 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
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 Réquin, 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 officers of the unit, masculine and feminine, French and British, to lunch with him next day at his headquarters. 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 à 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 shutters. 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 bundles and to have been eating all day out of paper bags. A certain dissimilarity 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, "Please 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 café 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.
Dorea 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 magnificent 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 Générale" 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.
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 perhaps than I know anyone in the world. I must jump back to Nancy and IVth Army Headquarters, hurry through our pleasant lunch with General Réquin and get on to the great snowbound convent that was to house the hospital for three months.
General Réquin 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 commander 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 difficulty 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 Réquin.
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 combined 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, "You 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 concealed 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 barns. He must go cautiously, lest he rouse even greater hostility. He counted on "ces dames" to be tactful and circumspect.
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.
It may be that the sisters were more German than French in sympathy. Or it may be that living 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 feeling 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 worn 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 Réquin's warning that chilled me? She spoke in French but with a strong German accent, apologizing for the Mère Supérieure, 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 impressions. 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 convent 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 conglomeration of large raftered rooms pervaded by livestock, of small stuffy 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 Santé 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 Mère Supérieure lay ill beyond, for Sister Marie Jeanne who looked after me and brought my coffee to my room each morning 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 morning coffee on a tray with a clean white cloth. The cup was of fine white porcelain 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 Réquin 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 worn face very sad, and say, "La Mère Supérieure va très 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.
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 condition. 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 cupboard--s-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 nightmare 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 Marne 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.
Gosset was as shocked as I. He condemned the whole ground floor and set about reorganizing in a fury. There was a series of large bright dormitories upstairs, already 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 opératoire). 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 upstairs. 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 who proved to be quite first-class and keen as mustard were pleased with their "infirmières anglaises" and the infirmières 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 her 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 was very bad, she would tell me. Dr. Bernard had given him a blood transfusion. No. 7'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---"J'ai mal, ma soeur. Ma jambe 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 séance 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 interesting 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 suddenly 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 Wörms, médecin inspecteur of the IVth Army, would have been even more enthusiastic, I fancy, if he hadn't been so afraid of Gosset. Poor miserable little Wörms. Ineffective, fussy, he was full of good will and gratitude. But General Réquin remained our 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 manners and his fanciful talk made up a personality almost too picturesque to be true. There was something extravagant about his flattery, something excessive in his attentions, something exaggerated about his professed admiration for England and the English. While Réquin was small, compact, downright and dependable, De Lattre seemed to me large, fluid and unaccountable. 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 Réquin 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 Réquin 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 in 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 Mère Supérieure. I fear that she is dying." And she clasped her hands in supplication--"If Madame la Générale---but I dare not ask."
"What can I do, ma Soeur? But surely you can ask."
"It is like this, Madame la Générale---the Mother Superior has never been willing 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 Générale; 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 crowding 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 Générale," 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 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 Générale 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.
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 untroubled 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 believe 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. 10 Downing Street a more important 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 undismayed 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. The patients limp up and down the garden paths or lie on the grass in the sun. It is very peaceful.
"General Réquin 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 Fénétrange. 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 Italian 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 l'Europe."
Lady Hadfield came for a visit and General Réquin 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 Réquin and General de Lattre as guests of honor. De Lattre had brought one of his men with him who was a violinist, a Premier 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 Réquin. 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 someone's gramophone and ask again---Wasn't she frightened, that woman standing in her convent window? Yes, sometimes. But it was only at moments 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 contemptible. 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 misleading 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 officers understood better the awful significance of events, it is because they were prepared for defeat.
I remember the day Gosset 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 10, had invaded Holland and Belgium. To recall my reaction to this is impossible but I 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 jour, 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 threatening 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 Santé.
"C'est la défaite, madame."
"Comment?" 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 médecin chef of this hospital---responsible as I am for the morale of this unit. I cannot help it if you have no faith in 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. You've 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 tête-à-têtes was always the same, the desperate moral plight of France.
"Il faut que la France souffre."
"La France est dans un tel état que rien qu'un calvaire ne peut la sauver." Such statements were constantly on his great curling bitter lips. A complicated 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 fera du bien à la France de vivre sous le joug Allemand."
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 everything 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. Réquin has telephoned to tell me B. has been made "Général 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 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. Wireless 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 Réquin 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 contreordre from Réquin 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. "Le général vous envoie des fleurs." At 6.30 "Le général vous demande au téléphone." 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. Réquin 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 words, "Cela va si vite." Then "La volonté peut peut-être faire quelque chose contre les machines, je ne sais pas." Then "Nous allons voir des batailles terribles. J'ai vu tous mes officiers, ils ont une telle confiance que j'en ai peur. Nous sommes un contre deux ou trois. Ils vont s'acharner à Paris. C'est l'ordre 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 sens un peu 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."