Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  B.E.F.

  July 10

  How can I support these bitter months of separation? I am sorry to rant and wail like this. It takes me seldom, but sometimes the monotony of the present and the uncertain prospect of our reunion are appalling. When I think of leave and England I think really only of you, though I seem to echo Mr Moore in saying so. If it were not for you I should be tranquil and content to waste here a year or two. But years of our youth and love I cannot spare, nor months nor days nor hours. Do you remember Hotspur when the Prince kills him “Oh, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth”? So the war is robbing us of ours.

  Now that I have complained I feel better. “Hope is a lover’s staff.” I must “walk hence with that.”** Perhaps all will be well sooner than we dare dream, and meanwhile on “the bitter journey to the bourne so sweet”†† I dedicate myself to you day and night, doing always—don’t interrupt—what I think you would wish. O love, what architects we are of air-castles.

  B.E.F.

  July 12

  I was delighted with His Grace’s letter urging The Times to ask the Bishops to tell the Clergy to pray to God for rain.

  B.E.F.

  July 14

  I can’t bear the story about Orpen’s spy. It quite worried me until I dismissed it from my mind, as the lady did the story of the Gospels, with the comfortable reflection that it all happened long ago and let’s hope it isn’t true.

  B.E.F.

  July 17

  How silly of Alan not to show you my letter. I wonder why. It was written for your eyes, as all I write must be, and all I do. You say I must not love you less. Oh, my darling, fear anything but that. Surely I have more grounds of fear than you have, for you still live among wine and roses and love, surrounded by the ardent youth of England, and the still more ardent middle-age and eld, while I see nothing but dusty veterans lumbering about in sweat and lice. But even if I were on Calypso’s isle with Helen to wait at table and the Sirens coming in to sing after dinner, I can imagine no enchantments or enchantresses which could lure me from my fidelity.

  B.E.F.

  July 23

  A very pretty letter from you today in which you spell propaganda “propregander” and “propergander” (I prefer the second) and in which you calculate that £8 a week works out at over £200 a year. You angel.

  B.E.F.

  July 26

  It is so pleasant here—more like one’s old-fashioned ideas of war—standing on the top of a hill and seeing the battlefields all around you. We can see miles of the country held by the enemy which looks much closer from here than it does from the front line. And ten miles away we can see—and lovely it looks through glasses—the ruins of the cathedral which once graced the hiding-place of a rash old man.‡‡

  These new poets—all that I have read—seem to me especially bad about the war. They can’t see anything in it but lice and dirty feet and putrid corpses and syphilis. God knows that nobody living loathes the war more than I do, or realises more fully the waste and folly and universal unrelieved unnecessary harm it does. But there is romance in it. Nothing so big can be without it. And there is beauty too. I have seen plenty from our parting at Waterloo until today. And those poets ought to see it and reproduce it instead of going on whining and jibing. And the ones that don’t whine say it is all so glorious because we’re fighting for liberty and the world set free, and to hell with the Hohenzollerns, and the Yanks are coming. This attitude of course is even more tiresome than the other. I think Rupert Brooke might have continued to do it all right. He started well.

  B.E.F.

  July 28

  This morning I have been undergoing instruction in patrolling, which means learning how to crawl, which most of us can do before we walk and I found I hadn’t forgotten. But it was bad crawling weather this morning and I didn’t enjoy it.

  I send you a dreadful photograph taken just before the last battle. I look like a startled hare that has suddenly seen a joke.

  There was no letter today. All the posts are very much upset by this tiresome advance. The last letter was addressed 3rd Battalion Gren. Gds., 88 St James’s Street.

  We have a new doctor whose name is Coffin. Would you believe it? I couldn’t at first but it’s true and it delights me. It’s so Dickens.

  Goodbye, when are you going to marry me?

  B.E.F.

  August 9

  This must be a short letter as it is written in my sleep-time and I am tired. All last night I was crawling and I am to do the same tonight. I like it as long as the ground is dry, though the thistles rather spoil it. It’s just like stalking.

  B.E.F.

  August 11

  These last two nights I have spent crouching and crawling. As I lay flat on the dun wet ground I pictured your party at dinner—Birrell fingering his port-glass benignly meditating a roar, Edwin, stomach thrust forward with sunken chin and listening eyes, Scatters holding the table and the attention of all with infectious smile and slightly frog-like expression of lust, Venetia fingering her hair, speaking seldom and with quick assurance while watching with anxiety the servants, the food and the wine, Mary slightly flushed and windblown, speaking with that appearance of diffidence which conceals self-confidence and self-content, you leaning forward and from side to side like the conductor of an orchestra, calling at will for the right sound from each instrument, yourself bright and animated and beautiful as the Mother of Love. That, you see, is what I am thinking of when I ought to be thinking of the enemy and of a thousand other things. We have a password when we go out on patrol, and last night I nearly gave them “Diana” but I was too shy to. Would you like to think of fierce men crawling about No Man’s Land in the darkness and whispering your name to one another when they meet?

