You will be very brave won’t you Angel, it will be very hard to sit at home and do nothing, and I am afraid you will have money troubles too but it must all come right if we are steadfast and I will always love you more than anything on earth.
Two days later Archie’s squadron learnt that it was to move to Southampton to embark for France. He immediately wired to Ashfield for Agatha to come to Salisbury, if she could, to say goodbye. She and Clara set off straightaway; the banks were closed and all the money they had was in five-pound notes, which Clara, well-trained by Auntie-Grannie, always kept for emergencies. But no one would take a five-pound note and they were obliged to leave their names and addresses with ticket collectors all over Southern England (a trail vividly described in Unfinished Portrait). After endless complications and delays, they arrived in Salisbury on the evening of August 3rd, where Agatha and Archie had only a little time together before his departure. The next day she and Clara returned to Torquay.
On August 5th Archie left for Southampton and on the 12th crossed the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force. On landing he sent a postcard to Agatha; muddling her chronology again in the rush and turmoil of those first weeks, she maintained that it arrived three days after their parting. In fact she did not receive it until mid-September. Agatha later learnt how quickly Archie had been pitched into action. His logbook traces his progress across Northern France, until on September 12th his squadron, No. 3, moved with three others to Fève-en-Tardenous, where there was a heavy storm (which Archie and two of his friends missed, having fallen asleep on the floor of an inn). The German invaders, defeated by French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne and obliged to retreat some distance, now dug themselves into Belgium and much of the coal and iron-bearing part of France. The allied armies, retaining their direct communications with the Channel ports, poured men and weapons into that flat, muddy, occupied territory, seeking, yard by yard, to oust the Germans. This bloody trench warfare began in mid-September 1914 and was to last for four years.
Archie’s dash and bravery were soon proved; on October 19th he was mentioned in the first despatch from Field Marshal Sir John French to Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, describing the battles of Mons, the Marne and, particularly, the Aisne, and emphasising the great strain to which the RFC was subjected. In mid-November Archie was gazetted Flight Commander and Temporary Captain. More important, he was still alive and neither wounded nor shell-shocked. For the lists of dead and missing that were to mark the passage of those years were beginning to appear in English newspapers, and a dreadful procession of the physically and psychologically maimed started to make its way home. Agatha saw these men; she was now working with the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in Torquay, to which came many of the boats carrying the wounded. She had been going to classes in bandaging and first aid for some time before the war started and now she began at the hospital as a ward-maid, cleaning and scrubbing, and, like the other novices, being more of a hindrance than a help to the trained nursing staff. She learnt to grit her teeth and inflict painful treatment, assist in the operating theatre, cheer up wounded men and humour the doctors. It was hard, messy, evil-smelling, tiring work, which she later described in the novel Giant’s Bread. Nightmarish though this transformation was, Agatha was at least busy, with distractions sufficiently exhausting to prevent her from being overwhelmed with anxiety for Archie. She was, moreover, a good practical nurse, and the companionship of the wards and her patients’ dependence supported her. With her noticing ear and fascination with hierarchy and routine, she had a good deal of entertainment from hospital life: the deference shown by ward-maids to nurses, nurses to Sisters, and by everyone to doctors, the variations in forms of address and in manners (amicable badinage among the VADs, who called each other by their surnames, genteel whisperings by Sister This and Sister That) – all interested and amused her as much as the conventions observed in the household at Ashfield and in the carefully graded society of Torquay.
This was Agatha’s first responsible job and she enjoyed being able to do it well. Like Archie, she was wiser and wearier when they were reunited at the end of the year, on his first period of leave. They met in London, as Agatha put it, ‘almost like strangers’, for both of them had not only been living through an entirely new kind of experience, of death, uncertainty and fear, but had been doing so alone. Archie’s reaction was to behave as casually, almost flippantly, as possible, while Agatha had become more serious. The insecurity of the times had made her all the more anxious that they should be married and Archie all the more convinced they should not: ‘You stop one, you’ve had it, and you’ve left behind a young widow, perhaps a child coming – it’s completely selfish and wrong.’ Archie’s leave began on December 21st. The plan was that Clara should stay with them in London and, when she left for Devonshire, they should go to Clifton to stay with Archie’s mother and stepfather. Agatha was uncomfortable with Mrs Hemsley, who was kind but gushing and possessive, and it may have been her nervousness at the prospect of spending Christmas with her, coupled with reaction to the tension of the past five months, that caused her to quarrel violently with Archie. The immediate cause was his Christmas present, a luxurious fitted dressing-case: ‘If he had bought me a ring, or a bracelet, however expensive, I should not have demurred … but for some reason I revolted violently against the dressing-case.’ It is not difficult to see why. The gift represented frivolity – indeed, that was why Archie had bought it, in his determination to recapture some of the light-heartedness the War had swept away. Agatha, grave and responsible, was particularly touchy about any implication that she was not dedicated, serious, professional, that she did not have battles to fight as well: ‘What was the good of my going back home to hospital with an exciting dressing-case …?’ The present also disturbed her in another way. ‘A ring or bracelet’ would perhaps have represented something permanent and binding; a dressing-case, however beautiful and well-appointed, suggested transitoriness, impermanence. That was what Archie was feeling; it was what Agatha wished to dispel. But these subtleties do not dawn on people when they give and receive presents. Archie had been clumsy, Agatha was tactless, and a tremendous row ensued, of such magnitude that it reunited them far more effectively than anything else could have done.
Clara departed and they left on the difficult and tiring journey to Clifton, where Agatha went almost immediately to bed, only to be roused by Archie, urgently arguing that they should marry before his leave was up. This time it was Agatha who foresaw the difficulties; separated from her mother, ill at ease in her prospective mother-in-law’s home, she was doubtless terrified by Archie’s intensity and impassioned determination. He talked wildly of special licences and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Agatha gave in and agreed that they should be married next morning, Christmas Eve.
Mrs Hemsley was, as Agatha predicted, greatly upset but Mr Hemsley, always sympathetic, urged them on. Archie and Agatha scrambled about for a licence to marry: a fortnight’s notice was required for an ordinary £8 licence and a special £25 licence was unobtainable for December 24th. Then a kindly registrar, stretching a point, issued one on the strength of Archie’s being a local resident. The vicar agreed to perform the ceremony that afternoon; the organist, who happened to be practising in the church, to play the wedding march; and Mr Hemsley and a passer-by, who turned out to be a friend of Agatha’s, to act as witnesses. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve Agatha and Archie were married. With some difficulty, they managed to book a room at the Grand Hotel, Torquay, in order to be on their own together. The dressing-case, which Archie had hidden, was brought out again for the wedding journey, its devil exorcised. At midnight, after an even more horrendous train journey, they arrived at the Grand Hotel. They spent Christmas Day with Clara and Madge, now recovered from the initial shock they had felt when, on a bad line from Clifton, Agatha had telephoned to announce her news. On Boxing Day Agatha travelled to London with Archie to see him off; she was not to see him again for six months. She comforted herself, and sought to amuse Archie, by making him a New Year present, ‘The AA Alphabet for 1915’. (AA stood for Archie and Agatha and also for Ack Ack, as the anti-aircraft guns were called.) It is full of private jokes and wistful references:
A is for Angel, by nature (?) and name
And also for Archibald, spouse of the same
K for the Kaiser, of Kultur the King!
(Indirectly the cause of a new wedding ring!)
The