Village girl with a submachine gun caught the eye of Life war reporter

Simone Segouin had left school and was working her father’s fields when the Germans arrived in 1940. She decided to do something about it.

Simone Segouin, then known by her nom de guerre Nicole, was a brave French Resistance fighter aged just 18.

OBITUARY

Simone Segouin Resistance fighter.
Born Thivars, France, October 3, 1925; died Courville-sur-Eure, France, February 21, aged 97.

It is 90km northeast from Chartres to Paris. You can drive it in an hour and 20-odd minutes.

When 2011 Tour de France-winner Cadel Evans cycled through in defence of his title the following year, he was averaging about 45km/h on his way to the capital. When Simone Segouin did the trip – as history swept through the streets of her hometown – it took days. But she was mostly on foot, a bit distracted, and burdened with MP-40 Schmeisser submachine gun weighing 4kg that she had probably souvenired from the body of a Nazi, perhaps one she’d killed.

It was June 1944. Segouin – then 18 and using the codename Nicole – was moving north with fellow members of the French resistance emerging from years of subterranean warfare during which they bravely brought down vital bridges, derailed German troop trains and blew up munitions supplies. They were in good company, marching with the US Fourth Infantry Division, the first to land at Utah Beach on D-Day a few weeks earlier.

But it was still dangerous and she faced threat with every step. Stranded German snipers, abandoned by their retreating comrades, shot at civilians and soldiers from vantage points such as the 12th-century Chartres Cathedral. (Thankfully, its 700-year-old world heritage-listed stained glass windows had been removed to the basement, but it can be seen today.)

Segouin understood that capture by the Germans – the fate of 90,000 resisters – would mean certain death, but only after prolonged torture.

She had been born in a village 8km south of Chartres on a farm where she and three brothers lived poorly. Her father, Robert, had won medals fighting for France against the Germans in World War I, and when they returned to France in 1940 with Paris declared an open city – not a tactic in Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s war plans – many French were distressed.

Their future president, Charles de Gaulle, fled to England, a country he hated. But French without such options, many of whom would not have run in any case, fought for their country, particularly those beyond Paris and especially when they began to hear tales of French Jews being transported to concentration camps in their tens of thousands.

Bravely, Segouin’s father opened his farm to house the early resisters. Segouin had been working the fields a year by then. She soon fell in with these strangers and helped out with local reconnaissance using a bicycle she stole from a German woman and gaily repainted. In its basket she carried baguettes and she was able to cycle around the town unnoticed while monitoring enemy movements.

Observing her bravery and love of her country, resistance leaders asked if she wished to be more seriously involved in France’s defence. She recalled her response: “No. It would please me to kill Boche (the derogatory term for Germans).”

Her repeated bravery from then, alongside her equally courageous colleagues, frustrated and stalled German plans over and again.

As liberation beckoned in Chartres, she was spotted by Life correspondent Jack Belden, and legendary war photographer Robert Capa. They spoke to her, but only as “Nicole”. Belden bumped into her again the following day – in the meantime she had rounded up 25 German soldiers as POWs – and her astounding story was published in Life magazine under the heading The Girl Partisan of Chartres – briefly she was famous.

Belden reported how she “was clad in a light-brown jacket and a cheap flowered skirt of many hues which ended just above her knees” while eating thick chunks of bread with jam, but taking little notice of circus of celebration around her, which included locals in the town square hauling up village women accused of collaborating; their hair was shorn off.

“Nothing pleased Nicole so much as the killing of the Germans (but) I could find no traces of what is conventionally called toughness in Nicole,” Belden wrote.

“After routine farm life, she finds her present job thrilling and exhilarating. Now that the war is passing beyond her own home district she does not think of going back to the farm. She wants to go with the partisans and help free the rest of France.”

And that’s what she did, marching through freed Paris streets behind a recently returned de Gaulle, perhaps with more pride than her leader.

She went on to become a pediatric nurse in Chartres and was awarded a Croix de Guerre. Just 18 months ago she was made a Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit.