The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in France — Reading Companion

They were very kind to me about it, but when I eventually grasped the system, I saw it was as though I had asked a Brass Hat whether he belonged to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told the sad tale of my _gaffe_ to the members of a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it must have been quite good for the Fannies ... but somehow it wasn't equally good for them when I timidly asked whether they were G.S.V.A.D.'s ... though they were also very kind to me about it.

The D. of T. motored me over to the Fannies' convoy, on a pale day of difficult sunlight. Is there anywhere in the world, I wondered, more depressing--more morbid--landscape, than that round Calais? It weighs on the soul as a fog upon the senses, and it seemed to me that only people of such a tenacious gaiety as the French or such an independence from environment as the British could survive there for long. I have seen country far flatter that was yet more wholesome, and I loathe flat country. There is something in the perpetual repetition of form in the country round Calais, the endless sameness of its differences, that is peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies blotted with paler clouds, endless rows of bare poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads unwinding for ever, acres of unbroken and sickly green, of new-turned earth of an equally sad brown ... and over all the trail of war, whose footprint is desolation. The occupation even of an army of defence means camp after camp; tin huts, wooden huts, zinc roofs; hospitals; barbed wire; mud. And, amidst all this, and the sudden reminders of more active warfare in houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble by a bomb, there are people working, year in, year out, undismayed by the sordid litter of it....

The saving of it all to the newcomer, though even that must pall on anyone too accustomed, is that, like Pater's Monna Lisa, upon this part of France "the ends of the world are come" ... (and who shall wonder if in consequence "her eyelids are a little weary"?). Inscrutable Chinamen, silent as shadows, flashing their sudden smiles, even more mysterious than their immobility, turned from their labour to watch the passing of the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each with a white man's vote, voluntarily enlisted for the Empire, swung along; vividly dark Portuguese, clad in grey, came down to their rest camps; Belgians trotted past with their little tassels bobbing from their jaunty caps. And, in great droves along the roads, or, sometimes, more solitary in the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze, their English escort shepherding.

The first time my companion told me we were coming on German prisoners, I shut my eyes, determined to open them unprejudiced, with a vision clear of all preconceptions; really, at the bottom of my heart, expecting that I should find them extraordinarily like anyone else.... But they were not. They were all so like each other, that by the time you had seen several hundreds you were still wondering confusedly whether they were all relations ... even my Western eye detected more difference between the types of Chinamen I met upon the road than in these Teutons. Of course, the round brimless cap has something to do with it, as has the close hair-crop, but when all is said, how much of a type they are, how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred to one purpose through generations! The outstanding ear, placed very low on the wide neck, the great development of cheekbones and of the jaw on a level with the ears, and then the sudden narrowing at the short chin ... and the florid bulkiness of them. A detachment of _poilus_ swung past in their horizon blue, and what a different type was flashed up against that background of square jowls, what a thin, nervous, wiry type, all animation....

The Germans were so exactly like all the photographs of prisoners one has seen in the daily papers that it was quite satisfying; I remember the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going to New England I saw a frame house and an old man with a goatee beard driving a spider-wheeled buggy, exactly like an illustration out of _Harper's_....

All of which--with the exception of the old man out of _Harper's_--is not as irrelevant as it may appear, in fact, is not irrelevant at all, for it is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole atmosphere, which goes to make life's background for everyone quartered hereabouts, and it is the background which, especially to memory in after years, makes so great a part of the whole.

As we went, remember, I still knew nothing about the work I had come out to see or the lives of those employed in it, I could only watch flashing past me the outward setting of those lives, and try, from the remarks of my companion, to build up something else. Yet what I built up from him, as what I had built up from the talk at my hotel the night before, was more the attitude of the men towards the women than the attitude of the women towards their life, though it was none the less interesting for that. And here I may as well record, what I found at the beginning--and I saw no reason to reverse my judgment later on--and that was no trace of sex-jealousy in any department whatsoever. I only met genuine unemotional, level-headed admiration on the part of the men towards the women working amongst them. The D. of T. was no exception, and opined that if the war hadn't done anything else, at least it had killed that irritating masculine "gag" that women couldn't work together. For that, after all, will always be to some minds the surprise of the thing--not that women can work with men, but that they can work together.

"People talk a lot," he said reflectively, "about what's to happen after the war ... when it's all over and there's nothing left but to go home. What's going to happen to all these girls, how will they settle down?"

"And how do you think...?"

"I don't think there'll be any trouble whether they marry or not. They will have had their adventure."

I looked at him and thought what a penetrating remark that was. Later, in view of what I came to think and be told, I wondered whether it were true after all; later still came to what seems to me the solution of it, or as much of a solution as that can be which still leaves one with an "I wonder...."

He told me tales of the Fannies who, being now under the Red Cross, came directly under his jurisdiction. He told me of a lonely outpost at the beginning of the war where there was only one surgeon and two Fannies, and how for twenty-four hours they all three worked, "up to the knees in blood," amputating, tying up, bandaging, without rest or relief. How the whole of the work of the convoying of wounded for the enormous Calais district was done entirely by the girls, of how, at this particular Fanny convoy to which we were going, they were raided practically every fine night, and that their camp was in about the "unhealthiest spot," as regarded raids, in the district. How during the last raid nine aerial torpedoes fell around the camp, and exploded, and one fell right in the middle and did not explode, or there would have been very little Fanny Convoy left ... but how it made a hole seven feet deep and weighed a hundred and ten pounds and stood higher than a stock-size Fanny. And, crowning touch of jubilation to the Convoy, of how the French authorities had promised to present it to them after it was cleaned out and rendered innocuous, to their no small contentment. As well-earned a trophy as ever decorated a mess-room....

