The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  The calm fortitude with which the young nurses attend these cases is beyond admiration. They smile and are gay, and refuse to be worn down by the atmosphere of disaster around them. Suddenly, I see something that, from a distance, seems strange and beautiful: shrouded behind a veil of mosquito-netting lies a young Greek god, with long, fair, curly hair bleached by the violent sun. But, on closer inspection, I see that the head is the greeny-black of certain bronzes. The face, with closed eyes and open lips, is racked in torment. ‘What is this?’ The sister says, ‘He’s very bad, I am afraid he’s going to die.’ Apollo Belvedere begins groaning, whimpering and later shouting.

  The doctor’s enthusiasm for me to photograph his various exhibits is sometimes hard to face. He rubs his hands. ‘Splendid, Beaton. There’s a great deal to show you — burns all the colours of the rainbow. But best of all, we’ve got in a field case. You are lucky! We’ve just received a South African, who was driving in a truck when a mine went off. We’re operating on him tonight. Just you take your time; there’ll be plenty for you to photograph there. We’re having him X-rayed now. We’ll start at 9 o’clock.’ He slaps his hands.

  ‘You’ll have dinner with us, of course — in fact, you and your party will be our guests in the hospital tonight — and then we’ll go on together afterwards. Meanwhile come and have a shock-injection.’ While I drink a most welcome whisky and water, the surgeon talks about his work. ‘When I have leave, I go farther up to the front line. If I were to go back to Cairo or somewhere like that, I’d find my place taken when I returned here, so many people are after it. I’d like to be up in the front line all the time, but they can’t spare me: I’m too valuable for such rough work. The doctors on the spot do the jobs that have to be attended to immediately, or else the patient would be dead by the time he reached here.’

  At dinner the doctors were a cheerful lot — with relish relaying local jokes that were greeted with gusts of laughter — but they became transformed when afterwards we all retired to the solemnity of the operating theatre. Here was complete silence except for the whimpering of a negro writhing on a high bed on wheels. He was starting to come round from the anaesthetic, administered while his badly burnt legs were treated. Time for another injection. A glint of terror came into his eyes as the needle of morphia was pricked into his arm. ‘We always have to have someone standing by: sometimes they try to fight their way off the table,’ Simpson Smith explained. ‘Let’s go into the adjoining theatre.’ About eight men in white overalls, their khaki shorts showing at the back, were pulling on rubber gloves; over their faces small squares of white linen were tied with white tape bows. My new friend was obviously disappointed that he himself was not to be performing the operation. ‘You see, we take it in turns here,’ he remarked. ‘Major Bingham is on tonight.’ The results of the X-ray photographs were handed around. The colonel showed me the negatives, which were interpreted as revealing little bits of dispersed metal, but their whereabouts could not be gauged precisely. ‘My God, you’re lucky, Beaton! This’ll be a great opportunity for you. You can take your time: it’s a big operation. It all depends where we find the metal is lodged, but it may last an hour and a half. There’s a fly!’ With a fly whisk he swotted it. ‘If that fly were to alight on an open wound, it might at least give the man dysentery. See this stuff?’ My friend blew some powder out of a rubber squirt. ‘It’s sulphanilamide and it’s the most wonderful medical discovery since Pasteur discovered antiseptics and bacteria in 1865. You just put some of this in the wound and there’s no chance of gangrene or any poisoning.’ Another fly. He got it. ‘No, this stuff is extraordinary. You’ll see; Major Bingham, the surgeon, will undoubtedly use it continuously during the operation.’ Major Bingham, with his bright eyes, looked little more than a schoolboy.

  A South African of strong physique with olive skin, flashing eyes and curly black hair was wheeled in on a stretcher. The doctors read his history. ‘You were driving a truck and a mine went off: your pal is all right, but you got it in the leg a bit and in the arm here? Where does it hurt?’ The surgeon gently placed his gloved hand on the brown skin of the abdomen. ‘Does that hurt?’ ‘Yes, doctor,’ said the man with an expression of disgust caused by the pain. ‘Well, we will see what we can do for you.’ Quickly the anaesthetist fixed a rubber mouthpiece over the man’s face and soon he was breathing stertorously, his chest and belly heaving as he inhaled the ether and oxygen. The breathing became desperate as air-hunger increased and was all that could be heard in this small white-tiled room. The patient’s forehead began to sweat. Now he was unconscious. A nasty little safety razor began to shave the torso. A bowl containing the wisps of hair was taken away. The body was now painted orange with iodine and the operation could start.

  The lights were centred on the abdomen. The remaining parts were hidden beneath cloths and towels. The patient sucked air through the rubber mouthpiece which, connected by a tube, caused a glass cylinder of liquid to fill with bubbles each time he breathed out. The muffled instructions of surgeon and assistants were difficult to hear. A nurse, masked like the others, was busy with her tray of instruments, producing, one by one, the necessary knives or scissors. An assistant mopped the surgeon’s sweating brow as he slowly cut a large slit down the patient’s outer gut that was held back to reveal the intestines. My friend came up to me and whispered, ‘Don’t hurry, Beaton. Take your time. He’ll be an hour yet. It’ll get much better later. If the metal has got into the intestines or liver it’s a tremendous business with masses of blood everywhere.’ The white figures hovered. The patient breathed a little less desperately, and the anaesthetist changed over his apparatus to gas and oxygen.

