Women's Barracks (25 page)

It was eleven o'clock in the evening. We were tired, and nearly all of us were already in bed. Ginette was brushing her hair, and Ann was still in the bathroom.

The guards were on the roof, watching for bombs. They telephoned to Claude to ask for hot coffee, and Monique, who happened to be in the hall, said she would go down to the basement to prepare it. Monique had just gone down to the kitchen when a terrific explosion resounded all around us. In the same second the lights went out, and stones and planks and chunks of plaster and pieces of window rained down upon us. I heard Ginette scream, and cries went up from all over the house.

After a time that seemed endless to us, we came to realize that a V-2 had fallen on Down Street. I remember that I was first of all stricken with astonishment. For four years we had seen buildings crumble all around us, but it seemed impossible that such a thing could happen now to us.

I moved carefully and stood up. I was unhurt. Ginette was bleeding, but she could walk. We felt our way forward in the darkness, climbing over piles of rubble until we found the door of the room. When I opened it, I saw that the hall was filled with women in pajamas. Someone had found a candle, and its flame cast a flickering light over the scene. The entrance to the building had been torn out, and with it the entire front of the house.

Already groups were climbing over the debris to reach the street. Presently we were all outdoors, and people came running toward us with flashlights. We were cold, and Ginette was wiping her bleeding forehead with a piece of cloth torn from her nightgown.

Opposite us was the big hotel, where a dance was going on. It was there that the ARP took us, and we made a sensational entrance in our torn nightclothes, with our faces covered with dust and blood, with our scratched bare feet and our still half-awakened air.

We were put to bed in the Turkish bath.

The next morning, in the graying dawn, I looked again on Down Street. The house was a ruin of blackened bricks, disemboweled, open to the sky, with its rafters torn from their moorings, its stones crushed, its windows smashed, its doors hurled from their frames. In a cluttered hole there was a barrel from which a red stream dribbled, forming a puddle, and under this mass of wreckage, of planks and iron and glass and shrapnel, the ARP searched with their shovels for the body of Monique, entombed in the ruins of the kitchen.

This was my last memory of Down Street. I gazed for a long while at the annihilated switchboard room, at the great assembly hall open to all the winds, at the bleeding, crushed house.

Standing beside me, I saw the Ambassador of Peru. And he too was gazing, with a very thin smile, scarcely perceptible, on his overred lips.

Three days later we landed in France.

The End