The ambulance drivers were subsequently ordered to retreat from village to village in the face of ferocious German attacks. One of Fabius’s final assignments was to transport the Red Cross treasury in her ambulance to Bordeaux, an area she knew well and where the government was intending to transfer in the wake of the German invasion. She stopped for a night en route in Orléans, staying in a hotel which was hit by Luftwaffe planes in the early hours; twenty people were killed. Lucky to survive, Odette moved on as soon as she could. ‘I did not want to be accused of disappearing with the Red Cross millions.’ But although the SSA was formally disbanded in early September 1940, several of the women, having been exposed to fear and danger, subsequently involved themselves in further actions against the Germans by joining some form of inchoate resistance.
The Duchess of Windsor also joined the SSA for a short time and agreed to deliver plasma, bandages and cigarettes to hospitals near the Maginot Line. Wallis admitted: ‘I was busier and perhaps more useful than I had ever been in my life.’ However, much to the annoyance of the Duke of Windsor, assigned to the British Military mission at Vincennes, just outside Paris, British newspapers were not interested in writing about the activities of his ‘courageous’ wife, ‘billeted within the sound of gunfire’, as he proudly tried to tell them. Then, once Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May and began to threaten the French defences, the Duke and several of the international set – including the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes, Sir Charles and Lady Mendl, the writer and collector Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas – decided it was time to flee Paris. Edward deposited Wallis in Biarritz and returned to Paris briefly to sort out his affairs. By the end of May his need to be with his wife was so overpowering that, leaving their house at 85 Boulevard Suchet in the hands of a German caretaker, he now abandoned his oldest and most loyal friend and ADC, Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, without a word of warning, forcing him to find his own way back to England without any means of transport. Not surprisingly, Metcalfe saw this as a callous disregard of twenty years of friendship and threatened never to forgive him. ‘He deserted his job in 1936, well he’s deserted his country now, at a time when every office boy and cripple is trying to do what he can. It is the end,’ he told his wife. Some historians have defended the Duke on the grounds that he probably left Paris with the approval – indeed the relieved approval – of the military mission. More significantly perhaps, the Duke understood that, at a time when everyone else seemed to be against the Duchess, he had to be with her to support and defend her. From Biarritz the pair went to La Cro?, their home in the Cap d’Antibes, where they heard news of the German advance and the French collapse. It was agreed with the local British Embassy that the Duke and Duchess must get to Spain, without getting caught up with the fleeing French government.