  I concentrated hard on my drawing, yet I felt a little weak when looking up to see the surgeon’s gloved hand penetrating down through the newly-formed cavity deep between coils of entrail. ‘Beaton, you’re a lucky bloke and you’ve brought this man luck, too. He’s one of the few lucky ones. The metal has got lodged in the kidney where perhaps it’ll form an abscess which can be dealt with later, but we’re not going to do anything more now than sew him up. It may never bother him. If it does, it won’t be anything of a job. The sewing-up will take nearly as long as the rest of the operation.’ The brilliant lights shone down on to the dozens of silver pincers that stretched wide the gaping chasm of the wound. One by one the nurse was handed back a pair which was forthwith placed into the sterilizer. The incision was now sewn up.

  Since the most serious part of the operation was over, the spirit and atmosphere changed in the operating theatre. The surgeon talked more freely and his assistants offered comments and suggestions. Now the patient’s arm was to be the focus of attention. The white figures altered their former composition as a group: some leant forward holding the arm in position while others retired from the ring of light. The blood flowed down the side of the stretcher on to the surgeon’s shoes and on to the floor. A bigger and yet bigger cavity was made in the search for the elusive metal. ‘It’s a bit tricky to probe when we’re so near the joint: we don’t want him to lose the use of his arm: as it is the poor bugger will have a stiff elbow for a bit!’ The cavity was squirted with the new discovery and wrapped in fresh bandages. The old blood-stained things, and the support on which the wounded arm had travelled, were thrown into a bucket.

  ‘Now, what else is wrong with him? Serious grazes on hip and leg.’ Again the South African’s dossier was read. ‘This is one of the bad things about this war, there are so many multiple wounds. A shell explodes and a man is lucky if he doesn’t get hit in six different places. But we’ve a lot to be thankful for in this desert. No horses, so we don’t get cases of glanders. This arm has had to be explored very carefully for grit and bits of the road, but there are few camels about and so little chances of tetanus.’ The patient’s body was turned over to enable another operation that was lengthy but was not serious. The strongest lights were turned off for the heat had become almost overwhelming. The surgeon and his assistants chatted am
ong themselves as they worked now on this minor job. ‘What sort of a time did you have on the hospital ship coming out?’ ‘Oh, I travelled like a lord, but it was slow, of course. Arrived at Suez. Got there just a year after a friend of mine came out but he had a bad time of it, got pneumonia, and died. It took me a long time to find his grave.’

  At last the South African truck driver was wrapped in layers of blankets, and the mouthpiece taken from him. His face was sweating and white, his closed eyes weeping tears. The anaesthetist wiped his nose. Soon the patient was making spluttering noises like a baby in its cot. ‘Now he’s for the hot box,’ said my friend. ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll be heading for home in a hospital ship in thirty-six hours.’ Men with leather yokes, like those from which old-fashioned farmers hang milk pails, came in to bear away the stretcher to a cave-like embrasure covered with an awning of electric lights. The victim was said to be ‘quite comfortable’, but a man stands by ‘just in case’.

  Now that the operation had been successfully performed even the spectators realized how drained of energy everyone had become. In the colonel’s room we drank a night-cap. The young surgeon came in, his shoes still witness of his recent exploits; but the doctors all laughed and talked of cheerful things.

  Corps Headquarters

  To visit a regiment in the desert, it is necessary first to report at Corps Headquarters, then at a Divisional Headquarters, before proceeding down the line to Brigade and on to the Battalion Headquarters. With the aid of a compass four of us — Derek, a conducting officer, a minute Scottish driver named, of course, Jock, and myself set sail to pay our formal calls. For most of the day, surrounded by miles of scrub, we could see nothing on the horizon. My guide did not appear too sure of his bearings. Several times we stopped. He took our position again. He stood on the roof of our transport and scanned the distances through field glasses. Nothing in sight. We proceeded. Again we stopped and peered. Yes, there’s some sort of signpost there. We drove towards a mound of stones, but found it to be without any markings to indicate our whereabouts. Further mathematical calculations were made, and once more we went on.

  We arrived eventually at a group of camouflaged, dispersed lorries, somewhere in what might be the centre of nothing. Yes, this was the 13th Corps Headquarters. A small unit of sophisticated young men with exaggeratedly cultured voices, whom one would expect to find in the quadrangles of Christ Church or at the bar at White’s, invited us to a drink or a piece of chocolate. They made telephone calls to say that we were on our way to Division, and with another car to guide us we set off again, heading for an invisible point on an empty horizon. After a while we stopped for, according to instructions, we should long ago have reached our goal; a new reading of the compass was taken. It appeared that somehow the metal vibrations of our transport affected the true bearings. We started again. Suddenly our car crashed down at the back with a thump, followed by a grinding noise that continued until we stopped dead. Violently we sounded the horn to indicate our plight to Derek in the accompanying car ahead. Dispassionately we watched it becoming smaller and smaller in the distance, unmindful of our signals.

