Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  The aforementioned assignation was fixed for five o’clock in the lounge of the Caledonian Hotel; but I came down from Slateford by an early afternoon tramcar and spent a couple of hours strolling contentedly about the city, which happened to be looking its best in the hazy sunshine of one of those mild October days which induce mellow meditations. After my monastical existence at the hospital I found Princes Street a very pleasant promenading place. The War did not seem to have deprived Edinburgh of any of its delightful dignity; and when I thought of Liverpool, where I wandered about with my worries in July, my preference for Edinburgh was beyond question. The town-dweller goes out into the country to be refreshed by the stillness, and whatever else he may find there in the way of wild flowers, woods, fields, far-off hills, and the nobly-clouded skies which had somehow escaped his notice while he walked to and fro with his eyes on the ground. Those who live on the land come into the city and – if they are sensible people with an aptitude for experiencing – see it as it really is. It always pleases me to watch simple country people loitering about the London pavements, staring at everything around them and being bumped into by persons pressed for time who are part of that incessant procession which is loosely referred to as ‘the hive of human activity’. All this merely indicates that although I arrived in Edinburgh with a couple of hours to spare and had nothing definite to do except to have a hair-cut, nevertheless I found no difficulty in filling up the time by gazing at shop-windows, faces, and architectural vistas, while feeling that I was very lucky to be alive on that serenely sunlit afternoon.

  Waiting for Doctor Macamble in the lounge of the Caledonian Hotel wasn’t quite such good value. Life was there, of course, offering itself ungrudgingly as material to be observed and ultimately transmuted into memoirs; but it was lounge life, and the collop of it which I indiscriminately absorbed was – well, I will record it without labouring the metaphor any further. (The word collop, by the way, is inserted for the sake of its Caledonian associations.) I sat myself down within easy hearing distance of a well-dressed yellow-haired woman with white eyelashes; she was having tea with an unemphatic-looking major with a sandy moustache. The subjects undergoing discussion were Socialism, Pacifism, Ramsay MacDonald, and Snowden, and the major was acting as audience. His fair companion was ‘fairly on her hind-legs’ about it all. Pacifists, she complained, were worse than the Germans. As for MacDonald and Snowden – ‘I only hope that if they do start their beloved revolution,’ she exclaimed, ‘they’ll both be strung up to the nearest lamp-post by the soldiers they are now trying to betray.’

  ‘Well, Mabel, I suppose you’re old enough to know your own mind,’ replied the stalwart and sleepy-eyed major.

  ‘And what will you do, Archie, if there’s ever a revolution?’ she enquired.

  ‘Oh, hide, I suppose,’ he answered.

  ‘Really, Archie, I sometimes wonder how you came to be my cousin!’ She handed him back his automatic cigarette-lighter, which he closed with a click, looking as if he’d prefer to be competing for the scratch medal at Prestwick or Muirfield instead of hearing pacifists consigned to perdition. The hotel musicians then struck up with Mendelssohn’s (German) Spring Song, to which she was supplying a self-possessed and insouciant tra-la-la when Doctor Macamble trotted in with profuse apologies for being late.

  The outspoken utterances of Mabel had at all events made me feel decidedly ‘pro-Macamble’, but I took the wise precaution of moving him a few tables further away from her. I assumed that after hearing even a modicum of his anti-war eloquence she would be more than likely to join in, and might conceivably order her cousin Archie to frog-march the doctor out of the lounge; in fact, I feared that she might regard it as her duty to break up our little pacifist meeting, thinly attended though it was.

  Before rendering my account of the meeting I must explain that Macamble was a doctor not of medicine but of philosophy – a Ph.D. in fact – which may have been the cause of his being so chock-full of ideas and adumbrations. Urbanely regarding him across an interval of eighteen years I find him quite un-obnoxious; but I must candidly confess that I obtained no edification while bearing the brunt of his fussy and somewhat muddled enthusiasm. After listening to him for about an hour and a half I could be certain of one thing only – that he believed himself to be rather a great man. And like so many of us who maintain that belief, he had so far found very few people to agree with him in his optimistic self-estimate. I suspect that he looked on me as a potential disciple; anyhow he urgently desired to shepherd me along the path to a salvation which was, unquestionably, the exact antithesis to army life. Transmogrified into a music-hall ditty, Macamble’s attitude to army officers would have worked out something like this:

  I couldn’t shake hands with a Colonel

  And Majors I muchly detest:

  All Captains to regions infernal

  I consign with both gusto and zest:

  To Subalterns blankly uncivil,

  I pronounce as my final belief

  That the man most akin to the ‘divvle’

  Is that fiend – the Commander-in-Chief.

  I could manage to be amused by that sort of artless intolerance; but when ‘about the second hour’ he became disposed to speak disparagingly of Rivers, I realized that he was exceeding the limit. How much he knew about Rivers I didn’t enquire. What he did was to imply that a subtly disintegrating influence was at work on my pacifist zealotry, and after these preliminaries he disclosed the plan which he had formulated for my liberation from the machinations of that uniformed pathologist. With all the goodwill in the world, Doctor Macamble advised me to abscond from Slateford. I had only to take a train to London, and once I was there he would arrange for me to be examined by an ‘eminent alienist’ who would infallibly certify that, I was completely normal and entirely responsible for my actions. The word ‘alienist’ was one of many whose exact meaning I had never identified in the dictionary. (I dimly associated it with a celebrated Italian named Lombroso who probably wasn’t an alienist at all.) Macamble’s man, he explained, was well known through his articles in the Press; but unfortunately it transpired that it was the popular rather than the pathological Press – the Daily Mail, in fact. I suppose I ought to have waxed indignant, but all I thought was, ‘Good Lord, he’s trying to persuade me to do the dirty on Rivers!’ Keeping this thought to myself, I remained reticent and parted from him with the heartiest of handshakes. Did I ever see him again, I wonder? And have I been too hard on him? Well, I can only say that nothing I can do to Doctor Macamble could be worse than his advice to me – had I been imbecile enough to act on it.

  On a pouring wet afternoon a day or two later I was in the entrance hall of the hospital, indulging in some horseplay with another young officer who happened to be feeling ‘dangerously well’ at the moment. It was the hour when visitors came to see patients, and my somewhat athletic sense of humour had focused itself on a very smug-looking brown felt hat, left to take care of itself while the owner conversed with elaborate cheerfulness to some ‘poor fellow’ upstairs. I had just given this innocuous headgear a tremendous kick and was in the middle of a guffaw when I turned and saw Rivers standing just inside the door with a heavy bag in his hand. He was just back from leave. The memory of this little episode brings me a living picture of him, slightly different from his usual self. A spontaneous remembrance of Rivers would reveal him alert and earnest in the momentum of some discussion. (When walking he moved very fast, talking hard, and often seeming forgetful that he was being carried along by his own legs.) Standing there in the failing light of that watery afternoon, he had the half-shy look of a middle-aged person intruding on the segregative amusements of the young. For a moment he regarded me with an unreprimanding smile. Then he remarked, ‘Go steady with that hat, Sherston,’ and went rapidly along the corridor to his workroom.

  The hat, as I picked it up and restored its contours to their normal respectability, looked somehow as though it might have belonged to Doctor Mac
amble.

  3

  I have previously remarked that I would give a good deal for a few gramophone records of my ‘interchanges of ideas’ with Rivers. I now reiterate the remark because at the moment of writing I feel very much afraid of reporting our confabulations incorrectly. In later years, while muddling on toward maturity, I have made it my business to find out all I can about the mechanism of my spontaneous behaviour; but I cannot be sure how far I had advanced in that art – or science – in 1917. I can only suggest that my definite approach to mental maturity began with my contact with the mind of Rivers.

  If he were alive I could not be writing so freely about him. I might even be obliged to call him by some made-up name, which would seem absurd. But he has been dead nearly fourteen years now and he exists only in vigilant and undiminished memories, continuously surviving in what he taught me. It is that intense survival of his human integrity which has made me pause perplexed. Can I hope to pass the test of that invisible presence, that mind which was devoted to the service of exact and organized research? What exactitude would he find in such a representation of psychological experience as this, and how far would he approve my attempt to describe him? Well, I can only trust that he would smile at my mistakes and decide that I am tolerably accurate about the essentials of the story.

  Of one thing, at any rate, I can be certain.

  In 1917 the last thing he expected me to be capable of saying to him was – ‘Such knowledge as I have of the why and wherefore of this War is only enough to make me feel that I know nothing at all.’ He would have said it of himself, though, since he was merely a plain scientist, and not an omniscient politician or political writer. And he would have added that it pained him deeply to feel that he was ‘at war’ with German scientists. (At that time I did not know that he had studied at Heidelberg.)

  As regards the ‘larger aspects’ of the War, my method was to parade such scraps of information as I possessed, always pretending to know more than I did. Even Rivers could not cure me of the youthful habit (which many people never unlearn at all) of being conversationally dishonest. All he could do was to make me feel uncomfortable when I thought about it afterwards – which was, anyhow, a step in the right direction. For instance he would be saying something about the Franco-Prussian War, and I would bluff my way through, pretending to know quite a lot about the Alsace-Lorraine question (though all I knew was that I’d once been introduced to a prebendary called Loraine, who subsequently became a canon, and who had prepared Aunt Evelyn for confirmation somewhere about the year 1870). Worse still, I would talk about some well-known person as if I knew him quite well instead of having only met him once. Since then I have entirely altered my procedure, and when in doubt I pretend to know less than I really do. The knowledge thus gained is part of my indebtedness to Rivers.

