The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 3 - Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  April 10. Up at 3.30. Started 5.30. Reached camping ground at Ludd about noon. Clear dawn with larks singing; large morning star and thin slice of moon above dim blue hills. Fire-fly lights of camp below.

  Starting off like that in the grey-green morning is delicious. One feels so fresh, with one’s long shadow swaying on, and for the first two hours the country is green and pleasant. After Ramleh (a white town with olives and fruit trees and full of British) it was very hot and the road terribly dusty. No shadow at all now and one ached all over and felt footsore – marching between cactus-hedges with motors passing all the time and clouds of dust. At lunch the C.O. told a story about some friend of his who was in charge of a camp of Turkish prisoners; they gave trouble, so he turned a machine-gun on them and killed a lot. This was received with sycophantic ha-ha’s from the captains. Queer man, his lordship.

  Note. Sensations of a private on the march. Left, left; left-right, left. 110 paces to the minute. Monotonous rhythm of marching beats in his brain. The column moves heavily on; dust hangs over it; dust and the glaring discomfort of the sky. Going up a hill the round steel helmets sway from side to side with the lurch of heavily-laden shoulders. Vans and lorries drone and grind and blunder along the road; cactus-hedges are caked with dust. The column passes some Turkish prisoners in dingy dark uniform and red fez, guarded by Highlanders. ‘Make the——s work, Jock!’ someone shouts from the ranks…. Through the sweat-soaked exhaustion that weighs him down, he sees and hears these things; his shoulders are a dull ache; his feet burn hot and clumsy with fatigue; his eyes are tormented by the white glare of the airless road. Men in front, men behind; no escape. ‘Fall out on the right of the road’…. He collapses into a dry ditch until the whistle blows again.

  Evening. April 12. Kantara. Left camp 1 p.m. yesterday with advance party. Very hot; scent of orange blossom. Train left Ludd about 5 and reached Kantara at 9 this morning. When I left here a month ago I hoped I’d seen the last of it for a long time! Felt horribly tired yesterday and wasn’t much improved by sixteen hours of jolting and excruciating noise of railway truck.

  Every time I woke up my face was thick with sand and grime from the engine. But it was warm, and I had my valise.

  It feels positive agony to leave those Palestine hills. Here I sit, in a flapping tent close to the main road through the camp. Strong wind, and sand blowing everywhere. Nearest tree God knows where! Remainder of Battalion arrives to-morrow morning. Our party was getting tents up this morning.

  After one o’clock I escaped to a lake, about a mile away in the salt marshes where nothing grows. It was quite solitary except for an aeroplane overhead and a flock of flamingoes. Kantara’s tents and huts were a sand-coloured blur on the edge of the hot quivering afternoon. Blown by the wind, the water came merrily in wavelets. I had a bathe in the shallow salt water with deep mud below, and the sun and wind were quite pleasant as I ran up and down – happy, because there wasn’t a soul within a mile of me, though it was a dreary sort of place when one came to think of it. Miles of flat sand; dry bushes here and there, but nothing green, and the dried mud glistening with salt. But the water was blue-green; and the flamingoes had left a few feathers on the edge of the lake before they flapped away with the light shining through their rosy wings.

  April 15. 9 p.m. Another day over and wasted. Endless small tiresome details to be worried through; and at the end of the day exhaustion, exasperation, and utter inability to think clearly or collect any thoughts worth putting down.

  Two men, going on leave to Cairo to-morrow, have just been into my tent for their pay; their happy excited faces the only human thing worth recording from the past 15 hours.

  April 19. A week at Kantara gone by. One bad sandstorm. Company training every day 6.30–10 and in afternoon. Sand; sunlight. Haven’t been half a mile from camp all the time. Last Sunday night I took a party down to get their clothes and blankets boiled. Waited 2 hours for the boilers to be disengaged, and then 100 stark naked men stood about for an hour while most of their worldly possessions were stewed.

  The little Doc. goes away to-morrow to join the 10th Division who are staying in Palestine. I shall miss his birdlore and his whimsical companionship very much.

