Ghent University

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

The Language of Pain:

Experiencing and Witnessing

Physical Trauma in the Literature

of the First World War

Paper submitted in partial

Supervisor: fulfilment of the requirements

Dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck for the degree of “Master in de

taal- en letterkunde: Engels”

By Nikolaas Brennan

May 2016

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Acknowledgments

Writing a thesis is by no means an easy feat and I therefore feel it is most necessary to thank

those who have supported and guided me along the way.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck,

whose excellent professional guidance, suggestions and feedback during the writing process

of this thesis was of enormous value. Secondly, I would also like to thank my parents, sister,

friends, family and colleagues for their continual support in all my endeavours. I would

especially like to thank Frederik Martens for always proofreading my work and for being a

great support these last few years.

Finally, I wish to dedicate this work to my late grandfather Robert ‘Bob’ Brennan and

Uncle Ben Lucas, who, I am sure, would have been very proud and who continue to inspire

and motivate me in so many ways.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... 3

Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 5

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 7

2. Background Research ....................................................................................................... 11

2.1. A New Kind of War ................................................................................................... 11

3. Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................... 14

3.1. The Unsharability of Pain .......................................................................................... 14

3.2. Expressing the Inexpressible ..................................................................................... 16

4. Literature and Literacy at the Front .................................................................................. 21

4.1. The Soldiers ............................................................................................................... 21

4.2. Nurses ........................................................................................................................ 25

5. The Authors ...................................................................................................................... 31

5.1. Wilfred Owen ............................................................................................................ 31

5.2. Edward Thomas ......................................................................................................... 33

5.3. Vera Brittain .............................................................................................................. 35

5.4. Mary Borden .............................................................................................................. 37

6. Literary Analysis ............................................................................................................... 40

7. Associative Techniques..................................................................................................... 41

7.1. Religious Associations .............................................................................................. 41

7.2. Sound Associations .................................................................................................... 44

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7.3. Nature Association .................................................................................................... 47

8. Visual Techniques ............................................................................................................. 52

9. Nurse’s Representational Strategies.................................................................................. 60

9.1. Helplessness ............................................................................................................... 61

9.2. Detachment ................................................................................................................ 63

9.3. Touch ......................................................................................................................... 65

10. Soldiers as Witnesses .................................................................................................... 69

11. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 71

12. Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 75

Word count: 23.066

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1. Introduction

One of the great confrontations of the First World War occurred during the Battle of

Passchendaele, which is also frequently referred to as the Third Battle of Ypres. The

campaign was initiated by the British and was fought between July and November of 1917

with the intention of securing a hold on the Belgian town of Ypres. Despite the plan being

disapproved by the British War Cabinet, Field Marshall Douglas Haig nonetheless proceeded

and the human cost of this battle proved disastrous (Tucker, 1694). It is claimed that the

number of British casualties mounted up to 244, 897 (Edmonds, 361) with men often being

injured or killed in the most horrendous circumstances. In the aftermath of the battle a popular

story was spread about Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell who supposedly went out to

inspect the battlefield and was so shocked by what he saw that he broke down and wept: “Did

we really send men to fight in this?” (Tucker, 1694). It is hard to prove whether or not this

anecdote is truthful, but it does give an idea of the scale and severity of suffering the soldiers

of the Great War were subjected to.

War always implies some form of suffering, and over the years there has been an

incredible output of books, essays and articles on what the impact of war is on those who

experienced it. Paul Fussell, the famous literary historian, conducted research on the influence

of war on literature. His book, The Great War and Modern Memory remains one of the most

highly acclaimed works dealing with this subject and investigates how the war influenced

authors and the literature they produced. The suffering of soldiers could manifest itself in

several ways. On the one hand you had the physical trauma to the body that was caused by

battle and on the other hand you the psychological suffering of soldiers that were forced to

endure military service in the most horrendous circumstances. Since the end of the war, a lot

of interest has gone to the psychological suffering of soldiers. This is due to the staggering

numbers of men that were diagnosed with shell shock, a neurological condition that was

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induced by the experience and stress of being in battle. Scholars who have conducted research

on this phenomenon include Sigmund Freud, Khalí Tal and Cathy Caruth (Berger, 570). Soon,

literary scholars such as James Berger started researching the impact of shell shock on the

literature of soldier-poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Ivory Gurney and Wilfred Owen, who

suffered from the neurological condition. The widespread interest in the influence of shell

shock on soldier-poets has resulted in a certain kind of negligence on what the impact of

physical trauma is on literature. It is therefore my intention to focus my research on what the

influence of physical pain was on the literature produced during the First World War.

It would be wrong to claim that there has been no research done whatsoever on

physical trauma and its influence on language and literature. In 1985, Elaine Scarry published

The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World in which she elaborates her theory

that physical trauma completely destroys language. It is her opinion that pain is inexpressible

due to the fact that it “resists language” (Scarry, 4). Nayef A. Al-Joulan agrees with Scarry’s

theory on the inexpressibility of pain due to its resistance to language, and he therefore

attempts to uncover certain specific mechanisms that authors use to overcome this obstacle in

his article “Incurable Sores on Innocent Tongues: The Language of Pain in World War I

Poetry”. He explains that soldier-poets use visualisation, association and symbolic

mechanisms to convey physical pain.

Despite the fact that I find Scarry and Al-Joulan’s work to be very convincing, I do

feel that an elaboration on their theory is in order. Both authors solely concentrate on how

soldiers convey physical trauma in their literature. By narrowing their focus, I feel that they

are neglecting nurses, who were a very important group of people who were also exposed to

the same dangers and horrors as soldiers, but have not enjoyed the same exposure as soldiers1.

1 Paul Fussell made no references to the literary contribution of nurses during the First World War in The Great

War and Modern Memory.

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It is therefore my intention to expand Al-Joulan’s theory and research how nurses try to

convey physical pain to their readers. I suggest that nurses not only use the same mechanisms

that soldier-poets do, but that they also have their own, unique way of expressing physical

pain. An explanation for this might be found in the fact that their position towards physical

trauma was different to soldier-poets. Whereas nurses were often in a role as witnesses of

pain, soldiers were generally those who experienced it. I am interested in finding out what the

consequences of these roles are towards expressing pain and if they, in any way, result in a

different approach.

To reach this goal, I have selected a corpus of literary works written by soldier-poets

and nurses alike. The soldier-poets that I am going to focus on are Wilfred Owen and Edward

Thomas due to the fact their poetry provides clear examples of the mechanisms that Al-Joulan

describes. The works by nurses that I have selected are Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone

and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. I opted to only focus on volunteer nurses because,

compared to professional nurses, they “were more likely to write for publication, to reflect on

the meaning of suffering, and to express their emotional responses to it” (Hallet 68). It may

seem unorthodox to compare poetry to prose but my motivation is a purely practical one:

whereas there is an abundance of poetry written by soldier-poets that deals with physical pain,

I found very little poetry written by nurses that deal with the same subject that can be

compared to it. Nurse memoirs, however, are filled with descriptions of physical trauma and

suit my purpose much better.

I will start this thesis by explaining in which ways The First World War was a new

kind of war and how technological innovations led to a new kind of suffering for those

involved. In the following chapter, I will set the theoretical framework for my analysis in

which I will elaborate on Elaine Scarry’s theory on the unsharability of pain through language

and the mechanisms Nayef A. Al-Joulan claims authors use to convey physical trauma. Next,

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I will give a general overview of what life was like as a soldier or nurse during the Great War

and how literature played a role in their day-to-day life followed by a brief biographical

sketch of the selected authors’ war experiences. In the second part of this Master dissertation,

I will take a closer look at how the mechanisms that Al-Joulan discerned are present in my

selected corpus and how they attempt to overcome the limitations that physical pain imposes

on language as described by Scarry. Finally, I will prove that, besides using similar

mechanisms to soldier-poets, nurses also introduce new ones which are motivated by their

role as witnesses to the pain and suffering of soldiers and the horrors of war.

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2. Background Research

2.1.A New Kind of War

The First World War was the first conflict that was really fought on a global scale. When the

war erupted in August 1914, nobody could have guessed the huge scale the conflict would

grow to in four years of fighting. In England, people at first were optimistic and claimed it

would be a quick war that would ‘be over by Christmas’. The truth, however, was far more

grim, and in due course it would prove to be a conflict with a severe impact on society and its

members. None were probably more affected by the cruelties of the Great War than the

hundreds of thousands of men who went to fight in the trenches of France and Belgium or at

the frontline near the Russian border or at Gallipoli. The scale and severity of the war was

such that it affected every soldier in one way or another. There were the obvious physical

injuries that soldiers sustained from active front duty which could range from small injuries

such as cuts and bruises all the way to bullet wounds and dismemberment. These clearly

visible physical traumas served as proof of one’s military service during the Great War.

However, during the First World War the army encountered another kind of psychological

trauma which had been largely neglected in prior conflicts. For some soldiers the war

experience was so traumatic that it led to an insanity that, during the war, received the

nickname ‘Shell Shock’. The influence of Shell Shock and psychological trauma on literature

has been thoroughly researched in recent years2 and, although I will occasionally refer to

psychological trauma, the main focus of this Master dissertation will be on physical trauma

and its influence on language. The reason for this is due to the fact that there has been an

overemphasis on the influence of psychological trauma on language and literature which has

resulted in the fact that the impact physical trauma is often overlooked by literary scholars.

2 In 1997, James Berger published “Trauma and Literary Theory” in which he researches how psychological

trauma influenced literature

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The Great War was, in many ways, a new kind of war. There were several aspects that

set it apart from previous conflicts throughout history. A first and foremost difference was its

scale in comparison to earlier wars. Never before had there been a conflict that involved so

many people from so many different nations from all over the world: the Entente Powers, also

known as the Allies, consisted of European superpowers such as Great Britain, Russia and

France and around twenty other countries who, together with their colonies, provided over 40

million men for the war effort. On the other side, there were the Central Powers which

consisted of Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, The Kingdom of Bulgaria and the

Ottoman Empire who, together, had a total strength of around 25 million men. The Great War

was also a conflict that introduced new ways of fighting battles. There was the more

traditional land and naval warfare but the First World War also introduced aerial and chemical

warfare which gave the conflict an entirely new aspect. New military technology was

constantly being developed and the four years of hard combat saw the introduction of several

new kinds of weapons. There was the invention of new arms such as the flame thrower, the

development and refinement of machine guns and high explosive shells, the Germans used

mustard gas for the very first time during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, there was the

introduction of tanks and fighter planes, and zeppelins made aerial attacks a common threat in

battle.

All these new developments had very far- reaching consequences for those involved.

Firstly, the improvement of artillery made it very difficult for troops to advance quickly

without suffering high losses which lead to the combatants reaching a stalemate and the

necessity of fighting a sedentary war in trenches. Life in the trenches was by no means easy

for soldiers: the trenches were cold, wet and infested with lice and rats which made it a place

in which diseases were very liable to spread quickly. Diseases and infections such as typhus

and cholera were not uncommon and, because of the damp surroundings, many men suffered

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from fungal conditions such as trench foot. Secondly, the new technological developments

and improvements resulted in an unprecedented high casualty rate. In the first two years of the

war alone, the British Expeditionary Force recorded 12,733 casualties during the First Battle

of the Marne, 58,155 during The First Battle of Ypres (Edmonds 466-468) and approximately

59,000 during The Second Battle of Ypres (Edmonds 359). Injuries and death have always

been common in war but the sheer brutality of young soldiers’ wounds in the Great War was

unprecedented.

The extremely high casualty rates forced the medical world to respond appropriately.

During the First World War new medical technology and new types of treatments were

developed to ensure casualties were quickly tended to and death rates were kept as low as

possible and that men were able to return to frontline duty as soon as physically possible. In

an interview with the BBC, Dr Peter Lloyd Jones of Cardiff University explains that, prior to

the war, almost 80% of soldiers who had suffered fractures in the thigh bone died of this

injury simply because the soldiers could not be moved effectively without creating danger to

the medical staff (Clarke n.p.). This problem was solved by the introduction of the Thomas

splint to the battlefield. This device could easily be strapped over the fractured area and was

very effective in “immobilising fractures of the lower limb, reducing the morbidity and

mortality of these injuries” (O’Meara and Robinson 1). Other examples of medical

innovations included the development of new antiseptics for cleaning wounds, the formation

of a blood bank and the development and use of vaccinations in order to prevent common

trench diseases such as typhoid. Medical personnel also quickly realised that, in order to save

as many lives as possible, they would need to be far closer to the battlefront than they had

been in previous wars so that precious time would not be wasted by transporting wounded

men to field hospitals. As a result, doctors and nurses did not only witness the pain and

suffering caused by war, in many cases they were starting to experience it too.

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3. Theoretical Framework

3.1.The Unsharability of Pain

In the preliminary chapter of this Master dissertation, I discussed how the technological

innovations of the First World War opened up an entire new dimension of suffering to those

involved. Never before had there been such a brutal conflict that claimed the lives of so many.

In the next chapter I will elaborate on the importance of literature at the frontline. Soldiers

read voraciously as a form of leisure and also used writing as a means of coping with the

horrors around them. One of the objectives of this thesis is to research how literature was used

during the First World War to expose physical pain. To reach this goal, I have selected a

representative body of works written during and after the First World War that illustrate how

soldier-poets and nurses tried to express the physical pain and trauma they experienced.

