Stanley Spencer recreates his experience
as hospital orderly in the Great War
We came to Burghclere on holiday,
curious to visit the painted memorial chapel
dedicated to a dead soldier. Instead, we found the walls
remembering many other men in hospital uniform.
They crowded round us, absorbing us into a life
unspared by the artist, certainly unsparing of us.
We were shocked into reality. Spenser had not hidden
his own feelings or protected ours, as we found ourselves
drawn into the conflict. First came the hospital bus,
pausing behind formidable gates, which two orderlies
were wrenching apart. Before the bus drives through,
the sick, the wounded, the crazed and the dying
anxiously look ahead to see what’s coming to them.
Installed in make-shift wards, they had expected
an area of peace away from the front line.
But no! their memories fight back, roar through their silence.
Static beds shudder, fears lurk behind the blankets;
they are still up the line. The whistling of orderlies
turns into bullets screaming over their heads.
A shell-shocked patient, ordered to scrub the floor,
flings himself down to escape shells crashing beside him.
And when it comes to tea,
one patient hides his face
in a blanket. There’s poison gas in the bread,
and the jam is raw blood.
And then come other memories:
of distorted deaths, the unspeakable wounds,
soaking the earth with human flesh, of mules
gutted, in agony like the men.
Where’s God? was a cry from terrified hearts
of man and beast. They were not to know
they’d be answered later,
when they’d be lying snug in the earth,
crowned with a white wood cross,
and God would bring them out, each with his cross to carry,
to greet friends, comrades and mules
in a Heaven where Christ himself has left his cross behind and is sharing with them
the new life of his own resurrection.
There were people in the chapel the day we went:
tourists, the curious, the irreligious,
who might have chatted to each other,
standing and gazing at the painted walls.
But we, and all of them, stood cold and silent,
held still by feelings of pity, despair and hope
no words could ever express.
Sandham Memorial Chapel
Sylvia Read