No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  He dressed and waited for his card. It was Saturday morning, and he was almost the last man to be examined. He wondered what instructions they had had about him. Oh, foul dogs. But they were very close on him now, very close. They were grinning very close behind him, like hyaenas just going to bite. Yes, they were running him to earth. They had exposed all his nakedness to gibes. And they were pining, almost whimpering to give the last grab at him, and haul him to earth – a victim. Finished!

  But not yet! Oh no, not yet. Not yet, not now, nor ever. Not while life was life, should they lay hold of him. Never again. Never would he be touched again. – And because they had handled his private parts, and looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither and their hearts should rot. So he cursed them in his blood, with an unremitting curse, as he waited.

  They gave him his card: C.2. – Fit for non-military service. He knew what they would like to make him do. They would like to seize him and compel him to empty latrines in some camp. They had that in mind for him. But he had other things in mind.

  He went out into accursed Derby, to Harriett. She was reassured again. But he was not. He hated the Midlands now, he hated the North. People here were viler than in the South, even than in Cornwall. They had a universal desire to take life and down it: these horrible machine people, these iron and coal people. They wanted to set their foot absolutely on life, grind it down, and be master. Masters, as they were of their foul machines. Masters of life, as they were masters of steam-power and electric-power and above all, of money-power. Masters of money-power, with an obscene hatred of life, true, spontaneous life.

  Richard Lovatt knew it. They had looked into his anus, they had put their hand under his testicles. –That athletic young fellow, he didn’t seem to think he ought to mind at all. He looked on his body as a sort of piece of furniture, or a machine, to be handled and put to various uses. That was why he was athletic. Somers laughed, and thanked God for his own thin, underweight body. At least he remained himself, his own. He hoped the young athletic fellow would enjoy the uses they put him to.

  Another flight. He was determined not to stop in the Derby Military Area. He would move one stage out of their grip, at least. So he and Harriett prepared to go back with their trunks to the Oxfordshire cottage, which they loved. He would not report, nor give any sign of himself. Fortunately in the village everybody was slack and friendly.

  Derby had been a crisis. He would obey no more: not one more stride. If they summoned him, he would disappear: or find some means of fighting them. But no more obedience: no more presenting himself when called up. By God, no. Never while he lived, again, would he be at the disposal of society.

  So they moved south – to be one step removed. They had been living in this remote cottage in the Derbyshire hills: and they must leave at half-past seven in the morning, to complete their journey in a day. It was a black morning, with a slow dawn. Somers had the trunks ready. He stood looking at the dark gulf of the valley below. Meanwhile heavy clouds sank over the bare, Derbyshire hills, and the dawn was blotted out before it came. Then broke a terrific thunderstorm, and hail lashed down with a noise like insanity. He stood at the big window over the valley, and watched. Come hail, come rain, he would go: forever.

  This was his home district – but from the deepest soul he now hated it, mistrusted it even more than he hated it. As far as life went, he mistrusted it utterly, with a black soul. Mistrusted it and hated it, with its smoke and its money-power and its squirming millions who aren’t human any more.

  Ah, how lovely the South-west seemed, after it all. There was hardly any food, but neither he nor Harriett minded. They could pick up and be wonderfully happy again, gathering the little chestnuts in the woods, and the few last bilberries. Men were working harder than ever felling trees for trench-timber, denuding the land. But their brush fires were burning in the woods, and when they had gone, in the cold dusk, Somers went with a sack to pick up the unburnt faggots and the great chips of wood the axes had left golden against the felled logs. Flakes of sweet pale gold oak. He gathered them in the dusk, in a sack, along with the other poor villagers. For he was poorer even than they. – Still, it made him very happy to do these things – to see a big, glowing pile of wood-flakes in his shed – and to dig the garden, and set the rubbish burning in the late, wistful autumn – or to wander through the hazel copses, away to the real old English hamlets, that are still like Shakespeare – and like Hardy’s Woodlanders.

  Then, in November, the Armistice. It was almost too much to believe. The war was over! It was too much to believe. He and Harriett sat and sang German songs, in the cottage, that strange night of the Armistice, away there in the country: and she cried – and he wondered what now, now the walls would come no nearer. It had been like Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the Pit and the Pendulum – where the walls come in, in, in, till the prisoner is almost squeezed. So the black walls of the war – and he had been trapped and very nearly squeezed into the pit, where the rats were. So nearly! So very nearly. And now the black walls had stopped, and he was not pushed into the pit, with the rats. And he knew it in his soul. – What next then?

