Women of Valor (19 page)

After another run to the treatment center with some wounded soldiers, they returned to Nomexy and found all the flags and crosses had disappeared. The division had retreated from Châtel, and the residents of Nomexy had quickly chosen discretion. “I was astounded to see the streets empty and the houses undressed in so little time,” Rosette wrote.

With the retreat, Jacotte and Crapette and the rest of the medical company pulled back to Jorxey, a village about ten kilometers west of the Moselle. Since their assignment to the medical company, which had its own Jeep, stretcher bearers, and cook, Jacotte and Crapette had only to drive the ambulance. The other Rochambelles were scattered among various tactical units and often had to do their own support work. The medical company, moving with the fighting front, generally took over village cafés to set up an infirmary. The cafés tended to be located on a square, where there was room to park the ambulances in front; they had a large room where stretchers could be laid out, and they had water. Such was the situation at Jorxey. Jacotte and Crapette had fallen into an exhausted sleep in the back of their ambulance when Krementchousky came banging on the door and said they had to get up, it was an order! They did, groaning, and found the emergency was that a local farmer’s wife had cooked up a big meal for them, with cabbage and potatoes and a mirabelle tart (it was plum season), their first proper meal in days. They ate with relish, and then slept for the rest of the afternoon, to return for more of the same fare that evening. The woman who served them was called “Tante” or Aunt, by her niece, and Jacotte and Crapette began referring to her as “Tante Mirabelle.” Two mirabelle tarts later, they baptized the ambulance
Tante Mirabelle,
and the good farmer’s wife assisted in the ceremony. (The name of their ambulance was later to prompt many an Alsatian to give them a bottle of mirabelle brandy, a homemade potion of some renown.) They pulled out at 5:00 A.M. the next day to retake Châtel, crossing the river via a temporary pontoon bridge the engineers had managed to put up. This time, the Germans began launching mortars at their very approach, and it was hard fighting to retake the town.

Edith and Lucie, newly released from the hospital, caught up with their Spahi unit at Nomexy. They parked their ambulance behind the house closest to the river, and ran, heads down, with their stretchers to pick up the wounded soldiers on and around the footbridge. The infirmary behind them was in a school, and it was rapidly filling up with the injured. Then the hail of mortars started marching right across the river toward their ambulance. Lucie ran for shelter and Edith got the ambulance out of there fast, just as a shell destroyed the house they had been using for cover. She drove toward some garages they had seen, thinking they might provide a good place to park, and found Lucie talking to a young soldier in the doorway of one of the garages. As she approached, the soldier lit a cigarette and Lucie leaned over to light hers off the flame. At that very moment, a jet of blood spurted from his neck and he collapsed, dead. A fragment from an exploding mortar had sliced his jugular. Lucie covered her eyes with her hands and went rigid with shock. Edith pulled her down into a homemade bunker where some local residents were hiding, and stayed there with her, talking her back to a state of calm.
6
Lucie was having a few too many close calls.

Jacotte Fournier (l) and Crapette Demay in front of a stack of fertilizer in Lorraine.

And she wasn’t the only one. A couple of American officers, driving up in a Jeep while Nomexy was under attack, were hit by a mortar. One of the men had his leg blown off. Raymonde Brindjonc took his necktie for a tourniquet to stop the bleeding (“I always used their ties as garottes,” she said). The man was conscious, but heavy, and as Raymonde tried to pull him over to the ambulance, they fell into a ditch. As they rolled down, a mortar slammed into the place they’d been standing a moment before. Both of them would have been killed if they had not fallen. Years later, the American officer told a division veteran that he had never forgotten the big blue eyes of the woman who saved him that night.

At Epinal, the U.S. Fifteenth Corps attacked the remaining Panzer divisions and sent the survivors flying for the shelter of the Vosges Mountains. The division pushed the Germans out of Châtel as well, and the columns of tanks moved out in an eastwardly direction.

Tank company commander Captain Jacques de Witasse, meanwhile, had broken a couple of ribs and separated his collarbone in a Jeep accident, and like many before and after him, plotted his escape from the hospital when it was time to be transferred to the rear. He was transported in an American ambulance, supposedly driving from Vittel westward, but he directed the American driver eastward instead until they arrived at his company’s camp near Charmes. “The American ambulance driver quickly understood that he had been had, and furious, started letting loose imprecations in the best Texas style,” Witasse wrote. “To calm him down, the
Austerlitz
[tank] crew gave him a marvelous reception in which the Lorraine mirabelle had a leading role. The American left several hours later, completely happy, and alone in his ambulance, which seemed to have a tendency to weave a bit as it headed in the approximate direction of Vittel.”
7

After Châtel, Georges Ratard took Arlette to see a division doctor, who confirmed what she already knew: she was pregnant. Georges wanted her to quit, and she was ready. She said she didn’t mind leaving the Rochambelles in the middle of the war. “I was happy,” she said. “I didn’t regret leaving, because I was expecting a son.” She was convinced from the start that the baby was a boy, and that was important to her. Arlette was Rosette’s second partner, after “You” Guerin, to leave the Rochambelles because of pregnancy.

Toto’s only comment was that if Arlette had come to her sooner, she would have helped her avoid a pregnancy just then. Arlette later said she was utterly naïve at the time, that she didn’t have a clue how to avoid getting pregnant, and wouldn’t have tried anyway. Rosette, however, said that on the day of her wedding, Arlette asked several Rochambelles how to prevent pregnancy, and no one knew. They told her to ask Toto, and apparently she never did. Innocence bordering on ignorance was close to the rule among the women. Rosette recounted that one afternoon in a soldiers’ cantine, a fellow stuck his head in the door and said, “Quick, they’re distributing the
capotes anglaises!
” (Literally, this would be an English bonnet, but was also slang for condom.) One of the Rochambelles stood up and said “Great! I don’t have anything to wear!”

