The Forbidden Zone E-Book

Mary Borden

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 179

Beschreibung

Mary Borden worked for four years in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theater of the First World War. This beautifully written book, to be read alongside the likes of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, is a collection of her memories and impressions of that experience. Describing the men as they march into battle, engaging imaginatively with the stories of individual soldiers, and recounting procedures at the field hospital, the author offers a perspective on the war that is both powerful and intimate.

Leseprobe

THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

MARY BORDEN

EDITED BYHAZEL HUTCHISON

FOREWORD BYMALCOLM BROWN

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Prologue

Part One

The North

Belgium

Bombardment

The Captive Balloon

The Square

Sentinels

The Regiment

The Beach

Moonlight

Enfant de Malheur

Rosa

Part Two

The Somme

The City in the Desert

Conspiracy

Paraphernalia

In the Operating Room

Blind

The Priest and the Rabbi

The Two Gunners

Glossary

Biographical note

Modern Voices

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street

www.hesperus.press

The Forbidden Zone first published 1929

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2008

The Forbidden Zone © Patrick Aylmer, 1929, 2008

Foreword © Malcolm Brown, 2008

Introduction © Hazel Hutchison, 2008

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-184391-443-3

ISBN (e-Book): 978-1-84391-996-4

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

FOREWORD

It is a rare but rewarding experience to open an unfamiliar book on a familiar subject and recognise at once a writer of genuine originality. For many years I have prowled the labyrinthine literature of the First World War, visiting and revisiting the established greats − Remarque, Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Owen, plus numerous other ‘names’ of proven quality − but also searching for new voices, the almost forgotten, the hitherto unheard. I have made a particular point of giving space in my various publications to the rank and file, the ‘ordinary’ partici- pants of both sexes, whose eagerness to tell it how it was in the white heat of war might otherwise have ended only in silence, their words sadly lost in a cultural no man’s land.

And suddenly I find myself introduced to the brief memoir of an American nurse who spent the best part of four years behind the lines in the Belgian or the French sectors of the Western Front, whose name was unknown to me, and I am thunder- struck. This is the literary equivalent of finding a gold mine while rooting for gold dust. Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, I have the temerity to claim, is a work with a touch of genius. A multum in parvo masterpiece.

Look, for example, at the early section entitled, simply, ‘Bombardment’. The writer evokes a beautiful new dawn; a tiny speck appears in the sky, an aeroplane flying so high its engine cannot be heard; it is the only moving element in an otherwise static, peaceful scene. Below is a sleeping seaside town, unaware that that aerial speck is about to signal to a great gun hiding some way off in the Belgian sand dunes an instruction to open fire. As the town is savaged and mutilated, its populace turned into terrified crawling vermin, the aeroplane darts down and laughs, teasing its victims in their desperation. Then the speck in the sky disappears in the morning sunshine and the town is left in convulsions. Published in 1929, Mary Borden’s book is surely, in its minuscule, cut-diamond way, a pre-vision of Guernica, years before that phenomenon, as interpreted by one of the last century’s greatest artists, stunned an alarmed and nervous world.

Or take the section entitled ‘Enfant de Malheur’. Here Mary Borden gives a gripping account of the last days of a French ‘poilu’ (who has those words tattooed on his arm, plus for good measure the life-size head of a woman on his back). The phrase enfant de malheur translates as ‘child of misfortune’, but this seems an inadequate label for this snarling, foul-mouthed ex- criminal from Paris, one of twenty ‘assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs’ (to quote Mary Borden), who had been sentenced to penal servitude for life, only to be conscripted on the outbreak of war into one of France’s Bataillons d’Afrique. Born killers, these convict soldiers go ‘over the top’ into action like wolfhounds, but now, terribly wounded, already missing one leg and with the other under threat, this man is facing death. Deeply Catholic at heart, he is terrified of damnation, and Mary Borden tells in vivid detail the attempt by two of her colleagues, Pim, the daughter of an Archdeacon brought up in an English cathedral city and trained in Edinburgh, and Guerin, a French medical orderly who is also a priest mobilised for the war, to reconcile him to the inevitable. Despite his wounds, the poilu remains an incredibly handsome human being, with the body of a Greek athlete and the face of an angel. By contrast, Guerin is a singularly unprepossessing, unheroic figure, notable for his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince-nez. Yet it is Guerin who brings the enfant de malheur through the long ordeal, Guerin to whom he pours out his ‘dark, secret, haunting memories’, Guerin who can finally claim, as he dies, that ‘he is safe’. It is an agonising struggle with echoes in the literature of Europe; a story out of Russia or Ireland, or more particularly, from the depths of France’s own long battle between the sacred and the profane. Here it is, in Mary Borden’s lucid words, in a few crisp pages.

