 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
GENERAL DE GAULLE was unknown even to his own compatriots when my husband brought him back from Bordeaux to London on the eighteenth of June, 1940. Almost no one in France or Great Britain knew his name; nor did the French in England receive him kindly. They looked askance at this brigadier general who had been Under Secretary for War in Paul Reynaud's government for a few short weeks and now dared defy Marshal Pétain and set himself up as the leader of French resistance.
"Qui est-ce que le Général de Gaulle?" they said to me. "On ne le connaît pas."
There were many Frenchmen in England at the time. Of the hundred thousand French troops who had been rescued by our navy from Dunkirk a large proportion had returned to France, but the French expeditionary force from Norway was quartered in Great Britain. They were commanded by General Bédouard and included some of the best troops in the French Army. Many had been wounded at Narvik and were convalescing in British hospitals. Our ports at the same time had provided refuge for important elements of the French Navy. Some fifteen thousand French sailors were in camp at Aintree; and many of the officials who had acted for France since the outbreak of war were still with us. These included the staff of the French Embassy, the large military mission under General LeLong, the French consulate general in London and the numerous consulates scattered over the country in cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham.
What was to become of them all? That was the burning question for General de Gaulle, the embarrassing problem for the British authorities and my husband's very special preoccupation. For he and De Gaulle had a single common purpose, to persuade the French people to continue the war; and they had the wholehearted support of the Prime Minister in their project.
B. had installed De Gaulle in an office next his own in St. Stephen's House, Westminster, by the time I reached home, had formed a military mission under the war cabinet to organize French resistance and was already engaged in a score of battles on De Gaulle's behalf. Battles with the War Office and the Admiralty and the Ministry of Propaganda, battles with the Supply Services, Military Intelligence, the B.B.C.; battles with De Gaulle himself, for De Gaulle was sore, his nerves were raw, he objected to any form of publicity, and publicity was essential to the success of his crusade.
It was only a few days before I arrived with the girls that B. brought De Gaulle back to England, but recruiting had already started for the Free French forces. I remember my bewilderment on my first evening at home. It didn't surprise me to find my husband going all out on a new war job, and so full of it that he could think of nothing else, nor was it remarkable that he should still be interested in France and the French. But I didn't know what he was talking about when he spoke of the Free French. I have never heard the words before, hadn't a notion to what they referred. When we left Arcachon we had no knowledge of any movement in England to organize the French troops who were willing to fight on. Had we only known when we left our formation at Noailles, I was certain that some of the men would have come with me. But as I've already said, we missed General de Gaulle's broadcast of the eighteenth of June. I didn't know that such a man existed until suddenly I came home to find B. absorbed in his cause and on fire with the possibilities it held out.
The atmosphere of London was strange. There was a hush, a sense of suppressed momentous tension, as if the great city and indeed the nation were holding its breath while it grimly, silently, prepared for the expected invasion, but nothing was more strange than my husband's faith in the man I had never heard of and his absorption in the future of a nation I had seen pouring in a panic down the roads of France. For I had thought its fate sealed, had believed the story to be finished.
"We passed close to V-----" I said. "I thought of Gaston. I would have liked to visit your grandmother's grave, but I couldn't, we were swept on."
He wasn't listening. What was this thing that so absorbed him? If he were not even interested in hearing about V-----?
And then in the quiet of the room where we had sat during the first weeks of the war, with Voltaire standing undisturbed on his pedestal, he explained.'
France was going to be cut off, he said, from all the outside world, and subjected from now on to relentless propaganda---and that propaganda would be directed to the one purpose of bringing the French in against us. Such an idea appeared unthinkable now, but the war might last a very long time and the people of France would know nothing about it save what the Germans chose to tell them. We would be obliged, moreover, eventually to bomb French towns. If the German propaganda were successful and the French as a nation took up arms against us then we might lose the war. one thing and one only would counteract German influence---the fact that a French force was fighting with us.
"And De Gaulle is the man?"
"Yes, the Cabinet has recognized De Gaulle as the leader of French resistance throughout the world. We've opened a recruiting station at Olympia. Those who don't join De Gaulle are being collected at the White City. The orders are that they are to be left free to decide for themselves. If they want to return to France we undertake to send them back, if they choose to remain and fight on they can enlist in the Free French forces. Those who do so decide acquire the status of our own troops, receive the same emoluments, equipment---all that."
Gradually as the days passed I began to understand. It wasn't merely a question of enlisting the French troops in England; what was even more important to Britain was the attitude of the great French Empire. Casablanca, Algiers, Dakar, the Chad, Madagascar, Djibouti, Indo-China. Most were little more to me than names at that time but the names quivered in the air of B.'s office, electric with possibility of aid or disaster. What would they do? Would they rally to General de Gaulle and help us, or would they close their harbors to our ships and help the enemy?
It is amazing to me now, looking back on those days of desperate suspense and preparation, that De Gaulle with his handful of followers or my husband with the half-dozen officers of his mission should have hoped to bring over to our side any considerable part of the great French Empire; but they did. They had faith even after Oran. They seemed to find it impossible to believe that the French colonies would acquiesce in the humiliating terms of the armistice and take their orders from Vichy. For the colonies had not been invaded, nor had the French colonial armies suffered defeat. There appeared to us in London to be no need nor excuse in Morocco or Madagascar for capitulation. We in Great Britain knew that we were preparing for a long war which could have only one end, we knew it so well that we could not understand that in the eyes of the world outside we had already lost the war and would be brought to our knees by Hitler's invading army in a few weeks. But to the French nation and the French colonies this was the truth: for the iron curtain was down and they were already on the other side of it. The great tragedy of a people being led blindfold to their own destruction had begun. From now on for four years, the French nation was to watch the world conflict from the opposite side of an all but impassable gulf.
We didn't take this in. We didn't accept it. How could we? When I say we---I mean my husband and all the British who loved France and of course General de Gaulle himself and those who rallied to him.
