Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Charles’s leg was set in Monchy, but then it shoogled unset again as he was driven in a field ambulance, bumping the long ten kilometres back to Arras. In the better equipped underground hospital in the cellars beneath the town, he was examined again and doctors wondered if it would not be a better idea to amputate. However, he was then sent to the seaside Base Hospital in Camiers, on the north coast of France, where doctors took more time debating whether the limb was worth saving, and decided to give it a chance. Seven weeks were spent stabilising the leg with much agony, both physical and mental. He wrote home on 1 May, lamenting ‘this awful inability to control or co-ordinate my thoughts, which is, I suppose, a result of the shell shock’.2 It was probably also the morphine.

  Two of the first letters announcing his injury were written in wobbly pencil as he could not sit up or use a pen. The first was to his mother announcing his injury with a delirious ‘Tell Susan Lunn that I love her very much’3 scribbled wildly on the back. Susan Lunn was his mother’s cousin who had just lost her own son, Charles’s contemporary, in battle. Another letter was to the Warden of Winchester College with whom he had been staying when last on leave, in which he said that his legs ‘gave way beneath me like a trayful of claret glasses’. Shattered as he was, the rest of the letter insisted that he felt ‘entirely and solely uplifted by the hands of God’.4 He was pleased that his priest brought him Holy Communion. However, there was a crane at the foot of his bed with a sandbag hanging from it to raise his leg and so many people bumped into it that he got into a state of panic whenever he saw someone coming up and down the busy ward. Finally, when ‘a fat old parson who crusades around these wards ran full tilt into it’, and Charles yelled in pain, ‘He turned to see what he had done and said blandly, “Aha, you stick out too much.” After this I could stand no more, and got my bed shifted across the ward.’5

  Like so many active, fit young men he suddenly found himself dependent, inactive and bedridden, sure he would never walk properly again. It was a blow to his confidence that took a long time to recover from and changed his life for ever. He was, however, well aware of the fact that he did actually have his life and even his leg for the moment, and was luckier than the many men he had known who were already dead. He wrote another poem on the distortions caused by his dreams, later published in The New Witness.

  The queerest thing of all now, is the way the sizes shift, Johnny:

  Bracken Hill’s no height now, no height at all.

  And the little dog Peter, was the weight I just could lift,

  He has grown to hide high mountains, but the great dog’s starved and small …6

  In a letter to his Edinburgh friends, the Pyatts, he explained, ‘I have been given one of the fourteen Military Crosses allotted to the 29th Division. No one else in the regiment, I am sorry to say, for most of them deserve it more than I do…’7 Charles initially refused the award because he was injured by his own barrage, and because he did not think himself more deserving than anyone else. Lieutenant-Colonel Welch, commanding the Ist Battalion KOSB, wrote back to the Headquarters of the 87th Infantry Brigade, insisting, saying,

  Captain C. K. Scott Moncrieff is an officer with a distinct temperament, and of an intelligence far above the average, and in my opinion, whatever he says to the contrary, I shall still remain convinced that, not only on the date in question, but on one or two previous occasions also, he thoroughly earned the award which His Majesty has been pleased to bestow. This opinion would be borne out by the officers and men who were serving with him in this Battalion.8

  Charles was given a copy of the letter, implying that he would be in trouble if he continued to object to his medals. They still belong to the family, framed in a box backed with his regimental tartan, enshrined by his mother after his death: a Military Cross, the 1914–15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

