 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
WE FOLLOWED hot on the heels of the French brigade into Damascus. No argument this time as to whether or not we should be allowed to move up with the troops. The hospital had earned the admiration and respect of the British medical authorities. Our patients had arrived at their base hospitals in excellent shape and Nazareth and Jerusalem both sent messages of congratulation on the work we had done. Never again would the efficiency of the unit be called in question by the British command.
It had become not only an accepted, integral part of the French brigade; it had come to life, had a vitality and a character now of its own that depended on no one person or group of persons. There had been a moment at Deraa when its character and perhaps even its existence had been threatened. Commandant Durbach had seized on the opportunity to show his authority, during Fruchaud's absence, by ordering the American Field Service to hand over a certain number of trucks to the A.C.L. at Kenetra. He had been reported to me as saying, "Now we are on French soil, I propose to run this hospital myself and shall allow no woman to interfere."
The woman referred to was feeling pretty wretched that day. My shoulder had become inflamed, I could keep nothing down, not even the lime juice and was being violently sick in my suffocating tent when Nick Alderson came to tell me that the trucks were being dispersed under Durbach's orders. I said, "Just a minute, Nick," finished being sick for the time being and went in search of Durbach. I pointed out to him that the vehicles were not his to dispose of. They had been given by an American committee to my unit and could not be replaced if we lost them. I would gladly lend two water buggies if the A.C.L. needed them at Kenetra, but if we started giving our trucks away we would no longer be a mobile unit and would lose a great part of our value.
The trucks did not go and Durbach did. He was transferred to Kenetra on Fruchaud's return, and took over that light field ambulance from Vernier, who had broken down suddenly in the middle of the battle. But the episode had involved a principle that had to be settled and B. had had to come with Colonel Brosset to Deraa to settle it. A miserable affair but finished. Colonel Fruchaud had stood by me, Brosset, representing the French H.Q., had upheld my authority and all was well.
The American Field Service broke away at this time. They had never liked being attached to a hospital. Some went back to the States, some stayed on with the French as ambulance drivers, one---we called him "Smithy"---had fallen in love with Nancy Wright (they were married not long after in Beirut). The Friends' Ambulance Unit undertook to fill the vacancies from Cairo, and so we folded our tents and loaded our trucks and took the road.
But before we move on to Damascus I must mention Basil Russell, Squadron Leader R.A.F. and air liaison officer of the Spears Mission with the Free French. For he came to see me in Deraa and found me vomiting wildly in my tent and sent an S.O.S. to Jerusalem to B. Such a kind creature he was and so unlucky. He got himself taken prisoner a week later on Mezzé airdrome near Damascus, and later when he had come back to his liaison job he quarreled with the Free French and was transferred to India and later again he disappeared into Burma, never to return.
Poor Basil. His wife had written asking me if I would take her into the unit, I had agreed, and she was already straining to get out from England when we were in Deraa, badgering Dorea every other day in London, laying sprightly but determined siege to the passport office; and she did get to us in time to see him. They met in Cairo, he came I think twice to Tobruk. They had I suppose a fortnight together in all, before he was posted to India, not much out of five years' separation but more than was granted to many young wives. Poor Jocelyn, she called Basil her "camel" and always carried a stuffed camel with her as a sort of mascot. He did look rather like one. But their story is only one of many linked with the life of the unit. If I were to tell you of all the love affairs, of the engagements made and broken, the wild trips across deserts to find husbands or brothers or sweethearts, they would fill a book and you would get a picture all out of focus. For the work of the unit was the thing that mattered, and the life of the unit in the midst of war; our little personal lives had to go on as best they could, inside and alongside the exciting, grueling task given us to do.
I went on ahead to Damascus at Fruchaud's suggestion, to see Koenig and find new quarters for our hospital. The brigade had moved up to Nebek in the north and Deraa was already too far behind the battle, in his opinion, to be of use. It was and has remained one of the fixed principles of this distinguished surgeon that in war all big surgical operations should be performed as near the lines as possible. Comfort, quiet, even the safety of the patients were to him secondary considerations. To receive the wounded quickly and operate thoroughly, as soon as possible after the man had been wounded, was the one thing that mattered. He has dealt with the subject extensively in his book La Chirurgie de Guerre, and argued his case repeatedly with the British Medical Service during the year and a half that he remained médecin chef of our unit; with us he had no need to argue; we were as keen as he to be near the fighting.
Cynthia drove me that day. Damascus had been a lodestar for both of us and her round young face was alight with anticipation as we bounced over the shell holes of the damaged road through the dazzling heat. But Damascus does not reveal itself to a stranger who arrives by car in the glare of a June noon. We drew up before a large modern hotel and saw through our dark spectacles a long white wide street with tramlines and shops that seemed to run into the side of a mountain.
