On the beach one day, Bartlett and I found an old ship’s fender. Because the knotted ropes at the top had frayed into something resembling hair, Bartlett said, sighing: ‘Poor fellow, I knew him well He was in my platoon in the Hampshires, but went mad and jumped overboard from the hospital ship.’ A little farther along the beach, 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 exclaimed, holding his nose: ‘Pooh, don’t he ‘alf stink!’ We turned again, leaving the coastguard 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. Among our laboriously nonsensical games was one of changing the labels on all the pictures in the galleries. Anything to make people laugh. But we found the going hard.
24
SIEGFRIED had written in March 1917 from the Second Battalion, asking me to pull myself together and send him a letter because he felt horribly low in spirits. He complained of his welcome there. The battalion was now restocked with senior officers, and my enemy, the Special Reserve second-lieutenant with the regular commission, now an acting-captain, had gone so far as to call him a bloody wart, and allude to the bloody First Battalion. Siegfried swallowed the insult, but tried to get transferred to the First Battalion.
The Second was resting until the end of the month about two miles from our beloved Morlancourt, surrounded by billows of mud slopes and muddy woods and aerodromes, and fine new railroads where he used to lollop about on the black mare of an afternoon. (David Thomas and I once watched Siegfried breaking in that black mare, a beautiful combative creature with a homicidal kink, and wondered at his patience. He would put the mare at a jump and, when she sulked, not force her but simply turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after time she refused, yet could neither provoke his ill-temper nor make him give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom – a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that.)
He was posted to ‘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 hoped that the battalion would get into some sort of a show soon; it would be a relief after all these weeks of irritation and discomfort and disappointment. (One usually felt like that in the Second Battalion.) He supposed that his Old Huntsman would not be published until the autumn. He had seen the last issue of The Nation, and commented what fun it was for us two to appear as a military duet in a pacifist organ. ‘You and me, the poets who mean to work together some day and scandalize the jolly old Gosses and Stracheys.’ (Re-reading this letter, I am reminded that the occasion of my final breach with Siegfried, ten years later, was my failure to observe the proper literary punctilios in a correspondence with the late Sir Edmund Gosse, C.B. And that, when the Old Huntsman appeared, Sir Edmund had 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, was proving itself splendidly heroic in the war.)
Heavy fighting in the Hindenburg Line broke out soon afterwards. Siegfried’s platoon went to support the Cameronians, and when these were driven out of some trenches they had won, he regained the position with a bombing-party of six men. Though shot through the throat, he continued bombing until he collapsed. The Cameronians rallied and returned, and the brigadier sent Siegfried’s name in for a Victoria Cross – a recommendation refused, however, on the ground that the operations had been unsuccessful; for the Cameronians were later driven out again by a bombing-party under some German Siegfried.
Back in London now, and very ill, he wrote that often when he went for a walk he saw corpses lying about on the pavements. In April, Yates had sent him a note saying that four officers were killed and seven wounded in a show at Fontaine-les-Croiselles – a ‘perfectly bloody battle’. But the battalion advanced nearly half a mile which, to Siegfried, seemed some consolation. Yet in the very next sentence he wrote how mad it made him to think of the countless 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 tired of it or had got as much kudos as they wanted. He wished he could do something in protest, but even if he were to shoot the Premier or Sir Douglas Haig, they would only shut him up in a mad-house like Richard Dadd of glorious memory. (I recognized the allusion. Dadd, a brilliant nineteenth-century painter, and incidentally a great-uncle of Edmund and Julian, had made out a list of people who deserved to be killed. The first on the list was his father. Dadd 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, as a protest, he refused to go out again, they would only accuse him of being afraid of shells. He asked me whether I thought we should be any better off by the end of that summer of carnage. We would never break the German line by hammering at it. So far our losses were heavier than the Germans’. The Canadians at Vimy had suffered appallingly, yet the official communiqués told unblushing lies about the casualties. Julian Dadd had visited him in hospital and, like everyone else, urged him to take a safe job at home – but he knew that this could only be a beautiful dream: he would be morally compelled to go on until he got killed. The thought of going back now was agony, just when he had come out into the light again – ‘Oh, life, oh, sun!’ (A quotation from a poem of mine about my return from the grave.) 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, simply watch the trees dressing up in green and feel the same himself. He was beastly weak and in a rotten state of nerves. A gramophone in the ward plagued him beyond endurance. The Old Huntsman had come out that spring after all, and for a joke he would send a copy to Sir Douglas Haig. He couldn’t be prevented from doing that anyhow.
