No Man's Land (12 page)

When I had read it I got up and went down to the shore in my dressing-gown and pyjamas. All day I sat on the rocks by the sea with the cable in my hand. I hardly noticed how the beautiful morning, golden and calm as an August in Devon, turned slowly into gorgeous afternoon, but I remembered afterwards that the rocks were covered with tiny cobalt-blue irises, about the size of an English wood violet.

For hours I remained in that state of suspended physical animation when neither heat nor cold, hunger nor thirst, fatigue nor pain, appear to have any power over the body, but the mind seems exceptionally logical and clear. My emotions, however, in so far as they existed, were not logical at all, for they led me to a conviction that Geoffrey's presence was somewhere with me on the rocks.

I even felt that if I turned my head quickly I might see him behind me, standing there with his deep-set grey-blue eyes, his finely chiselled lips and the thick light-brown hair that waved a little over his high, candid forehead.

And all at once, as I gazed out to sea, the words of the ‘Agony Column' advertisement, that I had cut out and sent to Roland nearly two years before, struggled back into my mind.

‘Lady,
fiancé
killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.'

I even remembered vaguely the letter in which I had commented on this notice at the time.

‘At first sight it is a little startling. Afterwards the tragedy of it dawns on you. The lady (probably more than a girl or she would have called herself “young lady”; they always do) doubtless has no particular gift or qualification, and does not want to face the dreariness of an unoccupied and unattached old-maidenhood. But the only person she loved is dead; all men are alike to her and it is a matter of indifference whom she marries, so she thinks she may as well marry someone who really needs her. The man, she thinks, being blind or maimed for life, will not have much opportunity of falling in love with anyone, and even if he does will not be able to say so. But he will need a perpetual nurse, and she if married to him can do more for him than an ordinary nurse and will perhaps find relief for her sorrow in devoting her life to him. Hence the advertisement; I wonder if anyone will answer it? It is purely a business arrangement, with an element of self-sacrifice which redeems it from utter sordidness. Quite an idea, isn't it?'

I was still, I reflected, a girl and not yet a ‘lady', and I had certainly never meant to go through life with ‘no particular gift or qualification'. But – ‘quite an idea, isn't it?' Was it, Geoffrey? Wasn't it? There was nothing left in life now but Edward and the wreckage of Victor – Victor who had stood by me so often in my blackest hours. If he wanted me, surely I could stand by him in his.

If he wanted me? I decided, quite suddenly, that I would go home and see. It would not, I knew, be difficult to get permission, for though the renewal of my contract was overdue and I had said that I would sign on again, I had not yet done so. Work was slack in Malta; several hospitals were closing and the rest were overstaffed. Much as I liked my hospital and loved the island, I knew that I was not really needed there any more; any one – or no one – could take my place. If I could not do anything immediate for Victor I would join up again; if I could – well, time and the extent of his injuries would decide when that should be.

That night – quiet as all nights were now that so few sick and wounded were coming from Salonika – I tried to keep my mind from thoughts and my eyes from tears by assiduously pasting photographs of Malta into a cardboard album. The scent of a vase of sweet-peas on the ward table reminded me of Roland's study on Speech Day, centuries ago. Although I had been up for a day and two nights, I felt no inclination to sleep.

I was not, as it happened, very successful in stifling thought. By one of those curious chances which occurred during the War with such poignant frequency, a mail came in that evening with a letter from Geoffrey. It had been written in pencil three days before the attack; reading it with the knowledge that he had been so soon to die, I found its simple nobility even less bearable than the shock of the cablegram.

As I took in its contents with a slow, dull pain, the silent, shadowy verandah outside the door seemed to vanish from my eyes, and I saw the April evening in France which Geoffrey's words were to paint upon my mind for ever – the battened-out line of German trenches winding away into shell-torn trees, the ant-like contingent of men marching across a derelict plain to billets in the large town outlined against the pale yellow sky, the setting sun beneath purple clouds reflected in the still water at the bottom of many ‘crump-holes'. How he wished, he said, that Edward could have been with him to see this beauty if it were any other place, but though the future seemed very vague it was none the less certain. He only hoped that he would not fail at the critical moment, as he was indeed ‘a horrible coward'; for his school's sake, where so often he had watched the splendours of the sunset from the school field, he would especially like to do well. ‘But all this will be boring you.'

Characteristically he concluded his letter with the haunting lines that must have nerved many a reluctant young soldier to brave the death from which body and spirit shrank so pitifully.

‘Rupert Brooke,' he added, ‘is great and his faith also great. If destiny is willing I will write later.'

Well, I thought, destiny was not willing, and I shall not see that graceful, generous handwriting on an envelope any more. I wonder why it is that both Victor and Geoffrey were fired to such articulateness by the imminence of death, while Edward and Roland, who had the habit of self-expression, both became so curtly monosyllabic? Oh, Geoffrey, I shall never know anyone quite like you again, so true, so straight, such an unashamed idealist! It's another case of ‘whom the Gods love'; the people we care for all seem too fine for this world, so we lose them… Surely, surely there must be somewhere in which the sweet intimacies begun here may be continued and the hearts broken by this War may be healed!

VERA BRITTAIN

I THANK YOU, SISTER

from
Testament of Youth

T
HE NEXT MORNING
saw me begin an experience which I remember as vividly as anything that happened in my various hospitals.

Soon after our arrival the Matron, a beautiful, stately woman who looked unbelievably young for her South African ribbons, had questioned us all on our previous experience. I was now the owner of an ‘efficiency stripe' – a length of scarlet braid which V. A. D.s were entitled to wear on their sleeve if they had served for more than a year in military hospitals and had reached what their particular authority regarded as a high standard of competence – and when I told the Matron of my work in Malta, she remarked with an amused, friendly smile that I was ‘quite an old soldier'. This pleasant welcome confirmed a rumour heard in Boulogne that the hospital was very busy and every pair of practised hands likely to count. I was glad to be once more where the work was strenuous, but though I knew that 24 General had a special section for prisoners, I was hardly prepared for the shock of being posted, on the strength of my Malta experience, to the acute and alarming German ward.

The hospital was unusually cosmopolitan, as in addition to German prisoners it took Portuguese officers, but I can recall nothing about these except their habit of jumping off the tram and publicly relieving themselves on the way to Le Touquet. Most of the prisoners were housed – if the word can be justified – in large marquees, but one hut was reserved for very serious cases. In August 1917 its occupants – the heritage of Messines and the Yser – were soon to be replenished by the new battles in the Salient which have given their sombre immortality to the Menin Road and Passchendaele Ridge.

Although we still, I believe, congratulate ourselves on our impartial care of our prisoners, the marquees were often damp, and the ward was under-staffed whenever there happened to be a push – which seemed to be always – and the number of badly wounded and captured Germans became in consequence excessive. One of the things I like best to remember about the War is the nonchalance with which the Sisters and V. A. D.s in the German ward took for granted that it was they who must be overworked, rather than the prisoners neglected. At the time that I went there the ward staff had passed a self-denying ordinance with regard to half days, and only took an hour or two off when the work temporarily slackened.

Before the War I had never been in Germany and had hardly met any Germans apart from the succession of German mistresses at St Monica's, every one of whom I had hated with a provincial schoolgirl's pitiless distaste for foreigners. So it was somewhat disconcerting to be pitch-forked, all alone – since V. A. D.s went on duty half an hour before Sisters – into the midst of thirty representatives of the nation which, as I had repeatedly been told, had crucified Canadians, cut off the hands of babies, and subjected pure and stainless females to unmentionable ‘atrocities'. I didn't think I had really believed all those stories, but I wasn't quite sure. I half expected that one or two of the patients would get out of bed and try to rape me, but I soon discovered that none of them were in a position to rape anybody, or indeed to do anything but cling with stupendous exertion to a life in which the scales were already weighted heavily against them.

At least a third of the men were dying; their daily dressings were not a mere matter of changing huge wads of stained gauze and wool, but of stopping haemorrhages, replacing intestines and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes. Attached to the ward was a small theatre, in which acute operations were performed all day by a medical officer with a swarthy skin and a rolling brown eye; he could speak German, and before the War had been in charge, I was told, of a German hospital in some tropical region of South America. During the first two weeks, he and I and the easy-going Charge-Sister worked together pleasantly enough. I often wonder how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the theatre – as we did all day at frequent intervals – in that foetid stench, with the thermometer about 90 degrees in the shade, and the saturated dressings and yet more gruesome human remnants heaped on the floor. After the ‘light medicals' that I had nursed in Malta, the German ward might justly have been described as a regular baptism of blood and pus.

While the operations went on I was usually left alone in the ward with the two German orderlies, Zeppel and Fritz, to dress as best I could the worst wounds that I had ever seen or imagined.

‘I would have written yesterday… but I was much too busy,' runs a typical letter to my mother. ‘I did not get off duty at all, and all afternoon and evening I had the entire ward to myself, as Sister was in the operating theatre from 1.30 to 8.0; we had fifteen operations. Some of the things I have to do would make your hair stand on end!'

Soon after my arrival, the first Sister-in-charge was replaced by one of the most remarkable members of the nursing profession in France or anywhere else. In an unpublished novel into which, a few weeks after leaving Etaples, I introduced a good many scenes from 24 General, I drew her portrait as that of its chief character, Hope Milroy, and it is by this name, rather than her own, that I always remember her. Sister Milroy was a highbrow in active revolt against highbrows; connected on one side with a famous family of clerics, and on the other with an equally celebrated household of actors and actresses, she had deliberately chosen a hospital training in preference to the university education for which heredity seemed to have designed her, though no one ever suffered fools less gladly than she. When she first came to the ward her furious re-organisations were devastating, and she treated the German orderlies and myself with impartial contempt. On behalf of the patients she displayed determination and efficiency but never compassion; to her they were all ‘Huns', though she dressed their wounds with gentleness and skill.

‘Nurse!' she would call to me in her high disdainful voice, pointing to an unfortunate patient whose wound unduly advertised itself. ‘For heaven's sake get the iodoform powder and scatter it over that filthy Hun!'

The staff of 24 General described her as ‘mental', not realising that she used her reputation for eccentricity and the uncompromising candour which it was supposed to excuse as a means of demanding more work from her subordinates than other Sisters were able to exact. At first I detested her dark attractiveness and sarcastic, relentless youth, but when I recognised her for what she was – by far the cleverest woman in the hospital, even if potentially the most alarming, and temperamentally as fitful as a weathercock – we became constant companions off duty. After the conscientious stupidity of so many nurses, a Sister with unlimited intelligence and deliberately limited altruism was pleasantly stimulating, though she was so incalculable, and such a baffling mixture of convention and independence, that a long spell of her society demanded a good deal of reciprocal energy.