At the usual ‘break’ for 9.30 biscuits and apron-changing next morning I had only a few moments’ respite, as the ‘Fall In’ had already sounded for the first expected ambulances. But on my way to the dining-hall I went - as I had gone at every available opportunity during the past three days - to the V.A.D. sitting-room to take another fearful glance at the letter-rack, and there, high above the other letters, I saw a crushed, pencil-scrawled envelope addressed in Edward’s handwriting. In a panic of relief - for at least he couldn’t be dead - I pulled it down, but even then I could hardly open it, for the paper was so thin and my fingers shook so.
The little note was dated July 1st, and the written words were faint and uneven.
‘DEAR VERA,’ it said, ‘I was wounded in the action this morning in left arm and right thigh not seriously. Hope to come to England. Don’t worry. EDWARD.’
For a moment the empty room spun round; then I remembered the waiting ambulances and the Sister’s injunction to ‘hurry back.’ In the effort of pulling myself together I recalled, too, that I could save my father and mother, whose letters arrived in Macclesfield a day later than mine, another twenty-four hours of cruel anxiety. Regardless of the indignant glances of Sisters who knew that V.A.D.s were allowed to run only in cases of hæmorrhage or fire, I dashed like a young hare down the stone corridor to the telephone and asked my uncle at the National Provincial Bank to wire to the family.
‘I hope they will send him to England soon . . .’ I wrote home late that night, ‘but we hear hundreds and probably thousands of them are waiting to come across . . . the large number of officers we were expecting yesterday did not arrive . . . There were so many wounded the day before . . . that there were not platforms enough at Charing Cross to land them and they had to be taken round to Paddington . . . Do you see his regiment is mentioned as having done specially well in the battle by The Times’ special correspondent to-day? It would be funny if he turned up here. I only wish he would.’
On that morning, July 4th, began the immense convoys which came without cessation for about a fortnight, and continued at short intervals for the whole of that sultry month and the first part of August. Throughout those ‘busy and strenuous days’ the wards sweltered beneath their roofs of corrugated iron; the prevailing odour of wounds and stinking streets lingered perpetually in our nostrils, the red-hot hardness of paths and pavements burnt its way through the soles of our shoes. Day after day I had to fight the queer, frightening sensation - to which, throughout my years of nursing, I never became accustomed - of seeing the covered stretchers come in, one after another, without knowing, until I ran with pounding heart to look, what fearful sight or sound or stench, what problem of agony or imminent death, each brown blanket concealed.
In order to be within call at night, Betty and I were moved from Denmark Hill to a ground-floor flat in a block just outside the Brixton gate of the hospital. Every evening, after managing by the complete sacrifice of off-duty time to finish the morning dressings just before supper and leave the night people to give the afternoon and evening treatment, we limped from the chaos of the wards into the grateful privacy of our flat, and fell on to our beds feeling as though someone had dealt a series of numbing blows to all our bones and muscles from knee to shoulder. It was an effort to make our aching arms go through the movements of taking off our clothes, a triumph of resolution to force our sore feet to carry us to the bathroom.
Our daily work was complicated and increased by the new V.A.D.s who were rushed to the hospital by Devonshire House to meet the emergency. Not having been broken in to a ‘push’ by preceding weeks of ordinary routine, they went sick in shoals with septic fingers, heat strokes and chills. At the same time the orderlies were fast disappearing to take the place of stretcher-bearers wounded at the front, and the few that remained had constantly to answer the ‘Fall In’ and were never available for work in the wards.
For the first time I learnt that one could be tired to the limits of human endurance, and yet get through more work in a day than I had ever thought possible. When the groans of anæsthetised men made the ward a Bedlam, and the piteous impatience of boys in anguish demanded attention just when the rush of work was worst and the heat least endurable, I kept myself going, with the characteristic idealism of those youthful years, by murmuring under my breath two verses from Kipling’s ‘Dirge of Dead Sisters’:
(When the days were torment and the nights were clouded terror,
When the Powers of Darkness had dominion on our soul—
When we fled consuming through the Seven Hells of fever,
These put out their hands to us and healed and made us whole.)
(Till the pain was merciful and stunned us into silence—
When each nerve cried out on God that made the misused clay;
When the Body triumphed and the last poor shame departed—
These abode our agonies and wiped the sweat away.)
But there were other and greater compensations than Kipling. Edward was safe and Victor and Geoffrey were still in England; for the time being I had no immediate anxiety, and physical fatigue was a small price to pay for that relief.
By the evening of July 4th, my forty-bed hut in the park was already filled beyond capacity with acute surgical cases. But across the road in the College, the long empty rows of officers’ beds still waited.
11
Very early next morning, I heard the two V.A.D.s from J, the officers’ ward in the College, summoned from their beds by telephone. I was then still sleeping at Denmark Hill, and in a half-dream listened to them a few minutes later hurrying down the stairs and out into the quiet yellow light of the summer dawn.
