Women of Valor (4 page)

By early June, they were moving the wounded from treatment centers along the front to hospitals westward, as bombing and artillery attacks reached further into France. On the evening of June 11, the doctors left as well, and Conrad and Verhille worked through the night, the wounded coming in like a rising tide. In the morning they packed the ambulance full and left for Bar-le-Duc. From June 11 until June 19, when France surrendered to the Germans, just about everyone got up from the east and tried to get to the west. Soldiers struggled under the weight of seventy-pound packs on their backs, farmers drove livestock ahead of them, women brought babies into the world on wagons by the roadside, and children were separated from their families and lost. There was no food and no water. Conrad drove soldiers when she could, when the ambulance wasn’t full of wounded. The retreat was a Boschian scene of panic and despair, the shuffling columns moving west one day, south another, chased by stories of German atrocities.

Conrad tried to cross the Moselle River westward but the bridge had been blown out. She drove her ambulance along the river and fell straight into a German roadblock. She surrendered immediately and showed her U.S. passport. The officer in charge told a soldier to accompany her to the nearest post. He got in, and she drove to the post, where the soldier got out, telling her to wait there. “What an idiot! Naturally I was not going to ‘wait there,’” she wrote.
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She took off into the deepening dusk, driving north along the river, hoping the bridge at Charmes was still intact. She found it, and started across, but halfway there she screamed and slammed on the brakes. The bridge had been blown out in the middle. German soldiers came running.

The Germans made her drive west to Dompaire, to a prisoners’ camp. She was so tired when she arrived that she crawled onto a stretcher in the back of her ambulance and slept through the night. In the morning she found 20,000 French prisoners in the camp, plus two ambulances from her unit. She went to see the camp commander, and showed her U.S. passport again. She was free to leave: the Americans were not yet belligerents in the war. The commander allowed her to take some wounded prisoners to the hospital at Thaon, where the nuns showed her to a room and she slept straight through for twenty-four hours. She was exhausted.

But she wasn’t going to give up. Conrad got an
Ausweis,
or official pass, from the German authorities to run the ambulance between Etain and Paris, transporting wounded French soldiers. She drove across Paris the night the surrender was signed, and there was not a French soul on the streets. She saw only four German guards.
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Back home in the chic Passy neighborhood of the 16th arrondissement, Conrad was unable to rest. She saw long lines of people outside the Red Cross offices: no one knew the fate of their relatives in the army. Were they still alive? Had they been taken prisoner? She had an idea, and drove east with it. She called on the German command staff and asked if she could collect mail from the prisoners. She designed a simple card that had no more than the address of the camp, a simple message: “Ma chérie, Je suis en bonne santé. Je t’embrasse. (My dear, I am in good health. I send a kiss.)” And the prisoner’s signature. She began at Lunéville, where among the prisoners she found her honorary regimental commander Gustave Gounouilhou. She later would help him escape occupied France. She then visited camps at Baccarat and Sarrebourg. The prisoners could write nothing else, she had promised the German officials, otherwise the cards would all have to be read by a censor, and it would take weeks. The point was to let families know as soon as possible that their men were alive.

Returning to Paris with lists of prisoners and 100,000 cards in the ambulance, she panicked: how was she going to send them? The banks were closed, and she couldn’t get 100,000 francs to buy stamps. She thought of the Red Cross, and the Office of Prisoners of War. Finally the American Red Cross took charge of distributing the cards, and Conrad worked with the director of the National Archives on a form for the soldiers to fill out with their personal and family information. In all, Conrad visited seventy prisoner-of-war camps and hospitals that summer, and brought back 100,000 pieces of mail each time. She took dried sausages and canned food with her to distribute to the prisoners, bringing the last twenty cans of American soup from the gourmet food store Hédiard at Place Madeleine. By the end of the summer, the Germans had put in place a formal system of communication, and she was no longer needed. She went back to Paris.

