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Title: Good-bye to all that
An autobiography
Author: Robert Graves
Release date: September 22, 2025 [eBook #76911]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Jonathan Cape, 1929
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT ***
Transcriber’s Notes
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by a
♦ symbol in the text. The change description is shown immediately
below the paragraph or section in which the correction appears.
Details and other notes may be found at the end of this text.
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
POEMS (1914–1927) _William Heinemann_
POEMS (1929) _The Seizin Press_
MY HEAD, MY HEAD _Marlin Seeker_
LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS _Jonathan Cape_
LARS PORSENAZ OR THE FUTURE OF SWEARING _Kegan Paul_
THE SHOUT _Elkin, Mathews and Marrot_
[Illustration: ROBERT GRAVES]
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
An Autobiography
BY
ROBERT GRAVES
[Illustration: publisher logo]
JONATHAN CAPE THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON
FIRST PUBLISHED 1929 SECOND IMPRESSION NOVEMBER 1929
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY J. AND J. GRAY EDINBURGH
MY DEDICATION IS AN EPILOGUE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Robert Graves, 1929 _Frontispiece_
Cuinchy Brick-stacks seen from a British trench on the Givenchy
canal-bank. The white placarded brick-stack is in the British support
line; the ones beyond are held by the Germans. The village of Auchy is
seen in the distance. (_By courtesy of the Imperial War Museum._) _To
face page_ 152
Trench Map showing the Cambrin-Cuinchy-Vermelles Trench Sector in the
summer of 1915. Each square-side measures 500 yards and is ticked off
into 50-yard units. Only the German trench-system is shown in detail;
a broken pencil-line marks the approximate course of the British
front trench. The minecraters appear as stars in No Man’s Land. The
brick-stacks in the German line appear as minute squares; those held by
the British are not marked. The intended line of advance of the 19th
Brigade on September 25th is shown in pencil on this map, which is the
one that I carried on that day 190
Maps. (_Reproduced by the courtesy of the Imperial War Museum._)
Somme Trench Map—The Fricourt Sector, 1916. This map fits against the
map facing page 262 246
Somme Trench Map—Mametz Wood and High Wood, 1916. This map fits
against the map facing page 246 _To face page_ 262
Robert Graves, from a pastel by Eric Kennington 296
Various Records, mostly self-explanatory. The Court of Inquiry
mentioned in the bottom left-hand message was to decide whether the
wound of a man in the Public Schools Battalion—a rifle-shot through
his foot—was self-inflicted or accidental. It was self-inflicted. B.
Echelon meant the part of the battalion not in the trenches. Idol was
the code-name for the Second Battalion the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The
notebook leaf is the end of my 1915 diary only three weeks after I
began it; I used my letters home as a diary after that. The message
about Sergeant Varcoe was from Captain Samson shortly before his death;
I was temporarily attached to his company 322
1929, The Second Battalion the Royal Welch Fusiliers back to pre-war
soldiering. The regimental Royal goat, the regimental goat-major and
the regimental pioneers (wearing white leather aprons and gauntlets—a
special regimental privilege) on church parade at Wiesbaden on the
Rhine. The band follows, regimentally. The goat has a regimental number
and draws rations like a private soldier. ‘Some speak of Alexander, and
some of Hercules....’ _To face page_ 364
WORLD’S END
The tympanum is worn thin.
The iris is become transparent.
The sense has overlasted.
Sense itself is transparent.
Speed has caught up with speed.
Earth rounds out earth.
The mind puts the mind by.
Clear spectacle: where is the eye?
All is lost, no danger
Forces the heroic hand.
No bodies in bodies stand
Oppositely. The complete world
Is likeness in every corner.
The names of contrast fall
Into the widening centre.
A dry sea extends the universal.
No suit and no denial
Disturb the general proof.
Logic has logic, they remain
Quiet in each other’s arms,
Or were otherwise insane,
With all lost and nothing to prove
That even nothing can be through love.
LAURA RIDING
(From _Love as Love, Death as Death_)
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
I
The objects of this autobiography, written at the age of thirty-three,
are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to
you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once
all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it
need never be thought about again; money. Mr. Bentley once wrote:
The science of geography
Is different from biography:
Geography is about maps,
Biography is about chaps.
The rhyme might have been taken further to show how closely,
nevertheless, these things are linked. For while maps are the
biographical treatment of geography, biography is the geographical
treatment of chaps. Chaps who are made the subjects of biography have
by effort, or by accident, put themselves on the contemporary map
as geographical features; but seldom have reality by themselves as
proper chaps. So that _Who’s Who?_ though claiming to be a dictionary
of biography, is hardly less of a geographical gazetteer than _Burke’s
Peerage_.... One of the few simple people I have known who have
had a philosophic contempt for such gazetteering was Old Joe, a
battalion quartermaster in France. He was a proper chap. When he
had won his D.S.O. for being the only quartermaster in the
Seventh Division to get up rations to his battalion in the firing line
at, I think, the Passchendaele show, he was sent a slip to complete
with biographical details for the appropriate directory. He looked
contemptuously at the various headings. Disregarding ‘date and
place of birth,’ and even ‘military campaigns,’ he filled in two items
only:
Issue . . Rum, rifles, etc.
Family seat . My khaki pants.
And yet even proper chaps have their formal geography, however
little it may mean to them. They have birth certificates, passports,
relatives, earliest recollections, and even, sometimes, degrees and
publications and campaigns to itemize, like all the irrelevant people,
the people with only geographical reality. And the less that all these
biographical items mean to them the more particularly and faithfully
can they fill them in, if ever they feel so inclined. When loyalties
have become negligible and friends have all either deserted in alarm
or died, or been dismissed, or happen to be chaps to whom geography is
also without significance, the task is easy for them. They do not have
to wait until they are at least ninety before publishing, and even then
only tell the truth about characters long dead and without influential
descendants.
* * * * *
As a proof of my readiness to accept biographical convention, let
me at once record my two earliest recollections. The first is being
held up to the window to watch a carnival procession for the Diamond
Jubilee in 1897 (this was at Wimbledon, where I had been born on 24th
July 1895). The second, an earlier recollection still, is looking up
with a sort of despondent terror at a cupboard in the nursery, which
stood accidentally open and which was filled to the ceiling with octavo
volumes of Shakespeare. My father was organiser of a Shakespeare
reading circle. I did not know until long afterwards that it
was the Shakespeare cupboard, but I, apparently, had then a strong
instinct against drawing-room activities. It is only recently that I
have overcome my education and gone back to this early intuitional
spontaneousness.
When distinguished visitors came to the house, like Sir Sidney Lee
with his Shakespearean scholarship, and Lord Ashbourne, not yet a
peer, with his loud talk of ‘Ireland for the Irish,’ and his saffron
kilt, and Mr. Eustace Miles with his samples of edible nuts, I knew
all about them in my way. I had summed up correctly and finally my
Uncle Charles of the _Spectator_ and _Punch_, and my Aunt Grace, who
came in a carriage and pair, and whose arrival always caused a flutter
because she was Lady Pontifex, and all the rest of my relations. And
I had no illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used
to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses’ Walk, at the edge
of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me; he was an
inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser. Nurses’ Walk lay between
‘The Pines,’ Putney (where he lived with Watts-Dunton) and the Rose
and Crown public-house, where he went for his daily pint of beer;
Watts-Dunton allowed him twopence for that and no more. I did not know
that Swinburne was a poet, but I knew that he was no good. Swinburne,
by the way, when a very young man, went to Walter Savage Landor, then a
very old man, and asked for and was given a poet’s blessing; and Landor
when a child had been patted on the head by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and
Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen
Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil; and Queen Anne when a child....
But I mentioned the Shakespeare reading circle. It went on for years,
and when I was sixteen curiosity finally sent me to one of the
meetings. I remember the vivacity with which my mother read the part
of Katherine in the _Taming of the Shrew_ to my father’s Petruchio,
and the compliments on their performance which the other members gave
me. Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Hill were two of the most popular members of
the circle. This meeting took place some years before they became Mr.
Justice Hill and Lady Hill, and some years, too, before I looked into
_The Shrew_. I remember the lemonade glasses, the cucumber sandwiches,
the _petits fours_, the drawing-room knick-knacks, the chrysanthemums
in bowls, and the semi-circle of easy chairs around the fire. The
gentle voice of Mr. Maurice Hill as Hortentio was admonishing my
father: ‘Thou go thy ways, thou hast tamed a cursed shrew.’ I myself
as Lucio was ending the performance with: ‘’Tis a wonder by your leave
she will be tamed so.’ I must go one day to hear him speak his lines as
Judge of the Divorce Courts; his admonishments have become famous.
After earliest recollections I should perhaps give a passport
description of myself and let the items enlarge themselves. Date of
birth.... Place of birth.... I have given those. Profession. In my
passport I am down as ‘university professor.’ That was a convenience
for 1926, when I first took it out. I thought of putting ‘writer,’ but
people who are concerned with passports have complicated reactions to
the word. ‘University professor’ wins a simple reaction—dull respect.
No questions asked. So also with ‘army captain (pensioned list).’
My height is given as six feet two inches, my eyes as grey, and my hair
as black. To ‘black’ should be added ‘thick and curly.’ I am described
as having no special peculiarity. This is untrue. For a start, there
is my big, once aquiline, now crooked nose. I broke it at Charterhouse
playing Rugger with Soccer players. (I broke another player’s nose
myself in the same game.) That unsteadied it, and boxing sent it askew.
Finally, it was operated on. It is very crooked. It was once useful
as a vertical line of demarcation between the left and right sides of
my face, which are naturally unassorted—my eyes, eyebrows, and ears
being all set noticeably crooked and my cheek-bones, which are rather
high, being on different levels. My mouth is what is known as ‘full’
and my smile is crooked; when I was thirteen I broke two front teeth
and became sensitive about showing them. My hands and feet are large. I
weigh about twelve-stone four. My best comic turn is a double-jointed
pelvis; I can sit on a table and rap like the Fox sisters with it.
One shoulder is distinctly lower than the other, but that is because
of a lung wound in the war. I do not carry a watch because I always
magnetize the main-spring; during the war, when there was an army order
that officers should carry watches and synchronize them daily, I had to
buy two new ones every month. Medically, I am a thoroughly ‘good life.’
My passport gives my nationality as ‘British subject.’ Here I might
parody Marcus Aurelius, who begins his Golden Book with the various
ancestors and relations to whom he owes the virtues of a worthy
Roman Emperor. Something of the sort about myself, and why I am not
a Roman Emperor or even, except on occasions, an English gentleman.
My mother’s father’s family, the von Ranke’s, was a family of Saxon
country pastors, not anciently noble. Leopold von Ranke, the first
modern historian, my great-uncle, brought the ‘von’ into the family.
To him I owe my historical method. It was he who wrote, to the scandal
of his contemporaries: ‘I am a historian before I am a Christian; my
object is simply to find out how the things actually occurred,’
and of Michelet the French historian: ‘He wrote history in a style
in which the truth could not be told.’ Thomas Carlyle decried him as
‘Dry-as-Dust’; to his credit. To Heinrich von Ranke, my grandfather,
I owe my clumsy largeness, my endurance, energy, seriousness, and my
thick hair. He was rebellious and even atheistic in his youth. As
a medical student at a Prussian university he was involved in the
political disturbances of 1848. He and a number of student friends
demonstrated in favour of Karl Marx at the time of his trial for high
treason. Like Marx, they had to leave the country. He came to London
and finished his medical course there. In 1859 he went to the Crimea
with the British forces as a regimental surgeon. All I know about this
is a chance remark that he made to me as a child: ‘It is not always
the big bodies that are the strongest. When I was at Sevastopol in the
trenches I saw the great British Guards crack up and die by the score,
while the little sappers took no harm.’ Still, his big body carried him
very well.
He married, in London, my grandmother, a Schleswig-Dane. She was
the daughter of Tiarks, the Greenwich astronomer. She was tiny,
saintly, frightened. Before her father took to astronomy the Tiarks
family had, it seems, followed the Danish country system, not at
all a bad one, of alternate professions for father and son. The odd
generations were tinsmiths and the even generations were pastors. My
gentler characteristics trace back to my grandmother. She had ten
children; the eldest of these was my mother, who was born in London.
My grandfather’s atheism and radicalism sobered down. He eventually
returned to Germany, where he became a well-known children’s doctor at
Munich. He was about the first doctor in Europe to insist on clean milk
for his child patients. When he found that he could not get clean
milk to the hospitals by ordinary means he started a model dairy-farm
himself. His agnosticism grieved my grandmother; she never ceased to
pray for him, but concentrated more particularly on saving the next
generation. She was a Lutheran. My grandfather did not die entirely
unregenerate; his last words were: ‘The God of my fathers, to Him at
least I hold.’ I do not know exactly what he meant by that, but it
was a statement consistent with his angry patriarchal moods, with his
acceptance of a prominent place in Bavarian society as Herr Geheimrat
Ritter von Ranke, and with his loyalty to the Kaiser, with whom once
or twice he went deer-shooting. It meant, practically, that he was
a good Liberal in religion as in politics, and that my grandmother
need not have worried. I prefer my German relations to my Irish
relations; they have high principles, are easy, generous, and serious.
The men have fought duels not for cheap personal honour, but in the
public interest—called out, for example, because they have protested
publicly against the scandalous behaviour of some superior officer
or official. One of them who was in the German consular service lost
seniority, just before the war, I was told, because he refused to use
the consulate as a clearing-place for secret-service reports. They are
not heavy drinkers either. My grandfather, as a student at the regular
university ‘drunks,’ was in the habit of pouring his beer down into his
eighteen-fortyish riding-boots. His children were brought up to speak
English in their home, and always looked to England as the home of
culture and progress. The women were noble and patient, and kept their
eyes on the ground when they went out walking.
At the age of eighteen my mother was sent to England as companion to
a lonely old woman who had befriended my grandmother when she was
an orphan. For seventeen years she waited hand and foot on this old
lady, who for the last few years was perfectly senile. When she finally
died, my mother determined to go to India, after a short training as a
medical missionary. This ambition was baulked by her meeting my father,
a widower with five children; it was plain to her that she could do as
good work on the home-mission field.
About the other side of my family. The Graves’ have a pedigree that
dates back to the Conquest, but is good as far as the reign of Henry
VII. Colonel Graves, the regicide, who was Ireton’s chief of horse, is
claimed as the founder of the Irish branch of the family. Limerick was
its centre. There were occasional soldiers and doctors in it, but they
were collaterals; in the direct male line was a sequence of rectors,
deans, and bishops. The Limerick Graves’ have no ‘hands’ or mechanical
sense; instead they have a wide reputation as conversationalists. In
those of my relatives who have the family characteristics most strongly
marked, unnecessary talk is a nervous disorder. Not bad talk as talk
goes; usually informative, often witty, but it goes on and on and
on and on and on. The von Ranke’s have, I think, little mechanical
aptitude either. It is most inconvenient to have been born into the
age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to
have no sympathy with them; a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army
rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity.
My grandfather, on this side, was Protestant Bishop of Limerick. He had
eight, or was it ten, children. He was a little man and a remarkable
mathematician; he first formulated some theory or other of spherical
conics. He was also an antiquary, and discovered the key to ancient
Irish Ogham script. He was hard and, by reputation, far from
generous. A gentleman and a scholar, and respected throughout the
countryside on that account. He and the Catholic Bishop were on the
very best terms. They cracked Latin jokes at each other, discussed fine
points of scholarship, and were unclerical enough not to take their
religious differences too seriously.
When I was in Limerick as a soldier of the garrison some twenty-five
years after my grandfather’s death, I heard a lot about Bishop Graves
from the townsfolk. The Catholic Bishop had once joked him about the
size of his family, and my grandfather had retorted warmly with the
text about the blessedness of the man who has his quiver full of
arrows, to which the Catholic answered briefly and severely: ‘The
ancient Jewish quiver only held six.’ My grandfather’s wake, they said,
was the longest ever seen in the town of Limerick; it stretched from
the cathedral right down O’Connell Street and over Sarsfield Bridge,
and I do not know how many miles Irish beyond. He blessed me when I was
a child, but I do not remember that.
Of my father’s mother, who was a Scotswoman, a Cheyne from Aberdeen, I
have been able to get no information at all beyond the fact that she
was ‘a very beautiful woman.’ I can only conclude that most of what she
said or did passed unnoticed in the rivalry of family conversations.
The Cheyne pedigree was better than the Graves’; it was flawless right
back to the medieval Scottish kings, to the two Balliols, the first
and second Davids, and the Bruce. In later times the Cheynes had been
doctors and physicians. But my father is engaged at the same time as
myself on his autobiography, and no doubt he will write at length about
all this.
My father, then, met my mother some time in the early ’nineties. He
had previously been married to one of the Irish Coopers, of Cooper’s
Hill, near Limerick. The Coopers were an even more Irish family than
the Graves’. The story is that when Cromwell came to Ireland and
ravaged the country, Moira O’Brien, the last surviving member of the
great clan O’Brien, who were the paramount chiefs of the country round
Limerick, came to him one day and said: ‘General, you have killed my
father and my uncles, my husband and my brothers. I am left as the sole
heiress of these lands. Do you intend to confiscate them?’ Cromwell
is said to have been struck by her magnificent presence and to have
answered that that certainly had been his intention. But that she could
keep her lands, or a part of them, on condition that she married one
of his officers. And so the officers of the regiment which had taken a
leading part in hunting down the O’Briens were invited to take a pack
of cards and cut for the privilege of marrying Moira and succeeding to
the estate. The winner was one Ensign Cooper. Moira, a few weeks after
her marriage, found herself pregnant. Convinced that it was a male
heir, as indeed it proved, she kicked her husband to death. It is said
that she kicked him in the pit of the stomach after making him drunk.
The Coopers have always been a haunted family and _Hibernicis ipsis
Hibernicores_. Jane Cooper, whom my father married, died of consumption.
The Graves family was thin-nosed and inclined to petulance, but never
depraved, cruel, or hysterical. A persistent literary tradition; of
Richard, a minor poet and a friend of Shenstone; and John Thomas,
who was a mathematician and jurist and contributed to Sir William
Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions; and Richard, a divine and regius
professor of Greek; and James, an archaeologist; and Robert, who
invented the disease called after him and was a friend of Turner’s;
and Robert, who was a classicist and theologian and a friend of
Wordsworth’s; and Richard, another divine; and Robert, another divine;
and other Robert’s, James’s, Thomas’s and Richard’s, and Clarissa, one
of the toasts of Ireland, who married Leopold von Ranke (at Windermere
Church) and linked the Graves and von Ranke families a couple of
generations before my father and mother married. See the British Museum
catalogue for an eighteenth and nineteenth-century record of Graves’
literary history.
It was through this Clarissa-Leopold relationship that my father met my
mother. My mother told him at once that she liked _Father O’Flynn_, for
writing which my father will be chiefly remembered. He put the words
to a traditional jig tune, _The Top of Cork Road_, which he remembered
from his boyhood. Sir Charles Stanford supplied a few chords for the
setting. My father sold the complete rights for a guinea. The publisher
made thousands. Sir Charles Stanford, who drew a royalty as the
composer, also made a very large sum. Recently my father has made a few
pounds from gramophone rights. He has never been bitter about all this,
but he has more than once impressed on me almost religiously never to
sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever.
I am glad in a way that my father was a poet. This at least saved me
from any false reverence of poets, and his work was never an oppression
to me. I am even very pleased when I meet people who know his work and
not mine. Some of his songs I sing without prejudice; when washing up
after meals or shelling peas or on similar occasions. He never once
tried to teach me how to write, or showed any understanding of my
serious work; he was always more ready to ask advice about his own
work than to offer it for mine. He never tried to stop me writing and
was glad of my first successes. His light-hearted early work is the
best. His _Invention of Wine_, for instance, which begins:
Ere Bacchus could talk
Or dacently walk,
Down Olympus he jumped
From the arms of his nurse,
And though ten years in all
Were consumed by the fall
He might have fallen further
And fared a dale worse.
After he married my mother and became a convinced teetotaller he lost
something of this easy playfulness.
He broke the ecclesiastical sequence. His great-grandfather had been a
dean, his grandfather a rector, his father a bishop, but he himself was
never more than a lay-reader. And he broke the geographical connection
with Ireland, for which I cannot be too grateful to him. I am much
harder on my relations and much more careful of associating with them
than I am with strangers. But I can in certain respects admire my
father and mother. My father for his simplicity and persistence and my
mother for her seriousness and strength. Both for their generosity.
They never bullied me or in any way exceeded their ordinary parental
rights, and were grieved rather than angered by my default from formal
religion. In physique and general characteristics my mother’s side is
stronger in me on the whole. But I am subject to many habits of speech
and movement characteristic of the Graves’, most of them eccentric.
Such as finding it difficult to walk straight down a street,
getting tired of sentences when half-way through and leaving them in
the air, walking with the hands folded in a particular way behind the
back, and being subject to sudden and most disconcerting spells of
complete amnesia. These fits, so far as I can discover, serve no useful
purpose, and the worst about them is that they tend to produce in the
subject the same sort of dishonesty that deaf people have when they
miss the thread of conversation. They dare not be left behind and rely
on their intuition and bluff to get them through. This disability is
most marked in very cold weather. I do not now talk too much except
when I have been drinking or when I meet someone who was with me in
France. The Graves’ have good minds for purposes like examinations,
writing graceful Latin verse, filling in forms, and solving puzzles
(when we children were invited to parties where guessing games and
brain-tests were played we never failed to win). They have a good eye
for ball games, and a graceful style. I inherited the eye, but not
the style; my mother’s family are entirely without style and I went
that way. I have an ugly but fairly secure seat on a horse. There
is a coldness in the Graves’ which is anti-sentimental to the point
of insolence, a necessary check to the goodness of heart from which
my mother’s family suffers. The Graves’, it is fair to generalize,
though loyal to the British governing class to which they belong, and
so to the Constitution, are individualists; the von Ranke’s regard
their membership of the corresponding class in Germany as a sacred
trust enabling them to do the more responsible work in the service of
humanity. Recently, when a von Ranke entered a film studio, the family
felt itself disgraced.
The most useful and at the same time most dangerous gift that I owe
to my father’s side of the family—probably more to the Cheynes than the
Graves’—is that I am always able, when it is a question of dealing with
officials or getting privileges from public institutions which grudge
them, to masquerade as a gentleman. Whatever I happen to be wearing;
and because the clothes I wear are not what gentlemen usually wear,
and yet I do not seem to be an artist or effeminate, and my accent and
gestures are irreproachable, I have even been ‘placed’ as the heir to
a dukedom, whose perfect confidence in his rank would explain all such
eccentricity. In this way I have been told that I seem, paradoxically,
to be more of a gentleman even than one of my elder brothers who
spent a number of years as a consular official in the Near East. His
wardrobe is almost too carefully a gentleman’s, and he does not allow
himself the pseudo-ducal privilege of having disreputable acquaintances
and saying on all occasions what he really means. About this being a
gentleman business: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my
gentleman’s education that I feel entitled occasionally to get some
sort of return.
II
My mother married my father largely, it seems, to help him out with
his five motherless children. Having any herself was a secondary
consideration. But first she had a girl, then she had another girl, and
it was very nice of course to have them, but slightly disappointing,
because she belonged to the generation and the tradition that made a
son the really important event; then I came and I was a fine healthy
child. She was forty when I was born and my father was forty-nine.
Four years later she had another son and four years later she had
still another son. The desired preponderance of male over female
was established and twice five made ten. The gap of two generations
between my parents and me was easier in a way to bridge than a single
generation gap. Children seldom quarrel with their grandparents, and I
have been able to think of my mother and father as grandparents. Also,
a family of ten means a dilution of parental affection; the members
tend to become indistinct. I have often been called: ‘Philip, Richard,
Charles, I mean Robert.’
My father was a very busy man, an inspector of schools for the
Southwark district of London, and we children saw practically nothing
of him except during the holidays. Then he was very sweet and playful
and told us stories with the formal beginning, not ‘once upon a time,’
but always ‘and so the old gardener blew his nose on a red pocket
handkerchief.’ He occasionally played games with us, but for the most
part when he was not doing educational work he was doing literary work
or being president of literary or temperance societies. My mother was
so busy running the household and conscientiously carrying out her
social obligations as my father’s wife that we did not see her
continuously, unless on Sunday or when we happened to be ill. We had
a nurse and we had each other and that was companionship enough. My
father’s chief part in our education was to insist on our speaking
grammatically, pronouncing words correctly, and using no slang. He left
our religious instruction entirely to my mother, though he officiated
at family prayers, which the servants were expected to attend, every
morning before breakfast. Punishments, such as being sent to bed early
or being stood in the corner, were in the hands of my mother. Corporal
punishment, never severe and given with a slipper, was my father’s
business. We learned to be strong moralists and spent a great deal of
our time on self-examination and good resolutions. My sister Rosaleen
put up a printed notice in her corner of the nursery—it might just as
well have been put up by me: ‘I must not say bang bust or pig bucket,
for it is rude.’
We were given very little pocket-money—a penny a week with a rise to
twopence at the age of twelve or so, and we were encouraged to give
part at least of any odd money that came to us from uncles or other
visitors to Dr. Barnardo’s Homes and (this frightened us a bit) to
beggars. There was one blind beggar at Wimbledon who used to sit on the
pavement reading the Bible aloud in Braille; he was not really blind,
but able to turn his eyes up and keep the pupils concealed for minutes
at a time under drooping lids which were artificially inflamed. We
often gave to him. He died a rich man and had been able to provide his
son with a college education. The first distinguished writer that I
remember meeting after Swinburne was P. G. Wodehouse, a friend of one
of my brothers; he was then in the early twenties, on the staff of the
_Globe_, and was writing school stories in _The Captain_ magazine.
He gave me a penny, advising me to get marsh-mallows with it. I was too
shy to express my gratitude at the time; and have never since permitted
myself to be critical about his work.
I had great religious fervour which persisted until shortly after my
confirmation at the age of sixteen. I remember the incredulity with
which I first heard that there actually were people, people baptized
like myself into the Church of England, who did not believe in Jesus.
I never met an unbeliever in all these years. As soon as I did, it
was all over with my simple, faith in the literal fundamentalist
interpretation of the Bible. This was bad luck on my parents, but
they were doomed to it. One married couple that I know, belonging to
the same generation, decided that the best way in the end to ensure a
proper religious attitude in their children, was not to teach them any
religion at all until they were able to understand it in some degree of
fulness. The children were sent to schools where no religious training
was given. At the age of thirteen the eldest boy came indignantly to
his father and said: ‘Look here, father, I think you’ve treated me very
badly. The other chaps laugh at me because I don’t know anything about
God. And who’s this chap Jesus? When I ask them they won’t tell me,
they think I am joking.’ So the long-hoped-for moment had arrived. The
father told the boy to call his sister, who was a year younger than
him, because he had something very important to tell them both. Then
very reverently and carefully he told them the Gospel story. He had
always planned to tell it to them in this way. The children did not
interrupt him. When finally he had finished there was a silence. Then
the girl said, rather embarrassed: ‘Really, father, I think that is the
silliest story I’ve heard since I was a kid.’ The boy said: ‘Poor
chap. But what about it, anyhow?’
I have asked many of my acquaintances at what point in their childhood
or adolescence they became class-conscious, but have never been given a
satisfactory answer. I remember when it happened to me. When I was four
and a half I caught scarlet fever; my younger brother had just been
born, and it was impossible for me to have scarlet fever in the house,
so I was sent off to a public fever hospital. There was only one other
bourgeois child in the ward; the rest were all proletarians. I did
not notice particularly that the attitude of the nurses or the other
patients to me was different; I accepted the kindness and spoiling
easily, because I was accustomed to it. But I was astonished at the
respect and even reverence that this other little boy, a clergyman’s
child, was given. ‘Oh,’ the nurses would cry after he had gone; ‘Oh,’
they cried, ‘he did look a little gentleman in his pretty white
pellisse when they came to take him away.’ ‘He was a fair toff,’ echoed
the little proletarians. When I came home from hospital, after being
there about two months, my accent was commented on and I was told that
the boys in the ward had been very vulgar. I did not know what ‘vulgar’
meant; it had to be explained to me. About a year later I met Arthur, a
boy of about nine, who had been in the ward and taught me how to play
cricket when I was getting better; I was then at my first preparatory
school and he was a ragged errand-boy. In hospital we had all worn the
same hospital nightgown, and I had not realized that we came off such
different shelves. But now I suddenly recognized with my first shudder
of gentility that there were two sorts of people—ourselves and the
lower classes. The servants were trained to call us children, even
when we were tiny, Master Robert, Miss Rosaleen, and Miss Clarissa, but
I had not realized that these were titles of respect. I had thought of
‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ merely as vocative prefixes used when addressing
other people’s children. But now I realized that the servants were the
lower classes, and that we were ourselves.
I accepted this class separation as naturally as I had accepted
religious dogma, and did not finally discard gentility until
nearly twenty years later. My mother and father were never of the
aggressive, shoot-’em-down type. They were Liberals or, more strictly,
Liberal-Unionists. In religious theory, at least, they treated their
employees as fellow-creatures. But social distinctions remained clearly
defined. That was religion too:
He made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estates.
I can well recall the tone of my mother’s voice when she informed the
maids that they could have what was left of the pudding, or scolded
the cook for some carelessness. It was a forced hardness, made almost
harsh by embarrassment. My mother was _gemütlich_ by nature. She would,
I believe, have given a lot to be able to dispense with servants
altogether. They were a foreign body in the house. I remember what the
servants’ bedrooms used to look like. By a convention of the times they
were the only rooms in the house that had no carpet or linoleum; they
were on the top landing on the dullest side of the house. The gaunt,
unfriendly-looking beds, and the hanging-cupboards with faded cotton
curtains, instead of wardrobes with glass doors as in the other
rooms. All this uncouthness made me think of the servants as somehow
not quite human. The type of servant that came was not very good; only
those with not particularly good references would apply for a situation
where there were ten in the family. And because it was such a large
house, and there was hardly a single tidy person in the household, they
were constantly giving notice. There was too much work they said. So
that the tendency to think of them as only half human was increased;
they never had time to get fixed as human beings.
The bridge between the servants and ourselves was our nurse. She gave
us her own passport on the first day she came: ‘Emily Dykes is my name;
England is my nation; Netheravon is my dwelling-place, and Christ is
my salvation.’ Though she called us Miss and Master she spoke it in no
servant tone. In a practical way she came to be more to us than our
mother. I began to despise her at about the age of twelve—she was then
nurse to my younger brothers—when I found that my education was now in
advance of hers, and that if I struggled with her I was able to trip
her up and bruise her quite easily. Besides, she was a Baptist and went
to chapel; I realized by that time that the Baptists were, like the
Wesleyans and Methodists, the social inferiors of the members of the
Church of England.
I was brought up with a horror of Catholicism and this remained with
me for a very long time. It was not a case of once a Protestant always
a Protestant, but rather that when I ceased to be Protestant I was
further off than ever from being Catholic. I discarded Protestantism
in horror of its Catholic element. My religious training developed in
me a great capacity for fear (I was perpetually tortured by the fear
of hell), a superstitious conscience and a sexual embarrassment. I
was very long indeed in getting rid of all this. Nancy Nicholson and
I (later on in this story) were most careful not to give our four
children an early religious training. They were not even baptized.
The last thing that is discarded by Protestants when they reject
religion altogether is a vision of Christ as the perfect man. That
persisted with me, sentimentally, for years. At the age of nineteen I
wrote a poem called ‘In the Wilderness.’ It was about Christ meeting
the scapegoat—a silly, quaint poem-and has appeared in at least seventy
anthologies. Its perpetual recurrence. Strangers are always writing to
me to say what a beautiful poem it is, and how much strength it has
given them, and would I, etc.? Here, for instance, is a letter that
came yesterday:
Sir,—I heard with great delight your beautiful poem ‘In the
Wilderness,’ broadcast from 2LO last night, and am writing to you
because your poem has given me strength and hope. I am a gentlelady
in need—in great need—not of a gift, but of a _loan_, on interest of
5 per cent. I also need a kind friend to show me human sympathy and
to help me if possible by an introduction to a really upright and
conscientious London solicitor who will fight my cause, not primarily
for the filthy lucre, but because it is waging the the battle of
Right against the most infamous Wrong. First of all I ask you to
believe that I am writing you the simple truth. I also am gifted as a
writer, but as my physical health has always been a great struggle,
and poverty from my childhood has been my lot, and I will not stoop
to write down to the popular taste, and perhaps, also, because I
have no influential friends to give me a helping hand, I earn very
little by my pen. But I know how to wield a pen, and I am going
to put myself into this letter just as I am—I am not apt to deceive,
I hate lies and every form of deception. This letter is ‘a bow sent
at a venture,’—to see if you would like to help a literary sister
who is being gravely wronged by her only near relative, an abnormal
woman, who has hated her for years without any cause. To be very
direct—I need £10 for one year at 5 per cent.—to be repaid £10, 10s.
0d. I need it _at once, very urgently_—to pay arrears of furnished
digs—£3, 13s. 0d.—Milk Bill 16s. 8d., Grocery Bill 10s. 6d. and coal
1s. 8d.—then to leave Bolton (the black town of mills which fogs
incessantly) and go for a change to Blackpool: then to go up to Town
to put my legal business into a London solicitor’s hands. I will
sign a Promissory Note for £10, 10s. 0d., to repay a year hence. I
am cultured and and highly educated and well-born. I was trained
to teach on the higher schools and I hold high testimonials for
teaching. But I overworked and at last became consumptive, and had
tuberculosis of both lungs. It was taken early and I am relatively
cured. But my teaching career is broken, and I do so love teaching.
In consequence of this I have a monthly pension from a Philanthropic
Society of £2, 11s. 8d. But it is so tiny, I cannot possibly live on
it, squeeze as I may. But an inheritance of over £1000 is mine, which
is being wrongly withheld from me by the rogue of a solicitor in
whose hands it is. I had one brother and one sister. The brother had
saved money, and insured himself in many ways against his old age.
The sister was well married to a man in good position; heartless,
and hardened with her worldly life, and abnormally unnatural. She
was expelled from two schools. She contracted an insane hatred of
me, her little sister, and being full of cupidity, has tried to rob
me of the little I have. My brother intended me to be his heir
and inherit all his money. He wrote her this. But he was not a good
brother and I did not visit him. He was a widower without offspring.
Then he died suddenly in 1926, Xmas. She got to his house and wired
me the death. Afterwards she wrote a few lines _but never told me the
date of the funeral and has hid everything about his affairs from
me_—his declared heir! She declared there was no Will to be found,
and when I arrived in the Midlands from Yorkshire and got to his
Vicarage _she, with her woman friend, had locked me out of the house,
to prevent my search for the Will_! Upon advice I issued a Caveat
and they at once _violated the Caveat_, and began to arrange for the
sale of furniture! I heard of it by chance and stopped the sale. Then
I was taken ill with my lungs in Derbyshire, whither I had returned
after engaging a lawyer to safeguard my interests on the spot. They
then corrupted my solicitor, who let me down badly, and I was ill in
Derby. They warned the Caveat, and I could not enter an appearance,
so it became abortive. Then my sister got herself made sole
Administratrix. I had intended to apply to be joint Administratrix.
Then began a series of fraudulent acts and maladministration. Her
solicitor is a rogue and he is trying to force me to ‘_approve_’
his unsatisfactory accounts by withholding my share until I sign an
undertaking not to proceed against them afterwards. _One_ item in
accounts is falsified which I can prove, and other gross acts of
fraud can be proved. _Foul play_ has been pursued throughout, and
they are now shadowing me everywhere by hired agents who find out
the solicitors I employ and buy them off, or otherwise prevent their
acting against them for me. It is the _grossest_ case imaginable. I
hold all my documents and can prove everything. I have a clear and
strong case. But I need a _London_ solicitor—away from the North
where my sister lives in Northumberland—and I will not sink my
moral principle to accept, not my lawful Half-Share, but what they
choose to offer me, namely £919, 13s. 3d. and 18 months’ interest. I
want the Court to take over the administration. I have applied to the
solicitor for an advance upon my share and he refuses again in order
to _compel_ me to sign this infamous agreement. I had £50 in advance
in 1926 which is shown in accounts. I just need this £10 now so as to
pay up here and get to Blackpool—for I have been ill again with my
lungs, and I _badly_ need a change.
Will you help a stranger with this not very big loan, and on
interest? I would bring all the accounts and papers to show you
when I come to town. And if I have found a friend in you, I shall
indeed thank God. You can trust me. I _am_ worthy, though I can give
no references, because the people are dead. But I think you do not
like being ‘bullied’ with such things. I am middle-aged, but a child
in heart—original—and just myself, and look rather ridiculously
young, without any artifice or makeup.
But apart from the loan, I need a _friend_. The family used to sneer
at me that I ‘never made friends for what I could get out of them.’
Truly I never did. I like rather to help others myself. I should
like to help _you_ if I could in any way. I just love to serve. My
life has been lonely, and both parents are dead, and I don’t make
friends lightly. So that is all. But I won’t finish without telling
you that I love the Master, the Lord Jesus Christ, as you love Him,
and trust Him in all this darkness. I always like to bring His Name
in—and so good night—I would be thankful if you will write to me in a
_registered_ letter. Some of my letters have gone astray, I fear
I do not trust the woman in these lodgings, and my letters are going
to a shop to be called for.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours very truly
* * * * * (Miss).
_P.S._—Do you think you could get a letter to me by _Saturday_? I do
so love your poems.
I put this in here because it is not a letter to answer, nor yet
somehow a letter to throw away. The style reminds me of one of my
Irish female cousins. And that again reminds me of the ancient Irish
triad—‘Three ugly sisters: Chatter, Poverty, and Chastity.’
III
I went to six preparatory schools. The first was a dame’s school at
Wimbledon. I went there at the age of six. My father, as an educational
expert, did not let me stay here long. He found me crying one day
at the difficulty of the twenty-three-times table, and there was a
Question and Answer History Book that we used which began:
_Question_: Why were the Britons so called?
_Answer_: Because they painted themselves blue.
My father said it was out of date. Also I was made to do mental
arithmetic to a metronome. I once wet myself for nervousness at this
torture. So I went to the lowest class of King’s College School,
Wimbledon. I was just seven years old, the youngest boy there, and they
went up to nineteen. I was taken away after a couple of terms because
I was found to be using naughty words. I was glad to leave that school
because I did not understand a word of the lessons. I had started
Latin and I did not know what Latin was or meant; its declensions and
conjugations were pure incantations to me. For that matter so were
the strings of naughty words. And I was oppressed by the huge hall,
the enormous boys, the frightening rowdiness of the corridors, and
compulsory Rugby football of which nobody told me the rules. I went
from there to another preparatory school of the ordinary type, also at
Wimbledon, where I stayed for about three years. Here I began playing
games seriously, was quarrelsome, boastful, and talkative, won prizes,
and collected things. The only difference between me and the other
boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps. The value of coins
seemed less fictitious to me than stamp values. My first training as a
gentleman was here. I was only once caned, for forgetting to bring
my gymnastic shoes to school, and then I was only given two strokes
on the hand with the cane. Yet even now the memory makes me hot with
fury. The principal outrage was that it was on the hand. My hands have
a great importance for me and are unusually sensitive. I live a lot in
them; my visual imagery is defective and so I memorize largely by sense
of touch.
I seem to have left out a school. It was in North Wales, right away in
the hills behind Llanbedr. It was the first time I had been away from
home. I went there just for a term, for my health. Here I had my first
beating. The headmaster was a parson, and he caned me on the bottom
because I learned the wrong collect one Sunday by mistake. This was
the first time that I had come upon forcible training in religion. (At
my dame’s school we learned collects too, but were not punished for
mistakes; we competed for prizes—ornamental texts to take home and hang
over our beds.) There was a boy at this school called Ronny, and he was
the greatest thing that I had ever met. He had a house at the top of
a pine tree that nobody else could climb, and a huge knife, made from
the top of a scythe that he had stolen; and he killed pigeons with a
catapult and cooked them up in the tree. He was very kind to me; he
went into the Navy afterwards and deserted on his first voyage and was
never heard of again. He used to steal rides on cows and horses that
he found in the fields. And I found a book that had the ballads of
‘Chevy Chace’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ in it; they were the first two
real poems that I remember reading. I saw how good they were. But, on
the other hand, there was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys
bathed naked, and I was overcome by horror at the sight. There was one
boy there of nineteen with red hair, real bad, Irish, red hair
all over his body. I had not known that hair grew on bodies. And the
headmaster had a little daughter with a little girl friend, and I was
in a sweat of terror whenever I met them; because, having no brothers,
they once tried to find out about male anatomy from me by exploring
down my shirt-neck when we were digging up pig-nuts in the garden.
Another frightening experience of this part of my life was when I had
once to wait in the school cloakroom for my sisters, who went to the
Wimbledon High School. We were going on to be photographed together.
I waited about a quarter of an hour in the corner of the cloakroom. I
suppose I was about ten years old, and hundreds and hundreds of girls
went to and fro, and they all looked at me and giggled and whispered
things to each other. I knew they hated me, because I was a boy sitting
in the cloakroom of a girls’ school, and when my sisters arrived they
looked ashamed of me and quite different from the sisters I knew at
home. I realized that I had blundered into a secret world, and for
months and even years afterwards my worst nightmares were of this
girls’ school, which was always filled with coloured toy balloons.
‘Very Freudian,’ as one says now. My normal impulses were set back for
years by these two experiences. When I was about seventeen we spent
our Christmas holidays in Brussels. An Irish girl staying at the same
_pension_ made love to me in a way that I see now was really very
sweet. I was so frightened I could have killed her.
In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily
homo-sexual. The opposite sex is despised and hated, treated as
something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. I
only recovered by a shock at the age of twenty-one. For every one born
homo-sexual there are at least ten permanent pseudo-homo-sexuals
made by the public school system. And nine of these ten are as
honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.
I left that day-school at Wimbledon because my father decided that the
standard of work was not good enough to enable me to win a scholarship
at a public school. He sent me to another preparatory school in the
Midlands; because the headmaster’s wife was a sister of an old literary
friend of his. It proved later that these were inadequate grounds.
It was a queer place and I did not like it. There was a secret about
the headmaster which a few of the elder boys shared. It was somehow
sinister, but I never exactly knew what it was. All I knew was that
he came weeping into the class-room one day beating his head with his
fists and groaning: ‘Would to God I hadn’t done it! Would to God I
hadn’t done it!’ I was taken away suddenly a few days later, which
was the end of the school year. The headmaster was said to be ill. I
found out later that he had been given twenty-four hours to leave the
country. He was succeeded by the second master, a good man, who had
taught me how to write English by eliminating all phrases that could
be done without, and using verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and
adverbs wherever possible. And where to start new paragraphs, and
the difference between O and Oh. He was a very heavy man. He used to
stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right
angles. (The school he took over was now only half-strength because
of the scandal. A fortnight later he fell out of a train on to his
head and that was the end of him; but the school is apparently going
on still; I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys’ funds for
chapel windows and miniature rifle ranges and so on.) I first learned
rugger here. What surprised me most at this school was when a boy
of about twelve, whose father and mother were in India, was told by
cable that they had both suddenly died of cholera. We all watched him
sympathetically for weeks after, expecting him to die of grief or turn
black in the face, or do something to match the occasion. Yet he seemed
entirely unmoved, and since nobody dared discuss the tragedy with him
he seemed to forget what had happened; he played about and ragged as
he had done before. We found that rather monstrous. But he could not
have been expected to behave otherwise. He had not seen his parents
for two years. And preparatory schoolboys live in a world completely
dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, different
moral system, different voice, and though on their return to school
from the holidays the change over from home-self to school-self is
almost instantaneous, the reverse process takes a fortnight at least. A
preparatory-school boy, when off his guard, will often call his mother,
‘Please, matron,’ and will always address any man relation or friend
of the family as ‘Sir,’ as though he were a master. I used to do it.
School life becomes the reality and home life the illusion. In England
parents of the governing classes virtually finish all intimate life
with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempt on
their part to insinuate home feeling into school life is resented.
Next I went to a typically good school in Sussex. The headmaster was
chary of admitting me at my age, particularly from a school with such a
bad recent history. Family literary connections did the trick, however,
and the headmaster saw that I was advanced enough to win a scholarship
and do the school credit. The depressed state I had been in since the
last school ended the moment I arrived. My younger brother followed me
to this school, being taken away from the day-school at Wimbledon,
and, later, my youngest brother went there straight from home. How good
and typical the school was can best be seen in the case of my youngest
brother, who is a typical good, normal person, and, as I say, went
straight from home to the school without other school influences. He
spent five or six years there—and played in the elevens—and got the
top scholarship at a public school—and became head boy with athletic
distinctions—and won a scholarship at Oxford and further athletic
distinctions—and a degree—and then what did he do? Because he was such
a typically good normal person he naturally went back as a master to
his old typically good preparatory school, and now that he has been
there some years and wants a change he is applying for a mastership
at his old public school and, if he gets it and becomes a house-master
after a few years, he will at last, I suppose, become a headmaster and
eventually take the next step and become the head of his old college at
Oxford. That is the sort of typically good preparatory school it was.
At this school I learned to keep a straight bat at cricket and to have
a high moral sense, and my fifth different pronunciation of Latin, and
my fifth or sixth different way of doing simple arithmetic. But I did
not mind, and they put me in the top class and I got a scholarship—in
fact I got the first scholarship of the year. At Charterhouse. And why
Charterhouse? Because of ἴστημι and ἵημι. Charterhouse was the only
public school whose scholarship examination did not contain a Greek
grammar paper and, though I was good enough at Greek Unseen and Greek
Composition, I could not conjugate ἴστημι and ἵημι conventionally. If
it had not been for these two verbs I would almost certainly have gone
to the very different atmosphere of Winchester.
IV
My mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany
five times between my second and twelfth year. After this he died
and we never went again. He had a big old manor-house ten miles from
Munich; it was called ‘Laufzorn,’ which means ‘Begone, care!’ Our
summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine
forests and hot sun, red deer and black and red squirrels, acres of
blue-berries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of
edible mushrooms that we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar
flowers in the fields—Munich is high up and there are outcrops of
Alpine flowers here and there—and the farm with all the usual animals
except sheep, and drives through the countryside in a brake behind my
grandfather’s greys. And bathing in the Iser under a waterfall; the
Iser was bright green and said to be the fastest river in Europe. We
used to visit the uncles who had a peacock farm a few miles away, and
a granduncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the
lakeshore of Tegensee, where every one had buttercup-blonde hair. And
occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived some hours
away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps, in Aufsess Castle.
This castle was a wonder; it was built in the ninth century and had
been in the von Aufsess family ever since. The original building was
a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up. A medieval castle had
been added. Aufsess was so remote that it had never been sacked, and
its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. Each baron added to the
treasure and none took away. My Uncle Siegfried was the heir. He showed
us children the chapel with its walls hung with enamelled shields
of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the family into which
he married. These families were always noble. He pointed to a stone
in the floor which pulled up by a ring and said: ‘That is the family
vault where all we Aufsesses go when we die. I’ll go there one day.’ He
scowled comically. (But he was killed in the war as an officer of the
Imperial German Staff and I believe that they never found his body.) He
had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children found him on the
pebbled garden path, eating the pebbles. He told us to go away, but, of
course, we would not. We sat down and tried to eat pebbles too. He told
us very seriously that eating pebbles was not a thing for children to
do; we should break our teeth. We agreed after trying one or two; so
to get rid of us he found us each a pebble which looked just like all
the other pebbles, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre.
But this was only on condition that we went away and left him to his
picking and crunching. When we came back later in the day we searched
and searched, but only found the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once
let us down in a joke.
Among the treasures of the castle were a baby’s lace cap that had
taken two years to make, and a wine glass that my uncle’s old father,
the reigning baron, had found in the Franco-Prussian War standing
upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined village. For
dinner when we were there we had enormous trout. My father, who was a
fisherman, was astonished and asked the baron how they came to be that
size. The baron said that there was an underground river that welled up
close to the castle and the fish that came out with it were quite white
from the darkness, of enormous size and stone-blind. They also gave us
jam, made of wild roseberries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch.’
The most remarkable thing in the castle was an iron chest in a small
thick-walled white-washed room at the top of the keep. It was a huge
chest, twice the size of the door, and had obviously been made inside
the room—there were no windows but arrow-slits. It had two keys.
I could not say what its date was, but I recall it as twelfth or
thirteenth century work. There was a tradition that it should never be
opened unless the castle were in the most extreme danger. One key was
held by the baron and one by the steward; I believe the stewardship
was a hereditary office. The chest could only be opened by using both
keys, and nobody knew what was inside; it was even considered unlucky
to speculate. Of course we speculated. It might be gold, more likely it
was a store of corn in sealed jars, or even some sort of weapon—Greek
fire, perhaps. From what I know of the Aufsesses and their stewards, it
is inconceivable that the chest ever got the better of their curiosity.
The castle ghost was that of a former baron known as the Red Knight;
his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase that took
us to our bedrooms. We slept for the first time in our lives on feather
beds.
Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous
state, had nothing to compare with the Aufsess tradition, though it had
for a time been a shooting-lodge of the kings of Bavaria. Still, there
were two ghosts that went with the place; the farm labourers used to
see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously
along without any horses, and before the days of motor-cars this was
frightening enough. And the banqueting hall was magnificent. I have
not been there since I was a child, so it is impossible for me to
recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, and its
bare boards were only furnished at the four corners with little islands
of tables and chairs. The windows were of stained glass, and there were
swallows’ nests all along where the walls joined the ceiling. Roundels
of coloured light from the stained-glass windows, the many-tined
stags’ heads (that my grandfather had shot) mounted on the wall,
swallow-droppings on the floor under the nests and a little harmonium
in one corner where we sang German songs; these concentrate my memories
of Laufzorn. It was in three divisions. The bottom storey was part of
the farm. A carriage-drive went right through it, and there was also
a wide, covered courtyard—originally these had served for driving the
cattle to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive
was the estate steward’s quarters, on the other the farm servants’ inn
and kitchen. In the middle storey lived my grandfather and his family.
The top storey was a store-place for corn and apples and other farm
produce. It was up here that my cousin Wilhelm, who was killed in an
air-fight during the war, used to lie for hours shooting mice with an
air-gun. (I learned that he was shot down by a schoolfellow of mine.)
The best part of Germany was the food. There was a richness and
spiciness about it that we missed in England. We liked the rye
bread, the black honey (black, I believe, because it came from the
combs of the previous year), the huge ice-cream puddings made with
fresh raspberry juice, and the venison, and the honey cakes, and the
pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different sorts of
mushrooms. And the bretzels, and carrots cooked with sugar, and summer
pudding of cranberries and blue-berries. There was an orchard close to
the house, and we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages
as we liked. There were rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. The
estate, in spite of the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, and his
liberalism and experiments in modern agricultural methods, was still
feudalistic. The farm servants, because they talked a dialect that
we could not understand and because they were Catholics and poor and
sweaty and savage-looking, frightened us. They were lower even than the
servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians settled about half
a mile from the house, imported from Italy by my grandfather as cheap
labour for his brick-making factory, we associated them in our minds
with the ‘gypsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over
the factory one day; he made me taste a lump of Italian _polenta_. My
mother told us afterwards (when a milk pudding at Wimbledon came to
table burnt and we complained about it), ‘Those poor Italians at the
factory used to burn their _polenta_ on purpose sometimes just for a
change of flavour.’
There were other unusual things at Laufzorn. There was a large pond
full of carp; it was netted every three or four years. The last year
we were there we were allowed to help. It was good to see the net
pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with
wriggling carp, and a big pike was threshing about among them. I was
allowed to wade in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black
rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on them to make
them leave go. I do not remember that it hurt much. The farm labourers
were excited, and one of them, called The Jackal, gutted a fish with
his thumbs and ate it raw. And there was the truck line between the
railway station, two miles away, and the brick-yard. There was a fall
of perhaps one in a hundred from the factory to the station. The
Italians used to load up the trucks with bricks, and a squad of them
would give the trucks a hard push and run along the track pushing for
about twenty or thirty yards; and then the trucks used to sail off
all by themselves to the station. There was a big hay-barn where we
were allowed to climb up on the rafters and jump down into the springy
hay; we gradually increased the height of the jumps. It was exciting
to feel our insides left behind us in the air. Then the cellar, not
the ordinary beer cellar, but another that you went down into from the
courtyard. It was quite dark there except for a little slit-window; and
there was a heap of potatoes on the floor. To get to the light they had
put out long white feelers—a twisted mass. In one corner there was a
dark hole closed by a gate: it was a secret passage out of the house to
a ruined monastery, a mile or two away. My uncles had once been down
some way, but the air got bad and they had to come back. The gate had
been put up to prevent anyone else trying it and being overcome.
When we drove out with my grandfather he was acclaimed by the principal
personages of every village we went through. At each village there
was a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley and always a tall Maypole
banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national
colours. The roads were lined with fruit trees. The idea of these
unguarded public fruit trees astonished us. We could not understand
why there was any fruit left on them. Even the horse-chestnut trees on
Wimbledon Common were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the
chestnuts were ripe and in defiance of an energetic common keeper. The
only things that we could not quite get accustomed to in Bavaria were
the wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and
the _ex-voto_ pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory,
grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames. We
had been taught to believe in hell, but did not like to be reminded of
it. Munich we found sinister—disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke
and intense sounds of eating, the hotly dressed, enormously stout
population in the trams and trains, the ferocious officials, the wanton
crowds at the art shops and picture galleries. Then there was the
Morgue. We were not allowed inside because we were children, but it was
bad enough to be told about it. Any notable who died was taken to the
Morgue and put in a chair, sitting in state for a day or two, and if he
was a general he had his uniform on, or if she was a burgomaster’s wife
she had on her silks and jewels; and strings were tied to their fingers
and the slightest movement of one of the strings would ring a great
bell, in case there was any life left in the corpse after all. I have
never verified the truth of all this, but it was true enough to me.
When my grandfather died about a year after our last visit I thought
of him there in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, and his morning
coat and striped trousers and his decorations and his stethoscope, and
perhaps, I thought, his silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside
the chair. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive but knowing himself dead.
The headmaster who caned me on the hand was a lover of German culture,
and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it was to my credit
that I could speak German and had been to Germany. At my other
preparatory schools this German connection was regarded as something
at least excusable and perhaps even interesting. It was not until I
went to Charterhouse that I was made to see it as a social offence. My
history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, to
just before the end of the war, when I began to realize things better,
was a forced rejection of the German in me. In all that first period I
used to insist indignantly that I was Irish and deliberately cultivate
Irish sentiment. I took my self-protective stand on the technical point
that it was the father’s nationality that counted. Of course I also
accepted the whole patriarchal system of things. It is difficult now
to recall how completely I believed in the natural supremacy of male
over female. I never heard it even questioned until I met Nancy, when I
was about twenty-two, towards the end of the war. The surprising sense
of ease that I got from her frank statement of equality between the
sexes was among my chief reasons for liking her. My mother had always
taken the ‘love, honour, and obey’ contract literally; my sisters
were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of
woman’s suffrage, and not to expect as expensive an education as their
brothers. The final decision in any domestic matter always rested with
my father. My mother would say: ‘If two ride together one must ride
behind.’ Nancy’s crude summary, ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’
took a load off my shoulders.
We children did not talk German well; our genders and minor parts of
speech were shaky, and we never learned to read Gothic characters
or script. Yet we had the feel of German so strongly that I would
say now that I know German far better than French, though I can read
French almost as fast as I can read English and can only read a German
book very painfully and slowly, with the help of a dictionary. I use
different parts of my mind for the two languages. French is a surface
acquirement and I could forget it quite easily if I had no reason to
use it every now and then.
V
I spent a good part of my early life at Wimbledon. My mother and father
did not get rid of the house, a big one near the Common, until some
time about the end of the war; yet of all the time I spent in it I can
recall little or nothing of significance. But after the age of eleven
or twelve I was away at school, and in the spring and summer holidays
we were all in the country, so that I was only at Wimbledon in the
Christmas holidays and for a day or two at the beginning and end of
the other holidays. London was only a half-hour away and yet we seldom
went there. My mother and father never took us to the theatre, not even
to pantomimes, and until the middle of the war I had only been to the
theatre twice in my life, and then only to children’s plays, taken by
an aunt. My mother wished to bring us up to be serious and to benefit
humanity in some practical way. She allowed us no hint of its dirtiness
and intrigue and lustfulness, believing that innocence was the surest
protection against them. Our reading was carefully censored by her.
I was destined to be ‘if not a great man at least a good man.’ Our
treats were educational or æsthetic, to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court,
the Zoo, the British Museum, or the Natural History Museum. I remember
my mother, in the treasure room at the British Museum, telling us with
shining eyes that all these treasures were ours. We looked at her
astonished. She said: ‘Yes, they belong to us as members of the public.
We can look at them, admire them, and study them for as long as we
like. If we had them back at home we couldn’t do more.’
We read more books than most children do. There must have been
four or five thousand books in the house. They consisted of an
old-fashioned scholar’s library bequeathed to my father by my namesake,
whom I have mentioned as a friend of Wordsworth, but who had a far more
tender friendship with Felicia Hemans; to this was added my father’s
own collection of books, mostly poetry, with a particular cupboard for
Anglo-Irish literature; devotional works contributed by my mother;
educational books sent to my father by their publishers in the hope
that he would recommend them for use in Government schools; and novels
and adventure books brought into the house by my elder brothers and
sisters.
My mother used to tell us stories about inventors and doctors who gave
their lives for the suffering, and poor boys who struggled to the top
of the tree, and saintly men who made examples of themselves. There
was also the parable of the king who had a very beautiful garden which
he threw open to the public. Two students entered; and one, who was
the person of whom my mother spoke with a slight sneer in her voice,
noticed occasional weeds even in the tulip-beds, but the other, and
there she brightened up, found beautiful flowers growing even on
rubbish heaps. She kept off the subject of war as much as possible; she
always had difficulty in explaining to us how it was that God permitted
wars. The Boer War clouded my early childhood; Philip, my eldest
brother (who also called himself a Fenian), was a pro-Boer and there
was great tension at the breakfast-table between him and my father,
whose political views were always orthodox.
The sale of the Wimbledon house solved a good many problems; it was
getting too full. My mother hated throwing away anything that could
possibly, in the most remote contingency, be of any service to anyone.
The medicine cupboard was perhaps the most significant corner
of the house. Nobody could say that it was untidy, exactly; all the
bottles had stoppers, but they were so crowded together that it was
impossible for anybody except my mother, who had a long memory, to
know what was at the back. Every few years, no doubt, she went through
this cupboard. If there was any doubtful bottle she would tentatively
re-label it. ‘This must be Alfred’s old bunion salve,’ and another,
‘Strychnine—query?’ Even special medicines prescribed for scarlet-fever
or whooping-cough were kept, in case of re-infection. She was always
an energetic labeller. She wrote in one of my school prizes: ‘Robert
Ranke Graves won this book as a prize for being first in his class
in the term’s work and second in examinations. He also won a special
prize for divinity, though the youngest boy in the class. Written by
his affectionate mother, Amy Graves. Summer, 1908.’ Home-made jam
used always to arrive at table well labelled; one small pot read:
‘Gooseberry, lemon and rhubarb—a little shop gooseberry added—Nelly
re-boiled.’
In a recent book, _Mrs. Fisher_, I moralized on three sayings and
a favourite story of my mother’s. I ascribed them there for the
argument’s sake to my Danish grandmother. They were these:
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, never to swing objects
around in your hands. The King of Hanover put out his eye by swinging
a bead purse.’
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, to be careful when you
carry your candles up to bed. The candle is a little cup of grease.’
‘There was a man once, a Frenchman, who died of grief because he
could never become a mother.’
And the story told in candlelight:
‘There was once a peasant family living in Schleswig-Holstein, where
they all have crooked mouths, and one night they wished to blow out
the candle. The father’s mouth was twisted to the left, so! and he
tried to blow out the candle, so! but he was too proud to stand
anywhere but directly before the candle, and he puffed and he puffed,
but could not blow the candle out. And then the mother tried, but her
mouth was twisted to the right, so! and she tried to blow, so! and
she was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle,
and she puffed and puffed, but could not blow the candle out. Then
there was the brother with mouth twisted outward, so! and the sister
with the mouth twisted downward, so! and they tried each in their
turn, so! and so! and the idiot baby with his mouth twisted in an
eternal grin tried, so! And at last the maid, a beautiful girl from
Copenhagen with a perfectly formed mouth, put it out with her shoe.
So! Flap!’
These quotations make it clear how much more I owe, as a writer, to
my mother than to my father. She also taught me to ‘speak the truth
and shame the devil!’ Her favourite biblical exhortation was ‘My son,
whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’
I always felt that Wimbledon was a wrong place, neither town nor
country. It was at its worst on Wednesdays, my mother’s ‘At Home’ day.
Tea was in the drawing-room. We were called down in our Sunday clothes
to eat cakes, be kissed, and be polite. My sisters were made to recite.
Around Christmas, celebrated in the German style, came a dozen or so
children’s parties; we used to make ourselves sick with excitement.
I do not like thinking of Wimbledon. Every spring and summer after my
third year, unless we happened to go to Germany, or to France as we did
once, we went to Harlech in North Wales. My mother had built a house
there.
In the days before motor traffic began around the North Welsh coast,
Harlech was a very quiet place and little known, even as a golf centre.
It was in three parts. First, the village itself, five hundred feet
up on a steep range of hills; it had granite houses with slate roofs
and ugly windows and gables, chapels of seven or eight different
denominations, enough shops to make it the shopping centre of the
smaller villages around, and the castle, a favourite playground of
ours. Then there was the Morfa, a flat plain from which the sea
had receded; part of this was the golf links, but to the north was
a stretch of wild country which we used to visit in the spring in
search of plovers’ eggs. The sea was beyond the links—good hard sand
stretching for miles, safe bathing, and sandhills for hide and seek.
The third part of Harlech, which became the most important to us, was
never visited by golfers or the few other summer visitors or by the
village people themselves; this was the desolate rocky hill-country at
the back of the village. As we grew older we spent more and more of
our time up there and less and less on the beach and the links, which
were the most obvious attractions of the place. There were occasional
farms, or rather crofts, in these hills, but one could easily walk
fifteen or twenty miles without crossing a road or passing close to a
farm. Originally we went up there with some practical excuse. For the
blue-berries on the hills near Maesygarnedd; or for the cranberries
at Gwlawllyn; or to find bits of Roman hypocaust tiling (with the
potter’s thumb-marks still on them) in the ruined Roman villas by
Castell Tomenymur; or for globe-flowers in the upper Artro; or to catch
a sight of the wild goats that lived at the back of Rhinog Fawr, the
biggest of the hills of the next range; or to get raspberries from the
thickets near Cwmbychan Lake; or to find white heather on a hill that
we did not know the name of away to the north of the Roman Steps. But
after a time we walked about those hills simply because they were good
to walk about on. They had a penny plain quality about them that was
even better that the twopence coloured quality of the Bavarian Alps. My
best friend at the time was my sister Rosaleen, who was one year older
than myself.
I suppose what I liked about this country (and I know no country like
it) was its independence of formal nature. The passage of the seasons
was hardly noticed there; the wind always seemed to be blowing and the
grass always seemed to be withered and the small streams were always
cold and clear, running over black stones. Sheep were the only animals
about, but they were not nature, except in the lambing season; they
were too close to the granite boulders covered with grey lichen that
lay about everywhere. There were few trees except a few nut bushes,
rowans, stunted oaks and thorn bushes in the valleys. The winters were
always mild, so that last year’s bracken and last year’s heather lasted
in a faded way through to the next spring. There were almost no birds
except an occasional buzzard and curlews crying in the distance; and
wherever we went we felt that the rocky skeleton of the hill was only
an inch or two under the turf. Once, when I came home on leave from the
war, I spent about a week of my ten days walking about on these hills
to restore my sanity. I tried to do the same after I was wounded,
but by that time the immediate horror of death was too strong for the
indifference of the hills to relieve it.
I am glad that it was Wales and not Ireland. We never went to Ireland,
except once when I was an infant in arms. We had no Welsh blood in us
and did not like the Harlech villagers much. We had no temptation to
learn Welsh or to pretend ourselves Welsh. We knew that country as a
quite ungeographical region; any stray sheep-farmers that we met who
belonged to the place we resented somehow as intruders on our privacy.
Clarissa, Rosaleen and I were once out on the remotest hills and had
not seen a soul all day. At last we came to a waterfall and two trout
lying on the bank beside it; ten yards away was the fisherman. He was
disentangling his line from a thorn-bush and had not seen us. So we
crept up quietly to the fish and put a sprig of white bell-heather
(which we had found that afternoon) in the mouth of each. We hurried
back to cover, and I said: ‘Shall we watch?’ but Clarissa said: ‘No,
don’t spoil it.’ So we came home and never spoke of it again even
to each other: and never knew the sequel.... If it had been Ireland
we would have self-consciously learned Irish and the local legends.
Instead we came to know the country more purely, as a place whose
history was too old for local legends; when we were up walking there
we made our own. We decided who was buried under the Standing Stone
and who had lived in the ruined round-hut encampment and in the caves
of the valley where the big rowans were. On our visits to Germany
I had felt a sense of home in my blood in a natural human way, but
on the hills behind Harlech I found a personal harmony independent
of history or geography. The first poem I wrote as myself concerned
that hill-country. (The first poem I wrote as a Graves was a free
translation of a satire by Catullus).
My father was always too busy and absent-minded to worry much about us
children; my mother did worry. Yet she allowed us to go off immediately
after breakfast into the hills and did not complain much when we came
back long after supper-time. Though she had a terror of heights herself
she never restrained us from climbing about in dangerous places; so
we never got hurt. I had a bad head for heights and trained myself
deliberately and painfully to overcome it. We used to go climbing in
the turrets and towers of Harlech Castle. I have worked hard on myself
in defining and dispersing terrors. The simple fear of heights was the
most obvious to overcome. There was a quarry-face in the garden of
our Harlech house. It provided one or two easy climbs, but gradually
I invented more and more difficult ones for myself. After each new
success I had to lie down, shaking with nervousness, in the safe meadow
grass at the top. Once I lost my foothold on a ledge and should have
been killed; but it seemed as though I improvised a foothold in the
air and kicked myself up to safety from it. When I examined the place
afterwards it was almost as if the Devil had given me what he had
offered Christ in the Temptation, the freedom to cast myself down from
the rock and be restored to safety by the angels. Yet such events are
not uncommon in mountain climbing. George Mallory, for instance, did
an inexplicable climb on Snowdon once. He had left his pipe on a ledge
half-way down one of the precipices and scrambled back by a short cut
to retrieve it, then up again by the same way. No one saw just how
he did the climb, but when they came to examine it the next day for
official record, they found that it was an impossible overhang nearly
all the way. The rule of the Climbers’ Club was that climbs should
not be called after their inventors, but after natural features. An
exception was made in this case; the climb was recorded something
like this: ‘_Mallory’s Pipe_, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining
map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in
failing light, by Mr. G. H. L. Mallory.’
VI
About Charterhouse. Let me begin by recalling my feelings on the day
that I left, about a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed them
with a friend who felt much as I did. First we said that there were
perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse at the
time, but that this was difficult to believe. Next, that there was no
possible remedy, because tradition was so strong that if one wished
to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff and
start all over again. But that even this would not be enough, for the
school buildings were so impregnated with what was called the public
school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental badness, that they
would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere and its
name changed. Next, that our only regret at leaving the place was that
for the last year we had been in a position as members of Sixth Form
to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St.
John’s College, Oxford, which seemed by reputation to be merely a more
boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We would be freshmen there, and
would naturally refuse to be hearty and public school-ish, and there
would be all the stupidity of having our rooms raided and being forced
to lose our temper and hurt somebody and be hurt ourselves. And there
would be no peace probably until we got into our third year, when we
would be back again in the same sort of position as now, and in the
same sort of position as in our last year at our preparatory school.
‘In 1917,’ said Nevill, ‘the official seal will be out on all this
dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then we’ll have to start as new
boys again in some dreary profession. My God,’ he said, turning to
me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the idea of it. I must put something
in between me and Oxford. I must at least go abroad for the whole
vacation.’ I did not feel that three months was long enough. I had a
vague intention of running away to sea. ‘Do you realize,’ he said to
me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our life principally at Latin
and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we are going to start
another three years of the same thing?’ But, when we had said our very
worst of Charterhouse, I said to him or he said to me, I forget which:
‘Of course, the trouble is that in the school at any given time there
are always at least two really decent masters among the forty or fifty,
and ten really decent fellows among ♦the five or six hundred. We
will remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for
the sake of ten just persons. And in another twenty years’ time we’ll
forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that
perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average
decent, and we’ll say “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible
perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse sentimentally,
and they’ll go through all we did.’ I do not wish this to be construed
as an attack on my old school, but merely as a record of my feelings
at the time. No doubt I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and
character-training that public schools are supposed to provide, and as
a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The whole moral tone
of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’
♦ “the the” replaced with “the”
As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later,
in 1919, when my brother, four years younger than myself, was already
in residence, and I did not take my degree until 1926, at the same time
as the brother who was eight years younger than myself. Oxford was
extraordinarily kind to me. I did no Latin or Greek there, though
I had a Classical Exhibition. I did not sit for a single examination.
