 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
THE colonel had arranged for me to see General Garbet, our divisional commander, concerning the name of the unit and we went together soon after my arrival.
"I can swear to you," the colonel said, "that General Garbet is as angry about this muflerie caddishness as I am."
I had first met Garbet in Suez when we dropped anchor there in '41. His ship had lain alongside the "Otranto." He was a major then and had come up from the south with a shipload of blacks from the Chad. Now he had succeeded Brosset in command of the division. A very different type from Brosset, he was painfully shy and was reputed to be a woman hater. He looked at me very straight out of deep brown serious eyes.
I told him I was greatly disturbed by a feeling of hostility in some quarters against my husband. The change in the name of the hospital was difficult to explain on any other ground. I could not continue to work for the division unless something could be done to remove the impression.
He answered that the hostility I had sensed was not only toward me but toward the whole division; that the War Office, i.e., the Ministère de la Guerre, seemed to want to destroy it, that he would take the matter up with the Minister of War and General Juin. He assured me with great earnestness that no one in his command was capable of feeling anything toward me but the deepest gratitude. "The hospital is known and loved," he said, "as 'Spears' tout court throughout the division."
"You understand, General, why I am pressing the point?"
"I do, and I would refer you to General Guérriac. I will see to the Paris end, but the order came from the Service de Santé of the army and Guérriac is the medical inspector."
"General de Lattre is the army commander?"
"Yes."
"We are under his orders?"
"Yes, but Guérriac is the man to see."
"Where is he?"
"In Belfort."
"Very well, I'll go to Belfort."
Dorea came with me, T. W. drove us. What a drive! The road at first led down the valley through a series of small ruined towns, not merely pillaged, gutted. The Germans had deliberately set fire to them before clearing out. Nothing left but charred buildings and heaps of blackened brick and stone. In some not a house was standing. It was thawing, the roads were muddy rivers, the scene under the lowering sky that threatened rain or a new fall of snow was desolate and dreary beyond belief, but here and there a solitary old woman, bent double, was tottering among the ruins and poking with her stick. 'Then we climbed through pine forests. We had to go over the col, a high pass, as the lower road was still held by the Germans. The battle for Colmar was at its height, and we became involved in an interminable convoy. It grew colder, the mountain road was narrow and deep in icy slush with banks of snow on either side. The going wouldn't have been too difficult if the convoys had all been heading in one direction. T. W. driving superbly could just manage by sticking to the wheel ruts in the skiddy slush but if she left them we were done, and when a convoy going south met a convoy coming north the thing was hopeless. A five-ton Renault would come swinging down on us, try to pass, T. W. would shout, the juggernaut came on, a sickening lurch, a grinding noise, the sound of splintering and tearing, we both were bogged and all the great vehicles behind in both directions were brought to a stop.
We spent five hours on the top of the col among the snowy pines. The forest resounded to shouts and good-humored curses. Dorea and I stayed huddled in our sheepskins, but T. W. was out in the slush continually with a spade. She seemed to be the only driver in the whole French Army who carried one. I shall always remember her stocky khaki figure, her heavy army boots, her raw red hands, as she tramped and shouted and shoveled snow from under army trucks.
A weary business. When the road was free we crept forward skidding and lurching, then the first truck of a new oncoming convoy would appear ahead and the drama would begin again. We lost a wing and smashed a head lamp. It was growing dark as we descended; at nine our lights gave out and we had to stop. Where were we?
I looked out on a scene worthy of the Purgatorio. Broken black masses loomed to either side, ruined jagged wall, lit by the moving headlights of the lumbering convoys. Ahead of us what seemed to be a square full of elephants bogged ill the snow, shadowy figures moved clumsily, stamping, shouting, the narrow street resounded to the grinding of many brakes, the rumbling of interminable wheels. Gunfire in the distance.
