NIGHT
Not being among the lucky creatures who can fall happily to sleep when
they know they are to be called at one o'clock, I lay in my tiny bed and
revelled in that wonderful story of "The Bridge Builders" out of "The
Day's Work," till the sound of the storm without became the voice of
Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and lay and listened to the
truly fiendish train whistles which no reading could have transmuted,
and wondered why it is that French engine drivers apparently pay no
attention to signals, but just go on whistling till they are answered,
like someone who goes on ringing a bell till at length the door is
opened. The rain was turning to snow, so there was less of that steady
tinkling from without with which running water fills the world. I lay
and listened; and the whistles and the bellying of the chintz curtain
and the occasional swish of a heavy gust against the side of the hut
were at last beginning to blend in one blur in my mind when a girl came
softly into my room and whispered that it was time to dress.
That utter quietness of the girls was a thing that had impressed me
after staying in hotels full of the British Army, which goes to bed at
midnight, bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts from room to
room, and begins the whole process, reversed, at about six o'clock the
next morning. Here the girls wore soundless slippers, so that those who
had to be about should not disturb those who slept, and doors were
opened and shut with a cotton-wool care which appealed to me, or would
have, if I hadn't had to get up.
When I was dressed I found my way down endless blowy corridors, for the
doors at the ends are always kept open, to the room of the girl who had
called me. She looked at my fur coat and said it would get spoilt. I
replied with great truth that it was past spoiling, but she took it off
me, whipped my cap from my head, and the girls proceeded to dress me.
They pulled a leather cap with ear-pieces down on my head and stuffed me
into woolly jackets and wound my neck up in a comforter and finished up
with a huge leather coat and a pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, so
that when all was done I couldn't bend and had to be hoisted quite stiff
up to the front of the ambulance.
But first we all went into the kitchen, where part of the domestic staff
sits up all night to prepare food for the night drivers. There we drank
the loveliest cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon would stand up in,
piping hot, out of huge bowls. Then my driver and the section leader for
the night led me across the soaking park to where, in almost total
darkness, girls were busy with their ambulances. I was hoisted up beside
my driver and endeavoured clumsily with my bear's paws to fasten the
canvas flap back across the side as I was bidden. I may say that I felt
extraordinarily clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom could have put
me in their pockets. They knew so exactly what to do, their movements
were all so perfectly adjusted to their needs, they knew where
everything was, while I fumbled for steps and hoped for the best....
They made me feel, in the beautiful way they shepherded me, that I was a
silly useless female and that they were grave chivalrous young men; they
watched over me with just that matter-of-fact care.
To me it was all wonderful, that experience. To the girls, who do it
every night, every alternate fortnight, year in, year out, the thrill of
it has naturally gone long since; the wonder is that to them all remains
the pity of it. We swung out of the park into the road. There was no
moon, the stars were mostly hidden by the heavy clouds, the sleet blew
in gusts against the wind screen. We went at a good pace, bound for a
Canadian hospital, and then for a station beyond E----, where the train
was waiting, for this was what is called an "evacuation" that I was
going to see. No train of wounded was due in that night, and the
Convoy's business was to take men who were being sent elsewhere from the
hospitals to the train.
We stopped in front of a shadow hospital, set in a town of shadow-huts,
and a door opened to show an oblong of orange light, and send a paler
shaft widening out into the night towards the sleek side of our
ambulance.
We heard the men being placed in the ambulance, the word was given, and
again we set off through the night, this time so slowly, so carefully,
for we carried that which must not be jarred one hair's breadth more
than could be helped. We crept along the roads, past the pines that
showed as patches of denser blackness against the sky, past the
sand-dunes that glimmered ghostly, past the blots of shadow made by
every shrub and tree-trunk, and behind and before us crawled other
ambulances, laden even as we.
The station was wrapped in darkness, save for a hanging light here and
there, and an occasional uncurtained window in the waiting train. We
drew up under a light, where a sergeant was waiting.
"Four from No. 7 Canadian," said my driver crisply. The sergeant
repeated, looked at a list he carried and marked our cases off it duly,
then told us the number of the compartment where we should stop. The
ambulance slid on, very slowly, beside the train and slowly came to
rest.
I could see into the white-painted interior of the train, could see the
shelves running along its sides, and on the shelves, making oblong
shapes of darkness against all the white, men laid straightly ... in
front of us the Red Cross orderlies were sliding men down on stretchers
from the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out, carrying them up
into the train and packing them on the shelves like fragile and precious
parcels.
And suddenly it seemed to me there was something profoundly touching
about the sight of a man lying flat and helpless, shoved here and there,
in spite of all the care and kindness with which it was accomplished. It
is a thing wrong in essence, it seems an outrage on Nature--I got an odd
feeling that there was something wrong and unnatural about the mere
posture of lying-down that I never thought of before. The world seemed
suddenly to have become deformed, as a monster is deformed who is born
distorted. It shouldn't be possible to slide men on to shelves like
this....
The girl at the wheel pushed back the little shutter set in the front of
the ambulance and we looked into the dimly-lit interior. I could see the
crowns of four heads, the jut of brow beyond them, the upward peak of
the feet under the grey blankets, pale hands, one pair thin as a
child's, that lay limply along the edge of the stretchers.
The orderlies came to the open door, one man mounted within, and the top
stretcher from one side was slipped along its grooves and disappeared,
tilted into the night. The boy on the top stretcher the other side
turned his head languidly and watched--I could see a pale cheek,
foreshortened from where I sat, a sweep of long dark eyelashes, the
curve of the drooping upper lip. His turn came, and, passive, he too was
slid out, then the two men below were carried away and up into the
train. The ambulance was empty.
We turned in a circle over the muddy yard and started off again,
stopping again by the sergeant to get our orders.
"Number 4," said the sergeant, and we swung, once more at a good pace,
along the heavy roads, took fresh turnings about and about in the city
of hospital huts, and drew up at Number 4.
Again we were loaded, and again we crept back along the roads where we
had a few minutes before gone so swiftly, meeting empty cars, keeping in
line behind those laden like ourselves. Again we slowed down by the
waiting sergeant to say, "Two stretchers and two sitters from Four." He
echoed us, and we crept on to the appointed carriage and stopped. So it
went on through a couple of hours, ambulance after ambulance swiftly
leaving the station, slowly coming back, all drawing up gently by the
train, each, opened, making a faint square of light in the velvet
darkness. And then, at last, when it was all over, the return, swift
again, towards the camp.
We bumped along the road, the dim pines falling away into the shadows
behind, a very mild funnel of light showing us a scrap of the way before
us and of hedge on either side, the twigs of it perpetually springing
out palely to die away once more. The wind was behind us and the screen
clear; far ahead of us on the road was an empty ambulance with its
curtains drawn back, bare but for its empty stretchers and dark
blankets, which made, in the pale glow of the white-painted interior, a
sinister Face--two hollow eyes and a wide mouth--that fled through the
night, always keeping the same distance ahead, grimacing at me, like an
image of the Death's Head of War.... I was glad when it swung round a
turning and was lost to us.
We drove into the unrelieved darkness of the convoy park and drew up
with precision in our place, I wrestled again with the flap, and we got
out into the wet sleet, half-snow, half-rain. My driver covered up the
bonnet with tarpaulin, turned off the lights, and we went across to the
kitchen. It was half-past three, and we were the first to come back; we
asked for bowls of soup and stood sipping them and munching sandwiches
that lay ready cut in piles upon the table.
Then, one after another, the drivers entered ... pulling off their great
gloves as they came, stamping the snow from their boots. They stood
about, drinking from their steaming bowls, bright-eyed, apparently
untired, throwing little quick scraps of talk to each other--about the
slowness of "St. John's" on this particular night, who hadn't their
cases ready and kept one or two ambulances "simply ages"; or the engine
trouble developed by one car which still kept it out somewhere on the
road. And I stood and listened and watched them, and I received an
impression of extraordinary beauty.
These girls, with their leather caps coming down to their brows and over
their ears, looked like splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces
coming out from between the leather flaps. They were not pretty, they
were touched with something finer, some quality of radiance only
increased by their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with her
clear face, her round, close head, her stamping feet and strong, cold
hands, seemed so intensely alive within the dark globe of the night,
that her life was heightened to a point not earthly, as though she were
a visitant from the snows or fields I had not seen, fields Olympian....
And as each came swinging in--"_vera incessu patuit dea_...."
I could have wished them there for ever, like some sculptured frieze, so
lovely was the rightness and the inspiration of it.
But I went to my bed, and one of the goddesses insisted on refilling my
hot-water bag, though I assured her it would be quite well as it was,
and I was unwound from my swaddling clothes and left to dream.