Mary Borden JOURNEY DOWN A BLIND ALLEY

HOW vividly they stand out in my memory, those villages of France where we camped for a single summer night. It is as if the dark torrent of the war surging round us made each one a lighted island, promising safety and rest. I must have clung to them with intense emotions of relief and gratitude. Indeed I have for them now the kind of feeling that wells up when I remember a village in America where I spent part of my childhood. St. Chéron was a ragged, dusty straggle of derelict cottages. I spent only one night there, we moved next day to Rosnay, but the memory of our grubby little bungalow with its dusty porch, its ragged plaster and the neglected privy behind a barn gives me a nostalgic pang. I recall with regret the soft tremulous night, the scent and sound of the rustling grasses outside my low window, the booming, like breakers on a beach, of distant guns.

None of us slept very well. There was no door in the doorway between the two rooms and I could hear Dorea and Maria rolling their big bodies in their camp beds, then Maria called:

"Are you asleep, boss?"

"No."

"Do you know what I want you to do?"

"What?"

"I want you to promise to take us all back to St. Jean after the war. I want to see Madame Nicolai again and Madame Bernard and old man Klein. God but it was fun behind those manure heaps. Do you remember the hot cross buns Klein made with the swastikas on them?"

"They weren't swastikas."

"I swear they were. Anyhow promise, boss, that you'll come back with us after the war."

"All right---but let's get some sleep."

The beds creaked again. One of the three began to snore gently.

We rolled out of bed about six. I can see Maureen moving across the street from the open-air kitchen with our coffee---such a pretty thing with her pink checks and big brown eyes. The four of us sit down at the round table with its sordid crimson cloth. Our beds pre rolled up, our bags packed. The two handsome brass candlesticks are standing proudly on the tawdry chimney piece. Dorea is pulling fat wads of thousand-franc notes from her pockets. We had had a great stroke of luck. The intendance had paid her our mess allowance for a month ahead the day we left St. Jean le Bassel! We were in funds.

"Twenty-five thousand francs, my dears---and the Dodge full of stores. We won't starve whatever happens."

The coffee in our tin mugs is strong and hot; Maria hands us chunks of bread from the big round loaf; Maureen has produced a pot of orange marmalade. We are hungry and happy. Yes, it is a happy breakfast party. Why not, we are friends, we like being together, the sense of danger is just strong enough to give a keen savor to life. I think that is the explanation of bur high spirits; we are intensely alive.

It was June 10, the day chosen by Mussolini for his declaration of war and his attack on France. But I find no mention of the fact in my diary nor do I remember taking any notice of this special piece of bad news. Perhaps we didn't hear of it---perhaps hearing we gave it little thought. The news was so bad anyhow that no added calamity occurring at a distance made any great difference. We were in a spot, but the disasters accumulating beyond our small horizon didn't seem to concern us.

I wrote the following in my journal that afternoon sitting on the front porch of the bungalow we were about to abandon.

It is very still, very hot. The news is bad. Rumor that the French government has left Paris for Tours. I wonder about B. Impossible now to get in touch with him. Dorea has just come back in the Dodge from Vitry-le-François where we are supposed to get our provisions---says it's a shambles, and that she must fetch supplies in future between one and three in the morning. The loud explosions last night were the factory at St. Dizier going up in smoke. Not a cat left in this place. No living soul about save ourselves. The people in the café spent the night packing up. T. W. is under the Sunbeam across the street. I can see her feet sticking out.

Went with Gosset yesterday to Rosnay. He is very nervy but agrees that the little chateau has possibilities as a hospital. We move there this afternoon. Our orders last night were to go, clean up the place, but unpack nothing as we may have to move further south. The Service de Santé at Songy says over the phone, "We are dispersing our formations."'

I wonder what that means. The communiqué has just announced, "On the Aisne between Château Porcin and Les Chênes l'ennemi a été nettement bloqué." That is Réquin. The little chap has held them. There must be thousands of wounded but I have seen no ambulances on the road and we can do nothing. Was interrupted just then. A message came asking for the help of two surgeons in the military hospital in Châlons. Boutron, Guénin and Dr. Bernard have just set off. I go with Gosset and the convoy to Rosnay. Let us hope we can stay there and get to work. It's on the main road from Châlons, so there should be no difficulty about bringing the wounded.

We stayed two nights in Rosnay. It was to be our longest stop until we reached Arcachon on the twentieth. From the eleventh to the twentieth we were allowed to do one-night stands only. No sooner did we arrive in a place, find billets and unpack the kitchen than we were pushed out by the French Air Force or warned to move on. We seemed to be pursued by the air force and became exasperated with the heavy earthbound men in their magnificent lorries who bore down on us and took our beds from under us when they should have been, so we thought, in the air. They had wings, hadn't they? We grumbled. We passed a number of airfields that provided the answer. The planes were there on the ground but no living soul was left to lift them. The fat pilots, they all seemed fat to me, preferred apparently to travel by road.

We despised these fat boys. We heaped scorn and abuse on them. But we didn't draw the obvious conclusion and admit to ourselves that the game was up. Gosset knew it, I think all our French officers realized it, I couldn't. Indeed I never gave up hope of settling down and getting to work. When Réquin's army was forced to retire from the Aisne I thought, "They will hold them on the Marne." When they withdrew from the Marne I said, "They will stand on the Loire." And each evening when we reached a new destination I would say to myself or Dorea, "This time we have surely come far enough. We will be safe here." And then the air force would arrive and order us off, or Gosset would go out reconnoitering and come back to say he had found a divisional état-major in retreat and been told we must be on the move by dawn. We got used to it. We learned to take it as a matter of course, but I never became resigned, never gave up hope of getting some sort of hospital going, never believed until the day Pétain asked for an armistice that the French would lay down their arms and accept defeat.

