The Horror of Love (18 page)

The atmosphere was not much better at 4 Carlton Gardens, the Free French headquarters. Outwardly, the general’s routine revealed him as a giant be-jodhpured automaton, arriving punctually from the Connaught Hotel at nine, proceeding straight to his office next to Gaston’s, overlooking St James’s Park, returning to the Connaught at 1pm for a heavy luncheon, including
digestif
and cigar, then heading back to the office to work until eight. To the MP and diarist ‘Chips’ Channon, who spied him strutting ‘insolently’ along Jermyn Street, De Gaulle appeared serene in his self-proclaimed role of saviour of France. Within the eccentric, extremist atmosphere of Carlton Gardens, his friable self-esteem and obsession with French dignity could produce an atmosphere of near hysteria.

Within the broader context of the war, the British government’s principal problems with France in 1940 were reconciling their support of the Free French with Roosevelt’s mistrust, relations with Vichy, De Gaulle’s status and that of the nascent French Resistance. De Gaulle’s goal was to achieve united control of all French resistant movements while negotiating their volatile relationships within the Allies. Gaston’s principal problem was controlling De Gaulle. The general had ‘never pretended to like the English. But coming to them as a beggar, with his country’s wretchedness branded on his forehead and in his heart, was
unbearable.’
²
Harold Macmillan, who knew De Gaulle during the North African campaign, described him as a combination of ‘terrible inferiority complex and spiritual pride’.
³

Gaston loved political prestige, but found its milieu lugubrious. Much as he worshipped the general, he never claimed De Gaulle was much fun socially. Much more to his taste were the society acquaintances he had developed during his period at Oxford, and as often as he could he escaped from Carlton Gardens, which shared ‘that heavy atmosphere which envelops all power’ to spend time with
‘les gens du monde’
. Not everyone was thrilled with his society airs. Georges Boris, former Cabinet director to Leon Blum, remarked: ‘We needed an administrator, what we got was a dancer.’
⁴
Many names familiar to readers of the
Tatler
, including Nancy Mitford, were keen to show their support for the Free French. Lady Peel opened a hotel in her house in Baron Square, Lady Spears donated funds for a Free French hospital, a Churchill cousin set up a restaurant at Olympia for Free Frenchwomen and Olwen Vaughan established the Petit Club Français in St James’s Place.

Officially known as the Canteen of the Allies, the Petit Club was one of the landmarks of Free French London. There were never enough funds, the food, cooked at first in a converted lavatory, was famously dreadful, even by wartime standards, and Olwen, in alice band and unfortunate lipstick, could be a terrifying hostess, unceremoniously flinging out anyone to whom she took a dislike, but the ambience was remembered happily for years by Free Frenchmen. Olwen loved the cinema as much as she loved France, having been secretary of the British Film Institute when it opened in 1933, and her colleagues in the film industry came over to Piccadilly from Soho, lending much bohemian glamour. The club was described in Irwin Shaw’s novel
The Young Lions
as ‘merely three small rooms decked with dusty bunting with a long plank nailed on a couple of barrels that did service for a bar. In it, from time to time, you could get venison chops and Scotch salmon … It was the sort of place where all ranks could fraternize on a
mildly alcoholic basis with the certain knowledge that the cold light of day would erase the military indiscretions of the previous night.’ Olwen served red Algerian wine at legal prices to her homesick guests, on Bastille Day she decorated with
tricolores
and the party spilled out into the street. Thanks to her film connections, the Petit Club became the place where, ‘if you knew Rita Hayworth was in town, you went to look, before the Savoy’.

The general would dine at the Ritz, the Connaught, the Savoy, or the RAC Club on Pall Mall; Gaston preferred parties at Emerald Cunard’s suite at the Dorchester or the Travellers’ Club, where he became a member, presented by Harold Nicolson. He particularly admired the staircase, a gift from Talleyrand. At a lecture given by Nicolson on Proust, he met a Parisian acquaintance, the Marquise de Ludres, at the door, and asked her, since she had known Proust so well, if she had divined his genius in their conversations. ‘If I had, I would have kept his letters, ’ she replied. He discovered several other old
gratin
friends, including the Princess de Polignac and Leo d’Erlanger, by whom he was introduced to the foreign minister Lord Halifax. In turn, Halifax presented him to Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe and his wife Baba, sister-in-law to the imprisoned Diana Mosley. Gaston’s social life was an essential means of publicizing the Free French and getting influential people on the general’s side – several dinners were organized, including one with Cecil Beaton, who photographed De Gaulle, and Noël Coward.

