She continued to vacillate about whether to continue nursing, and went so far as to make arrangements to rent a room in Bayswater in anticipation of taking a clerical position at the War Office. A visit to Somerville in early March also confirmed in her own mind that she could not return to Oxford until the war was over.
Finally, though, she decided to remain at Camberwell. She was not quite ‘the erratic weathercock’ she seemed, she explained to Edward, for no sooner had she made her mind up to leave ‘than the growing conviction came over me quite against my reason, that somewhere He was living still, and knew and disapproved’. In order not to remain at Camberwell indefinitely, Vera, together with Stella Sharp, her old school friend from St Monica’s days, who was also serving as a VAD at the First London General, put her name forward as a volunteer for foreign service. In a matter of weeks, or more probably months, she could expect to be sent to any one of several destinations: Egypt, Salonika, Malta or, as she fervently hoped, France.
In the meantime, there would be more than enough work to occupy her at Camberwell. At the beginning of June, Edward returned to England on leave. During his forty-eight hours in London, after lightning visits to his parents in their new, rented accommodation at Macclesfield, to Victor at Purfleet, and to the Leightons at Keymer, he revealed to Vera that his leave was preparatory to a new ‘show’. ‘He spoke in veiled but significant language of a great battle – another Big Push – soon to take place, and knew that he was to be in it. He said that it would be somewhere in the region of Albert, where he is now’. At the end of June, the First London General received orders to release all convalescents and prepare for a great influx of wounded. At Camberwell, they knew that a tremendous bombardment had begun from the heavy vibration of the guns beneath their feet, echoing across the Channel. On 1 July, as they emerged from Southwark Cathedral following a performance of Brahms’s Requiem, Vera and Stella Sharp were met by the sight of newspaper placards proclaiming ‘GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS’. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Sick with apprehension, Vera busied herself with the arrival of the first convoy of wounded. Victor was with her at the weekend, giving her what reassurance he could. On 4 July, Vera found a pencilled note from Edward in the hospital letter rack informing her that he had been wounded in the left arm and right thigh, ‘not seriously’, and that he hoped to come to England. The next day, as Vera wrote in a hurried entry in her diary, ‘There was an early morning convoy of officers into J [ward] … I saw Miss George, who ran up to me & said “Do you know your brother’s in J?” Edward in J! … It was like some impossible novel that he should have come to my hospital’.
For the next three weeks, before Edward left Camberwell for a protracted period of convalescence, Vera was at his bedside as often as her nursing duties would permit, piecing together the story of his experiences on the Somme.
Early on the morning of 1 July, Edward had led his company in the first wave of the attack that was to go down in history as one of the most terrible days of slaughter in the history of the British Army: suffering 57,470 casualties, of whom almost 20,000 were fatalities in a single day. While his company was waiting to go over the top, the wounded from an earlier phase of attack began to crowd into the trenches. Then part of the regiment in front began to retreat, throwing Edward’s men into panic. Edward had to return to the trenches twice to exhort them to follow him over the parapet. About 90 yards along No Man’s Land, Edward was hit by a bullet through his thigh. He fell down and crawled into a shell hole. Soon afterwards a shell burst close to him and a splinter from it went through his left arm. The pain was so great that for the first time he lost his nerve and cried out. After about an hour-and-a-half, he noticed that the machine-gun fire was slackening, and started a horrifying crawl back through the dead and wounded to the safety of the British trenches.
For ‘conspicuous gallantry and leadership during an attack on Mouquet Farm near Thiepval’, on 1 July, Edward was awarded the Military Cross. ‘Isn’t it unspeakably splendid about Edward’s Military Cross!’, Vera wrote to her mother in August, on receiving the news. In a sense, it seemed a reversal of expectation that Edward, sensitive and peace loving, should have distinguished himself in battle, when Roland, who had been so desperate for military glory, had gone to his death in circumstances devoid of heroic limelight. Victor believed that there was no warring side to Edward’s nature and that he was sustained by duty alone. Certainly the strain on Edward quickly began to show, and after the first day of the Somme he appeared to have aged ten years.
