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.