That is I think the reason why I was never really unhappy during those harassing days. The plight of France soon became evident, but I didn't believe it was desperate. Not even after our heartbreaking night in the military hospital at Châlons. Nor when a few days later we rushed into the hideous flood of refugees pouring down the road from Paris to Lyons. The spectacle of a nation gone out of its mind with fear was to haunt me long after I got home. I would wake up in a cold sweat in my London bed to wonder what would happen if the Germans invaded England; and the faces of mad women would start out at me in the dark, women with insane eyes and streaming-hair, at the wheels of cars full of children. I felt no pity for these at the time; only a cold fury at the thought ,that they were blocking the roads, hindering the movements of troops, doing their best to lose the war. That the war for France was already lost, that no troops were moving up to meet the enemy, didn't occur to me as a possibility.

I think that Dorea and Barbara were more alive to the desperate character of the situation than I. If they didn't say so, it was, I fancy, because there was no point in depressing me. There was nothing to be done save what we were doing, so why worry? If the worst happened, we had our cars. As long as the cars could keep going we were all right.

But what cars! There were vehicles in our motley collection that would have broken the hearts of most women. Not all were groggy. The Ford station wagons were bearing up well. Mrs. Ashton-Bennet's was a beautiful thing fit for a shop window in Piccadilly. The Sunbeam in T. W.'s hands wasn't giving too much trouble and the surviving Dodge (we had abandoned the other near Nancy) managed to trundle along with Dorea at the wheel and Didi, the cook, bouncing about inside with the stores. But the limousine Lady Hadfield had given me was far too elegant and fragile to take what was coming to it. Boddles' small Renault was as tricky as a wildcat, and Wilky's Hotchkiss was something out of a bad dream. It boiled on every hill. Looking back as we rounded a climbing bend, I would see it spouting brown water in the air like a boiling geyser.

But it was the Bedford that gave us our worst headaches. It carried over thirty French orderlies and if it died on us God alone knew how we would manage, for every vehicle was filled to capacity. I as a rule had Maureen and Mademoiselle Radenac and Dr. Bernard with me in the Renault, Rosie with Marie or T. W. in front; the nurses were divided among the station wagons; Gosset drove his two-seater with one of the sergeants beside him. There wasn't a seat to spare anywhere. In fact everything hung on the Bedford. If the Bedford broke down we would have to abandon the orderlies, turn them loose in the road. But that was impossible. Gosset would never have done it. He would have jettisoned the whole of our material rather than leave his men behind---quite rightly. But if he did we were done for as an ambulance unit. Our very existence, as such, depended in fact on the Bedford. Barbara knew this well enough. No one had to tell her, no one could tell her anything about the Bedford. She knew the old creature as if she had made it. Hoary with age, it creaked and groaned and lurched along the roads. Gently, tenderly she persuaded it to go on. Again and again it seemed about to pass out, certainly it would have laid itself down and died a dozen times had she not nursed it like a decrepit and beloved invalid.

I don't know just why, during the days that followed when we took to the hills, the sight of our mixed convoy, so dilapidated in some parts, so handsome in others, winding its slow laborious way up hill and down dale through the beautiful country and the heartless sunshine, would give me a catch at the throat. I suppose it was the valiant girls at the wheels, the sense of their complete reliability and courageous good humor that twisted something in my left side, but the vehicles too seemed to be taking part in our crazy drama by doing their best. And I remember, perhaps because I was tired, looking back down a steep hill to watch with breathless suspense and misty eyes the old Bedford flounder like an elephant across a stream and begin the ascent.

It didn't die on us. Heaving and puffing with its thirty orderlies inside and Barbara on the box it made the grade. Even the Hotchkiss got there. We lost no more vehicles until the last night on the road, when I collected the twenty-five British women of 282 and made the final dash for Bordeaux.

Lord Moran has many interesting things to say in his book, The Anatomy of Courage. My mind kept going back as I turned its pages to those days in France and I asked myself whether we were put to any real test of courage. For the Germans never caught up with us, we were always one jump ahead of them, the towns that we saw going up in flames were always towns we had left behind, what danger existed was always danger once removed and what courage was called for was moral, not physical. What it came to in the end was simply that we were running away very successfully and were having a grand time while we did so, but we were not proud of the fact, we were angry.

On the other hand none of the girls were what Lord Moran calls yokels, those whose fearlessness has its source in a vacant mind. Most of them had enough imagination to picture to themselves vividly the dangers we managed to avoid and the horrors we missed seeing. So if courage is will power and moral courage counts for something, then my unit came through their test, such as it was, very respectably.

There was one, but only one, member of the unit who was afraid and showed it and shirked in the worst possible way---for she turned ugly and did her best to contaminate the others with her cowardice.

I had told the girls before we left England that no one need be ashamed of being afraid, that what mattered was doing one's job however scared one was. And I admire, naturally, the woman who controls her terror or shattered nerves even more than the one who is fearless. But this particular member of our company made little or no effort at self-control and I call her a coward because she seemed to want to break down the morale of the unit in order to have company for her ugly spirit. She didn't succeed. She remained unique, and she wouldn't be worth discussing, if she hadn't made such a striking contrast with the rest by her contemptible conduct.

