Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  I had been young and exuberant, and now I was just a dying animal, on the verge of oblivion.

  And then a queer thing happened. My sense of humour stirred in me, and – emerging from that limbo of desolate defeat – I thought ‘I suppose I ought to say something special – last words of dying soldier’…. And do you know that I take great pride in that thought because I consider that it showed a certain invincibility of mind; for I really did believe that I was booked for the Roll of Honour. I need hardly say that I wasn’t; after a bit the corporal investigated my head and became optimistic, and I plucked up courage and dared to wonder whether, perhaps, I was in such a bad way after all. And the end of it was that I felt very much better and got myself back to No. 14 Post without any assistance from Davies, who carried my tin hat for me.

  Velmore’s face was a study in mingled concern and relief, but the face of Sergeant Wickham was catastrophic.

  For Wickham was there, and it was he who had shot me.

  The fact was that his offensive spirit had led him astray. He had heard the banging of our bombs and had been so much on his toes that he’d forgotten to go and find out whether we had returned. Over-eager to accomplish something spectacular, he had waited and watched; and when he spotted someone approaching our trench had decided that the Germans were about to raid us. I was told afterwards that when he’d fired at me he rushed out shouting, ‘Surrender – you——’ Which only shows what a gallant man he was – though everyone knew that already. It also showed that although he’d heard me lecturing to the company N.C.O.s on my ‘Four C’s – i.e. – Confidence, Co-operation, Common sense, and Consolidation’ – he had that morning been co-operating with nothing except his confident ambition to add a bar to his D.C.M. (which, I am glad to say, he ultimately did).

  I suppose it was partly my fault. Both of us ought to have known better than to behave like that. The outcome was absurd, but logical. And to say that I was well out of it is an understatement of an extremely solemn fact.

  3

  Thus ended my last week at the War. And there, perhaps, my narrative also should end. For I seem to write these words of someone who never returned from France, someone whose effort to succeed in that final experience was finished when he lay down in the sunken road and wondered what he ought to say.

  I state this quite seriously, though I am aware that it sounds somewhat nonsensical. But even now I wonder how it was that Wickham’s bullet didn’t go through my skull instead of only furrowing my scalp. For it had been a fixed idea of mine that something like that would happen. Amateur psychologists will say that I had a ‘death-wish’, I suppose. But that seems to me to be much the same as wanting peace at any price, so we won’t argue about it.

  Anyhow I see a sort of intermediate version of myself, who afterwards developed into what I am now; I see him talking volubly to Velmore and Howitt on the way back to company H.Q.; and saying good-bye with a bandaged head and assuring them that he’d be back in a week or two, and then walking down to battalion H.Q., with his faithful batman Bond carrying his haversack and equipment; and then talking rather wildly to the Adjutant and Major Evans (who was now in command), and finally getting into the motor ambulance which took him to the casualty clearing station.

  And two days later he is still talking rather wildly, but he is talking to himself now, and scribbling it down with a pencil as he lies in a bed at No. 8 Red Cross Hospital, Boulogne. It is evidence of what I have just written, so I will reproduce it.

