And that is one reason why I agreed when you asked me not to write to you. Understood, suddenly, that not being able to indulge my love is not the same as not loving.
The other reason, however, is that I am still basking in the honesty of your confession that ‘for both of us’ writing, whilst knowing that nothing of love could ever be expressed, would be a torment. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I have your likeness, you dear man. I have you smiling only for me. That is enough. And I can write to your sister to preserve some physical connection, however vicarious.
Keep yourself safe, safer, safest.
You shall always remain my world, my heaven.
Geoffrey
Friday, 1 January 1915
France
Dear Anstace
Let me give you this:
Soldiers marching with night already a cloak along unmetalled unlit roads. The way deep-rutted and blasted in places with shell-holes.
March close to the man in front.
Step in his steps and so steer clear of the obstacles.
‘Pit to the right. Watch your step!’
‘Step high, lads. Mud and oil. Watch your footing. Pass it back … pass it back.’
Like a prayer. Guidance and directions flung over the shoulder, in no more than an undertone but clear enough on the cold night air so that each man learns from the fellow in front how to walk steady.
Suddenly the gloom is broken by a solitary star-shell arcing way above us. Too far off to be of any danger but close enough to throw enough light for a brief dawning.
And as the brightness rose, it paused (seemingly) at the apex of its trajectory and then curved down to earth again. We were given great, elastic shadows stretched out, then pulled back under our feet before being drawn out again behind us.
Impossible to separate one man from another. We are a single thing, bristling with rifles slung and packs shouldered, traversing the contours of the wilderness like a great caterpillar.
Throughout this night-march, at intervals, other lights bloomed elegantly overhead to illuminate our progress and set shadows dancing.
Hubert
Tuesday, 1 March 1915
France
Dear Anstace
Sometimes at night other sounds—separated from the war—come to life. The best time to hear them is when one is on sentry-duty when your ears are straining for any alien sound. Then, like a miracle, you hear noises that spin out from another dimension.
I heard the chuff and toot of a locomotive last night and yet I know we are far, far from any rail. It must have been a trick of the still night or some playful dalliance of winds, skitting in the upper atmosphere, which scooped and then dropped this sound for me.
Perhaps the train I heard was crossing another continent carrying country folk to market or children on some special outing. Perhaps it was taking married daughters home to visit their mothers or young men to the shores of deep-blue lakes for a day’s fishing. Wherever it was, it betokened travel and journeys and everything other than the stasis of mud, its heavy suction.
There is a copse over the ridge. Something about the fold of the land has left it unscathed from the fighting although it sits in No-Man’s-Land between the khaki and the grey. I heard a blackbird greet the dawn singing full-throated from the highest tree in that copse and I cannot describe the lift it gave me as if I was carried on each cadence way above our trenches. And I knew that I was not alone for all along this stretch of trenches there’d be other men in khaki and in grey who’d be waking to that solitary voice and feel carolled as I did.
Hubert
Thursday, 17 March 1915
Belgium
Dear Anstace
There is something about twilight which threatens.
The half-light of dawn and dusk are when one’s eyes are not to be trusted. It is when The Enemy is most expected and we must all stand-to in case.
But if the Grey Men had surfaced as today slid into the west, they’d have been confounded by the most radiant sunset. They’d have been unable to lurch across the craters and the swamps without stopping in their tracks, lifting their heads and drinking in the colours: rose and apricot and even a blush of green before the deeper blues rolled over from the east and subdued the glory.
Hubert
Saturday, 1 May 1915
Ypres
Dear Delia,
You cannot know what a comfort it is to have you back home to write to. I think I should turn quite mad if I did not have the thought of you pulling me back from the brink. And yet, increasingly, I wonder if madness is not the only way to survive. All around me I see men who have murdered their own true selves so that another personality might live in its stead.
I cannot think there is any other explanation. How else could these ordinary men, fathers of young children, many of them, who have dandled their offspring on their knees, who have wept when the diphtheria or a fever has carried one of the little ones off, who have courted their girls and loved them and stroked them with a gentleness in the shared darkness, who have played with their brothers and friends and caroused innocently on a Saturday night until they stagger home locked in each other’s embrace, in love in their cups … how else could these men perform what I have seen them do? A uniform confers madness. The Army knows this. It exploits this fact for it is madness that releases a soldier from the moral checks and taboos of a civilized society so that he can do the terrible things that are a soldier’s stock in trade.
It is not just the soldiers. These Quakers in the F.A.U. may not be fighting but they are aspiring to the same insane level of existence. They talk of the heroism of the soldier and throw themselves into their work with a reckless regard to their own safety so that they too can experience the frisson of war. They may have a conscientious objection to doing the killing themselves but they are damned glad that they’re here in the thick of the slaughter. They merely pay homage to a different face of the god of militarism.
You cannot comprehend the extent of the suffering I have witnessed here. I pray that you never will. And yet there is no sense at all that we have now reached the limit of our endurance, indeed all the talk is of retaliation. We, in turn, shall use poison gas in our onslaught and then some other lunatic will think of other weapons through which to increase the sophistication of the barbarity both sides are prepared to inflict.
