And oh, the mystery of her eyes,
So tremulous with shy surprise,
Rapt in a dream half-understood,
The mystic dream of maidenhood.
They falter, hesitate and glow;
Nor tell me half I long to know.
What do they see? What do they dream?
Shy goddess of the secret stream.
At the beginning of 1916 the government had raised the minimum age for soldiers going to the front from seventeen to eighteen, which left Alec, who was still seventeen, temporarily in no man's land as far as his immediate future was concerned. He had finished his training but had nowhere to go and so he was despatched to Southwold to hold the coast in the event of a German invasion. Thirty men slept in a barrack cottage the size of a shoebox. They were given straw beds and straw pillows, and held in abject conditions behind barbed wire, eating filth and freezing to death. One night Alec witnessed from a distance a German gunboat raid on Lowestoft as it was intercepted by the British fleet. Convinced that his demise was imminent he wrote to his father describing a lucky escape: ‘If our fleet had not come up they would have bombarded Southwold in which case there would now be no more Billy.’
Arthur wrote immediately to Major Sir Frederick Kenyon (a tutor from his Oxford days, who, by chance, was now the officer in command of Alec's company at Berkhamsted) pleading with him to have Alec recalled. Kenyon took immediate action, and Alec and the rest of the cadet troops at Lowestoft were removed to a more comfortable billet. But Alec could not for ever be so easily saved. Arthur was aware of that. Time was running out and soon he would be sent abroad to face the German guns.
On 28 July 1917 Arthur, K and Evelyn were looking forward to welcoming Alec home on leave from the Harrowby camp in Grantham where he was perfecting his machine-gun skills. Alec, too, was looking forward to the weekend as Barbara and her mother had been invited to stay at Underhill. His relationship with Barbara was heating up: there had been one day of bliss, in which he and she had held hands for a whole afternoon in the garden at Beechcroft. He had put his arm round her neck, touched her cheek with his fingers and afterwards they had stood in the ‘green room’ locked in each other's arms: ‘She yielded herself utterly to the demand of love,’ he wrote – but this is not, as we shall soon discover, to be construed as meaning that they had full sexual intercourse. Whatever they had done together, he couldn't wait to see Barbara again at Underhill and eagerly counted down the days to his departure. His mood was buoyant. Only the day before Arthur had telegraphed him with the first review of The Loom of Youth. It was a good one in the Times Literary Supplement that flattered both father and son: ‘As an example of precocious literary talent, for which heredity must be allowed in part to account, the book is indeed remarkable.’ But just as Alec's leave had been granted so it was suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn. There was no telephone at Underhill in those days so he was unable to warn his family.
At Underhill the day dragged on as they waited for his arrival. By the evening there was still no news and the Waughs retired anxiously to bed, not knowing what had happened. Alec's orders were to leave from Victoria station at seven the next morning. He arrived in London late and caught the last train to Golders Green heavy at heart that his parents, expecting a happy weekend, would instead only have a few hours in which to say their goodbyes. Some time after midnight K was awoken by the sound of mud hitting her bedroom window. She looked out to see Alec laden with bags: ‘I cross to France first thing tomorrow,’ he shouted up to her. According to Arthur, ‘There was no sleep in Underhill that night.’
Early next morning Arthur, K and Evelyn went with Alec to the station. Their parting was as vivid to Arthur fourteen years later as it had been on the very day:
Those blear twilights at Victoria Station; the half dumb journey in the underground, with its pitiful, loving pretence of anecdote and jest; the clanking staircases; the sobbing women; the snatches of song; the guard's determinate whistle; the last desperate glance of courage and hope – will our generation
ever forget the things which it endured in those hours of morning sacrifice? They seemed to collect and embody into one all the partings of a lifetime; as one stood there and watched the train gather pace and round the vanishing corner, one felt that all one's life had been spent in saying good-bye to some fond hope or vision, amid the roaring, regardless clamour of an inexorable traffic.
