambulance and Zizon heard Denise’s voice: “It’s her, captain!” Denise had persuaded Captain Ceccaldi to come looking for Zizon and they had crashed into her in the dark. Denise was bruised in the wreck, Ceccaldi uninjured. His Jeep had lost a wheel and ended up in a ditch. The ambulance’s radiator was smashed and pouring water, and gas was leaking as well. They sent Henri and his revolver to walk the eight kilometers back to camp and bring help, while they sat and stared morosely at the three new wrecks on the corridor. Division mechanics, working at the speed of light, had them up and running the following day.
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At that point, Zizon wondered if she would have signed on as an ambulance driver if she’d known how gory it was going to get. “All the blood, the wounds, the dead, could I really stand it? Had I ever imagined that I would be picking up men blown to pieces, be spattered with their blood, and then have it dried on my hands for hours afterward? Had I ever realized what war wounds were like, the burns that transform a man into a swollen monster, and all this repairing of flesh and bone that is the surgery of war?”
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The next day, Zizon and Denise were ordered to join a tactical unit nearby, but there was a mix-up in instructions, and they started in the direction of Argentan. A motorcycle soldier stopped them just before the village and turned them around. It was still in German hands. They went back the way they came and tried another direction, toward a village called Fleuré. Another motorcycle soldier cut them off and asked if they’d lost their minds, Fleuré was still in German hands. They went back whence they came and on the way saw a tent in a field, the advance general headquarters. A captain suggested they get out of there before Leclerc found them parading up and down the front line looking for their unit. They returned to Ecouché and found everyone there except Toto and her team.

Toto and Raymonde had been working thirty-six hours with no rest. On August 14, they led a convoy of a half-dozen ambulances from Sées, where the bombing was intense, to Ecouché, where the tactical unit was camped. They were driving a market truck, converted into an ambulance by the Germans and confiscated by the Spahis, marked with a big red cross on the sides, but no national insignia. Night fell before they could reach Ecouché, and Christiane Petit insisted that they stop rather than blunder about in the darkness. Toto called a halt in the woods by Saint Christophele-Jajolet. Raymonde was so exhausted she was shaking, and she was afraid if Toto saw her trembling, she would cut her from the ranks. Raymonde slumped against the ambulance door and fell into a deep sleep.