Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  But for James, public affairs could still transcend private ones—the habit of a lifetime is not easily broken; and the aspect which Port Vendres presented when he finally stepped ashore there that day drove all thoughts of anything else out of his head. The quay was piled high with crates of Spanish oranges, waiting for the ships which never came to carry them away to Northern Europe; much of the fruit had rotted, and the sinister velvety blue-grey of mildew showed through the slats. Among the crates, and all over the street along the water-front sat heaps—the word is really accurate—of refugees, desolate little groups piled on their miserable belongings; one or two cheap suitcases, bundles of bedding, two-handled metal cooking-pots slung over their shoulders, wretched paper parcels of clothing. They sat on the pavement, in the entries of shops and houses, at the edge of the roadway. They had broken into some of the orange-crates and pulled out the fruit that was not yet rotten and were eating it; orange-peel, strewn all over the place, added to the general effect of desolation, dirtiness and distress. Port Vendres is normally one of the most beautiful coastal towns in Europe, with its mediaeval moles and harbour-buildings silhouetted against the lovely blue of the Mediterranean in front; but on that January day James Milcom lost all sense of its beauty, it so epitomised human misery. The refugees were not going anywhere or doing anything—there was nothing for them to do and nowhere in particular for them to go; there never is, for refugees—they were just sitting where they were put, eating oranges.

  James, his suitcase in one hand and his typewriter in the other, walked round the harbour, looking for a car. The harbour-master was distractedly supervising the unloading of yet more refugees and crates of oranges from James’s and another ship, and could give no help. At a quay on the further side a French destroyer, having decanted the French Minister to Barcelona and his staff, was preparing to put to sea again to pick up another cargo of human jetsam. On the wharf behind her a big empty warehouse was receiving a fresh type of goods—derelict human beings; fresh straw had been laid down on the floors of all three storeys, and the refugees were being put in there. James, showing his Press pass, was allowed to enter. All over the ground floor men, women and children were sitting on the straw; they too were eating oranges. In a small glass-walled office one nurse and three young girls were heating tinned milk on spirit-stoves and doling it out to the younger children—in another officials were going through the wretched luggage of the Spaniards, looking for arms or compromising documents; in a third their papers were being examined to establish their identity. Every few minutes a lorry, laden with yet more of this dismal cargo, rolled in from Cerbère, dropped its load on the wharf, and roared off again. The scene on the two upper floors was a repetition of that to be witnessed downstairs. Outside, two field kitchens were theoretically producing coffee and hot soup for the people, who waited in queues, tin mugs in their hands—but the soup machine had just struck work for lack of coal. James handed the boy in charge a hundred-franc note to buy some more, and went on. There was no sanitation but to go outside, he observed; but this the refugees were not troubling to do. He fell in with one of the junior officers from the French destroyer, returning from a hurried trip by car to Cerbère. “Si nous n’en avons pas pour dix ans de typhus, cela m’étonnera,” observed this young man.

  It was through this young officer that James eventually found the car which drove him to Perpignan. He took two refugee passengers with him, an American representative of a telephone concern, and an elderly and discouraged Spanish lady, who had managed to salvage a surprising and most inconvenient amount of her personal luggage, including two typewriters, but had no French money. She offered Milcom one of the typewriters to pay for her share of the car. In the next few days he was to learn how often typewriters were proffered as currency along the French frontier.

  He went straight to the Hôtel de l’Europe where, being known to the management, he succeeded in getting a room. The hotel was already crowded out with refugees, Spanish as well as foreign, and with journalists from every part of Europe; the parrot-cage re-echoed with voices; little Spanish children ran about, yelling; women without luggage sat drooping in the chairs along the gangway, making James’s heart contract as he remembered Raquel sitting there, four months before. The one telephone by the bureau was besieged by journalists, and this feature prompted James to an astute move—he went straight into the garage next door, from which he had hired a car on his previous visits, interviewed the manager, and booked up the garage telephone from five-thirty to six-thirty p.m. every evening for the next week, paying a large sum down for the privilege. He also hired the best car available, with a tough-looking chauffeur. James had learned something about refugeeing by this time, and knew that an unattended car would stand small chance of remaining in the possession of its owner anywhere near Perpignan during the next few days. Then, having made these dispositions, he went back to the hotel to get some dinner.