After breakfast I went to my own ward as usual, and was in the midst of preparing dressing-trays - with which, regardless of floors and lockers, the day now began - when I heard a voice agitatedly calling: ‘Brittain! Brittain! Come here!’
I turned, and saw to my great astonishment the elder of the two V.A.D.s from J standing in the doorway. She was panting so much from hurry that she could hardly speak, but managed just to gasp out: ‘I say - Do you know your brother’s in J ward ?’
By pure good luck I managed to avoid the complete wreckage of my dressing-bowls, and gasped in my turn: ‘What! Edward in J?’
‘Honestly, he is,’ she answered jerkily; ‘I’ve just been washing him. Sorry I can’t stop - only got permission to come over and tell you!’ And she rushed back across the road.
I was excitedly explaining the situation to my Charge-Sister, when Matron - the stony-eyed and somewhat alarming successor to the first Matron, who had left the hospital a few weeks earlier for work in another field - rang up to say that Second-Lieutenant E. H. Brittain had come in with the convoy that morning and was asking for his sister. I could see him, she added, as soon as I could be ‘spared from the ward’. Overwhelmed with work though we were, the Sister told me that I might go and need not return at once, so, half-dazed with surging emotions, I raced over to the College.
Such a confusion of screens and stretchers and washing-bowls replaced the orderly beds of the previous night that for several seconds I stood in the doorway of J and looked for Edward in vain. Then, half way down the ward, a blue pyjama-clad arm began to wave, and the next moment I was beside his bed.
For a minute or two we gazed at each other in tremulous silence. One of his sleeves, I saw, was empty and the arm beneath it stiff and bandaged, but I noticed with relief, as I looked with an instinctively professional eye for the familiar green stain, that the outer bandage was spotless. With his one available hand he was endeavouring to negotiate a breakfast tray; I helped him to eat a poached egg, and the commonplace action restored to both of us the habit of self-control.
Even then, neither of us could say much. He seemed - to my surprise, for I remember Geoffrey’s haggard depression after a much smaller wound - gayer and happier than he had been all through his leave. The relief of having the great dread faced and creditably over was u
ppermost in his mind just then; it was only later, as he gradually remembered all he had been through on July 1st, that Victor and Geoffrey and I realised that the Battle of the Somme had profoundly changed him and added ten years to his age.
Throughout that day, when he saw no one except myself and the uncle who again sent out a series of telegrams, the astounding coincidence of his arrival at Camberwell possessed all his thoughts. At Waterloo, he told me, the congestion had been so enormous that there was no hope of being allocated by request to special hospitals.
‘I simply couldn’t believe my eyes,’ he concluded, ‘when an orderly pinned a label on me saying “1st London General”.’
That afternoon and for several successive days, I was allowed to have tea with him in his ward. Except for a brief good-night it was my only chance of seeing him, for I was on duty without a break for nearly a fortnight. Even the end-of-day ten minutes were difficult to wrest from the J Charge-Sister, a cynical old curmudgeon who could not be persuaded that I really wanted to talk to Edward, and not to flirt with the twenty other officers whose beds surrounded his in the crowded ward. She was so palpably hostile to my visits that one evening, exhausted by ten days’ unremitting endeavour to save thirty or forty shattered men whose tendency to die continually threatened to defeat us, I suddenly relapsed into tears as I sat by Edward’s bed, and could do nothing but try wordlessly to choke them back as he stroked my hand with his long, thin fingers.
The first gaiety of relief was by now slowly evaporating. He still remained tranquil and controlled, but his left arm was stiff and the fingers immovable; the bullet had badly damaged the central nerve, and he secretly worried about its possible effect upon his violin playing. I learnt the details of July 1st only by degrees, for whenever my mother or Victor or Geoffrey was not with him at tea-time, he was endeavouring to give such poor comfort as he could to his company commander’s mother, a dignified, white-haired woman with tragic eyes. Captain H. was missing for weeks after the battle; early in the day he had been wounded in the stomach by shrapnel, but had told two of the attacking party, who stopped to pick him up, to ‘get on with the job and not bother about him’. Edward privately believed that ‘Bill’ had been blown up by a shell, but long afterwards his body was found; he must have died as he lay there on the field.
Edward’s own story, when finally pieced together, seemed a typical enough narrative, but, remembering how repeatedly he had been omitted from drafts going to France, I found myself listening to it with secret satisfaction. He told it to me at intervals in approximately these words:
‘The battalion was ordered to take part in the main attack, and only about seventeen men and two officers of the attackers came through altogether. The barrage lifted at 7.30, and in the sudden silence I remember noticing what a perfect morning it was, with a cloudless blue sky. I had to lead the first wave of our company, but we didn’t go over right away because other regiments were opening the attack. While we were waiting for the order to start, a whole lot of wounded from the first part of the show came crowding into the trench; that upset the men a good bit, and then just before we were supposed to go over, part of the Yorkshire regiment in front of us got into a panic - probably started by German counter-orders - and began to retreat.
