Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Readers of my pedestrian tale are perhaps wondering how soon I shall be returning to the temperate influence of Aunt Evelyn. In her latest letter she announced that a Zeppelin had dropped a bomb on an orchard about six miles away; there had also been an explosion at the Powder Mills at Dumbridge, but no one had been hurt. Nevertheless Butley was too buzzing and leisurely a background for my mercurial state of mind; so I stayed in London for another fortnight, and during that period my mental inquietude achieved some sort of climax. In fact I can safely say that my aggregated exasperations came to a head; and, naturally enough, the head was my own. The prime cause of this psychological thunderstorm was my talk with Markington, who was unaware of his ignitionary effect until I called on him in his editorial room on the Monday after our first meeting. Ostensibly I went to ask his advice; in reality, to release the indignant emotions which his editorial utterances had unwittingly brought to the surface of my consciousness. It was a case of direct inspiration; I had, so to speak, received the call, and the editor of the Unconservative Weekly seemed the most likely man to put me on the shortest road to martyrdom. It really felt very fine, and as long as I was alone my feelings carried me along on a torrent of prophetic phrases. But when I was inside Markington’s office (he sitting with fingers pressed together and regarding me with alertly mournful curiosity) my internal eloquence dried up and I began abruptly. ‘I say, I’ve been thinking it all over, and I’ve made up my mind that I ought to do something about it.’ He pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead and leant back in his chair. ‘You want to do something?’ ‘About the War, I mean. I just can’t sit still and do nothing. You said the other day that you couldn’t print anything really outspoken, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t make some sort of statement – about how we ought to publish our War Aims and all that and the troops not knowing what they’re fighting about. It might do quite a lot of good, mightn’t it?’ He got up and went to the window. A secretarial typewriter tick-tacked in the next room. While he stood with his back to me I could see the tiny traffic creeping to and fro on Charing Cross Bridge and a barge going down the river in the sunshine. My heart was beating violently. I knew that I couldn’t turn back now. Those few moments seemed to last a long time; I was conscious of the stream of life going on its way, happy and untroubled, while I had just blurted out something which alienated me from its acceptance of a fine day in the third June of the Great War. Returning to his chair, he said, ‘I suppose you’ve realized what the results of such an action would be, as regards yourself?’ I replied that I didn’t care two damns what they did to me as long as I got the thing off my chest. He laughed, looking at me with a gleam of his essential kindness. ‘As far as I am aware, you’d be the first soldier to take such a step, which would, of course, be welcomed by the extreme pacifists. Your service at the front would differentiate you from the conscientious objectors. But you must on no account make this gesture – a very fine one if you are really in earnest about it – unless you can carry it through effectively. Such an action would require to be carefully thought out, and for the present I advise you to be extremely cautious in what you say and do.’ His words caused me an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps I was only making a fool of myself; but this was soon mitigated by a glowing sense of martyrdom. I saw myself ‘attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired’, and while Markington continued his counsels of prudence my resolve strengthened toward its ultimate obstinacy. After further reflection he said that the best man for me to consult was Thornton Tyrrell. ‘You know him by name, I suppose?’ I was compelled to admit that I didn’t. Markington handed me Who’s Who and began to write a letter while I made myself acquainted with the details of Tyrrell’s biographical abridgement, which indicated that he was a pretty tough proposition. To put it plainly he was an eminent mathematician, philosopher, and physicist. As a mathematician I’d never advanced much beyond ‘six from four you can’t, six from fourteen leaves eight’; and I knew no more about the functions of a physicist than a cat in a kitchen. ‘What sort of a man is he to meet?’ I asked dubiously. Markington licked and closed the envelope of his rapidly written letter. ‘Tyrrell is the most uncompromising character I know. An extraordinary brain, of course. But you needn’t be alarmed by that; you’ll find him perfectly easy to get on with. A talk with him ought to clarify your ideas. I’ve explained your position quite briefly. But, as I said before, I hope you won’t be too impetuous.’

  I put the letter in my pocket, thanked him warmly, and went soberly down the stairs and along the quiet sidestreet into the Strand. While I was debating whether I ought to buy and try to read one of Tyrrell’s books before going to see him, I almost bumped into a beefy Major-General. It was lunch-time and he was turning in at the Savoy Hotel entrance. Rather grudgingly, I saluted. As I went on my way, I wondered what the War Office would say if it knew what I was up to.