For all Boris’s accusations of frivolity, Gaston never lost sight of the reason for his presence in London; for all the determinedly cheerful gaiety of the Petit Club or the aristocrats in exile, France remained lost, and the future horrifically uncertain.

In London … the light was grey. We were Frenchmen and we walked about the streets of that London like so many broken toys, useless and shamefaced spectators on the rocks of a beach being covered by an irresistible tide. There was a collapse of all standards, the ground giving way under one’s
feet, the unspeakable bitterness of the present, the incoherence of the imagined future.
⁵

Leo d’Erlanger, with whom Gaston was lodging in Mayfair, later showed him the rug which had lain before the fireplace in his bedroom, worn out by long nights of pacing, as Gaston walked sleepless, ‘obsessed by the sadnesses of the present and the memories of the past’.

12

LOVE

A
fter seven months in London, Gaston became weary of the petty, backstabbing culture at Carlton Gardens. As an experienced, professional politician, he was equally frustrated and irritated by the pomposity and incompetence of many of his colleagues who took their titles too seriously and their jobs not seriously enough. Knowing that De Gaulle made it a point of honour never to refuse a man who wished to return to active combat, he requested a transfer to Africa. He suggested that Maurice Dejean, who before the war had served as
chef de cabinet
to the minister for foreign affairs, replace him and in March 1941 he was delegated in turn to the command of Free French forces in East Africa. Departing from Glasgow, Gaston took an enforced six-week holiday as his ship, evading German submarines, crawled to the Cape, before crossing South Africa and Angola to Ethiopia. The port of Djibouti, which remained loyal to Pétain, gave the country its principal access to the sea and was of great strategic importance in providing a ‘ladder’ for ships to the Horn of Africa, to the south of the Suez Canal. Gaston’s aim was to bring French Somalia over to the Free French and to support the British blockade of the port, which would considerably weaken Vichy forces in the region. After visiting Aden and Cairo for negotiations with the British, he arrived in Addis Ababa on 11 June.

The resources of the Free French were very meagre. Gaston had one infantry battalion (the BM4), recently arrived from Syria, at his disposal, as well as a group of deserters from Djibouti.
He set about raising two more Somali companies and distributing leaflets by air over the port to encourage French soldiers to abandon Vichy, flying many of these missions personally. He also set up a Free French mission to Kenya under Lieutenant Henri Girard which would oversee the situation in Madagascar, La Réunion and the Comoros Islands. In November, he achieved a small success when Free French troops fought alongside the British at the taking of the Ethiopian town of Gondar.

Christmas found Gaston in pensive mood. The sparkling chill of the desert nights reminded him of ‘the time when the Ethiopian king turned with the two other
magi
towards the stable at Bethlehem’. The soldiers of the BM4 sang carols ‘fervently’ and ‘our hearts went out with desolate ardour towards those families and loved ones of whom, lost in this corner of Africa, we had no news. How far away France seemed in those times when victory was as yet uncertain.’ It was as well, perhaps, that news was so scarce, as learning that he had been deprived of the French nationality his father had struggled to attain would have made a wretched Christmas present. Gaston’s brother Jean-Paul, who had been able to return to France, had received a visit from an official at Louveciennes informing him that Gaston had been stripped of his citizenship as a consequence of his joining the Free French, and that all his possessions were to be sequestered awaiting confiscation. Luckily, the inspector sent to deal with the division of the brothers’ property agreed to permit Jean-Paul to act as conservator for Gaston’s share and conveniently disappeared, a gesture which made it clear where his own sympathies lay. The next summer, Jean-Paul was informed by friends that Gaston’s apartment in the Rue Bonaparte was also to be sequestered and for a month he smuggled his brother’s furniture, books and beloved
bibelots
out of Paris to safety.

Gaston grew more and more frustrated with the complexities of his role in Ethiopia. Early in 1942, he had met Haile Selassie, restored to his imperial title by the British after the brief Italian occupation. Selassie was alert to the potential of co-operation with the Free French and their powerful allies against the
continuing threat of Italian expansionism, but though he promised to do all he could to facilitate Gaston’s mission, Gaston himself was sceptical of the British position. He voiced his concerns to De Gaulle, claiming it was obvious that the British, obliged to evacuate Ethiopia, were as anxious as possible to remove any foreign influence, particularly that of the Free French in Djibouti with its vital railway. In response, De Gaulle blamed the State Department in Washington for its ‘protectionist’ strategy towards Vichy, which was preventing the Free French from bringing the province of the Somali coast into the war and handicapping Vichy through the Djibouti blockade.

Gaston did manage to extract the confirmation of the concession of the Djibouti railway in favour of the Free French (it had belonged to France before the war), but he also learned that a simultaneous treaty between the British and the Ethiopians would risk consigning the concession to the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), that great Gaullist bugbear. Selassie responded to Gaston’s protests by claiming that he perfectly understood the difficulties of the Free French and asked only that they understood his. Worse still, Gaston heard that the British and Vichy had come to a secret accord whereby the territory of Djibouti would not be attacked in return for Vichy leaving the ships in the port alone, and making no attempt upon Aden. Gaston attempted to block this agreement, but the attentions of the British, and indeed De Gaulle, were frankly elsewhere.

Djibouti would not be definitively claimed for the French until January 1943, when Général Paul Legentilhomme was installed as high commissioner for the Indian Ocean after an offensive involving 1,800 troops the preceding November. By then, Gaston had been back in London for several months, having achieved little more than a medal for his efforts. Despite his extremely limited success as a diplomat, he had ventured to ask De Gaulle for an embassy, but the general, looking rather hurt, asked plaintively: ‘Do you not wish to work with me?’ and offered him the post of director of his Cabinet. From then on,
they worked together in ‘perfect understanding’.

Nancy Mitford’s involvement with the Free French began in August 1940, when she took a job in a canteen at White City established for French soldiers who had been interned after Dunkirk. She stayed in North London with Julian Huxley, a biologist, and his Swiss wife Juliette. Writing to Gaston in 1963, she remembered how much she hated Mrs Huxley for her cruelty to the French troops in their time of despair. Nancy decided that she adored them. ‘I never knew what hard work was before, I only hope I can stand up to it, ’ she told Mrs Hammersley. ‘… but am perfectly happy and simply love the frogs more and more.’ She returned to Blomfield Road that September, as the Blitz was beginning. ‘The nights!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nobody who hasn’t been in it can have the smallest idea of the horror one is going through. I never don’t feel sick, can’t eat anything and though dropping with tiredness can’t sleep either … last night I shall never forget as long as I live.’ Maida Vale was particularly badly affected, as the Luftwaffe aimed for Paddington station, and Nancy’s descriptions are a moment-by-moment account of what it was like to endure the bombing.

Peter had appeared with the two small children of one of the men in his unit who had been bombed out. Their mother was dying of a miscarriage and the soldier had no leave. Nancy put them to bed in the kitchen where she was sleeping with her maid, Gladys, and at two o’clock that morning the house next door was hit. Nancy took the children through the blackout in a taxi to Hampstead – ‘it was like leaving Sodom and Gomorrah, great fires the whole way and fearful explosions’ – where her old governess Zella found them a bed. The Home Guard fired on her returning cab and she awoke to find five more Blomfield Road homes destroyed. The children, Gladys, Nancy’s bulldog, fur coat and linen were sent to the country later that morning in another cab. ‘I think every living thing that can be got out of this hell should be … the screaming bombs simply make your flesh creep … the great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops and the wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances
tearing up the street and the horrible unnatural blaze of light from the searchlights all has to be experienced to be understood.’ (According to Nancy, Gladys nonetheless loved air-raids – in a BBC interview she recalled her maid popping her head round the bedroom door towards the end of the war and remarking, ‘Isn’t it a
treat
to hear them again?’) At White City, some of her earlier enthusiasm for the divine frogs had turned to exasperation at their spoiled behaviour. She had gone to considerable trouble to procure a cardinal to offer a little spiritual succour, but they
would
persist in grumbling that the bombs kept them awake and that they hadn’t been taken to the theatre even once: ‘
Ça je trouve un peu exagéré quand même.’