The ironies of war, I reflected sadly, were more than strange; in terms of a rational universe they were quite inexplicable. But now the universe had become irrational, and nothing was turning out as it once seemed to have been ordained.
Edward’s award was officially announced in The Times of October 21st, 1916, under the heading of ‘Rewards for Gallantry: Short Stories of Brave Deeds’:
‘Temp. Sec.-Lt. EDWARD HAROLD BRITTAIN, Notts and Derby R. - For conspicuous gallantry and leadership during an attack. He was severely wounded, but continued to lead his men with great bravery and coolness until a second wound disabled him.’
But when I read this notice, I was far away from both Edward and England.
With the coming of summer weather and increased activity on the various fronts, small groups of Sisters and V.A.D.s had begun to leave Camberwell for foreign service, chiefly in France. During the rush of work after the Somme, when every London hospital needed its full quota of nurses, the exodus had temporarily ceased, but as soon as the convoys slackened a Sister and two V.A.D.s were ordered, to my secret terror, to leave for service on a hospital ship, the Glenart Castle. Their names had been just above Betty’s and mine on the list of active service volunteers; from this we knew that our own summons would not be long delayed, and each privately prayed that when it came it might be for France.
At the beginning of September I was due for leave, which seemed more than ever desirable after an attack by thirteen German airships on September 2nd had deprived London of a whole night’s rest. The heavy work of July and August in the incessant heat of that long London summer had left me limp and jaded, and I left Euston for Macclesfield, where my parents were still living, with a sense of profound relief.
On Macclesfield station my father met me with the news that a telegram awaited me at the house. Hurrying there in a taxi, I opened and read it; it announced that I was ordered on foreign service, and recalled me to Camberwell at once.
After scrambling through a dinner which I could hardly eat for fatigue and excitement, I caught the last train back to London. Too tired, too apprehensive and too bitterly disappointed at losing my leave to read or to sleep, I found the second long journey interminable. It was almost midnight when I tramped wearily through the silent slums between Camberwell New Road and our flat, but Betty was lying awake in bed, waiting for my return. When she heard me at the door she called through the window that both of us were ordered east, probably to Malta.
7
Tawny Island
WE SHALL COME NO MORE
So then we came to the Island,
Lissom and young, with the radiant sun in our faces;
Anchored in long quiet lines the ships were waiting,
Giants asleep in the peace of the dark-blue harbour.
Ashore we leapt, to seek the magic adventure
Up the valley at noontide,
Where shimmering lay the fields of asphodel.
O Captain of our Voyage,
What of the Dead?
Dead days, dead hopes, dead loves, dead dreams, dead sorrows—
Do the Dead walk again?
To-day we look for the Island,
Older, a little tired, our confidence waning;
On the ocean bed the shattered ships lie crumbling
Where lost men’s bones gleam white in the shrouded silence.
The Island waits, but we shall never find it,
Nor see the dark-blue harbour
Where twilight falls on fields of asphodel.
V. B. 1932.
1
The memory of my sunlit months in the Mediterranean during the War’s worst period of miserable stagnation still causes a strange nostalgia to descend upon my spirit. For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career - yet Malta remains in my recollection as an interval of heaven, a short year of glamorous beauty and delight, in which, for the time being, I came to life again after Roland’s death.
Quite why the island should have had this effect upon me I do not know, for I went to Malta in peril, I arrived there in pain, I was often lonely and homesick, and I left in the deepest depths of sorrow and abnegation. Nevertheless, the enchantment remains. The place has become for me a shrine, the object of a pilgrimage, a fairy country which I know that I must see again before I die. Looking back through the years to sun-filled memory-pictures of golden stone buildings, of turquoise and sapphire seas, of jade and topaz and amethyst skies, of long stretches of dust-white road winding seaward over jagged black rocks older than history, I am filled with yearning and regret, and I cry in my heart: Come back, magic days! I was sorrowful, anxious, frustrated, lonely - but yet how vividly alive! Take away this agreeable London life of writing, of congenial friends, of minor successes for which I fought so long and worked so hard, take away my pleasant Chelsea home that would have seemed in the Buxton days an unattainable Paradise - and give me back that lovely solitude, that enchanted obscurity, those warm shimmering mornings of light and colour, those hours of dreaming in hot scented fields of oxalis and gladioli and asphodel !
But I know that those things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphur-coloured walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenuous eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish.
It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem - a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.
I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellogg Pact, or any Disarmament Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war.
2
On the late afternoon of Saturday, September 23rd, 1916, a large tender carried a party of excited and apprehensive young women down the glittering expanse of Southampton Water. The tender had orders to embark them on H.M. Hospital Ship Britannic, which was sailing next day for Mudros in order to bring home the chronically sick and wounded from various Eastern campaigns. Betty and I, by far the youngest of the group, were also the most excited and certainly not the least apprehensive, for a persistent wonder whether I should ever see Edward or Victor or Geoffrey again caused a lump in my throat and a dull ache at the pit of my stomach.
The mingled depression and exhilaration of that day still lives in the pages of my diary.
‘Mother and Edward . . . spent an hour or two with me this morning before our final departure. I bade them a last au revoir at the corner of Brief Street, as I did not want to watch them walk away.
‘We left the hospital with Miss C. in a ’bus and met Principal Matron at Waterloo. I hated Waterloo and the Southampton express; there was such a general bustle and noise and confusion which somehow seemed to intensify the feeling that we were going away
. . . I felt acutely miserable, not so much at the idea of leaving England and everybody (for since Roland went the long, long journey no place in the world seems so very far away from any other place) as because everything was so unsettled and I hate things to be unsettled and not know at all what is going to happen to me . . . In spite of the depressing effect of the ’bus and Waterloo it was a great relief to me to leave Camberwell . . . So much had I grown to hate it that I felt that any change, to however much worse physical conditions, would be a welcome relief . . .
‘At 4.0 we all assembled at the dock . . . As we left the harbour a transport of the R.F.C. cheered us and waved their hats. We sailed down the Solent just as the sun was setting; on either side of us the colours of the mainland were vividly beautiful. The sinking sun made a shimmering golden track on the water which seemed to link us in our tender to the England we were leaving behind, and in the evening light the aeroplanes and seaplanes which now and again flew round us looked like fairy things.’
When we came near to the Isle of Wight, the Britannic, anchored off Cowes, appeared in the distance like a huge white mammoth lying on its side. For a moment a sick dread had seized me when I learnt that she had been built as sister ship to the Titanic, but as I watched her scarlet crosses and four large funnels gleaming in the low sunshine, I consoled myself by reflecting that her conversion into a hospital ship had removed her to a different category. During the winter of 1915 she had run between England and Mudros, but her use was discontinued after the evacuation of the Dardanelles. Now that the Balkans had become active she was to start again, and this journey to Mudros, where those of us destined for Malta had to tranship, was the maiden voyage of her new series.
I had hardly begun to unpack in the luxurious inner cabin which I was to share with Betty, when we were summoned to listen to an address by the Sister-in-Charge of the Malta contingent on the behaviour expected from the V.A.D.s on board. Her injunctions involved so frequent a repetition of the words: ‘They may not . . . they shall not . . .’ that we should soon have become openly mutinous had not a tranquillising service on the deck next morning before we sailed reminded us how futile were little hot-headed rebellions against injudicious severity in face of the hazards that might be before us. By the time that we had sung ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul’, and listened to an idealistic red-haired chaplain telling us that ‘for a certain high type of human nature the far and the perilous thing has always had an alluring charm’, some of us were ready to confront danger and suffer martyrdom to the limit of endurance.
Martyrdom, however, though admittedly uncomfortable, might have been less exasperating than the constant humiliation to which our youthful dignity, far from enabling us to shine, in the chaplain’s words, ‘as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of distress and fear’, was compelled ignominiously to submit. Our Sister-in-Charge, an Amazonian individual with a harsh voice and hawk-like features, appeared to us as one of those women whose idea of discipline is to visualise every activity that her subordinates might enjoy and then issue a general prohibition. We had not been on the ship for a day before the boat deck - the best place from which to see the unfamiliar countries that we were passing - was put out of bounds. We were also forbidden to leave our cabins in pyjamas - a regulation guaranteed to prevent all those who, like ourselves, had inside cabins, from observing any passing attraction in the way of land or ships. Had I obeyed it I should have seen neither Gibraltar at midnight nor Messina at dawn.
The V.A.D. passengers were ruthlessly divided into ‘sections’, each under a section-leader who led a dog’s life trying to keep pace with the orders issued to her. Every V.A.D. had to sit, eat and attend functions with other members of her section even though her best friend was in another - as she always was if the Sister happened to discover the friendship. Finally, as these arrangements did not separate us from the medical officers as completely as the Sister had intended, she and the Matron of the Britannic nursing staff - a sixty-year-old ‘dug-out’ with a red cape and a row of South African medals - ordered a rope to be stretched across the main deck to divide the V.A.D. sheep from the R.A.M.C. goats; by this expedient they hoped automatically to terminate the age-long predilection of men and women for each other’s society. After a few days, during which the more adventurous of both sexes had edged as near to the rope as they dared, and several others had regarded one another from a distance with eyes full of cupidity, the guardians of our virtue were astonished and pained beyond measure when one or two couples, being denied the opportunity of normal conversation on deck, were found in compromising positions beneath the gangways.
Late on the Sunday afternoon, we sailed. At chapel that evening, the Sisters and V.A.D.s at the 1st London General sang on our behalf the hymn: ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’ - not without good reason, as later experience was to prove. Their thought ‘for those in peril on the sea’ was perhaps stimulated by the fact that they themselves had just emerged from peril of another kind, for, on the very evening after our departure, a fleet of raiding Zeppelins dropped bombs on Purley, Streatham Hill and Brixton, doing a good deal of damage quite near to the hospital. ‘The windows of the White Horse were smashed - just where Mother and I passed that morning after saying good-bye to you,’ wrote Edward later.
‘Providence has tempered the wind to the shorn lamb again,’ I thought a little ruefully, remembering how frightened I had been of air-raids when I first went to London, and reflecting that so close a conjunction of Zeppelins and submarines might entirely have annihilated that modicum of courage which, throughout the War, only just enabled me to keep my dignity in perilous situations.
As the great screws began to thrash and throb, Betty and I, alien in our thoughts yet very glad of one another’s company, escaped to the forbidden boat deck to see the last of England. Making for the Cornish coast and the Bay of Biscay, the Britannic began her journey east by going west, and as we passed the Needles we seemed to sail right into the heart of a gold and purple sunset, which dazzled us with a lovely radiance too bright for human eyes. On the deck below us the R.A.M.C. orderlies were singing and dancing; we looked down upon them as though seeing a music-hall stage from the front of the dress-circle. One man who had a violin played Tosti’s ‘Good-bye’; the plaintive, familiar notes rang out into the mild September twilight.
Falling leaf and fading tree,
Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising on you and me—
Sha-dows rising - on you-ou and me!
The swallows are making them ready to fly,
Wheeling out - on a wind-y sky.
Good-bye, Summer - Good-bye, good-bye!
Good-bye, Sum-mer ! Good-bye - go-od-bye!
Now that the perils of the sea were really at hand, the terror that had hung over me since I volunteered for foreign service and for one grim second had gripped me by the throat when Betty told me that we were going to Malta, somehow seemed less imminent. The expensive equipment of our cabins was illogically reassuring; those polished tables and bevelled mirrors looked so inappropriate for the bottom of the sea. ‘We are in danger!’ I kept saying as I lay awake in the dark that night, but although we knew that our voyage was to be so much longer than we had expected, it was difficult on so warm and calm an evening to convince one’s self that at any moment might come a loud explosion, followed by a cold, choky death in the smooth black water. Later, when a storm swept over the Bay of Biscay and land was far away, the gruesome possibility seemed less remote.
Six months afterwards, writing to my mother about the torpedoing of the Asturias with two of our most popular Malta V.A.D.s on board, I tried to describe the disintegrating fear which left me with a sick reluctance to undertake long voyages that ignominiously persists to this day.
‘I feel so sorry for them to think it happened at night, for I remember the feelings of terror the dark hours used to bring us on the Britannic - feelings which, of course, we never mentioned to each other at the time but afterwards a
ll admitted we had had. I used to look over the steep side of that tremendous ship and think to myself: “Perhaps now - or now - or now!” It is being on the qui vive for something that may happen any moment of any hour which makes the strain of a long voyage nowadays. “Betty” and I were not in a very good place for being torpedoed on the Britannic as having a cabin we were on a lower deck than most of the others, in fact we were only a yard or two from the place where the torpedo ultimately went through. I used to wake up at night and listen to the thresh of the screws and the whistle of the wind above the mastheads and the rushing of the water against the side, and wonder if any among the strange occasional crashes and bangs that went on all night was a torpedo or mine striking the ship.’
But even feeling so desperately afraid could not entirely quench the thrill of passing those far, enchanted lands which to a sixteen-year-old Cook’s tourist had seemed so inaccessible. For the whole of one long hot evening I lay on deck, still a little sick and faint from the trials of the Bay, and watched the brick-red coast of Portugal deepen into the low grey rock of Cape St Vincent. That night Gibraltar towered above us, a black shadow studded with lights, and the next morning the arrogant peaks of the Sierra Nevada leaned over the jagged summits of the Alpujarras to see the white monster, to which over-confident men and women had entrusted their lives, slip noiselessly along the menacing blue water. One day more, and the grey and purple rocks of Sardinia greeted us before we stopped for forty-eight hours to coal at Naples in the shadow of the cloud-crowned giant Vesuvius. Messina, that narrow, tragic strait perpetually guarded by the blue sentinel Etna, slipped past us in the dawn of our ninth morning afloat, and on the tenth day the Mediterranean began to gleam with great jewels - golden islands, purple-shadowed, set in a sapphire sea.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 32