I went back to Liverpool. The president of the medical board had been
right: I should not have been back on duty. The training at the camp
was intensive and I was in command of a trained-men company and did
not allow myself sufficient rest. I realized how bad my nerves were
when one day, marching through the streets of Litherland on a battalion
route-march, I saw three men wearing gas-masks standing by an open
manhole in the road. They were bending over a dead man; his clothes
were sodden and stinking, and his face and hands were yellow. Waste
chemicals of the munitions factory had got into the sewage system and
he had been gassed when he went down to inspect. The men in masks had
been down to get him up. The company did not pause in its march so I
had only a glimpse of the group; but it was so like France that I all
but fainted. The band-music saved me.
I was detailed as a member of a court-martial which sat in the camp.
The accused was a civilian alleged to have enlisted under the Derby
Scheme, but not to have presented himself when his class was called to
the colours. He was a rabbit, a nasty-looking little man. I tried to
feel sympathetic but found it difficult, even when he proved that he
had never enlisted. His solicitor handed us a letter from a corporal
serving in France, who explained that he had, while on leave, enlisted
in the rabbit’s name because he had heard that the rabbit had been
rabbiting with his wife. This rabbiting the rabbit denied; but he
showed that the colour of the eyes recorded on the enlistment-form was
blue while his own were brown, so it seemed that the story was true so
far. But a further question arose: why had he not enlisted under
the Military Service Act, if he was a fit man? He said that he was
starred, having done responsible work in a munitions factory for the
necessary length of time before the Military Service Act had become
law. However, we had police evidence on the table to show that his
protection certificates were forged, that he had not been working on
munitions before the Military Service Act, and that therefore he was in
the class of those ‘deemed to have enlisted,’ and so a deserter in any
case. There was nothing for it but to sentence him to the prescribed
two years’ imprisonment. He broke down and squealed rabbit-fashion, and
said that he had conscientious objections against war. It made me feel
contemptible, as part of the story.
Large drafts were now constantly being sent off to the First, Second,
Ninth, and Tenth Battalions in France, and to the Eighth Battalion in
Mesopotamia. There were few absentees among the men warned for the
drafts. But it was noticeable that they were always more cheerful about
going in the spring and summer when there was heavy fighting on than
in the winter months when things were quiet. (The regiment kept up its
spirit even in the last year of the war. Attwater told me that big
drafts sent off in the critical weeks of the spring of 1918, when the
Germans had broken through the Fifth Army, went down to the station
singing and cheering enthusiastically. He said that they might have
been the reservists that he and I had seen assembling at Wrexham on
12th August 1914, to rejoin the Second Battalion just before it sailed
for France.) The colonel always made the same speech to the draft. The
day that I rejoined the battalion from the Isle of Wight I went via
Liverpool Exchange Station and the electric railway to Litherland.
Litherland station was crowded with troops. I heard a familiar
voice making a familiar speech; it was the colonel bidding Godspeed
to a small draft of men who were rejoining the First Battalion. ‘...
going cheerfully like British soldiers to fight the common foe ...
some of you perhaps may fall.... Upholding the magnificent traditions
of the Royal Welch Fusiliers....’ The draft cheered vigorously; rather
too vigorously, I told myself. When he had finished I went over and
greeted a few old friends: 79 Davies, 33 Williams, and the Davies who
was nicknamed ‘Dym Bacon,’ which was Welsh for ‘there isn’t any bacon.’
(He had won the nickname in his recruit days. He was the son of a Welsh
farmer and accustomed to good food and so he complained about his
first morning’s breakfast, shouting out to the orderly-sergeant: ‘Do
you call this a bloody breakfast, man? Dym bacon, dym sausages, dym
herrings, dym bloody anything. Nothing but bloody bread and jaaam.’)
