The Love-Charm of Bombs (10 page)

Two weeks later, Macaulay published her account of her night in Camden Town in
Time and Tide
. Here, she did not minimise the misery she had witnessed. The government had instructed newspapers to maintain as optimistic as possible a stance towards the bombing, preventing them from including pictures of corpses or severely wounded bodies. But Macaulay refused to sanitise war. Her report contains moments of cheerfulness – she recounts the rescue worker’s embarrassment that he has sworn at the Germans in front of a lady – but these serve to emphasise the bleakness of the overall situation. She ends the article by juxtaposing the rescue worker complaining that ‘It’s like this every night now’ with the ‘bland voice’ on the radio the next day. ‘There were a few casualties,’ the radio states dismissively, ‘but little material damage appears to have been done.’

This, Macaulay declares, is ‘a sample corner of total war’. Here, there are civilian bodies entombed under dust and rubble; elsewhere, ‘men are being burnt alive, blinded, shot, drowned, smashed to bits when their planes crash’. Having evoked the full horror of the dead children and their trapped, bruised mother, she insists that ‘civilian war deaths are no worse than those of the young men in the fighting forces’: ‘it is no worse that women should be killed than men’. Macaulay rejects the apologetic cant of propagandists. She lauds the rescue workers for their bravery, but does not allow this bravery to exonerate the brutality of war. The dead pilots and the dead civilians are ‘all part of the blind, maniac, primitive, stupid bestiality of war, into which human beings periodically leap, spitting in civilisation’s face and putting her to confused rout’.

Both Macaulay and
Time and Tide
risked government disapproval by publishing this piece. Macaulay informed Virginia Woolf that
Time and Tide
had doubts about whether they should print it at all, because the censors had requested the press ‘not to be too vivid about these affairs’. They did in fact cut one sentence. Macaulay initially included the rescue worker’s despairing ‘How long will people stick it?’, but her editors decided that the censor might ‘boggle’ at it. ‘Accounts of raids,’ she told Woolf, ‘have to be cheery – communal meals and singing, and people shouting “We can take it”.’

Macaulay’s refusal to shout ‘We can take it’ herself perhaps belied the fact that she was all the time taking an awful lot, and taking it with remarkable courage. Aged fifty-nine, she was engaged in arduous manual labour. While angry and sceptical about the war itself, Macaulay always undertook her ambulance duties enthusiastically. Training in August 1939, she wrote to thank her friend Daniel George for his contribution of a ‘mortified elephant’ to a literary animal book they were collaborating on, observing that ‘he must have felt just as I did this afternoon when I couldn’t put a stretcher together after taking it apart. Only I didn’t cry and weep.’ By June the following year she could announce proudly to Jean: ‘I am improving my bandaging to-day; also stretcher bearing.’ Now, driving a heavy van, lifting up wounded patients and risking her own life, she resembled the ideal civilian invoked by government propaganda.

By working as an ambulance driver, Macaulay had discovered a way to be involved in the war effort, valiantly and stoically, while also rejecting war. She found refuge from sadness and pain in the camaraderie of her fellow workers and in her own bravery, but this did not make her shock at what was going on around her any less intense. Macaulay was torn between involvement and detached disbelief, and this division was manifested by the split between her dual roles as ambulance driver and writer. By working in her ambulance and doing her best to mitigate the suffering caused by fighting, she was taking part in the war. By writing articles, she made it clear that she had not accepted the war itself, even if she accepted her role within it.

The chief appeal of ambulance driving was that it was a manual rather than a cerebral task, which enabled her to commit herself physically but not intellectually to the war effort. Shortly after the declaration of war she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann that she was dreading the onslaught of bombing – ‘it will be hateful seeing people hurt and killed and terrified’ – but that she would rather be in an ambulance than offer her services to the Ministry of Information, as writers were being asked to do.

In my job, my mind is free in a sense, and all I have to think of is avoiding collisions and finding the cases and bringing them in; in a Ministry, one’s mind would be sucked in too.

