Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (45 page)

5

After a week at St George’s Hospital I decided that, although lonely, I was really quite happy. My loneliness was due to the speedy drifting away of Betty, who, having so far neither loved nor lost, did not share my depressing predilection for solitary meditations on the rocks or wanderings
a‘ deux
about the uninhabited parts of the island. Her more normal instincts, intensified by the social bias of her upbringing, led her to prefer the naval society of Valletta, and, fortified by introductions from home, she was quickly absorbed into its tennis-parties and teas.

I did not much miss her as soon as I grew stronger, and began to enjoy the work which just after my illness had seemed so exhausting. The hospital, like Imtarfa, was an ex-barracks built entirely of stone, with marquees for extra beds, and the nursing staff was posted not to wards but to ‘blocks’, which were long, narrow, twostoried buildings, with open verandahs above and below. Half a dozen or more small wards, each containing from ten to twenty beds, opened off each verandah. In nearly all the blocks the V.A.D. was left on duty alone - a responsibility never permitted her at the 1st London General - for either the afternoon or the evening, and was often in charge of over a hundred patients.

After the fatiguing stuffiness of the hot wards in Camberwell, this open-air life in the warm sun beside a sparkling sea sent me tripping up and down the blocks with a renewed youthful vigour which even intervals of remorseful grief could not permanently quench. There was a definite pleasure in the limitation of discipline to essentials, as well as in the relaxed uniform regulations, which allowed the addition of a white drill coat and skirt, white shoes, panama hat and blue crêpe-de-Chine mess dress to our ugly outdoor uniform. At night came a final joy, when I stood on the verandah outside the stone-floored room shared with only one other V.A.D., and looked across the silver streak of St George’s Bay between black rocks to the moonlit expanse of sea and the dark shadows of occasional ships passing close to the shore. The notes of ‘The Last Post’, as they died away over the water each evening, sounded so poignant that I never could hear them without a pricking of the eyes.

‘I continue to like the whole place immensely,’ runs a letter written to my mother on November 6th. ‘They even give lectures - good ones - on nursing to V.A.D.s here, which they would never do at Camberwell - chiefly, so I always imagined, because they were afraid of V.A.D.s getting to know too much. In fact they used to say we were there to be useful and not to be taught things, which seems rather a contradictory point of view.’

This 1st London General attitude to V.A.D.s was typical of the nursing profession as a whole, especially in England, where the introduction of semi-trained Red Cross probationers into military hospitals had pushed to a crisis the thirty-year-old struggle for the registration of nurses. The Matron at Camberwell was always scrupulously just to us in practice, but we must have been bogies to her in theory, for she and other promoters of state registration evidently visualised a post-war professional chaos in which hundreds of experienced V.A.D.s would undercut and supplant the fully qualified nurses. Actually, this fear was groundless; all but a very few V.A.D.s were only too thankful when the War was over to quit a singularly backward profession for their own occupations and interests, but many ‘trained women’, having no such interests themselves, could not believe that others were attracted by them. The presence of Red Cross nurses drove some of them almost frantic with jealousy and suspicion, which grew in intensity as the V.A.D.s increased in competence.

With November began the rainy season, when nights of thunder and fierce lightning followed copper-red sunsets, and tremendous gales left the sea with a swept and garnished appearance which filled us with dread for the ships in the Mediterranean. The furious wind blew the rain with such violence into the open verandah that water ricocheted off the stone walls and floors in a constant splash, and we were obliged to go on duty clad in black mackintoshes, gum-boots and sou’-westers.

‘The doors and shutters are always blowing open and letting in a chill blast heavy with rain,’ I wrote to my mother. ‘One often wakes at night to hear the wind howling, the sea raging and the rain coming down with the sound of an express train rushing past. Having one’s meals in the mess tent . . . is like sitting under a wet umbrella; the rain rattles on the canvas above, occasionally leaking through on to your head; tent poles and lights sway together till one feels confused and sleepy, and the water comes in at the sides of the tent and runs under the tables.’

