From our house above the town I ran eagerly downhill to my first morning's work, not knowing, fortunately for myself, that my servitude would last for nearly four years. The hospital had originally been used as a riding-school, but a certain Duke of Devonshire, with exemplary concern for the welfare of the sick but none whatever for the feet of the nursing staff, had caused it to be converted to its present charitable purpose. The main part of the building consisted of a huge dome, with two stone corridors running one above the other round its quarter-mile circumference. The nurses were not allowed to cross its diameter, which contained an inner circle reserved for convalescent patients, so that everything forgotten or newly required meant a run round the circumference. As kitchens, sink-rooms and wards all led off the circular corridors and appeared to have been built as far from one another as possible, the continuous walking along the unresistant stone floors must have amounted, apart from the work itself, to several miles a day.
My hours there ran from 7.45 a.m. until 1 p.m., and again from 5.o p.m. until 9.15 p.m.--a longer day, as I afterwards discovered, than that normally required in many Army hospitals. No doubt the staff was not unwilling to make the utmost use of so enthusiastic and unsophisticated a probationer. Meals, for all of which I was expected to go home, were not included in these hours. As our house was nearly half a mile from the hospital on the slope of a steep hill, I never completely overcame the aching of my back and the soreness of my feet throughout the time that I worked there, and felt perpetually as if I had just returned from a series of long route marches.
I never minded these aches and pains, which appeared to me solely as satisfactory tributes to my love for Roland. What did profoundly trouble and humiliate me was my colossal ignorance of the simplest domestic operations. Among other " facts of life," my expensive education had omitted to teach me the prosaic but important essentials of egg-boiling, and the Oxford cookery classes had triumphantly failed to repair the omission. I imagined that I had to bring the saucepan to the boil, then turn off the gas and allow the egg to lie for three minutes in the cooling water. The remarks of a lance-corporal to whom I presented an egg " boiled " in this fashion led me to make shamefaced inquiries of my superiors, from whom I learnt, in those first few days, how numerous and devastating were the errors that it was possible to commit in carrying out the most ordinary functions of everyday life. To me, for whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism, the complications of sheer existence were nothing short of a revelation.
Despite my culinary shortcomings, the men appeared to like me; none of them were very ill, and no doubt my youth, my naive eagerness and the clean freshness of my new uniform meant more to them than any amount of common sense and efficiency. Perhaps, too, the warm and profoundly surprising comfort that I derived from their presence produced a tenderness which was able to communicate back to them, in turn, something of their own rich consolation.
Throughout my two decades of life, I had never looked upon the nude body of an adult male; I had never even seen a naked boy-child since the nursery days when, at the age of four or five, I used to share my evening baths with Edward. I had therefore expected, when I first started nursing, to be overcome with nervousness and embarrassment, but, to my infinite relief, I was conscious of neither. Towards the men I came to feel an almost adoring gratitude for their simple and natural acceptance of my ministrations. Short of actually going to bed with them, there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day--thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy--beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single.
In the early days of the War the majority of soldier- patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side. Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, this day-by-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame. Since it was always Roland whom I was nursing by proxy, my attitude towards him imperceptibly changed; it became less romantic and more realistic, and thus a new depth was added to my love.
In addition to the patients, I managed to extract approval from most of the nurses--no doubt because, my one desire being to emulate Roland's endurance, I seized with avidity upon all the unpleasant tasks of which they were only too glad to be relieved, and took a masochistic delight in emptying bed-pans, washing greasy cups and spoons, and disposing of odoriferous dressings in the sink-room. The Matron-- described as " a slave-driver " by one of the elegant lady V.A.D.s who intermittently trotted in to "help" in the evenings after the bulk of the work was done-treated me with especial kindness, and often let me out through her private gate in order to save me a few yards of the interminable miles upon my feet....
Vera eventually requested a transfer to a field hospital in France close to the fighting.
...In the German ward we knew only too certainly when "the next show" began. With September the "Fall In" resumed its embarrassing habit of repetition, and when we had no more beds available for prisoners, stretchers holding angry-eyed men in filthy brown blankets occupied an inconvenient proportion of the floor. Many of our patients arrived within twenty-four hours of being wounded; it seemed strange to be talking amicably to a German officer about the "Putsch" he had been in the previous morning on the opposite side to our own.
Nearly all the prisoners bore their dreadful dressings with stoical fortitude, and one or two waited phlegmatically for death. A doomed twenty-year-old boy, beautiful as the young Hyacinth in spite of the flush on his concave cheeks and the restless, agonised biting of his lips, asked me one evening in a courteous whisper how long he had to wait before he died. It was not very long; the screens were round his bed by the next afternoon.
Although this almost unbearable stoicism seemed to be an understood discipline which the men imposed upon themselves, the ward atmosphere was anything but peaceful. The cries of the many delirious patients combined with the ravings of the five or six that we always had coming round from an anaesthetic to turn the hut into pandemonium; cries of "Schwester!" and "Kamerad!" sounded all I day. But only one prisoner--a nineteen-year-old Saxon boy with saucer-like blue eyes and a pink-and-white complexion, whose name I never knew because everybody called him "the Fish"--demanded constant attention. He was, he took care to tell us, "ein einziger Knabe." Being a case of acute empyema as the result of a penetrating chest wound, he was only allowed a milk diet, but continually besieged the orderlies for "Fleisch, viel Brot, Kartoffeln!"
"Nicht so viel schreien, Fisch !" I scolded him. "Die anderen sind auch krank, nicht Sie allein!"
But I felt quite melancholy when I came on duty one morning to learn that he had died in the night.
There was no time, however, for regrets, since I had to spend half that day sitting beside a small, middle-aged Bavarian who was slowly bleeding to death from the subclavian artery. The haemorrhage was too deep-seated to be checked, and Hope Milroy went vehemently through the dressings with her petrified cavalcade of orderlies while I gave the dying man water, and wiped the perspiration from his face. On the other side of the bed a German- speaking Nonconformist padre murmured the Lord's Prayer; the sombre resonance of its conclusion sounded like the rolling of some distant organ:
"Und vergieb uns unsere Schulden, wie wir unsern Schuldigern vergeben. Und fuhre uns nicht in Versuchung, sondern erlose uns von dem Ubel. Denn Dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewikeit, Amen."
But the dying patient was not much interested in the forgiveness of his sins; the evil from which neither friends nor enemies could deliver him prevailed all too obviously.
"Schwester, liebe Schwester!" he whispered, clutching at my hand. "Ich bin schwach-so schwach!"
When I came back from luncheon he too had died, and Hope Milroy was sitting exhausted at the table.
"I've just laid that man out," she said; "and now I want some tea. I don't care about watching a man bleed to death under my very eyes, even if he is a Hun."
Before making the tea, I went behind the screens to take a last look at the wax doll on the bed. Now that the lids had closed over the anxious, pleading eyes, the small bearded face was devoid of expression. The window above the body happened to be closed, and Hope called to me to open it.
"I always open the windows when they die--so as to let their souls go out," she explained.