Siegfried Sassoon and the 15th Royal Welch Fusiliers are bound away, away from the promised land. And all roads lead, eventually, to France.
April 10
Up at 3.30: started at 5.30. Reached camping-ground at Ludd about noon. Came thirteen miles. Clear dawn with crested larks singing, and large morning star and shaving moon above dim blue hills; firefly lights of camps below us. Marched through green country and low hills in the cool morning, till Ramileh, a white town with olives and fruit-trees all round, and full of British. Weather very hot after 7.30, and roads awful dusty; marching between cactus-hedges, with motors passing. Clouds of dust and glaring pale-blue sky. One thought of cool green woodlands and chuckling water-brooks.
Is he grumpy, once more on the march, or happy–bound away from pleasant purgatory toward the “real war” in France? Is he up with the lark once again, or bidding farewell to the unspoiled natural world in order to return to the hellscape? I’m not sure Sassoon knows.
He attempts something unusual, now: a short prose piece, modern (by his standards, at least–my what language!), atmospheric, and in the third person.
On the March
Left; left; left, right, left. 110 paces to the minute. The monotonous rhythm of the marching troops goes on in his brain. His eyes blink at the glaring sky; the column move heavily on in front; dust hangs over them; dust and the pale blue, quivering sky. As they go up a hill their round steel helmets sway from side to side with the lurch of their heavy-laden shoulders. Vans and lorries drone and blunder and grind along the road; the cactus-hedges are caked with dust. The column passes some Turk prisoners, in dingy dark uniform and red fez, guarded by Highlanders. ‘Make the fuckers work, Jock’ someone shouts. He sees and hears these things through the sweat-soaked weariness that weighs him down; his shoulders a dull ache; his feet burning hot and clumsy with fatigue; his eyes tormented by the white glare of the dusty road. Men before and behind him—no escape. ‘Fall out on the right of the road.’ He collapses in the dry ditch.
The experiment appears to be abandoned at this point, and then the diary jerks back to what is apparently reportage–hearsay, that is, of an actual British atrocity.[1]
Lord X’s story at lunch of how some friend of his turned a machine-gun on to Turkish prisoners in a camp he was in charge of, and killed 280 (they had been causing trouble, but it seemed an atrocious affair; the story was received with appreciative sycophantic laughter from the company commanders).
And after this horror story, the next thing in this whiplash diary is a poem, also experimental in form:
Shadows
In the gold of morning we march; our swaying shadows are long;
We are risen from sleep to the grey-green world and our limbs move free.
Day is delight and adventure, and all save speech is a song;
Our thoughts are travelling birds going southward across the sea.
We march in the swelter of noon; our straggling shadows are squat;
They creep at our feet like toads.
Our feet that are blistered and hot:
The light-winged hours are forgot;
We are bruised by the ache of our loads.Sunset bums from behind; we would march no more; but we must:
And our shadows deride us like dervishes dancing along in the dust.April 10[2]
To continue this rather confusing array of literary productions, we have A.P. Herbert–best known (elsewhere, and certainly here) for the The Secret Battle–publishing a poem today, a century back, in Punch. But it’s not a humorous poem, or even a light one: it’s inspirational fare for an army in crisis:
The Windmill
A Song Of Victory
Yes, it was all like a garden glowing
When first we came to the hill-top there,
And we laughed to know that the Bosch was going,
And laughed to know that the land was fair;
Acre by acre of green fields sleeping,
Hamlets hid in the tufts of wood,
And out of the trees were church-towers peeping,
And away on a hillock the Windmill stood.Then, ah, then, ’twas a land worth winning,
And now there is naught but the naked clay,
But I can remember the Windmill spinning,
And the four sails shone in the sun that day.But the guns came after and tore the hedges
And stripped the spinneys and churned the plain,
And a man walks now on the windy ledges,
And looks for a feather of green in vain;
Acre by acre the sad eye traces
The rust-red bones of the earth laid bare,
And the sign-posts stand in the market-places
To say that a village was builded there.But better the French fields stark and dying
Than ripe for a conqueror’s fat content,
And I can remember the mill-sails flying,
Yet I cheered with the rest when the Windmill went.Away to the east the grass-land surges
Acre by acre across the line,
And we must go on till the end like scourges,
Though the wilderness stretch from sea to Rhine;
But I dream some days of a great reveille,
When the buds shall burst in the Blasted Wood,
And the children chatter in Death-Trap Alley,
And a windmill stand where the Windmill stood.And we that remember the Windmill spinning,
We may go under, but not in vain,
For our sons shall come in the new beginning
And see that the Windmill spins again.
Perhaps. But other veterans of the fight in France are focused more on recent loss than on future recovery–or what their sons might see when they come to France.
Edward Brittain wrote to his sister Vera today to discuss their mother’s recent breakdown, to gripe about the weather and facilities in Italy, and to express his dismay at what is happening–and what has happened–on the Western Front:
It is most pathetic to think that the old places where we were 2 years ago are now in the hands of the Hun as also are the graves of many people we know. As far as I can tell Louvencourt is still behind our lines though fighting in Aveluy Wood doesn’t sound far away. I was talking to a major who is attached to us yesterday about making some dugouts in a strong piece of ground and he was very particular about wire goggles being worn by men working or living there because of splinters caused by shells bursting on the stone ‘because’, he said, ‘I can imagine nothing worse than being blind for the rest of your life’. It seemed rather strange that he should say that on the anniversary of the day on which Tah was blinded.[3]
And back in England, at the Humber Garrison headquarters, John Ronald Tolkien had yet another medical board. Not surprisingly–he has not had serious symptoms of his “trench fever” in months, and the need for able-bodied men has never been more acute–he is at last pronounced fit, and liable for general service.[4]