I am aware that the nurses have dropped into the background of my narrative. This is inevitable. They played a leading part in our community while the hospital functioned, once we took to the road they became passengers. But the test of morale was for them the greater since all I required of them was to do what I asked and not fuss. What that cost some of them I didn't at the time fully realize. Though it was a part of my daily business to watch for signs of ill temper or nerves or any form of incipient panic, I hadn't time to talk to them much or get inside their minds. I had to judge from their faces, from the way they tackled their food, things of that sort. If anyone was off her feed---but they never were. We always stopped at noon, preferably in a village, requisitioning a café kitchen, and had a good hot meal. Didi would tumble out of the Dodge, Dodo would go foraging and come back with her cape full of fresh eggs or arms full of vegetables. Dorea would hand out the stores.

At one place we bought a sheep, at another half a pig. We had ample supplies of sugar, coffee and tea, bully beef and sardines. We did ourselves well at any rate for the first few days and our lunches were jolly affairs. If Guénin or Gosset looked back up the road with some apprehension, if some of the more nervy ones were eager to move on, no one remarked on the fact. There may have been squabbles. I don't pretend that our feminine staff was a group of angels. T. W. cursed quite a bit under her breath, Maria growled, Josie was usually carsick, Boddles was always losing something. But I remember walking back down the road two or three times during the day when the convoy was resting to look into each car to see how the passengers were faring and I carry with me a picture of the station wagons each filled with cheerful tousled heads, rumpled capes, paper bags of sweets, crumbs, bits of chocolate. And so, to repeat again, though we were never put to any serious test, I feel that the unit showed up remarkably well. The girls proved, and this is the interesting thing, that they had enough courage to meet what was asked of them and a lot to spare. Indeed I knew from the way they behaved that if anything really frightening did happen, they would not let me down.

Rosnay was an enchanting village of small whitewashed houses with gay flowers at their doors. It seemed to be spellbound. For it lay straight in the path of the enemy on the main road south from Châlons and it was utterly peaceful. Old women sat in their doorways knitting, children played in the sun, family parties were drinking coffee in the gardens, a river flowed.

The blue-eyed, sunburned mayor had been warned of our coming and had made preparations. He welcomed us courteously and showed us into a series of delightful old-fashioned cottage bedrooms with waxed floors, old oak cupboards and snowy beds. There was room in the cottages for all the nurses and some of the drivers. Maureen and I were lodged in the manor down by the river. Eight of the M.T.C. moved into the attic above us---not a comfortable billet for the attic was bare. But the atmosphere of the village was so pleasant, normal and friendly, that everyone was delighted. Dorea and Dodo set to work at once unpacking our pretty green china in the village hall that was to be our mess, while Gosset, Maureen, Wright and I went over to the château.

We were told not to unload our material , but Gosset agreed with me that we might as well plan out the building, and we were counting up the number of beds we could put into each of the empty rooms when the second S.O.S. came from Châlons. Mademoiselle Radenac and six orderlies were wanted urgently, also a supply of surgical dressings, bandages and candles.

"Why candles, Gosset?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Electricity cut off, I suppose."

I would go with them, I said.

Gosset objected. It was a fifty-mile run. If Châlons were threatened, the fewer people left there to be evacuated the better. My place was here with the nurses. Suppose we had to move quickly? I promised that I wouldn't stay. I would see how our équipe was getting on, then come back.

We had parked the big trucks in the yard of the château. I sent Maureen to collect Mademoiselle Radenac, Mrs. Ashton-Bennet and her Ford with Pellew as second driver, while Gosset, Nancy Wright and I hauled the needed supplies out of the trucks. Nancy had packed all the operating-room stuff herself in wicker baskets and knew just where to find the dressings and bandages. But candles? We opened box after box---at last they were discovered under one of the drivers' seats.

We must have left about seven. The six orderlies were pleased to be going. Mademoiselle Radenac sat beside me as still as a mouse. Impossible to tell what she was thinking or feeling. She didn't look any more scared than usual. Such a strange little creature. She would go to the stake with those scared eyes and never a murmur from that mute tight little mouth. I had tried to be kind and would make an effort to talk to her but she would answer in monosyllables. Where did she come from? What sort of a home did she have to go back to? Had she a mother, a father, a sweetheart? No, not a sweetheart. She was a lay nun. But who could tell? Who could say that that bulging forehead and meager form might not have been pleasing to a man who was perhaps even now lying dead in some no man's land? Or perhaps he was in an office somewhere scribbling with one. of those spluttering pens, filling up a few hundred of the innumerable forms that cluttered up the French bureaucracy and dreaming of a tiny apartment full of stiff shiny furniture where he would one day install Mademoiselle Radenac.

I would try to picture it, try to understand the little enigma sitting beside me, then I would forget all about her. She was so silent and so withdrawn it was as if she weren't there. Today it was like that. She had been sent for. She was going to do her duty. She would do it admirably. If she were frightened no one would ever know. She was probably a heroine. I would deposit her in Châlons. If she didn't come back it would be as if she had never existed.

Such a beautiful evening. A golden light was spread over the fields as we sped north, but when we drove into the yard of the military hospital in Châlons it seemed to be growing dark. It hadn't taken us two hours from Rosnay but I see the dreadful scene that greeted us as shrouded in twilight. All the vast yard in front of the dark building was covered with wounded on stretchers. I didn't count them. There must have been something near a thousand, and the ambulances were still coming in. And in the center of the field of the dying, two men were standing waving helpless arms in exhausted, discouraged gesticulation. Their clothes had once been white. They wore surgeons' blouses and aprons; but their aprons were scarlet, their sleeves were splashed with the same color, even their hands were red with blood. They paid us no attention as we picked our way through the close-packed stretchers toward the distant yawning door, but as I passed close to one of them, I saw his bleared eyes and knew that he was drunk, either with wine or with blood and sweat and horror.

