 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
T.W.'s khaki shoulders are solid against the glare of the Sinai desert, her hands are steady on the wheel as the Ford V-8 plunges and sways. A stolid British girl, one of the best girl jockeys in England, she has entered for the war in the Middle East stakes as she used to enter for a point to point. And she moves off into the desert as if she were moving up to the starting line. There is the same slight compression of the lips and the same purpose behind her calm mask of indifference; she means to prove that she is as good as a man.
The road is a switchback; the world is wide and empty and made entirely of sand and wind. Some joker has laid down this switchback across the desert and the wind is covering it under great sand-drifts. You have to charge them head on and not change gear however much you may want to, else you'll stick in the sand and if that happens you have got to get out your sand tracks and your spade and start shoveling away the desert from under the car, and you will curse softly under your breath and ask why they don't do something about the damned road. But they are doing something. Look! There, ahead of you! An Arab with a broom! He is a lone figure against the big white sky. He is sweeping the desert away. He gives a languid swish with his broom, lifts it into the air and the sand flies away on the wind.
We moved off from Beirut in convoy on New Year's Day, '42 and reached Safafi West on the twelfth. If you don't know where to look for Safafi West, no more did I. It lies to the south of Buq Buq. Coming from Cairo you make for Alexandria, turn left round some sand hummocks before you reach the city and follow the coast road through El Alamein and Dabaa and Sidi Barani until you get to Buq Buq. There is nothing at Buq Buq save a crossroads. Down in a hollow between the main road and the sea there is a graveyard. Our tanks were caught there, bogged in the mud, but you wouldn't know that, there's nothing to show. You turn your back on it and make south at Buq Buq and find your way to Safafi along a track that might be called a road but when you get there, there is nothing, not even a crossroads, to prove to you that you have arrived.
It is a mystery to me how we got there. We had three days in Cairo while the bulk of the convoy crawled round the Delta and the girls all scattered. Barbara and Cynthia went to stay with Russell Pasha. I spent a night with the nurses at the 63rd General Hospital at Heliopolis, then moved to the Shones.' T. W. I believe went to Shepheard's where she found Jocelyn Russell waiting, Daphne to the Continental.
Jocelyn had arrived by sea-air from London a week earlier. She was to replace Virginia Clive, who was joining the W.A.A.F.'s in Jerusalem. I had been quite mistaken in thinking I could not get rid of a girl. if I wanted to. It would be the easiest thing in the world to get rid of the lot. Joy Goode had already left to be married. It began to look as if Cynthia would soon follow suit. A.T.S. and W.A.A.F.'s were ready to take on any who, like Virginia, wished to leave me. No, the difficulty would be to keep them together, or get replacements. So I was glad to have Jocelyn and to find her so smart, efficient and sprightly.
She drove me round Cairo for the two delightful days that I spent in the Shones' lovely house, then I pushed on ahead with Rosie to Alex leaving Barbara to collect the others from Shepheard's and Gruppis and the Gexira Club. The rendezvous was Dabaa and they came along in great style. Rosie and I awaited them I remember in the road outside the N.A.A.F.I.
We were in camp for a week at El Dabaa and though Dabaa even in those days couldn't be called a pleasure resort, there was a town major and a superb N.A.A.F.I. called the Ark and an army bakery, and scattered all over that bit of the desert were groups of officers who popped up out of their dugouts in the sand and invited the girls to drinks and supper and singsongs. A good deal was happening in the desert while we were at Dabaa that we didn't know about. We knew that the VIIIth Army had come into existence because we belonged to it. And we'd read in the papers in November about the new British offensive and in December we'd been told how the Australians had burst out of Tobruk and joined up with the XIII Corps. And when we reached Dabaa, we had heard tell of the tank battle of Sidi Rezek that had lasted from November 21 until December 6. But though we thought of ourselves as seasoned veterans, by the time we left Dabaa, we had no notion of what the war in the desert was like, with its vast ebb and flow, its great encircling movements, its sudden cyclonic changes of fortune. We weren't familiar with the map---took for granted since the siege of Tobruk was raised that the coast road was open, didn't know that the British had only recaptured Solum on the twelfth of January for that was the day we moved to Safafi West. It was proposed that the Foreign Legion should take Helfaya Pass by assault from the south and we were to be there to receive the wounded. But we weren't told of this until after we got there.
Safafi West was a mark on the map some twenty kilometers southeast of Helfaya but when we got to what we thought was the spot we found ourselves on top of a rocky escarpment and there wasn't enough sand on the rock to scrape up with a spoon. There were two British trucks standing a little way off and heaps of stones scattered about and remains of Arab huts. They were in ruins but it was bitterly cold and they might perhaps provide temporary shelter---otherwise there was nothing.
Fruchaud came across to me scowling, map in hand.
"This can't be the place, Fruchaud."
"It should be. But how they expect us to put up tents?"
'I'd better ask."
I went over to the trucks and found a couple of sappers cranking up, about to move off. I asked if this was Safafi West.
"That's right, Miss---and don't let your people go into those huts---they're mined. We lost two of our chaps that way this morning." He pointed behind me and turning, I saw Dr. Albert, the big fat Lebanese boy who had joined the unit in Beirut, sitting happily in the broken doorway of one of the stone huts.
"Albert," I shouted. "Come out of that hut. They are all mined." And Albert shot into the air like a balloon, and we laughed. But it wasn't exactly a jolly place. The British lorries moved off and the boys started unloading the tents. They struggled for the best part of the afternoon to put one up and we sat in the cars watching them. It was no good. Impossible to drive tent pegs into solid rock, impossible to hold the tent down. The wind tore the canvas out of their hands. And then at about four o'clock when they were ready to give it up, I saw a very queer long funnel-shaped cloud coming at us on a slant from the west and ten minutes later the lights of the world had gone out; we were groping for each other and shouting to each other through a dark that was thick and dry and icy cold---through a black wind that carried a million knives. We were in the middle, simply, of the worst sandstorm I was to encounter during our two years in the desert.
A sandstorm in hot weather is bad. A sandstorm in winter is worse. This was a sand blizzard and it had caught us on the top of an escarpment with no shelter anywhere.
We drew up our vehicles in a semicircle, nose to nose, close together like camels with their backs to the wind. Nick Alderson managed to clear a couple of trucks and put stretchers in them for the nurses. Then we all went to ground for the night. It was a long night beginning as it did at four o'clock, but it wasn't too bad, once we climbed into the cars and shut everything. We had blankets and rugs and dry rations to last us a week, bully beef and sardines and army biscuits and cheese and water bottles filled with sweet water, and whisky and gin---and good company. What more could we want?
Rosie and I were snug in our car as a couple of Eskimos.
Barbara, next door, had produced precious tins of American beer. T. W. and her lot were busily eating on the other side of us. I could just distinguish their faces through the gritty gloom. Glum? No; on the contrary; I fear that the night was ribald, but who was there to shock? Every now and then an army truck would loom out of the dark sand fog and a voice would hail us through the wind. "I say!---Who are you? We're lost. May we spend the night in your camp?" And a man's face would peer through the car window; a face that might be a nice face if one could have seen it without its mask of sand. And I would wave a hand at the storm and shout, "Certainly; make yourself at home." And so we collected quite a number of stray vehicles round us, before we went to sleep. And when morning came and we awoke the storm was over, our guests were gone, the sun came up in a sky that was shiny as mother-of-pearl and Oscar Cashera was busy beside the rolling kitchen; so we drank boiling hot coffee and wiped the sand off our faces as best we could and moved down off the escarpment on to the plain where there was soil to hold tent pegs; and made a beautiful camp.
But the Germans surrendered Helfaya Pass before the Foreign Legion could attack, much to the Legion's disgust, and the South Africans took it over. We found them moving in when we went up to have a look at the place and they let us poke about as much as we liked. We filled the luggage rack on the roof of the car with German water containers and Barbara picked up a handsome spanner and several odd bits of iron that she fancied and Cynthia found the diary of a young German soldier who was very homesick for the fatherland and his little Schatz Trüdchen, but we found no silk stockings though we'd been told the cozy dugouts in the sides of the cliffs were full of them.
And the next day Commandant Savet came along with orders to take our tents down again and move on.
Commandant Savet was in charge of movements. He was a priest and an ardent Gaullist. He died fighting at Bir Hakim and is a heroic figure; but he knew nothing about moving a convoy, nor did the French convoy know how to move; and he dashed round our bit of desert collecting his scattered ambulances and signals and repair shops like a distracted hen collecting her chicks.
Our destination this time he said was Timimi sixty miles beyond Tobruk on the road to Benghazi. The French column was moving across country, We were to travel by the coast road and rejoin the brigade at El Adam.
So back we went to Buq Buq. But we had struck camp at seven in the morning and reaching Buq Buq at nine were told by an officer shivering miserably in the windy road that further movements were postponed till next day. So Fruchaud suggested that rather than sit for twenty-four hours by the roadside, I should push on with the personnel féminin to Tobruk, find lodgings there for the night and join him next day at El Adam.
The girls were delighted at the idea. So was I. How could we know that General Rommel had started a new counteroffensive that morning and that we wouldn't be welcome in Tobruk? The very blue sea was shining through the yawning gaps in the pink and white houses as we passed through Solum. We were pleasantly excited as we climbed the escarpment to the lonely arch that was Fort Capuzzo. But the road was long. The sun was setting as we came in sight of Tobruk, swept round the terrible harbor with its eloquent burden of drowned ships and made for the heroic town. It looked a town like another in the distance. We couldn't see until we turned sharp up the hill and into what had been the main street that the houses were houses no longer.
A red cap directed us to area headquarters. I didn't understand why the officers at area were so taken aback when I climbed the stairs and walked into the half of their building that was left. I could see that they were hot and bothered. I understood, when I told them that I had sixteen women with me, that it was awkward for them. But I didn't know that we were the only women in the desert west of Merza Matruh, and it took me some time to realize that they not only didn't know what to do with us or where to put us for the night but were profoundly shocked at our being allowed in the desert at all.
Colonel Matheson, A.D.M.S., didn't pretend to be glad to see me. He stared out of his handsome eyes as if confounded.
Sleep in Tobruk? Sixteen women? Impossible. No one slept in Tobruk.
Where then should I take the girls?
There was a transit camp two miles out on the Derna road. They might take us. He got on the phone.
Someone brought me shyly a cup of tea while he telephoned. Someone was talking behind me to someone else about dumps. Rommel it appeared had captured them. They were our dumps and he had swept forward and gobbled up the lot.
The transit camp evidently didn't want us. Sixteen ladies were too much for the transit camp. Nor did the beach hospital. But the beach hospital consented in the end to take us in.
I don't remember how we found our way that evening to the beach. It was to become our home. We were to taxi back and forth along that track every day for months, morning, noon and night. We were to break springs and smash radiators against boulders in the dark and suffer much grief on that track before we were done with Tobruk. But I suppose someone acted as guide that first evening. All I remember is floundering through deep sand into a great dingy white tent holding some thirty beds and being told that it was ours for the night.
We were marooned there for a week. A sandstorm that lasted three days engulfed the beach hospital next morning and nothing could move. The commandant was kind. He offered us the hospitality of his mess, and we floundered and fought our way to his hut three times a day, hoping for news, for a message of some kind from Fruchaud, but the only news that came through was of the fighting and it was bad. Rommel had caught us by surprise in the desert south of Benghazi. He had captured our dumps, that I knew. His dash forward might be merely a reconnaissance in force or it might be the beginning of a full-scale offensive. It must have been on the twenty-second or third that I went to VIIIth Army on the road to El Adam, was directed to General de Larminat's tent and there found Koenig, who was a general now in command of the brigade, and at last got news of the unit.
It was coming. It was by way of arriving that evening. It had got lost in the sandstorm. All the world had got lost in the sandstorm. Koenig was fuming with exasperation. Then be laughed. "And you, chère madame, is it correct do you think to advance ahead of your troops?"
I don't remember where I last connected with Fruchaud. I think it was in Colonel Matheson's office. I know that we were ordered to stay where we were until the twenty-fifth. On the morning of the twenty-fifth at eight o'clock we were to be at the Monument ready to join the convoy and move on to Timimi.
The Italian war memorial on the Derna road fifteen miles west of Tobruk is one of the few landmarks in that part of the desert. It was always referred to as the Monument. A track led up to it from Acroma fort to the south and our convoy came along the track at about nine o'clock and we moved off with it. The troops under Koenig had moved due west from El Adam and were making across the desert for Mekili. Our orders were to proceed along the coast road and as we received no counterorder we did so proceed. Our ultimate destination, Fruchaud said, as we moved off, was Giovani Berta in Cyrene.
It was slow going, for an endless succession of British convoys were moving down the road as we moved up. We had to wait sometimes for hours to let them pass. It was growing dark when we reached Gazala and our harassed Commandant Savet called a halt for the night. There was an Italian roadhouse near our staging ground occupied by a battery of British five-pounders, and I went to see if it would provide shelter for the night. The men were cooking in the shed at the back. There appeared to be no officer about, but the sergeant in charge gave us an empty room and the girls put up their camp beds in it. I slept in my car just outside. It was a wonderful moonlight night with no wind and I lay awake for some time listening to the rumble of the convoys going down the road.
The sergeant had suggested casually that we push on to Derna for the night. There were nice houses in Derna. It was a pretty place. But I said I thought we had better not. Our orders were to open up at Timimi. He may have been joking. I don't think so. I think he knew more than we that Derna was already occupied by the Germans. When we joined the doctors in the field across the road for breakfast, Fruchaud told me that further orders had come from De Larminat. We were to set up the main body of the hospital at Timimi, but a light field section was to move on next day to Mekili. He proposed to do this himself.
The stream of convoys going down toward Tobruk and the fact that none were coming up had puzzled me, but it was only now that I became uneasy. For the road was one unbroken procession of vehicles moving east and it was made up of every kind of unit and it was traveling fast. Guns, supply columns, ambulances, signals, all were making east as fast as they could go. And nothing was going west save ourselves.
Barbara was driving me and I was sitting beside her. She said nothing. We watched fascinated. At last I spoke.
"It looks singularly like a retreat to me. What do you say?"
She mumbled an assent. Just then some lorry drivers catching sight of us shouted and waved.
"They seemed surprised to see us."
"Women in the desert." She was laconic. "Going the wrong way."
We lapsed again into silence. She was thinking, I fancy as I was, of that other retreat in France with its panic flood of refugees. For when I said, "What puzzles me is that it all looks so cheerful," she mumbled, "No civilians about."
We found our arrow and turned in to a field on the right just this side the crossroads. Timimi, like Solum and most places I've come on in the desert, seemed to be nothing but a mark on the map. If there had ever been a village there, it was gone. The main road went straight on to Derna and Benghazi, but a track, or rather a series of tracks, branched off south to Mekili.
The crossroads were a seething mass of vehicles. From our field I could see the two streams of converging traffic. I sat all afternoon while the boys put up the tents, watching the British Army go past, and I didn't like it. At five, I asked Fruchaud if he had received any communication from De Larminat as I had seen Savet come bumping across the field and go off again. He said no, rather crossly. We had passed a British ambulance station in a roadhouse two miles back so I sent for Barbara and we drove down there. The R.A.M.C. captain was as surprised as most men in the desert when I walked in.
"I'm Mrs. Spears," I said, "and I have my hospital up by the crossroads. I presume you will be evacuating our wounded."
"Afraid not. We're moving off."
"Soon?"
"Sometime this evening."
"Which way?"
"That way." He pointed east as I expected.
"Well, I'd be grateful if you'd send me word before you go. Will you do that?"
"Certainly."
"And could we wash our hands? I see you have washbasins."
"But of course. I'm so sorry."
We had a wash and went back. The boys had put up the reception and operating tents, one ward and a tent for the nurses. Supper was being served in the open; and a British captain was talking to Fruchaud, whose face was thunder. The captain was an officer of the Spears Mission doing liaison with the brigade. He came across to me. I could see he was worried.
"I don't like it," he said.
"I can't say I like it myself."
"You oughtn't to be here."
"We were ordered here. De Larminat's orders."
"I know---and your colonel says he is leaving you here and going to Mekili tomorrow."
"That's it."
"But it's impossible."
"Come and eat," I said, "I'm hungry."
'I'm going to tackle Fruchaud again."
I was sitting in the Ford V-8 with a tin plate of very good stew on my lap when a staff car came bumping wildly across our field and a colonel with red tabs and a white face jumped out and crossed to me.
"Are you Mrs. Spears?"
"I am."
"I've come from VIIIth Army. You are to move back at once to Tobruk."
"Tonight?"
"Yes, tonight. There's going to be a battle here. We want this field for our guns. You must all be gone before dawn."
"You should see my médecin chef, Colonel Fruchaud. He's in charge."
We found Fruchaud in his truck. I presented the colonel and explained. It was as I feared. Fruchaud refused to go. He was polite but adamant.
"I'm a French officer under General de Larminat's orders."
The VIIIth Army colonel was equally polite but obviously frantic with fatigue and in a great hurry.
"I quite understand, mon Colonel. But you appear to have lost contact with your commanding officer. It is inconceivable that General de Larminat should order you to remain here."
" My orders are to leave the hospital here and to proceed with a light section to Mekili tomorrow."
"But we are not holding Mekili. The French brigade has been ordered to withdraw. There will be no one in Mekili tomorrow."
Fruchaud bowed. "I regret---my orders are as I have said."
I left them and went outside with the young officer of the Spears Mission. The moon had come up; the nurses had gone to bed; the boys had scattered.
"Could you go up to Mekili now tonight," I asked, "find De Larminat, explain and come back?"
"I could certainly---but not in the time. It would take at least four hours to get there by night, even with a moon. And you must be gone before dawn.,'
Fruchaud and the colonel were still arguing. I saw Barbara wandering about in the moonlight and called to her. We climbed into a car, and again I explained.
"I'm in a spot," I said. "What shall I do? I can override Fruchaud of course as regards ourselves. But if I do we'll never hear the end of it, they'll say we are cowards and ran away. On the other hand we are going to be a damned nuisance to VIIIth Army if we stay. They'll be furious. They might even order us out of the desert. And I wouldn't blame them. To have a pack of women and some French doctors getting in the way of their guns---"
We looked at it in silence. It wasn't a pleasant situation. All about us was the moonlit desert, behind us the, rumble of the VIIIth Army in retreat.
"Fruchaud's right of course. He can't do anything else." She said presently.
"I know, if we hadn't lost contact --- "
Again we were silent. At last I came to a decision.
"Dammit all, Barbara. We're British. This is our war. I'm going to do nothing to embarrass VIIIth Army. I don't care what the French think of us."
But I did care. I came to a compromise with Fruchaud. The bulk of the hospital, including all the women, would go back to Tobruk while he moved up to Mekili, with his forward unit. Did the colonel from VIIIth Army want the women to pack off tonight? Yes, he did. Very well. The nurses should be hauled out of bed. Barbara would take the lot in four staff cars. T. W. would stay with me. We would wait while the boys took down the tents and leave with them at dawn.
It was horrid. The unit was split. The French officers went into a huddle once the VIIIth Army colonel had gone. I caught the sound of sarcastic laughter. One thing saved us from a complete breakup. Fruchaud found it impossible to organize his forward unit without six of our British boys. He wanted to marquer le coup by sending them all back ... he couldn't. He had no trained French orderlies.
I went to find Nick Alderson. He was very run-down. He had a large carbuncle on the back of his neck.
"I don't want you to go to Mekili, Nick. You're not fit. Let Michael Rowntree go in your place."
He thought for a moment. I watched his sensitive face in the moonlight. How handsome he was with his fair curly hair. I had been very hard on him, had thought him weak and a prig. The trouble was the old thing, I had no sympathy with conscientious objectors. But I saw that night that he was very honest and was trying with all his heart to lead a good life.
"I must go," he said. "It's my duty."
Perhaps I had a premonition. I thought about him and of his great courtesy to me when the girls had gone. He had been as considerate as a son. I spent the night in his ambulance. He brought me coffee at about five. We moved off just as the sky was growing light. Jibery was silent as we drove away at the head of the convoy. He was to be in charge at Tobruk.
We made very good time; the road was empty; and Barbara with the girls was waiting outside Colonel Matheson's office. They were in great form. They had come to within ten miles of Tobruk before midnight, so had parked by the road and slept in the cars till morning. Then Barbara had cooked them a wonderful breakfast. Sausages and bacon and coffee; all over a fire in a petrol tin half full of sand.
We were to be allotted a wing of No. 62 General Hospital, Colonel Matheson told me, and were to live in our own tents on the beach, near the beach hospital. I had best take my people down to the beach and get them dug in, then call on the colonel of 62 in the morning.
Our strip of land allotted to us along the shore was beautiful. The rocks reminded me of Cornwall. Everyone fell to with a will. Dr. Jibery and the Asquins seemed to think none the worse of us. By supper time most of the tents were up and I was feeling more cheerful. We were at table when an orderly brought a telephone message. It was from De Larminat. The Hadfield-Spears Hospital Unit was ordered to return to Timini immediately. I handed the message to Jibery and we went outside.
"Very well," I said. "We go back. But I cannot move without informing VIIIth Army. If you will go now with Miss Graham to VIIIth Army, find the A.D.M.S. Brigadier Walker and explain to him, I will be ready to leave in the morning."
Jibery agreed. He and Barbara set out. I told the girls not to unpack, explained to Michael Rowntree what had happened and went to bed. Barbara poked her nose into my tent about ten. They hadn't found Brigadier Walker but had left a message. She came in and sat down on my luggage. We looked at each other. I can see the light now from the hurricane lamp shining on her humorous face. What a mess it was. But there was Michael's head between the tent flaps and his arm holding a bit of paper. "Orders from VIIIth Army. No member of the Hadfield-Spears Hospital is to move from Tobruk. This order supersedes all other orders."
"Get Jibery, Michael."
Jibery came. I gave him the paper.
"We can't go," I said.
"No." He agreed.
"But I will go, Jibery. I must go. This puts me in an impossible position. I must see De Larminat and explain."
Jibery said he would go with me. So I sent T. W. a message to be ready with a car by seven in the morning and we started at seven for Mekili.
Back past the Monument, back through Gazala, back past our staging ground at Timimi. There were guns perhaps but no signs of fighting. No battle after all, only a retreat in full swing. A hundred trucks were pelting toward us over the desert---ten, twelve, twenty abreast, as we turned south at the crossroads. An officer, who was attempting to regulate the traffic, stared when he saw us, shouted something, but we were gone.
The desert was wide. There were a dozen tracks to choose from. We sped on. A little before noon we came on a French truck and stopped to ask would this track take us to Mekili camp? It was the postman of the brigade. He pulled some letters out of a bag. One was from B. in London. We pushed on through the blinding sun. Black clumps appeared in the dazzling distance. Were they trucks or mirage? We came into Mekili camp at twelve-thirty. It was vast. It was spread out over miles of sand. At last we found De Larminat's caravan.
I was nervous. He saw me get out of the car and opened the door as I mounted the short steep steps, my knees trembling, and looked up at his cold, expressionless, dark face. B. and I had dined with him in Beirut; I liked his wife; they had a charming house; he was a student of Shakespeare and she a gifted painter. What good would that do me now? He was a professional soldier, a commander of troops in the field, hard, irascible, intolerant and reputed to have a great contempt for British methods of warfare; he must be very angry.
He was. He asked me to be seated; offered the one chair by his writing table. His manner was icy.
"I have come to explain why we have not obeyed your orders."
He didn't answer. I looked at his bullet head, his mouth, was it cruel, sensual or merely sardonic? Was there contempt as well as anger in his hard small eyes? I didn't know, couldn't read his face.
"We received this---" I handed him the last message from VIIIth Army and waited; then when he still said nothing added---"So I thought I had better come."
A bugle was calling somewhere out on the sands. There was a sound of wind and lumbering trucks, then a sharp military command.
He spoke at last, told me very succinctly that if he could not give orders to my hospital and have them obeyed, it was of no use to him; I had best take it back to England.
I replied that I understood his annoyance but felt I was in no way to blame. I had brought the unit to the desert under his orders and had only one wish, to obey them. If I received contradictory orders what was I to do? My position was impossible.
If he was mollified, he betrayed no sign of it, but his anger shifted a moment later to VIIIth Army. Brigadier Walker had no business to interfere.
The disposal of the units of the Free French forces was not his affair. This sort of thing was intolerable.
I couldn't very well point out to the dark powerful man that he himself was under VIIIth Army. I was too much afraid of him. To prolong the discussion was I felt useless. I would go back, I said, to VIIIth Army next day and ask Brigadier Walker never again to send orders direct to my unit, then rose to go. I asked him to believe that I bitterly regretted what had happened.
He bade me good-by with courtesy but didn't unbend, his face was stony as I went down the steps.
"I'm not certain," I said to T. W. as we drove away, "that we are not going to be given the sack. Now we must find Fruchaud."
Mekili camp was a camp in a bad dream. We rolled and rattled from one group of tents to another. I saw Koenig standing afar off like some tall queer bird of the desert but he didn't come near us. Someone gave us food. I think it was Sneed-Cox, the British liaison officer. Someone else told us at last where to look for Fruchaud. He was up forward. We must leave Mekili fort on our left, follow---I was obsessed by the necessity of seeing Fruchaud. It was impossible to allow him to nurse resentment and contempt for the British members of the staff. The unit would never be the same again, if I didn't put things right with him now. How beastly it all was. If De Larminat really meant---I was so wretched that I didn't listen to the instructions that were being given to T. W. as to the track we were to follow, and didn't think of asking for an escort.
Jibery had left us. He was in a hurry to get back to Tobruk and a friend had given him a lift, so T. W. and I launched ourselves out into the farther desert alone with the vaguest of notions as to where we were going. It was a silly thing to do. Mekili was a very advanced post. There was nothing between it and the enemy save a stretch of empty sand. We only realized how empty it was when we had left the fort some miles behind us. Not a truck anywhere on the horizon. Nothing moving in all that vast expanse save ourselves. No sign of any living thing. And the sun was down, the sky was crimson beyond the darkening sand. How lonely it was.
"If you push on much further, T. W., we'll find ourselves in the German lines."
But she was in one of her obstinate moods. "Let's try over there. He may be behind those sand hills."
"O. K."
We turned north. It was almost dark by now. Suddenly she stopped. "My God, we're in the middle of a mine field."
We were. We backed out along our own tracks. Even then she wouldn't give in. "Just one more go. I can see a track now, quite a decent track, don't you see it? It must lead somewhere."
We found them in the end. They were camped in a hollow between the sand hills by the dry bed of a stream, and were just sitting down to supper, on the bank. A pleasant scene. Hajali was ladling out his excellent bully beef stew, there was wine, a pot was bubbling on the fire. Colonel Fruchaud spread a coat for me on the ground. Nick brought me a steaming plate and a brimming mug. I was hungry. Everyone was hungry. We ate like wolves, and suddenly I knew that I was happy again. Completely, blissfully happy.
I told Fruchaud after supper of the orders from VIIIth Army and my painful interview with De Larminat. The moon had risen and we walked a little way over the pebbles up the bed of the stream. He seemed to understand my difficulty. He was glad, he said, that I had come. There could be no doubt in De Larminat's mind of my courage and readiness to obey. We parted friends. The boys gathered round to wave cheerful good-bys. Madame Butherne's good fair face beamed in the gloaming. My heart was light as we trundled away. T. W. and I drove home by moonlight and reached Tobruk beach at 1 A.M.
It wasn't until some weeks later that I heard how De Larminat had refused for two days to obey VIIIth Army orders and withdraw from Mekili. He had expressed himself very caustically, they said, on the subject of the British retreat.
THE 62nd General Hospital occupied a series of buildings built round four sides of a wide empty square just outside Tobruk. It had nine hundred beds, good surgeons and doctors but no nurses, and a very inadequate staff of nursing orderlies. Though the glare in the square was blinding, the wards were dark and the wounded lay all day in twilight for the windows had been painted over with blue paint.
My heart sank when the C.O. took me into the block that was being handed over to us. It had eighty beds and most of them were filled with bad chest cases, many of them Germans. The men were ghosts. They lay in long rows, propped up on dingy pillows panting softly and stared through the gloom out of sunken eyes. Silent men, they didn't speak to each other, each one was alone, in the no man's land between life and death. Stretcher-bearers were bringing other silent men from the operating rooms across the square. The orderlies lifted the unconscious forms swathed in white bandages on to empty beds and laid them between gray sheets stiff with dry blood. The sheets it seemed were seldom changed; the beds were never empty for long. There were too many tenants waiting. They came from Derna, Gazala, Acroma and El Adam. They came in a hurry down the long desert tracks, and they were hurried on to make room for others. Some joined the cavalcade that swung down to the crazy jetty and were carried aboard the hospital ship that called twice a week from Alex, waiting far out in the harbor beyond the sunken hulks of other ships that had traveled for the last time the same smiling sea, some were carried on alone only a little way to the morgue. Whichever it was, immediately a patient was gone his successor moved into his bed. So how, the C.O. asked me, could the sheets be changed? There were three thousand soiled sheets waiting now to be washed and no one to wash them and no water to wash with. He eyed me askance.
I went back to the beach to fetch the nurses.
"You haven't a high opinion," I said to them, "of French military hospitals, but you are going to work now in a British hospital that beats any French hospital I've ever seen for squalor. And you are not to grumble. The VIIIth Army doesn't want us here, nor does the C.O. of the hospital. We've got to justify our existence by the work we do and not be a nuisance. Don't criticize, don't badger the orderlies, they are all overworked. If you can't get what you want, make do without. The surgeons will come round. Once they see you at work they'll be only too glad to give you their big cases. Remember you are the only nursing sisters in this part of the world. All the nurses of 62 are in Cairo or Merza Matruh. Come along---and no grumbling, understand?"
The nurses played up. Nothing could make those dreary wards pleasant, but they set to work with four of our own F.A.U. boys and had transformed our block in twenty-four hours. I remember Irving's grim face as I helped her remake the beds. She had coaxed a couple of dozen clean sheets from the corporal in charge of the block. It was a case of changing the worst. As we bent together over the dark evil-smelling linen she would draw in her breath with a hiss. "No, Edith, not this one; it will have to do."
We settled down. We were to work there until the middle of May. When the Tobruk box followed the example of Gazala and Knightsbridge and Bir Hakim and shut itself in, we were shut out and moved to Solum.
With eight nurses for eighty beds it was easy to do a good nursing job. Even without Nancy Wright and Madame Butherne, who had joined Fruchaud in the forward unit, we were more than adequately staffed. For there was little or no work in the theater and reception. Our French patients were almost all operated on by Fruchaud before they reached us and the British were dealt with in the operating rooms by their own people. Commandant Durbach, who had come back to us, was kept kicking his heels. The British surgical and medical staff were polite but didn't require his assistance. It was the same with the nurses. We offered to do more, but the C.O. wouldn't have us in the other blocks. He accepted the F.A.U. boys, however, and two were allotted as orderlies to each of the ten wards.
Gradually the surgeons came round as I had hoped. Some chest cases they had despaired of pulled through. When the German and Italian planes came over as they often did to bomb the harbor, the sisters showed no interest but went quietly on with their work. There was a big raid one day---about twenty planes; they got an oil tanker and a couple of lighters, and a bomb landed close by the end of our ward. A part of the ceiling came down, and the patients were frightened. It was teatime. Evelyn and Edith were on duty, and John Marley, a very small member of the F.A.U. who wore always a vague smile on his childish face, was serving tea. He found to his surprise when he came in with a cup of tea in each hand that the beds were empty. The patients were lying under them on the floor, so he went on serving tea to them where they were, on his hands and knees, and by the time he got round the ward the raid was over and Edith and Evelyn were laughing at him as they got the patients back into bed and some of the patients were laughing too, for Edith lets out the most infectious, irresistible crescendo of giggles when she laughs that I have ever heard.
Later that day twenty British sailors came in suffering from shock and third-degree bums. Flaming like torches they had jumped into the icy harbor. I am told, and I believe it, that there is no greater agony. They were brought to our ward. And after that there was no hanging back on the part of the British surgical staff. We had few French wounded, never more than twenty at a time, but the most serious operation cases among the British were sent to us to be nursed, our beds were always full and the ward throbbed with the peculiar subdued excitement that accompanies the fight against death, pain and despair.
It was a good moment for us to be in Tobruk for the morale that winter and spring was low. The war wasn't going well and the men had lost confidence in their chiefs. I used to go over to the sergeants' mess in the beach hospital to listen in to the news from London and came to expect an inevitable announcement of some serious reverse. At last, one day, I heard Mr. Churchill's voice and it said, "I have to announce a great disaster. It is an imperial disaster. Singapore has fallen."
There were half a dozen British N.C.O.'s in the tent. We looked at each other and said nothing. As I went back to our camp I thought of the men scattered all over the desert who had been listening in. I saw them in small lonely camps, in caves in the sand hills, in the isolated trucks that had become their desert homes, tuning in to the B.B.C. to hear the voice of the Prime Minister coming to them from England to announce the fall of Singapore.
I do not suggest that they gave way to despair. The war has proved that belief in defeat is incompatible with the British character. They could take it, and they did, these nomad troops of the desert, but the morale of the VIIIth Army as we saw it in hospital was so low that Edith would fly into a temper with her patients and trounce them roundly, then come to me saying:
"I'm worried to death. I didn't know our men could be like this. They all want to go home and grumble all day about the mess G.H.Q. is making of everything. They say they don't care any more what happens. They've had enough of the desert. I give it to them, I do. Sometimes I make them laugh and they say, 'Well, sister, if you can stand it I guess we can! But it makes you sick to hear them go on about Rommel. There's only one hero in this war and that's Rommel and when I say what about our own generals they say---'Archie Wavell was all right! But they don't seem to know the name of anyone else and some days it's all I can do to get a smile out of any of them."
We saved I know many British lives; and the presence of the girls was a tonic to the men; and so we established our right to be near the desert war. But I didn't know to what extent our nurses had earned the respect of the authorities at G.H.Q. until we had done the retreat to El Alamein and I saw the D.M.S. General Tomlinson in Cairo and he said: "I am going to use your unit as a lever in forcing the VIIIth Army to allow nurses in future to go forward in the desert."
General de Larminat in the meantime had consented to withdraw from Mekili and had moved his column back to El Azrac, and our forward unit with Fruchaud in command had moved with him.
They put up their tents at El Azrac and I went up to see them as soon as I heard. they had arrived. I say El Azrac but there was as usual nothing to show that such a place existed. We followed a track marked by petrol tins painted with the Croix de Lorraine west from Acroma, and out into the desert and eventually found the Spears arrow. There were some South African tanks to the right of the track, our tents to the left, otherwise nothing but sand dotted with camel-scrub, and the wide high sky; a lonely piece of desert.
But the unit was in high spirits. Madame Butherne was giving first aid to all the invisible troops in the region and Fruchaud had had quite a lot of work, British and South African casualties as well as French. The Stukas came over quite often, they said, and showed me with pride how well they had arranged their camp with a slit trench by the side of each small tent.
Nick still looked washed out but seemed to have enjoyed the trek from Mekili. They had traveled by night and it had been exciting. He told me a story as we sat drinking tea in the winter sun.
They had received their movement orders late one afternoon and had been told to fetch rations that evening from Supply for nine days. So he had gone with a truck to collect the rations, been shown a series of dumps and told to help himself. It was growing dark, the camp was all in confusion and the wind was blowing the sand in all directions. There was a mound of biscuit boxes, another of bully beef tins, another of sardines and so on. The first dump he came on was of pineapple cubes, and a black man, a tirailleur was sitting on top of the pile of tins. Nick noticed that he was gray in the face, but he was silent and Nick was in a hurry, and everyone was shouting and rushing about in the windy dark, so he passed on, But when he had collected his other rations, he thought of the pineapple cubes and as he liked pineapple very much he went back to get some, and he found the black man lying on top of the heap of pineapple cubes and he was dead. He had toppled over and died while Nick was gone and the wind was covering him with sand and no one was paying any attention to him. Nick hesitated, he said; should he take some pineapple cubes or not? He decided not and drove away, leaving the black man from the far-away Chad, lying on the mound of pineapple cubes with the sand drifting over him.
I didn't see Nick again. Michael Rowntree came to me some days later in Tobruk to tell me that he had been killed. I went up next day to El Azrac to visit his grave, and hear what had happened. A German plane had come over and had dropped a stick of bombs, aimed apparently at the South African tanks the other side of the track. Nick like the other members of the unit had obeyed orders and jumped immediately, when the first bomb dropped, into his slit trench, but one of the bombs had landed in the exact middle of it. Madame Butherne had come running with the boys a minute later. They had gathered him up, she told me. And then she added what gave the story of Nick's death a special poignancy. "He wasn't well," she said, "as you know. But a British officer came in the day before, desperately wounded, the only hope was a blood transfusion, and Nick gave him two pints of his blood; afterwards on the way back to his hut he fainted."
"Did the British officer live?"
"No, he died."
"But Nick didn't give his blood in vain, Michael."
"No."
They had buried him in the desert near the camp, but they were moving on to Bir Hakim---so he would lie alone.
I visited his grave again after the battle of El Alamein, when we came back for the second time to Tobruk. The armies of the desert had swept past. The war had flowed back and forth over the place where he lay, leaving behind its ugly deposit of charred trucks, broken tanks, disabled guns and wrecked planes; and all the sand as far as the eye could see was strewn with petrol tins, as an untidy chicken run is strewn with droppings, but Nick's grave had not been disturbed. It lay between the graves of two of the Fighting French who had died in Madame Butherne's tent. It was right that he should lie between them, for he was French on his mother's side and though he would not go out to fight, he gave his blood generously to a British soldier before his life was taken from him by an enemy whom he had been commanded by God and his conscience to love.
It is a small matter and almost too cruelly trivial to mention, but his death removed what was left of the ill feeling that had remained among the French members of the unit for ourselves since Timimi.
It is a strange thing to grow fond of a place whose every stone shouts aloud the brutal horrors of war. Alan Moorhead in his African Trilogy describes Tobruk immediately before its fall in '42 as hideous and squalid. "It was difficult," he writes, "to see any tradition in this squalor or feel the sense of history and heroic deeds. The depressing, degrading leveling influence of war had made the place accursed." But to me it was eloquent, as eloquent as the weary hulk of a ship washed up by the sea after a long losing battle against a storm. It had the absorbing interest of a human document. A queer grim tragic beauty seemed to play over its ugly ruins. And I became attached to it. Was it because of the men who lived their strange life under its stones and asked me so wistfully to bring the girls to their shelters for supper? I don't think so. Navy House was broken in half. Captain Smith, who welcomed us to his mess in '42, was dead when we went back after El Alamein. He had lived through the siege, been transferred and had asked, he told me, to come back again to Navy House. Tobruk he said had become like home to him. A quiet man with the deep gaze of some sailors, he stayed behind to blow up the flimsy jetty he had constructed of old planks and barrels when Rommel's tanks swept down the escarpment, and he blew himself up with it and died of his wounds.
There were many others still there when we arrived in '42 who had been through the siege. Men of Coastal Command or A.C.A.C. Some had built themselves snug little houses in deep wadies by the shore, tiny hidden villages invisible from the air that went clambering down steep narrow paths to the sea and reminded one of miniature villages in Devonshire. Their inhabitants--each claimed by the way to be the oldest inhabitant of Tobruk---were very house-proud and would say of the siege, "Oh it wasn't so bad," and tell how they had distilled their own sea water and how ships would slip into harbor during the night with supplies and then like as not they would add, "But we won't hold it again. You'll see, there won't be a second siege of Tobruk." Many said that, so many that we were dismayed. But when I reported their sayings in Cairo at the end of March, Cairo only laughed.
Yes; I grew fond of Tobruk, it became a part of my permanent life, the life that I carry with me from the past. When I think of it now I have the same nostalgic longing that comes when I remember St. Jean le Bassel . But with the thought of Tobruk comes a keener pang---for I know that I shall never go back. St. Jean was an insignificant little place, Tobruk was immense---an immense drama in stone. I have been back to St. Jean, but I could never find my way to Tobruk again. It is gone, as truly as if its rugged promontory had slipped into the sea dragging with it the modest Virgin that some men in khaki bad lifted so carefully from her ruined altar and placed beside the broken door of the church.
The VIIIth Army is gone from Tobruk. The British Navy can ignore now that perilous harbor with its mute tragic burden. Some day, perhaps, other sailors will come to lift those sunken ships. But I shan't go back, and so for me it will never change nor the heroism of its siege be dimmed, nor the shame of its fall. Always as long as I live I shall be aware of its men who are buried below the escarpment and the men who went down and still seem to be waiting beside their ships under the waters of the still harbor to be raised by the sound of a trumpet blast.
I lived on the beach at Tobruk with the main part of the unit but went to Bir Hakim every few days. T. W. moved up there early in February and stayed, save for a week or two, now and then when Rosie relieved her, until the women were all ordered out at the end of May. Alan Moorhead states that there were two women in Bir Hakim during the final battle but I don't think that is true. There were four until the Germans launched their big attack. Nancy Smith, Madame Butherne and Kit Tatham-Warter of the Hadfield-Spears Unit and Susan Travers who was driving one of Koenig's cars. Madame Asquins had been there with her husband for a short time, but she didn't like it so they came back to Tobruk quite early.
All the valiant four were ordered out when the situation became very serious, much to their disgust. But Susan Travers got back. General de Larminat, who had established his H.Q. in the Solum region, sent her up with a letter to Koenig and once she got there she stayed until the end. She came out with the garrison on the night of June 12 driving Koenig's Ford van. He had had two cars damaged under him and was standing in the lane when she came along, so she drove him out. I went down the lane some months later. It was still clearly marked with wire because of the mine fields to either side and it cannot have been a pleasant drive with the Germans at the end of it machine-gunning the convoy by the light of the burning trucks. But I have been told that Susan was as cool as if driving down Caser el nil in Cairo and I am sure it is true. For she is an intrepid woman and the great admiration we all feel for her was T. W.'s one consolation. Furious at having been ordered out, and very envious of Susan, T. W. forgave her for doing what she would so have liked to do herself because she admired her so much.
We followed F. track from El Adam when we first began to go to Bir Hakim---turning south before we reached Knightsbridge and passing Abu-Mafis on the left and the rhinoceros signs of the VIIth Armored Division on our right to enter the camp by the north gate. But it was shorter to climb the escarpment south of El Adam and cut straight across country and it amused Barbara to drive by compass so we took to going that way. I was always a little nervous on these drives for Barbara's was only a Boy Scout compass, and I would watch anxiously for the wrecked Stuka that was the one landmark on the forty kilometer stretch of desert, but we only got half lost once and were prevented from shooting south past the camp by a French patrol that waved us to come back.
Life in the forward unit was austere but exhilarating. There was a wonderful feeling of freedom and camaraderie, curious perhaps since the whole camp was shut in by mine fields and the thirty-six hundred troops dug into the great sandy box were all but invisible. We were told by friends in the R.A.F. that the camouflage was first-class and I know that Koenig's orders in regard to tentage were severe. Our smart new operating theater had to go. It was too good a mark for the Stukas. Colonel Fruchaud had a small tent which he shared with Père Boileau; the women and other officers slept to begin with in kutoons. All were well dug in. You dug a hole in the desert like a grave but wider, then put your canvas over the top about level with the ground. There was room for a camp bed inside and a foot to spare. Your belongings you kept on shelves cut in the earth. But as time went on the various members of the unit dug themselves underground houses ten feet square, lined the walls with petrol tins, collected scrap iron from the desert wreckage for roofing and made themselves snug. It was nice and warm, Rosie tells me, underground. The boys had rigged up a wonderful system of electric light. Most luxurious. But Bir Hakim was a great place for sandstorms; they lasted sometimes four or five days and after a night of storm you would find the entrance to your house blocked and would have to be dug out. You never washed, of course.