What is more, it is clear that Mary Borden knows what she is doing. She is not a fine writer by accident, or default. She is not an inspired primitive. She is clearly in full command of the literary zone in which she is working. She comes closer to Britain’s national experience when she finds herself in the region of the Somme, though here again she is not serving behind British lines. She has only one direct contact with British soldiers, a brief episode at the very end of her narrative entitled ‘The Two Gunners’. The story concerns two casualties, both very big men, brought to her field hospital seriously wounded. One dies, the other survives. She comes away from the encounter with two telling pieces of Tommy jargon, both spoken by the soldier who came through: the injunction to his pal to ‘Stick it’ − a much used slogan in the world of the trenches − as he is carried off to the operating room, and his own answer to Mary Borden when she asks how he is next morning. He replies: ‘A1 at Lloyd’s’. With her brilliant ear for language, she has caught the Tommy spirit of the time to a ‘T’. Those two answers sum up perfectly the dogged, we’re-not-here-to-be-defeated, curse-the-Kaiser attitude of the ordinary British soldier slogging on and on through a hard- fought war.

Her flair for words is found at its best, however, in the masterly section entitled ‘In the Operating Room’. A particularly destruct- ive action has produced a mass crop of casualties and more are coming in all the time. There are three seriously wounded men on three operating tables, with other cases constantly clamouring for attention. In a sustained piece of dialogue several pages long she reports, apparently verbatim, the exchanges between the three surgeons and the three patients, with occasional interven- tions ascribed to ‘Nurse’, maybe or maybe not herself. Non-stop, the rhythmic pounding of the guns some ten miles off provides a menacing background. The section reads like a radio drama of enormous power long before that genre was invented, which makes me speculate that this book is not only a wonderful read but could also be a prime candidate for exploitation in other media.

If there is one further comment that I would like to make it is this: I am most grateful that despite being a male historian of the First World War, I was asked to write a Foreword to a work by a female writer. I was brought up under the shadow of that war. Born in 1930, a mere twelve years after the Armistice which drew it to a close, I have been conscious of its looming presence since my childhood. My father served in France, as a member of the medical corps not a combatant; my mother never ceased to mourn a favourite cousin who had joined the especially tragic category of the missing with no known grave; and in the village where I grew up it seemed almost normal that houses I visited should have on their walls photographs of family members who had left to fight for King and Country and had not come back. When I became a television documentary maker at the BBC, with ambitions ultimately to turn myself into a historian, I knew that sooner or later the so-called ‘Great War’ would become a prime subject.

As it happened, the tipping point when it came was the purchase of a book written not by a fighting soldier but by a volunteer female nurse. The year was 1975, the place of pur- chase a huge, rambling second-hand bookshop at Westward Ho! in north Devon. My father, who had become a minister of religion, wished to visit the shop to look at theology books; while he did so I scanned the shelves offering history and bio- graphy. There I found a copy of Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain, a genuine first edition for sale at a price which showed into what a cultural trough the war had fallen at that juncture: 50 pence. (This was a time when it was possible to state that the battlefields of the Western Front were rarely visited, a claim that would be impossible to make today.) I devoured the book, scoured a clutch of others relating to more military aspects, and eagerly proposed to my superiors in BBC Television that I should write and direct a major documentary to commemor- ate the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, which would fall in the summer of 1976. My request was accepted.

This was the beginning of a long process which has governed the pattern of my life ever since. When, ten years later, I left the media, it was to become a historian at the Imperial War Museum. My special mandate was to write a series of books about the First World War, which would use as their principal seed-corn the words and memories of those who were there.

In view of the forgoing it might be possible to claim that the key which in my case opened the door into the sad, yet compulsively fascinating territory of that war was compassion as much as combat. Faithful to that unusual initiation, since mutating into a historian I have in my various writings paid regular tribute to the labours of nurses, and other women who volunteered for service ‘in the field’, finding myself particularly impressed by the stories of those who came from other cultures or countries not directly involved. Thus when I was invited to contribute a Foreword to this new edition of The Forbidden Zone, by the Chicago-born Mary Borden, I leapt at the chance, even though I was being offered, as it were, a blind date with a total stranger. Celebrating her remarkable contribution to the literature of that conflict, today not far off a century in the past, is a task that I have been delighted, and moved, to undertake.

– Malcolm Brown, 2008

INTRODUCTION

In 1914, Mary Borden was twenty eight. A rich, young heiress from Chicago married to a British missionary, an aspiring writer and the mother of three small children, she would not have been anybody’s first choice as the director of a military field hospital. Nevertheless, after the First World War broke out, Borden volunteered with the French Red Cross. She had no nursing experience, but she spoke a little French, and un- like many volunteers, she was willing to work on a ward for typhoid victims in a makeshift hospital in a Dunkirk casino. She quickly discovered why this was an unpopular posting. The hospital was badly equipped and hampered by bureau- cracy. The mortality rate was high. The smell of gas gangrene was overpowering. Borden wrote to General Joffre offering to fund and manage her own hospital unit for the French Army. By the end of 1914, already over half a million troops were sick or wounded. General Joffre was hardly in a position to refuse.

In 1915, Borden took charge of L’Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 near Rousbrugge in Flanders. She moved several times during the war. During the Somme offensive in the summer of 1916, she relocated with most of her medical team to the Hospital of Evacuation 32 at Bray-sur-Somme. This was a dangerous location, so close to the front line that it was often within range of shell and artillery fire. Resources were tight. At Bray, Borden had a team of only twelve nurses, plus surgeons and orderlies, to care for over 800 badly wounded men. She estimated that in six months the hospital received 25,000 patients. Despite this, four out of five of those who made it as far as Borden’s hospital survived, a statistic of which she was proud. However, she was also profoundly troubled by the ironies of nursing in wartime. Men who recov- ered were sent back to their regiments to face death all over again. Those too damaged to fight were sent home disabled to face life.

Much of The Forbidden Zone was written during the war in rare snatches of time between shifts and during occasional rounds of leave in Paris. Borden’s letters show that she sent a manuscript to Collins for publication in August of 1917, but it was perhaps naive of Borden to think that the book could be published while the war was still in progress. Like many other graphic accounts of the war, it was not printed because the content was too controversial and potentially damaging to wartime morale. However, Borden did publish some poetry and a short prose sketch in the English Review in 1917. The Forbidden Zone was not published until 1929, within months of some of the best-known texts of the war, such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of An Infantry Officer (1930). By the late 1920s, the political climate had changed, and the uncensored story of the war was beginning to emerge. However, the published version of Borden’s book was very different from the text she had sent to Collins. She heavily revised her original manu- script and added five new stories: ‘Enfant de Malheur’, ‘Rosa’, ‘Blind’, ‘The Priest and the Rabbi’ and ‘The Two Gunners’. These were written from memory or reconstructed from incid- ents recounted in letters to her lover and later second husband, Edward Spears, a young English officer who she fell in love with during the war. The first edition of The Forbidden Zone also included five long free-verse poems, including new versions of the four published in 1917.

