“Have you heard from home? They make me sick with the awful bottoms they write about doing our duty, etc. I think it’s funny. The other day mother called me her English-hearted heroine. A bit soft, I thought. She always was a bit mushy, but this war seems to be finishing her off. How you and I have been able to survive mother all these years I’m blessed if I know. Anyhow, there’s one heroine who wouldn’t have been so keen if she had known she was coming to France to spend from 6. 30 a.m. to after 9 p.m. up to the elbows in greasy water in a bath of steam. Still, I suppose it’s preferable to cleaning Matron’s bicycle every day for six months, as I did in England during my training. Why the dickens they dress you up in a pretty cap and make you think you’re going to smooth the patient’s fevered brow beats me hollow. If they told you the truth you could take it or leave it; and if you took it, as you probably would, you wouldn’t feel they had let you down. They seem to think a V.A.D. is never tired, or that she ever wants any sleep. I’ve never heard a dog spoken to as some of the pukka nurses speak to us. They are scared stiff we’ll pinch their jobs after the War, of course; but they needn’t worry. None of us in Washing-Up Alley ever want to smell iodiform again. All I ask is home and breakfast-in-bed for the rest of my life. I’ve had all the excitement I want. Being a V.A.D. is an overrated pastime.
“Still, I am not complaining, after what Dale told me about your shop. I think I’m jolly lucky. She says if she’d stayed there any longer, she’d have gone mad, what with men dying in the ambulances under your very eyes and no sleep. She says is Mrs. Bitch still ruling the roost? and if she is may God have mercy on your soul, but she hopes to hear she died in horrible agony. So let me know, and write soon, darling old Sis.
“Your loving
“TRIX.”
Dear Trix. I chuckle to myself at the story of Snitch and the lavatory paper. Dear Trix. Thank God she has struck a soft job under a matron who is not all efficiency and no heart. I chuckle again. I feel almost happy. A letter from Trix is as stimulating as a glass of bubbly. Dear Trix. I know sisters who detest one another, but Trix and I are not that kind. I do not exaggerate when I say I would die for her. She is closer to me than anyone on earth. I am happy to think she is so far from me. Nothing will induce me to tell her the truth about here. Merry hell? . . . Hell, granted, but merry. . . .
Dear Trix. . . . Dear old Trix. . . .
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I am in my soft low bed at home, with its rose-pink satin eiderdown, its cosy ribbon-edged blankets and its sweet lavender-scented sheets. My head rests on a downy hand-embroidered pillow. I awaken gently, gradually. I gaze at the pink-flushed walls. Mother wanted them ivory-white, but I insisted on the pinky tone for warmth; I have always been glad of that. The tiny enamelled clock on my bed-table says 9. Sarah is opening the door.
“Ah, you’re awake, Miss Nelly. Your Ma said not to disturb you if you were sleeping, but let you rest after your theatre.”
I smile and sit up, propping my head with the tiny, oval, rose-satin cushion Sarah passes me. She places my breakfast-tray where I can get it without effort. It is rose wicker, edged with a transparent glass bottom, . . . the very latest thing in breakfast trays, . . . and the china is rose-coloured and iridescent. I will have everything to match, and they pander to me shamefully. There are tiny snippets of toast on my tray, a boiled egg, marmalade, little rolls of fresh butter. Sarah draws the curtains, hands me my dainty chiffon-lined Shetland dressing-jacket—the one Trix made for Christmas, and adorned with ribbon roses the exact colour of my eiderdown. The sleeves are long and flowing to prevent me from catching a chill in the sleeveless nightdress that mother thinks is so fast. Sarah hands me the morning paper, switches on the electric fire, . . . “Coldish this morning, Miss Nelly, and your ma says you’ve to rest until lunch if you feel tired, not being in bed till nearly twelve.”
A shrill piercing scream.
Merciful God, what was that? I sit up with a stifled cry. I stare round the bare room, bewildered. Where am I? Who are these strangers, these half-dressed strangers?
“Get a move on, Smithy. You’ll be late away.”
Commandant’s whistle.
The midnight convoy signal.
I have been dreaming.
