Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  “I got your letter,” he wrote, “here, which was the best place I could have had it in, because I am right on the frontier, and am therefore in a position to make a certain number of enquiries. You don’t need to be told that I shall do every single thing that I can to get you the news you want. But don’t be surprised or anxious if you don’t hear for some time; at this moment there is naturally a certain amount of confusion, and it will take quite a time before one can find out where anyone is.” Then he crossed out the last two words and wrote instead—“people are.” There was no telling into whose hands this letter would fall on its way from Perpignan to Santander—you couldn’t be too careful. “People are” was better—more general.

  He tilted himself back in his chair, balancing his fountain pen between his second and third fingers, and flipped it to and fro, thoughtfully, for some time. What next?

  “I am very well,” he wrote down, like a child penning an exercise, “and hard at work. I am very glad that you are well.”

  There—that covered that. He leaned back again. He couldn’t ask any questions—none of the questions to which he so desperately wanted the answers; still less could he say all the things he wanted to say—how miserable and bleak his existence was without her, how glad he was to have something to do for her at last. He took out her letter and read it again—by now for about the twentieth time. “I pray that you are safe and well.” He couldn’t say he prayed for her because he didn’t pray. He could perhaps write a chatty account of what he was doing, but even that was beyond the terms of the bond—that they should not write. She had only written because of Juanito—he was sending only the needful answer. So that was about all. Never had his sense of despairing frustration been more acute than as he sat by the window staring out over the river, the two letters on the little table in front of him beside the coffee-cup. At last he slid his pen down into position again and wrote—

  “I shall write again as soon as I have any news for you. You know that you can count on me to do everything I can. God bless you.”

  And signed it with both his names. There. He sighed gustily, folded the thing up, put it in an envelope and addressed it. “What a godless mess,” he said to himself. It was his epitaph on his love.

  Later that evening—“Is Crossman still at St.-Jean?” he asked Crumpaun.

  “Yes—he was when I left,” the older man replied.

  “He was going to stay on a bit, I gathered,” Hever put in.

  So James enclosed his letter to Raquel in one to Crossman, bespeaking his good offices to get it forwarded to Santander by the best means available. And that, again, was that.

  The next few days were more or less a repetition of those first two; the three journalists drove about, visiting camps and frontier-posts, and watching one of the most desolating and menacing spectacles of modern times. Along a hundred miles of frontier an entire army and the population of three provinces was in motion, pouring down like water—here a trickle, there a flood—into France. To James the whole thing became a nightmare. As he saw it, French and Spaniards alike were locked in a sort of deathly wrestling-match with one another and with forces outside their ken or control—the ideological forces which were beginning to menace Europe. Horrible as the spectacle was, the menace behind it was even more alarming. French sympathies were with the Republicans, undoubtedly; but to admit them would create enormous local problems and cost enormous sums—on the other hand there was some first-rate modern war material, guns, planes and motor machine-guns, supplied by the Russians and by the French themselves, which could be acquired for the army if the troops were let in. But Franco had won—and there was his supporter Italy to be reckoned with, let alone Germany. No wonder that French policy swung to and fro, like a demented pendulum. However, in the end sympathy and the matériel had it; and the miliciens were let in.