As a basis for this study, I have opted to use Elaine Scarry’s influential study on

physical trauma and language. In the introduction of her book The Body in Pain: The Making

and Unmaking of the World (1985), Scarry explains the difficulty individuals experience

when having to express physical pain to others: “Physical pain happens, of course, not several

miles below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of persons who

inhabit the world through which we each day make our way” (4). This is a first crucial point

that Scarry makes in her book. Pain is something that is very individual and thus very unlike

any other feelings that we, as humans, experience. For example: when we feel anger, we

generally feel angry at someone or something; when we are in love, we have amorous

feelings towards another human being; when we feel indifference, we feel indifferent about a

certain situation. Our state of consciousness is nearly always directed at an external object,

situation or person. Physical pain, however, has no external object. In contrast to our other

interior states of consciousness, pain is something that is completely without exterior

referential content. According to Scarry, it is precisely this which makes physical pain so

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difficult to put into words. It is something that is extremely difficult to grasp if an individual

has not experienced it firsthand: “when one speaks about one’s own physical pain and about

another person’s physical pain, one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly

distinct orders of events” (Scarry, 4).

The unique nature of pain as a purely interior state leads Scarry to make a second point

clear. She explains that pain cannot be shared and that it “ensures this unsharability through

its resistance to language” (4). Scarry even goes so far as to claim that pain not only offers

resistance to language, but that it will also cause the destruction of it. When a person is

suffering from pain, the individual is rendered to a position in which language is completely

made redundant and is no longer used. Instead, the individual will resort to the sounds that a

human makes before any knowledge of language: these sounds include, amongst other,

crying, moaning, whimpering and babbling. A consequence of this reversion is the need for

people to come up with linguistic constructs that make it possible to communicate about pain-

to a doctor for instance- and, also important, to reflect upon it.

Because of the heavy impact of physical pain and the subsequent destruction of

language, some individuals are incapable of communicating about it in any way and will thus

count on others to do so for them: “the language of pain should sometimes be brought into

being by those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are”

(Scarry, 6). This can manifest itself in either spoken words or in written words. For the

purpose of this research, I will limit myself to the latter. Examples of this include poetry,

prose and medical questionnaires that aim to form a diagnosis of a condition based on the

description of the pain felt by the patient. Elaine Scarry cites the example of Virginia Woolf

who condemned literature for its lax attitude and apprehension towards representing physical

pain. She explains that authors themselves also experience a same kind of inexpressibility

when writing about physical pain and she notes that the person in pain might find it

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“reassuring to learn that the artist-whose lifework and everyday habit are to refine and extend

the reflexes of speech- ordinarily falls silent before pain” (Scarry, 10).

3.2.Expressing the Inexpressible

One important emphasis that needs to be made when using Elaine Scarry’s The Body

in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World in light of this dissertation, is that it is not a

work on the First World War. Instead, it is a more general philosophical research on the

difficulties of expressing physical pain, the consequences this inexpressibility implies and

how it also relates to arts and literature in general. It is therefore also a study on how we, as

humans, reconstruct language, to overcome the limitations caused by physical suffering.

Elaine Scarry’s theory on the unsharability of pain due to the fact that it resists

language, has been popular among literary scholars. It has also often been used in research on

literature and language of the First World War. Santanu Das, author of Touch and Intimacy in

First World War Literature follows Scarry’s theory and takes a closer look into the medical

sector of the First World War and how the medical language is a “courageous but often

inadequate attempt to coax the language of pain into clarity, and interpret it” (189). In 2011,

another scholar called Nayef. A. Al-Joulan published an article called “Incurable Sores on

Innocent Tongues: The Language of Pain in World War I Poetry” in which he uses the main

idea of the unsharability of pain and the subsequent destruction of language and tries to

discern mechanisms that war poets used in their verse to rebuild the destroyed language. In

other words: how do they express pain?

Al-Joulan explains that, when war erupted, many volunteered out of some sort of

patriotic or political ideal. Others volunteered so they could break the shackles that society

had tied upon them. This was an important motivation for people from lower classes and

citizens from the British colonies and dominions. The war was thus greeted with enthusiasm

and patriotic propaganda drew upon society’s habit of hero-worshipping to justify the battle

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against the Germans. This explains why there was such little anti-war literature during the

first stages of the Great War. It was not until the war started claiming its terrible toll on

human life that the attitude started to change. Al-Joulan explains that the focus of literature

shifted from providing the public with patriotic messages to trying to explain what it was like

fighting the war. Similarly, Jay Winter explains that literature aimed to convey “the aesthetics

of direct experience” (2) to the general public. This proved more difficult than expected and

authors such as Wilfred Owen, who tried to write about the horrors of the war, frequently

found it to be simply inexpressible.

One of the mechanisms Al-Joulan describes is that of visualising the cause of pain. He

elaborates that authors try to describe an image so vividly and poignantly that the reader feels

that they are right in the middle of the traumatic experience. In fact, what authors do by using

this visualisation mechanism, is giving the cause of pain a reference by carefully laying out

the scene image per image in front of the reader. I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons

why language is destroyed by physical pain is due to the fact that the latter has no reference to

the outside world but is instead completely individual. By elaborating on the visual scenery,

the reader is provided with something tangible in the exterior world with which they can

relate. The author tries to express pain which is otherwise inexpressible by giving it an

external reference. This visual mechanism is something that we will frequently find when

analysing the literature produced by both soldier-poets and nurses. Whereas Al-Joulan’s

article focuses only on the lyric used by soldier-poets who saw active frontline service, I

would like to add that nurses in particular do not refrain from describing the most gruesome

scenes they encountered while working in field hospitals. By giving these explicit

descriptions, they speak for all those who are incapable of describing the pain they are

experiencing (Scarry, 6). The accounts that nurses provide are very detailed in their

descriptions of the sights, noises, smells and sounds that were common when treating physical

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wounds as becomes apparent in the following excerpt from a memoir written by Mary Ann

Brown, who served as a nurse during the First World War and vividly describes every sight,

sound and smell she encountered while treating a wounded soldier:

The feeling of his bare body on my bare arms, his screams, his breath, the

odour of blood and the sound of the knife softly passing through the flesh were

too much for me. I managed to stand it until the operation was over and then

went into the open air and was deathly sick. (qtd in Das, 190)

A second mechanism that we can find in this fragment is association. Authors use images that

conjure up associations. In this particular case, Mary Ann Brown describes a knife cutting

through human flesh and she emphasises the sound that this produces. Readers unconsciously

make an association to something similar that is familiar to them, for example slicing up a

piece of steak during dinner. Next she describes the sentiment of feeling nauseous but having

to maintain a straight face until being in a more appropriate place to be ill. This is also a

sentiment that people can relate to and which help us to understand the experience that nurse

Brown is trying to explain to us.

A final mechanism that Al-Joulan discusses is the extensive use of symbols to express

pain. The objective of using symbolism to express physical pain is yet again due to the fact

that pain is something individual without external referent. It is something that is completely

personal and it is why pain resists objectification in spoken and written language (Scarry, 5).

According to Al-Joulan, authors use symbols that people can associate to pain to make their

message clear. It is my opinion that these symbols will be more prevalent in the poetry written

by soldier-poets than in the memoirs written by nurses because the former’s lyrical character

offers itself more naturally to the use of symbolism. I also find that there is a very fine line

between the associative and the symbolic mechanism that Al-Joulan describes and the

distinction between the two is not always very clear. For example: one can argue that the use

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of religious imagery to express physical pain is a symbolic mechanism, but one still needs to

make the association between pain and religion so in my opinion it is therefore also an

associative mechanism. To avoid confusion, I have opted to integrate symbolic mechanisms

and associative mechanisms together into one group that I will be referring to as associative

techniques.

Seeing as pain is inexpressible and thus renders language useless and causes its

destruction, the reconstruction of language is tiresome and laborious work for authors. Many

who attempt to write about the experiences of physical trauma quickly become aware of the

limitations of their language. Al-Joulan associates the difficulty of writing poetry about

physical trauma with digging a hole: “writing poetry is as difficult as digging, where one may

bury the dead and find bones of the earlier dead” (112). He explains that Seamus Heaney, an

Irish war poet of the Second World War, employs these images in his poem Digging (1966) in

which he “hints at the painful vocation of the war poet, who is supposed to unearth the truth

of the war and dig into its politics, before burying/covering it in the underlying texture of his

verse” (112). In this thesis, it is also my aim to unearth how war literature unearths the truths

about physical traumas caused by warfare and how authors attempt to express that which

according to Elaine Scarry is inexpressible.

Similarly to Al-Joulan, I will partly focus on literature produced by soldier-poets. I

will take a closer look into how the mechanisms Al-Joulan describes are present in the poetry

by Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. Research has already been done on this: Astrid

Vandenbroucke has written a thesis in which she provides concrete examples of how Al-

Joulan’s mechanisms are used to communicate pain in the poetry of war-poets such as Owen

and Isaac Rosenberg. I will frequently draw upon her findings, but I also wish to expand this

research to literature produced by nurses who also make an attempt to express the severity of

physical trauma caused by warfare to their readers. It is my opinion that this is a relevant and

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necessary elaboration and addition to Elaine Scarry’s and Nayef Al-Joulan’s theory seeing as

they mainly focus on those who have experienced pain and not those who had to witness it.

Scarry emphasis the difficulty of talking about another’s pain compared to talking about your

own pain and claims “one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct

orders of events” (4).

The interest in nurse memoirs is fairly recent. For example: Paul Fussell, who is

considered an authority on how the experience of the First World War influenced literature,

does not mention or acknowledge the literary contribution of nurses and it is my opinion that,

by limiting their focus, Fussell and Al-Joulan are forgetting a very important group of authors

who also struggled with the same limitations of language that Scarry describes. Nurses are

witnesses of the horrendous wounds the war causes on the body and they are, without any

doubt, traumatised by this in their own way. Many nurses such as Mary Ann Brown, Vera

Brittain and Mary Borden also wrote about their experiences treating wounds. I am therefore

intent on answering to key questions: Do nurses still employ the same mechanisms to express

physical trauma as soldier-poets do and do they use any other new mechanism that soldier-

poets do not?

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4. Literature and Literacy at the Front

When conducting research on the impact of physical pain on literature of the First World War,

it is important to get a clear understanding of the background of the authors who were

experiencing and witnessing pain. In the following paragraphs I will give a brief general

picture of what life was like as a soldier, doctor or nurse on the forefront of the First World

War and how literature played a role in their day-to-day life.

4.1.The Soldiers

When Great Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, the declaration was

received with great enthusiasm by the general public. During the first weeks of the war,

recruitment offices were overwhelmed by the vast number of young men who wanted to enlist

to do their part for King and country. By the time the war ended in 1918, over 2.60 million

out of a total of four million British servicemen had volunteered for active army service. It is

interesting to reflect on why so many hurried to enlist during those early stages of the war.

When researching British patriotism in the literature of Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling

for my Bachelor paper, I discussed that it would not be entirely truthful to claim that all these

men volunteered due to a great surge of patriotism. Some had a rather naive view of the war

and considered it a big adventure, other men saw the financial benefit of military service and

enlisted in order to provide for their families. For some young men it was an easy way to

sever strict parental ties (Simkins).

At the start of the twentieth century, British society was very class-bound. If you had

the good fortune to have been born into a wealthy family, you belonged to the upper- or

middle-class circles of society. If you were born into a family of labourers, miners or dock

workers you generally belonged to the working class. Class mobility was not entirely unheard

of but it was, nonetheless, rather uncommon. One generally remained in the class one was

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born into. When war was declared in 1914, it was greeted with general enthusiasm by all

layers of society. The call to arms was thus answered by men from every corner of British

society and, over the course of the war, these men would be interacting with each other in a

different way than they had ever done before. In his book Tommy: The British Soldier on the

Western Front 1914-1918, Richard Holmes quotes a young medical student who joined the

army in the early stages of the war and who acknowledges the diversity of the men enlisting

for military service. He describes the army as “a kind of mixing bowl, where young men from

all classes of the population met and had to adjust themselves to an extremely rigid discipline”

(103). He continues by stating that “the aim was to create a team spirit” (103). The classes

were mingled in such a way that would not be possible in a peacetime society. In his book,

Holmes offers an illustrative anecdote by Harry Ogle, a non-commissioned officer in the

British army, who had been an art teacher prior to the war and thus belonged to the middle-

class. Ogle recounts an occasion when he was rebuked by a man called Tom who was one of

his privates. Tom had been a miner before the war and when Ogle sets outs to dig a funk hole,

which is a type of dugout, Tom offers him counselling on how to dig a hole properly. In

normal peacetime society this behaviour would have been completely unacceptable. Ogle, as

an educated man, would never have allowed a miner to lecture him in such a way. However,

at the frontline, Ogle saw the benefit of Tom’s pre-war profession. Holmes explains that

“thousands of young men like Harry Ogle were broadened by the experience of serving with

soldiers from working-class backgrounds, and many never forgot it” (307). Another officer,

Second Lieutenant Campbell, was equally impressed by his men and wrote: “For the first time

in my life I, from a public school was doing manual work beside men who were manual

workers. In a flash of revelation [...] I saw that instead of my being superior to them they were

superior to me” (qtd in Holmes, 308).

