WHAT LIES BENEATH

Niall MacMonagle

Camiers Siding: a VAD convoy unloading an ambulance train at night after the Battle of the Somme

by Olive Mudie-Cooke

Watercolour and charcoal. Courtesy the Imperial War Museum

ARMISTICE Day, November 11, 1918, literally the stoppage [Latin, stitium] of arms, marked the end of the Great War, 100 years ago today — “a very cloudy still day”, in London, according to Virginia Woolf who wrote in her diary, on that momentous day.

“Twenty-five minutes ago the guns went off, announcing peace. A siren hooted on the river. They are hooting still... The rooks wheeled round, and wore for a moment the symbolic look of creatures performing some ceremony, partly of thanksgiving, partly of valediction over the grave.”

Artist Olive Mudie-Cooke was 28 when the bells tolled on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

Born in 1890, having studied at St John’s Wood Art College and Goldsmith’s, in January 1916, aged 26, she volunteered as an ambulance driver, experienced the war firsthand and painted what she saw.

Her most famous work, that of a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) member lighting a cigarette for a wounded soldier, captures a brief, relaxed moment — but this painting records the challenges of the battlefield.

A Voluntary Aid Detachment convoy of four female figures carries a stretchered figure, according to the title, towards an ambulance.

The Imperial War Museum however interprets the scene, plausibly, the other way round: the wounded are being transferred from an ambulance to a train’s open carriage bearing a red cross.

On the left, another ambulance. Inside the lit carriage, a wounded figure lies.

Mudie-Cooke’s use of charcoal and watercolour darken an already dark, shadowy, murky scene. The 140 days of 1916 between July 1 and November 18 marked the Battle of the Somme. That first day 57,470 British soldiers died. Some 30,000 were killed or wounded in the first 30 minutes alone.

After the war Olive Mudie-Cooke travelled throughout Europe and Africa, most notably to South Africa — but the war must have taken its toll. In 1925 she took her own life in France. She was 35.

Armistice Day was greeted with cheering crowds. A Siegfried Sassoon poem speaks of how “everyone suddenly burst out singing” — but 20 years later the world was once more at war.

Verdun, The Somme, Ypres, Amiens... the Great War still casts a tragic and very long shadow — and yet Western and Central Europe is the least violent region in the world today.