  He insisted on going back to Derbyshire. Harriett, who hated him for the move, refused to go. So he went alone: back to his sisters, and to finish the year in the house which they had paid for for him. Harriett refused to go. She stayed with Hattie in London.

  At St. Pancras, as Somers left the taxi and went across the pavement to the station, he fell down: fell smack down on the pavement. He did not hurt himself. But he got up rather dazed, saying to himself, ‘Is that a bad omen? Ought I not to be going back?’ But again he thought of Scipio Africanus, and went on.

  The cold, black December days, alone in the cottage on the cold hills – Adam Bede country, Snowfields, Dinah Morris’ home. Such heavy, cold, savage, frustrated blackness. He had known it when he was a boy. – Then Harriett came – and they spent Christmas with his sister. And when January came he fell ill with the influenza, and was ill for a long time. In March the snow was up to the window-sills of their house.

  ‘Will the winter never end?’ he asked his soul. May brought the year’s house-rent of the Derbyshire cottage to an end: and back they went to Oxfordshire. But now the place seemed weary to him, tame, after the black iron of the North. The walls had gone – and now he felt nowhere.

  So they applied for passports – Harriett to go to Germany, himself to Italy. A lovely summer went by, a lovely autumn came. But the meaning had gone out of everything for him. He had lost his meaning. England had lost its meaning for him. The free England had died, this England of the peace was like a corpse. It was the corpse of a country to him.

  In October came the passports. He saw Harriett off to Germany – said Goodbye at the Great Eastern Station, while she sat in the Harwich-Hook-of-Holland express. She had a look of almost vindictive triumph, and almost malignant love, as the train drew out. So he went back to his meaninglessness at the cottage.

  Then, finding the meaninglessness too much, he gathered his little money together and in November left for Italy. Left England. England which he had loved so bitterly, bitterly – and now was leaving, alone, and with a feeling of expressionlessness in his soul. It was a cold day. There was snow on the downs like a shroud. And as he looked back from the boat, when they had left Folkestone behind and only England was there, England looked like a grey, dreary-grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above.

  Memory of all this came on him so violently, now in the Australian night, that he trembled helplessly under the shock of it. He ought to have gone up to Jack’s place for the night. But no, he could not speak to anybody. Of all the black throng in the dark Sydney streets, he was the most remote. He strayed round in a torture of fear, and then at last suddenly went to the Carlton Hotel, got a room, and went to bed, to be alone and think.

  Detail for detail he thought out his experiences with
the authorities, during the war, lying perfectly still and tense. Till now, he had always kept the memory at bay, afraid of it. Now it all came back, in a rush. It was like a volcanic eruption in his consciousness. For some weeks he had felt the great uneasiness in his unconscious. For some time he had known spasms of that same fear that he had known during the war: the fear of the base and malignant power of the mob-like authorities. Since he had been in Italy the fear had left him entirely. He had not even remembered it, in India. Only in the quiet of Coo-ee, strangely enough, it had come back in little spasms: the dread, almost the horror, of democratic society, the mob. Harriett had been feeling it too. Why? Why, in this free Australia? Why? Why should they both have been feeling this same terror and pressure that they had known during the war, why should it have come on again in Mullumbimby. – Perhaps in Mullumbimby they were suspect again, two strangers, so much alone. Perhaps the secret service was making investigations about them. Ah, canaille!

  Richard faced out all his memories like a nightmare in the night, and cut clear. He felt broken off from his fellow-men. He felt broken off from the England he had belonged to. The ties were gone. He was loose like a single timber of some wrecked ship, drifting the face of the sea. Without a people, without a land. So be it. He was broken apart, apart he would remain.

  The judgments of society were not valid to him. The accepted goodness of society was no longer goodness to him. In his soul he was cut off, and from his own isolated soul he would judge.

