 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
THE wife of a British Minister accredited to a small nation is certain to receive much flattery and attention. This was especially true in the Levant. For the patriots of Syria and the Lebanon counted from the beginning on our government to stand by them in their struggle for independence, and they made the fact very evident. It had not been General Catroux's proclamation that had filled them with new hope and confidence but the British guarantee of that proclamation. They did not count on the French, I believe, for two reasons, first because they had already been given the same promise three times, second because they were far from being convinced of General de Gaulle's title to speak for France. His authority was vague and depended on his British ally. As a French officer he was merely the leader of a band of rebels who had been outlawed by Pétain; and Pétain was not a vague figure to the peoples of the Levant. His writ had run until very recently in Beirut and Damascus. It had been broadcast to every village in the Lebanon and every tribe in the Syrian desert until his troops were defeated and shipped back to France by the incomprehensible British.
The Levantines are not stupid people. The bankers of Beirut and the Arab chiefs in their Syrian tents knew that it was the British who had brought the war into their country and they knew why. The Axis representatives had been active; the arrival of German planes had been no secret. The British were a great power, as great perhaps as the Germans, not so the French who had been defeated by the Germans in France and by the British in the Levant. The Syrians did not welcome the arrival of a new lot of Frenchmen who had come with the consent and support of the British Army to assume the old privileged position of France in their country. Too many were still living who remembered the rebellion of 1925 in the Jebel Druse and the bloodshed that followed in Damascus when the French had shelled the city. Twenty-five thousand Arabs had been killed in that uprising.
Feeling in the Lebanon was less strong. Half the population was Christian, the other half Moslem and Druse, and the French had proclaimed themselves to be the protectors of the Christians. Very strange protectors, some said, who incited the Moslems against those they professed to protect; others, especially the very rich, were ready to welcome their old friend General Catroux. But clearly it was the British who would decide the fate of the Levant States---unless of course they were defeated by the Germans. Until the British arrived both the Syrians and the Lebanese had believed that the Germans would win the war. Now they were no longer certain. The British in the meantime were here, and the Free French had renewed the old promise of independence; but this time with a difference.
General Gouraud had declared it in 1921, Monsieur de Jouvenel had repeated the proclamation as high commissioner after the affair of 1925; a treaty recognizing their independence and purporting to end the French mandate had been signed by the French, Syrian and Lebanese governments in .1936, and this, like the other promises, had come to nothing as it had not been ratified by the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. But this time Great Britain had associated herself with the Free French in recognizing both Syria and the Lebanon as sovereign and independent states. In the words of General Catroux's manifesto of September, 1941, in Damascus, "Le Gouvernement Britannique, allié de la France Libre, agissant en accord avec elle, s'est par une déclaration simultanée associé à cette tâche politique importante."(l) And the British government had put the official seal on the recognition by appointing a Minister to the two governments.
It was natural in the circumstances that the peoples of the Levant should look upon the British Minister as a friend and be very nice to his wife; they were.
We were supposed to have an official residence in Damascus as well as in Beirut since B. was accredited to both governments. Damascus indeed was the more important place of the two, but we could find nothing suitable. The modern houses were few, the well-to-do Syrians who lived in them had no wish to let, and it was a rule in IXth Army not to requisition a building save for purely military needs. We had found one or two fine Arab houses in the old city, one in particular that instantly took my fancy but it was as instantly turned down by our own people on grounds of security. We visited it, I remember, in May, conducted by a Secretary, I think he was, of the Syrian cabinet. It had been at one time a sheik's palace and was being used now as a divorce court, but that, our guide said, presented no difficulty. The Syrian government would be only too delighted to turn the court out if we would move in.
You would not have guessed from outside the old worn windowless wall that a palace lay behind. You entered from a narrow street by a great door studded with nails to find yourself in an enchanted space where shimmering light played on a myriad windowpanes and pale marble pavements faintly blue. The wide courtyard was square, the four walls of the house were fragile. There was a fountain, there were orange trees. A yellow rambler clambered delicately over the frail windows opposite, a luxuriant wisteria drooped from the eaves on our right, foaming down the frail pearly façade. The door behind me was of ivory, carved and inlaid with ebony. I caught my breath. There was no one to be seen. Nothing moved in the enchanted place save the fountain rising and falling---rising and falling. How still it was. Not a sound from the bazaar, only the plash of water in the round basin.
But they said, No---it wasn't possible. Even if we could put in plumbing and heating. The street was too narrow. The British Minister must live in a street wide enough for tanks to patrol in case of trouble. So we were obliged to stay at the Orient Palace Hotel when we went to Damascus.
It was rather horrid staying in the hotel and it added greatly to my difficulty in getting to know the Moslem women. I wanted to know them. I took for granted that it was one of my duties as a Minister's wife to make friends among the people to whom my husband was accredited. I met some of the leading men but I wanted to know their families. I am not thinking of Tajedine who was president when we arrived; no one could have called that comic little rascal an Arab leader. He was merely a political boss out of some fantastic Franco-Arabian Tammany Hall. I am thinking of the men who had spent most of their lives in exile or in prison and were going to form the government of the country a year later. Chukri Quwatli, who was to become President, and Saadullel Jabri and Jamil Mardam Bey and Faris Bey Khoury. Occasionally one or another would dine with us in the stiff green-plush semi-private dining room of the Orient Palace. They interested me, I liked them. I found it easy to talk to them. Chukri Quwatli was massive and dark, his powerful frame and proud face with its arched nose was heavy. Jabri had elegance, he was slight with a smooth silver-gray head, his face was delicately modeled but he had a look of great determination. Faris Khoury was a Christian, he reminded me forcibly of my American grandfather. He had a great shock of gray hair and laughing eyes. He was old and rugged and strong. He had been one of the early graduates of the American University of Beirut and spoke fluent English with an American accent. They all gave one an impression of strength, but in Jamil Mardam one felt elasticity, a mixture of subtlety and resilience, a quick controlled sharpness that seemed almost French. He was the most "European" of the four.
Freya Stark alludes to these men in her book East is West as being fine examples of a rising middle class among the Arabs of Syria. The phrase does not convey to my mind any idea of their style. They are not Arab princes but they have the stamp of what we call "race." I used to place them in imagination on the stair of some ducal mansion in London, then in the fine rare formality of a Paris drawing room and found they fitted very well into both. None would lose any part of his dignity or ease in any surroundings however magnificent or strange. Redoubtable men, they would be formidable opponents. To me they seemed very like men of a kindred people.
It wasn't until a year later, and we at last had a house of our own, that I met their womenfolk. Well-born Moslem women don't frequent hotels. In Paris perhaps or London, not in Damascus. Nor does a Moslem lady dine out with her husband in the Arab world. If she is progressive like Madame Mardam she may receive a man who is her husband's friend, provided that she is very certain indeed that he is a true friend to her people, but until she is certain, she remains aloof and veiled. It may be that the Syrian ladies were not certain as yet of us, at this time. I don't know. I made friends with only two, I became intimate with only one during our first year in Damascus and both were rebels.