I see them now as a very small company of magnificent madmen. There was no sense in what they were trying to do. Reason should have convinced them that they had no chance of succeeding. Repeated disappointments should have proved to them that their project was doomed. But they were inspired by something more powerful than logic. With continued opposition inside Britain and failure outside, De Gaulle grew only more bitterly concentrated on the task he had set himself, B. the more grimly determined to help him.
It was in the very nature of the problem that De Gaulle should be as difficult to help as a man could be. To build him up into a world figure was essential---but he could not and would not see this. His aversion to personal publicity was so intense that I think it must have sprung from a passionate desire to believe still, in spite of all proof to the contrary, that the French people and notably the French colonies would vindicate the honor of France by continuing the war of their own volition and not in answer to an appeal sent out from London by one man, himself, who had sought refuge in Britain. I think that the whole business of personal propaganda was humiliating to him. But it had to be done. To make him known against his will, to get him a clear field on the wireless and persuade him to make the most of it; find him not only a recruiting center in London but a camp outside where his recruits could be trained, were some of the initial tasks of the Spears Mission, and without the Prime Minister's wholehearted support the thing would have been impossible.
The story of how my husband brought General de Gaulle back to England from Bordeaux on the eighteenth of June, 1940, is not my story but the fact is known, and it had momentous consequences that General de Gaulle would be the last to deny. Indeed if he had not asked his friend Spears to come to his rescue General de Gaulle might never have become the head of the Fourth French Republic, but we will let that pass. I only came into the picture when the thing was done and General de Gaulle was safe in London, as safe that is to say as any of us. What surprised me was that no one of first importance among his countrymen was with him. French officers were arriving in fishing boats and colliers. Boys of sixteen to twenty were turning up by the score. There were ways of getting out of France. Madame de Gaulle had come with her children to join her husband. It was all very puzzling. For the members of Paul Reynaud's government it had been, I understood, well-nigh impossible to get away. General Weygand, I was told, had issued orders for General de Gaulle's arrest on the day that Marshal Pétain took over and asked for an armistice, but there must have been some leaders who could have escaped. What, I wondered, had become of General Georges? And our old acquaintance General Façalde who had been military attaché at the French Embassy during the last war and was in command of an army corps during the Battle of Dunkirk? And Réquin, and Captain Lecomte and General de Lattre de Tassigny? I had lost Réquin. I had last seen him at La Palisse on the fifteenth but we had come on the état-major of Paris at Tulle, near the Château de l'Espinasse. It couldn't have been impossible for General Colson's staff to get away. If I could do it with twenty-five girls one would imagine it within the power of the French officers in the same region. It looked almost as if they hadn't wanted to get away; were resigned; were prepared, perhaps like Gosset, to welcome their Calvary.
I knew that the French officials in England were against De Gaulle. All the Embassy, all the French mission including my old friend General Lelong, who had helped me when our unit was leaving for France, all the consulates were against the Free French movement. Indeed a high French official was doing his best to stop everyone from joining De Gaulle.
"Why, B.?"
"For various reasons. The instinct of the official to cling to his job. Pétain's prestige. De Gaulle to most of these people is nothing more than a franc-tireur."
"And in Bordeaux? Surely there must have been others in Reynaud's government who agreed with De Gaulle? Why did you bring only De Gaulle and his A.D.C., was there no one else who wanted to come?"
"There were only two men I knew in the Bordeaux government who were wholeheartedly. for going on with the war. De Gaulle was one. Georges Mandel the other. Mandel wouldn't come. I did my best to persuade him. He said he would leave later, not now. I knew that being a Jew he would be for it if he stayed. I felt a certain delicacy about alluding to this---but at last I said to him. 'In your case, Monsieur le Ministre,' And he smiled; 'It is just because of my case that I can't leave. But I'll join you in a few days! He must have left it too late."
It is a little difficult to recall my own state of mind at that time. It is always easier to remember what one did than what one felt, but it all seemed quite simple. I had come back to find my husband absorbed in the task of organizing French resistance; that I should take part in the effort was plainly indicated. I slipped into it without question and opened a canteen for the French recruits at Olympia within twenty-four hours of my arrival in London. Dorea, Maria, Cynthia and Rosie gave up going on leave and set to work with me, then others came forward; Kathleen Queensbery, Sylvia Henley, Mrs. Huxley were among these. A week later we opened a second canteen at the White City, with Kathleen Queensbery in charge, later on still a third at Euston. Sylvia Henley took over that very unhealthy place. By the end of July I had moved into camp with the Free French troops, was installed with a reorganized unit of twenty to thirty young women in a large hut, popularly known as a spider in Delville Barracks, Aldershot Command, and had become a general welfare officer in the Free French forces.
One might have thought perhaps that the Hadfield-Spears unit had had enough of the French Army or even for the moment of active service. It wasn't so. We had come back to find England awaiting invasion, how could we remain idle? We had tried each other out, we didn't want to disband. That at least is what I felt. I didn't want to lose these girls. Nor did it occur to me to say that I had had enough of the French Army. On the contrary I was identified, in my own eyes, with the French Army. I didn't know then that Guénin was going to hate the Hadfield-Spears Unit and that Dr. Bernard would one day attack me in the press because of what was going to happen two years later in Syria. As for General de Gaulle, if anyone had told me that he was one day going to turn all the batteries of his propaganda against my husband, I would have laughed.
I didn't know him. I hadn't even met him when I set to work at Olympia. I realized at once on meeting him that I would never know him, that here was a man whom it would be impossible to call a friend, but I believed in him. I meant what I said when I offered to organize and equip a new field hospital for the Free French and go with his troops overseas. I told him that the only active service I had ever known was with the French Army, that war for me meant France and that all I asked was to go on with the work I had begun in 1914. It was true, I remembered Ambulance 282 with affection and regret. I remembered General Réquin and Captain Lecomte with gratitude and undiminished confidence. I trusted them wherever they were ---and I believed in De Gaulle. He represented for me all that was left of the France I had been proud to serve.
