book did

not sell, but was as good a book as 1917 censorship allowed; it should be re-printed. Adams was killed; in fact, three out of five of the officers of the First Battalion at that time were killed in the Somme fighting. Scatter’s dream of open warfare was not realized. He himself was very seriously wounded. Of A Company choir there is one survivor besides myself—C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still in hospital sometime after the war ended.

XIX

When I was given leave in April 1916 I went to a military hospital in London and had my nose operated on. It was a painful operation, but performed by a first-class surgeon and cost me nothing. In peace-time it would have cost me sixty guineas, and another twenty guineas in nursing-home fees. After hospital I went up to Harlech to walk on the hills. I had in mind the verse of the psalm: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ That was another charm against trouble. I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother, who owned considerable cottage property in the neighbourhood. I bought it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the guns stopped (‘when the guns stop’ was how we always thought of the end of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war-bonus would keep me for a year or two at least. The cottage was on the hillside away from the village. I put in a big window to look out over the wood below and across the Morfa to the sea. I wrote two or three poems here as a foretaste of the good life coming after the war.

It was about this time, but whether before or after my operation I cannot remember, that I was taken by my father to a dinner of the Honourable Cymmrodorion Society—a Welsh literary club—where Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, were to speak. Hughes was perky, dry and to the point; Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his ‘glory of the Welsh hills’ speeches. The power of his rhetoric was uncanny. I knew that the substance of what he was saying was commonplace, idle and false, but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of the audience. The power I knew was not his; he sucked it from his hearers and threw it back at them. Afterwards I was introduced to him, and when I looked closely at his eyes they were like those of a sleep-walker.

I rejoined the Third Battalion at Litherland, near Liverpool, where it had been shifted from Wrexham as part of the Mersey defence force; I liked the Third Battalion. The senior officers were generous in not putting more work on me than I wished to undertake, and it was good to meet again three of my Wrexham contemporaries who had been severely wounded (all of them, by a coincidence, in the left thigh) and seemed to be out of it for the rest of the war—Frank Jones-Bateman and ‘Father’ Watkin, who had been in the Welsh Regiment with me, and Aubrey Attwater, the assistant adjutant, who had gone to the Second Battalion early in 1915 and had been hit when out on patrol. Attwater had come from Cambridge, at the outbreak of war and was known as ‘Brains’ in the battalion. The militia majors, who were for the most part country gentlemen with estates in Wales, and had no thoughts in peace-time beyond hunting, shooting, fishing, and the control of their tenantry, were delighted with Attwater’s informative talk over the port at mess. Sergeant Malley, the mess-sergeant, would go round with his ‘Light or vintage, sir?’ and the old majors would say to Attwater: ‘Now, Brains! Tell us about Shakespeare. Is it true that Bacon wrote him?’ Or, ‘Well, Brains! What do you think about this chap Hilaire Belloc? Does he really know when the war’s going to end?’ And Attwater would humorously accept his position as combined encyclopaedia and almanac. Sergeant Malley was another friend whom I was always pleased to meet again. He could pour more wine into a glass than any other man in the world; it bulged up over the top of a glass like a cap and he was never known to spill a drop.

Wednesdays were guest-nights in the mess, when the married officers who usually dined at home were expected to attend. The band played Gilbert and Sullivan music behind a curtain. In the intervals the regimental harper gave solos—Welsh melodies picked out rather uncertainly on a hand-harp. When the programme was over the bandmaster was invited to the senior officers’ table for his complimentary glass of light or vintage. When he was gone, and the junior officers had retired, the port went round and round, and the conversation, at first very formal, became rambling and intimate. Once, I remember, a senior major laid it down axiomatically that every so-called sportsman had at one time or another committed a sin against sportsmanship. When challenged, he cross-examined each of his neighbours in turn, putting them on their honour to tell the truth. One of them, blushing, admitted that he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘It was my last chance before I rejoined the battalion in India.’ Another said that when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. The next one had gone out with a poacher—in his Sandhurst days—and crumbled poison-berry into a trout-stream. An even more scandalous admission came from a new-army major, a gentleman-farmer, that his estate had been overrun with foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty miles away, he had given his bailiff permission to protect the hen-roosts with a gun. Finally it was the turn of the medical officer to be cross-examined. He said: ‘Well, once when I was a student at St. Andrews a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost and I never returned the ten bob.’ At this one of the guests, an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, became suddenly excited, jumped up and leant over the table, doubling his fists. ‘And was not the name of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now immediately?’

The camp was only separated by the bombing-field from Brotherton’s, where a specially sensitive explosive for detonators was made. The munition makers had permanently yellow faces and hands and drew appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what would happen if Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the shock would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp besides destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. He maintained that the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would go over and strike a big munition camp about a mile away and set that off. One Sunday afternoon Attwater limped out of the mess and suddenly saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire. The camp fire-brigade was immediately bugled for and managed to put the fire out before it reached a vital spot. So the argument was never decided. I was at Litherland only a few weeks. On 1st July 1916 the Somme offensive started, and all available trained men and officers were sent out to replace casualties. I was disappointed to be sent back to the Second Battalion, not the First.

It was in trenches at Givenchy, just the other side of the canal from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived at the battalion on July 5th to find it in the middle of a raid. Prisoners were coming down the trench, scared and chattering to each other. They were Saxons just returned from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany. Their uniforms were new and their packs full of good stuff to loot. One prisoner got a good talking-to from C Company sergeant-major, a Birmingham man, who was shocked at a packet of indecent photographs found in the man’s haversack. It had been a retaliatory raid. Only a few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the Western front so far. It caught our B Company—the B’s were proverbially unlucky. The crater, which was afterwards named Red Dragon Crater after the Royal Welch regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards across. There were few survivors of B Company. The Germans immediately came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway, who had been a company sergeant-major on the retreat and was now an acting-major, rallied some men on the flank and drove them back. Blair, B Company commander, was buried by the mine up to his neck and for the rest of the day was constantly under fire. Though an oldish man (he had the South African ribbon), he survived this experience, recovered from his wounds, and was back in the battalion a few months later.

This raid was Stanway’s revenge. He organized it with the colonel; the colonel was the Third Battalion adjutant who had originally sent me out to France. The raid was elaborately planned, with bombardments and smoke-screen diversions on the flanks. A barrage of shrapnel shifted forward and back from the German front line to the supports. The intention was that the Germans at the first bombardment should go down into the shell-proof dug-outs, leaving only their sentries in the trench, and reappear as soon as the barrage lifted. When it came down again they would make another dash for the dug-outs. After this had happened two or three times they would be slow in coming out at all. Then, under cover of a smoke-screen, the raid would be made and the barrage put down uninterruptedly on the support and reserve lines to prevent reinforcements. My only part in the raid, which was successful, was to write out a detailed record of it at the colonel’s request. It was not the report for divisional headquarters but a page of regimental history to be sent to the depot to be filed in regimental records. In my account I noted that for the first time for two hundred years the regiment had reverted to the pike. Instead of rifle and bayonet some of the raiders had used butchers’ knives secured with medical plaster to the end of broomsticks. This pike was a lighter weapon than rifle and bayonet and was useful in conjunction with bombs and revolvers.

An official journalist at headquarters also wrote an account of the raid. The battalion enjoyed the bit about how they had gone over shouting ‘Remember Kitchener!’ and ‘Avenge the _Lusitania_!’ ‘What a damn silly thing to shout,’ said someone. ‘Old Kitchener was all right, but nobody wants him back at the War Office, that I’ve heard. And as for the _Lusitania_, the Germans gave her full warning, and if it brings the States into the war, it’s all to the good.’

There were not many officers in the Second who had been with it when I left it a month after Loos, but at any rate I expected to have a friendlier welcome than the first time I had come to the battalion at Laventie. But, as one of them recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914, and had been on the Square with me, had achieved his ambition of a regular commission in the Second Battalion. He was one of those who had been sent out to France before me as being more efficient and had been wounded before I came out. But now he was only a second-lieutenant in the Second Battalion, where promotion was slow, and I was a captain in the Third Battalion. Line-battalion feeling against the Special Reserve was always strong, and jealousy of my extra stars made him bitter. It amused him to revive the suspicion raised at Wrexham by my German name that I was a German spy. Whether he was serious or not I cannot say, probably he could not have said either; but the result was that I found myself treated with great reserve by all the officers who had not been with me in trenches before. It was unlucky that the most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name of Karl Graves. It was put about that he was a brother of mine. My consolation was that there was obviously a battle due and that would be the end either of me or of the suspicion. I thought to myself: ‘So long as there isn’t an N.C.O. told off to watch me and shoot me on the slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things had been known. As a matter of fact, though I had myself had no traffic with the enemy, there was a desultory correspondence kept up between my mother and her sisters in Germany; it came through her sister, Clara von Faber du Faur, mother of my cousin Conrad, whose husband was German consul at Zurich. It was not treasonable on either side, merely a register of the deaths of relations and discreet references to the war service of the survivors. The German aunts wrote, as the Government had ordered every German with relations or friends in enemy or neutral countries to do, pointing out the righteousness of the German cause and presenting Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia. My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they were deluded. The officers I liked in the battalion were the colonel and Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor. Doctor Dunn was what they call a hard-bitten man; he had served as a trooper in the South African War and won the d.c.m. He was far more than a doctor; living at battalion headquarters he became the right-hand man of three or four colonels in succession. When his advice was not taken this was usually afterwards regretted. On one occasion, in the autumn fighting of 1917, a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out adjutant, colonel, and signals officer. Dunn had no hesitation in pulling off the red-cross armlets that he wore in a battle and becoming a temporary combatant officer of the Royal Welch, resigning his duties to the stretcher-bearer sergeant. He took command and kept things going. The men were rather afraid of him, but had more respect for him than for anyone else in the battalion.

XX

Four days after the raid we heard that we were due for the Somme. We marched through Béthune, which had been much knocked about and was nearly deserted, to Fouquières, and there entrained for the Somme. The Somme railhead was near Amiens and we marched by easy stages through Cardonette, Daours, and Buire, until we came to the original front line, close to the place where David Thomas had been killed. The fighting had moved two miles on. This was on the afternoon of 14th July. At 4 a.m. on the 15th July we moved up the Méaulte-Fricourt-Bazentin road which wound through ‘Happy Valley’ and found ourselves in the more recent battle area. Wounded men and prisoners came streaming past us. What struck me most was the number of dead horses and mules lying about; human corpses I was accustomed to, but it seemed wrong for animals to be dragged into the war like this. We marched by platoons, at fifty yards distance. Just beyond Fricourt we found a German shell-barrage across the road. So we left it and moved over thickly shell-pitted ground until 8 a.m., when we found ourselves on the fringe of Mametz Wood, among the dead of our new-army battalions that had been attacking Mametz Wood. We halted in thick mist. The Germans had been using lachrymatory shell and the mist held the fumes; we coughed and swore. We tried to smoke, but the gas had got into the cigarettes, so we threw them away. Later we wished we had not, because it was not the cigarettes that had been affected so much as our own throats. The colonel called up the officers and we pulled out our maps. We were expecting orders for an attack. When the mist cleared we saw a German gun with ‘First Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers’ chalked on it. It was evidently a trophy. I wondered what had happened to Siegfried and my friends of A Company. We found the battalion quite close in bivouacs; Siegfried was still alive, as were Edmund Dadd and two other A Company officers. The battalion had been in heavy fighting. In their first attack at Fricourt they had overrun our opposite number in the German army, the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment, who were undergoing a special disciplinary spell in the trenches because an inspecting staff-officer, coming round, had found that all the officers were back in Mametz village in a deep dug-out instead of up in the trenches with their men. (It was said that throughout that bad time in March in the German trenches opposite to us there had been no officer of higher rank than corporal.) Their next objective had been The Quadrangle, a small copse this side of Mametz Wood. I was told that Siegfried had then distinguished himself by taking single-handed a battalion frontage that the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take the day before. He had gone over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared the occupants out. It was a pointless feat; instead of reporting or signalling for reinforcements he sat down in the German trench and began dozing over a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not report. The colonel was furious. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because it was reported that British patrols were still out. ‘British patrols’ were Siegfried and his book of poems. ‘It would have got you a D.S.O. if you’d only had more sense,’ stormed the colonel. Siegfried had been doing heroic things ever since I had left the battalion. His nickname in the Seventh Division was ‘Mad Jack.’ He was given a Military Cross for bringing in a wounded lance-corporal from a mine-crater close to the German lines, under heavy fire. He was one of the rare exceptions to the rule against the decoration of Third Battalion officers. I did not see Siegfried this time; he was down with the transport having a rest. So I sent him a rhymed letter, by one of our own transport men, about the times that we were going to have together when the war ended; how, after a rest at Harlech, we were going for a visit to the Caucasus and Persia and China; and what good poetry we would write. It was in answer to one he had written to me from the army school at Flixécourt a few weeks previously (which appears in _The Old Huntsman_).

