A curfew was in force. Soldiers shot at anyone.
In Normandy, they talk of that summer as ‘the time of bombardments’. Saint-Lô, 13 miles south of Boisgrimot, was christened by Samuel Beckett ‘the Capital of the Ruins’ after the RAF and USAAF flattened nine-tenths of the city on 6/7 June. The Allies planned to capture Saint-Lô in nine days. In the event, it took them 43 days. The main reason: the bocage, those compacted mounds of earth used by Robert’s family since time immemorial to partition off land and encourage game, on top of which abundant greenery, trees, bushes, brambles, intertwined.
The foliage of the bocage was at its thickest in June, providing concealment for German anti-tank guns and troop movements. Allied soldiers had expected small hedges as in Bodmin, where they had trained, but these hedgerows were three times higher and too dense for tanks to push through. An American general found the bocage to be more impenetrable than anything that he had experienced in Guadalcanal. Confronted by this untidy maze of small winding tracks sunk between broad banks of tangled roots, and swarming with large mosquitoes, General Omar Bradley judged it ‘the damnedest country I’ve ever seen’. His troops named it ‘The Green Hell’.
Boisgrimot lay in the middle.
Robert’s chateau was a symbol of the frustrations encountered in bocage country. ‘The fear aroused by fighting in the bocage produced a hatred which had never existed before the invasion,’ wrote Antony Beevor in his classic account of D-Day. The German defence of Sainteny was bolstered by tanks of the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’, which one month earlier had murdered 642 villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane. In the decisive days between 3 and 11 July, 7,000 GIs were killed within a three-mile radius. The Doynels’ house was a target for both sides as a potential observation post or sniper base.
German snipers were particularly lethal. An American sergeant remembered: ‘They used every bit of debris, hedge corner, and bush to hide in, under, or in back of.’ German and American tanks blew off the church tower and cracked apart the Doynel family crypt, exposing the bones of Robert’s parents. The chateau and pigeonnier met the same destruction. ‘Liberation’ in Robert’s case meant the Doynels having to evacuate their family seat and the loss of almost everything.
The intense attacks and counter-attacks reduced Sainteny to piles of rubble; 2,500 cattle died. Jacqueline Hodey took part in the village exodus towards the end of June. She was led out by French veterans of the First World War who warned what noises to be alert for. She witnessed Boisgrimot and the surrounding estates exchange hands five times in three weeks. She said, ‘I fried potatoes at Les Landes farm. One day it was for Americans, next for Germans, and some days for both.’
Otto Graebener never revealed to Priscilla anything about Göring’s pine crates marked ‘FRAGIL’ – and it is unlikely that Priscilla would have paid attention. Once the bombing started, her priority became to leave Le Havre, where she had travelled in a great state of anguish and confusion after receiving Robert’s latest refusal to divorce. ‘I had driven out there at my own risk as I was not allowed to be there at all. When I found that the Allies were not advancing as quickly as I had hoped, I thought it wiser to go back to Paris, so I cycled just over 100 miles in a day and a bit.’
Graebener’s last protective act was to deploy a young Spaniard to accompany Priscilla on her epic bicycle ride. Almost all that is known about Graebener’s associate is his name: Paco Diez. It was a terrorising journey, recollected in a succession of staccato images. Wounded cows waiting in corn fields. A woman tugging a sock off a swollen German corpse. And everywhere, lorries on their side, smoking, and the smell of putrefying flesh and cordite.
As Priscilla pedalled south, there was a thunderous roar over the trees that hid the horizon. RAF Typhoons whined up from behind and strafed the road with 20-mm cannon fire. The pilots in their overheated imagination may have mistaken Priscilla for a retreating enemy sniper. Beevor described how a most unconvincing although widespread belief developed among American and British troops ‘that Frenchwomen, supposedly the lovers of German soldiers, acted as snipers’. Suspected snipers were rarely taken prisoner. A sergeant in the 6th Engineer Special Brigade reported seeing dead French girls and German soldiers in the ditches near Omaha Beach. ‘They were killed by our planes and they were found lying side by side.’