Young Madame Azem was spoken of as the leader of a revolt among the Moslem ladies of Damascus against the veil and all that it signified; if she was, she led her rebellion with gaiety and discretion. She had lived for some years in Paris and I thought her French when she swept up to the door of the British consulate at the wheel of her large limousine and came rapidly up the steps in her smart country clothes, a turban bound closely round her tawny head. She had come to tell Mrs. Gardner (our consul's wife) that she would join her work party. She was breathless and vivacious. She was very attractive and I always tried to see her when I went to Damascus. Sometimes she would turn up at Aley, or in Beirut, driving herself at high speed across the mountains. She had a long-legged, quick, harum-scarum charm that was exceptional in her world, and her young husband, an impoverished member of the famous Azem family, let her do what she liked. There was no question for Hayat Azem of wearing a veil at any time, even a tiny one of finest gauze. Her father had been a Syrian member of the Turkish parliament and showed no desire to curb his daughter's somewhat inconsequent activities. Hayat wanted to start a society of the Red Crescent. Her aunt, Madame Abed, had had a long connection with the French Red Cross and thought it would be very difficult to split off and abandon Madame Catroux.
Madame Abed was no revolutionary and aspired to no elegance. She was old and dowdy and cozy and cynical. She was the widow of a man who had been President at one time, and at others Ambassador to half a dozen countries. She had lived in London and Washington without learning two words of English and would roll her bright brown eyes when her niece talked in her rapid enthusiastic way about Arab unity and Syrian independence, and say in faulty French, "You are young. When you have seen what I have seen---"
I began to perceive shades, many and fine, in Moslem society. My other rebel was quite different from Hayat Azem, and in a much less happy position. She wasn't married and she had a very strict father for whom she had a great regard. She was not a violent rebel, nor a rebel in politics, nor yet in religion. Politics didn't interest her very much nor questions of faith; she was a Moslem but she said, laughing, that it was impossible to keep the precepts of the Koran in the modern world. How could one kneel down on a carpet and pray three times a day in silk stockings? She didn't doubt the faith of her ancestors (they were very illustrious) nor wish to break away from it. She said simply that she would never marry since she wouldn't marry a Moslem and couldn't marry anyone else without breaking her father's heart. Life in a Moslem family was dreadful, she said. She had several sisters and a brother. They lived with their parents in a fine modern house; the chairs in the drawing room were stiffly set out in a large circle and when I went to see them, we sat in a circle. The rebel daughter would complain: "But we all sit together like that all day. You can never be alone in a family like ours."
Though she is very intelligent, I realized in time that nothing interested her very much but her own cramped frustrated life and the ways and means of getting out of it without upsetting her father and getting herself talked about. She got out of it usually in her brother's car or, if he failed her, in a taxi. She would escape over the mountains to Beirut in a taxi, and once there, she would toss the gauzy veil from her delicate boyish head, appear in clothes that might have come straight from Paris, and enjoy herself. Or she would put on tweeds and stout walking shoes and come out with us for a tramp through the hills. She looked more like an American than an English girl, she was very supple and slender, with small beautiful hands and feet. She had a great deal of charm. I'm not sure that she wasn't a bit of a minx. But we grew very fond of her. She stayed with us once for a week, and had a great success at a dance I remember at the Georges Tabets' where she wore a low ball dress of pale yellow satin, without sleeves. But she was in a panic when she found that a photographer with a flashlight had included her in his group. If her father were to see the photograph, if some nasty-minded mischief-making cat were to send it to Damascus---Poor little rebel.
"A Moslem lady cannot be forced by her husband to go out of her house," our guide had told me, when he showed us the palace of the wisteria and yellow ramblers. "It is in her marriage contract."
"I don't understand. You mean, do you not, that her husband cannot forbid her to go out?"
"No, lady, I mean that he cannot force her to go out. If a Moslem lady wishes to spend all her life at home in her own house and never go out even in a carriage, her husband cannot object."
"And do they wish to stay always at home?"
"Yes, lady, in the old days, it was most usual. That is why the old houses have courtyards and gardens. It is the desire of an Arab gentleman to provide his wife with everything that she needs inside her own walls. A garden to walk in, with shade for summer and sun for winter, rooms for hot weather in one part, the winter residence in another."
"I see. I thought the women longed to go out into the world and that their husbands kept them hidden away."
"Oh, no, lady, not in old families."
I had a quite different approach to the people of the country through the Spears clinics. There were five centers. One at Chtaura in the Bekaa Valley, one at Sidnaya not far from Damascus, one at Selimieh on the edge of the Palmyra desert, one at Latakia and one in the far north at Tel Tamar on the Khabur River. The districts had been chosen by the committee, all were under the wing of the Spears Mission and all could count on the army for rations, petrol and repairs, thanks to the sympathy of General Wilson. Indeed the boys couldn't have lived otherwise in the north nor kept their vehicles roadworthy.
The clinics at Sidnaya near Damascus and Chtaura in the Bekaa were easily reached. Chtaura indeed was on the main Beirut-Damascus road, halfway between the two, and we would often stop, especially in the winter when we were delayed on our way over the mountains by snow or fog, and would lunch at Masabki's hotel. If we told him we were coming he would have a fire roaring in the stove of his private dining room (it was tapestried in heavy Persian rugs) and a wonderful array of hors d'œuvres awaiting us, mezze they were called. Ripe olives and pistachio nuts and a special pungent cheese and a delicious savory dish of the country that we scooped up in a fold of paper-thin Arab bread. Fish would follow, then jugged hare or roast partridge and a great pie with whipped cream and all this with an excellent wine from the neighboring vineyards. Masabki was a wonderful host. He would load up the car with good things when we left. Jars of honey, baskets of apples and in the spring great bunches of fat asparagus. He was very kind to the F.A.U. boys of the clinic.
They didn't work in Chtaura, they lived there in a rough cottage and worked in the villages far down the wide beautiful valley. I would go and spend the day with them. The peasants would bring the sick from miles around, often on donkeys. I would find a donkey park at the village gate and a crowd thronging the courtyard of the headman's house. Some of the villages were very poor, there was great misery among the people. Malaria, dysentery and trachoma ravaged the country but the scene was always full of color and gaiety as well as pathos. Many of the small mud houses had charming interiors. The rooms were usually distempered in a soft blue and niches in the walls held plates of gay design. The younger women were often beautiful, and would welcome me with great courtesy. They would ask me in for coffee and if I offered cigarettes, the old grandmothers were delighted and would sit beside me puffing with deep enjoyment.
It was interesting to see their gentleness with each other. There is a legend abroad to the effect that Arabs do not love and cherish their girl children. Anyone who has entered into the life of those Syrian villages will know that this is not true. How many times have I seen a splendid horseman or an equally splendid ruffian, mounted on a diminutive donkey, bring his infant daughter to the hakim (doctor) and wait with stricken fearful face to know if the poor precious morsel was doomed. They were very tender with their little girls, these stalwart Moslems, gentle with a gentleness that could only be inspired by love.
