The Children's Book

he knew so well. He enlisted as a private, and then became a bombadier. He kept the little ring he had given Florence in the pocket of his tunic. He thought: when this is over, everything will be different, including me. The ocean voyage under the stars vanished like a mirage. Like Julian, in those early days, he seemed to see everything more clearly because it had all been called in question. He made drinking-friends in his platoon, one of whom had been an acquaintance when he was a boy running wild on Romney Marsh, a fishmonger’s son called Sammy Till. In 1915 he crossed the Channel and went north-west, towards Belgium.

Florian and Robin Wellwood and Robin Oakeshott all joined the Royal Sussex Regiment. Florian was sent to France fairly quickly. The two Robins found themselves in the same platoon. They sat together amongst their gear in a shared tent. They had been together, or almost, at things like the drama camp when they were boys. They had the same red hair and the same smile. They did not know, being well brought-up, how to broach the subject of whether they were brothers.

Robin Wellwood thought it would be insulting and hurtful to Robin Oakeshott to suggest that his Oakeshott father was a fiction. Robin Oakeshott thought he might embarrass Robin Wellwood by claiming the relationship which was never mentioned. Both of them shied away in their minds from the role Humphry Wellwood must have played in their origins. No one likes to think of their parents and sex, even in quite normal situations. But they stuck together, and did things the same way, and came to rely on each other.

Wolfgang Stern was already on the battlefield, in the German Sixth Army, under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. He was on the left of the Schlieffen scythe, retreating deliberately towards Germany to draw the French army outwards, away from Paris. The French soldiers wore a uniform from the past, with red trousers, a long great-coat, broadcloth tunic, flannel shirt and long underpants, winter and summer. Their boots were known as brodequins, which was the name of an instrument of torture. They carried a rifle, a kit weighing sixty-six pounds and a regulation bundle of kindling wood.

The French officers believed in attack, and then attack, and then again attack. They believed they had been defeated in 1870 because of a lack of firmness and elan. They charged, heavily, drums beating, bugles sounding, their long bayonets held in their guns before them. They were very brave, and the German machine-gunners, including Wolfgang, mowed them like fields of grass. Wolfgang felt alien to himself, in his grey tunic and forage cap. But then, he had always been an actor. Now, he was acting a very competent machine- gunner. He was well fed and his commanders planned intelligently. The war would not last long. The Plan was working to perfection.

Charles/Karl, the ex-anarchist, the socialist, the academic student of herd behaviour in war and peace, found that his intuition when faced with anarchist “deeds” of assassination, that he himself could not kill a man, was just. He went to tell his father that he was joining up. Basil Wellwood said he was glad, and sorry of course, and would give any help he could. Charles/Karl said he was not joining the armed forces: he was joining a Quaker enterprise called the Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Unit. These people provided stretcher-bearers to bring in the wounded and ambulances to take them to the hospital trains to bring them home. He said “It isn’t a lack of courage, Papa. And I do feel that I must do something in all this. And the ambulance units help everyone, they don’t discriminate …”

Basil answered the unspoken thing.

“Some of your mother’s friends are refusing invitations. They don’t call on her. Many of them don’t.”

“That would be better if I was a patriotic soldier. But I can’t, you do see?”

“I try to see. You don’t lack courage. You have my blessing.”

Charles/Karl gave him an envelope, marked “To be opened in the event of my death.”

“I’m not being dramatic, I’m being practical. And you must promise not to open it before …”

“Very well. I hope to hand it back to you very soon. All this should not last very long. Go safely.”

Dorothy too had managed to join a new kind of unit, the Women’s Hospital Corps. This was the work of two resourceful women doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. Unlike the Scottish women doctors who had been told to go “home,” they had quickly worked out that the War Office would simply turn them away. Both were suffragists and both had had long contentious dealings with the Home Office. So they approached the French Embassy, and the French Red Cross, and offered their skills, and medical supplies which would be paid for by their supporters. Money poured in, from suffragists and women’s colleges. A uniform was devised, for doctors, nurses, orderlies and managers. It was greenish-grey, short-skirted, with a neat loose long tunic, buttoned high. There were small cloth hats, with veils and overcoats. The women looked smart and purposeful. They had learnt that women must do everything more competently, more carefully, with more unrelenting discipline than men. In September 1914 they went from Victoria and Dieppe to Paris, which was full of wounded men. “An excitable British Red Cross lady,” said Flora Murray, “explained that nothing was any good here. The red tape was awful—all the arrangements had broken down. The sepsis was appalling. The town was full of Germans whose legs and arms had been cut off and who were being sent to Havre next day like that!!”

Griselda Wellwood was with them. Newnham College was supporting the doctors. Griselda—after a brief training as a VAD in Cambridge—went with them as a kind of liaison officer provided by the College, someone who spoke fluent French and German, and could help out with patients and authorities. Nurses with next to no French were asking wounded soldiers “Monsieur, avec-vous de pain in l’estomac?” Griselda helped both patients and nurses.

A hospital was set up in Claridge’s Hotel, in Paris, allotted by the French. Rooms were cleared, wards were set up, sterilising equipment and an operating theatre were installed and wounded men came in, steadily, French, British, German, to be nursed, to be operated on, to be protected, by severe Sisters, from curious flocks of visiting elegant ladies. To die. There was a quiet mortuary, in the basement. The surgeons amongst them had previously operated almost exclusively on women. They learned quickly.

Dorothy became skilled at amputations. Griselda made herself useful when, at Christmas, there were parties, and entertainments. The men put up a Union Jack with the legend: “The Flag of Freedom.” The suffragists were not amused. The men became aware of this and the flag was changed. “Freedom” became “England” and the doctors were told that the men were “all for Votes for Women.”

They put on plays. Wounded, shell-shocked, bandaged, tremulous, they put on plays. Some were farces and some were not. The Deserter was a precise representation of the court martial of a deserter, with bullying sergeant-major, bounding lieutenant, relentless judge-advocate. The accused was the hero, and died courageously, on stage, in front of the firing-squad.

The wounded men applauded, from beds and wheelchairs. Dorothy touched Griselda’s arm.

“Are you all right? You don’t look well.”

“It’s the execution. I have a horror of executions. They did it so matter-of-fact. But their sympathy was with—with him.”

Dorothy said, quietly and grimly, that if what they had seen, and what they had been told, was a true description of events out at the Front, most men would be driven to desert. She said “They said it would be over by Christmas. It isn’t. They don’t know now how or when it will end. I’m glad you’re here.”