A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front

by Olive Dent

  I pass a booth laden with aluminium rings faites dans lestranchées, and ornamented with tiny badges, small designs beaten out of spent cartridges and numerous chasings. Next to it is a stall for those postcards which the boys adore, celluloid masterpieces emblazoned with polychromatic badges and flags, and decorated with a chaste salutation ‘Forget-me-not,’ ‘To memory dear,’ ‘A kiss from France,’ ‘Ever of thee I’m fondly dreaming,’ and so on. It is not at all unusual for one boy to send as many as four or five of these postcards with its burning message to different, trusting (let us suppose!) damsels in England.

  One stall contains biscuits, over a hundred different kinds. Hardly a war-time scarcity, evidently. The numerous refreshment booths have pain d’épice, madeleines, croissants, rolls, different kinds of pastries and brioche. How good is the latter, piping hot, with fresh butter and honey, and to the accompaniment of tea, which the English have now taught the French to make really well.

  The delicacies on the booth presumably are chiefly for the indulgence of the market shoppers, not the stallholders. For one notices several of the latter frugally dining on a glass of vin rouge made warm with a little hot water and sustaining with an accompaniment of a hunch of dry bread, – quite a different meal to that of the denizens of Covent Garden, with their plate of ‘hot roast,’ their fish and chips, or their pot of tea and bulky sandwiches.

  But l’heure s’avance and I have only worked one item off my shopping list. Even so my loitering footsteps are waylaid at a china stall, where I buy for half-a-franc each some charmingly quaint, dull-brown casseroles. Thereby do I take time by the forelock, for such an opportunity as this morning’s may not present itself again before spring comes, and the forest near us is a carpet of flowers, so many of which I shall want to commandeer for our marquees.

  Rounding a corner towards the vegetable stall I behold two English Tommies making purchases of fruit. The stallholder is a girl of twenty or so, and she is smiling up at them roguishly as she presses her wares – which I deeply suspect of being somewhat overpriced – upon one of them, with a ‘Oh, aah, m’sieu, mais c’est bon.’

  And Tommy, as he ruefully disburses from a tiny belt pocket, is saying, ‘Garn, yer sorsy cat!’

  Potatoes at thirty-five centimes the kilo, dessert apples at fifteen centimes, oranges at ten centimes – how much nicer they appear served from the large tub-baskets which remind one of Marseilles! – cabbages at twenty-five centimes, cauliflowers at sixty, conclude my purchase at the greengrocery stall, where I am served by a very small, exceedingly old-fashioned, young person of twelve or thereabouts. She is dressed in a large checked, red and black, bouncing dress, a small checked, blue and white, bouncing apron, a shoulder tippet of black wool crochetted in three tiers, each edged with a scalloped-shell pattern. She has an exceedingly tight, exceedingly thin pigtail, – the end slightly swollen with a tightly bound barricade of white sewing cotton, – a very quick, disarming smile, and a very quickly upturned nose.

  We exchange a wide, friendly smile, hers fading as she turns to seek a new customer, mine fading at Maman’s leisure and typically French disinclination to make out le facteur.

  Finally, she sweeps aside some swedes and carrots and makes a salient on the stall, where she rests her book of bills and aggrievedly writes out my account in thin, spidery characters. Then she takes out a red cardboard porte billet, bulging with the greasiest of one, two, five, and twenty franc notes efficiently held in place by a piece of the greasiest string, gives me my change, and we part amid elaborate courtesies.

  A scrubbing-brush and some beeswax, – I create much merriment by my confession that I don’t know what to ask for, but my need is cire des abeilles, which is immediately understood and translated as encaustique, – complete my purchases, and with the ordering of coal and coke my responsibilities cease.

  As I write out the laissez-passer to admit the coal and the coalheaver into the camp, I inquire the price. ‘One hundred and sixty francs the thousand kilo.’

  Six pounds for nine and a half cwt.! What a price! As I leave the office, I conclude that the only comment which meets the situation is the old tag the boys adopt when other words seem superfluous: ‘Sister, I believe there’s a war on.’