It was almost quite dark in the long porch that spread across the front of the building, and that too was packed with shadowy bundles on stretchers. Inside, it was black night. I stumbled on one body, stepped aside, stumbled again. But the forms I had bumped into so rudely didn't curse me or complain, they were silent. Perhaps they were dead, perhaps not yet dead, but already far away from this dreadful place---hovering a moment over their distant homes before they slipped away forever.

All down the long corridor the dead and the dying and those who need not have died lay silent in the dark. We seemed to walk for miles down those corridors. We turned left, then right, and the motionless silent procession passed with us, unending. And there was almost no sound. Almost none of the bundles moaned or whimpered.

We found our doctors at last in a small room that must have once been an office. The last light from the setting sun came in at the window. They crowded round us like distracted children crying, "We have no light. We have no water. The light in the town has failed, the water has been cut off. There is no sterilizer. We are expected to operate."

I tried to soothe them. Our orderlies had followed Radenac and me with the baskets.

"Here are candles," I said. "And here are two big baskets of sterilized dressings."

"But there is no one to separate the dead from the dying. How can one tell? They are all so quiet. We don't know where to begin."

"We must begin," I said to Dr. Bernard, who was more composed than the others, "with those who are lying outside this door. Are there no nurses?"

"None. They have all gone save two Soeurs de Charité."

"Then you and I will separate the dead from the dying in this corridor. That is the first thing."

Mademoiselle Radenac was already busy unpacking the baskets, sending orderlies with pails to fetch water.

I went out into the dark corridor with Dr. Bernard. We lit candles and carried them from one form to another---lifting a blanket to look at a face, fumble for a pulse. Many were dead. The smell was very bad. Our orderlies carried the dead to the far end of the corridor and laid them down in the darkness.

Mademoiselle Radenac came out of the operating room to say that they would need more supplies. I said I would go for them. I think I left about midnight. Guénin and Boutron were operating. The ambulances were still rolling in as I picked my way with Dr. Bernard's help among the stretchers to the Ford where Pellew and Mrs. Ashton-Bennet were waiting. Dr. Bernard gave me the list Radenac had prepared. I said I would collect Wright with the things and bring her back.

But I did not return to Châlons. We lost our way, dawn was breaking when we reached Rosnay. Our team had telephoned from Châlons by the time we were ready to take the road again, to say that they were ordered. to leave as the hospital was closing down.

They left Châlons at eight, having worked all night and done twenty or more big operations. The Germans, as we learned later, were in the town at noon. I don't know what happened to the wounded. None came our way. We awaited them. Orders or no orders, Gosset would have taken them in but the ambulances didn't come. Neither that day nor the next in Guigny and Amance, nor the day after at Ancy-le-Franc. Not until we were swept into the torrential flood of refugees did we see a single ambulance; and then, those we saw carried, not wounded, but blowzy women and drunken troops who had thrown away their arms and waved bottles at us as they passed.

WE WERE furious when Gosset told us that night at supper that the air force was turning us out of Rosnay. A squadron was coming, he said, to occupy not only the château but all our billets. We must leave early next morning.

"Then we are not to be allowed to set up the hospital?"

"No. But we are ordered to set up a poste d'embarquement at the railway station at Guigny." The Service de Santé proposed to use Guigny station instead of Vitry-le-François as the latter was in flames. The line, it appeared, had broken.

"Where is Guigny?"

"To the north off the main road---just south of Vitry. There's a railway siding----a branch line. Miss Wright, will you come with me, please, we must make a selection of instruments."

" Just a moment, Gosset. How many nurses will you want at Guigny?"

"Six. I'm taking one surgical team."

"And what happens to the rest? Where do they go?"

"They must wait until Bernard can find a new cantonment."

"Where shall they wait?"

"Here in the road in their vehicles."

"What time must we vacate our billets?"

"Before seven. If you will come, Miss Wright." He strode out. Wright followed him. Dorea gave a snort. "Sounds jolly." Barbara said, "Drat that air force." I looked down the long table that Dodo had set out so nicely. The evening sun glinted on our pretty green china, lighted up a double row of mutinous faces.

"A pity," I said, "but there it is. We've got to pack up, and it won't be very pleasant, I fancy, at Guigny. You heard what Gosset said---so if any nurses care to volunteer --- ?"

The response was immediate. The scowls vanished. All the nurses were ready and eager to go to Guigny. There was a general pushing back of chairs. Cynthia said, "Come on, Barbara, let's have a last swim in the river." Dorea and Dodo began to clear the table.

The village street was quiet. The flowers in the cottage gardens glowed in the evening light. How peaceful it was. Didn't the mayor know that the line had broken? that even now the Germans---But Josie Pearce was at my elbow waving distracted hands. "How awful," she cried. "What am I to do? Oh dear, oh dear, what shall I do?"

"What on earth is the matter, Josie?"

"Your laundry," she cried. "I gave it to a woman to wash."

It was true; she had come to my room in the morning to suggest that as we would probably stay at Rosnay some time it might be a good idea to get some of my white dresses and aprons laundered. I remembered now that she had gone off with a bundle of my things.

"Well, you'll have to get it back, that's all."

"But I can't remember the woman's name," she wailed, "or which house she lived in." For a moment she stood there wringing her hands, then suddenly her face lighted up, and shouting, "I know, the town crier," she bolted down the street.

I was settling the details for the next day with Jean when I heard the town crier's bell, and there he was coming down the street with Josie following, and he was ringing the bell and crying aloud:

"Qui a le linge sale de Madame la Générale? Qui a le linge sale de Madame la Générale?"

