Chapter 9 EVENING

Grey rain was falling in straight thin lines upon the landscape, suddenly changed from its splendour of sun-bright sands and blue gleaming river to a blotted greyness. The rain danced over the trampled earth at the V.A.D. Motor Convoy Camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled water and making the great ambulances shine darkly. It was not a pleasant evening, being very cold withal, and snow fell amid the rain, but the Commandant took me out in her car to give me as comprehensive a view of E-- as could be seen in the gathering dusk.

When I say E-- I don't mean the little French fishing village, near which we did not go, but the whole vast town of huts set up by the B.E.F. For E-- is become a town of hospitals. We swung round corners, down long intersecting roads, about and about, and always there were hospitals, long rows of hospitals, each a little town in itself. I was reminded of nothing so much as the great temporary townships in the Canal Zone at Panama. There is just the same look of permanence combined with the feeling of it all being but temporary, while materially there is an air about board and tin buildings which is the same the world over. I almost expected to see a negro slouch along with his tools slung on his back, or to catch sight of the dark film of a mosquito-proof screen over doors and windows.

And the Motor Convoy do all of the ambulance work of the whole big district, which spreads considerably beyond even this great hospital town. There are about one hundred and thirty members in the camp and about eighty of the big Buick ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had seen, there are at E-- always day and night shifts, a girl being on night duty for one fortnight and on day duty for the next, except in times of stress, when everyone works day and night too.

We came in from our drive in the dark and I was shown to the room I was to have for as much of the night as there would be, considering I was going out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged to a V.A.D. at the moment home on leave, but she had left a nice selection of bed-books behind her, for which I was grateful, and there was a little electric reading lamp perched on the shelf above the bed. It was a tiny place, but it was all to myself.

At supper in the mess-room, with Mr. Leps, the Great Dane, lying by the stove and the cat curled between his outflung paws, we were waited on by a very pretty V.A.D. with dark eyes and a deeply moulded face compact of soft curves and pallor. Afterwards, the Commandant, a few of the girls, and I went into her room, which was a trifle larger than the ordinary run, and could be called a sitting-room at one end, for coffee and cigarettes. There was a concert on, and I was asked whether I would like to go to it, and, at the risk of seeming ungracious, I said if they didn't mind I would rather not. They said that they would rather not, too. I had seen the camp before dinner, had marvelled again how people ever got used to living in match-boxes and having to cross a strip of out-of-doors world to meals, and I was only wanting to sit still, and-if the Fates were kind-listen.

For all the time, as during the preceding days, I had felt the depression growing over me, the terror of this communal life which took all you had and left you-what? What corner of the soul is any refuge when solitude cannot be yours in which to expand it? What vagrant impulse can be cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge it?

These girls, these strong, clear-eyed creatures whom I had seen, day after day, who had at first impressed me only with their youth, their school-girl gaiety, their-horribile dictu-their "brightness"-was it possible that this life should really content them? I am not talking now, remember, of Waacs, girls mostly of the working class, or of those used to the sedentary occupation of clerkships, to whom this life is the biggest freedom, the greatest adventure, they have known. I am talking about girls of a class who, in the nature of things, lived their own lives, before the war, did the usual social round, went hither and thither with no man to say them nay-except a father, who doesn't count. Young femmes du monde, there is no adequate English for it, sophisticated human beings.

For women, even the apparently merely out-of-door hunting games-playing women, have arrived at a high state of sophistication; and this life they now lead is a community life reduced to its essentials. And a community life, though the building up of it marked the first stages of civilisation, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, anathema. Individuals had to combine to make the world, but now that it is made, all the instincts of the most highly developed in it are towards complete liberty as regards the amount of social intercourse in which he or she wishes to indulge. We have fought through thousands of years for a state of society so civilised that it is safe to withdraw from it and be alone without one's enemy tracking one down and hitting one over the head with an axe.

This right, fought for through the ascending ages, these girls have deliberately forgone, a every man in the Army has to forgo it also. Were they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like it, unthinkingly, without analysis?

I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys and camps, and I had wondered again as I saw over this convoy-saw the usual tiny cubicles, with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the shelf of books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot water, saw the two parks where the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy and huge in the growing gloom and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere smiling faces, uplifted voices, quick steps-yet I wondered.

Was it possible this malaise of community life never weighed on their souls? And, if possible-was it good that it should be so?

