Macartney-Filgate detailed me as Siegfried’s escort to a convalescent home for neurasthenics at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. Siegfried and I both throught this a great joke, especially when I missed the train and he reported to ‘Dottyville’, as he called it, without me. At Craiglockhart, Siegfried came under the care of Professor W.H.R. Rivers, whom we now met for the first time, though we already knew him as a leading Cambridge neurologist, ethnologist, and psychologist. He had made a point of taking up a new department of research every few years, and incorporating it in his comprehensive anthropological scheme.
Rivers died shortly after the war, when 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 politics. He was now busily engaged 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, based on Freud’s work, though he energetically repudiated Freud’s more idiosyncratic theses. His posthumous work Conflict and Dream is a record of his labours at Craiglockhart. Dick, by the way, had come under Rivers’ observation as a result of the police-court episode and, after treatment, been pronounced 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. On my return from Edinburgh I felt much happier. Siegfried began to write the terrifying sequence of poems, some of them published in the Craiglockhart hospital magazine, The Hydra, which appeared next year as Counter-Attack. Another patient was Wilfred Owen of the Manchester Regiment. It preyed on his mind that he had been unjustly accused of cowardice by his commanding officer. Meeting Siegfried here set Owen, a quiet, round-faced little man, writing war-poems.
25
THE president of the Osborne medical board had been right: I should not have been back on duty. The training at the Third Battalion camp was intensive, and being given command of a trained-men company I did not get enough 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 workmen in gas-masks beside an open man-hole, bending over a corpse which they had just hauled up from a sewer. His clothes were sodden and stinking; face and hands, yellow. Waste chemicals from the munitions factory had got into the sewage system and gassed him when he went down to inspect. My company did not pause in its march, and I had only a glimpse of the group; but it reminded me so strongly of France that, but for the band-music, I should have fainted.
The colonel detailed me as member of a court-martial on a civilian alleged to have enlisted under the Derby Scheme, but not to have presented himself when his class was called to the colours. I tried to feel sympathetic with the nasty-looking little man, who closely resembled a rabbit, but found it difficult, even when he proved never to have enlisted. His solicitor handed us a letter from a corporal in France, explaining that he had enlisted in the rabbit’s name while on leave, because the rabbit had recently been rabbiting with his wife. This the rabbit denied; but he showed that the colour of his eyes recorded on the enlistment-form was blue, while his own were rabbit-brown, so he seemed to have a case. But a further question arose: why had he not enlisted under the Military Service Act, if he was a fit rabbit? He claimed to be starred, having done responsible work in a munitions factory for the necessary length of time before the Military Service Act became law. However, police evidence on the table showed that his ‘protection certificates’ were forged, that he had not been working on munitions before the Military Service Act, and thus, coming into the class of those ‘deemed to have enlisted’, was a deserter in any case. Having no legal alternative, we sentenced him to the prescribed two years’ imprisonment. He broke down, squealed rabbit-fashion, and declared conscientious objections against war. Getting involved in the trial made me feel contemptible.
Large drafts now frequently went off to the First, Second, Ninth, and Tenth Battalions in France, and to the Eighth Battalion in Mesopotamia. Very few of the men warned for draft absented themselves. But they were always more cheerful about going in the spring and summer, when there was heavy fighting, than in the quieter winter months. (The regiment kept up its spirits even in the last year of the war. Attwater told me that big drafts sent off during the critical weeks of the 1918 spring, when the Germans had broken through the Fifth Army, went down to the station singing and cheering enthusiastically. They might have been the reservists whom he and I had seen assembling at Wrexham on August 12th, 1914, to rejoin the Second Battalion just before it sailed for France.)
Colonel Jones-Williams always made the same speech to the drafts. The day I joined the battalion from Osborne, 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: the colonel bidding Godspeed to a small draft of men on their way back to 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 felt – perhaps even ironically? 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. The son of a Welsh farmer and accustomed to good food, he had complained about his first morning’s breakfast, shouting 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!’)
I saw another well-remembered First Battalion face – D.G.M. and rosette, Médaille Militaire, Military Medal, no stripe. ‘Lost them again, Sergeant Dickens?’ I asked.
He grinned. ‘Easy come, easy go, sir.’
Then the train came in, and I stretched out my hand with ‘Good Luck!’
‘You’ll excuse us, sir,’ said Dickens.
The draft shouted with laughter, and I saw why my hand had not been wrung, and also why the cheers had been so loud. Everyone of them was in hand-cuffs. They had been detailed a fortnight before for a draft to Mesopotamia, but wanted to get back to the First Battalion, so they overstayed their leave. The colonel, not understanding the situation, put them into the guardroom to make sure of them for the next draft. They were now going back in hand-cuffs, under an escort of military police, to the battalion of their choice. The men bore Colonel Jones-Williams no ill-will for the hand-cuffs. A good-hearted man, he 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, forewarned what the winter would be like, with the mist steaming up from the Mersey and hanging about the camp, full of T.N.T. fumes. During the previous winter I used to sit in my hut, and cough and cough until I was sick. The fumes tarnished buttons and cap-badges, and made our eyes smart. I thought of going back to France, but realized the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover. But what about Palestine, where gas was unknown and shell-fire inconsiderable by 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, which meant: ‘Fit for garrison service at home.’ I reckoned on being sent to the Third Garrison Battalion of the regiment, now under canva
s at Oswestry in Wales. From there, when I felt a bit better, I would get myself passed BI, or: ‘Fit for garrison service abroad’, and would, in due course, be sent to a Royal Welch garrison battalion in Egypt. Once there, it should be easy to get passed AI and join the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth (New Army) Battalion in Palestine.
So presently I was sent to Oswestry. We had a good colonel, but the men were mostly compulsory enlistments; and the officers, with few exceptions, useless. My first task on arrival was to superintend the entraining of battalion stores and transport; we were moving to Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl. The adjutant gave me one hundred and fifty men, and allowed me six hours for the job. I chose fifty of the stronger men and three or four N.C.O.s who looked capable, then sent the remainder away to play football. By organizing the mob in First Battalion style, I got my 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 sent to him from the cadet-battalions. Few officers in the battalion had seen any active service.
It was at this point that I remembered Nancy Nicholson. I had first met her in April, 1916, at the Nicholsons’ Harlech house, while on leave after the operation on my nose. She was sixteen at the time, on holiday from school, and I knew her brother Ben, the painter, whose asthma kept him out of the army. When I returned to France in 1917, I had called on Ben and the rest of the family in Chelsea, and the last person to say goodbye to me on my way to Victoria Station was Nancy. I remembered her standing in the doorway, in a black velvet dress with coral necklace. She was ignorant, of independent mind, good-natured, and as sensible about the war as anybody at home could be. In the summer of 1917, shortly after the episode with Marjorie, I had taken her to a musical review, the first review of my life. It was Cheep; with Lee White, singing of Black-eyed Susans, and how ‘Girls must all be Farmers’ Boys, off with skirts, wear corduroys’. 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 answered each other. I liked all the family, particularly her mother, 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-officer, waiting to go to France.
I began a correspondence with Nancy, about some children’s rhymes of mine which she wanted to illustrate. Soon I fell in love with her. On my next leave, in October 1917, I visited her at the farm where she worked in Huntingdonshire – alone, except for her black poodle, among farmers, farm-labourers, and wounded soldiers who had been put on land-service – and helped her to run mangolds through a slicer. Our letters became more intimate after this. She warned me that she was a feminist and that I had to be 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. But Nancy’s crude summary of the Christian religion: ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’ took a load off my shoulders.