She had experience of working in a Ministry in the First World War, when her stints as a nurse and a landgirl were followed by a period working for the Department for Propaganda in Enemy Countries. It was in the Ministry, indeed, where she first met Gerald O’Donovan, who was then her boss. For Macaulay, to work for the Ministry of Information as Graham Greene was doing would be to condone implicitly not just the war effort but the war itself. And just because war seemed like the only option did not mean that war itself became acceptable.

Macaulay’s divided attitude and role were partly the result of her experiences in the First World War. Then, young and idealistic, she accepted war’s sacrifices. In a poem called ‘The Garden’, she insisted that the soldiers who ‘fell dumb in the spring-time of age’ had not ‘lost all’:

Nay, see how they have won

For their drifting dust a goodly heritage –

A garden, full of flowers and the sun.

This was the dust that Macaulay’s childhood friend Rupert Brooke had welcomed in ‘The Soldier’, anticipating that England’s ‘rich earth’ would conceal the ‘richer dust’ of his own, ennobled corpse. In April 1915, Brooke was bitten on the lip by a mosquito while sailing on a Royal Navy ship to the Dardanelles. He died of blood poisoning a few hours later and was buried on the island of Skyros. In the end, his dust did not blend patriotically with the earth of his homeland; his death failed to ennoble.

Rupert had been a key figure in Rose’s adolescence. The two had spent their early years a few doors away from each other in Rugby, before the Macaulays moved to Italy in 1887. After her return to England in 1894, Rose reconnected with Rupert, and they became neighbours again in Grantchester in their twenties. In a later memoir Rose looked back on idyllic days spent paddling together in the Grantchester meadows. By 1911, Rupert was living partly in London and Rose, now a published poet and novelist, was a frequent visitor. After the two young writers came joint first in a poetry competition, they took on literary London side by side. Rose later recollected her envy of Rupert, ‘who walked about the streets without a map, often with a plaid rug over his shoulders’. She could not remember whether it was she or Rupert who first met Naomi Royde-Smith, a sophisticated literary hostess who would introduce her to people who seemed to her, ‘an innocent from the Cam’, to be more ‘sparklingly alive’ than any in her home world. War temporarily cut Rose off from the stimulating world of literary London she was just starting to enjoy, and severed her irretrievably from Rupert. Six months after his death, she recorded her unhappiness about ‘the death at the war of several intimate friends of mine – Rupert Brooke was one – the sort of people who just can’t be spared’.

For Macaulay, as for many of her generation, Rupert Brooke’s death had revealed the futility of a conflict that quickly looked set to have no end. Her disillusionment, combined with her physical revulsion from the carnage she had witnessed as a nurse, was a driving force behind her commitment to the pacifist movement in the 1930s. In
Non-combatants and Others
Alix finds in pacifism an outlet for her own visceral pain at the indignities of war. ‘As I can’t be fighting in the war,’ she announces, ‘I’ve got to be fighting against it. Otherwise it’s like a ghastly nightmare, swallowing one up.’ Alix looks to pacifism as a source of personal strength, which will save her from her own weakness.

Like Alix’s, Macaulay’s politics were personal. The campaigning publisher Victor Gollancz described her politics as ‘on the side of the angels (my angels) but hardly profound’. ‘I hate party politics,’ Macaulay announced in 1942, wondering whether to accept an invitation to join the Council of the Liberal Party. In Macaulay’s 1921 novel
Dangerous Ages
,
Nan, an unmarried writer who is the most autobiographical figure in the book, does not bother to use her vote because she finds all the parties and all the candidates equally absurd. She is unable to believe that there is a right and a wrong in politics, seeing only ‘a lot of wrongs’.

Nonetheless, Macaulay herself did pledge support to pacifism; when it came to matters of war and peace, there was a wrong and a right worth campaigning for. She was an active supporter of the League of Nations in the 1920s and a sponsor for the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s. Her arguments in favour of peace tended to be more passionate than practical. In 1937 she wrote a lengthy pamphlet,
Open Letter to a Non-pacifist
,
which argues eloquently against war, but presents pacifism as at best a risky gamble, albeit one on the side of the gods (or angels). War itself is seen as a barbaric act that mocks so-called civilisation. Macaulay is virulently dismissive of arguments that savagery should be attacked with its own weapons.

