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Philip Hind
Member
Username: admin
Post Number: 500
Registered: 12-1999
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 30, 2002 - 7:38 pm: | 
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Vera Brittain wrote this description of a journey on the Britannic as part of her 1933 memoir Testament of Youth. Although the extract is rather long it is well worth persevering as it gives an interesting flavour of life on board for a young nurse. Of those mentioned in the text Betty is a nurse, Roland is Vera's lover recently killed at the front and Edward is her brother, recuperating at home after being wounded.
On the late afternoon of Saturday, September 23rd, 1916, a large tender carried a party of excited and apprehensive young women down the glittering expanse of Southampton Water. The tender had orders to embark them on H.M. Hospital Ship Britannic, which was sailing next day for Mudros in order to bring home the chronically sick and wounded from various Eastern campaigns. Betty and I, by far the youngest of the group, were also the most excited and certainly not the least apprehensive, for a persistent wonder whether I should ever see Edward or Victor or Geoffrey again caused a lump in my throat and a dull ache at the pit of my stomach.
The mingled depression and exhilaration of that day still lives in the pages of my diary.
" Mother and Edward . . . spent an hour or two with me this morning before our final departure. I bade them a last au revoir at the corner of Brief Street, as I did not want to watch them walk away.
We left the hospital with Miss C. in a 'bus and met Principal Matron at Waterloo. I hated Waterloo and the Southampton express ; there was such a general bustle and noise and confusion which somehow seemed to intensify the feeling that we were going away. . . . I felt acutely miserable, not so much at the idea of leaving England and everybody (for since Roland went the long, long journey no place in the world seems so very far away from any other place) as because everything was so unsettled and I hate things to be unsettled and not know at all what is going to happen to me. . . . In spite of the depressing effect of the 'bus and Waterloo it was a great relief to me to leave Camberwell. . . So much had I grown to hate it that I felt that any change,., to however much worse physical conditions, would be a welcome relief. . . .
" At 4.0 we all assembled at the dock. . . . As we left the harbour a transport of the R.F.C. cheered us and waved their hats. We sailed down the Solent just as the sun was setting ; on either side of us the colours of the mainland were vividly beautiful. The sinking sun made a shimmering golden track on the water which seemed to link us in our tender to the England we were leaving behind, and in the evening light the aeroplanes and seaplanes which now and again flew round us looked like fairy things."
When we came near to the Isle of Wight, the Britannic, anchored off Cowes, appeared in the distance like a huge white mammoth lying on, its side. For a moment a sick dread had seized me when I learnt that she had been built as sister ship to the Titanic, but as I watched her scarlet crosses and four large funnels gleaming in the low sunshine, I consoled myself by reflecting that her conversion into a hospital ship had removed her to a different category. During the winter of 1915 she had run between England and Mudros, but her use was discontinued after the evacuation of the Dardanelles. Now that the Balkans had become active she was to start again, and this journey to Mudros, where those destined for Malta had to tranship, was the maiden voyage of her new series.
I had hardly begun to unpack in the luxurious inner cabin which I was to share with Betty, when we were summoned to listen to an address by the Sister-in-Charge of the Malta contingent on the behaviour expected from the V.A.D.s on board. Her injunctions involved so frequent a repetition of the words : " They may not . . . they shall not. . ." that we should soon have become openly mutinous had not a tran-quillising service on the deck next morning before we sailed reminded us how futile were little hot-headed rebellions against inj udicious severity in face of the hazards that might be before us. By the time that we had sung " Jesu, Lover of my soul," and listened to an idealistic red-haired chaplain telling us that " for a certain type of human nature the far and the perilous thing has always had an alluring charm," some of us were ready to confront danger and suffer martyrdom to the limit of endurance.
Martyrdom, however, though admittedly uncomfortable, might have been less exasperating than the constant humiliation to which our youthful dignity, far from enabling us to shine, in the chaplain's words, "as lanterns of hope in the. darkest hours of distress and fear," was compelled ignominiously to submit. Our Sister-in-Charge, an Amazonian individual with a harsh voice and hawk-like features, appeared to us as one of those women whose idea of discipline is to visualise every activity that her subordinates might enjoy and then issue a general prohibition. We had not been on the ship for a day before the boat deck-the best place from which to see the unfamiliar countries that we were passing-was put out of bounds. We were also forbidden to leave our cabins in pyjamas-a regulation guaranteed to prevent all those who, like ourselves, had inside cabins, from observing any passing attraction in the way of land or ships. Had I obeyed it I should have seen neither Gibraltar at midnight nor Messina at dawn.
The V.A.D. passengers were ruthlessly divided into " sections," each under a section-leader who led a dog's life trying to keep pace with the orders issued to her. Every V.A.D. had to sit, cat and attend functions with other members of her section even though her best friend was in another-as she always was if the Sister happened to discover the friendship. Finally, as these arrangements did not separate us from the medical officers as completely as the Sister had intended, she and the Matron of the Britannic nursing staff-a sixty-year-old " dug-out " with a red cape and a row of South African medals-ordered a rope to be stretched across the main deck to divide the V.A.D. sheep from the R.A.M.C. goats ; by this expedient they hoped automatically to terminate the age-long predilection of men and women for each other's society. After a few days, during which the more adventurous of both sexes had edged as near to the rope as they dared, and several others had regarded one another from a distance with eyes full of cupidity, the guardians of our virtue were astonished and pained beyond measure when one or two couples, being denied the opportunity of normal conversation on deck, were found in compromising positions beneath the gangways.
Late on the Sunday afternoon, we sailed. At chapel that evening, the Sisters and V.A.D.s at the 1st London General sang on our behalf the hymn : " Eternal Father, strong to save "—not without good reason, as later experience was to prove. Their thought " for those in peril on the sea " was perhaps stimulated by the fact that they themselves had just emerged from peril of another kind, for, on the very evening after our departure, a fleet of raiding Zeppelins dropped bombs on Purley, Streatham Hill and Brixton, doing a good deal of damage quite near to the hospital. 'The windows of the White Horse were smashed—just where Mother and I passed that morning after saying good-bye to you,' wrote Edward later.
" Providence has tempered the wind to the shorn lamb again," I thought a little ruefully, remembering how frightened I had been of air-raids when I first went to London, and reflecting that so close a conjunction of Zeppelins and submarines might entirely have annihilated that modicum of courage which, throughout the War, only just enabled me to keep my dignity in perilous situations.
As the great screws began to thrash and throb, Betty and I, alien in our thoughts yet very glad of one another's company, escaped to the forbidden boat deck to see the last of England. Making for the Cornish coast and the Bay of Biscay, the Britannic began her journey cast by going west, and as we passed the Needles we seemed to sail right into the heart of a gold and purple sunset, which dazzled us with a lovely radiance too bright for human eyes. On the deck below us the R.A.M.C. orderlies were singing and dancing ; we looked down upon them as though seeing a music-hall stage from the front of the dress-circle. One man who had a violin played Tosti's "Good-bye" ; the plaintive, familiar notes rang out into the mild September twilight.
Falling leaf and fading tree,
Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising on you and me—
Shadows rising-on you-ou and me
The swallows are making them ready to fly,
Wheeling out-on a wind-y sky.
Good-bye, Surnmer-Good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, Sum-mer ! Good-bye-go-od-bye
Now that the perils of the sea were really at hand, the terror that had hung over me since I volunteered for foreign service and for one grim second had gripped me by the throat when Betty told me that we were going to Malta, somehow seemed less imminent. The expensive equipment of our cabins was illogically reassuring ; those polished tables and bevelled mirrors looked so inappropriate for the bottom of the sea. " We are in danger ! " I kept saying as I lay awake in the dark that night, but although we knew that our voyage was to be much Ionger than we had expected, it was difficult on so warm and calm an evening to convince one's self that at any moment might come a loud explosion, followed by a cold, choky death in the smooth black water. Later, when a storm swept over the Bay of Biscay and land was far away, the gruesome possibility seemed less remote.
Six months afterwards, writing to my mother about the torpedoing of the Asturias with two of our most popular Malta V.A.D.s on board, I tried to describe the disintegrating fear which left me with a sick reluctance to undertake long voyages that ignominiously persist to this day.
" I feel so sorry for them to think it happened at night, for I remember the feelings of terror the dark hours used to bring us on the Britannic
—feelings which, of course, we never mentioned to each other at the time but afterwards all admitted we had had. I used to look over the steep side of that tremendous ship and think to myself: ` Perhaps now—or now—or now ! It is being on the qui vive for something that may happen any moment of any hour which makes the strain of a long voyage nowadays. ' Betty ' and I were not in a very good place for being torpedoed on the Britannic as. having a cabin we were on a lower deck than most of the others, in fact we were only a yard or two from the place where the torpedo ultimately went through. I used to wake up at night and listen to the thresh of the screws and the whistle of the wind above the mastheads and the rushing of the water against the side, and wonder if any among the strange occasional crashes and bangs that went on all night was a torpedo or mine striking the ship."
But even feeling so desperately afraid could not entirely quench the thrill of passing those far, enchanted lands which to a sixteen-year-old Cook's tourist had seemed so inaccessible. For the whole of one Long hot evening I lay on deck, still a little sick and faint from the trials of the Bay, and watched the brick-red coast of Portugal deepen into the low grey rock of Cape St. Vincent. That night Gibraltar towered above us, a black shadow studded with lights, and the next morning the arrogant peaks of the Sierra Nevada leaned over the jagged summits of the Alpujarras to see the white monster, to which over-confident men and women had entrusted their lives, slip noiselessly along the menacing blue water. One day more, and the grey and purple rocks of Sardina greeted us before we stopped for forty-eight hours to coal at Naples in the shadow of the cloud-crowned giant Vesuvius. Messina, that narrow, tragic strait perpetually guarded by the blue sentinel Etna, slipped past us in the dawn of our ninth morning afloat, and on the tenth day the Mediterranean began to gleam with great jewels-golden islands, purple-shadowed, set in a. sapphire sea.
As the sun rose, the Britannic lurched and swayed drunkenly through the Archipelago, leaving far behind the three cruisers which were supposed to be her escort into the perilous Ægean.
" How fast we can go when we like ! " I thought admiringly, crouching in my dressing-gown with half a dozen others beside a prohibited porthole. I did not know until weeks afterwards that an enemy submarine was actually chasing us as we sat there so serenely without our lifebelts, nor realise that the beautiful ship was already doomed by a threat which was destined, in as lovely a dawn, to be cruelly fulfilled in that very place.
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Nine hours later we lay anchored in Mudros harbour, waiting to tranship. Never before had I seen so many vessels of all kinds, great and small, old and new, British and French and Levantine. Hospital ships gleamed white and enormous above the small black cargo-boats that ran inconspicuously through the Mediterranean to take refuge in the estuaries of' large rivers ; gaunt Dreadnoughts lay close beside little sailing vessels, with ancient rigging so fantastic that they seemed, in the brilliant incredible light which flooded the harbour, to be no longer the property of the Levantines from the tumble-down village on the sinister shore, but the old beautiful ships of the Greeks awaiting the Persian fleet.
Behind the camps and the miserable hovels of the fishermen, range upon range of savage hills enclosed the multitude of ships within a lost, incongruous world. Above these hills, as the sun set, the distant peaks of Sarnothrace burst into flame, and away to the right a cone-shaped mountain summit stood out darkly against the majestic: red reflected from the western sky. One of the Sisters told me that this mountain was Achi Baba, a dominant memorial to the lost gallantry wasted in the Dardanelles. " It gave me," my diary records, " a queer thrill to be so near, so very near. that dreadful Unknown Land-that most unknown of all this War's unknowns-to women, at any rate."
All afternoon and evening I stood on the deck, gazing as in a trance upon that momentous curve of Lemnos in the rich desolation of the Ægean. From this harbour as John Masefield was even then recording, the men on the transports bound for Gallipoli had gone " like kings in a pageant to the imminent death." Not far away two days before the landing at Cape Helles, Rupert Brooke had died, and had become part of some magic island in that blue, unearthly sea. With a pang I remembered my English tutor reading his sonnets at Oxford just after Roland had gone to the front, and thought how strange it was that I should be near to Rupert Brooke's " corner of a foreign field " so long before I was likely to see Roland's.
I learnt soon afterwards that Rupert Brooke had been buried on the Island of Skyros, in an olive grove above a watercourse at the foot of Mount Khokilas. By cloudy moonlight the men of his company had carried him in his uniform up the silent hill, and over his head they placed a big wooden cross and put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of the larger-cross an R.N.V.R. interpreter wrote in Greek : " Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."
That night we transhipped to another hospital boat, the small Union Castle liner Galeka. and under cover of the darkness slipped quietly out of the harbour. Above our heads in a deep indigo sky the great pale stars shone over us, looking so much larger and nearer than they had ever seemed in Buxton or Oxford or Camberwell. It was fortunate that we had the stars to give a lofty illumination to our adventure, for our new quarters, in contrast to the superb luxury of the Britannic, filled us with rueful dismay.
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Michail Michailakis
Member
Username: michailakis
Post Number: 62
Registered: 1-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 1, 2002 - 2:23 am: |
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Hi Philip,
I didn't know that Vera Brittain had actually travelled on the Britannic!I have never read "Testament of Youth" and I always thought that she only mentioned Britannic describing her encounter with some survivors at Malta.
Thank you for the interesting information and for the time spent for writing this message.
Regards,
Michail
Webmaster "Britannic"
http://members.tripod.com/michailakis
http://embark.to/Britannic
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