Mary Borden JOURNEY DOWN A BLIND ALLEY

TO REJOIN the unit in France was a rash thing to do. I should have known this, I had been warned. There was much I didn't know; but had I put the facts I knew together and considered them, they would have made a strong case against my going.

De Gaulle was in Paris, that alone should have been enough to warn me. He was head of a provisional government that had been recognized by the Allies in October. We had reached home, B. and I, for Xmas, I left for Paris three weeks later en route for Alsace and the unit. We had not thought about De Gaulle. We had not seen him since his visit to Beirut in '42. Why should I have been apprehensive? Why expect him to vent his spleen against my husband on the unit? I still believed him to be, if not a great man, a proud Frenchman and a patriot.

We reached Paris in a snowstorm. Dorea was with me, I had found her just as I had left her. "Hello, May." In a big hearty robust second the four years had whisked themselves away. And T. W. was at the Gare St. Lazare to meet us with one of our ancient Fords, and Rosie had come back, she was waiting at our transit hotel. She was limping down the stair as we came stamping in with snowy boots. A slight contretemps with a brick wall had caused the limp and wrecked her car. "May?" I had heard that high sweet voice in sandstorms, in camps like frying pans, in traffic jams of terror-stricken refugees. I shivered as I peeled off overcoat and woolly, but not with cold.

We spent only one night in Paris. I didn't want to stay, had already been away from the unit, I told myself, far too long. So when T. W. asked me, I said no, we would push on next day in spite of the weather and the roads. Both, she said, were bad. It had been snowing for several days. I was glad. I remember thinking "Let it snow, let Paris be shrouded in a white whirling mist, the storm will give me time." For what? Why, to pull myself together and quiet my agitated mind.

Certainly I was nervous. But it was not the presence of De Gaulle that made me so. There were many things to make me tremble with surprise, anticipation, memories of '39; and others that went further back. The house in the faubourg that had been so full of color and music and laughter, old friends who had once climbed those stairs. Some were ghosts now---and the others? I remember staring at the telephone as if it were a hand grenade. There was a woman. Was she there beyond the whirling screen of snow in the room I knew so well? I had loved her. She had had a proud fearless mind and we had had in common a great zest for life, had respected each other's passionate prejudices, had never lied to one another. I remembered her telephone number. Should I lift the receiver? And if I did, if she answered, what could I say, how could I ask what I longed to know? I could say, "This is May," and then, "How are you?" But I couldn't ask, "What have you been doing with yourself all this time? For the trite question had taken on suddenly a portentous meaning, and yet I must know, and was afraid of knowing. What should I do? I edged away from the telephone and turned to the girls. I would postpone that terrifying meeting.

"Where exactly is the unit?"

"In a village called Hohwald in the foothills of the Vosges, twenty miles from Strasbourg."

"Can we make it in a day?"

"Not in this weather. We'll have to sleep in Nancy."

"Well, we've slept in Nancy before." Dorea laughed, she too was excited. "I had a fine feather bed in someone's house. It's five years less a month since we left for St. Jean le Bassel. Can we go back, boss, and see the nuns?"

"Certainly, we must."

"And visit my landlady and Madame Nicolai and old Klein the baker? Do you remember St. Chéron and the bungalow with the handsome brass candlesticks? 'That was when I had to fetch the rations from Vitry in the middle of the night."

"Then we went on to Rosnay. Do you remember Rosnay? And the Constant Nymph family at Torteron. I wonder what has become of them, and the old man and two small boys with rook rifles who were defending France on the plain of Auvergne, and Mademoiselle de Choiseul who was waiting for the état-major that never came."

Yes, I remembered. I remembered as I had never remembered anything before in all my life. I could almost have traced each bend in the long road. Guigny and Amance and the Château of Ancy-le-Franc where I had interrupted General Huntzinger; La Palisse where I had last seen General Réquin, the good brothers at Gannat who had taken us in and Mademoiselle Radenac on her meager knees praying to God. Had He saved her? Suddenly I recalled that we had never said good-by to her. She hadn't been there when we left Noailles that night to make our final dash for Bordeaux. The officers only had waited up to say good-by. Gosset and Guénin and Bernard, what had become of them? And the hundreds of wounded we had left on their stretchers on the ground at Châlons? That was most dreadfully vivid of all, a silent field of the dead and the dying. What had become of those who had lived? Where were they? What had happened to them after we had gone? What had happened to everyone? Réquin, Gosset, Captain Lecomte? What, in a word, had become of France? Could I bear to find out?

There was one place where I could go without fear or apprehension, my mind flew to it. A small old chateau by a placid river. It was in the wine country. It held half my husband's childhood. The river was full of fish, the hills rising sharply on the far side were thickly wooded. There was an ancient tower in the garden fitted up as a carpenter shop where an old gentleman in a corduroy jacket had taught small boys to make all manner of useful things. He was dead now. But he had made me feel long ago that B. and I had a home in France, and his son would welcome me, I knew, as of old.

No, it wasn't the thought of General de Gaulle that troubled me when I went back to Paris. It was the past, it was my life, the part of me that I had left in France, and the monstrous war that had come in between me and that other self.

To revisit places and people one has loved after a long absence is like the finding of buried treasure even in a world at peace, but when all the stable world had seemed to be clattering into chaos, then the excitement of rediscovering old familiar things takes on the color of high adventure. But always, even if time alone has been the menace, with the excitement is mingled fear. Will the place be changed? Will the once delightful person be disappointing? How much greater the danger when an evil thing like war has divided their world from yours. I had longed to go back to France but with dread, knowing that it would not be the same.

It is important to make this clear. I did not worry unduly about the head of the French government or the fiasco his representatives had made of their affairs in the Levant, because I was obsessed by the fear of what four years of German occupation had done to France. De Gaulle himself had told me that if the war lasted too long France would be soiled. When I thought of him, I wondered what he felt about it now that he had returned. He had set himself not to restore France to her former grandeur, but to rebuild her on new foundations more solid than those that had crumbled. Her loss of face in the Middle East seemed relatively of no importance. In any case my life there was a separate thing and finished. If I was willing to forget the stings of his little jealous servants, surely he was, and if in spite of his immense, preoccupation he still nursed a grudge against his former friend, well, I need not see him. I had not come to France to ask him for a favor but to discharge a duty undertaken four years ago when his troops were homeless exiles without equipment. That he should object to my continuing the work I had begun did not seem possible.

All this was foolish and mistaken. I should have known better than to have thought that in Alsace with the 1st Free French Division could escape De Gaulle's resentment and ignore him. France and the Levant were not separate, De Gaulle had forgotten nothing. The division I had followed round the world had a spirit all its own, but it was a part now of an army that had laid down its arms in 1940.

I had had a letter in Beirut from Colonel Vernier with enclosures that should have warned me. He had written in distress to inform me that orders had been received to efface the name of Spears from the hospital. He had protested to General Brosset against the monstrous gesture and sent me copies of the correspondence.

The colonel's letter to General Brosset said, "I have the honor to inform you of a profound uneasiness which affects considerably the work of my unit and is the result of the openly hostile attitude adopted officially by the high command toward the founder of the hospital. I say officially because I have received an order from the Service de Santé of the army, requesting me to make disappear the mention of the name Spears from the records and emblems of the unit. The name had already been written in very small letters under the title H.C.M. 3 and this had been done to remind the true combatants of the 1st F.F. Division that the old 'Spears' had become H.C.M. 3 rather than to remind the Ministers on their tours of inspection of a name disagreeable to themselves.

"In the contract signed by General de Gaulle with Lady Spears the 22nd of February, 1941, in London, it is specified that in recognition of the organizers of the unit, the ambulance should bear the name, 'Ambulance Hadfield-Spears.' It is under this name that it has followed the division in good days and bad, in the different deserts where it has been at war and has suffered losses. Certain of our finest comrades have come to us to die saying to the drivers of their ambulances, 'Carry us to Spears,' putting rightly or wrongly their last hope in this name and in what it represented for them."

And General Brosset had promised to take the matter up with the army and had authorized Colonel Vernier to ignore the order in the meantime.

"It would be difficult," Brosset had written, "to make headquarters share my feelings, considering the personalities who have been recently mixed up with the life of our group or who have lately been put in contact with it. It would be and will be more difficult to make us forget that Spears signifies for us the familiar and much loved house to which we are so profoundly attached that if one day we must make the supreme sacrifice we can ask nothing better than to fulfill it at "Spears" nursed by our Quakers and helped by our dear nurses."

But now Brosset was dead, and the question of the name of the unit was in suspense. It was a matter to be dealt with. I had consulted my husband in Beirut, and on my return to London Dorea and Leslie Benson, who represented the British War Relief Committee in America. They had all agreed that action must be taken and I had decided after much painful thought to deal with the question myself. In doing so I had fastened for comfort on Brosset's hint that the order had emanated from new elements in the high command. Our division was clearly no party to the insult, and I did not believe that De Gaulle knew of it. If the division stood by me, I believed that all would yet be well.

I had had other more cheerful news from the hospital since their landing in the south of France. A small party had gone on ahead with the French commander and had landed on a beach near a village called Le Canadel in the Bay of St. Maxime on August 14, D-1 Day; the main body of the unit had disembarked at Fréjus on the thirtieth. The party with the commander had consisted of the colonel, Dr. Jibery, Rachel Howell-Evans, Joan Pryke, our French sergeant Nocitto and four of the F.A.U. boys, and Rachel had written me the following letter.

Dear Lady Spears,

I wish you had been with us on our adventure with the Commandos.

You would have enjoyed it. We were fetched by one of their officers on the 9th of August and stayed with them until the 11th in a small village near Salerno, when we were embarked on a naval ship called the "Prince David." 'The ship was one of three lying some way out to sea and we were taken to her in the landing craft which later landed us on the French coast. Two pulleys whisked us up and swung us on board the ship, complete in one little boat. The sailors were surprised to see Joan and me as no women were expected, and two officers had to turn out of their comfortable cabins for us, but they were very nice about it.

We were landed the following day on a wild, deserted part of Corsica and remained there until the morning of the 14th. While the Commandos did their final exercises, we bathed and lay on the beach watching the ever growing fleet of ships. By the 14th when we embarked again our three ships had grown to an Armada; every size and shape of ship from battleships to motor torpedo boats, invasion craft and aircraft carriers. We sailed along together for some hours, then various contingents broke off one by one until we were left with our original three ships and an escort of destroyers.

We were then given our final orders, the engines of the landing craft carrier ceased ticking over and the ships lay almost motionless. At 9:30 P.M. "Action Stations" was sounded, all the lights of the ship went out and the crew went to their various posts, even the padré and cook had some special role. I wrote down our final orders.

"Attention! attention! les Commandos Français se rassembleront dans une demi-heure sur le pont près de leurs embarcations. Terminé, terminé, terminé." It sounded very impressive.

We watched the first lot of Commandos get into their landing craft, all picked men with specific jobs, some went right inland to contact the Maquis, others were to climb Cap Negré to silence the shore batteries, others had to wait on the beaches to guide the rest of us in.

We began now to get ready ourselves. I discovered that someone had taken my tin hat and another had to be fetched for me from store. I was certain this was a bad omen as I had had that particular tin hat with me everywhere. At midnight we got into our boat. Silently and without hurry we sorted ourselves out. I managed to get myself up on the side of the boat, then when everyone was on board plus a jeep and our four panniers of medical equipment we were lowered noiselessly into the sea, the boat's engine began ticking over and we drifted, waiting for the other three landing craft and the motor torpedo boat that was to pilot us in.

