Mary Borden JOURNEY DOWN A BLIND ALLEY

OUR last days on the road throb in my memory, they have a harrowing beauty. As I watch our ragged convoy wind its clumsy way toward the mountains of Auvergne, I feel once more the old poignant mingled emotions of dismay, apprehension and bitter regret. For the tragedy of France was taking place against a glorious background of splendid summer. The deep rich meadows were all adance with daisies and buttercups, rivers laughed, great trees lifted yearning arms to a sky ineffably blue, and the soft shadows of white clouds moved slowly over the sunny hills. Life was sweet, the earth intoxicating.

Oh, beautiful France!

"What a lovely country," we said again and again. "What a wonderful jaunt this would be if we weren't flying for our lives."

"We must come back some day, follow this road again."

"Yes---when?"

The answer held a threat, vague but enormous. When the war, our war, was over. What did that mean in length of time and depth of suffering and extent of horrid change? I didn't want to know.

We had been a happy unit. We had taken Lady Hadfield's gift and made it into a living thing, all of us together, French and British. Now we were being driven apart with our work unfinished, were leaving a task that had scarcely begun. We had believed in our mission, had hoped to save many lives for France, heal many of her broken men, but all that we had meant to do must be left undone. And the spirit of the hospital that bound French and British together, the mutual respect and confidence, the close association with a common earnest purpose, the sense of shared responsibility and worthy achievement, all this was being brought to an end through no fault of our own.

I remembered our patients, I remembered the way Dr. Boutron and Sister Kelsey had combined together to save the life of the poor little Zouave who kept getting lost in his bed. I remembered Huguet and the Strawberry Queen, Evelyn Fuhlroth summoning Gosset at three in the morning. Panic if something went wrong with a patient, suspense during a crisis, delight when his crisis was past and he was safe. Our surgeons were young enthusiasts, our nurses were nurses by vocation. These were the experiences they had shared and which had made them friends. It was sad to think that the hospital was coming to an end and the unit about to break up.

I think that we all felt the same, with a few, a very few, exceptions. Now that we knew we were to be divided, the British going one way, the French another, I think we felt more united than ever before. Indeed, looking back on those last days with 282 I am surprised by the solidarity of that weary, dilapidated cavalcade. It was evident most especially in what we did not do and did not say. We were worried, nervy, very depressed, but no one quarreled, no one argued or complained, accused or excused. The thing that was going to divide us was too big, too overwhelming and too intimately shared by us all to be talked about. We accepted it as men in the dock accept a sentence of doom and refused to look ahead into that future time when we would no longer be comrades in war.

I find this remarkable. It was at least very decent and it makes the indecent aftermath the more pitiable. For the years that stretched ahead were going to give it the lie, were going to divide us in spirit as well as in body from most of our French colleagues. Dr. Goebbels was going to see to that. The fine feeling animating our officers at the time wasn't strong enough to stand the test of the German occupation.

But for the moment, as I've said, they behaved remarkably well. Observe the difference of purpose that could have divided us: We, the British, were straining forward in order to escape from a France that was being overrun by a conqueror. But for our French companions there appeared to be no escape, nor any possibility of further struggle---so that for them this continued journey had no purpose---save that of helping us.

It may be that Gosset had some idea of getting his people outside the zone that would be overrun and occupied by the Germans, but I doubt this. I think he was acting solely for us. There was no talk as yet of occupied or unoccupied zones. We had no inkling of the terms of the proposed armistice and knew nothing of a movement in the French Army to re-form in England and continue the fight by the side of Great Britain. No one in our group as far as I know had ever heard of General de Gaulle---his name was certainly not mentioned in my hearing. Nor did we hear his call to France over the wireless on the eighteenth. We were making for the derelict château of l'Espinasse on the eighteenth. It was a rainy night, very dark, and we had no wireless. My portable wireless was broken. Someone had dropped it. So we knew nothing of what was going on in Bordeaux and London. We believed that no armistice had been signed as yet. We were told that fighting was still going on. But where the enemy was we had no idea. He might be in front of us. Gosset was constantly haunted, when we launched out into a new road, by the fear that it might be cut. On the other hand the German advance might have stopped, though that was unlikely. Our only news was what we could pick up by the roadside, and the roads Guénin followed were strangely empty. The flood of refugees and soldiery was still pouring south along the great highways but we had struck off into the hills, and seemed to have left all the world behind. Impossible to imagine what had become of General Réquin, Captain Lecomte, De Lattre de Tassigny. Had the Germans taken over the convent of St. Jean le Bassel? There had been British ships, two days since, someone said, at St. Nazaire, but the town, another said, was in flames. I had thought at one time of making for Cherbourg. What port were we making for now?

I didn't know. I had come to no decision about that by the seventeenth. The doctors were against Bordeaux and in favor of our pushing on to the Mediterranean. They were persuaded that the Germans would take possession of Bordeaux before we could get there. Marseilles they said was much safer. We were traveling slowly, God help us. We were obliged to wait each day, sometimes for hours, while Guénin went foraging for petrol, and the pace of the convoy was the pace of the slowest vehicle. Even so, they argued, we could hope to outdistance the enemy, if I left the unit with my girls in the staff cars a hundred miles or so from the Mediterranean coast.

The plan didn't appeal to me. Bordeaux might be dangerous, it might prove indeed to be impossible, but Marseilles was much farther from England. There was no certainty that we would find a British ship when we got there. If my husband was still in Bordeaux, he would expect me to turn up and would make arrangements for our evacuation. I was miserably undecided.

