Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [31]
The Germans bombarded Orléans and set it on fire. Thanks be to God, the wind was blowing from east to west. This saved Orléans, and one of the world’s finest cathedrals.
The Germans shelled Orleans for two days, occupying Joan of Arc’s city on 17 June–when Maréchal Pétain asked Germany for an Armistice. The soldiers of the 51st fought well in retreat, although their high command had already chosen to abandon the struggle. A hundred miles south of Orleans at Le Blanc on 18 June, the regiment took heavy German artillery fire. Bullard was running across the street with a light machine gun, when a shell blast killed eleven of his comrades and injured sixteen more. Bullard was hurled against a wall, smashing vertebrae in his back. Hot shrapnel burned his forehead above the right eye.
Nursing his wounds, Bullard was told by other soldiers that Charles de Gaulle had broadcast an appeal that day from London. ‘I, General de Gaulle,’ the troops heard him say, ‘currently in London, invite the officers and the French soldiers who are located in British territory or who would come there, with their weapons or without their weapons, I invite the engineers and the special workers of armament industries who are located in British territory or who would come there, to put themselves in contact with me. Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Bullard wanted to fight on with the regiment or join de Gaulle in London, but he was in no condition to do either.
The 51st Regiment’s medical unit was in disarray, so Major Bader, as he testified later, ordered Bullard ‘to take advantage of an open route to Bordeaux, to leave my unit, and I gave him, on June 19th, 1940, a safe conduct pass’. Bordeaux was not yet occupied, and the American Hospital of Paris had established a field station on the way to Bordeaux at Angoulême. Bullard walked and hitch-hiked all day and night until he found the hospital. ‘By the time I got to Angoulême,’ Bullard wrote, ‘I was about done with pain … Wounded men were lying all over the place, on floors and everywhere. Again God was with me. The doctor on duty was an old friend, Dr. H. C. De Vaux, physician to the 170th Regiment when I was in it at Verdun.’ De Vaux bandaged him, gave him pain killers and advised him, as a wounded black American who fought for France, to leave the country before the Germans found him. With a canteen of water and ‘six boxes of sardines’ from Dr Vaux, Bullard began walking again. He slept that night on the side of a road. In the morning, a French soldier took pity on Bullard and gave him his bicycle. ‘I made such good time that I decided to bypass Bordeaux and keep on to Biarritz near the Spanish border.’
At four o’clock on the morning of Saturday, 22 June, Bullard cycled up to the American Consulate in Biarritz to apply for a passport. Other Americans were already there, waiting for the consulate to open. Bullard took a place in the queue and lay on the ground to sleep. Consul Roy McWilliams arrived early and saw each American in turn. When Bullard came in dressed as a French soldier, McWilliams said, ‘Better get out of that uniform. Forty German officers dined at my hotel last night.’ Other Americans waiting behind Bullard asked him to hurry. ‘I’m trying to save this soldier from the Germans,’ McWilliams admonished them. ‘If you can’t wait, go away.’ He asked if any of them had clothes for Bullard. One man gave him a pair of trousers and another a shirt. A little boy asked his father, ‘Daddy, can I give the nigger my beret?’
The man reprimanded his son for saying ‘nigger’, but Bullard told him, ‘Your child only repeated what he hears at home. It would be nicer if you’d teach him to say “colored man”.’
McWilliams asked to see Bullard’s passport. ‘I told him I had never had one. Before the First World War, an American could