It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.
I lay back and watched Tait getting into bed and pulling a blanket around her.
‘My goodness, it’s cold for June!’ she said. ‘It must have been the storm last night.’
‘You look as if you have a good mail, Tait.’
‘Yes, I have – family ones.’ She had the expression of a small girl on her face whenever she talked about her family. I knew them all well by description and was never tired of imagining their joy in companionable gossip, their shared development, their birthdays and Christmases, their weddings and christenings. Somehow a large family put a greater meaning into all these things.
Turning over I saw through the tent door the high leafy hedge of our field and the sun hitting the metal of a disused German gun. Sleep was difficult in these Normandy days, especially as there was no beginning or end to a day or night. As it flirted with me now, memories were persistent in their intrusion. Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war. I was so used to it in feeling that I could not count the time; in habit it was a weary while, so that when the ‘Second Front’ did finally come, I felt emptied of all sensation and all knowledge of circumstance, almost indifferent to the object of our journey and to the danger that might face us.
For what had seemed a very long time we had been in a ‘closed area’. We weren’t supposed to know where it was, but several of us guessed it to be Luton because of the many advertisements for straw hats. Here we were given lectures on map-reading, mustard gas, security, the ethics of army life and the best way to maintain morale. We had been put into battledress and had been given a mass of equipment to carry on our back. We waited and the ‘Second Front’ was stripped of all enchantment, and we became irritable, spending too much money on cinemas. Then one day we paraded and marched to the station and our kitbags were piled on to the platform. I remember some of us looked at ourselves in our pocket mirrors and Matron, ill-at-ease, remarked that ‘really’ we should be past the age of caring how we looked, adding that our berets should be worn in such a way that no hair should show above the forehead.
We started to entrain some time after seven o’clock in the morning and reached Southampton in the pale grey niggardly light of a dying afternoon. Into two lorries we clambered, hampered by our haversacks and tin hats, and drove slowly through the town into the residential areas and on through innumerable roads lined with camouflaged vehicles and cheering troops and curious civilians. It was nearly dark by the time we arrived at the camp. The dim shapes of trees moved against the sky and figures came to us out of the darkness – big, mysterious forms which turned out to be American soldiers. We had a hot meal, we watched an ENSA show, and we slept in bunks.
Early in the morning we were on the road again until we fell out of the lorries on to the turf of a municipal park. There were troops everywhere, standing, sitting, marshalled into groups – infantry, engineers, gunners – some leaning on their kitbags, others queueing in a long line for tea which came out of a large urn. They stared at us and we stared at them, all of us waiting for the time to pass. It was the Welsh Guards who began to sing, beautiful, deep-throated singing getting deeper and stronger. We heard it all, ‘each every note/ Of every lung and tongue and throat,/ Ay, every rhythm and rhyme/ Of every thing that lives and loves.’ We heard ‘The song of men all sorts and kinds,/ As many tempers, moods and minds/ As leaves are on a tree,/ As many faiths and castes and creeds,/ As many human bloods and breeds/ As in the world may be . . .’
And then we were on the way to the quayside. I remember Tait close beside me, slowly fitting her fingers into the longer fingers of a pair of khaki gloves. She was still putting them on when we walked up the gangway on to the ship. It was a small ship that took us over; it was very crowded and everybody was quiet. The sea was dead calm, like grey satin shot with pink. The water lapped quietly against her sides, and you could hear the deep popple under the bilges as she slid forward and gathered speed. On either side of us spread an immense convoy. It was a morning so moving that your spirit seemed hardly able to hold the elation you felt, the pride, the utter loneliness. Near the French coast there was sudden great excitement which you could feel rippling across the water, as the rumour was passed from mouth to mouth that a German reconnaissance aircraft had been spotted. If it was true, it must have stopped in its flight like an evil goblin paralysed by the coming of the dawn.
We had to climb over the boat sides into dinghies and our equipment made balance very difficult. We giggled, and Matron – still ill-at-ease – got pink with anger. We disembarked at a sort of pontoon bridge and so walked on to the beach. I am left only with an impression of the anti-aircraft balloons attached to ships, and of the tank-landing ship with its flat bottom and its huge doors opening and discharging its load. There were many smaller craft, and HMS Rodney, a monitor, was bombarding inland.
‘Blimey! The women have landed!’ yelled a Canadian, digging by the roadside. ‘Women! Crikey! The war must be over. Hi! Hi! I’m sick . . . oh, I’m sick!’ Such was our greeting as we drove along the narrow roads; bawdy words flung at us in soft Welsh accents, words of welcome in Scottish brogue, grubby hands offering us mugs of tea whenever the driver stopped to ask the way – which happened pretty frequently Dusty, narrow lanes, damaged houses, piles of rubble and odd pieces of equipment lying around in green fields; a gas cape, a water bottle, an entrenching tool, a pickaxe standing upright with a tin helmet on it marking an unknown grave, an odd German helmet in a ditch, a white cross where a soldier had been decently buried by someone in not quite such a hurry, a bunch of scarlet poppies lying withered beside a dead cow with rigid legs . . . When we arrived, we neither knew nor cared what time it was: stiff and sore we did not want to move. Then wearily we turned to do all the things necessary to camp for the night. The tents were still lying in their bags, but the trenches were dug when we sat down to eat from our ‘24-hour rations’, which entailed clever manipulations with solid methylated, concentrated meat block, dry biscuit and chocolate.
*
That was 14 June 1944. We had landed as part of a General Hospital which was set up in several fields at La Déliverande, some ten miles from the coast. There we remained for nearly a fortnight, deafened by the incessant barrage of our own guns by day and enemy shells by night. There was danger but no reality. We were waiting impatiently for orders to join our casualty clearing station (CCS), and until they came we felt ourselves to be attached and yet detached, working and yet waiting. Then we were on our way, through dusty lanes and hot fields of scarlet poppies, our thoughts driving ahead of the rumbling truck towards the reality of our work at the front.
By a system of leapfrogging, the CCSs helped to ensure that major medical services were always within reach of the forward troops. They had been allotted on paper on a scale of two per corps as corps troops, and one per army, but this proved wasteful in practice and greater flexibility was achieved by making all CCSs into army troops and distributing them as required by the medical services. Our corps had a most efficient Deputy Director of Medical Services who became a famous character in the Second Army, his abilities being by no means confined to the practice of healing the sick and wounded. All sides of army life attracted him, technical or tactical, and on many a problem the cry at headquarters was: ‘Send for the DDMS – he’ll know the answer!’ He had three DSOs and an MC and we loved him for his sense of fun and the fund of stories he always brought with him whenever he came to see how we were getting on. After one of his dissertations on the military meaning of the ‘Second Front’, we were able to realize there was more to it than tents packed tight with inert bodies.
Extract from Life in Our Hands
Pamela Bright © 1955
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What vivid writing; you can smell the sulphur and the smelling salts, and the extraordinary pride in these young women, as they did their absolute all, to ease suffering, and even death. A far cry from Dulce es decorum est, as these women both fought to remain cheerful and supportive of their menfolks.
In feel, and even time, this feels more Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, than the comparatively modern, 1944; a wonderful read – thank you, Pamela Bright.