Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

I was now trying to find out, while rubbing away, with oil and sandpaper, at an obstinate patch of rust on my niblick….

  At this point in my cogitations there was a commotion of thudding feet along the passage past my door, and I heard a nurse saying, ‘Now, now, you mustn’t get upset like this.’ The sound of someone sobbing like a child receded and became inaudible after the shutting of a door. That sort of thing happened fairly often at the hydro. Men who had ‘done their bit in France’ crying like children. One took it for granted, of course; but how much longer could I stay there among so many haunted faces and ‘functional nervous disorders’? Outwardly normal though a lot of them were, it wasn’t an environment which stimulated one’s ‘intellectual sobriety’!

  I felt in my pocket for a little talisman which I always carried about with me. It was a lump of fire-opal clasped on a fine gold chain. Someone whose friendship I valued highly had given it to me when I went to France and I used to call it ‘my pocket sunset’.

  I had derived consolation from its marvellous colours during the worst episodes of my war experiences. In its small way it had done its best to mitigate much squalor and despondency. My companions in dismal dug-outs had held it in their hands and admired it.

  I could not see its fiery colours now, for the room was almost dark.

  But it brought back the past in which I had made it an emblem of successful endurance, and set up a mood of reverie about the old Front Line, which really did feel as if it had been a better place than this where I now sat in bitter safety surrounded by the wreckage and defeat of those who had once been brave.

  Had I really enjoyed those tours of trenches up in the Bois Français sector? For it was that period, before the Somme battles began, which now seemed to have acquired an insidious attractiveness. No; in their reality I had intensely disliked those times – except, perhaps, the excitement of my night-patrols. It hadn’t been much fun when we relieved the Manchesters – sploshing and floundering up ‘the Old Kent Road’ at midnight; posting the sentries and machine-gunners and that bombing-post at the end of the sap; taking over the familiar desolation of soggy fire-steps and sniped-at parapets and looking out again across that nothing-on-earth-like region beyond the tangled thickets of wire. And then diving under the gas-blanket in the doorway of our dug-out and groping down the steps to find Barton sitting moodily at the table with his bottle of whisky, worrying over his responsibilities while his batman cooked him some toasted cheese in the smoky recess which served as a kitchen. Up there we had arrived at the edge of the world and everything pleasant was far behind us. To be dozing doggedly on the mud-caked sandbags of a wire-netting bunk, with bits of chalk falling on one’s face, was something achieved for King and Country, but it wasn’t enjoyable. There was no sense, I thought, in allowing oneself to sentimentalize the smells of chloride of lime and dead rats, or in idealizing the grousings of Ormand and Mansfield because the jam ration was usually inferior, seldom Hartley’s, and never Crosse and Blackwell’s. But we’d all done our best to help one another, and it was good to remember Durley coming in with one of his wryfaced stories about a rifle-grenade exploding on the parados a few yards away from him – Durley demonstrating just how he’d dodged it, and creating an impression that it had been quite a funny German practical joke. Yes, we’d all of us managed to make jokes – mostly family jokes – for a company could be quite a happy family party until someone got killed. Cheerfulness under bad conditions was by no means the least heroic element of the war. Wonderful indeed had been that whimsical fortitude of the men who accepted an intense bombardment as all in the day’s work and then grumbled because their cigarette ration was one packet short! But C Company Mess, as it was in the first half of 1916, could never be reassembled. Its ingredients were now imbued with ghostliness. Mansfield and Durley were disabled by wounds, and Ormand was dead. Barton was the only one of us who was functioning at the front now; he’d gone back last spring and had survived the summer and autumn without getting a scratch. Poor old devil, I thought, he must be qualifying for a spell at Slateford by now, for he’d been out there eighteen months before he was wounded the first time…. No, there wasn’t much sense in feeling exiled from a family party which had ceased to exist; and the Bois Français sector itself had become ancient history, as remote and obsolete as the first winter of the War. Everything would be different if I went back to France now – different even from what it was last April. Gas was becoming more and more of a problem – one might almost say, more of a nightmare. Hadn’t I just spent an afternoon playing golf with a man who’d lost half his company in a gas-bombardment a couple of months ago?…It seems to amount to this, I ruminated, twirling my putter as I polished its neck – that I’m exiled from the troops as a whole rather than from my former fellow-officers and men. And I visualized an endless column of marching soldiers, singing ‘Tipperary’ on their way up from the back-areas; I saw them filing silently along ruined roads, and lugging their bad boots through mud until they came to some shell-hole and pillar-box line in a landscape where trees were stumps and skeletons and no Quartermaster on earth could be certain of getting the rations up…. ‘From sunlight to the sunless land’…. The idea of going back there was indeed like death.

