Borden / Hutchison The Forbidden Zone

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-84391-996-4
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 138 Seiten

Mary Borden worked for four years in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theater of the First World War. This beautifully written book, to be read alongside the likes of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, is a collection of her memories and impressions of that experience. Describing the men as they march into battle, engaging imaginatively with the stories of individual soldiers, and recounting procedures at the field hospital, the author offers a perspective on the war that is both powerful and intimate.

Born in Chicago, Mary Borden (1886-1968) set up a hospital unit on the Western Front during the First World War, for which she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Government. She went on to have a distinguished career as a writer, publishing a number of novels and her memoir of her war experiences, The Forbidden Zone (1929).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Borden, Mary

Hutchison, Hazel

Leseproben

FOREWORD

It is a rare but rewarding experience to open an unfamiliar book on a familiar subject and recognise at once a writer of genuine originality. For many years I have prowled the labyrinthine literature of the First World War, visiting and revisiting the established greats - Remarque, Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Owen, plus numerous other ‘names’ of proven quality - but also searching for new voices, the almost forgotten, the hitherto unheard. I have made a particular point of giving space in my various publications to the rank and file, the ‘ordinary’ partici- pants of both sexes, whose eagerness to tell it how it was in the white heat of war might otherwise have ended only in silence, their words sadly lost in a cultural no man’s land.

And suddenly I find myself introduced to the brief memoir of an American nurse who spent the best part of four years behind the lines in the Belgian or the French sectors of the Western Front, whose name was unknown to me, and I am thunder- struck. This is the literary equivalent of finding a gold mine while rooting for gold dust. Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, I have the temerity to claim, is a work with a touch of genius. A multum in parvo masterpiece.

Look, for example, at the early section entitled, simply, ‘Bombardment’. The writer evokes a beautiful new dawn; a tiny speck appears in the sky, an aeroplane flying so high its engine cannot be heard; it is the only moving element in an otherwise static, peaceful scene. Below is a sleeping seaside town, unaware that that aerial speck is about to signal to a great gun hiding some way off in the Belgian sand dunes an instruction to open fire. As the town is savaged and mutilated, its populace turned into terrified crawling vermin, the aeroplane darts down and laughs, teasing its victims in their desperation. Then the speck in the sky disappears in the morning sunshine and the town is left in convulsions. Published in 1929, Mary Borden’s book is surely, in its minuscule, cut-diamond way, a pre-vision of Guernica, years before that phenomenon, as interpreted by one of the last century’s greatest artists, stunned an alarmed and nervous world.

Or take the section entitled ‘Enfant de Malheur’. Here Mary Borden gives a gripping account of the last days of a French ‘poilu’ (who has those words tattooed on his arm, plus for good measure the life-size head of a woman on his back). The phrase enfant de malheur translates as ‘child of misfortune’, but this seems an inadequate label for this snarling, foul-mouthed ex- criminal from Paris, one of twenty ‘assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs’ (to quote Mary Borden), who had been sentenced to penal servitude for life, only to be conscripted on the outbreak of war into one of France’s Bataillons d’Afrique. Born killers, these convict soldiers go ‘over the top’ into action like wolfhounds, but now, terribly wounded, already missing one leg and with the other under threat, this man is facing death. Deeply Catholic at heart, he is terrified of damnation, and Mary Borden tells in vivid detail the attempt by two of her colleagues, Pim, the daughter of an Archdeacon brought up in an English cathedral city and trained in Edinburgh, and Guerin, a French medical orderly who is also a priest mobilised for the war, to reconcile him to the inevitable. Despite his wounds, the poilu remains an incredibly handsome human being, with the body of a Greek athlete and the face of an angel. By contrast, Guerin is a singularly unprepossessing, unheroic figure, notable for his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince-nez. Yet it is Guerin who brings the enfant de malheur through the long ordeal, Guerin to whom he pours out his ‘dark, secret, haunting memories’, Guerin who can finally claim, as he dies, that ‘he is safe’. It is an agonising struggle with echoes in the literature of Europe; a story out of Russia or Ireland, or more particularly, from the depths of France’s own long battle between the sacred and the profane. Here it is, in Mary Borden’s lucid words, in a few crisp pages.

What is more, it is clear that Mary Borden knows what she is doing. She is not a fine writer by accident, or default. She is not an inspired primitive. She is clearly in full command of the literary zone in which she is working. She comes closer to Britain’s national experience when she finds herself in the region of the Somme, though here again she is not serving behind British lines. She has only one direct contact with British soldiers, a brief episode at the very end of her narrative entitled ‘The Two Gunners’. The story concerns two casualties, both very big men, brought to her field hospital seriously wounded. One dies, the other survives. She comes away from the encounter with two telling pieces of Tommy jargon, both spoken by the soldier who came through: the injunction to his pal to ‘Stick it’ - a much used slogan in the world of the trenches - as he is carried off to the operating room, and his own answer to Mary Borden when she asks how he is next morning. He replies: ‘A1 at Lloyd’s’. With her brilliant ear for language, she has caught the Tommy spirit of the time to a ‘T’. Those two answers sum up perfectly the dogged, we’re-not-here-to-be-defeated, curse-the-Kaiser attitude of the ordinary British soldier slogging on and on through a hard- fought war.

Her flair for words is found at its best, however, in the masterly section entitled ‘In the Operating Room’. A particularly destruct- ive action has produced a mass crop of casualties and more are coming in all the time. There are three seriously wounded men on three operating tables, with other cases constantly clamouring for attention. In a sustained piece of dialogue several pages long she reports, apparently verbatim, the exchanges between the three surgeons and the three patients, with occasional interven- tions ascribed to ‘Nurse’, maybe or maybe not herself. Non-stop, the rhythmic pounding of the guns some ten miles off provides a menacing background. The section reads like a radio drama of enormous power long before that genre was invented, which makes me speculate that this book is not only a wonderful read but could also be a prime candidate for exploitation in other media.

If there is one further comment that I would like to make it is this: I am most grateful that despite being a male historian of the First World War, I was asked to write a Foreword to a work by a female writer. I was brought up under the shadow of that war. Born in 1930, a mere twelve years after the Armistice which drew it to a close, I have been conscious of its looming presence since my childhood. My father served in France, as a member of the medical corps not a combatant; my mother never ceased to mourn a favourite cousin who had joined the especially tragic category of the missing with no known grave; and in the village where I grew up it seemed almost normal that houses I visited should have on their walls photographs of family members who had left to fight for King and Country and had not come back. When I became a television documentary maker at the BBC, with ambitions ultimately to turn myself into a historian, I knew that sooner or later the so-called ‘Great War’ would become a prime subject.

As it happened, the tipping point when it came was the purchase of a book written not by a fighting soldier but by a volunteer female nurse. The year was 1975, the place of pur- chase a huge, rambling second-hand bookshop at Westward Ho! in north Devon. My father, who had become a minister of religion, wished to visit the shop to look at theology books; while he did so I scanned the shelves offering history and bio- graphy. There I found a copy of Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain, a genuine first edition for sale at a price which showed into what a cultural trough the war had fallen at that juncture: 50 pence. (This was a time when it was possible to state that the battlefields of the Western Front were rarely visited, a claim that would be impossible to make today.) I devoured the book, scoured a clutch of others relating to more military aspects, and eagerly proposed to my superiors in BBC Television that I should write and direct a major documentary to commemor- ate the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, which would fall in the summer of 1976. My request was accepted.

This was the beginning of a long process which has governed the pattern of my life ever since. When, ten years later, I left the media, it was to become a historian at the Imperial War Museum. My special mandate was to write a series of books about the First World War, which would use as their principal seed-corn the words and memories of those who were there.

In view of the forgoing it might be possible to claim that the key which in my case opened the door into the sad, yet compulsively fascinating territory of that war was compassion as much as combat. Faithful to that unusual initiation, since mutating into a historian I have in my various writings paid regular tribute to the labours of nurses, and other women who volunteered for service ‘in the field’, finding myself particularly impressed by the stories of those who came from other cultures or countries not directly involved. Thus when I was invited to contribute a Foreword to this new edition of The Forbidden Zone, by the Chicago-born Mary Borden, I leapt at the chance, even though I was being offered, as it were, a blind date with a total stranger....