But look, there quite close was a lighted window. It glowed between two broken walls. 'The word "Café" showed on the yellow shade. T. W. was out and through the door in a second. "All right," she said a moment later. "We are in Plombières. We can eat and sleep here, no sheets but it looks clean." We parked the car in the square alongside the great discouraged trucks and carried our belongings through the slush to the café. Two old men were playing draughts beside a glowing stove. We sat down at one of the marble-topped tables. The old men nodded in a friendly fashion, a buxom woman brought us hot potato soup, jugged hare and cheese, a bottle of Château Neuf du Pape. We followed it with kirsch and presently tumbled into blissful beds to sleep like happy infants among the ruins, the Battle of Colmar clean forgotten.
I find a note in my diary of the following day:
The pompous hotel in Belfort with marble pillars and an immense staircase is quite the worst lodging we have struck yet. It is requisitioned for French officers and we saw some wandering dejectedly about the great gloomy place. A sorry-looking lot. The hotel ice-cold and almost dark, in the vast foyer one dim electric light near the ceiling. A cripple with a red nose was huddled behind the desk, otherwise there was no one, no servants to look after the place, no hot water even in the kitchen, so no hot-water bottles for our damp icy beds; and no petit déjeuner in the immense dining room in the morning, nothing but filthy tablecloths, dirty dishes and crumbs from the night before. The cook hadn't deigned to come. The wretched officers who poked their heads in, like ourselves looking for coffee, had to go away again.
General Guérriac was an old acquaintance. He had been in Beirut in '41 and had come often to our house. Later he had turned up with Reilinger in Tobruk, later still I had found him in Algiers, a fat old man with a round red benevolent face like Father Christmas without a beard, we had always been on friendly terms and I had thought of him as a kind old thing.
He seemed now to be glad to see me and denied all knowledge of the order to efface the name of Spears from the hospital.
"It didn't come," he said, "from this office, madame, I assure you."
"I attach importance to the name, General, not only because it is in part my own but because of the American committee that continues to support the hospital on the understanding that I remain in charge."
"I quite understand."
"It was General de Gaulle who chose the name."
"I know."
"Do you authorize me to put it back?"
"Certainly."
"I may tell the colonel that we have your permission to order a new official stamp bearing the title H.C.M. 3 with Ambulance Hadfield-Spears underneath?"
"You may."
It was only when I got back to Hohwald that I found he had lied to me. When I reported my interview to the colonel, it was too much for him to stomach and he produced the order. It stated clearly that General de Lattre de Tassigny and the Minister of War Monsieur Diethelm, after visiting H.C.M. 3 had given instructions that the name Spears should be effaced from the hospital. The order had come from Guérriac's office and bore his official stamp. It must have been in his files while he talked to me.
The colonel and I looked at each other. What was there to say? That a slight had been intended was evident. Should I go chasing after General de Lattre or should I take the matter direct to General de Gaulle? I did not believe that he would be glad to see me but I did believe that he was unaware of this discourtesy and that he would be shocked when he heard of it. It was with him that I had to do if with anyone. Or again should I leave the case in Garbet's hands and pretend to be satisfied? I thought a moment. The colonel was ordering a new stamp, the name Hadfield-Spears was being put back where it belonged. What did it signify that General de Lattre de Tassigny and Monsieur Diethelm disliked the name Spears? The men of the 1st Free French Division felt otherwise, they would defend it. I said to the colonel, "I shall pretend to be content."
It was a day or two later that Colonel de Lange of the Foreign Legion and Lalande called on me. 'They would be honored, they said, if I would dine with them. Would I bring the Spirettes and the English nurses on the evening that suited me? They made no reference to the vexatious subject of the unit's name but I understood the gesture.
I suspect the girls of being at the back of it. T. W. or Rachel, Jocelyn too, perhaps. Jocelyn might easily have said something at divisional H.Q. when she went to fetch the post. Rachel and T. W. had many friends in the division ready to do their bidding and take up arms on my behalf. Officers of the legion, the Chasseurs Alpins, the Fusiliers Marins. There were three Fusiliers Marins, but that is another story.