  2

  Early in the afternoon I left the letter at Tyrrell’s address in Bloomsbury. He telegraphed that he could see me in the evening, and punctually at the appointed hour I returned to the quiet square. My memory is not equal to the effort of reconstructing my exact sensations, but it can safely be assumed that I felt excited, important, and rather nervous. I was shown into an austere-looking room where Tyrrell was sitting with a reading lamp at his elbow. My first impression was that he looked exactly like a philosopher. He was small, clean-shaven, with longish grey hair brushed neatly above a fine forehead. He had a long upper lip, a powerful ironic mouth, and large earnest eyes. I observed that the book which he put aside was called The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin, and I wondered what on earth it could be about. He put me at my ease by lighting a large pipe, saying as he did so, ‘Well, I gather from Markington’s letter that you’ve been experiencing a change of heart about the War.’ He asked for details of my career in the Army, and soon I was rambling on in my naturally inconsequent style. Tyrrell said very little, his object being to size me up. Having got my mind warmed up, I began to give him a few of my notions about the larger aspects of the War. But he interrupted my ‘and after what Markington told me the other day, I must say’, with, ‘Never mind about what Markington told you. It amounts to this, doesn’t it – that you have ceased to believe what you are told about the objects for which you supposed yourself to be fighting?’ I replied that it did boil down to something like that, and it seemed to me a bloody shame, the troops getting killed all the time while people at home humbugged themselves into believing that everyone in the trenches enjoyed it. Tyrrell poured me out a second cup of tea and suggested that I should write out a short personal statement based on my conviction that the War was being unnecessarily prolonged by the refusal of the Allies to publish their war aims. When I had done this we could discuss the next step to be taken. ‘Naturally I should help you in every way possible,’ he said. ‘I have always regarded all wars as acts of criminal folly, and my hatred of this one has often made life seem almost unendurable. But hatred makes one vital, and without it one loses energy. “Keep vital” is a more important axiom than “love your neighbour”. This act of yours, if you stick to it, will probably land you in prison. Don’t let that discourage you. You will be more alive in prison than you would be in the trenches.’ Mistaking this last remark for a joke, I laughed, rather half-heartedly. ‘No; I mean that seriously,’ he said. ‘By thinking independently and acting fearlessly on your moral convictions you are serving the world better than you would do by marching with the unthinking majority who are suffering and dying at the front because they believe what they have been told to believe. Now that you have lost your faith in what you enlisted for, I am certain that you should go on and let the consequences take care of themselves. Of course your action would be welcomed by people like myself who are violently opposed to the War. We should print and circulate as many copies of your statement as possible…. But I hadn’t intended to speak as definitely as this. You must decide by your own feeling and not by what anyone else says.’ I promised to se
nd him my statement when it was written and walked home with my head full of exalted and disorderly thoughts. I had taken a strong liking for Tyrrell, who probably smiled rather grimly while he was reading a few more pages of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread before going upstairs to his philosophic slumbers.

  Although Tyrrell had told me that my statement needn’t be more than 200 words long, it took me several days to formulate. At first I felt that I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. But after several verbose failures it seemed as though the essence of my manifesto could be stated in a single sentence: ‘I say this War ought to stop.’ During the struggle to put my unfusilierish opinions into some sort of shape, my confidence often diminished. But there was no relaxation of my inmost resolve, since I was in the throes of a species of conversion which made the prospect of persecution stimulating and almost enjoyable. No; my loss of confidence was in the same category as my diffidence when first confronted by a Vickers Machine-gun and its Instructor. While he reeled off the names of its numerous component parts, I used to despair of ever being able to remember them or understand their workings. ‘And unless I know all about the Vickers Gun I’ll never get sent out to the front,’ I used to think. Now, sitting late at night in an expensive but dismal bedroom in Jermyn Street, I internally exclaimed, ‘I’ll never be able to write out a decent statement and the whole blasted protest will be a washout! Tyrrell thinks I’m quite brainy, but when he reads this stuff he’ll realize what a dud I am.’

  What could I do if Tyrrell decided to discourage my candidature for a court martial? Chuck up the whole idea and go out again and get myself killed as quick as possible? ‘Yes,’ I thought, working myself up into a tantrum, ‘I’d get killed just to show them all I don’t care a damn.’ (I didn’t stop to specify the identity of ‘them all’; such details could be dispensed with when one had lost one’s temper with the Great War.) But common sense warned me that getting sent back was a slow business, and getting killed on purpose an irrelevant gesture for a platoon commander. One couldn’t choose one’s own conditions out in France…. Tyrrell had talked about ‘serving the world by thinking independently’. I must hang on to that idea and remember the men for whom I believed myself to be interceding. I tried to think internationally; the poor old Boches must be hating it just as much as we did; but I couldn’t propel my sympathy as far as the Balkan States, Turks, Italians, and all the rest of them; and somehow or other the French were just the French and too busy fighting and selling things to the troops to need my intervention. So I got back to thinking about ‘all the good chaps who’d been killed with the First and Second Battalions since I left them’…. Ormand, dying miserably out in a shell-hole…. I remembered his exact tone of voice when saying that if his children ever asked what he did in the Great War, his answer would be, ‘No bullet ever went quick enough to catch me;’ and how he used to sing ‘Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee,’ when we were being badly shelled. I thought of the typical Flintshire Fusilier at his best, and the vast anonymity of courage and cheerfulness which he represented as he sat in a front-line trench cleaning his mess-tin. How could one connect him with the gross profiteer whom I’d overheard in a railway carriage remarking to an equally repulsive companion that if the War lasted another eighteen months he’d be able to retire from business?… How could I co-ordinate such diversion of human behaviour, or believe that heroism was its own reward? Something must be put on paper, however, and I re-scrutinized the rough notes I’d been making: Fighting men are victims of conspiracy among (a) politicians; (b) military caste; (c) people who are making money out of the War. Under this I had scribbled, Also personal effort to dissociate myself from intolerant prejudice and conventional complacence of those willing to watch sacrifices of others while they sit safely at home. This was followed by an indignant afterthought. I believe that by taking this action I am helping to destroy the system of deception, etc., which prevents people from facing the truth and demanding some guarantee that the torture of humanity shall not be prolonged unnecessarily through the arrogance and incompetence of… Here it broke off, and I wondered how many c’s there were in ‘unnecessarily’. I am not a conscientious objector. I am a soldier who believes he is acting on behalf of soldiers. How inflated and unconvincing it all looked! If I wasn’t careful I should be yelling like some crank on a barrel in Hyde Park. Well, there was nothing for it but to begin all over again. I couldn’t ask Tyrrell to give me a few hints. He’d insisted that I must be independent-minded, and had since written to remind me that I must decide my course of action for myself and not be prompted by anything he’d said to me.

