Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Then I watched the Company playing football, and getting beaten. And now I must do the accounts of our Company mess.

  June 4. Out 7.15 till 4.15. Did a Battalion attack. After lunch a gas lecture, and then we were bombarded with smoke and gas. I was feeling jumpy and nerve-ridden all day. It would be a relief to shed tears now. But I smoke on my bed, and the Divisional brass band is tootling on the grass outside the Château.

  I will read de la Mare and try to escape from feeling that after all I am nothing but what the Brigadier calls ‘a potential killer of Huns’….

  Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,

  There, out of all remembrance, make our home.

  June 5. (9.30 p.m.) Yesterday was the first bad day I’ve had for several weeks and I finished up feeling terribly nervy. This morning I got up, with great difficulty, at 6.30, and at 7.45 we started out for a Brigade Field Day. Did an attack from 10.30 to 2.30, but it wasn’t a strenuous one for me as I was told to ‘become a casualty’ soon after the 3000-yard assault began, and I managed to make my way unobtrusively to an old windmill on a ridge near by. There I lay low as long as I dared, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Below the hill I could see the troops advancing by rushes over the rye-grass of some luckless farmer. Larks were singing overhead and the sunlit country-side was swept by the coursing shadows of great white clouds. I’d escaped from soldiering for an hour, and was utterly content to sit up there among the rafters, watching the beams that filtered through chinks and listening to the creaking silence – alone in that place which smelt of old harvests, and where the rumour of war was a low rumble of guns, very far away. So I am in good spirits again this evening, and my nerve-furies have sailed away into the blue air.

  When I rode into the transport-lines this afternoon I saw young Stonethwaite drudging at cleaning a limber, supervised by a military policeman.

  He has still got ten days to do, of his 28 days ‘Field Punishment No. 2’ for coming on parade drunk at Marseilles. I gave him a cheery nod and a grin, and he smiled back at me as he stood there in his grimy slacks and blue jersey. I hadn’t spoken to him since I ‘talked to him like a father’ when he was awaiting his court martial. He was in the other Company I was with for a time in Palestine, and I took an interest in him, partly because he’d served with our First Battalion in France, and partly because of the noticeably nice look in his face. (He was the sort of chap that no one could help liking.) There was something purposeful and promising about him, even when he was only sitting on a rock in Judea trying to mend one of his rotten boots. I remember watching him playing football at Kantara, and he seemed the embodiment of youthful enterprise. But some of the old toughs got him blind to the world at Marseilles, and when I heard about it I felt quite miserable. So I went into the shed at Domvast where he was shut up and talked to him about making a fresh start and so on. And I suppose he felt grateful to me, standing there with his white face and his eyes full of tears. Seeing him there this afternoon I felt very glad I’d been kind to him. And he is being transferred to the Machine-Gun Corps, where he can begin all over again and be as popular as ever. I mention this little story because it has struck me as such a contrast to that V.C. investment parade.

  June 6. (10.30 p.m.) Was summoned this evening to an emergency meeting of Company officers in the Colonel’s room downstairs.

  Large gloomy room, not much lit by a few candles.

  C.O., sitting at the end of a long table, looking solemn and portentous, broke the news to us that we are shortly to take over the Neuville–Vitasse sector from the Second Canadian Division. He spoke in hushed tones (as though the Germans might overhear him). As I sat there I thought of the ‘selling sweep’, to which this seemed a natural sequel! Anyhow I am going up to the line for three days to-morrow, with the C.O. and one of the other Company Commanders, to obtain a little experience of the sector we shall take over, and ought to be able to find out quite a lot.

  June 8. (In the Front Line, near Mercatel.) Yesterday morning, in fine weather, we rode to Avesnes, and were conveyed thence in a lorry to Basseux (which was the last billet I was in with the Second Battalion). Then on to Agny and lunched at Brigade H.Q. Two mile walk from there up to Battalion H.Q. The devastated area looking dried-up and as devastated as ever. Canadian Colonel with a V.C. – evidently a terrific fire-eater but very pleasant. A guide brought me up to B Company H.Q. in the Front Line, which I reached about 7.30. The Company Commander, Captain Duclos, has been wounded twice and in France 21 months. If he gets one more ‘Blighty’ he’ll stay there, he says. In spite of his name he speaks no French but many of his company are from Quebec and speak very little English.

