 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
THERE are some little brown nuns in a place called Deraa in Syria. They are Christian Arabs and they are very poor, modest and gentle. Their faces are darkened by the burning sun that beats down on their dry stony land, and their black robes are often powdered with yellow dust. They do not belong to a great order like the Sisters of Providence in St. Jean le Bassel, but like them they keep a school, and they opened its gates to us and took us in with our loaded trucks and our noisy French, British and American staff. We filled their school with our wounded and their washhouse with our bloodstained linen. We parked our trucks and put up our tents in their scorched fields. We brought bombs in our wake and airplanes that machine-gunned our tents each morning and blood and pain and death, and they helped us unceasingly during the three weeks that we spent with them, even when they were very frightened.
Deraa isn't much of a place. It lies in the desert on the edge of the Jebel Druse just inside the Syrian frontier. If you take the road from Jerusalem to Damascus via Nablus and cross the Jordan Valley at Beisan you will pass through it but you won't be tempted to stop; it holds nothing of interest for travelers nor any obvious beauty. The Arab town on the plateau to the south of the deep wadi is beautiful in the evening when the mud walls of its flat-roofed houses turn from biscuit color to apricot and salmon pink, but the European quarter on the north side of the wadi is ugly. It has one long street lined with low square stone houses and on either side of the street is the flat desert.
It was the eighth of June and very hot when we arrived. We had moved up in convoy with the Free French troops from Palestine spending two nights on the road. The khamsin was blowing like a wind out of a furnace, clouds of yellow dust were rolling down the street to envelop the ugly houses, the few starved trees and the straggling troops in billows of yellow fog and the windshields of our cars were thick with flies. There were flies everywhere, myriads and myriads of flies.
We knew that we were to set up the hospital in Deraa, but where?
Every house seemed to be occupied by troops. The street and the desert coming up between the houses to the edge of the street were filled with army trucks. We had parked our lorries to one side and were waiting for orders when I saw a little creature trotting toward us against the wind. She was evidently a nun. She wore a long heavy black dress of some woolen stuff and a limp white kerchief bound round her head. Her face was withered and lined, she had gentle eyes; she smiled as she came up to me and spoke in French.
"You are an ambulance unit, madame?"
"Yes, my mother."
"You seek a place for your hospital?"
"We do."
"Then you are welcome to our school, it is empty, all our pupils have gone home because of the war."
I presented Commandant Durbach, and she bowed clasping her eager brown hands together.
"Will you not make use of my school, Monsieur le Commandant, I have five sisters with me and we would like to be of service. It is not a big building but there is a shed and an outhouse. "Come," she said, "I will show you."
So Durbach and I followed her down the street and turned into her gate. There were two gates and a drive up to the front door. The low school building formed three sides of a square. There was room for many ambulances in the dusty courtyard. With sufficient crowding we could perhaps get our hundred beds into the classrooms. The outhouse would do for an operating room and the shed next to it, near the gate, for resuscitation and reception; we could live in our tents in the adjoining field.
"And there is water," she said, with a proud lift of the head. "Look, here is our well. It is good sweet water. Ours is the only well left in Deraa. They blew up the others."
I looked into her small worn face.
"And how is it, my Mother, that they spared your well?"
She gave a little laugh. "When the officer came, the captain who commanded here, to blow up our well, I sat down on the top of it and said, 'If you blow up my well you blow me up with it,' so he went away." And she laughed again as pleased and proud as a child.
"Was he a very tall fair man?" I asked.
"Yes, he was tall."
I looked at Durbach, he nodded.
"He is a prisoner now, my Mother. He was wounded and brought to our camp in Irbid last night."
Her face was distressed for a moment, then she gave a defiant toss of the head and said, "He would have left us to die of thirst."
