Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  A month later, after both France and Britain had signed the Munich Agreement, there was a much brisker exchange. ‘My dear Winston, It is reported in the French press that in your broadcast to the United States you say that France’s good name is tarnished. If this is the award meted out to an ally for loyally subscribing to Mr Chamberlain’s policy it is not one likely to create good feeling and I regret it. Aff. Consuelo.’75 Churchill replied immediately with a very tart note. ‘The actual words used by me were: “We have sustained an immense disaster. The renown of France is dimmed. In spite of her brave, efficient army, her influence is profoundly diminished.” It is impossible to imagine any more moderate statement of the painful events that have occurred.’76

  Consuelo may have supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement but deep down she sensed that war was inevitable. Her sense of impending doom only increased when she attended the coming-out ball of her granddaughter, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, at Blenheim on 7 July 1939. Jacques and Consuelo had been among the earliest visitors to Blenheim after the 9th Duke’s death and the sight of Blenheim occupied by a happy family and her daughter-in-law’s keen engagement in local life laid many ghosts to rest. ‘How rewarding are my memories of Blenheim in my son’s time when his life, with Mary and his children, was all that I wished mine could have been,’77 Consuelo wrote rather wistfully in her memoirs. On this occasion, however, she went there with ‘anxious forebodings’. ‘At dinner, sitting next to Monsieur Corbin, the popular French ambassador, I found it difficult to share the diplomatic detachment his conversation maintained … I suffered the same unease that had afflicted me once in Russia when, surrounded by the glittering splendour of the Czar’s Court, I sensed impending disaster.’78

  Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill’s coming-out ball was the most magnificent of the 1939 season and lingered long in the memories of those who attended as a potent reminder of a lost world, the last private ball where the footman not only wore livery but powdered their hair. Consuelo was not alone in sensing it was the end of an era for least one debutante was already training to be a nurse in the event of war and was so exhausted that she didn’t dance at all.79 ‘I supped with Winston and Anthony Eden and wandered out to the lovely terraces Marlborough had built before his death,’ wrote Consuelo. That night she almost found it in her heart to forgive him. ‘With their formal lines and classic ornaments, they were the right setting for so imposing a monument as Blenheim Palace.’80

  In August, Winston Churchill invited himself for a few days’ rest with Consuelo and Jacques at St Georges-Motel, after making a tour of the Maginot Line. He was now sixty-four and a campaign was afoot in Britain to bring him back into government. Though he was optimistic about French military strength, his description of the gap between the end of the Maginot Line and the sea as dependent on ‘pillboxes and wire’, was far from reassuring. That weekend in August 1939, St Georges-Motel looked heartbreakingly beautiful. ‘Appreciation of those halcyon summer days was heightened by our consciousness that the sands of peace were fast running out,’ recalled Mary Soames (then Mary Churchill), who had travelled with her mother to Normandy to join her father. ‘There was swimming and tennis (so greatly enjoyed by Clementine) and fraises des bois. Winston painted several lovely pictures of the beautiful old rose-brick house and grounds, in company with Paul Maze, who was staying with his family at Le Moulin on the estate. We visited Chartres Cathedral and were drenched in the cool blueness of the windows: “Look thy last on all things lovely every hour”.’81 But it was a ‘prickly weekend’ where good humour quickly gave way to eruptions of tension.82

  Churchill himself later remembered that it was ‘a pleasant but deeply anxious company … even the light of this lovely valley at the confluence of the Eure and the Vesgre seemed robbed of its genial ray. I found painting hard work in this uncertainty.’83 When Churchill went down to Le Moulin to paint with Paul Maze on 20 August, he turned to him and said: ‘This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.’ ‘What amazed me was his concentration over his painting,’ wrote Paul Maze in his diary. ‘No one but he could have understood more what the war meant, and how ill prepared we were.’84

  On 21 August 1939, Paul Maze recounted that ‘Winston was fuming but with reason as the assemblée didn’t see any danger ahead.’ Paul Maze was even warned off talking to Churchill by a pro-appeasement guest, the debonair Evan Charteris. ‘As Charteris was walking up the stairs to go to his bedroom he shouted to me, “don’t listen to him. He is a warmonger”.’85 Mary Soames remembers being grateful to Consuelo for taking her off to visit the children in the sanatorium, as well as a gift of a most expensive handbag far beyond her sixteen years.86

  In the end, however, the visit was cut short on 23 August when Russia and Germany signed a pact of mutual non-aggression, leaving Hitler free to turn on Poland. ‘We had to go home: my father left at once for London by air. My mother and I followed the next day, and as we passed through Paris on that golden summer evening, the Gare du Nord teemed with soldiers – the French army was mobilizing,’87 recalled Mary Soames. Churchill’s secretary, Mary Shearburn, travelled with him by car between Dreux and Paris on the way to the airport, taking notes. ‘The corn was ripe and, in its heaviness, it looked like the golden waves of a gently undulating sea. Mr Churchill grew graver and graver as he sat wrapped in thought, and then said slowly and sorrowfully: “Before the harvest is gathered in – we shall be at war.”’88

  When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, it marked the beginning of the drôle de guerre or ‘phoney war’ – a phrase Consuelo later hated. ‘Somewhere in the hinterland of my consciousness lies the sadness, the haunting anxiety of that cold and desolate winter … In that snow-covered garden everything seemed tense – waiting.’89 Jacques formally rejoined the French army and tried to raise interest in a new Lafayette Escadrille with others, including Dr Gros (still practicing medicine in Paris), in a futile attempt to encourage early American entry into the war.90 Consuelo spent the long winter evenings huddled up in a fur coat by the fire in the company of Paul Maze and Basil Davidoff who had worked for the Balsans during the 1930s and replaced their land agent after he was called-up. On Friday 10 May 1940, however, everything changed when Consuelo’s maid woke her with the news that the Germans had invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and were marching south.

  One difficulty was that with the advent of war, the children in the sanatorium had been joined by several hundred evacuees from Paris. In the summer of 1939 and again in 1940, ‘there were children riding in the forest or jumping their ponies over hurdles in the fields, children playing tennis and swimming in the pool, children fishing for trout in the rivers or canoeing on canals, children playing golf or bicycling in the gardens,’ leaving Consuelo feeling that, like the old woman who lived in a shoe, ‘I had so many I very nearly did not know what to do.’91 The evacuees from Paris caused much more trouble than the children in the sanatorium. They were a wild bunch who ‘displayed a marvellous ingenuity in destruction. On every visit I had to register a new complaint.’ Consuelo was heartily relieved when she finally enlisted the daughter of a French cavalry officer who was able to exert such magical authority that she even managed to stop them from singing the ‘Internationale’ or from balling their fists and yelling ‘Heil Hitler, who comes to deliver us!’.92

  With the German advance the issue now was evacuation: Consuelo told her maid to pack a valise and leave it under the bed. The most pressing problem was the question of what to do with all the children, particularly those in the sanatorium. Parents came from Paris to beg the Balsans to keep the children where they were. Consuelo was told by the authorities that she was not authorised to move the evacuees in any case. In spite of the fact that Consuelo, Paul Maze and Basil Davidoff all sensed the position was hopeless, Jacques – in common with many Frenchmen – continued to view unfolding events through the prism of the Great War and maintained a faith in the French Army and the strength of the Ma
ginot Line. By the end of the day, 10 May, however, it was clear that the French army were having no success at all in turning back the German invasion. ‘Returning home from the sanatorium I found Paul Maze, his daughter Pauline, my husband and Davidoff listening to the latest news. The cold impersonal voice of the speaker as hour by hour in measured tones he announced the German advance in all its incredible swiftness was somehow shocking. We studied our maps in sickening apprehension. Everyone of us knew in our hearts that there was no hope, but our lips were sealed.’93

  Rather than move the children south to safety at this point, the Balsans were overwhelmed by a new problem as the area round St Georges-Motel was overrun with refugees. For some, this was the second or third time they had had to flee in the face of the remorseless German advance. For others, the prospect of a German invasion triggered painful memories of another war and another time. On 11 May, returning from a service at the village church where ‘women who had been widowed in the last war [were] now interceding for peace’, Consuelo met one of her own gardeners. ‘He was an old man and when I spoke to him he seemed obsessed. “Cette fois ils nous auront” – “This time they’ll get us,’ he kept repeating. I tried to reassure him and I remember saying, “The Americans will surely liberate you,’ but he shook his head. “Trop tard,” he said. And for him it was too late, for as the Germans moved in he shot himself.’94

  On 17 May the préfet called Consuelo to a meeting in Evreux where he asked her to help with an emergency order to accommodate an influx of 45,000 refugees from the north. Nothing in Consuelo’s life had prepared her for what she saw and heard the following day as they started to arrive. ‘Many had been obliged to walk, and on the road they had been raked by machine-guns from low-flying planes. A distraught woman told me that her two children had been killed walking a few yards in front of her. “I saw the aviator’s eyes as he aimed at them,” she kept repeating in her frenzied grief. They were all in desperate straits, their garments caked with blood, their shoes in shreds … In the wards doctors and nurses were removing bandages and we saw the serious wounds bombs and bullets had made. In some cases gangrene had already set in, necessitating amputations.’ In the face of this tide of human misery, the Balsans rushed out to buy clothes for the refugees. ‘I shall always remember a young woman’s joy when we spread a pretty little dress on her bed: “C’est pour moi? Oh, Madame, comme vous êtes bonne!” and for a moment she forgot the bullet in her breast and the loss of all she had.’ One woman toiled up the stairs of the makeshift hospital in Evreux with seven children in tow, the eldest boy carrying the youngest child in his arms. She was already in labour as Jacques drove her to the maternity hospital where she gave birth to a boy.95

  As the days passed, the refugees coming into the village were arriving from zones that were ever closer and the need to evacuate the children from the sanatorium before the Germans got to St Georges-Motel became pressingly urgent. The problem was that, however much Consuelo worried, there was no official plan for evacuation and it was only with great difficulty that she secured the right from the Ministry of Health to evacuate the children at all. The local authorities were now far too preoccupied with finding beds, housing, medical care and food for the ever-swelling tide of refugees coming into the area to plan any evacuation away from it. Joining the flight of refugees to the south was an individual decision: the exode of millions in France in June 1940 was a popular movement, ‘a contagion, but not one produced purely by fantasy’.96 People left their homes in a spirit of great uncertainty and when the enemy was on the doorstep this could lead to irrational decisions: Consuelo met one old man who had fled his home with nothing more than ten little ducklings in a basket.

  There was reluctance on the part of the Balsans to succumb to the mood of panic, but it was now clear that moving the children was the more responsible course of action and they began to rehearse drills with them. As ‘the wind from the north was bringing the sound of guns ever more clearly to our ears’, Consuelo and Jacques, still believing that the Germans would not arrive for a few days, set off south by car to look for a temporary sanatorium, as they had been advised to do by the authorities. As they left it seemed that nothing would ever touch St Georges-Motel. ‘The fountains I so loved were throwing their sun-tipped jets into the still air; the children’s laughter rang happily as they played near-by … I prayed it would be spared,’97 wrote Consuelo.

  Aiming for Pau near the Spanish frontier, where it was thought that the children would be finally be safe, the Balsans made an overnight stop at Châteauroux, where ‘German planes dropped bombs close to our cloth factories and we were awakened at dawn by anti-aircraft fire’. When they arrived, they found Pau overcrowded and unpleasant, its position near the Spanish border resulting in an atmosphere of suspicious tension where ‘distrust was rampant; arrests were numerous’. They located a villa which would serve their purposes and house the children on a temporary basis. On the second night, the government commandeered their hotel and they went to stay with Jacques’ brother Etienne. At 4 a. m. the next morning they set out to make their way back to Normandy.