The Orient Palace Hotel appeared to be deserted. We bought a French paper from an Arab newsboy and read that General Catroux had taken over the city the day before as Délégué Général et Commandant en Chef des Armées du Levant. A long-legged cadaverous British officer with a mournful face and humorous eyes unfolded out of a chair in the hotel and introduced himself. He was Major Roselli, he said, public relations, arrived from Cairo and did we know an old friend of his who was somewhere in these parts, called Barbara Graham---and would we have a drink? We were joined in the deserted bar by a colonel who presented himself as Colonel Gardner, British consul in Damascus, exiled to Jerusalem during the Vichy regime, come back now to take over the consulate again. Colonel Gardner had a soothing bedside manner, but seemed depressed. Yes, he said, the city was quiet. The fighting had been on the outskirts. Collet had marched in from Kenetra without opposition but the Indians and Australians had had an unpleasant time at Mezzé airdrome. No, the road to Beirut was decidedly not open. No roads were open save the one we had come by---and he seemed to disapprove in a paternal fashion of our having come, but was anxious to be of assistance.
We asked him the way to Koenig's headquarters and followed the train lines toward the pale-brown mountain. Koenig was in possession of what had been the offices of the Vichy staff. He laughed sardonically when he saw us.
"Colonel Fruchaud suggested---"
"I know. I know. Your Fruchaud is a madman. He wants to operate under the mouths of the guns. Sapristi and he does too. I saw him at it in Eritrea. Well---I have your place for you. You are to take over the Italian hospital as soon as you like---the sooner the better. The war isn't over with the fall of Damascus. You'll have plenty of work to do."
Motoring back to Deraa that afternoon we saw General Wavell in the distance. His car was parked with two others in the road and he was walking away from us across a field toward a tumble-down house with General Catroux and a couple of staff officers. He and Catroux were talking as they walked, and General Wavell was scratching mildly the seat of his pants. There was something infinitely comforting about the sturdy unassuming back and that homely gesture of the commander in chief in the Middle East.
We took over the Italian hospital as I remember two or three days later, and were getting it ready when B. turned up to go off again immediately with General le Gentilhomme to see how the fighting was going. He came several times during the next fortnight. He had been asked to make a report on the Syrian situation for the war cabinet and brought a secretary with him from Cairo, I think on his second visit. But whether it was then or later that he had interviews with the Arab leaders, I don't remember. General Catroux had proclaimed the independence of the Levant States at the beginning of the campaign and the British government had added its guarantee to the French proclamation, but it must have been evident even then that the Arabs were not too certain of the bona fide attitude of the Free French in this matter, for B. I know was at pains to emphasize, when he arrived, the fundamental unity of the Free French and the British, and to explain that the former had the full support of the British in promising the Levant States their freedom.
The girls and I in the meantime had discovered Damascus. To walk in the streets in July in the heat of the day was to walk through a fiery furnace, the floor red-hot under your feet, the sky a white-hot metal lid covering the world, but the air was dry, the evenings were cool and the minarets of the mosques were frail silver at night under the stars. Barbara and I would go nearly every afternoon with Cynthia or Rosie or some of the others into the suhks and walk through the clamoring jostling, colorful throng. Or we would take a car and go up along the river bank to a crazy café that hung high above the road at the top of a steep and uncertain wooden stair. Three rivers ran along the mountainside, one above the other, and the café was astride the middle stream. It flowed behind the stone tables where parties of Damascans sat drinking coffee, it fountained from the centers of the tables themselves, and there was a waterfall from the river above, that worked by a string. You pulled the string and it tumbled and rushed past under your feet and went cascading away---to the delight of the gentle little women, so mysteriously hooded in black, who would come in rattling fiacres with their children to spend the afternoon by the rollicking water.
I had taken the ground floor of a small house near the hospital, had furnished it with our camp furniture and some gay-colored bits of stuff from the bazaar and was living with Barbara and T. W. and Rosie and Cynthia. There was a terrace where Barbara kept a pair of tame pigeons, and a small garden with a stream running through it, and every morning very early a fine-looking Arab horseman would turn up leading a horse for T. W. Where she had picked him up I don't know to this day but he was eminently respectable, a rather grand person I believe. It was impossible for T. W. to remain anywhere for a week without finding a horse to ride.
She moved out of the flat to make room for B. on one of his visits and he stayed with us for a week. I didn't see much of him as my days were spent in the hospital, his with Catroux or Le Gentilhomme; but we would meet sometimes at the French Officers' Club for lunch or dinner. Koenig would join us, or Brosset or Valin of the French Air Force, and there would be talk naturally of the war, of the air raids in England, the battle of Crete, the German advance into Russia and the campaign in the Western Desert ---but the immediate question that preoccupied them all, B. no less than the others, was the bitter question of the forces of General Dentz.
I had had personally a shocking proof of their attitude toward the Free French a few days after we had opened our hospital. Madame Catroux had been to inspect the big French military hospital and had come to us with a dreadful story. The hospital was a huge affair, with a permanent staff of French military doctors and nurses. They had stayed on naturally as the place was full of wounded and Madame Catroux had sent them a considerable quantity of medical and surgical supplies from her Red Cross stores as well as four hundred sheets. She had followed up her gift two days later by a visit and had found thirty Free French wounded dying from neglect and maltreatment in a distant wing of the great building. They had been wounded early in the battle for Damascus and taken prisoner by the Vichy forces. Most of them had been there for two or three weeks, they were lying on filthy mattresses without sheets, there were no nurses to look after them and the doctors they said hadn't been near them for days.
