From Chicago to the Western Front

One day I was sorting out the collection of thrillers in the spare room when I glanced up at the watercolour of a beautiful woman that has hung on a wall there for four years, since we moved house. She is in profile, wearing the crisply billowing headdress of a nurse, her lowered gaze calm and reflective. The portrait used to hang in the guest room of my former house and before that in the hall of the farm I shared with my first husband. At some point in the Seventies he and I had bought it from the long-established London dealers Abbott & Holder, but it came with no information – except the name and date in the top right-hand corner, ‘Mary Spears 1918’, and the faint monogram CGD in the lower left.

Something made me take it from the wall. Her face had always captivated me, so why was she relegated to a room I rarely visit? And why had I never bothered to find out who she was? Out of sight, out of mind . . . But nowadays it is easy; a quick Internet search revealed that this saintly-looking nurse was in fact an acclaimed and popular novelist, and the author of a powerful First World War memoir. Mary Spears was born Mary (or May) Borden in 1886, the beautiful, capricious and intelligent daughter of a Chicago millionaire. At 20 she came into her fortune and escaped her stifling family to travel the world in search of excitement. Unfortunately she also made an unwise marriage to a missionary called Douglas Turner, but by the outbreak of the First World War she had become a celebrated literary hostess in London, establishing herself as a writer and mixing with the great men of the day, including George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound. A keen suffragist and independent spirit, she became Wyndham Lewis’s lover and bought his work. Then, in 1916, she met her great love, the handsome, brave and charismatic Edward Louis Spears, an Anglo-Irish lieutenant in the French army. Her divorce from Turner and the custody battle over their children was bloody, but Mary and Edward married in 1918. Perhaps Edward commissioned the distinguished artist Charles Geoffroy-Dechaume (yes, I identified the monogram too) to draw Mary in the uniform she was wearing when he met her – to mark their wedding. Mary Borden’s experiences during both world wars make extraordinary reading. I recommend Jane Conway’s fine biography, A Woman of Two Wars, for the full story of a vivid, original and courageous woman who deserves to be better known. The First World War plunged this privileged, headstrong young Anglo-American into a maelstrom of horror that she was to record in her memoir The Forbidden Zone (1929). Her account in it of nursing on the Western Front is enthralling, heartbreaking, haunting. Fragments of prose splinter from the page; weariness and despair are transformed through art. I do not understand why she is not ranked as one of the finest chroniclers of the Great War, and one of the few considerable female poets. But it is time to rediscover the talent of Lady Spears, as she became. In 1915, when she had only recently given birth to her third child, Mary set off for France. She had no nursing experience and no French, but she did have money and determination. She set up her own field hospital and there, confronting the horrors of war night and day, somehow she still found time to raise funds from America and to write. Her hospital had the lowest mortality rate on the Western Front, and her humanitarian work later won her not only the Croix de Guerre but also the Légion d’honneur. Borden begins The Forbidden Zone with a surprisingly bald statement: ‘I have not invented anything in this book.’ She explains that the sketches and poems were written between 1914 and 1918 but the stories are more recent and recount ‘true episodes I cannot forget’. The paradox becomes clear: she is telling the truth and yet the truth was so dreadful that ‘I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself . . .’ She divides the book into three parts: The North, The Somme and Poems. The opening sentences of the first chapter, ‘Belgium’, plunge the reader, as if in medias res, into the wasteland:

Mud: and a thin rain coming down to make more mud. Mud: with scraps of iron lying in it and the straggling fragment of a nation, lolling, hanging about in the mud, on the edge of disaster. It is quiet here. The rain and the mud muffle the voice of the war that is growling beyond the horizon. But if you listen you can hear cataracts of iron pouring down channels in the sodden land, and you feel the earth trembling.

