Tammy Duckworth is a Senator from Illinois and fourteen years ago she was a captain with the Illinois National Guard serving in Iraq.   

On November 12th 2004 she was piloting a Black Hawk helicopter when a rocket-propelled grenade tore through the cockpit.

Duckworth’s right leg was gone in an instant, shredded in a flash of heat and a spray of shrapnel from a grenade. Her left leg was terribly injured, and her right arm was nearly severed.– The Daily Herald 

On Monday Duckworth tweeted:

Duckworth’s story is one of remarkable courage, determination and persistence. I was stuck by that expression “my Alive Day” – the anniversary of that catastrophic even that nearly killed her and changed her life for ever – the break in time between the Before and the After.

Her Alive Day – the anniversary of her wound. A life’s great rupture.

And I was reminded of Enid Bagnold’s memoir of her time with the Voluntary Aid Detachment in WW1. In 1918 she published an account of her time as a nurse’s aide at the Royal Herbert in Woolwich. It’s available online so I didn’t even have to go and root it out.

She writes of one of the patients – who like Duckworth – measure time from the moment of his injury:

Waker had a birthday yesterday and got ten post cards and a telegram. But that is as nothing to another anniversary.

“A year to-morrow I got my wound—two o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“Shall you be awake, Waker?”

“Yes.”

How will he celebrate it? I would give a lot to know what will pass in his mind. For I don’t yet understand this importance they attach to such an anniversary. One and all, they know the exact hour and minute on which their bit of metal turned them for home.

Sometimes a man will whisper, “Nurse….” as I go by the bed; and when I stop I hear, “In ten minutes it will be a twelvemonth!” and he fixes his eyes on me.

What does he want me to respond? I don’t know whether I should be glad or sorry that he got it. I can’t imagine what he thinks of as the minute ticks. For I can see by his words that the scene is blurred and no longer brings back any picture. “Did you crawl back or walk?”

“I … walked.” He is hardly sure.

I know that for some of them, for Waker, that moment at two o’clock in the morning changed his whole career. From that moment his arm was paralysed, the nerves severed; from that moment football was off, and with it his particular ambition. And football, governing a kingdom, or painting a picture—a man’s ambition is his ambition, and when it is wiped out his life is changed.

But he knows all that, he has had time to think of all that. What, then, does this particular minute bring him?

They think I know; for when they tell me in that earnest voice that the minute is approaching they take for granted that I too will share some sacrament with them.

A Diary Without Dates – Enid Bagnold P.139-40

A Prose Poem

Re-reading Bagnold I was struck this time by the dream-like prose poem quality of her writing. A Diary without Dates is a short, first-person, present-tense account of her experiences from the autumn of 1916 to the summer of 1917. It’s lyrical, immediate, moving and unsentimental.

Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart.

It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see behind the screens?

I went cold and stood rooted, waiting till one of them could come out and speak to me.

Soon they took away the screen nearest to me; they had done with it.

The man I was to inquire for has no nostrils; they were blown away, and he breathes through two pieces of red rubber tubing: it gave a more horrible look to his face than I have ever seen.

The Sister came out and told me she thought he was “not up to much.” I think she means he is dying.

I wonder if he thinks it better to die…. But he was nearly well before he got pneumonia, had begun to take up the little habits of living. He had been out to tea.

Inexplicable, what he thinks of, lying behind the screen.

The gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass

The lives of nurses and aides at this time were very tightly regulated and bound by rules and conventions.  Protocols are strict, role distinctions rigid and it is all profoundly impersonal. 

The Sister who is over me, the only Sister who can laugh at things other than jokes, is going in the first week of next month. Why? Where? She doesn’t know, but only smiles at my impatience. She knows life—hospital life.

It unsettles me as I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five … eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements—taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them.

I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass….

Impermanency…. I don’t wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager. How often stifled! How often torn apart!

I didn’t know it was so easy to give pleasure

Bagnold is shocked when one of the gods – the nursing sisters – makes a caring remark about her sore throat and it reveals how important such small kindnesses can be in the cold world of the hospital. 

In life nothing is too small to please….

Once during the evening the eldest Sister said to me:

“I am worried about your throat. Is it no better?”

And from the pang of pleasure and gratitude that went through me I have learnt the value of such remarks.

In every bed there is some one whose throat is at least more sore than mine….

Though I am not one of those fierce V.A.D.’s who scoff at sore throats and look for wounds, yet I didn’t know it was so easy to give pleasure.

There was little free time and at any moment they could be subject to abrupt and unexplained changes of routines, responsibilities and locations. Her feet ached and the weary hospital life is lonely and isolated –  “an everlasting dislocation of combinations”.

Within these repetitive institutional routines – laying trays, scrubbing out or sewing splints – she found her own kind of freedom and mental release.

So long as I conform absolutely, not a soul will glance at my thoughts – few at my face. I have only to be silent and conform, and I might be in so far a land that even the eye of God had lost me.

A Matter of Lemons

And she observes and absorbs the strange unreachable remoteness of the nursing sisters and the class distinctions made between officers and men.

As the weeks go by I recognize the difficulty of keeping the life of the Sisters and the V.A.D.’s out of the circle of my thoughts. Their vigorous and symmetrical vision of the ward attacks me; their attitude towards the patients, which began by offending me, ends by overtaking me.

Moving from an officers’ ward to one for “Tommies” (other ranks) she notices the differences. 

The thing that upset me most on coming into a “Tommies'” ward was the fact that instead of twenty-six lemons twice a day for the making of lemonade I now squeeze two into an old jug and hope for the best about the sugar.

She commented that “there isn’t that mystery which used to surround the officers’ illnesses” – in other words, lower social status meant less entitlement to confidentiality and privacy. In one respect, however, officers and men seem to have been treated alike: they got very little pain relief in the daytime, although they were given something to help them sleep at night. It distresses her not to be able to do more for them.

In the Tommies ward her middle class accent and speech set Bagnold apart:

I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only V.A.D. of whom they continually ask, “What’s say, nurse?” It isn’t that I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.

An opportunity for learning to speak simple Saxon….

To the nursing sisters the Tommies are a large species of child – “boys’. To Bagnold they are men.

It’s a queer place, a “Tommies'” ward. It makes me nervous. I’m not simple enough; they make me shy. I can’t think of them like the others do, as “the boys”; they seem to me full-grown men.

Visitors and Relations

The nurses find Visitors whether relatives or strangers an annoying intrusion into their orderly world and a disturbance for the patients. 

On the whole the Sisters loathe relations. They look into the ward and see the mothers and sisters and wives camped round the beds, and go back into the bunk feeling that the ward doesn’t belong to them.

The eldest Sister said to me yesterday: “Shut the door, nurse; there’s Captain Fellows’s father. I don’t want him fussing round.”

On that we discussed relations, and it seemed to me that it was inevitable that a Sister should be the only buffer between them and their pressing anxieties.

“No, a relation is the last straw…. You don’t understand!” she said.

I don’t understand, but I am not specialized.

Bagnold joins a 

… heated discussion to-day as to whether the old lady who leaves a tract beneath a single rose by each bedside could longer be tolerated.

“She is a nuisance,” said the Sister; “the men make more noise afterwards because they set her hymns to ragtime.”

“What good does it do them?” said the V.A.D., ” … and I have to put the roses in water!”

I rode the highest horse of all: “Her inquiries about their souls are an impertinence. Why should they be bothered?”

These are the sort of things they say in debating societies. But Life talks differently….

The “Tommy” patient Pinker has greater tolerance than any of them and generously sees if differently:

Pinker said, “Makes the po’r ole lady ‘appy!”

Lessons of Compassion and Pain

Bagnold finds herself learning a lot:

One has illuminations all the time!

There is an old lady who visits in our ward, at whom, for one or two unimportant reasons, it is the custom to laugh. The men, who fall in with our moods with a docility which I am beginning to suspect is a mask, admit too that she is comic.

This afternoon, when she was sitting by Corrigan’s bed and talking to him I saw where her treatment of him differed from ours. She treats him as though he were an individual; but there is more in it than that…. She treats him as though he had a wife and children, a house and a back garden and responsibilities: in some manner she treats him as though he had dignity.

I thought of yesterday’s injection. That is the difference: that is what the Sisters mean when they say “the boys.”…

The story of Rees is not yet ended in either of the two ways in which stories end in a hospital. His arm does not get worse, but his courage is ebbing. This morning I wheeled him out to the awful sleep again—for the third time.

They will take nearly anything from each other. The only thing that cheered Rees up as he was wheeled away was the voice of Pinker crying, “Jer want white flowers on yer coffin? We’ll see to the brass ‘andles!”

From Pinker, a little boy from the Mile End Road, they will stand anything. He is the servant of the ward (he says), partly through his good nature and a little because he has two good arms and legs. “I ain’t no skivvy,” he protests all the time, but every little odd job gets done.

Rees, when he wakes, wakes sobbing and says, “Don’ go away, nurse….” He holds my hand in a fierce clutch, then releases it to point in the air, crying “There’s the pain!” as though the pain filled the air and rose to the rafters. As he wakes it centralizes, until at last comes the moment when he says, “Me arm aches cruel,” and points to it. Then one can leave him

Something else that Bagnold notices is the brutal way the “Tommies” will talk to each other not sparing feelings and yet they help each other with tenderness. 

