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THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
AN INTERPRETATION
By Coningsby Dawson
Author of “Carry On: Letters In Wartime,” Etc.
With An Introduction By His Father, W. J. Dawson
“The glory is all in the souls of the men--it's nothing external.”
--From “Carry On”
1917
[Illustration: LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON]
TO YOU AT HOME
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.
CONTENTS
TO YOU AT HOME. (Poem)
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
IN HOSPITAL. (Poem)
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
THE LADS AWAY. (Poem)
THE GROWING OF THE VISION
THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES. (Poem)
GOD AS WE SEE HIM
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
In my book, _The Father of a Soldier_, I have already stated the
conditions under which this book of my son's was produced.
He was wounded in the end of June, 1917, in the fierce struggle before
Lens. He was at once removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a
military hospital in London. There was grave danger of amputation of
the right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use
his hand he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of Canada
to write an important paper, detailing the history of the Canadian
forces in France and Flanders. This task kept him busy until the end
of August, when he obtained a leave of two months to come home. He
arrived in New York in September, and returned again to London in the
end of October.
The plan of the book grew out of his conversations with us and the
three public addresses which he made. The idea had already been
suggested to him by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. He had
written a few hundred words, but had no very keen sense of the value
of the experiences he had been invited to relate. He had not even read
his own published letters in _Carry On_. He said he had begun to read
them when the book reached him in the trenches, but they made him
homesick, and he was also afraid that his own estimate of their value
might not coincide with ours, or with the verdict which the public has
since passed upon them. He regarded his own experiences, which we
found so thrilling, in the same spirit of modest depreciation. They
were the commonplaces of the life which he had led, and he was
sensitive lest they should be regarded as improperly heroic. No one
was more astonished than he when he found great throngs eager to hear
him speak. The people assembled an hour before the advertised time,
they stormed the building as soon as the doors were open, and when
every inch of room was packed they found a way in by the windows and a
fire-escape. This public appreciation of his message indicated a value
in it which he had not suspected, and led him to recognise that what
he had to say was worthy of more than a fugitive utterance on a public
platform. He at once took up the task of writing this book, with a
genuine and delighted surprise that he had not lost his love of
authorship. He had but a month to devote to it, but by dint of daily
diligence, amid many interruptions of a social nature, he finished his
task before he left. The concluding lines were actually written on the
last night before he sailed for England.
We discussed several titles for the book. _The Religion of Heroism_
was the title suggested by Mr. John Lane, but this appeared too
didactic and restrictive. I suggested _Souls in Khaki_, but this
admirable title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on
_The Glory of the Trenches_, as the most expressive of his aim. He
felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor,
filth, discomfort and suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a
very popular war-book which we were then reading had six paragraphs in
the first sixty pages which described in unpleasant detail the
verminous condition of the men, as if this were the chief thing to be
remarked concerning them. He held that it was a mistake for a writer
to lay too much stress on the horrors of war. The effect was bad
physiologically--it frightened the parents of soldiers; it was equally
bad for the enlisted man himself, for it created a false impression in
his mind. We all knew that war was horrible, but as a rule the soldier
thought little of this feature in his lot. It bulked large to the
civilian who resented inconvenience and discomfort, because he had
only known their opposites; but the soldier's real thoughts were
concerned with other things. He was engaged in spiritual acts. He was
accomplishing spiritual purposes as truly as the martyr of faith and
religion. He was moved by spiritual impulses, the evocation of duty,
the loyal dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, the
complete surrender of the body to the will of the soul. This was the
side of war which men needed most to recognise. They needed it not
only because it was the true side, but because nothing else could
kindle and sustain the enduring flame of heroism in men's hearts.
While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the brutalities of war,
others erred by sentimentalising war. He admitted that it was
perfectly possible to paint a portrait of a soldier with the aureole
of a saint, but it would not be a representative portrait. It would be
eclectic, the result of selection elimination. It would be as unlike
the common average as Rupert Brooke, with his poet's face and poet's
heart, was unlike the ordinary naval officers with whom he sailed to
the AEgean.
The ordinary soldier is an intensely human creature, with an
“endearing blend of faults and virtues.” The romantic method of
portraying him not only misrepresented him, but its result is far less
impressive than a portrait painted in the firm lines of reality. There
is an austere grandeur in the reality of what he is and does which
needs no fine gilding from the sentimentalist. To depict him as a Sir
Galahad in holy armour is as serious an offence as to exhibit him as a
Caliban of marred clay; each method fails of truth, and all that the
soldier needs to be known about him, that men should honour him, is
the truth.
