by Karen Harper
We could hear the sound of distant guns from the north, like the rumbles of thunder. “Ours, not theirs, I hope,” Jacques muttered when he came back from filling the Citroën with petrol. “Winston was right that trench warfare is passé. If we hear planes, it is really time to flee, rehearsal or not.”
I had commandeered a few ambulances, two trucks, several cars, and even some wagons for this mock evacuation. We lined them all up and timed—without actually disturbing the children—how long it would take to load them with mattresses, boxes of food, milk, and clothing. I entrusted petrol coupons I had saved to each of the drivers.
Thank heavens the vehicles had pulled away to their various hiding places, because German planes circled the village that day. We watched from under a tree. I had already said a silent farewell to the hospital staff and children—and especially Katrine—because we did not want anyone but the château staff and my two, old faithful guards to know that we were leaving or why.
“You are really scared today,” Katrine had observed. “You are even shaking, and it is not cold. Do not worry for the château. I heard the Germans do not bomb nice houses they want to make their hindquarters.”
I almost laughed. “You mean headquarters, my dear.”
“Yes, that’s it. So I will see you tomorrow after school. And that lady you made a bed for in your office, the one who lost her children, is she all right? I heard her screaming when those planes flew over.”
I was leaving so much undone behind, especially if I had to flee to America. How long would it be before Jacques and I could dig up the treasure of our Legion of Honour medals? How would the nameless woman whose dead daughter had been named Rosette do without me? Would this sweet child Katrine make it through the war?
“I had best go back to the château now,” I told her, giving her one more hard hug and kissing her on both cheeks. “I must see how Monsieur Balsan is doing.”
“Oh, he is waiting outside for you. I saw him talking to those two friends of yours who always follow you around. So I will see you tomorrow and help Madame Claire, too.”
Claire was the woman I had put in charge here, should I go away for a day. A day? How long would it be? How long the refugee road to the south of France and then how to leave the country for America? But how far, how frightening had been my pathways before, and I had somehow come through. Even without my beloved Jacques, even fighting my mother sometimes, I had come through. But now, Winston was right. Damn the German Huns, the Nazis. I would die before they would get their greedy, brutal hands on me!
Holding hands at dusk, Jacques and I walked the grounds of the château. I even could hear the chatter of the fountains. We threw a coin in our moat for good fortune and by candlelight had wine and vegetable stew, which I prayed would not be our last supper.
Chapter Thirty-Five
We drove out of Saint-Georges-Motel at four o’clock the next morning. I tried not to look back. I had left a note for Rosemary to read to the rest of the staff and to give them a month’s wages and one for her to give to Katrine with a pearl necklace. Claire at the hospital had her directions. Strong women all, but we had to be. Yet I realized with some shame that I had not been without a personal maid my entire life.
We got a good start, though at dawn, traffic heading south became heavy again, absolutely clogged at times. We sometimes drove around wagons or walkers on the northern lane, for it was usually quite open—no one was heading toward the German invasion but an occasional French army vehicle. We crossed the Loire on the bridge at Blois, refueling our small Citroën with the petrol coupons Jacques parted with reluctantly. Some petrol stations were already low or out of fuel.
“At least we are going to see some family,” I told him, trying to buck us both up, for we were to stay with his brother Étienne the first night in Châteauroux, where the Balsan factories were. When Jacques had gone back into service, Étienne had stepped forward on his own to oversee things there. And finally, farther south we would look up his much younger brother Henri, the black sheep of their family, in the town where we hoped to find a refuge for the children.
“Welcome!” Étienne cried when we pulled in near dark. He hugged and kissed us on both cheeks. “Sad it takes a war for a family reunion. I will pull your motorcar into the carriage house where it cannot be seen. Dinner and a safe bed is waiting. Sad to have to say a ‘safe’ bed here in central France. Come in!”
I tried to broach that subject indirectly that night at a dinner of beef bourguignon, salad, with a lovely wine and then gateaux. “At least,” I said, “this is the heart of France, away from the dangerous borders.”
“Have you not heard?” Étienne said, putting his wine goblet down. “Sorry to say, but our city has been strafed and bombed, and we are fearful the planes may be back. They just missed the factory. And have you not heard they have bombed the cities of Lyon and Nancy?”
“Rumors but not that,” Jacques said. “I feel guilty having such precious time with you and this lovely meal when so many are suffering. But, Vive la France!”
“We must keep our spirits up,” Marie, Étienne’s wife, said. “And the best way to do that is to be with family, eat a good meal—but then I must go to mass again. You two have a good night’s sleep now—if you can.”
The look that passed between her and Étienne was full of concern if not fear. I hope they were not just putting on a good front for us. How very brave, even stoic, they had seemed, but I had picked up on the fact that she had been to mass twice today already and she kept fingering her rosary beads in her lap with one hand at dinner. Prayer was one way to stay sane in this madness.
We did sleep well at first, exhausted, but were awakened by a crump, crump sound. I saw Jacques was already up. He had opened the curtains and was silhouetted by lightning in the dark sky beyond.
“A storm?” I asked, getting up.
“A German storm of bombs. Falling near our factories. And on the neighborhood a few miles away.”
