At the age of eighteen, André joined the army in October 1916 as an artillery officer. Meanwhile the First World War had started (in 1914) and in March 1916, the Richards left for Japan where they arrived on 18th May. André met his mother in 1916 and the next time they were destined to meet was in 1949, i.e. thirty-three years later. He did receive letters from his mother (written from Japan) regularly but was compelled to destroy them due to the strict military rules.

Though André was separated from his mother due to the war, yet he always felt as if a force-field was protecting him. An inner contact continued to exist between the son and his mother due to which André escaped fatal accidents several times. He himself has admitted:” The continuous flow of “luck” was amazing.” Let’s quote two such instances of “luck” from his reminiscences. In May 1918, André had suffered an attack of flu along with others and was treated with heavy doses of aspirin. He and his colleagues recovered after forty-eight hours of high fever. However, they did not catch the ‘Spanish Flu’ which started towards the end of the war (and claimed the lives of twenty million people across the world—Sri Aurobindo’s wife Mrinalini Devi being one of them) for which aspirin was no longer a cure. “It seemed that we had been more or less vaccinated by the first attack of what was not yet called the Spanish Flu”, recollects André. The second instance of “luck”: on the night of 15 July 1918, the battery of 6# howitzer in which André was serving had to face severe gunfire from the enemy camp. “The way from the Command post to the battery was limited to a narrow footpath by rolls of barbed wire,” remembers André. While he was walking over there, he was caught in one of the rolls which were thrown on him following the explosion of a shell. Some more rolls fell on him as he was trying to extricate himself. Three months later, while he was at a distance of two hundred and fifty kilometers on the North-West of the site of 15 July, he found one of La Main de Massiges—the place where he and his fellow soldiers were present in July—and the location of their battery was shown as a target; however there was a mistake and the “ four guns being shown at both ends of the footpath” so that the spot where André was “pinned to the ground” was shown as the actual target.

The war ended in 1918 and André, as a reward for his bravery and contribution, received several titles of honour which included the Cross of the War 1914-1918 (which he received just after the War), the Cross of the Voluntary Fighters and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (these were received after 1935) which is considered as the highest order conferred by the State. In December 1919, he joined Ecole Polytechnique and obtained the title of Ancien éléve de l’ecole polytechnique in August 1921, after which he joined Le Carbone-Lorraine (Le Carbone came to be known as Le Carbone-Lorraine when it merged with Le Lorraine probably in 1935); he was the director of a factory making batteries and other electrical materials for Le Carbone-Lorraine from 1926 to 1939. Later he joined the Industrial Company of Battery Cells and became the honorary President of the company. He was also associated with several foreign and international organizations and established himself very well in the elite society of Paris. On 10 September 1923, he married Wanda and was blessed with two daughters Janine (born on 7 November 1924) and Françoise (19 June1931-15 March 2008) who was better known as Pournaprema...   more »