Good-bye to all that

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:

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 nth 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.