My will to continue to serve, and this time under his orders, was a result of the creed I live by, of my faith not in Englishmen or Frenchmen or Americans but in human beings. I don't mean that I believe them to be fundamentally noble or good. I have come to no simple conclusion on that. I merely mean that they are for me the only reality, the one bit of the world that I can hope to understand and I know that for good or bad I am joined with them. I need them, in other words. My solidarity with them is my reason for being. I demand of them, illogically no doubt, that they should behave well, feel cheated if they do not and am comforted if I find one Frenchman, one Englishman, one American or one Arab, Hottentot, Chinaman brave and kindly and true.
The Battle of France had done nothing to change me. I had seen the collapse of the French Army, had been an eyewitness of a nation gone out of its mind with fear, had had to do with officers who had no faith or pride in their country and men who were too frail to stand up to the Germans; but I had found some Frenchmen with whom I would willingly stand on the deck of a sinking ship or with whom I was ready to try again the fortunes of war; it was enough.
I remember very well the first time that I met General de Gaulle and the curious discomfort I felt when he stalked into the room. It was almost like fear. It was certainly mingled with a painfully strong feeling of aversion. He had brought Madame de Gaulle to dine with us en famille. A gentle, charming, slight, timid figure, I turned to her with relief, watching De Gaulle out of the corner of my eye, not wanting to look straight at him. I watched him through the evening. His face never showed the slightest change of expression as he talked. No flicker of interest lifted his hooded eyelids. I was fascinated, the novelist came into play, I began to study him.
I had asked B. to describe him and had been puzzled by his difficulty in doing so. As a rule he was good at word portraits. Finally he had said, frowning as if intent on solving a riddle, that he was like a medieval monk, that he saw him in a cassock pushing his long hands up his sleeves. "You know," he had said, "the monks' gesture." Now as I watched De Gaulle I understood B.'s difficulty. I couldn't have described him to myself. It was as if when I looked full at him I saw nothing, nothing but a lifeless figure, wrapped in a palpable coldness that hid him as a damp cloth hides a sculptor's clay.
I met him often during the months that followed and I went on studying him. It was a part of B.'s plan to introduce him to men in London who could be useful to him, and he would dine once or twice a week. I wasn't there often but I would come up sometimes from Aldershot; we would make a party of five or six. General de Gaulle, two or three Englishmen, B. and myself. The dinners were sometimes uncomfortable but always interesting. De Gaulle could be eloquent, he could make himself very agreeable if he felt so inclined. But he was often biting, scathing in his criticisms of England and the English, just as much or more so of France. His long lips would grimace as if he were drinking gall and wormwood when he talked of France.
The bitterness he felt for his own country erupted like poisonous bile from his mouth. Gradually I began to understand---and I think I did understand him in those days---perhaps I do so even now.
I believe pride is the basis of his character. I think he felt the dishonor of France as few men can feel anything, and that he had literally taken on himself the national dishonor, as Christ according to the Christian faith took on himself the sins of the world. I think he was like a man during those days who had been skinned alive, and that the slightest contact with friendly, well-meaning people got him on the raw to such an extent that he wanted to bite, as a dog that has been run over will bite in its agony any would-be friend who comes to its rescue. The discomfort I felt in his presence was due, I am certain, to the boiling misery and hatred inside him.
His one relief, in fact his one pleasure, was to hate. And he hated all the world, but most especially those who tried to be his friends. He had never pretended to like the British, he didn't attempt to conceal his dislike now that he needed them. On the contrary, to be beholden to anyone was in itself hateful. To come to the British as a suppliant, with the disgrace of his nation burned on his forehead and in his heart, was intolerable. But he could look to no one else; his own people failed him; the French officials reviled or snubbed him, the troops turned their backs on him; the response to his appeal was pitiable. The weaker his position the more arrogant he became. Very well, let the British help him. They needed him as much as or more than he needed them. But let there be no pretense of friendliness or sentiment about it. The Prime Minister and General Spears were using him, he would use them. He would wring out of them the arms and equipment he needed, but he wouldn't pretend to be grateful. He wasn't grateful. He hated them for giving him what he had to have. One day he would pay them back.
In the meantime the last thing he wanted was to be on intimate terms with anyone. No one was to be allowed to penetrate his inner privacy or reach his heart. If he was repellent, and he was to me, it was because he wished to repel.
These things about De Gaulle came to me gradually as I watched him and my husband work out their problem. They were a queer pair. And the thing that bound them together was the queerest part of it all---for it was a common outraged love for a country, a nation. De Gaulle was France---literally, in his own eyes, he was his nation. When he spoke for France and in the name of France, he was stating a fact that he wanted desperately to believe to be true, he was uttering a shout of defiance to all the world, daring the world to deny that it was so. He was setting himself up not only as the symbol of the pride and grandeur of France but as the living proof that France was not conquered and had a right to be proud.
B. loved France as a man loves an adored woman who has disgraced herself. He too felt, though inevitably to a lesser degree, the shame and the hurt. When we talked with De Gaulle of Pétain, Weygand, Baudoin, B.'s lips would twist with the same painful bitterness, and the two would suddenly look strangely alike. Two men bound by a common disappointment, a common sense of outrage, two men forced to drink from a single bitter cup; it was a curious bond. They might quarrel, get on each other's nerves, long to be rid of one another, they couldn't get free. They were in bondage to France. What was going to tear them apart and turn De Gaulle against B. had to be something of more importance to the British soldier than France or her honor. It was. The time came when it was a question with B. of Great Britain's honor as against his feeling for France. There was naturally no choice. It is a queer tale.
