Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  In Geneva after his death I called on the solicitor, who must have concluded that I was the dead Count’s mistress. He found my story as surprising as I had found his news. Mr Martin had known the old gentleman intimately, known him as the sanest of men, a devout Catholic, a philanthropist, one who had made a good end and was mourned by the Church and all who knew him. He showed me the will that left all that he died possessed of to me, or, should I predecease him, to my son. During the war he had added a codicil leaving a few thousand pounds that lay in another bank to orphan children and re-emphasising that no member of his family should touch a penny of his fortune. The story is strange and rather moving. I wish I had never met him.

  Naturally by law his two old sisters inherited part of the sum. The Swiss and English Governments grabbed most of the rest. I would have loved to thank him, more for his dreams than for the little residue that ultimately came to me. I will, if I get to Heaven, for he is there I am sure, trying to evade his sisters.

  *

  How bitterly cold it was in Paris. I felt warm only in bed or in the car. There was little other than official transport. Our dinner-guests might walk several kilometres in rain and slush. In England we had not suffered in this way. If one went to the theatre in Paris one took a hot-water-bottle for one’s lap. At concerts the orchestra wore greatcoats, hats and mittens, and the pianist had a brazier of glowing charcoal beside him to keep his hands usable.

  Our satanic Freddie Fane of Algiers days, of whom I was so fond, slipped on the icy pavement, broke his frail thigh and died of subsequent pneumonia. Very sad; and sad too that Edouard Bourdet, the director of the Comédie Française and brilliant star in the constellation of La Bande, should die suddenly. I remember sitting up in my gilded bed, the red silk counterpane scattered with sprigs of bay torn from a shaped tree in the garden and wiring them into a wreath for his obsequies.

  Economy again had me in its grip; the money exchange was grotesque. Everyone except the British Embassy used black-market rates, but I had to pay thirty pounds for a pair of shoes and seventy pounds for a lunch for eight.

  I was made the godmother of the First Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique. It meant supplying the soldiers with cigarettes, rugs, raincoats and other comforts, plus spirits for the officers. Luckily we had our arch-scrounger, the Sergeant-Major, to diminish the cost. A visit to them at the front was to be undertaken as soon as the great cold had passed. I hoped it might coincide with John Julius’s Easter holidays in early April and it fortunately did. General de Lattre was the First Army commander, so we would be in his reliable charge; and de Lattre had endeared himself to me in the glad days of Algiers.

  I wrote on 8 April to Conrad:

  I am going to dictate this letter to you, as I only got back last night and am leaving again tomorrow morning for our wearisome provincial tour, but I must tell all about going into battle.

  John Julius, Teddie Phillips and I left at nine in the morning in Teddie’s smart Bentley car. I looked awful in a tartan coat and postman’s cap. John Julius wore his O.T.C. khaki battledress and forage-cap, Eton College ablaze on his sleeve. Teddie’s seven foot of good R.N. tailoring gave us tone. Behind sat a useless Marine; he couldn’t drive and he chain-smoked.

  Hardly an hour out of Paris this famous Bentley broke down, but I had a nice time picking cowslips while the others fiddled with the valves. Off again to a place called Ligny-en-Barrois, which my old Michelin told me had a “table renommée.” We ate a not bad meal, and when we asked for the bill the first ray of the sun of General de Lattre fell upon us, for Madame said we were the guests of the General and brought out her livre d’or for signatures. How de Lattre could have known that I would choose that hotel to lunch at is incomprehensible.

  On again, the motor spluttering and limping a bit till we reached Strasbourg. The villages had been getting more and more demolished, and Strasbourg itself was quite a mess—worse than Bristol—the cathedral untouched, and yet every house around it flat. We were taken by the General in command to a nice little villa, which was ours for the nonce, and, it being then half-past seven, we washed and went to dinner with General Schwartz at eight. This was a fairly gloomy little affair, because the real General—du Vigier—in command at Strasbourg had been called away to consult with General Patch. Shells were falling not very often—in fact, I never heard one because I took a blue scarab and slept like a log—but there were three or four in the night.

