WOMEN’S
BARRACKS
TERESKA TORRES
Copyright © 1950 by Tereska Torres
Originally published in 1950 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., New
York, NY.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
While working in the newsroom of the Office of War Information in London
during World War II, I met a young woman who was our liaison with the
French information services. Tereska was a volunteer in the women’s
division of the Free French Forces, corresponding to our WACS. We became
friends, and I visited her often in the ancient mansion on Down Street
that had been turned into a barracks for these Frenchwomen. I came to
know Tereska’s circle.
Recently I met her again in Paris, happily married and the mother of two
children. Tereska had just written a book about her companions in the
Free French Forces, and she showed it to me. I recognized all the girls
of the little circle in Down Street, and their stories, which I knew to
be true.
It seemed to me that this book, with all its tenderness, was an
important book because it told a story that had not yet been truly told,
the story of women in war. This was the story of the effect of living
together in military barracks upon a group of young girls, many of them
utterly innocent when they entered the service, where they were to
encounter jaded women who had lived through every type of experience. I
recognized the authenticity of every line.
The problems brought forward here are problems that must be recognized
wherever women have to live together without normal emotional outlets.
What is told here should help to bring understanding of these special
problems, for the story of Down Street reminds us that women must be
women, even in war.
—George Cummings
FOREWORD
My husband tells me I ought to write my memoirs of the women’s army in
which I spent five years during World War II. It’s very difficult. I
don’t know where to begin or how to tell it. My husband tells me
laughingly that it will make a sensational book, and I really don’t see
myself as a writer of sensational books. But, he insists, the story will
be interesting to Americans because we were a barracksful of Frenchwomen
in exile, and it seems that Frenchwomen have a great deal of allure
abroad.
“You know I don’t like to talk about myself,” I protest.
“Well, then write about the others.” And he adds jokingly, “They’re more
interesting, anyway. Besides”—and he becomes serious—“it will be useful,
it will help people understand.”
It’s raining. It’s been raining since we arrived at the seashore. It
seems that it rains a great deal in Brittany. And the rain reminds me of
the summers in England when the rain fell ceaselessly.
I can still see, in every dismal detail, the big house on Down Street as
it looked on those wet, cheerless days. Down Street, for all those who
lived there, will always remain that big house of blackened brick in the
narrow gray street, that cold and somber house bracketed between high
brick walls. The dirty windows penetrated by yellowish light, the dim
corridors, the large glacial assembly room, the dismal dormitories, the
dining rooms with their bare tables—all had a prison-like aspect. Down
Street—for me the name evokes the list of infractions and punishments
posted in the entrance hallway; stairways to be swept, potatoes to be
peeled, floors to be scrubbed on our knees. It evokes the little
switchboard room, which someone dubbed the “Bordello,” with its high
walls and high grilled window. I can’t count the times I stood before
that window, seeking a bit of sky; but always facing us, standing there
in front of the hotel across the street, was the one we called “the
Ambassador of Peru,” holding himself erect, tall, thin, with painted
cheeks, forever watching our barracks with his strange demonic smile. He
seemed to me to be an angel of evil guarding our house.
But more than all these, Down Street evokes the women with whom I lived
in that house. The truth is, I’m one of those people who live a great
deal in the lives of others. Perhaps that’s why people seem to feel easy
in telling me things about themselves. I like to listen.
Sometimes at the barracks I wondered why so many of the girls in our
little group chose me as their confidante, and poured out their most
intimate feelings to me, their secret thoughts, while I didn’t offer
mine in return. I even asked this once of little Ursula. “Perhaps it’s
just because it is not an exchange,” she said. “When I talk to you, I
feel it’s not a bargain in which I leave you my troubles and you leave
me yours. You take mine, and that’s all.”
I never felt I was taking anyone’s troubles, though there were times
when I terribly wished I could help my friends in some way. I felt it
was wonderful to have people trust me and let me into their lives. And I
will try to write of their lives, telling not only what I saw, but of
the feelings and thoughts that they revealed to me, and of some of the
things I divined.
Naturally I was not present myself during all of the incidents that I am
about to relate. Yet I know that these things happened, and I know well
the women to whom they happened. These episodes are important, because
they are significant of the pressures and tensions that all of us felt,
and that all women must inevitably feel when they are isolated from
normal living, caught in the strange turmoil of war. And so, since I am
so well acquainted with the women who experienced these things—with
their characters as well as their outward lives—I shall from time to
time pretend, like a novelist, that I was an invisible witness to the
private moments of my comrades.