Our civilisation, our barbarism is built on that age-old, bloody, trampled ground; we have measured knives against knives, cannon against cannon, bombs against bombs, poison against poison, torture against torture.

The resulting world was a disordered mess. And if civilisation went under in hatred and lies, blown to bits by the bombers, it was going to be pretty difficult to put the pieces together again.

All will be hate, fury, tyranny, dictatorship, brutality, fear – the bestial and stupid aftermath of war.

Macaulay advocates a brand of pacifism based on passive resistance to mass aggression. The individual, mugged in the street, can fight back; the country, attacked by barbarous forces, cannot. She admits that the gamble of pacifism may fail, owing ‘to lack of courage and endurance on one side, or excess of barbarism or ingenuity on the other’, but insists, idealistically, that even then, the experiment would have been worth trying. Optimistically, she suggests that even if the tyrants successfully invade and capture a country – even if the Nazis occupy Britain – it is possible that life might be made so uncomfortable and difficult that the tyrant will get ‘pretty tired’ of jailing and shooting the population and decide to give it up. ‘Or, again,’ she adds, more realistically, ‘he might not.’ But even then, the pacifist must not descend to the barbarian’s level.

Macaulay’s experiences in the First World War taught her that she must not fall into the trap of accepting propagandist rhetoric again. But at the same time, they taught her that if there was going to be a war, it was better to be involved than to look on from the outside. Then, she railed against her own helplessness before she joined up as a nurse. ‘Oh it’s you that have the luck,’ she lamented in a poem addressed by ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’, ‘out there in blood and muck’; ‘In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting.’ Her work as a nurse and then a landgirl enabled her to play a direct part in working towards the outcome of the conflict. In
Non-Combatants and Others
Alix is appalled by the war, but finds that it is impossible to escape. Waking up in the night, her forehead hot and her feet cold, she stares into a darkness illuminated by a vision of the ‘things happening across the seas: dreadful things, ugly, jarring, horrifying things’. War presses round her; ‘Every one talked it, breathed it, lived in it.’ ‘I believe,’ she says to her brother, ‘it’s jealousy that’s demoralising me most. Jealousy of the people who can be in the beastly thing . . . Oh, I do so want to go and fight . . . I can’t bear the sight of khaki; and I don’t know whether it’s most because the war’s so beastly or because I want to be in it.’

Now, in the autumn of 1940, a tin hat on her head and dust caked on her hands, Macaulay was in the war. For as long as she was in charge of her ambulance, questions of war and peace were irrelevant. Instead she was assailed by more urgent questions of life and death; of trapped limbs, thirsty mothers and crying babies.

Despite being exposed to the butchery of war on a daily basis, Macaulay had abandoned her commitment to pacifism. In the early months of the war, Macaulay was finishing
And No Man’s Wit
, a novel set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, in a world increasingly gripped by fascism. The title of this novel comes from John Donne’s ‘An Anatomie of the World’, which is quoted at greater length in the epigraph:

The Sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse that this world’s spent . . .

‘Tis all in peeces, all cohærance gone;

All just supply, and all Relation . . .

In her 1937 pamphlet, Macaulay still believed that wit might offer a means to redeem the sun and the earth. Two years later, she was less sure. At the end of the novel Kate Marlow, a feisty but exhausted English doctor, is asked by a Spanish fascist whether she is a pacifist. ‘Oh, what does one mean by pacifist?’ she asks, in return. ‘I think war is horrible and cruel and grotesque, of course, and belongs to the dark age as much as the rack and the thumbscrew do.’ She is not certain, though, that nothing is worse; indeed it is worse, she suggests, ‘to let more and more people be tortured and enslaved without protest’. But ‘
is
war the only way to stop it, and have we tried all the others?’ In the end, she admits despondently that she does not know what she thinks; ‘one’s altogether confused’.