No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone’s mind and character and publishing it for all the world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter and recriminating at the security of other wives’ husbands. The men themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity indifference.

  And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old regime that has already passed – like ship-wrecked mariners to floating wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all Europe being broken up, to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our cherished aims – wealth, fame, success – in spite of all, ruat coelum! Mr A. C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr Shaw and his Scintillations – they are all there as before, revolving like haggard windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman’s decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting articles and leaders… We are like a nest of frightened ants when someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.

  September 5

  …I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two copies, I told the following lie to save my face:

  ‘They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to these.’

  ‘Where do you publish as a rule?’ he innocently asked.

  ‘Oh! several in the Manchester Guardian,’ I told him out of vanity. ‘But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to extra-war topics.’

  I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying – out of vanity too. So that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself. Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.

  September 9

  Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has another case on the 22nd.

  *

  I looked at myself in the mirror this morning – nude, a most revolting picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out ‘Bovril’ after me in the street.

  On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to the daily weekday service – which is attended only by two decrepit old women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece – and in war time too.

  Bruce Frederick Cummings was born in Barnstaple, Devon, in 1889. He attempted to enlist in the Army in November 1915 but was turned down by the medical board – a letter from his doctor said that he was suffering from the disease now known as multiple sclerosis and had less than five years to live. He published his diaries in 1917 under the title The Journal of a Disappointed Man and chose the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion – the forenames ‘Wilhelm’, ‘Nero’ and ‘Pilate’ were for him those of the most wretched men ever to have lived. The book had been turned down by Collins, who had originally agreed to publish it, on account of its ‘lack of morals’. Barbellion’s voice in the diaries is delightfully self-deprecating and self-aware:

  We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives.

  The Journal of a Disappointed Man is a wonderful antidote to the dominant bombast and boasting. It conveys without melodrama the sense of disorientation felt by many as they saw their world cascade out of control. Cummings died in October 1919 having just finished a second volume of memoirs, ‘Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains’. As he says in the diaries, ‘Death can do no more than kill you’.

  MARY BORDEN

  THE SQUARE

  from The Forbidden Zone

  BElOW MY WINDOW in the big bright square a struggle is going on between the machines of war and the people of the town. There are the motor cars of the army, the limousines, and the touring cars and the motor lorries and the ambulances; and there are the little bare-headed women of the town with baskets on their arms who try to push the monsters out of their way.

  The motors come in and go out of the four corners of the square, and they stand panting and snorting in the middle of it. The limousines are full of smart men in uniforms with silver hair and gold braid on their round red hats. The touring cars, too, are full of uniforms, but on the faces of the young men who drive them is a look of exhaustion and excitement. The motors make a great noise and a great smell and a great dust. They come into the square, hooting and shrieking; they draw up in the square with grinding brakes. The men in them get out with a flourish of capes: they stamp on the pavement with heavy boots; they salute one another stiffly like wooden toys, then disappear into the buildings where they hold murderous conferences and make elaborate plans of massacre.

  The motor cars have all gone wrong. They are queer. They are not doing what they were designed to do when they were turned out of the factories. The limousines were made to carry ladies to places of amusement: they are carrying generals to places of killing. The limousines and the touring cars and the motor lorries are all debauched; they have a depraved look; their springs sag, their wheels waver; their bodies lean to one side. The elegant limousines that carry the generals are crusted with old mud; the leather cushions of the touring cars are in tatters; the great motor lorries crouch under vast burdens. They crouch in the square ashamed, deformed, very weary; their unspeakable burdens bulge under canvas coverings. Only the snobbish ambulances with the red crosses on their sides have assurance. They have the self-assurance of amateurs.

  The business of killing and the business of living go on together in the square beneath the many windows, jostling each other.

  The little women of the town are busy; they are dressed in black; they have children with them. Some lead children by the hand, others are big with children yet unborn. But all the women are busy. They ignore the motors; they do not see the fine scowling generals, nor the strained excited faces in the fast touring cars, nor the provisions of war under their lumpy coverings. They do not even wonder what is in the ambulances. They are too busy. They scurry across to the shops, instinctively dodging, and come out again with bundles; they talk to each other a little without smiling; they stare in front of them; they are staring at life; they are thinking about the business of living.

