The Long Week-End 1897-1919

by Wilfred R. Bion

  I enjoyed the Inns of Court. We drilled in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We were very bad; even my feeble cadet corps experiences at school were enough to make me shine—or at least ‘glow’—rather more than others.

  We graduated to Hampstead Heath and to Leffman, an amateur—like us—CSM, an intelligent, efficient, drill-book performer—unlike us—who prided himself on the distinct and elocutionary exact pronouncement of his orders. One of us, a professional singer, Topliss Green, was contemptuous; “He thinks his voice carries!” Lunch—coffee and cheese at the Express Dairy—and ‘home’ in the evening.

  Once, when we had been dismissed early, I went to evensong at St Paul’s cathedral. It was a gloomy day. The non-conformist Sunday had eaten deeply into the soft remnants of my soul; it brought back the queer sense of Doom from my prep school days which had confirmed my fundamental timidity. Many regard timidity as the disposition of a ‘milksop’—flimsy, wayward, unreliable. In me it is the toughest, most robust, most enduring quality I have. ‘All we like sheep have gone astray’, but at least Handel’s sheep seem to be a cheerful lot. Not so my ‘ewe lamb’. I was tough, timid, gloomy and infectious. It was a hideous foundation on which to base one’s warlike hopes.

  I do not now remember when or how the period at Hampstead Heath came to an end. In retrospect it was pleasant and short—at the time never-ending. It was spring; it was warm; it was exciting to be in camp. In my tent were Baker, my bowler-hatted rival school rugger captain; his older friend Hunter, who shared with him a common background of mancunian origin; and Howells, who was of an age with Hunter and who dwells in memory as a man of sense, humourous and kindly. I was separated from them by my immaturity, queerness, nonconformity; drawn to them by the same difference.

  Typical of the trifles I remember is of being on parade with Baker immediately behind me in the second rank. We were inspected by our platoon sergeant to see that we were correctly turned out. One item of ‘correct’ dress was having the safety catch of our rifles in the ‘on’ position. As we stood immobile at attention Baker mischievously used to reach forward with the toe of his boot and trip the safety catch of my rifle to the ‘off position. So when the sergeant reached me I was detected as being ‘improperly’ dressed—much to the amusement of Hunter and Howells. This was often repeated so that ‘Private Bion improperly dressed again’ became a stock joke: so did my fury at the ‘unfairness’.

  Two great pleasures stand out. On most days we had a route march of some fifteen or twenty hot, dusty and thirsty miles—”Don’t empty your water bottles; only wet your lips. Save the rest.” Once we passed a garden with high lavender hedges and roses in profusion; an old gentleman reclined in an easy chair reading his newspaper. The faint blue, the soft glow of roses, the scent of England ruffled my hot and sweaty face. The ‘past’ was etched in my mind more indelibly than the grime which our communal showers could wash off. Later—so time as it is measured by calendar and clock told me, but not my sense of smell or poetic ear—perfumes known as ‘Quelques Fleurs’ and ‘Temps de Lilas’, a line of verse, ‘Soft as Sorrow, bright as old Renown’, set music vibrating in me. Another scent was introduced into my life by Quainton, a recruit nearer to me in age and social culture. Though a Quaker, he had joined the army with a view to fighting. One pleasure to which he introduced me was Pear’s Attar of Roses scented soap. From now on I washed away the sweat of the route inarch with Attar of Roses. Quainton’s fate almost washed away the joy of life I learned from him.

  My second delight was acquired in ‘night operations’. Tring station, our operations orders told us, was on fire, having been captured by ‘the enemy’. Perhaps the enemy was unimaginative or my memory deceives me by leading me to believe that this was a frequent event. It introduced me to the experience of creeping through the woods at night. Here I learned what it was to be alone with the sound of deer belling. Blessed peace 1 Blessed wildness in England’s cultivated calm. Tring station is on fire? Not yet; only make-believe so far; schoolboys of all ages playing soldiers, rehearsing for the real thing, but never learning that war and yet more terrible war is normal, not an aberrant disaster.

