Chapter 5

As she had earache we didn't talk, and I sat huddled in my corner and watched the names of the shops, thinking, as I was more or less forced to do by her movements, of her earache.

What struck me was her own angry bewilderment before the fact of her pain. "But it hurts.... You've no idea how it hurts!" She was surprised.

Many times a day she hears the words, "Sister, you're hurtin' me.... Couldn't you shift my heel? It's like a toothache," and similar sentences. I hear them in our ward all the time. One can't pass down the ward without some such request falling on one's ears.

She is astonished at her earache; she is astonished at what pain can be; it is unexpected. She is ready to be angry with herself, with her pain, with her ear. It is monstrous, she thinks....

The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine. A deadlock!

One has illuminations all the time!

There is an old lady who visits in our ward, at whom, for one or two unimportant reasons, it is the custom to laugh. The men, who fall in with our moods with a docility which I am beginning to suspect is a mask, admit too that she is comic.

This afternoon, when she was sitting by Corrigan's bed and talking to him I saw where her treatment of him differed from ours. She treats him as though he were an individual; but there is more in it than that.... She treats him as though he had a wife and children, a house and a back garden and responsibilities: in some manner she treats him as though he had dignity.

I thought of yesterday's injection. That is the difference: that is what the Sisters mean when they say "the boys."...

The story of Rees is not yet ended in either of the two ways in which stories end in a hospital. His arm does not get worse, but his courage is ebbing. This morning I wheeled him out to the awful sleep again--for the third time.

They will take nearly anything from each other. The only thing that cheered Rees up as he was wheeled away was the voice of Pinker crying, "Jer want white flowers on yer coffin? We'll see to the brass 'andles!"

From Pinker, a little boy from the Mile End Road, they will stand anything. He is the servant of the ward (he says), partly through his good nature and a little because he has two good arms and legs. "I ain't no skivvy," he protests all the time, but every little odd job gets done.

Rees, when he wakes, wakes sobbing and says, "Don' go away, nurse...." He holds my hand in a fierce clutch, then releases it to point in the air, crying "There's the pain!" as though the pain filled the air and rose to the rafters. As he wakes it centralizes, until at last comes the moment when he says, "Me arm aches cruel," and points to it. Then one can leave him.

It was the first time I had heard a man sing at his dressing. I was standing at the sterilizer when Rees's song began to mount over the screen that hid him from me. ("Whatever is that?" "Rees's tubes going in.")

It was like this: "Ah ... ee ... oo, Sister!" and again: "Sister ... oo ... ee ... ah!" Then a little scream and his song again.

I heard her voice: "Now then, Rees, I don't call that much of a song." She called me to make his bed, and I saw his left ear was full of tears.

O visitors, who come into the ward in the calm of the long afternoon, when the beds are neat and clean and the flowers out on the tables and the V.A.D.'s sit sewing at splints and sandbags, when the men look like men again and smoke and talk and read ... if you could see what lies beneath the dressings!

When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others.

I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night--two bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar whistling to his mate in the black and rustling garden.

But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.

Those distant guns again to-night....

Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when _they_ go over the top?

I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, "What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it." But that won't do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.

Summer.... Can it be summer through whose hot air the guns shake and tremble? The honeysuckle, whose little stalks twinkled and shone that January night, has broken at each woody end into its crumbled flower.

Where is the frost, the snow?... Where are the dead?

Where is my trouble and my longing, and the other troubles, and the happiness in other summers?

Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water.

We talk of tablets to the dead. There can be none but in the heart, and the heart fades.

There are only ten men left in bed in the ward. Sometimes I think, "Will there never be another convoy?"

And then: "Is not one man alone sufficient matter on which to reflect?" "One can find God in a herring's head...." says a Japanese proverb.

When there is not much to do in the ward and no sound comes from behind the screens, when there has not been a convoy for weeks, when the little rubber tubes lie in the trolley-drawer and the syringe gives place to the dry dressing--then they set one of us aside from the work of the ward to sit at a table and pad splints.

It isn't supposed to be a job we care for, and I am keeping up the delusion, but all the time I run my seams straight, pull the horsehair out to the last fine shred, turn in my corners as the corners of a leather book are turned, so that I may be kept at it, although out of cunning I appear to grumble and long to be released.

One does not wash up when one makes splints, one does not change the pillow-cases--forcing the resentful pillow down, down till the corners of the case are filled--nor walk the ward in search of odd jobs.

But these are not the reasons....

Just as I liked the unending laying of the trays in the corridor, so making splints appears to me a gentle work in which one has time to look at and listen to the ward with more penetrating eyes, with wider ears--a work varied by long conversations with Pinker about his girl and the fountain-pen trade.