  I suppose I ought to have concluded my strenuous wool-gatherings by adding that death is preferable to dishonour. But I didn’t. Humanity asserted itself in the form of a sulky little lapse into exasperation against the people who pitied my ‘wrong-headedness’ and regarded me as ‘not quite normal’. In their opinion it was quite right that I should be safely out of it and ‘being looked after’. How else could I get my own back on them but by returning to the trenches? Killed in action in order to confute the Under-Secretary for War, who had officially stated that I wasn’t responsible for my actions. What a truly glorious death for a promising young pacifist!…

  By these rather peculiar methods I argued it out with myself in the twilight. And when the windows were dark and I could see the stars, I still sat there with my golf bag between my knees, alone with what now seemed an irrefutable assurance that going back to the War as soon as possible was my only chance of peace.

  As I went along to see Rivers that evening I felt rather as if I were about to make a grand gesture. I may even have felt like doing it in the grand manner. Anyhow I was full of bottled-up emotion and conscious of the significance of the occasion. Looking back from to-day, however, I am interested, not in what my own feelings were, but in what Rivers had been thinking about the decision which he had left me so entirely free to make. Had he been asked, he would probably have replied, in his driest manner, that he considered it to be his duty, as an army medical officer, to ‘cure me of my pacifist errors’ (though one of our jokes had been about the humorous situation which would arise if I were to convert him to my point of view). Whatever he had been thinking while away on leave, he was there, with his gentle assurance of helpfulness, and all my grand gesture exuberance faded out at once. It was impossible not to be natural with Rivers. All I knew was that he was my father-confessor, as I called him, and that at last I really had got something to tell him which wasn’t merely a discursive amplification of my ‘marking time for a few weeks’ policy. As a ‘lead-up’ to a more definite disclosure I began by telling him about the odd experience I’d had during the night before he went on leave. I knew that he was scientifically sceptical about psychic phenomena, so I laid stress on the fact that it was probably a visual delusion caused by thinking about the Western Front in stormy weather. Though I described it diffidently, the strong emotion underlying my narrative must have been apparent. But I was so full of myself and my new-made determination that I was quite surprised when I saw that my story had affected him strongly, and that it had caused him to remove his spectacles and rub them rather more than was necessary. He said little, however, and waited for me to continue. With a bumping heart I asked him what would happen if I persisted in my pacifist attitude.

  ‘You will be kept here until the end of
the War,’ he replied quietly. I then asked what would happen if I went before a board for reconsideration of my ‘mental condition’. ‘I could only tell them that you were not suffering from any form of psycho-neurosis,’ he answered, adding that if I asked for permanent home service I should probably get it. I then overheard myself – as though I were a third person in the room – saying, rather hurriedly and not at all in the grand manner, ‘I was getting things into focus a bit while you were away and I see now that the only thing for me to do is to get back to the front as quick as I can. But what worries me is that I’m afraid of the War Office doing me down somehow and shunting me off on to some home-service job, and if I can’t be passed for G.S. I won’t be passed for anything at all.’ I could see that he was pleased; but he said that I must think it over and make quite sure that I meant it. We could then discuss our plan of campaign to wangle things with the War Office.

