The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  In fact, Tomara found it a rather emotional spring. One day she and Cedric Salter of the Daily Mail, whom she had known in Warsaw, drove to the Rumanian-Soviet border and looked across at Russia. There wasn’t much to see, but it affected her anyway. She knew it was the Communist government that had made the pact with Hitler, but still it hurt to think of her homeland allied in any way with the Nazis. The Balkans held many reminders of her past. The arrival of spring brought to mind other springs, and she yearned for more romance than was currently present in her life. She had good friends among her male colleagues, but most were either married or considerably younger than she. One of the latter was Derek Patmore, an Englishman who thought her “striking” and admired her “aura of delicate femininity” and quiet elegance. “Sonia could be charmingly Slav at times,” he said. Once when they were having lunch together, she asked him abstractedly if he did not feel the need of falling in love during wartime. “Somehow,” she mused, “it seems to help.”

  Dorothy Thompson would have understood. Her passion for international politics had stifled any romantic feeling remaining in her marriage, but she felt the void. From the farmhouse in Vermont, which in spite of their son Michael, now nine, they had not occupied concurrently for some time, she had recently written her husband, Sinclair Lewis: “Who knows? Maybe some time you might come home....”

  And had he done so, would he have found her there? A glancing encounter at best. From the “hot-spot circle” Thompson made her way to Paris. She was in her suite at the Hotel Meurice on the morning of May 10, 1940, when the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland. France had already mobilized, and she followed the French army to the front on a highly publicized tour that included active participation with the artillery in an underground fortification on the Maginot Line. But it was the juxtaposition of war and love that most caught her imagination, and the story she wrote from a Paris railway station that same week, for her column “On the Record,” served to remind her readers why it was she remained in the forefront of American journalism.

  MAY 13,1940 — The soldier stands face to face with his girl, his hands on her waist, under her jacket. The officer holds his girl by her arms. The soldier kisses his girl unashamedly. The officer kisses his girl with his eyes. None of the four speaks at all. ...

  The whistle blows. The officer holds his girl’s cheek to his. The soldier kisses his girl on the mouth. Just once more!

  Nobody watches any one else. No one pretends. No one is pretending anything.

  “Kill a Boche for me, darling.” Didn’t they say that in the last war?

  No one says a word about Boche or killing. Not a word. Not a flag. Not a salute ... not an au revoir. They pull apart, and the men crowd into the cars. They wear good woolen uniforms and good thick boots.

  They look through the open windows — a thousand faces, a thousand different faces, not one like another, not one common expression, not one replaceable face. Now, at last they smile, kindly, comfortingly, understandingly. The women and the girls stand together, but each alone, each surrounded by a little space of loneliness and separateness, each alone in her tears.

  The train begins to move. The men wave. The women wave and weeping, smile.

  No one calls “Vive la France!”

  There goes France.

  7

  Fleeing France

  Now, it was said, the great French counteroffensive would begin. Holland and Belgium had surrendered in the first week, but France would prevail. Meanwhile, refugees flowed southward from Belgium and Luxembourg into France, “two thirds of them women and children and many in rags,” Sonia Tomara reported. She compared it to the exodus of White Russians after the Bolshevik Revolution, or that of the Poles the previous fall, but the numbers transcended those migrations. The American Red Cross estimated them at five million.

  Tomara, back at the Herald Tribune Paris bureau, recorded their stories. In a babble of impressions, twenty Belgian boys relived how they had set out from Liege without saying goodbye to their parents and walked the entire distance to Paris. One woman had fled from a hospital with her newborn baby, leaving her six-year-old in the village with neighbors; when she tried to return for him, the village was already cut off. Most tragic was the woman who left Belgium with nine children and reached Paris with two, the others having been machine-gunned on the train.

  The plight of the refugees was covered in the New York press too. Janet Flanner, at work in the home office of the New Yorker, saw a photograph in the New York Mirror of Noel Murphy among the volunteers of American Friends of France. Noel was helping Anne Morgan transport refugees who could not walk long distances — pregnant women and old men mostly. Flanner read of bomb fragments hitting the volunteers’ cars, and worried. Later Noel wrote her of how in the Ardennes the Germans bombed the railroad station where she and 3,500 refugees had taken shelter, and how German fliers would dip down and machine-gun people on the roads. Noel described how she would have to pull her truck over and help the pregnant women — “all fainting and vomiting, poor women, you can imagine” — into a ditch. The situation was truly desperate, but she meant to keep on working as long as she could. She did not intend this as a criticism of her friend now safe in America, but it may have been hard for Janet not to take it so.

  Meanwhile the battle went forward. In the north French troops were outnumbered two to one, and the RAF lost half its bombers operating over France. The only factor in the Allies’ favor was Hitler’s hesitancy on how to proceed. German panzer divisions, primed to push forward and wipe out French and British troops trapped at Dunkirk, were ordered to pause instead and repair their tanks while Hitler reviewed his options. Graced with those crucial hours and favorable weather, more than eight hundred British naval and civilian craft embarked on a massive rescue, spiriting some 338,000 men away to safety in Britain.

  Virginia Cowles drove down to Dover to see the troops come in. “Hundreds of them filed through the docks, dirty and tired,” she wrote. “Some had equipment, some had none; some were in uniform and some in an odd assortment of sweaters and slacks. Most of them seemed in high spirits and waved at the crowd clustered against the railings to cheer them. The English soldiers grinned self-consciously and made jokes to each other; the French soldiers blew kisses to the girls. I went back to London by train and all along the way Union Jacks were fly-ing.”

  An American correspondent joined the influx of foreigners in Paris that spring. Despite the present threat, Mary Welsh found the city lovely after the gray English winter, and immersed herself in its sunlit, cosmopolitan charm. The closed-up shops and air raid drills that had distressed Janet Flanner seemed to her little different from those in London, while the English blackout was muted to a soft violet-blue in the French capital — less ominous somehow.

  Mary Welsh, London Daily Express, Life

  Mary Welsh was a practical woman; from childhood she had learned to adapt to the situation at hand. Her father was a lumberman, and she had spent summers following the Minnesota waterways on the family boat, young Indian loggers her frequent companions. When it stormed, she had waited it out on deck with the men, so the pervasive masculinity and wild tumult of war were a not unfamiliar ambience. Electing a career in journalism, Mary attended Northwestern, but was too eager to work in the field to stay for a degree. She took a job with a trade weekly, worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and at last moved along to the Chicago Daily News as a society reporter, the only position Colonel Frank Knox approved of for women. During her five years there she pleaded in vain for a foreign assignment, but the response was the same given to Helen Kirkpatrick — no women on the foreign staff. Welsh deliberated: should she remain at the News, which had taught her a lot, or try for a position in Europe? On a trip to London she met over tea with Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the Daily Express, to no avail. But later, in Chicago and New York, he asked her to dine, and although she declined an invitation to join him on a trip up the Nile, she apparently wore down his resistan
ce. He agreed to take her on at the Express.

  A small, full-bosomed woman, Welsh was attracted to large men. At Northwestern she had married a tennis player, a tactical error soon remedied “without memorable hard feelings,” she said. In London she tried again with Noel Monks, a gentle, oversized Australian with the Daily Mail, content to squeeze into her tiny Chelsea flat. When the British Expeditionary Force crossed over to France that winter of 1939-40, Monks went with it, and Welsh procured an assignment with the Royal Air Force in Normandy. English fliers were living comfortably in villages near the airstrips, she wrote, adding (perhaps a rumor) that one regiment of guards planned to import horses and hounds for some hunting.

