It was disconcerting a day or two later to be sent for, together with several V.A.D.s who had joined the hospital at the same time, and be told by the Matron that we were all due (as V.A.D.s were invariably ‘due’ whenever the season was unpropitious and none of the Sisters wanted to go away) for a week’s leave of our six-monthly fortnight. I was still enormously in awe of the Matron, whose impregnable calm gave nothing of herself away, but when the others went out I stood my ground and asked if I could speak to her alone. My cheeks turned scarlet and my hands, which suddenly seemed to have become four times their normal size, stole irresistibly towards the starched pockets of my clean apron as I explained the circumstances of Roland’s leave and begged to have mine a little later.
‘You see,’ I stammered, ‘he’s been at the front nearly nine months, and I’ve only seen him once all that time . . .’
I fully expected, in common V.A.D. parlance, to be ‘jumped on’, but to my astonishment the Matron gave me a sweet smile - and wasn’t it, too, most amazingly, just a tiny bit amused? - and answered benevolently: ‘Certainly, nurse; I’ll postpone your leave.’ I nearly fell over a chair from excess of gratitude as I stumbled out of her office, and, immediately I went off-duty, rushed to my pen to tell the good news to Roland.
‘To think,’ I wrote ecstatically, ‘that I can really look forward now to the end of this month! If only you are safe till then! And it will be all the time this time, instead of three and a half overcrowded days filled with railway journeys . . . Life seems quite irradiated now when I think of the sweet hours that may be ahead - when I shall see once more “the things I strive to capture in vain”. It will be worth while getting some really nice mufti for a week. I must try for once to look as well for you as I always do for people I don’t care about.’
On my next half-day I occupied an entranced hour or two in taking a tram to Victoria and putting this pleasant resolution into practice. At Gorringe’s in Buckingham Palace Road - already the scene of many large and satisfying off-duty teas - I spent all that was left of two months’ pay, and the whole of the supplementary pocket-money sent to me at intervals by my forgiving father, upon a stimulating selection of brave new garments. After a comprehensive examination of half the contents of two or three departments, my choice fell, colourfully rather than judiciously, upon a neatly cut navy coat and skirt, a pastel-blue blouse in soft crêpe-de-Chine, an unusually becoming fawn felt hat trimmed with crimson berries, and a black taffeta dinner-dress with scarlet and mauve velvet flowers tucked into the waist. With this I decided that I could still wear the black moiré rose-trimmed hat purchased the previous winter in Manchester.
7
Certainly the stage seemed perfectly set for his leave. Now that my parents had at last migrated temporarily to the Grand Hotel at Brighton, our two families were so near; the Matron had promised yet again that my own week’s holiday should coincide with his, and even Edward wrote cheerfully for once to say that as soon as the actual date was known, he and Victor would both be able to get leave at the same time.
‘Very wet and muddy and many of the communication trenches are quite impassable,’ ran a letter from Roland written on December 9th. ‘Three men were killed the other day by a dug-out falling in on top of them and one man was drowned in a sump hole. The whole of one’s world, at least of one’s visible and palpable world, is mud in various stages of solidity or stickiness . . . I can be perfectly certain about the date of my leave by to-morrow morning and will let you know.’
And, when the final information did come, hurriedly written in pencil on a thin slip of paper torn from his Field Service notebook, it brought the enchanted day still nearer than I had dared to hope.
‘Shall be home on leave from 24th Dec. - 31st. Land Christmas Day. R.’
Even to the unusual concession of a leave which began on Christmas morning after night-duty the Matron proved amenable, and in the encouraging quietness of the winter’s war, with no Loos in prospect, no great push in the west even possible, I dared to glorify my days - or rather my nights - by looking forward. In the pleasant peace of Ward 25, where all the patients, now well on the road to health, slept soundly, the sympathetic Scottish Sister teased me a little for my irrepressible excitement.
‘I suppose you won’t be thinking of going off and getting married? A couple of babies like you!’
It was a new and breath-taking thought, a flame to which Roland’s mother - who approved of early marriages and believed that ways and means could be left to look after themselves far better than the average materialistic parent supposed - added fuel when she hinted mysteriously, on a day off which I spent in Brighton, that this time Roland might not be content to leave things as they were . . . Suppose, I meditated, kneeling in the darkness beside the comforting glow of the stove in the silent ward, that during this leave we did marry as suddenly as, in the last one, we became ‘officially’ engaged? Of course it would be what the world would call - or did call before the War - a ‘foolish’ marriage. But now that the War seemed likely to be endless, and the chance of making a ‘wise’ marriage had become, for most people, so very remote, the world was growing more tolerant. No one - not even my family now, I thought - would hold out against us, even though we hadn’t a penny beyond our pay. What if, after all, we did marry thus foolishly? When the War was over we could still go back to Oxford, and learn to be writers - or even lecturers; if we were determined enough about it we could return there, even though - oh, devastating, sweet speculation! - I might have had a baby.