I have wondered since what the nuns of Deraa thought of it all when they found themselves caught between two opposing French forces. They belonged to the parish of the curé of Suedia. It was he who gave me news of them long after when I met him at lunch with Colonel Oliva-Roget, French delegate at the time in the Jebel Druse. Oliva-Roget had been in Syria for many years. It was only after the battle for Damascus was won that he joined the Free French. Did the nuns secretly take sides? Did they pass silent judgment on these blood brothers who were fighting each other, or ask the curé what lay behind it all? I don't think so. I don't believe they understood anything about politics or had the least wish to understand. They withdrew to their own modest quarters at the back of the school, letting us do as we liked with the building, even giving up to us the Mother's little sitting room by the front door. General le Gentilhomme was nursed in it and Jack Hasey, the American of the Foreign Legion who was shot through the throat, and other desperately wounded officers, and we wrought havoc in the schoolrooms. We filled them with the horrid refuse of shattered bodies. We had to spread all the paraphernalia of nursing out on the verandas. Long trestle tables piled with drums of sterile dressings, and bandages, medicine bottles, baskets of clean linen, others of dirty linen, baskets of salines in cartons, bedpans, urinals. It was impossible to keep bedpans out of sight. There was no place to put them, save on the veranda, to greet De Gaulle when he came or Catroux. Why not? What did elegance matter in the violent press of work, in the frenzied effort to save men's lives.
The nuns would come each morning to collect our hideous sheets. I would find them at all hours of the day on their back porch, bending their slender forms over crimsoned washtubs or spreading clean linen in the sun, but they never asked me why it was that we had come with our motley force of Indian and British and French troops to bring war to their country. And though many very important personages came to visit our patients, including General Wilson and General de Gaulle and General Catroux (even General Wavell himself stopped one day at the gate to wish us well), the diminutive Mother Superior of Deraa has a place all her own in my memory of the Syrian campaign, for she was innocent and without guile, she was an Arab who loved the Lord Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother and her heart was full of loving compassion for all men in the midst of a fratricidal battle of great bitterness and fury and hatred.
For the fighting in Syria was a horrid business for the Free French Brigade, and I fancy the British who were responsible for launching the Free French against the Vichy troops realize now that it was a mistake. Whether it was General de Gaulle's idea to begin with or General Wavell's I do not know. I had a worm's not a bird's eye view of the affair from the Free French side, I only saw what I saw and heard what I heard as a nurse in the Free French forces, was involved deeply, intimately in the drama, in a hundred dramas, as I prepared the bodies of Frenchmen shot by other Frenchmen for the operating table, but my horizon was bounded by the pain and rage of the men we looked after.
I know that for most of the French who fought with us for Damascus the whole campaign, like the armistice at the end of it, was a bitter disappointment. Some put a brave face on it, pretended to take it lightly. De Chevigny swaggered into our reception hut, his black poodle at his heels, and said gaily, "I've a little bullet in my belly, take it out quickly please, I must be back with my men tomorrow." And General le Gentilhomme when he was brought to us with a fractured arm seemed to be content with the way things were going, but to our grizzled legionnaires as to most of our French wounded it was a case for the gnashing of teeth, for there was a battalion of the legion fighting on the other side.
When I call to mind those suffocating, fly-infected schoolrooms smelling of blood and gangrene and sweat and disinfectant, the beds crowded so close together that the stretcher bearers could pass in and out only with the greatest difficulty, I feel again, not the physical suffering of the men's mangled bodies---that I was used to, it was an old story---but the festering pain of their minds. And as they tossed and writhed in their beds, as they raved in delirium, as they died, I know that one thought tormented many, namely, that this had been done to them by their own people.
Just why they had expected a different reception it is difficult to say. Who or what had misled them into believing that the French Army in Syria would refuse to fight against them I do not know. B. didn't talk of such things when he came to see me. They were secret matters and not for my ears. What I had heard was the excited talk of junior French officers in Castina camp. Judging from the rumors flying round the brigade, a man called Collet was the key to the situation. For days before we took the road we kept hearing about Colonel Collet and his Cherkess horsemen. Collet it appeared had been in Syria for years. He had stayed on under Mittelhauser after the armistice. But now he was ready to come over to us and bring his cavalry with him. He had been in touch with De Gaulle. He held Syria in his hands.
Wishful thinking? The blind conviction of men on fire with the rightness of the cause that their kinsmen must feel as they did in spite of all proof to the contrary? De Gaulle presumably shared the belief as did the high British command. Why else should the Free French Brigade have joined in the campaign, and the conduct of operation on the Damascus front been placed in the hands of General le Gentilhomme? The facts of the case gave a plain answer. The British were counting on the Free French to swing the Vichy French troops over to us. No secret information was needed to understand that. But when Colonel Collet did cross the frontier with only five hundred men, the disappointment among the British was evident but his arrival was hailed by the Free French with desperate triumph.