The Waughs returned without Alec to Underhill and polished the silver around the kitchen table in nervous silence. Barbara and her mother arrived, as arranged, in time for lunch. ‘I have wondered sometimes whether there would have been a different outcome to it all if my posting had come three days later and I had had that leave,’ Alec later mused. ‘Things were never the same between Barbara and myself again. A current had been switched off.’
As soon as Alec reached the shores of France he started to feel isolated and scared. In camp he wrote a nostalgic, elegiac poem about Sherborne: ‘Beautiful, sad and calm … It will dwell in me all my length of days… For half of my wayward heart is buried there.’ He wrote to Barbara asking her to send him photographs of his parents. ‘I haven't got a photo of them at all. It would make a lot of difference to have one to look at when I am lonely.’ Though not immediately ordered to the front line, he, like all his fellow soldiers, was passing the dead and wounded every day. How long would it be before his turn came? Within a month some of Alec's closest friends had been shot or blown to pieces. He wrote frequently to his father, always careful to reassure him of his own safety but unable to hide his disgust at what he was seeing all around him:
It's pretty awful. Both Jackson and Knight have been killed – the same shell and there are several casualties among the men… what I have seen in the last few days has banished my illusions about the glories of war. What is there fine and noble in young men carrying boxes up the line, suddenly
hearing a shell and dropping everything and falling flat in a ditch? One is frightened. But I must say the artillery drivers are magnificent, they go on bringing up shells all day and night and don't seem to care a damn. But it's a filthy show. Knight and Jackson were two of the best fellows you could meet – blown to bits. Oh well, by the time you get this I shall be in a rest camp.
Arthur's agitation at these letters was predictable and after a while his old-maidish fretting began, even at such a distance, to fray Alec's nerves. ‘Is my father panicking?’ he wrote to Hugh Mackintosh in London. ‘I hope not. He takes things far too seriously. He won't realise that I am only an individual. I am a mom marinorum to him. It's depressing.’
Like all the young fighting men in Flanders, Alec had been induced by his parents to believe that a soldier's death was noble. This was the only way that the older generation could justify the deplorable mass sacrifice of their sons. Alec compared his parents’ philosophy of the ‘noble death’ to the sight of the rotting corpses lying around him on the battlefield and forged the idea into a powerfully morbid threnody. Originally entitled ‘Carrion’ the poem – one of the most devastating to come out of the Great War – was addressed to K, whose brother Bassett had been shot a few months before Alec had left for France. In sentiment, it was equally addressed to Arthur. When they read it both Arthur and K were horrified, not least by the tasteless title. Alec agreed to change it to ‘Cannon-Fodder’ and, in a semi-legible scrawl that revealed his pitiful state of mind, wrote to explain himself:
The idea of the poem was that to the people at home death has a certain nobility. They cannot see, as we see, the roads littered with corpses, bits of corpses, a stray foot or head. We shall always look on the death of a soldier as something like that. It was an idea nobody seems to have thought out yet. But no applause and I thank you.
Cannon-Fodder by Alec Waugh
Is it seven days you've been lying there
Out in the cold, Feeling the damp, chill circlet of flesh
Loosen its hold On muscles and sinews and bones,
Feeling t
hem slip One from the other to hang limp on the stones? Seven days. The lice must be busy in your hair, And by now the worms will have had their share
Of eyelid and lip. Poor, lonely thing: is death really a sleep? Or can you somehow feel the vermin creep
Across your face As you lie, rotting, uncared for in the unowned place, That you fought so hard to keep
Blow after weakening blow? Well. You've got what you wanted, that spot is yours. No one can take it from you now.
But at home by the fire, their faces aglow
With talking of you, They'll be sitting, the folk that you loved,
And they will not know.
O girl at the window combing your hair, Get back to your bed.
Your bright-limbed lover is lying out there Dead.
O mother, sewing by candlelight,
Put away that stuff. The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck.
He is warm enough.
Soon like a snake in your honest home
The word will come. And light will suddenly go from it.
Day will be dumb. And the heart in each aching breast
Will be cold and numb.