  The side of the road going north was eerily quiet, while the side of the road going south was nose-to-tail with traffic and ‘in the stark disillusionment of the faces I saw I realised the stakes were heavily loaded’. When the Balsans stopped at a café in Periguex, they met two friends who told them that the Germans had come to St Georges-Motel, and that the French government had moved to Bordeaux. Jacques refused to believe this rumour, certain that it was an exaggeration. As they continued their journey north, Consuelo scanned the south-bound traffic for signs of the household cars which she knew would be now be heading for Pau if the story were true. In a piece of luck incomprehensible to anyone accustomed to modern roads, she eventually spotted Albert, the Balsans’ butler, with their driver. He saw them too but was unable to stop. A man of considerable resource, he then worked out that his employers would spend the night at Châteauroux and telephoned to tell them what had happened. ‘We were then told that the Germans were indeed in our village, which had been evacuated. Saint Georges had been bombed, but neither the chateau nor the sanatorium had been hit. The hospital at Dreux, on the contrary, had received a direct hit, and we heard that our agent’s wife, who had that day gone to be delivered of her child, had been killed, together with her newly-born child. One more tragedy among so many when nerves were taut and sensibilities flexed is best ignored, and we chose rather to rejoice in the news that the sanatorium children had safely escaped.’

  What Consuelo failed to mention in her memoirs was that it was Paul Maze who led the children from the sanatorium to safety, an oversight that can best be accounted for by embarrassment in the face of what was perceived, perhaps unfairly, to be a considerable debacle. With hindsight the children should either have been returned to their parents or evacuated sooner, and better plans should have been laid; but the Balsans were scarcely alone in failing to predict the fall of France. They were also caught out by official insistence that the children should not be moved without permission, by parents begging them to keep the children where they were and new demands on their philanthropy as St Georges-Motel suddenly turned into a refugee reception area. In her memoirs, however, Consuelo does give credit to the daughter of the French cavalry officer who took charge of 120 evacuee children when they were deposited by the French army just beyond the fighting in the Vendôme, struggled to look after them for three weeks, then made her way back with them after the armistice to St Georges-Motel in most difficult circumstances. Here, she informed the German general who had taken up residence in the chateau that it was now up to him to feed and house the children till they could be returned to their parents. ‘Which he did,’ wrote Consuelo.

  Ironically, the unfortunate impression which persisted long afterwards – that the Balsans had panicked and fled – had been caused rather, according to Consuelo’s account, by their anxiety for the children: for instead of returning to St Georges-M
otel they decided to go south again to see them into the villa in Pau. Here, rumours that an armistice would be agreed grew more insistent every day. Since both the chateau and the Paris house were in the northern part of France under enemy occupation, it appeared that Consuelo’s income from America would be frozen, and that further support for the sanatorium was impossible. The villa they had rented in such haste was unsuitable for long-term occupation, in any case, and they were now faced with returning the children who were well enough to their homes and dispersing those who were sick to other institutions.

  There is no other account than Consuelo’s of what happened next. In an attempt to find out what was happening the Balsans drove to Bordeaux, the temporary seat of the French government after the fall of Paris. In the crowd they met two American friends, one of whom was an important official in the Red Cross who ‘looked harassed and insistently begged me to leave the country. He told me that I figured on the Nazi hostage list. Only a few months back, Baron Louis de Rothschild had been imprisoned in Vienna and millions had been extorted from his family before he was returned. We were advised to cross the border at once – for it would soon be closed.’ Extremely worried, they found Jacques’ chief, the Ministre de l’Air, in the new government offices in Bordeaux. The impending armistice made life easier, for Jacques was demobilised immediately. However, the minister also insisted that Jacques should take Consuelo to America as quickly as possible and that the necessary visas should be secured immediately. Jacques and Consuelo then went to a café, which they found packed with a silent crowd. ‘Suddenly the radio broke into the familiar bars of the “Marseillaise”, which by now I had learned to associate with disaster. We all rose to our feet as if impelled. Then came the short and shattering announcement: “The French Government has asked for an armistice, which has been granted.” In the ensuing stillness, as men squared their jaws and women wept, we were terrorised by three terrific claps of thunder which rent the air in rhythmic sequence, as if the heavens themselves were moved.’