‘EDWARD.’
8
Between the Sandhills and the Sea
THE LAST POST
The stars are shining bright above the camps,
The bugle calls float skyward, faintly clear;
Over the hill the mist-veiled motor lamps
Dwindle and disappear.
The notes of day’s goodbye arise and blend
With the low murmurous hum from tree and sod,
And swell into that question at the end
They ask each night of God—
Whether the dead within the burial ground
Will ever overthrow their crosses grey,
And rise triumphant from each lowly mound
To greet the dawning day.
Whether the eyes which battle sealed in sleep
Will open to réveille once again,
And forms, once mangled, into rapture leap,
Forgetful of their pain.
But still the stars above the camp shine on,
Giving no answer for our sorrow’s ease,
And one more day with the Last Post has gone,
Dying upon the breeze.
V. B., Etaples, 1917. From Verses of a V.A.D.
1
When Edward went back to France in the last week of June 1917, I did not go with him to Victoria, for I had come superstitiously to believe that a railway station farewell was fatal to the prospect of meeting again.
Instead, I waved to him from the window as his taxi rounded the corner of the square, and then helped my mother to wrap up his violin and put it away once more. In the dining-room hung his portrait by Graham Glen; painted while his wound was still painful, the face above the Military Cross ribbon looked pale and sad and retrospective, as it had been for many months after the Somme.
It was not an auspicious return. At Boulogne his valise, with its newly purchased trench equipment, unaccountably disappeared and was never recovered, and he was obliged to go on without even a revolver to protect him during the miserable process of getting re-acclimatised to the War. For the next two months his lack of possessions, and the exasperating endeavour to replace them through correspondence while the postal communications between England and France grew steadily worse, added immeasurably to the wretched discomfort of that menacing summer.
At the Base, to his bitter disappointment, he was ordered to join the 2nd (Regular) Sherwood Foresters at Lens instead of his own 11th Battalion. When he returned to the line on June 30th, a year, less one day, after he had left it, he found the unfamiliar regiment on the verge of going into action. All too soon, my habitual suspense was renewed by a melancholy letter telling me that he was ‘in for another July 1st. If it should be that “Ere the sun swings his noonday sword” I must say good-bye to all of this - then good-bye. You know that, as I promised, I will try to come back if I am killed. It is all very sudden and it is bad luck that I am here in time, but still it must be.’
I had to wait nearly a week before learning that he was still alive and unhurt. A letter dated July 3rd, and written with quite uncharacteristic indignation, describes how he was sent into an attack the moment that he arrived, without knowing officers or men or the ground itself. It reveals how ‘magnificently’ some of our actions were organised, and how wastefully courageous lives were placed in jeopardy, and often thrown away, as the result of the crudest and most elementary failures of intelligence.
‘When I reported my arrival on Saturday night, having only left Étaples in the morning, I was told that I was to go up with the company and that they were going to attack in the early morning. The whole thing was a complete fiasco; first of all the guide who was to lead us to our position went wrong and lost the way completely. I must tell you that the battalion had never been in the sector before and nobody knew the way at all. Then my company commander got lost and so there was only one other officer besides myself and he didn’t know the way. The organisation of the whole thing was shocking as of course the position ought to have been reconnoitred before and it is obviously impossible for anyone who has never seen the ground before to attack in the dark. After wandering through interminable trenches I eventually found myself with only five men in an unknown place at the time when our barrage opened. It was clearly no use attempting to do anything and I found a small bit of trench and waited there till it got light. Then I found one of our front posts (there was no proper front line) and there we had to stop till we were relieved last night. As you can imagine, we had a pretty rotten time altogether. I don’t think that I and the other officer who reported with me ought to have been rushed into the show like that after a tiring two days’ travelling and not knowing the map.’
Had this incident found its way into the official communiqué, an admiring nation would no doubt have been told (especially in view of Edward’s record on the Somme) that ‘this gallant officer held the trench for two days with the help of only five men.’ Many similar ‘acts of heroism’ probably originated in equally crass incompetence at Staff Headquarters. ‘The C.O. said he was very pleased with the way we carried on in the line,’ Edward’s next communication reported, but the whole experience upset him so much that for nearly a month his letters were scrappy and impersonal. He only began to recover towards the end of July, when he was sent back to the 11th Battalion and rejoined it as second in command of his old company.
All this agitation made me very anxious to get back to the midst of things, especially as inactivity led to brooding, and brooding was, of all futile occupations, the most important to avoid. Although three out of the four persons were gone who had made all the world that I knew, the War seemed no nearer a conclusion than it had been in 1914. It was everywhere now; even before Victor was buried, the daylight air-raid of June 13th ‘brought it home’, as the newspapers remarked, with such force that I perceived danger to be infinitely preferable when I went after it, instead of waiting for it to come after me.
