The Master of Belhaven is a steady man. His diary is a daily record of the experiences of an artillery officer at the front, without literary pretensions. He’s observant and honest but not particularly demonstrative: as a professional soldier recording and assessing, he is not primarily concerned with the preservation of emotional impressions. And so his voluminous diary, which we have read only occasionally and at long intervals, has been informative without, I think I can safely say, sparking much passion in its readers. But that’s due in large part to the fact that the diary has been the work of a man in control. And as the strain begins to tell the diary becomes–vultures that we are–more gripping reading.
A damnable night, about the worst I have ever known. Not for a single moment has the shelling stopped and now, at 10 a.m., it is still going on worse than ever. My mess-cook has been hit and fell outside the door; everyone is badly shaken and every line down. We are completely isolated–I cannot get even the nearest battery on the ‘phone. I have twice had the wire to C Battery mended, but it is cut at once; and it is simply murder, sending men outside in this storm of steel… This is by far the worst strafe I have seen yet…[1]
With some contrasting irony, then, we can include this snippet from Jack Martin, who came to the front apprehensive, but now provides us with a propaganda-film-ready slice of life in the midst of a seemingly tolerable, even enjoyable war. Not only did a salvo’s direct hit on his bivouac prove scatheless–every shell was a dud–but he and his friends then had grandstand seats as the Red Baron himself attacked nearby. He was “very plucky,” and the fact that the onlookers were even briefly strafed only added to the excitement. No one was hurt–in their battalion, anyway. After these entertaining and not-personally-costly experiences, it was time for more fun:
We have played primitive cricket with a bat hacked out of piece of an ammunition case and a ball made up of pieces of rag tied round with string. It was a bit difficult to find a comparatively even piece of ground giving us the necessary twenty-two yards between wickets; the fielders had, perforce, to stand between shell holes and a step backwards generally resulted in a tumble into dirty water which was accounted a great joke by everybody except the unfortunate fieldsman.[2]
And back on the home island, other men are in motion–or are supposed to be. Today, a century back, was to be the day that Siegfried Sassoon reported to the Royal Welsh depot at Litherland–but he didn’t. He remains at home in Kent, his rebellion against the war advancing through inaction…
Hercules and Antaeus… surely something more or less like the statue in Brock’s office
And in Scotland, at Craiglockhart Hospital, the same morning saw the first meeting between Wilfred Owen and his new doctor, Arthur Brock. Owen is now riding a streak of great good fortune: the army has decided to consider his symptoms–concussion and possible neurological complications of “shell shock”–to be worthy of therapy, and now he has found his way to “precisely the right doctor.”
A Scottish farmer’s son, Brock was gruff and practical, but also highly learned and versed in a range of continental theories and practices. He took an unusually environmental approach to therapy, believing the key to good health to lie in the right relationship between organism and environment. And this, in turn, he defined in terms of the organism’s function, its work. Brock practiced what he called ergotherapy, a broad approach that encompassed not only working at one’s job or avocation but other activities such as walking, landscape-drawing, botany, etc. Literature, indeed, could be valued as therapeutic work…
And, though Brock was not inclined to appreciate art for art’s sake, he was fond of at least one artistic/mythological metaphor: his office featured a sculpture of Heracles wrestling with Antaeus, the message being that even the strongest hero was only victorious when his opponent became detached from mother earth, the environment that was the source of his power… The goal then, is to get those toes back on the ground.[3]
We’ll finish today, as we should–stretched between Britain and France, and not feeling quite right in either place. Edward Brittain has been sent back to the front–and promptly deprived of both battalion and valise. He will still try to effect a transfer to his former battalion, although Rowland Feilding’s recent testimony suggests that Brittain might find few familiar faces there…
France, 27 June 1917
I am now under orders and may go up to the 2nd Bn. at any time. If I don’t like it I shall write to Major Hudson who is at present in command of the 11th … and ask him to ask for me. That is the only way of effecting the change. I have been in Calais all morning . . . and got a shirt, 2 collars, a towel, and 2 prs. socks at the Ordnance Stores. I shall be able to carry these things in my pack and shall be able to subsist on them for some time! My only real difficulty is that I have no revolver and I am not going to buy another one.[4]
And on the same day when this unhappy letter was written to her, Vera Brittain was thinking of Oxford, and the world they had given up to go to war:
Oxford Revisited
There’s a gleam of sun on the grey old street
Where we used to walk in the Oxford days,
And dream that the world lay beneath our feet
In the dawn of a summer morning.Now the years have passed, and it’s we who lie
Crushed under the burden of world-wide woe,
But the misty magic will never die
From the dawn of an Oxford morning.And the end delays, and perhaps no more
I shall see the spires of my youth’s delight,
But they’ll gladden my eyes as in days of yore
At the dawn of Eternal Morning.