Certainly no Angels of Mons were watching over Etaples, or they would not have allowed mutilated men and exhausted women to be further oppressed by the series of noctural air-raids which for over a month supplied the camps beside the railway with periodic intimations of the less pleasing characteristics of a front-line trench. The offensive seemed to have lasted since the beginning of creation, but must actually have been on for less than a fortnight, when the lights suddenly went out one evening as the daystaff was finishing its belated supper. Instead of the usual interval of silence followed by the return of the lights, an almost immediate series of crashes showed this alarm to be real.
After days of continuous heavy duty and scamped, inadequate meals, our nerves were none too reliable, and I don’t suppose I was the only member of the staff whose teeth chattered with sheer terror as we groped our way to our individual huts in response to the order to scatter. Hope Milroy and I, thinking that we might as well be killed together, sat glassy-eyed in her small, pitch-black room. Suddenly, intermittent flashes half blinded us, and we listened frantically in the deafening din for the bugle-call which we knew would summon us to join the night-staff in the wards if bombs began to fall on the hospital.
One young Sister, who had previously been shelled at a Casualty Clearing Station, lost her nerve and rushed screaming through the Mess; two others seized her and forcibly put her to bed, holding her down while the raid lasted to prevent her from causing a panic. I knew that I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life, yet all the time a tense, triumphant pride that I was not revealing my fear to the others held me to the semblance of self-control.
When a momentary lull came in the booms and the flashes, Hope, who had also been under fire at a C.C.S., gave way to the sudden bravado of rushing into the open to see whether the raiders had gone; she was still wearing her white cap, and a dozen trembling hands instantly pulled her indoors again, a dozen shakily shrill voices scolded her indiscretion. Gradually, after another brief burst of firing, the camp became quiet, though the lights were not turned on again that night. Next day we were told that most of the bombs had fallen on the village; the bridge over the Canche, it was reported, had been smashed, and the train service had to be suspended while the engineers performed the exciting feat of mending it in twelve hours.
For a day or two after the raid I felt curiously light-hearted; like the hero of Hugh Walpole’s The Dark Forest - one of the few novels that I read that winter - ‘I was happy . . . with a strange exultation that was unlike any emotion that I had known before. It was . . . something of the happiness of danger or pain that one has dreaded and finds, in actual truth, give way before one’s resolution.’
But that vital sense of self-conquest soon vanished, for within the next few weeks a good night’s rest proved impossible for most of us. The liability to be called up for late convoys had already induced a habit of light, restless dozing, and the knowledge that the raiders meant business and might return at any moment after sunset did not help us to settle down quietly and confidently during the hours of darkness. Whenever a particularly tiring day had battered our exhausted nerves into indifference, the lights went out as the result of alarming reports from Abbeville or Camiers and revived our apprehensions. Rumour declared that we were all to be issued with steel helmets, and further spasmodic efforts were made to provide us with trenches in case of emergency.
Three weeks of such days and nights, lived without respite or off-duty time under the permanent fear of defeat and flight, reduced the staffs of the Etaples hospitals to the negative conviction that nothing mattered except to end the strain. England, panic-stricken, was frantically raising the military age to fifty and agreeing to the appointment of Foch as Commander-in-Chief, but to us with our blistered feet, our swollen hands, our wakeful, reddened eyes, victory and defeat began - as indeed they were afterwards to prove - to seem very much the same thing. On April 11th, after a dizzying rush of wounded from the new German offensive at Armentie‘res, I stumbled up to the Sisters’ quarters for lunch with the certainty that I could not go on - and saw, pinned up on the notice-board in the Mess, Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘Special Order of the Day’. Standing there spellbound, with fatigue and despair forgotten, I read the words which put courage into so many men and women whose need of endurance was far greater than my own:
‘TO ALL RANKS OF THE BRITISH ARMY IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS
‘Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army.
‘In spite of throwing already 106 Divisions into the battle and enduring the most reckless sacrifice of human life, he has as yet made little progress towards his goals.
‘We owe this to the determined fighting and self-sacrifice of our troops. Words fail me to express the admiration which I feel for the splendid resistance offered by all ranks of our Army under the most trying circumstances.
‘Many amongst us now are tired. To those I would say that Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest. The French Army is moving rapidly and in great force to our support.
‘There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
‘D. HAIG, F.M.,
‘General Headquarters,
‘Thursday, April 11th, 1918.’
‘Commander-in-Chief
‘British Armies in France.
Although, since that date, the publication of official ‘revelations’ has stripped from the Haig myth much of its glory, I have never been able to visualise Lord Haig as the colossal blunderer, the self-deceived optimist, of the Somme massacre in 1916. I can think of him only as the author of that Special Order, for after I had read it I knew that I should go on, whether I could or not. There was a braver spirit in the hospital that afternoon, and though we only referred briefly and brusquely to Haig’s message, each one of us had made up her mind that, though enemy airmen blew up our huts and the Germans advanced upon us from Abbeville, so long as wounded men remained in Etaples, there would be ‘no retirement’.
