Standing on the roadside where Pvt. Herbert Bachant was killed helping wrest the French city of Rennes from Hitler’s grasp “completed the circle” for the triplet daughters he never saw.
Bergenfield, New Jersey, natives Nancy Bachant, Janet Bachant and Karen Bachant Sellars were guests of honor at the ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Rennes, in the Brittany region, by Gen. George S. Patton’s army.
The sisters basked in adoration and applause and were interviewed by the French media. It was, they said, the experience of a lifetime. And it was made possible by their mother’s obituary, the Internet and an armchair historian in France.
Nancy, Janet and Karen were born to Teaneck, New Jersey, native Muriel Snyder Bachant on March 30, 1944, while their dad was off fighting in World War II. They were 4 months old when he died.
The triplets were celebrated during the war years — photographed in the New York press and posing at a War Bonds rally. After their father’s death, their mother remarried, took the surname McKeag and had another daughter. In 1949 the family left New York City for the red-brick Foster Village apartments in Bergenfield.
Muriel Bachant McKeag was still residing there when she died Feb. 9, 2013, at 90. Her obituary in The Record described Herbert’s sacrifice and Muriel’s perseverance as a young war widow.
More than a year later, in April, Etienne Maignen — a retired official with the Rennes chamber of commerce and author of “Rennes Pendant la Guerre (Rennes During the War)” — was at his computer doing what amateur historians often do.
He was Googling.
“After writing my book last year, I kept searching on the [Internet] for events about that period, especially during the liberation of Rennes,” he said by phone.
From the keywords “4th Armored Division,” “Rennes” and “1944,” Maignen arrived at the obituary for Muriel Bachant McKeag of Bergenfield.
He began reading. He had never heard of Muriel’s soldier husband or the triplet daughters. But he said that when he got to the place in the article noting where Herbert Bachant was killed — “the vicinity of Rennes” — and the date — Aug. 1, 1944 — “it was quite clear to me that this was the combat” that preceded Rennes’ liberation on Aug. 4, 1944.
Maignen, an organizer of the commemoration events, set out to find the 70-year-old triplets.
The obituary said they studied at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. Maignen typed the keywords “Lebanon Valley College” and “Bachant.”
Up popped an alumni notes item that Karen Bachant Sellars had retired from a teaching career at the American School in London, England.
Maignen called the American School, which put him in touch with Karen, who lives in London.
Karen was amazed to hear from Maignen and to receive his invitation to visit Rennes. She called her sisters in the States.
“When Karen Skyped me, she said, ‘You are going to be so jealous — I’m going to Rennes!’” said Nancy, who lives in the Seattle area.
But of course, Nancy would be going, too. And so would Janet, who lives in Manhattan.
“I was very excited when Karen told me she and her sisters had been looking for years about the way their father had been killed in action,” Maignen said.
The sisters, in fact, had gone to France on their own in 2004. But the precise circumstances of Pvt. Herbert Bachant’s death — including the location — remained a mystery to them.
That is, until Maignen stepped in.
Nancy, Janet and Karen and their families spent a week this summer in Rennes. The highlight was visiting the spot in the village of Saint-Gregoire, outside Rennes, where their father’s half-track was hit by German fire, and meeting a 93-year-old man whose family’s farmhouse, 70 years earlier, was commandeered by the Germans. The man was witness to the advancing column of Americans and of the resulting battle that claimed Herbert Bachant.
Speaking words Nancy wrote, Janet, in practiced French, told a conference on the liberation of Rennes that the sisters’ journey “completed the circle … to discover all we could about our father and how he died.”
“All our lives we have been searching for our father,” she concluded, “and now we have found him here in Saint-Gregoire.”
Janet and Nancy scooped dirt from the roadside. Janet will soon be visiting Nancy in Washington state, and they plan to mix the soil with their mother’s ashes. Some of Muriel Bachant McKeag’s ashes are interred in Herbert’s grave at a military cemetery in Virginia.
Janet said Muriel would have been “thrilled to no end” to know that her triplet daughters stood at the place where their father died.
“It would’ve been the highlight of her life,” Janet said. “She even gave us instructions when we went first went to France: ‘See if you can find his dog tags.’”
Distributed by MCT Information Services