  ‘I don’t know how to begin this. It is meant to be a confession of my real feelings, or an attempt to find out what they really are. Time drifts between me and last week. Everything gets blurred. I know that I feel amputated from the battalion. It seemed all wrong to be leaving the Company behind and going away into safety. I told the company sergeant-major I should be back soon and then climbed out of the headquarters shell-hole. Down the path between wheat and oats and beans, and over the dangerous willow-bordered road until I came to the red-roofed farm. Five o’clock on a July morning…. I passed the little cluster of crosses, and blundered into the Aid Post to get my head seen to. Prolonged farewells to the C.O. and other H.Q. officers – sleepy men getting situation reports from the Front Line. “You’ll see me back in three weeks” I shouted, and turned the corner of the lane with a last confident gesture. And so from one dressing station to another, to spend a night at the big C.C.S. where I tried to persuade an R.A.M.C. Colonel to keep me there till my head was healed. Even now I hang on to my obsession about not going to Blighty. I write to people at home saying that I’m staying in France till I can go up to the line again. And I do it with an angry tortured feeling. “I’ll stay here just to spite those blighters who yell about our infamous enemies,” is what I think, and then I wonder what the hell I am to them. If I’d moved my head an inch I’d be dead now, and what would the patriots care?…Then I remember the kindly face of my servant, and see him putting my kit on to the ambulance. I smile at him and say “Back soon,” and he promises to walk over to the C.C.S. next day with my letters and the latest news from the company. But I’d gone when he got there…. They’d sent me on to a place near St. Omer. If I’d kicked up a row and refused to go they’d have thought I was dotty, especially with a head wound. Who ever heard of anyone refusing to go down to the Base with a decent wound? Now I’m at Boulogne trying to be hearty and well. It’s only a scalp-graze, I say; but I dare not look the doctor in the face. It isn’t all of me that wants to stay in France now.

  ‘Nurses make a fuss over me till I scarcely dare to behave like a healthy man.

  ‘And still the memory of the Company haunts me and wrings my heart and I hear them saying “When’s the Captain coming back?” It seems as if there’s nothing to go back to in England as long as the War goes on. Up in the line I was at least doing something real, and I had lived myself into a feeling of responsibility – inefficient and impulsive though I was when in close contact with the Germans. All that was decent in me disliked leaving Velmore and Howitt and the troops. But now I begin to tell myself that perhaps half of them will be casualties by the time I get back, and I ask how many officers there are in the battalion who would refuse to go to England if it were made easy for them.

  ‘Not one, I believe; so why should I be the only one. They’d only think me a fool, if they knew I’d gone back on purpose to be with them.

  ‘Yet it is the supreme thing that is asked of me, and already I am shying at it. “We’ll be sending you across to England in a few days,” murmurs the nurse while she is dabbing my head. She says it quite naturally, as if it were the only possible thing that could happen. I close my eyes, and all I can see is the door into the garden at home and Aunt Evelyn coming in with her basket of flowers. In a final effort to quell those cravings for safety I try to see in the dark the far-off vision of the line, with flares going up and the whine and crash of shells scattered along the level dusk. Men flitting across the gloom; low voices challenging – “Halt; who are you?” Someone gasping by, carrying a bag of rations – “Jesus, ain’t we there yet?” – then he blunders into a shell-hole and crouches there while bullets hiss overhead. I see the sentries in the forward posts, staring patiently into the night – sombre shapes against a flickering sky. Oh yes, I see it all, from A to Z! Then I listen to the chatter of the other wounded officers in this room, talking about people being blown to bits. And I remember a man at the C.C.S. with his jaw blown off by a bomb – (“a fine-looking chap, he was,” they said). He lay there with one hand groping at the bandages which covered his whole head and face, gurgling every time he breathed. His tongue was tied forward to prevent him swallowing it. The War had gagged him – smashed him – and other people looked at him and tried to forget what they’d seen…All this I remember, while the desirable things of life, like living phantoms, steal quietly into my brain, look wistfully at me, and steal away again – beckoning, pointing – “to England in a few days”…. And though it’s wrong I know I shall go there
, because it is made so easy for me.’

  4

  On February 13th I had landed in France and again become part of the war machine which needed so much flesh and blood to keep it working. On July 20th the machine automatically returned me to London, and I was most carefully carried into a perfect hospital.

  There, in a large ward whose windows overlooked Hyde Park, I lay and listened to the civilian rumour of London traffic which seemed to be specially subdued for the benefit of the patients. In this apotheosis (or nirvana) of physical comfort, I had no possible cause for complaint, and my only material adversity was the fact that while at Boulogne I had hung my opal talisman on the bedpost and someone had succumbed to the temptation. But the opal, as I reminded myself, had done its work, and I tried to regard its disappearance as symbolical. Sunday passed peacefully, graciously signalized by a visit from two members of the Royal Family, who did their duty with the maximum amount of niceness and genuine feeling. For the best part of a minute I was an object of sympathetic interest, and I really felt that having succeeded in becoming a casualty, I was doing the thing in the best possible style.

