Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (58 page)

II

As the winter grew colder and colder I spent the deep trough of the early hours in a huddled heap beside the stove, drinking sample bottles of liqueur from Paris-Plage out of a tin egg-cup, and reading an impressive poem called ‘The City of Fear’ by a certain Captain Gilbert Frankau, who had not then begun to dissipate his rather exciting talents upon the romances of cigar merchants:

. . . the steel has stripped
And ravished the splendours of graven stone, the ruby
glory of glass,
Till apse and gargoyle, buttress and nave,
Reredos, pillar and crypt,
Lie tumbled and crumbled to monstrous ruins of splintering
granite-blocks . . .
Over the grave
Of the work that was spared for the sake of the work by the
Vandals of elder wars,
Only one tattered pinnacle leers to the calm of the
outraged stars.

I had seen the volume of poems reviewed in a magazine, and had asked for it as an unusual alternative to the perpetual demand for sweets, which were now preferred before newspapers, and certainly before books, since we never felt really warm and our primary need was to combat the eternal cold. To me most books had ceased to seem desirable even in theory, for my recurrent hopes had at last died of ever fulfilling those ambitions which had inspired the long-ago passionate fight to go to Oxford.

It had been, as Edward wrote on New Year’s Eve, such ‘a rotten year in many ways - Geoffrey and Tah dead and we’ve seen each other about a week all told . . . F. is in hospital at present so the C.O. and I are the only officers who joined the Bn in 1914.’ The War had gone on for such centuries; its end seemed as distant as ever, and the chances of still being young enough, when it did finish, to start life all over again, grew more and more improbable. By 1918 I had already begun to have uncomfortable, contending dreams of the future. Sometimes I had returned, conscience-stricken and restless, to civilian life while the War was still on, and, as in its first year, was vainly struggling to give my mind to learning. In other dreams I was still a V.A.D., at thirty, at forty, at fifty, running round the wards at the beck and call of others, and each year growing slower, more footsore, more weary.

For the first time, during that night-duty, I definitely gave up - except for occasional poetry - the attempt to read anything more exacting than magazines, which did not recall the bitter desire for intellectual work and the aspirations that had grown so old in waiting upon events. My Classical tutor, when she heard that Edward had gone to Italy, sent me a copy of
Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic
by G. M. Trevelyan. I looked at the attractive red volume with yearning and fear, and the fear conquered; though my nights had become comparatively peaceful by the time that the book arrived, I did not open it until I was studying the history of the
Risorgimento
long after the War. Even novels had ceased to be a refuge; most of them took me so far from everyday wartime life that coming back to it was a shock and a sorrow for which no temporary distraction could compensate.

The magazines, when more demanding than the
Tatler
, still belonged to the Conservative variety, such as the weekly
Times
, the
Spectator
and
Blackwood’s
, so that my impression of the winter’s most significant events - the Bolshevik November
coup d’état
two months after the proclamation of the Russian Republic, and the final act at Brest Litovsk on March 2nd, 1918, following the complete collapse of the Russian armies - was inevitably somewhat onesided. My upbringing had been so typical of my parents’ class that I did not become clearly aware of the existence and influence of such periodicals as the
Manchester Guardian
, the
Nation
and the
New Statesman
until I had left college and was nearing the end of my twenties. Before the War I had heard, academically, of Socialism - it was one of the subjects discussed at Sir John Marriott’s Buxton lectures, though his attitude towards it may be imagined - but the existence of the Labour Party, though I must have known of it, made no impression upon my political consciousness.

Meanwhile, as anticipation grew grey and hopes withered, my letters from home became more and more miserable.

‘Conditions . . . certainly seem very bad,’ I wrote to my family on January 10th; ‘from everyone’s people come exactly the same sort of letters as I get from you. Everyone is servantless, no one visits anyone else or goes away, and the food seems as hard to get hold of in other places as in London now. But do if you can,’ I implored, ‘try to carry on without being too despondent and make other people do the same . . . for the great fear in the Army and all its appurtenances out here is not that it will ever give up itself, but that the civil population at home will fail us by losing heart - and so of course morale - just at the most critical time. The most critical time is of course now, before America can really come in and the hardships of the winter are not yet over. It wouldn’t be so bad if the discomfort and inconvenience and trouble were confined to one or two towns or one or two families, but it seems to be general.’

This despondency at home was certainly making many of us in France quite alarmed: because we were women we feared perpetually that, just as our work was reaching its climax, our families would need our youth and vitality for their own support. One of my cousins, the daughter of an aunt, had already been summoned home from her canteen work in Boulogne; she was only one of many, for as the War continued to wear out strength and spirits, the middle-aged generation, having irrevocably yielded up its sons, began to lean with increasing weight upon its daughters. Thus the desperate choice between incompatible claims - by which the women of my generation, with their carefully trained consciences, have always been tormented - showed signs of afflicting us with new pertinacity.

On January 12th, a hard, bitter morning, a telegram suddenly arrived from Edward: ‘Just got leave. Can you get it too?’ I went at once to the humane Scottish ‘Redcape’ who had succeeded the Matron of the autumn; I had been in France for nearly six months, and she told me that she would put in for my leave immediately. In a day or two my orders came through, and I packed up and started for England.

As I was too late for that afternoon’s boat I had to spend the night in Boulogne, where I scarcely slept for a burning head and a dull ache all over my body. Next morning a very rough and prolonged crossing made me feel so ill that I hardly knew how to bear it, and as the freezing train from Folkestone did nothing to aid my recovery, I reached Kensington in a state of collapse very different from the triumphant return from Malta. Edward, who had arrived from Italy four days earlier, had gone to Victoria to meet me, but in the crowd and the dark confusion we had somehow missed each other.

