Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (35 page)

The next morning I had just finished dressing, and was putting the final touches to the pastel-blue crêpe-de-Chine blouse, when the expected message came to say that I was wanted on the telephone. Believing that I was at last to hear the voice for which I had waited for twenty-four hours, I dashed joyously into the corridor. But the message was not from Roland but from Clare; it was not to say that he had arrived home that morning, but to tell me that he had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on December 23rd.

PART II

‘When the Vision dies in the dust of the market place,
When the Light is dim,
When you lift up your eyes and cannot behold his face,
When your heart is far from him,

Know this is your War; in this loneliest hour you ride
Down the roads he knew;
Though he comes no more at night he will kneel at
your side
For comfort to dream with you.’

May Wedderburn Cannan.

6

‘When the Vision Dies . . .’

PERHAPS... TO R. A. L.

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.

V. B. 1916. From
Verses of a V.A.D.

1

Whenever I think of the weeks that followed the news of Roland’s death, a series of pictures, disconnected but crystal clear, unroll themselves like a kaleidoscope through my mind.

A solitary cup of coffee stands before me on a hotel breakfast-table; I try to drink it, but fail ignominiously.

Outside, in front of the promenade, dismal grey waves tumble angrily over one another on the windy Brighton shore, and, like a slaughtered animal that still twists after life has been extinguished, I go on mechanically worrying because his channel-crossing must have been so rough.

In an omnibus, going to Keymer, I look fixedly at the sky; suddenly the pale light of a watery sun streams out between the dark, swollen clouds, and I think for one crazy moment that I have seen the heavens opened . . .

At Keymer a fierce gale is blowing and I am out alone on the brown winter ploughlands, where I have been driven by a desperate desire to escape from the others. Shivering violently, and convinced that I am going to be sick, I take refuge behind a wet bank of grass from the icy sea-wind that rushes, screaming, across the sodden fields.

It is late afternoon; at the organ of the small village church, Edward is improvising a haunting memorial hymn for Roland, and the words: ‘God walked in the garden in the cool of the evening’, flash irrelevantly into my mind.

I am back on night-duty at Camberwell after my leave; in the chapel, as the evening voluntary is played, I stare with swimming eyes at the lettered wall, and remember reading the words: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, at the early morning communion service before going to Brighton.

I am buying some small accessories for my uniform in a big Victoria Street store, when I stop, petrified, before a vase of the tall pink roses that Roland gave me on the way to
David Copperfield
; in the warm room their melting sweetness brings back the memory of that New Year’s Eve, and suddenly, to the perturbation of the shop-assistants, I burst into uncontrollable tears, and find myself, helpless and humiliated, unable to stop crying in the tram all the way back to the hospital.

It is Sunday, and I am out for a solitary walk through the dreary streets of Camberwell before going to bed after the night’s work. In front of me on the frozen pavement a long red worm wriggles slimily. I remember that, after our death, worms destroy this body - however lovely, however beloved - and I run from the obscene thing in horror.

It is Wednesday, and I am walking up the Brixton Road on a mild, fresh morning of early spring. Half-consciously I am repeating a line from Rupert Brooke:

‘The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying . . .’

For a moment I have become conscious of the old joy in rainwashed skies and scuttling, fleecy clouds, when suddenly I remember - Roland is dead and I am not keeping faith with him; it is mean and cruel, even for a second, to feel glad to be alive.

2

Gradually the circumstances of Roland’s death, which at first I was totally unable to grasp, began to acquire coherence in my mind. Through letters from his colonel, his fellow-officers, the Catholic padre who had buried him, and his servant whose sympathy was extremely loquacious and illegibly expressed in pencil, we were able to piece together the details of his end - so painful, so unnecessary, so grimly devoid of that heroic limelight which Roland had always regarded as ample compensation for those who were slain, like Kingsley’s
Heroes
, ‘in the flower of youth on the chance of winning a noble name’. The facts, as finally gathered, were more or less these:

On the night, December 22nd, that Roland was mortally wounded, the 7th Worcesters had just taken over some new trenches. Like the company whose lethargic captain appears in the opening scene of
Journey’s End
, the previous occupants of these trenches had left them dirty and dilapidated, while the wire in front was so neglected that Roland’s platoon was ordered to spend the night in repairing it. Before taking the wiring party over, he went to inspect the place himself, using a concealed path which led to No Man’s Land through a gap in a hedge, because the communication trench was flooded. As it happened, this trench had been flooded for a long time, and the use of the alternative path was known to the Germans. Not unnaturally, they had trained a machine gun on the gap, and were accustomed to fire a few volleys whenever the troops facing them showed signs of activity. This enemy habit was known to the Worcesters’ predecessors, but they did not, apparently, think it worth mentioning to the relieving battalion.

At the time that the Worcesters took over, the moon was nearly full, and the path through the hedge must have been quite visible by night to the vigilant eyes which were only, at that point, a hundred yards away. As soon as Roland reached the gap, the usual volley was fired. Almost the first shot struck him in the stomach, penetrating his body, and he fell on his face, gesticulating wildly, in full view of the company. At the risk of their lives, his company commander and a sergeant rushed out and carried him back to the trench. Twenty minutes afterwards the doctor at the dressing-station put an end to his agony with a large dose of morphia, and from that moment Roland ceased - and ceased for ever - to be Roland.

The next morning a complicated abdominal operation was performed on him by the senior surgeon of the Casualty Clearing Station at Louvencourt, ten miles away, but the wound had caused so much internal mutilation that the doctors knew he was not likely to last longer than a few hours. The machine-gun bullet had injured, amongst other things, the base of the spine, so that if by some combined miracle of surgical skill and a first-rate constitution he had been saved from death, he would have been paralysed from the waist downwards for the rest of his life. As it was, he only came round from the operation sufficiently to receive, ‘in a state of mazy contentment’, Extreme Unction from the Jesuit padre who, unknown to us all, had received him into the Catholic Church early that summer. ‘Lying on this hillside for six days makes me very stiff,’ he told the padre cheerfully. They were his last coherent words. At eleven o’clock that night - the very hour in which I had been so happily filling the men’s paper-bags with crackers - Uppingham’s record prize-winner, whose whole nature fitted him for the spectacular drama of a great battle, died forlornly in a hospital bed. On the Sunday morning that we, in the Keymer cottage, were vainly trying to realise his end, his burial service was read in the village church beside the military cemetery at Louvencourt. As they brought his body from the church, the colonel told us, ‘the sun came out and shone brilliantly.’

That was all. There was no more to learn. Not even a military purpose seemed to have been served by his death; the one poor consolation was that his routine assumption of responsibility had saved the wiring party.

Later, night after night at Camberwell, watching the clouds drift slowly across the stars, I dwelt upon these facts until it seemed as though my mind would never contain the anguish that they brought me. Had it been heroism or folly, I asked myself for the thousandth time, which had urged him forth to inspect the wire beneath so bright a moon? In those days it seemed a matter of life or death to know.

‘All heroism,’ I argued desperately in my diary, ‘is to a certain extent unnecessary from a purely utilitarian point of view . . . But heroism means something infinitely greater and finer, even if less practical, than just avoiding blame, and doing one’s exact, stereotyped duty and no more.’

All the same, gazing fixedly out of the ward window at a tall church spire blackly silhouetted against banks of cloud pierced by a shaft of brilliant moonshine, I would whisper like a maniac to the sombre, indifferent night: ‘Oh, my love! - so proud, so confident, so contemptuous of humiliation, you who were meant to lead a forlorn hope, to fall in a great fight - just to be shot like a rat in the dark! Why did you go so boldly, so heedlessly, into No Man’s Land when you knew that your leave was so near? Dearest, why did you, why did you?’

Hardest of all to bear, perhaps, was the silence which must for ever repudiate that final question. The growing certainty that he had left no message for us to remember seemed so cruel, so baffling. To-day, after one or two experiences of shattering pain, I understand the degree to which both agony and its alleviations shut out the claims of memory and thought, but at that time, in spite of six months in hospital, I did not allow for the compelling self-absorption of extreme suffering or the stupefied optimism induced by anæsthetics, and it seemed as though he had gone down to the grave consciously indifferent to all of us who loved him so much. All through the first months of 1916, my letters and diaries emphasise, again and again, the grief of having no word to cherish through the empty years. He had been coming on leave the very next day - the day after he was wounded, the day that he died - and yet he had never mentioned to anyone his mother or me, nor the fact that he expected to see us so soon.

For weeks after the news of his death I waited and waited in the hope of a message, and wrote letters to France which my correspondents must have found very childish and pitiful, for they replied with infinite patience and kindness. But when I too had heard from his colonel, and his company commander, and his servant, and the Catholic padre, and a sympathetic officer who, in order to satisfy me, made a special journey to Louvencourt and catechised the doctors, I knew I had learnt all that there was to know, and that in his last hour I had been quite forgotten.

3

When my leave, which I spent entirely at Keymer, came to an end, it was Edward who took me back to Camberwell. In the final months of intense, exclusive preoccupation with Roland, I had almost forgotten him, but now he returned quite suddenly to the chief place in my consciousness.

One evening in Sussex I came in from a lonely walk to find him and Victor almost filling the tiny sitting-room with their long, khaki-clad limbs. Together they were trying to occupy the leave which now had hardly more point for them than for myself, and Roland’s mother had invited them both to tea. They looked, I remembered later in my diary, ‘like courtiers without a king’. The strained sorrow which lined their faces and darkened their eyes moved me to unexpected remorse, and I remembered, with the surprise of a new discovery, that Roland had been their friend long before he became my lover.

The death of the friend that he most admired before he himself had even succeeded in getting to France, plunged Edward, as I learnt long afterwards, into bitter humiliation even less endurable than his grief for Roland’s loss; he had not, he felt, the excuse of serious illness which gave Victor his right to mourn in the monotonous security of ‘defending’ Woolwich Arsenal. But in tenderness for my desolation he concealed from me much of his sorrow and all his bitterness, and I parted from him outside the 1st London General with a sense of leaving behind me all that life still held of strength and comfort.

My small room in the long wooden hut, uncannily silent because everyone else on night-duty was already asleep, seemed the utmost limit of miserable solitude, although Betty had put a fragrant bowl of mimosa there to welcome me. Sleep was impossible, and at supper I became wretchedly conscious of furtive glances from Sisters and V.A.D.s, intrusively curious, despite their embarrassed pity, to discover how an acquaintance was ‘taking’ her bereavement.