Today’s theme would seem to be meetings and gatherings and farewells. War has a way of making all path-crossing, all time spent with those other than your immediate comrades, freighted with emotion. Behind everything is the ominous music, the elephant in the room, the unavoidable but generally unvoiced thought that this meeting might be the last.
First, then, Duff Cooper, whose unofficial last leave has ended… so, really, any day now.
My servant came at 8.30 with the news that we were certainly not to go today… I learnt that we should probably go tomorrow night. Came home and made my will leaving everything to Diana. I hope Mother won’t mind. I lunched with Mother at her flat. She was unduly distressed to learn that I might go on Saturday. We dined at Queen Anne’s Gate…
“Unduly” distressed that her only son is about to head into combat, I see, yes… The guest list for this dinner overlaps with Cynthia Asquith’s recent dinners–notably in the person of Ivo Grenfell, the last surviving Grenfell brother, as well as a guardsman awaiting his first overseas posting.
There was an air raid warning in the middle but no raid followed–I played bridge and the others went down to the kitchen and cooked supper which they brought up to us later. I won £50 and ended the evening by driving with Diana. It was in every way a worthy last night in London. I was not in bed till five.[1]
Far away in Egypt, Siegfried Sassoon–who, despite solid country squire bona fides, has never fit in with the true Upper Class, especially in terms of his his schooling–has fallen in with an old hunting buddy. And that hunting buddy’s Eton buddies
April 26
…We talked old hunting days and were very pleased with life and old brandy supplied by his hosts; who were all majors except the Colonel (Norfolk Yeomanry). Eton manner was somewhere in the offing, but not too noticeable, Charles is just the same nice creature as he was four years ago. Wonder if I’ll ever see him again. We leave here on Sunday for Alexandria and Marseilles, and the rest of it.[2]
Well, I suppose that wasn’t too fraught, after all.
For the Brittain family, the fraught meeting is demanded, but not yet achieved. Edward Brittain wrote again today to his sister Vera, who is caught between competing responsibilities. As a V.A.D. nurse, she is under contract to care for the flood of wounded brought back from the battles all along the line; as an only, unmarried daughter, she is expected by her father to return home and care for her mother, who has suffered a breakdown.
Italy, 26 April 1918
I sympathise with you very much at having to go back just now especially as nobody at home will understand that you particularly wanted to stay where you were. In one of her letters not long ago Mother said something about its being a good thing for you to come home as you disliked the work so much, but of course it was a bit easy to read between the lines.
Brother and sister are both veterans, and comrades in arms both in the war against the Central Powers and the generational conflict against the Parental Cabal. The irony, of course, is that their parents’ concern to effect a partial family reunion is another “undue” worry concealed:
Naturally I realise that Mother is ill and not quite as usual but it is most annoying to read in her letters about her anxiety that you should arrive home before the Bosch gets to Calais etc. i.e. it doesn’t matter a damn if they get to Calais or Boulogne as long as you get home first. Incidentally Mother and Father seem to have got it firmly into their heads that the Bosch is going to get the Channel Ports and that we are going to lose the war etc., not of course realising that the latter can never happen and the former would only be a nominal affair owing to the remarkable fact that we have got rather a good Navy… We await the counteroffensive.[3]
Yes, the fraught meeting that the elder Brittains really fear is of their daughter with the Hun armies pushing for the coast.
But we’ll close with a family scene, in the peaceful springtime of Yorkshire… where beauty and peace are overshadowed by pacifism and war. Max Plowman‘s wife and son have been visiting him, staying near his place of ambiguous confinement, as he waits for word on his court martial. He is not imprisoned, but he is confined to barracks, unless his assigned escort will consent to go with him.
A recommitted pacifist in wartime, a family man unable to be alone with his family, a poet unable to perfectly enjoy the love and beauty around him… still, this is a very nice scene–for the most part. We have the family triad in the garden, don’t we? But also, of course, the snake in the grass, in the person of that escort:
Dorothy and Tim… stayed at a local vicarage here for about 3 weeks & went on to a tiny village just under the Clevedon Hills… & there they stayed with a Quaker family… [who] laid themselves out for our benefit. It was really beautiful, as kindness can be. Last Friday they got together a picnic party & persuaded my present unspeakable boor of an escort to come with me for the day. There was a trap for the benefit of Tim & the food, & we went right over the hills on to the Yorkshire Moors down to the very heaven of a valley where thousands of wild daffodils swayed in lush green meadows beside a brook. Doesn’t sound much like “close arrest” does it? Yet an ugly face never looks uglier than when it is surrounded by the loveliness & Shelly’s line about an “unwelcome face” recurred in my head…[4]