by Nevil Shute
Fred’s bit of trench was mined by the Germans and everyone knew it. The only things that could be done about it were retreat or counter-attack, and the local situation permitted neither. Those last days after the noise of tunnelling had stopped, waiting for the balloon to go up, must have been very trying for Fred; he wrote home a couple of jocular letters about it to my parents. It went up at dawn on June 13th and twenty-four of Fred’s platoon were killed or wounded by the explosion; at the same moment the Germans put down an artillery barrage. Fred was unhurt, but his sergeant and several men were buried by the débris. No doubt, having survived the explosion, he had the strengthening feeling that I know so well— ‘This can’t happen to me’ — for he led a party of men out from the remains of the trench to dig out his sergeant. There the shell got him.
In these days of sulfa drugs, blood plasma, and penicillin nobody would die of the wounds Fred got, extensive though they were. He was evacuated down to the base hospital at Wimereux and for ten days or so he made good progress. Then gangrene set in and became uncontrollable, in itself an indication of the march of medical science, because the medical attention that he got was very good. My father and mother crossed to France to be with him, as was common in those days of gentler war, and he died about three weeks after he was wounded with my mother by his side. If Fred had lived we might have had some real books one day, not the sort of stuff that I turn out, for he had more literature in his little finger than I have in my whole body. He was only nineteen when he died, and after nearly forty years it still seems strange to me that I should be older than Fred.
For the remainder of my time at Shrewsbury I don’t think I had the slightest interest in a career or any adult life; I was born to one end, which was to go into the army and do the best I could before being killed. The time at school was a time for contemplation of the realities that were coming and for spiritual preparation for death, and in this atmosphere the masculine, restrained services in the school chapel under Alington played an enormous part. The list of the school casualties grew every day. Older boys that we knew intimately, one who had perhaps been monitor in one’s own bedroom, left, appeared once or twice resplendent in new uniforms, and were dead. We remembered them as we had known them less than a year before as we knelt praying for their souls in chapel, knowing as we did so that in a year or so the little boys in our own house would be kneeling for us. Most moving of these casualties, perhaps, were those in the Royal Flying Corps, whose joy in their vocation was so great, whose lives so short. With the love of aircraft that I was developing I envied them so greatly, though it was well known at the time that the average life of a pilot on the Western Front was three weeks. What I did not know until the war was over was that they were being sent to France as fully trained fighter pilots flying Sopwith Pups and Camels with as little as twenty hours total solo flying experience. And in that war pilots went on till they were killed; there was no relief after a fixed number of missions.
I was writing poetry in the last year that I spent at school, all of it very bad.
In the autumn of 1915 my father took advantage of a break clause in the lease to give up South Hill, the house at Blackrock. I think he was concerned at the rising cost of everything due to the war and the mounting income tax, which was to rise to the unprecedented figure of six shillings in the pound. I think, too, he felt that the house held so many memories of Fred for my mother and myself that it would be better to get rid of it and start again. What he did seems curious now in these days of total war, because for the Christmas holidays he took my mother and myself on a trip to Rome and Naples.
Wars were localised in those days, when the range of aircraft was small and bombing far behind the lines was not a serious menace. The Western Front was ablaze with war from Switzerland to the sea but this war was completely static; there was nothing to prevent the normal express trains full of tourists from running as usual fifty miles behind the lines, and no currency restrictions then impeded foreign travel. One might have thought that the turmoil of war would have prevented my father from leaving his work to take his annual allowance of six weeks’ leave, but it didn’t. He was a very conscientious man who would never have put his personal interests above the job. I can only conclude that war affected daily life in those days less than it does now; probably civil service staffs were larger, also, for the work they had to do.
Rome was full of officers in magnificent uniforms frequently with sky-blue, flowing cloaks; the Italians in those days believed in getting some fun out of a war. Naples and Capri followed. My parents prolonged their leisurely holiday so that I had to travel back to Shrewsbury alone from Naples, an interesting and stimulating experience for a sixteen year old boy who spoke virtually no Italian and only schoolroom French. I think this journey did me a lot of good; although I had to change trains unexpectedly two or three times I had no real difficulties; when I got back to school I found that very few boys had made a journey of that length through wartime Europe. I think my parents showed a good deal of insight and wisdom in pushing me off on it.
The Easter holidays of 1916, in Dublin, gave me experience of another sort. This is not the place to write a history of the Irish rebellion, though to understand my little part in it a few words may be necessary to outline that half forgotten rising.
For some years Irish nationalism and dislike of British rule had been growing, though the province of Ulster was loyal to Britain. Home Rule for Ireland had been much discussed, but neither the Southern Irish nor the Ulstermen wanted to see the country divided. The Southern Irish were in the majority and wanted complete separation from Britain. The Ulstermen would not agree to any scheme for Home Rule that would place them in the minority, and they armed to prevent forcible incorporation into a United Ireland. The Southern Irish, later to be headed by the Sinn Fein party, armed a volunteer army to resist the Ulstermen and to unite their country in independence from Great Britain.
As the war went on the Germans established contact with the Sinn Fein volunteers by submarine and did everything within their power to stimulate a rising of Sinn Fein against British rule, with the object of making a rebellion in Ireland which would cause the diversion of British troops from the Western Front. In this they were successful, for after a series of preliminary incidents a full-scale armed rebellion broke out in Dublin on Easter Monday of 1916.
The principal street in Dublin is a wide thoroughfare known then as Sackville Street, and now as O’Connell Street. In the middle of this stands the General Post Office, a massive stone building which was, of course, my father’s domain and in which he had a fine executive office on the first floor. At that time my father and mother were living at the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dawson Street, and it was there that I joined them for my Easter holidays.
There had been a tenseness in the city for some days, with much movement of the green-uniformed volunteers in the streets, armed and marching in military formations, occasionally dispersed by the police. On account of the disturbed conditions my father went down to his office on Easter Monday morning, and at about eleven o’clock he was summoned to Dublin Castle, the headquarters of British administration, for a conference.
At noon the thing started, and an armed detachment of the Sinn Fein volunteers entered the Post Office, turned out the staff, and proceeded to barricade the windows to turn the stone building into a fort. At the same time they occupied most of the other strategic buildings in the city, especially those at street corners and those commanding the length of a street. The British forces in Ireland at that time were small and soldiers in uniform were shot at whenever they showed themselves; for two days or so the rebels had things all their own way. My father was fortunate that he was not in the Post Office when it was occupied or he would certainly have been held as a hostage, and he might well have been killed in the sad atrocities and reprisals that ended the rebellion at the end of the week.
I was in Sackville Street ten minutes after the Post Office was taken, for I ha
d walked down with my mother to bring my father home for lunch. The street was crowded with people, there was a cordon of volunteers around the Post Office, and trigger-happy young men in green uniforms in great excitement were firing off their revolvers from time to time at nothing in particular. I sent my mother home to the hotel and stayed with the crowd myself to try and get along the street to my father’s club to see if he was there.
A troop of Lancers on horseback escorting four or five horse-drawn military wagons came into Sackville Street from the north end and came down towards the Post Office on the far side of the road. They seemed to be unaware of what was going on, but they halted before coming opposite the Post Office, perhaps while the officer in charge assessed the situation. Then, in tense silence, they came on down the far side of the wide street. The rebels in the Post Office held their fire till the soldiers were opposite them, and then opened up with a ragged volley. Four of the Lancers fell from their saddles, killed instantly, I think, and one or two horses went down. The crowd scattered in alarm, myself with them, but within two or three minutes we were back again. These were the first men that I had seen killed.
We got a telephone call that night from the Castle to say that my father was safe, and all next day the battle grew. The British forces in Ireland converged upon the city and occupied such strategic buildings as the rebels had left empty, and bursts of rifle and Lewis gun fire down the streets became general, scattering the crowds of interested onlookers from time to time, including me. In this sad but interesting fighting I was far more comfortable and at home than my parents. This was my cup of tea. I was mentally conditioned for war; it was what I had been bred and trained for for two years. I felt that I knew what to do about this.
Next day an ambulance service was organised by the Royal Irish Automobile Club and I joined it as a stretcher bearer. I had a bowing acquaintance with elementary First Aid since I held a junior St. John certificate, and for the rest of the rebellion I cruised around the streets in a motor ambulance picking up casualties and taking them to hospital. I don’t think we were ever in any great danger though once or twice we turned a corner with our load of wounded and found ourselves in front of a street barricade and in the middle of a battle, and had to get out of it quick. Once I remember that we left our empty ambulance and sheltered in a doorway for a time, and the vehicles got hit by rifle fire once or twice, by ricochets rather than by direct aim.
In this party I was a callow youth acting as a labourer and a runner for more experienced people; I would not like it to be thought that I was playing a great part. At the conclusion of hostilities we were inspected and thanked by the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in Ireland, General Sir John Maxwell, and months afterwards the St. John’s Ambulance Society produced a very noble parchment talking about gallant conduct in tending the wounded at great personal risk, which still hangs in my study as a reminder of an adventure that befell the boy of seventeen who was myself.
War was new to England in those days, and you got a great deal for doing very little. For me, however, it was another push along the road to self-confidence, and when I got back to Shrewsbury a few days late for school I found to my own wonder that people were beginning to listen to what I said, or rather, stammered.
