Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  He didn’t take that last point up, at the time, he didn’t sec what she meant. But later he learned—with a certain shock. They were sitting in the sun one afternoon up near St.-Laurent-de-Cerdans, sucking oranges—Rosemary had bought herself a pair of the local espadrilles, made of black tape, down at the little factory, and sat with her slender legs stuck out in front of her, wiggling each foot in turn and admiring the set of her new footgear; in her gay jumper and short skirt, with her elaborate curled head, she looked the very picture of the frivolous modern young who were so much contemned by the moralists in 1939. They had been talking about women in journalism, and Geneviève Tabouis and Dorothy Thompson and Virginia Cowles, and Rosemary had displayed her usual familiarity with the character and outlook of all three, to his amused surprise. At last, idly, he asked her what she meant to do?

  “Oh, nursing, I think,” she said, raising her right foot and bending it to and fro, while she admired it critically, her head on one side.

  “Why nursing?” he asked. It was the last thing he would have expected to hear.

  “Well, you don’t have to be much educated for it—which I’m not,” the girl said; “and it’ll come in handy when the war comes.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, startled, hardly believing his ears.

  “Oh, just the war—us and Germany and everybody else—Armageddon or whatever they call it,” she answered, sticking out her left foot now, and twirling that. “One will have to be in it, you see; and nurses are always wanted—with air-raids and things, more than ever, shouldn’t you think?”

  “When do you expect it to come?”

  “Oh—‘any moment now, chaps; any moment now’—as the Western Brothers would say,” she answered cheerfully.

  “You’re certain it will come?” he asked, realising, confronted with her certainty, how much he himself had still hoped that it might somehow be averted.

  “Oh Heavens yes. Obviously. Why? Aren’t you?”

  He didn’t answer her question; in his almost horrified concern and surprise at her attitude, he asked her another himself.

  “How long have you been thinking this—that war was inevitable, I mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—about three or four years. When did sanctions break down? ’36, was it? Well, about since then. And all this performance”—she moved her hand over her shoulder at Spain—“has just pushed it along a bit faster. And then Munich—we as near as a toucher had it then.”

  “What did you think about Munich?” he asked her.

  “Oh, lousy. It made me feel dirty all over. But what can you do? We had all the right ideas, but we had them at the wrong time, in the wrong sort of world. Well, I guess we’ll have to think again,” she said impatiently. “God, I hope they give us conscription, and make it snappy while they’re about it.”

  “And do all the others at your school think the same as you do about the war?” he asked. He was at once appalled and fascinated by the pictures she conjured up, of a whole generation of youthful creatures growing up in clear anticipation of this menace, this horror, and remaining the calmly frivolous beings they to all outward seeming were.

  “All the older ones, naturally; from about the Upper Fourth. I don’t know what the brats think. But if you ask me, I think all ideologies are lousy,” said Rosemary with emphasis.

  He couldn’t have agreed more completely. And ideology, or the ideological powers, were becoming more and more vocal, threatening. While Milcom and Rosemary tramped the Pyrenean frontier and chatted with homesick Gardes Mobiles in mountain inns, deputies and black-shirted mobs in Rome screamed “Corsica!”, “Tunisia!”, “Nizza!”. Milcom didn’t like it, he said; didn’t like the look of it at all. He persuaded Mrs. Oldhead to change a large number of cheques, and to carry several thousand francs in French notes on her person always. If something broke suddenly, he said, there would be no hope of changing cheques; she had better have the money by her. Sensible Ethel Oldhead did as he advised, saying nothing to her ailing husband. Milcom changed a cheque himself, down in Perpignan, at the Banque de Roussillon. Then he went back to his occupation of writing to hospitals, and walking and driving with Rosemary. None of the French hospitals to which he wrote, it seemed, had any record of a Lieutenant Manuel Jereda; which was disappointing. But he continued to write—and to walk. In a menaced world, in a menaced France, one person, at least, was enjoying herself a great deal.

  Chapter Thirteen

  This Side—Prats-de-Mollo

  One evening towards the end of March when Rosemary and Milcom were discussing as usual where they should go next day, she said—“Why not Prats? I’ve never seen it, you know. The books say it’s a good church.”

