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Other Books by MARY BORDEN
Fiction
THE ROMANTIC WOMAN
JANE OUR STRANGER
THREE PILGRIMS AND A TINKER JERICHO SANDS FOUR o'clock
flamingo Jehovah's day a woman with white eyes sarah gay action for slander strange week-end passport for a girl mary of nazareth the king of the jews
General
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE THE TECHNI^^UE OF MARRIAGE
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Mary Borden
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DOWN A BLIND ALLEY
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Harper & Brothers Publishers Mew Tork and London
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COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY MARY BORDEN SPEARS. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ALL RIGHTS IN THIS BOOK ARE RESERVED. NO PART OF THE BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITHOUT WRITTEN PER- MISSION EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF BRIEF QUOTATIONS EMBODIED IN CRITICAL ARTICLES AND REVIEWS. FOR INFORMATION ADDRESS HARPER & BROTHERS
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CONTENTS
PART ONE
pages
PART TWO page 131
PART THREE page 323
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PART ONE
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PART ONE
CHAPTER I I
THERE IS a house in the center of France where my thoughts, however troubled, can always find rest; and another in Paris, in the old quarter on the left bank of the Seine, that is often recalled to my mind in London because we brought with us some of the things in it that we liked best, when we left. Our old Chinese rugs and Louis XV berg^res with their fine faded needlework came from the drawing room in the Faubourg St. Germain and Houdon's Voltaire stood on its slender marble column at the top of the stairs. It is a plaster of the period with a lovely patine; we bought it in Tours for a few francs. It had been lying for years in the cellar of a convent, but the good sisters had only discovered shortly before we came whose the head was and had thrown the infidel out just in time for us.
The chateau is small and very old, it is in the wine country. It belongs to some French cousins and stands beside a river east of Auxerre and not far from the ancient Abbey of Vesley. The Black Prince marched up the valley long ago, more recently a human flood poured down the road from Paris fleeing from the Germans; but when B. and I were married in 1918 Cousin Gaston and Sis were still there and it seemed to them the most natural thing in the world to extend to me the welcome they had given him ever since he was a small boy.
We went to France almost every year between the two wars for the Easter recess and summer holidays, making many short trips to Paris as well. Whenever he could get away B. would be off across the Channel and every spring I would see the same look in his eyes and know that he was longing to
go back to V .
Cousin Gaston and Sis were distant cousins but did not seem so. Tlie connection was through B.'s Irish grandmother. Sis came from Kildare County. She was a timid pretty little old lady when I met her with soft gray hair and wistful eyes. Though she had lived for many years in France and borne her husband two sons, she had clung always to her Irish family and
prevailed on them to spend many weeks of each year at V .
It was a wonderful place for children. The river was a full placid stream
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abounding in fish. The hills rising steeply on the far side were thickly wooded. There was an ancient tower in the garden fitted up as a carpenter shop where Gaston would teach the boys to make all manner of useful things and impart much gentle Old World wisdom.
B.'s grandmother used to come over with him from Ireland and settle in for the summer. She was a formidable old lady even when I knew her at the
end of her life. She died in 1920 and is buried at V . She lies in the
churchyard on the little hill south of the village beside Sis and Gaston. She must have been tremendous in her young days when she lived with them through the siege of Paris. A stalwart, autocratic, self-willed Irish woman who loved France and her French cousins but never spoke more than a few words of execrable French.
Cousin Gaston was already growing old in 1918. He always wore a brown corduroy jacket with antler hom buttons. His beard was white, his fine fleshy face too pale, his body a little too heavy for his fragile legs, but he would come hurrying to meet me with short uncertain steps, take both my hands in his and kiss me lightly first on one cheek then the other, with an exquisite tender Old World courtesy that I have not met with very often. It was because of him that I long ago came to share B.'s feeling that we had a home in France.
The house in Paris was another thing altogether. We moved into it at the end of the First World War when we were married, and made it into the kind of house that we liked. It was very attractive and rather absurd. It didn't give on the street — ^you drove or walked through a tunnel under an im- meuble, found the front door in a courtyard and mounted an imposing staircase to enter a suite of rooms, neither large nor imposing, that gave on a garden with other gardens beyond.
A gay little house, like a Normandy manor; we painted the library walls a deep green and filled the bookshelves with a medley of old volumes picked up on the quais or new volumes bound by the Muffles de la Guerre. We found an old red-lacquer writing table in the Rue des St. P^res to go in the window, deep armchairs to go to either side of the chimney piece. The paneled drawing room was the color of tarnished gold, and reflected faintly the shimmer of sunlit trees in the garden. A tiny winding staircase led down to a long music room; another outside led to the garden with its lilacs and laburnums. A nightingale used to come each summer and sing there. We kept open house during the Peace Conference and the staircases were often crowded with gay attractive friendly people. A house full of color and music and laughter.
But all this came after the war of 1914-1918. It was the war that had taken
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me to France. I had spent it with the French Army, had met B. for the first time during the Battle of the Somme, and we had given up the house in Paris in '21 to come home to England, when he resigned his commission, thinking that the world would have peace at least for his lifetime. But now in '39 we were at war again, and to the word "war," my answer was France. Instantly, inevitably, twenty-five years of crowded life were as if they had never been and a great wave of emotion out of the past swept me back to the France of 1914.
Dunkirk, a dingy hostelry in a cobblestone square filled with dapper French officers in sky-blue tunics and scarlet breeches. It is warm, its beds are enormous and soft and deep; the smell of succulent food pervades its stuflFy corridors. A siren screams from the church tower, there is a confused scramble for the cellars, a tram making along the windy beach to the ugly suburb of Malo-les-Bains stops; and out on the sands a swarm of tiny figures fall flat on their faces like frantic worshipers; Big Bertha, the great gun beyond the sand dunes in Belgium, is shelling the town.
Convoys are lumbering along the road to Poperinghe and Ypres. Columns of men in heavy gray-blue coats that are too big for them are staggering across the mud of Flanders, a woman in a gray army cape turns into a sodden field outside the village of Ruysbrock, between gateposts that carry a sign marked "Hdpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1'* Tlie woman is myself. I cannot see her face, but I can see the rows of wooden sheds that house the wounded, the nurses in their white caps hurrying from one to another, and the small square hut in the center of the compound that was my home.
That was the World War — the war to end war. We were young in those days and full of nonsense. But how strange to realize now looking back that when I landed on the quay at Dunkirk in 1914 I could not look forward and observe what was to happen there twenty-five years later. How frighten- ing to think that when I took the tram each day along the beach to the derelict casino at Malo-les-Bains no glimmer shone back out of the future to my tiny present to reveal what that beach was to witness of disaster and heroism.
"'We will fight on the beaches."
Winston Churchill knew no more than I in those days what Dunkirk was to stand for in history. He was at the Admiralty planning Gallipoli, and my husband, whose existence was unknown to me, was lying wounded in a London nursing home having done the retreat from Mons in liaison with General Lanrezac and the Battle of the Mame with Franchet d'Esperey.
It is fascinating and Instructive to contemplate in retrospect one's minute blind burrowing progress through the dark night of events which we imagine
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to have been vivid and luminous. I see myself as a very small mole nosing its way with comic assurance through the roaring gloom of that old war zone. And then, presto, I am at it again doing precisely the same thing in exactly the same way in a new, different, but even more terrible war. And so, though I gained much useful experience in the first that stood me in good stead in the second, by way of wisdom I would seem to have acquired less than nothing.
And now that both wars are over they tend already to blend into one. Soon, if I am not careful, I shall confuse their events, mistake the road I followed in 1916 on my way down from Flanders to the Somme for one I took in 1940 from Paris to Lorraine, or transpose frail Miss Warner with her eye- glasses and gray hair who came to Dunkirk from Philadelphia in 1915 as my head nurse and put her down on her slender feet in one of the wards at St. Jean le Bassel behind the Maginot Line. What more natural? Miss Warner, if she still lives, is old, but the valiant women who answer the call of pain, disease and death are all like her; the giant poplars lining the roads of France are the same today as yesterday; the soil of France does not change, and her fields, her rivers, her forests are timeless as human beings mark time.
I could not tell a coherent story if I would of my life in the French Army during the First World War. But it is right to evoke those days for a moment, for they are the introduction to my work with the French troops during the five years just ended. If I had not gone to the front with a mobile hospital in 1914, if I had not carried with me in my heart during the long interval a fadeless memory of the poilus of 1914-1918, I would not have longed so passionately to rejoin them nor leaped at the chance when it offered.
The early adventure began almost by accident. I had no thought of organizing a field hospital when I put my name down with the London Committee of the French Red Cross and was summoned to the presence of its president. La Vicomtesse de la Panouse.
Had I done any nursing?
No.
Did I speak French? A "Httle."
There was a typhoid epidemic in Dunkirk, was I willing to nurse typhoid? After a moment's hesitation, once more, yes.
Madame de la Panouse watched me out of a bright black eye, with the
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hint of an ironical smile touching her lips. A powerful woman. The Service de Sant6 she explained had been prepared for twenty-five thousand casualties; the sick and wounded already numbered half a million. Nurses were urgenfly needed in Dunkirk. But — ^well — there were difficulties. The French military authorities were not eager to introduce English nurses into their hospitals. My role would be to break down their prejudice and persuade them to allow us to nurse their sick. Would I go, taking two hospital nurses with me at my own expense?
Very well. I had best leave as soon as possible. I would find conaitions, she added as she said good-by, somewhat primitive.
A plump hand waved me off, wafted me as if by magic to Dunkirk. I found myself with my two nurses at the end of that windy tramway and stumbled into a place of nightmare. The dilapidated casino of Malo-des- Bains had been turned into a makeshift typhoid hospital of 250 beds.
The sick lay helpless under the great tarnished chandeliers of the gaming rooms, the rows of dingy beds were reflected to infinity in the vast gilded mirrors. There were no nurses until we arrived and nothing to nurse with; no feeding cups, no urinals, no bedpans. Even the dying must crawl out of bed and sit on open pails. The wind howled up the beach beyond the great windows but the stench in the rooms made one vomit. I would run every so often behind my screen to be sick, go for a moment to one of the broken panes in the glass veranda to breathe the fresh salt air from the sea, then hurry back to that dim purgatory of gaunt heads, imploring eyes and clutching hands.
We did what we could for them. My nurses told me what to do and I did it to the best of my ability. But it was a heartbreaking business. French army regulations forbade us to nurse at night; the overworked orderlies on night duty would fall asleep and each morning we would find that one or more of the men we had pulled through the day before had died in the dark.
This went on for some weeks, then a visiting inspector's question broke me down. A kind old man. It distressed him to see me cry. There — there, he patted my heaving shoulder. Would I like to have a hospital of my own? Yes. Oh yes. Very well, if I would write a letter to the commander in chief he would send it on. What? Write to General Joffre? But yes, why not? Why not indeed?
I hurried back that night to my billet in the Chapeau Rouge and dashed off a letter to General Joffre on a sheet of hotel note paper offering on certain conditions to equip a field hospital of a hundred beds for the French Army.
Yes.
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Four months later the huts of UHopital Chirurgical Mobile No. i were set up in a field in Flanders outside the village of Ruysbrock.
The conditions I put were few. I mention them because they proved wise and because I have repeated the formula twice during this war. Once to General Gamelin, once to General de Gaulle. I would give the complete equipment of a surgical hospital of loo beds on the understanding that the French Army would take it over as a military unit, provide the officers, N.C.O.'s and orderlies and appoint me as directnce with absolute authority over all women employed in the hospital and the right to recruit my own nurses. That was all, but it was enough. With my own position recognized by French G.H.Q. and the right to choose my nurses, I was confident that the hospital would be a success. If it was not, the fault would be mine.
An Anglo-French unit under French command; a French CO., a British dhectncey French surgeons, doctors, chemists and administrative oflEcers, British and American nurses. The formation was unique, an ex- periment that was watched by envious eyes and expected to fail: it didn't fail, it grew out of all recognition. Beginning with a dozen nurses, British, Australian, New Zealand and American; we ended the war with fifty, half of them French. Our first station was a pleasant affair of neat huts standing firmly in a green field, then suddenly I was in a vast enclosure resembling a lumber camp surrounded by seas of yellow mud.
I don't remember how I got to Bray-sur-Somme in 1916 but the scene is vivid. I imagine that I can still hear the thunder of the guns, the endless rumble of trucks passing our flimsy hospital gate, and smell the smell of gas gangrene that pervaded so many of the gaunt wooden sheds. I see myself sitting in my cubicle with sodden feet on my iron stove. My apron is stained with mud and blood; I am too tired to take it off. My feet are burning lumps as I hobble to open the door. A young officer stands there. He too is be- spattered with mud; his face is haggard. He introduces himself. He is Captain Spears of the Xlth Hussars, liaison officer with General Fayolle, our army commander.
TTie day came rushing out of the past on that silent morning of September 3, 1939, filling my London room with its roar, its mixture of romance and horror. They were shelling the Corby crossroads and the shells were scream- ing over our heads. Captain Spears had been up to the front line to try to locate a British company that had been lost in the mud. He had stopped on his way back to see if he could be of use to the woman who had found her way to this ugly section of the French lines. I gave him tea. He went away again as he had come through the wind, under the cracking sky. I lost him. The battle surged over us. But he turned up again behind the
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Chemin des Dames where I was sent in 1917 for the Neville offensive. And we were married in Paris in March, 1918.
I do not know how many wounded passed through our hands during those years of unparalleled slaughter. I remember the good priests who worked with us in our wards and fought with us to save the lives of our men. And I remember the old ones, the old Pe p^res who were my special aides in the huge reception hut where the men were brought in on their stretchers from the field dressing stations and laid on the floor. Often during a battle there would be as many as eight hundred men, lying side by side in long rows under the peaked roof of that shed. It was the business of the old ones to undress them and wrap them in blankets and put hot-water bottles at their feet and sides, while I went quickly from one to another with my needles giving injections of camphor oil, or caffeine, or morphia. Gentle, very gentle were my old ones when they lifted a shattered limb or cut away the bloodstained coat from a bleeding side. Their gnarled peasants' hands are beautiful to me and their grizzled heads have majesty. I look again dovra the dreadful place under the flickering light of our hurricane lanterns. It is one in the morning. The door at the far end is still opening and shutting, opening and shutting — for still they are coming from the battlefield — ^and my old ones are going quietly and steadily about their business. I can see them from behind the wooden screen where I have a dozen fine needles on the boil. I have been on duty thirty-six hours and am become a sleepwalker, an automaton, and then one of my old ones puts his head round the screen and holds out both his old hands, one with a tin cup of pinard, the other with a hunk of bread. He has brought me his casse-croflte and he says in his rough voice, "Faut manger, ma soeur."
I did not count the number who died as I knelt beside their stretchers. Great strong broken men who apologized in whispers for the trouble they gave in dying; slender boys whom I held in my arms while they cried for their mothers and who mistook me for some anxious woman I would never see; old patient humble men, as old as my old ones, who went quietly, so modestly; the French poilus of 1914-1918. I see them still, marching up the long roads of France in their clumsy boots and their heavy gray-blue coats that were too big for them; dogged, patient, steady men, plodding to death in defense of their land. I shall never forget them. Nothing in this new war has dimmed their memory nor crowded them out of the pantheon of the glorious dead.
All this and much more came back to me that radiant terrible Sunday morning in London. I must go back to those old ones, I whispered, take up
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again the work that was interrupted. But how could I hope to do any such thing? I was too old. I had been involved in an accident called the Wall Street crash, I could no longer afford to equip a hospital out of my own pocket; An A.R.P. garage in Fulham was my battle station.
And what of my husband? He had resigned from the Army in 1921 and was now in Parliament. Would his service in the last war be remembered? Would the Prime Minister send for him? It didn't seem likely. Wally Robertson, C.I.G.S., in 1918 had sent him to Paris as head of the British military mission to the French government; he had held the post until the end of the Peace Conference, and Winston Churchill, who was a friend, had made full use of his exceptional knowledge of France when he became Secretary for War in 1919. But Churchill wasn't at the head of a government department now. There had been a thing called Munich, a stupid, shameful, criminal thing, a thing that was supposed to avert war and give us peace in our time. And now we were at war and Lord Halifax was Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Hore Belisha was at the War Office, and Sir John Simon was somewhere else, and B. had cooked his goose with the lot of them because he had said what he thought about Munich in no uncertain terms. No. It was not likely that Neville Chamberlain would make use of him. He and I must be content this time to stay at home.
And so I took myself off to my A.R.P. garage and the blackout began.
But sitting behind the sandbags in West Fulham waiting for the bombers that didn't come — I would think of France — of France at war and of Paris when the war ended.
How lucky we had been, B. and I, in those old days. Circumstance had set us at the center of the world at a moment when the world suddenly was set free. The Paris scene of the Peace Conference came back with the rush and sweep and splendid color of a sumptuous ballet. Driving myself home from Fulham at midnight through the blackout, I would stumble into the dimly lit London study to find Voltaire smiling with terrifying serenity, and behind his delicate plaster head I would watch, as I sipped my cup of Bovril, a procession of shadows passing up a distant abandoned staircase in Paris.
Lloyd George and Maynard Keynes and Robert Cecil; Venizelos and Benes, Colonel and Mrs. House, Phillipe Berthelot and Georges Mandel. Colonel Lawrence accompanying Feisal, Paul Valery, Anna de Noailles, Jean Cocteau and Marie Laurencin, Henri Bernstein and Simone. What a varied, colorful pageant it had been.
Our funny little house had been thronged, not only with soldiers and statesmen, artists and writers, but with the fastidious ladies of quality who
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as a rule were intolerant o£ strangers. For the French Army had adopted Spears as a brother-in-arms and Paris had followed suit and opened its doors; a Paris that was as brilliant as a costly jewel, as gay as a happy carefree child.
Did I realize then in those days how lucky I was? I think so. I think I knew that the days whirling by would remain as the happiest days of my life. For I remember waking at night and listening to a sound that seemed to come out of heaven. It was the chant of the good nuns in a convent of our quarter rising soft and full above the rooftops. And I would be aware as I listened of a heartbreaking sweetness.
Ill
B. and I would talk of those days and of the years that came after, during the lonely evenings of the autumn of '39. We would sit together, imprisoned by the blackout, and discuss the series of blunders, French and British, that had led the two countries through a so-called peace, to this.
The Peace Conference had not been the end for him of his work with and for the French, it had been the beginning. Indeed he had thrown himself with such fire and ardor into championing the cause of France that he had become known among the anti-French bloc in the House of Commons as the member for Paris. Then in '35 things had begun to go wrong. The atmosphere changed. And though B. stuck to his guns, went on doggedly working in and out of Parliament to further Anglo-French relations, his efforts had not satisfied the French politicians who succeeded each other in office with such bewildering rapidity. They would turn up in London, knock at our door and make it their business to explain the causes of friction be- tween our two countries. Their complaint was that Great Britain having won the war had promptly "carted" her ally France, forgiven her enemy Germany, and was determined to build up a democratic German state in order to trade with her. France knew, they insisted, that this attitude would be fatal. She wanted security and believed not at all in a peaceful democratic German state. She was a realist. The sentimental complacency of the British exasperated her. Our incessant talk of peace, disarmament and the League of Nations drove our French friends to a frenzy.
All told the same story. Painleve, Poincar^, Daladier, Flandin, Paul Rey- naud, B. had kept in touch with them all. Flandin was one of the most out- spoken. We saw him often, for he came often to England. He liked to shoot English pheasants and would stay with the Kemsleys and B. would collect a number of M.P/s to meet him at dinner in London after his week end. He did not mince matters at these dinners. I remember a night when he pushed
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back his chair and hissed through clenched teeth. "Very well, if you refuse to build up your armaments France must come to an understanding with Germany/'
B. had formed an Inter Parliamentary Committee of French Deputies and British M.P/s with Flandin as his opposite number. The British members were entertained in Paris and vice versa. B. and Flandin continued working together until at the time of Munich the Frenchman sent his famous tele- gram of congratulation to Hitler. It was tiie end of their association. We had not seen him since.
But things had gone wrong long before that. From 1935 on, any kindness shown to a French Minister, in London, landed B. in hqt water with that Minister's enemies in Paris. If we received deputies of the right like Georges Mandel, those of the left cold-shouldered us. If we received men of the left those of the right were scathingly rude. Finally some of the friends we were most fond of refused to have anything more to do with us because B. had attended a dinner given for Blum in the House of Commons.
We seem to have been very naive about all this but it was, I think, impossible for a member of the tolerant British Parliament to assess at their true strength the violent passions that were tearing France apart in 1937- 1938. We had been in Paris during the February riots of '36 and had sensed the dangerous tension in the capital when Colonel de la Rocque's Croix de Feu clashed with the Communists, but we failed like most Britishers to estimate properly the disastrous moral effect on the propertied classes of the Front Populaire with its stay in strikes, its forty-hour week and its conges payds. Nor could we have imagined the lengths to which the Daladier govern- ment would go in order to avoid a Communist revolution.
The truth is that my husband loved France too well to acknowledge what was happening to her or believe that she had exchanged her old fear of Ger- many for the new prefabricated fear of the Communist bogey.
It didn't occur to us seriously that the French middle class might have made up its mind after the Blum regime to accept my compromise with Hitler rather than run the risk of a revolution of the left. Munich had done nothing to enlighten us in London. How could it when our own government was as ready as the French to sell out Czechoslovakia? We were amongst those in England who knew that, in spite of that futile betrayal a point would be reached when appeasement must stop. Daladier's government was weak, so was our own. We took for granted that both were aware that war was inevitable.
We should have known. The writing on the wall was clear enough for those who wished to read. Wishful thinking made us blind. B. and I paid
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what was to be our last visit to Paris before the war during the summer of '39 expecting to be welcomed as comrades about to share in a perilous enterprise. Our reception by old friends was distinctly chilly. The explanation offered came as a shock. "It is because you are dragging us into your horrible war.''
Well — all that was over — the long chapter of blunders and misunder- standings was finished. France was with us again — ^we were once more united in war. Nothing else mattered.
But was I to sit waiting for the duration in this A.R.P. garage? Was B. with his unparalleled knowledge of France to be left at home?
One morning an old friend of the last war. Lady Hadfield, rang up and asked me to come to see her in Carlton House Terrace. I went^ was shown up to her room and when she had kissed me heard her say:
"Robert has given me a sum of money for war work. I would like it to be for the French but I want to do something with you. What shall it be?''
I needed not one instant for reflection. "I would like to do what I did in the last war."
"A field hospital?"
"Yes."
"Very well, let's do it. How do we begin?" I thought a moment.
"B. knows General Gamelin. I could write to him." "Do, my dear."
It was as simple as that. I went home as I had once gone back to my billet in the Chapeau Rouge and wrote a letter to General Gamelin telling him that, through the great generosity of Sir Robert Hadfield, Lady Hadfield and I were prepared to equip and organize a mobile hospital of one hundred beds. And my letter began:
"Twenty five years ago I wrote to General Joffre — "
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CHAPTER II
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IT TOOK us three months to get ready. Not very long in which to assemble from two sides of the Channel a mobile field hospital complete with staff and transport; but I remember being in a fidget lest the war come to an end before we could get to the front. I find the following notes in my diary:
September 30th ^39. The Grand Quartier General has accepted in prin- ciple our offer of a hospital. General LeLong, head of the French Military Mission in London came into the Carlton yesterday with a party of French officers and stopped at our table to tell me the good news. Now that I am actually faced with the undertaking I feel dismay as well as elation. Lady Hadfield is as pleased as a child with a wonderful Xmas stocking but says she is too old to take an active part and that I am to do it all. She has opened a hospital account at Barclay's Bank, paid in Robert's handsome check and given me the checkbook.
She insists that the unit be called by both our names. So Hadfield- Spears it is to be. She wants to go to Paris next week but LeLong says we must wait until the Grand Quartier General has studied the question of modalites and can put me in touch with the proper authorities.
October 8th. Hitler's speech to the Reichstag the event of the week. I cannot believe the government will wobble over his peace proposals. Winston in the Cabinet seems to be a guarantee against that.
De Kerilis has arrived from Paris. He told B. the morale of the French Army was good, that of the people behind the lines not so good. Ten million civilians have been evacuated at a moment's notice from eastem France leaving horses, cattle etc. in the fields. De Kerelis says the Siegfried Line is better than the Maginot Line because deeper; but neither army can hope to break through; so with five million men on either side there seems to be no way of their getting to grips unless the Germans invade Belgium.
Gamelin has written B. saying that he has handed on my letter to his
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chief of staff and is certain our hospital will be of the greatest service, so I presume all is well.
When I asked B. what Gamelin was like, he shrugged his shoulders. Georges is his favorite. But I fancy he wonders how the present vintage compares with that of 1914-1918. Save for Georges and P^tain there seems to be no one of the first order. B. never trusted Weygand; says he was bom an old man.
The little chap at the French consulate was very touching when Lady H. explained in her halting French why she was asking for a permit to go to Paris, Her gift was, she told him, the repayment of a debt she owed France for the happiest years of her life. Harassed and exhausted, his eyes filled with tears. How gentle and sensitive these Frenchmen are. Such beautiful manners. Do I like having my hand kissed? Yes. I do. Yet I wonder — General Georges is of course a different type altogether, square, solid, with a fine frank face. I wonder if he remembers taking B. and me to the Ruhr in 1919.
Have asked Maureen Schreiber to come with me as second in command.
It was with some trepidation that I boarded the Paris train with Lady Hadfield the middle of October. Now that our project was launched, doubts assailed me of my ability to carry it through. I had undertaken to create a hospital out of nothing. I had nothing to build on save a sum of money and a bit of experience a quarter of a century out of date. To whom could I look for help and wise counsel? Lady Hadfield agreed to everything I suggested and tossed back every question or doubt that I put to her with the airy observation that she was certain I would manage beautifully.
That was all very well. How was I to find my way about the Service de Sante after all these years? No one with whom I had had to do in the last war would be there. Must I have a pass to get into the Minist^re de la Guerre? What sort of a pass? Where did I get it? I couldn't remember. I was mad, I said to myself, in the train, to think I could pull this thing off; it was sheer madness; and then suddenly, on arriving at the Gare du Nord to find the station thronged with French soldiery and the ladies of the French Red Cross busy behind their counters, it all came back to me, and I became once again what I had been, a woman in French uniform, a familiar of ministries, acquainted with all the habits and whims, the delays and red tape of the Service de Sante. And it seemed to me next day as I rattled down the Boulevard St. Germain in a taxi that the clock had been put back as if by magic twenty-five years. Nothing had happened during the interval; there had been no interval. This was the same war and I was
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the same person carrying on with my hospital. I was making for the Service de Sante to interview someone about its affairs as I always had to do when I came down from the front. I would be told this time that we were to move as we had moved so often before. A great battle had been fought to a standstill. We were to be sent to some other part of the line. What more natural? Where would it be? Champagne? The Ardennes? Verdun? No. The M6decin Colonel Aren facing me across his untidy desk said Le Colonel Liegois, aide major general at the grand quartier, was sending us to the IVth Army, to a village in Lorraine called St. Jean le Bassel, east of Nancy. There was a convent in St. Jean. A part of it had been requisitioned and would be handed over to us.
The window behind the courteous colonel reflected my gray army cape* There I sat as I always sat when I came down from Flanders, the Somme or the Chemin des Dames. The past twenty-five years were a dream. France hadn't changed, nor the Service de Sante. All those yellow forms, the long dirty pens that spluttered and scratched, the grimy corridors, nothing was different. What matter if Foch were dead and Fayolle and Clemen- ceau? There would be a new Tiger. Petain was still alive. A host of younger men schooled in the old traditions had been pouring out of St. Cyr ever since 1918. The French Army was still the finest army in the world and I was a proud woman to be as of old in its service.
Colonel Aren nodded as he glanced through the copies of my letters to the commander in chief. But yes, he was au courant — it was understood. He was to supply the personnel masculin, I was to bring my English nurses* He had received orders that everything was to be done to facilitate my task. One of his aides, by name Captain Lesaunier, had been told to hold himself at my disposal. He would send for him.
The colonel touched a bell. A phnton was dispatched to fetch Captain Lesaunier.
The French Army, Colonel Ar^n went on, was infinitely touched by the generosity of Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield. The Service de Sante had not forgotten my services during the last war. Nor those of my husband.
Yes, my husband still knew a number of officers.
The colonel smiled. 'Tour husband can claim the whole French Army as his friends, Madame la GeneraJe.''
Captain Lesaunier appeared somewhat breathless with a file under his arm. He was young and rosy with surprised baby-blue eyes. Colonel Ar^n presented him. 'Tou are to help Madame la Generale Spears. Do everything that she asks. If you get into difficulties come to me."
He bowed me out. Captain Lesaunier conducted me through the
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labyrinth of dingy corridors and down the stairs. We arranged to meet next day. A planton would be waiting at ten o'clock to conduct me to his office.
I hurried back to our hotel and burst in on Lady Hadfield with the good news. We could set to work at once. The people at the Service de Sante had received orders to help us in every possible way. Colonel Aren would pay her his respects at any time convenient to herself. He wanted to thank her personally for her great generosity. Such a charming man. He had said such nice things about B. A dear little captain with forget- me-not eyes in a round pink face was told off to help me. Everything was perfect. We were going to Lorraine, to a village called St. Jean le Bassel, behind the Maginot Line. I was to see Captain Lesaunier tomorrow. We had best get our surgical instruments and the big trucks in Paris — Renault and Citrooen were the people. I stopped for breath. She hugged me; I hugged her; we hugged ourselves. How wonderful it was!
I cannot remember what happened next. I have the most confused recol- lection of how I set to work. I think that first visit to Paris was short — that I was back in London ten days later. I know that Lady Hadfield stayed on in Paris for a bit, then left for her villa in the south of France and that I made repeated trips back and forth across the Channel haunting the Minist^re de la Guerre and the War Office in tum, collecting our staff, our officers, our five-ton Renault trucks (at a fabulous price), tents. X-ray, sterilizing apparatus and surgical instruments in Paris; nurses, drivers, staff cars, beds, bedding, linen and ward equipment in London. Lady Hadfield had offered her London dining room as an office, her basement as a ware- house, and Providence had sent us an angel to run the London end in the large, handsome, placid shape of Dorothy Van Tets. Providence, indeed, took an active hand in our affairs from the outset. Nurses appeared hke magic in answer to our appeal. Dorothy would see them first, then if they were keen enough to want to come for the small salary we offered, I would wade in to tell them about the discomforts and dangers they might be called upon to put up with. I made the salary small and painted the picture black deliberately. Experience proved my instinct right. Of the ten nurses finally selected not one let the unit down during the frightening and ex- hausting ordeal that awaited us. Nor do I believe there was a hospital overseas, British or French, where the standard of nursing was higher.
Lavinia Annaly was a second instrument of Providence. We had been
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in the A.R.P. garage together in Fulham and when she knew of my plans, took me to Mrs. Cook, then commandant of the M.T.C.
''Mam/' she said, "Fve brought Mrs. Spears to see you. She wants twenty-five first-class drivers and fifteen cars to go overseas with her field hospital.'' Then after a minute's pause, with a ravishing smile — ''Do you think you could help her?'' And Mrs. Cook rose to it like a bird. The M.T.C. was a small affair in those days, but the war was young and London swarmed with valiant young women, eager to go to the war and ready to provide their own vehicles. A wonderful lot they were, those vehicles. Ford station wagons, a handsome Buick, two Sunbeams, two Dodge vans and an old Bedford shooting brake with benches that would carry thirty men. It was to be the clown of our convoy. A motley collection; I fear it lacked elegance, but the personnel {eminin (nurses in gray, drivers in khaki)' were a very smart lot. Some were pretty and some were plain, some were thin and others were fat, but all were young and splendidly alive.
I remember very well the day that I called them together for the last time in London. I was going on ahead to Paris with Maureen, they were to fol- low in a fortnight. As I looked at the circle of expectant faces, I had an- other of my moments of doubt and dismay. What was I doing? What did I mean by daring to assume responsibility for taking these girls overseas? How had it all come about? Impossible to tell what lay in store for us. Im- possible to say how this one or that would behave in an emergency. Could I even be certain that I myself would not lose my head in a crisis? No. I couldn't. Well — I had started something. No turning back now if I wanted to. The moment passed. I didn't really believe in the dangers of which I had warned them and I did believe in my team. We hadn't tried each other out as yet, but they filled me with confidence. They were fine upstanding young women who had been drawn together by a spirit of adventure and a will to serve.
Maureen and I left finally the beginning of January. Audrey Pleydel- Bouverie had lent us her flat in Paris on the Quai Malaquai and it was there on a bitterly cold day that Jean Cosset presented himself. Le Medecin Capitaine Cosset, le medecin chef designate of our unit. He had come down from the Ardennes and wore a leather Jacket lined with sheepskin and riding boots. He was very tall. He had a long, queer, passionate face, pale sullen eyes and beautiful hands. He talked very fast in excellent English and began at once to ask questions about our equipment. Had I the list by me of our surgical instruments? No. Captain Lesaunier had the list. When would I go with him to see the captain? Tomorrow. Good. Would I come with him now to inspect the X-ray trailer? There were things that
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must be done to it. A disreputable two-seater Hotchkiss was at the door. Gosset climbed behind the wheel and rushed me out to the depot of the Seivice de Sant^ outside the Porte de Chatillon where our material was being assembled. I find the name in my little Paris address book of those days preceded by cryptic initials — E.C.O.A.T. Service de Sant^, Fort de Vanves, and underneath Sergeant Chef Duhazi, service module type. Sergeant Chef Duhazi springs from the grubby little page.^A swarthy, wiry, alert creature who could adapt a model type to the requirements of any fanatical X-ray specialist, he became my guide, counselor and friend, leading me quickly down the alleyways of the immense sheds where a million surgical instruments were being sorted and packed into baskets, offering me his lean muscular arm across the frozen slippery yard to other distant sheds where our handsome trucks waited for their loads. For Gosset and I together haunted the bleak premises of the Fort de Vanves as I had haunted the dim little office of good patient Captain Lesaunier in the Minist^re de h Guerre.
Poor Lesaunier. What a patient faithful soul he was. I used to climb his dingy stairs every other day. Always I found him telephoning, fruitlessly, behind mountainous files, to distant depots in the provinces for urgently, desperately needed supplies. He would motion me to a chair, sweeping a pile of papers on to the floor to give me room to sit down, while he clung to his instrument, imploring, cajoling and at last mildly threatening some colleague at the other end of the line, gazing at me the while, out of his unseeing harassed blue eyes. But when at last he put down the receiver, a smile would light up his round fair face and he would give himself to my business as if the little matter of collecting an X-ray trailer from one province of France, the screen to go inside it from another, by means of goods trains that took anything from two weeks to a month to do a couple of hundred miles, were the task above all else that warmed his heart and brightened the squalid routine Of his office. I wonder what has become of him? Once our equipment was assembled at the Fort de Vanves, I no longer had any reason to go to him for help and he dropped out of my life.
Gosset I continued to see every day. He would turn up at the Quai Malaquai and drive me with savage determination and a great grinding of brakes from one government office or military depot or warehouse to an- other. Some are there in my little worn book:
"Essence, Commandant Mar/orelle, etat-major ^i6me Bureau 1000 litres."
The reference is clear enough. We touched the good commandant of whom I have no recollection for a thousand liters of petrol but I am vague as to what I was doing in the office of Le Capitaine Gizi-Costan, com-
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merce exterieur of the Ministdre de Y Armament I think I was asking him for permission to purchase those five-ton Renault trucks. But perhaps I had gone about the roHing kitchen that looked like a clumsy gun carriage and was to play such an important part in our lives, for Cuisine Roulante, Maison D'Orval, 2 Place de la Borde appears immediately beneath the accommodating Capitaine Cizi.
It is difficult to recall one's first impression of a man whom one comes to know in very trying circumstances but I remember that I was very favor- ably impressed by Jean Gosset. He was an intellectual and a man of the world. He had excellent if slightly flamboyant manners and could exert a very effective charm. I learned later that he knew this and made good use of it. If he wanted something from someone he would say, ''Je vais faire du chamie pendant une demi-hemer I daresay he was turning his charm on me with his usual cynicism, during those days. Why not? We were partners. It was up to him to get on with me. The easiest way to do so was to charm me; he did.
It was evident that he had a gift for organization and I was told that he was an even more brilliant surgeon than his very fashionable father. Pro- fessor Gosset was a polished old worldling with a large house in the Champs de Mars and a very lucrative clientele. He spoke softly and he looked flabby. He invited me with some condescension to assist at one of his operations at Sal P^tri^re and I did, to my discomfort. I can endure any amount of war surgery, but I do not like seeing immense tumors removed from shrunken old women, even when the performance is gone through with smooth perfection, with a minimum of effort and in absolute silence. Professor Gosset operated beautifully, softly, exquisitely. He had stepped softly up to his position of pre-eminence among the surgedns of Paris and he kept that pre-eminence contentedly, so we were told, under the German occupation, collaborating no doubt with his habitual air of beauti- ful condescension until he died. I was not surprised when I heard that he had adapted himself so comfortably to the Nazis. I had disliked and dis- trusted him at once. It was quite otherwise with his son.
Ill
It is strange to look back and observe how little I understood during those days of what was going on in Paris behind the fagade of military activity. Why, I ask myself, had I no inkling of what was about to happen, no suspicion of the fate that was awaiting the French Army? I was given the hint again and again. I heard the whispering. Whispers that all was
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not well at the MinistdTC de TAir, that the quays at Le Havre were strewn with crated American planes — never uncrated because the necessary palms hadn't been properly greased — -whispers that Gamelin spent his time in Paris intriguing against Georges — ^whispers of peace — incessant whispers of peace.
I smiled at such stuflF and went on with my own business.
Bonnet they said in the salons of the polite world — ^he was the man. He would soon oust Daladier and start pour-parlers with the Germans. Of what use to prolong this phony war? Neither army could get at the other. The Germans knew it as well as we did. They were realists like the French. If only the British could be persuaded — the time was ripe for peace.
The reiterated word did begin after a time to irritate me. "Peace," they murmured over little tables at Larue's, or Maxim's, or Giro's. Peace — the whispers rose to loud chatter at cocktail parties.
How witty they were, these smart folk of Paris who crowded the Ritz bar. Smug diplomats, languid beauties. I had been enthralled in the old days by these ladies, fascinated by the miracle of their grace, their fragile ageless bones and inexhaustible temperament. But now there was something wrong, their light laughter struck a discordant note. What had their elegant furbelows and exquisite pointed fingernails to do with war?
But the war hadn't begun. It had been going on for three months to be sure but there had been no battle. Perhaps there would be none.
"Vous croyez vraiment," they said to me when I appeared in uniform, "que cela vaut la peine, cette guerre?"
It was all there for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear. The defeatism, the corruption, the treachery that had been eating away the foun- dation of France and was to bring about the collapse of her armies. I said to myself: "These people don't count. They represent nothing. France hasn't changed since 1914'' — ^and I would hurry for comfort to the woman whom I trusted above all .others, who was, and is, one of the most brilliant French women of her time.
She was grim during those days. She saw, I believe, what was coming and didn't flinch, she had a fearless mind, but she would ask about England, her eyes doubtful and dark with distress. Was it true that we had been caught unprepared? When would we be able to put a great army into the field? Did Chamberlain have his heart in the war? I could not give her the answers she longed to hear.
I have seen her again. And I shall tell of how I found her when the iron curtain was lifted. We have talked together since the liberation of France almost as we used to talk — ^almost but not quite. We had had in common a
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great liking for truth and an immense zest for life, could disagree with enjoyable violence respecting each other's passionate prejudices and we never hed to each other. Nor did we lie when we met again after the four years' silence, but there were questions I dared not put, fearing she would not tell me the truth, or if she did, that I would be unable to bear it. Some- thing enormous, you understand, happened to divide us, something that we cannot talk about without fear or prevarication. I haven't lost her. It is still possible for us to enjoy being together, but it will never be quite the same. So she must remain nameless.
And the others whom I loved, they too must be nameless, for they are gone. They seemed to me in '39 to be as close to us as they had been in 1918. They were full of interest and sympathy with my project. They said how gallant it was of these English girls to go to the front to nurse their wounded. Then they would shudder or change the subject. I should have known what that meant, should have realized. But how could I? They were a part of the best years of my life, belonged to the time when I was young and in love and lived on the left bank of the Seine. We had won a world war together then and our hearts were light because they had been brave. How could I doubt these old friends now? Why should I? They were the same people. I thought them unchanged.
I was wrong. They were graceful and kind. They expressed admiration but were not really interested in my venture. They didn't want to be inter- ested. They were giving their sons to the army, but unwillingly. They hated the war, but not as we hated it, for they did not admit that it was inevitable, and they wished to have as little to do with it as possible.
I remember sitting after luncheon with a group of these friends, shortly before I left for Lorraine. I remember the sunlit room, the wood fire in the grate, the delicious aroma of the coffee in my cup, and the plaintive chann of my hostess. I admired her quality more than that of almost any woman I had ever met. Frail, very slender, with a mocking tenderness in her voice, she had always charmed me. Now she said, ''How can you do it. May?"
"I did it before."
"'But that was different, ch^re amie." "You mean the war was different?" "But of course." "I don't understand."
She gave an impatient shrug, then laughed, a gentle mocking apologetic laugh.
'Tm afraid," she said, "that all I want is peace — peace at any price."
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I didn't believe her. It didn't occur to me to take her seriously as mean- ing literally what she said.
Now I am afraid to ask what became of that charming group when the monstrous thing happened. Because they were friends, I cannot pry into their secrets. Perhaps it is even true that I never knew them.
But we used to be intimate, that is the queer thing. It used to seem almost as if we belonged to the same race. Now we are strangers.
It may be that I shall meet them again in the streets of Paris or London; if I do, if they speak and smile at me, it will not alter the fact that I have lost them.
Dorothy Van Tets meanwhile had been filling the basement of Carlton House Terrace with blankets, and sheets and towels, hot-water bottles and pajamas, jugs and basins and mugs and plates, surgical trays and bedpans, every possible thing in fact that a surgical unit required, and all was ready to be shipped to Paris. Infinitely tactful and always unruffled, she had taken her placid way through the warehouses of the City of London and the offices of Whitehall and lo and behold all the City and most of White- hall had become her charmed collaborators.
I do not know how she shipped those crates and bales to Paris. Tve no idea how she managed to get the nurses complete with passports, exit permits and luggage across the Channel. The M.T.C. unit took themselves across in batches with their vehicles and drove them to Paris, the nurses came by train; and I found when I went to meet them one wintry night at the Care du Nord that the journey had not been without incident. Battered by the Channel waves, hungry, exhausted, disheveled, and hung about with an incredible assortment of string bags and paper parcels but laughing at their misery they came staggering down the platform. We piled them into the two Fords that were waiting and took them to join the M.T.C. unit at the Hotel Modeme in the Place de la Bastille amid groans and laughter. The note of the Hadfield-Spears Unit had been struck at its very beginning; it was a note of ribald mirth that rose in a crescendo exactly proportioned to the discomfort or tension of a given moment.
Colonel Ar^n had generously fulfilled his part of the bargain. Three young surgeons had been attached to the unit in addition to Cosset. Lieutenants Boutron, Huguet and Gu^nin; one medical man. Dr. Bernard, an X-ray specialist, Le Canouet, and the usual administrative staff. Fifty soJdats de Ilidme chsse were waiting in barracks near the Fort de Vanves to join up. The twelve military drivers who would drive the heavy trucks were under the orders of a sergeant chef selected by Cosset himself. We had been given a
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military number and had become Ambulance Chirurgical L6g^re de Corps d'Arm^e 282.
And so all the bits and pieces of our formation were gathered together. The beds and the mattresses and the pillows and Dorothy's beautiful soft blue blankets were loaded into the handsome French trucks.
Lady Hadfield came back from the south with a smart Renault limousine which she presented to me as my own personal car, B. came to spend my last week with me in Paris. Mrs. Cook came to attend the final inspection of the unit at the Fort de Vanves and on a bitter day early in February our convoy waved a gay good-by to Paris and took the road to Lorraine.
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CHAPTER III
I
IN SPITE of the ice on the roads, we did the two hundred and fifty miles without mishap and made Nancy by five o'clock. General R^quin, commander of the IVth French Army, had sent his A.D.C., Captain Lecomte, to meet us at the Hotel Thiers with his compliments, inviting Lady Hadfield, myself and all the oflScers of the unit, masculine and feminine, French and British, to lunch with him next day at his head- quarters. It was on the way to St. Jean le Bassel, Captain Lecomte explained; we could reach the convent easily after lunch. En attendant he had reserved rooms for Lady Hadfield and me at the hotel and had billeted ces dames as best he could in the town. I would understand. There were many troops garrisoned in Nancy. He hoped the young ladies would be indulgent.
The twenty-five young ladies were prepared to be. All they asked for the moment was a shelter where they could thaw out their swollen hands and remove frozen boots. Standing in the snow that shone faintly through the gathering dark I presented the young officer and to each he bowed formally from his slender waist, a little smile of amused admiration curving his sensitive lips. A tall, fine-drawn young man, very chic in the close- fitting black tunic of the Chasseurs a Pied, I think of him with pleasure and gratitude. During the coming months — ^and I was to see him in trying and tragic circumstances — ^his exquisite courtesy never failed him. Whatever the occasion he was always elegantly turned out and perfectly calm and completely adequate. We have laughed since at the memory of that winter evening in Nancy when we went together through the cold, dim, empty streets to one shuttered house after another to bed the girls down for the night.
Nancy! silent city of ghosts and splendid memories; the Place Stanislas dreamed under a coldly glittering sky, the snowy streets were deserted, not a chink of light filtered through the pale sedate rows of mysterious shut- ters. The girls of 282 shattered the silence and dispelled the ghosts as they spilled out of their motors. The "Nannies" as the drivers called them, proved to have brought with them an extraordinary assortment of curiously shaped
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bundles and to have been eating all day out of paper bags. A certain dis- similarity between the girls in khaki and those in gray became evident; arguing began between the figures in gray on the pavement and those in khaki astride the luggage racks on the roofs of the cars as to what must come down. Evelyn in gray must have her hold-all, Alexandra wanted her large kit bag. Maria's bass voice boomed through the gloom from the top of her Ford, Elaine Bodley kept crying, 'Tlease will somebody help me — Oh please, it is much too heavy.'' A frail member of the M.T.C. was our Boddles. T. W. cursed beneath her breath as she flung bundles of bedding into Lecomte's exquisite arms. Our first night on the road was a foretaste of what I was to expect. But the ten nurses and fifteen drivers were housed at last! Tant bien que mal. T. W. in an attic up a flight of outside stairs, steep as a ladder. I left her with a streaming cold under a dingy quilt. Boddles was to sleep in a bath. And an hour later with their hilarious noses in large jugs of beer, half the unit had forgotten their aches and pains in the cosy warmth of the Hotel Thiers's caf6 bar.
It is impossible in this narrative to give pen portraits of all these girls. Of the twenty-five who went to Lorraine in '40, seven started out again with our new unit for the Middle East a year later. It was inevitable that I should come to know some better than others.
Dorca Stanhope dominates the lot. She became and has remained my great ally, counselor and friend. Since she couldn't come with us to the Middle East she took on the ungrateful task, when we left England again, of looking after the affairs of the unit in London. I cannot overstate the debt I owe to her fine intelligence, her unwavering loyalty, her mag- nificent detachment. Everything about her is big. Big physically, big mentally and big hearted, she looked down on our little world of petty jealousies and mean ambitions with a penetrating gaze that missed nothing and dismissed much of it with a snort of good-humored derision.
She and Maria soon joined forces. Being much of a size they nicknamed themselves Mr. and Mrs. Rubens. Maria has a rough and ready sense of humor and was much given to nicknames. Elaine Bodley, the gay, the inconsequent, the comically sophisticated, became Boddles to us all, poor fat sister Alexandra Forbes became the Strawberry Queen because of her predilection for uniforms of strawberry pink, I was "Madame la G6n6iale'* pronounced with an execrable American accent. For Maria is an American by birth and I suspect that twenty-odd years of life in England with a couple of English husbands has made her into the likeness of someone who does not in reality exist. Her rough tongue, her gruff voice and great pounding stride belie the innocence of her eyes and her ability to blush.
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Barbara Graham was very nearly as important to me as Dorea, but it took me longer to know her, perhaps because I could never hear what she was saying. When she drove me, as she often did, she would keep up a steady flow of mumbling and chuckling, but for all I got out of it she might have been talking to herself. A curiously attractive creature with a careless disregard for her looks and only a spasmodic craving for soap and hot water, a bit of a gypsy, a bit of an explorer, a bit of a genius, no one could improvise in a crisis like Barbara or smear herself as beautifully with axle grease. She and Kit Tatham-Warter, who had turned from horses to motors at the outbreak of hostilities and talked of her mechanized vehicles as if they had all the tricks and habits of quadrupeds, were outstanding as drivers and mechanics. I could never decide which was the better of the two. Barbara drove with apparently careless ease. Kit, or T. W. as we called her, like a man — ^powerful, tireless and taciturn. I close my eyes and see her strong shoulders and steady head beyond the windscreen and know that whatever the state of the roads I needn't worry. I never did. Across trackless deserts, wadies deep in sand, snowbound mountain passes or unbridged torrents, these two drove their rattling, shuddering, heavy and obstreperous vehicles, undefeated and undefeatable. We shall hear more of them as we cross the Sinai and Western deserts. Of Cynthia too, whom I had first met in her Paris cradle in 1919, and Rosaleen Forbes, who joined us just in time to drive me during our nerve-racking flight across France. A couple of young thoroughbreds were Cynthia and Rosaleen — not yet twenty-one when they joined the unit — ^both darlings of the gods of a pleasant godless world, high- strung and not too strong physically, they had serenely and gaily defied their parents, waved good-by to their disgruntled admirers and were come determined to prove that they were tough.
But I musn't linger over these girls whom I grew to know better per- haps than I know anyone in the world. I must jump back to Nancy and IVth Army Headquarters, hurry through our pleasant lunch with General R^quin and get on to the great snowbound convent that was to house the hospital for three months.
General R^quin had always been an admirer of Great Britain. He and my husband had been comrades in arms in the last war and had not altogether lost touch with each other during the years between. Indeed it was, I believe, because of his warm feelings toward my country that our unit had been attached to his army. Not every French Army com- mander would have welcomed a group of English women with equal cordiality. His welcome, I knew, was genuine. He was B/s friend, he now became mine. He has remained so. For in his case, there has been no diffi-
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culty in bridging the gulf of a four-year separation. There has in fact been no gulf. Though he lived on in Paris during the German occupation, I knew that he never lowered his head, nor denied his friends. Dr. Goebbels' propaganda could not affect R6quin.
A strong man, short, sturdy, thickset, very fair-skinned, with silvery hair, a prominent nose and a pair of humorous blue eyes, he was weighty and quick, cordial and reserved, full of little jokes but deadly serious and com- bined the qualities of a gifted painter and a first-class commander of troops.
He expressed his gratitude to Lady Hadfield in a small staccato voice and welcomed the girls with the words, 'Tou are the only British troops in my army and I intend to make the most of you/'
He meant it. I found to my surprise that he really thought it important that his officers and men should see the English girls who had come to serve them. Often he said to me, "My people don't appreciate the effort Great Britain is making.'' Or, "We never see our British allies in this part of the front. My men keep asking me, 'Where are the English?' " "And he would invite two or three of the girls to go with him each week on tours of inspection of the Maginot Line, not so much for their sake as for that of his troops. No one could have been more considerate or more solicitous for our welfare. During all the weeks that we remained under his command I felt his presence in the background supporting me and knew that I could count on him in emergency. On his side he gave me his confidence. He proved this at that first meeting, for he took me aside after lunch and cautioned me. He had serious doubts he said of the loyalty of the civilian population in his sector. He counted on me to impress on my staff the danger of discussing in the village any aspect of the war, movement of troops, numbers of wounded, and so on. The same warning applied to the nuns in the convent. They were saintly women no doubt, but many spoke German only and he had been informed that a secret wireless was con- cealed in the vast cellars of the establishment. This might not be true. He was loath to order a search, for the situation was delicate, the village was devoutly Catholic and not at all friendly to the French troops who were billeted in its outhouses and bams. He must go cautiously, lest he rouse even greater hostility. He counted on "ces dames" to be tactful and circum- spect.
I am sorry now that he talked to me that day as he did. Perhaps he was right. Had he not done so, we might have been indiscreet, who knows? As it was, his words created a prejudice in my mind against the nuns making it impossible for me to treat them as friends — and yet I believe they were friends. I shall never know whether his suspicions and my own were just.
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It may be that the sisters were more German than French in sympathy. Or it may be that hving as they did in a frontier zone occupied throughout history by the armies first of one nation then of the other, they had rid themselves of any partisan feehng and were solely concerned with the Kingdom of God.
I do not pretend to understand the mind that remains aloof from such a desperate human struggle as war. There is a mystery about the saintly life that produces in me a faint nostalgic fear. Is it because I love the turbulent world too much? Am I afraid in the presence of a renunciation that I cannot make? Again I don't know. I only know that I am both fascinated and repelled by the atmosphere of a convent and that the serenity of a face framed by a nun's white coif makes me humble but rebellious.
At St. Jean le Bassel, the contrast between the quiet nuns and our noisy busy selves was very great. But I know now that those with whom we came in personal contact grew fond of us for I have been back to see them.
Indeed it is Sister Marie Jeanne with her wom tender face and heavenly eyes that I see when I think of St. Jean. And here is a strange thing. Overshadowing our busy, exciting hospital life with its fight against pain and death, towering above the movement of troops and the menace of battle, rises the convent. Looking back I see Marie Jeanne smiling gently when I ask if she is not afraid; listening, it is the convent bell calling to prayer, not the tramp of feet going up the road to the war, that I hear. And I am homesick for St. Jean le Bassel and the saintly women I refused to know.
The village though deep in snow was ugly the day we arrived. The little houses were mean and grubby behind their frozen mounds of manure and the convent forbidding. Lady Hadfield and I were received in a cold parlor by a bent little creature with a long withered face that seemed to me cold and secretive. Was it her voice or General Requin's waming that chilled me? She spoke in French but with a strong German accent, apologizing for the M^re Superieure, who was ill. She hoped in a hopeless whispered monotone that we would be content. She seemed very strange. She remained a stranger. It didn't occur to me that we must seem very strange to her, that she might be frightened by the two women who had just arrived all the way from England with a horde of stalwart young ladies in uniform. I was on my guard, even with the comic plump body who waddled before us to show us our quarters. I think that I was courteous. But my memory of that first encounter has been all confused by recent and quite different impres-
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sions. I remember panting after Gosset up and down stairs, then finding myself floundering through the snow with Dr. Bernard and Dorea: the nurses were to be lodged with me in the convent but the M.T.C. were to be billeted in the village.
Lady Hadfield must have left us by that time. She was spending the night at Nancy then returning to Paris and her villa in the south. It was growing dark. The single village street led between walls of manure past the con- vent gate, round the convent wall, and straggled into a crooked square under the great towering convent barns. Dr. Bernard had a piece of paper with a list of the girls' billets. But how we got them all tucked away, more or less to their liking, I cannot tell. I know that Boddles was lodged with her face creams at Klein's, the baker's, opposite the convent gate, and Maria came to roost in a house at the comer of the square, while Dorea has confessed to me since that her landlady appeared to have kept the village brothel but that the visitors were very well behaved. But again, the little houses are all jumbled together in my memory. I see, as I look back, a con- glomeration of large raftered rooms pervaded by livestock, of small stuflFy rooms filled with great feather beds, of Hadfield-Spears motors snorting in front of the manure heaps and rosy faces grinning from windows under thatched roofs. For the M.T.C. girls made the village their own in no time. Taking the walls of manure by storm, they laughed and cajoled their way into the stubborn hearts of the grim housewives, invaded the gloomy kitchens, the stiff little parlors all hung with framed photographs of relatives in German uniform and shamelessly shared the open privies with cows, pigs, and members of the family.
One wing of the great convent building had been requisitioned by the Service de Sant6 at the beginning of the war and some two hundred nuns and novices had been evacuated to make room for the H.O.E. that we were replacing, but more than that number must have remained. I never knew how many. Silent figures with bent heads would flit past us in the long dim corridors. Were they always the same? How could one tell? My room was on the first floor near a great door that cut off our world from theirs. I would catch glimpses of whispering groups through the doorway. And I knew that la M^re Superieure lay ill beyond, for Sister Marie Jeanne who looked after me and brought my coffee to my room each moming told me.
It was a narrow white room — ^whitewashed walls, a white iron bed with a white coverlet, white cambric curtains at the window that looked on the garden. Sister Marie Jeanne kept it spotless. She would bring me my moming coffee on a tray with a clean white cloth. The cup was of fine white porcelain
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garlanded with tiny pink roses. It was, though I didn't know it at the time, my special cup and she guarded it jealously.
Dear Sister Marie Jeanne, why didn't I talk to you? Your presence was a benediction. You thought of me as a great benefactress, a good woman whose life was dedicated to works of mercy. Had I told you the truth, that I had come to the war out of egotism and a spirit of adventure, to enjoy myself, you wouldn't have believed me. Your heart and mind are too innocent to understand. I knew the other day when I went back to see you that you loved me — ^and I loved you, Marie Jeanne.
No. I cannot blame General R^quin for my attitude toward Sister Marie Jeanne and the Mother Superior who was dying not ten yards from my door. I knew the Mother was very ill. Though she seldom said more than a gentle good morning, Marie Jeanne would stop sometimes for a moment by my bed, her wom face very sad, and say, "La Mere Sup^rieure va trds mal,'' or she would point toward the great door at the end of the corridor and say in an awed whisper, "She is still there" — then go gently away leaving me to drink my coffee and worry over the problems of the hospital and the immense uncanny lassitude of the war.
Ill
The unit that moved off the day we arrived had used the ground floor only of the wing we took over and had left it in an unspeakably filthy condi- tion. Most of the patients had been evacuated, only those who were too ill to be moved were left behind. But the empty wards were pigsties. A wireless was installed in the operating room; champagne bottles (empty) were stacked in the cupboards — and the plight of the patients who had been collected together in a great dark vaulted hall below ground was tragic. As I handed them over to my nurses, I was reminded of that night- mare casino in Malo-les-Bains.