[Illustration:SOMME TRENCH MAP

Martinpuich Sector

_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]

I went for a stroll with Edmund Dadd, who was now commanding A Company. Edmund was cursing: ‘It’s not fair, Robert. You remember A Company under Richardson was always the best company. Well, it’s kept up its reputation, and the C.O. shoves us in as the leading company of every show, and we get our objectives and hold them, and so we’ve got to do the same again the next time. And he says that I’m indispensable in the company, so he makes me go over every time instead of giving me a rest and letting my second-in-command take his turn. I’ve had five shows in just over a fortnight and I can’t go on being lucky every time. The colonel’s about due for his c.b. Apparently A Company is making sure of if for him.’

For the next two days we were in bivouacs outside the wood. We were in fighting kit and the nights were wet and cold. I went into the wood to find German overcoats to use as blankets. Mametz Wood was full of dead of the Prussian Guards Reserve, big men, and of Royal Welch and South Wales Borderers of the new-army battalions, little men. There was not a single tree in the wood unbroken. I got my greatcoats and came away as quickly as I could, climbing over the wreckage of green branches. Going and coming, by the only possible route, I had to pass by the corpse of a German with his back propped against a tree. He had a green face, spectacles, close shaven hair; black blood was dripping from the nose and beard. He had been there for some days and was bloated and stinking. There had been bayonet fighting in the wood. There was a man of the South Wales Borderers and one of the Lehr regiment who had succeeded in bayoneting each other simultaneously. A survivor of the fighting told me later that he had seen a young soldier of the Fourteenth Royal Welch bayoneting a German in parade-ground style, automatically exclaiming as he had been taught: ‘In, out, on guard.’ He said that it was the oddest thing he had heard in France.

I found myself still superstitious about looting or collecting souvenirs. The greatcoats were only a loan, I told myself. Almost the only souvenir I had allowed myself to keep was a trench periscope, a little rod-shaped metal one sent me from home; when I poked it up above the parapet it offered only an inch-square target to the German snipers. Yet a sniper at Cuinchy, in May, drilled it through, exactly central, at four hundred yards range. I sent it home, but had no time to write a note of explanation. My mother, misunderstanding, and practical as usual, took it back to the makers and made them change it for a new one.

Our brigade, the Nineteenth, was the reserve brigade of the Thirty-third Division; the other brigades, the Ninety-ninth and Hundredth, had attacked Martinpuich two days previously and had been stopped with heavy losses as soon as they started. Since then we had had nothing to do but sit about in shell-holes and watch the artillery duel going on. We had never seen artillery so thick. On the 18th we moved up to a position just to the north of Bazentin le Petit to relieve the Tyneside Irish. I was with D Company. The guide who was taking us up was hysterical and had forgotten the way; we put him under arrest and found it ourselves. As we went up through the ruins of the village we were shelled. We were accustomed to that, but they were gas shells. The standing order with regard to gas shells was not to put on one’s respirator but hurry on. Up to that week there had been no gas shells except lachrymatory ones; these were the first of the real kind, so we lost about half a dozen men. When at last we arrived at the trenches, which were scooped at a roadside and only about three feet deep, the company we were relieving hurried out without any of the usual formalities; they had been badly shaken. I asked their officer where the Germans were. He said he didn’t know, but pointed vaguely towards Martinpuich, a mile to our front. Then I asked him where and what were the troops on our left. He didn’t know. I cursed him and he went off. We got into touch with C Company behind us on the right and with the Fourth Suffolks not far off on the left. We began deepening the trenches and locating the Germans; they were in a trench-system about five hundred yards away but keeping fairly quiet.

The next day there was very heavy shelling at noon; shells were bracketing along our trench about five yards short and five yards over, but never quite getting it. We were having dinner and three times running my cup of tea was spilt by the concussion and filled with dirt. I was in a cheerful mood and only laughed. I had just had a parcel of kippers from home; they were far more important than the bombardment—I recalled with appreciation one of my mother’s sayings: ‘Children, remember this when you eat your kippers; kippers cost little, yet if they cost a hundred guineas a pair they would still find buyers among the millionaires.’ Before the shelling had started a tame magpie had come into the trench; it had apparently belonged to the Germans who had been driven out of the village by the Gordon Highlanders a day or two before. It was looking very draggled. ‘That’s one for sorrow,’ I said. The men swore that it spoke something in German as it came in, but I did not hear it. I was feeling tired and was off duty, so without waiting for the bombardment to stop I went to sleep in the trench. I decided that I would just as soon be killed asleep as awake. There were no dug-outs, of course. I always found it easy now to sleep through bombardments. I was conscious of the noise in my sleep, but I let it go by. Yet if anybody came to wake me for my watch or shouted ‘Stand-to!’ I was alert in a second. I had learned to go to sleep sitting down, standing up, marching, lying on a stone floor, or in any other position, at a moment’s notice at any time of day or night. But now I had a dreadful nightmare; it was as though somebody was handling me secretly, choosing the place to drive a knife into me. Finally, he gripped me in the small of the back. I woke up with a start, shouting, and punched the small of my back where the hand was. I found that I had killed a mouse that had been frightened by the bombardment and run down my neck.

That afternoon the company got an order through from the brigade to build two cruciform strong-points at such-and-such a map reference. Moodie, the company commander, and I looked at our map and laughed. Moodie sent back a message that he would be glad to do so, but would require an artillery bombardment and strong reinforcements because the points selected, half way to Martinpuich, were occupied in force by the enemy. The colonel came up and verified this. He said that we should build the strong-point about three hundred yards forward and two hundred yards apart. So one platoon stayed behind in the trench and the other went out and started digging. A cruciform strong-point consisted of two trenches, each some thirty yards long, crossing at right angles to each other; it was wired all round, so that it looked, in diagram, like a hot-cross bun. The defenders could bring fire to bear against an attack from any direction. We were to hold each of these points with a Lewis gun and a platoon of men.

It was a bright moonlight night. My way to the strong-point on the right took me along the Bazentin-High Wood road. A German sergeant-major, wearing a pack and full equipment, was lying on his back in the middle of the road, his arms stretched out wide. He was a short, powerful man with a full black beard. He looked sinister in the moonlight; I needed a charm to get myself past him. The simplest way, I found, was to cross myself. Evidently a brigade of the Seventh Division had captured the road and the Germans had been shelling it heavily. It was a sunken road and the defenders had begun to scrape fire-positions in the north bank, facing the Germans. The work had apparently been interrupted by a counter-attack. They had done no more than scrape hollows in the lower part of the bank. To a number of these little hollows wounded men had crawled, put their heads and shoulders inside and died there. They looked as if they had tried to hide from the black beard. They were Gordon Highlanders.

I was visiting the strong-point on the right. The trench had now been dug two or three feet down and a party of Engineers had arrived with coils of barbed wire for the entanglement. I found that work had stopped. The whisper went round: ‘Get your rifles ready. Here comes Fritz.’ I lay down flat to see better, and about seventy yards away in the moonlight I could make out massed figures. I immediately sent a man back to the company to find Moodie and ask him for a Lewis gun and a flare-pistol. I restrained the men, who were itching to fire, telling them to wait until they came closer. I said: ‘They probably don’t know we’re here and we’ll get more of them if we let them come right up close. They may even surrender.’ The Germans were wandering about irresolutely and we wondered what the game was. There had been a number of German surrenders at night recently, and this might be one on a big scale. Then Moodie came running with a Lewis gun, the flare-pistol, and a few more men with rifle-grenades. He decided to give the enemy a chance. He sent up a flare and fired a Lewis gun over their heads. A tall officer came running towards us with his hands up in surrender. He was surprised to find that we were not Germans. He said that he belonged to the Public Schools Battalion in our own brigade. Moodie asked him what the hell he was doing. He said that he was in command of a patrol. He was sent back for a few more of his men, to make sure it was not a trick. The patrol was half a company of men wandering about aimlessly between the lines, their rifles slung over their shoulders, and, it seemed, without the faintest idea where they were or what information they were supposed to bring back. This Public Schools Battalion was one of four or five others which had been formed some time in 1914. Their training had been continually interrupted by large numbers of men being withdrawn as officers for other regiments. The only men left, in fact, seemed to be those who were unfitted to hold commissions; yet unfitted by their education to make good soldiers in the ranks. The other battalions had been left behind in England as training battalions; only this one had been sent out. It was a constant embarrassment to the brigade.

I picked up a souvenir that night. A German gun-team had been shelled as it was galloping out of Bazentin towards Martinpuich. The horses and the driver had been killed. At the back of the limber were the gunners’ treasures. Among them was a large lump of chalk wrapped up in a piece of cloth; it had been carved and decorated in colours with military mottos, the flags of the Central Powers, and the names of the various battles in which the gunner had served. I sent it as a present to Dr. Dunn. I am glad to say that both he and it survived the war; he is in practice at Glasgow, and the lump of chalk is under a glass case in his consulting room. The evening of the next day, July 19th, we were relieved. We were told that we would be attacking High Wood, which we could see a thousand yards away to the right at the top of a slope. High Wood was on the main German battle-line, which ran along the ridge, with Delville Wood not far off on the German left. Two British brigades had already attempted it; in both cases the counter-attack had driven them out. Our battalion had had a large number of casualties and was now only about four hundred strong.

I have kept a battalion order issued at midnight:

To O.C. B Co. 2nd R.W.F. 20.7.16.

Companies will move as under to same positions in S14b as were to have been taken over from Cameronians aaa A Coy. 12.30 a.m. B Coy. 12.45 a.m. C Coy. 1 a.m. D Coy. 1.15 a.m. aaa At 2 a.m. Company Commanders will meet C.O. at X Roads S14b 99. aaa Men will lie down and get under cover but equipment will not be taken off aaa

S14b 99 was a map reference for Bazentin churchyard. We lay here on the reverse slope of a slight ridge about half a mile from the wood. I attended the meeting of company commanders; the colonel told us the plan. He said: ‘Look here, you fellows, we’re in reserve for this attack. The Cameronians are going up to the wood first, then the Fifth Scottish Rifles; that’s at five a.m. The Public Schools Battalion are in support if anything goes wrong. I don’t know if we shall be called on; if we are, it will mean that the Jocks have legged it. As usual,’ he added. This was an appeal to prejudice. ‘The Public Schools Battalion is, well, what we know, so if we are called for, that means it will be the end of us.’ He said this with a laugh and we all laughed. We were sitting on the ground protected by the road-bank; a battery of French 75’s was firing rapid over our heads about twenty yards away. There was a very great concentration of guns in Happy Valley now. We could hardly hear what he was saying. He told us that if we did get orders to reinforce, we were to shake out in artillery formation; once in the wood we were to hang on like death. Then he said good-bye and good luck and we rejoined our companies.