But let us go back to the days when they were partners. De Gaulle told me a story one night at dinner in London that provided me with a clue to his state of mind. I asked him what he thought France would be like at the end of the war and he said, "It depends on how long the war lasts. When I was a boy I used to go with my brothers to stay with my grandmother for the holidays. She had a country place in the north of France. The Germans overran it in 1914 and installed a divisional staff in the house. They stayed there four years. Then when the war was over my grandmother asked us to come back again to visit her, and we went. But the house was dirty. The Germans had dirtied it. France will be like that if the war lasts too long."
I like to remember this and one other incident, for it isn't easy to remember De Gaulle, and that is another queer thing about him. I cannot see him at those dinner tables as I see the others. Lord Moyne, for instance, or General Ismay. It is as if his chair were empty. There is only his voice. Now as I think of him, he fades out, becomes a ghost. I see his photographs plastered on a hundred hoardings, framed in a thousand windows, but I cannot see him.
It wasn't his irascible temper nor the raw state of his nerves that puzzled me in the end. I understood all that. It was finally the sense of something wanting in him, the lack of a vital element needed in the make-up of a human being. I would have put him down as quite inhuman but for one glimpse of him. It was Christmas Day in '40. Madame de Gaulle was in Shropshire. De Gaulle had come to the French camp for midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and hadn't time to join his family, so B. brought him back to our cottage that was near by for Christmas Day. We were alone. Only De Gaulle and ourselves and my boy Michael, who was home from Oxford.
It is a small house, a Tudor farmhouse. De Gaulle looked very big in the low-ceilinged rooms, and it was a rather sad Christmas Day, for all of us. But after lunch De Gaulle talked to Michael. He relaxed, his face softened. He talked to him for an hour about Oxford and the young men of England, and when he went back to London, Michael, who is a very reserved chap, came to me and said, "I would like to serve under General de Gaulle."
"La France a perdu une bataille, elle n'a pas perdu la guerre."
"France has lost a battle, she has not lost the war."
England was playing host to a very large number of French visitors at a time when she was hard put to it to look after her own, but not many rallied to her side under the banner of General de Gaulle. Out of all the thousands of French soldiers quartered in Britain at the time of the armistice, only one battalion of the Foreign Legion, one of Chasseurs Alpins and one company of Fusiliers Marins chose to fight on. In addition to these disappointing numbers, other oddments were dribbling in. Gunners, airmen, cavalry officers; a motley collection turned up at Olympia. They had heard De Gaulle's appeal as they retreated across France and had managed to make their escape. We had met a dozen or more on the "Etric," among them Major Fruchaud, a distinguished surgeon from Angers who was to become the médecin chef of my new hospital. And as I have said, a goodly crowd of youngsters had got away, students chiefly from round about Rouen. They had been about to go up for their exams when the collapse came and had been warned in time. Some had been taken on board British ships at Cherbourg, others had made their escape in fishing boats. Some were mere children, many were attractive youngsters of good family. There were between six and eight hundred of them at Delville when I moved down there. They were commanded by a Colonel Renouard, who spent the whole war, I believe, in England. The Foreign Legion under Colonel Magrin Verneret, now known as General Montclar, were in Morval barracks next door. He had with him as A.D.C. a very tall, thin, beak-nosed officer called Captain Koenig. Taken all together, soldiers, sailors and airmen, the Free French forces numbered roughly three thousand men at the time of the expedition to Dakar.
THE Hadfield-Spears Unit had arrived at Plymouth on the "Etric" from St.-Jean-de-Luz the twenty-seventh of June, 1940. Re-formed and reequipped it embarked at Glasgow on the "Otranto" on March 24th, '41, for a destination unknown. Seven of the original team volunteered to go with me once again overseas. Barbara Graham, Kit Tatham-Warter, Cynthia Toulmin and Rosie Forbes of the M.T.C. and three nurses, Evelyn Fuhlroth, Nancy Wright and Josie Pearce. To these were added four M.T.C. drivers and five nurses, bringing each group up to eight in the new unit.
Dorea, Maria, Pellew, Jean Williams and Kelsey stayed on with me at Delville and with one exception at Old Dean Camp, Camberley, where we moved with the French troops in November. Jean joined us a year later in Egypt. Kelsey left from Delville with Colonel Fruchaud's light field ambulance on the Dakar expedition and she too came back to us, but only after four years when we had circled the Mediterranean, taken part in five campaigns, Syria, Libya, North Africa, Italy and France, and were within fifty miles of our starting place, St. Jean le Bassel. Maureen Schreiber went with her husband to Lisbon. Pip Scott-Ellis organized a hospital for the Poles with Dodo Annesley and Marjorie Fielden. Boddles joined the W.A.A.F.'s. MacManaway married, the poor Strawberry Queen was killed in a motor accident soon after reaching home; the others drifted away and were lost in the vast army of women mobilized for Britain's total war. I was sorry to lose them. There were several with whom I would gladly have started out again. Boddles had made us laugh and I have made fun of her, gentle fun I hope, for she is a plucky creature who can be counted on in a crisis and will always rise to an occasion as she did on that harassing day when we went to Auxerre. But my great disappointment was that Dorea couldn't come. I needed her. I had come to depend on her as on no one else. I continued to depend on her until the end of the war. During the nine months I spent in England she never left me; after that she was to support me still through thick and thin, but from a distance.
Our lodgings in Camberley were squalid. I had recruited several canteen workers and Mrs. Cook had sent me a new lot of drivers with cars and Barbara Hawkins as commandant, to drive for the Free French Brigade, so Aldershot Command requisitioned for us a big hideous empty house and furnished it, very largely as I remember with crockery. There were enough china plates for a regiment but very few chairs, our rations were more than adequate, the French army cook was not. I think he was a Corsican. I knew he was violent, for he would erupt every so often into the dining room in pursuit of our serving maid armed with a carving knife. The great trial was the lack of garage accommodation for the cars. They had to stand in the open all winter and the rumpus that went on in the cold weather over emptying radiators at night and warming up engines before daylight when the girls were ordered out on maneuvers was considerable. A noisy house, bleak, draughty, warm in spots, icy in others, with doors banging, feet bringing in snow and mud and pounding up and down stairs, the telephone ringing all day, gramophones going in half a dozen rooms at once, voices calling, quarreling sometimes, laughing most times, not a bad house really. Looking back I see that summer, autumn and winter of '40-'41 as a succession of disordered, uncomfortable days made tolerable by the grim hilarity of the girls, lighted now and then by flashes of fear, for the blitz was on, and dominated by Dorea's good-humored commanding presence.