It is especially telling that Vera’s contemporary response to Edward’s experiences on the Somme shows no trace of anger or bitterness. Indeed, at one point she writes of 1 July as ‘one of the greatest dates in history’. Her focus is exclusively on her brother’s heroism, and she finds no place to question the uses to which his heroism had been put. This attitude is confirmed in the poem ‘To My Brother’, which Vera wrote two years later for the anniversary of 1 July. With its profusion of militaristic imagery, its martial excitement, and its hero-worship, ‘To My Brother’ is essentially a pro-war poem:
Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic ‘show’
You played your part
Two years ago,
And silver in the summer morning sun
I see the symbol of your courage glow –
That Cross you won
Two years ago.
Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago.
May you endure to lead the Last Advance
And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
Two years ago.
Roland’s death had confirmed him in Vera’s eyes as the embodiment of the ideal of ‘heroism in the abstract’. Now Edward’s bravery on the Somme provided her with another personal example of heroism and self-sacrifice. As Vera contemplated foreign service, she wrote that she would strive to live by such values – and if necessary to die by them as well.
Her overseas posting was to Malta. On 24 September 1916, Vera set sail on the SS Britannic, the converted sister ship of the Titanic, as part of a convoy of nursing sisters and VADs. Accompanying her was Stella Sharp, who had also been ordered to Malta. It was Vera’s first extended experience of foreign travel, but, despite the magnificent sights, including a visit to Naples with its museum full of discoveries from Pompeii, and a view of the Greek island of Skyros where Rupert Brooke is buried, passengers and crew lived in constant fear of being torpedoed by a German submarine (just two months later, the Britannic would be sunk by a torpedo with the loss of 50 lives). At Mudros, the port where they trans-shipped to the Galeka, a small liner that would take them into the Grand Harbour at Valletta, Vera leaned over the ship’s rail and thought about Roland, wondering whether she would ever return to England, ‘or if I should not, & so complete the tragic story.’ She would not mind if that turned out to be the case, and perhaps it might be an appropriate conclusion – ‘only I want to write so much.’
In fact, rather than being blown out of the water, Vera was one of 16 VADs who succumbed to a serious epidemic of food poisoning. She was carried off the ship on a stretcher and spent her first three weeks in Malta at Imtarfa Hospital, seven miles from Valletta, in the centre of the island. It was not until the last week of October that she was judged fit enough to be discharged to begin work at St George’s Hospital, two miles from Valletta, situated just above St George’s Bay. Here she and the other nurses occupied a two-storied converted army barracks built of stone. In her diary, where the entries were becoming more sporadic, Vera described St George’s as ‘a most beautiful hospital, built on a peninsula running right out into the sea.’ The sea was right below the rocks, with ‘a delightful little bay’ that was so close that Vera and other VADs could go down to swim from
their rooms, wearing mackintoshes to cover their bathing suits.
Malta had become an important hospital base for the British army in the course of the Gallipoli campaign, and by 1916 there were some 29 hospitals and convalescent homes on the island. At St George’s, sick patients, suffering from dysentery, enteric fever and malaria, as well as from diseases of the eye, ear, nose and throat, easily outnumbered the wounded. Yet while there was the same number of patients as at Camberwell (though with a smaller nursing staff to care for them), the working conditions were much better. There was greater informality, with a relaxed dress code. No one seemed very particular about uniform, and VADs were permitted to wear soft low collars and panama hats. ‘The difference between the stiffness & starchiness of the Nursing Profession in England and the free & easiness here’, Vera wrote home to her mother, ‘is quite remarkable.’ Nor was there much evidence of hostility between professional nurses and VADs. ‘The Sisters treat you as friends & equals instead of as incompetent underlings.’ In contrast to the strict rules in the London military hospitals, VADs at St George’s were in charge when the Sister was off duty, they wrote reports, took temperatures and pulses and distributed medicines. In one letter to Edith Brittain, Vera wrote proudly that she was in sole charge of the block (a block had an upper and lower floor with three wards on each), with only an orderly on hand to assist:
Vera with a group of her patients at St George’s Hospital, Malta.