Borden described The Forbidden Zone as ‘a collection of fragments’, and it is true that the book does not present a linear account of the war – much to the annoyance of early reviewers who criticised its ‘ugly’ images, its ‘mannerisms’ and ‘repetitions’. However, this effect was deliberate. As Borden points out in her Preface, the war itself was such a ‘great con- fusion’ that any attempt to order it would have been dishonest. Her fragmentary method, with its clipped sentences and unusual punctuation, creates a stylish and powerful text. The short sketches of the war zone catch vivid details and intimate encounters with the clarity of black and white photography. Her sharp eye for absurdity snatches wry humour from the darkest of settings: surgeons discussing oysters over a haemor- rhaging lung, an amputated knee nearly served up for supper, a stray English patient who describes his surroundings as a top-class luxury liner, ‘A1 at Lloyd’s’. Borden’s detached narra- tive also allows her to stand back and observe the warscape as though seeing it for the first time, attempting to find some explanation for the vast, surreal scene of devastation and the relentless noise of the guns:

You tell me there is no sea over there. But the roar? Surely there are waves breaking, and this desert is wet as if a great wave had just receded, leaving the muddy bottom of the earth uncovered. A bare sea bottom, strewn with bits of iron, coils of wire, stones. No sign of life, no fish fossils or rotting sea-weed, no plant of any kind, not a blade of green; a dead sea must have lain here.

For Borden, however, the war is ultimately a human event. Her stark portrayal of the individual ironies and traumas of the wounded men sets The Forbidden Zone among the great texts of the First World War. Borden’s theme is the courage of humanity in the face of death, and this theme speaks as eloquently from a hospital bed as it does from a front-line trench. For many years, The Forbidden Zone has been known to relatively few readers. Only sections of it have been reprinted, mostly in anthologies of women’s war writing. This new edition gives another generation of readers the chance to discover it.

After the close of the Second World War, Borden looked back over the six-year conflict in a volume of autobiography titled Journey Down a Blind Alley (1946). Then in her fifties, Borden spent that war running another hospital unit, mostly in North Africa with Free French forces. The years 1939–1945 were rich and quick-moving, full of vivid scenery, friendship, rivalry and danger. However, nothing seems to have quite recreated the intensity of the relationship with the French soldiers of the First World War, which she recalled passionately thirty years after the Somme:

I did not count the number who died as I knelt beside their stretchers. Great strong broken men who apologised in whis- pers for the trouble they gave in dying; slender boys whom I held in my arms while they cried for their mothers and who mistook me for some anxious woman I would never see; old patient humble men, as old as my old ones, who went quietly, so modestly; the French poilus of 1914–18. I see them still, marching up the long roads of France in their clumsy boots and their heavy grey-blue coats that were too big for them; dogged, patient, steady men, plodding to death in defence of their land. I shall never forget them.

Mary Borden did not forget the men who fought the Great War. Anyone who reads The Forbidden Zone is not likely to forget them either.

– Hazel Hutchison, 2008

To the Poilus

who came that way in

1914–1918

I have not invented anything in this book. The sketches and poems were written between 1914 and 1918, during four years of hospital work with the French Army. The five stories I have written recently from memory; they recount true episodes that I cannot forget.

I have called the collection of fragments The Forbidden Zone because the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire where I was stationed went by that name in the French Army. We were moved up and down inside it; our hospital unit was shifted from Flanders to the Somme, then to Champagne, and then back again to Belgium, but we never left La Zone Interdite.

To those who find these impressions confused, I would say that they are fragments of a great confusion. Any attempt to reduce them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify them. To those on the other hand who find them unbearably plain, I would say that I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a nearer approach to the truth.

I have dared to dedicate these pages to the poilus who passed through our hands during the war, because I believe they would recognise the dimmed reality reflected in these pictures. But the book is not meant for them. They know, not only everything that is contained in it, but all the rest that can never be written.

The Author

PART ONE

THE NORTH

BELGIUM

Mud: and a thin rain coming down to make more mud.

Mud: with scraps of iron lying in it and the straggling frag- ment 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.

Back there is France, just behind the windmill. To the north, the coast; a coast without a port, futile. On our right? That’s the road to Ypres. The less said about that road the better: no one goes down it for choice – it’s British now. Ahead of us, then? No, you can’t get out that way. No, there’s no frontier, just a bleeding edge, trenches. That’s where the enemy took his last bite, fastened his iron teeth, and stuffed to bursting, stopped devouring Belgium, left this strip, these useless fields, these crumpled dwellings.

Cities? None. Towns? No whole ones. Yes, there are half a dozen villages. But there is plenty of mud, and a thin silent rain falling to make more mud – mud with things lying in it, wheels, broken motors, parts of houses, graves.