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

by Pete Ayrton

  It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it. There, at the foot of the Curé’s garden, was the German cemetery, with heavy cement crosses, – some of them with long inscriptions; lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant Muller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he hadn’t happened to think of before; but the same thing must have occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would never forget the Curé’s hands, his dim, suffering eyes.

  Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the church, and went back to meet him.

  ‘Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be out here.’ David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.

  ‘So did I. I came out to look for him.’

  ‘Oh, I expect he’s found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize, Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven’t got engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It’s a good thing we’re pulling out, or we’d have banns and a bunch of christenings to look after.’

  ‘All the same,’ murmured Claude, ‘I like the women of this country, as far as I’ve seen them.’ While they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending over her sick soldier.

  When they walked back across the square, over the crackling leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ for the last waltz.

  ‘Le dernier baiser,’ said David. ‘Well, tomorrow we’ll be gone, and the chances are we won’t come back this way.’

  Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and died in New York in 1947. This piece is taken from One of Ours, which was published in 1922 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. When Willa was ten, the family moved to Nebraska, and it was there that she found the themes that were to inspire her best work, including the Prairie Trilogy – O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia – and One of Ours. This last is the story of Charles Wheeler, a Nebraska man, who enlists when the USA joins the war and finds a meaning to his life on the battlefields of Europe: it is here that he feels for the first time that he matters. One of Ours contains powerful battle scenes but also scenes that show great sympathy for those who remained behind on the home front, whose lives were overwhelmed by the consequences of the fighting.

  IRENE RATHBONE

  WHO DIES IF ENGLAND LIVES?

  from We that Were Young

  THAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER Joan went straight to her room, and sat for a long time in her kimono by the open window. There wasn’t a breath of air.

  She had been kept so hard at it for the past few weeks that she had scarcely been beyond the hospital grounds; in her rare off hours she had felt too bone-weary to do anything but lie reading in the rest-room or on the grass outside. The last time she had seen Pamela – some time in June – the girl had been like a dancing fairy over her engagement. Joan could see her now, standing in a patch of sunlight in Lady Butler’s little drawing-room, exclaiming jubilantly: ‘I’m done for, Joan! I’m completely done for!’ and contrasted that radiant creature with the tight-lipped figure of this afternoon – the gold in her all turned to iron, the song to silence.

  What was the use of winning the war, Joan cried to herself in sudden despair, if none of the men who won it were to live? The papers were for ever quoting ‘Who dies if England lives?’ But after all what was England? The old men who sat at home, and in clubs, and gloatingly discussed the war? The bustling business men who thought they ran it? The women with aching hearts? Or the young manhood of the nation – that part of the nation that should be working, mating, begetting, but which now was being cut down? There was no question – the last. And in a year or two there’d be no ‘England.’

  She thought of Colin, Philip, and other friends, not seen for so long, and now in hourly danger. Colin’s letters had been very scrappy of late. She thought of a second cousin of hers, killed in the fighting round La Boiselle. She thought of her cousin Jack lying badly wounded at Boulogne. The waste, the waste of it all!

  Sighing, she drew her writing-pad towards her. Might as well do something. Better to write than to think.

  Write to Jack. Write to Betty to go and look up Jack in hospital. Write, too, to Barbara Frewen, who had recently gone over there to nurse. She read through again Barbara’s last two letters.

  The first was written from Sussex, early in July. ‘We really do seem to be getting a move on at last, and the guns for the past ten days have been perfectly appalling – booming incessantly, day and night. It has been like one huge throb through all the air. The windows rattle all the time, and even the china on the washstands. One daren’t think what it must be like out there.’

  The second was from No. 14 Stationary, Wimereux, and had come last week. ‘Most extraordinary luck getting here, for I never even asked for France. The hospital is right on the sea, as you know. We work in tents and huts which are delightfully airy and bright. Of course it’s within easy reach of Betty and all of them, and I’ve already paid several visits to the Alexandra, and also to the dear old Connaught (which, my dear, does not look so nice as in our day!). Yesterday I spent a heavenly afternoon in the woods at Hardelot, and how I thought of you! I could just see you there sitting on the ramparts, surrounded with poetry-books! I am much more at peace in my mind now that I am nursing, but also I shall never like the work so much. That time with the Y. M. C. A. was a beautiful time, all so sunny and romantic somehow. But it was a very easy life, we could do practically what we liked, and we felt – didn’t we? – that it was too pleasant. How is your friend, that boy whom I sent you out for a walk with from Ostrohove? My Sam is somewhere behind the lines at the moment, thank heaven – at one of those instruction schools. He hopes to come up and see me at Boulogne before long.’

  Yes, it was all sunny and romantic! thought Joan, looking back on those days, already so long ago. She envied Barbara being in dear Boulogne again – even though it was as a V. A. D., and not as a Y. M. worker.

