Women of Valor (22 page)

The soldiers were young, some of them not even the eighteen years required to join the army, some of them away from home for the first time. Military culture tends not to leave room for emotions of sadness, fear, and loss, while those were often precisely the emotions of a war experience. The young men came to the Rochambelles for moral support, for encouragement, for telling secrets, and for shedding tears. Marie-Thérèse remembered two childhood friends who enlisted in Paris, and who told her the story of their lives: They had loved the same girl, and she had chosen one of them, and instead of the choice destroying the friendship, it had made it stronger. In Lorraine, one of the young men was killed. The surviving friend came to Marie-Thérèse and wept long tears of grief on her shoulder. He was nineteen years old. “He needed a compassionate heart, a friendly ear,” she said.

As the division wrapped up the area around Baccarat, winter began to close in. The first snow had fallen and stuck on the ground, and the tank regiment began confiscating white tablecloths and bed linens from villagers to camouflage their vehicles. Patton’s troops had finally taken Metz, after a twelve-day assault and 2,000 bombing runs, and were moving into the northeastern corner of France towards Belgium.
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Another U.S. unit came up from the south to meet the French at Vacqueville, in the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. The infirmary was the only room with a table, and the American and French command staffs spread their maps out there to consult before going their separate ways. An American officer kept taking a draw from a whiskey flask every time artillery hit nearby, and offered some to Jacotte and Crapette. They refused. It was 7:00 A.M.; they hadn’t yet had their coffee. Besides, Jacotte said later, had they needed a drink every time they heard a little artillery, they would have been drunk throughout the war. And they had work to do.

The Rochambelles’ route to Alsace, November 20-23, 1944

CHAPTER SIX

A Warm Kitchen and a Cold Cellar

Between the Second Division and Strasbourg stood the blue pines of the Vosges Mountains, where the Germans sat with all possible geographical and tactical advantages. Two infantry divisions of the Seventh U.S. Army’s Fifteenth Corps were working hard to break through German defenses around the central Donon pass, so General Leclerc looked to the north. The only place it was known to be impossible to cross in winter, and thus was likely left undefended, was the narrow pass at Dabo, 660 meters high. Leclerc sent Jacques Massu’s tactical group to Dabo and, once he got through, two others to the Saverne and Petite Pierre passes, further north. The French were ripping holes in the German line.

Edith knew the Dabo pass road from vacation trips with her parents, and the idea of getting a convoy of heavy tanks and armored vehicles around its hairpin turns on icy roads was nothing less than terrifying. They crawled up the narrow forest track in the dark, one foot on the brake and one on the clutch, trying to keep from sliding into the vehicle in front and behind. At dawn, they reached the pass, and exhaled. The descent, which should have been slightly easier, became a slalom to avoid some dead horses, swollen and rotting in the snow, apparently victims of a mortar. A half-track in front of them had pushed the bulk of the horse carcasses off to the side of the road, but they had to drive over piles of gore. Edith said it turned their tires red.

They were bivouacked that night in a village on the western edge of Alsace, and Edith and Anne ran to the sole, tiny hotel to reserve a room for the night. They dined in the hotel restaurant on soup, omelettes, and sautéed potatoes, nicely complemented by a crisp Alsatian wine. Edith was happy to hear the accents of home, and the hotel owners were delighted to see some French soldiers. They climbed up to their room feeling warm and satisfied, and found their things outside the locked door. Someone else from the division had picked the lock and stolen their sleeping quarters. The hotel owner found them some cots in the attic, where they slept very well, despite their annoyance.

