Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [34]
No one woke. There was of course only one thing to do. We went to the garage and siphoned off a few liters of juice from the Embassy cars which were standing there. We comforted ourselves with the excuse that had Bullitt been there he would have given us all the petrol we needed. Afterwards, in Bordeaux, we met some of the American Embassy lads who told us that the theft of petrol had made the junior members of the staff very angry … Junior members of an embassy are apt to take themselves more seriously than their bosses.
Candé offered better hospitality to Peter Muir, an American First World War ambulance driver who had recently returned to France as a medical officer with the American Field Service. When a German battalion at the front captured the Lawrenceville and University of Virginia graduate, he and another driver convinced the Germans they were physicians. Taken to Paris, they escaped, begged some civilian clothes and bought a car. On the drive west in search of their missing medical unit, they stopped at Candé.
There were quite a few people gathered in the magnificent salon for cocktails. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bedaux, were there and could not have received us more graciously. The others were embassy attachés and their wives, and two or three refugees. It was a grand feeling to stand about, drinking cold Martinis and chatting in one’s own language among friends and seemingly far away from the war and the Huns. There was only one reminder of the war, and that could be seen through the window down in the valley to the southwest. It was a brown spot covering about five hundred acres of forest, and was an eye-sore. A gunpowder factory had been built there, well hidden by the trees, and the French had blown it up before the arrival of the enemy. Mr. Bedaux told me that he had thought the explosion would cause the Chateau to tumble in ruins, but though it had trembled slightly it had withstood the shock.
Bedaux neglected to add that the explosion from the Ripault factory had killed one of his horses, damaged the ceiling in an art deco bathroom and shattered several windows. The morning after Muir’s arrival at Candé, he was unable to start his car. An American diplomat drove him to the nearest highway to hitch a ride. Believing his ambulance team had gone to Bordeaux after his capture, the German-speaking Muir accepted lifts from Wehrmacht soldiers heading that way. He finally found his American comrades in Biarritz and escaped with them over the border to Spain.
Arriving in New York on 18 July aboard the SS Manhattan with about seven hundred other Americans, Peter Muir told the New York Times that he had seen both sides in the war and was convinced that ‘we had better start thinking about the German Army; it is terrific, marvelous, with perfect efficiency’. In War without Music, a memoir he wrote and published a few months later, he warned his countrymen, ‘It was then, and is now, my firm conviction that the Madman of Munich is out to dominate the world, and if England does not stop him, America must.’
The Manhattan had also carried a contingent of American First World War veterans of the French army. One of them, Eugene Bullard, was still recovering from the injuries he suffered at Le Mans and recalled his welcome home: ‘On our arrival we were met by Jack E. Specter, then a representative of American Legion Post No. 1, Paris, of which I was a member in good standing. Specter announced that he had arranged hotel reservations for our group of refugee legionnaires. To me, the only Negro, he added, “Bullard, I haven’t got any reservation for you. I didn’t know you were in the group.”’ After