  “But we went to Prats, right at the beginning,” Milcom objected.

  “Only the camp, Jems—we never went to the town.”

  “Didn’t we? All right—let’s go to Prats.”

  “Shall we take lunch, or can we eat there?”

  “Oh, we can eat there—there’s a quite decent little pub in the town.”

  “Oke. Eight to start?”

  “Yes—eight.”

  They set out from the tilted little square by the fountain punctually; the low sun, shooting through the gorge of the Mondony, as it did for fifteen tantalising minutes every morning, caught the higher branches of the great plane trees, lighting up the spiky balls of seed which still dangled from the bare twigs, and gilding the shabby fronts of the houses opposite. James glanced round him before kicking away a rock from under the wheel of the car—just so he had seen the square now, a dozen times, in the early light, in the keen morning air.

  “I’m getting quite fond of the smell of sulphur,” he said, as he settled into the car beside Rosemary; “I shall feel positively deprived of it when I go away.”

  She laughed. “And mimosa—don’t forget that,” she said gaily. He must never guess how it took the fun out of everything for her even to think of his going away. Oh well—don’t let’s think about it! she thought. He had gone away before, she had thought she would never see him again, and yet here they were, driving up to Prats together! And anyhow to-day was to-day. She began to whistle “Un seul couvert, pliss, Jems”—it was her sort of theme-song for him; the nick-name she had latterly begun to use was based, though he didn’t know it, on that song. James vaguely liked being called “Jems”—it was a long time since anyone had used a nick-name for him. He never bothered to ask why. But the song corresponded to one that was beginning to sing itself in Rosemary’s heart, a small song that had, beside the grave shy tenderness of youthful love, an element of joy, almost of hope in it. Naturally, after these weeks spent tête-à-tête, she was much more profoundly in love with Milcom than she had been at St.-Jean-de-Luz; and, for all her realistic warnings and cautionings of herself, she could not quite prevent a feeling that, as she put it, she had a chance—only a 20 per cent chance perhaps, but still a chance. He was so nice to her; clearly he liked being with her; it would be far, far ahead, of course, but it did seem to her that he was getting over the Condesa a tiny little bit. So her heart sang, and she whistled a silly modern song, as they drove together up the winding grey road, between the mountain woods, bloomy and heavy with the swelling buds of spring, towards Prats-de-Mollo.

  They had coffee at Le Tech, a small village with an extremely modest inn, and then drove on to Prats. They parked in the big open space outside the eastern gate, where weeks before James had seen the Spanish ponies tethered under the wall; and then proceeded to examine the walls of the miniature city, with charming little pepper-pot turrets in pink brick projecting from the angles.

  “Where does that go?” Rosemary asked, pointing to a broad and rather well-built road which crossed the Tech by a stout modern bridge, and wound up into the hills beyond.

  “No idea—we’ll ask”—and he enquired of the two Gardes Mobiles at the city gate.

  “To the Col d’Ares, Monsieur. It is the military road. But to traverse it is forbidden.”
/>
  “Even with a pass?” James asked. The policeman requested to see the pass, and James produced the Sous-Préfet’s well-thumbed chit. Ah well—possibly, the man said; all the same it would have to be countersigned by the Capitaine here at Prats, or the sentries would not let one pass. It was a route militaire, he repeated.

  “Do you want to go up there?” Rosemary asked.

  “I thought we might. We ought to get a fine view from the top. Let’s get hold of this Capitaine and see about it—we can look at the church when we come down.”

  The Captain was in his bureau, in the big building just across the open Place; after a little conversation he readily countersigned the Sous-Préfet’s permit, and they got into the car again and drove off across the bridge. At the far end they were halted by a sentry, and again a few hundred yards further on by two more, but on showing the paper they were allowed to proceed. The military road wound up over the southern slopes in great looped curves; it was broad and well engineered, with easy gradients and stoutly-built bridges and culverts, but it had not yet been surfaced; great piles of road-metal, mostly a sort of pinkish granite, were neaped along it at intervals ready for use, but the road itself at present consisted merely of grass and greasy mud, deeply rutted, on which the Peugeot skidded and shied sideways like a nervous horse. Driving slowly and carefully James coaxed her up to a point where it flattened out on wide grassy downs, with thickets of broom and juniper here and there; it ran level for about a quarter of a mile, and then abruptly stopped. Just stopped, as if cut off with a knife; there was a sloping edge about two feet high where the foundations of the road ended, and beyond a narrow mule or char track, winding away round a shoulder of the hill.

