Coming Home Is the Hardest Part
At the end of the European war, Leclerc took the Second Division—and some of its ambulance drivers—to Indochina, where Suzanne Torrès eventually commanded 1,200 medical corps troops. Not all of the women were free to follow the front, and many of those who left the division found themselves staring at the flatline horizon of civilian life with a mixture of dread and relief. They were back home, and home was where they belonged. The problem was that most of them had been changed to a point that they could hardly fit back in their previous roles. They were returning to a society in which women had the same legal status as children. They could not open a bank account, enroll in a university course, or sell property without their husband’s permission. They could not vote. Despite their patriotic service, they did not have the rights of full-fledged citizens.
There was a social dimension to their dilemma as well. The Rochambelles had become accustomed to a tremendous amount of personal freedom, even within the confines of a military organization, and an equal amount of responsibility. Returning to civilian life meant scaling back their ambitions and readjusting their sights. It meant, in many small ways, taking a big step backwards. Yet the Rochambelles’ experience in the war and the network of friends they made there also became a springboard for new opportunities. Some of the women found jobs through division friends, and others went to work in veterans’ services that emerged after the war. All of them said that focusing on work and family helped them adjust.
Jacotte cried for days after returning to Paris, but there was no getting around it. Her father was ill and her mother needed her to come home and help support her two younger sisters. A division officer recommended her to the Ministry of Defense, and she went to work there as a bilingual secretary. She wanted, more than anything, to go to Indochina and continue as a Rochambelle. “We had had an adventurous life, we slept anywhere, ate anything. To return to the fairly rigid framework of office, family, office … I thought I was going to be ill having to work in an office,” she said. “It was physically difficult.”
As partial remedy, Jacotte walked down the Champs-Elysées to the officer’s mess for lunch through the grass and weeds rather than on the sidewalk, just to have contact with the natural world. She had been living more or less outdoors for nearly two years, and she felt like an alien next to other civilians. At the same time, she was removed from her friends in the division, from relationships built on daily contact under often terrifying conditions. “Those friendships are totally unique and cannot be understood in civilian life,” she said. Her friends were not just the other women drivers, but also the division soldiers. “We represented their family. They had no mothers or sisters around, they had us, Crapette and me,” she said. “We went through the same difficulties, we took the same risks. And we took away with us those friendships.”
Jacotte worked at the Defense Ministry for eight months, and then transferred to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which eventually was assigned to oversee Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe. She spent her career there, and rose through the ranks to become secretary to the secretary general. She never married, and neither did her two sisters. She lived with her youngest sister Yvonne, and after Yvonne died, her sister Suzanne moved in with her. In 2005, at the age of ninety-five, Jacotte’s health was fragile, and her hearing and vision were fading, but her mind remained as acutely sharp as ever. And she could still do a fine imitation of the sound of an incoming mortar. Whisssstle, thwack!
* * *
Danièle Heintz, after recovering from bronchitis, was sent to the First French Army’s medical group in Germany in May 1945. There she met her future husband, Jacques Clément, a biologist working as an army pharmacist. They were married in 1952, and went on to have three sons. After returning to France, Danièle earned a degree in nursing, and then worked with her husband in a laboratory. She also studied for and received a law degree, and continued on to doctoral work in law, but did not finish the program. She combined her knowledge in law and medicine by working with biological laboratories, helping them sort out the new postwar rules for analysis and security. She said that the transition to civilian life would have been difficult without her studies to focus on.
Danièle also said she felt that her six months’ tour of combat, from the Battle of Caen to the Colmar Pocket, had strengthened her character. “We had to confront fear and exceptional circumstances. That certainly gives a firmness of character and a toughness that one wouldn’t have had, otherwise,” she said. “It is the kind of experience that if you can do it without falling down, it gives you a resilient character.”