At this juncture the usual inappropriate message came through from Division. Division could always be trusted to send through a warning about verdigris on vermorel-sprayers, or the keeping of pets in trenches, or being polite to our allies, or some other triviality, when an attack was in progress. This time it was an order for a private in C Company to report immediately to the assistant provost-marshal back at Albert, under escort of a lance-corporal. He was for a court-martial. A sergeant of the company was also ordered to report as a witness in the case. The private was charged with the murder of a French civilian in an estaminet at Béthune about a month previously. Apparently there had been a good deal of brandy going and the French civilian, who had a grudge against the British (it was about his wife), started to tease the private. He was reported, somewhat improbably, as having said: ‘English no bon, Allmand trés bon. War fineesh, napoo the English. Allmand win.’ The private had immediately drawn his bayonet and run the man through. At the court-martial the private was exculpated; the French civil representative commended him for having ‘energetically repressed local defeatism.’ So he and the two N.C.O.’s missed the battle.

What the battle that they missed was like I pieced together afterwards. The Jocks did get into the wood and the Royal Welch were not called on to reinforce until eleven o’clock in the morning. The Germans put down a barrage along the ridge where we were lying, and we lost about a third of the battalion before our show started. I was one of the casualties.

It was heavy stuff, six and eight inch. There was so much of it that we decided to move back fifty yards; it was when I was running that an eight-inch shell burst about three paces behind me. I was able to work that out afterwards by the line of my wounds. I heard the explosion and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between the shoulder-blades, but had no sensation of pain. I thought that the punch was merely the shock of the explosion; then blood started trickling into my eye and I felt faint and called to Moodie: ‘I’ve been hit.’ Then I fell down. A minute or two before I had had two very small wounds on my left hand; they were in exactly the same position as the two, on my right hand, that I had got during the preliminary bombardment at Loos. This I had taken as a sign that I would come through all right. For further security I had repeated to myself a line of Nietsche’s, whose poems, in French, I had with me:

Non, tu ne peus pas me tuer.

It was the poem about a man on the scaffold with the red-bearded executioner standing over him. (This copy of Nietsche, by the way, had contributed to the suspicions about me as a spy. Nietsche was execrated in the papers as the philosopher of German militarism; he was more popularly interpreted as a William le Queux mystery-man—the sinister figure behind the Kaiser.)

One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to have escaped emasculation. The wound over the eye was nothing; it was a little chip of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin cemetery headstones. This and a finger wound, which split the bone, probably came from another shell that burst in front of me. The main wound was made by a piece of shell that went in two inches below the point of my right shoulder and came out through my chest two inches above my right nipple, in a line between it and the base of my neck.

My memory of what happened then is vague. Apparently Doctor Dunn came up through the barrage with a stretcher-party, dressed my wound, and got me down to the old German dressing-station at the north end of Mametz Wood. I just remember being put on the stretcher and winking at the stretcher-bearer sergeant who was looking at me and saying: ‘Old Gravy’s got it, all right.’ The dressing-station was overworked that day; I was laid in a corner on a stretcher and remained unconscious for more than twenty-four hours.

It was about ten o’clock on the 20th that I was hit. Late that night the colonel came to the dressing-station; he saw me lying in the corner and was told that I was done for. The next morning, the 21st, when they were clearing away the dead, I was found to be still breathing; so they put me on an ambulance for Heilly, the nearest field-hospital. The pain of being jolted down the Happy Valley, with a shell-hole at every three or four yards of the roads, woke me for awhile. I remember screaming. But once back on the better roads I became unconscious again. That morning the colonel wrote the usual formal letters of condolence to the next-of-kin of the six or seven officers who had been killed. This was his letter to my mother:

22/7/16

Dear Mrs. Graves,

I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great loss.

He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way down to the base I believe. He was not in bad pain, and our doctor managed to get across and attend him at once.

We have had a very hard time, and our casualties have been large. Believe me you have all our sympathy in your loss, and we have lost a very gallant soldier.

Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything.

Yours sincerely,

* * *

Later he made out the official casualty list and reported me died of wounds. It was a long casualty list, because only eighty men were left in the battalion.

Heilly was on the railway; close to the station was the hospital—marquee tents with the red cross painted prominently on the roofs to discourage air-bombing. It was fine July weather and the tents were insufferably hot. I was semi-conscious now, and realized my lung-wound by the shortness of breath. I was amused to watch the little bubbles of blood, like red soap-bubbles, that my breath made when it escaped through the hole of the wound. The doctor came over to me. I felt sorry for him; he looked as though he had not had any sleep for days. I asked him for a drink. He said: ‘Would you like some tea?’ I whispered: ‘Not with condensed milk in it.’ He said: ‘I’m afraid there’s no fresh milk.’ Tears came to my eyes; I expected better of a hospital behind the lines. He said: ‘Will you have some water?’ I said: ‘Not if it’s boiled.’ He said: ‘It is boiled. And I’m afraid I can’t give you anything with alcohol in it in your present condition.’ I said: ‘Give me some fruit then.’ He said: ‘I have seen no fruit for days.’ But a few minutes later he came back with two rather unripe greengages. I felt so grateful that I promised him a whole orchard when I recovered.

The nights of the 22nd and 23rd were very bad. Early on the morning of the 24th, when the doctor came to see how I was, I said: ‘You must send me away from here. The heat will kill me.’ It was beating through the canvas on my head. He said: ‘Stick it out. It’s your best chance to lie here and not to be moved. You’d not reach the base alive.’ I said: ‘I’d like to risk the move. I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ Half an hour later he came back. ‘Well, you’re having it your way. I’ve just got orders to evacuate every case in the hospital. Apparently the Guards have been in it up at Delville Wood and we’ll have them all coming in to-night.’ I had no fears now about dying. I was content to be wounded and on the way home.

I had been given news of the battalion from a brigade-major, wounded in the leg, who was in the next bed to me. He looked at my label and said: ‘I see you’re in the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers. Well, I saw your High Wood show through field-glasses. The way your battalion shook out into artillery formation, company by company-with each section of four or five men in file at fifty yards interval and distance—going down into the hollow and up the slope through the barrage, was the most beautiful bit of parade-ground drill I’ve ever seen. Your company officers must have been superb.’ I happened to know that one company at least had started without a single officer. I asked him whether they had held the wood. He said: ‘They hung on at the near end. I believe what happened was that the Public Schools Battalion came away as soon as it got dark; and so did the Scotsmen. Your chaps were left there alone for some time. They steadied themselves by singing. Later, the chaplain—R.C. of course—Father McCabe, brought the Scotsmen back. They were Glasgow Catholics and would follow a priest where they wouldn’t follow an officer. The middle of the wood was impossible for either the Germans or your fellows to hold. There was a terrific concentration of artillery on it. The trees were splintered to matchwood. Late that night the survivors were relieved by a brigade of the Seventh Division; your First Battalion was in it.’

That evening I was put in the hospital train. They could not lift me from the stretcher to put me on a bunk, for fear of starting hæmorrhage in the lung; so they laid the stretcher on top of it, with the handles resting on the head-rail and foot-rail. I had been on the same stretcher since I was wounded. I remember the journey only as a nightmare.

My back was sagging, and I could not raise my knees to relieve the cramp because the bunk above me was only a few inches away. A German officer on the other side of the carriage groaned and wept unceasingly. He had been in an aeroplane crash and had a compound fracture of the leg. The other wounded men were cursing him and telling him to stow it and be a man, but he went on, keeping every one awake. He was not delirious, only frightened and in great pain. An orderly gave me a pencil and paper and I wrote home to say that I was wounded but all right. This was July 24th, my twenty-first birthday, and it was on this day, when I arrived at Rouen, that my death officially occurred. My parents got my letter two days after the letter from the colonel; mine was dated July 23rd, because I had lost count of days when I was unconscious; his was dated the 22nd.[8] They could not decide whether my letter had been written just before I died and misdated, or whether I had died just after writing it. ‘Died of wounds’ was, however, so much more circumstantial than ‘killed’ that they gave me up. I was in No. 8 Hospital at Rouen; an ex-château high above the town. The day after I arrived a Cooper aunt of mine, who had married a Frenchman, came up to the hospital to visit a nephew in the South Wales Borderers who had just had a leg amputated. She happened to see my name in a list on the door of the ward, so she wrote to my mother to reassure her. On the 30th I had a letter from the colonel:

30/7/16

Dear von Runicke,

I cannot tell you how pleased I am you are alive. I was told your number was up for certain, and a letter was supposed to have come in from Field Ambulance saying you had gone under.

Well, it’s good work. We had a rotten time, and after succeeding in doing practically the impossible we collected that rotten crowd and put them in their places, but directly dark came they legged it. It was too sad.

We lost heavily. It is not fair putting brave men like ours alongside that crowd. I also wish to thank you for your good work and bravery, and only wish you could have been with them. I have read of bravery but I have never seen such magnificent and wonderful disregard for death as I saw that day. It was almost uncanny—it was so great. I once heard an old officer in the Royal Welch say the men would follow you to Hell; but these chaps would bring you back and put you in a dug-out in Heaven.

Good luck and a quick recovery. I shall drink your health to-night.

* *

I had little pain all this time, but much discomfort; the chief pain came from my finger, which had turned septic because nobody had taken the trouble to dress it, and was throbbing. And from the thigh, where the sticky medical plaster, used to hold down the dressing, pulled up the hair painfully when it was taken off each time the wound was dressed. My breath was very short still. I contrasted the pain and discomfort favourably with that of the operation on my nose of two months back; for this I had won no sympathy at all from anyone, because it was not an injury contracted in war. I was weak and petulant and muddled. The R.A.M.C. bugling outraged me. The ‘Rob All My Comrades,’ I complained, had taken everything I had except a few papers in my tunic-pocket and a ring which was too tight on my finger to be pulled off; and now they mis-blew the Last Post flat and windily, and with the pauses in the wrong places, just to annoy me. I remember that I told an orderly to put the bugler under arrest and jump to it or I’d report him to the senior medical officer.

Next to me was a Welsh boy, named O. M. Roberts, who had joined us only a few days before he was hit. He told me about High Wood; he had reached the edge of the wood when he was wounded in the groin. He had fallen into a shell-hole. Some time in the afternoon he had recovered consciousness and seen a German officer working round the edge of the wood, killing off the wounded with an automatic pistol. Some of our lightly-wounded were, apparently, not behaving as wounded men should; they were sniping. The German worked nearer. He saw Roberts move and came towards him, fired and hit him in the arm. Roberts was very weak and tugged at his Webley. He had great difficulty in getting it out of the holster. The German fired again and missed. Roberts rested the Webley against the lip of the shell-hole and tried to pull the trigger; he was not strong enough. The German was quite close now and was going to make certain of him this time. Roberts said that he just managed to pull the trigger with the fingers of both hands when the German was only about five yards away. The shot took the top of his head off. Roberts fainted.

The doctors had been anxiously watching my lung, which was gradually filling with blood and pressing my heart too far away to the left of my body; the railway journey had restarted the hæmorrhage. They marked the gradual progress of my heart with an indelible pencil on my skin and said that when it reached a certain point they would have to aspirate me. This sounded a serious operation, but it only consisted of putting a hollow needle into my lung through the back and drawing the blood off into a vacuum flask through it. I had a local anæsthetic; it hurt no more than a vaccination, and I was reading the _Gazette de Rouen_ as the blood hissed into the flask. It did not look much, perhaps half a pint. That evening I heard a sudden burst of lovely singing in the courtyard where the ambulances pulled up. I recognized the quality of the voices. I said to Roberts: ‘The First Battalion have been in it again,’ and asked a nurse to verify it; I was right. It was their Delville Wood show, I think, but I am uncertain now of the date.

A day or two later I was taken back to England by hospital ship.

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.

Tommy Atkins to the front, He has gone to bear the brunt. Shall ‘stay-at-homes’ do naught but snivel and but sigh? No, while your eyes are filling We are up and doing, willing To face the music with you—or to die!

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.