Madame Catroux cried with rage as she described the scene. "They are skeletons," she said, "they are burning with fever---and the. smell---when I went into the rooms. One man was calling for a drink. He was the only French soldier in the room with five Arabs and the Arabs were sitting on their beds staring at him. 'A boire,' he was calling. 'Pour l'amour de Dieu donnez-moi à boire.' But the Arabs only stared."
Madame Catroux had summoned the head French nurse and asked her what she meant by leaving this man to die of thirst and the nurse had shrugged her shoulders and said, "Let his companions see to it. I've no time." And the wretched sick man had called out, "I don't want to die here with those men staring at me. Take me away. I won't die with those eyes staring at me."
"It is because they are Free French," Madame Catroux told us. "I sent four hundred sheets myself to that hospital two days ago---and all their own men are in clean beds, but our men are dying on dirty mattresses. You can see by their charts why they are dying. Will you take ten, today, into your hospital if my husband gives orders to have them moved? Twenty can go to the sisters at St. Joseph."
We said yes and she hurried away. That afternoon we received an order signed by Catroux, so Fruchaud and I went to the military hospital and we found it was as she had said and we had the ten wounded men brought to us that evening and all our building with its big airy wards that had been sweet and clean was filled with the smell of their gangrenous wounds immediately they were carried in. And Fruchaud had to open up their terrible wounds and operate anew on each man and I watched the operations and I remember them all, particularly I remember one man who had had a bullet through his arm, and had a dressing on it, but the Vichy surgeon hadn't noticed that the bullet had gone through the top of his arm into his shoulder though all his shoulder was black, and Fruchaud had to cut most of it away. The shoulder blade was shattered into a hundred fragments. I remember that the smell in the operating room when the black wreckage was laid open made even the doctors want to vomit. This man recovered, all recovered slowly thanks to Fruchaud's magnificent work, except the man who was dying of thirst. He was too far gone when he came. Fruchaud could do nothing. He died in the night and though we gave him cool water and orange juice as much as he could drink and never left him alone, his thirst wasn't quenched.
B. must have left us about the end of the first week in July; this time I believed our good-by was final. He must get back he said to London. The Spears Mission had by now spread to West Africa and Egypt. There was a mission at Brazzaville with branches at Donala and Fort-Lamy, there was a large mission in Cairo. Wherever French resistance was active B. had organized a mission or a branch of his mission to assist them. There must be a mission in Syria as soon as the fighting was over, but the central organization was still in London, and he was anxious to get back.
The battle for Beirut had been dragging on. We knew little about it in Damascus. The Australians, we were told, had been having a tough time. If Pétain's troops had fought against the Germans in France, people said, with the ardor they displayed in the Levant, the war might have taken a very different course. At last we heard that the armistice had been signed at Acre on the fourteenth of July, that the Vichy troops had withdrawn to Tripoli and that the road to Beirut was open. I was privately informed at the same time that General Spears had flown up to Beirut from Cairo and was staying at the Hotel St. Georges.
The temptation was too great to resist. I was off within an hour, Rosie at the wheel, speeding along one of the most beautiful roads in the world. I have traveled it so many times since that I cannot remember the special thrill of that first view of the Bekaa Valley or that first winding climb over the mountains. The road has become a living thing to me; the long smooth sweep of the Bekaa between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon opens out before my eyes as I remember---and the mountains rise above the snug village of Chtaura where Masabki waits in his hostelry to put succulent dishes before us---and I hear the tinkle of the camels' bells as we round the last high bend on the top of the pass; and as I look back and down, down, I see the shadows of soft clouds moving over the wide fields and Mount Hermon white as crystal in the far distance; and I long to be back again in body as I am in spirit, in that land where the Bedouin tents are black velvet on the pale smooth flanks of the mountains and the sheep and the goats follow the ready pipe of the shepherd and know his voice and the prophet Elijah lies buried they tell you not very far from the valley where Adonis died in the arms of Venus, for Syria and the Lebanon are dear to me, the people have become my friends and there is more beauty in their country than in any other that I have found in the world.
Rosie and I had chosen, unknown to ourselves, a day of ceremony for our trip to Beirut and we came on a great crowd in the Place des Canons with troops drawn up in the square. General Wilson and General Catroux were making a state entry into the city and we watched it from under the arch of the Petit Sérail, the seat as I learned later of the Lebanese government. But when we reached the Hotel- St. Georges we found B. had been and gone. He had come flying back they told us at the St. Georges and had been with General Catroux to see General Wilson at Aley in the hills. There was a story going round the town that General Wilson's first action on arriving in Beirut had been to call on the Vichy French admiral and that General Catroux had been very put out by this gesture of friendly courtesy to an enemy who had been sinking British ships in Beirut Harbor only a few days before. We heard it on the terrace of the hotel. We didn't know whether to believe it or not, but I began to understand very soon that something had gone wrong with the armistice terms and was not astonished to hear from B. that the situation in Syria was going to be very difficult, so difficult in fact that Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in the Middle East, had raised the question of his staying on for three months to head the branch of the Spears Mission in Beirut.
