Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  The fighting in the Vosges went on for two months, as Allied forces drove north eastwards towards the Rhine, with heavy casualties on both sides. In Train to Nowhere, Anita told of one incident that encapsulated the grimness of war. The Germans had dragged out a sick boy and shot him a few days before the Allied troops arrived. The boy’s mother asked to shoot two Germans – any Germans – in revenge. A French officer gave her a revolver. Two German prisoners were produced, ‘too tired even to lift their hands. Whatever they saw in her face they were beyond caring and she was expressionless as she shot them.’

  This was nothing like Anita’s previous wartime life in the Middle East, where, miles away from the fighting, she had become too close to men whose shattered nerves made them dangerous lovers. Anita and her colleagues, when not sleeping in their ambulances, were sometimes allotted a room in a recently bombed-out village to dry their clothes. She learnt to differentiate the sound of a German shell from the less shrill sound of Allied guns. ‘This was the world in which I found myself’, she wrote. ‘I who had once been an idiotic London debutante.’ The ambulancières, after a day at the front, sat around in their muddy clothes discussing the perfect wardrobe. Jeanne told them: ‘Only shoes, stockings and gloves really matter. For the rest, mes petites, you cannot dress too plainly, and black is better than navy blue – a well-cut black tailleur will take you from breakfast to midnight, and the hat is of great importance.’ Shortly after this useful advice had been imparted, a large shell landed nearby and Anita fled for cover, snatching a tin washbasin in lieu of a helmet.

  On 12 November 1944, Anita wrote in her diary: ‘My twenty-ninth birthday! Reached the Rhine.’ It was, in fact, her thirtieth. Peter Wilson, still on leave in London, wrote to her with plans for their future. Peter would stay on in London for a while to see something of his son Roddy, who was an apprentice at Rolls Royce. Then Peter wanted to become an agricultural labourer, living in a shack where wild creatures would come for sanctuary and Anita would visit whenever she wanted to meet the ‘furry babies’. Just before Christmas, the battle of Strasbourg began in freezing weather. The ambulancières, billeted in Alsace villages, tried to reassure the nervous inhabitants that the Allied armies would not pull out, leaving them exposed to Nazi reprisals. They didn’t know that General Eisenhower had, in fact, threatened to withdraw American troops from Alsace, since he considered the Germans to be solidly entrenched around Colmar. Only when Winston flew to France on 3 January to support General de Lattre, Commander of the French army, and General de Gaulle did Eisenhower change his mind, on condition that the French took full responsibility for the defence of Strasbourg.

  The snow made the battlefields as horrific as the trenches of the Great War. Anita wrote: ‘In all directions, men advancing through the fields were suddenly blown up in a fountain of scarlet snow and their comrades would drag them back, themselves sinking above the knees at every step.’ The battle of Colmar lasted three weeks, ending on 9 February, the last battle of the war to be fought on French soil. ‘The sound of guns, that had not ceased for three months, died away with the first breath of spring.’

  While Anita, now admired as ‘une Anglaise formidable’ was rescuing the wounded on the battlefield, Peter, in London, had found a job in Whitehall, running Winston’s bombproof underground map room. He saw a lot of both Rose and Anita’s brother Desmond, who had just become engaged, to Anita’s disapproval, to Agnes Bernelle, a lusciously beautiful actress and the daughter of a Jewish-Hungarian theatre impresario, now exiled in London. In 1996 Agnes wrote a very appealing memoir, The Fun Palace, in which she revealed that, during the war, under the code name ‘Vicky’, she had been recruited to make anti-Nazi broadcasts to Germany, where she had been born. Peter’s grumpy letters to Anita list how expensive clothes are – 39/6d for a shirt – and his distaste for ats girls. Anita, living on disgusting soup, washing in a tin basin of cold water and sleeping in her ambulance was, perhaps, not too sympathetic.

