Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Since the age of fifteen Charles had used four different noms de plume: Amos (A Man of Scotland) and A. L. (A Lowlander) or even A. L. H. (A Lowland Highlander), for his poetry. He now used ‘Bramantip’ or ‘Allison’ for his column in The New Witness (Allison was the name of the old servant his family had when he was a child at Weedingshall and Inverness), which was a continuing tale of a soldier, based on the character and experiences of one of the men in his company, containing the realism of life in the trenches, but sometimes from a comic angle,

  The frost had slipped away unnoticed in the darkness and a heavy rain was falling. Allison wore a Burberry over his greatcoat, and, on his Sam Browne belt, a revolver, fifty cartridges, field glasses, a prismatic compass, a water bottle, a haversack, and (mark you) a sword. It is difficult to believe it, that in those archaic days, and even on push bikes, people did wear swords, and with this bumping against him or sticking between the spokes of his back wheel, Allison paddled out along the dark and quite unknown road … And ran bump into a little gesticulating knot of Indians and recoiled into a shell hole. It was not a very deep one, luckily, and the Gurkhas bailed him out without difficulty.22

  He only used his own name, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, for his reviews, which were long, rambling and opinionated, often more about the purpose of literature than the books under discussion. When critical he was devastating and the poets and writers did not always forgive him. After the twelve Bramantip articles which began in October 1916, he started a regular review column sometimes entitled ‘From the Logrollers Cabin’ which allowed him free rein on matters literary and was lively, ardent and relentless. He was also allowed to publish his own poetry on a regular basis.

  The number of pseudonyms reflected his difficulty with his identity. Some early poems, to those who could decipher the meaning between the lines, were homoerotic. The vivid, even harsh descriptions of the Bramantip articles were at odds with his detached critical persona, but at the end of a long series of articles from the Bramantip pen, he admitted, ‘Next morning Allison, with whose identity the present writer’s has now become totally confused, was sent down the line with frozen feet, and found himself at home, after all, on Christmas morning.’23

  Charles’s articles were not at first political, but Chesterton had pet bugbears, one of them being Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail and The Times, whom The New Witness accused of whipping up war fever in 1913 and abusing his power throughout the war. Charles was not interested in such feuds: his passions were first and foremost literary. The other Chesterton obsession, which slowly developed after 1918, was with Jewish oligarchs, and could easily be seen as a growing anti-Semitism if his later published works had not contradicted that slur, and revealed a complex theory of what he called ‘Jewish tragedy’. The New Witness certainly published clearly anti-Semitic letters in its letters page, but also replies from a Mr Rubinstein who suggested that Catholicism was not in keeping with the attractive and tolerant English spirit and that all Catholics should be encouraged to emigrate to Rome.24 Charles became gradually politicised, but not in a blatant or dogmatic way – he preferred satire.

  During October and November 1916 Charles stayed at Lanark with his parents, where to relax he worked on family genealogies with his father. Alongside his reviews for The New Witness, he wrote a series of Halloween stories for the magazine, based on his experiences in Messines in 1914. He also visited friends in Edinburgh, including Richard Ball, who was there on leave from the Russian Front working with the Society of Friends, the Quakers. Charles felt keenly that his dear friend Richard was pale and sensitive, loving and good and that this would be their last meeting. It was. Ball distinguished himself as a conscientious objector and pacifist and died bravely as a medical orderly on the Eastern Front two years later.