The decision to bicycle probably saved Priscilla. One month later, at 4 p.m. on this same road between Livarot and Vimoutiers, two fighter bombers spotted Rommel’s open Horch driving south, and attacked. Rommel was hit in the temple and thrown from the car, fracturing his skull. Priscilla and Diez were lucky to escape a similar fate: ‘We were machine-gunned most of the way by the British, and that was why we had no intention of taking a lorry, as one could at least see aeroplanes and hear them in time to get into a ditch.’
Crouched in a ditch to avoid the bullets, Priscilla understood what Robert had endured in the trenches. Beevor quotes a Gordon Highlander in Normandy that week on the effect of having shells explode around him. ‘All that shrieking, whining venom is directed at you . . . Involuntarily you curl up into the foetal position.’
At nightfall, Priscilla and Diez crept into a barn. ‘We had to sleep in a loft on some hay as there were refugees everywhere and no rooms to be found.’ Was this when Priscilla was photographed lying back in the straw? Was Diez the photographer? Were they lovers too in this dirty corner of the hayloft? Or was the photograph taken somewhere else and was Otto the one with the camera? Or Emile? Or was it Pierre, and, if so, was Priscilla dreaming of him and of their daughter?
I have no answers. Her serene expression has a post-coital languor – at least, this was my initial reaction. But tilt the photograph and the way that Priscilla lies back could suggest simply that she is shattered after her exertions of pedalling all day under fire, and in the heat of summer. Viewed from this angle, her posture is more convulsive, more like a crucifixion, as if she has a premonition of what lay in store for her in Paris.
A fortnight after the Normandy landings, the RAF bombed the oil depots at the docks in Saint-Ouen, once the centre of Bureau Otto’s operations. Clouds of thick smoke drifted over the sun, smelling of burning rubber – and bringing back to Priscilla the greasy black clouds that had mushroomed out of Rouen four years earlier; only, now, everything was in reverse.
Priscilla told Gillian that during the Occupation French women relieved at the appearance of their periods would say: ‘Les Anglais sont débarqués’ – the English have landed – an allusion to the red coats formerly worn by British soldiers. This stopped on 6 June 1944 – and for Priscilla too. She may have escaped the bombs, but she could not escape what was waiting for her at the end of that ‘Liberation cycle ride’, as she called it. Her body, still weak from her operation in September, was not up to pedalling non-stop for so many hours, all the time having to dodge incendiary bullets. She had made a colossal effort to reach Paris, but at a cost. ‘I became ill and had to have an operation shortly after.’
When he heard the news, Pierre set out from his home in Annemasse. Kikki Johanet alerted her that he was on his way, and imagined the wonderful moments that she and Pierre would enjoy together. ‘My very dear and charming Pris, I see you from here as a valkyrie, launched over valleys and hills to find your Tristan all alone.’ Speaking in the capacity of her ‘ange gardien’, Johanet regretted that he did not himself possess a pair of wings, that he was not a pure spirit. But he was content all the same, ‘because I see that I have generated plenty of pure spirit in you both!’
One morning in early July, a knock on her door at her clinic in the west of Paris. Pierre. Holding a cage with a canary chick inside.
Pierre slept in Priscilla’s room, the tiny yellow bird shuttling from its perch to the bars, watching them. She wrote of the scene: ‘Where else could this happen but in France? The nursing home was very comfortable and the nurses were very kind and efficient. The rooms were large and were all named after flowers.’
The diagnosis c
ame. The cyst on her right ovary, aggravated by the cycle ride, had grown ‘to the size of a grapefruit’, according to Gillian. What Priscilla was afraid of most had overtaken her. On 29 July, Dr Sicard performed a hysterectomy. Priscilla would never have children.
Her illness, operation and convalescence played out against the Allied advance. A nurse smuggled in a wireless so that Priscilla could tune in to the BBC. On 12 July 1944, she had learned that Carentan had fallen to the Allies. On 18 July, Saint-Lô. The 83rd Infantry Division finally liberated Sainteny on 21 July.
The power cuts in Paris lasted all day, the lights burning for one hour at dawn and another hour at 11 p.m. Priscilla lay back on the pillow, listening to Pierre’s bird cracking seeds. She was too frail to move. ‘Poor little thing had to suffer so much while living in Paris,’ Graebener had written.