  The Germans did not retreat easily, returning by night to newly conquered villages to kill any of their countrymen who dared to put out a white flag. In March 1945 the Kreisleiter of Welzlar was hanged for defeatism, two days before us troops arrived, for putting up a sign proclaiming ‘Welcome to our liberators’. That month Anita was given compassionate leave because Marjorie, whom her daughter had not seen for five years, was dangerously ill with pneumonia in Dublin. By the time Anita arrived at St Vincent’s nursing home, Marjorie had recovered enough to criticize her shoes, so Anita went on to Castle Leslie, where Shane was living alone. The house was freezing but Shane was waited on by six servants. Anita travelled back to her division via London where, on Good Friday, the prime minister’s car brought her to Chequers. When she left, Winston said: ‘Give my love to the French … I think they are rather fond of me.’

  Anita had just returned to Mulhouse when the Division prepared to cross the Rhine. After a special mass at Obernai, a medieval village just outside Strasbourg, to mark the quitting of French soil, the ambulancières were given a short lecture on ‘how to behave chez les boches’. Anita thought it should be the other way round. The year before she had written to Betsan: ‘How can one teach them [the Germans] how unattractive they are!’ On 20 April Anita wrote to Winston the kind of letter, full of personal detail and sharply observed vignettes, that great leaders, concerned with great events, don’t often receive and must find welcome. ‘We’re simply smacking through Germany,’ Anita told him, and went on to describe terrified old farmers and their wives ingratiating themselves with their conquerors by bringing them delicious food:

  One feels so uncomfortable when they lick your boots. It’s obvious they are damned frightened yet when driving back alone with wounded through the dark forests one doesn’t feel quite at ease either! … I suppose these are the most interesting days of my life – of any life – to be in at the kill at the end of this long long fight. Thank goodness we had you – it would have been so much harder and duller without.

  She took up the letter again the following day: ‘10 villages later – gosh what a sight – the departing SS men shot at all civilians here they saw hanging out white flags – one man has three revolver bullets in his face.’

  She decided that Peter was the most central point to distribute her letters ‘to share my news with everyone’ and put him in charge of copying and distribution. A letter dated 26 April, neatly typed by Peter, tells of Anita’s excitement at taking over the Hohenzollern castle at Sigmaringen, where Laval and Pétain had recently been kept in semi-imprisonment before being hastily evacuated that very morning. The ambulancières splashed about in Maréchal Pétain’s bathtub and, that evening, drank his delicious wine. There was a more sombre event to recount: the murder of two ambulancières, the sisters Lucette and Odette Le Coq. Their ambulance had been ambushed by retreating Germans, who shot the girls at point blank range, in spite of the Red Cross flag on the bonnet of their van. Anita wrote: ‘Though we’ve taken risks under bombardment and quite a number of girls have been killed, we never expected to be attacked in the ambulance by daylight or shot like that.’

  Her opinion of the Germans hardened: ‘If you don’t boot them morning noon and night then some tramp like Hitler comes along and takes over.’ She was revolted by their obsequiousness – ‘the women wave and smile under the white flags while the German soldiers lie dead along the road’. She and her colleagues went on tending the German wounded: ‘[O]ne does not know how to stop being kind to a suffering man – it seems so natural to do one’s utmost for them.’ In spite of the occasional bombardment, life was easier. The ambulancières lodged in houses, slept in proper beds and ordered their meals from eager-to-please householders – ‘I’ve never eaten so much butter in my life – butter and eggs and milk.’

  pows were armed and put on guard duty, German policemen were ordered to pick up dying German soldiers: ‘It’s a queer sensation to work with Germans – it’s like modelling with butter when you are used to hewing granite.’
A German policeman, bullied by Anita into saving the wounded, presented her with a swastika-decorated dagger, engraved with the words ‘to you I surrender my oath’. This event-filled letter ended, ‘2 armoured cars have just gone by laden with young German soldiers captured in the next wood – they fought hard aged 12 to 15’. The age of these schoolboy conscripts was a clear sign that the war was near its end.

