Page 36 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)

DR. JEAN RENé bréMAUD felt more at home in Saigon than he did in Paris, perhaps because he had spent more than a quarter of his life in Southeast Asia. Paris also held a disproportionate number of unpleasant memories that served to remind him of why he seldom returned to the country of his birth.

The next years were dark for all Parisians.

Food rationing along with strict regulations and curfews were mandated for French citizens while German soldiers treated themselves to the finest cuisine, wine, and entertainment that Paris had to offer.

Early on, a fellow doctor had been arrested while working in the hospital.

The SS officers who marched that day through the halls of H?tel-Dieu, a public hospital on the parvis of Notre-Dame, had not even let him finish his consult.

Someone had informed on him. He and his family were deported east. Brémaud never saw or heard from them again. They were Jews.

His moral and ethical obligations as defined by the Greek physician Hippocrates to treat all in need of care superseded the patriotic draw to actively resist the Nazis.

Instead, Dr. Brémaud resisted by using more covert measures.

He walked a fine line, treating German soldiers and French citizens alike while secretly supporting the Resistance.

He cared for wounded fighters in his home and passed them information that assisted in their escape to Allied countries.

His status as a physician gave him the freedom to move between the two worlds all the while knowing that exposure of his double life could end in imprisonment, deportation east, or summary execution.

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 for collaboration 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 emblazoned with 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 the épuration 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 H?tel 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 the cause.

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.