Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (60 page)

‘I won’t talk about your push as you will have too much to do with it already,’ considerately wrote Edward on Easter Sunday, when the offensive was ten days old, ‘but I am glad we have recaptured Albert if only for memory’s sake; if the Hun cannot break our line, and I don’t think he can, I should think that the end of the War is fairly near. We are in the line with snow all about us - a great change as it is very cold but we are just getting used to it. There have been wonderful sights to see - huge peaks covered with tall pine trees - marvellous roads with hairpin bends and everything solid rock where the snow lies until June . . . Early this morning we had a most extraordinary communion service about 300 yards behind the front line behind a knoll - a most original performance.’

He would forgive me, I knew, for my sudden apparent neglect; ‘I imagine you to be so busy that you have no time for anything and I quite understand why you haven’t written,’ he assured me on April 10th. Why did I leave him letterless ever? I ask myself now. Why didn’t I send him Field Postcards, or brief two-line pencil scrawls, as he always found time to send to me even during a push?

‘It is most pathetic,’ he went on, ‘to think that the old places where we were 2 years ago are now in the hands of the Hun as also are the graves of many people we know. As far as I can tell Louvencourt is still behind our lines though fighting in Aveluy Wood doesn’t sound far away. I was talking to a Major who was attached to us yesterday about making some dug-outs in a stony piece of ground and he was very particular about wire goggles being worn by men working or living there because of splinters caused by shells bursting on the stone “because,” he said, “I can imagine nothing worse than being blinded for the rest of your life.” It seemed rather strange that he should say this on the anniversary of the day on which Tah was blinded.’

14

As the German offensive rolled heavily on without appearing to slacken, the men who came into hospital after two or three weeks of continuous fighting no longer seemed to be weighed down with the sombre depression of the first batches of wounded; instead, they were light-headed and often strangely
exaltés
. After the first shock of defeat, certain units of the British Army began to suffer from a curious masochism, and, as in 1914, turned from their usual dogged reliance upon their own strength to the consolations of superstition and the illusions of fatigue.

There was little chance to get to know patients who arrived in the morning and left before the evening, and in the daily rush of dressings and convoys I had not much time for talking, but once or twice I became aware of strange discussions being carried on by the men. On one occasion I stopped to listen, and was impelled to remain; I wrote down the conversation a few weeks afterwards, and though it cannot have been verbally exact, I reproduce it as it appeared in my 1918 ‘novel’ of nursing in France:

‘’Ave yer come down from Albert way?’ inquired a sergeant of a corporal in the next bed, who, like himself, wore a 1914 ribbon.

‘Yus,’ was the reply, ‘I have. There’s some mighty queer things happenin’ on the Somme just now, ain’t there, mate?’

‘That there be,’ said the sergeant. ‘I can tell yer of one rum thing that ’appened to me, meself.’

‘Git on then, chum, let’s hear it.’

‘Well, when the old regiment first came out in ’16, we had a Captain with us - O.C. of our company, ’e was - a mighty fine chap. One day at the beginning of the Somme battle some of the boys got into a tight place - a bit foolish-like, maybe, some of them was - and ’e comes along and pulls ’em out of it. One or two of ’em had got the wind up a bit, and ’e tells ’em then not to lose ’eart if they gets into difficulties, for ’e sorter knows, ’e says, when the boys ’as need of ’im, and wherever ’e is, ’e says, ’e’ll do ’is best to be there. Well, ’e was killed, ’elpin’ the boys as usual, at the end of the fightin’ on the Somme, and we mourned for ’im like a brother, as you might say . . . ‘E were a tall fine chap, no mistakin’ ’im, there wasn’t. Well, the other day, just before the Boches got into Albert, we was in a bit of a fix, and I was doin’ all I knew to get us out. Suddenly I turns round, and there I sees ’im with ’is bright eyes and ’is old smile, bringin’ up the rear.

‘“Well, Willis, it’s been a narrow shave this time,” ’e says. “But I think we’ve pulled it off.”

‘An’ forgettin’ ’ow it was, I makes as if to answer ’im, and all of a sudden ’e ain’t there at all. Struck me all of a heap for a bit, like. What do you make of it, mate?’

‘It’s more nor I can tell,’ answered the corporal. ‘’Cos another very queer thing happened to some chaps in our company. In the old days on the Somme we had a tophole party of stretcher-bearers, and one day a coal-box comes and wipes out the lot. But last week some of our chaps sees ’em again, carrying the wounded down the communication trench. And I met a chum in the train who swears he was carried out by two of ’em.’

A Lancashire boy from an opposite bed leaned forward eagerly.

‘I can tell yer summat that’ll beat that,’ he said. ‘T’other day when we was gettin’ clear of Peronne, I found a chap beside me lookin’ very white and done-up, like, as if ’e could scarcely walk; fair clemmed, ’e seemed to me. I found I’d got one or two of them ’ard biscuits in me pocket, an’ I pulls one out and hands it to ’im. “ ’Ave a biscuit, mate,” sez I.

‘ “Thank you, chum,” ’e sez, “I don’t mind if I do.”

‘And ’e takes the biscuit and gives it a bite. As ’e puts out ’is ’and for it I sees ’e’s got one o’ them swanky identity-disks on ’is wrist, and I reads ’is number as plain as anythink. Then ’e gets mixed up wi’ t’others, and I don’t see ’im no more. And it’s not till I gets back to billets that I remembers.

‘“Lawks,” I sez to meself, “if that ain’t the chap I ’elped Jim to bury more’n a week agone, my name ain’t Bill Bennett.”

‘An’ sure enough, mates, I remember takin’ the silver identity-disk off ’is wrist, an’ readin’ the number on it as plain as plain. An’ it were the number of the man I gave the biscuit.’

There was an awed silence in the ward, and I turned from the dressing I was doing to ask rather breathlessly:

‘Do you really mean that in the middle of the battle you met those men again whom you’d thought were dead?’

The sergeant’s reply was insistent.

‘Aye, Sister, they’re dead right enough. They’re our mates as was knocked out on the Somme in ’16. And it’s our belief they’re fightin’ with us still.’

Not long afterwards I was reminded of this conversation by some lines from E. A. Mackintosh’s ‘Cha Till Maccruimein’, in his volume of poems
A Highland Regiment
, which Roland’s mother and sister had sent me for Christmas:

And there in front of the men were marching,
With feet that made no mark,
The grey old ghosts of the ancient fighters
Come back again from the dark . . .

But at the time I merely felt cold and rather sick, and when I had finished the dressing I put down my tray and stood for a moment at the open door of the hut. I saw the Sisters in their white overalls hurrying between the wards, the tired orderlies toiling along the paths with their loaded stretchers, the usual crowd of Red Cross ambulances outside the reception hut, and I recognised my world for a kingdom of death, in which the poor ghosts of the victims had no power to help their comrades by breaking nature’s laws.

Angels of Mons still roaming about, I thought. Well, let them roam, if it cheers the men to believe in them! No doubt the Germans, too, had their Angels of Mons; I have often wondered what happened when the celestial backers of one Army encountered their angelic opponents in the nocturnal neutrality of No Man’s Land. Michael’s war in heaven was nothing, I feel certain, to what happened then.

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.