Extract from "The Madest Day" (by E. Coquart and P. Huet, at Albin Michel)
(Gruchy is 1km west
of Vierville)
(Night from 5 to 6 June and dawn from 6 June)
"The château of Gruchy is not even visible from the departmental 514 that approaches the wall of enclosure, surrounded by futai and masked by hedges. The sea is very close. Actually, she's all around. The castle, it is said here, rests on "a grove of earth". On one side, the cliff is eight hundred meters away. On the other hand, the beach is two kilometers away.
The house is big, huge. But Madame de Loÿs and her son Guy (16 years old) now have only the dining room on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. All the rest is occupied by German soldiers, about a hundred men (of company 9/726), whose presence singularly disturbs the life at the castle. It's not funny every day, but Mrs. de Loÿs adheres to a rigorous course of action, passed on to her son: no openly hostile attitude, no question of playing "war wars", but no familiarity either. Stay cold and reserved, know how to keep your distance, never accept any invitation. In short, be content with the strict minimum in his forced relations with the occupant.
Madame de Loÿs is a woman of determination, order and composure. She had weighed things up: given the course of the war and the increasingly difficult shortages in the capital, it was better to take refuge in the countryside (with an elderly aunt).
For the past few days, however, Mrs. de Loÿs has wondered. On the coast, it rains bombs like never before. It's a flood. To the point that a friend, Dr. Pinard, came to ask her if she would welcome her over eighty-year-old mother and her companion lady. They live in Cricqueville-en-Bessin, near the peak of the Hoc, a goal that has been battled for several days by the Allied aviation: "I can no longer ensure the safety of my mother," the doctor said.
But also at Gruchy Castle, the night of June 5 to 6 will be shook: "It becomes brutal", comments Mme de Loÿs.
And loud. Between 4 and 5 a.m., the soldiers waved like forceful men, shouted orders, crossed the stairs, ran in all the rooms. Madame de Loÿs and her son leave on the terrace where they are soon joined by Captain Grünschloss, commander of the company stationed at the castle.
Unlike others, such as this Meyer, a fanatical officer, a Hitlerian, settled with close friends at Isles Castle, Grünschloss is a good man. A professor of civil law, this Bavarian speaks in French and shows himself a great correction. On May 25, when the old aunt had just died, her manners impressed Madame de Loÿs herself.
"What can I do for you?" he asked.
- "I'd be grateful if you could get the stairs and the hall out of any German presence because I have no other way out to get the body out. I'd like her to leave her house outside the occupant's presence. I also wish that when you take the coffin, your men are elsewhere, that it is not a spectacle for them."
- "It will be so," promised Grünschloss, and he kept his word. But before that, the captain wished to salute the mortal remains. Rendezvous was taken. At that time, the captain entered the room of the dead man in a large uniform, and before gathering, took care to remove his sword.
A very high man. Even if today, time is running out...
"I'm sorry, but for security reasons, I'm forced to evacuate the house."
"But where do you intend to send us?" asked Ms. de Loÿs.
"In the underground."
One of the undergrounds. The family ancestor, a feud of architecture at the Viollet-le-Duc, had once embarked on a few architectural fantasies that gave the 17th century castle a slightly tarabiscote charm. In the same spirit, he had vast undergrounds dug around the property, which had never been completed. To build a shelter, the Germans had chosen the nearest one, which would sink into the park and get into the woods, on the other side of the coastal road. They had set up the floor as a kind of rudimentary parquet, reinforced the ceiling and brushed up the tar walls.
It's really pressing. The bombs fall all around the castle, explode in the park (probably the bombardment by the Liberators at high altitude, who "see" the Percaea). Mrs. de Loÿs and her son walk into the underground, but realize that they have simply forgotten the old lady and her housekeeper on the first floor.
Guy turns around, picks up the housekeeper first. "She trembled so much," he recalls, "that she shook the stair ramp... He guides her to the underground. Then he goes back to his steps, looking for Dr. Pinard's mother. There, things get complicated: the old lady stubbornly refuses to leave the room. She's deaf, deaf to the point that she doesn't hear anything about the bombing. The electricity is cut, it's still dark in the room. In order for Mrs. Pinard to read her lips, the young boy illuminates his face with a flashlight, and tries, with minimal courtesy, to explain the seriousness of the situation. Talks are dragging, but the bombs are still falling. At the end of the argument, Guy de Loÿs took the old lady "thin as a fetu" in her arms and went down the stairs. She protestes, complains about the brazen manners of this very unkind young man. But as they reach the kitchen door, a tremendous explosion throws them both on the ground. This time, the grandmother understood, she screams, she storms: "Fast, faster! My son placed me at your house to save me, not to kill me!"
Sounded by the blast of the explosion, Guy acts like a sleepwalker. He takes Mrs. Pinard back into his arms, runs to the underground.
This one's full. In addition to the German soldiers who were ordered to remain there, some 40 civilians have piled themselves in the narrow casing. Neighbors, farmers. There's a crying woman whose husband just died under the bombs, a barely two-week-old infant. Mrs. de Loÿs and Guy settled at the entrance, near the German command and the emergency post.
6 a.m., in the underground of the castle of Gruchy. Madame de Loÿs is approaching her son.
"Did you hear what the operator said?"
Guy's up his shoulders. Unlike his mother, he does not understand a German word
"He said: large enemy fleet eight miles at sea."
New telephone communication a few moments later: soldiers in the underground are ordered to move from "the passive defensive phase to the active defensive phase". They get up, take up their weapons, slowly climb the stairs that lead them to the surface, apparently not in a hurry to fight. Only the operator and the nurses stay in the shelter. Moral in dungeon, they openly display their pessimism: "Finished war. Deutschland kaputt," they lamented to Gruchy's chestnut.
Nurses and stretchers are called in their turn and leave the underground, abandoning the first wounded who, in the meantime, arrived. One of them is very seriously affected. It is lying on a stretcher, the skull box literally turned off. At the same time fascinated and horrified, the young Guy did not manage to leave his eyes. He sees, under the miraculously intact membrane, the palpitating brain. The unfortunate one suffers martyrdom, he must hold his hands constantly so that he does not touch his horrible wound, which could cause irreparable damage. Madame de Loÿs finds the parade: with the help of a rope, she binds the wounded on his stretcher..
.(day of 6 June)
Hours pass, endless. The vacarm is still as infernal, the earth trembles under explosions, the underground vibrates, sometimes fills with a terrifying shock wave. Civilians get used to it, guessing that the battle started on the beach, under the cliffs. They also know the difference between planes and guns, between bombs and shells.
A slight lull occurs around 11 a.m. Madame de Loÿs turned to her son: "There must be milk, bread or something else at home. Find something to feed all these good people."
Guy goes out in the open: everywhere craters of bombs, shells holes, murky, calcined trees. He expects to find the castle in ruins, but he was miraculously spared. Only the façade was sifted with bullets and all the windows were sprayed. Later, the owners will learn that a shell went under the house and that it fell unexploded.
The young boy went around the house, and fell nose to nose with Captain Grünschloss. Surprised, the officer asks him what he's doing here. Does he want to be killed?
"My mother sent me to get water, milk and supplies for the people in the underground."
"Take everything that can be useful in our reserve."
He accompanies Guy de Loÿs in the outbuildings where all food rations are stored. They then head to the kitchen to pick up bread.
"Take whatever you want," said Captain Grünschloss. Then he moves away. The Loÿs were not to see him alive. Captain Grünschloss was killed eight hundred metres from the castle. He had gathered his men to form a defence point on the Vierville road. (they blocked all day the advance of the Americans from the 5th Ranger and the CieC/116 towards the peak of the Hoc).
How long? In Gruchy's underground, hours, minutes, seconds flow to the dropper. The noises of the battle infiltrate, sniff along the walls of moisture, resonate or choke through saccades. The castle's buried waiting.
In the course of the afternoon, other wounded Wehrmacht infantrymen descended the stairs leading to the basement. But there are no nurses left to take care of them. They are thus nearly twenty, some of them seriously affected.
Ms. de Loÿs does her best, multiplies the summary dressings.