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.
The general consulted not God but the War Office, and the War Office
was persuaded not to press the matter as a disciplinary case,
but to give Siegfried a medical board. Morgan had done his part of
the work well. The next task I set myself was to persuade Siegfried
to take the medical board. I rejoined the battalion and met him at
Liverpool. He looked very ill; he told me that he had just been down
to the Formby links and thrown his Military Cross into the sea. We
discussed the whole political situation; I told him that he was right
enough in theory; but that every one was mad except ourselves and one
or two others, and that it was hopeless to offer rightness of theory
to the insane. I said that the only possible course for us to take
was to keep on going out to France till we got killed. I now expected
myself before long to go back for the fourth time. I reminded him of
the regiment; what did he think that the First and Second Battalions
would think of him? How could they be expected to understand his point
of view? They would say that he was ratting, that he had cold feet,
and was letting the regiment down by not acting like a gentleman. How
would Old Joe, even, understand it (and he was the most understanding
man in the regiment)? To whom was his letter addressed? The army could,
I repeated, only understand it as cowardice, or at the best as a lapse
from good form. The civilians were more mad and hopeless than the army.
He would not accept this view, but I made it plain that his letter had
not been given and would not be given the publicity he intended; so,
because he was ill, and knew it, he consented to appear before the
medical board.
So far, so good. The next thing was to rig the medical board. I applied
for permission to give evidence as a friend of the patient. There were
three doctors on the board—a regular R.A.M.C. colonel and major, and a
captain, who was obviously a ‘duration of the war’ man. I had not
been long in the room when I realized that the colonel was patriotic
and unsympathetic, that the major was reasonable but ignorant, and that
the captain was a nerve-specialist, right-minded, and my only hope.
I had to go through the whole story again. I was most deferential to
the colonel and major, but used the captain as an ally to break down
their scruples. I had to appear in the rôle of a patriot distressed
by the mental collapse of a brother-in-arms, a collapse directly due
to his magnificent exploits in the trenches. I mentioned Siegfried’s
‘hallucinations’ in the matter of corpses in Piccadilly. The irony of
having to argue to these mad old men that Siegfried was not sane! It
was a betrayal of truth, but I was jesuitical. I was in nearly as bad
a state of nerves as Siegfried myself and burst into tears three times
in the course of my statement. Captain McDowall, whom I learned later
to be a well-known morbid psychologist, played up well and the colonel
was at last persuaded. As I went out he said to me: ‘Young man, you
ought to be before this board yourself.’ I was most anxious that when
Siegfried went into the board-room after me he should not undo my work
by appearing too sane. But McDowall argued his seniors over.
Siegfried was sent to a convalescent home for neurasthenics at
Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. I was detailed as his escort. Siegfried
and I both thought this a great joke, especially when I missed the
train and he reported to ‘Dottyville,’ as he called it, without me.
At Craiglockhart, Siegfried was in the care of W. H. R. Rivers,
whom we now met for the first time, though we already knew of him
as a neurologist, ethnologist and psychologist. He was a Cambridge
professor and had made a point of taking up a new department of
research every few years and incorporating it in his comprehensive
anthropological scheme. He died shortly after the war when he was on
the point of contesting the London University parliamentary seat as
an independent Labour candidate; intending to round off his scheme
with a study of political psychology. He was busy at this time with
morbid psychology. He had over a hundred neurasthenic cases in his
care and diagnosed their condition largely through a study of their
dream-life; his posthumous book _Conflict and Dream_ is a record of
this work at Craiglockhart. It was not the first time that I had heard
of Rivers in this capacity. Dick had come under his observation after
the police-court episode. Rivers had treated him, and after a time
pronounced him sufficiently cured to enlist in the army. Siegfried and
Rivers soon became close friends. Siegfried was interested in Rivers’
diagnostic methods and Rivers in Siegfried’s poems. Before I returned
from Edinburgh I felt happier. Siegfried began to write the terrifying
sequence of poems that appeared next year as _Counter-Attack_. Another
patient at the hospital was Wilfred Owen, who had had a bad time with
the Manchester Regiment in France; and, further, it had preyed on his
mind that he had been accused of cowardice by his commanding officer.
He was in a very shaky condition. It was meeting Siegfried here that
set him writing his war-poems. He was a quiet, round-faced little man.