  By June he had been conveyed, painfully in a stretcher, to the Lady Ridley Hospital, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London. Another semi-autobiographical article appeared in The New Witness on 12 July 1917 entitled ‘On Being Wounded’, subtle in its analysis of feeling and consciousness. He described the ‘continuous, insensible shifting of the perspective from the moment that he feels the thud made by the arrival of the bullet’ as being like the point of focus of a microscope, passing through successive layers of an object, each layer being the only one existing at any time. He talked of the ‘abrupt transition from a life of incessant strain and action to one of complete inactivity. The engine is abruptly stopped – dead.’ He longed for news of the front; he had seen artillery officers nearly weeping at the thought that while they lay impotent, their battery was at last, after months of waiting, moving forward in pursuit. Did the mine go off? Did they take the wood? But reality is a battered foot or shattered arm. Soon the realisation that this means a return to England hits the soldier and ‘he whispers, London, almost reverently. It is a splendid moment.’ It may be weeks before the wound is stable enough to move, but the moment comes then ‘Another strand is interwoven; the insignificance of one wounded man when in the grip of a system which handles the unending stream of casualties with the indifference of a universal store.’ With his large luggage label the soldier is pushed on and off stretchers, dumped in odd corners of draughty railway stations, stacked in rows on ambulance trains, but all the time nearing an increasingly vivid England. Then there was the pain and the morphine, which gave an alternation of depression and exultation, between enduring it and contemplating convalescence, ‘it is as if one were changed suddenly from a black bishop, moving freely about the black squares of the chessboard, into a white one, for whom blackness does not exist.’ Finally there was the welcome ‘spectacle of taxicabs, parks, delightful old gentlemen who raise their hats at the sight of the ambulance’.

  At Carlton House Terrace, the location, treatment and company could not have been better and Charles began to perk up. He was lucky to get a bed in a drawing room from where he could see the back of Downing Street and the Foreign Office. By mid-June his brother Colin was visiting with armfuls of roses, and Vyvyan Holland came with a huge and rare box of chocolates. Robert Ross arrived fresh from a weekend at the Asquiths with gossip, a novel and the latest poetry books. Charles asked Ross, also an art critic, to give his opinion on the portraits in the room, and discussed with him his surgeon who, he said, looked about fourteen.

  A young officer called Broadway, also a patient, but a mobile one, would come down in his dressing gown after breakfast and again for messages before going out. He brought notepads for Charles and arranged visits from brother officers. In one notepad there is a pencil sketch satirically depicting Robert Ross as a devil-like figure. The idea of a decadent influence and ‘bad’ company still haunted Charles, however he could not ignore Ross’s genuine compassion and kindness.

  The same notepad contained two handwritten short stories, later published in The New Witness. The most striking, called ‘Mortmain’, was about the supernatural effect of shell shock. A wounded officer is taken to have an arm amputated in a field hospital in France, and while under anaesthetic he dimly sees an image of Shaftesbury Avenue in London from outside a theatre, and his wife, Claire, wearing the pearls he gave her. She is accompanied by a slick male acquaintance, aptly named Courtly. From his vantage point, semi-conscious, the soldier watches as his wife is accompanied home by Courtly, who enters their flat, reaches for the light and is mysteriously electrocuted by the action of an unknown hand (the right, like the narrator’s own amputated hand). The maid enters early next morning to see a dead man sprawled on the sofa. Then outside on the balcony ‘Claire sat, laughing unevenly. The string of her necklace had broken, and upon her lap was a little pool of pearls, which, from time to time, she flung at the sparrows, splashing, quarrelling and courting in the dust of the courtyard.’9 Back in the field hospital in France, her husband, the officer with the amputated arm, is also found to be dead, just as a fellow patient lowers the gramophone needle on to a popular song t
itled ‘Who were you with last night?’

  Still haunted by ghoulish imaginings, Charles’s poetry also expressed his physical and mental despondency. He was awarded the Silver Badge, which was given to all military personnel who were discharged as a result of sickness or wounds received during wartime but his reaction was cynical and negative; and he wrote:

  Silver Badgeman

  Houses I hate now, who have seen houses strewn,

  A bitter matter for battle, by sun and by moon:

  Stones crumbled, bricks broken, timbers charred and rotten,

  And the smell of the ghost of a house; these are ill-forgotten.

  Gardens too, I hate; for I have seen gardens going

  Into green slime and brown swamp, no flowers growing

  In pits where old rains linger, stale snows harden,

  And only graves, where roses grew, still tell of the garden.

  And I hate plowed lands, who have been set a-plowing

  Crooked furrows to fight in, where the guns go sowing

  Bodies of men in the trenches, and grey mud covers

  Fools, philosophers, failures, labourers, lovers.10

  Five stanzas were written in May 1917, when his dreams were still nightmares. But a year later, without as he himself said, ‘justification or foundation’, he added five more stanzas. The poem changed direction, citing not just ruined gardens and buildings, but a ruined people who had regressed to stone-age savagery.

  I have gone to the woods where in ages before me

  Grappling, my hairy ancestors got me and bore me;

  I have sought out the caves where, pursued, my mothers

  Whimpered, and turned to receive grunting lovers.

  … Yet not these in their time loved peace nor knew it,

  Who, scented afar their quarry, grew stiff to pursue it,

  When a brown arm, shot from the bough, caught the bird for plunder,

  Or limb on the ground tore the screaming rabbit asunder.

  So no peace shall I find, in all the ages,

  Short and harsh man’s life is and death is its wages.

  Life goes hot from the throat, by the cry made holy,

  Or passes, bedded in towns, with unction, slowly.11

  Charles’s hospital locker was full of books to review. Through writing he felt stable, almost forgiving himself for not being out in the field fighting. Yet he was still angry and he turned his anger on other poets. Siegfried Sassoon was the first to come under fire. Sassoon, three years older than Charles, had a private income and was a man who could afford to be a poet. He had been to Cambridge, but left without a degree, he loved hunting, and was an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, published by William Heineman, was the first volume of Sassoon’s poetry not published by himself. It was June and Charles was still suffering from nerves; the graphic war poems were too brutal for his worn sensibilities. In the review, Charles regretted Sassoon sang ‘only in two keys, anger and cynicsm; anger with himself for being such a fool as to go soldiering … cynicism … turned like a flammenwerfer on officers and men alike’. The poem, ‘One Legged Man’, was ‘too obvious to be effective’. ‘I have saved a leg of my own from destruction; but in the other event, I think I should not have made a song about it.’ He did however praise the lyrical poems at the end: ‘Again and again in the short lyrics and the sonnets … he touches perfection.’12 However, his conclusion was fairly damning: ‘I dismiss then Mr Sassoon’s war poems as a regrettable incident.’ He wanted him instead to celebrate the return of peace.

  The next book of poetry he reviewed while recuperating in Carlton House Terrace was Robert Nichols’s Ardours and Endurances. His review contained more of his own confused inner dialogue than of Nichols’s poetry, of which he wrote, ‘It is not, can’t you see? good enough.’13 His reviews were essays on the state of poetry as a whole and little space was dedicated to the unfortunate poet in question. The next was on a clutch of four collections and Charles complained at the outset, ‘the output of printed verse has reached a density unknown in days when the last word in poetry was recited among a thousand cliques too proud, too recondite or, it may be, too epicene to publish.’ He gave a decent consideration to Helen Hamilton’s long poem The Compleat Schoolmarm, about the only respectable career available to women as yet, that of a school mistress: ‘Wrongly educated; underpaid and therefore ill-fed; overworked and therefore ill-rested, socially and sexually an outcast – she does indeed make a sacrifice to the higher education of women.’ However, he could not help suggesting that it would have been better done in prose: Miss Hamilton’s verse ‘wanders about the page like a lost thing without rhyme or metre’.14

  By August 1917, he could get around in a wheelchair. Still news came from the front: he was devastated to hear from Mrs Chisholm Batten that her son Jack, his fellow scholar and great schoolfriend, had been killed earlier that month. Slowly he became strong enough to be taken out in his chair to his club. On 12 September Gladys Dalyell and his mother Meg wheeled him to the RAC Club where he gave them lunch. They discussed a book by Ian Hay, a novelist and soldier, called The Oppressed English, which had something to say on the union: ‘Today a Scot is leading the British army in France [Field Marshal Douglas Haig], another is commanding the British grand fleet at sea [Admiral David Beatty], while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home [Sir William Robertson]. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot [Viscount Finlay]; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary [Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour]. The Prime Minister is a Welshman [David Lloyd George], and the First Lord of the Admiralty is an Irishman [Lord Carson]. Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England.’15 It was the sort of absurdist approach to politics that appealed to Charles and he was gradually changing and becoming interested in pointing out the irony in governance.