In September 1940, a friend at the U.S. embassy called with a warning. The Gestapo was spreading a rumor that she had carried weapons in her ambulance. She brushed it off. Then an army contact called and asked if she would help in sorting out wounded soldiers who could be released from hospitals from those who needed a longer stay. The Germans wanted to release them all where they were, and the French wanted to get the serious cases to Val de Grace Hospital in Paris. As an American, Conrad had room to move where the French did not. She went. While she was in Reims, Jeanne Krug of the champagne family came to ask for help. She had taken in 300 babies during the retreat but had trouble finding milk for them all. She said the cows were giving bad milk because of the chaos, and she could not find condensed milk. Conrad called the Civil Aid Services in Paris, who took charge of the babies’ milk. Conrad took prisoner after prisoner from eastern hospitals to Paris, driving a thousand kilometers every few days.

In November 1940 she went south to Vichy, where government officials had retreated to maintain a French state during the German occupation. Conrad wanted to organize her financial affairs between France and the United States. She visited some old friends and had tea with Madame Pétain, wife of the marshal who was now head of government. The following month, on one of her runs to the prisoners’ camps, she saw the men barefoot in the snow. She went back to Madame Pétain for help, and a committee was organized to make wooden clogs for them. Conrad also visited a British women’s prison camp in Besançon. The women were sleeping on a concrete floor covered with a little straw, with no heating and few blankets. There were five toilets for 7,000 people. When they arrived, the camp was filthy and lice-infested. The women of Besançon had come and provided them with cleaning materials, but the prisoners were still freezing. Conrad promised to try to help. She took the visit as a personal warning as well: if the United States entered the war, she would be interned in similar quarters. For a woman of Conrad’s energy, being sidelined from the action would be punishment even more difficult to endure than the tough conditions of a prisoner-of-war camp.

In early 1941, a French general with whom she was friendly asked her to go to the States and inform the Americans about the situation in France. But when she visited Marshal Philippe Pétain, the aging Vichy leader, he tried to dissuade her, denying the implications of “collaboration” with the Nazis. He preferred to think of it as a “barter system,” he told her. Conrad believed that Pétain was wrong, and packed her bags for New York. “It took all of my courage to leave,” she wrote.
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The expatriate French she found in New York had become bitterly divided into two camps: those who supported General Henri Giraud and his First Army and those loyal to General Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces. Giraud and his group represented conservative, traditional, Catholic France, while the Gaullists considered themselves the vanguard of a more inclusive future. The Lorraine Cross with two horizontal bars, symbol of the Gaullists, was viewed with outright hostility by the Giraud group. From 1940 to 1943 inter-French squabbling served as background static in the exile community, with each group vying for international recognition as the official Vichy opposition.

Conrad didn’t pay much attention to the fuss. She knew that any gathering of the French would result in cultural fission, a search for differences between one another rather than the finding of common ground. With the Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943, Conrad sensed a larger battle in the offing. Naturally, she wanted to help, and she had both an idea and the connections to make it happen. Conrad decided to organize an ambulance corps, and to have it trained, equipped and prepared for duty when the battle to liberate France would begin. That wasn’t all: Conrad wanted women to drive the ambulances, because that would free up the men for fighting. She remembered what her friend the general had said about keeping volunteer efforts from getting in the way of the war. If the women were part of the army, they would not be treated as meddling civilians. The greatest difficulty, she understood perfectly, would be getting a women’s ambulance corps attached to an army. Conrad embraced the challenge, and the chance to contribute to her dearest cause: the liberation of France.

She started by asking for money from wealthy friends. Donating funds to buy ambulances was very much in fashion in New York at the time, and civic associations, high school clubs, and citizenship groups all were participating in the effort. Conrad soon had enough money to buy nineteen brand-new Dodge model WC 54 1.5-ton, four-wheel-drive ambulances. Built by the Wayne Society of Richmond, Indiana, and assembled on a Dodge chassis, they had no armor plating, no weapons, a double-clutch gearshift, and a top speed of eighty-five kilometers per hour.
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Conrad then began recruiting drivers, spreading the word among friends and posting advertisements in the French departments of local universities.

From Bryn Mawr College came Germaine de Bray, a professor of French. From the Parsons School of Design came Laure de Breteuil and Anne de Bourbon-Parme, both eighteen-year-old art students. Laure’s mother, Elisabeth de Breteuil, also signed up, partly to keep an eye on the two young women.

