‘Shall I undress you by this lovely fire and carry you upstairs in my khaki over-coat?’ So he undoes my things, and I slip out of them; then he takes the pins out of my hair, and we laugh at ourselves for behaving as we so often do, like young lovers. ‘We have never become a proper Darby and Joan, have we?’
‘I’ll read to you till the fire burns low, and then we’ll go to bed.’ Holding the book in one hand, and bending over me to get the light of the fire on the book, he puts his other hand over my breast, and I cover his hand with mine, and he reads from Antony and Cleopatra. He cannot see my face, nor I his, but his low, tender voice trembles as he speaks the words so full for us of poignant meaning. That tremor is my undoing. ‘Don’t read any more. I can’t bear it.’ All my strength gives way. I hide my face on his knee, and all my tears so long kept back come convulsively. He raises my head and wipes my eyes and kisses them, and wrapping his greatcoat round me carries me to our bed in the great, bare ice-cold room. Soon he is with me, and we lie speechless and trembling in each other’s arms. I cannot stop crying. My body is torn with terrible sobs. I am engulfed in this despair like a drowning man by the sea. My mind is incapable of thought. Only now and again, as they say drowning people do, I have visions of things that have been – the room where my son was born; a day, years after, when we were together walking before breakfast by a stream with hands full of bluebells; and in the kitchen of our honeymoon cottage, and I happy in his pride of me. David did not speak except now and then to say some tender word or name, and hold me tightly to him. ‘I’ve always been able to warm you, haven’t I?’ ‘Yes, your lovely body never feels as cold as mine does. How is it that I am so cold when my heart is so full of passion?’ ‘You must have Elizabeth to sleep with you while I am away. But you must not make my heart cold with your sadness, but keep it warm, for no one else but you has ever found my heart, and for you it was a poor thing after all.’ ‘No, no, no, your heart’s love is all my life. I was nothing before you came, and would be nothing without your love.’
So we lay, all night, sometimes talking of our love and all that had been, and of the children, and what had been amiss and what right. We knew the best was that there had never been untruth between us. We knew all of each other, and it was right. So talking and crying and loving in each other’s arms we fell asleep as the cold reflected light of the snow crept through the frost-covered windows.
David got up and made the fire and brought me some tea, and then got back into bed, and the children clambered in, too, and we sat in a row sipping our tea. I was not afraid of crying any more. My tears had been shed, my heart was empty, stricken with something that tears would not express or comfort. The gulf had been bridged. Each bore the other’s suffering. We concealed nothing, for all was known between us. After breakfast, while he showed me where his account books were and what each was for, I listened calmly, and unbelievingly he kissed me when I said I, too, would keep accounts. ‘And here are my poems. I’ve copied them all out in this book for you, and the last of all is for you. I wrote it last night, but don’t read it now… It’s still freezing. The ground is like iron, and more snow has fallen. The children will come to the station with me; and now I must be off.’
We were alone in my room. He took me in his arms, holding me tightly to him, his face white, his eyes full of a fear I had never seen before. My arms were around his neck. ‘Beloved, I love you,’ was all I could say. ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ he said, ‘remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever.’ And hand in hand we went downstairs and out to the children, who were playing in the snow.
A thick mist hung everywhere, and there was no sound except, far away in the valley, a train shunting. I stood at the gate watching him go; he turned back to wave until the mist and the hill hid him. I heard his old call coming up to me: ‘Coo-ee!’ he called. ‘Coo-ee!’ I answered, keeping my voice strong to call again. Again through the muffled air came his ‘Coo-ee’. And again went my answer like an echo. ‘Coo-ee’ came fainter next time with the hill between us, but my ‘Coo-ee’ went out of my lungs strong to pierce to him as he strode away from me. ‘Coo-ee!’ So faint now, it might be only my own call flung back from the thick air and muffling snow. I put my hands up to my mouth to make a trumpet, but no sound came. Panic seized me, and I ran through the mist and the snow to the top of the hill, and stood there a moment dumbly, with straining eyes and ears. There was nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death.
Then with leaden feet which stumbled in a sudden darkness that overwhelmed me I groped my way back to the empty house.
VERA BRITTAIN (1893–1970) was born in Staffordshire and studied at Oxford. She begins her memoir Testament of Youth (1933) saying, ‘When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.’ Her fiancé Roland Leighton was killed in France in December 1915; her brother Edward in Italy in June 1918. Brittain worked as a nurse during the war, and joined the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment). This work took her to London, Malta and France.
In Sussex, by the end of January, the season was already on its upward grade; catkins hung bronze from the bare, black branches, and in the damp lanes between Hassocks and Keymer the birds sang loudly. How I hated them as I walked back to the station one late afternoon, when a red sunset turned the puddles on the road into gleaming pools of blood, and a new horror of mud and death darkened my mind with its dreadful obsession. Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet evening in early spring.
