Women of Valor (23 page)

She stood speechless, wondering what to do with them. They wouldn’t all fit in her ambulance. She could make them march behind, but all the way to the barracks? The officer suggested he collect their arms to turn over. Edith agreed. A couple of the men went upstairs and came down with armloads of sabers, pistols and revolvers. She had been told that medical units had no right to carry weapons. She looked outside to see if any assistance might be in view, and saw a line of American soldiers creeping around the corner, guns at the ready. Worried that they would shoot first and ask questions later, she shouted out the window in English: “Hello boys! Hello boys!” The GIs stood up and recognized that she had the same uniform as they did, if not the same accent. They came into the clinic, and she explained the surrender and that she expected correct behavior from them. They sent for transportation, keeping their eyes glued to the pile of weapons on the table.
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Getting into Strasbourg was not easy for the rest of the division. Marie-Thérèse discovered fear on a narrow track leading up to Fort Kléber, on the south side of the city, where fighting continued over two days. She and Marie-Anne were sitting in the ambulance, having a smoke, when suddenly they had tracer bullets coming through the ambulance across their laps. “I had the fright of my life. The officers yelled at everyone to get in the ditches. I can still see myself, nose in the mud, wondering what the hell I was doing there.” Then calls for ambulances came and they jumped up and ran to collect the wounded.

Fighting continued, even after they were in the city. Several of the Rochambelles had become close friends since their musical evenings in Roville with Jean “Jaboun” Nohain, who, at forty-five years old, was an honorary big brother as well as their musical adviser. He was a writer, singer and radio star, a celebrity in a pre-television age. Trying to wrench an army barracks away from the Germans in Strasbourg the first day they were there, Jaboun’s tank was hit and an artilleryman badly wounded. Jaboun got out of his protected position to help the soldier and was shot. A good part of the left side of his face was gone. Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne rearranged an already full ambulance to fit him in, and Marie-Anne sat in the back holding bandage after blood-soaked bandage to his head, while he screamed in pain and begged them for some morphine. At that moment, they had none. Their instructions were to follow the mud track they had taken into town to find the next treatment center behind lines, as the closest one had been bombed.

“It was a nightmare to drive an ambulance full of wounded who were suffering,” Marie-Thérèse said. Jaboun was getting all the other wounded soldiers agitated with his screaming. She decided to take the main road instead, as it would be faster. They came almost immediately upon an American ambulance, broken down behind lines, with one lightly wounded soldier in it. Marie-Anne suggested they get some morphine from him, but the American driver refused to give them morphine unless they took his patient. They put one of their less severely injured soldiers in the front, and Marie-Anne squeezed into the back with the American soldier. She promptly gave Jaboun a shot of morphine. He subsequently went through several operations in the States, and returned to France to became a television star. “Of his wound there was practically no trace,” Marie-Thérèse said, but some facial paralysis left a slight speech impediment, enough to become a Nohain signature. Younger comedians later made fun of his way of speaking, and whenever Marie-Thérèse saw them do that, she got furious and had to turn off the television. “If they knew how he got that…” she said indignantly.

But the small injustices of life were something Nohain understood. After the war, he wrote a play,
The Fireman’s Ball.
He explained that he named it thus in memory of the tank crewman who was killed that day in Strasbourg, Henri Etchegaray. Whenever they had talked about the unfairness of this or that, Etchegaray would always say, with a shrug of his shoulders, “Like at the fireman’s ball, it’s always the same ones who dance.” Nohain danced his way to the age of eighty and then died in January 1981. Marie-Thérèse went to the funeral, and Nohain’s son, Dominique, asked her to sit with the family in the front pews of Notre-Dame de Passy. “You’re the one who saved him,” he told her.