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At first, the army reflected the British social class system. Educated men from the

higher classes of social life were generally commissioned as officers into the army whereas

men with a working class background were enlisted as privates and, in the best case, became

non-commissioned officers. The army tried to maintain this association with rank and social

background but, as casualties quickly reached alarming heights, this was no longer tenable as

the war progressed. In due course, men from lower ranks of society were being commissioned

as officers. Holmes explains that “in 1914 most officers came from public schools and many

from Oxford or Cambridge University, but in 1918 there was much greater variety, including

a miner and an errand boy” (357). Not everyone was equally pleased with this development.

Some conservative army officials doubted if this was a beneficiary development but it was, as

they acknowledged, without a doubt a necessary one. Alan Hanbury-Sparrow described the

Old army’s attitude as follows: “You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but you can

make a good leather one (qtd in Holmes, 358).

It is interesting to reflect on the role that literature played for the soldiers and officers

on the frontline of the Great War. It is equally interesting to research if the inter-class

association in the army as I mentioned above had any kind of influence on the literary

experience of the soldiers in the trenches. Did it in any way affect how soldier-authors chose

to express that which they witnessed and felt while serving on the frontline?

A fact that must be stated is that literature was a very important form of leisure for all

soldiers in the trenches, officers and enlisted men alike. “Men read voraciously across a

literary spectrum of extraordinary breadth” (Holmes, 604). Some read classic works by

Francis Bacon, others preferred the more melodramatic novels like those written by Charles

Garvice. Poetry was also very popular as were newspapers such as The Times, John Bull and

the London Mail. Soldiers’ literary experience was not only limited to reading. A lot of

soldiers also wrote extensively during the war. Men wrote poetry, prose and certain battalions

24

even encouraged men to write by publishing their own trench newspapers. Paul Fussell states

that, in 1914, soldiers were not only literate, they were also literary. He explains that

The Great War occurred at a special historical moment when two liberal forces

were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand, the belief in the

educative powers of classical and English literature was still extremely strong.

On the other, the appeal of popular education and “self-improvement” was at

its peak. (157)

Fussell elaborates that it is exactly these two forces, which he dubs aristocratic and

democratic, which made literature so respected in all layers of society during the First World

War and which makes it the ideal medium to communicate through. Literature was thus not

limited to the educated officers who had studied at public school or an Oxbridge University

but it was rather something for all men alike.

There were, as I mentioned earlier, several media soldiers used to communicate

through. An interesting medium is the trench journal. Several battalions across the British

army published these so-called trench newsletters of which The Wipers Times is probably the

most famous. They contained all sorts of information such as battalion news, decorations,

jokes, politics and casualties but what really makes them a source of interest is that they give

voice to the common soldier. According to Holmes many contributors were private soldiers

and the editors of these journals were most likely soldiers with a rank no higher than captain

(607). One must, however, keep in mind that these journals were still heavily limited in what

they could comment on and criticise, due to censorship. Because of their journalistic nature,

they were not always the best medium for soldiers to express that which they were struggling

with. Poetry was, in that regard a far better alternative, especially when trying to find a

language for pain. Poetry offered the soldier the opportunity to express that which Scarry

25

claims to be “inexpressible”. In the next poem Will Harvey uses verse to pay homage to his

comrade Second Lieutenant R.E. Knight who was killed on the Somme.

Dear, rash, warm-hearted friend,

So careless of the end,

So worldly-foolish so divinely-wise,

Who, caring not one jot

For place, gave all you’d got

To help your lesser fellow-men to rise.

Harvey uses poetry to express the emotional pain he feels because of the death of his close

friend and comrade. For soldiers, literature was not only a source of leisure. It was also a way

to cope with the terrible destruction that surrounded them. It offered them solace from the war

and it gave them a voice to discuss what they were experiencing.

4.2. Nurses

The First World War was a conflict that was fought in several different areas. First and

foremost, it was fought in the complicated network of trenches that stretched from Belgium

all the way to France. It was also fought in No Man’s Land, a term coined to describe the

desolated area that divided the Allied and German front line. Secondly, the seas and oceans

also served as a stage for conflict with numerous naval battles occurring throughout the war.

Finally, the Great War also saw the addition of aerial combat which meant that the conflict

was being fought in three different areas: on land, at sea and in the air. However, Mary

Borden, an American born nurse whose acclaimed work The Forbidden Zone will serve as

one of the focal points of this dissertation, claims that another battlefield should be added to

this list: the operating room. Whereas the trenches were the place where young men fought

the enemy and got injured and thus experienced physical trauma, the numerous field hospitals

and operating rooms were the place where nurses and doctors witnessed the horrific physical

26

injuries and attempted to restore the often gruesomely injured body to the best of their

abilities. In his book Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, Santanu Das states

that in this “world where morphine and anaesthesia were forever in short supply, the ‘real’

enemy was not death but pain” (204). Angela Smith, author of The Second Battlefield:

Women, Modernism and the First World War, explains that nurses “were not soldiers and did

not experience actual combat but were still exposed to many of its most disturbing results”

(70). They were, as she describes “witnesses of the carnage” (70) and were, without a doubt

affected by this.

The trauma that medical personnel suffered differed to that from the soldiers they were

treating in the sense that their trauma was not necessarily one of a physical nature, but rather

one caused by witnessing physical pain. They searched for the boundaries of empathy they

can show their patients without losing track of their main objective which was, after all,

saving lives and caring for the wounded. Das describes this in his book as the medical forces’

“awareness of the incommensurability and absoluteness of physical pain” (177).

There is a great variety of people and functions we can consider including when

discussing the medical sector of the First World War. First and foremost there were obviously

the doctors who tirelessly devoted themselves to providing medical care and performing

surgery in some of the most gruesome conditions possible. However, in this Master

dissertation my focus will not be on doctors, but on nurses. It is my opinion that nurses form a

perfect counterbalance to soldiers on how physical trauma is represented in literature from the

First World War. The operating room was indeed a battlefield in which the doctors can be

likened to officers or high-ranking generals who set up the battle plan, organise their troops

and make sure that all is executed to the standard that is expected. However, the real dirty

work such as changing bandages, mopping blood, emptying bed pans, dealing with patients’

sorrow and pains was not done by doctors but by nurses. Nurses can thus be likened to

27

privates and are on the forefront of what Mary Borden so adequately coined “the other

battlefield” (qtd in Das, 187) fighting their own different battle in which their objective is not

a political one, but a rather more humane one; in which the aim is to provide the best care for

the wounded as they possible can and to save as many lives as possible. Another reason for

focussing on nurses is a more practical one. Throughout the war, nurses, and especially

voluntary nurses, recorded their war experiences in a great number of ways. They wrote

letters, books, diaries, memoirs and even sketch books. Doctors and professional nurses on the

other hand, generally wrote objective and scientific reports on the wounds they were treating.

Voluntary nurses thus provide me with a greater variety of choice to form an adequate corpus

for this research.

In what follows I want to elaborate on a couple of aspects. I first want to get a general

understanding of who nurses were, what their background was and why women chose to

become nurses in the first place. Secondly, I am interested in finding out how their

experiences with witnessing and treating physical trauma influenced them and how this is

subsequently represented within the literature they produced. How do nurses express the pain

of others and how do they express their own pain?

A parallel that can be made between soldiers and nurses is the voluntary aspect that

both experienced during the First World War. Of course there was the Red Cross consisting of

a great number of fully trained and qualified professional nurses who were dispatched to the

trenches. However, there was also a large group of women who volunteered to help. The

Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) was established in 1909 by the Red Cross and the Order

of Saint John. In this dissertation, I will be focussing only on the latter group of V.A.D. nurses

because they suit the aim of this dissertation better. We can assert that there is a notable

difference of focus between the texts written by professional nurses and those written by

V.A.D. nurses. Christine Hallet explains that:

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Trained nurses were unlikely to write with publication in mind, and thus,

tended to adopt a conversational style [...] V.A.D.s were more likely to write

for publication, to reflect on the meaning of suffering, and to express their

emotional responses to it, often conveying a sense of their own feelings and

helplessness. (68)

In other words, war memoirs and diaries written by V.A.D. nurses are more likely to be

literary than those written by professional nurses, due to the fact that it is written for a

possible audience and that more care has been put into how the message can be best conveyed

to readers.

The Voluntary Aid Detachment was, as the name suggests, a voluntary organisation

offering their services to medical organisations in the United Kingdom and the British

Empire. By the first of August 1914, the Voluntary Aid Detachment counted 47,196

volunteers. By the end of the decade this number had mounted to 82,857 (Das, 185). The idea

of a group of female civilian volunteers helping in the field hospitals was not one that was

greeted with much enthusiasm by professional nurses and doctors who feared that these

women were not prepared for what they would encounter. They argued that the volunteers

were not adequately trained and subsequently lacked the necessary skills to be of any use.

However, the increasing amount of work due to the overwhelming number of casualties

resulted in the need for more personnel in the aid stations and the V.A.D. was eventually

assigned to help. The volunteers served as nursing orderlies and ambulance drivers. They

carried out various essential tasks such as changing bandages, hospital hygiene, and general

patient care. In time, these women of the V.A.D. were offered extensive medical training but

they were not qualified nurses.

The women who volunteered to serve in the Voluntary Aid Detachment were mainly

women from upper- and middle- class circles. Santanu Das explains: “The V.A.D. recruitment

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campaign conflated class prejudices with the idea of service: it worked on the assumption that

upper-and middle-class women by dint of their ‘character’ and ‘breeding’ were more fit to

serve and represent the country than working-class women” (185). Women volunteered for

various reasons. For some women, it was a way of emancipating themselves from the

shackles of the Edwardian society. It offered women a sense of independence from their

spouse and families, and gave them opportunities which otherwise would not have been

possible. Needless to say that many feminists were among the first volunteers who offered

their services to the V.A.D. For Vera Brittain, it was a way to be close to her lover, brother

and friends; to make herself useful. Another reason why some volunteered was the sheer

sense of exhilaration, excitement and adventure that captured so many young women.

However, this sentiment was quickly subdued when exposed to the horrors of the First World

War as becomes apparent in the literature, memoirs and diary entries by nurses.

We can distinguish two main themes that emerge when analysing the literature

produced by nurses during and after the First World War: the first theme being the sense of

helplessness and inadequacy nurses feel towards their patients and their pain and the second

theme the intimacy they share with the patients and the special role the senses play in this.

Nurses, for the main part, worked in hospitals and were thus, in theory, spared from

the common dangers which were inevitable there when one goes to battle.3 They were

however witnesses to the horrors that warfare produced on the body and they were called

upon to heal the broken bodies. A recurrent theme in nurse memoirs is a great sense of

helplessness and powerlessness towards the wounded soldier. They cannot feel the pain of the

physical trauma that the soldier is feeling as they have not experienced it themselves, but they

3 It must however be noted that the medical staff was not completely spared from the horrors of battle. Many

nurses went far up into the front lines to collect wounded soldiers and there are reports of casualties amongst

medical personnel.

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do witness this pain. This leads to a great feeling of ineptness and inadequacy amongst nurses.

Enid Bagnold calls this feeling a “deadlock” and explains that “the pain of one creature

cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well

whose pain you do not imagine” (qtd in Das, 189). Santanu Das refers to this sentiment as the

“impotence of sympathy”. A term he borrows from Robert Browning to describe the sense of

powerlessness that is so prevalent in nurse memoirs. It is this feeling of helplessness that

nurses try to convey to their readers and it is my opinion that this amplifies the difficulties of

putting physical pain into words. Not only can nurses never fully understand the pain an

injured soldier is experiencing, they will also never be able to adequately put the pain they are

witnessing into words which leads to a feeling of great exasperation and helplessness. I expect

that this will be a very recurrent theme in nurses’ writings and that this will be one of the main

differences that I will find when comparing literature written by soldiers who experienced

physical trauma to nurses who witnessed it. We will notice a stronger factual and visually

detailed representation of the physical trauma in the literature written by nurses as opposed to

the more lyrical approach of soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen.

Nurses’ memoirs often also focus on the bond they create with their patients. Many

nurses came from middle-or upper-class circles and had experienced very little close intimacy

with the opposite sex. We will notice that close attention will be spent on the representation of

the senses and touch in the memoirs and that nurses often choose a far more visual and

graphic representation of the physical traumas they encounter than soldier-poets tend to use.

The question that then arises, and that I also wish to address during this research, is whether

or not soldiers, who wrote about the suffering of their fellow comrades, can be compared to

nurses. Even though they do not share the same experience of pain, they do share the same

experience of fighting. I intend to research of this has any influence.

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5. The Authors

In the following chapter I want to pay closer attention to some important biographical

aspects of the authors that I have chosen to focus on in this Master dissertation. Although I

will not elaborate on each author in equal detail, I still feel it is important to have knowledge

of some key aspects of the author’s personal life in order to have a better and more insightful

understanding into the literature they produced and the techniques and mechanisms they

employ to convey physical trauma.

5.1.Wilfred Owen

There are few other soldier-poets that enjoy such a wide recognition as Wilfred Owen.

His shrewd, condemning and realistic poetry on the First World War was in stark contrast to

that of his contemporaries such as Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling who,

especially at the start of the war, took a far more patriotic approach. This, together with his

famous friendship with Siegfried Sassoon and Owen’s tragic death only a few days before

armistice was declared on the eleventh of November 1918, make him the personification of

the horrors of the war he so poignantly described. His most famous poem Dulce et Decorum

Est remains one of the more well-known and haunting poems on the gruesome results of gas

attacks in the trenches.

