In early September, the Germans were retreating north from Lyon, which was liberated on the first of the month, under heavy rearguard cover, and their resistance stiffened as they moved north-eastwards towards Belfort. The French supply lines were now becoming dangerously extended. The initial advance had been rapid, and Cézette recalls that his unit, advancing on foot, was often far ahead of the American-built GMC trucks carrying its supplies. It was now obvious to all that the French objective was Alsace and then the Rhine. By the middle of the month, French intelligence reported that two or three infantry battalions with artillery support were reinforcing their positions inside the great loop made by the Doubs river near the industrial town of Montbéliard, which guarded the approaches to Belfort. The French advance slowed, and the two armies became engaged in two months of almost static warfare, characterized mainly by sporadic exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire.
The weather deteriorated steadily, and by November the keeper of the journal de marche was complaining of intense cold and heavy snow. As he drove north from Lyon, Cézette had been unsure as to precisely what was landing on the windscreen of his jeep, and it took him some time to realize that this was the snow he had heard so much about in Martinique. He soon became all too familiar with it. To make matters worse, the snow was alternating with freezing rain that thawed the ground just enough to bog down both vehicles and men in mud. Fanon and his comrades were sleeping in two-man tents that were barely a metre high, and often had to dig themselves out. The poor atmospheric conditions hampered radio communications, and the dank pine forests had been both mined and booby-trapped. It was in these conditions that a general French advance under the command of Commandant Bourgoin began in November. In the meantime, the US Seventh army and units of the First French army were attacking from the east. To the north, German forces were regrouping in Alsace. Individual soldiers on the ground rarely have any sense of the broader picture and Fanon cannot have known that he was taking part in the gradual build-up to the Battle of Alsace.97 Cézette, Manville and Mosole all fought with distinction in that battle. Mosole was awarded the Croix de Guerre and silver star for his distinguished conduct. During a skirmish in a cemetery in Wittenheim, which fell to the French on 30 January 1945, Manville succeeded in knocking out a tank by firing a rifle bullet into its canon and detonating the shell in the breech. Whilst this was clearly a matter of good luck rather than good marksmanship, it won him the rank of corporal and the Croix de Guerre.
The terrain to the south-east of Montbéliard favoured the attacking forces, but the advance was still not an easy one. To the north of the French positions, the Doubs and the Rhine–Rhône canal ran in parallel across a sodden plain. Above it, rolling hills rose to an altitude of 400 metres. This was not easy ground: the hills were covered in pines, and cut by minor rivers and streams flowing into the Doubs. Intelligence-gathering was a matter of listening rather than of visual observation, and the sound of ongoing building work had been detected in the Bois de Grappes, which covered the steepish slopes of a hill known as Le Grand Mont, where it appeared that a German unit was digging in. On 25 November, Private Frantz Fanon was serving an 81-millimetre mortar in the wood under enemy fire and was hit by shrapnel from an incoming mortar round. Badly wounded in the chest, he was cited in a Brigade dispatch for his ‘distinguished conduct’, and awarded the Croix de Guerre with a bronze star. The citation was signed by the Sixth RTS’s commanding officer, Colonel Raoul Salan, who would later be one of the staunchest defenders of French Algeria and a leading figure in the April 1961 putsch against de Gaulle.98 Ironically, France had already decorated another of its future enemies; Ben Bella was mentioned in dispatches on four occasions and was finally awarded the médaille militaire for the bravery he showed while retrieving three abandoned machine guns under fire. Shortly after the capture of Rome, he was awarded his medal by de Gaulle in person.99
Fanon was evacuated and hospitalized in Nantua, a small lakeside town in the Jura mountains some ninety kilometres to the north of Lyon. He made a quick recovery from his wounds and was soon playing football for a local team as part of his convalescence. According to his brother Joby, he made good friends in the region and was particularly fond of his marraine de guerre, or ‘godmother’, who remained in touch with him when he left Nantua for a brief stay in Paris before going back to his unit in January. The regiment was now officially being ‘rested’, but its rest-period took the uncomfortable form of night patrols on the banks of the Rhine. Fanon did, however, have time to write to his brother. On 16 January 1945, he wrote:
My Dear Joby,
We don’t have the luxury of having pens here, so you will have to try to decipher my letter . . . You must have heard by now that I was wounded. I have rejoined my unit and I am on the banks of the Rhine. When I get the chance during our night patrols, I wash my face in the Rhine . . . Listen to me, I’ve grown a lot older than you. Man la prend fé tant pis pou moins, mais pas vini en France avant la fin la què va (I’ve been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes, but I won’t be back in France before the end of the war.) I’m sick of it all. Don’t worry: Pierre Mosole and Marcel Manville were still alive a week ago. You asked me if I got the cross. Yes, with bars and medals, and all the rest of it. I wanted to tell you we are still alive, but we don’t want to talk about the war. I could tell you certain things, but I’m a soldier and you won’t know them until later. You’ll have to be satisfied with knowing that I’ve had enough. But it’s still rough twenty-four hours a day. And we have to stay in holes because the Boches are on the other side, and they don’t miss. Roll on the end of the war, and my return.
Fanon had learned that freedom was not indivisible. He was a black soldier in a white man’s army. Writing to his mother that same month, Fanon tried to hide his true feelings, and spoke longingly of the punch and blaff he was looking forward to when he got back to Martinique, but another letter written to both his parents on 12 April 1945 tells a different story:
Today, 12 April. It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why? To defend an obsolete ideal. I don’t think I’ll make it this time. During all the scraps I’ve been in, I’ve been anxious to get back to you, and I’ve been lucky. But today, I’m wondering whether I might not soon have to face the ordeal. I’ve lost confidence in everything, even myself.
If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong!
Nothing here, nothing justifies my sudden decision to defend the interests of farmers who don’t give a damn.
They are hiding a lot of things from us. But you will hear them through Manville or Mosole. The three of us are in the same regiment. We’ve been separated, but we write to each other, and even if two of us die, the third will tell you some dreadful truths.
I’ve volunteered for a dangerous mission, and I leave tomorrow. I know I won’t be coming back.100
The nature of Fanon’s ‘dangerous mission’ is not known. Perhaps he simply did not have time to go on it: just over three weeks after this letter was written, Germany capitulated.
Fanon and Manville were back in Toulon for the festivities that marked the liberation of France, and were reunited with those members of the 5BMA who had fought in the Royan pocket. The port was crowded with soldiers and sailors, and there was a strong American military presence. Whilst the GIs appeared to lack for nothing, the French and Martinican troops were, according to Manville, living in bad conditions and felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens rather than as liberating heroes. That the local girls preferred American dancing partners who could give them chewing gum and nylons to black Martinicans who had nothing, added to a growing sense of disillusionment. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon describes with considerable bitterness how white French girls backed away in fear when black French soldiers asked them to dance.101 Fanon and his comrades wanted only one thing: to get back to the West Indies and to tell everyone how the French, for whom they had given and suffered so much, had abandoned them.102 Martinique was very much on Fanon’s mind, and he kept in touch with developments there as best he could. On 5 August 1945, he wrote to a correspondent in Martinique who has been identified only as ‘Mme. L. C.’