  April 23. Lying in my little bivouac (a new idea which enables me to be alone) I watch dim shapes going along the dusty white road in blue dusk and clouded moonlight. As they pass I overhear scraps of their talk. Many of them thick-voiced and full of drink. Others flit past silently. Confused shouts and laughter from the men’s tents behind; from the road the sound of tramping boots. The pallor of the sand makes the sky look blue. A few stars are visible, framed in the triangle of my door, with field-glasses and haversack slung against the pole on the middle. Sometimes a horse goes by, or a rumbling lorry. So I puff my pipe and watch the world, ruminating on what exists within the narrow bivouac of my philosophy, lit by the single lantern-candle of my belief in things like War and Peace and The Woodlanders.

  Since last year I seem to be getting outside of things a bit better. Recognizing the futility of war as much as ever, I dimly realize the human weakness which makes it possible. For I spend my time with people who are, most of them, too indolent-minded to think for themselves. Selfishly, I long for escape from the burden that is so much more difficult than it was two or three years ago. But the patience and simple decency which I find in the ordinary soldier, these make it possible to go on somehow. I feel sorry for them – that’s what it is.

  For in our Division considerably more than half the N.C.O.s and men have been on active service without leave since September 1915, when they went to Gallipoli. And now, as a nice change of air, they are being shipped back to the Western Front to help check the new German offensives. Obviously they have sound reasons for feeling a bit fed-up.

  ‘Of course they have! That is why we are so grateful to them and so proud of them’ reply the people at home. What else do they get, besides this vague gratitude? Company football matches, beer in the canteens, and one mail in three weeks.

  I felt all this very strongly a few evenings ago when a Concert Party gave an entertainment to the troops. It wasn’t much; a canvas awning; a few footlights; two blue-chinned actors in soft felt hats – one of them jangling rag-time tunes on a worn-out upright; three women in short silk skirts singing the old, old, soppy popular songs; and all five of them doing their best with their little repertoire.

  They were unconscious, it seemed to me, of the intense impact of their audience – that dim brown moonlit mass of men. Row beyond row, I watched those soldiers, listening so quietly, chins propped on hands, to the songs which epitomized their ‘Blighty hunger’, their longing for the gaiety and sentiment of life.

  In the front rows were half-lit ruddy faces and glittering eyes; those behind sloped into dusk and indistinctness, with here and there the glowing spark of a cigarette. And at the back, high above the rest, a few figures were silhouetted against the receding glimmer of the desert. And beyond that was the starry sky. It was as though these civilians were playing to an audience of the dead and the living – men and ghosts who had crowded in like moths to a lamp. One by one they had stolen back, till the crowd seemed limitlessly extended. And there, in that half-lit oasis of Time, they listen to ‘Dixieland’ and ‘It’s a long, long trail’, and ‘I hear you calling me’. But it was the voice of life that ‘joined in the chorus, boys’; and very powerful and impressive it sounded.

  May 1st. (S.S. Malwa. P. & O. 10,838 tons, after leaving Alexandria for Marseilles. Three Battalions on board; also Divisional General, four Brigadiers, and numerous staff-officers. 3300 ‘souls’ altogether not counting the boat’s crew. Raft accommodation for about 1000. Six other boats in the convoy, escorted by destroyers.)

  Scraps of conversation float up from the saloon below the gallery where I am sitting. ‘I myself believe…. I think, myself…. My own opinion is….’

  The speaker continues to enunciate his opinion in a rather too well-bred voice. The Wa
r – always the War – and world politics, plus a few other matters of supreme importance, are being discussed, quite informally, by a small group of staff-officers. (I know it is unreasonable, but I am prejudiced against staff-officers – they are so damned well dressed and superior!) After a while they drift away, and their superior talk is superseded by a jingle of knives, forks, and spoons; the stewards are preparing the long tables for our next meal.

  S.S. Malwa (not a name that inspires confidence – I don’t know why), cleaving the level water with a perturbed throbbing vibration, carries us steadily away from the unheeding warmth and mystery of Egypt. Leaving nothing behind us, we are bound for the heavily-rumoured grimness of the battles in France. The troops are herded on the lower decks in stifling, dim-lit messrooms, piled and hung with litter of equipment. Unlike the Staff, they have no smart uniforms, no bottles of hair-oil, and no confidential information with which to make their chatter important and intriguing. John Bull and ginger beer are their chief facilities for passing the time pleasantly. They do not complain that the champagne on board is inferior and the food only moderate. In fact they make me feel that Dickens was right when he wrote so warm-heartedly about ‘the poor’. They are only a part of the huge dun-coloured mass of victims which passes through the shambles of war into the gloom of death where even generals ‘automatically revert to the rank of private’. But in the patience and simplicity of their outward showing they seem like one soul. They are the tradition of human suffering and endurance, stripping of all the silly self-glorifications and embellishments by which human society seeks to justify its conventions.