After a ten-minute wait that seemed endless we started off. A pitch-black night, no moon or stars and no sound save the pop-popping of the engine and the lapping of the water against the boat's sides. This was the part that impressed me most. We were not allowed to smoke or talk or move and it took us two hours to reach the beach. Plenty of time to think. Later there wasn't time to get excited or frightened. For what seemed ages we chuffed along in the utter blackness, seeing and hearing nothing, then at last, to the left came the faint muffled sound of guns getting more distinct every minute, and out of the darkness ahead we began to see sparks which grew into gun flashes, Very lights, rockets and flares and slowly the outline of the coast of France came into view.

A landing craft drifted past silently, empty except for the crew. We didn't dare call to them and ask how things were going. Half a mile offshore after waiting for a while we took leave of the other L.C.'s and the M.T.B. and made our way alone toward the beach. We felt the boat ground, the drawbridge was lowered and we walked onto the shore of France.

We had been told that we would find a path following the steps up from the beach and that this would lead us to a railway line, that we should turn left along this and that 500 yards on we would come to a tunnel where we were to spend the rest of the night, using it as a first-aid post. So we left David Rowlands and Nocitto to guard the panniers and went up the path, we had to cut some barbed wire to get through. We found the railway and followed it as ordered but there was no tunnel.

There was a small house with a light showing so we went up to it to ask how far the tunnel was. The people were overjoyed to see us and gave us wine and grapes but we had hardly taken our packs off our backs when a Commando came running up to say we'd been landed on the wrong beach and must come back at once to be re-embarked. So with much grumbling we started off again down the railway track. Mortar fire and various other noises had begun by now, and were increasing. We hadn't got very far when we met the colonel, who had gone to investigate. He told us the mortar fire had got too accurate for the boat, it couldn't wait for us, and it had pushed off; and there were a considerable number of Germans between us and our objective, the tunnel.

As it was five miles to the tunnel, he said we must take to the hills and try to reach the Commandos by a roundabout way. The old man in the house gave us our bearings and we set off, single file rather like "Grandmother's steps" cursing if anyone kicked a stone or made any noise. We couldn't see anything in the dark. The colonel was in the lead, his revolver ready cocked and he held us up once for quite five minutes while he crept round and challenged a deserted horse and cart. A bit further along we thought we heard guttural voices coming from the other side of a hedge so we all crept forward on our hands and knees making much more noise than on our two feet. Eventually we reached the track over the hills the old man had described but it was very steep and rough going, we kept falling into holes and bumping into trees and getting ourselves and our packs tied up in prickly bushes for it was still pitch-dark. We got so puffed that when we heard someone coming and tried to give the correct Commando whistle we could let out nothing but a series of squeaks, so in desperation we shouted "Français," but there was no reply, so we lay a little flatter on the ground and the footsteps went away. All this time there was a fair amount of shell and rifle fire and every now and then the hills would be lit up by Very lights and flares.

We reached the top at daybreak and decided to have an hour's rest, but had hardly settled down when we were rudely awakened by American bombers who seemed to come over in hordes at five-minute intervals and make straight for us, diving singly with their machine guns spitting and each dropping two bombs at the end of the dive. The colonel kept saying, "Keep down, don't move, they've seen us and mistaken us for Germans." By the time it was over we were covered in bits of trees, earth and shrapnel and were completely black but no one was even slightly wounded.

Two Commando scouts who'd been sent out to find us came along soon after this, so off we went again, reaching Commando H.Q. at 9:30 where we watched a dog fight overhead and ate a few biscuits. The colonel of the Commandos told us there was a suitable house for a dressing station two kilos further on, so off we set again, this time down hill and even worse going. We got so tangled in the undergrowth that it took us three hours to get through and when the R.A.F. came along dropping rations by parachute we were too embedded in the wood to get any. And then at last, after walking another five kilos we found ourselves back in the village where we had landed, "Le Canadel," by now cleared of Germans, and there on the beach were Nocitto and David Rowlands. They had been badly bombed and shelled but had managed to set up a first-aid post on the beach, then when it got noisy had moved to a hut on the railway.

