 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
I FOUND them in Hamamet, on the shore of the Bay of Tunis, but it wasn't until the beginning of February '44 that I was able to join them. The war had moved off but there were still several thousand British troops in hospital in the Levant. There were Xmas parcels to do, I was president of the British Red Cross for Syria and the Lebanon, I'd been put on the IXth Army's United Services Welfare Council and become responsible for all welfare that had to do with service women. A.T.S., W.A.A.F.'s, W.R.E.N.'s were coming to Beirut on leave in increasing numbers. Great holiday camps had sprung up along the shore, my service women's clubs were overflowing, there was much to do. Without Mary Dodge and my delightful Red Cross director, Maureen Gibson, and our excellent band of local workers, I could never have got through with it. Then the Spears clinic in the far north of Syria began to have trouble with the French authorities again. A French military doctor had swooped down suddenly on our little hospital in Tel Tamar and had taken possession. The boys wrote in despair. A campaign had been begun among the Bedouins and the Kurds against Sheirajan, our excellent surgeon. They said in the villages that he had murdered one of his patients. Our political officer had to take a hand, Colonel d'Essesars who had succeeded Brosset at Deir-ez-Zor, was called in. It was all very distressing. Then B. and I received a shattering blow. The Caseys were leaving Cairo. Dick was going as governor general to Bengal.
I have said little about the Caseys and almost nothing about our very brief visits to Cairo. Their friendship is a private thing and this narrative is not meant to deal with my private life. They will remain a part of it I hope long after I have written finis at the end of this manuscript. Long, lanky, elegant Dick will come breezing in, from Bengal or Australia, with little Maie striding beside him, and he will blink through his thick tangled eyelashes and Maie will say, "Hullo darling"---and it will be as if we had never been separated. But Dick had been more to us than a warmhearted friend. I know few men as clear-sighted and with an equal integrity; he had given B. his wholehearted support in all his difficulties, so his going was a double blow.
He went to London in January for discussions on his new job. It was Margaret Gilruth who rang up this time to say that Mrs. Casey was in bed with malaria, the children Jane and Don had flu and she had had it too, would I come? Margaret is a person of great charm, ability and independence. She walks lightly through the world with laughter on her lips. She walked into my life, then walked away, but she will come back one day. Jane and Don adored her. Jane was thirteen and Don was nine. They had been left behind by their parents in Washington, had been retrieved a year later, brought to Egypt and now they were off to India. And "Miz," Don would say if he were poking his snub nose over my shoulder. "Gee, you mustn't forget Miz." Don was very American and almost too much for Maie; Miz was the dachs.
I remember one of the telegrams that kept arriving addressed to Dick from Calcutta. I don't recall the exact wording but it was more or less this:
PLEASE LET ME KNOW THE SIZE OF YOUR PARTY. HOW MANY SECRETARIES AND SERVANTS WILL BE ACCOMPANYING YOU. STOP. YOUR BEDROOM AND SITTING ROOM ARE AIR-CONDITIONED BUT NOT YOUR WIFE'S SITTING ROOM. STOP. DO YOU WISH ME TO PUT THIS IN HAND. And more to the same effect.
Maie laughed. "'There's only us," she said. "Dick and Don and Jane and Miz and me." But she shook her head as she looked with me at the photographs of Government House. "Not my cup of tea at all."
She recovered from her bout of malaria. The house filled with packing cases and boxes. We sat by the fire in the evening recalling rather wistfully the high spots of the past two years.
We were too busy during the last days to be miserable. All Maie's friends wanted to see her. Amy and Walter Smart, Terance and Sophie Shone, Alexander Kirk, Russell Pasha and Dorothea. Barbara Freyberg was gone. We both loved her, but she was already in Italy.
Then General Montgomery came for the week end, suddenly, from Sicily. He had come for a rest and he sat all day Sunday in the garden. "Isn't he a darling?" Maie said. "So cozy."
He showed me the new ribbon of the Africa Star. "The yellow is the color of my car," he said. "I matched it." He wasn't enthusiastic when I told him I was with the French. "There are only two nations that can fight the Germans---the British and the Americans."
The departure of the Casey family at six on that winter morning remains vivid in my memory. It was dark, and cold in the houseboat on the Nile where their friends had foregathered to say good-by. Dick came hurrying in, his face harassed, his hands full of passports. Maie followed, very chic, with a ridiculous hat tilted over one eye. Jane was wide-eyed; Don, slung all over with helmet, haversack, kodak, air-gun, had Miz in his arms.
Alexander Kirk drove me away when they had disappeared across the shadowy water and he had heard the Sunderland pass into the sky. Alexander is a very fastidious man. He has a caustic tongue and does not tolerate bores or vulgarians. He said, as we drove away, "Two more virginal people---" His eyes were red. Then he added, "All the fun has gone out of life in Cairo." It was true for me.
The weather was bad all the way to Tunis. Storms of rain. Many airfields flooded. I traveled in a D.C. 3. We had to come down at Castel Benito and I spent the night in Benghazi at the Officers' Club. My room had four walls but the corridor outside ended in the open air. Even the tragic harbor seemed sordid. When we reached Tunis next day I saw Biddy Pattison waving from the other side of a lake and we had to be carried across it from the Dakota in a truck.
It wasn't a happy visit. The unit had struck a bad patch. There was no Barbara now to hold them all together. M.T.C. and nurses were arranged against each other, with Jean being ground between the two groups, and there were three strange French girls whom I had never heard of before.
The colonel was obviously uncomfortable when he presented them. They belonged, he said, to a blood transfusion unit that was momentarily disbanded; they were only with us as guests. The colonel was not himself. He was jumpy, evasive and rather cross when I said the hospital looked shabby. It was installed in a derelict hotel of indescribable dinginess. Most of the windows and doors had been used for firewood by the Germans. General de Lattre de Tassigny had come, Jean told me, on a tour of inspection and had not been pleased. He had said he expected something very different, remembering St. Jean le Bassel. I was chagrined but not surprised. Our material was wearing out; our linen was going gray; the blue blankets were faded and stained.
The patients were happy enough but the nurses seemed to be very nervy and cross. The girls and boys, like the officers, were quartered in a group of white villas. Pretty Moorish villas, delightful in design, but derelict like the hospital. Mine they called the Eggshell, because it was tiny and white with a round dome. It was close to the shore. A cactus hedge divided the garden, from the sands and the gray stormy winter sea.
The bad weather seemed to have invaded our mess. The girls were messing now by themselves, the officers in another building, and feeling was running high on the subject of rations. Jean warned me. There were two camps, nurses on one side, M.T.C. on the other. They had voted and the M.T.C. had had it, they had stuck to French rations, and the nurses were, they declared, starving. British rations included porridge and orange marmalade, French rations neither porridge nor marmalade, but wine and coffee. Not realizing how serious the matter was I brought up the subject at supper and let loose the storm.
"But we voted. We agreed to have the same food as the officers."
"I didn't vote, I wasn't here."
"And I've made them marmalade." Jocelyn's voice was shrill. "I bought the oranges and scrounged the sugar."
"I brought back four loaves of American bread last week, you know I did." Rachel's eyes were like a tiger's.
"You say so---but I've never seen any."
"How can we be expected to do a full morning's work with nothing in our stomachs but black coffee and dry black bread?"
"Not even margarine to put on it."
"The boys have porridge and jam."
"Yes, and bacon. I've seen it."
I went in search of Michael. "The food situation, Michael, is serious."
"I know."
"It's a question of porridge mostly."
"They are welcome to ours. We can't eat it. It's almost entirely made of straw."
"What's to be done? It isn't only the food. Everything seems to be rather horrid. Why has the colonel put the hospital in that dilapidated building? Why not in our own nice tents?"
"There's no room for the tents in Hamamet."