We were engulfed in a sandstorm I remember on my first visit just as we passed through the gate in the wire and it took us an hour to find the unit. Dim huddled figures would loom through the yellow fog. A chasseur, a legionnaire, a spahi, and we would ask, "Where is Spears?"---for the troops called the unit now by that name---and an arm would point into the blind distance. Then, just as we were beginning to despair, T. W. popped like a rabbit out of a hole and led us floundering to Fruchaud's hut, and there he was in the middle of the storm, in a dingy, ice-cold tent with a rope down the middle of it and all his clothes and Père Boileau's flung across it and the sand whirling in under the flapping canvas and he had a chair with a canvas table in front of it and the table and floor and earthen shelves were strewn with sheets of paper all covered with sand and he was writing his book on war surgery.
There wasn't much comfort at Bir Hakim, but the food, thanks to Père Boileau and Hajali the Lebanese cook, was wonderful. How they managed it I don't know, but the unit lived like fighting cocks. The officers' mess was in one of the three-ton Bedfords---the kitchen in a sand pit just outside---and I knew that whenever I went to see them I would have a far better lunch than I would get at any corps headquarters. No cold bully beef with pickles and tinned peaches were served under that Bedford hood. Hot succulent stew with onions, hot pease pudding, pommes frites, crème au chocolat, red wine and beer and coffee---large steaming mugs of strong coffee with thick creamy condensed milk and sugar. And what a jolly lot of ruffians they looked sitting on the long benches. Fruchaud would place me on his right, Barbara on his left with Thibaut opposite.
Thibaut was a new member. He had come from Damascus to join us as second surgeon. He had the figure and the walk of a Spanish torero and the bravery---as we came to know. Père Boileau among the officers was that rare creature, a very brave coward. Never I believe in all the weeks that he remained at Bir Hakim did he cease being frightened, never would he consent to come back to the comparative peace and security of Tobruk. Always at mealtimes he sat nearest the open end of the Bedford and if a bomb fell even at a great distance, he was out in a second in one great leap and into the next trench. Two minutes later he would be back again, a sheepish grin on his pallid visage, and would growl, "C'est plus fort que moi"---and go on with his lunch.
It is not my purpose to attempt to describe the war in the desert. I could not write of military operations if I would. I write of what I saw, and we saw no battles save battles in the air. We saw the wreckage they left behind, one picked one's way through the garbage of war that was spread over a thousand square miles of sand; and we saw the men who took part in them, before and after they went into battle. Many men talked to us. Friends of the girls found their way down to the beach from Gazala and Knightsbridge and we heard sorry tales of tanks abandoned undamaged and full of petrol, of units that had broken and fled when there was no need for flight and many complaints of VIIIth Army and G.H.Q. Cairo. One story going round Tobruk was of a gentleman in red tabs who arrived from Alex by sea and stepping ashore called for a taxi to take him to the best hotel.
An invigorating friendly place, the desert. Crossing and recrossing the part that lay between Tobruk and El Adam, Bir Hakim and Knightsbridge, Rosie and I would stop and pass the time of day with the men who lived far out on the sand in lonely trucks and they would ask us in and give us mugs of tea, and talk to us about their girls or show us photographs of their wives and children, and they would look with shy admiration at Rosie and say---"It's very surprising to meet young ladies like you, Miss, in the desert." And one day when we got lost and she went up to a truck to ask the way, I heard a voice from inside call out, "Am I dreamin' or do I hear the voice of angels speaking?" And a grizzled head appeared wearing a broad astonished grin.
But Bir Hakim camp was most invigorating of all. And that to me was very important. For in Bir Hakim I found again the old spirit of the French Army of 1914-1918. Was it Koenig's doing? De Larminat's? Or was it that the handful of men who had cut themselves off from their nation were at last free, and had come in sight of their goal? They had fought their compatriots in Syria and gnashed their teeth, some had fought the Italians in Eritrea, now after months of waiting they were going to fight the enemy who had marched on Paris and turned a marshal of France into a coward. They were still only a handful of men, and at that a motley collection. Two battalions of the Foreign Legion, one regiment of Marines (Fusiliers Marins), one battalion of marine infantry, spahis, North Africans, blacks from the Pacific; but there was a spirit in them that made them alike and not like the men we had met in Lorraine. These men were tough, they were hard, they were aching for a fight and would know how to take punishment. They were like the poilus of 1914.
Strange to recall how little we suspected what was coming. We knew that a great battle was preparing. That we must have known for we watched the supplies pouring into Tobruk, and early in March De Larminat asked me to come up to Bir Hakim to lunch with him, and after lunch he asked me to prepare the unit for a much more arduous life than any we had known hitherto. He seemed to have forgiven me for the Timimi business and spoke with suppressed excitement. I must dispense for one thing with a large part of our equipment, and I must select from among my staff only those who were fit and willing to undergo serious hardships. We would travel far, he said, and only those who could endure great heat and thirst and fatigue must venture to come. So we sent a large part of our heavy equipment including most of the beds and bedding back to Alexandria to be put in store and I put the question to the girls. Were they prepared to follow the brigade across three thousand miles of desert in blazing heat?
I had had a message from the Minister of State, Middle East, that B. had been knighted by the King, appointed Minister to Syria and the Lebanon, was on his way back and expected me to meet him in Cairo on the fifteenth of March. I told them this and explained that I had to go. Barbara, too, was leaving. She was going to join Freya Stark in Baghdad, and Cynthia was going to America to her mother whom she hadn't seen since St. Jean le Bassel, but I would be back. Fruchaud had promised, I said, to warn me in time so that I could be with them for the great advance. And I know that De Larminat, though he didn't say so, expected to be in hot pursuit of the Afrika Corps round El Agheila by the middle of June. But when I did get back on June 11, the unit had moved, not forward, but back to Solum, the hospital tents were set up in a field by the shore and Koenig was preparing to come out of Bir Hakim the next night at the head of his troops.