The ways of man are strange–even if the ways of the soldier are becoming more familiar to us. Edward Brittain was sent from England to a boat to a train to a strange battalion and then straight into battle, where he got lost under fire. After all this he was rather understandably indignant. But now, having survived a pointless assault (which cost 400 casualties and caused even the staid official history of the regiment to rail against the intelligence work[1] that led to it) he returns to dwell on a problem that arose in transit.
France, 4 July 1917
We came back to a village about 7 miles behind the lines yesterday morning . . .I am in command of A company at present but I don’t expect I shall be for long. The C.O. said he was pleased with the way we carried on in the line.
It is an awful nuisance not having my valise: I do hope you will be able to do something to find it at your end because I can do nothing at all now I am here. Will you please send me a copy of the contents of the valise as soon as possible because, if I hear nothing of it in another week or so, I shall have to start claiming for it.
But Vera Brittain–who must still be in the middle of the journey from trepidation to terror to relief that her brother’s several letters over the last few days will have caused–is more familiar than most with the way in which discomforts and everyday frustrations can loom strangely large, emerging between the peaks of mortal danger to trouble the valleys of the war of attrition. The British Officer Class will go into a foolhardy battle with no preparation and show admirable sang froid–but it often finds it hard indeed to asked to do without a bagful of accustomed creature comforts… On the other hand, lost luggage can’t seem to mean much to someone who feared losing her brother in another attack. I’m sure that Vera will do what she can, but once the fear of having lost her brother in this attack subsides, the underlying sadness of the situation will reassert itself: he is writing her a slew of worrisome short letters because he is friendless: he knows no one in the battalion, and all three of his closest friends are now dead.
Elsewhere in France, Patrick Shaw Stewart provides comic relief in combat training while on a Lewis Gun (light machine gun) course:
I need hardly say that I provide many hearty laughs for my school-fellows, as always occurs when poor Paddy has to deal with the tiresome mechanics incidental to modern war; I wish I had lived in the flint-head-arrow period; I could have instructed a company much better in them.’[2]
Siegfried Sassoon, meanwhile, is pursuing a more unusual course. He has begun his rebellion by writing a fierce statement of dissent… and then going home and puttering about his mother’s house in the country, instead of returning to duty. Today, at least, the bureaucracy has discovered the missing subaltern.
Adjutant Third R.W.F. wires, me ‘Join at Litherland immediately’. (I have now over stayed my leave a week. This is
the first step.)[3]
Before taking the second step, however, Sassoon will find that he can manage to stretch the sense of “immediately” (and his promise to be an obedient rebel) for two further days of country lolling before bestirring himself to respond.