I needed no telling to grasp what was happening. That the Armistice Commission was behaving as if not the Free French but the Vichy French were our friends was a fact that affected every French member of our hospital staff as well as every patient. There was not an officer in the unit, nor a patient, who hadn't a friend or relative on the other side. Immediately the armistice was signed, their one idea was to get in touch. They couldn't believe, our people, that their old comrades wouldn't respond. They still were confident that they could explain away the nightmare of misunderstanding. They didn't know, how could they? that Dentz had sold out to Germany, was in constant touch with Berlin, and even while the negotiations for an armistice were going on at Acre was laying the basis of an organization to disrupt the country and supply the Axis with information. Immediately the fighting was over they tried to get in touch with their friends on the Vichy side, and found it impossible.
The terms of the armistice laid it down that the Free French were allowed to do no propaganda among the Vichy forces. That they should be denied all access to the Vichy troops was perhaps not intended but that was the interpretation given by the British. Again and again men I know set out in quest of their old comrades and came back frustrated, ashamed, infuriated, doors slammed in their faces, entrance to the Vichy cantonments forbidden, the road to conciliation barred by the British.
The hospital was in a furor in a fortnight. Our doctors turned sullen, Fruchaud's face was black as he did the dressings of the men who had been rescued from the Vichy surgeons. He seethed now with rage, stormed in and out of the wards, burst out one day in a fury. "Now I know," he shouted, "how we are going to be treated when France is liberated. We the Free French will be les derniers des bandits."
Out of bounds, beyond the pale, confined to makeshift barracks and improvised camps, were the Free French. But the enemy or what we had thought was the enemy since he had fought us and filled our hospitals with wounded and taken our men prisoner and delivered them over to the Germans, the enemy was at large all over the country. His citadel was Tripoli on the coast north of Beirut. He had withdrawn there officially and no British or Free French were allowed to approach him in that fastness, but he was rushing up and down the land as he chose, you met him everywhere in Damascus, in the hotels, in the hairdressers', in the suhks, in the French Officers' Club. It had been his club before, hadn't it? Why should he be debarred from using it now? A battle? What of that? He had taken sides against us in this war. What matter? He was out of it now, he was going home, that was why he and his plump wife were so busy in the bazaars. We were sending him home and we were allowing him to take five hundred kilos of luggage with him and he and his wife were buying up everything they could lay hands on. Buttons by the kilo, hooks and eyes and pins by the gross, shoes certainly, but leather soles for shoes as well by the hundred and bales of woolen cloth and silks and needles and thread and brushes and combs and soap, much soap, and food, rice and olive oil, sugar and coffee and flour-and last but not least silver and gold. Oh yes, much silver and gold found its way to France in the hold of the "Providence."
It was the same in Beirut. The Vichy wives who were going home descended on the shops of Beirut like a flock of locusts, and where they had passed, the shops were bare; and if you motored from Damascus to Beirut or Baalbek, you found that all over the country the enemy was still comfortably installed in his handsome barracks while our troops, Free French or British or Indian, camped out on bare blazing hillsides or in mosquito-infested groves. The Black Watch for instance.
I took a car one day and went with three of the girls to Baalbek.. We had rations with us but we stopped at the Hotel Palmyre in the afternoon and asked for tea. The manager said he was sorry, the hotel was requisitioned for French officers and I answered, "Then it is quite right to serve us. We rank as officers. I am La Génerale Spears, directrice of a hospital in the Free French forces." But again the manager said he was sorry. The hotel was requisitioned for the other French-not the Free French---all he could do was allow us to drink a glass of citronade outside on the veranda. So we went away and pushing on past Rayak we saw a fine caserne on our right and a British red cap in the road by the gate to it so we stopped and asked him if there was a British unit anywhere near and he said yes; we'd find the Black Watch camped just over there in those trees. He pointed behind us to a grove of poplars about two hundred yards away, so we turned and found Colonel Picthorne sitting on a camp stool in a suffocating thicket fighting mosquitoes and drinking tea with Captain Wilding and two or three of his staff. They were delighted to see the girls and gave us tea in tin mugs and army biscuits to eat, and told us that they were not allowed to go near the caserne and the colonel said it was a pity that the Vichy officers had confined their troops to barracks as many of them he believed wanted to join us---but only half a dozen or so managed to escape each night and get into our lines. This battalion of the Black Watch was decimated, as some who read this may know, in the Western Desert and many of its officers are buried in the cemetery outside Tobruk. When I visited their graves a year later I thought of that horrid, hot little camp and of the French officers next door to it who had issued from their fine barracks to sail away to France, and it didn't seem quite fair.
