The Long Week-End 1897-1919

by Wilfred R. Bion

  Part of the pretension of manliness was to turn up for the day without any food—being indifferent to hardship and food was manly. In my soft way, nurtured on the luxuries of Colman’s boat on the Broads, I thought—but did not say—that it was not manly, merely incompetent. Years later, when I read a book describing the dreadful winter of the South Polar exploration, I felt I knew it all—the manliness, the incompetence, the utter futility, contrasting so nobly with the sneaking, unmanly clockwork precision and success of a rival team. In my soft feminine way I preferred success. I certainly preferred success that fine blustering day at sea when I was invited by the effervescent Thompson to make do with a hunk of stale, musty cake; search had revealed that there was no other food aboard.

  Mr Thompson’s wife, unlike Hirst’s, was not in a loony bin. Mrs Thompson was beautiful; she wore smart, frightening clothes; she liked manly, intelligent boys like Laurie who won a lead over me which he never lost. One or two of the boys of Thompson’s school who were staying after the end of their term were already far in the lead. They looked tremendously scruffy to me; it was hard to realize that they were superior beings.

  I was in love with Mrs Thompson; with hang-dog look and downcast eyes I worshipped from afar. And then I realized… it was quite simple really. She could not understand how a great big boy like me, who could easily be taken for military age, did not run away and join the army. I couldn’t understand it myself. Whenever I thought of doing so I felt such a fool that I dismissed the thought. It would have been fine to run away, join the army, go to the front and… I couldn’t quite make up my mind about getting killed and finally settled for winning the VC and coming back to see how Mrs Thompson took it. Even so I had doubts; one glance at my woe-begone face in a mirror showed how ridiculous I would look as a hero. Subsequent events proved me right.

  Anyhow, there in the evenings I sat—a great boring lump of doglike devotion. Poor Mrs Thompson! My heart bled for her. I could not make out why I didn’t run away and…

  The holidays at last came to an end. I didn’t run away; I didn’t join up. And the bloody fleet did not have a Great Naval Battle. Laurie and I on our last day did, however, put aside our school caps—so as not to bring dishonour on them—put on sailing caps and amidst some furze bushes pulled out two brand new pipes and began to smoke them. We admitted that it was better than fiddling around doing nothing in particular; tobacco was a solace. After a bit I told Laurie I thought I would take a stroll. He, damn him, agreed with alacrity and offered, almost insisted, on coming with me. It was the last straw; war, pipes, Grand Fleet, Mrs Thompson—they could all be at the bottom of the sea for all I cared.

  On the second day of term someone rushed into the studies. “The Army! Quick!”, and vanished. At first, with dignity sufficient to show that we of the Sixth would never be influenced by scum like boys from the Lower Sixth, we moved towards the gate. But… That was band music! Those powerful throbbing pulsations! We ran; we reached the gates just before the head of the column. It was the army!

  As column after column passed I was overawed. “North Midland Division”, someone said. North Staffs, South Staffs, the Leicesters… I had never heard of any regiments in my life except the Guards, and they were only something to do with Tuck’s postcards, Buckingham Palace and other fairy-story furniture. But the Leicesters—they were real. I was converted; in an hour or two I spoke with professional ease of regiment of the line, gunners, ‘figurez vous en plein Sahara’. I was not brash as I had been about India, cannibals and such exotic fry in my first term at the prep school, for I did not even know this was a Territorial Division—nothing at all compared with regulars. My pride, though immeasurable, was not based on knowledge. Later this same division, incompetently handled at Neuve Chapelle, arrived at the Line worn out and unfed only to break when its attack met the withering fire of German machine guns. They said it never recovered; this I can believe even though I never heard any supporting evidence. When we saw them the division was at full strength; the marching columns could have gone on marching for ever without tiring me.

  From then on I could not work. I was captain of the 1st XV; I was a prefect. Dust and ashes. At last, at last—I left school after a year which would not move. I went to say good-bye to Bobby Sutton. I was miserable, and angry at being miserable. I said something rude and hostile about being glad to leave. I then burst into tears—to my surprise and embarrassment, and I suppose to his. Bobby was not a sentimental man and I expect it was as well for both of us that I immediately removed myself, collected my traps from the School House and went to the station. I had been at the school for ten years; the last year, my year of glory, the culmination of one of the longest school careers, ended in anti-climax. My captaincy of the XV had been a succession of cancelled matches, frustrations, gloom. My captaincy of swimming, the same. Visiting teams were composed of abstracted and bored men who had made great efforts to come together to give the school a game. Their efforts were understood, but not appreciated; our lack of appreciation aroused no sympathetic response.

  As the train drew into Liverpool Street station I knew I would shortly meet my father and mother. Thank God, thank God! And then I thought, for what?

  WAR

  1

  THE world was all before. The iron gates of my Paradise clanged to behind me as I walked, alone, solitary in my anonymous glory to face the dawn of the freedom for which I had waited so long. Were there not millions of others? No; I only knew what it was like to be me. No one knew that terrible fear; no one could know how it felt, how awful that first night at the prep school, Search-the-Scriptures Sunday classes, the Sunday ‘tuck’ in the gym, crawling over the horrible bar with the concrete floor below, the ‘summer suns are glowing’ but not for me. “Oh, not again!” Exactly; not again. No more; no, never more.

  I knew that tunnel at Bishopsgate. Once it used to open out into the sunshine. There breaks a yet more glorious day. And this— dark, sodden, sulphurous Liverpool Street—was if. Surely it must be a pool whose stench-borne waters close over one for ever. So like the shell-hole—no, no; not yet. That was later; or long ago; take your choice. Now I stepped out into the glorious company of the umbrella-bearing Saints. England at War. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public-school soul. “Let us run with enlarged hearts”, the Headmaster used to beseech our inconsiderately unmedical Maker. “Animula, vagula, blandula…” Did Hadrian really feel like that? That was a long time ago, and not in Liverpool Street with the rain pouring relentlessly, icily down. A great big boy like you! These buses! Not one… ah, here—Russell Square? “T’other way chum”. Someone’s umbrella emptied itself down my neck. Mustn’t say “damn”, damn it!

  I got there. In my parent’s bedroom the electric light cast its livid warmth; they were glad to see me—that I knew. But I could feel that her boy’s precocious departure for the war left my mother kissing a chitinous semblance of a boy from whom a person had escaped. But I was imprisoned, unable to break out of the shell which adhered to me. ‘Couvre-toi de gloire!’, but how loudly my unjesting soul said, ‘Couvre-toi de flannelle’, despite the prickiness of those hated Indian stockings. The roar of traffic in the streets below l)ore all its sons away’. Although fanned by its waves yet I remained tenuously held by a thread, my father praying that I would join the Church’s communion; my mother praying, as I knew she must be, that I would not be swept away and lost. Often I have wondered whether it had not been better if those invisible bands had not been so steely strong, or whether, had they been any weaker, I should have lost my hold on sanity, ‘“and, ‘and” I would weep as a child when asleep in the throes of terror. “A great big boy like you!”, sneered Miss Whybrow and Mrs Thompson. And here… would the evening never end?

  One morning—it may have been the next—I presented myself at the recruiting office of the Inns of Court OTC which, being a territorial unit, had been embodied at the outbreak of the war. Although it was technically liable to be sent abroad for active service
, by this time the authorities had learned from experience with the UPS that it was not a good idea to put all potential officers together where they could in one short disaster be destroyed or captured. There were two such units; the Artists’ Rifles and the Inns of Court. The Artists no more consisted of artists than the Inns of Court consisted of lawyers. It was understood, however, that men considering themselves to be officer material would join one or other of these units. Who ‘understood’ that I was officer material I do not know; it did not occur to me that I was not. Thus I found myself in a queue of similarly aspiring officers and gentlemen waiting to be interviewed so that our credentials might be scrutinized. I thought we looked a rum lot including three or four elderly desk-bound men who had been swept into the army as the national authorities—Lord Kitchener of the piercing and accusing eyes, Asquith with his unsheathed sword—combed ever more deeply into our reserve of manhood.

