November 25, 1942. The Casablanca road, you will remember, enters Rabat down near the native quarter. The large ogive portal seemed pleasantly familiar and the storks still perch on the crenelated walls. Once inside, however, you would hardly recognize the place. The Medina and the Casbah des Oudaias are, of course, unchanged and unchangeable, but the old Transat Hotel is no more, having been superseded by the Balima, in whose imposing lobby, immediately after the fall of France, Lord Gort and Duff Cooper cooled their heels while waiting for the interview with Noguès which never materialized.
The fields and terrains vagues which, when we were here, sprawled up to the hardly completed Residence of Lyautey are now a solidly developed residential district of fine and beautifully kept-up villas—out of California by Moorish Spain.
The D.A.P. headquarters is close to the Residence and, like most of the other administration buildings, surrounds a colonnaded courtyard. The turbaned Berber sentries saluted smartly and an elderly chaouch, or orderly, conducted me up the stairs to the outer office of the directeur. The latter’s Chef de Cabinet, Commandant Pantalacci, received me with great politeness. “The Colonel is looking forward to welcoming you,” he said.
Through the open door I could see a part of the large corner office. On one wall a huge three-dimensional relief map of Morocco. Through the window, a fine view of the Chella, necropolis of former sultans, and, like the Acropolis, a “must,” you will remember, by moonlight.
We went in. A compact figure in khaki arose, hand outstretched across the enormous desk. Black hair swept back from a high forehead. Aquiline nose. Intense dark eyes, aware, penetrating, luminous. Colonel Augustin Guillaume, Chief of the D.A.P., instantly recognizable as the type of officer responsible for the greatness of the French Army in its heyday. Later that afternoon I learned from Pantalacci something of Guillaume’s record to date. Born 1895 in the Hautes Alpes, graduated 1914 from Saint-Cyr just in time to leave for the Vosges with an active combat unit, naturally a battalion of chasseurs alpins. Taken prisoner November, 1914. Three escape attempts landed him in a German disciplinary camp near the Russian frontier, where in company with a certain Captain Charles de Gaulle he improved the idle hours by mastering both German and Russian. Immediately after World War I he embarked on the determining course of his career by applying for and being received into the elite corps of les Officiers des Affaires Indigenes of Lyautey in Morocco. From then on his advance was rapid, his distinctions and citations numerous. Appointed to his present job in 1940, one of his important contributions to the war effort has been the clan-destine organization, under cover of his official position and the noses of the German Armistice Commission, of those indefatigable partisans and extracurricular mountain fighters the Berber goumiers of the Atlas. He should be fun to work with.
Have been assigned an office across the hall with a lovely stove. Important, as there is no central heating and winter is practically upon us. My billet has been arranged for chez le Capitaine et Madame de Battisti, who have a villa in the Orangerie section of Rabat outside the walls. Am on my way there now to meet them and get bedded down, and tomorrow morning will call on General Noguès. I think I’m going to like this job.
November 30, 1942. Yes, I do like this job, which incidentally keeps me good and busy. A typical day? No such thing, since each day raises problems as diverse as the disposition of the Loyalist Spanish internees and the new tariff to be established for 3d Division by the local Association of Bordel Madams. However, here is how most days start.
Am awakened at 7 A.M. by Mohammed, my Berber orderly, who enters my comfortable room on the second floor of the Villa Mon Repos with a tray on which is a cup of tea brewed by Madame de Battisti, who is dark, decorative, rather shy, and very nice. From across the hall, Capitaine de Battisti—a dashing young cavalry officer, amusing and attractive—sings out, “La salle de bain est à vous, mon commandant.”
Mohammed has brought my Citroën—furnished by D.A.P.—to the door. It was a week before I discovered by accident that since I had not told him he could drive the car by himself, Mohammed and a copain each morning had been pushing it by hand from the garage a mile or so away.
Now we are rolling through the quiet streets, under the arched portal, and up to the Balima, at which an American mess has been established in the basement. Breakfast, usually with one of our consular officials, Mayer or Hooker Doolittle or both. By 8:30 am driving up the broad boulevard past the arcades of shops, the Poste et Télégraphe, the Méchouar, through whose entrance the palace of the Sultan can be glimpsed, up to the D.A.P., which is only a few yards from the rear, or working, entrance of the Residence.
The morning grist: from Guillaume’s office, the French translation of yesterday’s German propaganda broadcast in Arabic. “The Anglo-Saxons have decided to deliver you to the Jews as they have your brother Moslems in Palestine....In North Africa hundreds of Moslems have gone before American firing squads for expressing hostile sentiments against the Anglo-Saxon aggressors....American requisitioning of food reduces Moslems to starvation....American violation of native religious customs,” etc., etc. Unfortunately, the technique of the “big lie” is quite successful among the Arabs.