Quite a lot of military and civilian wounded had collected by this time, so we hurriedly chose a suitable house in the village and while the colonel went off to do an urgent amputation Joan and I got it ready, moving furniture out of the way and sweeping up broken glass with wounded arriving all the time. The colonel operated most of the night. The Commandos sent us down rations next day and German medical supplies and some German prisoners to act as orderlies and six horses and three carts which we used for fetching supplies and evacuating light cases. We heard tanks rumbling past the following night and realized that the Americans had arrived, and the following day our division began to disembark near St. Raphael. We stayed three days in Le Canadel then moved on by horse cart to Le Lavandou where we had the wounded from the division to look after as well as the Commandos. As there was some hitch over the arrival of the A.C.L. we had a lot of work. We admitted 112 wounded in one night, making 200 with those we already had.

We kept on with the shock troops of the division as far as Lyons moving nearly every day to keep up with the advance and there the rest of the unit joined us and we went back to normal again.

The colonel too had written me in high feather. He had been very proud of the fact that when General Brosset landed with the division, "Spears was already there," but the three captains, Thibaut, Cupigny, and Guénan, who had been left behind, had been so angry that they had all resigned in a body. Thibaut it transpired had come back later but things hadn't been the same since in the unit. Jealousy, Jean had said when she wrote to me. They couldn't forgive the colonel for slipping off in the middle of the night without telling anyone. How could he when he was sworn to secrecy? She didn't blame him, but she wasn't at all happy about the unit. She enclosed a statement of their itinerary since landing.

I went over it with T. W. that night in Paris. She got her map from her haversack and we followed the unit's trail.

"Here we are. 'Fréjus. We landed on August 30th. September 3rd Aix-en-Provence. One night at Aix--- 4th Vals, 6th Lyons. Fine reception at Lyons. All the town flagged. 10th Dax. 12th Dijon. The division was moving up to Belfort so we turned east at Dijon and reached Villa Sexel on the 16th. Up to that point all the people had been very friendly. At Villa Sexel they were quite different. No more cheers, no one would help us. An awful place. We stayed two months then were ordered back across France to Saintes, near Cognac. A three-day convoy. De Larminat was going to attack the Germans on the Gironde. The roads were awful, half the trucks were bogged or broken down. We'd no sooner got there than the fuss started on the Rhine, so back we went again, this time to Hohwald where we are now. What time will you start in the morning?"

"As early as you like."

"Nine o'clock."

"Right." She gave a pull to her tunic, said good night and stumped away.

Hohwald was deep in snow. It looked enchanting in the morning sun. Rosy-cheeked children were out with their sleds. A typical Alsatian village on a Christmas card.

It had been dark when we arrived, only chinks of light showing under the deep eaves of the gabled houses along the narrow winding street. There had been a sheen of starlight and the sound of wind in the branches of a thousand pines, the mountains had been only dimly visible. But we had been too tired and cold to feel the charm of the shrouded valley.

We had been battling our way through a blizzard for two days, sharing the storm the first day with the American Army. A disappointing drive. I had seen nothing of the old road to Nancy, and we had found the Americans in possession of the town. The Hotel Thiers wouldn't take us in. It had been very different from that other winter night five years before when Captain Lecomte had come to meet us. The only accommodation available to us as members of the French forces was in a third-rate commercial hotel that had known no heating since the beginning of the war. We had spent a dreadful night. A slattern in a black shawl with swollen hands had consented in return for a tin of Nescafé to let us make some for ourselves in the morning on her oil stove, but it wasn't until we reached Sarrebourg that we got warm. There, in our old haunt, the Hotel Bourg, we were lucky for we had reached the sector of General Leclerc's division, and the French officers who had their mess in the hotel had been charming. They had been stationed, they told us, in Yorkshire and could not say enough about the kindness of the Yorkshire people. Their colonel, moreover, had given me news of Lecomte, he was now a major in General Leclerc's staff and stationed not far from Hohwald. I could easily go and see him.

The hospital occupied most of the village, and it had grown to four times its original size, was full of strange officers and nurses, and though working hard with its four hundred beds full of wounded was in a state of confused unrest.

The operating rooms, principal surgical wards and offices were in the Grand Hotel, there was an annexe for the medical cases in a smaller hotel that had been the former home of the local Gauleiter, the personnel féminin was quartered all over the place. Rooms had been prepared for Dorea and me at Madame Eboué's Pension de Famille, because they were warm and under the same roof as the mess. T. W. and Rosie, Rachel, Jocelyn and Iris were on our floor, most of the English nurses were just below us, but Jean had a room with Pat in the Grand Hotel, the three French girls of the Blood Transfusion Unit were billeted in the village and four French Red Cross nurses were living in the annexe. The colonel had a room in a house at the foot of the path that led steeply up to the pension. He seemed delighted to meet Dorea but ill at ease with me.

Looking back I realized now that the confusion and discord in the hospital reflected what was happening throughout France. Was not France herself in the winter of 1945 a medley of discordant elements with her F.F.I. and F.T.P., her heroic resistance and her bogus resistance, her Pétainists and her milice and her armies from overseas who were straining their strength to the utmost limit of endurance so that France should not be said to have been liberated by strangers? And were not those frail armies themselves fretted by discord and obliged to endure an uneasy partnership with the vast legions of America and Great Britain?

The hospital was uneasy as France was uneasy. Every ward now had its F.F.I. orderlies to supplement our British F.A.U. boys, every service was manned in part by new officers, surgeons, medical men, dentists, chemists and clerks who had carried on at home for better or worse during the occupation and had now been enrolled in the division. Who were they? How was I to accommodate myself to these strangers? And the place swarmed with French women most of whom I had never seen before. Certainly the colonel had not kept his promise to limit the hospital to two hundred beds, nor consulted me when he took on new nurses. But how could I blame him? I had been away for six months. When he had applied to Dorea for reinforcements from London the British Ministry of Labour had flatly refused to allow any English nurses to go abroad to foreign units, so he had been obliged to increase his staff as best he could, picking up new orderlies, nurses and officers here and there, in a haphazard fashion as he traveled through France. The four Red Cross girls had joined at Saintes. Someone had collected a strange young woman with wild hair from a farm in the south. Another had been admitted as a patient and was staying on as an unofficial assistant to one of the new surgeons. Frances, the sister in charge of the operating room, was being driven to a frenzy by strange women who kept erupting into her sanctum in the wake of our new officers, gave an anesthetic or two, created minor chaos then disappeared leaving her to clear up the mess.

The British members of the staff, masculine as well as feminine, were submerged in the flood of newcomers and many were incensed at the way the hospital was being run. But Jean was most unhappy of them all. Her professional conscience and her loyalty to me were both outraged. She and the colonel were scarcely on speaking terms and she had made up her mind to leave. She could no longer be responsible, she declared, for the care of the patients. They themselves complained. Several of those in the annexe had asked, "What has happened to Spears? This isn't the way we were looked after when we came in the last time." She had no authority over the French nurses. Anyone the surgeons fancied was allowed to give an anesthetic. It was sheer luck that there had been no fatal accidents and the F.F.I. were awful. Resistance? Their idea of resistance had been to come out of their hiding holes, take pot shots at the Germans when they were in the mood, and loot any house they fancied. There was constant thieving in the wards. 'They took the patients' money from under their pillows when they were asleep. There was no discipline. She had protested to no avail. She had invoked my, name and the high reputation of the hospital in vain. The colonel was sacrificing the good name of the unit. She was very overwrought.

"But Jean, you can't leave me now when the war is nearly at an end." I was consternated. She was very sweet but. determined to go.

The colonel when I spoke of Jean's decision at once became very excited, Jean was quite changed. He had to have nurses. Miss Stanhope could send none. What was he to do? He had given Jean authority over the French girls, she had refused to accept it. Admittedly they were not highly trained, but Jean and Edith could train them if only they would. Now that I had arrived they would all be under my orders, I could send away any I didn't like. But we were in France now and everything was different. He was being inundated with demands from French women with no nursing experience, to be taken on. All the young women in France who had friends or relatives in the division wanted to join the unit. He would be only too glad to hand the matter over to me.