  On 2 May Peter, in his Whitehall office, aware that victory was imminent, ignored the general excitement and spent the afternoon watching the ducklings on the lake in St James’s Park and hoping, he wrote to Anita, that they would spend the next hatching season together. Although almost the entire German army had surrendered, he suspected that Anita’s regiment might still be fighting and remarked delicately, referring to her abortion, that, in the circumstances, it had, perhaps, been a wise decision. He wrote to her almost daily, trying to convince her that they must live close to the earth and forswear worldly belongings. He scoffed at those in ‘the social world’ who were planning ve day celebrations, feeling that such rejoicings were not yet in order. His wife had decided not to give him a divorce but he was going to talk to her about it. Anita had made it clear to Rose that she would never marry Peter but perhaps she hadn’t made it clear to him. On ve day itself, 8 May, Peter spent the day in Kew Gardens, communing with nature and critical of the formal flower beds. He wanted to get away from the human race, especially ‘so-called sophisticated humans’.

  On 11 May Peter was able to write to Anita that her brother Jack, imprisoned since 1940 in Oflag V11 B in Bavaria, had been released and was on his way to Dublin. Oflags were restricted to officer-prisoners; they had preferential treatment and weren’t required to work but conditions were grim and very cold. At the outbreak of war, Anita had knitted Jack a balaclava cap in khaki angora wool and he’d slept in it every night during five freezing winters. As well as the good news about Jack, Peter also mentioned that General Knox, Paul’s commanding officer in the Great War, had sent a minion to Peter’s office to ask for Anita’s address. It was clear that Paul was still on the prowl.

  On 22 May Anita wrote to ‘Dear Cousin Winston’, a six-page letter full of criticism of the Germans, who left their dying in the sunlit fields to be tended by the occupying forces in makeshift surgeries set up in barns. Anita’s brigade had taken 25,000 prisoners – ‘I took dozens myself (slight exaggeration – dozens begged me to take them) … pleasant, kindly honest people, they are so tolerant they’ll let children be tortured if someone in authority says so.’ How unlike the ‘outrageous prying old spinsters of England who show their disapproval of cruelty towards man or beast by whacking the perpetrator with an umbrella’. Fraternization was frowned on but, Anita told Winston, the ‘acquiescent husbandless blond beauties’ in vanquished Germany were so ‘amiable, indifferent and ready’ as to be irresistible to the French soldiers. Or so Anita believed. In his book Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945, William Hitchcock describes widespread rape in the Rhineland, as well as theft and looting by the occupying troops: ‘The Red Army was the most culpable but was by no means alone in abusing the power of the victor.’

  Peter was meanwhile ingratiating himself with Anita’s family and friends. Clare Sheridan now called him ‘Pete’ and found him ‘sweet, and so understanding’. When he visited her at Brede, she listed his support for what she told Anita (23 May 1945) was ‘a community future … I’ll tell you all about it when you come’. This was to be set up at Brede, although details were yet to be worked out. Clare ended her letter: ‘If you were my daughter I’d be madly proud of you’, which was perhaps a dig at Marjorie, with her instructions against getting tanned and her criticism of Anita’s shoes. Peter had also become Rose’s intimate friend. The two would spend evenings together, neither wearing much in the way of clothes during that sultry summer. Rose gave Peter the keys to her flat, although he had to give them back when her gentleman-caller situation became unusually complicated. Peter was also close to Agnes, who confided in him that Lord Tredegar, a friend of Desmond’s, had given her a valuable jade necklace.

  Peter was still intent on some sort of getaway when Anita came home; anywhere where he could forget what he called the sordid remains of humanity would do. The sordid remains were a worry. In a letter to Anita on 4 June, he lashed out at de Gaulle for being stubborn over Syria, the Jews in Palestine, whom he thought cowardly and, for some unexplained reason, Chicago newspapers. He had heard that France was swinging back to Pétain, although, at the same time, he feared that there might be a communist revolution there and was anxious lest Anita got mixed up in it. A general election – dubbed the ‘khaki election’ – had been called for 5 July. Like many other people, and most newspapers, Peter thought it inconceivable that Winston wouldn’t form the next government, in spite of food shortages and social unrest. Sensing a reluctance on Anita’s part to be demobilized, he tells her rather plaintively that he has all her clothes in the room he is renting at 75 Knightsbridge for a remarkably cheap £2 a week.

