Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  On March 20th, Hope Milroy came off night-duty; the next day, Thursday the 21st, she had the usual day off before going to a new ward, and we arranged to spend the afternoon and evening together. At lunch-time, before we started, the staff were discussing a disturbing report that had come, no one knew whence, of a terrific enemy onslaught on the now too far-extended British lines. I felt reluctant to leave the hospital, but the Sister who supervised my hut persuaded me to go.

  ‘It’ll probably be the last half-day you’ll have for some time,’ she said. ‘And no convoys can possibly be here before to-night.’

  So Hope and I set off together towards Camiers across the muddy fields. At a village estaminet we divided the usual enormous omelette, sitting before the fire in an old kitchen which shone with pewter and polished saucepans. The air was strangely still that evening; long wraiths of mist hung like white veils over the sodden meadows, and as we worked our way back to the coast we lost ourselves continually among the darkening sandhills. Close to the shore, the high, black windows of a deserted watch-tower seemed to leer at us like a wicked eye; try as we would to escape from the encircling sand-dunes, we found ourselves again and again within sight of the grim little ruin. I remembered once, years before, when I was a child of thirteen, listening in half-fascinated terror to a mistress at St Monica’s reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’:

  What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?

  The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,

  Built of brown stone, without a counterpart

  In the whole world.

  I clutched Hope’s arm in sudden agitation.

  ‘Do let’s get away from that tower!’ I implored her. ‘I’d rather go back all the way we’ve come than pass it again.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd!’ expostulated Hope. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of in an old watch-tower!’

  But I seized her and dragged her away until at last, after much struggling through wet sand and thin prickly grass, we reached the shore. She protested that I had hurried her to the point of exhaustion, but as we stood, breathless, beside the muffled sea, the queer menace of that evening startled us both into silence. A sinister stillness hung like heavy fog upon the air; even the waves lapping the shore appeared to make no sound. The setting sun, an angry ball of copper looming through a heavy battalion of thunderous clouds, reminded me of the lurid suns that had set over England in the July before the War, and the belief of the superstitious that they had seen blood upon the sun and moon. Once again, everything seemed waiting, waiting.

  ‘Doesn’t it all look ominous!’ said Hope at last.

  Almost without speaking, we walked back to the camp. There we learned that the rumours of the morning were confirmed, and the great German offensive had begun.

  13

  I went on duty the next day to find that my light medical hut had been hastily ‘converted’ into a surgical ward during the night. The harassed and bewildered V.A.D. who had taken in the convoy gave me the report. Ten patients, she explained, were for immediate operation; a dozen more were for X-ray; several were likely to hæmorrhage at any moment, and others were marked down for visits by specialists. No, she was afraid she didn’t know who had had breakfast and who had not, as the orderly was away on picket-duty. Then she departed, leaving me in sole charge of forty desperately wounded men.

  Only a short time ago, sitting in the elegant offices of the British Red Cross Society in Grosvenor Crescent, I read in the official Report by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and Order of St John the following words - a little pompous, perhaps, like the report itself, but doubtless written with the laudable intention of reassuring the anxious nursing profession:

  ‘The V.A.D. members were not . . . trained nurses; nor were they entrusted with trained nurses’ work except on occasions when the emergency was so great that no other course was open.’

  And there, in that secure, well-equipped room, the incongruous picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the ‘emergency’ of March 22nd, 1918, and gazing, half hypnotised, at the dishevelled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy khaki, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy blood-stained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me - and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirit.

  For a moment my sword of Damocles, the ever-brooding panic, came perilously near to descending on my head. And then, unexpectedly, I laughed, and the danger disappeared. Triumphantly elated by the realisation that I had once again done it in, I began to indent quite gaily for surgical instruments, tourniquets, bandages, splints, wool, gauze, peroxide, eusol and saline. But I had to bombard the half-frantic dispensary for nearly an hour before I could get my stores, and without them it was impossible even to begin on the dressings. When I returned I found to my relief that a Sister had been sent to help me. Though only recently out from England she was level-headed and competent, and together we started on the daily battle against time and death which was to continue, uninterrupted, for what seemed an eternity.

  However long I may be destined to survive my friends who went down in the Flood, I shall never forget the crushing tension of those extreme days. Nothing had ever quite equalled them before - not the Somme, not Arras, not Passchendaele - for into our minds had crept for the first time the secret, incredible fear that we might lose the War. Each convoy of men that we took in - to be dispatched, a few hours later, to England after a hasty wash and change of dressing, or to the cemetery after a laying-out too hurried to be reverent - gave way to a discouragement that none of us had met with in a great battle before.

  ‘There’s only a handful of us, Sister, and there seem to be thousands of them!’ was the perpetual cry whether the patient came from Bapaume or Péronne or St Quentin, where the enemy hordes, released from the Eastern Front, were trying to smash the Allied resistance before the rescuing Americans arrived in force. Day after day, while civilian refugees fled panic-stricken into Etaples from threatened villages further up the line, and the wounded, often unattended, came down in anything that would carry them - returning lorries, A.S.C. ambulances and even cattle-trucks - some fresh enemy conquest was first incredulously whispered and then published tentatively abroad. One after another, Péronne, Bapaume, Beaumont Hamel, were gone, and on March 27th Albert itself was taken. Even Paris, we learnt, had been shelled by a long-range gun from seventy-five miles away. Gradually we became conscious that we were in the midst of what a War historian afterwards called ‘the most formidable offensive in the history of the world’.

  On the 4th of April, after a fortnight of fourteen-hour days, with the operating theatres going day and night, the ‘Fall-In’ sounding continuously, and the day staff taking it in turns to be called up to help with night convoys, we limped wearily into the Mess for supper to hear a new and yet more hair-raising rumour.

  ‘The Germans are in the suburbs of Amiens!’ it ran round the tables.

  We looked at each other, speechless, with blanched faces; I was probably as pale as the rest, for I felt as though cold fingers were exploring my viscera. We were already becoming a Casualty Clearing Station, with only the advance units at Abbeville between ourselves and the line; how much longer should we be able to remain where we were? How long until we too fled before the grey uniforms advancing down the road from Camiers? This horror . . . monstrous, undreamed of, incredible . . . this was defeat. That night we began to pack our boxes. Each evening when we came off duty, we wondered whether the morning would find us still at our posts.

  For nearly a month the camp resembled a Gustave Doré illustration to Dante’s Inferno. Sisters flying from the captured Casualty Clearing Stations crowded into our quarters; often completely without belongings, they took possession
of our rooms, our beds, and all our spare uniform. By day a thudding crescendo in the distance, by night sharp flashes of fire in the sky, told us that the War was already close upon their heels.

  Nearer at hand, a ceaseless and deafening roar filled the air. Motor lorries and ammunition waggons crashed endlessly along the road; trains with reinforcements thundered all day up the line, or lumbered down more slowly with their heavy freight of wounded. Even the stretcher cases came to us in their trench-stained khaki, with only the clothing round the wound roughly torn away; often their congealed blood fastened them firmly to the canvas, and we had to cut it before we could get them free. The wards were never tidied and the work was never finished; each convoy after staying its few hours was immediately replaced by another, and the business of dressing wounds began all over again. I was glad to be no longer nursing German prisoners; social tact, I felt, would now have become altogether too difficult on either side.

  ‘I won’t talk about your push as you will have too much to do with it already,’ considerately wrote Edward on Easter Sunday, when the offensive was ten days old, ‘but I am glad we have recaptured Albert if only for memory’s sake; if the Hun cannot break our line, and I don’t think he can, I should think that the end of the War is fairly near. We are in the line with snow all about us - a great change as it is very cold but we are just getting used to it. There have been wonderful sights to see - huge peaks covered with tall pine trees - marvellous roads with hairpin bends and everything solid rock where the snow lies until June . . . Early this morning we had a most extraordinary communion service about 300 yards behind the front line behind a knoll - a most original performance.’

  He would forgive me, I knew, for my sudden apparent neglect; ‘I imagine you to be so busy that you have no time for anything and I quite understand why you haven’t written,’ he assured me on April 10th. Why did I leave him letterless ever? I ask myself now. Why didn’t I send him Field Postcards, or brief two-line pencil scrawls, as he always found time to send to me even during a push?

  ‘It is most pathetic,’ he went on, ‘to think that the old places where we were 2 years ago are now in the hands of the Hun as also are the graves of many people we know. As far as I can tell Louvencourt is still behind our lines though fighting in Aveluy Wood doesn’t sound far away. I was talking to a Major who was attached to us yesterday about making some dug-outs in a stony piece of ground and he was very particular about wire goggles being worn by men working or living there because of splinters caused by shells bursting on the stone “because,” he said, “I can imagine nothing worse than being blinded for the rest of your life.” It seemed rather strange that he should say this on the anniversary of the day on which Tah was blinded.’

  14

  As the German offensive rolled heavily on without appearing to slacken, the men who came into hospital after two or three weeks of continuous fighting no longer seemed to be weighed down with the sombre depression of the first batches of wounded; instead, they were light-headed and often strangely exaltés. After the first shock of defeat, certain units of the British Army began to suffer from a curious masochism, and, as in 1914, turned from their usual dogged reliance upon their own strength to the consolations of superstition and the illusions of fatigue.

  There was little chance to get to know patients who arrived in the morning and left before the evening, and in the daily rush of dressings and convoys I had not much time for talking, but once or twice I became aware of strange discussions being carried on by the men. On one occasion I stopped to listen, and was impelled to remain; I wrote down the conversation a few weeks afterwards, and though it cannot have been verbally exact, I reproduce it as it appeared in my 1918 ‘novel’ of nursing in France:

  ‘’Ave yer come down from Albert way?’ inquired a sergeant of a corporal in the next bed, who, like himself, wore a 1914 ribbon.

  ‘Yus,’ was the reply, ‘I have. There’s some mighty queer things happenin’ on the Somme just now, ain’t there, mate?’

  ‘That there be,’ said the sergeant. ‘I can tell yer of one rum thing that ’appened to me, meself.’

  ‘Git on then, chum, let’s hear it.’

  ‘Well, when the old regiment first came out in ’16, we had a Captain with us - O.C. of our company, ’e was - a mighty fine chap. One day at the beginning of the Somme battle some of the boys got into a tight place - a bit foolish-like, maybe, some of them was - and ’e comes along and pulls ’em out of it. One or two of ’em had got the wind up a bit, and ’e tells ’em then not to lose ’eart if they gets into difficulties, for ’e sorter knows, ’e says, when the boys ’as need of ’im, and wherever ’e is, ’e says, ’e’ll do ’is best to be there. Well, ’e was killed, ’elpin’ the boys as usual, at the end of the fightin’ on the Somme, and we mourned for ’im like a brother, as you might say . . . ‘E were a tall fine chap, no mistakin’ ’im, there wasn’t. Well, the other day, just before the Boches got into Albert, we was in a bit of a fix, and I was doin’ all I knew to get us out. Suddenly I turns round, and there I sees ’im with ’is bright eyes and ’is old smile, bringin’ up the rear.

  ‘“Well, Willis, it’s been a narrow shave this time,” ’e says. “But I think we’ve pulled it off.”

  ‘An’ forgettin’ ’ow it was, I makes as if to answer ’im, and all of a sudden ’e ain’t there at all. Struck me all of a heap for a bit, like. What do you make of it, mate?’

  ‘It’s more nor I can tell,’ answered the corporal. ‘’Cos another very queer thing happened to some chaps in our company. In the old days on the Somme we had a tophole party of stretcher-bearers, and one day a coal-box comes and wipes out the lot. But last week some of our chaps sees ’em again, carrying the wounded down the communication trench. And I met a chum in the train who swears he was carried out by two of ’em.’

  A Lancashire boy from an opposite bed leaned forward eagerly.

  ‘I can tell yer summat that’ll beat that,’ he said. ‘T’other day when we was gettin’ clear of Peronne, I found a chap beside me lookin’ very white and done-up, like, as if ’e could scarcely walk; fair clemmed, ’e seemed to me. I found I’d got one or two of them ’ard biscuits in me pocket, an’ I pulls one out and hands it to ’im. “ ’Ave a biscuit, mate,” sez I.

  ‘ “Thank you, chum,” ’e sez, “I don’t mind if I do.”

  ‘And ’e takes the biscuit and gives it a bite. As ’e puts out ’is ’and for it I sees ’e’s got one o’ them swanky identity-disks on ’is wrist, and I reads ’is number as plain as anythink. Then ’e gets mixed up wi’ t’others, and I don’t see ’im no more. And it’s not till I gets back to billets that I remembers.

  ‘“Lawks,” I sez to meself, “if that ain’t the chap I ’elped Jim to bury more’n a week agone, my name ain’t Bill Bennett.”

  ‘An’ sure enough, mates, I remember takin’ the silver identity-disk off ’is wrist, an’ readin’ the number on it as plain as plain. An’ it were the number of the man I gave the biscuit.’

  There was an awed silence in the ward, and I turned from the dressing I was doing to ask rather breathlessly:

  ‘Do you really mean that in the middle of the battle you met those men again whom you’d thought were dead?’

  The sergeant’s reply was insistent.

  ‘Aye, Sister, they’re dead right enough. They’re our mates as was knocked out on the Somme in ’16. And it’s our belief they’re fightin’ with us still.’

  Not long afterwards I was reminded of this conversation by some lines from E. A. Mackintosh’s ‘Cha Till Maccruimein’, in his volume of poems A Highland Regiment, which Roland’s mother and sister had sent me for Christmas:

  And there in front of the men were marching,

  With feet that made no mark,

  The grey old ghosts of the ancient fighters

  Come back again from the dark . . .

  But at the time I merely felt cold and rather sick, and when I had finished the dressing I put down my tra
y and stood for a moment at the open door of the hut. I saw the Sisters in their white overalls hurrying between the wards, the tired orderlies toiling along the paths with their loaded stretchers, the usual crowd of Red Cross ambulances outside the reception hut, and I recognised my world for a kingdom of death, in which the poor ghosts of the victims had no power to help their comrades by breaking nature’s laws.

  Angels of Mons still roaming about, I thought. Well, let them roam, if it cheers the men to believe in them! No doubt the Germans, too, had their Angels of Mons; I have often wondered what happened when the celestial backers of one Army encountered their angelic opponents in the nocturnal neutrality of No Man’s Land. Michael’s war in heaven was nothing, I feel certain, to what happened then.