 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
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 bergères 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 château 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. The 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 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 horn 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 immeuble, 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 Mutilés de la Guerre. We found an old red-lacquer writing table in the Rue des St. Pères 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 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 stuffy 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 "Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1." The 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 but 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 frightening 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 Marne 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 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 eyeglasses 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 "little."
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 hint of an ironical smile touching her lips. A powerful woman. The Service de Santé she explained had been prepared for twenty-five thousand casualties; the sick and wounded already numbered half a million. Nurses were urgently 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?
Yes.
Very well. I had best leave as soon as possible. I would find conditions, she added as she said good-by, somewhat primitive.
A plump band 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.
Four months later the huts of L'Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 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 100 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 directrice 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 C.O., a British directrice, French surgeons, doctors, chemists and administrative officers, British and American nurses. The formation was unique, an experiment 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 bespattered with mud; his face is haggard. He introduces himself. He is Captain Spears of the XIth Hussars, liaison officer with General Fayolle, our army commander.
The 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 screaming 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 Chemin des Dames where I was sent in 1917 for the Neville offensive. And we were married in Paris in March, 19l8.
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 Pépères 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 down 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-croûte 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 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 Valéry, 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 as a rule were intolerant of 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.
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 between 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. Painlevé, Poincaré, Daladier, Flandin, Paul Reynaud, B. had kept in touch with them all. Flandin was one of the most outspoken. 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 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 telegram of congratulation to Hitler. It was the 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 hot 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 congés payés. Nor could we have imagined the lengths to which the Daladier government 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 Germany 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 any 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 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 misunderstandings 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---"
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 Général has accepted in principle 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 Général has studied the question of modalités 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 eastern 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 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, be 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 Pétain there seems to be no one of the first order. B: never trusted Weygand; says he was born 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 be 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 Santé 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 Ministère 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 Santé. 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 the same person carrying on with my hospital. I was making for the Service de Santé 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 Médecin Colonel Arèn facing me across his untidy desk said Le Colonel Liegois, aide major général 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 Santé. 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 Clemenceau? There would be a new Tiger. Pétain 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 Arèn 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 planton was dispatched to fetch Captain Lesaunier.
The French Army, Colonel Arèn went on, was infinitely touched by the generosity of Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield. The Service de Santé 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. "Your husband can claim the whole French Army as his friends, Madame la Générale."
Captain Lesaunier appeared somewhat breathless with a file under his arm. He was young and rosy with surprised baby-blue eyes. Colonel Arèn presented him. "You are to help Madame la. Générale Spears. Do everything that she asks. If you get into difficulties come to me."
He bowed me out. Captain Lesaunier conducted me through the 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 Santé had received orders to help us in every possible way. Colonel Arèn 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 Citröen 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 recollection 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 Ministère de la Guerre and the War Office in turn, 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 warehouse, 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 like 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 exhausting 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 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, "I've 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 féminin (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 follow in a fortnight. As I looked at the circle of expectant faces, I had another 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. Impossible 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-Bouveric had lent us her flat in Paris on the Quai Malaquai and it was there on a bitterly cold day that Jean Gosset presented himself. Le Médecin Capitaine Gosset, le médecin 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 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 Service de Santé 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 Santé, Fort de Vanves, and underneath Sergeant Chef Duhazi, service modèle 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 Ministère de la 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 another. Some are there in my little worn book:
"Essence, Commandant Marjorelle, état-major 4ième 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 Cizi-Costan, commerce extérieur of the Ministère de l'Armament. I think I was asking him for permission to purchase those five-ton Renault trucks. But perhaps I had gone about the rolling 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 favorably 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 be wanted something from someone he would say, "Je vais faire du charme pendant une demi-heure!" 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. Professor 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 Pêtrière 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 surgeons 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 beautiful 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 distrusted him at once. It was quite otherwise with his son.
It is strange to look back and observe how little I understood during those days of what was going on in Paris behind the façade 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 not well at the Ministère de l'Air, 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 stuff 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 Ciro'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 foundation 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 bear.
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 great liking for truth and an immense zest for life, could disagree with enjoyable violence respecting each other's passionate prejudices and we never lied 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. Something 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 interested. 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 charm 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, chère 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.
"I'm afraid," she said, "that all I want is peace---peace at any price."
I didn't believe her. It didn't occur to me to take her seriously as meaning 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 Whitehall had become her charmed collaborators.
I do not know how she shipped those crates and bales to Paris. I've 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 Gare 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 Moderne 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 Arèn had generously fulfilled his part of the bargain. Three young surgeons had been attached to the unit in addition to Gosset. Lieutenants Boutron, Huguet and Guénin; one medical man, Dr. Bernard, an X-ray specialist, Le Canouet, and the usual administrative staff. Fifty soldats de IIième classe 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 Gosset himself. We had been given a military number and had become Ambulance Chirurgical Légère de Corps d'Armée 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.