No Man's Land

by Pete Ayrton

  On the way back to Denmark Hill I diverted my mind by observing the names on shops and business premises. I was rewarded by Pledge (pawnbroker), Money (solicitor), and Stone (builder). There was also an undertaker named Bernard Shaw. But perhaps the most significant name was Fudge (printing works). What use, I thought, were printed words against a war like this? Durley represented the only reality which I could visualize with any conviction. People who told the truth were likely to be imprisoned, and lies were at a premium… All my energy had evaporated, and it was a relief to be back in bed. After all, I thought, it’s only sixteen days since I left the Second Battalion, so I’ve still got a right to feel moderately unwell. How luxurious it felt, to be lying there, after a cup of strong tea, with daylight diminishing, and a vague gratitude for being alive at the end of a fine day in late spring. Anyhow the War had taught me to be thankful for a roof over my head at night…

  Lying awake after the lights were out in the ward, it is possible that I also thought about the Second Battalion. Someone (it must have been Dunning) had sent me some details of the show they’d been in on April 23rd. The attack had been at the place where I’d left them. A little ground had been gained and lost, and then the Germans had retreated a few hundred yards. Four officers had been killed and nine wounded. About forty other ranks killed, including several of the best N. C. O.s. It had been an episode typical of uncountable others, some of which now fill their few pages in Regimental Histories. Such stories look straightforward enough in print, twelve years later; but their reality remains hidden; even in the minds of old soldiers the harsh horror mellows and recedes.

  Of this particular local attack the Second Battalion Doctor afterwards wrote: ‘The occasion was but one of many when a Company or Battalion was sacrificed on a limited objective to a plan of attack ordered by Division or some higher Command with no more knowledge of the ground than might be got from a map of moderate scale.’ But for me (as I lay awake and wondered whether I’d have been killed if I’d been there) April 23rd was a blurred picture of people bombing one another up and down ditches; of a Company stumbling across open ground and getting mown down by machine-guns; of the doctor out in the dark with his stretcher-bearers, getting in the wounded; and of an exhausted Battalion staggering back to rest-billets to be congratulated by a genial exculpatory Major-General, who explained that the attack had been ordered by the Corps Commander. I could visualize the Major-General all right, though I wasn’t aware that he was ‘blaming it on the Corps Commander’. And I knew for certain that Ralph Wilmot was now minus one of his arms, so my anti-war bitterness was enabled to concentrate itself on the fact that he wouldn’t be able to play the piano again. Finally, it can safely be assumed that my entire human organism felt ultra-thankful to be falling asleep in an English hospital. Altruism is an episodic and debatable quality; the instinct for self-preservation always got the last word when an infantryman was lying awake with his thoughts.

  *

  With an apology for my persistent specifyings of chronology, I must relate that on May 9th I was moved on to a Railway Terminus Hotel which had been commandeered for the accommodation of convalescent officers. My longing to get away from London made me intolerant of the Great Central Hotel, which was being directed by a mind more military than therapeutic. The Commandant was a non-combatant Brigadier-General, and the convalescents grumbled a good deal about his methods, although they could usually get leave to go out in the evenings. Many of them were waiting to be invalided out of the Army, and the daily routine-orders contained incongruous elements. We were required to attend lectures on, among other things, Trench Warfare. At my first lecture I was astonished to see several officers on crutches, with legs amputated, and at least one man had lost that necessary faculty for trench warfare, his eyesight. They appeared to be accepting the absurd situation stoically; they were allowed to smoke. The Staff Officer who was drawing diagrams on a blackboard was obviously desirous of imparting information about the lesson which had been learnt from the Battle of Neuve Chapelle or some equally obsolete engagement. But I noticed several faces in the audience which showed signs of tortured nerves, and it was unlikely that their efficiency was improved by the lecturer, who concluded by reminding us of the paramount importance of obtaining offensive ascendancy in No Man’s Land.