"And we need new sheets, coverlets, jugs, basins. Jean tells me all the ward equipment is wearing out. Edith says she only has one hypodermic syringe, Evelyn says---"
"The trouble is," Michael explained, "that we now depend on Algiers for everything and Algiers has nothing to give us. The British Army has washed its hands of us and the Americans haven't taken us over."
It was all very depressing. Mary Hawkins and Margaret Stevens, the two new nurses Dorea had sent out, asked to see me. Hawkins did the talking, she said they were bitterly disappointed. They thought they were going to the front and here they were stuck in this awful place with only sick men to look after. And why should Jean Barr be head sister? She had had far less experience than most of them. Then Evelyn came, then Edith, then Franco. My days were one long series of difficult interviews.
And what, they asked, did these French girls think they were good for? I hadn't asked for them, had I? Why had the colonel taken them on without referring to me?
I wasn't too happy myself about that. The colonel had explained that they were only with us temporarily en subsistence. Was a principle involved? Should I insist on my right to recruit the personnel féminin and send them away? I didn't see how I could if they were only visitors, and they seemed nice girls. Françoise was charming; Antoinette rather silly perhaps, Marie just a plump little thing. I consulted Jean. They didn't worry her, she said. Jean is a humorous person, it takes a lot to get her down. I had been watching her with the nurses. She remained serene and sweet-tempered, too sweet-tempered if anything. She didn't complain but I knew it was our own lot that worried her.
"You must be tough, Jean. They are all getting out of hand. Not less discipline, but more. You have my complete backing."
But the officers too were at sixes and sevens. Thibaut came to me mysteriously, after dark, in my Eggshell. He told me while the sea roared beyond the cactus hedge that the colonel wanted to turn the hospital from a mobile unit into a field hospital of four hundred beds on the American plan, and he and all the others were against it.
"But how can he? Our equipment," I said, "is inadequate as it is."
The colonel expected to get a complete American equipment. All the division was being equipped by the Americans. The colonel had been in Algiers about it. I must on no account let him know that he, Thibaut, had come to see me.
"But I must discuss it with him?"
"Certainly; but not as coming from me, or there will be an---'histoire.'"
I had had enough "histoires" since my arrival, but the future character of our formation was involved. I knew that with our present personnel of thirty-five British F.A.U. boys and ten nurses we could never cope with a hospital of four hundred beds. It would mean a large French staff, French nurses who would refuse to accept Jean's authority, French orderlies---and where were they to come from?
I sought out the colonel. He was all on fire with enthusiasm over his new scheme. I had to tell him that I was against any such plan. He argued at some length. The division needed, he said, a large field hospital. We would not sacrifice our mobility. We could divide the formation into a light mobile section to go forward, and a second-line hospital. And the personnel? He was vague about the personnel. I realized in the end that the whole project was vague. He wasn't at all certain of getting the American equipment. We came to a compromise. I would go to Algiers and try to see the head of the American Supply Service and ask for equipment for two hundred beds.
It occurred to me in the luxurious French plane that carried me to Algiers, in company with General de Larminat, that I hadn't had time to worry over my feelings toward the Free French. The crisis in Beirut had happened in another world. Jean had given a cocktail party and asked a number of our old friends to meet me. De Robert had come and Commandant Simon and Lalande and Pierre Duro and a dozen others. None had shown any awareness of a horrid situation in the Levant, and I hadn't found it at all strange to be talking to them about old times and their next move to Italy. They were friends, I was glad to see them, it was taken for granted that the "Spirettes" would be with them in the Italian campaign, and De Larminat had been as usual courteous, cold, scathing in his criticisms, this time of the Americans, but with a faint, friendly, humorous gleam in his hard intelligent eye. I had lunched with him in his camp. Now he escorted me to Algiers where Duff and Diana Cooper had offered to put me up for two days.