O men, who had known his manhood and truth,
I had found him true. O you, who had loved his laughter and youth,
I had loved it too. O girl, who has lost the meaning of life,
I am lost as you.
And yet there is one worse thing,
For all the pain at the heart and the eye blurred and dim,
This you are spared, You have not seen what death has made of him. You have not seen the proud limbs mangled and broken, The face of the lover sightless, raw and red, You have not seen the flock of vermin swarming
Over the newly dead.
Slowly he will rot in the place where no man dare go, Silently over the right the stench of his carcass will flow, Proudly the worms will be banqueting… This you will never know.
He will live in your dreams for ever as last you saw him. Proud-eyed and clean, a man whom shame never knew. Laughing, erect, with the strength of the wind in his manhood –
O broken-hearted mother, I envy you.
Flanders, September 1917
Alec found himself manning a machine-gun emplacement in the front-line at Passchendaele – the muddiest and bloodiest battle in military history. A quarter of a million British soldiers were lost for the gain of five miles of desolate squelching terrain. But he was extraordinarily lucky. On the night before the battle he was commanded to move right up to the front with two men and take a German pillbox, with orders to hold it until reinforcements arrived. The three of them pushed the dead Germans out. They found apples, pears and whisky in the pillbox and although relief did not arrive for four agonising days and nights, neither Alec nor his men were required to fire a single shot. Outside, within spitting distance of where Alec sat, three thousand British guns released four million rounds of ammunition. During the battle Alec wrote a long letter to ‘My own darling Barbara’, a stream of consciousness that, owing to his trapped condition, rolled on for page after page before it could be sent. It was too dangerous to ask the stretcher bearers to carry letters out. Alec asked Barbara (when and if she received the letter) to read it aloud to Arthur:
The shell holes are so close together that you cant find a way across, they are about 4 ft across and full of water. Last night I fell into one full length and in consequence felt fairly miserable this morning with my clothes wet and clinging. When will all this end? Never again shall I fret about being in a cushy bit of line and clamour for war. I've seen it and know how utterly horrible it is. But the relief should be here soon. When I was being shelled on Thursday night I felt if I come through this alive I'll prove my life was worth saving. I'll try to think less of myself and more of others, make life fit in with the lives of those I love, instead of trying to make theirs fit into mine. That may sound sentimental and dramatic but it is what I felt and still feel when shells are falling round. One hasn't time to put a veneer over what one feels. One can actually hear one's heart speaking…
War is not a big thing but squalor on a large scale.
Death is noble usually, here it is pitiable. There is something tragic and splendid in the idea of young lives laid down willingly, but war does not get to the idea; it is utterly loathsome, it is not tragic, it is miles below tragedy, just horror on a massive scale…
It is hard to realise that while I am in this land of corruption you and father are sitting in the loggia watching the sunlight fall across the garden, the same sun that is shining in the dust thrown up by the shells. Oh well I shall be back to it soon… perhaps.
Some pretty awful news has just come through. My section officer and my servant have just been killed; if I hadn't come up here I would probably have been in the same box. Oh my God this is hell. The men who were bringing up our mail and rations have been laid out; it seems there's no trace of them. I am in command of the section now; it is awful, my Lord it is. My word it is awful. My section officer had not been married a year. They were fond of each other, every day they wrote each other huge long letters. It really knocks the life out of one. I have had luck, my word I have. If I had stayed with him, I should probably be done for by now. What a filthy business it is. I've done with warfare!
After Passchendaele Alec was moved south to the desolate landscape of the Somme. He and Arthur exchanged letters every day. Arthur sent him the flood of reviews and letters concerning The Loom of Youth. H. G. Wells had written to him, ‘Your son is an astounding young man, and I've rarely read a first novel with so much interest.’ Arnold Bennett had hailed it a ‘staggering performance’, praising the ‘very remarkable gift of this man’, and the eminent poet and critic J. C. Squire had written:
To what prodigy have you given birth? (if the phrase may be used of a male parent?) It is very pleasing to see you as the dedicatee. In this straw infested age the too common doctrine is that there is something shameful, almost
disreputable in the relationship of father and son – that the younger generation should not only knock at the door but lift it off its hinges and knock the old man over the head with it. I shall be proud indeed if one of my offspring treats me as yours has treated you.
Not everybody was as delighted with Alec's literary accomplishment as J. C. Squire. As predicted, the headmaster of Sherborne was outraged. He saw the book as a vile slur on his great institution. Although in the novel the school is called Fernhurst, no one who had had anything to do with Sherborne could have failed to recognise the setting. It contained portraits of masters who were still employed at the school, was critical of Sherborne's ethos of athleticism, suggested that all boys were routinely dishonest, and that homosexual affairs were rife throughout the school – that such things went on all the time, that everybody knew it, but ‘the one unforgivable sin is to be found out’.
By modern standards of defamation many of these connections are oblique. You could easily read the whole book without noticing the homosexual passage that so scandalised society at the time: ‘Morecombe [Davies mi] came up to Gordon's [Alec's] study nearly every evening and usually Foster left them alone together. During the long morning hours when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure.’ That is about as far as it goes – far tamer than the equivalent passage from Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays, written sixty years earlier. Hughes, who was writing about Rugby, described ‘miserable little pretty white-handed curly headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows who did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next’ and added in a footnote: ‘There were many noble friendships between big and little boys, but I can't strike out the passage: many boys will know why it has been left in.’
That Alec's book should have caused such outrage was a sign of the times. At a shaky moment in the nation's history it brought into question the whole ethos of the public-school sys
tem. It was brazenly frank. Correspondence about The Loom ran for ten weeks in the Spectator and for six in the Nation. The book was described as ‘disgusting’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘wholly untrue’ and ‘pernicious stuff in letters from bishops, pupils, politicians and the ex-headmaster of Eton. Schoolboys up and down the country were caned when they were caught reading it. Sales boomed. While Alec was on active service, The Loom went into a fifth impression. Despite all this success he was disturbed to hear that it had gone down badly at Sherborne and wrote a letter, of self-justification rather than apology, to the Shirburnian, which refused to print it; in a separate letter, the Chief wrote to Alec asking him to resign from the Old Shirburnians. To those people to whom these sorts of things matter, they matter very much indeed. Principles are called into play. On principle Alec refused to resign; on principle the old boys’ society (whose president was the headmaster) removed him from the roll; on principle Arthur entered the fray in support of his son; on principle the games master, Mr Godfrey Carey, who recognised a barely disguised portrait of himself as the Bull in the book, wrote a stinker to Arthur, accusing him of having aided and abetted his son in the creation of this evil novel: ‘A poisoned dagger,’ he fumed, ‘largely forged and guided by you has been aimed at the heart of the old school.’ On principle Arthur himself resigned from the Old Shirburnians: For him to do so was a devastating blow – time for a second farewell to Sherborne:
I felt that my own devotion to the school had been strained to the breaking point. I could not choose but stand by my son, and follow him into exile. But when I said ‘Good-bye’ to Sherborne, I broke irrevocably and for ever the magic wand of Prospero, which had kept the spirit of youth still living in a heart that was now beginning to grow heavy under the hand of time and change.
But for Arthur worse was yet to come. In late April Alec and a few of his men were given orders to hold a gun emplacement to slow down a German advance near the village of Neuville-Vitasse in Northern France. They were asked specifically to guard the valley beneath them but could not help noticing a sea of German soldiers assembling round them on the opposite side from that which they had been commanded to defend. They were confused by these troop movements and unsure how to proceed. Many of their comrades-in-arms seemed to be in retreat. One infantryman, attempting to relay a message to the British troops behind, returned with the news that the road back to camp was blocked. They were cut off. Suddenly Alec and his small band came in for heavy shelling, first by the German light artillery and then by pernicious high-velocity whizzbangs. Alec turned in time to see several of his finest men and closest friends blown to pieces. By noon it was clear to those who had survived that they were deep in sticky jam, surrounded on all four sides by German forces, who were closing in fast.
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