It was a wonderful party. The mess was in an inn about twenty miles from Hohwald, many officers were present. There were toasts and speeches and comic songs and a huge cake with "Spears" in icing and a great deal to drink. There was also a good deal of talk about General de Lattre de Tassigny. One of my neighbors at table was very outspoken about General de Lattre. He had set out, he said, to ruin the division and he was succeeding. They had been given no rest since they had landed in France, no time to reorganize after a battle, nor to train new recruits; and gradually their best officers were being taken away from them. He had been with two others to Paris to protest to General de Gaulle. "We are his own troops after all, who have been with him from the beginning---but, well---"
"Do you mean to say he wasn't sympathetic?"
"He was very nice. He asked us to dinner en famille, but he has other things to think about now."
At ten o'clock when the electricity was cut off little lights in cups were put down on the long tables and Germaine sang to us in her deep warm husky voice. How friendly it was. Yes, that was it, I was among friends. Nothing that had happened in Syria, nothing that ever happened would make these men forget the unit that had joined them in Aldershot four years ago. Palestine, Syria, Libya, North Africa, Italy and now Alsace. We had traveled a long road together and would continue till the fighting was done. General de Lattre had no part in our common adventure, and General de Gaulle seemed to have lost interest in it. We were in France now, as the colonel had said, and everything was different, even for the Free French Division.
They had rejoined their wives and families but I wondered if that had consoled them for what they found in France. Some I knew were very bitter. I knew of at least one who had found even the welcome of his relatives painfully disappointing. He had told me that he had seen and talked to something like a hundred family friends and relations since he had landed in France and that out of the hundred he had found only two who were interested in the war. One an old man, a family retainer who had fought in the last war, the other a woman, his wife's cousin. When he appeared at her door she had cried, "At last a soldier in the family," and had burst into tears. Several of his relations had talked freely of how their business affairs had prospered with the Germans. He spoke of a profound psychological change among the people of France, a habit of cringing, hesitating, being careful. I had noticed the same thing among some of our new doctors. They were timid and apologetic, seemed as if about to look over their shoulders when they talked to me to see if anyone were spying on them, would check the movement, smile painfully; and a woman in the village of Hohwald had said to me, "We always used to say 'Auf Wiedersehen' at the front door never 'au revoir.' Even now when I leave someone's house I find myself saying good-by in German. One cannot cure oneself quickly of a habit of fear."
It was quite soon after my arrival at Hohwald that I drove over to see Major Lecomte, but it wasn't until Shrove Tuesday that we made our pilgrimage to St. Jean le Bassel.
Lecomte was not much changed, a little thinner, the skin tighter over the bones of his pale face, but he had the same gentle smile and exquisite courtesy. He told me that General Réquin had been ill and gave me his Paris address. I must be sure to let the general know when I was there, they had talked so often about us, and had been shocked by the report in the French papers of General Spears's assassination. It had never been denied but they had learned happily that it wasn't true. We spoke of the old days. He asked after the young ladies who had come sometimes to Vic. Miss Tomlin? Miss Graham? T.W.? It was not possible to ask him how he had lived through the last four years, nor was it necessary. Looking into his fine-drawn face I knew what I had known when I met General Georges in Algiers. Lecomte had never made friends with the enemies of my country. All was well.
Would it be the same at the convent? We had been doubtful of the nuns. Réquin had warned me; he had been very uneasy about the people of the village. I remembered the photographs in the cottages of men in German uniform. The Germans had had a large military hospital in the convent in 1914-1918, all the garden had been full of their wooden huts. Now they had taken possession again and stayed four years. It was with some trepidation that Dorea, T. W., Jean and I started off for St. Jean. Would the nuns be glad to see us after all this time? Would they even remember us?
The season was the same. We had arrived in Lorraine just five years ago but now we were approaching from a part of the country that had been occupied by the German Army in 1940. Here was Saverne. "Look," I cried, "the pink village, where Boddles and I went painting and heard old Auguste the town crier calling a new class to the colors."
On we sped, into Sarrebourg. Just up the street was the sweetshop that Evelyn used to frequent and opposite was the place where I had bought the wireless so that I could tune in to London during those tragic days. But we mustn't stop. Yes, over the bridge, then right and there is the turn for Fénétrange, and there are the convent gates, and here we are in the village street. It was like a fairy tale.
But St. Jean had been deep in snow when we arrived in '39. This time a thaw had set in and the mounds of manure at the front doors of the little houses were oozing-dark liquid into squelching mud; and the village was full of American troops and an American flag flew from the convent gate. Nevertheless it was the same. The street curved round the convent walls and straggled into the little square under the great towering convent barns, and there was Klein's the baker who had made hot cross buns marked with swastikas on that Shrove Tuesday five years ago.
"We won't go to the convent yet," I said, "or the nuns will feel they must give us lunch. We'll lunch at Klein's if he'll have us."
"And call on my old girl," Dorea said.
"And mine," T. W. said.
"And Madame Nichalai for Maria and Madame Bernard."
The American Army in St. Jean must have been very surprised that day to see four women in khaki clambering over the manure heaps to knock on cottage doors and be hugged against the buxom laughing bosoms of the village housewives and dragged inside with shouts of laughter. What a welcome we had. Cakes and kirsch were brought out in each kitchen, and how the tongues wagged, and what a lunch old Klein set before us. It was three by the time we staggered back to the car and turned in at the convent gate.
There was the priest's house on the left, and on the right the outbuilding where we used to go for hot baths, and behind the priest's house was the graveyard where we had buried our dead. I trembled a little as we drew up at the front door and rang.
It was opened by the plump comic sister who had always made us laugh.
Her round red face between the great wings of her coif was a study, she stared transfixed, then lifted her fat hands to heaven and with a very unsaintly whoop of joy cried, "Madame la Générale! C'est Madame la Générale!" And went scuttling off calling at the top of her voice, "Madame la Générale est là. Madame la Générale est là."
Then they all came flocking round us like excited birds, the beautiful Soeur Assistante, the withered little Soeur Econome and my own Sister Marie Jeanne. They led us into the parlor and made us sit down, and their faces were radiant. They asked after the general, who had passed there one day five years ago, and my son "Monsieur Michael," who had stayed for a week, and the nurses and the young ladies, they remembered every one; and then they told us about the Boches who had come the day after the last French doctors had gone, and the comic one whose name I never knew made a pantomime of the Germans' arrival. "What , no French here?" they had said. "Keine Franzosen?" They were very angry when they found the birds had flown.
Oh how angry they had been. But the huts in the garden that General Réquin had given us they called "Wunderbar," and had taken away.
Yes, the Soeur Assistante said, they had taken my little house away and the water colors General Réquin had given me. They had filled our wing of the building with wounded and had driven their tanks through the garden destroying many of the trees and lilac bushes. Her fine blue eyes were clouded, they were almost stormy for a moment. I thought I saw her long delicate hands quiver in her lap, then she smiled:
"But it is you, Madame la Générale, who have had wonderful adventures," and we had to tell of them. "Libya, Tunisia," they repeated the names after us breathlessly, with shining eyes. How brave, how wonderful! It was like telling a story to children.
Sister Marie Jeanne slipped away, but now she came back and led us into the small sitting room by the front door where Lady Hadfield and I had been received that first day long ago. A table was set with a white cloth and we were made to sit down to coffee and cakes and a compôte de Mirabelle. They all waited on us, they stood round us as we sat down, and dear Sister Marie Jeanne put beside my plate a frail porcelain cup with a garland of pink roses, and I recognized it, for it was the cup she had brought to my room every morning.
"Oh---" I said, "my own cup, Marie Jeanne."
"Yes, Madame la Générale, it is your cup and you have not forgotten." And she clapped her worn hands with delight, but her eyes were filled with tears.
Pitiable France, miserable France; hungry, cold, torn by dissension. Cities without fires, farms and fields without cattle, men without regret. In Alsace there was food and firewood, at Madame Eboué's one lived well, there was cold ham for tea and pâté de foie gras to spread on hot buttered toast, but the vineyards all around were strewn with mines. German mines and mines of the U.S. Army, one kind as deadly as the other, and up above the village, high on the mountain with a view across the Alsatian plain to Strasbourg and the Rhine was the German concentration camp of Struthof where twenty thousand men and women had been put to death. She took us up there, good Madame Eboué, for the small hotel that the commandant of the camp had requisitioned for his use belonged to her, and her niece had lived in the farm across the field all those years, within earshot of the tortured.
