A grim day, today, and a reminder that we rarely read the writings of those who suffer the most. Never the dead, and rarely the maimed. But our first victim is, as of yet, only missing. We’ve read Herbert Read‘s letters only selectively, here,[1] and so we haven’t had the proper preparation: although he likes to sound like a lone philosopher–a rock, an island–he depends, like so many soldiers, on one particular friend.
Our precious Colin is missing. We have been through hell for the second time in seven weeks and once again been cruelly smashed. Col was in the front line with his company. They were gassed and barraged with heavies for about four hours and then surrounded from all sides by the Boche. All day we had no news of them but in the evening counter-attacked and took several prisoners–among them an officer who spoke very good English and was a very intelligent specimen. I questioned him about the morning’s happenings and he said that a good few prisoners had been taken, among them a captain. Now Col was the only Captain in the front line, so I feel pretty confident that it was he. Besides, the prisoner said he had gold stars on his shoulder-straps, was very young and fair–all of which points to Colin. So I feel fairly happy about him. He, at any rate, is out of it and with ordinary luck should come through alright. I am the unfortunate one: I am robbed of my best friend in circumstances which make such a friend as Col half one’s life. But for his sake I am glad.
Despite his philosophical leanings, Read has been something of a happy warrior, at times–and certainly a brave one. But the loss of his friend and comrade leads him, perhaps not surprisingly, toward despair–not of humanity, but of the war it created.
How sick I am of the old business. Most of the prisoners we took were boys under twenty. Our own reinforcements were all boys. Apart from the uniforms, Germans and English are as like as two peas: beautiful fresh children. They are massacred in inconceivable torment. This is the irony of this war: individually we are one as good as the other: you can’t hate these innocents children simply because they dress in grey uniforms. And they are magnificently brave, English and German alike. But simply because they are united into a callous inhuman association called a State, and because a State is ruled by politicians whose aim (and under the circumstances their duty) is to support and maintain the life and sovereignty of this monster, life and hope are dined and sacrificed. And look at their values. On the one hand national well-being and vanity, commercial expansion, power: on the other, love, joy, hope–all that makes life worth living–all that persuades one to consent to live among so much that is barbarous and negative. So perhaps you will begin to see the connection between ‘the German push, Thoreau, and anarchy.’ And perhaps you will get ‘a glimpse of how, in my heart of hearts, I regard my whole connection with the army and its work.’ I could make my connection with it something of a success if I had the will. Without the will I have not done so badly. I like its manliness, the courage it demands, and the fellowship it gives. These are infinitely precious things. But I hate the machine–the thing as a whole and its duty (to kill), its very existence. My will is to destroy it and my energies must be devoted to that end. Is this the glimpse you wanted?
Read’s politics–the anarchism, the echoes of Nietzsche–are not typical of our young officers. But yes–this is the glimpse we wanted. It would seem that Evelyn Roff has questioned what exactly “the German push, Thoreau, and anarchy” have to do with each other, and Read has answered us both. But less, perhaps, with these last few sentences than with the whole of his mood, and so not precisely in the way that he intends: influence and reading and all the vagaries of individual experience are all highly important in shaping one man’s outlook–but every young soldier is fed up with this war, now.[2]
Is it fair to lump in Read’s experience with the rest of his generation, when he pleads for his own particular view? Perhaps not–and yet behold to the fiery young anarchist’s next thought:
Colin’s fate rather alters my outlook. Now I don’t think I should hesitate to take the Staff job–it is no use making a martyr of one’s self and clinging to this worst of existences in the Army… I’ve been a martyr long enough to satisfy even my vanity…[3]
Please god, make me an anarchist! But not yet…
So Colin is lost–but he may yet turn up unscathed. When I read Read on his friend Colin, I thought of how Siegfried Sassoon turned against the war after his beloved friend David Thomas was killed–no other deaths have affected him so strongly since. But there is still news, from time to time, of the suffering of other old comrades:
May 9
To-day is warm—a proper May-day, with glory in the air. Lots of letters came for me, including a cheque from Heinnemann for the first 1000 copies of my book; and news that Bunny Tattersall has been given a D.S.O. and had his leg taken off at the thigh… ‘Does it matter losing your legs?'[4]
Any soldier would be liable to trace this thought of a terribly wounded friend back to their own mortality and fragility, and Sassoon does–but it is his mind he worries about, and not the mere limbs of his body.
I must never forget Rivers. He is the only man who can save me if l break down again. If I am able to keep going it will be through him. So I get to the end of another notebook, and five months have gone by since I left Craiglockhart. The next notebook begins where we march away from camp this afternoon to entrain for some place in Picardy or Pas de Calais.
Rivers. But perhaps it is the end of another small pocket-notebook, rather than the news of the amputation, that occasions this stock-taking.
And all my future is ‘to-morrow’, or at the most two or three weeks of training for battle. Beyond that, the fireproof curtain comes down (as it did in the music hall last night). And it is covered with placards advertising my new volume of remarkable and arresting poems. I cannot believe that the curtain will go up this year and disclose the painted scene of Peace and Plenty. But I am quite prepared to leave my seat in the stalls and go away with Mr Mors,[5] in case he calls for me at the theatre.
He might have done better with a metaphor drawing on his recent trip to the zoo, rather than the theater. But once again, even as Sassoon wallows closest to self-parody, he is able to dodge a collapse into bathos by demonstrating (just enough) self-awareness.
But all this is silliness—the facts are what we want in our notebooks, and events. So here’s to the next five months, and the harvest.[6]
Yes and no: I’m not sure that we do want facts so much as feelings (though feelings neatly knotted to the dates on which they were felt!). But the next five months will very nearly see us through…
Cynthia Asquith has recently begun nursing. She has social status, minor celebrity as the ex-PM’s daughter-in-law, and no training to speak of. But she has good will, and honesty, so perhaps hers will turn out to be a useful personal contribution to the war effort–or, rather, toward alleviating the suffering it has caused. But if nursing, like so many professions, requires not only training but also natural inclination (that is, a certain combination of personality traits)… well, Asquith appears not to be abundantly well supplied in that department either…
Thursday, 9th May
…I rested and motored over to the hospital with Orde in a blue funk, feeling the mixed sensations of a ‘new boy’, a night traveller, and an actress on her first night.
There is a sort of supper meal at eight, but I didn’t have any—I washed up the things and stood about. Lights are put out in the ward at nine o’clock, and occasionally one walks round the dim lantern-lit room. It is rather creepy—surrounded by all those huddled forms sleeping aloud. The porridge is put on early and has to be stirred all through the night, and one has to stoke the furnace. When there is nothing to do we sit quite comfortably in the little sitting room talking, reading, or writing. The queer anomalous meals are great fun in the setting and the eating: at about twelve one has what I suppose represents lunch (something is left in the larder in the nature of eggs, sardines, and so on, and one drinks what one likes, such as Horlicks, tea, cocoa, or coffee) and at four one has a delicious meal of porridge and so on—the porridge is far the best I have ever tasted.
She has quite a way with atmospheric description–and the triple analogy at the beginning is excellent. But she is also loitering nervously on the outskirts of the hospital experience, and will soon have to face what it, and she, is there for. In another queer moment of consonance, she, too, has a mid-thigh amputation to deal with. Since I’ve belatedly realized that her diary is one of the most engaging of all, I will let her run now, and describe the night without fussing interruption.
The pet and the interest of A Ward now is poor little Harris, who has got his leg off right high up. A few days ago he had to have a lot more taken off his stump and he has nearly died of haemorrhage ever since. He is much better now, but still a very bad colour. He is such a darling—so brave and always smiling. It’s still very painful—pray
God I never have to see that stump naked!My first night was eventful. At about eleven there came a knock at the door. In burst Nurse Ewing, who is alone in B Ward (where they are supposed not to have bad cases). She was white as paper and told us one of her men (obviously a case of bad shell shock) was quite unmanageably walking in his sleep—thinking he was at the Front, poor fellow—hurling missiles about in the delusion that they were bombs and labouring under the impression that his companions were Germans. He was ‘hollering’ like anything and Nurse Ewing said she couldn’t be left alone with him. Away went Nurse Orde with her, leaving me quite alone in that snoring ward. I was in terror lest Harris should have a haemorrhage or something, but after a time they—to my intense relief—returned.