  It was nearly midnight when she finished writing to her various friends (the letter to Pamela was the most exhausting of all); and when, dazed with fatigue, she dropped into bed, the last thing that her sleepy eyes beheld was her apron, with its red cross, hanging over the back of the chair. Symbol of servitude. For how many months, for how many years, would she, and her kind, be wearing uniform?

  *

  Miss Leather was right. Joan never heard another word from Matron about the Richardson business; and her early indignation died down as she realised that Matron had no more meant the insulting things she had said to her than a sergeant-major meant the things he roared out when he strafed a Tommy. She had employed a drastic form of utterance to express disapprobation of a small lapse, and that was all there was to it.

  And so, when the time came, Joan signed her death-warrant (as the V. A. D.s called it) without let or hindrance, and thankfully bound herself to serve at the 1st London for the next six months, at a salary of £20 a year.

  But that the spirit of the hospital – as far as the regular staff went – was an unimaginative and flinty one was shown a few weeks later by an event which shook the whole community.

  Working with Phipps in Sister Grundle’s ward was a girl called O’Reilly – a good-natured creature, a little slow and vague, but willing. Somehow or other, in spite of the warm weather, O’Reilly had managed to catch a very bad cold. She took no notice of it at first, but after a time it went on to her chest, and she had prolonged fits of coughing. As the cough kept her awake for hours at night, and was a source of intense irritation to Sister Grundle by day, O’Reilly suggested that she had perhaps better ‘go sick.’ Sister Grundle glared at her opprobriously, for a moment, over a gigantic bosom, then took her temperature, saw that it was a few points
above normal, and, more to be rid of her than for any humanitarian reason, dispatched her to Matron.

  Matron received her in the stony manner which was characteristic of her, and laid a couple of fingers on the girl’s pulse.

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with you at all, Nurse,’ she snapped. ‘Many people have a slight cough without making a fuss of this sort. What you want is a little hard work. You V. A. D.s are far too easily sorry for yourselves. Go back to your ward.’

  And back O’Reilly went, swearing to herself that nothing in heaven or earth would induce her ever to report sick again.

  ‘And she’s getting worse and worse,’ declared Phipps to the others at night. ‘Soon she’ll scarcely be able to crawl round the ward. She refuses to take her own temperature – says it would be useless. I keep pressing aspirins and cough lozenges on her, but—’

  There came a point when O’Reilly’s condition could no longer be ignored. Having almost collapsed one morning, she was sent to the sick-room at the top of the main building and put instantly to bed. It was found that she had bronchial pneumonia. From then onwards she received the best attention which the hospital could provide. But by then it was too late.

  Everyone went about, as it were, on tip-toe. ‘How is O’Reilly?’ would be asked in frightened whispers – even by those who had only known the girl by sight. Guarded reports came from the sick-room. Nothing could be definitely ascertained. At mealtimes Matron’s face was scanned by hundreds of young eyes, but it preserved its nutshell impenetrability.

  Then it was rumoured that O’Reilly had become unconscious; then that her people had been sent for; then that she was a little better and was being kept alive on oxygen and brandy.

  By the time that her parents had been able to get over from Ireland the girl was dead.

  O’Reilly had not been a particularly popular or a particularly significant member of the community of the 1st London, but thenceforward she became a symbol and a martyr. For days feeling ran high among those who knew the facts about her; but Phipps’s fury of indignation against Matron was mingled with remorse that she herself had not been able to do more to help the girl.

  Outwardly, of course, the higher authorities proceeded on their way as before, but their attitude to V. A. D.s as malingerers underwent a profound change. In dying poor O’Reilly had done more for her companions than ever she had done by living.

  *

  The stifling August days wore through, and now that work was less of a nightmare, Joan, in her off hours, used to take a bus and go into London.

  She saw Pamela twice, but was unable to dissuade her friend from the munitions scheme; and when, soon afterwards, Pamela left Bruton Street and went to work in some awful factory out at Willesden, Joan realised that henceforward meetings would be impossible.

  On ordinary days it was not worth while to go as far as Hampstead, but on her ‘half-day’ a week (from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.) it was very pleasant to be at home, to lie curled on the old chintz-covered sofa in the drawing room, to chat to Aunt Florence, to hear news of relations, and of how Jimmy was getting on in the country where he was ‘cramming’ with three friends. Not so pleasant to trek back after dinner (a little tug at the heart) by tube and bus to dreary Camberwell – allowing just enough time to arrive at the hostel before Sister Ansdell locked up for the night.

  Sometimes, instead of going home, Joan would divide her ‘half-day’ between different friends – tea-ing at one house, dining at another; or else go to a matinee with an officer on leave, or to dinner with him at a restaurant. Swift delightful patches of another sort of life, taking the smell of lysol and of wounds from the nostrils.

  These London expeditions of Joan’s earned her, from her roommates, the reputation of living ‘a double life.’ One of them, especially, a kindly individual called Gower with a long nose and a pronounced cockney accent, thought her almost paralysingly energetic. Gower herself seldom went beyond the hospital grounds.

  ‘You’ll come to a bad end, Seddon,’ she used to say to Joan through the curtains of her cubicle at night. ‘Can’t live the double life, you know – end by wearing yourself out!’ (she pronounced it ‘ay-out’).

  ‘Out on the tiles again, Seddon?’ she would call, as Joan came in, by the skin of her teeth, at ten o’clock from a ‘half-day.’ And Joan would laugh at the stock joke, and keep up the fiction of secret dissipations.

  *

  September sailed in on the calm glory of a full moon.

  On the second night, at about twelve o’clock, Joan was awakened from fathom-deep sleep by the murmur of voices in the bedroom. Reluctantly she opened an eye, and saw, outlined against the window, the heads of the three other V. A. D.s. But what struck through her half-consciousness as an odd fact was that their heads were silhouetted against crimson. Was it morning, she wondered vaguely, or was there a fire?

  ‘Get up, Seddon – air raid!’ she heard Gower’s voice somewhere in the darkness.

  ‘Air raid?’ grunted Joan.

  ‘Yes – Zeppelin! You’ll probably see it if you go to the window. Slip on your shoes and your coat, and you’d better put a few ’air-pins in your pocket – you never know.’

  Gower spoke in matter-of-fact tones, but Joan couldn’t for the life of her see the necessity for putting hair-pins into her coat pocket. She knew she was excessively sleepy, and not in a condition to reason about anything – but hairpins? She saw a vision of herself with Gower, Sister Ansdell, and the rest, wandering about outside, screwing up their hair in an attempt at decency while dodging German bombs. Then she dropped off.

  Voices broke in on her again. ‘There it is! There it is!’This time she roused herself fully, scrambled out of bed, and went to the window. An extraordinary spectacle met her eyes. Far up in a murky pink sky gleamed a small silver cigar, and near it hovered, dancingly, a fire-fly. For a moment these two objects kept at an equal distance from one another, then merged, and there was a burst of flames. A roar, as from the whole of London, went up; and the flaming cigar sank through the sky and disappeared beyond the trees.

  The whole thing had been so unexpected, so eerie, and Joan had been so far from wide awake that she could never clearly remember afterwards what she had imagined, and what she had really seen and heard.

  For instance, why had the sky appeared red against the windowpanes when first she woke – for that was surely before the Zeppelin caught fire? And that dull terrifying roar – had it actually come from the throats of thousands of London onlookers miles away, or only from a few folk on Denmark Hill? All was confused. But printed vividly on her brain for ever was the picture of that small silver cigar and the dancing fire-fly.

  Later she learnt – as did all the world – that the German military airship, S. L. 11, had been attacked by Lieut. Leaf Robinson, and had fallen, a burning mass, near Cuffley, Middlesex. It was considered that London had been saved by the young man’s deed, and he was awarded the V. C.

  ‘Can’t ’elp being sorry for them pore burnt Germans,’ remarked one of the charwomen, who scrubbed the ward-floor, to Joan. ‘Mothers’ sons every one of ’em. And coming by night all that way from their ’omes too, up in the air.’

  This was so concise an expression of the haunting thoughts which Joan had been trying to hold at bay that she shuddered. It could not have been better put: ‘Mothers’ sons every one of ’em.’ An instant’s imagination as to what that Zeppelin crew must have been feeling as their machine caught fire would have checked the roar which had greeted its destruction.

  And apart from this, although it was true that Robinson had done a very gallant thing, was there not, Joan asked herself, something distasteful in the frantic eagerness with which he had been praised and decorated? – something that savoured of smug self-congratulation on the part of the city at its escape? Every day, in the skies of France, deeds as gallant were being performed and going unrewarded; every day the stolid soldiers in the trenches were unostentatiously ‘saving London.’ But for once the civili
an population had really felt itself to be in danger, had actually seen itself defended, and had gone mad with gratitude.

  Irene Rathbone was born in 1892. Before the war she pursued a theatrical career and was a dedicated suffragist. During the war, she worked as a nurse in hospitals in England and as a VAD (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse in France. Written in 1930, We that Were Young is an autobiographical novel that reflects those experiences and poignantly conveys how for a whole generation the war was a time of tragedy but also of exhilarating change:

  ‘How you must have cursed the war,’ murmured Molly.

  ‘We did – we did. But looking back, now, I think we loved it too. Oh, it’s so difficult to explain… It was our war, you see. And although it was every-dayish at the time, and we were so sickened with it, it seems now to have a sort of ghastly glamour.’

  But as more and more injured and maimed soldiers pass through the rest camps, the exhilaration of the women gives way to a powerful sense of injustice. After the publication of We that Were Young, Rathbone became more radical – she was a committed pacifist, an anti-fascist and a supporter of Republican Spain. They Call it Peace, written in 1936, reflects these views. Irene Rathbone died in Oxford in 1980.