In June, he had visited the Morrells at Oxford, not knowing that I was still there, but wrote that perhaps it was as well 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. Five poems of his had appeared in The Cambridge Magazine (one of the few aggressively pacifist journals published in England at the time, the offices of which were later sacked by Flying Corps cadets). None of them, he admitted, was much good except as a dig at the complacent and perfectly unspeakable people who thought the war ought to go on indefinitely until everyone got killed but themselves. The pacifists were now 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 Richard Dadd assassination programme.) The thought of France nearly drove him dotty sometimes. Down in Kent he could hear the guns thudding ceaselessly across the Channel, on and on, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to rush back and the with die 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 – the wrong gallery – and he could think of no means of doing any effective preventive work at home. His name had gone in for an officer-cadet battalion appointment in England, which would keep him safe if he pleased; but it seemed a dishonourable way out.
At the end of July, a
nother letter from Siegfried reached me at Osborne. 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.’). As I opened the envelope, a newspaper cutting fluttered out, marked in ink: ‘Bradford Pioneer, Friday, July 27th, 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 against 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’ and thought his action magnificently courageous. But more things had to be considered than the strength of our case against the politicians. In the first place, he was in no proper physical condition to suffer the penalty which the letter invited: namely 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 cost Siegfried emotionally. It was wicked that he should have to face the consequences of his letter on top of those Quadrangle and Fontaine-les-Croiselles experiences. I also realized the inadequacy of such a gesture. Nobody would follow his example, either in England or in Germany. The war would inevitably go on and on until one side or the other cracked.
I at once applied to appear before a medical board that sat next day; and asked the doctors 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 Osbome and attend to this Siegfried business. Next, I wrote to the Hon. Evan Morgan, with whom I had canoed at Oxford a month or two previously, the private secretary to one of the Coalition Ministers. I asked him to do everything possible to prevent republication of, or comment on, the letter; and arrange that a suitable answer should be given to Mr Lees-Smith, the leading pacifist Member of Parliament, when he asked a question about it in the House. I explained to Evan that I was on Siegfried’s side really, but that he should not be allowed to become a martyr to a hopeless cause in his present physical condition. Finally, I wrote to the Third Battalion. I knew that Colonel Jones-Williams was narrowly patriotic, had never been to France, and could not be expected to take a sympathetic view. But the second-in-command, Major Macartney-Filgate, was humane; so I pleaded with him to make the colonel see the affair in a reasonable light. I told him of Siegfried’s recent experiences in France and suggested that he should be medically boarded and given indefinite leave.
Presently, Siegfried 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. Major Macartney-Filgate, whom he found in command, the colonel being away on holiday, had been unimaginably decent, making him feel an utter brute, and had consulted the general commanding the Mersey Defences. Now the general was ‘consulting God, or someone like that’. Meanwhile, I could write to him at the hotel, because he had promised not to run away to the Caucasus. He hoped, in time, to persuade them to be nasty – they probably didn’t realize that his performance would soon be given great publicity. Though he hated the whole business more than ever, he knew more than ever that he was right and would never repent of what he had done. He added that things were looking better in Germany, but that Lloyd George would probably call it a ‘plot’. The politicians seemed to him incapable of behaving like human beings.
The general consulted not God but the War Office; and Evan’s Minister persuaded the War Office not to press the matter as a disciplinary case, but to give Siegfried a medical board. Evan had done his part well. I next set myself somehow to get Siegfried in front of 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 political situation; I took the line that everyone was mad except ourselves and one or two others, and that no good could come of offering common sense to the insane. Our only possible course would be to keep on going out until we got killed. I expected myself to go back soon, for the fourth time. Besides, what would the First and Second Battalions think of him? How could they be expected to understand his point of view? They would accuse him of ratting, having cold feet, and letting the regiment down. How would Old Joe, even, the most understanding man in the regiment, understand it? To whom was his letter addressed? The army could, I repeated, only read it as cowardice, or at the best as a lapse from good form. The civilians would take an even unkinder view, especially when they found out that ‘S.’ stood for ‘Siegfried’.
He refused to agree with me, but I made it plain that his letter had not been given, and would not be given, the publicity he intended. At last, unable to deny how ill he was, Siegfried consented to appear before the medica
l board.
So far, so good. Next, I had 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 ‘duration of the war’ captain. I very soon realized that the colonel was patriotic and unsympathetic; the major reasonable but ignorant; and the captain a competent nerve-specialist, right-minded, and my only hope. I had to go through the whole story again, treating the colonel and major with the utmost deference, but using the captain as an ally to break down their scruples. Much against my will, 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’ of corpses strewn along on Piccadilly. The irony of having to argue to these mad old men that Siegfried was not sane! Though conscious of a betrayal of truth, I acted jesuitically. Being in nearly as bad a state of nerves as Siegfried myself, I burst into tears three times during my statement. Captain McDowell, who proved to be a well-known Harley Street psychologist, played up well. As I went out, he said to me: ‘Young man, you ought to be before this board yourself.’ I prayed that when Siegfried came into the board-room after me he would not undo my work by appearing too sane. But McDowell argued his seniors over to my view.