  This afternoon in lovely sunlight and heat I went for a little crawl by myself and had rather fun. I found an arm sticking out of the earth. I don’t know what impulse made me take off the glove. The arm had been there a long time and there was little left except bones. The hand was beautiful—thin and delicate like the hand of a woman and the nails had grown long and even like a mandarin’s nails. How much the flesh may once have hidden the beauty of the framework you couldn’t tell, but it must always have been a small hand and I think the owner must have been proud of it because gloves are not usually worn at the war. It gave me no feeling of disgust or uneasiness but rather content to find that beauty can still hang about the bones, surviving the corruption of the flesh, and staying with the body until the bitter end of complete annihilation. The hand was raised and the fingers curved in rather an affected gesture. I wish I could have kept the glove. My brother-officers were amazed at my lack of squeamishness in removing the glove from a corpse, and yet they would think nothing of treading on a beetle. How different we are.

  When I came in from my crawl I found a hard case to deal with. Some stretcher-bearers carrying down dead and wounded this morning had during their absence been despoiled of their few belongings by their brave companions. It is apparently understood that when a man is killed or wounded his comrades instantly pounce on his belongings, but to take those of the stretcher-bearers too was considered a bit hot.

  And Oh! I hadn’t finished the story of my crawl. I finished by getting back into our own trenches at a sentry-post without being detected by the sentry, which shows how clever I am and how bad is the British Army.

  Breccles, Norfolk

  August 2

  I had to leave London today unconsoled by my daily delight and I must face erratic posts in this primitive county. I travelled down by train in floods of rain with Scatters and Birrell, starting with a firm resolve of reading and silence. It hit poor Scats cruel hard, for he can’t read although he had armed himself with a new-bought half-calf copy of the Oxford Book which I thought incomparably funny. Birrell read a life of Tom Moore and I had a little quiet cry over Eddie [Marsh]’s new edition of Rupert Brooke’s poems with memoir attached (I’ll send it tomorrow). Harling Road, the sta
tion for Breccles, has no cover and a platform a mile long, so in sheets of rain we descended a drop of some five feet from compartment to ground. Imagine the horror of seeing Birrell take a crowner on his back, heels and umbrella waving in air, a Victorian comic cut, but inexpressibly painful. Then I dropped Scatters’s 50/-Oxford Book into a puddle and before we got off in our shoddy open Ford our wretchedness was crowned by the sight of 300 happy happy prisoners packing into closed Rolls lorries. The house is if possible more impossible than last time, more moths, fewer lamps, more creakings, worse belfry-smells. I heard Birrell muttering “This is a house for the young” as his head cracked on a beam, showering him with wormwood dust, but it has the advantage of transfiguring Edwin, and tonight with Mary Herbert and me flanking him, good wine and lessened raid-funk, he was a man of hope and light, till Birrell (the ox, the fool) roared at him “Why do they want to label your scheme ‘Home Rule for India’? It’s done now, but the phrase stinks of failure.” He never smiled again. We discussed “bores” at dinner and whether anybody could steer quite clear of the epithet. I thought Hugo safe but was shouted down. Rib§§ was not passed. Birrell himself I think is free of any taint, but I didn’t say so, then Edwin made my blood run fast and glowingly, for he cited you alone as never having bored him. Now we are all in our beds, and I have got the George Moore book that is only privately printed because of its obscenity, but it looks as dull and monotonous as a drain-inspector’s treatise.¶¶ I have been thinking that journalism, with Max’s backing, might be a lucrative and honourable livelihood. Could you not write an article or so about the beauty others have missed at the war?

  Breccles

  August 4

  I have never borne three days letterless. Curse the ramshackle set-up and this barbaric county. The party goes well enough. Birrell is subjected now to a weak giggling state whenever Scatters opens his mouth, like you rather, and to exclaiming repeatedly “What a fancy it is!” Scatters has no respect for his age, but pulls spoons out of his pocket before servants and calls him “darling” or “old sweet.” To lunch arrived Lutyens, and Chapman from a neighbouring house. At 2.45 I suggested to Birrell a project of church two miles away at three. He jumped at it and in the twinkling of an eye Mary and he and I were tramping across country as zealous as converts. What I ask myself did Chapman think? How did he explain this piety, not seeing his own presence at the board was as good as a church bell? No reading today—chess instead and Scatters the champion beating Venetia repeatedly. A pretty spectacle was at midnight. Edwin having gone to bed, the rest of us strolled into the garden for half an hour’s exercise, somersaults, standing on heads, dancing, flying machine, etc. while Birrell stood stone-still in centre holding a little candle amazed, for all the world like “This lanthorn doth the horned moon present, myself the man i’ the moon.”||||

  B.E.F.

  August 4

  There was no letter from you today but I was feeling for some unknown reason so light-hearted and happy that even that misfortune did not depress me. I had a long sleep last night with troubled little dreams of you, interrupted and awakened by the sound of guns—our own guns—continually going off.

  I have been enjoying the Aga’s book.*** He must be a very clever man if he wrote it.