  Almost the first person he met in the parrot-cage was Crumpaun, consuming a whiskey-and-soda.

  “Hullo! So you got out,” was the worthy’s salutation.

  “Yes. Where did you get that whiskey?” James asked. He knew by bitter experience that the Hôtel de l’Europe did not provide whiskey.

  “Here.” Crumpaun tapped his ample chest. “More upstairs too. Have one?”

  “And how!” said James, pulling a chair away from one of the small tables, and dropping into it beside Crumpaun, who called for another glass, and mixed him a drink from a capacious flask. “How did you get here?” James asked.

  “Drove—with Tom Hever. There’s nothing doing any more at St.-Jean. It’s a splendid drive,” said Crumpaun meditatively. “Did you drive out?”

  “God, no—boat.”

  “Her-rum. Well, I daresay we shan’t need a car. Probably pick up all we want right here.”

  “I’ve got a car,” said James. “You and Tom can come round with me if you want to.”

  “That’ll suit Tom,” said Crumpaun comfortably. “He always wants to get about. Any news of the Condesa?”

  “No,” said James bleakly.

  Next day, however, Crumpaun decided to join Hever and Milcom when they drove out to see what there was to be seen. Just as they were leaving the hotel a clerk came out with some mail for Crumpaun; he glanced at the envelopes, muttered “Time enough for that later,” and stuffed them into his pocket. It was beginning to rain as they bowled along the road which Milcom and Raquel had taken on their drive to Arles in the autumn—the start of that seventy-two-hours downpour which added so much to the misery of the refugees.

  “Where are we going?” Hever asked.

  “Le Boulou and Le Perthus,” said James, who had a map on his knee.

  A group of Gardes Mobiles stopped the car at the cross-roads outside Le Boulou, but allowed it to proceed after seeing the Press passes. They drove to the railway-station, and on the way encountered the first refugees which Hever and Crumpaun had seen: they leaned out to stare at the women carrying children, with others tagging at their heels; at wounded Republican soldiers, with grey blankets rolled round their ragged grey uniforms. Two quite young girls staggered along, carrying an immense trunk between them. The big yard in front of the station was full of refugees, and in the station itself stood a long train, already packed with humanity, into which yet more damp creatures were very slowly being stowed, to be sent off to the interior of France. Crumpaun remained in the car, but Milcom and Hever went in. Everything was in hopeless confusion: people were being put into coaches and pulled out again, families were getting separated, children howled. The train had been in the station for six hours, they learned, and would not leave for “several hours” yet. Milcom asked the harassed station-master why not, since it was already full?

  “It will not, voilà tout, Monsieur,” the man snapped.

  “What a mess,” said Hever as they left. “I didn’t realise that the French were so infernally inefficient.”

  “They’re always inefficient whe
re any money has to be spent,” James replied gloomily. “They simply can’t spend money.”

  “God help them in a war, then,” said Hever.

  “He won’t,” James replied with conviction.

  They drove on towards Le Perthus, past an improvised internment camp full of soldiers in the vineyards at the edge of the town. The road soon left the plain, and climbed gently up a long valley with a stream in the bottom of it, whose rocky slopes were thick with cork-oaks and wild olives—here and there almonds were springing into a faint flush of chill pink bloom. It rained harder than ever—Milcom and Hever, already wet, shivered; and still down the road came the refugees—old men, women with suitcases, other women carrying and dragging babies, more girls swinging trunks. “God, how their arms must ache!” Hever exclaimed.