She had pinned her future on Pierre. He appeared when no one was around. ‘The nurses all adored him and helped to keep the doctor in ignorance of his sharing my room.’ He was out during the day, visiting friends. Paris was becoming sadder, quieter, he reported. All cinemas and theatres suppressed. Bread queues getting longer. Only the no. 1 line to Neuilly working normally, with one station in every two closed. She waited for his return. Over the canary’s baby song she heard firing.
Pierre brought back scraps of news. The streets hummed with rumours, or Blue Pigeons, as P. G. Wodehouse, now living in the Hôtel Bristol, called them. Hitler – last seen in France in 1943 buying fish in Saint-Brieuc market – had joined a Japanese suicide cult. Other stories had firmer foundations. A Panzer division was on its way from the north. German sappers were laying dynamite under the bridges, following Hitler’s orders to reduce Paris to ‘a pile of ruins’. The Americans were approaching from the south-west.
There was the creak of tables being overturned. Pierre watched from a café near the Ecole Militaire, sipping his ersatz aperitif, the German ambulances returning from the Falaise plain, the wounded on stretchers, the unseeing eyes; he was unable not to gloat.
On 25 July, Chartres was taken. On 31 July, General Patton’s 3rd Army broke out from Normandy. Lorries in black and green camouflage started to remove boxes of files from 11 Rue des Saussaies. Three years before, Lieutenant-Colonel Blake, former British Military Attaché in Belgium, told the Joint Intelligence Staffs: ‘Even the Germans say that if they entered France at 60 km an hour, they expect to leave at twice the speed.’ On bad terms with the Gestapo, Max Stocklin had reached Switzerland at the end of July. Early in August, Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl departed with his lorry for Spain.
One morning, a reddish-haired man with different-coloured eyes appeared at Priscilla’s bedside: Otto Graebener, to say goodbye. He had come from Hendaye, after organising Alois Miedl’s passage across the Spanish border, and was shortly to rejoin Miedl in San Sebastian. Before quitting Paris, he wanted to check up on his ‘darling Pris’. The scene in her room astonished him.
Priscilla had relied on friends to ease the emptiness after her womb was removed. Her room was ‘always full of people’, she wrote with unconvincing jauntiness. ‘As soon as I was well enough to have visits, my bedroom became bedlam. It was not rare for me to have ten or twelve people all sitting round my bed and the nurses seemed amused by the various dramas going on. Of course, everyone was abnormal and excitable because of outside events.’
This was the first time that anyone aside from Zoë had met her ‘Swiss’ friend Otto. To Graebener, it all seemed very hysterical. ‘Poor little Pris,’ he had written to her, as though describing a third person, ‘she was always surrounded by too many people.’
On another day, Robert appeared and made a scene. He had returned to Paris. His club remained open in August because no one had gone away. He brought news of Boisgrimot, the unrecognisable skyline. Sainteny was in the hands of the US VII Corps. American soldiers, hoping to endear themselves to the scattered population, were using phrases provided in the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. One phrase was: ‘Are you married?’ Another: ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’
No one was more upset with Priscilla than Daniel Vernier. He walked in unannounced with Simone – to catch Priscilla in the arms of Pierre. Vernier was speechless. This was the first time that he had suspected anything between Priscilla and his brother-in-law. Pierre pulled away from her, ‘sheepish at first and then with an increasing bright manner’. He chastised Vernier for avoiding him lately. He had been trying to get in touch to invite him to dinner. He was very excited. He wanted Daniel and Simone to be the first to know: Priscilla and he were getting married and they were giving an engagement party next week. Vernier rushed from the room.
Troop movements prevented Pierre from returning to his home in Annemasse. What he intended to say to his wife is anyone’s guess. He wrote to Priscilla eight months later: ‘We spent six marvellous weeks together during which we got to know each other better.’ But it had weighed on him that she would not now be able to bear their daughter.
Priscilla loved Pierre. Wishbone thin, she lay stretched out on her bed, staring at everyone and no one, thinking of him. But their time together was almost up, their engagement party postponed indefinitely by spontaneous street celebrations featuring columns of excitable young men chanting the Marseillaise – alternating with the crack of rifles from Laval’s pro-German paramilitary force, the Milice. Chamberlin’s French Gestapo eliminated 110 people between 17 June and 17 August, dumping their tortured bodies on the pavement, eyes ripped out, fingerless. Loudspeakers ordered Priscilla to be indoors by 9 p.m. Yvette Goodden did not dare leave her apartment for four days following an encounter with the Wehrmacht. ‘They are in a devilish temper,’ she wrote after bicycling to Montmartre. ‘The Germans were emptying out a big shop and were shooting at everyone who drew too close.’