  On Saturdays they put up their booths on the cobble stones and hold their market. The motors have to go round another way on market days. There is no room in the square for the generals, nor for the dying men in the ambulances. The women are there. They buy and sell their saucepans and their linen and their spools of thread and their fowls and their flowers; they bargain and they chatter; they provide for their houses and their children; they give oranges to their children, and put away their coppers in their deep pockets.<
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  As for the men on the stretchers inside the smart ambulances with the bright red crosses, they do not know about the women in the square. They cannot hear their chattering, nor see the children sucking oranges; they can see nothing and hear nothing of the life that is going on in the square; they are lying on their backs in the dark canvas bellies of the ambulances, staring at death. They do not know that on Saturday mornings their road does not lie through the big bright square because the little women of the town are busy with their market.

  MARY BORDEN

  THE BEACH

  from The Forbidden Zone

  THE BEACH WAS LONG AND SMOOTH and the colour of cream. The woman sitting in the sun stroked the beach with the pink palm of her hand and said to herself, ‘The beach is perfect, the sun is perfect, the sea is perfect. How pretty the little waves are, curling up the beach. They are perfectly lovely. They are like a lace frill to the beach. And the sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. It is odd to think of how old the beach is and how old the sea is, and how much older that old, old fellow, the fiery sun. The face of the beach is smooth as cream and the sea to-day is a smiling infant, twinkling and dimpling, and the sun is delicious; it is burning hot, like youth itself. It is good to be alive. It is good to be young.’ But she could not say this aloud so she said to the man beside her in the wheel chair:

  ‘How many millions of years has it taken to make the beach? How many snails have left their shells behind them, do you think, to make all this fine powdery sand? A million billion?’ She let the sand run through her strong white fingers and smiled, blinking in the sun and looked away from the man in the invalid chair beside her toward the horizon.

  The man wriggled and hitched himself clumsily up in his chair; an ugly grimace pulled his pale face to one side. He dared not look down over the arm of his wheel chair at the bright head of the woman sitting beside him. Her hair burned in the sunlight; her cheeks were pink. He stole a timid, furtive look. Yes, she was as beautiful as a child. She was perfectly lovely. A groan escaped him, or was it only a sigh?

  She looked up quickly. ‘What is it, darling? Are you in pain? Are you tired? Shall we go back?’ Her voice sounded in the immense quiet of the beach like a cricket chirping, but the word ‘darling’ went on sounding and sounding like a little hollow bell while she searched his features, trying to find his old face, the one she knew, trying to work a magic on him, remove and replace the sunken eyes, the pinched nose, the bloodless wry mouth. ‘He’s not a stranger,’ she said to herself. ‘He’s not.’And she heard the faint mocking echo, ‘Darling, darling,’ ringing far away as if a bell-buoy out on the water were saying ‘Darling, darling,’ to make the little waves laugh.

  ‘It’s only my foot, my left foot. Funny, isn’t it, that it goes on throbbing. They cut it off two months ago.’ He jerked a hand backward. ‘It’s damn queer when you think of it. The old foot begins the old game, then I look down and it’s not there any more, and I’m fooled again.’ He laughed. His laughter was such a tiny sound in the great murmur of the morning that it might have been a sand-fly laughing. He was thinking, ‘What will become of us? She is young and healthy. She is as beautiful as a child. What shall we do about it?’And looking into her eyes he saw the same question, ‘What shall we do?’ and looked quickly away again. So did she.

  She looked past him at the row of ugly villas above the beach. Narrow houses, each like a chimney, tightly wedged together, wedges of cheap brick and plaster with battered wooden balconies. They were new and shabby and derelict. All had their shutters up. All the doors were bolted. How stuffy it must be in those deserted villas, in all those abandoned bedrooms and kitchens and parlours. Probably there were sand-shoes and bathing dresses and old towels and saucepans and blankets rotting inside them with the sand drifting in. Probably the window panes behind the shutters were broken and the mirrors cracked. Perhaps when the aeroplanes dropped bombs on the town, pictures fell down and mirrors and the china in the dark china closets cracked inside these pleasure houses. Who had built them?

  ‘Cowards built them,’ he said in his new bitter, rasping voice, the voice of a peevish, irritable sand-fly. ‘Built them to make love in, to cuddle in, to sleep in, hide in. Now they’re empty. The blighters have left them to rot there. Rotten, I call it, leaving the swanky plage to go to the bad like that, just because there’s a war on. A little jazz now and a baccarat table would make all the difference, wouldn’t it? It would cheer us up. You’d dance and I’d have a go at the tables. That’s the casino over there, that big thing; that’s not empty, that’s crowded, but I don’t advise you to go there. I don’t think you’d like it. It’s not your kind of a crowd. It’s all right for me, but not for you. No, it wouldn’t do for you – not even on a gala night.

  ‘They’ve a gala night in our casino whenever there’s a battle. Funny sort of place. You should watch the motors drive up then. The rush begins about ten in the evening and goes on till morning. Quite like Deauville the night of the Grand Prix. You never saw such a crowd. They all rush there from the front, you know – the way they do from the race-course – though, to be sure, it is not quite the real thing – not a really smart crowd. No, not precisely, though the wasters in Deauville weren’t much to look at, were they? Still, our crowd here aren’t precisely wasters. Gamblers, of course, down and outs, wrecks – all gone to pieces, parts of ’em missing, you know, tops of their heads gone, or one of their legs. When they take their places at the tables, the croupiers – that is to say, the doctors – look them over. Come closer, I’ll whisper it. Some of them have no faces.’

  ‘Darling, don’t.’ She covered her own face, closed her ears to his tiny voice and listened desperately with all her minute will to the large tranquil murmur of the sea. ‘Darling, darling,’far out the bell-buoy was sounding.

  ‘Bless you,’ said the thin, sharp, exasperated sand-fly voice beside her. ‘Little things like that don’t keep us away. If we can’t walk in we get carried in. All that’s needed is a ticket. It’s tied to you like a luggage label. It has your name on it in case you don’t remember your name. You needn’t have a face, but a ticket you must have to get into our casino.’

  ‘Stop, darling – darling, stop!’

  ‘It’s a funny place. There’s a skating rink. You ought to see it. You go through the baccarat rooms and the dance hall to get to it. They’re all full of beds. Rows of beds under the big crystal chandeliers, rows of beds under the big gilt mirrors, and the skating rink is full of beds, too. The sun blazes down through the glass roof. It’s like a hot-house in Kew Gardens. There’s that dank smell of a rotting swamp, the smell of gas gangrene. Men with gas gangrene turn green, you know, like rotting plants.’ He laughed. Then he was silent. He looked at her cowering in the sand, her hands covering her face, and looked away again.

  He wondered why he had told her these things. He loved her. He hated her. He was afraid of her. He did not want her to be kind to him. He could never touch her again and he was tied to her. He was rotting and he was tied to her perfection. He had no power over her any more but the power of infecting her with his corruption. He could never make her happy. He could only make her suffer. His one luxury now was jealousy of her perfection, and his one delight would be to give in to the temptation to make her suffer. He could only reach her that way. It would be his revenge on the war.

  He was not aware of these thoughts. He was too busy with other little false thoughts. He was saying to himself, ‘I will let her go. I will send her away. Once we are at home again, I will say good-bye to her.’ But he knew that he was incapable of letting her go.

  He closed his eyes. He said to himself ‘The smell of the sea is good, but the odour that oozes from the windows of the casino is bad. I can smell it from here. I can’t get the smell of it out of my nose. It is my own smell,’ and his wasted greenish face twitched in disgust.

  She looked at him. ‘I love him,’ she said to herself. ‘I love him,’ she repeated. ‘But can I go on loving him?’ She
whispered, ‘Can I? I must.’ She said, ‘I must love him, now more than ever, but where is he?’

  She looked round her as if to find the man he once had been. There were other women on the beach, women in black and old men and children with buckets and spades, people of the town. They seemed to be glad to be alive. No one seemed to be thinking of the war.

  The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The beach was perfect; the sun perfectly delicious; the sea was perfectly calm. The man in the wheel chair and the woman beside him were no bigger than flies on the sand. The women and children and old men were specks.

  Far out on the sea there was an object; there were two objects. The people on the beach could scarcely distinguish them. They peered through the sunshine while the children rolled in the sand, and they heard the sound of a distant hammer tapping.

  ‘They are firing out at sea,’ said someone to someone.

  How perfect the beach is. The sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. Behind the windows of the casino, under the great crystal chandeliers, men lie in narrow beds. They lie in queer postures with their greenish faces turned up. Their white bandages are reflected in the sombre gilt mirrors. There is no sound anywhere but the murmur of the sea and the whispering of the waves on the sand, and the tap tap of a hammer coming from a great distance across the water, and the bell-buoy that seems to say, ‘Darling, darling.’

  MARY BORDEN

  CONSPIRACY

  from The Forbidden Zone

  IT IS ALL CAREFULLY ARRANGED. Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back again. You send your socks and your shirts again and again to the laundry, and you sew up the tears and clip the ravelled edges again and again just as many times as they will stand it. And then you throw them away. And we send our men to the war again and again, just as long as they will stand it; just until they are dead, and then we throw them into the ground.