XXII

I was posted to the Second Battalion again. I found it near Bouchavesnes on the Somme. It was a very different Second Battalion. No riding-school, no battalion-mess, no Quetta manners. I was more warmly welcomed this time; my suspected spying activities were forgotten. But the day before I arrived, the colonel had been wounded while out in front of the battalion inspecting the wire. He had been shot in the thigh by one of the ‘rotten crowd’ of his letter, who mistook him for a German and fired without challenging; he has been in and out of nursing homes ever since. Doctor Dunn asked me with kindly disapproval what I meant by coming back so soon. I said that I could not stand England any longer. He told the acting C.O. that I was, in his opinion, unfit for trench service, so I was put in command of the headquarter company. I went to live with the transport back at Frises, where the Somme made a bend. My company consisted of regimental clerks, cooks, tailors, shoemakers, pioneers, transport men, and so on, who in an emergency could become riflemen and used as a combatant force. We were in dug-outs close to the river, which was frozen completely over except for a narrow stretch of fast water in the middle. I had never been so cold in my life; it made me shudder to think what the trenches must be like. I used to go up to them every night with the rations, the quartermaster being sick; it was about a twelve-mile walk there and back. The general commanding the Thirty-third Division had teetotal convictions on behalf of his men and stopped their issue of rum except for emergencies; the immediate result was a much heavier sick-list than the battalion had ever had. The men had always looked forward to their tot of rum at the dawn stand-to as the one bright moment of the twenty-four hours. When this was denied them, their resistance weakened. I took the rations up through Cléry, which had been a wattle and daub village of some hundreds of inhabitants. The highest part of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet high; the rest was enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down steam-roller by the roadside had the name of the village chalked on it as a guide to travellers. We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which the Germans continued to shell from habit.

[Illustration: ROBERT GRAVES

from a pastel by Eric Kennington]

Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne. They were not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne was also in ruins. The winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played inter-company football matches on the river, which was now frozen two feet thick. I remember a meal here in a shelter-billet; stew and tinned tomato on metal plates. Though the food came in hot from the kitchen next door, before we had finished it there was ice on the edge of the plate. In all this area there were no French civilians, no unshelled houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures that I saw except soldiers and horses and mules were a few moorhen and duck in the narrow unfrozen part of the river. There was a shortage of fodder for the horses, many of which were sick; the ration was down to three pounds a day, and they had only open standings. I have kept few records of this time, but the memory of its misery survives.

Then I had bad toothache, and there was nothing for it but to take a horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station. The dentist who attended me was under the weather like everyone else. He would do nothing at first but grumble what a fool he had been to offer his services to his country at such a low salary. ‘When I think,’ he said, ‘of the terrible destruction to the nation’s teeth that is being done by unqualified men at home, and the huge fees that they are exacting for their wicked work, it makes me boil with rage.’ There followed further complaints against the way he was treated and the unwillingness of the Royal Army Medical Corps to give dentists any promotion beyond lieutenant’s rank. Later he began work on my tooth. ‘An abscess,’ he said, ‘no good tinkering about with this; must pull it out.’ So he yanked at it irritably and the tooth broke off. He tried again; there was very little purchase and it broke off again. He damned the ineffective type of forceps that the Government supplied. After about half an hour he got the tooth out in sections. I rode home with lacerated gums.

I was appointed a member of a field general court-martial on an Irish sergeant charged with ‘shamefully casting away his arms in the presence of the enemy.’ I had heard about the case unofficially. He had been maddened by an intense bombardment, thrown down his rifle, and run with the rest of his platoon. An army order, secret and confidential, had recently instructed me that, in the case of men tried for their life on other charges, sentence might be mitigated if conduct in the field had been exemplary; but cowardice was only punishable with death and no medical excuses could be accepted. But I knew that there was nothing between sentencing the man to death and refusing to take part in the proceedings. If I chose the second course I would be court-martialled myself, and a reconstituted court would bring in the death verdict anyhow. Yet I would not sentence a man to death for an offence which I might have committed myself in the same circumstances. I was in a dilemma. I met the situation by evading it. There was one other officer in the battalion with the year’s service, as a captain, which entitled him to sit on a field general court-martial. I found him willing to take my place. He was hard-boiled and glad of a trip to Amiens, and I took over his duties for him.

Executions were frequent in France. My first direct experience of official lying was when I was at the base at Havre in May 1915 and read the back-files of army orders in the officers’ mess at the rest-camp. There were something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet not a week later the responsible Minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist member, had denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s forces.

The acting commanding-officer was sick and irritable; he felt the strain badly and took a lot of whisky. One spell he was too sick to be in the trenches, and came down to Frises, where he shared a dug-out with Yates the quartermaster and myself. I was sitting in my arm-chair reading the Bible and came on the text: ‘The bed is too narrow to lie down therein and the coverlet too small to wrap myself therewith.’ ‘I say, James,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty appropriate for this place.’ He raised himself on an elbow, genuinely furious. ‘Look here, von Runicke,’ he said, ‘I am not a religious man. I’ve cracked a good many of the commandments since I’ve been in France; but while I am in command here I refuse to hear you or anyone bloody else blaspheme Holy Writ.’ I liked James a lot. I had met him first on the day I arrived at Wrexham to join the regiment. He was just back from Canada and hilariously throwing chairs about in the junior ante-room of the mess. He had been driving a plough through virgin soil, he told us, and reciting Kipling to the prairie-dogs. His favourite piece was (I may be misquoting):

Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there? Four points on a ninety-mile square. With a helio winking like fun in the sun, Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?

He had been with the Special Reserve a year or two before he emigrated. He cared for nobody, was most courageous, inclined to be sentimental, and probably saw longer service with the Second Battalion in the war than any officer except Yates.

A day or two later, because he was still sick and I was the senior officer of the battalion, I attended the Commanding Officers’ Conference at brigade headquarters. Opposite our trenches was a German salient and the brigadier wanted to ‘bite it off’ as a proof of the offensive spirit of his command. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff’s desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was not a desirable thing to be exposed to fire from both flanks; if the Germans were in a salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that it was the passion for straight lines for which headquarters were well known, and that it had no strategic or tactical significance. The attack had been twice proposed and twice cancelled because of the weather. This was towards the end of February, in the thaw. I have a field-message referring to it, dated the 21st:

Please cancel Form 4 of my AA 202 units will draw from 19th brigade B. Echelon the following issue of rum which will be issued to troops taking part in the forth coming operations at the discretion of O.C. units 2nd R.W.F. 7½ gallons.

Even this promise of special rum could not encourage the battalion. Every one agreed that the attack was unnecessary, foolish, and impossible. The company commanders assured me that to cross the three hundred yards of No Man’s Land, which because of constant shelling and the thaw was a morass of mud more than knee-deep, would take even lightly-armed troops four or five minutes. It would be impossible for anyone to reach the German lines while there was a single section of Germans with rifles to defend them. The general, when I arrived, inquired in a fatherly way how old I was, and whether I was not proud to be attending a Commanding Officers’ Conference at the age of twenty-one. I said that I had not examined my feelings, but that I was an old enough soldier to realize the ♦impossibility of the attack. The colonel of the Cameronians, who were also to be engaged, took the same line. So the attack was finally called off. That night I went up with rations as usual; the battalion was much relieved to hear the decision.

♦ “impossiblity” replaced with “impossibility”

We had been heavily shelled on the way up, and while I was at battalion headquarters having a drink a message came to say that D Company limber had been hit by a shell. As I went to inspect the damage I passed the chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises bend, and a group of three or four men. He was gabbling the burial service over a dead man lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet. It was a suicide case. The misery of the weather and the knowledge of the impending attack had been too much for him. This was the last dead man I was to see in France, and like the first, a suicide.

I found that the limber, which contained petrol tins of water for the company, had had a direct hit. There was no sign of the horses; they were highly prized horses, having won a prize at a divisional horse-show some months back for the best-matched pair of the division. So the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back and went looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of morass that night but could not find them or get any news of them. We used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France. Our transport men were famous horse-thieves, and no less than eighteen of our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another, for their good looks. There were even two which we had ‘borrowed’ from the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French police; its only fault was that it was the left-hand horse of the police squadron, and so had a tendency to pull to the wrong side of the road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion, so naturally Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at about four o’clock in the afternoon, kept on with the search until long after midnight. When we reached Frises at about three o’clock in the morning I was completely exhausted. I collapsed on my bunk.

The next day it was found that I had bronchitis and I went back in an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross hospital. The major of the R.A.M.C. recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are _you_ doing out in France, young man? If I find you in my hospital again with those lungs of yours I’ll have you court-martialled.’

The quartermaster wrote to me there that the horses had been found shortly after I had gone; they were unhurt except for grazes on their bellies and were in the possession of the machine-gun company of the Fourth Division; the machine-gunners were found disguising them with stain and trying to remove the regimental marks.

At Rouen I was asked to say where in England I would like to go to hospital. I said, at random, ‘Oxford.’

XXIII

So I was sent to Oxford, to Somerville College, which, like the Examination Schools, had been converted into a hospital. It occurred to me here that I was probably through with the war, for it could not last long now. I both liked and disliked the idea. I disliked being away from the regiment in France and I liked to think that I would probably be alive when the war ended. As soon as I was passed fit Siegfried had got boarded toe and tried to follow me to the Second Battalion. He was disappointed to find me gone. I felt I had somehow let him down. But he wrote that he was unspeakably relieved to know that I was back at Oxford.

I liked Oxford and wanted to stay there. I applied, on the strength of a chit from the Bull Ring commandant at Havre, for an instructional job in one of the Officer-Cadet Battalions quartered in the men’s colleges. I was posted to the Wadham Company of No. 4 Battalion. These battalions had not been formed long; they had grown out of instructional schools for young officers. The cadet course was only three months (later increased to four), but it was a severe one and particularly intended to train platoon commanders in the handling of the platoon as an independent unit. About two-thirds of the cadets were men recommended for commissions by colonels in France, the remainder were public-school boys from the officers’ training corps. Much of the training was drill and musketry, but the important part was tactical exercises with limited objectives. We used the army textbook S.S. 143, or ‘_Instructions for the training of platoons for offensive action_, 1917,’ perhaps the most important War Office publication issued during the war. The author is said to have been General Solly-Flood, who wrote it after a visit to a French army school. From 1916 on the largest unit possible to control in sustained action was the platoon. Infantry training had hitherto treated the company as the chief tactical unit.

Though the quality of the officers had deteriorated from the regimental point of view (in brief, few of the new officers were now gentlemen), their deficiency in manners was amply compensated for by their greater efficiency in action. The cadet-battalion system, in the next two years, saved the army in France from becoming a mere rabble. We failed about a sixth of the candidates for commissions; the failures were sometimes public-school boys without the necessary toughness, but usually men who had been recommended, from France, on compassionate grounds—rather stupid platoon sergeants and machine-gun corporals who had been out too long and were thought to need a rest. Our final selection of the right men to be officers was made by watching them play games, principally rugger and soccer. The ones who played rough but not dirty and had quick reactions were the men we wanted. We spent most of our spare time playing games with them. I had a platoon of New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, two men from the Fiji Island contingent, an English farm-labourer, a Welsh miner and two or three public-school boys. They were a good lot and most of them were killed later on in the war. The New Zealanders went in for rowing; the record time for the river at Oxford was made by a New Zealand eight that year. I found the work too much for my lungs, for which the climate of Oxford was unsuitable. I kept myself going for two months on a strychnine tonic and then collapsed again. I fainted and fell downstairs one evening in the dark, cutting my head open; I was taken back to Somerville. I had kept going as long as I could.

I had liked Wadham, where I was a member of the senior common-room and had access to the famous brown sherry of the college; it is specially mentioned in a Latin grace among the blessings vouchsafed to the fellows by their Creator. My commanding officer, Colonel Stenning, in better times University Professor of Hebrew, was a fellow of the college. The social system at Oxford was dislocated. The St. John’s don destined to be my moral tutor when I came up was a corporal in the General Reserve; he wore grey uniform, drilled in the parks, and saluted me whenever we met. A college scout had a commission and was instructing in the other cadet battalion. There were not, I suppose, more than a hundred and fifty undergraduates at Oxford at this time; these were Rhodes scholars, Indians, and men who were unfit. I saw a good deal of Aldous Huxley, Wilfred Childe, and Thomas Earp, who were running an undergraduates’ literary paper of necessarily limited circulation called _The Palatine Review_, to which I contributed. Earp had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years; he was president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919 he was still in residence, and handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then reformed.