I was so struck by it that I asked the Emir Mirza in Selimieh if it were true that the Moslems loved their daughters as much as their sons and he said, "Yes---and for me it is true that I love my granddaughters best, because they are most helpless."
We were on our way, Rosie and I, to Tel Tamar near the Turkish frontier, traveling in the old Ford V-8, but with a military driver from the Spears Mission as escort. I haven't space to describe the journey but it was very fascinating and everywhere we found British officers of the O.C.P. ready to welcome us. Each, with his French opposite number, was dealing with wheat. In Hama, ancient city of water wheels on the Orontes, we found Captain Branch. In Aleppo we picked up Major Altounian, malarial expert, had a picnic lunch on the banks of the Euphrates next day, and found Colonel Ditchburn awaiting us at Deir-ez-Zor. Colonel Ditchburn was out political officer for the whole of the Jezere. He put us up very kindly in his comfortable house and took us to dine with the Brossets.
Our old friend Colonel Brosset had been appointed French delegate for the Jezere and had moved into the residency. Madame Brosset had just arrived, traveling with her four children from Brazil. We saw them after dinner in their beds on the roof. Colonel Brosset insisted on showing them to us. You couldn't find children like his every day, he said, so we climbed to the roof and there they were asleep in the moonlight, with their small noses showing above the coverlets. Brosset swelled out his fine chest as he looked down on them. And indeed he had a right to be proud, for they were lovely young tender things, and I think of them now that their father is dead and can feel again the soft strangeness of that mild, distant Eastern night with the Euphrates moving slowly, silently past the house.
It was a two-day journey from Deir-ez-Zor to Tel Tamar. We had to cross a wide strip of desert (there were many gazelle and Altounian's driver chased them across the sands much to my annoyance and broke the springs of his car doing it), and slept at Hassache. Our friend there was Captain Nairn, a mobilized missionary of the Church of Scotland; he was not happy with his French colleagues. Indeed Hassache seemed a desolate place, and all the wide desert country round it seemed sinister and forbidding, until we at last reached Tel Tamar and the Spears clinic boys in their sugar-loaf mud dwelling.
They were a remarkable team, those F.A.U. boys at Tel Tamar, and our Dr. Sheirajan had already earned the confidence of the wild district. They had opened the small hospital that had been given by the League of Nations to the Assyrians before the war and had made it the medical center of the Jezere. It was a modest affair, built of mud like all the village houses, a series of sugar loaves placed one against the other, but it had an adequate operating room, the Bedouins from their scattered camps and the Kurds from their district villages as well as the Assyrian Christians crowded its humble rooms and Sheirajan, who was an excellent surgeon, had saved many lives and given sight to many who were blind. But they were crying out for quinine.
Ras-el-Ain where Abraham waited for Sarah, Kamaechley on the Turkish border. Smallpox was raging and our Spears Mission officer was in serious trouble with the tribes who were hoarding wheat; back to Hassache and Deir-ez-Zor and south to Palmyra where we visited the lovely ruins with an escort of the Camel Corps and slept in the cool house of the French commandant; and so to Damascus and home.
A wide country of great distances, with only one railway running across it to Mosul and that most of the way on the other side of the Turkish frontier. Isolated British officers, each with a French colleague, coaxing precious wheat from the tribes, and small groups of steady British boys washing the eyes of innumerable children who need not be blind, cleansing innumerable hideous sores that need not be dirty, vaccinating for smallpox, dealing with dysentery and malaria and tuberculosis. It would be a pity, I thought, if we, the French and the British who had invaded this land and turned it into a vast military camp, should fall to quarreling.
The world of Beirut was very different from Damascus, its people being Christian or used to living in a Christian community were much easier to know.
Those we met first were not the ardent protagonists of independence, they were the rich cosmopolitan set who had long looked to France as the arbiter of taste and the source of refined pleasures. They spoke fluent French, and less fluent English. They were in the habit of going to Paris each year, the women to buy clothes, the men to attend the race meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil. The war had made that impossible; they were prisoners in their own country and rather bored. To entertain us gave them something to do and they did it very well---they had wonderful cooks.
The men of this set were bankers and landed proprietors. They owned villages and olive groves and large wheat fields. Some of their fortunes had been founded on wheat. Some, Emile Eddé was supposed to be one, were said to grow hashish. They were very rich as they paid no taxes to speak of. Their chief amusements were horse racing and cards, but not many played for high stakes. There was something childlike about them, a certain innocence in their gay friendliness that was very pleasing. And they could easily be snubbed. Madame Catroux seemed to take pleasure in snubbing them. And even Madame de Larminat could be very rude.
There were races every Sunday in Beirut and on every saint's day as well. The racecourse was charmingly set amid umbrella pines with the mountains lifting their snowy peaks in the distance; and the Arab horses that ran were beautiful little creatures.
Donna Maria Sursock owned the racecourse and would receive me in her box when I went to a meeting. She is a handsome woman, an Italian of the Colonna family who had married a rich Lebanese. She was rather too Italian in those days for my taste and we were not on intimate terms, but she had a charming daughter who had been to school in England and always had an English "miss" in attendance. Yvonne Sursock was much sought after by the British officers of IXth Army.
The older women, like the men, played cards a great deal. Bridge and a game called pinochle. There were women's bridge parties every afternoon, and in the evenings they would meet at the Aero Club. The Aero Club had been started to encourage flying but had taken to cards instead. If I had a free evening I would ring up Habib Trad and he would arrange a four at the club. We would play from nine to twelve, then, if it were winter, a servant would bring us rich hot chocolate and brioche. My bridge cronies in the early days were usually the same and included Habib Trad or his brother and Alice Sabbag. Alice always smoked a hubble-bubble while she played. Many of the women smoked these water pipes. It was the one noticeably oriental habit that they clung to. Even Linda Sursock, who was much traveled and probably the most intelligent woman of her set, could spend a long idle afternoon on a divan with a hubble-bubble. Her house was a luxurious mixture of East and West. Priceless rugs hung on the walls of her large central hall (some had been shown at Burlington House). There was a room lined in old Damascus paneling with a divan running round it and a fountain in the center whose basin she always kept filled with heavily scented flowers---so filled that Brigadier Clayton, not noticing, stepped straight into it with a tremendous splash one night when we took him to Linda's to dinner and had to be lent a pair of gray flannels by the son of the house. Linda had been a friend of the Catroux' from the days of their early romance and was presumably pro-French in sentiment; but she never talked politics, she was discreet, enigmatic and rather mysterious. Her good looks had an antique cast. She would have figured very well on the walls of a Pharaoh's tomb.
Strangely enough Alice Tueni's was the only interior that had the authentic French stamp and she had been brought up in England.
