Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (56 page)

We were told that the disturbance began by a half-drunken ‘Jock’ shooting the military policeman who had tried to prevent him from taking his girl into a prohibited café. In some of the stories the girl was a young Frenchwoman from the village, in others she had turned into one of the newly arrived W.A.A.C.s; no doubt in the W.A.A.C. camp she was said to be a V.A.D. Whatever the origin of the outbreak, by the end of September Etaples was in an uproar. A number of Australians and New Zealanders, always ready for trouble, joined in the fray; rumour related that numerous highly placed officials had resigned from the control of the camp, and a young officer with the M.C. was said to have shot himself on the Bull Ring.

Quite who was against whom I never clearly gathered, but one party was said to be holding the bridge over the Canche and the others to be trying to take it from them. Obviously the village was no place for females, so for over a fortnight we were shut up within our hospitals, to meditate on the effect of three years of war upon the splendid morale of our noble troops. As though the ceaseless convoys did not provide us with sufficient occupation, numerous drunken and dilapidated warriors from the village battle were sent to such spare beds as we had for slight repairs. They were euphemistically known as ‘local sick’.

It was mid-October before the ‘Battle of Eetapps’ ended and the Sisters and V.A.D.s were at last allowed to leave their respective camps. Fortunately the mutiny had not prevented the arrival of letters, from which I learnt that, throughout the latter fortnight of September, Edward had been in the worst of the ‘strafe’ perpetually roaring round Passchendaele. On the 19th a note came from him to say that his company had already suffered many casualties, though he himself was so far unhurt.

‘Here,’ I wrote to my mother, exactly two years after the Battle of Loos, and in language not so different from that used by Roland to describe the preparations for the first of those large-scale massacres which appeared to be the only method of escape from trench warfare conceivable to the brilliant imagination of the Higher Command, ‘there has been the usual restless atmosphere of a great push - trains going backwards and forwards all day bringing wounded from the line or taking reinforcements to it; convoys coming in all night, evacuations to England and bugles going all the time; busy wards and a great moving of the staff from one ward to another . . . I hope I shall hear something of Edward soon; I seemed to be thinking of him and listening to the bugles going through the whole of last night.’

Four days later, I learnt that his company had left the front line on September 24th, after being in the ‘show’ without a break since the 14th. ‘We came out last night,’ he told me, ‘though perhaps “came out” scarcely expresses it; had about 50 casualties, including I officer in the company - the best officer of course. I ought to have been slain myself heaps of times but I seem to be here still.’

It was during this offensive that he came to be known as ‘the immaculate man of the trenches’. In addition to his daily shave, he wrote most considerately whenever he could to let me know that he was still ‘quite alright’. ‘In the second half of September,’ he finally summed up the position on October 2nd, ‘we only had 3
days out of the line, which is heavy work for the Salient when straffing.’

This was war in real earnest, yet to my tense anxiety he did seem to bear the proverbial charmed life. So long as he remained, even though the others were dead, hope remained, and there was something to live for; without him - well, I didn’t know, and blankly refused to think. But between mid-September and mid-October his activities so distressed me that I seldom wrote to him at all, superstitiously believing that if I did he would certainly be dead before the letter arrived. With his usual tolerance he only protested very mildly about this unexpected treatment.

‘I quite understand why you didn’t write during the interval but, if possible, please don’t do so again or else I shan’t tell you when I am about to face anything unpleasant, and then you will not be able to help me face it.’

By October 9th, though I had heard from him that he had come safely, and, as he thought, finally, out of ‘the strafe’, the rush at 24 General had increased rather than slackened.

‘Someday, perhaps,’ I wrote home on October 12th, ‘I will try to tell you what this first half of October has been like . . . Three times this week we have taken in convoys and evacuated to England, and the fourth came in this morning. On one occasion sixteen stretcher cases came into our ward all at the same time. Every day since this day last week has been one long doing of the impossible - or what seemed the impossible before you started. We have four of our thirty-five patients on the D.I.L. (dangerously ill list) . . . and any one of them would keep a nurse occupied all day, but when there are only two of you for the whole lot you simply have to do the best you can . . . No one realises the meaning of emergencies who has not been in France . . . I am at the moment sitting in an extremely cold bath-hut waiting for the hot water to be turned on . . . This is going to be a dreadfully cold winter, and every day the rain teems down, very cold and heavy . . . Every night and morning I make up my mind that any money I can save here will go towards buying stores of coal, so that for the rest of my natural life when the War is over (if there is anything left of me by then) I can have a fire in my bedroom for ever and ever ! . . . I didn’t have a bath after all, as the water was only tepid.’

On the same day, Edward sent me a characteristic picture of life in the Salient during that saturating autumn:

‘We are in another lot of wet tents surrounded by mud and it is very cold as usual; consequently our servants, with the customary incorrigibleness of the British soldier, are singing lustily and joyfully. A new draft has just arrived wet through and are sitting on wet ground under wet bivouac sheets. The next man due for leave has been out 16 months and the next dozen have been out 14 or 15, and the order has just come round that all men must wash their feet in hot water - presumably in the dixies in which their tea is made or else in the canteens out of which they eat and drink, as there is no other receptacle; I suppose the A.D.M.S. thinks we carry portable baths in the forward areas - and the intelligence officer has managed to procure us 2 bottles of whisky, the first we have had for quite 3 months, and the bombing officer - a gentleman of forgetful disposition about 7 feet by 4 and clumsy in proportion and belonging to our company - has gone to the field cashier miles away and has probably got lost as he started about noon and it has now been dark an hour, and the C.O. has cursed most people during the day, and I observe that this tent is not as waterproof as it may have been once upon a time, and there is our old friend miserably holding on to the eastern slopes of the ridges from which he has been driven but still demanding our presence in this sorrowful land; of such is daily life.’

