‘We might have come off worse considering that we were in the most pronounced salient just E. of Polygon Wood - one of the worst bits of the whole front during the whole War. However I am told that I am going on leave in 3 or 4 days . . . We have at last a gramophone and a very fine song by a man named Sherrington, “Sweet Early Violets” . . . You have no idea how bitter life is at times.’
How much of its bitterness was due, I wonder, to his knowledge that three months of incessant anguish had produced a total insecure advance of less than five miles? How fully did he realise the utter failure of the long offensive which had absorbed half the gallantry and chivalry, not only of the 11th Sherwood Foresters, but of the whole Fifth Army? Tired and discouraged as he and the surviving remnant of the battalion had become, the terrific gales and whipping rains of the late autumn, which turned the shell-gashed flats of Flanders into an ocean of marshy mud that made death by drowning almost as difficult to avoid as death from gun-fire, must have added the last intolerable straw to their burden of misery.
At Etaples the wind from the sea, heavy and cold and menacing, turned the camp into a dizzy panorama of rocking wood and flapping canvas. One afternoon I came off duty to find my Alwyn hut blown into a collapsed heap of rags and planks on the top of all my possessions. It was past hope of repair, so after grubbily collecting our belongings from beneath the debris, S. and I, without undue reluctance, parted company and were sent to occupy vacant beds in the two-to-a-room winter quarters.
9
At the end of October came the Italian collapse at Caporetto. As von Bülow pursued his demoralised opponents to the River Piave, and one by one captured the heights between the Piave and the Brenta which protected the Venetian plain, there was much speculation in France over the fate of Venice. For the moment I took little interest in these discussions, never dreaming that the rout of an Italian Army in a remote mountain village could concern me for the rest of my life, nor that a time would come when I should not be able to look at a map of the Italian front without a tightening of the throat.
But on November 3rd, when the Flanders offensive was subsiding dismally into the mud and Edward was daily expected home on leave, a brief, mysterious note came from him, written in the vaguely remembered Latin of the Sixth Form at Uppingham:
‘Hanc epistolam in lingua Latina male conscripta - nam multorum sum oblitus - quasi experimentiam tibi mitto. Si plurimos dies litteras a me non accipis, nole perturbari; ut in fossis sim ne credideris. Non tamen dies decimos domum redibo, utrumque ad locum aliquem propinquum ei quo parum ante Kalendas Junias revenisti necne eamus haud certe scio. Ut plurimos menses vel etiam annos te videre non possim maxime timeo; sed “vale” priusquam dixi et me vixurum esse ut rursus te videam semper spero. Spem aeternam ad laetitas in futuro tibi etiam tradent di immortales.’
Calling desperately upon the elusive shades of Pass Mods., I managed to gather from this letter that Edward’s battalion had been ordered to join the British and French Divisions being sent from France under Lord Plumer and General Fayolle to reinforce the Italian Army. When I had recovered a little from the shock, I took his note to the C. of E. padre, a burly, rubicund individual whose manner to V.A.D.s was that of the family butler engaging the youngest between-maid, and with innocent eyes asked him to translate. As I had suspected, he had not the remotest idea where to begin, and after much protest about the thinness of the notepaper, and the illegibility of Edward’s clear handwriting, he was obliged, to my secret triumph, to confess his ignorance.
Although I was glad that Edward had left the Salient, I couldn’t help being disappointed that he was going so far away after I had manœuvred myself, as I had hoped, permanently near him for the duration of our wartime lives.
‘Half the point of being in France seems to be gone,’ I told my family, ‘and I didn’t realise until I heard he was going how much I had . . . looked forward to seeing him walk up this road one day to see me. But I want you to try and not worry about him more because he is there . . . no one who has not been out here has any idea how fed-up everyone is with France and with the same few miles of ground that have been solidly fought over for three years. There is a more sporting chance anywhere than here. Of course there has been great talk about the migration . . . and all the men whose units are going are very pleased.’
It was certainly a change to get picture-postcards of bright-looking villages in the remote north of Italy after the mud-stained letters from Passchendaele, though the move did not appear, as yet, to have eradicated the pessimism that had seeped into Edward’s spirit in melancholy Flanders.
‘We have been accorded a most hearty reception all the way and been presented with anything from bottles of so-called phiz. to manifestoes issued by mayors of towns . . .’ he wrote on November 15th from Mantua. ‘We have got a very hard job to do here and during the next few weeks the uninitiated may think we have failed in it but I trust we shall not really have done so; everything is going to be very different to what we have been used to before . . . We have got the gramophone all this way all right - but I am afraid we may have to throw it away any time now. These plains are so boring; it is impossible to see more than 100 yards for vines. Sorry - I am wandering to-night being rather tired.’
That same evening I was sent on night-duty to an acute medical ward. Since each of my previous night-duties had become a sharp, painful memory of telegrams and death and brooding grief, I did not welcome the change, and wrote to my mother in a sudden fit of despondency, deepened by the renewed recollection that Edward, my fellow-survivor, was far away and depressed:
‘I feel very old and sad these days, though Sister “Milroy” . . . tells me she feels like my mother when she goes out with me, though she’s only eight years older. I wonder if I shall ever be eight years older, and if the next eight could possibly be as long as the last three. I suppose I am saturated with War, and getting thoroughly war-weary, like everyone else.’
10
The acute medical ward was under the night supervision of a Sister whom I soon came to address off-duty as ‘Mary’, for she was the trained-nurse elder sister of the V.A.D. with whom I had walked to Hardelot. Still in her twenties, tall, buxom and immensely strong, Mary, who had just come down from a Casualty Clearing Station, at first provoked me to antagonism as she moved calmly about the ward, interested, half smiling, a little complacent. But very soon we became friends and allies, and I put a poem about her into the small volume called Verses of a V.A.D. which I published in 1918.
‘I always follow the work - or else it follows me,’ I thought, looking apprehensively at the gasping pneumonias, the puffy, inarticulate nephritics and the groaning, blanket-swathed rheumatic fevers. Nights would go by, I knew, before I should have time to write to Betty or to Clare, whose brave, infrequent letters, describing the struggles of a would-be artist to acquire an adequate training at the Brighton Art School, revealed between the lines a prolonged battle against increasing domestic depression. Betty was now back in London, as there was ‘nothing doing’ in Malta - Malta which for me belonged already to a past life in another era. She didn’t want to leave home again, she wrote, and proposed to take a course of training as a masseuse.
Her dutiful readiness to abandon adventure perhaps made my own family restless, for they wrote with increasing perturbation about servant difficulties, towards which, with the nightly responsibility for thirty lives on my shoulders, I felt patronisingly unsympathetic. At twenty-three, having been consistently well fed on a rough but ample Army diet since 1915, I realised only dimly the state of acute neurasthenia into which poor food, constant anxiety, frequent air-raids and the shortage of all necessities were steadily driving middle-aged London.
‘I am sorry you have so much trouble about servants,’ runs a letter to my mother after a fortnight of night-duty: ‘it all seems such a waste of energy when energy is so precious. I really think that soon people will have no choice but either to live in hotels or else do their own work entirely. P
ersonally I would not be in England now for anything; I only wish there were some job that would bring you out here, for people at home seem to be having a pretty bad time.’
I had not underrated the strenuousness of my ward; indeed, it contained possibilities hitherto unrealised - as I knew one night after I had been chased up and down the hut by a stark naked six-foot-four New Zealander in the fighting stage of delirium. Two orderlies, hastily summoned from adjacent wards by one of my few convalescent patients, finally rescued my five-foot-three from its predicament, and as they strapped the insane giant into bed I sat by my table with a beating heart, listening to his fury exploding in a torrent of such expressive language as had not yet assailed my innocent ears even in two and a half years of Army life. When at last he had subsided under the quietening prick of Mary’s hypodermic syringe, the elderly Cockney dying of pneumonia in the corner began his permanent refrain: ‘Give me me trousers, I want to go to Trouville - want to go to Trouville - to Trouville!’
These acute medical cases were a disturbing contrast to the sane, courageous surgicals. Wounded men kept their personalities even after a serious operation, whereas those of the sick became so quickly impaired; the tiny, virulent microbe that attacked the body seemed to dominate the spirit as well. Why was personality so vulnerable, why did it succumb to such small, humiliating assailants? I mused perturbedly, as I hurried with the bed-pans along the frozen paths between the huts under the bright December stars.
‘Never in my life have I been so absolutely filthy as I get on duty here,’ I wrote to my mother on December 5th in answer to her request for a description of my work.
‘Sister A. has six wards and there is no V.A.D. in the next-door one, only an orderly, so neither she nor he spend very much time in here. Consequently I am Sister, V.A.D. and orderly all in one (somebody said the other day that no one less than God Almighty could give a correct definition of the job of a V.A.D.!) and after, quite apart from the nursing, I have stoked the stove all night, done two or three rounds of bed-pans and kept the kettles going and prepared feeds on exceedingly black Beatrice oil-stoves and refilled them from the steam kettles, literally wallowing in paraffin all the time, I feel as if I had been dragged through the gutter! Possibly acute surgical is the heaviest kind of work there is, but acute medical is, I think, more wearing than anything else on earth. You are kept on the go the whole time and in the end there seems nothing definite to show for it - except that one or two people are still alive who might otherwise have been dead.’
The rest of my letter referred to the effect, upon ourselves, of the new offensive at Cambrai.
‘The hospital is very heavy now - as heavy as when I came; the fighting is continuing very long this year, and the convoys keep coming down, two or three a night . . . Sometimes in the middle of the night we have to turn people out of bed and make them sleep on the floor to make room for more seriously ill ones that have come down from the line. We have heaps of gassed cases at present who came in a day or two ago; there are 10 in this ward alone. I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case - to say nothing of 10 cases - of mustard gas in its early stages - could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes - sometimes temporally [sic], sometimes permanently - all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. The only thing one can say is that such severe cases don’t last long; either they die soon or else improve - usually the former; they certainly never reach England in the state we have them here, and yet people persist in saying that God made the War, when there are such inventions of the Devil about . . .
‘Morning work - i.e. beds, T.P.R.s (temperatures, pulses, respirations), washings, medicines, etc., which in Malta I started at 6.0, start here at 3.30! The other morning there were no less than 17 people to wash! . . . Cold is terrific; the windows of the ward are all covered with icicles and the taps outside frozen. I am going about the ward in a jersey and long coat.’
The extreme cold had begun very early that winter. By the middle of December our kettles and hot-water bottles and sponges were all frozen hard when we came off duty if we had not carefully emptied and squeezed them the night before - which in our hasty, last-minute toilettes we seldom did, for getting up to go on duty in the icy darkness was a shuddering misery almost as exacting as an illness. Our vests, if we hung them over a chair, went stiff, and we could keep them soft only by sleeping in them. All the taps froze; water for the patients had to be cut down to a minimum, and any spilt in the hut passage between our rooms turned in a few seconds to ice.
Except for the weather it didn’t seem much like Christmas, with no Roland or Victor or Geoffrey to buy presents for, and Edward so far away that the chance of anything reaching him within a week of the proper time was discouragingly remote. Wartime Christmases anyhow had long lost their novelty, but Mary and I got up early all the same and made shopping expeditions to the village, walking back in pitch darkness through the frozen mud laden with fruit and sweets and gaudy decorations. Christmas Day itself was less unhappy than I had expected, for after a tea-party with the men in my ward, I spent the evening warmly and sleepily at a concert given by the convalescents from the two next-door huts, of which Hope Milroy was now in charge by day.
My own tea-party had to be brief because of another Corporal Smith - though of a type very different from that of the first mortally ill man that I had seen at the Devonshire Hospital - who was rapidly dying of phthisis. The traditional only son of a widow, who had been sent for from England, he was one of those grateful, sweet-tempered patients whom it was torture to be unable to save. As he and 1917 ebbed away together, I couldn’t rest even though the surviving gassed cases had gone to England and the convoys had suddenly ceased, but hovered all night between the stove and the foot of his bed, waiting for the inevitable dawn which would steal greyly around the folded screens. Only once, for ten minutes, did I forsake the self-imposed futility of watching the losing struggle, when Edward’s Christmas letter, written on December 22nd, came out of a snowstorm to remind me that love still existed, quick and warm, in a world dominated by winter and death.
‘To-night I owe you a long letter; I have written nothing but the shortest of notes since we started from Mantova over a month ago. I am so thankful for your letters - they are now as before the greatest help in the whole world . . . I don’t know whether I am glad to be here or not - it sounds strange but it’s quite true; I was glad to leave the unpleasant region we were in not far from you and the novelty was good for a time but yet in a way it is all the same because there is no known future and the end is not yet, though, on the face of things at present, there is perhaps more chance of return. Why do you want me to get married - a most improbable occurrence? Anyhow there will be no chance for a very long time. It is wonderful that you manage to write a play in spite of all your work; I never have time to do anything . . . and I dream of things and never do them. It is partly the fault of the Army itself . . . this sort of routine is so deadening; it is a life of thinking about little details the whole time and especially thinking about the right one at the right time; the brain must be essentially a machine of memory and after that the rule of life is expediency . . . I can’t get on with this because of the number of messages, orders, etc., which are continually arriving; the same happens every evening only it is more usual for them to come in the middle of dinner. I am rather a grumbler.
‘Those 2 poems of Masefield’s are very good . . . Poetry counteracts the deadening influence a good deal . . . I am reading The Loom of Youth in bits . . . It is very good and it is very true even if slightly exaggerated . . . My own experience is that the language and morals generally are not so blatant as he depicts them . . .
‘We are only half in t
he mountains here; we face them and the Austrian sits on them; they look very beautiful at times, sometimes near sometimes far off, and there is generally snow on the higher ones . . . We were all very short of anything to smoke until just lately when some cigarettes came for me from home; it is an absurd country for supplies though canteens are coming now . . . The gramophone returned last night with the spare kit from the base; great joy - “Sweet Early Violets” and “Down in the Forest” again . . . I wish I could see you again; it is so long since I did that we shouldn’t be able to talk properly for abouthour. It seems so much more than two years ago since Roland was killed - to-morrow and Monday I will think of you whenever I can and our love of him may lessen the miles between us. What a long war this is! It seems wonderful to have lived so long through it when everyone else is dead.
‘Good night, dear dear child.’
It must have been very soon afterwards that Corporal Smith died. His mother, a little woman in rusty black, wept quietly and controlledly beside him when the final struggle for breath began; she gave us no trouble even when Mary replied ‘Yes, quite sure,’ to her final piteous inquiry. After I had taken her through the bitter, snowy darkness to the night superintendent’s bunk, Mary and I laid out the boy’s wasted body. His rapid death had been due, we were told, to an over-conscientious determination to endure; he had refused to complain until too late.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 43
