Prelude to the Second Weltkrieg - Part 2: Commune of France

February 18, 1937

February 18, 1937 – Nancy, France

Dear Margeurite,

First I must apologize for the delay in my reply. We have been very busy lately. I'll explain why later.

Second I'll have you know Simone and I are doing very well. Though I won't forget your assumption that she would have nothing to do with me. If you must know, this was our first evening off in a while, and we ran back to town and danced most of the night together. I think she may be quite taken with me to be honest, and me... I'm falling more in love with her every day. She is really quite a dream.

Third I'm glad mother's ok. We can't feel guilty – mother's generation were treated so badly by the war, to be sure, but she survived and so did we. It's more important to look to the future. I'm glad she's using the cane now.

Fourth I've completely forgotten – which one was Claire? Was she the one with the big chest who slapped me that one time? Or was that Jean?

I'm only kidding! Claire's the skinny one with the frizzled hair, right? Ok ok enough teasing, I'm glad she's ok and her child is healthy enough to cry like that. If I must be honest, her husband always seemed like too much of an intellectual for her. I'm not saying that Claire's not smart, but he never seemed to love her as much as she doted on him. Like he thought he was above her. She deserves to be well taken care of.

Ok now for the part you've been waiting for the past several letters. This last week we have been busy doing field exercises. The kind where you're lucky if you get two hours of sleep each night and if you do you're getting them inside your vehicle resting your head on your coat. This was easily the toughest full week of work I've had since joining the army, no question.

It started with a briefing almost two hours long where they told us they wanted to test how well our tanks did at breaking through a defended position. We covered that in training of course, and we've run a few drills too, but this was the real thing, with real live ammunition and concrete targets and small rifles returning fire at us the whole time. They even dropped artillery all around us to inspire the real fear of God in us. And let me tell you it worked. It felt like being in a real battlefield, and it was very, very stressful. There was one shell that they either fired too close, or we were too far off the path we were supposed to take, because it exploded almost right in front of us and our left track ran through the crater it created. Margeurite, the sound of that shell falling on us was the most terrifying experience of my life. And they were trying to miss us!

Back to the point of the drills though. Attacking while you're on the move is so much harder than doing it while you're stationary, and by the end of the third day our whole crew's voice was hoarse from screaming over all the sounds all around us in order to get the machine doing everything at once. But we improved a lot. We did a kind of obstacle and target course the first day, and then another one on the last day, and we cut our time in half and doubled our accuracy. I wasn't even hating the old commander's voice by the end. A crazy thing what good teamwork does to the psyche.

The division commanders all praised us after that and told us [redacted]. "French tanks are going to be in charge [redacted]". So we're planning on doing a lot more of these kinds of drills. Then my commander stood right up and asked the question you've been asking forever, 'when are we planning on using these new techniques?' My admiration for him grew even bigger then, he's really on quite a streak.

General Rosselle, our division commander remember, stood right up and replied. He said "[redacted]."

Naturally when we turned in for that night after the final test we were all exhausted almost to death. But we were also excited by how much we'd improved and most of all by the general's response. We all got to talking about what fighting the Germans would be like, where we thought we'd be deployed, and what we thought it would be like to face German tanks head on. Most of all though, we were talking about what our chances would be in the war. Since you're such a good patriot Margeurite, you'll be happy to know that it was unanimous: the Germans don't stand a chance!

They gave us today off, like I mentioned, but when Simone and I returned to the barracks we got the last piece of big news. We're being redeployed to the Swiss border. I guess Jouhaux's plans to press the Germans on that front are going faster than we expected. So if you don't hear back from me for a while, it's because the army post team always takes a few days to redirect the mail accurately whenever we move around.

I will see if I can give you a call before we actually pack out of Nancy, but if not, look forward to my next letter. I'll tell you all about the trip and what the Alps look like in February.

Your brother,

Henri

P.S. Don't worry about Silmani too much. His crew recorded the fastest time on the second course and everyone credited his reloading time for the victory. He's officially the most valued member of the division today.