Hawkins was in command of the drivers, Jean in charge of the camp hospital, but Dorea ran the canteen, our noisy household and me. The thought of going abroad without her was bitter.
We had found faithful Dorothy Van Tets holding the fort at Carlton House Terrace. Sir Robert Hadfield was dying in a country house near Epsom, Lady Hadfield was in her villa in the south of France. It appeared impossible to get her home. Lord Dawson, Sir Robert's physician, his solicitor, Mr. Thomas, Lady Hadfield's secretary and I sent repeated wires. She answered that she couldn't get away but insisted that all was well. She remained at Cap Ferat for two years. We were allowed to go on using the dining room at Carlton House Terrace as an office until Sir Robert's death, then moved to a room in the Carlton Hotel. But there was no question of any financial help from Lady Hadfield in our new venture and we expected none. Nor luckily did we need it. I had sent out a circular letter to my friends in England asking for contributions toward a mobile hospital for the Free French and had had a disappointing response. Leslie Benson came to the rescue. She had just returned from Washington and represented the British War Relief Society in New York. She rang me up one morning to say that she had had my letter, that there was a large fund in America that had been collected for France and that she didn't see why, now that France was out of the war, I shouldn't have some of it for my Free French hospital. She would cable, she said, and put it to the chairman, Mr. Appleby. The answer came as I remember in less than a week. The British War Relief would finance my unit on condition that I applied to no other committee for assistance. I agreed naturally. They sent me a check for twenty thousand pounds, and our financial worries were over.
But it seemed only fair to Lady Hadfield to keep her name with my own in the new hospital did she wish it. She had made it all possible in the beginning. I wanted to show my gratitude. So we put her the question by telegram, received her enthusiastic approval, and the Hadfield-Spears Unit entered on a new lease of life.
The organization of this my third hospital was identical in principle with the other two, but its make-up was different. I put the same conditions in a letter to General de Gaulle that I had put to Marshal Joffre and General Gamelin, emphasizing once more the Anglo-French character of the unit and my complete control of the personnel féminin. General de Gaulle accepted the conditions and embodied them in a note de service that was in fact the charter of the hospital, a document of considerable importance to which I was going to be obliged to refer more than once during the years that followed. I had needed no such charter in 1914-1918, nor in 1939-1940. The armies of Marshals Joffre and Foch and of General Gamelin had allowed not the slightest interference with my authority in my own unit, but I needed such a document strangely enough with the forces of General de Gaulle and I must have realized this for in addition to the note de service there was an interchange of letters between General de Gaulle and myself making the status of the unit and my own position as directrice perfectly clear and these were to prove useful when various people began to show a desire to do my work for me.
Just why I was uneasy in regard to my authority over the personnel féminin I do not know. Possibly because Colonel Magrin Verneret had attempted to impose on me a couple of ladies of his acquaintance, perhaps because the whole adventure seemed so uncertain. There was no question of recruiting French nurses, for there was at the time no corps of French nurses in England to draw from. And I needed more men than women. We were going, this time, a very long way and must carry enough tentage to house our entire staff as well as the hospital services and a hundred patients, so what we needed most were heavy trucks and men to drive them who could act as orderlies when we were deployed. But when I put this to General de Gaulle he answered that with so few troops at his disposal he could not spare men to drive for us or act as orderlies in a hospital, he counted on me to supply them.
Dorothy and I were for a moment nonplused. Where were we to find thirty young men suitable, ready and free to go overseas with a French hospital? The answer was in the U.S.A. on the one hand, among the conscientious objectors of Britain on the other. So we sent an S.O.S. to the American Field Service in New York for drivers and another to the Friends' Ambulance Unit in London for hospital orderlies. Both appeals were answered. The American Field Service would supply a group of drivers, the Friends' Ambulance Unit would find us young men with hospital experience.
We seem to have acted on faith like the early Christians; we had found the men but where were we to find the vehicles, and the tents and all the rest? I remember making my way full of hope into the Transport Section of the War Office and starting out to explain to a kindly major what my idea was. "We must above all," I insisted, "be mobile, that is more important than anything else."
The very benign major lifted a grizzled eyebrow. "Just how," he asked, "do you envisage your unit? Is it to be a field ambulance or a casualty clearing station? Our field ambulances carry no beds, only stretchers. A C.C.S. on the other hand is not mobile. It depends for movement on the transport of the division to which it belongs."
"I want," I answered, "to combine the best points of each. Beds we must have and linen and pillows, the full equipment, in fact, of a C.C.S. of one hundred beds, but we must be able to move anywhere at any time under our own steam. How many trucks will we need?"
We worked it out together, the major and Dorothy and I. Fifteen three-ton Bedford trucks and as many fifteen-hundred-weight would do us, with five Ford V-8's to transport the nurses and officers. Very well, but where were we to get them? I remembered our motley convoy that had trundled its way across France, and my heart sank. To drag the twin of our old Bedford across a desert was unthinkable, to buy desert-worthy trucks in the trade was impossible, there were none to be had. The War Office was our only hope, and the War Office played up. They allowed us to purchase our vehicles, tents, beds, cookers and ward equipment from army stock, and once the permission was granted a dozen officers came to life at the end of Dorothy's telephone, ready and eager to help. Dorothy once more had come into her own. I need not worry about our equipment, blitz or no blitz Dorothy would find and collect what was needed. The question of staff was more difficult. General de Gaulle's medical service was practically nonexistent. Colonel Fruchaud, the one notable surgeon who had rallied to him, was going on ahead. He proposed to join us somewhere at some time, but we couldn't start out without at least a skeleton staff of officers. It took months to find them. I began to feel that the hospital would never take shape but at last a surgeon, Commandant Durbach, was presented to me, he would be our médecin chef until we found Fruchaud, then a doctor and doctoress, man and wife, Monsieur and Madame Asquins, then another medical man, Captain Jibery, a Breton from Quimper.