I was just reaching home after a morning’s shopping in Kensington High Street when the uproar began, and, looking immediately at the sky, I saw the sinister group of giant mosquitoes sweeping in close formation over London. My mother, whose temperamental fatalism had always enabled her to sleep peacefully through the usual night-time raids, was anxious to watch the show from the roof of the flats, but when I reached the doorway my father had just succeeded in hurrying her down to the basement; he did not share her belief that destiny remained unaffected by caution, and himself derived moral support in air-raids from putting on his collar and patrolling the passages.
The three of us listened glumly to the shrapnel raining down like a thunder-shower upon the trees in the park - those quiet trees which on the night of my return from Malta had made death and horror seem so unbelievably remote. As soon as the banging and crashing had given way to the breathless, apprehensive silence which always followed a big raid, I made a complicated journey to the City to see if my uncle had been added to the family’s growing collection of casualties.
When at last, after much negotiation of the crowds in Cornhill and Bishopsgate, I succeeded in getting to the National Provincial Bank, I found him safe and quite composed, but as pale as a corpse; indeed, the whole staff of men and women resembled a morose consignment of dumb spectres newly transported across the Styx. The streets round the Bank were terrifyingly quiet, and in some places so thickly covered with broken glass that I seemed to be wading ankle-deep in huge unmelted hailstones. I saw no dead nor wounded, though numerous police-supervised barricades concealed a variety of gruesome probabilities. Others were only too clearly suggested by a crimson-splashed horse lying indifferently on its side, and by several derelict tradesman’s carts bloodily denuded of their drivers.
These things, I concluded, seemed less inappropriate when they happened in France, though no doubt the French thought otherwise. At St Monica’s, one July afternoon, I became aware of a periodic thumping, like a tremendous heart-beat, which made one parched corner of the games-field quiver; the sou
nd might have been a reaping-machine two hundred yards away down the valley, but I knew it for the echo of the guns across the Channel, summoning me back to the War. ‘Oh, guns of France,’ Rose Macaulay has written of that same summer in ‘Picnic, July 1917’:
Oh, guns of France,
Be still, you crash in vain . . .
Heavily up the south wind throb
Dull dreams of pain . . .
Be still, be still, south wind, lest your
Blowing should bring the rain . . .
We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill
And sleep once again.
Oh, we’ll lie quite still, nor listen nor look,
While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,
Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Should break . . . should break.
There was no way of escaping that echo; I belonged to an accursed generation which had to listen and look whether it wanted to do so or not, and it was useless, at this late hour, to try to resist my fate. So, drowning compunction in determination, I ignored my parents’ anxious entreaties to me to stay with them a little longer and, a week or two after Edward had gone, I went to Devonshire House.
I was interviewed by a middle-aged woman with a grave face and an ‘official’ manner, who sat before a desk frowning over a folder containing my record. She motioned me to sit down, and I told her that I wanted to join up again.
‘And why,’ she asked peremptorily, ‘did you leave Malta?’
I trembled a little at the sharp inquiry. Breaches of contract were not, I knew, regarded with favour at Red Cross Headquarters, and were pardoned only on condition of a really good excuse. My own reason, which could not help sounding sentimental, was not, I felt certain, a ‘good excuse’ at all. But I could think of no plausible alternative to the simple truth, so I told it.
‘I came home meaning to marry a man who was blinded at Arras,’ I said, ‘but he died just after I got back.’
To my surprise, for I had long given up expecting humanity in officials, a mask seemed to drop from the tired face before me. I was suddenly looking into benevolent eyes dim with comprehension, and the voice that had addressed me so abruptly was very gentle when it spoke again.
‘I’m so sorry . . . You’ve had a sad time. Is there anywhere special you want to go?’
I hated England, I confessed, and did so want to serve abroad again, where there was heaps to do and no time to think. I had an only brother on the Western Front; was it possible to go to France?
‘There are two drafts going quite soon,’ said the kind voice. ‘Only a few vacancies are left, but I’ll do my best for you.’
She smiled at me as I got up to go, and, rather wanly, I smiled back. Outside her room, I asked a V.A.D. clerk who it was that had interviewed me. I have never been quite sure of the name that she gave me, but it sounded like ‘Mrs Keynes’.
2
On the wet afternoon of August 3rd, feeling rather sick after a rough crossing and a hasty second inoculation against typhoid done only the day before, I sat in the stuffy salon of the Hotel du Louvre at Boulogne, writing out endless ‘particulars’.
The rest of the draft were similarly engaged; most of them were new to foreign service, and I had felt all the veteran’s superiority towards their awkwardness over their life-belts, and their light, nervous conversation about submarines. It had seemed a little strange starting off without Betty, but familiarity with the routine was a very fair compensation for solitude.