“All the boys around us were leaving for the army, the Americans to the American army, the French to England or Canada,” Laure de Breteuil said in an interview. “It was natural. I was not going to just sit there and wait for things to happen.” But the War Department had other ideas about women joining the war effort, and the Free French military leaders weren’t supportive, either. “They weren’t interested, and why should they be?” Laure said. Conrad and Elisabeth de Breteuil went several times to Washington to try to persuade Free French army officials that their project had merit.

Anne Ebrard Hastings was working on a doctorate in government at Harvard University at the time. She was born in Paris in 1915, and married an American, Wendell Hastings, in France in September 1940. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when the United States entered the war, Wendell Hastings went into the Office of Secret Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Anne wanted to do something, but what? “I thought, one becomes a nurse,” she said. “That’s what happened to the other generation.”

She took a nurses’ training course, and then her husband saw Conrad’s notice recruiting ambulance drivers for the Free French. He suggested she get a driver’s license and see if she could join. “I thought I’d like the adventure, and I thought it’d be awful to stay in the States cozily, doing nothing. Before [the war] I loved mountain-climbing, rock-climbing really, the harder the better,” she said. “I wanted to prove myself, and see if I would be afraid.” She also was motivated by her family history. Her father had died in a German prison camp during the First World War.

Lulu Arpels, of the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry family, and Marianne Glaser, an Austrian who was desperate for news of her adult daughter in France, signed up with Conrad’s team. Jacqueline Lambert de Guise, a great beauty, and Hélène Fabre, heiress to a shipbuilding fortune, also joined, as did Marie-Louise (nicknamed “You” from childhood) Courou-Mangin, and several others. Jacqueline Fournier, finally escaping her secretarial destiny, signed on and became known as “Jacotte,” to distinguish her from the other Jacqueline.

The women began ambulance training at the old World’s Fair grounds in Flushing, Queens. Training included mechanics’ courses, stripping down engines, repairing small breakdowns, and changing tires. They also took army-run medical training in first aid, which involved bandaging, giving shots, and taking temperatures, and they worked as volunteers in New York hospitals to broaden their medical knowledge. All the training was well thought-out and useful, and contributed to turning them into short-term health professionals.

The mechanics part was somewhat less successful. Laure de Breteuil was not the only one to be intimidated by the exercise of changing a truck tire. “I looked at one of the wheels and said ‘If I have to change that damn thing I’ll never be able to,’” she explained. “That’s when I decided to be more on the nursing side of things.” The women mastered cleaning out carburetor jets, which frequently jammed up and stalled the engine, replacing spark plugs and removing fan belts.

Conrad kept recruiting, signing up a dozen Americans, among them Leonora Lindsley, who had lived in Paris with her journalist parents before the war. Together, the women went to Saks Fifth Avenue and Brooks Brothers to order their gear: long underwear, a dress uniform, fatigues, a pale blue mechanics’ jumpsuit they took to calling “the evening gown,” and a heavy trenchcoat.

Conrad was as tireless in organizing her new corps as she had been in France in 1940, and in the Great War twenty-five years earlier, when she was a young nurse. But now she was fifty-seven years old, and conscious of the difference in age from her new charges, most of whom were in their early twenties. She knew she needed a younger subordinate officer to run the squad while she oversaw their duties and served as liaison with U.S. and French military authorities. A friend thought she knew the ideal candidate.

*   *   *

Suzanne Rosambert Torrès was thirty-five years old, a smart, no-nonsense lawyer, born and raised in Paris, but fluent in English because her mother was American. She was separated from her husband, a well-known Paris lawyer and World War I veteran named Henri Torrès. When the new war was declared, Henri left France for New York, but Suzanne went straight to the eastern front, helping run one of the volunteer ambulance services and acting as liaison between the volunteers and the military command. She was devastated by the surrender, and when she heard Charles de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940 speech urging the French to fight on from abroad, she was determined to do exactly that. But first she had to find a way out of the country. Meeting up with like-minded friends, she traveled to Bordeaux, and then looked for a route to the French colonies in North Africa.