THE president of the Osborne medical board had been right: I should not have been back on duty. The training at the Third Battalion camp was intensive, and being given command of a trained-men company I did not get enough rest. I realized how bad my nerves were when one day, marching through the streets of Litherland on a battalion route-march, I saw three workmen in gas-masks beside an open man-hole, bending over a corpse which they had just hauled up from a sewer. His clothes were sodden and stinking; face and hands, yellow. Waste chemicals from the munitions factory had got into the sewage system and gassed him when he went down to inspect. My company did not pause in its march, and I had only a glimpse of the group; but it reminded me so strongly of France that, but for the band-music, I should have fainted.
The colonel detailed me as member of a court-martial on a civilian alleged to have enlisted under the Derby Scheme, but not to have presented himself when his class was called to the colours. I tried to feel sympathetic with the nasty-looking little man, who closely resembled a rabbit, but found it difficult, even when he proved never to have enlisted. His solicitor handed us a letter from a corporal in France, explaining that he had enlisted in the rabbit’s name while on leave, because the rabbit had recently been rabbiting with his wife. This the rabbit denied; but he showed that the colour of his eyes recorded on the enlistment-form was blue, while his own were rabbit-brown, so he seemed to have a case. But a further question arose: why had he not enlisted under the Military Service Act, if he was a fit rabbit? He claimed to be starred, having done responsible work in a munitions factory for the necessary length of time before the Military Service Act became law. However, police evidence on the table showed that his ‘protection certificates’ were forged, that he had not been working on munitions before the Military Service Act, and thus, coming into the class of those ‘deemed to have enlisted’, was a deserter in any case. Having no legal alternative, we sentenced him to the prescribed two years’ imprisonment. He broke down, squealed rabbit-fashion, and declared conscientious objections against war. Getting involved in the trial made me feel contemptible.
Large drafts now frequently went off to the First, Second, Ninth, and Tenth Battalions in France, and to the Eighth Battalion in Mesopotamia. Very few of the men warned for draft absented themselves. But they were always more cheerful about going in the spring and summer, when there was heavy fighting, than in the quieter winter months. (The regiment kept up its spirits even in the last year of the war. Attwater told me that big drafts sent off during the critical weeks of the 1918 spring, when the Germans had broken through the Fifth Army, went down to the station singing and cheering enthusiastically. They might have been the reservists whom he and I had seen assembling at Wrexham on August 12th, 1914, to rejoin the Second Battalion just before it sailed for France.)
Colonel Jones-Williams always made the same speech to the drafts. The day I joined the battalion from Osborne, I went via Liverpool Exchange Station and the electric railway to Litherland. Litherland station was crowded with troops. I heard a familiar voice making a familiar speech: the colonel bidding Godspeed to a small draft of men on their way back to the First Battalion. ‘… going cheerfully like British soldiers to fight the common foe… some of you perhaps may fall… upholding the magnificent traditions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers…’ The draft cheered vigorously; rather too vigorously, I felt – perhaps even ironically? When he had finished, I went over and greeted a few old friends: 79 Davies, 33 Williams, and the Davies who was nicknamed ‘Dym Bacon’, which was Welsh for ‘there isn’t any bacon’. (He had won the nickname in his recruit days. The son of a Welsh farmer and accustomed to good food, he had complained about his first morning’s breakfast, shouting to the orderly-sergeant: ‘Do you call this a bloody breakfast, man? Dym bacon, dym sausages, dym herrings, dym bloody anything! Nothing but bloody bread and jaaam!’)
I saw another well-remembered First Battalion face – D.G.M. and rosette, Médaille Militaire, Military Medal, no stripe. ‘Lost them again, Sergeant Dickens?’ I asked.
He grinned. ‘Easy come, easy go, sir.’
Then the train came in, and I stretched out my hand with ‘Good Luck!’
‘You’ll excuse us, sir,’ said Dickens.
The draft shouted with laughter, and I saw why my hand had not been wrung, and also why the cheers had been so loud. Everyone of them was in hand-cuffs. They had been detailed a fortnight before for a draft to Mesopotamia, but wanted to get back to the First Battalion, so they overstayed their leave. The colonel, not understanding the situation, put them into the guardroom to make sure of them for the next draft. They were now going back in hand-cuffs, under an escort of military police, to the battalion of their choice. The men bore Colonel Jones-Williams no ill-will for the hand-cuffs. A good-hearted man, he took a personal interest in the camp kitchens, had built a cinema-hut within the camp, been reasonably mild in orderly room, and done his best not to drive returned soldiers too hard.
I decided to leave Litherland somehow, forewarned what the winter would be like, with the mist steaming up from the Mersey and hanging about the camp, full of T.N.T. fumes. During the previous winter I used to sit in my hut, and cough and cough until I was sick. The fumes tarnished buttons and cap-badges, and made our eyes smart. I thought of going back to France, but realized the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover. But what about Palestine, where gas was unknown and shell-fire inconsiderable by comparison with France?
Siegfried wrote from Craiglockhart in August: ‘What do you think of the latest push? How splendid this attrition is! As Lord Crewe says: “We are not the least depressed.”’ I matched this with a remark of Lord Carson’s: ‘The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs.’
At my next medical board I asked to be passed in the category of B2, which meant: ‘Fit for garrison service at home.’ I reckoned on being sent to the Third Garrison Battalion of the regiment, now under canvas at Oswestry in Wales. From there, when I felt a bit better, I would get myself passed BI, or: ‘Fit for garrison service abroad’, and would, in due course, be sent to a Royal Welch garrison battalion in Egypt. Once there, it should be easy to get passed AI and join the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth (New Army) Battalion in Palestine.
So presently I was sent to Oswestry. We had a good colonel, but the men were mostly compulsory enlistments; and the officers, with few exceptions, useless. My first task on arrival was to superintend the entraining of battalion stores and transport; we were moving to Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl. The adjutant gave me one hundred and fifty men, and allowed me six hours for the job. I chose fifty of the stronger men and three or four N.C.O.s who looked capable, then sent the remainder away to play football. By organizing the mob in First Battalion style, I got my fifty men to load the train in two hours less than the scheduled time. The colonel congratulated me. At Rhyl, he gave me the job of giving ‘further instruction’ to the sixty or so young officers sent to him from the cadet-battalions. Few officers in the battalion had seen any active service.
It was at this point that I remembered Nancy Nicholson. I had first met her in April, 1916, at the Nicholsons’ Harlech house, while on leave after the operation on my nose. She was sixteen at the time, on holiday from school, and I knew her brother Ben, the painter, whose asthma kept him out of the army. When I returned to France in 1917, I had called on Ben and the rest of the family in Chelsea, and the last person to say goodbye to me on my way to Victoria Station was Nancy. I remembered her standing in the doorway, in a black velvet dress with coral necklace. She was ignorant, of independent mind, good-natured, and as sensible about the war as anybody at home could be. In the summer of 1917, shortly after the episode with Marjorie, I had taken her to a musical review, the first review of my life. It was Cheep; with Lee White, singing of Black-eyed Susans, and how ‘Girls must all be Farmers’ Boys, off with skirts, wear corduroys’. Nancy told me that she was now on the land herself. She showed me her paintings, illustrations to Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses; my child-sentiment and hers answered each other. I liked all the family, particularly her mother, Mabel Nicholson, the painter, a beautiful, wayward Scotch-melancholy person. William Nicholson, again ‘the painter’, is still among my friends. Tony, a brother, just older than Nancy, was a gunner-officer, waiting to go to France.
I began a correspondence with Nancy, about some children’s rhymes of mine which she wanted to illustrate. Soon I fell in love with her. On my next leave, in October 1917, I visited her at the farm where she worked in Huntingdonshire – alone, except for her black poodle, among farmers, farm-labourers, and wounded soldiers who had been put on land-service – and helped her to run mangolds through a slicer. Our letters became more intimate after this. She warned me that she was a feminist and that I had to be careful what I said about women; the attitude of the Huntingdon farmers to their wives and daughters kept her in a continual state of anger. But Nancy’s crude summary of the Christian religion: ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’ took a load off my shoulders.
