It is difficult to appreciate how unexpected the First World War actually was, especially to people like Agatha and her mother, who did not read between the lines of politicians’ speeches or bother with dissecting the ambitions of the Kaiser. There had been no major European wars for a generation – colonial imbroglios were not the same. True, there were those who perceived that German interests and Balkan quarrels would lead to trouble but even those responsible for running the country were surprised that things came to a head when they did. The summer months, a time when politicians and officials, like the rest of the English middle and upper classes, went to the country, the sea, Scotland, the spas, were in 1914 gloriously sunny; it seemed, afterwards, as if those weeks had been the last miraculous moment, like the pause before a wave topples over, of a world that for many had been golden and assured. Not for all; support was swelling for economic and social change. The Labour Party, formed in 1900, was growing in strength; the Liberals, despite Lloyd George’s programme of reform, were losing their grip; the House of Lords, for what was not to be the last time, teetered on the precipice of abolition. There was trade union agitation, rebellion in Ireland and disruption by women demanding female emancipation and the vote. Some time the wave would break, but not yet, not in these languid days and glowing evenings. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia at the end of June was the catalyst, and war came.
The Royal Flying Corps was among the first forces to be mobilised. Archie’s last letter from Netheravon, written as they were waiting for orders to move, describes his own attempt to swell the size of the Expeditionary Force:
On Friday I took my recruit to Devizes to get him enlisted and there heard of a bankrupt Russian Baron, who was in need of a job, so as he was a good mechanic and could speak Russian, French, German and English perfectly I persuaded him in the end to enlist in the RFC too.
He tried to reassure Agatha:
This waiting is rather hard but all is ready.
I have a revolver in a holster and an ammunition pouch full of bullets, just to please you.
The last time I shot off my gun was after travelling all night from Cheadle and I fired 96 rounds and averaged 19 out of 26 so I may hit a large German if I see one which is unlikely …
You will be very brave won’t you Angel, it will be very hard to sit at home and do nothing, and I am afraid you will have money troubles too but it must all come right if we are steadfast and I will always love you more than anything on earth.
Two days later Archie’s squadron learnt that it was to move to Southampton to embark for France. He immediately wired to Ashfield for Agatha to come to Salisbury, if she could, to say goodbye. She and Clara set off straightaway; the banks were closed and all the money they had was in five-pound notes, which Clara, well-trained by Auntie-Grannie, always kept for emergencies. But no one would take a five-pound note and they were obliged to leave their names and addresses with ticket collectors all over Southern England (a trail vividly described in Unfinished Portrait). After endless complications and delays, they arrived in Salisbury on the evening of August 3rd, where Agatha and Archie had only a little time together before his departure. The next day she and Clara returned to Torquay.
On August 5th Archie left for Southampton and on the 12th crossed the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force. On landing he sent a postcard to Agatha; muddling her chronology again in the rush and turmoil of those first weeks, she maintained that it arrived three days after their parting. In fact she did not receive it until mid-September. Agatha later learnt how quickly Archie had been pitched into action. His logbook traces his progress across Northern France, until on September 12th his squadron, No. 3, moved with three others to Fève-en-Tardenous, where there was a heavy storm (which Archie and two of his friends missed, having fallen asleep on the floor of an inn). The German invaders, defeated by French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne and obliged to retreat some distance, now dug themselves into Belgium and much of the coal and iron-bearing part of France. The allied armies, retaining their direct communications with the Channel ports, poured men and weapons into that flat, muddy, occupied territory, seeking, yard by yard, to oust the Germans. This bloody trench warfare began in mid-September 1914 and was to last for four years.
Archie’s dash and bravery were soon proved; on October 19th he was mentioned in the first despatch from Field Marshal Sir John French to Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, describing the battles of Mons, the Marne and, particularly, the Aisne, and emphasising the great strain to which the RFC was subjected. In mid-November Archie was gazetted Flight Commander and Temporary Captain. More important, he was still alive and neither wounded nor shell-shocked. For the lists of dead and missing that were to mark the passage of those years were beginning to appear in English newspapers, and a dreadful procession of the physically and psychologically maimed started to make its way home. Agatha saw these men; she was now working with the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in Torquay, to which came many of the boats carrying the wounded. She had been going to classes in bandaging and first aid for some time before the war started and now she began at the hospital as a ward-maid, cleaning and scrubbing, and, like the other novices, being more of a hindrance than a help to the trained nursing staff. She learnt to grit her teeth and inflict painful treatment, assist in the operating theatre, cheer up wounded men and humour the doctors. It was hard, messy, evil-smelling, tiring work, which she later described in the novel Giant’s Bread. Nightmarish though this transformation was, Agatha was at least busy, with distractions sufficiently exhausting to prevent her from being overwhelmed with anxiety for Archie. She was, moreover, a good practical nurse, and the companionship of the wards and her patients’ dependence supported her. With her noticing ear and fascination with hierarchy and routine, she had a good deal of entertainment from hospital life: the deference shown by ward-maids to nurses, nurses to Sisters, and by everyone to doctors, the variations in forms of address and in manners (amicable badinage among the VADs, who called each other by their surnames, genteel whisperings by Sister This and Sister That) – all interested and amused her as much as the conventions observed in the household at Ashfield and in the carefully graded society of Torquay.
This was Agatha’s first responsible job and she enjoyed being able to do it well. Like Archie, she was wiser and wearier when they were reunited at the end of the year, on his first period of leave. They met in London, as Agatha put it, ‘almost like strangers’, for both of them had not only been living through an entirely new kind of experience, of death, uncertainty and fear, but had been doing so alone. Archie’s reaction was to behave as casually, almost flippantly, as possible, while Agatha had become more serious. The insecurity of the times had made her all the more anxious that they should be married and Archie all the more convinced they should not: ‘You stop one, you’ve had it, and you’ve left behind a young widow, perhaps a child coming – it’s completely selfish and wrong.’ Archie’s leave began on December 21st. The plan was that Clara should stay with them in London and, when she left for Devonshire, they should go to Clifton to stay with Archie’s mother and stepfather. Agatha was uncomfortable with Mrs Hemsley, who was kind but gushing and possessive, and it may have been her nervousness at the prospect of spending Christmas with her, coupled with reaction to the tension of the past five months, that caused her to quarrel violently with Archie. The immediate cause was his Christmas present, a luxurious fitted dressing-case: ‘If he had bought me a ring, or a bracelet, however expensive, I should not have demurred … but for some reason I revolted violently against the dressing-case.’ It is not difficult to see why. The gift represented frivolity – indeed, that was why Archie had bought it, in his determination to recapture some of the light-heartedness the War had swept away. Agatha, grave and responsible, was particularly touchy about any implication that she was not dedicated, serious, professional, that she did not have battles to fight as well: ‘What was the good of my going back home to hospital with an exciting dressing-case …?’ The present also disturbed her in another way. ‘A ring or bracelet’ would perhaps have represented something permanent and binding; a dressing-case, however beautiful and well-appointed, suggested transitoriness, impermanence. That was what Archie was feeling; it was what Agatha wished to dispel. But these subtleties do not dawn on people when they give and receive presents. Archie had been clumsy, Agatha was tactless, and a tremendous row ensued, of such magnitude that it reunited them far more effectively than anything else could have done.
Clara departed and they left on the difficult and tiring journey to Clifton, where Agatha went almost immediately to bed, only to be roused by Archie, urgently arguing that they should marry before his leave was up. This time it was Agatha who foresaw the difficulties; separated from her mother, ill at ease in her prospective mother-in-law’s home, she was doubtless terrified by Archie’s intensity and impassioned determination. He talked wildly of special licences and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Agatha gave in and agreed that they should be married next morning, Christmas Eve.
Mrs Hemsley was, as Agatha predicted, greatly upset but Mr Hemsley, always sympathetic, urged them on. Archie and Agatha scrambled about for a licence to marry: a fortnight’s notice was required for an ordinary £8 licence and a special £25 licence was unobtainable for December 24th. Then a kindly registrar, stretching a point, issued one on the strength of Archie’s being a local resident. The vicar agreed to perform the ceremony that afternoon; the organist, who happened to be practising in the church, to play the wedding march; and Mr Hemsley and a passer-by, who turned out to be a friend of Agatha’s, to act as witnesses. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve Agatha and Archie were married. With some difficulty, they managed to book a room at the Grand Hotel, Torquay, in order to be on their own together. The dressing-case, which Archie had hidden, was brought out again for the wedding journey, its devil exorcised. At midnight, after an even more horrendous train journey, they arrived at the Grand Hotel. They spent Christmas Day with Clara and Madge, now recovered from the initial shock they had felt when, on a bad line from Clifton, Agatha had telephoned to announce her news. On Boxing Day Agatha travelled to London with Archie to see him off; she was not to see him again for six months. She comforted herself, and sought to amuse Archie, by making him a New Year present, ‘The AA Alphabet for 1915’. (AA stood for Archie and Agatha and also for Ack Ack, as the anti-aircraft guns were called.) It is full of private jokes and wistful references:
A is for Angel, by nature (?) and name
And also for Archibald, spouse of the same
K for the Kaiser, of Kultur the King!
(Indirectly the cause of a new wedding ring!)
The immediate and lengthy separation was as hard to bear married as unmarried. Archie was still exposed to great danger and the future was as uncertain as before. The casualty lists grew longer, friends and sons of friends were killed, the hospital was full of wounded. Everywhere Agatha saw death and decay. Her mother was frail, and, though Mary Ann was cheerful and robust, her other grandmother, Margaret, found living at Ealing a struggle, since her sight was rapidly failing and she suspected the servants of robbing her. By 1915 her eyes were so bad that she was obliged to come and live with Clara and Agatha at Ashfield. Much of her vast mahogany furniture came too, together with quantities of food – sardines and hams with which (despite her distrust of tinned goods) she had stacked her shelves and now hid on the tops of wardrobes, against the day when the Huns should seek to starve her out. It was particularly dreadful to Agatha to see the fate of that part of Margaret’s hoard which was not immune to the passage of time – mouldy jams, fermented plums, butter and sugar nibbled by mice, moth-eaten velvets and silks, lengths of print rotted by the passing of the years, papers crumbled to dust. Margaret wept among the waste. What, Agatha wondered, was the point of being thrifty and prudent? She was deeply troubled by the discovery and destruction of those bags of weevily flour, fine linen garments gone into holes, deliquescent preserves; it seemed a universal omen, disintegration like that described in Kipling’s story ‘The Mother Hive’. Just as Margaret’s provisions were shown to be useless and her defences vulnerable to erosion and attack, so the familiar, ordered pre-War world was decomposing and collapsing into ruin.
In July 1915 Archie had three days’ leave. He had been promoted to Captain in the Royal Field Artillery, to which he had been seconded, since trouble with his sinus made it impossible for him to fly. Agatha was relieved but still tense. They spent the time together in London, trying to forget the War, but it passed in a flash. Agatha then arranged to get herself to Paris, to be nearer him, only to find on arrival that further leave had been indefinitely postponed. Though Miss Dryden offered her a temporary job, Agatha felt she should return to England and the hospital, even though it was unlikely that she would obtain another permit to travel to France. Frustrated, lonely, tired by her two o’clock hospital shift and the chilly walk home, she succumbed to influenza and bronchitis and had to leave the hospital for three or four weeks. She returned to find that a dispensary had been opened, with Mrs Ellis, a local doctor’s wife, and Eileen Morris in charge. Agatha joined them as assistant and began to study for the examinations at Apothecaries’ Hall which would qualify her to dispense medicine for a medical officer or a chemist. The hours were better, alternate mornings and afternoons, ending at six o’clock, which made it easier to fit in her duties at Ashfield. There was now a good deal of housework, since the two strong girls who had acted as cook and parlourmaid had been replaced by two elderly maid-servants. Auntie-Grannie also needed encouragement and attention, especially when she dropped stitches in her knitting and sat despairing at her failing sight. (A ‘List of shawls and scarves she has crocheted during the Great War’ nonetheless had 144 entries.)
