The trench is like a slaughterhouse. All round me girls are lying dead or dying. Some are wounded. The wounded are trying to staunch one another’s blood. A few are shell-shocked. One scales the side of the shelter frantically, scrabbling and digging her toes into the earth like a maddened animal, then runs shrieking into the night. In the distance the buzz of the planes grows fainter and fainter. The raiders have been beaten off at last.
I tie Blimey’s arm. She nearly fights me as I tear strips from her petticoat to bind the artery. At last voices are heard. Soldiers from the camp rush on the scene, cursing and blaspheming at the sight of the mangled women.
The roll is called. The casualties are heavy. Ten dead, two missing, twenty-four injured. Four are unhurt, and of these three are shell-shocked. I am the only woman out of forty to escape.
The ambulances are coming. The dead are lying neatly in a row. The wounded lie beside them. Soldiers are trying to dress their wounds. Blimey is unconscious from loss of blood. Her Burberry will never be any use again. Misery and Cheery lie at my feet. Misery is clasping her unfinished crochet bedspread. Cheery looks curiously naked without her right hand. The stump of her arm is still shielding her face.
A soldier comes over to where I am sitting on the side of the trench.
“Well, you wasn’t meant to die to-night,” he says.
I turn my head in his direction and begin to laugh softly. He is alarmed.
“Can’t get you a drink, can I? You’re not hysterical nor nothing?”
I tell him no. I have never felt less hysterical in my life.
·····
Her soul died under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.
AFTERWORD CORPUS/CORPS/CORPSE: WRITING THE BODY IN/AT WAR
A declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front
Any day and in every way this can be seen, eating and vomiting and war.
Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen
1. La Zone Interdite
The body itself. The body of writing about the body. The body of writing about war. The body of men’s writing about the war. The body of women’s writing about the war. The body under stress. The body in duress. The sleepless body. The hungry body. The body in uniform. The body under fire. Bodies maimed, wounded, and killed. Bodies sexed and unsexed by war. . . . The Corps. The body of fighting men . . . or women. Bodies of bodies. Dying bodies. Dead bodies. Bodies without faces. Arms without bodies. Cannon fodder. Dead mutton. Bodies with dysentery. Abortion. War babies. The body of the Kaiser. The War Office as a body. The body of a comrade. Foreign bodies. The body of the enemy. The ludicrous body of the Commandant. A lover’s sweet body. The jaundiced body of the lesbian. The cancerous body of the mother. The shuddering body of shell shock. Artificial limbs and prosthetic devices. The frozen body. The body with chilblains. The dream of the body at home in bed. The mustard-gassed body vomiting out its lungs. The body transporting other bodies. The body mending the broken body. The body numb. The body abject and the body erect, killing and being killed. Half-dead bodies of prisoners of war. The gangrenous body. Mad bodies. Bodies in blood, shit, and vomit.
The purpose of this essay is to change the subject of critical focus on the erotics of war to the un/gendered body in pain. I do not simply valorize the feminine over the masculine war narrative, but rather wish to recover the lost voices, the cultural “music,” as Gertrude Stein says, of a noisy war.
Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . (1930) is a book about the body. Specifically, it chronicles the experience of a corps of six English gentlewomen, whose average age is twenty-one, as they drive field ambulances of wounded men picked up by trains at the Front to hospitals set up just behind the fighting lines in what Mary Borden has also memorialized as “the forbidden zone” in France in 1918.1 Their war is not a popular festival, like Erich Maria Remarque’s in All Quiet on the Western Front.2 It is a grotesque parody of the “brotherhood” felt by the German men, an inversion of “sisterhood.” Helen and her companions are volunteer ambulance drivers. They, like V.A.D. (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurses, have actually paid for the privilege of serving at the Front, their patriotic upper-class families proud to sacrifice daughters as well as sons for the war effort, providing their passage money and their uniforms, sending packages of cocoa and carbolic body belts to keep off the lice.
These body belts, personal disinfectants, always fighting a losing battle against the invasion of delicately bred female bodies by lice and fleas, worn between skin and rough clothing, suggest a “forbidden zone” on the body, dividing upper and lower, the spiritual and the physical. They remind us of chastity belts with which men of an earlier age “protected” the bodies of their womenfolk from invasion by other men when they went off to war, an age when women’s bodies were clearly defined as the property of men. Like the forbidden zone itself, marked neutral by signs and barbed wire, an unholy territory of dead and dying men, the wounded and their hospitals, the ambulance drivers and V.A.D. nurses were marked out for the most polluted of war work. Like gravediggers in peacetime they were shunned by the society whose dirty work they did. They were neither the “ladies” they had been brought up to be, nor were they paid professionals like working-class nurses in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (W.A.A.C.s) or Women’s Royal Naval Service (W.R.E.N.s), respected and rewarded for their labor. They were both terrorized and scorned by women in the regular armed services, precisely because they were volunteers but also because they were ladies exposed to the most acute physical horrors, suffering themselves under severe hardships, for which a comfortable life at home with servants had hardly prepared them. They made everyone except their patriotic parents at home feel ashamed.