Born on the 18th

of March 1893, Owen enlisted for active service on the 21st of

October of 1915. He would go on to become a commissioned officer in the Manchester

Regiment and was sent to active frontline duty in December 1916. His poetry shows an astute

consciousness of suffering, which was a consciousness that John Silkin, author of Out of

Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, claims Owen already had prior to the war: “Owen was

not, as is often implied, a man for whom the war worked a miraculous and beneficial

awakening, and without which there would have been no conscience-bearing poet” (198).

32

Silkin continues to explain that the war simply unified his already socially responsive attitude

to his lyrical self. Owen wanted to report on the horrors of the war and educate his readers on

the terrible conditions men were fighting in.

Wilfred Owen’s own personal war experiences were tragic and he severely suffered

both physically and mentally during his time in the trenches. Owen’s first traumatic

experience came as a civilian just a month into the war while he was living in France. There

he witnessed the treatment of wounded soldiers from the early battles of the First World War.

He makes an explicit report of this experience and already declares an urge to “educate the

actualities of the war” (Silkin, 199). A second traumatic event in which Owen himself

suffered physically occurred when he was caught by mortar shells during a heavy barrage and

fell unconscious in a shell hole only to wake up days later in an area littered with the remains

of his fellow officers. He was subsequently sent to Craiglockheart War hospital, a military

hospital in Edinburgh, where he could recover from the physical and emotional wounds he

sustained from this experience. Here, he famously met Siegfried Sassoon with whom he

struck a close friendship that would last for the remainder of his life and who also, according

to John Silkin, influenced his work: “What Sassoon did for him perhaps was to give him the

confidence to draw into his work a greater realism, a more stringent anger and satire” (208).

The correspondence he held with his family reflect the strong anti-war sentiments he

had while serving in the trenches and that would eventually form the cornerstone of his war

poetry. Santanu Das provides evidence in Owen’s correspondence with his mother and

brother that the poet was already actively searching for ways in which he could express the

horrors of the war he was experiencing (142). He thought of how he could most adequately

put physical trauma into words and tried to find a way around pain’s resistance to the

objectification to language as described by Elaine Scarry (5). He achieved this by largely

applying a very melodramatic tone and by using elaborate expressions. It is Owen’s approach

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to overcome the limitations of language to express the inexpressible that make him a very

suitable author to research in light of this investigation. In his poetry, which I will elaborate

on in detail later on in this thesis, we will clearly see some of the mechanisms to express pain

that Al-Joulan described in his paper. We will find examples of visual, symbolic and

associative approaches to describe pain in his poetry. The poems of Wilfred Owen that I have

selected for the purposes of this research, are those which in my opinion are most suitable and

most clearly display the mechanisms that I wish to uncover. The poems that I will be

discussing are “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “At a Calvary near the Ancre”, “Le Christianisme”,

“Spring Offensive”, “Futility” and “Mental Cases”.

5.2.Edward Thomas

Compared to Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas was a late bloomer when it came to

poetry. Thomas, who was born on the third of March 1878, did not write his first poem until

1914 under the persuasion of his close friend, the famous American poet Robert Frost. Prior

to his genesis as a poet, Thomas had honed his writing skills working as a literary critic,

essayist and biographer for various London publishers in the years leading up to the First

World War. Despite being a well respected critic and showing literary prowess, Thomas felt

the constant pressure of writing to meet deadlines while working in London, as an

impediment on his literary capabilities and potential. Despite his late start to poetry, many

respected authors such as Seamus Heaney, Ivor Gurney, Aldous Huxley and Ted Hughes held

Edward Thomas in high esteem and proclaim him as one of England’s finest twentieth-

century poets. His poetry, which is rather difficult to classify under one certain movement,

reflects the usage of certain traditional elements such as pastoral settings and verse lauded

with difficult and gracious language. However, Thomas does add a certain modern twist by

making his poetry very personal and by basing it on own personal experiences. Al-Joulan

finds a similarity between Edward Thomas and other contemporary poets such as Siegfried

34

Sassoon and Wilfred Owen because they “wrote about the terrible experience of war which

left its thumbprint on their thinking, imagination and verse” (110). In Thomas’s poetry we

will find a similar sensibility and a very astute “intensity of vision” (Lehman, n.p.)4.

Edward Thomas joined the army in the summer of 1915 after Robert Frost had

jokingly mocked his indecision about enlisting by sending him a poem he had written called

The Road Not Taken which is about a man who regrets the choices he has made in life.

Despite it not being Frost’s intention to force him into any decision and Thomas being already

married and, at the age of thirty-seven, rather old to enlist, he nonetheless volunteered for

service and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was

sent overseas the following year and served in France. He was killed by shell fire on the first

day of the Battle of Arras in 1917. He was buried in Agny Military Cemetary and he is also

commemorated in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey among the other great soldier-poets

from the First World War such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Charles Sorley. This

acts as testimony of his aptitude and proficiency as a poet. Despite the late start of his career

as a poet, Thomas wrote ferociously producing over 140 poems in the course of just two

years. The poetry that stems from this period displays a thorough understanding and

awareness of poetic techniques. The war is an ever present factor in his poetry and the

subjects are often isolated individuals who are, in their own way, affected by the war. Thomas

explores the limits of the impact of war on the individual and the landscape around him. One

of the main reasons that I chose to discuss Thomas is due to the fact that he uses an ekphrastic

technique5 that allows his readers to see the war through the eyes of an individual who is in

the war. We are watching scenes through the eyes of soldiers making us both a witness and

4 “Edward Thomas 1878-1917“ The Poetry Foundation. 2013. Web. 2 April 2016.

5 In this context an ekphrastic technique is the manner in which Thomas uses visual images to make a certain

sentiment clear to his readers.

35

someone who experienced the war first-hand. An important mechanism in his poetry is the

description of desolated landscapes and sceneries to create images and evoke feelings of

despair. Like Owen, he is also aware of the limitations of language and explores this in his

work. The poetry that I will be discussing are “In Memorium (Easter 1915)”, “Old Man”,

“Words”, “Digging” and “As the Team’s Head Brass”.

5.3.Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain’s family was, like many other families, shattered by the events of the

First World War. Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme on the 29th

of December 1893

into a well-off middle-class family who owned a paper manufactory. She grew up close to her

only brother Edward in the Derbyshire town of Buxton where she felt trapped and bored by

her role as a provincial lady and yearned for the possibility to go to university which her

father initially disapproved. She was eventually allowed into university and had just started

reading English at Somerville College at the University of Oxford when the war broke out. In

her most famous book Testament of Youth she explains that “when the Great War broke out, it

came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind

to my personal plans” (17). The plans that she had made for her future would forever be

destroyed. Nearly all the men she was close to had enlisted in the army: her beloved brother

Edward, her fiancé Roland Leighton and her close friends Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor ‘Tah’

Richardson. Brittain decided to put her university studies on hold and volunteered to join the

Voluntary Aid Detachment. During the course of the war, she served as a nurse in military

hospitals in London, Malta and France. Although she in no way liked the work, she drew

strength out of the knowledge that the men in her life were also doing their part in the war

effort. In her diary she wrote: “I shall hate it, but I will be all the more ready to do it on that

account. He [Leighton] has to face far worse things than any sight or act I could come across;

he can bear it and so can I” (qtd in Das 185).

36

During her time as a V.A.D. nurse, she kept a close correspondence with her brother

Edward and her fiancé Roland Leighton who would also frequently send her poetry. The war

eventually took a high toll on the men in Brittain’s life. Leighton was fatally wounded shortly

before Christmas 1915, Victor Richardson was gravely wounded in Arras by a shot through

the head blinding him before a cerebral abscess eventually killed him in 1917, Geoffrey

Thurlow was killed in Scarpe, but the death that would have the most impact on Brittain was

that of her brother Edward, who got killed in Italy in the summer of 1918. These losses,

together with the tremendous straining work of treating wounded soldiers, were very

traumatic for Brittain who, throughout the remainder of her life, tried to find ways to cope

with the horrors of war she had witnessed and the losses she endured. She eventually turned to

writing to give voice to her experiences. She published her most famous work Testament of

Youth in August of 1933. At first, she had attempted to write the book as a work of fiction

before deciding to write it as an autobiography. The result is a frank and brutally honest

memoir in which Brittain’s own losses and experiences as a nurse are situated against a larger

context which women could relate to.

One of the main reasons why I opted to include Vera Brittain and Testament of Youth

in this dissertation is due to the fact that it is such a frank and honest memoir. Throughout the

novel, Brittain describes horrific examples of physical trauma with a tone that is close to

indifference which I find very fascinating. This aura of indifference and detachment that we,

as readers, receive is unnerving and it is something that was common in the memoirs of

nurses. It is my opinion that this is a new stylistic mechanism used to express what Scarry

refers to as the inexpressible. Another thing that I found interesting is that Brittain herself set

out to write “a story as truthful as history, but as readable as fiction” (77). This means that it

was important to her to give an honest account of the events that had happened during the war

37

and that she is also interested in finding the correct words to express that which she had

experienced and witnessed during the war.

5.4.Mary Borden

A second nurse whose work I wish to include in this dissertation is Mary Borden who,

like Vera Brittain, wrote hauntingly honest accounts of her experiences as a nurse during the

Great War. Her most famous literary work is, without a doubt, The Forbidden Zone, which

was published in 1929. It is a collection of poems influenced by her experiences in the war

(Khan, 118). Mary Borden, also known as ‘May’ by her friends and family, was born in

Chicago in 1886 into a very wealthy family. Moving among the upper-class circles, she

enjoyed a good education but yearned to break free from the shackles of her strict evangelist

mother. She eventually moved to London in 1913 with her family where she was immersed in

the literary scene meeting with notable authors such as George Bernard Shaw and E.M.

Forster. Nosheen Khan, author of Women’s Poetry of the First World War, notes that Borden

herself was “an aspiring writer” who had already dabbled in writing before 1914 but would

only receive recognition after the war (118). She was also in London when she joined the

suffragette movement and actively advocated women’s rights.

When the First World War erupted, her husband was quick to volunteer and Borden,

like many other suffragettes, followed soon after offering her services as a nurse with the

French Red Cross. “Borden immediately left for France where she stayed till the end of the

hostilities, equipping and directing a mobile hospital at the Front” (Khan, 118). Borden went

to great lengths to ensure that the mobile hospital she worked in during the war was up to the

task at hand. She invested a great deal of her own personal fortune to ensure that wounded

soldiers would receive the correct treatment in a field hospital that was adequately equipped.

Borden worked in extremely dangerous areas near the frontline and was, after the war,

recognised for her services by the French and English government and received numerous

38

medals and accolades including the Croix de Guerre and membership of the Legion of

Honour (Khan, 118).

Like Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Mary Borden’s book The Forbidden Zone

was published more than ten years after the end of the Great War. It is Santanu Das’ belief

that “both these accounts were, or perhaps could only be written a decade after the war; at the

time of occurrence, the experience is not fully understood” (194). Again we find that nurses

had a way of relieving themselves of any kind of emotion while treating soldiers. It is a kind

of defence mechanism which allows them to carry out their duties to the best of their abilities.

This form of mental detachment from the suffering around them is something that is very

recurrent in the literature nurses produced during the war and it is something that I will be

looking into later in this dissertation. Borden and Brittain display this detachment and it was

not until after the war that the impact and severity of the war becomes apparent and starts

haunting them. Both Mary Borden and Vera Brittain suffered from recurring nightmares in

which they relived certain scenes they had witnessed during the war. This is a phenomenon

that Cathy Caruth, who has extensively studied trauma, refers to as “inherent latency”: the

subconscious allows the subject to relive certain situations so that they can be emotionally

processed in a correct way. Das explains that, for Borden and Brittain, “the act of writing

becomes a way of ordering experiences” (194).

The title of The Forbidden Zone is both a reference to the area right behind the firing

zone where Borden worked as a nurse (Borden, preface), but it can also refer to the fact that it

is “women’s invasion of those areas in life which are male territory, forbidden to the female”

(Khan, 118). These areas include warfare which had always been considered a very masculine

affair. However, the stories included in The Forbidden Zone are reflections of women’s role

during the Great War and Borden also provides an honest recount of her own experiences in

which she does not shy away of describing the most gruesome aspects of war: “Borden shows

39

the war as it was; she does not indulge in innocuous statements but instead concentrates on

the reality she herself perceives” (Khan, 119).

Despite the fact that The Forbidden Zone was not published until 1929, some of the

stories that it contains were written during the First World War while Mary Borden was

working as a nurse, and had already been published in August 1917 under the title “At the

Somme” in the English Review. These poems, “The Hill”, “The Song of the Mud”, “Where is

Jehova?” display many mechanisms that Al-Joulan described and that soldier-poets such as

Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas utilise in their poetry. Borden uses visual and associative

mechanisms to describe the horrors of war and the suffering of war, but she also displays that

sense of helplessness and distance that was so characteristic in the literature produced by

nurses during the First World War. It is my opinion that these elements are also mechanisms

in which witnesses of the horrors of battle and the suffering of soldiers try to overcome the

limitations that physical pain imposes on language (Scarry, 4).

