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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
In 'WAAC' by the mysterious author Anonymous, readers are taken on a thrilling journey through a dystopian society where the boundaries between reality and virtual reality blur. The book explores themes of identity, technology, and the power dynamics at play in a hyperconnected world. Anonymous' writing style is fast-paced and immersive, keeping readers on the edge of their seats as they delve deeper into the dark underbelly of this futuristic society. The novel is reminiscent of classic dystopian literature such as 'Brave New World' and '1984', but Anonymous brings a fresh perspective to the genre with their unique storytelling approach. The enigmatic author known only as Anonymous has sparked intrigue and speculation in literary circles with 'WAAC'. It is rumored that the author's own experiences with technology and society may have influenced the creation of this thought-provoking novel. Their anonymity adds an air of mystery to the work, inviting readers to question the true origins of 'WAAC' and the motivations behind its creation. For fans of dystopian fiction and speculative literature, 'WAAC' by Anonymous is a must-read. With its gripping storyline, insightful commentary on modern society, and mysterious authorship, this book is sure to captivate readers and leave them pondering the implications of our increasingly digital world.
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WAAC
Table of Contents
THE WOMAN'S STORY OF THE WAR
CHAPTER I
"Connie, we are going into the war!"
I can see my old father still, standing there at the open door of the library with a peculiar expression in his eyes, an expression I had seen in his eyes only once or twice before. Once, when he had just heard that his sister had been killed in a railway accident near Shrewsbury. Once, when he had broken to us the news that he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange.
He and I had always been such comrades, such confidants. Far closer confidants than he and my mother were. Perhaps because I was his only daughter and the youngest of the family.
My father was a parson living in a Rectory in the Midlands, six miles from the nearest town, and two from the little wayside railway station. My eldest brother was in the Navy. My second brother a lawyer in the Far East. Another, an actor of sorts in provincial touring companies. My youngest brother, an infantry subaltern—gazetted barely a year.
I was nineteen and had no occupation. I did nothing because my mother was old-fashioned (even for 1914), and considered it bad form, "unladylike," for a girl situated as I was to do anything. At least anything useful. My job was to marry. I suppose that had been my mother's "job" at my age.
My father came into the room, shut the door and sat down. Soon he got up and began to walk to and fro without speaking. I knew that when he did that it meant that he had something on his mind and was turning it over and didn't want to be spoken to. So I said nothing.
"I can't realize it, Connie," he said at last. "It is too frightful."
"The grocer said to me yesterday," I replied, "that in any case the war would be over in six months, so that even if we were dragged into it it wouldn't matter much."
"Damn the grocer!" he exclaimed hotly. "That was what they said when the Boer War broke out—'a punitive expedition that would be over by Christmas.' You shouldn't listen to what people of that sort say. They just foretell what they hope will happen."
My mother came in. She was one of those placid women whom nothing ever agitates, because they lack imagination. When my father told her the news her only comment was:
"Well, I suppose what must be must be. God knows best. I hope they won't send Henry out (Henry was my soldier brother), and that the Navy will keep out of it. The fighting will all be on the other side of the Channel, won't it?"
My mother was a good woman in the ordinary acceptation of that misbegotten phrase, and I am sure she did her best for us all according to her lights. But somehow she and I never hit it off. We were so different temperamentally. Neither of us was to blame.
During the next fortnight or more I bicycled into the town every afternoon to try to find out what was happening, for the newspapers had all at once grown reticent. There were Union Jacks everywhere, and one met little parties of young men marching along the streets, often in their shirt-sleeves—the weather was intolerably hot—with sloped broom-sticks on their shoulders to represent rifles. They marched in step and looked flushed and excited.
But everybody was more or less excited, and many looked harassed. Everybody asked everybody else what was going to happen, and of course nobody could say. But on one point practically all the aborigines were unanimous. The war could not last long.
"Well, Miss Connie, and what are you going to do?"
I was reading a telegram stuck up in the post-office window when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow. The speaker was an old friend of my father's, one of the County people, with a nice place three miles from the town. He had taught me to ride when I was a tot, but since I had grown up had always called me "Miss Connie" in the old-fashioned way.
I turned to him, smiling. He was rather an old dear.
"Do?" I said. "I don't understand. There is nothing I can do—except, I suppose, knit socks and mufflers and help in jumble sales. That is what I am told all of us will be expected to do presently. Sit at home and knit while our men are fighting for us. It sounds heroic?"
But the old man was serious.