  On the Monday I became comparatively active and instructed one of my friends to order a gramophone to be sent to A Company, plus a few ‘comforts’ for the officers. But Velmore and the others had vanished; their remoteness became more apparent every day, though I rejoiced when I received Velmore’s letter announcing that Howitt had been across no-man’s-land with ten men and had brought back five Germans and a machine-gun – these being the first prisoners captured by the 74th Division in France.

  Outwardly I was being suavely compensated for whatever exactions the war machine had inflicted on me. I had nothing to do except lie there and wonder whether it was possible to be more comfortable, even though I’d got a half-healed hole in my head. But inwardly I was restless and overwrought. My war had stopped, but its after-effects were still with me. I couldn’t sleep, so after a few days I was moved into a room where there was only one other bed, which was unoccupied. But in there my brain became busier than ever; the white-walled room seemed to imprison me, and my thoughts couldn’t escape from themselves into that completed peace which was the only thing I wanted. I saw myself as one who had achieved nothing except an idiotic anti-climax, and my mind worked itself into a tantrum of self-disparagement. Why hadn’t I stayed in France where I could at least escape from the War by being in it? Out there I had never despised my existence as I did now.

  Life had seemed a glorious and desirable thing in those moments when I was believing that the bullet had finished me off, when it had seemed as if the living soul in me also was about to be extinguished. And now that angry feeling of wanting to be killed came over me – as though I were looking at my living self and longing to bash its silly face in. My little inferno was then interrupted by a nurse who brought me my tea. What the hell was wrong with me? I wondered, becoming less irrational and exasperated. And I told myself that if I wasn’t careful I should go from bad to worse, realizing that the sun had been shining in at the window all the afternoon and I’d been lying there tearing myself to pieces and feeling miserable and frustrated. I suppose my nerves really are a bit rotten, I thought, lighting my pipe and trying to be sensible. But I was still worried by feeling so inglorious. I was nearly thirty-two and nothing that I’d done seemed to have been any good. There was some consolation in the feeling that one wasn’t as old as one’s age, but when I tried to think about the future I found that I couldn’t see it. There was no future except ‘the rest of the War’, and I didn’t want that. My knight-errantry about the War had fizzled out in more ways than one, and I couldn’t go back to being the same as I was before it started. The ‘good old days’ had been pleasant enough in their way, but what could a repetition of them possibly lead to?

  How could I begin my life all over again when I had no conviction about anything except that the War was a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation? That, at any rate, was something to be angry and bitter about now that everything had fallen to pieces and one’s mind was in a muddle and one’s nerves were all on edge….

  Yes; my mind was in a muddle; and it seemed that I had learned but one thing from being a soldier – that if we continue to accept war as a social institution we must also recognize that the Prussian system is the best, and Prussian militarism must be taught to children in schools. They must be taught to offer their finest instincts for exploitation by the unpitying machinery of scientific warfare. And they must not be allowed to ask why they are doing it.

  And then, unexpected and unannounced, Rivers came in and closed the door behind him. Quiet and alert, purposeful and unhesitating, he seemed to empty the room of everything that had needed exorcising.

  My futile demons fled him – for his presence was a refutation of wrong-headedness. I knew then that I had been very lonely while I was at the War; I knew that I had a lot to learn, and that he was the only man who could help me.

  Without a word he sat down by the bed; and his smile was benediction enough for all I’d been through. ‘Oh, Rivers, I’ve had such a funny time since I saw you last!’ I exclaimed. And I understood that this was what I’d been waiting for.

  He did not tell me that I had done my best to justify his belief in me. He merely made me feel that he took all that for granted, and now we must go on to something better still. And this was the beginning of the new life toward which he had shown me the way.

  It has been a long journey from that moment to this, when I write the last words of my book. And my last words shall be these – that it is only from the inmost silences of the heart that we know the world for what it is, and ourselves for what the world has made us.

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