Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (25 page)

In the early days of the War the majority of soldier-patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side. Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, this day-by-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame. Since it was always Roland whom I was nursing by proxy, my attitude towards him imperceptibly changed; it became less romantic and more realistic, and thus a new depth was added to my love.

In addition to the patients, I managed to extract approval from most of the nurses - no doubt because, my one desire being to emulate Roland’s endurance, I seized with avidity upon all the unpleasant tasks of which they were only too glad to be relieved, and took a masochistic delight in emptying bed-pans, washing greasy cups and spoons, and disposing of odoriferous dressings in the sink-room. The Matron - described as ‘a slave-driver’ by one of the elegant lady V.A.D.s who intermittently trotted in to ‘help’ in the evenings after the bulk of the work was done - treated me with especial kindness, and often let me out through her private gate in order to save me a few yards of the interminable miles upon my feet.

My particular brand of enthusiasm, the nurses told me later, was rare among the local V.A.D.s, most of whom came to the hospital expecting to hold the patients’ hands and smooth their pillows while the regular nurses fetched and carried everything that looked or smelt disagreeable. Probably this was true, for my diary records of one Buxton girl a month later: ‘Nancy thinks she would like to take up Red Cross work but does not want to go where she would have to dust wards and clean up as she does not think she would like that.’

On my first day at the hospital, a Scottish sergeant produced a comment of which the stark truth came finally home to me three summers afterwards.

‘We shall beat them,’ he said, ‘but they’ll break our hearts first!’

This same man told me a story - later guaranteed as true by Roland - which once again convinced me of the futility of war between men who (as I was beginning to realise even amid the bloodthirsty armchair patriotism so rampant in England just then) bore no grudge against one another.

Once, he said, when they were opposite the Saxons near Ypres, they and the enemy made a mutual agreement not to shoot one another. In order to appear active they continued to use their rifles, but fired into the air. Occasionally they met and talked in the space between the trenches, and when, finally, the Saxons had to change places with the Prussian Guards, they promised to fire a volley as warning. This promise they faithfully observed.

A few weeks afterwards I was given a variant on this story by a neighbour, who had heard it from a Buxton officer home on sick-leave. A similar truce, he related, had been in progress in another part of the line, where the occupants of the trenches on both sides would take it in turns to work in No Man’s Land quite unmolested. In the midst of this truce, the British company commander went sick, and a fire-eating patriot took his place. On the first occasion after his arrival that a group of Saxons left their trenches and placidly began their wire-mending, the fire-eater ordered his company’s machine guns to be turned on them. The men had no choice but to obey, and a large number of benevolent Saxons were ignominiously wiped out.

Four out of the five men, said my informant, to whom the young officer told this tale, roared with laughter and called the company commander’s action ‘a smart piece of work’. So much, I thought, for ‘Hun atrocities’ - for I was already beginning to suspect, as all my generation now knows, that neither side in wartime has a monopoly of butchers and traitors.

Perhaps it was a subconscious brooding on this story, perhaps a letter from Roland to say that all leave was temporarily cancelled, which gave me a few nights later one of the vividest dreams that I have ever had in my life.

I thought that I was standing, in a large room which looked like a schoolroom, before a table covered with green baize and littered with papers. A crowd of vague men and women pressed in upon me, but I never saw any of them clearly. I knew that I was in grave suspense, and had come there to hear news of some kind. I had not waited long when another shadowy individual came up to the table and said: ‘He is dead; he has died of wounds in France.’

Somehow I realised that the people in the room were speaking of Roland; that while they did not know him personally nor even by name, they were aware of his existence and of the relation in which I stood to him. When I heard their messenger’s words I was paralysed with the shock that comes when something happens that one has dreaded yet half expected - often a worse shock than that produced by the unforeseen. But I managed to ask my informant: ‘How do you know?’

‘It’s written down,’ he told me. ‘The name is here,’ and he handed me a folded slip of paper. I opened it quickly and there saw, written in unfamiliar but ordinary characters, the name ‘Donald Neale’. I knew this to be the name of the man who had died, and almost fainted in the revulsion of feeling. In an agony of relief I cried: ‘This isn’t his name! It’s all a mistake! It isn’t true!’

At that moment the alarm-clock that roused me early went off. I awoke feeling very limp, staring at the window and repeating to myself in a kind of ecstasy: ‘That wasn’t his name! It’s all a mistake! It isn’t true - thank God!’

8

The excitement of really beginning at last to nurse drove me into a fresh outburst of correspondence with Mina and Betty on the subject of joining up together in an Army hospital in London. Our objective was the 1st London General Hospital in Camberwell, where Mina was supposed to have a friend among the Sisters. Betty’s efforts to go there, though serene and amiable, were genuine and consistent, but Mina, whose dawning love-affair with an artist not in the Army had an effect upon her precisely contrary to the fervour for service produced by mine, was unexpectedly elusive when pinned down to the taking of any precise step, and in the end was deterred by an attack of minor illness from nursing at all.

The responses wrested from Red Cross Headquarters at Devonshire House, which I also bombarded with letters, were hardly more illuminating than Mina’s distracted replies to requests for first-hand information from London.

‘I had an unsatisfactory sort of letter from the Red Cross,’ I noted one evening, ‘talking vaguely of delays and numerous interviews. British authorities and their red tape are distinctly depressing. Strange that they should plead for volunteers and then make it as unpleasant as possible for you when you have volunteered.’

Ultimately I had to get a day’s leave to go up to London, for I knew that the Buxton Red Cross Society, which believed its little convalescent hospital in Higher Buxton to provide the only kind of nursing that any polite young woman could wish for, would never do anything drastic or send me anywhere. So, as the first step towards getting into a London hospital, I went to Paddington to join Mina’s Voluntary Aid Detachment, London 128, and, as I had already passed my First Aid and Home Nursing examinations, was enrolled as a full-fledged member of the British Red Cross.

In July, when I seemed already to have been nursing for months, my peaceful relations with the Devonshire Hospital staff were disturbed by the arrival of a new Sister-in-Charge. No doubt ideal nurses were difficult to obtain at that time by civilian hospitals, even with their complement of soldiers, for the new arrival was not precisely an example of the Nightingale tradition at its best. A weather-beaten, dry little woman, with hard brown eyes and a fussy manner, she had a habit of tight-lacing which made her appear aggressively out of proportion. Her aitches, though right numerically, were wrongly distributed, and I had difficulty in maintaining the correct expression of disciplined composure when she forcibly inquired, as she did every evening: ‘Narse! Have you given ‘Ibbert his haspirin?’

When she wanted to address me she always shouted ‘Narse!’ except when she tried to use my name. This she invariably got wrong, although it seemed to me simple enough to remember - particularly in wartime, when we were all so patriotic. Her distrust of V.A.D. probationers was evident from the first, but was counterbalanced by a determination even greater than my own to make me maid-of-all-work.

‘I’ve been a narse for seventeen yahs and a Sistah for twelve,’ she informed me ominously when I protested at being told for the second time to dust a ward which, as part of the ordinary morning’s routine, had been finished hours before.

‘Really,’ I wrote to Roland, ‘if feminism gains a hearing after this War is over, the leaders of the movement will have to be picked and chosen, I think the kind that shout and order about and find fault will have to be eliminated.’

For a few days - since I not unnaturally evaded the new Sister as much as possible - the hospital rang with cries of ‘Narse! Narse! Where’s that little V.A. narse! Why can’t
she
sweep this floor - or make this bed - or empty this bucket?’ - or whatever the particular job happened to be. Whenever my morning’s work was unusually heavy, I would hear her pattering after me.

‘Narse! Have you a minute to spah?’

‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ I would reply, looking as busy as possible, ‘but I’ve an awful lot to get through this morning.’

‘Oh,
nevah
mind!’ would come her affronted response; ‘I’ll get one of the othah narses to do it!’

Fortunately for my peace, she and the house-surgeon - a dapper little man with bandy legs and a serious long-nosed countenance - gradually became sworn enemies, and the faster their mutual antipathy increased, the longer they appeared to spend in frantically looking for one another.

From the Sister as from other incidental irritations, I sought, as usual, refuge in my letters to Roland.

‘Reminiscences again!’ I reproached myself on the anniversary of Speech Day. ‘These are the prerogative of the old, aren’t they, not of the young! But one lives so much in the past when the future is all blank and dim. Recollection is the privilege of the aged rather than of youth because when one is young one is supposed to have definite things to look forward to all the time. Sometimes I feel as if I were anticipating the point of view I may have when, if I live, I shall be old. The future of old age must look something like this, and that is why it delights them so to remember . . .

‘You will be amused to hear,’ I continued more cheerfully, ‘that I am making myself quite hardened to blackbeetles - of which there are batches in various places in hospital.’ (There had also been a number at Micklem Hall, and about these I was not at all brave.) ‘Last night when I was washing up cups in the surgical kitchen they were running about the floor and tumbling over one another in the sink. I didn’t run away, I just fastened my skirt up and went on washing the cups. I consider that as quite the most heroic thing I have done since the War started. To-night I raced round after them with the inevitable Keatings. To switch off on to quite a different subject, have you ever read Stephen Phillip’s
Christ in Hades
?’

From trenches in which blackbeetles must have appeared an extremely desirable alternative to their most numerous inhabitants, he replied with one of those letters which I specially treasured for their vivid evidence that the Roland I loved was still very much alive.

‘The sky was wonderful as we came along an hour ago - deep blue with mackerel spots of light gold clouds in the west meshed like chain armour on a blue ground, and below in the horizon a long bar of cloud so dark as to look purple against the sun. Why are sunsets more beautiful normally than sunrise?’

I remembered, as I read his description, the melancholy, colourful fragment of a poem which he had written just before the War.

And so, farewell. All our sweet songs are sung,
Our red rose-garlands withered;
The sun-bright day—
Silver and blue and gold—
Wearied to sleep.

The shimmering evening, like a grey, soft bird,
Barred with the blood of sunset,
Has flown to rest
Under the scented wings
Of the dark-blue Night.

Would he ever write any more such poems, I wondered, a little uncertain whether it had not been cruel of me to send him the volume of Rupert Brooke on which he now commented with so bitter a sense of achievement postponed.

‘It makes me . . . want to sit down and write things myself instead of doing what I have to do here. It stirs up the old forgotten things, and makes me so, so angry and impatient with most of the soulless nonentities one finds around one here. I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful. Modern warfare is merely a trade, and it is only a matter of taste whether one is a soldier or a greengrocer, as far as I can see. Sometimes by dint of an opportunity a single man may rise from the sordidness to a deed of beauty; that is all.’

Anxiously I endeavoured to restore his confidence in the ultimate survival of the ‘old forgotten things’.

‘It is Europe’s fault, not ours, that we have grown to a precocious bitterness, and learnt that glamour fades, and that behind that glamour grim realities lie . . . But don’t despair - dear child! Even War must end some time, and perhaps if we are alive in three or four years’ time, we may recover the hidden childhood again and find that after all the dust and ashes which covered it haven’t spoilt it much.’