Madame Catroux rang me up one day toward the end of July in Damascus and asked me to dine "en petit comité." There would be no one but ourselves and I must be indulgent if the food was uneatable. She had been in Beirut assessing the damage to the Résidence des Pins by the R.A.F. "Two bombs, ma chère, right through the middle of it. We won't be able to live in it for a year. It is going to cost millions. We've had to take over Weygand's old house for the winter. In the meantime I'm at Aley."
"You are speaking from Aley?"
"No, from Damascus. I've just come over from Aley for the night. I've been counting the knives and forks left behind by Madame Dentz and going over the linen. What a woman. If you could see the state the linen is in. What with the R.A.F. bombing les Pins and Madame Dentz leaving everything in confusion. But there, Georges says I'm not to talk about the R.A.F. and he wants to see you, he has news for you."
So T. W. drove me to the French Residency in Damascus and General Catroux's A.D.C. came down through the fresh shadowy garden where a fountain was sending frail crystal plumes into the soft scented night and led me up the outside stair into the charming French drawing room with its Louis XV bergères and its shaded lamps. Coming into it for the first time straight from Deraa, with the glare and the dust and the flies of the desert clinging to me, this civilized bit of authentic France had seemed like a miracle. And now again as Madame Catroux drew me down on to a settee beside her, I asked myself if the charming interior that reminded me so vividly of my own house in the Rue Monsieur in Paris were not in fact a dream.
We were sitting in the loggia after dinner outside the candlelit dining room. Two Annamite boys in spotless white, come all the way from Indo-China with Madame Catroux's Siamese cats, were serving coffee, when the general told me that B. was not going back to England with General de Gaulle but was remaining in the Levant and would be arriving quite soon.
How wonderful!
General Catroux smiled. His mournful gaze was kind. Madame Catroux, touched perhaps by my joy at the news, began to tell me of how she and Georges had first met in Syria many years before. Her voice was a caress, the light of romance softened her face. How pleasant it was, I thought, to find friends in this strange Eastern land, people of taste, of culture and sensibility, and a welcome in this house that was like an enchanted memory out of the past. B. would be happy here working with Catroux. I walked on air as I said good night. Madame Catroux followed me to the top of the garden staircase.
"You will want a house," she said. "I'll give you mine in Aley if Georges will let me take another that I like better---" She put her arm lightly round my shoulder. "Georges likes your general so much," she murmured.
The house in Aley wasn't precisely her own. It had been General Dentz's official hot-weather residence but General Catroux had the disposal of it apparently, together with all the other official French residences in the country, and because he almost always did what his wife asked, he agreed to her moving across the valley to a bigger house and passed this one on to us. It was a twenty-minute drive down the mountain to Beirut, and as the hospital was ordered to Beirut when B. arrived at the beginning of August, it all worked out very well. I could live with B. and look after the unit at the same time. It is a charming little house, perched above a deep valley, and from the terrace you can see down the valley to the distant harbor of Beirut and watch the ships come in or sail out over the still, pale water. We always lunched and dined on the terrace and I used to watch the mountains change from pale opalescent shades to crimson at sunset and so it was that I saw the French Army of Syria sail for France. More than thirty-five thousand officers and men went home during that summer and autumn of '41 to France. Under three thousand rallied to General de Gaulle, and of those, many remained not to take part in the war but because they had business interests in Syria and the Lebanon. If the Armistice Commission had cherished the hope that by treating the Vichy French with great consideration they would be won over to our side, its hopes were disappointed, and if dear naïve Brigadier Crystol still hoped when those loaded ships sailed away that the men who sailed in them would give a good account of the kind British to their friends at home, that hope too seemed vain. For more than one of the officers as he went on board declared that he would meet and fight us again in North Africa and I know that they kept their word.
If Brigadier Crystol should happen on these pages, it will hurt I fear his tender heart that I should say such hard things about his friends. He wasn't responsible for the terms of the armistice, those had been laid down by General Wilson, but as head of the Armistice Commission he carried them out and I remember the day when he called on me at Aley to say good-by. The last shipload of Vichy troops had sailed that day for France, with it had gone General de Verdilliac, the Vichy French member of the commission, and Brigadier Crystol had gone down to the quay to say good-by. And he described to me how sad it was. The British military band was playing the "Marseillaise" and he told me that General de Verdilliac and he had been so moved that they could not speak---in fact they had both stood on the quay and cried.
But I had had other friends with me on my mountain terrace a few days before and I thought of them as we talked. They were three officers of the Vth Indian Brigade whom we had met in Deraa and who had been taken prisoner in the fighting near Damascus. I had come on them by chance in the Normandy Hotel. They had been shipped to France six weeks before and had just been repatriated to Beirut. They looked so thin and miserable that I said: "Come to Aley with me---it's cool. We'll sit on the terrace and have drinks." So they climbed into my car and off we went, and they began to tell me how they had been kept in the hold of a French ship for three weeks in Salonika with only an hour a day on deck in the open air, and then on the top floor of an abandoned factory in Marseilles where they had been fed like pigs out of a trough, no plates, knives or forks provided. Just then the car turned into the Place des Canons. The square was crowded with taxis and trams and vehicles of all sorts, and a number of French officers in blue and scarlet were hopping out of taxis and popping into shops and my companions said quickly, very startled: "Aren't those Vichy officers?" and I said, "Yes."