I had been passed BI now, but the orders that came for me to proceed to Gibraltar upset my plans. Gibraltar being a dead-end, it would be as difficult to get from there to Palestine as it would from England. A friend in the War Office undertook to cancel the order until a vacancy could be found for me in the battalion stationed at Cairo. At Rhyl, I was enjoying my first independent command. I got it because of a rumoured 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. A slight error occurred, 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; where, on second thoughts, it seemed just as much needed as in York – so there it stayed for the remainder of the war.
Ireland had been seething since the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and Irish troops at the depôts were now giving away their rifles to the Sinn Feiners. On getting these orders, the colonel told me that I was the only officer he could trust to look after the rest of the battalion – thirty young officers, four or five hundred crocks engaged in camp duties, and a draft of two hundred trained men under orders for Gibraltar. He left me a competent adjutant, and three officers’ chargers to ride, also asking me to keep an eye on his children, whom he had to leave behind until a house could be found for them at Cork; I had been playing with them a good deal. I got the draft off all right, and their soldier-like appearance so impressed the inspecting general that he sent them all to the camp cinema at his own expense. This gave me another good mark with the colonel in Ireland. The climax of my faithful services was when I checked an attempt on the part of the camp quartermaster to make our 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 – Irishmen, from every regiment in the army, held up at Holyhead on the way home by the presence of submarines in the Irish Sea. They were rowdy and insubordinate, and during the four days of their stay gave me little rest. The five hundred missing blankets, part of the six thousand six hundred issued to them, 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 quartermaster’s stores, before reporting to me. 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; for I had given the camp quartermaster no receipt for the blankets. The Court of Inquiry was convened in the camp quartermaster’s private office; and I insisted that he should leave the room during the taking of evidence, because it was now no longer his private office but a Court of Inquiry. The president agreed, and his consequent ignorance of my line of defence saved the case. This success, and the evidence that I turned up 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 I retaliated by investigating his private life) so pleased the colonel that he recommended me for the Russian Order of St Anne, with Crossed Swords, of the Third Class. After all, then, I should not have left the army undecorated but for the October Bolshevik revolution, which cancelled the award-list.
I saw Nancy again when I visited London in December, and we decided to get married at once. Though attaching no importance to the ceremony, Nancy did not want to disappoint her father, who liked weddings and parties. I was still expecting orders for Egypt, and intended to go on from there to Palestine. However, Nancy’s mother made it a condition of marriage – Nancy being still a minor – that I should visit a London lung-specialist to find out whether I would be fit for active service in the course of the next year or two. I went to Sir James Fowler, who had visited me at Rouen when I was wounded. He told me that my lungs were healthy enough, 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 at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. She being just eighteen, and I twenty-two. George Mallory acted as the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first time that morning, and been so horrified that she all but refused to go through with the wedding, though I had arranged for the ceremony 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 shouti
ng them in a parade-ground voice.
Then the reception. At this stage of the war, sugar could not be got except in the form of rations. There was a three-tiered wedding-cake and the Nicholsons had been saving up their sugar and butter cards for a month to make it taste like a real one; but when George Mallory lifted off the plaster-case of imitation icing, a sigh of disappointment rose from the guests. However, champagne was another scarce commodity, and the guests made a rush for the dozen bottles on 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 her neighbour, E. V. Lucas, the essayist, and exclaimed: ‘Oh, dear, I wish she had not done that!’ The embarrassments of our wedding-night (Nancy and I being both virgins) were somewhat eased by an air-raid: Zeppelin bombs dropping not far off set the hotel in an uproar.
A week later, Nancy returned to her farm, and I to my command at Kinmel Park. It was an idle life now. No men attended parade; all were employed on camp duties. And I found a lieutenant with enough experience to attend to the ‘further instruction’ of the young officers. My orderly room took about ten minutes each day; crime was rare, and the adjutant always kept ready and in order the few documents to be signed; which left me free to ride all my three chargers over the countryside, in turn, for the rest of the day. I frequently used to visit the present Archbishop of Wales in his palace at St Asaph; his son had been killed in the First Battalion. We discovered a common taste for the curious; I have kept a postcard from him, which runs as follows: