The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 3 - Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Sometimes I actually find myself ‘out there’ (though the background is always in England – the Germans have usually invaded half Kent). And, as in the first dream, I am vaguely gratified at ‘adding to my war experience’. I take out a patrol and am quite keen about it.

  This dream obviously dates from the autumn of 1917, when I made the choice which seemed like a ‘potential death-sentence’. If it proves anything it is this; the fact that it was everybody’s business to be prepared to die for his country did not alter the inward and entirely personal grievance one had against being obliged to do it. The instinct of self-preservation automatically sank below all arguments put forward by one’s ‘higher self’. ‘I don’t want to die,’ it insisted. ‘I want to be a middle-aged man writing memoirs, and not a “glorious name” living for evermore on a block of stone subject to the inevitable attritions and obfuscations caused by climate.’ ‘But your deathless name will be invisibly inscribed in the annals of your imperishable race’ argued some celestial leader-writer. ‘I prefer to peruse to-morrow’s Times in normal decrepitude’ replied ignoble self-preservation.

  It would be an exaggeration if I were to describe Slateford as a depressing place by daylight. The doctors did everything possible to counteract gloom, and the wrecked faces were outnumbered by those who were emerging from their nervous disorders. But the War Office had wasted no money on interior decoration; consequently the place had the melancholy atmosphere of a decayed hydro, redeemed only by its healthy situation and pleasant view of the Pentland Hills. By daylight the doctors dealt successfully with these disadvantages, and Slateford, so to speak, ‘made cheerful conversation’.

  But by night they lost control and the hospital became sepulchral and oppressive with saturations of war experience. One lay awake and listened to feet padding along passages which smelt of stale cigarette-smoke; for the nurses couldn’t prevent insomnia-ridden officers from smoking half the night in their bedrooms, though the locks had been removed from all doors. One became conscious that the place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid and terrifying – men muttering uneasily or suddenly crying out in their sleep. Around me was that underworld of dreams haunted by submerged memories of warfare and its intolerable shocks and self-lacerating failures to achieve the impossible. By daylight each mind was a sort of aquarium for the psychopath to study. In the daytime, sitting in a sunny room, a man could discuss his psycho-neurotic symptoms with his doctor, who could diagnose phobias and conflicts and formulate them in scientific terminology. Significant dreams could be noted down, and Rivers could try to remove repressions. But by night each man was back in his doomed sector of a horror-stricken Front Line, where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the dead. No doctor could save him then, when he became the lonely victim of his dream disasters and delusions.

  Shell-shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long-delayed after-effect in the minds of these survivors, many of whom had looked at their companions and laughed while inferno did its best to destroy them. Not then was their evil hour, but now; now, in the sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech. Worst of all, in the disintegration of those qualities through which they had been so gallant and selfless and uncomplaining – this, in the finer types of men, was the unspeakable tragedy of shell-shock; it was in this that their humanity had been outraged by those explosives which were sanctioned and glorified by the Churches; it was thus that their self-sacrifice was mocked and maltreated – they, who in the name of righteousness had been sent out to maim and slaughter their fellow-men. In the name of civilization these soldiers had been martyred, and it remained for civilization to prove that their martyrdom wasn’t a dirty swindle.

  PART TWO

  LIVERPOOL

  AND LIMERICK

  1

  It is not impossible that on my way back to Clitherland I compared my contemporary self with previous Sherstons who had reported themselves for duty there.

  First the newly-gazetted young officer, who had yet to utter his first word of command – anxious only to become passably efficient for service at the front. (How young I had been then – not much more than two and a half years ago!) Next came the survivor of nine months in France (the trenches had taught him a thing or two anyhow) less diffident, and inclined, in a confused way, to ask the reason why everyone was doing and dying under such soul-destroying conditions. Thirdly arrived that somewhat incredible mutineer who had made up his mind that if a single human being could help to stop the War by making a fuss, he was that man.

  There they were, those three Sherstons; and here was I – the inheritor of their dim renown. Reporting for duty again, that was all it boiled down to, after making a proper fool of myself instead of just carrying on and taking the cushy job which I could have had for the asking without anyone uttering a word against me.

  Driving out to the camp in a taxi, however, I didn’t doubt that I should be received with heartiness – albeit tinged with embarrassment. I must try not to think about it, I thought; and anyhow it was a comfort not to be arriving there with a bee in my bonnet; which was, I supposed, what they’d all been saying about my behaviour. But my arrival turned out to be an anticlimax. A surprise awaited me. Only a few days before, the Depot had been transplanted to Ireland on account of the troubles there. Clitherland Camp was to be taken over by an Irish battalion. In the meantime it was occupied by the Assistant-Adjutant and a few dozen ‘details’, plus a couple of hundred recruits and men returned from hospital. So everything was quite easy. What did my concerns matter when the whole Depot had been revolutionized? The Assistant-Adjutant, who had been permanently disabled early in the War, was a much-loved institution. Warmly welcomed by him, I passed a pleasant evening discussing everything except people with pacifist opinions, and on the whole I felt quite pleased to be back inside the sheepfold.

