Completely unaware whether the ‘dreadful man’ was Alfred or the M.O., and entirely ignorant of what the one or the other was supposed to have done, I protested quite truthfully that I had not been annoyed at all, that I liked my work in the German ward, and would much rather remain there than be moved. But this, I was told, kindly but very definitely, was out of the question. I still wonder whether the whole upset was not a figment of Hope Milroy’s picturesque imagination - or whether some unperceived menace was really threatening my guileless head.
6
Off duty in France, I was less lonely than I had been in either London or Malta. Since I was not new to active service, the agreeable staff of 24 General treated me as a ‘veteran’ like themselves, and I had a pleasant choice of companions on country walks or shopping expeditions to Paris-Plage.
The area, too, as I came to know it better, seemed anything but the mere dust-heap that it had appeared to me on my journey from Malta. I remember mornings when exiguous wraiths of cloud scudded unsubstantially over the sandhills, crowned always by their tall clumps of thin, dark pines; and afternoons in which the blue shadows lengthened across the vast expanse of coast where the estuary met the distant sea. Towards Paris-Plage the ruddy sails of brown fishing-smacks caught the brief flame of sunset; along the shore irregular patches of emerald seaweed made a futurist pattern upon a golden-brown carpet. Close to the sea a delicate scattering of pink and purple shells began a new design; other cone-shaped varieties, curiously striped in black and yellow, might have been miniature models of the fashionable millinery in the Rue de la Paix.
No seascape in England quite resembles that coast, but the three miles of Romney Marsh between Rye and the sandhill-guarded shore of Camber-on-Sea have at least a family likeness. The same vivid light, due to the perpetual sweeping away of the mists by the wind, lies upon the Marsh and the flat water-logged meadows on either side of the white sentinel road running from Etaples to the woods surrounding Le Touquet. In summer and autumn this light becomes golden-yellow, but in winter it is always a dazzling green.
Along that straight road, Hope Milroy and I walked together one late evening in early September. So close a companionship between a Sister and a V.A.D. would have been frowned upon severely by the portentous Territorials at the 1st London General, but in France, though necessary discipline was maintained in the wards, the Q. A. Reserve Sisters had no such feeling of professional exclusiveness towards the girls who had helped them to fight so many forms of death since almost the beginning of the War. I had had a bitter disappointment that week, for Edward had put in for local leave to come and see me, but though I waited expectantly about the camp for two or three days, he never appeared. To divert my mind from gloomy speculations as to why leave was unobtainable, Hope invited me to one of those stray meals by means of which the insistent appetite of wartime could sometimes successfully challenge a disconsolate mood.
As we crossed the bridge which spanned the river Canche just before it branched into its shallow estuary, we saw two medical officers from 24 General walking a hundred yards in front of us, with backs stiff and shoulders hunched, pretending not to know that we were behind them.
‘They’re going Paris-Plaging,’ observed Hope dispassionately; it was a euphemism that we both understood. Like most of us she suffered from the strained atmosphere created by segregation, but she was among the few who despised surreptitious breaches of a rule that she could not alter. It made the men so conceited, she said, to think themselves worth any amount of risk to women who stood the chance of dismissal while they would get off scot-free whatever happened.
That evening, deep in the woods, we drank coffee and ate omelettes in a cottage garden carved out of a sunlit clearing. The tall, intertwined trees cast their growing shadows over us, and the evening sunlight, glancing through the boughs, made a quivering leafy pattern on the grass. Columbines and pansies framed the narrow garden path with pink and purple borders; the scent from a bush of sweetbriar in the corner hung like the lightest incense upon the quiet air. It seemed impossible that this untouched serenity and the German ward could exist within a few miles of each other; except for the occasional soft thumping of anti-aircraft guns at a distant gunnery school, the War had disappeared. From the depths of the wood a feathery line of blue smoke curled lazily upward; some peasants were making a fire of dry sticks, which recalled to my senses the friendly smell of a thousand bonfires that drifts across England in the early autumn. A verse from Thomas Hardy’s ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’ floated into my mind from the volume of his poems that Edward had sent me in Malta:
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
We sat in the garden till twilight, talking about Oxford, and Hope’s reaction against the academic traditions of her family. By the time that we reached the village again, long indigo shadows lay dark upon the fields, and the harvest moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the pale green sky.
7
Through my new surgical hut in the ‘front line’ of the hospital passed a ceaseless stream of Tommies from the Salient. The ward was less of a strain than the German ward only because it was more adequately staffed; my letters home tell the same story of perpetual convoys, of hæmorrhages, of delirium, of gas-gangrene cases doomed from the start who watched our movements with staring, fear-darkened eyes, afraid to ask the questions whose answers would confirm that which they already knew.
By the time that the new Battle of Ypres had blundered round those costly ridges for six unbroken weeks the whole staff of 24 General was jaded, and in spite of Passchendaele the Matron insisted upon the temporary re-establishment of ‘days off’. I spent mine with one of the senior V.A.D.s, who had been in France since 1915: at twenty-six, Norah had made up her mind that intellectual pretensions were not for her, but a large endowment of humorous common sense made her a pleasing companion for the sixteen-mile walk to Hardelot and back which proved the fatigue of the past weeks to have been nervous rather than physical.
