Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (21 page)

‘Sorrow, and the higher joy that is not mere happiness, and you, all seem to be the same thing just now,’ I explained haltingly to Roland. ‘Is it really all for nothing - for an empty name - an ideal? Last time I saw you it was I who said that and you who denied it. Was I really right, and will the issue not be worth one of the lives that have been sacrificed for it? Or did we need this gigantic catastrophe to wake up all that was dead within us? . . . In the light of all that you have seen, tell me what you think . . . Surely, surely it is a worthy ideal - to fight that you may save your country’s freedom from falling into the hands of this terrible and ruthless foe. It is awful to think that the very progress of civilisation has made this war what it is . . . Just to think that we have got to the stage of motors, aeroplanes, telephones, and 17-inch shells, and yet have not passed the stage of killing one another . . . . For me I think the days are over of sheltered physical comfort and unruffled peace of mind. I don’t think they will ever come again.’

I thought rightly, for they never did; and the profound shock of their initial departure left me as helpless and bewildered as a child abandoned on the alien shores of some illimitable sea. My diary for March and April 1915 is full of impossible, excruciating attempts to work out gigantic problems, which were apt to conclude - when they concluded at all, which was seldom - in a kind of vague pantheism. The spasmodic study of Plato, whose
Apologia
and
Meno
I was reading for Pass Mods., certainly did nothing to discourage my hysterical pursuit of elusive definitions. Wearily I wrote of myself as ‘trying to determine what that is of which intellect is only the instrument - trying to give a name to that vague but certain element and meditating as to whether it is deathless’ - and again of ‘often sitting motionless and seeing nothing beneath the oppression of my struggling thought’.

Sometimes, by way of variety, a bout of vague Olive Schreinerish philosophising mingled incongruously with records of banal domestic vexations. A typical entry runs as follows: ‘To know that the soul of man - God in him - is the source of strength, that by growing it causes suffering, yet through suffering it grows - this at least is Light. Daddy was in bed all day with an inflamed eye. Mother went to Manchester too so I had to look after him a good deal. What with that and thinking I did not get through much work.’

Just at this time a group of super-patriotic Buxton women, who were busily engaged in forming a women’s volunteer corps, provided yet another source of disturbance and interruption. Proudly they drilled and marched about the town in uniform, though none of them know what precisely was the object of all this activity. They were, however, most assiduous in telling me that I ought to join this, or that, or the other, the idea of course being that college was a pleasant and idle occupation which led nowhere. Thoroughly exasperated, I avoided their society, and it was not until two acquaintances outside the volunteer corps left Buxton to join a hospital under the French Red Cross, that the idea occurred to me of combining some nursing with my work for Oxford.

‘I remember once at the beginning of the War,’ I wrote enthusiastically to Roland, ‘you described college as “a secluded life of scholastic vegetation”. That is just what it is. It is, for me at least, too soft a job . . . I want physical endurance; I should welcome the most wearying kinds of bodily toil.’

So closely, at this stage, was active war-work of every type associated in the public mind with the patriotic impulse which sent men into the Army that I never dreamed, amid all my analytical speculations, of inquiring whether ‘joining up’ would not be, for me, a mere emotional antidote involving no real sacrifice. At the time my preoccupation with possible methods of following the persistently beating drum merely provided a blessed temporary relief from philosophical flounderings.

On Easter Sunday I noticed in church the Matron of the Devonshire Hospital, a local institution for the treatment of rheumatic complaints, which now took a number of soldiers. Impulsively I tackled her and asked if she had any work to offer which I could undertake in the intervals of reading. She looked at me sceptically and replied rather drily that if I knew how to darn there were always plenty of socks to be mended. As this happened to be the only form of elementary needlework that I had ever mastered, I gratefully accepted the somewhat prosaic alternative to my heroic visions; and when, a few days later, I sat surrounded by coloured wools in the hospital’s vaccine-room and attacked the colossal holes, I felt that I had advanced at least one step nearer to Roland and the War.

2

On April 17th, 1915, when the British were gruesomely capturing Hill 60, the first mention of Zeppelin raids appears in my diary. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Maldon and Shorncliffe were the places attacked, and Edward, whose battalion was still in Folkestone, wrote that the raiders had caused a refreshing outbreak of activity to interrupt the daily routine. Another raid, on Lowestoft, gave me some anxious hours, but it need not have done so, for Roland’s mother, who was naturally courageous, merely regarded the upset as profitable ‘copy’.

Two days later, meditations on the air-raids had given way to a dissertation on the controversial topic of ‘war-babies’ as treated by various newspapers. My own comments on this engrossing subject combined a limited number of independent opinions with inherited remnants of ancestral morality:

‘One set of people who write letters are most unmorally moral, want to disgrace the poor girls as much as possible and enlarge the offence out of all proportion . . . The other, the hysterical party, absolutely excuses the offence on the score of abnormal conditions (though true morality is supreme over circumstances), hold forth about “the children of the heroes of Mons and the Marne” (which they are not), and even make suggestions of compensation so extremely favourable to the offenders as to encourage others to repeat the sin, and thus undermine our whole social and moral structure.’

A leading article in
The Times
, dealing ‘with both sides of the question’, I condescendingly described as ‘very sensible’. It remarked, I recorded, that ‘this is a case for sense and charity . . . while we must not condone the offence, we must not make its results worse by harsh and narrow treatment . . . we must condemn the sin and the sinners while yet remarking that the results of it can be made the useful citizens of to-morrow.’

How warmly the leader-writer of that ‘sensible’ article must have congratulated himself on his skilful Primrose Day compromise! What, I wonder, if he is still living to-day, would be his editorial reactions to ‘peace-babies’ with a similar unorthodox origin?

That morning I left the reassuring study of
The Times
to take part in one of the first national ‘flag-days’ organised during the War. As I wandered with my basket of primroses up and down the Buxton streets, blindingly white as they always became in the midday sunshine, my thoughts swung dizzily between the conviction that Roland would return and the certainty that he could never possibly come back. I had little patience to spare for my mother’s middle-aged acquaintances, who patronised me as they bought my primroses, and congratulated me on putting aside my ‘studies’ to ‘do my bit in this terrible War’. I took their pennies with scant ceremony, and one by one thrust them with a noisy clatter into my tin.

‘Those who are old and think this War so terrible do not know what it means to us who are young,’ I soliloquised angrily. ‘When I think how suddenly, instantly, a chance bullet may put an end to that brilliant life, may cut it off in its youth and mighty promise, faith in the “increasing purpose” of the ages grows dim.’

The fight around Hill 60 which was gradually developing, assisted by the unfamiliar horror of gas attacks, into the Second Battle of Ypres, did nothing to restore my faith in the benevolent intentions of Providence. With that Easter vacation began the wearing anxiety of waiting for letters which for me was to last, with only brief intervals, for more than three years, and which, I think, made all non-combatants feel more distracted than anything else in the War. Even when the letters came they were four days old, and the writer since sending them had had time to die over and over again. My diary, with its long-drawn-out record of days upon days of miserable speculation, still gives a melancholy impression of that nerve-racking suspense.

‘Morning,’ it observes, ‘creeps on into afternoon, and afternoon passes into evening, while I go from one occupation to another, in apparent unconcern - but all the time this gnawing anxiety beneath it all.’

Ordinary household sounds became a torment. The clock, marking off each hour of dread, struck into the immobility of tension with the shattering effect of a thunderclap. Every ring at the door suggested a telegram, every telephone call a long-distance message giving bad news. With some of us the effect of this prolonged apprehension still lingers on; even now I cannot work comfortably in a room from which it is possible to hear the front-door bell.

‘I dare not think too vividly of him just now,’ I wrote one black evening after several days without a letter; ‘I can scarcely bear to look at the photograph taken at Uppingham . . . I have been trying to picture to myself what I should feel if I heard he was dead. It would be impossible to realise; life would seem so utterly empty and purposeless without him that it is almost inconceivable . . . I only know that such an anguish could never be conquered in a life of scholastic endeavour . . . never among those indifferent, unperceiving college women for the majority of whom war and love and grief might not exist. The ability to endure these things would come back in time, but only after some drastic change.’

To this constant anxiety for Roland’s life was added, as the end of the fighting moved ever further into an incalculable future, a new fear that the War would come between us - as indeed, with time, the War always did, putting a barrier of indescribable experience between men and the women whom they loved, thrusting horror deeper and deeper inward, linking the dread of spiritual death to the apprehension of physical disaster. Quite early I realised this possibility of a permanent impediment to understanding. ‘Sometimes,’ I wrote, ‘I have feared that even if he gets through, what he has experienced out there may change his ideas and tastes utterly.’

In desperation I began to look carefully through his letters for every vivid word-picture, every characteristic tenderness of phrase, which suggested that not merely the body but the spirit that I desired was still in process of survival. To begin with, the tender phrases came often enough, blinding my eyes with sharp tears after I had read, with determined equanimity, his half-gay, half-wistful descriptions of danger or fatigue.

‘I have just picked you these violets,’ he wrote one April day from ‘Plug Street Wood’, enclosing four little blue flowers gathered from the roof of his dug-out. I have them still; the blue is brown now, and crinkled, but the flower shapes remain unspoilt. With the violets he had intended to send a villanelle that he had written to accompany them, but, dissatisfied as always with his work, he kept back the poem for revision, and did not give it to me until some weeks afterwards.

The letters that he wrote me were happy and very typical so long as they remained in that ‘thick wood of tall thin trees’. A rich brewer from Armentie‘res, he told me, owned Ploegsteert Wood; it had been his pheasant ground. Sometimes I wonder if he and the pheasants are back there again, and whether he has the heart to shoot them where so much more than pheasants was destroyed. In Roland’s day there was a grave in the wood with a carefully made wooden cross inscribed with the words: ‘Here lie two gallant German officers.’ The men who put up the cross congratulated themselves a little on their British magnanimity, but when, later, they pushed the enemy out of the trenches in front of the wood, they found another grave as carefully tended, and inscribed: ‘Here lie five brave English officers.’

How earnestly I wished, as I sat, gloomily critical, at the last hospital working party which I was able to attend before going back to Somerville, that something of that generous dignity could be reflected at home!

‘Mrs W. and Miss A. got together,’ I related intolerantly, ‘and after discussing various people they knew who were nursing, they talked at length of cooks, and then entered on a long and deep conversation on the subject of combinations and pyjamas. Finally Sister J. came in and told us all about some very bad cases of wounded from Neuve Chapelle she had seen in a hospital in the south of England. After that the ladies seemed to try and outdo one another in telling stories of war horrors. I don’t think they could have known or loved anyone in the trenches. They made me feel absolutely cold.’

In those days I knew, of course, nothing of psychology, that beneficent science which has begun to make men and women more merciful to each other than they used to be in earlier generations. I was still too young to realise how much vicarious excitement the War provided for frustrated women cut off from vision and opportunity in small provincial towns, or to understand that the deliberate contemplation of horror and agony might strangely compensate a thwarted nature for the very real grief of having no one at the front for whom to grieve.

As we left the hospital we spoke to a wounded Tommy - a small elderly man who had been, the Sister told us, through Neuve Chapelle. He looked, I noticed, regarding him with awe - for at that time I had seen very few men back from the front - ‘not unnerved or even painfully ill - but very, very sad.’ Would Roland, I wondered, look as sad as that if I ever saw him again?