Tumult and Tears

by Vivien Newman

  She is mother to the wounded, she is sister to the dead.

  The victor’s cheers ring in her ears but these she does not heed;

  The victim’s groans and dying moans are given as her meed,

  And many a suffering hero choked his blind and sullen curse,

  To smooth it to a blessing for the Red Cross Army Nurse.

  Work on, O noble army nurse and the Crown of Crowns be yours,

  Not always shall destruction be the glory which endures.

  It is coming – it is coming; you are helping on the day,

  When we learn the nobler action is to succour not to slay.

  Anonymous

  The poet idealises nurses’ neutrality, perhaps not realising that respecting this could, for some at least, be a struggle and initially many nurses worried about the need to show compassion to those whose countrymen had potentially wounded or killed their own loved ones. VAD Vera Brittain was not alone in confessing to feelings of dread when she heard that she was detailed for duty in a German prisoners’ ward. Yet, she soon came to accept that soldiers from the opposing sides shared a common humanity. Like many nurses, Brittain used religious undertones to poeticize her service and her admiration for those working and suffering in the German Prisoners’ ward.

  THE GERMAN WARD

  When the years of strife are over and my recollection fades

  Of the wards wherein I worked the weeks away,

  I shall still see, as a vision rising ’mid the War- time shades,

  The ward in France where German wounded lay.

  I shall see the pallid faces and the half-suspicious eyes,

  I shall hear the bitter groans and laboured breath,

  And recall the loud complaining and the weary tedious cries,

  And the sights and smells of blood and wounds and death.

  I shall see the convoy cases, blanket-covered on the floor,

  And watch the heavy stretcher-work begin,

  And the gleam of knives and bottles through the open theatre door,

  And the operation patients carried in.

  I shall see the Sister standing, with her form of youthful grace,

  And the humour and the wisdom of her smile,

  And the tale of three years’ warfare on her thin expressive face-

  The weariness of many a toil-filled while.

  I shall think of how I worked for her with nerve and heart and mind,

  And marvelled at her courage and her skill,

  And how the dying enemy her tenderness would find

  Beneath her scornful energy of will.

  And I learnt that human mercy turns alike to friend or foe

  When the darkest hour of all is creeping nigh,

  And those who slew our dearest, when their lamps were burning low,

  Found help and pity ere they came to die.

  So, though much will be forgotten when the sound of War’s alarms

  And the days of death and strife have passed away,

  I shall always see the vision of Love working amidst arms

  In the ward wherein the wounded prisoners lay.

  Vera Brittain

  Nursing personnel were frequently accorded semi-divine status in posters, postcards and also in poetry. The most overt link between women, the Madonna, the soldiers and Jesus Christ occurs in Alonzo Foringer’s American Red Cross poster, in which a giant nurse cradles a diminutive soldier on a stretcher. The slogan reads, ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’. Nurses were often poeticised in maternal terms, both by patients and by other women, including nurses themselves.

  A SISTER IN A MILITARY HOSPITAL

  Blue dress, blue tippet, trimmed with red,

  White veil, coif-like about her head.

  Starched apron, cuffs, and cool, kind hands,

  Trained servants to her quick commands.

  Swift feet that lag not to obey

  In diligent service day by day.

  A face that would have brought delight

  To some pure-souled pre-Raphaelite;

  Madonna of a moment, caught

  Unwary in the toils of thought,

  Stilled in her tireless energy,

  Dark-eyed and hushed with sympathy.

  Warm, eager as the south-west wind,

  Straight as a larch and gaily kind

  As pinewood fires on winter eves,

  Wholesome and young as April leaves,

  Four seasons blent in rare accord

  — You have the Sister of our ward.

  Winifred Letts

  Prize-winning poet and VAD Alberta Vickridge recognizes nurses’ need to control their emotions in the face of soldiers’ sufferings. This need and the daily agonies they witnessed, took a considerable toll on nursing personnel, leading to a number suffering mental breakdowns and a few even taking their own lives. Parenthetically, no poet has written about shell-shocked or PTSD nurses, although shell-shocked soldiers occasionally appear in women’s poems.

  Vickridge also sees the maternal connection between nurses and patients. In their diaries and memoirs, nurses write about occasions when, at the end, a soldier confused the nurse with his mother and believed that it was she who was easing him into the next life.

  THE RED CROSS SISTER

  Indomitable and aloof,

  She moves along the sunny ward:

  Beneath their folds of spotless woof

  Her brows are calm: her eyes regard

  Like frost, is bright and keen and hard.

  No pitying tear must stain her cheek;

  She looks on pain emotionless,

  For she, to whom the maimed and weak

  Turn daily in their blind distress,

  Must pray for strength and steadfastness.

  Austere she seems, aloof, apart,

  Yet starred upon her linen’s snow,

  The Red Cross trembles o’er her heart,

  The scarlet flower of ruth, whose glow

  In secret warms the breast below.

