Château de Mesnières, Northern France, January 1945 by Peggy Scholberg

Mesnières Castle, Northern France, January 1945 and May 2024

“Fifteenth century castles came with fifteenth century heating systems.” These are the words my mother used when describing her freezing cold stay in the ancient Mesnières Castle in France. The hospital staff had just completed a seven-day trip across the Atlantic, arriving at the port of Le Harve in January of 1945. It would be during the coldest winter on record in forty years. The Battle of the Bulge was underway just a few hundred miles away.

Might sound fun to stay in a castle, yet that assumes the availability of all of the modern-day comforts. Castles built at that time were primarily made of stone, with walls typically 10 to 20 feet thick to withstand gunpowder artillery, and held together with lime mortar.

Unable to get warm, not even once, my mother became deathly ill. She was very lucky to have even survived. She was able to be transported via ambulance and get care at an Army hospital in Rouen. She had nothing but great things to say about the excellent care she received. Below is an excerpt. Read further to find about her hospital stay in Girls in a World at War.

My husband and I were able to recently visit the Mesnières Castle when on a Minnesota WWII Roundtable Battlefield tour. We found that at the castle today, young girls are taught to grow food in the garden, prepare meals, and serve them in a restaurant in the castle. My mother, so dedicated to helping young mothers cook and feed their family healthy meals, would have been thrilled to hear about this. 

Book Excerpt

They drove on in the dark with no headlights. About midnight the two trucks carrying the girls left the convoy. They turned off the road and through a massive gate with stone towers on either side. They had reached the Castle of Mesnieres. Inside the gate they drove over a moat on a drawbridge and entered an area where they could see the enormous castle. Six slender, pointed towers loomed against the sky in picturesque medieval style. By the light of the moon and two flashlights, the thirty-eight girls crossed a courtyard and entered a tall gothic-arched door in one of the towers.

As they climbed a narrow winding stone staircase, their flashlight beams fell on life-sized suits of armor and axes. When they arrived in the gigantic banquet room, the moonlight dimly showed forty cots in three rows. Two blankets were folded at the foot of each cot.

Vivienne laughed. “Imagine that. The Army has a haunted castle.” She tossed her musette bag onto a cot, and brushed back her hair with a flippant gesture.

“Haunted with romance,” Kathy said. “Look, there’s a raised platform at the end, where the king and queen must have eaten. I want a cot up there.” She handed her flashlight to Mathilda. “You can use this to chase ghosts away. I like the dark, to more easily imagine royal banquets.”

“Ghosts are repressed sex symbols,” Mrs. Foster muttered to Kathy.

“No heat.” Vivienne had her hand on a tall thin stove. “The fire is out.”

“I found a bathroom!” called Bunts. “One convenience for 36 women.”

“Supper is ready. Downstairs,” shouted a Sergeant from the door.

Mathilda spread the blanket on her cot. “I’m too nervous to eat. I’ll just roll up in these blankets.” Mathilda took off her shoes and lay on her cot.

“I’ll bring something for you to eat,” said Kathy, “if you’re awake. It’s likely you are tired because you have had nothing to eat.”

Taking one flashlight, leaving the other upstairs, they felt their way down the spiral staircase. In another gigantic room, lit by gasoline lamps, a hot supper was waiting. The cooking stoves had warmed the room just a little, but no one took off their trench coat. They unhooked their mess kits from their belts and dished up delicious corned beef hash. They were warmly grateful to these GIs who had stayed up half the night to cook for them.

After supper, they made up their beds. Two blankets would not be enough to keep them warm in the damp, freezing, drafty castle, so they didn’t undress. Even with her coat and two blankets, Kathy was miserably cold.

The next morning a French boy came in to build the fires. The stoves smoked so badly they had to open the windows—so they were no warmer.

Mathilda went back to bed after breakfast. Mrs. Foster went hunting for a telephone to call Red Cross headquarters in Paris. The nurses played bridge on their cots or wrote letters. Bunts, Vivienne, and Kathy went for a walk.

In a nearby village, Kathy tried to learn the history of the castle from an old baker. She couldn’t understand him so he gave her a book. She read the book with her dictionary. The descendants of Prince Charles, a minor prince, had been forced to sell the castle to King Louis XV in 1766. During the revolution, the land was confiscated, divided, and sold as small lots. No one had bought the castle, so it was given to a monastery who used it for an orphanage. It had continued to be used until the Germans took it over. Now that the Americans had it, it was used as a nurses’ staging area.

If the orphans could stand the cold, Kathy felt she should not complain. The building looked unchanged from the fifteenth century. They half expected the suits of armor to start moving and speaking, or a plumed knight gallop across the drawbridge on a horse.

For two weeks they practiced French with the villagers or played bridge. In the evening, officers from their hospital drove in from the nearby Camp Lucky Strike for a visit or to take a hot shower. The bath house with the hot shower was in a small building adjacent to the castle, and required a short walk in the chilling cold. Kathy was never sure which was more enticing to the visiting soldiers, the feminine company or the hot water.

The men brought news of the progress in setting up the hospital. An advance party had scouted Northeastern France, hunting for a suitable place to house the hospital. They found an old French cavalry post located in a small town called Suippes, which was 26 miles east of Reims, and 100 miles from the front. Some of the men had already moved there, temporarily living in tents while buildings were cleaned and repaired. For this work, some German PWs, or prisoners of war, had been requisitioned. As soon as it was in livable condition, supplies would be shipped in. Then the rest of the hospital staff would move into buildings nearby. Progress was moving, but for now, the girls would have to wait.

At Mesnieres, the weather remained cold and damp. Hours were spent in efforts to fix the stoves. Endless adjustments of damper and drafts and varying amounts and kinds of wood were tried, seeking some combination that would end the smoking. The stoves were never repaired and the room never warmed.

Not once in this time had Kathy been warm, despite wearing long woolen underwear under her pajamas. She even lined her cot with large paper bags. Nothing seemed to help. The only exception was the few minutes in a hot shower. However, by the time she had run back across the courtyard in the freezing cold with wet hair, she was thoroughly chilled again.

The men from Camp Lucky Strike told them they were rationed to one helmet full of coal a day. They spent their days huddled around stoves in their tents. When they came to visit, they declared the castle warm, and the hot showers a downright luxury. On the front lines, in the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers were literally freezing in their foxholes. And so, it didn’t occur to the girls to complain, but simply to shrug, “C’est la guerre.”

Girls in a World at War by Peggy Scholberg is available online wherever books are sold.