Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  This is where the correspondence ends. There are no more letters for many months. How it must have felt to be in limbo, having broken off relations with the girl he loved and waiting to be sent to the battlefront, is impossible to know, but easy to imagine. The silence is broken for the first time on June 18, 1916, in a letter formally addressed to Win’s mother, Mrs. Regensburg, sent by Rifleman Schlesinger #6901, 2/16 Queen’s Westminster Rifles, from Sandhill Camp, near Warminster, in Wiltshire. It is written in pencil.

  Mrs. Regensburg is kindly thanked for sending him a compact medicine chest, and Bernard assures her that with this precious gift he can “do all sorts of things without harm.” Gun shells may burst quite close to him, but “their subsequent effects—a headache or shaky nerves—will soon be counteracted by aspirin and nerve tonic.”

  He tells her how the men are all being made to crop their hair. Some, he reports, get the regimental barber to cut the regimental number on their heads with a fine pair of scissors. Others have an arrow carved out “to remind them they belong to the army.”

  Well, he concludes:

  I have dozens of people to whom I ought to write, so I had better wind up. Au revoir & love to all. Many thanks again.

  Cheery oh, Bernard

  The next letter to “Mrs. Regensburg,” at Rosemount, 17 Parsifal Road, London, would arrive from the front lines of the battle on the Somme.

  Two

  GOING TO WAR

  Bernard never liked to talk about his experiences in World War I. Ever one to look at the bright side of things, he did not care to even mention the worst he had seen: no stories about men chased into German machine-gun fire by officers blowing whistles, like football referees; no stories of soldiers torn apart by mines, or screaming as they died slowly in the filthy muck of no-man’s-land; of fresh corpses being eaten by bloated rats; of maggot-infested wounds and faces blown away; and so on, and on, into the unmentionable, or at least unimaginable, horrors of the war of attrition.

  He did, come to think of it, often proclaim, perhaps a little facetiously, the excellence of bully beef stew, or plain “Bully,” the most common and probably quite disgusting British army ration of tinned corned beef. Actually, even this luxury was rarely available on the front lines, where a soldier would be lucky to get a slice of stale bread with margarine. And I never heard him use words like “fuck,” since, as he once explained, he had heard so much swearing in the trenches that he had enough to last a lifetime. But that, apart from a few place names and a memory of marching into Jerusalem with General Allenby’s troops, was about it.

  Rifleman Schlesinger

  It was a lot easier to talk about the second war, much of which Bernard spent charging around northern India as an army doctor. But about his time on the Somme he remained mute. Perhaps memories of World War II had crowded out those of the first war. Or possibly he had repressed them.

  And yet repression, if that is what it was, was not complete. When I was still a very young boy, he was keen to pass on some of his relics of the Great War. I still have his RAMC cap badge, and his First Field Dressing, a small dun-colored package, manufactured in Doncaster, containing a piece of gauze, a pad, and a bit of waterproof material. This was kept by every British and Empire soldier on the inside flap of his tunic. Quite how much it would help after a person was ripped apart by machine-gun fire or shrapnel, I don’t know. An instruction on the package reads, “If two wounds, put the pad on one and the piece of gauze on the other and divide the waterproof.”

  I do remember Bernard mentioning that he was stationed somewhere around Arras, which would have put him near the infamous Vimy Ridge, the capture of which cost the Canadians about 10,000 casualties. But that battle was in 1917, when he was fighting the Bulgarians in Greece.

  I am not sure either what he was doing on July 1, that sickening first day of the Battle of the Somme when more than 20,000 British troops were killed and 40,000 wounded in a matter of hours, cut down by German machine guns after rushing over the tops of their trenches in wave after wave, fortified on empty stomachs by a tot of navy rum—you didn’t want to be hit in the gut just after breakfast. French and British generals knew perfectly well that not much could be done in the summer of 1916 to break the stalemate on the Western Front. The only plan they had was to kill more Germans than the Germans could kill British and French. Four months later, the Allies had advanced about seven miles. By then, more than a million German, French, and British Empire soldiers were wounded or dead.

  Map of Bernard’s trench near the Somme

  Amid Bernard’s letters is a small map, drawn in blue and red, of the trenches where the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles huddled together with soldiers from the Black Watch. I cannot imagine that anyone was allowed to carry such sensitive information, but Bernard always had a terrible sense of direction, so perhaps he secretly bore this map so he wouldn’t wander off into no-man’s-land. Or it could have been drawn up later.

  Several place names are scribbled on the map: Doublement, Zivy, Mill Street, Mercier. The trench was indeed near Vimy Ridge, in a place called Neuville-Saint-Vaast, four miles north of Arras. By the time Bernard got there, the town was already a pile of rubble. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French sculptor, had been killed there the year before.

  The QWR battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Clark, noted in his war diary that his troops, including Bernard, had landed in Le Havre from Southampton on June 23. On the thirtieth, they were in the trenches. On July 1 the diary notes, “Trenches. A + B company platoon in front line for instruction. Attached to 1/6 Black Watch.”

  There is a mention also of Vimy Ridge in a letter to Win written two years after the war, when Bernard talks about the warm companionship felt by human beings when huddling by a fire. “I suppose,” he writes, “it’s a throwback to our very ancient ancestors, yours and mine, who lived more or less wild in the open.” Then he remembers the “little Stretcher Bearer dugout in the front line near Vimy where Harry, a fellow called Finlow, and I used to sit on our haunches hunched up but comfortable and secure. A candle stuck into the muddy wall was our fire then and we discoursed into its flickering flame and stopped to relight it occasionally as the rush of air from some passing Bosch shell thumped it out.”

  This sounds rather more casual than it would have been on most nights. The British journalist Robert Kee once described the trenches as “the concentration camps of World War One.” John Keegan, in whose marvelous book The Face of Battle these words are quoted, remarks that this analogy is not quite exact historically, but that “there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire.”

  Bernard was still in the trenches on July 7, the date of his first letter. He speaks of the roasting-hot weather, interrupted by rainstorms that flooded the trenches and turned the terrain into liquid mud. His letter, written in pencil to “Rosemount,” the house on 17 Parsifal Road, is addressed to “All of you” (direct correspondence between Bernard and Win is still scrupulously avoided). The striking thing about the letter is how much is left unsaid. A stiff-upper-lipped, even perky tone is maintained throughout.

  He writes, “We have had our first spell in the trenches and of course our company were reported to have got in the way of things quickest and best.” Quite what those “things” were isn’t mentioned, but they could be imagined. The First Battalion of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles formed part of an almost suicidal attack on the German trenches in Gommecourt. When survivors of the first waves ran out of ammunition, they had to find extra bullets on the corpses of their murdered comrades floating in waterlogged bomb craters or caught in barbed wire.

  Bernard doesn’t mention any of this, nor where he is, for military ce
nsors would have deleted such information at once. He writes as though he were reporting a rugger match at Uppingham, but a few details do seep through: “It is some life out here I can tell you & certainly an experience not to be missed, from a sweaty digging fatigue under a hot sun & stray whizz bangs [high-velocity German artillery] somewhere more or less near, to a muddy dugout with rats & communication trenches with water up to your knees in places.”

  It would take him twenty-seven years to spell out more concretely what it actually meant to be a stretcher bearer on the Western Front in 1916. On February 17, 1943, sitting in a military hospital in Delhi, feeling lonely and impatient for the war to end, he writes a letter to his wife:

  On waking this morning I was trying to recall the most stirring events of my life and it hadn’t to go very far before it became our life. Let’s see what are some of them. Going back to schooldays—hearing my name announced at the end of a match & going through the rituals of receiving my first XV colours. My letter to you putting our “understanding” into cold storage is not such a pretty memory, but I can see myself now seated in the carpentry room composing it. Then came the war so full of stirring adventures that they have merged into a blur but one occasion has always stood out preeminently & that was having to dig out the human mess from a dugout that had received a direct hit.

  There may have been more letters sent in July 1916, for the next one in my possession, dated August 3, mentions that “life here is much the same—you must know the life well by now.” Or perhaps he is just referring to fragments of knowledge in England about the battlefronts with all the horrors glossed over. Apart from telling jokes and thanking the inhabitants of Parsifal Road for a delicious chocolate cake and a tin of cream, which were mailed to the front (how they survived in the field post God only knows), he gives a hint of his life as a stretcher bearer:

  Carrying long stretchers down narrow trenches not made for them is slightly different from the performance at Great Missenden or on Salisbury Plain. Were our old staff Sgt. to see the necessary rough rides patients have to undergo, he’d go grey I believe.

  After Bernard’s death, a Mr. Stewart Nicoll recalled in a letter of condolence that Bernard had “saved many lives; probably mine too, for he was one of the two stretcher bearers who got me out of the labyrinth. Shortly afterwards he became the medical orderly; many I know thought him better than the doctor.”

  From the way he played squash or tennis with me, when he was well into his seventies, I can picture his young face as he strained to rush wounded men through the trenches, his lips tight with concentration, a heavy sweat on his reddened brow. But in his letters he manages to turn even the most severe discomfort into a kind of joke. On September 3, a month of many raids on enemy trenches, often resulting in hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, he recalls how “we nearly got drowned in our dugout the other day & I swear I saw a periscope but we rammed it with a shovel & the U-boat sank to the bottomless depths. I hear tapioca mentioned down below. I wonder if it’s sticky. Well, cheery oh for now.”

  Cakes, sticky puddings, U-boat jokes. This is true to his chirpy outlook, but I don’t think his tone was particularly unusual, especially for a young Englishman of his class and education. Such men were supposed to make light of their hardships; it was part of the British ethos. Much has been written about the so-called public school officers and their attitudes to king, country, and the war itself, which was treated by some of them, at least in the initial stages, as a kind of game. There are stories of public school heroes kicking a football as they made their fatal dash into German machine-gun fire.

  Bernard was not an officer in World War I. He chose to remain a private. But the attitude—the stoicism, the good humor, the unquestioned patriotism, the unshakable sense of duty—was something he clearly wished to live up to. This type of fortitude was at once admirable and frighteningly naïve. For it left a generation of men vulnerable to propaganda that would lead them more or less eagerly to the slaughter. There were of course men of Bernard’s class, often of a literary or political bent, who saw through the official pronouncements about the British “spirit.” But Bernard was not inclined to question it. Embodying the right spirit was the core of his identity. It was how he chose to see himself, and how he wished to be seen by others.

  At the beginning of November 1916, Bernard’s company had left the trenches. Billets were found in barns and farmhouses, where the soldiers were taken care of by Madame This or That, French ladies who did everything from cooking their meals to darning their socks. He describes an afternoon at the nearest town (Arras, perhaps), where the QWR rankers entered a tea shop full of officers, “and so for an evening we feasted our eyes on soldiers of all nations, bowler hats, lights, shops & some sort of traffic other than limbers, country carts & staff cars.”

  The rest of this letter consists of a few almost unintelligible army jokes, and more profuse thanks for packages of fruit, cream, and cakes that found their way to the front. “There is not much else to tell you,” he concludes, “except that before the end of this war we may see a bit more of ——.” The last word is erased by a smudge of ink, either by Bernard or, more likely, by the military censor. Quite what place name or event the people at Rosemount were not allowed to see will forever be a mystery.

  In November 1916, Bernard’s company was transferred to “Muckydonia,” as the soldiers liked to call the mosquito-infested ravines of Macedonia where British, French, Greek, and Serbian troops were fighting the Bulgarian allies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire. They had boarded ship in Marseilles on November 18, stopped at Malta on the twenty-third for several days (“officers only allowed on shore”), and arrived at Salonika on the thirtieth. The QWRs were now part of the British Salonika Force.

  The Macedonia front has been described as 99 percent boredom and 1 percent hell. One of the problems was the weather, described quite vividly by Bernard in his first letter, dated December 8, 1916: “The weather out here certainly goes in for extremes. The night before last it came down in such torrents that our tents in the morning were separated from the field kitchens by a huge stream which had sprung up from nowhere. The mess orderlies consequently had to paddle across for our breakfast & one man, so I’m told, and several boxes of S[mall] A[rms] A[mmunition]—heavy things—floated away merrily.” But, he continues, “the heavens soon get fed up with pouring forth and blowing out their cheeks & the next day it’s as boiling hot as an English July.”

  Since he is still in Salonika, a city with a largely Jewish population that would be entirely wiped out by the Nazis less than three decades later, and the long trek into the mountain region is yet to begin, he doesn’t mention the swarms of mosquitoes that would soon infect and kill thousands of men with malaria.

  Instead, he reminisces about his first driving lessons in London given by his father’s chauffeur, named Graham, who instructed him in “the management of the Rolls.” Graham too was now enlisted in the army as a subaltern. Apparently he had had little confidence in Bernard’s driving skills, “especially after a certain occasion when it was either us or a heavy horse lorry who was to take preference at the Baker Street crossing. Rather hastily I chose the former & the lorry driver only just managed to stop his horses from nibbling the top of mother’s hat.”

  Ah, those old times. There is a hint, but only a hint, of what was yet to come when he thanks “Rosemount” (still not Win) for a pair of mitt-gloves, which “will come in very handy I expect when we move up (—in every sense of the word—) the line.”

  “Up” meant up into the hills, toward the sinister terrain around Doiran Lake, where strongly fortified Bulgarian positions surveyed the valley from their flinty mountain redoubt, known to the British as Pip Ridge, with an observation post called the Devil’s Eye. To get there, Allied soldiers often had to build roads first. In the rocky ravines, the British then dug—or literally blasted—filthy trenches as best they could, half submerged in cages of barbed
wire. The tactics were pretty much the same as on the Western Front: a barrage of artillery fire would supposedly smash the enemy positions, after which their trenches could be stormed by bayonet-wielding infantrymen.

  What happened between April 22, when the Battle of Doiran began, and May 9, when it was abandoned, was more like the desperate Allied assault on the Dardanelles when more than forty thousand British, Australian, and New Zealand troops died while trying to claw their way up the Turkish-held cliffs of Gallipoli. The hundred thousand Allied shells, many of them filled with toxic gas, fired at the Bulgarians did little damage. The rocky mountain fortress was impregnable and the valley proved to be a death trap.

  Mortars raining on the British in the narrow ravine caused such shock waves that soldiers were smashed against the rocks. Men who had made it, despite all the odds, to the mountain slopes, on top of which the Bulgarians were blasting away with machine guns and howitzers, were taunted with cries of “Come on, Johnny!” while being blown apart with bullets and hand grenades. In the valley, men were pinned down in trenches and bomb craters for days, most of them without access to food or drink, tormented by the mosquitoes, soaked by rainstorms or sweltering in the heat, and vomiting from the incoming gas shells. Anyone who raised his head was liable to get it blown off. And yet, as happened in France and the Dardanelles, each failure to overrun the enemy prompted another equally deadly and futile attempt, as if pure British pluck would ensure victory in the end. Until, in May, with more than ten thousand dead, the Allies finally gave up.