I had arrived at the cottage that morning to find his mother and sister standing in helpless distress in the midst of his returned kit, which was lying, just opened, all over the floor. The garments sent back included the outfit that he had been wearing when he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics – the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry. Those gruesome rags made me realise, as I had never realised before, all that France really meant. Eighteen months afterwards the smell of Étaples village, though fainter and more diffused, brought back to me the memory of those poor remnants of patriotism.
‘Everything,’ I wrote later to Edward, ‘was damp and worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been, you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time… There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition – the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head – with the badge thickly coated with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.’
Edward wrote gently and humbly in reply, characteristically emphasising the simple, less perturbing things that I had mentioned in another part of my letter.
‘I expect he had only just received the box of cigarettes and the collars and braces I gave him for Christmas and I feel glad that he did get them because he must have thought of me then.’
So oppressively at length did the charnel-house smell pervade the small sitting-room, that Roland’s mother turned desperately to her husband:
‘Robert, take those clothes away into the kitchen and don’t let me see them again: I must either burn or bury them. They smell of death; they are not Roland; they even seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. I won’t have any more to do with them!’
What actually happened to the clothes I
never knew, but, incongruously enough, it was amid this heap of horror and decay that we found, surrounded by torn bills and letters, the black manuscript note-book containing his poems. On the fly-leaf he had copied a few lines written by John Masefield on the subject of patriotism:
‘It is not a song in the street and a wreath on a column and a flag flying from a window and a pro-Boer under a pump. It is a thing very holy and very terrible, like life itself. It is a burden to be borne, a thing to labour for and to suffer for and to die for, a thing which gives no happiness and no pleasantness – but a hard life, an unknown grave, and the respect and bowed heads of those who follow.’
The poems were few, for he had always been infinitely dissatisfied with his own work, but ‘Nachklang’ was there, and ‘In the Rose Garden’, as well as the roundel ‘I Walk Alone’, and the villanelle ‘Violets’, which he had given me during his leave. The final entry represented what must have been the last, and was certainly the most strangely prophetic, of all his writings. It evidently belonged to the period of our quarrel, when he was away from his regiment with the Somerset Light Infantry, for it was headed by the words:
HÉDAUVILLE. November 1915:
The sunshine on the long white road
That ribboned down the hill,
The velvet clematis that clung
Around your window-sill,
Are waiting for you still.
Again the shadowed pool shall break
In dimples round your feet,
And when the thrush sings in your wood,
Unknowing you may meet
Another stranger, Sweet.
And if he is not quite so old
As the boy you used to know,
And less proud, too, and worthier,
You may not let him go—
(And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)
It will be better so.
What did he mean, I wondered, as I read and re-read the poem, puzzled and tormented. What could he have meant?
Five years afterwards, as I motored from Amiens through the still disfigured battlefields to visit Roland’s grave at Louvencourt, I passed, with a sudden shock, a white board inscribed briefly: ‘HÉDAUVILLE’.
The place was then much as it must have looked after a year or two’s fighting, with only the stumpy ruins of farmhouses crumbling into the tortured fields to show where once a village had been. But over the brow of a hill the shell-torn remnants of a road turned a corner and curved steeply downwards. As the car lurched drunkenly between the yawning shell-holes I looked back, and it seemed to me that perhaps in November 1915, this half-obliterated track had still retained enough character and dignity to remind Roland of the moorland road near Buxton where we had walked one spring evening before the war.
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was a British novelist, essayist and diarist. The First World War echoes through some of her major works of fiction: from the shellshocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the death of Andrew Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927). The following is an extract from an essay published in The Times on 15 August 1916 (signed ‘from a correspondent’). Woolf and her family had spent most of the previous month on the edge of the Downs near Lewes, Sussex.
Two well-known writers were describing the sound of the guns in France, as they heard it from the top of the South Downs. One likened it to ‘the hammer stroke of Fate’; the other heard in it ‘the pulse of Destiny’.
More prosaically, it sounds like the beating of gigantic carpets by gigantic women, at a distance. You may almost see them holding the carpets in their strong arms by the four corners, tossing them into the air, and bringing them down with a thud while the dust rises in a cloud about their heads. All walks on the Downs this summer are accompanied by this sinister sound of far-off beating, which is sometimes as faint as the ghost of an echo, and sometimes rises almost from the next fold of grey land. At all times strange volumes of sound roll across the bare uplands, and reverberate in those hollows in the Downside which seem to await the spectators of some Titanic drama. Often walking alone, with neither man nor animal in sight, you turn sharply to see who it is that gallops behind you. But there is no one. The phantom horseman dashes by with a thunder of hoofs, and suddenly his ride is over and the sound lapses, and you only hear the grasshoppers and the larks in the sky.
