Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (30 page)

Gradually, after a few days in which the awful sluggishness of the hours seemed a specially devised torture of hell, came the usual apologetic modifications of our ‘great victory’, and, still later, the lists showing the price that we had paid for this sorry achievement. The country, though growing accustomed to horror, staggered at the devastating magnitude of the cost of Loos. Even now, eighteen years afterwards, September 25th remains with July 1st and March 21st, one of the three dates on which the ‘
In Memoriam
’ notices in
The Times
fill the whole of one column and run on into the next. The usual rumour that the 6th Sherwood Foresters had been in the battle threw the whole of Buxton into a state of apprehension, and though, once again, this particular battalion had missed the worst of the fighting, news soon came of young officers killed in action who as boys had been with Edward at his Buxton day-school. But of Roland, still, there was no news at all.

‘Dreams, ideals, impersonal visions bow down to-day before this terrible human love,’ my diary records, ‘and in this hour my heart knows only one prayer.’

And when at last, on October 1st, a letter did come from Roland, it was to tell me that the alarm over which I had agonised had been false after all, and that after twice preparing to go ‘over the top’, his regiment had escaped the battle.

‘Oh, Roland ! . . .’ I responded; ‘that exclamation comprises every comment I have to make on the situation. “Continuation of Allied Offensive,” I keep on reading, so I suppose you
are
in it now. But I felt so sure you were in all that awful week-end fighting . . . When you are out there and know what is going on it must be quite impossible to put yourself in the place of people here, who don’t know and can’t get news. You have no idea what . . . these last few days have been to Mrs L. and me. Perhaps one day you will see the letters we have exchanged on the subject! For my part I have done nothing since Monday . . . but watch the gate, and follow every telegraph boy that went in the direction of our house . . . I am expecting to be called to London any day now. The wounded are beginning to come into England already and there will be a great rush soon.’

The summons, I felt, was near. Instinctively I dreaded it even though I had already recorded in my diary my longing for it to come.

‘It will be a relief not to be told I look tired by someone every night. If I don’t feel tired it is very annoying, and if I do it is more annoying still.’

One October afternoon I met in the town a visiting Somervillian whose comments on my prospective war-service so roused my indignation as temporarily to divert my thoughts from the still-raging battle.

‘This girl,’ I told Roland, ‘continued to remark rather sarcastically that she supposed I had no ideas of ever going back to Somerville . . . Everyone thinks I have left because I hadn’t enough stability to stick to it, and wanted . . . a little excitement. (Fancy nursing being
excitement
!) . . . My late music master actually said to Mother: ‘Going down,
is
she? Well, I told you so - I knew she would get tired of it before long.’ . . . Sometimes when I think . . . of the Dream-city, with its grey towers and autumn sunsets, and the little room where surrounded by books I used to read
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
before a glowing fire at twelve o’clock at night, I can only cry inwardly: ‘I
hate
nursing! How tired I am of this War - will it never end!’ And then I think of you out there in the danger and the darkness, and the cold and the rain - most precious being, a thousand times more tired of it than I! . . . The latest people who seem to know all about the ending of the War - and they are more depressing than usual - are turning round and making most ingeniously appropriate a prophecy in the Revelation of St John about the beast with seven heads and ten horns (who is of course the Kaiser!) ‘and all power was given unto him for two and forty months.’ Therefore, say they, the War will end in January 1918. Sounds delightful, doesn’t it!’

All that autumn Edward expected to be sent to France to join one of the numerous battalions of Sherwood Foresters already out there; in consequence his ‘last leaves’ were legion, and on one occasion he invited for the night his now beloved friend from the regiment, a young subaltern whom we all knew as Geoffrey. When that reticent idealist with visions of a clerical career in a slum parish first entered our house, he was so shy that his few remarks were almost inaudible. Geoffrey was too diffident, Edward told me, to be good at dealing with people, and yet his very self-depreciation caused him to be embarrassingly adored by his batmen and his men.

