She is wandering around in the flickering candlelight dressed in a soiled woolen undervest and a voluminous pair of navy blue bloomers, chain-smoking yellow perils at a furious rate. There is something vaguely comforting in the Amazonian height and breadth of Tosh. She has the hips of a matron—intensified by the four pairs of thick combinations she always wears for warmth, a mind like a sewer (her own definition), the courage of a giant, the vocabulary of a Smithfield butcher, and the round, wind-reddened face of a dairymaid.(11)
Georgina Toshington, who posthumously becomes a storybook heroine in England after she has been killed by a bomb while driving Commandant’s ambulance (Smithy wishes the bomb would kill Mrs. Bitch, but it kills Tosh instead), is the Edwardian version of England as Victoria, a large, imperialist, terrifying maternal figure. When Smithy is driving under the bombs, she is terrified by the “flattening sound, as though the sky were jealous of the earth and was determined to wipe it out of existence. Each time a bomb drops I see myself under it, flat, like the skin of a dead tiger that has been made into a rug with a little nicked half-inch of cloth all round the edges . . . flat, all the flesh and blood and bones knocked flat . . .”(156). This is the second figurative passage in Not So Quiet. . . , and it is repeated during the scene in which the bomb fragment kills Tosh. Its meaning is more deeply repressed than the figure of the dead tree as the Witch’s Hand. Nellie Smith’s own fear of annihilation (rather than her disgust at the maimed men whose bodies she ferries to hospital or the grave) is at issue here. While she talks about being a sacrificial victim to Home Front patriotism, her fear connects her own body, flattened like the tiger skin, to those earlier trophies of imperialistic adventures in India and Africa that grace English hearths. She, too, might become a hearth rug for safe warm (not gangrenous or frozen) feet, to lay before the Home Fires that have been kept burning by the sacrifice of so many colonial lives. (This vivid image of Home Front trophies should be compared to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s description of the photo of young Osbert in “Cottage Mantleshelf,” in which the picture is isolated and “un-paired” when everything else on the shelf is locked into a couple or “married.” The image of the female body at war as a flattened rug made out of her hide recalls Barbara Comyns’ splendid novel The Skin Chairs, 1962, Penguin, 1987.) Actually, Helen does not die like the hero-narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front. It is the intrepid Tosh who dies—though not before she has performed her role as keeper of the heterosexual flame.
Margaret Higonnet has argued that the fiction of nationalist wars equates heterosexuality with political correctness, that the linear narrative enforces gender stability.29 Civil War novels break from linear narrative, often invoking Kristeva’s “women’s time,” allowing more complicated temporal inversions, memories, and incestuous plots. The perfect example, for me, of this argument, is Marguerite Yourçenar’s Coup de Grâce (Farrar, Straus, 1957), set in the Baltic states just after the First World War, and one of the most disturbing versions of the interconnections between gender and war because the author has inserted an authoritarian preface in the reprint, cautioning the reader against reading for the woman’s text and arguing that Eric, her proto-fascist narrator, is not as “unreliable” as we had supposed. Yourçenar is the most stunning example of the woman writing from the male subject position, not in struggle with literary masculinizing as Helen Zenna Smith is in Not So Quiet. . . , but valorizing that very “valor” which Evadne Price and Erich Maria Remarque call into question.
Not So Quiet . . . runs on a present-tense time frame, which we might call “fast forward,” while All Quiet on the Western Front moves in a slow, nostalgic present toward the silence at the end of the war. The fact that Not So Quiet. . . does not end, but continues in sequels, with the life of the war-damaged narrator getting worse and worse, indicates Price’s realization that, for women, the effects of war last a lifetime and can never be forgotten. Vera Brittain’s memoirs indicate that she never got over the loss of lover and brother. The war is not over when it’s over in historical time. Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young and They Call It Peace also demonstrate that patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist “peacetimes” are still wartimes for the exploited.