I never had rooms at St. John’s, though I used to go there to draw
a Government grant for tuition fees. I lived outside the University
three-mile radius. For my last two undergraduate years I did not even
have a tutor. I have a warm feeling for Oxford. Its rules and statutes,
though apparently cast-iron, are ready for emergencies. In my case, at
any rate, a poet was an emergency.
Whenever I come to the word ‘Charterhouse’ in this story I find myself
escaping into digressions, but I suppose that I must get through with
it. From the moment I arrived at the school I suffered an oppression
of spirit that I hesitate now to recall in its full intensity. It
was something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the
potatoes, but being a potato out of a different bag from the rest.
The school consisted of about six hundred boys. The chief interests
were games and romantic friendships. School-work was despised by every
one; the scholars, of whom there were about fifty in the school at
any given time, were not concentrated in a single dormitory-house as
at Winchester, but divided among ten. They were known as ‘pro’s,’ and
unless they were good at games and willing to pretend that they hated
work as much as or more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever
called on to help these with their work, they usually had a bad
time. I was a scholar and really liked work, and I was surprised and
disappointed at the apathy of the class-rooms. My first term I was
left alone more or less, it being a school convention that new boys
should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom spoke
to them except to send them on errands, or to inform them of breaches
of school convention. But my second term the trouble began. There
were a number of things that naturally made for my unpopularity.
Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was
always short of pocket-money. I could not conform to the social custom
of treating my contemporaries to food at the school shop, and because
I could not treat them I could not accept their treating. My clothes
were all wrong; they conformed outwardly to the school pattern, but
they were ready-made and not of the best-quality cloth that the other
boys all wore. Even so, I had not been taught how to make the best of
them. Neither my mother nor my father had any regard for the niceties
of modern dress, and my elder brothers were abroad by this time. The
other boys in my house, except for five scholars, were nearly all the
sons of business men; it was a class of whose interests and prejudices
I knew nothing, having hitherto only met boys of the professional
class. And I talked too much for their liking. A further disability was
that I was as prudishly innocent as my mother had planned I should be.
I knew nothing about simple sex, let alone the many refinements of sex
constantly referred to in school conversation. My immediate reaction
was one of disgust. I wanted to run away.
The most unfortunate disability of all was that my name appeared on the
school list as ‘R. von R. Graves.’ I had only known hitherto that my
second name was Ranke; the ‘von,’ discovered on my birth certificate,
was disconcerting. Carthusians were secretive about their second names;
if these were fancy ones they usually managed to conceal them. Ranke,
without the ‘von’ I could no doubt have passed off as monosyllabic and
English, but ‘von Ranke’ was glaring. The business class to which most
of the boys belonged was strongly feeling at this time the threat and
even the necessity of a trade war; ‘German’ meant ‘dirty German.’ It
meant ‘cheap shoddy goods competing with our sterling industries,’
and it also meant military menace, Prussianism, sabre-rattling. There
was another boy in my house with a German name, but English by birth
and upbringing. He was treated much as I was. On the other hand a
French boy in the house was very popular, though he was not much good
at games; King Edward VII had done his _entente_ work very thoroughly.
There was also considerable anti-Jewish feeling (the business prejudice
again) and the legend was put about that I was not only a German but a
German-Jew.
Of course I always maintained that I was Irish. This claim was resented
by an Irish boy who had been in the house about a year and a half
longer than myself. He went out of his way to hurt me, not only by
physical acts of spite, like throwing ink over my school-books, hiding
my games-clothes, setting on me suddenly from behind corners, pouring
water over me at night, but by continually forcing his bawdy humour
on my prudishness and inviting everybody to laugh at my disgust; he
also built up a sort of humorous legend of my hypocrisy and concealed
depravity. I came near a nervous breakdown. School morality prevented
me from informing the house-master of my troubles. The house-monitors
were supposed to keep order and preserve the moral tone of the house,
but at this time they were not the sort to interfere in any case of
bullying among the juniors. I tried violent resistance, but as the odds
were always heavily against me this merely encouraged the ragging.
Complete passive resistance would probably have been better. I only got
accustomed to bawdy-talk in my last two years at Charterhouse, and it
was not until I had been some time in the army that I got hardened to
it and could reply in kind to insults.
A former headmaster of Charterhouse, an innocent man, is reported
to have said at a Headmasters’ Conference: ‘My boys are amorous but
seldom erotic.’ Few cases of eroticism indeed ever came to his notice;
there were not more than five or six big rows all the time I was at
Charterhouse and expulsions were rare. But the house-masters knew
little about what went on in their houses; their living quarters
were removed from the boys’. There was a true distinction between
‘amorousness,’ by which the headmaster meant a sentimental falling
in love with younger boys, and eroticism, which was adolescent lust.
The intimacy, as the newspapers call it, that frequently took place
was practically never between an elder boy and the object of his
affection, for that would have spoilt the romantic illusion, which was
heterosexually cast. It was between boys of the same age who were not
in love, but used each other coldly as convenient sex-instruments. So
the atmosphere was always heavy with romance of a very conventional
early-Victorian type, yet complicated by cynicism and foulness.
VII
Half-way through my second year I wrote to my parents to tell them that
I must leave Charterhouse, because I could not stand life there any
longer. I told them that the house was making it plain that I did not
belong and that it did not want me. I gave them details, in confidence,
to make them take my demand seriously. They were unable to respect this
confidence, considering that it was their religious duty to inform
the house-master of all I had written them. They did not even tell me
what they were doing; they contented themselves with visiting me and
giving me assurances of the power of prayer and faith; telling me that
I must endure all for the sake of ... I have forgotten what exactly.
Fortunately I had not given them any account of sex-irregularities in
the house, so all that the house-master did was to make a speech that
night after prayers deterrent of bullying in general; he told us that
he had just had a complaint from a boy’s parents. He made it plain at
the same time how much he disliked informers and outside interference
in affairs of the house. My name was not mentioned, but the visit of
my parents on a day not a holiday had been noticed and commented on.
So I had to stay on and be treated as an informer. I was now in the
upper school and so had a study of my own. But this was no security;
studies had no locks. It was always being wrecked. After my parents’
visit to the house-master it was not even possible for me to use the
ordinary house changing-room; I had to remove my games-clothes to a
disused shower-bath. My heart went wrong then; the school doctor said I
was not to play football. This was low water. My last resource was to
sham insanity. It succeeded unexpectedly well. Soon nobody troubled
about me except to avoid any contact with me.
I must make clear that I am not charging my parents with treachery;
they were trying to help me. Their honour is beyond reproach.... One
day I went down to Charterhouse by the special train from Waterloo
to Godalming. I was too late to take a ticket; I just got into a
compartment before the train started. The railway company had not
provided enough coaches, so I had to stand up all the way. At Godalming
station the crowd of boys rushing out into the station-yard to secure
taxis swept me past the ticket collectors, so I had got my very
uncomfortable ride free. I mentioned this in my next letter home, just
for something to say, and my father sent me a letter of reproach. He
said that he had himself made a special visit to Waterloo Station,
bought a ticket to Godalming, and torn it up.... My mother was even
more scrupulous. A young couple on their honeymoon once happened to
stop the night with us at Wimbledon, and left behind them a packet of
sandwiches, some of which had already been eaten. My mother sent them
on.
Being thrown entirely on myself I began to write poetry. This was
considered stronger proof of insanity than the formal straws I wore
in my hair. The poetry I wrote was not the easy showing-off witty
stuff that all the Graves’ write and have written for the last couple
of centuries. It was poetry that was dissatisfied with itself. When,
later, things went better with me at Charterhouse, I became literary
once more.
I sent one of my poems to the school magazine, _The Carthusian_. On
the strength of it I was invited to join the school Poetry Society.
This was a most anomalous organization for Charterhouse. It consisted
of seven members. The meetings, for the reading and discussion of
poetry, were held once a month at the house of Guy Kendall, then
a form-master at the school, now headmaster of University College
School at Hampstead. The members were four sixth-form boys and two
boys a year and a half older than myself, one of whom was called
Raymond Rodakowski. None of them were in the same house as myself. At
Charterhouse no friendship was permitted between boys of different
houses or of different years beyond a formal acquaintance at work
or organized games like cricket and football. It was, for instance,
impossible for boys of different houses, though related or next-door
neighbours at home, even to play a friendly game of tennis or
squash-racquets together. They would never have heard the last of
it. So the friendship that began between me and Raymond was most
unconventional. Coming home one evening from a meeting of the society
I told Raymond about life in the house; I told him what had happened
a week or two before. My study had been raided and one of my more
personal poems had been discovered and pinned up on the public notice
board in ‘Writing School.’ This was the living-room of the members of
the lower school, into which, as a member of the upper school, I was
not allowed to go, and so could not rescue the poem. Raymond was the
first person I had been able to talk to humanly. He was indignant, and
took my arm in his in the gentlest way. ‘They are bloody barbarians,’
he said. He told me that I must pull myself together and do something
about it, because I was a good poet, he said, and a good person. I
loved him for that. He said: ‘You’re not allowed to play football; why
don’t you box? It’s supposed to be good for the heart.’ So I laughed
and said I would. Then Raymond said: ‘I expect they rag you about
your initials.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they call me a dirty German.’ ‘I had
trouble, too,’ he said, ‘before I took up boxing.’ Raymond’s mother was
Scottish, his father was an Austrian Pole.
Very few boys at Charterhouse boxed and the boxing-room, which was over
the school confectionery shop, was a good place to meet Raymond, whom,
otherwise, I would not have been able to see often. I began boxing
seriously and savagely. Raymond said to me: ‘You know these cricketers
and footballers are all afraid of boxers, almost superstitious.
They won’t box themselves for fear of losing their good looks—the
inter-house competitions every year are such bloody affairs. But do you
remember the Mansfield, Waller and Taylor show? That’s a good tradition
to keep up.’
Of course I remembered. Two terms previously there had been a meeting
of the school debating society which I had attended. The committee
of the debating society was usually made up of sixth-form boys; the
debates were formal and usually dull, but in so far as there was any
intellectual life at Charterhouse, it was represented by the debating
society—and by _The Carthusian_, always edited by two members of this
committee; both institutions were free from influence of the masters.
Debates were always held in the school library on Saturday night.
One debate night the usual decorous conventions were broken by an
invasion of ‘the bloods.’ The bloods were the members of the cricket
and football elevens. They were the ruling caste at Charterhouse;
the eleventh man in the football eleven, though a member of the
under-fourth form, had a great deal more prestige than the most
brilliant classical scholar in the sixth. Even ‘Head of the School’ was
an empty title. There was not, however, an open warfare between
the sixth-form intellectuals and the bloods. The bloods were stupid
and knew it, and had nothing to gain by a clash; the intellectuals
were happy to be left alone. So this invasion of the bloods, who had
just returned from winning a match against the _Casuals_, and had
probably been drinking, caused the debating society a good deal of
embarrassment. The bloods disturbed the meeting by cheers and cat-cries
and slamming the library magazine-folders on the table. Mansfield, as
president of the society, called them to order, but they continued
the disturbance; so Mansfield closed the debate. The bloods thought
the incident finished, but it was not. A letter appeared in _The
Carthusian_ a few days later protesting against the bad behaviour in
the debating society of ‘certain First Eleven babies.’ Three sets of
initials were signed and they were those of Mansfield, Waller and
Taylor. The school was astonished by this suicidally daring act; it
waited for Korah, Dathan and Abiram to be swallowed up. The captain of
football is said to have sworn that he’d chuck the three signatories
into the fountain in Founder’s Court. But somehow he did not. The fact
was that this happened early in the autumn term and there were only
two other First Eleven colours left over from the preceding year; new
colours were only given gradually as the football season advanced. The
other rowdies had only been embryo bloods. So it was a matter entirely
between these three sixth-form intellectuals and the three colours of
the First Eleven. And the First Eleven were uncomfortably aware that
Mansfield was the heavy-weight boxing champion of the school, Waller
the runner-up for the middle-weights, and that Taylor was also a person
to be reckoned with (a tough fellow, though not perhaps a boxer—I
forget). While the First Eleven were wondering what on earth to do
their three opponents decided to take the war into the enemy’s country.
The social code of Charterhouse was based on a very strict caste
system; the caste-marks were slight distinctions in dress. A new
boy had no privileges at all; a boy in his second term might wear a
knitted tie instead of a plain one; a boy in his second year might
wear coloured socks; third year gave most of the privileges—turned
down collars, coloured handkerchiefs, a coat with a long roll, and so
on; fourth year, a few more, such as the right to get up raffles; but
very peculiar and unique distinctions were reserved for the bloods.
These included light grey flannel trousers, butterfly collars, coats
slit up the back, and the privilege of walking arm-in-arm. So the next
Sunday Mansfield, Waller and Taylor did the bravest thing that was ever
done at Charterhouse. The school chapel service was at eleven in the
morning, but the custom was for the school to be in its seats by five
minutes to eleven and to sit waiting there. At two minutes to eleven
the bloods used to stalk in; at one and a half minutes to came the
masters; at one minute to came the choir in its surplices; then the
headmaster arrived and the service started. If any boy was accidentally
late and sneaked in between five minutes to and two minutes to the
hour, he was followed by six hundred pairs of eyes; there was nudging
and giggling and he would not hear the last of it for a long time; it
was as though he were pretending to be a blood. On this Sunday, then,
when the bloods had come in with their usual swaggering assurance, an
extraordinary thing happened.
The three sixth-formers slowly walked up the aisle magnificent in grey
flannel trousers, slit coats, First Eleven collars, and with pink
carnations in their buttonholes. It is impossible to describe the
astonishment and terror that this spectacle caused. Everyone looked at
the captain of the First Eleven; he had gone quite white. But by this
time the masters had come in, followed by the choir, and the opening
hymn, though raggedly sung, ended the tension. When chapel emptied
it always emptied according to ‘school order,’ that is, according to
position in work; the sixth form went out first. The bloods were not
high in school order, so Mansfield, Waller and Taylor had the start of
them. After chapel on Sunday the custom in the winter terms was for
people to meet and gossip in the school library; so it was here that
Mansfield, Waller and Taylor went. They had buttonholed a talkative
master and drawn him with them into the library, and there they kept
him talking until dinnertime. If the bloods had had courage to do
anything desperate they would have had to do it at once, but they
could not make a scene in the presence of a master. Mansfield, Waller
and Taylor went down to their houses for dinner still talking to the
master. After this they kept together as much as possible and the
school, particularly the lower school, which had always chafed under
the dress regulations, made heroes of them, and began scoffing at the
bloods as weak-kneed.
Finally the captain of the eleven was stupid enough to complain to
the headmaster about this breach of school conventions, asking for
permission to enforce First Eleven rights by disciplinary measures. The
headmaster, who was a scholar and disliked the games tradition, refused
his request. He said that the sixth form deserved as distinctive
privileges as the First Eleven. The sixth form would therefore in
future be entitled to hold what they had assumed. After this the
prestige of the bloods declined greatly.
At Raymond’s encouragement I pulled myself together and my third
year found things very much easier for me. My chief persecutor,
the Irishman, had left. It was said that he had had a bad nervous
breakdown. He wrote me a hysterical letter, demanding my forgiveness
for his treatment of me, saying at the same time that if I did not give
this forgiveness, one of his friends (whom he mentioned) was still in
the house to persecute me. I did not answer the letter. I do not know
what happened to him. The friend never bothered.
VIII
I still had no friends except among the junior members of the house,
to whom I did not disguise my dislike of the seniors; I found the
juniors were on the whole a decent lot of fellows. Towards the end of
this year, in the annual boxing and gymnastic display, I fought three
rounds with Raymond. There is a lot of sex feeling in boxing—the dual
play, the reciprocity, the pain not felt as pain. This exhibition match
to me had something of the quality that Dr. Marie Stopes would call
sacramental. We were out neither to hurt nor win though we hit each
other hard.
This public appearance as a boxer improved my position in the house.
And the doctor now allowed me to play football again and I played
it fairly well. Then things started going wrong in a different way.
It began with confirmation, for which I was prepared by a zealous
evangelical master. For a whole term I concentrated all my thoughts on
religion, looking forward to the ceremony as a spiritual climax. When
it came, and the Holy Ghost did not descend in the form of a dove, and
I did not find myself gifted with tongues, and nothing spectacular
happened (except that the boy whom the Bishop of Zululand was blessing
at the same time as myself slipped off the narrow footstool on which
we were both kneeling), I was bound to feel a reaction. Raymond had
not been confirmed, and I was astonished to hear him admit and even
boast that he was an atheist. I argued with him about the existence of
God and the divinity of Christ and the necessity of the Trinity. He
said, of the Trinity, that anybody who could agree with the Athanasian
creed that ‘whoever will be saved must confess that there are not Three
Incomprehensibles but One Incomprehensible’ was saying that a man
must go to Hell if he does not believe something that is by definition
impossible to understand. He said that his respect for himself as a
reasonable being did not allow him to believe such things. He also
asked me a question: ‘What’s the good of having a soul if you have a
mind. What’s the function of the soul? It seems a mere pawn in the
game.’ I was shocked, but because I loved him and respected him I felt
bound to find an answer. The more I thought about it the less certain I
became that he was wrong. So in order not to prejudice religion (and I
put religion and my chances of salvation before human love) I at first
broke my friendship with Raymond entirely. Later I weakened, but he
would not even meet me, when I approached him, with any broad-church
compromise. He was a complete and ruthless atheist and I could not
appreciate his strength of spirit. For the rest of our time at
Charterhouse we were not as close as we should have been. I met Raymond
in France in 1917, when he was with the Irish Guards; I rode over to
see him one afternoon and felt as close to him as I had ever felt. He
was killed at Cambrai not long after.
My feeling for Raymond was more comradely than amorous. In my fourth
year an even stronger relationship started. It was with a boy three
years younger than myself, who was exceptionally intelligent and
fine-spirited. Call him Dick, because his real name was the same as
that of another person in the story. He was not in my house, but
I had recently joined the school choir and so had he, and I had
opportunities for speaking to him occasionally after choir practice.
I was unconscious of sexual feeling for him. Our conversations were
always impersonal. Our acquaintance was commented on and I was warned
by one of the masters to end it. I replied that I would not have
my friendships in any way limited. I pointed out that this boy
was interested in the same things as myself, particularly in books;
that the disparity in our ages was unfortunate, but that a lack of
intelligence among the boys of my own age made it necessary for me to
find friends where I could. Finally the headmaster took me to task
about it. I lectured him on the advantage of friendship between elder
and younger boys, citing Plato, the Greek poets, Shakespeare, Michael
Angelo and others, who had felt the same way as I did. He let me go
without taking any action.
In my fifth year I was in the sixth form and was made a house-monitor.
There were six house-monitors. One of them was the house games-captain,
a friendly, easy-going fellow. He said to me one day: ‘Look here,
Graves, I have been asked to send in a list of competitors for the
inter-house boxing competition; shall I put your name down?’ I had not
boxed for two terms. I had been busy with football and played for the
house-team now. And since my coolness with Raymond boxing had lost its
interest. I said: ‘I’m not boxing these days.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘young
Alan is entering for the welter-weights. He’s got a very good chance.
Why don’t you enter for the welter-weights too? You might be able to
damage one or two of the stronger men and make it easier for him.’ I
did not particularly like the idea of making things easier for Alan,
but I obviously had to enter the competition. I had a reputation to
keep up. I knew, however, that my wind, though all right for football,
was not equal to boxing round after round. I decided that my fights
must be short. The night before the competition I smuggled a bottle of
cherry-whisky into the house. I would shorten the fights on that.
I had never drank anything alcoholic before in my life. When I was
seven years old I was prevailed on to sign the pledge. My pledge card
bound me to abstain by the grace of God from all spirituous liquors
so long as I retained it. But my mother took the card from me and put
it safely in the box-room with the Jacobean silver inherited from my
Cheyne grandmother, Bishop Graves’ diamond ring which Queen Victoria
gave him when he preached before her, our christening mugs, and the
heavy early-Victorian jewellery bequeathed to my mother by the old lady
whom she had looked after. And since box-room treasures never left the
box-room, I regarded myself as permanently parted from my pledge. I
liked the cherry-whisky a lot.
The competitions started about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon
and went on until seven. I was drawn for the very first fight and my
opponent by a piece of bad luck was Alan. Alan wanted me to scratch.
I said I thought that it would look bad to do that. We consulted the
house games-captain and he said: ‘No, the most sporting thing to do
is to box it out and let the decision be on points; but don’t either
of you hurt each other.’ So we boxed. Alan started showing off to
his friends, who were sitting in the front row. I said: ‘Stop that.
We’re boxing, not fighting,’ but a few seconds later he hit me again
unnecessarily hard. I got angry and knocked him out. This was the first
time I had ever knocked anyone out and I liked the feeling. I had drank
a lot of cherry-whisky. I rather muzzily realized that I had knocked
him out with a right swing on the side of the neck and that this blow
was not part of the ordinary school-boxing curriculum. Straight lefts;
lefts to body, rights to head; left and right hooks; all these were
known, but the swing was somehow neglected, probably because it was not
so ‘pretty.’
I went to the changing-room for my coat, and stout Sergeant Harris,
the boxing instructor, said: ‘Look here, Mr. Graves, why don’t you put
down your name for the middle-weight competition too?’ I cheerfully
agreed. Then I went back to the house and had a cold bath and more
cherry-whisky. My next fight was to take place in about half an hour
for the first round of the middle-weights. This time my opponent,
who was a stone heavier than myself but had little science, bustled
me about for the first round, and I could see that he would tire me
out unless something was done. In the second round I knocked him down
with my right swing, but he got up again. I was feeling tired, so
hastened to knock him down again. I must have knocked him down four or
five times that round, but he refused to take the count. I found out
afterwards that he was, like myself, conscious that Dick was watching
the fight. He loved Dick too. Finally I said to myself as he lurched
towards me again: ‘If he doesn’t go down and stay down this time, I
won’t be able to hit him again at all.’ This time I just pushed at his
jaw as it offered itself to me, but that was enough. He did go down and
he did stay down. This second knock-out made quite a stir. Knock-outs
were rare in the inter-house boxing competition. As I went back to the
house for another cold bath and some more cherry-whisky I noticed the
fellows looking at me curiously.
The later stages of the competition I do not remember well. The only
opponent that I was now at all concerned about was Raymond, who
was nearly a stone heavier than myself and was expected to win the
middle-weights; but he had also tried for two weights, the middle and
the heavy, and had just had such a tough fight with the eventual winner
of the heavy-weights that he was in no proper condition to fight. So he
scratched his fight with me. I believe that he would have fought
all the same if it had been against someone else; but he was still fond
of me and wanted me to win. His scratching would give me a rest between
my bouts. A semifinalist scratched against me in the welter-weights, so
I only had three more fights, and I let neither of these go beyond the
first round. The swing won me both weights, for which I was given two
silver cups. But it had also broken both my thumbs; I had not got my
elbow high enough over when I used it.
The most important thing that happened to me in my last I two years,
apart from my attachment to Dick, was that I got to know George
Mallory. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven then, not long up from
Cambridge. He was so young looking that he was often mistaken for a
member of the school. From the first he treated me as an equal, and
I used to spend my spare time reading books in his room or going for
walks with him in the country. He told me of the existence of modern
authors. My father being two generations older than myself and my
only link with books, I had never heard of people like Shaw, Samuel
Butler, Rupert Brooke, Wells, Flecker, or Masefield, and I was greatly
interested in them. It was at George Mallory’s rooms that I first met
Edward Marsh, who has always been a good friend to me, and with whom,
though we seldom see each other now, I have never fallen out: in this
he is almost unique among my pre-war friends. Marsh said that he liked
my poems, which George had showed him, but pointed out that they were
written in the poetic vocabulary of fifty years ago and that, though
the quality of the poem was not necessarily impaired by this, there
would be a natural prejudice in my readers against work written in 1913
in the fashions of 1863.
George Mallory, Cyril Hartmann, Raymond, and I published a
magazine in the summer of 1913 called _Green Chartreuse_. It was only
intended to have one number; new magazines at a public school always
sell out the first number and lose heavily on the second. From _Green
Chartreuse_ I quote one of my own contributions, of autobiographical
interest, written in the school dialect:
My New-Bug’s Exam.
When lights went out at half-past nine in the evening of the second
Friday in the Quarter, and the faint footfalls of the departing
House-Master were heard no more, the fun began.
The Plead of Under Cubicles constituted himself examiner
and executioner, and was ably assisted by a timekeeper, a
question-recorder, and a staff of his disreputable friends. I
was a timorous ‘new-bug’ then, and my pyjamas were damp with the
perspiration of fear. Three of my fellows had been examined and
sentenced before the inquisition was directed against me.
‘It’s Jones’ turn now,’ said a voice. ‘He’s the little brute that
hacked me in run-about to-day. We must set him some tight questions!’
‘I say, Jones, what’s the colour of the House-Master—I mean what’s
the name of the House-Master of the House, whose colours are black
and white? One, two, three....’
‘Mr. Girdlestone,’ my voice quivered in the darkness.
‘He evidently knows the simpler colours. We’ll muddle him. What are
the colours of the Clubs to which Block Houses belong? One, two,
three, four....’
I had been slaving at getting up these questions for days, and just
managed to blurt out the answer before being counted out.
‘Two questions. No misses. We must buck up,’ said someone.
‘I say, Jones, how do you get to Farncombe from Weekites? One, two,
three....’
I had only issued directions as far as Bridge before being counted
out.
‘Three questions. One miss. You’re allowed three misses out of ten.’
‘Where is Charterhouse Magazine? One, two, three, four....’
‘Do you mean _The Carthusian_ office?’ I asked.
Everyone laughed.
‘Four questions. Two misses. I say, Robinson, he’s answered far too
many. We’ll set him a couple of stingers.’
Much whispering.
‘What is the age of the horse that rolls Under Green? One, two,
three....’
‘Six!’ I said, at a venture.
‘Wrong; thirty-eight. Six questions. Three misses! Think yourself
lucky you weren’t asked its pedigree.’
‘What are canoeing colours? One, two, thr ...’
‘There aren’t any!’
‘You’ll get cocked-up for festivity; but you can count it. Seven
questions. Three misses. Jones?’
‘Yes!’
‘What was the name of the girl to whom rumour stated that last year’s
football secretary was violently attached? One, two, three, four....’
‘Daisy!’ (It sounded a likely name.)
‘Oh really! Well, I happen to know last year’s football secretary;
and he’ll simply kill you for spreading scandal. You’re wrong anyhow.
Eight questions. Four misses!’
‘You’ll come to my “cube” at seven to-morrow morning. See? Good
night!’
Here he waved his hair-brush over the candle, and a colossal shadow
appeared on the ceiling.
The Poetry Society died about this time—and this is how it died. Two
of its sixth-form members came to a meeting and each read a rather
dull and formal poem about love and nature; none of us paid much
attention to them. But the following week they were published in _The
Carthusian_, and soon every one was pointing and giggling. Both poems,
which were signed with pseudonyms, were acrostics, the initial letters
spelling out a ‘case.’ ‘Case’ meant ‘romance,’ a formal coupling of two
boys’ names, with the name of the elder boy first. In these two cases
both the first names mentioned were those of bloods. It was a foolish
act of aggression in the feud between sixth form and the bloods. But
nothing much would have come of it had not another of the sixth-form
members of the Poetry Society been in love with one of the smaller
boys whose names appeared in the acrostics. In rage and jealousy he
went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic—which
otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed.
He pretended that he did not know the authors; but though he had not
been at the particular meeting where the poems were read, he could
easily have guessed them from the styles. Before things had taken this
turn I had incautiously told someone who the authors were; so I was
now dragged into the row as a witness against them. The headmaster
took a very serious view of the case. The two poets were deprived of
their monitorial privileges; the editor of _The Carthusian_, who,
though aware of the acrostics, had accepted the poems, was deprived
of his editorship and of his position as head of the school. The
informer, who happened to be next in school order, succeeded him in
both capacities; he had not expected this development and it made him
most unpopular. His consolation was a real one, that he had done it
all for love, to avenge the public insult done to the boy. And he was
a decent fellow, really. The Poetry Society was dissolved in disgrace
by the headmaster’s orders. Guy Kendall was one of the few masters
who insisted on treating the boys better than they deserved, so I was
sorry for him when this happened; it was an ‘I told you so’ for the
other masters, who did not believe either in poetry or in school uplift
societies. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kendall; the meetings of
the Poetry Society were all that I had to look forward to when things
were at their worst for me.
My last year at Charterhouse I devoted myself to doing everything I
could to show how little respect I had for the school tradition. In
the winter of 1913 I won a classical exhibition at St. John’s College,
Oxford, so that I could go slow on school work. Nevill Barbour and
I were editing the _Carthusian_, and a good deal of my time went in
that. Nevill, who as a scholar had met the same sort of difficulties
as myself, also had a dislike of most Charterhouse traditions. We
decided that the most objectionable tradition of all was compulsory
games. Of these cricket was the most objectionable, because it wasted
most time in the best part of the year. We began a campaign in favour
of tennis. We were not seriously devoted to tennis, but it was the
best weapon we had against cricket—the game, we wrote, in which the
selfishness of the few was supposed to excuse the boredom of the
many. Tennis was quick and busy. We asked Old Carthusian tennis
internationalists to contribute letters proposing tennis as the manlier
and more vigorous game. We even got the famous Anthony Wilding to
write. The games-masters were scandalized at this assault on cricket;
to them tennis was ‘pat ball,’ a game for girls. But the result of our
campaign was surprising. Not only did we double our sales, but a fund
was started for providing the school with a number of tennis-courts and
making Charterhouse the cradle of public-school tennis. Though delayed
by the war, these courts actually appeared. I noticed them recently as
I went past the school in a car; there seemed to be plenty of them. I
wonder, are there tennis-bloods at Charterhouse now?
Poetry and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered. My
life with my fellow house-monitors was one of perpetual discord. I had
grudges against them all except the house-captain and the head-monitor.
The house-captain, the only blood in the house, spent most of his time
with his fellow bloods in other houses. The head-monitor was a scholar
who, though naturally a decent fellow, had been embittered by his first
three years in the house and was much on his dignity. He did more or
less what the other monitors wanted him to do, and I was sorry that I
had to lump him in with the rest. My love for Dick provoked a constant
facetiousness, but they never dared to go too far. I once caught one
of them in the bathroom scratching up a pair of hearts conjoined, with
Dick’s initials and mine on them. I pushed him into the bath and turned
the taps on. The next day he got hold of a manuscript note-book of mine
that I had left on the table in the monitors’ room with some other
books. It had poems and essay notes in it. He and the other monitors,
except the house-captain, annotated it critically in blue chalk and all
signed their initials. The house-captain would have nothing to do
with this: he thought it ungentlemanly. I was furious when I found what
had been done. I made a speech. I demanded a signed apology. I said
that if I were not given it within an hour I would choose one of them
as solely responsible and punish him. I said that I would now have a
bath and that the first monitor that I met after my bath I would knock
down.
Whether by accident or whether it was that he thought his position
made him secure, the first monitor I met in the corridor was the
head-monitor. I knocked him down. It was the time of evening
preparation, which only the monitors were free not to attend. But a fag
happened to pass on an errand and saw the blow and the blood; so it
could not be hushed up. The head-monitor went to the house-master and
the house-master sent for me. He was an excitable, elderly man who had
some difficulty in controlling his spittle when angry. He made me sit
down in a chair in his study, then stood over me, clenching his fists
and crying in his high falsetto voice: ‘Do you realize you have done a
very brutal action?’ His mouth was bubbling. I was as angry as he was.
I jumped up and clenched my fists too. Then I said that I would do the
same thing to anyone who, after scribbling impertinent remarks on my
private papers, refused to apologize. ‘Private papers. Filthy poems,’
said the house-master.
I had another difficult interview with the headmaster over this. But
it was my last term, so he allowed me to finish my five years without
ignominy. He was puzzled by the frankness of my statement of love
for Dick. He reopened the question. I refused to be ashamed. I heard
afterwards that he had said that this was one of the rare cases of a
friendship between boys of unequal ages which he felt was essentially
moral. I went through one of the worst quarters of an hour of my
life on Dick’s account in this last term. When the master had warned
me about exchanging glances with Dick in chapel I had been infuriated.
But when I was told by one of the boys that he had seen the master
surreptitiously kissing Dick once, on a choir-treat or some such
occasion, I went quite mad. I asked for no details or confirmation. I
went to the master and told him he must resign or I would report the
case to the headmaster. He already had a reputation in the school for
this sort of thing, I said. Kissing boys was a criminal offence. I was
morally outraged. Probably my sense of outrage concealed a murderous
jealousy. I was surprised when he vigorously denied the charge; I could
not guess what was going to happen next. But I said: ‘Well, come to
the headmaster and deny it to him.’ He asked: ‘Did the boy tell you
this himself?’ I said ‘No.’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I’ll send for him
here and he shall tell us the truth.’ So Dick was sent for and arrived
looking very frightened, and the house-master said menacingly: ‘Graves
tells me that I once kissed you. Is that true?’ Dick said: ‘Yes, it
is true.’ So Dick was dismissed and the master collapsed, and I felt
miserable. He said he would resign at the end of the term, which was
quite near, on grounds of ill-health. He even thanked me for speaking
directly to him and not going to the headmaster. That was in the summer
of 1914; he went into the army and was killed the next year. I found
out much later from Dick that he had not been kissed at all. It may
have been some other boy.
One of the last events that I remember at Charterhouse was a debate
with the motion that ‘this House is in favour of compulsory military
service.’ The Empire Service League, or whatever it was called, of
which Earl Roberts of Kandahar, V.C., was the President, sent
down a propagandist to support the motion. There were only six votes
out of one hundred and nineteen cast against it. I was the principal
speaker against the motion, a strong anti-militarist. I had recently
resigned from the Officers’ Training Corps, having revolted against the
theory of implicit obedience to orders. And during a fortnight spent
the previous summer at the O.T.C. camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain,
I had been frightened by a special display of the latest military
fortifications, barbed-wire entanglements, machine-guns, and field
artillery in action. General, now Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson,
whose son was a member of the school, had visited the camp and
impressed upon us that war against Germany was inevitable within two
or three years, and that we must be prepared to take our part in it as
leaders of the new forces that would assuredly be called into being. Of
the six voters against the motion Nevill Barbour and I are, I believe,
the only ones who survived the war.
My last memory was the headmaster’s good-bye. It was this: ‘Well,
good-bye, Graves, and remember this, that your best friend is the
waste-paper basket.’
I used to speculate on which of my contemporaries would distinguish
themselves after they left school. The war upset my calculations.
Many dull boys had brief brilliant military careers, particularly as
air-fighters, becoming squadron and flight commanders. ‘Fuzzy’ McNair,
the head of the school, won the V.C. as a Rifleman; young Sturgess,
who had been my study fag, distinguished himself more unfortunately
by flying the first heavy bombing machine of a new pattern across the
Channel on his first trip to France and making a beautiful landing
(having mistaken the landmarks) at an aerodrome behind the German
lines. A boy whom I admired very much during my first year at
Charterhouse was the Hon. Desmond O’Brien. He was the only Carthusian
in my time who cheerfully disregarded all school rules. He had skeleton
keys for the school library, chapel and science laboratories and used
to break out of his house at night and carefully disarrange things
there. The then headmaster was fond of O’Brien and forgave him much.
O’Brien had the key of the headmaster’s study too and, going there one
night with an electric torch, carried off a memorandum which he showed
me—‘Must expel O’Brien.’ He had a wireless receiving-station in one
of the out-of-bounds copses on the school grounds, and he discovered
a ventilator shaft down which he could hoot into the school library
from outside and create great disturbance without detection. One day
we were threatened with the loss of a Saturday half-holiday because
some member of the school had killed a cow with a catapult, and nobody
would own up. O’Brien had fired the shot; he was away at the time on
special leave for a sister’s wedding. A friend wrote to him about the
half-holiday. He sent the headmaster a telegram: ‘Killed cow sorry
coming O’Brien.’ At last, having absented himself from every lesson and
chapel for three whole days, he was expelled. He was killed early in
the war while bombing Bruges.
At least one in three of my generation at school was killed. This was
because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them
in the infantry and flying corps. The average life of the infantry
subaltern on the Western front was, at some stages of the war, only
about three months; that is to say that at the end of three months he
was either wounded or killed. The proportions worked out at about four
wounded to every one killed. Of the four one was wounded seriously and
the remaining three more or less lightly. The three lightly wounded
returned to the front after a few weeks or months of absence and were
again subject to the same odds. The flying casualties were even higher.
Since the war lasted for four and a half years, it is easy to see why
the mortality was so high among my contemporaries, and why most of the
survivors, if not permanently disabled, were wounded at least two or
three times.
Two well-known sportsmen were contemporaries of mine: A. G. Bower,
captain of England at soccer, who was only an average player at
Charterhouse, and Woolf Barnato, the Surrey cricketer (and millionaire
racing motorist), who also was only an average player. Barnato was in
the same house as myself and we had not a word to say to each other
for the four years we were together. Five scholars have made names for
themselves: Richard Hughes as a B.B.C. playwright; Richard Goolden as
an actor of old-man parts; Vincent Seligman as author of a propagandist
life of Venizelos; Cyril Hartmann as an authority on historical French
scandals; and my brother Charles as society gossip-writer on the middle
page of _The Daily Mail_. Occasionally I see another name or two in the
newspapers. There was one the other day—M ... who was in the news for
escaping from a private lunatic asylum. I remembered that he had once
offered a boy ten shillings to hold his hand in a thunderstorm and that
he had frequently threatened to run away from Charterhouse.
IX
George Mallory did something better than lend me books, and that
was to take me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacations. I knew
Snowdon very well from a distance, from my bedroom window at Harlech.
In the spring its snow cap was the sentimental glory of the landscape.
The first time I went with George to Snowdon we stayed at the Snowdon
Ranger Hotel at Quellyn Lake. It was January and the mountain was
covered with snow. We did little rock-climbing, but went up some good
snow slopes with rope and ice-axe. I remember one climb the objective
of which was the summit; we found the hotel there with its roof blown
off in the blizzard of the previous night. We sat by the cairn and
ate Carlsbad plums and liver-sausage sandwiches. Geoffrey Keynes, the
editor of the _Nonesuch Blake_, was there; he and George, who used to
go drunk with excitement at the end of his climbs, picked stones off
the cairn and shied them at the chimney stack of the hotel until they
had sent it where the roof was.
George was one of the three or four best climbers in climbing history.
His first season in the Alps had been spectacular; nobody had expected
him to survive it. He never lost his almost foolhardy daring; yet
he knew all that there was to be known about climbing technique.
One always felt absolutely safe with him on the rope. George went
through the war as a lieutenant in the artillery, but his nerves were
apparently unaffected—on his leaves he went rock-climbing.
When the war ended he was more in love with the mountains than ever.
His death on Mount Everest came five years later. No one knows whether
he and Irvine actually made the last five hundred yards of the
climb or whether they turned back or what happened; but anyone who
had climbed with George felt convinced that he did get to the summit,
that he rejoiced in his accustomed way and had not sufficient reserve
of strength left for the descent. I do not think that it was ever
mentioned in the newspaper account of his death that George originally
took to climbing when he was a scholar at Winchester as a corrective to
his weak heart.
George was wasted at Charterhouse, where, in my time at least, he was
generally despised by the boys because he was neither a disciplinarian
nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his classes
in a friendly way and that puzzled and offended them. There was a
tradition in the school of concealed warfare between the boys and the
masters. It was considered no shame to cheat, to lie, or to deceive
where a master was concerned; yet to do the same to a member of the
school was immoral. George was also unpopular with the house-masters
because he refused to accept this state of war and fraternized with the
boys whenever he could. When two house-masters who had been unfriendly
to him happened to die within a short time of each other he joked to
me: ‘See, Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face.’ I always
called him by his Christian name, and so did three or four more of his
friends in the school. This lack of dignity in him put him beyond the
pale both with the boys and the masters. Eventually the falseness of
his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four
or five boys in the school who were, like him, out of their element,
and befriended them and made life tolerable for them. Before the final
Everest expedition he had decided to resign and do educational work at
Cambridge with, I believe, the Workers’ Educational Association. He
was tired of trying to teach gentlemen to be gentlemen.
I spent a season with George and a large number of climbers at the
hotel at Pen-y-Pass on Snowdon in the spring of 1914. This time it
was real precipice-climbing, and I was lucky enough to climb with
George, with H. E. L. Porter, a renowned technician of climbing, with
Kitty O’Brien and with Conor O’Brien, her brother, who afterwards
made a famous voyage round the world in a twenty-ton or five-ton or
some even-less-ton boat. Conor climbed principally, he told us, as a
corrective to bad nerves. He used to get very excited when any slight
hitch occurred; his voice would rise to a scream. Kitty used to chide
him: ‘Ach, Conor, dear, have a bit of wit,’ and Conor would apologize.
Conor, being a sailor, used to climb in bare feet. Often in climbing
one has to support the entire weight of one’s body on a couple of
toes—but toes in stiff boots. Conor said that he could force his naked
toes farther into crevices than a boot would go.
But the most honoured climber there was Geoffrey Young. Geoffrey had
been climbing for a number of years and was president of the Climbers’
Club. I was told that his four closest friends had all at different
times been killed climbing; this was a comment on the extraordinary
care with which he always climbed. It was not merely shown in his
preparations for a climb—the careful examination, foot by foot, of the
alpine rope, the attention to his boot-nails and the balanced loading
of his knapsack—but also in his cautiousness in the climbing itself.
Before making any move he thought it out foot by foot, as though it
were a problem in chess. If the next handhold happened to be just a
little out of his reach or the next foothold seemed at all unsteady
he would stop and think of some way round the difficulty. George used
sometimes to get impatient, but Geoffrey refused to be hurried. He
was short, which put him at a disadvantage in the matter of reach. He
was not as double-jointed and prehensile as Porter or as magnificent
as George, but he was the perfect climber. And still remains so. This
in spite of having lost a leg while serving with a Red Cross unit on
the Italian front. He climbs with an artificial leg. He has recently
published the only satisfactory text-book on rock-climbing. I was very
proud to be on a rope with Geoffrey Young. He said once: ‘Robert, you
have the finest natural balance that I have ever seen in a climber.’
This compliment pleased me far more than if the Poet Laureate had told
me that I had the finest sense of rhythm that he had ever met in a
young poet.
It is quite true that I have a good balance; once, in Switzerland, it
saved me from a broken leg or legs. My mother took us there in the
Christmas holidays of 1913–14, ostensibly for winter sports, but really
because she thought that she owed it to my sisters to give them a
chance to meet nice young men of means. About the third day that I put
on skis I went up from Champéry, where we were staying and the snow was
too soft, to Morgins, a thousand feet higher, where it was like sugar.
Here I found an ice-run for skeleton-toboggans. Without considering
that skis have no purchase on ice at all, I launched myself down it.
After a few yards my speed increased alarmingly and I suddenly realized
what I was in for. There were several sharp turns in the run protected
by high banks, and I had to trust entirely to body-balance in swerving
round them. I reached the terminus still upright and had my eyes damned
by a frightened sports-club official for having endangered my life
on his territory.
In an essay on climbing that I wrote at the time, I said it was a
sport that made all others seem trivial. ‘New climbs or new variations
of old climbs are not made in a competitive spirit, but only because
it is satisfactory to stand somewhere on the earth’s surface where
nobody else has stood before. And it is good to be alone with a
specially chosen band of people—people that one can trust completely.
Rock-climbing is one of the most dangerous sports possible, unless one
keeps to the rules; but if one does keep to the rules it is reasonably
safe. With physical fitness in every member of the climbing team, a
careful watch on the weather, proper overhauling of climbing apparatus,
and with no hurry, anxiety or stunting, climbing is much safer than
fox-hunting. In hunting there are uncontrollable factors, such as
hidden wire, holes in which a horse may stumble, caprice or vice in
the horse. The climber trusts entirely to his own feet, legs, hands,
shoulders, sense of balance, judgment of distance.’
The first climb on which I was taken was up Crib-y-ddysgel. It was a
test climb for beginners. About fifty feet up from the scree, a height
that is really more frightening than five hundred, because death is
almost as certain and much more immediate, there was a long sloping
shelf of rock, about the length of an ordinary room, to be crossed from
right to left. It was without handholds or footholds worth speaking of
and too steep to stand upright or kneel on without slipping. It shelved
at an angle of, I suppose, forty-five or fifty degrees. The accepted
way to cross it was by rolling in an upright position and trusting to
friction as a maintaining force. Once I got across this shelf without
disaster I felt that the rest of the climb was easy. The climb was
called The Gambit. Robert Trevelyan, the poet, was given this test in
the previous season, I was told, and had been unlucky enough to fall
off. He was pulled up short, of course, after a few feet by the rope
of the leader, who was well belayed; but the experience disgusted him
with climbing and he spent the rest of his time on the mountains just
walking about.
♦ “Crib-y-ddysgel” replaced with “Crib-y-ddysgl”
Belaying means making fast on a projection of rock a loop of the rope
which is wound round one’s waist, and so disposing the weight of the
body that, if the climber above or below happens to slip and fall, the
belay will hold and the whole party will not go down together. Alpine
rope has a breaking point of a third its own length. Only one member of
the climbing team is moving at any given time, the others are belayed.
Sometimes on a precipice it is necessary to move up fifty or sixty
feet before finding a secure belay as a point from which to start the
next upward movement, so that if the leader falls and is unable to put
on a brake in any way he must fall more than twice that length before
being pulled up. On the same day I was taken on a spectacular though
not unusually difficult climb on Crib Goch. At one point we traversed
round a knife-edge buttress. From this knife-edge a pillar-like bit of
rock, technically known as a monolith, had split away. We scrambled up
the monolith, which overhung the valley with a clear five hundred feet
drop, and each in turn stood on the top and balanced. The next thing
was to make a long, careful stride from the top of the monolith to the
rock face; here there was a ledge just wide enough to take the toe of
a boot, and a handhold at convenient height to give an easy pull-up to
the next ledge. I remember George shouting down from above: ‘Be careful
of that foothold, Robert. Don’t chip the edge off or the climb will
be impossible for anyone who wants to do it again. It’s got to last
another five hundred years at least.’
I was only in danger once. I was climbing with Porter on an
out-of-the-way part of the mountain. The climb, known as the Ribbon
Track and Girdle Traverse, had not been attempted for about ten years.
About half-way up we came to a chimney. A chimney is a vertical fissure
in the rock wide enough to admit the body; a crack is only wide enough
to admit the boot. One works up a chimney sideways with back and knees,
but up a crack with one’s face to the rock. Porter was leading and
fifty feet above me in the chimney. In making a spring to a handhold
slightly out of reach he dislodged a pile of stones that had been
wedged in the chimney. They rattled down and one rather bigger than a
cricket ball struck me on the head and knocked me out. Fortunately I
was well belayed and Porter was already in safety. The rope held me up;
I recovered my senses a few seconds later and was able to continue.
The practice of Pen-y-Pass was to have a leisurely breakfast and lie in
the sun with a tankard of beer before starting for the precipice foot
in the late morning. Snowdon was a perfect mountain for climbing. The
rock was sound and not slippery. And once you came to the top of any
of the precipices, some of which were a thousand feet high, but all
just climbable one way or another, there was always an easy way to run
down. In the evening when we got back to the hotel we lay and stewed in
hot baths. I remember wondering at my body—the worn fingernails, the
bruised knees, and the lump of climbing muscle that had begun to bunch
above the arch of the foot, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this
new purpose. My worst climb was on Lliwedd, the most formidable of
the precipices, when at a point that needed most concentration a raven
circled round the party in great sweeps. This was curiously unsettling,
because one climbs only up and down, or left and right, and the raven
was suggesting all the diverse possibilities of movement, tempting us
to let go our hold and join him.
X
I was at Harlech when war was declared; I decided to enlist a day
or two later. In the first place, though only a very short war was
expected—two or three months at the very outside—I thought that it
might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October,
which I dreaded. I did not work out the possibilities of being actively
engaged in the war. I thought that it would mean garrison service
at home while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I
entirely believed that France and England had been drawn into a war
which they had never contemplated and for which they were entirely
unprepared. It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen
could lie. I forgot my pacifism—I was ready to believe the worst
of the Germans. I was outraged to read of the cynical violation of
Belgian neutrality. I wrote a poem promising vengeance for Louvain.
I discounted perhaps twenty per cent, of the atrocity details as
war-time exaggeration. That was not, of course, enough. Recently I
saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings quoted somewhere in
chronological sequence:
‘When the fall of Antwerp got known the church bells were rung’
(_i.e._ at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany).—_Kölnische Zeitung_.
‘According to the _Kölnische Zeitung_, the clergy of Antwerp were
compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken.’—_Le
Matin_ (Paris.)
‘According to what _The Times_ has heard from Cologne, via
Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the
church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard
labour.’—_Carriere della Sera_ (Milan.)
‘According to information to the _Carriere della Sera_ from Cologne,
via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp
punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to
ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells
with their heads down.’—_Le Matin_ (Paris.)
When I was in the trenches a few months later I happened to belong to a
company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a
coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One
of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it
off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy.
As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s
only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because
he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four
uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of
my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them.
I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral commanding at the
Nore.’
Among my enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, who was the same age
as myself, and the son of the German consul at Zurich. In January
1914 I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above
the city. We had tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zurich
itself, where the lampposts were all sandbagged and family toboggans,
skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by
single-seater skeletons; arms and legs were broken by the score and the
crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian
regiment all through the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’ Order, which
was more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. He was killed
by the Bolsheviks after the war in a village on the Baltic where he
had been sent to make requisitions. He was a gentle, proud creature,
whose chief interest was natural history. He used to spend hours in the
woods studying the habits of wild animals; he felt strongly against
shooting them. Perhaps the most outstanding military feat was that of
an uncle who was dug out at the age of sixty or so as a lieutenant in
the Bavarian artillery. My youngest brother met him a year or two ago
and happened to mention that he was going to visit Rheims. My uncle
nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. I was there with my battery
in the war. One day the divisional general came up to me and said:
“Lieutenant, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Catholic?”
I said that this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable
service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten swine, the
French, are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think
they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but this is
war and they have our trenches taped from there. So I call upon you
to dislodge them.” I only needed to fire two rounds and down came the
pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. It was a very neat bit of shooting.
I was proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must go
and have a look at it.’
The nearest regimental depot was at Wrexham: the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
The Harlech golf secretary suggested my taking a commission instead
of enlisting. He rang up the adjutant and said that I was a
public-school boy who had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at
Charterhouse. So the adjutant said: ‘Send him right along,’ and on 11th
August I started my training. I immediately became a hero to my family.
My mother, who said to me: ‘My race has gone mad,’ regarded my going as
a religious act; my father was proud that I had ‘done the right thing.’
I even recovered, for a time, the respect of my uncle, C. L. Graves, of
_The Spectator_ and _Punch_, with whom I had recently had a tiff. He
had given me a sovereign tip two terms previously and I had written my
thanks, saying that with it I had bought Samuel Butler’s _Note Books_,
_The Way of All Flesh_ and the two _Erewhons_. To my surprise this had
infuriated him.
The fellows who applied for commissions at the same time as myself
were for the most part boys who had recently failed to pass into the
Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were trying to get into the
regular army by the old militia door—which was now known as the Special
Reserve. There were only one or two fellows who had gone into the army,
like myself, for the sake of the war and not for the sake of a career.
There were about a dozen of us recruit officers on the Square learning
to drill and be drilled. My Officers’ Training Corps experience made
this part easy, but I knew nothing about army traditions and made all
the worst mistakes; saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the
colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt and talking
shop in the mess. But I soon learned to conform. My greatest difficulty
was to talk to men of the company to which I was posted with the
necessary air of authority. Many of them were old soldiers re-enlisted,
and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. There were one
or two very old soldiers employed on the depot staff, wearing the
ribbon of Burma, 1885, and of even earlier campaigns, and usually also
the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’ or good service medal awarded for eighteen
years of undetected crime. There was one old fellow called Jackie
Barrett, a Kipling character, of whom it was said: ‘There goes Jackie
Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment in Quetta and
went across the north-west frontier on foot. Three months later he gave
himself up as a deserter to the British consul at Jerusalem. He buried
his chum by the way.’
I was on the square only about three weeks before being sent off on
detachment duty to Lancaster to a newly-formed internment camp for
enemy aliens. The camp was a disused wagon-works near the river, a
dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap-metal and guarded with
high barbed-wire fences. There were about three thousand prisoners
already there and more and more piled in every day; seamen arrested on
German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from big hotels in the
north, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers
and shopkeepers. The prisoners were resentful at being interned,
particularly those who were married and had families and had lived
peaceably in England for years. The only comfort that we could give was
that they were safer inside than out; anti-German feeling was running
high, shops with German names were continually being raided and even
German women were made to feel that they were personally responsible
for the Belgian atrocities. Besides, we said, if they were in Germany
they would be forced into the army. At this time we made a boast of
our voluntary system. We did not know that there would come a time
when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted
Englishmen because they were safe until the war ended.
In the summer of 1915 _The Times_ reprinted in the daily column,
_Through German Eyes_, a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an
exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. _The
Times_ found very amusing Herr Wolff’s allegations that he and forty
other waiters from the Midland Hotel, Manchester, had been arrested
and taken, handcuffed _and fettered_, in special railway carriages to
Lancaster under the escort of fifty Manchester policemen armed with
carbines. But it was true, because I was the officer who took them over
from the chief inspector. He was a fine figure in frogged uniform and
gave me a splendid salute. I signed him a receipt for his prisoners and
he gave me another salute. He had done his job well and was proud of
it. The only mishap was the accidental breaking of two carriage windows
by the slung carbines. Wolff also said that even children were interned
in the camp. This was true. There were a dozen or so little boys from
the German bands who had been interned because it seemed more humane to
keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. Their
safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.
I had a detachment of fifty Special Reservists, most of them with only
about six weeks’ service. They had joined the army just before war
started as a cheap way of getting a holiday at the training camp; to
find themselves forced to continue beyond the usual fortnight annoyed
them. They were a rough lot, Welshmen from the border counties, and
were constantly deserting and having to be fetched back by the police.
They made nervous sentries, and were probably more frightened of the
prisoners than the prisoners were of them. Going the round of sentries
on a dark night about 2 a.m. was dangerous. Very often my lantern used
to blow out and I would fumble to light it again in the dark and
hear the frightened voice of a sentry roar out, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’
and know that he was standing with his rifle aimed and his magazine
charged with five live rounds. I used to gasp out the password just
in time. Rifles were often being fired off at shadows. The prisoners
were a rowdy lot; the sailors particularly were always fighting. I saw
a prisoner spitting out teeth and blood one morning. I asked him what
was wrong. ‘Oh, sir, one no-good friend give me one clap on the chops.’
Frequent deputations were sent to complain of the dullness of the food;
it was the same ration food that was served to the troops. But after
a while they realized the war and settled down to sullen docility;
they started hobbies and glee parties and games and plans for escape.
I had far more trouble with my men. They were always breaking out of
their quarters. I could never find out how they did it. I watched all
the possible exits, but caught no one. Finally I discovered that they
used to crawl out through a sewer. They boasted of their successes with
the women. Private Kirby said to me: ‘Do you know, sir? On the Sunday
after we arrived, all the preachers in Lancaster took as their text,
“Mothers, take care of your daughters; the Royal Welch have come to
town.”’
The camp staff consisted of:
A fatherly colonel of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, the
commandant.
His secretary, by name C. B. Gull, one of the best-known pre-war
figures in Oxford, owner of the _Isis_, and combined divinity,
athletics and boxing coach. We used to box together to keep fit. He
also sponsored me as a candidate for the local lodge of The Royal
Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. The Grand Marshal who officiated at
my initiation had drank four or five pints of ‘bitter-gatter’ and
a glass or two of ‘juniper’ (these were secret words) and continually
short-circuited in the ritual. He kept on returning to the part where
they intone:
Grand Marshal: Spirit of true Buffaloism hover around I us!
Response: Benevolence and joy ever attend us!
The assistant-commandant, who alleged that he had ten years more
seniority than any other major in the British army and made wistful
jokes about his lost virility. His recurrent theme was: ‘If you only
knew how much that would mean to an old man like me.’
The adjutant, an East Lancashire lieutenant, by name Deane. The day
after war was declared a German armed cruiser had held up the neutral
liner in which he was sailing home from the Cape and taken him off. He
was forced to give his parole not to fight against Germany in the war.
The cruiser was subsequently sunk by a British ship, the _Highflyer_,
and Deane was rescued; but the signed parole was saved by the German
captain, who escaped in a boat and gave it in charge of the German
consul at Las Palmas. So Deane was forbidden the trenches, and when I
met him in 1917 he was a staff-colonel.
A doctor who was the mess buffoon. I broke the scabbard of my sword on
his back one night.
The interpreter, a Thomas Cook man who could speak every European
language but Basque. He admitted to a weakness in Lithuanian, and when
asked what his own nationality was would answer, ‘I am Wagon-Lits.’
I had an inconvenient accident. The telephone bell was constantly going
from Western Command Headquarters; it was installed in an office-room
where I slept on a sloping desk. One night Pack-Saddle (the
code-name for the Chief Supply Officer of the Western Command) rang
up shortly after midnight with orders for the commandant. They were
about the rationing of a batch of four hundred prisoners who were
being sent up to him from Chester and North Wales. I was half asleep
and not clever at the use of the telephone. In the middle of the
conversation, which was difficult because a storm was going on at the
time and Pack-Saddle was irritable, the line was, I suppose, struck by
lightning somewhere. I got a bad electric shock, and was unable to use
a telephone properly again until some twelve years later.
Guarding prisoners seemed an unheroic part to be playing in the
war, which had now reached a critical stage; I wanted to be abroad
fighting. My training had been interrupted, and I knew that even when
I was recalled from detachment duty I would have to wait a month or
two at least before being sent out. When I got back to the depot in
October I found myself stale. The adjutant, a keen soldier, decided
that there were two things wrong with me. First of all, I dressed
badly. I had apparently gone to the wrong tailor, and had also had a
soldier-servant palmed off on me who was no good. He did not polish
my buttons and shine my belt and boots as he should have done, and
neglected me generally; as I had never had a valet before I did not
know how to manage him or what to expect of him. The adjutant finally
summoned me to the Orderly Room and threatened that he would not send
me to France until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked
more like a soldier. My company commander, he said, had reported me to
him as ‘unsoldierlike and a nuisance.’ This put me in a fix, because my
pay only just covered the mess bills, and I knew that I could not ask
my parents to buy me another outfit so soon after I had assured
them that I had everything necessary. The adjutant next decided that
I was not a sportsman. This was because on the day that the Grand
National (I think) was run all the young officers applied for leave
to see the race except myself, and I volunteered to take the job of
Orderly Officer of the Day for someone who wanted to go.
I saw my contemporaries one by one being sent out to France to take
the place of casualties in the First and Second Battalions, while I
remained despondently at the depot. But once more boxing was useful.
Johnny Basham, a sergeant in the regiment, was training at the time
for his fight (which he won) with Boswell for the Lonsdale Belt,
welter-weight. I went down to the training camp one evening, where
Basham was offering to fight three rounds with any member of the
regiment, the more the merrier. One of the officers put on the gloves
and Basham got roars of laughter from the crowd as soon as he had taken
his opponent’s measure, by dodging about and playing the fool with
him. I asked Basham’s manager if I could have a go. He gave me a pair
of shorts and I stepped into the ring. I pretended that I knew nothing
about boxing. I led off with my right and moved about clumsily. Basham
saw a chance of getting another laugh; he dropped his guard and danced
about with a you-can’t-hit-me challenge. I caught him off his balance
and knocked him across the ring. He recovered and went for me, but I
managed to keep on my feet; I laughed at him and he laughed too. We had
three very brisk rounds, and he was decent in making it seem that I
was a much better boxer than I was by accommodating his pace to mine.
As soon as the adjutant heard the story he rang me up at my billet
and told me that he was very pleased to hear of my performance,
that for an officer to box like that was a great encouragement to the
men, that he was mistaken about my sportsmanship, and that to show his
appreciation he had put me down for a draft to go to France in a week’s
time.
Of the officers who had been sent out before me several had already
been killed or wounded. Among the killed was Second-Lieutenant W. G.
Gladstone, whom we called Glad Eyes. He was in his early thirties; a
grandson of old Gladstone, whom he resembled in feature, a Liberal
M.P., and lord-lieutenant of his county. When war was hanging in the
balance he had declared himself against it. His Hawarden tenantry were
ashamed on his account, and threatened, he told us, to duck him in
the pond. Realizing, once war was declared, that further protest was
useless, he immediately joined the regiment as a second-lieutenant. His
political convictions remained. He was a man of great integrity and
refused to take the non-combative employment as a staff-colonel offered
him at Whitehall. When he went to France to the First Battalion he
took no care of himself. He was killed by a sniper when unnecessarily
exposing himself. His body was brought home for a military funeral at
Hawarden; I attended it.
I have one or two random memories of this training period at Wrexham.
The landlord of my billet was a Welsh solicitor, who greatly
overcharged us while pretending amicability. He wore a wig—or, to
be more exact, he had three wigs, with hair of progressive lengths.
When he had worn the medium-sized hair for a few days he would put on
the wig with long hair, and say that, dear him, it was time to get a
hair-cut. Then he would go out of the house and in a public lavatory
perhaps or a wayside copse would change into the short-haired wig,
which he wore until it was time to change to the medium one again.
This deception was only discovered when one of the officers billeted
with me got drunk and raided his bedroom. This officer, whose name
was Williams, was an extreme example of the sly border Welshman. The
drunker he got the more shocking his confessions. He told me one day
about a girl he had got engaged to in Dublin, and even slept with
on the strength of a diamond engagement ring. ‘Only paste really,’
he said. The day before the wedding she had had a foot cut off by a
Dalkey tram, and he had hurriedly left the city. ‘But, Graves, she was
a lovely, lovely girl before that happened.’ He had been a medical
student at Trinity College, Dublin. Whenever he went to Chester, the
nearest town, to pick up a prostitute, he not only used to appeal to
her patriotism to charge him nothing, but he always gave her my name.
I knew of this because these women used to write to me. One day I said
to him in mess: ‘In future you are going to be distinguished from all
the other Williams’ in the regiment by being called Dirty Williams.’
The name stuck. By one shift or another he escaped all trench-service
except for a short spell in a quiet sector, and lasted the war out
safely.
Private Robinson. He was from Anglesey, and had joined the Special
Reserve before the war for his health. In September the entire
battalion volunteered for service overseas except Robinson. He said he
would not go, and that he could be neither coaxed nor bullied. Finally
he was brought before the colonel, who was genuinely puzzled at his
obstinacy. Robinson explained that he was not afraid. ‘I have a wife
and pigs at home.’ The battalion was, in September, rigged out in a
temporary navy-blue uniform until khaki might be available. All but
Robinson. They decided to shame him. So he continued, by order, to
wear the peace-time scarlet tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe;
a very dirty scarlet tunic (they had put him on the kitchen staff). His
mates called him Cock Robin and sang a popular chorus at him:
And I never get a knock
When the boys call Cock
Cockity ock, cock,
Cock Robin!
In my old red vest I mean to cut a shine....
But Robinson did not care:
For the more they call me Robin Redbreast
I’ll wear it longer still.
I will wear a red waistcoat, I will,
I will, I will, I will, I will, I will![1]
So in October he was discharged as medically unfit: ‘Of under-developed
intelligence, unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces,’
and went home to his wife and pigs. While, of the singers, those who
survived Festubert in the following May did not survive Loos in the
following September.
Recruit officers spent a good deal of their time at Company and
Battalion Orderly Room, learning how to deal with crime. Crime,
of course, meant any breach of army regulations; and there was plenty
of it. In these days Battalion Orderly Room would last four or five
hours every day, at the rate of one crime dealt with every three or
four minutes.; This was apart from the scores of less serious offences
tried by company commanders. The usual Battalion Orderly Room crimes
were desertion, refusing to obey an order, using obscene language to a
non-commissioned officer, drunk and disorderly, robbing a comrade, and
so on. On pay-nights there was hardly a man sober; and no attention was
paid so long as there was silence as soon as the company officer came
on his rounds just before Lights Out. (Two years later serious crime
had diminished to a twentieth of that amount, though the battalion was
treble its original strength, and though many of the cases that the
company officers had dealt with summarily now came before the colonel;
and there was practically no drunkenness.)
There was a boy called Taylor in my company. He had been at Lancaster,
and I had bought him a piccolo to play when the detachment went out
on route-marches; he would give us one tune after another for mile
after mile. The other fellows carried his pack and rifle. At Wrexham,
on pay-nights, he used to sit in the company billet, which was a
drill-hall near the station, and play jigs for the drunks to dance to.
He never drank himself. The music was slow at first, but he gradually
quickened it until he worked them into a frenzy. He would delay this
climax until my arrival with the company orderly-sergeant. The sergeant
would fling open the door and bellow: ‘F Company, Attention!’ Taylor
would break off, thrust the piccolo under his blankets, and spring to
his feet. The drunks were left frozen in the middle of their capers,
blinking stupidly.
In the first Battalion Orderly Room that I attended I was
surprised to hear a private soldier charged with a nursery offence,
about the committal of which expert evidence was given and heard
without a smile. I have an accurate record of the trial but my
publishers advise me not to give it here.
Orderly Room always embarrassed and dispirited me. I never got used to
it even after sentencing thousands of men myself. There was something
shameful about it. The only change that the introduction of the
civilian element into the army brought was that about half-way through
the war an army order came out that henceforth the word of command was
to be ‘Accused and escort, right turn, quick march,’ etc., instead of
‘Prisoner and escort, right turn, quick march, etc.’ It was only very
seldom that an interesting case came up. Even the obscene language,
always quoted verbatim, was drearily the same; the only variation I
remember from the four stock words was in the case of a man charged
with using threatening and obscene language to an N.C.O. The man had,
it appeared, said to a lance-corporal who had a down on him: ‘Corporal
Smith, two men shall meet before two mountains.’ Humour only came from
the very Welsh Welshmen from the hills who had an imperfect command of
English. One of them, charged with being absent off ceremonial parade
and using obscene language to the sergeant, became very indignant in
Orderly Room and cried out to the colonel: ‘Colonel, sir, sergeant tole
me wass I for guard; I axed him no, and now the bloody bastard says
wass I.’
The greatest number of simultaneous charges that I ever heard preferred
against a soldier was in the case of Boy Jones at Liverpool in 1917.
He was charged with, first, using obscene language to the bandmaster;
the bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: ‘Sir, he called
me a double effing c——.’ Next, with breaking out of the detention that
was awarded for this crime. Third, with ‘absenting himself from the
regiment until apprehended in the Hindenburg Line, France.’ Fourth,
with resisting an escort. Fifth, with being found in possession of
regimental property of the Cheshire Regiment. Boy Jones, who was only
fourteen and looked thirteen, had wriggled through the bars of his
detention-cell and, after getting a few things together at his hut, had
gone to Liverpool Exchange Station to wait for a victim. The victim was
a private in a Bantam Battalion just returning to France from leave.
He treated the bantam to a lot of drink and robbed him of his rifle,
equipment, badges and papers. He then went off in his place. Arrived
in France he was posted to the Bantam Battalion; but this did not suit
him. He wanted to be with his own regiment. He deserted the Bantams,
who were somewhere north of Arras, and walked south along the trenches
looking for his regiment, having now resumed his proper badges. After a
couple of days’ walk he found the Second Battalion and reported and was
immediately sent home, though he had a struggle with the escort at the
railhead. The punishment for all these offences was ten days confined
to camp and a spanking from the bandmaster.
The most unusual charge was against the regimental goat-major (a
corporal); it was first framed as _Lese majesty_, but this was later
reduced to ‘disrespect to an officer: in that he, at Wrexham—on such
and such a date—did prostitute the Royal Goat, being the gift of
His Majesty the Colonel-in-Chief from His royal herd at Windsor, by
offering his stud-services to ——, Esq., farmer and goat breeder, of
Wrexham.’ The goat-major pleaded that he had done this out of
kindness to the goat, to which he was much attached. He was reduced to
the ranks and the charge of the goat given to another.
The regular battalions of the regiment, though officered mainly by
Anglo-Welshmen of county families, did not normally contain more than
about one Welshman in fifty in the ranks. They were mainly recruited
in Birmingham. The only man at Harlech besides myself who had joined
the regiment at the start was a poor boy, a golf-caddie, who had got
into trouble a short time before for shoplifting. The chapels held
soldiering to be sinful, and in Merioneth the chapels were supreme.
Prayers were offered for me in the chapels, not because of the dangers
I ran in the war, but because I was in the army. Later, Lloyd George
persuaded the chapels that the war was a crusade. So there was a sudden
tremendous influx of Welshmen from North Wales. They were difficult
soldiers; they particularly resented having to stand still while the
N.C.O.’s swore at them. A deputation of North Welshmen came to me once
and said: ‘Captain Graves, sir, we do not like our sergeant-major; he
do curse and he do swear, and he do drink, and he is a maan of lowly
origin, too.’
At Wrexham we learned regimental history, drill, musketry, Boer War
field-tactics, military law and organization, how to recognize bugle
calls, how to work a machine-gun, and how to conduct ourselves as
officers on formal occasions. We dug no trenches, handled no bombs and
came to think of the company, not of the platoon, still less of the
section, as the smallest independent tactical unit. There were only
two wounded officers back from the front at the time; both had left
the Second Battalion on the retreat from Mons. Neither would talk much
of his experiences. All that one of them, Emu Jones, would tell
us was: ‘The first queer sight I saw in France was three naked women
hanging by their feet in a butcher’s shop.’ The other would say: ‘The
shells knock hell out of a man, especially the big black ones. Just
hell. And that fellow Emu; he wasn’t any good. We marched and marched
and he had a weak heart and used to faint and expect his poor, bloody
platoon to carry him as well as the rest of their load. We used to
swear he was shamming. Don’t believe what old Emu tells you of the
retreat.’
XI
I will try to recall my war-time feelings about the Royal Welch
Fusiliers. I used to congratulate myself on having chosen, quite
blindly, this of all regiments. ‘Good God!’ I used to think, ‘suppose
that when the war broke out I had been living in Cheshire and had
applied for a commission in the Cheshire Regiment.’ I thought how
ashamed I should have been to find in the history of that regiment
(which was the old Twenty-second Foot, just senior in the line to the
Royal Welch, which was the Twenty-third) that it had been deprived
of its old title ‘The Royal Cheshires’ as a punishment for losing
a battle. Or how lucky not to have joined the Bedfords. Though the
Bedfords had made a name for themselves in this war, they were still
called ‘The Peacemakers.’ For they only had four battle-honours on
their colours and none of these more recent than the year 1711; it was
a sneer that their regimental motto was: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Even
the Black Watch, the best of the Highland regiments, had a stain on
its record; and everyone knew about it. If a Tommy of another regiment
went into a public bar where men of the Black Watch were drinking, and
felt brave enough to start a fight, he would ask the barmaid not for
‘pig’s ear,’ which is rhyming-slang for beer, but for a pint of ‘broken
square.’ Then belts would be unbuckled.
The Royal Welch record was beyond reproach. There were twenty-nine
battle-honours on its colours, a number only equalled by two other
two-battalion regiments. And the Royal Welch had the advantage of these
since they were not single regiments, but recent combinations of two
regiments each with its separate history. The First Battalion of
the Royal Welch Fusiliers had twenty-six battle-honours of its own, the
remaining three having been won by the Second Battalion in its short
and interrupted existence. They were all good bloody battle-honours,
none of them like that battle of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
into which, it was said, they had gone with nine hundred men and from
which they had come out with nine hundred and one—no casualties, and
a band-boy come of age and promoted a private. For many hard battles,
such as The Boyne and Aughrim and the capture of Lille, the Royal Welch
had never been honoured. The regiment had fought in each of the four
hardest fought victories of the British army, as listed by Sir John
Fortescue. My regimental history is rusty, but I believe that they
were The Boyne, Malplaquet, Albuhera and Inkerman. That is three out
of four. It may have been Salamanca or Waterloo instead of The Boyne.
It was also one of the six Minden regiments and one of the front-line
regiments at that. They performed the unprecedented feat of charging a
body of cavalry many times their own strength and driving it off the
field. The surrender at York Town in the American War of Independence
was the regiment’s single disaster, but even that was not a disgrace.
It was accorded the full honours of war. Its conduct in the hard
fighting at Lexington, at Guildford Court House, and in its suicidal
advance up Bunker’s Hill, had earned it them.
I caught the sense of regimental tradition a day or two after I arrived
at the depot. In a cupboard in the junior anteroom at the mess, I
came across a big leather-bound ledger and pulled it out to see what
it was about. It was the Daily Order-book of the First Battalion in
the trenches before Sebastopol. I opened it at the page giving orders
for the attack on the Redan Fort. Such and such a company was
desired to supply volunteers for the storming party under Lieutenant
So-and-so. There followed details of their arms and equipment, the
number of ladders they were to carry, and the support to be afforded
by other companies. Then details of rations and supply of ammunition,
with an earnest Godspeed from the commanding officer. (A sketch of the
commanding officer was on the wall above my head, lying sick in his
tent at Scutari, wearing a cap-comforter for the cold.) And the next
entries were about clearing up after an unsuccessful attack—orders for
the burial of the dead, thanks from headquarters for the gallantry
vainly displayed, and a notice that the effects of the late Lieutenant
So-and-so, who had led the storming party, would be sold at public
auction in the trenches next day. In another day’s orders was the
notice of the Victoria Cross awarded to Sergeant Luke O’Connor. He had
lived to be Lieutenant-General Sir Luke O’Connor and was now colonel of
the regiment.
The most immediate piece of regimental history that I met as a
recruit-officer was the flash. The flash is a fan-like bunch of five
black ribbons, each ribbon two inches wide and seven and a half inches
long; the angle at which the fan is spread is exactly regulated by
regimental convention. It is stitched to the back of the tunic collar.
Only the Royal Welch are privileged to wear it. The story is that the
Royal Welch were abroad on foreign service for several years in the
1830’s, and by some chance never received the army order abolishing
the queue. When the regiment returned and paraded at Plymouth the
inspecting general rated the commanding officer because his men were
still wearing their hair in the old fashion. The commanding officer,
angry with the slight, immediately rode up to London and won from
King William IV, through the intercession of some Court official,
the regimental privilege of continuing to wear the bunch of ribbons
in which the end of the queue was tied—the flash. It was to be a
distinctive badge worn by all ranks in reward for the regiment’s
exemplary service in the Napoleonic wars.
The Army Council, which is usually composed of cavalry, engineer, and
artillery generals, with the infantry hardly represented, had never
encouraged regimental peculiarities, and perhaps could not easily
forget the irregularity of the colonel’s direct appeal to the Sovereign
in the matter of the flash. The flash was, at any rate, not sanctioned
by the Army Council on the new khaki service dress. None the less,
the officers and warrant-officers continued to wear it. There was a
correspondence in the early stages of the war, I was told, between the
regiment and the Army Council. The regiment maintained that since the
flash was a distinctive mark won in war it should be worn with service
dress and not merely with peace-time scarlet. The Army Council put
forward the objection that it was a distinctive mark for enemy marksmen
and particularly dangerous when worn only by officers. The regiment
retorted by inquiring on what occasion since the retreat from Corunna,
when the regiment was the last to leave Spain, with the key of the town
postern in the pocket of one of its officers, had any of His Majesty’s
enemies seen the back of a Royal Welch Fusilier? The Army Council was
firm, but the regiment was obstinate, and the matter was in abeyance
throughout the war. Once in 1917, when an officer of my company went to
Buckingham Palace to be decorated with the Military Cross, the King,
as colonel-in-chief of the regiment, showed a personal interest in the
matter. He asked: ‘You are serving in one of the line battalions?’
‘The Second Battalion, Your Majesty.’ So the King gave him the order:
‘About turn,’ and looked at the flash, and then ‘About turn’ again.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘you’re still wearing it, I see,’ and then, in a stage
whisper: ‘Don’t ever let anyone take it from you.’ The regiment was
delighted. After the war, when scarlet was abandoned on the grounds
of expense, the Army Council saw that it could reasonably sanction
the flash on service dress for all ranks. As an additional favour
it consented to recognize another defiant regimental peculiarity,
the spelling of the word ‘Welch’ with a ‘c’. The permission was
published in a special Army Order in 1919. The _Daily Herald_ commented
‘’Strewth!’ as if it were unimportant. That was ignorance. The spelling
with a ‘c’ was as important to us as the miniature cap-badge worn at
the back of the cap was to the Gloucesters (a commemoration of the time
when they fought back to back: was it at Quatre Bras?). I have seen a
young officer sent off battalion parade because his buttons read Welsh
instead of Welch. ‘Welch’ referred us somehow to the antique North
Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower and Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
the founder of the regiment; it dissociated us from the modern North
Wales of chapels, liberalism, the dairy and drapery business, Lloyd
George, and the tourist trade.
The regiment was extremely strict on the standard measurements of the
flash. When new-army battalions were formed and rumours came to Wrexham
that in, I think, the Eighteenth Battalion officers were wearing
flashes nearly down to their waists, there was great consternation. The
adjutant sent off the youngest subaltern on a special mission to the
camp of the Eighteenth Battalion, the colonel of which was not a Royal
Welch Fusilier, but a loan from one of the Yorkshire regiments. He
was to present himself at the Battalion Orderly Room with a large pair
of shears.
The new-army battalions were as anxious to be regimental as the line
battalions. It once happened in France that a major of the Royal
Fusiliers entered the mess of the Nineteenth (Bantam) Battalion of
the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He greeted the mess with ‘Good afternoon,
gentlemen,’ and called for a drink from the mess sergeant. After he
had talked for a bit he asked the senior officer present: ‘Do you know
why I ordered that drink from the mess sergeant?’ The Welch Fusilier
said: ‘Yes, you wanted to see if we remembered about Albuhera.’ The
Royal Fusilier answered: ‘Well, our mess is just along behind that wood
there. We haven’t forgotten either.’ After Albuhera the few survivors
of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Royal Fusiliers had messed
together on the captured hill. It was then decided that henceforth and
for ever the officers of each regiment were honorary members of the
other’s mess, and the N.C.O.’s the same.
Perhaps the most legendary item was Thomas Atkins. He was a private
soldier in the First Battalion who had served under Wellington in the
Peninsular War. It is said that when, many years later, Wellington
at the War Office was asked to approve a specimen form for military
attestation, he had ordered it to be amended from: ‘I, Private John Doe
of the blank regiment, do hereby, etc.,’ to ‘I, Private Thomas Atkins
of the Twenty-third Foot, do hereby, etc.’ And now I am going to spoil
the story, because I cannot for the life of me remember what British
grenadierish conduct it was that made Wellington remember. And so here
ends my very creditable (after eleven years) lyrical passage.
I was, as a matter of fact, going on to St. David’s Night. To
the raw leeks eaten to the roll of the drum with one foot on a chair
and one on the mess table enriched with spoils of the Summer Palace
at Pekin. (They are not at all bad to eat raw, despite Shakespeare.)
And to the Royal Goat with gilded horns that once leapt over the mess
table with the drummerboy on its back. And Major Toby Purcell’s Golden
Spurs. And Shenkin Ap Morgan, the First Gentleman of Wales. And ‘The
British Grenadiers,’ the regimental march-past. I was going to explain
that British grenadiers does not mean, as most people think, merely
the Grenadier Guards. It includes all regiments, the Royal Welch among
them, which wear a bursting grenade as a collar and cap-badge to recall
their early employment as storm troops armed with bombs.
In the war the Royal Welch Fusiliers grew too big; this damaged
regimental _esprit de corps_. Before the war there were the two line
battalions and the depot; the affiliated and flash-less territorials,
four battalions recruited for home service, could be disregarded, in
spite of their regular adjutants. The Third Battalion, which trained at
the depot, was a poor relation. Now more and more new-army battalions
were added (even a Twenty-fifth Battalion was on service in 1917, and
was as good a battalion as the Eighth). So the regiment (that is,
consensus of opinion in the two line battalions) only tentatively
accepted the new-army battalions one by one as they proved themselves
worthy, by service in the field. The territorials it never accepted,
disowning them contemptuously as ‘dog-shooters.’ The fact was that
three of the four territorial battalions failed signally in the Suvla
Bay landing at Gallipoli. One battalion, it was known, had offered
violence to its officers; the commanding officer, a regular, had not
cared to survive that day. Even the good work that these battalions
did later in Palestine could not cancel this disgrace. The
remaining territorial battalion was attached to the First Division
in France early in 1915, where, at Givenchy, it quite unnecessarily
lost its machine-guns. Regimental machine-guns in 1915 were regarded
almost as sacred. To lose one’s machine-guns before the annihilation
of the entire battalion was considered as bad as losing the regimental
colours would have been in any eighteenth or nineteenth-century
battle. The machine-gun officer had congratulated himself on removing
the machine-gun bolts before abandoning the guns; it would make them
useless to the enemy. But he had forgotten to take away the boxes of
spare-parts. The Second Battalion made a raid in the same sector a year
and a half later and recaptured one of the guns, which had been busy
against the British trenches ever since.
As soon as we arrived at the depot we Special Reserve officers were
reminded of our great good fortune. We were to have the privilege of
serving with one or the other of the line battalions. In peace-time a
candidate for a commission in the regiment had not only to distinguish
himself in the passing-out examination at the Royal Military College,
Sandhurst, and be strongly recommended by two officers of the regiment,
but he had to have a guaranteed independent income that enabled him to
play polo and hunt and keep up the social reputation of the regiment.
These requirements were not insisted on; but we were to understand that
we did not belong to the ‘regiment’ in the special sense. To be allowed
to serve with it in time of war should satisfy our ambitions. We were
not temporary officers, like those of the new army, but held permanent
commissions in the Special Reserve battalion. We were reminded that
the Royal Welch considered themselves second to none, even to the
Guards. Representations had been made to the regiment after the
South African War, inquiring whether it was willing to become the
Welsh Guards, and it had indignantly refused; such a change would have
made the regiment junior, in the Brigade of Guards, even to the Irish
Guards only so recently formed. We were warned that while serving with
a line battalion we were none of us to expect to be recommended for
orders or decorations. An ordinary campaigning medal inscribed with
a record of service with the battalion should be sufficient reward.
Decorations were not regarded in the regiment as personal awards, but
as representative awards for the whole battalion. They would therefore
be reserved for the professional soldiers, to whom they would be more
useful than to us as helps to extra-regimental promotion. And this
was what happened. There must have been something like two or three
hundred Special Reserve officers serving overseas. But except for three
or four who were not directly recommended by the battalion commander,
but distinguished themselves while attached to brigade or divisional
staffs, or those who happened to be sent to new-army battalions or
other regiments, we remained undecorated. I can only recall three
exceptions. The normal proportion of awards, considering the casualties
we suffered, which was about sixty or seventy killed, should have been
at least ten times that amount. I myself never performed any feat for
which I might conceivably have been decorated throughout my service in
France.
The regimental spirit persistently survived all catastrophes. Our First
Battalion, for instance, was annihilated within two months of joining
the British Expeditionary Force. Young Orme, who joined straight from
Sandhurst, at the crisis of the first battle of Ypres, found himself
commanding a battalion reduced to only about forty rifles. With
these and another small force, the remnants of the Second Battalion of
the Queen’s Regiment, reduced to thirty men and two officers, he helped
to recapture three lines of lost trenches and was himself killed.
The reconstituted battalion, after heavy fighting at Bois Grenier
in December, was again all but annihilated at the Aubers Ridge and
Festubert in the following May, and again at Loos in September, when
the one officer-survivor of the attack was a machine-gun officer loaned
from the South Staffordshire Regiment. The same sort of thing happened
time after time in fighting at Fricourt, the Quadrangle, High Wood,
Delville Wood, and Ginchy on the Somme in 1916, and again at Puisieux
and Bullecourt in the spring fighting of 1917. In the course of the
war at least fifteen or twenty thousand men must have passed through
each of the two line battalions, whose fighting strength was never more
than eight hundred. After each catastrophe the ranks were filled up
with new drafts from home, with the lightly wounded from the previous
disaster returning after three or four months’ absence, and with the
more seriously wounded returning after nine months or a year.
In the First and Second Battalions throughout the war it was not merely
the officers and non-commissioned officers who knew their regimental
history. The men knew far more about Minden and Albuhera and Waterloo
than they did about the fighting on the other fronts or the official
causes of the war.
XII
In 1916, when on leave in England after being wounded on the Somme, I
began an account of my first few months in France. Unfortunately, I
wrote it as a novel and I have now to retranslate it into history. I
will give one reconstituted chapter:
On arrival in France we six Royal Welch Fusilier officers went
to the Harfleur base-camp near Havre. Later it was to become an
educational centre for trench-routine, use of bombs, trench-mortars,
rifle-grenades, gas-helmets, and similar technicalities. But now we did
a route-march or two through the French countryside and that was all,
except for fatigues in Havre at the docks, helping the Army Service
Corps unload stores from ships. The town was gay. As soon as we had
arrived we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their
sisters. ‘I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good jig-a-jig.
Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne
for me?’ We were glad when we got orders to go up the line. But
disgusted to find ourselves attached not to the Royal Welch Fusiliers,
but to the Welsh Regiment.
We had heard little about the Welsh Regiment except that it was
tough but rough, and that the Second Battalion, to which we were now
attached, had a peculiar regimental history as the old Sixty-ninth
Foot. It had originally been formed as an emergency force from
pensioners and boy-recruits and sent overseas to do the work of a
regular battalion—I forget in which eighteenth-century campaign. At one
time it had served as marines. The Ups and Downs was the battalion’s
army nick-name, partly because 69 is a number which makes the same
sense whichever way up it is written. The 69 was certainly
upside-down when we joined it. All the company officers except two boys
recently from Sandhurst and a Special Reserve captain were attached
from other regiments. There were now six Royal Welch Fusiliers, two
South Wales Borderers, two East Surreys, two Wiltshires, one from the
Border Regiment, one from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Even
the quartermaster was an alien from the Connaught Rangers. There were
perhaps four time-serving N.C.O.’s left in the battalion. Of the men,
not more than fifty or so had been given more than a couple of months’
training before being sent out; some had only three weeks’ training;
a great many had never fired a musketry course. This was because the
First Division had been in constant hard fighting since the previous
August; the Second Welsh had in eight months lost its full fighting
strength five times over. The last occasion was the Richebourg fighting
of 9th May, one of the worst disasters of the early part of the war;
the division’s epitaph in the official _communiqué_ read: ‘Meeting
with considerable opposition in the direction of the Rue du Bois, our
attacks were not pressed.’
The Welsh ranks had been made up first with reservists of the later
categories, then with re-enlisted men, then with Special Reservists of
pre-war enlistment, then with 1914 recruits of three or four months’
training; but each class had in turn been exhausted. Now nothing
was left to send but recruits of the spring 1915 class, and various
sweepings and scourings. The First Battalion had, meanwhile, had the
same heavy losses. In Cardiff they advertised: ‘Enlist at the depot and
get to France quick.’ The recruits were principally men either over-age
or under-age—a repetition of regimental history—or men who had some
slight physical disability which prevented them from enlisting
in regiments more particular than the Welsh. I still have the roll of
my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are
misleading. When they enlisted all the over-age men had put themselves
in the late thirties and all the under-age men had called themselves
eighteen. But once in France the over-age men did not mind adding on
a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age
as forty or over and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in
civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David
Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another
collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior
to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was even older than
these. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me,
sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of
my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry course
at the depot?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man and I had only a
fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I
asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said.
‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist but they
told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier when I was in
Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp
and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new
pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night in a dug-out
opposite mine talking about the different seams of coals in Wales
and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical
comments. It was one of the most informative conversations I ever heard.
The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section.
There were five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance,
who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get
into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty. The official penalty
for this was death, but I had observed that he could not help it. I had
seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag
open for another fellow to fill. So we got him a job as orderly to a
chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all
boys under eighteen were combed out and sent to the base. Bumford and
Burford were both sent; but neither escaped the war. Bumford was old
enough to be sent back to the battalion in the later stages of the war,
and was killed; Burford was killed, too, in a bombing accident at the
base-camp. Or so I was told—the fate of many of my comrades in France
has come to me merely as hearsay.
The troop-train consisted of forty-seven coaches and took twenty-five
hours to arrive at Béthune, the rail-head. We went via St. Omer. It was
about nine o’clock in the evening and we were hungry, cold and dirty.
We had expected a short journey and so allowed our baggage to be put
in a locked van. We played nap to keep our minds off the discomfort
and I lost sixty francs, which was over two pounds at the existing
rate of exchange. On the platform at Béthune a little man in filthy
khaki, wearing the Welsh cap-badge, came up with a friendly touch of
the cap most unlike a salute. He was to be our guide to the battalion,
which was in the Cambrin trenches about ten kilometres away. He asked
us to collect the draft of forty men we had with us and follow him. We
marched through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely
excited at the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance. The men
of the draft had none of them been out before, except the sergeant
in charge. They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs
they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part. The Welsh always sang
when they were a bit frightened and pretending that they were not; it
kept them steady. They never sang out of tune.
We marched towards the flashes and could soon see the flare-lights
curving over the trenches in the distance. The noise of the guns grew
louder and louder. Then we were among the batteries. From behind us
on the left of the road a salvo of four shells came suddenly over our
heads. The battery was only about two hundred yards away. This broke
up _Aberystwyth_ in the middle of a verse and set us off our balance
for a few seconds; the column of fours tangled up. The shells went
hissing away eastward; we could see the red flash and hear the hollow
bang where they landed in German territory. The men picked up their
step again and began chaffing. A lance-corporal dictated a letter home:
‘Dear auntie, this leaves me in the pink. We are at present wading
in blood up to our necks. Send me fags and a lifebelt. This war is a
booger. Love and kisses.’
The roadside cottages were now showing more and more
signs of dilapidation. A German shell came over and then
whoo—oo—ooooooOOO—bump—CRASH! twenty yards away from the party. We
threw ourselves flat on our faces. Presently we heard a curious
singing noise in the air, and then flop! flop! little pieces of
shell-casing came buzzing down all around. ‘They calls them the musical
instruments,’ said the sergeant. ‘Damn them,’ said Frank Jones-Bateman,
who had a cut in his hand from a jagged little piece, ‘the devils have
started on me early.’ ‘Aye, they’ll have a lot of fun with you before
they’re done, sir,’ grinned the sergeant. Another shell came over.
Every one threw himself down again, but it burst two hundred yards
behind us. Only Sergeant Jones had remained on his feet and laughed at
us. ‘You’re wasting yourselves, lads,’ he said to the draft. ‘Listen by
the noise they make coming where they’re going to burst.’
At Cambrin village, which was about a mile from the front trenches, we
were taken into a ruined house. It had been a chemist’s shop and the
coloured glass lights were still in the window. It was the billet of
the Welsh company quartermaster-sergeants. Here we were issued with
gas-respirators and field dressings. This was the first respirator
issued in France. It was a gauze-pad filled with chemically-treated
cotton waste, to be tied across the mouth and nose. It seems it was
useless against German gas. I never put it to the test. A week or two
later came the ‘smoke-helmet,’ a greasy grey-felt bag with a talc
window to look through, but no mouthpiece. This also was probably
ineffective against gas. The talc was always cracking and there were
leaks where it was stitched into the helmet.
These were early days of trench-warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb
and the gas-pipe trench-mortar. It was before Lewis or Stokes guns,
steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks,
trench-raids, or any of the later improvements of trench-warfare.
After a meal of bread, bacon, rum and bitter stewed tea sickly with
sugar, we went up through the broken trees to the east of the village
and up a long trench to battalion headquarters. The trench was cut
through red clay. I had a torch with me which I kept flashed on the
ground. Hundreds of field mice and frogs were in the trench. They had
fallen in and had no way out. The light dazzled them and we could
not help treading on them. So I put the torch back in my pocket. We had
no picture of what the trenches would be like, and were not far off the
state of mind in which one young soldier joined us a week or two later.
He called out very excitedly to old Burford who was cooking up a bit of
stew in a dixie, apart from the others: ‘Hi, mate, where’s the battle?
I want to do my bit.’
The trench was wet and slippery. The guide was giving hoarse directions
all the time. ‘Hole right.’ ‘Wire high.’ ‘Wire low.’ ‘Deep place here,
sir.’ ‘Wire low.’ I had never been told about the field telephone
wires. They were fastened by staples to the side of the trench, and
when it rained the staples were always falling out and the wire falling
down and tripping people up. If it sagged too much one stretched it
across the top of the trench to the other side to correct the sag, and
then it would catch one’s head. The holes were the sump-pits used for
draining the trenches. We were now under rifle-fire. I always found
rifle-fire more trying than shell-fire. The gunner was usually, I
knew, firing not at people but at map-references—cross-roads, likely
artillery positions, houses that suggested billets for troops, and so
on. Even when an observation officer in an aeroplane or captive balloon
or on a church spire was directing the gun-fire it seemed unaimed,
somehow. But a rifle bullet even when fired blindly always had the
effect of seeming aimed. And we could hear a shell coming and take
some sort of cover, but the rifle bullet gave no warning. So though we
learned not to duck to a rifle bullet, because once it was heard it
must have missed, it gave us a worse feeling of danger. Rifle bullets
in the open went hissing into the grass without much noise, but when we
were in a trench the bullets, going over the hollow, made a tremendous
crack. Bullets often struck the barbed wire in front of the
trenches, which turned them and sent them spinning in a head-overheels
motion—ping! rockety-ockety-ockety-ockety into the woods behind.
Battalion headquarters was a dug-out in the reserve line about
a quarter of a mile from the front companies. The colonel, a
twice-wounded regular, shook hands with us and offered us the whisky
bottle. He said that we were welcome, and hoped that we would soon
grow to like the regiment as much as our own. It was a cosy dug-out
for so early a stage of trench-warfare. (This sector had only recently
been taken over from the French, who knew how to make themselves
comfortable. It had been a territorial division of men in the forties
who had a local armistice with the Germans opposite; there was no
firing and apparently even civilian traffic through the lines.) There
was an ornamental lamp, a clean cloth, and polished silver on the
table. The colonel, adjutant, doctor, second-in-command, and signalling
officer were at dinner. It was civilized cooking, with fresh meat and
vegetables. Pictures were pasted on the walls, which were wall-papered;
there were beds with spring mattresses, a gramophone, easy chairs. It
was hard to reconcile this with accounts I had read of troops standing
waist-deep in mud and gnawing a biscuit while shells burst all around.
We were posted to our companies. I went to C Company. ‘Captain Dunn is
your company commander,’ said the adjutant. ‘The soundest officer in
the battalion. By the way, remind him that I want that list of D.C.M.
recommendations for the last show sent in at once, but not more than
two names, or else they won’t give us any. Four is about the ration for
the battalion in a dud show.’
Our guide took us up to the front line. We passed a group of men
huddled over a brazier. They were wearing waterproof capes, for it
had now started to rain, and cap-comforters, because the weather was
cold. They were little men, daubed with mud, and they were talking
quietly together in Welsh. Although they could see we were officers,
they did not jump to their feet and salute. I thought that this was a
convention of the trenches, and indeed I knew that it was laid down
somewhere in the military textbooks that the courtesy of the salute was
to be dispensed with in battle. But I was wrong; it was just slackness.
We overtook a fatigue-party struggling up the trench loaded with
timber lengths and bundles of sandbags, cursing plaintively as they
slipped into sump-holes and entangled their burdens in the telephone
wire. Fatigue-parties were always encumbered by their rifles and
equipment, which it was a crime ever to have out of reach. When we had
squeezed past this party we had to stand aside to let a stretcher-case
past. ‘Who’s the poor bastard, Dai?’ the guide asked the leading
stretcher-bearer. ‘Sergeant Gallagher,’ Dai answered. ‘He thought he
saw a Fritz in No Man’s Land near our wire, so the silly b——r takes one
of them new issue percussion bombs and shoots it at ’im. Silly b——r aims
too low, it hits the top of the parapet and bursts back. Deoul! man,
it breaks his silly f——ing jaw and blows a great lump from his silly
f——ing face, whatever. Poor silly b——r! Not worth sweating to get him
back! He’s put paid to, whatever.’ The wounded man had a sandbag over
his face. He was dead when they got him back to the dressing-station.
I was tired out by the time I got to company headquarters. I was
carrying a pack-valise like the men, and my belt was hung with all
the usual furnishings—revolver, field-glasses, compass, whisky-flask,
wire-cutters, periscope, and a lot more. A Christmas-tree that was
called. (These were the days in which officers went out to France
with swords and had them sharpened by the armourer before sailing.
But I had been advised to leave my sword back in the billet where
we had tea; I never saw it again or bothered about it.) I was hot
and sweaty; my hands were sticky with the clay from the side of the
trench. C Company headquarters was a two-roomed timber-built shelter
in the side of a trench connecting the front and support lines. Here
were tablecloth and lamp again, whisky-bottle and glasses, shelves
with books and magazines, a framed picture of General Joffre, a large
mirror, and bunks in the next room. I reported to the company commander.
I had expected him to be a middle-aged man with a breastful of medals,
with whom I would have to be formal; but Dunn was actually two months
younger than myself. He was one of the fellowship of ‘only survivors.’
Captain Miller of the Black Watch in the same division was another.
Miller had only escaped from the Rue du Bois massacre by swimming down
a flooded trench. He has carried on his surviving trade ever since.[2]
Only survivors have great reputations. Miller used to be pointed at in
the streets when the battalion was back in reserve billets. ‘See that
fellow. That’s Jock Miller. Out from the start and hasn’t got it yet.’
Dunn had not let the war affect his morale at all. He greeted me very
easily with: ‘Well, what’s the news from England? Oh sorry, first I
must introduce you. This is Walker—clever chap, comes from Cambridge
and fancies himself as an athlete. This is Jenkins, one of those
patriotic chaps who chucked up his job to come here. This is Price, who
only joined us yesterday, but we like him; he brought some damn
good whisky with him. Well, how long is the war going to last and who’s
winning? We don’t know a thing out here. And what’s all this talk about
war-babies? Price pretends he knows nothing about them.’ I told them
about the war and asked them about the trenches.
‘About trenches,’ said Dunn. ‘Well, we don’t know as much about
trenches as the French do and not near as much as Fritz does. We can’t
expect Fritz to help, but the French might do something. They are
greedy; they won’t let us have the benefit of their inventions. What
wouldn’t we give for parachute-lights and their aerial torpedoes! But
there’s no connection between the two armies except when there’s a
battle on, and then we generally let each other down.
‘When I was out here first, all that we did in the trenches was to
paddle about in water and use our rifles. We didn’t think of them as
places to live in, they were just temporary inconveniences. Now we work
all the time we are here, not only for safety but for health. Night
and day. First, the fire-steps, then building traverses, improving
the communication trenches, and so on; lastly, on our personal
comfort—shelters and dug-outs. There was a territorial battalion that
used to relieve us. They were hopeless. They used to sit down in the
trench and say: “Oh my God, this is the limit.” They’d pull out pencil
and paper and write home about it. Did no work on the traverses or on
fire positions. Consequence—they lost half their men from frost-bite
and rheumatism, and one day the Germans broke in and scuppered a lot
more of them. They allowed the work we’d done in the trench to go to
ruin and left the whole place like a sewage-farm for us to take over
again. We were sick as muck. We reported them several times to brigade
headquarters, but they never got any better. Slack officers, of
course. Well, they got smashed, as I say, and were sent away to be
lines-of-communication troops. Now we work with the First South Wales
Borderers. They’re all right. Awful chaps those territorial swine.
Usen’t to trouble about latrines at all; left food about and that
encouraged rats; never filled a sandbag. I only once saw a job of work
that they did. That was a steel loop-hole they put in. But they put
it facing square to the front and quite unmasked, so they had two men
killed at it—absolute death-trap. About our chaps. They’re all right,
but not as right as they ought to be. The survivors of the show ten
days ago are feeling pretty low, and the big new draft doesn’t know
anything yet.’
‘Listen,’ said Walker, ‘there’s too much firing going on. The men have
got the wind up over something. Waste of ammunition, and if Fritz knows
we’re jumpy he’ll give us an extra bad time. I’ll go up and stop them.’
Dunn went on. ‘These Welshmen are peculiar. They won’t stand being
shouted at. They’ll do anything if you explain the reason for it. They
will do and die, but they have to know their reason why. The best way
to make them behave is not to give them too much time to think. Work
them off their feet. They are good workmen. Officers must work too, not
only direct the work. Our time-table is like this. Breakfast at eight
o’clock in the morning, clean trenches and inspect rifles, work all
morning; lunch at twelve, work again from one till about six, when the
men feed again. “Stand-to” at dusk for about an hour, work all night,
“stand-to” for an hour before dawn. That’s the general programme. Then
there’s sentry duty. The men do two-hour sentry spells, then work two
hours, then sleep two hours. At night sentries are doubled, so our
working parties are smaller. We officers are on duty all day and
divide up the night in three-hourly watches.’ He looked at his wrist
watch. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘that carrying-party must have got the R.E.
stuff by now. Time we all got to work. Look here, Graves, you lie down
and have a doss on that bunk. I want you to take the watch before
“stand-to.” I’ll wake you up and show you round. Where the hell’s my
revolver? I don’t like to go out without that. Hello, Walker, what was
wrong?’
Walker laughed. ‘A chap from the new draft. He had never fired his
musketry course at Cardiff, and to-night he fired ball for the first
time. It seemed to go to his head. He’d had a brother killed up at
Ypres and he said he was going to avenge him. So he blazed off all his
own ammunition at nothing, and two bandoliers out of the ammunition-box
besides. They call him the Human Maxim now. His foresight’s misty with
heat. Corporal Parry should have stopped him; but he was just leaning
up against the traverse and shrieking with laughter. I gave them both
a good cursing. Some other new chaps started blazing away, too. Fritz
retaliated with machine-guns and whizz-bangs. No casualties. I don’t
know why. It’s all quiet now. Everybody ready?’
They went out and I rolled up in my blanket and fell asleep. Dunn woke
me about one o’clock. ‘Your watch,’ he said. I jumped out of the bunk
with a rustle of straw; my feet were sore and clammy in my boots. I was
cold, too. ‘Here’s the rocket-pistol and a few flares. Not a bad night.
It’s stopped raining. Put your equipment on over your raincoat or you
won’t be able to get at your revolver. Got a torch? Good. About this
flare business. Don’t use the pistol too much. We haven’t many flares,
and if there’s an attack we will want as many as we can get. But use
it if you think that there is something doing. Fritz is always
sending up flare lights, he’s got as many as he wants.’
He showed me round the line. The battalion frontage was about eight
hundred yards. Each company held two hundred of these with two
platoons in the front line and two platoons in the support line about
a hundred yards back. Dunn introduced me to the platoon sergeants,
more particularly to Sergeant Eastmond of the platoon to which I was
posted. He asked Sergeant Eastmond to give me any information that I
wanted, then went back to sleep, telling me to wake him up at once if
anything was wrong. I was left in charge of the line. Sergeant Eastmond
was busy with a working-party, so I went round by myself. The men of
the working-party, who were building up the traverses with sandbags
(a traverse, I learned, was a safety-buttress in the trench), looked
curiously at me. They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them
up bricklayer fashion, with headers and stretchers alternating, then
patting them flat with spades. The sentries stood on the fire-step at
the corners of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their
fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds.
Two parties, each of an N.C.O. and two men, were out in the company
listening-posts, connected with the front trench by a sap about fifty
yards long. The German front line was about three hundred yards beyond
them. From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained
with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping men.
I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raising
my head stared over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden
pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglement and a
dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and
shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling,
singly at first, then both together. The pickets were doing the same. I
was glad of the sentry beside me; his name, he told me, was Beaumont.
‘They’re quiet to-night, sir,’ he said, ‘a relief going on; I think so,
surely.’ I said: ‘It’s funny how those bushes seem to move.’ ‘Aye, they
do play queer tricks. Is this your first spell in trenches, sir?’ A
German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went
hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes
and pickets. Instinctively I moved. ‘It’s bad to do that, sir,’ he
said, as a rifle bullet cracked and seemed to pass right between us.
‘Keep still, sir, and they can’t spot you. Not but what a flare is a
bad thing to have fall on you. I’ve seen them burn a hole in a man.’
I spent the rest of my watch in acquainting myself with the geography
of the trench-section, finding how easy it was to get lost among _culs
de sac_ and disused alleys. Twice I overshot the company frontage and
wandered among the Munsters on the left. Once I tripped and fell with a
splash into deep mud. At last my watch was ended with the first signs
of dawn. I passed the word along the line for the company to stand-to
arms. The N.C.O’s whispered hoarsely into the dug-outs: ‘Stand-to,
stand-to,’ and out the men tumbled with their rifles in their hands.
As I went towards company headquarters to wake the officers I saw a
man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter. I stopped and said:
‘Stand-to, there.’ I flashed my torch on him and saw that his foot was
bare. The machine-gunner beside him said: ‘No good talking to him,
sir.’ I asked: ‘What’s wrong? What’s he taken his boot and sock off
for?’ I was ready for anything odd in the trenches. ‘Look for yourself,
sir,’ he said. I shook the man by the arm and noticed suddenly
that the back of his head was blown out. The first corpse that I saw in
France was this suicide. He had taken off his boot and sock to pull the
trigger of his rifle with his toe; the muzzle was in his mouth. ‘Why
did he do it?’ I said. ‘He was in the last push, sir, and that sent him
a bit queer, and on top of that he got bad news from Limerick about
his girl and another chap.’ He was not a Welshman, but belonged to the
Munsters; their machine-guns were at the extreme left of our company.
The suicide had already been reported and two Irish officers came up.
‘We’ve had two or three of these lately,’ one of them told me. Then he
said to the other: ‘While I remember, Callaghan, don’t forget to write
to his next-of-kin. Usual sort of letter, cheer them up, tell them he
died a soldier’s death, anything you like. I’m not going to report it
as suicide.’
At stand-to rum and tea were served out. I had a look at the German
trenches through a periscope—a streak of sandbags four hundred yards
away. Some of these were made of coloured stuff, whether for camouflage
or from a shortage of plain canvas I do not know. There was no sign
of the enemy, except for a wisp or two of wood-smoke where they, too,
were boiling up a hot drink. Between us and them was a flat meadow
with cornflowers, marguerites and poppies growing in the long grass, a
few shell holes, the bushes I had seen the night before, the wreck of
an aeroplane, our barbed wire and theirs. A thousand yards away was a
big ruined house, behind that a red-brick village (Auchy), poplars and
haystacks, a tall chimney, another village (Haisnes). Half-right was a
pithead and smaller slag-heaps. La Bassée lay half-left; the sun caught
the weathervane of the church and made it twinkle.
I went off for a sleep. The time between stand-to and breakfast
was the easy part of the day. The men who were not getting in a bit
of extra sleep sat about talking and smoking, writing letters home,
cleaning their rifles, running their thumb-nails up the seams of their
shirts to kill the lice, gambling. Lice were a standing joke. Young
Bumford handed me one like this. ‘We was just having an argument as to
whether it was best to kill the old ones or the young ones, sir. Morgan
here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones will die of
grief, but Parry here, sir, he says that the young ones are easier to
kill and you can catch the old ones when they come to the funeral.’ He
appealed to me as an arbiter. ‘You’ve been to college, sir, haven’t
you?’ I said: ‘Yes, I had, but so had Crawshay Bailey’s brother
Norwich.’ This was held to be a wonderfully witty answer. _Crawshay
Bailey_ is one of the idiotic songs of Wales. (Crawshay Bailey himself
‘had an engine and he couldn’t make it go,’ and all his relations in
the song had similar shortcomings. Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich,
for instance, was fond of oatmeal porridge, and was sent to Cardiff
College, for to get a bit of knowledge.) After that I had no trouble
with the platoon at all.
Breakfast at company headquarters was bacon, eggs, coffee, toast and
marmalade. There were three chairs and two ammunition-boxes to sit on.
Accustomed to company commanders in England not taking their junior
officers into their confidence, I was struck by the way that questions
of the day were settled at meal-times by a sort of board-meeting with
Dunn as chairman. On this first morning there was a long debate as to
the best way of keeping sentries awake. Dunn finally decided to issue
a company order against sentries leaning up against the traverse; it
made them sleepy. Besides, when they fired their rifles the flash
would come always from the same place. The Germans might fix a rifle
on the spot after a time. I told Dunn of the bullet that came between
Beaumont and myself. ‘Sounds like a fixed rifle,’ he said, ‘because not
one aimed shot in a hundred comes as close as that at night. And we had
a chap killed in that very traverse the night we came in.’ The Bavarian
Guards Reserve were opposite us at the time and their shooting was
good. They had complete control of the sniping situation.
Dunn began telling me the characters of the men in my platoon; also
which N.C.O.’s were trustworthy and which had to be watched. He
was going on to tell me just how much to expect from the men at my
platoon inspection of rifles and equipment, when there was a sudden
alarm. Dunn’s servant came rushing in, his eyes blank with horror
and excitement: ‘Gas, sir, gas! They’re using gas.’ ‘My God!’ said
Price. We all looked at Dunn. He said imperturbably: ‘Very well,
Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room, and another pot of
marmalade.’ This was only one of many gas alarms. It originated with
smoke from the German trenches where breakfast was also going on; we
knew the German meal-times by a slackening down of rifle-fire. Gas was
a nightmare. Nobody believed in the efficacy of the respirators, though
we were told that they were proof against any gas the enemy could send
over. Pink army forms marked ‘Urgent’ were constantly arriving from
headquarters to explain how to use these contrivances. They were all
contradictory. First the respirators were to be kept soaking wet, then
they were to be kept dry, then they were to be worn in a satchel, then,
again, the satchel was not to be used.
Frank Jones-Bateman came to visit me from the company on our
right. He mentioned with a false ease that he had shot a man just
before breakfast: ‘Sights at four hundred,’ he said. He was a quiet boy
of nineteen. He had just left Rugby and had a scholarship waiting for
him at Clare, Cambridge. His nickname was ‘Silent Night.’
XIII
Here are extracts from letters that I wrote at this time:
21_st May_ 1915.—Back in billets again at a coal-mining village
called La Bourse. It is not more than three miles and a half from
the trenches, but the mines are still working. As we came out of
the trenches the Germans were shelling the wood by Cambrin village,
searching for one of our batteries. I don’t think they got it, but it
was fun to see the poplar trees being lopped down like tulips when the
whizz-bangs hit them square. When we marched along the _pavé_ road from
Cambrin the men straggled about out of step and out of fours. Their
feet were sore from having had their boots on for a week—they only
have one spare pair of socks issued to them. I enclose a list of their
minimum load, which weighs about sixty pounds. A lot of extras get
put on top of this—rations, pick or shovel, periscope, and their own
souvenirs to take home on leave:
Greatcoat 1
Tin, mess 1
„ cover 1
Shirt 1
Socks, pair 1
Soap 1
Towel 1
Housewife 1
Holdall 1
Razor 1
„ case 1
Cardigan 1
Cap, fatigue comforter 1
Pay-book 1
Disc, identity 1
Waterproof sheet 1
Tin of grease 1
Field-service dressing 1
Respirator 1
Spine protector 1
Jack knife 1
Set of equipment
Lather brush 1
Comb 1
Fork 1
Knife 1
Spoon 1
Tooth brush 1
Laces, pair 1
Rounds ammunition 150
Rifle and bayonet
Rifle cover 1
Oil bottle and pull-through.
Entrenching tool 1
Well, anyhow, marching on cobbled roads is difficult, so when
a staff-officer came by in a Rolls-Royce and cursed us for bad
march-discipline I felt like throwing something at him. Trench soldiers
hate the staff and the staff know it. The principal disagreement
seems to be about the extent to which trench conditions should modify
discipline. The La Bourse miners are old men and boys dressed in sloppy
blue clothes with bulging pockets. There are shell craters all around
the pit-head. I am billeted with a fatherly old man called Monsieur
Hojdés, who has three marriageable daughters; one of them lifted up
her skirt to show me a shell-wound on her thigh that laid her up last
winter.
22_nd May_.—A colossal bombardment by the French at Souchez, a few
miles away—continuous roar of artillery, coloured flares, shells
bursting all along the ridge by Notre Dame de Lorette. I couldn’t
sleep. It went on all night. Instead of dying away it grew and grew
till the whole air rocked and shook; the sky was lit up with huge
flashes. I lay in my feather bed and sweated. This morning they tell me
there was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the bombardment. But, as
Walker says: ‘Where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to
say.’ The men had hot baths at the mines and cleaned up generally.
Their rifles are all in an advanced state of disrepair and many of
their clothes are in rags, but neither can be replaced, we are told,
until they are much worse. The platoon is billeted in a barn full of
straw. Old Burford, who is so old that he refuses to sleep with the
other men of the platoon, has found a doss in an out-building among
some farm tools. In trenches he will sleep on the fire-step even in the
rain rather than in a warm dug-out with the other men. He says that he
remembers the C.O. when he was in long skirts. Young Bumford is the
only man he’ll talk to. The platoon is always ragging Bumford for his
childish simplicity. Bumford plays up to it and begs them not to be too
hard on ‘a lad from the hills.’
23_rd May_.—We did company drill in the morning. Afterwards
Jones-Bateman and I lay on the warm grass and watched the aeroplanes
flying above the trenches pursued by a trail of white shrapnel puffs.
In the evening I was detailed to take out a working-party to Vermelles
les Noyelles to work on a second line of defence—trench digging and
putting up barbed wire under an R.E. officer. But the ground was hard
and the men were tired out when they got back about two o’clock in the
morning. They sang songs all the way home. They have one about Company
Quartermaster-Sergeant Finnigan:
Coolness under fire,
Coolness under fire,
Mentioned in dispatches
For pinching the company rations,
Coolness under fire.
Now he’s on the peg,
Now he’s on the peg,
Mentioned in dispatches
For drinking the company rum,
Now he’s on the peg.
The chorus is:
Whiter than the milky cokernuts,
Whiter than the milky cokernuts,
Wash me in the water
That you washed your dirty daughter in
And I shall be whiter than the milky cokernuts.
Nuts,
Nuts,
Oooooh nuts.
Finnigan doesn’t mind the libel at all.
This is what happened the other day. Two young miners, in another
company, disliked their sergeant, who had a down on them and gave
them all the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When they were in billets
he crimed them for things they hadn’t done. So they decided to kill
him. Later they reported at Battalion Orderly Room and asked to see
the adjutant. This was irregular, because a private is not allowed to
speak to an officer without an N.C.O. of his own company to act as
go-between. The adjutant happened to see them and said: ‘Well, what is
it you want?’ Smartly slapping the small-of-the-butt of their sloped
rifles they said: ‘We’ve come to report, sir, that we are very sorry
but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.’ The adjutant said: ‘Good
heavens, how did that happen?’ They answered: ‘It was an accident,
sir.’ ‘What do you mean? Did you mistake him for a German?’ ‘No,
sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.’ So they were both shot
by a firing squad of their own company against the wall of a convent at
Béthune. Their last words were the battalion rallying-cry: ‘Stick it,
the Welsh!’ (They say that a certain Captain Haggard first used it in
the battle of Ypres when he was mortally wounded.) The French military
governor was present at the execution and made a little speech saying
how gloriously British soldiers can die.
You would be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in trenches.
Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies,
because fuel is scarce. Our machine-gun crews boil their hot water by
firing off belt after belt of machine-gun ammunition at no particular
target, just generally spraying the German line. After several pounds’
worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns—they are
water-cooled—begins to boil. They say they make German ration and
carrying parties behind the line pay for their early-morning cup of
tea. But the real charge will be on income-tax after the war.
24_th May_.—To-morrow we return to trenches. The men are pessimistic
but cheerful. They all talk about getting a ‘cushy’ one to send them
back to ‘Blitey.’ Blitey is, it seems, Hindustani for ‘home.’ My
servant, Fry, who works in a paper-bag factory at Cardiff in civil
life, has been telling me stories about cushy ones. Here are two of
them. ‘A bloke in the Munsters once wanted a cushy, so he waves his
hand above the parapet to catch Fritz’s attention. Nothing doing. He
waves his arms about for a couple of minutes. Nothing doing, not a
shot. He puts his elbows on the fire-step, hoists his body upside down
and waves his legs about till he get blood to the head. Not a shot
did old Fritz fire. “Oh,” says the Munster man, “I don’t believe
there’s a damn squarehead there. Where’s the German army to?” He has
a peek over the top—crack! he gets it in the head. Finee.’ Another
story: ‘Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy bad. Fed up and far from
home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger
taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing
through our lines by the old boutillery. “See, lads,” he says, “I’m aff
to bony Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to
the dressing-station he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper was
working. _He_ gets it through the head too. Finee. We laugh fit to die.’
To get a cushy one is all that the old hands think of. Only twelve
men have been with the battalion from the beginning and they are all
transport men except one, Beaumont, a man in my platoon. The few
old hands who went through the last fight infect the new men with
pessimism; they don’t believe in the war, they don’t believe in the
staff. But at least they would follow their officers anywhere, because
the officers happen to be a decent lot. They look forward to a battle
because a battle gives more chances of a cushy one, in the legs or
arms, than trench warfare. In trench warfare the proportion of head
wounds is much greater. Haking commands this division. He’s the man who
wrote the standard textbook, _Company Training_. The last shows have not
been suitable ones for company commanders to profit by his directions.
He’s a decent man; he came round this morning to an informal inspection
of the battalion and shook hands with the survivors. There were tears
in his eyes. Sergeant Smith swore half-aloud: ‘Bloody lot of use that
is, busts up his bloody division and then weeps over what’s bloody
left.’ Well, it was nothing to do with me; I didn’t allow myself
to feel either for the general or for the sergeant. It is said here
that Haking has told General French that the division’s _morale_ has
gone completely. So far as I can see that is not accurate; the division
will fight all right but without any enthusiasm. It is said too that
when the new army comes out the division will be withdrawn and used on
lines of communication for some months at least. I don’t believe it. I
am sure no one will mind smashing up over and over again the divisions
that are used to being smashed up. The general impression here is that
the new-army divisions can’t be of much military use.
28_th May_.—In trenches among the Cuinchy brick-stacks. Not my idea of
trenches. There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches
have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently
in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of brick; it is most
confusing. The parapet of one of the trenches which we do not occupy
is built up with ammunition-boxes and corpses. Everything here is
wet and smelly. The lines are very close. The Germans have half the
brick-stacks and we have the other half. Each side snipes down from the
top of its brick-stacks into the other’s trenches. This is also a great
place for rifle-grenades and trench-mortars. We can’t reply properly
to these; we have only a meagre supply of rifle-grenades and nothing
to equal the German sausage mortar bomb. This morning about breakfast
time, just as I came out of my dug-out, a rifle-grenade landed within
six feet of me. For some reason, instead of falling on its head and
exploding, it landed with its stick in the wet clay and stood there
looking at me. They are difficult to see coming; they are shot from
a rifle, with its butt on the ground, tilted, and go up a long way
before they turn over and come down. I can’t understand why this
particular rifle-grenade fell as it did; the chances were impossibly
against it.
[Illustration: THE BRICKSTACKS AT GIVENCHY
_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]
Sausages are easy to see and dodge, but they make a terrible noise when
they drop. We have had about ten casualties in our company to-day from
them. I find that I have extraordinarily quick reactions to danger; but
every one gets like that. We can sort out all the different explosions
and disregard all the ones that don’t concern us—the artillery duel,
machine-gun fire at the next company to us, desultory rifle-fire. But
the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off the sausage or the muffled
rifle noise when a grenade is fired, we pick out at once. The men are
much afraid, yet always joking. The company sergeant-major stands
behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at the sausages with a
rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says
that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet. Last
night a lot of stuff was flying about, including shrapnel. I heard one
shell whish-whishing towards me. I dropped flat. It burst just over the
trench. My ears sang as though there were gnats in them and a bright
scarlet light shone over everything. My shoulder was twisted in falling
and I thought I had been hit, but I hadn’t been. The vibration made my
chest sing, too, in a curious way, and I lost my sense of equilibrium.
I was much ashamed when the sergeant-major came along the trench and
found me on all fours, because I couldn’t stand up straight. It was at
a place where ‘Petticoat Lane’ runs into ‘Lowndes Square.’
There has been a dead man lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken
down to the cemetery to-night. He was a sanitary-man, killed last night
in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support
lines. His arm was stretched out and, when he was got in, it was still
stiff, so that when they put him on the fire-step his stiff arm
stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it
out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard. Do you
own this bloody trench?’ Or they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put
it there, Billy Boy.’ Of course, they’re miners and accustomed to
death. They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. They
will, for instance, rob anyone, of anything, except a man in their own
platoon; they will treat every stranger as an enemy until he is proved
their friend, and then there is nothing they won’t do for him. They
are lecherous, the young ones at least, but without the false shame of
the English lecher. I had a letter to censor the other day written by
a lance-corporal to his wife. He said that the French girls were nice
to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far
preferred sleeping with her and missed her a great deal.
6_th June_.—We have been billeted in Béthune, a fair-sized town about
seven miles or so behind the front line. There is everything one wants,
a swimming bath, all sorts of shops, especially a cake-shop, the best
I’ve ever met, a hotel where you can get a really good dinner, and a
theatre where we have brigade ‘gaffs.’ I saw a notice this morning on
a building by the Béthune-La Bassée canal—‘Troops are forbidden to
bomb fish. By order of the Town Major.’ Béthune is very little knocked
about, except a part called Faubourg d’Arras, near the station. I am
billeted with a family called Averlant Paul, in the Avenue de Bruay,
people of the official class. They are refugees from Poimbert. There
are two little boys and an elder sister, who is in what corresponds
with the under-fifth of the local high-school. She was worried last
night over her lessons and asked me to help her write out the theory of
decimal division. She showed me the notes she had taken; they were
full of abbreviations. I asked why she’d used abbreviations. She said:
‘The lady professor talked very fast because we were much hurried.’
‘Why were you hurried?’ ‘Oh, because part of the school is used as a
billet for the troops and the Germans were shelling it, and we were
always having to take shelter in the cellar, and when we came back each
time there was less and less time left.’
9_th June_.—I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle
introduction to the trenches at Cambrin. We are now in a nasty salient
a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualities are always
heavy. The company had seventeen casualities yesterday from bombs and
grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans.
To-day, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied
German sap, I came along whistling _The Farmer s Boy_, to keep up
my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at
the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with
animal groans. At my feet was the cap he had worn, splashed with his
brains. I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded
them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly-wounded man and
congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man.
But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man
who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been
taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range. Beaumont, of whom I
told you in my last letter, was also killed. He was the last unwounded
survivor of the original battalion, except for the transport men. He
had his legs blown against his back. Every one was swearing angrily,
then an R.E. officer came up and told me that there was a tunnel
driven under the German front line and that if we wanted to do a
bit of bombing, now was the time. So he sent the mine up—it was not a
big one, he said, but it made a tremendous noise and covered us with
dirt—and the chaps waited for a few seconds for the other Germans to
rush up to help the wounded away and then they chucked all the bombs
they had.
Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the
sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort
that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools
all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide
it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded
would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the
unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
24_th June_. —We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was
taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single
house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three
thousand inhabitants. It is beautiful now in a fantastic way. We came
up two nights ago; there was a moon shining behind the houses and the
shells had broken up all the hard lines. Next morning we found the
deserted gardens of the town very pleasant to walk about in; they are
quite overgrown and flowers have seeded themselves about wildly. Red
cabbages and roses and madonna lilies are the chief ornaments. There is
one garden with currant bushes in it. I and the company sergeant-major
started eating along the line towards each other without noticing
each other. When we did, we both remembered our dignity, he as a
company sergeant-major and I as an officer. He saluted, I asknowledged
the salute, we both walked away. After a minute or two we both
came back hoping the coast was clear and again, after an exchange of
salutes, had to leave the currants and pretend that we were merely
admiring the flowers. I don’t quite know why I was feeling like that.
The company sergeant-major was a regular and it was natural in him,
and I suppose that it was courtesy to his scruples that made me stop.
Anyhow, along came a couple of privates and stripped the bushes clean.
This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an
enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. The
front line is perhaps three quarters of a mile away. I made top score,
twenty-four; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball was a piece of
rag tied round with string, and the wicket was a parrot cage with the
grisly remains of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation
when the French evacuated the town. The corpse was perfectly clean and
dry and I recalled a verse of Skelton’s:
Parrot is a fair bird for a ladie.
God of His goodness him framed and wrought.
When parrot is dead he doth not putrify,
Yea, all things mortal shall turn unto nought
Save mannës soul which Christ so dear bought,
That never can die, nor never die shall.
Make much of parrot, that popajay royal.
The match was broken up suddenly by machine-gun fire. It was not
aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes and
the bullets falling down from a great height had a penetrative power
greater than an ordinary spent bullet.
This is a very idle life except for night-digging on the reserve
line. By day there is nothing to do. We can’t drill because it is
too near the German lines, and there is no fortification work to be
done in the village. To-day two spies were shot. A civilian who had
hung on in a cellar and had, apparently, been flashing news, and a
German soldier disguised as an R.E. corporal who was found tampering
with the telephone wires. We officers spend a lot of time practising
revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only
undestroyed living-room in our billet area. It was a glass case full of
artificial fruit and flowers, so we put it up on a post at fifty yards
range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn things.
My aunt had one. It’s the sort of thing that _would_ survive an intense
bombardment.’ For a moment I felt a tender impulse to rescue it. But I
smothered it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Nobody could hit it.
So at last we went up to within twenty yards of it and fired a volley.
Someone hit the post and that knocked it off into the grass. Jenkins
said: ‘Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The
glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said:
‘No, it’s in pain; we must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the
_coup de gracê_ from close quarters.
There is an old Norman church here, very much broken. What is left
of the tower is used as a forward observation post by the artillery.
I counted eight unexploded shells sticking into it. I went in with
Jenkins; the floor was littered with rubbish, broken masonry, smashed
chairs, ripped canvas pictures (some of them look several hundreds of
years old), bits of images and crucifixes, muddied church vestments
rotting in what was once the vestry. Only a few pieces of stained
glass remained fixed in the edges of the windows. I climbed up by way
of the altar to the east window and found a piece about the size
of a plate. I gave it to Jenkins. ‘Souvenir,’ I said. When he held
it up to the light it was St. Peter’s hand with the keys of heaven;
medieval glass. ‘I’m sending this home,’ he said. As we went out we met
two men of the Munsters. They were Irish Catholics. They thought it
sacrilegious for Jenkins to be taking the glass away. One of them said:
‘Shouldn’t take that, sir; it will bring you no luck.’[3]
Walker was ragging Dunn this evening. ‘I believe you’ll be sorry when
the war’s over, skipper. Your occupation will be gone and you’ll have
to go back on the square at the depot for six months and learn how to
form fours regimentally. You missed that little part of the show when
you left Sandhurst and came straight here. You’ll be a full colonel by
then, of course. I’ll give the sergeant-major half a crown to make you
really sweat. I’ll be standing in civvies at the barrack-gate laughing
at you.’
There is a company commander here called Furber. His nerves are in
pieces, and somebody played a dirty joke on him the other day—rolling
a bomb, undetonated, of course, down the cellar steps to frighten him.
This was thought a great joke. Furber is the greatest pessimist out
here. He’s laid a bet with the adjutant that the trench lines will
not be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years
hence. Every one laughs at Furber, but they like him because he sings
sentimental cockney songs at the brigade gaffs when we are back at
Béthune.
XIV
Now as the summer advanced there came new types of bombs and
trench-mortars, heavier shelling, improved gas-masks and a general
tightening up of discipline. We saw the first battalions of the new
army and felt like scarecrows by comparison. We went in and out of
the Cambrin and Cuinchy trenches, with billets in Béthune and the
neighbouring villages. By this time I had caught the pessimism of the
division. Its spirit in the trenches was largely defensive; the policy
was not to stir the Germans into more than their usual hostility. But
casualties were still very heavy for trench warfare. Pessimism made
everyone superstitious. I became superstitious too: I found myself
believing in signs of the most trivial nature. Sergeant Smith, my
second sergeant, told me of my predecessor in command of the platoon.
‘He was a nice gentleman, sir, but very wild. Just before the Rue du
Bois show he says to me: “By the way, sergeant, I’m going to get killed
to-morrow. I know that. And I know that you’re going to be all right.
So see that my kit goes back to my people. You’ll find their address in
my pocket-book. You’ll find five hundred francs there too. Now remember
this, Sergeant Smith, you keep a hundred francs yourself and divide
up the rest among the chaps left.” He says: “Send my pocket-book back
with my other stuff, Sergeant Smith, but for God’s sake burn my diary.
They mustn’t see that. I’m going to get it _here_!” He points to his
forehead. And that’s how it was. He got it through the forehead all
right. I sent the stuff back to his parents. I divided up the money and
I burnt the diary.’
One day I was walking along a trench at Cambrin when I suddenly dropped
flat on my face; two seconds later a whizz-bang struck the back
of the trench exactly where I had been. The sergeant who was with me,
walking a few steps ahead, rushed back: ‘Are you killed, sir?’ The
shell was fired from a battery near Auchy only a thousand yards away,
so that it must have arrived before the sound of the gun. How did I
know that I should throw myself on my face?
I saw a ghost at Béthune. He was a man called Private Challoner who
had been at Lancaster with me and again in F company at Wrexham. When
he went out with a draft to join the First Battalion he shook my hand
and said: ‘I’ll meet you again in France, sir.’ He had been killed at
Festubert in May and in June he passed by our C Company billet where
we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from
Cuinchy. There was fish, new potatoes, green peas, asparagus, mutton
chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard. Challoner
looked in at the window, saluted and passed on. There was no mistaking
him or the cap-badge he was wearing. There was no Royal Welch battalion
billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up and looked
out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the
pavement. Ghosts were numerous in France at the time.
There was constant mining going on in this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. We
had the prospect of being blown up at any moment. An officer of the
R.E. tunnelling company was awarded the Victoria Cross while we were
here. A duel of mining and counter-mining was going on. The Germans
began to undermine his original boring, so he rapidly tunnelled
underneath them. It was touch and go who would get the mine ready
first. He won. But when he detonated it from the trench by an electric
lead, nothing happened. He ran down again into the mine, retamped
the charge, and was just back in time to set it off before the Germans.
I had been into the upper boring on the previous day. It was about
twenty feet under the German lines. At the end of the gallery I found
a Welsh miner, one of our own men who had transferred to the Royal
Engineers, on listening duty. He cautioned me to silence. I could
distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere underneath. He whispered:
‘So long as they work, I don’t mind; it’s when they stop.’ He did his
two-hour spell by candle-light. It was very stuffy. He was reading a
book. The mining officer had told me that they were allowed to read; it
didn’t interfere with their listening. It was a paper-backed novelette
called _From Mill Girl to Duchess_. The men of the tunnelling companies
were notorious thieves, by the way. They would snatch things up from
the trench and scurry off with them into their borings; just like mice.
After one particularly bad spell of trenches I got bad news in a
letter from Charterhouse. Bad news in the trenches might affect a man
in either of two ways. It might drive him to suicide (or recklessness
amounting to suicide), or it might seem trivial in comparison with
present expediences and be disregarded. But unless his leave was due
he was helpless. A year later, when I was in trenches in the same
sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment had news from
home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid
the same night and was either killed or captured; so the men with him
said. There had been a fight and they had come back without him. Two
days later he was arrested at Béthune trying to board a leave-train
to go home; he had intended to shoot up the wife and her lover. He
was court-martialled for deserting in the face of the enemy, but
the court was content to cashier him. He went as a private soldier to
another regiment. I do not know what happened afterwards.
The bad news was about Dick, saying that he was not at all the innocent
sort of fellow I took him for. He was as bad as anyone could be. The
letter was written by a cousin of mine who was still at Charterhouse.
I tried not to believe it. I remembered that he owed me a grudge and
decided that this was a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had
been my greatest stand-by all these months when I was feeling low;
he wrote every week, mostly about poetry. They were something solid
and clean to set off against the impermanence of trench life and
the uncleanness of sex-life in billets. I was now back in Béthune.
Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they
had jslept, in the same room, one with the mother and one with the
daughter. They had tossed for the mother because the daughter was a
‘yellow-looking little thing like a lizard.’ And the Red Lamp, the army
brothel, was round the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue
of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his
short turn with one or the other of the three women in the house. My
servant, who had been in the queue, told me that the charge was ten
francs a man—about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served
nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. The
assistant provost-marshal had told me that three weeks was the usual
limit, ‘after which the woman retires on her earnings, pale but proud.’
I was always being teased because I would not sleep even with the nicer
girls. And I excused myself, not on moral grounds or on grounds of
fastidiousness, but in the only way they could understand: I said that
I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets was about
the peculiar bed-manners of the French women. ‘She was very nice and
full of games. I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma
chérie.” But she wouldn’t. She said, “Oh no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce
n’est pas convenable.”’ I was glad when we were back in trenches. And
there I had a more or less reassuring letter from Dick. He told me that
I was right, that my cousin had a spite against him and me, that he had
been ragging about in a silly way, but that there was not much harm to
it; he was very sorry and would stop it for the sake of our friendship.
At the end of July, I and Robertson, one of the other five Royal Welch
officers who had been attached to the Welsh, got orders to proceed to
the Laventie sector, some miles to the north. We were to report to the
Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Frank Jones-Bateman
and Hanmer Jones, two more of us, went to the First Battalion. The
remaining two of the six had already gone back, McLellan sick and
Watkin with bomb wounds that have kept him limping ever since. We were
sorry to say good-bye to the men; they all crowded round to shake
hands and wish us luck. And we felt a little sorry too that we had to
start all over again getting to know a new company and new regimental
customs. But it would be worth it, to be with our own regiment.
Robertson and I agreed to take our journey as leisurely as possible.
Laventie was only seventeen miles away, but our orders were to go there
by train; so a mess-cart took us down to Béthune. We asked the railway
transport officer what trains he had to Laventie. He told us one was
going in a few minutes; we decided to miss it. There was no train after
that until the next day, so we stopped the night at the Hotel de la
France. (The Prince of Wales, who was a lieutenant in the Fortieth
Siege Battery, was billeted there sometimes. He was a familiar
figure in Béthune. I only spoke to him once; it was in the public bath,
where he and I were the only bathers one morning. He was graciously
pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was and I loyally
assented that he was emphatically right. We were very pink and white
and did exercises on the horizontal bar afterwards. I joked to Frank
about it: ‘I have just met our future King in a bath.’ Frank said: ‘I
can trump that. Two days ago I had a friendly talk with him in the
A.S.C. latrines.’ The Prince’s favourite rendezvous was the _Globe_,
a café in the Béthune market square reserved for British officers and
French civilians; principally spies by the look of them. I once heard
him complaining indignantly that General French had refused to let him
go up into the line.)
The next day we caught our train. It took us to a junction, the name
of which I forget. Here we spent a day walking about in the fields.
There was no train until next day, when one took us on to Berguette,
a railhead still a number of miles from Laventie, where a mess-cart
was waiting for us in answer to a telegram we had sent. We finally
rattled up to battalion headquarters in Laventie High Street. We had
taken fifty-two hours to come seventeen miles. We saluted the adjutant
smartly, gave our names, and said that we were Third Battalion officers
posted to the regiment. He did not shake hands with us, offer us a
drink, or give us a word of welcome. He said coldly: ‘I see. Well,
which of you is senior? Oh, never mind. Give your particulars to
the regimental sergeant-major. Tell him to post whoever is senior
to A Company and the other to B Company.’ The sergeant-major took
our particulars. He introduced me to a young second-lieutenant of A
Company, to which I was to go. He was a special reservist of the East
Surrey Regiment and was known as the Surrey-man. He took me along
to the company billet. As soon as we were out of earshot of battalion
headquarters I asked him: ‘What’s wrong with the adjutant? Why didn’t
he shake hands or give me any sort of decent welcome?’
The Surrey-man said: ‘Well, it’s your regiment, not mine. They’re all
like that. You must realize that this is a regular battalion, one of
the only four infantry battalions in France that is still more or less
its old self. This is the Nineteenth Brigade, the luckiest in France.
It has not been permanently part of any division, but used as army
reserve to put in wherever a division has been badly knocked. So,
except for the retreat, where it lost about a company, and Fromelles,
where it lost half of what was left, it has been practically undamaged.
A lot of the wounded have rejoined since. All our company commanders
are regulars, and so are all our N.C.O.’s. The peace-time custom of
taking no notice of newly-joined officers is still more or less kept
up for the first six months. It’s bad enough for the Sandhurst chaps,
it’s worse for special reservists like you and Rugg and Robertson, it’s
worse still for outsiders like me from another regiment.’ We were going
down the village street. The men sitting about on the door-steps jumped
up smartly to attention as we passed and saluted with a fixed stony
glare. They were magnificent looking men. Their uniforms were spotless,
their equipment khaki-blancoed and their buttons and cap-badges
twinkling. We reached company headquarters, where I reported to my
company commander, Captain G. O. Thomas. He was a regular of seventeen
years’ service, a well-known polo-player, and a fine soldier. This is
the order that he would himself have preferred. He shook hands without
a word, waved me to a chair, offered a cigarette and continued
writing his letter. I found later that A was the best company I could
have struck.
The Surrey-man asked me to help him censor some company letters before
going over to the battalion mess for lunch; they were more literate
than the ones in the Welsh regiment, but duller. On the way to the mess
he told me more about the battalion. He asked me whether it was my
first time out. ‘I was attached to the Second Welsh Regiment for three
months; I commanded a company there for a bit.’ ‘Oh, were you? Well,
I’d advise you to say nothing at all about it, then they’ll not expect
too much of you. They treat us like dirt; in a way it will be worse
for you than for me because you’re a full lieutenant. They’ll resent
that with your short service. There’s one lieutenant here of six years’
service and second-lieutenants who have been out here since the autumn.
