It was a time of madness. There was no way of making sense of the abundant horrors of this war from within the gilded environment of Wrest Park–both for the soldiers and for those who helped them recover. Men suffering from shell shock and chlorine-gas poisoning were stretchered to beds facing one of the greatest formal gardens of England. Above them, on the ceilings, they gazed at titillating scenes of embracing, semi-naked girls floating in clouds. Between their beds were French rococo marble fireplaces and pier-glasses with sinuous gilded frames. Doors opened at the turn of an octagonal ivory door handle, a beautiful little object to clasp in one’s hand.
The other face of Wrest dealt with scenes such as this:
17 July 1916: ‘12.15 emergency operation; Dr Kirkwood took off a man’s arm. Dr Garner from Ampthill as anaesthetist. Have never seen anything like it’, wrote Nan, now fully trained and assisting in the operating theatre as Sister: ‘–up to the elbow the arm was rotten and blue (gas gangrene). Cleaned up theatre by 2.30.’
There was no time off. Here is surgeon Mr Ewart’s timetable for Saturday, 12 August 1916:
1. Walker–Hernia
2. Cleghorn–Paresis of Foot
3. Paul–Ampt. of Toe
4. Leonard–Removal of Plate from Femur
5. Clancey–Shrap. in Knee
6. Hodges–Jaw, wire to remove
7. Pattison–Axilla to stitch
8. Williams–Injury to Perineum
The ‘List of Outings’ timetable for the same day has fifty men going to Tingrith Manor at 2.30 p.m. ‘for tea and games, also cricket match’.
From Wrest the men were sent on to local convalescent homes, where once a month they would be inspected by a captain who would mark out which were fit to return to the trenches. A little leather autograph book survives in the Imperial War Office archives; it belonged to Edith Mary Taylor, a nurse at Wrest Park Hospital in 1916. It is filled with the small, painstaking script of ‘the boys’: men who had infinite time on their hands to compose their records of the war. Some are gung-ho in tone; many are not.
Far from the muddy/Dugouts I wont to be, Back to Old England/Where bullets wont strick me.
The man that wants to go/Back shure he is telling a lie.
John McKay of the 6th Battalion Oxrs Bucks, wounded by a bullet in the foot at Ypres, 20 March 1916.
Private Thomas William Carlton of the 9th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment, a Sunderland boy, cannot even spell his enemy’s name:
We got to Ypres to our sorrow/And it was simply murder Because we had to stand both night and day/Up to the knees in water…Now our Battalion was very lucky/Although we lost a lot of men But apart from that we did our best/To keep those fearful jermans back…
There is a Private Angus Mackenzie from the 8th Ptt 2nd Infantry Brigade, 1st Canadian Division, called up to help ‘the Motherland’. Most of his comrades were now dead:
Hundreds of that brave band/Have gone from a foreign stand Straight to that Happy Land/The Home of the Blest But thank the Almighty/There are some now in Blighty And this one at Wrest.12
They made a big fuss of Christmas at Wrest Park Hospital. It was as if the bottled-up maternal urges of the entire household were uncorked in one ear-splitting pop. Extraordinary to imagine, each of the 130 hospital beds had its own Christmas stocking. Consequently the day began at 3 a.m.,
when a pandemonium of penny whistles and toy trumpets broke forth, especially from Nurse Mac’s little room where she had the three empyemas [fluid on the lungs]–Billows, Rogers and Parker, the latter a very small mild man who was said to have bayoneted fourteen Germans.
There were trick matches and cigarettes, more fancy-dress costumes sent up from London, ‘orgies of eating’ and a convalescents’ band ‘braying loudly’ on the great staircase. Photographs show the wards crazily festooned with ivy. Costumes are West End quality: J. M. Barrie must have had a hand in securing these. The Herberts’ friend Maurice Baring arrived and was hailed as both ‘butt and idol’ of the boys; Bron was simply their ‘hero’. There are pictures of nurses and soldiers, and nurses and surgeons, but none of the domestic staff has made it into the Christmas pages of the scrapbook. Was it Hannah and her girls or Miss Martin and her nurses who wrapped the presents and hung the baubles?
All tried to forget the frightening episode of the week before. Early on 16 December, German warships had shelled Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians including children on their way to school. Then, with deliberate timing, a Zeppelin dropped a bomb on Dover on Christmas Eve–the first ever air raid on British soil. ‘This is not warfare’, thundered a leader in the weekly Independent, ‘this is murder.’13 That year, and for every year after until the war’s end, the famous line was cut from productions of Peter Pan: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’