  Being a gentleman and a man about town meant you had to belong to a club and Charles attended many clubs on a freelance basis. Officers during the war were more or less welcome everywhere. He had been officially a member of his father’s club, the New Club in Edinburgh, since January. The only club of Scotland’s ruling class, it had reciprocal rights with the London clubs White’s, Boodle’s and Brooks’s.

  The RAC Club in Pall Mall, where he went for lunch with Gladys and Meg, which had opened in 1897, was a mini-palace of opulence to compensate for the hardships suffered in war, almost becoming an officers’ club, with, by 1919, over thirteen thousand officers registered as temporary members. Designed by the architects of the Ritz Hotels in London and Paris, it had a luxurious gilded interior, sauna and shooting range. Many of Charles’s literary friends and associates belonged to the Reform Club, also in Pall Mall. Its library contained 50,000 books, mostly on political history and biography. At a time when many other clubs dished up school dinners, the Reform was famous for the artistry of its French chefs. When one head chef was found with a housemaid and dismissed, the members held a mass meeting to demand his reinstalment – with rights over all the housemaids. In spite of the war the spirit of hedonism was still alive. However a man’s clubs said a lot about his character, and Charles was becoming less and less of a hedonist. After the free membership for officers during the war was over, he had to join a club officially, and the club attended histor-ically by the Scottish writing intelligentsia was the Savile Club, then at 107 Piccadilly. R. L. Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Compton Mackenzie and George Saintsbury, Charles’s own professor from Edinburgh, were members. Although he came here in a freelance manner during the war, Charles would be officially proposed in 1919 by the critic Sir Edmund Gosse, Sir J. C. Squire, the literary editor, and eight others.

  Charles’s reviewing was now coming in fast. E. B. Osborn, who was soon to kindly include Charles in his book of collected poetry, made the mistake of writing a novel. Charles sketched a description of a self-regarding Great Man writing in the trenches – ‘sheet after sheet of neatly written but illegible gibberish … his book is, I regret
to say, wholly unreadable.’16

  The following week he was sent the nineteen-year-old Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth, ‘If I had been given the alternatives – to lie about in Flanders and, in mid-August, occupy Langemarck, or to return to England and, about the same time, criticise ‘The Loom of Youth’, I know not which of these adventures, alike so arduous and so gratifying, I should have chosen. But I had no choice…’17 He dedicated a whole page of the periodical to Waugh who then wrote to him and formed a lifelong acquaintance. At the same time Charles in a letter to a friend described the book as the ‘Doom of Youth’ and called it ‘a curiously boring book’.18

  The book became a controversial bestseller, openly mentioning romantic love between schoolboys. However, the romance was all of two pages and the rest of the book chronicled mundane life at a boarding school.

  Charles became interested in translations, reviewing some from the French – two novels and a collection of French war poetry. He was critical of Under Fire by Henri Barbusse; faced with French soldier slang the translator, Fitzwater Wray, rendered it word for word, making it neither English slang nor English literature. Although he gave the poetry plenty of space and discussion, Charles found its translation irritating. Translation in Britain did not occupy a significant place in literary culture, and reviews of translations were not common. On the other hand Charles knew the Balzac translation supervised by his professor Saintsbury and executed by Ellen Marriage, and had also read some of Constance Garnett’s translations from Russian. He knew Ezra Pound’s translation from Anglo-Saxon and Provençal, and it has been said that Charles’s first translations ‘are like some Pound in their challenging foreignness’.19 What is beautiful in one language is often clumsy or sheer nonsense in another. Fidelity and transparency, dual ideals, were usually at odds in translation. A seventeenth-century French critic had coined the phrase, les belles infidèles, arguing that translations, like women, could be either beautiful or faithful but not both. Charles however thought the translation of Barbusse was neither. He had lofty ideals about translation as he did in other areas of life, seeing it as a vocation and a service to literature.