It wasn't my habit to talk much to the girls about my worries. But I seem to remember going in search of Dorea on the night of the seventeenth in Mademoiselle de Choiseul's magnificent dwelling, and finding a whole group gathered in the immense best bedroom of the château drinking beer, Dorea, Maureen, Barbara, T. W., Maria, Cynthia, Rosie, there may have been others. They pulled me in, produced gin and lime juice, and cigarettes. I sat down on the great Louis XV bed. It was gilt with a high baldaquin of pale yellow damask. The dressing table was gilded too, the chaise longue and the hangings at the great windows were of the same damask. A huge sumptuous golden room. We sprawled on its silks in our bedraggled uniforms, scoffed at our battered faces in the long mirrors.

"Some room, boss. You've done us proud this time."

"Keep your dirty feet off that chair, T. W."

It was impossible to believe in this company that our luck wouldn't hold. I must wait. I had nothing to say to Dorea after all.

I have wondered since what Mademoiselle de Choiseul thought of us. We were to be her guests for the night, and she was standing at the top of her wide stone steps when we drew up in front of her princely door. We must have looked awful. Our vehicles looked in fact almost as if they had been through a war---so did we. Mademoiselle de Choiseul didn't look like that and would never have looked like that, even if she had been one of us, even if she had done the retreat with us, and I can quite see her as a useful member of the unit. She would have remained, I am certain, as immaculate, as well groomed and exquisitely tailored and beautifully sensibly shod as she was that evening when she came out to receive us. No wind of war would ruffle that neat white head, no sleeping in haylofts would wrinkle that trim black coat and skirt, no crash of cannon would shake those sturdy shoulders or cause those steady eyes to quiver.

She greeted us as a great lady accustomed to offering hospitality to an army of guests. She was pleasantly abrupt and reassuringly matter of fact. She had been asked, she said, to prepare the house for a general and his staff but they had not yet arrived. It seemed probable now that they would never arrive, so the house was ours. She led us into a vast circular hall with galleries above. Looking up one saw a distant domed roof. How many were we? Fifty? We could doubtless manage. Many of the beds were large. There were couches and chaises longues, if I cared to take the two top floors for my young ladies. But we would dispose of the rooms as we thought best. We must consider ourselves quite at home.

She withdrew to her own apartments, and we invaded the house, tramped up the stairs, rushed round the circular galleries dragging our bedrolls and kit bags. Five of the girls slept in the best bedroom with the golden damask and vast mirrors. Several in the end were obliged to sleep on the floor. I had a room at the top of the house, my window looked west. I could see for miles over the great oak trees in the park below to the distant mountains of Auvergne. We would travel that way tomorrow. Great and dreadful events were preparing beyond the horizon. This I knew. Britain would be gathering her forces together to meet the enemy. She was alone now. She was calling to her ships, her armies, her airmen. I tried to imagine what the people were feeling at home, Of what had been actually happening in Bordeaux and London I knew nothing.

Churchill had been to Tours in a vain endeavor to prevail on the French government to continue the war, if not in France in North Africa. He had offered to fuse the French and British empires into one. The offer had been refused, and the proposal to move the government to Algiers voted down. The five hundred French planes waiting on the airfield near Bordeaux to take off for Algiers received no orders. My husband had left for England that morning taking General de Gaulle with him in his plane. They were together in London, they were conferring together over the formation of a French force to continue the war by our side, while I stood watching the sun set behind the Mont d'Or. I only learned of this when I at last reached home.

I didn't see our hostess again until next morning. Dorea had organized our evening meal as usual in the village café. But in the morning a message came that Mademoiselle de Choiseul expected us all to breakfast with her in the dining room. And there she was at the head of an enormous table covered with spotless damask, all set with silver and china. She was pouring coffee in a businesslike way from a massive silver coffee pot, while an old manservant brought rolls, fresh butter and honey. She beckoned me to a chair beside her. She must have been sorry for us. She may even have liked us, for she needn't have done it. A strong, solitary woman, courageous, endowed assuredly with immense wealth, unmarried, in a country where the cloister is as a rule the one acceptable alternative to marriage for a woman of good family, she remains a solid but mysterious figure in the confused and fluid landscape of the war.

She was casual when we thanked her and trooped away. She came out on to the wide steps again to watch us drive off. We left her alone under the towering façade of her great mansion---to await the Germans.

Gosset had decided on consultation with Guénin to bear west through the Auvergne hills and make for Brive. If we could gain Brive we would be within easy motoring distance of Bordeaux, or failing Bordeaux, could turn south and reach the Mediterranean via Montauban and Toulouse. But we had little petrol and were about to be without maps. The road map General Réquin had given me in La Palisse had carried us thus far. But we were nearing the edge of it. And to find our way without would be difficult if not impossible. For this part of the country was strange to us all and sparsely populated.

At each village we came to we stopped while Gosset went in search of a stationer's, any shop that might possibly produce a map. The result was invariably the same. Every map had been bought up days ago.

We were very worried by lunch time. We couldn't make Brive that day, obviously, but we might, if we were lucky, reach Tulle---if the Bedford and the Dodge and the Hotchkiss, that is, could make the grade. We were lunching on a bank by the roadside and the road ahead wound steeply up. The Hotchkiss had been boiling all morning, the Dodge to Dorea's disgust was being very tiresome and the old Bedford was threatening to lie down and die. But at Tulle again if we were lucky we might find maps and petrol. But Tulle, Bernard said, would be no sort of place to stop for the night. It Was sure to be full of refugees. There was a chateau this side of it, the Chateau de l'Espinasse. In fact there were two by the same name. One of the two would surely provide shelter.

So we decided, cheered by memories of golden bedrooms and silver coffee pots, to make for one of the châteaux of l'Espinasse and began again our laborious crawling ascent through the wild lovely forest-clad mountains, and presently we reached a wide moorland plateau; and crossing it came to an old stone bridge over a little stream, and the road before the bridge was blocked by a great tree that had been laid across it. On the bridge stood an old man with a gun and two slender lads with rook rifles. And the old man called to us to halt, in a quavering voice, and the young lads glared at us with savage determined faces, and we didn't know what to make of it. Then the old man came forward and demanded to see our papers and we understood---and I could have wept. For the old man and the two striplings had felled the tree and placed it across the road as a barrier and they were defending France against the enemy.