Only a day or two afterwards I was leaving quarters to go back to my ward, when I had to wait to let a large contingent of troops march past me along the main road that ran through our camp. They were swinging rapidly towards Camiers, and though the sight of soldiers marching was now too familiar to arouse curiosity, an unusual quality of bold vigour in their swift stride caused me to stare at them with puzzled interest.
They looked larger than ordinary men; their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed. At first I thought their spruce, clean uniforms were those of officers, yet obviously they could not be officers, for there were too many of them; they seemed, as it were, Tommies in heaven. Had yet another regiment been conjured out of our depleted Dominions? I wondered, watching them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect. But I knew the colonial troops so well, and these were different; they were assured where the Australians were aggressive, self-possessed where the New Zealanders were turbulent.
Then I heard an excited exclamation from a group of Sisters behind me.
‘Look! Look! Here are the Americans!’
I pressed forward with the others to watch the United States physically entering the War, so god-like, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army. So these were our deliverers at last, marching up the road to Camiers in the spring sunshine! There seemed to be hundreds of them, and in the fearless swagger of their proud strength they looked a formidable bulwark against the peril looming from Amiens.
Somehow the necessity of packing up in a hurry, the ignominious flight to the coast so long imagined, seemed to move further away. An uncontrollable emotion seized me - as such emotions often seized us in those days of insufficient sleep; my eyeballs pricked, my throat ached, and a mist swam over the confident Americans going to the front. The coming of relief made me realise all at once how long and how intolerable had been the tension, and with the knowledge that we were not, after all, defeated, I found myself beginning to cry.
15
Just when the Retreat had reduced the strip of coast between the line and the sea to its narrowest dimensions, the summons came that I had subconsciously dreaded ever since my uncomfortable leave.
Early in April a letter arrived from my father to say that my mother had ‘crocked up’ and had been obliged, owing to the inefficiency of the domestic help then available, to go into a nursing-home. What exactly was wrong remained unspecified, though phrases referred to ‘toxic heart’ and ‘complete general breakdown’. My father had temporarily closed the flat and moved into an hotel, but he did not, he told me, wish to remain there. ‘As your mother and I can no longer manage without you,’ he concluded, ‘it is now your duty to leave France immediately and return to Kensington.’
I read these words with real dismay, for my father’s interpretation of my duty was not, I knew only too well, in the least likely to agree with that of the Army, which had always been singularly unmoved by the worries of relatives. What was I to do? I wondered desperately. There was my family, confidently demanding my presence, and here was the offensive, which made every pair of experienced hands worth ten pairs under normal conditions. I remembered how the hastily imported V.A.D.s had gone sick at the 1st London during the rush after the Somme; a great push was no time in which to teach a tyro her job. How much of my mother’s breakdown was physical and how much psychological - the cumulative result of pessimism at home? It did not then occur to me that my father’s sense of emergency was probably heightened by a subconscious determination to get me back to London before the Germans reached the Channel ports, as everyone in England felt certain they would. I only knew that no one in France would believe a domestic difficulty to be so insoluble; if I were dead, or a male, it would have to be settled without me. I should merely be thought to have ‘wind-up’, to be using my mother’s health as an excuse to escape the advancing enemy or the threatening air-raids.
Half-frantic with the misery of conflicting obligations, I envied Edward his complete powerlessness to leave the Army whatever happened at home. To-day, remembering the violent clash between family and profession, between ‘duty’ and ambition, between conscience and achievement, which has always harassed the women now in their thirties and forties, I find myself still hoping that if the efforts of various interested parties succeed in destroying the fragile international structure built up since the Armistice, and war breaks out on a scale comparable to that of 1914, the organisers of the machine will not hesitate to conscript all women under fifty for service at home or abroad. In the long run, an irrevocable allegiance in a time of emergency makes decision easier for the older as well as for the younger generation. What exhausts women in wartime is not the strenuous and unfamiliar tasks that fall upon them, nor even the hourly dread of death for husbands or lovers or brothers or sons; it is the incessant conflict between personal and national claims which wears out their energy and breaks their spirit.
That night, dizzy from work and indecision, I sat up in bed listening for an air-raid and gazing stupidly at the flickering shadows cast by the candle-lantern which was all the illumination that we were now allowed. Through my brain ran perpetually a short sentence which - having become, like the men, liable to sudden light-headed intervals - I could not immediately identify with anything that I had read.
‘ “The strain all along,” ’ I repeated dully, ‘ “is very great . . . very great.” ’ What exactly did those words describe? The enemy within shelling distance - refugee Sisters crowding in with nerves all awry - bright moonlight, and aeroplanes carrying machine-guns - ambulance trains jolting noisily into the siding, all day, all night - gassed men on stretchers, clawing the air - dying men, reeking with mud and foul green-stained bandages, shrieking and writhing in a grotesque travesty of manhood - dead men with fixed, empty eyes and shiny, yellow faces . . . Yes, perhaps the strain all along had been very great . . .
Then I remembered; the phrase came out of my father’s letter, and it described, not the offensive in France, but the troubles at home. The next day I went to the Matron’s office and interviewed the successor to the friendly Scottish Matron who had sent me on leave, and whose health had obliged her to leave Etaples and return to the calmer conditions of home service. The new Matron was old and charitable, but she naturally did not welcome my problem with enthusiasm. The application for long leave which I had hoped to put in would have, she said, no chance at all while this push was on; the only possibility was to break my contract, which I might be allowed to do if I made conditions at home sound serious enough.
‘I’m giving you this advice against my will,’ she added. ‘I’m already short of staff and I can’t hope to replace you.’
So, with a sinking heart, I asked for leave to break my contract owing to ‘special circumstances’, and returned to my ward feeling a cowardly deserter. Only to Edward could I express the explosive misery caused by my dilemma, and he replied with his usual comprehending sympathy.
‘I can well understand how exasperating it must be for you to have to go home now . . . when you have just been in the eddying backwater of the sternest fight this War has known; it is one of those little ironies which life has ready to offer at a most inopportune moment. I suppose that the Armentie‘res push will have affected you more nearly still as it is not so very far away . . . There was a rumour yesterday here that Ypres had gone at last but there is nothing official about it. It is quite surprising that we are still here but if we all came back these people would probably give up the War, and “the last state of that man . . .’
I was glad that my orders did not come through until almost the end of April, when the offensive against the British had slackened, and we knew for certain that we had not yet lost the War.
Early one morning I bade a forlorn farewell to my friends and went down alone in an ambulance to the station. From Hope Milroy I parted with special reluctance, though I should not have had her companionship much longer in any case, for a few weeks afterwards she was transferred from Etaples to Havre. In spite of her unconventionality she was awarded the Royal Red Cross at the end of the War, and is now Matron of a hospital abroad. Apart from our periodic correspondence, nothing remains of my days in France but the crowded cemetery at Etaples and a host of memories.
I was supposed to be catching the 8.20 for Boulogne that morning, but when, about 8.30, I endeavoured to board the train that came in, I was firmly prevented by the military officials at the station. The new arrival, they told me, was not the 8.20 but the night train from Paris, which should have appeared about 2 a.m.; since my orders were for the 8.20, by the 8.20 I must go, whatever time it arrived at Etaples. So I spent the rest of that interminable morning walking up and down the draughty station and hoping that the 8.20 would not be quite so late as its predecessor, though I knew that the push and the air-raids between them had so disorganised the railways that they probably wouldn’t recover for weeks.
When a sleet-shower came down and drove me into the cheerless waiting-room, I found my melancholy vigil shared by two officers, an American airman in the Canadian Air Force and a distracted infantry officer who was even more impatient than myself. He was getting married the next day, he told us, and everything depended on his catching the afternoon boat. The three of us pooled our agitation, joined up for luncheon in the small cold buffet, and once again paced the platform, with the knowledge that the boat was already missed driving the would-be husband almost to tears.
Eventually the young airman and
I agreed to become philosophical; we would spend the night in Boulogne, we decided - I going as usual to the Louvre, and he, with extreme propriety, to the R.A.F. Club round the corner - and cross peacefully together the next morning. But no philosophy ever invented could console the infantry officer, and when we did reach Boulogne at dusk he hurriedly left us, saying he had heard that a hospital ship was going over by night, and he thought he knew someone on it who could ‘wangle’ him across. The ‘wangle’ evidently succeeded, for we never saw him again.
It was after 2 p.m. before the 8.20 arrived at Etaples, and we were able to rest our tired legs and cold feet in the comparative warmth of a first-class carriage. We talked spasmodically for a time, but the long wait had exhausted the few conversational topics that we all had in common, and I began to feel unusually sympathetic towards the familiar notice above the door: ‘Taisez-vous! Mefiez-vous ! Les oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent!’ So I left the two officers to carry on a duologue, and looked out of the window at the tormented, hag-ridden country in which I had worked so fiercely for nine months, and was now obliged, by force of circumstance, to leave to the War.
As the train passed through Hardelot, I noticed that the woods on either side of the line were vivid with a golden-green lattice-work of delicate leaves. For a whole month in which off-duty time had been impossible, I had ceased to be aware of the visible world of the French countryside; my eyes had seen nothing but the wards and the dying, the dirt and dried blood, the obscene wounds of mangled men and the lotions and lint with which I had dressed them. Looking, now, at the pregnant buds, the green veil flung over the trees and the spilt cream of primroses in the bright, wet grass, I realised with a pang of astonishment that the spring had come.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 46