What my son aimed at in writing this book was to tell the truth about
the men who were his comrades, in so far as it was given him to see
it. He was in haste to write while the impression was fresh in his
mind, for he knew how soon the fine edge of these impressions grew
dull as they receded from the immediate area of vision. “If I wait
till the war is over, I shan't be able to write of it at all,” he
said. “You've noticed that old soldiers are very often silent men.
They've had their crowded hours of glorious life, but they rarely tell
you much about them. I remember you used to tell me that you once knew
a man who sailed with Napoleon to St Helena, but all he could tell you
was that Napoleon had a fine leg and wore white silk stockings. If
he'd written down his impressions of Napoleon day by day as he watched
him walking the deck of the _Bellerophon_, he'd have told you a great
deal more about him than that he wore white silk stockings. If I wait
till the war is over before I write about it, it's very likely I shall
recollect only trivial details, and the big heroic spirit of the thing
will escape me. There's only one way of recording an impression--catch
it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the wing. If you wait
too long it will vanish.” It was because he felt in this way that he
wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the task, and
concentrating all his mind upon it.
There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to
record,--his sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the
grim offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one
of its most wonderful results. He had both witnessed and shared this
renascence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with
scientific accuracy, but it was authentic and indubitable. It was
atmospheric, a new air which men breathed, producing new energies and
forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own
forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound together
in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by the conditions of
their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless
destruction of the body, they were forced into a new recognition of
the spiritual values of life. In the common conventional use of the
term these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and
in their conduct which would outrage the standards of a narrow
pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for
them. But they had made their own a surer faith than lives in
creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed their
souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had
accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the
essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men,
but which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the
forms of pious faith.
This was the true Glory of the Trenches. They were the Calvaries of a
new redemption being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious
Christs. And, as from that ancient Calvary, with all its agony of
shame, torture and dereliction, there flowed a flood of light which
made a new dawn for the world, so from these obscure crucifixions
there would come to men a new revelation of the splendour of the human
soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in
the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which
transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness
to the indestructible life of the spirit.
It is to express these thoughts and convictions that this book was
written. It is a record of things deeply felt, seen and
experienced--this, first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is
recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of
the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to
discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall
interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a
human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all
our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical
horror, “the deformations of our common manhood” on the battlefield,
the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its
real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct
it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the
deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened
civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs.
Browning, writing on _The Greek Christian Poets_, used a striking
sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new
emphasis. “We want,” she said, “the touch of Christ's hand upon our
literature, as it touched other dead things--we want the sense of the
saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may
cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been
perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest.” It is this glory
of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because
the writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among
things terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.
W. J. DAWSON.
February, 1918.
IN HOSPITAL
Hushed and happy whiteness,
Miles on miles of cots,
The glad contented brightness
Where sunlight falls in spots.
Sisters swift and saintly
Seem to tread on grass;
Like flowers stirring faintly,
Heads turn to watch them pass.
Beauty, blood, and sorrow,
Blending in a trance--
Eternity's to-morrow
In this half-way house of France.
Sounds of whispered talking,
Laboured indrawn breath;
Then like a young girl walking
The dear familiar Death.
I
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
I am in hospital in London, lying between clean white sheets and
feeling, for the first time in months, clean all over. At the end of
the ward there is a swinging door; if I listen intently in the
intervals when the gramophone isn't playing, I can hear the sound of
bath-water running--running in a reckless kind of fashion as if it
didn't care how much was wasted. To me, so recently out of the
fighting and so short a time in Blighty, it seems the finest music in
the world. For the sheer luxury of the contrast I close my eyes
against the July sunlight and imagine myself back in one of those
narrow dug-outs where it isn't the thing to undress because the row
may start at any minute.
Out there in France we used to tell one another fairy-tales of how we
would spend the first year of life when war was ended. One man had a
baby whom he'd never seen; another a girl whom he was anxious to
marry. My dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic--it began and
ended with a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first
three hundred and sixty-five mornings after peace had been declared I
was to be wakened by the sound of my bath being filled; water was to
be so plentiful that I could tumble off to sleep again without even
troubling to turn off the tap. In France one has to go dirty so often
that the dream of being always clean seems as unrealisable as
romance. Our drinking-water is frequently brought up to us at the risk
of men's lives, carried through the mud in petrol-cans strapped on to
packhorses. To use it carelessly would be like washing in men's
blood----
And here, most marvellously, with my dream come true, I lie in the
whitest of white beds. The sunlight filters through trees outside the
window and weaves patterns on the floor. Most wonderful of all is the
sound of the water so luxuriously running. Some one hops out of bed
and re-starts the gramophone. The music of the bath-room tap is lost.
