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By Root 2493 0

French tutor, ‘I was given food packages, a few good bottles, and I stuffed it all in my pockets. I really didn’t know what to do with it all.’ He was driven to a police station, where, ‘I ran into friends. We all had tags hung around our necks. They made me sign my name, and then we were shipped to the Gare du Nord, where I had the good fortune to come across a worker who had been one of my patients.’ The worker would have been one of the SNCF employees on Dr Carrel’s research and treatment programme. ‘He was good enough to tell Toquette where I was.’ The internees’ next stop was the camp for British men at Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris. It was lunchtime, ‘and the English were getting aid packages from the King and Queen. So we had an hour and a half lunch that was better than we had at the hospital and at home. I also bought a pair of suspenders, the kind I never found in the Paris shops. And a reamer to clean out my pipe.’ The men were taken by train to Compiègne. Clemence Bock recorded Jackson’s words: ‘That evening we were at Compiègne, the food was far inferior to the Saint Denis camp, but friends surrounded me and they gave me a small room with a small rug. Nearby was a camp where Jews were held.’

Some of the other internees were sons of American doughboys, Teddies, who had abandoned their mothers when they went home in 1918. Although legally American, many spoke no English and few had visited the United States. Some chose American citizenship over French solely to avoid French military conscription. They had little in common with the American-born captives, and there was occasional hostility between the two groups.

Sumner met Americans he knew. Some had been his patients at the hospital. One was the architect who designed the American Hospital’s Memorial Building, Charles Knight. Another was the organist of the American Cathedral, Lawrence K. Whipp. Whipp had been in the camp, where he gave occasional organ concerts, since the first round-up in January. In another barracks were Charles Bedaux and his son, Charles Emile.

While Dr Jackson had been ready with his baggage for internment, the 5 a.m. knock on the door of his Ritz Hotel suite came as a shock to Charles Bedaux. Bedaux, who usually slept with the aid of sleeping pills, opened his door to Gestapo officers who informed him he was under arrest. He produced documents, including a cadre de mission issued by Pierre Laval on 25 August, to show that he was directing a German-approved project in French Africa. They left him and Fern to sleep. Less than an hour later, more Germans arrived with an order to take Mrs Bedaux. Again, Charles brought out the papers to prove that he was in favour with high-ranking German officials. Again, the Gestapo withdrew.

Instead of going back to sleep, Bedaux drove across the Seine to the Hôtel Lutetia to confer with friendly Wehrmacht officers. They knew of no order for his arrest, but they promised to make inquiries. Bedaux returned to the Ritz to await word. Later, the officers arrived to tell him that, because all Americans were being interned, they could not help him. The Gestapo took Bedaux and his son to a German police station near the avenue Foch and locked them into the lavatory along with fifteen other American men. The degradation of confinement in a police lavatory worried Bedaux less than what might be happening to Fern. The Germans had taken her as well, and he did not know where she was. He waited with his son and countrymen all day in the lavatory, until at nightfall a bus transported them to the camp for British internees at Saint-Denis. The French driver of the bus, Charles Junior recalled, thoughtfully drove a long route via Paris’s more beautiful monuments. The driver told young Bedaux he wanted them to have a last look at the city.

The next day, the Americans at Saint-Denis were put on a train to Compiègne, where Charles and his son were strip-searched and given a medical examination. Bedaux father and son settled into Barracks 13, either for the duration of hostilities or until Charles’s