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6. Literary Analysis

In the second part of this Master’s dissertation I intend to take a closer look at a selection of

literature written by Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Vera Brittain and Mary Borden using

the theoretical framework that I elaborated on in the first part of this thesis. Central to this

analysis is Elaine Scarry’s hypothesis that pain resists objectification in spoken and written

language and therefore causes its destruction (5). I will then start by taking a closer look at a

selected corpus using the mechanisms that Nayef Al-Joulan stipulated in his article “Incurable

Sores on Innocent Tongues: The Language of Pain in World War I Poetry” which soldier-

poets used to express pain and thus attempt to express the inexpressible. The mechanisms that

he discusses are visual mechanisms and associative mechanisms. Astrid Vandenbroucke has

already conducted research into how Al-Joulan’s mechanisms are present in poetry and I will

regularly draw upon her findings. However, it is my intention to also elaborate by researching

if nurses, who did not necessarily experience physical pain but did witness it while treating

wounded soldiers, utilise the same mechanisms that soldier-poets did.

The choice of comparing poetry and prose might seem unorthodox due to the fact that

the differences between both genres are quite distinct, I motivate this decision due to the fact

that it suits the needs of this research better. Whereas there is an abundance of poetry written

by soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen that deals with physical pain, I found very little poetry

written by nurses that deal with the same subject that can be adequately compared to it. Nurse

memoirs, however, are filled with descriptions of physical trauma and therefore suit my

purpose much better.

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7. Associative Techniques

7.1.Religious Associations

One of the first associations that Astrid Vandenbroucke elaborates on is war-poets’

tendency to use religion to describe physical pain. Religious imagery in literature was

something that had been common long before the twentieth century and was widely used

during the First World War. Matthew Bevis explains that “Christian militarism captured the

public imagination and helped produce a new kind of soldier-hero” (24). These images were

not only used in literature but also in various other fields of propaganda. These religious

images were so widely recognised by the public that they served as useful stereotypes in

which authors could convey their message using certain religious symbols. Contemporary

readers would have been familiar with these symbols and they would have been quick to

make the correct associations. For example, in the beginning of the conflict, the war was often

referred to as a crusade and there were many propaganda posters that referred to certain

biblical stories that the public would easily recognise. An example is the use of the image of

Saint George, which contemporary readers would quickly associate with England, slaying the

dragon that represented the Germans and which gave the war an almost biblical character. We

also abundantly find this kind of religious imagery in the literature produced by war poets.

An often recurring theme in war poetry is the association between the likening of the

incessant suffering of the individual soldier to the suffering of Jesus Christ. A clear reference

to the death and suffering of Christ can be found in Edward Thomas’ short poem “In

Memorium (Easter 1915)”:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men

Now Far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

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In this short and mournful poem, Thomas makes a clear reference to Easter which is the

period of the liturgical year in which Christians remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for

humanity. Thomas is likening the sacrifice and suffering of the soldiers to that of Christ and is

imploring his readers to also reflect on all the young soldiers next Easter who, like Jesus, have

suffered and sacrificed so much for humanity. Thomas is clearly portraying the suffering

soldier as a “Christ-like martyr” (Bevis, 24).

Wilfred Owen, who had been a deeply religious Anglican during his youth, also

utilised religion in his poetry but he opted for a different approach. Andrew Gates explains

that Owen “sought to combat the [Christian] rhetoric by recalling his countrymen to the true

message of peace, love and brotherhood that ought to underlie the politics of any avowedly

“Christian” nation [...] and by overturning, with gruesome realism, the romantic lyric of war

and glory” (1). In “At a Calvary near the Ancre”, Owen connects the Crucifixion of Jesus to

the First World War. In the first stanza he describes how “One ever hangs were shelled roads

part” (line 1). This hanging is a reference to a cross which is still hanging in an area that has

been shelled. Owen continues by stating that ‘He’ (the Jesus on the cross) too has lost limbs.

Like the soldiers, he has also suffered: “In this war He too lost a limb” (line 2). The poem

continues by explaining how Jesus was forsaken by his disciples during his crucifixion and

Owen parallels this to his own experiences. Silkin explains that “it is the soldiers who are now

Christ’s suffering disciples” (232). Owen felt that he, and other soldiers, had been forsaken by

those with power who could help him. Politicians had forsaken him by sending him to the

trenches where suffering and death was so omnipresent. He compares these politicians to

“many a priest” who were “flesh- marked by the beast” and who had sentenced Jesus to die on

the cross. In the final stanza, Owen is accusing these politicians of neglecting the values of

peace and brotherhood that are typical of a Christian nation, and are instead promoting hate

and violence towards the enemy. Owen also criticises the Church in “Le Christianisme” for its

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“failure to extend its power of sympathy and beneficent perception to those enduring the war”

(Silkin 233).

A similar message is set out by Mary Borden who, in The Forbidden Zone, included a

story called “The Rabbi and the Priest”. This story depicts a French general quickly doing his

round after the Battle of the Somme giving medals to the wounded in Borden’s field hospital.

The General is then shocked to see an “ugly, scarred, black, burnt-up face” (Borden, 107) of a

soldier who seems to be grinning widely at him. The general is taken back when the soldier

explains that he is happy because he survived despite being left to die in No Man’s Land by

all his superior officers. He then continues by recounting a ‘funny’ story of a rabbi and a

priest (no doubt referring to multiple jokes that start with the same opening line) who, despite

the danger, took their time in No Man’s Land to go round to each and every dying man to

give final sacraments. Their sense of duty is so profound that, when the priest is also killed,

the rabbi crawls to the dying catholic and finishes the priests’ work.

This story is an obvious criticism towards the general who hastily, maybe due to fear

of being so close to the frontline, wants to finish the chore of greeting the wounded and

displays disgust at the sight of such a heavily mutilated figure. The soldier jokingly tells a

story about ‘the priest and the rabbi’ who, even under the most dangerous circumstances, do

not shy away from their responsibility and offer the dying soldiers their final sacraments

whereas the general is even too disgusted to look at the mutilated faces of the men he sent into

battle. The link with religion is quite clear due to the inclusion of a priest and a rabbi, but

Christians will also recognise elements of the biblical story of Jesus cleansing the lepers. The

wounded soldier is treated like a man with leprosy by the general who ostracises him due to

his appearance whereas the rabbi and the priest, like Jesus, try to ‘cleanse’ the wounded by

giving them their final sacraments. The aim of “The Rabbi and the Priest” is to shock. The

readers are first shocked by the gruesome description of the wounded soldier. They are next

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shocked by the way he is treated by his superior officer. Lastly, we are surprised with how the

wounded soldier reprimands the general for not respecting and acknowledging the sacrifice he

has made. The unsettling part of this story is that it is recognisable to readers. One has a

tendency to look away from the misery and pain of other individual. The soldier is telling us

that this is disrespectful. He wants us to look at his injuries as they are a reminder of the

sacrifice he has made.

7.2.Sound Associations

Elaine Scarry explains that when a human subject suffers physical trauma, the

individual is rendered to a position in which language is completely made redundant and that

the individual instead will resort to the sounds that one makes before any knowledge of

language: these sounds include, amongst others, crying, moaning, whimpering and babbling.

These are sounds that we already associate with pain and are thus useful tools when trying to

express physical pain.

Sound is a very important factor in Mary Borden’s “Bombardment" which she

included in The Forbidden Zone. Borden describes the ruinous effects of a bombardment on a

Belgian town. She first creates a tranquil scene by describing the town as being asleep and

explaining how “there was no sound anywhere” (11). This sense of peace and calm is all of a

sudden gently disrupted by an aeroplane whose “sound of the whirring of its engine was lost

[...], like a ghost” (11). We, as readers, get a sense of ominous foreboding by these words and

this feeling is justified when “a scream burst from the throat of the church tower” (11)

warning the town’s inhabitants of the imminent danger that is coming their way. She

describes this sound that the tower is omitting as a “wail of terror” which creates an image of

a human in despair screaming while pain is being inflicted. When the bombs are then dropped

“a roar burst from the wounded earth” (12), creating a strong image of a wounded human

screaming in agony. When the bombardment finally seizes, Borden depicts the city from the

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viewpoint of the aeroplane. The town is, again, given human characteristics by describing that

the face of the city has been damaged by the bombardment: “Scars appeared on it like the

marks of smallpox [...] gashes appeared in its streets, long wounds with ragged edges.

Helpless, spread out to the heavens, it grimaced with mutilated features” (13). The city, in

fact, looks like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. Borden uses the sounds and scenery one

sees in battle.

Sound and sound patterns are also very prevalent in the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who

was aware of its resourcefulness in the quest to express physical trauma. In Touch and

Intimacy in First World War Literature, Santanu Das devotes an entire chapter to Owen and

how he uses sensory sounds within his poetry. According to Das, this can manifest itself in

numerous ways. He explains that, in “Spring Offensive”, Owen uses half-rhyme and

sibilance6 to create an atmosphere of imminent danger. Through the use of these sounds and

sound patterns, we, as readers, get the impression that something terrible is lurking around the

corner waiting to strike at any given moment: “But many there stood still /To face the stark,

blank sky beyond the ridge,/ Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world” (lines 5-7).

The men realise that they have come to the end and that a huge slaughter is about to take

place. Das suggests that Owen’s use of hissing sounds in the first part of “Spring Offensive”

contributes to allowing readers to experience the imminent sense of danger (164). I must note

that it is my opinion that the visual images that this first stanza evokes contribute more to this

aim than the use of sibilance. I do not, however, underestimate the power and value of using

sound and sound patterns in the attempt to express physical pain.

In “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Wilfred Owen describes the horrendous results of a

mustard gas attack on a group of soldiers and I agree with Das when he suggests that Owen’s

use of sounds allows us to get a better understanding of the trauma traumatic effect of

6 Hissing sounds.

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chemical warfare on the body of soldiers. The poem opens with the following lines: “Bent

double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through

sludge” (lines 1-2). In his analysis, Das first draws our attention to the visual images that are

created and then suggests that the use of the iambs and trochees slow the pace of the iambic

pentameter of the poem down which resembles how the marching of soldiers is slowed down

while they march through the mud and sludge (155). When the men are attacked and

subsequently gassed, Owen provides a very vivid description:

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking and drowning. (lines 13-16)

There is real emphasis on the noises that one makes when being subjected to poisonous gas.

The effect of mustard gas is such that it causes severe burns to the eyes, skin and lungs.

Serious respiratory problems quickly ensue which forces the soldier to desperately gasp for

air. It gives us the impression that the victim is drowning. When reading the words

‘guttering’, ‘choking’ and ‘drowning’ one cannot help but mentally hear the sounds that the

soldier is making and it creates a realistic live experience for readers. Das coins this as

“visceral imagination” (156) and also draws our attention to Owen’s choice of using the

gerund for these verbs. By using this, he suggests that the action is still ongoing and it gives

readers an idea of the timeless suffering of soldiers. In fact, many men who survived mustard

gas attacks would suffer from the physical consequences for the rest of their lives and Owen’s

use of the gerund form gives their suffering an eternal character (Das, 157).

Despite the fact that the use of sound and sound patterns can be very useful in

conveying the horrors of physical trauma and the suffering of soldiers, it is important to note

that sound associations are far more prevalent in poetry than in prose. It subsequently means

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that we will find more examples of sound association in the literature produced by soldier-

poets than in the literature written by V.A.D. nurses. I suggest that an explanation for this can

be found in the fact that poetry is far more lyrical genre and is thus better suited to incorporate

sound and sound patterns. This does not mean that sound associations cannot manifest itself in

prose. As I have discussed earlier, Mary Borden also made use of this mechanism to convey

physical trauma but these are far more explicitly present within the text. In poetry, the

presence of sound association is far more implicit. For example: it is not until one starts to

analyse Wilfred Owen’s poetry that certain patterns, like the use of sibilance and alliteration,

become apparent and are subsequently linked to the author’s quest in trying to conveying

physical trauma to his readers.

7.3.Nature Association

The use of landscapes and nature as a backdrop to juxtapose the horrors of the war and

gruesomeness of physical trauma is something that is extensively used by soldier-poets and

nurses alike. An explanation for this can be found in the popularity of the pastoral tradition in

the years preceding the First World War. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul

Fussell explains that, during the war, the authors’ “recourse to the pastoral is an English mode

of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself

against them” (235). He continues by explaining that the pastoral is “a way of invoking a code

to hint by antithesis at the indescribable” (235) and that “the language of literary pastoral and

that of particular rural data can fuse to assist memory or imagination” (235). In other words,

the pastoral tradition is a useful tool when describing that which is too difficult to put into

words, seeing as it allows authors to make contrasts between the horrors of the war and the

quiet idyllic character of the English countryside. By taking this rural setting authors are

providing their readers with an exterior referent that they are familiar with and they contrast

this with horrific images of pain and war.

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Edward Thomas is well-known for his use of the English countryside in his poetry. In

“As the Team’s Head Brass”, Thomas creates an idyllic scene of a farmer working on his land

in which a narrator observes a couple of lovers going for a stroll and disappearing in the

woods. The narrator is sitting in a desolate place: “I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm”

(line 3). Al-Joulan says that Thomas likes to “recruit a shocking image of a wrecked,

depressing and indifferent landscape that evokes feelings of estrangement” (111).