  Early next morning we were off again—this time in a more reliable army car—to Kandel, the Headquarters of the French First Army; guards of honour wherever you looked. We were conducted to another villa for us alone. Sentries at the door, but no de Lattre, who did not expect us till mid-day. To fill in time we were taken off to the Siegfried Line, which had become the popular kind of Cheddar Gorge excursion. Deep down we walked under the blockhouses into room after room of bunks, and baths, and dispensaries, kitchens, passages. The darkness was complete, and nobody seemed to have a torch, so it was a case of striking matches and looking for loot. The loot was perfectly ridiculous—tin helmets, an electric globe, a rifle, some beer-mugs, and roll upon roll of highly prized bumf which we packed into as many tin hats as we could carry. After this collection was made it was mid-day, and we returned to Kandel to meet the General. Villages round here completely broken; very few civilians; what men there were cap in hand, clearly frightened. Difficult not to feel sorry for them, but as our car had a siren exactly like the London alert, it kept me reminded how much they had made us suffer. De Lattre is a dynamic man; glints of Winston and Max, and Monty; more streamlined than any of them; everything done full speed ahead. A lot of troops were lined up, which he told me to inspect immediately. This was very embarrassing for me, as I had no idea how to do it. Duckling once told me he looked every man full in the eyes. I tried, but no eye would meet mine. One feels one ought to say “Bravo” or “Well dressed, sir.”

  We lunched with the General Staff, which included a jolly tartaned Colonel called Aitken, and Bill Bullitt, former U.S. Ambassador to France, now a French staff-officer. John Julius became the clue and mainstay of this alarming lunch, for the General got interested in public-school systems, and turned the machine-gun on to him. John Julius rose to the occasion, plunged into limping French, and really did very well. De Lattre couldn’t hear enough about whipping, fagging and calling “boy.” In fact he was calling his staff “boy” for the rest of the trip. John Julius he called “Mon vieux,” paradoxically enough.

  At two o’clock we started for the Rhine—me, John Julius, and de Lattre on the back seat—Teddie in front. We drove north to a place called Speyer, where the French had built themselves a bridge across the Rhine independently of American material—a great pride to de Lattre, who had the pontoon bridges built secretly in a forest, and put up in two days. We crossed it on foot with tremendous fanfares. Everything seemed to stand to attention—men, guns, labourers, spades, oars. The river was running very swiftly, and I was much moved. The little génie who was responsible for its building was glorified by de Lattre and told to lay everything on for our return at nine o’clock that night.

  On again, at eighty miles an hour on these narrow shell-torn roads, with alarming notices saying “Roads clear of mines up to ditches.” As we were always on the very edge of the road, and perpetually had to leave it to make a detour on account of a truck having blown up, this knowledge might have been alarming: but somehow everything went at such a pace that life and death seemed of little account. Often we would neet a General, who would jump out of his car, maps fluttering in his hands, and show de Lattre how the battle was going. We would stop and get out when we passed French prisoners tramping home with their bundles on their backs. The General would ask them how long they had been prisoners. It was always five years, and they all said “C’est le plus beau jour de ma vie.” It is a victorious army, and, in consequence, everything is beaming and tremendously exhilarating. Paris is my battle-front. The western front was a holiday by c
omparison.

  Eppingen was on the fringe of the battle, and we stood like Generals in War and Peace on a little knoll, watching the village (less than a kilometre away) being taken; bombers and fighters overhead, and a good deal of Generals studying maps on what I like to think were drums, white puffs of smoke as shells exploded and a lot of artillery noise. I did not like to ask from where they were firing or at what, but fear wasn’t present that day. We moved on to a village still nearer—in fact in the battle. Houses were still flaming, prisoners being rounded up, hands held high in a Jewish gesture. I was fascinated by the prisoners. They looked a bit scared, but, I am sorry to say, in splendid condition. In this village we were supposed to find my Premiers Chasseurs d’Afrique, but the entire regiment was “engagé.” They had left one token officer behind to explain, so perhaps I saved somebody’s life. From here we motored for two hours south, calling all the way at divisional headquarters. Absurdly like a picture it was—Generals muttering “C’est très dur” and “Ici nous sommes en pleine bagarre;” their fingers on maps, tracing the life and death of regiments.

  We came to Karlsruhe as the light was waning. Very little of that rich town was left and the houses were still blazing. No light; no water; no gas; but the Headquarters brought its electric plant with it. We were all getting a bit hungry by nine, but food was never mentioned by the General and we continued to call on lesser Generals in little half-ruined German houses, sweeping maps, and changing orders, cutting the coat for the cloth.

  Crossing the Rhine at midnight was the most theatrically beautiful thing I have every seen. The Rhine was illuminated by the strongest, bluest possible floodlight, the kind of light that shone in Green Park in the blitz days. Silhouetted against this blaze was the broken skeleton of the blown bridge—enormous deformity. The swirling water itself was as bright as molten silver, and across the new bridge, almost level with the waves, we walked as though on the water—a Wagnerian scene. All the soldiers, engineers, oarsmen, in a state of frenzied salute—trembling hand and glazed eye. Midstream the chief engineer asked me to baptise his pennant. He called it “fanion,” a word I didn’t know, so that when I said “Bien volontiers,” I had no idea what I was going to baptise. It turned out to be a pretty little silk flag on a long wand, which I solemnly dipped into the Rhine water and so baptised it. I thought it was nice of de Lattre, who was very “France-conscious,” so obviously delighted that no hand but a French hand had touched the bridge, to allow an Englishwoman this gesture.

  We drove back at 80 m.p.h. to the H.Q. through a forest, to the accompaniment of a siren, and a C.-in-C.’s fanion fluttering above us, all lights up. “It won’t be safe in another ten days to drive this way,” said the General. “Why?” “Because it’s thick with Germans and soon they will lose their fear and organise themselves to resist.” We got home at 12.45 to find the staff very long-faced, Bill Bullitt’s rosy smiles quite gone. I attributed these altered expressions to hunger but discovered them to be caused by alarm. They had given us up for dead or kidnapped; they guessed we had taken the forest road where in the last few days two staff-officers and five other officers had been taken and not heard of again. What a dreadful thing to have happened to us at this stage of the war. Everyone at the supper was exhausted. The General’s half-face had dropped with one closed eye. Teddie, in spite of sleeping in the car, was falling, face-down into his plate. John Julius, flushed with success and excitement, seemed, I thought, a little tight. It came to its weary close at 2 a.m. and we got to very comfortable beds, and a high-spirited waking on April 6. The blossoms and the ruins together were stirringly sad—the weather was sublime. At ten the General was to come for leave-taking; he was half an hour late, so I reviewed a guard of honour to fill in time. When he ultimately came, he said he couldn’t find the house. I think he had overslept. He worked till 4 a.m., and claimed he was up at eight.

  Back at Strasbourg, we sat down to lunch with the General who had been absent two days before—du Vigier, a man of great charm. The lunch was purely staff and towards its end, in the course of conversation, he asked me with an unchanged voice, “si je voulais bien lui faire une commission,” which developed gradually, imperceptibly, into a three or four minute speech. One by one the guests and staff stopped talking to listen and mop their eyes. He spoke in burnished French of the gratitude Strasbourg (he is the Governor) owed to England and what Winston had done to save the town, when in early January the Supreme Command’s plan had been to evacuate it, and he had come over to Paris to pep them all into courage again and to persuade them to hold out. (Duff had pepped Winston, incidentally.) He spoke of England’s glory in not having tasted bitter shame (I thought of Singapore!), and poor France’s honte, and would I convey Strasbourg’s gratitude to Mr Churchill. Really excellent it was, and done in such a civilised way, without gavel or “Ladies and Gentlemen,” or on hind legs.

  The Embassy looked like the spring. The Verrières orchard in blossom had marched in to welcome our arrival. We were laden with amusing loot, for at Strasbourg a pretty French AT, accompanied by an A.D.C., arrived panting from H.Q. with a letter from de Lattre, apologising for having kept me waiting for les adieux, and with it a magnificent German axlet to hang on the waist, gleaming and smart (must have been Goering’s), also a bright red flag with swastika imposed, so we made a brave entrance to the Embassy with rifle and helmets and toilet-paper and beer-mugs. J.J., Raimund and I dined at Victor Rothschild’s and looked at his museum of concealed bombs—wonderful. Bombs in bits of coal, in turnips, in logs; one cannot imagine how they were found or how Victor dared open them.

  Then, as so-called relief, our duties took us on provincial visits. These were no less exhausting than the Paris grind. The first took us to Lyons. We might have been the King and Queen. Even the Cathedral bells had been taught to chime “God Save the King” as the Cardinal Archbishop received us in his sanctum. At Lyons Duff was made a Doctor of the University, as he was in several other of the great towns of France. On to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Avignon, where we heard to our grief that President Roosevelt was dead; to waterish Burgundy that runs with wine for innumerable tastings, to Lille and Tourcoing in the north, to devastated Caen and Falaise, to Strasbourg again, where fine girls, red-skirted beneath the vast black bows on their heads, marched in the Triumph beside the victorious Generals, to St Malo, to Poitiers, to the Bravade at St Tropez, to Angers, where I carried the flag alone and scored a hundred shining marks. Roses, roses, and laurels all the way, and National Anthems and garde-à-vous, tears of emotion, que Dieu vous garde.

  At Marseilles John Julius and I fought military vetos and nonsenses till they broke with boredom and allowed us to fly for a few days to Algiers that I had so fondly loved, alone in an aircraft for sixty that plied twice daily to and fro to no purpose whatever. Ghostly, and the ghost of old Louise opened the creaking door of Jamshid’s palace. The lion and the lizard in possession. The court, once flowery, now choked with unswept leaves of that vast busy, sheltering tree, the garden unfrequented. To this day that white town rings its glas in my heart. Ichabod!

  The cold increased and so did the work, with a nervous heart and a toothache thrown in. It was the most gruelling life I had ever led. Harder than being a hospital nurse or an actress or a farmhand. Far, far more exhausting and difficult. There were investitures of our King’s Medal for Courage. There were the Salvation Army and world-scientists and the princes of the Christian Churches (Rome excepted) donning their canonicals in the ballroom for a convention in the Embassy church. Football teams, academicians, the Nuncio (now Pope John XXIII), S.H.A.E.F. (who had their own clock and were therefore always an hour late or early). The B.I.F., E.N.S.A., W.V.S.—queues of alphabetical representatives; there were African consuls, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and their poodle, Colette swathed in woollen shawls with naked feet, and eyes like her own idolised cat.

  There were our eminent English writers, actors, composers, conductors. Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, T. S. Eliot, John
Lehmann, his sister Rosamond, Harold Nicolson and Raymond Mortimer must be given their own cocktail parties at which to receive the literary and musical world of Paris. Freddie Ayer lived in the house, though I did not know it for weeks, and there were Arabists and Freya Stark our dearest friend, Isaiah Berlin, Julian Huxley, Solly Zuckerman and Beatrice Eden, good and beautiful in her S.H.A.E.F. uniform. There were the Oliviers, Noël Coward, Donald Wolfit, Margot Fonteyn and our theatre Dames to be merged with Madeleine and Jean-Louis Barrault and Louis Jouvet; M.P.’s of two or three parties floated round most of the time, a bishop or two on his beat, and a steady flow of V.I.P.’s must be given receptions—lavish or homespun. Dinners must be spread for Ministers of the Resistance Government from Bidault to Thorez and also for the Corps Diplomatique.

  Dining with the Russians was the most gruelling of all evenings. Their orders were to invite their colleagues separately, so we were doomed to the same awkward square of four. Madame Bogomolov was dressed richly while I was more gaudy. We were received in the sumptuous eighteenth-century rooms, ablaze with raw electric bulbs, announced by a comfortable, rather scruffy charwoman in a cardigan. No vodka for the bad quarter of an hour. That standby arrived after we had sat down to dinner. With the hope of making us talk, toast after toast was given—the King, General de Gaulle, Winston, the Red Army, other armies, and when one said “no more,” the Ambassador would try to start us off again with “To your husband,” “To my wife.” Nothing would have drawn an indiscreet word out of Duff. He scarcely opened his mouth. On such sticky occasions I can babble and squeak ad nauseam. We used the well-worn subjects, dinner after dinner. Education, Ukrainian Universities and synthetic rubber (Madame’s speciality). I think they were just as bored as we were, and as familiarity took hold they took to speaking Russian to each other across my momentarily mute body. “What’s he saying? what’s he saying?” I’d scream and she would reply, “I tell him not to talk when you talk” or “Je lui dit—not to agacer you with his toasts,” followed by contortions of laughter as they quoted passages from Three Men in a Boat.