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The convoy is late. We are all lined up waiting—even the five newcomers are at last toeing the line—but the long crawling length of train does not round the bend. Little groups of stretcher-bearers stand about shivering and cursing the delay. Some of them warm their hands at our radiators. Two of them are in high spirits. They have been drinking. Commandant is eyeing them. She will report them before the night is much older. It is seldom the stretcher-bearers take to drink, but one can quite understand their giving way. There are times when I would drug myself with spirits, if I could lay hands on any. . . . Anything to shut out the horrors of these convoys.
Some of the girls begin to tramp about the station yard. I am too numb to get down. I suppose I still possess feet, though I cannot feel them. The wind has dropped slightly, but it seems to get colder and colder. Oh, this cold of France. I have never experienced anything remotely resembling it. It works through one’s clothing, into one’s flesh and bones. It is not satisfied till it is firmly ingrained in one’s internal regions, from whence it never really moves.
It has been freezing hard for over a week now. The bare trees in the road are loaded with icicles, . . . tall trees, ugly and gaunt and gallows-like till the whiteness veiled them—transforming them into objects of weird beauty.
Etta Potato and The Bug want me to come down. They are having a walking race with Tosh for cigarettes—the winner to collect one each from the losers. Won’t I join in? I refuse, . . . I am too numb to move. Off they start across the snow-covered yard. Tosh wins easily. Their laughter rings out as she extorts her winnings there and then. All of a sudden their laughter ceases. They fly back to their posts. The convoy must be sighted. I crane my neck. Yes. The stretcher-bearers stop smoking and line up along the platform. Ambulance doors are opened in readiness. All is bustle. Everyone on the alert. Cogs in the great machinery. I can hear the noise of the train distinctly now, . . . sound travels a long way in the snow in these death-still early morning hours before the dawn. Louder and louder.
If the War goes on and on and on and I stay out here for the duration, I shall never be able to meet a train-load of casualties without the same ghastly nausea stealing over me as on that first never-to-be-forgotten night. Most of the drivers grow hardened after the first week. They fortify themselves with thoughts of how they are helping to alleviate the sufferings of wretched men, and find consolation in so thinking. But I cannot. I am not the type that breeds warriors. I am the type that should have stayed at home, that shrinks from blood and filth, and is completely devoid of pluck. In other words, I am a coward. . . . A rank coward. I have no guts. It takes every ounce of will-power I possess to stick to my post when I see the train rounding the bend. I choke my sickness back into my throat, and grip the wheel, and tell myself it is all a horrible nightmare . . . soon I shall awaken in my satin-covered bed on Wimbledon Common . . . what I can picture with such awful vividness doesn’t really exist. . . .
I have schooled myself to stop fainting at the sight of blood. I have schooled myself not to vomit at the smell of wounds and stale blood, but view these sad bodies with professional calm I shall never be able to. I may be helping to alleviate the sufferings of wretched men, but commonsense rises up and insists that the necessity should never have arisen. I become savage at the futility. A war to end war, my mother writes. Never. In twenty years it will repeat itself. And twenty years after that. Again and again, as long as we breed women like my mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. And we are breeding them. Etta Potato and The B.F.—two out of a roomful of six. Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington all over again.
Oh, come with me, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Let me show you the exhibits straight from the battlefield. This will be something original to tell
your committees, while they knit their endless miles of khaki scarves, . . . something to spout from the platform at your recruiting meetings. Come with me. Stand just there.
Here we have the convoy gliding into the station now, slowly, so slowly. In a minute it will disgorge its sorry cargo. My ambulance doors are open, waiting to receive. See, the train has stopped. Through the occasionally drawn blinds you will observe the trays slotted into the sides of the train. Look closely, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, and you shall see what you shall see. Those trays each contain something that was once a whole man . . . the heroes who have done their bit for King and country . . . the heroes who marched blithely through the streets of London Town singing “Tipperary,” while you cheered and waved your flags hysterically. They are not singing now, you will observe. Shut your ears, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, lest their groans and heart-rending cries linger as long in your memory as in the memory of the daughter you sent out to help win the War.
See the stretcher-bearers lifting the trays one by one, slotting them deftly into my ambulance. Out of the way quickly, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington—lift your silken skirts aside . . . a man is spewing blood, the moving has upset him, finished him. . . . He will die on the way to hospital if he doesn’t die before the ambulance is loaded. I know. . . . All this is old history to me. Sorry this has happened. It isn’t pretty to see a hero spewing up his life’s blood in public, is it? Much more romantic to see him in the picture papers being awarded the V.C., even if he is minus a limb or two. A most unfortunate occurrence!