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed the angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square of charlock (lines 1-5)

The estrangement here is in the fact that the narrator is sitting on a fallen elm tree on a piece

of unploughed land watching lovers, who are traditionally used as symbols of love and hope,

disappear. The scene is a reference to the war in which the unploughed land is likened to a

battlefield. Throughout the poem, Thomas evokes warlike images: “the brass flashed” (line

11) can be likened to the flash of a gun that is being fired, “the blizzard felled the elm” (line

13) is the image of a soldier being killed in battle and “a woodpecker’s round hole” (line 14)

is a reference to the physical wound that killed the soldier.

The unploughed area where the narrator is sitting in is a barren land without any life.

Unploughed land does, however, usually hold high potential. If one was to plough it, one

could grow crops on it and make the land alive. However, in the image that Thomas creates

this is impossible due to the fact that the unploughed land is littered with fallen elms. These

symbolise the fallen soldiers on the battlefield. Thomas is trying to create a scene of

desparation by explaining, with use of nature imagery, that hope and potential are destroyed

on the battlefield. War claims the lives of those young men who had so much to offer.

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The narrator starts a conversation with the farmer in which the topic quickly turns to

war and how it has affected life. The narrator asks the farmer: “have you been out?” asking if

he has been to war. The farmer says he has been affected by the war. He talks in a manner-of-

fact way about losing his friends and also addresses his fear of bodily harm: “I could spare an

arm. I shouldn’t want to lose a leg/ If I should lose my head, why, so” (line 21-22). Al-Joulan

finds that “these concerns seem silent, incapable of translating the pain” (111). I, however,

disagree. The fact that the farmer is talking in this very casual way about which wounds he

would prefer, suggests that he is feeling more than he is saying. The distance and indifference

that the farmer is displaying is therefore slightly unnerving for readers and it is my opinion

that it makes the description of these wounds all the more graphic.

John Silkin explains that Owen uses nature “in a way that is new, not only for him, but

in relation to the generally accepted romantic view of nature, which is the view he inherited”

(206). Owen uses it to point out the futility, chaos and destruction of war and how it destroys

nature. In Spring Offensive, Owen provides the poem with a very peaceful description of a

spring morning:

Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled

By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,

For though the summer oozed in their veins (lines 8-10)

However, the tranquillity of the scene is constantly being disrupted by an ominous foreboding

which gives an impression that this quiet scenery is about to be disrupted:

But many stood still

To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,

Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world. (lines 5-7)

The men know that a battle is imminent and that, for some, it would be the last time that they

would enjoy such a magnificent scenery so they continue to muse about the warm fields,

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buttercups and trees until “soon they topped the hill and raced together” (line 28) and the

whole tranquil scene changes into a loud and chaotic scenery:

And instantly the whole sky burned

With fury against them; and soft sudden cups

Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes

Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space (lines 30-33)

The peaceful scenery suddenly transforms into a fiery inferno which strikes them in full fury.

It is now a scenery in which death, pain and despair is present. There is nothing left of the

tranquil scene, only devastation and despair.

Futility is another poem in which Owen similarly uses the image of nature to describe,

as the title of the poem suggests, the futility of war. The subject of the poem is a soldier who

is dying due to wounds he sustained during battle. Here, Owen uses the sun as something that

sooths the dying soldier, something it had always done, even when he was fighting in the

trenches:

Move him into the sun-

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it awoke him, even in France. (lines 1-5)

However, there is a change: “until this morning and this snow” (line 5). The snow is a cold

and hard sounding word that juxtaposes the warmth of the sun and hints to the fact that the

soldier has died. The narrator pleads with the sun to help the dying soldier: “If anything might

rouse him now/ The kind old sun will know” (lines 6-7). The futility of his death is reflected

in the fields that are half-sown. The fields are only partly covered with seeds meaning that it

is not yet being used at its full potential. Similarly, the young soldier’s life has been cut short,

he has not been able to fulfil his full potential in life.

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War not only has a disastrous, disruptive and destructive influence on the human

body, it also had a profound impact on the landscape of Belgium and France. To this day,

people walking through the old battlegrounds of the First World War near Ypres or Verdun

still see how the landscape is affected by the war. Craters are still visible and the fields in

Flanders and France are still littered with pieces of shrapnel, bullets and old shells. Authors

parallel these scars on the landscape to the physical trauma of soldiers. In Bombardment,

Mary Borden, describes an unknown town being subjected to a horrific air raid. Borden

chooses to give the town human characteristics by describing that the face of the city has been

damaged by the bombardment. The city looks like a wounded soldier on the battlefield.

Wilfred Owen does something similar in “Mental Cases” which is an extremely graphic poem

about soldiers suffering from shell shock who, at night, dream and relive the horrible images

of war and pain that they have experienced. Owen describes them as having:

Stroke on stroke of pain- but what slow panic,

Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?

Ever from hair and through their hands’ palms

Misery swelters. Surely we have perished? (lines 7-8)

In the twenty-second line, the night ends and we hope that the end of the dark night might

relieve the soldier of his suffering. Unfortunately “dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds

afresh”. Dawn is symbolic for the start of a new day, a chance at a new beginning. However,

Owen uses very violent and graphic images to hint at the fact that the morning will bring not

solace to the poor traumatised soldier, but that his wounds will break open again and that he

will continue to suffer.

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8. Visual Techniques

In the following chapter I will take a closer look at the second mechanism Nayef Al-Joulan

discerned in his article “Incurable Sores on Innocent Tongues: The Language of Pain in

World War I Poetry”. Al-Joulan states that soldier-poets also use visual mechanisms to

translate pain into language. Despite the fact that poetry as a genre requires poetic language,

and that associative mechanisms such as sound, nature and religious associations are very

useful when conveying physical trauma into language, there are some very distinct benefits in

using visual mechanisms. The idea behind using visual mechanisms is to create mental

images. By using very exact language to create these images, the author has to possibility to

recreate situations very precisely. It is clear language that is very straightforward for the

readers to understand. Whereas we can argue that associative techniques are more suggestive,

visual techniques are more objective and precise.

Elaine Scarry acknowledges the importance of creating visual images when trying to

convey emotions in literature. She does, however, stress the difficulty of this by pointing out

that art and literature can easily visually represent most states of consciousness such as anger,

joy and love, but that physical pain is notoriously difficult to represent in literature due to its

resistance to language (12). Visualising the source of pain and suffering can thus help to

overcome the problems that language experiences when dealing with physical trauma. Seeing

as Scarry states that pain is completely individual and has no exterior referent, the use of

visual mechanisms provides readers with a referent they can relate to. I find it important to

stress that, although these techniques are labelled as being visual, they are of course to some

extent also associative due to the fact that readers still need to make a connection between that

which is being visualised and the emotion that the author is trying to express.

Astrid Vandenbroucke has conducted research into the visual techniques soldier-poets

use within their poetry. I will use her findings as a starting point which I will discuss and

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elaborate with my own personal reading and interpretations. I will also discuss whether Mary

Borden and Vera Brittain use similar visual techniques and/or if they add anything new or use

a different approach to that of the soldier-poets.

Wilfred Owen found it very important to try and give his readers an idea of what war

in the trenches was like. “Owen declares that it is essential to paint the figures and actions of

the war” (Das, 113). The way he achieves this is by creating dramatic scenes in which the

trench experience is transmitted to the reader in a very realistic manner using very direct

language. He wants the reader participate in the experience. It is through this type of direct

visualisation that he provides us with an external referent that allows him to express physical

trauma. Nayef Al-Joulan uses Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” as an example of how Owen

visualises a scene from the trenches. In this poem, a small group of soldiers are being

subjected to a mustard gas attack (112):

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And floundering like a man in fire or lime...

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. (lines 9-14)

What is most striking is that Owen chooses to temper the used lyrical language and instead

opts for a more direct approach. Although we can still see that it is poetry due to the end-

rhyme and ballad-like form, it does not use difficult imagery. Owen meant this poem to be

very clearly understood by his reader. By using this direct language with very little tropes or

imagery, he destroys any possibility for misinterpretation of the context. Owen takes us by the

hand and he wants us to experience a particular moment in the trenches. Al-Joulan explains

that “the events seem to take place as one reads them. The reader is even alerted to the gas

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bombs, just like the soldiers in the poem. Chemicals are smelled and helmets placed on heads

in what seems to the reader a personal firsthand experience” (112). We also find evidence of

associative techniques used in this poem. There is also clear example of nature association in

this poem in which the typical yellow-greenish colour of the smoke of mustard gas is

compared to a green sea, but this is also a very visual mechanism to express physical pain.

Seeing as one of the physiological effects of gas is the swelling of airways which causes the

victim respiratory problems and suffocation, it is clear why he chooses a comparison to

drowning in a sea as to express this kind of physical trauma. The power of “Dulce et Decorum

Est” lies in the fact that the scene that Owen creates is so vivid and so real. We experience the

sound and sights of the battlefield which give the content a discomforting sense of realness.

Owen succeeds in translating the reality of the horrors of battle and the severity of the pain

that soldiers suffer.

Similarly, Mary Borden tries to create a scene in which the reader is drawn into the

experience. Whereas Owen wants his readers to experience the trenches, Borden draws her

readers into what she coined as “the other battlefield”. Her battlefield is the operating room

and the greatest enemy there is not a foreign soldier, a mortar shell, a bullet or mustard gas.

The greatest enemy that soldiers face in her battlefield is pain. She tries to convey the horrific

amount of pain that soldiers have to endure while they are being treated and the helplessness

that nurses and doctors feel towards those who are suffering. Nurses were prone to give vivid

descriptions of the wounds they treated. Christine Hallet suggests that “this compulsion may

have arisen out of the extraordinary nature of the wounds themselves” (72). She also explains

that the point and purpose for these kinds of realistic descriptions may have been to due “to a

desire to record these injuries for themselves, or to “offload” the emotional reaction to what

they had seen” (72). She concludes by stating that some, like Vera Brittain, already had

55

publication in mind and felt a need to educate the general public on the horrors of the war

(Hallet, 73).

In The Forbidden Zone, Mary Borden includes a very realistic account of life in a field

hospital in a short story called “In the Operating Room”. The story opens with the following

description: “The operating room is the section of a wooden shed. Thin partitions separate it

from the X-ray room on one side, and the sterilising room on the other [...] there are three

wounded men on three operating tables” (85). These opening lines immediately set the scene.

They are brought in such a way that it makes you feel like you are being introduced to the

operating room on your first day as a V.A.D. nurse. There is a sense of claustrophobia due to

a small wooden shed being appropriated for so many different purposes and it being so

crowded with people. This feeling is enhanced when Borden elaborates on the sounds that are

present in the operating room:

The doors keep opening and shutting. The boiler is pounding and bubbling in

the sterilising room. There is noise of steam escaping, of feet hurrying down

the corridor, of ambulances rolling past the windows, and behind all this, the

rhythmic pounding of the guns bombarding at a distance of ten miles or so.

(85)

We get an overwhelming amount of impressions that we have to take in all at once. Borden

uses very short sentences in which she makes a summary of all the action going on in the

room. People are hurrying, machines are making noises and ambulances are rushing in and

out. It all just adds to the enormous sense of stress and chaos of the scene. There is also an

atmosphere of danger due to the guns and bombardments that can be heard coming from the

trenches in the distance. These sounds of war are not only reminders of the dangers of being

so close to the frontlines, they also act as a vivid reminder that even more soldiers are getting

injured and that the work at the hospital will not be slowing down any time soon.

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In the next section of the story we are part of the proceedings in the operating room.

Borden continues to create a hectic scene by letting a great variety of characters talk after one

another. This creates a significant dramatic effect as it enhances the sense of chaos in the field

hospital. Patients are howling in pain, asking for assistance and moaning, and the doctors and

nurses are trying to see to everybody’s needs to the best of their abilities:

1st Patient: Mother of God! Mother of God!

2nd

Patient: Softly. Softly. You hurt me. Ah! You are hurting me.

3rd

Patient: I am thirsty.

1st Surgeon: Cut the dressing. Mademoiselle

2nd

Surgeon: What’s his ticket say? Show it to me. What’s the X-ray show?

(Borden, 86)

The entire story is focalised through the eyes of a nurse and the surgeons are giving orders to

the nurses and asking for information. Because we, as readers, are seeing everything from a

nurse’s perspective, we have the impression that the surgeons are asking these questions

directly to us. This causes us to be drawn completely into a live experience of working in a

field hospital which creates an enormous sense of realism. We feel the chaos and we hear and

see the pains of the patients in a most gruesome manner.

2nd

patient: Mother of Jesus, not like that. Don’t turn my foot like that. Not that

way. Take care. Great God, take care! I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t bear it.

2nd

Surgeon: There, there, don’t excite yourself. You’ve got a nasty leg, very

nasty. Smells bad. Mademoiselle, hold his leg up. It’s not pretty at all, this leg

2nd

Patient: Ah, doctor, doctor. What are you doing? Aiee-! [...]

2nd

Surgeon: Your leg is not at all pretty, my friend. We shall have to take it

off. [...]

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2nd

Surgeon: [...] is my saw there? Where is my amputating saw? Who’s got

my saw? (Borden, 86-87)

Borden continues to create very realistic images by concentrating on those aspects that readers

would find unnerving: we get an image of a soldier with an extremely badly injured and foul

smelling leg which is set in a weird and unnatural angle. The surgeons show little patience for

the pain of the soldier as they are set on doing their job quickly regardless of the discomfort of

the patient and when they order the nurse, through whose eyes we are watching the story, to

hold up the injured leg while he starts an amputation, we are once again drawn right into the

live experience which makes the story frightfully real.