But I ought not to have asked if she were pretty.

At first he didn't answer and appeared to be thinking very seriously--of a way out, perhaps.

"Does fer me all right," he presently said.

The defence of his girl occupied his attention, for after a few minutes he returned to it: "Sensible sort of girl. She ain't soft. Can cook an' all that."

I went on sewing my splint.

Almost reluctantly he pursued: "Got 'er photograph 'ere." But he did not get up at once, and we turned to the fountain-pens. "Any nib," he said, "crossed ever so, _I_ could mend it. Kep' the books too; we was always stocktaking."

Now I think of it, fountain-pen shops always _are_ stocktaking. They do it all down the Strand, with big red labels across the front.

He rose suddenly and crossed to his locker to look for her photograph, returning after a few minutes with a bundle of little cardboards. The first I turned over was that of a pretty fair-haired girl. "Is that her?" I asked. "She's pretty!" "That's 'er young sister," he answered. I turned over the rest, and he pointed out his family one by one--last of all his girl.

There are some men who are not taken in by a bit of fair hair.

One knows what these cheap photographs are, how they distort and blacken. The girl who looked at me from this one appeared to be a monster.

She had an enormous face, enormous spectacles, bands of galvanized iron drawn across her forehead for hair....

"Ther's just them two, 'er an 'er sister. 'Er sister ain't got a feller yet."

I praised his girl to Pinker, and praised Pinker to myself.

"A girl friend," he said, "keeps yer straighter than a man. Makes yer punctual."

"So she won't wait for you when you are late?"

"Not a minute over time," he said with pride. "I used to be a terror when I first knew 'er; kep' 'er waitin' abaht. She soon cured me, did F. Steel."

"You are a funny little bird, Pinker," said the Sister, passing.

"Lil bird, am I?" He tucked his cardboards carefully into his locker and followed her up the ward firing repartee.

I sewed my splint. In all walks of life men keep one waiting. I should like to ask the huge and terrible girl about her cure.

Monk is the ugliest man I have ever seen. He has a squint and a leer, his mouth drops at both sides, he has no forehead, and his straight, combed hair meets his eyebrows--or rather, his left eyebrow, since that one is raised by a cut. He has the expression of a cut-throat, and yet he is quite young, good-tempered, and shy.

When Monk was working at a woollen belt Pinker said: "Workin' that for yer girl?... You got a girl, Monk?"

Monk squinted sidelong at Pinker and rubbed his hands together like a large ape.

"'E ain't got no girl," shrilled Pinker. "Monk ain't got no girl. You don' know what a girl is, do yer, Monk?"

Although they do much more to help each other than I ever saw done in the officers' ward, yet one is always saying things that I find myself praying the other hasn't heard.

In the next bed to Monk lies Gayner, six foot two, of the Expeditionary Force. Wounded at Mons, he was brought home to England, and since then he has made the round of the hospitals. He is a good-looking, sullen man who will not read or write or sew, who will not play draughts or cards or speak to his neighbour. He sits up, attentive, while the ulcers on his leg are being dressed, but if one asks him something of the history of his wound his tone holds such a volume of bitterness and exasperation that one feels that at any moment the locks of his spirit might cease to hold.

" ... ever since Mons, these ulcers, on and off?"

"Yes."

"Oh well, we must cure them now."

Her light tone is what he cannot endure. He does not believe in cure and will not believe in cure. It has become an article of faith: his ulcers will never be cured. He has a silent scorn of hospitals. He can wind a perfect bandage and he knows the rules; beyond that he pays as little attention as possible to what goes on.

When his dressing is over he tilts his thin, intelligent face at the ceiling. "Don't you ever read?" I asked him.

"I haven't the patience," he replied. But he has the patience to lie like that with his thin lips compressed and a frown on his face for hours, for days ... since Mons....

I have come to the conclusion that he has a violent soul, that he dare not talk. It is no life for a man.

I said to Pinker this morning, "I wish you'd hurry up over your bath; I've got to get it scrubbed out by nine."

"Don't you hurry me, nurse," said Pinker, "it's the on'y time I can think, in me bath."

I should like to have parried with Pinker (only my language is so much more complicated than it ought to be) that thinking in one's bath is a self-deception. I lay in my own bath last night and thought very deep thoughts, but often when we think our thoughts are deep they are only vague. Bath thoughts are wonderful, but there's nothing "to" them.

We had a heated discussion to-day as to whether the old lady who leaves a tract beneath a single rose by each bedside could longer be tolerated.

"She is a nuisance," said the Sister; "the men make more noise afterwards because they set her hymns to ragtime."

"What good does it do them?" said the V.A.D., " ... and I have to put the roses in water!"

I rode the highest horse of all: "Her inquiries about their souls are an impertinence. Why should they be bothered?"

These are the sort of things they say in debating societies. But Life talks differently....

Pinker said, "Makes the po'r ole lady 'appy!"

As one bends one's head low over the splint one sits unnoticed, a part of the furniture of the ward. The sounds of the ward rise and fill the ears; it is like listening to a kettle humming, bees round a bush of flowers, the ticking of a clock, the passing of life....

Now and then there are incidents, as just now. Two orderlies came in with a stretcher to fetch Mr. Smith (an older man than Smiff and a more dignified) away to a convalescent home. Mr. Smith has never been to France, but walked into our ward one day with a sore on his foot which had to be cut. He was up and dressed in his bedraggled khaki uniform when the stretcher-bearers came for him.

He looked down his nose at the stretcher. "I don't much like the look of that," he said. The stretcher-bearers waited for him.

He stood irresolute. "I never bin in one of them, and I don't want to make a start."

"Its bad luck to be our name," called out Smiff, waving his amputated ankle. "Better get your hand in!"

Mr. Smith got in slowly and departed from the ward, sitting bolt upright, gripping the sides with his hands.

Some of the wards and the Sisters' bunks are charming at this time of the year, now that larkspur and rambler-roses are cheap in the market.

But the love of decoration is not woman's alone. Through the dispensary hatchway I saw three empty poison-bottles, each with a poppy stuck in its neck.

Everything in the dispensary is beautiful--its glasses, its flames, its brass weights, its jars and globes; but much more beautiful because it is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that: one feels like Gulliver.

No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple.

On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. If he feels well and my smile is humble he will stoop, and I see looking down at me a small worn face and bushy eyebrows, or a long ascetic face and bleached hair, or a beard and a pair of bearded nostrils.

Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes marked "To be returned at once" (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her head when she saw this message).

It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's marketing, and, meeting there, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear.

For the bachelors amuse themselves when they are not mixing and weighing by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny arm through the hatchway, they pin them on, little scraps of paper which fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails.

And the V.A.D.'s, who are not at all afraid, because one cannot be afraid of a man of whom one has never seen more than half, turn a blind eye to the slips and a deaf ear to the voices, bringing their bottles and their jars just in the manner they were taught to do when first they entered the hospital. And they gossip! They have just seen the morning papers on all the beds; they have just heard about the half-days for the week; they have collected little rags and ends of news as they came along the corridor.

They gossip. And once a bearded bachelor thumped the panel down almost on my finger, leaving three startled faces staring at a piece of painted wood. But a little dark girl worked the panel up an inch with her nails and cajoled through the crack.

I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G block grew larger and larger till the A block turned them into beings of one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.

But in the summer mornings it is remarkable too. Then regiments of charwomen occupy it, working in close mass formation. Seven will work abreast upon their knees, flanked by their pails, their hands moving backwards and forwards in so complicated a system that there appears to be no system at all.

Patches of the corridor are thick with soapsuds; patches are dry. The art of walking the corridor in the morning can be learnt, and for a year and five months I have done it with no more than a slip and a slide.

But yesterday I stepped on a charwoman's hand. It was worse than stepping on a puppy: one knows that sickening lift of the heart, as though the will could undo the weight of the foot....

The stagger, the sense of one's unpardonable heaviness.... I slipped on her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, jumping like a chamois, sent the next pail all over the heels of the front rank.

It was the sort of situation with which one can do nothing.

I met a friend yesterday, one of the old Chelsea people. He has followed his natural development. Although he talks war, war, war, it is from his old angle, it wears the old hall-mark.

He belongs to a movement which believes it "feels the war." Personal injury or personal loss does not enter the question; the heart of this movement of his bleeds perpetually, but impersonally. He claims for it that this heart is able to bleed more profusely than any other heart, individual or collective, in ... let us limit it to England!

In fact it is the only blood he has noticed.

When the taxes go up he says, "Well, now perhaps it will make people feel the war!" For he longs that every one should lose their money so that at last they may "feel the war," "stop the war" (interchangeable!)

He forgets that even in England a great many quite stupid people would rather lose their money than their sons.

How strange that these people should still picture the minds of soldiers as filled with the glitter of bright bayonets and the glory of war! They think we need a vision of blood and ravage and death to turn us from our bright thoughts, to still the noise of the drum in our ears. The drums don't beat, the flags don't fly....

He should come down the left-hand side of the ward and hear what the dairyman says.

"I 'ates it, nurse; I 'ates it. Them 'orses'll kill me; them drills.... It's no life for a man, nurse."

The dairyman hasn't been to the Front; you needn't go to the Front to hate the war. Sometimes I get a glimpse from him of what it means to the weaklings, the last-joined, feeble creatures.