We had begun our journey (how many days ago?) in Lorraine. We had traveled the departments of the Moselle and the Meuse and the Aube. We had made a sortie into the Yonne at Auxerre, had come back to go south and cross the Loire into the Allier, and not once had we been stopped at a barrier nor had we anywhere come on any sign of defense or defenders until we reached this lonely plateau and the old man with his two lads who were ready to die to defend their country's soil.

They let us pass when they had seen our papers, and we made l'Espinasse in a downpour. But the first chateau was already occupied by the French Air Force so we proceeded to the second and found that it had been derelict for many years and had been taken over by peasants who had repaired only a small part of it. Tramping through the mud of the stable yard with Bernard I found the farmer's family in a dark oak-paneled room that had once been a drawing room, sitting round the supper table by candlelight. There was, it seemed, no room for us in the house. All the rooms were already filled with refugees from the north. Was there no place, even for the ladies? Bernard insisted. The thin hatchet-faced woman at the head of the table admitted at last that there was a hayloft across the yard over the cowshed, so we followed her lantern through the rain and the squelching mud and climbed a ladder and inspected the loft. It was just a loft and there wasn't much hay in it to lie on but it did provide shelter from the rain. So we came down again to tell the girls. And on the way out through the cowshed the old witch woman said, "There's a bed here in the cowherd's room. You can have that ---if you like." But after looking at the mattress I said no, thank you, I would sleep in my car, little thinking that a miracle was awaiting us in the room of the cowherd. Yet so it was.

Gosset had pushed on into Tulle while this was going on. He came back with news. He had found the état-major of Paris in Tulle and had run into a French officer, Commandant Raymond Josselin, with whom I had had friendly dealings at the Ministère de la Guerre while I was organizing the hospital. The commandant sent me a message. Gosset was to tell me that my husband had been in Bordeaux two days ago but that almost all British units had already left France.

I was seized by panic. We were too late. If all British units had left there would be no ship to take us home.

I had installed myself in the Renault for the night. T. W. had got down my bedroll and I had made myself comfortable in the back seat with a rug and pillow. Gosset stood outside in the rain. I leaned forward. I had let down the window but couldn't see him. I spoke to a shadow.

"That settles it, I shall make for Bordeaux."

"It is for you to decide. But the road may not be open tomorrow."

"We must chance it. We must start at once, there is no time to lose."

"You mean tonight?"

"Yes, tonight."

"Impossible in this weather, and we have no map. The map is finished." "Then early in the morning."

"Very well."

"At what time, Gosset? How early can the convoy be ready?"

"I will call you at five."

He melted into the dark. I wrapped myself up again, lay listening to the drumming of the rain on the car's roof. We had traveled so slowly. But how could we have gone any faster with the Bedford to drag along and the X-ray trailer being a nuisance on every hairpin bend? Réquin had said we had plenty of time. He had been wrong, and almost all British units had already gone. We might be too late

Someone was tapping, on the window. It was morning and Gosset was outside in the road.

"Look what I found in the room you despised, by the cowherd's bed! A map that covers the country we are going to travel. Now say you don't believe in miracles."

A strange man. He became that morning a giant. He lifted me up and, carried me through the next eighteen hours like a Titan. They were the last we were to spend together. He was his old self again, the man who had whisked me out to the Fort de Vanves, driven me about Paris from état-major to état-major. Now that I was leaving him he became almost a friend.

We agreed, over mugs of coffee drunk on our feet in the road, that I should leave the formation as soon as we could get petrol and make for Bordeaux with the girls. Raymond Josselin had told him we might possibly get petrol at Brive. There were twenty-six of us. We would need six cars and 500 liters of petrol. It wouldn't be safe to start with less, as we might have to push on to the Spanish frontier.

"You mean if there is no one at Bordeaux to help us?"

"Parfaitement."

"If my husband is still there, all will be well."

"We will try to send him a message."

"How?"

"I don't know. We will find a way."

We by-passed Brive fearing again that the road might be cut and reached the village of Noailles about four o'clock. It was a pretty place on a hill a few miles south of the town. The rain had cleared away, the sky was blue, wild roses clambered over the low stone walls. We parked our vehicles along a country road outside the village and I told the girls what I had decided to do.

"We will start for Bordeaux as soon as we can get petrol. Dr. Guénin is going off now to look for it. I am going into Brive with Gosset to try to send a message to the British Embassy. There are twenty-six of us for six cars so you must manage with one suitcase, a bedroll and a haversack or dressing bag each. Please repack while I am gone. The sergent chef will get your tin boxes out of the truck. You will have to repack here on the grass. I will see about your places in the cars when I get back."

I waited a moment, for questions or objections, looking round the circle of faces. They were serious but I saw no sign of dismay---only one was scowling. No one said anything---so I left them and climbed into Gosset's two-seater.

Brive was hot, its wide blazing streets were crowded but the tide of refugees seemed to have spent itself. Gosset drove in and out of the traffic with his usual savage efficiency. I don't know where he took me---to the Bureau de la Place, I imagine, and the mairie and the préfecture. I know that we went into one hot dreary office after another and that the result each time was the same, a blank refusal to help the English woman.

Gosset would demand to see the person in charge, introduce me, explain my dilemma and ask that a message be sent to the British Embassy in Bordeaux. The person in charge, préfet or sous préfet or commandant de la place or his understudy would smile pityingly, shrug his shoulders, then Gosset would get angry and the person behind the desk would cease to smile and look at me with such unconcealed venom that, after several of these scenes, I felt I couldn't bear any more.