  We had a field-day against the Officer Training Corps of the Public Schools. The authorities had issued us with blank ammunition which our ‘patrols’ handed to the boys so that they had plenty to fire. Blank ammunition makes a rifle dirty; as we had to clean ours we kept our barrels unused. I do not remember the lessons which were drawn from our exercises; they cannot have been profound. They certainly did not bite into the substance of my mind as the love of Stokes, the South African, and Quainton (the quaint’un) did. Stokes is dead; Quainton has left only the sound of his name. ‘Gone are the gypsies but where, who can say7’ Perhaps memory can throw a flickering gleam—firelight that teaches gloom to illuminate the dust.

  From Berkhampstead I passed to an Officer Training Unit in transit for Bisley—change at Brookwood, the London Necropolis, for the few miles to Bisley. Before this I was amongst equals for none of us had combatant experience. I remember only a Jewish cadet who made fun of his Jewishness by singing—very competently—comic songs about Jews. The songs were well received. I did not ask him a question that bothered me—why did he make fun of Jews? It was no business of mine; I was learning not to ask questions. A Jew was entitled to make fun of Jews if he wanted to.

  Bisley was the final school for aspirants to commissioned rank in the Machine Gun Corps: for me it was only a transit camp on the way to the Tanks for which I had applied and which were known as ‘Machine Gun Corps (Heavy)’. The men there had almost all seen active service at the front. There was a difference, which was palpable, dividing us from them. They were tolerant and kind—as if we were children; you weren’t cruel to children, nor did you take them seriously.

  The camp was understaffed. We had two officers—at once known as Gona and Diah—the brothers Rhea. There were one or two warrant officers from the Brigade of Guards; and there were two or three hundred of us. The understanding between the men from the front was spontaneous, instantaneous, complete; it was in no sense favourable to co-operation with the authorities unless pursuing parallel aims in a wish to say good-bye to Bisley Camp.

  We learned the intricacy of the Vickers machine gun. We practised stoppages by using American ammunition, thoughtfully supplied by our American allies but withdrawn from combatant use as soon as its unreliability became apparent. Clearly, as it invariably led to the jamming of the machine gun, it was ideal for training soldiers in how to deal with emergencies.

  My first and only week-end pass from that camp was a horror which plucked harshly and cruelly at chords which I had forgotten—my week-end of respite from the daily misery of the prep school. 1 loathed it; I hated every moment of it. I have no recollection of how I spent the day; I must have been conscious—my psycho-analytical bible tells me so. What it was like for my mother I do not know and cannot remember caring. I was cut off from my base. And the enemy was in full occupation of my mother. ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’. Yes, woods you fool! It is there alone in the jungle that you have to learn to live.

  4

  WHEN it was time to go back to camp my mother was pre-occupied; she stroked my cheek; she said it was soft. I was furious and about to remind her that I was not a baby now—I had begun to feel smart, like a kind of soldier, by this time—when I noticed she was crying. I kept my mouth shut but fumed inwardly.

  Waterloo was horrible. Khaki everywhere, blanked out and anonymous. Brookwood. The London Crematorium. “Nearly there boys—any more for the London Crematorium?” As we neared Bisley the whole train became active. I thought it was because they were all on leave and we were approaching camp. But they were not all on leave—I doubt if there were more than a handful like me who were. Someone pulled the communication cord, the train came to a halt and the passengers, all in uniform, swarmed out of the carriages and onto the fields to make their way back to camp without running into the Military Police. 1 stayed where
I was, feeling foolish for all my military grandeur and wishing I did not always feel a milksop. At Bisley the few of us who had stayed because we had leave passes started to slush back to camp. Why was it always dark? Why was it always raining?

  Mutt and Jeff were there; they at least were always cheerful and had earned their nicknames because of their resemblance to two comic characters in one of the daily papers. They made life bearable in camp—not beyond. There was no anaesthetic for those suffering home leave, the worst being before embarkation.

  After what seemed an eternity of anxiety about the chance of being commissioned 1 was eventually posted to the 5th Tank Battalion. I had applied to go to Tanks as it was the only way to penetrate the secrecy surrounding them. I was ordered to report to Bovington Camp at Wool where I saw my first tank—it blocked the road to camp. The day was hot, sunny, still. The queer mechanical shape, immobilized and immobilizing, was frightening in the same way as the primitive tiger trap near Gwalior; I wanted to get away from it. A metallic hammering came from inside; a soldier got out and the day sprang into life again.

  It was a good camp, well disciplined—not ramshackle, temporary and amateur like so much I had seen in my feverish and irritable progress. This I felt was it. The officers were men you expected to obey; even a second lieutenant, though known as ‘a blot on the landscape’ as I soon found, was expected to behave like one in authority. We were drilled by a senior NCO and our manoeuvres were intended to impress other ranks with our efficiency, not as evidence of our unimportance.

  Drill, technical courses, revolvers, machine-guns, 6-pounders, and above all the mighty tank itself, filled our days. Then Mess; still a ritual. Not so wonderful—how could it be?—as the Royal Naval College, but still not bad for mere soldiers. Then Lights Out, the deep evening glow, the nightjars.

  I became re-united with Quainton and Stokes who had been parted from me at Berkhampstead. They had taken a different route to arrive at their commissions—in Tanks and, by a curious chance, the 5th Battalion. Health, good food, intense concentration on guns and courses, and on one occasion a ramble with Stokes, Quainton and Bayliss through the hot, humid, rhododendron-studded parkland far from the devastation of the tank driving area, seemed to stretch out the carefree minutes into hours and days. It was known, but like all else we knew we hardly dared believe, we were to go overseas as a battalion; we were proud of it.

  Embarkation leave and a lovely sunny day—how I wished my mother could see us as we marched down to Wool Station. But she preferred to stay in the cottage she had rented in the village. I was sure she would hear the band when the special train drew in—it played Auld Lang Syne and Home Sweet Home.

  Le Havre, ‘rest camp’; this time no courses to hide our frustration. Close by was a VD hospital and about this there was a ‘funny’ story. The ‘funny’ story belonged to the VD camp as certain adjectives belong to words; tired adjectives, tired words, tired stories; as tired as the diseases that belong to wars. “What are you doing7”, asked a padre of an officer who kept dodging from one camp to another. “I’ve just seen my son here and I don’t want him to see me.” A little later, to his surprise, he saw another officer behaving in the same way. “May I ask what you think you are doing7” he asked. “Nothing; only I’ve just seen my Dad in here and I don’t want him to see me.”

  Cohen, Bayliss, Stokes, Quainton and I were religious; in the view of other members of our company we were ‘pi’ or just plain humbugs. As far as I was concerned, though I kept to the disciplinary code, I felt that religion had not ‘taken’ even as effectually as medical innoculation. There were reminiscences of night-time fears when I was small in India, linked with a harmonium played very carefully by mother while my sister and I sang ‘Jesus loves me’, or There is a green hill far away’. The parched Indian landscape must have drained all its green into that hill which retained its city wall like a crown within which were tiny spires and towers huddled together against the foes ‘without’.

  Again, and for the last time, we marched as a battalion to entrain, the band creating a mild stir by playing the Marseillaise. As Carter, our company reconnaissance officer, remarked, the people of Le Havre must have hated the sound of it by this time. “On the other hand”, he said, “it does drive the point home in the unlikely event that any German spy might fail to notice and report our arrival to Boche HQ.” This indeed was unlikely, but then the enemy also made extraordinary mistakes.

  Le Havre, though undamaged by war, was stark and gloomy to march through for all the music the band was blowing through its streets. “We are quite near Agincourt”, I wrote dutifully to my old history master at school, feeling as far from the thin skin of my patriotism as I could be. ‘This quarrel honourable’—of course we all ‘did’ Henry V—seemed to be some quirk in Shakespeare rather than anything stable in the English character. No one could have been so ‘unpatriotic’ in the glorious days of Elizabethan England. Patriotic, had I realized it, was all I could be.

  Our destination? A mysterious place called The Front. Maybe for half an hour—time had already come to mean something that could not be measured by watches—we travelled slowly but in a manner reminiscent of railways in pre-war England. The coaches bore a resemblance to those on trains going to the East coast—Norwich, North Walsham, Cromer. Then the train stopped. Novices, we wanted to know why. After a while some of us asked why. A railwayman came along the line; he seemed a decent fellow and he stopped to give the matter some thought. Finally, though we were not sure as we only spoke public-school French, he suggested the train had stopped. Even in french French it sounded unenlightening. Later we became habituated; we did not ask questions requiring answers. It was wiser to sleep.