I was not surprised; from the first moment that I saw Geoffrey, I found in his baffling, elusive abruptness an indefinable attraction. He hated war, and though the role of poor curate would probably have made him as happy as anyone of his Franciscan temperament could be in a materialistic and self-seeking world, as an officer with the trenches in prospect he became uncertain of his own courage and felt profoundly miserable. Perhaps his most surprising quality was his beauty, which I cannot remember having seen equalled in any young man. Over six feet tall and proportionately broad, he had strongly marked, rather large features, deeply set grey-blue eyes with black lashes, and very thick, wavy brown hair. Owing to the appropriate sequence of his initials, he and Edward were known to the battalion as ‘Brit and Gryt’.

‘Public opinion has made it,’ I remarked to Roland, ‘a high and lofty virtue for us women to countenance the departure of such as these and you to regions where they will probably be slaughtered in a brutally degrading fashion in which we would never allow animals to be slaughtered . . . To the saner mind it seems more like a reason for shutting up half the nation in a criminal lunatic asylum!’

The very term in which I had gone up to Somerville and Edward had spent his few weeks in Oxford, Geoffrey had been due there at University College. After following the progress of the new Allied expedition to Salonika, and studying with mixed feelings the competitive journalistic outbursts over the shooting of Nurse Cavell, the three of us read, rather sadly, in
The Times
of October 15th, the customary account of the opening of the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, and speculated whether we should ever again see as students the grey walls clothed in their scarlet robes of autumn creeper. Would Roland, I wondered, read the article in France, and share both the poignancy of our regret and the bitter obstinacy of our determination to go on repudiating the life of scholarship that we had once chosen with such ardent enthusiasm?

On the following day, as if to justify my decision to remain away from college, my orders came from Devonshire House, telling me to report at the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell, on Monday, October 18th. Simultaneously a card arrived from Betty to say that she too had received orders to go to the same unit. Twenty-four hours later, in the midst of the rapid clearing-up and packing to which I was to grow so tediously accustomed during the next three years, I walked up and down the familiar roads, bidding a hurried good-bye to all the places made dear to me, even in Buxton, by association with Roland. It might be a long time, I thought, before I saw them again, and I was not mistaken, for I have never revisited the town since that Sunday afternoon. The leaves were falling fast, and a misty twilight quenched the autumn tints into greyness. Now that the moment of departure had come, I felt melancholy and a little afraid.

The next morning, soberly equipped in my new V.A.D. uniform, I took for the last time the early train to London, and turned my back for ever upon my provincial young-ladyhood.

5

Camberwell versus Death

TRIOLET

There’s a sob on the sea
And the Old Year is dying.
Borne on night wings to me
There’s a sob on the sea,
And for what could not be
The great world-heart is sighing.
There’s a sob on the sea
And the Old Year is dying.

R. A. L. 1913.

1

After the solid, old-fashioned comfort of the Buxton house, it seemed strange to be the quarter-possessor of a bare-boarded room divided into cubicles by much-washed curtains of no recognisable colour, with only a bed, a washstand and a tiny chest of drawers to represent one’s earthly possessions. There was not, I noticed with dismay, so much as a shelf or a mantelpiece capable of holding two or three books; the few that I had brought with me would have to be inaccessibly stored in my big military trunk.

As soon as I had unpacked in the cold, comfortless cubicle, I sat down on my bed and wrote a short letter to Roland on an old box-lid.

‘I feel a mixture of strangeness and independence and depression and apprehension and a few other things to-night. Though I am really nearer to you, you somehow feel farther away. Write to me soon,’ I implored him. ‘London - darkest London - sends you its love too, and wishes - oh! ever so much! - that it may soon see you again.’