  In the spring the Daily Express sent Welsh to Paris in time to see the chestnuts blossom. Although by her own admission her “clothes, coiffure and savoir-faire were all untutored Midwest,” she covered a showing of the latest collection at Lanvin’s chic dove-gray salon. Edith Piaf, crooning wistful songs, was more to her liking. Welsh met with government officials, practiced her French, and learned how to get from her flat behind the Invalides to the Ritz bar by metro. She was determined to make the most of Paris while she still could.

  Mary Welsh, Lond on, 1943.

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN

  Indeed, Paris remained an island of relative peace in a sea of upheaval. But one had only to read the communiques in the daily papers, Sonia Tomara wrote, to see that battles were being fought where people used to motor for weekends — that is, two hours north by car. The nights might be soft and starry, but “Parisians look at the sky with one thought: Is the weather good for the Germans? Do bombing planes prefer clouds or a clear sky for their raids? Which way does the wind blow in case the Germans decide to use gas?”

  And yet, she marveled, most people went calmly about their business, even their amusement. Theaters and music halls played nightly, restaurants were crowded, couples strolled in the parks. People thronged to the cinemas to be lulled by old American films, then jolted back to reality by newsreels of German bombings. Sunday, June 9, 1940, was hot, and Tomara watched cars driving south out of Paris on the only roads open to private vehicles. Many cars were topped with mattresses, a sign they were carrying families leaving the city and anxious to have a bed at their journey’s end. But other cars returned to town filled with flowers, dogs, even children, in spite of the government’s directive that all children under twelve be evacuated. In the Bois de Boulogne the swimming pools and tennis courts were crowded.

  Sonia sensed it would be her last Sunday in Paris for a long time. She walked in the Tuileries Gardens in the morning when they were still deserted, sniffing the perfume of the lime trees. She studied the angle at which the towers of Notre Dame rose above the Seine. And at sunset, with the sound of guns pounding in the distance, she glanced down the Champs-Elysees and saw a “river of gold flowing from under the Arc de Triomphe.”

  Like Tomara, Mary Welsh felt the days winding down, felt she “was going nicely through the steps of a minuet in a house that was about to burn down.” She scheduled another fitting with her dressmaker, lunched again with friends in the garden of the Ritz, and when her husband, Noel Monks, arrived in town from the front, drove with him to dine at an elegant restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. That night brought the first faint thud of artillery. The next day the government fled Paris.

  It was time to go. Already the roads south were clogged with sad, disillusioned Parisians. The Maginot Line had not proved magic after all; the great counteroffensive, long awaited, had not happened; the expected resistance had been a dream. Paris would not be defended, as its citizens had been led to believe, down to the last gray stone. It would not be defended at all. When news came that the government had departed without advising the civilian population what they should do, many panicked. Suddenly they too were refugees, like all those others trudging down from the north with vacant, expressionless eyes. Families mobilized whatever vehicles they could, stuffed them with blankets, pots, pans, and pets, and started south, toward what they did not know, only that it was in the opposite direction from the advancing German army.

  Welsh and Monks left by train the same day as the government’s withdrawal. They packed in twenty minutes, leaving behind, by Mary’s calculation, two fur coats, twenty-seven sweaters, her grandmother’s silver teaspoons, and various and sundry papers. She carried with her two changes of clothes, a tweed topcoat, a large bottle of Indiscreet toilet water, and her typewriter. At the Gare d’Austerlitz every car of the train was packed; when they managed to squeeze into one, Welsh found herself perched on her bag between the haunches of a spaniel dog and the knees of an elderly curator from the Louvre. At Blois, where they got off, seeking news to send back to London, they found the French information ministry sans information, and no way to send dispatches anyway.

  Mary had had enough. Friends were driving to Biarritz. Noel might follow his own leadings, but she was joining them.