  It sounded like the rumble of an approaching train. What was remarkable was the speed with which it came, out of the silence as from a ghostly world. Then it was upon us, so material, so evidently an express that in that context it was a ghost, shimmering, brightly lit, it passed with its rhythmic beat. It was not blacked out; in that innocent age the International Red Cross needed no protection other than to make its presence known. A faint smell of iodoform came through our windows.

  “Lucky sods”, said Yates feelingly. The rumble died away in the distance till silence swallowed us again. Yates was one of our few veterans; he had been in the landing of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers on Gallipoli. It was said that the survivors tossed up to decide which of them were to receive the Victoria Crosses which had been awarded in ‘bulk’ to the battalion because it was invidious to make distinctions when in valour all were equal. Yates was not quite our hero. One of his friends joked about his wearing his second lieutenant’s star on a shoulder strap already pierced for the stars necessary to mark his promotion to captain. “After all, I have already worn the stars!” he replied with what to us was more eloquent of a chip on his shoulder than of a badge of rank. Poor Yates—he looked worn and his attempts at putting a brave face on the prospects now looming were threadbare. The Colonel, he confided to me, had given him a damned good talking to. “I tell you he gave it me straight. He’s a fine chap!” The Colonel was a handsome young regular who had been jumped from captain to command of our battalion to match the DSO he had been awarded on the Retreat with his original infantry regiment.

  “What’s the matter with this damned traini” said Carter. The brilliant flashing special with its suggestion of spotless linen, nurses, cleanliness, against the anonymous dark had cast a gloom on us all. We were many hours, days, weeks from the Line; what was the trouble? Too far and too near.

  5

  WE woke to a fine sunny morning, stiff and cold from having slept on the concrete floor in our uniforms without bedding. Carter, who must have been nearer fifty than thirty, stoically did not show the pain which must have been much worse for him than for those, like me, who were nearer eighteen than twenty. “What a rum smell”, I said sniffing the sweet and rotten air. Carter drew in his breath through compressed lips and spat it out. The nearest, I
thought, he ever gets to a smile. “Must be a corpse somewhere—that’s what that smell means.” We hunted vainly, four or five of us when that many had woken. “It’s not a Boche—they stink; not the rotten sweet smell.” ‘In death they were not divided’—much. We could not find it so we had to endure it till we moved off two days later.

  The trains were for men or horses, forty or eight, and with one or two coaches or compartments for officers; not just broken down third-class compartments such as we might have used in our youth when we ourselves were civilians, but grand, shabby, broken down first class, thus making unmistakable the gulf that separated US from THEM. Our men, my men or The Men? Or perhaps “Men!” as one would address them before battle. It seemed queer that Sergeant O’Toole, Hayler, Allen, the other Allen, Richardson, Gee Colombo should suddenly have become estranged and separated as we now approached the Line for which we had prepared so long. Much later I had a similar crisis of etiquette when cheerful, jolly Smith suddenly became It’ when a shell splinter entered his brain and we could not get his limbs to pack properly into the grave. ‘Him’, ‘Corporal’, ‘Matey’, ‘Smith’—time was getting short and it made things awkward if we had to make a grave to fit him (or It).

  We sat in our superior comfort. I felt uneasily that my crew might not see or realize that I was entitled to travel first class because of my graver responsibilities.

  The afternoon landscape through which we crawled was scrub-covered. It grew dark. We went more slowly. Then stopped. “Is this the Line?” “No chum, it’s not.” “Then what?” “Nothing. We’ve arrived—that’s all.” We got out and 1 went to find my crew. They wanted to know too. They were wet and cold. We were standing outside the trucks and coaches which were forlorn and bleak. And the rain came down in sheets; rain which was destined to be ‘mentioned in dispatches’, to become famous later, but which for the present was only wet. We stood there and waited for something to happen. We had not even begun to realize that nothing happens in war, or—which comes to much the same—nobody knows what happens. I would have thought I was being made a fool of if I had been told that, even years after that war and yet another like it, 1 still would not know something so simple and obvious as who had won.