Up and down the ward, with swift precision, nurses move softly. They
have the unanxious eyes of those whose days are mapped out with
duties. They rarely notice us as individuals. They ask no questions,
show no curiosity. Their deeds of persistent kindness are all
performed impersonally. It's the same with the doctors. This is a
military hospital where discipline is firmly enforced; any natural
recognition of common fineness is discouraged. These women who have
pledged themselves to live among suffering, never allow themselves for
a moment to guess what the sight of them means to us chaps in the
cots. Perhaps that also is a part of their sacrifice. But we follow
them with our eyes, and we wish that they would allow themselves to
guess. For so many months we have not seen a woman; there have been so
many hours when we expected never again to see a woman. We're
Lazaruses exhumed and restored to normal ways of life by the fluke of
having collected a bit of shrapnel--we haven't yet got used to normal
ways. The mere rustle of a woman's skirt fills us with unreasonable
delight and makes the eyes smart with memories of old longings. Those
childish longings of the trenches! No one can understand them who has
not been there, where all personal aims are a wash-out and the courage
to endure remains one's sole possession.
The sisters at the Casualty Clearing Station--they understood. The
Casualty Clearing Station is the first hospital behind the line to
which the wounded are brought down straight from the Dressing-Stations.
All day and all night ambulances come lurching along shell-torn roads
to their doors. The men on the stretchers are still in their bloody
tunics, rain-soaked, pain-silent, splashed with the corruption of
fighting--their bodies so obviously smashed and their spirits so
obviously unbroken. The nurses at the Casualty Clearing Station can
scarcely help but understand. They can afford to be feminine to men
who are so weak. Moreover, they are near enough the Front to share in
the sublime exaltation of those who march out to die. They know when a
big offensive is expected, and prepare for it. They are warned the
moment it has commenced by the distant thunder of the guns. Then comes
the ceaseless stream of lorries and ambulances bringing that which has
been broken so quickly to them to be patched up in months. They work
day and night with a forgetfulness of self which equals the devotion
of the soldiers they are tending. Despite their orderliness they seem
almost fanatical in their desire to spend themselves. They are always
doing, but they can never do enough. It's the same with the surgeons.
I know of one who during a great attack operated for forty-eight hours
on end and finally went to sleep where he stood from utter weariness.
The picture that forms in my mind of these women is absurd, Arthurian
and exact; I see them as great ladies, mediaeval in their saintliness,
sharing the pollution of the battle with their champions.
Lying here with nothing to worry about in the green serenity of an
English summer, I realize that no man can grasp the splendour of this
war until he has made the trip to Blighty on a stretcher. What I mean
is this: so long as a fighting man keeps well, his experience of the
war consists of muddy roads leading up through a desolated country to
holes in the ground, in which he spends most of his time watching
other holes in the ground, which people tell him are the Hun
front-line. This experience is punctuated by periods during which the
earth shoots up about him like corn popping in a pan, and he
experiences the insanest fear, if he's made that way, or the most
satisfying kind of joy. About once a year something happens which,
when it's over, he scarcely believes has happened: he's told that he
can run away to England and pretend that there isn't any war on for
ten days. For those ten days, so far as he's concerned, hostilities
are suspended. He rides post-haste through ravaged villages to the
point from which the train starts. Up to the very last moment until
the engine pulls out, he's quite panicky lest some one shall come and
snatch his warrant from him, telling him that leave has been
cancelled. He makes his journey in a carriage in which all the windows
are smashed. Probably it either snows or rains. During the night
while he stamps his feet to keep warm, he remembers that in his hurry
to escape he's left all his Hun souvenirs behind. During his time in
London he visits his tailor at least twice a day, buys a vast amount
of unnecessary kit, sleeps late, does most of his resting in
taxi-cabs, eats innumerable meals at restaurants, laughs at a great
many plays in which life at the Front is depicted as a joke. He feels
dazed and half suspects that he isn't in London at all, but only
dreaming in his dug-out. Some days later he does actually wake up in
his dug-out; the only proof he has that he's been on leave is that he
can't pay his mess-bill and is minus a hundred pounds. Until a man is
wounded he only sees the war from the point of view of the front-line
and consequently, as I say, misses half its splendour, for he is
ignorant of the greatness of the heart that beats behind him all along
the lines of communication. Here in brief is how I found this out.
The dressing-station to which I went was underneath a ruined house,
under full observation of the Hun and in an area which was heavily
shelled. On account of the shelling and the fact that any movement
about the place would attract attention, the wounded were only carried
out by night. Moreover, to get back from the dressing-station to the
collecting point in rear of the lines, the ambulances had to traverse
a white road over a ridge full in view of the enemy. The Huns kept
guns trained on this road and opened fire at the least sign of
traffic. When I presented myself I didn't think that there was
anything seriously the matter; my arm had swelled and was painful from
a wound of three days' standing. The doctor, however, recognised that
septic poisoning had set in and that to save the arm an operation was
necessary without loss of time. He called a sergeant and sent him out
to consult with an ambulance-driver. “This officer ought to go out at
once. Are you willing to take a chance?” asked the sergeant. The
ambulance-driver took a look at the chalk road gleaming white in the
sun where it climbed the ridge. “Sure, Mike,” he said, and ran off to
crank his engine and back his car out of its place of concealment.
“Sure, Mike,”--that was all. He'd have said the same if he'd been
asked whether he'd care to take a chance at Hell.
I have three vivid memories of that drive. The first, my own uneasy
sense that I was deserting. Frankly I didn't want to go out; few men
do when it comes to the point. The Front has its own peculiar
exhilaration, like big game-hunting, discovering the North Pole, or
anything that's dangerous; and it has its own peculiar reward--the
peace of mind that comes of doing something beyond dispute unselfish
and superlatively worth while. It's odd, but it's true that in the
front-line many a man experiences peace of mind for the first time and
grows a little afraid of a return to normal ways of life. My second
memory is of the wistful faces of the chaps whom we passed along the
road. At the unaccustomed sound of a car travelling in broad daylight
the Tommies poked their heads out of hiding-places like rabbits. Such
dirty Tommies! How could they be otherwise living forever on old
battlefields? If they were given time for reflection they wouldn't
want to go out; they'd choose to stay with the game till the war was
ended. But we caught them unaware, and as they gazed after us down the
first part of the long trail that leads back from the trenches to
Blighty, there was hunger in their eyes. My third memory is of
kindness.
You wouldn't think that men would go to war to learn how to be
kind--but they do. There's no kinder creature in the whole wide world
than the average Tommy. He makes a friend of any stray animal he can
find. He shares his last franc with a chap who isn't his pal. He risks
his life quite inconsequently to rescue any one who's wounded. When
he's gone over the top with bomb and bayonet for the express purpose
of “doing in” the Hun, he makes a comrade of the Fritzie he
captures. You'll see him coming down the battered trenches with some
scared lad of a German at his side. He's gabbling away making
throat-noises and signs, smiling and doing his inarticulate best to be
intelligible. He pats the Hun on the back, hands him chocolate and
cigarettes, exchanges souvenirs and shares with him his last
luxury. If any one interferes with his Fritzie he's willing to
fight. When they come to the cage where the prisoner has to be handed
over, the farewells of these companions whose acquaintance has been
made at the bayonet-point are often as absurd as they are affecting. I
suppose one only learns the value of kindness when he feels the need
of it himself. The men out there have said “Good-bye” to everything
they loved, but they've got to love some one--so they give their
affections to captured Fritzies, stray dogs, fellows who've collected
a piece of a shell--in fact to any one who's a little worse off than
themselves. My ambulance-driver was like that with his “Sure, Mike.”
He was like it during the entire drive. When he came to the white road
which climbs the ridge with all the enemy country staring at it, it
would have been excusable in him to have hurried. The Hun barrage
might descend at any minute. All the way, in the ditches on either
side, dead pack animals lay; in the dug-outs there were other unseen
dead making the air foul. But he drove slowly and gently, skirting the
shell-holes with diligent care so as to spare us every unnecessary
jolting. I don't know his name, shouldn't recognise his face, but I
shall always remember the almost womanly tenderness of his driving.
After two changes into other ambulances at different distributing
points, I arrived about nine on a summer's evening at the Casualty
Clearing Station. In something less than an hour I was undressed and
on the operating table.
You might suppose that when for three interminable years such a stream
of tragedy has flowed through a hospital, it would be easy for
surgeons and nurses to treat mutilation and death perfunctorily. They
don't. They show no emotion. They are even cheerful; but their
strained faces tell the story and their hands have an immense
compassion.
Two faces especially loom out. I can always see them by lamp-light,
when the rest of the ward is hushed and shrouded, stooping over some
silent bed. One face is that of the Colonel of the hospital, grey,
concerned, pitiful, stern. His eyes seem to have photographed all the
suffering which in three years they have witnessed. He's a tall man,
but he moves softly. Over his uniform he wears a long white operating
smock--he never seems to remove it. And he never seems to sleep, for
he comes wandering through his Gethsemane all hours of the night to
bend over the more serious cases. He seems haunted by a vision of the
wives, mothers, sweethearts, whose happiness is in his hands. I think
of him as a Christ in khaki.
The other face is of a girl--a sister I ought to call her. She's the
nearest approach to a sculptured Greek goddess I've seen in a living
woman. She's very tall, very pale and golden, with wide brows and big
grey eyes like Trilby. I wonder what she did before she went to
war--for she's gone to war just as truly as any soldier. I'm sure in
the peaceful years she must have spent a lot of time in being
loved. Perhaps her man was killed out here. Now she's ivory-white with
over-service and spends all her days in loving. Her eyes have the old
frank, innocent look, but they're ringed with being weary. Only her
lips hold a touch of colour; they have a childish trick of trembling
when any one's wound is hurting too much. She's the first touch of
home that the stretcher-cases see when they've said good-bye to the
trenches. She moves down the ward; eyes follow her. When she is
absent, though others take her place, she leaves a loneliness. If she
meant much to men in days gone by, to-day she means more than
ever. Over many dying boys she stoops as the incarnation of the woman
whom, had they lived, they would have loved. To all of us, with the
blasphemy of destroying still upon us, she stands for the divinity of
womanhood.
What sights she sees and what words she hears; yet the pity she brings
to her work preserves her sweetness. In the silence of the night those
who are delirious re-fight their recent battles. You're half-asleep,
when in the darkened ward some one jumps up in bed, shouting, “Hold
your bloody hands up.” He thinks he's capturing a Hun trench, taking
prisoners in a bombed in dug-out. In an instant, like a mother with a
frightened child, she's bending over him; soon she has coaxed his head
back on the pillow. Men do not die in vain when they evoke such women.
And the men--the chaps in the cots! As a patient the first sight you
have of them is a muddy stretcher. The care with which the bearers
advance is only equalled by the waiters in old-established London
Clubs when they bring in one of their choicest wines. The thing on the
stretcher looks horribly like some of the forever silent people you
have seen in No Man's Land. A pair of boots you see, a British Warm
flung across the body and an arm dragging. A screen is put round a
bed; the next sight you have of him is a weary face lying on a white
pillow. Soon the chap in the bed next to him is questioning.
“What's yours?”
“Machine-gun caught me in both legs.”
“Going to lose 'em?”
“Don't know. Can't feel much at present. Hope not.”
Then the questioner raises himself on his elbow. “How's it going?”
_It_ is the attack. The conversation that follows is always how we're
hanging on to such and such an objective and have pushed forward three
hundred yards here or have been bent back there. One thing you notice:
every man forgets his own catastrophe in his keenness for the success
of the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty did I
hear a word of self-pity or complaining. On the contrary, the most
severely wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they had
got off so lightly. Since the war started the term “lightly” has
become exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is justified in saying
he's got off lightly when what he expected was death.
I remember a big Highland officer who had been shot in the
knee-cap. He had been operated on and the knee-cap had been found to
be so splintered that it had had to be removed; of this he was
unaware. For the first day as he lay in bed he kept wondering aloud
how long it would be before he could re-join his battalion. Perhaps he
suspected his condition and was trying to find out. All his heart
seemed set on once again getting into the fighting. Next morning he
plucked up courage to ask the doctor, and received the answer he had
dreaded.
“Never. You won't be going back, old chap.”
Next time he spoke his voice was a bit throaty. “Will it stiffen?”
“You've lost the knee-joint,” the doctor said, “but with luck we'll
save the leg.”
His voice sank to a whisper. “If you do, it won't be much good, will
it?”
“Not much.”
He lay for a couple of hours silent, readjusting his mind to meet the
new conditions. Then he commenced talking with cheerfulness about
returning to his family. The habit of courage had conquered--the habit
of courage which grows out of the knowledge that you let your pals
down by showing cowardice.
The next step on the road to Blighty is from the Casualty Station to a
Base Hospital in France. You go on a hospital train and are only
allowed to go when you are safe to travel. There is always great
excitement as to when this event will happen; its precise date usually
depends on what's going on up front and the number of fresh casualties
which are expected. One morning you awake to find that a tag has been
prepared, containing the entire medical history of your injury. The
stretcher-bearers come in with grins on their faces, your tag is tied
to the top button of your pyjamas, jocular appointments are made by
the fellows you leave behind--many of whom you know are dying--to meet
you in London, and you are carried out. The train is thoroughly
equipped with doctors and nurses; the lying cases travel in little
white bunks. No one who has not seen it can have any idea of the high
good spirits which prevail. You're going off to Blighty, to
Piccadilly, to dry boots and clean beds. The revolving wheels
underneath you seem to sing the words, “Off to Blighty--to Blighty.”
It begins to dawn on you what it will be like to be again your own
master and to sleep as long as you like.
Kindness again--always kindness! The sisters on the train can't do
enough; they seem to be trying to exceed the self-sacrifice of the
sisters you have left behind. You twist yourself so that you can get a
glimpse of the flying country. It's green, undisturbed, unmarred by
shells--there are even cows!
At the Base Hospital to which I went there was a man who performed
miracles. He was a naturalised American citizen, but an Armenian by
birth. He gave people new faces.
The first morning an officer came in to visit a friend; his face was
entirely swathed in bandages, with gaps left for his breathing and his
eyes. He had been like that for two years, and looked like a
leper. When he spoke he made hollow noises. His nose and lower jaw had
been torn away by an exploding shell. Little by little, with infinite
skill, by the grafting of bone and flesh, his face was being built
up. Could any surgery be more merciful?
In the days that followed I saw several of these masked men. The worst
cases were not allowed to walk about. The ones I saw were invariably
dressed with the most scrupulous care in the smartest uniforms, Sam
Browns polished and buttons shining. They had hope, and took a pride
in themselves--a splendid sign! Perhaps you ask why the face-cases
should be kept in France. I was not told, but I can guess--because
they dread going back to England to their girls until they've got rid
of their disfigurements. So for two years through their bandages they
watch the train pull out for Blighty, while the damage which was done
them in the fragment of a second is repaired.
At a Base Hospital you see something which you don't see at a Casualty
Station--sisters, mothers, sweethearts and wives sitting beside the
beds. They're allowed to come over from England when their man is
dying. One of the wonderful things to me was to observe how these
women in the hour of their tragedy catch the soldier spirit. They're
very quiet, very cheerful, very helpful. With passing through the ward
they get to know some of the other patients and remember them when
they bring their own man flowers. Sometimes when their own man is
asleep, they slip over to other bedsides and do something kind for the
solitary fellows. That's the army all over; military discipline is
based on unselfishness. These women who have been sent for to see
their men die, catch from them the spirit of undistressed sacrifice
and enrol themselves as soldiers.
Next to my bed there was a Colonel of a north country regiment, a
gallant gentleman who positively refused to die. His wife had been
with him for two weeks, a little toy woman with nerves worn to a
frazzle, who masked her terror with a brave, set smile. The Colonel
had had his leg smashed by a whizz-bang when leading his troops into
action. Septic poisoning had set in and the leg had been amputated. It
had been found necessary to operate several times owing to the poison
spreading, with the result that, being far from a young man, his
strength was exhausted. Men forgot their own wounds in watching this
one man's fight for life. He became symbolic of what, in varying
degrees, we were all doing. When he was passing through a crisis the
whole ward waited breathless. There was the finest kind of rivalry
between the night and day sisters to hand him over at the end of each
twelve hours with his pulse stronger and temperature lower than when
they received him. Each was sure she had the secret of keeping him
alive.
You discovered the spirit of the man when you heard him wandering in
delirium. All night in the shadowy ward with its hooded lamps, he
would be giving orders for the comfort of his men. Sometimes he'd be
proposing to go forward himself to a place where a company was having
a hot time; apparently one of his officers was trying to dissuade
him. “Danger be damned,” he'd exclaim in a wonderfully strong
voice. “It'll buck 'em up to see me. Splendid chaps--splendid chaps!”
About dawn he was usually supposed to be sinking, but he'd rallied
again by the time the day-sister arrived. “Still here,” he'd smile in
a triumphant kind of whisper, as though bluffing death was a pastime.
One afternoon a padre came to visit him. As he was leaving he bent
above the pillow. We learnt afterwards that this was what he had said,
“If the good Lord lets you, I hope you'll get better.”
We saw the Colonel raise himself up on his elbow. His weak voice shook
with anger. “Neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with
it. I'm going to get well.” Then, as the nurse came hurrying to him,
he sank back.
When I left the Base Hospital for Blighty he was still holding his
own. I have never heard what happened to him, but should not be at all
surprised to meet him one day in the trenches with a wooden leg, still
leading his splendid chaps. Death can't kill men of such heroic
courage.
At the Base Hospital they talk a good deal of “the Blighty Smile.”
It's supposed to be the kind of look a chap wears when he's been told
that within twenty-four hours he'll be in England. When this
information has been imparted to him, he's served out with warm socks,
woollen cap and a little linen bag into which to put his
valuables. Hours and hours before there's any chance of starting
you'll see the lucky ones lying very still, with a happy vacant look
in their eyes and their absurd woollen caps stuck ready on their
heads. Sometime, perhaps in the small hours of the morning, the
stretcher-bearers, arrive--the stretcher-bearers who all down the
lines of communication are forever carrying others towards blessedness
and never going themselves. “At last,” you whisper to yourself. You
feel a glorious anticipation that you have not known since childhood
when, after three hundred and sixty-four days of waiting, it was truly
going to be Christmas.
On the train and on the passage there is the same skillful
attention--the same ungrudging kindness. You see new faces in the
bunks beside you. After the tedium of the narrow confines of a ward
that in itself is exciting. You fall into talk.
“What's yours?”
“Nothing much--just a hand off and a splinter or two in the shoulder.”
You laugh. “That's not so dusty. How much did you expect for your
money?”
Probably you meet some one from the part of the line where you were
wounded--with luck even from your own brigade, battery or battalion.
Then the talk becomes all about how things are going, whether we're
still holding on to our objectives, who's got a blighty and who's gone
west. One discussion you don't often hear--as to when the war will
end. To these civilians in khaki it seems that the war has always been
and that they will never cease to be soldiers. For them both past and
future are utterly obliterated. They would not have it otherwise.
Because they are doing their duty they are contented. The only time
the subject is ever touched on is when some one expresses the hope
that it'll last long enough for him to recover from his wounds and get
back into the line. That usually starts another man, who will never be
any more good for the trenches, wondering whether he can get into the
flying corps. The one ultimate hope of all these shattered wrecks who
are being hurried to the Blighty they have dreamt of, is that they may
again see service.
The tang of salt in the air, the beat of waves and then, incredible
even when it has been realised, England. I think they ought to make
the hospital trains which run to London all of glass, then instead of
watching little triangles of flying country by leaning uncomfortably
far out of their bunks, the wounded would be able to drink their full
of the greenness which they have longed for so many months. The trees
aren't charred and blackened stumps; they're harps between the knees
of the hills, played on by the wind and sun. The villages have their
roofs on and children romping in their streets. The church spires
haven't been knocked down; they stand up tall and stately. The
roadsides aren't littered with empty shell-cases and dead horses. The
fields are absolutely fields, with green crops, all wavy, like hair
growing. After the tonsured filth we've been accustomed to call a
world, all this strikes one as unnatural and extraordinary. There's a
sweet fragrance over everything and one's throat feels lumpy. Perhaps
it isn't good for people's health to have lumpy throats, and that's
why they don't run glass trains to London.
Then, after such excited waiting, you feel that the engine is slowing
down. There's a hollow rumbling; you're crossing the dear old wrinkled
Thames. If you looked out you'd see the dome of St. Paul's like a
bubble on the sky-line and smoking chimneys sticking up like
thumbs--things quite ugly and things of surpassing beauty, all of
which you have never hoped to see again and which in dreams you have
loved. But if you could look out, you wouldn't have the time. You're
getting your things together, so you won't waste a moment when they
come to carry you out. Very probably you're secreting a souvenir or
two about your person: something you've smuggled down from the front
which will really prove to your people that you've made the
acquaintance of the Hun. As though your wounds didn't prove that
sufficiently. Men are childish.
The engine comes to a halt. You can smell the cab-stands. You're
really there. An officer comes through the train enquiring whether you
have any preference as to hospitals. Your girl lives in Liverpool or
Glasgow or Birmingham. Good heavens, the fellow holds your destiny in
his hands! He can send you to Whitechapel if he likes. So, even though
he has the same rank as yourself, you address him as, “Sir.”
Perhaps it's because I've practised this diplomacy--I don't
know. Anyway, he's granted my request. I'm to stay in London. I was
particularly anxious to stay in London, because one of my young
brothers from the Navy is there on leave at present. In fact he wired
me to France that the Admiralty had allowed him a three-days' special
extension of leave in order that he might see me. It was on the
strength of this message that the doctors at the Base Hospital
permitted me to take the journey several days before I was really in a
condition to travel.
I'm wondering whether he's gained admission to the platform. I lie
there in my bunk all eyes, expecting any minute to see him enter. Time
and again I mistake the blue serge uniform of the St. John's Ambulance
for that of a naval lieutenant. They come to carry me out. What an
extraordinarily funny way to enter London--on a stretcher! I've
arrived on boat-trains from America, troop trains from Canada, and
come back from romantic romps in Italy, but never in my wildest
imaginings did I picture myself arriving as a wounded soldier on a Red
Cross train.
Still clutching my absurd linen bag, which contains my valuables, I
lift my head from the pillow gazing round for any glimpse of that
much-desired brother. Now they've popped me onto the upper-shelf of a
waiting ambulance; I can see nothing except what lies out at the back.
I at once start explaining to the nurse who accompanies us that I've
lost a very valuable brother--that he's probably looking for me
somewhere on the station. She's extremely sympathetic and asks the
chauffeur to drive very slowly so that we may watch for him as we go
through the station gates into the Strand.
We're delayed for some minutes while particulars are checked up of our
injuries and destinations. The lying cases are placed four in an
ambulance, with the flap raised at the back so we can see out. The
sitting cases travel in automobiles, buses and various kinds of
vehicles. In my ambulance there are two leg-cases with most
theatrical bandages, and one case of trench-fever. We're immensely
merry--all except the trench-fever case who has conceived an immense
sorrow for himself. We get impatient with waiting. There's an awful
lot of cheering going on somewhere; we suppose troops are marching and
can't make it out.
Ah, we've started! At a slow crawl to prevent jarring we pass through
the gates. We discover the meaning of the cheering. On either side the
people are lined in dense crowds, waving and shouting. It's Saturday
evening when they should be in the country. It's jolly decent of them
to come here to give us such a welcome. Flower-girls are here with
their baskets full of flowers--just poor girls with a living to earn.
They run after us as we pass and strew us with roses. Roses! We
stretch out our hands, pressing them to our lips. How long is it since
we held roses in our hands? How did these girls of the London streets
know that above all things we longed for flowers? It was worth it all,
the mud and stench and beastliness, when it was to this that the road
led back. And the girls--they're even better than the flowers; so many
pretty faces made kind by compassion. Somewhere inside ourselves we're
laughing; we're so happy. We don't need any one's pity; time enough
for that when we start to pity ourselves. We feel mean, as though we
were part of a big deception. We aren't half so ill as we look; if you
put sufficient bandages on a wound you can make the healthiest man
appear tragic. We're laughing--and then all of a sudden we're crying.
We press our faces against the pillow ashamed of ourselves. We won't
see the crowds; we're angry with them for having unmanned us. And then
we can't help looking; their love reaches us almost as though it were
the touch of hands. We won't hide ourselves if we mean so much to
them. We're not angry any more, but grateful.
Suddenly the ambulance-nurse shouts to the driver. The ambulance
stops. She's quite excited. Clutching me with one hand, she points
with the other, “There he is.”
“Who?”
I raise myself. A naval lieutenant is standing against the pavement,
gazing anxiously at the passing traffic.
“Your brother, isn't it?”
I shook my head. “Not half handsome enough.”
For the rest of the journey she's convinced I have a headache. It's no
good telling her that I haven't; much to my annoyance and amusement
she swabs my forehead with eau-de-Cologne, telling me that I shall
soon feel better.
The streets through which we pass are on the south side of the
Thames. It's Saturday evening. Hawkers' barrows line the kerb; women
with draggled skirts and once gay hats are doing their Sunday
shopping. We're having a kind of triumphant procession; with these
people to feel is to express. We catch some of their remarks: “'Oo!
Look at 'is poor leg!” “My, but ain't 'e done in shockin'!”
Dear old London--so kind, so brave, so frankly human! You're just like
the chaps at the Front--you laugh when you suffer and give when you're
starving; you never know when not to be generous. You wear your heart
in your eyes and your lips are always ready for kissing, I think of
you as one of your own flower-girls--hoarse of voice, slatternly as to
corsets, with a big tumbled fringe over your forehead, and a heart so
big that you can chuck away your roses to a wounded Tommy and go away
yourself with an empty basket to sleep under an archway. Do you wonder
that to us you spell Blighty? We love you.
We come to a neighbourhood more respectable and less demonstrative,
skirt a common, are stopped at a porter's lodge and turn into a
parkland. The glow of sunset is ended; the blue-grey of twilight is
settling down. Between flowered borders we pick our way, pause here
and there for directions and at last halt. Again the stretcher-bearers!
As I am carried in I catch a glimpse of a low bungalow-building, with
others like it dotted about beneath trees. There are red shaded lamps.
Every one tiptoes in silence. Only the lips move when people speak;
there is scarcely any sound. As the stretchers are borne down the ward
men shift their heads to gaze after them. It's past ten o'clock and
patients are supposed to be sleeping now. I'm put to bed. There's no
news of my brother; he hasn't 'phoned and hasn't called. I persuade
one of the orderlies to ring up the hotel at which I know he was
staying. The man is a long while gone. Through the dim length of the
ward I watch the door into the garden, momentarily expecting the
familiar figure in the blue uniform and gold buttons to enter. He
doesn't. Then at length the orderly returns to tell me that the naval
lieutenant who was staying at the hotel, had to set out for his ship
that evening, as there was no train that he could catch on Sunday. So
he was steaming out of London for the North at the moment I was
entering. Disappointed? Yes. One shrugs his shoulders. _C'est la
guerre_, as we say in the trenches. You can't have everything when
Europe's at war.
I can hardly keep awake long enough for the sister to dress my
arm. The roses that the flower-girls had thrown me are in water and
within handstretch. They seem almost persons and curiously
sacred--symbols of all the heroism and kindness that has ministered to
me every step of the journey. It's a good little war I think to
myself. Then, with the green smell of England in my nostrils and the
rumbling of London in my ears, like conversation below stairs, I
drowse off into the utter contentment of the first deep sleep I have
had since I was wounded.