Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

  The Corps de Ballet seems to have fluttered about for some hours at The Hague, not knowing which way to go. At last, the “Authorities” (those unseen powers whose voices fall, in times of crisis, like loud speakers from above) ordered them to get into a coach, which would convey them to a port. Darkness fell while they were travelling. Aeroplanes roared overhead, and the coach was ordered off the road. The Company found itself deposited before a dark, closed door, and they were told to “ go into the hotel”. They peered in. It was crowded. Not a crack remained, capable of holding the slimmest figure of a dancing girl. Besides which, the lounge smelt unpleasantly stuffy. The dancers decided that a night in the garden was more inviting; but as the night went on, it grew very chilly, and the girls huddled together, and shivered under their coats.

  The place had the sweetly sounding name of Velsen, but in the thick darkness, nothing could be seen of it. Here and there, the shades of night were deepened by what seemed to be groups of great chestnut trees; and then again, the water of a tiny canal made a fleeting gleam of light. The girls walked about to keep warm, and their little footsteps disturbed birds or small animals, which scampered or flew away at the approach of these unaccustomed night-walkers.

  Very gradually the dawn began, and an incredible sight was slowly revealed. The garden in which the ballet girls had passed the night must have belonged to a bird fancier. While the ashen twilight of morning still gave a ghostly quality to everything which it touched, movements all about, in the shrubs and trees, showed that life was awakening with the day. By degrees, these movements became visual, and then it could be seen that the garden was peopled with white birds. Ducks swooped on to the surface of the stream, and swam away leaving a shimmering line of white water in their wake. White pigeons peered from the pigeon cote, to soar upwards and to swirl round and round while their sleepy mates gurgled and coo’ed within. Big white pheasants crowed harshly as they suddenly woke, and then, with a loud rustle they left their roosting-places in the trees. Pure white cocks and hens walked quickly across the grass, as if bent on some important business, and a crowd of white turkeys began to gobble. A magnificent white peacock spread his tail, which followed behind him like an Emir’s fan, as he made his royal progress through the grounds. A few seagulls flew rhythmically towards the coast; and down the little stream, one solitary black swan moved with supreme dignity and in complete silence, ignoring the presence of any other living creature in the garden.

  Strangest of all, a little herd of white deer awoke, and, standing on their hind legs, they made their breakfast off the upper boughs of the shrubs.

  I was spellbound by this amazing picture; and I could hardly listen to the story of the rest of that journey to England, though the other listeners found it very entertaining. I gathered that the Corps de Ballet had crossed on the upper deck of a Channel boat, from which vantage-ground they looked down upon the lower deck, packed with refugees, all very hungry. Like the ballet girls, they too had had nothing to eat for many hours, and now they showed great impatience at the length both of their journey and of their fast. I expect they felt even more impatient when, by one of those strange illusions well known to Balletomanes, the ballet Company floated over their heads on a bridge laid from the upper deck to the platform; and so they were the first to taste the homely and comforting cup of English strong tea, which seems to be offered to every returning exile.

  Another girl at our party had been one of four English drivers attached to a Polish ambulance, operating in France during the spring of 1940. They spent most of April and May in what she described as “ a hideous camp in lovely Brittany’’, where they felt that their war was, if anything, rather too peaceful. Most of the day, they waited for orders outside the hospital; and towards evening they were sent to collect sick or wounded from first aid posts scattered over a large area of beautiful country. They found the Polish officers quartered in pleasant roomy old châteaux, where they were invited to dine in the Messes before picking up their cases. They spent their off days wandering in the deep woods nearby, and sitting about with their books. They were quite cut off from the world, and knew absolutely nothing of the tragedy which was preparing in France. Life seemed to be a peaceful voyage down a quiet little stream; and when some Americans told them that the French were retreating, “their words seemed to them as idle tales”. Then, one day, they saw a big Canadian convoy on its way inland from the coast; and a few days later, they met it again, coming back. The girl who was telling us the story knew one of these Canadian officers. It was the first of many unexpected meetings between old friends which occurred during those days when all the world seemed to be wandering about, lost. She went to him, and asked him where he was going. He was amazed to find her in this remote corner of France.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.

  She said she was driving an ambulance for the Polish Army.

  “Get into my car and come with us. The French have gone, and I must get my men away. We had only just arrived. But you must leave at once. We’ll hold up the transport for a bit, so that your party can join us.”

  This revelation was the first warning of danger which had reached the party, but it was quite impossible for the drivers to leave their unit. They decided, however, to return to their headquarters, and to ask to see the General. He sent his staff out of the room and said:

  “Tell me what you know.”

  The driver then told him what she had heard from her Canadian friend, and the General replied that the Polish Army knew nothing at all of any French retreat. He told her to keep silent about this report, and then he took her to a small room where they found some of the staff. They drank glasses of Russian tea together, and all agreed that the Canadians must have been deceived by a fifth column rumour, and that what really was happening was that “le Front approche”.