I had never much cared for babies or had anything to do with them; before that time I had always been too ambitious, too much interested in too many projects, to become acutely conscious of a maternal instinct. But on those quiet evenings of night-duty as Christmas approached, I would come, half asleep, as near to praying as I had been at any time, even when Roland first went to France or in the days following Loos.
‘Oh, God!’ my half-articulate thoughts would run, ‘do let us get married and let me have a baby - something that is Roland’s very own, something of himself to remember him by if he goes . . . It shan’t be a burden to his people or mine for a moment longer than I can help, I promise. I’ll go on doing war-work and give it all my pay during the War - and as soon as ever the War’s over I’ll go back to Oxford and take my Finals so that I can get a job and support it. So do let me have a baby, dear God!’
The night before Christmas Eve, I found my ward transformed into the gay semblance of a sixpenny bazaar with Union Jacks, paper streamers, crinkled tissue lampshades and Christmas texts and greetings, all carried out in staggering shades of orange and vivid scarlet and brilliant green. In the cheerful construction of red paper bags, which I filled with crackers and sweets for the men’s Christmas stockings, I found that the hours passed quickly enough. Clipping, and sewing, and opening packets, I imagined him reading the letter that I had written him a few days earlier, making various suggestions for meeting him, if he could only write or wire me beforehand, when the Folkestone train arrived at Victoria, and travelling down with him to Sussex.
‘And shall I really see you again, and so soon?’ it had concluded. ‘And it will be the anniversary of the week which contained another New Year’s Eve - and David Copperfield, and two unreal and wonderful days, and you standing alone in Trafalgar Square, and thinking of - well, what were you thinking of? When we were really both children still, and my connection with any hospital on earth was unthought-of, and your departure for the front merely the adventurous dream of some vaguely distant future date. And life was lived, at any rate for two days, in the Omar Khayyámesque spirit of
Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday—
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?
But we are going to better that - even that - this time. Au revoir.’
When I went to her office for my railway-warrant in the morning, the Matron smiled kindly at my bubbling impatience, and reminded me how lucky I was to get leave for Christmas. At V
ictoria I inquired what boat trains arrived on Christmas Day, and learnt that there was only one, at 7.30 in the evening. The risk, I decided, of missing him in the winter blackness of a wartime terminus was too great to be worth taking: instead, I would go straight to Brighton next morning and wait for him there.
As Christmas Eve slipped into Christmas Day, I finished tying up the paper bags, and with the Sister filled the men’s stockings by the exiguous light of an electric torch. Already I could count, perhaps even on my fingers, the hours that must pass before I should see him. In spite of its tremulous eagerness of anticipation, the night again seemed short; some of the convalescent men wanted to go to early services, and that meant beginning temperatures and pulses at 3 a.m. As I took them I listened to the rain pounding on the tin roof, and wondered whether, since his leave ran from Christmas Eve, he was already on the sea in that wild, stormy darkness. When the men awoke and reached for their stockings, my whole being glowed with exultant benevolence; I delighted in their pleasure over their childish home-made presents because my own mounting joy made me feel in harmony with all creation.
At eight o’clock, as the passages were lengthy and many of the men were lame, I went along to help them to the communion service in the chapel of the college. It was two or three years since I had been to such a service, but it seemed appropriate that I should be there, for I felt, wrought up as I was to a high pitch of nervous emotion, that I ought to thank whatever God might exist for the supreme gift of Roland and the love that had arisen so swiftly between us. The music of the organ was so sweet, the sight of the wounded men who knelt and stood with such difficulty so moving, the conflict of joy and gratitude, pity and sorrow in my mind so poignant, that tears sprang to my eyes, dimming the chapel walls and the words that encircled them: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.’
Directly after breakfast, sent on my way by exuberant good wishes from Betty and Marjorie and many of the others, I went down to Brighton. All day I waited there for a telephone message or a telegram, sitting drowsily in the lounge of the Grand Hotel, or walking up and down the promenade, watching the grey sea tossing rough with white surf-crested waves, and wondering still what kind of crossing he had had or was having.
When, by ten o’clock at night, no news had come, I concluded that the complications of telegraph and telephone on a combined Sunday and Christmas Day had made communication impossible. So, unable to fight sleep any longer after a night and a day of wakefulness, I went to bed a little disappointed, but still unperturbed. Roland’s family, at their Keymer cottage, kept an even longer vigil; they sat up till nearly midnight over their Christmas dinner in the hope that he would join them, and, in their dramatic, impulsive fashion, they drank a toast to the Dead.
The next morning I had just finished dressing, and was putting the final touches to the pastel-blue crêpe-de-Chine blouse, when the expected message came to say that I was wanted on the telephone. Believing that I was at last to hear the voice for which I had waited for twenty-four hours, I dashed joyously into the corridor. But the message was not from Roland but from Clare; it was not to say that he had arrived home that morning, but to tell me that he had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on December 23rd.
PART II
‘When the Vision dies in the dust of the market place,
When the Light is dim,
When you lift up your eyes and cannot behold his face,
When your heart is far from him,
Know this is your War; in this loneliest hour you ride
Down the roads he knew;
Though he comes no more at night he will kneel at
your side
For comfort to dream with you.’
May Wedderburn Cannan.
6
‘When the Vision Dies . . .’
PERHAPS... TO R. A. L.
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.
Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.
Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.
But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.
V. B. 1916. From Verses of a V.A.D.
1
Whenever I think of the weeks that followed the news of Roland’s death, a series of pictures, disconnected but crystal clear, unroll themselves like a kaleidoscope through my mind.
A solitary cup of coffee stands before me on a hotel breakfast-table; I try to drink it, but fail ignominiously.
Outside, in front of the promenade, dismal grey waves tumble angrily over one another on the windy Brighton shore, and, like a slaughtered animal that still twists after life has been extinguished, I go on mechanically worrying because his channel-crossing must have been so rough.
In an omnibus, going to Keymer, I look fixedly at the sky; suddenly the pale light of a watery sun streams out between the dark, swollen clouds, and I think for one crazy moment that I have seen the heavens opened . . .
At Keymer a fierce gale is blowing and I am out alone on the brown winter ploughlands, where I have been driven by a desperate desire to escape from the others. Shivering violently, and convinced that I am going to be sick, I take refuge behind a wet bank of grass from the icy sea-wind that rushes, screaming, across the sodden fields.
It is late afternoon; at the organ of the small village church, Edward is improvising a haunting memorial hymn for Roland, and the words: ‘God walked in the garden in the cool of the evening’, flash irrelevantly into my mind.
I am back on night-duty at Camberwell after my leave; in the chapel, as the evening voluntary is played, I stare with swimming eyes at the lettered wall, and remember reading the words: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, at the early morning communion service before going to Brighton.
I am buying some small accessories for my uniform in a big Victoria Street store, when I stop, petrified, before a vase of the tall pink roses that Roland gave me on the way to David Copperfield; in the warm room their melting sweetness brings back the memory of that New Year’s Eve, and suddenly, to the perturbation of the shop-assistants, I burst into uncontrollable tears, and find myself, helpless and humiliated, unable to stop crying in the tram all the way back to the hospital.
It is Sunday, and I am out for a solitary walk through the dreary streets of Camberwell before going to bed after the night’s work. In front of me on the frozen pavement a long red worm wriggles slimily. I remember that, after our death, worms destroy this body - however lovely, however beloved - and I run from the obscene thing in horror.
It is Wednesday, and I am walking up the Brixton Road on a mild, fresh morning of early spring. Half-consciously I am repeating a line from Rupert Brooke:
‘The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying . . .’
For a moment I have become conscious of the old joy in rainwashed skies and scuttling, fleecy clouds, when suddenly I remember - Roland is dead and I am not keeping faith with him; it is mean and cruel, even for a second, to feel glad to be alive.
2
Gradually the circumstances of Roland’s death, which at first I was totally unable to grasp, began to acquire coherence in my mind. Through letters from his colonel, his fellow-officers, the Catholic padre who had buried him, and his servant whose sympathy was extremely loquacious and illegibly expressed in pencil, we were
able to piece together the details of his end - so painful, so unnecessary, so grimly devoid of that heroic limelight which Roland had always regarded as ample compensation for those who were slain, like Kingsley’s Heroes, ‘in the flower of youth on the chance of winning a noble name’. The facts, as finally gathered, were more or less these:
On the night, December 22nd, that Roland was mortally wounded, the 7th Worcesters had just taken over some new trenches. Like the company whose lethargic captain appears in the opening scene of Journey’s End, the previous occupants of these trenches had left them dirty and dilapidated, while the wire in front was so neglected that Roland’s platoon was ordered to spend the night in repairing it. Before taking the wiring party over, he went to inspect the place himself, using a concealed path which led to No Man’s Land through a gap in a hedge, because the communication trench was flooded. As it happened, this trench had been flooded for a long time, and the use of the alternative path was known to the Germans. Not unnaturally, they had trained a machine gun on the gap, and were accustomed to fire a few volleys whenever the troops facing them showed signs of activity. This enemy habit was known to the Worcesters’ predecessors, but they did not, apparently, think it worth mentioning to the relieving battalion.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 26