And sure enough he was only a few houses away when a woman popped out of her cottage door calling, "I have the dirty linen of Madame la Générale," and Josie returned triumphant, a bundle of damp white aprons under her arm.

The notes in my diary become from now on very brief. Under the twelfth of June I find this:

Left Rosnay yesterday at 7 A.M. with six nurses for Guigny railway station. Nothing at Guigny but an empty cheese factory by the railway siding. Installed operating room in manager's office---quite o.k. except for strong smell of cheese, then went off with Bernard to find new billets. Gosset's idea to bring all the unit including heavy lorries to Guigny. This impossible as there were no billets anywhere. Lucky we didn't as the roads in the afternoon were full of troops in retreat. And when we tried to get on to the Service de Santé at Songy there was no answer. They had decamped. Réquin too had moved his H.Q. God knows where. As we could get in touch with no one we have come on to Amance.

The entry may not seem very clear. Neither, as I remember, did the situation.

Guigny is enveloped in the dream atmosphere that came rolling up every now and then during those days like a fog to obscure the landscape and distort the most familiar objects. The place was a pocket, hemmed in by trees. There was nothing there save the hideous empty cheese factory and abandoned railway siding. But ugly little towns crowded each other, so I seem to recall, beyond the trees and out of them ran roads, fluid with flying troops, and the sky arching over the place resounded like a gong.

A desolate uncanny place pervaded by the smell of cheese and an unnatural, precarious stillness. I see Gosset striding about the ugly empty building like an irate giant; Guénin's burly form pacing the station platform like a bear in a cage; Le Canouet drooping on a discarded packing case, his nice brown eyes wistfully staring at the screen of foliage that shut us in.

I must have arrived about eight with the nurses. I spent a part of the morning with them unpacking the surgical baskets, then went off with Bernard to look for billets. But the houses were either locked and barred or crowded with refugees. I remember going round and round with Bernard while he knocked at the doors of mairies, sous préfectures and cafés. It was useless---and as the day wore on the purpose of our search became more and more senseless. For the atmosphere of the sordid district was changing rapidly. The temperature was rising, the pulse quickening, with the increasing thunder of guns that sounded much nearer than in the early morning. To bring all our staff and equipment north when the enemy was very evidently advancing south seemed to us madness by the middle of the afternoon, and we went back to the cheese factory and said so. Nothing had happened there. The nurses were waiting, the doctors were waiting, the orderlies were waiting. Nancy had made an excellent job of the improvised operating room, operating table, instruments, drums of sterilized dressing, surgeons' gowns; everything was ready. But there was no sign of an ambulance nor of any living human being save ourselves.

Dr. Bernard and I tried to convince Gosset of the folly of remaining in the place. His orders he insisted were to open a dressing station at Guigny. He had opened it. It must remain open until further orders. In the end he went off in his two-seater to see for himself what was going on and came back very excited. He had met the ---th en déroute. The troops were streaming past a few hundred yards from the cheese factory. He had tried to get the Service de Santé by phone and had failed. Songy didn't answer.

"Well then---" Bernard lifted a grizzled eyebrow.

"Well what?" Gosset waved his arms. Orders were orders until they were countermanded.

"But if there is no work? If we have nothing to do?"

At last he agreed to send the nurses back and move the bulk of the unit south to Amance, but the surgical team must stay. So I collected the nurses, we said good-by to Guénin and Le Canouet, and made off.

I didn't like it, neither did Gosset. I think we both felt, from that evening on, very nervous about dividing the unit. For we worked out that night a way of keeping in touch if we got separated. If any part of the unit had to go ahead of any other part, it must never do so without picking out a rendezvous on the map and it must leave word at the Bureau de la Place of the rendezvous exactly where it had gone, with the military number of the road it was following. This was most important as we found later to our cost. Failing the Bureau de la Place, the advance party would leave an orderly at the préfecture, failing the préfecture, at the mairie.

We had left Guénin and Le Canouet very disconsolate on the deserted railway platform. They sat there uselessly, through the long summer evening. Towns were going up in flames to right and left of them, regiments were streaming past in flight along the main roads from Châlons. Nothing happened in Guigny to break the uncanny quiet. They waited all night. No ambulance arrived. No train steamed up to the siding. The battle was raging beyond the trees. They could watch the flames of burning Vitry, listen to the guns. They had nothing else to do. When Gosset and I turned up early next morning we found them sitting where we had left them. They had had one patient during the night. A child of three who had been hit by a bomb and had died in Le Canouet's arms.

Gosset was in a dilemma. He had got in touch at last with the Service de Santé and the Service de Santé had insisted, blindly, on our maintaining our équipe at Guigny, but we had come on other regiments in flight on our way up to Guigny that morning and General de Lattre himself had passed us like a flash making south in his car. Now to find Guigny useless was too much. He ordered his team back to Amance.

They rejoined just in time to move on. For once again we were obliged to pack up and make off. But this time it was a couple of military police on motorcycles who warned us. The Service de Santé was silent. It sent us no orders---no message of any kind. And when Gosset went to look for them at noon in the place where he bad found them early that morning, they were gone.

We were at, lunch in a café by the road when the two police came dashing past on their motorcycles. Luckily, they saw us and stopped. They had come, they said, from Vitry. The Germans had overrun the place and were advancing rapidly down the road. We'd better waste no time.

Move we must and that quickly; the general direction was not in dispute, southward and away from the Germans, but what road should we take and what place should we make for?

