The British army may have buckled and barely held on the German Spring Offensive, but the postal service is still going like gangbusters: only three days after he was wounded–and, two, at most, after he posted a letter from a field hospital–Siegfried Sassoon‘s latest news has reached his friends. And Robert Graves–the recipient, whatever the strain in their relationship, of one of the first notes–is already writing back. It’s an auspicious anniversary, too:
16 July 1918
Two years ago today I wrote that thing from Mametz Wood.
Or not quite: Graves, alas, is off by a day. He surely means not “A Dead Boche,” but, rather, Letter to S.S. From Mametz Wood, one of the more delightful of his productions, and a pillar of any anthology of epistolary verse–or, for that matter, of the literature of military comradeship. But Sassoon’s wound is the real matter at hand:
Dear Sassons,
Another long letter thanking you among other things for your birthday present is with your battalion, just missed you. But I must write again. How clever of you to get a bullet thro’ your napper and write me a saner letter than you have sent me for some time past.
Sane and swift–but not, evidently, concealing the death-defying behavior that Sassoon will later describe in the memoir. Graves clearly does not think that there is a conservative tactical explanation for getting shot in the head. So is it death-defying, or death-seeking? Graves seems to be seriously worried about the possibility that this “raid” was a suicide attempt. (It is, though, difficult to tell what Graves’s feelings–he’s a jocular male writing to a more socially successful friend, after all–really are).
…I do hope you’re all right: can’t you give the Line a rest, or are you so bent on getting killed? I had already started a letter:
Poor Fusilier, vexed with the Fate
That keeps you there in France so late,
When all our friends of three years past
Are freed from trench and road at last;
Dear lads, one way or t’other done
With bloody France and homeward gone
Crippled with wounds or mad or blind
Or leaving their poor clay behind
Where still you lag, forlorn and drear,
Last of the flock, poor Fusilier!but it will have to be rewritten. . . .
Graves seems to be at a loss as to what he might say to Siegfried (which is hardly a strike against him). At least he’s safe… So Graves fills the letter with his own news.
I say I’ve had a rotten time in the last few days: Nancy’s mother died suddenly of pneumonia; she tried to conceal it because my brother-in-law was on leave from the 2nd Division and she wanted to give him a good time. Poor old Nancy’s awfully upset, but being very brave about it.
From this sad story Graves moves on to peace talk–like many, this summer, he is confident that the American contribution will both end the war and secure a more just peace–and then, in a typically not-nearly-as-smooth-as-he-thinks-it-is transition, he opens a discussion of his and Nancy’s plans for parenthood and post-war living.
Nancy insists on a Sussex farm and what could be nicer? We’ll have to hurry up or your godchild won’t have a decent house to live in. The idea is to take the house over in September and the land next spring: my sister Ros is coming across to help Nancy who reckons she could carry on a small dairy farm of about 100 acres quite well. The only drawback to this scheme is one concerned with the dibs, though to rent a farm, as we’re going to do, costs little once we’ve got the stock. The drawback I mean is the fear of getting into debt at the end of the first year if it’s a bad one because we’ll have no capital and I hate cadging on our penurious relations. I think you’ll have to promise to help us out if we get into a hole, with some of your Persian gold: I don’t suppose there’ll be any need to ask you, but if you’ll say you’ll support us over a bad time it will be a great relief in times of drought, plague, storms and pestilence.
Yes: Graves has neatly segued from “you’ve been shot in the head–are you suicidal?” to “I hope you can be my financial backer in my new hare-brained farming scheme.”
Sassoon will not be amused. It’s probably less the clumsy attempt at lightheartedness than the fact that Graves seems to peg Sassoon as a rich man without a care, focusing on the difference in their relative wealth and forgetting personality altogether–seeing the money, that is, and forgetting the man. Sassoon has just been extremely generous with a birthday present to Graves, but that Graves would gratefully accept a princely sum–freely given and on Sassoon’s terms–and then turn around and casually suggest embroiling Sassoon as a backer to his dubious plans for financial independence and domestic bliss suggests a willful ignorance of Sassoon’s worldview. Sassoon is no fan of domesticity or binding ties, and if he can sometimes be generous, few men would be less likely to like their generosity being presumed upon…
Graves switches course again, as if belatedly sensing, in his writer’s heart (well below his socially awkward, letter-writing brain), disaster.
I wrote a trench poem the other day to show you I could write just like you, about two men I knew killed by the same shell…
The last verse is pure Sassons, as your parody was once pure Masefield.
That’s not what he thinks it is, either: it’s a parody of Sassoon that stays parodic–Graves’s aperçu about Sassoon’s “Daffodil Murderer” is a good one, it just doesn’t apply here. There is no way that Sassoon will not see that gleefully chiming last couplet as mocking his anguished rhymes…
Happily, perhaps, this letter will take some time to find Sassoon, soon to be invalided home…
One more poem, then, today, and nothing at all amusing about it. There’s an awful little coincidence here in that the parody and the poem of jocular concern are written to a vexed fusilier with some suspicion that he has been suicidally reckless in No Man’s Land–and now we have an elegy for a young officer who may have sought death in battle with more resolve, and more success. But his sister will not know of this for years, yet…
Vera Brittain, whose last letters to her brother Edward discussed a publisher’s interest in her poems, has written something for him. And it’s a good reminder for us, even (or all the more so) overshadowed, as it is, by her ignorance of the personal context of his death: can you still tell the truth about war, and loss, in the old uplifting poetic diction? Can you still take a young man killed in the fourth year of such a war and stretch him out on a marble tomb like a knight of yore?
That she wrote this today, a century back, would make it clear that the answer is “yes–or at least you can try.”
That Which Remaineth
(In Memory of Captain E. H. Brittain, M.C.)
Only the thought of a merry smile,
The wistful dreaming of sad brown eyes—
A brave young warrior, face aglow
With the light of a lofty enterprise.
Only the hope of a gallant heart,
The steady strife for a deathless crown,
In Memory’s treasures, radiant now
With the gleam of a goal beyond renown.
Only the tale of a dream fulfilled,
A strenuous day and a well-fought fight,
A fearless leader who laughed at Death,
And the fitting end of a gentle knight.
Only a Cross on a mountain side,
The close of a journey short and rough,
A sword laid down and a stainless shield—
No more—and yet, is it not enough?