  James stopped the car and got out; Rosemary followed.

  “This can’t be the col, surely,” she said.

  “No, evidently not. It must be somewhere over there on the ridge”—he pointed across an intervening valley. He went and examined the drop and the char track, while Rosemary rambled about.

  “I think we can get on,” he called to her after a moment. She paid no attention; she was looking intently at the broom bushes which bordered the road. “James! Do come here,” she called in her turn.

  He went over to her. “What is it?”

  “Look here,” she said, pointing to the bushes. As brambles through which sheep have passed are draped and tangled with tufts and locks of dirty wool, so these green sprays of broom were draped with loops and strands of some stained and dirty material; it was a moment or two before James recognised them for what they were—bandages.

  “Good God!” he said.

  “Look—all down the road,” she went on, waving backwards. “And here.” She pointed to the ditch, which was full of muddy half-frozen water—at the bottom lay more of the stained and ragged bandages.

  “How very horrible,” he said. He looked about him, forwards and backwards; everywhere the grim rennants fluttered in the fresh mountain breeze. “A lot of wounded must have come out this way,” he commented—“they’re all over the place. Well, let’s get on. Do you mind standing at the side and telling me if I’m clear underneath?”

  She did as she was told, but the car negotiated the drop safely, and they drove on cautiously along the narrow track. It wound across the side of the hill, with a steep drop to the valley below on their left; there was barely room for the wheels to pass, but scraping the bank on their right, they proceeded for about another kilometre and a half, till they reached a high saddle of stone-strewn grass—here the track in its turn came to an end among the whitish rocks which stuck up out of the soil. Small paths, foot-paths or sheep-tracks, branched off in several directions, but there was nothing along which it was possible to drive a car.

  “Now what?” the girl asked.

  “I’ll turn her, I think, here on the level, and then we’ll walk up. Just hop out and watch for the clearance again, will you?”

  When the car was turned James got out and looked about him.

  “By Jove, it is a place,” he said.

  It was. The view was magnificent. On one side they looked across the Vallespir—with Prats lying like a toy town just below them, white and small—to the massif of the Canigou; on the other they looked down the valley along whose upper slopes they had just come, over a farther ridge, to the great hollow in which St. Laurent-de-Cerdans lies, the high southern sun was pouring into this, investing the wooded slopes with a silvery glitter—behind, close at hand, a rough slope of rock and scree mounted to a ridge where snow still lay in the hollows. They stood and gazed. The view, the height, the sense of sun and space, of being poised above the glory of the earth, halfway to the glory of the sky, filled Rosemary with a delicate passionate exaltation. This place of sky and mountains and deep valleys and toy-like towns was the most wonderful she had ever seen—and she was here with him, with him! She looked from the view to his rugged face; every detail, every defect was clear in the fierce light, outlined against that tremendous expanse of blue—and every detail and every defect she loved. She shivered a little, suddenly, under the impact of a strange sensation, something that with all her clear-eyed theoretical knowledge she had never yet experienced—the first onset of physical enchantment.

  He noticed the shiver—he was very noticing nowadays.

  “Cold?” he asked. “The wind is a bit nipping, isn’t it? Let’s go on up.”

  Unthinkingly, he took her elbow to start her off. She shivered again, sharply, at his touch.

  “You really are cold,” he said, surprised and kind. “Come along.” It never occurred to him that cold was just what she was not.

  They found a small path and followed it up towards the ridge. The air had a tonic freshness, in spite of the hot sun—and the wind was certainly keen; except for a few sheep and a herd of cows, escorted by a bull, the whole mountain-side seemed utterly deserted.

  “Why do you suppose they stopped the road there, short of the col?” Rosemary asked, with careful casualness, as after making a detour to avoid the bull they regained the path.

