After this war, there will be many other wars, and in the intervals there will be peace. So it will alternate for many generations. By examining the things cast up in the backwash, we can gauge the progress of humanity. When clean little lives, when clean little souls boil up in the backwash, they will consolidate, after the final war, into a peace that shall endure. But not till then.
Heroes
When he could stand it no longer, he fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The ball tore out his left eye, and then lodged somewhere under his skull, so they bundled him into an ambulance and carried him, cursing and screaming, to the nearest field hospital. The journey was made in double-quick time, over rough Belgian roads. To save his life, he must reach the hospital without delay, and if he was bounced to death jolting along at breakneck speed, it did not matter. That was understood. He was a deserter, and discipline must be maintained. Since he had failed in the job, his life must be saved, he must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot. This is War. Things like this also happen in peace time, but not so obviously.
At the hospital, he behaved abominably. The ambulance men declared that he had tried to throw himself out of the back of the ambulance, that he had yelled and hurled himself about, and spat blood all over the floor and blankets – in short, he was very disagreeable. Upon the operating table, he was no more reasonable. He shouted and screamed and threw himself from side to side, and it took a dozen leather straps and four or five orderlies to hold him in position, so that the surgeon could examine him. During this commotion, his left eye rolled about loosely upon his cheek, and from his bleeding mouth he shot great clots of stagnant blood, caring not where they fell. One fell upon the immaculate white uniform of the Directrice, and stained her, from breast to shoes. It was disgusting. They told him it was La Directrice, and that he must be careful. For an instant he stopped his raving, and regarded her fixedly with his remaining eye, then took aim afresh, and again covered her with his coward blood. Truly it was disgusting.
To the Médecin Major it was incomprehensible, and he said so. To attempt to kill oneself, when, in these days, it was so easy to die with honour upon the battlefield, was something he could not understand. So the Médecin Major stood patiently aside, his arms crossed, his supple fingers pulling the long black hairs on his bare arms, waiting. He had long to wait, for it was difficult to get the man under the anaesthetic. Many cans of ether were used, which went to prove that the patient was a drinking man. Whether he had acquired the habit of hard drink before or since the war could not be ascertained; the war had lasted a year now, and in that time many habits may be formed. As the Médecin Major stood there, patiently fingering the hairs on his hairy arms, he calculated the amount of ether that was expended – five cans of ether, at so many francs a can – however, the ether was a donation from America, so it did not matter. Even so, it was wasteful.
At last they said he was ready. He was quiet. During his struggles, they had broken out two big teeth with the mouth gag, and that added a little more blood to the blood already choking him. Then the Médecin Major did a very skilled operation. He trephined the skull, extracted the bullet that had lodged beneath it, and bound back in place that erratic eye. After which the man was sent over to the ward, while the surgeon returned hungrily to his dinner, long overdue.
In the ward, the man was a bad patient. He insisted upon tearing off his bandages, although they told him that this meant bleeding to death. His mind seemed fixed on death. He seemed to want to die, and was thoroughly unreasonable, although quite conscious. All of which meant that he required constant watching and was a perfect nuisance. He was so different from the other patients, who wanted to live. It was a joy to nurse them. This was the Salle of the Grands Blessés, those most seriously wounded. By expert surgery, by expert nursing, some of these were to be returned to their homes again, réformés, mutilated for life, a burden to themselves and to society; others were to be nursed back to health, to the point at which they could again shoulder eighty pounds of marching kit, and be torn to pieces again on the firing line. It was a pleasure to nurse such as these. It called forth all one’s skill, all one’s humanity. But to nurse back to health a man who was to be court-martialled and shot, truly that seemed a dead-end occupation.
They dressed his wounds every day. Very many yards of gauze were required, with gauze at so many francs a bolt. Very much ether, very much iodoform, very many bandages – it was an expensive business, considering. All this waste for a man who was to be shot, as soon as he was well enough. How much better to expend this upon the hopeless cripples, or those who were to face death again in the trenches.
The night nurse was given to reflection. One night, about midnight, she took her candle and went down the ward, reflecting. Ten beds on the right hand side, ten beds on the left hand side, all full. How pitiful they were, these little soldiers, asleep. How irritating they were, these little soldiers, awake. Yet how sternly they contrasted with the man who had attempted suicide. Yet did they contrast, after all? Were they finer, nobler, than he? The night nurse, given to reflection, continued her rounds.
In bed number two, on the right, lay Alexandre, asleep. He had received the Médaille Militaire for bravery. He was better now, and that day had asked the Médecin Major for permission to smoke. The Médecin Major had refused, saying that it would disturb the other patients. Yet after the doctor had gone, Alexandre had produced a cigarette and lighted it, defying them all from behind his Médaille Militaire. The patient in the next bed had become violently nauseated in consequence, yet Alexandre had smoked on, secure in his Médaille Militaire. How much honour lay in that?
Here lay Félix, asleep. Poor, querulous, feeble-minded Félix, with a foul fistula, which filled the whole ward with its odour. In one sleeping hand lay his little round mirror, in the other, he clutched his comb. With daylight, he would trim and comb his moustache, his poor, little drooping moustache, and twirl the ends of it.
Beyond lay Alphonse, drugged with morphia, after an intolerable day. That morning he had received a package from home, a dozen pears. He had eaten them all, one after the other, though his companions in the beds adjacent looked on with hungry, longing eyes. He offered not one, to either side of him. After his gorge, he had become violently ill, and demanded the basin in which to unload his surcharged stomach.
Here lay Hippolyte, who for eight months had jerked on the bar of a captive balloon, until appendicitis had sent him into hospital. He was not ill, and his dirty jokes filled the ward, provoking laughter, even from dying Marius. How filthy had been his jokes – how they had been matched and beaten by the jokes of others. How filthy they all were, when they talked with each other, shouting down the length of the ward.
Wherein lay the difference? Was it not all a dead-end occupation, nursing back to health men to be patched up and returned to the trenches, or a man to be patched up, court-martialled and shot? The difference lay in the Ideal.
One had no ideals. The others had ideals, and fought for them. Yet had they? Poor selfish Alexandre, poor vain Félix, poor gluttonous Alphonse, poor filthy Hippolyte – was it possible that each cherished ideals, hidden beneath? Courageous dreams of freedom and patriotism? Yet if so, how could such beliefs fail to influence their daily lives? Could one cherish standards so noble, yet be himself so ignoble, so petty, so commonplace?
At this point her candle burned out, so the night nurse took another one, and passed from bed to bed. It was very incomprehensible. Poor, whining Félix, poor whining Alphonse, poor whining Hippolyte, poor whining Alexandre – all fighting for La Patrie. And against them the man who had tried to desert La Patrie.
So the night nurse continued her rounds, up and down the ward, reflecting. And suddenly she saw that these ideals were imposed from without – that they were compulsory. That left to themselves, Félix, and Hippolyte, and Alexandre, and Alphonse would have had no ideals. Somewhere,
higher up, a handful of men had been able to impose upon Alphonse, and Hippolyte, and Félix, and Alexandre, and thousands like them, a state of mind which was not in them, of themselves. Base metal, gilded. And they were all harnessed to a great car, a Juggernaut, ponderous and crushing, upon which was enthroned Mammon, or the Goddess of Liberty, or Reason, as you like. Nothing further was demanded of them than their collective physical strength – just to tug the car forward, to cut a wide swath, to leave behind a broad path along which could follow, at some later date, the hordes of Progress and Civilisation. Individual nobility was superfluous. All the Idealists demanded was physical endurance from the mass.
Dawn filtered in through the little square windows of the ward. Two of the patients rolled on their sides, that they might talk to one another. In the silence of early morning their voices rang clear.
‘Dost thou know, mon ami, that when we captured that German battery a few days ago, we found the gunners chained to their guns?’