Commandant Durbach was square and heavy with a rather handsome but unfriendly face. Dr. Asquins had the look of a fair plump cherub, his wife was a mere wisp of a thing in large spectacles. Captain Jibery's eyes had an enigmatic glitter behind his pince-nez. I was a trifle dismayed at the thought of starting off into the unknown with so many strangers. For it was literally the unknown. When it came to recruiting new nurses and drivers, I couldn't tell them where we were going because I didn't know. Abyssinia? Eritrea? Italian Somaliland? Who could tell? My friends at the War Office talked of the tropics and tropical kit and tropical disease. They were eloquent on the subject of mosquito nets and mosquito boots and quinine, but beyond this they wouldn't go. All I could promise the young women I interviewed was a long journey to some place where we would be very hot, probably get dysentery and malaria but not, if we were prudent and lucky, typhoid, typhus, cholera or bubonic plague.
They were not dismayed, the young women. Mrs. Cook produced a couple of dozen M.T.C. volunteers who were first vetted by T. W. and reduced to twelve, then interviewed by me. It was a difficult business to choose. As I looked into their faces, listened to their voices, I realized what a gamble it was. For this was not like going to France. If I chose wrong and a girl turned out badly I couldn't send her home. The same applied to the nurses. Some who applied were too old, some too young, some didn't look strong. It was all very tricky. Daphne Burnside, M.T.C., was dangerously alluring, but there was something very sweet and good-humored about her. I was right about Daphne. Joy Goode looked sturdy and inspired confidence, she would stay the course; I was wrong, she was married to Mervyn Phipps from my house in the Lebanon four months later. Edith Irving might have a temper but her nursing experience was very great and her giggle very infectious. She might turn up trumps. Right again. She did. I learned to count on Irving. But how could I tell what we were going to come up against and what was an ideal recruit for our adventurous enterprise with a future as vague and uncertain as ours? I didn't know. I could only have answered, "Someone as balanced and hardheaded as Dorea, someone with a touch of genius and a sense of humor like Barbara, with T. W.'s phlegmatic audacity and Cynthia's pride and Rosie's astringent charm." Well, that quartette was coming, thank God. As long as they were with me, the old spirit of the unit would be kept alive.
General de Gaulle's long shadow lies across the dark landscape of that English summer and winter. I met him frequently but knew him no better. B. left with him for Dakar on the twenty-ninth of August. They were gone three months. Extracts from my inadequate diary recall the atmosphere of that queer time when the sirens were screaming and each livid day revealed new gashes in the London streets.
Aug. 18th, '40. The legion is going abroad. The king has been down to inspect them. De Gaulle and B. in attendance. They looked a fine tough lot, very chic in their white socks. We shall miss them. Colonel Magrin Verneret gave us lunch after the parade. A queer man with a soft voice and snake's eyes. He gives me the creeps. He has a hole in his head, a wound from the last war. You can see the cavity pulsating under the skin. He is always telling me that he is a tête brulée and cannot be expected to behave like an ordinary human being.
Sept. 17th. The invasion was to have been this week end. Van Tets reported on Friday that all shipping had been cleared out of the London docks. This might mean only that the Port of London is untenable but as all leave was stopped and the papers were full of German concentrations on the French coast it looked as if it might really come.
London was horrid yesterday. Lunched at the Carlton Grill. Visited Sylvia Henley at the Euston Canteen, then the White City. The last of the French troops left there for France this morning. Kathleen Queensbery has gone to work in the East End.
I don't think I am frightened. A slight but very slight reluctance to go to the Euston Canteen. Sylvia perfectly calm on her top floor with wrecked buildings all around the place and Euston Station, the target, a couple of hundred yards away.
I find it no great effort to carry on during a bombardment, but then I'm not short of sleep like people in offices in London. Delusions help. One, that speeding through the streets you will miss the damn things.
But London under bombardment strikes the imagination. A great beast, peaceable, good-natured, chained down, wounded again and again, roaring, showing its teeth, but unable to leap up, get to grips with its swarming attackers.
Sept. 20th. Was to have met Lavinia at Punch's Club for lunch but it disappeared in the night. Went to East End yesterday. Barbara driving. All my M.T.C. girls have volunteered to do a week at a time in Mile End with Kathleen Queensbery. The northwest corner of Berkeley Square is gone, fine house disemboweled, a piece of red stair carpet waving in the wind from what is left of an upstairs landing.
Oct. 5th. Am just beginning to realize that we are living in a world where everything dreadful that we put from us saying, "That couldn't happen," is more than likely to happen, such as being killed with one's soup spoon in one's mouth. Leslie Benson came over from Windsor, she said, "I no longer know whether a thing has happened or whether I dreamt it."
Was interrupted by phone to be told there had been damage at Strathearn Place and hurried up to London. The two houses next to ours in Hyde Park Square are gone. Big bits of them crashed on to us. All our windows are blown out by blast---ceiling in my bedroom has fallen on my bed. There seems to be a biggish hole in the roof. Very dirty and dismal with the rain coming in, rivulets of mud running down the stairs. But there was a kind of poetry about the desolation, the eloquence of trivial objects, contents of cupboards strewn about, whitish dust inches deep over everything, like ashes, and the view from the stair landing is like the last days of Pompeii. I remember dinner with B. in the dining room-lighted candles on the, table. The plates in the pantry cupboard came from Strasbourg. Many are broken. They were made in the factory we visited at Sarguemines. Now they are bombed in London.
Dec. 18th. Impossible to keep this diary up to date. B. came back a fortnight ago. Dakar seems to have been a heartbreaking business. But Koenig made a fine job of Libreville. Magrin Verneret would not take command as he refuses to fight other Frenchmen so Koenig conducted the operations.
The news from Greece and our offensive in the Western Desert dwarfs everything else. My little affairs are being complicated by being bombed out of the Carlton Hotel, but my luck holds. I slept at Strathearn Place the night before the bombing---same thing at the Carlton. Had been using the bedroom next to our office when in London---missed trouble by one night.
Dec. 28th. Eve Curie lunched with us today. B. was very impressed with her at Bordeaux. They talked of France, naturally, of Pétain, Weygand, Huntzinger and De Gaulle. She feels that Pétain is doing his best to resist. She is anxious that De Gaulle should be identified with French resistance inside France. B. believes Huntzinger to be the best of the Vichy lot. She is a curiously fascinating creature with a remarkably brave and lucid mind.
Jan. 8th. De Gaulle and Lord Cranbourne dined last night at the Ritz. De Gaulle talked of mechanical warfare. "Les masses," he said, "ne se battent plus." I asked how many armored divisions he considered necessary to defeat Germany. He said twenty-five and added that it was in the British genius to develop such a mobile fighting force to perfection, as a champion polo team. "Then there need be," I said, "no wholesale massacre." He answered, "Not on the battlefield. Mais la nature se venge toujours. II y aura des massacres; des morts de faim, des épidémies."
Our organization is almost complete in spite of setbacks. Dorothy told me this morning that we've lost all our hospital linen and blankets. They were lying in store in the city. The warehouse was destroyed yesterday.
Jan. 27th. Weeks go by and I write down nothing. Why? I know that the plain record of my days would be strange to read afterwards. Perhaps I don't believe that there will be an afterwards for me. Or it may be that any mental effort beyond that of coping with problems of getting enough cakes to satisfy our French youngsters is beyond me. The war is certainly stupefying. There is the need, too, of not thinking ahead. Had the horrors last night when we dined with General le Gentilhomme. The talk turned on water trucks. We hadn't thought of them until the other day. We must carry enough water, he says, to last us five days at the rate of two gallons per man per day. Estimating for 100 patients and 100 staff---that means 2000 gallons, and water trucks only hold 730 gallons each. We can't afford eight trucks. Our money will just run to four. But one of Dorothy's keenest supporters at the W.O. has sent six to our depot at Woking. Leslie says to keep the lot and trust to Mr. Appleby in New York to come across with the money. "It would be dreadful," she said, "if you were stranded." The gravity of her sweet face didn't seem to me to refer to any reality. The idea that we might die of thirst if we don't have the trucks doesn't make sense to me. But the photos of Abyssinia gave me the pip. The back of beyond stared from the glossy prints. Do I find the mountains of Abyssinia beautiful? No. Not I. A voice inside me began whispering. "You can't do it. What has impelled you to let yourself in for this?"
I don't know the answer. Vanity, curiosity, sense of adventure, the will to keep young, defy time, distance, all these vague discreditable reasons come into it and muddle up the decent impulse to do what one can in this bloody war. Now, whatever I feel, I'm in for it and couldn't back out if I wanted to.
Darkness and mud, rain and snow and a bedraggled crowd of French youngsters floundering through the stormy dark to our draughty canteen. Dorea, Barbara and Oscar Cachera, our stalwart French orderly, drawing beer from casks under the counter. Maria in charge of the milk bar, Cynthia and Rosie selling razor blades, shoelaces, chocolates and cigarettes---myself behind mountains of cakes that melt into the curly mouths of the children who have come from Rouen and Beauvais and Paris to shiver through an English winter and try to learn to fight for a country that has willed not to fight any more.
I was very sorry for them. They were innocent, these youngsters. They had no arrière-pensée, had not rallied to General de Gaulle for ignoble reasons as some seemed to have done. Sometimes they would come up to the cake counter and look into my face with wide unhappy eyes and say in desperate childlike earnest, "Il faut soulever la France. Will you help us? We have confidence in you." And I would be reassured.
I needed to be reassured. There were days when I asked myself if I had a right to take these girls abroad with such a confused and heterogeneous force. It wasn't so much the fact that the band of magnificent madmen who had rallied to De Gaulle appeared on closer acquaintance neither quite as magnificent nor as mad as I thought, it was rather a feeling of incoherence in the whole force. The legion had gone and didn't return. The youngsters were being trained to be Chasseurs Alpins. Colonel Renouard, who was camp commandant, spent most of his time in London and Colonel Cazou, who had turned up to command the troops, spent much of his time playing bridge, and save for the boys in training there seemed to be almost no Frenchmen in the ranks. There had been every nationality in the legion, here there were Gooms, there were blacks, but of French fighting troops there seemed to be almost none.
And what of France? What was going on there? No one knew. There was some coming and going. Occasionally one of our young companions would disappear and come back. Sometimes he didn't come back. If he did, his news was secret and not to be told, but one could gather from the look on his face that it wasn't reassuring.
They weren't happy, these men. How could they be? I didn't understand then what I know now, that added to their sense of strangeness was a feeling that perhaps they had been traitors to France in joining De Gaulle and the British. Pierre Bourdan makes the point in his book Les fours d'Attente and I am sure that it was true of some of the young men in Camberley. I couldn't have thought of this at the time. I was sorry for them but I thought they were at least buoyed up by the conviction that they were acting as loyal Frenchmen. I assumed that they were animated by the same passionate fanaticism that inspired De Gaulle. I don't think they were. I believe they were torn at times by doubt of the rightness of their cause, and my impression is that De Gaulle himself did little to help them. He remained aloof. He seemed to make no friends among them, and to want no friends.