  May 3. I get intolerant and contemptuous about the officers on board and all that they represent. While I’m sitting in a corner reading Tolstoy (how priggish it sounds!) they come straddling in to sprawl on wicker chairs and padded seats – their faces crimson from over-drinking. Fortunately the fact that the Western Front is two thousand miles nearer Piccadilly Circus than Palestine seems to console them. But one gets an occasional glimpse of disquiet in the emergence of a haunted look or a bitter, uneasy laugh. Haunted by secret fear of what awaits them in France (plus the chance of my Submarined ticket winning the ‘selling sweep’) they are to be pitied. But the pity needs to be vast, to encompass them all. No little human patronizing pity, like mine, is any use.

  I too am tortured, but I begin to see that the War has remade me and done away with a lot of my ideas that were no good. So I am really better for it, in spite of scowling bitterly at it.

  Their trouble is that they can’t understand why they are being made miserable by deprivation of everything in life which they want. So their suffering doesn’t help them, and they hide from their despair in drinks and oblivion. And life becomes an obscene thing, as it is on this boat. Obscene terror invades the overcrowded ship when those on board awake in the morning and remember their present peril. And I wonder how many of these officers are facing the future undaunted? I mean the young ones – not the middle aged, who will be mostly safe when once ashore. I believe that there is submerged horror in their souls. They cannot think; they dare not think it out. The situation appals them. So they try to forget, and this passes for courage. Their hectic gaiety is the stuff that stimulates war-correspondents to enthusiasm.

  Thus I sit and try to reason it out – evolving my notions from scraps of talk and flushed faces that are becoming gross with years of war.

  Then my mental equilibrium is restored by a man I used to hunt with in Kent, who comes along and talks about the old days and what fun we used to have. But there is a look in his eyes which reminds me of something. It comes back to me quite clearly; he looked like that when he was waiting to go down to the post for his first point-to-point. And he told me afterwards that he’d been so nervous that he really didn’t think he could face doing it again. And, being a shrewd sort of character, he never did.

  May 4. Am still studying the psychology of the average officer on board. (Have just been wondering what Rivers would say about it.) One can only pick up surface hints and clues from talk and general behaviour, but I am inclined to suppose that they possess a protective apparatus in lazy-mindedness. ‘Thank goodness! Civilization again!’ they murmur leaning back in a padded P. & O. chair. Cards and drinks and light fiction carry them through. Physically healthy, they know that they are ‘for it’, and hope for a Blighty wound with a cushy job to follow. It is every man for himself. In a battle most of them would be splendid, one hopes. But army life away from the actual front is demoralizing. Remembrance of Rivers warns me against intolerance; but isn’t this boat-load a sample of the human folly which can accept war as an inevitable and useful element in the routine of life? Old man Tolstoy says ‘the most difficult and the most meritorious thing in life is to love it in spite of all its undeserved suffering’. But who cares for Tolstoy’s wisdom here? Only me, apparently.

  During the day I watch the men lying about on the decks in the sunlight, staring idly at the glittering glorious blue sea and the huge boats ploughing along in line – six of us, with about ten destroyers in the offing. (Coming up on deck early this morning I saw one of the destroyers firing at something, so I suppose we are being chased all the time.) Leaning against one another in indolent attitudes, the men seem much nearer the realities of life than the average officer.

  I must, however, put in a word for the Divisional General, who has a very kind face and appears to be the best type of reticent regular officer. He is also reputed to be a good general. I watched him playing bridge last night in the gallery above the dining-saloon. He asked the band to play ‘The Rosary’ a second time. ‘It may be hackneyed,’ he exclaimed, ‘but I love it!’