I had been passed BI now, but the orders that came for me to proceed to Gibraltar upset my plans. Gibraltar being a dead-end, it would be as difficult to get from there to Palestine as it would from England. A friend in the War Office undertook to cancel the order until a vacancy could be found for me in the battalion stationed at Cairo. At Rhyl, I was enjoying my first independent command. I got it because of a rumoured invasion of the north-east coast, to follow a sortie of the German fleet. A number of battalions were sent across England for its defence. All fit men of the Third Garrison Battalion were ordered to move at twenty-four hours’ notice to York. A slight error occurred, however, in the Morse message from War office to Western Command. Instead of dash-dot-dash-dash, they sent dash-dot-dash-dot, so the battalion was sent to Cork instead; where, on second thoughts, it seemed just as much needed as in York – so there it stayed for the remainder of the war.
Ireland had been seething since the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and Irish troops at the depôts were now giving away their rifles to the Sinn Feiners. On getting these orders, the colonel told me that I was the only officer he could trust to look after the rest of the battalion – thirty young officers, four or five hundred crocks engaged in camp duties, and a draft of two hundred trained men under orders for Gibraltar. He left me a competent adjutant, and three officers’ chargers to ride, also asking me to keep an eye on his children, whom he had to leave behind until a house could be found for them at Cork; I had been playing with them a good deal. I got the draft off all right, and their soldier-like appearance so impressed the inspecting general that he sent them all to the camp cinema at his own expense. This gave me another good mark with the colonel in Ireland. The climax of my faithful services was when I checked an attempt on the part of the camp quartermaster to make our battalion responsible for the loss of five hundred blankets.
It happened like this. Suddenly, one night, I had three thousand three hundred leave-men from France thrown under my command – Irishmen, from every regiment in the army, held up at Holyhead on the way home by the presence of submarines in the Irish Sea. They were rowdy and insubordinate, and during the four days of their stay gave me little rest. The five hundred missing blankets, part of the six thousand six hundred issued to them, had probably been sold in Rhyl to pay for cigarettes and beer. I was able to prove at the Court of Inquiry that the men, though attached to the battalion for purposes of discipline, had been issued with blankets direct from the quartermaster’s stores, before reporting to me. The loss of the blankets might be presumed to have taken place between the time of issue and the time that the men arrived in the battalion lines; for I had given the camp quartermaster no receipt for the blankets. The Court of Inquiry was convened in the camp quartermaster’s private office; and I insisted that he should leave the room during the taking of evidence, because it was now no longer his private office but a Court of Inquiry. The president agreed, and his consequent ignorance of my line of defence saved the case. This success, and the evidence that I turned up of presents accepted by the battalion mess-president, when at Rhyl, from wholesale caterers (the mess-president had tried to make me pay my mess-bill twice over, and I retaliated by investigating his private life) so pleased the colonel that he recommended me for the Russian Order of St Anne, with Crossed Swords, of the Third Class. After all, then, I should not have left the army undecorated but for the October Bolshevik revolution, which cancelled the award-list.
I saw Nancy again when I visited London in December, and we decided to get married at once. Though attaching no importance to the ceremony, Nancy did not want to disappoint her father, who liked weddings and parties. I was still expecting orders for Egypt, and intended to go on from there to Palestine. However, Nancy’s mother made it a condition of marriage – Nancy being still a minor – that I should visit a London lung-specialist to find out whether I would be fit for active service in the course of the next year or two. I went to Sir James Fowler, who had visited me at Rouen when I was wounded. He told me that my lungs were healthy enough, though I had bronchial adhesions and my wounded lung had only a third of its proper expansion; but that my general nervous condition made it folly for me to think of active service in any theatre of war.