Very significant in this story is the fact that the wounded soldiers also experience a

form of dehumanisation. There are so many injured soldiers that the nurses and doctors have

to tend to, that it is impossible to interact with these men in a conventional way. The medical

staff does not address their patients with their given name but instead distinguishes them by

the injury they have sustained. For example soldiers who lose a limb are called “amputés” and

when a man with a wound to the chest arrives at the hospital, the nurse tells the doctor:

“Here’s the lung. Are you ready for it?” (89). This form of dehumanisation can also be

observed after the amputation of the gangrenous leg. The 2nd

surgeon orders the nurse to “take

that leg away, will you” (89) in which he is not only referring to the body part but also to the

patient. Also, when a new influx of wounded soldiers is admitted to the field hospital, the

nurse tells the doctors that “three knees have come in, two more abdomen, five heads” (89). It

seems that pain not only destroys language, but that it also destroys the individuality of the

human being. They are not men anymore, but they are broken body parts that are brought into

the hospital to be mended. The hospital is thus “a combination of an industrial factory, a

grisly kitchen and a house of magic, throbbing and humming with the remaking of men” (Das,

221).

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Vera Brittain also focuses on physical trauma in Testament of Youth. When Roland,

her fiancé, is sent to the trenches, she admits that she had secretly hoped that he would obtain

an injury that would necessitate his return to England: “I had once regarded a wound as a

desirable experience which might enable me to see him for weeks and perhaps months” (220).

However, when the brutality and the horrors of the wounds that soldiers suffered became

apparent to her while serving as a nurse, she quickly changes her mind and prays that Roland

“might go through the War with body unscathed” (220). Like Mary Borden, she also does not

refrain from providing her readers with gruesomely realistic descriptions: “the first dressing at

which I assisted, a gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid

bare, turned me sick and faint for a moment” (211). It is, however, important to note that,

compared to Mary Borden, Brittain did refrain from divulging too often into the description of

physical war wounds and instead focuses on her yearning to be close to her fiancé. She copes

with the horrors of the war by imagining that every wounded soldier she treats is, by proxy,

Roland. As the war progresses and casualty rates climb, she becomes obsessed that his body

could come through the war unscathed (Brittain, 220). In a way, she fears the physical

traumas she is treating as they are reminders of the horrors that could, and in the end

unfortunately would, befall Roland:

It was an extremely minor operation but rather messy. I had never seen even

anything so small before, but such things never seem to affect me physically at

all. [...] But all the time my mind was with that operation at Louvencourt; it

was Roland I saw struggling under the anaesthetic with His beautiful eyes

closed and his sturdy limbs all helpless; it was from Roland’s wound that I saw

the blood pour out in a scarlet stream. (qtd in Das, 211)

For me, Brittain’s description of physical trauma creates a new and very realistic dimension to

conveying pain, because she projects every wound she treats to a subject that is so well known

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to her. She makes every wound a very personal one by imagining that it is inflicted upon

Roland, a person whom she holds dear. We tend to construct a more generic and abstract

visualisation of pain and suffering when the victim is someone whom we do not know

personally. But when we project the trauma to a more familiar subject, for example a close

friend or a family member, the physical trauma and subsequent suffering all of a sudden

become far more concrete and realistic and it is far easier to sympathise with the victim. Out

of all the authors I discuss in this dissertation, Brittain is the only one that takes a visual

representation of physical trauma and subsequently projects it unto a known person. Again we

can argue whether this is not an example of an associative technique of conveying physical

pain to readers but I suggest that this is a good illustration of the importance of combining

both the visual and associative technique to come to an adequate way of expressing the

inexpressible.

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9. Nurse’s Representational Strategies

In the previous chapter I have taken Nayef A. Al-Joulan’s theory on the mechanisms

that soldier-poets utilised to express physical pain and I have illustrated these with examples

that I have found in the literature of Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. I have also

demonstrated that we can find these mechanisms in the literature produced by V.A.D. nurses

such as Vera Brittain and Mary Borden. We can thus already conclude that both groups of

authors use similar mechanisms to describe physical trauma and pain. However, seeing as Al-

Joulan only focussed on war-poets when stipulating his theory, I suggest that by excluding

nurses, he has left out an extremely significant group of people who were close witnesses to

the atrocities of war. Santanu Das agrees and explains that there has only just been a renewal

in interest in women’s war writing (176) and that “the plight of women as witnesses to the

violence, particularly of the nurses who were exposed to gruesome wounds, has just begun to

be recognised” (177). It is therefore my opinion that an elaboration on Al-Joulan’s theory is in

order and it is my intention to investigate if nurses introduce any new mechanisms through

which they try to convey physical trauma to their readers.

It is important to note that nurses show an awareness of the limitations of language

when describing physical trauma. Santanu Das points out that Mary Borden discusses this in

the preface of The Forbidden Zone. She writes:

I have dared to dedicate these pages to the Poilus who passed through our

hands during the war, because I believe they would recognise the dimmed

reality reflected in these pictures. But the book is not meant for them. They

know, not only everything that is contained in it, but all the rest that can never

be written. (Borden, Preface).

She dedicates the novel to all the soldiers that she treated while serving as a V.A.D. nurse

during the First World War. Poilu is an informal way of referring to a French infantryman and

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she explains that, although the book is dedicated to them, it is not actually meant for them

seeing as they already know about what she is writing and they cannot learn from it anymore.

Borden goes even further and explains that soldiers also have knowledge that she does not

have. She is referring to the fact that the soldiers she has treated have been injured during the

war and have experienced pain that the rest of us cannot imagine. She thus acknowledges her

role as a witness in the preface and realises that she can only write about what she has seen.

She has no way of writing down what these men have experienced because language simply

falls short to adequately describe the horrors.

9.1.Helplessness

There are some very central themes to nurse’s memoirs and a first that I want to draw

attention to is the sense of helplessness that V.A.D. nurses felt towards their patients. Borden

describes the operating room as a whole other battlefield in which the main enemy is pain.

Nurses and doctors were expected to restore the injured body but in many cases there was

nothing much they could do. Mary Borden describes such a situation in “The Operating

Room” in which a soldier, suffering from a bad injury to the abdomen, is brought into the

hospital after spending a stretch of time lying wounded in No Man’s Land before help could

get to him. The man is desperately begging for a drink of water, something the medical staff

cannot give him if they want to operate him. The surgeon soon realises that he cannot save the

man due to the severity of the wound and they are forced to wait for his death while he

continually pleads for help (88-89).

Helplessness is also a theme that I find to be very recurrent in Testament of Youth

albeit in a different way than Borden. Whereas the latter describes how she feels helpless

towards the pain of others, Brittain feels a sense of helplessness towards herself and her own

suffering. Throughout the book, she is constantly trying to help herself by finding ways to

ease her suffering. One of the ways she finds this is by enlisting as a V.A.D. nurse after

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Roland joins the army. Richard Baudenhausen explains that, throughout the book, “she

repeatedly links her service and personal suffering with those of male soldiers” (429). She is

looking for ways to justify the pain she is feeling and she does this “by pointing out how

women, too, were injured by the war [...] by characterising her service as an explicit tribute to

male sacrifice [...] and by describing circumstances in which she and other nurses endured

burdens similar to those of soldiers in battle” (Baudenhausen, 429-430). I found it very

striking that Brittain often makes big decisions based on events happening in her own life that

are causing her pain. For example, when Roland enlists in the army and is subsequently sent

to the trenches, she copes by volunteering as a V.A.D. nurse. When Roland is tragically

killed, she applies to work abroad and subsequently serves in Malta where she finds some

solace from the pain she feels due to Roland’s death. When she later returns to England to

marry Geoffrey Thurlow, his unfortunate death causes her to decide to serve in France so that

she can be closer to Edward. All her actions and decisions are fuelled by events that have

caused her pain and she is desperately searching for ways to help herself to heal from these

traumatic experiences. She is also constantly trying to justify the pain she is feeling by

likening her experiences and suffering to that of soldiers serving on the frontline. The pain of

losing someone is mostly psychological and it seems that Brittain feels that it is therefore

subordinate to the physical pain of soldiers. It seems that she wants her psychological pain to

become physical. She does this by taking more dangerous decisions. Serving in Malta implies

undergoing a very stressful and hazardous journey across the Mediterranean Sea and serving

in France puts her very close to the frontlines.

By creating a sense of helplessness, nurses emphasise the severity of the wounds they

are treating. Das explains that nursing is “a constant emptying out of oneself before great need

and greater pain, and yet somehow always falling short” (192). Not only are they called upon

to treat the bodies that are the result of the carnage of war, they are in many cases also

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subjected to the fact that they cannot help the person in pain. They are rendered useless by the

fact that some wounds are so severe that no help is possible. Some injuries are just too

traumatic to heal and the nurses are forced to assume a passive role until the injured soldier

finally succumbs. This sense of helplessness is disconcerting for us as readers as we are

forced to imagine a situation in which a person suffering from so much pain is denied further

medical attention to the fact that the injury is too severe. I think it is therefore a very useful

tool in describing the severity of physical trauma. It is a way of expressing the inexpressible.

9.2.Detachment

A second recurring theme that we can find in the literature produced by V.A.D. nurses

and that, in my opinion, aids the process of expressing physical trauma, is the way in which

nurses attempt to detach themselves from the horrors they were witnessing. This was a

defence mechanism which allowed nurses to get on with the daunting challenge of treating

severely wounded soldiers without it becoming too mentally straining. Borden was very

aware of the fact that she needed to emotionally detach herself while performing her nursing

duties:

There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and

knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and

pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are

eyes, eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that

cannot articulate; and parts of faces, the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these

things, but no men; how could I be a woman here and not die of it? (The

Forbidden Zone, 43-44)

Borden feels depersonalised by the war: “The fundamental unsharability of the ordeal, and yet

the juddering of the senses by knowing and serving the wounded body so closely leads to a

crisis of experiencing” (Das, 192). She feels embarrassed in her role as a woman because she

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cannot fully understand the pain men suffer: “being a woman, being young, becomes an

unbearable burden” (Das, 192). She therefore decides to detach and depersonalise men and

women from their gendered roles. Men are reduced to their physical wounds and she herself

detaches herself from her role as a woman and instead assumes the role of a nurse. Santanu

Das explains that the process of de-individualisation of nurses starts with the starched

whiteness of V.A.D. uniforms and eventually culminates in the spectacle of the destroyed

male body: “as mouths gape open and horror usurps sympathy, the eyes of the witness, sick

and delirious, seem almost to be scooped out in some absurd ritual of penance” (193). It is just

a constant process of detaching oneself to cope with the horrors of war. Hallet explains that

these kind of detached descriptions traumatise readers and brings them straight to the heart of

the reality of trauma (78).

Nearly every memoir, diary or letter produced by nurses that I read in preparation of

this master’s dissertation contained examples of detachment. It is striking how often injuries

are described in a very scientific way and how the most gruesome jobs are mentioned in a

very matter of fact manner. Nurses can come across as very crude, distant and emotionless

when describing their experiences. Brittain explains that nurses need “self-protective

callousness” (176) in order to cope with the constant pain and death that surrounds them.

While reading Testament of Youth, one cannot help noticing that Brittain has retained this

callousness even after the war. This becomes evident in the instances in which she discusses

the sad fate of severely or fatally wounded soldiers:

Nothing could have looked more dreadful than he did this morning, lying on

his back worn just to the skin and bone and a ghastly yellowish colour all over.

He lay with his eyes half closed and turned up so that only the whites were

showing [...]. He died from a most obscure complaint [...]. To me it is strange

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that I take his death, sad as it makes me feel, so much as a matter of course.

(176)

However sad and tragic the death of the soldier may be, Brittain distances herself from it by

accepting it as a matter of course. Christine Hallet is right when she describes this kind of

detachment as traumatising for readers. Not only are we given a particularly gruesome image

of a dying man, we also find out that his death is received with a sense of indifference by

those who witnessed it. For me, it just adds to the horror of the situation. It is like Brittain is

denying us a referent in which we can understand the pain of the dying soldier. We are instead

forced to reflect on the futility and the horror of his death and how terrible it is that he should

have to die without anybody caring about it. It is my impression that by detaching themselves

from the suffering of their patients, they are paradoxically drawing the attention of their

readers to it and thus expressing what is, in fact, inexpressible.

9.3.Touch

A final theme that is very recurrent in the literature produced by nurses during the

First World War, is the emphasis on the human body and more specifically the damage

inflicted upon it during battle. Central to this theme is the element of touching the wounded

body. Touching a wound proved to be far more traumatic for nurses than simply just having to

look upon it. Santanu Das explains that in Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain “dwells on

moments when the young, sheltered, female body comes in actual physical contact with male

wounds” (176) and that this is very typical in nurse memoirs. He continues by explaining that

it is “as if the hand was doomed to a compulsion to repeat the experience from which it most

shuddered” (176). The sight of a mangled and disfigured body accompanied by the

horrendous smell they produce and the fact that they physically have to touch the wounds

while treating it, were so shocking for young V.A.D. nurses, who mostly came from very

sheltered, middle-class backgrounds, that it became one of the central focal points in their

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writing. Vera Brittain admitted to Roland Leighton that she in some way had found a way to

cope with “the butcher shop appearance, or holes in various parts of people that you could put

your fist into”, but that she did have trouble with “having to hold a head or a leg for the sister

to dress it while the man moans and tries to squirm about (qtd in Das, 177). It seems that, for

Britain, observing a wound, although gruesome in its own right, is something that one can get

used to. It is the actual physical contact that is required to treat the injured body that proves to

be most traumatic for nurses

This opinion is shared by other nurses who also elaborated on the difficulty of

touching the injured body. Mary Borden also elaborated on having to make physical contact

with severely injured patients in The Forbidden Zone and places special emphasis on the

hands being the tools with which nurses come into contact with physical trauma: “You are

continually doing things with your hands: cutting of clothes stiffened with blood, washing the

edges of festering wounds, amputating gangrenous legs (124). Das also reflects on Borden’s

preface in which she dedicates The Forbidden Zone to the French soldiers who “passed

through her hands”. Again there is emphasis on the hands being the point where she comes

into physical contact with the war. However, Das finds that the description of soldiers passing

through the hands of nurses has a far more bureaucratic connotation: “Intimacy of gesture is

balanced by the professionalisation of service” (182).