"It's no good, Gosset. They won't help. I am British. They hate us now."

"It would seem so."

"Let's give it up. It doesn't matter. Take me to the post office; somewhere where I can consult a bottin---I want to look up the address of the British consulate in Bordeaux."

"Right." But suddenly on the way to the post office he ejaculated, "God, what a fool I am. I've a perfect right as an officer to send a telegram in the ordinary way."

So we burst into the post office, Gosset striding ahead, I trailing after, and he wrote out his telegram and pushed it through the guichet.

To Major General Spears, c/o The British Embassy, Bordeaux.

MRS. SPEARS ON THE WAY WITH STAFF OF TWENTY-FIVE. PLEASE ARRANGE JOURNEY HOME. SIGNED JEAN GOSSET, MÊDECIN CHEF, AMBULANCE 282.

The post office clerk looked doubtful when he read it. "I can't guarantee the delivery, mon Capitaine."

"No, of course not. But do your best. This is Madame Spears. She is here with her English nurses. She must leave, you understand---otherwise---"

The young man behind the guichet looked at me and nodded. "I'll do my best," he said.

We looked up the address of the consulate and went out again into the sun. My head was swimming. The car bounded forward.

"I'll give you an ordre de mission for Bordeaux," Gosset said. "And sign it with General Colson's name. He'll never know and if he does he won't mind.

They say Bordeaux is closed---that the military police have orders to let no one through. An ordre de mission signed by the chief of staff might help."

I looked round at him and thought again, "What an extraordinary man." His face was savage and sullen, his mouth bitter, he was driving as if he hated the car, hated the crowds in the street, hated the world. It was then that he said the words I noted earlier in this story. He spat them out.

"It will do France good," he said, "to live under the German yoke."

There was no news of Guénin when we got back. T. W. and Rosie had taken my luggage into a farmhouse near the road so that I could repack in peace. I gave the farmer's wife my face creams and left my large suitcase full of uniforms, shoes, underwear and so on for the quartermaster to dispose of.

We loaded up the cars and sat down to supper on the grass in a field by the road. There was nothing to do now but wait. If Guénin failed us---- Twilight deepened over the fields and hills. The moon rose. The world was still. At ten o'clock Sergeant Altenbach came from the village pub to say that Dr. Guénin had telephoned that he had at last struck the trail of a distant petrol supply and hoped to find it---but we mustn't expect him for some hours.

The orderlies had lifted the back seats out of the cars and placed them in a row along the roadside as the grass was getting damp. I sat down on one of these with Bernard. Couples drifted away through the moonlight.

Dr. Bernard told me that he was very anxious about the future. He was a Jew and he feared persecution of the Jews, once the Nazis took control of France. He would have asked me to take him to England if it had not been for his family. He could not abandon his wife and children.

We sat together for some time talking in subdued tones. I had not been on intimate terms with any of our officers. But I had always thought of Bernard as a friend and I was very sorry for him. It is strange to recall the mood of that beautiful summer night, in the light of what happened later. If those young Frenchmen had changed only to me personally I would not trouble to note the fact. That Dr. Bernard came to feel toward me a violent antagonism because of what happened in Syria three years later is not to the point here and scarcely worth mentioning. But those other good-bys in the moonlight, the floods of tears, the hopes of renewed meetings, even of marriage, the vows of fidelity--- Well, four years is a long time. One must be a romantic fool to believe that the flame of love or desire can endure for four years without being fed. But it seems strange nevertheless that the spirit of comradeship that had been born out of common danger should have withered and in some cases have been turned into venom through an agency that every one of these men knew to be bent on their own destruction.

Guénin, for instance. He got us our petrol at last. It was two o'clock in the morning when I saw the lights of his truck. I don't know how many kilometers he had traveled to find it. He had carried us across France with gallant untiring energy and remained to the last undefeated. But he wouldn't have lifted one of his strong thick fingers to help us four years later. When we did return to France in '45 and his friend Jean wrote to him, he turned on her with a snarl. His answer was brief. He never wanted to see or hear from any of us, ever again.

I said good-by to the orderlies before midnight. I walked down the long line of vehicles and shook hands with each of the men. None asked if they could come with us to England---and it didn't occur to me to suggest it. But Sergeant Altenbach begged for a souvenir. I gave him a blue enameled cigarette case that my son had given me when he was at Eton.

"What is going to become of all our equipment, Altenbach?"

"I give you my word of honor, madame, that it will not fall into the hands of the Germans. I will set the trucks on fire myself if necessary."

He didn't of course. Huguet told me when he came to see us in Alsace in the winter of '45 that there had been a violent dispute over the matter among the officers, the day after we left. It is I know against Red Cross regulations to destroy any surgical or medical stores. Whatever the reason, Lady Hadfield's gift was not destroyed; whether or not it was seized by the Germans, I don't know.

It would be interesting to know what really happened to these young Frenchmen during the four years of the occupation, what happened, I mean, to their minds. The data are lacking. Huguet is the only one I have seen since we left them. He joined up with General Leclerc's division after the Normandy invasion. His pleasure at finding us again was touching. He had written, he said, to Sister Forbes, hers was the only address he had. But the poor Strawberry Queen was dead by that time, so she couldn't answer.

He could give us little news of the others. Boutron had gone back, he believed, to his family and his private practice. He didn't know what had become of Le Canouet.

Beyond such bare facts I know very little. The girls met Bernard in the south. He and Rousset I know joined the resistance movement. Gosset---I heard only rumors about Gosset. None, as far as I know, came over to General de Gaulle until after the liberation of Paris. Well---that is their affair. What they felt in their hearts during that time is between them and their God. There were many men and women in France who were brave and true yet who passed for cowards and traitors, and there were some who joined the Free French whose motives were not altogether admirable.

