No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

At least a third of the men were dying; their daily dressings were not a mere matter of changing huge wads of stained gauze and wool, but of stopping haemorrhages, replacing intestines and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes. Attached to the ward was a small theatre, in which acute operations were performed all day by a medical officer with a swarthy skin and a rolling brown eye; he could speak German, and before the War had been in charge, I was told, of a German hospital in some tropical region of South America. During the first two weeks, he and I and the easy-going Charge-Sister worked together pleasantly enough. I often wonder how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the theatre – as we did all day at frequent intervals – in that foetid stench, with the thermometer about 90 degrees in the shade, and the saturated dressings and yet more gruesome human remnants heaped on the floor. After the ‘light medicals’ that I had nursed in Malta, the German ward might justly have been described as a regular baptism of blood and pus.

  While the operations went on I was usually left alone in the ward with the two German orderlies, Zeppel and Fritz, to dress as best I could the worst wounds that I had ever seen or imagined.

  ‘I would have written yesterday… but I was much too busy,’ runs a typical letter to my mother. ‘I did not get off duty at all, and all afternoon and evening I had the entire ward to myself, as Sister was in the operating theatre from 1.30 to 8.0; we had fifteen operations. Some of the things I have to do would make your hair stand on end!’

  Soon after my arrival, the first Sister-in-charge was replaced by one of the most remarkable members of the nursing profession in France or anywhere else. In an unpublished novel into which, a few weeks after leaving Etaples, I introduced a good many scenes from 24 General, I drew her portrait as that of its chief character, Hope Milroy, and it is by this name, rather than her own, that I always remember her. Sister Milroy was a highbrow in active revolt against highbrows; connected on one side with a famous family of clerics, and on the other with an equally celebrated household of actors and actresses, she had deliberately chosen a hospital training in preference to the university education for which heredity seemed to have designed her, though no one ever suffered fools less gladly than she. When she first came to the ward her furious re-organisations were devastating, and she treated the German orderlies and myself with impartial contempt. On behalf of the patients she displayed determination and efficiency but never compassion; to her they were all ‘Huns’, though she dressed their wounds with gentleness and skill.

  ‘Nurse!’ she would call to me in her high disdainful voice, pointing to an unfortunate patient whose wound unduly advertised itself. ‘For heaven’s sake get the iodoform powder and scatter it over that filthy Hun!’

  The staff of 24 General described her as ‘mental’, not realising that she used her reputation for eccentricity and the uncompromising candour which it was supposed to excuse as a means of demanding more work from her subordinates than other Sisters were able to exact. At first I detested her dark attractiveness and sarcastic, relentless youth, but when I recognised her for what she was – by far the cleverest woman in the hospital, even if potentially the most alarming, and temperamentally as fitful as a weathercock – we became constant companions off duty. After the conscientious stupidity of so many nurses, a Sister with unlimited intelligence and deliberately limited altruism was pleasantly stimulating, though she was so incalculable, and such a baffling mixture of convention and independence, that a long spell of her society demanded a good deal of reciprocal energy.

  The desire for ‘heaps to do and no time to think’ that I had expressed at Devonshire House was certainly being fulfilled, though I still did think occasionally, and more especially, perhaps, when I was nursing the German officers, who seemed more bitterly conscious of their position as prisoners than the men. There were about half a dozen of these officers, separated by a green curtain from the rest of the ward, and I found their punctilious manner of accepting my ministrations disconcerting long after I had grown accustomed to the other patients.

  One tall, bearded captain would invariably stand to attention when I had re-bandaged his arm, click his spurred heels together, and bow with ceremonious gravity. Another badly wounded boy – a Prussian lieutenant who was being transferred to England – held out an emaciated hand to me as he lay on the stretcher waiting to go, and murmured: ‘I tank you, Sister.’ After barely a second’s hesitation I took the pale fingers in mine, thinking how ridiculous it was that I should be holding this man’s hand in friendship when perhaps, only a week or two earlier, Edward up at Ypres had been doing his best to kill him. The world was mad and we were all victims; that was the only way to look at it. These shattered, dying boys and I were paying alike for a situation that none of us had desired or done anything to bring about. Somewhere, I remembered, I had seen a poem called ‘To Germany’, which put into words this struggling new idea; it was written, I discovered afterwards, by Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed in action in 1915:

  You only saw your future bigly planned,

  And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

  And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,

  And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

  ‘It is very strange that you should be nursing Hun prisoners,’ wrote Edward from the uproar in the Salient, ‘and it does show how absurd the whole thing is; I am afraid leave is out of the question for the present; I am going to be very busy as I shall almost certainly have to command the coy. in the next show… Belgium is a beastly country, at least this part of it is; it seems to breathe little-mindedness, and all the people are on the make or else spies. I will do my best to write you a decent letter soon if possible; I know I haven’t done so yet since I came out – but I am feeling rather worried because I hate the thought of shouldering big responsibilities with the doubtful assistance of ex-N. C. O. subalterns. Things are much more difficult than they used to be, because nowadays you never know where you are in the line and it is neither open warfare nor trench warfare.’

  A few days afterwards he was promoted, as he had expected, to be acting captain, and a letter at the end of August told me that he had just completed his course of instruction for the forthcoming ‘strafe’.

  ‘Captain B.,’ he concluded, ‘is now in a small dug-out with our old friend Wipers on the left front, and though he has got the wind up because he is in command of the company and may have to go up the line at any moment, all is well for the present.’

  Vera Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1893. She left her studies at Oxford to work as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse in 1915. Her best-selling memoir, Testament of Youth, is an account of these wartimes experiences. Rightly seen as a classic, the book describes Brittain’s falling out of love with the gung-ho enthusiasm for the war of some of her contemporaries to reach a heartfelt commitment to pacifism; in a letter written in November 1915 to Roland Leighton, her fiancé later killed in the war, she wrote:

  I have only one wish in life now and that is for the ending of the war. I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have seen here, I feel I shall never be the same person again, and wonder if, when the war does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh…

  Her commitment to pacifism was to last her whole life. She was a regular speaker for the League of Nations Union in the 1920s, joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1937 and during the Second World War published Letters to Peace Lovers which criticized the UK government for bombing urban areas in Germany. She was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957.

  Vera Brittain died in 1970. Testament of Youth, with its powerful mix of pacifism, idealism and feminism, continues to speak to successive generations.

  HELEN ZENNA SMITH

  LIQUID FIRE

  from Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War

  THE CONVOY IS LATE. We are all lined up waiting – even the five newcomers a
re at last toeing the line – but the long crawling length of train does not round the bend. Little groups of stretcher-bearers stand about shivering and cursing the delay. Some of them warm their hands at our radiators. Two of them are in high spirits. They have been drinking. Commandant is eyeing them. She will report them before the night is much older. It is seldom the stretcher-bearers take to drink, but one can quite understand their giving way. There are times when I would drug myself with spirits, if I could lay hands on any… Anything to shut out the horrors of these convoys. Some of the girls begin to tramp about the station yard. I am too numb to get down. I suppose I still possess feet, though I cannot feel them. The wind has dropped slightly, but it seems to get colder and colder. Oh, this cold of France. I have never experienced anything remotely resembling it. It works through one’s clothing, into one’s flesh and bones. It is not satisfied till it is firmly ingrained in one’s internal regions, from whence it never really moves.

  It has been freezing hard for over a week now. The bare trees in the road are loaded with icicles,… tall trees, ugly and gaunt and gallows-like till the whiteness veiled them – transforming them into objects of weird beauty.

  Etta Potato and The Bug want me to come down. They are having a walking race with Tosh for cigarettes – the winner to collect one each from the losers. Won’t I join in? I refuse,… I am too numb to move. Off they start across the snow-covered yard. Tosh wins easily. Their laughter rings out as she extorts her winnings there and then. All of a sudden their laughter ceases. They fly back to their posts. The convoy must be sighted. I crane my neck. Yes. The stretcher-bearers stop smoking and line up along the platform. Ambulance doors are opened in readiness. All is bustle. Everyone on the alert. Cogs in the great machinery. I can hear the noise of the train distinctly now,… sound travels a long way in the snow in these death-still early morning hours before the dawn. Louder and louder.

  If the War goes on and on and on and I stay out here for the duration, I shall never be able to meet a train-load of casualties without the same ghastly nausea stealing over me as on that first never-to-be-forgotten night. Most of the drivers grow hardened after the first week. They fortify themselves with thoughts of how they are helping to alleviate the sufferings of wretched men, and find consolation in so thinking. But I cannot. I am not the type that breeds warriors. I am the type that should have stayed at home, that shrinks from blood and filth, and is completely devoid of pluck. In other words, I am a coward… A rank coward. I have no guts. It takes every ounce of will-power I possess to stick to my post when I see the train rounding the bend. I choke my sickness back into my throat, and grip the wheel, and tell myself it is all a horrible nightmare… soon I shall awaken in my satin-covered bed on Wimbledon Common… what I can picture with such awful vividness doesn’t really exist…

  I have schooled myself to stop fainting at the sight of blood. I have schooled myself not to vomit at the smell of wounds and stale blood, but view these sad bodies with professional calm I shall never be able to. I may be helping to alleviate the sufferings of wretched men, but commonsense rises up and insists that the necessity should never have arisen. I become savage at the futility. A war to end war, my mother writes. Never. In twenty years it will repeat itself. And twenty years after that. Again and again, as long as we breed women like my mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. And we are breeding them. Etta Potato and The B. F. – two out of a roomful of six. Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington all over again.

  Oh, come with me, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Let me show you the exhibits straight from the battlefield. This will be something original to tell your committees, while they knit their endless miles of khaki scarves,… something to spout from the platform at your recruiting meetings. Come with me. Stand just there.

  Here we have the convoy gliding into the station now, slowly, so slowly. In a minute it will disgorge its sorry cargo. My ambulance doors are open, waiting to receive. See, the train has stopped. Through the occasionally drawn blinds you will observe the trays slotted into the sides of the train. Look closely, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, and you shall see what you shall see. Those trays each contain something that was once a whole man… the heroes who have done their bit for King and country… the heroes who marched blithely through the streets of London Town singing ‘Tipperary,’ while you cheered and waved your flags hysterically. They are not singing now, you will observe. Shut your ears, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, lest their groans and heartrending cries linger as long in your memory as in the memory of the daughter you sent out to help win the War.

  See the stretcher-bearers lifting the trays one by one, slotting them deftly into my ambulance. Out of the way quickly, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington – lift your silken skirts aside… a man is spewing blood, the moving has upset him, finished him… He will die on the way to hospital if he doesn’t die before the ambulance is loaded. I know… All this is old history to me. Sorry this has happened. It isn’t pretty to see a hero spewing up his life’s blood in public, is it? Much more romantic to see him in the picture papers being awarded the V. C., even if he is minus a limb or two. A most unfortunate occurrence!

  That man strapped down? That raving, blaspheming creature screaming filthy words you don’t know the meaning of… words your daughter uses in everyday conversation, a habit she has contracted from vulgar contact of this kind. Oh, merely gone mad, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. He may have seen a headless body running on and on, with blood spurting from the trunk. The crackle of the frost-stiff dead men packing the duck-boards watertight may have gradually undermined his reason. There are many things the sitters tell me on our long night rides that could have done this.

  No, not shell-shock. The shell-shock cases take it more quietly as a rule, unless they are suddenly startled. Let me find you an example. Ah, the man they are bringing out now. The one staring straight ahead at nothing… twitching, twitching, twitching, each limb working in a different direction, like a Jumping Jack worked by a jerking string. Look at him, both of you. Bloody awful, isn’t it, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington? That’s shell-shock. If you dropped your handbag on the platform, he would start to rave as madly as the other. What? You won’t try the experiment? You can’t watch him? Why not? Why not? I have to, every night. Why the hell can’t you do it for once? Damn your eyes.

  Forgive me, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. That was not the kind of language a nicely-brought-up young lady from Wimbledon Common uses. I forget myself. We will begin again.

  See the man they are fitting into the bottom slot. He is coughing badly. No, not pneumonia. Not tuberculosis. Nothing so picturesque. Gently, gently, stretcher-bearers… he is about done. He is coughing up clots of pinky-green filth. Only his lungs, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. He is coughing well to-night. That is gas. You’ve heard of gas, haven’t you? It burns and shrivels the lungs to… to the mess you see on the ambulance floor there. He’s about the age of Bertie, Mother. Not unlike Bertie, either, with his gentle brown eyes and fair curly hair. Bertie would look up pleadingly like that in between coughing up his lungs… The son you have so generously given to the War. The son you are so eager to send out to the trenches before Roy Evans-Mawnington, in case Mrs. Evans-Mawnington scores over you at the next recruiting meeting… ‘I have given my only son.’

  Cough, cough, little fair-haired boy. Perhaps somewhere your mother is thinking of you… boasting of the life she has so nobly given… the life you thought was your own, but which is hers to squander as she thinks fit. ‘My boy is not a slacker, thank God.’ Cough away, little boy, cough away. What does it matter, providing your mother doesn’t have to face the shame of her son’s cowardice?

  These are sitters. The man they are hoisting up beside me, and the two who sit in the ambulance. Blighty cases… broken arms and trench feet… mere trifles. The smell? Disgusting, isn’t it? Sweaty socks and feet swollen to twice their size… purple, blue, red… big black blisters filled with yellow matter. Quite a colou
r-scheme, isn’t it? Have I made you vomit? I must again ask pardon. My conversation is daily growing less refined. Spew and vomit and sweat… I had forgotten these words are not used in the best drawing-rooms on Wimbledon Common.

  But I am wasting time. I must go in a minute. I am nearly loaded. The stretcher they are putting on one side? Oh, a most ordinary exhibit,… the groaning man to whom the smallest jolt is red hell… a mere bellyful of shrapnel. They are holding him over till the next journey. He is not as urgent as the helpless thing there, that trunk without arms and legs, the remnants of a human being, incapable even of pleading to be put out of his misery because his jaw has been half shot away… No, don’t meet his eyes, they are too alive. Something of their malevolence might remain with you all the rest of your days,… those sock-filled, committee-crowded days of yours.

  Gaze on the heroes who have so nobly upheld your traditions, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Take a good look at them… The heroes you will sentimentalise over until peace is declared, and allow to starve for ever and ever, amen, afterwards. Don’t go. Spare a glance for my last stretcher,… that gibbering, unbelievable, unbandaged thing, a wagging lump of raw flesh on a neck, that was a face a short time ago, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Now it might be anything… a lump of liver, raw bleeding liver, that’s what it resembles more than anything else, doesn’t it? We can’t tell its age, but the whimpering moan sounds young, somehow. Like the fretful whimpers of a sick little child… a tortured little child… puzzled whimpers. Who is he? For all you know, Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, he is your Roy. He might be anyone at all, so why not your Roy? One shapeless lump of raw liver is like another shapeless lump of raw liver. What do you say? Why don’t they cover him up with bandages? How the hell do I know? I have often wondered myself,… but they don’t. Why do you turn away? That’s only liquid fire. You’ve heard of liquid fire? Oh, yes. I remember your letter… ‘I hear we’ve started to use liquid fire, too. That will teach those Germans. I hope we use lots and lots of it.’Yes, you wrote that. You were glad some new fiendish torture had been invented by the chemists who are running this war. You were delighted to think some German mother’s son was going to have the skin stripped from his poor face by liquid fire… Just as some equally patriotic German mother rejoiced when she first heard the sons of Englishwomen were to be burnt and tortured by the very newest war gadget out of the laboratory.