  In the afternoon I had an interview with the doctor who was empowered to decide how soon I went to the country. One of the men with whom I shared a room had warned me that this uniformed doctor was a queer customer. ‘The blighter seems to take a positive pleasure in tormenting people,’ he remarked, adding, ‘He’ll probably tell you that you’ll have to stay here till you’re passed fit for duty.’ But I had contrived to obtain a letter from the Countess of Somewhere recommending me for one of the country houses in her Organization; so I felt fairly secure. (At that period of the War people with large houses received convalescent officers as guests.)

  The doctor, a youngish man dressed as a temporary Captain, began by behaving quite pleasantly. After he’d examined me and the document which outlined my insignificant medical history, he asked what I proposed to do now. I said that I was hoping to get sent to some place in the country for a few weeks. He replied that I was totally mistaken if I thought any such thing. An expression, which I can only call cruel, overspread his face. ‘You’ll stay here; and when you leave here, you’ll find yourself back at the front in double-quick time. How d’you like that idea?’ In order to encourage him, I pretended to be upset by his severity; but he seemed to recognize that I wasn’t satisfactory material for his peculiar methods, and I departed without having contested the question of going to the country. I was told afterwards that officers had been known to leave this doctor’s room in tears. But it must not be supposed that I regard his behaviour as an example of army brutality. I prefer to think of him as a man who craved for power over his fellow men. And though his power over the visiting patients was brief and episodic, he must have derived extraordinary (and perhaps sadistic) satisfaction from the spectacle of young officers sobbing and begging not to be sent back to the front.

  I never saw the supposedly sadistic doctor again; but I hope that someone gave him a black eye, and that he afterwards satisfied his desire for power over his fellow men in a more public-spirited manner.

  Next morning I handed the letter of the Countess to a slightly higher authority, with the result that I only spent three nights in the Great Central Hotel, and late on a fine Saturday afternoon I travelled down to Sussex to stay with Lord and Lady Asterisk.

  Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born in Kent in 1886, the son of a merchant from a Baghdadi Jewish family and an English Gentile mother who loved Wagner’s operas – hence the name Siegfried. A poet who was also a keen cricket player, Sassoon was not a political animal in these pre-war days:

  France was a lady, Russia was a bear and performing in the county cricket team was much more important than either of them.

  Swept up in the patriotic fervour of 1914, Sassoon enlisted and was sent to fight in France in 1915. On the front, he distinguished himself with acts of heroic bravery and in 1916 was awarded the Military Cross. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the second volume of the autobiographical George Sherston trilogy, was first published in 1930. The power of the book is manifold: there is Sassoon’s growing realization of the folly of the fighting, there is his love and empathy for his fellow soldiers and there is his understated humour and ability to capture the absurdity of those in command. The book ends with the narrator, George Sherston, speaking out publicly against the war; an act of treason that could lead to his execution. He is declared suffering from shell-shock and sent to ‘Slateford War Hospital’. In real life this was Craiglockhart Military Hospital where Sassoon was treated by the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers. At Craiglockhart, he befriended Wilfred Owen before they were both sent back to fight in France, where Owen was killed in 1918. During the war, Sassoon had become a socialist and in 1919 he became the literary editor of the left-win
g Daily Herald. In 1931, he moved to Wiltshire, where he died in 1967.

  VERA BRITTAIN

  DESTINY WAS NOT WILLING

  from Testament of Youth

  IHAD JUST GOT INTO BED on May Morning and was drifting into sleep, when the cable came from Edward to say that Geoffrey was dead.

  When I had read it I got up and went down to the shore in my dressing-gown and pyjamas. All day I sat on the rocks by the sea with the cable in my hand. I hardly noticed how the beautiful morning, golden and calm as an August in Devon, turned slowly into gorgeous afternoon, but I remembered afterwards that the rocks were covered with tiny cobalt-blue irises, about the size of an English wood violet.

  For hours I remained in that state of suspended physical animation when neither heat nor cold, hunger nor thirst, fatigue nor pain, appear to have any power over the body, but the mind seems exceptionally logical and clear. My emotions, however, in so far as they existed, were not logical at all, for they led me to a conviction that Geoffrey’s presence was somewhere with me on the rocks.