Dear Alice Tueni. Tiny, quick, with a sweet soprano voice, she was like a bird and she would often sing to us. She had a grand piano, a great rarity in Beirut, and what was even more rare, shelves full of music. Hamish Mackenzie, our third secretary, and Burnet Pavit, who was political officer in those days in the Bekaa, were both musicians (Burnet is an excellent pianist), and were constantly going to the Tuenis' to borrow music or play on the lovely piano. I would go with them sometimes and sit listening to Chopin or Bach. In the summer, I would paint in the garden, it was a wild unbelievable jungle of color. May was the most beautiful month when the jacarandas were in bloom. Then all the streets of Beirut would be hung with blue banners.
I became very fond of my Lebanese friends. They were not perhaps very weighty, nor did they seem to have any very serious sense of responsibility to their own people, but they were gentle and sensitive, they had charming manners and if the women talked a great deal without saying very much, their talk was never unkind, and if I asked them to help me in any way, with my Xmas parcels or hospitality for the British troops, how quick they were to respond. Our A.D.C.'s office would be stocked before Xmas with hundreds of cakes. One had only to express a wish and it was fulfilled . A tea party for twenty-five convalescents from the 23rd General Hospital? A banquet was spread. Would a series of tea parties be possible? But of course. Three a week, they would all take turns.
Zelfa and Camille Chamoun, Minister as I write of the Lebanese government to the Court of St. James, were a different type. We met them first through Bill Astor. They were not I gathered very well off but they shared with a cousin a house in the mountains where there was some rough shooting and they asked us up for the day. It had the charm of an Irish house, dilapidated and rather untidy; full of good cheer and children and dogs. Delicious smells from the kitchen mingled with the frosty air in its windy rooms. Camille was a good shot and loved the mountains. A real Montagnard. He loved his country too with passion. Zelfa had been brought up in the circle of the American University, and her handsome cousin Klodagh Tabet had brought herself up to be a firebrand. They were not at all French in their tastes, this family. On the contrary Klodagh's brother had spent the best part of the past seven years in French prisons and she herself had been locked up for some weeks. They were the first keen Lebanese patriots I had come to know; they took their politics very seriously and would have little or nothing to do with what they alluded to as the Sursock crowd, who were all, they declared, pro-French.
It seemed unnecessary and foolish to me at this period to discriminate between the pro-French and the pro-British Lebanese. Our pleasant days were spent, if not in a war atmosphere, against a background of warlike activity. The country was full of British troops, new camps, new airfields; great hospitals were springing up, defenses were building all along the road to Damascus and new roads were cutting everywhere across the mountains. That the peoples of the Levant should play the British off against the French was the last thing we wanted. It would help no one if we took to quarreling.
Madame Catroux would state this, every so often. "We must be friends, ma chère, it would never do if these people thought we didn't agree."
"But we are. We do, don't we?"
We met constantly and if there were signs that the sympathy so often expressed was not very genuine, if one after another nice young French officers who were particularly friendly to nice young British officers were removed from Beirut---and if sometimes they liked to come to our house and their names appeared often in our guest book and they lost their jobs at the Grand Sérail as a result and disappeared into the wilderness---well, I couldn't very well accuse Margot of turning the pages of the book in my front hall to find out.
I wish now that I had come out into the open and had asked her why, if we were friends, she did such things and why, if we were allies, she and her husband didn't put an end to all the jealousy and suspicion in their entourage. I think it might have helped. It could have done no harm. I didn't. I never mentioned the affair of the clinic at Selimieh. I let it pass like the rest and we rubbed along.
What time I had for myself I knew only too well how to spend. I would be away into the mountains, or up the Barada River with my painting paraphernalia, or would go down to the harbor and sit on the terrace of the Quarantine Office and paint the fishing boats tied up to the quay. B. shared a small sailing boat with Robin Hutchins. He would try to take Sunday off and would go out for a part of the day on the water, or we would visit Baalbek or the crusader castle of the Crac le Chevalier, or drive up the Valley of Adonis or to the fragile Arab palace of Bet el Dene where Lamartine had lived for a time. In winter B. and Francis Stonor would go shooting, and I would persuade Dan Lascelles to come and he and I would be parked somewhere with our paints while the others went off after woodcock or partridge. I am no painter, but was compelled to paint. For I was in love with the land and the sky. I was fascinated by the old crooked trunks of the olive trees and the great eucalyptuses with fronds hanging down like the tresses of gods in the sun, and the deep mysterious valleys and the queer sinister shapes of their rocky sides and the light---I was in love with the wonderful soft full light that poured down round me and through me and seemed to fill, not only my eyes with beauty, but my body with an essence that was life-giving and had something to do with the source of pure happiness.
And so the autumn of '42 became the winter of '43. General Leclerc's forces moved up from the Chad in January to occupy Murzak and Sibla. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill met at Casablanca and the VIIIth Army pushing past Tripoli crossed the Tunisian border. I was with the unit again early in February, this time once more in Tobruk.
1943 appears from my diary to have been a year crowded with incident. B. and I seem to have been continually on the move, sometimes together, more often separately. There were conferences in Cairo and Jerusalem. B. was called to Cairo in February to see Winston on his way through. We found a house at last in Damascus and I kept running back and forth across the Palestinian border to fetch pots and pans from Haifa and Tel Aviv. B. went to England in the summer, leaving Dan as chargé d'affaires. I went three times to rejoin the unit, once by road to Tobruk, twice airborne to Tunisia. I wrote at the beginning of February from Bet el Azrac, the Caseys' house at Mena.
B., Dan, Francis and I came down to Cairo a week ago by car, motoring through a blizzard as far as Jerusalem. The MacMichaels kindly put us up for the night. Winston was still in Turkey when we arrived but lunched here on Tuesday with Alan Brooke, Alec Cadogan, Sholto Douglas and Randolph. I thought he looked tired. He said to Maie, "I'm old but I'll last it out." B. had an hour alone with him and seemed happy about things.
We often stayed with the MacMichaels in beautiful Government House in Jerusalem. The problems of Palestine and the Levant were far from identical but they were interlinked and B. was always glad of the chance to discuss them with Harold MacMichael. I doubt if Great Britain has ever had a high commissioner in that torn and troubled country more able than MacMichael or one who steered a steadier course more quietly. I felt the tension and the menace immediately on crossing the frontier, but I do not know to this day whether Sir Harold was pro-Jew or pro-Arab in his heart. I fancy he didn't allow his heart to come into it. If he felt strongly one way or the other, he never showed it and indeed never talked to me of his many preoccupations. He talked about Professor Joad's God and Evil, about old seals, of which he had a valuable collection, or about the background of the life of Christ that was written obscurely in the stones of the city and countryside. He could be witty, but his penetrating gaze was somber.
I remember that we had not intended to go to Jerusalem; but to fly direct to Cairo and that we waited until the last minute hoping that our plane could take off, so that we left Beirut very late and only reached the border after dark. It was snowing hard, there were two police cars waiting to escort us. I thought it unnecessary and scoffed at such elaborate precautions. I was wrong. MacMichael was ambushed on the same road not long after and when Lord Moyne was murdered in Cairo, B. was informed that he must not motor, even in Beirut, without police protection as the Stern gang had declared that they were going to bump off the leading British representatives in the Middle East and he was next on the list.