The injured body and touch are central in Mary Borden’s short story “The Beach” in

which a soldier, who has been severely wounded during the First World War, is on a holiday

at the seaside with his girlfriend. Borden opens the story by giving a description of the

surroundings of the couple: “The beach is perfect, the sun is perfect, the sea is perfect. How

pretty the little waves are, curling up the beach. They are perfectly lovely. They are like a lace

frill to the beach. And the sea is a perfectly heavenly blue” (33). There is a lot of repetition of

the word ‘perfect’ in this description. By idealising the natural environment it serves as a

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contrast to the horribly mangled appearance of the wounded soldier who, due to the physical

injuries he sustained, looks far from perfect. His altered appearance and the severity of his

wounds have put a heavy strain upon his relationship with his girlfriend and both are unsure

of how their relationship can progress:

He was thinking, ‘What will become of us? She is young and healthy. She is

beautiful as a child. What shall we do about it?’ And looking into her eyes he

saw the same question, ‘What shall we do?’ and looked quickly away again. So

did she. (34)

The man is in constant pain due to the injuries he has sustained: “the man wriggled and

hitched himself clumsily up in his chair; an ugly grimace pulled his pale face to one side [...] a

groan escaped” (Borden, 33). We also soon find out more about the nature of his wounds: “it

is only my foot, my left foot. Funny, isn’t it, that it goes on throbbing. They cut it off two

months ago. It is damn queer when you think of it. The old foot begins the old game, then I

look down and it is not there anymore and I am fooled again” (Borden, 34). The man is

suffering and the woman is concerned. She is constantly asking him if there is anything she

can do to alleviate his pain in which Borden again places emphasis on the helplessness one

feels towards those in pain. The man responds in a very curious way to her concern. On the

one hand he treats her kindly and tries to ease her worried mind by minimising the extent of

his suffering. But on the other hand, he sometimes severely upsets the woman by giving

gruesome descriptions of soldiers dying from gangrenous wounds in the trenches. The man

admits that the feelings he has for her are ruptured into many juxtaposing stances: “he

wondered why he told her these things. He loved her. He hated her. He was afraid of her. He

did not want her to be kind to him” (Borden, 37). He is fearful of loving the woman because

he is so aware of their bodies being so different. He is afraid that the woman will not love him

anymore and therefore thinks it will be easier if he tries not to love her. He also explains, that

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due to the nature of his wounds, he “could never touch her again” (Borden, 36). This lack of

physicality caused by his injuries will result in him not being able to reciprocate the love that

the woman gives him. He has lost the tools with which he can show his love. He cannot touch

and caress her and it is exactly this lack of being able to physically make contact with her that

causes him most pain.

Borden is trying to explain that the injured body is only one aspect of the trauma. The

real suffering lies within the fact that the soldier has also lost his ability to touch and therefore

to show intimacy towards his girlfriend and it is precisely this which causes him most grief.

The couple seems to have lost the ability to love in a normal way. It is more difficult to love

the man because he has changed both physically and mentally because of his wounds. The

woman is very aware of this: “I must love him, now more than ever, but where is he? She

looked round her as if to find the man he once had been” (Borden, 37). The man has lost the

ability to love in a normal way because he has physically lost the ability to touch. The woman

also feels trapped. On the one hand, she knows that he is still the man she loves, and she

wants to help him by offering to soothe his pain. On the other hand she fears to make physical

contact with him because he will not feel the same way he did before.

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10. Soldiers as Witnesses

There are many cases in which soldiers can also be regarded as witnesses to pain and

suffering. This can be the case when they witness the death or injuring of their fellow

comrades. The question that then arises is whether or not they, as witnesses, then use the same

representational strategies as nurses. Do they also display detachment? Do those soldiers-

poets also try to convey a sense of helplessness to their readers and is there the same emphasis

on touch that we can find in the memoirs written by nurses?

In the corpus I selected for this dissertation, there was one clear example of a poem in

which the poet explicitly assumes the role of a witness of physical trauma. In the opening

lines of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, the narrator is part of a group of soldiers

who are “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” (line 1) and are trying to get through the

mud. The narrator is very clearly somebody who is in the middle of the action and who is

experiencing the war. When the troop is all of a sudden attacked and gassed, the focalisation

changes. The narrator is no longer experiencing the scene, but instead assumes the role of a

witness observing the death of his comrade: “as under a green sea, I saw him drowning/ In all

my dreams, before my helpless sight” (lines 14-15). The narrator vividly explains the trauma

of having to witness the painful death of his friends and how there is nothing at all that he can

do to help him. Owen is very clearly trying to convey a sense of helplessness which adds to

the drama of the scene and which makes the physical pain of the subject all the more

gruesome.

Despite the fact that “Dulce et Decorum Est” uses helplessness to convey physical

pain, it does not contain any of the other mechanisms that were so typical in nurse memoirs.

There is no special emphasis on touch in this poem nor do we perceive any form of

detachment. It is striking how little of Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen’s poetry contains

mechanisms that nurses used. I suggest that an explanation for this can be found in the fact

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that nurses and soldiers had very different objectives. Soldiers were not expected to provide

extensive care to the wounded. It was their job to fight the enemy. Casualties are always to be

expected in battle, but the soldiers’ job is to keep advancing. Restoring the wounded body was

the main priority and concern of nurses which is why the body and touch get a more central

role in their memoirs. To perform their duties to the best of their abilities, nurses needed to

emotionally detach themselves from their patients. It is very plausible that soldiers would find

it much more difficult to create an emotional barrier between themselves and their injured or

killed comrades with whom they spent so much time and hardship. They must have, however,

felt helplessness towards each other’s suffering. It therefore makes sense that this is the only

mechanism present in the poetry of soldier-poets.

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11. Conclusion

The basis of this Master’s dissertation was Elaine Scarry’s theory on the inexpressibility of

pain due to the fact that physical trauma actively destroys language. Scarry argues that one of

the key problems of expressing pain is that it is a completely individual emotion that, unlike

our other states of consciousness, lacks external referents (4). It is therefore extremely

difficult to understand the pain that an individual has suffered without physically experiencing

it first. According to Scarry, this causes language to be destroyed (4). One of the main tasks of

authors who wish to convey physical trauma is creating a referent that people can relate to so

that pain can be better understood. Nayef A. Al-Joulan discerned several mechanisms that

soldier-poets use to achieve this aim such as the associative and visualisation mechanism. He

explains that using a visualising discourse is a “requirement in the communication of pain,

since, as Scarry also asserted, pain can only be effectively described when the human voice

only becomes visible” (Al-Joulan, 115).

Whereas Al-Joulan focussed his theory entirely upon the poetry written by soldier-

poets who experienced physical trauma, I argued that nurses such as Mary Borden and Vera

Brittain, who witnessed the carnage of the First World War, and who were expected to restore

the shattered bodies, encountered the same limitations to express physical pain that soldier-

poets such as Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas did. Nurses used the same visualisation

mechanisms by providing very graphic and explicit descriptions of the wounded body and

they also made use of the same associative mechanisms by making associations to nature,

sound and religion. I also proved that nurses are a valuable elaboration of Al-Joulan’s theory

due to the fact that they also have their own unique way of conveying physical pain which is

motivated by their role as witnesses. Nurses’ memoirs focus much more on the shattered body

and describe the horrors of having to touch a body that is so mutilated by war as is described

in Santanu Das’ Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. By doing this, they give a

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new dimension to the visualisation and association mechanism because they describe the

terrible rotten smells and horrific appearance of the wounds. They also go further and explain

how their own body reacts to witnessing this carnage: : “the first dressing at which I assisted-

a gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid bare- turned me sick

and faint for a moment” (Borden, 211). The witnessing of physical pain thus becomes a

traumatic experience itself.

Secondly, nurses also wanted to inform their readers on the helplessness they so often

felt towards wounded soldiers and how this traumatises them. Nursing was “a constant

emptying out of oneself before great need and greater pain, and yet somehow always falling

short” (Das, 192). This feeling of not being able to help another human being in distress was

so traumatic for nurses that they tried to emotionally detach themselves from the horrors

around them. This detachment is also present in the literature they produced and it is a

defence mechanism which Vera Brittain coined as “self-protective callousness” (176) so that

they could mentally cope with the horrors of treating mutilated bodies. We expect nurses to be

caring and concerned but not distant and cold. Detachment is thus unsettling and traumatising

for readers because it gives us the impression that the suffering and death of young soldiers is

received with indifference by those who witness it. By detaching themselves from the

suffering of their patients we, as readers, are paradoxically drawn to it. The readers take over

the role of caretaker from nurses and show the wounded soldier compassion and pity,

something which the memoir lacks. Detachment is thus, in my opinion, an extremely

powerful tool in conveying the severity of physical trauma.

One of the questions this thesis attempts to answer is whether or not the nurses’ role of

witnesses to the pain and suffering of soldiers and the horrors of war causes them to approach

conveying trauma in a different manner than soldier-poets who, in many cases, experienced it.

We can definitely conclude that nurses were very aware of their role as witnesses of the

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carnage of the First World War. For some nurses, like Vera Brittain, this results in an inner

conflict in which they feel uncomfortable discussing the horrors they are witnessing because

they feel that the trauma that this causes them cannot possible be compared to the suffering of

those actually fighting in the trenches. Brittain wrote: “I shall hate it [nursing], but I will be all

the more ready to do it on that account. He [Leighton] has to face far worse things than any

sight or act I could come across; he can bear it and so can I” (qtd in Das 185). Mary Borden

also acknowledges her role as witnesses of pain and understands that this will result in readers

judging their suffering as second-rate to that of soldiers. This is why Borden opted to refer to

field hospitals as “the other battlefield [...] where morphine and anaesthesia were forever in

short supply, the ‘real’ enemy was not death but pain” (Das, 204). By making this association,

she is actually removing nurses from their role as witnesses of the war and instead makes

them into participants who experience their own battle with pain. In this description, nurses

are themselves wounded and injured when they cannot ease a soldier from his suffering.

There are also situations in which nurses accept their role as witnesses of pain and use

it to their advantage when conveying physical trauma. In my literary analysis of The

Forbidden Zone and Testament of Youth I provided examples that prove that nurses often

detached themselves from the horrors of the First World War. When you are a witness to

something, it generally means that you are already detached from a particular event. Nurses

go even further and attempt to completely emotionally detach themselves from the pain

around them and thus further emphasise their role as witnesses. They also enhance this role

when they convey the sense of helplessness towards the wounded soldiers. The fact that they

are helpless as witnesses makes their descriptions of the pain and suffering of soldiers all the

more tragic.

Whereas soldiers, due to their service on the frontline, often experienced physical

trauma, they were also witnesses of the pain of their fellow soldiers. I wanted to research if

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this role as witness resulted in the use of the same unique mechanisms that nurses used. It was

striking to find out how seldom the soldier-poets I selected for this research tried to convey

physical trauma from this point of view. The only similarity that could be found was that both

nurses and soldier-poets stress the feeling of helplessness towards the individual in pain which

results in an emphasis on the tragedy of the physical trauma. An explanation for this can be

found in the fact that soldiers and nurses had different objectives during the war. Whereas

nurses were called upon to restore the shattered body, soldiers only had one objective which

was to fight the enemy. This is why nurses put more emphasis on the body and on touch and

on the necessity of emotionally detaching themselves from their patients.

Elaine Scarry rightly points out the difficulty of expressing physical trauma. Pain does

actively destroy language and it is an enormous challenge for writers to find ways to

overcome this obstacle. It is my opinion that authors such as Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas,

Mary Borden and Vera Brittain succeeded in this attempt and subsequently provided a voice

to the millions of men and women who were brutally silenced during the Great War.

75

12. Works Cited

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Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth”.” Twentieth Century Literature 49.4 (2003).

421-448. Print.

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582. Print.

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Borden, Mary. The Forbidden Zone. London. Hesperus Press Limited. 2008. Print.

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth: an Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925.

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Edmonds, James E. and G.C. Wynne. Military Operations France and Belgium, 1915: Winter

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“Edward Thomas 1878-1917”. The Poetry Foundation. 2013. Web. 2 April 2016.

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Gates, Andrew. “Wilfred Owen and Christianity”. The Modernism Lab. Web. 6 April 2016.

<www.modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index./Wilfred_Owen_and_Christianity>

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Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. London: Oxford University Press,

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77

Smith, Angela K. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War.

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