"But what are they doing? Are they allowed to go about as they like?"
"Allowed?" I echoed. "Of course they are allowed. They own this town."
I tell these things because I was asked the other day in Paris by a retired French Ambassador of distinguished record why the British Army was given the privilege of keeping order in Syria after the outbreak of violence in May, '45.
"I find it intolerable," said the Ambassador, "that the British should maintain order in our Empire. Why should there be a British Army in Syria?"
I let the word "empire" pass for the moment.
"You forget," I said, "that there was a war in the Middle East, that it was necessary to garrison the Turkish frontier."
"Nonsense, I am perfectly acquainted with the situation. We had more than adequate forces of our own to garrison Syria. We had thirty-eight thousand first-class troops."
"Don't you know what became of them, Your Excellency? All but three thousand left Syria of their own choice in '41 and came back to France. That is why there was no French Army in Syria---and why it was left to the British IXth Army to defend the Syrian frontier. Thirty-five thousand trained troops would have been a great help to us at a time when we badly needed all the help we could get. As it was, the only French troops left in Syria were the Free French Brigade and those General de Gaulle had sent to Libya to join the British VIIIth Army."
The Ambassador seemed very surprised, he seemed not to know these facts. How, after all, should he know them? He had been behind the iron curtain for four years. Unless of course he had happened to meet some of the officers who had returned from Beirut to France. I wonder what they told their friends when they got home. Even now that the curtain is lifted, there appears to be a strange reluctance to talk in official quarters of what happened in Syria in '41. A conspiracy of silence? That you may say is their own affair. But I do not see why the people of France should blame the British for the fact that the French troops under General Dentz preferred to abandon Syria rather than stay on and become involved in what the Pétain press alluded to in those days as the Anglo-German War.
Storms of rain swept us off the hills and down the slippery hairpin bends to Beirut at the end of October. General Catroux had come forward again to help us, this time in finding a winter residence, and we moved into the Japanese consulate. It was a large house with a fine hall vaguely reminiscent of Venice like so many Levantine houses and would do we thought very well for our short stay. It was to be my home for three years but I didn't know that. We didn't expect to stay long. There was no question at the time of appointing my husband as Minister. The Foreign Office hadn't yet taken him over and put him in mufti. He was Conservative Member of Parliament for Carlisle, on active military service overseas, head of the Spears Mission in Syria and Lebanon for the moment, but the central offices of the mission were still in London. He planned to go back when his three months were up and had no intention of relinquishing his seat in the House of Commons in order to become a diplomat.
Damascus had fascinated me. A stern city, old, proud, moody and violent; its beauty was cold, or again it was hot---the colors in the bazaars were like running flames. Beirut was soft, luscious as ripe fruit. It seemed to lack character. No elegance of the desert swept through its tortuous streets; the Arab chiefs who swaggered through the suhks of Damascus with flowing cloaks and clanking spurs gave place in Beirut to pale Jesuit fathers and dusky bearded bishops of the Maronite Church or the Greek Orthodox, the languid camels that wound their stilted way from the market place toward the hills seemed not to be at home.
A confused and confusing place to live in. The local aristocracy lived in an old quarter of great houses and gardens called the Quartier Sursock, with no frontage on the beautiful sea, the American University dominated the promontory at the opposite end of the town, the fine French Residency was to the south in a forest of pines next the race course and had once been a casino. We lived surrounded by schools and convents and though our house was not far above the center of the town, I was continually getting lost on my way home.
The Spears Mission was not far away. It was installed in a building that had been General Weygand's headquarters with the Hadfield-Spears Hospital next door. We had requisitioned the premises of the German hospital, the German nuns had been conducted to a refuge of their own in the hills and the personnel féminin of our unit lived in their house. The "Spirettes," as B. named the M.T.C. girls, parked their cars in the mission compound and became immediately a center of attraction for the British Army and Navy. Cynthia's romance that was to end two years later in marriage had already begun. Barbara had collected her old crony Swannie Roselli, Daphne was creating havoc among the officers who flocked to the bar of the Hotel St. Georges and Rosie became our A.D.C. No. 2, in conjunction with Julian Oxford, a lovable creature but the oddest A.D.C. ever known. The girls took turns as my driver. One of them would call for me each morning and take me, a five-minute run, to the hospital. It was charming. There were wide verandas from which one could look across the bay to the mountains, the wards were sunny and furnished in white. As there was no fighting in our part of the world all the nurses in turn went on leave. They too had collected many admirers and were having a very good time. It would all have been quite delightful had I not been so weak as to take on two of Madame Catroux's French nurses. That had been a mistake. They were not qualified nurses; they refused to do regular night duty, and they would go to Madame Catroux behind my back with continual complaints of the way the hospital was run. It was the British way, Colonel Fruchaud liked it, the patients were happy as kings and I had no intention whatever of changing, so I knew that trouble was coming; but I let it ride for a time as B. was working in close and friendly co-operation with General Catroux.
We saw, B. and I, a great many people and I began gradually to sort out the different groups that made up our large heterogeneous community. There were the French to begin with. They had been given a mandate for Syria and the Lebanon by the Allies in 1921, similar to the British mandate in Palestine, and had always had a high commissioner in residence with a large civilian staff. General Catroux had now abandoned the title of high commissioner but his staff still occupied the Grand Sérail, and seemed to be governing the country. There was a President of the Lebanese Republic, Monsieur Naccache, who had been appointed by General Dentz, and General Catroux had confirmed his appointment, but that didn't seem to mean very much, as the constitution had been abrogated by the French at the beginning of the war and the Chamber of Deputies dismissed. The President had a wife, but apparently she didn't count. She was a mild little creature and no match for Madame Catroux. Madame Catroux was pretty rough with the Lebanese. I wondered if she would try to be rough with me. She was the first lady in Beirut; I appeared to be the second. We met constantly on Red Cross committees, and at official dinners and public receptions. Her manner was effusive but there was a dangerous gleam in her eye. She was up to something, I knew; I awaited it, whatever it was, without undue apprehension.
General Catroux held the fine title of Commandant en Chef des Armées du Levant, but had no army to speak of under his command. Only our brigade and the local levies, "troupes spéciales" they were called, who had been recruited and trained by French officers. But the British IXth Army was in occupation. General Wilson had moved his headquarters up from Jerusalem to Brumana in the hills. There were a great many British officers in Beirut, there was the Spears Mission, the Security Mission, there were the supply and medical services, there was a naval mission under Captain Morse.
Morse had breezed into my life on the telephone before I left Damascus. I didn't know him from Adam when he rang up, a moment later he was a friend. Two minutes was all it ever took Anthony Morse, now, as I write, rear admiral in command at Singapore, to make a friend for life.
"Hello. Is that Mrs. Spears? I'm Morse. Senior naval officer in Beirut, just arrived. I'm Barbara's cousin. Got that? Barbara Graham's. Well then. Let's get together." And we did.
The American community was twofold. There was the American University with its beautiful hospital and the American consulate. Of the two the university was the more important. George Wadsworth, who was the first American Minister to be accredited to the Levant States, would I believe agree with me. For the university held aloof from politics, its staff was comparatively permanent and its influence in the country widespread and profound.
I first came to know the president, Bayard Dodge, through Nick Alderson and our F.A.U. boys. They had come to me one day in Damascus to ask if they might do some medical relief work in the villages. They had the time, they explained, and they were in touch with some of the local Syrian doctors who were eager to help their own people but had no means of reaching them. Our trucks were not in use. If they might take a truck out two or three times a week to some of the outlying villages they could organize a mobile clinic.
I had thought it an excellent idea and obtained permission for the scheme from the various authorities, French and British, and they had begun in a modest way a humanitarian effort that was becoming an important factor to the British forces of occupation. The irony of it was that the boys had no desire to help the British Army. They didn't believe in it or in any army and they wanted to have as little to do with it as possible. Indeed the attraction of the work of the clinics lay largely in the fact that it removed them from a military hospital and the necessity to nurse men who had been wounded in battle.
They would go out each day from Damascus to one of a series of distant villages, taking a local doctor and medical supplies. They would ask the chief man of the village to lend them a room and the villagers would flock to the house, for the medical services in the country, never adequate, had broken down completely during the war through lack of transport. Encouraged by this response the boys had then approached President Dodge, whose sympathy with all humanitarian work was well known, had asked his advice and had then come back to me with a plan for setting up a number of permanent medical clinics in outlying parts of the country.
"It is our kind of work," Nick Alderson said to me, "real Quaker work. We would much rather do relief in the villages among the poor than nurse the troops."
I looked into his charming eyes and was baffled. I would never understand the conscientious objector. The willingness of these boys to spend their lives tending skeleton babies dying of dysentery, making up medicines for emaciated Bedouin women who never, poor creatures, took off their clothes, and children with hideous sores was admirable but their attitude to the troops exasperated me.
"Don't forget, Nick, that if it weren't for the young men of your age who are holding the Syrian frontier you would have no chance to do the village work."
He didn't change color. "I don't mind being killed," he said quietly, "but I will not fight."
"Anyone can say that, Nick." I was put out. I remembered it six months later when the bomb hit him.
I went to B. with their project. The boys, I pointed out, had become in spite of themselves excellent channels of friendly communication, they were doing more than anyone else to gain the friendship and confidence of the people. If it was important to us to gain the sympathy of the Arabs in our war effort it was worth while surely to encourage these clinics. B. saw the point at once, so did General Wilson. So did Swannie Roselli, in charge of public relations, so did Bayard Dodge.
There had been four outstanding Americans in Beirut during the Vichy period and all four had kept the British flag flying as if it were their own. The four were the American consul general, Mr. Engert, and his wife, and Bayard and Mary Dodge. Mr. Engert had always loved England; as for Sarah, his wife, he told me that when he proposed marriage she had said she couldn't have accepted him if he hadn't felt as she did about the British. They gave proof of the genuineness of this feeling before and after we came. The British wounded whom I found in the French military hospital in Beirut spoke of Mrs. Engert's kindness with deep emotion.
America had not yet come into the war. I am speaking of November, '41; Pearl Harbor still lay ahead. But that didn't deter the Engerts nor Bayard and Mary Dodge from showing General Dentz where their sympathies lay. Mr. Engert became one of B.'s intimate colleagues and remained so during all the months that we were in the Levant together, and Bayard didn't hesitate when I asked his help with the clinics. Being a saint didn't prevent him from taking an interest in the affairs of the world and the outcome of the war.
A remarkable couple, Bayard and Mary Dodge. They are among the very few completely unselfish people I have ever known. I could not have done half what I did without them. When I took on the presidency of the British Red Cross in Syria and the Lebanon Mary became my vice president. When I started the holiday clubs for service women Mary was there to help me carry them through. In a thousand ways she helped me---spending herself day in and day out for the British troops, visiting them in hospital, organizing concerts and working parties, throwing open her house to them on Sunday afternoons. And the clinics could not have been a success without Bayard for he knew the country and the people, he could find us the doctors we needed and his name stood high as far as the Turkish frontier and beyond.
I was frank with him. "I am interested in these clinics," I said, "primarily because they help us, indirectly, in the war. In peacetime, it would be different, the humanitarian side would be paramount; for as long as the war lasts, nothing else matters."
We formed a committee under the aegis of the Spears Mission to run them. Bayard Dodge became chairman, the head of the Economic Section of the mission, treasurer, Swannie Roselli our liaison with Cario, and five centers were established in outlying parts of the country. But I found that the French had little sympathy with the effort. It was the old story of resentment and a new story beginning, a story of suspicion. What were we up to? What lay behind this? Who were these British conscientious objectors? It was impossible to explain them to Madame Catroux. How could I make her understand these boys when I couldn't understand them myself?
Bayard laughed when I told him how she had cross-questioned me about the clinics.
"Wait and see," he said. "You will find her starting clinics of her own before long."
"All the better, there is room enough, God knows."
"Exactly."
But Madame Catroux was impatient. To organize a rival service of clinics would take months and in the meantime there was the Hadfield-Spears Hospital just down the road. It made her nervous. She didn't feel at liberty to inspect, make suggestions as to how it should be run, yet she knew she could run it better than I, and that she should be the head of it. It ought to come under her. She was the head of the French Red Cross. She must bring it into her orbit. But how should she set about it?
Then she thought of something and the something reached me in the form of a note de service over General Catroux's signature and it laid down certain rules that were to be followed in my hospital, particularly rules regarding the nursing of the patients and most particularly in regard to night duty.
When I received these orders I sent General Catroux copies of my contract and correspondence with General de Gaulle, and General Catroux when he had read them was obliged to recognize my authority over my nursing staff to be absolute. Madame Catroux had made her attempt to get control of my unit and had failed. She never returned to the attack, but turned her energies into organizing a very excellent field ambulance of her own. We were to meet in the Delta, in Tunisia, Algiers, Italy, and at last in France, each with our unit. If we were rivals it was a friendly rivalry; if she outran me in the rapidity with which she moved across continents, we far outdistanced her in the number of men we looked after. I think we were better friends after the Beirut incident than before.
But I had had enough of French nurses who refused to accept our British ways and my far from rigorous discipline. Thérèse and Giselle had said bluntly in Damascus that they would not do so and had gone to the A.C.L. Madame Catroux's two Red Cross ladies now returned to her fold. There remained Madame Butherne.
I don't remember just when she joined us, but I think it must have been when we arrived in Beirut. She had gone out with Colonel Fruchaud's original party to Dakar, had worked with him during the Eritrean campaign and had stayed on with the A.C.L. during the fighting for Damascus. She was a big strong fine-looking woman with no nonsense about her. I had put her in reception and she had done very well. She wanted to stay with us. I was determined not to give way on the question of night duty, but in reception the problem didn't arise. In that service the nurse had to be ready to go on duty at any hour of the day or night. I decided to keep her. I never regretted it. She was loyal and hard-working and made many friends in the unit. I became very fond of her.
It had been on the whole a pleasant autumn. We had made new friends and had begun to know and like the people of the country. B. had had too much to do and became wretchedly ill with bronchitis and threatened pneumonia when the cold weather set in. But aside from this anxiety my life had been very agreeable. I think of it now as a hiatus between two periods of strenuous endeavor. It came to an end suddenly in December. B. was called to London for consultation and I received orders to pack up the hospital and move with the Free French Brigade to the Western Desert.