 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
THE story of the sortie from Bir Hakim came to us in fragments. It was brought by the wounded, by the men who had followed Koenig down the narrow lane between the wire and fought their way through the German lines with hand grenades and bayonets, to fall and be picked up in the lurid confusion and loaded pell-mell into ambulances, trucks, anything that was handy. We had it from excited mouths that were twisted with pain, it came in gurgles as the blood spurted, in soft whispers and savage ejaculation and it sounded through the ether masks of the theater; it was a story of triumph.
The atmosphere in the hospital was tense on the eleventh. Wild rumors flew round the camp. The garrison of Bir Hakim had surrendered, had been overrun, had been killed to a man. But the wounded began to arrive in the early morning and soon all the hospital was filled with the sound of jubilant voices calling to each other from beds and stretchers; greetings, curses, shouts of defiance, and laughter and groans all mixed together.
"Jacques!"
"Pierre!"
"Comment va?"
"On t'a eu, mon vieux."
"Nom de Dieu, que je souffre! Mais C'était beau, hein?"
"Dites, madame. Avez-vous vu un Fusilier Marin qui s'appelle Marcel--un petit roux? Il a tué deux à la bayonette et puis je l'ai perdu."
"T'as vu les salauds avec leur mitrailleuses au bout-là? Marcel a été à côté, pauvre bougre. C'était étroit, fichtre. Pas moyen de passer à cause des mines."
"Et les camions, qui flambaient! Quelle bagarre."
"Et le capitaine?"
"Sais pas. Je l'ai vu debout au milieu---puis rien."
"Y a eu de la casse."
"Forcément."
"Faut pas s'en plaindre. Nous sommes là, quoi?"
The reception tent was out of control. They wouldn't lie still. Each arrival was greeted with shouts, questions. They laughed while we dressed their wounds---they couldn't stop talking.
Koenig came in the afternoon. I saw him standing in the middle of the compound with General Catroux and went up to him. He was unshaved, his khaki beret was over one eye, he was laughing convulsively, he swayed on uncertain feet as he bowed to me, he looked slightly mad.
I took him across to one of the wards and as he entered the door of the tent a shout went up and the men rose in their beds. They couldn't all lift themselves up, and they couldn't all see him. Some had thick bandages over their eyes and some were encased in plaster. But it was as if all had leaped to their feet. And he went to them waving his arms and laughing and called them each by name and took their hands in his and all the tent was in a tumult of joy. It was the same in each ward.
I have become too accustomed to surgical wards filled with battle casualties to be easily moved; the visits of commanding officers have ceased to be events in our hospital life. But this was different from anything I had seen; this was not the visit of condolence of a general to men who had been sacrificed; it was a celebration. It was a meeting of friends who had waited a long time for the test that was to prove to them that they were what they claimed to be; now they had come through the test and had won the right to be called the fighting men of France. My eyes were wet as I watched the carnival of General Koenig with his wounded men.
He was criticized later. When the Gazala line was broken, and the IInd South African Division under Pinner came down the road to join the swollen garrison in Tobruk, and Rommel drove his massed tanks east along the Capuzzo track through the British armor, and the Guards marched out of the Knightsbridge box and Acroma fell and El Adam; and Tobruk was surrounded and shut itself in, only to fall open again like a thing of cardboard; then in the dismay and humiliation and rage of defeat there were British spirits mean enough to decry the effort of the Fighting French and attack Koenig and blame him for holding out too long or not long enough; and some went so far as to criticize him for coming out at the head of his troops instead of waiting to be the last. But I know what his troops felt about that, for I saw and I asked myself during our long trek back to Alex what Koenig and De Larminat, who had expected to be pursuing the Afrika Corps toward Agheila must be feeling, now that they found themselves engulfed with their little French force in the headlong retreat of the VIIIth Army.
They didn't tell me. No French officer or private soldier ever allowed himself any criticism in my presence of British leadership. Tact? Consideration for our feelings? Perhaps. Hot words were exchanged, the gossips said, between De Larminat and the British command. It wouldn't be surprising if it were true. He is a difficult man, De Larminat, almost as difficult as General de Gaulle. He may very well have poured contempt on our methods of warfare. If he did, it didn't affect the morale of his troops. There was no defeatism in Koenig's brigade.
We went a year later to visit the cemetery at Bir Hakim and wandered over the deserted camp, poking about in the debris among the empty tins. Rosie wanted to find the site of the hospital and her underground house. And we found or believed that we found the place where Thibaut had set up his operating theater during those final days and the hollow where he had laid his wounded . For Thibaut had stayed behind when the forward unit was ordered out and had gone on working up to the end with an assistant and two orderlies from the Groupe Sanitaire Divisionnaire. And he had performed twenty-one big operations during the last day with bombs falling all round him and had put them on stretchers in a hollow in the sand to wait until night when he proposed to bring them out in ambulances with the column. But a bomb fell on them toward evening and killed the lot. They are buried in a common grave in the Bir Hakim cemetery. Standing by the grave you can look out over the desert for many miles, and you will probably see what seem to be trucks moving across the dazzling sand but it will only be a mirage.
There had been changes in our officer staff. Colonel Fruchaud had asked to be transferred, during my absence, on grounds of ill health and had left two weeks before the battle. Colonel Vernier, former C.O. of the A.C.L., had taken his place, and Durbach, who had never been happy with us, had replaced Vernier once again at the A.C.L. Colonel Vernier was to remain médecin chef of the hospital until the end of the war. A short thickset sturdy little man with pleasant blue eyes, a plaintive voice and an impish sense of humor, he was a very different type from Fruchaud. Younger, less distinguished as a surgeon and a less polished man of the world, he had been in the French Colonial Service and had behind him a long and varied experience in French West Africa. He was an ardent Gaullist. There was a warmth about him, a frank friendliness and enthusiasm that won my confidence at once. I needed to have confidence. We were beginning our partnership in difficult circumstances. Though we were both too sanguine by temperament to believe in disaster, things did look pretty bad. A second French brigade under General Cazou had moved up to Capuzzo only to be overrun by German armor. It was said that VIIIth Army had neglected to warn them of the oncoming enemy. It was said that all the British tanks were destroyed, that the VIIth Armored Division had ceased to exist, that General Ritchie had been recalled, that Auchinleck had come up to the desert to take command of VIIIth Army, that Tobruk would not be defended. We didn't know what to believe. All we knew, Vernier and I, was that we were jointly responsible for the unit and must act together in unison.