The MacMichaels never betrayed any sign of nervousness or apprehension. They were always calm and cordial and the lovely house was beautifully run, but there was something in the atmosphere that made one feel that one was in a fortress, and I used to wonder if Lady MacMichael enjoyed driving herself about alone. She didn't tell me. She was very active as president of the Red Cross, and went everywhere, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Sarafand and Bethlehem, driving her own small car. If her face at times when she came home was grim, she didn't explain why. But our evenings by the log fire in the drawing room were I believe particularly cozy because for a few hours she could relax and enjoy the luxury of feeling perfectly safe.
The Caseys' house at Mena was very different. It belongs to Chester Beatty, who lent it to the Minister of State when Oliver Lyttelton came to Cairo in this capacity, and the latter handed it on to Dick. It had not been built for an official residence and was much less grand than the Embassy. It was in fact quite small and unbearably hot in summer, as the rooms all opened out onto a tiled courtyard that gave back a blinding glare; and it was infested with mosquitoes. I am not bothered much by mosquitoes, they don't like me, but at Mena I was devoured, for the finely woven mosquito nets on our beds were full of holes. The Caseys, bless their hearts, didn't seem to mind. They had no liking for pomp and ceremony, nor did Maie care for housekeeping.
They were breezy and gay, they were generous and free, there was a touch of recklessness about them, something youthful and daring and true that made them very endearing. Their Egyptian servants cheated them shamelessly and they didn't care. They hadn't time to bother about trifles. Margaret Gilruth, Maie Casey's delightful secretary, would worry about bills, but Maie would toss them aside. "We are living on our capital anyhow."
My instinct on first meeting Maie Casey had been true. We became friends and managed to see a good deal of each other. The house at Mena was always open to me. I had to stop off at Cairo on my way to the unit and I knew when the Beirut plane circled down over El Maza airfield that I would see a small figure standing in the sun with the wide sands of Egypt spreading round her. And there she always was, such a pretty thing, usually in a tailored coat and skirt of striped Damascus silk, white and mauve-we had bought the silk together one day in the suhks---with a large floppy hat on her curly gray head, and she would say, "Oh boy, but I'm glad to see you," for she talked like that to remind us that her heart was in the Australian bush.
Or it would be the other way round. Dick had to cover the whole of the Middle East; he traveled a great deal by plane and would drop her off at Beirut or Damascus to stay with us. She would ring up and say:
"Hello darling, Dick has to go to Teheran on Tuesday. Can I stay with you for three days?"
"Lovely. We'll be in Damascus."
"Then I'll get him to drop me at Mezzé airdrome."
"Beautiful."
"Let's do some painting. Done any painting lately? How's it going? The Barada? What's that? Oh, the river. What color rocks? Flamingo pink? Go on. Rocks aren't flamingo pink."
A man's voice would break in: "Is this a military call?" And hers would answer, "Of course it's a military call."
She came with me to Tobruk on that February trip in '43. She was eager to visit the unit and wore an Australian trooper's hat during the trip by way of compliment to the division that had stood the siege of the tragic town in 1940. We traveled by road and spent a night on the way with Admiral Harwood at Navy House in Alexandria. Admiral Godefroy of the French Navy was still in Alex with his ships lying at anchor as they'd been when Rommel advanced to within sixty miles. No efforts on the part of the British Navy or the British government had prevailed upon him to hand them over to the Allies, or place them at the disposal of General de Gaulle. Threats, blandishments, arguments, all had failed. Godefroy carried calmly on with his pleasant life of masterly inactivity. He played, it seemed, a good game of golf, and the British government continued to provide the funds for the payroll of this fleet that would not fight. I believe indeed that shortly before our descent on Admiral Harwood, the Frenchman had put forward a demand for an increase of pay for several of his officers on the ground that they had received promotion during their long months of idleness. I find a note in my diary under February 19, '43.
British admirals are extraordinary people. Harwood could find nothing but good to say of the Frenchman Godefroy. He apologized for him all through dinner. Maie very upset when we left. I pointed out our old haunts as we sped along the road I know so well. Dabaa, Sidi Barani, Buq Buq, Solum. That fine N.A.A.F.I., the Ark, that served us so well at Dabaa is gone together with almost everything else. Two armies, Rommel's and Monty's, have swept over this desert since I went down the road and there isn't much left. The pink walls of the gaping house in Solum that used to make a pretty frame for the blue sea have fallen. The desolation is complete. But it is spring and the desert is covered with wild flowers. Every wadi is knee deep in scarlet anemones, white marguerites, night-scented stock. The perfumed air flowed through the car as we traveled. Our camp is a mass of color, and Jocelyn is busy making faithful drawings of the exquisite things. Every flower you can think of, but all in miniature. She says she has collected ninety different kinds.
The unit is in fine shape, but was in the throes of a drama when we arrived. T. W.'s. boxer bitch had developed rabies, bitten Thibaut and licked half a dozen of the M.T.C. girls who had scratches on their hands. So Thibaut, Barbara, T. W., Biddy and Rachel were all dispatched to Cairo, for treatment.
Great pother at El Adam airdrome over sending them off. The wing commander in charge, anxious and helpful, but bewildered by their ribaldry. One of them began barking on the airfield as they waited, and Barbara said, "Come on, time we dogs got on board." My girls certainly have a style of their own.
The hospital was on the escarpment above the harbor and near railhead. Our part of the camp, that is, our living quarters, looked, as I remember, like nothing so much as a collection of allotments or squatters' huts. Jean and Pat Barr had been married in Alex and had built themselves a Peter Pan house on the edge of a wadi from loot they had collected in the sand. The door, windows and roof were from an Italian dump near by. The path to it led across a carpet of flowers and one could see down to the harbor from their small window; it had of course no windowpane.
Other members of the unit had gone in for building on a less ambitious scale. Rosie had made herself a house out of petrol tins. The roof blew off nearly every day. Several of the boys had elaborate dwellings but of peculiar shape. The general effect was striking, especially on washing day and I made a caustic comment but the colonel laughed me out of my disapproval. If the hospital was neat and tidy what did the rest matter? They weren't very busy and they wouldn't stay long. They were merely waiting for the division to move on into Tunisia.
A festive visit in spite of the rabies scare. The VIIIth Army had crossed the Tunisian border on January 29 and 1st Army with Giraud's North African French were moving up, if slowly, from Algiers. It was the time when men talked of a race between Monty and Anderson. Who would reach Tunis first? General Eisenhower had been appointed C. in C. in North Africa with General Alex, as he was affectionately called by so many, to second him. Great events were preparing and our officers were in a high state of hope and excitement. The French colony of Tunisia would soon be theirs once more. Their admiration for General Montgomery was unbounded, the pride of the men at being a part of VIIIth Army was touching. This is a fact of considerable historic importance. The officers and men of the 1st Free French Division have never lost their feeling for the VIIIth British Army. It was a bitter disappointment to them that Algiers would not allow them to wear the North Africa Star. I know this because I took the matter up on behalf of my unit. My girls who had spent two years in the desert with VIIIth Army were incensed when they were forbidden to wear it because they had been attached to a French division and I was incensed for them so the question was raised in the highest quarters and the final answer was that the decoration had been offered to the 1st Free French Division and refused by the government of Algiers.
The facts should be known. There are many men in France who still believe that the British withheld the ribbon they coveted more than any in the whole war. What is of the greatest importance and indeed will be I believe a factor in history is that these men will continue to feel bound to the British as comrades and brothers-in-arms for as long as they live. They are not a great number, but they count, for they are, to my mind, the best that France has to offer.
How glad they all were during those days of waiting on the El Adam escarpment. What a welcome they gave me. How they scoffed at the Moustachios, as they called the North African French. De Gaulle was their man. No one else. None had a good word for Giraud. Our colonel was the most fiery and uncompromising of the lot. He spat out the word "Moustachio" as if the mere sound made him sick, then would go trotting off calling for Mike to help organize a football team.
We went round the dreadful harbor one day in a naval launch, moving slowly between the sunken ships. Some lay well out of the water and leaned on their sides as if with great weariness. We could see into the waterwashed cabins, follow the gangway down into the obscurity beneath the shimmering surface. What lay below, I wondered, in that tragic depth? Nothing now surely but broken wood and rusted iron.
I visited Nick Alderson's lonely grave with Michael and some of the boys. They had put up a strong wooden cross with his name clearly marked. But some of the names in the cemetery of Tobruk were almost obliterated. Many of the graves were buried under a tangle of wild flowers. Jocelyn came with me and took a photograph of Captain Wilder's grave for Lady MacMichael. How long it seemed since I had come on the Black Watch in their little camp near Baalbek. It was Rosie, I see in my diary, who went with me to Bir Hakim. I find this entry:
February '5th, '43. Visited Bir Hakim today. Rosie found a rabbit hole in the sand which she insists was her home. How sad the camp was! The utter silence, the solitude, the scraps strewn in the sand; forgotten relics of boisterous fighting men. A tattered book on horseracing in English (it might have been T. W.'s.), an old boot.
And then on February 25:
Feeling still runs high in the division over the Moustachios. Michael Knox has been to see us. He says that De Gaulle is arriving in Algiers in a fortnight (he was wrong) and that there will be no rapprochement with Giraud for a long time. The unit he informs me is going to Tripoli, a drive of 1100 miles. If only I could go with them.
I didn't. I went back to Beirut, and missed the drive from Tobruk, not to Tripoli as they had thought, but far beyond to Sidi Bouali near Enfidaville in Tunisia. It was Barbara who led the girls on that long journey. They left Tobruk the middle of April, were fourteen days on the road, and arrived in fine style. I heard about their exploits from the A.D.M.S. when I rejoined them the middle of May. "Any number of officers have asked me," he said, "what unit it was that they met on the road with all those girl drivers. They'd never seen better driving or better road manners. A fine performance. They all said the same."
Barbara wrote me the following letter at the end of it.
May 1st, '43
My dear May,
Well we have joined the battle again at last. The long convoy run was the greatest fun and I think enjoyed by most. The division moved "en bloc," the 1st Brigade a day ahead of us, we were at the end of the 2nd Brigade convoy with only the "Lourde" behind us, to pick up the dead trucks. We did 100 to 110 miles a day and it took all day with incessant halts for this and that. We were all well stocked with N.A.A.F.I. so each halt was an occasion for a snack. We were very short of drivers so every available officer was driving, also the M.T.C. took over the water buggies as well as the staff cars. The latter were none the less laden and you would not believe the paraphernalia of cat-baskets, empty shell-cases and other battle debris converted to some use by the Nannies. Apart from my own junk the back of my car had to house the pigeons in a flat teacase, because---ill-timed gesture---they started to sit on their two eggs before we left, so they had to travel in comfort. They behaved as well as everyone else, taking their airing in the evening sky in turns and rewarded me by hatching their chicks on Easter Saturday under (nearly) the shadow of Marble Arch (Gulf of Sidi). I announced to the colonel with pride the addition of two to the unit's strength and everyone was pleased.
We had practically no trouble with the vehicles. Rosie spent some time and several nights with the "Lourde" changing half shafts etc. but was always mobile the next morning.
The second night we stayed in a green valley near Giovanni Berta. Frightfully cold. I froze all night in my battle-dress under six blankets. Not at all pleased to see Brosset in the cold dawn in immaculate shorts, "très sport" who came at 6 A. M. to see how we were doing.
We drove through the Italian colonies symmetrical and barren. Near the towns the colonists lined the roads with outstretched hands crying, "Biscotti Signorettis" against a background of little square houses with Fascist slogans, "Vincere moi" etc. One had a childish desire to reply, "Vinceremo moi. Ha! Ha!"
Stayed two nights 18 kms. south of Benghazi, one of the nastiest bits of desert I've seen. Round the Gulf of Sidi, still so heavily mined that even the ditches by the roadside weren't safe, and mines lying about everywhere. Once or twice we stayed very close to the sea, and had a chance to bathe. We were by now well organized and however late we got in, the kitchen always had a hot meal of sorts ready by the time we had bivouacked, and as we got well into our blankets a sudden burst of laughter from a truck or a three-year-old nostalgic tune from someone's gramophone would shatter the silence, till at last the camp would fall into deep quiet.
As you know we were supposed to go to a place south of Tripoli but the night before we arrived there, came the cheering news that we were to push on to the Tunisian front and relieve the New Zealand Division near Enfidaville, so we shot through as fast as maybe to Trigala, west of Sousse before going up into the line, and celebrated our first night on French colonial soil drinking sweet champagne produced and cherished for months and miles in his truck by Père Boileau. The colonel and I came up to Sidi Bouali next day and met the charming colonel of the N.Z.C.C.'s, who had already found us a fine emplacement in an olive grove about eight miles behind our lines. So here we are, the hospital is setting up, the division moving into the line and we shall probably be working again tomorrow.
Changes had been taking place meanwhile in the Levant and at first seemed to suggest that we were entering on a period of happy collaboration with the French. General Catroux re-established the constitution in both states and decided in March to hold free elections waiving his right to appoint a third of the deputies. He chose as head of the interim government in Syria Ata-Bey Ayoubi, a Moslem of great dignity and integrity; in the Lebanon a doctor by the name of Ayoub Tabet. The comic rascal Tajedine was dead and President Naccache now faded into the obscurity from which he had only half emerged.
B. was pleased. It really looked---to use his own words----as if Catroux meant business. What pleased him almost as much as this sign of good faith on the part of his French colleague was the very considerable achievement of the Spears Mission. Founded to help the French organize the resources of the country for war, it had been faced at the outset with two great difficulties. The French had shown no interest in the herculean undertaking and the Syrians, whose friendly co-operation was essential, refused to collaborate with the French. And yet in spite of this, the mission had achieved a great measure of success. For B. would not admit defeat. He had dragged the Grand Sérail into his schemes as partners on the one hand; he had, on the other, cajoled and reasoned and even at times bullied the Syrians into working with the French officers sent out into the country to collect wheat, supervise new irrigation schemes and organize the sale and distribution of olive oil. Other activities of the mission were purely British; one, B.'s special pet, was a scheme to revive the moribund silk industry. The mulberry trees had been allowed to die. It was a question of importing new plants and encouraging the villagers. I remember at one time being told that B. was buying up all the silk thread in the country, that the weavers of Damascus could make no more brocade. Parachutes took the place of those lustrous fabrics. The silkworms of the Lebanon, provided us in the end with forty thousand.
The economic problems were all but insuperable. The cost of living was soaring, the Arabs were hoarding wheat, the people had to be fed. There were bread riots in Damascus, there was a potato famine in Egypt and Palestine. There had been no attempt at control or rationing. To come to grips with all this we needed experts and B. got them, from London, from Palestine, from Cairo. The economic section alone of the Spears Mission was a formidable affair, B. the driving power behind it, and the Grand Sérail gave what contribution it could, but it was inevitable that most of the work should be done by the mission. At one time the most pressing question was to check inflation. Gold must be sold; as there were no gold sovereigns, tola bars were imported from London. Then a system of rationing was introduced and to make this effective a census had to be taken in all the cities, Beirut, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo etc. The French lacked the personnel even had they had the will to undertake such tasks. It was the Spears Mission that provided the staff, the British government the funds. B. bore the main responsibility with a British treasury official to advise him. Colonel Howard Jones, our agricultural expert, had no opposite number among the French. His experimental farms and his potato crops were his own affair. If large tracts of and land became fruitful, it was his doing. A quiet man who spoke almost in a whisper, he would wander into our garden to see how the grass was growing---he had brought the seed himself from Palestine---then drift away to the Bekaa or the Jezere to murmur words of wisdom into the ears of a wondering peasantry or coax an Arab chief into sowing a new kind of grain.
Wheat had been the great problem and wheat the outstanding success of the mission. In '41 we had been obliged to import 80,000 tons of wheat in British ships that could ill be spared. The deficit was turned in '43 into a surplus of 150,000, and B. had built up a joint organization, British, French, Syrian and Lebanese, called the O.C.P. to assure the distribution and control the price of grain, with General Catroux and himself as a committee of two at its head. And then, just when the barometer at last was set fair, General Catroux was transferred to Algiers and was replaced in the Levant by Monsieur Helleu.
I believe this to have been a calamity. I am convinced that had General Catroux remained on in Beirut, the crisis of November '43 would have been averted. I don't know if B. or Dan would agree with me. I only speak for myself. I know that General Catroux and B. often disagreed, that there were times when things came almost to breaking point; but they didn't break. Their collaboration, while he was there, never did break down for General Catroux was pliable as well as tenacious, he was not like some of his colleagues, obsessed by a sense of his own dignity nor so jealous of French prestige that he could tolerate no effort that did not emanate from the Grand Sérail. He was a man of the world with a wide experience, he was subtle and deep and an able negotiator; he had great charm. I wrote when I heard that he was leaving:
April 23rd. General Catroux has wired to his wife from London to meet him in Algiers and as she says she refuses to live there, I gather that she does intend to and will soon be packing up.
He and B. are well matched as duelists and I think B. will miss him if only as a stimulus when he goes to North Africa.
And on the twenty-ninth:
Madame Catroux is in Algiers, she says for a week, but I think he and she will move there quite soon and that Helleu is to succeed him in Beirut. Helleu comes from Ankara where he has been Vichy Ambassador, but we no longer boggle at such things.
I shall miss Margot. Her very unreliability makes her interesting. You never know whether she is going to bite or caress. She can be witty, charming and savage all at the same time. And her indiscretions are fascinating. If you know how to edit her talk you can learn a great deal. Her great quality is vitality---she stimulates. Yes, I am sorry that she is going.
Monsieur and Madame Helleu were very different from the Catroux'. He was small and feeble, with a scarlet nose, a plaintive voice and a continual simper; she was statuesque, early Victorian, very correct and must have been remarkably handsome at one time; I think she was very unhappy. It soon became evident that he was quite incapable of filling, even moderately well, the post General Catroux had vacated. He would disappear for days, the gossips said with a supply of whisky bottles, leaving Boegner and Baelen in charge of the Grand Sérail and his proud unbending wife alone at the Résidence des Pins. It wasn't long before Boegner held everything French, including his miserable chief, in his scrawny, prehensile, fanatically anti-British hands. I felt very sorry for Madame Helleu.
Mr. Casey summoned a meeting of the Middle East War Council for the beginning of May, and B. and I went down for it, staying with them for a week at Mena. I then rejoined the unit at Sidi Bouali. General Brereton commanding the American Air Force in the M.E. very kindly took me as far as Kerowan in his magnificent plane. A delightful trip in frightful weather. I wrote on May 16:
Arrived in Cairo a week ago and have been in a whirl ever since. The Cornwallises from Baghdad, Sir Reeder Bullard from Teheran, the MacMichaels from Jerusalem, and six commanders in chief, Jumbo Wilson, General Platt, Sholto Douglas, General Pownwall etc. Dinners every night and lunches every day. Alexander Kirk gave a dinner and dispensed hospitality unrivaled by any Eastern potentate. Maie was on his right, I was on his left, we were both buddies of his. The long bridal table all crystal and white leaves in the immense shadowy room was dramatic. We recalled the parties he used to give in Rome. He is full of gloom about Italy. The party was I think for Mortimer Davis, or perhaps just to please himself.
I gather that the conference has been a success and is sending resolutions to London which will not be well received. Why can't London trust the men on the spot when they are all agreed? Baghdad, Teheran, Palestine, Egypt and the Red Sea constitute one problem surely, not many.
All fighting in North Africa stopped the day before yesterday. Am leaving for Tunis tomorrow but have missed the bus!
May 20th. This is the nicest camp we've ever had. The tents are dispersed in an olive grove about ten miles from Enfidaville on a rise with a view over lovely grass country to the mountains. Everyone happy thanks to victory, lots of work and Barbara.
Pat Barr is to receive the Croix de guerre for his work in the forward unit. He went up with Thibaut and Jibery to a place called Tacrouna just below the mountain our troops call Edinburgh Castle, they were heavily shelled as they were surrounded by troops. Pat says they moved back a hundred yards when it got too hot and put up a big Red Cross and were not shelled after that.
General de Larminat is very pleased with them all and the colonel is as proud as a little peacock.
Biddy and T. W. had a charming idea. The XIth Hussars were moving back to Tripolitania after being the first to enter Tunis and had to pass by our camp on their way, so the girls knowing my general was very attached to his old regiment asked one of the officers, a friend of theirs, to stop and see me. He turned up at seven in the morning outside my tent with a towheaded smiling youngster who looked about sixteen, and introduced him saying, "Tell General Spears that this chap was the first man to enter Tunis." It seems he went tearing in on his motorcycle to find the German military police still regulating the traffic and shot past, hoping the rest of the regiment would follow; they did.
