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his _Old Huntsman_ would not be published until the autumn.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: