Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (48 page)

My reply to Edward’s letter described accurately enough the limitations characteristic of most middle-class girls before and during the War.

‘So many people are attracted by the opposite sex simply because it
is
the opposite sex - the average officer and the average “nice”
³¹
girl demand, I am sure, little else but this. But where you and I are concerned, sex by itself doesn’t interest us unless it is united with brains and personality; in fact we tend to think of the latter first and the person’s sex afterwards. This is quite enough to put you off the average “nice” girl, who would neither give you what you want nor make the effort herself to try and understand you when other men, who can give her what
she
wants, are so much easier to understand . . .

‘I think the old saw about young women being so much older than young men for their age, has always been very untrue and since the War is more so than ever. Women “grow up” in a certain sense (that of finishing their education just when they ought to begin it) much sooner than men and so get a sort of superficial “grown-upness” due to mixing with people and going out in a way the boy of the same age doesn’t. But in the things that really count it is the boy who is grown up; he has had responsibilities which under the present benighted system of educating women she has never had the fringe of . . . The boy of eighteen or nineteen has probably - and since the War certainly - had to cope with questions of morality and immorality whose seriousness would astound her if she understood it, and deal with subjects of whose very existence she is probably ignorant. Of course a man doesn’t mind the superficiality of inexperience if all he asks of her is her sex, but you . . . are different . . . I have noticed occasionally a slight suspicion of patronage in your dealings with women; I don’t really think this is because you think their sex inferior so much as you realise their inferiority (as it probably is) to you in personality and brain. I, conversely, feel the same, with many men! But it is necessary to be rather more careful in dealing with women, as if a man patronises a woman she always thinks it is because of her sex, whereas if a woman patronises a man, he (if he is cute enough to notice it, which he generally isn’t) never puts it down to
his
! I think there’s every hope for you in time to come from some woman several years older than you are now.’

9

By the middle of March the sunny afternoons had become as hot and sleepy as an English July. In Gargar Ravine, a deep valley where the greenest grass in Malta was strewn with grey boulders of incalculable age, scarlet anemones and a dozen varieties of vetch - yellow and mauve and cerise and orange and purple - sprang up beneath the old stumpy trees, with their dry, hollow trunks and dark, smooth leaves. The ravine must have been an ancient watercourse, for maidenhair fern grew in the damp crevices of the rocks and between the stones of the steps leading upwards to cultivated fields. The asphodels and oxalis were now over, but heavy masses of magenta clover, four times the size of the English variety, covered the ground, and mauve and pink gladioli held their slender, spiky heads erect in the warm, scented air.

Now that Edward, who had been ordered to take two successive officers’ courses, was safely in England for a few more months, I should have been drugged into comfortable peace by the calm, drowsy weather and the lovely, serene flowers, had not my letters from France continually sounded a note of apprehension, a warning yet again of approaching calamity. Geoffrey wrote ruefully that leave was remote, and a course for which he had hoped to be sent to the Base had been cancelled, while Victor deplored his lack of a consoling religious philosophy, and regretfully described himself as ‘an awful atheist’. He only wished, he confessed, that he were not, for in the New Army soldiers were made, not born, and with the knowledge of a coming ordeal in the near future, a man required something more to fall back upon than self-manufactured ideals. Not only, he said, were those ideals liable to be insufficient and unpractical, but even so they were hard enough for ‘unsoldierly natures’ like his to live up to. ‘If I only had a tenth of such a personality as Roland’s, I should have no anxieties about the future.’

Towards the end of the month I was put on night-duty in the eye and malaria block where I had started work at St George’s. Here I was in sole charge except for the occasional visits of the night-superintendent and the ‘co-operation’ of an orderly, who slept soundly for about ten hours out of the twelve. He explained to me his own theory of night-duty the first evening that I appeared on the block.

‘What I always says is, Sister, when a man asks you for a drink in the middle of the night and you gives it ’im, you wakes ’im up thoroughly. If you don’t take no notice, ’e just goes off to sleep agen.’