I knew almost nothing about Algiers and understood less. It seemed that General de Gaulle had established his pre-eminence over General Giraud in the French National Committee, but how he had done it I had no idea. Madame Catroux I reflected had not been asked after all to give General de Gaulle a room in her house. She was taking a mobile unit it appeared to Italy with Colonel Fruchaud as her médecin chef. It would be nice to see General Catroux again. I had last seen him in Beirut just after the crisis. He had been friendly, but very depressed, and with reason. I wondered how General de Gaulle had received him on his return. Not too badly it appeared. He was still governor of Algiers and co-ordinator of Moslem affairs for the French National Committee. But it was difficult to believe that De Gaulle would accept the affront offered him by the Lebanese. Catroux was a man of the world, he was big enough to recognize that B. had been right and his own people wrong in the Beirut affair. But De Gaulle was not a man of the world, he was a fanatic, and he was not big, in the sense of being generous, he was only exalted, he might in fact almost be called petty---his resentment, for instance, of the work done by the Spears Mission in Syria. Well, I would have to learn as usual from Margot's indiscretions where the wind lay.
A car whirled me from the airfield up to Duff's house above the great cold glittering town. It was lunchtime. Diana in trousers (no stockings, she explained) with a colored handkerchief round her fair lovely hair greeted me with the words: "We've a lunch party of the right, May, today," and I found myself shaking hands with General Giraud and our old friend General Georges. 'There were two princesses as well, I remember, very frail, distinguished and fin de siècle, who fell on the large slabs of good English roast beef supplied by the British Navy, like famished wolves, but it was Giraud who interested me, and Georges, especially Georges. Giraud was interesting because he was blank. It is the only word I can use. Looking at him, talking to him, waiting for some small psychic wave from his personality, one drew blank. But Georges filled me with a welter of confused emotions. He was so glad to see me, so warm in his greeting, so eager to have news of my general and to talk with me alone. Could he come? Would I be at home next day, give him half an hour? I said yes, I would be delighted to see him and then I asked myself what I meant by it? Here was a man who had remained on in France under Pétain, he had been commander in chief of an army that had broken and fled, then laid down its arms. He recalled the harrowing scenes of the retreat, the flood of refugees pouring down the roads of France, the headlong senseless onrush of drunken soldiery. I looked into his square, sturdy, aging face and could feel no resentment, nothing but pity and regret.
He had difficulty next day in getting to see me. He was living in Algiers as a guest of General Giraud. He rang me up in despair. He had no car, no office, no one had given him my message fixing a time. He never received his messages. If he could find a car he would be with me in half an hour. He managed it in the end. He got to me somehow and talked to me with vehemence but in vague terms of the pass things had come to. I didn't understand all he said. I could only listen and feel sorry. I tried to remember how he happened to be in Algiers. Had it been Winston? Winston had met him through B. in the last war and had admired him and become a friend. One thing was plain---Georges was unhappy, he was finished and he knew it. I saw it in his ravaged face and tragic eyes. He might be against De Gaulle, he had never been against Great Britain and he could not have made friends with her enemies or come personally to terms with them; of that I was certain. That then would be the test---if I ever returned to France and met our old friends.
Duff said, when I gave him my painful impression of the interview, that Georges might well be unhappy. He had been rash enough to distribute anti-Gaullist leaflets among the troops. It was a wonder that De Gaulle hadn't had him locked up.
I had a sense, as he spoke, of a formidable being, towering unseen in the background and mysteriously dominating the great North African city that was a part of metropolitan France; De Gaulle, a specter, the ghost of France, waiting to return, determined to return.
I didn't see him. He was ill, Duff said, and had gone away. I drove up to the white villa where he lived high on the mountain and left cards on his wife, more relieved than otherwise to find her out. Nor did I see General de Lattre. He too, Eve Curie told me, was ill in bed with flu. She came in to Diana's at cocktail time, very smart in uniform. She was on De Lattre's staff, and seemed friendly. And Madame de Larminat was just as she had been, gay, charmingly inconsequent and abrupt. And I sought out General Guérriac, the médecin inspecteur who had been in Beirut in the old days, and discussed the future of the unit and was taken next door to see Koenig, who greeted me with his special mixture of cordial friendliness and teasing mockery---and no one mentioned the affairs of the Levant until we dined with the Catroux'.