"You will have to do a great deal more than that before this war is over," was his answer, as he looked at me hard. "This is going to be a European war and it will last for years. Lord Roberts, poor old Bobs, one of my dearest friends, warned us long ago that it would come, and nobody believed him—people made fun of his prophecy. He and I were talking about it only the other day. But you—I thought you went through a course of first aid and nursing after you left school?"
"Yes, I did, but...."
"But what?"
I felt embarrassed. It had not occurred to me to think that the course I had gone through might now prove of use. I knew that some girls of my age, and younger, as well as much older women, were volunteering to help in various ways....
And then my mother. What would she say if I hinted that I would like to do something to help? The idea would shock her. As yet none of "the County" had enlisted as nurses or volunteered to do anything really useful. It had not become fashionable. It was a thing which as yet "wasn't done" by people like us. Later, of course, the illustrated weeklies became crowded with full-page portraits of Society women and County folk looking ravishing in their becoming nurse's uniforms.
"Lady A has joined the ranks of our Noble War Nurses."
"The Countess of B, who is nursing in Blank Hospital."
"Viscountess C, an indefatigable Red-Cross Worker."
And so on. But that time was not yet.
"Well?"
I looked up. The old man's kindly eyes were gazing into mine.
"You ought to do your bit, Miss Connie. You'll be made to later. Why not start at once? Why wait until all the stupid women who inhabit this county of ours agree that it is 'the right thing to do' just because they read in the newspapers that London Society has begun to bestir itself? If you would like to help in a hospital, for instance, I could help you with an introduction; I don't say they would make you a nurse at once, you might first of all be put to scrub floors and things. You needn't decide here and now. Just think it over when you get home, and if the idea appeals to you—ring me up. I know that your father would approve. What age are you?"
I told him.
He smiled. "Still, I dare say it can be managed."
My mother was distinctly antagonistic when the suggestion was made to her that I wanted to help in a hospital. It was my father who broached the subject on my behalf, and who argued with my mother that it was a thing I ought to do. In a month or two everybody—by which he meant all the County people—would be helping in one way or another, and so...
Later he took me aside.
"I have talked your mother round," he said. "And now I want to talk to you. As you know, Connie, I have not been a parson all my life—I sometimes feel I ought not to be one at all, as I was pretty much of a rolling stone years before you were born, and my outlook on life is rather a peculiar outlook for a parson to have. Connie, of course you know that you are an exceptionally pretty and attractive girl—I talk to you quite frankly—and therefore you will need to be careful. Though I was never a soldier, after trading mules to our Government, in New Orleans, during the first year of the Boer War, I went on to Capetown, as I know I have told you before. From there I moved about a good deal in South Africa and saw much of what was going on—more than I ought to have seen. I saw more than a little of the women who went out there to become hospital nurses and what not, and some of them were pretty disgusting.
"And so it will be in this war, only probably more so, and I therefore want to put you on your guard. You will have to take the rough with the smooth, by that I mean mix with the good and the bad, and with your personal attractiveness you will for certain have plenty of the wrong sort hanging around you. Connie, for God's sake be careful. I know your temperament probably better than you yourself do. The men, too, that you will meet. War changes some men's natures completely, makes some of us beasts, at any rate for a time. You have seen little of the world, and nothing of a war world. You most likely think that all gentlemen, as we call them, the type of man you meet here in the hunting-field, are underneath what they appear on the surface to be. They most likely are—in peace-time. Yet in a war atmosphere they change—nearly all of them change. Even Henry I wouldn't trust. By the way, I have a telegram from him. He is coming here to-morrow for one night. Next week—well, next week he goes out to France."
I saw my father wince, and something seemed to clutch me inside. Yet of course we had both known that Henry would have to go. I suppose, however, we realized in that instant that this brief visit might mark his parting from us—for ever. I quickly changed the subject.
Henry arrived in the highest spirits. Like all the young subalterns at that time, he looked on the war merely as a great adventure. He could talk of nothing else. All he hoped was that he would get to France in time to see "something of the fun."
I wonder if young men have any sort of imagination? Though younger than Henry, I found it impossible to think of the war as anything but a horrible and stupid slaughter of human beings who could have no reason for hating or wanting to kill each other individually. Naturally I realized that England would, under existing circumstances, have been for ever disgraced had she decided to sit on the fence. But that realization did not make war seem more justifiable.
"What about Lionel?" Henry said suddenly. Lionel was our actor brother. "He'll join up, I suppose?"