‘It looked like a regular rot, and I can’t remember just how I got the men together and made them go over the parapet. I only know I had to go back twice to get them, and I wouldn’t go through those minutes again if it meant the V.C . . . . They’d followed me across the open for about seventy yards when I got hit the first time; that was in the thigh. I fell down and got up, but fell down again; after twice trying to go on I gave it up and crawled into a shell hole. I was lying there with my arms stretched out and my head between them, as we’d been told to do, when a huge beast of a shell burst quite close to the hole. A splinter from it went through my arm; the pain was so frightful - much worse than the thigh - that I thought the arm had gone, and lost my nerve and began to scream. Then I saw it was still there and managed to pull myself together; and after I’d been in the hole about an hour and a half, I noticed that the hail of machine-gun bullets on the British trenches seemed to be slackening.
‘By this time there were two other men in the shell-hole with me - one was very badly wounded, but the other wasn’t hurt at all - only in a blue funk. I did all I could to persuade him to carry the wounded man in and send help for me, but I soon saw he wasn’t going to budge, so I decided to risk a crawl home myself. I climbed out of the hole and started dragging myself along between the dead and wounded to our trenches seventy yards away; I don’t remember much about it except that about half-way across I saw the hand of a man who’d been killed only that morning beginning to turn green and yellow. That made me feel pretty sick and I put on a spurt; luckily two of our stretcher-bearers saw me when I’d been in the open about twenty minutes, and they helped me over the parapet and carried me down to the dressing-station. When we got there, I sent them back for the wounded man in the shell-hole. At the C.C.S. I found crowds of officers and men that I knew; I’d quite lost count of the time, but after a while I was put to bed and was just dropping off to sleep when a damned orderly, thinking I was worse hit than I was, tried to make off with my watch; I cursed him pretty thoroughly, as you can imagine. They sent me straight back by ambulance train, where I had to lie in a filthy draught all the time, and across on the Egypt, but there were such crowds of wounded and so many delays that the whole journey took me five days.’
Later, when I remarked to Geoffrey how much I had been surprised by this story, and especially by the part where Edward rallied his men after the panic, Geoffrey announced that he wasn’t astonished at all; he’d always known, he said, that Edward was ‘a stout fellow’. Apparently other friends shared this opinion, for long afterwards another officer told me that in the 11th Sherwood Foresters’ mess they nicknamed Edward ‘the immaculate man of the trenches’; his habit of shaving with calm regularity on the worst days of a later and more continuous ‘push’ had a far more stimulating effect on the men’s morale than any number of pious exhortations. On the Sunday, too, after Edward came to Camberwell, my mother received a letter from Richard N., a senior subaltern who had been left out of the attack to look after the remnants of the battalion, congratulating her on Edward’s ‘courage and splendid behaviour’ on July 1st.
N. was one of Edward’s best friends in France; I had already heard how he and ‘Bill’ had listened to the record ‘God so loved the world’ on Edward’s portable gramophone during the tense evenings before the attack. The warmth of his letter seemed natural; we took it to be merely one friend’s tribute to another, and Edward himself treated it with pleasant ridicule; as soon as he left his bed he never spoke of the Somme again except under pressure. It was only at the end of August - just after Geoffrey had abruptly thrust some red and white carnations into my hands before going back to the front - that we realised that we had attached insufficient importance both to Edward’s story and N.’s letter.
At that time Edward had just begun his much-prolonged period of sick-leave; a serious injury to the nerves of his arm caused him intense pain for months, and involved a course of massage which lasted for nearly a year. One late summer evening I came off duty to find a pencilled post-card from him, telling me that he and my father had been inspecting a block of flats in Kensington, where my parents soon afterwards went to live and have remained to this day.
The rest of the post-card was brief:
‘Father came up this morning . . . He brought with him a letter from France addressed to me which contains the following: “To /2nd-Lt. E. H. Brittain. The G.O.C. congratulates you on being awarded the Military Cross by the Commander-in-Chief.” ’
12
Already, I thought, his prayer at Roland’s grave had been answered - by himself. In 1916, it should be added, the M.C. meant a good deal; it was still a comparatively rare decoration, awarded only for acts of really conspicuous courage.
At first my one regret was that Roland - always so sympathetic and yet just a little sceptical over Edward’s unavailing efforts to get to France - would never know how courageously and completely he had turned the tables on the scornful senior officers who left him behind when the regiment went to the front. But almost at once I realised that it was best that Roland, dead and undecorated, could not know; his reflections would have been too bitter. He had been so definitely ‘after’ the Military Cross, had thought it more to be desired than the Nobel Prize, and his fellow-officers in the 7th Worcesters had shared our confidence that some high military distinction would be his fate. Yet he had gone unadorned to his grave without taking part in a single important action, while the friend who had been a mere peace-loving musician wore the coveted decoration. How could he have endured, the next autumn term, to be a silent witness of Edward’s clamorous reception at Uppingham? - a reception such as we had often imagined for himself, but had never even thought possible for Edward, except perhaps years and years later as a great violinist and composer.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 31