Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (50 page)

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.

For hours I remained in that state of suspended physical animation when neither heat nor cold, hunger nor thirst, fatigue nor pain, appear to have any power over the body, but the mind seems exceptionally logical and clear. My emotions, however, in so far as they existed, were not logical at all, for they led me to a conviction that Geoffrey’s presence was somewhere with me on the rocks. I even felt that if I turned my head quickly I might see him behind me, standing there with his deep-set grey-blue eyes, his finely chiselled lips and the thick light-brown hair that waved a little over his high, candid forehead.

And all at once, as I gazed out to sea, the words of the ‘Agony Column’ advertisement, that I had cut out and sent to Roland nearly two years before, struggled back into my mind.

‘Lady,
fianc
é killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’

I even remembered vaguely the letter in which I had commented on this notice at the time.

‘At first sight it is a little startling. Afterwards the tragedy of it dawns on you. The lady (probably more than a girl or she would have called herself “young lady”; they always do) doubtless has no particular gift or qualification, and does not want to face the dreariness of an unoccupied and unattached old-maidenhood. But the only person she loved is dead; all men are alike to her and it is a matter of indifference whom she marries, so she thinks she may as well marry someone who really needs her. The man, she thinks, being blind or maimed for life, will not have much opportunity of falling in love with anyone, and even if he does will not be able to say so. But he will need a perpetual nurse, and she if married to him can do more for him than an ordinary nurse and will perhaps find relief for her sorrow in devoting her life to him. Hence the advertisement; I wonder if anyone will answer it? It is purely a business arrangement, with an element of self-sacrifice which redeems it from utter sordidness. Quite an idea, isn’t it?’

I was still, I reflected, a girl and not yet a ‘lady’, and I had certainly never meant to go through life with ‘no particular gift or qualification’. But - ‘quite an idea, isn’t it?’ Was it, Geoffrey? Wasn’t it? There was nothing left in life now but Edward and the wreckage of Victor - Victor who had stood by me so often in my blackest hours. If he wanted me, surely I could stand by him in his.

If he wanted me? I decided, quite suddenly, that I would go home and see. It would not, I knew, be difficult to get permission, for though the renewal of my contract was overdue and I had said that I would sign on again, I had not yet done so. Work was slack in Malta; several hospitals were closing and the rest were overstaffed. Much as I liked my hospital and loved the island, I knew that I was not really needed there any more; any one - or no one - could take my place. If I could not do anything immediate for Victor I would join up again; if I could - well, time and the extent of his injuries would decide when that should be.

That night - quiet as all nights were now that so few sick and wounded were coming from Salonika - I tried to keep my mind from thoughts and my eyes from tears by assiduously pasting photographs of Malta into a cardboard album. The scent of a vase of sweet-peas on the ward table reminded me of Roland’s study on Speech Day, centuries ago. Although I had been up for a day and two nights, I felt no inclination to sleep.

I was not, as it happened, very successful in stifling thought. By one of those curious chances which occurred during the War with such poignant frequency, a mail came in that evening with a letter from Geoffrey. It had been written in pencil three days before the attack; reading it with the knowledge that he had been so soon to die, I found its simple nobility even less bearable than the shock of the cablegram.

As I took in its contents with a slow, dull pain, the silent, shadowy verandah outside the door seemed to vanish from my eyes, and I saw the April evening in France which Geoffrey’s words were to paint upon my mind for ever - the battened-out line of German trenches winding away into shell-torn trees, the ant-like contingent of men marching across a derelict plain to billets in the large town outlined against the pale yellow sky, the setting sun beneath purple clouds reflected in the still water at the bottom of many ‘crump-holes’. How he wished, he said, that Edward could have been with him to see this beauty if it were any other place, but though the future seemed very vague it was none the less certain. He only hoped that he would not fail at the critical moment, as he was indeed ‘a horrible coward’; for his school’s sake, where so often he had watched the splendours of the sunset from the school field, he would especially like to do well. ‘But all this will be boring you.’