About the middle of the month Edward’s sick-leave ended, and he returned to light duty with the 3rd Sherwood Foresters at Cleadon Hutments, near Sunderland. A letter came from him, mentioning a new British attack against the German front line at Thiepval and Beaumont Hamel, just after I had been to Pieta‘ Cemetery, the military burial-ground on the road from Valletta to Hamrun, to find the grave of one of the Buxton boys who had been buried among the purple bougainvillæa and the little stiff cypresses after dying at Cottonera Hospital from typhoid contracted in Gallipoli. To his mother in Buxton I sent a carefully wrapped pink geranium picked from his grave before I opened Edward’s sad little note briefly describing the end of the two friends who had been with him on the Somme.

‘Captain H.’s body was found quite close to the old front line of July 1st. E. of Authuille Wood as far as I know but I should think it was hardly recognisable . . . N. was hit in the head by a sniper after capturing the German front line at Le Sars on Oct. 1st; he is buried in Peake Wood near Contalmaison.’

In the midst of the fear-inspiring gales, it was hard to believe that I should see my beloved three again before they had joined those friends in the crowded earth.

‘It is such a wild, stormy night, and the sea is beating the rocks like anything,’ I wrote to him in reply one desolate evening. ‘On this island, the land seems to shrink as one knows it better, and the miles and miles of sea between here and home to get longer and longer . . . One begins to understand a little the significance of the Revelation - “And there was no more sea.” For here sea is the very symbol of separation.’

We were certainly surrounded by a sea which held terrors never contemplated even by the prophetic author of the Revelation, for Malta from 1916 to 1917 was in the very centre of submarine warfare. Our daily life was dominated by maritime disasters; our conversation turned perpetually upon the dangers that threatened our letters, our parcels and our supplies. For meat, milk, jam and fish we were dependent upon tinned and dried foods from England, as fresh fish was unobtainable, goat’s milk unsafe, and the water undrinkable until it had been chlorinated.

‘Our extreme care at home to have nothing tinned amuses me now,’ I commented in one letter. Even the fruit and vegetables so plentiful upon the island could not be eaten raw on account of dysentery germs. Our systems, stimulated by energetic work and an outdoor life, never seemed to get as much sugar as they required, and whenever we were off duty we gorged ourselves with incredible avidity upon biscuits and sweets supplied by friends from home, who must have been horrified by our constant demands at a time when sugar was becoming the housekeeper’s nightmare.

My letters from Malta are full of wrecks and drownings; the sinking of ships provided much the same drama for us as a great battle for the hospitals of England and France. The
Arabia
was torpedoed a month after I landed, and constant rumours of submarine damage or alleged threats of bombardment by Austrian vessels kept our excitement up to fever pitch. Each new wreck was followed by an influx of half-drowned patients suffering from shock; having lost everything but the clothes that they arrived in, they bought up half the garments in Valletta. During the winter of 1916 the shops could hardly cope with the demands of stranded sailors and passengers, for their own supplies frequently went to the bottom, together with the tea and sugar intended for the hospitals.

‘If Malta existed solely for the reception of torpedoed people it would have fulfilled its mission in life,’ I wrote to my family.

In the third week of November, three hospital ships were sunk almost simultaneously. A few hours before the Anglican chaplain told us of the death of the Emperor Francis Joseph, we learnt that the
Britannic
had gone down in the Ægean. The news of her loss galvanised the island like an electric shock. A week later, the rescued members of her staff came on to Malta after spending some days in nursing their own sick and wounded at the Russian hospital in Athens, and were distributed among the various hospitals. As the clothing stores in Valletta were now temporarily depleted, we supplied the refugees with our own pyjamas and undergarments and hot-water bottles until they could return to England and re-equip. Boy-Scout hats from the Serbian Relief Fund picturesquely crowned the miscellaneous garments in which they were arrayed.

Among the sick was a young, cheerful Sister who had made friends with Betty and myself on the voyage to Mudros. We went to see her at Floriana Hospital, in Valletta, and found her completely changed - nervous, distressed and all the time on the verge of crying. But to talk of the disaster seemed to bring her relief, and from her conversation we learnt the story of the ship’s last hours.

The explosion, she told us, occurred during breakfast; it blew up the bottom of the main staircase, together with an orderly who happened to be there at the time. The nursing staff marched quietly out of the dining-saloon; they were told to fetch any valuables that they could get quickly and reassemble at once on the boat deck. The ‘valuables’ taken illustrated the strange workings of a mind trying to control its own panic; one girl seized her fountain pen and left £30 in notes under her pillow.

The old Matron, motionless as a rock, sat on the boat deck and counted the Sisters and nurses as they filed past her into the boats, refusing to leave until all were assembled. None of the women were lost; but a number of casualties occurred among the orderlies through the smashing of the last two boats by the huge propeller as the ship lurched over on her side. The medical officers, remaining to the end, climbed down the wire ropes - which almost cut their hands to pieces - dropped into the sea in their lifebelts, and struggled to the boats already afloat. Two of them disappeared and were never accounted for.

In one of the boats sat the Matron, looking towards the doomed
Britannic
while the rest of its occupants, with our friend amongst them, anxiously scanned the empty horizon. She saw the propeller cut a boat in half and fling its mutilated victims into the air, but, for the sake of the young women for whom she was responsible, she never uttered a sound nor moved a muscle of her grim old face. What a pity it is, I meditated as I listened, remembering the rope across the deck, that outstanding heroism seems so often to be associated with such unmitigated limitations! How seldom it is that this type of courage goes with an imaginative heart, a sensitive, intelligent mind!

They had spent three hours in the boats, concluded the Sister, before they saw two rescuing destroyers racing over the edge of the calm, sunny sea. Among those saved was a stewardess who had been on the
Titanic
, two medical officers from the torpedoed
Galeka
, and a released officer-prisoner from Würtemberg who was suffering from nerve-strain and had been ordered a sea voyage for the benefit of his health. At first their rescuers had looked, not for the boats, but for the
Britannic
herself, never dreaming, in spite of the fate of the
Lusitania
, that so great a ship could have gone down so soon.

Actually, she sank in three-quarters of an hour, and for many of the survivors, already sick with shock, the worst part of their ordeal was the sight of her disappearance. Incredulously horrified, they watched porthole after porthole slide under the water, until at length she heeled right over and went down in a pitiless whirlpool. The dreadful cry of the last siren, ‘All hands off the ship!’ just before she sank, would haunt their nights, our friend said, for the rest of their lives.

6

In England the sinking of the hospital ships and the gravity of the news from Roumania intensified the growing popular belief that our failure to beat the Germans months ago, and thus forestall these disasters, must be somehow due to inefficient political leadership. So Mr Asquith and his unwieldy Cabinet became the whipping-boys of emotional chagrin, and a letter from my uncle, after mentioning the probable appointment of a Food Dictator and the establishment of ‘meatless days’, discussed the Government crisis and the possibility of ‘the lethargic 23’ being replaced by a War Cabinet of five.

‘Either Mr Lloyd George or Sir Edward Carson are fancied for the Premiership and I think we should do well with either. Undoubtedly where warfare is concerned we want business men rather than politicians to direct affairs, and certainly the only man in the Government of the present who shows real power and the strength of mind to use it is Mr Lloyd George. He has consistently from the outbreak of War shown himself a strong man in every sense of the word.’

The enormous prestige of Mr Lloyd George and his Government in the eyes of the ‘plain man’ at this time is reflected in later letters, written when the War Cabinet had been in existence for two or three weeks. Apparently their popularity reached its height when they loftily rejected the idea of a ‘negotiated peace’; no one, it seemed, wanted to discuss anything so academic - except a strange little society which I had just seen mentioned in the newspapers, called the Union of Democratic Control. This amazingly optimistic organisation, I read, had actually held a meeting at Walthamstow to urge rational consideration of the peace proposals - and had of course had it broken up for their pains.