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 rebuilt, the foundation of the estate showed the classic pockmarks of heavy shells. The soil of Villeneuve’s thirty-five acres smoldered for seven years from all the mortar rounds. Steam rose from the earth, too hot to till. Well into the 1930s, Robert would watch as a plow stopped and a farmhand dug out a buried artillery round or hand grenade.
The 1,600-year-old cathedral in Soissons, where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally went for Mass, carried the indentations of bullet and artillery fire, clustering here and boring into the edifice there, from its stone foundation to its mighty Gothic peaks. Storefronts all around them wore similar marks, while veterans like Robert’s father hobbled home after service. For Olivier, an ankle wound incurred in 1915 limited his ability to walk unassisted. His injury intruded into his pastimes: When he hunted game, he brought his wife, and Consuelo carried the gun until Olivier spotted the prey, which allowed him to momentarily ditch his cane and hoist the rifle to his shoulder. Olivier was lucky. Other veterans were so disfigured, they didn’t appear in public.
“Throughout my childhood, I heard people talk mostly about the Great War: my parents, my grandparents, my uncles,” Robert later said. But even as it remained a constant topic, Olivier seldom discussed its basic facts: his four years at the front, as an officer whose job was to watch artillery shells land on German positions and relay back whether the next round should be aimed higher or lower. Nor did Olivier discuss the more intimate details of the fighting, as other veterans did in memoirs: stepping on the “meat” of dead comrades in an offensive or the madness the trenches induced. Instead Olivier walked the halls of Villeneuve, in some sort of private and almost unceasing conversation with the ghosts of his past. He was a distant father, telling his children that they “must not cry—ever,” and finding solace in nature’s beauty. He had earned a law degree after the war, but spent Robert’s childhood as Villeneuve’s gentleman farmer. Olivier felt most at ease talking about the dahlias he planted. Consuelo, who’d lost two brothers to the trenches, was far more outspoken. She instructed her children that they were never to buy German-made goods and told her daughters they could not learn such an indelicate tongue. Even her job moored her to the past: As chair of the Aisne chapter of the Red Cross, Consuelo spent most of her time helping families whose lives had been upended by the war.
The La Rochefoucaulds were not unique: No one in France could look beyond his disfigured memories. The French military was itself so scarred that it did nothing in the face of Hitler’s mounting power. In 1936, the führer’s army reoccupied the Rhineland (the areas around the Rhine River in Belgium), in violation of World War I treaties, without a fight, even though France had one hundred divisions, and the Third Reich’s crippled army could send only three battalions to the Rhine. As Gen. Alfred Jodl, head of the German armed forces operational staff, later testified: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” But despite overwhelming numerical strength, the French did nothing, and Germany retook the Rhine. Hitler never feared France again.
German military might grew, and as a new war seemed imminent, the French kept forestalling its reality, traumatized by what they’d already endured. In 1938, the French Parliament voted 537 to 75 for the Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler portions of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the World War I veteran and novelist Jean Giono wrote that war was pointless, and if it broke out again soldiers should desert. “There is no glory in being French,” Giono wrote. “There is only one glory: To be alive.” Léon Emery, a primary school teacher, wrote a newspaper column that may as well have been a refrain for people in the late 1930s: “Rather servitude than war.”