Food was simple and scarce, but there was little time or energy to eat it anyway. They lived primarily on bread and potatoes, with an occasional piece of sausage. They were tired, dirty, and sickened by the carnage they were witnessing.
Virginia’s amputated stump had merely been stiff when her work hours were fewer. But now, the continuous use of the clutch made her whole left thigh ache. The skin was often rubbed raw where it met the artificial limb. To make matters worse, the summer heat and humidity were now as intense as the winter’s cold had been. Virginia had only two stump socks. If she wore them both at once, the extra cushioning greatly alleviated her discomfort, but her increased perspiration soaked the socks. Wet wool between her leg and the wooden prosthesis was almost worse than no wool at all.
When she allowed herself the time to sleep, Virginia would drift off, thinking she had seen the worst injuries possible. But when she awoke and began working again, she came across even more gruesomely wounded men. By 9:00 AM on May 30, Virginia had already made the trip between the front and a newly established field hospital three times.
She returned to her pickup point for her fourth run and, as was her custom, immediately climbed out of the ambulance to assist the waiting medics and patients. While many of the men were writhing in pain, one lay motionless on his litter.
Virginia walked over and knelt down beside him. His entire head was bandaged, the blood beginning to seep through the gauze. As Virginia approached, the medic who had been attending him scurried off, she presumed in search of more bandages. As she studied the patient, who was unconscious, she realized there was something odd about his bandaged face. There were no contours where his eyes and nose should be. Rather, the bandage was almost level, so much so that she looked down at the rest of his body to see if he was perhaps lying face down. The toes of his muddied boots were pointing skyward. He was definitely lying face up.
The medic returned with more bandages and reached for the man’s wrist to feel for a pulse. He sat still for a moment and then looked at Virginia and shook his head.
“He’s gone, poor guy. Took one in the face. It blew the whole front of his head off. I can’t believe he made it this far; he got hit over an hour ago.”
Virginia stood and looked at the dead soldier’s face, understanding now why it appeared as flat as a tabletop. The medic reached for the soldier’s dog tags and read the name out loud as he printed it on a card pinned to the man’s shirt.
“Jean-Paul de la Tour.”
Virginia spun around to where the medic was crouched. “What’s his name?”
“Jean-Paul de la Tour. Why, you know him?”
“Does he have identification papers or anything with him?”
“Fellas usually keep that kind of thing in their helmets. But he didn’t have a helmet when I found him,” the medic answered. “Sometimes guys keep things in their boots.” He picked up the man’s left leg, pulled off the boot, and felt inside. He found a small packet of folded paper and opened it up, sorting through the contents.
“Here’s a photo. Anybody look familiar?”
Virginia took the picture from the medic’s outstretched hand. Laughing gaily at the camera was a handsome young man in uniform. Standing next to him, laughing just as gaily, blonde hair ruffled by a breeze, was Claire.
5
Vive la France
Anguish is a cloud that settles on each person differently. For some it becomes so dense that even breathing is a struggle. For others, it’s a fine mist, easily cut through and left behind. Virginia knew how she had handled her anguish. It was easiest for her to just jump back into life. But she was not at all certain how Claire would handle the pain she would surely feel at the news of her brother’s death.
Virginia simply hadn’t considered French stoicism. Claire was understandably shocked at first and wept. But in less than an hour, she dried her tears, squared her shoulders, and was ready to throw herself back into her war work. The army told her it would make every effort possible to return Jean-Paul’s body home. Claire chose not to accompany it.
She told Virginia there was nothing she could do for Jean-Paul at home, preferring instead to continue working. She felt certain that would be what her brother would have wanted. Their belief, she told Virginia, was that only a body died. The spirit lived on in the hearts of those left behind. She felt that her brother’s spirit would be with her, working beside her. Furthermore, Claire declared that for her, the war was no longer just a fight for France, but a fight for religious freedom.
France had once been a model of religious tolerance, repealing anti–Semitic laws in 1790, shortly after the Revolution and well before any other Western country. In the ensuing 150 years, the French had been true to their priceless heritage, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Liberty, equality, and fraternity were what the country offered the oppressed of other, less tolerant, European nations. But unemployment, poverty, and dismal living conditions gave rise to resentment against the three million immigrants living on French soil at the time. Throughout the late 1930s, Nazi-inspired prejudices grew in neighboring countries, and the immigrants’ numbers in France, many of them Jewish, increased as thousands fled to escape Nazi cruelty.
Resentment and rumors soon became news stories in French papers. “Only Jews want conflict in Europe,” they reported. “German Jews clutter up French streets, telling us to fight on their behalf.” Soon all Jews, even those whose families had been French for generations, as Claire’s had been, were regarded suspiciously.
But very few newspapers reached the bloody battlefields in early June 1940. Their only reality was transporting the never-ending number of wounded soldiers from the fields of slaughter to makeshift hospitals. At one point, the gory scenes reminded Virginia of the poem she had memorized in grade school about the bloody Civil War battle at Shiloh:
Dark forms were strewn thickly all over the field,
Whose hearts were now still and whose cold lips were sealed;
And streams crept slowly through torn, trampled grass
That they tinged such a horrible red, alas!
Every French roadway and forest trail Virginia turned her ambulance down was now choked with refugees fleeing the German juggernaut. The masses of humanity had left behind most of their possessions, their burning homes and farms, and their friends and relatives who had fallen victim to the carnage. It was heartbreaking to watch the traumatized throngs making use of every vehicle they could commandeer to carry themselves and their belongings to safety. Bikes, wagons with or without horses, dogcarts, and wheelbarrows were pressed into service. Those who had no vehicle stumbled forward on foot.
Virginia watched men and women carrying terror-stricken children, and the elderly taking turns supporting one another. Like Virginia, they were tired, hungry, and war weary. And like her, they were sickened by the bodies that littered the road after each pass of the German warplanes. The bombers’ goal was to destroy the roads to prevent the French military from making use of them. They appeared to have little concern for any civilian casualties—that was the price of war.
German military strategists had expected to find as worthy an adversary in the French as they had seen in the previous war. But Hitler was convinced of the opposite. He believed that the French had become lazy and were incapable of mounting the same kind of offensive they had exhibited in 1917 and 1918. Sadly, the Fiihrer’s prophecy proved the more accurate.
By late May 1940, many of the French army divisions had been lost in Belgium and the nation’s air force was practically wiped out. The Germans arrived with powerful tanks, while the French had only machine guns. The British reinforcements were not arriving fast enough. Although the Allies attempted to hold their ground, the German drive continued. Their objective was obvious—Paris. Their battle plan was simple: keep pushing the Allies southward, like a giant broom sweeping breadcrumbs toward the door.
Virginia heard rumors in the field about German
troops approaching Paris from the Belgian border. They were seventy miles away, then sixty-three, then fifty-seven. Meanwhile the lines her ambulance serviced became just as fluid, falling back five miles, then fifteen, then twenty. Six hundred thousand German soldiers, followed by thirty-five hundred of their best tanks, were storming toward the capital from the east. In their wake they left husbands, fathers, and sons dead or dying. There was little time to bury the dead. And the fuel shortage hindered the number of wounded she and Claire could move.
All ambulance drivers were responsible for finding fuel for their own vehicles. Occasionally Virginia and Claire stumbled upon a small surplus an army unit might have saved. But for the most part, they were forced to plead their case to farmers and villagers who had remained in their homes, keeping their last drops of gasoline in the event they needed to make a quick escape. When lack of fuel precluded driving, the two women willingly rolled up their sleeves and helped the doctors and medics treat the wounded in the field. They saw limbs amputated with little anesthesia and bellies ripped open by shrapnel, internal organs spilling out like glistening sausages.
The furious pace and constant cloud of dust and smoke caused the days and nights to run together for Virginia. She and Claire had established a small stable, the remains of a burned-out farm, as their meeting place every twenty-four hours. It was an attempt to assure one another of their safety, as they were now directly in the line of fire.
On June 10, the French government left Paris for Tours, 140 miles southwest of the capital. Winston Churchill, who had become the British prime minister on May 10, the same day that Hitler began his attack on Belgium and Holland, met French Premier Paul Reynaud in Tours on the June 11. Churchill was perhaps the greatest friend France had among the Britons. He urged Reynaud to continue to resist the Germans, and he took General de Gaulle, now the French undersecretary for war, back to London. There, de Gaulle was to act as Churchill’s ally against the peace party in his cabinet.
On June 13, the American ambassador to France notified the Germans on behalf of the French that Paris had been declared an open city. No resistance would be put forth against German invasion, and therefore no force would be needed on their part. Although the declaration preserved the city’s priceless art and architecture for the Germans, the citizenry itself had all but disappeared. The few who remained on June 14 were subjected to a degrading display of Nazi triumph. Dusty tanks clanked savagely down the Champs-Elysées, followed by goose-stepping infantry and blaring German bands.
On the same day, as the thrust of never-ending German military might surged southward, the French government left Tours for Bordeaux, two hundred miles farther south. Throughout the eastern and central regions of the country, the French were in retreat, pursued relentlessly by the Germans. Half of Premier Reynaud’s cabinet favored a surrender, while the other half urged him to fight on. Rather than deal with the dilemma, Reynaud resigned. Eighty-three-year-old Philippe Pétain, former World War I hero, assumed his position. Just hours after France’s new government was formed on June 19, Pétain formally petitioned the Germans for an armistice.
Pétain’s wishes were delivered in a radio broadcast to France’s forty-three million inhabitants, as the rest of the world listened in:
People of France: As requested by the President of the Republic, I shall henceforth be the leader of the French government. Being convinced of the affection of our admirable army, whose heroism stands as testimony to our long military position as they fight an enemy which outnumbers them, convinced that our army’s resistance has fulfilled our duty towards our allies, convinced of the support pledged by the former soldiers I’ve led, convinced of the French people’s faith in me, I give France the gift of myself to ease its troubles.
In these difficult times, I think of the poor refugees, who, in the depths of despair, trudge across our roads. I extend my compassion and concern for them. My heart is heavy as I tell you today that the fight must end.
Last night I spoke with our adversary and asked if they were prepared to help me, between soldiers, after the fight, with honor intact, to find a way in which to end the hostilities.
The country and the world stood still at that moment. With France now a part of the new German empire, a mere twenty-one miles of water separated Great Britain from a fanatic Nazi dictator bent on world domination.
Later that day, Virginia was attempting to take a short nap on a bed of moldy straw in a farmyard that had been turned into a makeshift field hospital. She sensed an increase in activity around her and forced herself to get up. She assumed that the enemy was on a fast approach.
She stopped a distraught medic to inquire about the commotion in camp. “Reynaud’s resigned and Pétain’s taken over as premier. He’s asked the Krauts to let us surrender. Mon Dieu! The hundreds of men I’ve watched die—and all for what?”
Virginia was incredulous. What had happened to liberté, égalité, fraternité? How could feisty France, the first nation to extend aid to the American Revolution and the nation who had been victorious over the Germans in the war a little over two decades before, now be willing to send up a white flag?
Virginia looked around her at the wounded men. They lay on straw beds, with little in the way of blankets. The bandages covering their wounds were rags, often having been made from the clothing of another soldier who had died. Their splints were tree limbs and little beyond water and bread was available to sustain them. There were no drugs to ease their pain or stave off their infections. The medic had been right: these men had made enormous sacrifices for their country. And now they were being asked by that same country to live under a tyrannical dictatorship, driven by a madman whose goal appeared to be global domination.
This was not the French spirit Virginia loved. The French she knew were outspoken, proud, and resolute against the dilution of their culture by any outside force.
At 3:30PM on June 22, in railway car number 2419D, in the city of Compiègne, north of Paris, the supreme commander of the French army, General Charles Huntzinger, signed the armistice with Germany. The railway car was significant. It was where, in 1918, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the French had demanded that the Germans appear as supplicants. There, the armistice ending the Great War had been signed, the armistice that had fractured the German empire and had gnawed at Hitler’s gut for nearly twenty-three years.
The morning after the signing, General Charles de Gaulle spoke solemnly from a BBC studio in London:
La France a perdu la bataille; elle n’a pas perdu la guerre [France has lost the battle; she has not lost the war]. For the honor of the country, I demand that all free Frenchmen continue to fight wherever they are and by whatever means they can. … I invite all Frenchmen of the land armies, the naval forces, the air forces, the engineers and the specialists and the workmen of the armament industry who may be in British territory or who can come there, to join me for this purpose. … I invite the leaders, the soldiers, the sailors and the airmen … to get in touch with me…. Vive la France! Long live France, free in honor and in independence!
Virginia listened to General de Gaulle’s speech on a radio in the café of a village near the stable where she and Claire had spent the night. The two had come to the village in search of food for the wounded, and were bundling up what they had begged from the residents when the general’s address began.
De Gaulle’s words removed only some of the sting of Pétain’s armistice. Virginia learned the terms of that armistice over the next several days. Germany would occupy approximately three-fifths of the country, including a wide strip along the whole of the Atlantic coast. The zone libre, the unoccupied area, began south of the Loire River and ran to the Mediterranean, minus the Alpine frontier and the aforementioned Atlantic coast. Furthermore, all military, naval, and air forces, except police forces, would be demobilized. The Germans were granted the rights to all arms and implements of war in the occupied area.<
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Pétain’s government was given the choice of setting up its capital in Paris, well within the occupied zone and the center of the German military administration, or anywhere it chose in the zone libre. Pétain selected Vichy, a small town east of Lyon, known for its curative mineral springs. Ultimately, the new Etat Français became known as Vichy France and from there, Pétain declared de Gaulle and all who followed him as traitors.
So that’s that, Virginia thought. La belle France, like a former lady of leisure who suddenly finds herself penniless and in rags, had fallen to her knees before the conquerors. About two hundred thousand Frenchmen had died in an effort to keep the country free. She was certain that she, herself, must have aided at least a thousand, many of whom did not survive. She had witnessed the death of her friend’s only sibling. The magnitude of it all left a tightness in her chest, along with a feeling of personal failure that she could have done more.
As with the other French army units, hers was disbanded once the armistice became official. Not sure what her next move should be, Virginia decided to join Claire, who was headed south to her family home in Cahors, a small town north of Toulouse. The city lay within the borders of Vichy France.
The rucksacks the two women had dragged around with them the previous months were just about void of anything of value. Still, they gratefully stowed away the small chunks of sausage and bread that the unit’s quartermaster had given them and began their journey in the back of an open-air troop transport truck. When it ran out of gas, they found a bicycle and took turns riding one another on the handlebars. Although having only one strong leg to power the bike, Virginia insisted that she take her turn peddling, with Claire riding. Their progress was slow but steady.
The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy Page 5