I said nothing for some moments. Lionel had written to me the week before saying that he could not possibly cancel his contract—his tour was due to continue for another seven weeks.
"You see, I am playing second lead," the letter went on, "and if Jones joins up, as he talks of doing, I shall step into his shoes, as I am understudying him. I can't afford to let slip such an opportunity for advancement and increased salary. The war can't last, everybody says so, so by the time I had finished my training—-if I enlisted—everything would most likely be over and peace have been declared..." and so it continued.
"Lionel has not yet decided what he will do," I lied. "He is on a good job, and good jobs are hard to get."
"To hell with good jobs!" Henry exclaimed. "Read that."
He fished a crumpled telegram out of his pocket and pushed it across to me. It was from our lawyer brother in the Far East:
"Returning England immediately joining up. "TOM."
Henry spent most of the day with me—he was my favourite brother—and on the following morning I saw him off at the wayside railway station: he had parted from our parents at home.
Even after all these years I can remember that parting on the deserted little platform, and his last kiss. I believed I knew then that I should never see him again.
My father's old friend was as good as his word, and in less than a few weeks he rang me up to say that everything was arranged. I was to report as soon as possible at an address in London, which he gave me, and ask to see Lady G.
She was a tall, austere-looking woman of few words. She bowed slightly, pointed to a chair, and proceeded to ask me a number of pertinent questions.
"Say Yes, or No, nothing more," she said without looking up from the paper on which she was writing my replies. When she had finished she folded the paper, handed it to me, and said:
"Take that to——" she told me an address. "The matron there will see you. Good afternoon."
Not a smile. Not a kind word. I might have been applying for some lucrative post, instead of offering my services gratuitously and signing away my liberty for an indefinite period.
Not until long afterwards did I discover what a kind and gentle woman Lady G was, and that on the very day she interviewed me she had been notified of the death in action of her eldest son. Before the war was over she lost two more sons, the only two she had left.
I was sent to a hospital outside London and detailed to wash dishes. When I had been there less than a week I was ordered to wash a corpse—the first corpse I had ever seen. After that I was put in charge of some ducks and geese and young turkeys. In a few weeks' time I got orders to go to France.
In the boat several men scraped acquaintance with me. They were not in uniform, and I couldn't quite place them. They were extremely polite, however, and helped me with my hand baggage while we were landing. I was not wearing any uniform, so was astonished when one of them offered to give me a lift in his taxi to the address that I had told him I wanted to go to.
When we had gone a little way he called to the driver to stop.
"This is F——'s Bar," he said. "I have to see somebody here, but I won't keep you waiting more than a minute or two."
I had waited barely a minute when the man returned with two other men in mufti, one of them a Frenchman.
They raised their hats, and I felt the Frenchman's eyes literally glued on my face.
"You speak French?" he inquired in French. I told him in French that I did.
"Will you get out and come this way, please?"
I began to feel uneasy.
"But why?" I asked.
"It is necessary," he replied in a sudden tone of authority.
Rather nervously I got out of the taxi. The Frenchman and his companion were talking in undertones. The man who had brought me had gone back into the bar.
They got one on each side of me.
"We have to cross the road," the Frenchman said.
"But my baggage," I exclaimed. "I can't leave it in the taxi unattended. It may be stolen. The driver may go off with it."
"The driver will not go off with it, Mademoiselle," was the prompt reply.
We walked about a hundred yards along the street, turned to the right, and went into an hotel. The Frenchman whispered something to the manager, who replied "Parfaitement." Then the three of us entered the lift.
Some moments later we were alone in a small sitting-room.
"Will Mademoiselle please take off her hat?"
I took it off. By this time I was growing alarmed. Were they going to abduct me? I knew now that the polite stranger in the boat had not been polite for nothing. When offering me that lift in his taxi he had some definite reason for doing so.
The Frenchman's companion, a Jewish looking person, opened a large dispatch case which he carried, and produced from it an album. This he laid on the table and opened. It contained pages of photographic portraits, with writing under each.
When he had turned over several pages he stopped and put his finger on one of the photographs, and said; "This one."
I could see that it was the photograph of a woman.
The Frenchman pulled a small magnifier out of his pocket, scrutinized the portrait with it for some moments, then took a step towards me and began to examine my face with the magnifier.
Then he examined my ears and my throat and the back of my neck in the same way.
"Tiens!" he exclaimed, smiling for the first time. "C'est drôle!"
Yet apparently he was not completely satisfied, for he went on to ask me a number of questions—one or two were rather embarrassing questions. And then it suddenly dawned on me what was happening, or had happened.
I felt intensely relieved.
"May I see the portrait of my double?" I asked.
"Mais non, Mademoiselle. C'est defendu."
And he shut the album.
After that both men were most polite. I had told them at the outset who I was and what I had come over for, and had offered to show them my papers. They had replied that they did not wish to see my papers. Now they begged me to join them in an apéritif, and thinking that if I did so it might help to cement the entente cordiale, I consented.
The Frenchman, whose manner had all at once completely changed (from being a solemn official he had become a bon camarade) naturally grew flirtatious. I did not then know—though I quickly discovered—that a Frenchman can no more help trying to flirt with any woman who has a vestige of good looks than he can help eating his dinner when he is hungry.
CHAPTER II
That hospital at a French Base! It was a temporary affair consisting of one or two tents perched on a plateau on a hill some way out of the town. To reach it without a long détour one had to climb a very steep hill.
There were only seven nurses and the head nurse, who called herself "matron," though anybody less like a hospital matron I have never seen. She had hair of shining gold, very beautiful blue eyes, a most intriguing little retroussé nose, and a figure that I know the other girls—I beg their pardon, "sisters"—envied. Her age at most was twenty-four.
She received me with a smile and kissed me—so unlike Lady G's greeting!—and told me to sit down and have a cup of tea.
"Now tell me all about yourself," she said when we had talked commonplaces for some minutes. "Are you out here for fun, or are you one of the serious sort?"
I couldn't help smiling. I sized her up at once; yet there was something rather irresistible about her.
"I believe I am one of the serious sort," I answered. "Anyway, I haven't come to France for fun."
"They all say that," she laughed. "Tea sweet enough?"
I wanted to feel annoyed, but couldn't.
"Have you many patients?" I asked.
"I really can't tell you," she replied. "They come and go so. But there is one dear boy I am sure you will like. Such a baby. Got shot across the back while he was crawling on all fours to cut some wire. A fraction of an inch more and the bullet would have touched his spine. But you must not monopolize him, or you'll annoy the other sisters. They are all in love with him. He'll be going back to Blighty soon, I am afraid. Have another cup?"
Casually I mentioned that I had lately been through a first aid course and a course of nursing.
"Not really!" she exclaimed. "Why, that's splendid. I shall make you my 'second in command'!"
She touched a spring bell, and another girl came in. She was tall and dark and rather plain. But she had laughing eyes.
"Jones" (her name was not Jones), the matron said, "this is... I've forgotten your name."
I told her.
"Of course. Take her along, dear, and show her all that she ought to see."
Then she drew her aside and they spoke in undertones for a minute or two.
"Isn't she a scream?" the new sister said when we had gone out of the tent. "But we all love her. And she knows her job. Make no mistake about that. Did she tell you about the boy she is in love with, the one who got shot across the back?"
I said that she had.
"She would! Well, she's not the only one. You got a boy out here?"
"Boy?" I said, not understanding.
She laughed aloud.
"Fellow. Chap. Young man if you like."
"Oh, no," I said quickly. "I have only just come out."
"Of course. I didn't know. You've not had time. You'll find us a happy little family, not like some hospitals. Nobody nasty or catty or anything of that sort."
"Have you many wounded?"
"Let me see—about twenty to-day. Pretty bad, some of them. Two died yesterday and one this morning. You'll see them all presently. Tell me, dear, have you ever had a man? You look as if you hadn't, but you are so pretty I am sure you must have."
I admit that I was—well, to speak plainly, shocked. And I suppose I must have shown it (though I tried not to) because my companion laughed.
"No," she said. "I see you haven't. Well, each to her taste. I am not a Puritan myself, but I am not one of those who sneer at Puritans. I sometimes wish I was different, but one can't help the way one's made. And I was made like that."
We had been walking slowly, and now came to one of the other tents. In it were a dozen or so beds, all occupied. And the occupants seemed all to be boys, some of them almost children. Some were bandaged. One had his arms stretched straight out and bound to a strip of wood—he looked as if he were crucified. Yet he smiled up at us as we came along, and made some feeble joke.
"Poor lad, he has been like that over a fortnight," my companion said when we were out of earshot. "Everything has to be done for him, even to cleaning his teeth. Yet he never grumbles or curses his luck, as some of them do. Wonderful, isn't it? And actually he is always cheerful. The M.O. thinks he may recover the use of his arms, but he isn't sure. There's nothing any of us wouldn't do for that boy. Bloody, I call it. But then it's a bloody war."
She introduced me to some of the other nurses. All were quite young, and friendly. Some of the things they said startled me, and some of their adjectives were astonishing. Yet under it all, I instinctively felt, lay sympathy and goodness and a determination to do their best to alleviate these poor fellows' suffering. Indeed I believe that not one of those girls, flighty and irresponsible as they were on the surface, would not have risked her life for any one of those wounded officers had it become necessary to do so.
To me it was all strange and very interesting. What, I wondered, would our respectable people at home have said or thought had they seen those girls as I saw them, or listened to their conversation? How horrified they would have been. I thought of my father and of my mother. My mother! I tried to picture my mother in my shoes in that hospital, but failed. I think she would have fainted. My father. Well, he was a man of the world, or had been. Though a padre, he would have understood and made allowances. But some of the young curates I had met at home, and some of those old rectors, and a bishop or two whose views I had heard expressed in my father's library—not one of them would have failed to condemn my new friends.
The duties of the sisters I soon discovered to be extremely uncongenial; yet they faced them without a murmur. There was only one orderly, and consequently the nurses had to perform menial tasks—floor scrubbing, slop emptying and so on. In addition, most of the patients needed constant attention, and all beds had to be made before seven o'clock in the morning. Daily fresh victims arrived, and others were sent home to England.
Not very many of the menial tasks fell to my share, for which I felt supremely grateful. Only one person annoyed me, and that was the young M.O. From the day I met him first he began to cast sheep's eyes at me, a thing I hated. If only he had possessed the instincts of what is called a gentleman his company might have been endurable, but unfortunately such instincts were foreign to him. The nurses all disliked him—with one exception. Why she did not dislike him—or rather, why she put up with him—I discovered later. You will have gathered that these sisters and their matron were anything but prudes, yet even they disliked "funny" stories with no point in them but their filth. And in those stories this young M.O. specialized. He seemed to revel in them and had not intelligence enough to recognize how we all detested them. During the whole of the four years I served in France he was the only M.O. I met who behaved like that. Many made love to me, but none, fortunately, had minds like sewer rats or tried to show me odious photographs.
For quite a long time I stayed in that hospital. Canvas is a disagreeable thing to sleep under. In hot weather it is too hot and very stuffy. In cold weather it cannot be heated properly, so that all one's belongings get damp and remain so. The nurses all worked splendidly.
One day the matron sent for me.
"Darling," she said in a queer voice, "I am going to lose you. Everything is to be changed here. These tents are coming down and there is to be a new hospital. I am going somewhere up the line, I believe. You are to go to Rouen. Have you ever been there? Well, you will like it. But I shall miss you terribly. You have done so well and been such a help. And the sisters all like you, though sometimes they call you 'the little Puritan!' I wonder how long you will remain a Puritan? A parson's daughter, aren't you?"
I said I was.
"Clergymen's daughters," she laughed. "They are proverbially—but no, I mustn't shock you. My father was not a parson. He was a plumber. Fact. But a church-going plumber. That's why I went on the stage—I couldn't stick my father's pie, or what passes for pie. Then the stage fired me. Said I had no talent. Which is God's truth, for I haven't. There was a boy on one tour same name as you. Very hot stuff—not a bit like you."
"What was he like?" I asked quickly.
"The girls called him a swab, and that about sums him up. Rather tall. Fair. And talked in rather a funny way—not a stammer, you'll understand, but a kind of lisp. When he was playing he somehow lost it."
"Was he any good? I mean, could he act at all?"
"Pretty fair, so far as I remember. But why do you want to know? Have you met him? Is he a friend of yours?"
"Not exactly," I said. "He happens to be a brother of mine."
"Your brother! Oh, I am sorry. I'd not have said all that if I'd known. How extraordinary. You're not a bit like him. I suppose he is a soldier now."
I was ashamed to tell the truth, so I said that probably he was—by now.
The nurses had already told me that the matron had been an actress; though they didn't know what sort of actress. Musical comedy, they surmised, seeing what "a scream" she was.
It was a wrench parting from them all. I had enjoyed being with them. I had learnt from them a lot of things, too, which I had not before dreamed existed or could happen. The fly in the ointment had been the young M.O. On the single occasion when he had tried to kiss me I had slapped his face. He had tried to kiss each nurse in turn, I afterwards discovered, and received a slap from each. He must have had the hide of a rhinoceros.