Such tricks of sound may easily be accounted for by the curious planes of curve and smoothness into which these Downs have been shaped, but for hundreds of years they must have peopled the villages and the solitary farmhouses in the folds with stories of ghostly riders and unhappy ladies forever seeking their lost treasure. These ghosts have rambled about for so many centuries that they are now old inhabitants with family histories attached to them; but at the present moment one may find many phantoms hovering on the borderland of belief and scepticism – not yet believed in, but not properly accounted for. Human vanity, it may be, embodies them in the first place. The desire to be somehow impossibly, and therefore all the more mysteriously, concerned in secret affairs of national importance is very strong at the present moment. It is none of our business to supply reasons; only to notice queer signs, draw conclusions, and shake our heads. Each village has its wiseacre, who knows already more than he will say; and in a year or two who shall limit the circumstantial narratives which will be current in the neighbourhood, and possibly masquerade in solemn histories for the instruction of the future!
The pencil inscription reads: ‘This hole caused by sh[ell] which killed Harry Brown 21st October 1918 in France’. Private Harry Brown was serving in the 9th Battalion of the Cameronian (Scottish Rifles) Labour Corps. The postcard was sent by Vincent Brown, Harry’s brother, and father of ‘Little Raymond’, who is pictured on the front (here).
The writing on the left of the Field Service Postcard onto which the pressed poppy is mounted reads: ‘The address only to be written on this side. If anything else is added, the postcard will be destroyed.’ The postcard did, however, reach Rosemary (Biddy) Shaddick, wife of Joseph Shaddick, who picked the poppy from a Flanders field and sent it home during his war service. It is currently held at the Imperial War Museum.
RUDOLF BINDING (1867–1938) was born in Basel, Switzerland, and studied in Germany. He was a writer and a poet. He served on the Western Front and was in command of a cavalry squadron. A Fatalist at War, which included diary entries and excerpts from letters written during the war, was published in 1927 and translated in 1929.
Easter Letter [1915]
West Flanders
I have not written to you for a long time, but I have thought of you all the more as a silent creditor. But when one owes letters one suffers from them, so to speak, at the same time. It is, indeed, not so simple a matter to write from the War, really from the War; and what you read as Field Post letters in the papers usually have their origin in the lack of understanding that does not allow a man to get hold of the War, to breathe it in although he is living in the midst of it. Certainly it is a strange element for everyone; but I probably find it even stranger, and feel more like a fish out of water than many who write about it – because I try to understand it. The further I penetrate its true inwardness the more I see the hopelessness of making it comprehensible for those who only understand life in terms of peace-time, and apply these same ideas to war in spite of themselves. They only think that they understand it. It is as if fishes living in the water could have a clear conception of what living in the air is like. When one is hauled out on to dry land and dies in the air, then he will know something about it.
So it is with War. Feeling deeply about it, one becomes less able to talk about it every day. Not because one understands it less each day, but because one grasps it better. But it is a silent teacher, and he who learns becomes silent too.
The stagnation that this siege warfare has brought about gives a superficial observer the illusion of peace. One regulates intercourse with the local population as well as one can, one tries to arrange fo
r the tillage of the land, one trains men as well as possible in mud and filth, one visits the officers of neighbouring units, one spends hours in discussion. The War is ignored; for not everyone has the capacity or the habit to notice it in everything and everyone. Yet it is behind everything and everyone; that is the strange part of it! The starlings that winter hereabouts in hordes whistle like rifle-bullets; and as the bullets cannot have learnt to whistle from the starlings one may safely presume the opposite. And everything whistles its tune of the War – the houses, the fields, men, beasts, rivers, and even the sky. The very milk turns sour under the thunder of shell-fire.
You will think I am romancing. But I am not. Only … the others do not notice this. They do not listen to the starlings; they hardly look at the fields; mankind has not changed since yesterday; and the milk has got sour through standing.
What exactly do they experience of the War? They know that the dug-outs in the line are comfortably fitted up, that they have brought up a mirror and a clock, that they have barbed wire in front of them, that the gunners hide their shells carefully, that troops are flung here and there, that the Field Post functions, that there are brave men who have been rewarded with the Iron Cross.
Then again, they notice effects. They see the wounded, hear of the dead, hear of towns that have been taken, of positions lost or won. But that is not the melody of war. It is as if one were to describe and understand the being and the melody of the wind by saying that it chases dead leaves, that the weathercock creaks, and that the washing on the line dries. All that is not its melody; as the fitting out of a trench, the Iron Cross, and even the dead are only infinitesimal outward and recognisable signs of an unknown and hidden mystery, be it sublime or cruel.
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War Page 5