Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [192]
The German wounded needed emergency treatment. For the first time during the occupation, the Germans requested admission to the American Hospital. ‘It is impossible for me to evacuate about forty of our wounded from the Kommandatur,’ Colonel Bernhuber said to General de Chambrun. ‘Would you be able to receive them?’ Aldebert agreed at once, and the German casualties were brought in on stretchers. Because the hospital’s rooms were full, the Germans had to be lodged in the corridors. Otherwise, the staff cared for them just as they did for the French. René de Chambrun wrote, ‘Strange spectacle that, in this corner of American earth, my father achieved a miracle: sleeping side by side were French and German soldiers, seriously ill Americans and English, bourgeois Parisians and railway workers from the suburbs who had been wounded in the bombardments of the train yards.’ The French and German soldiers were not quite side by side. General de Chambrun had taken the precaution of installing the soldiers in separate wings, Germans in the east, French in the west. It turned out to be a wise decision. While on her regular rounds, Elisabeth Comte uncovered rifles and bullets under the Germans’ stretchers and pillows. She went at once to General de Chambrun: ‘General, the Germans have arms and ammunition.’ The general informed Colonel Bernhuber, who, once again, behaved correctly. He ordered his men to turn over their arms to Otto Gresser, the hospital superintendent. Their cache included thirty grenades and 2,000 rounds of ammunition that Gresser stowed away.
Having recaptured the town hall, Germans patrolled the darkened streets of Neuilly. Apart from an occasional sniper shot at a passing Panzer, the suburb went quiet. Neuilly for the moment was pacified, but the uprising was spreading to the rest of Paris.
The Paris police, who in accord with Vichy policy had collaborated with German authority for four years, followed the example of the Neuilly résistants later that day. They suddenly declared a strike and barricaded themselves in the Prefecture of Police. That was the cue for thousands of Parisians to set up makeshift roadblocks, snipe at German troops and attack German positions. It was a dangerous gamble. Left to themselves, the résistants could not hold out long against the Wehrmacht.
Rising early again on 20 August, Clara de Chambrun noticed more changes to her ‘respectable-looking quarter’. The area around the Luxembourg Gardens had been invaded by ‘many persons of extremely rough appearance in the streets; dark-browed youths with sleeveless undershirts, a considerable portion of Algerians from the Parisian outskirts, and a large sprinkling from red Spain. They were not in the least warlike, merely camp followers and wartime profiteers to whom the strike of the Parisian police, ordered the night before, presented a favorable position for taking anything that came handy.’ She observed events from a balcony that might be struck by machine-gun fire at any moment. A German Panzer patrolling the streets suddenly found itself face to face with a woman in a scarlet skirt, who was pedalling her bicycle directly towards it. Clara had seen the woman before: ‘I recognized her as one of the communist functionaries at our neighboring branch post office and high placed in the C.G.T. [Confédération Générale du Travail]. On coming level with the tank she leaped from her wheel, fished from her very décolleté bosom a small pistol on a chain, fired two or three shots into the tires of the tank, which being solid were not damaged, then scuttled around the corner on her bike and found shelter inside the porte-cochère of number 4 rue Guynemer. ’ The woman escaped, but Clara’s house did not.
German machine gunners on the terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens reacted by spraying fire at the buildings opposite. Clara’s house took bullets from ground to roof, shattering every window