  Chapter XXII

  History Makers

  HOW MANY PRECONCEIVED notions has the war swept aside! And among others of assuredly more weight is the school-days idea of a history maker. Every one who has dangled a satchel has had his, or her, idea of the men who made history, to the total exclusion of the great statesmen and the inclusion only of mail-clad heroes dashingly riding with fluttering pennons and picturesque accoutrements to the Crusades, of Henry V’s swift-armed bowmen naked to the waist and with bare foot planted in the ploughed soil of Agincourt, of sturdy Ironsides, close-cropped and shovel-hatted, marching into action lustily singing their Psalms, of the dashing, scarlet-coated body of men who added to England’s fame the unforgettable record at Balaclava – how they have fired our blood, and stirred our imagination! How we have thrilled and exalted over their doings!

  And here we are living in the midst of history makers, men who have more than once taken part in deeds equalling and, on occasion, excelling that of Balaclava, and we readjust our notion of history makers, we correct our perspective, we humanise and individualise those makers of history. We realise that they were not men of superhuman nerve, muscle and endurance. We bring to mind for the first time the little, old-fashioned, girl-children, wimpled and with steeple head-dress waiting at home, the grey-robed Puritan wives a little sanctimonious and wholly anxious about those Cromwellian warriors, the Victorian wives, – big-hipped and tight-waisted, with smoothed hair in chenille hair-nets, – left to go through life without those fallen Crimean heroes. The men who made history were men. We are apt to forget that and think of them as so many lines and paragraphs of a history book.

  And when the standard histories of this war come to be written, no doubt they will be done by terribly efficient old gentlemen who wear pince-nez and have taken high honours in Classical Tripos. They will be written probably in polysyllabic prose and in epic style. They will abound in references to policies and constitutions, to treaties and conventions, and probably posterity will be deluded, momentarily perhaps, into thinking of our history makers as imposing personages clothed in scarlet, ermine-bordered, or august figures endowed with the fearsome dignity of Mars.

  But for my short span I shall refuse to forget that among the makers of history in our great age there were Tommy Brown and ‘The Colonel,’ and ‘Aussy’ and ‘Papa.’

  Tommy came to us in the big push of July 1916, military age twenty, real age eighteen. He had a gunshot wound in the head, was trephined, had a cerebral hernia, and for a time got along very nicely. He was great friends with another little boy whose bed we moved next to his – and ‘the Heavenly Twins,’ ‘David and Jonathan,’ and ‘the Children,’ were some of the names they received. The other little boy had a hernia and had been trephined; he had forgotten a great deal and was to teach such little things as the swallowing of a pill, the fastening of a button, the necessity for mastication, and so on.

  During the day we used to put ‘the Children’s’ beds in the sun, give them Japanese sunshades, drinks, fans, picture papers, and cigarettes, and quite a good time they used to have together. Every one in the camp knew them and used to exchange greetings and bring them little gifts, until at the end of the day’s levee their lockers used to be well-stored pantries of chocolate, fruit, sweets and biscuits.

  Then Tommy began to ‘go back.’ He commenced having fits and obsessions. He didn’t want to play with ‘the Colonel,’ as the other boy was called. He was irritated with the latter when he persisted, as he did dozens of times in the day, in clacking his tongue in imitation of our scurrying feet. ‘Sister, sister,’ was his continual cry if we moved out of his sight. ‘Don’t leave me sister,’ he implored one afternoon.

  ‘No, I won’t. I’m just going to the nex
t bed,’ – about two feet from his own. ‘I’m not really leaving you. I want to feed the Colonel.’

  ‘No, sister, don’t. He doesn’t want you as much as I do.’

  ‘Oh! but he wants his tea. Come, sonny, be a man.’

  ‘No, sister, I don’t want to be a man. I only want you,’ and he used to put out a hot, little hand and grab belt or apron or skirt, a hand that clung in the extraordinarily tenacious fashion that a sick person’s hands can cling.

  One day in one of his more lucid moments he told me what his obsession was. When up the line, his company were entering some trenches taken over from the enemy, and the dead body of a German with black face and protruding tongue and eyes had been the first sight that greeted him. The boy in front of Tommy had, on entering the trench, caught his foot on the body with the natural result. Poor Tommy could not rid himself of the memory, and when the fits recurred it was the dead German who always pursued him.