At that time, in 1916, no end to the war with Germany was in sight. My father decreed that if with my stammer I could get a commission in the regular army I should do so; I think he may have been influenced a little by the consideration that the training was now considerably longer than that deemed necessary for a temporary officer, for I was now his only child. As I was mechanically inclined he decided that I ought to go for a commission in the Royal Engineers or the Artillery, and to get in to Woolwich meant passing a fairly stiff competitive examination.
I sat for this once, and failed, but I had still time to take it again before the limiting age of 18½ was reached. To make sure of it this time my parents removed me from Shrewsbury at Christmas 1916 and sent me to a cramming establishment in London for six months, a step which was made easier by the fact that my father had been transferred back to London. The appointment of an Englishman had been a sore point when my father had become Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland in the first instance; to assist in the pacification of the country he was moved back to London and an Irishman was appointed in his place. My parents took a large flat in Kensington and furnished a bed sitting room in it as a study for me, going to great pains over that room. They bought a large roll-top desk for me, second hand, for five pounds; that desk has followed me around for most of my life and most of my books have been written at it.
I passed into Woolwich in the summer of 1918 near the bottom of the list, and somewhat to my own surprise I managed to get through the medical without stammering. I joined the Royal Military Academy soon afterwards, where my officers rapidly discovered that on occasion I still stammered quite a bit. I had elected for the Royal Flying Corps, however, which saved me from being chucked out at an early stage, and I trained as a Gunner for nine months to my own great content till Nemesis overtook me at Easter 1918 shortly before I passed out as a commissioned officer. At that date the Royal Flying Corps ceased to be a part of the army and became a separate entity, the Royal Air Force, so that no more Woolwich cadets were commissioned into the air arm. By that time I was stammering very badly from overwork and general war strain, and at my final medical examination before passing out I failed and was chucked out to become a civilian again.
My parents were still anxious for me to get a commission, and though I knew by that time that the right course for me was to go into the ranks I agreed to try another three months treatment for the stammer in an attempt to get commissioned into the Royal Air Force. I was depressed and apathetic at that time, and it would have been much wiser if I had enlisted straight away instead of hanging around; for one reason or another I never got into the R.A.F. In August 1918 my parents accepted the inevitable and I enlisted in the infantry, and was posted to the First Reserve Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment at the Isle of Grain at the mouth of the Thames.
By that time the casualty lists had grown enormously; the bottom of the manpower barrel was being scraped in England and people were being sent into the army and to France who never should have gone at all. Phillip Bainbrigge was typical of these casualties, a brilliant young Sixth Form schoolmaster at Shrewsbury. He was a tall, delicate, weedy man with very thick glasses in his spectacles without which he was as blind as a bat. He had a great sense of humour and enormous academic ability; when the time came for him to go into the army I have no doubt that he went willingly and made a good officer in regard to morale and within the limits of his physical deficiencies. He left as a memorial a sonnet written in the trenches which I have never seen printed, but which seems to me one of the best war poems that I have ever heard.
If I should die, be not concerned to know
The manner of my ending, if I fell
Leading a forlorn charge against the foe,
Strangled by gas, or shattered by a shell.
Nor seek to see me in this death-in-life
Mid shirks and curses, oaths and blood and sweat,
Cold in the darkness, on the edge of strife,
Bored and afraid, irresolute, and wet.
But if you think of me, remember one
Who loved good dinners, curious parody,
Swimming, and lying naked in the sun,
Latin hexameters, and heraldry,
Athenian subtleties of and,
Beethoven, Botticelli, beer, and boys.
Soon after that was written, Phillip Bainbrigge was dead.
At that time it was quite unusual for a boy with an old school tie to go into the ranks as a private soldier; the social barriers were still great in England. It was, of course, very good for me indeed. I will not say that I enjoyed the first fortnight because I didn’t; the adjustments to be made were too great. Life in the ranks was much cruder than it is today; the food was coarse, d
irty, and badly cooked, and it was difficult to learn to sleep on a straw palliasse on a plank bed. The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking to me in my immature state. I remember forming the resolution to do three things each day, believing that if I did these things I should come through the ranks all right and be the same person when I regained my own world: to wash, and clean my teeth, and evacuate. There could be worse good resolutions, I suppose.
I must have been in a hut with quite a decent lot of men, because they left me very much to myself. In a month I had settled down and was enjoying my life. I knew far more about soldiering than the other recruits and my time at Woolwich had hardened me physically, so that the recruit training was child’s play to me. Most of the battalion were men who were unfit in various ways, and though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France, the stammer was still bad and probably made the medical officer think twice about my value in the front line. For the last three months of the war, therefore, I mounted guard at the mouth of the Thames Estuary against Germans who could hardly have invaded us at that stage of the war, and in that time I recovered the morale that I had lost through my repeated failures to get a commission.