—Tereska Torres
CHAPTER 1
When the war began, I was in my last year of school at the convent of
St. Celestine. I was seventeen and unobtrusive, though not really plain.
I had never even gone out with a boy. I had been raised in the warm
family seclusion that is characteristic of respectable French families.
My mother’s parents lived with us in our small house near Orléans.
My father was a sculptor, and most of the friends of our family were, I
suppose, middle-class people—university professors, some minor
government officials, writers, and other artists. My own school friends
were a rather serious-minded set of little girls. Though we did our
share of giggling, we discussed such grave problems as the emancipation
of the Frenchwoman; for at that time, women in France still did not have
the vote. And though we knew nothing of men, we had long discussions
about the number of children we would have. I was an only child, and was
therefore ambitious to become the mother of a large brood.
Then the war was upon us. Papa enlisted. During the long winter of the
“phony war” we felt secure. Then the war began in earnest. Papa was at
the front, and we were sure France would win.
When the Germans reached Liége, Mother said we would have to leave
Paris. I said she was out of her mind. I said the Germans would never
get as close to Paris as they did in the last war. A week later the
Germans were at the Meuse, and my mother and my grandparents insisted
that we should prepare to leave.
And so one day in May I took off the navy-blue uniform dress of my
convent school, and with my mother and my grandparents I left Paris. We
were in danger, my mother said, because of our origins—her parents, who
had come from Poland, were Jewish.
We had heard nothing from my father for several weeks. Then there was
the news of the disaster at Dunkirk. Perhaps my father was there,
helping the English.
Everyone was leaving Paris—all the prominent people, and all the people
in government circles, including some of our friends, and everyone who
had a car. We had no car. We left on a train that was crowded like a
subway. We were going to St. Jean de Luz, where we could stay with my
father’s cousins.
We were certain we would be back soon; so certain that my mother left
the family silver and all our other possessions unlocked in the house,
simply telling the concierge to keep an eye on things. And I left my
Teddy bear sitting on my bed. He was just exactly my own age, and he had
slept with me all his life. It was for him that I wept when I thought of
the Germans taking possession of our house.
After three almost unbearable days of crowding and confusion, of trains
that stopped running and trains that changed destination, we all arrived
at St. Jean de Luz, where the sun shone, and there was a beautiful
beach, and there was the sea. The war seemed very far away.
I was sent back to my studies, to prepare for my graduation examination,
which I should have taken that year in Paris. I passed it at last, at
Bayonne, and was qualified to enter college. The day of my graduation
was the day when France signed her armistice of defeat.
I was only a girl, scarcely out of my childhood; I didn’t understand
what was happening at all, but I was shocked beyond comprehension. We
had been promised victory, and we were being handed defeat. There was
still no news of my father. My mother wept all day long. And the Germans
were coming, everybody said, even to the south.
It was on one of those days that I met one of my mother’s friends in the
street, and she talked to me about General de Gaulle and his
proclamation from London, asking for volunteers for his Free French
army. In that moment it became clear to me that the one possible answer
to the chaos in which we had been plunged was De Gaulle.
It was then that I began to beg my mother to leave. Day and night I
insisted that we had to leave France. Our lives, and the lives of her
parents, were in danger. And slowly she began to be persuaded.
Our fashionable little town was filling with refugees. Some of them were
refugees de luxe in their big cars, but there were also bewildered
remnants of troops in the streets, unshaven, distraught men—our own, and
also many soldiers from a Polish regiment that had been enlisted in
France. The Poles were fleeing for their lives, and no one could
understand them or help them until they found us. I remember that one
day we succeeded in finding civilian clothes for half a dozen Polish
soldiers who wanted to try to escape into Spain.
On the twenty-fifth of June, 1940, I went with my mother to Biarritz,
where there was a Portuguese consulate. We applied for visas for
ourselves and my grandparents, and we were among the very last to
receive them. That very night there were notices posted in St. Jean de
Luz announcing that German troops would be in town the next day. In the
morning all the shops were shuttered. I saw a troop carrier move through
the street, and turned my face away. That same day, I hitchhiked to
Hendaye, to secure transit visas through Spain. That night we packed our
bags and rucksacks; even my grandparents were loaded with all they could
carry.
The next day we took the train to Hendaye. We got out and approached the
customs station on our side of the international bridge. We could see
the Spanish flag floating across the bridge, but on our side there was
no flag; our tricolor had already been taken down. But at least there
was still no swastika. As the customs man stamped our passports, he
said, “_Les salauds_, they won’t remain here long.”
