THE FEVER CHART OF WAR
"The women are splendid...." How tired we are of hearing that, so tired
that we begin to doubt it, and the least hostile emotion that it evokes
is the sense that after all the men are so much more splendid, so far
beyond praise, that the less one says of anyone else the better. That
sentence is dead, let us hope, fallen into the same limbo as "Business
as Usual" and the rest of the early war-gags, but the prejudices it
aroused, the feeling of boredom, have not all died with it. Words have
at least this in common with men, that the evil that they do lives after
them.
Let me admit that when those in authority sent for me to go to France
and see what certain sections of the women there were doing, I didn't
want to go. I told them rather ungraciously that if they wanted the
"sunny-haired-lassies-in-khaki-touch" they had better send somebody
else. I am not, and never have been, a feminist or any other sort of an
'ist, never having been able to divide humanity into two different
classes labelled "men" and "women." Also, to tell the truth, the idea
of going so far behind the lines did not appeal. For this there is the
excuse that in England one grows so sick of the people who talk of
"going to the Front" when they mean going to some safe chateau as a base
for a personally conducted tour, or--Conscientious objectors are the
worst sinners in this latter class--when they are going to sit at
canteens or paint huts a hundred miles or so behind the last line of
trenches. The reaction from this sort of thing is very apt to make one
say: "Oh, France? There's no more in being in France behind the lines
than in working in England." A point of view in which I was utterly and
completely wrong. There is a great deal of difference, not in any
increased danger, but in quite other ways, as I shall show in the place
and order in which it was gradually made apparent to me.
Also, no one who has not been at the war knows the hideous boredom of it
... a boredom that the soul dreads like a fatal miasma. And if I had
felt it in Belgium in those terrible grey first weeks of her pain, when
at least one was in the midst of war, as it was then, still fluid and
mobile, still full of alarums and excursions, with all the suffering and
death immediately under one's eyes still a new thing; if I had felt it
again, even more strongly, when I went right up to the very back of the
front in the French war zone for the Croix Rouge, in those poor little
hospitals where the stretchers are always ready in the wards to hustle
the wounded away, and where, in devastated land only lately vacated by
the Germans, I sat and ate with peasants who were painfully and sadly
beginning to return to their ruined homes and cultivate again a soil
that might have been expected to redden the ploughshare, how much the
more then might I dread it, caught in the web of Lines of
Communication.... I feared that boredom.
And there was another reason, both for my disinclination and my lack of
interest. We in England grew so tired, in the early days of the war, of
the fancy uniforms that burst out upon women. Every other girl one met
had an attack of khaki-itis, was spotted as the pard with badges and
striped as the zebra. Almost simultaneously with this eruption came, for
the other section of the feminine community, reaction from it. We others
became rather self-consciously proud of our femininity, of being
"fluffy"--in much the same way that anti-suffragists used to be fluffy
when they said they preferred to influence a man's vote, and that they
thought more was done by charm....
With official recognition of bodies such as the V.A.D.'s and the even
more epoch-making official founding of the W.A.A.C.'s, the point of view
of the un-uniformed changed. The thing was no longer a game at which
women were making silly asses of themselves and pretending to be men; it
had become regular, ordered, disciplined and worthy of respect. In
short, uniform was no longer fancy dress.
But the feeling of boredom that had been engendered stayed on, as these
things do. It is yet to be found, partly because there still are women
who have their photographs taken in a new uniform every week, but more
because of our ignorance as to what the real workers are doing. And like
most ignorant people, I was happy in my ignorance.
Well, I went, and am most thankful for my prejudice, my disinclination,
my prevision of boredom. For without all those, what would my conversion
be worth? Who, already convinced of religion, is amazed at attaining
salvation? It is to the mocker that the miracle is a miracle, and no
mere expected sequence of nature, divine or human.
I was often depressed, the wherefore of which you will see, but bored,
never. Thrilled, ashamed for oneself that one does so little--admiring,
critical, amused, depressed, elated, all this gamut and its gradations
were touched, but the string of boredom, never. And the only thing that
worries anyone sent on such a quest as mine, and with the inevitable
message to deliver at the end of it, is that terrible feeling that no
matter how really one feels enthusiasm, how genuine one's conversion,
there will always be the murmur of--"Oh, yes.... Of course she has to
say all that ... it's all part of the propaganda. She was sent to do it
and she has to do it, whether she really believes in it or not...."
What can one say? I can only tell you, O Superior Person, that no matter
what I had been sent to do and told to write I not only wouldn't but
couldn't have, unless I meant it. I can only tell you so, I can't make
you believe it. But let me also assure you that I too am--or shall I say
was?--Superior, that I too have laughed the laugh of sophistication at
enthusiasm, that I too know enough to consider vehemence amusing and
strenuous effort ill-bred, that doubtless I shall do so again. But there
is one thing that seems to me more ill-bred, and that is lack of
appreciation of those who are doing better than oneself.
Lest you should misunderstand me when I say that I didn't want to go to
France this time, and feared boredom, and felt no particular interest in
the work of the women over there, let me add that I was careful to
sponge my mind free of all preconceived notions, either for or against,
when once it was settled that I should go. I went without enthusiasm, it
is true, but at least I went with a mind rigorously swept and garnished,
so that there might enter into it visitants of either kind, angelic or
otherwise.
For this has always seemed to me in common honesty a necessary part of
equipment to anyone going on a special mission, charged with finding
out things as they are--to be free not only of prejudice against, but
predisposition for; and just as a juryman, when he is empanelled, should
try and sweep his mind bare of everything he has heard about the case
before, so should the Special Missioner--to coin a most horrible
phrase--make his mind at once blank and sensitised, like a photographic
plate, for events to strike as truly as they may, with as little help or
hindrance from former knowledge as possible.
Human nature being what it is, it is probably almost impossible for the
original attitude to be completely erased, however conscientious one is,
and that is why I am glad that my former attitude was, if not inimical,
at least very unenthusiastic, so that I am clear of the charge of seeing
things as I or the authorities might have wished me to see them.
And, for the first few days, as always when the mind is plunged headlong
into a new world, though I saw facts, listened to them, was impressed,
very impressed, by their outward show, it still remained outward show,
the soul that informed the whole evaded me, and for many days I saw
things that I only understood later in view of subsequent knowledge,
when I could look back and see more clearly with the mind's eye what I
before had seen with the physical. Yet even the first evening I saw
something which, though only dimly, showed me a hint of the spirit of
the whole.
I was at the Headquarters of the British Red Cross--which is what the
letters H.Q.B.R.C.S. stand for--and I was being shown some very peculiar
and wonderful charts. They are secret charts, the figures on which, if a
man is shown them, he must never disclose, and those figures, when you
read them, bring a contraction at once of pity and of pride to the
heart. For, on these great charts, that are mapped out into squares and
look exactly like temperature charts at a hospital, are drawn curves,
like the curves that show the fever of a patient. Up in jagged
mountains, down into merciful valleys, goes the line, and at every point
there is a number, and that number is the number of the wounded who were
brought down from the trenches on such a day. Here, on these charts, is
a complete record, in curves, of the rate of the war. Every peak is an
offensive, every valley a comparative lull.
Sheet after sheet, all with those carefully-drawn numbered curves
zigzagging across them, all showing the very temperature of War....
With this difference--that on these sheets there is no "normal." War is
abnormal, and there is not a point of these charts where, when the line
touches it, you can say--"It is well."
As I looked at these records I began to get a different vision of that
tract of country called "Lines of Communication" which I had come to
see. This, where War's very pulse was noted day by day, was the
stronghold of War himself. Here he is nursed, rested, fed with food for
the mouths of flesh and blood, and food for the mouths of iron; here,
the whole time, night and day, as ceaselessly as in the trenches, the
work goes on, the work of strengthening his hands, and so every man and
woman working for that end in "L. of C." is fighting on our side most
surely. Something of the hugeness and the importance of it began to show
itself.
And, as regards that particular portion which I had come out to see, I
began to get a glimmering of that also, when it was told me, that of
those thousands of wounded I saw marked on the charts, a great
proportion was convoyed entirely by women. There are whole districts,
such as the Calais district, which includes many towns and stations,
where every ambulance running is driven by a woman. Not only the fever
rate of War is shown on those charts, but just as to the seeing eye,
behind any temperature-chart in a hospital, is the whole construction of
the great scheme--doctors, surgeons, nurses, food, drugs, money,
devotion, everything that finds its expression in that simple sheet of
paper filled in daily as a matter of routine, so behind these charts of
War's temperature kept at H.Q. is the whole of the complex organisation
known as the British Red Cross. And outstanding even amongst so much
that is splendid are certain bands of girls behind the lines, who, not
for a month or two, but year in, year out, during nights and days when
they have known no rest, have they, also, had their fingers on the pulse
of war.