I would go up to London and find B. in the throes of some new crisis with the F.O. or the Admiralty or the Ministry of Shipping. De Gaulle had moved his H.Q. to Carlton Gardens and the Spears Mission was installed in Gwydder House, Whitehall, opposite the Admiralty. It had become a huge affair with members attached to it from every government department. Colonel Archdale of the W.O. was in charge of the military section with which I had most to do. Major Burton was his second. Michael Knox (a captain in those days) divided his time between the mission and Camberley. George Mercer-Nairn had gone to Dakar and had stayed on in Africa. There were many others, all heart and soul in the Free French movement, but Michael Knox was possibly the greatest enthusiast of the lot. I was to find him in Cairo, in Libya, in North Africa, fighting the British on behalf of De Gaulle as B. had been doing in London since the beginning.
I would wait downstairs for a chance to speak to my husband and be ushered at last into his office only to be bundled out again two minutes later.
General Catroux was expected. He had arrived from Indo-China. Indo-China took its orders from Vichy and was prepared to receive the Japs. So General Catroux, who was not prepared to receive the Japs, had left with Madame Catroux. We the British had brought them back. It was awkward. General Catroux was a five-star general and had been governor general in Indo-China. It would be difficult for him to serve under General de Gaulle. He was due now. He had met De Gaulle that morning for the first time. I must vanish. General Catroux was announced. I had a momentary impression of a small spare man with mournful eyes before I withdrew.
I was always being bundled out. If not for Catroux, for Muselier or Le Gentilhomme, who had been whisked back from Djibouti, or someone.
I would seize my moment and ask B. my question. Did he really believe I was right in going on with this business?
What? B. would stare uncomprehending, then before I could answer go back to his papers, ring for his secretary, or Colonel Archdale would come in with some problem of equipment, or someone would come through on the phone, and I would be given the great treat of listening to one side of a row.
"God Almighty, what do they think we are trying to do? What? No shipping space? Until when? You know as well as I do that that's no good. Our own people? I know, I've heard that before. But certainly, every time. No. I won't, you can tell them that's final. Christ, what a mess."
Did he, I would repeat when there was a moment's lull, really think I should take this new hospital overseas with the Free French?
His answer was always the same. As far as the hospital was concerned I must do as I liked. He didn't want me to go but it was for me to decide. He himself held to what he had said when I first got back. The result of the recruiting among the French troops in England was lamentable. That made no difference. As a fighting force the Free French were negligible. No matter. He held to his belief that our only hope of keeping the French nation from coming in against us was to have a French force, however small, fighting with us.
I think now that he was mistaken. From what I have learned since we re-entered France, my impression is that the resistance movement inside France did not draw its inspiration from General de Gaulle and the Free French forces. Its impetus came from the Germans, its inspiration from the British. It was our British news, listened to secretly by ten thousand families, that kept the flame burning.
B. right or wrong was convinced, and he convinced me. He had staked everything on De Gaulle and would stick to him, so it seemed then, until France was liberated. I would go back to our sordid lodgings in Camberley determined to do the same and would find Dorea, Barbara, T. W., Rosie and Cynthia huddled over the fire. Someone would produce a bottle of gin. Half an hour later we would flounder through the dark to the canteen.
Mud and more mud, then snow and a biting bitter wind sweeping the camp, and the cities of Britain shaking under the German bombardment, and all the young manhood of Britain in training camps like ours, and the telephone ringing in the canteen or the mess and voices calling out of the dark and the distance, voices of young men who had once upon a time danced in London ballrooms with these girls of mine and were now scattered over the country waiting to go overseas. How strange they sounded, those far-away voices, so small, so urgent, so wistful. Could Cynthia come up for the evening? Could Rosie? "A spot of leave," the voice said. "A jolly evening."
"Couldn't they come? Where? When? Where are you? Are you there?---Hallo---Are you there?" Air raid warning purple. Air raid warning red. The voice was gone. The raid was on. Almost all the voices are silent now.
And at last I wrote in my diary on February 8, 1941 :
The hospital equipment has gone. The convoy left on Monday morning at 8:30 for Penarth, Cardiff, where the stuff is to be loaded on to a tramp steamer. It, the convoy, took up two and a half miles of road, quite impressive. De Gaulle inspected the unit last week in a bitter cold fog. If he was pleased he didn't show it. But our forty vehicles made a very good effect. The boys had smartened themselves up and Le Gentilhomme at least was delighted.
Very cold when they left for Wales. Parceled out my warm combinations among the girls who drove the six water buggies. The convoy went wrong in Cheltenham as the D.R. didn't turn up. But they got to their destination eventually, came back by train to Reading and as the bus sent by Aldershot to fetch them got lost, they didn't turn up till 3:30 A.M. but were quite recovered by lunch time. They have scattered now until the 20th. But Major Knox has learned from the W.O. that we shan't leave till next month so I must make new arrangements.
This waiting for a ship is most exasperating. If we don't get off until March, if the fighting is all over in East Africa, what do we do? Our equipment has gone to Port Sudan. How could we be switched back? Benghazi fell yesterday. We've occupied half Eritrea already. Abyssinia surely can't hold out another three months. Perhaps we'll be sent to Greece---Salonika---God knows.
B. is going abroad again, with General de Gaulle. A quick trip, by air to West Africa, then across by way of the Chad. This is all I know. He is so afraid I will chatter that he tells me nothing.
March 15th , '41. We leave on Thursday 20th. A series of pink papers marked secret contain our instructions. B. has gone. He and De Gaulle left the day before yesterday by motor to Southampton to get their plane, then came back. Am grateful for the extra time with him. The anguish of the first good-by couldn't be repeated. One can't suffer beyond a given point---so we were comparatively cheerful. I said it was a good omen, that he would surely turn up wherever I was when I had given up expecting him.
But he and De Gaulle only mean to be gone six weeks. So they will probably be on their way home by the time we get to Port Sudan.