by Paul Kix
Now, pure joy rushed through them, animating their limbs and speech and snorts of laughter. The skeptical captain came by, and asked what happened. His doubt turned to an exhilaration that matched the team’s, and he promised La Rochefoucauld and his men that he would nominate them for the Croix de Guerre (War Cross), given for acts of heroism. La Rochefoucauld blushed, honored, and felt suddenly stunned, too, as he watched a new and wonderful day pinken the skies: He had survived his most dangerous night without even a splinter.
But he couldn’t sleep well. A question worked in his mind: Had he actually succeeded? The boom of the sabotage echoed through the night, as loud as any of his other jobs, but this casemate was designed to sustain almost every blow. If the thing could make it through a napalm attack, shouldn’t it withstand his plastic explosives, too? He got word that the regiment would advance again on the casemate, and onto Pointe de Grave, the following afternoon. Robert would have his answer soon enough.
At dawn the next morning, the Allies once again dropped bombs and fired artillery on the German positions, preparing the way for the ground assault. Around 4 p.m. La Rochefoucauld and his regiment moved out, Leclerc’s tanks in front. They drew ever closer until at last Robert saw the casemate. It was disfigured, with gaping holes in its body. No shells shot out of the compound, no machine guns rattled. La Rochefoucauld’s captain fell back in line until he found his commando.
“Bravo,” he whispered.
By evening the regiment reached the German lines closer to Pointe de Grave and the southern mouth of the Gironde. “It would still take two days,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “two extremely hard days of combat—the Germans were tenaciously resisting step by step.” But the Allies, incrementally, unmistakably, gained ground. On April 20, French soldiers surrounded the German fortresses at Pointe de Grave, and the Nazis surrendered.
La Rochefoucauld, alas, didn’t witness it. The previous day he’d stepped on a mine. “My knee was shattered,” he wrote. The medics evacuated him first to Bordeaux for surgery and then to Rochefort-sur-Mer, north of Royan, to convalesce. “I made out with an arthrotomy and a silver kneecap,” he wrote. And there, in a coastal town as sun-drenched as his childhood vacation spots, he heard on May 8, 1945, that the war in Europe was over.
His country was free.
CHAPTER 22
In that joyful and gratifying spring, however, darker clouds drifted in. From his hospital bed La Rochefoucauld learned that his older brother, Henri, fighting with the Second Armored Division in Alsace, had died in battle. He was twenty-three. Robert’s grief took on beastly shapes, whole days “seized with rage,” he wrote. Henri was dead, another man’s potential stubbed out in the war’s indiscriminate and “abominable slaughter.”
The pain didn’t prey upon Robert alone, of course, so many families in 1945 having their Henri. But in the coastal towns around him, as he convalesced, murmurs spread of a different sort of anguish: whether the battle for liberation had been worth it. In the weeks and months after May 8, in fact, many people La Rochefoucauld helped free, in particular those in Royan, began to view the fight for France as the scene of an Allied atrocity.
The attack on the Atlantic pockets came three weeks before V-E Day, while Hitler and Goebbels, deep in the führer’s bunker, consoled themselves with horoscopes and even German radio stations carried news of the eastward-moving Americans and westward-moving Russians joining forces along the Elbe River, outside Berlin. Royannais challenged whether an attack on their town was needed. The war’s end in Germany would free the Gironde waterways, too. “It would have been more logical,” wrote a local commander after Royan’s liberation, “to wait for the surrender of Germany and thus to avoid new human and material losses.” The French high command, strangely, didn’t refute the illogic of the operation, but argued its necessity because of “l’aspect moral,” in the words of Gen. André d’Anselme, who ordered the ground attack in Royan. French troops wanted a victory, and to deny them that now, in 1945, would only frustrate them for the rest of their lives. So the battle was launched for its “ardent desire” of being won, d’Anselme said—not its military need, which other generals, including Leclerc, questioned.
In freeing the Atlantic pockets, the French military suffered nearly 1,400 casualties, the Germans 970. The government failed to provide an estimate of civilians killed or wounded.
The taking of Pointe de Grave and Royan demanded bravery from the men on the ground. Both sides were relentless; the Germans “wouldn’t surrender unless they found themselves incapable of continuing the fight,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. If the capture of Berlin made a mission in Royan pointless, then a terrible beauty revealed itself in the Gironde, too, the Germans defending ground for the sake of it, the French attacking positions for the honor in it, both sides aware they might be the last soldiers in the war to die, and both fighting anyway, for country or their brothers or themselves.
So when the burning glow of that notorious victory in Royan smoldered into white smoke, the French honored those who had fought admirably. Colonel de Milleret of the FFGR authored the citation for La Rochefoucauld’s War Cross, one week after V-E Day. “Placed at the forefront of the squadron of Commandos,” the short note read, “[La Rochefoucauld] showed the good qualities of composure, thus avoiding severe losses in his unit. [The] aspirant, full of energy and courage, proved worthy during the fighting of Pointe de Grave in the duty that had been entrusted to him.”
The days turned hot on the Atlantic coast and La Rochefoucauld yearned to return home, to the chateau outside Soissons. In August, the same month that the Japanese surrendered and the war in the Pacific ended, doctors thought La Rochefoucauld’s knee had fully recovered and released him from their care. He got a month’s leave from the army and headed straight to the thirty-five acres of Villeneuve. He found a property “in fairly poor condition,” he wrote, but his parents and surviving siblings focused his attention elsewhere. “The reunion was emotional,” La Rochefoucauld said, the joy tinged with melancholy. “Henri’s death had been trying on my mother and father.” (They would keep for the rest of their lives more photos of Henri in the chateau than any other child.) Robert met his youngest sister during that leave, Olivier and Consuelo’s tenth and final baby, born in February 1945, one month after Henri’s death: Marie-Henriette, named after her fallen brother.
Though grief remained, the house also filled with a sense of simple serenity: La Rochefoucauld alive, his family with him at home.
“The month of leave went by quickly,” he wrote. The army did not discharge him, and he would not have sought it anyway. The boy who’d dangled from the four-story roof of this chateau had grown into a man who still loved adventure. The army, even in peacetime, promised an alluring life. He left Villeneuve and, “I was soon called up as an aide-de-camp for General Noiret.” This was Roger Noiret, who had led troops in North Africa and later joined the Free French Forces in Great Britain.
He and La Rochefoucauld stationed themselves in Berlin, watching the Russians and Americans carve up the spoils of the Third Reich. One night the Soviets held a reception in the city “to celebrate French-Russian friendship,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. About thirty people attended, including the famed Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the most decorated officer in the history of Russia, who perhaps more than any other man contributed to the Allied success on the Eastern Front. When the French interpreter accompanying La Rochefoucauld introduced him to Zhukov, the Russian burst out laughing. “He’d heard my name rather quickly and thought I was called La Rochezhukov,” Robert wrote. Zhukov announced that the Frenchman was a Gallic cousin and kissed him full on the mouth, the Russian custom. “From then on, all the Soviet officers would only call me La Rochezhukov,” he wrote.
Everyone sat down for dinner. Robert saw a glass of vodka in front of him and servers standing behind and the boisterous Zhukov rising, at the head of the table, to give a speech. He toasted the Allies’ health. He then began to list the countries that had contri
buted to success, pausing after each nation, the men at table expected to drink their whole glass. When they did, the servers refilled, and Zhukov would announce the next nation. La Rochefoucauld saw where this was headed and looked to Noiret, who motioned with his eyes that they couldn’t refuse. Still, Noiret surreptitiously began dumping half of each glass on the carpet, before drinking the rest. La Rochefoucauld followed his general’s lead. The Russians did not.
The night got away from the soldiers. When Zhukov made his good-byes he had to be accompanied down the front steps of the hall, and then out across the cobblestone street. He saw his car and chauffeur and dove into the backseat—and came crashing out the other side. Noiret and La Rochefoucauld chose to say nothing, only in slightly better states themselves.