Like a company of Wagnerian Valkyries (though, of course, they would not have made such a Germanic comparison themselves) the ambulance drivers resembled Amazon goddesses, carrying slain soldiers from the battlefield to glory in Valhalla or to hospitals where they could recover to fight again. European intellectuals welcomed the war as a mystical purification of decadence, a revolution against greed and materialism. Women would, as usual, clean up the mess. The ambulances were the mythical horses of the modern Valkyries, and the women drivers cared for their engines as if they were horses. Transporting the dead or dying is a dangerous job, but it has also always been invested with mythological significance. The ferryman who guards the borders of life and death is a ghostly figure in our cultural myths. This corps of ferrywomen seems unreal as well, ghosts whose bodies had disappeared from history until revived by the reprinting of Not So Quiet . . . . (For photographs of women engaged in various kinds of war work see Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard’s Working for Victory?: Images of Women in the First World War, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.) All motor vehicles were rare and glamorous creatures at this time and driving itself a male and upper-class activity. In stiff-upper-lipped long-suffering bravery, the women had to be superhuman, driving for weeks on three hours of sleep a night, eating spoiled food, and very little of that (no decent Army rations for volunteers). They became experts at the geography of hell, driving at night with their lights off in the freezing cold and snow (the cabs were open to the elements, the backs of the lorries covered with canvas) with their lo
ads of screaming and moaning wounded.
One assumes that the War Office counted on class codes of honor to keep the women from telling or writing what they had seen or heard. Not So Quiet . . . brilliantly broke the sound barrier about what “Our Splendid Women” had really seen and heard and done in the war, offending all of those who had blocked their ears. When Not So Quiet . . . was published, one English reviewer suggested that it be burned (but the French gave it the Prix Severigne as “the novel most calculated to promote international peace”). Young, healthy, well-educated women became the charwomen of the battlefield, the cleaners of the worst human waste we produce, the symbolic bearers of all its pollution and disease. Like the mythological ferryman, their bodies became La Zone Interdite, for themselves as well as for those who sent them to the battlefields, forbidden, dangerous, polluted carriers of a terrible knowledge. This knowledge effectively separated them from the complacent, jingoist Home Front and the mobile battle fronts, which left these polluted zones behind as they moved on.
Because women’s role in World War I and women’s writing about that war is just beginning to receive attention, I want to begin with a discussion of the issues surrounding historical and literary revaluation. In particular, because Not So Quiet . . . is not in any sense an example of écriture feminine but a textual deconstruction of gender stereotypes in writing, it is important to place it in relation to other women’s war writing.
In 1929, the American V.A.D. nurse, Mary Borden, published poems and sketches written during 1914–18 when she was with the French Army, along with five stories written after the war: “I have called the collection of fragments ‘The Forbidden Zone’ because the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire where I was stationed went by that name in the French Army. We were moved up and down inside it; our hospital unit was shifted from Flanders to the Somme, then to Champagne, and then back again to Belgium, but we never left ‘La Zone Interdite.’ ”2 The horrors of the forbidden territories also extended to an unspoken ban on writing about it—Enid Bagnold was dismissed from her V.A.D. post after publishing A Diary without Dates in 1918.3 Both of these collections of fragments document women’s wartime experience in essentially “feminine” voices. Serious literary achievements, the books are marked by the fragmentation and dislocation of poignant love/war battles and the romantic and chivalric, almost religious, ethos of self-sacrifice. Enid Bagnold is proud that her nursing ability brings order and tranquillity to a hospital full of wounded men. Like a nun, she domesticates devastation. She writes:
I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five . . . eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements—taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them.4
Her pride in gleaming trays and scrubbed corridors is obviously a small human success after the failure to bring such healing graces to the suffering soldiers. (The knives will truly never lie still.) The women drivers in her later The Happy Foreigner are as attentive to the material objects in their charge—the cars they drive for the French Army—and the heroine puts a whole village to work making a dress for her to wear to a dance with a French officer.