The army wasn’t much more sophisticated than the ambulance drivers. When Arlette returned to Paris for demobilization, the army had no procedure for discharging a soldier because of pregnancy. “They didn’t know what to do,” she said. They took her military clothing, so she didn’t even have a coat. Elina Labourdette loaned her a fur-lined coat for the winter, and Arlette moved in temporarily with a cousin in the city. Rosette was assigned a new partner, Nicole Mangini-Guidon, an elegant blonde who had joined the group in Paris. Rosette was pleased to have Nicole as a partner, even though Nicole did not know how to drive. She had a wonderful manner of dealing with the injured soldiers. “I have the impression that her young and fresh beauty, and her compassion, comforts them,” she wrote. Rosette took over all driving duty, and the soldiers never knew their other “driver” wasn’t quite up to her job.

From Châtel, Anne-Marie and her partner Michette de Steinheil were sent to Zincourt, a few kilometers east, to pick up some wounded soldiers. On the way, they ran across Leclerc, who asked where they were going. They said Zincourt, and he said, go on then, giving them his habitual little push behind with his walking stick. Branet’s company was behind them, and Branet quipped over the radio: “Don’t worry, the Rochambelles are out front.” Anne-Marie and Michette found the streets of Zincourt empty, not a soul around; the village had just been deserted by the Germans. Then residents started coming out from behind their doors and greeted Anne-Marie and Michette as conquering heroes. Branet and his tanks arrived to “take” the village and found the women having lunch in the center square. Michette said they only had to transport one man, a civilian, from that town. They weren’t supposed to take care of civilians, but if there were no wounded soldiers, it was hard to refuse.

Anne-Marie and Jacques Branet were an established couple at that point, and their affair was an open secret in the division, even if they were careful not to let it show around others. “They were very, very discreet,” Michette said in an interview. “They didn’t flirt openly.” Anne-Marie was married at the time; her husband had been active in the Resistance and then joined the First Army. But her heart was no longer in the marriage, she confided to a friend. And then she met the classically handsome Branet, who, in Leclerc’s description, was adored by his men and esteemed by his bosses. Anne-Marie did not fail to enjoy his company, and, having been married, she was not in the same state of lamentable ignorance as the others.

The war, with its inherent elements of camaraderie, courage and sacrifice, was inevitably a crucible for romance, but the women insisted that any liaisons be carried out with great discretion. The stakes were too high for both the women and the men to play around carelessly: social reputations carried consequences, venereal disease was common and pregnancy outside of marriage could spell ruin. At the same time, an undercurrent of affection between some Rochambelles and division officers was often in the air. “Of course there were people losing their hearts to each other all the time,” Anne Hastings remarked.

Other women developed deep friendships with their fellow soldiers, relationships they would not have dreamt of wrecking on the shoals of sexual attraction. For Jacotte and Crapette, their buddies became the tank crew that always seemed to be right in front of them in convoy.
Malmaison
’s crew was led by Lieutenant Eric Foster, who was half English and half French, and included Drouillas, a Chilean; Chevalier, a Swiss, and Jacques Salvetat, from the south of France. One afternoon, the
Malmaison
crew invited the two women to “tea.” They all pretended to be in an extremely elegant environment, instead of sitting on a board in a muddy field. Salvetat peeled an apple for each of them and the women offered them cigarettes, which everyone was running low on at that point. “What a privilege it was to get to know them,” Jacotte said. “They were boys of great character.”

And even if one of them was sweet on Crapette, and everyone knew it, nothing was ever said or done. “We never had the slightest flirtation with the boys. There was no misunderstanding,” she said. “We were friends, that’s all. There was never any hand-holding or smiles. It simplified things that way. They considered us as untouchable.”

Had they been further back in the line, possibly there would have been time and inclination for flirting and seduction. But they were on the front. “We couldn’t have done what we did if we had had other ideas in our heads,” Jacotte insisted. Jacotte’s viewpoint was that of the majority of the women. Toto and Anne-Marie, both separated in distance and affection from their husbands, were exceptions.

Danièle, for example, had never been permitted to wear her hair down. When she joined the division, she wore her waist-length braids wrapped around her head, in the Alsatian style. The mores of the time dictated that she could go to war, but she could not wear her hair loose. It would have been considered an indicator of her moral condition. “We were very naïve in that era,” she said. “On one hand we were raised with sort of Scout ideals, that counted a little, as did the religious education of the time. The attitude of the girls was very important. Madame Conrad did not accept just anybody. All the girls were very well-mannered. We always said, ‘We are not A.F.A.T. [the auxiliaries]! We are Rochambelles.’”

Danièle noted that the women and men
vous-voyéed
each other, a linguistic device the French use to create distance and demonstrate formality, rather than the casual and informal “tu” form of you. “We were with 20,000 men and not one of them would have touched us,” she said. Janine Bocquentin seconded Danièle’s assessment. “We were friends and comrades,” she said. “I never heard of girls who slept with the boys. We weren’t there for that. We were there to experience an extraordinary moment, in my case at any rate. It was a great adventure.”

Friendship amongst the women also was cemented by this time. They had stood the test of combat, and the knowledge that they could trust one another with their lives forged links that never would be broken. Rosette wrote her mother from Lorraine, where the farmers maintained pungent stacks of fertilizer, that she was deeply satisfied. “This morning, walking in the stinking streets, I suddenly realized how happy I am with the life I’m leading, how warm it is in friendship, how rich it is in surprises. What a fine job it is to help men who are suffering. It is easy to overcome fear when you have a precise task to accomplish and you try to do it to your best ability.”