I do like it when my books overlap, especially when it happens serendipitously. I mentioned yesterday a few of the books I've been busy reading and two of them are books dealing with different aspects of WWI. Enid Bagnold's A Diary Without Dates is a true account of her experiences as a V.A.D. nurse written quite literally in the thick of things. It was published in 1918 just at the tail end of the war when it was still fresh in everyone's mind.
She writes from experience and those experiences (and memories) must have been painful. She saw first hand the suffering of wounded soldiers.
"'I'm in pain, Sister,' he said.
No one has every said that to me before in that tone.
He gave me the look that a dog gives, and his words had the character of an unformed cry.
He was quite alone at the end of the ward. The Sister was in her bunk. My white cap attracted his desperate senses.
As he spoke his knees shot out from under him with his restless pain. His right arm was stretched from the bed in a narrow iron frame, reminding me of a hand laid along a harp to play the chords, the fingers with their swollen green flesh extended across the strings; but of this hard his fingers were the slave, not the master.
'Shall I call your Sister?' I whispered to him.
He shook his head. 'She can't do anything. I must just stick it out. They're going to operate on the elbow, but they must wait three days first.'
His head turned from side to side, but his eyes never left my face. I stood by him, helpless, overwhelmed by his horrible loneliness.
Then I carried his tray down the long ward, and past the Sister's bunk. Within, by the fire, she was laughing with the M.O. and drinking a cup of tea--a harmless amusement.
'The officer in No. 22 says he's in great pain,' I said doubtfully. (It wasn't my ward, and Sisters are funny.)
'I know,' she said quite decently, 'but I can't do anything. He must stick it out.'
I looked through the ward once or twice during the evening, and still his knees, at the far end of the room, were moving up and down."
Imagine not being able to offer the men the slightest bit of relief. It somehow seems callow to be laughing, however harmless the amusement, under these circumstances. But perhaps the nurses and doctors would go slightly mad to be surrounded by so much pain and anguish and were in some need of relief themselves.
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Now Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness is a mostly imagined story set on the Homefront during the war. The fighting is held at arm's length, though it is always present in the background. Living on the Cornish coast there is the constant threat of U-boats, and every family feels the long reach of the war as their sons go off to fight. And when the lucky ones come back, they are still damaged in some way, in mind or body.
"And now we need more enemies. Even the Germans are not enough any more. So many men are gone, so many men are wounded. So many have their minds and spirits destroyed, and the news of this leaks from family to neighbor to acquaintance and spills into newsprint. Look at this group photograph of wounded veterans. Seven of them. Count the limbs. Between the seven of them they have one leg, and even that one leg lacks a foot. Their faces stare unreadably at the camera. Their hair is mostly parted to the side, but one has an exquisite, knife-sharp central parting. Two are moustached, five clean shaven. Their round collars are white and immaculate. Behind them dense, heavy summer foliage stirs a little in the breeze which also ruffles the hair of the one man who looks upward, away from the camera. He is perhaps the oldest of them, with a bony, vivid face. He must be thirty at least. He looks like a man standing on a cliff in the face of a sea-breeze, wondering if the weather is about to change. He cannot bear to look into the camera. On his far right there are two handsome legless boys, one with his hands folded in his lap, the other with his trunk perched on a high stool between wheelchairs, balancing himself with an arm round the shoulders of men on his right and left hand."
I'm sure I'll be reading more WWI novels and am looking forward to reading more from my list of primary source books about WWI. More about both these books soon. Next up will be Sebastian Barry and maybe Helen Zenna Smith.