The next morning was not kind to Robert, but when his mind cleared the day held its revelations, one of them even more amazing than Zhukov’s drawn-out toast. A lifetime after the German blitz, here La Rochefoucauld was, a résistant the Nazis had spent three years trying to kill, free, and even feted, in the city of Berlin.
EPILOGUE
As had been the case with so many evenings in Robert’s life, this one would be formal, and he stood before the mirror knotting his black tie. His fingers remained as dexterous as they’d been at ten, when he learned this nightly routine, but his cheeks had reddened and sagged with age, and his sweep of brown hair had turned white and begun to recede up his pate, collecting in shocks that with each new year bore a little less resemblance to the neatly parted look of his prime, when he’d gained the attention of every passing woman. He still had a noble bearing—all ironic gaze and straight-backed aplomb—and despite the evening’s formal attire, he managed the easy poise of the carefree, walking from the mirror with a light smile on his lips.
He turned out of the master bedroom and onto the red carpet of the chateau’s third-story hallway. He and Bernadette had moved here forty-two years ago, just after their marriage in 1955, and Robert still loved it. The sixty-six acres known as Pont Chevron featured a rolling lawn leading to the thirty-room chateau, and then another expanse falling from it, ending at the bank of the private lake that gave the estate its serenity. Situated just outside Ouzouer-sur-Trézée, a town in north-central France, the property had hosted Spanish kings and Portuguese queens before Robert and Bernadette moved in, but La Rochefoucauld liked it because it rivaled his own childhood home, Villeneuve. Both were pastoral idylls and great places to raise a family.
The guests began to arrive: his four adult children, seven grandchildren, and dozens of friends and acquaintances. He mingled with veterans and the local functionaries who’d helped him govern Ouzouer-sur-Trézée, in the thirty years he had been the town’s mayor. Not just the energy of the room but its very color seemed to lighten when the former president of France entered, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a friend of the family’s who would preside over tonight’s ceremony. Robert looked across at Bernadette, still a striking blond, and smiled. She knew what this evening meant to him, even if there was so much about the war Robert still refused to discuss.
There had been the one morning just after their marriage, for instance, when she had woken up and begun padding for the door. She remembered Robert suddenly on her, throwing her to the ground.
“What’s going on?” she’d screamed.
He had paused then, and seemed to gather himself in the moment, back in their bedroom. He’d told her that he was sure the Germans were coming.
She’d looked at him, numb and wanting to help, trying to see behind those darting eyes, but they were impenetrable. Robert didn’t describe the images he saw that day. He never would.
At last, the ceremony began, the people squeezing into the salon, with its chandelier overhead, floor-to-ceiling windows showing the trace of the inky March night, and floral-patterned walls like something out of another century. President d’Estaing stood near the front, with La Rochefoucauld beside him. They moved in the same social spheres and had become hunting buddies. The former president said that, fifty-two years after the war, they had all convened in this beautiful home to celebrate a résistant. He had already been honored by the French state: He had received the War Cross; the Medal of the Resistance; a medal for escaping German imprisonment, as well as four other commendations. But tonight, Count Robert Jean-Marie de La Rochefoucauld would receive France’s highest military distinction, the Legion of Honor, which had been awarded to the bravest of France’s soldiers since Napoléon’s reign.
The official government statement marking the occasion went on for a page, listing his accomplishments, and concluded by saying: “The honorary Major de La Rochefoucauld, Robert, résistant from the outset, decorated with three war awards, is a candidate worthy of being named chevalier of the Legion of Honor.”
With that, d’Estaing pinned the star-shaped medal on the left breast pocket of La Rochefoucauld’s jacket. Amid the applause and dabbed eyes, Robert’s face flushed redder still. When the room quieted, he said in a humble half whisper that the résistants who died alongside him were more worthy of this distinction. He told the crowd he had these soldiers in his thoughts.
