Author’s Notes – Les Ambulancières
About the battle of Belvedere
“… a personal triumph for Alphonse Juin. He had won his men’s trust and they had earned great respect from their fellow Allies. In six months, Juin had taken a widely disparate group of tribesmen from different countries, colonial settlers, and exiled Frenchmen, and forged them into an awesomely impressive formation capable of taking and giving out extreme punishment.”
Peter Caddick-Adams in Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell
from war correspondent Martha Gelhorn
American war correspondent Martha Gelhorn spent the night of February 5, 1944 in Sant Elia, the night Marie-Alphonsine Loretti was killed. From her book The Face of War.
“The jeep driver and I were going to San Elia, which used to be a town and is now a mass of blown-up masonry. Two French first-aid posts operate here. They are stationed in dirty basements that have beautiful thick walls…a place to be shelled whenever the Germans think it profitable.
“Across the Rapido from the town is the Belvedere, a bleak gray stone mountain that the French took … A sizeable unit went into the attack and hardly more than twenty percent were able to walk off the mountain, but the French hold it, and that is what they want.
And Marie-Alphonsine Loretti.
“I remember the dead girl ambulance driver, lying on a bed in a tent hospital, with her hands crossed on a sad bunch of flowers, and her hair very neat and blond, and her face simply asleep. She had been killed on the road below San Elia, and her friends, the other French girls who drove ambulances, were coming to pay their last respects. They were tired and awkward in their bulky, muddy clothes. They passed slowly before the dead girl and looked with pity and great quietness at her face, and went back to their ambulances.”
Other Notes
Eugénie Duisit, born in 1909, was awarded the croix de guerre on February 28, 1944 and the médaille militaire on March 6, 1948. She returned to duty after recovering from her wounds and served through the liberation of France in 1944-45, finishing the war with the rank of aspirant in the 3rd Division. After the war she returned to Paris and continued her career as an executive in youth sports associations and married. She died in 1978.
Paul Gandoët retired as a lieutenant general (four stars) in 1961. In his memoir, he wrote that in North Africa the battalion established a tight relationship with the artillery group that directly supported the battalion. The tirailleurs learned to maneuver under the direct fire of the artillery and the artillery learned to bring their fire in very close to the friendly troops. The training served them well and even saved them in Italy, the commandant wrote.
Ambulancières. Gandoët also wrote that there was a section of women ambulance drivers commanded by a woman officer of great quality, Lieutenant Clarens, with whom they trained. The battalion learned to work with its supporting doctors and ambulance drivers to pick up and evacuate the wounded. Gandoët wrote that the women ambulance drivers were girl volunteers, of very good families, patriots who after serious and hard training near Algiers were assigned to the divisions. All were by then covered with glory. Invitations were sent to them to attend the mess, but never by name. Those who could came. This measure in correctness was undertaken to preserve the spirit of the team and avoid the search for relationships “more tender than pure.”