  One face I recognized belonged to the captain of the rugger team of a famous school—one far better known and prestigious than my loved but unadorned institution. He, I noticed to my horror, was wearing a bowler hatl Of course, already and by nature a ‘gentleman’ and therefore as good as commissioned, whereas I—loutish as usual—wore the gaudy school cap of our 1st XV. ‘Soccer’ (not ‘rugger’), moon-faced and school-capped (not bowler hatted), I, already demoralized, faced two majors. They were red-faced as true alcoholic epileptics should be, but with piercing eyes. These were not as penetrating as the accusing finger of Lord Kitchener, but like gooseberries in a strawberry tart—more appropriate to an OTC. “Come back after lunch”, I was told. I came, but had no lunch.

  “You there—you with that college cap—’op it.”

  “Can I go?”

  “Yus—that’s wot I said—napoo, finished, rejected.”

  That blasted cap! I knew it. But I also knew that I had no base on which to stand. Why hadn’t I run away and joined the arn.y?

  2

  MY father and I were trying to see into the shop window. A large woman suddenly stepped back into me. She turned her angry face up to mine. “What the bloody hell!” Although only eighteen I was heavy and solidly built, but a moment’s scrutiny of my moonface as I raised my cap and stammered out an apology satisfied her curiosity. She and her companion laughed, linked arms and moved off. My father, who had drawn in his breath sharply as if to say something, thought better of it; we went back to my mother at the hotel.

  It was November 1915, gloomy and drizzling. We went up to our rooms, ostensibly to change but really to pass the intolerable hours until the evening meal. One cannot make a change of clothes last for ever; I found my parents in their room waiting.

  My mother looked up, but her affectionate greeting could not hide her anxiety. There was plenty of time before dinner to continue the family debate. Their debate and mine differed but overlapped in a way which seemed to make each an interference with the other. Their debate, I suspected, was about me, my hostility, misery, resentment and self-centredness. After a while my father picked up the paper and pretended to read; my mother knitted, which was awkward because it did not remove her from the scene enough to relieve my guilt that she was available for conversation; I did not want to talk.

  My idiotic cap I Of course the woman, being sensible, laughed. Anyone knew it was a symbol of humiliation—not officer quality. My father had been flabbergasted by my rejection; he was very good at being flabbergasted. But the ‘stout party’ of the kind of Punch joke with which he was familiar differed from the kind who had bumped into me. Two flabbergasts in one day had put him out; I could feel him wondering which one to start with.

  He put down his paper. He had decided to start at the “Cannot possibly understand how you could fail to be accepted by a nation at war” end. The storm beat around my head. Finally it let up enough for me to hear my father say, “I wonder if Marsh could help.” I would not have noticed it if my mother had not laid down her knitting as if something worth pondering had been said. She listened, but my father had nothing more to say. I kept my mouth shut.

  At length my mother conceded that it was ‘an idea’; we went in to dinner in a frame of mind which was surprisingly and unexpectedly cheerful. It was clear to me that my mother set great store by Mr Marsh. I think my father was as much surprised as I was to find he had dispersed so much gloom.

  The relief was more my parents’ than mine. I did not know who Marsh was and I found it difficult to imagine how anyone could help with me. Not that I had any opinion that I was worthless, but rather the contrary; I felt it would be difficult to demonstrate any grounds for my conceit of myself. I was furious at my humiliating failure to be accepted; I was humiliated by the humiliation which I vaguely felt to be my own fault. Adding sharp detail to my drab and sordid state was a memory of August 1914: a green meadow and on it drawn up, brave and shining, the guns of a territorial regiment. The men looked fine, so keen, like a materialization of Glory itself. ‘Quo Fas et Gloria Ducunt.’