  Sitting there with my elbows on the table I stared at the dingy red wallpaper in an unseeing effort at mental concentration. If I stared hard enough and straight enough, it seemed, I should see through the wall. Truth would be revealed, and my brain would become articulate. I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. That would be all right as a kick-off, anyhow. So I continued my superhuman cogitations. Around me was London with its darkened streets; and far away was the War, going on with wave on wave of gunfire, devouring its victims, and unable to blunder forward either to Paris or the Rhine. The air-raids were becoming serious, too. Looking out of the window at the searchlights, I thought how ridiculous it would be if a bomb dropped on me while I was writing out my statement.

  3

  Exactly a week after our first conversation I showed the statement to Tyrrell. He was satisfied with it as a whole and helped me to clarify a few minor crudities of expression. Nothing now remained but to wait until my leave had expired and then hurl the explosive document at the Commanding Officer at Clitherland (an event which I didn’t permit myself to contemplate clearly). For the present the poor man only knew that I’d applied for an instructorship with a Cadet Battalion at Cambridge. He wrote that he would be sorry to lose me and congratulated me on what he was generous enough to describe as my splendid work at the front. In the meantime Tyrrell was considering the question of obtaining publicity for my protest. He introduced me to some of his colleagues on the ‘Stop the War Committee’ and the ‘No Conscription Fellowship’. Among them was an intellectual conscientious objector (lately released after a successful hunger-strike). Also a genial veteran Socialist (recognizable by his red tie and soft grey hat) who grasped my hand with rugged good wishes. One and all, they welcomed me to the Anti-War Movement, but I couldn’t quite believe that I had been assimilated. The reason for this feeling was their antipathy to everyone in uniform. I was still wearing mine, and somehow I was unable to dislike being a Flintshire Fusilier. This little psychological dilemma now seems almost too delicate to be divulged. In their eyes, I suppose, there was no credit attached to the fact of having been at the front; but for me it had been a supremely important experience. I am obliged to admit that if these anti-war enthusiasts hadn’t happened to be likeable I might have secretly despised them. Any man who had been on active service had an unfair advantage over those who hadn’t. And the man who had really endured the War at its worst was everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers.

  Tyrrell (a great man and to be thought of as ‘in a class by himself’) took me up to Hampstead one hot afternoon to interview a member of Parliament who was ‘interested in my case’. Walking alongside of the philosopher I felt as if we were a pair of conspirators. His austere scientific intellect was far beyond my reach, but he helped me by his sense of humour, which he had contrived, rather grimly, to retain, in spite of the exasperating spectacle of European civilization trying to commit suicide. The M.P. promised to raise the question of my statement in the House of Commons as soon as I had sent it to the Colonel at Clitherland, so I began to feel that I was getting on grandly. But except for the few occasions when I saw Tyrrell, I was existing in a world of my own (in which I tried to keep my courage up to prot
est-pitch). From the visible world I sought evidence which could aggravate my quarrel with acquiescent patriotism. Evidences of civilian callousness and complacency were plentiful, for the thriftless licence of war-time behaviour was an unavoidable spectacle, especially in the Savoy Hotel Grill Room which I visited more than once in my anxiety to reassure myself of the existence of bloated profiteers and uniformed jacks in office. Watching the guzzlers in the Savoy (and conveniently overlooking the fact that some of them were officers on leave) I nourished my righteous hatred of them, anathematizing their appetites with the intolerance of youth which made me unable to realize that comfort-loving people are obliged to avoid self-knowledge – especially when there is a war on. But I still believe that in 1917 the idle, empty-headed, and frivolous ingredients of Society were having a tolerably good time, while the officious were being made self-important by nicely graded degrees of uniformed or un-uniformed war-emergency authority. For middle-aged persons who faced the War bleakly, life had become unbearable unless they persuaded themselves that the slaughter was worth while. Tyrrell was comprehensively severe on everyone except inflexible pacifists. He said that the people who tried to resolve the discords of the War into what they called ‘a higher harmony’ were merely enabling themselves to contemplate the massacre of the young men with an easy conscience. ‘By Jingo, I suppose you’re right!’ I exclaimed, wishing that I were able to express my ideas with such comprehensive clarity.