The politics of Not So Quiet. . . are another matter. The portrait of Tosh, though it’s meant to be complimentary, reminds me of the concentration camp commandant in Lina Wertmüller’s film Seven Beauties. If Not So Quiet. . . was intended as a “politically correct” version of English ambulance drivers’ experiences, specifically to counter the effects of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which appeared in 1928 and was banned in a sensational censorship trial (and I believe it was), Helen Zenna Smith is writing to clear the volunteers of the charge of lesbianism. Hall’s version of the war is very different—romantic, heroic, and she celebrates the hotbed of lesbian lovers in the Ambulance Corps.30 Tosh is the “Niece of an Earl.” One of the most well-known heroines among the ambulance drivers was Radclyffe Hall’s friend, “Toupie” Lowther. She was actually the daughter of an earl and, as Barbara, Lady Lowther, ran a unit operating in Compeigne from 1917 on and also headed the London Branch of Relief for Belgian Prisoners in Germany. “Toupie” is described as “a bulky tall woman of extremely masculine appearance who had a considerable reputation as a fencer and tennis player.”31 She and four of the women in her unit won the Croix de Guerre. The scandal of The Well of Loneliness and its revelations that there were “inverts” among “Our Splendid Women” also made a specific link between the upper classes and lesbianism. Hence, Evadne Price has Tosh leading the sadistic purge of the lesbian figure, Skinny, in Not So Quiet . . . . Skinny is described as “yellow,” thin (and she is the only member of the company to have dysentery—a “male” form of pollution?). Virginia Woolf’s description of Radclyffe Hall when she attended the censorship trial for The Well of Loneliness calls her “stringy” and “yellow.” The word yellow, of course, indicates both cowardice and jaundice. Her skinniness is a deliberate opposition to Tosh’s maternal Amazon’s body. Evadne Price effectively rewrites the lesbian body at war to rob it of the healthy romantic glow with which Radclyffe Hall had surrounded it in The Well of Loneliness.
Tosh sees that Skinny is separated from her “particular friend,” Frost, (another naming of the nonmaternal) as soon as they arrive. At the party (which is a strange counterpart to the grand eating scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front when the German soldiers steal pigs and geese, roast and eat them with Paul making potato pancakes as the bombs fall around them, a wonderful Bakhtinian carnivalization of war) Tosh ignores, insults, and taunts Skinny, who has a hysterical fit. Skinny and Frost get sent home for “refusing to obey orders,” in an unspoken agreement between Tosh and the Commandant that allows Tosh to retain her “honor” and makes clear to the reader that perversion has been routed and heterosexuality holds sway. The scene is a perfect example of Mary Douglas’s arguments in Purity and Danger about scapegoat-ing the “polluted” victim. The drivers are polluted in their role as the charwomen of the battlefield, and they sacrifice Skinny to purify themselves. This “purity” is not virginity but the flaunting of credentials of heterosexual experience. The female body at war must announce that it is made for motherhood. In his biography of Radclyffe Hall, Lovat Dickson implies that lesbianism caused an English defeat in the war, deftly reversing Una Troubridge’s claim that her husband, the admiral, who refused to pursue the German fleet in an Eastern engagement, had syphilis, and blaming the admiral’s “cowardice” on his wife’s relationship with Radclyffe Hall.32
Helen’s mother tolerates a pregnant servant when she had fired one in a similar situation before the war. Yet Nell’s sister Trix, who washes dishes in a V.A.D. nursing unit, gets pregnant and has an abortion. Class values are stronger than the need to reproduce cannon fodder. Helen, who has refused to return to the Front, much to the shame of her family, gets the money for the abortion from another patriotic matriarch, her Aunt Helen, and enlists in the W.A.A.C.s as an assis
tant cook, infuriating her family by rejecting the class glamour of the ambulance unit for the drudgery of peeling vegetables with working-class women, for whom the war salary is a great boost in status. Deliberately suppressing her experience, which would have given her an officer’s commission, Helen chooses to be declassed, to do women’s traditional dirty work, preparing food rather than cleaning the remains of killing. This textual swerve in the rejection of her own class and its complicity in the war is what makes Not So Quiet . . . so interesting and problematic a text. While it has followed the narrative of gender normality in its lesbian-bashing (as May Sinclair’s The Romantics creates the cowardly soldier—read “homosexual”—as a vampire), Not So Quiet . . . figures a kind of freedom for Helen in the break from her family and class. She trades the “khaki and red” world of ambulance-driving at the Front for the (relatively) “green” world of preparing food for the W.A.A.C.s.
