The next day, Dr Dunn diagnosed bronchitis, and I went back in an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross Hospital. The R.A.M.C. major recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are you doing out in France, young man? If I find you and those lungs of yours in my hospital again, I’ll have you court-martialled.’
Yates wrote to reassure me that the horses had been found shortly after I left – unhurt except for grazes on their bellies, and in possession of the Fourth Division machine-gun company. The machine-gunners were caught disguising them with stain, and trying to remove the regimental marks.
At Rouen they asked me where in England I should like to be hospitalized. I said, at random: ‘Oxford.’
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So I was sent to Oxford: to Somerville College which, like the Examination Schools, had been converted into a hospital. It occurred to me here that I had perhaps finished with the war, which would surely not last long now. I both liked and disliked the idea. I disliked being away from the regiment in France, but I liked to believe that I might still be alive when the war ended. Meanwhile, Siegfried had got boarded too and tried to follow me to the Second Battalion; but arrived only to find me gone. I felt that I had somehow let him down. But he wrote that he was unspeakably relieved to think of me safely back home.
We were now wondering whether the war ought to continue. It was said that, in the autumn of 1915, Asquith had been offered peace terms on the basis of status quo ante, which he was willing to consider; but that his colleagues’ opposition had brought about the fall of the Liberal Government and its supersession by the ‘Win-the-War’ Coalition Government of Lloyd George. Siegfried vehemently asserted that the terms should have been accepted; I agreed. We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder. I made a facetious note about this time:
War should be a sport for men above forty-five only, the Jesses, not the Davids. ‘Well, dear father, how proud I am of you serving your country as a very gallant gentleman prepared to make even the supreme sacrifice! I only wish I were your age: how willingly would I buckle on my armour and fight those unspeakable Philistines! As it is, of course, I can’t be spared; I have to stay behind at the War Office and administrate for you lucky old men. What sacrifices I have made!’ David would sigh, when the old boys had gone off with a draft to the front, singing Tipperary: ‘There’s father and my Uncle Salmon, and both my grandfathers all on active service. I must put a card in the window about it.’
Deciding to stay in Oxford, I applied, on the strength of a chit from Currie the Bull Ring commandant at Harfleur, for an instructional job in one of the Officer-Cadet Battalions quartered in the men’s colleges. They posted me to the Wadham Company of No. 4 Battalion. These battalions had grown out of instructional schools for young officers. The cadet course was three months – later increased to four – but a severe one, and particularly intended for the training of platoon commanders in the handling of the platoon as an independent unit. About two-thirds of the cadets had been recommended for commissions in France by battalion commanders, the remainder being public school boys from the O.T.C.
We taught drill and musketry, and ‘conduct befitting officers and gentlemen’, but chiefly tactical exercises with limited objectives. The Army Text-book S.S. 143, or Instructions for the training of platoons for offensive action, 1917, perhaps the most important War Office publication issued during the war, was our stand-by. The author is said to have been General Solly-Flood, who wrote it after a visit to a French Army School. Since 1916, the largest body of infantrymen possible to control in sustained action had been the platoon – which now superseded the company as the chief tactical unit.
Though the quality of the officers had deteriorated from the regimental point of view, their greater efficiency in action amply compensated for their deficiency in manners. The cadet-battalion system saved the army in France from becoming a mere rabble. We failed about a sixth of the candidates for commissions; the failures were sometimes public-school boys without the necessary toughness, but usually men from France, recommended on compassionate grounds – rather stupid platoon-sergeants and machine-gun corporals who had been out too long and needed a rest. Our final selection was made by watching the candidates play games, principally rugger and soccer. Those who played rough but not dirty, and had quick reactions, were the sort needed, and we spent most of our spare time playing games with them.
My platoon consisted of New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, two men from the Fiji Island contingent, an English farm labourer, a Welsh miner, and two or three public-school boys. Most of them were killed during the next year and a half of war. The New Zealanders went in for rowing; the record time for the river at Oxford was made by a New Zealand eight that summer. Hard work in the damp Oxford climate, however, proved too much for my lungs. I kept myself going for two months on a strychnine tonic, then fainted and fell down a staircase one evening in the dark, cutting my head; I was taken back to Somerville.
The Wadham dons had elected me a member of the senior common-room, which gave me access to the famous brown sherry which is especially mentioned in a Latin grace among the blessings vouchsafed to the Collegians by their Creator. My commanding officer, Colonel Stenning, in better times University Professor of Hebrew, was a fellow of the college. The social system at Oxford had been dislocated. Mr J. V. Powell, the St John’s don destined to be my moral tutor when I came up, now wore the grey uniform of a corporal in the General Reserve, drilled in the parks, and saluted me whenever we met. A college scout held a commission, and was instructing in the other cadet-battalion. There cannot have been more than a hundred and fifty undergraduates in residence at this time: American Rhodes Scholars, Indians, and the unfit. I saw a good deal of Aldous Huxley, Wilfred Childe, and Thomas Earp who, together, ran an undergraduates’ literary paper of necessarily limited circulation, called The Palatine Review, to which I contributed. Earp had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years – as president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919, still in residence, he handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then re-formed.
I enjoyed my stay at Somerville. The sun shone, and the discipline was easy. We used to lounge around the hospital grounds in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and sometimes walked out into St Giles’s and down the Commarket (still in pyjamas and dressing-gowns) for a morning cup of coffee at the Cadena. And I fell in love with Marjorie, a probationer nurse, though I did not tell her so at the time. My heart had remained whole, if numbed, since Dick’s disappearance from it, yet I felt difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience of woman love. I used to meet Marjorie, who was a professional pianist, when I visited a friend in another ward; but we had little talk together, except once when she confided in me how beastly a time the other nurses gave her – for having a naturalized German father. I wrote to her after I had left hospital, but finding that she was engaged to a subaltern in France, I stopped writing. I had seen what it must feel like to be in France and have a rival at home. Yet her reproofs of my silence suggested that she was at least as fond of me as of him. I did not press the point, but let the affair end almost before it started.
While with the cadet-battalion, I went out nearly every Sunday to the village of Garsington. Siegfried’s friends, Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell, lived at the manor house there. The Morrells were pacifists, and I first heard from them that there was another side to the question of war guilt. Clive Bell, England’s leading art critic and a conscientious objector, looked after the cows on the manor farm; he had been allowed to do this. ‘work of national importance’ instead of going into the army. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Si
twell, Herbert Read, Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself, and most other young writers of the time, none of whom now believed in the war.
Bertrand Russell, too old for military service, but an ardent pacifist (a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and asked: ‘Tell me, if a company of your men were brought along to break a strike of munition makers, and the munition makers refused to go back to work, would you order the men to fire?’
‘Yes, if everything else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.’
He asked in surprise: ‘Would your men obey you?’
‘They loathe munition-workers, and would be only too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all skrim-shankers.’
‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?’
‘Yes, as well as I do.’
He could not understand my attitude.
Lytton Strachey was unfit, but instead of allowing himself to be rejected by the doctors preferred to appear before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector. He told us of the extraordinary impression caused by an air-cushion which he inflated in court as a protest against the hardness of the benches. Asked by the chairman the usual question: ‘I understand, Mr Strachey, that you have a conscientious objection to war?’, he replied (in his curious falsetto voice): ‘Oh, no, not at all, only to this war.’ And to the chairman’s other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: ‘Tell me, Mr Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?’ he replied with an air of noble virtue: ‘I would try to get between them.’
In 1916, I met more well-known writers than ever before or since. There were two unsuccessful meetings. George Moore had recently written The Brook Kerith, and my neurasthenic twitchings interrupted the calm, easy flow of his conversational periods. He told me irritably not to fidget; in return I taunted him with having introduced cactus into the Holy Land some fifteen centuries before the discovery of America, its land of origin.
At the Reform Club, H. G. Wells, who was ‘Mr Britling’ in those days, and full of military optimism, talked without listening. He had just been taken for a ‘Cook’s Tour’ to France, and staff-conductors had shown him the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were allowed to see. He described his experience at length, and seemed unaware that I and Siegfried, who was with me, had also seen the sights.
But I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness; and I liked Augustine Birrell, who had been Asquith’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. I dared correct him when he remarked that the Apocrypha was never read in church services; and again, when he described Elihu the Jebusite as one of Job’s comforters. Birrell tried to override me on both points, but I called for a Bible and proved them.
He glowered very kindly at me: ‘I will say to you what Thomas Carlyle once said to a young man who caught him out in a misquotation: “Young man, you are heading straight for the pit of Hell!”’
And who else? John Galsworthy; or did I first meet him a year or two later? He was editing a literary magazine called Reveille, published under Government auspices, the proceeds of which were to go to a disabled-soldier fund. I contributed to it. When we met, he asked me technical questions about solider-slang – he was writing a war-play and wanted it to be accurate. He seemed a humble man and, except for these questions, listened without talking; which is, apparently, his usual practice.
I met Ivor Novello, in 1918, two years older than myself, and already world-famous as the author and composer of the patriotic song:
Keep the home fires burning
While the hearts are yearning…
There was some talk of his setting a song of mine. I found him wearing a silk dressing-gown, in an atmosphere of incense and cocktails. He and his young stage-friends were all sitting or lying on cushions scattered about the floor. Feeling uncomfortably military, I removed my spurs (I was a temporary field-officer at the time) in case anyone got pricked. Novello had joined the Royal Navy Air Service but, his genius being officially recognized, was allowed to keep the home fires burning until the boys came home…
The War Office now stopped the privilege that officers enjoyed, after leaving hospital, of going to their own homes for convalescence. It had been noticed that many of them took no trouble to get well and return to duty; they kept late nights, drank, and overtaxed their strength. Therefore, when somewhat recovered, I was sent to a convalescent home in the Isle of Wight – none other than Osbome Palace; my bedroom had once been the royal night-nursery of King Edward VII and his brothers and sisters. This was the strawberry season and fine weather; we patients could take all Queen Victoria’s favourite walks through the woods and along the quiet seashore, play billiards in the royal billiard-room, sing bawdy songs in the royal music-room, drink the Prince Consort’s favourite Rhine wines among his Winterhalters, play golf-croquet, and visit Cowes when in need of adventure. We were made honorary members of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Another of the caricature scenes of my life: myself as pseudo-yachtsman, sitting in a leather chair in the smoking-room of what had been, and is now again, the most exclusive club in the world, drinking gin and ginger, and sweeping the Solent with a powerful telescope.
I made friends with the French Benedictine Fathers, who lived near by. Driven from Solesmes in France by the anti-clerical laws of 1906, they had built themselves a new abbey at Quarr. The abbey had a special commission from the Vatican to collect and edit ancient church music. Hearing the fathers at their plain-song made me for the moment forget the war completely. Many of them were ex-Army officers who, I was told, had turned to religion after the ardours of campaign or disappointments in love. They saw the war as a dispensation of God for restoring France to Catholicism, and told me that the Freemason element in the French Army, represented by General ‘Papa’ Joffre, had now been discredited, and that the present Supreme Command, Foch’s, was predominantly Catholic – an augury, they claimed of Allied victory.
The Guest-master showed me a library of twenty thousand volumes, hundreds of them black-letter. The librarian, an old monk from Béthune, begged me for an accurate account of the damage done to his quarter of the town. The Guest-master asked whether I should like to read any of the books. There were all kinds: history, botany, music, architecture, engineering, almost every other lay subject. I asked him whether they had a poetry section. He smiled kindly and said, no, poetry could not be regarded as improving.
The Father Superior inquired whether I were a bon catholique.
I replied politely, that, no, I did not belong to the ‘true religion’. To spare him a confession of agnosticsm, I explained that my parents were Protestants.
‘But if ours is the true religion, why do you not turn Catholic?’ He asked the question so simply that I felt ashamed.
Having to put him off somehow, I said: ‘Reverend Father, we have a proverb in England, never to swap horses while crossing a stream. I am still caught up in the war, you know.’
When he looked disappointed, I offered him: ‘Peut-être après la guerre’ – the stock-answer that the Pas de Calais girls were ordered by their priests to give Allied soldiers who asked for a ‘Promenade, mademoiselle?’ It was seldom given, I heard, except for the purpose of bargaining.
All the same, I half-envied the Fathers (finished with wars and love-affairs) their abbey on the hill, and admired their kindness, gentleness, and seriousness. Those clean, whitewashed cells and meals eaten in silence at the long oaken tables, while a novice read The Lives of the Saints! The food, mostly cereals, vegetables, and fruit, was the best I had tasted for years –I had eaten enough ration beef, ration jam, ration bread, and cheese to last me a lifetime. At Quarr, Catholicism ceased to repel me.
Many of the patients at Osborne were neurasthenic and should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A. A. Milne was there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in his least humorous vein. One
Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, decided with me that something new must be started. So we founded the ‘Royal Albert Society’, its pretended aim being to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort. My regalia as president consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian boots, and a pair of side-whiskers. Official business might not proceed until the announcement had been duly made that ‘The whiskers are on the table’. Membership was open only to officers who professed themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort; those who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada; those who had resided for six months or longer by the banks of the Albert Nyanza; those who held the Albert Medal for saving life; or those who were linked with the Prince Consort’s memory in any other signal way. This must have been the first of the now popular burlesques of Victorianism. The members were instructed to report at each meeting reminiscences collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers, throwing light on the human side of the Consort’s life. We had fifteen members and ate quantities of strawberries.
On one occasion, a dozen officers came in to join the society, professing to have the necessary qualifications. One claimed to be the grandson of the man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life; the others were all interested students. They submitted quietly at first to the ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the Prince Consort’s private life, alleging that they could substantiate them with photographic evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that sort of society. Therefore, as president, I rose and told in an improved version the story which had won the 1914 All-England Inter-regimental Competition at Aldershot for the filthiest story of the year. I linked it up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had heard it from the lips of John Brown, the Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humour Queen Victoria used to find such delight; and that, having prevented him from sleeping for three days and nights, it had been a contributory cause of his premature death. The interrupters threw up their hands, in shocked surrender, and walked out. It struck me how far I had come since my first years at Charterhouse. If only I had used the same technique there!
Goodbye to All That Page 26