Yesterday, a century back, Edward Brittain wrote to his sister Vera advising her on her possible future either at Oxford or once again as a V.A.D… but the mail between England and Italy is not as speedy as the mail between England and France, and she has already moved on to a different set of calculations. Not only that, but she anticipates and dismisses his confidence that her experience would be noticed and respected by the bureaucracy…
10 Oakwood Court, London W14, 4 June 1918
As a V.A.D. I must perforce join up in England as a sink-scrubber once more, & have always the limited scope of a permanent subordinate.
So what then–how could she get closer to the war than hitherto–closer than nursing in Étaples, which has just been bombed?
As a W.A.A.C. officer I should have responsibility over women, which I [think] I’m worth, & am able to be sent almost up to the firing line. This War is never going to end & V.A.D.ing leads nowhere, but a woman’s commission might lead to some sort of official appointment après la guerre. Of course when I first joined there was no such thing as a woman officer but now her day is beginning to dawn. The case would be analogous to that of an R.A.M.C. orderly who got [a] commission in the Infantry.
It seems clear what Vera wants–but she is asking her brother (her little brother, but an officer) for advice:
Please give me your opinion which I value greatly. If you would rather think of me as a nurse I should prefer to remain one. Would Roland have liked me to wear khaki?
But there is something else to consider as well:
The novel is progressing but Mrs Leighton & I have decided it cannot be published till some time after the War as there’s too much truth in it about things & people. If I published it now I should have to water down the plot & weaken the characters. Mrs Leighton says ‘No, it’s too good as it is to lose; write it as you thought it & hold it back.’ I have an idea [for] another which I could publish & shall begin when I’ve finished the other. In the second the hero will be taken from you, & I don’t suppose you’d have me up for libel![1]
I wonder if this mention of libel is a faint echo of the Pemberton Billing case… probably not. Anyway, it would seem that their mother’s condition has improved to the extent that Vera is not only considering a new enlistment but also making progress on a novel, loosely based on the events of her own life over the past few years… and discussing it with the only professional writers with whom she is closely connected–Roland‘s mother.
Siegfried Sassoon, happy warrior though he might be, is not a particularly happy rear-area mid-level manager. Tersely, he falls back onto his diary–using it to vent his feelings after a trying day.
June 4
Out with the Company from 7.15 till 4.15. Did a Battalion attack, and after lunch a gas-lecture and we were bombarded with smoke and gas etc. I was feeling jumpy and nerve-ridden and exasperated all day. It would be a relief to shed tears now… I will read de la Mare and try to buck up. If is the result of working so hard and being
worried with trivial details from morning till night. After all, I am nothing but what the Brigadier calls ‘a potential killer of Germans (Huns)’. O God, why must I do it? I’m not. I am only here to look after some men.
Alright then! Nerves calmed, sense of purpose restored… But then the diary pivots from moral(e) resource to writer’s notebook. It’s hard to tell if the next bit, with its separate subheading, is intended more as fiction than pure memoir (whatever that might mean). But this is certainly a dream we can imagine Sassoon dreaming, and being eager to record:
Dreams
Last night I dreamed that I was leading my Company into battle. I was afraid they wouldn’t follow me (in my dream I’d forgotten that I should be trying to control them from behind). And everything wept wrong; and I lost them; and I knew they were on in front somewhere; and it all got mixed up with ‘getting left’ in a hunt and I’d lost hounds…[2]
Finally, today, a century back, another young poet–the high-flown, luckless Captain Claude Templer–is dead, killed late tonight (or early tomorrow morning) while returning from a raid on the German lines. The posthumous publication of his poems (and a few deliriously martial letters) will give a small measure of immortality to Templer, who remained fired by the old heroic impulses to the end. Despite the fact that he was captured as long ago as 1914–and recaptured after escape attempts–he longed to go back to the glorious fight, and got his wish–and despite intimations of mortality he was eager to fight as hard as possible. The editor of the posthumous publication of his writing tells us that he planned tonight’s raid himself, and assures the reader that, by it, Templer was “avenged” for his suffering in the P.O.W. camps. That sounds like Templer, but then again he was also the sort who might freely admit that he was a volunteer and that the principle of capturing defeated warriors–and, perhaps, even the harsher confinement of those P.O.W.s who show a determination to escape–was part of “the game.”
But who knows? Templer was a writer, but not the brightest bulb in the literary firmament–and despite his long confinement in Germany, he was still only twenty-two. He was “struck by a chance shell and instantaneously killed on the field of honour”–or so, we assume, his parents were told. (We might guess that his death may not have been as neat as that.) Unlike Achilles, he will not get to reassess his choices with an afterword from the underworld. It’s Odysseus who hears that reassessment, of course, the same Odysseus who in Book Ten of the Iliad plans and executes a night raid of the enemy’s lines that has little strategic purpose, late in a long war, and only gets more people killed.
But this rather disenchanted take is both unsporting (I don’t wish to seem like I am unloading on Templer simply because his poetry is so naive; that shouldn’t affect the pathos of his death) and far from Templer’s own register: he was a convinced Romantic who wrote elaborately faux-medieval, semi-Italianate verse. He doesn’t get to have the last word, but neither should I, really: instead, I will bestow it upon “T.M.,” the editorial voice of the poems which appeared after the war (and after a partial manuscript was repatriated). I wonder if this is a comrade, or whether it is a voice from the other side of the gulf, still insisting, from the drab post-war future, that it all made sense:
Not only was he an artist in thoughts, in words; but an artist in deeds and his life was crowned by the supreme sacrifice ‘for the poetry of an idea’: the sacrifice which every ‘gallant knight’ must make before the summit is attained.[3]