Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (43 page)

Martyrdom, however, though admittedly uncomfortable, might have been less exasperating than the constant humiliation to which our youthful dignity, far from enabling us to shine, in the chaplain’s words, ‘as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of distress and fear’, was compelled ignominiously to submit. Our Sister-in-Charge, an Amazonian individual with a harsh voice and hawk-like features, appeared to us as one of those women whose idea of discipline is to visualise every activity that her subordinates might enjoy and then issue a general prohibition. We had not been on the ship for a day before the boat deck - the best place from which to see the unfamiliar countries that we were passing - was put out of bounds. We were also forbidden to leave our cabins in pyjamas - a regulation guaranteed to prevent all those who, like ourselves, had inside cabins, from observing any passing attraction in the way of land or ships. Had I obeyed it I should have seen neither Gibraltar at midnight nor Messina at dawn.

The V.A.D. passengers were ruthlessly divided into ‘sections’, each under a section-leader who led a dog’s life trying to keep pace with the orders issued to her. Every V.A.D. had to sit, eat and attend functions with other members of her section even though her best friend was in another - as she always was if the Sister happened to discover the friendship. Finally, as these arrangements did not separate us from the medical officers as completely as the Sister had intended, she and the Matron of the
Britannic
nursing staff - a sixty-year-old ‘dug-out’ with a red cape and a row of South African medals - ordered a rope to be stretched across the main deck to divide the V.A.D. sheep from the R.A.M.C. goats; by this expedient they hoped automatically to terminate the age-long predilection of men and women for each other’s society. After a few days, during which the more adventurous of both sexes had edged as near to the rope as they dared, and several others had regarded one another from a distance with eyes full of cupidity, the guardians of our virtue were astonished and pained beyond measure when one or two couples, being denied the opportunity of normal conversation on deck, were found in compromising positions beneath the gangways.

Late on the Sunday afternoon, we sailed. At chapel that evening, the Sisters and V.A.D.s at the 1st London General sang on our behalf the hymn: ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’ - not without good reason, as later experience was to prove. Their thought ‘for those in peril on the sea’ was perhaps stimulated by the fact that they themselves had just emerged from peril of another kind, for, on the very evening after our departure, a fleet of raiding Zeppelins dropped bombs on Purley, Streatham Hill and Brixton, doing a good deal of damage quite near to the hospital. ‘The windows of the White Horse were smashed - just where Mother and I passed that morning after saying good-bye to you,’ wrote Edward later.

‘Providence has tempered the wind to the shorn lamb again,’ I thought a little ruefully, remembering how frightened I had been of air-raids when I first went to London, and reflecting that so close a conjunction of Zeppelins and submarines might entirely have annihilated that modicum of courage which, throughout the War, only just enabled me to keep my dignity in perilous situations.

As the great screws began to thrash and throb, Betty and I, alien in our thoughts yet very glad of one another’s company, escaped to the forbidden boat deck to see the last of England. Making for the Cornish coast and the Bay of Biscay, the
Britannic
began her journey east by going west, and as we passed the Needles we seemed to sail right into the heart of a gold and purple sunset, which dazzled us with a lovely radiance too bright for human eyes. On the deck below us the R.A.M.C. orderlies were singing and dancing; we looked down upon them as though seeing a music-hall stage from the front of the dress-circle. One man who had a violin played Tosti’s ‘Good-bye’; the plaintive, familiar notes rang out into the mild September twilight.

Falling leaf and fading tree,
Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising on you and me—
Sha-dows rising - on you-ou and me!

The swallows are making them ready to fly,
Wheeling
out
- on a wind-y sky.
Good-bye, Summer - Good-bye, good-bye!
Good-bye
, Sum
-mer ! Good-bye - go-od-bye!

Now that the perils of the sea were really at hand, the terror that had hung over me since I volunteered for foreign service and for one grim second had gripped me by the throat when Betty told me that we were going to Malta, somehow seemed less imminent. The expensive equipment of our cabins was illogically reassuring; those polished tables and bevelled mirrors looked so inappropriate for the bottom of the sea. ‘We are in danger!’ I kept saying as I lay awake in the dark that night, but although we knew that our voyage was to be so much longer than we had expected, it was difficult on so warm and calm an evening to convince one’s self that at any moment might come a loud explosion, followed by a cold, choky death in the smooth black water. Later, when a storm swept over the Bay of Biscay and land was far away, the gruesome possibility seemed less remote.