A feminist reader recognizes that this is a refusal of the glorification of death-work and a connection made to the eternal round of woman’s work in the kitchen, life-work. The new class alliance is a move to another Zone Interdite, the repressed but always present class divisions of English society, which remain in force in wartime segregation. This suggests to me that Evadne Price had read Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Niece of an Earl,” which was published in Life and Letters in 1928, and set out to prove that Woolf was wrong in asserting that there is no communication between classes—“We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off.” This is the great “disability” of the English novelist—“a gulf yawns before us; on the other side are the working classes,” who become “objects of pity, examples of curiosity.”33 Did Evadne Price, the journalist, have any ambitions that might have caused her to meet the challenge of Woolf’s statement? I think so. Her pseudonym, Helen Zenna Smith, is a case in point. “Helen” is the figure man has created to name the cause of war as female. Male war novelists are always finding “another Troy for her to burn,” and women are always revising, contending with, repudiating, or exonerating their own versions of the classical Helen. Smith is the most common English name, Everywoman. She writes, “How jealously I preserve the secret of that Z., that ludicrous Z. bestowed on me by my mother. Z. was the heroine of a book mother read the month before I arrived on earth. She wanted me to grow up like Z. Z. was the paragon of beauty, virtue, and womanliness” (15–16).
The textual Z is, of course, a semiotic signal for sleep, which is the ambulance drivers’ lost luxury. It is also the sign for noise, a textual buzz addressed to the reader’s ear. As the letter at the end of the alphabet, it signifies the end of writing, perhaps the end of a certain kind of writing. As Zenna, on the title page, the mysterious name looks like a diminutive for Zenobia. There were two Zenobias, one who died a Christian martyr, the other the great queen of Palmyra, who refused to be subjugated to Roman rule, famous for her love and support of literature (Longinus wrote at her court) and as a military strategist. The letter Z, like King Lear’s “thou whoreson Zed, thou unnecessary letter,” marks the “third sex,” the masculinized woman or the “war baby,” as Z in mathematics is the third symbol for the unknown, after X and Y. Evadne Price is the third person in the writing triangle of Remarque/Winifred Young/Helen Z. Smith. She is the “Z-woman,” as a “Z-man” was an army reservist and a “Z-gun” an anti-aircraft rocket, a secret weapon. “Zenna” also suggests the word for an Indian and Persian harem, zenana, a code for the position of all women during war. Zenobia is also the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, a story-teller of the “Veiled Lady” in a text which also concerns itself with the problem of “authorship” and the relation between history and fiction. The person who invented the name Helen Zenna Smith wanted to write the great feminist war book.
The most brutally realistic scenes in Not So Quiet. . . are not so much the night horrors of driving the wounded but the day-time, stomach-churning job of cleaning out the ambulances of the material wastes of the men, blood, shit, and vomit, hosing and scrubbing with chilblained hands, disinfecting the vans in below-freezing weather. The drivers actually become their ambulances. Helen says “all the time they unload me the bombs are getting nearer.” Mary Borden uses images of ambulances as wombs/tombs, pregnant, polluted bodies—“the motor lorries crouch in the square ashamed, deformed, very weary; their unspeakable burdens bulge under canvas coverings”; the men lie “on their backs in the dark canvas bellies of the ambulances staring at death.”34 The drivers feel as if they are undergoing abortions, birth has gone horribly wrong. Accepting this role, they act the pollution of a distorted ideology that implicates motherhood with war, the female body with dirt and death. They are war’s charwomen, and Smith returns again and again to this theme—the drivers must do all their own dirty work with their machines, but in addition they have to clean their own latrines and quarters, are served rotten and spoiled food by a filthy and lazy cook, bearing both men’s and women’s roles. Both Not So Quiet . . . and All Quiet on the Western Front fetishize food, because, of course, getting enough to eat is everyone’s primary concern in wartime. This is why the breasts of the phallic mother (Tosh, the Commandant, the matriarchal figures on the posters) become such important propagandistic signifiers in the literature of war. Everyone is hungry. Bare-breasted pin-ups in soldiers’ bunks probably had more meaning in relation to hunger than to sex. Smithy’s Aunt Helen, an incompetent waitress in the War Workers’ Canteen in London, observes that it would be more productive if she stayed home and did the housework and let one of her competent maids serve the workers.
When Helen enlists in the W.A.A.C.s as a domestic worker, it is for revenge on her class: “Put that on your needles and knit it, my patriotic aunt”(212). But she soon becomes attached to the other young women, Misery, Cheery, and Blimey, who, along with Smithy, make up “the Four Whys” who peel potatoes and onions together. We wonder about the X. Army uniforms are their first experience of good clothes. They have never brushed their teeth nor bathed very often, so the war does improve their circumstances. Helen alone survives the bombing raid that kills these spirited young women, under an “aggressively radiant” she-moon, another matriarchal figure, to return home to marry her impotent wounded fiance—“I hate kids, anyway”(232). “The trench is like a slaughterhouse”; Blimey’s new Burberry trench coat is covered with blood. It is this image one takes away from the novel, the dirty, blood-spattered trench coat, the sign of women’s transvestism into soldiers in World War I, still worn and called “trench coats” after their original role. The Burberry recalls the scene where Tosh dies in Helen’s arms, her blood soaking the coat. The dirty trench coat worn by Miss Kilman enrages Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and it marks the class of the hero’s first beloved in Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier. The trench coat is a class and gender mark covering the body of women at/in this war. Jenny Gould’s essay in Behind the Lines examines the profound discomfort aroused by the sight of women in khaki uniforms recorded by the Marchioness of Londonderry, founder of the Women’s Legion in Retrospect (1938). Amazons who aped men frightened people, who, of course, wrote letters to the papers demanding that women not be allowed to wear khaki, and the militarism was connected to lesbianism. In an anonymous letter of outrage to The Morning Post in 1915, a woman complained of the cropped hair of the “She-men”: “I noticed that these women assumed mannish attitudes, stood with legs apart while they smote their riding whips, and looked like self-conscious and not very attractive boys.”
Near these ridiculous “poseuses” stood the real thing—a British Officer in mufti. He had lost his left arm and right leg . . . if these women had a spark of shame left they should have blushed to be seen wearing a parody of the uniform which this officer and thousands like him have made a symbol of honour and glory by their deeds. I do not know the corps to which these ladies belong, but if they cannot become nurses or ward maids in hospital, let them put on sunbonnets and print frocks and go and make hay or pick fruit or make jam. . .
.35
Some of these blood-soaked (and gender-marked) coats are exhibited in the museum of World War I at Le Linge in Alsace, where trenches dating from the war are still in place, the German concrete bunkers a vivid contrast to the flimsy French earthworks. Signs tell visitors not to stray from the path, as mines may still be active. The pathetic and moving personal belongings of soldiers are on view, along with strategic maps of every battle in the war. The propaganda posters and literature of both sides is equally bloody-minded. I am writing this essay in Strasbourg, where Gutenberg invented the printing press and where Rouget de Lisle sang the Marseillaise for the first time in 1792, where Drivier’s unique sculpture (1936) in the Place de la Republique shows a mother with two sons, one dead for Germany and the other dead for France. The other night there was a small demonstration by Alsatian socialists in the Cathedral Square to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune. A group of young women sang in high, sweet voices, surrounded by votive candles, as others carried signs supporting the current struggles in New Caledonia and South Africa. It rains here all the time. I am never out of my trench coat.
Jane Marcus
Strasbourg
May 1988
Notes
1. Mary Borden. The Forbidden Zone (London: Heinemann, 1929).
2. The Forbidden Zone, preface.
3. Enid Bagnold. A Diary without Dates (London: Heinemann, 1918), reprinted by Virago, 1978. Virago has also reprinted The Happy Foreigner (1920), Bagnold’s novel about driving for the French Army just after the war ended. Both books are brilliant and beautifully written. But Enid Bagnold’s most disturbing novel is The Squire (1938), which makes clear how devastating war values are in domestic society. The Squire is about the militarization of motherhood as an institution between the wars.
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