There was another well-remembered First Battalion man—d.c.m.
and rosette, Médaille Militaire, Military Medal, no stripe. ‘Lost them
again, sergeant?’ I asked. He grinned: ‘Easy come, easy go, sir.’ Then
the train came in and I put out my hand with ‘Good luck!’ ‘You’ll
excuse us, sir,’ he said. The draft shouted with laughter and I saw
why my hand had not been wrung, and also why the cheers had been so
ironically vigorous. They were all in handcuffs. They had been detailed
a fortnight before for a draft to Mesopotamia; but they wanted to
go back to the First Battalion, so they overstayed their leave. The
colonel, not understanding, put them into the guardroom to make sure of
them for the next draft. So they were now going back in handcuffs under
an escort of military police to the battalion of their choice. The
colonel, as I have already said, had seen no active service himself;
but the men bore him no ill-will for the handcuffs. He was a
good-hearted man and took a personal interest in the camp kitchens, had
built a cinema-hut within the camp, been reasonably mild in orderly
room, and done his best not to drive returned soldiers too hard.
I decided to leave Litherland somehow. I knew what the winter would be
like with the mist coming up from the Mersey and hanging about the camp
full of T.N.T. fumes. When I was there the winter before I used to sit
in my hut and cough and cough until I was sick. The fumes tarnished all
buttons and made our eyes smart. I considered going back to France but
I knew this was absurd as yet. Since 1916 the fear of gas had been an
obsession; in any unusual smell that I met I smelt gas—even a sudden
strong scent of flowers in a garden was enough to set me trembling. And
I knew that the noise of heavy shelling would be too much for me now.
The noise of a motor-tyre exploding behind me would send me flat on
my face or running for cover. So I decided to go to Palestine, where
gas was not known and shell-fire was said to be inconsiderable in
comparison with France. Siegfried wrote from Craiglockhart in August:
‘What do you think of the latest push? How splendid this attrition is!
As Lord Crewe says: “We are not the least depressed.”’ I matched this
with a remark of Lord Carson’s: ‘The necessary supply of heroes must
be maintained at all costs.’ At my next medical board I asked to be
passed in the category of B2. This meant: ‘Fit for garrison service at
home.’ I reckoned on being sent to the Third Garrison Battalion of the
regiment, now under canvas at Oswestry in Wales. From there, when I
felt a bit better, I would get myself passed B1, which meant: ‘Fit for
garrison service abroad,’ and would, in due course, go to a garrison
battalion of the regiment in Egypt. Once there it would be easy
to get passed A1 and join the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth (new-army)
Battalion in Palestine.
So presently I was sent to Oswestry. A good colonel, but the material
at his disposal was discouraging. The men were mostly compulsory
enlistments, and the officers, with few exceptions, useless. The first
task I was given was to superintend the entraining of battalion stores
and transport; we were moving to Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl. I was
given a company of one hundred and fifty men and allowed six hours for
the job. I chose fifty of the stronger men and three or four N.C.O.’s
who looked capable, and sent the rest away to play football. By
organizing the job in the way that I had learnt in the First Battalion
I got these fifty men to load the train in two hours less than the
scheduled time. The colonel congratulated me. At Rhyl he gave me the
job of giving ‘further instruction’ to the sixty or so young officers
who had been sent to him from the cadet-battalions. Few officers in the
battalion had seen any active service. Among the few was Howell Davies
(now literary editor of the _Star_), who had had a bullet through his
head and was in as nervous a condition as myself. We became friends,
and discussed the war and poetry late at night in the hut; we used to
argue furiously, shouting each other down.