Mary Borden’s book is equally interesting on an aesthetic level. While Bagnold’s voice is lyrically nostalgic and romantic, despite the chronicle of hardship for volunteer nurses, Borden is a modernist, obviously influenced by Gertrude Stein. She carried Stein and Flaubert to the Front with her, and The Forbidden Zone speaks in her flat Chicago accent. It is hallucinatory and yet detached. The voice seems submerged in the unconscious like a nightmare that numbs with repetition. She, too, turns to material objects for solace at the sight of maimed men:
I had received by post that same morning a dozen beautiful new platinum needles. I was very pleased with them. I said to one of the dressers as I fixed a needle on my syringe and held it up, squirting the liquid through it: “Look. I’ve got some lovely new needles.” He said: “Come and help me a moment. Just cut this bandage, please.” I went over to his dressing table. He darted off to a voice that was shrieking somewhere. There was a man stretched on the table. His brain came off in my hands when I lifted the bandage from his head. When the dresser came back I said: “His brain came off on the bandage.” “Where have you put it?” “I put it in the pail under the table.” “It’s only one half of his brain,” he said, looking into the man’s skull. “The rest is here.” I left him to finish the dressing and went about my own business. I had much to do. It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms: It was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. I was there to sort them and tell how fast life was ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes. It was my business to create a counter-wave of life, to create the flow against the ebb. It was like a tug of war with the tide.5
The repetition of the word “business” in such circumstances and the brief emotionless descriptive sentences mark a detachment that has a calculated effect on the reader. We understand her pleasure in her new needles. Borden simply cannot bear the burden of womanhood and continue to work with wounded men: “It is impossible to be a woman here. One must be dead.”
There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are eyes—eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces—the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men . . .6
The fragmented bodies of men are reproduced in the fragmented parts of women’s war texts, the texts themselves a “forbidden zone” long ignored by historians and literary critics. Writers of war produce pieces of texts, like parts of a body that will never be whole. The texts are specific to World War I and the kinds of warfare specific to that particularly horrible war and its mutilation of millions of bodies. They wrote the body of war, the wounded soldier’s body and their own newly sexualized (only to be numbed) bodies as well as the effect of war on the body politic. The textual fragmentation marks the pages of their books as the forbidden zone of writing what hasn’t been written before, and their books actually look like battlefields where the body of Mother Earth has been torn apart by shells and bombs. The works of Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold cited above are not exceptional. There are many important women war writers. A materialist analysis of the fragmented texts would look immediately to the passage in Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young (1932) that excruciatingly details the step-by-step process by which a nurse removes fragments of shrapnel from a soldier’s wound. (We That Were Young has also been reprinted by The Feminist Press, 1989.) One might then observe that the fragmentation described as typical of modernist texts has an origin in the writing practice of women nurses and ambulance drivers. The recent discovery and reprinting of many “lost” examples of women’s war writing by Virago and The Feminist Press may be linked to the work of feminist scholars in many disciplines over the last fifteen years. This work ranges from psychological studies of gender and aggression; to new historical studies of pacifism; to philosophical treatises, such as Nancy Huston’s provocative essay on the relation between war and motherhood, which argues that men make war because women make babies.7
The study of World War I and its effect on women in England begins with the acknowledgment that all wars destroy women’s culture, returning women to the restricted roles of childbearing and nursing and only that work that helps the war effort. The struggle for women’s own political equality becomes almost treasonous in wartime. World War I practically destroyed
the women’s movement in England, a struggle of nearly fifty years in education, for the vote, marriage, and divorce and child custody legislation, in labor laws—an extraordinary mass movement of women demanding political justice and equality. Any account of women’s wartime energetic and responsible performance of social labor must recognize that that performance in the public sphere came from the previous struggle against an immensely hostile state to win the elements of education, knowledge, and skills that any democracy today customarily grants its citizens, but which, in Edwardian England, were systematically denied to half the population. The self-education in political organization, public speaking, social work, and other areas that thousands of English women provided for themselves, in opposition to the ruthless repression of the Liberal government, as they worked tirelessly in the suffrage movement is the source of such strengths commonly attributed by historians to a mythical “natural” female ethic of heroic self-sacrifice.8
In the Daily Chronicle in 1916, Rebecca West reminded her readers that it was “the rough and tumble” of the suffrage movement that hardened women for their wartime tasks:
The story of the Scottish Suffrage Societies’ Hospital in Serbia and Rumania is immortal. The biggest factory in France which supplies an article most necessary to our armies is under the sole charge of a woman under thirty, who was formerly a suffrage organiser. One could cite many such cases. And one doubts that women would have gone into the dangerous high explosive factories, the engineering shops and the fields, and worked with quite such fidelity and enthusiasm if it had not been so vigorously affirmed by the suffragists in the last few years that women ought to be independent and courageous and capable.9
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