He had been mistaken in supposing that his share in the Ypres
mêlée
was over. In the latter half of October, A and C Companies of the 11th Sherwood Foresters lost nearly all their officers, and Edward, who had been given a respite as ‘O.C. Details’ after being in so many ‘shows’, was urgently sent for to go up to A Company, where only one officer was left. There he was nearly killed while changing from one support line to another, yet once again he arrived back unwounded at Battalion Headquarters.

‘We might have come off worse considering that we were in the most pronounced salient just E. of Polygon Wood - one of the worst bits of the whole front during the whole War. However I am told that I am going on leave in 3 or 4 days . . . We have at last a gramophone and a very fine song by a man named Sherrington, “Sweet Early Violets” . . . You have no idea how bitter life is at times.’

How much of its bitterness was due, I wonder, to his knowledge that three months of incessant anguish had produced a total insecure advance of less than five miles? How fully did he realise the utter failure of the long offensive which had absorbed half the gallantry and chivalry, not only of the 11th Sherwood Foresters, but of the whole Fifth Army? Tired and discouraged as he and the surviving remnant of the battalion had become, the terrific gales and whipping rains of the late autumn, which turned the shell-gashed flats of Flanders into an ocean of marshy mud that made death by drowning almost as difficult to avoid as death from gun-fire, must have added the last intolerable straw to their burden of misery.

At Etaples the wind from the sea, heavy and cold and menacing, turned the camp into a dizzy panorama of rocking wood and flapping canvas. One afternoon I came off duty to find my Alwyn hut blown into a collapsed heap of rags and planks on the top of all my possessions. It was past hope of repair, so after grubbily collecting our belongings from beneath the debris, S. and I, without undue reluctance, parted company and were sent to occupy vacant beds in the two-to-a-room winter quarters.

9

At the end of October came the Italian collapse at Caporetto. As von Bülow pursued his demoralised opponents to the River Piave, and one by one captured the heights between the Piave and the Brenta which protected the Venetian plain, there was much speculation in France over the fate of Venice. For the moment I took little interest in these discussions, never dreaming that the rout of an Italian Army in a remote mountain village could concern me for the rest of my life, nor that a time would come when I should not be able to look at a map of the Italian front without a tightening of the throat.

But on November 3rd, when the Flanders offensive was subsiding dismally into the mud and Edward was daily expected home on leave, a brief, mysterious note came from him, written in the vaguely remembered Latin of the Sixth Form at Uppingham:

‘Hanc epistolam in lingua Latina male conscripta - nam multorum sum oblitus - quasi experimentiam tibi mitto. Si plurimos dies litteras a me non accipis, nole perturbari; ut in fossis sim ne credideris. Non tamen dies decimos domum redibo, utrumque ad locum aliquem propinquum ei quo parum ante Kalendas Junias revenisti necne eamus haud certe scio. Ut plurimos menses vel etiam annos te videre non possim maxime timeo; sed “vale” priusquam dixi et me vixurum esse ut rursus te videam semper spero. Spem aeternam ad laetitas in futuro tibi etiam tradent di immortales.’

Calling desperately upon the elusive shades of Pass Mods., I managed to gather from this letter that Edward’s battalion had been ordered to join the British and French Divisions being sent from France under Lord Plumer and General Fayolle to reinforce the Italian Army. When I had recovered a little from the shock, I took his note to the C. of E. padre, a burly, rubicund individual whose manner to V.A.D.s was that of the family butler engaging the youngest between-maid, and with innocent eyes asked him to translate. As I had suspected, he had not the remotest idea where to begin, and after much protest about the thinness of the notepaper, and the illegibility of Edward’s clear handwriting, he was obliged, to my secret triumph, to confess his ignorance.

Although I was glad that Edward had left the Salient, I couldn’t help being disappointed that he was going so far away after I had manœuvred myself, as I had hoped, permanently near him for the duration of our wartime lives.

‘Half the point of being in France seems to be gone,’ I told my family, ‘and I didn’t realise until I heard he was going how much I had . . . looked forward to seeing him walk up this road one day to see me. But I want you to try and not worry about him more because he is there . . . no one who has not been out here has any idea how fed-up everyone is with France and with the same few miles of ground that have been solidly fought over for three years. There is a more sporting chance anywhere than here. Of course there has been great talk about the migration . . . and all the men whose units are going are very pleased.’

It was certainly a change to get picture-postcards of bright-looking villages in the remote north of Italy after the mud-stained letters from Passchendaele, though the move did not appear, as yet, to have eradicated the pessimism that had seeped into Edward’s spirit in melancholy Flanders.

‘We have been accorded a most hearty reception all the way and been presented with anything from bottles of so-called phiz. to manifestoes issued by mayors of towns . . .’ he wrote on November 15th from Mantua. ‘We have got a very hard job to do here and during the next few weeks the uninitiated may think we have failed in it but I trust we shall not really have done so; everything is going to be very different to what we have been used to before . . . We have got the gramophone all this way all right - but I am afraid we may have to throw it away any time now. These plains are so boring; it is impossible to see more than 100 yards for vines. Sorry - I am wandering to-night being rather tired.’