I wonder if the papers at home have reported the gas. It must have been about ten days ago that the barrage of gunfire from the Germans began, heralding their attack, and then we saw what looked like a fog, a real pea-souper, rolling toward our lines. The clouds seemed to roll forwards in slow motion until the wind teased them out into a thin, but equally deadly blanket which settled over the whole countryside.
As we drove toward the front lines we were caught up in crowds of men running in all directions, shouting that the Germans had broken through. Soon we saw the casualties.
I cannot believe how much the human body can take and still survive. These creatures, victims of the noxious gas, should all have been dead and yet many lived for two or three days longer. I could see where the corrosive gas had eaten into the skin which had been exposed to it. Even a soldier’s hide, begrimed and calloused, dissolves in this gas. I can only imagine what damage has been inflicted on the sensitive membrane of nose, throat and lung. The suffering was horrible to watch and impossible to alleviate. We should have done better to shoot them where we found them instead of contributing to the delusion that anything could be done; it would have been the greater mercy.
We have worked incessantly for nine days and nights, beating it back and forth to the railhead. At one time, the Germans were only a mile and a half from our ambulance post and the battle seemed to engulf us wherever we were. I have never experienced such prolonged bombardment from both sides and there seemed no likelihood that it would cease.
Perhaps, when both sides have exhausted themselves, taking turns attacking and repelling, Ypres will becom
e famous as the last battle of this terrible war. God, I hope so.
Writing to you now about this nightmare, it seems ridiculous to confess that coming, unbidden into my head, are Chaucer’s words. You’ll know them; they’ll have been knocked into the head of everyone who has ever gone to school near Canterbury.
The irony is ghastly.
This April there was no Zephyr breathing sweetly on every ‘holt and heeth’ but a putrid gas from hell. This April, it would seem, is a time when folk have converted their traditional longing to go on pilgrimages into an evil belligerence. It is madness, Delia, on a scale to swallow the world.
I have no idea when you will receive this letter. There is no way to send anything home at the moment.
Remember me,
Your own friend,
Geoffrey Cordingley
Sunday, 2 May 1915
Belgium
Anstace
Hubert
Wednesday, 19 May, 1915
Ypres, 1915
Dear Delia,
I have written to you a number of times over the past few weeks. When I have not been so absolutely exhausted that my body was incapable of doing anything but sleeping, composing my thoughts for you has been something of a relief. But I shall not send any of those fragments now. The fact that I have been thinking of a Simmonds and writing to you will have to be enough.
Everything is different now—re-cast somehow. Perspectives have altered.
A fortnight ago, Giles Morland was killed whilst dispensing Oxo at the soup kitchen. A stray shell wiped out the lot of them. He was the closest I have come to having a friend out here but I cannot even picture him. Now, if I close my eyes and try to visualise his features, I can only ever see one face. I pray it is not an omen.
The next day, the Germans shelled the civilian hospital. A whole ward was destroyed. There were eleven killed, mostly nuns who had been nursing those too sick to be evacuated further from the front. There was nothing we could do. Their bodies were strewn about, twisted and broken. The dust of plaster settled over them, stopping their wounds, soaking up their blood as if to convert them by some metamorphosis—literally petrify them—into gruesome statues to adorn some hall in Hell. Nothing stirred except the starched sails of the nuns’ coifs, dishevelled now and grotesque, like the torn gills of some vast, bleached fungus. I could not feel pity or grief—just revulsion, overwhelming, debilitating revulsion. And then, on my way back to the front, I passed the soldiers filing up from the reserves, singing and gay. It seemed imperative to me that they should be deflected from their purpose. I had seen things to sear the eyes and scar the mind and I felt that these untried men just had to be told the truth so that they at least could prepare themselves for what would descend upon them.
But I could not tell them.
I could have told my driver to stop the car but I didn’t. My nerve failed me. I remembered the humiliation I felt that morning in Cambridge when I tried to stop Petrie enlisting. I also now know that bearing witness to suffering in war is as likely to inspire others to a kind of perverse self-sacrifice, dressed-up in some glorious aesthetic like patriotism, as convert them to pacifism. There are no words left to wield. This war has appropriated to itself all the language of heroism; all magnificent ambition points to a single militaristic goal. For those who refute that calling, there is nothing left but impotence, utter impotence.
I had to leave off writing but have come back to you after another shift on duty. I must confess I feel exhausted, beyond the mere physical wrack of muscle and sinew. You will have to excuse me if this letter slides into incoherence. The truth of the matter is that I do not believe I can continue. I have all but made up my mind to resign from the ambulance unit.
You know as well as I that my motives for joining the unit in the first place were confused. My hostility toward the war was chanelled, even before I was aware of it, by Phlip Baker and the Quakers at Jordan’s and, before I quite knew what was happening, I was in the middle of it all here in France and Belgium. There was a shared idealism then. Men like Giles Morland were radiant with it. But this was simply another manifestation of War Fervour. The ambulance crews may have been doing different work to the soldiers, and of course the dangers were not so acute and the conditions we lived in so grim, but it was war work all the same. And it fed the same atavistic urges of the primal male.
