The Happy Foreigner | Page 3

was nothing to be gained by
waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark coffee-room
in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black coffee, sugarless,
and two pieces of dry bread.
Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous. I
am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so
well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of
least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off
down the street to find her companions.
A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood
a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a
garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic used
as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and clerks. In a
smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned officers--the
brigadier and the two maréchaux des logis.

A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream
which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow
wooden bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built
upon simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on
either hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey
paper stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end
was a small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one
of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her
intimate life.
* * * * *
Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the
eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny,
in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then
turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A
bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
"Food is in!"
Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from
a tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread.
The watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
"Where is Stewart?"
"She is not back yet."
Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to
read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the
most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room
remained empty.
The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern
in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.

"Is there any food?"
"It's on the stove."
"Is it eatable?"
"No."
Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black
mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the
cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those
who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept too
well.
"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You
are doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice
through the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed:
"Use your hot-water bottle!"
"What for?"
"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you
will find the water has the chill off."
Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with
their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars in
the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of
the battlefields.
On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed
the test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car
that had been assigned to her.
Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain
she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no
answer. The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the
Americans did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road

there came a roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries
thundered down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives
to gain the pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered
Fanny's face and hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her