"Me 'ead's that queer, nurse; it seems to get queerer every day. I can't 'elp worryin'. I keep thinkin' of them 'orses."

Always the horses....

I said to Sister, "Is No. 24 really ill?"

"There's a chance of his being mental," she said. "He is being watched."

Was he mental before the war took him, before the sergeant used to whip the horses as they got to the jumps, before the sergeant cried out "Cross your stirrups!"?

It isn't his fault; there are strong and feeble men.

A dairyman's is a gentle job; he could have scraped through life all right. He sleeps in the afternoon, and stirs and murmurs: "Drop your reins.... Them 'orses, sergeant! I'm comin', sergeant; don't touch 'im this time!" And then in a shriller voice, "Don't touch 'im...." Then he wakes.

Poor mass of nerves.... He nods and smiles every time one looks at him, frantic to please.

There are men and men. Scutts has eleven wounds, but he doesn't "mind" the war. God made many brands of men, that is all; one must accept them.

But war finds few excuses; and there are strange minnows in the fishing-net. Sometimes, looking into the T.B. ward, I think: "It almost comes to this: one must spit blood or fight...."

"Why don't you refuse?" my friend would say to the dairyman. "Why should you fight because another man tells you to?"

It isn't so simple as that, is it, dairyman? It isn't even a question of the immense, vague machinery behind the sergeant, but just the sergeant himself; it isn't a question of generals or politicians of great wrongs or fierce beliefs ... but of the bugle which calls you in the morning and the bugle which puts you to bed at night.

Well, well.... The dairyman is in hospital, and that is the best that he can hope for.

I read a book once about a prison. They too, the prisoners, sought after the prison hospital, as one seeks after one's heaven.

It is so puffed up of my friend to think that his and his "movement's" are the only eyes to see the vision of horror. Why, these others _are_ the vision!

This afternoon I was put at splints again.

I only had an inch or two to finish and I spun it out, very happy.

Presently the foot of a bed near me began to catch my attention: the toe beneath the sheets became more and more agitated, then the toes of the other foot joined the first foot, beating a frenzied tattoo beneath the coverings. I looked up.

Facing me a pair of blue eyes were bulging above an open mouth, the nostrils were quivering, the fingers were wrung together. It was Gayner, surely seeing a ghost.

I rose and went to his bed.

"My jaws want to close," he muttered. "I can't keep them open."

I jumped and went for Sister, who took the news in a leisurely fashion, which reproved me for my excitement. Feeling a fool, I went and sat down again, taking up my splint. But there was no forgetting Gayner.

I tried to keep my eyes on my work, but first his toes and then his hands filled all my mind, till at last I had to look up and meet the eyes again.

Still looking as though he had seen a ghost--a beast of a ghost...! In hospital since Mons.... "I wonder how many men he has seen die of tetanus?" I thought.

"He's got the jumps," I thought.

So had I. Suppose Sister was wrong! Suppose the precious minutes were passing! Suppose...! She was only the junior Sister.

"Shall I get you some water?" I said at last. He nodded, and gulped in a horrible fashion. I got him the mug, and while he drank I longed, but did not dare, to say, "Are you afraid of ... that?" I thought if one could say the word it might break down that dumb fright, draw the flesh up again over those bulging eyes, give him a sort of anchor, a confessional, even if it was only me. But I didn't dare. Gayner is one of those men so pent up, so rigid with some inner indignation, one cannot tamper with the locks.

Again I went and sat down.

When next I looked up he was sweating. He beckoned to me: "Ask Sister to send for the doctor. I can't stand this."

I went and asked her.

She sucked her little finger thoughtfully.

"Give him the thermometer," she said. He couldn't take it in his mouth, " ... for if I shut my lips they'll never open." I put it under his arm and waited while his feet kicked and his hands twisted. He was normal. Sister smiled.

But by a coincidence the doctor came, gimlet-eyed.

"Hysteria...." he said to Sister in the bunk.

"Is no one going to reassure Gayner?" I wondered. And no one did.

Isn't the fear of pain next brother to pain itself? Tetanus or the fear of tetanus--a choice between two nightmares. Don't they admit that?

So, forbidden to speak to him, I finished my splint till tea-time. But I couldn't bring myself to sit down to it, for fear that the too placid resumption of my duties should outrage him. I stood up.

Which helped me, not him.

After the dressings are over we scrub the dishes and basins in the annexe.

In the annexe, except that there is nothing to sit on, there is leisure and an invitation to reflection.

Beneath the windows legions of white butterflies attack the cabbage-patch which divides us from the road; beyond the road there is a camp from which the dust flows all day.