It was at this point that I remembered Nancy Nicholson. I had first
met her at Harlech, where the Nicholsons had a house, when I was on
leave in April 1916 after the operation on my nose. She was sixteen
then, on holiday from school. I had made friends with her brother
Ben, the painter, whose asthma had kept him out of the army. When I
went back to France in 1917 I had gone to say good-bye to Ben and the
rest of the family on the way to Victoria Station, and the last
person to say good-bye to me at that time was Nancy, I remembered her
standing in the doorway in her black velvet dress. She was ignorant
but independent-minded, good-natured, hard, and as sensible about the
war as anybody at home could be. In the summer of 1917 (shortly after
the episode with the Somerville nurse) I had seen her again and we had
gone together to a revue, the first revue I had been to in my life. It
was _Cheep_, Lee White was in it, singing of Black-eyed Susans, and how
‘Girls must all be Farmers’ Boys, off with skirts, wear corduroys,’
and Nancy told me that she was now on the land herself. She showed
me her paintings, illustrations to Stevenson’s _Child’s Garden of
Verses_, my child-sentiment and hers—she had a happy childhood to look
back on—answered each other. I liked all her family, particularly her
mother, now dead, Mabel Nicholson, the painter, a beautiful wayward
Scotch-melancholy person. William Nicholson, again ‘the painter,’ is
still among my friends. Tony, a brother, just older than Nancy, was a
gunner, waiting to go to France.
I began a correspondence with Nancy about some children’s rhymes of
mine which she was going to illustrate. Then I found that I was in love
with her, and on my next leave, in October 1917, I visited her at the
farm where she was working, at Hilton in Huntingdonshire. I helped her
to put mangolds through a slicer. She was alone, except for her black
poodle, among farmers, farm labourers, and wounded soldiers who had
been put on land-service. I was alone too in my Garrison Battalion. Our
letters became more intimate after this. She warned me that she was a
feminist and that I had to be very careful what I said about women; the
attitude of the Huntingdon farmers to their wives and daughters kept
her in a continual state of anger she said.
I had been passed B1 now, but orders came for me to proceed to
Gibraltar. This was a disarrangement of my plans. Gibraltar was a
dead-end; it would be as difficult to get from there to Palestine
as it would be from England. A friend in the War Office undertook
to cancel the order for me until a vacancy could be found in the
battalion in Egypt. At Rhyl I was enjoying the first independent
command I had yet had in the army. I got it through a scare of an
invasion of the north-east coast, to follow a sortie of the German
Fleet. A number of battalions were sent across England for its defence.
All fit men of the Third Garrison Battalion were ordered to move at
twenty-four hours’ notice to York. (There was a slight error, however,
in the Morse message from War Office to Western Command. Instead of
dash-dot-dash-dash they sent dash-dot-dash-dot, so the battalion was
sent to Cork instead. Yet it was not recalled, being needed as much in
Cork as in York; Ireland was in great unrest since the Easter rising
in 1916, and Irish troops at the depots were giving away their rifles
to Sinn Feiners.) The colonel told me that I was the only officer he
could trust to look after the remainder of the battalion—thirty young
officers and four or five hundred men engaged in camp-duties. He left
me a competent adjutant and three officers’ chargers to ride. He also
asked me to keep an eye on his children, whom he had to leave behind
until a house was found for them at Cork; I used to play about a good
deal with them. There was also a draft of two hundred trained men under
orders for Gibraltar.
I got the draft off all right, and the inspecting general was so
pleased with the soldier-like appearance that the adjutant and I had
given them that he sent them all to the camp cinema at his own expense.