Characteristically he concluded his letter with the haunting lines that must have nerved many a reluctant young soldier to brave the death from which body and spirit shrank so pitifully.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going . . .
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

‘Rupert Brooke,’ he added, ‘is great and his faith also great. If destiny is willing I will write later.’

Well, I thought, destiny was not willing, and I shall not see that graceful, generous handwriting on an envelope any more. I wonder why it is that both Victor and Geoffrey were fired to such articulateness by the imminence of death, while Edward and Roland, who had the habit of self-expression, both became so curtly monosyllabic? Oh, Geoffrey, I shall never know anyone quite like you again, so true, so straight, such an unashamed idealist! It’s another case of ‘whom the Gods love’; the people we care for all seem too fine for this world, so we lose them . . . Surely, surely there must be somewhere in which the sweet intimacies begun here may be continued and the hearts broken by this War may be healed!

13

I had to wait for nearly a month before I received permission ‘to proceed to the United Kingdom’ by the overland route. Since the beginning of ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ on February 1st, and the subsequent endless story of torpedoed transports and hospital ships, we were no longer allowed to travel by sea; passenger boats were infrequent, and the Mediterranean had become so perilous that even the six-hour journey from Malta to Sicily offered possibilities which did not bear contemplation.

In the interval I received news from Edward of both Victor’s progress and Geoffrey’s end. ‘Tah,’ he told me, ‘is perfectly sensible in every way and I don’t think there is the very least doubt that he will live. He said that the last few days had been rather bitter. He hasn’t given up hope himself about his sight and occasionally says, “If I get better.” ’

On April 30th, when Edward wrote from Brocton Camp, he had heard only that morning of Geoffrey’s death, and did not yet know that he had been killed by a sniper while endeavouring to get into touch with the battalion on his left some hours after the attack on the Scarpe began. Shot through the chest, he died speechless, gazing intently at his orderly. The place where he lay was carefully marked, but when the action was over his body had disappeared and was never afterwards found.

‘I have been afraid for him for so long,’ ran Edward’s small, precise handwriting - an incongruous medium for such abysmal grief, ‘and yet now that he has gone it is so very hard - that prince among men with so fine an appreciation of all that was worth appreciating . . . Always a splendid friend with a splendid heart and a man who won’t be forgotten by you or me however long or short a time we may live. Dear child, there is no more to say; we have lost almost all there was to lose and what have we gained? Truly as you say has patriotism worn very very threadbare . . . This is an unlucky place - I was here when Roland died of wounds, when Tah was blinded and when Geoffrey was killed.’

If only I could comfort him a little, I thought, and I felt more than ever glad that I was going home.

‘I dare not think much about Geoffrey,’ I told him in reply. ‘As I work there is a shadow over everything; I know it is there but I try not to think why it is there or to analyse it too much . . . I used to write to him a great deal. I sent him cigarettes quite a few days ago; I am glad I sent them although he never received them.’

In the same letter I tried to indicate to him the decision to which I felt that I had come, but which I couldn’t put into definite words until I knew how far Victor had recovered and what shape his plans were taking for the future.

‘No one could realise better than I our responsibility towards him - not only because of our love for him, but because of his love for us, and the love felt for him by the one we loved and lost. I am not sure that this doesn’t apply more to me than to any of you. I at any rate know this, that I should be more glad than I can say to offer him a very close and life-long devotion if he would accept it, and I cannot imagine that Roland, if he had known what was to be - if he knows - would be anything but glad too. Those two are beyond any aid of ours - they who have died; and the only way to pay even one little bit of the debt to them is through the one who remains.’

On May 22nd, with a small party of home-going Sisters and V.A.D.s, I began my long, dirty and uncomfortable journey to an England that seemed, at the outset, curiously improbable and remote. We had to send our heavy luggage by sea - it arrived home, very typically, the day after I had once again departed on active service and had been obliged to purchase a complete new outfit - and were allowed to carry only one package, into which, disregarding uniform and equipment, I stuffed the silks, laces, pale blue kimono and other treasures acquired in Valletta. We were told to carry food for six days, and filled our haversacks with bread, butter, tinned milk and potted meat, all of which had become repulsively languid by the end of the second outrageously hot day. Somehow I found a corner for my diary; the last few entries describe what I still remember, for all my sorrow and anxiety, as one of the queerest and most exciting adventures of the War. I do not know why I omitted an incident which I recalled long after other details of the journey were forgotten - the melancholy sadness of listening, at sunset in Syracuse harbour, to the ‘Last Post’ being sounded for a Japanese sailor who had been washed overboard from the destroyer that had acted as our convoy across the turbulent Mediterranean.

‘
May 22nd, 1917
. - Left Malta with Sisters L. and N. and V.A.D.s K., M——n, M——n, and M——y. I hated to go, for I had been very happy there, and it was a real pain to say good-bye to Betty, with whom I have been for so long.

‘We were taken by transport to Grand Harbour, and after waiting on docks for about an hour, put on the
Isonzo
. Lady Methuen and party were on board and we had a Japanese destroyer “Q” as escort. It was a rough, wet and stormy day, and as there were no chairs we had to sit on deck on our piled-up luggage. Then began about the worst five hours I have ever experienced. Outside the harbour the seas were terrible; I have never known anything so rough, not even in the Bay of Biscay. The people on the
Isonzo
said it was one of the worst days they had ever been out, and probably they would not have gone on such a day were it not that on a very rough day the danger from submarines is less. We had not been long out of the harbour when the waves seemed mountains high and the ship pitched and rolled to an angle, as they afterwards told us, of 42 degrees. All the luggage piled up at the back, to say nothing of ourselves, rolled down the deck right as far as the rails. Mrs M., M——y and M——n kept up wonderfully; Sister N. and K. were being sick, and Sister L. and I felt terrible though we were not so sick as the others. Sister L. lay on a rug on the deck and I on the top of a pile of luggage, both of us incapable of moving. The waves broke not only over the deck but over the tarpaulin covering it, and dripped down in streams; the deck got covered with dirty seawater, which rolled over us in a turgid stream every time the boat lurched upward. However, we were quite incapable of caring how much water we sat in till finally one terrific roll dispersed all the luggage and sent me slipping down the deck. This happened three times; the last time I sat in about two inches of dirty water and slid in it nearly down to the rails, which effectually ruined all the clothes I had on.

‘Reached Syracuse at last; pretty harbour of small warm-coloured buildings and mountains rolling away into distance behind. Not allowed on shore; had good dinner on ship, of which we were more than in need.

‘Spent night squashed together on mattresses on deck with tarpaulin stretched in front; no chance of undressing or washing. Very noisy and stuffy, but slept fairly well.

‘
May 23rd
. - Roused at 4.0, breakfasted hastily at 5.0. At 6.0 got in Messina train on quay. Lovely scenery all along the line; rich in flowers (poppies, mauve columbine, etc.), orange and lemon groves and corn. Large and rugged mountains; deep clefts and gorges on edges of which tiny villages were perched. Saw Etna all the way, finally passed the foot of it. Day calm and beautiful. Reached Messina about 12.0. Just outside saw group of black crosses by railway line - evidently graves of unknown people who perished in earthquake. Stayed outside station an hour, then got out of train and crossed strait on big ferry-boat. Ferry took a train over but not ours . . . Messina strangely desolate; half ruins, half new unfinished buildings. Rush for Rome express; porters gesticulating, everything very hot and dirty. Got only second-class carriage; various odours, chiefly smoke, dust and “Retirata” prevailed. Dinner on train. Dreadful night, hardly slept; very cold at dawn. Mrs M. very selfish and trying; took up my seat as well as hers. Lay on holdall on floor with head on seat. Very dirty and uncomfortable.