We heard of it at Irbid. Only five hundred men? No matter, our French friends declared, the rest would come along once we moved on Damascus. Anything else was unthinkable. Stand by Vichy when Vichy had allowed the Germans to use the airdromes of Mezzé and Rayak? The thing was impossible. Why the regiments over there on the other side were full of friends, brother officers with whom they had been at St. Cyr. Once they could get in touch with them, everything would be different, we would see; the whole French force of thirty-eight thousand officers and men were only waiting for the chance to join us. The faces of our young friends were alight as they talked; they laughed, they almost cried with excitement. But Koenig, passing our convoy in his small open car, looked grim. And De Gaulle? Who will ever know what De Gaulle was feeling at that crucial hour?
We had reached Suez on the second of May expecting to be shipped back to Port Sudan and to proceed to Abyssinia, but much had happened during the six weeks that we had been at sea, and the war in the Middle East had entered on a new phase. Things had gone well in East Africa. We had regained British Somaliland toward the end of March, had occupied Addis Ababa during the first week of April, the Eritrean campaign was over, but the Axis was having things pretty much their own way everywhere else. The Germans had swept through the Balkans occupying Salonika on the ninth of April, Belgrade on the thirteenth and Athens on the twenty-seventh. A bad month, April, '41. We had spent it very enjoyably on board ship. The war in Greece was lost while we lazed on deck, met before dinner for cocktails, danced and played bridge after, or gazed at the indifferent moon and stars from the boat deck. The evacuation of our forces from Greece was completed as the "Otranto" sailed up the Red Sea. General Fryberg was in Crete with his New Zealand Division, awaiting the battle that was to cost him so dear and the long ding-dong struggle in the Western Desert had been going against us all the month. We had evacuated Benghazi on the third and by the twenty-sixth the Axis forces had crossed the Egyptian frontier at Solum; the siege of Tobruk had begun.
Immediately the ship anchored an officer of the Spears Mission came aboard to tell me that B. was in Cairo, that I was to join him for two days at the British Embassy then rejoin the unit and take it to Palestine. He was followed by Colonel Fruchaud, who had come up from Eritrea, and Mr. Stokes of the American Field Service recently arrived with fifteen drivers from New York. Stokes told me that our hospital equipment had been safely disembarked at Port Said and that one of my own cars was awaiting me on the quay.
To find B. in Cairo when I had been persuaded that he would have left for England with General de Gaulle before I arrived, to find the trucks we had motored to Wales in February safe at Port Said and one of our Ford V8's with an American Field Service driver from New York awaiting me on the quay was breath-taking. I was whisked off the ship, whirled up to Cairo, spent two days with B. at the British Embassy---the Lampsons were old friends and very kind---began to feel very ill (was it the heat?) , called on Madame Catroux, lunched with General Wavell, tried to find out what was going to happen to my unit, began to be worried by a flaming sore spot on my shoulder, said good-by to B., was whirled back to Suez and proceeded with the unit to Palestine by train in a daze of heat and pain, to find myself in bed next day with an outsize carbuncle on my shoulder and a high temperature in No. 12 General Hospital in Sarafand. And there I stayed for four long weeks.
A bad moment to choose in which to be laid up. The unit was quartered near me in Sarafand, the French Brigade in Castina camp twenty miles to the south. Barbara had to take charge, establish liaison with brigade headquarters and keep the unit together. But it wasn't yet a unit.
Could one hope, I would ask Barbara as she sat by my bed in No. 12 General Hospital, that our wild young millionaires from New York would make friends with our mild British conscientious objectors? No, one could not. And what of the girls? Well, the girls were having a very good time. The "Nannies" had acquired any number of chaps, there was a swimming club at Jaffa, there were horses to ride. And the new French officers who had joined us at Suez and the two French nurses, Thérèse and Giselle, whom I had chaperoned on the ship and who were still with us? What were they doing? Barbara didn't know. The French spent most of their time at Castina. She didn't see much of them. Nor did I. Commandant Durbach did not come to see me in hospital, Jibery came I think, I'm not sure. Madame Asquins one day brought me some jonquils, but Fruchaud was the only one who showed any real interest in my welfare. He would come each day to ask after my health and discuss the affairs of the unit.