  At the end of November, since the Battle of the Somme had reduced the Allied forces by over half a million, Charles was called up for a medical and passed fit for active service. He went straight to Duddingston on the outskirts of Edinburgh where he spent December retraining. At Christmas he met his parents in Edinburgh for tea at his mother’s club, bringing with him a new friend called Douglas, the Episcopal Chaplain of the regiment. He then explained to his family that he had decided to make some provision in the camp for Roman Catholics for whom no church was provided. He told some of the men to let it be known that any who liked might parade voluntarily and he would march them down to the midnight Mass at the nearest Catholic church in Portobello. He felt a sense of awe when he found that over two hundred were waiting for him, one a wounded convalescent on crutches and in carpet slippers who kept up manfully with the others over a mile and a half of ice-covered roads. On Christmas Day again over a hundred went with him to church. He hoped that Major Herries, father of his friend Aleck, would arrange a monthly service for them. He kept murmuring, ‘it was wonderful, so many turning up … it seemed almost a miracle.’25 In France or Belgium it would seem normal, but given the intolerance towards Catholics in Scotland at the time it was a daring and indeed miraculous event. The war had already changed people.

  On Boxing Day 1916 Charles set off for London to talk to his mother’s cousin, known as the ‘Father of the War Office’, now Major-General Sir George Scott Moncrieff,26 about helping to get a proper placement for his brother, Johnnie the vet. The next day, he sent his mother a telegram, ‘George very affable will help to secure commission in the Remounts. Foresees no difficulty.’27 The Army Remount Department was responsible for requisitioning 460,000 horses between 1914 and 1920, and was in dire need of vets. Ever the loving son, in the midst of seeing London friends, Charles didn’t forget to send Meg a telegram for her fifty-ninth birthday.

  After brief duty as a son and a brother he was back to being a soldier. On 10 January 1917 Charles left Victoria station early in the morning with nineteen KOSB subalterns to go to France, he believed in order to train troops at Etaples. The corps at Etaples was commanded, noted Charles the journalist, by Lord Bathurst, whose wife owned the Morning Post, and consisted of his men and another Scots regiment. Two days later Charles was on his way by train up the now familiar French valley to rejoin the KOSB, at the tail end of the Somme action. Snow concealed the usual hideousness of the ground, but the country was laid with miles of boards between and among shell holes. These boards were frozen stiff and as slippery as glass. ‘On this plain we have among the mud, scarred with last summer’s shell holes, mile upon mile of wooden pathways, boards placed end to end like dominoes, and zigzagging all over the country. The effect, especially lit by moonlight on the snow is extraordinary. I see how full of imagination Nevinson is.’28 The gifted and volatile futurist painter Richard Nevinson had recently exhibited a series of striking paintings of the front. Charles may have seen the exhibition but photos were also published in newspapers, along with those of the other popular war artist Muirhead Bone.

  In spite of deep frost, the action of 27 January 1917 at Soues was a great triumph when two battalions of Charles’s brigade took nearly 400 prisoners. His own battalion relieved them the next day, consolidated the position and were congratulated. The only sad consequence was that his New Zealand friend Neil Macleod was taken prisoner by the Germans.29 Later that day a German officer with twenty-one men strayed into KOSB territory and they were taken. Charles turned ‘yellow as a guinea’ with jaundice and was taken off to Amiens in a field ambulance. Five days later he was up and about with his guidebook and visited Amiens Cathedral, which he was glad to describe as ‘perfect and harmonious’, unaffected by the war; he walked the streets for a couple of hours and bought two leatherbound volumes of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories. When he returned to the hospital he found to his childish excitement that his post had arrived with The New Witness, with his column documenting the continuing adventures of Allison, and his description of Ypres, on the eve of its destruction ‘a city admirably defensible by archers’;30 the post also brought the Wykehamist with his poem ‘Domum’ prin
ted and a copy of the Daily Mail. Charles was finally beginning to see himself in print as a writer and critic.

  At Amiens he saw Vyvyan Holland, stationed with the Royal Field Artillery, whom he had not seen since long before the war. They arranged to meet at Amiens Cathedral to catch up on old times. Vyvyan was a changed and shattered man. He had been married in 1914 to Violet Craigie, the daughter of an army officer, then he had gone to war, as had his brother Cyril, already a soldier for eight years. Cyril had been killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1915 and for Vyvyan, ‘The last link with Tite Street and the spacious days had snapped.’31 He later learned that his wife Violet was badly injured in a fire and before he could get home to her, she died. For Charles and Vyvyan it was a moving meeting and they were both glad to relive old memories, joke and tease as they used to before the war.