  I even felt that if I turned my head quickly I might see him behind me, standing there with his deep-set grey-blue eyes, his finely chiselled lips and the thick light-brown hair that waved a little over his high, candid forehead.

  And all at once, as I gazed out to sea, the words of the ‘Agony Column’ advertisement, that I had cut out and sent to Roland nearly two years before, struggled back into my mind.

  ‘Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’

  I even remembered vaguely the letter in which I had commented on this notice at the time.

  ‘At first sight it is a little startling. Afterwards the tragedy of it dawns on you. The lady (probably more than a girl or she would have called herself “young lady”; they always do) doubtless has no particular gift or qualification, and does not want to face the dreariness of an unoccupied and unattached old-maidenhood. But the only person she loved is dead; all men are alike to her and it is a matter of indifference whom she marries, so she thinks she may as well marry someone who really needs her. The man, she thinks, being blind or maimed for life, will not have much opportunity of falling in love with anyone, and even if he does will not be able to say so. But he will need a perpetual nurse, and she if married to him can do more for him than an ordinary nurse and will perhaps find relief for her sorrow in devoting her life to him. Hence the advertisement; I wonder if anyone will answer it? It is purely a business arrangement, with an element of self-sacrifice which redeems it from utter sordidness. Quite an idea, isn’t it?’

  I was still, I reflected, a girl and not yet a ‘lady’, and I had certainly never meant to go through life with ‘no particular gift or qualification’. But – ‘quite an idea, isn’t it?’ Was it, Geoffrey? Wasn’t it? There was nothing left in life now but Edward and the wreckage of Victor – Victor who had stood by me so often in my blackest hours. If he wanted me, surely I could stand by him in his.

  If he wanted me? I decided, quite suddenly, that I would go home and see. It would not, I knew, be difficult to get permission, for though the renewal of my contract was overdue and I had said that I would sign on again, I had not yet done so. Work was slack in Malta; several hospitals were closing and the rest were overstaffed. Much as I liked my hospital and loved the island, I knew that I was not really needed there any more; any one – or no one – could take my place. If I could not do anything immediate for Victor I would join up again; if I could – well, time and the extent of his injuries would decide when that should be.

  That night – quiet as all nights were now that so few sick and wounded were coming from Salonika – I tried to keep my mind from thoughts and my eyes from tears by assiduously pasting photographs of Malta into a cardboard album. The scent of a vase of sweet-peas on the ward table reminded me of Roland’s study on Speech Day, centuries ago. Although I had been up for a day and two nights, I felt no inclination to sleep.

  I was not, as it happened, very successful in stifling thought. By one of those curious chances which occurred during the War with such poignant frequency, a mail came in that evening with a letter from Geoffrey. It had been written in pencil three days before the attack; reading it with the knowledge that he had been so soon to die, I found its simple nobility even less bearable than the shock of the cablegram.

  As I took in its contents with a slow, dull pain, the silent, shadowy verandah outside the door seemed to vanish from my eyes, and I saw the April evening in France which Geoffrey’s words were to paint upon my mind for ever – the battened-out line of German trenches winding away into shell-torn trees, the ant-like contingent of men marching across a derelict plain to billets in the large town outlined against the pale yellow sky, the setting sun beneath purple clouds reflected in the still water at the bottom of many ‘crump-holes’. How he wished, he said, that Edward could have been with him to see this beauty if it were any other place, but though the future seemed very vague it was none the less certain. He only hoped that he would not fail at the critical moment, as he was indeed ‘a horrible coward’; for his school’s sake, where so often he had watched the splendours of the sunset from the school field, he would especially like to do well. ‘But all this will be boring you.’

  Characteristically he concluded his letter with the haunting lines that must have nerved many a reluctant young soldier to brave the death from which body and spirit shrank so pitifully.

  War knows no power. Safe shall be my going…

  Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;

  And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

  ‘Rupert Brooke,’ he added, ‘is great and his faith also great. If destiny is willing I will write later.’