They have already had two Special Reserve captains foisted on them;
they’re planning to get rid of them somehow. In the mess, if you open
your mouth or make the slightest noise the senior officers jump down
your throat. Only officers of the rank of captain are allowed to drink
whisky or turn on the gramophone. We’ve got to jolly well keep still
and look like furniture. It’s just like peace time. Mess bills are very
high; the mess was in debt at Quetta last year and we are economising
now to pay that back. We get practically nothing for our money but
ordinary rations and the whisky we aren’t allowed to drink.
‘We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the
First and Second Battalions the other day. The First Battalion had had
all their decent ponies pinched that time when they were sent up at
Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to
prevent a break through. So this battalion won easily. Can you
ride? No? Well, subalterns who can’t ride have to attend riding-school
every afternoon while we’re in billets. They give us hell, too. Two
of us have been at it for four months and haven’t passed off yet.
They keep us trotting round the field, with crossed stirrups most of
the time, and they give us pack-saddles instead of riding-saddles.
Yesterday they called us up suddenly without giving us time to change
into breeches. That reminds me, you notice everybody’s wearing shorts?
It’s a regimental order. The battalion thinks it’s still in India.
They treat the French civilians just like “niggers,” kick them about,
talk army Hindustani at them. It makes me laugh sometimes. Well, what
with a greasy pack-saddle, bare knees, crossed stirrups, and a wild
new transport pony that the transport men had pinched from the French,
I had a pretty thin time. The colonel, the adjutant, the senior major
and the transport officer stood at the four corners of the ring and
slogged at the ponies as they came round. I came off twice and got wild
with anger, and nearly decided to ride the senior major down. The funny
thing is that they don’t realize that they are treating us badly—it’s
such an honour to be serving with the regiment. So the best thing is to
pretend you don’t care what they do or say.’
I protested: ‘But all this is childish. Is there a war on here or isn’t
there?’
‘The battalion doesn’t recognize it socially,’ he answered. ‘Still, in
trenches I’d rather be with this battalion than in any other that I
have met. The senior officers do know their job, whatever else one says
about them, and the N.C.O.’s are absolutely trustworthy.’
The Second Battalion was peculiar in having a battalion mess instead of
company messes. The Surrey-man said grimly: ‘It’s supposed to be more
sociable.’ This was another peace-time survival. We went together
into the big château near the church. About fifteen officers of various
ranks were sitting in chairs reading the week’s illustrated papers
or (the seniors at least) talking quietly. At the door I said: ‘Good
morning, gentlemen,’ the new officer’s customary greeting to the mess.
There was no answer. Everybody looked at me curiously. The silence that
my entry had caused was soon broken by the gramophone, which began
singing happily:
We’ve been married just one year,
And Oh, we’ve got the sweetest,
And Oh, we’ve got the neatest,
And Oh, we’ve got the cutest
Little oil stove.
I found a chair in the background and picked up _The Field_. The door
burst open suddenly and a senior officer with a red face and angry
eye burst in. ‘Who the blazes put that record on?’ he shouted to the
room. ‘One of the bloody warts I expect. Take it off somebody. It
makes me sick. Let’s have some real music. Put on the _Angelus_.’ Two
subalterns (in the Royal Welch a subaltern had to answer to the name of
‘wart’) sprang up, stopped the gramophone, and put on _When the Angelus
is ringing_. The young captain who had put on _We’ve been married_
shrugged his shoulders and went on reading, the other faces in the room
were blank.
‘Who was that?’ I whispered to the Surrey-man.
He frowned. ‘That’s Buzz Off,’ he said.
Before the record was finished the door opened and in came the
colonel; Buzz Off reappeared with him. Everybody jumped up and said
in unison: ‘Good morning, sir.’ It was his first appearance that
day. Before giving the customary greeting and asking us to sit down he
turned spitefully to the gramophone: ‘Who on earth puts this wretched
_Angelus_ on every time I come into the mess? For heaven’s sake play
something cheery for a change.’ And with his own hands he took off the
_Angelus_, wound up the gramophone and put on _We’ve been married just
one year_. At that moment a gong rang for lunch and he abandoned it.
We filed into the next room, a ball-room with mirrors and a decorated
ceiling. We sat down at a long, polished table. The seniors sat at the
top, the juniors competed for seats as far away from them as possible.
I was unlucky enough to get a seat at the foot of the table facing the
commanding officer, the adjutant and Buzz Off. There was not a word
spoken down that end except for an occasional whisper for the salt
or for the beer—very thin French stuff. Robertson, who had not been
warned, asked the mess waiter for whisky. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the mess
waiter, ‘it’s against orders for the young officers.’ Robertson was a
man of forty-two, a solicitor with a large practice, and had stood for
Parliament in the Yarmouth division at the previous election.
I saw Buzz Off glaring at us and busied myself with my meat and
potatoes.
He nudged the adjutant. ‘Who are those two funny ones down there,
Charley,’ he asked.
‘New this morning from the militia. Answer to the names of Robertson
and Graves.’
‘Which is which?’ asked the colonel.
‘I’m Robertson, sir.’
‘I wasn’t asking you.’
Robertson winced, but said nothing. Then Buzz Off noticed something.
‘T’other wart’s wearing a wind-up tunic.’ Then he bent forward and
asked me loudly. ‘You there, wart. Why the hell are you wearing your
stars on your shoulder instead of your sleeve?’
My mouth was full and I was embarrassed. Everybody was looking at me. I
swallowed the lump of meat whole and said: ‘It was a regimental order
in the Welsh Regiment. I understood that it was the same everywhere in
France.’
The colonel turned puzzled to the adjutant: ‘What on earth’s the man
talking about the Welsh Regiment for?’ And then to me: ‘As soon as you
have finished your lunch you will visit the master-tailor. Report at
the orderly room when you’re properly dressed.’
There was a severe struggle in me between resentment and regimental
loyalty. Resentment for the moment had the better of it. I said under
my breath: ‘You damned snobs. I’ll survive you all. There’ll come a
time when there won’t be one of you left serving in the battalion to
remember battalion mess at Laventie.’ This time came, exactly a year
later.[4]
We went up to the trenches that night. They were high-command trenches;
because water was struck when one dug down three feet, the parapet and
parados were built up man-high. I found my platoon curt and reserved.
Even when on sentry-duty at night they would never talk confidentially
about themselves and their families like my platoon in the Welsh
Regiment. Townsend, the platoon-sergeant, was an ex-policeman who had
been on the reserve when war broke out. He used to drive his men rather
than lead them. ‘A’ company was at Red Lamp Corner; the front trench
broke off short here and started again further back on the right.
A red lamp was hung at the corner, invisible to the enemy, but a
warning after dark to the company on our right not to fire to the left
of it. Work and duties were done with a silent soldier-like efficiency
quite foreign to the Welsh.
The first night I was in trenches my company commander asked me to
go out on patrol; it was the regimental custom to test new officers
in this way. All the time that I had been with the Welsh I had never
once been out in No Man’s Land, even to inspect the barbed wire. In
the Welsh Regiment the condition of the wire was, I believe, the
responsibility of the battalion intelligence officer. I never remember
any work done on it by C Company. I think we left it to the Royal
Engineers. When Hewitt, the machine-gun officer, used to go out on
patrol sometimes it was regarded as a mad escapade. But with both
battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers it was a point of honour to
be masters of No Man’s Land from dusk to dawn. There was not a night
at Laventie that a message did not come down the line from sentry to
sentry: ‘Pass the word; officer’s patrol going out.’ My orders for this
patrol were to see whether a German sap-head was occupied by night or
not.
I went out from Red Lamp Corner with Sergeant Townsend at about ten
o’clock. We both had revolvers. We pulled socks, with the toes cut
off, over our bare knees, to prevent them showing up in the dark and
to make crawling easier. We went ten yards at a time, slowly, not on
all fours, but wriggling flat along the ground. After each movement
we lay and watched for about ten minutes. We crawled through our own
wire entanglements and along a dry ditch; ripping our clothes on more
barbed wire, glaring into the darkness till it began turning round and
round (once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted
them on the slimy body of an old corpse), nudging each other with
rapidly beating hearts at the slightest noise or suspicion, crawling,
watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of enemy
flares and again crawling, watching, crawling. (A Second Battalion
officer who revisited these Laventie trenches after the war was over
told me of the ridiculously small area of No Man’s Land compared with
the size it seemed on the long, painful journeys that he made over it.
‘It was like the real size of the hollow in a tooth compared with the
size it feels to the tongue.’)
We found a gap in the German wire and came at last to within five yards
of the sap-head that was our objective. We waited quite twenty minutes
listening for any signs of its occupation. Then I nudged Sergeant
Townsend and, revolvers in hand, we wriggled quickly forward and slid
into it. It was about three feet deep and unoccupied. On the floor
were a few empty cartridges and a wicker basket containing something
large and smooth and round, twice as large as a football. Very, very
carefully I groped and felt all around it in the dark. I couldn’t guess
what it was. I was afraid that it was some sort of infernal machine.
Eventually I dared to lift it out and carry it back. I had a suspicion
that it might be one of the German gas-cylinders that we had heard
so much about. We got back after making the journey of perhaps two
hundred yards in rather more than two hours. The sentries passed along
the word that we were in again. Our prize turned out to be a large
glass container quarter-filled with some pale yellow liquid. This was
sent down to battalion headquarters and from there sent along to the
divisional intelligence office. Everybody was very interested in it.
The theory was that the vessel contained a chemical for re-damping gas
masks. I now believe it was the dregs of country wine mixed with
rainwater. I never heard the official report. The colonel, however,
told my company commander in the hearing of the Surrey-man: ‘Your new
wart seems to have more guts than the others.’ After this I went out
fairly often. I found that the only thing that the regiment respected
in young officers was personal courage.
Besides, I had worked it out like this. The best way of lasting the
war out was to get wounded. The best time to get wounded was at night
and in the open, because a wound in a vital spot was less likely. Fire
was more or less unaimed at night and the whole body was exposed.
It was also convenient to be wounded when there was no rush on the
dressing-station services, and when the back areas were not being
heavily shelled. It was most convenient to be wounded, therefore, on
a night patrol in a quiet sector. You could usually manage to crawl
into a shell-hole until somebody came to the rescue. Still, patrolling
had its peculiar risks. If you were wounded and a German patrol got
you, they were as likely as not to cut your throat. The bowie-knife
was a favourite German patrol weapon; it was silent. (At this time
the British inclined more to the ‘cosh,’ a loaded stick.) The most
important information that a patrol could bring back was to what
regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if a wounded
man was found and it was impossible to get him back without danger to
oneself, the thing to be done was to strip him of his badges. To do
that quickly and silently it might be necessary first to cut his throat
or beat in his skull.
Sir P. Mostyn, a lieutenant who was often out patrolling at Laventie,
had a feud on with a German patrol on the left of the battalion
frontage. (Our patrols usually consisted of an officer and one
or, at the most, two men. German patrols were usually six or seven men
under an N.C.O. German officers left as much as they decently could to
their N.C.O.’s. They did not, as one of our sergeant-majors put it,
believe in ‘keeping a dog and barking themselves.’) One night Mostyn
caught sight of his ♦opponets; he had raised himself on one knee to
throw a percussion bomb at them when they fired and wounded him in the
arm, which immediately went numb. He caught the bomb before it hit
the ground and threw it with his left hand, and in the confusion that
followed managed to return to the trench.
♦ “opponets” replaced with “opponents”
Like every one else I had a carefully worked out formula for taking
risks. We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save
life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run,
say, a one-in-five risk, particularly if there was some wider object
than merely reducing the enemy’s man-power; for instance, picking off
a well-known sniper, or getting fire ascendancy in trenches where the
lines were dangerously close. I only once refrained from shooting a
German I saw, and that was at Cuinchy about three weeks after this.
When sniping from a knoll in the support line where we had a concealed
loop-hole I saw a German, about seven hundred yards away, through my
telescopic sights. He was having a bath in the German third line. I
somehow did not like the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed
the rifle to the sergeant who was with me and said: ‘Here, take this.
You’re a better shot than me.’ He got him, he said; but I had not
stayed to watch.
About saving the lives of enemy wounded there was disagreement; the
convention varied with the division. Some divisions, like the Canadians
and a division of Lowland territorials, who had, they claimed,
atrocities to avenge, would not only take no risks to rescue
enemy wounded, but would go out of their way to finish them off. The
Royal Welch Fusiliers were gentlemanly: perhaps a one-in-twenty risk
to get a wounded German to safety would be considered justifiable. An
important factor in taking risks was our own physical condition. When
exhausted and wanting to get quickly from one point in the trenches to
another without collapse, and if the enemy were not nearer than four or
five hundred yards, we would sometimes take a short cut over the top.
In a hurry we would take a one-in-two-hundred risk, when dead tired a
one-in-fifty risk. In some battalions where the _morale_ was not high,
one-in-fifty risks were often taken in mere laziness or despair. The
Munsters in the First Division were said by the Welsh to ‘waste men
wicked’ by not keeping properly under cover when in the reserve lines.
In the Royal Welch there was no wastage of this sort. At no time in the
war did any of us allow ourselves to believe that hostilities could
possibly continue more than nine months or a year more, so it seemed
almost worth while taking care; there even seemed a chance of lasting
until the end absolutely unhurt.
The Second Royal Welch, unlike the Second Welsh, believed themselves
better trench fighters than the Germans. With the Second Welsh it
was not cowardice but modesty. With the Second Royal Welch it was
not vainglory but courage: as soon as they arrived in a new sector
they insisted on getting fire ascendancy. Having found out from the
troops they relieved all possible information as to enemy snipers,
machine-guns, and patrols, they set themselves to deal with them one
by one. They began with machine-guns firing at night. As soon as one
started traversing down a trench the whole platoon farthest removed
from its fire would open five rounds rapid at it. The machine-gun
would usually stop suddenly but start again after a minute or two.
Again five rounds rapid. Then it usually gave up.
The Welsh seldom answered a machine-gun. If they did, it was not with
local organized fire, beginning and ending in unison, but in ragged
confused protest all along the line. There was almost no firing at
night in the Royal Welch, except organized fire at a machine-gun or
a persistent enemy sentry, or fire at a patrol close enough to be
distinguished as a German one. With all other battalions I met in
France there was random popping off all the time; the sentries wanted
to show their spite against the war. Flares were rarely used in the
Royal Welch; most often as signals to our patrols that it was time to
come back.
As soon as enemy machine-guns had been discouraged, our patrols would
go out with bombs to claim possession of No Man’s Land. At dawn next
morning came the struggle for sniping ascendancy. The Germans, we
were told, had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging
themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy who had been firing all
day from a shell-hole between the lines. He had a sort of cape over his
shoulders of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown,
and his rifle was also green fringed. A number of empty cartridges
were found by him, and his cap with the special oak-leaf badge. Few
battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The
Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights
than we did, and steel loopholes that our bullets could not pierce.
Also a system by which the snipers were kept for months in the same
sector until they knew all the loopholes and shallow places in our
trenches, and the tracks that our ration-parties used above-ground by
night, and where our traverses came in the trench, and so on,
better than we did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches,
with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to learn
the German line thoroughly. But at least we counted on getting rid of
the unprofessional German sniper. Later we had an elephant-gun in the
battalion that would pierce the German loopholes, and if we could not
locate the loophole of a persistent sniper we did what we could to
dislodge him by a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the
artillery.
It puzzled us that if a sniper were spotted and killed, another sniper
would begin again next day from the same position. The Germans probably
underrated us and regarded it as an accident. The willingness of other
battalions to let the Germans have sniping ascendancy helped us; enemy
snipers often exposed themselves unnecessarily, even the professionals.
There was, of course, one advantage of which no advance or retreat of
the enemy could rob us, and that was that we were always facing more or
less East; dawn broke behind the German lines, and they seldom realized
that for several minutes every morning we could see them though still
invisible ourselves. German night wiring-parties often stayed out too
long, and we could get a man or two as they went back; sunsets were
against us, but sunset was a less critical time. Sentries at night were
made to stand with their head and shoulders above the trenches and
their rifles in position on the parapet. This surprised me at first.
But it meant greater vigilance and self-confidence in the sentry,
and it put the top of his head above the level of the parapet. Enemy
machine-guns were trained on this level, and it was safer to be hit in
the chest or shoulders than in the top of the head. The risk of unaimed
fire at night was negligible, so this was really the safest plan.
It often happened in battalions like the Second Welsh, where the
head-and-shoulder rule was not in force and the sentry just took a peep
now and then, that an enemy patrol would sneak up unseen to the British
wire, throw a few bombs and get safely back. In the Royal Welch the
barbed-wire entanglement was the responsibility of the company behind
it. One of our first acts on taking over trenches was to inspect and
repair it. We did a lot of work on the wire.
Thomas was an extremely silent man; it was not sullenness but shyness.
‘Yes’ and ‘no’ was the limit of his usual conversation; it was
difficult for us subalterns. He never took us into his confidence about
company affairs, and we did not like asking him too much. His chief
interests seemed to be polo and the regiment. He was most conscientious
in taking his watch at night, a thing that the other company commanders
did not always do. We enjoyed his food-hampers sent every week from
Fortnum and Mason; we messed by companies when in the trenches. Our
only complaint was that Buzz Off, who had a good nose for a hamper,
used to spend more time than he would otherwise have done in the
company mess. This embarrassed us. Thomas went on leave to England
about this time. I heard about it accidentally. He walked about the
West End astonished at the amateur militariness that he met everywhere.
To be more in keeping with it he gave elaborate awkward salutes to
newly joined second-lieutenants and raised his cap to dug-out colonels
and generals. It was a private joke at the expense of the war.
I used to look forward to our spells in trenches at Laventie. Billet
life meant battalion mess, also riding-school, which I found rather
worse than the Surrey-man had described it. Parades were carried
out with peace-time punctiliousness and smartness, especially the
daily battalion guard-changing which every now and then, when I was
orderly officer, it was my duty to supervise. On one occasion, after
the guard-changing ceremony and inspection were over and I was about
to dismiss the old guard, I saw Buzz Off cross the village street
from one company headquarters to another. As he crossed I called the
guard to attention and saluted. I waited for a few seconds and then
dismissed the guard, but he had not really gone into the biliet; he
had been waiting in the doorway. As soon as I dismissed the guard he
dashed out with a great show of anger. ‘As you were, as you were, stand
fast!’ he shouted to the guard. And then to me: ‘Why in hell’s name,
Mr. Graves, didn’t you ask my permission to dismiss the parade? You’ve
read the King’s Regulations, haven’t you? And where the devil are your
manners, anyhow?’ I apologized. I said that I thought he had gone into
the house. This made matters worse. He bellowed at me for arguing;
then he asked me where I had learned to salute. ‘At the depot, sir,’ I
answered. ‘Then, by heaven, Mr. Graves, you’ll have to learn to salute
as the battalion does. You will parade every morning before breakfast
for a month under Staff-sergeant Evans and do an hour’s saluting
drill.’ Then he turned to the guard and dismissed them himself. This
was not a particular act of spite against me but the general game of
‘chasing the warts,’ at which all the senior officers played. It was
honestly intended to make us better soldiers.
I had been with the Royal Welch about three weeks when the Nineteenth
Brigade was moved down to the Béthune sector to fill a gap in the
Second Division; the gap was made by taking out the brigade of Guards
to go into the Guards Division which was then being formed. On
the way down we marched past Lord Kitchener. Kitchener, we were told,
commented to the brigadier on the soldier-like appearance of the
leading battalion—which was ourselves—but said cynically: ‘Wait until
they’ve been a week or two in the trenches; they will lose some of
that high polish.’ He apparently mistook us for one of the new-army
battalions.
The first trenches we went into on our arrival were the Cuinchy
brick-stacks. The company I was with was on the canal-bank frontage,
a few hundred yards to the left of where I had been with the Welsh
Regiment at the end of May. The Germans opposite wished to be sociable.
They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of
these messages was evidently addressed to the Irish battalion we had
relieved:
We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and
invite you to a good German dinner to-night with beer (ale) and
cakes. You little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became
no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you
please.
Another message was a copy of the _Neueste Nachrichten_, a German army
newspaper printed at Lille. It gave sensational details of Russian
defeats around Warsaw and immense captures of prisoners and guns.
But we were more interested in a full account in another column of
the destruction of a German submarine by British armed trawlers; no
details of the sinking of German submarines had been allowed to appear
in any English papers. The battalion cared no more about the successes
or reverses of our Allies than it did about the origins of the
war. It never allowed itself to have any political feelings about the
Germans. A professional soldier’s job was to fight whomsoever the
King ordered him to fight; it was as simple as that. With the King as
colonel-in-chief of the regiment it was even simpler. The Christmas
1914 fraternization, in which the battalion was among the first to
participate, was of the same professional simplicity; it was not an
emotional hiatus but a commonplace of military tradition—an exchange of
courtesies between officers of opposite armies.
Cuinchy was one of the worst places for rats. They came up from the
canal and fed on the many corpses and multiplied. When I was here with
the Welsh a new officer came to the company, and, as a token of his
welcome, he was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned
in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and
there were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a
severed hand. This was thought a great joke.
The colonel called for a patrol to go out along the side of the
tow-path, where we had heard suspicious sounds on the previous night,
to see whether a working-party was out. I volunteered to go when it
was dark. But there was a moon that night so bright and full that it
dazzled the eyes to look at it. Between us and the Germans was a flat
stretch of about two hundred yards, broken only by shell-craters and an
occasional patch of coarse grass. I was not with my own company, but
lent to B, which had two officers away on leave. Childe-Freeman, the
company commander, said: ‘You’re not going out on patrol to-night, are
you? It’s almost as bright as day.’ I said: ‘All the more reason for
going; they won’t be expecting me. Will you please have everything
as usual? Let the men fire an occasional rifle and send up a flare
every half hour. If I go carefully they’ll not see me.’ But I was
nervous, and while we were having supper I clumsily knocked over a
cup of tea, and after that a plate. Freeman said: ‘Look here, I’ll
’phone through to battalion and tell them it’s too bright for you to
go out.’ But I knew Buzz Off would accuse me of cold feet, so Sergeant
Williams and I put on our crawlers and went out by way of a mine-crater
at the side of the tow-path. There was no need that night for the
usual staring business. We could see only too clearly. All we had
to do was to wait for an opportunity to move quickly, stop dead and
trust to luck, then move on quickly again. We planned our rushes from
shell-hole to shell-hole; the opportunities were provided by artillery
or machine-gun fire which would distract the sentries. Many of the
craters contained corpses of men who had been wounded and crept in and
died. Some of them were skeletons, picked clean by the rats. We got to
within thirty yards of a big German working-party who were digging a
trench ahead of their front line. Between them and us we could count
a covering party of ten men lying on the grass in their great-coats.
We had gone far enough. There was a German lying on his back about
twelve yards away humming a tune. It was the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. The
sergeant, who was behind me, pressed my foot with his hand and showed
me the revolver he was carrying. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
I gave him the signal for ‘no.’ We turned to go back; it was hard not
to go back too quickly. We had got about half-way back when a German
machine-gun opened traversing fire along the top of our trenches. We
immediately jumped to our feet; the bullets were brushing the grass,
so it was safer to be standing up. We walked the rest of the way
back, but moving irregularly to distract the aim of the covering party
if they saw us. Back in the trench I rang up the artillery and asked
them to fire as much shrapnel as they could spare fifty yards short of
where the German front trench touched the tow-path; I knew that one of
the night-lines of the battery supporting us was trained near enough
to this point. A minute and a quarter later the shells started coming
over. We heard the clash of downed tools and distant shouts and cries;
we reckoned the probable casualties. The next morning at stand-to Buzz
Off came up to me: ‘I hear you were on patrol last night?’ I said:
‘Yes, sir.’ He asked me for particulars. When I had told him about the
covering party he cursed me for ‘not scuppering them with that revolver
of yours. Cold feet,’ he snorted as he turned away.
One day while we were here the Royal Welch were instructed to shout
across to the enemy and induce them to take part in a conversation.
The object was to find out how strongly the German front trenches were
manned at night. A German-speaking officer in the company among the
brick-stacks was provided with a megaphone. He shouted: ‘Wie gehts
ihnen, kamaraden?’ Somebody shouted back in delight: ‘Ah, Tommee, hast
du den deutsch gelernt?’ Firing stopped and a conversation began across
the fifty yards or so of No Man’s Land. The Germans refused to say
what regiment they were. They would not talk any military shop. One of
them shouted out: ‘Les sheunes madamoiselles de La Bassée bonnes pour
coucher avec. Les madamoiselles de Béthune bonnes aussi, hein?’ Our
spokesman refused to discuss this. In the pause that followed he asked
how the Kaiser was. They replied respectfully that he was in excellent
health, thank you. ‘And how is the Crown Prince?’ he asked them. ‘Oh,
b——r the Crown Prince,’ shouted somebody in English, and was immediately
suppressed by his comrades. There was a confusion of angry voices and
laughter. Then they all began singing the ‘Wacht am Rhein.’ The trench
was evidently very well held indeed.
XV
This was the end of August 1915, and particulars of the coming
offensive against La Bassée were beginning to leak through the young
staff officers. The French civilians knew that it was coming and
so, naturally, did the Germans. Every night now new batteries and
lorry-trains of shells came rumbling up the Béthune-La Bassée road.
There were other signs of movement: sapping forward at Vermelles and
Cambrin, where the lines were too far apart for a quick rush across,
to make a new front line; orders for evacuation of hospitals; the
appearance of cavalry and new-army divisions. Then Royal Engineer
officers supervised the digging of pits at intervals in the front
line. They were sworn not to say what these were for, but we knew that
they were for gas-cylinders. Scaling ladders for climbing quickly out
of trenches were brought up by the lorry-load and dumped at Cambrin
village. As early as September 3rd I had a bet with Robertson that our
division would attack on this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. When I went home
on leave on September 9th the sense of impending events was so great
that I almost wished I was not going.
Leave came round for officers about every six or eight months in
ordinary times; heavy casualties shortened the period, general
offensives cut off leave altogether. There was only one officer in
France who was ever said to have refused to go on leave when his
turn came round—Cross of the Fifty-second Light Infantry (the Second
Battalion of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, which insisted on
its original style as jealously as we kept our ‘c’ in ‘Welch’). Cross
is alleged to have refused leave on these grounds: ‘My father fought
with the regiment in the South African War and had no leave; my
grandfather fought in the Crimea with the regiment and had no leave. I
do not regard it in the regimental tradition to take home-leave when on
active service.’ Cross was a professional survivor and was commanding
the battalion in 1917 when I last heard of him.
London seemed unreally itself. In spite of the number of men in uniform
in the streets, the general indifference to and ignorance about the
war was remarkable. Enlistment was still voluntary. The universal
catchword was ‘Business as usual.’ My family were living in London
now, at the house formerly occupied by my uncle, Robert von Ranke, the
German consul. He had been forced to leave in a hurry on August 4th,
1914, and my mother had undertaken to look after it for him while the
war lasted. So when Edward Marsh, then secretary to the Prime Minister,
rang me up from Downing Street to arrange a meal, someone intervened
and cut him off. The telephone of the German consul’s sister was, of
course, closely watched by the anti-espionage men of Scotland Yard. The
Zeppelin scare had just begun. Some friends of the family came in one
night. They knew I had been in the trenches, but were not interested.
They began telling me of the air-raids, of bombs dropped only three
streets off. So I said: ‘Well, do you know, the other day I was asleep
in a house and in the early morning an aeroplane dropped a bomb next
door and killed three soldiers who were billeted there, and a woman
and child.’ ‘Good gracious,’ they said, looking at me with sudden
interest, ‘what did you do then?’ I said: ‘I went to sleep again; I was
tired out. It was at a place called Beuvry, about four miles behind
the trenches.’ They said: ‘Oh, but that was in France,’ and the look
of interest faded from their faces, as though I had taken them in
with a stupid catch. I went up to Harlech for the rest of my leave, and
walked about on the hills in an old shirt and a pair of shorts. When I
got back, ‘The Actor,’ a regular officer in A Company, asked me: ‘Had
a good time on leave?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Go to many dances?’
I said: ‘Not one.’ ‘What shows did you go to?’ ‘I didn’t go to any
shows.’ ‘Hunt?’ ‘No!’ ‘Slept with any nice girls?’ ‘No, I didn’t. Sorry
to disappoint you.’ ‘What the hell _did_ you do, then?’ ‘Oh, I just
walked about on some hills.’ ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘chaps like you don’t
deserve to go on leave.’
On September 19th we relieved the Middlesex at Cambrin, and it was
said that these were the trenches from which we were to attack. The
preliminary bombardment had already started, a week in advance. As I
led my platoon into the line I recognized with some disgust the same
machine-gun shelter where I had seen the suicide on my first night in
trenches. It seemed ominous. This was the first heavy bombardment that
I had yet seen from our own guns. The trenches shook properly and a
great cloud of drifting shell-smoke clouded the German trenches. The
shells went over our heads in a steady stream; we had to shout to make
our neighbours hear. Dying down a little at night, the noise began
again every morning at dawn, a little louder each time. We said: ‘Damn
it, there can’t be a living soul left in those trenches.’ And still
it went on. The Germans retaliated, though not very vigorously. Most
of their heavy artillery had been withdrawn from this sector, we were
told, and sent across to the Russian front. We had more casualties
from our own shorts and from blow-backs than from German shells. Much
of the ammunition that our batteries were using came from America and
contained a high percentage of duds; the driving-bands were always
coming off. We had fifty casualties in the ranks and three officer
casualties, including Buzz Off, who was badly wounded in the head.
This was before steel helmets were issued; we would not have lost
nearly so many if we had had them. I had two insignificant wounds on
the hand which I took as an omen on the right side. On the morning of
the 23rd Thomas came back from battalion headquarters with a notebook
in his hand and a map for each of us company officers. ‘Listen,’ he
said, ‘and copy out all this skite on the back of your maps. You’ll
have to explain it to your platoons this afternoon. To-morrow morning
we go back to Béthune to dump our blankets, packs, and greatcoats. On
the next day, that’s Saturday the 25th, we attack.’ It was the first
definite news we had been given and we looked up half startled, half
relieved. I still have the map and these are the orders as I copied
them down:
First Objective.—_Les Briques Farm._—The big house plainly
visible to our front, surrounded by trees. To get this it is
necessary to cross three lines of enemy trenches. The first is three
hundred yards distant, the second four hundred, and the third about
six hundred. We then cross two railways. Behind the second railway
line is a German trench called the Brick Trench. Then comes the Farm,
a strong place with moat and cellars and a kitchen garden strongly
staked and wired.
Second Objective.—_The Town of Auchy._—This is also plainly
visible from our trenches. It is four hundred yards beyond the Farm
and defended by a first line of trench half way across, and a
second line immediately in front of the town. When we have occupied
the first line our direction is half-right, with the left of the
battalion directed on Tall Chimney.
Third Objective.—_Village of Haisnes._—Conspicuous by
high-spired church. Our eventual line will be taken up on the railway
behind this village, where we will dig in and await reinforcements.
When Thomas had reached this point the shoulders of The Actor were
shaking with laughter. ‘What’s up?’ asked Thomas irritably. The Actor
asked: ‘Who in God’s Name is originally responsible for this little
effort?’ Thomas said: ‘Don’t know. Probably Paul the Pimp or someone
like that.’ (Paul the Pimp was a captain on the divisional staff,
young, inexperienced and much disliked. He ‘wore red tabs upon his
chest, And even on his undervest.’) ‘Between you and me, but you
youngsters be careful not to let the men know, this is what they call
a subsidiary attack. We’ll have no supports. We’ve just got to go over
and keep the enemy busy while the folk on our right do the real work.
You notice that the bombardment is much heavier over there. They’ve
knocked the Hohenzollern Redoubt to bits. Personally, I don’t give a
damn either way. We’ll get killed anyhow.’ We all laughed. ‘All right,
laugh now, but by God on Saturday we’ve got to carry out this funny
scheme.’ I had never heard Thomas so talkative before. ‘Sorry,’ The
Actor apologized, ‘carry on with the dictation.’ Thomas went on:
‘The attack will be preceded by forty minutes discharge of the
accessory,[5] which will clear the path for a thousand yards, so
that the two railway lines will be occupied without difficulty. Our
advance will follow closely behind the accessory. Behind us are three
fresh divisions and the Cavalry Corps. It is expected we shall have
no difficulty in breaking through. All men will parade with their
platoons; pioneers, servants, etc. to be warned. All platoons to be
properly told off under N.C.O.’s. Every N.C.O. is to know exactly
what is expected of him, and when to take over command in case of
casualties. Men who lose touch must join up with the nearest company
or regiment and push on. Owing to the strength of the accessory, men
should be warned against remaining too long in captured trenches
where the accessory is likely to collect, but to keep to the open and
above all to push on. It is important that if smoke-helmets have to
be pulled down they must be tucked in under the shirt.’
[Illustration: THE CAMBRIN—CUINCHY—VERMELLES TRENCH SECTOR]
The Actor interrupted again. ‘Tell me, Thomas, do you believe in this
funny accessory?’ Thomas said: ‘It’s damnable. It’s not soldiering
to use stuff like that even though the Germans did start it. It’s
dirty, and it’ll bring us bad luck. We’re sure to bungle it. Look
at those new gas-companies, (sorry, excuse me this once, I mean
accessory-companies). Their very look makes me tremble. Chemistry-dons
from London University, a few lads straight from school, one or two
N.C.O.’s of the old-soldier type, trained together for three weeks,
then given a job as responsible as this. Of course they’ll bungle
it. How could they do anything else? But let’s be merry. I’m going on
again:
‘Men of company: what they are to carry:
Two hundred rounds of ammunition (bomb-throwers fifty, and signallers
one hundred and fifty rounds).
Heavy tools carried in sling by the strongest men.
Waterproof sheet in belt.
Sandbag in right coat-pocket.
Field dressing and iodine.
Emergency ration, including biscuit.
One tube-helmet, to be worn when we advance, foiled up on the head.
It must be quite secure and the top part turned down. If possible
each man will be provided with an elastic band.
One smoke-helmet, old pattern, to be carried for preference behind
the back where it is least likely to be damaged by stray bullets, etc.
Wire-cutters, as many as possible, by wiring party and others;
hedging-gloves by wire party.
Platoon screens, for artillery observation, to be carried by a man in
each platoon who is not carrying a tool.
Packs, capes, greatcoats, blankets will be dumped, not carried.
No one is to carry sketches of our position or anything likely to be
of service to the enemy.’
‘That’s all. I believe we’re going over first with the Middlesex in
support. If we get through the German wire I’ll be satisfied. Our guns
don’t seem to be cutting it. Perhaps they’re putting that off until the
intense bombardment. Any questions?’
That afternoon I repeated it all to the platoon and told them of
the inevitable success attending our assault. They seemed to believe
it. All except Sergeant Townsend. ‘Do you say, sir, that we have
three divisions and the Cavalry Corps behind us?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I
answered. ‘Well, excuse me, sir, I’m thinking it’s only those chaps on
the right that’ll get reinforcements. If we get half a platoon of Mons
Angels, that’s about all we will get.’ ‘Sergeant Townsend,’ I said,
‘you are a well-known pessimist. This is going to be a good show.’ The
next morning we were relieved by the Middlesex and marched back to
Béthune, where we dumped our spare kit at the Montmorency Barracks. The
battalion officers messed together in a big house near by. This billet
was claimed at the same time by the staff of a new-army division which
was to take part in the fighting next day. The argument was settled
in a friendly way by division and battalion messing together. It was,
someone pointed out, like a caricature of The Last Supper in duplicate.
In the middle of the long table sat the two pseudo-Christs, the
battalion colonel and the divisional general. Everybody was drinking a
lot; the subalterns were allowed whisky for a treat, and were getting
rowdy. They raised their glasses with: ‘Cheero, we will be messing
together to-morrow night in La Bassée.’ Only the company commanders
were looking worried. I remember C Company commander especially,
Captain A. L. Samson, biting his thumb and refusing to join in the
general excitement. I think it was Childe-Freeman of B company who said
that night: ‘The last time the regiment was in these parts it was under
decent generalship. Old Marlborough knew better than to attack the La
Bassée lines; he masked them and went round.’
The G.S.O. 1 of the new-army division, a staff-colonel, knew the
adjutant well. They had played polo together in India. I happened to
be sitting next to them. The G.S.O. 1 said to the adjutant, rather
drunkenly: ‘Charley, do you see that silly old woman over there? Calls
himself General Commanding. Doesn’t know where he is; doesn’t know
where his division is; can’t read a map properly. He’s marched the poor
sods off their feet and left his supplies behind, God knows where.
They’ve had to use their iron rations and what they could pick up in
the villages. And to-morrow he’s going to fight a battle. Doesn’t know
anything about battles; the men have never been in trenches before,
and to-morrow’s going to be a glorious balls-up, and the day after
to-morrow he’ll be sent home.’ Then he said, quite seriously: ‘Really,
Charley, it’s just like that, you mark my words.’
That night we marched back again to Cambrin. The men were singing.
Being mostly from the Midlands they sang comic songs instead of Welsh
hymns: _Slippery Sam_, _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine_,
and _I do like a S’nice S’mince Pie_, to concertina accompaniment. The
tune of the _S’nice S’mince Pie_ ran in my head all next day, and for
the week following I could not get rid of it. The Second Welsh would
never have sung a song like _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the
Rhine_. Their only songs about the war were defeatist:
I want to go home,
I want to go home,
The coal-box and shrapnel they whistle and roar,
I don’t want to go to the trenches no more,
I want to go over the sea
Where the Kayser can’t shoot bombs at me.
Oh, I
Don’t want to die,
I want to go home.
There were several more verses in the same strain. Hewitt, the Welsh
machine-gun officer, had written one in a more offensive spirit:
I want to go home,
I want to go home.
One day at Givenchy the week before last
The Allmands attacked and they nearly got past.
They pushed their way up to the keep,
Through our maxim-gun sight we did peep,
Oh my!
They let out a cry,
They never got home.
But the men would not sing it, though they all admired Hewitt.
The Béthune-La Bassée road was choked with troops, guns, and transport,
and we had to march miles north out of our way to get back to Cambrin.
As it was we were held up two or three times by massed cavalry.
Everything seemed in confusion. A casualty clearing-station had been
planted astride one of the principal crossroads and was already being
shelled. When we reached Cambrin we had marched about twenty miles in
all that day. We were told then that the Middlesex would go over first
with us in support, and to their left the Second Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders, with the Cameronians in support; the junior officers
complained loudly at our not being given the honour of leading the
attack. We were the senior regiment, they protested, and entitled to
the ‘Right of the Line.’ We moved into trench sidings just in front
of the village. There was about half a mile of communication trench
between us and the trenches proper, known as Maison Rouge Alley. It
was an hour or so past midnight. At half-past five the gas was to
be discharged. We were cold, tired and sick, not at all in the mood
for a battle. We tried to snatch an hour or two of sleep squatting
in the trench. It had been raining for some time. Grey, watery dawn
broke at last behind the German lines; the bombardment, which had been
surprisingly slack all night, brisked up a little. ‘Why the devil don’t
they send them over quicker?’ asked The Actor. ‘This isn’t my idea of a
bombardment. We’re getting nothing opposite us. What little there is is
going into the Hohenzollern.’ ‘Shell shortage. Expected it,’ answered
Thomas. We were told afterwards that on the 23rd a German aeroplane had
bombed the Army Reserve shell-dump and sent it up. The bombardment on
the 24th and on the day of the battle itself was nothing compared with
that of the previous days. Thomas looked strained and ill. ‘It’s time
they were sending that damned accessory off. I wonder what’s doing.’
What happened in the next few minutes is difficult for me now to sort
out. It was more difficult still at the time. All we heard back there
in the sidings was a distant cheer, confused crackle of rifle-fire,
yells, heavy shelling on our front line, more shouts and yells and a
continuous rattle of machine-guns. After a few minutes, lightly-wounded
men of the Middlesex came stumbling down Maison Rouge Alley to the
dressing-station. I was at the junction of the siding and the alley.
‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘Bloody balls-up’ was the
most detailed answer I could get. Among the wounded were a number
of men yellow-faced and choking, with their buttons tarnished green;
these were gas cases. Then came the stretcher cases. Maison Rouge Alley
was narrow and the stretchers had difficulty in getting down. The
Germans started shelling it with five-point-nines. Thomas went through
the shelling to battalion headquarters to ask for orders. It was the
same place that I had visited on my first night in the trenches. This
group of dug-outs in the reserve line showed very plainly from the
air as battalion headquarters, and should never have been occupied on
the day of a battle. Just before Thomas arrived the Germans put five
shells into it. The adjutant jumped one way, the colonel another, the
regimental sergeant-major a third. One shell went into the signals
dug-out and destroyed the telephone. The colonel had a slight wound on
his hand; he joined the stream of wounded and was carried as far as
the base with it. The adjutant took charge. All this time A Company
had been waiting in the siding for the rum to arrive; the tradition
of every attack was a double tot of rum beforehand. All the other
companies got it except ours. The Actor was cursing: ‘Where the bloody
hell’s that storeman gone?’ We fixed bayonets in readiness to go up to
the attack as soon as Thomas came back with orders. The Actor sent me
along the siding to the other end of the company. The stream of wounded
was continuous. At last Thomas’s orderly appeared, saying: ‘Captain’s
orders, sir: A Company to move up to the front line.’ It seems that
at that moment the storeman appeared with the rum. He was hugging the
rum-bottle, without rifle or equipment, red-faced and retching. He
staggered up to The Actor and said: ‘There you are, sir,’ then fell
on his face in the thick mud of a sump-pit at the junction of the
trench and the siding. The stopper of the bottle flew out and what
was left of the three gallons bubbled on the ground. The Actor said
nothing. It was a crime deserving the death-penalty. He put one foot
on the storeman’s neck, the other in the small of his back, and trod
him into the mud. Then he gave the order ‘Company forward.’ The company
went forward with a clatter of steel over the body, and that was the
last heard of the storeman.
What had happened in the front line was this. At half-past four the
commander of the gas-company in the front line sent a telephone message
through to divisional headquarters: ‘Dead calm. Impossible discharge
accessory.’ The answer came back: ‘Accessory to be discharged at all
costs.’ Thomas’s estimate of the gas-company’s efficiency was right
enough. The spanners for unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders were
found, with two or three exceptions, to be misfits. The gas-men rushed
about shouting and asking each other for the loan of an adjustable
spanner. They discharged one or two cylinders with the spanners that
they had; the gas went whistling out, formed a thick cloud a few
yards away in No Man’s Land, and then gradually spread back into the
trenches. The Germans had been expecting the attack. They immediately
put their gas-helmets on, semi-rigid ones, better than ours. Bundles of
oily cotton-waste were strewn along the German parapet and set alight
as a barrier to the gas. Then their batteries opened on our lines. The
confusion in the front trench was great; the shelling broke several of
the gas-cylinders and the trench was soon full of gas. The gas-company
dispersed.
No orders could come through because the shell in the signals dug-out
at battalion headquarters had cut communication both between
companies and battalion headquarters and between battalion headquarters
and division. The officers in the front trench had to decide on
immediate action. Two companies of the Middlesex, instead of waiting
for the intense bombardment which was to follow the forty minutes
of gas, charged at once and got as far as the German wire-which our
artillery had not yet attempted to cut. What shelling there had been
on it was shrapnel and not high explosive; shrapnel was no use against
barbed wire. The Germans shot the Middlesex men down. It is said that
one platoon found a gap and got into the German trench. But there
were no survivors of the platoon to confirm the story. The Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders went over too, on their left. Two companies,
instead of charging at once, rushed back to the support line out of the
gas-filled front trench and attacked from there. It will be recalled
that the front line had been pushed forward in preparation for the
battle; these companies were therefore attacking from the old front
line. The barbed wire entanglements in front of this trench had not
been removed, so that they were caught and machine-gunned between
their own front and support lines. The leading companies were equally
unsuccessful. When the attack started, the German N.C.O.’s had jumped
up on the parapet to encourage their men. It was a Jaeger regiment and
their musketry was good.
The survivors of the first two companies of the Middlesex were lying in
shell-craters close to the German wire, sniping and making the Germans
keep their heads down. They had bombs to throw, but these were nearly
all of a new type issued for the battle; the fuses were lit on the
match-and-matchbox principle and the rain had made them useless. The
other two companies of the Middlesex soon followed in support.
Machine-gun fire stopped them half-way. Only one German machine-gun
was now in action, the others had been knocked out by rifle or
trench-mortar fire. Why the single gun remained in action is a story in
itself.
It starts like this. British colonial governors and high-commissioners
had the privilege of nominating one or two officers from their
countries to be attached in war-time to the regular British forces.
Under this scheme the officers appointed began as full lieutenants.
The Governor-General of Jamaica (or whatever his proper style may be)
nominated the eighteen-year-old son of a rich Jamaica planter. He was
sent straight from Jamaica to the First Middlesex. He was good-hearted
enough but of little use in the trenches. He had never been out of
the island in his life and, except for a short service with the West
Indian militia, knew nothing of soldiering. His company commander took
a fatherly interest in Young Jamaica, as he was called, and tried to
teach him his duties. This company commander was known as The Boy.
He had twenty years’ service in the Middlesex, and the unusual boast
of having held every rank from ‘boy’ to captain in the same company.
His father, I believe, had been the regimental sergeant-major. The
difficulty was that Jamaica was a full lieutenant and so senior
to the other experienced subalterns in the company, who were only
second-lieutenants. The colonel decided to shift Jamaica off on some
course or extra-regimental appointment at the earliest opportunity.
Somewhere about May or June he had been asked to supply an officer
for the brigade trench-mortar company, and he had sent Jamaica.
Trench-mortars at that time were dangerous and ineffective; so the
appointment seemed suitable. At the same time the Royal Welch Fusiliers
had also been asked to detail an officer, and the colonel had sent
Tiley, an ex-planter from Malay, who was what is called a fine natural
soldier. He had been chosen because he was attached from another
regiment and had showed his resentment at the manner of his welcome
somewhat too plainly. By September mortars had improved in design and
become an important infantry arm; Jamaica was senior to Tiley and was
therefore in the responsible position of commanding the company.
When the Middlesex made the charge, The Boy was mortally wounded as
he climbed over the parapet. He fell back and began crawling down
the trench to the stretcher-bearers’ dug-out. He passed Jamaica’s
trench-mortar emplacement. Jamaica had lost his gun-team and was
serving the trench-mortars himself. When he saw The Boy he forgot about
his guns and ran off to get a stretcher-party. Tiley meanwhile, on the
other flank, opposite Mine Point, had knocked out the machine-guns
within range. He went on until his gun burst. The machine-gun in the
Pope’s Nose, a small salient opposite Jamaica, remained in action.
It was at this point that the Royal Welch Fusiliers came up in support.
Maison Rouge Alley was a nightmare; the Germans were shelling it with
five-nines bursting with a black smoke and with lachrymatory shells.
This caused a continual scramble backwards and forwards. There were
cries and counter-cries: ‘Come on!’ ‘Get back, you bastards!’ ‘Gas
turning on us!’ ‘Keep your heads, you men!’ ‘Back like hell, boys.’
‘Whose orders?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Gas!’ ‘Back!’ ‘Come on!’ ‘Gas!’
‘Back!’ Wounded men and stretcher-bearers were still trying to squeeze
past. We were alternately putting on and taking off our gas-helmets
and that made things worse. In many places the trench was filled in
and we had to scramble over the top. Childe-Freeman got up to
the front line with only fifty men of B Company; the rest had lost
their way in some abandoned trenches half-way up. The adjutant met
him in the support line. ‘You ready to go over, Freeman?’ he asked.
Freeman had to admit that he had lost most of his company. He felt
this keenly as a disgrace; it was the first time that he had commanded
a company in battle. He decided to go over with his fifty men in
support of the Middlesex. He blew his whistle and the company charged.
They were stopped by machine-gun fire before they had passed our own
entanglements. Freeman himself died, but of heart-failure, as he stood
on the parapet. After a few minutes C Company and the remainder of B
reached the front line. The gas-cylinders were still whistling and the
trench full of dying men. Samson decided to go over; he would not have
it said that the Royal Welch had let down the Middlesex. There was a
strong comradely feeling between the Middlesex and the Royal Welch. The
Royal Welch and Middlesex were drawn together in dislike of the Scots.
The other three battalions in the brigade were Scottish, and ♦the
brigadier was a Scot and, unjustly no doubt, accused of favouring them.
Our adjutant voiced the general opinion: ‘The Jocks are all the same,
the trousered variety and the bare-backed variety. They’re dirty in
trenches, they skite too much, and they charge like hell—both ways.’
The Middlesex, who were the original Diehard battalion, had more than
once, with the Royal Welch, considered themselves let down by the
Jocks. So Samson with C and the rest of B Company charged. One of the
officers told me later what happened to himself. It had been agreed
to advance by platoon rushes with supporting fire. When his platoon
had run about twenty yards he signalled them to lie down and open
covering fire. The din was tremendous. He saw the platoon on the left
flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed
to hear. He jumped up from his shell-hole and waved and signalled
‘Forward.’ Nobody stirred. He shouted: ‘You bloody cowards, are you
leaving me to go alone?’ His platoon sergeant, groaning with a broken
shoulder, gasped out: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they’re
all f——ing dead.’ A machine-gun traversing had caught them as they rose
to the whistle.
♦ “the the” replaced with “the”
Our company too had become separated by the shelling. The Surrey-man
got a touch of gas and went coughing back. The Actor said he was
skrim-shanking and didn’t want the battle. This was unfair. The
Surrey-man looked properly sick. I do not know what happened to him,
but I heard that the gas was not much and that he managed, a few months
later, to get back to his own regiment in France. I found myself with
The Actor in a narrow trench between the front and support lines. This
trench had not been built wide enough for a stretcher to pass the
bends. We came on The Boy lying on his stretcher wounded in the lungs
and the stomach. Jamaica was standing over him in tears, blubbering:
‘Poor old Boy, poor old Boy, he’s going to die; I’m sure he is. He’s
the only one who was decent to me.’ The Actor found we could not get
by. He said to Jamaica: ‘Take that poor sod out of the way, will you?
I’ve got to get my company up. Put him into a dug-out or somewhere.’
Jamaica made no answer; he seemed paralysed by the horror of the
occasion. He could only repeat: ‘Poor old Boy, poor I old Boy.’ ‘Look
here,’ said The Actor, ‘if you can’t shift him into a dug-out we’ll
have to lift him on top of the trench. He can’t live now and we’re
late getting up.’ ‘No, no,’ Jamaica shouted wildly. The Actor lost his
temper and shook Jamaica roughly by the shoulders. ‘You’re the
bloody trench-mortar wallah, aren’t you?’ he asked fiercely. Jamaica
nodded miserably. ‘Well, your battery is a hundred yards from here. Why
the hell aren’t you using your gas-pipes on that machine-gun in the
Pope’s Nose? Buzz off back to them.’ And he kicked him down the trench.
Then he called over his shoulder: ‘Sergeant Rose and Corporal Jennings,
lift this stretcher up across the top of the trench. We’ve got to
pass.’ Jamaica leaned against a traverse. ‘I do think you’re the most
heartless beast I’ve ever met,’ he said weakly.
We went on up to the front line. It was full of dead and dying. The
captain of the gas-company, who had kept his head and had a special
oxygen respirator, had by now turned off the gas. Vermorel-sprayers
had cleared out most of the gas, but we still had to wear our masks.
We climbed up and crouched on the fire-step, where the gas was not so
thick—gas was heavy stuff and kept low. Then Thomas arrived with the
remainder of A Company and, with D, we waited for the whistle to follow
the other two companies over. Fortunately at this moment the adjutant
appeared. He told Thomas that he was now in command of the battalion
and he didn’t care a damn about orders; he was going to cut his losses.
He said he would not send A and D over until he got definite orders
from brigade. He had sent a runner back because telephone communication
was cut, and we must wait. Meanwhile the intense bombardment that was
to follow the forty minutes’ discharge of gas began. It concentrated on
the German front trench and wire. A good deal of it was short and we
had further casualties in our trenches. The survivors of the Middlesex
and of our B and C Companies in craters in No Man’s Land suffered
heavily.
My mouth was dry, my eyes out of focus, and my legs quaking under
me. I found a water-bottle full of rum and drank about half a pint; it
quieted me and my head remained clear. Samson was lying wounded about
twenty yards away from the front trench. Several attempts were made to
get him in. He was very badly hit and groaning. Three men were killed
in these attempts and two officers and two men wounded. Finally his own
orderly managed to crawl out to him. Samson ordered him back, saying
that he was riddled and not worth rescuing; he sent his apologies to
the company for making such a noise. We waited for about a couple of
hours for the order to charge. The men were silent and depressed.
Sergeant Townsend was making feeble, bitter jokes about the good old
British army muddling through and how he thanked God we still had a
navy. I shared the rest of the rum with him and he cheered up a little.
Finally a runner came with a message that the attack was off for the
present.
Rumours came down the trenches of a disaster similar to our own in the
brick-stack area, where the Fifth Brigade had gone over, and again at
Givenchy, where it was said that men of the Sixth Brigade at the Duck’s
Bill salient had fought their way into the enemy trenches, but had been
bombed out, their own supply of bombs failing. It was said, however,
that things were better on the right, where there had been a slight
wind to take the gas over. There was a rumour that the First, Seventh,
and Forty-seventh Divisions had broken through. My memory of that day
is hazy. We spent it getting the wounded down to the dressing-station,
spraying the trenches and dug-outs to get rid of the gas, and clearing
away the earth where trenches were blocked. The trenches stank with a
gas-blood-lyddite-latrine smell. Late in the afternoon we watched
through our field-glasses the advance of the reserves towards Loos and
Hill 70; it looked like a real break through. They were being heavily
shelled. They were troops of the new-army division whose staff we had
messed with the night before. Immediately to the right of us was the
Highland Division, whose exploits on that day Ian Hay has celebrated in
_The First Hundred Thousand_; I suppose that we were ‘the flat caps on
the left’ who ‘let down’ his comrades-in-arms.
As soon as it was dusk we all went out to get in the wounded. Only
sentries were left in the line. The first dead body I came upon was
Samson’s. I found that he had forced his knuckles into his mouth to
stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. He
had been hit in seventeen places. Major Swainson, the second-in-command
of the Middlesex, came crawling in from the German wire. He seemed to
be wounded in the lungs, the stomach and a leg. Choate, a Middlesex
second-lieutenant, appeared; he was unhurt, and together we bandaged
Swainson and got him into the trench and on a stretcher. He begged me
to loosen his belt; I cut it with a bowie-knife that I had bought in
Béthune for use in the fighting. He said: ‘I’m about done for.’[6] We
spent all that night getting in the wounded of the Royal Welch, the
Middlesex and those of the Argyll and Sutherland who had attacked from
the front trench. The Germans behaved generously. I do not remember
hearing a shot fired that night, and we kept on until it was
nearly dawn and we could be plainly seen; then they fired a few shots
in warning and we gave it up. By this time we had got in all the
wounded and most of the Royal Welch dead. I was surprised at some of
the attitudes in which the dead had stiffened—in the act of bandaging
friends’ wounds, crawling, cutting wire. The Argyll and Sutherland
had seven hundred casualties, including fourteen officers killed out
of the sixteen that went over; the Middlesex five hundred and fifty
casualties, including eleven officers killed.
Two other Middlesex officers besides Choate were unwounded; their names
were Henry and Hill, second-lieutenants who had recently come with
commissions from, I think, the Artists’ Rifles; their welcome in the
Middlesex had been something like mine in the Royal Welch. They had
been lying out in shell-holes in the rain all day, sniping and being
sniped at. Henry, according to Hill, had dragged five wounded men into
his shell-hole and thrown up a sort of parapet with his hands and a
bowie-knife that he was carrying. Hill had his platoon sergeant with
him, screaming for hours with a stomach wound, begging for morphia; he
was dying, so Hill gave him five pellets. We always carried morphia
with us for emergencies like this. When Choate, Henrv and Hill arrived
back in the trenches with a few stragglers they reported at the
Middlesex headquarters. Hill told me the story. The colonel and the
adjutant were sitting down to a meat pie when he and Henry arrived.
Henry said: ‘Come to report, sir. Ourselves and about ninety men of
all companies. Mr. Choate is back, unwounded, too.’ They looked up
dully. The colonel said: ‘So you’ve come back, have you? Well, all the
rest are dead. I suppose Mr. Choate had better command what’s left of
A Company, the bombing officer will command what’s left of B (the
bombing officer had not gone over but remained with headquarters), Mr.
Henry goes to C Company, Mr. Hill to D. The Royal Welch are holding
the front line. We are here in support. Let me know where to find you
if I want you. Good night.’ There was no offer to have a piece of meat
pie or a drink of whisky, so they saluted and went miserably out.
They were called back by the adjutant. ‘Mr. Hill! Mr. Henry!’ ‘Sir?’
Hill said that he expected a change of mind as to the propriety with
which hospitality could be offered by a regular colonel and adjutant
to temporary second-lieutenants in distress. But it was only to say:
‘Mr. Hill, Mr. Henry, I saw some men in the trench just now with their
shoulder-straps unbuttoned and their equipment fastened anyhow. See
that this practice does not occur in future. That’s all.’ Henry heard
the colonel from his bunk complaining that he had only two blankets and
that it was a deucedly cold night. Choate arrived a few minutes later
and reported; the others had told him of their reception. After he had
saluted and reported that Major Swainson, who had been thought killed,
was wounded and on the way down to the dressing-station, he leaned over
the table, cut a large piece of meat pie and began eating it. This
caused such surprise that nothing further was said. He finished his
meat pie and drank a glass of whisky, saluted, and joined the others.
Meanwhile, I had been given command of the survivors of B Company.
There were only six company officers left in the Royal Welch. Next
morning there were only five. Thomas was killed by a sniper. He was
despondently watching the return of the new-army troops on the right.
They had been pushed blindly into the gap made by the advance of
the Seventh and Forty-seventh Divisions on the previous afternoon; they
did not know where they were or what they were supposed to do; their
ration supply had broken down. So they flocked back, not in a panic,
but stupidly, like a crowd coming back from a cup final. Shrapnel was
bursting above them. We noticed that the officers were in groups of
their own. We could scarcely believe our eyes, it was so odd. Thomas
need not have been killed; but he was in the sort of mood in which he
seemed not to care one way or the other. The Actor took command of A.
We lumped our companies together after a couple of days for the sake of
relieving each other on night watch and getting some sleep. The first
night I agreed to take the first watch, waking him up at midnight. When
I went to call him I could not wake him up; I tried everything. I shook
him, shouted in his ear, poured water over him, banged his head against
the side of the bed. Finally I threw him on the floor. I was desperate
for want of sleep myself, but he was in a depth of sleep from which
nothing could shake him, so I heaved him back on the bunk and had to
finish the night out myself. Even ‘Stand-to!’ failed to arouse him. I
woke him at last at nine o’clock in the morning and he was furious with
me for not having waked him at midnight.
The day after the attack we spent carrying the dead down to burial
and cleaning the trench up as well as we could. That night the
Middlesex held the line while the Royal Welch carried all the unbroken
gas-cylinders along to a position on the left flank of the brigade,
where they were to be used on the following night, September 27th.
This was worse than carrying the dead; the cylinders were cast-iron
and very heavy and we hated them. The men cursed and sulked, but got
the carrying done. Orders came that we were to attack again. Only
the officers knew; the men were only to be told just beforehand. It
was difficult for me to keep up appearances with the men; I felt like
screaming. It was still raining, harder than ever. We knew definitely
this time that ours was only a subsidiary night attack, a diversion
to help a division on our right to make the real attack. The scheme
was the same as before. At four p.m.the gas was to be discharged again
for forty minutes, then came a quartet of an hour’s bombardment, and
then the attack. I broke the news to the men about three o’clock. They
took it very well. The relations of officers and men, and of senior
and junior officers, had been very different in the excitement of the
attack. There had been no insubordination, but a greater freedom, as
if everyone was drunk together. I found myself calling the adjutant
Charley on one occasion; he appeared not to mind it in the least. For
the next ten days my relations with my men were like those I had with
the Welsh Regiment; later discipline reasserted itself and it was only
occasionally that I found them intimate.
At four p.m., then, the gas went off again. There was a strong wind
and it went over well; the gas-men had brought enough spanners this
time. The Germans were absolutely silent. Flares went up from the
reserve lines and it seemed as though all the men in the front line
were dead. The brigadier decided not to take too much for granted;
after the bombardment he sent out twenty-five men and an officer of
the Cameronians as a feeling-patrol. The patrol reached the German
wire; there was a burst of machine-gun and rifle fire and only two
wounded men regained the trench. We: waited on the fire-step from four
to nine o’clock, with fixed; bayonets, for the order to go over. My
mind was a blank except for the recurrence of ‘S’nice smince spie,
s’nice smince spie.... I don’t like ham, lamb or jam and I don’t
like roley-poley....’ The men laughed at my singing. The sergeant who
was acting company sergeant-major said to me: ‘It’s murder, sir.’ ‘Of
course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s nothing
else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. ‘But when I see’s a
s’nice smince spie, I asks for a helping twice....’ At nine o’clock we
were told that the attack was put off; we were told to hold ourselves
in readiness to attack at dawn.
No order came at dawn. And no more attacks were promised us after
this. From the morning of September 24th to the night of October 3rd
I had in all eight hours of sleep. I kept myself awake and alive by
drinking about a bottle of whisky a day. I had never drank it before
and have seldom drank it since; it certainly was good then. We had no
blankets, greatcoats, or waterproof sheets. We had no time or material
to build new shelters, and the rain continued. Every night we went out
to get in the dead of the other battalions. The Germans continued to
be indulgent and we had few casualties. After the first day or two the
bodies swelled and stank. I vomited more than once while superintending
the carrying. The ones that we could not get in from the German wire
continued to swell until the wall of the stomach collapsed, either
naturally or punctured by a bullet; a disgusting smell would float
across. The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey,
to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy.
On the morning of the 27th a cry was heard from No Man’s Land. It
was a wounded man of the Middlesex who had recovered consciousness
after two days. He was close to the German wire. Our men heard it and
looked at each other. We had a lance-corporal called Baxter and he
was tender-hearted. He was the man to boil up a special dixie of
tea for the sentries of his section when they came off duty. When he
heard the wounded man cry out he ran up and down the trench calling for
a volunteer to come out with him and bring the man in. Of course no
one would go; it was death to put one’s head over the trench. He came
running to ask me. I excused myself as the only officer in the company.
I said I would come out with him at dusk, but I would not go now. So
he went out himself. He jumped quickly over the parapet, then strolled
across waving a handkerchief; the Germans fired at him to frighten him,
but he came on, so they let him come up close. They must have heard the
Middlesex man themselves. Baxter continued towards them and, when he
got up to the Middlesex man, he stopped and pointed to show the Germans
what he was at. Then he dressed the man’s wounds, gave him a drink of
rum and some biscuit that he had with him, and told him that he would
come back again for him in the evening. He did come back for him with a
stretcher-party and the man eventually recovered. I recommended Baxter
for the Victoria Cross, being the only officer who had seen the thing
done; but he only got a Distinguished Conduct Medal.
The Actor and I had decided to get into touch with the battalion on
our right. It was the Tenth Highland Light Infantry. I went down
their trench some time in the morning of the 26th. I walked nearly
a quarter of a mile before seeing either a sentry or an officer.
There were dead men, sleeping men, wounded men, gassed men, all lying
anyhow. The trench had been used as a latrine. Finally I met a Royal
Engineer officer. He said to me: ‘If the Boche knew what an easy job
it was, he’d just walk over and take this trench.’ So I came back and
told The Actor that we might expect to have our flank in the
air at any moment. We turned the communication trench that made the
boundary between the two battalions into a fire-trench facing right; a
machine-gun was mounted to put up a barrage in case they ran. On the
night of the 27th the Highlanders mistook some of our men, who were out
in No Man’s Land getting in the dead, for the enemy. They began firing
wildly. The Germans retaliated. Our men caught the infection, but were
at once told to cease fire. ‘Cease fire’ went along the trench until
it came to the H.L.I., who misheard it as ‘Retire.’ A panic seized
them and they came rushing back. Fortunately they came down the trench
instead of over the top. They were stopped by a sergeant of the Fifth
Scottish Rifles, a territorial battalion now in support to ourselves
and the Middlesex. He chased them back into their trench at the point
of the bayonet.
On the 3rd of October we were relieved. The relieving troops were a
composite battalion consisting of about a hundred men of the Second
Royal Warwickshire Regiment and about seventy Royal Welch Fusiliers,
all that was left of our own First Battalion. Hanmer Jones and Frank
Jones-Bateman had both been wounded. Frank had his thigh broken with
a rifle-bullet while stripping the equipment off a wounded man in No
Man’s Land; the cartridges in the man’s pouches had been set on fire by
a shot and were exploding.[7] We went back to Sailly la Bourse for a
couple of days, where the colonel rejoined us with his bandaged hand,
and then further back to Annezin, a little village near Béthune, where
I lodged in a two-roomed cottage with an old woman called Adelphine Heu.
XVI
At Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for
duty and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that in a
week’s time we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full complement
of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come
into my room in the morning when I was shaving and tell me the local
gossip—how stingy her daughter-in-law was, and what a rogue the Maire
was, and about the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of
black twins. She said that the Kaiser was a bitch and spat on the floor
to confirm it. Her favourite subject was the shamelessness of modern
girls. Yet she herself had been gay and beautiful and much sought after
when she was young she said. She had been in service as lady’s maid
to a rich draper’s wife of Béthune, and had travelled widely with her
in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium.
She asked me about the various villages in which I had recently been
billeted, and told me scandal about the important families who used
to live in each. She asked me if I had been in La Bassée; she did not
realize that it was in the hands of the enemy. I said no, but I had
tried to visit it recently and had been detained. ‘Do you know Auchy,
then?’ I said that I had seen it often from a distance. ‘Then perhaps
you know a big farm-house between Auchy and Cambrin called Les Briques
Farm?’ I said, startled, that I knew it very well, and that it was a
strong place with a moat and cellars and a kitchen garden now full of
barbed wire. She said: ‘Then I shall tell you. I was staying there in
1870. It was the year of the other war and there was at the house a
handsome young _petit-caporal_ who was fond of me. So because he was a
nice boy and because it was the war, we slept together and I had a
baby. But God punished me and the baby died. That’s a long time ago.’
She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the
war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was
spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in
case God should miss it.
Troops serving in the Pas de Calais loathed the French; except for
occasional members of the official class, we found them thoroughly
unlikeable people, and it was difficult to sympathize with their
misfortunes. They had all the shortcomings of a border people. I wrote
home about this time:
‘I find it very difficult to love the French here. Even when we have
been billeted in villages where no troops have been before, I have not
met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants
of other countries. It is worse than inhospitality here, for after
all we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous
quantities of money out of us too. Calculate how much has flowed into
the villages around Béthune, which for many months now have been
continuously housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from the money
that they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay
that the troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note
(nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it on eggs, coffee,
and beer in the local _estaminets_; the prices are ridiculous and the
stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, the other day, I saw barrels
of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe.
The _estaminet_-keepers water it further.’ (The fortunes made in the
war were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when every peasant
in the devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims
for the loss of possessions that he had never had.) It was surprising
that there were so few clashes between the British and French as there
were. The Pas de Calais French hated us and were convinced that when
the war was over we intended to stay and hold the Channel ports. It
was impossible for us at the time to realize that it was all the same
to the peasants whether they were on the German or the British side of
the line—it was a foreign military occupation anyhow. They were not
at all interested in the sacrifices that we were making for ‘their
dirty little lives.’ Also, we were shocked at the severity of French
national accountancy; when we were told, for instance, that every
British hospital train, the locomotive and carriages of which had been
imported from England, had to pay a £200 fee for use of the rails on
each journey they made from railhead to base.
The fighting was still going on around Loos. We could hear the guns
in the distance, but it was clear that the thrust had failed and that
we were now skirmishing for local advantages. But on October 13th
there was a final flare-up; the noise of the guns was so great that
even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were
properly frightened, and began packing up in case the Germans broke
through. Old Adelphine was in tears with fright. Early that afternoon
I was in Béthune at the _Globe_ drinking champagne-cocktails with some
friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, when the assistant
provost-marshal put his head in the door and called out: ‘Any officers
of the Fifth, Sixth, or Nineteenth Brigades here?’ We jumped up. ‘You
are to return at once to your units.’ ‘Oh God,’ said Robertson, ‘that
means another show.’ Robertson had been in D Company and so escaped
the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top to-night to reinforce
someone, and that’ll be the end of us.’
We hurried back to Annezin and found everything in confusion. ‘We’re
standing-to—at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ we were told.
We packed up hastily and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out
in the road in fighting order. We were to go up to the Hohenzollern
Redoubt and were now issued with new trench maps of it. The men were in
high spirits, even the survivors of the show. They were singing songs
to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny whistle. Only at one
time, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise was reached, they stopped
and looked at each other, and Sergeant Townsend said sententiously:
‘That’s the charge. Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe
chums of ours.’ Gradually the noise died down, and a message came at
last from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another
dud show, chiefly to be remembered for the death of Charles Sorley, a
captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed in
the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)
This ended the operations for 1915. Tension was relaxed. We returned to
battalion mess, to company drill, and to riding-school for the young
officers. It was as though there had been no battle except that the
senior officers were fewer and the Special Reserve element larger.
Two or three days later we were back in trenches in the same sector.
In October I was gazetted a captain in the Third (Special Reserve)
Battalion. Promotion in the Third Battalion was rapid for subalterns
who had joined early, because the battalion had trebled its strength
and so was entitled to three times as many captains as before. It
was good to have my pay go up several shillings a day, with an
increase of war bonus and possible gratuity and pension if I were
wounded, but I did not consider that side of it much. It was rank that
was effective overseas. And here I was promoted captain over the heads
of officers who had longer trench service and were older and better
trained than myself. I went to the adjutant and offered not to wear the
badges of rank while serving with the battalion. He said not unkindly:
‘No, put your stars up. It can’t be helped.’ I knew that he and the
colonel had no use for Special Reserve captains unless they were
outstandingly good, and would not hesitate to get rid of them.
A Special Reserve major and captain had been recently sent home from
the First Battalion, with a confidential report of inefficiency. I
was anxious to avoid any such disgrace. Nor was my anxiety unfounded;
shortly after I left the Second Battalion two other Special Reserve
captains, one of whom had been promoted at the same time as myself,
were sent back as ‘likely to be of more service in the training of
troops at home.’ One of them was, I know, more efficient than I was.
I was in such a depressed state of nerves now that if I had gone into
the trenches as a company officer I should probably have modified my
formula for taking risks. Fortunately, I had a rest from the front
line, being attached to the brigade sappers. Hill of the Middlesex was
also having this relief. He told me that the Middlesex colonel had made
a speech to the survivors of the battalion as soon as they were back
in billets, telling them that the battalion had been unfortunate but
would soon be given an opportunity of avenging its dead and making a
fresh and, this time he hoped, successful attack upon La Bassée. ‘I
know you Diehards! You will go like lions over the top.’ Hill’s
servant had whispered confidentially to Hill: ‘Not on purpose I don’t,
sir!’ The sapping company specialized in maintaining communication
and reserve trenches in good repair. I was with it for a month before
being returned to ordinary company duty. My recall was a punishment for
failing, one day when we were in billets, to observe a paragraph in
battalion orders requiring my presence on battalion parade.
My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion this autumn was
uneventful. There was no excitement left in patrolling, no horror in
the continual experience of death. The single recordable incident I
recall was one of purely technical interest, a new method that an
officer named Owen and myself invented for dealing with machine-guns
firing at night. The method was to give each sentry a piece of string
about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end; when the
machine-gun started firing, sentries who were furthest from the fire
would stretch the string in the direction of the machine-gun and peg
it down with the points of the cartridges. This gave a pretty accurate
line on the machine-gun. When we had about thirty or more of these
lines taken on a single machine-gun we fixed rifles as accurately
as possible along them and waited for it; as soon as it started we
opened five rounds rapid. This gave a close concentration of fire and
no element of nervousness could disturb the aim, the rifles being
secured between sandbags. Divisional headquarters asked us for a report
of the method. There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our
machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges
from the ammunition belt it was possible to rap out the rhythm of the
familiar call: ‘Me—et me do—wn in Pi—cca-di—ll—y,’ to which the Germans
would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster
than theirs: ‘Se—e you da—mned to He—ll first.’
It was late in this October that I was sent a press-cutting from
_John Bull_. Horatio Bottomley, the editor, was protesting against
the unequal treatment for criminal offences meted out to commoners
and aristocrats. A young man, he said, convicted in the police-court
of a criminal offence was merely bound over and put in the care of
a physician—because he was the grandson of an earl! An offender not
belonging to the influential classes would have been given three
months without the option of a fine. The article described in some
detail how Dick, a sixteen-year old boy, had made ‘a certain proposal’
to a corporal in a Canadian regiment stationed near ‘Charterhouse
College,’ and how the corporal had very properly given him in charge
of the police. This news was nearly the end of me. I decided that Dick
had been driven out of his mind by the war. There was madness in the
family, I knew; he had once shown me a letter from his grandfather
scrawled in circles all over the page. It would be easy to think of him
as dead.
I had now been in the trenches for five months and was getting past
my prime. For the first three weeks an officer was not much good in
the trenches; he did not know his way about, had not learned the
rules of health and safety, and was not yet accustomed to recognizing
degrees of danger. Between three weeks and four months he was at
his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or
sequence of shocks. Then he began gradually to decline in usefulness
as neurasthenia developed in him. At six months he was still more or
less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had a few weeks’
rest on a technical course or in hospital, he began to be a drag on
the other members of the company. After a year or fifteen months he
was often worse than useless. Officers had a less laborious but
a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as
many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though the average
life of a man before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an
officer’s. Officers between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three
had a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young.
Men over forty, though they did not suffer from the want of sleep so
much as those under twenty, had less resistance to the sudden alarms
and shocks. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers told me later that the action of one
of the ductless glands—I think the thyroid—accounted for this decline
in military usefulness. It pumped its chemical into the blood as a
sedative for tortured nerves; this process went on until the condition
of the blood was permanently affected and a man went about his tasks in
a stupid and doped way, cheated into further endurance. It has taken
some ten years for my blood to run at all clean. The unfortunates were
the officers who had two years or more continuous trench service. In
many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four officers
who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before
they were lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way.
A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions still
happens to be alive who, in three shows running, got his company
needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear
decisions.
Aside from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the
trench soldier was, for the most part, not unhealthy. Food was
plentiful and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort
of wet feet and clothes and draughty billets. A continual need for
alertness discouraged minor illnesses; a cold was thrown off in a few
hours, an attack of indigestion was hardly noticed. This was
true, at least, in a good battalion, where the men were bent on going
home either with an honourable wound or not at all. In an inferior
battalion the men would prefer a wound to bronchitis, but would not
mind the bronchitis. In a bad battalion they did not care ‘whether,’ in
the trench phrase, ‘the cow calved or the bull broke its bloody neck.’
In a really good battalion, as the Second Battalion was when I went
to it first, the question of getting wounded and going home was not
permitted to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list.
In the 1914–15 winter there were no more than four or five casualties
from ‘trench feet’ in the Second, and the following winter no more than
eight or nine; the don’t-care battalions lost very heavily indeed.
Trench feet was almost entirely a matter of morale, in spite of the
lecture-formula that N.C.O.’s and officers used to repeat time after
time to the men: ‘Trench feet is caused by tight boots, tight puttees
or any other clothing calculated to interfere with the circulation of
blood in the legs.’ Trench feet was caused rather by going to sleep
with wet boots, cold feet, and depression. Wet boots, by themselves,
did not matter. If the man warmed his feet at a brazier or stamped
them until they were warm and then went off to sleep with a sandbag
tied round them he took no harm. He might even fall asleep with cold,
wet feet, and they might swell slightly owing to tightness of boots or
puttees; but trench feet only came if he did not mind getting trench
feet or anything else, because his battalion had lost the power of
sticking things out. At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of
1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two
days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in
the same trenches with no cases at all.
Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar
forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing
and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune was not the place it had been;
the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our
own troops and had sent the prices up. But it was still more or less
intact and one could still get cream buns and fish dinners.
In November I had orders to join the First Battalion, which was
reorganizing after the Loos fighting. I was delighted. I found it in
billets at Locon, behind Festubert, which was only a mile or two to the
north of Cambrin. The difference between the two battalions continued
markedly throughout the war, however many times each battalion got
broken. The difference was that the Second Battalion at the outbreak of
war had just finished its eighteen years overseas tour, while the First
Battalion had not been out of England since the South African War. The
First Battalion was, therefore, less old-fashioned in its militarism
and more human; livers were better; the men had dealings with white
women and not with brown. It would have been impossible in the First
Battalion to see what I once saw in the Second—a senior officer
pursuing a private soldier down the street, kicking his bottom because
he had been slack in saluting. The First Battalion was as efficient and
as regimental, on the whole more successful in its fighting, and a much
easier battalion to live in.
The battalion already had its new company commanders and I went as
second-captain to young Richardson of A Company. He was from Sandhurst,
and his company was one of the best that I was ever with. They were
largely Welshmen of 1915 enlistment. None of the officers in the
company were more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. A
day or two after I arrived I went to visit C Company, where a Third
Battalion officer whom I knew was commanding. The C’s greeted me in a
friendly way. As we were talking I noticed a book lying on the table.
It was the first book (except my Keats and Blake) that I had seen since
I came to France that was not either a military text-book or a rubbish
novel. It was the _Essays of Lionel Johnson_. When I had a chance I
stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon. I
looked round to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon and
bring _Lionel Johnson_ with him to the First Battalion. He was obvious,
so I got into conversation with him, and a few minutes later we were
walking to Béthune, being off duty until that night, and talking about
poetry. Siegfried had, at the time, published nothing except a few
privately-printed pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavour and a
satire on Masefield which, about half-way through, had forgotten to
be a satire and was rather good Masefield. We went to the cake shop
and ate cream buns. At this time I was getting my first book of poems,
_Over the Brazier_, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my
pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He told me that they were too
realistic and that war should not be written about in a realistic way.
In return he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain....
This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my
old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.
That night the whole battalion went up to work at a new defence
scheme at Festubert. Festubert was nightmare, and had been so since the
first fighting there in 1914, when the inmates of its lunatic asylum
had been caught between two fires and broken out and run all over the
countryside. The British trench line went across a stretch of ground
marked on the map as ‘Marsh, sometimes dry in the summer.’ It consisted
of islands of high-command trench, with no communication between them
except at night, and was a murderous place for patrols. The battalion
had been nearly wiped out here six months previously. We were set to
build up a strong reserve line. It was freezing hard and we were unable
to make any progress on the frozen ground. We came here night after
night. We raised a couple of hundred yards of trench about two or
three feet high, at the cost of several men wounded from casual shots
skimming the trench in front of us. Work was resumed by other troops
when the thaw came and a thick seven foot-high ramp built. We were told
later that it gradually sank down into the marsh, and in the end was
completely engulfed.
When I left the Second Battalion I was permitted to take my servant,
Private Fahy (known as Tottie Fay, after the actress), with me. Tottie
was a reservist from Birmingham who had been called up when war broke
out, and had been with the Second Battalion ever since. By trade he
was a silversmith and he had recently, when on leave, made a cigarette
case and engraved it with my name as a present. He worked well and
we liked each other. When he arrived at the First Battalion he met a
Sergeant Dickens who had been his boozing chum in India seven or eight
years back; so they celebrated it. The next morning I was surprised to
find my buttons not polished and no hot water for shaving. I was
annoyed; it made me late for breakfast. I could get no news of Tottie.
On my way to rifle inspection at nine o’clock at the company billet I
noticed something unusual at the corner of a farm-yard. It was Field
Punishment No. 1 being carried out—my first sight of it. Tottie was
the victim. He had been awarded twenty-eight days for ‘drunkenness in
the field.’ He was spread-eagled to the wheel of a company limber,
tied by the ankles and wrists in the form of an X. He remained in
this position—‘Crucifixion,’ they called it—for several hours a day;
I forget how many, but it was a good working-day. The sentence was to
be carried out for as long as the battalion remained in billets, and
was to be continued after the next spell of trenches. I shall never
forget the look that Tottie gave me. He was a quiet, respectful,
devoted servant, and he wanted to tell me that he was sorry for having
let me down. His immediate reaction was an attempt to salute; I could
see him try to lift his hand to his forehead, and bring his heels
together, but he could do nothing; his eyes filled with tears. The
battalion police-sergeant, a fierce-looking man, had just finished
knotting him up when I arrived. I told Tottie that I was sorry to see
him in trouble. That drink, as it proved, did him good in the end. I
had to find another servant. Old Joe, the quartermaster, knowing that
Tottie was the only trained officer’s servant in the battalion, took
him from me when his sentence expired; he even induced the colonel
to remit a few days of it. Tottie was safer in billets with Old Joe
than in trenches with me. Some time in the summer of the following
year his seven years’ contract as a reservist expired. When their
‘buckshee seven’ expired, reservists were sent home for a few days and
then ‘deemed to have re-enlisted under the Military Service Act,’ and
recalled to the battalion. But Tottie made good use of his leave.
His brother-in-law was director of a munitions factory and took Tottie
in as a skilled metal-worker. He was made a starred man—his work was so
important to industry that he could not be spared for military service,
so Tottie is, I hope, still alive. Good luck to him and to Birmingham.
Sergeant Dickens was a different case. He was a fighter, and one of
the best N.C.O.’s in either battalion of the regiment. He had been
awarded the d.c.m. and Bar, the Military Medal and the French
Médaille Militaire. Two or three times already he had been promoted to
sergeant’s rank and each time been reduced for drunkenness. He escaped
field-punishment because it was considered sufficient for him to lose
his stripes, and whenever there was a battle Dickens would distinguish
himself so conspicuously as a leader that he would be given his stripes
back again.
Early in December the rumour came that we were going for divisional
training to the back areas. I would not believe it, having heard
stories of this kind too often, and was surprised when it turned out to
be true. Siegfried Sassoon, in his _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, has
described this battalion move. It was an even more laborious experience
for our A Company than for his C Company. We got up at five o’clock
one morning, breakfasted hastily, packed our kits, and marched down to
the railhead three miles away. Here we had the task of entraining all
the battalion stores, transport and transport-animals. This took us to
the middle of the morning. We then entrained ourselves for a ten-hour
journey to a junction on the Somme about twenty miles away from the
front line. The officers travelled in third-class apartments, the men
in closed trucks marked: ‘Hommes 40, chevaux 8’—they were very stiff
when they arrived. ‘A’ Company was called on to do the detraining
job too. When we had finished, the dixies of tea prepared for us were
all cold. The other companies had been resting for a couple of hours;
we had only a few minutes. The march was along _pavé_ roads and the
rough chalk tracks of the Picardy downland. It started about midnight
and finished about six o’clock next morning, the men carrying their
packs and rifles. There was a competition between the companies as
to which would have the fewest men falling out; A won. The village
we finally arrived at was called Montagne le Fayel. No troops had
been billeted here before, and its inhabitants were annoyed at being
knocked up in the middle of the night by our advance-guard to provide
accommodation for eight hundred men at two hours’ notice. We found
these Picard peasants much more likeable than the Pas de Calais people.
I was billeted with an old man called Monsieur Elie Caron, a retired
schoolmaster with a bright eye and white hair. He lived entirely on
vegetables, and gave me a vegetarian pamphlet entitled _Comment Vivre
Cent Ans_. We already knew of the coming Somme offensive, so this was a
good joke. He also gave me Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ in English. I have
always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their
demerits; so I accepted it and later brought it home.
We were at Montagne for six weeks. The colonel, who appears in
Siegfried’s book as Colonel Winchell, was known in the regiment as
Scatter, short for Scatter-cash, because when he first joined the
regiment he had been so lavish with his allowance. Scatter put the
battalion through its paces with peace-time severity. He asked us to
forget the trenches and to fit ourselves for the open warfare that
was bound to come once the Somme defences were pierced. Every other
day was a field-day; we were back again in spirit to General
Haking’s _Company Training_. Even those of us who did not believe in
the break-through thoroughly enjoyed these field-days. The guns could
only just be heard in the distance, it was quite unspoilt country, and
every man in the battalion was fit. Days that were not field-days were
given up to battalion drill and musketry. This training seemed entirely
unrelated to war as we had experienced it. We played a lot of games,
including inter-battalion rugger; I played full-back for the battalion.
Three other officers were in the team; Richardson as front-row
scrum-man; Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, who was fly-half; and
David Thomas, a Third Battalion second-lieutenant, who was an inside
three-quarter. David Thomas and Siegfried were the closest friends I
made while in France. David was a simple, gentle fellow and fond of
reading. Siegfried, he, and I were together a lot.
One day David met me in the village street. He said: ‘Did you hear
the bugle? There’s a hell of a row on about something. All officers
and warrant-officers are to meet in the village schoolroom at once.
Scatter’s looking as black as-thunder. No one knows yet what the axe
is about.’ We went along together and squeezed into one of the school
desk-benches. When the colonel entered and the room was called to
attention by the senior major, David and I hurt ourselves standing up,
bench and all. Scatter told us all to be seated. The officers were
in one class, the warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers in
another. The colonel glared at us from the teacher’s desk. He began his
lecture with general accusations. He said that he had lately noticed
many signs of slovenliness in the battalion—men with their pocket-flaps
undone, and actually walking down the village street with their
hands in their trousers-pockets—boots unpolished—sentries strolling
about on their beats at company billets instead of marching up and
down in a soldier-like way—rowdiness in the _estaminets_—slackness in
saluting—with many other grave indications of lowered discipline. He
threatened to stop all leave to the United Kingdom unless discipline
improved. He promised us a saluting parade every morning before
breakfast which he would attend in person. All this was general axe-ing
and we knew that he had not yet reached the particular axe. It was
this: ‘I have here principally to tell you of a very disagreeable
occurrence. As I was going out of my orderly room early this morning I
came upon a group of soldiers; I will not mention their company. One
of these soldiers was in conversation with a lance-corporal. You may
not believe it, but it was a fact that he addressed the corporal by his
Christian name; _he called him Jack_. The corporal made no protest. To
think that the First Battalion has sunk to a level where it is possible
for such familiarity to exist between N.C.O.’s and the men under their
command! Naturally, I put the corporal under arrest, and he appeared
before me at once on the charge of ‘conduct unbecoming to an N.C.O.’
He was reduced to the ranks, and the man was given field-punishment
for using insubordinate language to an N.C.O. And, I warn you, if any
further case of the sort comes to my notice—and I expect you officers
to report the slightest instance to me at once instead of dealing
with it as a company matter....’ I tried to catch Siegfried’s eye,
but he was busy avoiding it, so I caught David’s instead. This is one
of those caricature scenes that now seem to sum up the various stages
of my life. There was a fresco around the walls of the class-room
illustrating the evils of alcoholism. It started with the innocent
boy being offered a drink by his mate, and then his downward path,
culminating in wife-beating, murder, and _delirium tremens_.
The battalion’s only complaint against Montagne was that women were not
so easy to get hold of in that part of the country as around Béthune;
the officers had the unfair advantage of being able to borrow horses
and ride into Amiens. I remained puritanical. There was a Blue Lamp at
Amiens as there was at Abbéville, Havre, Rouen, and all the big towns
behind the lines. The Blue Lamp was for officers, as the Red Lamp was
for men. It was most important for discipline to be maintained in this
way.
In January the Seventh Division sent two company officers from each
brigade to instruct troops at the base. I and a captain in the Queen’s
were the two who had been out longest, so we were chosen; it was a gift
of two months longer life to us.
XVII
I was one of about thirty instructors at the Havre ‘Bull Ring,’ where
newly-arrived drafts were sent for technical instruction before going
up the line. Most of my colleagues were specialists in musketry,
machine-gun, gas, or bombs. I had no specialist training, only general
experience. I was put on instructional work in trench relief and trench
discipline in a model set of trenches. My principal other business was
arms-drill. One day it rained, and the commandant of the Bull Ring
suddenly ordered me to lecture in the big concert hall. ‘There are
three thousand men there waiting for you, and you’re the only available
officer with a loud enough voice to make himself heard.’ They were
Canadians, so instead of giving my usual semi-facetious lecture on
‘How to be happy though in the trenches,’ I paid them the compliment
of telling them the story of Loos, and what a balls-up it was, and
why it was a balls-up. It was the only audience that I ever held for
an hour with real attention. I expected the commandant to be furious
with me because the principal object of the Bull Ring was to inculcate
the offensive spirit, but he took it well and I had several more
concert-hall lectures put on me after this.
In the instructors’ mess the chief subjects of conversation besides
local and technical talk were _morale_, the reliability of various
divisions in battle, the value of different training methods, and
war-morality, with particular reference to atrocities. We talked more
freely there than would have been possible either in England or in the
trenches. We decided that about a third of the troops in the British
Expeditionary Force were dependable on all occasions; these were the
divisions that were always called on for the most important tasks.
About a third were variable, that is, where a division contained
one or two bad battalions, but could be more or less trusted. The
remainder were more or less untrustworthy; being put in positions of
comparative safety they had about a quarter of the casualties that the
best divisions had. It was a matter of pride to belong to one of the
recognized best divisions—the Seventh, the Twenty-ninth, Guards’, First
Canadian, for instance. They were not pampered when in reserve as the
German storm-troops were, but promotion, leave, and the chance of a
wound came quicker in them. The mess agreed that the most dependable
British troops were the Midland county regiments, industrial Yorkshire
and Lancashire troops, and the Londoners. The Ulsterman, Lowland Scots
and Northern English were pretty good. The Catholic Irish and the
Highland Scots were not considered so good—they took unnecessary risks
in trenches and had unnecessary casualties, and in battle, though
they usually made their objective, they too often lost it in the
counter-attack; without officers they were no good. English southern
county regiments varied from good to very bad. All overseas troops were
good. The dependability of divisions also varied with their seniority
in date of promotion. The latest formed regular divisions and the
second-line territorial divisions, whatever their recruiting area, were
usually inferior. Their senior officers and warrant-officers were not
good enough.
We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in trenches, taken
in nationalities. We agreed on a list like this, in descending order:
English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians;
Irish and German Catholics; Scottish; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians;
Portuguese; Belgians; French. The Belgians and French were put
there for spite; they were not really dirtier than the Algerians or
Portuguese.
Atrocities. Propaganda reports of atrocities were, we agreed,
ridiculous. Atrocities against civilians were surely few. We remembered
that while the Germans were in a position to commit atrocities
against enemy civilians, Germany itself, except for the early Russian
cavalry raid, had never had the enemy on her soil. We no longer
believed accounts of unjustified German atrocities in Belgium; know
the Belgians now at first-hand. By atrocities we meant, specifically,
rape, mutilation and torture, not summary shootings of suspected spies,
harbourers of spies, _francs-tireurs_, or disobedient local officials.
If the atrocity list was to include the accidental-on-purpose
bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies
were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans. French and
Belgian civilians had often tried to win our sympathy and presents
by exhibiting mutilations of children—stumps of hands and feet, for
instance—representing them as deliberate, fiendish atrocities when they
were merely the result of shell-fire, British or French shell-fire as
likely as not. We did not believe that rape was any more common on the
German side of the line than on the Allied side. It was unnecessary.
Of course, a bully-beef diet, fear of death, and absence of wives made
ample provision of women necessary in the occupied areas. No doubt
the German army authorities provided brothels in the principal French
towns behind the line, as did the French on the Allied side. But the
voluntary system would suffice. We did not believe stories of forcible
enlistment of women.
As for atrocities against soldiers. The difficulty was to say where
to draw the line. For instance, the British soldier at first
regarded as atrocious the use of bowie-knives by German patrols. After
a time he learned to use them himself; they were cleaner killing
weapons than revolvers or bombs. The Germans regarded as atrocious
the British Mark VII rifle bullet, which was more apt to turn on
striking than the German bullet. For true atrocities, that is, personal
rather than military violations of the code of war, there were few
opportunities. The most obvious opportunity was in the interval
between surrender of prisoners and their arrival (or non-arrival) at
headquarters. And it was an opportunity of which advantage was only
too often taken. Nearly every instructor in the mess knew of specific
cases when prisoners had been murdered on the way back. The commonest
motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relations,
jealousy of the prisoner’s pleasant trip to a comfortable prison camp
in England, military enthusiasm, fear of being suddenly overpowered
by the prisoners or, more simply, not wanting to be bothered with the
escorting job. In any of these cases the conductors would report on
arrival at headquarters that a German shell had killed the prisoners;
no questions would be asked. We had every reason to believe that the
same thing happened on the German side, where prisoners, as useless
mouths to feed in a country already on short rations, were even
less welcome. We had none of us heard of prisoners being more than
threatened at headquarters to get military information from them;
the sort of information that trench-prisoners could give was not of
sufficient importance to make torture worth while; in any case it was
found that when treated kindly prisoners were anxious, in gratitude, to
tell as much as they knew.
The troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence
against prisoners were the Canadians (and later the Australians).
With the Canadians the motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian
found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German
trench; this atrocity was never substantiated, nor did we believe the
story freely circulated that the Canadians crucified a German officer
in revenge shortly afterwards. (Of the Australians the only thing to
be said was that they were only two generations removed from the days
of Ralph Rashleigh and Marcus Clarke.) How far this reputation for
atrocities was deserved, and how far it was due to the overseas habit
of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide. We only knew that to
have committed atrocities against prisoners was, among the overseas
men, and even among some British troops, a boast, not a confession.
I heard two first-hand accounts later in the war.
A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you
see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the
sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was
getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them
covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets.
Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked
behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good
Fritzes but dead ’uns.’
An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt when
we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar and
I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades.” So out they came, a dozen of
’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They
turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said:
“Now back into your cellar, you sons of bitches.” For I couldn’t
be bothered with ’em. When they were all down I threw half a dozen
Mills’ bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t
taking prisoners that day.’
The only first-hand account I heard of large-scale atrocities was from
an old woman at Cardonette on the Somme, with whom I was billeted in
July 1916. It was at Cardonette that a battalion of French Turcos
overtook the rear guard of a German division retreating from the Marne
in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while
they were still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures,
through a pantomime of slaughter, ending: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur
ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mis à la poche.’ The presence
of coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we
knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently,
at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps
headquarter-mess used to be visited at the château every morning by
a Turco; he was orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used
to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and a tin of plum and apple jam
used to be given him. One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so
that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin:
‘Oh, la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy to-morrow.’ The Turco would not
believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he said, ‘pozzy for Johnny to-morrow,
to-morrow, to-morrow.’ To get rid of him the cook said: ‘Fetch me the
head of a Fritz, Johnny, to-night. I’ll ask the general to give you
pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ ‘All right, mate,’ said the
Turco, ‘me get Fritz head to-night, general give me pozzy to-morrow.’
That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the
château was surprised to find a Turco asking for him and swinging
a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here’s Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco,
‘general give me pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ As Flixécourt
was twenty miles or more behind the line.... He did not need to end the
story, but swore it was true, because he had seen the head.
We discussed the continuity of regimental _morale_. A captain in a
line battalion of one of the Surrey regiments said: ‘It all depends on
the reserve battalion at home.’ He had had a year’s service when the
war broke out; the battalion, which had been good, had never recovered
from the first battle of Ypres. He said: ‘What’s wrong with us is that
we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad and so we get a constant
re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the
last two attacks that we made I had to shoot a man of my company to
get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful that I couldn’t
stand it. It’s the reason why I applied to be sent down here.’ This
was not the usual loose talk that one heard at the base. He was a good
fellow and he was speaking the truth. I was sorrier for Phillips—that
was not his name—than for any other man I met in France. He deserved
a better regiment. There was never any trouble with the Royal Welch
like that. The boast of every good battalion in France was that it
had never lost a trench; both our battalions made it. This boast had
to be understood broadly; it meant never having been forced out of a
trench by an enemy attack without recapturing it before the action
ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack
of reinforcements did not count, nor did retirement from a trench by
order or when the battalion of the left or right had broken and left a
flank in the air. And in the final stages of the war trenches could be
honourably abandoned as being entirely obliterated by bombardment,
or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected
shell-craters.
We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in _morale_.
‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful,
especially when the company feels itself as a single being and each
movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement
of one large creature.’ I used to have big bunches of Canadians to
drill four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen came forward once and
asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms and fixing and
unfixing bayonets. They said they had come to France to fight and not
to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the
four in which I had served there had been three different kinds of
troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were
good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at
drill. These last fellows were, for some reason or other, much the best
men in a show. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I told them that
when they were better at fighting than the Guards’ Division they could
perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.
We often theorized in the mess about drill. We knew that the best drill
never came from being bawled at by a sergeant-major, that there must be
perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that
carry it through. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave
an incorrect word of command. If the company could carry through the
order intended without hesitation, or, suppose the order happened to be
impossible, could stand absolutely still or continue marching without
any disorder in the ranks, that was good drill. The corporate spirit
that came from drilling together was regarded by some instructors
as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled. Others denied this
and said it acted just the other way round. ‘Suppose there is a section
of men with rifles, and they are isolated from the rest of the company
and have no N.C.O. in charge and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress
of danger that section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill and
will obey an imaginary word of command. There will be no communication
between its members, but there will be a drill movement. Two men will
quite naturally open fire on the machine-gun while the remainder
will work round, part on the left flank and part on the right, and
the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be
the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That is wrong.
Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal
action. Drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, but it is
the foundation of tactics and musketry. It was parade-ground musketry
that won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war will be
won by parade-ground tactics. The simple drill tactics of small units
fighting in limited spaces—fighting in noise and confusion so great
that leadership is quite impossible.’ In spite of variance on this
point we all agreed that regimental pride was the greatest moral force
that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit, contrasting
it particularly with patriotism and religion.
Patriotism. There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote
a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who
talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great
Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present
foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing. The nation included
not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home
wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication
troops, base units, home-service units, and then civilians down to the
detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from
enlistment, conscientious objectors, members of the Government. The
trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, did
not consider that the German trench-soldier might have exactly the same
system himself. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified
nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he despised himself.
He believed most newspaper reports of conditions and sentiments in
Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about
conditions and sentiments in England. His cynicism, in fact, was not
confined to his own country. But he never underrated the German as
a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were
resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.
Religion. It was said that not one soldier in a hundred was inspired
by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been
difficult to remain religious in the trenches though one had survived
the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at
Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not
hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning
the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules
when they were fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir—excuse me,
sir—that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that
the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at but the figure of our
Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This
was to explain why in giving practice fire-orders from the hill-top he
had shouted out: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five
rounds consecrate, fire!’ His platoon, even the two men whose letters
home always had the same formal beginning: ‘Dear Sister in Christ,’ or
‘Dear Brother in Christ,’ blazed away.
The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal
devil, were aware that the German soldier was, on the whole, more
devout than himself in the worship of God. In the instructors’ mess
we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For the
regimental chaplains as a body we had no respect. If the regimental
chaplains had shown one tenth the courage, endurance, and other human
qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British
Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But
they had not. The fact is that they were under orders not to get mixed
up with the fighting, to stay behind with the transport and not to
risk their lives. No soldier could have any respect for a chaplain
who obeyed these orders, and yet there was not in our experience one
chaplain in fifty who was not glad to obey them. Occasionally on a
quiet day in a quiet sector the chaplain would make a daring afternoon
visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, and that was
all. But he was always in evidence back in rest-billets. Sometimes the
colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s
dead, and he would arrive, speak his lines, and hastily retire. The
position was made difficult by the respect that most of the commanding
officers had for the cloth, but it was a respect that they soon
outwore. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new
chaplains in as many months. Finally he applied for a Roman Catholic
chaplain, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For,
as I should have said before, the Roman Catholics were not only
permitted in posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever
fighting was so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And
we had never heard of an R.C. chaplain who was unwilling to do all that
was expected of him and more. It was recalled that Father Gleeson of
the Munsters, when all the officers were put out of action at the first
battle of Ypres, stripped off his black badges and, taking command of
the survivors, held the line.
Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. I
told how the Second Battalion chaplain just before the Loos fighting
had preached a violent sermon on the battle against sin, and how one
old soldier behind me had grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push
wasn’t enough to worry about at a time.’ The Catholic padre, on the
other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they
died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven, or
at any rate would be excused a great many years in Purgatory. Someone
told us of the chaplain of his battalion when he was in Mesopotamia,
how on the eve of a big battle he had preached a sermon on the
commutation of tithes. This was much more sensible than the battle
against sin, he said; it was quite up in the air, and took the men’s
minds off the fighting.
I was feeling a bit better after a few weeks at the base, though the
knowledge that this was only temporary relief was with me all the time.
One day I walked out of the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the
drill ground. I had to pass by the place where bombing instruction was
given. A group of men was standing around the table where the various
types of bombs were set out for demonstration. There was a sudden
crash. An instructor of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a
little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He
had picked up a No. 1 percussion grenade and said: ‘Now, lads, you’ve
got to be careful with this chap. Remember that if you touch anything
while you’re swinging it, it will go off.’ To illustrate the point he
rapped it against the edge of the table. It killed him and another man
and wounded twelve others more or less severely.
XVIII
I rejoined the First Battalion in March, finding it in the line again,
on the Somme. It was the primrose season. We went in and out of the
Fricourt trenches, with billets at Morlancourt, a country village at
that time untouched by shell-fire. (Later it was knocked to pieces;
the Australians and the Germans captured and recaptured it from each
other several times, until there was nothing left except the site.)
‘A’ Company headquarters were in a farmhouse kitchen. We slept in our
valises on the red-brick floor. The residents were an old lady and her
daughter. The old lady was senile and paralysed; about all she could
do was to shake her head and say: ‘Triste, la guerre.’ We called her
‘Triste la Guerre.’ Her daughter used to carry her about in her arms.
The Fricourt trenches were cut in chalk, which was better in wet
weather than the La Bassée clay. We were unlucky in having a
battalion-frontage where the lines came closer to each other than at
any other point for miles. It was only recently that the British line
had been extended down to the Somme. The French had been content, as
they usually were, unless they definitely intended a battle, to be at
peace with the Germans and not dig in too near. But here there was
a slight ridge and neither side could afford to let the other hold
the crest, so they shared it, after a prolonged dispute. It was used
by both the Germans and ourselves as an experimental station for new
types of bombs and grenades. The trenches were wide and tumbledown,
too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The
French had left relics of their nonchalance—corpses buried too near
the surface; and of their love of security—a number of lousy but deep
dug-outs. We busied ourselves raising the front-line parapet and
building traverses to limit the damage of the trench-mortar shells
that were continually falling. Every night not only the companies in
the front line but both support companies were hard at work all the
time. It was even worse than Cuinchy for rats; they used to run about
A Company mess while we were at meals. We used to eat with revolvers
beside our plates and punctuate our conversation with sudden volleys
at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber
support of the roof above our heads. A Company officers were gay. We
had all been in our school choirs except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a
crow, and we used to chant church anthems and bits of cantatas whenever
things were going well. Edmund insisted on joining in.
We were at dinner one day when a Welsh boy came rushing in, hysterical
with terror. He shouted out to Richardson: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a
trenss-mortar in my dug-out.’ This in sing-song Welsh made us all shout
with laughter. Richardson said: ‘Cheer up, 33 Williams, how did a
big thing like a trench-mortar happen to be in your dug-out?’ But 33
Williams could not explain. He went on again and again: ‘Sirr, sirr,
there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’ Edmund Dadd went out to
investigate. He found that a trench-mortar shell had fallen into the
trench, bounced down the dug-out steps, exploded and killed five men.
33 Williams had been lying asleep and had been protected by the body of
another man; he was the only one unhit.
[Illustration: SOMME TRENCH MAP
CONTALMAISON—FRICOURT
_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]
Our greatest trial was the canister. It was a two-gallon drum with a
cylinder inside containing about two pounds of an explosive called
ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelt like marzipan, and when
it went off sounded like the day of judgment. The hollow around the
cylinder was filled with scrap metal apparently collected by the
French villagers behind the German line—rusty nails, fragments of
British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and
bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one
canister that had not exploded and found in it, among other things,
the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister
was easy to hear coming and looked harmless in the air, but its shock
was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but
the deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth and cog-wheels and so on
would go flying all over the place. We could not agree how a thing of
that size was fired. The problem was not solved until 1st July, when
the battalion attacked from these same trenches and found one of the
canister-guns with its crew. It was a wooden cannon buried in the earth
and fired with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men
refused; they had sworn for months to get the crew of that gun.
One evening I was in the trench with Richardson and David Thomas (near
‘Trafalgar Square,’ should anyone remember that trench-junction) when
we met Pritchard and the adjutant. We stopped to talk. Richardson
complained what a devil of a place it was for trench-mortars. Pritchard
said: ‘That is where I come in.’ He was the battalion trench-mortar
officer and had just been given the first two Stokes mortar-guns
that we had seen in France. Pritchard said: ‘They’re beauties. I’ve
been trying them out and to-morrow I’m going to get some of my own
back. I can put four or five shells in the air at the same time.’ The
adjutant said: ‘About time, too. We’ve had three hundred casualties
in the last month here. It doesn’t seem so many as that because we’ve
had no officer casualties. In fact we’ve had about five hundred
casualties in the ranks since Loos, and not a single officer.’ Then
he suddenly realized that he had said something unlucky. David said:
‘Touch wood.’ Everybody sprang to touch wood, but it was a French
trench and unriveted. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket; that was wood
enough for me. Richardson said: ‘I’m not superstitious, anyway.’
The next evening I was leading up A Company for a working-party. B and
D Companies were in the line and we overtook C, which was also going up
to work. David was bringing up the rear of C. He was looking strange,
worried about something. I had never seen him anything but cheerful all
the time I had known him. I asked what was the matter. He said: ‘Oh,
I’m fed up and I’ve got a cold.’ C Company went along to the right of
the battalion frontage and we went along to the left. It was a weird
kind of night, with a bright moon. A German occupied sap was only
forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling
up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries
ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves. It often
happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that
they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said,
the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’
for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live
and let live than we were. (The only time, so far as I know, besides
Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without
firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded
that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl out on top
to avoid drowning.) There was a continual exchange of grenades and
trench-mortars on our side; the canister was going over and the
men found it difficult to get out of its way in the dark. But for the
first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard
had been using his Stokes’ mortar all day and had sent over two or
three hundred rounds; twice they had located his emplacement and he had
had to shift hurriedly.
‘A’ Company worked from seven in the evening until midnight. We must
have put thousands of sandbags into position, and fifty yards of front
trench were beginning to look presentable. About half-past ten there
was rifle-fire on the right and the sentries passed down the news
‘officer hit.’ Richardson at once went along to see who it was. He came
back to say: ‘It’s young Thomas. He got a bullet through the neck,
but I think he’s all right; it can’t have hit his spine or an artery
because he’s walking down to the dressing-station.’ I was pleased
at this news. I thought that David would be out of it long enough
perhaps to escape the coming offensive and perhaps even the rest of
the war. At twelve o’clock we had finished for the night. Richardson
said to me: ‘Von Ranke’ (only he pronounced it Von Runicke—it was my
regimental nickname), ‘take the company down for their rum and tea,
will you? They’ve certainly deserved it to-night. I’ll be along in
a few minutes. I’m going out with Corporal Chamberlen to see what
work the wiring-party’s been doing all this time.’ So I took the men
back. When we were well started I heard a couple of shells come over
somewhere behind us. I noticed them because they were the only shells
fired that night; five-nines they seemed by the noise. We were nearly
back at Maple Redoubt, which was the name of the support line on the
reverse side of the hill, when we heard the cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’
and after a while a man came running to say: ‘Captain Graves is hit.’
There was a general laugh and we went on; but a stretcher-party
went up anyhow to see what was wrong. It was Richardson; the shells
had caught him and the corporal among the wire. The corporal had his
leg blown off, and died of wounds a day or two later. Richardson had
been blown into a shell-hole full of water and had lain there stunned
for some minutes before the sentries heard the corporal’s cries and
realized what had happened. He was brought down semi-conscious; he
recognized us, told us he wouldn’t be long away from the company, and
gave us instructions about it. The doctor said that he had no wound in
any vital spot, though the skin of his left side was riddled, as we had
seen, with the chalky soil blown up against him. We felt a relief in
his case, as in David’s, that he would be out of it for a while.
Then news came that David had died. The regimental doctor, a throat
specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing-station: ‘You’ll
be all right, only don’t raise your head for a bit.’ David had then,
it was said, taken a letter from his pocket, given it to an orderly,
and said: ‘Post that.’ It was a letter written to a girl in Glamorgan,
to be posted in case he got killed. Then the doctor saw that he was
choking; he tried trachotomy, but it was too late. Edmund and I were
talking together in the company headquarters at about one o’clock when
the adjutant came in. He looked ghastly. He told us that Richardson had
died at the dressing-station. His heart had been weakened by rowing
(he had been in the Eight at Radley) and the explosion and the cold
water had been too much for it. The adjutant said to me nervously: ‘You
know, somehow I feel, I—I feel responsible in a way for this; what
I said yesterday at ‘Trafalgar Square.’ Of course, really, I don’t
believe in superstition, but....’ Just at that moment there was a
noise of whizz-bang shells about twenty yards off; a cry of alarm,
followed by: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ The adjutant turned quite white and
we knew without being told what it meant. We hurried out. Pritchard,
having fought his duel all night, and finally silenced the enemy, was
coming off duty. A whizz-bang had caught him at the point where the
communication trench reached Maple Redoubt; it was a direct hit. The
casualties of that night were three officers and one corporal.
It seemed ridiculous when we returned without Richardson to A Company
billets to find ‘Triste La Guerre’ still alive and to hear her once
more quaver out ‘Triste, la guerre’ when her daughter explained that
the _jeune capitaine_ had been killed. The old woman had taken a fancy
to the _jeune capitaine_; we used to chaff him about it. I felt David’s
death worse than any other death since I had been in France. It did not
anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every
night now, when he came up with the rations, he went out on patrol
looking for Germans. It just made me feel empty and lost.
One of the anthems that we used to sing was: ‘He that shall endure to
the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head
like a charm whenever things were bad. ‘Though thousands languish
and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet
still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an
inheritance incorruptible.... Through faith unto salvation, Ready to
be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing
‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever
hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to
the end with faith unto salvation. I knew that my breaking point was
near now, unless something happened to stave it off.... It was
not that I was frightened. Certainly I feared death; but I had never
yet lost my head through fright, and I knew that I never would. Nor
would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would
be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied
trousers. I had seen cases like that.
The battalion was issued with a new gas-helmet, popularly known as ‘the
goggle-eyed b——r with the tit.’ It differed from the previous models.
One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet and breathed
out through a special valve held in the mouth. I found that I could not
manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced
the septum, so that I was forced to breathe through my mouth. In a
gas-attack I would be unable to use the helmet and it was the only type
claimed to be proof against the new German gas. The battalion doctor
advised me to have an operation done as soon as I could.
These months with the First Battalion have already been twice recorded
in literary history; though in both cases in a disguise of names
and characters. The two books are Siegfried Sassoon’s _Memoirs of a
Fox-hunting Man_, and _Nothing of Importance_, by Bill Adams, the
battalion sniping and intelligence officer. Adam’s book did not
sell, but was as good a book as 1917 censorship allowed; it should
be re-printed. Adams was killed; in fact, three out of five of the
officers of the First Battalion at that time were killed in the Somme
fighting. Scatter’s dream of open warfare was not realized. He himself
was very seriously wounded. Of A Company choir there is one survivor
besides myself—C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still
in hospital sometime after the war ended.
XIX
When I was given leave in April 1916 I went to a military hospital in
London and had my nose operated on. It was a painful operation, but
performed by a first-class surgeon and cost me nothing. In peace-time
it would have cost me sixty guineas, and another twenty guineas in
nursing-home fees. After hospital I went up to Harlech to walk on the
hills. I had in mind the verse of the psalm: ‘I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ That was another charm
against trouble. I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother,
who owned considerable cottage property in the neighbourhood. I bought
it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the
guns stopped (‘when the guns stop’ was how we always thought of the end
of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a
bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there
by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season,
cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war-bonus would keep me
for a year or two at least. The cottage was on the hillside away from
the village. I put in a big window to look out over the wood below
and across the Morfa to the sea. I wrote two or three poems here as a
foretaste of the good life coming after the war.
It was about this time, but whether before or after my operation I
cannot remember, that I was taken by my father to a dinner of the
Honourable Cymmrodorion Society—a Welsh literary club—where Lloyd
George, then Prime Minister, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime
Minister, were to speak. Hughes was perky, dry and to the point;
Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his ‘glory of the Welsh
hills’ speeches. The power of his rhetoric was uncanny. I knew that
the substance of what he was saying was commonplace, idle and false,
but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of the
audience. The power I knew was not his; he sucked it from his hearers
and threw it back at them. Afterwards I was introduced to him, and when
I looked closely at his eyes they were like those of a sleep-walker.
I rejoined the Third Battalion at Litherland, near Liverpool, where
it had been shifted from Wrexham as part of the Mersey defence force;
I liked the Third Battalion. The senior officers were generous in
not putting more work on me than I wished to undertake, and it was
good to meet again three of my Wrexham contemporaries who had been
severely wounded (all of them, by a coincidence, in the left thigh)
and seemed to be out of it for the rest of the war—Frank Jones-Bateman
and ‘Father’ Watkin, who had been in the Welsh Regiment with me, and
Aubrey Attwater, the assistant adjutant, who had gone to the Second
Battalion early in 1915 and had been hit when out on patrol. Attwater
had come from Cambridge, at the outbreak of war and was known as
‘Brains’ in the battalion. The militia majors, who were for the most
part country gentlemen with estates in Wales, and had no thoughts in
peace-time beyond hunting, shooting, fishing, and the control of their
tenantry, were delighted with Attwater’s informative talk over the
port at mess. Sergeant Malley, the mess-sergeant, would go round with
his ‘Light or vintage, sir?’ and the old majors would say to Attwater:
‘Now, Brains! Tell us about Shakespeare. Is it true that Bacon wrote
him?’ Or, ‘Well, Brains! What do you think about this chap Hilaire
Belloc? Does he really know when the war’s going to end?’ And Attwater
would humorously accept his position as combined encyclopaedia and
almanac. Sergeant Malley was another friend whom I was always pleased
to meet again. He could pour more wine into a glass than any other man
in the world; it bulged up over the top of a glass like a cap and he
was never known to spill a drop.
Wednesdays were guest-nights in the mess, when the married officers who
usually dined at home were expected to attend. The band played Gilbert
and Sullivan music behind a curtain. In the intervals the regimental
harper gave solos—Welsh melodies picked out rather uncertainly on a
hand-harp. When the programme was over the bandmaster was invited to
the senior officers’ table for his complimentary glass of light or
vintage. When he was gone, and the junior officers had retired, the
port went round and round, and the conversation, at first very formal,
became rambling and intimate. Once, I remember, a senior major laid
it down axiomatically that every so-called sportsman had at one time
or another committed a sin against sportsmanship. When challenged,
he cross-examined each of his neighbours in turn, putting them on
their honour to tell the truth. One of them, blushing, admitted that
he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘It was my last
chance before I rejoined the battalion in India.’ Another said that
when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had
killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. The next one had gone out
with a poacher—in his Sandhurst days—and crumbled poison-berry into a
trout-stream. An even more scandalous admission came from a new-army
major, a gentleman-farmer, that his estate had been overrun with
foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty
miles away, he had given his bailiff permission to protect the
hen-roosts with a gun. Finally it was the turn of the medical officer
to be cross-examined. He said: ‘Well, once when I was a student at St.
Andrews a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the
Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost and
I never returned the ten bob.’ At this one of the guests, an officer
in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, became suddenly excited, jumped
up and leant over the table, doubling his fists. ‘And was not the name
of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now
immediately?’
The camp was only separated by the bombing-field from Brotherton’s,
where a specially sensitive explosive for detonators was made. The
munition makers had permanently yellow faces and hands and drew
appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what
would happen if Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the shock
would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp besides
destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. He maintained that
the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would
go over and strike a big munition camp about a mile away and set that
off. One Sunday afternoon Attwater limped out of the mess and suddenly
saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire.
The camp fire-brigade was immediately bugled for and managed to put
the fire out before it reached a vital spot. So the argument was never
decided. I was at Litherland only a few weeks. On 1st July 1916 the
Somme offensive started, and all available trained men and officers
were sent out to replace casualties. I was disappointed to be sent back
to the Second Battalion, not the First.
It was in trenches at Givenchy, just the other side of the canal
from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived at the battalion on July
5th to find it in the middle of a raid. Prisoners were coming down
the trench, scared and chattering to each other. They were Saxons
just returned from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany.
Their uniforms were new and their packs full of good stuff to loot.
One prisoner got a good talking-to from C Company sergeant-major, a
Birmingham man, who was shocked at a packet of indecent photographs
found in the man’s haversack. It had been a retaliatory raid. Only a
few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the
Western front so far. It caught our B Company—the B’s were proverbially
unlucky. The crater, which was afterwards named Red Dragon Crater after
the Royal Welch regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards
across. There were few survivors of B Company. The Germans immediately
came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway,
who had been a company sergeant-major on the retreat and was now an
acting-major, rallied some men on the flank and drove them back. Blair,
B Company commander, was buried by the mine up to his neck and for the
rest of the day was constantly under fire. Though an oldish man (he had
the South African ribbon), he survived this experience, recovered from
his wounds, and was back in the battalion a few months later.
This raid was Stanway’s revenge. He organized it with the colonel; the
colonel was the Third Battalion adjutant who had originally sent me
out to France. The raid was elaborately planned, with bombardments and
smoke-screen diversions on the flanks. A barrage of shrapnel shifted
forward and back from the German front line to the supports. The
intention was that the Germans at the first bombardment should go
down into the shell-proof dug-outs, leaving only their sentries in the
trench, and reappear as soon as the barrage lifted. When it came down
again they would make another dash for the dug-outs. After this had
happened two or three times they would be slow in coming out at all.
Then, under cover of a smoke-screen, the raid would be made and the
barrage put down uninterruptedly on the support and reserve lines to
prevent reinforcements. My only part in the raid, which was successful,
was to write out a detailed record of it at the colonel’s request. It
was not the report for divisional headquarters but a page of regimental
history to be sent to the depot to be filed in regimental records. In
my account I noted that for the first time for two hundred years the
regiment had reverted to the pike. Instead of rifle and bayonet some of
the raiders had used butchers’ knives secured with medical plaster to
the end of broomsticks. This pike was a lighter weapon than rifle and
bayonet and was useful in conjunction with bombs and revolvers.
An official journalist at headquarters also wrote an account of the
raid. The battalion enjoyed the bit about how they had gone over
shouting ‘Remember Kitchener!’ and ‘Avenge the _Lusitania_!’ ‘What a
damn silly thing to shout,’ said someone. ‘Old Kitchener was all right,
but nobody wants him back at the War Office, that I’ve heard. And as
for the _Lusitania_, the Germans gave her full warning, and if it
brings the States into the war, it’s all to the good.’
There were not many officers in the Second who had been with it when
I left it a month after Loos, but at any rate I expected to have a
friendlier welcome than the first time I had come to the battalion at
Laventie. But, as one of them recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a
chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of
the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914,
and had been on the Square with me, had achieved his ambition of a
regular commission in the Second Battalion. He was one of those who had
been sent out to France before me as being more efficient and had been
wounded before I came out. But now he was only a second-lieutenant in
the Second Battalion, where promotion was slow, and I was a captain
in the Third Battalion. Line-battalion feeling against the Special
Reserve was always strong, and jealousy of my extra stars made him
bitter. It amused him to revive the suspicion raised at Wrexham by my
German name that I was a German spy. Whether he was serious or not I
cannot say, probably he could not have said either; but the result was
that I found myself treated with great reserve by all the officers
who had not been with me in trenches before. It was unlucky that the
most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name
of Karl Graves. It was put about that he was a brother of mine. My
consolation was that there was obviously a battle due and that would
be the end either of me or of the suspicion. I thought to myself: ‘So
long as there isn’t an N.C.O. told off to watch me and shoot me on the
slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things had been known. As a
matter of fact, though I had myself had no traffic with the enemy,
there was a desultory correspondence kept up between my mother and her
sisters in Germany; it came through her sister, Clara von Faber du
Faur, mother of my cousin Conrad, whose husband was German consul at
Zurich. It was not treasonable on either side, merely a register of the
deaths of relations and discreet references to the war service of the
survivors. The German aunts wrote, as the Government had ordered every
German with relations or friends in enemy or neutral countries to do,
pointing out the righteousness of the German cause and presenting
Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia.
My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they
were deluded. The officers I liked in the battalion were the colonel
and Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor. Doctor Dunn was what they call
a hard-bitten man; he had served as a trooper in the South African War
and won the d.c.m. He was far more than a doctor; living at
battalion headquarters he became the right-hand man of three or four
colonels in succession. When his advice was not taken this was usually
afterwards regretted. On one occasion, in the autumn fighting of 1917,
a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out adjutant,
colonel, and signals officer. Dunn had no hesitation in pulling off the
red-cross armlets that he wore in a battle and becoming a temporary
combatant officer of the Royal Welch, resigning his duties to the
stretcher-bearer sergeant. He took command and kept things going. The
men were rather afraid of him, but had more respect for him than for
anyone else in the battalion.
XX
Four days after the raid we heard that we were due for the Somme.
We marched through Béthune, which had been much knocked about and
was nearly deserted, to Fouquières, and there entrained for the
Somme. The Somme railhead was near Amiens and we marched by easy
stages through Cardonette, Daours, and Buire, until we came to the
original front line, close to the place where David Thomas had
been killed. The fighting had moved two miles on. This was on the
afternoon of 14th July. At 4 a.m. on the 15th July we moved up the
Méaulte-Fricourt-Bazentin road which wound through ‘Happy Valley’
and found ourselves in the more recent battle area. Wounded men and
prisoners came streaming past us. What struck me most was the number
of dead horses and mules lying about; human corpses I was accustomed
to, but it seemed wrong for animals to be dragged into the war like
this. We marched by platoons, at fifty yards distance. Just beyond
Fricourt we found a German shell-barrage across the road. So we left it
and moved over thickly shell-pitted ground until 8 a.m., when we found
ourselves on the fringe of Mametz Wood, among the dead of our new-army
battalions that had been attacking Mametz Wood. We halted in thick
mist. The Germans had been using lachrymatory shell and the mist held
the fumes; we coughed and swore. We tried to smoke, but the gas had got
into the cigarettes, so we threw them away. Later we wished we had not,
because it was not the cigarettes that had been affected so much as our
own throats. The colonel called up the officers and we pulled out our
maps. We were expecting orders for an attack. When the mist cleared
we saw a German gun with ‘First Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers’
chalked on it. It was evidently a trophy. I wondered what had
happened to Siegfried and my friends of A Company. We found the
battalion quite close in bivouacs; Siegfried was still alive, as were
Edmund Dadd and two other A Company officers. The battalion had been in
heavy fighting. In their first attack at Fricourt they had overrun our
opposite number in the German army, the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment,
who were undergoing a special disciplinary spell in the trenches
because an inspecting staff-officer, coming round, had found that all
the officers were back in Mametz village in a deep dug-out instead of
up in the trenches with their men. (It was said that throughout that
bad time in March in the German trenches opposite to us there had been
no officer of higher rank than corporal.) Their next objective had been
The Quadrangle, a small copse this side of Mametz Wood. I was told
that Siegfried had then distinguished himself by taking single-handed
a battalion frontage that the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take
the day before. He had gone over with bombs in daylight, under covering
fire from a couple of rifles, and scared the occupants out. It was a
pointless feat; instead of reporting or signalling for reinforcements
he sat down in the German trench and began dozing over a book of poems
which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not
report. The colonel was furious. The attack on Mametz Wood had been
delayed for two hours because it was reported that British patrols were
still out. ‘British patrols’ were Siegfried and his book of poems. ‘It
would have got you a D.S.O. if you’d only had more sense,’
stormed the colonel. Siegfried had been doing heroic things ever since
I had left the battalion. His nickname in the Seventh Division was
‘Mad Jack.’ He was given a Military Cross for bringing in a wounded
lance-corporal from a mine-crater close to the German lines, under
heavy fire. He was one of the rare exceptions to the rule against the
decoration of Third Battalion officers. I did not see Siegfried this
time; he was down with the transport having a rest. So I sent him a
rhymed letter, by one of our own transport men, about the times that
we were going to have together when the war ended; how, after a rest
at Harlech, we were going for a visit to the Caucasus and Persia and
China; and what good poetry we would write. It was in answer to one
he had written to me from the army school at Flixécourt a few weeks
previously (which appears in _The Old Huntsman_).
[Illustration:SOMME TRENCH MAP
Martinpuich Sector
_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]
I went for a stroll with Edmund Dadd, who was now commanding A Company.
Edmund was cursing: ‘It’s not fair, Robert. You remember A Company
under Richardson was always the best company. Well, it’s kept up its
reputation, and the C.O. shoves us in as the leading company of every
show, and we get our objectives and hold them, and so we’ve got to do
the same again the next time. And he says that I’m indispensable in the
company, so he makes me go over every time instead of giving me a rest
and letting my second-in-command take his turn. I’ve had five shows
in just over a fortnight and I can’t go on being lucky every time.
The colonel’s about due for his c.b. Apparently A Company is
making sure of if for him.’
For the next two days we were in bivouacs outside the wood. We were in
fighting kit and the nights were wet and cold. I went into the wood
to find German overcoats to use as blankets. Mametz Wood was full of
dead of the Prussian Guards Reserve, big men, and of Royal Welch and
South Wales Borderers of the new-army battalions, little men. There
was not a single tree in the wood unbroken. I got my greatcoats
and came away as quickly as I could, climbing over the wreckage of
green branches. Going and coming, by the only possible route, I had
to pass by the corpse of a German with his back propped against a
tree. He had a green face, spectacles, close shaven hair; black blood
was dripping from the nose and beard. He had been there for some days
and was bloated and stinking. There had been bayonet fighting in the
wood. There was a man of the South Wales Borderers and one of the Lehr
regiment who had succeeded in bayoneting each other simultaneously. A
survivor of the fighting told me later that he had seen a young soldier
of the Fourteenth Royal Welch bayoneting a German in parade-ground
style, automatically exclaiming as he had been taught: ‘In, out, on
guard.’ He said that it was the oddest thing he had heard in France.
I found myself still superstitious about looting or collecting
souvenirs. The greatcoats were only a loan, I told myself. Almost the
only souvenir I had allowed myself to keep was a trench periscope,
a little rod-shaped metal one sent me from home; when I poked it up
above the parapet it offered only an inch-square target to the German
snipers. Yet a sniper at Cuinchy, in May, drilled it through, exactly
central, at four hundred yards range. I sent it home, but had no time
to write a note of explanation. My mother, misunderstanding, and
practical as usual, took it back to the makers and made them change it
for a new one.
Our brigade, the Nineteenth, was the reserve brigade of the
Thirty-third Division; the other brigades, the Ninety-ninth and
Hundredth, had attacked Martinpuich two days previously and had been
stopped with heavy losses as soon as they started. Since then we had
had nothing to do but sit about in shell-holes and watch the artillery
duel going on. We had never seen artillery so thick. On the 18th
we moved up to a position just to the north of Bazentin le Petit to
relieve the Tyneside Irish. I was with D Company. The guide who was
taking us up was hysterical and had forgotten the way; we put him under
arrest and found it ourselves. As we went up through the ruins of the
village we were shelled. We were accustomed to that, but they were gas
shells. The standing order with regard to gas shells was not to put
on one’s respirator but hurry on. Up to that week there had been no
gas shells except lachrymatory ones; these were the first of the real
kind, so we lost about half a dozen men. When at last we arrived at
the trenches, which were scooped at a roadside and only about three
feet deep, the company we were relieving hurried out without any of the
usual formalities; they had been badly shaken. I asked their officer
where the Germans were. He said he didn’t know, but pointed vaguely
towards Martinpuich, a mile to our front. Then I asked him where and
what were the troops on our left. He didn’t know. I cursed him and he
went off. We got into touch with C Company behind us on the right and
with the Fourth Suffolks not far off on the left. We began deepening
the trenches and locating the Germans; they were in a trench-system
about five hundred yards away but keeping fairly quiet.
The next day there was very heavy shelling at noon; shells were
bracketing along our trench about five yards short and five yards over,
but never quite getting it. We were having dinner and three times
running my cup of tea was spilt by the concussion and filled with dirt.
I was in a cheerful mood and only laughed. I had just had a parcel of
kippers from home; they were far more important than the bombardment—I
recalled with appreciation one of my mother’s sayings: ‘Children,
remember this when you eat your kippers; kippers cost little, yet if
they cost a hundred guineas a pair they would still find buyers among
the millionaires.’ Before the shelling had started a tame magpie had
come into the trench; it had apparently belonged to the Germans who
had been driven out of the village by the Gordon Highlanders a day or
two before. It was looking very draggled. ‘That’s one for sorrow,’
I said. The men swore that it spoke something in German as it came
in, but I did not hear it. I was feeling tired and was off duty, so
without waiting for the bombardment to stop I went to sleep in the
trench. I decided that I would just as soon be killed asleep as awake.
There were no dug-outs, of course. I always found it easy now to sleep
through bombardments. I was conscious of the noise in my sleep, but I
let it go by. Yet if anybody came to wake me for my watch or shouted
‘Stand-to!’ I was alert in a second. I had learned to go to sleep
sitting down, standing up, marching, lying on a stone floor, or in any
other position, at a moment’s notice at any time of day or night. But
now I had a dreadful nightmare; it was as though somebody was handling
me secretly, choosing the place to drive a knife into me. Finally, he
gripped me in the small of the back. I woke up with a start, shouting,
and punched the small of my back where the hand was. I found that I had
killed a mouse that had been frightened by the bombardment and run down
my neck.
That afternoon the company got an order through from the brigade to
build two cruciform strong-points at such-and-such a map reference.
Moodie, the company commander, and I looked at our map and laughed.
Moodie sent back a message that he would be glad to do so, but would
require an artillery bombardment and strong reinforcements because
the points selected, half way to Martinpuich, were occupied in
force by the enemy. The colonel came up and verified this. He said that
we should build the strong-point about three hundred yards forward and
two hundred yards apart. So one platoon stayed behind in the trench
and the other went out and started digging. A cruciform strong-point
consisted of two trenches, each some thirty yards long, crossing at
right angles to each other; it was wired all round, so that it looked,
in diagram, like a hot-cross bun. The defenders could bring fire to
bear against an attack from any direction. We were to hold each of
these points with a Lewis gun and a platoon of men.
It was a bright moonlight night. My way to the strong-point on
the right took me along the Bazentin-High Wood road. A German
sergeant-major, wearing a pack and full equipment, was lying on his
back in the middle of the road, his arms stretched out wide. He was a
short, powerful man with a full black beard. He looked sinister in the
moonlight; I needed a charm to get myself past him. The simplest way, I
found, was to cross myself. Evidently a brigade of the Seventh Division
had captured the road and the Germans had been shelling it heavily. It
was a sunken road and the defenders had begun to scrape fire-positions
in the north bank, facing the Germans. The work had apparently been
interrupted by a counter-attack. They had done no more than scrape
hollows in the lower part of the bank. To a number of these little
hollows wounded men had crawled, put their heads and shoulders inside
and died there. They looked as if they had tried to hide from the black
beard. They were Gordon Highlanders.
I was visiting the strong-point on the right. The trench had now been
dug two or three feet down and a party of Engineers had arrived
with coils of barbed wire for the entanglement. I found that work had
stopped. The whisper went round: ‘Get your rifles ready. Here comes
Fritz.’ I lay down flat to see better, and about seventy yards away in
the moonlight I could make out massed figures. I immediately sent a man
back to the company to find Moodie and ask him for a Lewis gun and a
flare-pistol. I restrained the men, who were itching to fire, telling
them to wait until they came closer. I said: ‘They probably don’t
know we’re here and we’ll get more of them if we let them come right
up close. They may even surrender.’ The Germans were wandering about
irresolutely and we wondered what the game was. There had been a number
of German surrenders at night recently, and this might be one on a big
scale. Then Moodie came running with a Lewis gun, the flare-pistol,
and a few more men with rifle-grenades. He decided to give the enemy a
chance. He sent up a flare and fired a Lewis gun over their heads. A
tall officer came running towards us with his hands up in surrender.
He was surprised to find that we were not Germans. He said that he
belonged to the Public Schools Battalion in our own brigade. Moodie
asked him what the hell he was doing. He said that he was in command of
a patrol. He was sent back for a few more of his men, to make sure it
was not a trick. The patrol was half a company of men wandering about
aimlessly between the lines, their rifles slung over their shoulders,
and, it seemed, without the faintest idea where they were or what
information they were supposed to bring back. This Public Schools
Battalion was one of four or five others which had been formed some
time in 1914. Their training had been continually interrupted by large
numbers of men being withdrawn as officers for other regiments. The
only men left, in fact, seemed to be those who were unfitted to
hold commissions; yet unfitted by their education to make good soldiers
in the ranks. The other battalions had been left behind in England as
training battalions; only this one had been sent out. It was a constant
embarrassment to the brigade.
I picked up a souvenir that night. A German gun-team had been shelled
as it was galloping out of Bazentin towards Martinpuich. The horses and
the driver had been killed. At the back of the limber were the gunners’
treasures. Among them was a large lump of chalk wrapped up in a piece
of cloth; it had been carved and decorated in colours with military
mottos, the flags of the Central Powers, and the names of the various
battles in which the gunner had served. I sent it as a present to Dr.
Dunn. I am glad to say that both he and it survived the war; he is in
practice at Glasgow, and the lump of chalk is under a glass case in
his consulting room. The evening of the next day, July 19th, we were
relieved. We were told that we would be attacking High Wood, which we
could see a thousand yards away to the right at the top of a slope.
High Wood was on the main German battle-line, which ran along the
ridge, with Delville Wood not far off on the German left. Two British
brigades had already attempted it; in both cases the counter-attack had
driven them out. Our battalion had had a large number of casualties and
was now only about four hundred strong.
I have kept a battalion order issued at midnight:
To O.C. B Co. 2nd R.W.F. 20.7.16.
Companies will move as under
to same positions in S14b
as were to have been
taken over from Cameronians aaa
A Coy. 12.30 a.m.
B Coy. 12.45 a.m.
C Coy. 1 a.m.
D Coy. 1.15 a.m. aaa
At 2 a.m. Company Commanders
will meet C.O. at X
Roads S14b 99. aaa
Men will lie down and
get under cover but equipment
will not be taken off aaa
S14b 99 was a map reference for Bazentin churchyard. We lay here on
the reverse slope of a slight ridge about half a mile from the wood.
I attended the meeting of company commanders; the colonel told us the
plan. He said: ‘Look here, you fellows, we’re in reserve for this
attack. The Cameronians are going up to the wood first, then the Fifth
Scottish Rifles; that’s at five a.m. The Public Schools Battalion
are in support if anything goes wrong. I don’t know if we shall
be called on; if we are, it will mean that the Jocks have legged it.
As usual,’ he added. This was an appeal to prejudice. ‘The Public
Schools Battalion is, well, what we know, so if we are called for, that
means it will be the end of us.’ He said this with a laugh and we all
laughed. We were sitting on the ground protected by the road-bank; a
battery of French 75’s was firing rapid over our heads about twenty
yards away. There was a very great concentration of guns in Happy
Valley now. We could hardly hear what he was saying. He told us that
if we did get orders to reinforce, we were to shake out in artillery
formation; once in the wood we were to hang on like death. Then he said
good-bye and good luck and we rejoined our companies.
At this juncture the usual inappropriate message came through from
Division. Division could always be trusted to send through a warning
about verdigris on vermorel-sprayers, or the keeping of pets in
trenches, or being polite to our allies, or some other triviality, when
an attack was in progress. This time it was an order for a private in C
Company to report immediately to the assistant provost-marshal back at
Albert, under escort of a lance-corporal. He was for a court-martial.
A sergeant of the company was also ordered to report as a witness in
the case. The private was charged with the murder of a French civilian
in an estaminet at Béthune about a month previously. Apparently there
had been a good deal of brandy going and the French civilian, who had
a grudge against the British (it was about his wife), started to tease
the private. He was reported, somewhat improbably, as having said:
‘English no bon, Allmand trés bon. War fineesh, napoo the English.
Allmand win.’ The private had immediately drawn his bayonet and run the
man through. At the court-martial the private was exculpated; the
French civil representative commended him for having ‘energetically
repressed local defeatism.’ So he and the two N.C.O.’s missed the
battle.
What the battle that they missed was like I pieced together afterwards.
The Jocks did get into the wood and the Royal Welch were not called
on to reinforce until eleven o’clock in the morning. The Germans put
down a barrage along the ridge where we were lying, and we lost about
a third of the battalion before our show started. I was one of the
casualties.
It was heavy stuff, six and eight inch. There was so much of it that
we decided to move back fifty yards; it was when I was running that
an eight-inch shell burst about three paces behind me. I was able
to work that out afterwards by the line of my wounds. I heard the
explosion and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between
the shoulder-blades, but had no sensation of pain. I thought that
the punch was merely the shock of the explosion; then blood started
trickling into my eye and I felt faint and called to Moodie: ‘I’ve
been hit.’ Then I fell down. A minute or two before I had had two very
small wounds on my left hand; they were in exactly the same position
as the two, on my right hand, that I had got during the preliminary
bombardment at Loos. This I had taken as a sign that I would come
through all right. For further security I had repeated to myself a line
of Nietsche’s, whose poems, in French, I had with me:
Non, tu ne peus pas me tuer.
It was the poem about a man on the scaffold with the red-bearded
executioner standing over him. (This copy of Nietsche, by the
way, had contributed to the suspicions about me as a spy. Nietsche was
execrated in the papers as the philosopher of German militarism; he
was more popularly interpreted as a William le Queux mystery-man—the
sinister figure behind the Kaiser.)
One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up near the groin;
I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to have escaped
emasculation. The wound over the eye was nothing; it was a little chip
of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin cemetery headstones. This
and a finger wound, which split the bone, probably came from another
shell that burst in front of me. The main wound was made by a piece of
shell that went in two inches below the point of my right shoulder and
came out through my chest two inches above my right nipple, in a line
between it and the base of my neck.