I enjoyed being at Somerville. It was warm weather and the discipline of the hospital was easy. We used to lounge about in the grounds in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and even walk out into St. Giles’ and down the Cornmarket (also in pyjamas and dressing-gowns) for a morning cup of coffee at the Cadena. And there was a V.A.D. probationer with whom I fell in love. I did not tell her so at the time. This was the first time that I had fallen in love with a woman, and I had difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience. I used to meet her when I visited a friend in another ward, but we had little talk together. I wrote to her after leaving hospital. When I found that she was engaged to a subaltern in France I stopped writing. I had seen what it felt like to be in France and have somebody else playing about with one’s girl. Yet by the way she wrote reproving me for not writing she may well have been as fond of me as she was of him. I did not press the point. There was the end of it, almost before it started.

While I was with the cadet battalion I used to go out to tea nearly every Sunday to Garsington. Siegfried’s friends, Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell, lived at the manor house there. The Morrells were pacifists and it was here that I first heard that there was another side to the question of war guilt. Clive Bell was working on the manor farm; he was a conscientious objector, and had been permitted to do this, as work of national importance, instead of going into the army. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read, Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself and most other young writers of the time, none of whom now believed in the war. Bertrand Russell, who was beyond the age of liability for military service but an ardent pacifist (a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and said: ‘Tell me, if a company of men of your regiment were brought along to break a strike of munition makers and the munition makers refused to submit, would you order the men to fire?’ I said: ‘Yes, if everything else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.’ He was surprised and asked: ‘Would your men obey you?’ ‘Of course they would,’ I said; ‘they loathe munition makers and would be only too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all skrim-shankers.’ ‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?’ ‘Yes, as well as I do.’ He could not understand my attitude.

Lytton Strachey was unfit, but instead of allowing himself to be rejected by the doctors he preferred to appear before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector. He told us of the extraordinary impression that was caused by an air-cushion which he inflated during the proceedings as a protest against the hardness of the benches. Asked by the chairman the usual question: ‘I understand, Mr. Strachey, that you have a conscientious objection to war?’ he replied (in his curious falsetto voice), ‘Oh no, not at all, only to _this_ war.’ Better than this was his reply to the chairman’s other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: ‘Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?’ With an air of noble virtue: ‘I would try to get between them.’

In 1916 I met more well-known writers than ever before or since. There were two unsuccessful meetings. George Moore had just written _The Brook Kerith_ and my neurasthenic twitchings interrupted the calm, easy flow of his conversational periods. He told me irritably not to fidget; in return I taunted him with having introduced cactus into the Holy Land some fifteen centuries before the discovery of America, its land of origin. At the Reform Club, H. G. Wells, who was Mr. Britling in those days and full of military optimism, talked without listening. He had just been taken for a ‘Cook’s Tour’ to France and had been shown the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were shown by staff-conductors. He described his experiences at length and seemed unaware that I and the friend who was with me had also seen the sights. But I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness. And I liked Augustine Birrell. I happened to correct him when he said that the Apocrypha was not read in the church services; and again when he said that Elihu the Jebusite was one of Job’s comforters. He tried to over-ride me in both points, but I called for a Bible and proved them. He said, glowering very kindly at me: ‘I will say to you what Thomas Carlyle once said to a young man who caught him out in a misquotation, “Young man, you are heading straight for the pit of Hell!”’

And who else? John Galsworthy; or was my first meeting with him a year or two later? He was editor of a magazine called _Réveillé_, published under Government auspices (and was treated very ungenerously), the proceeds of which were to go to a disabled-soldier fund. I contributed. When I met him he asked me technical questions about soldier-slang—he was writing a war-play and wanted it accurate. He seemed a humble man and except for these questions listened without talking. This is, apparently, his usual practice; which explains why he is a better writer if a less forceful propagandist than Wells.... And Ivor Novello, in 1918. Then aged about twenty and already world famous as the author and composer of the patriotic song:

Keep the home fires burning While the hearts are yearning....

There was some talk of his setting a song of mine. I found him, wearing a silk dressing-gown, in a setting of incense, cocktails, many cushions, and a Tree or two. I felt uncomfortably military. I removed my spurs (I was a temporary field-officer at the time) out of courtesy to the pouffes. He was in the Royal Naval Air Service, but his genius was officially recognized and he was able to keep the home fires burning until the boys came home.

By this time the War Office had stopped the privilege that officers had enjoyed, after coming out of hospital, of going to their own homes for convalescence. It was found that many of them took no trouble to get well quickly and return to duty, they kept late nights, drank, and overtaxed their strength. So when I was somewhat recovered I was sent to a convalescent home for officers in the Isle of Wight. It was Osborne Palace; my bedroom had once been the royal night-nursery of King Edward VII and his brothers and sisters. This was the strawberry season and fine weather; the patients were able to take all Queen Victoria’s favourite walks through the woods and along the quiet sea-shore, play billiards in the royal billiard-room, sing bawdy songs in the royal music-room, drink the Prince Consort’s favourite Rhine wines among his Winterhalters, play golf-crocquet and go down to Cowes when in need of adventure. We were made honorary members of the Royal Yacht Squadron. This is another of the caricature scenes of my life; sitting in a leather chair in the smoking-room of what had been and is now again the most exclusive club in the world, drinking gin and ginger, and sweeping the Solent with a powerful telescope.

I made friends with the French Benedictine Fathers who lived near by; they had been driven from Solesmes in France by the anti-clerical laws of 1906, and had built themselves a new abbey at Quarr. The abbey had a special commission from the Vatican to collect and edit ancient church music. Hearing the fathers at their plain-song made us for the moment forget the war completely. Many of them were ex-army officers who had, I was told, turned to religion after the ardours of their campaigns or after disappointments in love. They were greatly interested in the war, which they saw as a dispensation of God for restoring France to Catholicism. They told me that the freemason element in the French army had been discredited and that the present Supreme Command was predominantly Catholic—an augury, they said, of Allied victory. The guest-master showed me the library of twenty thousand volumes, hundreds of them blackletter. The librarian was an old monk from Béthune and was interested to hear from me an accurate account of the damage to his quarter of the town. The guest-master asked me whether there were any books that I would like to read in the library. He said that there were all kinds there—history, botany, music, architecture, engineering, almost every other lay subject. I asked him whether there was a poetry section. He smiled kindly and said, no, poetry was not regarded as improving.

The Father Superior asked me whether I was a _bon catholique_. I replied no, I did not belong to the true religion. To spare him a confession of agnosticism I added that my parents were Protestants. He said: ‘But if ours is the true religion why do you not become a Catholic?’ He asked the question in such a simple way that I felt ashamed. But I had to put him off somehow, so I said: ‘Reverend father, we have a proverb in England never to swap horses while crossing a stream. I am still in the war, you know.’ I offered: ‘Peut-être après la guerre.’ This was a joke with myself; it was the stock answer that the Pas de Calais girls were ordered by their priests to give to Allied soldiers who asked for a ‘Promenade, mademoiselle?’ It was seldom given, I was told, except for the purpose of bargaining. All the same, I half-envied the Fathers their abbey on the hill, finished with wars and love affairs. I liked their kindness and seriousness; the clean whitewashed cells and the meals eaten in silence at the long oaken tables, while a novice read the _Lives of the Saints_; the food, mostly cereals, vegetables and fruit, was the best I had tasted for years—I was tired of ration beef, ration jam, ration bread and cheese. At Quarr, Catholicism ceased to be repulsive to me.

Osborne was gloomy. Many of the patients there were neurasthenic and should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A. A. Milne was there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in the least humorous vein. Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, who had introduced me to the Quarr Fathers, decided with me that something must be started. So we founded the ‘Royal Albert Society’; its aim was to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort. I was president and my regalia consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian boots, and a pair of side-whiskers. Official business was not allowed to proceed until the announcement had been duly made that the whiskers were on the table. Membership was open only to those who professed themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort, those who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada, those who had resided for six months or upwards by the banks of the Albert Nyanza, those who held the Albert Medal for saving life, or those who were linked with the Prince Consort’s memory in any other signal way. The members were expected to report at each meeting reminiscences that they had collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers, throwing light on the human side of the Consort’s life. We had about fifteen members and ate strawberries. On one occasion about a dozen officers came in to join the society; they professed to have the necessary qualifications. One said that he was the grandson of the man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life; the others were mere students. They submitted quietly at first to the ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they were not serious and had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the private life of the Prince Consort, alleging that they could substantiate them with documentary evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that sort of society. So, as president, I rose and told in an improved version the story which had won the 1914 All-England Interregimental Competition at Aldershot for the worst story of the year. I linked it up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had been told it by John Brown, the Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humour Queen Victoria used to find such delight, and that it had prevented him from sleeping for three days and nights, and was a contributory cause of his premature death. The story had the intended effect; the interrupters threw up their hands in surrender and walked out. It struck me suddenly how far I had come since my first years at Charterhouse seven years back, and what a pity it was that I had not used the same technique there.

On the beach one day Bartlett and I saw an old ship’s fender; the knotted ropes at the top had frayed into something that looked like hair, so Bartlett said to me: ‘Poor fellow, I knew him well. He was in my platoon in the Hampshire Regiment and jumped overboard from the hospital ship.’ A little farther along 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 said, holding his nose: ‘Pooh, don’t he ’alf stink!’ We turned again, leaving him 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. Bartlett and I were nonsensical, and changed the labels of all the pictures in the galleries. Anything to make people laugh. But it was hard work.

XXIV

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:

... 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, 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.

[Illustration: VARIOUS RECORDS

Mostly self-explanatory]

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.

XXV

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:

To these I turn, in these I trust, Brother Lead and Sister Steel; To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust....

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 _n_th 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.

XXVI

In the middle of December the cadet-battalions were wound up and the officers, after a few days’ leave, were sent back to their units. The Third Battalion of the Royal Welch was now at Limerick. I decided to overstay my leave until Nancy’s baby was born. She was expecting it early in January 1919, and her father had taken a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny was born on Twelfth Night. She was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had had no foreknowledge of the experience—I assumed that she knew—and it took her years to recover from it. I went over to Limerick; the battalion was at the Castle Barracks. I lied my way out of the over-staying of leave.

Limerick was a Sinn Fein stronghold, and there were constant clashes between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish got on well together, as inevitably as Welsh and Scottish disagreed. The Royal Welch had the situation well in hand; they made a joke of politics and used their entrenching-tool handles as shillelaghs. It looked like a town that had been through the war. The main streets had holes in them like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. I was told by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into another. He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia. Life did not start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house was flung open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, then a nearly naked child, which sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for dirty pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. Ireland was exactly as I had pictured it. I felt its charm as dangerous. Yet when I was detailed to take out a search-party in a neighbouring village for concealed rifles I asked the adjutant to find a substitute; I said that I was an Irishman and did not wish to be mixed up in Irish politics.

I realized too that I had a new loyalty, to Nancy and the baby, tending to overshadow regimental loyalty now that the war was over. Once I was writing a rhymed nonsense letter to Nancy and Jenny in my quarters overlooking the barrack square:

Is there any song sweet enough For Nancy or for Jenny? Said Simple Simon to the Pieman: ‘Indeed, I know not any.’

I have counted the miles to Babylon, I have flown the earth like a bird, I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross, But no such song have I heard.

At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with _The British Grenadiers_. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. _The British Grenadiers_ succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem:

Some speak of Alexander, And some of Hercules,

but were driven out:

But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny, Where are there any like these?

I had ceased to be a British grenadier.

So I decided to resign my commission at once. I consulted the priority list of trades for demobilization and found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again. I would rather have been an agricultural worker (Nancy and I spoke of farming when the war ended), but I had no agricultural background. And I found that I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and would be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination (Smalls) I had already been excused because of a certificate examination that I had taken while still at Charterhouse. So there only remained the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. This sounded good enough. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford was a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like working for my living. We were all so accustomed to the war-time view, that the only possible qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we took it for granted that our scars and our commanding-officers’ testimonials would get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the patriotic spirit of employers before it cooled again, sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.

I wrote to a friend in the Demobilization Department of the War Office asking him to expedite my demobilization. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must be certified not to have had charge of Government moneys for the last six months; and I had not. But the adjutant had just decided to put me in command of a company. He said that he was short of officers whom he knew could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the new-army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunk on parade were frequent. Not to mention table-manners, at which Sergeant Malley would stand aghast. There were now two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior, yet if a junior officer was regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry or had been to Sandhurst) he was invited to use the senior ante-room and be among his own class. All this must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured in 1914, now promoted captain by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice.

The adjutant cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals that were being arranged for St. David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in _Julius Cæsar_. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds. Next day the senior lieutenant in the company that I was to have taken over went off with the company cash-box, and I would have been legally responsible. Before the war he used to give displays at Blackpool Pier as _The Handcuff King_; he got away safely to America.

I went out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval officer, and had been having his ricks burnt and cattle driven. He was very despondent. Through the window he showed me distant cattle grazing beside the Shannon. ‘They have been out there all winter,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t had the heart to go out and look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill and woke up with a chill. I knew that it was the beginning of influenza. At the barracks I found that the War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the troubles there. The adjutant, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help us with those theatricals.’ I protested, but he was firm. I did not intend to have my influenza out in an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present state.

I had to think quickly. I decided to make a run for it. The orderly-room sergeant had made my papers out on receipt of the telegram. I had all my kit ready packed. There only remained two things to get: the colonel’s signature to the statement that I had handled no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which only the battalion demobilization officer could supply—but he was hand-in-glove with the adjutant, so it was no use asking him for them. The last train before demobilization ended was the six-fifteen from Limerick the same evening, February 13th. I decided to wait until the adjutant had left the orderly room and then casually ask the colonel to sign the statement, without mentioning the adjutant’s objection to my going. The adjutant remained in the orderly room until five minutes past six. As soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the colonel’s signature, saluted, hurried out to collect my baggage. I had counted on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but none was to be seen. I had about five minutes left now and the station was a good distance away. I saw a corporal who had been with me in the First Battalion. I shouted to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men. I’ve got _my ticket_ and I want to catch the last train back.’ Summers promptly called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it, left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it was moving out of the station and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers. ‘Good-bye, corporal, drink my health.’

But still I had not my demobilization code-marks and knew that when I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon they would refuse to pass me out. I did not care very much. Wimbledon was in England, and I would at least have my influenza out in an English and not an Irish hospital. My temperature was running high now and my mind was working clearly as it always does in fever. My visual imagery, which is cloudy and partial at ordinary times, becomes defined and complete. At Fishguard I bought a copy of the _South Wales Echo_ and read in it that there would be a strike of London Electric Railways the next day, 14th February, if the railway directors would not meet the men’s demands. So when the train steamed into Paddington and while it was still moving I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up and ran across to the station entrance, where, in spite of competition from porters—a feeble crew at this time—I caught the only taxi in the station as its fare stepped out. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford to waste no time getting to Wimbledon. I brought my taxi back to the train, where scores of stranded officers looked at me with envy. One, who had travelled down in my compartment, had been met by his wife. I said: ‘Excuse me, but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I only need go as far as Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ They were delighted; they said that they lived out at Ealing and had no idea how to get there except by taxi. On the way to Waterloo he said to me: ‘I wish there was some way of showing our gratitude. I wish there was something we could do for you.’ I said: ‘Well, there is only one thing in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me, I’m afraid. And that,’ I said, ‘is the proper code-marks to complete my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’ He rapped on the glass of the taxi and stopped it. Then he got down his bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. He said: ‘Well, I happen to be the Cork District Demobilization Officer and I’ve got the whole bag of tricks here.’ So he filled my papers in.

At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for nine or ten hours as I had expected, I was given priority and released at once; Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’ and demobilization from theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. So after a hurried visit to my parents, who were living close by, I continued to Hove, arriving at supper-time. When I came in, I had a sudden terror that made me unable to speak. I seemed to see Nancy’s mother. She was looking rather plump and staid and dressed unlike herself, and did not appear to recognize me. She was sitting at the table between Nancy and her father. It was like a bad dream; I did not know what to say or do. I knew I was ill, but this was worse than illness. Then Nicholson introduced me: ‘This is Nancy’s Aunt Dora, just over from Canada.’

I warned them all that I had influenza; and hurried off to bed. Within a day or two everybody in the house had caught it except Nicholson and the baby and one servant who kept it off by a gipsy’s charm. I think it was the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new epidemic as bad as the summer one had started; there was not a nurse to be had in Brighton. Nicholson at last found two ex-nurses. One was competent, but frequently drunk, and when drunk she would ransack all the wardrobes and pile the contents into her own bags; the other, sober but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of the open window, spread out her arms, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me.’ The husband, by the way, was not drowned, merely unfaithful. A doctor, found with difficulty, said that I had no chance of recovering; it was septic pneumonia now and both my lungs were affected. But I had determined that, having come through the war, I would not allow myself to succumb to Spanish influenza. This, now, was the third time in my life that I had been given up as dying, and each time because of my lungs. The first occasion was when I was seven years old and had double-pneumonia following measles. Yet my lungs are naturally very sound, possibly the strongest part of me and, therefore, my danger mark. This time again I recovered and was up a few weeks later in time to see the mutiny of the Guards, when about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp and paraded through the streets of Brighton in protest against camp discipline.

The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’ mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’

When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered. I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it was always easier for me now when overtaken in any fault to lie my way out. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and lighting—each item was ticked off as satisfactory. And other loose habits of war-time survived, such as stopping passing motors for a lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever was about. And I retained the technique of endurance, a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But I modified my language, which had suddenly become foul on the day of Loos and had been foul ever since. The chief difference between war and peace was money. I had never had to worry about that since my first days at Wrexham; I had even put by about £150 of my pay, invested in War Bonds. Neither Nancy nor I knew the value of money and this £150 and my war-bonus of, I think, £250 and a disability pension that I was now drawing of £60 a year, and the occasional money that I got from poetry, seemed a great deal altogether. We engaged a nurse and a general servant and lived as though we had an income of about a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of her time drawing (she was illustrating some poems of mine), and I was busy getting _Country Sentiment_ in order and writing reviews.

I was very thin, very nervous, and had about four years’ loss of sleep to make up. I found that I was suffering from a large sort of intestinal worm which came from drinking bad water in France. I was now waiting until I should be well enough to go to Oxford with the Government educational grant; it seemed the easiest thing to do. I knew that it would be years before I was fit for anything besides a quiet country life. There was no profession that I wished to take up, though for a while I considered school-mastering. My disabilities were many; I could not use a telephone, I was sick every time I travelled in a train, and if I saw more than two new people in a single day it prevented me from sleeping. I was ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy. I had been much better when I was at Rhyl, but my recent pneumonia had set me back to my condition of 1917.

Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as he was demobilized, expecting me to join him. But after being there for a term or so he became literary editor of the newly-published _Daily Herald_. He gave me books to review for it. In these days the _Daily Herald_ was not respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British Fleet. The Versailles Treaty shocked me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared. When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s Atlantic flight and rescue, the marriage of Lady Diana Manners, and a marvellous horse called The Panther, which was the Derby favourite and came in nowhere. The _Herald_ spoilt our breakfast for us every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country, due to the closing of munition factories, of ex-service men refused re-instatement in the jobs that they had left in the early stages of the war, of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news, too, of my mother’s relatives in Germany and the penury to which they had been reduced, particularly those who were retired officials and whose pension, by the collapse of the mark, was reduced to a few shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart; we now called ourselves socialists.

The attitude of my family was doubtful. I had fought gallantly for my country—indeed I was the only one of my father’s five sons of military age who had seen active service—and was entitled to every consideration because of my shell-shocked condition; but my socialism and sympathy for the Bolsheviks outraged them. I once more forfeited the goodwill of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over, reminding me that my brother Philip had once been a pro-Boer and a Fenian, but had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and come out all right in the end. Most of the elder members of my family were in the Near East, either married to British officials or British officials themselves. My father hoped that when I was recovered I would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family influence would be of great service to me, and there get over my revolutionary idealism. Socialism with Nancy was rather a means to a single end. The most important thing to her was judicial equality of the sexes; she held that all the wrong in the world was caused by male domination and narrowness. She refused to see my experiences in the war as in any way comparable with the sufferings that millions of married women of the working-class went through. This at least had the effect of putting the war into the background for me; I was devoted to Nancy and respected her views in so far as they were impersonal. Male stupidity and callousness became an obsession with her and she found it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men. It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population, or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.

It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized. My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy, finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes, refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances. At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson. This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy seemed merely eccentric.

XXVII

In October 1919 I went up to Oxford at last. The lease of the Harlech house was ended and Nicholson gave us the furniture to take with us. The city was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom had nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead and charged accordingly. Keble College had put up army huts for its surplus students. There was not an unfurnished house to be had anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty by getting permission from my college authorities to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill; I pleaded my lungs. John Masefield, who liked my poetry, offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.

The University was very quiet. The returned soldiers had little temptation to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the bulldogs as before the war. The boys straight from the public schools were quiet too. They had had the war preached at them continually for four years, had been told that they must carry on loyally at home while their brothers were serving in the trenches, and must make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. The boys had been leaving for the cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, so that the masters had it all their own way; trouble at public schools nearly always comes from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had been up at Oxford just before the war and had meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and they scribble away in their notebooks like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’ The ex-service men—they included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and even a one-armed twenty-five-year-old brigadier—though not rowdy, were insistent on their rights. At St. John’s they formed what they called a Soviet, demanding an entire revision of the college catering system; they won their point and an undergraduate representative was chosen to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons whom I had often seen during the war trembling in fear of an invasion of Oxford, with the sacking and firing of the colleges and the rape of the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who had regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession. I was amused at the difference in manner to me that some of them showed. My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met, remained a friend; he prevailed on the college to allow me to change my course from Classics to English Language and Literature and to take up my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I was glad now that it was an exhibition, though in 1913 I had been disappointed that it was not a scholarship: college regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married, scholars had to remain single.

I used to bicycle down from Boar’s Hill every morning to my lectures. On the way down I would collect Edmund Blunden, who was attending the same course. He too had permission to live on the hill, on account of gassed lungs. I had been in correspondence with Edmund some time before he came to Oxford. Siegfried, when literary editor of the _Herald_, had been among the first to recognize him as a poet, and now I was helping him get his _Waggoner_ through the press. Edmund had war-shock as badly as myself, and we would talk each other into an almost hysterical state about the trenches. We agreed that we would not be right until we got all that talk on to paper. He was first with _Undertones of War_, published in 1928.

Edmund and Mary his wife rented two rooms of a cottage belonging to Mrs. Delilah Becker, locally known as the Jubilee Murderess. She was a fine-looking old lady and used to read her prayer-book and Bible aloud to herself every night, sitting at the open window. The prayer-book was out of date: she used to pray for the Prince Consort and Adelaide, the Queen Dowager. She was said to have murdered her husband. In Jubilee year she had gone away for a holiday, leaving her husband in the cottage with a half-witted servant-girl. News came to her that he had got the servant-girl into trouble. She wrote to him: ‘Dear husband, if I find you in my cottage when I come back you shall be no more.’ He did not believe her and she found him in the cottage, and sure enough he was no more. She told the police that he had gone away when he saw how angry with him she was; but no one had seen him go. He had even left his silver watch behind, ticking on a nail on the bedroom wall. The neighbours swore that she had buried him in the garden. Mary Blunden said that it was more probable that he was buried somewhere in their part of the cottage, which was semi-detached. ‘There’s an awfully funny smell about here sometimes,’ she said. Old Delilah said to Mary once: ‘I have often wondered what has happened to the old pepper-and-salt suit he had on when he was—when he went away.’ Whenever she went out she took the carving-knife out of the drawer and laid it on the kitchen-table, where it could be seen by them when they went past her window. I liked Delilah very much and sent her a pound of tea every year until her death. Her comment on life in general was: ‘Fair play’s good sport, and we’re all mortal worms.’ She also used to say: ‘While there’s wind and water a man’s all right.’

