The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in France

by F. Tennyson Jesse

But first we all went into the kitchen, where part of the domestic staff sits up all night to prepare food for the night drivers. There we drank the loveliest cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon would stand up in, piping hot, out of huge bowls. Then my driver and the section leader for the night led me across the soaking park to where, in almost total darkness, girls were busy with their ambulances. I was hoisted up beside my driver and endeavoured clumsily with my bear's paws to fasten the canvas flap back across the side as I was bidden. I may say that I felt extraordinarily clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom could have put me in their pockets. They knew so exactly what to do, their movements were all so perfectly adjusted to their needs, they knew where everything was, while I fumbled for steps and hoped for the best.... They made me feel, in the beautiful way they shepherded me, that I was a silly useless female and that they were grave chivalrous young men; they watched over me with just that matter-of-fact care.

To me it was all wonderful, that experience. To the girls, who do it every night, every alternate fortnight, year in, year out, the thrill of it has naturally gone long since; the wonder is that to them all remains the pity of it. We swung out of the park into the road. There was no moon, the stars were mostly hidden by the heavy clouds, the sleet blew in gusts against the wind screen. We went at a good pace, bound for a Canadian hospital, and then for a station beyond E——, where the train was waiting, for this was what is called an "evacuation" that I was going to see. No train of wounded was due in that night, and the Convoy's business was to take men who were being sent elsewhere from the hospitals to the train.

We stopped in front of a shadow hospital, set in a town of shadow-huts, and a door opened to show an oblong of orange light, and send a paler shaft widening out into the night towards the sleek side of our ambulance.

We heard the men being placed in the ambulance, the word was given, and again we set off through the night, this time so slowly, so carefully, for we carried that which must not be jarred one hair's breadth more than could be helped. We crept along the roads, past the pines that showed as patches of denser blackness against the sky, past the sand-dunes that glimmered ghostly, past the blots of shadow made by every shrub and tree-trunk, and behind and before us crawled other ambulances, laden even as we.

The station was wrapped in darkness, save for a hanging light here and there, and an occasional uncurtained window in the waiting train. We drew up under a light, where a sergeant was waiting.

"Four from No. 7 Canadian," said my driver crisply. The sergeant repeated, looked at a list he carried and marked our cases off it duly, then told us the number of the compartment where we should stop. The ambulance slid on, very slowly, beside the train and slowly came to rest.

I could see into the white-painted interior of the train, could see the shelves running along its sides, and on the shelves, making oblong shapes of darkness against all the white, men laid straightly ... in front of us the Red Cross orderlies were sliding men down on stretchers from the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out, carrying them up into the train and packing them on the shelves like fragile and precious parcels.

And suddenly it seemed to me there was something profoundly touching about the sight of a man lying flat and helpless, shoved here and there, in spite of all the care and kindness with which it was accomplished. It is a thing wrong in essence, it seems an outrage on Nature—I got an odd feeling that there was something wrong and unnatural about the mere posture of lying-down that I never thought of before. The world seemed suddenly to have become deformed, as a monster is deformed who is born distorted. It shouldn't be possible to slide men on to shelves like this....

The girl at the wheel pushed back the little shutter set in the front of the ambulance and we looked into the dimly-lit interior. I could see the crowns of four heads, the jut of brow beyond them, the upward peak of the feet under the grey blankets, pale hands, one pair thin as a child's, that lay limply along the edge of the stretchers.

The orderlies came to the open door, one man mounted within, and the top stretcher from one side was slipped along its grooves and disappeared, tilted into the night. The boy on the top stretcher the other side turned his head languidly and watched—I could see a pale cheek, foreshortened from where I sat, a sweep of long dark eyelashes, the curve of the drooping upper lip. His turn came, and, passive, he too was slid out, then the two men below were carried away and up into the train. The ambulance was empty.