The disaster we didn't believe in was not long in coming. I was sitting at tea in the mess tent just one week after Bir Hakim when Commandant Reilinger, medical inspector for De Larminat, walked in and announced the fall of Tobruk. I knew Reilinger well. He was a French doctor who had lived for years in the States and talked English with a strong American accent. The Tobruk garrison, he added, of thirty thousand men including the Guards' brigade had been taken prisoner.
I was very angry, so angry that I got up and cried out:
"How dare you say such a thing? I will not allow you, Reilinger, or anyone to come into this camp and spread such rumors. It's not true. It cannot be true."
I hurried from the tent. He followed. He apologized. He said he wouldn't have repeated the story if De Larminat himself hadn't told him that it was a fact. I still didn't believe it. And when next day I found it was true, I couldn't take it in, it didn't make sense. Tobruk had held out before for six months. It was the largest supply base in the desert. We had seen the supplies pouring into it all these past months. If Cairo didn't mean to defend it, why the two million gallons of petrol, the three thousand new Bedfords? Why order the Guards into the trap? But Cairo had decided to defend it, someone said, but too late. What did that mean? No, someone else said, that wasn't it at all. Cairo had decided not to defend the place, but London had overruled Cairo at the last moment.
I hated all this talk. I had a foolish, fatuous, but none the less agonized sense of personal outrage. Tobruk was immense, to surrender it without a fight was terrible.
We moved back to Garola, the other side of Merza Matruh. We put up our tents between the railway line and the sea. We stayed there three days or four or five. I don't know. No patients arrived. The girls went in swimming, lay on the beach. The beach was strewn I remember with bruised waterlogged oranges from a wrecked ship. An untidy depressing beach.
T. W. came back one day from Matruh to say the workshops were closing down. No more spare parts to be had. All the services were packing up. She was laconic as was our habit. The Germans seemed to be pretty close. We might as well fill up with petrol. They had told her at the transit camp that the New Zealand division was on its way up from the Delta.
I must have been worried for I remember my feeling of relief when I heard that the New Zealanders were arriving. I had last seen them at Baalbek in Syria.
We sent all our trucks to the petrol point to fill up. No orders came from De Larminat. We didn't know where he was. We seemed to be forgotten. I consulted Vernier and went in search of VIIIth Army and Brigadier Walker. They were behind us somewhere, but where? No one seemed to know. I went down the road, on and on, I passed Fuka and Bagush. No one could tell me what I wanted to know.
There was no congestion on the road but all the desert to either side was an endless staging ground with units on the move. At last I saw the VIIIth Army sign, and turned up a track toward the sea and came on some scattered tents. A group of dejected figures in khaki was just disappearing into one of them with Brigadier Walker on its edge. He saw me and crossed over and said in a whisper through the window of the car, "If you don't mind waiting. There's a conference on. They are going to decide things. I'll be able to advise you afterwards." So I waited and presently he came out of the tent and said I was to take my unit without delay to Amariha camp outside Alex. He would let them know that we were coming.
I went back to Garola and told Vernier. Should we wait and try to find Reilinger? I remembered Timimi. But where should we look for Reilinger? The French brigade had vanished. Michael Rowntree reported that the Matruh hospital had closed down. The nurses had already gone. There seemed no point in hanging about. We broke camp and moved off early next morning reaching Dabaa at nine o'clock. The girls were cheerful but hungry. The Ark, N.A.A.F.I.'s extra splendid roadhouse, was crowded but they made room for us and we had a superb breakfast of bacon and eggs and bread and orange marmalade.
A little farther down the road we came on the brigade. Vernier found Koenig and told him we were making for Amariha camp and we moved on through Alamein and by-passing Alexandria, arrived at Amariha. Amariha was a fine camp twelve miles or so from Alex on the road to Cairo but no one had been warned there that we were coming. They were crowded out, the Commandant's office said. And who were we anyhow? I explained the somewhat peculiar character of our formation. Amariha still looked dubious. They could not, however, but admit that I was Lady Spears, wife of the British Minister in Syria and that I had with me fifty genuine Britishers---so they told us to go across to Ikingi camp and there we found an empty dilapidated bungalow with a field in front of it enclosed in wire and we moved into both on the first day of July.
We stayed there a week. It was an interesting week in the calendar of the desert war, that first week in July, '42. The middle of it is known as Ash Wednesday because G.H.Q. Cairo chose that day to make a bonfire of its records, and it was quite an interesting week for us, but very disagreeable. In fact it was the most disagreeable week for me of all the war.
We had lost touch with the brigade and had of course nothing to do. It was very hot. The empty bungalow was filthy, there was no light and no water, its reservoir was dry. We put up some small tents in the yard to sleep in and every day and all day we were enveloped in a sand and dust storm, not because of any wind from the desert, but from the trucks that were rushing down from the desert, and every day area H.Q. in Alex was pestering us about our latrines. The VIIIth Army was in full retreat at our back door, Alex was being emptied, the great car parks were spilling their thousands of new trucks into the road, but area took a passionate interest in our latrines.
It had always been so in VIIIth Army. On the Tobruk beach, at El Azrac and Bir Hakim, at Solum and even during our brief stay at Garola, solemn officers had turned up to inspect and condemn our latrines. They weren't deep enough, they weren't big enough, they weren't dug according to standard. Fruchaud would fly into a rage. He had his own ideas about latrines and they didn't coincide with the British. Now here they were again, the hygiene squad, in Ikingi. We must make a proper latrine according to the prescribed British pattern. If we couldn't do the job ourselves, they would do it for us. "Fine," I said, "it will be finished at about the time the Germans arrive."
The girls were restless. We were suffocating. We ate and breathed sand Alex and the sea were only ten miles away. Couldn't they all have twenty-four hours' leave? The nurses needed new uniforms. There were dressmakers in Alex. Why not? I consulted Vernier. He agreed to my sending them into Alex in pairs, each pair for twenty-four hours. They found rooms at the Westminster Hotel, had breakfast in bed, hot baths, shampoos, manicures, and ordered their new uniforms. Then I had an idea and sent for Michael. We didn't know where we were going, perhaps we would never come back this way again. Wouldn't it be wise to collect the beds and equipment that were stored in Alex? He agreed that it would be, and so while the convoys poured out of Alex, we went in and had our hair done and collected out beds and bedding from store.
