11 OCTOBER 1940, Page 10

SOUVENIR DE BOULOGNE

By W. E. WOOSNAM-JONES

ONE could see her any day of the week in what we called the " Officers Club " at Boulogne, the big spidery building which had been the Restaurant of the Gare Maritime down at the docks. Today it lies a tangled smoking heap of wreckage, but in the days when there was a B.E.F. still in France it was a favourite place to dump one's kit and snatch a hasty meal between the leave-boat and the train. She used to sit in a sort of mahogany pulpit half-way down the room, with two large ledgers and an enormous cash-book before her. The room would suddenly fill with a shouting, pushing crowd of hungry travel-stained officers weighed down with heavy equip- ment, in the pandemonium the fat little manager and his handful of sweating, over-worked waiters would strive desperately to cope with the flood of urgent orders which poured in upon them, but in all that noise and hurly-burly she never once raised her head.

You could see her type all over France—short, stocky, sallow-faced, with masses of coarse black hair—behind every counter, in every store, at every desk, working stolidly ten and twelve hours a day for a few hundred francs a month. There she sat, bent over her precious account-books from morning to night, endlessly filling in long red and blue columns of tiny figures, page after page of sous and centimes, all carefully added and totalled and checked and counter-checked until one's head reeled watching her. But one didn't watch her long. She was just part of the furniture.

I saw her on May loth. The German armies were pouring over the neutral frontiers like water through a broken dam. Those of us on leave were hurriedly returning to our units. Our boat left Dover with the A.A. guns banging at an enemy machine high in the clear sunlit sky. As we came into Boulogne clouds of fat black smoke were rising lazily from the outskirts where the first enemy raids had already struck home. We filed down the gangway, looking round us curiously. There were few people about, and a curious hush over the usually busy port. Suddenly the sirens wailed, the nearby guns opened heavily, and everyone ran for shelter. Two of us hurried through the restaurant to reach an abri on the other side. Little marble-topped tables lay overturned on the floor, the bar was untenanted, the long room was deserted. No, not deserted. One person was still there. Unmoved by the noise and uproar outside, she was still there, still sitting at her desk on its queer high pedestal, imperturbable, alone, only the steady movement of her pen showing that she was a living figure. A scurrying waiter broke cover, swerved across the room, tapped her on the shoulder urgently, and gesticulated imperiously. She raised her head slowly, looked at him without the faintest flicker of interest, and bent over her books again. Her pen began again to move slowly down those endless rows of figures, and butside the raving guns made a crescendo of sound. The waiter shrugged his shoulders helplessly and ran for cover. And my companion turned. " By God," he said " Look there. There's the spirit of France for you. That's what broke the Boche at Verdun, and that's what's going to break him again." I nodded, and we turned towards the shelter. But this time we didn't run. We walked. We walked slowly too, somewhat defiantly and, if the truth be told, just a little ashamedly. Behind us a pen went on moving.

I saw her just once again. It was many days later, and many things had happened. They had been days of wild and terrible fighting, when morning after morning our machines went up to face desperate odds of sixty, eighty and a hundred to one, when day after day our pilots came home with riddled and crippled aircraft—came home riding on lorries and tanks, came limping home on foot, and, in the end, came not home at all. The French Armies broke, the German mechanised divisions thrust through to Abbeville and the sea, and- turned North to pour up the Channel coast. Our aerodromes by now were bombed and useless, our pilots mostly missing or dead. We received orders to try to get the men of the squadrons out through Boulogne before the Germans got there. We did it by the skin of our teeth. For long, weary hours we crawled through pitiful and endless columns of refugees, stumb- ling blindly westward. We passed through towns and villages where all order had completely broken down and chaos reigned. We saw and knew nothing of that France which was being betrayed by her leaders and her politicians. But we saw a France which was strangled and dying in the coils of red tape and petty bureaucracy. We saw the gendarmes and police who should have been trying to canalise the refugees and keep some order on the roads busy with their notebooks taking down the licence-numbers of all the cars which passed them. We saw Maires and Town Clerks insisting on Permis de &lour and Cartes d'Identite when children were dying of hunger and exhaustion on their pave- ments. We saw petty hidebound bureaucracy and petty un- imaginative officialdom reaching its finest flower on the ruins of a dying country. And our hearts were sick within us. For the first time we realised that France might be beaten.

In Boulogne fires raged, and on the last night the dive- bombers of the enemy rained their bombs on the devoted city. The dawn broke, and the boats came alongside the quays. Tons of high explosive were hastily unloaded for the demolitions. On the outskirts the Welsh Guards were already fighting desperately to cover the evacuation. On. the quay our waiting men stood quietly and steadily until they could file up the gangways. German reconnaissance machines came over high up, scouting for the dreaded dive-bombers, and were engaged by hurtling fighters while the A.A. guns boomed round us. There was little for us to do but wait. Presently a trickle of wounded came down to the boats, competently escorted by orderlies and attendants. The sun blazed mercilessly from a cloudless heaven and some of the wounded cried for water—the age-old cry of the wounded all the world over. There would be water on the boats, but we could anticipate a little. So I hurried into the restaurant. There would be water there. Just as I entered, the guns outside redoubled their wild fury, the building rocked, and acrid fumes of burning swept in. Half deafened by the pandemonium outside, I looked across the room and—yes—she was still there, still sitting in that ridiculous mahogany pulpit, with a little electric light shining on her account books, still adding up those endless columns of sous and centimes.

In my mind I cursed her as she sat there adding up her columns of niggling little figures, heedless that outside men were dying and wounded were call;ng for water and her country was falling in ruin around her. And in her I cursed the France which had lost its soul and put in its place a dry dusty volume of Rules and Regulations, the France which was guided (God save the word) not by the Maid of Lorraine, but by thousands of miserable self-centred little leather- bottoms who clung feverishly to their jobs and sat on their stools and strangled their country in rolling coils of red tape, and in her I cursed the whole tribe of intriguers and job-holders and blind bureaucrats who let their country go down in ruin provided they could pile up their precious paperasserie and their dossiers and all the rest of their cursed paraphernalia. I got my water and I hurried out. I never saw her again.

Many people in this country, saddened and bewildered. are asking what is the real spirit of France today and what does the future hold for her. It is a riddle I cannot answer. But know one thing That woman was, and is, the spirit of France. But was my friend right in what he saw and admired in het on May roth? Or was I right in what, embittered 'and over wrought perhaps,- I cursed in her a fortnight later? I cannot tell. But the answer to this question is undoubtedly the answer to the riddle of France.