I Gave You Life Twice

      On June 17, we left quite early in the morning. I recall our driver grumbling about the early hour when we loaded the luggage in the boot and lashed some more on the roof. We stopped for lunch in Tarare (Rhône). We then drove to Boën (Loire) and to Noirétable (Loire). While we were eating some supper, having parked the car next to many others in a vacant lot, someone helped himself to our spark plugs. My mother asked me to see if I could get some, and I did, using a monkey wrench to extract them from the cars of people who, I thought, needed them less than we did. I also was convinced, like my mother, that this was a matter of survival. Never again would we leave our car unattended. Since we could not find a place to rent for the night, we slept in the car.

      This spark plug incident was not my first major sin, it was the second. The first one occurred in Fontainebleau at l’Hôtel de l’Aigle Noir, where we had had that great lunch of which I wrote earlier. From a tray in the entry hall, I had removed and kept some pretty postcards that were for sale, although I thought they were free. Some days later, my mother found out about my theft. I was made to return all the postcards and deliver a tearful verbal apology to the hotel manager.

      Both the newspapers and the car radio kept us advised of the rout of the French Army. The gendarmes had received orders to keep civilians off the highways, so that the nonexistent reinforcements could reach the battle fronts. During this Retreat (“La Retraite”) there were continuous streams of people from further north and east walking on the highways to get away from the German troops. People carried suitcases, bundles of clothes, knapsacks, babies; pushed wheelbarrows loaded with grandmas or possessions; rode carts heaped high with furniture, mattresses, and household goods, pulled by oxen, mules, horses, or donkeys; and rode in cars and trucks of all kinds. The pace was set by the slowest pedestrian and, once caught in such a stream, it was impossible to get out of it. Certainly overtaking could not occur. If you reached a police roadblock, you were ordered off the highway into an adjoining field, and you could not proceed any further except by furtive escape. People verged on panic, although outwardly calm, but certainly most were afraid of the aerial bombardments they could hear from time to time. Mixed in with this fear was disbelief at the rout of the “invincible” French Army.

      Consequently, my mother decided that we would not travel on any national (main) road, or even on roads of second or third category. Instead, we headed across country using country roads: some paved, some with gravel surfaces, and some dirt roads. Sometimes, these roads were marked on the maps we had, and sometimes we had to guess and use dead reckoning to get through the rough topography of the Massif Central. Occasionally, she made exceptions to the rule, so that we could get food, lodging, or even more difficult, gasoline for the car. Gasoline supplies were scarce because of large military and civilian demands and uncertain or non-existent deliveries. Consequently, each purchaser was limited to a few liters, usually five or ten (1.2 or 2.4 gal) at each purchase.

      The scarcity of essential supplies, the need to travel along narrow, poorly-maintained roads, and the desirability of avoiding crowds, undoubtedly increased the stress under which my mother was functioning. She kept control of herself very well, but she did everything she could to communicate her sense of urgency to our driver and to me, insisting that we had to reach Pau and its proximity to the Spanish frontier, as rapidly as possible and before the German armies overtook us.

      On June 18, we left Noirétable early in the morning, driving to Vallore-Montagne near St. Etienne for lunch. When we were ready to leave, there was a short circuit in the car ignition system. My mother was quite put out that the driver did not have the faintest idea about how to fix it. Fortunately, we were able to find a mechanic who took care of it in a minute by re-wrapping a wire with frayed insulation. We then drove to Ambert (Puy-de-Dôme) and to Arlanc in the same département. In Arlanc, we waited in line about half-an-hour to get our car tank filled up, a difficult feat that my mother was able to achieve by flouting her pregnant status. In addition, my mother had a dark-blue cape that looked like the cape normally worn by nurses. The gasoline attendant disregarded the limit that supposedly applied to all other customers, judging that a pregnant woman and nurse should get all the fuel she needed so as not to have to wait again in line. We had driven only a very few km when we heard planes overhead. They dropped bombs on Arlanc and got a direct hit on the gas station where we had been just a few minutes earlier. The noise and the smoke column will remain etched in my memory. The Germans bombed civilian towns and villages, and strafed highways populated shoulder to shoulder by refugees, adding to the panic and blocking highways to French military traffic. We arrived at La-Chaise-Dieu (Haute-Loire) very late that afternoon, but it was still light. Mother was able to find a room for us in a house that had an interior courtyard with a lockable door, so that our car would be safe. Unfortunately, the gate opening was barely wide enough for the car and, while my mother was guiding the driver as he backed in, a wheel ran over her foot. In order that her swelling foot would not prevent her from traveling the next day, she kept her shoes on all night while we tried to sleep on mattresses laid out on the floor.