When the forms were filled in, a Sister from Headquarters ordered me to go to No. 24 General Hospital at Etaples; I was told to ‘proceed’ the next day, and to spend the night in Boulogne. So I wired to Edward that I had arrived in France, and shared a room for the night with S., a talkative, red-haired V.A.D. some years older than myself. By the time that Edward replied to my telegram the 11th Battalion had moved up to the Salient, to take part in the series of offensives round Ypres which began on July 31st and continued, futile and expensive, till the middle of November.
Our train next day did not leave until the afternoon, so I spent the morning in the English Church at Boulogne commemorating the Third Anniversary of the War. The Chaplain-General to the Forces, once Bishop of Pretoria, preached to the packed congregation of officers and nurses a sermon to which I only half listened, but I paid more attention to the prayers and the collects:
‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take Thou vengeance of our sins; spare us, good Lord, spare Thy people, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.’
A phrase from my Pass Mods. days at Oxford slipped into my mind; I had quoted it not long ago to Edward in a letter from Malta:
‘The gods are not angry for ever . . .’
It came, I thought, from the Iliad and those quiet evenings spent with my Classical tutor in reading of the battles for sorrowful Troy. How like we were to the fighters of those old wars, trusting to the irresponsible caprices of an importuned God to deliver us from blunders and barbarisms for which we only were responsible, and from which we alone could deliver ourselves and our rocking civilisation!
But I did not, at the moment, allow my thoughts to pursue the subject thus far. Dreaming in the soft light that filtered through the high, stained-glass windows, I saw the congregation as a sombre rainbow, navy-blue and khaki, scarlet and grey, and by the time that the ‘Last Post’ - with its final questioning note which now always seemed to me to express the soul’s ceaseless inquiry of the Unseen regarding its ultimate destiny - had sounded over us as we stood in honour of the dead who could neither protest nor complain, I was as ready for sacrifices and hardships as I had ever been in the early idealistic days. This sense of renewed resolution went with me as I stepped from the shadowed quiet of the church into the wet, noisy streets of Boulogne. The dead might lie beneath their crosses on a hundred wind-swept hillsides, but for us the difficult business of continuing the War must go on in spite of their departure; the sirens would still sound as the ships brought their drafts to the harbour, and the wind would flap the pennons on the tall mast-heads.
Since those years it has often been said by pacifists - as in a brave, lop-sided pamphlet which I read only the other day - that war creates more criminals than heroes; that, far from developing noble qualities in those who take part in it, it brings out only the worst. If this were altogether true, the pacifist’s aim would be, I think, much nearer of attainment than it is. Looking back upon the psychological processes of us who were very young sixteen years ago, it seems to me that his task - our task - is infinitely complicated by the fact that war, while it lasts, does produce heroism to a far greater extent than it brutalises.
Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. When patriotism ‘wore threadbare’, when suspicion and doubt began to creep in, the more ardent and frequent was the periodic re-dedication, the more deliberate the self-induced conviction that our efforts were disinterested and our cause was just. Undoubtedly this state of mind was what anti-war propagandists call it - ‘hysterical exaltation’, ‘quasi-mystical, idealistic hysteria’ - but it had concrete results in stupendous patience, in superhuman endurance, in the constant re-affirmation of incredible courage. To refuse to acknowledge this is to underrate the power of those white angels which fight so naïvely on the side of destruction.
3
A heavy shower had only just ceased when I arrived at Étaples with three other V.A.D.s ordered to the same hospital, and the roads were liquid with such mud as only wartime France could produce after a few days of rain.
Leaving our camp-kit to be picked up by an ambulance, we squelched through the littered, grimy square and along a narrow, straggling street where the sole reposi
tories for household rubbish appeared to be the pavement and the gutter. We finally emerged into open country and the huge area of camps, in which, at one time or another, practically every soldier in the British Army was dumped to await further orders for a still less agreeable destination. The main railway line from Boulogne to Paris ran between the hospitals and the distant sea, and amongst the camps, and along the sides of the road to Camiers, the humped sandhills bristled with tufts of spiky grass.
To-day, when I go on holiday along this railway line, I have to look carefully for the place in which I once lived so intensely. After a dozen almost yearly journeys, I am not sure that I could find it, for the last of the scars has disappeared from the fields where the camps were spread; the turnips and potatoes and mangel-wurzels of a mild agricultural country cover the soil that held so much agony. Even the weather-beaten crosses, with their bright gardens of pansies and stocks and marigolds, in the big cemetery below the pinewoods at the top of the hill have been replaced by the stone architecture of our post-war frenzy for memorials - as though we could somehow compensate the dead by remembering them regardless of expense. Only the sandhills and the sea remain unchanged.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 40