What I would like to know about my former associates is what I fear I shall never know. I wouldn't have expected them to be heroes. Gosset had in him the stuff of a hero but his was a distorted nature. The others were sensitive, charming, chivalrous, little men, of no great weight. If they acquiesced in the humiliating defeat of their people and made a submissive best of a shameful existence, I daresay they had their reasons. The reasons don't interest me. What would interest me would be to know if Guénin remained a proud Frenchman, inwardly defiant, essentially true to his own country. The fact that he came to hate us is of little consequence---the other is of immense importance. For Guénin was tough and if the tough guys of France shrugged their shoulders

But we didn't foresee any of these things when he appeared out of the dark that night of the nineteenth of June with the petrol that was going to carry us to Bordeaux. I had sent the girls who were to drive, to their cars to get some sleep. But as soon as I saw the lights of the truck coming I waked them, and they came tumbling out into the road. It took half an hour to fill up. Each of the cars could carry in addition to fourteen gallons in its tanks five gallons in bidons. That should see us, Guénin said, to the frontier if need be. My watch said two-thirty as T. W. let in the clutch of the Renault. With luck we could get to Bordeaux for breakfast. We moved away. Ambulance 282 had come to an end.

SIX cars carrying twenty-six women hurtling through the night. Would we make it? Would we get there in time? The great highroad to Bordeaux was empty. It gleamed like steel in the moonlight.

I led, in the Renault, T. W. driving, Rosie beside her, Maureen and Jean with me in the back. Napier with Esba Bell brought up the rear.

We were stopped by a military post some fifty miles beyond Brive. I showed the movement order that Gosset had given me with General Colson's signature.

The garde mobile studied it, handed it back and said, "You won't be allowed to enter Bordeaux."

"Why not?"

"Bordeaux is closed. No one is allowed to enter the city."

"Nevertheless I must. These ladies are all British. We are obliged to leave France. It is by order of the chief of staff, General Colson." I showed him the name.

He shrugged his shoulders, handed back the paper. "You can try," he said.

We pushed on. Maureen and Jean were asleep. T. W. and Rosie had shown no sign of interest. They were leaving it all to me. It was the same with the others in the cars behind. Our black sheep had made a scene earlier but no one questioned my authority now, nor showed any doubt of my wisdom. I almost wished they would. Their confidence and obedience made me feel isolated.

It was just after dawn that Esba's V8 broke down. We were winding by that time through hills. Maria behind at the wheel of her station wagon signaled with her horn. T. W. drew up. There were only four cars behind us; Esba's was missing. We waited five minutes, no car appeared.

"We must go back, T. W."

We found the V8 a mile down the road. It was the fan belt, Napier said. "I'll give you twenty minutes," I said. "If you can't put it right in twenty minutes, we must abandon the car."

We waited. No one passed us. Another splendid day was dawning on what seemed to be an empty world. At the end of twenty minutes they gave it up. "I'm sorry, Esba." Well---there it was. It was her own car. The passengers and luggage were removed and divided among us. Kelsey and Fuhlroth got in with me. We were seven people after that in the Renault. The drivers changed over. Rosie took the wheel from T. W. She had been dozing while T. W. drove---but by seven o'clock she was nodding again at the wheel. I began to fear that all the drivers would fall asleep and thought it best to stop. We managed to get coffee in a sordid café of a nameless town ---then pushed on again.

The girls were cheerful---not I. If it were true that Bordeaux was closed, we would have to turn south and make for the Spanish frontier. I was sick with apprehension as we entered the city's suburbs; closed or not closed, I was determined to get through. Just how I meant to set about it, I don't know, for we came on no barriers. There was no sign of a control post in the long monotonous streets. We followed the tramlines and drew up in a shaded square near the consulate at ten o'clock, and telling the girls to wait, I got out.

It was very hot. The sun was blazing. There was a crowd in front of the consulate and a British soldier standing against the big door. I pushed my way through to him.

"I want to see the consul."

"He's gone."

"Where?"

"To Bayonne."

"You mean the consulate is closed?"

"That's it, miss."

"Well, there must be someone, or you wouldn't be here."

"There's the military attaché upstairs, but he won't do anything for you---"

"We'll see about that."

He didn't try to stop me. I slipped past through the door and ran up the stairs into an office. An enormous fire was burning in the grate. I thought, "The British have gone mad---a fire in this heat," then realized that they were burning papers. "They" were two pleasant young Englishmen and I said to them, "I am Mrs. Spears," and they said, "We've been so worried about you. Have you got your girls with you?"

"Yes, they are outside. Is my husband here?"

"No, I'm afraid he's gone."

"Back to England?"

"Yes, he left two days ago."

"Oh---"

"But we've been expecting you. We had a telegram signed 'Gosset.' The Ambassador is still here and Lord Melise Graham, the military attaché. They are making arrangements--- If you don't mind waiting a few minutes. Do sit down, you look dreadfully tired."

I murmured something about a plane. I had hoped my husband could have sent us home in his plane. It was true, we were twenty-six---still--

"I'm afraid the general took the plane with him."

"I see."

"But you musn't worry. We are going to send you and your girls home. The Ambassador will see to that."

So the man in the post office at Brive had been a friend after all.

I was given a chair in the next room by another huge fire. Presently Lord Melise Graham came to me, very solicitous, very kind, rather worried. Had we got enough petrol to get to Arcachon? Yes. Then if we would push on to Arcachon and call at a certain villa, we would. find a naval officer there who would tell us what to do. If we would be there by six.

I said, yes certainly, but it was not yet eleven in the morning. Would it be possible for us to go to a hotel first and have a wash and some food? We'd been traveling all night. The girls were tired and dirty.

