Enid Bagnold

“ If I were a man I should certainly go to public-houses. All that polished brass and glass boxed up away from the moon and the shadows would call to me. And to drink must be a happy thing when you have climbed the hill.
The T.B. ward is a melancholy place. There is a man in a bed near the door who lies with his mouth open; his head is like a bird-cage beneath a muslin cloth. I saw him behind his screens when I took them over a little lukewarm chicken left from our dinner. ”

“ Sometimes in the late evening one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond [Pg 46] 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. ”

“ I like discipline. I like to be part of an institution. It gives one more liberty than is possible among three or four observant friends.
It is always cool and wonderful after the monotone of the dim hospital, its half-lit corridors stretching as far as one can see, to come out into the dazzling starlight and climb the hill, up into the trees and shrubberies here.
The wind was terrible to-night. I had to battle up, and the leaves were driven down the hill so fast that once I thought it was a motor-bicycle.
Madeleine's garden next door is all deserted now: they have gone up to London. ”

“ Everything in the dispensary is beautiful—its glasses, its flames, its brass weights, its jars and globes; but much more beautiful because it is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that: one feels like Gulliver.
No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple.
On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. ”

“ But whom need one trust? Brother, lover, friend ... no more. Why wish to trust all the world?...
"They are not real men," she says, "not men through and through."
That's where she goes wrong; they are men through and through—patchy, ordinary, human. She means they are not men after her pattern.
Something will happen in the ward. Once I have touched this bedrock in her I shall be for ever touching it till it gets sore!
One should seek for no response. They are not elastic, these nuns....
In all honesty the hospital is a convent, and the men in it my brothers. ”

“ I heard her voice: "Now then, Rees, I don't call that much of a song." She called me to make his bed, and I saw his left ear was full of tears.
O visitors, who come into the ward in the calm of the long afternoon, when the beds are neat and clean and the flowers out on the tables and the V.A.D.'s sit sewing at splints and sandbags, when the men look like men again and smoke and talk and read ... if you could see what lies beneath the dressings!
When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others. ”

“ I know how the waves of the pain come up and recede; how a little sleep just brushes the spirit, but never absorbs it; how the arms will struggle up to the air, only to be covered and enmeshed again in heat and blankets. ”

“ As one bends one's head low over the splint one sits unnoticed, a part of the furniture of the ward. The sounds of the ward rise and fill the ears; it is like listening to a kettle humming, bees round a bush of flowers, the ticking of a clock, the passing of life....
Now and then there are incidents, as just [Pg 112] now. Two orderlies came in with a stretcher to fetch Mr. Smith (an older man than Smiff and a more dignified) away to a convalescent home. Mr. Smith has never been to France, but walked into our ward one day with a sore on his foot which had to be cut. ”

“ She is ready to be angry with herself, with her pain, with her ear. It is monstrous, she thinks....
The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine. A deadlock!
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. ”

“ On Christmas Eve I didn't leave the hospital till long after the Day-Sisters had gone and the Night-Sisters came on. The wards were all quiet as I walked down the corridor, and to left and right through the glass doors hung the rows of expectant stockings.
Final and despairing postscript on Mr. Pettitt.
When a woman says she cannot come to lunch it is because she doesn't want to.
Let this serve as an axiom to every lover: A woman who refuses lunch refuses everything.
The hospital is alive; I feel it like a living being.
The hospital is like a dream. ”

“ He sits up, attentive, while the ulcers on his leg are being dressed, but if one asks him something of the history of his wound his tone holds such a volume of bitterness and exasperation that one feels that at any moment the locks of his spirit might cease to hold. ”

“ If one ceases for one instant to pity Mr. Wicks he becomes an awful bore. Some days, when the sun is shining, I hear his grieving tenor voice all over the ward, his legendary tale of a wrong done him in his promotion. The men are kind to him and say "Old man," but Mr. Gray, who lies in the next bed to him, is drained of everything except resignation. I heard him say yesterday, "You told me that before...." ”

“ There are only ten men left in bed in the ward. Sometimes I think, "Will there never be another convoy?"
And then: "Is not one man alone sufficient matter on which to reflect?" "One can find God in a herring's head...." says a Japanese proverb.
When there is not much to do in the ward and no sound comes from behind the screens, when there has not been a convoy for weeks, when the little rubber tubes lie in the trolley-drawer and the syringe gives place to the dry dressing—then they set one of us aside from the work of the ward to sit at a table and pad splints. ”

“ They take the stretcher into a ward, and while I wait I know what they are doing behind the screens which stand around a bed against the wall. I hear the shuffle of feet as the men stand to attention, and the orderlies come out again, and the folds of the flag have ballooned up to receive and embrace a man's body. ”

“ The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows, basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.
Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock—a fossil, as though it had been there for ever.
London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.
The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears upon the pillow.
"Can you get me a book, nurse?" ”

“ I looked through the ward door once or twice during the evening, and still his knees, at the far end of the room, were moving up and down.
It must happen to the men in France that, living so near the edge of death, they are more aware of life than we are.
When they come back, when the postwar days set in, will they keep that vision, letting it play on life ... or must it fade?
And some become so careless of life, so careless of all the whims and personalities [Pg 28] and desires that go to make up existence, that one wrote to me:
"The only real waste is the waste of metal. ”

“ When the ward is empty and there is, as now, so little work to do, how we, the women, watch each other over the heads of the men! And because we do not care to watch, nor are much satisfied with what we see, we want more work. ”

“ One does not wash up when one makes splints, one does not change the pillow-cases—forcing the resentful pillow down, down till the corners of the case are filled—nor walk the ward in search of odd jobs.
But these are not the reasons....
Just as I liked the unending laying of the trays in the corridor, so making splints appears to me a gentle work in which one has time to look at and listen to the ward with more penetrating eyes, with wider ears—a work varied by long conversations with Pinker about his girl and the fountain-pen trade. ”

“ Wicks, Sister, not only has his back to the road with trams on it, but for eleven months he has had his eyes on the yellow stone of the wall of the German ward; that is, when they are not on his own bedrail....
"But if his bed were turned round to range alongside the window...? For he is a man with two eyes; not one who can write upon a stone wall with his thoughts.
"And yet ... it would be impossible! There's not a ward in the hospital whose symmetry is so spoilt.
"And that, you know, is a difficulty for you to weigh. How far are you a dictator? ”

“ There are times when my heart fails me; when my eyes, my ears, my tongue, and my understanding fail me; when pain means nothing to me....
In the bus yesterday I came down from London sitting beside a Sister from another ward, who held her hand to her ear and shifted in her seat. ”

“ I thought last night that a hospital ward is, above all, a serene place, in spite of pain and blood and dressings. Gravity rules it and order and a quiet procession of duties.
Last night I made beds with the eldest Sister. The eldest Sister is good company to make beds with; she is quiet unless I rouse her, and when I talk she smiles with her eyes. I like to walk slowly round the [Pg 75] ward, stooping and rising over the white beds, flicking the sheets mechanically from the mattress, and finally turning the mattress with an ease which gives me pleasure because I am strong. ”

“ Every sort of price must be paid, every Mud of curious coinage—the pennies and farthings of fear and despair in odd places, as well as the golden coin of life which is spent across the water.
All day long the words of command come over the ward window-sills. All day long they bump and shout and sweat and play that charade of theirs behind the guns.
All day long little men training to fill just [Pg 146] such another hospital as ours with other little men. ”

“ I think plants in a ward are a barbarism, for as they are always arranged on the table by the door, it is again obvious that they are intended only to minister to the eye of the visitor, that race of gods. ”

“ It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's [Pg 114] marketing, and, meeting there, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear.
For the bachelors amuse themselves when they are not mixing and weighing by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny arm through the hatchway, they pin them on, little scraps of paper which fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails. ”

“ It isn't supposed to be a job we care for, and I am keeping up the delusion, but all the time I run my seams straight, pull the horsehair out to the last fine shred, turn in my corners as the corners of a leather book are turned, so that I may be kept at it, although out of cunning I appear to grumble and long to be released. ”

“ To have an intimate life one must have a little time.
Who am I that I can step in from outside to criticize? The hospital is not my life. I am expectant....
But for them here and now is the business of life.
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 [Pg 87] ward attacks me; their attitude towards the patients, which began by offending me, ends by overtaking me. ”

“ I shall never look at white butterflies again without hearing the sounds from the camp, [Pg 123] without seeing the ring of riders, without thinking, perhaps, of the dairyman and of the other "dairymen."
The butterflies do not care for noise. When, standing beside the cabbage-patch, the bugler blows the dinner-bugle, they race in a cloud to the far corner and hover there until the last note is sounded. ”

“ Scutts and Monk talk to me while I sew, but what about the Monks, Scutts, Gayners, whose wounds will never need a dressing or a tube—who lie along a front of two miles, one on his face, another on his back?
Since 3.15 this morning a lot of men have died. Thank God one cannot go on realizing death.
But one need not think of it. This is a ward; here are lucky ones. Even when I look at Rees, even when I look at the grocer, even when I look at the T.B. ward, I know that anything, anything is better than death. ”

“ The sergeant wolfed the cheese too. He got it out from under my very eyes while I was clearing the tables and ate it, standing up to it in the pantry with his back to me when I went in to fetch a tray.
Whenever I see that broad khaki back, the knickered legs astride, the flexed elbow-tips, I know that his digestion is laying up more trouble for him.
Benks, the Mess orderly, overeats himself too. He comes to the bunk and thrusts his little smile round the door: "Sister, I got another of them sick 'eadaches," very cheerfully, as though he had got something worth having. ”

“ He was pleased with his own joke, and the dairyman smiled too, uncomprehendingly, his eyebrows shooting up and down like swallows' wings. Such jokes mean nothing to him; he is where no joke but his own will ever please him any more....
Palmer doesn't like sitting near him, but since it is too much trouble to move he allows it—poor Palmer, who has a piece of metal somewhere in his brain and is never seen without one long hand to his aching head. He said to me yesterday when I asked him which convalescent home he was going to, "It doesn't matter. We both go to the same kind before long...." ”

“ Women are left behind when one goes into hospital. Such women as are in a hospital should be cool, gentle; anything else becomes a torment to the "prisoner."
For me, too, it is bad; it brings the world back into my eyes; duties are neglected, discomforts unobserved.
But there are things one doesn't fight.
"Charme de l'amour...." The ward is changed! The eldest Sister and the youngest Sister are my enemies; the patients are my enemies—even Mr. Wicks, who lies on his back with his large head turned fixedly my way to see how often I stop at the bed whose number is 11. ”