I was now quite hardened to living and working on my feet; only a very exceptional ‘push’ made bones and muscles ache as they had ached after the Somme. As for the wounds, I was growing accustomed to them; most of us, at that stage, possessed a kind of psychological shutter which we firmly closed down upon our recollection of the daily agony whenever there was time to think. We never dreamed that, in the years of renewed sensitiveness after the War, the convenient shutter would simply refuse to operate, or even to allow us to romanticise - as I who tried to write poetry romanticised in 1917 - the everlasting dirt and gruesomeness.
‘Have just been writing a poem on the German ward,’ I told my mother on September 15th; ‘was composing it this morning while watching a patient who was rather sick come round from an operation.’
The poem was published later in Verses of a V.A.D. As anyone who can visualise the circumstances of its composition will imagine, it was not a good poem, and would not be worth mentioning but for the fact that it produced a letter of congratulation from Lady Ampthill - who had succeeded Dame Katharine Furse as Chairman of the Joint Women’s V.A.D. Committee - on its irreproachable sentiments. The sentiments were, of course, irreproachable only from the standpoint of a society whose motto was ‘Inter Arma Caritas ’; that first flicker of genuine if slightly patronising internationalism would hardly have commended itself to the ‘Fight to a Finish’ enthusiasts.
Beneath the drifting clouds of a warm September morning, Norah and I walked through sandhills and meadows and pinewoods on our way to Hardelot. At a searchlight depot on a lonely hillside two Tommies hailed us with delight when we asked them thirstily for water; they said they had not seen an English woman for over three months. We arrived at Hardelot a little before lunchtime; after hesitating outside the Pre Catalan, an old château with a beautiful garden which had been converted into an expensive restaurant ‘for off
icers and nurses’, we decided that it would be cheaper, if not quite so pleasant, to eat at the small hotel at Hardelot-Plage.
So we went on for the extra mile, and were about to order a meal in the hotel salon, when a car drove up and an Australian officer stalked through the door with a Q. A. Reserve Sister sidling in behind him. The officer had begun to make some inquiries in very bad French about a room for the night when he noticed Norah and me. He turned and glared at us with a degree of malevolence that I have seldom seen on any human countenance; the worst language in the world could not have told us more plainly how unutterably de trop we were.
Norah and I concluded that if the Sister liked to spend part of her leave in this manner it was no business of ours; we rather deplored her choice of officer, but perhaps the selection was limited. The hotel, we decided, was obviously not large enough to hold both ourselves and them, so we walked back again to Hardelot, and lunched in sylvan chastity at the Pré Catalan.
The incident made a good tale to tell over the supper-party that we held in Norah’s hut when we got back. Those evening parties - not so dissimilar from the cocoa-drinkings at Oxford, except that instead of essays and dons and Napoleon we discussed operations and Sisters and lumbar punctures - made life in France much more sociable than in Camberwell or Malta, where we had never forgathered in the same way. At Etaples the supervision in ‘quarters’ was slight and infrequent; the privacy of the V.A.D.s was respected and they were credited with responsible behaviour off duty as well as on - a policy which made for good discipline, though in English hospitals no one appeared to understand this elementary fact of psychology.
8
I returned to my ward for another six weeks without a half day - a deprivation due not only to the perpetual rush of operations and dressings, but to the local mutiny afterwards described by the men as the ‘Battle of Eetapps’. At the time, this somewhat disreputable interruption to a Holy War was wrapped in a fog which the years have deepened, for we were not allowed to mention it in our letters home, and it appears, not unnaturally, to have been omitted from standard histories by their patriotic authors.a
We were told that the disturbance began by a half-drunken ‘Jock’ shooting the military policeman who had tried to prevent him from taking his girl into a prohibited café. In some of the stories the girl was a young Frenchwoman from the village, in others she had turned into one of the newly arrived W.A.A.C.s; no doubt in the W.A.A.C. camp she was said to be a V.A.D. Whatever the origin of the outbreak, by the end of September Etaples was in an uproar. A number of Australians and New Zealanders, always ready for trouble, joined in the fray; rumour related that numerous highly placed officials had resigned from the control of the camp, and a young officer with the M.C. was said to have shot himself on the Bull Ring.
Quite who was against whom I never clearly gathered, but one party was said to be holding the bridge over the Canche and the others to be trying to take it from them. Obviously the village was no place for females, so for over a fortnight we were shut up within our hospitals, to meditate on the effect of three years of war upon the splendid morale of our noble troops. As though the ceaseless convoys did not provide us with sufficient occupation, numerous drunken and dilapidated warriors from the village battle were sent to such spare beds as we had for slight repairs. They were euphemistically known as ‘local sick’.
It was mid-October before the ‘Battle of Eetapps’ ended and the Sisters and V.A.D.s were at last allowed to leave their respective camps. Fortunately the mutiny had not prevented the arrival of letters, from which I learnt that, throughout the latter fortnight of September, Edward had been in the worst of the ‘strafe’ perpetually roaring round Passchendaele. On the 19th a note came from him to say that his company had already suffered many casualties, though he himself was so far unhurt.
‘Here,’ I wrote to my mother, exactly two years after the Battle of Loos, and in language not so different from that used by Roland to describe the preparations for the first of those large-scale massacres which appeared to be the only method of escape from trench warfare conceivable to the brilliant imagination of the Higher Command, ‘there has been the usual restless atmosphere of a great push - trains going backwards and forwards all day bringing wounded from the line or taking reinforcements to it; convoys coming in all night, evacuations to England and bugles going all the time; busy wards and a great moving of the staff from one ward to another . . . I hope I shall hear something of Edward soon; I seemed to be thinking of him and listening to the bugles going through the whole of last night.’
Four days later, I learnt that his company had left the front line on September 24th, after being in the ‘show’ without a break since the 14th. ‘We came out last night,’ he told me, ‘though perhaps “came out” scarcely expresses it; had about 50 casualties, including I officer in the company - the best officer of course. I ought to have been slain myself heaps of times but I seem to be here still.’
It was during this offensive that he came to be known as ‘the immaculate man of the trenches’. In addition to his daily shave, he wrote most considerately whenever he could to let me know that he was still ‘quite alright’. ‘In the second half of September,’ he finally summed up the position on October 2nd, ‘we only had 3days out of the line, which is heavy work for the Salient when straffing.’
This was war in real earnest, yet to my tense anxiety he did seem to bear the proverbial charmed life. So long as he remained, even though the others were dead, hope remained, and there was something to live for; without him - well, I didn’t know, and blankly refused to think. But between mid-September and mid-October his activities so distressed me that I seldom wrote to him at all, superstitiously believing that if I did he would certainly be dead before the letter arrived. With his usual tolerance he only protested very mildly about this unexpected treatment.
‘I quite understand why you didn’t write during the interval but, if possible, please don’t do so again or else I shan’t tell you when I am about to face anything unpleasant, and then you will not be able to help me face it.’
By October 9th, though I had heard from him that he had come safely, and, as he thought, finally, out of ‘the strafe’, the rush at 24 General had increased rather than slackened.
‘Someday, perhaps,’ I wrote home on October 12th, ‘I will try to tell you what this first half of October has been like . . . Three times this week we have taken in convoys and evacuated to England, and the fourth came in this morning. On one occasion sixteen stretcher cases came into our ward all at the same time. Every day since this day last week has been one long doing of the impossible - or what seemed the impossible before you started. We have four of our thirty-five patients on the D.I.L. (dangerously ill list) . . . and any one of them would keep a nurse occupied all day, but when there are only two of you for the whole lot you simply have to do the best you can . . . No one realises the meaning of emergencies who has not been in France . . . I am at the moment sitting in an extremely cold bath-hut waiting for the hot water to be turned on . . . This is going to be a dreadfully cold winter, and every day the rain teems down, very cold and heavy . . . Every night and morning I make up my mind that any money I can save here will go towards buying stores of coal, so that for the rest of my natural life when the War is over (if there is anything left of me by then) I can have a fire in my bedroom for ever and ever ! . . . I didn’t have a bath after all, as the water was only tepid.’
On the same day, Edward sent me a characteristic picture of life in the Salient during that saturating autumn:
‘We are in another lot of wet tents surrounded by mud and it is very cold as usual; consequently our servants, with the customary incorrigibleness of the British soldier, are singing lustily and joyfully. A new draft has just arrived wet through and are sitting on wet ground under wet bivouac sheets. The next man due for leave has been out 16 months and the next dozen have been out 14 or 15, and the order has just come round that all men must wash their
feet in hot water - presumably in the dixies in which their tea is made or else in the canteens out of which they eat and drink, as there is no other receptacle; I suppose the A.D.M.S. thinks we carry portable baths in the forward areas - and the intelligence officer has managed to procure us 2 bottles of whisky, the first we have had for quite 3 months, and the bombing officer - a gentleman of forgetful disposition about 7 feet by 4 and clumsy in proportion and belonging to our company - has gone to the field cashier miles away and has probably got lost as he started about noon and it has now been dark an hour, and the C.O. has cursed most people during the day, and I observe that this tent is not as waterproof as it may have been once upon a time, and there is our old friend miserably holding on to the eastern slopes of the ridges from which he has been driven but still demanding our presence in this sorrowful land; of such is daily life.’
He had been mistaken in supposing that his share in the Ypres mêlée was over. In the latter half of October, A and C Companies of the 11th Sherwood Foresters lost nearly all their officers, and Edward, who had been given a respite as ‘O.C. Details’ after being in so many ‘shows’, was urgently sent for to go up to A Company, where only one officer was left. There he was nearly killed while changing from one support line to another, yet once again he arrived back unwounded at Battalion Headquarters.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 42