They lived almost next door to the Duff Coopers and Diana had taken a great fancy to Margot. She was, Diana said, the one live wire among the French women in Algiers and she particularly wanted me to meet Madame Bénèt, for General Bénèt was going to Beirut. He had been summoned from Washington and was to take Helleu's place.
Madame Catroux hurried forward across her lamplit drawing room as we came in. She called me Mary and kissed me, I think, and took me, I know, by the hand and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Tell me, ma chère. Helleu was beneath contempt, wasn't he? I must talk to you alone. Georges has told me what a dreadful time you all had, but I want to hear more." I had my cue.
Madame Catroux's house was luxurious and beautifully warm. Diana's was icy. Her dinner was elaborate and was served by the Annamite boys I had first seen in Damascus. I don't remember the Siamese cats who bad traveled with her from Indo-China but I am sure they were there. General Catroux was only a little less weary and his gaze a little less mournful than when we last met. He asked after my general and said he hoped we would like General Bénèt. His manner was easy and friendly. He turned to Diana and left me to General Vanier. I was delighted to see him again. He was Canadian diplomatic representative, it seemed, to the National Committee. I had last seen him on board the "Galatea" in St.-Jean-de-Luz Harbor. He had gone to England with our Ambassador on the cruiser when we were transshipped to the "Etric." He was a friend of General Réquin's. We recalled those far-off days. Had he any news of Réquin? Yes, Réquin had retired, was living in Paris. How, I wondered, did one get news from Paris? I had thought France was cut off. But the princesses who had been at lunch at Diana's were going back, they had said, at the end of the winter. They appeared to travel back and forth quite easily. It was all very confusing.
I sat on a couch for a time after dinner with Madame Bénèt. She seemed very pleasant. Then Madame Catroux took me off into a corner. "Now tell me, Mary," she said, "all about that wretched Helleu." But it was she who told me, and by the time she had finished, I knew the form. The blame for all the trouble in Beirut was to be put on Helleu. He had committed a gaffe and was the scapegoat. The affair hadn't been serious, not at all. What had happened had been luckily of no great consequence, but Algiers was ashamed of the poor show their people had made in the Levant. I would find General and Madame Bénèt most agreeable, very different from the Helleus; and Algiers, that is to say the governor of Algiers, wished to remove from my mind any disagreeable impression that I might have received from men like Helleu or Boegner. It was all very interesting and Helleu's subsequent fate is interesting for he is not after all among the unemployed. It didn't seem wise apparently to dismiss him. There was that telegram; it was not, perhaps, the only paper in his possession that would throw light on the ill-fated action he had taken in Beirut. Second thoughts in high French quarters suggested that it would be best to insure his silence, so he was appointed after all to another post. But neither Madame Catroux nor I would have believed this possible at the time.
I saw Brigadier Loomis of the United States Army in charge of supplies, promised to send Diana a hot-water bottle from Cairo and flew back to Hamamet in a snowstorm, intrigued, relieved and amused by the friendliness I had found in Algiers.
If I had had any doubts as to what I should do about the unit, they were dispelled when I got back to Hamamet. Jean came to me, then Jocelyn, then Edith and Biddy and Rachel. It made such a difference, they said, to have me there. No one else could speak with the same authority. 'Then Michael came and begged me to reason with the colonel. He couldn't possibly undertake the work of a four-hundred-bed hospital.
"But it won't be that, Michael. 'The colonel has promised. We've compromised on two hundred."
"I'm afraid he'll change his mind once you've gone."
It seemed evident that I still had a function to perform in the unit. I thrashed it all out again with the colonel at Carthage. We had a picnic at Carthage and discussed the future looking out across the ruins of the amphitheater and the Bay of Tunis to the distant mountains.
I didn't mention Thibaut's visit but I told him that Jean and Michael were both very worried. The worst of it was that Beirut was a long way off, and they would be putting an even greater distance between us when they crossed to Italy. I must be away I explained for some time but I would not fail to join him in Italy. I begged him meanwhile not to go beyond our agreed number of two hundred beds and he promised. Then I asked him bluntly what the feeling was among our own officers about the trouble in Beirut.
He dismissed the whole affair with a shrug of his shoulders. "Politics," he said with a snort. "We've nothing to do with politics. What matters to us is the war!"
"A pity," I said, "that your people in the Levant don't feel as you do."
He looked at me a moment in silence, his boyish eyes clouded, then dismissed the Levant with another shrug.
"We are going to miss you," they said, when it came to saying good-by, "and you are going to miss the best part of the war."
It was the middle of June before I reached Italy. I came down on the airdrome outside Naples a week after D-Day. General Eisenhower with Montgomery in command of the XXIst Army Group had landed in Normandy, while in Italy Rome had been occupied and the Vth American and VIIIth British armies under General Alexander with the French between them had pushed on to the north and were nearing Siena.
The unit had crossed from Bizerta early in May and had done their best job of the war. They had followed so close on the heels of the division that at St. Georgio even the colonel had felt it was rash. I had missed it all as they had foreseen. I didn't know where they were when I took off from Cairo. Keith Park, Air Marshal, Middle East, had said: "I can land you in Naples, but after that I can't help you and as there are four airdromes I don't see how your people can meet you. If there is no one you had better go to Caserta and as for---"
I had sent a wire to the colonel and another to Morse who was I knew in Naples, but it seemed unlikely that my messages would be received in time. All the way, huddled on my bench in the Dakota, I kept saying to myself, "Either I shall be stranded on the airdrome and not know what to do, or T. W. by some miracle will be there to meet me as she has been a hundred times." And then we came down (it was half-past four), and as I stepped from the plane an American officer came forward and said, "Are you Lady Spears?" And when I said yes, he said, "Your car, Lady Spears, has just arrived." And there T. W. was, with "Marguerite," the old Chevrolet. The colonel had had my telegram at midnight, she had motored two hundred and fifty miles since breakfast against interminable convoys, and had made it in time.
"But how did you know which airfield to come to? Keith Park said."
Her eyebrow expressed a certain scorn for the delightful air marshal. There was only one airfield for transport planes---everyone knew that---and there were only two roads up the backbone of Italy. She proposed to take me up Route 6 via Cassino. I'd better see Cassino. But she'd rather not start back till morning, if I didn't mind, Marguerite needed a bit of attention. Anthony Morse was sure to put us up for the night.
Did she know where to find him?
Of course. The eyebrow again. He was staff officer, western approaches. He would be at Navy House on the harbor. He lived in a palace farther out along the shore, but he would be in his office. I relaxed; it was evident that the Spirettes knew their way about Italy.
It would be nice to linger with Anthony Morse on his terrace looking over the Bay of Naples and watch the ships coming in with supplies for the armies that were steadily, surely pushing Kesselring back toward the Brenner. Morse is so vital, so invigorating, his eyes are so blue, he gave us such a warm affectionate welcome.
"Hello. How's the general? Let's go home. Master is coming for drinks. Do you see that?"---pointing to the crowded harbor. "That from the point of view of tonnage is the biggest harbor now in the world---bigger than New York."
"Master" was Admiral Cunningham, C. in C. Mediterranean. He had commanded the expedition to Dakar, he was a friend of B.'s and admired De Gaulle. "De Gaulle showed himself a great man at Dakar," the admiral said, "in the way he took disappointment."
But I must push on up Route 6 through tragic Cassino, eloquent as Tobruk Harbor, and the other ravaged towns where the battle had passed, to our camp on Lake Bolsena with the tents by the shore full of wounded and nurses and drivers splashing gaily about through the mud in rubber boots, and the colonel bursting with pride. They had been in a bad way in Hamamet but the Italian campaign had put them right. It had been tough, it had been arduous in the extreme, it had been dangerous, and very exciting; they had moved camp eight times in a month, every three days they had cleared out their patients, taken down their tents and moved forward to put them up and fill them again with new casualties. It had meant great effort, little or no sleep, a complete lack of comfort, and splendid teamwork; it was what they liked best and they were at the top of their form.