Now two insignificant units at the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell - the military extension of St Bartholomew’s Hospital - Betty and I had reported to the Matron that afternoon. We were among the youngest members of the staff, we learnt later, only two of the other V.A.D.s being ‘under age’. The nucleus of the hospital, a large college, red, gabled, creeper-covered, is still one of the few dignified buildings in the dismal, dreary, dirty wilderness of south-east London, with its paper-strewn pavements, its little mean streets, and its old, ugly houses tumbling into squalid decay. Formerly - and now again - a training centre for teachers, it was commandeered for use as a hospital early in the War, together with some adjacent elementary schools, the open park-space opposite, and its satellite hostel nearly two miles away on Champion Hill.

To this hostel, as soon as we had reported ourselves, Betty and I were dispatched with our belongings. Our taxicab, driving through Camberwell Green over Denmark Hill and turning off the summit of Champion Hill into a pleasant, tree-shaded by-road, deposited us before a square, solid building of dirty grey stone, with gaping uncurtained windows. Closely surrounded by elms and chestnuts, tall, ancient and sooty, it looked gloomy and smelt rather dank; we should not be surprised, we thought, to find old tombstones in the garden.

At that stage of the War the military and civilian professional nurses who had joined Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service or the Territorial Force Reserve were still suspicious of the young semi-trained amateurs upon whose assistance, they were beginning to realise with dismay, they would be obliged to depend for the duration of the War. Only about a dozen V.A.D.s had preceded the batch with which I was sent, and the arrangements made for our reception were typical of the spirit in which, as a nation, we muddled our way through to ‘victory’.

It still seems to me incredible that medical men and women, of all people, should not have realised how much the efficiency of over-worked and under-trained young women would have been increased by the elimination of avoidable fatigue, and that, having contemplated the addition of V.A.D.s to the staff for at least six months before engaging them, they did not make the hostel completely ready for them before they arrived instead of waiting till they got there. But in those days we had no Institute of Industrial Psychology to suggest ideal standards to professional organisations, and a large proportion of our military arrangements were permeated with a similar unimaginativeness. On a small scale it undermined the health and even cost the lives of young women in hospitals; on a large scale it meant the lack of ammunition, the attempt to hold positions with insufficient numbers, and the annihilation of our infantry with our own high-explosive shells.

Each morning at 7 a.m. we were due at the hospital, where we breakfasted, and went on duty at 7.30. Theoretically we travelled down by the workmen’s trams which ran over Champion Hill from Dulwich, but in practice these trams were so full that we were seldom able to use them, and were obliged to walk, frequently in pouring rain and carrying suitcases containing clean aprons and changes of shoes and stockings, the mile and a half from the hostel to the hospital. As the trams were equally full in the evenings, the journey on foot had often to be repeated at the end of the day.

Whatever the weather, we were expected to appear punctually on duty looking clean, tidy and cheerful. As the V.A.D. cloak-room was then on the top floor of the college, up four flights of stone steps, we had to allow quarter of an hour for changing, in addition to the half hour’s walk, in order to be in time for breakfast. This meant leaving the hostel at 6.15, after getting up about 5.45 and washing in icy water in the dreary gloom of the ill-lit, dawn-cold cubicle. After a few grumbles from the two eldest of the room’s five occupants, we accepted our unnecessary discomforts with mute, philosophical resignation. When the rain poured in torrents as we struggled up or down Denmark Hill in the blustering darkness all through that wet autumn, Betty and I encouraged each other with the thought that we were at last beginning to understand just a little what winter meant to the men in the trenches.

Many chills and other small illnesses resulted from the damp, breakfastless walk undertaken so early in the morning by tired girls not yet broken in to a life of hardship. After I left I heard that a V.A.D. living at the hostel had died of pneumonia and had thus been responsible for the establishment of morning and evening ambulances, but until then no form of transport was provided or even suggested. Neither, apparently, did it occur to the authorities who so cheerfully billeted us in a distant, ill-equipped old house, that young untried women who were continually in contact with septic wounds and sputum cups and bed-pans, and whose constantly wet feet became cumulatively sorer from the perpetual walks added to the unaccustomed hours of standing, required at least a daily bath if they were to keep in good health.