  Who knows her thoughts? Since in the deeps

  Of every woman’s heart, the same

  Strong mother-love unchanging sleeps,

  Perchance unchilded, hers would claim

  All children hurt in life’s rough game.

  And, secret from ridiculers,

  She holds in tender memory

  These wounded boys, – these babes of hers –

  Some healed and gone and some whose cry

  Has named her in death’s agony.

  Alberta Vickridge

  ‘Dreadful and horrid death’: Christian symbols

  In the heightened religious atmosphere of the day and with the Red Cross so highly visible and soldiers’ sufferings so agonising, it is unsurprising that the Cross, ideas of redemption through suffering, and Christian symbols found their way into nurses’ and civilians’ wartime poetry.

  Roman Catholic Mary Henderson served with the Scottish Women’s Hospital Units for Foreign Service (SWH). The prosaic title of the her poem implies this is just one of many incidents she has witnessed in makeshift hospitals in Serbia, where hundreds of wounded lay on straw pallets on every inch of available space. Like many nursing personnel, she sees the link between the wounded Christ and modern-day soldiers. She may even be daring to suggest that her patients’ agonies are greater than His.

  AN INCIDENT

  He was just a boy, as I could see,

  For he sat in the tent there close by me.

  I held the lamp with its flickering light,

  And felt the hot tears blur my sight

  As the doctor took the blood-stained bands

  From both his brave, shell-shattered hands--

  His boy hands, wounded more pitifully

  Than Thine O Christ, on Calvary.

  I was making tea in the tent where they,

  The wounded, came in their agony;

  And the boy turned when his wounds were dressed,

  Held up his face like a child at the breast,

/>   Turned and held his tired face up,

  For he could not hold the spoon or cup,

  And I fed him … Mary, Mother of God,

  All women tread where thy feet have trod.

  And still on the battlefield of pain

  Christ is stretched on His Cross again;

  And the Son of God in agony hangs,

  Womanhood striving to ease His pangs.

  For each son of man is a son divine,

  Not just to the mother who calls him ‘mine’,

  As he stretches out his stricken hand,

  Wounded to death for the Mother Land.

  Mary Henderson

  Henderson seems to accept or at least be resigned to soldiers’ sufferings; not so Mary Borden, who in a long, modernist poem points an accusatory finger at those who send unidentified soldiers to an agonising death, disguising it as their Christian duty. The conditions for French poilus with whom Borden worked were significantly worse than for British and Imperial forces. Many truly were cattle fodder.

  UNIDENTIFIED

  Look well at this man. Look!

  Come up out of your graves, philosophers,

  And you who founded churches, and all you

  Who for ten thousand years have talked of

  God...

  For you have something interesting to learn

  By looking at this man.

  Stand all about, you many-legioned ghosts,

  Fill up the desert with your shadowy forms,

  And in the vast resounding waste of death,

  Watch him while he dies;

  He will not notice you...

  He waits for death;

  He watches it approach;

  His little bloodshot eyes can see it bearing

  down on every side;

  He feels it coming underneath his feet, running, burrowing underneath the ground;

  He hears it screaming in the frantic air.

  Death that tears the shrieking sky in two,

  That suddenly explodes out of the festering bowels of the earth...

  You scorned this man.

  He was for you an ordinary man.

  Some of you pitied him, prayed over his

  soul, worried him with stories of Heaven and Hell.

  Promised him Heaven if he would be

  ashamed of being what he was,

  And everlasting sorrow if he died as he had

  lived, an ordinary man...

  None of you trusted him.

  No one of you was his friend...

  Go back, poor ghosts. Go back into your graves.

  He has no use for you, this nameless man.

  Scholars, philosophers, men of God, leave this man alone.

  No lamp you lit will show his soul the way;

  No name restore his lost identity.

  The guns will chant his death march down the world.

  The flare of cannon light his dying;

  The mute and nameless men beneath his

  feet will welcome him beside them in the mud.

  Take one last look and leave him standing there,

  Unfriended, unrewarded, and unknown.

  Mary Borden

  If relatively few poets had personal experience of soldiers’ Front Line sufferings, women were intimately aware of mothers’ emotional agony. A striking feature of women’s religious poetry is the ease with which predominantly Protestant women portrayed themselves/were portrayed as a Mater Dolorosa, with significant numbers turning to Mary, believing that She, above all women, understood their pain.

  One unidentified poet, calling her collection simply Poems of a Mother, is amongst the many female poets to speak directly of this relationship.

  TO OUR LADY OF SORROWS

  Mother, you knew beneath the Cross

  More than a mother’s pain and loss;

  Our sons have suffered too and died,

  And so our place is at your side,

  Watching with you the Crucified.

  You gave him freely up to die,

  But O you know the agony!

  Show us poor others how you bore

  To watch His passion slow and sore

  Until the end came and He died.

  O Mother take us home with you;

  Your home was sad and empty too

  For three long days – sweet John was there,

  But all your grief he could not share,

  O Mother of the Crucified.