We walked across the bridge, managing to lug all of our baggage. After
the formalities on the other side, we took a taxi to the railway station
at Irún. On the way the driver stopped at a check post, and while our
papers were being examined, a carful of German soldiers drove up. Our
driver gave the Hitler salute. I shuddered. But the Germans did not
question us, and we drove on.
At Figueira da Foz, in Portugal, we found ourselves in a luxurious
vacation center with the elite of France and Belgium: diamond merchants,
movie stars, famous authors and statesmen, who sunned themselves on the
golden beach, or strolled along the palm-shaded walks, or amused
themselves in the cafés. We were refugees together with Danielle
Darrieux, Dalio, Maurice Chevalier. We passed our days in endless
gossipy discussions—should we leave for Chile, Argentina, or Brazil?
Some said the United States was sending a ship for us all. Others said
we would leave in a week for Canada. There were bullfights in the
afternoons, movies in the evenings, and I attended my first ball.
It was there in Figueira da Foz that we received our first news of my
father. Some French officers arrived and informed us that units of my
father’s division had escaped across the Channel.
We were overjoyed and frightened at the same time. There was a good
chance that Father had escaped from France, but was he safe and well?
Had he actually arrived in England at all? Nobody knew.
Mother could not leave her aged parents to go to England and search for
Father, but I could. I had to do a good bit of persuading, but in the
end it was agreed. My mother and her parents would sail for Canada, and
I would go to England.
I left before they did. A British ship was taking volunteers for De
Gaulle’s forces, and place was found for me aboard.
After I reached London it took me only a few days to find an army
comrade of my father’s, and to learn that my father had been taken
prisoner. He was to remain in prison throughout the war.
The Free French Forces had just announced that they would recruit women.
Here was the very opportunity I had hoped for. I had arrived at the
opportune moment, and presented myself on the first day of female
recruiting. There, in the large barren hall, I felt that I would at last
be transformed from a schoolgirl to a woman with a purpose.
A few score women were already on hand. I wondered just what sort of
girls were to become my companions, for surely they would not be
representative of the average, typical Frenchwoman. To be in London at
all during the war, they had to be drawn from special groups.
There was always a certain number of students from France, but French
families are extremely closely knit, and in times of stress, these
students would most likely have been drawn home, so that the only ones
to have remained in England would be the children of disturbed or broken
families—divorced parents, disoriented homes. And then there would be
some girls from the working classes—French maidservants and the French
prostitutes of Soho. Another category of women were the adventuresses,
emancipated women, and career women who for one reason or another had no
family life.
In the end, there were to be some five hundred of us in this service
during the war, and more than as many again in an ambulance and nursing
corps that was formed later for service in France. Our own group was
like the WACS or the ATS. We were to replace men in all sorts of jobs,
so that they might be released for combat.
From that first day, we were to be united by one act—our act of
volunteering. For whether we had come from Paris or the provinces,
whether we had already been in London when the war broke out or had made
our way there from abroad, whether we joined in 1940 or reached London
in 1944, all of us were impelled by the same ideal. All of us, workers,
students, servants, divorcees, secretaries, the younger and the older,
volunteered with the sincere hope of giving ourselves to France—the
France beloved of every Frenchwoman, the France for whom every one of us
was certainly ready, on that first day in the recruiting station, to
die.
* * * * *
From the recruiting desk I passed into a huge, cold, gloomy room where a
dozen young women stood shivering, naked, waiting their turns for the
medical examination. The first one with whom I became acquainted was
Mickey, for, with her easy, impulsive way, she was never slow to greet a
stranger. A rather tall girl, with the gawkiness of a figure just out of
adolescence, she commented freely and laughingly as she looked about,
finding something extremely droll in the military air that we all tried
to assume. As she watched the physician, hurried and coarse, examining
the teeth and eyes of the girls while keeping up a stream of
questionable pleasantries, Mickey remarked that it was funny to be
getting acquainted with the bodies of our future comrades before we even
knew their names.
Mickey said she had just escaped from France, where she had been
spending her summer holiday with her aunt and uncle. Mickey’s parents
were in Scotland, where her father taught French in a small college. He
was French and her mother was English. They had married late in life and
she was a “December child,” somewhat pampered, as we were to learn,
impulsive, and avid for excitement, since she had been brought up as an
only child in the muted household of an aging couple. Her father was a
typical absent-minded, gentle old professor, and Mickey rattled on,
telling everyone within earshot about him, as we waited for our medical
examination. She simply adored him, she said, slurring the accent in
“adore” with a quaint tinge of English inflection. Because of her
father, Mickey considered herself French rather than English. She had
spent much of her young life with her father’s family in France, and now
she had returned on a fishing vessel to enlist in the Free French
Forces.