  (He didn’t actually use the word ‘wangle’, but he implied that it might not be altogether easy to ‘work it’ for me.) We then talked for a bit about other things and did our best to forget that there was a war on.

  4

  My previous chapter began with a little exordium on the needfulness for exactitude when one is remembering and writing down what occurred a decade or two ago. At the present moment I am – to be exact – exactly 936 weeks away from my material; but that sort of accuracy is, of course, merely a matter of chronological arithmetic. Since what I am about to relate is only an interlude, I propose to allow my fantasies more freedom than is my conscientious habit. Don’t assume, though, that I am about to describe something which never happened at all. Were I to do that I should be extending the art of reminiscence beyond its prescribed purpose, which is, in my case, to show myself as I am now in relation to what I was during the War.

  Allow yourself then to imagine that the before-mentioned 936 weeks have not yet intervened between ‘now’ and the autumn of 1917. You will at once observe what I can only call ‘one George Sherston’ going full speed up a hill on the outskirts of Edinburgh. The reason for his leg-locomotive velocity is that he is keeping pace with that quick walker, W. H. R. Rivers. The clocks of Edinburgh are announcing the hour of ‘One’ (which we shall, I fear, some day be obliged by law to call ‘Thirteen’, though I myself intend, for an obvious reason, to compromise by referring to it as ‘12A’). Up that hill we go, talking (and walking) as hard as we can. For we, a couple of khaki-clad figures in (do you doubt my veracity?) ‘the mellow rays of an October sun’, are on our way to have luncheon with an astronomer; and not an ordinary astronomer either, since this one was – to put it plainly – none other than the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. That, so far, was all I knew and all I needed to know, my ignorance of astronomy being what it was. Rivers was taking me up there, and it promised to be a very agreeable outing, and quite a contrast to that Mecca of psycho-neuroses, Slateford War Hospital.

  Anybody who desires to verify my observations on the observatory is – or ought to be – at liberty to go there and see it for himself. But it will be one-sided verification, since I am unable to visualize, even vaguely, the actual observatory. Let us therefore assume it to be a building in all respects worthy of the lofty investigations which were why it was there – or, if you prefer it, ‘to which it was dedicated’. Arrival and admittance having followed one another in accordance with immemorial usage, the Astronomer Royal welcomed us with the cordiality of a man who has plenty to spare for his fellow-men – no cordiality being required of him by the constellations, comets, and other self-luminous bodies which he had spent so much of his time in scrutinizing. I have known people who would probably have improvised some such conversational opening as ‘Well, sir, and how are the stars? Any new ones lately?’ – but I was too shy to say anything at all to a man so widely acquainted with the universe. We were introduced to the fourth member of the quartet, a jocular-looking parson who rejoiced in the name of Father Rosary, and was, I inferred, a priest. We then sat down to luncheon. As I glanced around the room, which had eighteenth-century charm, I no longer felt shy and was completely prepared to enjoy myself. This feeling may have been brought on by Father Rosary, who was evidently an artist at creating a pleasant impression and following it up by being the best possible company. What did he talk about, I wonder, during that luncheon which has now become a memory of indistinct delightfulness – as all such luncheons should?

  He told us amusing stories; witty stories, well worth remembering; but I have forgotten them. He spoke of entrancing places in foreign countries; but I had never seen them and they were only names which made me wish I’d been less unenterprising, instead of waiting for a European war to transport me abroad. He talked, without ostentation, about famous people whom he’d known. Who were they, I wonder? I rather think he mentioned Walter Pater (whose cadenced prose I had read with more awareness of its music than of its instructive ingredients) and if he didn’t, he ought to have done. There was indeed an untranslatably Paterish quality about Father Rosary when he was being eloquently urbane. I suppose one should call it ‘an aroma of humanism’ – which means that his religious vocation had not prevented him from being helpfully interested in everything that men think and do.

