Three short updates, today, from Egypt, Italy, and France.
Siegfried Sassoon, on his last day in camp at Kantara, does not seem particularly thrilled with things.
March 9
On District Court Martial in the morning. President pompous and incompetent. A major in the 19th Rifle Brigade. Going up the line to-morrow. (Walk this evening. Remount train. Grey faces.) Drunk officer. Nurses in Mess. Concert.[1]
Just remember to stay out of Sassoon’s way, especially if you are a grey-faced, hard-drinking woman…
Also today, a century back, Edward Brittain responds to a letter from his sister Vera that we were not able to read. But it seems that all we missed was the two of them missing each other, in two senses. Edward remains both generally supportive and perhaps a bit bemused/jealous about his sister’s upcoming book, and he is taking in stride the illness which has spoiled any chance of leave…
Italy, 9 March 1918
Many thanks for yours of the 1st. It was certainly a great pity about that leave; I wonder where we shall meet next time. I am much better and expect to leave hospital to-morrow; they are all very busy in my absence as there are only 2 officers on duty. My temperature has been quite down for 2 or 3 days in fact it is 97.6 to-night and I have been out for short strolls in the afternoon with a padre who is in my room; he is ancient but a much better padre than our own who I think I told you is an absurd specimen.
Many thanks for your roundel and Vernède’s poem. Have you any idea at all when the book is coming out?
There is a beautiful glimpse of the mountains through this window; the further ones are still covered with snow as it is rather cold still though it is supposed to be the last cold spell. I expect you will be very busy soon when the raiding season, which is now at its height, is over. We hear that the Hun is going to use a new kind of gas…[2]
Herbert Read is familiar with raiding season, and yet his dispatch from the Western Front is both sunny and unwarlike. It’s striking enough that I decided to type out a bit of rank heresy: only the most perverse of moderns would simply toss away Thomas Hardy…
9.iii.18
It is June here. For three days there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky and the larks have been singing all day long. And though we are actually on the line, we find it hard to realize that there is a war on. Things are unearthly quiet. I am writing this out in the sun, and the scene round me is a wide amphitheatre about 600 yards in diameter, an old sand quarry… Our dugouts are deep down in the sides of the quarry and quite comfortable with beds and tables. We keep a cat–a beautiful brown and white one, very clean and full of play and a foot-warmer by night…
I’ve just finished Hardy‘s The Return of the Native and I’ve been rather disappointed with it. I think better people, James in particular, have spoilt Hardy for me. His plot creaks like an antiquated machine and his characters are put together to suit Hardy’s ideas and are not revelations of any human value. I don’t think he digs very deeply down into the individual. He has a philosophy of no little value which is a world-view, a generalization, and his art is constructed according to it. But that, of course, is not art. Art should construct out of a philosophy if you like: it must do so because a writer’s character and temperament are his philosophy. But the final things should have a value of its own, a beauty and individual human value. But I’m not dismissing Hardy with these words: he has a fine sense of tragedy, and he can make the puppets of his mind act with some significance.[3]
So Read, like Ralph Hamilton, is snug in his quarry–for the time being. It is June-like and sunny, and the larks are singing, and there is ample time for literary criticism and the airing of aperçus about the correct order of operations between art and philosophy. And, really, even though I like The Return of the Native very much indeed, Read’s criticisms are not terribly off-base.
But there’s an irony, here: Hardy has moved on from tragedy, and now writes poetry in an often ironic mode, where the bitter joke is just that inexorable creakiness with which the world grinds on, and grinds us down. Complain if you will that it makes for unnatural art (it doesn’t!) but surely it anticipates life…
It will not stay June-like for long, and neither larks’ nests nor quarries will be safe from the newfangled machines of the Great War’s plot…