Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (26 page)

9

In spite of periodic encounters with the Sister, my new life brought me tranquillity to exactly the extent that it diverted my mind from the letter that had not come or the telegram that might be coming. Going home in the warm dusk one evening I asked myself rather naïvely: ‘What
do
I think about when I am doing my work at the hospital?’ and came to the conclusion that the answer was: ‘Nothing whatever, except the thing that I am going to do next.’ Such mental quiescence, I told Roland, was more than worth the fatigue involved.

‘I thought to myself as I was wandering round with ten pints of milk and sixteen cups on a heavy wooden tray, “You’re nothing but a thing that work is squeezed out of - a drudge, a time-machine, toiling by the clock along a stereotyped routine.” . . . Nevertheless, sometimes when I am making extremely untidy beds in the morning, or boiling water for Bovril in the dim little kitchen in the evening . . . I see it all in a kind of golden glow and I feel strangely thrilled inside and whisper to myself exultingly: “War knows no power.”’

When a fortnight passed in which no letter came from Roland at all, I was glad to have attached myself so securely to the hospital.

‘If it were not for the nursing I do not know how I could bear this,’ I confessed. ‘I feel as if I couldn’t go on much longer without news of some sort, and yet it is no good feeling like that because one
has
to go on, come what may . . . I often wonder just how I should take it if I heard he was dead. Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed by a sort of blank and despairing resignation to what one feels must be inevitable. And - when I think of all that brilliant life could do and be, I scarcely know how to contain my bitter and anguished feelings.’

The only way to contain them was by work, and I flung myself into the more sordid and tedious obligations of nursing with the fervour of a religious devotee. Never had I worked so furiously even before the Somerville scholarship; my days gave me a new insight into the lives of women who had always to toil in this way for mere maintenance, and at night I was often so tired that the entries in my diary are almost indecipherable. But for Roland I reserved half-hours of tranquillity from the hard, monotonous days; even when I did not hear from him for a long, anxious period, I endeavoured, as I believed he was endeavouring for me, to preserve the integrity of the self that he had loved.

‘Like no one else,’ I told him in a letter written at the end of July, ‘you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places . . . The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon or wind on the moorlands or rich music . . . or books that have meant more to me than I can explain, or the smell of the earth after a shower or the calmness of the sky at sunset . . . This is grand, but still it isn’t enough for this world, whatever it may be like “when we’re beyond the sun”. The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.’

To console myself, I concluded, I had been re-reading one of our favourite fragments from W. E. Henley’s
Bric-a‘-Brac
:

What is to come we know not. But we know
That what has been was good - was good to show,
Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
We are the masters of the days that were:
We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered . . . even so.
Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow?
Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe—
Dear, though it spoil and break us! - need we care
What is to come?

A day or two afterwards, Edward arrived home for a long leave which seemed likely to be his last; it was now possible, he told us with his usual serene aloofness, that the 11th Sherwood Foresters might be ordered to the Persian Gulf. ‘Mother,’ I noted, ‘wants him and me to have a snapshot taken together - I say as a typical example of two people (one at any rate for the first time in her life) who-are-doing-just-what-other-people-think-they-ought!’

Together Edward and I looked at
The Times
History of the War, picked out a newspaper paragraph stating that the total estimate of European war casualties was already five million dead and seven million wounded, and studied with care the first official account of Neuve Chapelle.

‘It is quite impossible to understand,’ I commented afterwards, ‘how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure.’

On the last evening of his leave, we celebrated the first anniversary of the War by a long walk between the dark moorlands up the Manchester Road. Again, as in the garden at Micklem Hall, Edward expressed the haunting premonition that he himself would not survive to see the coming of peace. It wasn’t, he said, as though he were a full-fledged and well-known composer; he couldn’t see that his life at present was of much use to anyone, including himself. Everything, it seemed, after he had gone the next day, was being taken from me - my future, my work, my lover, and now my brother. Life was melancholy indeed. Even Roland’s mother, whose brave communications, dramatically transcribed with a quill pen in gigantic jet-black calligraphy, had often heartened me to face the interminable suspense of days that we both dreaded, for once wrote sadly, commenting on the many letters of sympathy that had now so reluctantly to be sent.

In the middle of August, to conclude three miserable weeks of disappointment, and parting, and anxiety, and depression following the news of the expensive operations at Suvla Bay, the first death that I had ever witnessed occurred at the hospital. Although surprised at my own equanimity, I had not yet acquired the self-protective callousness of later days, and I put into the writing of my diary that evening an emotion comparable to the feeling of shock and impotent pity that had seized Roland when he found the first dead man from his platoon at the bottom of the trench:

‘Nothing could have looked more dreadful than he did this morning, lying on his back worn just to skin and bone and a ghastly yellowish colour all over. He lay with his eyes half closed and turned up so that only the whites were showing, and kept plucking at the bed-clothes and pulling them down. It quite made me shudder to see his great bony hands at the end of his thin skeleton arms. He died from a most obscure complaint; they do not know exactly, I think, what it is. I pray that when I come to die it may not be like that. We ought to pray in our litany for deliverance from a lingering as well as from a sudden death. It is not death itself that presents such terrors to the mind but dissolution - and when that begins before death . . . It seems sad that he should die like this in the midst of strangers, with Sister beside him of all people, and no one really to care very much . . . To me it is strange that I take this death - sad as it makes me feel - so much as a matter of course when only a short time ago the idea of death made me shudder and filled me with horror and fear. From the time Nurse Olive related to me the one or two deaths she had been present at and I thought her callous to take it so much as a matter of course, to the time when I take it as a matter of course myself, I must have undergone a great revulsion of mind . . . And now that he is dead, reasonable as I try to be I cannot make myself feel that the individual, whatever it may have been, has really vanished into nothing and
is
not. I merely feel as if it had gone away into another place, and the worn-out shell that the men carried away was not Smith at all.’

10

‘Never, never,’ begins my diary for August 18th, ‘have I been in such agitation before. He has got leave; he is in England now. This morning as I was dusting bedsteads at the hospital Mother came with a wire from Mrs L. to say: “Roland comes home today!” ’

At midday a telegram sent off from Folkestone by Roland himself came to confirm the news. The afternoon interval of freedom was spent in the usual prolonged endeavour - inevitable owing to the distance between our homes - to get into touch by telegraph or telephone. Finally Roland wired asking if I would meet him next morning at St Pancras, and the Matron, to whose interested ears my mother had already confided the news of our unofficial relationship, gave me leave from the hospital for a long week-end.

No one, this time, suggested going with me to London; already the free-and-easy movements of girl war-workers had begun to modify convention. So I went up to town by the early train, to be at last alone with Roland for an uninterrupted day. Feverishly excited as I had been since the previous morning, I found it very difficult to realise that I was actually doing what I had dreamed of for months. To read was quite impossible, and I spent the entire four-hour journey in agitatedly wondering how much he would have altered.

During the few minutes that I had to wait at St Pancras for him to arrive from Liverpool Street, I shivered with cold in spite of the hot August noon. When at last I saw him come into the station and speak to a porter, his air of maturity and sophistication turned me stiff with alarm.

At that stage of the War it was fashionable for officers who had been at the front to look as disreputable and war-worn as possible in order to distinguish them from the brand-new subalterns of Kitchener’s Army. Not until later, when almost every young officer except eighteen-year-old cadets had been abroad at one time or another, was it
comme il faut
to model one’s self the more assiduously on a tailor’s dummy the longer one had been in the trenches. Modishly shabby, noticeably thinner and looking at least thirty, Roland on leave seemed Active Service personified.

In another moment we were standing face to face, tense with that anxiety to find one another unchanged which only lovers know at its worst. Just as we had parted we shook hands without any sign of emotion, except for his usual pallor in moments of excitement. For quite a minute we looked at each other without speaking, and then broke awkwardly into polite conversation.

‘What shall we do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you think we’d better go and have lunch somewhere?’

‘All right, but isn’t it a little early?’

‘Oh, never mind!’

So we went once again to the Florence, and, on the way there, looked out of opposite windows in the taxi. Even when we had sat down at our table, it was difficult to begin anything - including luncheon. We started to thaw only when I told him that, half waking one morning, I seemed to hear an inner voice saying quite audibly: ‘Why do you worry about him? You know he will be all right.’

This information stirred his customary conscious optimism into expression.

‘All along I have felt I shan’t be killed. In fact I may almost say I
know
it. I quite think I shall be wounded, but that is all.’

And when I recalled how much he had once wanted to go to the Dardanelles, where the casualties were so terrible, he rejoined with gay confidence: ‘Oh, I should have come through even there!’

‘Your hair’s just like a bristly doormat!’ I told him inconsequently, and he endeavoured, quite unsuccessfully, to smooth his close-cropped head with his strong fingers as he remarked that after all he hadn’t had such a bad time in France or ever been in specially dangerous trenches.

‘In fact,’ he concluded, ‘in many ways it’s quite a nice life!’ His one regret appeared to be that his regiment had not yet taken part in even a minor action.

A good deal of that afternoon was spent in discussing how much we should be able to see of each other during my precious week-end. After prolonged argument we agreed that, as my family were expecting me and I had no luggage, he should come back to Buxton with me for the night; I could then, I said, return with him to Lowestoft from Saturday till Monday.

In these maturer years I have often reflected with amazement upon the passionate selfishness of twenty-year-old love. During that brief respite from clamorous danger Roland must have needed, above all things, rest and freedom from noise, yet without compunction I involved him in a series of tedious, clattering journeys. He must have dreamed in crowded dug-outs of the peace and privacy of his bedroom at home, yet later, when I arrived at Lowestoft, I accepted with equanimity the fact that in occupying it I had turned him out to share a room with his brother. Not once did it occur to me - nor even, I believe, to him - that my company was dearly bought at the expense of his comfort.

Into the midst of our discussion of time-tables we sandwiched a visit to Camberwell, for, in spite of the previous day’s preoccupations, I had remembered to write for an appointment with the Matron of the 1st London General. A very small woman, grave and immensely dignified, the Matron seemed to me unexpectedly young for such an impressive position.

‘I stood,’ I recorded afterwards, ‘all through the interview, and know now just how a servant feels when she is being engaged.’

‘And what is your age, nurse?’ the Matron inquired, after hearing the necessary details of my Devonshire Hospital experience.

‘Twenty-three,’ I replied, promptly but mendaciously, giving the minimum age at which I could be accepted in an Army hospital under the War Office, as distinct from the smaller hospitals run by the Red Cross and the St John Ambulance Brigade. Since I still looked, in the provincial excessiveness of my best coat and skirt, an unsophisticated seventeen, she probably did not believe me, but being a woman of the world she accepted the bold statement at its face value, and promised to apply for me in October as soon as their new huts were ready.