WHEN THE VIII Corps headquarters left Morlaix on September 29, 1944, at the end of the Brittany campaign, Louis Guilloux went with them. Although he had explained that his German was rudimentary, the men in the Judge Advocate office wanted their French interpreter to continue to work with them in Belgium and Germany. For three days, he experienced life in the field with the U.S. Army, traveling in boxcars, taking breaks along the side of the tracks for K- and C-rations, trading with the locals for fresh bread, eggs, and fruit, drinking captured vodka at night and sleeping in tents in the newly threshed fields of northern France. Guilloux had a chance to speak with peasants and villagers, from Rennes to Paris, who told harrowing tales of Nazi reprisals and attacks on local Resistance fighters by the Vichy militia. From eyewitnesses and survivors, he learned of the extent of the atrocities committed throughout France: “Stories of houses burned,” he wrote, “young men hanged under balconies in village squares, roundups and massacres as in the darkest hours of ancient history.”
Guilloux’s health was declining. Severe malnourishment from the war years followed by eating too much with the Americans may have been to blame. His friend Joe Greene noticed how poorly he looked and asked an Army doctor to examine the French interpreter when the VIII Corps reached Saint-Quentin, north of Paris. The doctor speculated that another week with an Army on the move would send him straight into the hospital, and he advised the officers not to take the risk that Guilloux might collapse or even die en route. Just like that, he was officially discharged. He had served for a month, a civilian employee with a uniform and lieutenant’s pay. Colonel Scully gave him a letter addressed “To Whom it May Concern,” certifying his loyal and valuable service, promising him the rest of his wages, and guaranteeing him U.S. transportation and subsistence as far as Saint-Brieuc.
It wasn’t easy to get home—the roads of France were jammed with refugees looking for transport. Guilloux wandered about Saint-Quentin searching for help. He felt strange in his American uniform. He was stopped by Military Police who suspected him of being AWOL and had to explain to them who he was: a French volunteer, released from his unit. They took him to a garage, where he boarded a jeep for Paris. From there he was sent to Versailles, to an organization in charge of official transports. An English truck took him as far as Laval, halfway between Paris and Saint-Brieuc. He was still a hundred miles from home.
“What I felt most of all,” he wrote about the trip, “was a profound desire to sleep that was not easy to satisfy…now that the tension had disappeared, everything was giving way within me. There were long moments of melancholy at the idea that…I wouldn’t be in on it.” Driven by the sense of being “in on it”—being part of the liberation of his country—he had worked well beyond his physical capacity. His hair had turned gray, he noted, giving him a new authority with the other stragglers he encountered on the road.
Finally, on October 6, Guilloux reached Saint-Brieuc. He spent the next four months in convalescence, too tired to write in his diary or to work on Le Jeu de Patience, his novel in progress.
He heard from a few of his American friends. Joe Greene wrote to him in October, from the new VIII Corps headquarters in Belgium, with a cavalier, if chilling statement: “I am still hanging them.”
Greene went on to describe the violin he had received for getting Whittington acquitted, a Mangenot from Mirecourt, near Strasbourg. It had a beautiful tone. Always ambitious, Greene told Guilloux he wanted to become a literary agent in civilian life, specializing in getting French authors like Guilloux good contracts. He had yet another story idea for Louis, based on one of his American trials.
Samuel Putnam, the American translator of Le Sang noir, wrote the same month: Did Guilloux have a new war novel in the works? Putnam was sure he could find him a publisher. And Bill Cormier, his faithful friend, wrote to say how sorry he was to have lost his companion.
In January 1945, before he could recover his strength, Guilloux came down with a severe case of pulmonary congestion: “It seems I was very badly off, that I almost died. If that’s true, it wouldn’t have been difficult, because I hardly suspected anything was wrong.”
After his recovery, he went back to recording the events of the day, his progress in his writing, trips planned or taken, meals with friends. Some of his subsequent diary entries from that period consisted of a single line, as though the events were so important, no comment was required: “May 1945: Surrender of Germany”; “August: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
While Guilloux recovered, the VIII Corps continued on its advance toward Germany. In his war memoirs, Bill Cormier recounted the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of a German slave labor camp in Ohrdurf, then a move to Weimar, where the men surveyed the Buchenwald concentration camp three weeks after it was liberated. Corpses too numerous to bury were piled up everywhere. In April at Possneck, near the Czech border, Cormier received a long-awaited package from his father—a Christmas fruitcake soaked in bourbon.
After the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, discharge was on the minds of every American soldier. Cormier worked in a Redeployment unit, sending some men home and transferring others to duty in the Pacific according to a point system based on length of service, time overseas, battle decorations, and number of children. Major General Middleton left on May 19. In June, it was Cormier’s turn to go home. A truck took him from Frankfurt past the ruined French cathedral at Reims. The stones had already been organized and numbered for restoration. “The building probably took hundreds of years to rise,” Cormier wrote. “I wonder how long to restore.” Then, to his great amusement, there was a bureaucratic mix-up. The men in his unit were supposed to go directly to the Pacific, but they’d been ordered to depart via Camp Twenty Grand, one of the GI transit camps named after an American cigarette—part of a constellation that included Camp Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, Old Gold, Wins, Herbert Tareyton. But the only available ships out of Twenty Grand were headed stateside. Along with the GIs, 6,000 French war brides would sail for the United States from these camps, after rigorous administrative screenings and civic instruction. Each young woman received a trousseau of lingerie; a priceless gift in a country where textiles were still carefully rationed. On the SS Bienville from Le Havre to Boston, his own “liberty ship,” Cormier read Anna Karenina, the longest book he could find. His war was over.