Six months afterwards, writing to my mother about the torpedoing of the
Asturias
with two of our most popular Malta V.A.D.s on board, I tried to describe the disintegrating fear which left me with a sick reluctance to undertake long voyages that ignominiously persists to this day.

‘I feel so sorry for them to think it happened at night, for I remember the feelings of terror the dark hours used to bring us on the
Britannic
- feelings which, of course, we never mentioned to each other at the time but afterwards all admitted we had had. I used to look over the steep side of that tremendous ship and think to myself: “Perhaps now - or now - or now!” It is being on the
qui vive
for something that may happen any moment of any hour which makes the strain of a long voyage nowadays. “Betty” and I were not in a very good place for being torpedoed on the
Britannic
as having a cabin we were on a lower deck than most of the others, in fact we were only a yard or two from the place where the torpedo ultimately went through. I used to wake up at night and listen to the thresh of the screws and the whistle of the wind above the mastheads and the rushing of the water against the side, and wonder if any among the strange occasional crashes and bangs that went on all night was a torpedo or mine striking the ship.’

But even feeling so desperately afraid could not entirely quench the thrill of passing those far, enchanted lands which to a sixteen-year-old Cook’s tourist had seemed so inaccessible. For the whole of one long hot evening I lay on deck, still a little sick and faint from the trials of the Bay, and watched the brick-red coast of Portugal deepen into the low grey rock of Cape St Vincent. That night Gibraltar towered above us, a black shadow studded with lights, and the next morning the arrogant peaks of the Sierra Nevada leaned over the jagged summits of the Alpujarras to see the white monster, to which over-confident men and women had entrusted their lives, slip noiselessly along the menacing blue water. One day more, and the grey and purple rocks of Sardinia greeted us before we stopped for forty-eight hours to coal at Naples in the shadow of the cloud-crowned giant Vesuvius. Messina, that narrow, tragic strait perpetually guarded by the blue sentinel Etna, slipped past us in the dawn of our ninth morning afloat, and on the tenth day the Mediterranean began to gleam with great jewels - golden islands, purple-shadowed, set in a sapphire sea.

As the sun rose, the
Britannic
lurched and swayed drunkenly through the Archipelago, leaving far behind the three cruisers which were supposed to be her escort into the perilous ægean.

‘How fast we can go when we like!’ I thought admiringly, crouching in my dressing-gown with half a dozen others beside a prohibited porthole. I did not know until weeks afterwards that an enemy submarine was actually chasing us as we sat there so serenely without our lifebelts, nor realise that the beautiful ship was already doomed by a threat which was destined, in as lovely a dawn, to be cruelly fulfilled in that very place.

3

Nine hours later we lay anchored in Mudros harbour, waiting to tranship. Never before had I seen so many vessels of all kinds, great and small, old and new, British and French and Levantine. Hospital ships gleamed white and enormous above the small black cargo-boats that ran inconspicuously through the Mediterranean to take refuge in the estuaries of large rivers; gaunt Dreadnaughts lay close beside little sailing vessels, with ancient rigging so fantastic that they seemed, in the brilliant incredible light which flooded the harbour, to be no longer the property of the Levantines from the tumble-down village on the sinister shore, but the old beautiful ships of the Greeks awaiting the Persian fleet.

Behind the camps and the miserable hovels of the fishermen, range upon range of savage hills enclosed the multitude of ships within a lost, incongruous world. Above these hills, as the sun set, the distant peaks of Samothrace burst into flame, and away to the right a cone-shaped mountain summit stood out darkly against the majestic red reflected from the western sky. One of the Sisters told me that this mountain was Achi Baba, a dominant memorial to the lost gallantry wasted in the Dardanelles. ‘It gave me,’ my diary records, ‘a queer thrill to be so near, so very near, that dreadful Unknown Land - that most unknown of all this War’s unknowns - to women, at any rate.’

All afternoon and evening I stood on the deck, gazing as in a trance upon that momentous curve of Lemnos in the rich desolation of the Ægean. From this harbour, as John Masefield was even then recording, the men on the transports bound for Gallipoli had gone ‘like kings in a pageant to the imminent death’. Not far away, two days before the landing at Cape Helles, Rupert Brooke had died, and had become part of some magic island in that blue, unearthly sea. With a pang I remembered my English tutor reading his sonnets at Oxford just after Roland had gone to the front, and thought how strange it was that I should be near to Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field’ so long before I was likely to see Roland’s.

I learnt soon afterwards that Rupert Brooke had been buried on the Island of Skyros, in an olive grove above a watercourse at the foot of Mount Khokilas. By cloudy moonlight the men of his company had carried him in his uniform up the silent hill, and over his head they placed a big wooden cross and put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of the larger cross an R.N.V.R. interpreter wrote in Greek: ‘Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks.’

That night we transhipped to another hospital boat, the small Union Castle liner
Galeka
, and under cover of the darkness slipped quietly out of the harbour. Above our heads in a deep indigo sky the great pale stars shone over us, looking so much larger and nearer than they had ever seemed in Buxton or Oxford or Camberwell. It was fortunate that we had the stars to give a lofty illumination to our adventure, for our new quarters, in contrast to the superb luxury of the
Britannic
, filled us with rueful dismay.

By one of the characteristic wartime muddles of officialdom, the
Galeka
had been ordered to take many more passengers than she was able to accommodate, with the result that a hundred V.A.D.s were obliged to occupy two big ‘wards’ in the hold, which all too recently had been used by convalescent Tommies suffering from dysentery and kindred ailments. These quarters, whether for men or for women, were singularly ill-suited to a semi-tropical, submarine-infested sea. Apart from tiny portholes high above our heads and one or two electric fans, there was no method of changing or moving the hot, fœtid air, and only a narrow, ladder-like staircase, difficult to negotiate except in calm weather, provided a means of exit to the upper decks. If an enemy torpedo had struck the ship, we should have been trapped as surely as rats in a sealed sewer.

Our ‘beds’ at night were swinging iron cots, made up with the same blankets and mattresses as the sick men had used. Sleep, owing to the stuffy heat and the persistent flies, was almost impossible. Privacy, however great our need of it - and a few of us had begun inexplicably to suffer from headaches and acute diarrhœa - proved equally inaccessible, for each ward had only one washhouse, a rough annex containing several tin basins in a row, and one privy, with five tin commodes side by side and sociably free from partitions. To young women delicately brought up in fastidious homes, it was a perturbing demonstration of life as lived in the publicity of the slums. Several girls solved the ablution problem by not washing at all, but the other difficulty was less easily remedied. We began by using the five-seated privy one at a time, but the waiting queues became so lengthy that this form of individualism soon proved impracticable.

However, I was not long in a condition to be oppressed by such inconveniences. On the third morning in the new ship, a feverish discomfort that I had endured for two days turned suddenly to shivering fits and a stiffening of the limbs. Shamefaced but rather alarmed, I reported sick, and was greeted with the words: ‘What? Another!’ and sent to my cot in the sweltering hold. Sixteen V.A.D.s altogether retired there that day, smitten by a mysterious disease which later caused quite a mild sensation, followed by an epidemic of research amongst the medical officers in Malta.

Indescribably hot, aching in every limb and semi-delirious, I was hardly conscious of anxious visits from the Matron and the chief Medical Officer, but lay listening to the groans of my fellow-sufferers, and watching the legions of indeterminate insects crawling along the wooden flooring above my head, until I fell feverishly asleep. When I did have to visit the communal lavatory, my soaring temperature rendered me equally indifferent to the altruistic friends who helped me there, and the strangers already in occupation. During the stuporous night the drowsiness of fever at last quenched my terror of torpedoes, although the danger was far from over. Throughout our journey from Mudros to Malta, an enemy submarine which no boat could locate lurked unmolested in the Mediterranean; it sank the Cunarder
Franconia
on October 4th, and the same day torpedoed a French transport, the
Gallia
, quite close to us, with a loss of six hundred lives. Altogether, the situation seemed a curious comment on my father’s fear, two or three years earlier, that if I went to a finishing school in Paris I might develop appendicitis.