This gave me a good mark with the colonel in Ireland. The climax
of my good services was when I checked an attempt on the part of the
camp quartermaster to make the battalion responsible for the loss of
five hundred blankets. It happened like this. Suddenly one night I had
three thousand three hundred leave-men from France thrown under my
command; they were Irishmen, from every regiment in the army, and had
been held up at Holyhead on the way home by the presence of submarines
in the Irish Sea. They were rowdy and insubordinate, and for the four
days that they were with me I had little rest. The five hundred missing
blankets were some of the six thousand six hundred that had been issued
to them, and had probably been sold in Rhyl to pay for cigarettes and
beer. I was able to prove at the Court of Inquiry that the men, though
attached to the battalion for purposes of discipline, had been issued
with blankets direct from the camp quartermaster’s stores before coming
to it. The loss of the blankets might be presumed to have taken place
between the time of issue and the time that the men arrived in the
battalion lines. I had given no receipt to the camp quartermaster for
the blankets. The Court of Inquiry was held in the camp quartermaster’s
private office; but I insisted that he should leave the room while
evidence was being taken, because it was now no longer his private
office but a Court of Inquiry. He had to go out, and his ignorance
of my line of defence saved the case. This success, and the evidence
that I was able to give the colonel of presents accepted by the
battalion mess-president when at Rhyl, from wholesale caterers (the
mess-president had tried to make me pay my mess-bill twice over and
this was my retaliation), so pleased the colonel that he recommended me
for the Russian Order of St. Anne, with Crossed Swords, of the Third
Class. So, after all, I would not have left the army undecorated
but for the October revolution, which cancelled the award-list.
I saw Nancy again in December when I went to London, and we decided to
get married at once. We attached no importance to the ceremony. Nancy
said she did not want to disappoint her father, who liked weddings and
things. I was still expecting orders for Egypt and intending to go on
to Palestine. Nancy’s mother said that she would permit the marriage
on one condition: that I should go to a London lung specialist to see
whether I was fit for eventual service in Palestine. I went to Sir
James Fowler, who had visited me at Rouen when I was wounded. He told
me that my lungs were not so bad, though I had bronchial adhesions and
my wounded lung had only a third of its proper expansion; but that
my general nervous condition made it folly for me to think of active
service in any theatre of war.
Nancy and I were married in January 1918 in St. James’ Church,
Piccadilly. She was just eighteen and I was twenty-two. George Mallory
was the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first
time that morning and had been horrified by it. She all but refused
to go through the ceremony at all, though I had arranged for it to be
modified and reduced to the shortest possible form. Another caricature
scene to look back on: myself striding up the red carpet wearing
field-boots, spurs, and sword; Nancy meeting me in a blue-check silk
wedding dress, utterly furious; packed benches on either side of the
church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys
out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting
them out in a parade-ground voice. Then the reception. At this stage of
the war, sugar was practically unobtainable; the wedding cake was in
three tiers, but all the sugar icing was plaster. The Nicholsons
had had to save up their sugar and butter cards for a month to make
the cake taste anything like a cake at all. When the plaster case
was lifted off there was a sigh of disappointment from the guests. A
dozen of champagne had been got in. Champagne was another scarcity and
there was a rush towards the table. Nancy said: ‘Well, I’m going to
get something out of this wedding, at any rate,’ and grabbed a bottle.
After three or four glasses she went off and changed back into her
land-girl’s costume of breeches and smock. My mother, who had been
thoroughly enjoying the proceedings, caught hold of E. V. Lucas, who
was standing next to her, and exclaimed: ‘Oh dear, I wish she had not
done that.’ The embarrassments of our wedding night were somewhat eased
by an air-raid; bombs were dropping not far off and the hotel was in an
uproar.
A week later she returned to her farm and I to my soldiers. It was an
idle life now. I had no men on parade; they were all employed on camp
duties. And I had found a lieutenant with enough experience to attend
to the ‘further instruction’ of the young officers. My orderly room
took about ten minutes a day; crime was rare, and the adjutant always
had ready and in order the few documents to be signed; and I was free
to ride my three chargers over the countryside for the rest of the
day. I used to visit the present Archbishop of Wales frequently at his
palace at St. Asaph; his son had been killed in the First Battalion.
We found that we had in common a taste for the curious. I have kept a
postcard from him which runs as follows:
The Palace, St. Asaph.
Hippophagist banquet held at Langham’s Hotel, February 1868.
A. G. Asaph.
(I met numbers of bishops during the war but none since; except
the Bishop of Oxford, in a railway carriage in 1927, who was discussing
the beauties of Richardson. And the Bishop of Liverpool, at Harlech, in
1923. I was making tea on the sea-shore when he came out from the sea
in great pain, having been stung in the thigh by a jellyfish. He gladly
accepted a cup of tea, tut-tutting miserably to himself that he had
been under the impression that jellyfish only stung in foreign parts.