Bulletin issued by the “Front National de Libération”—unsigned, no address: “Inhabitants of Morocco! The enemies of America and her Allies are still solidly installed in North Africa. Darlan, Nogués, and Co., the apostles of Nazism, responsible for leading France to the abyss, for the pillaging of her soil and that of her colonies, for the massacre of our soldiers and sailors, these men at the head of a powerful Fifth Column in the pay of Germany are still in power. They must be pitilessly exterminated, death to the spies, traitors and adventurers.”
Memo from the Sûreté: “I have the honor to inform you that last evening at 19:00 an American soldier accompanied by a Mauresque woman was pursued down the Avenue Moulay Hassan by four hundred enraged natives including thirty of the Sultan’s Black Guard. The soldier and the woman finally eluded their pursuers by taking refuge in a house of prostitution. Investigation of the incident indicates that the anger of the crowd was directed not specifically against the United States Army but rather towards the Mauresque woman, her manner of dress, particularly the absence of a veil, and the company she was keeping. I remain, with highest consideration,” etc.
Finally, a note from Percy Black: “Find out why the hell they haven’t released the ‘de Gaulliste’ prisoners. Get a list of all inmates of Moroccan work-camps. Am sending Lt. Auberjonois to Rabat to take charge of censorship of Radio Maroc and the French Press.”
Report from the Deuxième Bureau on enemy units north of the Pyrenees and enemy capabilities in re Spain and the Spanish Zone.
Conference with Pantalacci, Guillaume, and Noguès—the last polite, affable, cooperative in certain matters, procrastinating in others. His vast office in the Residence is next the salon in which you and I once had tea with Lyautey. Nogués was then a capitaine on his staff, he told me, and it was he who delivered to the Marshal the telegram announcing World War I. “They are mad, mad, mad,” the Marshal cried. “A war between Europeans is a civil war and that is the worst kind of all.”
Leading from the Resident’s office to the rear entrance is a corridor whose walls are hung with straw matting. Off this corridor are the bureaus of the Resident General’s Cabinet, whose Chief is Monsieur Hardion. I stop in to tell him, together with his assistant Lalouette and de Carbonel, who oversees Radio Maroc, of the censorship plans.
“If our press and radio are to be taken over,” Hardion said, his intense dark eyes flashing, “I shall resign.” He would like to. Almost any excuse to get back to his tank outfit and fight Germans would do. A tough guy, Hardion, but an able one and likable.
“Don’t be hasty,” I said. “You will find Auberjonois quite reasonable.”
He looked glum.
Across the hall to the office of Colonel Piatte, Chef du Cabinet Militaire crisp, nervous, intelligent, competent. He fills me in on some additional Deuxième Bureau stuff and I depart.
Next stop, Direction des Communications, Production Industrielle, et Travaille, which is halfway down the boulevard just below the impressive Finance Ministry, presided over by the brilliant and talented Ludovic Tron. Monsieur N., director of DCPIT, is neither brilliant nor talented. Furthermore he has a tendency to stall. He is doing it now over the matter of the work-camp internees.
“It will take some time, several weeks, to assemble the complete list,” he says.
“We require it today.”
“Impossible.”
“In that case”—rising and looking sad—“my usefulness here is at an end. I shall ask to be recalled from Rabat. It will be necessary, of course, for me to explain not only to General Patton but also to General Noguès, whom I have this moment left and who assured me of your cooperation, exactly why I am leaving.”
“Let me see what I can do,” he says nervously.
“Fine.”
Lunch at the Balima with our Lieutenant Cameron, who has recently set up our Counter Intelligence office in a nearby building. He passes on some dope which tends to confirm certain of our misgivings in re the Chief of the French Sûreté.
Back to Colonel Guillaume’s office to meet the impressive and picturesque Caïd El Ayadi El Hachemi. His territory extends from Marrakech to the Oued Oumer Ribia, his followers number over one hundred thousand rifles. In southern Morocco he is second only in importance to the Glaoui, whom incidentally I visited a fortnight ago when he was de passage at Casablanca. We reminisced about General Daugan and the old days and I have a date to see him again in Marrakech. Ayadi professed warm friendship for the U.S.A. and will be glad to welcome the commander of any American troops that may enter his region.
I was halfway through my written report to Percy when a chaouch knocked and entered bearing a bulky envelope. Outside, the initials DCPIT. Inside, the list of work-camp internees with a polite covering note from Monsieur N. It would seem that with the French, the mournful veiled-threat technique is preferable to shouting and desk-pounding, at which in any event I am deficient.
Well, that was today. Tomorrow may be entirely different.
P.S. The evening “Vigie” has a paragraph about an “incendie au Grove Coconut, boîte de nuit populaire de Boston dans la Massachusetts. Plusieurs morts ont été signalés.” Anyone we know?
December 19, 1942. Yesterday drove in to Casablanca to make a verbal report on a number of things to Percy. In order to have a place where he may interview such shady characters as would hesitate to come openly to our headquarters, Percy has acquired—by the simple process of evicting a rich collaborator—a fine apartment of neo-Chinese decor on an upper floor of a modern building at 227 Boulevard de la Gare, complete with a white-coated houseman, formerly an Austrian spy. This comfortable hideaway he shares with Bunny Carter and Piggy Warburg,{10}the latter presently engaged in confecting for Washington a voluminous report to be entitled “Morocco and the Jewish Question.”
Around ten or so, as we were preparing to turn in—yes, there is an extra bedroom—the telephone rang.
“Shall I answer it?” I said.
“It’s tapped,” Percy said. “Makes a difference what you say. I’ll take it.”
He listened with mounting exasperation. “Algiers again,” Percy said, hanging up. “They have ordered General Patton to take over Radio Maroc at once, by force if necessary. Reason given, antidemocratic broadcast yesterday to the effect that an authoritarian government was still necessary in Morocco. Real reason, British annoyance over Radio
Maroc beating the B.B.C.’s daily news bulletin by one hour due to some mix-up over double daylight-saving time.”
Percy got up, fixed me with a beady eye. “Sorry, Piggy—I mean Bunny—” he said, “you will have to return to Rabat immediately and take over the station.”
“O.K., Percy,” I said, “but in case force becomes necessary, give me something in writing.”
“The Supreme Commander,” Percy scribbled on a half sheet of scented notepaper, “has directed General Patton to take over full control of Radio Maroc. Major Codman will take charge of the station tonight. He will have full authority to designate whomever he may detail to represent him. By order of General George S. Patton, Jr., by Colonel Percy Black, A.C. of S. G-2, Western Task Force.”
“It would be better on green or pink paper with at least one seal,” I said, “but maybe it will do the trick.”
During dinner it had started raining and now it was pouring. The drive back to Rabat was something of a nightmare. Sheets of solid water lashed at the wiperless windshield and dimmed headlights. A close call at the jutting bridge abutment over the ravine. Another at the crossroads in Boulhaut. A relief to pass through the dripping Rabat archway and limp up the streaming boulevard, two cylinders out of four missing, to the darkened front door of Monsieur Hardion’s villa.
A ring. A long wait. Footsteps on the stairs. The door opens a crack. Monsieur Hardion, an overcoat over his pajamas.
“Sorry to bother you at this time of night, but I bear an important message.”
“Come in. Come in.”
“My instructions are to take over Radio Maroc as of now.” I handed Monsieur Hardion Percy’s perfumed note. As he read it, his mouth became a straight hard line.
“That settles it,” he said. “I shall resign.”
“Not until tomorrow,” I said. “There is work to be done.”
“One moment,” he said. Telephone. A number. A wait. A voice. “Is that you, Carbonel? Here, Hardion. Sorry to bother you at this hour, but your presence is required here immediately.” Click.
“Are you all right, Bernard?” A silvery mellifluous voice from the stair landing. Leaning gracefully over the banisters, Madame Hardion, her blond good looks becomingly set off by the diaphanous scarf thrown carelessly over her negligee.
“Yes, quite all right. But you, Nellie, you must not take cold.”
She starts down the stairs. “Ah, it’s the Commandant Codman.” Surprise. Business of rearranging scarf. A good entrance.
A knock on the front door. Madame Hardion opens it. Carbonel enters breathing hard and dripping pools of water. Conference. Hardion and Carbonel agree to accompany me to Radio Maroc. We sally forth into the torrential night. Silhouetted in the doorway, Madame Hardion, in beautifully modulated phrases, beseeches Bernard to be careful, to be prudent.
