Wilfred Owen is a busy bee these days.
Tues. Night[1]
Dearest of Mothers,
So pleased to have Father’s letter & your note this morning… Last week passed unmercifully quickly. The only way to lengthen time is to add more miles to the roads of our journeys. And the only way to lengthen life is to live out several threads at a time and join them up in crucial moments.
At present I am a sick man in hospital, by night; a poet, for quarter of an hour after breakfast; I am whatever and whoever, I see while going down to Edinburgh on the tram: greengrocer, policeman, shopping lady, errand boy, paper-boy, blind man, crippled Tommy, bank clerk, carter, all of these in half an hour; next a German student in earnest; then I either peer over bookstalls in back-streets, or do a bit of a dash down Princes Street,—according as I have taken weak tea or strong coffee for breakfast…
The next paragraph makes Craiglockhart–especially for those undergoing Dr. Brock’s “ergotherapy”–sound much like a sort of summer camp for grown men. It’s not work therapy, really, but rather activity therapy. Golf and tennis and swimming and arts and crafts… and for Owen, who aspires so fervently to be a writer and has always had an interest in theater, magazine-making and the amateur stage:
This afternoon I spent with a Daily Mail sub-editor, Salmond… When we had discussed together many mighty things and men, and an Emersonian silence fell between us, we went upstairs to the Cinema, & so finished a very pleasant afternoon. Tonight Pockett enrolled me as Mr. Wallcomb, in Lucky Durham, a fashionable young fellow, whose chief business in the play is introducing people.
Thus I need at once:
1) 1 Green Suit,
2) 2 or 3 Green Shirts,
The list runs to seven items, mostly green, that might do for his costume, and then segues into a long and rambling discussion of poetry and other matters. Owen is having a very good time–but he has as yet no confidantes to describe it to, save his mother.
It’s too late o’night to talk like this. Time I snuggled myself away.
Goodnight, dear Mother.
X W.E.O.[2]
In painful contrast to this evidence of a young man on the mend is Kate Luard‘s letter from Ypres, today, a century back. We have seen this pattern before: during the excitement, trauma, and back-breaking work that fills the days after an attack, she writes to record events, to praise the heroically praiseworthy, and, perhaps, to help manage the stress of the situation, controlling things that are out of anyone’s control by putting them on paper. Then, when the pace of work slows, the diary shifts into an elegiac mode, and she writes to express something of the pathos, misery, and suffering she has witnessed. The pattern follows that of her work as the senior nurse, which shifts now from crisis management toward administrative tasks, and there is one terrible duty in particular that will now take up much of her time and emotional energy.
The very nice Australian Sister in charge of the Australian C.C.S., which is not yet working, is getting my 209 break-the-news addresses into order for me to begin upon some day, and that since yesterday week. Does that give you some idea of what is has been like?
Luard shakes off this mood, now, and discusses other goings-on in the hospital, including rivalries between the surgeons, experimental treatments, the various emotional and physical needs of the patients and her efforts to meet them, and even her campaign to establish something of a normal social life by leading the nurses in hosting an “At Home” gathering for the doctors and friendly area officers.
But Luard’s thoughts come back, before the end of today’s entry, to the pity of war.
A boy called Reggie in the moribund Ward was wailing, ‘I do feel bad and no one takes no notice of me.’ When I comforted him he said, ‘You’re the best Sister in the world–I know I’m a nuisance, but I can’t help it–I’ve been out there so long and I’m so young–Will you give me a sleeping draught and a drop o’ champagne to make me strong?’ He had both and slept like a lamb, but he died to-day. A dear old dying soldier always would shake hands and say, ‘How are you to-day?’ He died last night. One boy in the Prep. Hut implored me to stay by him until he had his operation…[3]
References and Footnotes
- Incorrectly dated by the editor of his letters--Tuesday was the 7th, not the 8th. ↩
- Collected Letters, 480-2. ↩
- Unknown Warriors, 139-40. I also want to take the opportunity here to thank Tim Luard for his invaluable work in adding some of Kate Luard's letters to individual siblings to the published text of her open letters, as well as for all of his work on his great aunt's writing. His recent article gives a great deal of more information about Luard's experience during Third Ypres than I have been able to include, including both illustrations, and descriptions of several memorable events of the battle's first week. ↩