Calling you by your names.
Your names are strung with the names of ruined and immortal cities,
Termonde and Antwerp, Dixmude and Ypres and Furnes,
Like jewels on one chain—
Thus,
In the high places of Heaven,
They shall tell all your names.
May Sinclair
Sinclair is unusual in publicly poeticizing the extent to which her foreign service had gone so dreadfully wrong and for the finger of blame she points at those whom she accuses of stealing her dream. Most women who felt antagonism towards colleagues only confided such deeply personal feelings to private journals or letters; they preferred, at least in their public writings, to voice admiration for their comrades, often in adulatory terms. However, much as Sinclair resented the way she had been treated by her colleagues and Hector Munro, she was haunted by what she had seen in Belgium and of Belgians’ sufferings in the early days (and which continued throughout the War) as the Allied Armies hastened to evacuate, leaving that country to her fate. This poem, published in The Egoist on 1 May 1915, makes her feelings clear:
AFTER THE RETREAT
If I could only see again
The house we passed on the long Flemish road
That day
When the Army went from Antwerp, through Bruges, to the sea;
The house with the slender door,
And the one thin row of shutters, grey as dust on the white wall.
It stood low and alone in the flat Flemish land,
And behind it the high slender trees were small under the sky.
It looked
Through windows blurred like women’s eyes that have cried too long.
There is not anyone there whom I know,
I have never sat by its hearth, I have never crossed its threshold, I have never
opened its door,
I have never stood by its windows looking in;
Yet its eyes said: ‘You have seen four cities of Flanders:
Ostend, and Bruges, and Antwerp under her doom,
And the dear city of Ghent;
And there is none of them that you shall remember
As you remember me.’
I remember so well,
That at night, at night I cannot sleep in England here;
But I get up, and I go:
Not to the cities of Flanders,
Not to Ostend and the sea,
Not to the city of Bruges, or the city of Antwerp, or the city of Ghent,
But somewhere
In the fields
Where the high slender trees are small under the sky—
If I could only see again
The house we passed that day.
May Sinclair
Although for the majority of women nursing service took place on the Home or the Western Fronts, a number of volunteers and professionals served in more distant theatres. Mary Henderson worked as an administrator with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), mainly in the Russia Unit. She dedicated a poem to ‘The Rank and File of the Scottish Women’s Hospital’ in response to the Prefect of Constanza (Rumania)’s comment, ‘No wonder Britain is so great if her women are like that.’
Notwithstanding the hyperbolic language, this provides a vivid picture of the horrific conditions under which the women both travelled to and subsequently worked on the Eastern Front, caring for Serb and Rumanian soldiers – countries of which many had been ignorant before 1914.
LIKE THAT
‘Like that.’ Like what? Why British to the core,
You went beyond our sheltering British shore,
Out to the peril of an Arctic sea,
Bearing the flag of British Liberty.
You laughed above the lurking submarine,
Clothing Death’s terrors in a happy sheen
Of debonair lightheartedness – I’ve seen
How very gallant women’s hearts may be
Though torn the while with deepest sympathy,
British and women – women to the core.
I’ve seen you kneeling on the wooden floor,
Tending your wounded on their straw-strewn bed,
Heedless the while that right above your head
The Bird of Menace scattered death around.
I’ve seen you guiding over shell-marked ground
The cars of succour for the shattered men,
Dauntless, clear-eyed, strong-handed, even when
The bullets flung the dust up from the road
By which you bore your anguished, helpless load.
I’ve seen you, oh, my sisters, ‘under fire,’
While in your hearts there burned but one desire –
What British men and women hold so dear –
To do your duty without fear.
Mary Henderson
Sinclair and Henderson concentrate their poetic attention on female comrades. Author turned volunteer nurse Mary Borden looks at the conditions in which the French poilus, many of whom would soon be her patients, were serving, conditions with which she was all too familiar. Heavy contamination owing to the extensive pre-war usage of fertilizers, the putrefying bodies and the thousands of gas shells that had been released across the lines, resulted in the ubiquitous mud of the battlefields posing as great a threat to the wounded as their initial injuries. Death by sepsis was common and nurses as well as soldiers were at risk from deadly infection.
AT THE SOMME: THE SONG OF THE MUD
This is the song of the mud,
The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;
The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys;
The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds;
The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses;
The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.
This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu.
His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy;
His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it.
This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud, And his skin is of mud;
And there is mud in his beard.
His head is crowned with a helmet of mud.
He wears it well.
He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him.
He has set a new style in clothing;
He has introduced the chic of mud.
This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.
The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,
The slimy inveterate nuisance,
That fills the trenches,
That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,
That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts,
That spreads itself over the guns,
That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips,
That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;
And slowly, softly, easily,
Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;
Soaks up the power of armies;
Soaks up the battle.
Just soaks it up and thus stops it.
This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them dow
n,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!
Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.
There is not a trace of them.
There is no mark where they went down.
The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.
This is the song of the mud,
The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin;
The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys.
Mud, the disguise of the war zone;
Mud, the mantle of battles;
Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers:
This is the song of the mud.
Mary Borden
‘Very Active Danger/Valiant And Determined’: The VADs
Although there were multiple volunteer hospital and nursing units, the most prominent, best-known and officially recognized volunteer nurses were members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD). The majority of VADs served via the Red Cross, a few were members of the Order of St John of Jerusalem – they had identical status as the organizations merged to form the Joint War Office Committee, the only difference was in the uniform volunteers wore.
Although these have often been magnified in novels and films, there were some tensions between the professional nursing staff, the ‘Pros’, and the VADS. With time, both sides learned to tolerate and value their respective contributions to the care of the wounded. Inevitably, these tensions found their way into poetry, as in this untitled poem written by Esther Bignold for her young VAD daughter Grace.
‘Valueless A Duffer!’ says the Sister’s face,
When I try to do her orders with my bestest grace.
‘Vain and Disappointing!’ says Staff Nurse’s eye,
If I dare to put my cap straight while she’s walking by.
‘Very Active Danger’, looks the angry pro,
If I sometimes score a wee bit over her you know.
‘Virtuous And Dumpy!’ that’s the way I feel,
When I’m uniformed from cap strings to each wardroom heel.
‘Vague And Disillusioned’ that’s my mood each night,
When I’ve tried all day to please ’em and done nothing right.
‘Valiant And Determined’, I arise next day,
As I tell myself it’s duty and I must obey.
‘Very Anxious Daily’ I await my leave,
Which I spend with my own soldier, as you may believe.
‘Verily A Darling’ that’s his name for me,
When I meet him in my uniform of VAD.
Esther Bignold
In a poem published in February 1918, Marguerite Few focuses not on the chasm between professionals and volunteers but on the one separating VADs from their carefree, pre-war existence when a frenetic rounds of parties, balls and other social activities had been expected to culminate in marriage to a suitably eligible young bachelor, followed by motherhood. That world is now light years away from the one that the VAD in this poem now inhabits.
THE DÉBUTANTE 1917
Just 18 years and she has looked on death
And washed dread wounds and handled shattered limbs,
And sleepless watched nightlong a passing breath,
And seen strong men in agony – strange whims
Has humoured, choked her rising fears
And worked the harder that she shed no tears.
Her feet that should have danced are tired to-night
With pacing other measures many hours;
Her heart beats heavily that should be light,
For her no acclamations, feasts, and flowers,
But the long aching strain
Of waiting some lad who may not come home again.
So through the years I see her pass sublime,
The shadow of her sorrows on her face:
Poor child, the perfect mother for the race -
But old before her time.
Marguerite Few
VADs themselves wrote numerous poems about their service – indeed they were the most prolific of all uniformed women poets. Although some VADS served in tented Base or General Hospitals overseas (never in Casualty Clearing Stations), the majority served on the Home Front. They were always under the supervision of a professional nurse but, with the ratio of patients to professional nurses constantly increasing, additional responsibilities were handed to VADs.
Night duty was a time when volunteers’ skills were often stretched to their limits; patients – and staff were at their most vulnerable with demons held at bay during daylight hours now surfacing to stalk the wards.
NIGHT DUTY
The pain and laughter of the day are done
So strangely hushed and still the long ward seems,
Only the Sister’s candle softly beams.
Clear from the church near by the clock strikes ‘one’;
And all are wrapt away in secret sleep and dreams.
Here one cries sudden on a sobbing breath,
Gripped in the clutch of some incarnate fear:
What terror through the darkness draweth near?