Had French nurses learned nothing since 1914? Apparently not. But that was unfair, there had been no nurses in the casino at Malo-les-Bains until we came and there had been a retreat from Mons, a battle of the Mame and an epidemic of typhoid, while here there had been no retreat, no battle, no epidemic, only a phony war where a few men had got wounded, almost by accident. And though the wounds of these men were infected, their lips parched with fever, their backs gaping with bedsores deep enough to swallow a fist, their nurses had just tripped gaily away from the door.
Cosset was as shocked as I. He condemned the whole ground floor and
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set about reorganizing in a fury. There was a series of large bright dormi- tories upstairs, aheady filled with the white beds of a hundred former pupils; these would make beautiful wards. He gave orders that they should be got ready. We had with us a portable operating room (cellule operatoire). Gosset put it inside one of the old wards, moved the sterilizing trailer to its back door and set carpenters and painters to work. Dr. Bernard cleared the operating room of its champagne bottles and turned it into a place of resuscitation. Barbara and Cynthia rushed into Sarrebourg and came back with twenty-five kilos of white paint and several rolls of American cloth, while Maureen with a team of helpers unpacked our nice English pillows, our new white sheets, Dorothy's lovely soft blankets and my last extravagant purchase in Paris, a hundred gay bedspreads, fifty pink and fifty blue.
It took us a fortnight to get the new wards into shape, but it was a great day when the stretcher bearers were summoned to move the patients up- stairs. I watched their faces as they were carried into the bright clean rooms. The M.T.C. girls had done a good job. All the bedside tables were painted white and covered with American cloth — green and white check to go with pink bedspreads, blue and white with the blue — and the sisters were there in their crisp white caps and aprons, waiting to settle the poor creatures into their new clean beds.
Ravishing Jean with her heart-shaped face, handsome Evelyn with her bright-blue eyes and snow-white teeth, gentle MacManaway, trim Kelsey — I felt a choke in my throat as I saw the shock of surprise, then the dawning delight on those wasted faces and heard the gasping intake of incredulous breath. But what I remember most vividly of all was the twisting trembling mouth of the Strawberry Queen and what I hear now is her sudden stifled sob as she lifted a paralyzed skeleton of a man in her strong fat arms and placed him oh so gently on one of the air cushions Dorothy had sent from London.
I do not propose to discuss in this book the subjects of war surgery, hospital management or the technical side of nursing. I am not qualified to do so. But I know good nursing from bad. I have watched several hundred operations and can tell quickly enough if a surgeon is bungling his job. After all one can judge the work in a hospital as in a factory, by results. Our results were good. Not only did an exceptional proportion of our patients get well, they were happy, the hospital was a happy place. Not perhaps very orthodox. I had no matron, the nurses were responsible directly to me. I made very few rules and didn't pretend to a technical knowledge that I didn't possess, but the system worked. Our young French surgeons
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who proved to be quite first-class and keen as mustard were pleased with their ''infirmieres anglaises'' and the infirmieres after some turning up of noses at French methods were pleased with their surgeons. Before long, some were very pleased indeed. Romance made its appearance. I had no objection. Indeed I was glad to find that quite soon each surgeon was proclaiming the sister in charge of his ward to be the best of the bunch. But what delighted me was the affection of our patients for their English nurses.
There was only one service in the hospital that gave any trouble. Peace did not reign in the operating room. Nancy Wright, our stalwart Australian who bore the title of surgeon's assistant in that commonwealth, was the operating sister, and as long as she was left in charge with Pip Scott-Ellis as her stooge all was well, but a tiny scared creature was introduced to it a fortnight after our arrival who nearly wrecked the place. Her name was Mademoiselle Radenac. She was a professional nurse and had worked with Gosset in the Ardennes; he had asked me to take hqr on and I, to my sorrow, had consented. Scared she might be, scared she certainly looked, but she was as obstinate as a mule. She had her way of doing things and nothing could change it and it was not the way of Australia. If Australia cleaned and powdered her rubber gloves in her fashion, France in the shrunken shape of Mademoiselle Radenac would creep in when Australia wasn't looking and undo what Australia had done. And explanations were difficult, for Australia spoke no word of French, France no word of English. Luckily Pip Scott-Ellis was bilingual, breezy and a stalwart buffer between them. Luckily for Australia. For Radenac, tiny and timid as she appeared, was more than a match for our magnificent towering Wright. I suspect her of calling on all the saints to help her. I believe that she knelt each night in her cotton nightdress by her bed, bowing her narrow shoulders, her high round forehead on her bony hands, while she prayed to be given strength to overcome the great slashing Australian. And she did overcome her, quite often. More than once I found Nancy Wright in tears and had to appeal to Gosset to put the devout little Radenac in her place as second to the sister-in-charge.
Evelyn Fuhlroth had taken on night duty and stuck to it for choice during the whole of our three months at St. Jean.
I would do the rounds each night before going to bed and if any very serious cases had come in during the day, I was sure to find the surgeon who had operated giving her his last instructions. I remember the long, darkened, quiet wards, the shadowy forms in the beds, the night light on the sister's desk shining softly on her bright eyes and white cap. No. 5
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was very bad, she would tell me. Dr. Bernard had given him a blood trans- fusion. No. y's temperature had gone down. No. 13 was naughty — ^he had torn off his dressing again. A voice near by spoke in a whisper: "Ma soeur" — That was 19 — "/'ai mal, ma soeur. Ma /am be me fait mal." She moved away quickly. I stood by the bed as she arranged the fracture pillows, to ease the heavy plaster leg. What matter that she didn't understand much French when she knew the language of pain.
What difference did it make if these angels of efficient mercy squabbled among themselves, grumbled about their food, and complained that the M.T.C. girls had all the perks. Maureen would come to me nearly every day with tales of woe. So and so had nipped in and stolen someone's hot bath. A. had been rude to B. C. wanted to change her day off with D. and D. wouldn't. I remember once after a particularly unpleasant seance taking refuge in one of the wards. A tiny Zouave had come in, with five perforations of the intestine and acute peritonitis. Dr. Boutron had operated. An interest- ing case. It was the first time I had seen Septoplex powder poured into an inflamed abdomen and we were all on tiptoe believing the little chap would pull through, as he did. But he had a way of sliding down in his bed until he all but disappeared; and two of the nurses were lifting him up on his pillows that afternoon when I came in. One to either side, their arms linked under him, they lifted him between them, slowly, carefully, with such exquisite smooth certainty that I caught my breath as one does when sud- denly ushered into the presence of a very beautiful work of art. I had wanted to knock their heads together that very morning. Now I felt almost like going down on my knees. I did nothing so incorrect. But that night, as on so many nights when I thought over the day in my silent white room, I was satisfied. Yes, the hospital was a good hospital, no patient would ever suffer under our roof from maltreatment or neglect. The authorities were pleased with us. General Worms, medecin inspectem of the IVth Army, would have been even more enthusiastic, I fancy, if he hadn't been so afraid of Gosset. Poor miserable little Worms. Ineffective, fussy, he was full of good will and gratitude. But General R6quin remained pur great friend and protector. I would take two or three of the girls to lunch with him at Vic. He would visit the wounded every week or so and stay to tea, bringing with him our special favorite. Captain Lecomte, and sometimes General de Lattre de Tassigny, one of the divisional commanders.
I wondered about De Lattre. An interesting character. Rather fascinating, but I wasn't sure that I liked him. His heavy good looks, his dramatic man- ners and his fanciful talk made up a personality almost too picturesque to be true. There was something extravagant about his flattery, something
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excessive in his attentions, something exaggerated about his professed admiration for England and the Enghsh. While R6quin was small, eompact, downright and dependable, De Lattre seemed to me large, fluid and un- accountable. Was he, as his friends declared, a magnificent commander of troops or as his enemies hinted an intriguant and a lazybones who spent his time collecting together for his own pleasure all the good musicians among the ranks of his division? Who was I, to criticize? General Requin thought highly of him and I surely should be grateful for the evenings of really beautiful music spent at his divisional headquarters.
I am aware that none of this has the sound of war. The truth is that there was no war that could be called war in our sector — neither in February when we arrived, nor at any time up to the sixth of June when we left, suddenly, to be engulfed in the army's headlong retreat. There were wounded, just enough wounded to keep the surgeons and nurses occupied. Somewhere up there beyond the pillboxes and the flooded areas of the Maginot Line that failed so completely to resemble my imagined picture, since one could never tell where it was or if one were in it, French patrols were going out to meet German patrols and the French wounded were brought back to us. Six or eight one day, a dozen the next. But all around and above, the land and the sky were quiet — so quiet that I felt uneasy. General R6quin was uneasy too. He confessed to me that he was worried about the effect on his troops of the long inactivity. I was worried about the troops who had been ij} action and who came to us to be nursed. They were not like the poilus of 1914-1918. Oh not at all. That lot had been tough — gros gaillards who took their punishment as all in the day's work and cracked jokes on the operating table. These men compared to them were frail and soft, patient under pain, yes, but sensitive, with a look in their eyes that reminded one of the eyes of suffering children or gentle dumb animals, and some clung like children to the nurses, and others showed a pathetic, an excessive joy in the flowers we gathered to put in the wards. But that was in the spring when the lilacs in the nuns' garden and the apple trees in the orchard burst into bloom.
And then one morning when Sister Marie Jeanne brought me my morning coffee, I saw that she was very sad. Her eyes were red with weeping and when I asked what troubled her, the tears brimmed over and she said:
*'It is la M^re Sup^rieure. I fear that she is dying." And she clasped her hands in supplication — "If Madame la Gdn^rale — ^but I dare not ask."
''What can I do, ma Soeur? But surely you can ask."
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"It is like this, Madame la G6n6iale — the Mother Superior has never been wiUing to see a doctor, but if you were to ask her/' The thin timid hands twisted miserably — "Then the captain who is such a good Catholic and such a great surgeon —
"You believe that she would consent to see Dr. Gosset if I asked her —
"I do, madame, I am certain."
"But why, my Sister, should she listen to me? I do not know the Mother Superior. I have never seen her. She has been ill ever since we came."
"Yes, Madame la Generale, it is true. But she knows about you. We have told her. I am certain she will do what you ask."
"Then of course I will come."
She led me through the great double doors that divided our two worlds and beyond them I found a dim group of some twenty or thirty nuns crowd- ing the paneled corridor, and they let us pass, bowing their wide white caps all together — it was like a great sweep of white wings — ^and we went into the room where the Mother Superior was lying. It was a narrow bare white room just like my own save that the small white iron bed had a canopy and a white curtain at its head. The Mother Superior was dressed in a high black stuff dress and she was enormous. She had a great man's face, dark yellow, the color of a man's soiled pigskin glove. Her head was bare, her hair smooth and dark; she was propped up on high white pillows and her great heavy body dressed in hot black as if to go to Mass filled the bed, and all round the bed the nuns were on their knees; I cannot tell you how many there were, I only know that the air was stifling, that I felt I could not breathe.
They made room for me by the bed, edging away without rising from their knees and the swarthy masculine face turned toward me on the pillow and a gash appeared in it, and between the dark dry anguished lips I saw black broken teeth — she had smiled — and then a harsh guttural German voice came from between the lips and it said: "Madame la Generale," on a long shuddering sigh.
"Yes, my Mother," I stammered. "I have come to ask you to see Dr. Gosset."
A pair of ancient alien eyes looked into mine, eyes with no message that I could read, suffering dying eyes of an unknowable stranger, of a woman who might once have been a peasant, bending her strong back in the fields, of a woman who might belong even now to the enemy. Then the heavy head made a sign of assent and the eyes closed.
I hurried back to our quarters in search of Gosset, who agreed to go at once. But it was too late. He told me in the afternoon that she was dying
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of cancer of the liver. He could do nothing save make her a little more comfortable. And then two days later Sister Marie Jeanne told me that the Mother Superior had died in the night and that her last words had been, ''Madame la G^nerale est venue me voir/"
It was the strangest thing. I couldn't believe her. I didn^t want to believe her. Why, I asked myself, did this stranger think of me at the very end? She had been the head of a great convent with many young souls in her charge. The fortunes of war and army orders had brought me, a foreigner and an infidel, to her door. Yes, but she had taken me and mine in. We had been living under her roof all that time that she was dying. She had been lying there for weeks in great pain a few paces from my room. And I had never been to see her until Sister Marie Jeanne had plucked up courage to implore me to come. I had thought that I meant nothing to her, that I could mean nothing, but it seemed that she had wanted to see me, had expected the courtesy of a visit and had laid such store by it, though it came so late, that she thought of it as she died.
I went down the next day to the nuns' chapel where she lay in terrifying state. Her monstrous body in its coffin was almost upright behind the lighted candles. They flickered on her huge blind face. And all the chapel was filled with the gentle forms of the novices who kept watch ceaselessly, kneeling before that terrible effigy, their slender heads bowed, their hearts lifted in prayer.
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CHAPTER IV
I
SPRING brought in no battles on our sector; there was no sound of war ' in Lorraine. The sky was cloudless and innocent, the air sweet, the un- troubled earth went quietly about the business of nourishing all tender green young things and we went quietly about ours, oblivious of the calamity that was bearing down upon France.
I cannot understand why we were not disturbed when Hitler on the ninth of April invaded Norway and Denmark — then on the tenth of May attacked Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. That was a significant day on which Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Did I beheve that this one man would throw the Germans back, clear them out of the Netherlands, that all would be well now with the Allies because of him? Perhaps I thought his arrival at No. lo Downing Street a more im- portant event than the Nazi invasion of the low countries — if I did I was probably right. But I do not know what I believed or why I remained un- dismayed even when on the fourteenth of May the Dutch laid down their arms.
Again, if I had confidence in the French Army and in Great Britain's invincible might, if I believed, quite simply, in victory, is that a sane explanation for the happy folly of those pleasant days? I scarcely think so. I think the answer is to be found somewhere among the imponderables of a private world of illusion, in the hypnotic power of peaceful surroundings that made the horror going on at a distance seem unreal, in the stupefying effect on the senses of a garden fragrant with lilac and in the long soothing arm of a happy childhood, so safe that it made me incapable of belief in disaster.
I find the following written in my diary on April 29th, '40.
Nearly three months since we came to St. Jean. We arrived in icy weather, roads like glass, the land frozen. Now all our huts are buried in greenery. The apple blossom will soon be out in the nuns' orchard.
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The patients limp up and down the garden paths or He on the grass in the sun. It is very peaceful.
''General R^quin came to lunch yesterday with Captain Lecomte. Boddles did the menus. Dodo, Marjorie Fulden and Dorea the lunch table. After lunch we played games and R. showed us how to make paper frogs.
''Huguet has Just galloped past my window, leaped on his bicycle and gone off to race Le Canouet to F6n6trange. Our surgeons are all boys except Gosset. He is badly soured up. Says he has le cafard. Dr. Bernard says why not since he spends his time listening to the German and Italiap news.
''Lecomte doesn't think the war will flare up on the Allied front. He thinks the Germans will stick to their original plan of a defensive wall in the West behind which ''ils vont manger ITurope."
II
Lady Hadfield came for a visit and General Requin organized a review in her honor. The unit, officers, orderlies, M.T.C. and nurses, marched with the troops round the convent walls and through the village — ^and after the review we had a banquet with General R6quin and General de Lattre as guests of honor. De Lattre had brought one of his men with him who was a / violinist, a PremieT Prix de Rome. He played exquisitely. It was all very festive. I think Lady Hadfield was pleased. I didn't see her again until five years later. She was in Vichy when the collapse came, and managed to get back to the villa she loved on Cap Ferat, where she remained until '43. But long before she reached England, I had left for the Middle East, so we didn't meet.
We had a series of visitors at St. Jean. B. came in March and spent three days with Requin. My boy turned up during his Easter recess from Oxford. T. W. took him for a drive through the foothills of the Vosges. Jean took him to Metz. He had a beautiful time. Constance, Cynthia's mother, came for a week end in May. We sat in the garden, played bridge after dinner.
Looking back to those sunny peaceful days, I observe myself standing at the window of my room gazing quietly into the deep garden. I catch the whisk of a white apron disappearing up the path, hear laughter and the chink of teacups from the popote, the pulsating amorous croon from some- one's gramophone and ask again — ^Wasn't she frightened, that woman stand- ing in her convent window? Yes, sometimes. But it was only at moments
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that she felt a flash of vivid fear. For the most part she seems to have been in a trance.
The German hordes crash into Holland and Belgium, break through at Sedan, divide the French armies, drive the British and the French of the North into the sea at Dunkirk, race on to Amiens, Abbeville, Boulogne and Calais, while she stands there like a fool looking across to the faint silhouette of the hills and murmurs to her idiot self — ''Oh lovely world/'
Constance wrote the middle of May suggesting that as things looked very bad it might be best to send Cynthia and Rosie to her in Paris until they took a turn for the better. I showed the two girls the letter.
''You can go/' I said. "You know that all leave has been stopped in the French Army. Still, you aren't French — none of us are. Nor are we military. We are British and we are volunteers. No one asked us to come here and we are not in fact paid to do what we are doing. So perhaps that lets us out. It depends on how you look at it. I can send you to Paris. No one in my unit is obliged to stay who doesn't want to. But if you go you obviously cannot come back. It is impossible to send you home when things look bad and take you on again when the trouble is over. I'm sure you understand." They did. They were angry with Constance and mortified. Nothing, they declared, would induce them to leave. It was three years before Cynthia saw her mother again.
Gallant? Yes. But if they had cut and run, it would have been con- temptible. Nobody did and if anyone wanted to they didn't tell me. The idea of leaving didn't I believe occur to any save one and the less said about her the better. How explain our high spirits during those days of unparalleled disaster? We were a long way from the battle, true. We got little news certainly. But it should have been, God knows, enough. No, I don't think ignorance is the answer. I think these English women failed to understand the menace behind the news, not because it was njisleading and scrappy, not because we were drugged by the quiet beauty of our surroundings, and the steady routine of hospital work, but because they had brought with them, each one, an invincible belief in victory — ^And if our French oflBcers under- stood better the awful significance of events, it is because they were pre- pared for defeat.
I remember the day Cosset first used the word in my presence. It was the eleventh of May. Winston Churchill had made his famous speech the day before to the House of Commons warning the British people that he had nothing to offer them but blood, toil, tears and sweat. I had not heard the speech, but I had heard that Hitler on the same day. May lo, had invaded Holland and Belgium. To recall my reaction to this is impossible but I
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believe that I swallowed the announcement as I did the usual allowance of disagreeable news, very much as one might swallow a daily dose of castor oil, gulping it down with a spasm of throat and stomach muscles. For I remember feeling tight about the head each morning after I had listened in to Radio Paris.
Gosset was coming down the garden from the officers' popote, his queer long passionate face glowering in the sunlight. He too had been listening to the news, but he got his (as I realized later) from Germany — and his **Bon /our, madame," though elaborately polite, had the sound of a snarl.
''What is it, Gosset?" He was so often in a rage with some one of his colleagues or the higher authorities or the world in general that I found it wise to draw his spleen out of him instantly on seeing the thunder threaten- ing on his lofty forehead. So I asked, *'What is it?" expecting him to burst into one of his bitter tirades against the fools at the Service de Sante.
"C'est la dehite, madame."
*'Comni€nt?'' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misunderstood and said "What?" with the open mouth of a fool. "I tell you, it is the defeat." "What is the defeat?" I was growing angry.