When a weasel crosses your path bad luck is supposed to follow. What happens when a weasel runs over your toes? That was my experience the first night I slept in the hospital tent on the hill on the rive gauche of the Seine at Rouen. After that I made the tent weasel-proof so far as possible.
There could hardly be a greater contrast than the contrast which existed between the little temporary hospital which I had just left and the great hospital at Rouen, or rather row of hospitals. Run on strictly military lines, organized like a departmental stores, with a matron (or was she second in command?) whose acumen outrivalled that of any man I have ever met—and I have been intimate with very clever men since those early war years—she was emphatically the Right Woman in the Right Place.
Nothing excited her. Nothing even flustered her. She could interview half a dozen people at the same time and not miss a point in any of their arguments. She spoke slowly and with deliberation, with a soft and very charming accent, was courteous to everybody—though some of the Brass Hats she had to deal with must have tried her patience sorely—and never forgot anything. She was one of those rare people who, if they tell you they are going to do a thing or see to something, will, you know for certain, do it or see to it at once. She ought to have been managing director of some commercial organization. Yet before the war, so I was credibly informed, she had been apprenticed to a hat shop in London's West End!
If the nurses where I had been knew how to enjoy themselves, those in Rouen knew how to work even harder—and by nurses I mean also the V.A.D.'s. To all intents they worked round the clock on the days when fresh convoys of wounded came down the line. And so did the M.O.'s, of whom I shall have more to say later.
The women were drawn from all ranks of the community. Shop girls, domestic servants of the better class, well-to-do girls and women who before the war had probably never done a stroke of work in their lives, women with titles, and many others mingled on the same social plane. How many there were I cannot say, but in that huge hospital camp there must have been at least a hundred, in addition to many male orderlies. There was friction, of course. No mass gathering of that size composed almost wholly of women could have lived in complete harmony. The only thing which bored me was the incessant talk, the eternal chatter about men. I had a few officer friends in the town, and if ever I was seen with one of them, or it became known that I was going to lunch or dine with one or more of them, there was the inevitable remark with a meaning snigger—"Ah, I saw you!" or "We know where you dined last night!" or "Who's the lovely man you were with yesterday?" and so on, followed by silly chaff.
CHAPTER III
In Rouen I had my first proposal of marriage. A Colonel. Actually.
He was only passing through Rouen, and looked about forty. He said he had a moor in Scotland and all sorts of other nice things; but somehow he didn't attract me, though he certainly knew how to make love. I was glad it was after I had refused him, and not before, that I saw him one night coming out of a well-known horrible establishment near the Rue Grosse Horloge. I suppose that according to the accepted standards of alleged morality the knowledge that he frequented a place of that sort should have made me reject him at once if I had not already done so. But it would not have. I had learned so much, grown so much wiser since I had quitted my father's sheltered Rectory, that an incident of that nature seemed hardly to matter. I had come to recognize the truth of my father's assurance that "war makes some men beasts, at any rate for a time."
It was soon after this that I was detailed to meet some of the trains arriving at Rouen with wounded from the casualty clearing stations. The sights one saw daily in the hospital were harrowing enough, but the spectacle of those trains packed with men, sometimes half cut to pieces, some of them with features mangled beyond recognition, upset me far more. Or would have done so had I allowed myself to become upset. But a thing we nurses had quickly learned was never to betray our feelings. Some of our patients—I know this because some of them told me—imagined that we were hard and devoid of sympathy because we seemed to be so indifferent to their sufferings.
Indifferent! If only they had known! Often when alone after completing my duties I would cry my eyes out for quite a long time, and I know that other nurses did the same. But nothing would have induced us to let this be discovered if we could help it. The matron would have been down on us, too, telling us that we were not fit to be nurses—though I believe she was just as "weak" as any of us, had the truth been known.
At about this time I had a letter from my actor brother. The leading man in his company had joined up, and he, Lionel, was playing lead in some futile musical comedy. He wrote in high glee about this "bit of luck" as he called it, and his rise in salary; then went on to hope that I was "not having too rough a time among all those poor wounded devils." Then he explained at length how impossible it still was for him to join the army, adding that probably his company would later on come out to France "to give some shows for the fighting boys," so that after all he would then be "doing his bit ... even though not actually fighting. We can't all do the donkey work, can we? And men like me are not fitted for that kind of thing—it isn't in our blood...."