My memory of what happened then is vague. Apparently Doctor Dunn came
up through the barrage with a stretcher-party, dressed my wound, and
got me down to the old German dressing-station at the north end of
Mametz Wood. I just remember being put on the stretcher and winking at
the stretcher-bearer sergeant who was looking at me and saying: ‘Old
Gravy’s got it, all right.’ The dressing-station was overworked that
day; I was laid in a corner on a stretcher and remained unconscious for
more than twenty-four hours.
It was about ten o’clock on the 20th that I was hit. Late that night
the colonel came to the dressing-station; he saw me lying in the corner
and was told that I was done for. The next morning, the 21st, when they
were clearing away the dead, I was found to be still breathing; so they
put me on an ambulance for Heilly, the nearest field-hospital. The pain
of being jolted down the Happy Valley, with a shell-hole at every
three or four yards of the roads, woke me for awhile. I remember
screaming. But once back on the better roads I became unconscious
again. That morning the colonel wrote the usual formal letters of
condolence to the next-of-kin of the six or seven officers who had been
killed. This was his letter to my mother:
22/7/16
Dear Mrs. Graves,
I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died
of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great
loss.
He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way
down to the base I believe. He was not in bad pain, and our doctor
managed to get across and attend him at once.
We have had a very hard time, and our casualties have been large.
Believe me you have all our sympathy in your loss, and we have lost a
very gallant soldier.
Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything.
Yours sincerely,
* * *
Later he made out the official casualty list and reported me died of
wounds. It was a long casualty list, because only eighty men were left
in the battalion.
Heilly was on the railway; close to the station was the
hospital—marquee tents with the red cross painted prominently on the
roofs to discourage air-bombing. It was fine July weather and the
tents were insufferably hot. I was semi-conscious now, and realized
my lung-wound by the shortness of breath. I was amused to watch the
little bubbles of blood, like red soap-bubbles, that my breath made
when it escaped through the hole of the wound. The doctor came over to
me. I felt sorry for him; he looked as though he had not had any sleep
for days. I asked him for a drink. He said: ‘Would you like some tea?’
I whispered: ‘Not with condensed milk in it.’ He said: ‘I’m afraid
there’s no fresh milk.’ Tears came to my eyes; I expected better of
a hospital behind the lines. He said: ‘Will you have some water?’ I
said: ‘Not if it’s boiled.’ He said: ‘It is boiled. And I’m afraid I
can’t give you anything with alcohol in it in your present condition.’
I said: ‘Give me some fruit then.’ He said: ‘I have seen no fruit for
days.’ But a few minutes later he came back with two rather unripe
greengages. I felt so grateful that I promised him a whole orchard when
I recovered.
The nights of the 22nd and 23rd were very bad. Early on the morning of
the 24th, when the doctor came to see how I was, I said: ‘You must send
me away from here. The heat will kill me.’ It was beating through the
canvas on my head. He said: ‘Stick it out. It’s your best chance to lie
here and not to be moved. You’d not reach the base alive.’ I said: ‘I’d
like to risk the move. I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ Half an hour
later he came back. ‘Well, you’re having it your way. I’ve just got
orders to evacuate every case in the hospital. Apparently the Guards
have been in it up at Delville Wood and we’ll have them all coming in
to-night.’ I had no fears now about dying. I was content to be wounded
and on the way home.
I had been given news of the battalion from a brigade-major, wounded in
the leg, who was in the next bed to me. He looked at my label and said:
‘I see you’re in the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers. Well, I saw your
High Wood show through field-glasses. The way your battalion shook
out into artillery formation, company by company-with each section of
four or five men in file at fifty yards interval and distance—going
down into the hollow and up the slope through the barrage, was the
most beautiful bit of parade-ground drill I’ve ever seen. Your company
officers must have been superb.’ I happened to know that one company at
least had started without a single officer. I asked him whether they
had held the wood. He said: ‘They hung on at the near end. I believe
what happened was that the Public Schools Battalion came away as soon
as it got dark; and so did the Scotsmen. Your chaps were left there
alone for some time. They steadied themselves by singing. Later, the
chaplain—R.C. of course—Father McCabe, brought the Scotsmen back. They
were Glasgow Catholics and would follow a priest where they wouldn’t
follow an officer. The middle of the wood was impossible for either the
Germans or your fellows to hold. There was a terrific concentration
of artillery on it. The trees were splintered to matchwood. Late that
night the survivors were relieved by a brigade of the Seventh Division;
your First Battalion was in it.’
That evening I was put in the hospital train. They could not lift
me from the stretcher to put me on a bunk, for fear of starting
hæmorrhage in the lung; so they laid the stretcher on top of it, with
the handles resting on the head-rail and foot-rail. I had been on the
same stretcher since I was wounded. I remember the journey only as a
nightmare.
My back was sagging, and I could not raise my knees to relieve the
cramp because the bunk above me was only a few inches away. A German
officer on the other side of the carriage groaned and wept unceasingly.
He had been in an aeroplane crash and had a compound fracture of the
leg. The other wounded men were cursing him and telling him to
stow it and be a man, but he went on, keeping every one awake. He was
not delirious, only frightened and in great pain. An orderly gave me
a pencil and paper and I wrote home to say that I was wounded but all
right. This was July 24th, my twenty-first birthday, and it was on
this day, when I arrived at Rouen, that my death officially occurred.
My parents got my letter two days after the letter from the colonel;
mine was dated July 23rd, because I had lost count of days when I was
unconscious; his was dated the 22nd.[8] They could not decide whether
my letter had been written just before I died and misdated, or whether
I had died just after writing it. ‘Died of wounds’ was, however, so
much more circumstantial than ‘killed’ that they gave me up. I was in
No. 8 Hospital at Rouen; an ex-château high above the town. The day
after I arrived a Cooper aunt of mine, who had married a Frenchman,
came up to the hospital to visit a nephew in the South Wales Borderers
who had just had a leg amputated. She happened to see my name in a list
on the door of the ward, so she wrote to my mother to reassure her. On
the 30th I had a letter from the colonel:
30/7/16
Dear von Runicke,
I cannot tell you how pleased I am you are alive. I was told your
number was up for certain, and a letter was supposed to have come in
from Field Ambulance saying you had gone under.
Well, it’s good work. We had a rotten time, and after succeeding
in doing practically the impossible we collected that rotten crowd
and put them in their places, but directly dark came they legged it.
It was too sad.
We lost heavily. It is not fair putting brave men like ours alongside
that crowd. I also wish to thank you for your good work and bravery,
and only wish you could have been with them. I have read of bravery
but I have never seen such magnificent and wonderful disregard for
death as I saw that day. It was almost uncanny—it was so great. I
once heard an old officer in the Royal Welch say the men would follow
you to Hell; but these chaps would bring you back and put you in a
dug-out in Heaven.
Good luck and a quick recovery. I shall drink your health to-night.
* *
I had little pain all this time, but much discomfort; the chief pain
came from my finger, which had turned septic because nobody had taken
the trouble to dress it, and was throbbing. And from the thigh, where
the sticky medical plaster, used to hold down the dressing, pulled
up the hair painfully when it was taken off each time the wound was
dressed. My breath was very short still. I contrasted the pain and
discomfort favourably with that of the operation on my nose of two
months back; for this I had won no sympathy at all from anyone, because
it was not an injury contracted in war. I was weak and petulant and
muddled. The R.A.M.C. bugling outraged me. The ‘Rob All My Comrades,’
I complained, had taken everything I had except a few papers in my
tunic-pocket and a ring which was too tight on my finger to be pulled
off; and now they mis-blew the Last Post flat and windily, and with the
pauses in the wrong places, just to annoy me. I remember that I
told an orderly to put the bugler under arrest and jump to it or I’d
report him to the senior medical officer.
Next to me was a Welsh boy, named O. M. Roberts, who had joined us
only a few days before he was hit. He told me about High Wood; he had
reached the edge of the wood when he was wounded in the groin. He had
fallen into a shell-hole. Some time in the afternoon he had recovered
consciousness and seen a German officer working round the edge of the
wood, killing off the wounded with an automatic pistol. Some of our
lightly-wounded were, apparently, not behaving as wounded men should;
they were sniping. The German worked nearer. He saw Roberts move and
came towards him, fired and hit him in the arm. Roberts was very weak
and tugged at his Webley. He had great difficulty in getting it out
of the holster. The German fired again and missed. Roberts rested the
Webley against the lip of the shell-hole and tried to pull the trigger;
he was not strong enough. The German was quite close now and was going
to make certain of him this time. Roberts said that he just managed to
pull the trigger with the fingers of both hands when the German was
only about five yards away. The shot took the top of his head off.
Roberts fainted.
The doctors had been anxiously watching my lung, which was gradually
filling with blood and pressing my heart too far away to the left of my
body; the railway journey had restarted the hæmorrhage. They marked the
gradual progress of my heart with an indelible pencil on my skin and
said that when it reached a certain point they would have to aspirate
me. This sounded a serious operation, but it only consisted of putting
a hollow needle into my lung through the back and drawing the blood off
into a vacuum flask through it. I had a local anæsthetic; it hurt
no more than a vaccination, and I was reading the _Gazette de Rouen_
as the blood hissed into the flask. It did not look much, perhaps half
a pint. That evening I heard a sudden burst of lovely singing in the
courtyard where the ambulances pulled up. I recognized the quality
of the voices. I said to Roberts: ‘The First Battalion have been in
it again,’ and asked a nurse to verify it; I was right. It was their
Delville Wood show, I think, but I am uncertain now of the date.
A day or two later I was taken back to England by hospital ship.
XXI
I had sent my parents a wire that I would be arriving at Waterloo
Station the next morning. The way from the hospital train to the
waiting ambulances was roped off; as each stretcher case was lifted off
the train a huge hysterical crowd surged up to the barrier and uttered
a new roar. Flags were being waved. It seemed that the Somme battle
was regarded at home as the beginning of the end of the war. As I idly
looked at the crowd, one figure detached itself; it was my father,
hopping about on one leg, waving an umbrella and cheering with the best
of them. I was embarrassed, but was soon in the ambulance. I was on the
way to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate. This was Sir Alfred Mond’s
big house, lent for the duration of the war, and a really good place to
be in; having a private room to myself was the most unexpected luxury.
What I most disliked in the army was never being alone, forced to live
and sleep with men whose company in many cases I would have run miles
to avoid.
I was not long at Highgate; the lung healed up easily and my finger
was saved for me. I heard here for the first time that I was supposed
to be dead; the joke contributed greatly to my recovery. The people
with whom I had been on the worst terms during my life wrote the most
enthusiastic condolences to my parents: my housemaster, for instance.
I have kept a letter dated the 5th August 1916 from _The Times_
advertisement department:
_Captain Robert Graves._
Dear Sir,
We have to acknowledge receipt of your letter with reference to the
announcement contradicting the report of your death from wounds.
Having regard, however, to the fact that we had previously published
some biographical details, we inserted your announcement in our issue
of to-day (Saturday) under ‘Court Circular’ without charge, and we
have much pleasure in enclosing herewith cutting of same.
Yours, etc.
The cutting read:
Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially reported died
of wounds, wishes to inform his friends that he is recovering from his
wounds at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate, N.
* * *
Mrs. Lloyd George has left London for Criccieth.
* * *
I never saw the biographical details supplied by my father; they might
have been helpful to me here. Some letters written to me in France
were returned to him as my next-of-kin. They were surcharged: ‘Died of
wounds—present location uncertain.—P. Down, post-corporal.’ The only
inconvenience that my death caused me was that Cox’s Bank stopped my
pay and I had difficulty in persuading it to honour my cheques. I had
a letter from Siegfried telling me that he was overjoyed to hear I was
alive again. (I wondered whether he had been avenging me.) He was now
back in England with suspected lung trouble. We agreed to take our
leave together at Harlech when I was better. Siegfried wrote that he
was nine parts dead from the horror of the Somme fighting.
I was able to travel early in September. We met at Paddington.
Siegfried bought a copy of _The Times_ at the bookstall. As usual
we turned to the casualty list first; and found there the names of
practically every officer in the First Battalion, either killed or
wounded. Edmund Dadd was killed. His brother Julian, in Siegfried’s
company, wounded. (Shot through the throat, as we learned later, only
able to talk in a whisper, and for months utterly prostrated. It
had been at Ale Alley at Ginchy, on 3rd September. A dud show; the
battalion had been outflanked in a counter-attack.) News like this in
England was far more upsetting than when one was in France. I was still
very weak and could not help crying all the way up to Wales. Siegfried
said bitterly: ‘Well, I expect the colonel got his c.b. at
any rate.’ England was strange to the returned soldier. He could not
understand the war-madness that ran about everywhere looking for a
pseudo-military outlet. Every one talked a foreign language; it was
newspaper language. I found serious conversation with my parents all
but impossible. A single typical memorial of this time will be enough:
A MOTHER’S ANSWER TO
‘A COMMON SOLDIER’
By A Little Mother
A MESSAGE TO THE PACIFISTS. A MESSAGE TO THE BEREAVED. A MESSAGE TO THE
TRENCHES
_Owing to the immense demand from home and from the trenches for this
letter, which appeared in the ‘Morning Post,’ the Editor found it
necessary to place it in the hands of London publishers to be reprinted
in pamphlet form, seventy-five thousand copies of which were sold in
less than a week direct from the publishers._
_Extract from a Letter from Her Majesty_
‘The Queen was deeply touched at the “Little Mother’s” beautiful
letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our
soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.’
* * * * *
_To the Editor of the ‘Morning Post’_
Sir,—As a mother of an only child—a son who was early and eager to do
his duty—may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter
appeared in your issue of the 9th inst.? Perhaps he will kindly convey
to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not
what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race
think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard,
seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the
world, for it is we who ‘mother the men’ who have to uphold the honour
and traditions not only of our Empire but of the whole civilized world.
To the man who pathetically calls himself a ‘common soldier,’ may I say
that we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as
‘Peace! Peace!’ where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over
land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future
that their blood was not spilt in vain. We need no marble monuments to
remind us. We only need that force of character behind all motives to
see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending.
The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the ‘common soldier’
from his ‘slight wounds’ will not cry to us in vain. They have all
done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and
without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show
them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no
‘sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and “comfy” in the
summer.’ There is only one temperature for the women of the British
race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred
trust of motherhood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to
the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh
and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on
every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of ‘only
sons’ to fill up the gaps, so that when the ‘common soldier’ looks back
before going ‘over the top’ he may see the women of the British race on
his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.
The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the ‘common
soldier.’ We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no
pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our
eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking
boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on
in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the
bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we’ve fetched
our laddie from school, we’ve put his cap away, and we have glanced
lovingly over his last report which said ‘Excellent’—we’ve wrapped them
all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the
war to be looked at. A ‘common soldier,’ perhaps, did not count on
the women, but they have their part to play, and we have risen to our
responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be
proud of us. If the men fail, Tommy Atkins, the women won’t.
Tommy Atkins to the front,
He has gone to bear the brunt.
Shall ‘stay-at-homes’ do naught but snivel and but sigh?
No, while your eyes are filling
We are up and doing, willing
To face the music with you—or to die!
Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it.
Now we are giving it in a double sense. It’s not likely we are going
to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over
he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of ‘Lights out,’
a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our own secret
chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a
bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we
emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men’s memories
have handed down to us for now and all eternity.
Yours, etc.,
A Little Mother.
* * * * *
EXTRACTS AND PRESS CRITICISMS
‘The widest possible circulation is of the utmost importance.’—_The
Morning Post_.
‘Deservedly attracting a great deal of attention, as expressing with
rare eloquence and force the feelings with which the British wives
and mothers have faced and are facing the supreme sacrifice.’—_The
Morning Post_.
‘Excites widespread interest.’—_The Gentlewoman_.
‘A letter which has become celebrated.’—_The Star_.
‘We would like to see it hung up in our wards.’—_Hospital Blue_.
‘One of the grandest things ever written, for it combines a height of
courage with a depth of tenderness which should be, and is, the stamp
of all that is noblest and best in human nature.’—_A Soldier in France_.
‘Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of
her day, but no woman has done more than the “Little Mother,” whose now
famous letter in the Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench
to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing
like it has ever made such an impression on our fighting men. I defy
any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it.... My God! she makes us
die happy.’—_One who has Fought and Bled_.
‘Worthy of far more than a passing notice; it ought to be reprinted and
sent out to every man at the front. It is a masterpiece and fills one
with pride, noble, level-headed, and pathetic to a degree.’—_Severely
Wounded_.
‘I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the “Little
Mother’s” beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has
calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice
over.’—_A Bereaved Mother_.
‘The “Little Mother’s” letter should reach every corner of the earth—a
letter of the loftiest ideal, tempered with courage and the most
sublime sacrifice.’—_Percival H. Monkton_.
‘The exquisite letter by a “Little Mother” is making us feel
prouder every day. We women desire to fan the flame which she has so
superbly kindled in our hearts.’—_A British Mother of an Only Son_.
* * * * *
At Harlech, Siegfried and I spent the time getting our poems in order;
Siegfried was at work on his _Old Huntsman_. We made a number of
changes in each other’s verses; I remember that I proposed amendments
which he accepted in his obituary poem ‘To His Dead Body’—written
for me when he thought me dead. We were beginning to wonder whether
it was right for the war to be continued. It was said that Asquith
in the autumn of 1915 had been offered peace-terms on the basis of
_status quo ante_ and that he had been willing to consider them; that
his colleagues had opposed him, and that this was the reason for the
fall of the Liberal Government, and for the ‘Win-the-War’ Coalition
Government of Lloyd George that superseded it. We both thought that
the terms should have been accepted, though Siegfried was more
vehement than I was on the subject. The view we had of the war was
now non-political. We no longer saw it as a war between trade-rivals;
its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger
generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.
I made a facetious marginal note on a poem I wrote about this time,
called _Goliath and David_ (in which the biblical legend was reversed
and David was killed by Goliath):
‘War should be a sport for men above forty-five only, the Jesse’s,
not the David’s. “Well, dear father, how proud I am of you serving
your country as a very gallant gentleman prepared to make even the
supreme sacrifice. I only wish I were your age: how willingly would
I buckle on my armour and fight those unspeakable Philistines! As it
is, of course, I can’t be spared; I have to stay behind at the War
Office and administrate for you lucky old men.” “What sacrifices I
have made,” David would sigh when the old boys had gone off with a
draft to the front singing _Tipperary_. “There’s father and my Uncle
Salmon and both my grandfathers, all on active service. I must put a
card in the window about it.”’
We defined the war in our poems by making contrasted definitions of
peace. With Siegfried it was hunting and nature and music and pastoral
scenes; with me it was chiefly children. When I was in France I used
to spend much of my spare time playing with the French children of the
villages in which I was billeted. I put them into my poems, and my own
childhood at Harlech. I called my book _Fairies and Fusiliers_, and
dedicated it to the regiment.
Siegfried stayed a few weeks. When he had gone I began the novel on
which my earlier war chapters are based, but it remained a rough draft.
In September I went for a visit to Kent, to the house of a First
Battalion friend who had recently been wounded. His elder brother
had been killed in the Dardanelles, and his mother kept his bedroom
exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, his linen always
freshly laundered, and flowers and cigarettes by his bedside. She was
religious and went about with a vague bright look on her face. The
first night I spent there my friend and I sat up talking about the war
until after twelve o’clock. His mother had gone to bed early, after
urging us not to get too tired. The talk excited me but I managed to
fall asleep at about one o’clock. I was continually awakened by sudden
rapping noises which I at first tried to disregard but which grew
louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. I lay in a cold
sweat. About three o’clock I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of
laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door. I collided
in the passage with the mother, who, to my surprise, was fully dressed.
She said: ‘It’s nothing. One of the maids has hysterics. I am so sorry
you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to bed, but I could not sleep
though the noises had stopped. In the morning I said to my friend: ‘I’m
leaving this place. It’s worse than France.’
* * * * *
In November Siegfried and I rejoined the battalion at Litherland and
shared a hut together. We decided that it was no use making a protest
against the war. Every one was mad; we were hardly sane ourselves.
Siegfried said that we had to ‘keep up the good reputation of the
poets,’ as men of courage, he meant. The best place for us was back
in France away from the more shameful madness of home service. Our
function there was not to kill Germans, though that might happen, but
to make things easier for the men under our command. For them the
difference between being under someone whom they could count as a
friend, someone who protected them as much as he could from the grosser
indignities of the military system and having to study the whims of
any thoughtless, petty tyrant in an officer’s tunic, was all the
difference in the world. By this time the ranks of both line battalions
were filled with men who had enlisted for patriotic reasons and the
professional-soldier tradition was hard on them.... Siegfried, for
instance, on (I think) the day before the Fricourt attack. The attack
had been rehearsed for a week over dummy trenches in the back areas
until the whole performance was perfect, in fact almost stale.
Siegfried was told to rehearse once more. Instead, he led his platoon
into a wood and read to them—nothing military or literary, just the
_London Mail_. Though the _London Mail_ was not in his line, Siegfried
thought that the men would enjoy the ‘Things We Want to Know’ column.
Officers of the Royal Welch were honorary members of a neighbouring
golf club. Siegfried and I used to go there often. He played golf and
I hit a ball alongside him. I had once played at Harlech as a junior
member of the Royal St. David’s, but I had given it up before long
because it was bad for my temper. I was afraid of taking it up again
seriously, so now I limited myself to a single club. When I mishit it
did not matter. I played the fool and purposely put Siegfried off his
game; he was a serious golfer. It was the time of great food shortage;
the submarines sank about every fourth food ship, and there was a
strict meat, butter and sugar ration. But the war did not seem to have
reached the links. The principal business men of Liverpool were members
of the club and did not mean to go short while there was any food at
all coming in at the docks. Siegfried and I went to the club-house for
lunch on the day before Christmas; there was a cold buffet in the club
dining-room offering hams, barons of beef, jellied tongues, cold roast
turkey and chicken. A large, meaty-faced waiter presided. Siegfried
satirically asked him: ‘Is this all? There doesn’t seem to be quite
such a good spread as in previous years.’ The waiter apologized: ‘No,
sir, this isn’t quite up to the usual mark, sir, but we are expecting a
more satisfactory consignment of meat on Boxing Day.’ The dining-room
at the club-house was always full, the links were practically deserted.
The favourite rendezvous of the officers of the Mersey garrison
was the Adelphi Hotel. It had a cocktail bar and a swimming bath.
The cocktail bar was generally crowded with Russian naval officers,
always very drunk. One day I met a major of the King’s Own Scottish
Borderers there. I saluted him. He told me confidentially, taking me
aside: ‘It’s nice of you to salute me, my boy, but I must confess
that I am not what I seem. I wear a crown on my sleeve and so does
a company sergeant-major; but then he’s not entitled to wear these
three cuff bands and the wavy border. Look at them, aren’t they
pretty? As I was saying, I’m not what I seem to be. I’m a sham. I’ve
got a sergeant-major’s stomach.’ I was quite accustomed to drunken
senior officers, so I answered respectfully: ‘Really, major, and how
did you come to get that?’ He said: ‘You think I’m drunk. Well, I am
if you like, but it’s true about my stomach. You see I was in that
Beaumont-Hamel show and I got shot in the guts. It hurt like hell, let
me tell you. They got me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying;
there was a company sergeant-major in the hospital at the time and
he had got it through the head, and _he_ was busy dying, too, and he
did die. Well, as soon as the sergeant-major died they took out that
long gut, whatever you call the thing, the thing that unwinds—they say
it’s as long as a cricket pitch—and they put it into me, grafted it on
somehow. Wonderful chaps these medicos. They can put in spare parts as
if one was a motor-car. Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an
abstemious man; the lining of the new gut is much better than my old
one; so I’m celebrating it. I only wish I had his kidneys too.’
An R.A.M.C. captain was sitting by. He broke into the conversation.
‘Yes, major, I know what a stomach wound’s like. It’s the worst of the
lot. You were lucky to reach the field-ambulance alive. The best
chance is to lie absolutely still. I got mine out between the lines,
bandaging a fellow. I flopped into a shell-hole. My stretcher-bearers
wanted to carry me back, but I wasn’t having any. I kept everyone off
with a revolver for forty-eight hours. That saved my life. I couldn’t
count on a spare gut waiting for me at the dressing-station. My only
chance was to lie still and let it heal.’
In December I attended a medical board; they examined my wound and
asked me how I was feeling. The president wanted to know whether I
wanted a few months more home service. I said: ‘No, sir, I should be
much obliged if you would pass me fit for service overseas.’ In January
I went out again.
I went back as an old soldier; my kit and baggage proved it. I had
reduced the Christmas tree that I first brought out to a pocket-torch
with a fourteen-day battery in it, and a pair of insulated wire-cutters
strong enough to cut German wire (the ordinary British army issue
would only cut British wire). Instead of a haversack I had a pack
like the ones the men carried, but lighter and waterproof. I had lost
my revolver when I was wounded and had not bought another; rifle and
bayonet could always be got from the battalion. (Not carrying rifle
and bayonet made officers conspicuous in an attack; in most divisions
now they carried them, and also wore trousers rolled down over their
puttees like the men, because the Germans had been taught to recognize
them by their thin knees.) Instead of the heavy blankets that I had
brought out before I now had an eiderdown sleeping-bag in an oiled-silk
cover. I also had Shakespeare and a Bible, both printed on india-paper,
a Catullus and a Lucretius in Latin, and two light weight, folding,
canvas arm-chairs, one as a present for Yates the quartermaster,
the other for myself. I was wearing a very thick whipcord tunic with a
neat patch above the second button and another between the shoulders;
it was my only salvage from the last time out except the pair of
ski-ing boots which I was wearing again, reasonably waterproof—my
breeches had been cut off me in hospital.
There was a draft of ten young officers with me. As Captain Charles
Edmonds notes in his book _A Subaltern’s War_, young officers at this
time were expected to be ‘roistering blades with wine and women.’ These
ten did their best. Three of them got venereal disease at Rouen. In
each case, I believe, it was the first time that they had been with
women. They were strictly brought-up Welsh boys of the professional
classes and knew nothing about prophylactics. One of them was sharing
a hut with me. He came in very late and very drunk one night from the
_Drapeau Blanc_, a well-known blue-lamp brothel, woke me up and began
telling me what a wonderful time he had. ‘He had never known before,’
he said, ‘what a wonderful thing sex was.’ I said irritably and in some
disgust: ‘The _Drapeau Blanc_? Then I hope to God you washed yourself.’
He was very Welsh and on his dignity. ‘What do you mean, captain? I did
wass my fa-ace and ha-ands.’ There were no restraints in France as in
England; these boys had money to spend and knew that they had a good
chance of being killed within a few weeks anyhow. They did not want to
die virginal. So venereal hospitals at the base were always crowded.
(The troops took a lewd delight in exaggerating the proportion of army
chaplains to combatant officers treated there.) The _Drapeau Blanc_
saved the life of scores of them by incapacitating them for future
trench service.
The instructors at the Bull Ring were full of bullet-and-bayonet
enthusiasm which they tried to pass on to the drafts. The drafts
were now, for the most part, either forcibly enlisted men or wounded
men returning, and at this dead season of the year it was difficult
for anyone to feel enthusiastic on arrival in France. The training
principle had recently been revised. _Infantry Training_, 1914, had
laid it down politely that the soldier’s ultimate aim was to put out
of action or render ineffective the armed forces of the enemy. This
statement was now not considered direct enough for a war of attrition.
Troops were taught instead that their duty was to hate the Germans and
kill as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice the men were
ordered to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as
they charged. The bayonet-fighting instructors’ faces were permanently
set in a ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now! In at his belly! Tear his guts
out!’ they would scream as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper
swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life. No
more little Fritzes! ... Naaaoh! Anyone would think that you _loved_
the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that. Bite him, I say!
Stick your teeth in him and worry him! Eat his heart out!’
Once more I was glad to be sent up to the trenches.
XXII
I was posted to the Second Battalion again. I found it near
Bouchavesnes on the Somme. It was a very different Second Battalion. No
riding-school, no battalion-mess, no Quetta manners. I was more warmly
welcomed this time; my suspected spying activities were forgotten.
But the day before I arrived, the colonel had been wounded while out
in front of the battalion inspecting the wire. He had been shot in
the thigh by one of the ‘rotten crowd’ of his letter, who mistook him
for a German and fired without challenging; he has been in and out of
nursing homes ever since. Doctor Dunn asked me with kindly disapproval
what I meant by coming back so soon. I said that I could not stand
England any longer. He told the acting C.O. that I was, in his opinion,
unfit for trench service, so I was put in command of the headquarter
company. I went to live with the transport back at Frises, where the
Somme made a bend. My company consisted of regimental clerks, cooks,
tailors, shoemakers, pioneers, transport men, and so on, who in an
emergency could become riflemen and used as a combatant force. We were
in dug-outs close to the river, which was frozen completely over except
for a narrow stretch of fast water in the middle. I had never been so
cold in my life; it made me shudder to think what the trenches must
be like. I used to go up to them every night with the rations, the
quartermaster being sick; it was about a twelve-mile walk there and
back. The general commanding the Thirty-third Division had teetotal
convictions on behalf of his men and stopped their issue of rum except
for emergencies; the immediate result was a much heavier sick-list
than the battalion had ever had. The men had always looked forward to
their tot of rum at the dawn stand-to as the one bright moment
of the twenty-four hours. When this was denied them, their resistance
weakened. I took the rations up through Cléry, which had been a wattle
and daub village of some hundreds of inhabitants. The highest part
of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet
high; the rest was enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down
steam-roller by the roadside had the name of the village chalked on it
as a guide to travellers. We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which
the Germans continued to shell from habit.
[Illustration: ROBERT GRAVES
from a pastel by Eric Kennington]
Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne.
They were not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne was
also in ruins. The winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played
inter-company football matches on the river, which was now frozen two
feet thick. I remember a meal here in a shelter-billet; stew and tinned
tomato on metal plates. Though the food came in hot from the kitchen
next door, before we had finished it there was ice on the edge of the
plate. In all this area there were no French civilians, no unshelled
houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures that I saw
except soldiers and horses and mules were a few moorhen and duck in
the narrow unfrozen part of the river. There was a shortage of fodder
for the horses, many of which were sick; the ration was down to three
pounds a day, and they had only open standings. I have kept few records
of this time, but the memory of its misery survives.
Then I had bad toothache, and there was nothing for it but to take a
horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station. The
dentist who attended me was under the weather like everyone else.
He would do nothing at first but grumble what a fool he had been to
offer his services to his country at such a low salary. ‘When I
think,’ he said, ‘of the terrible destruction to the nation’s teeth
that is being done by unqualified men at home, and the huge fees that
they are exacting for their wicked work, it makes me boil with rage.’
There followed further complaints against the way he was treated and
the unwillingness of the Royal Army Medical Corps to give dentists any
promotion beyond lieutenant’s rank. Later he began work on my tooth.
‘An abscess,’ he said, ‘no good tinkering about with this; must pull it
out.’ So he yanked at it irritably and the tooth broke off. He tried
again; there was very little purchase and it broke off again. He damned
the ineffective type of forceps that the Government supplied. After
about half an hour he got the tooth out in sections. I rode home with
lacerated gums.
I was appointed a member of a field general court-martial on an Irish
sergeant charged with ‘shamefully casting away his arms in the presence
of the enemy.’ I had heard about the case unofficially. He had been
maddened by an intense bombardment, thrown down his rifle, and run with
the rest of his platoon. An army order, secret and confidential, had
recently instructed me that, in the case of men tried for their life
on other charges, sentence might be mitigated if conduct in the field
had been exemplary; but cowardice was only punishable with death and no
medical excuses could be accepted. But I knew that there was nothing
between sentencing the man to death and refusing to take part in the
proceedings. If I chose the second course I would be court-martialled
myself, and a reconstituted court would bring in the death verdict
anyhow. Yet I would not sentence a man to death for an offence which
I might have committed myself in the same circumstances. I was in a
dilemma. I met the situation by evading it. There was one other
officer in the battalion with the year’s service, as a captain, which
entitled him to sit on a field general court-martial. I found him
willing to take my place. He was hard-boiled and glad of a trip to
Amiens, and I took over his duties for him.
Executions were frequent in France. My first direct experience of
official lying was when I was at the base at Havre in May 1915 and read
the back-files of army orders in the officers’ mess at the rest-camp.
There were something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or
desertion; yet not a week later the responsible Minister in the House
of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist member, had denied
that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in
France on any member of His Majesty’s forces.
The acting commanding-officer was sick and irritable; he felt the
strain badly and took a lot of whisky. One spell he was too sick to be
in the trenches, and came down to Frises, where he shared a dug-out
with Yates the quartermaster and myself. I was sitting in my arm-chair
reading the Bible and came on the text: ‘The bed is too narrow to lie
down therein and the coverlet too small to wrap myself therewith.’
‘I say, James,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty appropriate for this place.’
He raised himself on an elbow, genuinely furious. ‘Look here, von
Runicke,’ he said, ‘I am not a religious man. I’ve cracked a good
many of the commandments since I’ve been in France; but while I am in
command here I refuse to hear you or anyone bloody else blaspheme Holy
Writ.’ I liked James a lot. I had met him first on the day I arrived
at Wrexham to join the regiment. He was just back from Canada and
hilariously throwing chairs about in the junior ante-room of the mess.
He had been driving a plough through virgin soil, he told us, and
reciting Kipling to the prairie-dogs. His favourite piece was (I may be
misquoting):
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
Four points on a ninety-mile square.
With a helio winking like fun in the sun,
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
He had been with the Special Reserve a year or two before he emigrated.
He cared for nobody, was most courageous, inclined to be sentimental,
and probably saw longer service with the Second Battalion in the war
than any officer except Yates.
A day or two later, because he was still sick and I was the senior
officer of the battalion, I attended the Commanding Officers’
Conference at brigade headquarters. Opposite our trenches was a German
salient and the brigadier wanted to ‘bite it off’ as a proof of the
offensive spirit of his command. Trench soldiers could never understand
the Staff’s desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was not a desirable
thing to be exposed to fire from both flanks; if the Germans were in a
salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could
be persuaded to stay. We concluded that it was the passion for straight
lines for which headquarters were well known, and that it had no
strategic or tactical significance. The attack had been twice proposed
and twice cancelled because of the weather. This was towards the end of
February, in the thaw. I have a field-message referring to it, dated
the 21st:
Please cancel Form 4 of my
AA 202 units will draw from
19th brigade B. Echelon the following
issue of rum which will
be issued to troops taking
part in the forth coming
operations at the discretion of
O.C. units 2nd R.W.F. 7½ gallons.
Even this promise of special rum could not encourage the battalion.
Every one agreed that the attack was unnecessary, foolish, and
impossible. The company commanders assured me that to cross the three
hundred yards of No Man’s Land, which because of constant shelling
and the thaw was a morass of mud more than knee-deep, would take even
lightly-armed troops four or five minutes. It would be impossible for
anyone to reach the German lines while there was a single section
of Germans with rifles to defend them. The general, when I arrived,
inquired in a fatherly way how old I was, and whether I was not proud
to be attending a Commanding Officers’ Conference at the age of
twenty-one. I said that I had not examined my feelings, but that I was
an old enough soldier to realize the ♦impossibility of the attack. The
colonel of the Cameronians, who were also to be engaged, took the same
line. So the attack was finally called off. That night I went up with
rations as usual; the battalion was much relieved to hear the decision.
♦ “impossiblity” replaced with “impossibility”
We had been heavily shelled on the way up, and while I was at
battalion headquarters having a drink a message came to say that D
Company limber had been hit by a shell. As I went to inspect the damage
I passed the chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises bend, and a
group of three or four men. He was gabbling the burial service over a
dead man lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet. It was
a suicide case. The misery of the weather and the knowledge of the
impending attack had been too much for him. This was the last dead man
I was to see in France, and like the first, a suicide.
I found that the limber, which contained petrol tins of water for
the company, had had a direct hit. There was no sign of the horses;
they were highly prized horses, having won a prize at a divisional
horse-show some months back for the best-matched pair of the division.
So the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back and went
looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of
morass that night but could not find them or get any news of them. We
used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France. Our
transport men were famous horse-thieves, and no less than eighteen of
our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another,
for their good looks. There were even two which we had ‘borrowed’ from
the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French
police; its only fault was that it was the left-hand horse of the
police squadron, and so had a tendency to pull to the wrong side of the
road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion, so naturally
Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at about
four o’clock in the afternoon, kept on with the search until long after
midnight. When we reached Frises at about three o’clock in the morning
I was completely exhausted. I collapsed on my bunk.
The next day it was found that I had bronchitis and I went back in
an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross hospital. The major
of the R.A.M.C. recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are _you_ doing
out in France, young man? If I find you in my hospital again with those
lungs of yours I’ll have you court-martialled.’
The quartermaster wrote to me there that the horses had been found
shortly after I had gone; they were unhurt except for grazes on their
bellies and were in the possession of the machine-gun company of the
Fourth Division; the machine-gunners were found disguising them with
stain and trying to remove the regimental marks.
At Rouen I was asked to say where in England I would like to go to
hospital. I said, at random, ‘Oxford.’
XXIII
So I was sent to Oxford, to Somerville College, which, like the
Examination Schools, had been converted into a hospital. It occurred to
me here that I was probably through with the war, for it could not last
long now. I both liked and disliked the idea. I disliked being away
from the regiment in France and I liked to think that I would probably
be alive when the war ended. As soon as I was passed fit Siegfried had
got boarded toe and tried to follow me to the Second Battalion. He was
disappointed to find me gone. I felt I had somehow let him down. But
he wrote that he was unspeakably relieved to know that I was back at
Oxford.
I liked Oxford and wanted to stay there. I applied, on the strength of
a chit from the Bull Ring commandant at Havre, for an instructional
job in one of the Officer-Cadet Battalions quartered in the men’s
colleges. I was posted to the Wadham Company of No. 4 Battalion.
These battalions had not been formed long; they had grown out of
instructional schools for young officers. The cadet course was only
three months (later increased to four), but it was a severe one and
particularly intended to train platoon commanders in the handling of
the platoon as an independent unit. About two-thirds of the cadets were
men recommended for commissions by colonels in France, the remainder
were public-school boys from the officers’ training corps. Much of the
training was drill and musketry, but the important part was tactical
exercises with limited objectives. We used the army textbook S.S. 143,
or ‘_Instructions for the training of platoons for offensive action_,
1917,’ perhaps the most important War Office publication issued during
the war. The author is said to have been General Solly-Flood,
who wrote it after a visit to a French army school. From 1916 on the
largest unit possible to control in sustained action was the platoon.
Infantry training had hitherto treated the company as the chief
tactical unit.
Though the quality of the officers had deteriorated from the regimental
point of view (in brief, few of the new officers were now gentlemen),
their deficiency in manners was amply compensated for by their greater
efficiency in action. The cadet-battalion system, in the next two
years, saved the army in France from becoming a mere rabble. We failed
about a sixth of the candidates for commissions; the failures were
sometimes public-school boys without the necessary toughness, but
usually men who had been recommended, from France, on compassionate
grounds—rather stupid platoon sergeants and machine-gun corporals
who had been out too long and were thought to need a rest. Our final
selection of the right men to be officers was made by watching them
play games, principally rugger and soccer. The ones who played rough
but not dirty and had quick reactions were the men we wanted. We spent
most of our spare time playing games with them. I had a platoon of New
Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, two men from the Fiji Island
contingent, an English farm-labourer, a Welsh miner and two or three
public-school boys. They were a good lot and most of them were killed
later on in the war. The New Zealanders went in for rowing; the record
time for the river at Oxford was made by a New Zealand eight that year.
I found the work too much for my lungs, for which the climate of Oxford
was unsuitable. I kept myself going for two months on a strychnine
tonic and then collapsed again. I fainted and fell downstairs one
evening in the dark, cutting my head open; I was taken back to
Somerville. I had kept going as long as I could.
I had liked Wadham, where I was a member of the senior common-room and
had access to the famous brown sherry of the college; it is specially
mentioned in a Latin grace among the blessings vouchsafed to the
fellows by their Creator. My commanding officer, Colonel Stenning,
in better times University Professor of Hebrew, was a fellow of the
college. The social system at Oxford was dislocated. The St. John’s
don destined to be my moral tutor when I came up was a corporal in
the General Reserve; he wore grey uniform, drilled in the parks, and
saluted me whenever we met. A college scout had a commission and was
instructing in the other cadet battalion. There were not, I suppose,
more than a hundred and fifty undergraduates at Oxford at this time;
these were Rhodes scholars, Indians, and men who were unfit. I saw
a good deal of Aldous Huxley, Wilfred Childe, and Thomas Earp, who
were running an undergraduates’ literary paper of necessarily limited
circulation called _The Palatine Review_, to which I contributed. Earp
had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through
the dead years; he was president and sole member, he said, of some
seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919 he was
still in residence, and handed over the minute-books to the returning
university. Most of the societies were then reformed.
I enjoyed being at Somerville. It was warm weather and the discipline
of the hospital was easy. We used to lounge about in the grounds in our
pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and even walk out into St. Giles’ and down
the Cornmarket (also in pyjamas and dressing-gowns) for a morning cup
of coffee at the Cadena. And there was a V.A.D. probationer with
whom I fell in love. I did not tell her so at the time. This was the
first time that I had fallen in love with a woman, and I had difficulty
in adjusting myself to the experience. I used to meet her when I
visited a friend in another ward, but we had little talk together. I
wrote to her after leaving hospital. When I found that she was engaged
to a subaltern in France I stopped writing. I had seen what it felt
like to be in France and have somebody else playing about with one’s
girl. Yet by the way she wrote reproving me for not writing she may
well have been as fond of me as she was of him. I did not press the
point. There was the end of it, almost before it started.
While I was with the cadet battalion I used to go out to tea nearly
every Sunday to Garsington. Siegfried’s friends, Philip and Lady
Ottoline Morrell, lived at the manor house there. The Morrells were
pacifists and it was here that I first heard that there was another
side to the question of war guilt. Clive Bell was working on the manor
farm; he was a conscientious objector, and had been permitted to do
this, as work of national importance, instead of going into the army.
Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were
frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have
been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read,
Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself and most other young writers of the
time, none of whom now believed in the war. Bertrand Russell, who was
beyond the age of liability for military service but an ardent pacifist
(a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and said:
‘Tell me, if a company of men of your regiment were brought along to
break a strike of munition makers and the munition makers refused to
submit, would you order the men to fire?’ I said: ‘Yes, if everything
else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.’
He was surprised and asked: ‘Would your men obey you?’ ‘Of course
they would,’ I said; ‘they loathe munition makers and would be only
too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all
skrim-shankers.’ ‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?’
‘Yes, as well as I do.’ He could not understand my attitude.
Lytton Strachey was unfit, but instead of allowing himself to be
rejected by the doctors he preferred to appear before a military
tribunal as a conscientious objector. He told us of the extraordinary
impression that was caused by an air-cushion which he inflated during
the proceedings as a protest against the hardness of the benches.
Asked by the chairman the usual question: ‘I understand, Mr. Strachey,
that you have a conscientious objection to war?’ he replied (in his
curious falsetto voice), ‘Oh no, not at all, only to _this_ war.’
Better than this was his reply to the chairman’s other stock question,
which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: ‘Tell me,
Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to
violate your sister?’ With an air of noble virtue: ‘I would try to get
between them.’
In 1916 I met more well-known writers than ever before or since. There
were two unsuccessful meetings. George Moore had just written _The
Brook Kerith_ and my neurasthenic twitchings interrupted the calm,
easy flow of his conversational periods. He told me irritably not to
fidget; in return I taunted him with having introduced cactus into the
Holy Land some fifteen centuries before the discovery of America, its
land of origin. At the Reform Club, H. G. Wells, who was Mr. Britling
in those days and full of military optimism, talked without
listening. He had just been taken for a ‘Cook’s Tour’ to France and had
been shown the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and
influential neutrals were shown by staff-conductors. He described his
experiences at length and seemed unaware that I and the friend who was
with me had also seen the sights. But I liked Arnold Bennett for his
kindly unpretentiousness. And I liked Augustine Birrell. I happened to
correct him when he said that the Apocrypha was not read in the church
services; and again when he said that Elihu the Jebusite was one of
Job’s comforters. He tried to over-ride me in both points, but I called
for a Bible and proved them. He said, glowering very kindly at me: ‘I
will say to you what Thomas Carlyle once said to a young man who caught
him out in a misquotation, “Young man, you are heading straight for the
pit of Hell!”’
And who else? John Galsworthy; or was my first meeting with him a year
or two later? He was editor of a magazine called _Réveillé_, published
under Government auspices (and was treated very ungenerously), the
proceeds of which were to go to a disabled-soldier fund. I contributed.
When I met him he asked me technical questions about soldier-slang—he
was writing a war-play and wanted it accurate. He seemed a humble man
and except for these questions listened without talking. This is,
apparently, his usual practice; which explains why he is a better
writer if a less forceful propagandist than Wells.... And Ivor Novello,
in 1918. Then aged about twenty and already world famous as the author
and composer of the patriotic song:
Keep the home fires burning
While the hearts are yearning....
There was some talk of his setting a song of mine. I found him,
wearing a silk dressing-gown, in a setting of incense, cocktails, many
cushions, and a Tree or two. I felt uncomfortably military. I removed
my spurs (I was a temporary field-officer at the time) out of courtesy
to the pouffes. He was in the Royal Naval Air Service, but his genius
was officially recognized and he was able to keep the home fires
burning until the boys came home.
By this time the War Office had stopped the privilege that officers
had enjoyed, after coming out of hospital, of going to their own homes
for convalescence. It was found that many of them took no trouble to
get well quickly and return to duty, they kept late nights, drank,
and overtaxed their strength. So when I was somewhat recovered I was
sent to a convalescent home for officers in the Isle of Wight. It was
Osborne Palace; my bedroom had once been the royal night-nursery of
King Edward VII and his brothers and sisters. This was the strawberry
season and fine weather; the patients were able to take all Queen
Victoria’s favourite walks through the woods and along the quiet
sea-shore, play billiards in the royal billiard-room, sing bawdy songs
in the royal music-room, drink the Prince Consort’s favourite Rhine
wines among his Winterhalters, play golf-crocquet and go down to Cowes
when in need of adventure. We were made honorary members of the Royal
Yacht Squadron. This is another of the caricature scenes of my life;
sitting in a leather chair in the smoking-room of what had been and
is now again the most exclusive club in the world, drinking gin and
ginger, and sweeping the Solent with a powerful telescope.
I made friends with the French Benedictine Fathers who lived near by;
they had been driven from Solesmes in France by the anti-clerical
laws of 1906, and had built themselves a new abbey at Quarr. The
abbey had a special commission from the Vatican to collect and edit
ancient church music. Hearing the fathers at their plain-song made us
for the moment forget the war completely. Many of them were ex-army
officers who had, I was told, turned to religion after the ardours of
their campaigns or after disappointments in love. They were greatly
interested in the war, which they saw as a dispensation of God for
restoring France to Catholicism. They told me that the freemason
element in the French army had been discredited and that the present
Supreme Command was predominantly Catholic—an augury, they said, of
Allied victory. The guest-master showed me the library of twenty
thousand volumes, hundreds of them blackletter. The librarian was an
old monk from Béthune and was interested to hear from me an accurate
account of the damage to his quarter of the town. The guest-master
asked me whether there were any books that I would like to read in
the library. He said that there were all kinds there—history, botany,
music, architecture, engineering, almost every other lay subject. I
asked him whether there was a poetry section. He smiled kindly and
said, no, poetry was not regarded as improving.
The Father Superior asked me whether I was a _bon catholique_. I
replied no, I did not belong to the true religion. To spare him a
confession of agnosticism I added that my parents were Protestants.
He said: ‘But if ours is the true religion why do you not become a
Catholic?’ He asked the question in such a simple way that I felt
ashamed. But I had to put him off somehow, so I said: ‘Reverend father,
we have a proverb in England never to swap horses while crossing a
stream. I am still in the war, you know.’ I offered: ‘Peut-être après
la guerre.’ This was a joke with myself; it was the stock answer that
the Pas de Calais girls were ordered by their priests to give to Allied
soldiers who asked for a ‘Promenade, mademoiselle?’ It was seldom
given, I was told, except for the purpose of bargaining. All the same,
I half-envied the Fathers their abbey on the hill, finished with wars
and love affairs. I liked their kindness and seriousness; the clean
whitewashed cells and the meals eaten in silence at the long oaken
tables, while a novice read the _Lives of the Saints_; the food, mostly
cereals, vegetables and fruit, was the best I had tasted for years—I
was tired of ration beef, ration jam, ration bread and cheese. At
Quarr, Catholicism ceased to be repulsive to me.
Osborne was gloomy. Many of the patients there were neurasthenic and
should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A. A. Milne was
there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in the
least humorous vein. Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, who
had introduced me to the Quarr Fathers, decided with me that something
must be started. So we founded the ‘Royal Albert Society’; its aim
was to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort.
I was president and my regalia consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian
boots, and a pair of side-whiskers. Official business was not allowed
to proceed until the announcement had been duly made that the whiskers
were on the table. Membership was open only to those who professed
themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort, those
who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada, those who had
resided for six months or upwards by the banks of the Albert Nyanza,
those who held the Albert Medal for saving life, or those who were
linked with the Prince Consort’s memory in any other signal way.
The members were expected to report at each meeting reminiscences that
they had collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers,
throwing light on the human side of the Consort’s life. We had about
fifteen members and ate strawberries. On one occasion about a dozen
officers came in to join the society; they professed to have the
necessary qualifications. One said that he was the grandson of the
man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert
Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life;
the others were mere students. They submitted quietly at first to the
ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they were not
serious and had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most
of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the private life
of the Prince Consort, alleging that they could substantiate them with
documentary evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that
sort of society. So, as president, I rose and told in an improved
version the story which had won the 1914 All-England Interregimental
Competition at Aldershot for the worst story of the year. I linked it
up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had been told it by John
Brown, the Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humour Queen Victoria used
to find such delight, and that it had prevented him from sleeping for
three days and nights, and was a contributory cause of his premature
death. The story had the intended effect; the interrupters threw up
their hands in surrender and walked out. It struck me suddenly how far
I had come since my first years at Charterhouse seven years back, and
what a pity it was that I had not used the same technique there.
On the beach one day Bartlett and I saw an old ship’s fender; the
knotted ropes at the top had frayed into something that looked like
hair, so Bartlett said to me: ‘Poor fellow, I knew him well. He was
in my platoon in the Hampshire Regiment and jumped overboard from the
hospital ship.’ A little farther along we found an old pair of trousers
half in the water, and a coat, and then some socks and a boot. So we
dressed up Bartlett’s old comrade, draped sea-weed over him where
necessary, and walked on. Soon after we met a coastguard and turned
back with him. We said: ‘There’s a dead man on the beach.’ He stopped a
few yards off and said, holding his nose: ‘Pooh, don’t he ’alf stink!’
We turned again, leaving him with the dead, and the next day read in
the Isle of Wight paper of a hoax that ‘certain convalescent officers
at Osborne’ had played on the coroner. Bartlett and I were nonsensical,
and changed the labels of all the pictures in the galleries. Anything
to make people laugh. But it was hard work.
XXIV
I used to hear from Siegfried regularly. He had written in March from
the Second Battalion asking me to pull myself together and send him
a letter because he was horribly low in spirits. He complained that
he had not been made at all welcome. A Special Reserve officer who
had transferred to the Second Battalion and was an acting-captain had
gone so far as to call him a bloody wart and allude to the bloody
First Battalion. He had swallowed the insult, but was trying to get
transferred to the First Battalion. The Second was resting until the
end of the month about two miles from Morlancourt (where we had been
together in the previous March), surrounded by billows of mud slopes
and muddy woods and aerodromes and fine new railroads, where he used
to lollop around on the black mare of an afternoon watching the shells
bursting away by the citadel. The black mare was a beautiful combative
creature with a homicidal kink, only ridden by Siegfried. David Thomas
and I once watched him breaking her in. His patience was wonderful.
He would put the mare at a jump and she would sulk; and he would not
force her but turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after
time she refused, but could not provoke his ill-temper or make him
give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom. It
was a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that. He was in C
Company now, he wrote, with a half-witted platoon awaiting his orders
to do or die, and a beast of a stiff arm where Dr. Dunn had inoculated
him, sticking his needle in and saying: ‘Toughest skin of the lot, but
you’re a tough character, I know.’ Siegfried protested that he was not
so tough as Dunn thought. He was hoping that the battalion would
get into some sort of show soon; it would be a relief after all these
weeks of irritation and discomfort and disappointment. (That was a
feeling that one usually had in the Second Battalion.) He supposed that
his _Old Huntsman_ would not be published until the autumn. He had seen
the _Nation_ that week, and commented how jolly it was for him and me
to appear as a military duet singing to a pacifist organ. ‘You and me,
the poets who mean to work together some day and scandalize the jolly
old Gosse’s and Strachey’s.’ (Re-reading this letter now I am reminded
that the occasion of the final end of our correspondence ten years
later was my failure to observe the proper literary punctilios towards
the late Sir Edmund Gosse, c.b. And, by the way, when the _Old
Huntsman_ appeared, Sir Edmund severely criticized some lines of an
allegorical poem in it:
... Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance
And many a slender sickly lord who’d filled
My soul long since with lutanies of sin
Went home because he could not stand the din.
This, he considered, might be read as a libel on the British House of
Lords. The peerage, he said, had proved itself splendidly heroic in the
war.)
Siegfried had his wish; he was in heavy fighting with the battalion in
the Hindenburg Line soon after. His platoon was then lent as support
to the Cameronians, and when, in a counter-attack, the Cameronians
were driven out of some trenches that they had won, Siegfried, with a
bombing party of six men, regained them. He was shot through the throat
but continued bombing until he collapsed. The Cameronians rallied
and returned, and Siegfried’s name was sent in for a Victoria
Cross. The recommendation was refused, however, on the ground that the
operations had not been successful; for the Cameronians were later
driven out again by a bombing party under some German Siegfried.
He was back in England and very ill. He told me that often when he went
out he saw corpses lying about on the pavement. He had written from
hospital, in April, how bloody it was about the Second Battalion. Yates
had sent him a note saying that four officers were killed and seven
wounded in the show at Fontaine-les-Croiselles, the same place that he
had been at, and it had been a ‘perfectly bloody battle.’ But there
had been an advance of about half a mile, which seemed to Siegfried
to be some consolation. Yet, in the very next sentence, he wrote how
mad it made him to think of all the good men being slaughtered that
summer, and all for nothing. The bloody politicians and ditto generals
with their cursed incompetent blundering and callous ideas would go
on until they were tired of it or had got all the kudos they wanted.
He wished he could do something to protest against it, but even if he
were to shoot the Premier or Sir Douglas Haig they could only shut him
up in a madhouse like Richard Dadd of glorious memory. (I recognized
the allusion. Dadd was an early nineteenth-century painter who made
out a list of people who deserved to be killed. The first on the list
was his father. He picked him up one day in Hyde Park and carried him
on his shoulders for nearly half a mile before publicly drowning him
in the Serpentine.) Siegfried went on to say that if he refused to go
out again as a protest they would only accuse him of being afraid of
shells. He asked me whether I thought we would be any better off by the
end of that summer of carnage. We would never break their line. So far,
in April, we had lost more men than the Germans. The Canadians at
Vimy had lost appallingly, yet the official _communiqués_ were lying
unblushingly about the casualties. Julian Dadd had come to see him in
hospital and, like every one else, urged him not to go out again, to
take a safe job at home—but he knew that it was only a beautiful dream,
that he would be morally compelled to go on until he was killed. The
thought of going back now was agony, just when he had got back into
the light again—‘Oh life, oh sun.’ His wound was nearly healed and he
expected to be sent for three weeks to a convalescent home. He didn’t
like the idea, but _anywhere_ would be good enough if he could only be
quiet and see no one, just watch the trees dressing up in green and
feel the same himself. He was beastly weak and in a rotten state of
nerves. The gramophone in the ward plagued him beyond endurance. The
_Old Huntsman_ had come out that spring after all, and, for a joke,
he had sent a copy to Sir Douglas Haig. He couldn’t be stopped doing
_that_ anyhow.
In June he had gone to visit the Morrells just before I left hospital
at Oxford. He had no idea I was still there, but he wrote that perhaps
it was as well that we didn’t meet, neither of us being at our best;
at least one of us should be in a normal frame of mind when we were
together. I had asked what he had been writing since he came home,
and he answered that five poems of his had appeared in the _Cambridge
Magazine_ (one of the few pacifist journals published in England
at the time, the offices of which were later raided by militarist
flying-cadets). He said that none of them were much good except as digs
at the complacent and perfectly —— people who thought the war ought to
go on indefinitely until every one was killed except themselves. The
pacifists were urging him to produce something red hot in the style
of Barbusse’s _Under Fire_ but he couldn’t do it; he had other
things in his head, _not poems_. I didn’t know what he meant by this
but hoped that it was not a programme of assassination. He wrote that
the thought of all that happened in France nearly drove him dotty
sometimes. He was down in Kent, where he could hear the guns thudding
all the time across the Channel, on and on, until he didn’t know
whether he wanted to rush back and die with the First Battalion or stay
in England and do what he could to prevent the war going on. But both
courses were hopeless. To go back and get killed would be only playing
to the gallery—and the wrong gallery—and he could think of no way of
doing any effective preventive work at home. His name had been sent
in for an officer-cadet battalion appointment in England, which would
keep him safe if he wanted to take it; but it seemed a dishonourable
way out. Now at the end of July another letter came: it felt rather
thin. I sat down to read it on the bench dedicated by Queen Victoria to
John Brown (‘a truer and more faithful heart never burned within human
breast’). When I opened the envelope a newspaper-cutting fluttered out;
it was marked in ink: ‘_Bradford Pioneer_, Friday, July 27, 1917.’ I
read the wrong side first:
The C.O.’s must be Set Free
_By Philip Frankford_
The conscientious objector is a brave man. He will be remembered as
one of the few noble actors in this world drama when the impartial
historian of the future sums up the history of this awful war.
The C.O. is putting down militarism. He is fighting for freedom
and liberty. He is making a mighty onslaught upon despotism. And,
above all, he is preparing the way for the final abolition of war.
But thanks to the lying, corrupt, and dastardly capitalist Press
these facts are not known to the general public, who have been taught
to look upon the conscientious objectors as skunks, cowards, and
shirkers.
Lately a renewed persecution of C.O.’s has taken place. In spite of
the promises of ‘truthful’ Cabinet Ministers, some C.O.’s have been
sent to France, and there sentenced to death—a sentence afterwards
transferred to one of ‘crucifixion’ or five or ten years’ hard
labour. But even when allowed to remain in this country we have to
chronicle the most scandalous treatment of these men—the salt of
the earth. Saintly individuals like Clifford Allen, Scott Duckers,
and thousands of others, no less splendid enthusiasts in the cause
of anti-militarism, are in prison for no other reason than because
they refuse to take life; and because they will not throw away
their manhood by becoming slaves to the military machine. These men
must be freed. The political ‘offenders’ of Ireland ...
Then I turned over and read:
Finished with the War
_A Soldier’s Declaration_
(This statement was made to his commanding officer by
Second-Lieutenant S. L. Sassoon, Military Cross, recommended for
D.S.O., Third Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, as
explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army. He
enlisted on 3rd August 1914, showed distinguished valour in France,
was badly wounded and would have been kept on home service if he had
stayed in the army.)
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military
authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately
prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence
and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I
believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered
upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it
impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects
which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can
no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I
believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the
political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are
being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest aganst
the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I
may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority
of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not
share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
_July_ 1917. S. Sassoon.
This filled me with anxiety and unhappiness. I entirely agreed
with Siegfried about the ‘political errors and insincerities’; I
thought his action magnificently courageous. But there were more
things to be considered than the strength of our case against the
politicians. In the first place, he was not in a proper physical
condition to suffer the penalty which he was inviting, which was to
be court-martialled, cashiered and imprisoned. I found myself most
bitter with the pacifists who had encouraged him to make this gesture.
I felt that, not being soldiers, they could not understand what it
would cost Siegfried emotionally. It was wicked that he should attempt
to face the consequences of his letter on top of his Quadrangle and
Fontaine-les-Croiselles experiences. I knew, too, that as a gesture it
was inadequate. Nobody would follow his example either in England or in
Germany. The war would obviously go on, and go on until one side or the
other cracked.
I decided to intervene. I applied to appear before the medical board
that was sitting next day; and I asked the board to pass me fit for
home service. I was not fit and they knew it, but I asked it as a
favour. I had to get out of Osborne and attend to things. Next I
wrote to the Hon. Evan Morgan, with whom I had canoed at Oxford a
month or two previously. He was private secretary to one of the
Coalition Ministers. I asked him to do everything he could to prevent
republication of or comment on the letter in the newspapers, and to
arrange that a suitable answer should be given to Mr. Lees Smith,
then the leading pacifist M.P. and now Postmaster-General in the
Labour Cabinet, when he brought up a question in the House about it.
I explained to Morgan that I was on Siegfried’s side really, but
that he should not be allowed to become a martyr in his present
physical condition. Next I wrote to the Third Battalion. I knew that
the colonel, a South Welshman, was narrowly patriotic, had never been
to France, and could not possibly be expected to take a sympathetic
view. But the senior major, an Irishman, was humane, so I wrote to him
explaining the whole business, asking him to make the colonel see it
in a reasonable light. I told him of Siegfried’s recent experiences
in France. I suggested that he should be medically boarded and given
indefinite leave.
[Illustration: VARIOUS RECORDS
Mostly self-explanatory]
The next news I heard was from Siegfried, who wrote from the Exchange
Hotel, Liverpool, that no doubt I was worrying about him. He had come
up to Liverpool a day or two before and walked into the Third Battalion
orderly room at Litherland feeling like nothing on earth, but probably
looking fairly self-possessed. The senior-major was commanding, the
colonel being away on holiday. (I was much relieved at this bit of
luck.) The senior-major, who was nicer than anything I could imagine
and made him feel an utter brute, had consulted the general commanding
Mersey defences. And the general was consulting God ‘or someone like
that.’ Meanwhile, he was staying at the hotel, having sworn not to
run away to the Caucasus. He hoped, in time, to persuade them to be
nasty about it, and said that he did not think that they realized that
his performance would soon be given great publicity. He hated the
whole business more than ever, and knew more than ever that he was
right and would never repent of what he had done. He said that things
were looking better in Germany, but that Lloyd George would probably
say that it was a ‘plot.’ The politicians seemed to him incapable of
behaving like human beings.
The general consulted not God but the War Office, and the War Office
was persuaded not to press the matter as a disciplinary case,
but to give Siegfried a medical board. Morgan had done his part of
the work well. The next task I set myself was to persuade Siegfried
to take the medical board. I rejoined the battalion and met him at
Liverpool. He looked very ill; he told me that he had just been down
to the Formby links and thrown his Military Cross into the sea. We
discussed the whole political situation; I told him that he was right
enough in theory; but that every one was mad except ourselves and one
or two others, and that it was hopeless to offer rightness of theory
to the insane. I said that the only possible course for us to take
was to keep on going out to France till we got killed. I now expected
myself before long to go back for the fourth time. I reminded him of
the regiment; what did he think that the First and Second Battalions
would think of him? How could they be expected to understand his point
of view? They would say that he was ratting, that he had cold feet,
and was letting the regiment down by not acting like a gentleman. How
would Old Joe, even, understand it (and he was the most understanding
man in the regiment)? To whom was his letter addressed? The army could,
I repeated, only understand it as cowardice, or at the best as a lapse
from good form. The civilians were more mad and hopeless than the army.
He would not accept this view, but I made it plain that his letter had
not been given and would not be given the publicity he intended; so,
because he was ill, and knew it, he consented to appear before the
medical board.
So far, so good. The next thing was to rig the medical board. I applied
for permission to give evidence as a friend of the patient. There were
three doctors on the board—a regular R.A.M.C. colonel and major, and a
captain, who was obviously a ‘duration of the war’ man. I had not
been long in the room when I realized that the colonel was patriotic
and unsympathetic, that the major was reasonable but ignorant, and that
the captain was a nerve-specialist, right-minded, and my only hope.
I had to go through the whole story again. I was most deferential to
the colonel and major, but used the captain as an ally to break down
their scruples. I had to appear in the rôle of a patriot distressed
by the mental collapse of a brother-in-arms, a collapse directly due
to his magnificent exploits in the trenches. I mentioned Siegfried’s
‘hallucinations’ in the matter of corpses in Piccadilly. The irony of
having to argue to these mad old men that Siegfried was not sane! It
was a betrayal of truth, but I was jesuitical. I was in nearly as bad
a state of nerves as Siegfried myself and burst into tears three times
in the course of my statement. Captain McDowall, whom I learned later
to be a well-known morbid psychologist, played up well and the colonel
was at last persuaded. As I went out he said to me: ‘Young man, you
ought to be before this board yourself.’ I was most anxious that when
Siegfried went into the board-room after me he should not undo my work
by appearing too sane. But McDowall argued his seniors over.
Siegfried was sent to a convalescent home for neurasthenics at
Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. I was detailed as his escort. Siegfried
and I both thought this a great joke, especially when I missed the
train and he reported to ‘Dottyville,’ as he called it, without me.
At Craiglockhart, Siegfried was in the care of W. H. R. Rivers,
whom we now met for the first time, though we already knew of him
as a neurologist, ethnologist and psychologist. He was a Cambridge
professor and had made a point of taking up a new department of
research every few years and incorporating it in his comprehensive
anthropological scheme. He died shortly after the war when he was on
the point of contesting the London University parliamentary seat as
an independent Labour candidate; intending to round off his scheme
with a study of political psychology. He was busy at this time with
morbid psychology. He had over a hundred neurasthenic cases in his
care and diagnosed their condition largely through a study of their
dream-life; his posthumous book _Conflict and Dream_ is a record of
this work at Craiglockhart. It was not the first time that I had heard
of Rivers in this capacity. Dick had come under his observation after
the police-court episode. Rivers had treated him, and after a time
pronounced him sufficiently cured to enlist in the army. Siegfried and
Rivers soon became close friends. Siegfried was interested in Rivers’
diagnostic methods and Rivers in Siegfried’s poems. Before I returned
from Edinburgh I felt happier. Siegfried began to write the terrifying
sequence of poems that appeared next year as _Counter-Attack_. Another
patient at the hospital was Wilfred Owen, who had had a bad time with
the Manchester Regiment in France; and, further, it had preyed on his
mind that he had been accused of cowardice by his commanding officer.
He was in a very shaky condition. It was meeting Siegfried here that
set him writing his war-poems. He was a quiet, round-faced little man.
XXV
I went back to Liverpool. The president of the medical board had been
right: I should not have been back on duty. The training at the camp
was intensive and I was in command of a trained-men company and did
not allow myself sufficient rest. I realized how bad my nerves were
when one day, marching through the streets of Litherland on a battalion
route-march, I saw three men wearing gas-masks standing by an open
manhole in the road. They were bending over a dead man; his clothes
were sodden and stinking, and his face and hands were yellow. Waste
chemicals of the munitions factory had got into the sewage system and
he had been gassed when he went down to inspect. The men in masks had
been down to get him up. The company did not pause in its march so I
had only a glimpse of the group; but it was so like France that I all
but fainted. The band-music saved me.
I was detailed as a member of a court-martial which sat in the camp.
The accused was a civilian alleged to have enlisted under the Derby
Scheme, but not to have presented himself when his class was called to
the colours. He was a rabbit, a nasty-looking little man. I tried to
feel sympathetic but found it difficult, even when he proved that he
had never enlisted. His solicitor handed us a letter from a corporal
serving in France, who explained that he had, while on leave, enlisted
in the rabbit’s name because he had heard that the rabbit had been
rabbiting with his wife. This rabbiting the rabbit denied; but he
showed that the colour of the eyes recorded on the enlistment-form was
blue while his own were brown, so it seemed that the story was true so
far. But a further question arose: why had he not enlisted under
the Military Service Act, if he was a fit man? He said that he was
starred, having done responsible work in a munitions factory for the
necessary length of time before the Military Service Act had become
law. However, we had police evidence on the table to show that his
protection certificates were forged, that he had not been working on
munitions before the Military Service Act, and that therefore he was in
the class of those ‘deemed to have enlisted,’ and so a deserter in any
case. There was nothing for it but to sentence him to the prescribed
two years’ imprisonment. He broke down and squealed rabbit-fashion, and
said that he had conscientious objections against war. It made me feel
contemptible, as part of the story.
Large drafts were now constantly being sent off to the First, Second,
Ninth, and Tenth Battalions in France, and to the Eighth Battalion in
Mesopotamia. There were few absentees among the men warned for the
drafts. But it was noticeable that they were always more cheerful about
going in the spring and summer when there was heavy fighting on than
in the winter months when things were quiet. (The regiment kept up its
spirit even in the last year of the war. Attwater told me that big
drafts sent off in the critical weeks of the spring of 1918, when the
Germans had broken through the Fifth Army, went down to the station
singing and cheering enthusiastically. He said that they might have
been the reservists that he and I had seen assembling at Wrexham on
12th August 1914, to rejoin the Second Battalion just before it sailed
for France.) The colonel always made the same speech to the draft. The
day that I rejoined the battalion from the Isle of Wight I went via
Liverpool Exchange Station and the electric railway to Litherland.
