Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (59 page)

‘I say!’ he burst out at last, ‘I d-do want you to forgive me for the way I insulted you yesterday!’

‘Insulted me?’ I repeated vaguely, for to my certain knowledge I had never seen the young man before.

‘Yes - insulted you! I do apologise!’ he reiterated passionately.

‘But you haven’t insulted me!’ I reassured him in the most soothing tones that my surprise could assume. ‘I don’t even know who you are. You must have mistaken me for somebody else.’

He glared at me bitterly, as though I were making an intolerable task even worse than it need have been.

‘Oh, no, I haven’t!’ he insisted. ‘It was you all right. I insulted you horribly and I beg you to forgive me.’

Obviously there was no way of getting rid of him but to accept the apology.

‘Oh, well!’ I capitulated, ‘I can’t imagine what you’re apologising for, but whatever it was I forgive you if it makes you any happier.’

‘Thank you - thank you!’ he gasped, as though at the end of his endurance, and, saluting desperately, disappeared into the darkness. I walked back to the hospital feeling as mystified as I had been over ‘Alfred’ and the German ward. France was certainly a queer, haunted country in 1918, peopled by ghosts and bogies and insane sex-obsessions.

‘We are beginning now to feel the deprivations of the War a little more out here,’ I wrote home on March 3rd; ‘no more cakes or biscuits can be bought at the French shops or the E.F. canteen or chocolates or sweets after the present stock is sold out and you can only get meals at restaurants between the hours of twelve and two or after six.’

That same week Edward himself was taken ill with a form of P.U.O. similar to mine; it was not serious, he wrote to me from hospital, and by the middle of the month he was back with the battalion, ruefully describing the joys of billets in the mountains of the Trentino.

‘We have had an awful lot of trouble with the civilians on whom we are billeted; the places are very small farms for the most part, very dirty, and with an average of 6 to 10 small, screaming children in each; several families, some being refugees, live in each house. The day we got here 4 teaspoons disappeared and the next day most of the sugar ration went, and then a knife and 3 plates and several cigarettes out of the room where I sleep. Consequently I sent for an interpreter this afternoon, and there was a great wailing and chattering for about
hour - one of the stolen articles made its appearance every 5 minutes except 3 teaspoons and a knife for which we eventually accepted 9 lire; I was rather sorry to take the money off them, but there was nothing else to do if the business was going to be stopped.’

By this time I had been moved from the ‘gassed’ ward to take charge of a light medical hut. Although I had no Sister I was not very busy, and was often able to stand at the door in the softening air of early spring, listening to the unintelligible sing-song chatter of a Chinese Labour Company putting up some new huts close by, or watching the German Taube ’planes that now seemed to appear so frequently above the camp. It became quite a familiar sight - the pretty silver-white bird with the cotton-wool puff-balls of smoke from our anti-aircraft guns surrounding but never quite reaching it in the clear blue sky.

Idly I supposed that the enemy were reconnoitring and would one day bomb us. Rumour, as busy as usual, reported that on one of their visits ‘the Huns’ had dropped a message: ‘Move your railway-line or move your hospitals’, and a lethargic effort to dig trenches near the camps had been started in consequence. Although I had not realised before how conveniently the main line from Boulogne to Paris was safeguarded by the guileless Red Cross, I felt no particular apprehension, for I had grown accustomed to air raids that didn’t come off. The roar of bombs dropping on Camiers soon after I arrived had awakened me to the petrifying realisation that there were no cellars in a camp, but since then the lights had gone out in the wards on numerous winter evenings when nothing had happened except ‘wind-up’ on the part of shell-shocked patients.

On March 20th, Hope Milroy came off night-duty; the next day, Thursday the 21st, she had the usual day off before going to a new ward, and we arranged to spend the afternoon and evening together. At lunch-time, before we started, the staff were discussing a disturbing report that had come, no one knew whence, of a terrific enemy onslaught on the now too far-extended British lines. I felt reluctant to leave the hospital, but the Sister who supervised my hut persuaded me to go.

‘It’ll probably be the last half-day you’ll have for some time,’ she said. ‘And no convoys can possibly be here before to-night.’

So Hope and I set off together towards Camiers across the muddy fields. At a village
estaminet
we divided the usual enormous omelette, sitting before the fire in an old kitchen which shone with pewter and polished saucepans. The air was strangely still that evening; long wraiths of mist hung like white veils over the sodden meadows, and as we worked our way back to the coast we lost ourselves continually among the darkening sandhills. Close to the shore, the high, black windows of a deserted watch-tower seemed to leer at us like a wicked eye; try as we would to escape from the encircling sand-dunes, we found ourselves again and again within sight of the grim little ruin. I remembered once, years before, when I was a child of thirteen, listening in half-fascinated terror to a mistress at St Monica’s reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’:

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world.

I clutched Hope’s arm in sudden agitation.

‘Do let’s get away from that tower!’ I implored her. ‘I’d rather go back all the way we’ve come than pass it again.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ expostulated Hope. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of in an old watch-tower!’

But I seized her and dragged her away until at last, after much struggling through wet sand and thin prickly grass, we reached the shore. She protested that I had hurried her to the point of exhaustion, but as we stood, breathless, beside the muffled sea, the queer menace of that evening startled us both into silence. A sinister stillness hung like heavy fog upon the air; even the waves lapping the shore appeared to make no sound. The setting sun, an angry ball of copper looming through a heavy battalion of thunderous clouds, reminded me of the lurid suns that had set over England in the July before the War, and the belief of the superstitious that they had seen blood upon the sun and moon. Once again, everything seemed waiting, waiting.

‘Doesn’t it all look ominous!’ said Hope at last.

Almost without speaking, we walked back to the camp. There we learned that the rumours of the morning were confirmed, and the great German offensive had begun.

13

I went on duty the next day to find that my light medical hut had been hastily ‘converted’ into a surgical ward during the night. The harassed and bewildered V.A.D. who had taken in the convoy gave me the report. Ten patients, she explained, were for immediate operation; a dozen more were for X-ray; several were likely to hæmorrhage at any moment, and others were marked down for visits by specialists. No, she was afraid she didn’t know who had had breakfast and who had not, as the orderly was away on picket-duty. Then she departed, leaving me in sole charge of forty desperately wounded men.

Only a short time ago, sitting in the elegant offices of the British Red Cross Society in Grosvenor Crescent, I read in the official
Report by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and Order of St John
the following words - a little pompous, perhaps, like the report itself, but doubtless written with the laudable intention of reassuring the anxious nursing profession:

‘The V.A.D. members were not . . . trained nurses; nor were they entrusted with trained nurses’ work except on occasions when the emergency was so great that no other course was open.’

And there, in that secure, well-equipped room, the incongruous picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the ‘emergency’ of March 22nd, 1918, and gazing, half hypnotised, at the dishevelled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy khaki, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy blood-stained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me - and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirit.

For a moment my sword of Damocles, the ever-brooding panic, came perilously near to descending on my head. And then, unexpectedly, I laughed, and the danger disappeared. Triumphantly elated by the realisation that I had once again done it in, I began to indent quite gaily for surgical instruments, tourniquets, bandages, splints, wool, gauze, peroxide, eusol and saline. But I had to bombard the half-frantic dispensary for nearly an hour before I could get my stores, and without them it was impossible even to begin on the dressings. When I returned I found to my relief that a Sister had been sent to help me. Though only recently out from England she was level-headed and competent, and together we started on the daily battle against time and death which was to continue, uninterrupted, for what seemed an eternity.

However long I may be destined to survive my friends who went down in the Flood, I shall never forget the crushing tension of those extreme days. Nothing had ever quite equalled them before - not the Somme, not Arras, not Passchendaele - for into our minds had crept for the first time the secret, incredible fear that we might lose the War. Each convoy of men that we took in - to be dispatched, a few hours later, to England after a hasty wash and change of dressing, or to the cemetery after a laying-out too hurried to be reverent - gave way to a discouragement that none of us had met with in a great battle before.

‘There’s only a handful of us, Sister, and there seem to be thousands of them!’ was the perpetual cry whether the patient came from Bapaume or Péronne or St Quentin, where the enemy hordes, released from the Eastern Front, were trying to smash the Allied resistance before the rescuing Americans arrived in force. Day after day, while civilian refugees fled panic-stricken into Etaples from threatened villages further up the line, and the wounded, often unattended, came down in anything that would carry them - returning lorries, A.S.C. ambulances and even cattle-trucks - some fresh enemy conquest was first incredulously whispered and then published tentatively abroad. One after another, Péronne, Bapaume, Beaumont Hamel, were gone, and on March 27th Albert itself was taken. Even Paris, we learnt, had been shelled by a long-range gun from seventy-five miles away. Gradually we became conscious that we were in the midst of what a War historian afterwards called ‘the most formidable offensive in the history of the world’.

On the 4th of April, after a fortnight of fourteen-hour days, with the operating theatres going day and night, the ‘Fall-In’ sounding continuously, and the day staff taking it in turns to be called up to help with night convoys, we limped wearily into the Mess for supper to hear a new and yet more hair-raising rumour.

‘The Germans are in the suburbs of Amiens!’ it ran round the tables.

We looked at each other, speechless, with blanched faces; I was probably as pale as the rest, for I felt as though cold fingers were exploring my viscera. We were already becoming a Casualty Clearing Station, with only the advance units at Abbeville between ourselves and the line; how much longer should we be able to remain where we were? How long until we too fled before the grey uniforms advancing down the road from Camiers? This horror . . . monstrous, undreamed of, incredible . . . this was defeat. That night we began to pack our boxes. Each evening when we came off duty, we wondered whether the morning would find us still at our posts.

For nearly a month the camp resembled a Gustave Doré illustration to Dante’s
Inferno
. Sisters flying from the captured Casualty Clearing Stations crowded into our quarters; often completely without belongings, they took possession of our rooms, our beds, and all our spare uniform. By day a thudding crescendo in the distance, by night sharp flashes of fire in the sky, told us that the War was already close upon their heels.

Nearer at hand, a ceaseless and deafening roar filled the air. Motor lorries and ammunition waggons crashed endlessly along the road; trains with reinforcements thundered all day up the line, or lumbered down more slowly with their heavy freight of wounded. Even the stretcher cases came to us in their trench-stained khaki, with only the clothing round the wound roughly torn away; often their congealed blood fastened them firmly to the canvas, and we had to cut it before we could get them free. The wards were never tidied and the work was never finished; each convoy after staying its few hours was immediately replaced by another, and the business of dressing wounds began all over again. I was glad to be no longer nursing German prisoners; social tact, I felt, would now have become altogether too difficult on either side.