Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (36 page)

For the next few nights, I was sent on temporary duty to a variety of unknown wards. The Matron, whose humane sympathy had already extended my leave, no doubt meant to protect me from the tactless condolences of my former patients, but the experiment was not a success. With the Scottish Sister in my familiar ward - where the lively arguments about the evacuation of Gallipoli would not long have been diverted to the sorrows of a nurse over one more man ‘gone west’ - I might have settled down into some kind of routine, but a series of strange Sisters and patients provided me with no incentive to forget myself in work. As I was conspicuously not sleeping and must have appeared the ghost of the excited girl who went on leave - indeed, I felt as though I had gone down to death with Roland and been disinterred as somebody else - the Matron sent for me and offered to put me, with Betty, back on day-duty.

Obstinately I refused the concession, ungraciously insisting that I had ‘got to get through this alone’, but in the next ward to which I was sent I much regretted my stupidity, for the work was depressing beyond description. A harsh, intolerant day Sister carped at me perpetually, attributing every small mishap in her ward to my nocturnal activities, while her V.A.D., who was shortly getting married, exasperated me with her jubilant complacency and the freedom with which she shared her romance with the men - particularly as, unconsciously cruel, they persisted in discussing it with me. To complete my nervous misery, a paralytic patient required constant uninviting ministrations, and drove me half crazy with the animal noises which he emitted at intervals all through the night.

Even death was evidently better than paralysis, I reflected miserably, vainly endeavouring to defeat thought by working my way with resentful conscientiousness through the pile of correspondence that had descended upon me. At the beginning of 1916 the amount and variety of letters of sympathy were still overwhelming, for reiteration had not yet wearied the pens of the sympathisers, but out of them all only two really counted. One of these came from my English tutor, to whom also the War had brought a measure of personal sorrow. Her brief, grave note, suggesting as consolation the living beauty of the life that was gone, assumed a degree of contemplative detachment of which I was then quite incapable. But it comforted me, with its beautiful scholarly script, in a way probably unguessed by the writer, for it represented a link with the world once so rapturously chosen and now incredibly remote - the world of intellectual experiment, of youthful hope, of all the profound and lovely things that belong to the kingdom of the mind. Yet it was to the other letter, so great a contrast in its shy abruptness, that I turned still oftener.

‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ Geoffrey had written from the bleak perils of the Salient, vainly striving for words that would express his acute sensitiveness to another’s pain. There were times, he said, when letters were but empty things, and he could not write.

By the end of January, Camberwell and its demands had come to seem unspeakably hateful. I had hardly realised how entirely it had been the eagerness to share Roland’s discomforts which had made me shoulder the disagreeable tasks left over by everyone else, but now that he was dead the stultifying monotony of the rough work that I had once found so inspiring weighed upon me with growing heaviness, and the increasing consciousness of loss and frustration filled me with impotent fury and resentment.

‘Everything is so exactly the same as it was before, which brings it all back so vividly,’ I wrote to Edward. ‘It seems unendurable that everything should be the same.’

The Sisters must have been disconcerted by the change in me, for I now evaded all but the most obvious duties, and took an infinite time to perform the simplest tasks, while the inquisitive pity of the V.A.D.s soon turned to bewildered impatience. No doubt they would have understood a sentimental, dependent sorrow, with hair-stroking at bedtime and hand-holdings in the dark, but they were not unnaturally baffled by an aloof, rigid grief, which abhorred their sympathy, detested their collective gigglings and prattlings, and hated them most of all for being alive when Roland was dead. Betty, in spite of much rough treatment, was invariably gentle, but Mina wrote two or three reproachful letters, scolding me for having become - as Betty had told her - so ‘difficult’. The sooner I left that hospital, the better for everyone concerned it would be, her final effort concluded severely.

Numerous other correspondents counselled patience and endurance; time, they told me with maddening unanimity, would heal. I resented the suggestion bitterly; I could not believe it, and did not even want it to be true. If time did heal I should not have kept faith with Roland, I thought, clinging assiduously to my pain, for I did not then know that if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead.

Deliberately I turned my back upon my companions at the hospital, and except when Edward or Victor came up to town, spent all my off-duty time alone. Driven in upon myself, I sought such consolation as I could find in books and letters, and in Sunday morning visits to the Catholic church of St James’s, Spanish Place. Roland, his mother told me, had often gone to this church; long before the impulse had seized him to put ‘R.C.’ in the space for ‘Religion’ in his Army papers, he had been attracted by the sybaritic mysticism of the Catholic faith. I could not follow him there, being temperamentally too much of an agnostic to become a convert even in tribute to his memory. But as I knelt, drowsy with sleeplessness, at High Mass beneath the tall, pointed arches, the lovely Latin intonations which I could not follow flowed over me with anodyne sweetness, drugging my senses with temporary resignation to the burden of my sorrow.

In my wooden hut, by means of a folding card-table and a remnant of black satin for tablecloth, I made a small shrine for a few of the books that Roland and I had admired and read together.
The Story of an African Farm
was there and
The Poems of Paul Verlaine
, as well as
The Garden of Kama
and
Pêcheur d’Islande
. To these I added Robert Hugh Benson’s Prayer Book,
Vexilla Regis
, not only in honour of Roland’s Catholicism, but because my mother had sent me some lines, which I frequently read and cried over, from Benson’s ‘Prayer after a Crushing Bereavement’:

‘And lastly to me who am left to mourn his departure, grant that I may not sorrow as one without hope for my beloved who sleeps in Thee; but that, always remembering his courage, and the love that united us on earth, I may begin again with new courage to serve Thee more fervently who art the only source of true love and true fortitude; that, when I have passed a few more days in this valley of tears and in this shadow of death, supported by Thy rod and staff, I may see him again, face to face, in those pastures and amongst those waters of comfort where, I trust, he already walks with Thee. Oh Shepherd of the Sheep, have pity upon this darkened soul of mine!’

Fifteen years were to pass before Bertrand Russell, ruthlessly undeluded by beatific visions of a compensating futurity, published
The Conquest of Happiness
, with its unresigned, unpitying exhortation to the bereaved:

‘A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident.’

Both passages are beautiful, and Benson’s has a faith and a mysticism which Russell’s lacks, but if I were to suffer the same loss to-day, it would be in Russell, and not in Benson, that I should find courage and comfort.

4

Whenever half-days made it possible, I escaped from London to the family at Keymer, but in the daily three-hour intervals a new source of consolation presented itself, unexpectedly enough, in the person of Victor. His meningitis had apparently entitled him to indefinite light duty combined with frequent and prolonged periods of leave, and these he dedicated entirely to my service, unobtrusively constituting himself the Father Confessor that he had once been to Roland.

Towards himself his attitude was consistently humble. ‘I am a very ordinary and matter-of-fact person,’ he told me once. Upon his friends he made no demands, but continually encouraged the staking of claims upon himself by others. On alternate Sundays, when I was off duty in the evening, we had supper together for several fortnights running at the Trocadero, where I was always the talker and he the patient, untiring listener. However much I railed, complained and lamented, his dark, considerate eyes never lost their gentle expression of interested attention.

For the first two months after my return to Camberwell, we seem to have corresponded every few days. His letters in their sloping, ingenuous hand now appear pathetically childish, and yet so maturely selfless in their obvious determination to see both sides of every problem, and then to give exactly the advice likely to prove most congenial to the inquirer. As the details of Roland’s last moments came through, he must have spent hours in laboriously writing to explain how important it was that the wire should be mended even on a moonlit night, while ‘the best traditions of the Regular Army’ demanded that a platoon commander should inspect the damage himself even when the occasion was dangerous.

At the time - accustomed though I was by Roland’s passionate vitality to quite a different manifestation of youth - I did not perceive the ingenuous childishness; I realised only the healing balm of unself-regarding sympathy, and found the long, boyish letters very comforting. His unmitigated kindness, his gift of consolation and his imaginative pity for the sorrows of others, still impress me, when I re-read his letters, as quite astonishing in a young man at an egotistical age.

The more I came to detest my work at Camberwell, the more I relied upon my short intervals with Roland’s family to give some purpose to an existence which seemed to have become singularly pointless. Two or three weeks after Roland’s death, his mother began to write, in semi-fictional form, a memoir of his life, which she finished in three months, as well as replying at length to letters of condolence from friends and readers all over the country. At the end of that time she had a short breakdown from shock and overwork, and was in bed warding off serious heart trouble for several weeks. The many occasions on which I went down to see her and discuss the publication of her memoir, filled me with longing to write a book about Roland myself, but I concluded that three months was too short a time for me to see personal events in their true perspective. I would wait, I decided, rather longer than that before contributing my own account of his brief, vivid existence. I should have been astonished indeed had anyone told me that I should wait for seventeen years.

In Sussex, by the end of January, the season was already on its upward grade; catkins hung bronze from the bare, black branches, and in the damp lanes between Hassocks and Keymer the birds sang loudly. How I hated them as I walked back to the station one late afternoon, when a red sunset turned the puddles on the road into gleaming pools of blood, and a new horror of mud and death darkened my mind with its dreadful obsession. Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet evening in early spring.

I had arrived at the cottage that morning to find his mother and sister standing in helpless distress in the midst of his returned kit, which was lying, just opened, all over the floor. The garments sent back included the outfit that he had been wearing when he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics - the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry. Those gruesome rags made me realise, as I had never realised before, all that France really meant. Eighteen months afterwards the smell of Etaples village, though fainter and more diffused, brought back to me the memory of those poor remnants of patriotism.

‘Everything,’ I wrote later to Edward, ‘was damp and worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been, you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies - dead that had been dead a long, long time . . . There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition - the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head - with the badge thickly coated with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.’

Edward wrote gently and humbly in reply, characteristically emphasising the simple, less perturbing things that I had mentioned in another part of my letter.

‘I expect he had only just received the box of cigarettes and the collars and braces I gave him for Christmas and I feel glad that he did get them because he must have thought of me then.’