  He was, so to speak, a connoisseur in the wisdom of the ages, and I can imagine his rich voice rolling out that fine passage of Pater’s which cannot be quoted too often: ‘For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality – no language they have spoken, no oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.’

  Meanwhile our lively host had uncorked a bottle of ancient champagne. It might be a century old, he said, or it might be less. But it was probably the most absurdly obsolete bottle of champagne in Edinburgh, and might, he added, be a bit insipid. He had discovered it in his cellar; some previous astronomer had left it there, and by miraculous oversight it had survived to be sniffed and inspected by Father Rosary and finally subjected to the tasting test of his impeccable palate for wine. Rivers, who was a good judge of water, sipped it respectfully and (after admiring the delicate old glass from which it was fulfilling its destiny by being at last imbibed) remarked that he’d never tasted anything like it in his life. Father Rosary commented on its ‘solemn stillness’, and then, he alone knew why, began talking about Tennyson. ‘Do you young men read Tennyson?’ he asked me, and quoted ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’ with the subdued relish of an epicure. The astronomer, however, hadn’t much use for poetry. Astronomy made it seem a bit unnecessary, he thought. ‘Now slides the silent meteor on – pretty enough – but if he’d known what I do about meteors he wouldn’t have put it into a poem.’

  ‘But I thought he took a great interest in astronomy,’ I ventured.

  ‘Yes; but he used it to suit his own game of idealizing the universe, and never really faced those ghastly immensities I’m always staring at,’ he replied, revealing for a moment the ‘whatever brute or blackguard made the world’ outlook which showed itself in his face when he wasn’t cracking jokes with Father Rosary, whose personality seemed to imply that Heaven was an invisible Vatican, complete with library, art-collection, and museum. Rivers, who wasn’t a great poetry reader (he was handicapped by having no visual memory), remarked that he had an indistinct recollection of some poem by Tennyson in which he had to some extent ‘seen eye to eye’ with the astronomer. There was no copy of Tennyson’s works up at the observatory, but had we consulted one we should have found that Rivers was right. The line ‘These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses’ can scarcely be classed as an idealization of those two realities.

  Father Rosary now recreated harmonious gaiety by seating himself at the piano and trolling out a series of delightful ditties. After that he led us yet further from uncomfortable cont
roversies by playing some classical and nobly serious pieces, for he loved the old Italian masters. And when, at the final chords, I looked across the room, the ultimate serenity of the music seemed to be at rest in the face of my friend.

  5

  Sitting myself down at the table to resume this laborious task after twenty-four hours’ rest, I told myself that I was ‘really feeling fairly fresh again’. And I could have sworn that I heard the voice of Rivers say ‘Good!’ I mention this just to show the way my mind works, though I suppose one ought not to put that sort of ‘aside’ into a book, especially as I am always reminding myself to be ultra-careful to keep my story ‘well inside the frame’. But I begin to feel as if I were inside the frame myself, and that being so, I don’t see why Rivers shouldn’t be inside it too – in more ways than one.

  Well – to continue the chronicle – there were moments, after I’d emerged from my anti-war imbroglio (forgive the phrase, it amuses me) when I felt not unnaturally upset at the idea of returning to the good old trenches, though I did what I could to sublimate that ‘great adventure’ into something splendid. The whole business was now safely settled and the date of my medical board was early in November. Rivers had made an expedition to London on my behalf, had interviewed two influential personages, and had obtained the required guarantee that no obstacles would be placed in my road back to regions where bombs, mustard-gas, box-barrages, and similar enjoyments were awaiting me.

  He showed me a letter from one of them (a devoted ‘public servant’ with whom I’d often played cricket in the old days, and whom no one but a maniac could possibly have disliked) in which the writer referred to me (in collaboration with his typist) as ‘our poor friend’, which thereafter became our favourite term for alluding to me.