I went back under blazing starlight at about five, quite revived by delicious porridge and tea. Talked to Orde till about six when we call the men and the bustle begins. Breakfast has to be got ready for them and I take washing materials round to the bedridden ones. After their breakfast the dressings are done, at which I have to help, holding bowls and running to fetch things of whose whereabouts I have no idea—one feels anxious and foolish. A wag—Matthews—is a wonderful helper and enjoyed bringing boiling hot fomentations: I didn’t mind the three dressings at all—the wounds were quite inoffensive. My only trial was attending to poor dear Harris. Thank God we didn’t undo his stump! But we had to wash him and pull the draw sheets. The slightest movement is agony to his stump and it made me feel sickish, but I was able to function all right. We had screens round us. He was so sweet, and when we left him in peace, spent ages with the brush, comb, and glass making his hair curl. They are a delightful lot of men. My favourite is a K.R.R. called Morris, who does beautiful elaborate embroidery with an admiring audience standing round—one man seems to do nothing-all day but thread needles for him. They are very friendly to one—ambitiously facetious a great many of them: one joke is to ask one to start the gramophone when one creeps round the ward in the dark. I felt my identity disappearing into ‘Nurse’ and my one absorption was to satisfy the Sister and please the men.
I felt excited and not in the least tired at eight when Mary arrived in the pony-cart which was to drive me home. I am glad I decided to do this. My self-esteem is much reinforced.[7]
This is fascinating stuff, and the first time since Vera Brittain‘s early days that we have read along as a new nurse steels herself to the suffering of her patients. I wish more of our soldiers had been able to write with such self-awareness about their identity shifting and their self-esteem growing…
One reason that we haven’t read more about upper class women taking up nursing, actually, is that Diana Manners has done so, but not written much about it. Now, however, that her beloved is abroad, she writes regularly about what she sees and feels. She is not half the writer that Cynthia Asquith is, but then again this is not an extract from a writer’s diary: this is one side of a dropped conversation, the intimate gossip–with its unvarnished feeling and undisguised prejudice–that passes between two lovers, reconvening after a day apart. Manners’s job is somewhat different, too: she is working as a sort of orderly in a civilian hospital. Yes, the queen of the Coterie is an attendant, now, not for noble wounded warriors, but for poor and indigent Londoners.
I arrived this morning and was sent to a women’s surgical ward–not bad, you know, cleanish and a few lovely children, glowing consumptives who shame one very much when the soul bleats or revolts. I lunched at the unusual hour of 11.15 off a portion or parcel of a dreadful past fish…
It’s been a long day, so we’ll skip past a bizarre and rather pointless anti-semitic joke and a number of arrestingly sympathetic-cruel descriptions of working class cancer patients, and move to her veteran’s conclusion.
So little time to write… I hang my legs in cold water just to calm them, one is not off one’s feet. I don’t remember it being so torturing last time… Perhaps novelty and patriotism stiffened my sinews. It was one of our spring days, but one must lead the leisured life to appreciate weather. I’m glad to say once busy it matters little except to one’s general spirits…[8]
References and Footnotes
- In part because of his own editing-down of the published versions, and then with further omission of the more philosophically circumambulant letters. ↩
- Except for those who weren't, e.g. Claude Templer. ↩
- The Contrary Experience, 127-8. ↩
- Here Sassoon quotes his own poem of that title, just now published, but written in 1917. ↩
- I.e. death ↩
- Diaries, 246-7. ↩
- Diaries, 435-7. ↩
- Diaries, 165. ↩