Page 73 of Cry Havoc
Even with strict rationing, not all Parisians went hungry. There were French women who ate well during the occupation. It was not that they slept with German soldiers that angered their fellow countrymen. Rather it was the sight of them as they ate in well-stocked restaurants, drinking and laughing before strolling to the theater on the arms of enemy soldiers. There were a different set of rules for those who spread their legs.
As the noose tightened around the Nazi scourge following the D-Day landings in Normandy, the nightmare visited upon Paris by the Germans was replaced by another. Brémaud was a witness to the dark side of liberation, as young women faced brutal reprisals forcollaboration horizontale.They were rounded up by the masses, their heads shaved as a mark of shame, a physical manifestation of their sins, a mark of damnation. Polite French society had given way to the more savage and carnal of human impulses. The resentment from years of seething pent-up aggression festering just beneath the surface toward those who had hiked up their skirts for food, shelter, and protection had found an outlet. While liberation produced a wave of euphoria across the nation as the Nazi occupiers were driven from French soil in August 1944, it left a new terror in its wake, a terror that became a nightmare for women who were seen as collaborators. Those known to have or were suspected of having consorted with the enemy were dragged from their homes by angry mobs and beaten, their shorn hair burned in piles in the streets. Some were stripped of their clothes or forced to wear shirts emblazonedwith the mark of the Reich. They were paraded through the city, pelted with stones, tarred, and spat upon. Swastikas were painted on their foreheads as they were forced to face a public shaming and humiliation surrounded by jeering countrymen. Some were jailed and others executed as part of theépuration sauvage.Resistance leaders’ efforts to quell the reprisals fell on deaf ears. The country wanted blood.
Dr. Brémaud did not share the thirst for retribution. He saw France for what it was—a humiliated nation, shamed by its quick defeat and forced to endure years of occupation. There was now a channel for that rage—the weakest among them. Some were prostitutes who had serviced both German and French clients, while others were young mothers whose husbands had been killed or were imprisoned in German camps. Some were just hungry. A few had found love. All were vulnerable. Hunger had been weaponized for companionship. Never mind that it was a survival mechanism; bodies exchanged for food.
Brémaud treated the cuts, bruises, and broken bones of once beautiful women who had just weeks earlier dined on luxurious meals in the Tour d’Argent and drank expensive cocktails at the Hôtel Ritz accompanied by men draped in the gray uniforms of the Reich. Their long hair was gone, leaving them with the look of prisoners from a penal colony. He recognized the hollow expression in their eyes, the result of alienation and abuse.
Newspapers printed unfounded rumors of French women who had fallen in love with German soldiers picking up rifles and targeting the Allies as snipers. This only served to spur on the reprisals. Many of these rumors were instigated by those who had only joined the Resistance in the waning days of the war when victory was all but assured. Brémaud held a special disdain for those men, and for those who now eagerly assisted in the tormenting of women to deflect attention from their own Nazi collaboration or lack of support for the Resistance. During the war, Brémaud was hard pressed to find a safe house through which to transport the wounded or convince a wealthy businessman to provide money for thecause. Upon liberation there was not a Frenchman or -woman who had not single-handedly defeated the Nazis as part of the Resistance.
Rubbish.Brémaud knew the truth, and it sickened him to his core.
He had been casting a broken arm when an orderly found him. They ran to the emergency room, but it was too late. The woman was already dead. She could not have been much older than eighteen. Though her ashen face retained her youthful beauty, her eyes were open, staring vacantly into oblivion. Her attackers had avoided her face. Their wrath had been focused on her pregnant stomach. Those who hit her had done so with bats or pipes, possibly both. They had ensured the baby inside her was dead. The expectant mother had bled out internally. Brémaud would later find out that the baby’s father was a Luftwaffe officer who fled ahead of the Allies’ advance.
While he had assisted the Resistance at great personal risk in service to his nation, his country, in the end, had turned on its own. Brémaud had no desire to witness what would happen to the children fathered by German soldiers. The French could be extremely unforgiving.
He left the hospital that day in a trance, wandering the newly liberated arrondissements of his great city. Drunk American GIs carousing in the streets and signs in English advertising free condoms stood in stark contrast to the order and discipline of the previous four years under the Reich.
By 1946, Brémaud had seen enough.
The Orient beckoned. France needed doctors in Laos and Vietnam. And so Brémaud left his beloved Ville-Lumière for French Indochina. There was an opening at the Indochinese University in Hanoi, a medical school structured along French tradition. A new life awaited, one in which he could leave the horrors of the past years behind. It was not long before he recognized he had traded one horror for another. The Germans had occupied France just as France was occupying Vietnam. The baton of oppression had been passed.
He stayed through the fall in 1954 as the French faced their final,decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The French Union had intended to draw the Viet Minh into a conventional battle to debilitate their ability to wage war. Instead, the French position was overrun after a two-month siege. The Geneva Accords were signed in July, dividing Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. Even after the fall he couldn’t bring himself to return to his native soil. Instead, he, along with hundreds of thousands of others, relocated south during the three-hundred-day grace period stipulated by the negotiators in Geneva. The border was sealed on May 18, 1955.