During my first week I came in for a new series of stormy nights, and had to walk up and down the verandah continually because the voice of any patient who called to me was drowned by the noise of the sea crashing on the rocks below.

‘There are no moon or stars, so it is pitch dark,’ I told my mother on March 19th. ‘There are occasional gusts of rain, distant rumbles of thunder and frequent flashes of lightning . . . It is eerie and very lonely to stand on the open verandah with the rain blowing against you, looking into absolute pitch darkness and listening to the sea roaring . . . with a hurricane lamp which the wind keeps blowing out. (Have just been round the block to see if any of them are frightened of the storm.) Do you remember how afraid I used to be of thunder when I was little? Now I feel quite a “Lady of the Lamp” marching along with the thunder crashing and the lightning - such lightning as you never see in England - flashing around us, to see if other people are afraid.’

After the coldest of cold blue dawns had leapt into sudden flame each morning with the swift up-rushing of the sun from behind a low turret-crowned hill, we retired to bed in our lovely night-quarters at the far end of the compound. The stone-floored room which I shared with Betty and another young nurse was only a few yards from the sea. Outside our windows the far purple distance - in which, on the clearest days, the snow-capped summit of Etna appeared as dimly as the dream of a white cloud - blended through shades of cobalt and sapphire into the brilliant turquoise of sea and sky. The door opened on to a fringe of short green grass; beyond this the golden rocks met the white crests of miniature waves which swung rather than broke against the shore. Before going to sleep in the early morning we usually read or talked for an hour, sitting in dressing-gowns and pyjamas on the grass or the rocks. From my bed I could watch through the open door the white-sailed Gozo boats floating with spread wings a hundred yards out to sea, and the tiny painted
dhaisas
passing like lethargic green and red beetles along the water’s edge.

Although we were at the opposite end of the compound from the Sisters’ quarters, the medical officers’ block was next to ours on the extreme point of the peninsula. This convenient contiguity made pleasantly possible some unofficial afternoons of tennis and conversation without much likelihood of discovery by the Matron. Now that the warm weather was really beginning, long walks had become less attractive; the best of the flowers were over, and fleas and mosquitoes had taken their place. So Betty and I and our room companion, with an appearance of great virtue, went to our beds directly after breakfast. About three in the afternoon we hurriedly dressed ourselves in the white blouses and skirts and panama hats which were the nearest approach to mufti that we could devise, and cautiously crept over with our racquets to the officers’ quarters.

Agreeable teas, with vermouths and whiskies at the officers’ mess, followed these stolen games. Quite what would have happened had we been found so blatantly breaking the sacred rule of segregation, I never troubled to inquire. The medical officers were not, upon closer acquaintance, a collection of earth-shaking personalities, but the pleasant, normal afternoons that we spent with them saved us from the neuroses that spring from months of conventual life, and gave us a vitality which was well worth the sacrifice of our afternoon sleep.

The brief hours in bed seemed sufficient because the nights were so placid. On C Block I had nothing to do but dress a few eyes four-hourly, make half a dozen beds, and give hot drinks to wakeful patients. Only once was this smooth serenity interrupted, when a twenty-year-old orderly, who had been isolated in an empty ward, died from convulsions in the early hours of the morning. As an infectious case he had been under the care of an R.A.M.C. ‘special’, and I had merely to report progress to the Night Superintendent.

One evening I came on duty to find him rolling his eyes and choking in continuous grotesque paroxysms, with ‘Auntie’, a dignified embodiment of superb inactivity, supervising his death-bed. The young man suffered, I was told - though never straightforwardly - from venereal disease, and had been precipitated into this convulsive condition by a hypodermic injection. Soon after midnight a final paroxysm finished him off, and when the orderlies had removed him I had to spend several hours in disinfecting the ward.