  Poor little Tommy! He was the only child of his mother, and she was a widow. She used to write him every day, and, as the days wore on, he could not even be troubled to have us open and read the letters to him. He just lay with his fingers closed on the day’s letter. Then one brilliant morning of fleckless turquoise sky and golden light, he died very quietly and very peacefully, just slept away.

  Poor little mother in black, no more listening for his welcome footstep, no more washing and sewing for him, no more cooking his favourite dishes, – nothing but a numbing monotony, an aching emptiness in the coming years. I crossed his hands and prayed an unsaid prayer. He lay like a carven figure on a tomb in some mediaeval vault. Poor little history maker!

  It was one fine August morning when I made his acquaintance. I was dipping under the eaves of the tent when the ward-corporal brought along a batch of wounded from a convoy, and heading the queue was a roguish-looking individual with copper-coloured curls crisping round a head like that of an Olympian competitor. A tin hat a few sizes too small, a broad smile, and fun-laden eyes of intense blue was the impression one got of him as one hurried on.

  He came into the marquee, was fed, bathed, and, evidently thinking his self-imposed silence of sufficiently long duration, broke into a babble of talk which never ceased until three or four days later he was evacuated to Blighty.

  ‘You know, sister, I’m too great a rogue to die unhung, so Fritz won’t get me. He’s winged me this time, but he won’t get me. Oh no, it’s nor-too-bad, but, say, sister, is it a Blighty? Dinkum? That’s the goods.’

  A Ballarat men interposed.

  ‘Am I from Aussy? Betcher sweet life. Been there, sister? Oh! you don’t know what a country’s like yet. Gosh, it’s God’s own country. You’re going après la guerre? You’ll never come back. Some squatter will snap you up.’

  One or two English Tommies grin sheepishly and look up tentatively, but ‘Aussy’ careers boldly on.

  ‘How are we doing?’ he speaks to another patient, wounded a few days previously, from his own division.

  ‘Oh, same as ever,’ – then his love of an audience overcoming his desire to give authentic news, – ‘You know, the Bosches have got a gun whose shells burst three times, don’t you? Fact. But we’ve got a gun whose recoil brings up the next day’s rations.’ Turning to me, ‘It’s an Australian invention, sister. The man who invented it has been invalided home and runs a boomerang farm in Victoria.’

  ‘It sounds like an Australian invention,’ I drily agree, and some quality of my voice makes the other patients laugh.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Aussy,’ says the Ballarat man. ‘Don’t try kidding sister. She can do a bit in that line. She’d kid you up country without a tent.’

  ‘Dinkum,’ says the Queenslander. ‘She’d kid you up a tree and chop it down while you stood on the branches.’

  ‘She’d kid you down a well and cut the rope after she played out the bucket,’ joins in the West Australian.

  ‘All this sounds remarkably unkind,’ – a vigorous disclaimer. ‘But it gives point to my belief that before going to Australia I must learn the language.’

  ‘There you are, Digger. That’s the way she hands it out to us, doesn’t half put it across us sometimes.’

  Soon the talk drifts, as it always does when two or three Australians are gathered together, to ‘Gyppo,’ and as I run backwards and forwards I hear tales of the bonza old chap who was the only fair dealer in Alex and who gave you a bonza feed of Al tucker for five piastre; of the old beggars who used to cry ‘Gibbe backsheesh, Australian;’ of the news vend or who glibly repeated words taught him by a mischievous Tommy, and came calling ‘Verra good news, 100,000 Australians killed,’ and of how ‘we cleared him out and gosh, he never touched the ground, sister. Awful crowd, we Aussies, you know. We’re a fighting unit, not soldiers.’

  And like so many naughty schoolboys they derive considerable satisfaction from my agreement that they are indeed ‘terrible boys.’

  The last day Aussy was in the wards, we had among other admissions a little boy who, when I asked him his name, fumbled and plucked at his tunic pocket, grew red in the face, continued to fumble, and finally drew out his pay-book and showed me his name.

  It was Maconochie.

  But alas! though I received the information in an appreciated silence, I could only shield him for the time being. His chart came down from the office shortly afterwards, and his name stood revealed for all who ran to read.

  ‘Aussy’ was merciless.

  He held a court of inquiry as to what was to be done with ‘the enemy,’ but the sentence – to be carried out the following morning at dawn – was too gory, too piecemeal, and too culinary to be recorded here. Meantime, ‘Fray Bentos, you’ve left the best part of your head over here,’ throwing him his cap. ‘Rations, lend me your razor. I expect you’ll have one, since you’ve got almost a moustache.’

  ‘Mixed veg, will you have a backsheesh fag?’ – throwing him a ration cigarette. ‘Irish stew, sling the possy over ’eere,’ putting out his hand for the jam.

  Maconochie, however, had lived his short life in Eastern London, and after the first short-lived shyness had worn away, showed himself no mean match for ‘Aussy.’

  ‘I guess you’re some kid,’ remarked the latter, as Maconochie spun an enamelled plate to the ridge of the marquee and caught it behind his back.

  ‘I guess you’re some goat,’ flashed back ‘Fray Bentos,’ as he dived into an adjacent annexe.

  But unfortunately for the merriment of our existence, the ward-corporal came round a few minutes afterwards and warned ‘Aussy’ for England.

  ‘Good-bye, sister, I’m real sorry I’m going,’ – so was I, – ‘I’d like to give you a souvenir, my rising sun, which has come with me from Australia, been through the Peninsula picnic, and then through this strafe in La Belle France. Good-bye, sister, and may your little shadow never grow less.’

  He clumped out of the ward, a ‘dinkum Aussy’ hat pulled over his copper-coloured curls, his two labels tied to his tunic, and a sling holding up his ‘boxing-glove’ of cotton-wool and bandage which swathed the remains of his left hand. He had endeared himself to all in the ward, and he left behind him a streak of brightness which still occasionally shines on me. Happy young rogue, most unorthodox of history makers!

  ‘Papa’ was in the Foresters. He came to us in the fall suffering from bronchitis. He was admitted somewhat early in the morning, and I only had time to see him installed before the medical officer did his round. Then the resulting catechism disclosed some slightly surprising facts.

  ‘Have you had this trouble long?’

  ‘Off and on for a matter of five and twenty years. In the spring of 1882 I had pleurisy and—’

  1882! Good gracious, years before one was born! One looks amazed at the hoary old die-hard.

  ‘How old are you?’

  He tells his age.

  ‘I think you have done your bit, what do you say, sister?’ as the ‘Blighty tickets’ are handed over.


  ‘Well, sir, I have been discharged once’ – a fit of coughing – ‘have my discharge papers here,’ hunting in his treasure bag during another fit of coughing, ‘but I joined up again. Once a soldier always a soldier, sir, and I’m worth plenty young ones yet. Those who can help, ought to. I couldn’t stand aside and do nothing, sir.’

  Good old history maker! Would that all the male and female slackers could see and hear you, could look at the wrinkled face, the scant, hoary hair, the toil-worn hands, and know of your brave attempt to help your country in her heavy hour of stress. The Old Country cannot be so effete when she turns out men like you. It is men of your breed that has won and will keep for England her proud fame, eminence, and power.

  Doughty old history maker!

  Chapter XXIII

  Our Boy-Blue Mail

  ‘NOTHING MUCH FOR you,’ says a nurse, turning from the table where the mail is spread out. ‘A letter from a patient, judging by the writing.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ one grouses, taking up the note.

  Now that little grouse is very culpable, for there is scarcely a nurse but receives at one time or other some very charming letters from patients, letters she will be glad to con over in the coming years, perhaps when she is a lonely old woman, and the full, crowded days of the present have become dim memories.

  Most of the letters from ‘our boys’ are lame, halting, little expressions of thanks, laboriously written from an inarticulate mind and with the find-you-well-as-this-leaves-me-at-present style which, one thought, had been ridiculed out of existence. They are written on the most marvellous assortment of scrap paper that one could wish to see; but, of course, papier de luxe is scarcely to be associated with a dug-out. Letters from England come to us written on ‘real’ note-paper.