Perhaps once more aspires the Latin hymn
From Magdalen tower, but not for me to hear.
I toil far distant, for a darker year
Shadows the century with menace grim.
I walk in ways where pain and sorrow dwell,
And ruin such as only War can bring,
Where each lives through his individual hell,
Fraught with remembered horror none can tell,
And no more is there glory in the spring.
And I am worn with tears, for he I loved
Lies cold beneath the stricken sod of France;
Hope has forsaken me, by death removed,
And Love that seemed so strong and gay has proved
A poor crushed thing, the toy of cruel chance.
Often I wonder, as I grieve in vain,
If when the long, long future years creep slow,
And War and tears alike have ceased to reign,
I ever shall recapture, once again,
The mood of that May Morning, long ago.
The concluding speculation is answered now - not only for me but for all my generation. We never have recaptured that mood; and we never shall.
9
After the Fever Hospital came a blessed fortnight of sick leave in Macclesfield.
The year was now on the high road to summer, and, whenever I could forget for a few moments that warmth and fine weather meant great campaigns and peril for Edward, I was conscious of a quiet pleasure in my surroundings such as I had not known since leaving Oxford. For nearly twelve months I had had no holiday in its true sense of an interval of tranquillity, and those two weeks did a great deal to hasten the process of psychological recuperation which had begun on Easter Sunday.
The house, which my parents had taken from a local family, had a gracious little garden where lilac and laburnum and pink hawthorn were already in flower. Beneath the hot, scented bushes I read for many hours my neglected books, and, in a warm, semi-furnished loft attached to the house, compiled a small volume of favourite quotations. When the long spring evenings grew too cold for the garden, a very tolerable piano in the drawing-room helped me both to forget and to remember.
‘This afternoon,’ I wrote to Edward, ‘I have been playing over the slow movement from Beethoven’s No. 7 Sonata, and some of the Macdowell Sea Songs which you used to play. Whenever I sit down to the piano now I can always see you playing away, absolutely unconcerned by other people’s requests to you to come out, or listen a moment! If you were to die I think I should have to give up music altogether, for there would be so many things I could never bear to hear or play - just as now I cannot bear to play “L’Envoi ”, or the “Liber scriptus proferitur” part of Verdi’s Requiem, which for some reason or other I always connected with Roland’s going to the front . . .
‘I am a little amused by the tone of the Uppingham magazine sent on to you. The Editorial has certainly greatly deteriorated since Roland’s day. Both it and the entire magazine seem chiefly concerned with football. Exploits on the football field are related in detail, while the exploits of those on another field across the sea pass unnoticed, and such names of those who met their death there as R. A. Leighton and S. L. Mansel-Carey are hidden in a little corner marked “Died of Wounds”. But one consoles one’s self with the thought that their names will live on the Chapel walls long after the zealous footballers have passed out of remembrance. I noticed also that people who distinguished themselves at football while at school get biographies in the magazine, though he who surpassed the school record for prizes had no special mention at all. Sic transit gloria mundi.’
I returned to a London seething with bewildered excitement over the Battle of Jutland. Were we celebrating a glorious naval victory or lamenting an ignominious defeat? We hardly knew; and each fresh edition of the newspapers obscured rather than illuminated this really quite important distinction. The one indisputable fact was that hundreds of young men, many of them midshipmen only just in their teens, had gone down without hope of rescue or understanding of the issue to a cold, anonymous grave.
‘I have just been to St Paul’s where they closed the service by singing a hymn of thanksgiving for our “Moral” Victory! That seems to me to be going just a little too far,’ a letter of mine commented to Edward on June 11th. ‘We couldn’t do more than that if we had given the German navy a smashing blow, instead of having ended the battle in a draw which we say was a victory to us, and they say was a victory to them.’
But before this letter was written, Edward had been home on a short, unexpected leave.
As soon as he arrived he went up to Macclesfield, with Geoffrey, for the week-end, but he and my mother came back to London for the last two days, and I was given forty-eight hours off duty to stay with them at the Grafton Hotel. Except for an intense antipathy to noise - noise in trains, in ’buses, in the street, in restaurants - he seemed unchanged.
The afternoon of his return to London stands out very clearly in my recollection, for on that day the news came through of Kitchener’s death in the Hampshire. The words ‘KITCHENER DROWNED’ seemed more startling, more dreadful, than the tidings of Jutland; their incredibility may still be measured by the rumours, which so long persisted, that he was not dead, that he had escaped in another ship to Russia, that he was organising a great campaign in France, that the wreck of the Hampshire was only a ‘blind’ to conceal his real intentions, that he would return in his own good time to deliver the final blow of the War.
For a few moments during that day, almost everyone in England must have dropped his occupation to stare, blank and incredulous, into the shocked eyes of his neighbour. In the evening, Edward and our mother and I walked up and down, almost without a word, beside the river at Westminster. Sad and subdued, we stood on the terrace below St Thomas’s Hospital and looked at the black silhouette of the Union Jack on the War Office, flying half-mast against the darkening red of an angry June sky. So great had been the authority over our imagination of that half-legendary figure, that we felt as dismayed as though the ship of state itself had foundered in the raging North Sea.