I think that it must have been at this point in our pilgrimage that Gosset gave up any idea of getting to work again. He didn't take me into his confidence, but when he spread out the road map on the café table and began discussing possible itineraries with Guénin, there was no further mention of suitable quarters for a hospital. It was now merely a question of getting as far as possible before dark and of selecting a place where we might find petrol for our thirty vehicles as well as billets for our hundred souls.

I had sent the girls scurrying from the lunch table to their billets to pack up their belongings and, when I had seen to my own things, went off down the lane where the cars were waiting. The big Renault trucks were garaged in a shed and there I found Gosset, inside one of them, astride great bundles of bedding in the act of throwing out our nice hospital pillows.

"What on earth are you doing that for, Gosset?"

"To lighten the trucks," he shouted. "We must lighten the trucks. Every one of the trucks is overloaded."

He was very excited and went on flinging down pillows pell-mell on to the dirty floor. Maureen was almost in tears. Dorea was watching with an inscrutable expression. Then suddenly with the work half done he made off calling for Dr. Bernard, calling to Miss Napier to assemble her cars, calling back over his shoulder to me that we must be on the road in half an hour and to see to it that all "ces dames" were ready.

When he had gone I said, "Now we put the pillows back where they belong." And we did---not only that day but the next, for it happened again. Dorea declares that Gosset threw them out each day and that each day we put them back, but I cannot swear to that.

I saw his point about lightening the lorries, it was vital to keep our vehicles going; and I was prepared to sacrifice all unessentials---in particular such belongings as gramophones, china and books. I think it was at Amance that we abandoned our elegant dinner service from Sarreguemines, but pillows---no. "What," asked Dorea, "is a hospital without pillows?" Barbara said, "Why worry about the trucks anyhow? They are new. But what about my old girl?" And she dived again into the Bedford's bonnet. T. W. was in the road on her back as usual under the Sunbeam. "Just hand me a bit of soap, will you. There's a leak in my petrol tank." Rosie, managing in her mysterious way to look fragile and elegant in a pair of filthy khaki trousers, was testing the oil in the Renault.

"All right, Rosie?"

"Fine." A smile lit up her very young, very serious, very beautiful face.

"We're off in a few minutes."

"I'm ready."

But Boddles was wailing. "T. W., do come; my starter's jammed. T. W., do come and help. I don't know what to do."

I went back to the café. Guénin and Bernard were still poring over the map. I sat down beside them and lit a cigarette. Staring at the white dusty road I had a sensation of blindness. I had no idea of where the road led. There appeared to be no reason to fix on any particular place for our next halt. We had lost touch with the IVth Army. It was in retreat somewhere beyond the sunny fields, green thickets and wild rose hedges, but where? The road was empty. Were we already left behind? It occurred to me that if we couldn't find the Service de Santé it must be equally true that they couldn't find us. This meant that there was no one now to give us orders. There was in fact no one who had the faintest idea where we were. We were on our own and must look after ourselves.

Then I heard Guénin say, "Tonnerre! We can get petrol at Tonnerre and can just make it by nightfall." And I had a sudden lift of the heart for I knew Tonnerre. B. and I had stayed with the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre some years before at the Château of Ancy-le-Franc. It was a huge Renaissance palace, only a few miles from the town. It could easily accommodate our hundred bodies.

"But that's wonderful," I cried. "I had no idea we were anywhere near Tonnerre. The Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre is a friend. Even if he isn't at Ancy-le-Franc we are sure to find someone."

So it was arranged that I should go ahead in the Renault with Maureen, Guénin and Bernard (T. W. and Rosie on the box), make arrangements with the duke or his steward to billet us for the night, and that Gosset would follow with the convoy.

It was a lovely drive. To have come suddenly within range of a familiar place and a friend out of the far distant world of peace was so like a miracle that I chattered away to Guénin and Bernard about the delightful week I had spent in the great château, as if all our troubles were over. It was built in the form of a square. All our vehicles could drive through into the stable yard. The orderlies would be on velvet in the outbuildings.

Alas---we realized as we approached the proud façade that others had got there before us. The park was full of troops. Through the stable arch we saw that the yard was crowded with guns. The great wide steps were swarming with officers and there was a sentinel at the door.

T. W. swept round the gravel with a flourish and brought our dusty Renault to a stop. The doctors hung back. "Do you think it's any use? Do you think you'd better?"

I was rather frightened but I got out and went up the front steps. They seemed as formidable as the steps of St. Peter's. A group of officers stared. A young lieutenant touched his cap.

"I am looking," I said, "for the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre. Can you help me?"

"I'm afraid he isn't here, madame."

"Then I would like to speak to his steward or one of his servants."

The young officer hesitated uncomfortably. "I don't know, madame, if it is possible."

"But surely it is possible. I am Madame la Générale Spears, a friend of the duke's. There must be someone."

"I will inquire, Madame la Générale."

The lieutenant disappeared. I waited. Officers came hurrying up the steps; others came hurrying out of the great door. They all seemed very surprised to see me standing there. I was hot, tired, disappointed and acutely aware that my white apron and coif were rumpled and dirty.

At last a very tall figure appeared, all in black, with silvery hair. It was one of the duke's servants. I didn't know him but he bowed with ceremony and informed me that the duke was not at home, he was in the south!

"Who then is here?" I asked.

"The état-major is here, madame."

"What état-major?"

He lifted his long hands.

I turned to the young officer. "Tell me, please, what état-major is it?"

"The état-major of the Army Group of General Huntzinger."

"Then if you will be so kind as to take me to the general, I would like to speak to him."

"But madame," the young man hesitated miserably. "Isn't it rather risky?"

