The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  And yet, as the sun rose after the battle, Maurice Wilson somehow still stood on Flanders soil without so much as a scratch on his body. He had been courageous, but also—he must have known—profoundly lucky. That moment marked the end of his first life, and the beginning of another.

  * * *

  Wilson had little time to process his trauma. The German offensive was not over. Far from it. Some of the survivors of the battle of Wytschaete were ordered to remain near the front line in case they were needed to rebuff a continued German advance. But Wilson was spared this duty. He was ordered to return to a camp behind the lines to recuperate. As his bedraggled column marched toward safety, a dozen more of his men were killed and wounded by German shells. Finally, five days after the battle, Wilson and his surviving comrades took a bath for the first time in weeks.

  After Wytschaete, new recruits came to the First Fifth from all over England, swelling its numbers. It was no longer a purely Yorkshire battalion. Wilson’s sonorous vowels and dropped aitches were now matched by flat Midlands accents and twisty Kentish slang. For most of May, and the early part of June, hundreds of new men were sent to the battalion in France. Occasionally, officers would be sent out with groups of soldiers to perform specific tasks. Wilson himself led a group digging new trenches near the town of “Pop”—Poperinghe. But for the most part, this period was quiet. On June 10, while behind the lines in a place known as Siege Camp, a senior officer awarded Wilson the Military Cross for his actions on April 25.

  Soon, though, the First Fifth moved back to the front line. They were positioned to the east of the ruined medieval city of Ypres—or Wipers, as the men knew it—and north of the Menin Road. Fighting patrols scoured between the wire and ditches of no-man’s-land on successive nights, with the occasional German bullet catching some English khaki, but no significant battles. By 1918, the country around Ypres was a hellscape of flattened villages, mud, watery shell holes, and wire. But by the standards of the battalion’s previous engagements at the Somme, Passchendaele, and Wytschaete, this period of the war was not especially dangerous. The atmosphere was also enlivened by the arrival of American troops, who lent a platoon to the First Fifth, and who were happy to swap exotic items such as chewing gum and Yankee chocolate with their British comrades. Wilson led many patrols of small groups of men into no-man’s-land, looking for Germans to kill. He rarely found them. Finally, though, Wilson caught the enemy’s attention.

  On July 19, 1918, on what his commanding officer’s diary notes was a “quiet day,” Wilson led a group of men in front of the wire in no-man’s-land just south of a notoriously dangerous spot on the Menin Road named Hellfire Corner, when a German machine gunner tracked him in his sights and squeezed the trigger. Wilson was hit across his back and left arm by two or three bullets. You imagine the startling feeling of being shot, like being scalded by an unseen assailant with the tip of a fire-hot poker: the strange, sudden conflation of pain, noise, and cognition; the impact enough to spin a man off his feet and land him in the Flanders mud.

  Wilson’s fellow soldiers dragged him back to the British trenches, applied field dressings, and called for the medics. Wilson was taken to a casualty clearing station in Berck-sur-Mer, a pleasant town many miles behind the front line, with such blessings as sea air and female nurses in crisp uniforms. German metal was removed from his flesh and the wound was sutured. From Berck-sur-Mer, he was moved to a Red Cross hospital in Boulogne, and from there, back to England by ship.

  Wilson had received his “Blighty”: an injury that didn’t kill you, but which bought you a ticket home. Was he grateful to the German who injured him? To be shot, but not dead? To be a hero, but not one of the millions of heroes buried in a pit in France? Such a reaction would have been quite normal. Many men who received a Blighty thanked the Almighty. “To be wounded” in French, Wilson knew from his happy lessons at Carlton Road, was to be blessé. But what a strange prayer to be answered, and what a crazy war.

  By high summer, Wilson had time to think on these and many other matters, out of earshot of shell fire and his commanding officers. Starting on August 10, 1918, he recuperated in a military hospital in Manchester, a rain-sodden city in northwest England. Wilson didn’t know it, but he would never again join his unit on the battlefield. His war—against the German army, at least—was over.