We saw the British fleet steam out of the harbor, and Admiral Godefroy's French fleet lying safe and snug at anchor. Their safety had been enforced it is true, but they would be free to dare the open seas if and when General Rommel came. We ran into friends at the Cecil, boys who had come down from the Alamein line for a few hours' leave. John Clark, Michael Broderick, Edward Imber-Terry, Hal Astley-Corbett; they were tired and nervy and their faces showed strain; some we never saw again. And we ran into French officers from Godefroy's fleet at Pastrudis. I lunched most days at Pastrudis and there were always a dozen or more eating the rich food of that famous restaurant and drinking champagne. Their tables were gay. They seemed to be celebrating, in anticipation, Rommel's arrival.
It appeared imminent. The road into Alex and the desert round Ikingi grew more and more congested. I watched the convoys with increasing dismay. At last Reilinger turned up. The division was making across the desert to Cairo. We were to pack up and move on to Mena. It looked as if Alex might be cut off.
I said very well, but we must get permission from VIIIth Army before we moved. The hygiene squad were putting the finishing touches, I noticed, to our latrine as I got into my car. It would be ready for use they said the next day.
I went to area H.Q. and reported Reilinger's instructions. Would they please telephone Cairo and ask if we might move up to Mena? They would. I would get a message as soon as the answer came through. I thanked them. At the door I said: "By the way, that latrine will be finished tomorrow. Some day I shall write an article and its title will be 'The VIIIth Army and Latrines'!" I carried the look on their shocked faces away with me.
The orders from Cairo came through before I got back to Ikingi and I found the camp in confusion. We were to proceed under our own steam and without delay to Mena camp. Vernier had gone to the division, Jibery had received the message. As he hadn't known of my visit to area, he took the order as a sudden S.O.S. from Cairo and the result was that one or two of the French staff had panicked. They came running. We must be off at once, they said, that very night. One of the doctors had ordered the boys to make a bonfire of the kitchen tent and was throwing our cooking utensils on the fire. Michael Rowntree was watching with mild inscrutable calm. Hamilton Mills was almost in tears.
"Nonsense," I said. "There's no hurry." I fished a saucepan out of the embers. "The message is in answer to mine. We can't leave tonight anyhow."
"The colonel isn't here. Two of the nurses are in Alex. They'll have to be fetched in the morning."
A wail went up at that. "Oh! Our new uniforms. Oh! they aren't finished. We must have our uniforms."
It was quite a business fetching those nurses and their uniforms. T. W. went in early next morning. She left at seven and by midday hadn't got back. The convoy was all drawn up and ready, still T. W. didn't come. The traffic was terrible. There was a block probably. Even the colonel was getting the fidgets. If they hoped to reach Mena that night they must start. So I said I would wait, and they moved off about one. Daphne was driving me that day. We sat in the dingy porch watching the bright yellow billowing dust. T. W. turned up about three, complete with nurses and bundles of half-finished uniforms. We edged our way into the massed traffic on the road and crawled with it toward Cairo. It was two in the morning when we turned into Mena camp. I had lost T. W. near Half-Way House but had collected Rosie. She had driven into a shell hole. The other three staff cars came dribbling in. Jocelyn first, then Barbara, then T. W. By two in the morning I had all the girls with me. Where Vernier was and the rest of the convoy I had no idea.
The commandant of the French camp gave us food and the hospitality of his offices for the rest of the night. The camp he said was being evacuated next morning. We shoved the office furniture out of the way and slept on the floor. At seven as we were pushing off for Cairo, Vernier came along. The convoy he said was just down the road. I told him I would take the girls to Shepheard's Hotel and get them breakfast.
Shepheard's was deserted. Not a soul to be seen but a porter and a clerk at the reception desk. I asked for two bedrooms with baths, and sixteen breakfasts, and there as I turned round was De Larminat coming down the wide stairs. His impassive face showed no surprise, perhaps a faint, very faint gleam of approval in the enigmatic eyes.
"Bonjour, madame."
"Bonjour, Général."
"Your formation is with you?"
"It is."
"You have all your material?"
"We have."
"Then please get in touch before noon with the British medical authorities at G.H.Q. I want your hospital in the Cairo area. Be good enough to tell them this from me and ask for a locality."
I had a bath, breakfast and went to G.H.Q.
It was Saturday I think, the fourth of July---and one of those days. G.H.Q. said I didn't belong to them and handed me on to B.T.E. I found a brigadier who said I now belonged to Reese Force.
"What's that?" I said.
"It's a new force," he said, "being organized by General Reese for the defense of Cairo."
"Oh," I said.
"Have you got your people with you?"
"I have."
"Where's your equipment?"
"Waiting in our trucks near Mena."
"You mean to say you've arrived with your complete equipment?"
"That's it."
He lifted a telephone, and asked for Q. A long sandy-haired colonel came in from Q.
"This is Lady Spears," the brigadier said. "She has turned up with her field hospital, personnel and equipment complete. About the only one isn't she who hasn't lost anything on the road?"
The colonel nodded and asked how many beds we had.
I said a hundred. I started to explain that we had collected our beds from Alex, then realized that I was babbling.
"How long will it take you to put up your hospital?"
"Two or three hours."
"How soon can you begin?"
"This afternoon."
They stared. There was a moment's silence. I didn't understand why they were so surprised by all this. Then the brigadier gave me in my turn a surprise.
"I'll send an officer with you to find a camping ground on the Suez road. But I want you to have a forward unit ready to function on the Gezira racecourse. That's in case we have to defend the bridge."
"I think I concealed my surprise. I don't think it occurred to the brigadier or the colonel before or after the interview that I knew nothing of what had been going on in Cairo when I walked into B.T.E. I knew quite a lot by the time I had tramped the blistering sand along the Suez road, been allotted a site at Kilo 4 and established contact with the colonel and the boys; but I was too tired to take much interest, so tired that the following days are one long hot blur, with a camp at the end of them that was an inferno.
We never of course sent our forward unit up to the racecourse on Gezira Island, since Rommel for reasons that are still being explained didn't advance beyond El Alamein. We sat quietly on a red-hot plate and sizzled at Kilo 4 on the Suez road through the rest of July, when General Catroux took pity on us and moved us into a beautiful school at Heliopolis. And there I had to leave them again for a time.