Alsace was home for many division members, and arriving there held a particular poignancy for them. When the Germans invaded France in 1870, they annexed Alsace to Germany and held it until 1919, when the Versailles Treaty ending World War I gave it back to France. With the 1940 invasion, the Germans had again claimed Alsace as theirs. The Alsatians in the division carried a double emotional charge, fighting for their nation but also very much for their region. Roland Hoerdt, a
Romilly
tank crew member, was one of them. Just as he arrived in Alsace, a small injury was becoming very painful. He had cut his finger on a tin can, and it had become infected and swollen, and no matter how silly it seemed in the midst of a war, it was making him miserable. His lieutenant told him to go to the Rochambelles to get it taken care of. “The ambulance came, and I hesitated to get in: I explained, I am Alsatian, I have waited more than four years for the moment to take Strasbourg, this is not the time to leave!” Zizon and Denise said they would get him back quickly. They rushed to the nearest field hospital, marched Hoerdt to the front of a large room full of wounded soldiers, and demanded immediate treatment. Just because Hoerdt was a fearless tank operator who didn’t blink in the face of heavy artillery didn’t mean that a doctor with a scalpel wouldn’t scare him to death. “I was sweating big drops and I confess I was afraid when I saw the surgeon arrive with his lancet, and if my charming ambulance drivers hadn’t held me by the arms, I think I would have run.”
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The doctor lanced the infection, wrapped it in a big bandage, and Zizon and Denise got Hoerdt back in time to invade Strasbourg.

The division had gotten across the Vosges Mountains so quickly the Germans didn’t even realize they were there yet. Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne had come through the Saverne pass, bringing up the rear with Yves Ciampi, a division doctor whose parents were famous classical musicians. Their unit was posted at Singrist, a village outside the town of Saverne, with a mission to block any attempted German attack from the rear. Instead, they found that German cars and trucks kept arriving from the eastern side, the road from Strasbourg. Division soldiers erected a barrier of tree trunks to slow down approaching traffic, and positioned a tank and machine gunner at the end. Any vehicle that tried to run the barrier would end up in their sights. They picked up a few cars like that with no problem, but then a car stopped in the middle of the trap, and a German man in civilian clothes, accompanied by some German officers, jumped out and started firing a machine gun in the direction of the village.

Marie-Thérèse was a little way down the road, behind the ambulance, unloading blankets for the infirmary they were setting up in a farmhouse. She felt the blast before she knew what was happening. “Fortunately I didn’t take the burst straight on but in ricochet,” she said. “I was thrown into the ditch. It was a very violent shock.” She had been hit in the left foot, but at first couldn’t feel her leg at all. Division gunners opened up on the German civilian and the officers, killing most and badly wounding the civilian, who died a few hours later in the infirmary. The bullet had not penetrated Marie-Thérèse’s leggings, boot, and three pairs of socks, but had bruised her Achilles tendon to such an extent that she was never able to play sports again. Ciampi had a look at it, bandaged it, and put a splint on her ankle for support. Marie-Thérèse couldn’t bend her foot, but she could get around.

Soon afterward Ciampi got into some mirabelle brandy, found a trumpet in the farmhouse, and started blasting “Vous N’Aurez Pas L’Alsace et La Lorraine,” a World War One song that had been dusted off, along with the artillery, for this second go-round. The refrain:

Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine

Et malgré vous nous resterons Français

Vous avez pu germaniser la plaine

Mais notre coeur vous ne l’aurez jamais!

(You won’t have Alsace and Lorraine

And despite you, we will stay French

You managed to Germanize the plain

But our hearts you never will have!)

Later that evening, a German fuel truck arrived at the Saverne end of the village, and division soldiers opened fire on it. It burst into flames with an intense explosion and the driver and passenger burned to death inside. “It was a completely crazy night,” Marie-Thérèse said. She went and hid in a barn to rest for a couple of hours when the pain in her foot got too bad. “I didn’t want them to see me cry.”

The next day, they continued eastward. The telephones were working in villages they passed through, and operators told the division that some of the commanding German officers had taken their families to the mountains to get them out of Strasbourg in case of Allied bombing. The Alsatian operators gave as much information as they could about where the Germans were in the city. Captain De Witasse’s company put a fluent German speaker on the phone to Nazi Army headquarters in Strasbourg and managed to get some information out of the unsuspecting German on the other end. The Germans no more expected the Allies to get past the Vosges than the French had thought the Germans could cross the Maginot Line four years before.