I didn't realize that I was suggesting the impossible. I had forgotten that the French government had fled to Bordeaux, or if I remembered, was too dazed to realize that half the official world of Paris with their wives and their clerks and their mistresses had swarmed into the city filling its hotels and restaurants with their clamor, their quarrels, their frivolity and their greed, their terror and their sordid intrigues. I didn't know that my husband had taken General de Gaulle with him to England. I only heard the strange story of Bordeaux when I got home. No one told me that day as I sat by the blazing fire and watched young men throwing bundles of papers on to the flames that a cruiser was waiting off the coast in waters infested with enemy submarines, to take away the Ambassador, who was waiting until the French capitulation was actually signed. No one told me anything, and I asked no questions, was only dimly aware of the atmosphere of suppressed excitement, of the hurried but quiet destruction of documents and of the murmured consultations going on next door.

Melise Graham came back presently to say that he and his secretary would be delighted to put their bedrooms in the hotel at our disposal for the day. We could at least have hot baths, and he hoped get some lunch.

Were we in funds?

Yes.

Did I know Arcachon?

Yes. I had been there some years before.

The villa we were to go to was a little way out beyond the town and the harbor. If I would call there (he wrote the name down) not later than six o'clock, I would be told what to do. He needn't caution me that we must say nothing to anyone.

I thanked him and went back to the girls---such good girls, patiently waiting.

"All is well," I said. "My general has gone, but the Ambassador is still here and the military attaché has lent us his rooms. We are going on to Arcachon, but we'll have baths first, then lunch."

Alas, we could get no lunch, either in the hotel or outside. The town seemed to be filled with restaurants, but all were crowded and no one would take us in. At the sight of our uniforms, the sound of our English accent, every door was closed, sometimes very roughly. Everywhere we met with scowls, abrupt refusals. We divided into small groups, hoping that in twos or threes we might worm our way into those enticing interiors with their clattering dishes and succulent smells. I told the girls they could do as they liked until four o'clock. At four they must all be in the square and in their places in the cars. They scattered. The shops were all open, the windows alluring. Silk stockings, lace underwear, sweets, picture postcards. Being British was no passport to favor in Bordeaux, but we were allowed to spend.. I believe some even got sandwiches in a snack bar. Maureen and I managed to get coffee at about three; and then at four everyone turned up in the square, save MacManaway. Where was she? Nobody knew. Who had last seen her? "She was with me," Kelsey said, "half an hour ago. She went into a shop."

"What sort of shop?"

"I think it was a hat shop, I'm not sure."

"In which street? Do you remember the name of the street?"

"I'm afraid I don't. It was one of those streets up there." She waved a hand.

I was frantic. MacManaway couldn't speak a word of French. She wouldn't know how to ask the way.

"Come, T. W., the rest of you stay here. I can't have you all running round looking. I'll lose the lot of you."

I rushed up toward the crowded streets. "You go that way, T. W." We hurried through the throng, poked our heads into shop after shop. It was like struggling in a dream. I was panting, breathless-we might miss the ship. There must be a ship of some kind somewhere waiting to take us away from these strange, rude, unfriendly people who had once been our allies.

We had been told to be at the villa at Arcachon not later than six. It was already four-thirty. Suddenly I saw her sailing ahead of me, her long nurse's cape billowing behind her. A tall, graceful, unconscious and very alien figure heading serenely in the wrong direction. "MacManaway," I gasped.

I needn't have worried. There was, as it turned out, no hurry. Repeated delays, interminable waiting, an agony of prolonged suspense lay ahead of us.

We reached Arcachon in a cloudburst. The huge parklike drives of that pleasure resort were rivers by the time we found the villa, but the rain had stopped suddenly---and Ian Fleming, whom I had met in London, looking very smart as a naval lieutenant came out to the gate. He smiled when he saw the five cars full of females, a little as Captain Lecomte had smiled long ago on a winter evening in Nancy, the British version of the same smile of amused admiration, but less gentle, with less of chivalry than the other, and more of wry humor, even a touch perhaps of annoyance. Well---we were after all of his own blood and we had not come to offer our services, we'd been thrust on him and would probably be a great nuisance.

He took me to a pleasant sitting room with deep armchairs and gave me a drink. The complete man of the world and perfect host, but he was not very forthcoming. We would be looked after. I musn't worry. If we did just what we were told. Had we had any food? No. Then I had better take the girls now to get supper. There was a restaurant up the road. He would send for us when we were wanted. Yes. We would be leaving tonight. He would send someone to the restaurant, we would have time for supper, but must leave immediately we were sent for.

So off we went again and the restaurant looked more inviting than anything we had seen for some time. It had been built to entice the rich tourist. It stood back from the road among pines. There were clean red and white checked cloths on the tables. A magnificent bar offered a choice of innumerable drinks.

Could we eat?

But certainly we could eat. What would we like? The waiter was a waiter out of another world---a world of pleasure, of delicate appetite, of amorous week ends and sensuous laughter. I ordered cold meat, salad, bread and butter and beer for twenty-six ladies.