Edward’s leave, like all short leaves, vanished in a whirl-wind of activities. Somehow he crowded into it an afternoon at Keymer, a visit to Victor, who was now at Purfleet, a concert, and one or two theatres, which inevitably included Romance, with Doris Keane and Owen Nares, and Chu Chin Chow. I seemed hardly to have seen him when it was time for him to return, but in a quiet interval, when we were alone together, he spoke in veiled but significant language of a great battle impending. It would start, he told me, somewhere near Albert, and he knew that he would be in it.
Before his train left for Folkestone, I had to go back to Camberwell, and he went with me to get my ’bus from the bottom of Regent Street. I climbed the steps of the ’bus with a sinking heart, for I knew very well how many were the chances against our meeting again. When I turned and waved to him from the upper deck, I noticed with impotent grief the sad wistfulness of his eyes as he stood where Roland had stood to watch the advent of 1915, and saluted me beside the fountain in Piccadilly Circus.
‘I’m more than ever convinced,’ Victor said to me afterwards, ‘that it’s worse for him than it was for Roland. Edward entirely lacks any primitive warring side to his character such as Roland possessed . . . I don’t think that the heroic and glorious side of war appeals to him as it did to Roland and I think that this makes it much harder for him.’
Later he told me that Edward had said to him at Purfleet: ‘The thought of those lines of trenches gives me a sick feeling in the stomach.’
Just after Edward’s return to France, I had the first of those dreams which were to recur, in slightly different variations, at frequent intervals for nearly ten years. Sometimes, in these dreams, Roland was minus an arm or a leg, or so badly mutilated or disfigured that he did not want me to see him; sometimes he had merely grown tired of all of us and of England, and was trying to become another person in a country far away. But always
he was alive, and within range of sight and touch after the conquest of some minor impediment.
‘I thought that Tah and I suddenly got a letter each in Roland’s handwriting,’ I told Edward. ‘In the dream we knew he was dead just as we do in everyday life. I opened mine with the very strange kind of feeling that one would have if such a thing happened actually. In the letter he said it was all a mistake that he was dead, and that he was really a prisoner in Germany but so badly maimed that he would never be able to get back again. I felt a sudden overwhelming feeling of relief to think he was after all alive under any circumstances whatever, and I gazed and gazed at the familiar handwriting on both Tah’s letter and mine, marvelling that it was really his, and as I gazed at it, it seemed gradually to change and become more and more different, till finally it was not like his at all.’
Edward’s reply closed with one or two sentences that quickened the sense of forboding anxiety which I had felt since his departure.
‘I am sure you will be interested to hear that we have quite a lot of celery growing near our present position.’ (‘The celery is ripe’ was for some obscure reason the phrase chosen by us to indicate that an attack was about to come off.) ‘It is ripening quickly although it is being somewhat delayed by this cold and wet weather we are having lately, and if the weather continues better I expect it will be ready in about a week.’
At the end of June, the hospital received orders to clear out all convalescents and prepare for a great rush of wounded. We knew that already a tremendous bombardment had begun, for we could feel the vibration of the guns at Camberwell, and the family in Keymer heard them continuously. The sickening, restless apprehension of those days reminded me of the week before Loos, but now there was no riverside bank beside which to dream, no time to spare for the somnolent misery of suspense. Hour after hour, as the convalescents departed, we added to the long rows of waiting beds, so sinister in their white, expectant emptiness.
On June 30th, a tiny pencilled note came from Edward. ‘The papers,’ it announced tersely, ‘are getting rather more interesting, but I have only time to say adieu.’
Obviously the moment that I had dreaded for a month was imminent, and I had no choice but to face it. How much longer was there, I wondered, to wait in this agony of fear? Had I time to get one last message through to Edward before the attack began? I decided to try; and sent off a letter that night.
‘Your little note has made me very sad. It seems not even yet time to cry “Will the night soon pass?” for you are very right, all too right, about the papers; the news this morning is like the sinister gathering of a thunderstorm just about to break overhead. There seems to be an atmosphere of tense expectation about all the world, and a sense of anguished foreknowledge of the sacrifice that is to be made . . . But I know you will not forget that as long as I am alive . . . I shall always remember all the things that both you and he meant and wished to do and be, and that as far as I am able, they shall all be fulfilled.
‘I say this because the remembrance of his death is with me very vividly to-day; I say it too because in your little note - in case of what may be - you say farewell. Adieu, then, if it must be. But I still prefer to say, and believe, what I said before at Piccadilly Circus—
“Au revoir.” ’
10
By the next day, July 1st, all the beds were ready, and Betty and I were each given an afternoon off duty. Neither of us felt in the mood for shops, or restaurants, or the proletarian camaraderie of the parks in midsummer, but we had heard that Brahm’s Requiem was to be sung that afternoon at Southwark Cathedral, and we decided to go.
‘What a theme for what a day!’ I thought afterwards. In the cool darkness of the Cathedral, so quieting after the dusty, reeking streets of Camberwell, we listened, with aching eyes, to the solemn words in their lovely, poignant setting:
Lord, make me to know what the measure of my days may
be, let me know all my frailty, ere death overtake me.
Lord God, all my days here are but a span long to
Thee, and my being naught within Thy sight . . .
O Lord, who will console me? My hope is in Thee.
When the organ had throbbed away into silence, we came out from the dim, melodious peace to hear the shouting of raucous voices, and to see newspaper boys with huge posters running excitedly up and down the pavement. Involuntarily I clutched Betty’s arm, for the posters ran:
‘GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS.’
A boy thrust a Star into my hand, and, shivering with cold in the hot sunshine, I made myself read it.
‘BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS - OFFICIAL
‘FRONT LINE BROKEN OVER ‘16 MILES
‘FRENCH SHARE ADVANCE
‘THE FIGHTING DEVELOPING IN ‘INTENSITY
‘British Headquarters, France.
‘Saturday , 9.30 a.m.
‘British Offensive. At about half-past seven o’clock this morning a vigorous offensive was launched by the British Army. The front extends over about 20 miles north of the Somme.
‘The assault was preceded by a terrific bombardment, lasting about an hour and a half.
‘It is too early as yet to give anything but the barest particulars, as the fighting is developing in intensity, but the British troops have already occupied the German front lines.’
Two days afterwards, that singularly wasteful and ineffective orgy of slaughter which we now know as the Battle of the Somme was described by The Times correspondent as ‘90 miles of uproar’:
‘For nearly four whole days now the 90 miles of the lines along the British front have been 90 miles of almost continuous chaos, of uproar and desolation. Day by day our bombardment has grown in intensity, until under the dreadful hurricane whole reaches of the enemy’s trenches have been battered out of existence.’
Only the mechanical habit of work which I had by now acquired enabled me to get through that evening, for the whole of my conscious mind resolved itself into one speculation: Was Edward still in the world - or not? At the hostel, after supper, I wrote to my mother; I did not know how much Edward had told her, but if he was dead it seemed better that she should share my knowledge and be forewarned. It surprises me still that I was able to write so calmly, so unemotionally. The whole of my generation seems always to have worn, for the benefit of its parents, a personality not quite its own, and I often wonder if, in days to come, my own son and daughter will assume for me the same alien disguise.
‘The news in the paper, which we got at 4.0 this afternoon, is quite self-evident,’ ran my letter, ‘so I needn’t say much about it. London was wildly excited and the papers selling madly. Of course you remember that Edward is at Albert and it is all round there that the papers say the fighting is fiercest - Montaubon, Fricourt, Mametz. I have been expecting this for days, as when he was here he told me that the great offensive was to begin there and of the part his own regiment was to play in the attack.’
For the next three days I lived and worked in hourly dread of a telegram. Had it not been for the sympathy of Geoffrey and Victor, and the knowledge that they too were watching and waiting in similar anxiety, this new suspense would have been overwhelming. Geoffrey wrote from Brocton Camp, in Staffordshire, where he was once more temporarily attached to the 13th Sherwood Foresters, to tell me that nine officers were going to the front from his battalion next day; he would have been going himself were he not on a course which lasted five more weeks. He’d been thinking about us all more than usual, he said, and only hoped that Edward would be as well looked after as himself ‘out there’. For many things, he concluded, he yearned to be there once more, and yet he knew that when the summons came again he would dread it - ‘or, to use a balder word, funk it’ - which was, he seemed to think, an awful confession to make, ‘as it’s absolutely the only thing now.’
On Sunday, the day after the battle, Victor came up from Purfleet to see me, for he too had had a note from Edward similar to mine. ‘The remark “One can only hope
they will follow” now applies. I am so busy that I have only time for material things. And so I must bid you a long, long adieu.’
Throughout the brief hour of my off-duty time we walked up and down St James’s Park, staring with unseeing eyes at the ducks fluttering over what was left of the lake - which was being drained to make room for Army huts - while Victor vainly tried to convince me how excellent were Edward’s chances of survival, since he was the kind of person who always kept his head in a crisis.
Next day we were told that the first rush of wounded was on its way to Camberwell.
‘This afternoon,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘the hospital was warned to get ready for 150 patients, 50 officers and 100 men. We had not really that much accommodation for officers, so all the patients from one of the surgical wards in the College were transferred into one of the new huts and their ward made into an officers’ ward. There was terrific tearing about all afternoon and everyone available was sent for to help haul mattresses, trollies and patients about . . . When I came off duty to-night the convoy had not yet arrived but was expected any hour. We were all warned by Matron to-night that very busy and strenuous days are ahead of us, and all our own arrangements must go quite on one side for the time being.’
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 30