That man strapped down? That raving, blaspheming creature screaming filthy words you don’t know the meaning of . . . words your daughter uses in everyday conversation, a habit she has contracted from vulgar contact of this kind. Oh, merely gone mad, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. He may have seen a headless body running on and on, with blood spurting from the trunk. The crackle of the frost-stiff dead men packing the duck-boards watertight may have gradually undermined his reason. There are many things the sitters tell me on our long night rides that could have done this.
No, not shell-shock. The shell-shock cases take it more quietly as a rule, unless they are suddenly startled. Let me find you an example. Ah, the man they are bringing out now. The one staring straight ahead at nothing . . . twitching, twitching, twitching, each limb working in a different direction, like a Jumping Jack worked by a jerking string. Look at him, both of you. Bloody awful, isn’t it, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington? That’s shell-shock. If you dropped your handbag on the platform, he would start to rave as madly as the other. What? You won’t try the experiment? You can’t watch him? Why not? Why not? I have to, every night. Why the hell can’t you do it for once? Damn your eyes.
Forgive me, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. That was not the kind of language a nicely-brought-up young lady from Wimbledon Common uses. I forget myself. We will begin again.
See the man they are fitting into the bottom slot. He is coughing badly. No, not pneumonia. Not tuberculosis. Nothing so picturesque. Gently, gently, stretcher-bearers . . . he is about done. He is coughing up clots of pinky-green filth. Only his lungs, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. He is coughing well to-night. That is gas. You’ve heard of gas, haven’t you? It burns and shrivels the lungs to . . . to the mess you see on the ambulance floor there. He’s about the age of Bertie, Mother. Not unlike Bertie, either, with his gentle brown eyes and fair curly hair. Bertie would look up pleadingly like that in between coughing up his lungs. . . . The son you have so generously given to the War. The son you are so eager to send out to the trenches before Roy Evans-Mawnington, in case Mrs. Evans-Mawnington scores over you at the next recruiting meeting. . . . “I have given my only son.”
Cough, cough, little fair-haired boy. Perhaps somewhere your mother is thinking of you . . . boasting of the life she has so nobly given . . . the life you thought was your own, but which is hers to squander as she thinks fit. “My boy is not a slacker, thank God.” Cough away, little boy, cough away. What does it matter, providing your mother doesn’t have to face the shame of her son’s cowardice?
These are sitters. The man they are hoisting up beside me, and the two who sit in the ambulance. Blighty cases . . . broken arms and trench feet . . . mere trifles. The smell? Disgusting, isn’t it? Sweaty socks and feet swollen to twice their size . . . purple, blue, red . . . big black blisters filled with yellow matter. Quite a colour-scheme, isn’t it? Have I made you vomit? I must again ask pardon. My conversation is daily growing less refined. Spew and vomit and sweat . . . I had forgotten these words are not used in the best drawing-rooms on Wimbledon Common.
But I am wasting time. I must go in a minute. I am nearly loaded. The stretcher they are putting on one side? Oh, a most ordinary exhibit, . . . the groaning man to whom the smallest jolt is red hell . . . a mere bellyful of shrapnel. They are holding him over till the next journey. He is not as urgent as the helpless thing there, that trunk without arms and legs, the remnants of a human being, incapable even of pleading to be put out of his misery because his jaw has been half shot away. . . . No, don’t meet his eyes, they are too alive. Something of their malevolence might remain with you all the rest of your days, . . . those sock-filled, committee-crowded days of yours.
Gaze on the heroes who have so nobly upheld your traditions, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Take a good look at them. . . . The heroes you will sentimentalise over until peace is declared, and allow to starve for ever and ever, amen, afterwards. Don’t go. Spare a glance for my last stretcher, . . . that gibbering, unbelievable, unbandaged thing, a wagging lump of raw flesh on a neck, that was a face a short time ago, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Now it might be anything . . . a lump of liver, raw bleeding liver, that’s what it resembles more than anything else, doesn’t it? We can’t tell its age, but the whimpering moan sounds young, somehow. Like the fretful whimpers of a sick little child . . . a tortured little child . . . puzzled whimpers. Who is he? For all you know, Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, he is your Roy. He might be anyone at all, so why not your Roy? One shapeless lump of raw liver is like another shapeless lump of raw liver. What do you say? Why don’t they cover him up with bandages? How the hell do I know? I have often wondered myself, . . . but they don’t. Why do you turn away? That’s only liquid fire. You’ve heard of liquid fire? Oh, yes. I remember your letter. . . . “I hear we’ve started to use liquid fire, too. That will teach those Germans. I hope we use lots and lots of it.” Yes, you wrote that. You were glad some new fiendish torture had been invented by the chemists who are running this war. You were delighted to think some German mother’s son was going to have the skin stripped from his poor face by liquid fire. . . . Just as some equally patriotic German mother rejoiced when she first heard the sons of Englishwomen were to be burnt and tortured by the very newest war gadget out of the laboratory.