Though Agatha eventually found dispensing monotonous, it was calm and orderly and the dispensary an oasis in the chaos that otherwise engulfed her. Mrs Ellis taught Agatha the practical side, while Eileen instructed her in the theory of physics and chemistry. She found it difficult at first but she was helped by her talent for mathematics, especially algebra, and her liking for codifying and classifying, symbols and signs, lists and measuring. In carefully ruled notebooks she described in alphabetical order the appearance and properties of various substances, the sources from which they may be derived, their active principles and the substances with which they are incompatible – aconitine, cascara, cannabis indica, quinine, gentiana (‘looks like Russian chocolate’).… She made lists of substances to be recognised: ‘Extract of Ergot liquid: smells of bad meat extract; Collodium: smells of ether – white deposit round cork.’ There were notes on alkaloids, tables summarising the preparation of antimony, belladonna, digitalis, morphine, etc., with recommended doses. The most endearing entry had nothing to do with pharmacy. It was a pencilled list of names – Archibald Christie, Reggie Lucy and Amyas Boston (a former beau, who had acted in The Blue Beard of Unhappiness and whose name Agatha was later to give the victim in Five Little Pigs). Each name was paired with Agatha’s own married name, and the letters common to each pair were crossed out. It was the game girls play, counting up the remaining letters and chanting formulas which show which man they should marry. Most interesting and touching is the last pair, coupling Clara Miller and Agatha Christie, in an attempt, presumably, to discover what, now Agatha was married, their relationship would be.
Archie’s next leave was in October 1915 and they spent it in the New Forest. They celebrated their wedding anniversary, and Christmas, by post. Archie wrote:
Many happy returns of the 24th (and incidentally Christmas). You were really rather a dear last year, entrusting yourself boldly to me, but you will never really regret it and I shall love you as much as then – more I think. I wish I could get home for the anniversary celebrations but alas my 3 months hard labour is not up till nearly the end of January. Still then when I come home as a temporary major with about £700 a year pay we will revel in the flesh pots.… Blast the War, which keeps me here.…
His promotion to Squadron Commander and Temporary Major was gazetted on January 27th; on New Year’s Day he had again been mentioned in despatches for especial bravery. In his letters to Agatha, he still tried to be frivolous. One, sent in July 1916, was an official paper stamped in large red letters ‘Secret’:
Dear Miss, in response to your request I forward herewith your character and trust you will find it to your satisfaction. We are never wrong. Our fee is only £1. 1s.
Yours faithfully, The OMNISCIENT ONE.
Character of Miss A. M. C. Miller
A kindly and affectionate disposition; fond of animals except worms and cockchafers; fond of human beings except husbands (on principle). Normally lazy but can develop and maintain great energy. Sound in limb and eye, wind not good up hill. Full of intelligence and artistic taste. Unconventional and inquisitive.
Face good especially hair; figure good and skin still excellent. Can wheedle well. Wild but if once captured would make a loving and affectionate wife.
Archie was again mentioned in despatches in January 1917 and the following month promoted to Depot Commander and Lieutenant Colonel. To Agatha’s delight he was also awarded – she never knew why – the Order of St Stanislaus Third Class, with swords, a medal so pretty that she always longed to wear it as a brooch. Altogether 1917 was more bearable for Agatha, although the War seemed never-ending. Archie had three periods of leave and in between she worked for the Apothecaries’ examination. She had no trouble in passing two out of the three parts, chemistry and materia medica (the composition of medicines, doses and so on). The practical part, however, reduced her to the same ham-handed state she had displayed when asked to play the piano in public at Miss Dryden’s, but at her second attempt she passed, largely, she believed, because, rather than rolling pills or making suppositories, she had only to mix medicine and wait for the appropriate reactions to occur.