  CHAPTER THREE EXILES IN A STRANGE COUNTRY

  • August 1918–October 1923 •

  The doctors did not know what to make of Second Lieutenant Maurice Wilson. He left the military hospital in Manchester with his gunshot wounds healing well, as far as the surgeons could see, and movement returning to his left arm. They assumed he would soon be well enough to return to the front lines. But Wilson told them he was still in agony. He said he could not wear suspenders, as any kind of pressure around his torso caused him pain. He told the doctors that his skin was tender to the touch. The overwhelmed medics seem to have paid little heed to what their patient was telling them, or to what his symptoms might suggest about his state of mind. Wilson’s wounds, wrote one doctor having observed him in a military hospital in York, in early September 1918, “have soundly healed, and give rise to little or no disability. Recommend three weeks leave.” Maurice Wilson went home to rest at home in Bradford, with his mother, father, youngest brother, Stanley, and older brother Victor.

  Victor, the bright-eyed, handsome twenty-year-old who had gone to war in 1915, was now, at twenty-three, a husk. He had been shot in his left foot while fighting in France in 1917. The foot healed, but his mind never did. Victor was assailed by nightmares. He shook visibly. He suffered from vertigo. He was almost entirely deaf. The army medical board considered Victor at least “80 per cent disabled.”

  * * *

  In the First World War, army doctors struggled to understand the nonphysical harm from which so many infantry soldiers suffered. In the decades after the war, a narrative took hold that the entire army medical corps was callous in cases of soldiers’ mental distress. There is some truth in it. During the conflict, 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers were shot for cowardice. Many of those soldiers who died at the hands of firing squads would surely have been diagnosed now with a form of combat-related psychological harm. At the time, some army medical officers refused to help these men. One doctor recalled that he went to the trial of a man accused of cowardice determined not to assist the defendant, “for I detest his type—I really hoped he would be shot.”

  However, many compassionate and inquisitive army psychologists were at work who understood that trench warfare was taxing the psyche of its combatants in destructive ways. In February 1915, a pioneering doctor named C. S. Myers introduced the term shell shock into medical literature. At this point in the war, it was widely believed that the actual force of an exploding shell was the principal cause of the baffling array of symptoms exhibited by sufferers, which included deafness and trembling, but also amnesia—and, in some cases, extraordinary, unnatural ways of walking. Some doctors posited that the central nervous system of their patients was being physically attacked by the force of an explosion. But others wondered whether a more complicated psychological injury was at play. Whatever the causes of shell shock, the condition had never been seen before the First World War. A new kind of industrialized conflict had caused a new kind of harm.

  By the time Victor Wilson went home on a hospital ship in 1917, shaking and sleepless, the intellectual debate over whether the majority of psychiatric injuries were “commotional” (relating to the physical shock of a nearby explosion) or “emotional” (relating to the fear of an incoming shell, or other battlefield trauma) had developed. But it seemed obvious, not least to Myers, the psychologist who had first written about shell shock, that the evidence pointed in many cases more to emotion than commotion. Some troops had, of course, been near explosions and their bodies and minds were reeling from the impact. But many troops had been frightened, quite literally, out of their wits.

  By 1917, Myers under
stood that the term shell shock—as a catchall to describe a great variety of psychological and psychiatric distress—was insufficient. Ben Shephard’s authoritative history of army psychiatry, A War of Nerves, notes that, by the penultimate year of the conflict, frontline doctors were “learning to distinguish between rough categories—pure ‘commotional’ shell-shock, a soldier blown up by a shell, on the one hand; the various varieties of ‘emotional’ shell-shock—exhaustion, ‘neurasthenia’ or nervous collapse, ‘hysteria,’ and ‘confusion’ on the other. Each required slightly different treatment.” In Victor Wilson’s medical records, one can see doctors puzzling out his case, using the nascent terminology. Certainly, none of his doctors condemned him as a coward.

  * * *

  The doctors who saw Maurice Wilson were wary of diagnosing him with neurasthenia—for good reason. If he had post-traumatic symptoms, they would take longer to show themselves. However, in his overstatement of his apparently moderate physical symptoms, you sense his anxiety about returning to combat. It was a common enough feeling among soldiers on hospital leave. Ronald Rows, a doctor who worked at a clinic for neurasthenic soldiers in Maghull, in northwest England, noted of his patients that “the further the invalid soldier went from the front line, the more difficult it was to get him back to it,” and that England provided “a sense of relief, a sense of safety, a feeling of escape.… Quite naturally there arose a desire not to return.”

  Nevertheless, after his three-week respite, Maurice Wilson reported to a reserve battalion in a coastal Suffolk town called Woodbridge. Almost immediately, he caught the Spanish flu, which eventually infected around a quarter of the British population and killed more than two hundred thousand people in 1918 and 1919 alone. The illness was enough to knock Wilson out of the final period of the war. He spent the autumn of 1918 in a hospital bed in the university town of Cambridge, where he read news of the Allied advances that would eventually lead to victory. When the Armistice came, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November 1918, Wilson was still bedridden. His colleagues in the battalion had, meanwhile, liberated the town of Valenciennes, in France. Military bands played music, a British general gave a speech, the soldiers found their way to bars.

  J. B. Priestley, the Bradford writer, was in France on that day. He recalled, “The genuine Armistice took us by surprise after so many false reports, and we had to hurry to get drunk enough to go shouting and reeling about the town. I can remember trying to work myself up into the right Bacchanalian mood, trying to ignore the creeping shadows, the mysterious rising tide of regret and sadness, which I think all but the simplest men suffer from on these occasions.”

  Wilson was not a simple man. Consider the creeping shadows he felt when news broke of the end of the war. He was still in a hospital bed, hundreds of miles from home. He awaited demobilization. He was in physical pain. He dreaded being sent back to the Continent as part of the army of occupation. Two of his army doctors decreed that he was fit enough to do so, suggesting that Wilson was in “robust health” and “apparently under some misapprehension as to the degree of severity of his wounds.” But two other doctors who examined him intimated that his case might be similar to other “officers suffering from neurasthenia.” A weakness of the nerves. It was the only time an army doctor came close to diagnosing Maurice Wilson with a mental injury, rather than a physical one.

  As soon as he stepped foot back on English soil, Wilson feared what his future might hold. In December 1918, while he was still in the army, he wrote his first letter to the War Ministry, requesting that he be considered for a gratuity—an annual sum of money—to recompense him for the injuries he had suffered in uniform. The War Ministry refused his request. According to a medical assessment, Wilson was only considered “20 per cent disabled,” on account of his gunshot wounds, and did not therefore meet the high thresholds for the award.

  Wilson did not serve in the army of occupation. In the early summer of 1919, he received his demobilization papers and returned to Bradford, to begin his new civilian existence. But the Bradford of his childhood was gone.

  Maurice Wilson in uniform, wearing his Military Cross ribbon, 1918 or 1919.

  Up until the First World War, the Wilsons had been building an enviable life. In the industrial revolution of the preceding century, Bradford had become the center of the world’s textile trade through a combination of easy access to wool, soft water, coal, and cheap labor. The city was especially famous for producing “worsted”—a long-staple wool yarn. Its nickname, Worstedopolis, evoked both a rich association with its most famous product, and a sinister, fairy-tale quality. The center of town was a forest of smoking chimneys.

  Mark Wilson’s father, Tom, had moved to Bradford from the nearby city of Sheffield in the middle part of the nineteenth century, following the wool boom, and had trained as an engineer in a dye works. When Tom died in his forties, he left his wife, Mariah, in sole charge of their seven children: Sarah, Mary, Martha, Annie, Clara, Mark, and Harrison.

  Mark Wilson had a tough childhood, but he made the best of things. His five elder sisters worked, like many other Bradford women, as spinners in the mills. Mark left school in his early teens to work as a factory boy, sweeping underneath the rows of deafening machines. By the turn of the century he had moved into the lowest rung of management, as a “weaver’s overlooker.” By 1914, at forty-five years old, he had his own business at Holme Top Mill, on Park Lane. In the classifications used by the census takers, Mark Wilson graduated in a decade from a “worker” to an “employer.”

  As Mark Wilson’s income rose, so did his aspirations. He moved his family away from the polluted city center and bought a five-bedroom house at 39 Cecil Avenue, a respectable street in a good suburb. The avenue backed onto Horton Park, which was leafy and pleasantly landscaped. The family now had enough space, and money, for a maid to live with them. Wilson’s neighbors on Cecil Avenue were men of standing: managers, merchants, and magistrates. When they wrote letters, their stiff notelets were proudly embossed with their home address.

  The most obvious beneficiaries of Mark Wilson’s hard work and improvement in fortunes were his four sons. The Wilsons were a tight family, and the boys grew up fond of one another. Maurice would later happily recall an early Christmas morning, when Stanley opened a make-believe sweet shop, at which Maurice was the only customer. The shop put up the SOLD OUT sign by 6:00 a.m. As the years passed, and the older boys became teenagers, the Wilson brothers played team sports together—especially cricket.

  Before the war, many children in Bradford worked as “half-timers” in the mills from the age of ten or even younger. A half-timer went to lessons in the mornings, then labored on the shop floors in the afternoon: hard and dangerous work. Mark Wilson was a half-timer himself. His sons, however, were spared this future. Like other children on Cecil Avenue, they were educated full-time. They attended good secondary schools, learned trigonometry, performed in plays, and read foreign languages. Mark Wilson’s goal was for his boys to leave school at the age of sixteen to profit from their brains, not their hands.

  The Wilson boys would also be expected to serve their community, like their father. Mark Wilson had grown up in poverty. Now, as an employer, he saw deprivation every day. A workhouse stood a hundred yards from his factory. In workhouses a city’s homeless poor were given shelter in exchange for labor, in often appalling conditions. They had existed in Britain since the Black Death, but they proliferated in the Victorian era. By the early twentieth century, many workhouses had closed, but the Little Horton workhouse, near Wilson’s mill, operated in some form until 1920.

  Mark Wilson was also a Liberal Party member, who attended local meetings, and the treasurer of the Bradford Cinderella Club, which clothed and cared for the city’s most neglected children. He attended fundraisers. He knew the Lord Mayor. When war broke out in 1914, Mark Wilson dressed his youngest son, Stanley, as a Belgian soldier and put a tin in his hand to collect money for refugees. Stanley’
s picture made two editions of the local paper.

  Mark Wilson’s engagement in civic life was not unusual for a Bradford burgher. This was a city of social experiments, in which politics was always practical. In the 1830s, Bradford had been at the heart of a national campaign to institute a ten-hour-maximum working day in factories. In the 1850s, Titus Salt, a textile magnate and a Liberal member of Parliament, moved his entire workforce three miles out of the city to save them from the grime and pollution there. Salt built them not only a giant new mill, but a new model village named Saltaire, which had its own hospital, church, concert hall, and shops. In 1893, Bradford was the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party, which was committed to the then-radical idea of promoting working-class candidates in general elections. By 1914, the city was a bastion of trade unionism. Bradfordians didn’t just talk politics; they did politics. For the rest of his life, Maurice Wilson’s political consciousness was shaped both by the bourgeois Christian liberalism of his father and by the firebrand working-class agitation of his home city’s more famous radical movement.

  George Orwell wrote, “In 1910 every human being in these islands could be ‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent.” But Bradford’s prewar class divisions were less obvious than those in other parts of the country. J. B. Priestley wrote of its special atmosphere: “The social hierarchy was invisible.… I am not pretending we had a miniature classless society there, but we probably came nearer to having one than anybody born in southern England can even imagine.”