Litherland station was crowded with troops. I heard a familiar
voice making a familiar speech; it was the colonel bidding Godspeed
to a small draft of men who were rejoining the First Battalion. ‘...
going cheerfully like British soldiers to fight the common foe ...
some of you perhaps may fall.... Upholding the magnificent traditions
of the Royal Welch Fusiliers....’ The draft cheered vigorously; rather
too vigorously, I told myself. When he had finished I went over and
greeted a few old friends: 79 Davies, 33 Williams, and the Davies who
was nicknamed ‘Dym Bacon,’ which was Welsh for ‘there isn’t any bacon.’
(He had won the nickname in his recruit days. He was the son of a Welsh
farmer and accustomed to good food and so he complained about his
first morning’s breakfast, shouting out to the orderly-sergeant: ‘Do
you call this a bloody breakfast, man? Dym bacon, dym sausages, dym
herrings, dym bloody anything. Nothing but bloody bread and jaaam.’)
There was another well-remembered First Battalion man—d.c.m.
and rosette, Médaille Militaire, Military Medal, no stripe. ‘Lost them
again, sergeant?’ I asked. He grinned: ‘Easy come, easy go, sir.’ Then
the train came in and I put out my hand with ‘Good luck!’ ‘You’ll
excuse us, sir,’ he said. The draft shouted with laughter and I saw
why my hand had not been wrung, and also why the cheers had been so
ironically vigorous. They were all in handcuffs. They had been detailed
a fortnight before for a draft to Mesopotamia; but they wanted to
go back to the First Battalion, so they overstayed their leave. The
colonel, not understanding, put them into the guardroom to make sure of
them for the next draft. So they were now going back in handcuffs under
an escort of military police to the battalion of their choice. The
colonel, as I have already said, had seen no active service himself;
but the men bore him no ill-will for the handcuffs. He was a
good-hearted man and took a personal interest in the camp kitchens, had
built a cinema-hut within the camp, been reasonably mild in orderly
room, and done his best not to drive returned soldiers too hard.
I decided to leave Litherland somehow. I knew what the winter would be
like with the mist coming up from the Mersey and hanging about the camp
full of T.N.T. fumes. When I was there the winter before I used to sit
in my hut and cough and cough until I was sick. The fumes tarnished all
buttons and made our eyes smart. I considered going back to France but
I knew this was absurd as yet. Since 1916 the fear of gas had been an
obsession; in any unusual smell that I met I smelt gas—even a sudden
strong scent of flowers in a garden was enough to set me trembling. And
I knew that the noise of heavy shelling would be too much for me now.
The noise of a motor-tyre exploding behind me would send me flat on
my face or running for cover. So I decided to go to Palestine, where
gas was not known and shell-fire was said to be inconsiderable in
comparison with France. Siegfried wrote from Craiglockhart in August:
‘What do you think of the latest push? How splendid this attrition is!
As Lord Crewe says: “We are not the least depressed.”’ I matched this
with a remark of Lord Carson’s: ‘The necessary supply of heroes must
be maintained at all costs.’ At my next medical board I asked to be
passed in the category of B2. This meant: ‘Fit for garrison service at
home.’ I reckoned on being sent to the Third Garrison Battalion of the
regiment, now under canvas at Oswestry in Wales. From there, when I
felt a bit better, I would get myself passed B1, which meant: ‘Fit for
garrison service abroad,’ and would, in due course, go to a garrison
battalion of the regiment in Egypt. Once there it would be easy
to get passed A1 and join the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth (new-army)
Battalion in Palestine.
So presently I was sent to Oswestry. A good colonel, but the material
at his disposal was discouraging. The men were mostly compulsory
enlistments, and the officers, with few exceptions, useless. The first
task I was given was to superintend the entraining of battalion stores
and transport; we were moving to Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl. I was
given a company of one hundred and fifty men and allowed six hours for
the job. I chose fifty of the stronger men and three or four N.C.O.’s
who looked capable, and sent the rest away to play football. By
organizing the job in the way that I had learnt in the First Battalion
I got these fifty men to load the train in two hours less than the
scheduled time. The colonel congratulated me. At Rhyl he gave me the
job of giving ‘further instruction’ to the sixty or so young officers
who had been sent to him from the cadet-battalions. Few officers in the
battalion had seen any active service. Among the few was Howell Davies
(now literary editor of the _Star_), who had had a bullet through his
head and was in as nervous a condition as myself. We became friends,
and discussed the war and poetry late at night in the hut; we used to
argue furiously, shouting each other down.
It was at this point that I remembered Nancy Nicholson. I had first
met her at Harlech, where the Nicholsons had a house, when I was on
leave in April 1916 after the operation on my nose. She was sixteen
then, on holiday from school. I had made friends with her brother
Ben, the painter, whose asthma had kept him out of the army. When I
went back to France in 1917 I had gone to say good-bye to Ben and the
rest of the family on the way to Victoria Station, and the last
person to say good-bye to me at that time was Nancy, I remembered her
standing in the doorway in her black velvet dress. She was ignorant
but independent-minded, good-natured, hard, and as sensible about the
war as anybody at home could be. In the summer of 1917 (shortly after
the episode with the Somerville nurse) I had seen her again and we had
gone together to a revue, the first revue I had been to in my life. It
was _Cheep_, Lee White was in it, singing of Black-eyed Susans, and how
‘Girls must all be Farmers’ Boys, off with skirts, wear corduroys,’
and Nancy told me that she was now on the land herself. She showed
me her paintings, illustrations to Stevenson’s _Child’s Garden of
Verses_, my child-sentiment and hers—she had a happy childhood to look
back on—answered each other. I liked all her family, particularly her
mother, now dead, Mabel Nicholson, the painter, a beautiful wayward
Scotch-melancholy person. William Nicholson, again ‘the painter,’ is
still among my friends. Tony, a brother, just older than Nancy, was a
gunner, waiting to go to France.
I began a correspondence with Nancy about some children’s rhymes of
mine which she was going to illustrate. Then I found that I was in love
with her, and on my next leave, in October 1917, I visited her at the
farm where she was working, at Hilton in Huntingdonshire. I helped her
to put mangolds through a slicer. She was alone, except for her black
poodle, among farmers, farm labourers, and wounded soldiers who had
been put on land-service. I was alone too in my Garrison Battalion. Our
letters became more intimate after this. She warned me that she was a
feminist and that I had to be very careful what I said about women; the
attitude of the Huntingdon farmers to their wives and daughters kept
her in a continual state of anger she said.
I had been passed B1 now, but orders came for me to proceed to
Gibraltar. This was a disarrangement of my plans. Gibraltar was a
dead-end; it would be as difficult to get from there to Palestine
as it would be from England. A friend in the War Office undertook
to cancel the order for me until a vacancy could be found in the
battalion in Egypt. At Rhyl I was enjoying the first independent
command I had yet had in the army. I got it through a scare of an
invasion of the north-east coast, to follow a sortie of the German
Fleet. A number of battalions were sent across England for its defence.
All fit men of the Third Garrison Battalion were ordered to move at
twenty-four hours’ notice to York. (There was a slight error, however,
in the Morse message from War Office to Western Command. Instead of
dash-dot-dash-dash they sent dash-dot-dash-dot, so the battalion was
sent to Cork instead. Yet it was not recalled, being needed as much in
Cork as in York; Ireland was in great unrest since the Easter rising
in 1916, and Irish troops at the depots were giving away their rifles
to Sinn Feiners.) The colonel told me that I was the only officer he
could trust to look after the remainder of the battalion—thirty young
officers and four or five hundred men engaged in camp-duties. He left
me a competent adjutant and three officers’ chargers to ride. He also
asked me to keep an eye on his children, whom he had to leave behind
until a house was found for them at Cork; I used to play about a good
deal with them. There was also a draft of two hundred trained men under
orders for Gibraltar.
I got the draft off all right, and the inspecting general was so
pleased with the soldier-like appearance that the adjutant and I had
given them that he sent them all to the camp cinema at his own expense.
This gave me a good mark with the colonel in Ireland. The climax
of my good services was when I checked an attempt on the part of the
camp quartermaster to make the battalion responsible for the loss of
five hundred blankets. It happened like this. Suddenly one night I had
three thousand three hundred leave-men from France thrown under my
command; they were Irishmen, from every regiment in the army, and had
been held up at Holyhead on the way home by the presence of submarines
in the Irish Sea. They were rowdy and insubordinate, and for the four
days that they were with me I had little rest. The five hundred missing
blankets were some of the six thousand six hundred that had been issued
to them, and had probably been sold in Rhyl to pay for cigarettes and
beer. I was able to prove at the Court of Inquiry that the men, though
attached to the battalion for purposes of discipline, had been issued
with blankets direct from the camp quartermaster’s stores before coming
to it. The loss of the blankets might be presumed to have taken place
between the time of issue and the time that the men arrived in the
battalion lines. I had given no receipt to the camp quartermaster for
the blankets. The Court of Inquiry was held in the camp quartermaster’s
private office; but I insisted that he should leave the room while
evidence was being taken, because it was now no longer his private
office but a Court of Inquiry. He had to go out, and his ignorance
of my line of defence saved the case. This success, and the evidence
that I was able to give the colonel of presents accepted by the
battalion mess-president when at Rhyl, from wholesale caterers (the
mess-president had tried to make me pay my mess-bill twice over and
this was my retaliation), so pleased the colonel that he recommended me
for the Russian Order of St. Anne, with Crossed Swords, of the Third
Class. So, after all, I would not have left the army undecorated
but for the October revolution, which cancelled the award-list.
I saw Nancy again in December when I went to London, and we decided to
get married at once. We attached no importance to the ceremony. Nancy
said she did not want to disappoint her father, who liked weddings and
things. I was still expecting orders for Egypt and intending to go on
to Palestine. Nancy’s mother said that she would permit the marriage
on one condition: that I should go to a London lung specialist to see
whether I was fit for eventual service in Palestine. I went to Sir
James Fowler, who had visited me at Rouen when I was wounded. He told
me that my lungs were not so bad, though I had bronchial adhesions and
my wounded lung had only a third of its proper expansion; but that
my general nervous condition made it folly for me to think of active
service in any theatre of war.
Nancy and I were married in January 1918 in St. James’ Church,
Piccadilly. She was just eighteen and I was twenty-two. George Mallory
was the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first
time that morning and had been horrified by it. She all but refused
to go through the ceremony at all, though I had arranged for it to be
modified and reduced to the shortest possible form. Another caricature
scene to look back on: myself striding up the red carpet wearing
field-boots, spurs, and sword; Nancy meeting me in a blue-check silk
wedding dress, utterly furious; packed benches on either side of the
church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys
out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting
them out in a parade-ground voice. Then the reception. At this stage of
the war, sugar was practically unobtainable; the wedding cake was in
three tiers, but all the sugar icing was plaster. The Nicholsons
had had to save up their sugar and butter cards for a month to make
the cake taste anything like a cake at all. When the plaster case
was lifted off there was a sigh of disappointment from the guests. A
dozen of champagne had been got in. Champagne was another scarcity and
there was a rush towards the table. Nancy said: ‘Well, I’m going to
get something out of this wedding, at any rate,’ and grabbed a bottle.
After three or four glasses she went off and changed back into her
land-girl’s costume of breeches and smock. My mother, who had been
thoroughly enjoying the proceedings, caught hold of E. V. Lucas, who
was standing next to her, and exclaimed: ‘Oh dear, I wish she had not
done that.’ The embarrassments of our wedding night were somewhat eased
by an air-raid; bombs were dropping not far off and the hotel was in an
uproar.
A week later she returned to her farm and I to my soldiers. It was an
idle life now. I had no men on parade; they were all employed on camp
duties. And I had found a lieutenant with enough experience to attend
to the ‘further instruction’ of the young officers. My orderly room
took about ten minutes a day; crime was rare, and the adjutant always
had ready and in order the few documents to be signed; and I was free
to ride my three chargers over the countryside for the rest of the
day. I used to visit the present Archbishop of Wales frequently at his
palace at St. Asaph; his son had been killed in the First Battalion.
We found that we had in common a taste for the curious. I have kept a
postcard from him which runs as follows:
The Palace, St. Asaph.
Hippophagist banquet held at Langham’s Hotel, February 1868.
A. G. Asaph.
(I met numbers of bishops during the war but none since; except
the Bishop of Oxford, in a railway carriage in 1927, who was discussing
the beauties of Richardson. And the Bishop of Liverpool, at Harlech, in
1923. I was making tea on the sea-shore when he came out from the sea
in great pain, having been stung in the thigh by a jellyfish. He gladly
accepted a cup of tea, tut-tutting miserably to himself that he had
been under the impression that jellyfish only stung in foreign parts.
As a record of the occasion he gave me a silver pencil which he had
found in the sandhills while undressing.)
I grew tired of this idleness and arranged to be transferred to
the Sixteenth Officer Cadet Battalion in another part of the same
camp. It was the same sort of work that I had done at Oxford, and I
was there from February 1918 until the Armistice in November. Rhyl
was much healthier than Oxford and I found that I could play games
without danger of another breakdown. A job was found for Nancy at a
market-gardener’s near the camp, so she came up to live with me. A
month or two later she found that she was to have a baby and had to
stop land work; she went back to her drawing.
None of my friends had liked the idea of my marriage, particularly to
anyone as young as Nancy; one of them, Robbie Ross, Wilde’s literary
executor, whom I had met through Siegfried and who had been very good
to me, had gone so far as to try to discourage me by hinting that there
was negro blood in the Nicholson family, that it was possible that
one of Nancy’s and my children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried
found it difficult to accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he
had not met, but he still wrote. After a few months at Craiglockhart,
though he in no way renounced his pacifist views, he decided that
the only possible thing to do was, after all, to go back to France.
He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again had
made him more restless than ever. Hospital life was nearly unbearable;
the feeling of isolation was the worst. He had had a long letter from
Old Joe to say that the First Battalion had just got back to rest from
Polygon Wood; the conditions and general situation were more appalling
than anything he had yet seen—three miles of morasses, shell-holes and
dead men and horses through which to get the rations up. Siegfried
said that he would rather be anywhere than in hospital; he couldn’t
bear to think of poor Old Joe lying out all night in shell-holes and
being shelled (several of the ration party were killed, but at least,
according to Joe, ‘the battalion got its rations’). If only the people
who wrote leading articles for the _Morning Post_ about victory could
read Joe’s letter!
It was about this time that Siegfried wrote the poem _When I’m asleep
dreaming and lulled and warm_, about the ghosts of the soldiers who
had been killed, reproaching him in his dreams for his absence from
the trenches, saying that they had been looking for him in the line
from Ypres to Frise and had not found him. He told Rivers that he
would go back to France if they would send him, making it quite clear
that his views were exactly the same as they had been in July when he
had written the letter of protest—only more so. He demanded a written
guarantee that he would be sent back at once and not kept hanging about
in a training battalion. He wrote reprehending me for the attitude I
had taken in July, when I was reminding him that the regiment would
only understand his protest as a lapse from good form and a failure to
be a gentleman. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he said,
to identify oneself in any way with good form or gentlemanliness, and
if I had real courage I wouldn’t be acquiescing as I was. He pointed
out that I admitted that the people who sacrificed the troops were
callous b——s, and that the same thing was happening in all countries
except parts of Russia. I forget how I answered Siegfried. I might have
pointed out that when I was in France I was never such a fire-eater as
he was. The amount of Germans that I had killed or caused to be killed
was negligible compared with his wholesale slaughter. The fact was that
the direction of Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed with his
environment; he varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist. His
poem:
To these I turn, in these I trust,
Brother Lead and Sister Steel;
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust....
was originally written seriously, inspired by Colonel Campbell,
v.c.’s bloodthirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army
school. Later he offered it as a satire; and it is a poem that comes
off whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less
heroic than Siegfried.
I have forgotten how it was worked and whether I had a hand in it, but
he was sent to Palestine this time. He seemed to like it there, and I
was distressed in April to have a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim,’
that the division was moving to France. He wrote that he would be sorry
to be in trenches, going over the top to take Morlancourt or Méaulte.
Seeing that we had recaptured Morlancourt had brought it home to him.
He said that he expected that the First and Second Battalions had
about ceased to exist by now for the _n_th time. I heard again from
him at the end of May, from France. He quoted Duhamel. ‘It was written
that you should suffer without purpose and without hope, but I will
not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss.’ Yet he wrote the
next paragraph in his happy-warrior vein, saying that his men were the
best that he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. I mightn’t
believe it, but he was training them bloody well. He couldn’t imagine
whence his flamelike ardour had come, but it had come. His military
efficiency was derived from the admirable pamphlets that were now
issued, so different from the stuff we used to get two years before.
He said that when he read my letter he began to think, damn Robert,
damn every one except his company, which was the smartest turn-out ever
seen, and damn Wales and damn leave and damn being wounded and damn
everything except staying with his company until they were all melted
away. (Limping and crawling across the shell-holes, lying very still
in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.) I was to
remember this mood when I saw him (_if_ I saw him) worn out and smashed
up again, querulous and nerve-ridden. Or when I read something in the
casualty list and got a polite letter from Mr. Lousada, his solicitor.
There never was such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six
months it would have ceased to exist.
Nancy’s brother, Tony, was also in France now. Nancy’s mother made
herself ill with worrying about him. Early in July he was due to
come home on leave; I was on leave myself at the end of one of the
four-months’ cadet courses, staying with the rest of Nancy’s family
at a big Tudor house near Harlech. It was the most haunted house that
I have ever been in, though the ghosts were invisible except in the
mirrors. They would open and shut doors, rap on the oak panels,
knock the shades off lamps, and drink the wine from the glasses at our
elbows when we were not looking. The house belonged to an officer in
the Second Battalion whose ancestors had most of them died of drink.
There was only one visible ghost, a little yellow dog that appeared on
the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it one day.
This was the time of the first Spanish influenza epidemic and Nancy’s
mother caught it, but she did not want to miss Tony when he came
on leave. She wanted to go to theatres with him in London; they
were devoted to each other. So when the doctor came she reduced her
temperature with aspirin and pretended that she was all right. But she
knew that the ghosts in the mirrors knew. She died in London on July
13th, a few days later. While she was dying her chief feeling was one
of pleasure that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account. (Tony
was killed two months later.) Nancy’s mother was a far more important
person to her than I was, and I was alarmed of the effect that the
shock of her death might have on the baby. A week later I heard that
on the day that she had died Siegfried had been shot through the head
while making a daylight patrol through long grass in No Man’s Land. And
he wrote me a verse letter which I cannot quote, though I should like
to do so. It is the most terrible of his war-poems.
And I went on mechanically at my cadet-battalion work. The candidates
for commissions we got were no longer gentlemen in the regimental
sense—mostly Manchester cotton clerks and Liverpool shipping clerks—but
they were all experienced men from France and were quiet and well
behaved. We failed about one in three. And the war went on and on.
I was then writing a book of poems called _Country Sentiment_.
Instead of children as a way of forgetting the war, I used Nancy.
_Country Sentiment_, dedicated to her, was a collection of romantic
poems and ballads. At the end was a group of pacifist war-poems. It
contained one about the French civilians—I cannot think how I came to
put so many lies in it—I even said that old Adelphine Heu of Annezin
gave me a painted china plate, and that her pride was hurt when I
offered to pay her. The truth is that I bought the plate from her for
about fifteen shillings and that I never got it from her. Adelphine’s
daughter-in-law would not allow her to give it up, claiming it as her
own, and I never got my money back from Adelphine. This is only one of
many of my early poems that contain falsities for public delectation.
In November came the Armistice. I heard at the same time news of the
death of Frank Jones-Bateman, who had gone back again just before the
end, and of Wilfred Owen, who often used to write to me from France,
sending me his poems. Armistice-night hysteria did not touch the camp
much, though some of the Canadians stationed there went down to Rhyl to
celebrate in true overseas style. The news sent me out walking alone
along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battle-field,
the Flodden of Wales) cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.
XXVI
In the middle of December the cadet-battalions were wound up and the
officers, after a few days’ leave, were sent back to their units. The
Third Battalion of the Royal Welch was now at Limerick. I decided to
overstay my leave until Nancy’s baby was born. She was expecting it
early in January 1919, and her father had taken a house at Hove for the
occasion. Jenny was born on Twelfth Night. She was neither coal-black
nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had had no
foreknowledge of the experience—I assumed that she knew—and it took her
years to recover from it. I went over to Limerick; the battalion was at
the Castle Barracks. I lied my way out of the over-staying of leave.
Limerick was a Sinn Fein stronghold, and there were constant clashes
between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little
ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish got on well together, as inevitably as
Welsh and Scottish disagreed. The Royal Welch had the situation well
in hand; they made a joke of politics and used their entrenching-tool
handles as shillelaghs. It looked like a town that had been through
the war. The main streets had holes in them like shell-craters and
many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. I was told
by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built
in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into
another. He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except
the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia. Life did not
start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At
nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it
deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian
house was flung open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just
missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post,
then a nearly naked child, which sat down in the gutter and rummaged
in a heap of refuse for dirty pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which
began to bray. Ireland was exactly as I had pictured it. I felt its
charm as dangerous. Yet when I was detailed to take out a search-party
in a neighbouring village for concealed rifles I asked the adjutant to
find a substitute; I said that I was an Irishman and did not wish to be
mixed up in Irish politics.
I realized too that I had a new loyalty, to Nancy and the baby, tending
to overshadow regimental loyalty now that the war was over. Once I was
writing a rhymed nonsense letter to Nancy and Jenny in my quarters
overlooking the barrack square:
Is there any song sweet enough
For Nancy or for Jenny?
Said Simple Simon to the Pieman:
‘Indeed, I know not any.’
I have counted the miles to Babylon,
I have flown the earth like a bird,
I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
But no such song have I heard.
At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks
from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window,
making the panes rattle with _The British Grenadiers_. The insistent
repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade
formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury
Cross and Babylon. _The British Grenadiers_ succeeded for a moment in
forcing their way into the poem:
Some speak of Alexander,
And some of Hercules,
but were driven out:
But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny,
Where are there any like these?
I had ceased to be a British grenadier.
So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority
list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers
and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly
want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural
worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no
agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’
course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year,
and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of
war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been
excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while
still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant
would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough.
It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would
count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was
a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my
living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the
only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good
record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our
scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever
we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact,
to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled
again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.
I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office
asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would
do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of
Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the
adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said
that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with
company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions
were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders,
stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention
table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were
now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior
officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North
Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the
senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed
very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in
1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries
and set free by the terms of the Armistice.
The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised
to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged
for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in _Julius Cæsar_. His
change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the
senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off
with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible.
Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as _The
Handcuff King_; he got away safely to America.
I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper,
at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had
been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent.
Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the
Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t
had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent
the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it
was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War
Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that
all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the
following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there.
The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let
you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested,
but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish
military hospital with my lungs in their present state.
I had to think quickly. I decided to make a run for it. The
orderly-room sergeant had made my papers out on receipt of the
telegram. I had all my kit ready packed. There only remained two things
to get: the colonel’s signature to the statement that I had handled
no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which only the battalion
demobilization officer could supply—but he was hand-in-glove with the
adjutant, so it was no use asking him for them. The last train
before demobilization ended was the six-fifteen from Limerick the
same evening, February 13th. I decided to wait until the adjutant had
left the orderly room and then casually ask the colonel to sign the
statement, without mentioning the adjutant’s objection to my going. The
adjutant remained in the orderly room until five minutes past six. As
soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the colonel’s
signature, saluted, hurried out to collect my baggage. I had counted
on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but none was to be seen. I had
about five minutes left now and the station was a good distance away. I
saw a corporal who had been with me in the First Battalion. I shouted
to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men. I’ve got _my
ticket_ and I want to catch the last train back.’ Summers promptly
called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it,
left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it was
moving out of the station and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers.
‘Good-bye, corporal, drink my health.’
But still I had not my demobilization code-marks and knew that when
I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon they would refuse
to pass me out. I did not care very much. Wimbledon was in England,
and I would at least have my influenza out in an English and not an
Irish hospital. My temperature was running high now and my mind was
working clearly as it always does in fever. My visual imagery, which is
cloudy and partial at ordinary times, becomes defined and complete. At
Fishguard I bought a copy of the _South Wales Echo_ and read in it that
there would be a strike of London Electric Railways the next day, 14th
February, if the railway directors would not meet the men’s demands.
So when the train steamed into Paddington and while it was still
moving I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up and ran across to
the station entrance, where, in spite of competition from porters—a
feeble crew at this time—I caught the only taxi in the station as its
fare stepped out. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford
to waste no time getting to Wimbledon. I brought my taxi back to the
train, where scores of stranded officers looked at me with envy. One,
who had travelled down in my compartment, had been met by his wife.
I said: ‘Excuse me, but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I
have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I only
need go as far as Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ They
were delighted; they said that they lived out at Ealing and had no idea
how to get there except by taxi. On the way to Waterloo he said to me:
‘I wish there was some way of showing our gratitude. I wish there was
something we could do for you.’ I said: ‘Well, there is only one thing
in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me,
I’m afraid. And that,’ I said, ‘is the proper code-marks to complete
my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and
there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’ He
rapped on the glass of the taxi and stopped it. Then he got down his
bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. He said: ‘Well, I
happen to be the Cork District Demobilization Officer and I’ve got the
whole bag of tricks here.’ So he filled my papers in.
At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for nine or ten
hours as I had expected, I was given priority and released at once;
Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’ and demobilization from
theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. So
after a hurried visit to my parents, who were living close by, I
continued to Hove, arriving at supper-time. When I came in, I had a
sudden terror that made me unable to speak. I seemed to see Nancy’s
mother. She was looking rather plump and staid and dressed unlike
herself, and did not appear to recognize me. She was sitting at the
table between Nancy and her father. It was like a bad dream; I did
not know what to say or do. I knew I was ill, but this was worse than
illness. Then Nicholson introduced me: ‘This is Nancy’s Aunt Dora, just
over from Canada.’
I warned them all that I had influenza; and hurried off to bed. Within
a day or two everybody in the house had caught it except Nicholson
and the baby and one servant who kept it off by a gipsy’s charm. I
think it was the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new
epidemic as bad as the summer one had started; there was not a nurse
to be had in Brighton. Nicholson at last found two ex-nurses. One was
competent, but frequently drunk, and when drunk she would ransack all
the wardrobes and pile the contents into her own bags; the other,
sober but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of
the open window, spread out her arms, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea,
sea, give my husband back to me.’ The husband, by the way, was not
drowned, merely unfaithful. A doctor, found with difficulty, said that
I had no chance of recovering; it was septic pneumonia now and both my
lungs were affected. But I had determined that, having come through
the war, I would not allow myself to succumb to Spanish influenza.
This, now, was the third time in my life that I had been given up as
dying, and each time because of my lungs. The first occasion was when
I was seven years old and had double-pneumonia following measles. Yet
my lungs are naturally very sound, possibly the strongest part
of me and, therefore, my danger mark. This time again I recovered and
was up a few weeks later in time to see the mutiny of the Guards, when
about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp
and paraded through the streets of Brighton in protest against camp
discipline.
The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and
the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had
taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George
forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for
hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting
Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a
threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes
and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him
a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the
two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half
hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against
the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England
the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food,
beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets
at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could
be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict
four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won
the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George.
The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’
mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The
signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’
When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went
up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We
were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing
else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to
see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school
uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe
that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been
still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian
life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At
the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior
of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech
about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in
commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered.
I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to
come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it
with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who
had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind
Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only
see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out
tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley
against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I
were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and
what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still
had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership
that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it
was always easier for me now when overtaken in any fault to lie my way
out. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a
review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers,
communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel
and lighting—each item was ticked off as satisfactory. And other loose
habits of war-time survived, such as stopping passing motors for a
lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway
carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever was
about. And I retained the technique of endurance, a brutal persistence
in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied
with the main points of any situation. But I modified my language,
which had suddenly become foul on the day of Loos and had been foul
ever since. The chief difference between war and peace was money. I
had never had to worry about that since my first days at Wrexham; I
had even put by about £150 of my pay, invested in War Bonds. Neither
Nancy nor I knew the value of money and this £150 and my war-bonus of,
I think, £250 and a disability pension that I was now drawing of £60 a
year, and the occasional money that I got from poetry, seemed a great
deal altogether. We engaged a nurse and a general servant and lived as
though we had an income of about a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of
her time drawing (she was illustrating some poems of mine), and I was
busy getting _Country Sentiment_ in order and writing reviews.
I was very thin, very nervous, and had about four years’ loss of
sleep to make up. I found that I was suffering from a large sort of
intestinal worm which came from drinking bad water in France. I was
now waiting until I should be well enough to go to Oxford with the
Government educational grant; it seemed the easiest thing to do. I knew
that it would be years before I was fit for anything besides a quiet
country life. There was no profession that I wished to take up, though
for a while I considered school-mastering. My disabilities were
many; I could not use a telephone, I was sick every time I travelled
in a train, and if I saw more than two new people in a single day it
prevented me from sleeping. I was ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy.
I had been much better when I was at Rhyl, but my recent pneumonia had
set me back to my condition of 1917.
Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as he was demobilized,
expecting me to join him. But after being there for a term or so he
became literary editor of the newly-published _Daily Herald_. He gave
me books to review for it. In these days the _Daily Herald_ was not
respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only
daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the
blockade of Russia by the British Fleet. The Versailles Treaty shocked
me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared.
When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public
interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s
Atlantic flight and rescue, the marriage of Lady Diana Manners, and
a marvellous horse called The Panther, which was the Derby favourite
and came in nowhere. The _Herald_ spoilt our breakfast for us every
morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country, due to the
closing of munition factories, of ex-service men refused re-instatement
in the jobs that they had left in the early stages of the war, of
market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news,
too, of my mother’s relatives in Germany and the penury to which
they had been reduced, particularly those who were retired officials
and whose pension, by the collapse of the mark, was reduced to a few
shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart; we now called
ourselves socialists.
The attitude of my family was doubtful. I had fought gallantly
for my country—indeed I was the only one of my father’s five sons of
military age who had seen active service—and was entitled to every
consideration because of my shell-shocked condition; but my socialism
and sympathy for the Bolsheviks outraged them. I once more forfeited
the goodwill of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over,
reminding me that my brother Philip had once been a pro-Boer and a
Fenian, but had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and
come out all right in the end. Most of the elder members of my family
were in the Near East, either married to British officials or British
officials themselves. My father hoped that when I was recovered I
would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family
influence would be of great service to me, and there get over my
revolutionary idealism. Socialism with Nancy was rather a means to
a single end. The most important thing to her was judicial equality
of the sexes; she held that all the wrong in the world was caused by
male domination and narrowness. She refused to see my experiences in
the war as in any way comparable with the sufferings that millions of
married women of the working-class went through. This at least had the
effect of putting the war into the background for me; I was devoted to
Nancy and respected her views in so far as they were impersonal. Male
stupidity and callousness became an obsession with her and she found
it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men.
It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the
house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify
her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population,
or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything
at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the
newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its
literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.
It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized.
My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my
publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose
religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her
give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy,
finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes,
refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances.
At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it
was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I
saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I
was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the
children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not
legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be
thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much
the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson.
This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand
then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They
were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad
luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by
a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly
afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy
seemed merely eccentric.
XXVII
In October 1919 I went up to Oxford at last. The lease of the Harlech
house was ended and Nicholson gave us the furniture to take with us.
The city was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom had
nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms
ahead and charged accordingly. Keble College had put up army huts
for its surplus students. There was not an unfurnished house to be
had anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty
by getting permission from my college authorities to live five miles
out, on Boar’s Hill; I pleaded my lungs. John Masefield, who liked my
poetry, offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.
The University was very quiet. The returned soldiers had little
temptation to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with
the police and races with the bulldogs as before the war. The boys
straight from the public schools were quiet too. They had had the war
preached at them continually for four years, had been told that they
must carry on loyally at home while their brothers were serving in the
trenches, and must make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. The boys
had been leaving for the cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, so
that the masters had it all their own way; trouble at public schools
nearly always comes from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clarke, a
history don at Oriel, who had been up at Oxford just before the war and
had meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany,
told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir”
and “No, sir.” They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and they
scribble away in their notebooks like lunatics. I can’t remember a
single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’ The
ex-service men—they included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and
even a one-armed twenty-five-year-old brigadier—though not rowdy, were
insistent on their rights. At St. John’s they formed what they called
a Soviet, demanding an entire revision of the college catering system;
they won their point and an undergraduate representative was chosen
to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons whom I had often seen
during the war trembling in fear of an invasion of Oxford, with the
sacking and firing of the colleges and the rape of the Woodstock and
Banbury Roads, and who had regarded all soldiers, myself included, as
their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession. I
was amused at the difference in manner to me that some of them showed.
My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met,
remained a friend; he prevailed on the college to allow me to change my
course from Classics to English Language and Literature and to take up
my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I was glad now that it was
an exhibition, though in 1913 I had been disappointed that it was not a
scholarship: college regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married,
scholars had to remain single.
I used to bicycle down from Boar’s Hill every morning to my lectures.
On the way down I would collect Edmund Blunden, who was attending the
same course. He too had permission to live on the hill, on account of
gassed lungs. I had been in correspondence with Edmund some time before
he came to Oxford. Siegfried, when literary editor of the _Herald_, had
been among the first to recognize him as a poet, and now I was helping
him get his _Waggoner_ through the press. Edmund had war-shock as badly
as myself, and we would talk each other into an almost hysterical state
about the trenches. We agreed that we would not be right until we
got all that talk on to paper. He was first with _Undertones of War_,
published in 1928.
Edmund and Mary his wife rented two rooms of a cottage belonging to
Mrs. Delilah Becker, locally known as the Jubilee Murderess. She was a
fine-looking old lady and used to read her prayer-book and Bible aloud
to herself every night, sitting at the open window. The prayer-book was
out of date: she used to pray for the Prince Consort and Adelaide, the
Queen Dowager. She was said to have murdered her husband. In Jubilee
year she had gone away for a holiday, leaving her husband in the
cottage with a half-witted servant-girl. News came to her that he had
got the servant-girl into trouble. She wrote to him: ‘Dear husband, if
I find you in my cottage when I come back you shall be no more.’ He did
not believe her and she found him in the cottage, and sure enough he
was no more. She told the police that he had gone away when he saw how
angry with him she was; but no one had seen him go. He had even left
his silver watch behind, ticking on a nail on the bedroom wall. The
neighbours swore that she had buried him in the garden. Mary Blunden
said that it was more probable that he was buried somewhere in their
part of the cottage, which was semi-detached. ‘There’s an awfully funny
smell about here sometimes,’ she said. Old Delilah said to Mary once:
‘I have often wondered what has happened to the old pepper-and-salt
suit he had on when he was—when he went away.’ Whenever she went
out she took the carving-knife out of the drawer and laid it on the
kitchen-table, where it could be seen by them when they went past her
window. I liked Delilah very much and sent her a pound of tea every
year until her death. Her comment on life in general was: ‘Fair
play’s good sport, and we’re all mortal worms.’ She also used to say:
‘While there’s wind and water a man’s all right.’
I found the English Literature course tedious, especially
eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Mr. Percy Simpson, the editor of
Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized. He said that he had once suffered for
his preference for the Romantic revivalists. He had been beaten by his
schoolmaster for having a Shelley in his possession. He had protested
between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ But he
warned me that I must on no account disparage the eighteenth century
when I sat for my final examination. It was also difficult for me, too,
to concentrate on cases and genders and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon
grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject. He said
that it was of purely linguistic interest, that there was hardly a line
of Anglo-Saxon extant of the slightest literary merit. I disagreed;
_Beowulf_ and _Judith_ seemed good poems to me. Beowulf lying wrapped
in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland
billet; Judith going for a _promenade_ to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and
_Brunanburgh_ with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting—all this was closer to
most of us at the time than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere
of the eighteenth century. Edmund and I found ourselves translating
everything into trench-warfare terms. The war was not yet over for us.
In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience
of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road; the men would be
singing and French children would be running along beside them, calling
out: ‘Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef’; and I would smell the
stench of the knacker’s yard just outside the town. Or I would be in
Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would
roar out, ‘Party, ’shun!’ and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with
brown knees and brown expressionless faces, would spring to their feet
from the broken steps where they were sitting. Or I would be in a barn
with my first platoon of the Welsh Regiment, watching them play nap
by the light of dirty candle stumps. Or it would be a deep dug-out at
Cambrin, where I was talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft
and see somebody’s muddy legs coming down the steps, and there would
be a crash and the tobacco-smoke in the dug-out would shake with the
concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books.
These day-dreams persisted like an alternate life. Indeed they did not
leave me until well on in 1928. I noticed that the scenes were nearly
always recollections of my first four months in France; it seemed as
though the emotion-recording apparatus had failed after Loos.
The eighteenth century was unpopular because it was French. Anti-French
feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund,
shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: ‘No more wars for me at
any price. Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them
I’ll go like a shot.’ Pro-German feeling was increasing. Now that the
war was over and the German armies had been beaten, it was possible
to give the German soldier credit for being the best fighting-man in
Europe. I often heard it said that it was only the blockade that had
beaten them; that in Haig’s last push they never really broke, and that
their machine-gun sections had held us up for as long as was needed
to cover the withdrawal of the main forces. And even that we had been
fighting on the wrong side; our natural enemies were the French.
At the end of my first term’s work I attended the usual college
board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed and said a
little stiffly: ‘I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays that you
write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental.
It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others.’
There were a number of poets living on Boar’s Hill; too many, Edmund
and I agreed. It had become almost a tourist centre. There was the Poet
Laureate, with his bright eye, abrupt challenging manner, a flower in
his buttonhole; he was one of the first men of letters to sign the
Oxford recantation of war-time hatred against the Germans—indeed it
was for the most part written by him. There was Gilbert Murray, too,
gentle-voiced and with the spiritual look of the strict vegetarian,
doing preliminary propaganda work for the League of Nations. Once,
while I was sitting talking to him in his study about Aristotle’s
_Poetics_, and he was walking up and down the room, I suddenly asked
him: ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you
trying to avoid the flowers on the rug or are you trying to keep to
the squares?’ I had compulsion-neuroses of this sort myself so it was
easy to notice one in him. He wheeled round sharply: ‘You’re the first
person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or
the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in
sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go
another seven steps, than I turn round. I asked Browne, the professor
of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it wasn’t a
dangerous habit. He said: “When you find it getting into multiples of
seven, come to me again.”’
I saw most of John Masefield, a nervous, generous person, very
sensitive to criticism, who seemed to have suffered greatly in
the war, when an orderly in a Red Cross unit; he was now working at
_Reynard the Fox_. He wrote in a hut in his garden surrounded by tall
gorse-bushes and only appeared at meal-times. In the evening he used to
read his day’s work over to Mrs. Masefield and they would correct it
together. Masefield was at the height of his reputation at the time,
and there was a constant flow of American visitors to his door. Mrs.
Masefield protected Jan. She was from the North of Ireland, a careful
manager, and put a necessary brake on Jan’s generosity and sociability.
We admired the way that she stood up for her rights where less resolute
people would have shrunk back. The tale of Mrs. Masefield and the
rabbit. Some neighbours of ours had a particularly stupid Airedale;
they were taking it for a walk past the Masefields’ house when a wild
rabbit ran across the road from the Masefields’ gorse plantation. The
Airedale dashed at it and missed as usual. The rabbit, not giving it
sufficient credit for stupidity and slowness, doubled back; but found
the dog had not yet recovered from its mistake and ran right into its
jaws. The dog’s owners were delighted at the brilliance performance of
their pet, recovered the rabbit, which was a small and inexperienced
one, and took it home for the pot. Mrs. Masefield had seen the business
through the plantation fence. It was not, strictly, a public road and
the rabbit was, therefore, legally hers. That evening there came a
knock at the door. ‘Come in, oh, do come in, Mrs. Masefield.’ It was
Mrs. Masefield coming for the skin of her rabbit. Rabbit-skins were
worth a lot in 1920. Mrs. Masefield’s one extravagance was bridge; she
used to play at a halfpenny a hundred, to steady her play, she told us.
She kept goats which used to be tethered near our cottage and which
bleated. She was a good landlord to us, and advised Nancy to keep
up with me intellectually if she wished to hold my affections.
Another poet on Boar’s Hill was Robert Nichols, still another
neurasthenic ex-soldier, with his flame-opal ring, his wide-brimmed
hat, his flapping arms and ‘mournful grandeur’ in repose (the phrase is
from a review by Sir Edmund Gosse). Nichols served only three weeks in
France, in the gunners, and was in no show; but he was highly strung
and the three weeks affected him more than twelve months affected
some people. He was invalided out of the army and went to lecture in
America for the Ministry of Information on British war-poets. He read
Siegfried’s and my poetry, and apparently gave some account of us. A
legend was started of Siegfried, Robert and myself as the new Three
Musketeers. Not only was Robert not in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with
Siegfried and myself, but the three of us have never been together in
the same room in our lives.
[Illustration: 1929 THE SECOND BATTALION, THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS]
That winter George and Ruth Mallory invited Nancy and myself to go
climbing with them. But Nancy could not stand heights and was having
another baby; and, for myself, I realized that my climbing days were
over. My nerves were bad, though possibly still good enough for an
emergency, and beyond improvement. I was, however, drawn into one
foolhardy experience at this time. Nancy and I were visiting my parents
at Harlech. My two younger brothers were at the house. They played
golf and mixed with local society. One evening they arranged a four at
bridge with a young ex-airman and a Canadian colonel who was living
in a house on the plain between Harlech Castle and the sea. The elder
of my brothers got toothache; I said that I would take his place. The
younger, still at Charterhouse, demurred. He was rather ashamed of
me now as a non-golfer, a socialist, and not quite a gentleman.
And my bridge might discredit him. I insisted, because at that time
Canadian colonels interested me, and he made the best of it. I assured
him that I would try not to wound his feelings. The colonel was about
forty-five—tough, nervous, whisky-drinking, a killer. He was out of
sorts; he said that his missus was upstairs with a headache and could
not come down. We played three or four rubbers; I was playing steadily
and not disgracing my brother. The colonel was drinking, the airman
was competing. Finally the colonel said in a temper: ‘By God, this
is the rottenest bridge I’ve ever sat down to. Let’s go bathing!’
It was half-past ten and not warm for January, but we went bathing
and afterwards dried ourselves on pocket handkerchiefs. ‘We’ was the
colonel, myself and my brother. The airman excused himself. The bathe
put the colonel in better humour. ‘Let’s go up to the village now and
raid the concert. Let’s pull some of the girls out and have a bit of
fun.’ The airman gigglingly agreed. My brother seemed embarrassed. The
colonel said: ‘And you, you bloody poet, are you on?’ I said angrily:
‘Not yet. You’ve had your treat, colonel. I went bathing with you and
it was cold. Now it’s my treat. I’m going to take you climbing and make
you warm. I want to see whether you Canucks are all B.S. or not.’ That
diverted him.
I took them up the castle rock from the railway station in the dark.
After the first piece, which was tricky, there would have been little
climbing necessary if I had followed a zig-zag path; but I preferred to
lead the colonel up several fairly stiff pitches. The others kept to
the path. When we reached the top he was out of breath, a bit shaky,
and most affable—almost affectionate. ‘That was a damn good climb you
showed us.’ So I said: ‘We’ve not reached the top yet.’ ‘Where
are we going now?’ he asked. I said: ‘Up that turret.’ We climbed into
the castle and walked through the chapel into the north-western tower.
It was pitch dark. I took them left into the turret which adjoined the
tower but rose some twenty feet higher. The sky showed above, about
the size of an orange. The turret had once had a spiral staircase, but
the central core had been broken down after the Cromwellian siege;
only an edging of stones remained on the walls. This edging did not
become continuous until about the second spiral. We struck matches and
I started up. The colonel swore and sweated, but followed. I showed him
the trick of getting over the worst gap in the stones, which was too
wide to bridge with one’s stride, by crouching, throwing one’s body
forward and catching the next stone with one’s hands; a scramble and he
was there. The airman and my brother remained below. I was glad when we
reached the second spiral. We climbed perhaps a hundred and twenty feet
to the top.
When we were safely down again most of the whisky was gone. So I
said: ‘Now let’s visit the concert party.’ I had heard the audience
dispersing, from the top of the turret. We visited the artistes.
The colonel was most courteous to the women, especially the blonde
soprano, but he took a great dislike to the tenor, a Welshman, and
told him that he was no bloody good as a singer. He cross-examined
him on his military service and was delighted to find that he had
been for some reason or other exempted. He called him a louse and a
bloody skrim-shanker and a lot more until the blonde soprano, who was
his wife, came to the rescue and threatened to chuck the colonel out.
He went out grinning, kissing his hand to the soprano and telling
the tenor to kiss the place where he wore no hat. The tenor turned
courageous and shouted out something about reading the Scriptures
and how morally unjustifiable it was to fight. We all laughed till
we wheezed. Then the colonel said we must get a drink; he knocked up
a hotel barman and even got inside the bar, but the barman refused
to serve him and threatened to call the police. The colonel did not
raid the shelves as he would have done half an hour before when the
whisky was fiercer in him; he merely told the barman what he thought
of the Welsh, broke a glass or two and walked out. ‘Let’s go home and
have some more bridge.’ He walked arm-in-arm with me down the hill
and confided as one family man to another that his nerves were all in
pieces because his missus was in the family way. That was why he had
broken up the bridge-party. He had wanted her to have a good sleep. ‘If
we go back quietly now, she’ll not wake up; we can bid in whispers.’
So we went back and he drank silently and the airman drank silently
and we played silently. I had three or four glasses myself; my brother
abstained. We stopped at three-thirty in the morning. The colonel
paid up and went to sleep on the sofa. I was eighteen shillings and
my brother twelve shillings up at sixpence a hundred. I was sick and
shaking for weeks after this.
In March the second baby was born and we called him David. My mother
was overjoyed. It was the first Graves grandson; my elder brothers had
had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the Graves family silver
and documents. When Jenny was born my mother had condoled with Nancy:
‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first to practise on.’ Nancy had
from the first decided to have four children; they were to be like
the children in her drawings and were to be girl, boy, girl, boy, in
that order. She was going to get it all over quickly; she believed in
young parents and families of three or four children fairly close
together in age. She had the children in the order she intended and
they were all like her drawings. She began to regret our marriage, as
I also did. We wanted somehow to be dis-married—not by divorce, which
was as bad as marriage—and able to live together without any legal or
religious obligation to live together. It was about this time that I
met Dick again, for the last time; I found him merely pleasant and
disagreeable. He was at the university, about to enter the diplomatic
service, and had changed so much that it seemed absurd to have ever
suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness remained.
XXVIII
I met T. E. Lawrence first at a guest-night at All Souls’.
Lawrence had just been given a college fellowship, and it was the first
time for many years that he had worn evening dress. The restlessness
of his eyes was the first thing about him I noticed. He told me that
he had read my poems in Egypt during one of his flying visits from
Arabia; he and my brother Philip had been together in the Intelligence
Department at Cairo, before his part in the Arab revolt had begun,
working out the Turkish order of battle. I knew nothing about his
organization of the Arab revolt, his exploits and sufferings in the
desert, and his final entry into Damascus. He was merely, to me, a
fellow-soldier who had come back to Oxford for a rest after the war.
But I felt a sudden extraordinary sympathy with him. Later, when I was
told that every one was fascinated by Lawrence, I tried to dismiss this
feeling as extravagant. But it remained. Between lectures at Oxford
I now often visited Lawrence at All Souls’. Though he never drank
himself, he used always to send his scout for a silver goblet of audit
ale for me. Audit ale was brewed in the college; it was as soft as
barley-water but of great strength. (A prince once came down to Oxford
to open a new museum and lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony;
the mildness of the audit ale deceived him—he took it for lager—and he
had to be taken back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.)
Nancy and I lunched in Lawrence’s rooms once with Vachel Lindsay, the
American poet, and his mother. Mrs. Lindsay was from Springfield,
Illinois, and, like her son, a prominent member of the Illinois
Anti-Saloon League. When Lawrence told his scout that Mr. Lindsay,
though a poet, was an Anti-Saloon Leaguer, he was scandalized and
asked Lawrence’s permission to lay on Lindsay’s place a copy of verses
composed in 1661 by a fellow of the college. One stanza was:
The poet divine that cannot reach wine,
Because that his money doth many times faile,
Will hit on the vein to make a good strain,
If he be but inspired with a pot of good ale.
Mrs. Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual
that she met at Oxford. Lawrence had brought out the college gold
service in her honour and this she took to be the ordinary thing at a
university luncheon-party.
His rooms were dark and oak-panelled. A large table and a desk were the
principal furniture. And there were two heavy leather chairs, simply
acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when
I was visiting T. E. and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel
Lawrence, to ask you a single question. You are the only man who will
answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting
any money in South Arabian oil?’ Lawrence, without rising, simply
answered:‘No.’ ‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for
that. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he
had found something missing; on his way home through London he chose
the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card. Other things in
the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of Feisul,
which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond which
he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books,
including a Kelmscott _Chaucer_, three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab
leaders who had fought with him, one of them with the sheen on
the nap made with crushed lapis-lazuli; a station bell from the Hedjaz
railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy, a clay
soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence
was digging before the war.
We talked most about poetry. I was working at a book of poems which
appeared later under the title of _The Pier-Glass_. They were poems
that reflected my haunted condition; the _Country Sentiment_ mood was
breaking down. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving
these poems and I adopted most of them. He told me of two or three
of his schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One
was for improving the turf in the quadrangle, which he said was in
a disgraceful condition, nearly rotting away; he had suggested at a
college meeting that it should be manured or treated in some way or
other, but no action had been taken. He now said that he was going
to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would have to re-turf it
altogether. He consulted a mushroom expert in town, but found that it
was difficult to make spawn grow. He would have persisted if he had
not been called away about this time to help Winston Churchill with
the Middle-Eastern settlement. Another scheme, in which I was to have
helped, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. He was going to drive
them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded
the college to reply, when Magdalen protested and asked for its deer
back, that it was the All Souls’ herd and had been pastured there from
time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid. It fell
through for the same reason as the other. But a successful strike
of college-servants for better pay and hours was said to have been
engineered by Lawrence.
I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college
except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to
pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St.
John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at
Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my
loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill.
At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the
hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and
housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides
drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of
the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of
this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few
things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights
were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best
way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury
Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There
was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men
killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near
Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had
met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary
doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia
and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford.
I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed
us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived
such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind
the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy
with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the _Morning
Post’s_ account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s
hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her
keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you
_are_ old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did
the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient
family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would
never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer
used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering.
‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had
one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’
He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a
church near by. He had only the bowl to work upon, but enjoyed doing
a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that we had not baptized
our children. He was interested, but not scandalized, remarking that
his old mother had always said of baptism that at any rate there was
no harm in it, and that she would not like her children to blame her
in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually
found that what my old mother said was right.’ He said that to his
mind the new generation of clergymen were very much better men than
the last.... Though he now only went to church three times a year—one
visit to each of the three neighbouring churches—he could not forget
that the church was in the old days the centre of all the musical,
literary and artistic education in the country village. He talked
about the old string orchestras in Wessex churches, in one of which
his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; he regretted
their disappearance. He told us that the clergyman who appears as
old St. Clair in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was the man who protested
to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the
Dorchester Barracks, and was the cause of headquarters no longer being
sent to this once very popular station.
We had tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house,
was crowded with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for
old possessions, and Mrs. Hardy was too fond to suggest that anything
at all should be removed. Hardy, his cup of tea in hand, began making
jokes about bishops at the Athenæum Club and imitating their episcopal
tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter (Yes,
my lord!).’ Apparently he considered bishops were fair game. He was
soon censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for
a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend, Henry James, eating
soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.
After tea we went into the garden, and Hardy asked to see some of my
recent poems. I showed him one, and he asked if he might make some
suggestions. He objected to the phrase the ‘scent of thyme,’ which he
said was one of the _clichés_ which the poets of his generation studied
to avoid. I replied that they had avoided it so well that it could be
used again now without offence, and he withdrew the objection. He asked
whether I wrote easily, and I said that this poem was in its sixth
draft and would probably be finished in two more. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘I
have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts
for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’ He said that he
had been able to sit down and write novels by time-table, but that
poetry was always accidental, and perhaps it was for that reason
that he prized it more highly.
He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that there were
chapters in them that he had enjoyed writing. We were walking round the
garden, and Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He said that he
had once been pruning a tree here when an idea suddenly had come into
his head for a story, the best story that he had ever thought of. It
came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue.
But as he had no pencil and paper with him, and was anxious to finish
pruning the tree before it rained, he had let it go. By the time he sat
down to recall it, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and
paper,’ he said. He added: ‘Of course, even if I could remember that
story now, I couldn’t write it. I am past novel-writing. But I often
wonder what it was.’
At dinner that night he grew enthusiastic in praise of cider, which
he had drunk since a boy, and which, he said, was the finest medicine
he knew. I suggested that in the _Message to the American People_,
which he had been asked to write, he might take the opportunity of
recommending cider.
He began complaining of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He
disliked leaving letters unanswered, and yet if he did not write these
people pestered him the more; he had been upset that morning by a
letter from an autograph-fiend which began:
Dear Mr. Hardy,—I am interested to know why the devil you
don’t reply to my request....
He asked me for my advice, and was grateful for the suggestion that a
mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or
two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital (‘Swanage Children’s
Hospital,’ put in Hardy), which would forward a receipt.
He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less
noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He
also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man;
on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems,
though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the
critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem
of his where he had written ‘his shape _smalled_ in the distance.’
Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed
a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word
in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had
found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole
authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of
early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he
did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said
that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he
worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature
was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say
something disparaging against Homer’s _Iliad_, he protested: ‘Oh, but I
admire the _Iliad_ greatly. Why, it’s in the _Marmion_ class!’ Lawrence
could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)
We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before
we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they
accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an
example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was
burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous
piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see
that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of
poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were
sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal
proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion _vers
libre_ could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on
the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than
those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they
were written he cared very little what happened to them.
He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to
have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have
succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to
book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred
times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men
to the war who did not want to go.’
This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing
invitation to come and visit him.
From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s
old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the
shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was
selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock,
and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the
week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved
figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea
of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential
district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we
should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery,
groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things
that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and
make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted
and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take
a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither
Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or
commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books
while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the
shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not
obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a
ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop
to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close
to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock
bought. The _Daily Mirror_ advertised the opening on its front page
with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came
up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be
a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of
Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door
and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’)
or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge
to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building
had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock
purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the
work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on
Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the
day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The
term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in
Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron
this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of
Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the
other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’
gardener’s wife.
The gross weekly takings were now £60 a week and Nancy, though she had
given up her drawing, still had the house and children to consider.
We had no car, and constant emergency bicycle-rides had to be made to
Oxford to get new stock from the wholesalers; we made a point of always
being able to supply whatever was asked for. We engaged a shop-boy to
call for orders, but the work was still too heavy. Mrs. Howard went out
of partnership and Nancy and I found great difficulty in understanding
her accounts. I was fairly good at conventional book-keeping; the
keeping of company accounts had been part of my lecture-syllabus when I
was instructing cadets. But that did not help me with these, which were
on a novel system.
The shop business finally ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting,
but my writing, my university work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of
the house and children. We had the custom of every resident of Boar’s
Hill but two or three. One of those whom we courted unsuccessfully was
Mrs. Masefield. The proximity of the shop to her house did not please
her. And her housekeeper, she said, preferred to deal with a provision
merchant in Oxford and she could not override this arrangement.
However, to show that there was no ill-feeling, she used to come once
a week to the shop and buy a tin of Vim and a packet of Lux, for which
she paid money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The
moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found that
it was very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really
honest; we could not resist the temptation of undercharging the poor
villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our
money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to
me. Nobody ever caught us out; it was as easy as shelling peas, the
shop-boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that
most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to
be out of the tea selling at ninepence a quarter which Mrs. So-and-so
always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and Mrs. So-and-so asked
for it in a hurry, the only thing to do was to make up a pound of the
sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it
at ninepence; the difference would not be noticed. We were sorry for
the commercial travellers who came sweating up the hill with their
heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without
any orders. They would pitch a hard-luck tale and often we would relent
and get in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us
some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to
cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two
more and overcharge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum
before you take the stuff off the scales and there’s fewer still who
will take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’
The shop lasted six months. Nancy suddenly dismissed the nurse. Nancy
had always practised the most up-to-date methods of training and
feeding children, and the nurse, over-devoted to the children, had
recently disobeyed her instructions. Nancy put the children before
everything. She decided that there was nothing to be done but to take
them and the house over herself, and to find a manager for the
shop. At this point I caught influenza and took a long time to recover
from it.
War horror overcame me again. The political situation in Europe seemed
to be going from bad to worse. There was already trouble in Ireland,
Russia and the Near East. The papers promised new and deadlier poison
gases for the next war. There was a rumour that Lord Berkeley’s house
on Boar’s Hill was to become an experimental laboratory for making
them. I had bad nights. I thought that perhaps I owed it to Nancy to go
to a psychiatrist to be cured; yet I was not sure. Somehow I thought
that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than
anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured;
my _Pier-Glass_ haunting would end and I would become merely a dull
easy writer. It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a
good poet. I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to
have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over
their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized
by anyone in any way.
I decided to see as few people as possible, stop all outside work, and
cure myself. I would read the modern psychological books and apply them
to my case. I had already learned the rudiments of morbid psychology
from talks with Rivers, and from his colleague, Dr. Henry Head, the
neurologist, under whose care Robert Nichols had been. I liked Head’s
scientific integrity. Once when he was testing a man whom he suspected
of homicidal mania he had made some suggestion to him which came within
the danger-area of his insanity; the man picked up a heavy knife from
his consulting table and rushed threateningly at Head. Head, not
at all quick on his legs and dodging round the table, exclaimed:
‘Typical, typical! Capital, capital!’ and, only as an afterthought:
‘Help! Help!’ He had great knowledge of the geography of the brain and
the peculiar delusions and maladjustments that followed lesions in
the different parts. He told me, at different times, exactly what was
wrong with Mr. Jingle in _Pickwick Papers_, why some otherwise literate
people found it impossible to spell, and why some others saw ghosts
standing by their bedside. He said about the bedside ghosts: ‘They
always come to the same side of the bed, and if you turn the bed round
you turn the ghost round with it. They come to the contrary side of the
lesion.’
A manager was found for the shop. But as soon as it was known that
Nancy and I were no longer behind the counter the weekly receipts
immediately began to fall; they were soon down to £20, and still
falling steadily. The manager’s salary was more than our profits.
Prices were now falling, too, at the rate of about five per cent,
every week, so that the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly
in value. And we had let one or two of the Wootton villagers run up
bad debts. When we came to reckon things up we realized that it was
wisest to cut the losses and sell out. We hoped to recoup our original
expenditure and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction by
selling the shop and the goodwill to a big firm of Oxford grocers that
wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, the site was
not ours and the landlord was prevailed upon by an interested neighbour
not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us and
spoil the local amenities. No other site was available, so there was
nothing to do but sell off what stock remained at bankrupt prices
to the wholesalers and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately
again, the building was not made in bolted sections, and could not
be sold to be put up again elsewhere; its only value was as timber, and
in these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and the
prices fallen to very little. We recovered twenty pounds of the two
hundred that had been spent on it. Nancy and I were so disgusted that
we decided to leave Boar’s Hill. We were about five hundred pounds in
debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took the whole matter in
hand, disposed of our assets for us, and the debt was finally reduced
to about three hundred pounds. Nancy’s father sent her a hundred-pound
note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and the remainder was
unexpectedly contributed by Lawrence. He gave me four chapters of
_Seven Pillars of Wisdom_, his history of the Arab revolt, to sell for
serial publication in the United States. It was a point of honour with
him not to make any money out of the revolt even in the most indirect
way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, there seemed no harm
in that.
We gave the Masefields notice that we were leaving the cottage at the
end of the June quarter 1921. We had no idea where we were going or
what we were going to do. We decided that we must get another cottage
somewhere and live very quietly, looking after the children ourselves,
and that we must try to make what money we needed by writing and
drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything when I was ill, now
gave me the task of finding a cottage. It had to be found in about
three weeks’ time. I said: ‘But you know that there are no cottages
anywhere to be had.’ She said: ‘I know, but we are going to get one.’
I said ironically: ‘Describe it in detail; since there are no cottages
we might as well have a no-cottage that we really like.’ She said:
‘Well, it must have six rooms, water in the house, a beamed
attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be
in a village with shops and yet a little removed from the village. The
village must be five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction
from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire. And we
can only afford ten shillings a week unfurnished.’ There were other
details that I took down about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs and
kitchen sinks, and then I went off on my bicycle. I had first laid a
ruler across the Oxford ordnance-map and found four or five villages
that corresponded in general direction and distance and were on the
river. By inquiry I found that two had shops; that, of these two, one
had a towered church and the other a spired church. I therefore
went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and said: ‘Have you
any cottages to let unfurnished?’ The house-agent laughed politely.
So I said: ‘What I want is a cottage at Islip with a walled garden,
six rooms, water in the house, just outside the village, with a beamed
attic, and rent ten shillings a week.’ The house-agent said: ‘Oh, you
mean the World’s End Cottage? But that is for sale, not for renting.
It has failed to find a purchaser for two years, and I think that the
owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half
what he originally asked.’ So I went back and next day Nancy came with
me; she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right,
but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those
window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We
haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house,
surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’ She was
right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to
us at the rate of ten shillings a week.
Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot
Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster
and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from
the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with
Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for
a new book I always found exactly the right one somewhere or other in
Skelton’s poems. We moved into the Islip cottage and a new chapter
started. I did not sit for my finals.
XXIX
We were at Islip from 1921 until 1925. My mother in renting us the
house had put a clause in the agreement that it was to be used only as
a residence and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She
wanted to guard against any further commercial enterprise on our part;
she need not have worried. Islip was an agricultural village, and far
enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which
the outskirts of a university town are usually well known. The village
policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there
we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a
native Islip cottager. Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station
for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the
pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had
even cleaned it.
Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I
played football for the village team. There had been no football in
Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it. The
village nonogenarian complained that the game was not what it had been
when he was a boy; he called it unmanly. He pointed across the fields
to two aged willow trees: ‘They used to be our home goals,’ he said.
‘T’other pair was half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in
the end. Three men were killed in one game; one was kicked to death,
t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’
Islip football, though not unmanly, was ladylike by comparison with the
game as I had played it at Charterhouse. When playing centre-forward I
was often booed now for charging the goalkeeper while he was fumbling
with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my
inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in
circles round and round the field until he was robbed; he seldom went
anywhere near the goal-mouth. The football club was democratic. The
cricket club was not. I played cricket the first season but left the
club because the selection of the team was not always a selection of
the best eleven men; regular players would be dropped to make room for
visitors to the village who were friends of a club official, one of the
gentry.
At first we had so little money that we did all the work in the house
ourselves, including the washing. I did the cooking, Nancy did the
mending and making the children’s clothes; we shared the rest of the
work. Later money improved: we found it more economical to send the
washing out and get a neighbour in to do some of the heavier cleaning
and scrubbing. In our last year at Islip we even had a decrepit car
which Nancy drove. My part was to wind it up; the energy that I put
into winding was almost equivalent to pushing it for a mile or two. The
friends who gave it to us told us that its name was ‘Dr. Marie,’ and
when we asked ‘Why?’ we were told ‘Because it’s all right in theory.’
One day when Nancy was driving down Foxcombe Hill, the steepest hill
near Oxford, there was a slight jar. Nancy thought it advisable to
stop; when we got out we found that there were only three wheels on the
car. The other, with part of the axle, was retrieved nearly a mile back.
These four years I spent chiefly on housework and being nurse to the
children. Catherine was born in 1922 and Sam in 1924. By the end
of 1925 we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere
of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of
children’s napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life except
for the money difficulties, I liked my life with the children. But the
strain told on Nancy. She was constantly ill, and often I had to take
charge of everything. She tried occasionally to draw; but by the time
she had got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would
always disturb her. She said at last that she would not start again
until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school.
I kept on writing because the responsibility for making money rested
chiefly on me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing when I
have had something to write. We kept the cottage cleaned and polished
in a routine that left us little time for anything else. We had
accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them
to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean
dresses as our neighbours’ children did.
I found that I had the faculty of working through constant
interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’
screams—hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be
played with—and learned to disregard all but the more important ones.
But most of the books that I wrote in these years betray the conditions
under which I worked; they are scrappy, not properly considered and
obviously written out of reach of a proper reference-library. Only
poetry did not suffer. When I was working at a poem nothing else
mattered; I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had
time to sit down to write it out. At one period I only allowed myself
half an hour’s writing a day, but once I did write I always had too
much to put down; I never sat chewing my pen. My poetry-writing has
always been a painful process of continual corrections and corrections
on top of corrections and persistent dissatisfaction. I have never
written a poem in less than three drafts; the greatest number I recall
is thirty-five (_The Troll’s Nosegay_). The average at this time was
eight; it is now six or seven.
The children were all healthy and gave us little trouble. Nancy had
strong views about giving them no meat or tea, putting them to bed
early, making them rest in the afternoon and giving them as much fruit
as they wanted. We did our best to keep them from the mistakes of our
own childhood. But it was impossible for them when they went to the
village school to avoid formal religion, class snobbery, political
prejudice, and mystifying fairy stories about the facts of sex. I never
felt any possessive feeling about them as Nancy did. To me they were
close friends with the claims of friendship and liable to the accidents
of friendship. We both made a point of punishing them in a disciplinary
way as little as possible. If we lost our temper with them it was
a different matter. Islip was as good a place as any for the happy
childhood that we wanted to give them. The river was close and we had
the loan of a canoe. There were fields to play about in, and animals,
and plenty of children of their own age. They liked school.
After so much shifting about during the war I disliked leaving home,
except to visit some well-ordered house where I could expect reasonable
comfort. But Nancy was always proposing sudden ‘bursts for freedom,’
and I used to come with her and usually enjoy them. In 1922 we used a
derelict baker’s van for a caravan ride down to the south-coast. We had
three children with us, Catherine as a four-months-old baby. It rained
every single day for the month we were away—and the problem of washing
and drying the baby’s napkins whenever we camped for the night—and the
problem of finding a farmer who would not mistake us for gypsies
and would be willing to let us pull into his field—and then the shaft
that twice dropped off when we were on hills—and twice the back of the
cart flew open and a child fell out on the road—and the difficulty of
getting oats for the horse (which had been five years on grass as being
too old for work) on country roads organized for motor traffic—and
cooking to be done in the open with usually a high wind and always rain
and the primus stove sputtering and flaring up. It was near Lewes that
we drew up on a strip of public land alongside the horse and van of a
Mr. Hicks, a travelling showman from Brighton. He told us many tricks
of the road and also the story of his life: ‘Yes, I saw the Reverend
Powers, Cantab, of Rodmell last week, and he, knowing my history, said:
“Well, Mr. Hicks, I suppose that in addressing you I should be right in
putting the letters b.a. after your name?” I said: “I have the
right to it certainly, but when a man’s down, you know how it is, he
does not like attaching a handle to his name.” For you must know, I was
once a master at Ardingly College.’
‘Indeed, Mr. Hicks, and where were you b.a.?’
‘Didn’t I just tell you, at Ardingly? I won a scholarship at the
beginning and they gave me the choice of going to Oxford or Winchester
or Cambridge or Eton. And I chose Winchester. But I was only there
a twelvemonth. No, I couldn’t stand it any longer owing to the
disgraceful corruption of the junior clergy and the undergraduates—you
understand, of course. I rub up a bit of the classic now and then, but
I like to forget those times. The other day, though, me and a young
Jew-boy who had cleaned up seventy-five pounds at the race meeting with
photographing and one thing and another, had a fine lark. I got out two
old mortarboards and a couple of gowns from the box in the van
where I keep them, and you should have seen us swaggering down Brighton
Pier, my boy.’ A few days later we stopped at a large mansion in
Hampshire, rented by Sir Lionel Philips, the South African financier,
whom Nancy knew. I found myself in an argument with him about socialist
economics, and he told me a story which I liked even better than Mr.
Hicks’. ‘I visited Kimberley recently and realized what a deep hole I
had made. Where, as a young man, I tore the first turf off with my bare
hands, they were now mining down half a mile.’
In the end we got back safely.
I was so busy that I had no time to be ill myself. Nancy begged me
not to talk about the war in her hearing, and I was ready to forget
about it. The villagers called me ‘The Captain,’ otherwise I had
few reminders except my yearly visit to the standing medical board.
The board continued for some years to recommend me for a disability
pension. The particular disability was neurasthenia; the train journey
and the army railway-warrant filled out with my rank and regiment
usually produced reminiscential neurasthenia by the time I reached the
board. The award was at last made permanent at forty-two pounds a year.