  There was a fair amount of shelling last evening; considerable patrolling activity on our side, and much sending up of flares by the Boche. In fact things are much the same as they used to be, except that we didn’t sniff for mustard-gas then, and didn’t walk about with ‘box-respirators in the alert position’. I don’t think I’m any worse than I was at Fricourt and Mametz. I would have enjoyed doing a patrol last night. But I feel a bit of a fool being up here with no responsibility for anything that happens, so it is rather a good test of one’s nerves.

  These trenches are narrow and not sandbagged. They will be very wet when it rains. At present they are as dry as dust. Very few rats. Company H.Q. is in a steel hut which would just stop a whizz-bang.

  Duclos seems a fine chap. He was very friendly last night, and we sat and jawed about old battles and cursed the politicians and the people with cushy jobs – all the usual dug-out talk. And I went to sleep at stand-to (2.30) and woke with the usual trench mouth.

  Odd that I should find myself back here, only a mile or two away from where I was wounded (and the Front Line a mile or two farther back after 14 months’ fighting!).

  I have returned into the past, but none of my old friends are here. I am looking across to the ridge where Ormand and Dunning and all those others were killed. Nothing can bring them back; and I come blundering into it all again to guffaw with a Canadian captain. The old crowd are gone; but young ‘Stiffy’ and Howitt are just as good.

  Expect I’ll see more than enough of this sector, so I won’t describe it in detail. The landscape is the deadly conventional Armageddon type. Low green-grey ridges fringed with a few isolated trees, half smashed; a broken wall here and there – straggling dull-grey silhouettes which were once French villages. Then there are open spaces broken only by ruined wire-tangles, old trenches, and the dismal remains of an occasional rest camp of huts. The June grass waves, poppies flame, shrapnel bursts in black puffs, an aeroplane drones, larks sing, and someone comes along the trench clinking a petrol tin (now used for water). And this is about all one sees as one stumps along the communication-trenches, dry and crumbling and chalky, with a dead mole lying about here and there.

  Inside Company H.Q. I watch another conventional trench-warfare scene. Duclos snores on his wire-netting berth, while I sit at a table with one large yellow candle burning. On the table is a grease-spotted sheet of The Sussex Express. Heaven knows why it got here, but it enables me to read ‘Whist Drive at Heathfield’ and ‘Weak Milk at Hellingly’, and indulge in a few ‘free associations’ about Sussex. At the other end of the tubular steel Nissen hut, daylight comes unnaturally through the door; evening sunshine. The H.Q. runner, a boy of 19, leans against the door-post, steel hat tilted over his eyes and long eyelashes showing against the light. The signaller sits at a table with his back to me, making a gnat-like noise on his instrument. The servants are cooking, with sandbags soaked in candle-grease, and this typical smell completes the picture! From outside one hears dull bumpings of artillery and the leisurely trickle of shells passing overhead. Now and then the tap-tap of machine-gun fire….

  (After midnight.) Went out about 10 and dropped in for an unpleasant half-hour. The Germans put over a ‘box-barrage’ including a lot of aerial torpedoes. No gas, however. The Battalion on our left were raided, and the uproar was hideous. When it w
as all over I came back here and read Lamb’s Letters, which I’d brought with me as an antidote to such performances. I was much impressed by Duclos during the ‘strafe’. He knows just how to walk along a trench when everything feels topsy-turvy and the semi-darkness is full of booms and flashes. He never hurries; quietly, with (one imagines) a wise, half-humorous look masking solid determination and mastery of the situation, he moves from sentry to sentry; now getting up on the fire-step to lean over beside some scared youngster who peers irresolutely into the drifting smoke which hides the wire where the Germans may be lying, ready to rush forward; now cracking a joke with some grim old soldier. ‘Everything Jake here?’ he asks, going from post to post, always making for the place where the din seems loudest, and always leaving a sense of security in his wake. Men finger their bayonets and pull themselves together when his cigarette-end glows in the dusk, a little planet of unquenchable devotion to duty.

  Sunday, June 9. I left the Front Line at 3 o’clock this afternoon. Two killed and eight wounded last night. Coming down the communication-trench I passed two men carrying a dead body slung on a pole. ‘What’s the weight of your pig?’ asked a man who met them, squeezing himself against the side of the trench to let them pass. Colonial realism!

  After various delays I got back to Habarcq at 11 p.m. and here I am in my quiet room again, with the trees rustling outside and a very distinct series of War pictures in my head. The businesslike futility of it is amazing. But those Canadians were holding their sector magnificently, and gave me a fine object-lesson in trench-organization.

  June 13. Too busy to write anything lately. I seem to be on my legs all the time. On Tuesday we did an attack with Tanks. Sitting on the back of a Tank, joy-riding across the wheat in afternoon sunshine, I felt as if it were all rather fun – like the chorus of haymakers in the opening scene of a melodrama! But when I see my 150 men on parade, with their brown healthy faces, and when I watch them doing their training exercises or marching sturdily along the roads, I sometimes think of what may be awaiting them. (Only a couple of weeks ago one of our best Service Battalions was practically wiped out in the fighting on the Aisne.) And so (to quote Duhamel again) I ‘realize the misery of the times and the magnitude of their sacrifice.’

  I have never seen such a well-behaved company. But when their day’s work is over they have about four hours left, with nothing to do and nowhere to go except the estaminets. I calculate that about £500 a week is spent, by our Battalion alone, in the estaminets of this village, and every man goes to bed in varying degrees of intoxication! What else can they do, when there isn’t so much as a Y.M.C.A. hut in the place? They aren’t fond of reading, as I am!

  Every night I come back to my big empty room, where the noise of bombardments miles away is like furniture being moved about overhead. And from 8.30 to 10.30 I read and do my day’s thinking. Often I am too tired to think at all, and am pursued by worries about Lewis guns and small company details. And while I’m reading someone probably drops in for a talk and I must put down Motley and Other Poems and listen to somebody else’s grumbles about the War (and Battalion arrangements).

  Outside, the wind hushes the huge leafy trees; and I wake early and hear the chorus of birds through half-dissolved veils of sleep. But they only mean another day of harsh realities which wear me down.

  It isn’t easy to be a company commander with a suppressed ‘anti-war complex’! When I was out here as a platoon commander I was able to indulge in a fair amount of day-dreaming. But since I’ve been with this Battalion responsibility has been pushed on to me, and since we’ve been in France I haven’t often allowed myself to relax my efforts to be efficient. Now that our intensive training is nearly finished I am easing off a bit and allowing myself to enjoy books. The result is that I immediately lose my grip on soldiering and begin to find everything intolerable except my interest in the welfare of the men. One cannot be a useful officer and a reader of imaginative literature at the same time. Efficiency depends on attention to a multitude of minor details. I shall find it easier when we get to the Line, where one alternates between intense concentration on real warfare and excusable recuperation afterwards. Here one is incessantly sniped at by the Orderly Room and everyone is being chivvied by the person above him. I have never been healthier in body than I am now. But under that mask of physical fitness the mind struggles and rebels against being denied its rights. The mechanical stupidity of infantry soldiering is the antithesis of intelligent thinking.

  Sensitive and gifted people of all nations are enduring some such mental starvation in order to safeguard – whatever it is they are told that they are safeguarding…. And O, how I long for a good Symphony Concert! The mere thought of it is to get a glimpse of heaven.

  June 14. At dinner this evening I was arguing with young ‘Stiffy’, who has strong convictions of his own infallibility. But it was only about some detail of Lewis-gun training! Also he asserted that I’d got ‘a downer’ on some N.C.O., which I stoutly denied. We got quite hot over it. Then the argument dissolved into jollity and fled from our minds for ever. After all, we’d had a good feed, and some red wine; to-morrow will be Saturday, an easy day’s work; and the others had come into the meal flushed and happy after a platoon football match. ‘Damn it, I’m fed up with all this training!’ I exclaimed in a loud voice, scrooping back my chair on the brick floor and standing up. ‘I want to go up to the Line and really do something,’ added I – quite the dare-devil.

  ‘Same here’, agreed handsome boy Howitt in his soft voice. Howitt always agrees with me. He is gentle and unassuming and not easily roused, but he gets things done. ‘Stiffy’ is thickset and over-confident and inclined to contradict his elders, but good-natured.

  I went out into the cool, grey, breezy evening. Miles away the guns muttered and rumbled as usual. ‘Come on, then; come on, you poor fool!’ they seemed to be saying. I shivered, and came quickly up to the Château – to this quiet room where I spend my evenings ruminating and trying to tell myself the truth – this room where I become my real self, and feel omnipotent while reading Tolstoy and Walt Whitman (who had very little in common, I suppose, except their patriarchal beards). ‘I want to go up to the Line and really do something!’ I had boasted thus in a moment of vin rouge elation, catching my mood from those lads who look to me as their leader. How should they know the shallowness of my words? They see me in the daylight of my activities, when I must acquiesce in the evil that is war. But in the darkness where I am alone my soul rebels against what we are doing. ‘Stiffy’, grey-eyed and sensible and shrewd; Howitt, dark-eyed and loverlike and thoughtful; how long have you to live – you in the plenitude of youth, in your pride of being alive, your ignorance of life’s narrowing and disillusioning road? It may be that I shall live to remember you as I remember all those others who were my companions for a while and whose names are no longer printed in the Army List. What can I do to defeat the injustice which claims you, perhaps, as victims, as it claimed those ghostly others? Sitting here with my one candle I know that I can do nothing. ‘Save his own soul he has no star.’

  PART FOUR

  FINAL EXPERIENCES

  1

  I never went back to those trenches in front of Neuville-Vitasse.

  The influenza epidemic defied all operation orders of the Divisional staff, and during the latter part of June more than half the men in our brigade were too ill to leave their billets. Owing to the fact that I began a new notebook after June 14th, and subsequently lost it, no contemporary record of my sensations and ideas is available; so I must now write the remainder of this story out of my head.

  The first episode which memory recovers from this undiaried period is a pleasant one. I acquired a second-in-command for my company.

  Hitherto no such person had existed, and I was beginning to feel the strain. In that private life of mine which more or less emerges from my diary, solemn introspection was getting the better of my sense of humour.

  But now a benefic
ent presence arrived in the shape of Velmore, and I very soon began to say to myself that I really didn’t know what I’d have done without him. It was like having an extra head and a duplicate pair of eyes. Velmore was a tall, dark, young man who had been up at Oxford for an academic year when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies. More scholastic than soldier-like in appearance (mainly because he wore spectacles) he had the look of one who might some day occupy a professorial chair. His previous experience at the front gave him a solid basis of usefulness, and to this was added a temperament in which kindliness, humour, and intelligence divided the honours equally, with gentleness and modesty in readiness to assert themselves by the power of non-assertion.

  With these valuable qualities he combined – to my astonishment and delight – what in conventional military circles might have been described as ‘an almost rabid love of literature’. To hear poetry talked about in our company mess was indeed a new experience for me. But Velmore, on his very first evening, calmly produced Flecker’s poems from his pocket and asked young ‘Stiffy’ if he had ever read The Golden Journey to Samarkand. When he volunteered to read some of it aloud the junior officers exchanged embarrassed glances and took an early opportunity to leave me alone with my second-in-command, who was soon enunciating, with ingratiating gusto:

  Across the vast blue shadow-sweeping plain

  The gathered armies darken through the grain

  Swinging curved swords and dragon-sculptured spears,

  Footmen, and tiger-hearted cavaliers.

  A paraphrase of the last two lines became Velmore’s stock joke when reporting that the company was on parade and it was a great consolation to me to hear that fine body of men described as ‘the footmen with their dragon-sculptured spears’. But Velmore was never anything else but a consolation to me.