Good-bye to all that

I used to hear from Siegfried regularly. He had written in March from the Second Battalion asking me to pull myself together and send him a letter because he was horribly low in spirits. He complained that he had not been made at all welcome. A Special Reserve officer who had transferred to the Second Battalion and was an acting-captain had gone so far as to call him a bloody wart and allude to the bloody First Battalion. He had swallowed the insult, but was trying to get transferred to the First Battalion. The Second was resting until the end of the month about two miles from Morlancourt (where we had been together in the previous March), surrounded by billows of mud slopes and muddy woods and aerodromes and fine new railroads, where he used to lollop around on the black mare of an afternoon watching the shells bursting away by the citadel. The black mare was a beautiful combative creature with a homicidal kink, only ridden by Siegfried. David Thomas and I once watched him breaking her in. His patience was wonderful. He would put the mare at a jump and she would sulk; and he would not force her but turn her around and then lead her back to it. Time after time she refused, but could not provoke his ill-temper or make him give up his intention. Finally she took the jump in mere boredom. It was a six-footer, and she could manage higher than that. He was in 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 protested that he was not so tough as Dunn thought. He was hoping that the battalion would get into some sort of show soon; it would be a relief after all these weeks of irritation and discomfort and disappointment. (That was a feeling that one usually had in the Second Battalion.) He supposed that his Old Huntsman would not be published until the autumn. He had seen the Nation that week, and commented how jolly it was for him and me to appear as a military duet singing to a pacifist organ. ‘You and me, the poets who mean to work together some day and scandalize the jolly old Gosse’s and Strachey’s.’ (Re-reading this letter now I am reminded that the occasion of the final end of our correspondence ten years later was my failure to observe the proper literary punctilios towards the late Sir Edmund Gosse, c.b. And, by the way, when the Old Huntsman appeared, Sir Edmund severely criticized some lines of an allegorical poem in it:

This, he considered, might be read as a libel on the British House of Lords. The peerage, he said, had proved itself splendidly heroic in the war.)

Siegfried had his wish; he was in heavy fighting with the battalion in the Hindenburg Line soon after. His platoon was then lent as support to the Cameronians, and when, in a counter-attack, the Cameronians were driven out of some trenches that they had won, Siegfried, with a bombing party of six men, regained them. He was shot through the throat but continued bombing until he collapsed. The Cameronians rallied and returned, and Siegfried’s name was sent in for a Victoria Cross. The recommendation was refused, however, on the ground that the operations had not been successful; for the Cameronians were later driven out again by a bombing party under some German Siegfried.

He was back in England and very ill. He told me that often when he went out he saw corpses lying about on the pavement. He had written from hospital, in April, how bloody it was about the Second Battalion. Yates had sent him a note saying that four officers were killed and seven wounded in the show at Fontaine-les-Croiselles, the same place that he had been at, and it had been a ‘perfectly bloody battle.’ But there had been an advance of about half a mile, which seemed to Siegfried to be some consolation. Yet, in the very next sentence, he wrote how mad it made him to think of all the 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 were tired of it or had got all the kudos they wanted. He wished he could do something to protest against it, but even if he were to shoot the Premier or Sir Douglas Haig they could only shut him up in a madhouse like Richard Dadd of glorious memory. (I recognized the allusion. Dadd was an early nineteenth-century painter who made out a list of people who deserved to be killed. The first on the list was his father. He 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 he refused to go out again as a protest they would only accuse him of being afraid of shells. He asked me whether I thought we would be any better off by the end of that summer of carnage. We would never break their line. So far, in April, we had lost more men than the Germans. The Canadians at Vimy had lost appallingly, yet the official communiqués were lying unblushingly about the casualties. Julian Dadd had come to see him in hospital and, like every one else, urged him not to go out again, to take a safe job at home—but he knew that it was only a beautiful dream, that he would be morally compelled to go on until he was killed. The thought of going back now was agony, just when he had got back into the light again—‘Oh life, oh sun.’ 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, just watch the trees dressing up in green and feel the same himself. He was beastly weak and in a rotten state of nerves. The gramophone in the ward plagued him beyond endurance. The Old Huntsman had come out that spring after all, and, for a joke, he had sent a copy to Sir Douglas Haig. He couldn’t be stopped doing that anyhow.

In June he had gone to visit the Morrells just before I left hospital at Oxford. He had no idea I was still there, but he wrote that perhaps it was as well that 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. I had asked what he had been writing since he came home, and he answered that five poems of his had appeared in the Cambridge Magazine (one of the few pacifist journals published in England at the time, the offices of which were later raided by militarist flying-cadets). He said that none of them were much good except as digs at the complacent and perfectly —⁠— people who thought the war ought to go on indefinitely until every one was killed except themselves. The pacifists were 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 programme of assassination. He wrote that the thought of all that happened in France nearly drove him dotty sometimes. He was down in Kent, where he could hear the guns thudding all the time across the Channel, on and on, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to rush back and die with the 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—and the wrong gallery—and he could think of no way of doing any effective preventive work at home. His name had been sent in for an officer-cadet battalion appointment in England, which would keep him safe if he wanted to take it; but it seemed a dishonourable way out. Now at the end of July another letter came: 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’). When I opened the envelope a newspaper-cutting fluttered out; it was marked in ink: ‘Bradford Pioneer, Friday, July 27, 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 aganst 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’; I thought his action magnificently courageous. But there were more things to be considered than the strength of our case against the politicians. In the first place, he was not in a proper physical condition to suffer the penalty which he was inviting, which was 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 would cost Siegfried emotionally. It was wicked that he should attempt to face the consequences of his letter on top of his Quadrangle and Fontaine-les-Croiselles experiences. I knew, too, that as a gesture it was inadequate. Nobody would follow his example either in England or in Germany. The war would obviously go on, and go on until one side or the other cracked.

I decided to intervene. I applied to appear before the medical board that was sitting next day; and I asked the board 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 Osborne and attend to things. Next I wrote to the Hon. Evan Morgan, with whom I had canoed at Oxford a month or two previously. He was private secretary to one of the Coalition Ministers. I asked him to do everything he could to prevent republication of or comment on the letter in the newspapers, and to arrange that a suitable answer should be given to Mr. Lees Smith, then the leading pacifist M.P. and now Postmaster-General in the Labour Cabinet, when he brought up a question in the House about it. I explained to Morgan that I was on Siegfried’s side really, but that he should not be allowed to become a martyr in his present physical condition. Next I wrote to the Third Battalion. I knew that the colonel, a South Welshman, was narrowly patriotic, had never been to France, and could not possibly be expected to take a sympathetic view. But the senior major, an Irishman, was humane, so I wrote to him explaining the whole business, asking him to make the colonel see it in a reasonable light. I told him of Siegfried’s recent experiences in France. I suggested that he should be medically boarded and given indefinite leave.

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.