Food had become everyone’s overriding concern. German requisitions had created desperate shortages, not only for ordinary people but also for those in the Resistance who were hiding in the woods and hills.
Fortunately, there were people like Jean and Madeleine Casteret, vineyard-workers-turned-cattle-rustlers. The Casterets lived in St. Yzans, not far from Château Loudenne, which the Germans once considered using as a brothel. Now they were raising cattle and growing food for their soldiers there.
“We did our rustling at night after the Germans had gone to bed,” Jean said. “The Resistance would send us a coded signal over the radio and we’d set off.” They would sneak over to Loudenne and quietly herd as many animals as they could toward the nearby woods where the Maquis would be waiting. “It was dangerous because you just never knew when one of the guards might spot us and wake everyone up, but it was enormously satisfying to narguer les allemands (stick it to the Germans).”
Even Henri Gaillard may have felt a tinge of satisfaction from time to time.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I have the honor to inform you that train 9305, which was due at 2:30 P.M., has been halted at kilometer 45 because of the arrival on the tracks of two cows. It would appear that someone opened the doors of several box cars and let the animals loose. Some have disappeared. Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.
* * *
FIVE
The Growling Stomach
GERTRUDE DE GALLAIX WAS IN A HURRY. IT WAS just after six in the morning, but she knew that long lines of women and children would already be forming at her neighborhood market.
Grabbing her shopping basket and book of ration tickets, Gertrude rushed from her third-floor Paris apartment down the spiral staircase to the street below. In her basket was an egg carrier (no merchant had cartons) and a filet, a crocheted string bag, to hold any vegetables she could buy. There were also two empty wine bottles, ones she and her husband Marcel had finished off during the week. Because of a bottle shortage, Gertrude knew that no merchant would sell her more wine unless she had empties to return.
Gertrude turned left from her apartment building and headed south down the street, rue Boissière, toward Place d’Iéna, two blocks away. Although there was only a hint of dawn, the streets were already busy. A street sweeper wielding a twig broom opened a fire hydrant to flush litter he had swept from the sidewalk into the gutter. A knife sharpener, standing by the curb with his cart and whetstone, rang a bell, crying, “Knives, scissors, anything for sharpening? Very cheap!”
As Gertrude continued along Boissière, she glanced to her right. On rue du Bouquet de Longchamp, two German soldiers were standing guard. Gertrude gave a little shudder. That was where the Commissariat de Police was located and where she, an American, was required to register at least once every day. Though married to a Frenchman, the Germans considered her an enemy alien and insisted on knowing her whereabouts at all times.
Gertrude had nearly reached the intersection at Place d’Iéna when she realized something was wrong. Although it was the biggest market in the 16th Arrondissement, there were no lines, no queues of frantic shoppers trying to get their marketing done before children had to be taken to school, no old grandmothers or grandfathers holding a place in line for their sons and daughters. No one. As she got closer, she discovered why. There was no food. By 6:05 A.M., whatever had been brought in that day from the country had already been picked over and was gone.
More shocking, there was not a drop of wine. The space where the wine merchant usually set up his stand was as empty as the bottles in Gertrude’s basket.
“Food was one thing, but a wine shortage? In France? That is something I never thought I would see,” Gertrude later recalled.
The wine shortage, which was being felt throughout France by 1941, was but one of many caused by the Nazis in their drive to make Germany self-sufficient and independent of imports. By requisitioning most of France’s raw materials, finished products, especially its food and wine, Hitler believed Germany would be in a stronger position to win the war. The Führer put his heir apparent, Field Marshal Hermann Göring, in charge of requisitions. Göring, who weighed nearly three hundred pounds and was called “Fat Stuff” behind his back, could not have been more pleased. “The French are so stuffed with food that it is really a disgrace,” he said. “This is the secret of their wit and gaiety. Without this wealth of food, they would not be so happy.”
Immediately, Göring began systematically stripping France of her bounty: wheat from the Ile de France, cheese and vegetables from the Loire Valley, fruit from the orchards of Normandy, Charolais beef from Burgundy and, most of all, trainload after trainload of wine, thousands of bottles of which found their way into the field marshal’s personal cellar.
As head of Economic Planning for Occupied Lands, Göring had virtual economic omnipotence. One of his first moves in his new job was to bar the French from Paris’s luxury restaurants, which he had exempted from most wine restrictions and whose wine cellars he kept stocked to meet the demands of their German clientele. “It’s for us that Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent must make the best cuisine,” he said. “Three or four first-class restaurants reserved for German officers and soldiers will be perfect, but nothing for the French. They don’t need that kind of food.”
Had he stopped there, it might have been seen as just a slap in the face. Instead, he delivered a kick to the stomach, declaring French people would have to make do on 1,200 calories a day, half the number an average person needs to survive. Older people, those the Germans considered less productive, were given ration books limiting them to 850 calories a day.