At the time, Danièle did not feel her individual existence was of overriding importance. And like many of her generation, she felt her national identity deeply. “Life has no price, no value, without freedom,” she said. “It was all the same to me if I died. There was a spirit in that era that does not exist today.” Young people have told her she was lucky to have lived during those years, to have experienced the passion and sacrifice of World War II. She responds that they must find their own luck, build their own adventures. She donated her uniform to the World War II Memorial at Caen, where it is displayed with those of British paratroopers and U.S. infantrymen, and titled simply “Uniform of a Rochambelle.”
* * *
Marie-Thérèse Pezet also left the Rochambelles and went home to Paris to try to return to her normal life. She had been working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1938 and 1939, and had taken an extended leave of absence when the Vichy government was installed. When she reported back to the ministry’s personnel department in January 1946, the personnel director was pleased to inform her that she had just missed the deadline for recouping prewar posts. She told him she had been in the army. “He told me no one had forced me to join,” she said. The personnel director had worked under the Vichy regime, and petty revenge was all that was left him. The war was still going on, on certain levels.
Marie-Thérèse joined the Finance Ministry instead, and then, in the ever-shifting sands of the Fourth Republic, worked for various government ministers, finishing her career at the Labor Ministry as chief of staff to the minister. In 1948, she was sent to a meeting at Colmar for the Ministry of Health. General Koenig was there, and placed her at his right to review a military parade of Second Division veterans. Upon learning that she had the citation for the Croix de Guerre, but not the actual medal, he sent for one and pinned it on her himself.
The local prefect noted that if she was with the Leclerc division in the war, then she had been in Alsace. “I said, like all Leclerc’s soldiers, I left part of my heart in Alsace,” she said. He asked if there was anywhere she would like to visit in the area, and she remembered Ostheim, a village she had driven through many times during the battle for Grussenheim, and had used the same three landmarks to find her way: a church steeple that had been bombed and was half falling off, a tall chimney with a stork’s nest, and the body of a dead German in a neighboring field. The prefect took her to Ostheim, and as they rounded the corner, she saw the chimney with the stork’s next, and the church steeple being rebuilt, and she suddenly began to cry. The emotion of those intense days only came to the surface long after the fact.
In 1950, Marie-Thérèse married Ivan Tarkoy, a Hungarian diplomat. He had arrived in Paris in 1946 and did not return to his homeland. They managed to get his parents out of Hungary after five years and they also came to Paris and lived with them. They had no children.
One afternoon, Marie-Thérèse was at the Second Division Association House, a restaurant and club for veterans, when a nurse called her over to a table where a group of veterans were sitting. The nurse asked her to speak to one of the veterans. He had been accosting every Rochambelle he met, looking for the one who saved his life. Marie-Thérèse approached the table, facing the soldier in question, and he described how and where he had been wounded. She realized he was the one they had taken to Lunéville against orders, the soldier hemorrhaging so badly they were sure he had died. She was very pleased that he was alive, though she could see that he had lost both arms. He was delighted to find her, thanked her for saving his life, and asked if she would give him a kiss. She came around the table toward him, and as she leaned over, saw that he was sitting in a round buoy-type cushion to hold him up in the wheelchair, as he had no legs. “I almost fainted,” she said. “I said to myself, what have I done? Maybe I should have let him die. We disobeyed orders, and who is punished, but him! He was only twenty.” The young man seemed happy just to be alive, even in his reduced state. It took her a long time to stop feeling sick at heart over him, and to let go of the guilt. Her job had been to drive an ambulance, not to make judgments on life or death. And she had done her job well enough to earn three citations for bravery, as well as the Military Medal, the Croix de Guerre with palm added for extra valor, and membership in the Legion of Honor.
* * *
Christiane Petit also left the Rochambelles, and worked in social services for veterans for about a year before she married an ex - army officer in 1946. They had three children in four years, and then separated. Christiane and the children moved to the south of France to her parents’ home, and she worked at a series of jobs, including that of librarian. With her children grown and her parents gone, she moved back to Paris in the 1960s, and Marie-Thérèse helped her get a job as librarian at the Labor Ministry.