While we waited I thought of my last visit to Arcachon. We had approached it, my husband and I and the children, in a small yacht and had been unable to enter the harbor. A tricky harbor---there was a dangerous sand bar. We had lain outside, had sent up flares signaling for a pilot, but no pilot had come out so we had had to push on through a stormy night to Bayonne. No---that was wrong, that had been on another trip---when? I couldn't remember; my head was aching. But we had anchored at some time in Arcachon and spent our time ashore eating oysters. It was a great place for oysters. Why hadn't I thought of asking for oysters? But it was June, the twentieth of June, and there was a war going on somewhere and we were trying to get out of France. And here was our supper; cold meat, salad

And what cold meat! Great silvery platters of thinly sliced rare roast beef and pink ham and tongue arranged in a beautiful pattern with a fringe all round of aspic. And what delicious bowls of crisp lettuce, and what white rolls and what golden butter. But before we could touch it, before anyone could take one mouthful, there was a sound in the road of a motorcycle and a petty officer of His Majesty's Navy came hurrying in. We must leave at once. We must go immediately to the harbor. He would show us the way to the jetty. Twenty-six delicious slices of cold roast beef---twenty-six empty stomachs. It was almost too much. We left the ham and the salad and trooped away, and when we reached the jetty we waited, for there was no one there. We waited an hour. We waited two hours. Then a message came to say that all arrangements has been canceled for that night. We were to be at the jetty at eight o'clock in the morning. We would be accommodated in the meantime on the top floor of a near-by hospital; the wards were empty, there were plenty of beds; we could sleep in them.

It was food we wanted even more than beds. But there was no food to be had. All the restaurants in Arcachon were closed by that time, so we dragged ourselves up to the top floor of the hospital and laid ourselves down in rows on the bare mattresses and slept. And in the morning, when we went back to the jetty, it was the same thing again---orders were canceled. We must wait. We could wait, if we wished, on the beach. I must be able to assemble my unit within twenty minutes. With that proviso we could do as we liked.

The hospital where we had slept was on the sea front, and the médecin chef took pity on us. He gave us coffee and rolls on the terrace.

"You have come from far?" he asked.

"Yes---from Lorraine."

"And you are leaving now for England?"

"I hope so."

"There is a ship, perhaps, coming to take you?"

"I'm afraid I don't know."

How silly, I thought, to lie. There must be a ship. There was no other possible explanation of our presence. He knew all about our fruitless trips to the jetty.

Boddles and Josie and a dozen others besieged me. Might they go in swimming? They had seen some bathing suits in a shop round the comer. The sea looked wonderful. It was going to be frightfully hot.

"Certainly," I said. "If you want to---but you must be within call. I'll come down with you to the beach."

All I wanted was sleep. I found a bit of shade under a scrubby pine above the sands. "Here," I said to the girls. "I'll be here." I spread my cape on the ground and lay down and slept.

A voice woke me, a light pleasant woman's voice speaking in French.

"It is Madame Spears, is it not?"

I sat up. A young woman in a pretty linen dress and sandals was standing beside me. Her toenails were scarlet, her hair was beautifully waved; she carried a parasol. And beyond her stretched the sands. I rubbed my eyes. The sands were swarming with holiday-makers. Lovely ladies in maillots lay under gay striped umbrellas, children were busy with spades and buckets. It was like Deauville at the height of the season.

"We met in Paris," the lady was saying, "at Madame X's---you don't remember?"

"I am sorry."

"You are alone here?"

"No---not exactly."

"I see that you are in uniform."

"Yes."

'They say you are going to England, that you expect a ship. Is it true?"

"I'm afraid I don't know."

But the lady was very persistent. "I have a friend," she said, "a French officer who wants very much to go to England. Could you take him with you?"

"I'm afraid not. I'm afraid I know nothing. If you will excuse me." I scrambled down the bank on to the sands---not only to get away from her. It had suddenly come to me that I would never be able to find the girls in the crowd on the beach. How could I assemble them in twenty minutes? As long as they were in uniform it was easy. But in bathing suits they looked like anybody else. They might be far out to sea. But there, thank God, were Dorea and Maria, sitting fully dressed in the sand.

"Pretty sight, isn't it?" Dorea said.

"God! But it makes me sick." Maria was savage.

"Perhaps," I said, "the war was only a very bad dream."

I told. them about the woman with the parasol. "If we hang round this beach much longer," I said, "everyone in Arcachon will know we are expecting a ship. Where is T. W.? I'm going up to the villa."

"She's asleep in your car."

There was a naval captain with Ian Fleming. I told them of my encounters. If there were spies about, if there were submarines outside, if there was a ship waiting somewhere, surely it was madness to leave twenty-five English girls hanging about the beach.

I learned next day that there were believed to be a number of Italian submarines in those waters and that the admiral in command of the cruiser that was to take the Ambassador home was even more exasperated than I at being kept waiting. But that was when we had at last found the "Galatea" and been taken on board. We had another eighteen hours to wait on that seemingly frivolous shore.

I daresay we were unfair to those languid young men and pretty women who lay with such apparent insouciance on the sands. What else could they do? What could be more sensible than to let the children build sand castles while the Germans advanced down the fine macadamed road? How would it help to keep the kiddies indoors? The Germans weren't likely to machine-gun a beach full of pretty women. They were right, one may say, those elegant creatures with their varnished toenails. Or were they so sensible after all? Suppose they had refused to lie in the sand with their husbands and lovers? Suppose they had been even a little different, even a little more determined not to accept the defeat that had been agreed to in Bordeaux?

I have wondered about the French officer who wanted to get to England and about the médecin chef of the hospital who took us in for the night. We left him the four Ford station wagons and the Renault. I hope he made good use of them. But perhaps he would have come with us if the Navy. had been able to take him. We found quite a number of French officers on the "Etric" when we were transshipped to that vessel in St. Jean-de-Luz. But of course the number that the "Galatea" could take was strictly limited.

I remember collecting someone's English governess from a cottage hidden away in a lane, then there were the five wounded British soldiers who had come from north of Paris in an uncovered truck and been ten days on the road. One had an open fracture, his arm was in plaster. His nurse had given him a bottle of disinfectant and he had been treating his wound by the simple method of pouring the stuff into a hole in the plaster every so often. But it was the captain who was in really bad shape. I found them in their truck at Fleming's gate that afternoon after he had moved us from the beach to the garden of another villa near by, and he asked me to look after them. So we took them away to our garden and laid them on rugs on the grass, and Jean and I went back to the hospital in the town and fetched dressings, forceps and so on. So we were able to fix them up.