The niece was a frail young woman with a lovely Madonna face; she showed us the gas chamber where the Jewish women had been murdered. It was like a large Frigidaire with smooth white walls. Nothing to cling to, she said. They were stripped naked, and their eyes put out, then bundled in thirty together, and the German guard would stroll up and down outside till, the screaming stopped and they knew that it was finished. "We could hear the screams at our house," she said, "but after a time we got so used to them that we didn't hear them any more." And she looked at me with a sad apologetic smile.
The world has been told enough, one would presume, about such camps. Struthof was a small affair compared to Belsen. The piles of scalps discovered and the butcher shop need not be described. We didn't go into the great barbed-wire enclosure for it held a new lot of prisoners, the French had taken it over and had interned several hundred Alsatian collaborators, and I had no wish to stare at them. But we met a procession of women coming in from a walk through the golden afternoon and I stood watching them with amazement as they marched through the gate in the wire. For they wore fur coats and high-heeled shoes, some had on silk stockings, their faces were sullen, their carriage haughty, even arrogant, and an old lady, very smart in a black coat and skirt with a stiff hat tilted on her neat white hair, headed the procession.
I said to Madame Eboué's charming niece, "Do they know what the Germans did here in this camp?" And she said yes, they had been shown the horrors but they didn't seem to care. We were making our way across to the farm to tea and as we talked we went along a path through a vegetable garden that the former prisoners had made for the German commandant, the one who had gone mad after beating four hundred men to death. There were small white specks and splinters scattered thickly on the earth of the garden to fertilize it, I supposed, but they looked strange to me and my companion said, yes, they were human bones from the camp incinerator, then she led us in to tea.
We moved south from Alsace at the end of March. The division did not advance as we had hoped into Germany. It was transferred from De Lattre's army to the Army of the Alps and ordered to the Mediterranean, so we followed it to that brittle coast of abandoned casinos, luxury hotels made over to the American Army, and silly villas with ruined gardens and broken windows.
I had been with Rachel to Paris and had motored down the great highroad through Auxerre to Lyons. We had, to pass through V----- and when we drew near I said:
"Rachel, I would like to stop at the next village. There is a graveyard on a little hill, you will see the church." And I find this note in my diary written on Easter Sunday, April 1st '45.
France was beautiful, the great rivers and the forests are unchanged. The tall poplars along the road are straight as arrows. All the valleys were opalescent yesterday with plum blossom and peach and the frail green of new leaves. We stopped at V----- and drove up the hill to the church. I didn't go to the chateau for I knew no one was there. It was pillaged by the Germans, Marcel had told me, because of the family's connection with ourselves, so I went into the churchyard and stood for a little while by the graves. Cousin Gaston lies there with Sis beside him, and B.'s grandmother and grandfather and his mother too. The sun shone down on the old stones, the lettering on his grandmother's stone had been almost effaced. You can only just make out her name.
I thought of the days not so very long ago when we came with the children for the summer. I could see the Abbey of Veslay across the valley and catch a glimpse of the river that flows past the château, but the house and the old tower were hidden by the trees.
We had a long way to go so I didn't stay, but the road was thronged with memories. I saw the children with their donkey cart making for Avignon and the sweetshop where they bought their favorite chocolate peppermints. Their sunny heads and sturdy legs were so vivid that I forgot the flood of refugees "that had come in between."
Fragments of a nation that had come to terms with the enemy to avoid destruction and now was inwardly destroyed, glimpses into the life of a people that had purchased peace at a price and now could not hope for peace even when the war was ended. Gradually I put the fragments together, carefully I felt my way back into the past searching for buried treasure, for the France I had known; here and there I found it.
