The Glory of the Trenches | Page 4

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.