  Returning to the regiment on 17 February 1917, Charles was put in command of a prisoner of war company. He was given a very comfortable little hut with tables and chairs, china plates and a lamp. Nearby was a ‘large cage containing 500 Germans – who did an amazing amount of work’ cleaning equipment, mending uniforms and boots, and seemed normal, unaggressive, ‘clean and good and docile’. Beside this prison Charles wrote two long reviews for The New Witness. The first was of two slim poetry volumes by Claude Houghton and Robert Graves. He called the piece ‘Lesboefs and Morval’32, after two small destroyed towns on the Somme, the first still occupied by the invader, the second freed. He compared Graves’s work in Goliath and David to the freed town, inspired by a muse who has shaken off her fetters; while Houghton’s was like the town enslaved, writing that ‘dates back to the school of Arthur O’Shaugnessy and the “poppied sleep” poetry of the seventies’.33 He finished the second review, a critical one of the American Edgar Lee Masters’ volume of poetry The Great Valley on Good Friday when he also heard the news that the Americans had entered the war. He wrote: ‘the effect of this new adhesion on the War concerns me … for a nation can wax great in commerce without poets, and America is grown great. But without poets a nation cannot be great in war.’34 As a critic he had swiftly taken to making statements on the state of poetry internationally and the war in general.

  Six weeks later, on 2 April, Charles was near Arras, shivering under the heaviest snow he could remember for over ten years. He had just got his men into billets and late that night started a letter home which stated ominously, ‘My hostess is very old and sunken and is crouching over the other side of the stove telling her beads and looking up dully over my shoulder at the snow.’35 The Battle of Arras had already begun. Long columns of motor lorries arrived with supplies, along with several Scottish regiments. For three days their pipe bands playing in all the squares made ‘the whole town full of life and rejoicing’36 – then Charles and his men joined the 1st Battalion KOSB who had just been evacuated from Gallipoli. From Arras they marched ten kilometres across the frozen plain to the small town of Monchy-le-Preux, one of the keys to the northern end of the Hindenburg Line.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wounded Out

  ‘I,

  Like a pailful of water thrown from a high window, fell … Alone…’

  CKSM, ‘The Face of Raphael’, 1917

  Monchy-le-Preux is a town built on a hundred-metre-high knoll on a fertile plain, with a road winding up and round the hill like a drawing in a fairy tale; the highest point for five miles all around. At the top is a château, a church, a town hall and houses for about six hundred people. It had been unchanged since 1200 and had seen many skirmishes at its foot, but none as violently destructive as this.

  The Germans had taken Monchy in 1914 and held the vantage point until two weeks before Charles arrived. He and his men were lucky not to have been involved in the first British assault. On 11 April 1917 during a week of snow, twelve infantry battalions (nearly ten thousand men), four tanks and one cavalry regiment attacked and took the knoll with huge losses. The cavalry were the first to climb the two roads to the château, but were shot down from the air. When the Allies eventually entered Monchy, they found the main roads blocked by the carcasses of 196 horses and 91 cavalrymen. They spent so long flushing out the remaining snipers that the roads were still blocked by dead horses on the night of 22 April when Charles arrived.

  This was the first day of thaw, and the reconnaissance officer tried to make his way down the east side of Monchy to look for a suitable trench location for the assault into the German lines. The enemy were only five hundred yards away and needed pushing further back if the town was to be held. The officer got his men to clear a path through the dead horses, and the digging party got under way constructing an assault trench only 100 metres east of Monchy in a flat field, wet and sludgy after the thaw.

  Black, thick, fertile soil formed the cold walls of the KOSB’s fortress that night, as they waited for the signal. At zero hour, 4.45 a.m., in darkness and mist, they left the trench, each man carrying in his pockets a bomb, a flare, a sandbag and rations for three days. The German trench was a short dash across a muddy field, a simple stroll in peacetime.

  Shivering after a night in the mud and daunted by the likely outcome (losses averaged at 4000 a day on the Arras offensive), Charles’s men may have shown some reluctance. Therefore he led them, something company commanders were not meant to do, out into the guns. Amid a roaring din, the high explosives pitched in the ground with a shaking thud, to explode a fraction of a second later with a bang like the slamming of a giant door, throwing up a huge column of earth and blowing men to pieces. Continually, too, came the high-explosive shrapnel: a big shell, known to the troops as a ‘Woolly Bear’, bursting with a fierce whipping ‘crack’ about one or two hundred feet from the ground, delivering hot shrapnel and portions of burst shell case like rain.

  ‘Tomorrow is St George’s Day, best of all for the armies of England,’ Charles had written home the day before. Shakespeare’s birthday and the day Rupert Brooke had died, 23 April, was the day Charles’s life was cut in half by friendly fire. At 5 a.m. in the pitch dark a small British shell aimed at the German trench fell short and exploded in front of him. He fell, his left leg broken in two places with shrapnel in his right thigh. He lay on the battlefield for some time, successfully directing his men and urging them on until they overtook his position and claimed the German trench. He heard the sounds of men fighting, the rasp in their throats and the cough of the dying taken by surprise. He waited until well into daylight, thinking and imagining, wondering if he was going to be shot, to die, or to be found, until he was carried fainting and delirious back to the village. That German trench was never lost again to the other side for the duration of the war.

  The road to the village followed an ancient red brick wall with trees leaning overhead along a path cleared as if through a snowdrift between banks of frozen dead horse flesh. Through this in the grey morning light Charles was carried on his stretcher to have his leg set in the château which served as a temporary dressing station.

  There was a transcendental explanation, he thought, for being alive after the battle and carried safely back to a field hospital. Quoting the French poet Paul Claudel’s poem ‘Hymne à SS Agnès’, he wrote, ‘“l'amér commencement du ciel” is a marvellous phrase, and the 2 lines are just what I felt that morning at Monchy; “quand l'âme frémissante étudie l'amer commencement du ciel.”’1 A literal translation of Claudel’s lines might run: ‘when the trembling soul studies the bitter beginnings of dawn…’ But knowing that ‘ciel’ means both ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’, here, as later with Proust, Charles took liberties with his translation. His poetic rendering of those lines took a personal, interpretative, leap: ‘In the dim hour of life and death, when the slow agony is begun,/ And the soul scans with faltering breath that hard road whereby Heaven is won.’ He was acutely aware at this point of the other world; of the sense that this earthly battle at Monchy was mirrored by the battle on another level for each man’s soul. He had his own poetic vision and that confidence gave him vigou
r. His own poem about his wounding, called ‘The Face of Raphael’, quoting Claudel, was published later in The New Witness. All the time alert to the other world, he described their march to battle, unaware of what was keeping step with them, ‘Coelistis exercitus’ – an army of angels.

  I,

  Like a pailful of water thrown from a high window, fell … Alone.

  An hour or two I lay and dozed, my unattempting features closed,

  Or opened a reluctant eye to search the irresponsive sky,

  Not speaking, while my dull ears heard many a just-remembered word

  Twine themselves into a song, tuneless

  Here beginneth

  That old lesson, earth to earth turns, and death regards birth,

  Nothing of us but doth fade utterly …

  … Ah, whose mind prayed

  Through mine then? Whose quiet singing heard I from my stretcher, swinging

  Sorry, weary, sick, belated back to Arras? Who dictated

  Strongly, clearly, till I sung these French words with my English tongue?

  The poem was a forewarning of his vocation; an intuition of his inspiration as a translator. ‘Who dictated strongly, clearly, till I sung these French words with my English tongue?’ Sing was the right verb, as his future translations would show, starting with the Song of Roland, the ancient verses passed down by word of mouth from the time of Charlemagne when the jongleur ‘sang’ the troops into battle.