When Edward went back to France in the last week of June 1917, I did not go with him to Victoria, for I had come superstitiously to believe that a railway station farewell was fatal to the prospect of meeting again. Instead, I waved to him from the window as his taxi rounded the corner of the square, and then helped my mother to wrap up his violin and put it away once more. In the dining-room hung his portrait by Graham Glen; painted while his wound was still painful, the face above the Military Cross ribbon looked pale and sad and retrospective, as it had been for many months after the Somme.[1]
This, needless to say, is a very good measure of how much things have changed over the last two years. Tearful-faux-cheerful farewells on the platform are no longer opportunities to pose or play new roles or even simply to cling to the departing soldier… when you have already lost several of those you tried to hold on to until the last moment, such a demonstration seems fruitless, painful, and ill-omened. After seeing her brother into a taxi, Vera Brittain went upstairs and wrote these verses:
To Them
I hear your voices in the whispering trees,
I see your footprints on each grassy track,
Your laughter echoes gaily down the breeze–
But you will not come back.The twilight skies are tender with your smile,
The stars look down with eyes for which I yearn,
I dream that you are with me all the while–
But you will not return.The flowers are gay in gardens that you knew,
The woods you loved are sweet with summer rain,
The fields you trod are empty now, but you
Will never come again.
Although our only other anecdote for today springs from the same genre, it could hardly be more different in tone. And yet it fits: this cheeky-dismal note from Robert Graves speaks to the exact same contrast of the hopes of 1915 and the pain of 1917.
At the end of chapter XIII of his memoir, Graves reports a conversation between the battalion Adjutant and a company commander named Furber, a pessimist whose “nerves are in pieces.” The other men remain confident–this is before Loos, even–that they will soon be driving the Germans back. Furber, however, bets that “the trench line won’t be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years hence,” and the Adjutant laughingly accepts. The conversation took place on June 24th, 1915, and Graves adds a footnote: Furber won the bet.[2]