MY FIRST CONVOY
We arrived on a great day for the Fannies--the famous Aerial Torpedo had
preceded us by a bare hour. There it lay, on the floor of the mess-room,
reminding me, with its great steel fins and long rounded nose, of a dead
shark. The Commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive
Fanny entering was greeted with the two words--"It's come." The D. of T.
swore he would have it mounted on a brass and mahogany stand with an
engraved plate to tell its history. Two strong Fannies reared it up, for
even empty its weight was noteworthy, and it stood on its murderous nose
with its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent and crumpled
like a sheet of paper, above my head. A great trophy, and a hard-earned
one.
This was the first camp I saw, and a very good one as camps go. (I
merely add that latter sentence because personally I think any form of
community life the most terrible of hardships.) It is rather pathetic to
see how, in all the camps in France, the girls have managed to get not
only as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never saw a
woman's office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers; and
window-boxes, flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated everywhere.
Every office, too, though strictly businesslike, has chintz curtains of
lovely colours. You can always tell a woman's office from a man's, which
is a good sign, and should hearten the pessimists who cry that this
doing of men's work will de-feminise the women.
The Commandant at this Fannies' camp took me into her office, and she
and the D. of T.--who chimed in whenever he thought she was not saying
enough in praise of his admired Fannies--told me the rough outlines of
the history of the body since the beginning of the war. Though now
affiliated to the Red Cross, they were an independent body before the
war, and when hostilities broke out were a mounted corps, with horse
ambulances. They offered themselves to the English authorities, were
refused, and came out to the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for
fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais staffed by themselves for
nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of
1916 they offered to drive motor ambulances and thus release Red Cross
men drivers, and now they are running, with the exception of two
ambulances for Chinese, the whole of the Calais district, and have
released many A.S.C. men as well. It is a big area, with many outlying
camps where there are detached units. As a rule, there is only one girl
to each ambulance, but in very lonely spots the allowance is three girls
to two cars. At St. Omer the authorities at first objected to having
them, but now they have taken over the whole of the Red Cross and A.S.C.
ambulances there.
At this camp that I saw, they have no day or night shifts, as there is
not much night work except during a push, when everyone works night and
day without more than a couple of hours' sleep snatched with clothes
on--indeed, I heard of a convoy where for a fortnight the girls never
took off their clothes, but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The
other occasion when there is night work is when there is a raid. As I
have said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot for bombs, and
until just lately the girls had no raid-shelter. Now one has been dug
for them, roofed with concrete and sandbags and earth, which would stand
anything short of a direct hit from some such pleasant little missile as
is now the pride of the camp.
But at first, even when the raid-shelter was built, there was no
telephone extension to it from the office, and therefore the Commandant
had to stay in the office with one other to take the telephone calls,
then had to cross the open, in full raid, and going to the mouth of the
shelter call out the names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the
ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the spirit of the girls, that
never once, through all the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always
answered to her name and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and
went across to her car. But it seemed to me that it was as good to sit
quietly in a matchboard office and await the messages, to say nothing of
taking them across that danger zone. Now an order has gone forth that
the ambulances are not to start till the raid is over, as they are too
precious to be risked.
It is not a bad record, this continuous service of the Fannies since the
outbreak of war, is it?
For remember it is not work that can be taken up and dropped. You sign
on for six months at a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in
the year. And the girls sign on, again and again; they are nearly all
veterans at it. And, comfortable as the camp has been made--all the
necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by
the Red Cross--and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles--greatest
blessing of all--decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of everything
that can be done to make the girls happy and keep them well--it is still
a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well for a week or even a
fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years is not at all the same
thing....
Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are all very well. Girls who
go out rather delicate soon become strong in the hard open air life,
and there has not been a single case of strain from working the heavy
ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves,
and all repairs with the exception of the very complicated cases, for
which they are allowed to call on the help of two mechanics, but only
after the request has gone through those in authority.
The domestic staff, with the exception of one Frenchwoman in the
kitchen, is supplied by the girls themselves, and on this subject of
domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army
rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straitened
England--supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross
gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, etc.
When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a lordly dish and was told to
take as much as I liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment.
There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this
camp the Commandant was known as "Boss," a respectful familiarity I did
not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had even inscribed it on
the door of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over
the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic
sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after
I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a
limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to
remove forcibly the temptation for one person to use it all up. Perched
on two stalks of stone stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to
sit in with the knees up, but of no known human size. Inscribed above
it--(under a fresco in black and white of cats in the moonlight)--are
these touching words: "Do not turn on the hot water when the cold is off
or the Boiler will Bust."
Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but
you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain
things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice
anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I
never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling
that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I
happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point
and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another
story.
We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy
ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set
purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the
best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do
exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but
were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions;
and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only
describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for
what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their
look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this
determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that
interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard
for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human
woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot
with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh
treatment of a car--the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and
every girl driving a car makes it--they come in, toss their caps down,
brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman
has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover--and they don't mind.
It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is
partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things
would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ...
and for the rest--I really think they are too intent on what they are
doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be
thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is
to be as free as a man.