A strange swarthy man, heavy jowled, hot tempered, moody and very restless, he proved to be nearly as quarrelsome and intolerant as Gosset, but to me during the year and a half of our association his attitude was faultless. For he was a man of the world as well as a distinguished surgeon, he had many friends in England, was at home in our great London hospitals and was entirely free from the resentment that with so many lesser Frenchmen amounted almost to a mental disease at this time. He had moreover an active, enthusiastic mind, a great love of music and an insatiable curiosity for things historical. His sight-seeing expeditions in Palestine, Syria and the Jebel Druse were to become a feature of our life in the north. He could run Daphne off her long legs, reduce even T. W. to breathless exasperation, trekking across rugged wastes and scrambling over ruins. He could be in fact, and often was, a delightful companion but he wasn't happy at Sarafand. He would sit silent, his legginged legs crossed, his face lowering; he appeared to be hiding something. What did it mean? I was afraid that I knew. When I had called on Madame Catroux she had said a surprising thing to me. "I find it intolerable," she had said, "that English nurses should be allowed to nurse our dear wounded."
"Nos chers blessés" was the phrase. I was to hear it often and I was to become well acquainted with the possessive jealousy of the French Red Cross ladies and the French doctors like Durbach for their wounded. We were going to be obliged to take it into serious account in our hospital but when Madame Catroux came out with it, I was surprised.
I came to know Margot Catroux so well and have seen her in so many of her innumerable moods and manifestations that my first impression has been overlaid with a hundred others, but I recall an effect of flurry and nervousness of uncontrolled and unco-ordinated impulses, of sharp eyes and overgracious gestures, tactless remarks and radiant smiles. A chaotic creature but full of vitality, not without charm and perhaps warmhearted.
I thought of all the thousands of French wounded from Narvik and Dunkirk who bad been nursed in our British hospitals. I thought of Delville and Camberley and St. Jean le Bassel and decided to leave my answer unsaid. What she wanted was to persuade me to take on some of the French women in Egypt as nurses. Her way of setting about it hadn't been tactful; no matter. She had had great experience in the Red Cross, she was headstrong, impatient, unoccupied, she itched to get her hands on my hospital. I guessed at this while we continued to sip our tea. But I had been warned, I must not quarrel with Madame Catroux, so for the moment I avoided the issue. I was not at all unwilling, I said, to employ French women if they were fully qualified and would accept our English methods. I already had two. We needed no more at present. Later perhaps. We parted amicably to meet again, she assured me, quite soon. There was a determined gleam in her eye.
Thinking back to this interview in Sarafand, connecting it in my mind with the attitude of Commandant Durbach, I was worried and miserable.
If the French didn't want us, if they resented our being here, then why had we come and how could we remain? Suppose I were to withdraw, take my nurses and the F.A.U. and transfer the lot to a British hospital? But Madame Catroux had no proper corps of French nurses available. General de Gaulle had been unable to supply even drivers and orderlies. The hospital would break up. And I had signed a contract with General de Gaulle, spent twenty thousand pounds' worth of American dollars on our equipment, brought all these girls thousands of miles, and B. was devoting himself heart and soul to De Gaulle in Cairo as he had done in London, was fighting the British authorities in the Middle East on his behalf, just as in Whitehall. No, it was impossible to turn back.
General le Gentilhomme was consoling. A dear little man. He came to see me several times, and Koenig, fresh from the Eritrean campaign with five stripes now on his sleeve. I liked Koenig. I believed in him. "One must be a little mad," he said, "to be Free French," and he laughed his sour, cackling laugh. Then other friends began to emerge from Castina. Pierre Duro and De Serigny and Morel who had gone to Dakar. And at last B. came to say good-by.
He had been to Jerusalem with General de Gaulle to see General Wilson. They were flying home in a day or two. There was trouble he said with the British authorities over my hospital. The British didn't want us to go into Syria with the Free French Brigade. Their idea when a battle was pending was to move their hospitals back out of the way. But Le Gentilhomme was fighting for us. I mustn't worry.
