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By Root 2567 0

he went into the Memorial Building of the hospital and found General de Chambrun. Without preamble, he announced, ‘I am, General, an officer of the German Army, but I am neither a Nazi nor even a German. I am an Austrian, and, since this war is nearly lost, I am ready to capitulate. But the soldier that you are will understand, I am sure, that I refuse to deliver my men and myself to a gang of snipers. I ask to meet a French officer or an American officer to offer my surrender. ’ (Clara recalled her husband telling her, ‘I asked why he did not surrender. “What? To this mob … I still have strong enough means of defense not to capitulate to such a rabble.”’) General de Chambrun promised to contact the American or French command, but he had no direct means of communication with either. He would have to go out and find them somewhere beyond the city limits of Paris. Colonel Bernhuber provided him with a laissez-passer to help him through the German checkpoints.

General de Chambrun left the hospital. His route took him past the battle in the avenue Victor Hugo towards the southwest, where the Allies were rumoured to be advancing. After crossing the German lines with Bernhuber’s laissez-passer, Aldebert found an American advance unit about twenty-five miles from Neuilly. The American colonel in charge contacted his commanding officer to ask who could accept Colonel Bernhuber’s surrender. After a short telephone call, he turned to General de Chambrun and said, ‘The French have to receive the surrender, because a French division–Leclerc’s, I believe–is going to be the first to enter the capital.’ The task now was to find Leclerc. If Aldebert did not contact him soon, the hospital would be destroyed.

General de Chambrun had dealt at the hospital with a man he knew only as ‘Monsieur Jean’, a chief in de Gaulle’s underground Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). At three o’clock, when Aldebert returned to the hospital, he got in touch with Monsieur Jean and asked him to find Leclerc. Then, he called Clara. The battle outside had not abated. ‘More wounded have been brought in,’ he told her, ‘and the cannon sounds much nearer.’ Hearing the explosions down the line, Clara commented, ‘I did not need the telephone to tell me that.’ Soon, Monsieur Jean called General de Chambrun to relay a message from Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division headquarters. Aldebert was to inform Colonel Bernhuber that Leclerc would send one or two tanks in the morning to the traffic roundabout where the boulevard Inkermann crossed the avenue Victor Hugo, a few hundred yards from the hospital. A German officer should ‘carry a white flag to confirm the surrender without conditions by Colonel Bernhuber and the troops under his command’.

Bernhuber accepted the terms, but no one had the power to stop the fighting until he surrendered in the morning. In the hospital, doctors operated all night on the battle’s most severely wounded victims and prayed they could hold out until the shooting stopped.

While battle raged outside the hospital, Clara saw a few tanks of General Jacques Leclerc’s French Second Armoured Division rolling past the rue de Vaugirard on their way to the Hôtel de Ville. Clara had known Leclerc by his real name, Philippe de Hautecloque, and as the cousin of her old friend Henry de Castries. However much Clara disliked Leclerc’s commander de Gaulle, she was relieved to see the arrival of his regular force under a professional, Saint-Cyr-trained soldier, who also happened to be, like her husband, an aristocrat. Leclerc, she believed, could control the résistants who remained, to her, so much riff-raff.

A small vanguard of Leclerc’s tanks reached the square of the Hotel de Ville during the night, and ecstatic crowds assumed Paris had been liberated. Although the Germans still controlled 85 per cent of the city, résistants who captured the radio station broadcast an appeal to the churches to ring their bells to proclaim the liberation. The Left Bank churches responded immediately. Then, at twenty-two minutes past eleven, 13-ton ‘Emmanuel’, the