  But when I was alone – that was where the difficulty began. What was it – that semi-suicidal instinct which haunted me whenever I thought about going back to the line? Did I really feel an insidious craving to be killed, or am I only imagining it now? Was it ‘spiritual pride’, or was it just war-weariness and repressed exasperation?

  What I mean is this – that being alone with oneself is not the same thing as succeeding in being a good-natured and unpretentious person while talking to one’s friends. With the Assistant-Adjutant I was ‘the same old Sherston as ever’ – adapting himself to other people’s notions and doing his best to be cheerful. But in spite of my reliance on Rivers and my resolve to remain, through his influence, sensible and unimpulsive, none the less in what, for the sake of exposition I will call my soul, (Grand Soul Theatre; performances nightly) protagonistic performances were keeping the drama alive. (I might almost say that there was a bit of ‘ham’ acting going on at times.)

  For my soul had rebelled against the War, and not even Rivers could cure it of that. To feel in some sort of way heroic – that was the only means I could devise for ‘carrying on’. Hence, when I arrived at Clitherland, my tragedian soul was all ready to start back for the trenches with a sublime gesture of self-sacrifice. But it was an angry soul, with no inclination to be nice to anyone except its fellow-soldiers. It wanted to see itself dominating the audience (mainly civilians) and dying defiantly in some lime-lighted shell-hole; ‘martyred because he could not save mankind,’ as his platoon-sergeant remarked afterwards, in a burst of blank-verse eloquence of which he had hitherto believed himself incapable.

  The Orderly Room, however, was unconscious of all this. After spending three idle days at the camp, I was instructed to proceed – not to ‘some corner of a foreign field’ – but wherever I wanted to go during ten days’ leave. I was unofficially told I could make it twelve if I liked.

  My memories of that bit of leave are distinctly hazy. It goes without saying that the object of going on leave was to enjoy oneself. This I determined to do. I also made up my mind
to be as brainless as I could, which may account for my not being able to remember much of it now, since it is only natural that the less you think about what you are doing the less there is to remember.

  Butley, with its unavoidable absence of liveliness, did make me to some extent cerebrally aware of what was happening to me. Through no fault of its own, it suffered from the disadvantage of being ‘just the same as ever’ – except that all the life seemed to have gone out of it. And I was merely my old self, on final leave, with Aunt Evelyn doing her level best to make things bright and comfortable for me. The pathos of her efforts needs no emphasizing, though thinking of it gives me a heartache, even now. A strong smell of frying onions greeted my arrival. This, anyhow, gave me a chance to say how fond I was of that odour – as indeed I still am. ‘Steaks are quite difficult to get now, dear, so I do hope it’s a tender one,’ she remarked. And afterwards, while we were eating it, ‘Much as it disagrees with me I never can resist the merry onion.’

  Her tired face was just about as merry as an onion. And the steak, of course, was tough. We hadn’t much to tell one another either. Conversation about Slateford was restricted to my saying what a good place it was for golf, and there was an awkwardness even in telling her what a wonderful man Dr. Rivers was, since his name at once raised the spectre of my ‘protest’, which neither of us desired to discuss.

  No doubt she had hoped and prayed that I might get a home-service job; but now she just accepted the fact that I’d got to go out again.

  Naturally, I didn’t include Aunt Evelyn among the people on whom I wanted to get my own back by being killed. But I knew that she disapproved of people being pacifists when there was a war to be won. So she suffered in silence; and if I said anything at all it was probably in the ‘don’t much care what happens to me’ style which young people go in for when in contact with elderly and anxious relatives. So Aunt Evelyn had nothing to console her except her one form of optimism, which was to try and believe that the Germans were doing so badly that very soon there would be none left.

  And the only news she could think of was that dear old Mrs. Hawthorn was dead, which didn’t lead to anything except the fact that she had been nearly ninety. Yet if I’d heard about it when I was in my little room at Slateford I should have indulged in quite a pleasant reverie about old Mrs. Hawthorn and the children’s parties I used to go to at her house, and how she used to sit there like a queen, her artificial complexion so perfectly put on that nobody minded in the least, though in a younger person it would have been thought highly improper. But that was before the Boer War, and now the ‘Great One’ had killed both Mrs. Hawthorn’s great-nephews – those handsome boys of whom she had been so proud when she gave parties for them.

  Sitting here in my omniscience I am inclined to blame Aunt Evelyn and myself for not realizing that the only solution for ‘final leave’ was to open a bottle of champagne. But there was no champagne in the house. From patriotic principles, Aunt Evelyn preferred Empire wines. (I don’t wish to libel South African hock, but the vine which produced Aunt Evelyn’s vintage must have been first cousin to an aloe.) Meanwhile we did our best to be communicative, and after keeping introspection at arm’s length from Friday till Tuesday, I went off to Sussex and stayed with the Moffats, who knew all about opening bottles of bubbly; and there I had a couple of days with the hounds and succeeded in being authentically jolly. I can remember one good hunt along the vale below the downs. I hadn’t felt so happy since I didn’t know when, I thought; which merely meant that while galloping and jumping on a good horse everything else was forgotten – for forty-five minutes of the best, anyhow. And there was no sense in feeling morbid about the dead; they were well out of the war, anyway; and they wouldn’t grudge me my one good day in the vale.