  The party now returned to the headquarters of their ambulance, and found that other drivers, who had been sent out earlier in the day, had not returned. Everything seemed mysterious and unpleasant.

  In the evening, in the little cafe where they usually had supper, they had another unexpected meeting with an old acquaintance. This was an English woman who had been sent over to bring back some A.T.S., who were manning a mobile canteen. She said, “You must come to St. Malo with us. The War Office has ordered all English women to leave France.”

  Now the Matron in charge of the ambulance was consulted, and she decided that they were under Polish orders, and could not go back to England without leave.

  So the last link with home was broken, and the A.T.S. parry went away, saying as they left:

  “Any message for your mother?”

  “Only love.”

  That was the end of that. The four ambulance drivers felt that they were now the only English women left in France.

  The sirens screeched all through the night, and in the morning, the Matron approached the Polish General, asking for further orders. The château occupied by the staff seemed completely normal. A butler and two footmen conducted them to a small drawing-room hung with priceless tapestry, in which the General, wearing a mackintosh, was bending over a map. He seemed preoccupied, and, without looking up, he said only five words:

  “These ladies must not go.”

  That was the last they saw of him.

  The ambulance party now seemed quite marooned. For one whole day, they sat calmly in the hospital, rolling bandages, and then the drivers received a fresh order. The hospital at Rennes was reported as being evacuated, and they were to drive there and secure any medical stores which might be left behind. Someone seemed to have decided that this unit should continue to face the enemy, in their corner of Brittany.

  Rennes was an amazing sight. The enormous camp outside the town was deserted, leaving only one sentry at the gate. Food remained uneaten on the tables, and half-cooked in the kitchens. Clothes were littered on the ground, and letters lay on the tables. Columns of black smoke hung over the town, and when they reac
hed the barracks to which they were sent to find the medical stores, no one seemed to have time to attend to them. The town itself had become a dead town. Footsteps echoed in the silent streets, which looked as long-ago deserted as the empty streets of Pompeii. The story of that day, and of the following ones, was like a confused nightmare.

  There was the sudden apparition, in the empty streets of Rennes, of four British soldiers with blackened faces and clothes, asking, in a broad Lancashire dialect, for the ambulance to carry away some wounded from a train which had just been blown up in the station. There was the hospital ward crowded with wounded, many of them only half bandaged, with no one to attend to them. And at last there was the room where the medical stores—tons of them—were found at last, and in which, as they came in, a telephone bell was pealing. They lifted the receiver.

  “Evacuate at once.”

  Now, everything the ambulances could hold was hastily hurled into them. Aeroplanes roared above them as they drove back thus laden; and then they were told to return at once to save more stores from falling into enemy hands. Before they could start, the Germans were already in the town.

  A night of confusion followed. Five or six times, they had orders to pack their ambulances and to be ready to leave at once. Five or six times came the order to unpack and go to bed. The Major ordered them to leave. The Colonel forbade it. The Major left. The Colonel said that no nurses must follow his example. The Matron waited ready to obey orders from the Polish staff, but none were issued. Meanwhile the men were seeping away, and by morning the camp was almost empty. Then the milkman appeared, bringing with him his normal peace-time atmosphere. He left a pint of milk, and went off whistling. The nurses filled their thermos flasks for any emergency. They seemed to be almost alone, but at any rate, they had stayed together. A few officers were still in the camp to decide on what action should be taken, and when, but they had absolutely no outside intelligence to guide them.

  At about eleven o’clock in the morning, a tiny car arrived, driven by a French officer, who, when he saw them, said most emphatically:

  “You must go. Being British you will be taken prisoners at once, the Germans are now two miles off.”

  Again the Matron went to seek orders from the Polish authorities and when she came back, she said, with her eyes fixed on the ground, “We can leave at once”. Even then she had probably received no, definite orders. These Poles had been left, like Casabianca, with orders to stay where they were, and they could not bring themselves to give in. But now the English drivers leapt into the ambulances and shot out of the gates on to the road to Bordeaux.

  The crowded French roads during those weeks of the Retreat, have been often described; and on these, there were also the three thousand Poles from their own camp, as well as many men of the French Air Force, trying to get to England. These men kept hanging on to the back of the ambulances so as to get a short lift on their way. Now the ambulances were warned not to go on to Nantes, which was already in enemy hands, but to turn west for St. Nazaire. The Loire there is very wide, and it was expected that the French might make a stand on this river, for there seemed to be a touching faith in an old prophecy that this was where the enemy would be checked.

  At St. Nazaire, while they were asking for the transport officer to give them a pass over the Loire ferry, an English tommy said, “Excuse me, Madam, I think I have seen you before”. It was yet another unexpected rencontre. This was an ex-footman of Lady Cunard’s, and as they waited for this life and death permission to cross into safety, they conversed politely about the many friends they used to meet in Grosvenor Square in the old days.

  Suddenly it was announced that the last ferry-boat would leave in five minutes’ time, from the far end of the town. The drivers sprang to their seats, and dashed at full speed through the streets, arriving with three minutes to spare. The runway was already packed with cars, but the ambulances had priority which they hoped would carry them through. Eight or nine other cars were in the same (as they hoped) fortunate position, but now they all got into a hopeless block. The cars were so crowded together, that if anyone moved an inch, there was an alarming sound of breaking mudguards, in spite of which, people continued to move on, leaving torn-off fragments of their cars behind. Many screaming hysterical Frenchwomen added to the pandemonium, and in this impossible position they stayed, not for the expected three minutes, but for eighteen maddening hours.

  When they were almost in despair, there appeared on the scene a padre who had been blown up in the train at Rennes, and had since walked to St. Nazaire. At the same moment some British soldiers arrived. Their ship had been sunk in the port, and they now had no clothes at all. Some were promptly found among the stores in the ambulance, and in these the padre clothed the men, and he then took them off with him to cross by boat, taking also the young Polish nurses, who were a great responsibility to the ambulance party. The English drivers remained on the runway, being told by the French that if the Germans approached, they must at once put on mufti and walk down the road to meet them, saying that they were Americans who had been left behind.

  It was now getting dark, and they unpacked an enormous ham from their stores, which they shared with everyone within reach. This was quite a gay episode. All night, a distracting and extraordinary noise went on—the screaming sound of a machine cutting steel in the dock nearby, where a ship was still actually being built. And all night too, explosions shook the town.

  When darkness was at its deepest, a French officer gave them orders to empty the ambulance, and to move it where it could be set up as a barricade. No sooner was this done than a terrific raid began, and they all had to crawl under the ambulance, where strange faces met strange faces in a still stranger proximity. The Matron was now very calm and encouraging. She had been under fire before.

  During the night, they were told to put their civilian clothes under their uniform, in case they had to appear suddenly in mufti; and then they were informed they would leave by the first morning ferry-boat. They distributed some of their tinned food among the French soldiers, who opened the tins with their bayonets, and swallowed the contents without cooking; and then the exhausted drivers snatched some uneasy sleep in their ambulances.

  Early in the morning the ferry began to work, but every time the boat appeared, the ambulances were crowded out. They shared the fete of the Sick Man at the Pool at Bethesda, whose experience was that “ While I am coming, another steppeth down before me”. They were pushed out every time, by cars which wrenched away parts of any vehicles in their path, in order to break through and reach the ferry-boat first. It was chaos.

  Now there reappeared their friend the padre, and he soon got into touch with a transport officer, who combed out the cars ahead and placed them second in the rank, saying that the next boat would be the last to cross. It was an unbelievable moment. The eighteen hours of that frantic struggle were ended. They moved freely on to the ferry, and were carried calmly across the river. What did it matter to them that they were received on the other side by a fresh raid, with bombs falling all round them? It felt no more alarming than a short sharp rainstorm.

  The padre now mounted the front seat of the ambulance, and guided them to La Rochelle. On either side of the road, the ditches were piled up with cars which had run out of petrol, and so had been abandoned. The heat now grew so intense that the Matron could no longer bear the journey in that oven-like ambulance, with every garment she possessed packed upon her back. She made them stop while she took off some of her superfluous layers of clothes, and while this was going on, came another unexpected meeting. A woman’s voice hailed them: “What can I do for you?”

  It was the head of the committee, under which they had worked when they first reached Paris, a time which now seemed a century before.

  This lady escorted them to the Mairie, and to look for the various town officials who could help them to get away. Every office was empty. All had gone to the port. They followed to the quay-side, where they we
re taken to the transport officer, who greeted them with these crushing words:

  “You are too late. The British Navy has gone. You must go on to Bordeaux.”

  It was vain to reply that they had no petrol left, and that an attempted journey to Bordeaux must inevitably land them in one of those roadside ditches, among those abandoned cars. This did seem the end.

  But at this darkest moment, it appeared that the British Navy had not gone. It was still there. It always will be.

  Two British naval officers arrived. They were still combing the country for any English left behind; and they said that their ships were leaving immediately from a point five miles away. “Can you quickly collect all your party?”

  But when they heard that the party consisted partly of six Polish nurses, then the officers looked rather blank. Their orders were to collect only British subjects. No foreigners at all. However, nothing really disturbed their control of the situation. They told the drivers to come with them, and to explain the case to the Captain; and if he consented, the nurses could then be brought on board.

  Now they had to smash up their ambulances and to get into the officers’ boat, leaving the nurses behind. It was agony to do this, and everyone on shore seemed to be weeping, but the calmness of those naval officers was a tower of strength.

  When they reached the ship, they were at once fortified by some cups of that famous strong black tea, which they drank while the Captain sent back for the nurses, and also for some Jewish girls who were with them. They had literally been the last party to be brought away; and now they were packed cosily like sardines on the floor of a cabin, and they were told that they would leave at midnight. There was a great sense of safety in being subject to the time-table of a British warship: no more would three minutes turn into eighteen hours. They were ordered to sail at midnight. And they did.