His family had never heard the full story of his fight; with the passage of time he’d only shared fragments. His oldest daughter, Astrid, then forty-two, had been hunting game with him in the Landes department as a teenager when Robert told her of the mini-Kommandantur not far from them, and the résistants who’d freed him by shooting up the place, nearly killing him in the process. Robert’s other daughters, Constance and Hortense, pieced together the Saint-Médard sabotage from the war movies they watched with him, and the almost monosyllabic commentary he provided. His youngest, Jean, twenty-nine, who would inherit Robert’s title of Count, had learned about the Occupation and his papa’s place in it from the friends of his parents who gathered at the house for dinners and parties. We thought for sure your father was dead so many times, they’d said. The children swapped these anecdotes and remained fascinated by them even as they began having children of their own—but the narrative never satisfied them. Now, in the days after the Legion of Honor celebration, with the medal suspended in a case above the fireplace, the family’s curiosity picqued. With enough prodding, Robert agreed to work with an audio-recording service, and over a series of interviews recorded and then edited and finally presented his full tale on two compact discs. “He didn’t live to be a hero,” Hortense said, years after receiving her own copy of the recording. “He was very humble.” In fact, he seemed almost bashful on the CDs, a child of upper-class understatement, moving quickly and prosaically through the episodes of his war, as if everyone had dressed up as a nun or crawled onto suspended netting inches above a Nazi. Constance began to collect his military records, so the family might have a fuller portrayal of their father’s service.
It should have ended there, the old man living his sunset years in the obscurity of his family’s admiration. But a combat story as wily as Robert de La Rochefoucauld’s found ways to keep twisting and unspooling, even a half century after the Germans fled.
In the fall of 1997, Maurice Papon’s criminal trial began for deporting some of the sixteen hundred Jews who had been shuttled onto cattle cars in the Gironde department while he was the local prefecture’s secretary general.
La Rochefoucauld had met Papon in the 1960s, at a party at the midpoint of Papon’s political career. He was by then Paris’ prefect of police; he would ultimately serve as President d’Estaing’s budget minister from 1978 to 1981. After La Rochefoucauld and Papon were introduced at that party, they began discussing the war. Papon said he’d been the secretary general for the Gironde prefecture from 1942 to 1945. Though he worked for Vichy, Papon told Robert he’d secretly worked for the Resistance. Robert said in response that he remembered fighting alongside bands of Jewish resisters in the Gironde in 1944 and had asked one of the Jewish fighters why so many of them had joined. “There’s no mystery to it,” the rebel had said, as La Rochefoucauld recounted. �
�We have an excellent contact in the Gironde prefecture. He warns us as soon as the Germans start looking for one of us, or a raid is being organized.” La Rochefoucauld studied Papon’s face, and wondered aloud if Papon was that contact. Papon smiled and nodded. The two became friendly.
Thirty years later, as Robert read press accounts of the trial, he saw the prosecution describe Papon as a war criminal. Papon’s signature, after all, allowed eight of the ten convoys of Jews to leave the Gironde. The news accounts also showed the defense shading the argument against Papon, demonstrating that he was a junior administrator in the Gironde who had literally been tasked with signing off on orders. Papon’s lawyers scored a major point when they cross-examined the historian who first published the accusations against Papon. The historian said he had changed his mind. He no longer believed that the documents he’d found proved Papon’s guilt.
But this, too, wasn’t the whole story of Papon, and in a trial that would become the longest in French history, Robert’s anecdote about the Jewish resisters reached the defense team. Robert met with the lawyers and agreed to testify. Over the protests of his family, Robert took the stand in Bordeaux one bleak February afternoon in 1998, four months into a trial that would last six.
“I left for England in 1942,” the seventy-four-year-old said. “And I was parachuted into France several times together . . . with the English. After a lot of adventures, I was caught by the Germans. I escaped several times, including once from Fort du Hâ, and I ended up with a Maquis group . . . a Maquis called Charly, if I remember correctly.