  After that there was London with its good dinners and an air-raid and seeing a few friends and going to a few theatres, and before I knew where I was, Clitherland Camp had claimed me for its own again.

  I was feeling much more cheerful, and I told myself that I intended to lead a life of light-hearted stupidity. At Slateford I had been an individual isolated from outside influences, with plenty of time for thinking things over and finding out who I was. Now I was back in the brain-fuddling existence which did its best to prevent my thinking at all. I had to knock out my pipe and go on parade. My time was no longer my own. My military duties, however, were more a matter of killing time than of using it, and we were all merely waiting to move across to Ireland. So for about three weeks after I came back from leave I was in much the same position as the man in the comic song:

  I’d got lots of time to do it; but there wasn’t much to do

  When I was made head-keeper – of the pheasants at the Zoo.

  2

  While writing these memoirs, my interest in each chapter has been stimulated by the fact that I nearly always saw myself engaged in doing something for the first time. Even if it was only ‘going back to Butley’, I wasn’t quite the same as when I’d last left it, so one hoped that monotony was being avoided. All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming that they’ve ‘never seen anything like it before’ and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.

  Time has taught me that this talent for experiencing everyday life with ever-renewed freshness and intensity is the best qualification for making one’s memoirs readable. Professional ruminator though I admittedly am, I cannot accuse myself of lacking interest in life, and my main difficulty has been that I absorb so much that I am continually asking to be allowed to sit still and digest the good (and bad) things which life has offered me. A ruminator really needs two lives; one for experiencing and another for thinking it over. Knowing that I need two lives and am only allowed one, I do my best to lead two lives; with the inevitable consequence that I am told by the world’s busybodies that I am ‘turning my back on the contemporary situation’. Such people are usually so busy trying to crowd the whole of life into their daily existence that they get very little of it permanently inside their craniums. My own idea is that it is better to carry the best part of one’s life about in one’s head for future reference.

  As the reader already knows, I have seldom gone out in search of adventurous material. My procedure has always been to allow things to happen to me in their own time. The result was that when anything unexpected did happen to me it impressed itself on my mind as being significant. I can therefore claim that my terrestrial activities have been either accidental in origin or else part of the ‘inevitable sequence of events’. Had there been no Great War I might quite conceivably have remained on English soil till I was buried in it. Others have done the same, so why not Sherston? The fact remains that up to the end of 1917 I had never been to Ireland.

  Outwardly it was a dismal journey, for I left Liverpool late at night and the weather was wintry. Crewe station at midnight was positively Plutonian. Waiting for the Holyhead express to come in, I listened to echoing clangour and hissing steam; people paced the platform with fixedly dejected faces, while glaring lights and gloom and vapour intermingled above them. Crewe station and everyone inside it seemed to be eternally condemned to the task of winning the War by moving men, munitions, and material to the places appointed for them in the outer darkness of Armageddon. This much I observed as I stood with hunched-up shoulders, feeling sombrely impressed by the strangeness of the scene. Then I boarded the Holyhead train, remembering how I used to ride along the Watling Street with the Packlestone Hounds and see ‘Holyhead, 200 miles’ on a signpost; this memory led me to wonder whether I should get a day’s hunting in Ireland. After that an ‘inevitable sequence of events’ carried me across to Dublin, and thence to Limerick. There was snow on the ground and the Em
erald Isle was cold and crunchy underfoot.

  By the time I had been at Limerick a week I knew that I had found something closely resembling peace of mind. My body stood about for hours on parade, watching young soldiers drill and do physical training, and this made it easy for me to spend my spare time refusing to think. I felt extraordinarily healthy, and I was seldom alone. There had been no difficulty in reverting to what the people who thought they knew me would have called my ‘natural self’. I merely allowed myself to become what they expected me to be. As someone good-naturedly remarked, I had ‘given up lecturing on the prevention of war-weariness’ (which meant, I suppose, that the only way to prevent it was to stop the War). The ‘New Barracks’, which had been new for a good many years, were much more cheerful than the huts at Clitherland, and somehow made me feel less like a temporary soldier. Looking at the lit windows of the barrack square on my first evening in Ireland, I felt profoundly thankful that I wasn’t at Slateford. And the curfew-tolling bells of Limerick Cathedral sounded much better than the factory hooters around Clitherland Camp. I had been talking to four officers who had been with me in the First Battalion in 1916, and we had been reviving memories of what had become the more or less good old days at Mametz. Two of them had been wounded in the Ypres battle three months before, and their experiences had apparently made Mametz Wood seem comparatively pleasant, and the ‘unimaginable touch of time’ had completed the mellowing process.