  Well, I thought, destiny was not willing, and I shall not see that graceful, generous handwriting on an envelope any more. I wonder why it is that both Victor and Geoffrey were fired to such articulateness by the imminence of death, while Edward and Roland, who had the habit of self-expression, both became so curtly monosyllabic? Oh, Geoffrey, I shall never know anyone quite like you again, so true, so straight, such an unashamed idealist! It’s another case of ‘whom the Gods love’; the people we care for all seem too fine for this world, so we lose them… Surely, surely there must be somewhere in which the sweet intimacies begun here may be continued and the hearts broken by this War may be healed!

  VERA BRITTAIN

  I THANK YOU, SISTER

  from Testament of Youth

  THE NEXT MORNING saw me begin an experience which I remember as vividly as anything that happened in my various hospitals.

  Soon after our arrival the Matron, a beautiful, stately woman who looked unbelievably young for her South African ribbons, had questioned us all on our previous experience. I was now the owner of an ‘efficiency stripe’ – a length of scarlet braid which V. A. D.s were entitled to wear on their sleeve if they had served for more than a year in military hospitals and had reached what their particular authority regarded as a high standard of competence – and when I told the Matron of my work in Malta, she remarked with an amused, friendly smile that I was ‘quite an old soldier’. This pleasant welcome confirmed a rumour heard in Boulogne that the hospital was very busy and every pair of practised hands likely to count. I was glad to be once more where the work was strenuous, but though I knew that 24 General had a special section for prisoners, I was hardly prepared for the shock of being posted, on the strength of my Malta experience, to the acute and alarming German ward.

  The hospital was unusually cosmopolitan, as in addition to German prisoners it took Portuguese officers, but I can recall nothing about these except their habit of jumping off the tram and publicly relieving themselves on the way to Le Touquet. Most of the prisoners were housed – if the word can be justified – in large marquees, but one hut was reserved for very serious cases. In August 1917 its occupants – the heritage of Messines and the Yser – were soon to be replenished by
the new battles in the Salient which have given their sombre immortality to the Menin Road and Passchendaele Ridge.

  Although we still, I believe, congratulate ourselves on our impartial care of our prisoners, the marquees were often damp, and the ward was under-staffed whenever there happened to be a push – which seemed to be always – and the number of badly wounded and captured Germans became in consequence excessive. One of the things I like best to remember about the War is the nonchalance with which the Sisters and V. A. D.s in the German ward took for granted that it was they who must be overworked, rather than the prisoners neglected. At the time that I went there the ward staff had passed a self-denying ordinance with regard to half days, and only took an hour or two off when the work temporarily slackened.

  Before the War I had never been in Germany and had hardly met any Germans apart from the succession of German mistresses at St Monica’s, every one of whom I had hated with a provincial schoolgirl’s pitiless distaste for foreigners. So it was somewhat disconcerting to be pitch-forked, all alone – since V. A. D.s went on duty half an hour before Sisters – into the midst of thirty representatives of the nation which, as I had repeatedly been told, had crucified Canadians, cut off the hands of babies, and subjected pure and stainless females to unmentionable ‘atrocities’. I didn’t think I had really believed all those stories, but I wasn’t quite sure. I half expected that one or two of the patients would get out of bed and try to rape me, but I soon discovered that none of them were in a position to rape anybody, or indeed to do anything but cling with stupendous exertion to a life in which the scales were already weighted heavily against them.

  At least a third of the men were dying; their daily dressings were not a mere matter of changing huge wads of stained gauze and wool, but of stopping haemorrhages, replacing intestines and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes. Attached to the ward was a small theatre, in which acute operations were performed all day by a medical officer with a swarthy skin and a rolling brown eye; he could speak German, and before the War had been in charge, I was told, of a German hospital in some tropical region of South America. During the first two weeks, he and I and the easy-going Charge-Sister worked together pleasantly enough. I often wonder how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the theatre – as we did all day at frequent intervals – in that foetid stench, with the thermometer about 90 degrees in the shade, and the saturated dressings and yet more gruesome human remnants heaped on the floor. After the ‘light medicals’ that I had nursed in Malta, the German ward might justly have been described as a regular baptism of blood and pus.