We said good-by. I was very sorry for myself when he'd gone. A week later, he was back again, all his plans changed. I must have said good-by to him half a- dozen times during that miserable period. At last it came to an end. Le Gentilhomme had had his way. On the sixth of June I climbed into my Ford with a fat bandage making a lump on my shoulder and we took the road with the French column, Barbara driving me.
"Do you know what day it is, May?"
"Yes, the sixth of June."
"Mean anything to you?"
I thought a moment, then it came to me. On the sixth of last June we had begun our retreat across France.
"We're not retreating this time."
"No."
A new convoy much handsomer than the old lumbering motley collection that had wound its way through the Auvergne hills was taking the road again, and a new Hadfield-Spears Unit was starting out on a new adventure. Where would it take us? How far were we going? That we would travel 150,000 miles and take part in four campaigns before we reached home was not revealed to me. I was excited, yes, but filled with misgiving. True, our trucks were all new, but so was the major part of the staff, and Fruchaud wasn't with us. He had gone down with a sharp attack of asthma, would join us as soon as possible; Durbach in the meantime was médecin chef.
"Cheer up, May. Once we get to work we'll be all right."
The khamsin caught us at Beisan where we spent the night in the open. It swept us on next day to Irbid, and at Irbid we were ordered to open up but when we got to Irbid all the desert was full of trucks and guns and a great confusion of French, and Indian troops, and we didn't know where to go. So I asked a British officer but he only waved his arm at the horizon and shouted through the wind. "Out there, anywhere, the desert is yours." So we moved on and presently a small pick-up bounced toward us with a big grinning man in it and he called, "Follow me," and turned round and we followed him to a distant water point thinking he had been sent by the command to guide us, but the truth was that he had caught sight of Daphne's golden curls and Rosie's little nose and had acted on his own, thinking it would be pleasant to have these girls as neighbors. It was the kind of thing that was going to happen often during our long trek through the deserts.
We had great difficulty in putting up our tents for the khamsin was blowing a gale and there was no shelter anywhere, only miles and miles of flat burning wind-swept sand and stone. But we managed to get the operating tent ready and a ward of thirty beds in a couple of hours and at sundown we received our first casualty of the Syrian campaign, the commandant of Deraa, who had wanted to blow up the nuns' well.
He had a slight wound in his arm and he stalked into our camp with a cold supercilious sneer on his thin white face. A very smart figure in his sky-blue tunic and red breeches, but out of another age and another world. And with his arrival the painful drama began that was to involve me inextricably in the fate of the Free French forces. For the scene that took place on that scorched wind-swept plain by those flapping tents made me hot with pity and shame. I had been disappointed with many of the French officers in Aldershot. I had been doubtful of the whole ragged band that had rallied to De Gaulle, but now I was one of them, now I could remember only one thing. They were with us; this man and his lot were against us; and we were at war.
Our officers received him with pathetic friendliness. He met their friendliness with a stony stare. Durbach took him into the operating tent and dressed his wound, then invited him to dine with them in their mess. It was nothing more than a trestle table out in the open but it was nevertheless their mess (we had had no time to put up a mess tent) and he accepted their invitation coldly and sat with them in silence sharing their bully beef stew, and after the meal Dr. Jibery brought him to the ward to go to bed. And because I felt that I must take my cue from Durbach I was very polite, gave him pajamas, soap and towel and a toothbrush and led him to a bed made up with clean sheets and left him, for other wounded were arriving.
Fuhlroth, who was on night duty, came to me later in a rage. "I won't have that officer in my ward," she cried. "He's a prisoner, isn't he? Then why isn't he treated like one? If Durbach thinks it's any good being nice to him he ought to hear him talk to the other wounded---ours I mean. He thinks I don't understand French and he's been trying to upset our men ever since he came in, calling them all sorts of names, traitors, cowards, saligauds, whatever that means. I'm sure saligaud isn't a nice word, is it? But he used it to describe General de Gaulle. I heard him."
