Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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School in Saumur were bravely covering the French Army’s retreat over the River Loire.
Three American journalists – H. R. Knickerbocker of Hearst Newspapers, Ken Downs of the International News Service and Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s – pitched up at Candé late one night as the French government was leaving Tours. Ken Downs, who had been there in 1937, knew Bedaux’s housekeeper. When she came to the gate, he asked her for somewhere to sleep. ‘She grumbled that she’d have to get permission from the American Embassy, which occupied the house,’ Reynolds wrote. ‘She went away and didn’t return. We were in no mood to dicker. We’d all had a tough seven days and we wanted a night’s sleep. Knick and Downs climbed the iron picket fence and walked the mile and a half to the house. They roused a sleepy and very junior member of the Embassy staff. Reluctantly he came back with them and opened the gate.’ The diplomat led them to the stables and gave them some horse blankets. ‘We were a bit put out because our relations with the Embassy had been excellent. We had been accustomed to the effusive friendliness of Ambassador Bullitt, the genial companionship of Maynard Barnes, the press attaché, and of Colonel Fuller. Any of them would have said, “Here’s the house, boys. Come in, have a drink, and make yourselves at home.” But this very junior member was very sleepy and not at all interested.’ The journalists woke on the dewy grass at sunrise. Needing petrol for their car, they threw pebbles at the chateau’s windows to rouse the diplomats inside. The resourceful Reynolds wrote,
No one woke. There was of course only one thing to do. We went to the garage and siphoned off a few liters of juice from the Embassy cars which were standing there. We comforted ourselves with the excuse that had Bullitt been there he would have given us all the petrol we needed. Afterwards, in Bordeaux, we met some of the American Embassy lads who told us that the theft of petrol had made the junior members of the staff very angry … Junior members of an embassy are apt to take themselves more seriously than their bosses.
Candé offered better hospitality to Peter Muir, an American First World War ambulance driver who had recently returned to France as a medical officer with the American Field Service. When a German battalion at the front captured the Lawrenceville and University of Virginia graduate, he and another driver convinced the Germans they were physicians. Taken to Paris, they escaped, begged some civilian clothes and bought a car. On the drive west in search of their missing medical unit, they stopped at Candé.
There were quite a few people gathered in the magnificent salon for cocktails. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bedaux, were there and could not have received us more graciously. The others were embassy attachés and their wives, and two or three refugees. It was a grand
feeling to stand about, drinking cold Martinis and chatting in one’s own language among friends and seemingly far away from the war and the Huns. There was only one reminder of the war, and that could be seen through the window down in the valley to the southwest. It was a brown spot covering about five hundred acres of forest, and was an eye-sore. A gunpowder factory had been built there, well hidden by the trees, and the French had blown it up before the arrival of the enemy. Mr. Bedaux told me that he had thought the explosion would cause the Chateau to tumble in ruins, but though it had trembled slightly it had withstood the shock.
Bedaux neglected to add that the explosion from the Ripault factory had killed one of his horses, damaged the ceiling in an art deco bathroom and shattered several windows. The morning after Muir’s arrival at Candé, he was unable to start his car. An American diplomat drove him to the nearest highway to hitch a ride. Believing his ambulance team had gone to Bordeaux after his capture, the German-speaking Muir accepted lifts from Wehrmacht soldiers heading that way. He finally found his American comrades in Biarritz and escaped with them over the border to Spain.
Arriving in New York on 18 July aboard the SS Manhattan with about seven hundred other Americans, Peter Muir told the New York Times that he had seen both sides in the war and was convinced that ‘we had better start thinking about the German Army; it is terrific, marvelous, with perfect efficiency’. In War without Music, a memoir he wrote and published a few months later, he warned his countrymen, ‘It was then, and is now, my firm conviction that the Madman of Munich is out to dominate the world, and if England does not stop him, America must.’
The Manhattan had also carried a contingent of American First World War veterans of the French army. One of them, Eugene Bullard, was still recovering from the injuries he suffered at Le Mans and recalled his welcome home: ‘On our arrival we were met by Jack E. Specter, then a representative of American Legion Post No. 1, Paris, of which I was a member in good standing. Specter announced that he had arranged hotel reservations for our group of refugee legionnaires. To me, the only Negro, he added, “Bullard, I haven’t got any reservation for you. I didn’t know you were in the group.”’ After twenty-seven years in France, the first black combat pilot and veteran of two wars against Germany was reminded why he had not come home before. He reflected, ‘For me, that burst of brightness from Miss Liberty’s torch was quickly clouded.’
At Charles Bedaux’s luxurious Château de Candé, the American party went on. More than a quarter of a million refugees from Belgium, Holland and Paris sought shelter in the surrounding Loire provinces. The German Army was encircling and bombarding the city of Tours, which burned for three days before Wehrmacht troops conquered the gutted city. As the number of Americans at Candé increased to 500, Bedaux housed and fed them in considerable style. To deal with normal health problems, Bedaux requested assistance from the American Hospital at Neuilly. The hospital dispatched a medical team, headed by Dr Sumner Waldron Jackson.
BACK IN PARIS, WHILE THE GERMANS were settling in next door to the American Embassy at the Hôtel Crillon, Ambassador Bullitt read a letter from the American Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr Thierry de Martel. On 13 June, de Martel wrote, ‘I promised you not to leave Paris. I did not say if I would remain in Paris alive or dead. To remain living in Paris would be a cashable check for our adversaries. If I remain here dead, it is a check without funds to cover it. Adieu. Martel.’ A meticulous neurosurgeon, he prepared for the German occupation as for an operation. He woke early on 14 June in his elegant apartment at 18 rue Weber near the Champs-Elysées. After shaving and dressing, he went to his study on the apartment’s second storey and lay on a sofa. Hours later, a French colleague from the American Hospital found his body. Beside him lay a strychnine solution syringe. Nearby were two documents. One was a note with instructions that nothing be done to save him. The other was the play Hernani, ou l’Honneur Castillan, about the suicide of a Spanish nobleman, open at Victor Hugo’s words, ‘Since one must be tall to die, I arise.’ By the time Bullitt read his letter promising not to desert Paris, 65-year-old Thierry de Martel was dead.
Thierry de Martel was the son of Count Roger de Martel de Janville and Sybille de Mirabeau, who wrote romantic novels under the name Gyp. His mother’s books mocked the French aristocratic society of which she was a part, and they denigrated late nineteenth-century Jewish arrivistes. Adrienne Monnier thought her books were ‘disgustingly stupid novels’. Born in 1875, de Martel grew up under the new Third Republic in his family’s royalist milieu that believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer charged in 1894 with treason, unjustly convicted, imprisoned and later exonerated. During the Great War, Dr de Martel fought, was wounded and received military citations before joining the American Hospital as a surgeon in 1917. Together with Dr Clovis Vincent, he revolutionized brain surgery in France. Their techniques reduced mortality during brain tumour operations from 60 to 16 per cent, and he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. His devotion to patients impressed the American Hospital’s staff as much as his surgical skills. In 1931, when another physician’s neglect of the American poet Pauline Avery Crawford forced him to amputate her infected leg, he came to her bedside in the American Hospital afterwards. ‘Do not cry!’ he said. ‘I have just returned from Italy where I found that all the most beautiful statues in the museums were those that were a little