  D. H. Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire in 1880; he died in the South of France in 1930. This passage is from the autobiographical novel Kangaroo, an account of a visit to New South Wales of an English writer (Richard Lovat Somers) and his German wife which includes the chapter ‘The Nightmare’, a flashback to Lawrence’s experiences in England during the war. Brutal experiences no doubt made worse by Lawrence having a German wife and the perception by the army recruiters in the Midlands that he was an intellectual trying to avoid doing his duty for King and Country:

  He hated the Midlands now, he hated the North. People here were viler than in the South, even than in Cornwall. They had a universal desire to take life and down it: these horrible machine people, these iron and coal people…

  During the war, the Lawrences were accused of spying and signalling to German submarines from the Cornish coast at Zennor, where they lived. In 1917, the Lawrences were forced to leave Cornwall under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. This extract from ‘The Nightmare’ forcefully conveys the sense of crushing oppression and harassment Lawrence experienced during the war.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON

  DONE ALL THAT WAS EXPECTED OF IT

  from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

  GOING INTO LIVERPOOL WAS, for most of us, the only antidote to the daily tedium of the Depot. Liverpool usually meant the Olympic Hotel. This palatial contrast to the Camp was the chief cause of the overdrafts of Ormand and other young officers. Never having crossed the Atlantic, I did not realize that the Hotel was an American importation, but I know now that the whole thing might have been brought over from New York in the mind of a first-class passenger. Once inside the Olympic, one trod on black and white squares of synthetic rubber, and the warm interior smelt of this pseudo-luxurious flooring. Everything was white and gilt and smooth; it was, so to speak, an airtight Paradise made of imitation marble. Its loftiness made resonance languid; one of its attractions was a swimming-bath, and the whole place seemed to have the acoustics of a swimming-bath; noise was muffled and diluted to an aqueous undertone, and even the languishing intermezzos of the string band throbbed and dilated as though a degree removed from ordinary audibility. Or so it seemed to the Clitherland subaltern who lounged in an ultra-padded chair eating rich cakes with his tea, after drifting from swimming-bath to hairdresser, buying a few fiction-magazines on his way. Later on the cocktail bar would claim him; and after that he would compensate himself for Clitherland with a dinner that defied digestion.

  ‘Fivers’ melted rapidly at the Olympic, and many of them were being melted by people whose share in the national effort was difficult to diagnose. In the dining-room I began to observe that some non-combatants were doing themselves pretty well out of the War. They were people whose faces lacked nobility, as they ordered lobsters and selected colossal cigars. I remember drawing Durley’s attention to some such group when he dined with me among the mirrors and mock magnificence. They had concluded their spectacular feed with an ice-cream concoction, and now they were indulging in an afterthought – stout and oysters. I said that I supposed they must be profiteers. For a moment Durley regarded them with unspeculative eyes, but he made no comment; if he found them incredible, it wasn’t surprising; both his brothers had been killed in action and his sense of humour had suffered in proportion. I remarked that we weren’t doing so badly ourselves and replenished his champagne-glass. Durley was on sick-leave and had come to Liverpool for a night so as to see me and one or two others at the Depot. The War was very much on his mind, but we avoided discussing it during dinner. Afterwards, when we were sitting in a quiet corner, he gave me an account of the show at Delville Wood on September 3rd. Owing to his having been wounded in the throat, he spoke in a strained whisper. His narrative was something like this:

