That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  Your friend,

  Geoffrey Cordingley

  Sunday, 8 November 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Anstace

  Today, I had sufficient leisure to walk about the park and get my bearings. Up till now, I have not been able to explore beyond the immediate confines of the camp, it sprawls so. About half a mile away, however, away from the fields of tents is a great house. It is in its grounds, in fact, that Malton Camp is set up.

  I can now recognize what I know as an exercise yard as, in fact, a stable-yard, a cobbled square, bound on two sides by coach houses and stable-block, pushed out into an adjoining grazing meadow. The buildings served the mansion which sits out of sight, to the north, behind a thick copse—though most of the leaves are down now— and a slight rise in the ground.

  The house is concealed from the roads and lanes hereabouts. Privacy must have been more important to the owners than ostentation. You would think otherwise, however, when you see the house because it is extraordinarily flamboyant, more like an elaborate French château or an excessively ornate seaside hotel than an English country seat. I do not know much about architecture but clearly this is a late-Victorian pile built with new money. The family, I gather, are second-generation merchant bankers and must have been exceedingly well-off, with funds to spare, to add cupolas and fancy iron finials to every tower, of which there are many. The house has a pinkish hue to it—there are some hotels in Bloomsbury, I fancy, made out of the same brick or stone—and, when I saw the place this afternoon, the virginia creeper, which is doing its very best to convey an impression of aged grandeur, had turned whole faces of the mansion an extraordinary deep red.

  There is a lake too and some shrubberies but not, I think, any of the deep herbaceous borders which you tell me you are planning for your aunt’s garden.

  I wonder how this house, with all its showy self-importance, feels about itself now with the owner no longer in residence or, if occasionally so, then probably just holed up in a garret or a wing whilst the rest of the place is given over to officers and military strategists and the grounds are turned into exercise yards and parade grounds and tracts for orienteering over (moderately) rough terrain. (You will have to punctuate that sentence yourself. I can never decide if ‘wonder’ ought to take a question-mark.) Anyway, I’d like to think of the house puffing out its chest a little and enjoying a sense of greater purpose. It should be proud that it is no longer merely a retreat for some magnate—no doubt with an equally elaborate residence in Belgravia—but is a bustling hub and ‘home’ for hundreds of men who are engaged in a serious business.

  Yours truly,

  Hubert Simmonds

  Friday, 13 November 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Delia

  The cold weather has really set in and it has been perishing. The huts which the army threw up when war was declared are the most ineffective, draughtiest bulwark against an east wind that you could imagine. They thought paraffin stoves would do the trick but even with one at each end of our row of beds, it leaves the blighters, midway between the two, utterly frozen. We cannot decide amongst ourselves who is the worse off: those of us in the huts with some limited heating or the men in the tents with none but at least the comparative warmth generated by sleeping in closer proximity to each other.

  Up till now, I have not really minded the rough-living nor even the sacrifices one has to make to personal hygiene but this aching cold and the wet are fiendish. Please therefore ask Mother to send a scarf and some mittens and a pair or two of large socks so I can double them up.

  Thank you for passing on news of Geoffrey. It’s odd to think that he has got to France before me when he was so adamantly opposed to the war.

  Your brother,

  Hubert

  Sunday, 15 November 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Anstace

  Thank you for your letters: your five to my two. I sense that you do not really want to hear any more about my routines and the rhythms of the day. You are not really interested in reading any more pen-portraits of officers and men. But this is my life now and ten hours of training a day leaves little energy for much besides scribbling a collection of loose observations about this strange new environment.

  I know that I have written nothing about you or to you. I have written nothing about us. To do so, it seems to me, would be to stray into a false dimension because that life we shared, where I was that other man, the one whom you knew, is in suspension. If I try to step back into it and reinhabit my former self, I know it will just be a hypothetical existence, a mere fantasy. I don’t want that. I don’t want to risk drifting into the sentimental shadows peddled by the rash of popular songs that people are beginning to sing. I wish they’d use more honest metaphors like ‘the page has turned’, ‘the wheat fields are shorn’, ‘the swallows have flown’. Of course I hope that there will be a brighter future but it is a delusion to believe it will be like the world we left behind and we shall never be the same as we were.

  I wonder: will our former selves, the ones we now seldom put on, gradually wear thin until, like the translucent carapace, sloughed from an adder in spring, they are discarded, to be replaced by a much more vivid form? If that is how it works, at least our essential identity remains in tact. It is only the outer surface which changes.

  But perhaps ‘identity’ is actually not so much of our own engineering as of others’. We take shape because of the definition those around us give us. Now I have a rank and number and, for a name, I am never called anything more affectionate than ‘Simmonds’. I do not yet understand when they talk about camaraderie. I do not understand how that can ever be engendered when one has to work so very hard to expel finer feelings and human warmth from one’s normal expression. I believe this is the real sacrifice every soldier has to make for, without it (so I am beginning to realise as the prospect of actual fighting sinks in), even to contemplate the killing of another human being would be absolutely abhorrent. In my imagination I have taken myself there to the front-line. I have willed myself to imagine death and injury and every grotesque wounding. To fail to do so would be a dishonesty. I need to absorb every anxiety in preparation for what might be. Not to do so would risk leaving oneself crippled by fear and dread. This is the real discipline for which the drill, the training and the exposure to rough living and coarse, uncouth language are just expressions.

  I believe that this necessary metamorphosis will be a distillation, a refining. Something of me—whether it is just the reflections of ‘me’ which I have been wearing to date or something essential—will inevitably be shed, perhaps lost forever. How could it be otherwise? But at least there will have been this refining.

  Perhaps the butterfly has some fond memories of its former, steadily chomping caterpillar existence, never looking beyond the green expanse of the leaves it is comfortably consuming, but I doubt it. How could a cabbage, however delicious, compare favourably with the sparkling clarity of air and the heady intoxication of nectar?

  I am preparing to stretch new wings (I now have my first suit of—secondhand—khaki). By the time I have to face ‘an enemy’, they’ll be fully unfurled. I have no idea where they will carry me.

  That is enough philosophizing for one envelope.

  I remain, your friend

  Hubert Simmonds

  Tuesday, 17 November 1914

  Dunquerque 1914

  My dear Delia,

  I have given this letter to one of the orderlies crossing with the hospital ships but I can scarcely comprehend the distance it will have to travel. It’s not so much the miles—probably, being here, I am not so much farther from Kent than I was when in Cambridge— as the ‘world’ I now inhabit.

  I am glad that you are in Dunchurch because—and this has surprised me—it is there and not Cambridge that I want to connect to. I thought I had turned my back on my feudal domain to embrace Cambridge and the freedom which that place gave me but Cambridge now seems
faded and insubstantial, like an overexposed photograph, compared to the village where I grew up. Perhaps it is because I know that so few of the men who were ‘my Cambridge’ are still there. Perhaps it is not the place but the people who give somewhere its significant location. Whatever the cause, it is Dunchurch, its blackthorn hedgerows, the flint church, the fields beyond the ha-ha and the rhododendron shrubbery, which drift unbidden into my mind. Knowing you are there in body as I am in mind is immensely gratifying. I hope that, when you—in Kent— read what I need to describe, some balm from our home county will drift over the channel, in return, to those of us serving here. God knows we need it.

  For three days we have been working in ‘the sheds’: two huge goods sheds, inadequately lit and ventilated. Every inch of floor space, on the platforms and the rails, is covered with desperate stretcher cases. They are supposed to be laid out in rows, with room to walk between them but there is inadequate supervision—just one harassed French medical student, it would appear—and so when the trains from the Front arrive, the wounded are just disgorged chaotically.

  For most this is the end of the journey. There is a grim significance in the row of buffers at the far end of the shed. There is nowhere else to go, unless you count that which only the priests can prepare them for. These priests, spectral figures for the most in their black soutanes, glide through the rows of dying men offering more hope than we can. One priest, fully robed, had a young boy, also robed, in his wake swinging a thurible. The incense hung on the air and gave some relief from the terrible stench which was otherwise all pervasive. I sought them out at times, just to breathe in something other than the smell of putrid flesh. As time passed, their white surplices became more and more bloody so they resembled butchers rather than purveyors of salvation. The boy looked as though he had seen too much ever to laugh again. They should not have allowed him in. He is an old man in suffering.

  I have seen things today which belong in Hell. There are men living with indescribable wounds. Most are infected and you can almost watch the contagion spreading before your eyes. Whole flesh falls prey to the advancing corruption until only desperate remedies—the knife and the saw—will save the man. I wonder whether those who are saved can ever be men again. They will have passed through too much.

  I remain yours,

  Geoffrey Cordingley

  Wednesday, 18 November 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Anstace

  It would be boorish not to thank you for your long letter but you must have sent it before receiving my last. You’ll now understand why I’d rather you didn’t write to me in that vein again. I know this is wretchedly selfish of me especially as my letters to you have nearly all been descriptions of my life in the army. But when you write long letters, telling me how you spend your time (specifically so that I can imagine what the world outside Malton Park is like) it distracts me and makes it all the harder to apply myself to this new existence. Perhaps I should be pleased to receive accounts and descriptions and inconsequential snippets of news and gossip. Certainly, there are men here who like nothing better than reading out ‘news from home’ to the rest of us. For me it is so much trivia.

  Geoffrey once told me that, when he was sent away to school aged seven or eight his parents were forbidden to write for the first half-term. It would be too upsetting, his Housemaster argued; better to make a complete break and then to allow the old home-life to drift back into focus in due course. It’s a bit like breaking-in a horse, I imagine. I expect such a sudden and absolute separation was terrible to bear for many of those little boys but, for me, shedding the former, running clear of the old life is the only way I can transcend it.

  Yours truly,

  Hubert Simmonds

  Saturday, 21 November 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Anstace,

  So you think me brutal. I see it quite otherwise. If Mankind sits somewhere on a spectrum between the beasts and the angels, what I am about, by sheer force of will, must veer toward the sublime. After all, sublimation is what missionaries and monks do. Such is my choice.

  Selfish, solipsistic—those are charges I accept. Is what I am about so different from that withdrawal which I believe great artists, composers and others allow themselves? One talks of an artistic temperament and we half-acknowledge the implication that this brings a prickly egocentricity. Normal family relationships or romantic attachments are sacrificed because of the urge to create the symphony or suite of poems. Artists answer to a different call. If we let them get away with it, should we not give soldiers the same licence?

  I am coming back to this letter after having left off from my reply to yours—started in thoughtless haste. I have given myself time to think. Your tirade deserves something more than a furious rebuttal. You deserve more than that.

  When you throw down words like ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’, I have to pick them up and turn them over. When you tell me that I am hiding behind ‘metaphysical posturing’, I have to take that charge seriously.

  It’s not that what I have written is untrue but there is another truth. I want to avoid the rack. I want to escape the torture of being stretched between two worlds: the one we once shared and this other alien, militaristic one where men are numbered and uniformed, where movement is drilled, where salutes and foot-stamping replace those old conventions of hand-shaking. I am embracing the discipline like an ascetic but I only have so much will-power and when you offer me Dunchurch and Canterbury and Cambridge it is like a temptation.

  But it was wrong of me and cruel to ridicule your letter. Did I really call it inconsequential and trivial. What a dolt! What a blockhead! It would have served me right if you had never put pen to paper again. I see now that you were offering me relief from the life which I am now living. Many of the men here are almost crippled by their desperation for letters. For some, all it take is a few brittle platitudes on the back of a penny postcard, and they are restored. But others expect their women-folk to parcel up their old home-life in close detail on a weekly basis. Then they can be transported, intoxicated even, by getting the letters out and re-reading them over and over until the next missive arrives. Their craving is fed but they are never satisfied.