Ex-service men were continually coming to the door selling boot-laces
and asking for cast-off shirts and socks. We always gave them a cup of
tea and money. Islip was a convenient halt between the Chipping Norton
and the Oxford workhouses. One day an out-of-work ex-service man, a
steam-roller driver by trade, came calling with his three children,
one of them a baby. Their mother had recently died in childbirth. We
felt very sorry for them and Nancy offered to adopt the eldest child,
Daisy, who was about thirteen years old and her father’s greatest
anxiety. She undertook to train Daisy in housework so that she would
be able later to go into service. Daisy was still of school age. Her
father shed tears of gratitude, and Daisy seemed happy enough to be a
member of the family. Nancy made her new clothes—we cleaned her, bought
In shoes, and gave her a bedroom to herself. Daisy was not a success.
She was a big ugly girl, strong as a horse and toughened by her three
years on the roads. Her father was most anxious for her to continue her
education, which had been interrupted by their wanderings. But Daisy
hated school; she was put in the baby class and the girls of her own
age used to tease her. In return she pulled their hair and thumped
them, so they sent her to Coventry. After a while she grew homesick
for the road. ‘That was a good life,’ she used to say. ‘Dad and me and
my brother and the baby. The baby was a blessing. When I fetched him
along to the back doors I nearly always won something. ’Course, I was
artful. If they tried to slam the door in my face I used to put my
foot in it and say: “This is my little orphan brother.” Then I used to
look round and anything I seen I used to ast for. I used to ast for
a pram for the baby, if I seen an old one in a shed; and I’d get it,
too. Of course we had a pram really, a good one, and then we’d sell
the pram I’d won, in the next town we come to. Good beggars always ast
for something particlar, something they seen lying about. It’s no good
asking for food or money. I used to pick up a lot for my dad. I was a
better beggar nor he was, he said. We used to go along together singing
_On the Road to Anywhere_. And there was always the Spikes to go to
when the weather was bad. The Spike at Chippy Norton was our winter
home. They was very good to us there. We used to go to the movies once
a week. The grub was good at Chippy Norton. We been all over the
country, Wales and Devonshire, right up to Scotland, but we always come
back to Chippy.’ Nancy and I were shocked one day when a tramp came
to the door and Daisy slammed the door in his face and told him to
clear out of it, Nosey, and not to poke his ugly mug into respectable
people’s houses. ‘I know you, Nosey Williams,’ she said, ‘you and your
ex-service papers what you pinched from a bloke down in Salisbury,
and the bigamy charge against you a-waiting down at Plymouth. Hop it
now, quick, or I’ll run for the cop.’ Daisy told us the true histories
of many of the beggars we had befriended. She said: ‘There’s not
one decent man in ten among them bums. My dad’s the only decent one
of the lot. The reason most of them is on the road is the cops have
something against them, so they has to keep moving. Of course my dad
don’t like the life; he took to it too late in life. And my mother was
very respectable too. She kept us clean. Most of those bums is lousy,
with nasty diseases, and they keeps out of the Spike as much as they
can ’cause they don’t like the carbolic baths.’ Daisy was with us for
a whole winter. When the spring came and the roads dried her father
called for her again. He couldn’t manage the little ones without her he
said. That was the last we saw of Daisy, though she wrote to us once
from Chipping Norton asking us for money.
My pension was our only certain source of income, neither of us
having any private means of our own. The Government grant and college
exhibition had ended at the time we moved to Islip. I never made
more at this time than thirty pounds a year from my books of poetry
and anthology fees, with an occasional couple of guineas for poems
contributed to periodicals. There was another sixteen pounds a year
from the rent of the Harlech cottage and an odd guinea or two from
reviewing. My volumes of poetry did not sell. _Fairies and Fusiliers_
had gone into two editions because it was published in the war-years
when people were reading poetry as they had not done for many years.
The inclusion of my work in Edward Marsh’s _Georgian Poetry_ had
made my name well known, but after 1919, when the series ended, it
was forgotten again. _Country Sentiment_ was hardly noticed; the
_Pier-Glass_ was also a failure. They were published by Martin Seeker,
not by Heinemann who had published _Fairies and Fusiliers_—William
Heinemann, just before he died, had tried to teach me how poetry should
be written and I resented it. These three books had been published in
America, where my name was known since John Masefield, Robert Nichols
and, finally, Siegfried Sassoon had gone to lecture about modern
English poetry. But English poets slumped, and it was eight years
before another book of my poems could find a publisher in America. In
these days I used to take the reviews of my poetry-books seriously. I
reckoned their effect on sales and so on the grocery bills. I still
believed that it was possible to write poetry that was true poetry
and yet could reach, say, a three or four thousand-copy sale. I
expected some such success. I consorted with other poets and had a
fellow-feeling for them. Beside Hardy, Siegfried, and the Boar’s Hill
residents, I knew Delamare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells
and many more. I liked W. H. Davies because he was from South Wales
and afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list
of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were
not true poets—until only two names were left. I approved the final
choice. Delamare I liked too. He was gentle and I could see how hard he
worked at his poems—I was always interested in the writing-technique
of my contemporaries. I once told him what hours of worry he must
have had over the lines:
Ah, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose;
and how, in the end, he had been dissatisfied. He admitted that he had
been forced to leave the assonance ‘Roves and rose,’ because no synonym
for ‘roves’ was strong enough. I seldom saw Osbert and Sacheverell
Sitwell after the war-years. When I did I always felt uncomfortably
rustic in their society. Once Osbert sent me a present of a brace of
grouse. They came from his country residence in Derbyshire in a bag
labelled: ‘With Captain Sitwell’s compliments to Captain Graves.’ Nancy
and I could neither of us face the task of plucking and gutting and
roasting the birds, so we gave them to a neighbour. I thanked Osbert:
‘Captain Graves acknowledges with thanks Captain Sitwell’s gift of
Captain Grouse.’
Our total income, counting birthday and Christmas cheques from
relatives, was about one hundred and thirty pounds a year. As Nancy
reminded me, this was about fifty shillings a week and there were
farm labourers at Islip, with more children than we had, who only
got thirty shillings a week. They had a much harder time than we did
earning it and had no one to fall back on, as we had, in case of
sudden illness or other emergency. We used to get free holidays, too,
at Harlech, when my mother would insist on paying the train-fare as
well as giving us our board free. We really had nothing to complain
about. Thinking how difficult life was for the labourers’ wives kept
Nancy permanently depressed. I have omitted to mention a further
source of income—the Rupert Brooke Fund, of which Edward Marsh was the
administrator. Rupert Brooke had stated in his will that all royalties
accruing from any published work of his should be divided among needy
poets with families to support. When money was very short we would dip
into this bag.
We still called ourselves socialists, but had become dissatisfied
with Parliamentary socialism. We had greater sympathy with communism,
though not members of the Communist Party. None the less, when a branch
of the Parliamentary Labour Party was formed in the village, we gave
the use of the cottage for its weekly meetings throughout the winter
months. Islip was a rich agricultural area; but with a reputation for
slut-farming. It did not pay the tenant farmers to farm too well. Mr.
Wise, one of our members, once heckled a speaker in the Conservative
interest about a protective duty imposed by the Conservative Government
on dried currants. The speaker answered patronizingly: ‘Well, surely a
duty on Greek currants won’t hurt you working men here at Islip? You
don’t grow currants in these parts, do you?’ ‘No, sir,’ replied Mr
Wise, ‘the farmers main crop hereabouts is squitch.’
I was persuaded to stand for the parish council, and was a member
for a year. I wish I had taken records of the smothered antagonism
of the council meetings. There were seven members of the council,
with three representatives of labour and three representatives of
the farmers and gentry; the chairman was a farmer, a Liberal who had
Labour support as being a generous employer and the only farmer in
the neighbourhood who had had a training at an agricultural college.
He held the balance very fairly. We contended over a proposed
application to the district council for the building of new cottages.
Many returned ex-soldiers who wished to marry had nowhere to live with
their wives. The Conservative members opposed this because it would
mean a penny on the rates. Then there was the question of procuring a
recreation ground for the village. The football team did not wish to
be dependent on the generosity of one of the big farmers who rented it
to us at a nominal rate. The Conservatives opposed this again in the
interest of the rates, and pointed out that shortly after the Armistice
the village had turned down a recreation ground scheme, preferring
to spend the memorial subscription money on a cenotaph. The Labour
members pointed out that the vote was taken, as at the 1918 General
Election, before the soldiers had returned to express their view. Nasty
innuendoes were made about farmers who had stayed at home and made
their pile, while their labourers fought and bled. The chairman calmed
the antagonists. Another caricature scene: myself in corduroys and a
rough frieze coat, sitting in the village schoolroom (this time with
no ‘evils of alcoholism’ around the wall, but with nature-drawings
and mounted natural history specimens to take their place), debating
as an Oxfordshire village elder whether or not Farmer So-and-so was
justified in using a footpath across the allotments as a bridle-path,
disregarding the decayed stile which, I urged, disproved his right.
My association with the Labour Party severed my relations with the
village gentry with whom, when I first came to the village, I had
been on friendly terms. My mother had been to the trouble of calling
on the rector when she viewed the property. I had even been asked by
the rector to speak from the chancel steps of the village church at a
war memorial service. He suggested that I should read poems about the
war. Instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some
of the more painful poems of Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying
of gas-poisoning and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud.
And I suggested that the men who had fallen, destroyed as it were by
the fall of the Tower of Siloam, had not been particularly virtuous or
particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors
should thank God that they were alive and do their best to avoid wars
in the future. The church-party, with the exception of the rector, an
intelligent man, was scandalized. But the ex-service men had not been
too well treated on their return and it pleased them to be reminded
that they were on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest
men: I noticed that though obeying the King’s desire to wear their
campaigning medals, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.
The leading Labour man of the village was William Beckley, senior.
He had an inherited title dating from the time of Cromwell: he was
known as ‘Fisher’ Beckley. A direct ancestor had been fishing on the
Cherwell during the siege of Oxford, and had ferried Cromwell himself
and a body of Parliamentary troops over the river. In return Cromwell
had given him perpetual fishing-rights from Islip to the stretch of
river where the Cherwell Hotel now stands. The cavalry skirmish at
Islip bridge still remained in local tradition, and a cottager at the
top of the hill showed me a small stone cannon-ball, fired on that
occasion, that he had found sticking in his chimney-stack. But even
Cromwell came late in the history of the Beckley family; the Beckleys
were watermen on the river long before the seventeenth century. Indeed
Fisher Beckley knew, by family tradition, the exact spot where a barge
was sunk conveying stone for the building of Westminster Abbey.
Islip was the birthplace of Edward the Confessor, and the Islip lands
had been given by him to the Abbey; it was still Abbey property after
a thousand years. The Abbey stone had been quarried from the side of
the hill close to the river; our cottage was on the old slip-way down
which the stone-barges had been launched. Some time in the ’seventies
American weed was introduced into the river and made netting difficult;
fishing finally became unprofitable. Fisher Beckley had been for many
years now an agricultural labourer. His socialist views prevented him
from getting employment in the village, so he had to trudge to work to
a farm some miles out. But he was still Fisher Beckley and, among us
cottagers, the most respected man in Islip.
XXX
My parents were most disappointed when I failed to sit for my Oxford
finals. But through the kindness of Sir Walter Raleigh, the head of the
English School, I was excused finals as I had been excused everything
else, and allowed to proceed to the later degree of Bachelor of
Letters. Instead of estimating, at the examiners’ request, the effect
of the influence of Dryden on pastoral poets of the early eighteenth
century, or tracing the development of the sub-plot in Elizabethan
comedies between the years 1583 and 1594, I was allowed to offer a
written thesis on a subject of my own choice. Sir Walter Raleigh was a
good friend to me. He agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should
not be expected to tutor me. He liked my poetry, and suggested that we
should only meet as friends. He was engaged at the time on the official
history of the war in the air and found it necessary to have practical
flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he
needed. It was on a flight out East that he got typhoid fever and died.
I was so saddened by his death that it was some time before I thought
again about my thesis, and I did not apply for another tutor. The
subject I had offered was _The Illogical Element in English Poetry_.
I had already written a prose book, _On English Poetry_, a series of
‘workshop notes’ about the writing of poetry. It contained much trivial
but also much practical material, and emphasized the impossibility of
writing poetry of ‘universal appeal.’ I regarded poetry as, first, a
personal cathartic for the poet suffering from some inner conflict,
and then as a cathartic for readers in a similar conflict. I made a
tentative connection between poetry and dream in the light of the
dream-psychology in which I was then interested as a means of
curing myself.
The thesis did not work out like a thesis. I found it difficult to keep
to an academic style and decided to write it as if it were an ordinary
book. Anyhow, I could expect no knowledge of or sympathy with modern
psychology from the literature committee that would read it. I rewrote
it in all nine times, and it was unsatisfactory when finished. I was
trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry. It
was only, I wrote, to be fully understood by close analysis of the
latent associations of the words used; the obvious prose meaning was
often in direct opposition to the latent content. The weakness of the
book lay in its not clearly distinguishing between the supra-logical
thought-processes of poetry and of pathology. Before it appeared I
had published _The Meaning of Dreams_, which was intended to be a
popular shillingsworth for the railway bookstall; but I went to the
wrong publisher and he issued it at five shillings. Being too simply
written for the informed public, and too expensive for the ignorant
public to which it was addressed, it fell flat; as indeed it deserved.
I published a volume of poems every year between 1920 and 1925; after
_The Pier-Glass_, published in 1921, I made no attempt to write for
the ordinary reading public, and no longer regarded my work as being
of public utility. I did not even flatter myself that I was conferring
benefits on posterity; there was no reason to suppose that posterity
would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I only wrote when
and because there was a poem pressing to be written. Though I assumed
a reader of intelligence and sensibility and considered his possible
reactions to what I wrote, I no longer identified him with contemporary
readers or critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than
the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural
design to indicate the size of the building. As a result of this
greater strictness of writing I was soon accused of trying to get
publicity and increase my sales by a wilful clowning modernism. Of
these books, _Whipperginny_, published in 1923, showed the first signs
of my new psychological studies.
_Mock-Beggar Hall_, published in 1924, was almost wholly philosophical.
As Lawrence wrote to me when I sent it to him, it was ‘not the sort of
book that one would put under one’s pillow at night.’ This philosophic
interest was a result of my meeting with Basanta Mallik, when I was
reading a paper to an undergraduate society. One of the results of
my education was a strong prejudice, amounting to contempt, against
anyone of non-European race; the Jews, though with certain exceptions
such as Siegfried, were included in this prejudice. But I had none
of my usual feelings with Basanta. He did not behave as a member of
a subject-race—neither with excessive admiration nor with excessive
hatred of all things English. Though he was a Bengali he was not given
to flattery or insolence. I found on inquiry that he belonged to a
family of high caste. His father had become converted to Christianity
and signalized his freedom from Hindu superstition by changing his
diet; meat and alcohol, untouched by his ancestors for some two
thousand years, soon brought about his death. Basanta had been brought
up in the care of a still unconverted grandmother, but did not have
the strict Hindu education that the boy of caste is given by his male
relatives. He was sent to Calcutta University and, some years before
the war, after taking a law degree, was given the post of assistant
tutor to the children of the Maharajah of Nepal. In Nepal he came to
the notice of the Maharajah as one of the few members of the Court
not concerned in a plot against his life, and was promoted to chief
tutor.
The relations between Nepal and India were strained at this time.
Basanta was the only man in Nepal with an up-to-date knowledge of
international law. His advice ultimately enabled the Maharajah to
induce the British to sign the 1923 treaty recognizing the complete
independence of the country, which had for many years been threatened
with British protection. Under the terms of this treaty, no foreigners
might enter Nepal except at the personal invitation of the Maharajah.
The Maharajah had sent Basanta over to England to study British
political psychology; this knowledge might be useful in the event of
future misunderstandings between Nepal and India. He had now been some
eleven years in Oxford but, becoming a philosopher and making many
friends, had overcome his long-standing grudge against the British.
Basanta used to come out to Islip frequently to talk philosophy
with us. With him came Sam Harries, a young Balliol scholar, who
soon became our closest friend. Metaphysics soon made psychology of
secondary interest for me: it threatened almost to displace poetry.
Basanta’s philosophy was a development of formal metaphysics, but
with characteristically Indian insistence on ethics. He believed in
no hierarchy of ultimate values or the possibility of any unifying
religion or ideology. But at the same time he insisted on the necessity
of strict self-discipline in the individual in meeting every possible
demand made upon him from whatever quarter, and he recommended constant
self-watchfulness against either dominating or being dominated by any
other individual. This view of strict personal morality consistent
with scepticism of social morality agreed very well with my
practice. He returned to India in 1923 and considered taking an
appointment in Nepal, but decided that to do so would put him in a
position incompatible with his philosophy. He would have returned
to Oxford but a friend had died, leaving him to support a typical
large Hindu family of aunts and cousins remotely related. We missed
Basanta’s visits, but Sam Harries used to come out regularly. Sam was
a communist, an atheist, enthusiastic about professional football
(Aston Villa was his favourite team) and experimental films, and most
puritanical in matters of sex.
Other friends were not numerous. Edith Sitwell was one of them.
It was a surprise, after reading her poems, to find her gentle,
domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent
her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs. She used to
write to Nancy and me frequently, but 1926 ended the friendship. 1926
was yesterday, when the autobiographical part of my life was fast
approaching its end. I saw no more of any of my army friends, with the
exception of Siegfried, and meetings with him were now only about once
a year. Edmund Blunden had gone as professor of English Literature
to Tokyo. Lawrence was now in the Royal Tank Corps. He had enlisted
in the Royal Air Force when he came to the end of things after the
Middle-Eastern settlement of 1921, but had been forced to leave it
when a notice was given of a question in the House about his presence
there under an assumed name. When Sir Walter Raleigh died I felt my
connection with Oxford University was broken, and when Rivers died,
and George Mallory on Everest, it seemed as though the death of my
friends was following me in peace-time as relentlessly as in war.
Basanta had spoken of getting an invitation from the Maharajah for us
to visit Nepal with him but, when he found it impossible to resume his
work there, the idea lapsed. Sam went to visit him in India in 1924;
his reputation as a communist followed him there. He wrote that he
was tagged by policemen wherever he went in Calcutta; but they need
not have worried. A week or two after his arrival he died of cerebral
malaria. After Sam’s death our friendship with Basanta gradually
failed. India re-absorbed him and we changed.
There came one more death among our friends; a girl who had been a
friend of Sam’s at Oxford and had married another friend at Balliol.
They used to come out together to Islip with Basanta and talk
philosophy. She died in childbirth. There had been insufficient care
in the pre-natal period and a midwife attended the case without having
sterilized her hands after attending an infectious case. Deaths in
childbirth had as particular horror for me now as they had for Nancy.
I had assisted the midwife at the birth of Sam, our fourth child, and
could not have believed that a natural process like birth could be so
abominable in its pain and extravagant messiness. Many deaths and a
feeling of bad luck clouded these years. Islip was no longer a country
refuge. I found myself resorting to my war-time technique of getting
through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy
was in poor health and able to do less and less work. Our finances had
been improved by an allowance from Nancy’s father that covered the
extra expense of the new children—we now had about two hundred pounds
a year—but I decided that cottage life with four of them under six
years old, and Nancy ill, was not good enough. I would have, after all,
to take a job. Nancy and I had always sworn that we would manage
somehow so that this would not be necessary.
The only possible job that I could undertake was teaching. But I
needed a degree, so I completed my thesis, which I published under
the title of _Poetic Unreason_ and handed in, when in print, to the
examining board. I was most surprized when they accepted it and I had
my bachelor’s degree. But the problem of an appointment remained, I
did not want a preparatory or secondary-school job which would keep me
away from home all day. Nancy did not want anyone else but myself and
her looking after the children, so there seemed no solution. And then
the doctor told Nancy that if she wished to regain her health she must
spend the winter in Egypt. In fact, the only appointment that would
be at all suitable would be a teaching job in Egypt, at a very high
salary, where there was little work to do. And a week or two later
(for this is the way things have always happened to me in emergencies)
I was asked to offer myself as a candidate for the post of professor
of English Literature at the newly-founded Egyptian University at
Cairo. I had been recommended, I found out later, by two or three
influential friends, among them Arnold Bennett, who has always been a
good friend to me, and Lawrence, who had served in the war with Lord
Lloyd, the then High Commissioner of Egypt. The salary amounted, with
the passage money, to fourteen hundred pounds a year. I fortified these
recommendations with others, from my neighbour, Colonel John Buchan,
and from the Earl of Oxford, who had taken a fatherly interest in me
and often visited Islip. And so was given the appointment.
Among other books written in the Islip period were two essays on
contemporary poetry. I then held the view that there was not such
a thing as poetry of constant value; I regarded it as a product of
its period only having relevance in a limited context. I regarded all
poetry, in a philosophic sense, as of equal merit, though admitting
that at any given time pragmatic distinctions could be drawn between
such poems as embodied the conflicts and syntheses of the time and were
therefore charged with contemporary sagacity, and such as were literary
hang-overs from a preceding period and were therefore inept. I was, in
fact, finding only extrinsic values for poetry. I found psychological
reasons why poems of a particular sort appealed to a particular class
of reader, surviving even political, economic, and religious change. I
published two other books. One was waste—a ballad-opera called _John
Kemp’s Wager_. It marked the end of what I may call the folk-song
period of my life. It was an artificial simple play for performance
by village societies and has been once performed, in California. The
newspaper cuttings that I was sent described it as delightfully English
and quaint. A better book was _My Head, My Head_, a romance on the
story of Elijah and the Shunamite woman. It was an ingenious attempt
to repair the important omissions in the biblical story; but like all
the other prose-books that I had written up to this time it failed in
its chief object, which was to sell. During this period I was willing
to undertake almost any writing job to bring in money. I wrote a series
of rhymes for a big map-advertisement for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits
(I was paid, but the rhymes never appeared); and silly lyrics for a
light opera, _Lord Clancarty_, for which I was not paid, because the
opera was never staged; and translations from Dutch and German carols;
and rhymes for children’s Christmas annuals; and edited three sixpenny
pamphlets of verse for Benn’s popular series—selections from
Skelton’s poems, and from my own, and a collection of the less
familiar nursery rhymes. I did some verse-reviewing for the _Nation_
and _Athenæum_, but by 1925 I found it more and more difficult to be
patient with dud books of poetry. And they all seemed to be dud now. I
had agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot in a book about modernist
poetry to which we were each to contribute essays, but the plan fell
through; and later I was glad that it had.
I also made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the
poison of war-memories by finishing my novel, but I had to abandon
them. It was not only that they brought back neurasthenia, but that
I was ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet
not sure enough of myself to retranslate it into undisguised history.
If my scruples had been literary and not moral I could easily have
compromised, as many writers have since done, with a pretended diary
stylistically disguising characters, times, and dates. I had found the
same difficulty in my last year at Charterhouse with a projected novel
of public-school life.
XXXI
So, second-class, by P. & O. to Egypt, with a nurse for the children,
a new wardrobe in the new cabin-trunks and a good-looking motor-car in
the hold. Lawrence had written to me:
Egypt, being so near Europe, is not a savage country. The Egyptians
... you need not dwell among. Indeed, it will be a miracle if an
Englishman can get to know them. The bureaucrat society is exclusive,
and lives smilingly unaware of the people. Partly because so many
foreigners come there for pleasure, in the winter; and the other
women, who live there, must be butterflies too, if they would consort
with the visitors.
I thought the salary attractive. It has just been raised. The work
may be interesting, or may be terrible, according to whether you get
keen on it, like Hearn, or hate it, like Nichols. Even if you hate
it, there will be no harm done. The climate is good, the country
beautiful, the things admirable, the beings curious and disgusting;
and you are stable enough not to be caught broadside by a mere
dislike for your job. Execute it decently, as long as you draw the
pay, and enjoy your free hours (plentiful in Egypt) more freely.
Lloyd will be a good friend.
Roam about—Palestine. The Sahara oases. The Red Sea province. Sinai
(a jolly desert). The Delta Swamps. Wilfred Jennings Bramly’s
buildings in the Western Desert. The divine mosque architecture of
Cairo town.
Yet, possibly, you will not dislike the job. I think the coin spins
evenly. The harm to you is little, for the family will benefit by
a stay in the warm (Cairo isn’t warm, in winter) and the job won’t
drive you into frantic excesses of rage. And the money will be
useful. You should save a good bit of your pay after the expense of
the first six months. I recommend the iced coffee at Groppi’s.
And so, my blessing.
I had a married half-brother and half-sister in Cairo who had both
been there since I was a little boy. My brother, a leading Government
official (at a salary less than my own), and his wife viewed my
coming to Egypt, I heard, with justifiable alarm. They had heard of
my political opinions. My sister, to whom I was devoted, had no such
suspicions and wrote a letter of most affectionate welcome. Siegfried
came to see me off. He said: ‘Do you know who’s on board? “The
Image!” He’s still in the regiment, going to join the battalion in
India. Last time I saw him he was sitting in the bottom of a dug-out
gnawing a chunk of bully-beef like a rat.’ The Image had been at my
last preparatory school and had won a scholarship at the same time as
myself; and we had been at Wrexham and Liverpool together; and he had
been wounded with the Second Battalion at High Wood at the same time
as myself; and now we were travelling out East together. A man with
whom I had nothing in common; there was no natural reason why we should
have been thrown so often in each other’s company. The ship touched
at Gibraltar, where we disembarked and bought figs and rode round the
town. I remembered the cancelled War Office telegram and thought what
a fool I had been to prefer Rhyl. At Port Said a friend of my sister’s
helped us through the Customs; I was feeling very sea-sick, but I knew
that I was in the East because he began talking about Kipling and
Kipling’s wattles of Lichtenburg, and whether they were really wattles
or some allied plant. And so to Cairo, looking out of the windows
all the way, delighted at summer fields in January.
My sister-in-law advised us against the more exclusive residential
suburb of Gizereh, where she had just taken a flat herself, so with
her help we found one at Heliopolis, a few miles east of Cairo. We
found the cost of living very high, for this was the tourist season.
But I was able to reduce the grocery bill by taking advantage of the
more reasonable prices of the British army canteen; I presented myself
as an officer on the pension list. We had two Sudanese servants, and,
contrary to all that we had been warned about native servants, they
were temperate, punctual, respectful, and never, to my knowledge, stole
a thing beyond the remains of a single joint of mutton. It seemed queer
to me not to look after the children or do housework, and almost too
good to be true to have as much time as I needed for my writing.
The University was an invention of King Fuad’s, who had always been
anxious to be known as a patron of the arts and sciences. There had
been a Cairo University before this one, but it had been nationalistic
in its policy and, not being directed by European experts or supported
by the Government, had soon come to an end. The new University had
been planned ambitiously. There were faculties of science, medicine
and letters, with a full complement of highly-paid professors;
only one or two of these were Egyptian, the rest being English,
Swedish, French and Belgian. The medicine and science faculties were
predominantly English, but the appointments to the faculty of letters
were predominantly French. They had been made in the summer months
when the British High Commissioner was out of Egypt, or he would no
doubt have discountenanced them. Only one of the French and Belgian
professors had any knowledge of English, and none of them had
any knowledge of Arabic. Of the two hundred Egyptian students, who
were mostly the sons of rich merchants and landowners, fewer than
twenty had more than a smattering of French—just enough for shopping
purposes—though they had all learned English in the secondary schools.
All official university correspondence was in Arabic. I was told
that it was classical Arabic, in which no word is admitted that is
of later date than Mohammed, but I could not tell the difference.
The ‘very learned Sheikh’ Graves had to take his letters to the post
office for interpretation. My twelve or thirteen French colleagues
were men of the highest academic distinction. But two or three English
village-schoolmasters would have been glad to have undertaken their
work at one-third of their salaries and done it far better. The
University building had been a harem-palace of the Khedive. It was
French in style, with mirrors and gilding.
British officials at the Ministry of Education told me that I must keep
the British flag flying in the faculty of letters. This embarrassed
me. I had not come to Egypt as an ambassador of Empire, and yet I did
not intend to let the French indulge in semi-political activities at
my expense. The dean, M. Grégoire, was a Belgian, an authority on
Slav poetry. He was tough, witty, and ran his show very plausibly. He
had acquired a certain slyness and adaptability during the war when,
as a civilian in Belgium under German occupation, he had edited an
underground anti-German publication. The professor of French Literature
had lost a leg in France. He greeted me at first in a patronizing way:
I was his young friend rather than his dear colleague. But as soon
as he learned that I also had bled in the cause of civilization
and France I became his most esteemed chum. The Frenchmen lectured,
but with the help of Arabic interpreters, which did not make either
for speed or accuracy. I found that I was expected to give two
lectures a week, but the dean soon decided that if the students were
ever to dispense with the interpreters they must be given special
instruction in French—which reduced the time for lectures, so that I
had only one a week to give. This one was pandemonium. The students
were not hostile, merely excitable and anxious to show their regard
for me and liberty and Zaghlul Pasha and the well-being of Egypt,
all at the same time. I often had to shout at the top of my loudest
barrack-square voice to restore order. They had no textbooks of any
sort; there were no English books in the University library, and it
took months to get any through the French librarian. This was January
and they were due for an examination in May. They were most anxious
to master Shakespeare, Byron, and Wordsworth in that time. I had no
desire to teach Wordsworth and Byron to anyone, and I wished to protect
Shakespeare from them. I decided to lecture on the most rudimentary
forms of literature possible. I chose the primitive ballad and its
development into epic and the drama. I thought that this would at least
teach them the meaning of the simpler literary terms. But English was
not easy for them, though they had learned it for eight years or so
in the schools. Nobody, for instance, when I spoke of a ballad-maker
singing to his harp, knew what a harp was. I told them it was what
King David played upon, and drew a picture of it on the blackboard;
at which they shouted out: ‘O, _anur_.’ But they thought it beneath
their dignity to admit the existence of ballads in Egypt; though I had
myself seen the communal ballad-group in action at the hind legs of
the Sphinx, where a gang of fellaheen was clearing away the sand.
One of the gang was a chanty-man: his whole job was to keep the others
moving. The fellaheen did not exist for the students; they thought of
them as animals. They were most anxious to be given printed notes of my
lectures with which to prepare themselves for the examinations. I tried
to make the clerical staff of the faculty duplicate some for me, but in
spite of promises I never got them done. My lectures in the end became
a dictation of lecture-notes for lectures that could not be given—this,
at any rate, kept the students busy.
They were interested in my clothes. My trousers were the first Oxford
trousers that they had seen in Egypt; their own were narrow at the
ankles. So I set a new fashion. One evening I went to dine with the
rector of the University. Two of my students, sons of Ministers,
happened also to be invited. They noticed that I was wearing white silk
socks with my evening dress. Later I heard from the vice-rector, Ali
Bey Omar, whom I liked best of the University officials, that a day
or two later he had seen the same students at a Government banquet,
wearing white silk socks. When they looked round on the distinguished
assembly they found that they were the only white socks present. Ali
Bey Omar gave a pantomime account of how they tried to loosen their
braces surreptitiously and stroke down their trousers to hide their
shame.
For some weeks I missed even my single hour a week, because the
students went on strike. It was Ramadan, and they had to fast for a
month between sunrise and sunset. Between sunset and sunrise they
ate rather more than usual in compensation, and this dislocation of
their digestive processes had a bad effect on their nerves. I have
forgotten the pretext for the strike: it was some trouble about
the intensive French instruction. The fact was that they wanted leisure
at home to read up their notes of the earlier work of the term in
preparation for the examination. The Professor of Arabic, who was one
of the few Egyptians with a reputation as an orientalist, published
a book calling attention to pre-Islamic sources of the Koran. His
lectures, delivered in Arabic, demanded more exertion from them than
any of the others, so when the examination came round most of them
absented themselves from the Arabic paper on religious grounds. To
an orthodox Mohammedan the Koran, being dictated by God, can have no
pre-Islamic sources.
I came to know only two of my students fairly well; one was a Greek,
the other a Turk. The Turk was an intelligent, good-natured young
man, perhaps twenty years old. He was very rich, and had a motor-car
in which he twice took me for a drive to the Pyramids. He talked both
French and English fluently, being about the only one (except for
twelve who had attended a French Jesuit college) who could do so. He
told me one day that he would not be able to attend my next lecture as
he was going to be married. I asked him whether this was the first or
second part of the ceremony; he said it was the first. When he returned
he told me that he had not yet been allowed to see the face of his
wife, because her family was orthodox; he would only see it at the
second ceremony. But his sister had been at school with her and said
that she was pretty and a good sort; and her father was a friend of
his father’s. Later, the second ceremony took place, and he confessed
himself perfectly satisfied. I learned that it seldom happened that
when the veil was lifted the bridegroom refused the bride, though he
had the right to do so; she had a similar right. Usually the
couple contrived to meet before even the first ceremony, The girl
would slip the man a note saying: ‘I shall be at Maison Cicurel at the
hat-counter at three-thirty to-morrow I afternoon if you want to see
me. It will be quite in order for me to lift my veil to try on a hat.
You will recognize me by my purple parasol.’
I inquired about the rights of Mohammedan women in Egypt. Apparently
divorce was simple; the man only had to say in the presence of a
witness: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,’ and she was
divorced. On the other hand she was entitled to take her original
dowry back with her, with the interest that had accrued on it during
her married life. Dowries were always heavy and divorces comparatively
rare. It was considered very low-class to have more than one wife;
that was a fellaheen habit. I was told a story of an Egyptian who
was angry with his wife one morning because the breakfast-coffee was
badly made. He shouted out: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce
you.’ ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘now you’ve done it. The servants have
heard what you said. I must go back to my father with my ten thousand
pounds and my sixty camels.’ He apologized for his hasty temper. ‘We
must be remarried,’ he said, ‘as soon as possible.’ She reminded him
that the law prevented them from marrying again unless there were an
intermediate marriage. So he called in a very old man who was watering
the lawn and ordered him to marry her. He was to understand that it
was a marriage of form only. So the gardener married the woman and,
immediately after the ceremony, returned to his watering-pot. Two days
later the woman died, and the gardener inherited the money and the
camels.
The Greek invited me to tea once. He had three beautiful sisters
named Pallas, Aphrodite, and Artemis. They gave me tea in the garden
with European cakes that they had learned to make at the American
college. Next door a pale-faced man stood on a third-floor balcony
addressing the world. I asked Pallas what he was saying: ‘Oh,’ she
said, ‘don’t mind him; he’s a millionaire, so the police leave him
alone. He’s quite mad. He lived ten years in England. He’s saying now
that they’re burning him up with electricity, and he’s telling the
birds all his troubles. He says that his secretary accuses him of
stealing five piastres from him, and it isn’t true. Now he’s saying
that there can’t be a God because God wouldn’t allow the English to
steal the fellaheen’s camels for the war and not return them. Now he’s
saying that all religions are very much the same, and that Buddha is
as good as Mohammed. But really,’ she said, ‘he’s quite mad. He keeps
a little dog in his house, actually in his very room, and plays with
it and talks to it as though it were a human being.’ (Dogs are unclean
in Egypt.) She told me that in another twenty years the women of Egypt
would be in control of everything. The feminist movement had just
started, and as the women of Egypt were by far the most active and
intelligent part of the population, great changes were to be expected.
She said that neither she nor her sisters would stand her father’s
attempts to keep them in their places. Her brother showed me his
library. He was doing the arts-course as a preliminary to law. Besides
his legal textbooks he had Voltaire, Rousseau, a number of saucy French
novels in paper covers, Shakespeare’s works and Samuel Smiles’ _Self
Help_, a book which I had never met before. He asked my advice about
his career, and I advised him to go to a European university because an
arts degree at Cairo would be of little advantage to him.
I did not pay an official call at the Residency at first, though
my brother urged it as etiquette; I decided not to until I had seen
how things were at the University. I had not realized before to what
extent the British were in power in Egypt. I had been told that Egypt
was an independent kingdom, but it seemed that my principal allegiance
was not to the King who had given me my appointment and paid me my
salary, but to the British High Commissioner. Infantry, cavalry, and
air squadrons were a reminder of his power. The British officials could
not understand the Egyptians’ desire to be rid of them. They considered
Egypt most ungrateful for all the painful and difficult administrative
work that they had put into it since the ’eighties, raising it from
a bankrupt country to one of the richest in the world. None of them
took Egyptian nationalism seriously; there was no Egyptian nation they
said. The Greeks, Turks, Syrians, and Armenians who called themselves
Egyptians had no more right in the country than the British. Before the
British occupation they had bled the fellaheen white. The fellaheen
were the only true Egyptians, and it was not they who called for
freedom. Freedom was mere politics, a symptom of the growing riches
of the country and the smatterings of Western education that they had
brought with them. The reduction of the British official class in the
last few years was viewed with disgust. ‘We did all the hard work and
when we go everything will run down; it’s running down already. And
they’ll have to call us back, or if not us, the dagoes, and we don’t
see why they should benefit.’ They did not realize how much the vanity
of the Egyptians—probably the vainest people in the world—was hurt by
the constant sight of British uniform.
Egypt now considered itself a European nation. At the same time
it attempted to take the place of Turkey as the leading power of
Islam. This led to many anomalies. On the same day that the University
students made the protest against the professor of Arabic’s irreligious
views, the students of El Azhar, the great Cairo theological college,
struck against having to wear the Arab dress of kaftan and silk
headdress and appeared in European dress and tarbouche. The tarbouche
was the national hat; even British officials wore it. I myself had
a tarbouche. Being red it attracted the heat of the sun; and it was
stuffy inside and did not protect the back of the head. It would have
been difficult to find a hat more unsuitable for the climate.
XXXII
I did two useful pieces of educational work in Egypt. I ordered a
library of standard textbooks of English literature for the Faculty
Library at the University (from which I hope Mr. Bonamy Dobrée, my
successor, profited). And I acted as examiner to the diploma class
of the Higher Training College which provided English teachers for
the primary and secondary schools. The following is the substance of
a letter handed to me for information as a member of the Board of
Examiners concerned:
To The Principal,
Higher Training College, Cairo.
Sir,
In accordance with your instructions, I beg to submit the following
statement of the works read by the Diploma Class for the forthcoming
examination in English Literature (1580 to 1788) and in Science:
ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_.
2. Lobban’s _The Spectator Club_, p. 39, and _Sir Roger and the
Widow_, p. 51; (111) 5 Essays of Addison, _Fans_, p. 64; _The
Vision of Mirza_, p. 72; _Sir Roger at the Assizes_, p. 68; _Sir
Roger at the Abbey_, p. 81; _Sir Roger at the Play_, p. 86.
3. Galsworthy’s _Justice_.
4. Dryden:
(_a_) With Class 4A, the following poems in Hales’ _Longer English
Poems_:
(_i_) _Mac Flecknoe_ (omitting lines 76–77; 83–86; 142–145;
154–155; 160–165; 170–181; 192–197).
(_ii_) _The Song for St. Cecilia’s Day_ (Hales’, p. 32).
(_iii_) _Alexander’s Feast_ (Hales’, p. 34).
(_b_) With Class 4b, the extracts from _Absolam and
Achitophel_, in Gwynn’s _Masters of English Literature_,
p. 144–145 (characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham).
5. Pope:
(_a_) With 4a, in Hales’ Longer English Poems: The Rape of the
Lock (omitting lines 27–104; 221–282; 449–466; 483 to the end).
(_b_) With 4b, the character of ‘Atticus,’ in Gwynn’s Masters
of Eng. Lit., p. 181.
6. Johnson’s _Vanity of Human Wishes_, in Hales’, p. 65 (omitting
lines 241–343).
7. Goldsmith’s _Vicar of Wakefield_. (All done by 4a; but
only to the end of chap. 19 in 4b.)
8. Goldsmith’s _The Traveller_, in Hales’, p. 91.
9. Gray’s _Elegy_, in Hales’, p. 79.
I regret that lack of time has prevented us from studying the works
of Milton and Spenser or the prose works of Dr. Johnson.
SCIENCE
1. Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 6 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s _Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes_.
2. The first seven chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s Science from an
Easy Chair.
I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant, etc.
These are my contemporary comments, pinned to the letter:
‘When some forty years ago England superseded France as the controlling
European Power in Egypt, English was at first taught in the schools
as an alternative to French, but gradually became dominant as the
European administrative language, though French remained the chief
language of commerce and culture. As a result, the young Egyptian,
who now definitely claims himself a European and denies his African
inheritance, has come to have two distinct minds (switched off and on
casually)—the irresponsible hedonistic café and cinema mind, which
leans towards French, and the grave moralizing bureaucratic mind, which
leans towards English. Early English educationalists in Egypt shrewdly
decided to give their students a moralistic character-forming view of
English literature; and this tradition continues as a counterpoise
to the boulevard view of life absorbed from translations of French
yellow-back novels. But the student of 1926 is not so well-instructed
in English as his predecessor of ten years ago, because the English
educational staff has gradually been liquidated, and the teaching of
English is now principally in the hands of Egyptians, former students,
who are not born teachers or disciplinarians. The Western spirit of
freedom as naively interpreted by the Egyptian student greatly hinders
Egyptian education. The primary and secondary schools, not to mention
the University, are always either on strike, threatening a strike, or
prevented from striking by being given a holiday. So work gets more
and more behindhand. Even the Higher Training College is not free from
such disturbances, which possibly account for the regretted neglect of
Milton, Spenser, and the prose works of Dr. Johnson. This Diploma
Class consists of students who, after some twelve years’ study of
English, the last four or five years under English instructors, are now
qualifying to teach the language and literature to their compatriots.
‘The Egyptian student is embarrassingly friendly, very quick at
learning by heart, disorderly, lazy, rhetorical, slow to reason, and
absolutely without any curiosity for general knowledge. The most
satisfactory way to treat him is with a good-humoured sarcasm, which he
respects; but if he once gets politically excited nothing is any use
but an affected violent loss of temper. When introduced to the simpler
regions of English literature he finds himself most in sympathy with
the eighteenth century; and the English instructor, if he wishes to get
any results at all, must be ready to regard Shakespeare, Galsworthy and
Conan Doyle as either immature or decadent figures in relation to the
classical period. The _Science_ referred to in the attached letter is
supposed to educate the student in twentieth-century rationalism, to
which he gives an eighteenth-century cast. The following essay is the
work of one Mahmoud Mohammed Mahmoud of the Diploma Class, and refers
principally to two chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s _Science from an
Easy Chair_:
Environment as a Factor in Evolution
This is the theory of evolutions. Once it was thought that the
earth’s crust was caused by catastrophes, but when Darwin came
into the world and had a good deal of philosophy, he said: ‘All
different kinds of species differ gradually as we go backwards and
there is no catastrophes, and if we apply the fact upon previous
predecessors we reach simpler and simpler predecessors, until we
reach the Nature.’ Man, also, is under the evolutions. None can deny
this if he could deny the sun in daylight. A child from the beginning
of his birthday possesses instincts like to suckle his food from the
mamel of his mother and many others. But he is free of habits and he
is weak as anything. Then he is introduced into a house and usually
finds himself among parents, and his body is either cleansed or left
to the dirts. This shows his environment. Superficial thinkers are
apt to look on environment as (at best) a trifle motive in bringing
up, but learned men believe that a child born in the presence of some
women who say a bad word, this word, as believed by them, remains in
the brain of the child until it ejects.
Environment quickly supplies modification. The life of mountainous
goats leads them to train themselves on jumping. The camel is
flat-footed with hoofs for the sand. Some kind of cattle were wild in
the past but lived in plain lands and changed into gentle sheep. The
frog when young has her tail and nostrils like the fish, suitable for
life at sea, but changing her environment, the tail decreased. The
sea is broad and changeable, so those who live at sea are changeable
and mysterious. Put a cow in a dirty damp place and she will become
more and more slender until she die. Also horses; horse had five
fingers on his legs but now one only from running for water in the
draught. Climate also affects bodily habits of the dear Europeans
who live in Egypt. They who were smart and patient and strong with a
skin worth the name of weatherproof become also fatigable and fond
of leisure.... From the theory we learn that human beings should be
improved like the beasts by creating healthy youngs and by good
Freubel education.
‘The next short specimen essay by Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammed is in
answer to the question: “What impression do you get from Shakespeare of
the character of Lady Macbeth?”:
The Character of Lady Macbeth
Sir, to write shortly, Lady Macbeth was brave and venturesome; but
she had no tact. She says to Macbeth: ‘Now the opportunity creates
itself, lose it not. Where is your manlihood in these suitable
circumstances? I have children and I know the love of a mother’s
heart. But you must know I would dash the child’s head and drive away
the boneless teeth which are milking me rather than to give a promise
and then leave it.’
Macbeth says: ‘But we may fail.’
‘Fail?’ says L. M. ‘But stick to the point and we will not fail.
Leave the rest to me. I shall put drugs in the grooms’ drink and we
shall ascuse them.’
Macbeth says: ‘You are fit to lay men-children only.’
The impression on the reader becomes very great and feels with anger.
‘And this from the hand of Mahmoud Mahmoud Mohammed, offered as a
formal exercise in English composition:
The Best Use of Leisure Time
Leisure time is a variety to tireful affairs. God Almighty created
the Universe in six days and took a rest in the seventh. He
wished to teach us the necessity of leisure time. Man soon discovered
by experience that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ But
this leisure time may be dangerous and ill-used if the mind will not
take its handle and move it wisely to different directions. Many
people love idleness. It is a great prodigality which leads to ruin.
Many Egyptians spend their times in cafés longing for women and
tracking them with their eyes, which corrupts and pollutes manners.
They are perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime. Others try
to have rest through gumbling, which is the scourge of society and
individual. But let _us_ rather enjoy external nature, the beautiful
leavy trees, the flourishing fields, and the vast lawns of green
grass starred with myriads of flowers of greater or small size. There
the birds sing and build their nests, the meandering canals flow with
fresh water, and the happy peasants, toiling afar from the multitude
of town life, purify the human wishes from personal stain. Also
museums are instructive. It is quite wrong to keep to usual work and
fatigable studies, but quite right to free our minds from the web of
wordly affairs in which they are entangled.
Yes, let us with the lark leave our beds to enjoy the cool breeze
before sunrise. Let us when the lasy or luxurious are snoring or sunk
in their debaucheries sit under the shady trees and meditate. We
can think of God, the river and the moon, and enjoy the reading of
Gray’s _Elegy_ to perfection. We shall brush the dues on the lawn at
sunrise, for,
A country life is sweat
In moderate cold and heat.
Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable
passions, wise moral and good pathos: reading maketh a full man,
nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument
at little price. ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law
which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the
sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of
the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the
sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better
than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do
a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a
sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that
the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or
the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the
Egyptian Exhibition, and the soldier may go to the sea to practice
swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may
take shelter in time of war.
Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his
books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among
the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and
Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it
is his own fault. He _can_ be happy if his leisure time brings profit
and not disgrace.
‘The Diploma Class students are supposed to be four years in advance
of my own, and, not being of the moneyed class, are more interested
in passing their examinations with distinction. Also, since their
careers as teachers of English depend on the continuance of the
British military occupation, they take the morality of this
regime more seriously than the University students, who are mostly
the sons of pashas. These, with few exceptions, suffer from the
bankruptcy of modern Egyptian life; they are able to take neither
European culture nor their own Islamic traditions seriously. So far
as I can make out from talking with the more intelligent of them,
what Egypt asks for is a European government and education free of
European political domination, but with a European technical personnel
in the key positions, which it cannot do without and will pay highly
for. Egypt can never be a great independent spiritual or political
force in the Near East, but because of its wealth it can become at
least the commercial centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Turkey is already
a modern European country; Egypt will remain for some time yet
eighteenth-century in spirit—a compromise between political romanticism
and religious classicism. For a generation or two yet the descendants
of the landowners enriched by European administration will continue to
“spend their times in cafés longing for women,” and to be “perplexed
and annoyed by the length of daytime,” while “the happy peasants” go
on “toiling afar from the multitude of town life.” And my professional
successors will continue to become “fatigable and fond of leisure.”’
* * * * *
For I had already decided to resign. So had the professor of Latin,
my only English colleague. And the one-legged professor of French
Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on.
The Egyptians were most hospitable. I attended one heavy banquet,
at the Semiramis Hotel, given by the Minister of Education. Tall
Sudanese waiters dressed in red robes served a succession of the most
magnificent dishes that I have seen anywhere, even on the films.
I remember particularly a great model of the Cairo Citadel in ice,
with the doors and windows filled with caviare which one scooped out
with a golden Moorish spoon. I heard recently that this banquet, which
must have cost thousands, has not yet been paid for. I found little
to do in Egypt (since I had no intention of mixing with the British
official class, joining the golf club, or paying official calls) but
eat coffee-ices at Groppi’s, visit the open-air cinemas and sit at home
in our flat at Heliopolis and get on with writing. My sister, who lived
near, continued sisterly. During the season of the Khamsin, a hot wind
which sent the temperature up on one occasion to 113 degrees in the
shade, I put the finishing touches to a book called _Lars Porsena, or
The Future of Swearing and Improper Language_. I also worked on a study
of the English ballad.
The best thing that I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old King Seti
the Good unwrapped of its mummy-cloths in the Cairo Museum. Nearly all
the best things in Egypt were dead. The funniest thing was a French
bedroom farce played in Arabic by Syrian actors in a native theatre.
The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on
opposite sides of the stage. They sang French songs (in translation),
varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of
their own music. The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts,
oranges, sunflower-seeds and heads of lettuces.
I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic
year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at
the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told to
collect it from his A.D.C. He asked me how I found Egypt and I said:
‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly.
‘Only all right?’ That was all that passed between us. He believed
in his job more than I did in mine. He used to drive through Cairo in
a powerful car, with a Union Jack flying from it, at about sixty miles
an hour. He had motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way—Sir Lee Stack,
the Sirdar, had been killed the year before while driving through
Cairo and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day I
was shown the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened;
there was a crowd at the spot which I at first took for a party of
sightseers, but the attraction proved to be a naked woman lying on
the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms. She was one of the
_hashish_ dope-cases that were very common in Egypt. The crowd was
jeering at her; the policeman a few yards off paid no attention.
I attended a levee at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It
began early, at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable
precedence to the staff of the University; it came in soon after the
diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before
the army. While still in England I had been warned to buy suitable
clothes—a morning coat and trousers—for this occasion. To be really
correct my coat should have had green facings, green being the national
colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon.
Opinions differed greatly as to what was suitable Court-dress; most of
the French professors arrived in full evening dress with swallowtail
coats and white waistcoats, others wore ordinary dinner jackets. Most
of them had opera-hats; they all had decorations round their necks.
They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball. After
signing my name in the two large hotel registers, one belonging
to the King and the other to the Queen, I was given a refreshing
rice-drink, a courtesy of the Queen’s. I then went up the noble
marble staircase. On every other step stood an enormous black soldier,
royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye commented
on their somewhat listless attitudes; but, no doubt, they pulled
themselves smartly to attention when the Egyptian army general staff
went past. I had been warned that when I met King Fuad I must not be
surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was
apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he was nervous. When
he was a child his family had been shot up by an assassin employed
by interested relatives; and Fuad had taken cover under a table and,
though wounded, had survived. We were moved from room to room. At last
a quiet Turkish-looking gentleman of middle age, wearing regulation
Court-dress, greeted us deferentially in French; I took him for the
Grand Chamberlain. I bowed and said the same thing in French as the
professor in front of me had said, and expected to be led next to the
Throne Room. But the next stage was the cloak-room once more. I had
already met King Fuad. And no Eastern magnificence or wheezing cry.
I attended a royal soiree a few days later. The chief event was a
theatrical variety show. The performance was predominantly Italian.
King Fuad had been educated in Italy, where he attained the rank of
captain in the Italian cavalry, and had a great regard for Italian
culture. (He was ignorant of English, but was a good French scholar.)
The performance belonged to the 1870’s. There was a discreet blonde
shepherdess who did a hopping dance in ankle-length skirts, and a
discreet tenor who confined his passion to his top notes; and there
was a well-behaved comedian who made nice little jokes for the Queen.
I clapped him, because I liked him better than the others, and
everybody looked round at me; I realized that I had done the wrong
thing. An official whispered to me that it was a command performance
and that the actors were, therefore, entitled to no applause. Unless
His Majesty was himself amused the turns must be greeted in silence. I
was wearing Court-dress again but, not to be outdone by the Frenchmen,
I had put on my three campaigning medals—and wished that I had that St.
Anne of the Third Class with the Crossed Swords. And the refreshments!
I will not attempt to describe that Arabian Night buffet; it was so
splendid indeed that it has remained a mere blur in my memory. I
pocketed some particularly fantastic confections to bring home to the
children.
What caused me most surprise in Egypt was the great number of camels
there. I had thought of them only as picture-postcard animals. I had
not expected to see thousands of them in the streets of Cairo, holding
up the motor traffic—in long trains, tied head to rump, with great
sacks of green fodder on their backs.
Our children were a great anxiety. They had to drink boiled milk and
boiled water and be watched all the time to prevent them from taking
off their topees and blue veils. Then they all got measles and were
carried off to an isolation hospital, where they were fed on all the
things that we had been particular since their birth not to give them;
and the native nurses stole their toys. They returned very thin and
wretched-looking and we wondered if we should ever get them safely
home. We booked our passages some time at the end of May. We had only
just enough money for third-class on a small Italian boat with a cargo
of onions. We disembarked at Venice and stopped a day there. After
Egypt, Venice seemed like Heaven. It could never again be to me
what it was that day. I had a European egg in Venice. Egyptian eggs
were about the size of a pigeon’s egg and always tasted strongly of the
garlic which seemed to form a large part of the diet of the Egyptian
fowl.
There are plenty of caricature scenes to look back on in Egypt. Among
them, for instance, myself dressed in my smart yellow gaberdine suit
and seated at a long, baize-covered table in the Faculty Conference
Room. In front of me is a cup of Turkish coffee, a sun helmet, and a
long record in French of the minutes of the last meeting. I am talking
angry bad French at my Belgian and French colleagues in support of the
young professor of Latin, who has just leaped to his feet, pale with
hatred. He is declaring in worse French that he positively refuses
to make a forced contribution of fifty piastres to a memorial wreath
for one of the Frenchmen (who had just died), since he was never
consulted. I am declaring that neither will I, blustering to him in
English that so far as I am concerned all dead Frenchmen can go bury
themselves at their own expense. The lofty, elegant room, once a harem
drawing-room—a portrait of the late Khedive, with a large rent in it,
hanging at a tipsy slant at one end of the room; at the other a large
glass showcase, full of Egypto-Roman brass coins, all muddled together,
their labels loose, in one corner. Through the window market-gardens,
buffaloes, camels, countrywomen in black. Around the table my
horrified, shrugging colleagues, turning to each other and saying:
‘Inoui.... Inoui....’ And outside the rebellious shouts of our students
working themselves up for another strike.
The rest makes no more than conversation—of the Government clerk who
was so doubly unfortunate as to be run over by a racing-car and to find
that the driver was the eldest son of the Minister of Justice;
and of the rich girl in search of a husband who went as paying guest
at fifteen guineas a week to the senior Government official’s wife,
agreeing to pay for all wines and cigars and extras when society came
to dine, and who, meeting only senior Government officials and their
wives, complained that she did not get her money’s worth; and of my
night visit to the temple of a headless monkey-god, full of bats;
and of the English cotton manufacturer who defended the conditions
in his factory on the ground that the population of Egypt since the
British came had been increasing far too rapidly, and that pulmonary
consumption was one of the few checks on it; and of the student’s
mother who, at the sports, said how much she regretted having put
him on the mantelpiece when a baby and run off (being only twelve
years old) to play with her dolls; and of ‘The Limit,’ so named by
Australians during the war, who told my three years’ fortune by
moonlight under the long shadow of the pyramid of Cheops—told it truly
and phrased it falsely; and of the Arab cab-driver who was kind to his
horses; and of my visit to Chawki Bey, the national poet of Egypt,
in his Moorish mansion by the Nile, who was so like Thomas Hardy and
in whose presence his sons, like good Turks, sat dutifully silent;
and of the beggar in the bazaar with too many toes; and of the veiled
vengeance there who tried to touch us; and of the official who, during
the war, on a dream of dearth, had played Joseph, dumping half the
wheat of Australia in Egypt, where it found no buyers and was at last
eaten by donkeys and camels, and who told me that the whole secret of
vivid writing was to use the active rather than the passive voice—to
say ‘Amr-ibn-el-Ass conquered Egypt,’ rather than ‘Egypt was conquered
by Amr-ibn-el-Ass’; and of a visit to ancient dead Heliopolis
with its lovely landscape of green fields, its crooked palm trees,
its water-wheels turned by oxen, and its single obelisk; and of the
other Heliopolis, a brand-new dead town on the desert’s edge, built by
a Belgian company, complete with racecourse and Luna Park, where the
R.A.F. planes flew low at night among the houses, and where the bored
wives of disappointed officials wrote novels which they never finished,
and painted a little in water-colours; and of the little garden of
our flat where I went walking on the first day among the fruit-trees
and flowering shrubs, and how I came upon no less than eight lean and
mangy cats dozing in the beds, and never walked there again; and of
the numerous kites, their foul counterpart in the sky and in the palm
trees; and, lastly, of that fabulous cross-breed between kite and cat
which woke us every morning at dawn, a creature kept as a pet in a
neighbouring tenement inhabited by Syrians and Greeks, whose strangled
cock-a-doodle-doo was to me the dawn-cry of modern Egypt. (Empty
cigar-box—no applause—and I thank you.)
So back to Islip; much to the disappointment of my parents, who thought
that I had at last seen reason and settled down to an appointment
suited equally to my needs and my talents; and to the undisguised
relief of my sister-in-law.
* * * * *
The story trails off here. But to end it with the return from
Egypt would be to round it off too bookishly, to finish on a note of
comfortable suspense, an anticipation of the endless human sequel. I
am taking care to rob you of this. It is not that sort of story. From
a historical point of view it must be read, rather, as one of gradual
disintegration. By the summer of 1926 the disintegration was already
well-advanced. Incidents of autobiographical pertinence became fewer
and fewer.
When we came back Nancy’s health was very much better, but none of us
had any money left. There were a number of books to be sold, chiefly
autographed first editions of modern poets; and Lawrence came to the
rescue with a copy of his _Seven Pillars_ marked, ‘Please sell when
read,’ which fetched over three hundred pounds.
In 1927 Jonathan Cape wrote to me suggesting that I should write a book
for boys about Lawrence. There was not much time to do it to have it
ready for autumn publication (about two months)—and Lawrence was in
India and I had to get his permission and send parts of the manuscript
there for him to read and pass. Lowell Thomas anticipated me with a
_Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrence_; so I decided to make mine a general
book, three times the length of his, working eighteen hours a day at
it. Most of those to whom I wrote for information about Lawrence,
including His Majesty the King, gave me their help. The only rebuff I
got was from George Bernard Shaw, who wrote me the following postcard:
Eyot St. Lawrence,
Welwyn, Herts.
8_th June_ 1927.
A great mistake. You might as well try to write a funny book about
Mark Twain. T. E. has got all out of himself that is to be got. His
name will rouse expectations which you will necessarily disappoint.
Cape will curse his folly for proposing such a thing, and never give
you another commission. Write a book (if you must) about the dullest
person you know; clerical if possible. Give yourself a chance.
G. B. S.
Just before Christmas the book was selling at the rate of ten thousand
copies a week. I heard later that Shaw had mistaken me for my _Daily
Mail_ brother.
Shortly afterwards I had a reply, delayed for nine months, to an
application that I had made, when things were bad, for an appointment
as English lecturer in an Adult Education scheme. I was told that my
qualifications were not considered sufficient. By this time I had lost
all my academic manners and wrote wishing the entire committee in
Baluchistan, to be tickled to death by wild butterflies.
In 1927, in a process of tidying-up, I published a collected book of my
poems. One of the later ones began:
This, I admit, Death is terrible to me,
To no man more so, naturally.
And I have disenthralled my natural terror
Of every comfortable philosopher
Or tall dark doctor of divinity.
Death stands at last in his true rank and order.
The book was selective rather than collective, intended as a
disavowal of over half the poetry that I had so far printed. As Skelton
told Fame, speaking of his regretted poem _Apollo Whirled up his
Chair_, I had done what I could to scrape out the scrolls, To erase it
for ever out of her ragman’s rolls. But I still permitted anthologists
to print some of the rejected pieces if they paid highly enough—if they
wanted them, that was their business and I was glad of the money. On
the other hand I stopped contributing new poems to English and American
periodicals. My critical writings I did not tidy up; but let them go
out of print. In 1927 I began learning to print on a hand-press. In
1928 I continued learning to print.
On May 6th, 1929 Nancy and I suddenly parted company. I had already
finished with nearly all my other leading and subsidiary characters,
and dozens more whom I have not troubled to put in. I began to write
my autobiography on May 23rd and write these words on July 24th, my
thirty-fourth birthday; another month of final review and I shall have
parted with myself for good. I have been able to draw on contemporary
records for most of the facts, but in many passages memory has been
the only source. My memory is good but not perfect. For instance, I
can after two hearings remember the tune and words of any song that
I like, and never afterwards forget them; but there are always odd
discrepancies between my version and the original. So here, there
must be many slight errors of one sort or another. No incidents,
however, are invented or embellished. Some are, no doubt, in their
wrong order; I am uncertain, for example, of the exact date and place
of the megaphoned trench-conversation between the Royal Welch and the
Germans, though I have a contemporary record of it. I am not sure
of some of the less-important names (even of Lance-corporal Baxter’s,
but it was at least a name like Baxter). To avoid the suggestion of
libel I have disguised two names. Also, I make a general disclaimer
of such opinions as I have recorded myself as holding from chapter to
chapter, on education, nature, war, religion, literature, philosophy,
psychology, politics, and so on. This is a story of what I was, not
what I am. Wherever I have used autobiographical material in previous
books and it does not tally with what I have written here, this is the
story and that was literature.
I find myself wondering whether it is justified as a story. Yet I seem
to have done most of the usual storybook things. I had, by the age of
twenty-three, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled,
learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken
life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame, and been
killed. At the age of thirty-four many things still remain undone.
For instance, I have never been on a journey of exploration, or in a
submarine, aeroplane or civil court of law (except a magistrate’s court
on the charge of ‘riding a vehicle, to wit a bicycle, without proper
illumination, to wit a rear lamp’). I have never mastered any musical
instrument, starved, committed civil murder, found buried treasure,
engaged in unnatural vice, slept with a prostitute, or seen a corpse
that has died a natural death. On the other hand, I have ridden on a
locomotive, won a prize at the Olympic Games, become a member of the
senior common-room at one Oxford college before becoming a member of
the junior common-room at another, been examined by the police on
suspicion of attempted murder, passed at dusk in a hail-storm
within half a mile of Stromboli when it was in eruption, had a statue
of myself erected in my lifetime in a London park, and learned to tell
the truth—nearly.
The End
Dedicatory Epilogue
to
Laura Riding
I have used your _World’s End_ as an introductory motto, but you
will be glad to find no reference at all to yourself in the body of
this book. I have not mentioned the _Survey of Modernist Poetry_ and
the _Pamphlet against Anthologies_ as works of collaboration between
you and me, though these books appear in publishers’ catalogues and
obviously put much of my own previous critical writing out of account.
And though I have mentioned printing, I have not given details of
it, or even said that it was with you, printing and publishing in
partnership as The Seizin Press. Because of you the last chapters have
a ghostly look.
The reason of all this is, of course, that by mentioning you as a
character in my autobiography I would seem to be denying you in your
true quality of one living invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond
event. And yet the silence is false if it makes the book seem to have
been written forward from where I was instead of backward from where
you are. If the direction of the book were forward I should still be
inside the body of it, arguing morals, literature, politics, suffering
violent physical experiences, falling in and out of love, making and
losing friends, enduring blindly in time; instead of here outside,
writing this letter to you, as one also living against kind—indeed,
rather against myself.
You know the autobiography of that Lord Herbert of Cherbury whose son
founded the Royal Welch Fusiliers; how he was educated as a gentleman,
studied at Oxford, married young, travelled, played games, fought in
Northern France and wrote books; until at last his active life
ended with a sudden clap of thunder from the blue sky which did ‘so
comfort and cheer’ him that he resolved at last, at this sign, to print
his book _De Veritate_, concerning truth. If you were to appear in my
_De Veritate_ it could only be as ‘this loud though yet gentle noise
... one fair day in the summer, my casement being opened towards the
south, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring.’
For could the story of your coming be told between an Islip Parish
Council Meeting and a conference of the professors of the Faculty
of Letters at Cairo University? How she and I happening by seeming
accident upon your teasing _Quids_, were drawn to write to you, who
were in America, asking you to come to us. How, though you knew no
more of us than we of you, and indeed less (for you knew me at a
disadvantage, by my poems of the war), you forthwith came. And how
there was thereupon a unity to which you and I pledged our faith and
she her pleasure. How we went together to the land where the dead
parade the streets and there met with demons and returned with the
demons still treading behind. And how they drove us up and down the
land.
That was the beginning of the end, and the end and after is yours.
Yet I must relieve your parable of all anecdote of mine. I must tell,
for instance, that in its extreme course in April last I re-lived
the changes of many past years. That when I must suddenly hurry off
to Ireland I found myself on the very boat, from Fishguard, that had
been my hospital-boat twelve years before. That at Limerick I met Old
Ireland herself sitting black-shawled and mourning on the station
bench and telling of the Fall. And so to the beautiful city of Sligo
celebrated in song by my father. And the next train back, this time
by the Wales of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. And the next day to Rouen
with you and her, to recollect the hill-top where you seemed to die as
the one on which I had seemed to die thirteen years before. And then
immediately back. And then, later in the same month, my sudden journey
to Hilton in Huntingdon, to a farm with memories of her as I first knew
her, to burst in upon—as it happened—David Garnett (whom I had never
met before), gulping his vintage port and scandalizing him with my
soldier’s oaths as I denied him a speaking part in your parable.
After which.
After which, anecdotes of yours, travesties of the parable and so
precious to me as vulgar glosses on it. How on April 27th, 1929 it was
a fourth-storey window and a stone area and you were dying. And how it
was a joke between Harold the stretcher-bearer and myself that you did
not die, but survived your dying, lucid interval.
After which.
After which, may I recall, since you would not care to do so yourself,
with what professional appreciation (on May 16th) Mr. Lake is reported
to have observed to those that stood by him in the operating theatre:
‘It is rarely that one sees the spinal-cord exposed to view—especially
at right-angles to itself.’
After which.
After which, let me also recall on my own account my story _The Shout_,
which, though written two years ago, belongs here; blind and slow like
all prophecies—it has left you out entirely. And, because you are left
out, it is an anecdote of mine.
After which.
After which, even anecdotes fail. No more anecdotes. And, of course,
no more politics, religion, conversations, literature, arguments,
dances, drunks, time, crowds, games, fun, unhappiness. I no longer
repeat to myself: ‘He who shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ It
is enough now to say that I have endured. My lung, still barometric of
foul weather, speaks of endurance, as your spine, barometric of fair
weather, speaks of salvation.
[1] ‘Why,’ said the cobbler, ‘what should I do? Will you have me to
go in the King’s wars and to be killed for my labour?’ ‘What, knave,’
said Skelton, ‘art thou a coward, having so great bones?’ ‘No,’
said the cobbler, ‘I am not afeared: it is good to sleep in a whole
skin.’—Merry Tales of Skelton (_Early sixteenth century_).
[2] I do not know what happened to Miller. This was written in the
summer of 1916.
[3] Jenkins was killed not long after.
[4] The quartermaster excepted.
[5] The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the
front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on
anyone who used any word but ‘accessory’ in speaking of the gas. This
was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about it long
before this.
[6] Major Swainson recovered quickly and was back at the Middlesex
Depot after a few weeks. On the other hand, Lawrie, a Royal Welch
company quartermaster-sergeant back at Cambrin, was hit in the neck
that day by a spent machine-gun bullet which just pierced the skin, and
died of shock a few hours later.
[7] He was recommended for a Victoria Cross but got nothing because no
officer evidence, which is a condition of award, was available.
[8] I cannot explain the discrepancy between his dating of my death and
that of the published casualty list.
ERRATUM
_p. ♦396, line 1, et seq._
♦ “398” replaced with “396”
Since this paragraph was printed, I have heard from Mr. Marsh that the
facts are not quite as I have stated them, and that there is not really
any “Rupert Brooke Fund” administered by Mr. Marsh. I much regret this
error which arose from an imperfect recollection. R. G.
Transcriber’s Notes
1. Italicised words are indicated by _underscores_.
2. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the
book.
3. Illustrations are indicated by “[Illustration: caption-text]” and
have been moved to before or after an enclosing paragraph.
4. Misspelled words have been corrected (see below). Archaic,
inconsistent and alternative spellings have been left unchanged.
Spelling and other typos (e.g. duplicate words) in direct quotes
from other sources were left unchanged. Hyphenation has not been
standardised.
5. “Edit Distance” in Corrections table below refers to the
Levenshtein Distance.
Corrections:
Page Source Correction Edit distance
62 among the the five among the five 4
95 Crib-y-ddysgel Crib-y-ddysgl 1
175 opponets opponents 1
202 and the the brigadier and the brigadier 4
301 impossiblity impossibility 1
Erratum 398 396 1
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