I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of my thought, of the depression which had been eating at me-not, as I tried to explain, that I didn't admire them all, Heaven knew, rather that I must be, personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted-how I wanted-to know how it was they did ... whether they really and actually could like it...? "Of course, I know," I ended apologetically, "some people like a community life--"

"They must be in love with it to like community life carried to this extent, then," said one swiftly, and a small, fair creature, with a ribbon bound round her hair, agreed with her. She interested me, that fair girl, because she was one of those people who feel round for the right word until they have found it, however long it takes; impervious to cries of "Go on, get it off your chest," she still sat quietly and wrestled until the word came which exactly expressed the fine edge of her meaning. She knew so well what she wanted to say that she didn't want to say it any differently.

They all talked, each throwing in a sentence to the discussion now and again, but not one of them grumbled. Yet they all showed plainly that it was not a blind enjoyment-or, indeed, much enjoyment at all-that they found in the life. They were reasoning, critical, analytic, and extraordinarily dispassionate.

I can't put that conversation down for two reasons, the first being that one doesn't print the talk of one's hostesses, and the second that it would be too difficult to catch all those little half-uttered sentences, those little alleys of argument that led to understanding, but led elliptically, as is the way of either sex when it is unencumbered by the necessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension of the other. But out of that hour emerged, shining, several things which we in England ought to realise better, and which lifted for me that cloud of depression which had lowered over me all the days in France.

These are not bouncing school-girls, "good fellows" having the time of their lives, as vaguely those in England consider them, they are, thank goodness, finely-evolved human beings who no more enjoy "brightness" than you or I would. And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was so "bright" which had oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of finding that it wasn't so, that what I had feared I should be forced to take as the unreflecting school-girl humour of overgrown school-girls was only a protective aspect, that behind it the eyes of not only sane but subtle young women looked out with amusement and patience upon a world determined to see in them, first and last, "brightness"!

Perhaps five per cent.-such was the estimate flung out into the talk-of the girls really do enjoy it, the ghastly, prolonged, cold-blooded picnic of it, perhaps five per cent. really are having the "time of their lives," but the rest of them have moments when it hardly seems possible to stick it. Yet they stick it, and stick it in good comradeship, which is the greatest test of the lot. Their salvation lies in the separate rooms-small, cold, but a retreat from the octopus of community life....

WAACS IN THE BAKERY

WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES

WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SANDBAGS

That concert which I had felt so apologetic not to attend-what a relief it had been to them that I didn't want to, didn't want to get "local colour" and write of them as being so jolly, so gay! For this again is typical-there are perhaps five girls out of every hundred who enjoy being amused, to whom it is all part of the life which they actually love, but from the greater part goes up the cry, "Work us as hard as you like, but for Heaven's sake don't try and amuse us!"

For, of course, it takes differing temperaments differently. To some community life is little short of a nightmare, but to all there come moments when it is exceedingly maddening. In those moments your own room or a big hot bath are wonderful ways of salvation.

As we talked, from A. came the theory that she was only afraid it would prevent her ever loving motors again; and she had always adored motors as the chief pleasure of life, before they became the chief business. B. could not agree to that. C., who did agree, pointed out that it was on the same principle as never wanting to go back to a place, no matter how beautiful it was, if you had been very unhappy there. Even after your unhappiness was dead and buried it would always spoil that place for you.... B. said "Yes" to that, but argued that it would not spoil the beauty of other places for you, which would be the equivalent of this life spoiling all motors for A., after the war.

The flaws in the analogy were not pursued, for D. advanced an interesting theory that the hardest part of it was that you were so afraid of what you might be missing all the time somewhere else. She argued that the difficulty with her had always been to make up her mind to any one course of action, because it shut off all the others, and, like so many of us, she wanted everything....

A. said that shilly-shalliers never got anywhere, but I maintained with D. that it wasn't shilly-shallying, which is another sort of thing altogether, it was the passionate desire to get the most out of life, to discover what was most worth while. "I want to spend ten years in the heart of China more than to do any one thing," I pointed out, "but I sha'n't do it because when I came out I shouldn't be young any more. Therefore the ten years in China will have to go to a man, because it doesn't matter so much to a man." This life in the B.E.F. was D.'s ten years in China, not because-heaven forbid-it is going to last ten actual years, or even that, as far as I could see, it was ageing her at all, but simply because while she was doing it she couldn't be doing anything else. She had had to burn her boats.

Now that, to a certain temperament, means a great deal, and it is one of the things, if not the chief thing, that marks service in France off from equally hard work at home, and makes it, for reasons outside the work, so much harder.

All natures are not the same as D.'s, of course. To one girl a certain thing is the hardship, to another a different thing. But the point is that the hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to me it was the most exquisite discovery I could have made in the whole of France. For the finer the instrument, the more fine it is of it to perform the work, and the more finely will that work, in the long run, be done.

* * *