War and the Muses - "Trains," by Helen Mackay

Helen Mackay (1891-1965), was an unusual woman for her times.  A pioneering pediatrician, she was the first woman to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, for distinguished work as both a clinician and researcher, having made important contributions to the identification and treatment of anemia in children during the 1920s.  But before that, as a medical student and young physician, she had already established herself as an author and poet of some ability, with several volumes of essays and verse to her credit by the end of World War I, as can be seen from two pieces she wrote about trains and the war.

While in London on November 1, 1915, Mackay, then on the staff of a local hospital, witnessed an almost iconic scene characteristic of war in the twentieth century, troops preparing to leave for the front bidding farewell to their families at a railroad station, an image repeated tens of thousands of times during the world wars and recreated in numerous war films.

"Train"

The father reaches down from the window

And grips the boy's hand

And does not speak at all.

Will the train never start?

He takes the boy's chin in his hand

Leaning out through the window

And lifts the face that is so young, to him

They look and look,

And know they may never look again.

Will the train never start?

God, make the train start!

Nearly two years later, on July 20, 1917, Mackay, was at a railroad station near Paris.  Two trains had been side-tracked in favor of higher priority ammo and troop trains headed for the Front.  One of the trains was carrying men on leave -- permissionnaires -- to Paris, while the other was bringing casualties back from the Front.   

"Trains"

Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of grass-hoppers and crickets and birds.

One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages.  They are all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris.  The officers in several of the carriages have managed to get some water, and are scrubbing luxuriously, with tin-cups and soup-plates for basins.  Soapy faces appear at the windows.  The men have opened the carriage doors all along the train and got out to tumble about in the grass at the edge of the train.  They pick buttercups that grow close to the rails, and some of them have wandered off into the tall wheat to gather poppies.

The second train on the siding is full of wounded, who must wait, like the permissionnaires, to let pass the munition and troop trains going out. The wounded are quite comfortably arranged on their tiers of stretchers; the doctors and orderlies have all the needed things, and move about competently, up and down the train. It is strange how quiet the train of wounded is.  It is only here and there along it that one hears moaning or a cry.

A munition train crawls by, all grey.  It is nothing that the permissionnaires or wounded need notice.

Then, after a time, that seems very long, comes a troop-train going out. The men in the troop train hang out of the windows and look silently upon all the things they are passing in the fields, that seem so full of peace and so kind.

They wave to the permissionnaires, who are silent for a moment, watching them as they go.  And then they pass the train of wounded, some of whom look up at them.