The medical school relocated south as well, establishing graduate programs under the Ministry of Education in Hue and Saigon. Dr. Brémaud settled in Saigon. Vietnam was home now. He began lecturing at Saigon University while starting a tuberculous clinic to deal with the disease in an area that had one of the highest incidence rates in the world. By 1956, he was well established and respected, a pillar of the community. Initially, he focused on TB prevention through the administration of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine developed by two of his countrymen at the Pasteur Institute, and through treatments, first with para-aminosalicylic acid and later with ethambutol. Over time, his clinic had gradually transitioned into a general practice.
His university lectures focused on the tuberculosis crisis but branched out into other infectious diseases so prevalent in Vietnam. The country was a hotbed of malaria, leprosy, bubonic plague, and the venereal diseases that came with widespread prostitution. The inevitable result of war was collateral damage, and innocents could die just as easily from lack of care and disease as from a bomb or bullet. As in occupied France decades earlier, civilians were the ones who paid the highest price. His goal with his university lectures was to equip his students to be ready after the fall of yet another empire occupying their homeland. When the Americans abandoned or were thrown from Vietnam, there would be a vacuum to fill.
His status as a physician and medical school lecturer resulted in invitations to parties and gatherings attended by politicians, military officers,Catholic clergy, and private sector business magnates. Through his reputation and associations, Brémaud soon became the doctor to the elite, also treating their spouses and children. Physicians by nature are inherently trustworthy, after all.
In 1958, he married into Vietnamese society. Ten years his junior, VuTiên floated amongst the upper class to which she had been born. University educated, well-read, and a magnificent hostess, she moved naturally in these circles. Brémaud loved watching her work a room. While his bedside manner tended to be more logical and direct, Vû was outgoing and extroverted, an easy warmth emanating from her inviting smile. They were married by Bishop Joseph Pham Van Thien in what was then the Church of Saigon. Built with tiles from Marseille, bricks from Toulouse, and exquisite stained glass from Chartres, their ceremony in the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon had been more than a wedding, it had been an event.
Though Brémaud shook hands and listened patiently to the generals and politicians drawn to the family of which he was now a part, he saw them as puppets, installed at the behest of the Americans. President Ngô Ðình Diêm’s policies that favored the Catholic minority over the Buddhist majority could not last. And neither could American support. Had the United States learned nothing from Dien Bien Phu? Every time he saw an American soldier stumbling out of a brothel or witnessed their drunken antics in the streets, he thought of his native France, of Paris, of liberation, and ofépuration sauvage.The American occupiers were no better than the French colonizers and no better than the Nazis that had plagued his native France. One day they too would be defeated. When the Americans left—and they would, it was only a matter of time—the Vietnamese people would be able to determine their own future, and he and his wife would be safe from any purges, having supported the cause.
Two years after they were married, under pressure from his wife, Brémaud returned to Paris for the first time since 1946. He had been honored with, and accepted, the Médaille de la Résistance for his work inFrance during the war. Not only would it bolster an already stellar reputation, VuTiên wanted to visit France with her husband. And so, in March 1960, they spent two weeks in Paris. Dr. Brémaud was awarded the medal at Hôtel-Dieu hospital on a small stage set up on the front lawn to a standing ovation. The next days were spent showing his wife the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Pantheon, Conciergerie, Musée d’Orsay, Palace of Versailles, Sainte-Chapelle, Arc de Triomphe, Musée Rodin, Grand Palais, Tuileries Garden, and of course the nearby Notre-Dame cathedral.
One morning, Brémaud rose early, kissed his wife, and exited the Grand Hotel Terminus on Saint-Lazare. He took the Pont de Neuilly route bus a few stops and then walked the two blocks to Hôtel-Dieu, admiring the grandeur of the oldest hospital in Paris. He remembered the Resistance fighters and Nazis he had treated, and the women left battered in their wake. He was standing alone, so lost in thought that he did not realize a man had approached and stopped next to him.
“The war was hard on everyone.” The man’s French was almost perfect, almost.
“It was,” Brémaud responded.
“Especially on doctors, no?”
Brémaud turned to see a young, handsome man with blond hair, hands in the pockets of his dark overcoat, looking at the hospital in which Brémaud had once worked.
“You must have been too young to remember.”
“Ah, I was,” the stranger replied.
“You are not from Paris. I can’t quite place your accent.”
“I come from further east, and I have a proposition for you.”
That had been eight years ago. In the interim, Brémaud’s social circle and influence had only grown. His wife’s cousin had risen through the ranks and was serving as President Nguyen Van Thieu’s special assistant for military and national security affairs. They dined with him and his wife at least once a week, discussing politics, policies, current events, and thestatus of the war effort. Brémaud had also been asked to do more by his Soviet handler. His marriage and access, status and reputation as a doctor, along with his private clinic, made him the perfect asset.
Dr. Brémaud always made sure his schedule was blocked for a long, leisurely lunch. He was French after all. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would finish his morning lectures at Saigon University and then meet his wife or another couple for lunch at either Caravelle or Majestic, both of which had excellent wine selections. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he would shutter the clinic and break for lunch just before noon to walk to one of a number of restaurants that dotted the Ch? L?n district.
He walked a little faster than normal today. He had another stop to make after he ate, and there were still patients to see in the afternoon. He felt the perspiration under his arms and at his temples, unsure if it came from the intense humidity or his nerves.