PARIS
18 December, 1915
SARAH MACNAUGHTAN (1864–1916) was a volunteer nurse and writer. Her diaries, which detailed her work at home in Belgium, in Russia and on the Persian Front were published after her death in a collection entitled My War Experiences in Two Continents (1919).
[September 1914]
We arrived at Antwerp on the 22nd, twenty-four hours late. The British Consul sent carriages etc to meet us. Drove to the large Philharmonic Hall, which has been given to us as a hospital. Immediately after breakfast we began to unpack beds, etc., and our enormous store of medical things; all feeling remarkably empty and queer, but put on heroic smiles and worked like mad
[…]
27 September – Yesterday, when we were in the town, a German airship flew overhead and dropped bombs. A lot of guns fired at it, but it was too high up to hit. The incident caused some excitement in the streets.
Last night we heard that more wounded were coming in from the fighting-line near Ghent. We got sixty more beds ready, and sat up late, boiling water, sterilising instruments, preparing operating-tables and beds, etc etc. As it got later all the lights in the huge ward were put out, and we went about with little torches amongst the sleeping men, putting things in order and moving on tip-toe in the dark. Later we heard that the wounded might not get in till Monday.
The work of this place goes on unceasingly. We all get on well, but I have not got the communal spirit, and the fact of being a unit of women is not the side of it that I find most interesting. The communal food is my despair. I cannot not eat it. All the same, this is a fine experience, and I hope we’ll come well out of it. There is boundless opportunity, and we are in luck to have a chance of doing our darndest.
28th September – Last night I and two orderlies slept over at the hospital as more wounded were expected. At 11pm word came that ‘les blessés’ were at the gate. Men were on duty with stretchers, and we went out to the tram-way in which the wounded are brought in from the station, twelve patients in each. The transit is as little painful as possible, and the stretchers are placed in iron brackets, and are simply unhooked when the men arrive. Each stretcher was brought in and laid on a bed in the ward and the nurses and doctors undressed the men. We orderlies took their names, their ‘matricule’ or regimental number, and the number of their bed. Then we gathered up their clothes and put corresponding numbers on labels attached to them – first turning out the pockets, which are filled with all manner of things, from tins of sardines to loaded revolvers. They are all very pockety, but have to be turned out before the clothes are sent to be baked.
We arranged everything, and then got Oxo for the men, many of whom had had nothing to eat for two days. They are a nice-looking lot of men and boys, with rather handsome faces and clear eyes. Their absolute exhaustion is the most pathetic thing about them. They fall asleep even when their wounds are being dressed. When all was made straight and comfortable for them, the nurses turned the lights low again, and stepped softly about the ward with their little torches.
A hundred beds all filled with men in pain give one plenty to think about and it is during sleep that their attitudes of suffering strike one most. Some of them bury their heads in their pillows as shot partridges seek to bury theirs among autumn leaves. Others lie very stiff and straight, and all look very thin and haggard. I was struck by the contrast between the pillared concert-hall where they lie with its platform of white paint and decorations and the tragedy of suffering which now fills it.
At 2am more soldiers were brought in from the battlefield, all caked in dirt and we began to work again. These last blinked oddly at the concert-hall and nurses and doctors, but I think they do not question anything much. They only want to go to sleep.
LESLIE HOLDEN wrote a 27-page letter from a hospital bed in France on 6 December 1916. Although it is signed ‘From Leslie’ it has no addressee. Instead it begins with a title – A Little Graffic Experience of A Coolgardie Boy – marking out the manuscript as part memoir and part letter. This extract, retaining the spelling and grammar of the original, is taken from the end of the letter. The corrective note at the foot of the page is written in a different hand.