What memory of carnage and of death?
What vanished scenes of dread to his closed eyes appear?
And one laughs out with an exultant joy.
An athlete he — Maybe his young limbs strain
In some remembered game, and not in vain
To win his side the goal — Poor crippled boy,
Who in the waking world will never run again.
One murmurs soft and low a woman’s name;
And here a vet’ran soldier calm and still
As sculptured marble sleeps, and roams at will
Through eastern lands where sunbeams scorch like flame,
By rich bazaar and town, and wood-wrapt snow-crowned hill.
Through the wide open window on great star,
Swinging her lamp above the pear-tree high,
Looks in upon these dreaming forms that lie
So near in body, yet in soul so far
As those bright worlds thick strewn on that vast depth of sky.
Eva Dobell
One of the popular, albeit inaccurate, myths surrounding VADs is that all volunteers served in a nursing capacity. Many were cooks, scullery and ward maids, ironically perhaps as many would have been waited on by domestic servants in their homes. Some of those whose service was in the kitchen or pantry captured their new life in poetry, showing how the sheer reality of grappling with recalcitrant equipment could come close to lowering the spirits of even the most resilient of uniformed war workers.
This anonymous poet from Gallowhill Auxiliary Hospital, Paisley, (home of philanthropic Lady Smiley who would have been given the title of ‘Commandant’ and took a close interest in all that went on under her roof), vents her frustration with the kitchen range on New Year’s Eve, whilst admitting that she is proud to be of service to wounded soldiers.
ODE TO THE KITCHEN RANGE
Old Range to you a bright New Year
Old thing, I almost called you “Dear”
Because the time is nearly here
For us to part;
‘Good-bye’ I say without a tear
With happy heart.
Your soot has often made me sneeze,
Your steel I’ve polished on my knees,
I’ve scraped some scores of spots of grease
From off your top,
For four weeks now, Old Range, so please
I want to stop.
Good-bye at five to sleep so sweet,
At earliest dawn we used to meet,
For you, my friend I had to greet
About five thirty,
And on ‘flue’ days (twice weekly treat)
You were so dirty.
Old Range, though you no more I’ll clean
I hope till nineteen-seventeen
And though I send you, well,
to Jean,
There’s no ill-will,
Because together we have been
In Gallowhill.
Home of our wounded Tommies, where
I nurse, dust, cook – without a care –
Clean you Old Range, or turnips pare
With Mrs. Plant;
There’s one I bless because I’m there –
Our Commandant.
Anonymous
Despite the essential nature of their lowly tasks, these women who formed, according to the Gallowhill poet, ‘the backbone of the nation’, frequently felt overshadowed and looked down on by those who nursed the wounded. Winifred Wedgwood neatly sums up the differences between the VAD services in the following poem.
OUR VAD SCULLIONS
Our nurses are always apparent,
So we give them their halos alright;
But how many think of our scullions,
Because they work buried from sight?
Yet their toil is hard and unceasing,
And often it’s dirty work too:
But they cheerfully work without grousing,
For somebody’s got it to do!
I liken them unto the stokers,
Who toil and are never seen.
Yet on them the whole ship’s depending.
Now please stop - and - think - what I mean!
Winifred Wedgwood
‘I wish my mother could see me now’: Ambulance Units
The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) was amongst the most decorated and successful of the women’s units. Formed in 1907, the organisation aimed ‘to provide assistance to civil and military authorities in times of emergency’. One form of assistance would be to gallop onto the battlefield to rescue casualties.
The realities of the Western, and indeed other Fronts meant that ambulances replaced horses. Having driven for the Belgian Army from the outset, on 1 January 1916, FANYs became the first women to drive ambulances officially for the British Army. Known to ‘drive like bats out of hell’ when travelling to collect the wounded, on the return journeys to hospital their patience, gentleness and consideration for those in their care was legendary.
Not only did they drive ambulances, they also maintained and serviced these vehicles themselves, and their mechanical skills were deeply respected. Sir Arthur Stanley, Head of British Red Cross Society, commented that members of the FANY had: ‘The courage of a lion, the hide of a rhinoceros and a capacity so great that it could nurse the worst form of typhoid or start a frozen car.’ They certainly needed all of these attributes.
Tumult and Tears Page 10