Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [27]
FOUR
All Blood Runs Red
WHILE CLARA AND ALDEBERT WERE HEADING south to avoid the Germans, another American left Paris to find them. Eugene Bullard walked towards the front lines, lugging a knapsack of sausages, crackers, canned food and a two-volume history of the American contingent of the French air corps during the First World War, the Lafayette Escadrille. ‘I said good-bye and set out to join the 170th Regiment in holding back the enemy–at least that was what I thought,’ Bullard wrote. His march took him to Châlons, about halfway along the 100-mile trek to Épinal in the Moselle Valley, where Bullard believed the French infantry regiment was holding the Germans back. Refugees at Châlons told him the Germans had already captured Épinal. So, he walked back to Paris. At the gates of Paris, Bullard learned that another infantry regiment, the 51st, had engaged the Germans near Orleans. He trudged south to join them.
Bullard, with the heavy pack still on his back, marched 50 miles in twenty-eight hours. He stopped at Chartres, where, as he wrote, ‘I had a stroke of luck. I ran into Bob Scanlon, the black boxer and comrade from the Foreign Legion. There were two of us now, together, two friends sharing everything. I did not feel lonely anymore.’
German Stukas dive-bombed Chartres as the two Americans were leaving. ‘During the bombardments I threw myself on the ground, and I saw Bob Scanlon do the same thing about twenty feet away,’ wrote Bullard. ‘A huge shell burst about where he was, leaving a crater with the dead and wounded and bits of human bodies strewn around it. I thought Bob’s must be one of them, for he was nowhere in sight.’ Bullard, unable to find even a shred of Scanlon’s clothing, abandoned the search for his friend. Near the bomb crater, a boy with a paralysed arm screamed for his mother. The woman, Bullard wrote,
lay cut in half as if by a guillotine, her hand still clutching a piece of chicken. The crippled lad jumped up and down shrieking. He went into a convulsion as I tried to comfort him. I put my hand on his shoulder to take him with me–where, I don’t know–but the poor little thing jerked away in terror and his eyes actually crossed and uncrossed … Still crying, I pushed on in the hope of fighting the enemy that causes such horrors.
An unusual route had brought Eugene Jacques Bullard from his birth-place, Columbus, Georgia, in 1895 to the Battle of France in 1940. His parents were of mixed African-Creek Indian heritage, and his father had been born a slave at the beginning of the Civil War. When Eugene was 6 years old, his mother died. His father supported his six children working as a labourer. When a foreman struck him with an iron grappling hook, William Bullard made the mistake of fighting back. A white mob rode out to the family cabin that night to lynch him, but the terrified children convinced the men their father was away. The drunken racists swore to return. ‘This near lynching of his father,’ wrote one of Bullard’s biographers, Craig Lloyd, ‘was the traumatic event that led young Bullard to leave home sometime later.’
Bullard was ten years old when he ran away. At first, he travelled with a gypsy family and worked with horses. A year later, he stowed away on a tramp steamer to Hamburg. When the captain discovered the youngster on board, he gave him £5 and dropped him in Glasgow. Bullard found odd jobs and, in Manchester, became a professional boxer. A twenty-round match with Georges Forrest in 1913 brought him to Paris. After winning the decision, he stayed in Paris as a boxer and sparring partner.