As a record of the occasion he gave me a silver pencil which he had
found in the sandhills while undressing.)
I grew tired of this idleness and arranged to be transferred to
the Sixteenth Officer Cadet Battalion in another part of the same
camp. It was the same sort of work that I had done at Oxford, and I
was there from February 1918 until the Armistice in November. Rhyl
was much healthier than Oxford and I found that I could play games
without danger of another breakdown. A job was found for Nancy at a
market-gardener’s near the camp, so she came up to live with me. A
month or two later she found that she was to have a baby and had to
stop land work; she went back to her drawing.
None of my friends had liked the idea of my marriage, particularly to
anyone as young as Nancy; one of them, Robbie Ross, Wilde’s literary
executor, whom I had met through Siegfried and who had been very good
to me, had gone so far as to try to discourage me by hinting that there
was negro blood in the Nicholson family, that it was possible that
one of Nancy’s and my children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried
found it difficult to accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he
had not met, but he still wrote. After a few months at Craiglockhart,
though he in no way renounced his pacifist views, he decided that
the only possible thing to do was, after all, to go back to France.
He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again had
made him more restless than ever. Hospital life was nearly unbearable;
the feeling of isolation was the worst. He had had a long letter from
Old Joe to say that the First Battalion had just got back to rest from
Polygon Wood; the conditions and general situation were more appalling
than anything he had yet seen—three miles of morasses, shell-holes and
dead men and horses through which to get the rations up. Siegfried
said that he would rather be anywhere than in hospital; he couldn’t
bear to think of poor Old Joe lying out all night in shell-holes and
being shelled (several of the ration party were killed, but at least,
according to Joe, ‘the battalion got its rations’). If only the people
who wrote leading articles for the _Morning Post_ about victory could
read Joe’s letter!
It was about this time that Siegfried wrote the poem _When I’m asleep
dreaming and lulled and warm_, about the ghosts of the soldiers who
had been killed, reproaching him in his dreams for his absence from
the trenches, saying that they had been looking for him in the line
from Ypres to Frise and had not found him. He told Rivers that he
would go back to France if they would send him, making it quite clear
that his views were exactly the same as they had been in July when he
had written the letter of protest—only more so. He demanded a written
guarantee that he would be sent back at once and not kept hanging about
in a training battalion. He wrote reprehending me for the attitude I
had taken in July, when I was reminding him that the regiment would
only understand his protest as a lapse from good form and a failure to
be a gentleman. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he said,
to identify oneself in any way with good form or gentlemanliness, and
if I had real courage I wouldn’t be acquiescing as I was. He pointed
out that I admitted that the people who sacrificed the troops were
callous b——s, and that the same thing was happening in all countries
except parts of Russia. I forget how I answered Siegfried. I might have
pointed out that when I was in France I was never such a fire-eater as
he was. The amount of Germans that I had killed or caused to be killed
was negligible compared with his wholesale slaughter. The fact was that
the direction of Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed with his
environment; he varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist. His
poem:
To these I turn, in these I trust,
Brother Lead and Sister Steel;
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust....
was originally written seriously, inspired by Colonel Campbell,
v.c.’s bloodthirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army
school. Later he offered it as a satire; and it is a poem that comes
off whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less
heroic than Siegfried.
I have forgotten how it was worked and whether I had a hand in it, but
he was sent to Palestine this time. He seemed to like it there, and I
was distressed in April to have a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim,’
that the division was moving to France. He wrote that he would be sorry
to be in trenches, going over the top to take Morlancourt or Méaulte.
Seeing that we had recaptured Morlancourt had brought it home to him.