At St. Georgio they had been shelled. The colonel confessed rather shamefacedly that they were only three miles from the German lines and in an exposed position---so naturally the enemy had sent over some shells. There had been great excitement it seemed in the operating room for Thibaut had been in the middle of a big abdominal operation when the lights went out and Vernier had rushed in shouting, "Everyone on the floor." So Thibaut had had to finish his abdominal on the ground with the help of a hurricane lamp. "But it was all right," Jean said, in her sweet laughing way. "Biddy nearly stepped on the poor man's intestines, they were spread out on the floor, but he got on very well and was evacuated to Naples a fortnight ago. Come look at the holes in the tents." They were very proud of the rents in the canvas. No one had been wounded except Pat Aitken and his was, Rachel said with a snort, only a scratch, but Hajali the cook declared he had had a saucepan knocked out of his hand by a piece of shrapnel.
I spent a wonderful month with the unit in Italy. It took days to hear all their news. There had been two weddings. Biddy had married Major Rivers-Bulkley of the Scots Guards at brigade headquarters near Cassino the day they landed at Naples. Pamela Houghton had married Arnold Spiers, one of the F.A.U. boys. Biddy had spent her wedding night with her major at the transit hotels in Naples then had taken her place in the hospital convoy.
Pam and Arnold were spending their honeymoon between the surgical wards, the operating room and their own small tent in the compound.
The colonel said, "By the end of the sixth year of the war the problem of married quarters in this unit will have become insoluble."
What did I think: of Jean's face? Pat asked. It was all the colonel's doing. He had driven his jeep over the edge crossing a bridge on the road to Rome, the jeep was wrecked and Jean's funny nose badly skinned. Jean laughed, and went striding away through the mud in her rubber boots. A disreputable figure in her muddy trousers. What did she care, they all were disreputable when it rained, and it rained very hard. The camp for several days was a sea of mud. No one seemed to mind.
"I would rather like," I said, "to go to Rome."
"Come with me," Rachel cried. "Let me take you, Lady Spears. I know where you can buy silk stockings and powder puffs and scent, real French scent."
"And gloves," Jocelyn put in, "quite cheap, and the most heavenly lingerie."
The ambulances meanwhile were rolling in at the gate, and the hospital beds were full. 'The legion took Radio Cafani a few days after my arrival and the wounded were in such high spirits that there was no keeping them in their beds. It was Almost like Bir Hakim. Our three young captains, Thibaut, Cupigny and Guénan, were doing fine work and fat Dr. Albert was getting all the penicillin he wanted from the Americans; even Hawkins was radiant. She came to me one evening and said, "I want to tell you that I was quite wrong about Jean and about everything. I've never been so happy in my life."
It was very exhilarating. To be with the troops again was enough in itself, but to be this time with French troops who were approaching France was wonderful.
Madame Catroux, the colonel told us, was up in the mountains with her mobile unit. Fruchaud? No. Fruchaud had gone back to Syria. She had a new médecin chef and followed the Germans so closely that it was said she could be heard scolding them, night and day.
Could I go up to see her?
But certainly.
So T. W. and I chased Madame Catroux through the Piedmont hills and found her at last perched on top of a mountain within call , almost, of the enemy lines. The Germans had left that particular mountaintop that morning, she told us, she was just moving in. "Come," she said, "to my caravan and see how I live."
She was haggard and happy. 'The caravan was charming inside. The bed had a gay coverlet, there was a cupboard of pretty tea things. We sat and drank grapefruit juice looking out over the densely wooded Italian hills, then left her to put up her hospital beds in the abandoned schoolhouse near by. An intrepid woman. Where, I wondered, would I find her next time?
General Brosset came to lunch a day or two later, bringing the Comtesse de Luart. She too, it appeared, had a mobile unit in Italy and wanted to talk to me about the question of changing the names of our units. Madame Catroux's, mine and hers, were now called H.C.M. 1, 2 and 3. Mine, the Hadfield-Spears Unit, was H.C.M. 3. It had been done in Algiers. The excuse was, that the Americans refused to equip voluntary units. She was going to protest to General Juin and wanted me to do the same. Why should our units lose their identity? I agreed with every word she said, and looked with envy at the handsome creature's golden hair and nylon stockings, then remembered that she had been in Paris for some time during the occupation ---and afterwards in Algiers.
General Brosset had taken over command of the division and had been a good friend to the unit. It was he, Jocelyn said, who had insisted on bringing it to Italy. He ordered the Spirettes down to the shore of the lake after lunch to watch him swim. He was a magnificent swimmer and we watched him plunging through the waves with obedient admiration, then all clustered round him and were photographed. I never saw him again. He was doing his best all through the Italian campaign to be killed. I remember his gaiety that day at Bolsena, remember his shouting, "Where are the Spirettes? Jocelyn, Rachel, Biddy, T. W., where are you? Come down to the lake and see me swim." It is horrid to think that he was drowned in his jeep six months later.
There was less talk among our friends, I noticed, about the Moustachios. The 1st Free French Division still considered itself a cut above the others but it was clear to everyone that General Juin had done what Giraud had failed to do and that the North African divisions and the Free French divisions had been made into a single magnificent fighting force. Juin gave me lunch at his headquarters and wasted no time over the name of my unit. A very direct rugged little man with a piercing eye, he said I was perfectly right. My unit must keep its name and identity. I said that for the sake of convenience in drawing hospital supplies, I would be quite content to call the hospital H.C.M. 3 with "Ambulance Hadfield-Spears" in brackets, and he authorized me to do this. He then made a point of coming back with me after lunch to the hospital, to thank me formally in the presence of the patients for the services that the unit had rendered.
I liked General Juin. He was the type to inspire confidence. T. W., Rachel and I spent a night at VIIIth Army with General Oliver Leese in his camp overlooking Lake Trasimeno. He had nothing but praise for General Juin and his army. His two A.D.C.'s, Ian Calvacaressi and David Butters, had arranged the visit. They had come out with us in the "Otranto." How long it seemed ---well, it was three years and a bit since we had set sail from Glasgow. We spoke of it, sitting on the steps of my caravan high among the hills. "'This is our special V.I.P.E.R.S. caravan," Ian said. "General Smuts slept here last night," but I was thinking of my band of steady British girls and of the long way they had come.
Orders came to break camp at the end of June and move south to prepare once more to go overseas. It could only mean France. When? How soon? Where would we land? Were we going all the way round to Normandy or was it true that General de Lattre was commanding an all-French expedition and would make a landing on the south coast?
Wild rumors ran through the camp. Each one had heard something. No one knew anything. We moved south in convoy with the division and traveling by night went into camp at Albanova, twenty miles north of Naples.
It was a pleasant camp. Our tents were set among tall lime trees. The corn in the fields had been gathered into golden sheaves. 'The girls brought baskets of ripe peaches each morning from a neighboring farm. The nights were soft and warm. I would lie awake with my tent flap wide open watching the moonlight drift through the treetops.
"You will stay and go with us to France. Stay! You must stay."
But I couldn't stay. B.'s time in Syria was growing short. Questions were being asked in Parliament about absent M.P.'s. He would have to go home soon now if he wanted to keep his seat in the House of Commons. I must go back to Beirut.
It was hard. I had come to know Biddy and Rachel and Iris as I had once got to know Dorea and Barbara and Rosie and Cynthia. T. W. was the only one left of the original drivers, Jean and Evelyn were the only two nurses who had been with me in France in '39, but the group, by some strange alchemy, was the same. The spirit of the Hadfield-Spears Unit, that special mixture of gallant toughness and ribald mirth and quarrelsome loyalty and high undaunted purpose was still going on and would prevail, I knew, to the end.
"I'll see you in France," I said, as I climbed once again into my plane.