"I only lost my leg a year ago.I've got a 'Rowley,' now, I'd have you know.I soon learnt what pain was, I thought I knew,But now my poor old leg is black, and red, white and blue!The fitter said, 'You're walking very well,'I told him he could take his leg to ——,But they tell me that some day I'll walk right away,By George! and with my Rowley too!"
It was at least comforting to know that in time one would!
Half an hour's fitting was enough to make the leg too tender for anything more that day, and Idiscovered to my joy that I was quite well able to drive a small car with one foot. I was lent a sporting Morgan tri-car which did more to keep up my spirits than anything else. The side brake was broken and somehow never got repaired, so the one foot had quite an exciting time. It was anything but safe, but it did not matter. One day, driving down the Portsmouth Road with a fellow-sufferer, a policeman waved his arms frantically in front of us. "What's happened," I asked my friend, "are we supposed to stop?" "I'm afraid so," he replied, "I should think we've been caught in a trap." (One gets into bad habits in France!)
As we drew up and the policeman saw the crutches, he said: "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't see your crutches, or I wouldn't have pulled you up." The friend, who happened to be wearing his leg, said, "Oh, they aren't mine, they belong to this lady." The good policeman was temporarily speechless. When at last he got his wind he was full of concern. "You don't say, sir? Well, Ineverdid. Don't you take on,wewon't run you in, Miss," he added consolingly, turning to me. "I'll fix the stop-watch man." I was beginning to enjoy myself immensely. He regarded us for some minutes and made a round of the car. "Well," he said at last, "Icall you a couple o' sports!" We were convulsed!
At that moment the stop-watch man hurried up, looking very serious, and I watched the expression on his face change to one of concern as the policeman told him the tale.
"We won't run you in, not us," he declared stoutly, in concert with the policeman.
"What were we doing?" I asked, as he looked at his stop-watch.
"Thirty and a fraction over," he replied. "Only thirty!" I exclaimed, in a disappointed voice, "I thought we were doingat leastforty!"
"First time anyone's ever said that tome, Miss," he said; "it's usual for them to swear it wasn't a mile above twenty!"
"A couple o' sports," the policeman murmured again.
"I thinkyou'rethe couple of sports," I said laughing.
"Well," said the stop-watch man, lifting his cap, "we won't keep you any longer, Miss, a pleasant afternoon to you, and (with a knowing look) there'snothingon the road from here to Cobham!"
Of course the Morgan broke all records after that!
Unfortunately, in July, I was obliged to undergo an operation on my right foot, where it had been injured. By great good luck it was arranged to be done in the sister's sick ward at the hospital. It was not successful though, and at the end of August a second was performed, bringing the total up to six, by which time I loathed chloroform more than anything else on earth.
Before I returned to the convent again, the King and Queen with Princess Mary came down to inspect the hospital.
It was an imposing picture. The sisters andnurses in their white caps and aprons lined the steps of the old red-brick, Georgian House, while on the lawn six to seven hundred limbless Tommies were grouped, forming a wonderful picture in their hospital blue against the green.
I was placed with the officers under the beautiful cedar trees and had a splendid view, while on the left the different limb makers had models of their legs and arms. The King and Queen were immensely interested and watched several demonstrations, after which they came and shook each one of us by hand, speaking a few words. I was immensely struck by the King's voice and its deep resonant qualities. It is wonderful, in view of the many thousands he interviews, that to each individual he gives the impression of a real personal interest.
I soon returned to the convent, and there in the beautiful gardens diligently practised walking with the help of two sticks. The joy of being able to get about again was such that I could have wept. The Tommies at the hospital took a tremendous interest in my progress. "Which one is it?" they would call as I went there each morning. "Pick it up, Miss, pick it up!" (one trails it at first). The fitter was a man of most wonderful patience and absolutely untiring in his efforts to do any little thing to ease the fitting. I often wonder he did not brain his more fussy patients with their wooden legs and have done with it!
"Got your knee, Miss?" the men would callsometimes. "You're lucky." When I saw men who had lost an arm and sometimes both legs, from above the knee too, I realised just how lucky I was. They were all so splendidly cheerful. I knew too well from my own experience what they must have gone through; and again I could only pray that something good would come out of all this untold suffering, and that these men would not be forgotten by a grateful country when peace reigned once more.