There had been a battle for Deraa, and we had taken some dozen Vichy French officers prisoner with I don't know how many other ranks. I only saw the officers. They had been herded together in the fort of Irbid that was occupied by the Transjordan Frontier Force and a British officer of the VIIIth Hussars seconded to the Frontier Force came to get me next morning to act as interpreter. I went with him across the five miles of desert to the fort and found a group of sullen Frenchmen behind barbed wire with their tin trunks and haversacks piled round them on the ground. I didn't like talking to them. The idea that these men who had been fighting us and their blood brothers a few hours before would forgive and make friends had ceased to make sense to me. It never made sense again, neither that day nor the next, nor at -any time during and after that bitter campaign. But it was the idea, no doubt about that. For General Catroux drove up to the fort at Irbid while I was there. He had come to reason with the Vichy officers in their wire cage. He had come hoping to persuade these gentlemen in scarlet and sky blue to transfer their allegiance from Marshal Pétain and General Huntzinger, who had ordered them to resist the British, to General de Gaulle, whose forces with the British had defeated them in battle the day before.
I felt very uncomfortable when General Catroux stepped inside the barbed wire. I excused myself . I was glad to get away. This, I said to myself, was no business of mine. But I knew that wasn't true.
I drove back miserably through the glaring sun and wind to find our tents coming down. Orders had arrived, Durbach said, to move up to Deraa.
There was an ambulance standing by with an Indian driver, and an Indian medical colonel was talking to our prisoner who stood by the ambulance, very pale, very arrogant, with his arm in a sling. Our officers were watching from a distance, they looked glum.
"What's up?" I asked Durbach.
"He won't give his parole so he's being sent to a prison camp."
"What did you expect?"
Durbach stared, scowled, muttered something under his breath and stalked away.
We were too busy in Deraa, once the battle for Damascus was on, to worry about the way it was going. I have the vaguest notion as to which British units were involved. I know that two Indian regiments took part under Brigadier Lloyd, that a battalion of Royal Fusiliers were caught at Kenetra to the west of us; and that our old friend Magrin Verneret refused once again to lead the legion against the forces of Vichy and remained idle in Deraa throughout the fighting, to the annoyance of Colonel Wright, who was in command of the station. But I couldn't describe the military operations if I wished to. The conduct of the troops wasn't my business, my business was to look after the wounded. They came with a rush. During the three weeks' fighting we received six hundred serious surgical cases, French, British and Indian.
Fruchaud's light field ambulance was ahead of us at Sheikmeskin. Its title was Ambulance Chirurgical Légère but it was known as the A.C.L. and I shall call it that. It was the only other field hospital belonging to the French and we were often alongside it. He had handed it over to a colonial surgeon, Commandant Vernier, when he joined me at Suez. My former nurse Kelsey was with it and it did a magnificent job in conditions much worse than ours. The Indians had a dressing station in Deraa but were not equipped to do operations while the British, thanks to the precautions of the medical authorities in Jerusalem, had no hospital of any kind nearer than Nazareth, so it was agreed that all grands blessés whether French, British or Indian should be sent to us. Fruchaud joined us fortunately at the end of four days. We needed him.
It was very exciting to see the unit gather itself together, come to life and rise in a body to meet the urgent occasion. Nancy Wright had turned the outhouse into an operating room in a couple of hours. It became a dynamo whose wheels never stopped turning. Fruchaud was a tiger, he could and did work at lightning speed for twenty-four hours on end. With Avery to help her, and Rosie and Cynthia to clean instruments and wash rubber gloves, Nancy kept pace with him, while T. W., Barbara and I turned to in reception with Thérèse and Giselle.
The hospital throbbed. Night and day the fight went on, our special fight to save men's lives. Everyone was engaged in battle, most of all perhaps the sisters in the small hot crowded wards. With caps awry and stained aprons limp and the sweat streaming down their faces, they fought for their patients tirelessly, quietly; quick and vigilant they were and faultlessly efficient; and the men in their steaming beds knew, and complete understanding existed between them and their nurses. And all the while the ambulances kept rolling in at the gate and the tempo of the battle increased, until there came a day when we were bombed and the patients we were to send down to Nazareth by train were killed in the railway station and the ammunition dump near the church went up and the church bell began to ring its alarm.