A very tricky situation seems to have arisen among the French in this part of the world, and they seem to be dragging us into a mess with the Americans. The feeling between the Gaullists and the Giraudists is very explosive, and the Americans are apparently backing Giraud. Giraud is on the spot (Algiers). De Gaulle is---where? I don't know. In London I suppose. Nevertheless the Free French are recruiting with such success in Tunisia that the Giraudists are badly worried and General Eisenhower has ordered the recruiting to stop. Our people, i.e., the colonel and all the Free French in hospital, are livid about this. They refuse to have any truck with the Moustachios and say the latter openly boast of their continued allegiance to Pétain.
To add to the confusion there seems to be a conflict among certain elements, high up, of the Free French as to how to deal with the situation. There are those apparently who want to drop the Croix de Lorraine and the name Free French and weld the whole lot together, while others don't trust the North African French and are in a fever lest Eisenhower or rather Roosevelt, should persuade Churchill to throw over De Gaulle and play with Vichy.
De Larminat gave nothing away when I lunched with him, but the colonel and all our people are very excited and Michael Knox came over to see me breathing fire. He out-Caesars Caesar where De Gaulle is concerned. De Gaulle wouldn't come to Algiers, he declared, until the psychological moment. He was going to get North Africa, make no mistake about that. If De Larminat was put to it, he'd fight. Fight whom? I asked. The Americans, the Giraudists---anybody. What right had Eisenhower to order recruiting to stop? General Juin wasn't a bad sort. He'd said: "Move your recruiting office round the corner and I won't say anything."
Orders have come from the Xth Corps that we are to be ready to move on the 30th. All the VIIIth Army is moving down to Tripolitania to re-form and we are to go with it. Reilinger and Vernier and everybody else very keen to stay with VIIIth Army. But Knox showed me a letter from De Larminat to Xth Corps stating that he had been ordered by General de Gaulle to remain in Tunisia and asking to be allowed a month's repos on French soil for his troops. The real object is recruiting and also I believe the determination not to hand over Tunisia to Giraud. Knox's talk of revolution very wild, but my impression is that many decent men want to join the Gaullists while it seems to be true that Giraud's forces are largely made up of men still loyal to Pétain.
Later:
Madame Catroux descended on us yesterday. Her first words to me were, "Ma chère, il faut que vous m'aidez. Il n'y a plus de soldats Gaullists, il n'y a que les Français. Cette histoire de recrutement est odieuse. Il faut que cela cesse."(2)
She stayed to tea and several young officers turned up to whom she had given rendezvous in our camp, among them her stepson and De Courcelles, De Gaulle's former A.D.C., the one who came with him to England from Bordeaux in B.'s plane. Madame C.'s talk was very curious. The whole trend to run down De Gaulle and laugh at the Croix de Lorraine. I played the village idiot. Among other things she said Giraud had ordered all Gaullists to be sent to England. That was too much for me. I said, "What! the whole division?" She looked startled, then waved aside the unpleasant notion that all De Gaulle's 1st Division was Gaullist and said she meant the men who were coming over from France to join him. Re De Gaulle's own arrival in Algiers, she said that "Georges" had gone with Harold MacMillan to fetch him, that naturally he could not bring his entourage, there was no logement in Algiers. De Courcelles asked with a subtlety that she seemed to miss: "Et vous, êtes-vous bien logée, madame?" She smiled. "Ah oui. Nous nous avons une très belle résidence. Nous pouvons donner une chambre et un bureau au Général de Gaulle dans notre maison." She smiled again---the smile of a tiger. At the same time she alluded to Giraud as "Ce pauvre Giraud," and whispered savagely in my ear as she was leaving---"I know who is at the bottom of all this, it's De Larminat."
The colonel told me after she had gone that she had given a dressing down to two of our wounded when she was doing the round of the wards. I wasn't there, but I knew the two men. 'They had been in Giraud's N.A. Army and had come over to join the Free French Division in time to take part in the battle. Madame Catroux alluded to them as "Mauvais soldats, mauvais Français."
I have copied the extract from my diary because it reflects the extreme confusion in North Africa at that time and the precariousness of General de Gaulle's position. That, I have been told since, was his real reason for ordering De Larminat to remain in Tunisia instead of obeying VIIIth Army orders and going with Xth Corps to Tripolitania. He did go, however, early in June, and the unit went with him. They spent three months in Zuara but it was the end of the division's service with VIIIth Army. When I visited the unit again in October they were back in Tunisia at Khanguet, but much had happened. Eighth Army had gone. It had crossed to Sicily in July and the Americans had moved in. The French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers with De Gaulle and Giraud as co-chiefs had been recognized by the Allies in August and General Catroux had become governor general of Algeria. Madame Catroux too had been made a general.
More important to me was Barbara's imminent departure. She was leaving the unit for good this time and was going to be married in Cairo to Major Jennings Bramley. General Maast, governor of Tunisia, came to inspect the unit before she left and decorated us both with the Nichan-If-Takar, the Star of the Bey of Tunis, thanking her for the great services she had rendered to the French troops, and I think she was pleased, but it was a sad little ceremony for us all; officers, nurses, M.T.C. girls and the F.A.U. boys were sorry to see Barbara go. She had been a wise, whimsical, humorous boss, controlling her small body of individualists with a minimum display of authority, and her going meant that only three remained of the girls who had been with me in France in '39. Cynthia had come back from America but had gone again to marry Peter Smith Dorrien, and Rosie had been invalided home. Only T. W., Jean and Evelyn were left of the original unit, and there seemed to be no one person who could fill Barbara's place as my spokesman and representative. Michael Rowntree undertook to look after our finances and send the accounts direct to Dorea Stanhope, Jean became head sister but in all other matters I must throw the general responsibility on the colonel, and the colonel was deeply unhappy. He had received word that his wife, whom he had not seen since the outbreak of war, had died in hospital in Paris, that his four children were with his mother but would have to be boarded out somewhere, he didn't know where. He was heartbroken and worried to the point of agony at being cut off from them. "You see how it is," he said. "She died in France and my children are in France, and France is in the hands of the enemy."
Then Jocelyn came to my tent one morning. I knew she had been hiding great anxiety over her husband for a long time. She had had one letter from India, telling her that he was going on a mission and she was not to worry if she didn't hear for three months, but the letter had been written over a year ago, and since, she had heard nothing. Now she came into my tent and said, "I've had rather a shock. Delhi has sent back all my letters to Basil, I got them yesterday." She gave a small convulsive laugh. "They make a big bundle"
She didn't break down. She only trembled slightly and looked at me with a smile jerking her mouth.
"Of course I know that it doesn't mean he is dead. It is only that they don't see any point in keeping all these old letters. I'm sure he'll turn up one of these days; even if he was dropped in Burma I know he'll get out. But it was a bit of a shock." And she gave another convulsive laugh. Poor Jocelyn, she never heard from Basil again.