He said that he expected that the First and Second Battalions had
about ceased to exist by now for the _n_th time. I heard again from
him at the end of May, from France. He quoted Duhamel. ‘It was written
that you should suffer without purpose and without hope, but I will
not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss.’ Yet he wrote the
next paragraph in his happy-warrior vein, saying that his men were the
best that he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. I mightn’t
believe it, but he was training them bloody well. He couldn’t imagine
whence his flamelike ardour had come, but it had come. His military
efficiency was derived from the admirable pamphlets that were now
issued, so different from the stuff we used to get two years before.
He said that when he read my letter he began to think, damn Robert,
damn every one except his company, which was the smartest turn-out ever
seen, and damn Wales and damn leave and damn being wounded and damn
everything except staying with his company until they were all melted
away. (Limping and crawling across the shell-holes, lying very still
in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.) I was to
remember this mood when I saw him (_if_ I saw him) worn out and smashed
up again, querulous and nerve-ridden. Or when I read something in the
casualty list and got a polite letter from Mr. Lousada, his solicitor.
There never was such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six
months it would have ceased to exist.
Nancy’s brother, Tony, was also in France now. Nancy’s mother made
herself ill with worrying about him. Early in July he was due to
come home on leave; I was on leave myself at the end of one of the
four-months’ cadet courses, staying with the rest of Nancy’s family
at a big Tudor house near Harlech. It was the most haunted house that
I have ever been in, though the ghosts were invisible except in the
mirrors. They would open and shut doors, rap on the oak panels,
knock the shades off lamps, and drink the wine from the glasses at our
elbows when we were not looking. The house belonged to an officer in
the Second Battalion whose ancestors had most of them died of drink.
There was only one visible ghost, a little yellow dog that appeared on
the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it one day.
This was the time of the first Spanish influenza epidemic and Nancy’s
mother caught it, but she did not want to miss Tony when he came
on leave. She wanted to go to theatres with him in London; they
were devoted to each other. So when the doctor came she reduced her
temperature with aspirin and pretended that she was all right. But she
knew that the ghosts in the mirrors knew. She died in London on July
13th, a few days later. While she was dying her chief feeling was one
of pleasure that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account. (Tony
was killed two months later.) Nancy’s mother was a far more important
person to her than I was, and I was alarmed of the effect that the
shock of her death might have on the baby. A week later I heard that
on the day that she had died Siegfried had been shot through the head
while making a daylight patrol through long grass in No Man’s Land. And
he wrote me a verse letter which I cannot quote, though I should like
to do so. It is the most terrible of his war-poems.
And I went on mechanically at my cadet-battalion work. The candidates
for commissions we got were no longer gentlemen in the regimental
sense—mostly Manchester cotton clerks and Liverpool shipping clerks—but
they were all experienced men from France and were quiet and well
behaved. We failed about one in three. And the war went on and on.
I was then writing a book of poems called _Country Sentiment_.
Instead of children as a way of forgetting the war, I used Nancy.
_Country Sentiment_, dedicated to her, was a collection of romantic
poems and ballads. At the end was a group of pacifist war-poems. It
contained one about the French civilians—I cannot think how I came to
put so many lies in it—I even said that old Adelphine Heu of Annezin
gave me a painted china plate, and that her pride was hurt when I
offered to pay her. The truth is that I bought the plate from her for
about fifteen shillings and that I never got it from her. Adelphine’s
daughter-in-law would not allow her to give it up, claiming it as her
own, and I never got my money back from Adelphine. This is only one of
many of my early poems that contain falsities for public delectation.
In November came the Armistice. I heard at the same time news of the
death of Frank Jones-Bateman, who had gone back again just before the
end, and of Wilfred Owen, who often used to write to me from France,
sending me his poems. Armistice-night hysteria did not touch the camp
much, though some of the Canadians stationed there went down to Rhyl to
celebrate in true overseas style. The news sent me out walking alone
along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battle-field,
the Flodden of Wales) cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.