Mickey prattled on, seemingly quite at ease in her nudity—perhaps
because she knew that she was pretty. One could see that Mickey felt
sure of herself in her body, as though she were wearing a Paris dress
that no one could help admiring. Hers was a slim, boyish, somewhat gawky
figure in perfect modern style, marred only by a few pimples on her
shoulders, a temporary blemish.
“What you need is to make love. That’ll get rid of those pimples for
you,” said a slightly older woman, winking at Mickey confidentially.
Mickey laughed, almost as though the whole thing were agreed upon; after
all, she was eighteen, and the day was coming when she would “make
love.” The expression was obviously exciting to her, touching as it did
upon something that was still mysterious and forbidden.
In a corner a little girl awaited her turn, seated on a chair. She had
pulled up her slender legs and hugged them close, so that all one could
see of her was her head of glossy chestnut hair, cut in a page-boy bob,
falling straight and thick on both sides of her face. Her legs hid her
body, while her forehead rested on her narrow, boyish knees. Trembling
with cold, she hugged her legs closer to her body. The older woman’s
advice to Mickey and the coarseness of the woman’s laughter seemed to
strike the little girl, for she reacted as from a muddy-handed slap.
This was Ursula.
I noticed her then, noticed how her frail body contracted at the crude
words. Instinctively she passed her fingers over her face, and she
turned her head away a trifle. Later, when I came to know her well,
Ursula told me that this had somehow been a terrible moment for her; not
that what was said was in itself so coarse, but because she had never
before completely undressed in front of others, and because the ease,
the very naturalness of the remark and the assumption that went with it,
not only for Mickey but for all of us, gave her her first shock of
reality, her first sense of what our coming life might be like. At that
moment, she later told me, she felt as though a kind of dirtiness had
entered her, and was sliding down her throat.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed her revulsion, for a silken-looking
young lady standing beside Ursula said, “I hate vulgarity, don’t you? My
name is Jacqueline. I’m from Grenoble. And you?”
Ursula told her name and said that she was from Paris.
“You’re cold,” Jacqueline said. “Take my coat. How old are you?”
Ursula seemed to hesitate. When we became friends she confessed that she
was wondering, then, whether to reply with her official age, eighteen,
or with her real age—just short of sixteen! She hesitated, for Ursula
never learned how to lie quickly, and she ended by saying that she was
seventeen. That seemed an honest compromise to little Ursula.
“You look fourteen,” Jacqueline declared, with her patronizing
knowingness that was to become so familiar to us. “You still look like a
baby, really. Listen, I’ll help you out. I’ll get us assigned to the
same dormitory.”
Ursula thanked her. And yet, despite her frail and childlike air, she
was, as we were to learn, quite a determined little person, used to
living alone and managing for herself. Her parents were divorced, and
she had been raised in a variety of schools and by servants, by cousins,
by nurses, in the course of travel from place to place. Indeed, she
showed some embarrassment at the sudden possessiveness with which
Jacqueline, aristocratic even in her nudity, had taken charge of her,
and she politely refused the coat Jacqueline had offered.
A door opened and a woman in uniform entered.
“All those who have completed their examinations come and get uniforms,”
she shouted.
Mickey led the rush to the next room, where there was a table piled with
khaki garments. She was broad-shouldered, with narrow hips, long
muscular legs, and diminutive pointed breasts, and she moved with a
tennis-playing directness that nevertheless had a touch of the
peculiarly awkward feminine charm of a girl of that age. Just after
Mickey came Jacqueline, who, at the alluring call of the uniform, had
momentarily deserted her new protégée. Jacqueline was, in contrast to
Mickey, finely made, with delicately rounded hips and exquisite round
breasts, and small altogether, as though all that was coarse in
civilization had been refined away, to leave this elegant little body, a
complete statement of perfection.
The corporal behind the table took our measures at a glance. “Sizes
medium and large.” She tossed each of us a jacket and a skirt of rough
hard wool, two khaki shirts, two neckties, a pair of stockings, a
rose-colored brassiere, a linen undershirt, a pair of knee-length khaki
jersey panties, and shoes.
We all began to dress, emitting little cries, laughing. We tried to knot
our ties, to button skirts that were too large and jackets that were too
small.
