—François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
On May 16, 1940, a strange sound came from the east. Robert de La Rochefoucauld was at home with his siblings when he heard it: a low buzz that grew louder by the moment until it was a persistent and menacing drone. He moved to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the family chateau, called Villeneuve, set on thirty-five acres just outside Soissons, an hour and a half northeast of Paris. On the horizon, Robert saw what he had long dreaded.
It was a fleet of aircraft, ominous and unending. The planes already shadowed Soissons’ town square, and the smaller ones now broke from the formation. These were the German Stukas, the two-seater single-engine planes with arched wings that looked to Robert as predatory as they in fact were. They dove out of the sky, the sirens underneath them whining a high-pitched wail. The sight and sound paralyzed the family, which gathered round the windows. Then the bombs dropped: indiscriminately and catastrophically, over Soissons and ever closer to the chateau. Huge plumes of dirt and sod and splintered wood shot up wherever the bombs touched down, followed by cavernous reports that were just as frightening; Robert could feel them thump against his chest. The world outside his window was suddenly loud and on fire. And amid the cacophony, he heard his mother scream: “We must go, we must go, we must go!”
World War II had come to Soissons. Though it had been declared eight months earlier, the fight had truly begun five days ago, when the Germans feinted a movement of troops in Belgium, and then broke through the Allied lines south of there, in the Ardennes, a heavily forested collection of hills in France. The Allies had thought that terrain too treacherous for a Nazi 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: