First, today, a brief update on the far-flung Brittain clan. Edward, still in Italy, writes to Vera, not yet rescued from/abandoning her post in France.
I receive alternately doleful and breathlessly breezy letters from Mother and so I suppose she is rather better except on the occasions when she and Father have a tiff. Many thanks for the slippers, brilliantine, and socks which arrived about 3 hours ago…[1]
Yes, you’re right, it is heartening to see that someone is still sending socks, even at this late stage of the proceedings…
But it’s not really the high season in terms of footwear-demand. It’s May, after all, and the weather is warm and dry, even within a few miles of the old trenches. Siegfried Sassoon–returned once more nearly to within shooting distance of the Western Front–approaches it even as he and so many others first did: by reading English verse, and deploying its Arcadian recourses:
May 13
Yesterday morning we reached Noyelles-sur-Mer, and marched to Domvast, a village thirteen kilos from Abbeville. We marched about eleven miles and got here at 6.30 p.m. Into billets—farmyard smells etc—all just like two years ago. Weather fine with a breeze behind us all the way. Country looking very beautiful—while ‘the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings’.
Not, in fact, a deep dive into the anthology, but a quotation of up-to-date Hardy. The poem is entitled “Afterwards,” and the joke is a clever one: the speaker of Hardy’s verses is a poet contemplating his own demise. This is, as we are so fond of saying these days, very “meta:” the poet doesn’t praise May tout court, rather, he thinks of praising May and wonders whether, after he is gone, readers will notice the glad green wings and think of him, the poet who, perhaps, opened their eyes to such things:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
They may well. It’s very clever, this little quotation, and a reminder that Sassoon–like the quoted poetic Doktorvater who has taught him just such tricks–is capable of more than just blunt-force ironies. Sometimes he thrusts home an irony needle-sharp–and so quickly and surely that we might not feel a thing.
So, best pleased at noticing the context of the quote, I’ll belabor the point to the point of dullness: Hardy writes as a great writer facing old age; Sassoon quotes him as a young man whose slim second book has just come out, and who will leave a less metaphorical postern unlatched when he sallies out–soon, now–on some dubious patrol or trench raid. And he stands a much slighter chance than the older man of seeing another May.
But spring still gives a solace more fundamental than literary, and sometimes indoor and outdoor Sassoon take pleasure together, as the single human being they together are:
Domvast is a straggling village lying low among orchards and trees, with the Forest of Crécy a mile away westward. I went there this morning in the rain. Wind in the beech-wood; endless avenues of branching green. All very comforting.
I feel rather ghost-like coming back to the familiar country and happenings… All the queer Arcadian business of settling down in a village unspoiled by continuous billeting and (still) thirty or forty miles away from the war.
Five weeks ago we were marching away from Ramallah, and Jerusalem![2]
And only two days’ march to the east of Sassoon, Kate Luard has also recently arrived, once again beginning work with a new Casualty Clearing Station, in charge of its nurses. Luard is always indefatigable, but in this first letter to her family from the new unit she sounds positively reinvigorated. It may be the fourth spring of the war, but it is still spring, and the Germans haven’t broken through yet.
Monday, May 13th. Pernois (between Amiens and Doullens). There is so much to see to in starting a new site with a new Mess consisting of Nothing, and with patients already in the Wards when we arrived, that there has not been a moment yet to unpack my kit, barely to read my mails, let alone to write letters, other than official and Break-the-News, till now, 10.30 p.m…
The C.O. of this Unit is very keen and full of brains, discipline and ideas. Everyone is out for efficiency and we are all working together like honey bees, and hastening to fall in with each other’s brilliant suggestions!
Let us hope such a Utopia is not too good to last. There is really a very fine spirit in the place and the N.C.O.’s and men have got it, too. The Sisters are all so pleased with our unique Quarters that they’re ready for anything. The C.O. has gone this time to the opposite extreme from daisies under our beds and we are sleeping in the most thrilling dugouts I’ve ever seen. They are bell-tents; but instead of the usual damp floppy, windy, squashy affair, you enter through two little green canvas doors into a porch and then descend by lovely steps made of ammunition boxes down into a little round dug-out room, with a boarded floor and lined walls for 3½ feet up to the ground level. Then come two feet of sandbags and then the bell-tent begins! The tent pole is done away with and the top supported by a stout wooden tripod from the walls – at ground level. Large portholes are made in the sandbags, lined with wood or tin – as windows – and ledges are fitted in as shelves. We have 5 solid feet between us and bomb splinters and are warm and cosy and dry and as airy as we like with door and windows, and we can loop the tent up anywhere above the sandbags. I have one to myself and the others are two in one, with ample room. It even has a tiny window of oiled linen let into the roof of the porch…
Major S. has been with a Brigade up the Line a long time and loved it. He says it’s ‘a grand life: there’s such a wonderful spirit of self-sacrifice among those chaps and never any petty jealousies or spite.’ I’ve never met a decent M.O. from up the Line who didn’t say the same…[3]