  No son is like the sons that gave

  Their lives the suffering to save;

  O Mother, let us wait and hold

  The comfort of your garment’s fold,

  And watch your grief and holy pride.

  ‘A Mother’

  A member of a Non-Conformist (Christian) sect, Mrs Stephen Parker sums up the comfort many non-Catholic women gained, much to their bemusement, in turning to Mary.

  THE CONVERT

  When I had my son in the house about me, or working there at the bench in the shed,

  I hadn’t a care in the world to fret me – and now it’s a year since my son’s dead.

  Dead and buried he is in Flanders, in a nameless grave I shall never see,

  I shall go to him – (God send it early!) – but he will never return to me.

  They came to me with their oil of comfort – tender women and men of God,

  Bidding me think with pride and joy of that poor grave under the blood-drenched sod.

  Flowers and holy books they brought me, prayed, whispered and went away –

  And my breast was locked on my grief like a prison: I dreaded the night and I hated the day.

  I think I had come to the brink of madness, the sun was darkened the moon was gone:

  It seemed God had made a wheel for his pleasure, to see me bound and broken upon.

  I had thought so long on my son and his dying, there in the dark in his ebbing blood,

  When there came a thought of our Lord’s Dear Mother – They took her son. She understood.

  I can’t say I’m truly a Catholic, can I? I was a Methodist born and bred!

  I never could hold with confessing to priests, and I trouble no one to pray for my dead.

  But when my grief is a pall about me, and my tortured heart knows no release,

  I tell it all to our Lord’s Dear Mother - She understands and She gives me peace.

  Mrs Stephen Parker

  In Roman Catholic France, statues of Mary were ubiquitous. The ‘Leaning Virgin of Albert’ became the most famous example during the First World War. Working a mere five miles from the small town of Albert, Mary Borden would have known that in January 1915, the golden statue of the Virgin atop the town’s impressive Basilica had been shelled. However, despite hanging at a precarious angle, she did not fall to the ground. A legend developed that victory within the year would go to whichever side succeeded in toppling her. To many serving personnel the very fact that she had not fallen proved that God was determined to protect the Virgin and redemption would come through Her to suffering humanity.

  Borden’s view is bleaker, however. In her poem even the Holy Mother is powerless to save Herself, Her Child or humankind.

  THE VIRGIN OF ALBERT

  Oh, the poor Virgin!

  She is throwing herself from Heaven;

  She is plunging down from the high tower with the child in her hands.

  Look, hold your breath, watch the awful gesture of her divine despair

  Her golden figure shoots head downwards through the air

  The red carcase of the Church gapes beneath her

  The ragged skeleton of the tower holds her up

  High above the ruined town.

  But she is plunging.

  With her arms outstretched beyond her head, downward,

  With the child in her terrible pointing hands,

  She is diving down;

  She will dash the child down, on to the stones of the desolate abandoned street.

  She has been betrayed.

&nb
sp; God has betrayed her.

  Oh, the pity!

  Oh, the terrible, desperate creature!

  She believed in God,

  And her people worshipped her,

  And because she was the Mother of Compassion,

  She stood between them and the anger of God.

  For she believed in the love of God.

  Lifted up above the city,

  Above the little dark homes of her helpless people,

  She stood, holding up her child to God.

  So for centuries she stood lifted up in her humility and love;

  And because God had chosen her and given her a child,

  Because she had borne a son to Him,

  She believed he would be kind to her people.

  One day destruction came like roaring dragons out of Heaven, and fell upon the town.

  Out of the soft mysterious distance invisible monsters came shrieking past her head.

  Flocks of them, unseen, with whistling wings, thick as vultures to a carcase in a desert,

  They swooped down and sprang upon the city.

  And the city writhed in their clutches.

  Houses staggered, the streets cracked open.

  Meek, motionless, holding her child up to Heaven, the Virgin watched from her tower.

  She watched the houses vomit,

  Watched them reel like drunkards-fall;

  Watched the people running, pouring through the quaking streets with their treasures piled on wagons;

  Watched the wagons smothered, buried, with the horses, the beds and bedding, the fowls and pretty birds in cages.

  She could hear the women and the children screaming;

  And the squealing of horses and groaning of cattle and squeaking of pigs caught in burning stables, sheds, yards.

  Helpless, high above them, prisoner in the thundering sky,

  Bound to her shaking pedestal, with the church walls giving way beneath her,

  She stood holding her child up to God, while her people screamed to her to save them.

  Now the city is deserted.

  The people are gone.

  The roofless houses and the broken buildings grimace at the Virgin.

  The houses of the people who once worshipped her are open filthy places.

  The church yawns horrid.

  Where the altar was is a heap of dust.

  The uncovered apse is choked with debris and the wind and the rain play new havoc there every day.

  Oh the poor desolate Virgin!

  She has been abandoned;

  She has been betrayed.

  God has betrayed her.

  She is throwing herself down from Heaven with the child in her terrible pointing hands.