Of her time as a Rochambelle, Christiane kept her Croix de Guerre with palm, her Military Medal, and her pair of brown leather, lace-up army boots. She received the Legion of Honor medal from President François Mitterand at the 1995 ceremony of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, the only woman among seven veterans.
“I don’t regret anything. It was a marvelous time, it brought me many things,” she said. “I prayed a lot for France, and Providence put me on that path. With the things I did with the Second Division, I saw the sign of God. I have always been guided by God.” Faith was Christiane’s support during the war and has remained so afterward. Faith, along with work, marriage and children, helped her make the transition to civilian life.
* * *
Having a baby also helped Raymonde Brindjonc, who eventually became a mother of three. After the war, she followed her husband around army postings in North Africa, and worked as a secretary for an oil company before returning to France in 1962. She divorced in 1964 and reclaimed her maiden name, Jeanmougin. At a Second Division reunion in Strasbourg, she encountered Rosette Trinquet, now Peschaud, and her husband Philippe, who owned a petroleum transport company. The company offered her a job, and she kept it for twenty years. After retiring, she volunteered to work at the veterans’ association headquarters, the Maison de la 2e DB, serving as secretary general since 2003. The veterans’ association has been downsized over the years, from a mansion on Rue Grenelle to a two-story building on the Rue de Miromesnil, and most recently to a small office at the Jardin Atlantique, atop the Montparnasse train station. The circle of surviving veterans has been shrinking along with their office space.
Raymonde said that having a baby brought her focus back to the day-to-day existence of civilian life, and that without her role as a mother, she would have found the transition difficult. Among the characteristics she took from her experience as a Rochambelle was a new assertiveness and willingness to take risks. “It allowed me to go full speed ahead. Even if I didn’t know what I was doing, I knew I would get by. Maybe I had a little of that in me already, because I signed up [for the division],” she said. “You have to take chances in life.”
* * *
Zizon Sicco decided not to go on to Indochina because she missed her family. She wanted to go home to Morocco, to her parents. But while waiting for an official discharge from the Army, she was sent to work at the General Staff headquarters in Paris. The Rochambeau Group was officially dissolved in September 1945, but some of its members still were not discharged from the Army.
One day, elegant in her fur coat, Zizon went with two friends to an Army demobilization office in Rambouillet and stood in a long line of men with discharge papers ready to be signed. She and her friends finally arrived in front of a desk where a gaunt young man sat, his clothes too large, one of his hands still and gloved. Zizon asked what happened to him. He said he’d been hit by machine gun fire in both arms and his heart. He had had a lot of nerve damage, among other injuries, and had spent a year in the hospital. One of her friends asked where he’d been wounded, and he said near Badonviller, a village called Fenneviller. The name clicked in Zizon’s head, bringing an image of a dying soldier and a doctor telling her she had wasted her time in bringing him to the treatment center. “You didn’t die!” she exclaimed.1 It was the soldier who said that he would never hold the hand of another woman, and he made his claim true by marrying her within the year. Zizon stayed in France after all and became a municipal councilor for the town of Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, and then assistant to the mayor. She wrote her memoirs on the Ile d’Yeu during the summer of 1956, and her husband, Jacques Bervialle, had them published after she died in 1974. Toto wrote the preface, referring to Zizon as “that intrepid little silhouette.”
* * *
Like Raymonde, Anne Hastings also declined service in Indochina and instead followed her husband in his work abroad, first to England and then to Saudi Arabia. They had three children, and she was happy to focus on them after the war. She said she didn’t think that the war changed her much, but added that her daughters have reminded her that her personal standard for what was a thrill was pretty high.
The Hastings eventually returned to the Cambridge, Massachusetts area and Anne began working with the Harvard University archaeology department, going on digs and writing about the discoveries. She didn’t return to her graduate studies after the war because “my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. She stopped going on excavations when she was about seventy, and her husband fell ill. They moved to Washington, D.C. to be close to one of their daughters, and her husband died in 1999.
Although her war experience was positive, Anne remained unenthusiastic about women in the military. “I was glad we were there, and Leclerc was very nice. We did all right, but I still don’t like the idea of women being in the war,” she said. “I don’t think we did any damage. But I still think it’s a little bit complicated to insert women into active combat units. Of course there were people losing their hearts to each other all the time.”
* * *
Losing their hearts, and committing their lives. The postwar Second Division magazine, Caravane, ran an article in January 1949 poking fun at the division as matchmaker. “The Second Division is known all over the world for its qualities and performances that it would be too immodest to list here. But did you know that it also has been a quite brilliant matrimonial agency?” The article went on to list twenty Rochambelle marriages, noting that it was not counting the couples who were already married when they joined the division:2
1/ You Courou-Mangin m. Jacques Guerin
2/ Arlette Hautefeuille m. Georges Ratard
3/ Nicole Mangini m. Michel Carage
4/ Michelle “Plumeau” Mirande m. Jean de Rogaisky
5/ Hélène Langé m. Michel Musnier
6/ Michette de Steinheil m. Alain Rodel
7/ Florence Conrad m. Paul Lannusse
8/ Liliane Walter m. Henri Uzan
9/ Anne-Marie Davion m. Jacques Branet
10/ Zizon Sicco m. Jacques Bervialle
Ten marriages resulted from the European campaign. Those who continued on to Indochina carried on the trend. They were:
1/ Edith Schaller m. Lionel Vézy
2/ Jacqueline Lambert de Guise m. Maurice Sarazac
3/ Geneviève Vaudoyer m. Edmund Grail
4/ Yvonne Negre m. Lucien Berne
5/ Sabine de Saint Martin m. François Sanguinetti
6/ Rosette Trinquet m. Philippe Peschaud
7/ Amicie Berne m. Jean Barnaud
8/ Lucette Brochot m. Zonk Brezina
9/ Ghislaine Bechmann m. Alfred Bergamin
10/ Suzanne Torrès m. Jacques Massu
* * *
Anne-Marie and Jacques Branet were married in July 1946, three months after her divorce became final. His family became reconciled to the marriage, despite their misgivings. They adopted two children, and their daughter, Marie-Pierre Branet, said in an interview that the Rochambelles were like surrogate aunts to her while growing up. Edith and her daughter, and Michette and her daughter would join Anne-Marie and Marie-Pierre for ski trips in the Alps in winter, and vacations at the Branet’s country house in Savoie in the summer. “They were very close and they all loved life,” Marie-Pierre said. “I don’t know if it was because they had lived through some very tough times. They didn’t talk about that, they talked about the good times they had.”
Jacques stayed in the army and rose to the rank of general. He died in 1969, and then Anne-Marie died in 1984. It took Marie-Pierre twenty years to finally clean out her clothes and things from their house in Savoie. “I miss them every day,” she said.
* * *
Rosette went on to Indochina, where she met her husband, Philippe Peschaud. They were married in Rabat in April 1947. Leclerc served as best man at their wedding, and wrote a dedication in a book on the history of the division: “To the cadet Rosette Trinquet, who, after having taken part splendidly in all the operations of the 2e DB in France and in Indochina, wanted to conserve the spirit … in choosing a husband!” Rosette said that she had developed such strong arms from driving ambulances that when the seamstress was pinning the sleeves on her wedding gown, she inadvertently flexed her muscle and popped all the pins out.
Seven months later Leclerc was in Algeria, posted to his beloved North Africa again. A plane ride, a sandstorm and a mountain brought his life to an abrupt end. He had already said goodbye to the Second Division, when he left its command at Fontainebleau, on June 22, 1945: “I leave you, but I do not leave behind our division insignia. I will keep it: it will be my finest decoration. I ask you, you also, to keep it. When you find your energy flagging, remind yourselves of Koufra, Alençon, Paris, and Strasbourg. Stay with your comrades, find your leaders, and continue to spread through the country the patriotism which has been our strength.” The nation, as well as the division, wept. Leclerc was forty-five years old. Patton preceded him in death, killed in a car accident in Germany in 1945. They were two of a kind, Patton and Leclerc, and neither of them made it to the old soldier fade. If there is an afterlife for stubborn and cantankerous warhorses, they are arguing still.
When the French pulled out of Indochina, the Peschauds returned to Paris. Philippe left the Army and founded his oil transport company. Rosette, after all the years of adventure, was suddenly stranded at home, a wife but not yet a mother, and spent four difficult years trying to find a new footing. Remembering those days of long nothingness wiped the smile off her face. “That was hard,” she said. Then came two children, and she got involved in organizing the postwar division’s associations and especially the Fondation Maréchal Leclerc de Hauteclocque, formed in 1974, serving as its vice president since 1996. The foundation helped set up a museum about the Second Division and the Resistance, as well as a research documentation center, and continues to organize seminars and award prizes. For years, the Rochambelles directed an annual charity sale to benefit veterans’ services and a scholarship fund, giving it up only in 2004 when it simply became too much for them to handle. Rosette also has written several articles for veterans’ publications and has spoken regularly at historical forums about the Rochambelles, keeping the group’s reputation alive and polished.
She noted that a group of army ambulance drivers was formed in 1982 and named itself the Rochambeau Group, after the World War II originals, making the Rochambelles the first women’s unit to begin a tradition in the French Army. Three of the new Rochambelles served in the Balkans in the 1990s. Rosette said she believed Suzanne Torrès and Florence Conrad would have been proud to see their project continue in service.
* * *
Toto and Jacques Massu were married in Paris in 1948. After returning from Indochina to France, Toto also worked on the postwar organizations, heading the veterans’ association for a year, before following Massu to various army postings abroad. She and Massu had a daughter, and asked Florence Conrad to be her godmother. Conrad, meanwhile, had married Colonel Paul Lannusse and bought a small chateau at Rouziers-de-Touraine in the Loire Valley. She died there on July 4, 1966, at the age of eighty, and was buried in her Rochambelle uniform with full military honors. For all their shared experiences, Conrad and Toto never had an easy friendship. Conrad’s demands and Toto’s temper brought conflict too quickly to the fore. Still, Toto wrote a laudatory obituary in the veterans’ magazine when Conrad died.
“When I met Florence Conrad in New York in 1945 [sic], she already had the glow, in many American circles and above all in the French community, of a veritable legend, a legend that, if one looks at the sources, did not surpass the reality,” Toto wrote. “I am certain that tomorrow and long after, as long as one of our ‘young ones’ evokes the great moments of her life, Florence Conrad will dominate the scenario with her unforgettable personality.”3 The young ladies have grown old, and Toto was right: stories about Florence Conrad are still being told.
In 1969, Toto published her memoir, entitled Quand j’étais Rochambelle (When I was a Rochambelle), the title taken from the song the women used to make up as they went along while peeling vegetables in that desert tent many years before. Toto died in November 1977, and her daughter a year later, both of them struck by different forms of cancer. Massu, retired from the army at the rank of general, remarried and settled in rural village south of Paris. He said in an interview in 2000 that the Rochambelles had earned the devotion of the entire division. “No one ever saw an ambulance driver crack. They were very courageous to the end,” he said. “Anyone who had any doubts was quickly reassured.” Massu died in October 2002.
Of the fifty-one women who served in the Rochambeau Group in Europe, thirty-six left the group in the summer of 1945, and fifteen went on to Indochina (four new recruits served in Indochina only). In the European campaign, one Rochambelle was killed (Leonora Lindsley), one disappeared (Micheline Grimprel), and six were wounded (Polly Wordsmith, Edith Schaller, Marianne Glaser, Tony Rostand, Lucie Deplancke, and Marie-Thérèse Pezet). Only Polly’s injuries were serious enough to end her career as an ambulance driver; the others bandaged themselves up and kept on going.
* * *
Among those who went to Indochina, Janine Bocquentin began training as a paratrooper in order to continue as a nurse with her unit there, but when it came time to jump, the army refused to allow women to participate. She went to the Scouts de France, who helped her train, but again, when it came time to jump, the Scouts’ insurance company said it had to follow the army’s regulations. She and seven other women went to air circuses and exhibitions, and found instructors willing to let them jump without insurance. They got their number of jumps to qualify, and returned to Indochina as paratroopers, working for two months there until the military command discovered that there were women in the unit. Janine was immediately reassigned to a hospital in Saigon. There she met her husband, a Second Division veteran working as a civilian engineer. They were married in 1949 and started on a family that would eventually include eight children. They returned to France from Indochina in 1957.
Janine, a devout Catholic, became involved in helping displaced Algerians after the war for independence there sent many thousands fleeing to metropolitan France in the early 1960s. If she had not been a Rochambelle, she said, she would have gone to Africa as a missionary nurse. She believed that the war shaped her destiny by putting her in a position to help the Algerians in France. “The war allowed me to reach my dreams,” she said.
* * *
Edith also went on to Indochina. There, in 1946, she married Lionel Vézy, a Spahi she had met in France, with Leclerc and Toto as witnesses. Edith served as director of the Second Division’s convalescence center in Saigon for a year, caring for a ward of sixty to seventy soldiers at a time. Later she joined her husband on a rubber plantation in Cambodia, where they spent three years. They adopted a daughter in France and then moved to the Ivory Coast to run another plantation. Her husband died in 1995.
Edith published her memoir, “Gargamelle,” mon ambulance guerrière 2e DB (“Gargamelle,” my warrior ambulance of the Second Armored Division), in 1994, because she wanted to record some of the lighter moments of the war and not dwell on the pain and suffering. In the book, she outlined many of Lucie’s and her escapades, and noted with pride that she received five citations for bravery and five punishments for disobedience. She also received the Croix de Guerre with palm, the Military Medal, and is an officer in the Legion of Honor. At the age of ninety-five, she was working as a volunteer twice a week in the Documentation Center of the Memorial de Maréchal Leclerc de Hauteclocque. Age neither slowed her step nor softened her sass: Edith remained incorrigible through the years.
Did being a Rochambelle change her? She said it cemented her national identity. As a native of Colmar, she was under German rule as a child, then French as a teenager and young adult, only to watch Alsace become German again in 1939. “I became very French and very patriotic,” she said.
* * *
Georges Ratard came to get Arlette in Paris after the liberation of Strasbourg in December 1944, and took her to his mother’s house in Brittany, leaving her with his mother and grandmother, both of whom were convinced that he had married her because she was pregnant. “That annoyed me,” she said. The baby (a boy indeed) was born in May, and Georges was posted to Alençon after the war ended. They lived in a wing of a chateau the army had requisitioned, a building with lovely grounds but neither heat nor running water. They took turns washing the baby’s diapers in a brook, trading off when their fingers froze up.
Georges went to work for NATO, they had two more sons, and then he retired in 1967 and began teaching Latin in a high school in Les Sables d’Olonne, an Atlantic coast resort town where Arlette had found an apartment. They built their own house on a sand dune, and watched development spring up around them. By the end of the century, there were thirty or so division veterans living in the area and meeting for lunch once a month. Having shared the experience of war was the foundation of solid friendship, Arlette said. “We have good memories, of camaraderie, of having had the courage to do it,” she said. “War isn’t pretty, when you see the burned-out tanks, the swollen animals in the fields. If I saw it today it would make me sick. But at the time, we didn’t think about it.” She believed the soldiers were pleased to have women taking care of them if they were suffering or in pain. “They all said the women were more like their mothers, for consoling them, for taking care of them, it’s better than a man,” she said. “Picked up by a Rochambelle, you had a more maternal hand.”
Into her eighties, Arlette traveled every year to visit her youngest son in Brazil, where he ran a small hotel in a coastal village, and bodysurf in the warm south Atlantic waters. She also stayed close to Rosette, who regularly invited several of her old comrades to her vacation home in Corsica, and to Lucie, who came to see her and Georges often at Sables d’Olonne. She frequently found little notes Lucie wrote in books she gave her, all to “Marlette,” short for Mon Arlette. “Lucie was the definition of joy. She was radiant,” Arlette said. “I miss her the most.”
Lucie died in August 1985. The decade of the 1980s took Denise Colin (1980), Marie-Anne Duvernet (1985), Crapette Demay (1987) and Suzanne Evrard (1988) as well. ‘You’ Guerin died in 2000 and Tony Rostand followed in 2001. As of March 2006, there were sixteen surviving Rochambelles who served in the European campaign, some of them ill, others enjoying good health. The youngest of them was eighty-two, the eldest ninety-five. Each of them had received the Military Medal, an honor reserved for soldiers and not for officers, and most of them had won the Croix de Guerre, with palms added for extra valor. They kept their medals wrapped in tissue paper and tucked away in desk drawers, along with fading photographs and occasional souvenirs of the war.
* * *
France hurried to remember its heroes of the war, and nearly every town or city has an Avenue du Général Leclerc. Two towns have seen fit to honor the Rochambelles. Vendôme, 200 kilometers southwest of Paris and birthplace of the revolutionary era Comte de Rochambeau, named a major traffic circle Carrefour des Rochambelles in May 1984. Then in September 2002, Argentan, the Normandy town that slipped through the division’s fingers back into German hands and then finally was liberated by the Americans in August 1944, honored the women with a Square des Rochambelles. Assistant Mayor Marie-Joseph Pierre said that town officials in Argentan thought the Rochambelles’ story was fascinating and wanted to do something for them. The officials found a square near the entrance of town that would bear their name, and even if it becomes the inevitable traffic circle in a few years, it will be called the Rond Point des Rochambelles. The town also put up a plaque honoring the memory of Micheline Grimprel, who disappeared forever on the road to Argentan. Edith and Rosette drove out from Paris for the dedication ceremony.
Along the coast of Normandy, officials have organized a Marathon for Liberty around the annual D-Day anniversary celebrations, and in 2001, began a women’s race called the Rochambelle. A thousand women ran its 8.6 kilometers in 2004, launched by a starter gun fired by Edith. (Finally, in Normandy, she got to shoot back.)
The sixtieth anniversary of the war was commemorated in 2004 and 2005, the last big celebration for many of the veterans. Six Rochambelles participated in the ceremony on August 25, 2004, the anniversary of the liberation of Paris, where Rosette was promoted to Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit for her work with the Leclerc Foundation. French President Jacques Chirac pinned the Grand Croix on her chest, but she moved it to her lower jacket pocket. There wasn’t room for it among the other medals she won for her work during the war. A chill wind swept across the Place de la Concorde that morning, but the veterans—both men and women—stood as straight as they had sixty years before, steeped in the pride and honor of having been there when it counted. The Rochambelles had opened the door to women as integrated members of an army and not simply as auxiliaries, set apart and removed from possible danger. They had worked at the front, under the worst of conditions and through the deadliest of wars. They did so despite initial opposition and hostility, and they earned the admiration and respect of their fellow soldiers. The women also found out about themselves, about how far they could reach and how tall they could stand. The personal limits and social roles they had been born into were stretched out of all imagination.
The passage of time has only heightened their achievements. Today the Rochambelles’ youth has been confided to history and their beauty rests in fragile bones, but their hearts remain those of the spirited young women who drove off, so long ago, to help free their country.