It was during this practical training that Agatha encountered a person of memorably strange demeanour, the more creepy because he was so ordinary. This was one of the principal pharmacists of Torquay, to whom she had been sent for coaching. Having demonstrated the making of some sort of suppositories and shown Agatha how to turn them out of the mould, he left her to box them, telling her to prepare labels stating that the dose contained a drug in the proportion of one part to a hundred. Agatha, however, was certain that the pharmacist had miscalculated, his actual mixture being ten times as strong. Sure enough, the decimal point in his calculations was in the wrong place. Agatha knew how easily such errors could be made. (She had once awoken at three o’clock in the morning with the vague recollection of putting a carbolic-contaminated lid on a pot of ointment and had immediately got up and gone to the dispensary to check.) She had been horrified by the casual manner in which an experienced pharmacist mixed this and that with the utmost confidence, compared with the prudence of the amateurs in her dispensary. This time she knew the pharmacist had been dangerously careless. Agatha’s reaction is interesting. She did not think it wise to point out the mistake; this man was not, she thought, the sort of person who would admit to having made an error, especially to a student. She deliberately tripped, upset the tray on which the suppositories were cooling and firmly trod on them, apologising profusely. That episode was only part of the story. Its sequel came on another occasion, when, trying to impress her, the pharmacist took from his pocket a lump of stuff and asked her whether she knew what it was: ‘It’s curare,’ he said. ‘Know about curare? Interesting stuff, very interesting. Taken by the mouth, it does you no harm at all; enters the bloodstream, it paralyses and kills you … do you know why I keep it in my pocket?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ It seemed to her an extremely foolish thing to do. ‘Well, you know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it makes me feel powerful.’ The pharmacist was to reappear in Agatha’s life: as Mr Zachariah Osborne, in The Pale Horse.
The Red Cross record card showed that during the war Agatha worked a total of 3,400 hours, unpaid from October 1914 to December 1916 and, thereafter, as a dispenser, at an annual rate of £16 until the end of her service in September 1918. Her unofficial record was a sixty-page hand-made volume, illustrated with coloured drawings, bound in card and tied with pink and gold ribbon, which she and Eileen Morris devised between them. The contents of What We Did in the Great War included an opera, The Young Students, by ‘AMC’, complete with score, an ‘Agony Column’, ‘Hints on Etiquette’ (‘Sister: “never omit to say ‘Doctor’ at least once after every third word …”’), and a parody, ‘The Chemist and The Pharmacists,’ by ‘AC’, after Lewis Carroll:
… The centrifugalizing force
Was whirling fast on high,
No leucocytes were there, because
No leucocytes were nigh;
But many epithelial cells
Were passed up high and dry.
The Chemist and the Pharmacist
Were writing their reports,
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of noughts –
(Correct to seven places too!)
Percentages of sorts.…
Archie’s preoccupations were more serious; one of the letters he sent in 1917 gives some indication of his duties:
My darling Angel
All is activity for the moment. I was glued to a telephone till 11pm last night and my temper is not so sweet today in consequence. I sentenced a man to 28 days of what the Daily Mirror used to call ‘crucifixion’ i.e. being tied to a tree and undergoing other punishments and fatigues because he refused to work, went absent without leave and pretended to be sick when he was not.…
At the beginning of December Archie was mentioned in despatches for the fourth time. On New Year’s Day 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and became a Companion of St Michael and St George. There was one more leave, in June, and then, to Agatha’s joy, in September he was posted home, as a Colonel, to the Air Ministry. She left the hospital at once, joined him at an hotel and began to look round for a furnished flat.
Archie was just twenty-nine and Agatha twenty-eight. They had both grown used to tiredness, pain and grief, seen suffering and death, and were in different ways more mature. But for most of those crucial four years they had been apart and, while they had learnt how to sustain each other in difficult and precarious times, they were used to meeting and parting rather than being together for weeks at a stretch. The beginning of Agatha’s married life – for when she left Ashfield she felt it had really begun – was not what she would have envisaged five or six years before. The country was still at war, and they and their microscopic flat at 5 Northwick Terrace, in St John’s Wood, were looked after not by a maid but by Archie’s batman, Bartlett. Archie worked long hours at the Air Ministry and Agatha, missing the hospital and her friends, filled in her days with a course of shorthand, where she struggled, and book-keeping, which she enjoyed and did well. It was as she left the secretarial school that she saw one of the most curious sights she had ever seen:
Everywhere there were women dancing in the street … laughing, shouting, shuffling, leaping even, in a sort of wild orgy of pleasure, an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt perhaps that if there had been any Germans around the women would have torn them to pieces. Some of them I suppose were drunk, but all of them looked it. They reeled, they lurched, shouted.… I got home to find Archie was home from his Air Ministry. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, in his usual calm and unemotional fashion.
It was November 11th and the Armistice had been declared. The Great War was over.