  In London, Virginia Cowles had been following the censored version of news from France and trying to arrange permission to go to the front. Just when she believed herself successful, word came that the Germans had crossed the Seine near Rouen. This placed Paris uncomfortably close to the front, and all flights were canceled. Unwilling to accept such a signal to remain where she was, Virginia grabbed the first available plane, mysteriously routed for “somewhere in France,” which turned out to be Tours. She made her way by train to Paris. As her taxi driver searched for a hotel not boarded up, Virginia looked in vain for the defending army. When Franco laid siege to Madrid, she recalled, the city held out for two years. Where were the barricades, the troops? Where were her fellow reporters?

  At last she located Walter Kerr, foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune, and together they drove up the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. Three gendarmes stood in lonely vigil at the flame. Cowles and Kerr continued down Avenue Marceau, across the Pont de PAlma, to the Invalides where fleets of taxicabs, an estimated five or six hundred, were lined up to effect the last-minute evacuation of government documents. At the Ecole Militaire they saw men carrying out file cases and loading them into vans. Only in the less affluent neighborhoods were the streets full of people. These, thought Cowles, were the people too poor to leave.

  All day she kept her ears tuned, but a deathly quiet prevailed. At the Place de la Concorde they ran across soldiers plodding along. “Their faces were grimy and their clothes caked with mud,” she wrote. “Two of them were limping, a third had a bandage round his head, a fourth was walking in his stocking feet, carrying his shoes. They were evidently stragglers who had got lost or deserted, and were making their way back to their homes. But there was no one to notice them. No one had time for soldiers now.”

  Cowles had to decide what to do. The German army was exactly seventeen miles to the north. Most of her colleagues had already left town, and no cars were available anywhere. Just when she thought she might have no choice but to remain for the occupation, Tom Healy of the London Daily Mirror appeared, driving a Chrysler. He agreed to take her with him to Bordeaux.

  The only woman correspondent already a seasoned refugee, Sonia Tomara had been living with her sister Irina in a little flat behind the Etoile, a happy interlude that she could prolong no longer. After a farewell visit to their mother and aunt, two small figures dressed in black, Sonia and Irina and a Canadian doctor friend started out in a large car with enough gasoline to reach Bordeaux. But at the first hill the gears failed, and they had to pull off the road and wait out the hours until morning. Towed by a military truck to a garage in Fontainebleau, they learned that the car would require two days to repair — should there be a mechanic available, which there was not. Nor was anyone interested in towing the car further. They did persuade a young man with a truck, but no fuel, to siphon the gasoline from their car and take them to Orleans. Sitting on top of their luggage in the truck bed, they again headed south.

  Now they were part of the dense caravan of fleeing humani
ty. The flight from Paris was the most motorized exodus in history at that time, and the hours were punctuated by noise and confusion, by the scrape of gears and the thick smell of petrol, by curses and despairing cries. The truck passed hundreds of nonfunctioning vehicles ditched by the roadside, and thousands of people whose only recourse now was to walk. At night the military commandeered the main route, and Tomara’s crew had to make their way along dark country lanes, without lights because of the bombers.

  They reached the Orleans railway station, only seventy miles from Paris, on the fourth day. “People lay on the floor inside and the town square was filled,” Sonia wrote. “We piled our baggage and waited until daylight. There was nothing to eat in the town, no rooms in the hotels, no cars for hire, no gasoline anywhere. Yet a steady stream of refugees was coming in, men, women and children, all desperate, not knowing where to go or how.”

  The next day, pausing at Montbazon on the Bordeaux road, Sonia heard that the French government had relocated in Tours seven miles away, and set off alone to walk there. It was raining, and she carried her sleeping bag and typewriter. At last someone gave her a lift. In Tours she found the government gone, along with most of her fellow correspondents, but the wireless operator and censor allowed her to file her story before they, too, fled. That night there was an air raid, and as she listened to the bombs falling, she could only hope they were not aimed at the refugee-choked roads. “A catastrophe has befallen France,” Sonia wrote. “Nobody knows how or when it will end. Like the other refugees, and there are millions of us, I do not know when I shall sleep in a bed again, or how I shall get out of this town.”