Between the Vosges and the Rhine, Zizon and Denise had to stop for repairs to the ambulance and were left behind by their unit. Attempts to find it led into dangerous territory several times, and finally, as a last resort, they decided to go to headquarters and admit to the brass that they couldn’t find their unit. Denise still had her beret, which looked more official, so she went ahead, hoping to discreetly find a lieutenant to direct them. But Captain Christian Girard, Leclerc’s ever-present aide-de-camp, ushered her in to Leclerc himself, who was poring over a map of Strasbourg. Massu had just entered the city and Leclerc was too delighted to be cross with an ambulance driver. He showed her the route to take, and off she and Zizon went, as fast as they could, weaving around the heavy American vehicles coming up behind.

Marie-Thérèse Pezet and Marie-Anne Duvernet crossing a river in Alsace, November 1944.

Outside Strasbourg, Madeleine and Paule were with the Fourth Company of tanks pinned down by heavy fire when the company commander, Captain Jean de Castelnau, was badly wounded. Madeleine and Paule nosed the ambulance next to the crippled tank, climbed up, and got Castelnau into the ambulance with such grace and speed that the infantrymen of the March of Chad Regiment, taking cover in the roadside ditches, burst into applause. Their ambulance windshield then was shot through and both Madeleine and Paule were cut by glass, but it was not enough to stop them. “The other wounded soldiers were yelling, Paule, Madeleine, take us, don’t leave us here,” Madeleine said in an interview. But they said they had to get the badly injured Castelnau out of there fast. They ran him to the ambulance at the end of the line, and Zizon and Denise took off with him toward the treatment center. Then Madeleine and Paule went back to get the others.

Zizon and Denise, with Castelnau in the back, were crossing a temporary bridge made of two wide planks when they came under fire, their flag shot right off the hood of the ambulance. In front of them, a Jeep stalled, and they were stuck, sitting ducks on the bridge, until it got going again. The American soldiers below were yelling at them to go faster, faster, while Zizon tried to negotiate the planks without shaking up the other wounded soldiers, one of whom was screaming in pain. When they got across, they found that Castelnau had died.

The next day, Captain Charles Ceccaldi called Toto in and said Paule and Madeleine were to be punished, as they were missing a wrench from their mechanics kit. Toto started to protest. “I understood that our Chieftain had heard a little too much praise of them, and that his male pride was hurt, when he responded ‘Exactly! They might be heroines, but they sure are damned troublemakers!’”
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Jacotte said that she didn’t think Ceccaldi was as bad as Toto made him out to be in her memoir, but that he just didn’t know how to command women. Neither did the other officers, she noted. “Either they became super-authoritarian or they were clumsy,” she said. “He wasn’t clumsy.”

At Fort Ney, another of the old stone fortresses ringing Strasbourg, the German military governor General Franz Vaterrodt holed up and refused to surrender unless forced to do so. The French had only one squadron, one infantry company and one battery of 105mm artillery, not much against a fort. Then up the road came a U.S. artillery company with some 155mm howitzers. The French asked if they would mind firing a few at the fort. They let loose a barrage of heavy shells, and a half-hour later the German governor surrendered. The combined exercise, though impromptu, had been effective.

German defenses at the Strasbourg airfield held up Rosette and Nicole’s unit until division tanks routed hundreds of Germans out of their trenches. They surrendered, offering their watches and pens to their captors. Rosette didn’t want to have anything to do with war booty, but other division members were not so principled. She recalled running into one of the Ninth Company soldiers later that evening who said, “My dear, your watch is not very attractive, wouldn’t you like another?” And pulled up his sleeve to reveal a dozen different watches on his arm.

Rosette’s experience of liberating Strasbourg contrasted sharply with Edith’s. She got in the city on November 24 and found that the infirmary had been set up in the former Café de la Wehrmacht. She loaded up wounded soldiers as usual, and at one point had two French and two Germans in the back when she was delayed on a city street. While waiting to move again, she opened the back door to rearrange some supplies and a group of civilians came around. “I had the clear impression that the people showed more compassion for the
boches
than for the French,” Rosette wrote. “They talked to them, comforted them, brought them water, apples, schnapps … the sight of it put me in a rage, and it was without any niceness at all that I asked the population to get away from my vehicle.”

