‘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.’
The letter closed with a final grave paragraph which told me that at the end of March the situation in France had been still unchanged, but was likely ‘on the day of the hunt’ to alter a good deal. ‘Well, Vera,’ ran its concluding words, ‘I may not write again - one can never tell - and so, as Edward wrote to me, it is time to take a long, long adieu.’
Such valedictory resignation seemed almost to have pushed him over the border of the tangible world already, I thought unhappily, reflecting that even if events failed to justify his pessimism, the submarines were steadily reducing my chance of seeing either him or Geoffrey before that indeterminate Mafeking which we called the end of the War. Civilians had now been forbidden to leave Malta, and for the time being no women either civilian or military were allowed on the Isonzo, the ex-destroyer mail-boat running between Malta and Sicily. Rumours that we should all be sent to Salonika because the submarine campaign was making Malta impracticable as a hospital base buzzed continually round the island. Unsettled and restless, we waited impatiently for something to happen.
Outside our few square miles of expectation, a good deal was happening. The taking of Baghdad, the Russian Revolution, and America’s entry into the War penetrated even the surprised pages of the Daily Malta Chronicle, though they failed to interrupt for long its assiduous preoccupation with events nearer home.
‘I do not remember if I remarked last week upon the sudden cessation of all news from Petrograd,’ ran a letter written by my uncle on March 18th, ‘but people were at great pains to imagine what was the cause of the curious silence. There have been suggestions of a revolution in Russia for months past, and everyone hoped and prayed that a catastrophe might be averted, as people here naturally feared the effect not only upon Russia but upon the whole Grand Alliance. And now when the curtain is raised again we find this most wonderful upheaval has taken place with comparatively no bloodshed and certainly no interruption of war operations.’
The last sentence appears a somewhat curious comment on the subsequent history of the Revolution, but at this stage the Allies were busily taking both Russians and Americans to their bosoms with fervent impartiality. A newspaper cutting preserved from this time - unnamed and undated, though the style seems familiar - represents the mood of enthusiastic self-congratulation then indulged in by the responsible but sadly misguided Press.
‘Unless Isaiah were an editor, with the minor prophets for a staff, how should any newspaper hope to deal adequately with a time when new marvels and portents are added to things already on a scale so far beyond ordinary human grasp? Weeks ago, in an interpretation and a forecast, which seemed bold, but have been verified almost to the letter, we explained the real America, the real Mr Wilson. Anticipating the entrance of the United States into the struggle we dwelt on the vast meaning of the sign. In this War full idealism is the only common sense for all the people who intend to count. Those who are still of little faith, despite all that has happened, are of no further use to God or man in an age when there is less fear, physical or moral, than ever before since the earth was. Prudence that mimicked sagacity is discovered to be a wiseacre, the sharpest cynic known to be no more than a man with a hatpin.’
For me the splendour so obvious to the papers had turned a little pallid in the light of the news from France. Despite the curtness of telegrams, the discretion of letter-writers and the vague optimism of official communiqués, the uproar of the Battle of Arras had somehow echoed across the Mediterranean. The wind that churned the sand into eddies, filling our eyes with grit, seemed heavy with a universal uneasiness, as though it had once carried the sound of great guns bludgeoning the battered remnants of men and trenches into ghoulish anonymity.
‘The sirocco is blowing to-night in a hateful way, rushing down the stone verandah, and making the doors and shutters creak and groan,’ I wrote anxiously to Geoffrey, in a kind of superstitious belief that I could hold him to life by my letters: ‘To me this particular wind always seems fraught with sinister things; it hides the stars, so that the night is as black as ink, and makes the men peevish and sends their temperatures up.’
All that week the sirocco blew, ominous with appre
hension, driving me to confess my misery of suspense to correspondents who would, I knew, have suffered or escaped the pains and griefs of hell weeks before the mail could reach them.
‘I have to keep on writing letters because the vague bits of news from France that filter through to us make me so anxious to receive them,’ I admitted to Edward on April 17th. ‘From the long list of names that appear in the telegrams there seems to be a vast battle going on along the whole of our front and the French one too, but it is very difficult to make out at all what is happening. Is Geoffrey anywhere in the Bapaume direction? The longer the War goes on, the more one’s concern in the whole immense business seems to centre itself upon the few beings still left that one cares about, and the less upon the general issue of the struggle.
‘One’s personal interest wears one’s patriotism rather threadbare by this time,’ I continued, ignominiously forgetting that in editorial eyes the expression of these sentiments would automatically relegate me to the ranks of those ‘of little faith’, who were ‘of no further use to God or man’. ‘After all, it is a garment one has had to wear for a very long time, so there’s not much wonder if it is beginning to get a little shabby . . . The last two nights have been horribly windy, but at 4 a.m. yesterday there was one of the most impressive skies I have ever seen - deep indigo blue, with long torn cloud-wracks stretched all across, the spaces between them studded with big brilliant stars, and, on the horizon just above the sea, a little red crescent of moon shining beneath a very black cloud.’
Yet another night’s red moon, I thought, looking up after finishing Edward’s letter at the ominous glow in the unquiet sky. Another night, and still no news. Is Victor still alive? Is Geoffrey? Oh, God - it’s intolerable to be out here, knowing nothing till ages afterwards, but just wondering and wondering what has happened!
11
I had good reason to wonder.
The next night, just after I had gone on duty and was making the usual tour of the wards, an orderly brought me a cablegram. Standing between the beds of two patients, I opened it and read the words:
‘Victor dangerously wounded; serious.’
‘I hope it isn’t bad news, Sister?’ exclaimed one of the men, who must have gathered from my face that it certainly was.
‘A great friend of mine’s been dangerously wounded in France,’ I replied, surprised to find that I could speak quite quietly. ‘He’s been dangerously wounded - and it doesn’t say how!’
It didn’t say how. Now that I knew so much about wounds, that vagueness seemed the telegram’s worst infliction. After the Somme I had seen men without faces, without eyes, without limbs, men almost disembowelled, men with hideous truncated stumps of bodies, and few certainties could have been less endurable than my gruesome speculations. Long afterwards I learnt that the cable had been sent by my father, who, with the kindest possible intentions, had believed that he was letting me down gently by suppressing the exact truth.
I could not, I knew, send off a demand for more precise information until the morning, and if I was to preserve sufficient sanity for the responsibilities of the night, I must somehow put a stop to this mental reconstruction of appalling mutilations. I didn’t feel inclined, just then, to talk about Victor to Betty or any of the other night V.A.D.s, who would not have understood why I should mind so much about someone who was not a fiancé or a brother or one of the other standard relationships. It was futile to write further letters until I knew more, so the only remaining resource was my now intermittent diary. I fetched it from the night-quarters, and poured into it the chaotic wretchedness which had, as so often before, no other outlet.
‘He has “made good” now,’ the entry concluded, ‘and won through to the bridging of the gulf which he always felt lay between himself on the one hand and Roland and Edward on the other. Is he able to realise this - or has he, like Roland, departed hence without the consciousness of his supreme glory? Did he fight and conquer Death in his dreadful illness of 1915, only to die of dreadful wounds? For these answers too I must wait. Waiting, watching, suspense, mourning - will there never be anything else in life? I am so weary of it all - but I bow my head before the storm now, I don’t try to fight it any more. I no longer expect things to go well for me; I don’t know that I even ask that they shall. All I ask is that I may fulfil my own small weary part in this War in such a way as to be worthy of Them, who die and suffer pain.’
It all sounded, like most of my youthful diary, very earnest and sentimental; only an experienced writer can put aspirations and prayers and resolutions into words without appearing a sententious prig. From the patients’ point of view, at any rate, it was probably better for me to be priggish than hysterical, which was the other alternative.
I had to wait four days before a reply came from Edward, to whom I had cabled because I knew that I could trust him to spare me nothing.
‘Eyesight probably gone. May live.’
So that’s it, I thought. He’s blind. His eyes are gone. I wonder if his face is gone too? No, not that; if it had been, Edward would have told me.
‘I don’t know whether to hope he will live or not,’ I wrote that night to my mother. ‘“Betty” says what a good thing he has not got a mother, thinking, I suppose, how upset his mother would be, but I think he is all the more to be pitied on that account, especially as he has no sister either . . . Poor dear “Three Musketeers”, it doesn’t seem fair that Roland should be dead and Victor blind, to say nothing of Edward’s bad arm. What a good thing we had no knowledge of what was in store for them in the future to spoil that last Speech Day.’
I learnt from the next two mails that Victor had been wounded on April 9th at Arras, first in the arm - which he had disregarded - and then in the head, while leading his platoon to attack the inexorable redoubt known as ‘The Harp’. At Rouen a hospital Matron had summoned his father, thinking that he could only last a few days. But unexpectedly he had rallied, and was sent home to the optical ward in the 2nd London General Hospital, Chelsea, where the care of the best eye specialists in England or France represented his only chance of sight.
The reports from France had been so conflicting that Edward, who sent me these details from Stafford, had vetoed all cables until nine days after the battle.
‘It has been bad enough for me in this out-of-the-way hole,’ he explained, ‘waiting a day and a half for letters from London and waiting in intolerable suspense the whole time, but it would be worse for you.’
He had been able, he told me, to get two leaves from Brocton Camp to go to London; even the first time Victor had recognised his voice, and on the second occasion he had talked quite rationally.
‘I don’t think he will die suddenly,’ the letter concluded, ‘but of course the brain must be injured and it depends upon how bad the injury is. I am inclined to think that it would be better that he should die; I would far rather die myself than live entirely without sight . . . You and I know how to lose all that we have most dearly loved but I think we hardly bargained for this. Sight is really a more precious gift than life . . . As he lies on his bed with bandages round his left eye and head and the right eyelid closed, he looks just like a picture of the Christ - the familiar expression seen on the Cross.
‘If only that right eye might have its sight!’
Immediately after the battle, the Colonel of the 9th K.R.R.C. had written to tell Victor’s father that he had recommended him for the Military Cross; ‘he did exceedingly well that day and . . . I have no doubt he will get it.’
The M.C. was in fact awarded to Victor a few weeks later, but this tribute did little more than intensify the stricken confusion into which his family had been plunged since the telegram from Rouen. After living in Sussex for many years, peacefully indifferent to foreign affairs, and politics, and all the other sources from which irrelevant calamity can descend upon the unprepared heads of inoffensive citizens, they found it almost as difficult to credit Victor with a supreme act of military courage as to
grasp the overwhelming fact of his blindness.
To Edward also the prospect of Victor’s Military Cross brought no consolation; he had worn the purple and white ribbon himself for nearly a year, and knew that the attractions of being a hero were apt to lose their staying power when they were expected to compensate for severe physical damage.
‘Victor got a bullet right through the head behind the eyes,’ he wrote miserably on April 22nd to Geoffrey, who was waiting for dawn in the trenches on the Scarpe. ‘I’m afraid the sight has gone entirely; the left eye had to be removed in France and a specialist here thinks there is no hope for the right eye; the optic nerve is severed. It is a tragedy which leaves one stupefied and he had such beautiful eyes.’
But Geoffrey, the only person who could have comforted him, never read the letter, for on April 23rd he was killed in action at Monchy-le-Preux.
12
I had just got into bed on May Morning and was drifting into sleep, when the cable came from Edward to say that Geoffrey was dead.
When I had read it I got up and went down to the shore in my dressing-gown and pyjamas. All day I sat on the rocks by the sea with the cable in my hand. I hardly noticed how the beautiful morning, golden and calm as an August in Devon, turned slowly into gorgeous afternoon, but I remembered afterwards that the rocks were covered with tiny cobalt-blue irises, about the size of an English wood violet.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 37
