The Saboteur. Paul Kix
offensive—which is of course why the Germans had chosen it.
Three columns of German tanks stretching back for more than one hundred miles had emerged from the forest. And for the past few days, the French and Belgian soldiers who defended the line, many of them reservists, had lived a nightmare if they’d lived at all: attacked from the sky by Stukas and from the ground by ghastly panzers too numerous to be counted. In response, Britain’s Royal Air Force had sent out seventy-one bombers, but they were overwhelmed, and thirty-nine of the aircraft had not returned, the greatest rate of loss in any operation of comparable size in British aviation history. On the ground, the Germans soon raced through a hole thirty miles wide and fifteen miles deep. They did not head southwest to Paris, as the French military expected, but northwest to the English Channel, where they could cut off elite French and British soldiers stuck in Belgium and effectively take all of France.
Soissons stood in that northwestern trajectory. Robert and his six siblings rushed outside, where the scream of a Stuka dive was even more horrifying. Bombs fell on Soissons’ factories and the children ran to the family sedan, their mother, Consuelo, ushering them into the car. Consuelo told her eldest, Henri, then seventeen, one year older than Robert, to go to the castle at Châteaneuf-sur-Cher, the home of Consuelo’s mother, the Duchess of Maillé, some 230 miles south. Consuelo would stay behind; as the local head of the Red Cross, she had to oversee its response in the Aisne department. She would catch up with them later, she shouted at Henri and Robert. Her stony look told her eldest sons that there was no point in arguing. She was not about to lose her children, who ranged in age from seventeen to four, to the same fiery blitzkrieg that had perhaps already consumed her husband, Olivier, who—at fifty—was serving as a liaison officer for the RAF on the Franco-German border.
“Go!” she told Henri.
So the children set out, the bombs falling around them, largely unchecked by Allied planes. Though history would dub these days the Battle for France, France’s fleet was spread throughout its worldwide empire, with only 25 percent stationed in country and only one-quarter of that in operational formations. This left Soissons with minimal protection. The ceaseless screaming whine of a Stuka and deep reverberating echo of its bombs drove the La Rochefoucaulds to the roads in something like a mindless panic.
But the roads were almost at a standstill. The Germans bombed the train stations and many of the bridges in Soissons and the surrounding towns. The occasional Stuka strafed the flow of humanity, and the younger children in the La Rochefoucaulds’ car screamed with each report, but the gunfire always landed behind them.
As they inched out of the Nazis’ northwestern trajectory that afternoon, more and more Frenchmen joined the procession. Already cars were breaking down around them. Some families led horses or donkeys that carried whatever possessions they could gather and load. It was a surreal scene for Robert and the other La Rochefoucauld children, pressing their faces against the windows, a movement unlike any modern France had witnessed. The French reconnaissance pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry saw the exodus from the sky, and as he would later write in his book, Flight to Arras, “German bombers bearing down upon the villages squeezed out a whole people and sent it flowing down the highways like a black syrup … I can see from my plane the long swarming highways, that interminable syrup flowing endless to the horizon.”
Hours passed, the road stretched ahead, and though the occasional Stuka whined above, the La Rochefoucaulds were not harmed by them—these planes’ main concern was joining the formation heading to the Channel. News was sparse. Local officials had sometimes been the first to flee. The La Rochefoucauld children saw around them cars with mattresses tied to their roofs as protection from errant bombs. But Robert watched as those mattresses served a more natural purpose when the traffic forced people to camp on that first night, somewhere in the high plains of central France.
Makeshift shelters rose around them just off the road, and though no one heard the echo of bombs, Henri ordered his siblings to stay together as they climbed, stiff-legged, out of the car. Henri was serious and studious, the firstborn child who was also the favorite. Robert, with high cheekbones and a countenance that rounded itself into a slight pout, as if his lips were forever holding a cigarette, was the more handsome of the two, passing for something like Cary Grant’s French cousin. But he was also the wild one. He managed to attend a different boarding school nearly every year. The brothers understood that they were to watch over their younger siblings now as surrogate parents, but it was really Henri who was in charge. Robert, after all, had been the one immature enough to dangle from the parapet of the family chateau, fifty feet above the ground, or to once say shit in front of Grandmother La Rochefoucauld, for the thrill it gave his siblings.
The children gathered together, Henri and Robert, Artus and Pierre Louis, fifteen and thirteen, and their sister Yolaine, twelve. The youngest ones, Carmen and Aimery, seven and four, naturally weren’t part of their older siblings’ clique. They were not invited to play soccer with their brothers and Yolaine, and only occasionally did they swim with them in the Aisne river, which flowed around the family estate. They were already their own unit, unaware of the idiosyncrasies and dynamics of the older crew: the way Artus favored the company of his younger brother Pierre Louis to Henri and Robert’s, or the way all the boys tended to gang up on Yolaine, the lone girl, until Robert defended her, sometimes with his fists, the bad brother with the good heart.
Years later Robert would not recall how they spent that first night—on blankets that Consuelo had quickly stored into the trunk or with grass as their bedding and the night stars to comfort them. But he would remember walking among the great anxious swarm of humanity, who settled in clusters on a field that, under the moonlight, seemed to stretch to the horizon. Robert was as scared as the travelers around him. But, in the jokes the refugees told or even in their silent resolve, he felt a sense of fraternity spreading, tangible and real. He had often lived his life at a remove from this kind of experience: He was landed gentry, his lineage running through one thousand years of French history. When Robert and his family vacationed at exclusive resorts in Nice or Saint Tropez, they avoided mass transit, traveling aboard Grandmother La Rochefoucauld’s private rail car—with four sleeper cabs, a lounge and dining room. But the night air and communion of his countrymen stirred something in Robert, something similar to what his father, Olivier, had experienced twenty years earlier in the trenches of the Great War. There, among soldiers of all classes, Olivier had dropped his vestigial ties to monarchy and become, he said, a committed Republican. Tonight, looking out at the campfires and the families who laid down wherever they could, with whatever they had, Robert felt the urge to honor La France, and to defend it, even if the military couldn’t.
The children were on the road for four days. As many as eight million people fled their homes during the Battle for France, or one-fifth of the country’s population. The highways became so congested during this exodus that bicycles were the best mode of travel, as if the streets of Bombay had moved to the French countryside. Abandoning their car and walking would have been quicker for the La Rochefoucaulds, but Henri would have none of it. Thousands of parents lost track of their children during the movement south, and newspapers would fill their pages for months afterward with advertisements from families in search of the missing. The La Rochefoucaulds stayed in the car, always together, nudging ahead, taking hours just to cross the Loire River on the outskirts of southern France, on one of the few bridges the Germans hadn’t bombed.
The skies were clear of Stukas now, yet the roads remained as crowded as ever. This was a full-on panic, Robert thought, and though he wasn’t the best of students he understood its cause. It wasn’t just the invasion people saw that forced them out of their homes. It was the invasion they’d replayed for twenty years, the invasion they’d remembered.
World War I had killed 1.7 million Frenchmen, or 18 percent of those who fought, a higher proportion than any other developed country. Many battles were waged in France, and the fighting was so horrific, its damage so ubiquitous, it was as if the war had never ended. The La Rochefoucaulds’ own estate, Villeneuve, had been a battle site, captured and recaptured seventeen times, the French defending the chateau, the Germans across the Aisne river, firing. The fighting left Villeneuve in rubble, and the neighboring town of Soissons didn’t fare much better: 80 percent of it was destroyed. Even after the La Rochefoucaulds