  It is a pleasant sunny day—the anniversary of the war. Where were you on August 4th 1914? I think you were at Rowsley. I dined that night with Patrick, Anne Kerr, Adele Essex and her lamented husband at the Ritz. After dinner we went back to Bourdon House and I left them to play a rubber while I went to the Foreign Office to hear the latest news. I came back and told them we were at war with Germany. I think we played another rubber and then George Essex went wisely to bed. Adele, Anne, Patrick and I drove round London in an open taxi to hear the fools cheering. Ringing their bells before wringing their hands, if ever bells weren’t rung and hands were. They sat back to the driver because of their hair and Patrick and I lolled like Pashas opposite.

  Did you read Lord Lansdowne’s letter in The Times two days ago? I thought it excellent and sensible and written in the grand manner. There have been replies to it which mean nothing. I feel so very strongly sometimes about politics. I’m afraid you never do. And I don’t find myself in agreement with anybody. I used usually to agree with Patrick. But now the Morning Post’s silly reactionary jingoism irritates only a little less than O.’s silly contemptible pacifism. Lord Lansdowne is the man for me. Do you know him? I like his appearance but I have never spoken to him. He had an ancestor at the end of the eighteenth century whom everybody hated and who was always right.

  I suppose the country must be ruled by Northcliffe, Bottomley and (with all due respect) Beaverbrook. This letter ought to have been written to Katharine in the shape of an anti-democracy essay. I apologise for inflicting it on you, but you said the other day—God bless your eyes—that you liked me to write without restraint and let whatever was simmering in my heart boil over and pour on to the paper. Unluckily this afternoon it was politics. It shan’t occur again.

  B.E.F.

  August 5

  We go up again tonight. The first four days we shall spend in the unpleasant place which is full of flies and rats and smells of corpses. The prospect is not very cheerful as it is pouring with rain and, which is sadder still, Wine Red is going to leave us in three days to command another Company. However, with my full flask in one pocket, my little writing-case with your pictures in another, my Shakespeare’s Comedies in a third and my cigars in a fourth, I feel armed to meet a sea of sorrows.

  You did very well to send Boufflers.††† I remember your showing it to me once when you were ill and I have always been meaning to read it. I have hardly laid it down all day. It has amused me almost too much, because it hasn’t let me go to sleep, as I meant to do, with the prospect of none before me tonight. There are so many points in which they are like you and me. She makes him promise not to gamble, he breaks his promise, their friends do not realise their love which they conceal, they are separated, she writes him a diary of her life. At a gay party she takes advantage of the darkness to cry, and she usually writes to him at night. I have only read half of it at present.

  Poor Chevalier and poor Madame de Sobran. They are on my heart today. They weren’t very happy, but they had far greater opportunities than we have. He goes to the war too, but what a pleasant, easy little war. And their supper parties sound more fun than ours. He says in one of his letters to her: “I am like a miser parted from his treasure,” which is just what I said to you not long ago. They quarrel a lot. We used to quarrel once, but never shall again.

  B.E.F.

  August 7

  I have finished Boufflers today. What an exquisite end to the story. I was so glad. Their marriage didn’t lessen the romance of their love. It isn’t a very good book but I am very grateful for it. There is too much irrelevant history of the Revolution but I can never have too much of that.

  B.E.F.

  August 8

  Did my letter cross yours in which we both suggest journalism as my future? Odd if it did. I would write the article that you suggest but I doubt whether the Daily Express would care for it.

  Breccles

  August 5

  It’s a funny situation—Birrell and three young women in the house—and rather wearing too, though mostly for Venetia who unselfishly took him a seven-mile walk while Mary and I slept. Tonight he told a story that amused me rather of Stephen, a poet (J. K.?), saying that because Heaven lies about us in our infancy, there was no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age. It was capped by Venetia quoting Harry Cust’s phrase that Heaven lies about us in our infancy and Evan lies about us when we grow up. You probably know them both, but I did not. I submit with diffidence.

  Breccles

  August 8

  They brought me news tonight of a British offensive. I turned sick and could see no beauty in the twilight glow or the country’s peace, which I had relished all the day. No papers ever wing through the wastes
of desolation that surround this lovely house, and in my fever and ravings of last night your danger, generally so cruelly present, was lost in the plans of future joys. I have had to bring a lot of strength and heroism forward to keep curbed a breakdown of tears and shudders and conspicuous cowardice.

  It was a jolly ten-mile drive to market this morning in a dog-cart through poppy-fields with a big gamp and a sack for the stock. Returning we looked like “flitters”—the trap overladen with frying-pans, pudding basins, a commode, gridirons, various tins, a terrier and two of the rosiest, tenderest, sweetest grunting pigs. We chose them out of thirty and took an hour to do it, with an old Colin Clout tipping us winks about points to fasten on to. “Furst count the tits” was his happy wrinkle, seizing a grunter by the back legs and counting off in pairs. Nothing under twelve should satisfy. That is something learnt. Our two pigs are regular beasts of Ephesus.

  A letter was waiting for me, or rather Wade was, because now she likes to hand me yours. It’s for her a moment of intimacy in her day and I believe like mine her happiest, bless her.

  Breccles

  August 11

  Alas! I didn’t send you Boufflers. In a hundred years shall we be read? I fear not, but all’s one.