We made a tour of inspection. The large surgical wards were full of wounded, the English sisters were in charge here and I found nothing wrong. Many of the patients knew me. They were old clients of the house and greeted me as a friend. There were gay knitted coverlets on the beds, there was new oilcloth on the dressing tables; all was tidy as of old.

Germaine Sablon was doing the rounds. She was handing out soap, razors, playing cards and cigarettes. If Germaine hasn't figured as yet in this story it is not because she wasn't liked, but because she had seemed to me until now an elusive creature. She was Barbara's discovery. She had come to sing to the patients in Tunisia, and Barbara had taken a great fancy to her, so at Barbara's request I had asked her to join us and take charge of the foyer, and when Barbara had left she had stayed on. I was aware of her warm exuberant charm, I knew that she had worked in the resistance in France and was 100 per cent Free French but I didn't really know her. Now she greeted me with such cordiality that I was drawn to her as never before. A bustling creature with laughing blue eyes, she stands out in my memory from all the other French women who helped us. She was gay, vigorous, slapdash. She would go off to Paris with an empty truck and return loaded with good things for the men. Bottles of wine, tins of sardines, chocolate, cocoa, cigarettes, woolen gloves and scarves, coverlets. Our old blue blankets had disappeared, thank God. The gay coverlets were Germaine's present.

The colonel and I continued our round. The Cabinet Dentaire was on the first floor and the hall was like the waiting room in a railway station. Abouchard, our old dentist, was a friend. He was a Syrian with a French wife. I met his new colleague Prochasson for the first time. He too was to become a friend. Between them they seemed to be fitting out the whole division with new teeth. Up another flight of stairs. Things not so good at the top of the house in the long rows of small rooms. There appeared to be no nurse in charge. The patients lay alone in untidy beds. Dirty dishes stood about; measles in there, query typhoid here, bronchitis next door. A fat young French woman came mincing along. Was she a proper nurse? No, the colonel admitted, she was not. He was vague as to when and where he had found her, she was somebody's sister or cousin.

They had tidied up the annexe for our inspection and the four girls of the French Red Cross were lined up beside Albert and Nocitto. They looked rather frightened. The colonel presented them, another Françoise, then Franchette, then Hélène. I shook hands. These three were to turn out very well. A Christmas card came the other day from Indo-China, signed Françoise and Franchette. But I could not but agree with Jean about the annexe. There were a hundred patients crowded into the small building. One room was filled with two-decker beds, like bunks in a ship. The linen was dingy; there was a bad smell.

Certainly there was much to be done. To get the hospital shipshape would demand patience and a great deal of tact. The personnel féminin must be weeded out, but I must go gently and try to make our own lot understand. There was nothing for it, we were in France and everything was different.

A series of interviews began in my little room, almost all with my own British staff. Difficult interviews. Some were shocked by the flirtations going on, others incensed by the attitude of the new doctors, others by the feeling they had met with in the country. The village had been downright pro-German they said before we came. All complained of Villa Sexel. Several wanted to resign. There was dissension even among the Quakers.

Again and again I explained and appealed to them to see the thing through. We couldn't hope, I said, to go back to the old days when we had been a small compact homogeneous mobile unit. We were in France now and everything was different; the colonel had said it, I said it. It wasn't fair to blame him for enlarging the hospital. The division was heavily engaged. It counted on us. The French Medical Service in France was all in confusion, the local hospitals were without adequate supplies. There were no supplies of any kind in France, save those that came from the Allies, and nothing functioned properly outside the army. Where were these wounded men to go if we didn't take them? We had never yet refused to do what was asked of us. If the division wanted us to supply beds for four hundred men then we must do so, and I must do the best I could about pulling the hospital together. Dorea backed me up. We managed to persuade most of the British unit to stay, but Jean remained adamant.

"But Jean, the war will soon be over. I want the unit to end in style with flags flying."

She was sorry. She must go home.

Part Three. Chapter Twenty-Eight

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