  A day or so after the Marsh conversation, loafing along Russell Street, I heard a band. I could hardly believe my good fortune when the excitement, the craning of necks told me they might be coming my way. Then—there it was; distant khaki moving rhythmically. All too soon it was passing. How fine they lookedl Who? What? Royal FusiliersI City of London! Why didn’t I go and join up and get done with the whole damned business instead of messing around with… respectable people? While I could take wings and ‘finish the damned thing’ mentally, I felt as if I had feet and a body of lead. I could not finish the damned thing; I was rooted in a ghastly, unimaginative, unromantic slug of reality. My feet would not lift off the pavement; paralysis from the pelvis down. I felt that anyone could see I was not walking but shuffling. I hauled myself, iron rail by iron rail, to the Russell Square hotel lunch and Russell Square paternal moral nurture.

  My eyes glazed, my ears were filled, my venturesome dream of joining the army gave place to the following dialogue in which I could distinguish my own voice, clearly and distinctly—so clear and distinct that I could not understand it. Had I not been familiar with my father’s voice and the very sentiments expressed I would have said that I did not know either of the participants. Was it really about joining the army? To fight? Was it to make the world safe for Non-conformity? ‘Like a mighty army… Onward Christian Soldiers…’—shuffling as to war? The trumpets sounded an ambiguous note. ‘Come to the cookhouse door boys.’ The needle had stuck in the groove of a very old recording.

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t like”, said my father. I knew the tone of voice.

  “What’s that?” I said flatly and with an enthusiasm to push the answer as far away from my understanding as I could.

  “Why do they call it ‘The Devil’s Own’?”

  “Oh that”, I said carelessly. “Well you see, George III or somebody once asked where these troops, or trained bands or whatever they then were, came from, and he was told they were lawyers. He said, ‘They should be called The Devil’s Own’. It’s a kind of joke really.”

  “But”, said my father turning this over in his mind, “surely they could drop that now? After all, one can’t fight under that banner when our cause is just.”

  “We don’t use banners now”, I said, playing for time, but I knew I was going to be defeated; his eyes had glassed over which meant paradoxically that the game was up. “And anyhow they don’t fight. It’s only an OTC.”

  “You know very well what I mean”, he said with some warmth, unglazing his eyes for the moment. I realized you can’t be angry and keep your eyes glazed. “This is very dear to me; we should fight with clean hands.”

  It was very dear to him. I remembered when I was small and had in an unguarded moment bragged of the daring with which I and another boy had broken bounds and gone down town without permission—’skunked’ down town we called it. “The very term you use shows that you think it is mean. The skunk itself is an animal—” “It doesn’t go into town at all Dad!”

&
nbsp; But my Dad did, at great length, morally, biologically, theologically. I tried to avoid these conflagrations in which he extinguished me with a moral foam that made it impossible to breathe. If only I could join the Royal Fusiliers! They were probably made up of boys whose mothers said, “What the bloody hell!”

  “Have you heard from Marsh?”, I said, hoping to deflect the flow. To my surprise it worked.

  “As a matter of fact I have. That is just what I was coming to when I was saying the one thing I didn’t like was its being called—”

  “What did he say Dad?”

  “He wants us to come to dinner.” It was a struggle, but he abandoned the Devil to tell me that I was to go with them so he could introduce me to his old friend. Dark suit—but no school cap, I thought.

  3

  MAHOGANY, silver candlesticks, two maids and plenty of white starch. The conversation was uneasy; I could not believe it would be anything else with me about. My father was trying to ask me something—I imagine it would be by way of getting me to explain why I had been such an oaf—but my mother gave him a look which stopped him.

  Mr Marsh did help. On January 4th 1916 I was being sworn in as a member of the armed forces. The officer had thin sneering lips. “So, you are Mr Marsh’s friend?”, he inquired. Was I? Luckily he wasn’t wanting an answer or heaven knows what I would have let him in for. A few days later I was in uniform, baggy, itchy, hot. I felt so unsoldierly that I had quite a shock when a girl who had given me a white feather a few days past didn’t give me another as I passed by her beat. I thought she must have been pre-occupied or worried about something to have missed me. Then I realized that she had mistaken me—taken me?—for a soldier. My mother was proud of me.