  It was true that Anita didn’t want to leave the army. She knew that if she did, she would be called upon to cope with a problem that concerned Jack. It had been hoped that, having recovered his health, Jack would take over the running of Glaslough. Instead he decided to relinquish it, apply for us citizenship and start a new life in America, his country of birth. Desmond’s engagement to Agnes had initially met with opposition but when Desmond brought her to Glaslough, Marjorie liked her immediately and offered the couple her St John’s Wood flat. Anita was not won over by her future sister-in-law. During her Easter leave, she wrote to Marjorie: ‘I definitely disliked her and will not like her any more simply because she is Desmond’s wife.’ She disapproved of the pair’s ve-day antics, when, or so she had been told, ‘Desmond in slacks and open neck shirt bicycled Aggie to 10 Downing Street and went in asking to present our cousin with a bottle of whisky from some Jew.’ In fact, as Agnes made clear in her memoir, the bottle, which had been handed over to Mary Churchill, was ‘a litre of vintage wine, which a distinguished refugee, a Dr Wittkowsky, had kept all through the war, to be given to Winston when victory was declared.’ Another dubious story, which got back to Marjorie, was ‘that her son Desmond and his actress friend had held up the Victory Parade.’

  Ungracious and sulky, Anita told her mother that she had decided not to see Desmond and Agnes for a few years. Anita had been the most caring of sisters, a Wendy to her two lost boys, who had suffered more than she had from their slapdash parenting. Now Desmond no longer needed her. He was loved by a beautiful and talented woman and, perhaps more painful to his sister, was regarded as the family success story. He had been a Spitfire pilot for two years of the war but, in 1943, a medical check had revealed a damaged heart. Invalided out of the raf on a pension of 7/6d a week, he found a desk job, which gave him enough free time to write his first novel, Careless Lives, based on his own dashing wartime exploits. Dedicated to ‘My brother John, a Prisoner of War’, it became a bestseller when it was published in 1945.

  The war was over but Anita and her ambulance were still needed in Germany. There were no more wounded soldiers to be rescued from the battlefield but, instead, the French survivors of Nordhausen labour camp who had been moved to a makeshift sanatorium when the camp had been liberated in April. Three ambulances, including Anita’s, set out to make the 300-mile journey eastwards across Germany to Nordhausen in the Hartz mountains, now in the American zone. The ambulancières had thought that Nordhausen ‘might be a hospital where French workers too ill to travel would be waiting for transport’. Only when they saw ‘a kind of huge football goal’ and were told that it was the gibbet from which forty corpses used to dangle at a time did they realize what had gone on there. Anita described Nordhausen as an extermination camp but, although people starved to death there or died because of horrific experiments carried out on them, it was in fact a forced labour camp. Ill or dying prisoners were often sent to camps such as Buchenwald to be slaught
ered en masse. At Nordhausen the prisoners, who included French political deportees, had made parts for the infamous V-2s. Every month one thousand of the workers died from starvation and exhaustion. ‘This suited the Nazis,’ Anita wrote bitterly. ‘They didn’t want too many people who were not quite of their own sort.’ This sentence seems to be an oblique reference to Jews but Jews would probably have been sent directly to the crematoria. The ‘shivering, exhausted wretches’ whom Anita saw in what was by then a transit camp were Dutch, Italian and Polish prisoners.

  The ambulances were to bring fifteen patients back to France, although these men had only a few weeks to live. The American officer in charge of the operation said: ‘I’d rather see men dead than looking like that.’ During the two-day journey back across the Rhine, Anita and her colleagues, with great tenderness, dealt with the blood and diarrhoea, which made the ambulances smell intolerably. This was much worse than digging wounded men out of the snow in Colmar under the eye of German tanks. At the end of that terrible journey, on a night glowing with golden light, Anita wrote, ‘better if the whole earth remained desolate as the moon if this is all mankind can make of it’. Geneviève, her co-driver, said: ‘Nothing could ever matter again after this, could it?’