XXI
I had sent my parents a wire that I would be arriving at Waterloo Station the next morning. The way from the hospital train to the waiting ambulances was roped off; as each stretcher case was lifted off the train a huge hysterical crowd surged up to the barrier and uttered a new roar. Flags were being waved. It seemed that the Somme battle was regarded at home as the beginning of the end of the war. As I idly looked at the crowd, one figure detached itself; it was my father, hopping about on one leg, waving an umbrella and cheering with the best of them. I was embarrassed, but was soon in the ambulance. I was on the way to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate. This was Sir Alfred Mond’s big house, lent for the duration of the war, and a really good place to be in; having a private room to myself was the most unexpected luxury.
What I most disliked in the army was never being alone, forced to live and sleep with men whose company in many cases I would have run miles to avoid.
I was not long at Highgate; the lung healed up easily and my finger was saved for me. I heard here for the first time that I was supposed to be dead; the joke contributed greatly to my recovery. The people with whom I had been on the worst terms during my life wrote the most enthusiastic condolences to my parents: my housemaster, for instance. I have kept a letter dated the 5th August 1916 from The Times advertisement department:
Captain Robert Graves.
Dear Sir,
We have to acknowledge receipt of your letter with reference to the announcement contradicting the report of your death from wounds. Having regard, however, to the fact that we had previously published some biographical details, we inserted your announcement in our issue of to-day (Saturday) under ‘Court Circular’ without charge, and we have much pleasure in enclosing herewith cutting of same.
Yours, etc.
The cutting read:
Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially reported died of wounds, wishes to inform his friends that he is recovering from his wounds at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate, N.
* * *
Mrs. Lloyd George has left London for Criccieth.
* * *
I never saw the biographical details supplied by my father; they might have been helpful to me here. Some letters written to me in France were returned to him as my next-of-kin. They were surcharged: ‘Died of wounds—present location uncertain.—P. Down, post-corporal.’ The only inconvenience that my death caused me was that Cox’s Bank stopped my pay and I had difficulty in persuading it to honour my cheques. I had a letter from Siegfried telling me that he was overjoyed to hear I was alive again. (I wondered whether he had been avenging me.) He was now back in England with suspected lung trouble. We agreed to take our leave together at Harlech when I was better. Siegfried wrote that he was nine parts dead from the horror of the Somme fighting.
I was able to travel early in September. We met at Paddington. Siegfried bought a copy of The Times at the bookstall. As usual we turned to the casualty list first; and found there the names of practically every officer in the First Battalion, either killed or wounded. Edmund Dadd was killed. His brother Julian, in Siegfried’s company, wounded. (Shot through the throat, as we learned later, only able to talk in a whisper, and for months utterly prostrated. It had been at Ale Alley at Ginchy, on 3rd September. A dud show; the battalion had been outflanked in a counter-attack.) News like this in England was far more upsetting than when one was in France. I was still very weak and could not help crying all the way up to Wales. Siegfried said bitterly: ‘Well, I expect the colonel got his c.b. at any rate.’ England was strange to the returned soldier. He could not understand the war-madness that ran about everywhere looking for a pseudo-military outlet. Every one talked a foreign language; it was newspaper language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible. A single typical memorial of this time will be enough:
A MOTHER’S ANSWER TO
‘A COMMON SOLDIER’
By A Little Mother
A MESSAGE TO THE PACIFISTS. A MESSAGE TO THE BEREAVED. A MESSAGE TO THE TRENCHES
Owing to the immense demand from home and from the trenches for this letter, which appeared in the ‘Morning Post,’ the Editor found it necessary to place it in the hands of London publishers to be reprinted in pamphlet form, seventy-five thousand copies of which were sold in less than a week direct from the publishers.
Extract from a Letter from Her Majesty
‘The Queen was deeply touched at the “Little Mother’s” beautiful letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.’
To the Editor of the ‘Morning Post’
Sir,—As a mother of an only child—a son who was early and eager to do his duty—may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter appeared in your issue of the 9th inst.? Perhaps he will kindly convey to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard, seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the world, for it is we who ‘mother the men’ who have to uphold the honour and traditions not only of our Empire but of the whole civilized world.
To the man who pathetically calls himself a ‘common soldier,’ may I say that we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as ‘Peace! Peace!’ where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future that their blood was not spilt in vain. We need no marble monuments to remind us. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the ‘common soldier’ from his ‘slight wounds’ will not cry to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no ‘sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and “comfy” in the summer.’ There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred trust of motherhood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of ‘only sons’ to fill up the gaps, so that when the ‘common soldier’ looks back before going ‘over the top’ he may see the women of the British race on his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.
The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the ‘common soldier.’ We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we’ve fetched our laddie from school, we’ve put his cap away, and we have glanced lovingly over his last report which said ‘Excellent’—we’ve wrapped them all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the war to be looked at. A ‘common soldier,’ perhaps, did not count on the women, but they have their part to play, and we have risen to our responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be proud of us. If the men fail, Tommy Atkins, the women won’t.
Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It’s not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of ‘Lights out,’ a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our own secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men’s memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity.
Yours, etc.,
A Little Mother.
EXTRACTS AND PRESS CRITICISMS
‘The widest possible circulation is of the utmost importance.’—The Morning Post.
‘Deservedly attracting a great deal of attention, as expressing with rare eloquence and force the feelings with which the British wives and mothers have faced and are facing the supreme sacrifice.’—The Morning Post.
‘Excites widespread interest.’—The Gentlewoman.
‘A letter which has become celebrated.’—The Star.
‘We would like to see it hung up in our wards.’—Hospital Blue.
‘One of the grandest things ever written, for it combines a height of courage with a depth of tenderness which should be, and is, the stamp of all that is noblest and best in human nature.’—A Soldier in France.
‘Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of her day, but no woman has done more than the “Little Mother,” whose now famous letter in the Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing like it has ever made such an impression on our fighting men. I defy any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it.... My God! she makes us die happy.’—One who has Fought and Bled.
‘Worthy of far more than a passing notice; it ought to be reprinted and sent out to every man at the front. It is a masterpiece and fills one with pride, noble, level-headed, and pathetic to a degree.’—Severely Wounded.
‘I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the “Little Mother’s” beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.’—A Bereaved Mother.
‘The “Little Mother’s” letter should reach every corner of the earth—a letter of the loftiest ideal, tempered with courage and the most sublime sacrifice.’—Percival H. Monkton.
‘The exquisite letter by a “Little Mother” is making us feel prouder every day. We women desire to fan the flame which she has so superbly kindled in our hearts.’—A British Mother of an Only Son.
At Harlech, Siegfried and I spent the time getting our poems in order; Siegfried was at work on his Old Huntsman. We made a number of changes in each other’s verses; I remember that I proposed amendments which he accepted in his obituary poem ‘To His Dead Body’—written for me when he thought me dead. We were beginning to wonder whether it was right for the war to be continued. It was said that Asquith in the autumn of 1915 had been offered peace-terms on the basis of status quo ante and that he had been willing to consider them; that his colleagues had opposed him, and that this was the reason for the fall of the Liberal Government, and for the ‘Win-the-War’ Coalition Government of Lloyd George that superseded it. We both thought that the terms should have been accepted, though Siegfried was more vehement than I was on the subject. The view we had of the war was now non-political. We no longer saw it as a war between trade-rivals; its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder. I made a facetious marginal note on a poem I wrote about this time, called Goliath and David (in which the biblical legend was reversed and David was killed by Goliath):
‘War should be a sport for men above forty-five only, the Jesse’s, not the David’s. “Well, dear father, how proud I am of you serving your country as a very gallant gentleman prepared to make even the supreme sacrifice. I only wish I were your age: how willingly would I buckle on my armour and fight those unspeakable Philistines! As it is, of course, I can’t be spared; I have to stay behind at the War Office and administrate for you lucky old men.” “What sacrifices I have made,” David would sigh when the old boys had gone off with a draft to the front singing Tipperary. “There’s father and my Uncle Salmon and both my grandfathers, all on active service. I must put a card in the window about it.”’
We defined the war in our poems by making contrasted definitions of peace. With Siegfried it was hunting and nature and music and pastoral scenes; with me it was chiefly children. When I was in France I used to spend much of my spare time playing with the French children of the villages in which I was billeted. I put them into my poems, and my own childhood at Harlech. I called my book Fairies and Fusiliers, and dedicated it to the regiment.
Siegfried stayed a few weeks. When he had gone I began the novel on which my earlier war chapters are based, but it remained a rough draft.
In September I went for a visit to Kent, to the house of a First Battalion friend who had recently been wounded. His elder brother had been killed in the Dardanelles, and his mother kept his bedroom exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, his linen always freshly laundered, and flowers and cigarettes by his bedside. She was religious and went about with a vague bright look on her face. The first night I spent there my friend and I sat up talking about the war until after twelve o’clock. His mother had gone to bed early, after urging us not to get too tired. The talk excited me but I managed to fall asleep at about one o’clock. I was continually awakened by sudden rapping noises which I at first tried to disregard but which grew louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. I lay in a cold sweat. About three o’clock I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door. I collided in the passage with the mother, who, to my surprise, was fully dressed. She said: ‘It’s nothing. One of the maids has hysterics. I am so sorry you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to bed, but I could not sleep though the noises had stopped. In the morning I said to my friend: ‘I’m leaving this place. It’s worse than France.’
In November Siegfried and I rejoined the battalion at Litherland and shared a hut together. We decided that it was no use making a protest against the war. Every one was mad; we were hardly sane ourselves. Siegfried said that we had to ‘keep up the good reputation of the poets,’ as men of courage, he meant. The best place for us was back in France away from the more shameful madness of home service. Our function there was not to kill Germans, though that might happen, but to make things easier for the men under our command. For them the difference between being under someone whom they could count as a friend, someone who protected them as much as he could from the grosser indignities of the military system and having to study the whims of any thoughtless, petty tyrant in an officer’s tunic, was all the difference in the world. By this time the ranks of both line battalions were filled with men who had enlisted for patriotic reasons and the professional-soldier tradition was hard on them.... Siegfried, for instance, on (I think) the day before the Fricourt attack. The attack had been rehearsed for a week over dummy trenches in the back areas until the whole performance was perfect, in fact almost stale. Siegfried was told to rehearse once more. Instead, he led his platoon into a wood and read to them—nothing military or literary, just the London Mail. Though the London Mail was not in his line, Siegfried thought that the men would enjoy the ‘Things We Want to Know’ column.
Officers of the Royal Welch were honorary members of a neighbouring golf club. Siegfried and I used to go there often. He played golf and I hit a ball alongside him. I had once played at Harlech as a junior member of the Royal St. David’s, but I had given it up before long because it was bad for my temper. I was afraid of taking it up again seriously, so now I limited myself to a single club. When I mishit it did not matter. I played the fool and purposely put Siegfried off his game; he was a serious golfer. It was the time of great food shortage; the submarines sank about every fourth food ship, and there was a strict meat, butter and sugar ration. But the war did not seem to have reached the links. The principal business men of Liverpool were members of the club and did not mean to go short while there was any food at all coming in at the docks. Siegfried and I went to the club-house for lunch on the day before Christmas; there was a cold buffet in the club dining-room offering hams, barons of beef, jellied tongues, cold roast turkey and chicken. A large, meaty-faced waiter presided. Siegfried satirically asked him: ‘Is this all? There doesn’t seem to be quite such a good spread as in previous years.’ The waiter apologized: ‘No, sir, this isn’t quite up to the usual mark, sir, but we are expecting a more satisfactory consignment of meat on Boxing Day.’ The dining-room at the club-house was always full, the links were practically deserted.
The favourite rendezvous of the officers of the Mersey garrison was the Adelphi Hotel. It had a cocktail bar and a swimming bath. The cocktail bar was generally crowded with Russian naval officers, always very drunk. One day I met a major of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers there. I saluted him. He told me confidentially, taking me aside: ‘It’s nice of you to salute me, my boy, but I must confess that I am not what I seem. I wear a crown on my sleeve and so does a company sergeant-major; but then he’s not entitled to wear these three cuff bands and the wavy border. Look at them, aren’t they pretty? As I was saying, I’m not what I seem to be. I’m a sham. I’ve got a sergeant-major’s stomach.’ I was quite accustomed to drunken senior officers, so I answered respectfully: ‘Really, major, and how did you come to get that?’ He said: ‘You think I’m drunk. Well, I am if you like, but it’s true about my stomach. You see I was in that Beaumont-Hamel show and I got shot in the guts. It hurt like hell, let me tell you. They got me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying; there was a company sergeant-major in the hospital at the time and he had got it through the head, and he was busy dying, too, and he did die. Well, as soon as the sergeant-major died they took out that long gut, whatever you call the thing, the thing that unwinds—they say it’s as long as a cricket pitch—and they put it into me, grafted it on somehow. Wonderful chaps these medicos. They can put in spare parts as if one was a motor-car. Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an abstemious man; the lining of the new gut is much better than my old one; so I’m celebrating it. I only wish I had his kidneys too.’
An R.A.M.C. captain was sitting by. He broke into the conversation. ‘Yes, major, I know what a stomach wound’s like. It’s the worst of the lot. You were lucky to reach the field-ambulance alive. The best chance is to lie absolutely still. I got mine out between the lines, bandaging a fellow. I flopped into a shell-hole. My stretcher-bearers wanted to carry me back, but I wasn’t having any. I kept everyone off with a revolver for forty-eight hours. That saved my life. I couldn’t count on a spare gut waiting for me at the dressing-station. My only chance was to lie still and let it heal.’
In December I attended a medical board; they examined my wound and asked me how I was feeling. The president wanted to know whether I wanted a few months more home service. I said: ‘No, sir, I should be much obliged if you would pass me fit for service overseas.’ In January I went out again.
I went back as an old soldier; my kit and baggage proved it. I had reduced the Christmas tree that I first brought out to a pocket-torch with a fourteen-day battery in it, and a pair of insulated wire-cutters strong enough to cut German wire (the ordinary British army issue would only cut British wire). Instead of a haversack I had a pack like the ones the men carried, but lighter and waterproof. I had lost my revolver when I was wounded and had not bought another; rifle and bayonet could always be got from the battalion. (Not carrying rifle and bayonet made officers conspicuous in an attack; in most divisions now they carried them, and also wore trousers rolled down over their puttees like the men, because the Germans had been taught to recognize them by their thin knees.) Instead of the heavy blankets that I had brought out before I now had an eiderdown sleeping-bag in an oiled-silk cover. I also had Shakespeare and a Bible, both printed on india-paper, a Catullus and a Lucretius in Latin, and two light weight, folding, canvas arm-chairs, one as a present for Yates the quartermaster, the other for myself. I was wearing a very thick whipcord tunic with a neat patch above the second button and another between the shoulders; it was my only salvage from the last time out except the pair of ski-ing boots which I was wearing again, reasonably waterproof—my breeches had been cut off me in hospital.
There was a draft of ten young officers with me. As Captain Charles Edmonds notes in his book A Subaltern’s War, young officers at this time were expected to be ‘roistering blades with wine and women.’ These ten did their best. Three of them got venereal disease at Rouen. In each case, I believe, it was the first time that they had been with women. They were strictly brought-up Welsh boys of the professional classes and knew nothing about prophylactics. One of them was sharing a hut with me. He came in very late and very drunk one night from the Drapeau Blanc, a well-known blue-lamp brothel, woke me up and began telling me what a wonderful time he had. ‘He had never known before,’ he said, ‘what a wonderful thing sex was.’ I said irritably and in some disgust: ‘The Drapeau Blanc? Then I hope to God you washed yourself.’ He was very Welsh and on his dignity. ‘What do you mean, captain? I did wass my fa-ace and ha-ands.’ There were no restraints in France as in England; these boys had money to spend and knew that they had a good chance of being killed within a few weeks anyhow. They did not want to die virginal. So venereal hospitals at the base were always crowded. (The troops took a lewd delight in exaggerating the proportion of army chaplains to combatant officers treated there.) The Drapeau Blanc saved the life of scores of them by incapacitating them for future trench service.
The instructors at the Bull Ring were full of bullet-and-bayonet enthusiasm which they tried to pass on to the drafts. The drafts were now, for the most part, either forcibly enlisted men or wounded men returning, and at this dead season of the year it was difficult for anyone to feel enthusiastic on arrival in France. The training principle had recently been revised. Infantry Training, 1914, had laid it down politely that the soldier’s ultimate aim was to put out of action or render ineffective the armed forces of the enemy. This statement was now not considered direct enough for a war of attrition. Troops were taught instead that their duty was to hate the Germans and kill as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice the men were ordered to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The bayonet-fighting instructors’ faces were permanently set in a ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now! In at his belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life. No more little Fritzes! ... Naaaoh! Anyone would think that you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that. Bite him, I say! Stick your teeth in him and worry him! Eat his heart out!’
Once more I was glad to be sent up to the trenches.