Chapter 5 OUTPOSTS

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.

My first rest station was in an out-of-the-way little place, bleak and treeless, and consisted of a wooden hut built alongside the railway line. In this hut lived the two V.A.D.'s who ran the show-which means that they do the cooking for themselves and for the trains which they supplied with food, that they dispense medicines for the patients who appear daily at sick parade, and give first aid to accidents, change dressings if any cases on a hospital train need it, feed stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, whose hours often prevent them getting back to billets for regular meals, take in nurses who are either arriving or leaving by a night train and would otherwise have nowhere to go, and in their spare time-if you can imagine them having any-grow their own vegetables, and make bandages, pillows, and other supplies for the troops. Just two girls, voluntary unpaid workers, who are nurses, needle-women, doctors, chemists, gardeners and general servants, and whose work can never be done, or, when done, has to begin at once all over again. No recreation except what they find in books and themselves, nowhere to go, and that perpetual silhouette of railway trucks and the hard edge of station roof out of the window, of shabby houses and their own tiny yard at the back, the noise of shunting and train whistling in their ears night and day, and with it all-worst touch of the lot-to have to do their own work for themselves.

To slave for others all day as long as you can come in and find things ready for you at night-your hot cocoa in its cup and your hot-water bag-that great consolation of the women members of the B.E.F.-in your bed, is endurable. But to come in and have no cocoa if you don't make it yourself, no bag if you don't see to it-that is a different affair, and that is where these two girls seemed to me to touch a point that of necessity the others I had seen did not. And now that women are doing men's work it is to be supposed they have found out the value of meals and no longer look on an egg with one's tea as the greatest height to which nourishment need rise, and hence have honourably to set about cooking for themselves-and there is no woman but will understand the boredom of that-the rations that a paternal army insists on showering upon them. Under such circumstances to work is human, but to eat divine.

As I stepped out of the car at the door, feeling terribly impertinent at this rolling round in luxury to gaze at the work of my betters, one of the V.A.D.'s came to the door of the shanty to greet us. She was a fair creature, with windblown yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident had placed exactly like an old-time patch upon the curve of one flushed cheek. She was wrapped in a big pinafore of butcher blue, and explained that she was "cleaning up."

It all looked very clean to me, certainly the little dispensary, the room into which you first walked, was spotless, everything ranged ready for Sick Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining in the shaft of sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway. To the left was the kitchen, stone-floored, fitted with an English stove, to the right the tiny slip of sitting-room from which opened the two still narrower little bedrooms. That was all.

This is the atmosphere in which the two girls live, but, as usual, they have done everything that is possible with it. Brilliant curtains, pictures, rows of books-the rest stations keep up a sort of circulating library, exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a library also-and charming pottery ranged along the shelves. The rest stations rather make a point of their pottery. It is their tradition always to drink out of bowls instead of cups, and their plates have the triumphant Gallic cock, in bravery of prismatic plumage, striding across them.

After I had said good-bye to the golden girl of the inspired smut, I went on to a bigger rest station at a terminus and was in time to lunch there. It was a more sophisticated affair than that which I had left, yet when this rest station was started, at the beginning of the war, its habitation was a railway truck-for the romance of which some of those who were there in that first rush, when you were never off your feet for twenty-four hours at a time, sometimes sigh....

Now part of the station buildings has been partitioned off for them, and there is a fairly big dispensary, with a bed for dressings and accident cases, of which quite a number are brought in, a kitchen, a little dining-room where all the furniture is home-made-deep chairs out of barrels and the like-and behind that a big storeroom, crammed from floor to ceiling with stores. The girls do not sleep here, but in billets at the town, but they have to provide meals at any hour and meet all the ambulance trains with food and extra comforts.

We had a very good lunch, of stew and onions and potatoes, big bowls of steaming coffee, and a pudding with raisins, all cooked by one of the V.A.D. domestic staff, who always had to slip into her place last to eat it, and get out of it first to serve the next course. I saw only these two rest stations, each typical in its way, the one of the isolated and the other of the central kind, but they are scattered up and down the line, varying in character according to the needs of the particular place.

At one, for instance, there is a small ward attached, where slight cases, not bad enough to be admitted to the hospital, and yet requiring some attention, can be kept for a day or two, thus possibly avoiding serious illness. Near to this same one is a Labour Battalion, many of the men from which are out-patients whose medical inspection is held at the rest station. Near another is a large convalescent camp, the O.C. of which looks to the V.A.D.'s of the rest station for help in various ways.

At them all there is always the work of feeding the stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, who in times of pressure have to spend many hours at their work of unloading the trains without any chance of getting a regular meal. In the early days of the rest stations, when the ambulance trains were often merely improvised, food and dressings had to be provided for all the wounded on board, but now, when the working of the British Red Cross is as near perfection as any human organisation well can be, the men have every care taken of them on the perfectly-fitted trains. Yet there is much attention given to the sick and wounded of every nation who come in on the trains, attention chiefly consisting of the giving of extra comforts-cocoa, lemons, shirts, slippers, cigarettes, cushions-and the re-dressing of wounds, while a great deal as well as feeding them is done for the staffs of the trains, for whom, besides the lending library, an exchange of gramophone records and of laundry has been arranged.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about the rest stations is that they are one of the few points of contact between the members of the B.E.F. and the French population. Our camps, our hospitals, our motor convoys, are all little Englands in themselves, but every morning to the sick parade of these rest stations come not only the local V.A.D.'s and ambulance drivers, but the French civilian population as well, and in greater and greater numbers. Accidents are brought to a rest station very often in preference to being taken anywhere else, and anxious mothers bring Jean or Marie when a mysterious ailment shows itself in untoward spot or sneeze. The Gallic cock is more than a decoration as he strides across the pottery of the rest stations-he is become a symbol as well.

* * *