I went several times to Paris between January and that last unhappy week in June. One could be comfortable enough there on military service billeted at the excellent small Hotel Vendôme where we ate British Army rations, and if one kept to one's own people or to old friends in the division, there was nothing to distress one. But outside the circles of the army or the Embassy there was little to comfort or reassure me. I am aware that not all my fellow countrymen and women felt as I did. There were those who seemed to think the past was dead, that it didn't matter what our former charming friends had felt about the Germans. If their conduct had not been too outrageous one must ignore it and forgive. France was sick. Everywhere I heard the phrase, "La France est malade." She must be nursed gently back to health and sanity. I did not disagree about the sickness but to me the past was living, the most living and vital element in her languid and diseased organism. Nothing worked, nothing functioned, it seemed to me, but the past. The furnaces and factories were cold, the electric lights went out, the trains didn't run and the shops were empty behind their showy windows, but the past was alive and throbbing in the streets, it was creeping up and down the stairs, it looked out of a million eyes.
Cunning, sly, insidious and subtle, like a shameful secret or a hidden vice or again a microbe in the blood; it was at its work, eating the heart out of the nation, whispering, "You are cold and hungry, you were much better off before. 'The Germans weren't so bad; true, they took away your riches but you were cleverer than they thought. You managed, you can do it again. You learned to lie and cheat, to trick the enemy, what's wrong with going on as before? The people? Who are the people? They are the enemy, you and your family are all that matter. Every man for himself now, let's have no more talk about the people. Liberté, égalité, yes, if you care for words, but not fraternité."
De Gaulle presumably was out to kill the past. His methods were primitive but not gentle. How could they be? 'The basis of his character is pride. Not difficult to imagine his seething fury. He would be acting out of hatred ---hatred against the Allies to whom he was indebted for his country's liberation and who were in occupation of the broken humiliated land, hatred against his own soiled unrepentant people, hatred of the past that clung about and clogged his heels.
The prisons, it seemed, were full. Pétain and all his colleagues would come up for trial. France would be clean again, De Gaulle would clean it. And yet the thing seemed to be beyond him. Obsessed by pride he could think of nothing but prestige and how to restore it. The army was apparently his one solution. Military parades to please the Paris mob, make them believe again in the might of France. Military pageants may possibly do something to restore a nation's self-respect, they won't fill children's stomachs, nor would the new ever more swollen army light the fires in the factories and mend the roads. De Gaulle was not beloved. The nation was not grateful. He had come but not alone and he was not after all a savior. He was a tyrant, feared, respected, but without friends as lonely now as he had ever been in exile and I believe as full of hatred.
This is my reading of him. I didn't see him, but I knew him, and my only intimates at this time were among the men of his own Free French Division.
I kept away from my former peacetime friends; some were in prison for collaboration, others---but it was better not to ask. I put off again my meeting with the one woman I longed and feared to see, went almost nowhere save on official business. It was strange to live in Paris as if it were a military camp, but that was what it came to. Paris for me was just a military barracks.
I came on Colonel Arèn who had first received me at the Ministère de la Guerre in '39 when I arrived with Lady Hadfield. Hearing he was back again I went to see him. He was a general now, medical inspector of the military hospitals of Paris. He had turned commercial traveler during the occupation and sold soda water; it fitted in very well, he said smiling, with his work for the resistance, but he had been near starvation and he showed me a photograph of himself, so emaciated as to be unrecognizable.
General Réquin when he opened his door to me stared as if I were a ghost, but a minute later he had drawn me into his living room and set me down and it was as if nothing had come between his world and mine. I saw him and his wife after that several times, and each time I learned a little more of what life had been for people of their sort in Paris with the Germans. "We felt safe," they said, "each day after nine o'clock in the morning until six the following morning. The Gestapo always made their arrests before nine." Or "We used to go to a little restaurant opposite every day at noon, in that way we could be sure of one fairly solid meal a day. It was always crowded but quite silent, no one in the restaurant ever spoke."
And then one day someone said to me, "Do you remember Professor Pernot and his family?" And I said, "But of course, they took us in for the night at Torteron, where are they? Are they here? Can I see them?" And she said, "Yes, we were talking of you the other day, they wondered if you would remember."
