Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (62 page)

It seemed to me then, with my crude judgments and black-and-white values, quite inexplicable that the older generation, which had merely looked on at the War, should break under the strain so much more quickly than those of us who had faced death or horror at first hand for months on end. To-day, with middle-age just round the corner, and children who tug my anxious thoughts relentlessly back to them whenever I have to leave them for a week, I realise how completely I under-estimated the effect upon the civilian population of year upon year of diminishing hope, diminishing food, diminishing light, diminishing heat, of waiting and waiting for news which was nearly always bad when it came. Those older men and women who, by good fortune or artful ingenuity, escaped the dreariness of passive submission to wartime circumstances, the colonels, senior to my father, who commanded home battalions, the Matrons and Red Cross Commandants, senior to my mother, who ran hospitals in towns or convalescent homes in the country, had a far better chance of surviving with nerves unimpaired than those who played exclusively the apprehensive rôle of parents.

Having driven direct from the station to see my mother at the home I was still wearing my uniform, which gave the Matron, whom I encountered just as I was leaving, an excuse to treat me with a brisk peremptoriness not usually accorded to nursing-home visitors.

‘Be quiet!’ she commanded sharply, though I was not making a noise. ‘There’s an operation patient coming round in that room by the door!’

As I had grown accustomed, for over a month, to doing the day’s work in the midst of ten or more operation patients coming round simultaneously, this information did not particularly impress me, but I made a mental resolve never again to appear officially dressed as a V.A.D. within a hundred yards of any non-military trained nurse.

The home, I decided, with its gloomy, airless, expensive rooms, was certainly not calculated to restore the spirits of a sick parent suffering also from nervous prostration, and the Matron’s brusqueness had done nothing to remove my initial prejudice. I have often since thought that nothing so clearly illustrates the cautious, unenterprising conservatism that hampers the medical profession as the affection with which it clings, for its own convenience, to the tradition-steeped ‘doctor’s mile’ in the West End. How the invalids who pay so lavishly for their accommodation in the heavy, sunless purlieus of Harley Street ever recover from anything at all remains to me a perpetual mystery. Nor can I understand why, in these days of quick transport, a newly planned area of modern hospitals, with gardens, balconies, vita-glass windows and beds for ‘paying’ patients, is not started by an enterprising group of younger men and women upon the wind-swept heights of Hampstead or around the sun-drenched open spaces near the river in Chelsea.

As soon, therefore, as I had re-established my father in the flat, I brought my mother back from the costly ground-floor dreariness of Mayfair to her own high bedroom, where she could at least look upon the wooded park with its vivid, blossoming trees, which alone of all creation seemed unaffected by the grey, life-draining economy of 1918. Throughout the hot, dusty months of that comfortless summer, I proceeded to ‘run’ the flat with a series of ever-changing, inefficient maids, varied by servantless intervals in which I played the part of nurse, cook and maid-of-all-work.

To begin with, the maids were chosen by my mother from the rag-tag and bob-tail selection of girls who for some reason, usually none too creditable, had not been absorbed by munitions or the Service organisations. The first turned out to be several months pregnant, and, as soon as we discovered the fact, left us in wrath to take refuge upon the capacious bosom of the Salvation Army; the second was an amateur prostitute who painted her face ten years before lipstick began to acquire its present fashionable respectability, and smoked pungent cigarettes which, to my father’s intense indignation, continually permeated the flat from her bedroom. It was not until late in the summer, while my mother was away in the country, that I happened by chance upon a black-haired, beetle-browed girl whose quick-tempered abruptness concealed an honest disposition and a real capacity for hard work. After I had engaged her, comparative peace descended upon our household for over a year.

I can look back more readily, I think, upon the War’s tragedies - which at least had dignity - than upon those miserable weeks that followed my return from France. From a world in which life or death, victory or defeat, national survival or national extinction, had been the sole issues, I returned to a society where no one discussed anything but the price of butter and the incompetence of the latest ‘temporary’ - matters which, in the eyes of Kensington and of various acquaintances who dropped in to tea, seemingly far outweighed in importance the operations at Zeebrugge, or even such topical controversies as those which raged round Major-General Maurice’s letter to
The Times
, and the Pemberton-Billing case.

Keyed up as I had been by the month-long strain of daily rushing to and fro in attendance on the dying, and nightly waiting for the death which hovered darkly in the sky overhead, I found it excruciating to maintain even an appearance of interest and sympathy. Probably I did not succeed, for the triviality of everything drove me to despair. The old feeling of frustration that I had known in Buxton came back a thousand times intensified; while disasters smashed up the world around me I seemed to be marooned in a kind of death-in-life, with the three years’ experience that now made me of some use to the Army all thrown away.

There I had definitely counted; here I seemed merely the incompetent target for justifiable criticism, since a knowledge of surgical nursing did not qualify me for housekeeping, which I had never attempted even in peacetime, and which baffled me completely when I was suddenly faced with its intricacies under wartime restrictions to which people at home had at least grown accustomed gradually. Most bitterly of all I resented the constant dissipation of energy on what appeared to me to be non-essentials. My youth and health had mattered so much when the task was that of dragging wounded men back to life; I believed that the vitality which kept me going had helped others who had lost their own to live, and it seemed rather thrown away when it was all exploded upon persuading the grocer to give us a pot of jam. The agony of the last few weeks in France appeared not to interest London in comparison with the struggle to obtain sugar; the latter was discussed incessantly, but no one wanted even to hear about the former.

Still sore and indignant, I happened one day to read some verses by Sir Owen Seaman which I found in a copy of
Punch
dated April 3rd, 1918 - the very week in which our old strongholds had fallen and the camp at Etaples had been a struggling pandemonium of ambulances, stretchers and refugee nurses:

‘THE SOUL OF A NATION’

The little things of which we lately chattered—
The dearth of taxis or the dawn of spring;
Themes we discussed as though they really mattered,
Like rationed meat or raiders on the wing;—

How thin it seems to-day, this vacant prattle,
Drowned by the thunder rolling in the West,
Voice of the great arbitrament of battle
That puts our temper to the final test.

Thither our eyes are turned, our hearts are straining,
Where those we love, whose courage laughs at fear,
Amid the storm of steel around them raining,
Go to their death for all we hold most dear.

New-born of this supremest hour of trial,
In quiet confidence shall be our strength,
Fixed on a faith that will not take denial
Nor doubt that we have found our soul at length.

O England, staunch of nerve and strong of sinew,
Best when you face the odds and stand at bay,
Now show a watching world what stuff is in you!
Now make your soldiers proud of you to-day!

Sir Owen had been mistaken, I reflected sorrowfully; representing the finer type of non-combatant whose mind was concerned with the larger aspects of the situation, he had ignored - perhaps intentionally - the less disinterested crowd to whom the ‘little things’ went on mattering more than the Army’s anguish. The thunder might roll in the west as loud as it could, but in spite of his noble verses, it would still be drowned in England by the chatter about meat and milk.

The sole consolation of those antagonistic weeks was the young American airman, to whom I shall always be grateful for the sunny imperturbability which never seemed in the least shaken by my irritable impatience, my moods of black depression. Almost every day for a month or so he ‘blew in’ to the flat like a rush of wind from the wings of his own ’plane, and extravagantly insisted upon taking me to the Savoy Grill and numerous theatres - which were at least a pleasant contrast to the back of the Western Front - in the intervals of escorting Gaiety girls to less obvious but doubtless more enthralling entertainments. He also, with characteristic generosity, presented me with innumerable meat coupons, which by that time had become far more precious than all the winking diamonds in the empty luxury shops of deserted Bond Street.

2

I was no better reconciled to staying at home when I read in
The Times
a few weeks after my return that the persistent German raiders had at last succeeded in their intention of smashing up the Étaples hospitals, which, with the aid of the prisoner-patients, had so satisfactorily protected the railway line for three years without further trouble or expense to the military authorities.

It was clear from the guarded
communiqué
that this time the bombs had dropped on the hospitals themselves, causing many casualties and far more damage than the breaking of the bridge over the Canche in the first big raid. Hope Milroy, I was thankful to remember, had been moved to Havre a fortnight earlier, but a few days later a letter from Norah filled in the gaps of the official report. The hospital next door, she told me, had suffered the worst, and several Canadian Sisters had been killed. At 24 General one of the death-dealing bombs had fallen on Ward 17, where I had nursed the pneumonias on night-duty; it had shattered the hut, together with several patients, and wounded the V.A.D. in charge, who was in hospital with a fractured skull. The Sisters’ quarters were no longer safe after dark, she concluded, and they all had to spend their nights in trenches in the woods.

More than ever, as I finished her letter, I felt myself a deserter, a coward, a traitor to my patients and the other nurses.

How could I have played with the idea - as I had, once or twice lately - of returning to Oxford before the end of the War? What did the waste of an immature intellect matter, when such things could happen to one’s friends? My comrades of the push had been frightened, hurt, smashed up - and I was not there with them, skulking safely in England. Why, oh why, had I listened to home demands when my job was out there?

A brief note that came just afterwards from Edward seemed an appropriate - and fear-provoking - comment on the news from Étaples.

‘
Ma chère,
’ he had written just before midnight on May 12th, ‘
la vie est br‘eve
- usually too short for me to write adequate letters, and likely to be shorter still.’

For some time now, my apprehensions for his safety had been lulled by the long quiescence of the Italian front, which had seemed a haven of peace in contrast to our own raging vortex. Repeatedly, during the German offensive, I had thanked God and the Italians who fled at Caporetto that Edward was out of it, and rejoiced that the worst I had to fear from this particular push was the comparatively trivial danger that threatened myself. But now I felt the familiar stirrings of the old tense fear which had been such a persistent companion throughout the War, and my alarm was increased when Edward asked me a week or two later to send him ‘a funny cat from Liberty’s . . . to alleviate tragedy with comedy’.

‘This evening,’ he added wistfully, ‘I should like to hear Dr Farmer play the same Bach Prelude and Fugue which he played in Magdalen chapel on the evening of November 15th, 1914.’

We had perhaps gone to Magdalen together that evening, I thought; it had been just before he left the O.T.C. to join the 11th Sherwood Foresters at Sandgate.

I procured the ‘funny cat’ and sent it off; was he in for yet another July 1st? I wondered. And because the original July 1st was so nearly approaching its second anniversary, I felt moved to write him a poem that would tell him, as I could never quite tell him in words or in letters, how greatly I esteemed him for the brave endurance which he had shown on that day and so many times since. So I wrote the poem, purchased a copy of the newly published war-poets’ anthology,
The Muse in Arms
, and sent the book to Italy with my own verses inscribed on the fly-leaf:

TO MY BROTHER (In Memory of July 1st, 1916)

Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic ‘show’
You played your part
Two years ago,