  Is it so unnatural of me to want to rise above such a dependency?

  These are such strange times. There is no map. All I know is that there is an opportunity for distillation which I have to seize.

  Your friend,

  Hubert Simmonds

  Sunday, 22 November 1914

  Dunquerque

  Dear Anstace

  I do not know how closely you correspond with Delia but you may know that I came out to France a few weeks ago with the Anglo-Belgian Field Ambulance and am already all too familiar with the suffering that the fighting casts up in its wake. If there is something in mankind which means warfare will forever be inevitable, why have we not, with all the advances in civilized living which we have achieved, invented a clean way to dispatch our fellow men? Killing is not the horror. It is the half-killing, the maiming, the mutilation, the disfiguring which is so terrible.

  I have a dread of Hubert coming out here. It is not so much the risks that he will be exposed to (those now seem simply an extension of the risks one runs every day—thrown from a bolting horse, snuffed out by influenza or pneumonia, riddled by some virulent infection or other) but rather that, as a soldier, he will have to inflict on others the appalling injuries I have seen. That is the terror. That decent men (that this particular king among men) can be trained to commit such barbarity and live with what they have done. Could Hubert—the Hubert we know—perpetrate such things and survive?

  And if he survives, what will he have become? Will you want what he has become?

  These are questions we have to ask ourselves; and answer. As your aunt said: we can’t counter something we refuse to face.

  Do you remember someone called Giles Morland? He’s a Quaker. He was at Jordan’s and is with me out here. Anyway,
he remembers you from somewhere or other (do you have relations in the midlands?) and sends his regards.

  As do I.

  Geoffrey Cordingley

  Monday, 30 November 1914

  Boeringhe

  Dear Delia,

  Picture me scribbling this note, squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse surrounded by eight nuns of the peasant variety, coarse-skinned and dull eyed for the most part, telling their beads as they perch on their ‘chattels’, sheets tied at the four corners and stuffed with all manner of things: chalices, Bibles, hams and cheeses. We have been ordered to evacuate the ambulance post at Boeringhe which was based in the convent.

  Giles Morland and I had only been told to make a visit to the post but even as we approached there were shells whistling overhead. And then, whilst we were waiting for further orders we heard that the French had ordered the place to be evacuated. It fell to us to evacuate the nuns, one of whom had been wounded and two others who were decidedly infirm. We thought at first to make a couple of trips to transport them to relative safety but, once I had packed Giles off with the least hale, the growing intensity of the shelling convinced me that I had better move the women out.

  This was a dangerous enough exercise because the road came under fire as we struggled along it, weighed down by their ‘chattels’ from which they would not be parted. Indeed, when I proposed that we should abandon the bundles so we could proceed more quickly, they sat down on them in the middle of the road and refused to move another step until I had withdrawn that suggestion. Shells were sending spurts of mud into the air from the fields to the side of us; the bodies of dead horses littered the road; there was not an undamaged building visible but yet they seemed oblivious to the danger they were in.

  It is only now, some hours later, in the relative safety of this old farmhouse that I can see how different their outlook is from Morland’s. It’s not that they possess courage. They have that other quality which stands so many of the men out here in such good stead; I mean a lack of imagination, a sort of blunted awareness or even, perhaps, an inability to be troubled by two things at once. A splinter in the tip of a plump, pink finger is as likely to cause distress as a day’s heavy bombardment. Morland is impervious to danger for quite different reasons. He is blinded by his conviction. He simply knows—absolutely—why he’s here. The stark truth is that he quite simply wants to do everything in his power to relieve suffering, and if the price is self-immolation, it is a price he is prepared to pay. He will go wherever the suffering is greatest with no thought to his own safety.