Well at Boniville about forty of our lads left us there, in Motor Busses for Beacourt Wood on Fatigues. After a few days stay at Boniville we were on the move again, and when we arrived at Rebumpre we had another forty lads, leaving us there for detonating Bombs etc at Gordon’s Dump and also at Alberts, all of the[m] out of our platoon but Gil. W. Boulter, A Perratt and myself. We we [sic] moved up to Alberts the following day bivuacing in a field, where we stayed for about three days, there was then only about a dozen of our Coy with us. Then on the Saturday afternoon we were off again, passing through ‘La Bosielle’, about four miles from Alberts, and on up to Chalk Pit; we were on fatigues up to the front line, about 2 miles away. Taking up bombs, ammunition, Water etc.
Well we made our first trip when we arrived there. Sunday three time[s] and once at night then two trips the following day, Monday, when at midday we were, taken out, marched back to ‘La Bosielle,’ had a tin of Bully Beef and a couple of biscuits thrown to us, a roll call which amounted to about 130 lads of our Battalion and the[n] at about 4 o’clock we were off again bound for the front line and over the top with the best of Luck. The remainder of our Btn were still back at Gordon’s Dump etc. Well I don’t mind admitting that I had a comical taste in my mouth, on that long march to the trenches, with death flying flagrants all around us; as Fritz had a very uncomfortable Artillery barage right back. Well when we got into our front line it was about 6 oclock with Fritz almost sniping with Wizz Bangs and a few rifles thrown in. Well our Bomber’s and B Coy went over on our left, and got there position, we going over later on, and digging in; by midnight things were fairly quiet, lasting until about about [sic] 9’am, when Fritz began to let us know that he also had a guernsey. Well he shelled heavily all through that day, putting up a very heavy barrage on our supports, and when it began to get dark we were one mass of flares from Fritzs star pistols, intermixed with lights for Artillery work, which still continued as Fritz was very jumpy, but to our miscomfort. We were relieved at 2am of Wednesday morning, by the 2nd Div. and we soon made fast tracks for safety, which we found after passing over which were a lovely trench 36 hrs before was now nothing but one mass of debris and scrap iron.
Well we arrived down just behind chalk, at [sic] 4am, where our A.M.C. were working we got a cup of tea, which to us, dead beat, tasted something delicious, we then moved back to La Bosielle staying there for a few hours, and then back to Alberts, and out of the hundred and sixty or so which went up that night between thirty and forty of us answered the Roll Call. Well we moved back again at mid-day after a bit of a wash and shave, end of August, and getting our packs. We were then bound for Doullen’s (to entrain to Bey[the rest of this word is cut off] about forty miles away, which we reached in about four days time. We then went in the Line at Ypres. Well I’ll now close, I could write another dozen
pages, but I haven’t the time, I’m now in Annexe Col [the rest of this word is cut off] No 1 General Hospital France, Etretat, but I’m leaving Today Dec. 12, 1916 for the Bas[the rest of this word is cut off] and then on to the Btn. I only left the B[the rest of this word is cut off] ten days ago, but I only came away with Influenza, and I’m as Good as Gold again now. I’ll now conclude, with the Fondest Love and Kisses to all at home.
From
Leslie.
NOTE: The influenza that Leslie caught was in fact he had his leg blown off in the trenches.
MAY SINCLAIR (1863–1946) was a novelist and philosopher, born in Cheshire. The excerpt below is from A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), based on her experiences in the Munro Ambulance Corps in 1914.
[Monday 28 September, 1914.]
In the afternoon Mademoiselle F. called to take me to the Palais des Fêtes. We stopped at a shop on the way to buy the Belgian Red Cross uniform – the white linen overall and veil – which you must wear if you work among the refugees there.
Madame F. is very kind and very tired. She has been working here since early morning for weeks on end. They are short of volunteers for the service of the evening meals, and I am to work at the tables for three hours, from six to nine p.m. This is settled, and a young Red Cross volunteer takes me over the Palais. It is an immense building, rather like Olympia. It stands away from the town in open grounds like the Botanical Gardens, Regent’s Park. It is where the great Annual Shows were held and the vast civic entertainments given. Miles of country round Ghent are given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fêtes. It is the peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where they never set foot before.
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War Page 11