"How could I forget, they were so kind, so delightful. They had a charming house, all sunshine and open windows. There were the two old people and two daughters and two small children. They were leaving. I begged them not to go but they insisted, we saw them drive away and I have often wondered if they reached their journey's end."
"The house was pillaged, the unmarried daughter murdered by the Germans. The house was at the exact line of demarcation between the occupied and unoccupied zones. Both girls joined the resistance. Lenio, the younger, went back to Torteron, her sister went to Paris. Between them they arranged the escape of many British aviators, then Lenio was denounced."
Clearly the girl's slender face came back to me, as I had seen it that lovely, dreadful afternoon in June. It was fine and sensitive, the nose was high-bridged, the cheeks were thin, the sun was on it and the eyes were sad.
"We look to England," she had said, "to save us."
A frail gentle creature, with the high forehead of an intellectual, and sweet bloodless lips. Killed by the Germans.
"Can I go to see them?"
"They would like to see you."
So I found them again, the Constant Nymph's family in a small apartment in Paris that suggested very straitened circumstances. Gentle people.
I would have recognized the professor with his little white beard who had raised his hat to me long ago outside the village café in Torteron, but I wouldn't have known the mother. Her hair was white, her face ravaged, her beauty gone, and when we spoke of the Germans she began to tremble violently in her chair and lifting her worn transparent hands, she cried out in anguished rage against them. But they talked quietly of Lenio who was dead.
"She was always delicate," they said. "For us the principal traits in her character were her devotion to her family and her friends, and the energy of her perpetual struggle against ill health. She was born in 1909. Her name was Hélène but we called her Lenio. She had a weak chest and was obliged to spend three winters at Briançon because of her lungs. She was an expert photographer and her father's invaluable helper in photographing manuscripts. Before the war she obtained her Red Cross diploma, a permit to drive heavy trucks and had begun to learn to be a pilot; she had to stop flying when war was declared as the authorities forbade the training of women, so she joined the Red Cross service of the air force.
"After the debacle of 1940 she accompanied her family to the south, yes, we reached our destination, then returned to Torteron to continue the struggle against the Germans. It was then that the inhabitants got to know her in a new guise, undertaking all sorts of different occupations. Some may have suspected that she belonged to the resistance. For a time she looked after the sick and wounded Maquis. Then she began piloting aviators to Paris. She was arrested on the ninth of May. The last word she sent us hidden in her linen was from Bourges. 'We are leaving, our hearts serene.' She had a friend with her called Renée Fruillarde, they were arrested and died at the same time. We had news from the gendarmes of Bourges that she had been taken to Romainville, then to Saarbrücken on the seventh of July, and the horrors of the camp began. She was in command there of her group of three hundred women, all in one room. They all talk of her courage and discipline. On July 23 they left for Ravensburg. There she had her head shaved and took it as a joke, as a result she had sunstroke, with high fever, but in spite of this was forced to do various kinds of manual labor, sawing wood, stone breaking for the roads. In September, departure again for the underground factory at Waldba. Terracing after that with her feet in water, no shoes, food nonexistent. Her comrades still talk of her courage and energy but she coughed and was terribly emaciated. On January 22 she returned with Renée to Ravensburg in what they called a black convoy, as sick, unfit for work. They were condemned from this moment. Their former comrades didn't recognize them. On the twenty-sixth one of them ran across the camp to take Lenio some underlinen, she was so weak that she could only thank her friend with her eyes. On the twenty-eighth she left with Renée for what they called the Jugend Lager where they were put to knitting, but on February 5 their cotton jackets were taken from them, they were left with only a thin cotton smock, and were given a cup of soup a day as nourishment. A few days later Lenio was admitted to the infirmary, a shed with straw mattresses where she was finished off with a pill in the evening; her friend was gassed the same day."
Brave, ardent, constant Hélène Pernot, called Lenio by those who loved her, and of whom, though I only met her once in that sunny room overlooking the valley of the Loire, I am one.