Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (66 page)

On one of my solitary morning perambulations round Westminster, I happened to pass Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital, in Millbank, and remembered hearing that its new Matron was my January friend at 24 General. I had not forgotten her kind eyes when she agreed to put in for my leave, and on my next free afternoon I called at the hospital and asked if I might see her. I was shown up at once, and after reminding her that she had enabled me to share his last fortnight at home with Edward, who now was dead, and explaining my determination to quit St Jude’s, I inquired whether there chanced to be a vacancy at Millbank.

‘I’m glad,’ she said, quite simply, ‘that I helped you to see your brother again.’

She had room, she told me, for another V.A.D.; being herself a ‘Red Cape’, she obviously sympathised with my distaste for the narrow rigidity of civilian discipline, and promised to ask for me from Devonshire House as soon as I obtained permission to transfer from St Jude’s.

A day or two later, after an acrimonious interview with the Assistant Matron, I found myself once more in Devonshire House, interviewing a young official with a round face and bright, chubby cheeks, whose name I never discovered. She sat with the usual folder containing my record in front of her; quite good reports, I felt, might once have been sent in from Malta, or from France, but my stock must now have fallen so low that whatever I said or did could hardly matter.

‘I’ve come to say I can’t stop at St Jude’s,’ I began aggressively. ‘If I can’t go somewhere else, I just shan’t sign on again.’

But the wrath that I awaited did not descend. Instead, my young
vis-a‘-vis
merely looked melancholy.

‘You’re not the first,’ she said with a sigh, gazing pensively at the blue active-service stripes on my sleeve. ‘What exactly is your objection to St Jude’s?’

‘It’s rather difficult to put into words,’ I answered, completely mollified by her air of lugubrious resignation. ‘It just isn’t a place for V.A.D.s, except very new ones. One might as well never have served at all.’

‘I know,’ she assented, sighing again - and then inquired, more cheerfully: ‘Well, is there anywhere special you
would
like to go? I’m sorry I can’t send you back to France.’

And, without further delay, we completed to my entire satisfaction the arrangements already begun with the Scottish Matron.

9

So at the end of October I joined the staff at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Millbank, on the Westminster side of the river. In those days it seemed quite an imposing block of buildings, but now, dwarf-like and apologetic, it cowers behind the flat white immensity of Thames House and Imperial Chemicals. The black corrugated iron hut opposite the main entrance, in which I worked for the greater part of my time there, still remains shabbily standing - a very poor relation to the splendid giants erected around it - as an annex to the Ministry of Pensions.

Thankful to have returned to a military atmosphere from the lampless conventionality of civilian nursing, I settled down to a humdrum but tolerable routine. Throughout the new Sisters’ quarters reigned the peace which is always present in a hospital where the controlling authority is benevolent and reasonable. On the whole I was very fortunate in my Matrons all through the War; at the Devonshire Hospital, at the 1st London, in Malta, in France and at Millbank, they were all humane, conscientious women, genuinely anxious to do their best for their subordinates in a profession as cluttered with outworn traditions and vexatious restrictions as an old farmyard with disused tin cans and rusty fragments of barbed wire.

Mechanical contentment, however, is one thing, and vital contact with life quite another. Of the five months that I spent at Millbank, hardly a memory now remains. Dimly I recall my frequent crossings of the road between the hospital and my ward, always with a sideways glance towards the Embankment at the end and the funnels of the barges slipping across that narrow glimpse of the river; vaguely I remember the winter creeping on - a mild, muggy winter, so different from the biting cold in France a year ago - and my mother coming into my flag-decked ward for a party to the men on Christmas Day. I have faint recollections, too, of scurryings back from the West End down Great Smith Street on an 88 or 32 ’bus at the close of off-duty time in the early months of 1919 - less rapid and conscientious scurryings than those back to Camberwell three years before, since I was by now indifferent to reprimand and had nothing to lose by being late. My whole attention was concentrated on surviving until my six months’ contract expired and brought release from the suddenly unbearable monotony of nursing - though I feared my freedom, too, for reasons that I could not then quite explain even to myself.

Finally, and most clearly of all, I remember a young medical officer scolding my Ward-Sister for making me day-time ‘special’ to a hopeless and peculiarly revolting case of syphilitic cancer; it wasn’t a job for a girl, he said, and one of the older nurses ought to have taken it on. He seemed surprised that I hadn’t protested, but it never occurred to me to do so; I no longer thought of myself as younger or less experienced than the Sisters with whom I worked, and I couldn’t see that it mattered to myself or anyone else if I caught and even died from one of my patient’s dire diseases, when so many beautiful bodies of young men were rotting in the mud of France and the pine forests of Italy.

Having become, at last, the complete automaton, moving like a sleep-walker through the calm atmosphere of Millbank, I was no longer capable of either enthusiasm or fear. Once an ecstatic idealist who had tripped down the steep Buxton hill in a golden glow of self-dedication to my elementary duties at the Devonshire Hospital, I had now passed - like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far - into a permanent state of numb disillusion. Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon - the restless pre-war months at home, the naïve activities of a college student, the tutelage to horror and death as a V.A.D. nurse, the ever-deepening night of fear and suspense and agony in a provincial town, in a university city, in London, in the Mediterranean, in France - it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, ‘a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing’.

And now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the War; nothing remained except to endure it.

It had not, however, to be endured much longer. I had only been at Millbank for a few days when it became obvious even to me that something unusual and important was happening all over Europe. For a long time, although I read spasmodically about the German retreat, my mind refused to take in its significance; I had ceased to think of the War as ever ending, and much less as ending in victory. But now the growing crescendo of triumphant battle, the rapid withdrawal of the Germans on the Western Front to the Hindenburg line and beyond while Turkey and Austria were collapsing in the East, penetrated even my torpid consciousness, and I awoke with a fearful start to the astonishing fact that, up at Ypres, the Allies had required only one day to gain as much territory as had been taken in three months during the costly and all too bitterly memorable offensive round Passchendaele in 1917.

After November 3rd, when the Germans were left alone to face the united strength of their old enemies reinforced by the exultant, inexhaustible Americans, when Valenciennes fell and the British Army struck its ultimate blow on the Sambre, I realised that the end had become a matter of days. But I could still call up only a languid interest when I read that the Canadians, by capturing Mons, had picturesquely finished the War where it began, and I neither knew nor cared that a day or two afterwards a section of the recovered territory was occupied by a new battalion of the London Rifle Brigade, which had crossed the Channel just in time to see the fighting reach its incredible conclusion.

Among these newly arrived troops marched a speculative young rifleman whose acceptance for military service had been delayed by ill health and the devastations of personal grief until the final spring of the War; in his pack, side by side with the
De Rerum Natura
of Lucretius, he carried a bulky manuscript note-book containing highly philosophical disquisitions on the causes of military conflict and the ethics of its elimination from the body politic, which would have amazed and mystified his fellow privates. But even in that heavy day of harsh surprises, that conclusive hour which dragged me back unwillingly to the sharp remorselessness of continuing life, nothing would have astounded me so much as the suggestion that those weighty manuscripts and their youthful writer might have some possible significance for myself in the time to come.

10

When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: ‘We’ve won the War !’ They only said: ‘The War is over.’

From Millbank I heard the maroons crash with terrifying clearness, and, like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up, I went on automatically washing the dressing bowls in the annex outside my hut. Deeply buried beneath my consciousness there stirred the vague memory of a letter that I had written to Roland in those legendary days when I was still at Oxford, and could spend my Sundays in thinking of him while the organ echoed grandly through New College Chapel. It had been a warm May evening, when all the city was sweet with the scent of wallflowers and lilac, and I had walked back to Micklem Hall after hearing an Occasional Oratorio by Handel, which described the mustering of troops for battle, the lament for the fallen and the triumphant return of the victors.