The only one who seemed to know how to knot her tie properly was a
strapping large girl with a boyish haircut, who looked immediately
natural and in her place in uniform. When she had finished dressing she
glanced around the room and called out to the corporal, “Do you want me
to help you?” She had a heavy, almost masculine voice, reassuring and
cheerful, and the confidence in her voice contrasted with her
expression, which was a little oppressive, and predominantly sad. The
oppressiveness was in her heavy chin, and there was a sadness in her
very beautiful eyes, violently blue, and in her mouth with its large
lips, sunken at the corners.
The corporal accepted her help, and I think that several of us noted,
mentally, that the large calm girl with her air of self-possession and
an ability to command would make good officer material.
“What’s your name?” the corporal asked.
“Ann,” the other replied in her deep voice, and the light feminine name
seemed unsuited to her.
Ursula was among the girls before the counter. Ann handed her a uniform,
and then helped her to dress and to knot her tie. She had a friendly,
easy way of being helpful—like a big brother.
We studied each other in our uniforms. It was dainty Jacqueline who
immediately drew every eye. She was instantly classified as ravishing—so
ravishing that one could scarcely feel jealous. Jacqueline had the sort
of impersonal beauty in which every other woman feels she is somehow
represented. Jacqueline’s complexion was the freshest, purest, rosiest
imaginable. Her face was positively luminous, irradiated by her
glamorous hazel eyes; her beautiful white teeth, bright and gleaming,
were framed by a mouth with rather large sensual lips, as soft to the
eye as they would be to kiss.
Jacqueline twisted her reddish-brown hair into an amusing little bun,
and smiled at Ursula with a well-bred graciousness precisely suited to
her appearance.
Mickey was laughing over the way we looked; she laughed over everything
and over nothing, eager to find fun. Her pale blue eyes were perpetually
wide-open, and her nose puckered out of sight when she laughed. Because
of her mixed Anglo-French parentage, she spoke French always with that
quaint little British accent which added another droll quality to her
fun-loving air.
“Are you English?” Jacqueline asked her.
“No, I’m French,” Mickey insisted, repeating her history. “My mother is
English and my father is French, but I’m French! I just came from
France. I adore France!”
With her impulsive warmth, she seemed to be establishing herself as a
firm friend of Jacqueline’s. And indeed, Jacqueline responded to her as
to someone who was also, obviously, from a family with good breeding.
The silken, precious-looking Jacqueline came from the world of the
aristocracy. Her story, too, came out soon enough. She was among us
almost as a runaway, to escape a depressing family life, mangled as it
can sometimes become only in high society. Jacqueline’s father had died
when she was a child of seven, and her mother had remarried only a year
later. Jacqueline had never liked her stepfather, and as soon as she
reached adolescence the child had discovered that her beauty carried
with it something of disaster and doom. Her stepfather’s too pressing
attentions had aroused a frightened loathing in Jacqueline, and as soon
as she was old enough she had seized the first opportunity to escape
from her family on an exchange visit with some of their friends in
England. But there too her beauty had won her too much attention, and
one night she had tried to escape by dropping from the roof, and had
injured herself quite seriously. As soon as she felt well enough, she
had come to London to enlist.
* * * * *
The corporal shouted, “Form ranks in pairs, and try to march in step if
you can. Forward march!”
With much confusion we managed to form ranks. The scene reminded us
somehow of our classroom days.
“Silence!” cried the corporal, and our little column marched out of the
room, with the women jostling each other and choking back their laughter
as they squeezed through the narrow doorway.
Outdoors, in the street, it began to rain; a small, fine, clinging rain,
sharp and cold. No one marched in step. I was surprised how difficult it
was, since marching always looked so easy when one watched a parade of
soldiers. I was in line with Ursula. “I never believed marching was
something that had to be learned,” she remarked, and blushed for having
offered her observation.
A few passers-by turned to look at us. I wondered whether they could
possibly realize how much that march meant to us. We were literally
marching into a completely new life. I kept saying to myself, This is
what I wanted. This is what I came for. This is the first time that I
decided on something for myself, and made it come true. And it gave me a
frightening sense of entering not only the Army, but life itself.
And so we marched behind the corporal, who had placed Ann at the head of
the column, and it was a ridiculous column, zigzagging, with the tall
and the short all jumbled together, a column of women half running, in
our ill-fitting uniforms, too long, too short, too wide. But neither
long-striding Ann nor the glowing Jacqueline nor the elderly woman with
the coarse voice nor even the fun-loving Mickey—not any of us thought of
laughing.