  ‘After our first time up there – digging a trench in front of Delville Wood – we came back to Bonte Redoubt and got there soon after daylight on the 30th. That day and the next we were being shelled by long-range guns. About ten o’clock on the night of the 31st, Kinjack decided to shift camp. That took us two hours, though it was only 1,500 yards away, but it was pitch dark and pouring with rain. I’d got into “slacks” and was just settling down in a bell-tent when we got the order to move up to Montauban in double quick time. Kinjack went on ahead. You can imagine the sort of mix-up it was – the men going as fast as they could, getting strung out and losing touch in the dark, and the Adjutant galloping up and down cursing everyone; I never saw him in such a state before – you know what a quiet chap he usually is. We’d started in such a hurry that I’d got my puttees on over my “slacks”! It must have been nearly five miles, but we did it in just over the hour. When we got there no one could say what all the “wind-up” was about; we were in reserve all next day and didn’t move up to the Wood till the evening after that. We were to attack from the right-hand corner of the Wood, with the East Surreys covering our left and the Manchesters attacking Ginchy on our right. Our objective was Pint Trench, taking Bitter and Beer and clearing Ale and Vat, and also Pilsen Lane in which the Brigade thought there were some big dug-outs. When I showed the battle-plan to the Sergeant-Major, all he said was “We’ll have a rough house from Ale Alley”. But no one had any idea it was going to be such a schimozzle as it was!… Anyhow by 8.30 on the night of September 2nd I got C Company inside the Wood, with Perrin and his Company just in front of us. A lot of the trees were knocked to splinters and most of the undergrowth had gone, so it wasn’t difficult to get about. But while we were getting into position in shell-holes and a trench through the Wood there were shells coming from every direction and Very lights going up all round the Wood, and more than once I had to get down and use my luminous compass before I could say which side was which. Young Fernby and the Battalion bombers were on my right, and I saw more of him than of Perrin during the night; he was quite cheerful; we’d been told it was going to be a decent show. The only trouble we struck that night was when a shell landed among some men in a shell-hole; two of the stretcher-bearers were crying and saying it was bloody murder.

  ‘Next day began grey and cheerless; shells screeching overhead, the earth going up in front of the Wood, and twigs falling on my tin hat. When it got near zero, the earth was going up continuously. Boughs were coming down. You couldn’t hear the shells coming – simply felt the earth quake when they arrived. There was some sort of smokescreen but it only let the Boches know we were coming. No one seems to be able to explain exactly what happened, but the Companies on t
he left never had a hope. They got enfiladed from Ale Alley, so the Sergeant-Major was right about the “rough house”. Edmunds was killed almost at once and his Company and B were knocked to bits as soon as they came out of the Wood. I took C along just behind Perrin and his crowd. We advanced in three rushes. It was nothing but scrambling in and out of shell-holes, with the ground all soft like potting-mould. The broken ground and the slope of the hill saved us a bit from their fire. Bitter Trench was simply like a filled-in ditch where we crossed it. The contact-aeroplane was just over our heads all the time, firing down at the Boches. After the second rush I looked round and saw that a few of the men were hanging back a bit, and no wonder, for a lot of them were only just out from England! I wondered if I ought to go back to them, but the only thing I’d got in my head was a tag from what some instructor had told me when I was a private in the Artists’ Rifles before the War. In an attack always keep going forward! Except for that, I couldn’t think much; the noise was appalling and I’ve never had such a dry tongue in my life. I knew one thing, that we must keep up with the barrage. We had over 500 yards to go before the first lift and had been specially told we must follow the barrage close up. It was a sort of cinema effect; all noise and no noise. One of my runners was shot through the face from Ale Alley. I remember something like a half-brick flying over my head, and the bullets from the enfilade fire sort of smashing the air in front of my face. I saw a man just ahead topple over slowly, almost gracefully, and thought “poor little chap, that’s his last Cup Tie”. Anyhow, the two companies were all mixed up by the time we made the third rush, and we suddenly found ourselves looking down into Beer Trench with the Boches kneeling below us. Just on my left, Perrin, on top, and a big Boche, standing in the trench, fired at one another; down went the Boche. Then they cleared off along Vat Alley, and we blundered after them. I saw one of our chaps crumpled up, with a lot of blood on the back of his neck, and I took his rifle and bandolier and went on with Johnson, my runner. The trench had fallen in in a lot of places. They kept turning round and firing back at us. Once, when Johnson was just behind me, he fired (a cool careful shot – both elbows rested) and hit one of them slick in the face; the red jumped out of his face and up went his arms. After that they disappeared. Soon afterwards we were held up by a machine-gun firing dead on the trench where it was badly damaged, and took refuge in a big shell-hole that had broken into it. Johnson went to fetch Lewis guns and bombers. I could see four or five heads bobbing up and down a little way off so I fired at them and never hit one. The rifle I’d got was one of those “wirer’s rifles” which hadn’t been properly looked after, and very soon nothing happened when I pressed the trigger which had come loose somehow and wouldn’t fire the charge. I reloaded and tried again, then threw the thing away and got back into the trench. There was a man kneeling with his rifle sticking up, so I thought I’d use that; but as I was turning to take it another peacetime tag came into my head – Never deprive a man of his weapon in a post of danger!