I often watched them playing bowls on the lawn with a marvellous dexterity—a one-armed man holding the chair steady for a double amputation while the latter took his aim.
I remember seeing a man struggling painfully along with an above-the-knee leg, obviously his first day out. A group of men watched his efforts. "Pick it up, Charlie!" they called, "we'll race you to the cedars!" but Charlie only smiled, not a bit offended, and patiently continued along the terrace.
At last I was officially "passed out" by the surgeon, and after eighteen months was free from hospitals. What a relief! No longer anyone to reproach me because I wasn't a man! It was my great wish to go out to the F.A.N.Y.s again when I had got thoroughly accustomed to my leg. I tried riding a bicycle, and after falling off once or twice "coped" quite well, but it was not till November that I had the chance to try a horse. I was down at Broadstairs and soon discovered a job-master and arranged to go out the next day. I hardlyslept at all that night I was so excited at the prospect. The horse I had was a grey, rather a coincidence, and not at all unlike my beloved grey in France. Oh the joy of being in a saddle again! A lugubrious individual with a bottle nose (whom I promptly christened "Dundreary" because of his long whiskers) came out with me. He was by way of being a riding master, but for all the attention he paid I might have been alone.
I suggested finding a place for a canter after we had trotted some distance and things felt all right. I was so excited to find I could ride again with comparatively little inconvenience I could hardly restrain myself from whooping aloud. I presently infected "Dundreary," who, in his melancholy way, became quite jovial. I rode "Bob" every day after that and felt that after all life was worth living again.
On November 11th came the news of the armistice. The flags and rejoicings in the town seemed to jar somehow. I was glad to be out of London. A drizzle set in about noon and the waves beat against the cliffs in a steady boom not unlike the guns now silent across the water. Through the mist I seemed to see the ghosts of all I knew who had been sacrificed in the prime of their youth to the god of war. I saw the faces of the men in the typhoid wards and heard again the groans as the wounded and dying were lifted from the ambulance trains on to the stretchers. It did not seem a time for loud rejoicings, but rather a quiet thankfulnessthat we had ended on the right side and their lives had not been lost in vain.
The words of Robert Nichols' "Fulfilment," fromArdours and Endurances(Chatto & Windus), rang through my brain. He has kindly given me permission to reproduce them:
Was there love once? I have forgotten her.Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.Other loves I have, men rough, but men who stirMore grief, more joy, than love of thee and mine.Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,Lined by the wind, burned by the sun;Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth,As whose children we are brethren: one.And any moment may descend hot deathTo shatter limbs! pulp, tear, blastBeloved soldiers, who love rough life and breathNot less for dying faithful to the last.O the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony,Open mouth gushing, fallen head,Lessening pressure of a hand shrunk, clammed, and stonyO sudden spasm, release of the dead!Was there love once? I have forgotten her.Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.O loved, living, dying, heroic soldierAll, all, my joy, my grief, my love are thine!
AFTER TWO YEARS
My dream of going out to work again with the F.A.N.Y.s was never realised. Something always seemed to be going wrong with the leg; but I was determined to try and pay them a visit before they were demobilised. On these occasions the word "impossible" must be cut out of one's vocabulary (videNapoleon), and off I set one fine morning. Everything seemed strangely unaltered, the same old train down to Folkestone, the same porters there, the same old ship and lifebelts; and when I got to Boulogne nearly all the same old faces on the quay to meet the boat! I rubbed my eyes. Had I really been away two years or was it only a sort of lengthy nightmare? I walked down the gangway and there was the same old rogue of a porter in his blue smocking. Yet the town seemed strangely quiet without the incessant marching of feet as the troops came and went. "We never thought to seeyouout here again, Miss," said the same man in the transport department at the Hotel Christol!
I went straight up to the convoy at St. Omer, and had tea in the camp from which they had beenshelled only a year before. This convoy of F.A.N.Y.s, to which many of my old friends had been transferred, was attached to the 2nd army, and had as its divisional sign a red herring. The explanation being that one day a certain general visited the camp, and on leaving said: "Oh, by the way, are you people 'army'?"
"No," replied the F.A.N.Y., "not exactly."
"Red Cross then?"
"Well, not exactly. It's like this," she explained: "We work for the Red Cross and the cars are theirs, but we are attached to the second army; we draw our rations from the army and we're called F.A.N.Y.S."
"'Pon my soul," he cried, "you're neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but you're thundering good red herrings!"
It was a foregone conclusion that a red herring should become their sign after that!
The next day I was taken over the battlefields through Arcques, where the famous "Belle" still manipulates the bridge, and along by the Nieppe Forest. We could still see the trenches and dug-outs used in the fierce fighting there last year. A cemetery in a little clearing by the side of the road, the graves surmounted by plain wooden crosses, was the first of many we were to pass. Vieux Berquin, a once pretty little village, was reduced to ruins and the road we followed was pitted with shell holes.
It was pathetic to see an old man and his wife,bent almost double with age and rheumatism, poking about among the ruins of their one-time home, in the hope of finding something undestroyed. They were living temporarily in a miserable little shanty roofed in by pieces of corrugated iron, the remains of former Nissen huts and dug-outs.
In Neuf Berquin several families were living in new wooden huts the size of Armstrongs with cheerful red-tiled roofs, that seemed if possible to intensify the utter desolation of the surroundings.
Lusty youths, still in thebleu horizonof the French Army, were busy tilling the ground, which they had cleared of bricks and mortar, to make vegetable gardens.
My chief impression was that France, now that the war was over, had made up her mind to set to and get going again just as fast as she possibly could. There was not an idle person to be seen, even the children were collecting bricks and slates.
I wondered how these families got supplies and, as if in answer to my unspoken question, a baker's cart full of fresh brown loaves came bumping and jolting down the uneven village street.
Silhouetted against the sky behind him was the gaunt wall of the one-time church tower, its windows looking like the empty sockets of a skull.
Estaires was in no better condition, but here the inhabitants had come back in numbers and were busy at the work of reconstruction. We passed "Grime Farm" and "Taffy Farm" on the way to Armentières, then through a little place called Croixdu Bac with notices printed on the walls of the village in German. It had once been their second line.
In the distance Armentières gave me the impression of being almost untouched, but on closer inspection the terrible part was that only the mere shells of the houses were left standing. Bailleul was like a city of the dead. I saw no returned inhabitants along its desolate streets. The Mont des Cats was on our left with the famous monastery at its summit where Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had been tended by the monks when lying wounded. In return for their kindness he gave orders that the monastery was to be spared, and so it was for some time. But whether he repented of his generosity or not I can't say. It must certainly have been badly shelled since, as its walls now testify. On our right was Kemmel with its pill-boxes making irregular bumps against the sky-line. One place was pointed out to me as being the site of a once famous tea-garden where a telescope had been installed, for visitors to view the surrounding country.
We passed through St. Jans Capelle, Berthen, Boschepe, and so to the frontier into Belgium. The first sight that greeted our eyes was Remy siding, a huge cemetery, one of the largest existing, where rows upon rows of wooden crosses stretched as far as the eye could see.
We drove to Ypres via Poperinghe and Vlamertinge and saw the famous "Goldfish" Château on our left, which escaped being shelled, and was then gutted by an accidental fire!
I was surprised to see anything at all of the once beautiful Cloth Hall. We took some snaps of the remains. A lot of discoloured bones were lying about among thedébrisdisinterred from the cemetery by the bombardments.
Heaps of powdered bricks were all that remained of many of the houses. The town gasometer had evidently been blown completely into the air, what was left of it was perched on its head in a drunken fashion.
Beyond the gate of the town on the Menin Road stood a large unpainted wooden shanty. I wondered what it could be and thought it was possibly a Y.M.C.A. hut. Imagine my surprise on closer inspection to see painted over the door in large black letters "Ypriana Hotel"! It had been put up by an enterprisingBelge. Somehow it seemed a desecration to see this cheap little building on that sacred spot.
The Ypres-Menin Road stretched in front of us as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the horizon. On either hand was No-man's-land. I had seen wrecked villages on the Belgian front in 1915 and was more or less accustomed to the sight, but this was different. It was more terrible than any ruins I had ever seen. For utter desolation I never want to behold anything worse.
The ground was pock-marked with shell-holes and craters. Old tanks lay embedded in the mud, their sides pierced by shot and shell, and worst of all by far were the trees. Mere skeletons of treesstanding gaunt and jagged, stripped naked of their bark; mute testimony of the horrors they had witnessed. Surely of all the lonely places of the earth this was by far the worst? The ground looked lighter in some places than in others, where the powdered bricks alone showed where a village had once stood. There were those whose work it was to search for the scattered graves and bring them in to one large cemetery. Just beyond "Hell-fire Corner" a padre was conducting a burial service over some such of these where a cemetery had been formed. We next passed Birr Cross Roads with "Sanctuary Wood" on our left. Except that the lifeless trees seemed to be more numerous, nothing was left to indicate a wood had ever been there.
The more I saw the more I marvelled to think how the men could exist in such a place and not go mad, yet we were seeing it under the most ideal conditions with the fresh green grass shooting up to cover the ugly rents and scars.
Many of the craters half-filled with water already had duckweed growing. Words are inadequate to express the horror and loneliness of that place which seemed peopled only by the ghosts of those "Beloved soldiers, who love rough life and breath, not less for dying faithful to the last."
We drove on to Hooge and turned near Geluvelt, making our way back silently along that historic road which had been kept in repair by gangs of workmen whose job it was to fill in the shell holes as fast as they were made.
As we wound our way up the steep hill to Cassel with its narrow streets and high, Spanish-looking houses, the sun was setting and the country lay below us in a wonderful panorama. The cherry-trees bordering the steep hill down the other side stood out like miniature snowstorms against the blue haze of the evening. We got back to find the Saturday evening hop in progress (life still seemed to be formed of paradoxes). It was held in the mess hut, where the bumpy line down the middle of the floor was appropriately called "Vimy Ridge," and the place where the shell hole had been further up "Kennedy Crater." The floor was exceedingly springy just there, but it takes a good deal to "cramp the style" of a F.A.N.Y., and details of this sort only add to the general enjoyment.
The next day I went down to the old convoy and saw my beloved "Susan" again, apparently not one whit the worse for the valiant war work she had done. Everything looked exactly the same, and to complete the picture, as I arrived, I saw two F.A.N.Y.s quietly snaffling some horses for a ride round the camp while their owners remained blissfully unconscious in the mess. I felt things were indeed unchanged!
That evening I hunted out all my French friends. The old flower lady in the Rue uttered a shriek, dropped her flowers, and embraced me again and again. Then there was thePharmacieto visit, the paper man, the pretty flapper, Monsieur and Madame from the "Omelette" Shop, and a host ofothers. I also saw the French general. For a moment he was puzzled—obviously he "knew the face but couldn't put a name to it," then his eye fell on the ribbon. "Mon enfant," was all he said, and without any warning he opened his arms and I received a smacking kiss on both cheeks!Quel émotion!Everyone was so delighted, I felt the burden of the last two years slipping off my shoulders.
Quite by chance I was put in my old original "cue." I counted the doors up the passage. Yes, it must be the one, there could be no doubt about it, and on looking up at the walls I could just discern the shadowy outlines of the panthers through a new coating of colour-wash.
The hospital where I had been was shut up and empty, and was shortly going to become a Casino again. How good it was to be back with the F.A.N.Y.s! I had just caught them in time, for they were to be demobilised on the following Sunday and I began to realise, now that I was with them again, just how terribly I had missed their gay companionship.
It was a singular and happy coincidence that on the second anniversary of the day I lost my leg, I should be cantering over the same fields at Peuplinghe where "Flanders" had so gallantly pursued "puss" that day so long ago, or was it really only yesterday?
France,May 9th, 1919.
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.
Transcriber's Note:Varied hyphenation retained. Obvious spelling and punctuation errors repaired and noted by the use of a dottedunderlinein the text. Scrolling the mouse over such text will display the change that was made.
Varied hyphenation retained. Obvious spelling and punctuation errors repaired and noted by the use of a dottedunderlinein the text. Scrolling the mouse over such text will display the change that was made.