I smiled. It seemed a funny word to use, "Risky? Oh no. I am in trouble. I am certain that General Huntzinger will help me. Be so good as to show me the way."

What could the poor boy do? Between chivalry and fear of his general he was distracted but he led me into the château up a flight of broad stairs, down a long corridor, pointed to a door and fled.

I knocked. A voice said, "Entrez," rather angrily. I opened the door and walked into a crowd of generals. Three stars, four stars, five stars. I'd never seen so many stars together in such a small space. Nor so many peering eyes. My head swam. Everything blacked out save a circle of astonished eyes, staring as if at a ghost. Then a small, spare, sandy-haired man stepped forward and I said:

"I am Madame Spears, and I have lost my army."

"What army is that, madame?"

"The IVth Army."

The general looked at me gravely in silence.

"I am retreating," I went on hurriedly, "with my hospital. We were looking for a place where we could camp for the night. I came here because I had stayed here in peacetime, and hoped the duke would take us in. But I see you have got here before me."

I think the general smiled. I believe he said something about being sorry. Then he was silent again. He seemed not to know what to do with me. I don't wonder. I had walked into a military conference of desperate urgency. I didn't know this. I only knew that there was no room for us in the great house that had once been so hospitable and that I was miserable and I stood there miserably a moment looking into Huntzinger's weary eyes---for it was he---then was turning away when I heard a voice so far above my bead that it seemed to come from the painted ceiling, and it said in excellent English, "Have you had tea, Mrs. Spears?" and I laughed.

"No. I haven't had tea and I don't think I had much lunch. We were interrupted at lunch."

"Then come with me and have tea in the next room and while you are having tea, the general will find you another château for the night."

"I have friends with me. Three ladies and two officers, could they have tea too?"

"But of course."

So General Huntzinger's A.D.C. took me next door into a room hung with tapestries; I remembered it well; it was the small drawing room where we used to sit after dinner. And presently Maureen arrived with the two doctors. (T. W. and Rosie stayed with the car.) Then a soldier servant appeared with a large tray carrying a silver tea service, pretty porcelain cups, a plate of thinly sliced bread and butter, and another of dried figs. It was wonderful.

General Huntzinger came in when we had finished tea. His A.D.C. must have taken Maureen and the doctors away so that he could talk to me privately, for I recall that we were alone. He didn't say much. I remember him as a dry, colorless man, very courteous, obviously very worried, and more than a little disgusted with the way his armies were behaving, but the impression he made on me was not that of a great military commander capable of snatching victory from defeat or inspiring confidence in despairing men.

He sat down crossing one thin knee over the other and looked at me in his grave searching way. I told him how we had lost touch with the IVth Army.

I said, "There seems to be a certain amount of confusion in our sector."

"There is a great deal of confusion, madame, a great deal too much." He frowned. "But you are no longer in the IVth Army sector."

"Oh."

"Do you want to rejoin the IVth Army?"

"But of course. We belong to it. We've been with General Réquin since the beginning."

"Then you should go to Auxerre, tomorrow; you will find General Réquin near Auxerre. I advise you to go yourself and consult with him. In the meantime I have requisitioned a chateau in the neighborhood for you. The owners are very disagreeable people, but you may tell them from me that if they make difficulties they will be evicted."

He rose. I did the same. "Is there anything more," he asked, "that I can do for you?"

"Yes---if you will be so kind."

"What is it, madame?"

"If you could send a message to my husband saying that we are all safe and well. He is somewhere with the French government. He is with Paul Reynaud. Do you think you could get him the message?"

"He shall have it, madame."

He had lifted a grizzled eyebrow when I had said we were safe, but now he smiled his dry smile again. I thanked him and left. I was to see him once more, but not to speak to.

His A.D.C. took me down to the car. A dispatch rider was waiting to show us the way.

"Don't stand any nonsense from those people," the captain said cheerfully, "and don't worry. We'll send your médecin chef on when he turns up and if anything happens to make it impossible for you to rejoin General Réquin we'll get in touch with you."

I do not know what the French history books will have to say about General Huntzinger beyond the fact that he was one of the signatories of the Franco-German, armistice at Compiègne and became Minister of War to the Vichy government. A French writer has quoted him as making a very interesting statement at Compiègne. He is reported to have said as he signed the capitulation of France, "If Britain is not brought to her knees in three months, we are the greatest criminals in history." But I don't suppose the words will be engraved on the portals of the Third Republic and I wonder how many of the schoolboys of France will be told in the lycées how General Huntzinger ordered the French forces in Syria in 1941 not to interfere with the German planes arriving on their airdromes, but to resist any Allied troops that might venture to cross into Syria from Palestine. I was not clairvoyant when I met Huntzinger. I didn't foresee that he would one day become an enemy of Great Britain, nor that the French troops who carried out his orders in '41 would some day fill my new hospital with British and Free French casualties. I saw nothing to worry me in his grim old eyes. He had been kind and I was grateful. He could help me, and I proposed to avail myself of his help. But I was by no means convinced of being in any desperate need. My interview hadn't roused in me any frightening suspicions of the true state of affairs.. On the contrary---I came down the great chateau steps walking on air. General Huntzinger had found us lodgings for the night, all was well for the moment---and the moment was all that mattered. The war, to be sure, was being lost for France just up the road, beyond that belt of trees, across that bridge, or if you prefer, in the room I had just left with the painted ceiling, but we were so preoccupied with the immediate problems of shelter for the night and food that we didn't notice it.