  May 5. In the circular gallery above the dining-saloon a few electric lamps glow with a subdued and golden sobriety which reveals vulgar oak panelling and carved balustrades, bilious green curtains, and a tawdry gilt and painted ceiling adorned with meaningless patterns. The skylight – an atrocity in blue and green glass with the steamship company’s crest – is invisible owing to absence of light from above, but the lunette wall spaces below are made alluring by a pair of oleographic representations of simpering sirens doing some dancing. Electric fans revolve and hum, hurling dim whizzing shadows on the walls like ghostly wings. The boat throbs and quivers and creaks – straining onward as though conscious of her own danger which keeps every light shrouded from exterior gloom; the buzzing air is vitiated and oppressive. The smoking-room, with its convivial crowd of tipsy jabberers, is no place to write descriptive prose in. Out here it is quieter. In the saloon below some officers are playing cards; others are occupied with a small roulette-wheel. I gaze down at their well-oiled heads, where they bend over the green tables; I listen to the chink of coins and the jargon of their ejaculative comments on the game, while dusky stewards continually bring them drinks. These are the distractions which drug their exasperation and alarm; for like the boat they are straining forward to safety, environed by the menace of submarines.

  Having watched all this for a while, I stumble from a dim passage into blustering darkness and invigorating air. Out there the sea is darker than the sky, but the escorting destroyers are seen like long shadows – scarcely more than a blur on the water, stealing forward all the time.

  Gradually getting used to the gloom, I see a sentry looming by the davits, silent above the recumbent sleepers, while the sea races backward cavernous and chill with spray.

  All along the decks the troops are sleeping, huddled close together under their blankets. And on their defencelessness a gleam of stars looks down.

  Nothing is heard but the sluicing of the waves and the throb of the engines.

  Within are chart-rooms and engine-rooms, and the wireless operator in his little den, and the captain in his stateroom, and all the rest of them whose dutifulness may at any moment become a futile contention with disaster. And outside, the mystery and unpitying hugeness of the sea; and the soldiers whose sleeping forms remind me of the dead.

  May
7. A quiet morning with rain clouds and sunshine. We came into Marseilles harbour about 8.30 a.m. It is said that the captain of the boat celebrated our safe arrival by bursting into tears on the bridge.

  May 8. Musso. (Rest camp outside Marseilles.) Yesterday afternoon we marched away from the docks at 3.15 and got here at 6.30. The troops were childishly excited by seeing a European city after being in the East so long. The bright green plane trees along the streets gave them particular pleasure. Everyone seems delighted and refreshed also by being able to read yesterday’s Daily Mail. But it doesn’t cheer me to read that ‘we advanced our line a little nearer Morlancourt, a position of great tactical importance’. Two years ago we were living there, and it was five miles behind our Front Line.

  Marseilles is a very pleasant looking place with its climbing streets and the grey hills behind. I went there this afternoon. Inspected the Zoological Gardens, as I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go! Not much there, owing to the War. In one of the aviaries, among a lot of bright-plumaged little birds, there was a blackbird; looking rather the worse for wear, he sat and sang his heart out, throwing his head back and opening his yellow bill wide, quite oblivious of the others. Somehow he made me think of a prisoner of war.

  May 10. (11 p.m.) The Battalion entrained and left Marseilles yesterday afternoon. The train has been rumbling along all day through the Rhône country, green and lovely with early summer. Now it goes on in the dark, emitting eldritch shrieks which echo along the valleys. It was a blue and white day and nightingales were singing from every bush and thicket. I hear one now, while the train has stopped, warbling in the gloom to an orchestral accompaniment of croaking frogs. Muttering voices of officers in the next compartment. In here, the other three are asleep in various ungainly attitudes. Young Howitt looks as if he were dead.

  Monday, May 13. (Domvast, a village 13 k. from Abbeville.) Early yesterday morning we detrained at Noyelles, near Abbeville. On Saturday evening we were on some high ground while passing the environs of Paris. Gazing out across that city I wondered whether I shall ever go there as a civilian. It looked rather romantic and mysterious somehow, and a deep-toned bell was tolling slowly. Four hours’ march from Noyelles. Got here 6.30. Into billets – farmyard smells – all just like two years ago. Weather fine, with a breeze behind us all the way. Country looking very beautiful. But May is a deceptive time of year to arrive anywhere; it creates an illusion of youth and prosperity, as though the world were trying to be friendly, and happiness somewhere ahead of one.