Siegfried Sassoon: A Joy Ride and the Roll of Honor; Edward Brittain and the Censor

Siegfried Sassoon continues to write in his diary nearly every evening, setting himself the task, it would seem, of making something–anything–of his experiences every day. And today, a century back, buoyed him up, knocked him sideways, and then set him down hard.

June 12

Yesterday we did an Attack with Tanks. I was sitting on the back of a tank, joy-riding across the wheat and rye-grass in afternoon sunshine; suddenly I remembered my tank poem.

The Siegfried Sassoon Sense of Humor: rare, dry, and precise. “Joy-riding” on a deafening, smoke-belching tank but squinting still for some sort of outdoorsy-poetic good feeling… and then remembering his own disturbing vision of a tank bringing the real war home to shock (and, presumably, crush) the performing “harlots” and smug civilians in a music hall:

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, sweet Home,”

And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

So is he rebuking himself for his vapidity–to joy-ride on such a machine while the war still goes on!–or is he reminding himself of the experiential gulf and the fundamental reality of the war–that no tanks are coming to the music halls, and he and his men are likely to soon be riddled corpses themselves?

I’m not entirely sure, although the next paragraph suggests a continued rueful lightness of mood–perhaps he regrets the heavy-handedness of “Blighters” rather than its sentiments.

Busy again all to-day. Another fine day. The weather is miraculous. Like the sunlit opening scene of a melodrama—Chorus of haymakers. Act II Thunder and Lightning. Heavy firing in the wings. Act III Limelight; dying, speeches; ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ Act IV Memorial tablet erected in parish church.

But then the day takes a turn, and the war–with better, bitterer black comic timing than Sassoon–comes down heavily on his side of the gulf: another corpse.

After lunch to-day I glanced at The Times—killed in action Lt. C. N. Dobell, R.W.F.

Little Colin who was with me at Mametz Wood. And I took him out hunting with the Limerick Hounds last February, his first real day’s hunting. ‘It can’t be true; it can’t be true,’ I thought. But it’s there in print.

Fool-poems in the Spectator about ‘our unforgotten dead’. ‘We must live more nobly, remembering those who fell,’ etc. Will that comfort Colin, or his girl? He wanted life; fox-hunting, and marriage; and peace-soldiering. Now he’s lost it all; aged twenty-one.

 

Colin

One by one they’ve passed across the scene;
One by one; the lads I’ve known and met;
Laughing, swearing, shivering in the wet.
On their graves the grass is green;
Lads whose words and eyes I can’t forget.

Colin’s dead to-day; he’s gone away;
Cheery little Colin, keen to hunt;
Firm and cool and quiet in a stunt.
Is there any more to say?
Colin’s name’s been printed in The Times,
‘Killed in Action’. He can’t read my rhymes.

June 12^[1]

 

There’s only one other thing I want to write about today, but I’m really not sure how it handle it. This entire project makes use of a tension–a productive tension, I hope–between the swings and narrowness of immediate experience and the pseudo-omniscience that comes with reflection and retrospect. It is, generally, against the rules here to look ahead–to use our knowledge of the intervening century to retrospectively color the writing of the day. This policy privileges diaries and letters over memoirs–we are trying to “do history” in real time, with writing written a century back. But it can be irresistible to supplement with later writing that contextualizes the writer’s experience, and while some memoirs and autobiographies strive for a straight presentation of the facts (creating a more subtle but no less threatening kind of distortion) others explicitly depend on the retrospective position of the older author and operate more like a novel, with a distinction between the “voice” and the “character” that puts the reader in the ironic position of knowing more about the significance of events than the person writing the book did at the time…

I’m making this too complicated. What I mean is that while I always have to quote Testament of Youth with extreme care–because the older Vera Brittain has already framed century-back events by looking ahead to subsequent events which I don’t want to “give away”–we’ve now run into something that ought to be expressed in a sort of double future conditional tense: she not only didn’t know about this a century back, but she also will not know about when she comes to write the book–the book which created the “voice” that makes her such an important part of this project, and led to interest in her contemporary diary and letters.

So this event–today’s event–is at the heart of the story of what actually happened, a century back, and yet no part of Vera’s experience of the war or her later non-fiction writing about it. It’s missing from the story, twice, because the truth (if we may speak of such a creature) of her brother’s identity–or, more to the point, his actions–remained invisible for many decades afterwards.^[2]

But today, a century back, just behind the lines of the Italian front, Edward Brittain’s C.O.–one Colonel C.E. Hudson–was informed by the Provost Marshall that a letter between two officers of his battalion–one of them Edward Brittain, the other apparently a friend on leave–had been opened at a base, and read. (It’s not clear if this was targeted, done because of some existing suspicion, or merely as part of a standard military police procedure to occasionally spot-check the self-censoring of officers, who were absolved from having their mail read at the source even as they censored their own men’s letters.)

The opened letter apparently contained clear evidence that both officers were involved in sexual relationships with men under their command. This was not just a breach of the prevailing sexual morality (and both military and civil law) but, by any reasonable standard, an abuse of power and a serious threat to unit cohesion. And whatever he might think about the situation, Colonel Hudson’s hands were tied: the Provost Marshall forbade informing the officers in question while the investigation continued.^[3]