Fabulous Female Firsts. Marlene Wagman-Geller

spent the next decade at skiing and tennis parties all over Europe, enjoying a heady cocktail of champagne, the Charleston, and rushing off to Vienna, Budapest, or Belgrade for a week’s entertainment. Susan recalled, “I had lots and lots of friends. Lots and lots of young men. Well, lovers, really.” She explained her years of “wining and dining and several affairs with wholly unsuitable men” was a means of escape as her family and native England were “very dull.” The idylls of the socialite ended while she was staying in the luxurious retreat of an American divorcee at the time Britain declared war on Germany. Travers, tired of her anchorless lifestyle, joined the Croix-Rouge, the French Red Cross. Her dislike of blood and sickness made her fall short of a Florence Nightingale, and she became an ambulance driver. Her reason for choosing that route was because, “I wanted adventure. I wanted more action.” In 1940, Susan joined the French expedition whose mission was to help the Finns in the Winter War against the Russians.

      While she was in Scandinavia, the Nazis overran France, and Susan made her way to Britain. Hungry for purpose and further action, she contacted General de Gaulle’s London headquarters. “There followed what must have been the fastest job interview in the world,” and the government in exile recruited her as a nurse with the Free French forces. In 1940, the English woman was on a ship filled with legionnaires on a convoy heading for Africa. The next few months were spent in Cameroon and the Congo. Chafing at working as a nurse, she found a way to be reassigned to North Africa with a battalion of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion. Half the Legion had sided with de Gaulle; the other had thrown in their lot with the collaborationist Vichy government.

      After a stint in Sudan and Eritrea, Susan arrived at what was then called Palestine and worked as an ambulance driver, a challenging occupation as the desert roads were riddled with mines and subject to attack. She had been an army doctor’s driver; that ended when he died after a truck he was riding in hit a mine. Travers managed to survive a number of car crashes, but she suffered a wound from shellfire. Her Hemingwayesque “grace under pressure” endeared her to the legionnaires, who nicknamed her “La Miss.” The feeling was reciprocal as she admired the Legion’s code of “Honneur et Fidélité.” She formed close bonds with many of her comrades, including Pierre Mesmer, who was slated to become Prime Minister of France.

      Susan also dabbled in several liaisons, including one with the White Russian Prince, Colonel Dimitri Amilakvari, who later died in a skirmish. Unfortunately, love proved as elusive as clutching the desert sand until 1941 when the thirty-one-year-old became the driver for the forty-two-year-old General Marie-Pierre Joseph François Koenig after a gunshot ended the life of his chauffeur while he was picking fruit in a garden. They developed feelings for one another; however, one fly in the romantic ointment was he was her commanding officer; the other was Marie-Jeanne Klein Koenig, his Penelope in France awaiting his return. Given the romantic entanglements, they initially exercised restraint. The turning point was when Susan was in the hospital with jaundice and Koenig brought her a bouquet of roses. Upon her recovery, he came into her room one night, and she later related that unlike Madame Koenig, she did “everything he wanted.” Although they had to refrain from all telltale PDA, the Beirut nights were spent in one another’s arms. They kept up a façade that the reason they were always together was because the general needed his driver to be at his constant call. He refused to let Susan live with him due to discretion and because, as he put it, “What the men can’t have, I can’t have.”

      The blissful honeymoon came to a halt in 1942 when the military ordered Koenig to defend Bir Hakeim in the Western Desert with the objective of preventing the Axis powers from capturing the Suez Canal. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” thought Travers, and she followed her lover, who she always called “general.” Travers told him, “Wherever you will go, I will go too,” acting upon her vow to stay by his side. In order to protect her from enemy fire, the soldiers placed her in a coffin-sized hole in the desert sands, where, for two weeks, she heard the cries of the dying. The 4,000 French troops and the lone woman spent two weeks encircled by Ernst Rommel’s Panzer Division, pounded by their guns and raked by shells from their Stukas. During the Battle of Bir Hakeim in Libya, when their French desert camp came under intense bombardment from German and Italian forces, Rommel told his men that it would take them all of fifteen minutes to crush any opposition. The army hoped they could last a week. Under Koenig’s command the 1,000 legionnaires and 1,500 Allied troops held out for fifteen days, and Bir Hakeim became a symbol of resistance. With ammunition and water depleted, and in 128-degree temperatures, Koenig resolved to lead a breakout at night through the minefields and cordons of Nazi panzers that encircled Bir Hakeim. Ms. Travers was the driver for Koenig and the Russian prince on a perilous flight. She pressed the pedal of the Ford to the floor and burst through the German lines, blazing a trail for the other Allied vehicles to follow. Eleven bullets hit the vehicle, and despite crashing into some parked panzers, she, along with her present and past lover, reached the British lines. Of the 3,700 troops, 2,400 escaped, including 650 legionnaires. Koenig became the hero of France; Susan Travers received the Croix de Guerre. Her award referred to her “bravery in the face of several barrages of intense artillery fire, and numerous bullet strikes of her vehicle.”

      The couple’s amorous celebration ended with the arrival of Madame Koenig. In 1943, the army assigned the general to join de Gaulle in Tunisia. He had his eyes on the prize of military advancement, and to avoid a potentially damaging scandal, he abandoned his mistress. Susan showed more bravery in war than in love, and she contemplated suicide. Recalling her family motto, “Neither Afraid Nor Timid,” she put down her pistol.

      Proud of her efforts, in 1945, she wrote, “I had become the person I’d always wanted to be.” At the end of the war, she faced the prospect of returning to civilian life and told the Legion’s recruiting officer, who happened to be her friend, “I shall leave all my old friends—I shall go back and live with my family (who had returned to England), and it will be dull.” Astoundingly, he invited her to sign up as an official Legionnaire. The woman with the nickname “La Miss” did not need to give her sex on the application as it was a male-only establishment, and there was no medical exam. All she stated was that she was a warrant officer in logistics. In the chaotic postwar months, her request slipped through amid the hundreds of thousands of forms. Ms. Travers, the only woman ever to serve in the Legion, had to, of course, make her own uniform. She departed for Tunisia, where her job was to buy a barrel of red wine and deliver it on the back of a mule. Later, she departed for Vietnam during the first Indochina War. She later said of her wartime exploits, “I just happen to be a person who is not frightened. I am not afraid.”