“Should we go to the cellar?”
“I will ask Étienne.”
When he went out, I heard their voices in the hall while I watched mesmerized and horrified as the sky was lit by distant explosions.
Jacques came back in. “Étienne says this attack is like the one before, more a threat than a danger. The Germans want France’s factories intact when they come here. And he says it was just on the radio that our motherland may make a bargain with Germany rather than be pounded to dust.”
“A bargain with them? Such as what?”
“They may call it an armistice, but it stinks of surrender.” He closed the curtains and sat on the bed with his head in his hands. I had never seen him cry, but he did so silently, with his shoulders shaking.
I went over and sat beside him. The mattress sagged to bump us together. For once, after all the times he had held me, I tried to comfort him.
AFTER AN EARLY breakfast and good-bye hugs, we set out again the next day. “I am afraid to drive even near the factories,” he told me as our headlights sliced through the predawn darkness. “The bastards! We French should have fought despite the cost. I hate giving in to evil!”
I was out of reassuring words. I had comforted so many, but fierce fear did more than nibble at me now. Jacques or not at my side, I fought hard to keep it from devouring me.
When daylight came, we saw where traps for tanks had been dug on some roads and had to go around them. I could feel the Germans at our back with their blitzkrieg, their “lightning war,” that moved so fast. “Jacques, I will not be captured.”
“That is the point of all this, my love.”
“But if there is a checkpoint or something like that, if they take my passport and discover I am on their wanted list, I would rather be shot.”
“Do not talk like that! We will get to the border, leave poor, sad France.” His voice broke, and we drove on.
FINALLY, AFTER ANOTHER grueling stretch on crowded roads, using our dwindling petrol coupons, we arr
ived in Périgueux on our way to Pau and the Spanish border. We sought out two friends of Jacques’s I had never met. They took us down to a café near their building. It was on a side street and, for once, quiet with no poor refugees. As hungry and grateful as I was for the tea and croissants, it was hard for me to enjoy them because I kept seeing in my mind the parade of people, the faces of the frightened and the lost.
“We must tell you something, but wanted to fortify you first,” his friend Pierre said while Estelle just kept frowning and nodding. “On the radio, when they are not playing German music already, that horrible ‘Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ they announced how far the . . . the occupation . . . has come toward us. I regret to inform you that the Germans are in your village already.”
I gasped and clutched my throat with both hands. “Saint-Georges-Motel? Are you sure? We were hoping—praying—it would be too small a place, and they would at least just pass through.”
Estelle reached over to touch my shoulder. Jacques sat stunned, silent, but I had never seen him more angry. “And bombs?” he asked.
“Yes, but your brother Étienne phoned your château, then here. Your home was not hit, nor was the hospital, Jacques. Some places in town . . .”
I covered my face with my hands. All those ill, innocent children. Katrine and her family, all the others—as good as prisoners. God forgive me, but I also thought of the June flowers, those innocent little ducklings . . .
“We will go on tomorrow, toward Pau where my youngest brother lives,” Jacques spoke at last, his voice deadly calm. “I thank you for being in touch with Étienne as I asked. We still hope to find a safe place for the hospital children to live in case the Germans take over that facility—if they even have any wounded in this lightning war they wage.”
I reached across the table to grasp his hand. Mine was trembling but his was, too.
“Come stay with us the night,” Pierre said. “You cannot push on in the dark with all the danger on the roads, especially now . . . now that France has declared the armistice with Germany . . . now that France has fallen.”
We sat there in tears, silent. Then suddenly from a phonograph, or radio, came the strains of “La Marseillaise.” Everyone in the café jumped to their feet, the Germans be damned. People in the street came running and stood at attention, too, some with their hands over their hearts. A woman ran through the tables waving a French tricolor flag that had sharp folds in it, as if it had been hidden in a drawer.
Everyone began to sing, but the words stung my soul: The day of glory has arrived! Against us tyranny’s bloody flag is raised! I only got that far before I could not go on, so I only mouthed the words. Yet, around me, however ragged and tearful the voices, nothing had ever sounded braver.
THE ROAD TO Pau was through beautiful, peaceful farmland, just waiting to be plundered by the German rapists. The city itself was a crowded mess. Jacques said it was because it was on the route to the Spanish border where many desperate people would try to escape the country—including us.
But here we were blessed to find a big, old house large enough to accommodate the hospital children if they could flee south with the Germans nearby, with their planes in the sky. But how to get them here quickly and safely? For once I cursed the Vanderbilt name and my ties to the fortune I sometimes spent so frivolously, though it had gone for good things, too.
The city of Pau gave me a feeling of increasing claustrophobia and dread. Panicked French officers seemed to be everywhere, looking for German loyalists. Thank God, we had a place to stay amid the seething, homeless crowds, for Jacques’s youngest brother Henri happily took us in, though he lived in a small apartment.
“We do not mean to crowd you,” Jacques told him when he barely cracked opened the door, then his face lit to see us. “But I did not let my sweetheart talk me into sleeping on the floor of an old house we just rented for our children’s hospital patients. And we need your help with that.”
“But come in, come in!” he cried, kissing us on both cheeks. “You are both welcome, and I have a bed you can use. And to be of help to my big brother, sacre bleu—a joy and an honor.”
“Not if it is your only bed, Henri,” Jacques insisted, clapping him on the back and then hugging him again.
“I am the host and you and your lovely Consuelo will do as the host says!” he declared and dragged us out of the hall. Though he was in his early fifties, he had never married and was estranged from some of the extended family, for what I knew not, though I knew how that felt. He reminded me of Ivor that way, a bit different, a bit of a loner.
Bread, cheese, and hard cider had never tasted so good. As exhausted as we were, catching up on conversation had never been sweeter. Henri promised to phone Étienne, who would phone the hospital at Saint-Georges-Motel to tell them where to bring the children if they could leave the village before the Germans totally took over.
“But this will give us a reason to work together—for you, my brother, and for my dear sister Consuelo’s children!” Henri insisted.
Coffee, which usually kept me awake if I drank it late, had no effect, and I fell asleep against Jacques’s shoulder in the very middle of his advising Henri how to patch things up with Étienne.
Like a baby, I guess I was carried to the bed Henri loaned us, for I remember nothing after. It felt but a few hours when Jacques shook me awake. How I wished I would be here when—if—the children came, but we had to press on. Henri seemed proud to be able to help, to be trusted with the task of waiting for the children. I hugged him a special good-bye, because, as with leaving Étienne and Marie, who knew when or if we would see our French family—even our English or American ones—again.
Chapter Thirty-Six
After our five-hundred-mile flight south, more shock and grief. “Oh, no, monsieur,” the petrol station owner told Jacques at the fueling station where we used our next-to-last coupon. “You will not be able to pass through the southern border to Spain or elsewhere.”
“But my wife is an American citizen.”
“We had all best to learn the new rules, no? You must drive to the American consulate in Bordeaux, and get a visa there. I know these things, monsieur, for my cousin, he works there, yes, right in the consulate, but not as an officer. He is a guard and they are besieged now, as are we all, no? Here, I can draw you directions once you get to Bordeaux. It is such a lovely city, but what will become of it now? Besieged by people and panic.”
Besieged and panicked, indeed. I was distraught.
“I do not think we have a choice but to go there,” Jacques told me when we were back in the Citroën. “Our petrol coupons are running out, our money . . .”
“Our patience, our courage,” I added.
He reached over to squeeze my thigh. “For now this Citroën is our home and best friend. We are off to the lovely city of Bordeaux.”
IT WAS A beautiful city, but the excellent directions to the American consulate took us to what looked like a mob scene. Motorcars in long lines, people packed around the building. The only comforting thing was that the American flag hung above the door, and it was so good to see it. My longing to escape, to be home safe, was a physical ache now—or was that my exhaustion and fear gnawing at me again?
We stood for three hours in a queue of panicked people waiting to see one of seven officials. God forgive me for wishing I could pull some strings as Mother had more than once with the Vanderbilt name, but it was not on my French passport.
“Yes?” the mustached, chubby man said in a most harried tone when we were finally at the front of the line. “I must tell you at once, that under these circumstances, we officers are struggling with requests and regulations the U.S. State Department keeps sending out and changing. And the border will close soon, hence all the panic, so I know you will be reasonable.”
Not a good beginning, I thought, as I began to explain. We had decided not to try to mention our plight of needing to escape the Nazis. Would he even believe such a story?
He skimmed our paperwork. “You do not have a visa?”
“No, but I am an American citizen also and—”
“To issue you a visa—for both of you—I would need your birth certificates and marriage certificate.”
“But those are with our lawyer in Paris.”
He rolled his eyes. “Paris might as well be the moon, madame, until this hellish, so-called armistice is worked out with the Germans. You must come back in the morning, and I will inquire, but there are many more behind you.”
Jacques cut in, “We are not giving up our passports. Is there any other way to obtain visas, then?”
“Well, you could have your passports visa-ed for Spain and Portugal but you would have to go to Bayonne where those countries have consulates. Then you could go to Lisbon in Portugal to get your official entry to the U.S. But that is a gamble, because the frontier will be closing soon, very soon, if it has not already. Yes, that might be your best chance. Please move on, then. Next!”
I could have hit the man and yet he had given us a ray of hope to not have to be separated from our passports and to get out of France. But to drive on with our last petrol coupon to another place and the threat of the way being cut off there, too, was daunting.
We walked several blocks to our motorcar, buying a loaf of bread and soda water on the way. We had no place to sleep but in the car. How far to Bayonne? We looked at each other, weary, frightened but determined. We did not even talk it over, for we had no choice.
“Bayonne, it is,” Jacques said and started our faithful, old motorcar.
WE DROVE THROUGH a torrent of rain. It seemed the very heavens were against us. I might not be able to hear the swish-swish of our windscreen wipers, but they mesmerized me as I tried to help Jacques navigate the road to the west. And they said it rained too much in England! Strange, but I thought of beautiful Blenheim in the spring rain. I thought of Winston leading the nation through this dreadful war and yet taking time to be worried about me. I missed my English family and wanted to see them all again, desperately.