22nd & 23rd July, 2004
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Bruce Bellingham
A Thought for Today
Rest assured that you will never rest
assured. Not in this world.
BELLINGHAM’S A LIFE WELL - LIVED
This from our friends at the
London Telegraph.
Susan Travers 1909-2003
Susan Travers, who has died
in Paris aged 94, was the only woman to have joined the French Foreign
Legion; English by birth, she came to regard the Legion as her true
family and played a key part in the breakout by its troops from Rommel's
siege of the desert fortress of Bir Hakeim in 1942.
When war came in 1939, Susan Travers was living in the South of France,
where she had grown up, and she joined the Croix Rouge, the French Red
Cross. Hitherto she had led the rather inconsequential life of a
socialite, but the challenges that now faced her gave her a purpose for
the first time. Although her dislike of blood and illness made her a
less than ideal nurse, she soon realized her ambition to become an
ambulance driver, and in 1940 accompanied the French expeditionary force
sent to help the Finns in the Winter War against the Russians.
France fell to the Nazis while she was in Scandinavia, and so she made
her way to London, where she volunteered as a nurse with General de
Gaulle's Free French forces. She was attached to the 13th Demi-Brigade
of the Legion Etrangere (about half the Legion had stayed loyal, the
others throwing in their lot with Vichy) and sailed for West Africa,
where she witnessed the abortive attack on Dakar.
She was then posted to Eritrea and took on the hazardous job of driving
for senior officers. The desert roads were often mined and subject to
enemy attack, and she survived a number of crashes, as well as being
wounded by shellfire.
Her dash and pluck quickly endeared her to the legionnaires, who
nicknamed her "La Miss". For her part, she admired the Legion's code of
"honneur et fidelite", and formed good friendships with many of her
comrades, among them Pierre Mesmer, later Prime Minister of France.
She also enjoyed several romantic liaisons, notably with a tall White
Russian prince, Colonel Dimitri Amilakvari, but none of these proved
lasting. Then, in June 1941, her world was transformed. The cause was
Colonel Marie-Pierre Koenig, her commanding officer, whose new driver
she became.
Although he was married, they quickly fell for each other - he wooing
her with roses when she was in hospital with jaundice - and although it
was impossible to show affection for one another in public, they enjoyed
a happy few months together while posted to Beirut.
This idyll was ended when their unit was attached to the 8th Army and,
in the spring of 1942, sent to hold the bleak fort of Bir Hakeim, at the
southern tip of the Allies' defensive line in the Western Desert. At the
start of May, Italian and German forces attacked in strength, Rommel
having told his men that it would take them 15 minutes to crush any
opposition; the 8th Army hoped the fort would last a week. Instead,
under Koenig's command, the 1,000 legionnaires and 1,500 other Allied
troops held out for 15 days, and Bir Hakeim became for all Frenchmen who
resisted the Nazis a symbol of hope and defiance.
With all ammunition and - in temperatures of 51 C - all water exhausted,
Koenig resolved to lead a breakout at night through the minefields and
three concentric cordons of German panzers that encircled Bir Hakeim.
Susan Travers was to drive both him and Amilakvari.
The attempt was swiftly discovered, however, when a mine exploded, and
with tracer lighting up the night sky and tank shells hurtling towards
her, Susan Travers took the lead. Determined to get both her passengers
to safety, she pressed the accelerator of her Ford to the floor and
burst through the German lines, blazing a trail for the other Allied
vehicles to follow. Although her car was struck by a score of bullets,
and on one occasion she drove into a laager of parked panzers, she
reached the British lines.
Of the 3,700 Allied troops who had been at Bir Hakeim, more than 2,400
escaped with her, including 650 legionnaires and Koenig became the hero
of France. Susan Travers was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Ordre
du Corps d'Arme for her feat.
With Koenig's career in the ascendant, he ended his affair with Susan
Travers soon afterwards, much to her grief. Nevertheless, she remained
with the Legion through the fighting in Italy and France until the end
of the war, acting as both a driver and a nurse to the wounded and the
dying. By May 1945 "I had become the person I'd always wanted to be"
and, not wanting any other life, applied to join the Legion officially.
She took care to omit her sex from the form, and her application was
accepted. She was appointed an officer in the logistics division, and so
became the only woman ever to serve with the Legion.
Susan Travers was born in London on September 23 1909. Her father, a
naval officer, had married her mother for her money and the union was
not an especially happy one. Susan's childhood was comfortable but
over-strict, and she had her most enjoyable times away from her parents
with her grandmother in Devon.
She was sent to school at St Mary's, Wantage - an experience which she
did not remember fondly - but during the First World War her father had
been put in charge of marine transport at Marseilles (where his own
father had once been British Consul), and in 1921 he decided to move the
family to Cannes.
The Riviera was starting to become fashionable, and Susan quickly took
to the way of life there. Inspired by the deeds of a neighbour, Suzanne
Lenglen, she also became a fine tennis player.
Being a girl, she had been more or less ignored by her father and her
only brother, and by her late teens had developed a craving for male
company: "Most of all," she wrote later, "I wanted to be wicked." Sent
to a finishing school in Florence, she succumbed at 17 for the first
time to the blandishments of a man, a hotel manager named Hannibal.
By her own admission, she spent the next decade in a rather vapid, if
enjoyable, round of skiing and tennis parties all over Europe, thinking
nothing of travelling to Budapest or Belgrade for a week's
entertainment.
With her gamine figure, striking features and blue eyes, she was a
constant and willing object of male attention, heedless of her father's
reproach that she was "une fille facile". It was a careless approach to
life brought to an abrupt halt by the onset of conflict in 1939.
After the war she served for a time in Indo-China, but resigned her
commission in 1947 to bring up her children from her marriage that year
to a Legion NCO, Nicholas Schlegelmilch. He contracted an illness in the
tropics in 1949 and, after spending 18 months in hospital, was never the
same person as before. Nevertheless, they remained together; after his
death in 1995 she continued to live in France.
In 1956, Susan Travers was awarded the Medaille Militaire in recognition
of her bravery at Bir Hakeim. The medal was pinned on her by Koenig, by
then Minister of Defence.
Forty years later, in 1996, she was given the Legion's highest award,
the Legion d'Honneur, in recognition of her unique part in the force's
history.
She published a memoir, Tomorrow To Be Brave, in 2000.
Susan Travers died on December 18, 2003. She is survived by two sons.
© Copyright of Telegraph
Group Limited 2003. All Rights Reserved.
Obviously no one had to
suggest to Susan Travers, “Get a Life.”
Bruce Bellingham, San
Francisco. bellsf@mac.com
For more Bellingham log on
to “Bellingham by the Bay” at
http://www.bellingham.blogspot.com/
OUCH:
ALMOST THE LAST WORD
This time it’s supplied by
Dave Gross.
According to the Daily News, there was a biographic picture in the works
for Ray Charles life and Ray asked Ruth Brown who she thought should
play her in the movie. Ruth said Halle Berry, to which Ray Charles
replied, "Ruth, I ain't that blind."
The wonderful Margaret Whiting turns eighty years young today. Her
throaty, emotional voice is as lovely as ever. And, speaking of voices,
Licia Albanese, who attended last year’s Carnegie Hall Birthday concerts
is 85 today. Happy, Happy Birthday ladies.
I’ll be back over the weekend with more poems from Folio and, courtesy
of Eric, our music guru, the download of the song “Up.” Sleep warm.
RM 7/21/2004 5:33PM PDST
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