Radio Maroc is situated on an upper floor of the huge Poste, Téléphone et Télégraphe Building halfway up the boulevard. The rain-sodden sentry presented arms in dispirited fashion. In the vast marble-floored rotunda our footsteps echoed hollowly. No one about. The mezzanine offices dark, empty. We march on up the stairs to the floor above. Empty, dark. Next floor, ditto. Through a closed door on the top floor the sound of violins. We enter. A phonograph plays softly. Standing before the microphone, Monsieur Godefroy, “le speaker,” French for announcer, declaiming like a sociétaire of the Théâtre Français, “le Radio-Maroc, vingt-trois heures trente. Les nouvelles sont bonnes. Sur le front russe trois cent chars allemands anéantis....”
Sitting at the control board, intently following the script, a familiar, if unexpected, figure—Lieutenant Auberjonois.
“Fernand,” I said, “how come?”
Still following the script, Auberjonois, as I sat down beside him, hissed in my ear, “Algiers called up about an hour ago to ask if Radio Maroc had been taken over, and, if not, to take it over immediately, by force, if necessary. There was no one around, so I took it over.”
“Fine.” Monsieur Godefroy was signing off. I stood up and in solemn tones read, once again, Percy’s note.
“Postscript: Under the authority vested in me by virtue of the above order, I designate Lieutenant Auberjonois, G-2, Western Task Force, to take full charge of Station Radio Maroc, and to remain in full charge, by force, if necessary, until further notice. And now,” I said, not into the mike, “let’s all go over to the Balima and have a drink.” P.S. Next morning bright and early I called the ever-cooperative Colonel Lauer, Chief of Staff of the 3d Division, and outlined my need for an Arabic scholar to cover the Moslem broadcasts.
“I have just the man,” Colonel Lauer said. “Lieutenant Archibald Roosevelt.”
“Of course, why didn’t I think of it?”
We got Archie on the phone.
Lieutenant Roosevelt is hereby designated to take over censorship of the Arab broadcasts. By force, if necessary.
Christmas Day, 1942—Rabat. Admiral Jean François Darlan, originally representative of the Vichy Government in Algiers, had arranged the general armistice between the French and American troops in early November. With Anglo-American approval, Darlan remained French Chief of State in North Africa until his assassination on 24 December 1942. General Henri Giraud succeeded him.
Have just come from a memorial service at the cathedral for the late Admiral Darlan, who was shot on Christmas Eve by a young man named Bonnier de la Chapelle, who in turn will be shot tomorrow, having been tried and convicted this morning by the French authorities. All the officials, the wealth, and the beauty of Rabat were there in their Sunday best. All behaved with decorum, but I have seldom attended a less funereal gathering. After the service the congregation gathered in groups under the palms in front of the cathedral exchanging amenities and gossip.
To forestall what I feel may be your next question, NO, I do NOT think the Darlan solution might well be applied to the local picture. Besides my weakness for Madame Noguès, I have grown quite attached to the General himself, and anyway am against assassination on general principles. As a matter of fact, Madame Noguès, nee Delcassé, is full of charm. She asks, as always, after you.
Seriously, I am still convinced that General Patton is right in preserving, at least for the time being, the present administration in Morocco and making the French responsible for law, order, and our communications. Like every capital, Rabat presents a veneer of superficiality and inconscience. Beneath the not wholly misleading surface, a lot of hard, conscientious, and patriotic work has been and is being accomplished. For those who judge Rabat chiefly in terms of its continuous round of intramural dinner parties, its bickerings and flirtations, the formal lunches and Sunday-afternoon receptions at the Residence, it might prove something of an eye opener to accompany General Noguès on one of his frequent trips into the interior or merely as far as the Sultan’s palace.
Smooth functioning of the Protectorate is premised, as Marshal Lyautey{11} pointed out, on close working cooperation between the Sultan and the Resident General. Since the days of the great marshal some Residents have lost sight of this elementary principle. The present Sultan, His Majesty Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef, whom you and I met when he was a delicate and seemingly ineffective youth of fifteen or sixteen, is now in his middle thirties. He is still fragile in appearance but has acquired real dignity and considerable charm. He is intelligent, sensitive, willful, and clever. A clumsy Resident could find him quite a problem. Noguès has handled the relationship with consummate skill. Understanding, flexibility, personal warmth, firmness, in exactly the right proportions. El Glaoui, Pasha de Marrakech, almost the last of the great feudal overlords, is still the most powerful individual Moslem chieftain of Morocco. His entire career has been closely identified with the French and he well knows where his bread is buttered. The same is true of the vastly erudite Chérif Kitani, head of the important religious brotherhood of Kitanya. Surrounded by the rare books of his famous library in Fez, he chuckles and smiles, and rumbles—a benign, portly, white-whiskered Moslem Santa Claus. But despite the surface geniality, he, like the Glaoui, must be kept in line.
Throughout the entire complex native pattern of friendly, semi-friendly, and potentially hostile tribes of Arab, Berber, and Arabized
Berber collectivities of city, plain, and mountain, their caϊds and pashas, their individual peculiarities, their local customs, their deep-seated xenophobia, continuous control and a very sure touch is essential. Noguès has it.
So there it is. Noguès guessed wrong, tragically wrong, in resisting us. Since the landings he has been, and continues to be, useful to us. I am quite aware that in addition to the de Gaullists, most of our own press and consular representatives are out to get his scalp. They will probably succeed. I only hope that by the time they do, we shall have passed on to other fields of action. Merry Christmas.
December 29, 1942. Well, Christmas’ is over and so is Admiral Darlan. Giraud is in—you probably heard his speech, or rather interview, last night and everything seems to be going along fairly well.
Yesterday was a sort of typical quiet Sunday. It went something like this: 7 a.m., tea in bed—Sidi’s own minted tea. Up. Shaved before the Captain now instead of after. Brahmin, my orderly, brings the car around. It is still dark, but the east is getting pink. Drive through the villa quarter, threading my way among bicyclists, natives, and children, through the old walls—the storks are not back from Alsace yet—and through the center of the town, which is already awakening. Porgy and Bess themes—Arabs hawking their morning papers. Breakfast at the hotel with the division officers. American breakfast—eggs, real coffee, sugar, cream. Up the hill to the lazy Residence. Sunrise.
Work, reports, interviews, Sunday lunch at the house of the father-in-law of my Corsican captain. Father-in-law is Alsatian and a doctor—his wife Belgian. He came here the year I was born. In those days an Arab family paid the doctor one hundred francs a year to keep them in good health, but they kept running in eighth cousins on him, until finally he struck.
Tending the Sultan paid better but had certain inconveniences. He, the doctor, came down with typhus on one occasion when visiting Sa Majesté up in the hills somewhere. The local medics pronounced him dead and Father-in-law came out of a two weeks’ coma just in time to prevent the coffin lid from being nailed down on him. Then he told about tending one of the royal wives. He was only allowed to use his stethoscope through a slit in the harem door—but even today Mrs. Father-in-law looks rather prim and says, “I have the impression you profited by your visit just the same.”
There is a helluva lot of work to do here and I thoroughly enjoy my end of it, which is liaison of various and very varied kinds with the Residence. Of course, I don’t know how long my job will last, as things are in rather a state of flux.
I am in somewhat of a dither. Who should blow in here but Ted Curtis and Harold.{12} They flew up here to say that they had been cabling the Pentagon to send me right over in a bomber to do liaison work. They were astounded to learn that I had come over “the hard way.” They stopped in on their way up to see my General, who said, “Certainly not” so now the tussle is on.
My General arrived here today—in fine form. “The aviation people are after you. I told them that, as always, they were too late. Moreover, you will go further and see more with me.” Maybe he’s right, I really don’t know, but nothing I do or don’t do would have much to do with deciding it. As a matter of fact, the whole trip from the very beginning has been and is wholly fascinating, not to say amazing.
January 13, 1943. My General has just made me his Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff and says he has no intention of giving me to the Air. I imagine you saw the piece about him in Life. Yesterday he got the Grande Croix from the Sultan. The citation in Arabic translates “Les lions dans leurs tanières tremblent en le voyant approcher” (“Lions in their lairs tremble at his approach”)—and so does everyone else. He has been swell to me and, as a great treat, promises us all a warm summer.
January 24, 1943. The news of Alec Woollcott’s death came out in this morning’s news flash and I find myself feeling immeasurably sad about it. In a queer but fundamental way he was very much engraved in our lives. In the last year or two I had grown really fond of him and from his last letter I gathered that you and he were getting to be fairly close buddies. It is this aspect I mind the most, since now, of all times, I hate to think of the disappearance of anything or anybody that you and I share in common. Of our “public” friends, I think that I shall miss him more than anyone since George Gershwin.
Speaking of which, last evening I found myself for the first time since landing actually alone for a couple of hours. We have an excellent Stein way in the apartment and I surprised myself by remembering—the last time I tried I hadn’t been able to, so it must have been telepathy or something—a lot of George’s old tunes, including, naturally, “Cousin in Milwaukee” and “You Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and thinking more than ever of our funny house in Marion, of George’s cigar and fur overcoat, and of 53 Pinckney Street, and hoping that latter song title hadn’t any catch in it and was basically sound. Of course it is and I must have a touch of the good old African cafard or I wouldn’t write this way.