Nancy and I were married in January 1918 at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. She being just eighteen, and I twenty-two. George Mallory acted as the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first time that morning, and been so horrified that she all but refused to go through with the wedding, though I had arranged for the ceremony to be modified and reduced to the shortest possible form. Another caricature scene to look back on: myself striding up the red carpet, wearing field-boots, spurs, and sword; Nancy meeting me in a blue-check silk wedding-dress, utterly furious; packed benches on either side of the church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting them in a parade-ground voice.
Then the reception. At this stage of the war, sugar could not be got except in the form of rations. There was a three-tiered wedding-cake and the Nicholsons had been saving up their sugar and butter cards for a month to make it taste like a real one; but when George Mallory lifted off the plaster-case of imitation icing, a sigh of disappointment rose from the guests. However, champagne was another scarce commodity, and the guests made a rush for the dozen bottles on the table. Nancy said: ‘Well, I’m going to get something out of this wedding, at any rate,’ and grabbed a bottle. After three or four glasses, she went off and changed back into her land-girl’s costume of breeches and smock. My mother, who had been thoroughly enjoying the proceedings, caught hold of her neighbour, E. V. Lucas, the essayist, and exclaimed: ‘Oh, dear, I wish she had not done that!’ The embarrassments of our wedding-night (Nancy and I being both virgins) were somewhat eased by an air-raid: Zeppelin bombs dropping not far off set the hotel in an uproar.
A week later, Nancy returned to her farm, and I to my command at Kinmel Park. It was an idle life now. No men attended parade; all were employed on camp duties. And I found a lieutenant with enough experience to attend to the ‘further instruction’ of the young officers. My orderly room took about ten minutes each day; crime was rare, and the adjutant always kept ready and in order the few documents to be signed; which left me free to ride all my three chargers over the countryside, in turn, for the rest of the day. I frequently used to visit the present Archbishop of Wales in his palace at St Asaph; his son had been killed in the First Battalion. We discovered a common taste for the curious; I have kept a postcard from him, which runs as follows:
The Palace, St Asaph.
Hippophagist banquet held at Langham’s Hotel, February 1868
A. G. Asaph.
(I met several bishops during the war, but none afterwards; except the Bishop of Oxford, in a railway carriage, two years ago, discussing the beauties of Samuel Richardson. And the Bishop of Liverpool, at Harlech, in 1932 – I was making tea on the sandhills, when he came out from the sea with cries of 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 stung only in foreign parts.)
Wearying of this idleness, I arranged to be transferred to the Sixteenth Officer Cadet Battalion in another part of the same camp. There I did the same sort of work as with the Fourth at Oxford, and stayed from February 1918 until the Armistice on November 11th. Rhyl being much healthier than Oxford, I could play games without danger of another break-down. Nancy got a job at a market-gardener’s near the camp, and came up to live with me. A month or two later she found that she was having a baby, stopped land work, and went back to her drawing.
None of my friends had approved of my engagement, particularly to a girl as young as Nancy. One of them, Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s literary executor, whom I first met through Siegfried, tried to dissuade me from marriage, hinting, very unkindly that there was Negro blood in the Nicholson family – that perhaps one of our children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried could not easily accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he had not met, but he still wrote from Craiglockhart. A few months later, though in no way renouncing his pacifist views, he decided that his only possible course was, after all, to return to France. He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again made him more restless than ever. He found the isolation of hospital life nearly unbearable. Old Joe had written him a long letter to say that the First Battalion were just back at rest-billets from the Polygon Wood fighting; the conditions and general situation were more appalling than anything yet known – three miles of morass, shell-holes, corpses, and dead horses through which to bring up the rations. Siegfried felt 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 transport-men had been killed, but at least, according to Joe, ‘the Battalion got its rations’. If only the people who wrote leading articles in the Morning Post about victory could read Joe’s letter! (When this feat won Joe a D.S.O., he was sent a slip to complete with biographical details for a new edition of The Companionage and Knightage, but looked contemptuously at the various headings. Disregarding ‘date and place of birth’, and even ‘military campaigns’, he filled in two items only:
Issue: Rum, rifles, etc.