Don’t go, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, . . . don’t go. I am loaded, but there are over thirty ambulances not filled up. Walk down the line. Don’t go, unless you want me to excuse you while you retch your insides out as I so often do. There are stretchers and stretchers you haven’t seen yet. . . . Men with hopeless dying eyes who don’t want to die . . . men with hopeless living eyes who don’t want to live. Wait, wait, I have so much, so much to show you before you return to your committees and your recruiting meetings, before you add to your bag of recruits . . . those young recruits you enroll so proudly with your patriotic speeches, your red, white and blue rosettes, your white feathers, your insults, your lies . . . any bloody lie to secure a fresh victim.
What? You cannot stick it any longer? You are going? I didn’t think you’d stay. But I’ve got to stay, haven’t I? . . . I’ve got to stay. You’ve got me out here, and you’ll keep me out here. You’ve got me haloed. I am one of the Splendid Young Women who are winning the War. . . .
“Loaded. Six stretchers and three sitters!”
I am away. I slow up at the station gate. The sergeant is waiting with his penc
il and list.
I repeat, “Six stretchers and three sitters.”
“Number Eight.”
He ticks off my ambulance. I pass out of the yard.
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Number Eight. A lucky number! A long way out, but a good level road, comparatively few pot-holes and stone heaps.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Along we creep at a snail’s pace . . . a huge dark crawling blot on the dead-white road.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
The sitter leans back motionless. Exhausted, or asleep, after the long journey. His arm is in splints, his head bandaged, and his left foot swaddled in a clumsy trench slipper. He leans back in the darkness, his face as invisible as though a brick wall were separating us. The wind cuts like a knife. He must be numbed through, for he has no overcoat and his sleeve is ripped up. He has draped the Army blanket cloak-wise over his shoulders, leaving his legs to the mercy of the freezing night. It is snowing again. Big snow-flakes that hiss as they catch the radiator. I tell the sitter he will find a cigarette and matches in the pocket of my coat nearest him. I have placed them there purposely . . . my bait to make him talk. I want him to talk. He does not reply. I want him to talk. If I can get a sitter to talk it helps to drown the cries from inside. I discovered that some time ago. I repeat my offer, a trifle louder this time. But he makes no reply. He is done. Too done to smoke even. No luck for me to-night.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
How smoothly she runs, this great lumbering blot. How slowly. To look at her you’d never think it possible to run an ambulance of this size so slowly. . . .
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Did I hear a scream from inside? I must fix my mind on something. . . . What? I know—my coming-out dance. My first grown-up dance frock, a shining frock of sequins and white georgette, high-waisted down to my toes. . . . Did I hear a scream? . . . Made over a petticoat . . . don’t let them start screaming . . . a petticoat of satin. Satin slippers to match, not tiny—my feet were always largish; so were my hands. . . . Was that a scream from inside? . . . Such a trouble Mother had getting white gloves my size to go above the elbow. . . . Was it a scream? . . . My hair up for the first time . . . oh, God, a scream this time . . . my hair up in little rolls at the back . . . another scream—the madman has started, the madman has started. I was afraid of him. He’ll start them all screaming. . . . Thirty-one little rolls like fat little sausages. A professional hairdresser came in and did them—took nearly two hours to do them while Trix and Mother watched, and Sarah came in to peep. Don’t let him start the others; don’t let him start the others. . . . Thirty-one little sausages of hair, piled one on top of the other, and all the hair my own too, copied from a picture post card of Phyllis Dare or Lily Elsie. Now, which one was it? . . . The shell-shocked man has joined in. The madman has set the shell-shocked man howling like a mad dog. . . . Lily Elsie, I think it was. . . . What are they doing to one another in there?
Not So Quiet... Page 6