  At Le Perthus even Crumpaun was moved to leave the car, so fantastic was the scene. The one long narrow street was crowded from end to end with refugees, between whom Gardes Mobiles, officials, sightseers and journalists pushed their way; they were sitting all over the pavements or perched on the steps of the houses, vainly seeking some shelter from the beating rain—all were wet through, and had been for many hours; some had thrown their blankets over their shoulders, others their bed-spreads (most had brought some form of bedding)—the exhausted faces of women, the drawn ones of infants, looked peculiarly wretched peering from under the gay flounces of a peasant quilt. Girls who two or three days before had still had the spirit to paint their faces now had streaks of rouge running down their necks; the white hair of the old men and women was plastered by the pitiless rain on their yellow skins. In the middle of the village the journalists came on three trucks, each mounting a field kitchen, from which several harassed and unshaven young Englishmen were doling out soup, noodles and coffee to the people who stood waiting in long queues—they received the food for the most part in two-handled copper or iron stew-pans, which almost all the refugees, as Milcom had already noticed in Port Vendres, carried slung at their backs; they then took the filled vessel over to the pavement, and the children and elders fell to, each with his own iron spoon. The stew-pans and spoons, Hever observed, seemed to be a regular part of refugee technique. But what horrified Hever and Crumpaun was the use to which the soaked wretches put the muddy yellow water of the roaring gutters, which carried a filthy burden of orange-peel, bits of paper, cigarette-ends and cess; having eaten, they rinsed out spoons and vessels alike in them, and some—thirsty, it seemed, even in the rain—actually dipped their mugs into the nauseous stream, and drank. To Milcom the whole scene had the nightmarish quality of a prophetic dream. This was whither ideologies led; to this, if ideologies spread and gripped the nations more firmly, mankind would come—to sit homeless in pouring rain, fed on charity if fed at all, and drink the contaminated waters of the gutter. God, what a spectacle for the twentieth century to produce!

  He asked an old fellow with a rather clever face who the young Ingleses were who were feeding the people.

  “Los Quaqueros,” (The Quakers) he replied.

  Being journalists, they soon managed to rout out the Captain of the Gardes Mobiles and the Mayor of the village, and questioned them. About ten thousand here now, the Mayor said, and more coming in all the time. No, no more miliciens; on an order from the Préfecture at Perpignan that had been stopped—only old men, women and children might now cross the frontier. “Ask him what’s happening to the miliciens,” Hever said. James did so. “Mais, they are up there, at the barrier—go and see them,” the Mayor said. They did so—but first James asked him also who the young Englishmen were who were feeding the multitude, and why?

  “The Quakers—they do that. It is their métier,” said the Mayor with a shrug, and turned away to answer a policeman who arrived with some question.

  They walked on up towards the pass itself. On either side the hills, sparsely covered with green and dripping cork-oaks, rose into the clouds; over them smoke puffed up here and there, mingling with the wreaths of fog and cloud—from the camp-fires of the troops and Gardes Mobiles who were posted there to prevent the passage of the Spanish soldiers, so a weary Lieutenant told Milcom. “But further along, they are coming in all the time, arms and all, by the mule-tracks,” he said. “Que voulezvous? La frontière est un peu vaste par ici.”

  The scene at the barrier, when at last they reached it, was horrible beyond description. A stout wire rope was drawn across the road and beyond it on both sides, in all for some four hundred yards; on the French side of this stood a company of Senegalese troops with fixed bayonets, their black-coffee-coloured faces seamed with tribal initiatory scars, grinning with cheerful African idiocy. On the Spanish side stood a solid block of human beings, four hundred yards square, packed vertically like sardines in a tin, forced by steady pressure from behind towards the barrier, France, and safety; from them rose a ceaseless roar of appeal, fury and despair, like the howling of a million wolves. It was the most horrible sight, the most horrible sound, that the three Englishmen had ever seen or heard.

  “Christ!” said Hever, appalled. “Blast the French!”

  “They can’t help it; they can’t very well let them all in,” said Crumpaun reasonably.

  “They could if they chose,” said Hever. He was right; a few days later they did—for a reason.

  Hever and Milcom climbed the slope towards the old fortress, where several hundred miliciens were already interned, till they could look down over the mountain road leading into Spain. The first nine kilometres were a solid block of motor-cars, waiting in the hope of being allowed to pass into France. Wet through, the two men returned to the village. In their absence Crumpaun had effected a scoop—he had met and interviewed Del Vayo, the Republican Minister, who had got out on foot.

  “Where’s he gone?” Hever asked.

  “Down to Perp.,” Crumpaun replied.

  “Let’s go after him,” Hever said urgently to Milcom.

  “All right—go on and get the car turned. I want to talk to these fellows for a moment,” said Milcom—by this time they had pushed their way back as far as the food kitchens.

  Acting on the assumption that they were in fact Quakers, as the Mayor had said, Milcom merely asked the young men with the trucks how they were getting on.

  “Oh, it’s enough to break your heart,” one of them said, handing his tin soup-dipper to a girl with a weary—“Here, Suzanne, get to it. You been up to the rope?” he asked Milcom. “They’ve been like that for twenty-four hours. Out behind it there are women and children dying of hunger and exposure, and we can’t do a thing for them, though we’ve got five tons of chocolate and tinned milk and sardines over there”—he waved his hand at two more trucks, parked by the roadside and guarded by Senegalese. “We tried yesterday and again this morning—yelled at them through megaphones in Spanish to make way and let us through and we’d feed them. But it wasn’t any good—they’re raving mad. As soon as we walked in with the cases on our shoulders they nearly murdered us—tore them down and broke them open, and fought, so everything was trampled to pulp in the mud in five minutes. No one got a bite.”

  “Couldn’t you have gone in with an escort?—the Gardes Mobiles are pretty efficient,” Milcom asked.

  “So you’d think! No, the French mustn’t cross the frontier—unneutral act! Even in an emergency like this,” said the young man bitterly. “But we’re doing a job, all the same. Seen our hospital?” He led James across the street to the village school, where two elderly and three young women, under the direction of another exhausted young man, were dressing the wounds of miliciens and administering first aid to women and children. As they walked back—“By the way, you haven’t got a gasper, have you? We’re out,” said the young man.

  Milcom gave him two packets of Players, which he accepted gratefully. “We don’t get much time to get down to Perp.,” he said—it amused Milcom to notice how widespread this hideous abbreviation had become in a few hours.

  “Is your head-quarters down there?” h
e asked.

  “Head-quarters? No—we’re here. We sleep in the trucks,” the young man replied, puffing with intense satisfaction at his cigarette.

  “But where’s the Quaker Relief? Haven’t the rest of them got out?”

  “I don’t know,” said the young man.

  “But aren’t you part of it? You are the Quakers?”

  The young man gaped at him.

  “Quakers nothing!” he then said, with emphasis. “We’re the Amalgamated Society of Printers! Sent out six trucks and all this food, and we haven’t even had time to get in! And we can none of us talk French—on’y Spanish. Quakers!—I’ll be blowed!”

  James left him almost incoherent in his repudiation. But as he shoved his way down to the car he thought a good deal about this small incident. No, they weren’t Quakers—they were the emissaries of a Trades Union in London. But they were, regardless of personal danger and discomfort, feeding the hungry and tending the sick, the things that Quakers do—from Bilbao to Vladivostok, he thought, this was the distinguishing mark of the Quakers, so that anyone who did those things must, to Spanish and French alike, be Quakers too. Some testimonial! “By their fruits ye shall know them,” muttered James, who was unfashionably familiar with his Bible, as he reached the car.

  It was after three o’clock when they got back to Perpignan, and they had all been wet through for several hours; over a whiskey with Crumpaun, James decided to call it a day as far as the frontier was concerned. But, leaving the pursuit of Del Vayo to Hever, he managed to get an interview with the Prefect, and learned that the order to keep the miliciens out had been cancelled—they were to be let in again.

  “Every two hours, they change their minds in Paris,” the Prefect said gloomily. “It brings complications—which, for the rest, are already sufficient.” James, in elegant French, said that he betted they were, and listened sympathetically to the hastily improvised plans for distributing the non-combatant refugees, and the wounded, in various parts of France, and for interning the miliciens. “There are one hundred thousand of them!” the Prefect said despairingly. “Where are they to go? We have no camps, but they cannot roam at will. We must create camps—and you cannot do that quickly with men working a four-day week. They say they will send us fifty thousand troops to guard the frontier—but that is fifty thousand more to feed! Believe me, Monsieur, sympathy is all very well—but on the spot it is not so simple.”