Family seat: My khaki pants.)
Siegfried now wrote the poem ‘When I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm’ about the ghosts of soliders, reproaching him in dream for his absence – they had looked for him in the line from Ypres to Frise and not found him. He told Rivers that he would go back to France if they agreed to send him, but made it quite clear that his views were what they had been in July when he wrote the letter of protest – if possible, more violently so. He demanded a written guarantee that he would be sent overseas at once, and not kept hanging around a training battalion. In a letter to me he reprehended the attitude I had taken in July, when I reminded him that the regiment would either think him a coward, or regard his protest as a lapse from good form. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he wrote, to identify oneself in any way with good form; a man of real courage would not acquiesce as I did. I admitted, he pointed out, that the people who sacrificed the troops were callous bastards, and that the same thing was happening everywhere, except in Russia. What my answer was, I forget; perhaps that, while in France, I had never seen such a fire-eater as he – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused to be killed could hardly be compared with his wholesale slaughter. In fact, Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed direction 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…
had originally been inspired by Colonel Campbell, V.C.’s blood-thirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army school. Later, Siegfried offered it as a satire; and it certainly comes off, whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less heroic than Siegfried.
Whether I pulled any strings escapes my memory; at any rate this time he got posted to the Twenty-fifth Royal Welch – dismounted Yeomanry – in Palestine. He seemed to enjoy the life there, but in April a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim’, gave me the distressing news that the division had orders for France. He wrote that he would be sorry to get back to trenches, and perhaps go over the top at Morlancourt or Méaulte. The mention of Morlancourt in the communiqués had brought things home to him. He expected that the First and Second Battalions had about ceased to exist by now, for the nth time.
I heard again, at the end of May, from France. Siegfried quoted Duhamel: ‘It was ordained 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 he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. Though I mightn’t believe it, he was training them bloody well and couldn’t imagine whence his flame-like ardour had come; but come it had. His military efficiency derived from the admirable pamphlets now being 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 everyone except my company, the smartest turn-out, ever seen, and damn Wales, and damn leave, and damn being wounded, and damn everything except staying with my company until it has melted away! Limping and crawling among the shell-holes, lying very still in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.’ He asked me 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 had never been such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six months it would have ceased to exist.
Nancy’s brother, Tony, had also gone to France now, and her mother made herself ill by worrying about him. Early in July he should be due for 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 Maesyneuardd, a big Tudor house near Harlech. This was the most haunted house that I have ever been in, though the ghosts, with one exception, were not visible, except occasionally 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. The visible ghost was a little yellow dog that would appear on the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it through the window that time.
The first Spanish influenza epidemic began, and Nancy’s mother caught it, but did not want to miss Tony’s leave and going to the London theatres with him. So when the doctor came, she took quantities of aspirin, reduced her temperature, and pretended to be all right. But she knew that the ghosts in the mirrors knew the truth. She died in London on July 13th, a few days later. Her chief solace, as she lay dying, was that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account. I was alarmed at the effect that the shock of her death might have on Nancy’s baby. Then I heard that Siegfried had been shot through the head that same day while making a daylight patrol through long grass in No Man’s Land; but not killed. And he wrote me a verse-letter from a London hospital (which I cannot quote, though I should like to do so) beginning:
I’d timed my death in action to the minute…
It is the most terrible of his war-poems.
Tony was killed in September. I went on mechanically at my cadet-battalion work. The new candidates for commissions were mostly Manchester cotton clerks and Liverpool shipping clerks – men with a good fighting record, quiet and well behaved. To forget about the war, I was writing Country Sentiment, a book of romantic poems and ballads.
In November came the Armistice. I heard at the same time of the deaths of Frank Jones-Bateman, who had gone back again just before the end, and Wilfred Owen, who often used to send me poems from France. Armistice-night hysteria did not touch our 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 battlefield, the Flodden of Wales), cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.
Siegfried’s famous poem celebrating the Armistice began:
Everybody suddenly burst out singing,
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom…
But ‘everybody’ did not include me.