Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (40 page)

‘I’m more than ever convinced,’ Victor said to me afterwards, ‘that it’s worse for him than it was for Roland. Edward entirely lacks any primitive warring side to his character such as Roland possessed . . . I don’t think that the heroic and glorious side of war appeals to him as it did to Roland and I think that this makes it much harder for him.’

Later he told me that Edward had said to him at Purfleet: ‘The thought of those lines of trenches gives me a sick feeling in the stomach.’

Just after Edward’s return to France, I had the first of those dreams which were to recur, in slightly different variations, at frequent intervals for nearly ten years. Sometimes, in these dreams, Roland was minus an arm or a leg, or so badly mutilated or disfigured that he did not want me to see him; sometimes he had merely grown tired of all of us and of England, and was trying to become another person in a country far away. But always he was alive, and within range of sight and touch after the conquest of some minor impediment.

‘I thought that Tah and I suddenly got a letter each in Roland’s handwriting,’ I told Edward. ‘In the dream we knew he was dead just as we do in everyday life. I opened mine with the very strange kind of feeling that one would have if such a thing happened actually. In the letter he said it was all a mistake that he was dead, and that he was really a prisoner in Germany but so badly maimed that he would never be able to get back again. I felt a sudden overwhelming feeling of relief to think he was after all alive under any circumstances whatever, and I gazed and gazed at the familiar handwriting on both Tah’s letter and mine, marvelling that it was really his, and as I gazed at it, it seemed gradually to change and become more and more different, till finally it was not like his at all.’

Edward’s reply closed with one or two sentences that quickened the sense of forboding anxiety which I had felt since his departure.

‘I am sure you will be interested to hear that we have quite a lot of celery growing near our present position.’ (‘The celery is ripe’ was for some obscure reason the phrase chosen by us to indicate that an attack was about to come off.) ‘It is ripening quickly although it is being somewhat delayed by this cold and wet weather we are having lately, and if the weather continues better I expect it will be ready in about a week.’

At the end of June, the hospital received orders to clear out all convalescents and prepare for a great rush of wounded. We knew that already a tremendous bombardment had begun, for we could feel the vibration of the guns at Camberwell, and the family in Keymer heard them continuously. The sickening, restless apprehension of those days reminded me of the week before Loos, but now there was no riverside bank beside which to dream, no time to spare for the somnolent misery of suspense. Hour after hour, as the convalescents departed, we added to the long rows of waiting beds, so sinister in their white, expectant emptiness.

On June 30th, a tiny pencilled note came from Edward. ‘The papers,’ it announced tersely, ‘are getting rather more interesting, but I have only time to say adieu.’

Obviously the moment that I had dreaded for a month was imminent, and I had no choice but to face it. How much longer was there, I wondered, to wait in this agony of fear? Had I time to get one last message through to Edward before the attack began? I decided to try; and sent off a letter that night.

‘Your little note has made me very sad. It seems not even yet time to cry “Will the night soon pass?” for you are very right, all too right, about the papers; the news this morning is like the sinister gathering of a thunderstorm just about to break overhead. There seems to be an atmosphere of tense expectation about all the world, and a sense of anguished foreknowledge of the sacrifice that is to be made . . . But I know you will not forget that as long as I am alive . . . I shall always remember all the things that both you and he meant and wished to do and be, and that as far as I am able, they shall all be fulfilled.

‘I say this because the remembrance of his death is with me very vividly to-day; I say it too because in your little note - in case of what may be - you say farewell. Adieu, then, if it must be. But I still prefer to say, and believe, what I said before at Piccadilly Circus—

“
Au revoir
.” ’

10

By the next day, July 1st, all the beds were ready, and Betty and I were each given an afternoon off duty. Neither of us felt in the mood for shops, or restaurants, or the proletarian
camaraderie
of the parks in midsummer, but we had heard that Brahm’s Requiem was to be sung that afternoon at Southwark Cathedral, and we decided to go.

‘What a theme for what a day!’ I thought afterwards. In the cool darkness of the Cathedral, so quieting after the dusty, reeking streets of Camberwell, we listened, with aching eyes, to the solemn words in their lovely, poignant setting:

Lord, make me to know what the measure of my days may
be, let me know all my frailty, ere death overtake me.
Lord God, all my days here are but a span long to
Thee, and my being naught within Thy sight . . .
O Lord, who will console me? My hope is in Thee.

When the organ had throbbed away into silence, we came out from the dim, melodious peace to hear the shouting of raucous voices, and to see newspaper boys with huge posters running excitedly up and down the pavement. Involuntarily I clutched Betty’s arm, for the posters ran:

‘GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS.’

A boy thrust a
Star
into my hand, and, shivering with cold in the hot sunshine, I made myself read it.

‘BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS - OFFICIAL

‘FRONT LINE BROKEN OVER ‘16 MILES

‘FRENCH SHARE ADVANCE

‘THE FIGHTING DEVELOPING IN ‘INTENSITY

‘British Headquarters, France.

‘
Saturday
, 9.30 a.m.

‘British Offensive. At about half-past seven o’clock this morning a vigorous offensive was launched by the British Army. The front extends over about 20 miles north of the Somme.

‘The assault was preceded by a terrific bombardment, lasting about an hour and a half.

‘It is too early as yet to give anything but the barest particulars, as the fighting is developing in intensity, but the British troops have already occupied the German front lines.’

Two days afterwards, that singularly wasteful and ineffective orgy of slaughter which we now know as the Battle of the Somme was described by
The Times
correspondent as ‘90 miles of uproar’:

‘For nearly four whole days now the 90 miles of the lines along the British front have been 90 miles of almost continuous chaos, of uproar and desolation. Day by day our bombardment has grown in intensity, until under the dreadful hurricane whole reaches of the enemy’s trenches have been battered out of existence.’