But before I went back to Beirut something very nice happened. It happened that first Sunday after Ash Wednesday----when I was still dazed by the heat and dust and noise of the convoys that had poured through Ikingi camp.
I found myself on a terrace that Sunday evening, stretched out on a wicker chaise longue with pale-blue cushions. There was a moon over my head and a glass of ice-cold lemonade at my elbow and my host was on one side of me and the British Ambassador on the other side. But the person who counted most was opposite across the terrace. She was a little slender creature with curly gray hair and a sweet determined mouth. I could see the moonlight glinting on the tip of her delicious nose. She was my hostess, Maie Casey, wife of the Minister of State in the Middle East and I had a feeling that we were going to be friends as long as we lived.
LANGUID water swooning in the embrace of two long arms of rock. Bathing huts faded to robin's-egg blue, gay striped umbrellas, date palms, a dusty hill behind, crowned by a tall house, strawberry pink with many windows, dilapidated, oriental, Venetian, standing against the pale sky---and in the far distance the lovely faint silhouette of the mountains of Lebanon.
The rocks reached out from either side of the bathing huts into a sea of Prussian blue and every few minutes as if tickled by the brown fingers the sea would laugh and throw crystal showers high into the dazzling air and slim bodies would leap and fall in great sweeping arcs into the pond from a platform on iron stilts. Boats like white flat fish darted about and children shrilled through the damp heat and a voice howled an Arab lament across the water from a wireless somewhere behind me.
The sea was incredible, the rocks were incredible, the ladies swinging their plump behinds along the cement promenades that had been laid down on top of the burning rocks were incredible; one could believe in none of it.
As a backdrop for a musical comedy in the naughty nineties, the pool full of bobbing heads, the multicolored mermaids strewn on the rocks and the crazy restaurant with its shabby tables and chairs perched above the cement walk might do. But as a first line of defense for Egypt and the Suez Canal, no; yet that was why the IXth British Army and the Spears Mission and the officers of H. M. Royal Navy were here sharing this gaudy Turkish bath with the French.
The Bain Militaire, a relic certainly of a bygone time. The French Army of the Levant had made it long ago in the days of Weygand or Gouraud or De Martel, for the amusement of the officers of the garrison and their women and children, and now the other French had invited the British Army and Navy to share it with them, since we were allies and all in the war together. Every one of the males who walked by in loincloths or shorts had something to do with the war, and the French women who came tripping along on tiny high heels with their full bosoms and wobbling buttocks tied up in gay-colored handkerchiefs, all perforce had something to do with the military, else they would not have been allowed in.
It was August and the bathing season in Beirut was at its height when Rosie and I arrived from Egypt. We had come by car (Rosie very proud to have done the five-hundred-mile drive from Heliopolis in one day) and had found B. dining on the cool terrace at Aley above the deep shadowed valley. Joan Ali Khan was there, I remember her golden head candlelit against the immense canopy of the stars, and Freya Stark had turned up from Baghdad and I think John Hamilton and Dan Lascelles of our Legation. We had talked of the war in the desert and the threat to Syria from the Germans who were battering at the walls of Stalingrad and pushing down through the Caucasus, and Freya gave me news of Barbara, whom she had left in Baghdad, and spoke of the new spirit of union among the Arabs of the Middle East. Then John Hamilton had surprised us, for he is a gentle creature, with an outburst against the depravity of the French colony of Beirut who had some of them never set foot in France, and Dan as I remember said nothing at all though he had more interesting stuff packed in his nervous mind than any of us (it took me the best part of two years to persuade Dan Lascelles. to talk to me), and then when they had gone and Rosie had slipped off to bed B. and I sat for a while on the terrace.
General Catroux had returned, he told me, from Egypt; General de Gaulle was expected. We must go to Damascus soon for three or four days; President Dodge wanted to see me about the clinics, Mrs. Dodge wanted to see me about the nurses' club and the working party; Madame Catroux wanted me to join her in a charity ball. She had been on the phone several times. She was at Shkief, their new house in the hills. I'd better ring up.
Friendly? Oh very. Why not? He and Catroux were handling this thing together.
We had always been night owls, B. and I. Most of our talking had to be done late at night; there seemed to be no time in the day. But I was tired after my journey, my mind was all in confusion. As I dropped off to sleep in my cool pleasant mountain bedroom I seemed to be crossing the desert again. Tobruk and Bir Hakim and Solum, Helfaya Pass and Buq Buq and Dabaa fled past in my dream. Then I found myself perched on a rock above the Bain Militaire, waiting for B. to come from his office.
This wasn't a dream, it was merely the hot-weather routine of H.M.'s Minister to Syria and the Lebanon. He would leave Aley for his Beirut office each morning, I would follow at noon with a servant and lunch baskets and we would meet in our cabin at the Bain. The French officer in charge had very kindly had it built for us. It was mostly of straw with a thatched roof and one side open to the sea, and it stood on a rock dominating the lagoon. There were deck chairs and cretonne cushions to lie on, the lunch was laid on a white cloth--cold chicken and salad, a bowl of peaches and pears, and Joseph, as soon as B. came, would cook scrambled eggs on a primus outside. It was all very pleasant and very strange after the desert.
The glare from the water stabbed through my sunglasses; the voice of the lamenting Arab howled in my ears; Rosie had gone to change into her bathing suit. How long was it since we had got lost in a sandstorm looking for Railhead? Ages ago. We had started out that day from Safafi, and missed the telegraph poles, and when we reached the place where we were supposed to find the dummy tanks they were gone.
I was seeing Bayard and Mary Dodge at five. Mary would give me tea in her pleasant American house with its old spindly mahogany. We would settle the days for our committees. A committee for the clinics with Bayard, another for the Red Cross with Mary; and I must see the matron of the New Zealand hospital and go to the 23rd General at Sidon and get together with Madame Catroux about the ball. It would have to be, she said, at the Grand Hotel at Sofar as all the rich Egyptians stayed there. Linda Sursock would help and Donna Maria and Madame Georges Tabet. All the smart Lebanese. We would have to sell hundreds of tickets and Madame Catroux would have President Naccache on her right at the gala dinner and I with luck would have General Catroux on mine, that is if he consented to come. B. certainly wouldn't---and---well---one must face it, being the wife of the British Minister in the Lebanon was a very different job from running a field hospital.
That was Commandant Joulin out there floating on his back, the nicest of General Catroux's A.D.C.'s, and here came Joan and Ali Khan, very jaunty he was, carrying their lunch basket between them, and the man across on the opposite rocks looked like Robin Hutchins, the head of the military section of the Spears Mission. A very fine-looking chap, Robin, such good legs. Hamish MacKenzie would be turning up later. What a nice staff we had at the Legation with Dan, Tony and Hamish. Hamish said Dan frightened him out of his wits, but Dan wasn't really terrifying, it was only that he had such a special liking for excellence. A fastidious mind and great integrity didn't make perhaps an easy diplomat, things would never I imagined be easy for Dan Lascelles. He couldn't drift out of trouble into the dim distance like our beautiful languid Tony, who loved birds and the English poets of the nineteenth century, nor find solace in the company of the hospitable Lebanese ladies like Hamish. Here was one of our troubles now, Boegner, the skinny man with the dark fanatic face who had joined De Gaulle only when the battle for Beirut was won; and with him were the two toasts of the French Officers' Club; tall dusky beauties with splendid shoulders and beautiful legs, their handkerchiefs so scanty as to be almost unnoticeable.
The battle for Beirut! Had there been one? Madame X waved to me as she passed. Her husband had come out of Bir Hakim not long ago. He was in camp now, near Cairo. But the pretty little thing just going by had a husband it seemed in Madagascar who had not cared to join General de Gaulle. There were several wives in Beirut it appeared with husbands on the Vichy side. But General Catroux was kind, he was paying their marriage allowances so that they could stay on in their villas behind the languid palms. Others again, so I'd been told, had been left behind when their men sailed back to France in the good ship "Providence," and these too were being looked after at the Hotel St. Georges by the French Army.
But that wasn't fair. There was no French Army here in this country. The French Army of Syria had gone back to France and those who had not gone to France had gone to the desert. They were waiting to fight again at El Alamein. Here there was only General Catroux and his staff and a dozen delegates in a dozen residences in places like Latakia and Aleppo and Homs and Suedia in the Jebel Druse. Our old friend Magrin Verneret was at Latakia. He had put us up for the night and taken us to see the crusaders' castle of Sahum. An erratic man, he had the fascination of a dangerous soft-footed half-tamed creature who might go suddenly for your throat. And Colonel d'Essesars, a sweet man, was at Homs. And Cornillon Molinier was about somewhere with the air force. He kept popping in and out. B. liked him awfully, and he liked Rosie, was one of her many admirers. But of French troops there were none, only the troupes spéciales with French officers of a type very different from the men who were serving with De Larminat and Koenig in the 1st Free French Division.
There were, apparently, a great many Vichy French about; some in high positions. The post, telegraph, harbor and so on. The Free French had had, it seemed, nothing like enough men to staff the administration when they took over and General Catroux, rather than let IXth Army help, had preferred to keep on the French civil servants who had run the show under Dentz. What would happen if the war ever came this way, if the Germans came down through Turkey? Our security people weren't happy, but we couldn't kick the Vichy men out; only Catroux could do that, or De Gaulle. The IXth Army were in control of the country for war purposes but the French had territorial privileges. It seemed to be very complicated. Where did the Lebanese and Syrian governments come in? Perhaps they didn't. They had been given their independence but didn't appear to have much say in what was going on. It must be odd to have no control over your own army and police.
The French officers in command of the local troops were not very interested in the war apparently. Why should they be? They were very comfortable as they were. They had been comfortable in their Syrian garrisons when the enemy broke through at Sedan and rushed down on Paris. They had been equally comfortable when the Germans descended in their transport planes on their Syrian airdromes; and when we arrived they had come quite comfortably over to our side and were staying on undisturbed under the sign of the Croix de Lorraine.
But since they were here what were they doing? The British IXth Army was here to defend Egypt. What were the French defending? The interests of France presumably. France had had a mandate. But General Catroux had put an end to the mandate. He had said so on the eighth of June, over a year ago, on the day we moved up to Irbid---and General Catroux was an honorable man. He had refused to hand over French Indo-China to the Japs, and had joined General de Gaulle, who had joined us, so we were allies. We mustn't forget that. We were all in the war together, that is to say for the same reason. But if we were here because of the war and the French were here simply because they had been here for the last twenty-five years and meant to stay war or no war, and the local governments expected us all to hand the country back to them when the war was over, the situation seemed to hold possibilities of confusion and misunderstanding.
I don't know just when it was that B. began to doubt the good faith of the Free French in their dealings with the Syrian and Lebanese governments. He has never told me. It is possible that he doesn't know himself. But nothing happened during that summer of '42 to make his dealings with General Catroux too difficult or interfere with our friendly intercourse. Madame Catroux and I held our charity ball together at Sofar and made a large sum of money. All the bigwigs of the country turned up, the President of the republic, Monsieur Naccache and his wife, the Foreign Minister, the Minister of the Interior, all the Ministers in fact of the government that didn't govern (the constitution had been suspended at the outbreak of war) and all the French officials who were in fact carrying on the business of government for them, and all the smart set of Beirut, whom I was beginning to know, the Sursocks and the Tabets and the Tuenis and the Trads and the Pharaeons and the Bustros, and Emile Eddé, who meant to be the next President of the republic when General Catroux decided to allow the people to hold elections in the country, and nice good-natured Bechara Khoury who also wanted to be the next President but wasn't as sure of himself as Emile Eddé, since he wasn't popular with the Catroux---and quite a number of officers from IXth Army and the American consul general and the Egyptian, Turkish, Greek and Persian consuls---everyone in fact who mattered with the exception of H.M.'s Minister Sir Edward Spears and General Catroux, Délégué Général et Commandant en Chef des Armées du Levant.
And then General de Gaulle arrived and moved like royalty into the Résidence des Pins, (the damage done by the R.A.F. had been repaired) and all the world, including H.M.'s Minister and Lady Spears, was summoned to his presence.
We didn't know we had received a summons, nor that we were about to be given a special audience. It was all done by telephone between A.D.C.'s. There was an official reception on a certain day at the French Residency, Francis Stonor our new A.D.C. told us, at four-thirty. All the consular corps was invited. But we were bidden to come at ten minutes past four. We were not to be bundled in with the crowd of consuls but were to receive special treatment. I thought it rather odd, so did B. It was not, after all, our first meeting with General de Gaulle. Such formality seemed a little excessive. Still, we decided to go. Not at ten past four precisely, that was impossible. But I put on my smartest dress and a large hat and we drove through the great gates of the residency and past the guard of honor at four-twenty.
Half a dozen servants and a couple of officers were on the wide front steps to meet us. I jumped out, and as I knew the residency well, made for the large salon on the right of the entrance hall, which I saw was already filled with people. But one of the A.D.C.'s said, "Pardon, madame," and whisked me round to a door on the left and I found myself in a room that was almost dark, as all the blinds were down; and it was quite empty. B. and Francis had followed and there we waited in a dim twilight, wondering what it was all about, until a minute or two later a door at the end of the room was flung open and General de Gaulle stalked in, followed by General Catroux. They bowed in turn over my hand. They greeted B., then Francis; General de Gaulle sat down beside me on a settee and asked after my health. I replied and asked after his. Then a servant came in with a large tray holding some fifty glasses of orangeade, and General de Gaulle signed to me to take one and I did, and I asked about the health of Madame de Gaulle and then a moment later General Catroux got to his feet and said to De Gaulle, "My General, your guests await you," so General de Gaulle got up and B. got up and I got up, thinking, "Now for the party," and I made again for the large salon, but again the A.D.C. said, "Pardon, madame," and got between me and the doors of the salon and steered me out on to the front steps, and our car with its two nice Union Jacks flying drew up and we got into it and drove off and that was that.
I said to B., "We've had an audience," and he said "Yes, so it would seem," and we laughed. But when Francis explained that it was meant as a special courtesy because of our exalted rank I said I needn't have got myself all dolled up if I wasn't to be allowed to go to the party; and I remembered a day two years before when General de Gaulle had shared our family Xmas dinner in a cottage in England and reflected on how things had changed.
He stayed in Beirut about a week as I remember, and we saw him again. He asked us to lunch this time and I sat on his right and, firmly determined not to be repelled or intimidated by his heavy, cold, hooded eyes, I told him about the day at Solum after the sortie from Bir Hakim when Koenig came to the hospital to visit the wounded. I described the scene, very much as I have described it in this book, and he listened with an impassive face, but with close attention, and then he said, "Je vous remercie de m'avoir raconté cela," but he did not say, "Thank you for what you and your nurses did for my men." Neither then nor at any time during the war did he say anything that could be construed as a tribute to the work we had done.
I mention this not because it affected my attitude to his troops---to them I was bound, to them I belonged, not to him, for him I had never felt anything warmer than a cold, fascinated admiration---but because the incident confirmed my early analysis of his character. There was no room in General de Gaulle's intense concentrated being for such a weak emotion as gratitude. He was no longer an unknown exile suffering an agony of humiliation. He was not a refugee in Beirut come to beg favors from a powerful friend. He was, in his own opinion at least, on French territory, and was conducting himself as a monarch. But he still found it impossible to acknowledge a debt to any foreigner, even to an individual Englishwoman who shared the life of his troops. One might have expected from him in his changed circumstances a generous gesture. A more normal man would have unbent. Not De Gaulle. He had come a long way. He was the recognized head of a movement that was gathering strength every day, but he had still a very long way to go, and he couldn't relax. He wouldn't relax until he had reached, if ever he did reach, his final goal; not only the liberation but the restoration of France. Even that wouldn't be the end, not to restore France to her former grandeur; that wasn't enough to satisfy him; France must be reborn and rebuilt on foundations quite other than those that had crumbled in 1939.
If one believes, as I do, that he was obsessed by these visions at the time I speak of, and was concentrating on the method of transforming them from dreams into powerful fact, then his icy arrogance, his fantastic assumption of sovereign power when he possessed no such thing and his persistent will to repel and refuse all friendly gestures becomes comprehensible. He was bluffing on a colossal scale. He was playing a gigantic game, with almost no cards in his hand. He was out first to conquer France for the French and then to force the world to recognize as a first-class power a France that had forfeited the world's respect.
We didn't, as I recall, see any more of him on that visit. What the substance was of his conferences with General Catroux I have no idea. If he recognized in his former comrade and colleague, General Spears, a future antagonist, it would not surprise me. Events were going to suggest plainly that he had no intention then or at any time of allowing the States of the Levant to achieve a real independence. If that was true, then the British government's guarantee of his own proclamation must have been very irksome and the presence of his friend Spears in Beirut very galling. For he knew Spears. He was well aware that with him no bargaining and no compromise would be possible. Put bluntly, De Gaulle I believe meant to go back on his promise, he had no intention of allowing Syria and the Lebanon to slip through his fingers; if it weren't for the British it would be easy he knew to get out of the promise he'd given. But the British were tiresome and obstinate when they thought their good name was involved, and Spears was more obstinate than most. He would have to get at the British government somehow. Political blackmail, threat to impede our war effort? Yes, there were means of doing it. But to get at the British Minister on the spot was impossible. He didn't attempt it.
If I seem to be drawing a very long bow, I can only say that what happened later bears out what I believe to have been in De Gaulle's mind at the time. That he was in a very bellicose mood was proved by a speech he made at the Cercle de l'Union in Beirut a day or two after we lunched with him. His audience that evening was French; no outsiders were admitted, but I listened in on the wireless from Aley and heard him say:
"Cela m'est égal qui gagne la guerre pourvu que la France la gagne." ("It is a matter of indifference to me who wins the war as long as France wins it.")
It became evident at the end of the summer ('42) that unless I gave up all connection with the unit I must take to the air and manage to lead two lives separated by several thousand miles. For I was involved in two distinct spheres of activity with two centers of gravity and the center of gravity of the hospital was going to move farther and farther away from my fixed base, the British Legation in Beirut.
One might argue that my first duty was to my husband; that no one else could take the place of the British Minister's wife in the Levant, while the hospital could get on quite well without me; but B. didn't share that view. Neither in '43 nor at any time did he ask me to give up the unit or object to my leaving him to rejoin it. On the contrary, he made it easy. I had duties in Syria and the Lebanon and he expected me to discharge them, but he knew that I had put my heart into the making of this field hospital and he took it seriously as a creditable war effort. He was in fact proud of the unit and of the British women, of whom I was one, who followed the Free French in the field. He had moreover a special interest in the Free French Division, since he had been responsible with General de Gaulle for its formation; and he never lost that interest. So he left me free to divide my time, indeed demanded that I should do so with one thought always present in his mind, that winning the war was what mattered most and that the smallest individual effort toward that end was important.
One other consideration weighed with me continually; my responsibility to the British War Relief Committee in New York. They had made me a very handsome offer and were carrying it out with great generosity. Not only had they given the bulk of the money for the initial expense of equipment, they were sending a monthly contribution that covered our running expenses.
Not the running expenses of the hospital, those had been taken over by the military, but such things as nurses' salaries, uniforms, tropical kit, renewal of hospital equipment and our office expenses in London. Dorea Stanhope as honorary secretary of the unit was in charge at the London end, and was in constant touch with Leslie Benson, and Leslie had made it clear that the money from America was given on the understanding that I remained head of the unit.
I was therefore not free to give it up had I wanted to do so. I didn't. I had no such intention. However difficult and whatever the distance I must lead my two lives.
I made a brief visit to the unit in August. I was with them again in October.
General de Larminat and his A.D.C. Captain Lorelle were seriously injured in August in a motor smash and had been admitted to the hospital as patients. It was still in its excellent quarters in Heliopolis and I knew that they would be well cared for but there had been a number of changes in our team and I wanted to make sure that all was well. Four new M.T.C. girls had arrived in July with Jean Williams to replace Annabel Mann, who had gone home, Cynthia, who had gone to the U.S.A. to see her mother and make up her mind whether or not she wanted to marry Peter Smith-Dorrien, Joy Goode, who had been married to Mervyn Phipps, and Daphne Burnside, who was leaving. We had needed our new recruits badly, and I had asked this time for drivers who were trained V.A.D.'s and would be prepared to go into the wards in times of stress. They had been a long time on the way as their ship had been held up in the Red Sea because of the threat to Egypt during the retreat to El Alamein, but had turned up at last in Cairo in time to join us at Heliopolis, and they had seemed very nice. Biddy Pattison was large and appeared intelligent and competent. Rachel Howell-Evans the first time she drove me had looked at me out of wonderfully beautiful scared gray eyes and had said in a husky voice that was peculiarly charming, "I hear you like to be driven very fast, Lady Spears." She has told me since that she was very afraid of me and thought she ought to call me Mam. But I had had little chance to get to know either; while Iris Goodwin and Ruth Nicolls I felt I didn't know at all. Iris isn't the kind to put her goods in the shop window. It took me months to recognize the strength inside that shy slip of a girl.
I hadn't much liked Captain Lorelle when I first met him in Beirut. He had seemed to me a cynical, rather dissipated young man with an exaggerated interest in the ladies who frequented the bar of the Hotel St. Georges, but I revised my opinion when he came to us with a broken back. It was a nasty smash. The car had gone over a culvert on the Cairo-Alex road and Lorelle had been thrown clear. He told me that when he came to, he saw De Larminat caught under the car and managed to crawl over to him. He didn't know his back was broken and thought the general was dead. He tried to shift the car but couldn't. All he could do was yell for help. There was a stream of military traffic going past above them and at last someone heard him and they were put into an Indian ambulance. He thought he must have fainted because he remembered nothing about being picked up and suddenly found De Larminat and himself being driven off in an ambulance with Indian drivers and orderlies. De Larminat was quite unconscious but he, Lorelle, had just enough sense, he told me, to know that they would be taken to an Indian hospital near by so he shouted, "Spears. Hadfield-Spears Hospital, Heliopolis." And though the pain was pretty bad, he managed to keep conscious and to go on shouting, "Spears, take us to Spears," until they did finally drive all the way out to the unit.
He and De Larminat had been installed in a suite of two bedrooms and bath, looking down from a height into the courtyard, Evelyn Fuhlroth became their special nurse and Lorelle soon began to run the hospital from the high balcony. He would get the boys to carry him out on his stretcher, and lying there on his stomach he would shout hilarious orders and insults to the boys, the nurses, the Spirettes and the doctors who passed down below. And he ragged Evelyn unmercifully. His great amusement was to make her blush. "Look, Lady Spears, look how she's blushing, the poor girl, and I only asked her what kind of panties she wears." Madame de Larminat would turn up each morning with bottles of champagne and a giant thermos filled with ice cream from Gruppis, and Lorelle would be wheeled into De Larminat's room and we would all gather round the general's bed, and Madame de Larminat would laugh at her husband's face that changed under its head bandages as the days passed from deep purple to a strange shading of mauve, yellow and green. His injuries were very painful but luckily not very grave. He left us as I remember after a fortnight, Lorelle appeared in Beirut at the end of September very gay in a plaster strait jacket that held him in a vice from chin to hips. He had made all the nurses and Spirettes write their names on it and, opening his waistcoat to show me, he asked me to add my signature. I did so on his chest. I didn't see him again. He was flown in his plaster to the States to see his American wife and returned in time to be killed leading an assault in the last battle for Tunis. De Larminat told me in his terse way that he had asked leave to take part in the battle, and had fallen at the head of his men. "Une mort respectable."
I returned to Aley in September to move the household down to Beirut, but it was understood in my family that I was to rejoin the unit for the battle that was preparing at El Alamein, and a message reached me on October 20 from Colonel Vernier suggesting that it would be desirable for me to come, so I packed my kit bag again, rolled up my blankets, got into uniform and took the plane on the twenty-second for Cairo.
T. W. met me at El Maza. The unit was at Buselli, she said, in the Delta, about fifteen miles this side of Alex---much too far back in her opinion. We'd better go straight down, if I didn't mind. I was only just in time. Did I want to stop in Cairo for anything? No.
She settled down at the wheel and continued to talk in a series of jerky mutterings that seemed to have become a habit among the girls, but I heard the suppressed excitement underneath.
Monty was expected to open his offensive any day now. The Bays had come up. She'd seen her baby brother---Yes, very fit, thanks---the regiment in very good form---VIIIth Army was quite different from last summer. I should have seen the convoys going up.
The colonel had left with the forward unit. Jibery was in charge at Buselli. The French were at the extreme south end of the line on the edge of the Kantara depression. Yes, we had very good quarters. A section of a big military hospital, first-class army huts. The Australians were next door.
The girls? Not too bad. They'd had a beastly time hanging about at Mena after they left Heliopolis, but they'd be all right now. We had two hundred beds ready and Jean had asked for help, so Biddy and Rachel and Iris had gone into the wards. Was Barbara coming back? Yes, she should arrive in a few days.
I had timed my arrival, it seemed, very well. The battle of El Alamein began the next day, October 23, 1942, and the ambulances began to roll in at the hospital gate the same evening. That was all we saw of Monty's great attack and VIIIth Army's magnificent revenge on Rommel. But the suspense of the first days, the growing excitement, the great surging leap forward came back to us as if carried by the wind.
It was said later that the French didn't do well at El Alamein. I only know that they had a very tough time and suffered heavily, especially in officers. Our officers' ward was soon filled with old friends---De Robert, De Boulardière, Lalande, Morel, many others. Every bed in the hospital was full by the time Barbara arrived, and with three of the M.T.C. helping the nurses she was badly needed. Biddy, Rachel and Iris were proving themselves invaluable. Jean had allotted one to each of the big surgical wards; even so the nurses had their hands full.
Evelyn had one of the heaviest wards. It was a large double hut, officers in one half, other ranks in the other. I remember the excitement among the officers when the news came through that the Americans and British had landed in North Africa, then that the French forces in Algiers after a three-day resistance had capitulated. This was almost more than they could stomach. That the French had fought the Allies again---! They couldn't understand it. "Les salauds," they muttered, ears strained to hear the voice of the radio. "Les crétins. They are the very same who fought us in Syria. What do you think of that, Lady Spears?" And a great discussion would begin about Weygand, Noguès, Admiral Esteva, Juin, and what General de Gaulle would do when he'd got Tunis and Bizerta in his hands.
The officers had many visitors. The ladies of the French Red Cross in Alexandria were more than kind. They brought fruit, sweets, cakes, cigarettes and papers. Madame Catroux came one day with great baskets of oranges and did a tour of all the wards. She had installed a convalescent home in Alex and seemed happier than she had been in Beirut. There were days when the hospital was quite gay with half a dozen smart limousines outside the office, but some of the wards were grim, and beyond the partition that cut off the officers from the rest of Evelyn's hut the old silent struggle that we knew so well was going on day and night.
I went late one night and found Evelyn still on duty though she should have gone off long before. She was by a bed in the far shadowed comer giving a saline and I went over to her and saw that the man's hands and eyes were bandaged. I waited. When she had installed her saline, she turned and came down the ward with me between the rows of sleeping forms. Some were moaning a little, some were delirious, some seemed scarcely to breathe.
Evelyn was one of our very best nurses. She had a fiery nature and was happiest when she had a great deal to do but her blue eyes were very distressed that night.
"I hope he'll die," she said. "I think he will, he's very bad, I can't find his pulse, he'd much better die, he is blind and has lost both hands."
But he didn't die. He was one of the youngsters who had joined up at Camberley. Barbara knew him at once when she went into the ward. "Don't you remember," she said, "he used to come to the canteen to drink milk and eat many cakes?" Perhaps if Evelyn hadn't been such an excellent nurse, he might have died. How can one say that it would have been better so? I saw him some months later in the French hospital in Damascus. Madame Butherne had left us and was looking after him there. He insisted that he could see a little. But it wasn't true. He had no eyes. I saw the empty sockets. I don't know what has become of him.
We were accustomed to death, but at Baselli it came suddenly into our private midst. It came over the telephone. There was a telephone in my hut and it rang late one night while I was getting ready for bed.
A man's voice, English, asked for Kit Tatham-Warter.
"She isn't here," I said. "Who wants her?"
A friend, he said, of her brother's. An officer in the Queen's Bays. Where could he find her?
"I'm sorry; she's in Alex tonight. She won't be back until tomorrow."
"Oh---" a pause, then, "I have news for her."
The voice sounded so troubled that I asked quickly, "Is it bad news?"
"Yes, I'm afraid it is. I shouldn't be telephoning."
"I'm Lady Spears. You can tell me. I'm in charge here." I waited; there was a silence. "Are you there?"
"Yes."
"Has Kit's brother been wounded?"
"Yes."
"Killed?"
"Yes; he was killed this morning."
T. W.'s baby brother. He wasn't a baby. He was married, but she always spoke of him like that. Biddy Pattison went into Alex to tell her and brought her back next morning. Looking out of my window before lunch I saw her at work on her car. She was in overalls and covered with grease. She didn't look up as I passed. She spent all that day and the next greasing and tinkering with the cars. I never saw her cry. She went off to find the regiment and came back again. I didn't ask for details. She didn't talk to me; nor I believe to anyone, unless to Biddy, just stuck to her job and carried on. She had entered for the war and was not to be defeated. No one would have known during those days that anything had happened to her. There was no sign, save her silence.
Colonel Vernier all this time had been far ahead of us in the desert with the forward unit. I went up to see him after the battle, traveling up the road down which we had pelted the beginning of July. Rommel was in full retreat and German and Italian prisoners were pouring down the road to the hastily constructed prison camps. Vast throngs of them were sitting on the ground in the barbed-wire enclosures as if attending some great religious ceremony---but they were waiting, Rachel said, for their dinner. We turned off to the south on a track marked by a white signboard with "Bombay" in large black letters. All the desert was mapped out by these signboards. A remarkable sight. The mine fields were named after great rivers. The Tiber. The Nile. The Amazon. But the gates through the mine fields took one's mind home; Albert Gate, Stanhope Gate---and so on. We turned in as I remember at Stanhope Gate and pushed on across the Amazon.
The colonel was in great form. He gave us lunch in his dugout and described the eagerness of the prisoners who had been streaming past not to be left behind. A long line of trucks would come by driven by prisoners and filled with prisoners. One British Tommy in the first truck in charge of the lot. A truck had broken down just outside his door. I should have seen the German driver. He was out in a wink and into the bonnet. He worked in a frenzy. The convoy was almost out of sight when he got the engine going and went racing after it.
They would be moving forward soon now, the colonel said. The Germans were on the run and "Spears" would be after them with the rest. I must stay. I must go with them to Tripoli, Tunis, Paris. I must get long leave from the general. His exuberance did not seem unreasonable.
I longed to stay on. But there was Xmas to prepare for in the Levant. We had three thousand Xmas parcels to do for the British troops in hospital in Beirut, Sidon, Damascus and Aleppo. And we were giving two Xmas dances at home, one for officers, one for other ranks in the Spears Mission.
Home? Which was home?
"You'll come back soon, won't you?" they cried, as I got into the old Ford. I would come back, yes, of course---whenever I could get away I'd be with them. But I was handing over to Barbara; from now on for a year it was going to be her show.