The poetic prose is personal, immediate, grabbing you with a skinny hand like the Ancient Mariner and insisting that you open your eyes and look:

This is what is left of Belgium. Come, I’ll show you. Here are trees drooping along a canal, ploughed fields, roads leading into sand dunes, roofless houses. There’s a farm, an old woman with a crooked back feeding chickens, a convoy of motor lorries round a barn; they squat like elephants. And here is a village crouching in the mud: the cobblestone street is slippery and smeared with refuse and there is a yellow cat sitting in a window. This is the headquarters of the Belgian Army. You see those men, lolling in the doorways – uncouth, dishevelled, dirty? They are soldiers. You can read on their heavy jowls, in their stupefied, patient, hopeless eyes, how boring it is to be a hero.

This is not so much the pity of war as the dreary, endless ugliness of war. Not even the officers with their privileges will escape: ‘They wear fine uniforms. Their faces are clean. They have been eating good food . . . They wear gloves. They will be destroyed with their gold braid and their medals and the good food inside them.’ This staccato style expresses the mood of harsh acceptance that permeates The Forbidden Zone; not acceptance of man’s inhumanity to man, but of the implacable fate that will play with human beings, pitilessly. The writer who had delighted in witty, well-informed conversation in salons now listens to ‘the boy’s . . . choking and shuddering . . . and every few seconds . . . a wail of defiant terror’. The fashionable woman who dressed for dinner now sees herself ironically through the wrong end of a telescope: ‘You fuss about busily. You move your feet and rustle your petticoats . . . You have stained your fingers. There is a spot on your white apron; but you are superb . . .’ The confident socialite who had travelled the world now finds herself demolished by the emotional need of a blinded soldier who thinks his nurse has left him alone: ‘Sister! My sister! Where are you?’ To the dismay of her veteran male orderlies this encounter briefly breaks Mary’s spirit: ‘At that I fled from him. I ran down the long, dreadful hut and hid behind my screen and cowered, sobbing, in a corner, hiding my face.’ What makes The Forbidden Zone such a unique testament is its very modern approach to style. It is neither reportage, nor memoir, nor fiction, but a combination of all three. No two chapters are alike: ‘Paraphernalia’ is a dry exercise in bitter self-mockery, ‘In the Operating Room’ is written like a Radio 4 play, and ‘The Priest and the Rabbi’ reads like a fable. ‘Rosa’ is the gripping account of a nurse’s moral dilemma, faced with a would-be suicide who could be saved, but who would then be shot for desertion. ‘Blind’ has such an intensity that reportage is lifted to the economical exactitude of the novella. You read without knowing how she will shift her style to encompass the variety of experience, or if she will falter and beg you to share her trauma: ‘Looking back, I do not understand that woman – myself – standing in that confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood.’ Her anger and frustration are beautifully contained: ‘There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe, were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks . . . scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought here – what was left of them.’ The writer-turned-nurse uses bold metaphor to make us see the wounded men anew: ‘Pain is the mistress of them . . . you can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless. She lies in their beds all day . . . she never leaves them . . . she lies there to spoil their dreams.’ With no sentimentality, Mary beckons you to view the suffering with such pity that, like her, you recognize death as a welcome grace: ‘There’s not a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick! In a moment a man’s spirit will escape, will be flying through the night past the pale, beautiful sentimental face of the moon.’ And then there are the poems which form the last part of The Forbidden Zone. They have the loping, declamatory power of Walt Whitman but they do not sing majestically like his poems. Instead they almost wail, in broken disbelief. ‘Where Is Jehovah’ and ‘The Virgin of Albert’ spit on the altars of a Christian faith which could do nothing to avert the horror of war, while the best poem, ‘Unidentified’, is a litany of mourning for the doomed unknown soldier who, at the point of death, remembers ‘what he loved and what he wanted, and what he never had’. This woman was extraordinary. In the Second World War she set up another field hospital in France and, as the Germans advanced, barely escaped with her life. Later she founded a mobile unit for the Free French in Palestine. Yet she remains little known. The Forbidden Zone was published in the same year as A Farewell to Arms, Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front – and maybe that was the trouble. Critical reception was mixed, and some people found Mary’s book too graphic. Personally I don’t think they could stomach the fact that this angry, beautiful, true book was written by a woman – and one who was there.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Bel Mooney 2015