Only the mechanical habit of work which I had by now acquired enabled me to get through that evening, for the whole of my conscious mind resolved itself into one speculation: Was Edward still in the world - or not? At the hostel, after supper, I wrote to my mother; I did not know how much Edward had told her, but if he was dead it seemed better that she should share my knowledge and be forewarned. It surprises me still that I was able to write so calmly, so unemotionally. The whole of my generation seems always to have worn, for the benefit of its parents, a personality not quite its own, and I often wonder if, in days to come, my own son and daughter will assume for me the same alien disguise.

‘The news in the paper, which we got at 4.0 this afternoon, is quite self-evident,’ ran my letter, ‘so I needn’t say much about it. London was wildly excited and the papers selling madly. Of course you remember that Edward is at Albert and it is all round there that the papers say the fighting is fiercest - Montaubon, Fricourt, Mametz. I have been expecting this for days, as when he was here he told me that the great offensive was to begin there and of the part his own regiment was to play in the attack.’

For the next three days I lived and worked in hourly dread of a telegram. Had it not been for the sympathy of Geoffrey and Victor, and the knowledge that they too were watching and waiting in similar anxiety, this new suspense would have been overwhelming. Geoffrey wrote from Brocton Camp, in Staffordshire, where he was once more temporarily attached to the 13th Sherwood Foresters, to tell me that nine officers were going to the front from his battalion next day; he would have been going himself were he not on a course which lasted five more weeks. He’d been thinking about us all more than usual, he said, and only hoped that Edward would be as well looked after as himself ‘out there’. For many things, he concluded, he yearned to be there once more, and yet he knew that when the summons came again he would dread it - ‘or, to use a balder word, funk it’ - which was, he seemed to think, an awful confession to make, ‘as it’s absolutely the only thing now.’

On Sunday, the day after the battle, Victor came up from Purfleet to see me, for he too had had a note from Edward similar to mine. ‘The remark “One can only hope they will follow” now applies. I am so busy that I have only time for material things. And so I must bid you a long, long adieu.’

Throughout the brief hour of my off-duty time we walked up and down St James’s Park, staring with unseeing eyes at the ducks fluttering over what was left of the lake - which was being drained to make room for Army huts - while Victor vainly tried to convince me how excellent were Edward’s chances of survival, since he was the kind of person who always kept his head in a crisis.

Next day we were told that the first rush of wounded was on its way to Camberwell.

‘This afternoon,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘the hospital was warned to get ready for 150 patients, 50 officers and 100 men. We had not really that much accommodation for officers, so all the patients from one of the surgical wards in the College were transferred into one of the new huts and their ward made into an officers’ ward. There was terrific tearing about all afternoon and everyone available was sent for to help haul mattresses, trollies and patients about . . . When I came off duty to-night the convoy had not yet arrived but was expected any hour. We were all warned by Matron to-night that very busy and strenuous days are ahead of us, and all our own arrangements must go quite on one side for the time being.’

At the usual ‘break’ for 9.30 biscuits and apron-changing next morning I had only a few moments’ respite, as the ‘Fall In’ had already sounded for the first expected ambulances. But on my way to the dining-hall I went - as I had gone at every available opportunity during the past three days - to the V.A.D. sitting-room to take another fearful glance at the letter-rack, and there, high above the other letters, I saw a crushed, pencil-scrawled envelope addressed in Edward’s handwriting. In a panic of relief - for at least he couldn’t be dead - I pulled it down, but even then I could hardly open it, for the paper was so thin and my fingers shook so.

The little note was dated July 1st, and the written words were faint and uneven.

‘DEAR VERA,’ it said, ‘I was wounded in the action this morning in left arm and right thigh not seriously. Hope to come to England. Don’t worry. EDWARD.’

For a moment the empty room spun round; then I remembered the waiting ambulances and the Sister’s injunction to ‘hurry back.’ In the effort of pulling myself together I recalled, too, that I could save my father and mother, whose letters arrived in Macclesfield a day later than mine, another twenty-four hours of cruel anxiety. Regardless of the indignant glances of Sisters who knew that V.A.D.s were allowed to run only in cases of hæmorrhage or fire, I dashed like a young hare down the stone corridor to the telephone and asked my uncle at the National Provincial Bank to wire to the family.

‘I hope they will send him to England soon . . .’ I wrote home late that night, ‘but we hear hundreds and probably thousands of them are waiting to come across . . . the large number of officers we were expecting yesterday did not arrive . . . There were so many wounded the day before . . . that there were not platforms enough at Charing Cross to land them and they had to be taken round to Paddington . . . Do you see his regiment is mentioned as having done specially well in the battle by
The Times
’ special correspondent to-day? It would be funny if he turned up here. I only wish he would.’

On that morning, July 4th, began the immense convoys which came without cessation for about a fortnight, and continued at short intervals for the whole of that sultry month and the first part of August. Throughout those ‘busy and strenuous days’ the wards sweltered beneath their roofs of corrugated iron; the prevailing odour of wounds and stinking streets lingered perpetually in our nostrils, the red-hot hardness of paths and pavements burnt its way through the soles of our shoes. Day after day I had to fight the queer, frightening sensation - to which, throughout my years of nursing, I never became accustomed - of seeing the covered stretchers come in, one after another, without knowing, until I ran with pounding heart to look, what fearful sight or sound or stench, what problem of agony or imminent death, each brown blanket concealed.