Women's Barracks

by Tereska Torres

  Ursula readjusted her gas mask and helmet. They were heavy and clumsy, but regulations required that they be worn in the street. She waited for a bus and mounted to the top. In the day, it was amusing to sit up there and look down into the street. But at this hour one could no longer see anything beyond the windows.

  Everybody noticed her French uniform. Ursula was proud of her uniform. A woman nearby leaned toward her and said with a strong English accent, "Vive la France!"

  "Merci," said Ursula. "Thank you very much."

  A man said to her, "I was in France in 1914, at Douai, Verdun, Valenciennes."

  Ursula smiled. It was amazing how many Englishmen had already stopped her in the street to tell her things like that. They had all been at Douai, Verdun, Valenciennes. Indeed, Englishmen often pressed my hands in the street, repeating the same words. The English are nice.

  Ursula got down from the bus. For a moment it was difficult for her to orient herself in the dark, but she managed to find her way toward Down Street.

  That night there were fewer of us at dinner than usual. It was a Saturday, and many of the girls had begun to make friends and to go out. In the rooms at night, there were always some who talked about their lovers, recounting their experiences in full detail, while laughing and often ridiculing the men. I suppose for some of us, this served to increase our curiosity, and at the same time to decrease the importance of such things, to lower the barriers to love affairs, so that it didn't matter much if one went out and did the same. After all, all this was temporary. The war would soon be over. In the spring of 1941 there would surely be a second front. And then our exile would be ended, together with all these local love affairs and the loneliness of Down Street. But for others of us, this easy talk had another effect, making promiscuity repulsive.

  The talk went on when we went down to supper, and while we stood in line for our food. Sergeant Machou, the cook, dished out the portions according to her preferences. The best servings were handed to the women who flattered her, or who could talk back with her own vulgarity. She also had respect for those who were friendly with the officers, and so she was always generous with Ann.

  Ursula stood in line for her soup, and then she looked around, and I knew that she was looking for Claude. But Claude had liberty, and had gone out to dinner. Mickey was gossiping at another table. She kept whispering to Ginette and glancing at Ursula. I had already heard a bit of Mickey's tale upstairs. Although Mickey had warned Ursula to keep silent, she apparently felt no need to follow her own advice. As Ursula hesitated, looking so isolated, missing Claude, I motioned her over to the place beside me.

  That evening in the dormitory, the women all looked at her coldly, and scarcely anyone spoke to her. I helped her carry her bedding up from the switchboard room.

  Ginette made a remark about gousses, and there was a general burst of laughter. But Ursula didn't know what it meant. She went to bed early, and in spite of the light and the noise, she closed her eyes, trying to sleep. Poor girl; she had told me everything, as we trundled her bedding from the switchboard room, and I knew that she could not sleep, and that she was lying there with a cold feeling oppressing her heart.

  Chapter 9

  I had been given more interesting work to do. Every day our contacts with France grew better, and some of the resistance reports came to me, to be adapted for use in propaganda. I became deeply absorbed, excited by my work, and it was perhaps because of the excitement of my task that I felt less need for a personal emotional life than so many of the girls. Or perhaps I was only slower to develop, emotionally.

  Jacqueline, doing the same sort of work, nevertheless was soon personally enmeshed. She was in an office next door to mine, for her chief. Lieutenant De Prade, was working on establishing more contacts with the resistance movement.

  From the day when she had been assigned to his office, Jacqueline had told herself that she was fated, and that it was her fate always to be unlucky. For here she had discovered the man of her life. He was intelligent, elegant, cultivated, handsome, and they had the same tastes in everything. But he was married, and he adored his young wife and children, whom he had had to leave in France. Moreover, De Prade was a devout Catholic, and he treated Jacqueline like a young sister. Nevertheless, she was certain that he was desperately attracted to her.

  As for De Prade, he struggled against Jacqueline's attraction with all his strength. He knew that she was in love with him, but he tried to persuade himself that this was only a youthful infatuation, and that she would find another man to love. She was so pretty, and she was so much sought after by all the officers at GHQ, that things would certainly arrange themselves.

  De Prade had rented a little house in Kensington where he lived with three other officers and a servant. Every week end Jacqueline visited them. She had become a sort of mascot, a symbol of home for the group. Jacqueline knew how to manage a house, and the men had grown quite accustomed to having her take charge of their servant. She played the lady of the house, arranged all the menus, and acted as hostess when they had guests.

  With her distinguished grace, with the beautiful manners of a young Frenchwoman of good family, Jacqueline reminded De Prade's comrades of their sisters, their wives, or their daughters. All of them were more or less in love with her, and they deluged her with flowers and candy.

  But Jacqueline loved De Prade. Beneath her air of pampered urbanity, she had a will of iron. She wanted De Prade; in spite of and against everything, she wanted him. During the course of weeks, she had been working on him, playing the innocent young girl, calling him Uncle Alain (he was twelve years older than she). And every day she felt that she was gaining ground, that he was slipping closer to intimacy in their seemingly innocent relationship. She had her own room in the house in Kensington, and slept there on Saturdays and Sundays. De Prade would come to say good night, tucking her into bed and kissing her cheek. Then he would leave.

  He was still a young man, and each week end this game grew more unendurable. But he too was stubborn. He was determined to remain faithful to his wife. For some time the struggle continued. Inevitably, it had to come to an issue.

  While for Jacqueline and for most of us there was a growing life outside the barracks, in our jobs or in love affairs, Ursula was still there at her little table in the hall, on duty, and all her life seemed to be enclosed in the switchboard room with Claude, only a few steps away.

  One afternoon Ursula was seated with her check list as we went back to our jobs from lunch. It was not long after the famous night with Claude. We hurried past her. Most of us got into one of the trucks that were waiting outside, but the richer ones went to the corner to take the bus, and the most ambitious marched off on foot for the exercise.

  Ursula wrote down the names of the last to leave, as they hurried past, running because they were late.

  The Captain walked rapidly by. Ursula rose to attention. The Captain gave her a condescending little nod, and went into her office.

  Ursula could hear Machou yelling in the kitchen; she was probably cursing out one of the girls on K.P. The poor things! Of all the punishments, this was the one Ursula most dreaded. She preferred the heaviest labor to spending five minutes in the presence of Machou.

  She couldn't understand how the regular kitchen helpers could bear their slavery. There were several little girls from Brittany permanently assigned to Machou, and somehow they seemed to have adjusted themselves well enough to their kitchen tasks, and also to life outside the barracks, in London. On their smooth round cheeks their newly employed rouge appeared almost obscene, and their heavily reddened lips seemed to be bleeding. Ursula wondered about them, and she talked to me about them, for they were girls of about her own age, and they seemed to find this life agreeable enough, while she learned so painfully.

  The little girls from Brittany had arrived in different ways, mostly from Brest. Some had come on the fishing boats of their brothers or cousins; others had arrived after wild adventures, stowe
d away in naval craft. One of them had found herself running along the quay during a bombardment of Lorient in 1940. She was deathly frightened. A sailor ran alongside her. He told her to jump into his boat for shelter. The girl had followed his advice, screaming as each bomb fell. The sailor had put her down in the hold, and in the meantime the captain had raised anchor for England. On arriving, he had been startled to discover his stowaway.

  The little girl had been even more astonished, but there she was in England, together with a number of French sailors, who advised her to stay. She had wept, imagining that her mother would believe her to be dead, but she had decided to remain, hearing the call of General de Gaulle. A woman's army was about to be formed—and at home there was the Boche.

  That was how most of these daughters of the fishermen and peasants of Brittany had arrived, to be assigned by the Captain to kitchen work or to the daily cleaning of the barracks. The little girls from Brittany went out with the sailors from their own province, who took them dancing in sordid little halls and slept with them in disreputable hotels. Otherwise, they'd have been left alone, always stuck at the barracks. With the sailors they could talk of home, of St. Malo, of Brest, of Cherbourg. What else could they have done, in a London filled with heretics who had never even set foot in Brittany?

  As assistants, these girls had the women who were on punishment. The penalties were posted in the hall. One could read:

  Jeanne, 50 lbs. of potatoes to peel, for being drunk.

  Louise, dishwashing, for painting her nails red. Andree, confined to quarters for a week, for disrespect to an officer.

  Two or three times, Ursula had been punished. Once she had appeared late for morning roll call. Another time the corporal had found her hair too long. Ursula peeled potatoes to atone for her long hair—it had reached to the collar of her jacket, which was forbidden. This regulation was relaxed later on, and Ursula again let her hair grow; but at first this rule, like all the others, was rigidly enforced.

  Seated on the kitchen stool, enveloped in a long yellow smock of rough canvas, she had endured the jesting and the ribaldry of Machou and her acolytes for two hours. No one spoke directly to her, but their voices, which seemed to be purposely raucous, and their descriptions of their affairs with men disgusted Ursula. She felt sick and dirty. There was no feeling of superiority in her, as in Jacqueline. On the contrary, Ursula was embarrassed by her own feeling of revulsion. She would have liked to be able to hide it, as though it were some disability, and to laugh with the others, and to be treated as one of them. She wanted so much to be liked, but there was nothing to be done. Whenever she opened her mouth, her voice seemed to come out false, strange, and forced, so that Ursula herself couldn't recognize it, and she was sure that the others were not deceived. They called her a sissy, and gave their tales an extra seasoning so as to make her blush.

  All this was not purposely vicious; except for Machou, they weren't badhearted. But they were bored in the kitchen, and the presence of a timid little girl who blushed was a diversion. Their cruelty was only childish. Actually most of them were of the same age, or scarcely older than Ursula. And they knew well enough what would be thought of them at home if their mothers or fathers were aware of the life they were leading in London.

  At her table in the hall, Ursula heard the coarse voice of Machou, and the voice of one of the Brittany girls answering in the same tone. She sighed and opened a book that she had taken from the barracks library. The door of the switchboard room was closed. Claude was angry with her, and wasn't speaking to her, for it was generally known how the news had spread of their night together, even though Mickey swore that she hadn't said a word. And for Ursula there was another complication. The women were no longer speaking to her. Claude, nevertheless, had lost none of her popularity. She was admired and rather feared by the girls. It was Ursula whom they all held in disfavor, and every night Ursula wept in her bed.

  For the first time in her life, she was aware of her body. It had a special independent life of its own. It longed for the warmth of Claude and for Claude's hands. It twisted in every direction in the narrow little bed, hungry and cold, in search of the other body that had awakened it.

  The evening before, a new order had been issued: The sentinel was no longer to sleep in the switchboard room. Ursula thought she would fall sick with frustration. If at least Claude would talk to her or smile… But Claude didn't even look at her.

  Miserably, she tried to fix her attention on her book. She didn't know what she was reading. Then suddenly the half-open door of the barracks was pushed open, and a soldier entered. He wore a Polish uniform. He was a very young man, small in stature, a little chubby, not handsome, with a round childish face, a thick mouth, and very large black eyes. He looked all around, with his brows raised, and this gave his face the expression of a questioning, astonished child.

  Realizing that Ursula was looking at him, he asked in a foreign accent, "Isn't this the barracks of the Free French—the women’s barrack?"

  It was only then that Ursula recognized him, and she felt a rush of joy in her heart, as at recovering a friend.

  "Yes, it's me!" she cried, and at the same moment she grew very red, for there was really no way for her to know that it was she whom he sought. But the young soldier smiled and approached her.

  "Now, that's really lucky! I was wondering how I would manage to find you, because I only knew your first name."

  "But how did you know my first name?" Ursula asked.

  "Why, when you were leaving, your friend called you Ursula."

  Ursula gave him a chair and he sat down beside her. Once he had got that sentence out of him, he fell silent again, and Ursula found him a little dull. Claude, for instance, always had something to say. She kept you continuously hanging on her words.

  The young soldier asked her what she was doing and whether she was free for dinner that evening. Ursula said she was. It would be better than to stay in the barracks when Claude wasn't even speaking to her.

  Then he arose, and asked her pardon for having come without warning, and left.

  Nevertheless, Ursula felt more cheerful because of his visit.

  Her turn of duty was over at five o'clock and it was still daylight, gray and rainy as usual. Ursula went up to the empty dormitory. It was cold; the window was open. The cots were made up as in men's barracks, with the sheets and blankets carefully folded at the head of the bed in a square packet with no overhanging edges. The mattress was folded double, so there was nowhere to sit except on the bedsprings.

  Ursula stood in the middle of the room. Although the women were still forbidden to put things on the empty shelves around the walls, the officers had relaxed their attention to this regulation during the past few days, and little by little, photographs, holy images, little vases, and books had appeared next to the beds. But there was nothing at all by Ursula's bed. She had no mementos. She decided that she would buy herself a bunch of violets to put in the toothbrush glass above her cot, as Jacqueline had done. She would go out right away for the violets.

  In the street, Ursula bought the violets for sixpence, and suddenly she had the idea of giving them to Claude. As soon as the thought came to her, she couldn't wait. She began to run in the street, holding tight to the little bouquet, which consisted mostly of leaves around four or five violets. She arrived at the barracks out of breath and knocked at the door of the switchboard room. Claude's melodious voice said, "Come in."

  Claude was seated in front of the switchboard, manipulating the plugs. She kept her back erect, as always. The blonde hair was brushed back. She turned her head toward Ursula, slightly contracting her plucked brows in an annoyed manner. Ursula, her head lowered and her heart full of uncertainty, held out her little bouquet to Claude, without saying a word.

  Claude's frown dissolved in a smile. "Oh, how nice!" she cried. "What lovely violets! Come let me kiss you!"

  And drawing Ursula to her, she kissed her eyes. In that second Ursula came back t
o life. Her brown eyes were once more alight, her heart was like honey. She felt happy and light. Everything was beautiful, everything was perfect, her life, the barracks, London—since Claude still liked her, since Claude didn't hold anything against her. She sat down on the camp bed, and between two telephone calls Claude recounted her woes—she had seen her husband again, she was desperately in love with him, she would never love anyone else. Claude drew a photograph out of her pocket and showed it to Ursula.

  Claude's husband had an air of self-confidence and cruelty. Claude began once more to relate how she had met him, and how they had married after years of quarreling and love-making. Her voice became feverish as she spoke, and all at once she seemed almost an old woman; a woman showing age, filled with agitation, with dark reflections in her eyes, with bitterness against everything —against herself, against her husband, against the barracks. And suddenly she began to quarrel with Ursula, complaining that the evening before, in Claude's absence, Ursula had failed to note down a telephone call from Ann. Then it was finished. Ursula could never again be happy for more than a few seconds with this strange and ever beautiful woman. The dinner bell sounded. A voice called Ursula.

  She went out sadly, trying to hold back her tears. In the hall, the young soldier waited for her.

  Chapter 10

  There was no secrecy in our dormitory. It had become almost a law to announce whom you were going out with, and on returning to describe the results.

  One evening Mickey perfumed herself with chypre, borrowed from Ginette. She used a depilatory under her arms, and selected her best khaki silk tie. She said that she had a date with Robert. Ann laughed, because Mickey had gone through all these preparations a few evenings before, for a movie date with Robert, only to have him call it off at the last moment.