A number of Quakers are arguing for withdrawal. Their Christianity gives them a different frame of reference (the Jesus they emulate is cast from a different mould to the Christ invoked by the conventional army chaplain) and this provides them with plenty of material to justify pulling out of the war machine.
Of course, simply contemplating leaving France is a luxury which none of the soldiers share. When they joined-up, they surrendered their freedom until ‘a blighty’, death or the cessation of hostilities released them. I, and the rest of the men in the unit, could walk away from all this tomorrow, if we so chose.
At least while I am here I can imagine that I share something with Hubert. We have some affinity. Writing to you—throwing the burden of my weary thoughts upon you—is another precious link with your brother. Do you have any news of him?
Too tired now to continue.
I remain, your friend,
Geoffrey Cordingley
PS There are rumours that this unofficial postal service, managed through the Friends may have been uncovered and that all communication will have to go through the army and its censors soon. We shall see…
Wednesday, 22 September 1915
H.Q., 1915
My dear Delia,
This letter will have been delivered to you with a French postmark. The ‘pigeon-post’ which has served us so well is no more. There has been the most monumental of rows. Our adjutant has absolutely forbidden its continuance, telling us that we are laying the Unit open to charges of suspected espionage, that we should be ashamed of exploiting unauthorized channels to write home when the heroes at the Front are denied them, and so on … and so forth … I think he was genuinely alarmed that if it all leaked out the whole ambulance corps would be reorganized under some other command. His job may well have been on the line. Nothing makes one so eloquent as self-interest.
It is this which explains why you have not been receiving my letters. Thank you so much for continuing to write, even though, as you said, it was like shouting into a cave with not even an echo for answer.
It is now early autumn and you will be back in Cheltenham, resuming your training, being transformed into a formidable school ma’am. I have, as you know, intimate knowledge of the tyrannical female and your description of the St. Mary’s tutors’ glee, in being able to appropriate the roles vacated by the male tutors at St. Paul’s College, struck a powerful chord. I know that any grief my mother felt on the death of my father was wonderfully tempered by the chance to be in sole control of Mount Benjamin.
Yes, I am still in France. However, after the nightmare that was Ypres, I have been pulled right back behind the lines to H.Q. Now, all my time is spent servicing motor engines, either the ambulances or staff cars. The most humane action I find myself undertaking these days is the release of a nut welded to its bolt through the application of grease on the thread and brawn to the spanner.
If I needed anything to focus my mind when considering the future, this radical change to the work I am assigned has done it. Isn’t there some legal term applied to those who associate with criminals whilst not being personally responsible for the crime? They are ‘accessories’ or something. That is my function now. My day is spent making machines work. No clearer metaphor is needed.
I may see you sooner than either of us seriously imagined.
Yours,
Geoffrey Cordingley
Thursday, 25 November 1915
H.Q.
Dear Delia,
You implied in your last letter that if I ‘steal back home’ (as you put it), I shall somehow be abandoning Hubert. I have to tell you that, if anyone h
as done the abandoning, it is your brother. It was his idea not to write to me and I gather his letters to you and your parents are hardly frequent. He expects us to cherish him (and we do) but he gives us nothing to feed that emotion, that act. You must believe me when I say that I do not neglect Hubert in my thoughts. I never have. Indeed, whenever I write to you, my affection for him is rekindled. But my being on the English side of the Channel, whilst he is somewhere on the French, can have no bearing on his safety. It is not as if he has seen me, or had any contact from me (nor me from him) since that first day after his embarkation. If he is wounded, you are as likely to hear as soon as I am and, as you know, I have not been involved in caring for the wounded for months now. It would take a miracle for me to be the one bearing his stretcher. And let me tell you: nothing of God’s beneficence is ever seen these days.
This war has been conceived on a vast scale and Hubert and I are no more significant than ants on a heath. There is no providence to decree that our paths should ever cross again. You must not be so superstitious as to believe it. If there were anything I could do over here to guarantee Hubert’s safety, I should do it without a moment’s hesitation. But there is nothing. There is nothing. There is nothing. So why should I stay and play the mechanic?
Of course my motives for coming home are entirely selfish. Most men’s are in my experience. I shall not attempt to refute that charge of yours. But there is an argument I could employ to justify my resignation from the ambulance unit and my return to England.
Don’t you see that ‘talk’ (as you put it) far from being something to discourage is the very thing that has to happen now. Every village in England must be cherishing its dead as Dunchurch is but they should not resign themselves to the sacrifice. It cannot be right that Eric Baxter has to end his days strapped into a chair, parked in the sun by the hen-run in his backyard. It cannot be right that the others you mention are dead or missing. And, if it is not right for those, then I cannot see how it can be right for the nation. England is not greater than the sum of its sons, though the patriot would have us believe otherwise and would willingly pour the blood of his own children down its gaping maw. I’ll spar with any patriot and pit my experience against his idealism.
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