Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [30]
The ‘imperturbable’ Monsieur Auzello asked what he could do for them. Hemingway and Bruce glanced back at the mob behind them for a rough head-count and answered that they would like fifty martini cocktails. The martinis ‘were not very good, as the bartender had disappeared,’ Bruce recorded in his diary, ‘but they were followed by a superb dinner’.
For once in history, soldiers seem to have had a better time that night than their officers. What Simone de Beauvoir described as a ‘débauche de fraternité’ during the day became a débauche tout court after dark. Few soldiers were to sleep alone that night.
Major Massu, on returning from the dinner at the Invalides to his battalion camped around the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, wrote later that he preferred to draw a veil over what he found there. In fact so widespread was the lovemaking that a Catholic group began distributing hastily run-off tracts addressed to the young women of Paris: ‘In the gaiety of the Liberation do not throw away your innocence. Think of your future family.’
Not everybody, however, was out on the streets to savour a new era of freedom. Through an open widow, Pastor Boegner saw a neighbour, an old lady, sitting at her table playing patience, just as she did every evening.
5
Liberated Paris
Paris on the morning after the fighting had a strange air of calm. For those who went out early on a tour of inspection – mainly the older generation, since the young were sleeping off the excesses of the night before, as well as the accumulated fatigue of the last week – the traces of fighting amply testified to the reality of events.
During the battle for the Hotel Meurice, some of the huge columns had been shot down from the great façade of the Ministry of Marine on the north side of the Place de la Concorde. In the expanse of the Concorde, even the burnt-out tanks looked small. Just beyond, in the Tuileries gardens, the carbonized hulk of a Tiger tank was still smoking.
Across the river, outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, yet another scorched carcass of a tank – this time a Sherman of the 2e DB – had written on its side in chalk: ‘Ici sont morts trois soldats français.’ Flowers had already been laid on its blackened hulk. Other flowers soon appeared on street corners or outside portes-cochères where victims had failed to reach safety. Passers-by often paused, then stepped round them carefully as in a cemetery. They were reminded of all those who had not lived to see Paris free again.*
Many other areas had also suffered in the fighting – the Palais du Luxembourg and its surroundings, the Champ de Mars, the Palais Bourbon, the Île de la Cité and the Place de la République. But, as General Koenig observed, they were incredibly lucky that the destruction of monuments had been so limited. The Grand Palais, that beached whale of the belle époque, was reduced to little more than a skeleton, but all the other major buildings could be repaired.
In the cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, glass with starred holes from bullets was left unreplaced for reasons of pride as well as economy. Shop windows broken in the fighting had been quickly boarded up, and yet people were already beginning to remove the latticework of sticky tape from their own windows in the belief that the threat of bomb-blast had disappeared, though the Germans were still within artillery range out at Le Bourget.
Most people, certainly the liberators of the day before, were light-headed either from lovemaking or the drinking of relentless toasts. David Bruce recorded that it had been impossible to refuse the bottles thrust at them, which had been hoarded almost religiously for the moment of liberation. ‘The combination was enough to wreck one’s constitution,’ he wrote. ‘In the course of the afternoon, we had