‘As I listened,’ I told him, ‘to the organ swelling forth into a final triumphant burst in the song of victory, after the solemn and mournful dirge over the dead, I thought with what mockery and irony the jubilant celebrations which will hail the coming of peace will fall upon the ears of those to whom their best will never return, upon whose sorrow victory is built, who have paid with their mourning for the others’ joy. I wonder if I shall be one of those who take a happy part in the triumph - or if I shall listen to the merriment with a heart that breaks and ears that try to keep out the mirthful sounds.’

And as I dried the bowls I thought: ‘It’s come too late for me. Somehow I knew, even at Oxford, that it would. Why couldn’t it have ended rationally, as it might have ended, in 1916, instead of all that trumpet-blowing against a negotiated peace, and the ferocious talk of secure civilians about marching to Berlin? It’s come five months too late - or is it three years? It might have ended last June, and let Edward, at least, be saved! Only five months - it’s such a little time, when Roland died nearly three years ago.’

But on Armistice Day not even a lonely survivor drowning in black waves of memory could be left alone with her thoughts. A moment after the guns had subsided into sudden, palpitating silence, the other V.A.D. from my ward dashed excitedly into the annex.

‘Brittain! Brittain! Did you hear the maroons? It’s over - it’s all over! Do let’s come out and see what’s happening!’

Mechanically I followed her into the road. As I stood there, stupidly rigid, long after the triumphant explosions from Westminster had turned into a distant crescendo of shouting, I saw a taxicab turn swiftly in from the Embankment towards the hospital. The next moment there was a cry for doctors and nurses from passers-by, for in rounding the corner the taxi had knocked down a small elderly woman who in listening, like myself, to the wild noise of a world released from nightmare, had failed to observe its approach.

As I hurried to her side I realised that she was all but dead and already past speech. Like Victor in the mortuary chapel, she seemed to have shrunk to the dimensions of a child with the sharp features of age, but on the tiny chalk-white face an expression of shocked surprise still lingered, and she stared hard at me as Geoffrey had stared at his orderly in those last moments of conscious silence beside the Scarpe. Had she been thinking, I wondered, when the taxi struck her, of her sons at the front, now safe? The next moment a medical officer and some orderlies came up, and I went back to my ward.

But I remembered her at intervals throughout that afternoon, during which, with a half-masochistic notion of ‘seeing the sights,’ I made a circular tour to Kensington by way of the intoxicated West End. With aching persistence my thoughts went back to the dead and the strange irony of their fates - to Roland, gifted, ardent, ambitious, who had died without glory in the conscientious performance of a routine job; to Victor and Geoffrey, gentle and diffident, who, conquering nature by resolution, had each gone down bravely in a big ‘show’; and finally to Edward, musical, serene, a lover of peace, who had fought courageously through so many battles and at last had been killed while leading a vital counter-attack in one of the few decisive actions of the War. As I struggled through the waving, shrieking crowds in Piccadilly and Regent Street on the overloaded top of a ’bus, some witty enthusiast for contemporary history symbolically turned upside down the signboard ‘Seven Kings’.

Late that evening, when supper was over, a group of elated V.A.D.s who were anxious to walk through Westminster and Whitehall to Buckingham Palace prevailed upon me to join them. Outside the Admiralty a crazy group of convalescent Tommies were collecting specimens of different uniforms and bundling their wearers into flag-strewn taxis; with a shout they seized two of my companions and disappeared into the clamorous crowd, waving flags and shaking rattles. Wherever we went a burst of enthusiastic cheering greeted our Red Cross uniform, and complete strangers adorned with wound stripes rushed up and shook me warmly by the hand. After the long, long blackness, it seemed like a fairy-tale to see the street lamps shining through the chill November gloom.