The chateau to which General Huntzinger sent us was a fine modern house of white stone in a thickly wooded park behind high wrought-iron gates. It had some twenty bedrooms, luxuriously furnished, and was quite horrible. The owner flatly refused at first to let us in, when Guénin delivered the general's message his wife had hysterics, and when Gosset at last arrived alone he was in a towering rage. He had left our convoy in the road the far side of Tonnerre and refused to send for it. Gosset refused to stay, I refused to budge. I had been wrong at Songy about not going to Troyes, but this time I knew I was right. Our only hope now of getting any advice or information was from Huntzinger's headquarters. We had had a great stroke of luck in falling on Huntzinger and whatever Gosset said I was determined to do what the general told me. I would go to Auxerre next day and if our luck held would find Réquin. It wasn't far, we could go and be back early before dark. I don't know why Gosset was so against staying in the horrid house. I can't explain it even now, but I won. Guénin took T. W. back to fetch the convoy, Bernard took Gosset off into the park and Maureen and I fell into a stupor on a pair of elegant twin beds.

The experiences of the following day have blacked out the rest of that unwelcome sojourn. War or no war, it isn't pleasant to be forced to sleep in a house that hates you. I left it early next morning and never saw our unwilling host and hostess again. Dorea tells me that Thompson seemed to go daft and danced very strangely among the trees that evening by moonlight and that Didi gave them some quite detestable egg whisks for lunch next day, but I was well away on the road to Auxerre by that time. It was the thirteenth of June. The French government had moved to Tours. The Germans were to enter Paris next day and Weygand was even then discussing with his staff the advisability of ordering a cease fire. But of this we knew and suspected nothing. Even when suddenly we came up against the flood of refugees at Auxerre we failed to understand the meaning of that horrifying human torrent.

It was crawling south. It filled the great Paris-Lyons road with a solid moving mass of machinery. We had approached Auxerre from the east, came up against the torrent and were stopped. We had to cross, but how? The cars all heading one way were six abreast, they were in frantic haste but moved inch by inch and there wasn't an inch to spare between the bumpers of those in front and the bonnets of those behind. Handsome limousines with smart chauffeurs in livery; trucks piled high with household belongings; women and children on top; tiny Citröens, decrepit Fords, mattresses on roofs, pots and kettles swinging from running boards and bonnets, prams, bird cages; the sun poured down, the dust and petrol fumes enveloped the monstrous thing in a yellow mist and through it one caught sight of frenzied women's faces distorted by fear into the likeness of fiends; while along the edges, on the grass in and out among the trees moved two streams of bicycles. Healthy young men, boys of eighteen with ruddy faces, sleek youths of twenty or so with open sports shirts and smooth hair, where had they come from, why weren't they going the other way, footing it with knapsacks on their backs and rifles in their hands?

We had left Ancy-le-Franc in two cars; it was more prudent in case of a breakdown. T. W. driving me in my Renault with Rosie beside her, Boddles driving Boutron in her small one. We waited on the edge of the horrifying river half an hour, then gave it up and turned south. We might find it possible, T. W. thought, to cross lower down. We managed it in the end and wormed our way into Auxerre only to be blocked again on the bridge. The bridge was even worse than the road. The stream of cars in the road did move forward very slowly, in jerks, with long halts. On the bridge nothing could move at all. We sat wedged in on four sides for an hour and a half. Rosie has reminded me that an airplane appeared overhead while we were on the bridge and that, at the sight of it, half the people abandoned their cars, leaving them driverless, to further obstruct the traffic. Finally in despair Bernard and I decided to get out and walk up the hill to the barracks, We would ask for Réquin and wait for the cars.

It was a miracle that they were able to rejoin us. We had toiled up the street through the broiling sun to the caserne, pushed our way through a scene of incredible confusion into the commandant's office and been told that Réquin was in a village ten kilometers to the north when some German planes decided to bomb the place. At the same moment I saw our two cars in the courtyard, and T. W., Rosie and Boddles and Boutron standing quietly, their backs against a brick wall. We joined them. I don't know how many. bombs were dropped nor how much damage they did. None fell actually in the barrack square nor I believe on the bridge. The Germans were perhaps merely having a bit of fun with the refugees. They no longer bothered to machine-gun civilians as they had done in the north. They had achieved their purpose of spreading panic and blocking the movement of troops; it wasn't necessary.

We found Réquin at last in a godforsaken little house in a pocket among the hills. He was asleep when we arrived. It was Lecomte who came to the door. The general, he explained with a suggestion of his old smile, hadn't slept for several nights. They had been on the move. But he would call him---most certainly he would call him. The general would never forgive him if he allowed me to go away. And presently Réquin came down to the prim dreary parlor, all brown plush and mahogany. It was a curious, sad little interview. For he had nothing to say. There was nothing he could say, no advice he could give me. I had thought, I said, of making for a village called V-----. There was a house there belonging to relatives of ours. Did he think that a good idea? It was to the south not far from Avallon. Once more he spread a map on the table. "Yes," he said, "V----- should do very well," but he spoke without conviction, and looking into his white exhausted face my heart sank---for I knew that it was no good. He couldn't help us now nor even tell us what to do.

It had been my purpose, I remembered, to rejoin the IVth Army. But where was it? Where was Colonel Dumas? Where were the rest of the staff? There was no one about as we drove away. Réquin appeared to be alone with Lecomte; lost like ourselves.

We didn't go back the way we had come. We made a wide detour to avoid Auxerre, crossed the unabated torrent of refugees ten miles farther south, missed our road in the dark and reached our château at ten o'clock at night to find the iron gates of the park locked and no sight or sound of ally living soul within.

They had gone. The unit had moved on leaving us behind. 'Why? What had happened? What were we to do?

Chapter Nine

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