  “No idea. Perhaps there’s no road to connect with it on the Spanish side—or perhaps they didn’t want to connect. Or the money may have given out,” James said over his shoulder—they were walking in single file. “Hullo, there we are,” he exclaimed a few moments later. The path, winding round a spur, had brought them into a shallow stony valley, running up to the ridge; at the top of it, from a cairn of stones, two flags fluttered against the sky. They pushed on; the north wind, blowing down the gully as down a funnel, was cold on their faces now, and as they approached the col the usual dismal frontier jetsam began to litter the slopes beside the path—here a rifle, there a revolver; a tin hat; a machine gunner’s asbestos glove, the palm sewn with metal rings; a couple of bayonets. Now they could see the Franco guards, who had emerged from somewhere to look at the newcomers, standing silhouetted against the sky beside the flags, huddled in ragged overcoats which flapped in the breeze, with scarves tied over their caps.

  “I bet they’re cold,” James remarked.

  “Yes. It’s funny, there are no cars up here, or typewriters,” Rosemary observed; she knew now what to expect of frontier passes.

  “Perhaps there’s no road that cars could get up on the Spanish side,” James said again.

  But he was wrong about that, as they saw for themselves a few minutes later. The guards, on being addressed in Spanish and offered cigarettes, greeted them with the usual enthusiasm, and after a little conversation led them over the crest of the ridge to see the great sight of the Col d’Ares. A well-made, well-metalled road ran down into Spain on the far side of the pass, skirting a deep ravine; the bottom of this ravine, and the slope between it and the road, was covered with wrecked motor vehicles of every description—lorries, guns and gun-carriages, cars, ambulances, motor-cyles—lying upside down, on their sides, on their noses, anyhow; this wreckage stretched as far as the eye could reach, a matter of at least four miles, and it was evident that an att
empt had been made to burn it, for the cars and lorries bore the marks of fire.

  “Good God!” James said, and then stood in silence, gaping. He had seen a good deal of war, but this was wholesale ruin on a scale such as he had never yet witnessed.

  The Franquistas were delighted to tell him all about it. Yes, Los Rojos knew about the Spanish road and the French road, and had supposed that they met on the col; so when they saw themselves trapped by the troops of the Caudillo near Rivas, a whole division had retreated up to the Col d’Ares, with all their war material and supplies, only to find when they reached the summit that there was a gap of five kilometres between the end of the Spanish road and the beginning of the French one—five kilometres of rocky slopes down which it was impossible to drive lorries, cars, and guns. So they had run the whole outfit over the edge of the road into the ravine, where they set fire to it.

  James and Rosemary walked some distance down the road, examining this scene of desolation. Then they went back ta the col. The Franco guards, meanwhile, had retired out of the wind into the ingenious little shelter which they had made for themselves, a sort of lean-to under a small face of rock, constructed out of the bottoms of lorries; the upholstered seats of motor-cars had been turned into beds, and there was even a fireplace made of unidentifiable pieces of metal. They invited the strangers into this peculiar abode, and stoked up the fire—James observed with interest that one of them was reading Don Quixote, out of a magnificent eighteenth-century edition, with a coat-of-arms tooled in gold on the superb leather binding. Yes, the man said, he read it every day; it was a good book. But when James again offered them his cigarettes, one of the guards tore a leaf out of another volume, equally splendid externally, with which to make a spill. James picked up the book. It was in Spanish, a “History of Social Progress.” The guards had no idea what it was that made the English stranger laugh out aloud.

  Suddenly there were shouts outside; the guards sprang up off their leather beds and tumbled out through the low entrance. James and Rosemary followed; the smoke from the lacquered car-wood which the Spaniards used for fuel had an acrid chemical pungency, making one’s eyes water, and catching the throat. On the road stood half a dozen Gardes Mobiles, trim and snug in their heavy belted overcoats and gaiters; they presented the greatest possible contrast to the Spanish sentries, who had reinforced their ragged coats with every sort of garment—scarves, sweaters, jackets and waistcoats; one even had a pair of golf stockings wound round his neck and ears.