*'The Germans have invaded Holland and Belgium. It is the beginning of the end."
"How can you talk like that, Gosset?"
He shrugged his high shoulders. Was there a gleam of pleasure in his sullen pale gray eyes? I think so. If I didn't see it then I was to recognize it often in the days that followed. For though I left him that morning abruptly, and went off angrily on my own business, he kept coming back to me with his tidbits. Like a great dog he would bring his horrid, gnawed, meaty bones of disaster to lay at my feet, until finally after gloating over the murder of Rotterdam, and the capitulation of the Dutch, he arrived to rub his morbid hands over the break-through at Sedan, and then I turned on him.
I remember my words. They sound futile and childish — they were all I could produce.
"Tell me, Gosset. Let me understand you. Do you seriously believe in a final French and British defeat?" "But yes."
"You actually believe that we are going to lose the war?" "But naturally."
"Well I don't. And I tell you flatly that I consider such defeatist talk on your part inadmissible. You are the in6decin chef of this hospital — responsible as I am for the morale of this unit. I cannot help it if you have no faith in
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your army. I have in mine. Whatever the French do, the British will never give in. And I can and do insist that you keep your feelings to yourself. YouVe no right to talk to anyone in this formation as you talk to me. In England we put people in prison for spreading despondency and alarm."
It seems remarkable to me now that after this interchange, we managed to carry on together as well as we did. If Gosset resented my scolding he didn't show it, but continued to come of an afternoon to my garden hut for tea. And though he tempered his pessimism in public, his theme during these t^te-a-t^tes was always the same, the desperate moral plight of France, faut que Ja France souffre/'
''La France est dans un tel etat que rien qu'un calvaire ne peut la sauver/'
Such statements were constantly on his great curling bitter lips. A compli- cated man and an unhappy one. I suspect now, though it didn't occur to me at the time, that he wanted a German victory. For when the collapse he awaited did actually come some weeks later he greeted the news with the following words hissed through his teeth:
''Cela fere du bien k la France de vivre sous le /oug Allemand."
Ill
On May 16 General Gamelin ordered the Allies to abandon the line that ran south from Antwerp through Louvain and Namur and fall back to the Scheldt.
On May 17 I wrote in my diary:
I am frightened. I wasn't ever during the last war. I don't think it is fear for my life. Fear for France, for England — for everyone and every- thing that I know. Gamelin's order to his troops to die rather than give way a foot of soil sounds desperate. Invited the officers to the popote. Two tables of bridge — the rest played a child's game called Liar. Their shouts of laughter made me wonder. But the evening was a success.
May 19th. Gosset tells me that every mobile unit in the north similar to ours has either been wiped out or evacuated to the rear. Horrible stories of nurses of an ambulance he knew being drowned trying to cross a river under fire — ^What river?
20th. R^quin has telephoned to tell me B. has been made ''G^n^ral de division'' Major general. So I fancy Winston is going to make use of him.
He did. The two prime ministers of Great Britain and France were as well ministers of defense, and Churchill had appointed B. as his personal
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representative with Reynaud, in that capacity. But I didn't know this until later.
22nd. French radio announces Germans at Amiens and Arras. Italian says Abbeville. Gosset says there is a rumor that General Giraud and all his staff have been taken prisoner. Listened in with Maureen to the B.B.C. at midnight. Worst moment of the day when the English voice was blotted out by a German. Very queer to feel that the road to Calais and Dover is cut — that I could only get the girls home via Havre or perhaps Dieppe. Feeling of being very, far away — and we are.
23rd. Feel better today. Wireless announced that General Spears had spoken to France in French, recalling 1914. Wish I could have heard his voice. Such a lovely evening. The sunlight is streaming down through the branches outside my window. Nancy Wright is stretched out on a deck chair in the garden reading. All is peaceful.
25th. \yireless report Germans in Boulogne. Have spent 2,000 francs on a good set (found it in Sarrebourg) so that we can hear England even if we can't get there. The boom of Big Ben is wonderful. It reassures like the thought of Winston Churchill.
May 28th. Yesterday should have been a gala day. General R6quin was to have come to dinner. He was sending his film unit to entertain us afterwards. But the day began with Paul Reynaud's announcement that the King of the Belgians had betrayed France and ordered his army to capitulate. Everyone subdued. A sunlit nightmare. Expected a contre- ordre from R6quin all day. It didn't come so we went on with our gala preparations. The film unit turned up at 5:30. I made up my face and got into clean clothes at 6. A small car arrived soon after loaded with flowers, huge masses of peonies, lupins, poppies etc. *Xe general vous envoie des fleurs." At 6:30 "Le general vous demande au telephone.'' It was to tell me that he couldn't dine. Was leaving in the morning. "On a besoin de moi ailleurs.'' I had a moment of panic — asked if I could come to say good-by. Yes. Hurried out to tell Gosset. Left at 8 with T. W. driving and Lemaire (my military chauffeur) on the box with a disquieting gun. Strange drive through the darkening country. Crimson glow in the sky. Wide, rolling dark fields. Was afraid in a new way. R^quin is a friend. If the Germans come down from the north — if the war spreads to our sector, threatens to engulf Lorraine, he wouldn't forget us, would warn us in time. I could trust him. But now. Who is there?
Packing cases filled the hall at Vic. Captain Lecomte, suave, graceful, unruffled, took us in to the general. Very somber, subdued talk. His first
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words, '*Ceh va si vite." Then 'Xa volonte pent peut-etre faire quelque chose contre les machines, je ne safs pas." Then "Nous.allons voir des batailles terribles. J'ai vu tons mes ofGciers, ils ont une telle confiance que fen ai peur. Nous sommes un contre deux on tiois. Ih vont s'achamer ^ h Paris. C'est Tordre de Weygand de mourir sur place/' He spoke in a small dry voice. He was very white, his face rigid. In the presence of his intense preoccupation I was diffident about mentioning my own apprehension. But I told him I felt somewhat lost — *'Je me suis un pen perdue'' — ^and asked if we could follow his army. He said he would send for us if it was possible. I went with him to find Lecomte to say good-by. I asked him to see that we were sent for, he bowed and answered with a little smile, ''Je m'en chargerai, madame."
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I
TW. DROVE me through the night to St. Jean. She had waited in the • car while I talked to Rdquin and asked no questions when I came out. I said ''General R^quin is leaving. Home, please." Lecomte stood in the lighted doorway, as we moved off.
The dark fields of Lorraine were desolate. Strange fields of a strange land. I was turning my back on England. I felt a little sick, my head was tight again inside an iron band. "You are frightened,'' I told myself. Yes. R^quin had frightened me. The war seemed to be waiting out there in the dark beyond the headlights of the car, like a pack of wolves.
Staring at T. W.'s steady shoulders, I thought, ''How shall I get the girls home if the worst happens?'' And I followed the road back to Paris in my mind. (How long would it remain open?) And beyond Paris? Which port should we make for? Dieppe, Le Havre, Cherbourg? It would depend on the enemy. Cherbourg was the best bet. They wouldn't reach Cherbourg.
There had been treachery, they said, in the Ilnd Army. The French hadn't blown up the bridges. But that, someone said, was because of the refugees. You couldn't, it appeared, blow up bridges packed with women and children who were flying for their lives — not if you were civilized — ^you would prefer to let the enemy across.
But what did I mean by the words "if the worst happened"? Well, if Weygand didn't close the gap, if German armor fanned out, turned south as well as north, attacked the IVth Army from the rear. All those little men in their underground forts of the Maginot Line, what good would they be then? And there was no IVth Army now in Lorraine. R6quin was taking it with him. His staff, he had said, and some divisions. There would be troops of course left to hold our sector. There would be a battle, many wounded. Well, that was what we had come for.
But why, a sick voice whispered, have you come, why bring twenty-five English girls to this far eastem corner of France? What induced you to assume such responsibility? The French are not your people. No, but they are allies. France is not your country. No, but our battle is joined in France.
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When we defend France we are defending our own soil, it's the same thing. Is it? Would you be willing to die in defense of the Convent of St. Jean, as you would be ready to die for any British workingman's cottage? Be quiet.
All right. All right, but if the worst came to the worst, who would you count on?
T. W. obviously. Dorea, Barbara, Maria. I could count on the whole British lot to hold together, do what was expected of them. Even the more foolish and less plucky would stick it. They'd have to. The worse things got, the tighter the bond that bound us together. But what of the French? Would they feel bound to us? I thought of Cosset. Who could foretell the behavior in a crisis of that gloomy incalculable man? He awaited defeat with bitter exultation, but curiously enough I felt that he would behave well, out of pride, out of hatred, out of revenge. Because we, the British, had brought this war on France, had come in our insolence to witness her crucifixion, because we were the real enemy, he would heap coals of fire on our heads, save us if he could, if not go down with us into the German maw.
Then there was Dr. Bernard. A Jew though his face didn't carry the signature of his race. It was more like the face of an Englishman than any of the others. I had always counted on him as a special friend and ally. He had been the peacemaker in the unit, his gentleness and his reasonable- ness had been soothing to Cosset. His value lay in his kindliness and his understanding of our English ways. One couldn't tell how he would behave in danger. He would remain calm, he was much less excitable than the other, but would he show courage and energy? And again, what of the three young surgeons? And Lelong, our chemist, and Rousset? They were ready enough to beguile the time and forget the war in flirtations, but what claim had we on any of them? Up against the ultimate test of survival, wouldn't they become strangers? Who was there in the French Army who would care in the last resort what became of the Strawberry Queen? Ceneral R6quin. Yes. He would care. He had made himself responsible for us. Now that he had gone, there was no one. Well, we must follow him. Lecomte had promised to see we were sent for. And we would be sent for. We must stick to the IVth Army. It was the best I could do for the girls, the only precaution that I had a right to take.
II
It was late when we got back but Cosset was waiting to tell me that my husband had been on the phone and would ring up again. I stared dumb-
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founded. Then B. must be in Paris. The news, with its sudden content of rehef, reassurance, promise of help, made me feel weak in the knees. We went to my garden hut and T. W. produced cold sausage and champagne, the remains of the gala dinner that General R^quin had meant to attend. How long ago it seemed. The hut was full of the flowers he had sent. I told Gosset that R^quin was moving to another sector and would send for us. He scowled. Should I tell him the rest? No — ^better not — ^better tell no one.
Then the telephonist came running up the shadowed garden to fetch me. I hurried back with him and was immediately involved in a violent argument with the voice I preferred to all voices in the world of men.
It was wonderful. He was so cross, so natural, so incredibly cantankerous, that all the world seemed normal and ordinary.
Yes, he was in Paris. But where had I been? Why hadn't I been there when he first called up? What did I mean by rushing about the country at this time of night?
I had been to see R^quin.
Why?
Well, for reasons — What reasons?
Never mind, they were good reasons. Was he staying on in Paris? Yes — for a bit. For how long? He couldn't say. What was he doing?
He couldn't say that, either. What he wanted to say, if I would only give him a chance, was that we were on no account to move from our present position. Did I understand? We were not to move.
But we probably would move.
What?
I had just asked to be moved. It was wiser.
Wiser to move? Nonsense. I was talking nonsense.
A difficult conversation since we could say nothing of military matters, but very revivifying.
He had been very upset by an account of the German bombing of a big hospital in Ostend. This news he gave me. Nothing more. I understood well enough what he was feeling about that. He feared the same thing might happen to us and believed we were comparatively safe in our far corner. Well, I couldn't argue with him over the phone, explain that R^quin was going.
He would ring up again, he said, in a day or two. In the meantime I was
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not to move. If I wanted to get hold of him I was to ask for FAmbassade d'AngJeterre — ^and would be put through immediately.
He rang off. I said to myself, ''It's all very well for him to talk like that. If we get orders to move, we move. I know Tm right about sticking to R6quin and the IVth Army/'
I felt much better. If I had known what he knew I would have felt worse, but I didn't.
Our orders to pack up and be ready to take the road came next day. General R^quin had acted quickly — or was Gosset right in thinking this had nothing to do with R^quin? However that might be, we were to evacuate all the patients who could be safely sent to the rear, hand over to another unit and stand by.
B. rang up again that night. He was furious when I told him. He was flying to London in two or three days and wanted me to come to Paris at once. I said it was impossible and was roundly trounced over the wire, but stuck to it. I couldn't come.
Strange to recall those quarrels over the telephone. I longed to go to him. But we had stripped the wards, loaded up the lorries, were expecting our movement orders any day — ^any hour. How could I go to Paris? The unit might move off while I was gone.
Every night or two he came through on the phone. Each time more urgent. He wanted to see me. He particularly wanted to see me. Didn't I understand? Didn't I want to come? Of course, I wanted to come. But I couldn't.
He flew to London, was back two days later. I had no idea what he went for. Dunkirk in the meantime was evacuated. A quarter of a million British troops and a hundred and fifty thousand French were rescued from the beaches. We knew nothing about this. All was quiet in our sector. We had handed over our patients to their new nurses and were waiting with nothing to do but sit in the garden, go fishing, play the gramophone.
Extraordinary to remember my utter ignorance of what was going on. I had had a moment of horrid realization the evening I said good-by to Requin. It had passed, I was my normal pigheaded optimistic self again. I hadn't the sense to be frightened any more or to realize what lay behind my husband's urgency.
No two people could have been more eager, each one to make the other understand, nor more hopelessly at odds while they talked together than B. and I during those brief exasperating telephone calls.
The trouble was that he could explain nothing. I knew that Winston must have sent him to Paris, but I didn't know what his job was; I had no
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idea that as Winston's personal representative with Paul Reynaud he was in daily contact with the French Premier, Petain and Weygand, and French G.H.Q. and was striving with all his might, not only to make the French understand and trust the British, but to make them believe in victory — so how could I know that he was fighting a losing battle against the mass defeatism of the French Army, that the attitude of Petain, Weygand and Reynaud himself filled him with the gravest misgivings and that he already envisaged the total collapse of French armed resistance.
I, at my end of France, knew only what the wireless allowed us to know. Reynaud told us to put our trust in Petain, the hero of Verdun, and Wey- gand, the trusted chief of staff of the great Marechal Foch. If there was a note of hysteria in the French Premier's voice when he implored us to have confidence in these great men of another war, if a horrid doubt made me shudder for an instant, it was only for an instant. The girls, with nothing to do, were clamoring to be allowed to go to Sarrebourg, Saverne, the lakes, the mountains. Why keep them cooped up? It was summer; the sun was shining, there wasn't an airplane to be seen in the sky. Oh, all right, they could go on their picnic provided I knew just where they were going. I turned on the wireless. A voice exhorted courage, confidence across the sunny air of my little white room. Maureen brought in a tray with coffee. Dorea followed with a pot of honey.
"Cheer up. May. If they are back by seven, it'll be all right. Even if we get orders to move this minute, we couldn't leave till tomorrow. There's the kitchen to pack up and our own belongings — ^and T. W. says your car has blown a gasket — and Barbara is in a frenzy over the Bedford. Turn oflE that wireless, it's all lies anyhow, and have some coffee. Here's to the Weygand
How could I know that France was crumbling under our feet? Our part of France was utterly peaceful. Never had she been more beautiful. Why should I sit in my room with this wretched wireless?
Boddles came running one Sunday morning. "You must come. May. I've found an enchanted village. Too fantastic. It's strawberry pink. Too lovely — you must come — ^you must. Where are your paints?"
She whirled me away up the road to Saverne and there it was — an absurd storybook village perched on the side of a green hill. All the little houses were the color of strawberries. The mountain rising steep behind them was vivid green. We set up our easels beside the village street. The sun poured down. White fluffy clouds sailed softly overhead. How lovely it was. Presently the young men and maidens of the village gathered round us, in their Sunday best. "Bon /our," they said gaily and stood watching us, laughing pleasantly
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among themselves. Then an old old man, bent almost double, came out of a door at the far end of the dreaming street under the big green mountain and began ringing a great bell and he was calling out something in a thin cracked voice, and the young men and maidens all laughed when they saw him coming in the distance, but I couldn't hear what he was calling, so I said, "What is he calling out?'' And they answered, "Oh, it's only old Auguste, the town crier, calling a new class to the colors" — ^and went off laughing, their arms round each other's waists. That was how the war appeared in Lorraine.
B. rang up again that night and ordered me this time to come to Paris.
'This is an order, you understand."
"It's no good talking like that. I can't leave I tell you."
"Why? What are you doing?"
"Waiting. As a matter of fact I've been painting with Elaine up the Saveme road."
"What?" His voice was a roar. "Did you say painting?" "Yes — ^water colors."
He thought I'd gone mad — ^but when he said so, I put it down as just a way of showing ill temper. That it was insane to go on a sketching expedition within a few miles of the Germans didn't seem to strike anyone, even Gosset. At last, however, on the sixth of June (German armor was dashing forward from a Somme bridgehead making for Rouen and the Seine), I started for Paris in the Buick, our most reliable staff car, Barbara Graham driving and Lemaire beside her again with his rifle.
A note in my diary reminds me that Gosset was in a state about my going. He was in fact dead against it, fearing the road might be cut by German raiders. All our officers were against it, for that matter. Dr. Bernard said he could not attempt to dissuade me as my husband had sent for me — ^but — well, they would be anxious until I got safely back. Boutron offered to go with me to protect me; an offer I lightheartedly refused. Indeed I didn't see how the gentle creature could help me much against German armed raiders — nor did I believe such an encounter probable. I hadn't a qualm as I drove off. My one worry was the thought that the unit might get orders to move while I was gone. But I was only spending one night in Paris. I would be back the next day. Still, to make quite certain we decided to go via Troyes and stop on the way at General R6quin's headquarters. If orders to move had been sent, he would tell me and I would turn back.
Colonel Dumas, chief of staff at IVth Army, was very surprised when I walked in. The general, he regretted to say, was absent. He would be desol6 to have missed my visit. Yes. Everything was arranged. It had been a little
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difficult. The Grand Q.G, had made difficulties but the general had won the day and we were to join up with the IVth Army as promised. Soon? Yes, quite soon. The sooner in fact, the better. But I could quite well go on *to Paris and return next day. Why not dine with the general and sleep at Chalons on my way back to St. Jean? They were moving their H.Q. in the morning to a village near Chalons. He would show me the place on the map. If Miss Graham would look —
Miss Graham studied the large scale map on 'the wall, compared it with her own road map and marked the place where the general would expect us to dine. It sounded delightful. Colonel Dumas conducted me to my car. He paused at the top of the steps and looked at me out of dark harassed brown eyes. Did I believe that all would be well?
It was only much later that I realized how odd it was of him to put me such a question. The look in his eyes as he spoke must have startled me — for I remembered it. I had caught sight for an instant of a mind assailed with horrid doubt. But I dismissed it at the time and went happily on my way.
An uneventful journey. Barbara drove with her usual elegance. We were lucky, we said, to find so few convoys on the road. There was nothing in fact to suggest any new menace to Paris save the cement road blocks as we neared the Porte de Vincennes. We weren't stopped. No control post asked for our papers. We rolled through the strangely empty Paris streets in the late afternoon and arrived at the Ritz where B., I knew, was staying.
It was very quiet in the Ritz. There was no one about but the concierge.
I asked if the general was expecting me.
But certainly — if I cared to go up, the rooms were on the second floor.
Was he there?
No. He was at his office.
Then I would telephone first.
The concierge was sorry. There was no telephone.
No telephone at the Ritz?
No— the telephone was cut off. Government orders. There were no civil telephones now in Paris. What was I to do?
I would find the general at the British Embassy. If I cared to go.
I did. I went back to the car and explained to Barbara. ''He's at the Embassy. I can't telephone. Telephone's cut off. Let's go."
B. was with the Ambassador when I arrived. His secretary, a very pleasant Englishwoman, was typing by the window as I was shown into his office. She went to fetch him. I waited. TTien he came in and as I looked at his face, the world of illusion that I had been living in vanished.
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I had been thinking of him as he was in 1916, when I first saw him at Bray-sur-Somme; we had met during one war, now we met again in another, and I was horrilSed. His eyes were bloodshot. There were hnes inches deep in his face. But it was not because he was twenty-five years older. I had seen him two months before when he came to stay with R6quin. Then, he hadn't looked like this. Never had I seen him look like this. His smile of greeting was sweet, it was the same old smile. The horrible thing was that it didn't belong to his face, only crept on to it for an instant, then was gone, leaving it naked, ravaged, savage and exhausted. I saw, as I looked, what was happening to France — and I saw, for one second, what was going to happen. The war leaped at me out of his eyes. I was terrified.
We said little. He had only a few minutes to give me. We could talk, he said, later. I was to go back to the Ritz, order a cold supper for two in his sitting room; he hoped to join me by nine.
My instinct warned me to be matter of fact.
"How is Paul Reynaud?''
He didn't answer. I waited. He said nothing.
It took me a minute to digest the meaning of this — then —
"And Weygand?"
"Weygand went near the battle some days ago. He hasn't yet recovered from the shock.''
"I don't understand.''
"Weygand has never commanded troops in the field. He always had staff jobs in the last war. He had never been under fire until the other day. He is a very old man."
"Then you don't believe in him?"
"I never believed in him."
"But if the Weygand Line doesn't hold — ^what happens?" "God knows—"
I went back to the Ritz. Cynthia's mother was at Vichy but her American stepfather. Bill Gower, was in Paris and Barbara was to spend the night at their flat. Lemaire was to stay with the car. She deposited me at the Ritz, would call for me with car and Lemaire at eight next moming. It was awkward not being able to telephone — ^if anything happened — ^but nothing would happen before moming.
I went up to B.'s rooms, ordered our cold supper in the salon for nine o'clock and had a hot bath. The rooms gave on the garden. All was quiet. There seemed to be no one in the hotel. Michael's photograph stood on the table. Michael was in England. When would I see him again?
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III
It was ten before B. got back. He kissed me absent-mindedly. When he had had a wash we sat down to supper. Cold chicken and ham, salad, Camembert cheese, a bottle of Chablis.
"About our moving — I want to explain/'
*Tes?'' He was only half listening. Immense preoccupations absorbed him. He looked at me like a blind man.
"R^quin is a friend. If we get into trouble I can turn to him for advice — otherwise in the confusion we might be forgotten — "
The telephone rang. He had an Embassy extension in his sitting room. It was Maureen calling from St. Jean to say that they had received orders to move next moming, would I please start back at once? I couldn't hear her distinctly nor could she hear me.
*Tou want me to come back tonight?"
'Tes. We leave first thing in the morning."
"But I was told at Troyes— "
"I can't hear—"
"I was told by Colonel Dumas — " "Colonel who?"
''Never mind. Hold on a minute — "
I turned to B, "IVe got to go back — ^now — tonight."
''Nonsense."
''But I must. They are leaving early in the morning. It's a six hours' run." ''You can't. Where's your car?" "I don't know." "Well then—"
I spoke again on the phone. "I'll start back," I said, "by midnight — should be with you by six." She rang off.
There was a knock on the door. A gentleman was announced. Very grave, very correct. He presented himself. He was Monsieur le Grand. He apologized for disturbing us. He was Captain Lecomte's father-in-law and he had a message for me. The message was to the effect that General R6quin would expect me to dine with him the next night at the place that had been shown me that moming on the map.
I thanked him. He bowed and withdrew,
"I must now," I said, "get hold of Barbara."
"You must first finish your supper."
I ate my chicken, gulped down a glass of Chablis.
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"How can I get hold of her?'' ''Where is she?''
"At Constance's flat. Can you send a car?"
*Tes — if you must go." He looked dreadfully tired.
"I must/' I said.
Then Barbara and Bill Cower walked in.
''Barbara! How extraordinary! I was just going to send for you. We've got to go baclc tonight."
"I'm sorry. May. We can't. I've wrecked the car. Ran into one of those road blocks in the dark."
"Where is the car?"
"In the middle of the Champs Elys^es where I crashed." "Can't you get it repaired?" "Afraid not. It's a total wreck."
I was frantic. I lost my temper. What to do? It was by now nearly mid- night. I kept repeating that I must get back. If the unit moved off without us, we might never find them. Barbara had no more to say. I was sorry I had lost my temper. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know about the road blocks in the Champs Elys^es. But there it was. We were stranded without a car and had two hundred and fifty miles to do before morning.
B. took matters in hand. He would ask General Colson, French chief of staff at the Ministere de la Guerre, to send us back early in the morning. But he could not and would not disturb him before seven. I must get through to Cosset, tell him what had happened and say that I would leave as early as possible.
I got Cosset without delay. What? I had meant to start back tonight? Quite unnecessary. Madame Schreiber was mistaken. She had acted without his knowledge. They were not leaving until one o'clock. Treize hemes. If I left by eight in the morning all would be well.
B. said, "You women!" I told Barbara I was sorry I'd been angry, that if she would collect Lemaire and be at the Ritz at eight o'clock I'd be ready. B. would get us a car somehow.
It was one in the morning when Barbara and Bill left us. A peculiar evening. We prepared for bed. Had just turned out the light when the bombing began. It was spasmodic, but combined with my anxiety about the unit made sleep impossible. I woke B. at seven and he rang Colson. "Ma femme est en panne. Sa formation hit mouvement." Colson agreed at once. A fast car would be at the Ritz by eight o'clock. I dressed, packed my bag, drank some coffee — said good-by. B. was talking to London on the telephone as I left the room. He waved a distraught hand.
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It was Saturday the seventh of June. German armor sweeping south, reached Rouen the next day, crossed the Seine on the tenth and entered Paris on the fourteenth. B. had been to London and had rejoined Reynaud on the Loire by that time, but I knew nothing about that. My Une of com- munication with my husband snapped as I left the Ritz. I didn't see him or hear from him again until I reached England on the twenty-sixth of July. It was to be five years before I went back to Paris.
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CHAPTER VI
I
HE car General Colson had put at my disposal was a supercharged
J- Peujot shaped like a torpedo. Two lean, swarthy, hawk-faced French soldiers in steel helmets, one at the wheel, the other with a rifle between his knees, were in front. Barbara and I wedged ourselves into the narrow back seat, Lemaire between us, our bags under our feet. We were very cramped. It was eight-thirty. I said, 'We must make St. Jean le Bassel by one." The eagle at the wheel nodded. We shot across the Place Vendome.
I like being driven fast. The girls knew this and would go all out on the straight. But the straight and the crooked were all the same to this driver. Traffic lights, control posts, convoys, farm wagons, market squares and crowded thoroughfares were no obstacle. Never before or since have I been driven as I was driven that day. The car in those steel hands was a live thing. It was like being on the back of the winner in a dog race. We made St. Didier by ten forty-five. We were halfway and had averaged just over sixty miles an hour. But it took us half an hour to get petrol. Barbara hadn't spoken nor I — ^with the car lurching and leaping through the air, talk was impossible. But at the petrol point we looked at each other. "Can we make it, Barbara?"
'1 don't think so. He can't keep it up. No man could."
It was a quarter past twelve when we reached Nancy and I realized as we left the town that the superb silent creature in charge was slacking off very slightly.
Should I say anything? I remember, as if it were yesterday, staring with awe at those lean shoulders, that narrow, steady head — those incredible hands. Then I leaned forward.
"'If you can keep up your speed," I said, "we can just do it."
He stiffened. It was like touching a racehorse with the whip. The speed- ometer moved to kilos 120. We turned sharp right in Fenetrange on two wheels at one-fifteen and pulled up at one-thirty in front of the convent gates to find the hospital convoy drawn up in the road about to move off.
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We had done the two hundred and fifty miles in four hours and a half. Ten minutes later we were on our way back along the road we had come.
Barbara and Lemaire tumbled out. Gosset stepped forward. I stood in the road. Would I please stay where I was. Everyone was placed. He had given orders that none were to leave their vehicles. If I would be so kind as not to disturb his arrangements. There was unfortunately no room for me in the convoy. Without the Buick it had been extremely difficult to caser every- one. Miss Fuhlroth was installed in my Renault with her bad leg (she had phlebitis) on a strapontin, thus taking up two places. Madame Schreiber and Dr. le Canouet were traveling with her. Lemaire could get into the old Bedford with the French orderlies. Miss Graham would join Miss Toulmin and Dr. Guenin, but it would cause the greatest confusion if I insisted on transferring myself to the Renault. I could see for myself that the Ford station wagons were packed with nurses.
There was nothing for it but to stick to General Colson's car for the rest of the day.
I turned to my hawk-faced driver. Could he drive me back? But certainly, his orders were to take me to my destination — ^what was our destination? A place, Gosset said, called Maison Blanche. And where was that? It was fifteen miles south of ChSlons. We were to go back?
Just so. He unfolded his map — pointed it out to my driver. It was a hundred miles back on the road to Paris. So we needn't have been in such a hurry. No. He had expected to meet us on the road.
The two eagles in helmets made no sign. They had been told to bring me to St. Jean as quickly as possible. They had done what they were told. I turned again to Gosset.
Were we to set up the hospital at Maison Blanche?
He didn't know. We would get further orders when we arrived. If I would be good enough to step into my car.
Maureen had joined me and was staring at me intently. I could see Evelyn lying back on a white pillow in the Renault. Cheerful hands waved to me from car windows. But where were the nuns? Where was Sister Marie Jeanne? She would be sad if I didn't say good-by to her. But Gosset was pawing the ground.
^'Allons madame, en route.*'
Then Maureen intervened. Hadn't I better have something to eat? Cer- tainly, Gosset snapped. I could stop at the cafe in Fen6trange if I was
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hungry and catch them up. I said I would do that. My two escorts were hungry, if I was not.
We moved off. Our retreat had begun. We didn't suspect it, but the Had- field-Spears Unit was to keep on moving till it reached England.
I don't know how or why it was that Nancy Wright got in beside me. I thought she was Barbara, but when we stopped at Fen6trange I found it was Wright. I said, ''Oh it's you, Nancy," and stumbled into the caf6. But we were too late. There was no food, only coffee and beer. So we sat with the two drivers drinking coffee while they devoured their rations, and I think Nancy told me the story of those last hours of incredible confusion, of how everyone had got in everyone's way, how Boddles had kept them all waiting, and how Kelsey's little Zouave had cried and had nearly fallen out of the window waving good-by. It was very hot in the caf6, my head was swimming and I don't remember very clearly what she said, but I do recall the savage gleam of our drivers' great knives as they slashed at their hunks of bread, and the buzzing as it seemed of a myriad flies. Then we were off again at the same headlong speed, lurching and leaping over the road.
The country fled past again. There was the turn to Vic. What ages it seemed since I had taken it to say good-by to R^quin. He was expecting me to dine with him somewhere, where was it? Someone had turned up with a message, a nice man, while I was at supper with B. Poor B. I must ring him up from Maison Blanche. How worried he was about Reynaud, and they had once been such friends. The little Frenchman had seemed so full of fire and ardor when he came to see us in London. The best of the lot, B. had said. But that had been long ago in another world. A world where one only talked of war. I hadn't even kissed B. good-by. He was at the tele- phone, had waved a hand. I wished — Oh I wished —
The car gave a bound, I swung against Wright and came back to the present. Our job was to set up our hospital at Maison Blanche and be pre- pared to take in the wounded. "Nous allons avoir des batsLillcs tenibles,'^ Requin had said — so we were in for a busy time.
After that it was all like a dream where everything you grasp melts in your hand, familiar things twist into ghostly shapes. And all through the dream I was being rushed through space at breakneck speed in a car driven by grinning demons — toward a place that didn't exist.
We passed our convoy just beyond Nancy, catching up first the heavy lorries, then the old Bedford with its load of orderlies, then the two Dodge vans. Dorea seemed to be in trouble. Wilky driving the Hotchkiss wore an agonized expression. Cynthia was leading in her Ford station wagon with
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Dr. Gu6nin standing on the ranning board. In a flash we had left them behind.
I tried to imagine our new hospital in Maison Blanche, pictured to my- self a large white house, nice clean wards like those in the convent, rows of neat beds with white sheets, blue blankets.
But when we reached the spot on the map there was no such place as Maison Blanche. No large white house, nor even a small house, no village nor house of any kind, nothing but a dream forest of great trees and a crossroads and a couple of distracted French officers waving their arms at the passing motors who told me to turn left and proceed to Chatel Raoult where Ambulance 282 was to be billeted for the night.
But the forest and the dream deepened as we sped south and when we reached Chatel Raoult all we found was a deaf commandant, who knew nothing about us, hidden away in a jungle in a little wooden pavilion — and it was like a scene in a fairy tale. The grass was so high round the porch that the pavilion was smothered and the late aftemoon sunlight streaming into his untidy room was very hot, and spread over everything was deep silence and dust. He was a sad, gray little man, very deaf, with weak watery eyes, and he had received no orders nor any warning of our coming. No one had thought to tell him, or perhaps he hadn't heard when they told him over the telephone, but when at last I did make him hear and he realized that thirty women were descending on him for the night he was very frightened and said in the curious small voice of the very deaf, ''Mais madame, je ne peux pas. II n'y a rien ici, rien," and indeed there did seem to be nothing, nothing but great silent trees and an old barn.
Cosset had said we would receive further orders when we reached our destination, and this apparently was it, but there were no orders. There must be some mistake. The Service de Sante couldn't be mad enough to expect us to set up our hospital in a jungle. How would we get the wounded? How send them on? There wasn't a sign of an ambulance, nor of any military vehicle of any kind. Not a living soul to be seen, for that matter. The commandant appeared to be quite alone. I must find Ceneral Worms, make him do something. But where was the Service de Sante? I turned to the commandant.
''I must telephone the Service de Sante.''
"Comment, madame?" He held his right ear with his hand and blinked. "I must telephone," I shouted, "to the Service de Sant^." "What Service de Sante, madame?" "The Service de Sante of the IVth Army." "Which army did you say?"
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"The IVth Army. I want to speak to the Medecin Inspecteur Worms." He shook his head. "I am sorry/'
''General Worms/' I shouted. "I want to speak to the Medecin Inspecteur of the IVth Army, General Worms.''
He had either never heard of General Worms, or he didn't hear now. A horrid suspicion darted into my mind.
''Don't you belong to the IVth Army?" I screamed into his poor deaf ear.
"But no, madame, I belong to the — the region of the rear."
"But we have been sent here to rejoin the IVth Army."
He blinked again. I gave it up, and went out into the porch, leaving him waving his helpless little hands.
"What sort of a war is this?" I grumbled to Nancy Wright. "How in heaven's name are we supposed to set up a hospital in this place?"
"Dans la verdure peut-etre, madame. Ici il n'y a que de la verdure."
It was the commandant again at my elbow, hearing for once when hearing was useless, and using a phrase that I had never heard applied to a hospital before but was to hear often enough during the days that followed. I thought it funny at the time, or perhaps I was slightly hysterical for I remember turning to Wright and saying, "He suggests we should put up our tents in the greenery" — and going off into a wild fit of laughter.
"But we aren't prepared — " Sister Wright was shocked.
"Of course, we are not prepared."
"We have only three tents, one for the theater, one for the reception, one for stores." "I know."
"We were never intended — "You're teUing me—"
"We must have a building of some sort to house the patients."
"A building. Exactly. A building — ^well, there's a bam over there."
But here was the Renault with Maureen and Fuhlroth and Le Canouet and here came Gosset, thank God, in his two-seater. This was his show. This was his war, whatever he might feel about it. I would let him cope with Worms and the Service de Sante and la verdure and all the rest of it.
The remainder of that day is a blur. Maureen told me later that I looked so wildly exhausted when she arrived at Chatel Raoult that she thought it best to take me away from the others. I daresay she was right. I remember finding myself in a hot hotel bedroom, sitting vaguely on a hard yellow chair opposite a dizzy wall covered with pink roses — and asking where I was.
We're in ChMons.'
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"Oh, are we all here?" "No."
"Why not? Where are the others?"
"Gosset has taken them to a village called St. Ch6ron."
"Where is that?"
"Thirty miles south. We'll join them tomorrow." "South, you say?" "Yes. South."
"Well, that's a good thing."
I remember no more. I fell on my bed and slept lik^ a log, till morning, reassured, please note the foolishness of it, by the thought that the girls were thirty miles farther from the enemy than I was.
There is, I fear, a good deal that was idiotic in my conduct during the forty-eight hours that followed my departure from the Ritz. My mad dash across France had been unnecessary. To have allowed myself to be whisked away from the unit to Chalons for the night was wrong and very unwise. For General Colson's car was gone. The eagles having landed us at the only hotel still open in Chalons had gone back to Paris. We were without trans- port in a town awaiting the arrival of the enemy. We didn't know this. That is to say we didn't believe, though we knew the Germans weren't far off, that they would get through. Why we didn't believe it, I can't tell you. But it was so. And this, in spite of the fright B. had given me in Paris. It doesn't make sense, as I say, it was idiocy, to go peacefully to sleep while Maureen hunted the ghostly streets along the Marne for a telephone.
She found one in a cellar, and a captain who telephoned to R^quin's headquarters and promised to lend us a car to take us there if we would tum up at his office at eight o'clock in the moming. Then she too came back to the deserted hotel and to bed. And in the morning, rested, refreshed, full of confidence, there we were, a couple of fools discussing solemnly over our excellent coffee the problem of finding a suitable place in which to install the hospital. That, I declared, was the first thing and R^quin must help us. He must requisition a chateau- somewhere or a school. Worms was hopeless. Fancy sending us on a wild-goose chase to a place like Chatel Raoult. We agreed, very smug we were on the way to General R6quin's headquarters, that the confusion, the lack of control and direction in the Service de Sant^ was shocking.
"I must ring up B.," I said, "as soon as we are installed and have a telephone number of our own." The idea that 282 was never to have such a thing again didn't occur to me as a remote possibility.
General R^quin's headquarters were this time in a large pleasant farm-
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house. Captain Lecomte received us and conducted us to the general's office. He looked more cheerful than at our last meeting.
"You didn't give us the pleasure of your company at dinner after all."
''No. Fm sorry. \ye received orders to move. I rejoined the unit. It was late by the time I reached Chalons."
It was, he said, of no consequence. We were here, that was the main thing. But where exactly were we?
I said I didn't quite know and explained what had happened. He was incensed. I must see Worms immediately, he declared, and decide myself where I would set up my hospital. He would like to have us as near as possible to his headquarters so that he could keep an eye on us. He would telephone Worms that I was coming. The doctors seemed to make a sad muddle of their affairs. If I had any trouble with Worms, I was to let him know.
I thanked him. Maureen and I got up to go. He stopped us to point out his sector on the map, and the plain of Champagne spreading behind it. ''Clean as a table," he said in his dry way. ''Nothing to hang on to. I shall try to hold them on the Aisne."
He came with us to the front door. "At night when I can't sleep," he said, "I think sometimes of Mademoiselle Alice and her handsome Zouave." He smiled. We were in full retreat before I saw him again.
We found Cosset with General Worms in a stuffy little house in the village of Songy. Worms in a dither, Cosset very angry. It was to be our last conference with the Service de Sante. Though we didn't know it, there would be no more talk after today about a suitable place for our hospital. We were about to be scattered over the country like chaff in a high wind. The fact that nothing we said that day mattered in the least makes my conduct no more excusable.
I had done an unpardonable thing. Cosset put it bluntly, in going over Worms's head to the army commander. I said I was sorry, that I had no such intention. I had gone to the general merely to ask for a car to take me to St. Cheron, to which Cosset replied rudely that had I stayed with the unit I would have had no need of a car. Maureen very pink said it had been absolutely necessary to find me a bed, I had been exhausted. Cosset gave a snort. Worms waved his worried little hands over the map on the table. *'Voyons — II s'agit de vous trouver un emplacement."
Cosset flung a long leg over his knee and stared out of the little window into the hot street. It was all very unpleasant. I knew I was in the wrong, but I didn't trust Worms and I did trust R^quin and I was by that time in such a rage with Cosset that when Worms suggested sending us to Troyes
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to work in the big military hospital of that town I turned the suggestion down flat. Troyes? But Troyes was a hundred and fifty kilometers behind the lines. We were a mobile field unit and a self-contained unit. To attach us to a great military base hospital was to destroy our raison d'etre.
Poor little Worms. I can see his worried pinched old face. But he was right that day and I was wrong. He knew much better than I what lay ahead of us. If the line on the Aisne didn't hold, the hundred and fifty kilometers in front of Troyes would curl up in a flash under the German armor. Our best, perhaps our only, chance of being useful was to take ourselves off now, immediately, to a spot well behind the battle zone. Of all this he was pain- fully aware. But he couldn't tell me that he didn't believe the IVth Army could hold the Aisne. He could only advise me timidly to join forces with his very excellent hospital at Troyes. The medecin chef, he said, would be more than grateful for the help we could give him. Gosset said nothing. When I asked his opinion, his shoulders informed me that he wasn't in- terested— so when I turned the proposal down, Worms gave it up. The army commander had ordered him to let me choose my own emplacement. I was determined to stay near the front, very well I could stay. If I would go with Captain Gosset to Rosnay I would find there a small chateau that might do. He pointed it out on the map. It was about fifty kilometers south of us on the main road from Chalons to Troyes.
Gosset and I were silent during the drive to St. Ch6ron. Actually he was no more eager than I to be attached to the hospital at Troyes. I learned this later from Dr. Bernard, but that didn't help matters at the moment. He held himself responsible for the safety of the unit and was furious that I had gone to see R^quin without consulting him. I don't blame him. I had behaved in a very foolish and highhanded manner.
I realize now how seriously he took his responsibility. Believing that de- feat was certain, inclined by temperament to expect and even welcome calamity, he nevertheless was determined to do his duty, and discharge his obligation to the band of strange British women who must have maddened him by their optimism — and though I, for my part, hated his defeatism, I could not but admire his conduct of the unit during the harassing days that followed. He exerted himself to the utmost on our behalf and I came to count on him.
Indeed it is probable that if it had not been for Gosset and Dr. Gu6nin we would have been taken prisoner. For our unit was to be left very soon to look aftcF itself and find its own way across France as best it could. We could never have done it if these two hadn't known the country intimately. That was to become a question of great importance. For once the
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flood of refugees began to pour down the highroads of France south of Paris our one hope was to follow the little country roads, and avoid the congested towns with their milling throngs, their groaning bridges, their eternal traffic blocks. No, without Gosset and Gu^nin we couldn't have made it. We would have been lost.
But I anticipate. There was no thought of retreat in my mind that lovely ninth of June when I found the unit camping in the straggling village street of St. Charon. What a gay dirty lot of gypsies they were. The trucks were all drawn up under the trees on one side of the street, the staff cars on the other; the orderlies, down at the bottom of the hill, were gathered round the rolling kitchen. Girls came running from cottages and bams to wel- coifte us.
''It's Madame la Gen^rale. Hi! everybody — ^here is Madame la Gen^rale." Maria came at a gallop through the dust under the blazing sky. Barbara waved a spanner, wiped her nose with a black hand and grinned.
It was lunchtime. I was hustled up the hill to the village pub. Dorea and Dodo produced an excellent meal of bully beef, salad, cheese and a cool white wine. After lunch I was taken to inspect the billets. Fuhlroth, our invalid, had been installed in the one comfortable furnished room available. I found her lying in a large double bed in a blue crepe-de-Chine nightie with the window open on poppy fields that shimmered in the heat. Most of the drivers and nurses were sleeping in bams. Cynthia, Rosie and Pip Scott- Ellis had moved into an abandoned piggery. They had put up a sign over the broken door, ''Chateau du Poic/' and had turned the interior into an apartment not unlike the most modem of night clubs. Cynthia had pulled gay strips of cloth out of her tin box. Pip had drawn cartoons in charcoal on large squares of brown paper.
''But wait till you see your domain, boss.''
Dorea and Maria conducted Maureen and me proudly to the derelict bungalow they had prepared for us. It had once been white. It had two rooms, a sitting room and a bedroom, and a veranda; four battered chairs, a table with a dirty crimson cloth, and two handsome brass candlesticks. Maureen, Dorea and Maria were to sleep in the sitting room. I was to have the small bedroom to myself. They had put up my camp bed, made me a dressing table out of a packing case and retrieved a jug and basin from one of the trucks.
"Isn't it grand, boss?'r
"Grand."
We sat down on the veranda steps. There was a giant plane tree before
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the front door. The village dozed in the heat. The sound of cannon was far away. I must go with Gosset presently to Rosnay to inspect the building where we proposed to set up the hospital. It was wonderful to be back — it was like coming home.
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CHAPTER VII
I
HOW vividly they stand out in my memory, those villages of France where we camped for a single summer night. It is as if the dark torrent of the war surging round us made each one a lighted island, promising safety and rest. I must have clung to them with intense emotions of relief and gratitude. Indeed I have for them now the kind of feeling that wells up when I remember a village in America where I spent part of my child- hood. St. Charon was a ragged, dusty straggle of derelict cottages. I spent only one night there, we irfovcd next day to Rosnay, but the memory of our grubby little bungalow with its dusty porch, its ragged plaster and the neglected privy behind a barn gives me a nostalgic pang. I recall with regret the soft tremulous night, the scent and sound of the rustling grasses outside my low window, the booming, like breakers on a beach, of distant guns.
None of us slept very well. There was no door in the doorway between the two rooms and I could hear Dorea and Maria rolling their big bodies in their camp beds, then Maria called:
"Are you asleep, boss?"
"No."
"Do you know what I want you to do?" "What?"
"I want you to promise to take us all back to St. Jean after the war. I want to see Madame Nicolai again and Madame Bernard and old man Klein. God but it was fun behind those manure heaps. Do you remember the hot cross buns Klein made with the swastikas on them?"
"They weren't swastikas."
"I swear they were. Anyhow promise, boss, that you'll come back with us after the war."
"All right — ^but let's get some sleep."
The beds creaked again. One of the three began to snore gently. We rolled out of bed about six. I can see Maureen moving across the street from the open-air kitchen with our coffee — such a pretty thing with
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her pink cheeks and big brown eyes. The four of us sit down at the round table with its sordid crimson cloth. Our beds are rolled up, our bags packed. The two handsome brass candlesticks are standing proudly on the tawdry chimney piece. Dorea is pulling fat wads of thousand-franc notes from her pockets. We had had a great stroke of luck. The intendance had paid her our mess allowance for a month ahead the day we left St. Jean le Bassel! We were in funds.
'Twenty-five thousand francs, my dears — ^and the Dodge full of stores. We won't starve whatever happens."
The coffee in our tin mugs is strong and hot; Maria hands us chunks of bread from the big round loaf; Maureen has produced a pot of orange marmalade. We are hungry and happy. Yes, it is a happy breakfast party. Why not, we are friends, we like being together, the sense of danger is just strong enough to give a keen savor to life. I think that is the explanation of our high spirits; we are intensely alive.
It was June 10, the day chosen by Mussolini for his declaration of war and his attack on France. But I find no mention of the fact in my diary nor do I remember taking any notice of this special piece of bad news. Perhaps we didn't hear of it — ^perhaps hearing we gave it little thought. The news was so bad anyhow that no added calamity occurring at a distance made any great difference. We were in a spot, but the disasters accumulating beyond our small horizon didn't seem to concern us.
I wrote the following in my journal that afternoon sitting on the front porch of the bungalow we were about to abandon.
It is very still, very hot. The news is bad. Rumor that the French gov- ernment has left Paris for Tours. I wonder about B. Impossible now to get in touch with him. Dorea has just come back in the Dodge from Vitry- le-Frangois where we are supposed to get our provisions — says it's a shambles, and that she must fetch supplies in future between one and three in the morning. The loud explosions last night were the factory at St. Dizier going up in smoke. Not a cat left in this place. No living soul about save ourselves. The people in the caf6 spent the night packing up. T. W. is under the Sunbeam across the street. I can see her feet sticking out.
Went with Gosset yesterday to Rosnay. He is very nervy but agrees that the little chateau has possibilities as a hospital. We move there this afternoon. Our orders last night were to go, clean up the place, but un- pack nothing as we may have to move further south. The Service de Sant6 at Songy says over the phone, ''We are dispersing our formations.''
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I wonder what that means. The cqmmuniqu6 has just announced, ''On the Aisne between Chateau Porcin and Les Chines I'ennemi a 6t6 nette- ment bloque/' That is R6quin. The httle chap has held them. There must be thousands of wounded but I have seen no ambulances on the road and we can do nothing. Was interrupted just then. A message came ask- ing for the help of two surgeons in the military hospital in Chalons. Boutron, Gu^nin and Dr. Bernard have just set off. I go with Cosset and the convoy to Rosnay. Let us hope we can stay there and get to work. It's on the main road from Chalons, so there should be no difficulty about bringing the wounded.
We stayed two nights in Rosnay. It was to be our longest stop until we reached Arcachon on the twentieth. From the eleventh to the twentieth we were allowed to do one-night stands only. No sooner did we arrive in a place, find billets and unpack the kitchen than we were pushed out by the French Air Force or warned to move on. We seemed to be pursued by the air force and became exasperated with the heavy earth- bound men in their magnificent lorries who bore down on us and took our beds from under us when they should have been, so we thought, in the air. They had wings, hadn't they? we grumbled. We passed a number of airfields that provided the answer. The planes were there on the ground but no living soul was left to lift them. The fat pilots, they all seemed fat to me, preferred apparently to travel by road.
We despised these fat boys. We heaped scorn and abuse on them. But we didn't draw the obvious conclusion and admit to ourselves that the game was up. Cosset knew it, I think all our French officers realized it, I couldn't. Indeed I never gave up hope of settling down and getting to work. When R^quin's army was forced to retire from the Aisne I thought, ''They will hold them on the Marne." When they withdrew from the Marne I said, "They will stand on the Loire." And each evening when we reached a new destination I would say to myself or Dorea, ''This time we have surely come far enough. We will be safe here." And then the air force would arrive and order us off, or Cosset would go out reconnoitering and come back to say he had found a divisional etat- ma/or in retreat and been told we must be on the move by dawn. We got used to it. We learned to take it as a matter of course, but I never became resigned, never gave up hope of getting some sort of hospital going, never believed until the day Petain asked for an armistice that the French would lay down their arms and accept defeat.
That is I think the reason why I was never really unhappy during
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those harassing days. The plight of France soon became evident, but I didn't beheve it was desperate. Not even after our heartbreaking night in the mihtary hospital at Chalons. Nor when a few days later we rushed into the hideous flood of refugees pouring down the road from Paris to Lyons. The spectacle of a nation gone out of its mind with fear was to haunt me long after I got home. I would wake up in a cold sweat in my London bed to wonder what would happen if the Germans invaded England; and the faces of mad women would start out at me in the dark, women with insane eyes and streaming hair, at the wheels of cars full of chil- dren. I felt no pity for these at the time; only a cold fury at the thought that they were blocking the roads, hindering the movements of troops, doing their best to lose the war. That the war for France was already lost, that no troops were moving up to meet the enemy, didn't occur to me as a possibility.
I think that Dorea and Barbara were more alive to the desperate char- acter of the situation than L If they didn't say so, it was, I fancy, because there was no point in depressing me. There was nothing to be done save what we were doing, so why worry? If the worst happened, we had our cars. As long as the cars could keep going we were all right.
But what cars! There were vehicles in our motley collection that would have broken the hearts of most women. Not all were groggy. The Ford station wagons were bearing up well. Mrs. Ashton-Bennet's was a beauti- ful thing fit for a shop window in Piccadilly. The Sunbeam in T. W.'s hands wasn't giving too much trouble and the surviving Dodge (we had abandoned the other near Nancy) managed to trundle along with Dorea at the wheel and Didi, the cook, bouncing about inside with the stores. But the limousine Lady Hadfield had given me was far too elegant and fragile to take what was coming to it. Boddles' small Renault was as tricky as a wildcat, and Wilky's Hotchkiss was something out of a bad dream. It boiled on every hill. Looking back as we rounded a climb- ing bend, I would see it spouting brown water in the air like a boiling geyser.
But it was the Bedford that gave us our worst headaches. It carried over thirty French orderlies and if it died on us God alone knew how we would manage, for every vehicle was filled to capacity. I as a rule had Maureen and Mademoiselle Radenac and Dr. Bernard with me in the Renault, Rosie with Marie or T. W. in front; the nurses were divided among the station wagons; Gosset drove his two-seater with one of the sergeants beside him. There wasn't a seat to spare anywhere. In fact everything hung on the Bedford. If the Bedford broke down we would have to
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abandon the orderlies, turn them loose in the road. But that was im- possible. Gosset would never have done it. He would have jettisoned the whole of our material rather than leave his men behind — quite rightly. But if he did we were done for as an ambulance unit. Our very existence, as such, depended in fact on the Bedford. Barbara knew this well enough. No one had to tell her, no one could tell her anything about the Bedford. She knew the old creature as if she had made it. Hoary with age, it creaked and groaned and lurched along the roads. Gently, tenderly she persuaded it to go on. Again and again it seemed about to pass out, certainly it would have laid itself down and died a dozen times had she not nursed it like a decrepit and beloved invalid.
I don't know just why, during the days that followed when we took to the hills, the sight of our mixed convoy, so dilapidated in some parts, so handsome in others, winding its slow laborious way up hill and down dale through the beautiful country and the heartless sunshine, would give me a catch at the throat. I suppose it was the valiant girls at the wheels, the sense of their complete reliability and courageous good humor that twisted something in my left side, but the vehicles too seemed to be taking part in our crazy drama by doing their best. And I remember, perhaps because I was tired, looking back down a steep hill to watch with breathless suspense and misty eyes the old Bedford flounder like an elephant across a stream and begin the ascent.
It didn't die on us. Heaving and puffing with its thirty orderlies inside and Barbara on the box it made the grade. Even the Hotchkiss got there. We lost no more vehicles until the last night on the road, when I col- lected the twenty-five British women of 282 and made the final dash for Bordeaux.
II
Lord Moran has many interesting things to say in his book. The Anatomy of Courage. My mind kept going back as I turned its pages to those days in France and I asked myself whether we were put to any real test of courage. For the Germans never caught up with us, we were always one jump ahead of them, the towns that we saw going up in flames were always towns we had left behind, what danger existed was always danger once removed and what courage was called for was moral, not physical. What it came to in the end was simply that we were running away very successfully and were having a grand time while we did so, but we were not proud of the fact, we were angry.
On the other hand none of the girls were what Lord Moran calls
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yokels, those whose fearlessness has its source in a vacant mind. Most of them had enough imagination to picture to themselves vividly the dangers we managed to avoid and the horrors we missed seeing. So if courage is will power and moral courage counts for something, then my unit came through their test, such as it was, very respectably.
There was one, but only one, member of the unit who was afraid and showed it and shirked in the worst possible way — for she tumed ugly and did her best to contaminate the others with her cowardice.
I had told the girls before we left England that no one need be ashamed of being afraid, that what mattered was doing one's job however scared one was. And I admire, naturally, the woman who controls her terror or shattered nerves even more than the one who is fearless. But this particular member of our company made little or no effort at self-control and I call her a coward because she seemed to want to break down the morale of the unit in order to have company for her ugly spirit. She didn't succeed. She remained unique, and she wouldn't be worth dis- cussing, if she hadn't made such a striking contrast with the rest by her contemptible conduct.
I am aware that the nurses have dropped into the background of my narrative. This is inevitable. They played a leading part in our community while the hospital functioned, once we took to the road they became passengers. But the test of morale was for them the greater since all I required of them was to do what I asked and not fuss. What that cost some of them I didn't at the time fully realize. Though it was a part of my daily business to watch for signs of ill temper or nerves or any form of incipient panic, I hadn't time to talk to them much or get inside their minds. I had to judge from their faces, from the way they tackled their food, things of that sort. If anyone was off her feed — but they never were. We always stopped at noon, preferably in a village, requisitioning a caf6 kitchen, and had a good hot meal. Didi would tumble out of the Dodge, Dodo would go foraging and come back with her cape full of fresh eggs or arms full of vegetables. Dorea would hand out the stores.
At one place we bought a sheep, at another half a pig. We had ample supplies of sugar, coffee and tea, bully beef and sardines. We did our- selves well at any rate for the first few days and our lunches were jolly affairs. If Guenin or Gosset looked back up the road with some appre- hension, if some of the more nervy ones were eager to move on, no one remarked on the fact. There may have been squabbles. I don't pretend that our feminine staff was a group of angels. T. W. cursed quite a bit under her breath, Maria growled, Josie was usually carsick, Boddles was
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always losing something. But I remember walking back down the road two or three times during the day when the convoy was resting to look into each car to see how the passengers were faring and I carry witiii me a picture of the station wagons each filled with cheerful tousled heads, rumpled capes, paper bags of sweets, crumbs, bits of chocolate. And so, to repeat again, though we were never put to any serious test, I feel that the unit showed up remarkably well. The girls proved, and this is the interesting thing, that they had enough courage to meet what was asked of them and a lot to spare. Indeed I knew from the way they be- haved that if anything really frightening did happen, they would not let me down.
Rosnay was an enchanting village of small whitewashed houses with gay flowers at their doors. It seemed to be spellbound. For it lay straight in the path of the enemy on the main road south from Chalons and it was utterly peaceful. Old women sat in their doorways knitting, children played in the sun, family parties were drinking coffee in the gardens, a river flowed.
The blue-eyed, sunburned mayor had been warned of our coming and had made preparations. He welcomed us courteously and showed us into a series of delightful old-fashioned cottage bedrooms with waxed floors, old oak cupboards and snowy beds. There was room in the cottages for all the nurses and some of the drivers. Maureen and I were lodged in the manor down by the river. Eight of the M.T.C. moved into the attic above us — not a comfortable billet for the attic was bare. But the atmosphere of the village was so pleasant, normal and friendly, that everyone was delighted. Dorea and Dodo set to work at once unpacking our pretty green china in the village hall that was to be our mess, while Gosset, Maureen, Wright and I went over to the chateau.
We were told not to unload our material, but Gosset agreed with me that we might as well plan out the building, and we were counting up the number of beds we could put into each of the empty rooms when the second S.O.S. came from Chalons. Mademoiselle Radenac and six order- lies were wanted urgently, also a supply of surgical dressings, bandages and candles.
"Why candles, Gosset?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Electricity cut off, I suppose." I would go with them, I said.
Gosset objected. It was a fifty-mile run. If Chalons were threatened, the fewer people left there to be evacuated the better. My place was here with the nurses. Suppose we had to move quickly? I promised that I
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wouldn't stay. I would see how our equipe was getting on, then come back.
We had parked the big trucks in the yard of the chateau. I sent Maureen to collect Mademoiselle Radenac, Mrs. Ashton-Bennet and her Ford with Pellew as second driver, while Gosset, Nancy Wright and I hauled the needed supplies out of the trucks. Nancy had packed all the operating- room stuff herself in wicker baskets and knew just where to find the dress- ings and bandages. But candles? We opened box after box — at last they were discovered under one of the drivers' seats.
We must have left about seven. The six orderlies were pleased to be going. Mademoiselle Radenac sat beside me as still as a mouse. Impossible to tell what she was thinking or feeling. She didn't look any more scared than usual. Such a strange little creature. She would go to the stake with those scared eyes and never a murmur from that mute tight little mouth. I had tried to be kind and would make an effort to talk to her but she would answer in monosyllables. Where did she come from? What sort of a home did she have to go back to? Had she a mother, a father, a sweetheart? No, not a sweetheart. She was a lay nun. But who could tell? Who could say that that bulging forehead and meager form might not have been pleasing to a man who was perhaps even now lying dead in some no man's land? Or perhaps he was in an office somewhere scribbling with one of those spluttering pens, filling up a few hundred of the innumerable forms that cluttered up the French bureaucracy and dreaming of a tiny apartment full of stiff shiny furniture where he would one day install Mademoiselle Radenac.
I would try to picture it, try to understand the little enigma sitting beside me, then I would forget all about her. She was so silent and so withdrawn it was as if she weren't there. Today it was like that. She had been sent for. She was going to do her duty. She would do it admirably. If she were frightened no one would ever know. She was probably a heroine. I would deposit her in ChMons. If she didn't come back it would be as if she had never existed.
Such a beautiful evening. A golden light was spread over the fields as we sped north, but when we drove into the yard of the military hospital in Chalons it seemed to be growing dark. It hadn't taken us two hours from Rosnay but I see the dreadful scene that greeted us as shrouded in twilight. All the vast yard in front of the dark building was covered with wounded on stretchers. I didn't count them. There must have been some-
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thing near a thousand, and the ambulances were still coming in. And in the center of the field of the dying, two men were standing waving helpless arms in exhausted, discouraged gesticulation. Their clothes had once been white. They wore surgeons' blouses and aprons; but their aprons were scarlet, their sleeves were splashed with the same color, even their hands were red with blood. They paid us no attention as we picked our way through the close-packed stretchers toward the distant yawning door, but as I passed close to one of them, I saw his bleared eyes and knew that he was drunk, either with wine or with blood and sweat and horror.
It was almost quite dark in the long porch that spread across the front of the building, and that too was packed with shadowy bundles on stretchers. Inside, it was black night. I stumbled on one body, stepped aside, stumbled again. But the forms I had bumped into so rudely didn't curse me or com- plain, they were silent. Perhaps they were dead, perhaps not yet dead, but already far away from this dreadful place — ^hovering a moment over their distant homes before they slipped away forever.
All down the long corridor the dead and the dying and those who need not have died lay silent in the dark. We seemed to walk for miles down those corridors. We turned left, then right, and the motionless silent procession passed with us, unending. And there was almost no sound. Almost none of the bundles moaned or whimpered.
We found our doctors at last in a small room that must have once been an office. The last light from the setting sun came in at the window. They crowded round us like distracted children crying, "We have no light. We have no water. The light in the town has failed, the water has been cut off. There is no sterilizer. We are expected to operate."
I tried to soothe them. Our orderHes had followed Radenac and me with the baskets.
''Here are candles," I said. "And here are two big baskets of sterilized dressings."
"But there is no one to separate the dead from the dying. How can one tell? They are all so quiet. We don't know where to begin."
"We must begin," I said to Dr. Bernard, who was more composed than the others, "with those who are lying outside this door. Are there no nurses?"
"None. They have all gone save two Soeurs de Charite."
"Then you and I will separate the dead from the dying in this corridor. That is the first thing."
Mademoiselle Radenac was already busy unpacking the baskets, sending orderlies with pails to fetch water.
I went out into the dark corridor with Dr. Bernard. We lit candles and
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carried them from one form to another — ^lifting a blanket to look at a face, fumble for a pulse. Many were dead. The smell was very bad. Our orderlies carried the dead to the far end of the corridor and laid them down in the darkness.
Mademoiselle Radenac came out of the operating room to say that they would need more supplies. I said I would go for them. I think I left about midnight. Gu^nin and Boutron were operating. The ambulances were still rolling in as I picked my way with Dr. Bernard's help among the stretchers to the Ford where Pellew and Mrs. Ashton-Bennet were waiting. Dr. Bernard gave me the list Radenac had prepared. I said I would collect Wright with the things and bring her back.
But I did not return to Chalons. We lost our way, dawn was breaking when we reached Rosnay. Our team had telephoned from Chalons by the time we were ready to take the road again, to say that they were ordered to leave as the hospital was closing down.
They left ChMons at eight, having worked all night and done twenty or more big operations. The Germans, as we learned later, were in the town at noon. I don't know what happened to the wounded. None came our way. We awaited them. Orders or no orders, Gosset would have taken them in but the ambulances didn't come. Neither that day nor the next in Guigny and Amance, nor the day after at Ancy-le-Franc. Not until we were swept into the torrential flood of refugees did we see a single ambulance; and then, those we saw carried, not wounded, but blowzy women and drunken troops who had thrown away their arms and waved bottles at us as they passed.
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CHAPTER VIII
I
WE WERE furious when Gosset told us that night at supper that the air force was turning us out of Rosnay. A squadron was coming, he said, to occupy not only the chateau but all our billets. We must leave early next morning.
''Then we are not to be allowed to set up the hospital?'' "'No. But we are ordered to set up a poste d'embarquement at the railway station at Guigny." The Service de Sante proposed to use Guigny station instead of Vitry-le-Franjois as the latter was in flames. The line, it appeared, had broken.
"Where is Guigny?''
"To the north off the main road — just south of Vitry. There's a railway siding — a branch line. Miss Wright, will you come with me, please, we must make a selection of instruments."
"Just a moment, Gosset. How many nurses will you want at Guigny?'^
"Six. I'm taking one surgical team."
"And what happens to the rest? Where do they go?"
"They must wait until Bernard can find a new cantonment."
"Where shall they wait?"
"Here in the road in their vehicles."
"What time must we vacate our billets?"
"Before seven. If you will come, Miss Wright." He strode out. Wright followed him. Dorea gave a snort. "Sounds jolly." Barbara said, "Drat that air force." I looked down the long table that Dodo had set out so nicely. The evening sun glinted on our pretty green china, lighted up a double row of mutinous faces.
"A pity," I said, "but there it is. We've got to pack up, and it won't be very pleasant, I fancy, at Guigny. You heard what Gosset said — so if any nurses care to volunteer — "
The response was immediate. The scowls vanished. All the nurses were ready and eager to go to Guigny. There was a general pushing back of
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chairs. Cynthia said, ''Come on, Barbara, let's have a last swim in the river." Dorea and Dodo began to clear the table.
The village street was quiet. The flowers in the cottage gardens glowed in the evening light. How peaceful it was. Didn't the mayor know that the line had broken? that even now the Germans — But Josie Pearce was at my elbow waving distracted hands. ''How awful," she cried. "What am I to do? Oh dear, oh dear, what shall I do?"
"What on earth is the matter, Josie?"
"Your laundry," she cried. "I gave it to a woman to wash."
It was true; she had come to my room in the morning to suggest that as we would probably stay at Rosnay some time it might be a good idea to get some of my white dresses and aprons laundered. I remembered now that she had gone off with a bundle of my things.
"Well, you'll have to get it back, that's all."
"But I can't remember the woman's name," she wailed, "or which house she lived in." For a moment she stood there wringing her hands, then suddenly her face lighted up, and shouting, "I know, the town crier," she bolted down the street.
I was settling the details for the next day with Jean when I heard the town crier's bell, and there he was coming down the street with Josie following, and he was ringing the bell and crying aloud:
"Qui a Je Iinge sale de Madame la Gdnerale? Qui a le linge sale de Madame h Generale?"
And sure enough he was only a few houses away when a woman popped out of her cottage door calling, "I have the dirty linen of Madame la Gdnerale," and Josie returned triumphant, a bundle of damp white aprons under her arm.
The notes in my diary become from now on very brief. Under the twelfth of June I find this:
Left Rosnay yesterday at 7 a.m. with six nurses for Guigny railway sta- tion. Nothing at Guigny but an empty cheese factory by the railway siding. Installed operating room in manager's office — quite o.k. except for strong smell of cheese, then went off with Bernard to find new billets. Gosset's idea to bring all the unit including heavy lorries to Guigny. This impossible as there were no billets anywhere. Lucky we didn't as the roads in the afternoon were full of troops in retreat. And when we tried to get on to the Service de Sant^ at Songy there was no answer. They had de- camped. R6quin too had moved his H.Q. God knows where. As we could get in touch with no one we have come on to Amance.
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The entry may not seem very clear. Neither, as I remember, did the situation.
Guigny is enveloped in the dream atmosphere that came rolling up every now and then during those days like a fog to obscure the landscape and dis- tort the most familiar objects. The place was a pocket, hemmed in by trees. There was nothing there save the hideous empty cheese factory and aban- doned railway siding. But ugly little towns crowded each other, so I seem to recall, beyond the trees and out of them ran roads, fluid with flying troops, and the sky arching over the place resounded like a gong.
A desolate uncanny place pervaded by the smell of cheese and an un- natural, precarious stillness. I see Gosset striding about the ugly empty building like an irate giant; Gu^nin's burly form pacing the station plat- form like a bear in a cage; Le Canouet drooping on a discarded packing case, his nice brown eyes wistfully staring at the screen of foliage that shut us in.
I must have arrived about eight with the nurses. I spent a part of the morning with them unpacking the surgical baskets, then went off with Bernard to look for billets. But the houses were either locked and barred or crowded with refugees. I remember going round and round with Bernard while he knocked at the doors of mairies, sous prefectures and cafes. It was useless — and as the day wore on the purpose of our search became more and more senseless. For the atmosphere of the sordid district was changing rapidly. The temperature was rising, the pulse quickening, with the increasing thunder of guns that sounded much nearer than in the early morning. To bring all our staff and equipment north when the enemy was very evidently advancing south seemed to us madness by the middle of the afternoon, and we went back to the cheese factory and said so. Nothing had happened there. The nurses were waiting, the doctors were waiting, the orderlies were waiting. Nancy had made an excellent job of the improvised operating room, operating table, instruments, drums of sterilized dressing, surgeons' gowns; everything was ready. But there was no sign of an ambulance nor of any living human being save ourselves.
Dr. Bernard and I tried to convince Gosset of the folly of remaining in the place. His orders he insisted were to open a dressing station at Guigny. He had opened it. It must remain open until further orders. In the end he went off in his two-seater to see for himself what was going on and came back very excited. He had met the — th en ddroute. The troops were streaming past a few hundred yards from the cheese factory. He had tried to get the Service de Sante by phone and had failed. Songy didn't answer.
*Well then — " Bernard lifted a grizzled eyebrow.
'Well what?'' Gosset waved his arms. Orders were orders until they were countermanded.
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"But if there is no work? If we have nothing to do?"
At last he agreed to send the nurses back and move the bulk of the unit south to Amance, but the surgical team must stay. So I collected the nurses, we said good-by to Gu^nin and Le Canouet, and made off.
I didn't like it, neither did Gosset. I think we both felt, from that evening on, very nervous about dividing the unit. For we worked out that night a way of keeping in touch if we got separated. If any part of the unit had to go ahead of any other part, it must never do so without picking out a rendezvous on the map and it must leave word at the Bureau de la Place of the rendezvous exactly where it had gone, with the military number of the road it was following. This was most important as we found later to our cost. Failing the Bureau de la Place, the advance party would leave an orderly at the prefecture, failing the prefecture, at the mairie.
We had left Gu6nin and Le Canouet very disconsolate on the deserted railway platform. They sat there uselessly, through the long summer evening. Towns were going up in flames to right and left of them, regiments were streaming past in flight along the main roads from Chalons. Nothing hap- pened in Guigny to break the uncanny quiet. They waited all night. No ambulance arrived. No train steamed up to the siding. The battle was raging beyond the trees. They could watch the flames of burning Vitry, listen to the guns. They had nothing else to do. When Gosset and I turned up early next morning we found them sitting where we had left them. They had had one patient during the night. A child of three who had been hit by a bomb and had died in Le Canouet's arms.
Gosset was in a dilemma. He had got in touch at last with the Service de Sant6 and the Service de Sant^ had insisted, blindly, on our maintaining our equipe at Guigny, but we had come on other regiments in flight on our way up to Guigny that morning and General de Lattre himself had passed us like a flash making south in his car. Now to find Guigny useless was too much. He ordered his team back to Amance.
They rejoined just in time to move on. For once again we were obliged to pack up and make off. But this time it was A couple of military police on motorcycles who warned us. The Service de Sante was silent. It sent us no orders — no message of any kind. And when Gosset went to look for them at noon in the place where he had found them early that morning, they were gone.
II
We were at lunch in a caf6 by the road when the two police came dashing past on their motorcycles. Luckily, they saw us and stopped. They had come,
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they said, from Vitry. The Germans had overrun the place and were advancing rapidly down the road. We'd better waste no time.
Move we must and that quickly; the general direction was not in dispute, southward and away from the Germans, but what road should we take and what place should we make for?
I think that it must have been at this point in our pilgrimage that Gosset gave up any idea of getting to work again. He didn't take me into his confi- dence, but when he spread out the road map on the caf6 table and began discussing possible itineraries with Gu6nin, there was no further mention of suitable quarters for a hospital. It was now merely a question of getting as far as possible before dark and of selecting a place where we might find petrol for our thirty vehicles as well as billets for our hundred souls.
I had sent the girls scurrying from the lunch table to their billets to pack up their belongings and, when I had seen to my own things, went off down the lane where the cars were waiting. The big Renault trucks were garaged in a shed and there I found Gosset, inside one of them, astride great bundles of bedding in the act of throwing out our nice hospital pillows.
"'What on earth are you doing that for, Gosset?"
'To lighten the trucks," he shouted. "We must lighten the trucks. Every one of the trucks is overloaded."
He was very excited and went on flinging down pillows pell-mell on to the dirty floor. Maureen was almost in tears. Dorea was watching with an inscrutable expression. Then suddenly with the work half done he made off calling for Dr. Bernard, calling to Miss Napier to assemble her cars, calling back over his shoulder to me that we must be on the road in half an hour and to see to it that all "ces dames" were ready.
When he had gone I said, "Now we put the pillows back where they belong." And we did — not only that day but the next, for it happened again. Dorea declares that Gosset threw them out each day and that each day we put them back, but I cannot swear to that.
I saw his point about lightening the lorries, it was vital to keep our vehicles going; and I was prepared to sacrifice all unessentials — in particular such belongings as gramophones, china and books. I think it was at Amance that we abandoned our elegant dinner service from Sarreguemincs, but pillows — no. "What," asked Dorea, "is a hospital without pillows?" Barbara said, "Why worry about the trucks anyhow? They are new. But what about my old girl?" And she dived again into the Bedford's bonnet. T. W. was in the road on her back as usual under the Sunbeam. "Just hand me a bit of soap, will you. There's a leak in my petrol tank." Rosie, managing in her
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mysterious way to look fragile and elegant in a pair of filthy khaki trousers, was testing the oil in the Renault. "All right, Rosie?"
''Fine." A smile lit up her very young, very serious, very beautiful face. ''We're off in a few minutes." 'Tm ready."
But Boddles was waiHng. 'T. W., do come; my starter's jammed. T. W., do come and help. I don't know what to do."
I went back to the cafe. Guenin and Bernard were still poring over the map. I sat down beside them and lit a cigarette. Staring at the white dusty road I had a sensation of blindness. I had no idea of where the road led. There appeared to be no reason to fix on any particular place for our next halt. We had lost touch with the IVth Army. It was in retreat somewhere beyond the sunny fields, green thickets and wild rose hedges, but where? The road was empty. Were we already left behind? It occurred to me that if we couldn't find the Service de Sant^ it must be equally true that they couldn't find us. This meant that there was no one now to give us orders. There was in fact no one who had the faintest idea where we were. We were on our own and must look after ourselves.
Then I heard Guenin say, "Tonnerre! We can get petrol at Tonneae and can just make it by nightfall." And I had a sudden hft of the heart for I knew Tonnerre. B. and I had stayed with the Due de Clermont-Tonnerre some years before at the Chateau of Ancy-le-Franc. It was a huge Renais- sance palace, only a few miles from the town. It could easily accommodate our hundred bodies.
''But that's wonderful," I cried. "I had no idea we were anywhere near Tonnerre. The Due de Clermont-Tonnerre is a friend. Even if he isn't at Ancy-le-Franc we are sure to find someone."
So it was arranged that I should go ahead in the Renault with Maureen, Guenin and Bernard (T. W. and Rosie on the box), make arrangements with the duke or his steward to billet us for the night, and that Gosset would follow with the convoy.
It was a lovely drive. To have come suddenly within range of a familiar place and a friend out of the far distant world of peace was so like a miracle that I chattered away to Gu6nin and Bernard about the delightful week I had spent in the great chateau, as if all our troubles were over. It was built in the form of a square. All our vehicles could drive through into the stable yard. The orderlies would be on velvet in the outbuildings.
Alas — we realized as we approached the proud fagade that others had got there before us. The park was full of troops. Through the stable arch
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we saw that the yard was crowded with guns. The great wide steps were swarming with officers and there was a sentinel at the door.
T. W. swept round the gravel with a flourish and brought our dusty Renault to a stop. The doctors hung back. ''Do you think it's any use? Do you think you'd better?"
I was rather frightened but I got out and went up the front steps. They seemed as formidable as the steps of St. Peter's. A group of officers stared. A young lieutenant touched his cap.
'1 arri looking/' I said, ''for the Due de Clermont-Tonnerre. Can you help
"I'm afraid he isn't here, madame."
"Then I would like to speak to his steward or one of his servants." The young officer hesitated uncomfortably. "I don't know, madame, if it is possible."
"But surely it is possible. I am Madame la G6n6rale Spears, a friend of the duke's. There must be someone." "I will inquire, Madame la Generale."
The lieutenant disappeared. I waited. Officers came hurrying up the steps; others came hurrying out of the great door. They all seemed very surprised to see me standing there. I was hot, tired, disappointed and acutely aware that my white apron and coif were rumpled and dirty.
At last a very tall figure appeared, all in black, with silvery hair. It was one of the duke's servants. I didn't know him but he bowed with ceremony and informed me that the duke was not at home, he was in the south!
"Who then is here?" I asked.
"The etat-majoT is here, madame."
"What etat-ma/or?"
He lifted his long hands.
I turned to the young officer. "Tell me, please, what etat-majoT is it?" "The 6tat'TnajoT of the Army Group of General Huntzinger." "Then if you will be so kind as to take me to the general, I would like to speak to him."
"But madame," the young man hesitated miserably. "Isn't it rather risky?"
I smiled. It seemed a funny word to use, "Risky? Oh no. I am in trouble. I am certain that General Huntzinger will help me. Be so good as to show me the way."
What could the poor boy do? Between chivalry and fear of his general he was distracted but he led me into the chateau up a flight of broad stairs, down a long corridor, pointed to a door and fled.
me?
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