by Pete Ayrton
Don’t go, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington,… don’t go. I am loaded, but there are over thirty ambulances not filled up. Walk down the line. Don’t go, unless you want me to excuse you while you retch your insides out as I so often do. There are stretchers and stretchers you haven’t seen yet… Men with hopeless dying eyes who don’t want to die… men with hopeless living eyes who don’t want to live. Wait, wait, I have so much, so much to show you before you return to your committees and your recruiting meetings, before you add to your bag of recruits… those young recruits you enroll so proudly with your patriotic speeches, your red, white and blue rosettes, your white feathers, your insults, your lies… any bloody lie to secure a fresh victim.
What? You cannot stick it any longer? You are going? I didn’t think you’d stay. But I’ve got to stay, haven’t I?… I’ve got to stay. You’ve got me out here, and you’ll keep me out here. You’ve got me haloed. I am one of the Splendid Young Women who are winning the War…
‘Loaded. Six stretchers and three sitters!’
I am away. I slow up at the station gate. The sergeant is waiting with his pencil and list. I repeat, ‘Six stretchers and three sitters.’
‘Number Eight.’
He ticks off my ambulance. I pass out of the yard.
Number Eight. A lucky number! A long way out, but a good level road, comparatively few pot-holes and stone heaps.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Along we creep at a snail’s pace… a huge dark crawling blot on the dead-white road.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
The sitter leans back motionless. Exhausted, or asleep, after the long journey. His arm is in splints, his head bandaged, and his left foot swaddled in a clumsy trench slipper. He leans back in the darkness, his face as invisible as though a brick wall were separating us. The wind cuts like a knife. He must be numbed through, for he has no overcoat and his sleeve is ripped up. He has draped the Army blanket cloak-wise over his shoulders, leaving his legs to the mercy of the freezing night. It is snowing again. Big snowflakes that hiss as they catch the radiator. I tell the sitter he will find a cigarette and matches in the pocket of my coat nearest him. I have placed them there purposely… my bait to make him talk. I want him to talk. He does not reply. I want him to talk. If I can get a sitter to talk it helps to drown the cries from inside. I discovered that some time ago. I repeat my offer, a trifle louder this time. But he makes no reply. He is done. Too done to smoke even. No luck for me to-night.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
How smoothly she runs, this great lumbering blot. How slowly. To look at her you’d never think it possible to run an ambulance of this size so slowly…
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Did I hear a scream from inside? I must fix my mind on something… What? I know – my coming-out dance. My first grown-up dance frock, a shining frock of sequins and white georgette, high-waisted down to my toes… Did I hear a scream?… Made over a petticoat… don’t let them start screaming… a petticoat of satin. Satin slippers to match, not tiny – my feet were always largish; so were my hands… Was that a scream from inside?… Such a trouble Mother had getting white gloves my size to go above the elbow… Was it a scream?… My hair up for the first time… oh, God, a scream this time… my hair up in little rolls at the back… another scream – the madman has started, the madman has started. I was afraid of him. He’ll start them all screaming…Thirty-one little rolls like fat little sausages. A professional hairdresser came in and did them – took nearly two hours to do them while Trix and Mother watched, and Sarah came in to peep. Don’t let him start the others; don’t let him start the others… Thirty-one little sausages of hair, piled one on top of the other, and all the hair my own too, copied from a picture post card of Phyllis Dare or Lily Elsie. Now, which one was it?… The shell-shocked man has joined in. The madman has set the shell-shocked man howling like a mad dog… Lily Elsie, I think it was… What are they doing to one another in there?
‘Let me out. Let me out.’
The madman is calling that. Lily Elsie, I think it was. Lily Elsie…
‘Stop screaming. You’re not the only one going through bloody hell.’
A different voice that one. That must be one of the sitters… Satin slippers with buckles on the toes – little pearl buckles shaped like a crescent. Aunt Helen or Trix gave me those.
‘Shut up screaming, or I’ll knock hell out of you with my crutch, you bastard. Shut up screaming.’
What was that crash? They’re fighting inside. They’re fighting inside… Scream, scream, scream…
‘I’m dying. Oh, Jesus, he’s murdered me. I’m dying.’
What are they doing? Are they murdering one another in there? I ought to stop the ambulance; I ought to get out and see. I ought to stop them… I ought. A driver the other night stopped her ambulance, and a man had gone mad and was beating a helpless stretcher case about the head. But she overpowered him and strapped him down again. Tosh, that was. But Tosh is brave. I couldn’t do it. I must go on…
They are all screaming now. Moaning and shrieking and howling like wild animals… All alone with an ambulance of raving men miles from anywhere in the pitch blackness,… raving madmen yelling and screaming. I shall go mad myself…
Go and see… go and see… go and see.
I will not. I cannot… my heart is pounding like a sledge-hammer. My feet and hands are frozen, but the sweat is pouring down my back in rivulets. I have looked before, and I dare not look again. What good can I do? The man who spewed blood will be lying there dead,… his glassy eyes fixed on the door of the ambulance, staring accusingly at me as I peep in,… cold dead eyes, blaming me when I am not to blame… The madman will curse me, scream vile curses at me, scream and try to tear himself from the straps that hold him down,… if he has not torn himself away already. He will try to tear himself from his straps to choke the life from me. The shell-shocked man will yammer and twitch and jerk and mouth. The man with the face like raw liver will moan… I will not go and see. I will not go and see.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Number Eight, where are you? Have I missed you in the monotony of this snow-covered road. I have been travelling for hours. Am I travelling too slowly? Am I being over-careful? Could I accelerate ever so slightly… cover the distance more quickly? I will do it. A fresh scream from someone as I jolt over a stone… I’ve hurt someone. I slow down again.
Scream, scream, scream. Three different sets of screams now – the shriek of the madman, the senseless, wolfish, monotonous howl of the shell-shock case, and now a shrill sharp yell like a bright pointed knife blade being jabbed into my brain. One, two, three, four,… staccato yells. Which one is that? Not the little fair-haired boy. He is too busy choking to death to shriek. Another one has joined in… inferno. They are striking one another again… hell let loose. Go and see, go and see…
I will not go and see. I will not go and see.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
The sitter sleeps through it all. A pool of snow has fallen in his lap. We have missed Number Eight. I must have missed the turning in the snow. The black tree-stump on the left that leads to Number Eight… snow-obscured. I must have missed the turning in the snow.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
The screams have died down, but a dreadful moaning takes their place. Oo-oo-oh… oo-oo-oh… dirge-like, regular, it rises above the sound of the engine and floats out into the night. Oo-oo-oh… oo-oooh… it is heart-breaking in its despair. I have heard a man moan like that before. The last moans of a man who will soon cease moaning for ever. Oo-oo-oh… the hopelessness, the loneliness. Tears tear at my heart… awful tears that rack me, but must not rise to my eyes, for they will freeze on my cheeks and stick my eyelids together until I cannot see to drive. Even the solace of pitying tears is denied me.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
I have given up all hope of reaching Number Eight by now. I will go on until there is a place to turn.
Crawl, crawl, c
rawl.
The moans have ceased. I strain my ears. The madman is shouting again,… a hoarse vituperative monologue. I cannot catch his words. I do not want to catch his words. But I strain to catch them just the same. He will start the others again…
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
If only I could find a place to turn. The road seems to grow narrower. How many journeys shall I make to-night? Was it a big convoy? I didn’t notice at the station,… I always forget to notice. Perhaps I shall have shrapnels next time… shrapnels, too exhausted from loss of blood to scream. A sitter who will talk and smoke.
…The madman is screaming again… he will start the others.
Crawl, crawl, crawl.
Is that a light? No… yes! Number Eight! The big canvas marquee gleaming dully in the darkness… the front entrance flaps already parted… white-capped nurses waiting in the doorway. They can see my lights. The orderlies are standing by… Number Eight… Number Eight… I am there at last. The tears are rolling down my cheeks… let them. Let the tears freeze my eyelids together now… let them freeze my eyelids… It doesn’t matter now… nothing matters now…
HELEN ZENNA SMITH
THE BEAUTY OF MEN WHO ARE WHOLE
from Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War
IAM AFRAID OF GOING MAD… of being discovered one morning among the boulders at the foot of a rocky hillside as was The Bug the day following on the air-raid that smashed the station and the convoy train to matchwood… a night of smashings, though none so cruelly smashed as The Bug. She had lost her way and missed her footing in the darkness, said the powers-that-be. This on the brightest night in a season of moonlit nights.
An accident… So The Bug rests alongside Tosh in the bleak cemetery in the shadow of the Witch’s Hand.
An accident… drivers walking about with sullen eyes, and whisperings that are not pleasant listening… and I, in the hours after the midnight convoy, sitting thinking things that are best not thought… my fingers tight against Commandant’s thick, red throat, gloating in the ebbing strength of that squat, healthy body until I am sick and faint with murderous longing.
The impulse has gone… but in its place has come something worse. I am haunted now as The Bug was haunted. Whenever I close my aching red eyes a procession of men passes before me: maimed men; men with neither arms nor legs; gassed men, coughing, coughing, coughing; men with dreadful burning eyes; men with heads and faces half shot away; raw, bleeding men with the skin burned from their upturned faces; tortured, all watching me as I lie in my flea-bag trying to sleep… an endless procession of horror that will not let me rest. I am afraid. I am afraid of madness. Are there others in this convoy fear-obsessed as I am, as The Bug was… others who will not admit it, as I will not, as The Bug did not… others who exist in a daily hell of fear? For I fear these maimed men of my imaginings as I never fear the maimed men I drive from the hospital trains to the camps. The men in the ambulances scream, but this ghostly procession is ghostly quiet. I fear them, these silent men, for I am afraid they will stay with me all my life, shutting out beauty till the day I die. And not only do I fear them, I hate them. I hate these maimed men who will not let me sleep.
Oh, the beauty of men who are whole, who have straight arms and legs, whose bodies are not cruelly gashed and torn by shrapnel, whose eyes are not horror-filled, whose faces are smooth and shapely, whose mouths smile instead of grinning painfully… oh, the beauty and wonder of men who are whole. Baynton, young and strong and clean-limbed, are his eyes serene and happy now as they were the afternoon of the concert in the prisoners’ compound… or are they staring up unseeingly somewhere in No Man’s Land, with that fair skin of his dyed an obscene blue by poison gas, his young body shattered and scattered and bleeding? Roy Evans-Mawnington… is he still smiling and eager-faced as on the day he was photographed in his second-lieutenant’s uniform… or has the smile frozen on his incredulous lips?
Oh, the beauty of men who are whole and sane. Shall I ever know a lover who is young and strong and untouched by war, who has not gazed on what I have gazed upon? Shall I ever know a lover whose eyes reflect my image without the shadow of war rising between us? A lover in whose arms I shall forget the maimed men who pass before me in endless parade in the darkness before the dawn when I think and think and think because the procession will not let me sleep?
What is to happen to women like me when this war ends… if ever it ends. I am twenty-one years of age, yet I know nothing of life but death, fear, blood, and the sentimentality that glorifies these things in the name of patriotism. I watch my own mother stupidly, deliberately, though unthinkingly – for she is a kind woman – encourage the sons of other women to kill their brothers; I see my own father – a gentle creature who would not willingly harm a fly – applaud the latest scientist to invent a mechanical device guaranteed to crush his fellow-beings to pulp in their thousands. And my generation watches these things and marvels at the blind foolishness of it… helpless to make its immature voice heard above the insensate clamour of the old ones who cry: ‘Kill, Kill, Kill!’ unceasingly.
What is to happen to women like me when the killing is done and peace comes… if ever it comes? What will they expect of us, these elders who have sent us out to fight? We sheltered young women who smilingly stumbled from the chintz-covered drawing-rooms of the suburbs straight into hell?
What will they expect of us?
We, who once blushed at the public mention of childbirth, now discuss such things as casually as once we discussed the latest play; whispered stories of immorality are of far less importance than a fresh cheese in the canteen; chastity seems a mere waste of time in an area where youth is blotted out so quickly. What will they expect of us, these elders of ours, when the killing is over and we return?
Once we were not allowed out after nightfall unchaperoned; now we can drive the whole night through a deserted countryside with a man – provided he is in khaki and our orders are to drive him. Will these elders try to return us to our conventional pre-war habits? What will they say if we laugh at them, as we are bound?
I see in the years to come old men in their easy chairs fiercely reviling us for lacking the sweetness and softness of our mothers and their mothers before them; chiding us for language that is not the language of gentlewomen; accusing us of barnyard morals when we use love as a drug for forgetfulness because we have acquired the habit of taking what we can from life while we are alive to take… clearly do I see all these things. But what I do not see is pity or understanding for the war-shocked woman who sacrificed her youth on the altar of the war that was not of her making, the war made by age and fought by youth while age looked on and applauded and encored. Will they show us mercy, these arm-chair critics, once our uniforms are frayed and the romance of the war woman is no longer a romance? I see much, but this I do not see.
And the next generation… our younger brothers and sisters… young things raised in a blood-and-hate atmosphere – I see them hard and callous and cold… emotionless, unfriendly, cruelly analytical, predatory, resentful of us for stealing the limelight from their childhood, bored by the war and the men and women who fought the war, thanklessly grabbing the freedom for which we paid so dearly… all this I see as my procession of torn, dreadful-eyed men passes in the cold dark hours preceding the dawn.
And I see us a race apart, we war products… feared by the old ones and resented by the young ones… a race of men bodily maimed and of women mentally maimed.
What is to become of us when the killing is over?
*
Commandant is willing that I should go.
A rest – sick leave she calls it – but she avoids my cold glance carefully when speaking the words. She understands. I have finished with the war for good. I will take no more part in it. Why should I, who hate and fear war with all my heart, and would gladly die to end it if that were possible, work to keep it going? Etta Potato says my logic is unsound, but I am too weary to argue, too eager to be gone fro
m the little communal bedroom where nightly marches my procession of maimed men.
I divide my kit between Etta Potato and Chutney, leaving only my uniform to travel in. My overcoat is deeply stained where Tosh’s head rested… but I must wear it, for I have no other clothes. There are a few farewells; Etta Potato drives me to the station… I do not see Commandant… I am in the train at last… Etta Potato waving farewell from the platform…
My war service is ended.
I am going home.
Darkened stations… endless cold waits… soldiers in khaki… wounded soldiers in blue… V. A. D.’s… nurses… grey, uninteresting landscapes… bare trees… camps, camps, camps… tin huts, wooden huts… marching troops… desolation… cemeteries of black crosses… hospitals… and everywhere mud, mud, mud.
I am going home.
The train stops, starts again, stops; I change to another, on and on and on…
I am going home.
Why am I so calm about it?
Boulogne at last. Why do I not shout and laugh and dance? How often have I pictured this Channel crossing, my wild exhilaration, arriving under the chalk cliffs of England, the white welcoming chalk cliffs of England.
The sweetness of England… England, where grass is green and primroses in early springtime patch the earth a timid yellow… where trees in bud are ready to leaf on the first day of pale sunshine… England, England, how often have I promised to throw myself flat upon your bosom and kiss the first green blade of grass I saw because it was English grass and I had come home?