I found the English Literature course tedious, especially eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Mr. Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized. He said that he had once suffered for his preference for the Romantic revivalists. He had been beaten by his schoolmaster for having a Shelley in his possession. He had protested between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ But he warned me that I must on no account disparage the eighteenth century when I sat for my final examination. It was also difficult for me, too, to concentrate on cases and genders and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject. He said that it was of purely linguistic interest, that there was hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon extant of the slightest literary merit. I disagreed; _Beowulf_ and _Judith_ seemed good poems to me. Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a _promenade_ to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and _Brunanburgh_ with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting—all this was closer to most of us at the time than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Edmund and I found ourselves translating everything into trench-warfare terms. The war was not yet over for us. In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road; the men would be singing and French children would be running along beside them, calling out: ‘Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef’; and I would smell the stench of the knacker’s yard just outside the town. Or I would be in Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would roar out, ‘Party, ’shun!’ and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with brown knees and brown expressionless faces, would spring to their feet from the broken steps where they were sitting. Or I would be in a barn with my first platoon of the Welsh Regiment, watching them play nap by the light of dirty candle stumps. Or it would be a deep dug-out at Cambrin, where I was talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft and see somebody’s muddy legs coming down the steps, and there would be a crash and the tobacco-smoke in the dug-out would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books. These day-dreams persisted like an alternate life. Indeed they did not leave me until well on in 1928. I noticed that the scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; it seemed as though the emotion-recording apparatus had failed after Loos.

The eighteenth century was unpopular because it was French. Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund, shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: ‘No more wars for me at any price. Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them I’ll go like a shot.’ Pro-German feeling was increasing. Now that the war was over and the German armies had been beaten, it was possible to give the German soldier credit for being the best fighting-man in Europe. I often heard it said that it was only the blockade that had beaten them; that in Haig’s last push they never really broke, and that their machine-gun sections had held us up for as long as was needed to cover the withdrawal of the main forces. And even that we had been fighting on the wrong side; our natural enemies were the French.

At the end of my first term’s work I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed and said a little stiffly: ‘I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays that you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others.’

There were a number of poets living on Boar’s Hill; too many, Edmund and I agreed. It had become almost a tourist centre. There was the Poet Laureate, with his bright eye, abrupt challenging manner, a flower in his buttonhole; he was one of the first men of letters to sign the Oxford recantation of war-time hatred against the Germans—indeed it was for the most part written by him. There was Gilbert Murray, too, gentle-voiced and with the spiritual look of the strict vegetarian, doing preliminary propaganda work for the League of Nations. Once, while I was sitting talking to him in his study about Aristotle’s _Poetics_, and he was walking up and down the room, I suddenly asked him: ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you trying to avoid the flowers on the rug or are you trying to keep to the squares?’ I had compulsion-neuroses of this sort myself so it was easy to notice one in him. He wheeled round sharply: ‘You’re the first person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go another seven steps, than I turn round. I asked Browne, the professor of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it wasn’t a dangerous habit. He said: “When you find it getting into multiples of seven, come to me again.”’

I saw most of John Masefield, a nervous, generous person, very sensitive to criticism, who seemed to have suffered greatly in the war, when an orderly in a Red Cross unit; he was now working at _Reynard the Fox_. He wrote in a hut in his garden surrounded by tall gorse-bushes and only appeared at meal-times. In the evening he used to read his day’s work over to Mrs. Masefield and they would correct it together. Masefield was at the height of his reputation at the time, and there was a constant flow of American visitors to his door. Mrs. Masefield protected Jan. She was from the North of Ireland, a careful manager, and put a necessary brake on Jan’s generosity and sociability. We admired the way that she stood up for her rights where less resolute people would have shrunk back. The tale of Mrs. Masefield and the rabbit. Some neighbours of ours had a particularly stupid Airedale; they were taking it for a walk past the Masefields’ house when a wild rabbit ran across the road from the Masefields’ gorse plantation. The Airedale dashed at it and missed as usual. The rabbit, not giving it sufficient credit for stupidity and slowness, doubled back; but found the dog had not yet recovered from its mistake and ran right into its jaws. The dog’s owners were delighted at the brilliance performance of their pet, recovered the rabbit, which was a small and inexperienced one, and took it home for the pot. Mrs. Masefield had seen the business through the plantation fence. It was not, strictly, a public road and the rabbit was, therefore, legally hers. That evening there came a knock at the door. ‘Come in, oh, do come in, Mrs. Masefield.’ It was Mrs. Masefield coming for the skin of her rabbit. Rabbit-skins were worth a lot in 1920. Mrs. Masefield’s one extravagance was bridge; she used to play at a halfpenny a hundred, to steady her play, she told us. She kept goats which used to be tethered near our cottage and which bleated. She was a good landlord to us, and advised Nancy to keep up with me intellectually if she wished to hold my affections.

Another poet on Boar’s Hill was Robert Nichols, still another neurasthenic ex-soldier, with his flame-opal ring, his wide-brimmed hat, his flapping arms and ‘mournful grandeur’ in repose (the phrase is from a review by Sir Edmund Gosse). Nichols served only three weeks in France, in the gunners, and was in no show; but he was highly strung and the three weeks affected him more than twelve months affected some people. He was invalided out of the army and went to lecture in America for the Ministry of Information on British war-poets. He read Siegfried’s and my poetry, and apparently gave some account of us. A legend was started of Siegfried, Robert and myself as the new Three Musketeers. Not only was Robert not in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with Siegfried and myself, but the three of us have never been together in the same room in our lives.

[Illustration: 1929 THE SECOND BATTALION, THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS]

That winter George and Ruth Mallory invited Nancy and myself to go climbing with them. But Nancy could not stand heights and was having another baby; and, for myself, I realized that my climbing days were over. My nerves were bad, though possibly still good enough for an emergency, and beyond improvement. I was, however, drawn into one foolhardy experience at this time. Nancy and I were visiting my parents at Harlech. My two younger brothers were at the house. They played golf and mixed with local society. One evening they arranged a four at bridge with a young ex-airman and a Canadian colonel who was living in a house on the plain between Harlech Castle and the sea. The elder of my brothers got toothache; I said that I would take his place. The younger, still at Charterhouse, demurred. He was rather ashamed of me now as a non-golfer, a socialist, and not quite a gentleman. And my bridge might discredit him. I insisted, because at that time Canadian colonels interested me, and he made the best of it. I assured him that I would try not to wound his feelings. The colonel was about forty-five—tough, nervous, whisky-drinking, a killer. He was out of sorts; he said that his missus was upstairs with a headache and could not come down. We played three or four rubbers; I was playing steadily and not disgracing my brother. The colonel was drinking, the airman was competing. Finally the colonel said in a temper: ‘By God, this is the rottenest bridge I’ve ever sat down to. Let’s go bathing!’ It was half-past ten and not warm for January, but we went bathing and afterwards dried ourselves on pocket handkerchiefs. ‘We’ was the colonel, myself and my brother. The airman excused himself. The bathe put the colonel in better humour. ‘Let’s go up to the village now and raid the concert. Let’s pull some of the girls out and have a bit of fun.’ The airman gigglingly agreed. My brother seemed embarrassed. The colonel said: ‘And you, you bloody poet, are you on?’ I said angrily: ‘Not yet. You’ve had your treat, colonel. I went bathing with you and it was cold. Now it’s my treat. I’m going to take you climbing and make you warm. I want to see whether you Canucks are all B.S. or not.’ That diverted him.

I took them up the castle rock from the railway station in the dark. After the first piece, which was tricky, there would have been little climbing necessary if I had followed a zig-zag path; but I preferred to lead the colonel up several fairly stiff pitches. The others kept to the path. When we reached the top he was out of breath, a bit shaky, and most affable—almost affectionate. ‘That was a damn good climb you showed us.’ So I said: ‘We’ve not reached the top yet.’ ‘Where are we going now?’ he asked. I said: ‘Up that turret.’ We climbed into the castle and walked through the chapel into the north-western tower. It was pitch dark. I took them left into the turret which adjoined the tower but rose some twenty feet higher. The sky showed above, about the size of an orange. The turret had once had a spiral staircase, but the central core had been broken down after the Cromwellian siege; only an edging of stones remained on the walls. This edging did not become continuous until about the second spiral. We struck matches and I started up. The colonel swore and sweated, but followed. I showed him the trick of getting over the worst gap in the stones, which was too wide to bridge with one’s stride, by crouching, throwing one’s body forward and catching the next stone with one’s hands; a scramble and he was there. The airman and my brother remained below. I was glad when we reached the second spiral. We climbed perhaps a hundred and twenty feet to the top.

When we were safely down again most of the whisky was gone. So I said: ‘Now let’s visit the concert party.’ I had heard the audience dispersing, from the top of the turret. We visited the artistes. The colonel was most courteous to the women, especially the blonde soprano, but he took a great dislike to the tenor, a Welshman, and told him that he was no bloody good as a singer. He cross-examined him on his military service and was delighted to find that he had been for some reason or other exempted. He called him a louse and a bloody skrim-shanker and a lot more until the blonde soprano, who was his wife, came to the rescue and threatened to chuck the colonel out. He went out grinning, kissing his hand to the soprano and telling the tenor to kiss the place where he wore no hat. The tenor turned courageous and shouted out something about reading the Scriptures and how morally unjustifiable it was to fight. We all laughed till we wheezed. Then the colonel said we must get a drink; he knocked up a hotel barman and even got inside the bar, but the barman refused to serve him and threatened to call the police. The colonel did not raid the shelves as he would have done half an hour before when the whisky was fiercer in him; he merely told the barman what he thought of the Welsh, broke a glass or two and walked out. ‘Let’s go home and have some more bridge.’ He walked arm-in-arm with me down the hill and confided as one family man to another that his nerves were all in pieces because his missus was in the family way. That was why he had broken up the bridge-party. He had wanted her to have a good sleep. ‘If we go back quietly now, she’ll not wake up; we can bid in whispers.’ So we went back and he drank silently and the airman drank silently and we played silently. I had three or four glasses myself; my brother abstained. We stopped at three-thirty in the morning. The colonel paid up and went to sleep on the sofa. I was eighteen shillings and my brother twelve shillings up at sixpence a hundred. I was sick and shaking for weeks after this.

In March the second baby was born and we called him David. My mother was overjoyed. It was the first Graves grandson; my elder brothers had had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the Graves family silver and documents. When Jenny was born my mother had condoled with Nancy: ‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first to practise on.’ Nancy had from the first decided to have four children; they were to be like the children in her drawings and were to be girl, boy, girl, boy, in that order. She was going to get it all over quickly; she believed in young parents and families of three or four children fairly close together in age. She had the children in the order she intended and they were all like her drawings. She began to regret our marriage, as I also did. We wanted somehow to be dis-married—not by divorce, which was as bad as marriage—and able to live together without any legal or religious obligation to live together. It was about this time that I met Dick again, for the last time; I found him merely pleasant and disagreeable. He was at the university, about to enter the diplomatic service, and had changed so much that it seemed absurd to have ever suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness remained.

XXVIII

I met T. E. Lawrence first at a guest-night at All Souls’. Lawrence had just been given a college fellowship, and it was the first time for many years that he had worn evening dress. The restlessness of his eyes was the first thing about him I noticed. He told me that he had read my poems in Egypt during one of his flying visits from Arabia; he and my brother Philip had been together in the Intelligence Department at Cairo, before his part in the Arab revolt had begun, working out the Turkish order of battle. I knew nothing about his organization of the Arab revolt, his exploits and sufferings in the desert, and his final entry into Damascus. He was merely, to me, a fellow-soldier who had come back to Oxford for a rest after the war. But I felt a sudden extraordinary sympathy with him. Later, when I was told that every one was fascinated by Lawrence, I tried to dismiss this feeling as extravagant. But it remained. Between lectures at Oxford I now often visited Lawrence at All Souls’. Though he never drank himself, he used always to send his scout for a silver goblet of audit ale for me. Audit ale was brewed in the college; it was as soft as barley-water but of great strength. (A prince once came down to Oxford to open a new museum and lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony; the mildness of the audit ale deceived him—he took it for lager—and he had to be taken back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.) Nancy and I lunched in Lawrence’s rooms once with Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, and his mother. Mrs. Lindsay was from Springfield, Illinois, and, like her son, a prominent member of the Illinois Anti-Saloon League. When Lawrence told his scout that Mr. Lindsay, though a poet, was an Anti-Saloon Leaguer, he was scandalized and asked Lawrence’s permission to lay on Lindsay’s place a copy of verses composed in 1661 by a fellow of the college. One stanza was:

The poet divine that cannot reach wine, Because that his money doth many times faile, Will hit on the vein to make a good strain, If he be but inspired with a pot of good ale.

Mrs. Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual that she met at Oxford. Lawrence had brought out the college gold service in her honour and this she took to be the ordinary thing at a university luncheon-party.

His rooms were dark and oak-panelled. A large table and a desk were the principal furniture. And there were two heavy leather chairs, simply acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when I was visiting T. E. and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel Lawrence, to ask you a single question. You are the only man who will answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting any money in South Arabian oil?’ Lawrence, without rising, simply answered:‘No.’ ‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for that. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he had found something missing; on his way home through London he chose the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card. Other things in the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of Feisul, which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond which he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books, including a Kelmscott _Chaucer_, three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab leaders who had fought with him, one of them with the sheen on the nap made with crushed lapis-lazuli; a station bell from the Hedjaz railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy, a clay soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence was digging before the war.

We talked most about poetry. I was working at a book of poems which appeared later under the title of _The Pier-Glass_. They were poems that reflected my haunted condition; the _Country Sentiment_ mood was breaking down. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving these poems and I adopted most of them. He told me of two or three of his schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One was for improving the turf in the quadrangle, which he said was in a disgraceful condition, nearly rotting away; he had suggested at a college meeting that it should be manured or treated in some way or other, but no action had been taken. He now said that he was going to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would have to re-turf it altogether. He consulted a mushroom expert in town, but found that it was difficult to make spawn grow. He would have persisted if he had not been called away about this time to help Winston Churchill with the Middle-Eastern settlement. Another scheme, in which I was to have helped, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. He was going to drive them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded the college to reply, when Magdalen protested and asked for its deer back, that it was the All Souls’ herd and had been pastured there from time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid. It fell through for the same reason as the other. But a successful strike of college-servants for better pay and hours was said to have been engineered by Lawrence.

I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St. John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill. At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford.

I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the _Morning Post’s_ account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you _are_ old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering. ‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’

He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a church near by. He had only the bowl to work upon, but enjoyed doing a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that we had not baptized our children. He was interested, but not scandalized, remarking that his old mother had always said of baptism that at any rate there was no harm in it, and that she would not like her children to blame her in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually found that what my old mother said was right.’ He said that to his mind the new generation of clergymen were very much better men than the last.... Though he now only went to church three times a year—one visit to each of the three neighbouring churches—he could not forget that the church was in the old days the centre of all the musical, literary and artistic education in the country village. He talked about the old string orchestras in Wessex churches, in one of which his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; he regretted their disappearance. He told us that the clergyman who appears as old St. Clair in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was the man who protested to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the Dorchester Barracks, and was the cause of headquarters no longer being sent to this once very popular station.

We had tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house, was crowded with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for old possessions, and Mrs. Hardy was too fond to suggest that anything at all should be removed. Hardy, his cup of tea in hand, began making jokes about bishops at the Athenæum Club and imitating their episcopal tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter (Yes, my lord!).’ Apparently he considered bishops were fair game. He was soon censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend, Henry James, eating soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.

After tea we went into the garden, and Hardy asked to see some of my recent poems. I showed him one, and he asked if he might make some suggestions. He objected to the phrase the ‘scent of thyme,’ which he said was one of the _clichés_ which the poets of his generation studied to avoid. I replied that they had avoided it so well that it could be used again now without offence, and he withdrew the objection. He asked whether I wrote easily, and I said that this poem was in its sixth draft and would probably be finished in two more. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’ He said that he had been able to sit down and write novels by time-table, but that poetry was always accidental, and perhaps it was for that reason that he prized it more highly.

He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that there were chapters in them that he had enjoyed writing. We were walking round the garden, and Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He said that he had once been pruning a tree here when an idea suddenly had come into his head for a story, the best story that he had ever thought of. It came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue. But as he had no pencil and paper with him, and was anxious to finish pruning the tree before it rained, he had let it go. By the time he sat down to recall it, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and paper,’ he said. He added: ‘Of course, even if I could remember that story now, I couldn’t write it. I am past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it was.’

At dinner that night he grew enthusiastic in praise of cider, which he had drunk since a boy, and which, he said, was the finest medicine he knew. I suggested that in the _Message to the American People_, which he had been asked to write, he might take the opportunity of recommending cider.

He began complaining of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He disliked leaving letters unanswered, and yet if he did not write these people pestered him the more; he had been upset that morning by a letter from an autograph-fiend which began:

Dear Mr. Hardy,—I am interested to know why the devil you don’t reply to my request....

He asked me for my advice, and was grateful for the suggestion that a mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital (‘Swanage Children’s Hospital,’ put in Hardy), which would forward a receipt.

He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written ‘his shape _smalled_ in the distance.’ Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer’s _Iliad_, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire the _Iliad_ greatly. Why, it’s in the _Marmion_ class!’ Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)

We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion _vers libre_ could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they were written he cared very little what happened to them.

He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’

This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing invitation to come and visit him.

From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock bought. The _Daily Mirror_ advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’) or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’ gardener’s wife.

The gross weekly takings were now £60 a week and Nancy, though she had given up her drawing, still had the house and children to consider. We had no car, and constant emergency bicycle-rides had to be made to Oxford to get new stock from the wholesalers; we made a point of always being able to supply whatever was asked for. We engaged a shop-boy to call for orders, but the work was still too heavy. Mrs. Howard went out of partnership and Nancy and I found great difficulty in understanding her accounts. I was fairly good at conventional book-keeping; the keeping of company accounts had been part of my lecture-syllabus when I was instructing cadets. But that did not help me with these, which were on a novel system.

The shop business finally ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting, but my writing, my university work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of the house and children. We had the custom of every resident of Boar’s Hill but two or three. One of those whom we courted unsuccessfully was Mrs. Masefield. The proximity of the shop to her house did not please her. And her housekeeper, she said, preferred to deal with a provision merchant in Oxford and she could not override this arrangement. However, to show that there was no ill-feeling, she used to come once a week to the shop and buy a tin of Vim and a packet of Lux, for which she paid money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found that it was very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really honest; we could not resist the temptation of undercharging the poor villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to me. Nobody ever caught us out; it was as easy as shelling peas, the shop-boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to be out of the tea selling at ninepence a quarter which Mrs. So-and-so always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and Mrs. So-and-so asked for it in a hurry, the only thing to do was to make up a pound of the sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it at ninepence; the difference would not be noticed. We were sorry for the commercial travellers who came sweating up the hill with their heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without any orders. They would pitch a hard-luck tale and often we would relent and get in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two more and overcharge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum before you take the stuff off the scales and there’s fewer still who will take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’

The shop lasted six months. Nancy suddenly dismissed the nurse. Nancy had always practised the most up-to-date methods of training and feeding children, and the nurse, over-devoted to the children, had recently disobeyed her instructions. Nancy put the children before everything. She decided that there was nothing to be done but to take them and the house over herself, and to find a manager for the shop. At this point I caught influenza and took a long time to recover from it.

War horror overcame me again. The political situation in Europe seemed to be going from bad to worse. There was already trouble in Ireland, Russia and the Near East. The papers promised new and deadlier poison gases for the next war. There was a rumour that Lord Berkeley’s house on Boar’s Hill was to become an experimental laboratory for making them. I had bad nights. I thought that perhaps I owed it to Nancy to go to a psychiatrist to be cured; yet I was not sure. Somehow I thought that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured; my _Pier-Glass_ haunting would end and I would become merely a dull easy writer. It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a good poet. I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized by anyone in any way.

I decided to see as few people as possible, stop all outside work, and cure myself. I would read the modern psychological books and apply them to my case. I had already learned the rudiments of morbid psychology from talks with Rivers, and from his colleague, Dr. Henry Head, the neurologist, under whose care Robert Nichols had been. I liked Head’s scientific integrity. Once when he was testing a man whom he suspected of homicidal mania he had made some suggestion to him which came within the danger-area of his insanity; the man picked up a heavy knife from his consulting table and rushed threateningly at Head. Head, not at all quick on his legs and dodging round the table, exclaimed: ‘Typical, typical! Capital, capital!’ and, only as an afterthought: ‘Help! Help!’ He had great knowledge of the geography of the brain and the peculiar delusions and maladjustments that followed lesions in the different parts. He told me, at different times, exactly what was wrong with Mr. Jingle in _Pickwick Papers_, why some otherwise literate people found it impossible to spell, and why some others saw ghosts standing by their bedside. He said about the bedside ghosts: ‘They always come to the same side of the bed, and if you turn the bed round you turn the ghost round with it. They come to the contrary side of the lesion.’

A manager was found for the shop. But as soon as it was known that Nancy and I were no longer behind the counter the weekly receipts immediately began to fall; they were soon down to £20, and still falling steadily. The manager’s salary was more than our profits. Prices were now falling, too, at the rate of about five per cent, every week, so that the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly in value. And we had let one or two of the Wootton villagers run up bad debts. When we came to reckon things up we realized that it was wisest to cut the losses and sell out. We hoped to recoup our original expenditure and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction by selling the shop and the goodwill to a big firm of Oxford grocers that wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, the site was not ours and the landlord was prevailed upon by an interested neighbour not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us and spoil the local amenities. No other site was available, so there was nothing to do but sell off what stock remained at bankrupt prices to the wholesalers and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately again, the building was not made in bolted sections, and could not be sold to be put up again elsewhere; its only value was as timber, and in these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and the prices fallen to very little. We recovered twenty pounds of the two hundred that had been spent on it. Nancy and I were so disgusted that we decided to leave Boar’s Hill. We were about five hundred pounds in debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took the whole matter in hand, disposed of our assets for us, and the debt was finally reduced to about three hundred pounds. Nancy’s father sent her a hundred-pound note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and the remainder was unexpectedly contributed by Lawrence. He gave me four chapters of _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_, his history of the Arab revolt, to sell for serial publication in the United States. It was a point of honour with him not to make any money out of the revolt even in the most indirect way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, there seemed no harm in that.

We gave the Masefields notice that we were leaving the cottage at the end of the June quarter 1921. We had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do. We decided that we must get another cottage somewhere and live very quietly, looking after the children ourselves, and that we must try to make what money we needed by writing and drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything when I was ill, now gave me the task of finding a cottage. It had to be found in about three weeks’ time. I said: ‘But you know that there are no cottages anywhere to be had.’ She said: ‘I know, but we are going to get one.’ I said ironically: ‘Describe it in detail; since there are no cottages we might as well have a no-cottage that we really like.’ She said: ‘Well, it must have six rooms, water in the house, a beamed attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be in a village with shops and yet a little removed from the village. The village must be five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire. And we can only afford ten shillings a week unfurnished.’ There were other details that I took down about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs and kitchen sinks, and then I went off on my bicycle. I had first laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance-map and found four or five villages that corresponded in general direction and distance and were on the river. By inquiry I found that two had shops; that, of these two, one had a towered church and the other a spired church. I therefore went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and said: ‘Have you any cottages to let unfurnished?’ The house-agent laughed politely. So I said: ‘What I want is a cottage at Islip with a walled garden, six rooms, water in the house, just outside the village, with a beamed attic, and rent ten shillings a week.’ The house-agent said: ‘Oh, you mean the World’s End Cottage? But that is for sale, not for renting. It has failed to find a purchaser for two years, and I think that the owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half what he originally asked.’ So I went back and next day Nancy came with me; she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house, surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’ She was right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to us at the rate of ten shillings a week.

Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for a new