Fortified by a large dose of aspirin from Edward’s medical case, I went to bed at once, but woke next morning with a temperature of 103 degrees, and for several days had such high fever that the London doctor thought I should be obliged to overstay my leave. The particular ‘bug’ that had assailed me was difficult to locate, but was obviously a form of ‘P.U.O.’ or trench fever not dissimilar from the Malta disease in 1916. Perhaps, indeed, that old enemy was reasserting itself, stimulated by overwork or by my fatigued failure to dry my bedclothes sufficiently one recent morning when I had come off duty to find them saturated by a snowstorm which had blown open my hut window during the night.

After a week of feverish misery I was thankful to find myself beginning to feel better. The aches and pains had been bad enough, but worst of all was the conscience-stricken sense that I had spoiled Edward’s leave and overburdened my mother. Her health was certainly none too good; with one indifferent maid she had felt her powers taxed to their limit by the care of the flat, and must have been driven nearly frantic by the simultaneous appearance of a sick daughter who needed quite careful nursing, and a vigorous son who continually demanded her society at concerts or urged her to accompany him in a newly acquired selection of violin sonatas.

As soon as my temperature went down it seemed like a pleasant dream to have Edward once more beside me, telling me stories of the journey to Italy, and describing the grey rocks and dark pine forests of the Asiago Plateau. But by the time that I was able to go out, rather shakily holding his arm, only three days of his leave were left, and all that we could manage to achieve alone were two theatres and a few hours of Bach and Beethoven.

Our short time together, so long anticipated and so much discussed in letters, had been completely upset by my absurd illness, and on January 25th, almost before we had talked of anything, he was obliged to go back. I had missed so much of his society that I broke my resolution to avoid stations and saw him into the return leave-train for Italy at Waterloo; I compromised with superstition by leaving the platform before the train went out. At the flower-stall on the station he bought me a large bunch of the year’s first Parma violets, and though we did not mention it, we both thought of a verse in the song ‘Sweet Early Violets’, which he had bought for his gramophone in Italy and played over to me at home:

Farewell! Farewell!
Tho’ I may never see your face again,
Since now we say ‘good-bye!’
Love still will live, altho’ it live in vain,
Tho’ these, tho’ these, my gift, will die!

How handsome he is now, I thought, but so grave and mature; it’s obviously an ageing business to become a company commander at twenty-one. Dear Edward, shall we ever be young again, you and I? It doesn’t seem much like it; the best years are gone already, and we’ve lost too much to stop being old, automatically, when the War stops - if it ever does.

If it ever does! The journey back from Waterloo, in a chilly Tube train, had a quality of wretchedness that no words can convey, though I had now said good-bye at stations so often that I had long outgrown the disintegrating paralysis which followed the first farewell to Roland in March 1915. I couldn’t help asking myself for the hundredth time if I should ever see Edward again, but the sorrow of parting had become almost a mechanical sorrow; like the superhuman achievements of ward rushes after convoys, it was an abnormality which had been woven into the fabric of daily life. I no longer even wondered when the War would end, for I had grown incapable of visualising the world or my own existence without it.

At home a flat dejection pervaded everything now that Edward was gone, and I firmly resisted the suggestion that I should use my semi-invalid weakness as an excuse to apply for extension of leave. The universal topics of maids and ration-cards now so completely dominated the conversation in every household that I felt quite glad when my own fortnight was up four days later, and I could return from food-obsessed England to France.

Remembering the eager feminism of my pre-war girlhood, and the effervescent fierceness with which I was to wage post-war literary battles in the cause of women, it seems incredible to me now that I should have gone back to hospital completely unaware that, only a few days before my leave began, the Representation of the People Bill, which gave votes to women over thirty, had been passed by the House of Lords. I had been equally ignorant of its passage through the Commons the previous June, when my thoughts were occupied with Victor’s death and the daylight air-raid, but my indifference to the fact that, on February 6th, 1918, woman suffrage became a part of English law only reflected the changed attitude of the war-absorbed Pankhursts themselves. With an incongruous irony seldom equalled in the history of revolutions, the spectacular pageant of the woman’s movement, vital and colourful with adventure, with initiative, with sacrificial emotion, crept to its quiet, unadvertised triumph in the deepest night of wartime depression.

12

When I arrived at Boulogne I half expected to be sent to another unit, as movement orders were often the consequence of leave, but no such instructions awaited me, and I returned thankfully to 24 General and my friends.

I reached Etaples just before midnight; my crossing had been velvet-smooth, and the night was still and calm. Overhead in an indigo sky a brilliant moon shone frostily above the camps, casting sharply defined black shadows along the iron paths. At Sisters’ quarters I learnt that Hope Milroy had just gone on night-duty - a typically annoying coincidence, since I had just come off - so I crept between the silent huts to her ward, and sat beside its glowing stove drowsily drinking coffee until half way through the night.

In the light medical ward to which I was posted next day, I soon recovered from the heavy-footed aftermath of my illness. A fortnight later the hut was reserved for gassed cases, and I had once again the task of attending to the blinded eyes and scorched throats and blistered bodies which made the struggle for life such a half-hearted affair. One of the dying men had his wife beside him for two or three days; she didn’t much enjoy her vigil, and had already begun to flirt with the orderly sergeant before he came to superintend the removal of her husband’s body. I wondered whether she knew that the dead man had been syphilitic as well as gassed.

About this time I had a strange little adventure on one of my shopping expeditions into Étaples. I usually walked there with Norah or Mary, but that evening I happened to be alone, and was turning away from the small, somnolent harbour into the muddy stretch of road between the village and the camps, when a young officer planted himself in front of me. Instinctively I stopped; in the waning light I could see that he was shaking all over like a sick man seized with a rigor. Wild blue eyes stared at me from a pinched, pallid face, and at first he had great difficulty in speaking.