On 12 August, as the Abwehr began shredding its secret files, railway workers went on strike. On the same platform at the Gare de l’Est where Priscilla had waited to be transported to Besançon, German women and whimpering children assembled in scared groups, not knowing how they were supposed to leave Paris. The Métro ceased working altogether on 15 August. The boulevards were choked with hundreds of vehicles departing for Germany, their roofs covered with branches for camouflage, and weighed down with bottles of wine, bidets, whatever the drivers had managed to grab. Trucks piled with stolen valuables rolled in a clanking procession down Rue Lord Byron, tyres flapping and tense men perched on the mudguards. As in June 1940, everyone was taking to the road. The city was falling as it had been captured, the chorus line of handsome youths which had entered Paris four years earlier now resembling the bedraggled French soldiers that they had routed.
Parisians cheerfully waved the Germans off with lavatory brushes. ‘We shout insults and sometimes an angry driver swerves and knocks us down,’ wrote Antonia Hunt. But it was dangerous to be associated with the scornful crowd, as it was for Priscilla to stand at her window in case she was mistaken for a sniper. ‘People who visited me took risks as the Germans were trigger-happy and a girlfriend of mine had a narrow escape one day when bullets whizzed past her.’ Zoë was on her way to the nursing home when a garbage can on the pavement sprang back, hit by a bullet.
On the radio, a woman sang Joseph Kessel’s words that he had composed at the Ashdown Park Hotel in Sussex: ‘Take the guns, the munitions and the grenades from under the straw . . .’
The Allies had landed unopposed in the south of France; five days later a Free French unit swept into Hendaye, in time to stop the green Mercury containing Otto Graebener and Alois Miedl. On 18 August, Annemasse fell.
Pierre was agitating to get back to his wife and children. He reported news of fighting outside Fresnes prison, where Cornet was still incarcerated. He had seen bonfires of uprooted German street signs, with people feeding torn-up photos of Hitler and Göring into the flames, after carefully removing the glass from the frames. Priscilla watered the canary.
On 19 August, the BBC prematurely declared Paris’s libera
tion – but with the peals of St Paul’s rather than Notre Dame. Not for another five days did Priscilla tune in to a radio announcer, who was about to speak live to a captain of the Free French. He had arrived in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville, his shabby column of eleven half-tracks and three Shermans safely guided through the back streets by an Armenian on a moped. The announcer said: ‘I have in front of me a French captain who is the first to arrive in Paris. His face is red, he is grubby and he needs a shave, and yet I want to embrace him.’
Two hours later, at 11.22 p.m, a large bell started tolling: the 13-ton Gros Bourdon of Notre Dame – the first time that Priscilla had heard its F-sharp since 1940. Soon, other church bells rang out over the darkened rooftops. The sound reached the Hôtel Meurice where General Choltitz, Military Commander of Greater Paris, was speaking to Berlin. He held the telephone to the window just as, five years before, an English correspondent had raised her receiver to catch the grinding of German tanks crossing the Polish border. Choltitz explained: ‘What you are hearing is that Paris is going to be liberated and that Germany without doubt has lost the war.’
No one in Priscilla’s nursing home slept that night. Elderly patients pinned medals to their nightgowns. Excited nurses, with tricolour cocades in their curled hair, stitched flags from sheets to hang from the balcony. A thin old man smelling of ether was carried into the main entrance on a stretcher so that he could hear the singing in the street. He repeated over and over: ‘They’re here.’
Yvette Goodden wrote in her diary: ‘We’re going to go for a walk and we sing bare-headed with the crowd, Marseillaise, Tipperary, the Chant du départ, à bas les boches, Hitler au poteau. We climb on to the roof and there’s a magnificent crescent moon, to the west an immense conflagration, also to the east, the race course at Longchamps, the Germans firing on 2nd Arrondissement. We see tracers in the sky.’
Priscilla Page 32