‘There was a brilliant moon that night,’ I wrote home afterwards, ‘and it was very solemn and impressive to watch the orderlies carry him across the compound on a stretcher to the mortuary, with the Union Jack over him and the moonlight shining on all - it is a queer moonlight in these places, very black shadows and startling outlines; everything is transfigured. The orderlies marched in that special slow order - I don’t know what its name is - that they always use when carrying a corpse.’

Less eventful nights slipped away in the laborious creation of a scarlet kimono from a length of vivid silk purchased in Valletta. Often, when my incompetent needle refused, as it has always refused throughout my life, to collaborate with my intentions, the kimono was abandoned for such scanty literature as I had collected from home - Thomas Hardy’s poems, John Masefield’s
Gallipoli
, numerous copies of
Blackwood’s Magazine
, and the recently published Report of the Commission on the Dardanelles.

‘It makes very tragical reading, but is extraordinarily interesting in conjunction with the colour and romance of Masefield’s
Gallipoli
,’ I told Edward one evening. ‘The latter makes you feel, in spite of the condemnatory language of the report, and the sense one has all through that the campaign was an utter failure with nothing in its result large enough to justify it, that it must have been a very fine and wonderful thing to have been one of that small army that fought so gallantly for such a forlorn hope. Since Roland had to die . . . I have often wondered whether really I would not have been glad for him to have been to Gallipoli . . . He was such a person for a forlorn hope. And nothing more could have happened to him than to be dead. We might not then have known the place of his grave, but after all that doesn’t matter much. I cannot see that one gets much more satisfaction out of a wooden cross on a mound of grass than out of an unknown gully or ravine on the Gallipoli peninsula. But no wonder poor Jerry . . . got enteric and came here to die.’

That day’s mail had been depressing, I admitted, and not least because I had learnt from it that his arm was now quite healed and could hardly keep him in England any longer as soon as the officers’ courses were finished.

‘As well as your news about being passed fit, there was a letter from Father . . . - German retirement at the wrong time for us and therefore anything but an advantage, Russia internally rotten and likely to sue for a separate peace - conditions dreadful at home, end no nearer in sight, etc., etc . . . . Victor too sends me a letter half cynical, half hopelessly resigned; apparently he was on the verge of an attack . . . This too leaves me anxiously . . . wondering how long it will be before I hear any more of him and what it will be when I do. I think I would rather have had an attitude of open resentment and rebellion in the face of death than this sort of stifled bitterness.’

10

Victor’s long letter had been written on March 24th from a sector near Arras. To-day, as I re-read his realistic phrases, they seem to me to be less infused with bitterness than with a completely adult and slightly sardonic philosophy. Accustomed though I was by 1917 to the sudden tragic maturities of trench life, the speed with which he had grown up moved me to intolerable pity.

The letter began with a keen criticism of Robert Service’s
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
, which had just been sent out to him from England. He particularly resented, it seemed, a line in the poem called ‘Pilgrims’ which described death as ‘the splendid release’. That, he commented, was the phrase of ‘a Red Cross Man’, and not of a member of a fighting unit.

As Roland had done so often two years earlier, Victor went on to speculate why they were all out there; it was a meditation then very characteristic of the more thoughtful young officer, who found himself committed to months of cold and fear and discomfort by the quick warmth of a moment’s elusive impulse. Like Victor he usually concluded that, although the invasion of Belgium, and the example set by friends, and perhaps even ‘Heroism in the Abstract’, had a share in it all, the only true explanation that could be given by ninety per cent of the British Expeditionary Force was to be found in the words of an Army marching song to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’:

We’re here because
We’re here because
We’re here because
We’re here . . .

The acutely conscious and purposeful soldier such as Donald Hankey, the author of
A Student in Arms
, was, according to Victor, quite exceptional; a recent
Punch
essay in the Watch Dogs series on ‘a little word of six letters’ represented far more truthfully the Army’s view of the War. If taken literally it was, he said, ‘no exaggeration - “it is a shorter word than sanguinary” - and figuratively it really expressed the whole situation, but my one fear in case of my safe return is that I may be perpetually uttering it in the drawing-room.’