" Not so Quiet " - the costs of war (Helen Zenna Smith)

Helen Zenna Smith was a pseudonym for Evadne Price*, journalist and popular children's writer, asked by her publisher to write a spoof of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front  (1929) from a woman's point of view:-  "All Quaint …by Erica Remarks".  Instead, after reading Remarque,  she wrote her searing account of the VAD women ambulance drivers in France, drawing on the real diaries of driver Winifred Constance Young.

A visceral indictment of the young women's physical and mental misery, both on and off duty, engulfed with cold, pain, filth, hunger and fear, relying on the comradeship of fellow drivers to help them survive each day.  These sheltered middle-class girls had to drive out repeatedly to the train station for convoys of wounded men to be loaded into their ambulances, night and day, and then drive around a shattered landscape (often during shelling) to find their numbered hospital stations.

Loading ambulances at Ypres,  Gilbert Rogers 1919

 Crown © Imperial War Museum

She is even more savage on the consequences of war.  She pulls no punches at all.

"Boom-a boom-booma-boom- boommm!
'God I hate those bloody guns', mutters Tosh and this time B.F. is silent.  We stare ahead.  We hate and dread the days following on the guns when they boom without interval. Trainloads of broken human beings: half-mad men pleading to be put out of their misery; torn and bleeding and crazed men pitifully obeying orders like a herd of senseless cattle, dumbly, pitifully straggling in the wrong direction, as senseless as a flock of senseless sheep obeying a senseless leader, herded back into line by the orderly, the kind sheep-dog with a 'Now then, boys, this way. That's the ticket, boys',  instead of a bark; men with faces bleeding through their hasty bandages; men with vacant eyes and mouths hanging foolishly apart dropping saliva and slime; men with minds mercifully gone; men only too sane, eyes horror-filled with blood and pain…"
…..  "Tears tear at my heart...awful tears that rack me, but must not rise to my eyes, for they will freeze on my cheeks and stick my eyelids together until I cannot see to drive.  Even the solace of pitying tears is denied me."

A V.A.D. motor driver   Gilbert Rogers

©  Imperial War Museum

She rages bitterly against those flag-wavers like her mother, writing to her from home safe in Wimbledon Common:

"Committees …committees…committees…. recruiting meetings.  She has seventeen more recruits than Mrs Evans-Mawnington up to date.  My brother Bertie won't be satisfied until he gets to the trenches…she doesn't fancy the idea, but of course she is proud her son wants to fight for the Dear Old Flag.   The cat has had three kittens, three dear fluffy balls of fur …Mons, Wipers and Liege… rather sweet, don't I think?  Mrs Evans-Mawnington is boasting that Roy Evans-Mawnington is on his last leave before going out to the trenches.  Simply awful if  Roy got out there before Bertie.  Darling, I don't know how proud mother is of me and Trix and Bertie.  My three heroes...  so-and-so-and-so ….my affectionate mother, whose little daughter is … Doing her bit."

Menin Gate, Ypres,   Richard Tennant Cooper

© Royal Signals Museum, Blandford

"What is to happen to women like me when the killing is done and peace comes …if it ever comes?  What will they expect of us, these elders who have sent us out to fight?   We sheltered young women who smilingly stumbled from the chintz-covered drawing rooms of the suburbs straight into hell?" 

Extracts from Not So Quiet,  Helen Zenna Smith, 1930

* Evadne Price became a WWII war correspondent in 1943 and was there for the  liberation of the camps and the  Nuremburg trials.

Posted to France

"Half past five.  And still Commandant has not sorted the letters.
.    .   .    .    .
At six o'clock the room is practically empty.  Those who are hungry for letters have given up in despair and gone to lie down.  The ten o'clock convoy may turn out a certainty, although the eight o'clock one is off.  Five new drivers arrive straight out from England.  They look half-dead.  They have had a drive of about seventy miles in the snow in an ambulance on top of a filthy crossing to Boulogne.  They are completely exhausted.  The tea is finished, too.  I am about to enquire of cook when Commandant comes in.  She eyes the newcomers severely and, without any greeting, turns to me.
'Smith, show these drivers to the vacant beds and see they report to me in five minutes.'
What a welcome! No wonder the poor things look depressed.  She leaves her door open.  I simply dare not ask about the tea.
'I'm dying for a cup of tea,' says one, 'and then I'm going to have a sleep.'

Poor deluded fool.  She has no idea she will be sent straight out to learn the various localities of the different hospitals, to take over her own ambulance at midnight.  She is lucky if she gets a cup of hot tea first.  It all depends whether Commandant has closed her door and I can bully cook.

'Smith.  Take one of these new drivers. Preston, go with Smith.'

The snow is thick now.  I am so cold my fingers refuse to grip the wheel. ... How am I going to point out the landmarks when they are all snow-obscured?  The black tree-stump on the left that leads to Number Eight, the shell-hole that indicates the turning to Number Five, and so on.  Familiar as the landscape is to me, it takes me all my time to keep my bearings.  We go on and on in silence till the station is reached.  We couldn't converse, even if we felt chatty.  The snow gets in our mouths every time we open them.
....
This girl has been twice round the camp...I am only supposed to take her once.  But so worried am I at the possibility of the wounded men being ditched in the snow ... or worse... I have exceeded my duty.  The result is she has not located one hospital correctly.

It is after ten when we get back.  I am so numb I cannot feel my feet.  All I want is a hot drink, a fag, a hot-water bottle, and an hour's stew in my fleabag.

There are four letters on my camp-bed ...one from my sister Trix, one from mother, one in a handwriting I do not recognise, and one from Aunt Helen.  They can wait until I am warm and cosy under my blankets."

Not So Quiet ... Stepdaughters of War  Helen Zenna Smith (pseudonym of Evadne Price)  based on the war diaries of Winifred C. Young.
[This is one of the less searing passages to read of those young ambulance drivers' experiences on the night convoys of wounded men.]