The Glory of the Trenches | Page 5

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