He talked very like a nice father about to show off his girls and back them against the world.

We arrived on a great day for the Fannies--the famous Aerial Torpedo had preceded us by a bare hour. There it lay, on the floor of the mess-room, reminding me, with its great steel fins and long rounded nose, of a dead shark. The Commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive Fanny entering was greeted with the two words--"It's come." The D. of T. swore he would have it mounted on a brass and mahogany stand with an engraved plate to tell its history. Two strong Fannies reared it up, for even empty its weight was noteworthy, and it stood on its murderous nose with its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent and crumpled like a sheet of paper, above my head. A great trophy, and a hard-earned one.

This was the first camp I saw, and a very good one as camps go. (I merely add that latter sentence because personally I think any form of community life the most terrible of hardships.) It is rather pathetic to see how, in all the camps in France, the girls have managed to get not only as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never saw a woman's office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers; and window-boxes, flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated everywhere. Every office, too, though strictly businesslike, has chintz curtains of lovely colours. You can always tell a woman's office from a man's, which is a good sign, and should hearten the pessimists who cry that this doing of men's work will de-feminise the women.

The Commandant at this Fannies' camp took me into her office, and she and the D. of T.--who chimed in whenever he thought she was not saying enough in praise of his admired Fannies--told me the rough outlines of the history of the body since the beginning of the war. Though now affiliated to the Red Cross, they were an independent body before the war, and when hostilities broke out were a mounted corps, with horse ambulances. They offered themselves to the English authorities, were refused, and came out to the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais staffed by themselves for nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of 1916 they offered to drive motor ambulances and thus release Red Cross men drivers, and now they are running, with the exception of two ambulances for Chinese, the whole of the Calais district, and have released many A.S.C. men as well. It is a big area, with many outlying camps where there are detached units. As a rule, there is only one girl to each ambulance, but in very lonely spots the allowance is three girls to two cars. At St. Omer the authorities at first objected to having them, but now they have taken over the whole of the Red Cross and A.S.C. ambulances there.

At this camp that I saw, they have no day or night shifts, as there is not much night work except during a push, when everyone works night and day without more than a couple of hours' sleep snatched with clothes on--indeed, I heard of a convoy where for a fortnight the girls never took off their clothes, but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The other occasion when there is night work is when there is a raid. As I have said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot for bombs, and until just lately the girls had no raid-shelter. Now one has been dug for them, roofed with concrete and sandbags and earth, which would stand anything short of a direct hit from some such pleasant little missile as is now the pride of the camp.

But at first, even when the raid-shelter was built, there was no telephone extension to it from the office, and therefore the Commandant had to stay in the office with one other to take the telephone calls, then had to cross the open, in full raid, and going to the mouth of the shelter call out the names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the spirit of the girls, that never once, through all the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always answered to her name and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and went across to her car. But it seemed to me that it was as good to sit quietly in a matchboard office and await the messages, to say nothing of taking them across that danger zone. Now an order has gone forth that the ambulances are not to start till the raid is over, as they are too precious to be risked.

It is not a bad record, this continuous service of the Fannies since the outbreak of war, is it?

For remember it is not work that can be taken up and dropped. You sign on for six months at a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in the year. And the girls sign on, again and again; they are nearly all veterans at it. And, comfortable as the camp has been made--all the necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by the Red Cross--and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles--greatest blessing of all--decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of everything that can be done to make the girls happy and keep them well--it is still a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well for a week or even a fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years is not at all the same thing....

Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are all very well. Girls who go out rather delicate soon become strong in the hard open air life, and there has not been a single case of strain from working the heavy ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves, and all repairs with the exception of the very complicated cases, for which they are allowed to call on the help of two mechanics, but only after the request has gone through those in authority.

The domestic staff, with the exception of one Frenchwoman in the kitchen, is supplied by the girls themselves, and on this subject of domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straitened England--supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, etc.

When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a lordly dish and was told to take as much as I liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment. There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this camp the Commandant was known as "Boss," a respectful familiarity I did not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had even inscribed it on the door of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to remove forcibly the temptation for one person to use it all up. Perched on two stalks of stone stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to sit in with the knees up, but of no known human size. Inscribed above it--(under a fresco in black and white of cats in the moonlight)--are these touching words: "Do not turn on the hot water when the cold is off or the Boiler will Bust."

Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.

We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions; and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh treatment of a car--the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and every girl driving a car makes it--they come in, toss their caps down, brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover--and they don't mind.

It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ... and for the rest--I really think they are too intent on what they are doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is to be as free as a man.

It is a matter of temperament whether community life, with its enforced lack of individualism, or the intense refraction engendered by the fact of two people only living together in a solitude, is the more trying. In the former state one may hope to attain isolation from the very superabundance of personalities all around, but for the latter there is at least this to be said, that if the two feel like leaving each other alone there is no distraction of noise and presences. Either is a test to persons who are sensitive about their right to solitude, a greater one than to those who mix happily with their fellow humans. Both are to be found in their best expression among the English girls in France. From the Fanny convoy to a lonely rest station was a change that set me thinking over the problem, a problem in which I was a mere observer, but which all these girls had solved each in her different way, doubtless, but as far as I could tell, to the nicest hair-fine edge of success.