Göring’s moves sparked deep resentment, especially among winemakers, winegrowers and others connected with France’s wine trade. Léon Douarche, vice president of the French Winegrowers Association, complained that Göring was snatching wine away from those who need it most. “The old and ill need wine,” he declared. “It’s an excellent food for them; it’s easily digested and a vital source of vitamins and minerals. It’s the best elixir for guaranteeing a long life that has ever been invented.”
Douarche’s message struck a chord. Medical doctors throughout the country called on German and Vichy authorities to provide for a more equitable distribution of wine in order to compensate for the loss of calories. Those engaged in “intellectual work,” they said, should be entitled to half a liter of wine a day; manual laborers should have at least a liter and, in some cases, a liter and a half (two full bottles) as long as it was consumed with meals; women should receive one-third less than men.
To underscore how desperate the situation was, the doctors cited a visit they made to a nursing home where they found several elderly patients pretending to be near death. “We asked them why they were doing that. We said, ‘Don’t you want to get well, don’t you want to go home?’ They replied, ‘No, here if the staff thinks you are dying, they give you wine with your lunch twice a week.’ ”
The doctors concluded their report with a warning: “It would be a mistake to refuse wine to those who are truly ill. It can lead to a lack of equilibrium.”
Their warning and recommendations were ignored.
For the first time since the siege of Paris in 1870, signs of severe malnutrition appeared in France. Although France still produced more food than any other European country, it was now the worst-nourished, and everyone felt it. “We were obsessed with food,” said Gertrude de Gallaix, “it was all we could think of.”
Gertrude threw out her geraniums and began growing vegetables on her balcony. “Some of my neighbors raised chickens and rabbits on theirs. One even had a goat tethered to the railing so she would have milk for the baby.”
In the countryside, the situation was slightly better. At Château Siran, for instance, there had always been a vegetable garden, but as food shortages grew worse, it took on much greater importance, according to May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. “In addition to the vineyards, our lives i
ncreasingly revolved around the garden. Our first concern was always the garden.”
We arise every morning at 6:30, not one minute later [she wrote in her diary]. After making our beds and before having breakfast, we water the vegetable garden. Our everyday life is marked by a total lack of basic goods, little heating, a very restricted diet with no sugar, little bread, almost no meat, butter does not exist. . . . We live according to the rhythm of the seasons. The harvest of plums for jam made with very little sugar; it is bitter and does not keep long. We grind corn to make a rough flour which serves as a base for most of our food. We roast barley to make fake coffee.
It was the kind of diet and lifestyle that prevailed throughout Bordeaux. Many winegrowers planted corn and millet between their rows of vines so they would have something to feed their animals. To feed themselves, some ripped out vines to make room for bigger gardens. But the gravelly soil, which was perfect for vines because it provided good drainage and forced the roots to grow deep, was inhospitable to vegetables. Whereas vines grew best when they were made to suffer, vegetables needed to be pampered.
One day, Grandmother Miailhe decided that her family, which had been putting in long days in their vineyard and garden, could use a bit of pampering as well. She announced they were going on a picnic. She had picked some tomatoes and radishes that morning and had saved some corn bread from the night before, and now she packed it in a basket with a bit of jam as well. May-Eliane and the other children could hardly wait to get started.
Hopping on their bicycles, they headed off down a meandering dirt road that took them past vineyards and through shaded pine woods toward Château Cantemerle, three miles away. It was a pleasant ride. The sun was shining, birds were singing and, best of all, no Germans were in sight. When they reached Cantemerle, one of the oldest properties in Bordeaux, a half hour later, everyone was in high spirits. The château was an ideal spot for such an outing, surrounded by tall oak trees and a large, lovely park. Adults chattered about the weather, their vineyards and the war, while the children played cache-cache (hide-and-seek) and other games. Even lunch was a kind of game.
We began running around chasing after frogs [May-Eliane wrote in her diary]. That is what we ate: frogs. We just ran around and picked them up off the ground.
Some games were more serious than others. In the summer of 1940, France was invaded a second time, this time by potato bugs called doryphores. The “invasion” was especially acute in Burgundy, where huge potato fields were under attack. The Germans, who were shipping French potatoes back to the Fatherland, were irritated that France had not yet eradicated the pest. To solve the problem, schoolteachers were ordered to send their pupils into the fields to collect bugs. Robert Drouhin remembers his teacher handing him and his classmates jars, saying, “See who can collect the most.” For the children, it felt like a holiday as they scurried out of their classroom into the field and began picking bugs off the potatoes. “At the end of each day, our teacher had to turn the bugs we had collected over to a German soldier,” Robert said. “I don’t know what the Germans would have done if we hadn’t collected enough bugs.”
Before long the French, who called Germans les Boches, or goons, had a new nickname for their oppressors: les doryphores. “Ja,” sneered one soldier who heard the pejorative name, “we’re the doryphores all right. We will eat the potatoes and you will eat nothing.”
Or next to nothing. By 1942, said one historian, the real voice of France had become “the growling stomach.”
To assuage the beast, nearly everything became fair game. In Bordeaux, a reporter from a local newspaper was cutting across the city’s Square Laffite on his way to work when he suddenly stopped. It seemed awfully quiet. Where were the pigeons? He began to count. Later, he wrote in the newspaper, “The pigeon population has plummeted from 5,000 to 89.” Pigeon rôti had become a staple on many Bordelais’ tables.
And that was not all.
“We were so hungry that we ate the goldfish in the pool,” remembered a young American who arrived in France in 1940. Varian Fry, who was thirty-two, had been sent to the port of Marseille on the Mediterranean coast on a mission of mercy. His assignment from the Emergency Rescue Committee of New York was to help artists and intellectuals flee the Nazis.
Word of his operation with its promise of false identification papers and escape abroad spread quickly, and people began lining up on the stairs outside his office. But smuggling people out of the country took time, and soon Fry had a houseful of people to feed and care for until the necessary arrangements could be made. Among his “guests” were Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Hannah Arendt and Max Ernst. There would be more than 1,500 in all before Fry too had to flee France.
“What helped a lot was wine,” he said. “As food grew scarcer, we drank more and more of it. Occasionally on Saturday evenings, we would buy ten or twelve bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Hermitage, Mercurey, Moulin-à-Vent, Juliénas, Chambertin, Bonnes Mares or Musigny and have an evening of drinking and singing.”
Over the next thirteen months, however, the situation deteriorated. “For several days, we had no bread at all, and practically no meat,” Fry wrote in a memoir. That is when they remembered the goldfish in the pond. “But the worst of it was that it also became harder and harder to find wine,” he lamented.
That was true even in Bordeaux, the largest fine-wine district on earth. “The Bordelais have stopped drinking their wine!” exclaimed one newspaper. They did not have much choice. With so much wine being requisitioned, many restaurants limited the amount they served to customers. Some stopped serving wine altogether, prompting one patron to complain, “We have to drink so much water these days that it feels like Noah’s Ark here!”
But German requisitions were only part of the reason for the wine shortage. Many growers were no longer able to get their wine to market because the Germans had seized their trucks. Those who still had vehicles could not drive very far because gasoline was severely rationed.
New laws also cut into the amount of wine available. Growers were ordered to distill part of their wine into fuel and industrial alcohol, which the Germans needed as solvents and antifreeze for their motor vehicles as well as a basis for their explosives. Those producing more than 5,000 hectoliters of wine a year were ordered to distill one-half of their harvest.
Those regulations, coupled with unfavorable weather, lack of labor and a shortage of chemicals to treat vines guaranteed that wine production would drop, and drop sharply. In 1940, production fell nearly 30 percent. By 1942, production was barely half of what it had been in 1939.
Among those severely affected were the Miailhes, who owned five vineyards in Bordeaux: Châteaux Siran, Palmer, Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse de Lalande, Ducru-Beaucaillou (until 1943) and Coufran. “But there’s an old saying here,” recalled May-Eliane years later. “The more châteaux you own, the poorer you are. Certainly at that time, nobody had any money and that included us.”
Even before the war, the Miailhes’ vineyards, like so many others, were already in terrible condition because of the recession in the 1920s and the poor-quality harvests of the 1930s.
In the spring of 1942, Edouard Miailhe, May-Eliane’s father, informed the family that they could no longer afford to pay their workers and would have to sell one of their farms. He also warned they would have to uproot many of their vines because they were unable to take care of them.
But that was just the beginning. That year, the Germans requisitioned tens of thousands of farm horses—30,000 from one wine region alone—for transporting soldiers and matériel to the front. Edouard’s brother Louis was ordered to bring all of the Miailhe horses to the square in front of the town hall. He was upset but held his tongue. With two families of Italian Jews still hidden in one of their châteaux, the last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself.
When he arrived, Louis found the square filled with horses belonging to other winegrowers, the animals pushing and neighin
g their displeasure at being packed into close quarters. As disgruntled growers held the reins, Germans armed with pens and clipboards carefully examined the horses, checking their teeth, stroking their flanks, deciding which were worth taking. Some growers tried to trick the Germans by putting stones in their horses’ hooves to make them limp.
Finally, Miailhe’s name was called. “These yours?” an officer asked, glancing at the six horses Louis was holding. Miailhe nodded. The German began circling, stopping at one point to lift one of the horse’s hooves. After making a few notes, he remarked, “They’re good,” and signaled another soldier to take them away.
“It nearly killed Uncle Louis. He was so attached to his horses,” May-Eliane said. Her uncle had worked long hours with them, training them to walk a straight line through the vines and to pull with just the right force so that the point of the plow would bite deep enough into the rocky soil to clear weeds but not so deep that it would damage the roots of the vines.
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 13