If I had had any doubts left of my staff they were put to rest once and for all on that exciting day. We had been machine-gunned each morning at about six o'clock. A single Vichy plane had made it a habit to fly over our camp before breakfast and let go with its mitrailleuse, but our own tents were widely dispersed and no one had been hurt, so we paid little attention. My tent was just outside the convent courtyard between the back door of the operating room and the morgue. If the pop-pop sounded very near, I would unashamedly get out of bed and lie under it until the noise stopped ---then I would go back to bed again and wait for Wright to come and dress my shoulder.
I had chosen to place my hut near the hospital buildings, partly in order to be on call immediately, partly out of laziness. For the camp was enormous. With a hundred yards between each tent it was bound to be.
The mess tent was in the center of the great field, the nurses' tents were to the far side, the trucks were parked beyond in pairs, also with the regulation hundred yards' distance between each pair. The M.T.C. girls had moved to an abandoned house out of sight at the back of the nuns' compound, and on the brink of the wadi with the Arab town opposite. All these distances had irritated me. To walk miles across a blazing field to lunch every day, with an inflamed shoulder, other miles to find Nick Alderson in his faraway truck, to trek down in the heat to see Barbara, was really, I grumbled, too much of a good thing. I revised my opinion the day we were bombed.
We had finished lunch, the nurses had scattered for a half hour's rest and I was lying down in my very hot little tent when the first bomb fell. I think it hit the railway station and the Red Cross train. I don't know how many bombs there were all told. I know the ammunition dump went up across the street a minute later just as I reached the reception shed. But what I recall most vividly is the sight of the nurses legging it across the field from their tents. Edith Irving was in the lead. How that girl can run. After her came the rest, hair flying; they hadn't waited to put on caps and aprons. Three minutes after the first bomb they were in their wards, and I knew what I knew---that never, whatever happened, would any one of them let the unit down. I noticed the nurses especially. I remember with pleasure the sight of them in their bright blue overalls flying toward me across the wide yellow field, but no one was found wanting that day. None lost their heads. It was only when the church bell began to toll the alarm that the nuns were frightened. They had been warned that the bells would only ring out at a time of great danger, so they came running to find me all of a twitter like a flock of scared birds to ask what it meant and what they should do.
"I don't know," I said, "but I will go and find out."
Fruchaud stopped me as I reached the gate. He came hurrying out of the operating room. "You are going, madame, to see Colonel Wright."
"Yes, to ask his advice for the nuns."
"Then let me advise you for yourself. If you will take toutes ces dames (he meant all the girls) and go down to Nazareth I will stay here with our patients."
" But colonel, I couldn't do that."
'I assure you-it would be best."
"But no---oh no-it wouldn't be best at all. How can you believe---!'
He bowed. "It shall be as you wish." And he went back to his work.
He had meant what he said, but I think he was pleased that I wouldn't accept such an arrangement.
I walked out of the gate and down the street to Colonel Wright's headquarters. The bells were tolling and the munitions dump was exploding and the troops as I went were taking up their battle stations and Major Hackett of the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force was talking on the telephone about tanks as I walked into the office of the area commander. They appeared to be Vichy tanks. But when he asked how many and how far away they were, I didn't hear the answer.
Then Colonel Wright came in and I told him the nuns were frightened by the church bells and would he tell me what they should do. And he said, "Tell them to stay where they are. Nothing more. But if fighting begins in the street get them together in the courtyard and keep them there---the same applies to your girls."
"Very well."
"I would advise your taking your staff away; would send you down to Jerusalem if I could; but I can't. The road is cut. We're surrounded by Vichy tanks."
"We wouldn't have gone," I said. "You know that. We've a hospital full of wounded."
I turned to go. He stopped me. There was a gleam of pleasure in his eye. "If there is a battle," he said, "there is a danger that the Arabs across the wadi may rise against us."
"In that case," I answered, "you'd better send someone with me to inspect our camp. Barbara and the girls are living in a house on the edge of the wadi."
So he sent a young officer back with me and we walked round the camp and found an unexploded bomb embedded in the field halfway between the two pairs of trucks, and decided to leave Barbara and the girls where they were, but to place a guard on the house. And the guard came at nightfall and camped on Barbara's veranda with their rifles and a machine gun. But the Vichy tanks, none of us know why, didn't attack Deraa; Colonel Wright didn't have his battle after all---and the little nuns slept in peace.