Leclerc’s instructions to the division on the drive to Strasbourg had been simple: get there fast. They raced across the Alsatian plain in two days, with Massu’s tactical group out front, and gathered in four separate approaches to the fortified city. Leclerc got back the code of confirmation at 10:10 A.M. on November 23: Colonel Marc Rouvillois’s unit was inside the city.

Edith and Anne, attached to the Rouvillois group that day, drove right up under one of the massive seventeenth-century fortresses, waiting for a bombardment. None came, and so they kept going, straight into Strasbourg from a northerly approach. They stopped outside a military barracks, and women came out into the streets to greet them. Edith was starting to feel confident that she would have a hot meal and a bed that night, but a Spahi signaled to her. Four men had been wounded and there was a great deal of resistance up ahead. Anne had been given temporary leave to join her husband, as his American unit was in the area, and Madeleine Collomb joined Edith instead. They picked up the wounded soldiers and headed for the Strasbourg hospital. Edith knew where it was, and they got there quickly.

Trouble was, the hospital was still in enemy hands. Edith hadn’t thought about that, but when she drove up to the gate, two German soldiers were posted on guard. Thinking fast, she leaned out the window as she approached and yelled at them in German that she had wounded aboard. They opened the gate and she drove in. A nurse and a nun met them, and Edith switched to Alsatian, not knowing whose side they were on. But the nurses noticed what the guards did not: the ambulance was not German. “You’re French,” they whispered. Edith nodded. “Praise God!” said the nun, her eyes filling with tears. Madeleine and the nurses unloaded the wounded soldiers and Edith asked the nun to take care of them, not to give them to the Germans. The nun told her not to worry. They returned by ring roads to their Spahi unit, and were told that one soldier was missing. It was dark by then, and Edith couldn’t go looking until morning.
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Early the next day, Edith started looking for the missing soldier, asking passers-by on the path they had taken the previous day, but learned nothing. She went back to the hospital. This time, two Alsatian civilians were guarding the gate. Inside, the four French patients were recovering, but had no information on their missing comrade. Someone suggested she check the morgue; the hospital’s chapel was being used for that purpose as of the previous day. She pushed on the door and found it blocked. The body of a young man, with golden curls and brilliant blue eyes staring into nothingness, lay in front of the door. His shirt was gone, he had no visible wounds. She pushed a little harder to move him from in front of the door, and saw that he had no feet. He had bled to death. She felt sad that no one had been there to tie a tourniquet for him, to perform the simple kindness of saving his life. And she wondered why he had been left there in front of the door. She felt for a light switch, and understood in a jolt. Bodies were piled up all over the room, on top of each other, at all angles, up to the low ceiling in one corner. She tried to look for her missing soldier, walking past the stacks of dead men, but the air in the room was too close, too still. She left, and leaned against the wall outside to try to breathe again.

She remembered the hospital cook she had met the day before, a big, jolly man with a white chef’s hat, and thought he would be a good antidote to the nightmare of the chapel. He invited her into his warm kitchen, and she stopped over each pot, breathing in the savory fragrance of simmering stew, sauerkraut, beans with ham, sausages, cabbage. It smelled delicious, but contrary to her nature, she did not feel hungry. Finally he persuaded her to have some soup and omelette, and she felt among the living again. She left, and driving past a building with a makeshift sign that read
“Krankenhaus,”
German for “hospital,” she thought: what if the missing soldier is there? She bounced in without hesitation and found eighteen German officers standing at attention. They looked at each other, the officers impeccable and correct, Edith in her dirty olive-drab. “I had a full stomach and an empty head,” she remarked later. A dozen German nurses in starched whites stood to the side, disapproving. It appeared to be the occupying medical corps. An officer approached, stopped neatly in front of her and said: “We demand to be taken prisoner.”
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