At the 1st London we always had to be on with a Sister … but they trust you much more here – in fact they have to, because there are not enough Sisters to go round … Do you remember how afraid I used to be of thunder when I was little? Now I feel quite a ‘Lady of the Lamp’ marching along with the thunder crashing … to see if other people are afraid!
Off duty, the social life offered by governmental and naval society was full of diversions. There were picnics and garden parties, including one at the Governor’s palace, and invitations to tea and tennis. Vera enjoyed many of these, although she sometimes wondered whether they were ‘appropriate to the present state of affairs’. She found it difficult to be among people who remained untouched by ‘all the unhappy things in this war’, an attitude that played its part in separating Vera from her old school friend Stella Sharp, who had no such misgivings about enjoying herself and was fortunate enough not to suffer any personal bereavement for the duration of the war.
Most of all, though, the beauty and mystery of Malta itself were breaking the hold of the intense spell of grief that had enveloped Vera since Roland’s death. In the brilliant light, the glorious sunrises and sunsets, and the beautiful and unfamiliar flower life of the island, Vera was discovering a strangely reinvigorating affirmation of life. Nevertheless, at Christmas 1916, as she prepared to mark the first anniversary of Roland’s death, she observed that making yourself used to living without a person was like managing with your left hand if you lost your right, but that she missed ‘Him as much as I ever did & always shall’.
Anxiety for those at home experiencing Zeppelin raids, or in France on the Western Front, was never far away, and Vera’s apprehension was increased by regular delays to the mail, leading her to make both Edward and Mrs Brittain promise to send cablegrams in the event of bad news. Edward remained out of harm’s way, engaged in home duties at Brocton Camp in Staffordshire, but Geoffrey had returned to France in early August, seen off by Vera and Edward from Liverpool Street. In October, not long after Vera’s arrival in Malta, a letter from Edward contained the surprising news that Victor had succeeded in getting to the Front by transferring from a Territorial battalion to the 9th King’s Royal Rifles.
Roland’s death had imbued both Victor and Geoffrey with a romantic aura in Vera’s eyes. Victor, in particular, was compared by her to Sir Galahad, as a chivalric knight whose lord had fallen in battle. The disparity between the somewhat ethereal image of Victor that she had created, and the reality of a modern soldier adapting to trench life, was highlighted by Vera’s reaction to Victor’s letters from the Front, which began to reach Malta in November. Writing to Vera, Victor was cheerfully optimistic about his new life in the trenches, describing life in the dugouts as very comfortable, and regretting that he was unable to send her reports of anything more ‘gruesome’ or ‘thrilling’ than his discovery of ‘a very few very dead Frenchmen in No Man’s Land’. ‘Really’, he continued, ‘I am beginning to agree with the Rifleman who when some dear old lady said “What a terrible War it is”, replied, “Yes Mum, but better than no War’.
Evidently – though her letters to Victor have not survived – Vera did not measure the force of her reply. From Victor’s response to what she wrote, in particular his sad little remark that ‘[i]t is quite awful to feel the silent contempt of those whom one regards as one’s dearest friends’, it’s clear that she found his unqualified militarism at the very least distasteful. Much more palatable were Geoffrey Thurlow’s declarations of his unsuitability as an officer. ‘You say that you are not callous enough for a nurse’, Geoffrey had written to her a month before she sailed for Malta. ‘Personally I’m far too timid for this life and whenever a shell comes near me I’m absolutely petrified within and without.’ In Geoffrey’s letters, throughout the winter and early spring of 1916–17, Vera was discovering, beneath the shy exterior, someone of warm understanding with a sensitive mind, who was open about his lack of a martial temperament.
In early February 1917, Vera was moved to St George’s only surgical block. None of the patients was seriously ill, and she filled her spare time by catching up on her reading, including the books that Edward had sent her from England. One of these was the recently published Report of the Commission on the disastrous Dardanelles expedition. As ever, Vera inclined to the more heroic view of events, helped by her reading of John Masefield’s Gallipoli, with its emphasis on the ‘grandeur’ of the campaign and its portrayal of the valour of its fighting men, whom Masefield compared to Greek heroes. She could not help thinking that it must have been ‘a very fine and wonderful thing’ to have ‘fought so gallantly for such a forlorn hope’; and she wished that Roland, if he had had to die, could have been killed defending Gallipoli’s beaches.
Victor’s letter to Vera of 24 March struck a rare note of cynical resignation, intimating that his battalion was on the verge of an attack and signing off with the fatalistic words, ‘[w]ell, Vera, I may not write again – one never can tell – and so, as Edward wrote to me, “it is time to take a long long adieu”.’ Three weeks later, in a letter to Edward, Vera wrote of her own sense of foreboding, as news was gradually filtering through of a great battle. ‘The longer the war goes on’, she admitted to him, ‘the more one’s concern in the whole immense business seems to centre itself upon the few beings still left that one cares about, & the less upon the general issue of the struggle.’ The following evening, while she was on night duty, Vera received a cable from Edward, informing her that Victor had been dangerously wounded.
She cabled home immediately asking for more news, and four days later another cable from Edward reached her:
Eyesight probably gone may live
On 9 April, Victor had led his men in an attack on a heavily defended German entrenchment, known as ‘The Harp’, at Vimy Ridge, three miles north of Arras. Victor was hit in the right arm, had the wound dressed, and carried on. There was serious machine gun fire and soon afterwards Victor fell unconscious from a bullet to the head. Scarcely conscious, he lay for ten days critically ill in a Rouen hospital, before risking the sea journey to London for specialist treatment. His left eye was shattered and had to be removed. At first his right eye appeared undamaged, but closer inspection would reveal that the optic nerve had been severed.
When Victor had been with Vera the previous July, speculating about Edward’s fate in the Battle of the Somme, he had told her of his belief that he would never go to the Front, and she had responded by saying that she was glad to know that there would be someone left after the War, and that
she would not be left alone. With this memory in mind, Vera began to formulate a plan to return to England. ‘The burden of debt’ that those who could not fight owed to men such as Victor made her feel that she would ‘give up all the things I ever meant to do & to be if I could but repay him a little for what he has sacrificed’. Something else was motivating her too: the idea that in Victor’s ‘clear & reverent memory’ of Roland, Roland seemed to live still.
She had got no further with her plans when, on 1 May, two further cables containing devastating news reached her in quick succession. The first informed her that Victor’s sight was hopelessly gone. The second – delivered an hour later – told her that Geoffrey had been killed in action on 23 April, at Monchy-Le-Preux, three miles south-east of Arras, in an attack on the Scarpe. During fierce fighting, Geoffrey had left the comparative safety of his trench and had gone out on top where he was almost immediately hit in the left lung by a German sniper. Under heavy bombardment, he was brought back into the trench and placed on a stretcher. Gazing intently at the orderly, Geoffrey uttered not a word and died about fifteen minutes later. Captain Daniel, Geoffrey’s company commander, believed that he would not have suffered much pain, and would have experienced a feeling of slight suffocation.
Geoffrey’s body was placed in a shallow area of trench, and the spot was marked until the padre could give him a proper burial. However, after the fighting was over the body had disappeared and was never found.
Three days before his death, Geoffrey had written a letter to Vera which she received on the evening of the day that the cable arrived with the news of the death. It was the kind of farewell letter, Vera told Edward, that she wished she had had from Roland. Geoffrey had written of the beauty he saw around him, even in the shell-torn landscapes of the Western Front. He observed the way in which the setting sun was reflected in the water at the bottom of the many crump holes, ‘making them look [like] masses of gold.’ And he ended this final letter to Vera with a renewed expression of his fear, as he waited to go into battle, that he would fail ‘at the critical moment as truly I am a horrible coward’.
Vera Brittain and the First World War Page 7