Although they do much more to help each other than I ever saw done in the officers’ ward, yet one is always saying things that I find myself praying the other hasn’t heard.

Bagnold comments wryly on the contrast between hospital life and what little she has beyond it:

If one did not forget the hospital when one leaves it, life wouldn’t be very nice.

And she sees the irony in her position. Like many of the voluntary nurses Bagnold was from a well-to-do background. Now she goes from running a bath for patients to having one drawn for her by a maid: “It’s like being turn and turn about maid and mistress.” 

The Wonder of fresh Snow

Anecdotes, snatches of conversation and quick observations are woven in with lyrical moments of description. The snow on the road or the way the mist and fog roll in over the windowsills of the ward windows.

Here is her description of the snow:

There is the first snow here, scanty and frozen on the doorstep.

I came home last night in the dark to dinner and found its faint traces on the road and in the gutter as I climbed the hill. I couldn’t see well; there were stars, but no moon. Higher up it was unmistakable; long white tracks frozen in the dried mud of the road, and a branch under a lamp thickened with frozen snow.

Shall I ever grow out of that excitement over the first bit of snow…?

I felt a glow of pride in the hill, thinking:

“In London it’s all slush and mud. They don’t suspect what we’ve got here. A suburb is a wonderful place!”

After a wet and muddy day in London I’ve seen the trains pull into Charing Cross with snow piled on the roofs of the carriages, and felt a foot taller for joy that I was one of those fortunates who might step into a train and go down into a white countryside.

It is the same excitement to wake up early to an overnight fall and see down the Dover Road for miles no foot of man printed, but only the birds’ feet. Considering the Dover Road has been a highway since the Romans, it really is a fine moment when you realize its surface has suddenly become untrodden and unexplored as any jungle.

And then she chides herself for the excitement and brings herself up short: 

Alas, the amount of snow that has set me writing!… two bucketfuls in the whole garden!

The Arrival of a Convoy at Night

This is how she describes the scene she knows is happening at the station two miles away as a new convoy of the wounded arrive:

The rickety country station lit by one large lamp; the thirteen waiting V.A.D.’s; the long wooden table loaded with mugs of every size; kettles boiling; the white clock ticking on; that frowsy booking clerk….

Then the sharp bell, the tramp of the stretcher-bearers through the station, and at last the two engines drawing gravely across the lighted doorway, and carriage windows filled with eager faces, other carriage windows with beds slung across them, a vast Red Cross, a chemist’s shop, a theatre, more windows, more faces….

The stretcher-men are lined up; the M.O. meets the M.O. with the train; the train Sisters drift in to the coffee-table.

“Here they come! Walkers first….”

The station entrance is full of men crowding in and taking the steaming mugs of tea and coffee; men on pickaback with bandaged feet; men with only a nose and one eye showing, with stumbling legs, bound arms. The station, for five minutes, is full of jokes and witticisms; then they pass out and into the waiting chars-à-bancs.

A long pause.

“Stretchers!”

The first stretchers are laid on the floor.

There I have stood so often, pouring the tea behind the table, watching that littered floor, the single gas-lamp ever revolving on its chain, turning the shadows about the room like a wheel—my mind filled with pictures, emptied of thoughts, hypnotized.

Bagnold knows it well and through her mind’s eye, so do we.

Bladed Searchlights and a Crooked Moon

Sometimes in the late evenings one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one’s tasks – bed-making, washing, one errand and another – and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.

The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind.

She has the capacity to convey intensity of emotion through small details closely observed. 

At the hospital she could hear the gunfire across the English channel:

I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night—two bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar whistling to his mate in the black and rustling garden.

But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.

Those distant guns again to-night….

Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when they go over the top?

I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, “What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it.” But that won’t do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.

Summer…. Can it be summer through whose hot air the guns shake and tremble? The honeysuckle, whose little stalks twinkled and shone that January night, has broken at each woody end into its crumbled flower.

Where is the frost, the snow?… Where are the dead?

Where is my trouble and my longing, and the other troubles, and the happiness in other summers?

Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water.

We talk of tablets to the dead. There can be none but in the heart, and the heart fades

Bagnold lost her position after the book was published presumably because of it. In the preface she wrote;

I apologize to those whom I may hurt.

Can I soothe them by pleading that one may only write what is true for oneself?

.

Apparently undeterred, she took off for France as an ambulance driver.

She wrote about that in  The Happy Foreigner – also available to read on-line and the next book on my list.

Here are two paintings of the Royal Herbert Hospital. They are from the next was a couple of decades after Bagnold’s service: