Part 23

By this time the War Office had stopped the privilege that officers had enjoyed, after coming out of hospital, of going to their own homes for convalescence. It was found that many of them took no trouble to get well quickly and return to duty, they kept late nights, drank, and overtaxed their strength. So when I was somewhat recovered I was sent to a convalescent home for officers in the Isle of Wight. It was Osborne Palace; my bedroom had once been the royal night-nursery of King Edward VII and his brothers and sisters. This was the strawberry season and fine weather; the patients were able to take all Queen Victoria’s favourite walks through the woods and along the quiet sea-shore, play billiards in the royal billiard-room, sing bawdy songs in the royal music-room, drink the Prince Consort’s favourite Rhine wines among his Winterhalters, play golf-crocquet and go down to Cowes when in need of adventure. We were made honorary members of the Royal Yacht Squadron. This is another of the caricature scenes of my life; sitting in a leather chair in the smoking-room of what had been and is now again the most exclusive club in the world, drinking gin and ginger, and sweeping the Solent with a powerful telescope.

I made friends with the French Benedictine Fathers who lived near by; they had been driven from Solesmes in France by the anti-clerical laws of 1906, and had built themselves a new abbey at Quarr. The abbey had a special commission from the Vatican to collect and edit ancient church music. Hearing the fathers at their plain-song made us for the moment forget the war completely. Many of them were ex-army officers who had, I was told, turned to religion after the ardours of their campaigns or after disappointments in love. They were greatly interested in the war, which they saw as a dispensation of God for restoring France to Catholicism. They told me that the freemason element in the French army had been discredited and that the present Supreme Command was predominantly Catholic—an augury, they said, of Allied victory. The guest-master showed me the library of twenty thousand volumes, hundreds of them blackletter. The librarian was an old monk from Béthune and was interested to hear from me an accurate account of the damage to his quarter of the town. The guest-master asked me whether there were any books that I would like to read in the library. He said that there were all kinds there—history, botany, music, architecture, engineering, almost every other lay subject. I asked him whether there was a poetry section. He smiled kindly and said, no, poetry was not regarded as improving.

The Father Superior asked me whether I was a _bon catholique_. I replied no, I did not belong to the true religion. To spare him a confession of agnosticism I added that my parents were Protestants. He said: ‘But if ours is the true religion why do you not become a Catholic?’ He asked the question in such a simple way that I felt ashamed. But I had to put him off somehow, so I said: ‘Reverend father, we have a proverb in England never to swap horses while crossing a stream. I am still in the war, you know.’ I offered: ‘Peut-être après la guerre.’ This was a joke with myself; it was the stock answer that the Pas de Calais girls were ordered by their priests to give to Allied soldiers who asked for a ‘Promenade, mademoiselle?’ It was seldom given, I was told, except for the purpose of bargaining. All the same, I half-envied the Fathers their abbey on the hill, finished with wars and love affairs. I liked their kindness and seriousness; the clean whitewashed cells and the meals eaten in silence at the long oaken tables, while a novice read the _Lives of the Saints_; the food, mostly cereals, vegetables and fruit, was the best I had tasted for years—I was tired of ration beef, ration jam, ration bread and cheese. At Quarr, Catholicism ceased to be repulsive to me.

Osborne was gloomy. Many of the patients there were neurasthenic and should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A. A. Milne was there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in the least humorous vein. Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, who had introduced me to the Quarr Fathers, decided with me that something must be started. So we founded the ‘Royal Albert Society’; its aim was to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort. I was president and my regalia consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian boots, and a pair of side-whiskers. Official business was not allowed to proceed until the announcement had been duly made that the whiskers were on the table. Membership was open only to those who professed themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort, those who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada, those who had resided for six months or upwards by the banks of the Albert Nyanza, those who held the Albert Medal for saving life, or those who were linked with the Prince Consort’s memory in any other signal way. The members were expected to report at each meeting reminiscences that they had collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers, throwing light on the human side of the Consort’s life. We had about fifteen members and ate strawberries. On one occasion about a dozen officers came in to join the society; they professed to have the necessary qualifications. One said that he was the grandson of the man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life; the others were mere students. They submitted quietly at first to the ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they were not serious and had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the private life of the Prince Consort, alleging that they could substantiate them with documentary evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that sort of society. So, as president, I rose and told in an improved version the story which had won the 1914 All-England Interregimental Competition at Aldershot for the worst story of the year. I linked it up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had been told it by John Brown, the Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humour Queen Victoria used to find such delight, and that it had prevented him from sleeping for three days and nights, and was a contributory cause of his premature death. The story had the intended effect; the interrupters threw up their hands in surrender and walked out. It struck me suddenly how far I had come since my first years at Charterhouse seven years back, and what a pity it was that I had not used the same technique there.

On the beach one day Bartlett and I saw an old ship’s fender; the knotted ropes at the top had frayed into something that looked like hair, so Bartlett said to me: ‘Poor fellow, I knew him well. He was in my platoon in the Hampshire Regiment and jumped overboard from the hospital ship.’ A little farther along we found an old pair of trousers half in the water, and a coat, and then some socks and a boot. So we dressed up Bartlett’s old comrade, draped sea-weed over him where necessary, and walked on. Soon after we met a coastguard and turned back with him. We said: ‘There’s a dead man on the beach.’ He stopped a few yards off and said, holding his nose: ‘Pooh, don’t he ’alf stink!’ We turned again, leaving him with the dead, and the next day read in the Isle of Wight paper of a hoax that ‘certain convalescent officers at Osborne’ had played on the coroner. Bartlett and I were nonsensical, and changed the labels of all the pictures in the galleries. Anything to make people laugh. But it was hard work.

XXIV

I used to hear from Siegfried regularly. He had written in March from the Second Battalion asking me to pull myself together and send him a letter because he was horribly low in spirits. He complained that he had not been made at all welcome. A Special Reserve officer who had transferred to the Second Battalion and was an acting-captain had gone so far as to call him a bloody wart and allude to the bloody First Battalion. He had swallowed the insult, but was trying to get transferred to the First Battalion. The Second was resting until the end of the month about two miles from Morlancourt (where we had been together in the previous March), surrounded by billows of mud slopes and muddy woods and aerodromes and fine new railroads, where he used to lollop around on the black mare of an afternoon watching the shells bursting away by the citadel. The black mare was a beautiful combative creature with a homicidal kink, only ridden by Siegfried. David Thomas and I once watched him breaking her in. His patience was wonderful. He would put the mare at a jump and she would sulk; and he would not force her but turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after time she refused, but could not provoke his ill-temper or make him give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom. It was a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that. He was in C Company now, he wrote, with a half-witted platoon awaiting his orders to do or die, and a beast of a stiff arm where Dr. Dunn had inoculated him, sticking his needle in and saying: ‘Toughest skin of the lot, but you’re a tough character, I know.’ Siegfried protested that he was not so tough as Dunn thought. He was hoping that the battalion would get into some sort of show soon; it would be a relief after all these weeks of irritation and discomfort and disappointment. (That was a feeling that one usually had in the Second Battalion.) He supposed that his _Old Huntsman_ would not be published until the autumn. He had seen the _Nation_ that week, and commented how jolly it was for him and me to appear as a military duet singing to a pacifist organ. ‘You and me, the poets who mean to work together some day and scandalize the jolly old Gosse’s and Strachey’s.’ (Re-reading this letter now I am reminded that the occasion of the final end of our correspondence ten years later was my failure to observe the proper literary punctilios towards the late Sir Edmund Gosse, c.b. And, by the way, when the _Old Huntsman_ appeared, Sir Edmund severely criticized some lines of an allegorical poem in it:

... Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance And many a slender sickly lord who’d filled My soul long since with lutanies of sin Went home because he could not stand the din.

This, he considered, might be read as a libel on the British House of Lords. The peerage, he said, had proved itself splendidly heroic in the war.)

Siegfried had his wish; he was in heavy fighting with the battalion in the Hindenburg Line soon after. His platoon was then lent as support to the Cameronians, and when, in a counter-attack, the Cameronians were driven out of some trenches that they had won, Siegfried, with a bombing party of six men, regained them. He was shot through the throat but continued bombing until he collapsed. The Cameronians rallied and returned, and Siegfried’s name was sent in for a Victoria Cross. The recommendation was refused, however, on the ground that the operations had not been successful; for the Cameronians were later driven out again by a bombing party under some German Siegfried.

He was back in England and very ill. He told me that often when he went out he saw corpses lying about on the pavement. He had written from hospital, in April, how bloody it was about the Second Battalion. Yates had sent him a note saying that four officers were killed and seven wounded in the show at Fontaine-les-Croiselles, the same place that he had been at, and it had been a ‘perfectly bloody battle.’ But there had been an advance of about half a mile, which seemed to Siegfried to be some consolation. Yet, in the very next sentence, he wrote how mad it made him to think of all the good men being slaughtered that summer, and all for nothing. The bloody politicians and ditto generals with their cursed incompetent blundering and callous ideas would go on until they were tired of it or had got all the kudos they wanted. He wished he could do something to protest against it, but even if he were to shoot the Premier or Sir Douglas Haig they could only shut him up in a madhouse like Richard Dadd of glorious memory. (I recognized the allusion. Dadd was an early nineteenth-century painter who made out a list of people who deserved to be killed. The first on the list was his father. He picked him up one day in Hyde Park and carried him on his shoulders for nearly half a mile before publicly drowning him in the Serpentine.) Siegfried went on to say that if he refused to go out again as a protest they would only accuse him of being afraid of shells. He asked me whether I thought we would be any better off by the end of that summer of carnage. We would never break their line. So far, in April, we had lost more men than the Germans. The Canadians at Vimy had lost appallingly, yet the official _communiqués_ were lying unblushingly about the casualties. Julian Dadd had come to see him in hospital and, like every one else, urged him not to go out again, to take a safe job at home—but he knew that it was only a beautiful dream, that he would be morally compelled to go on until he was killed. The thought of going back now was agony, just when he had got back into the light again—‘Oh life, oh sun.’ His wound was nearly healed and he expected to be sent for three weeks to a convalescent home. He didn’t like the idea, but _anywhere_ would be good enough if he could only be quiet and see no one, just watch the trees dressing up in green and feel the same himself. He was beastly weak and in a rotten state of nerves. The gramophone in the ward plagued him beyond endurance. The _Old Huntsman_ had come out that spring after all, and, for a joke, he had sent a copy to Sir Douglas Haig. He couldn’t be stopped doing _that_ anyhow.

In June he had gone to visit the Morrells just before I left hospital at Oxford. He had no idea I was still there, but he wrote that perhaps it was as well that we didn’t meet, neither of us being at our best; at least one of us should be in a normal frame of mind when we were together. I had asked what he had been writing since he came home, and he answered that five poems of his had appeared in the _Cambridge Magazine_ (one of the few pacifist journals published in England at the time, the offices of which were later raided by militarist flying-cadets). He said that none of them were much good except as digs at the complacent and perfectly —— people who thought the war ought to go on indefinitely until every one was killed except themselves. The pacifists were urging him to produce something red hot in the style of Barbusse’s _Under Fire_ but he couldn’t do it; he had other things in his head, _not poems_. I didn’t know what he meant by this but hoped that it was not a programme of assassination. He wrote that the thought of all that happened in France nearly drove him dotty sometimes. He was down in Kent, where he could hear the guns thudding all the time across the Channel, on and on, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to rush back and die with the First Battalion or stay in England and do what he could to prevent the war going on. But both courses were hopeless. To go back and get killed would be only playing to the gallery—and the wrong gallery—and he could think of no way of doing any effective preventive work at home. His name had been sent in for an officer-cadet battalion appointment in England, which would keep him safe if he wanted to take it; but it seemed a dishonourable way out. Now at the end of July another letter came: it felt rather thin. I sat down to read it on the bench dedicated by Queen Victoria to John Brown (‘a truer and more faithful heart never burned within human breast’). When I opened the envelope a newspaper-cutting fluttered out; it was marked in ink: ‘_Bradford Pioneer_, Friday, July 27, 1917.’ I read the wrong side first:

The C.O.’s must be Set Free

_By Philip Frankford_

The conscientious objector is a brave man. He will be remembered as one of the few noble actors in this world drama when the impartial historian of the future sums up the history of this awful war.

The C.O. is putting down militarism. He is fighting for freedom and liberty. He is making a mighty onslaught upon despotism. And, above all, he is preparing the way for the final abolition of war.

But thanks to the lying, corrupt, and dastardly capitalist Press these facts are not known to the general public, who have been taught to look upon the conscientious objectors as skunks, cowards, and shirkers.

Lately a renewed persecution of C.O.’s has taken place. In spite of the promises of ‘truthful’ Cabinet Ministers, some C.O.’s have been sent to France, and there sentenced to death—a sentence afterwards transferred to one of ‘crucifixion’ or five or ten years’ hard labour. But even when allowed to remain in this country we have to chronicle the most scandalous treatment of these men—the salt of the earth. Saintly individuals like Clifford Allen, Scott Duckers, and thousands of others, no less splendid enthusiasts in the cause of anti-militarism, are in prison for no other reason than because they refuse to take life; and because they will not throw away their manhood by becoming slaves to the military machine. These men must be freed. The political ‘offenders’ of Ireland ...

Then I turned over and read:

Finished with the War

_A Soldier’s Declaration_

(This statement was made to his commanding officer by Second-Lieutenant S. L. Sassoon, Military Cross, recommended for D.S.O., Third Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, as explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army. He enlisted on 3rd August 1914, showed distinguished valour in France, was badly wounded and would have been kept on home service if he had stayed in the army.)

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.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest aganst the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

_July_ 1917. S. Sassoon.

This filled me with anxiety and unhappiness. I entirely agreed with Siegfried about the ‘political errors and insincerities’; I thought his action magnificently courageous. But there were more things to be considered than the strength of our case against the politicians. In the first place, he was not in a proper physical condition to suffer the penalty which he was inviting, which was to be court-martialled, cashiered and imprisoned. I found myself most bitter with the pacifists who had encouraged him to make this gesture. I felt that, not being soldiers, they could not understand what it would cost Siegfried emotionally. It was wicked that he should attempt to face the consequences of his letter on top of his Quadrangle and Fontaine-les-Croiselles experiences. I knew, too, that as a gesture it was inadequate. Nobody would follow his example either in England or in Germany. The war would obviously go on, and go on until one side or the other cracked.

I decided to intervene. I applied to appear before the medical board that was sitting next day; and I asked the board to pass me fit for home service. I was not fit and they knew it, but I asked it as a favour. I had to get out of Osborne and attend to things. Next I wrote to the Hon. Evan Morgan, with whom I had canoed at Oxford a month or two previously. He was private secretary to one of the Coalition Ministers. I asked him to do everything he could to prevent republication of or comment on the letter in the newspapers, and to arrange that a suitable answer should be given to Mr. Lees Smith, then the leading pacifist M.P. and now Postmaster-General in the Labour Cabinet, when he brought up a question in the House about it. I explained to Morgan that I was on Siegfried’s side really, but that he should not be allowed to become a martyr in his present physical condition. Next I wrote to the Third Battalion. I knew that the colonel, a South Welshman, was narrowly patriotic, had never been to France, and could not possibly be expected to take a sympathetic view. But the senior major, an Irishman, was humane, so I wrote to him explaining the whole business, asking him to make the colonel see it in a reasonable light. I told him of Siegfried’s recent experiences in France. I suggested that he should be medically boarded and given indefinite leave.

The next news I heard was from Siegfried, who wrote from the Exchange Hotel, Liverpool, that no doubt I was worrying about him. He had come up to Liverpool a day or two before and walked into the Third Battalion orderly room at Litherland feeling like nothing on earth, but probably looking fairly self-possessed. The senior-major was commanding, the colonel being away on holiday. (I was much relieved at this bit of luck.) The senior-major, who was nicer than anything I could imagine and made him feel an utter brute, had consulted the general commanding Mersey defences. And the general was consulting God ‘or someone like that.’ Meanwhile, he was staying at the hotel, having sworn not to run away to the Caucasus. He hoped, in time, to persuade them to be nasty about it, and said that he did not think that they realized that his performance would soon be given great publicity. He hated the whole business more than ever, and knew more than ever that he was right and would never repent of what he had done. He said that things were looking better in Germany, but that Lloyd George would probably say that it was a ‘plot.’ The politicians seemed to him incapable of behaving like human beings.