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

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Watching sunset waves foaming and coming in rather grandly with a breeze blowing across from Asia Minor (rather nice idea, that), I thought of Rivers – I don’t quite know why.

  Thinking of him always helps…. Port Said also provided me with a dozen wire pipe-cleaners at a penny each. Marshall quite indignant at such profiteering. ‘No one here except swindlers’ he said.

  March 10. Left Kantara yesterday evening. Thirteen officers in a cattle truck. Got to Gaza after being bumped and rattled for twelve hours.

  March 11. Reached Railhead (Ludd) at 2.30 p.m. Olive trees and almond orchards. Fine hills inland, not unlike Scotland. Last night we went through flat sandy places. About daybreak the country began to be green. Tents among crops and trees all the way up from Gaza. Weather warm and pleasant, with clouds. Thousands of camels in one camp. A few Old Testament pictures of people and villages. Inhabitants seem to live by selling enormous oranges to the troops on the train.

  March 12. Just off to Jerusalem, after sleeping in tent at rest camp about a mile from Ludd Station. Self and M. dined in Canteen tent. Talked to Mountain-Battery Major who’d ridden down from Bethlehem. ‘Don’t go to the Garden of Gethsemane,’ he said. ‘It’s the duddest show I’ve ever seen!’

  First night in Palestine quite pleasant, anyhow. Looked out last thing at calm stars and clouds and quiet candle-glow of bell-tents among olive trees. Large black-headed tits among cactuses. Also a sort of small rook (made same noise as a rook, anyway). Rain in the night. Then sunshine and larks singing. Soft warm air, like English summer. Early this morning, rumble of gun-fire miles away, for about ten minutes. Nothing grim about this Front so far. France was grim, even at Rouen.

  Same day. Ramallah. Started at 9.30. (Twelve officers and baggage in a lorry.) Reached 74th Division H.Q. at 4.30. The road climbed and twisted among the hills, which are wild and desolate, strewn with rocks and stones like thousands of sheep. Tractors going up with six-inch howitzers. Ambulances coming down. Leaving Ludd we passed a long procession of grey donkeys loaded with blankets for the troops. At the first halt (Latron, at the foot of the hills) I munched my food in a ruined garden by a stream; frogs croaking and strange notes of birds; wild flowers out.

  About 2.30 we entered Jerusalem. Not a very holy looking place. Went straight through into another region of desolate looking hills. Marshall remarked that he wished he’d brought his ruddy Bible with him now. Ramallah is 8 miles north of Jerusalem, on the top of a hill. Taken by us two months ago. Divisional H.Q. a large house with a line of cypresses. Weather cold, grey, and rainy. Yellow flaring sunset. Hills faint purple. Strange medley of soldiers and inhabitants in the narrow village street at dusk. Some of the Hebrews very handsome. Lonely glens and ravines all around, sad and silent, and the hilltops hoary in the twilight. No sound of artillery. In the muddy road I stopped and talked to a man I hadn’t seen since I was in the Yeomanry, now a sergeant attached to Divn. H.Q. When I last saw him we were both privates, and in the same troop. That was nearly three and a half years ago, and seems a longish time. They have been made into Infantry, like the battalion I am joining.

  March 13. Very wet morning. Our little tent became flooded and miserable, so I went out. Sat in a tent for nearly an hour talking to a private (Middlesex Regiment) while it rained. Told me he’d been twelve years in America with a circus, training trick horses. Gave a gloomy account of the Line here. Very bad country for troops, great hardships, and not much to eat! About noon the sun came out and I walked away from the village. With the better weather the country showed itself as much nicer than it had looked from a distance. Along the stony terraces there are innumerable wild flowers. Red anemones, cyclamen, and others I don’t know the names of. Went back along a glen with a cheerful stream, small but companionable. Birds came down there to drink. Sitting on a stone I watched 2 men and 2 women (Arabs) driving some small black and white cattle and two donkeys along the other side of the stream. The cattle turned and looked at me and their owners shouted greetings. I waved back and shouted ‘Cheer-oh!’ The cattle-bells sounded just right. Back in the village, lorries, limbers, camel-columns, etc. coming and going, and the same old business grinding on. But I felt as if I’d escaped it all for a few hours.