It was at three-thirty next morning that we made our last trip to the jetty and were taken off in a couple of sardine boats (half the girls in one, half in another)---and the following three hours were without question the worst of any I'd endured since our trek began. To begin with the wind had risen, the sea was rough, the night dark as pitch and the fishermen who had been charged to take us past the tide rip thought we were mad. They kept saying it in their patois.

"Who but the British would be so insane as to expect us to find our way out past the sand bar on such a night?"

The girls were prostrate, some were violently sick, and didn't listen. Naval Cadet Mr. Pim couldn't understand. He was in charge of my boat and kept asking me, "What are they saying?"

"They say the British Navy is crazy to send them out with a lot of women on a night like this."

Pim was sweet. He looked about fourteen, and took his responsibility very seriously. I hope that he is alive, that he didn't go down when the "Galatea" was sunk and that he won't be hurt if I laugh at him just a little, for when at last we did get past the tide rip and were out in the open sea, there was no sign of the "Galatea" and it really didn't help much for Pim to flash my pocket torch into the immense and very dark night and fire his little pistol into the wind. And I cannot honestly blame the fishermen for not believing him when he waved his young arm toward the north and declared the ship was out there, not south as they thought. What was the good, I said, of arguing with the old boys. You couldn't see a thing. The cruiser obviously would carry no lights-so what could we do? We must wait until daylight---and we did wait, rolling about in the troughs of the waves in the dark, and if I hadn't been so desperately anxious, I would undoubtedly have been as sick as all the others.

Yes, that couple of hours was for me the worst of all. For as I clung to the gunwale of the horribly rolling craft I kept saying to myself:

"After getting them away, I shall have to take them back. After getting them at last safely out of France, I shall have to take them back again."

And then it began to grow light and I found that Pip Scott-Ellis was upright and I called, "Pip-for God's sake use your eyes-look for the ship." And there at last we saw her on the horizon coming from the south; and we made for her in our two boats and at six o'clock I climbed the gangway and handed the girls over to the British Navy.

Rosie tells me that she was more frightened on the voyage home than at any other time since our retreat began. It was not so with me. With the need for taking decisions involving the girls' safety at an end, I was incapable of further anxiety. But I was annoyed when we reached St.-Jean-de-Luz and I was told that we were to be transshipped from the "Galatea" to the "Etric"; I protested. It was useless. The admiral was adamant. The "Galatea," he said, was a fighting ship. He couldn't risk an engagement with twenty-five women on board! So we were pushed off on to the "Etric," that was already carrying a thousand too many passengers, and found ourselves quartered on D deck with a battalion of Poles who remained in their hammocks most of the day, swinging their Polish bottoms gently above the long tables where we ate and singing their Polish songs through most of the night.

The troops officer was apologetic. "If I'd only known," he kept saying, "that you were coming on board. I've got three thousand souls in this ship. All the private cabins were filled days ago by rich old ladies from their villas in the south of France."

"It's lucky we didn't go that way. Our officers wanted us to try Marseilles. I don't suppose we'd have found a ship."

"We're the last British transport to leave France," he said---"and about time too. I tell you what---you take my cabin at night. I don't go to bed at night. I'll take it over during the day. But it makes me sick to have to put your girls in hammocks down on D deck when the first class is full of lap dogs and ladies' maids. If we did meet a submarine---" He gave me detailed instructions as to what we were to do. There were lifeboats for a quarter of the passengers. He'd be damned if he was going to let service women be caught below decks.

I wandered down the promenade deck past the old ladies in their deck chairs, to see if Lady Hadfield was among them. She wasn't. She had stayed quietly in her villa on Cap Ferat---and they weren't all of them so very old, these women lying comfortably against cushions, and some were acquaintances who were eager to talk---so eager that I went back to my friend the troops officer next day and said, "I wonder if you could suggest to the first-class passengers that it would be a great kindness to let my girls have the use of their cabins for an hour or so in the mornings or afternoons---just to lie down in." And he did ask them, but none responded---not even those whom I had met at dinner parties in London before the war.

So I slept in the troops officer's cabin and the girls slept in hammocks---they were moved from D deck to what had been the Families' Dining Room---third-class---and we fetched our meals in iron buckets from the galley and sat on the floor of the deck during the rest of the time. And we didn't mind how shabby we looked. Indeed we rather fancied ourselves, I think, and were rather sorry for "the old girls" as Maria called them who had been in the south of France and had missed all the fun.

"For it was fun, Madame la Générale, now wasn't it? Do you remember when Josie lost your washing and had to get out the town crier?"

"And the pink village," Boddles cried. "Too lovely."

"And the hot cross buns from Klein's with swastikas on them."

"They weren't swastikas."

"They were, I swear they were."

"You will take us back to St. Jean, won't you, boss-when the war is over? "

"It's not over yet."

No. It was only beginning when we landed in Plymouth on June 26, 1940, and the girls followed me in single file down the gangway. But we didn't worry about that. We only knew that we had got home.

We had started out in February with a complete hospital---all beautifully loaded on to handsome trucks; and we had lost it. The X-ray trailer and the sterilizing truck and the rolling kitchen, Dorothy's blue blankets and the pillows Gosset had kept throwing away; we'd lost the lot. And the cars the girls had given had been left on the quais at the end of the jetty in Arcachon, together with the Renault Lady Hadfield had brought to me in Paris. Such a pity. Such a waste. But she would understand.

A military police sergeant was standing at the foot of the gangway, as I stepped ashore.

"Mrs. Spears? But you are the lost unit we've been worrying about."

"Are we? Well, you needn't worry any more. I've lost none of the girls."

Part Two. Chapter Thirteen

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