  In 1917 it did not occur to me that golf would one day be regarded as a predominant national occupation rather than a pastime. Nevertheless I did not like the game to be treated with levity; in fact I played it somewhat seriously. (My friend Cromlech had once insisted on trying to defeat me in a game in which he used nothing but a niblick; and to my great annoyance he performed such astonishing feats with it as to cause me some disquietude, though I won quite comfortably in the end.)

  When played seriously, even golf can, I suppose, claim to be ‘an epitome of human life’. Anyhow, in that fourth October of the War I was a better golfer than I’d ever been before – and, I may add, a better one than I’ve ever been since.

  I must admit, though, that I wasn’t worrying much about the War when I’d just hit a perfect tee-shot up the charming vista which was the fairway to the first green at Mortonhall. How easy it felt! I scarcely seemed to be gripping the club at all. Afternoon sunshine was slanting through the golden-brown beeches and at last I knew what it was like to hit the ball properly. ‘I suppose I’m getting too keen on the game,’ I thought, as I bicycled home to the hydro at the end of some such afternoon, when I’d been sampling one of the delightfully unfrequented links which the War had converted into Arcadian solitudes. It was all very well, but this sort of thing couldn’t go on for ever. Sooner or later I must let Rivers know my intentions. Had I been an ordinary patient I should have been due for a medical board long before now, and even Rivers couldn’t postpone it indefinitely. And if I were to refuse to go before a board the situation would become awkward again. He had allowed me to drift on for twelve weeks, and so far he hadn’t asked me what I intended to do or put the slightest pressure on me about it. Now that he was back from leave he would probably tackle the question. Perhaps he would do so that very evening.

  Meanwhile I went up to my room and sat there cleaning my clubs. After a bit the Theosophist came in to smarten himself up before going into Edinburgh for dinner. When in good spirits he had a habit of addressing me in literary language, usually either tags of Shakespeare or locutions reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s romances. If I remarked that the way the windows rattled and creaked was enough to keep one awake all night, he would reply, ‘True, O King,’ or ‘Thou hast uttered wise words, O great white chief.’ He now informed me, while rubbing his face with a towel, that he had been engaged on ‘enterprises of great pith and moment’.

  ‘To-day, toward the going down of the sun, O Sherston, the medicine men put forth their powers upon me, and soothfully I say unto you, they have passed me for permanent home service.’ Where would he go to, I enquired.

  ‘I shall sit in an office, O man of little faith, wearing blue tabs upon my tunic and filling in Army Forms whereof no man knoweth the mysterious meaning,’ he replied, and left me wondering what occupation I ought to find for my disillusioned self.

  Writing about it so long afterwards, one is liable to forget that while the War was going on nobody really knew when it would stop. For ordinary infantry officers like myself there was always what we called ‘a faint bloody hope that it may be over in six months from now’. And at Slateford there was always a suppressed awareness which reminded me that I was ‘shortening the War’ for myself every week that I remained there. No one but an expert humbug would now deny that some such awareness existed in most of us who were temporarily ‘out of it’ but destined sooner or later to find ourselves in a front-line trench again.

  While I continued to clean my clubs, some inward monitor became uncomfortably candid and remarked ‘This heroic gesture of yours – “making a separate peace” – is extremely convenient for you, isn’t it? Doesn’t it begin to look rather like dodging the Kaiser’s well-aimed projectiles?’ Proper pride also weighed in with a few well-chosen words. ‘Twelve weeks ago you may have been a man with a message. Anyhow you genuinely believed yourself to be one. But unless you can prove to yourself that your protest is still effective, you are here under false pretences, merely skrimshanking snugly along on what you did in the belief that you would be given a bad time for doing it.’

  Against this I argued that, having pledged myself to an uncompromising attitude, I ought to remain consistent to the abstract idea that the War was wrong. Intellectual sobriety was demanded of me. But the trouble was that I wasn’t an ‘intellectual’ at all; I was only trying to become one. I was also, it seemed, trying to become a good golfer. Rivers had never played golf in his life, though he approved of it as a healthy recreation. It would mean nothing to him if I told him that I’d been round North Berwick in one under bogey (which I hadn’t done). There were many other subjects we could discuss, of course, but after the first six weeks or so there had seemed less and less to be said about my ‘mental position’. And it was no use pretending that I’d come to Slateford to talk to him about contemporary novelists or even the incalculability of European Chancelleries. Sooner or later he would ask me straight out what I intended to do. My own reticence on the subject had been caused by the fact that I hadn’t known what I did intend to do.