  March 14. Marshall and I walked up to Divisional Supply Depot, about six miles. Then on to 25th Battalion, another three miles through the usual wild hills where the Division have been advancing lately. Fine day. Got there about four o’clock. They are bivouacked on a hillside, along rocky terraces. The Colonel greeted us genially. He is a real live lord. (Something to live up to!) I must now pull myself together and try to be a keen young officer. Colonel evidently thinks me efficient, owing to my M.C. and service in France. Am second in command of ‘C’ Company. Only one other officer. (Company commander in England on leave.)

  March 15. Out from 9 till 4, with the Company, working at roadmending. Got very wet. Before we started the Brigadier addressed the Battalion; he stood on the terrace above us, leaning on a five-foot pole. He praised the men for their recent exploits in chasing ‘Johnny Turk’ over the hills and ended by saying that he hoped our efforts would soon get him a Division. The latter remark did him no good at all.

  March 17. Heavy rain the last two days. Am sitting in this canvas shelter with my one candle. Men’s voices sing and talk gruffly in the bivouacs below. Some are singing hymns. (It is Sunday evening.) Two (B Company) officers here. One an Oxford man (Magdalen); about 25; gentle and diffident; reads good books; not a strong character; I imagine him repeating Kipling’s poem ‘If’ to himself and hoping to be a better man for it. The other is an ex-commercial traveller from Welshpool; aged 35, with a broken nose and slight stammer. A considerable character; very garrulous and amusing.

  March 23. Battalion moved 3 miles down the Nablus road to new camp (on terraces among fig trees). Hot day. Thousands of small purple iris out.

  March 26. Seem to be getting on all right. Very easy life, mending roads.

  The Battalion Doctor has made all the difference to me lately (mentally). Different species from the other officers. Lean, grimy and brown, he goes grubbing up roots on the hills; knows every bird; rather like a bird himself. Before the war used to cruise about on rivers and canals and remote streams studying wild life. Eyes like brown pools; scrubby moustache; foul pipe; voice somehow suggests brown water flowing. Feels kind about animals (instead of shooting them).

  Am learning about birds from him. Went out yesterday and was shown Critchmar’s Bunting, Nubian Shrike, Syrian Jay, Lesser Whitethroat, Redstart, Arabian Wheatear, Goldfinch, and Blackcap. Also a Kestrel and some Egyptian Vultures. Can’t think what I should do without the Doctor!

  March 28. Late afternoon. Quiet and warm. Frogs croaking in the wet ground up the wadi. Small thorn trees make clumps of young green up the terraces. At the end of the wadi there is a water spring; small rills sing their way down among the stones and over slabs of rock. Pippits and wheat-ears flit and chirp among the bushes, perch on rocks, or are busy in the olive branches. On my way home from a walk, a gazelle got up and fled uphill among the boulders; stood quite still about 500 yards away, watching me. Then trotted quietly away. A free creature.

  Evening. Warm dusk. The hills looming dark and solemn all around. Here and there a single dark tree on the skyline. The moon comes up hazy and clouded with silver-grey drifts. A warm wind blows across the darkening heights. Below me, the camp is a shrouded glitter of tiny lights scattered on the dusk. Sounds of voices and rattling wheels which come far-off and clear, small sounds of life in the vast silence of the night and the hills. Then an eerie yelping, suddenly breaking off again. Must have been jackals.

  I look down on the dim olive-trees where the terraces wind and climb – wild labyrinthine gardens. Huge headstones, slabs, and crags glimmer anciently in the clouded moonlight, like the tombs of giants, heaved and tilted sideways. Some are like enormous well-heads; others are cleft and piled to form narrow caves. Ghosts might inhabit them. But they are older
than men, older than wars. They are as man first found them. Now they are ramparts of rock tufted with flowers, tangled with clematis and honeysuckle and briar. Thus I describe my sense of peace and freedom. And as I finish writing, someone comes excitedly into the tent with the latest news from France.

  The bulletins are getting steadily worse. Names which mean nothing to the others make me aware that the Germans have recaptured all the ground gained in the Somme battles.

  March 31. (Easter Sunday.) Out all the afternoon with the Doc. Rain came on and blotted the landscape. (We were on a hill from which the Mountains of Moab are visible on a clear day – rather like a herd of elephants, they look.)

  In a ruined tower in a vineyard we smoked our pipes by a blazing fire of dry olive branches. He makes most of the other officers seem purblind, mentally. Says very little about them, and regards them with tolerant and good-humoured detachment. He spotted at once what a good chap Marshall is; but Marshall is being transferred to another Battalion with which he has some previous connection. He will probably be happier there; but I shall miss him.

  When I’m alone in the tent I feel a bit heavy-hearted about the news from France, which gets more ominous every day though no one else seems to be worrying much. I read War and Peace of an evening; a grand and consoling book – a huge panorama of life and suffering humankind which makes the present troubles easier to endure and the loneliness of death a little thing. I keep my books in a Turkish bomb-box which my servant found for me. It just holds them nicely and the transport officer will be told that it contains ‘messing utensils’. I should be in the soup without something to read!

  April 3. 9 a.m. Alone with my notebook on a thyme-scented terrace close to the camp, with the sun warming my face and large white clouds moving slowly across the blue. Bees and flies drone peacefully about the grey rocks; butterflies ramble and settle on thick white clover where a few late scarlet anemones still make a spot of colour. People tell me that the climate of Judea gets bad later on, but it is like Paradise now. A little way off an Orphean Warbler sings delightfully from a thorn bush, producing the most liquid and delicate fantasia anyone could ask for. Old vines are half hidden by the spring growth of weeds and grass. A tiny fly-catcher perches six feet away on a bush, and a red-start preens himself near by. Files of camels plod along the road far below, and limber-wheels crush the stones as they clatter along. (Eight mules to each limber.) Fig trees have a few young leaves. Clematis is over; wild roses are beginning, on big bushes. Down the hill some gunners are busy around their sixty-pounders, turning some sort of wheel with a rattling noise. I watch their tiny arms working like piston-rods. Then the unmechanical warbler begins again with a low liquid phrase, and a pair of buntings flutter on to a crab-apple tree near the ledge of rock where I’m sitting.

  Then a whistle blows down by the battery; a motor bike goes along the rough road; machine-gun fire taps and echoes to crashings away among the hills – probably only practice-firing. It is a heavenly morning and a heavenly place. The war is quite subsidiary to the landscape; not a sprawling destructive monster like it is in France. Am now second-in-command of A Company. (C Company commander is back from leave.)

  April 4. A hot cloudless day. Saw a lot of griffon vultures; also a flock of what the Doc. says must have been black storks, moving steadily northward – rather like aeroplanes. Wonder where they were making for.

  Everyone has quite decided that we are going to France. Probably untrue.

  These hills are more lovely every day with everything bursting into flower and leaf. We move down to Ludd on Sunday. I don’t want to leave these hills.

  Perhaps we shall return. I wonder how I should stand another dose of France. Funny to think that I tried to get sent there in January.

  April 5. Last night after dinner (we all have it together in a big Mess Tent) there was an episode which is worth recording. The Colonel announced that he was going to have ‘a selling sweep on where we are going to’. The procedure for a ‘selling sweep’ was unknown to me, but there seemed to be a general notion that it was rather a dashing affair to take part in. We all sat round the table and the C.O. acted as auctioneer. First of all everyone took a ticket and then there was a ‘draw’ and the lucky ones drew a bit of paper with a word on it. (France, Salonika, Mesopotamia, Italy, Palestine, Ireland, Submarined and Home were the words.) The whole thing put my back up properly and the C.O. looked none too pleased when I declined to take a ticket. (Now I come to think of it, it must have been the first time I’ve been really annoyed since I left England!) The auction then started, and I must say he did it in a most lifelike manner, with appropriate witticisms delivered in flashy style. Most of the junior officers have no money except their pay, but they felt it incumbent on them to bid, either through a sycophantic desire to please, or because they dared not refuse. France fetched £15; Home £14; and Palestine £20. When he put up Submarined there was a pause, and then I bid ten pounds for it (which was my one bid during the auction). There was no advance on this and it became my exasperating property. At the end there was £94 in the pool, and France had been bought by Major Evans (Second-in-Command) who had also drawn it. (Being a thoroughly decent man he will probably pay back all the money spent by those who can’t afford it.) Behind it one felt that they all dreaded going to the Western Front and would have paid anything to stay in Palestine.

  It was a sort of raffish attempt to turn the whole thing into a joke and a ‘smart Yeomanry Regiment’ gamble. Everyone knows now that we are going to France. All maps were handed in to-day and hot-weather kit cancelled. The M.O. evidently felt as I did, for he went quietly out before the show began.

  April 7. (Sunday) 6.45 a.m. A quiet warm morning; clouds low on the hilltops and the sun shining through. Blue smoke rises from the incinerators of our camp and the one on the far side of the Nablus road. Everyone busy clearing up among the fig trees which are now misty green. To-day we begin our 45-mile march down to Ludd. It is also the first day of our journey to France, or wherever it is we are going to.

  These war diaries of mine contain many a note scribbled in that hour of departure when the men are loading limbers or putting on their packs and everyone is in a fuss, except perhaps the present writer, who invariably slopes off to some secluded spot outside the camp or village. From there he hears the noise of bustling preparation – high shouts, clatter of tins, sounds of hurrying feet, ‘come on; fall in, headquarters’; and so on.

  Birds whistle and pipe small in the still morning air, flitting among the clematis and broom, alighting on fig branches or bright green thorn bushes. The hillside feels more like a garden than ever before – an everlasting garden just outside the temporary habitations of men. In half an hour I shall be trudging along behind the column with a lot of baggage mules, trudging away from Arcadia, with not much more liberty than a mule myself.

  April 7. 8 p.m. In my bivouac on a hillside near Suffa, after two days’ marching. (About ten miles each day.) This morning we started from a point near Ramallah, over 3000 feet up. The early morning sky was clear; low grey banks of clouds like snow mountains above the hills toward the sea. Up at 5.15 and away by 7.40. Reached here 1.30. Passed General Allenby on the way. Hot sun and a breeze from the sea. Pink and white rock roses along the wadis. From this hill I can see a city of tiny lights below and on the opposite slope, where the rest of the Brigade are camped. Stars overhead and sound of men’s voices singing and chattering: they seem contented with their lot. Away in the twilight jackals howl, and some night bird calls.

  My bivouac is pitched in a tangle of large yellow daisies. (My servant is a marvel; very quiet man who never forgets anything.) A mule brays among the murmur of men’s voices (probably saying what it thinks about the war). We are almost in the plains again, at the foot of the grey stony hills. Horrid smell of dead camels in places along the road this morning. Saw a Syrian Pied Woodpecker this evening. Grey with scarlet head and tail. Also a White Stork and a Hoopoe. (Doc. pointed out all three; my eye
s would be useless without his help.)

  Later. Reading Hardy’s Woodlanders. Like going into a cool parlour with green reflections on wall and ceiling – after the dust and sweat of marching.

  April 9. 10.45 a.m. Latron. (Exactly four weeks ago I was here on my way up.) Started 6.45 this morning. Clear dawn; its cool stillness became very hot by 8. Got here 10. Camp is on a bare sweltering slope near the dusty main road with droning lorries and files of pack animals passing. Low, rolling country, rather brown and treeless; mostly vines and corn. The sea, hazy and distant, shown by a line of sand-hills. After seeing the Company settled down I have escaped to the shadow of a thin belt of small fir trees. Tents, camps, and horse-lines only a couple of hundred yards away, but the place is cool and green, drowsy with the hum of insects and the midday chirping of a few sparrows and crested larks. Out in the vinefield, brimstone yellow with weeds, some Latronians are hoeing busily, thereby increasing my enjoyment of sitting still. Dull march to-day. Ten yards away a patriarchal person is sitting under a tree, regarding me gravely and evidently having nothing else to do. According to Old Testament topography we are now in the tribe of Dan, and I can best describe this old gent by saying that I think he looks exactly like what I think Dan ought to have looked like. After a while a welcome breeze comes from the sea, swaying the firs to an ocean murmur. Then a bird (possibly a bulbul) gives us – me and Dan – a charming flute solo. Dan dozes, and so shall I.

  Evening. Out after tea, I found a charming garden beside a clear quick-flowing stream with willows and tall reeds. The garden belongs to a French monastery. Oranges, lemons, and bananas growing. Also some small apple-like fruit with large seeds in them. During a dumb-show conversation, I asked the Arab-looking gardener what these were and he said they were ‘askadinias’ (which sounds like some sort of joke).

  Came home wading through huge golden daisies among cactus-like hedges.