That first evening in Strasbourg, Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne were sitting at their tactical group’s command post, a house in town with a garden. They were sipping confiscated champagne with some officers in one room, while in the room next door, another officer was interrogating a German civilian prisoner. Suddenly a tank lieutenant burst into the house, shouting, “I want him, leave him to me! “The lieutenant was Alsatian, and had just returned from learning that some of his family had been deported by the Nazis. He grabbed the prisoner and shoved him out into the garden before anyone could react. “We heard two shots,” Marie-Thérèse said. The prisoner was dead. “I was so upset and shocked. It was, actually, a murder. Even the enemy deserves an interrogation, a defense. He could have been innocent.”

That same evening, Edith found Anne and discovered that they had free time, and should find their own sleeping quarters. Edith considered the possibilities and decided they should start at the top, La Maison Rouge, Strasbourg’s finest hotel. The desk informed her that they were hosting only military that night, and Edith and Anne quickly presented their credentials. The room had two beds and a bathroom with a bathtub. Ecstasy! They soaked themselves clean, put on fresh uniforms and went off into the night. The Strasbourgeois were beginning to celebrate their liberation, and French flags were popping up in every window. They went to Edith’s favorite restaurant, L’Aubette, and found it full of Spahis. They failed to recognize their Rochambelles at first, clean and dressed up as they were, and they all had a cheerful dinner together. The next day, the division moved out, heading south, Edith driving alone as Anne was sent elsewhere.

She was not alone for long. A replacement partner was sent her way at Neudorf. Suzanne Evrard arrived in spike heels and a chignon, false eyelashes, and serious makeup. Edith started missing Anne immediately. Suzanne took the wheel, but after a while she asked to switch, and got a small suitcase from the back of the ambulance. Edith marveled at the bag full of pots, tubes, brushes, nail polish, and lipstick. Suzanne said she was a beautician, and proceeded to take off her perfect makeup and reapply it in a slightly lighter skin tone, while Edith alternated between keeping up with the convoy in front and watching the transformation in the seat next to her. They ate dried biscuits that night and slept in the ambulance, and in the morning Edith splashed her face dismally with cold water, her helmet as basin, as usual. Suzanne began to meticulously reapply her mask of makeup, and Edith was starting to get depressed, when Anne arrived, her jaw dropping at the sight of Suzanne. They had a good laugh over it afterwards.
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Once the center of Strasbourg was liberated, the Spahis of the Bompard platoon cobbled together a
bleu-blanc-rouge
flag to hoist on the spire of the cathedral, fulfilling Leclerc’s Koufra oath. They used a butcher shop’s blue tablecloth, a captain’s white shirt, and a Spahi’s red cloth belt to represent Strasbourg rejoining the French nation. The Second Division had taken Paris and Strasbourg, the two largest urban centers of combat, by repeating the same tactic. They showed up inside the cities before the Germans even knew they were on their way. Leclerc was turning
Blitzkrieg
around and throwing it right back at the Germans.

Strasbourg was back in the French fold, but the rest of Alsace was still held by the Germans. The worst fighting of the war, under the most bitter conditions, lay in front of the division. To make matters worse, Leclerc was also fighting off a transfer of the Second Division to de Lattre’s First French Army. Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny, whose 150,000 troops had landed in Provence in August, was coming north to Mulhouse, and Leclerc was ordered to detach from the U.S. Army and place his division under French command. He was loath to do so, for many reasons. Girard explained the problem in his memoir:

De Lattre’s quartermasters continue to obstinately apply the same [out-dated methods] that have failed a hundred times. They have learned nothing and refuse to evolve. Their stubbornness annoys the Americans, who have their own methods and don’t see why they should be the ones to conform to the habits of a small minority.… We are, for our part, always very welcome, because the General has decided, by realism and by logic, to adopt American methods. The result is that we obtain what we need without difficulty. It is absurd to try to live in a society of which one has need, in perpetual rebellion against customs that have proved their efficiency.
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