  It was with this background to his thoughts that James drove up and down the south Pyrenean frontier—this, and his haunted and despairing search for Juanito. They went up to Prats-de-Mollo, where they saw the Spanish mules and ponies tethered in a long row under the sunny wall of the square outside the main gate—Prats is a walled town; they saw the little parties coming in down the mule-tracks off the snow-covered frontier ridge: Grandmamma riding the cow, Grandfather the mule, bedding strapped to the backs of sheep and goats, Mother carrying a child, while others trailed at her skirts. A foot-and-a-half of snow up there, they told him—it was hard. Their faces showed how hard it had been. Again a phrase from the Bible sprang into James’s mind—“Pray that your flight be not in the winter.” Theirs had been. Goodness, how apposite all those words of Christ about the end of the world were! “Then shall they say to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and save us from the wrath to come.” The miliciens in the tunnel at Cerbère—they had invoked the aid of the mountains. On another day, starting early, the three went over to Bourg Madame and visited the internment camp there—if one could call a barbed wire enclosure where men crouched in the open, in winter, at twelve hundred feet, a camp; on the way home they saw, with sour amusement, the devastation caused at Vernetles-Bains. Here the municipality, too frugal to allow the empty hotels to be occupied by the Spanish soldiers, had shut them all up in the public gardens, which contained a famous collection of rare trees and shrubs; these the famished miliciens, during the very first night, tore up and cut down to make bonfires to warm themselves—so a doleful official informed the party. Hever laughed out loud.

  “Good for them!” he said heartily. “Monsieur, what else could you expect?”

  Both Milcom and Crumpaun had felt a good deal of sympathy for the French predicament to begin with; but as the days passed, and they saw more and more of the suffering entailed on the helpless internees by the French combination of inefficiency and parsimony, this turned slowly to a dull anger. And this anger, in Milcom’s case, was finally fanned to a flame by the state of affairs at Argelés.

  It is not possible to pretend that the camp at Argelés was anything but highly discreditable to the French. Argelés lies on the sea, on a stretch of sandy beach; here the authorities massed thousands of men behind barbed wire, exposed to the bitter east wind which in February and March rasps the whole Mediterranean coast like a steel file. There was no wood, no vegetation; when the wretched soldiers tried to dig in the loose sand for shelter, they came in three feet to water, so that their dug-outs were colder than the bare ground above. The water was brackish, and did nothing to solve the drinking problem, which was acute. Food was short. There was dysentery and pneumonia; there were cases of gangrene. As more and more men were brought in the conditions became so bad that the authorities eventually refused to allow any foreign observers into the place, and extended this ban to the International Red Cross, the Quaker Hospital Unit, and the Swedish Red Cross, which last had four motor hospital vans, fully equipped for operations, parked outside the gate. Meanwhile, as a Garde Mobile informed Milcom, there was not so much as a tube of aspirin in the whole camp.

  James had gone down to Argelés for the second or third time to pursue his enquiries for Juanito, and found himself locked out. Standing there in the tearing wind, seeing the shivering huddled limping figures behind the barbed wire and the idle hospital lorries outside, a true cold Irish fury seized on him. He drove straight back to the hotel, packed his bags, drove on to Toulouse, and took the afternoon train to Paris. There he first saw one of Tom Hever’s colleagues at Hooters, and told him about Argelés; then he went and worried the Embassy; finally he wrote a despatch for the Epoch which was so blistering that that demure journal would not print it. Nevertheless something happened. A special correspondent flew from London to Perpignan, and a week later a terrible article on the camp appeared in one of the English Sunday papers; soon afterwards a reasonable amount of medical help, at least, was given to the interned Spanish.

  Milcom stayed in Paris for a few days to watch the results of his efforts, and while there something happened which added to his anger. Up till t
hen he had tried to believe that it was mainly inefficiency and parsimony, rather than deliberate policy, which was at the bottom of the French ill-treatment of the interned army. The political position was more difficult than ever—the French naturally wished to open relations with the victorious Franco government, but they wanted to retain the surrendered war material which had induced them to allow the miliciens to enter; the Franco government, for its part, was making the return of this material a condition of opening diplomatic relations. Meanwhile the refugees were costing France three million francs a week, a figure to give any Frenchman the shivers. Loud-speakers were promptly installed in all the camps, blaring out recommendations to the miliciens to return to Spain, where they would receive “just treatment.” The miliciens did not respond very well. Deputies scurried in and out of Spain, desperately trying to bargain. In the middle of all this, at a luncheon, James happened to overhear one of the aforesaid deputies discussing this burning problem with a rather well-known Franquista who was “watching” affairs in Paris.

  “Ah, mon cher,” said the deputy, “je pense que le faim et le froid feront peu à peu notre affaire.”

  For a moment James thought that he would not be able to refrain from knocking the man down. He succeeded in controlling himself; but then he went over and made an excuse of illness to his host, and left—sit at table with that deputy he would not. He went round to Hooters and told the story to Hever’s colleague. The colleague drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Yes—that’s the line,” he said. “‘Qu’est-ce-que j’y touche, moi?” That’s the only question a Frenchman asks himself to-day. They’re done for, you know, Jim; they’re rotted through and through with avarice.”

  “But it’s murder—murder in cold blood,” James raged. “God damn them!”

  “He will, don’t you worry,” said the colleague. “This country’s going down the drain—you mark my words.” And he gave James some facts about the French Air Force. James groaned, and wired to the Epoch to ask for a month’s leave; he was angry about his article. Then he went back to Perpignan to go on looking for Juanito.

  Chapter Twelve

  This Side—Amélie-les-Bains

  Nothing remains “news” for long in the modern world, and the Spanish retreat was no exception. By the time Milcom got back to Perpignan from Paris practically all the journalists had left, including Crumpaun and Hever. Numbers of refugees and a few business men remained in the Hôtel de l’Europe, waiting for an opportunity to return to Spain, or for news of their relatives or their concerns; they sat listlessly about in the parrot-cage, adding to the dismal effect of that always dismal place. James began to find it intolerable. He was lonely, he was miserable; his aching need of Raquel seemed to get worse, not better, as the days and weeks went by. And he was increasingly discouraged by his total failure to get any news of Juanito. This search had become to him a sort of symbol of his love, the one thing left of it that had any actuality; his eyes more desperate than ever, day after day he trudged round offices and camps, questioning officials and searching the faces of prisoners, but to no purpose. And at night he came back to the hotel to sit, now quite alone, dining in the parrot-cage, hearing again the sobs and laughter of Raquel’s hysteria echoing up to its glass roof, or seeing her sitting lax with fatigue in the gangway. It tormented him that he could not be absolutely sure which chair she had sat in that day. It was on the right, and the fourth or fifth—near that horrible palm—but he could not be certain which. Sometimes he walked round to the various shops where they had purchased her stockings and things, and made some excuse to enter, bought some trivial object, just to stand there again and try to re-see her as she had stood, to recall the words in which she had made her choice. But what made these memories insupportable was what she had said that last time that they sat up in the glen behind S. Joseph’s Chapel, that she had loved him already in Madrid. Oh, if he had known! If he had known when they were here! Blind and a fool—that was what he had been.

  After about a week of this, James found it quite unendurable, and decided to look for other quarters. He consulted the garage proprietor. The garage proprietor recommended the Hôtel des Thermes Jadis at Amélie-les-Bains, and thither the following day, after telephoning for rooms, Milcom removed himself, alone in his hired car; with order restored, the chauffeur was no longer necessary.

  The Hôtel des Thermes Jadis is a peculiar place, in many ways. It is one of those second-class French provincial hotels to which foreign visitors almost never find their way, except as the result of a motoring accident, though it thrives (or did thrive) on an ample French middle-class clientèle of rheumatic patients. (To find the real France it is much more rewarding to go to such a place than to Paris—let alone Biarritz or Cannes.) Other things besides the inmates, however, make it peculiar. To begin with it consists of three quite separate buildings. One, containing the dining-room and other public rooms, and the hot sulphur baths—reached by a lift to the basement—is built almost over the hot springs themselves; a second section, separated from the first by a broad gravelled drive, contains bedrooms and the bureau; the third is on the far side of a small tip-tilted public square, in which stand two or three magnificent plane trees and a fountain with an ever-flowing spout of hot sulphur-water, as well as plain cold, from which the housewives in the tall buildings round the square fill their brocs of a morning. Finally, and oddest feature of all, the hot water in the bathrooms and the central heating owes nothing to furnaces or the hand of man; it is heated by God, in the bowels of the earth. Like all places of its sort the Thermes Jadis is shabby, sparsely furnished and fairly clean; and unlike many others of its kind it has also a quite excellent cuisine, in which fresh trout from the River Tech and Pyrenean mutton figure largely.

  James arrived there late one evening at the beginning of March. He had spent another exhausting and fruitless day checking names and interviewing Republican officers at the camp at Le Boulou, and it was already dark as he drove into the town over the bridge, where the smell of sulphur, coming up from the steaming waters below, first assailed his nostrils. It reminded him sharply of Raquel; he remembered how she had sniffed and put up her handkerchief the first time he crossed that bridge, with her beside him. But in spring another smell contends with that of rotten eggs for mastery in the streets of Amélie—the sharp spicy fragrance of mimosa, growing all about the town gardens, growing wild on the rocky slopes above; in the windy darkness he was aware of this also, as he pulled up in the little square, to which a passer-by had directed him for the Thermes Jadis. The slope was so steep that his brakes would not hold; he left the car in gear, locked it, and set out to look for the hotel. Painted letters over an archway at one side of the square led him into the central section, where a notice above a bell said “Bureau.” James rang the bell and waited. No one came. He proceeded to explore. There up a few steps was the Bureau, sure enough, behind glass doors; but it was empty, and the doors locked. He rang again, called; there was no answer—no one seemed to be about. James began to get impatient; he was tired, hungry, and discouraged after his day of fruitless search—he wanted his dinner. He went on through the archway, which pierced the whole depth of the building, and came out onto the drive beyond, which crossed a hidden river by a stone bridge; he could hear rushing water in the darkness, and smelt the twin odours of sulphur and mimosa again—a lighted window or two gleamed in a building ahead. The whole business began to take on the quality of a dream, almost a nightmare, to James in his fatigue—could this be right? He went on up the drive, noticing on his right what appeared to be a long conservatory of coloured glass, also dimly lit; goodness, what an extraordinary place! Rounding a curve, he emerged onto a wide gravel sweep, glimmering palely in the darkness, and saw below him to his left, through plate-glass windows, the welcome vision of a large dining-room, brightly lit, and full of people eating. But how to reach it? It was at least two stories below the spot where he stood. Again he went on, crossing the sweep towards the li
ghted windows—ah good, here was a door, and another bell. He rang vigorously, and stood looking through the glass doors into a rather dismal hall set with a few wicker chairs and tables, and most economically lit. At length a boy in rather dirty chef’s clothes appeared, and ushered James into the hall, which smelt stuffy and airless; James’s heart sank in the familiar irrational despair of the traveller who arrives late and weary in a strange place, and finds the auspices unfavourable. However he firmly demanded dinner, and followed the boy down two flights of concrete stairs to the dining-room. Please God there would be something edible at least, he thought, as he sat down at a table and ran his eye over the room, which was full of the most extraordinary collection of people he had ever seen; elderly men with grey or black tufted side-whiskers, and women with what appeared to be antimacassars of purple or bright blue wool drawn over ample alpaca shoulders—because really it was a nightmare otherwise, inside and out! He bent and studied the menu which an elderly waiter put down in front of him, when to his immense surprise he heard himself hailed in English—“Mr. Milcom! It is you.” He looked up into the shining face of Rosemary Oldhead.

  “Good heavens!” said James, rising—“What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Just what I was going to ask you,” she answered, her eyes dancing. “You haven’t got rheumatism, have you? Because why anyone who hasn’t should come to this God-awful place—”

  “Monsieur desires?” the waiter interrupted.

  “Yes, go on—order,” Rosemary said resignedly, sitting down opposite to him. “They’re mad about meal-hours here, and we’re all eating pudding already. I should have the soup—it’s quite good; and the trout—they’re always lovely.”

  James found himself smiling, in spite of his fatigue.