  Jock was under the back wheels, his straddled legs all that could be seen of him. ‘Ai think it’s a gurruge jarb this taime.’ But where was the local Lex? Meanwhile our other khaki-coloured transport had missed us and turned back; both the drivers now got together under the car, and pronounced the breakdown irrevocable. Someone must return to 13th Corps to telephone for assistance.

  One of the great paradoxes in the desert is the richesse of its telephones compared with the poverty of its domestic arrangements. The RAF communications (the air formation signals) alone have fifty static telephone exchanges with 600 subscribers — and as many as 3,500 calls are put through from Rear Headquarters each day, while during last April the number of calls at Advanced Headquarters increased from 900 to 1,900 a day. On one landing ground alone there are 1,200 miles of field cable. The maintenance difficulties can be imagined.

  Jock and I remained by the broken-down car. We felt remote and alone in the desert. My companion said, ‘Ai niwer thaght a year agoh ai’d her sittin hayer in the muddle of the dessert. It’s a straingh laif and noo mistaik. Donn’t ye thaink whee’d bettair huv oohr deener?’ We made some tea. We opened tins. By now the sun was hot. In Libya at this time of the year the evenings are autumnal, the nights positively wintry, though clear and with stars full out. The early mornings are nippy, like springtime, but high summer is achieved by noonday.

  The hours passed, the sun was strong, and the furnace of the car provided the only shade. Later we were relieved. Derek and the others came towards us. ‘What news?’ ‘The rest of the journey must be made in the lorry, while this car and the luggage are left here until the repair unit call.’

  Once more we rely upon our unreliable compass to take us across stony, scrubby bareness. Jock, stranded, waiting alone in the desert, looked very pathetic.

  We drive in a thirty-degree direction for half an hour. ‘That looks like a camp over there. Get on the roof once more and look through the glasses. We should see something by now,’ said Derek. We drove on but again no luck. Derek suggested another direction: ‘Perhaps they gave us the wrong instructions. What are those little dots on the horizon? Are they boulders, hummocks or tents?’

  We had come across a dispersed camp. Just to make sure that we were at our destination, the conducting officer drove up to a caravan to ask our position. To his surprise, humiliation and shocked embarrassment, he found he had bearded the Corps Commander, General Willoughby-Norrie. Many generals might have blown off a fuse at such an informal encounter, and stormed furiously about such things as the dangers of bad navigation; but Norrie is said to be imperturbable. Certainly his immaculate perfection of appearance gave one the impression that he had just fitted his uniform in Sackville Street. Amused by our haphazard arrival, he tried to put us at our ease, and passed us on to the care of his staff officers. But I did not think it was at all funny when I realised how easy it is to get lost or to walk into the enemy’s hands.

  Stirling and the Long Range Desert Group, the highwaymen of the desert, have made a legend for themselves with their extremely scientific, yet romantic, pirate-story adventures. Sometimes for months on end they patrol the desert ocean in armoured vehicles equipped with radios. Often they penetrate miles behind the enemy’s lines, take him by surprise at night, burn army lorries, destroy tanks, and blow up vital equipment. This war is one of machines and technical efficiency: it allows little scope for individual escapades by groups of men. But the very specialized warfare that the Long Range Desert Group have perfected is an exception. It is one which the Germans, thus far, have ignored or have not dared to undertake.

  Stirling, Ramsay and the other officers seemed to be a serious, sophisticated lot — like members of an olympian club. The easy laughter and childlike ragging that whiles away time in many messes was absent. A most impressive group, too dedicated for small talk, they plot and carry out a primitive and savage form of warfare with a buccaneer’s courage and a philosopher’s mental refinement. The men, coming from all walks of life — chauffeurs, bricklayers, policemen, professional soldiers — were drilling in the heat of the day with as much precision and smartness as if they were outside Wellington barracks square.

  Clump, clump, clump. A patrol commander came in, heavily-bearded, covered with sand, matted hair on end, sunburned so that the white shining teeth were his most brilliant feature. He had just returned from an expedition of many months’ duration yet his fellow officers welcomed him as if he had returned from short leave. ‘Had a good time?’ ‘Everything go well?’ No doubt on account of the stranger in their midst, few questions were asked. Everything was taken quietly as a matter of course. Yet, undoubtedly, this man had come across tremendous excitements. Lunch over, the newcomer took us round to see his men. A more grotesquely assorted, more frightening-looking bunch of bandits it would be hard to imagine. Bearded, covered with dus
t, with blood-shot eyes, they were less of the world of today than like primeval warriors, or timeless inhabitants of a remote hemisphere. One apparition with ginger matting for hair, and red eyes staring from a blue-grey dusty face, looked no more human than an ape. They were now avidly reading the mail that had arrived during their long absence. One man, who had been a professional swimmer, chuckled as he read aloud: ‘I cannot wait until after the war, when we can get married and live together for always.’