One of the most senior doctors at the hospital was Sumner Waldron Jackson, a genito-urinary specialist from Maine. He and his Swiss-born wife, Toquette, had lived through one war against Germany and, like many in their circle, had been following the news on the radio for the last two years, listening with mounting horror to Hitler’s threats. Charlotte Sylvie Barrelet de Ricout, always known as Toquette, came from a well-off family of Swiss Protestants. Her lawyer father had brought his young family to live in France, settling at Enghien-les-Bains just outside Paris, where Toquette grew up with a love of tennis and sailing on the lake at Enghien. She had been working as a nurse since 1914 and met Sumner in Paris when both were at the American Red Cross Hospital Number Two, treating hideously wounded men brought back from the trenches, often barely alive. The romance began, apparently, with a snatched kiss in a linen cupboard at the hospital, and the pair were married in November 1917. He was thirty-two, she twenty-seven. In 1919 they returned to live for a while in Philadelphia. But Toquette was not happy in America, too French to feel at home there, and so after two years persuaded her husband to return to Paris. That he obliged his young wife so willingly is an indication of her forceful personality since the move involved his taking not only French-language but also fresh medical exams. In January 1929 their first and only son Phillip was born, by which time Sumner was working as a surgeon and urologist at the American Hospital and the family were living in an apartment at 11 Avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement. As the hospital in Paris braced itself for action, its doctors were already working at a makeshift field hospital established in a former casino at Fontainebleau, using it as a dressing station for French soldiers and wounded refugees needing emergency care.
But, however well prepared the hospital might have been, almost everyone was shocked by the speed and efficiency of the German invasion. The Blitzkrieg began on 13 May and swiftly shattered the French faith in their heavily fortified Maginot Line. The Wehrmacht with its superior mechanized Panzer divisions, supported by Luftwaffe dive bombers, bypassed the fortifications and within one month Dutch, Belgian and Norwegian forces had all capitulated, sending refugees streaming over the border into France. British and French forces, similarly overwhelmed, were trapped at Dunkirk. Although in the nine days following 27 May a total of 338,226 soldiers were rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 boats, the British Expeditionary Force lost 68,000 soldiers during the French campaign and had to abandon nearly all tanks, other vehicles and equipment. Metcalfe always believed that the Duke of Windsor should have remained in Paris until the last minute, overseeing the evacuation on the Dunkirk beaches. ‘This would have made him seem a hero not a coward,’ Metcalfe’s daughter suggested. But the Duke and Duchess had fled Paris on 16 May and made their way to the H?tel du Palais in fashionable Biarritz, where life was much calmer than in the capital.
On 10 June the government too left Paris for Bordeaux via Tours, the fight not necessarily entirely over, but giving the signal to the population that it was no longer safe to remain in the capital. ‘The streets were empty. People were closing their shops. The metallic shudder of falling iron shutters was the only sound to break the silence, a sound familiar to anyone who has woken in a city threatened by riot or war,’ was how the novelist Irène Némirovsky described the scene in her realistic account, Suite Fran?aise. Four days later, on 14 June, the French government declared Paris an Open City, a declaration intended to protect it as long as no resistance was offered by troops or by the population; otherwise the city would be treated as being in the war zone and liable to destruction. Hitler wanted Paris protected, preserved, so that Germany could forge an alliance with it, enjoy its attributes. While never admitting its superiority, and criticizing the depravity and louche habits of French women, he nonetheless wanted every German soldier to experience, once, the pleasures of Paris: ‘Jeder Einmal nach Paris’ (‘Everyone should have his turn in Paris’) was the popular phrase used by the Wehrmacht.
On that day, the day the Germans entered the city and hoisted the swastika over the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, there were fourteen recorded suicides in Paris, of which the best-known was that of Dr Thierry Martel, Chief Surgeon at the American Hospital. Martel, aged sixty-five, was a complex man, simultaneously anti-German and anti-Jewish, a decorated veteran of the Great War and a member of Maurras’s Action Fran?aise. The son of French aristocrats who loudly proclaimed their belief in the guilt of Dreyfus as well as their dislike of the number of nouveau riche Jews, he was also the uncle of Jacques Tartière, the Gaullist résistant married to the American actress Drue Leyton. But he had lost a son in the Great War and vowed after that never to speak to a German. Following Martel’s suicide, Dr Sumner Jackson took over as Chief Surgeon and directed policy. Already in May the hospital was sheltering downed US and British pilots. No decision was ever taken to become involved in resistance, but Toquette and her sister Tat, while refusing to leave France, agreed that it might be safer for Phillip if they moved south out of Paris and left Sumner alone in their flat.