This Could Have Been You 97 Years Ago

Part of the Canadian Vimy Memorial, copyright Melanie Wills

If you were a young Canadian man in 1917, you might well have been involved in the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9. Here’s an excerpt from my novel, Elusive Dawn, from the point of view of one of the Canadian officers. Some of the women working as nurses and ambulance drivers were waiting behind the lines to pick up the pieces. This has been abridged, leaving out some military details and mention of other characters.

            Justin Carrington was thankful to be out of the deep subway and cave where the slimy chalk walls had begun to close in on him, reminding him of the suffocating mud of the Somme, making him ashamed of the panic that he had to force back into the pit of his belly. By now he should have been used to the sweat and latrine stench of war, but with men packed so tightly together in these underground tunnels grey with cigarette and candle smoke, the oxygen seemed to have been used up. So he breathed deeply of the cold, pre-dawn air.

            Like most of the men, he hadn’t been able to sleep, even if it had been physically possible to find a comfortable place to rest. For months the entire Canadian Corps had been training for this day. Over and over they had practiced behind the lines – their objectives carefully laid out, the timing of their advance coordinated to the split-second – so that every last man knew exactly what to do….

            The men had had their rum ration, and boxes of Canadian Lowney chocolate bars had miraculously appeared. Justin savoured every bite of his, while relishing the reminder of home.

            So now they all stood silently in the trenches, in the rain that was turning to sleet, many up to their knees in icy sludge. 30,000 Canadian infantry strung along the four miles of Vimy Ridge. With another 70,000 soldiers in support roles behind – the gunners, engineers, medics, cooks, and so forth – it meant that the entire Canadian Corps was here, together for the first time….

            Justin checked his watch yet again. 5:15. Almost Zero Hour.

            His company of four platoons would go over in the second wave, leap-frogging those leading the assault at a predetermined line. The first battalions were already in the shallow jumping-off trenches and craters in no-man’s-land.

            After a week of constant shelling that had pummeled the German trenches and defences with a million shells, the silence now was eerie. And taut. Every one of them knew only too well that the Allies had tried and failed to take this strongly fortified and tactically important ridge during the past two years…. Despite some trepidation, Justin felt confident that their intense preparation and unprecedented bombardment would surprise and overwhelm the Germans.

            And he felt buoyed by the latest letter from Antonia Upton. She had written, “We have been evacuating the wounded from the base hospitals in large numbers recently,” which, in the parlance of censorship, insinuated that she realized space was being made for an onslaught of new casualties. She went on to say:

            We often hear the remorseless guns, and I wonder how you can stand the diabolical noise that surely threatens the very sanity of civilization. When we have air raids here, I sometimes find it difficult to muster the courage to keep going, cherishing the sanctity and preciousness of life too much to lose it. There is so much yet to experience, so much promise to fulfill. It seems almost treasonous to admit that I don’t want to sacrifice myself or any of my friends to the dubious glory of the Empire. Forgive my womanly heart, for I do not mean to diminish what you men are trying and dying to achieve.

            I expect you will soon be preoccupied, and trust you will be careful as well as lucky. I enjoyed our perambulations about the Hampshire countryside, and hope we can repeat those when the wildflowers are in bloom and the trees, lushly green. And perhaps you will take me sailing and canoeing when I come to visit your magical Muskoka. I have presumptuously included a photograph of myself in the event that you may wish to recall your correspondent.

            Fondly, Toni

            He had chuckled at the formality of that last sentence, which was no doubt intended to make the gesture appear less intimate. But he was delighted by the photograph and studied it frequently as if he could delve better into her psyche. To him it was evident that she was transparent, her inner beauty reflected in her outer attractiveness. From her perceptive, forthright gaze shone humour and a joie de vivre that captivated him. He had the picture tucked into his breast pocket, and felt the intoxicating stirrings of love.

            Joyfully he had replied to her:

            Your photo has brought me much cheer, but I hope that I may see the real you before long. Not in your capacity as an ambulance driver, however!

            I applaud your womanly heart, and agree with your sentiments. I have done much soul-searching over the past two years, caught between my civilized conscience and the dictates of war. I have seen both the best and the worst that human beings can do, the many and ever more mechanized ways we can slaughter one another, although we are more alike than dissimilar.

            Your friendship has revived in me the determination to survive this war and to make a difference in a world changed forever, but open to new possibilities. Our generation must try to right the wrongs that brought us here and for which so many, as Rupert Brooke so aptly said, ‘poured out the red sweet wine of youth’.

            Be assured that your thoughts and words comfort and sustain me, Toni. I long to sit in the sunshine with you, listening to the birds, but without the guns which now disturb their songs. The larks here seem forever hopeful. So shall I be.

            Affectionately, Justin

            It was snowing now, the wind whipping up a blizzard.

            5:28. Two minutes to go. After a passing whisper, the tiny clinks of bayonets being fixed to rifles coalesced and tinkled down the line.

At Home With the Astors

The Author at Cliveden

Once owned by Waldorf and Nancy Astor, Cliveden is a magnificent estate on the Thames near Maidenhead, England. At the outbreak of the Great War, the Astors generously donated their indoor tennis court and bowling alley to the Canadian Red Cross to be used as a hospital. Lots of additions were made, and it became The Duchess of Connaught Hospital, which is where some of my characters nurse and convalesce. 

Nancy visited the wounded regularly, and was very popular with them and the staff. Although an American, Vicountess Nancy Astor became the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons, in 1919.

There are 42  WW1 war graves – mostly Canadian - in a lovely secret and sunken garden on the estate. The Astors donated part of their extensive grounds to the Canadians again in WW2, and a more substantial hospital was built. It functioned as the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital until the 1980s.

The Author at Cliveden - photo copyright Melanie Wills

Cliveden is now a luxury hotel, where I enjoyed a delightful lunch last summer. That famous portrait of Nancy in the background was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1909.

Hospitals with Chandeliers

Duchess of Westminster Hospital, Le Touquet, France

The young Duchess of Westminster, like so many others, was eager to do “her bit” for the war effort, so she turned her seaside villa in Le Touquet France into a hospital with the help of the Red Cross. In the early days of the war, she and her friends would dress in full evening regalia, including diamond tiaras, to greet the incoming wounded whatever time of day. "It's the least we can do to cheer up the men," the Duchess would say, her wolfhound at her side. Her villa soon became too small, and her hospital took over the local Casino, which is probably what we see in the photo above. I couldn’t resist creating the fictional Duchess of Axminster’s hospital on the French coast in Elusive Dawn.

Rothschild Villa Strassburg, Deauville, France [by Kamel 15- GNU General Public Licence]

Other private estates were offered as convalescent homes. Canadian VAD Violet Wilson accepted a position at this Rothschild villa in Deauville, France. Luxuries were provided by wealthy Canadians for officers recuperating from minor wounds and illnesses. Violet was rather disgusted that she was little more than a glorified housemaid, just serving tea and so forth. But the benefit of this resort-like place to the officers was evident in this newspaper article.

Canadian Convalescent Hospital, Bearwood Park

Bearwood Convalescent Hospital in Woking, England had been a private home with 90 bedrooms, belonging to the widow of the Times newspaper owner. It housed 900 Canadian soldiers. The Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) funded and set up a Red Cross officers’ hospital in London. The Red Cross also arranged for convalescing officers to spend up to a month as guests at country houses in England, or failing that, in hotels.

Officers and nurses were often sent to the Riviera on sick leave. Famous poet-doctor, Lieutenant-Colonial John McCrae (who wrote "In Flanders Fields"), spent 3 weeks at Cap Martin in late 1916 recovering from pleurisy. The balmy weather and absence of shellfire and air raids undoubtedly provided a relaxing and healthful retreat – a temporary reprieve from the mud and blood of war.

Volunteer Angels of Mercy

“Short of actually going to bed with [the men], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years,” wrote Vera Brittain, one of the most renowned Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses of the First World War, in Testament of Youth. Like Vera, VADs were generally from genteel, sheltered, and chaperoned backgrounds, because only people of means could afford to pay for the courses and work for free.

Lady Diana Manners, 1916 - photo by E.O. Hoppe

Some were aristocrats, like Lady Diana Manners – reputedly the most beautiful woman in England and expected to marry the Prince of Wales. Her mother was opposed to Diana’s becoming a VAD, and “explained in words suitable to my innocent ears that wounded soldiers, so long starved of women, inflamed with wine and battle, ravish and leave half-dead the young nurses who wish only to tend them.” The Duchess gave in, but “knew, as I did, that my emancipation was at hand,” Diana says in her memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, and admits, “I seemed to have done nothing practical in all my twenty years.” Nursing plunged her and other young women into a life-altering adventure.

Growing up with servants, many of these girls had never had to wash a plate or boil an egg. But with only a few weeks of training by St. John Ambulance in First Aid and Home Nursing, women over 20 became qualified to work under the guidance of professional nurses, who usually resented these amateur “do-gooders”. Of course, many lied about their age!

While VADs spent much of their time changing linens, sterilizing equipment, serving meals, and so forth, they were just as readily asked to hold down the exposed intestines of a mortally wounded soldier, as was Canadian Doreen Gery on her first day in a British military hospital. Her protest to the Nursing Sister that she would rather die than do that, earned the retort, “Well, die then! You’re no good to me if you can’t do the work!” Like other VADs, Doreen valiantly got on with the job. Giving up was considered the equivalent of cowardice in a soldier.

In makeshift hospital cities of tents or wooden huts near the battlefields there was no running water, rats scurried about under the beds, and the tents sometimes collapsed in fierce gales that howled off the English Channel during two of the coldest winters in living memory. Wounded often streamed into these base hospitals filthy and crawling with lice. One VAD, after two weeks of unending work, discovered that she had “collected some of the notorious ‘grey-backs’… when I was brushing my hair, and I was so exhausted that I just collapsed in tears. It seemed the last straw.”

VADs who later became famous included American aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who worked at the Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, and Agatha Christie, who dispensed drugs, thus learning about poisons, which she later used in writing her mysteries.

In ElusiveDawn, one of my intrepid characters becomes a VAD, and sees service in England and France, as did 500 other Canadian women.