Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Read online

  In the hospital, guilt at the ease and safety he had purchased by his gesture of disobedience began to trouble him, and he finally persuaded his psychiatrist to let him go back to the war. His psychiatrist was Dr. W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922), the well-known Cambridge physiologist and anthropologist, a bachelor 53-year-old Royal Army Medical Corps captain when Sassoon encountered him. In one sense Rivers is the real hero of “George Sherston’s” memoirs, and the only person whose name Sassoon has not changed. His memory was a lifelong presence for Sassoon, who much later, in 1952, wrote in his diary: “I should like to meet Rivers in ‘the next world.’ It is difficult to believe that such a man as he could be extinguished.” Sped on his way by Rivers, he returned to active service, at first in Egypt and Palestine. But he was transferred back to the Western Front after the German attack of March 1918, and in July he was wounded again, this time in the head, and sent home for good.

  After the war he found himself caught up in London literary life, especially that branch of it espousing a genteel socialism, and for a time he worked as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. But when he was alone he was trembly and tired, afflicted by nightmares of the war. He felt a vague impulse to write something more sustained than lyric poems but wasn’t certain what it should be. A long poem? A play? Or did he have a talent for prose? For fiction? For memoir? Later, he remembered talking with Gosse shortly after the Armistice:

  During our talk he strongly urged me to undertake a long poem which would serve as a peg on which—for the general public—my reputation would hang. He suggested that I might draw on my sporting experiences for typical country figures—the squire, the doctor, the parson, and so on. He was, of course, partly influenced by anxiety that I should divert my mind from the war. At the time I thought the idea unworthy of serious consideration.

  Too much, perhaps, like a replay of George Crabbe’s The Parish Register and The Borough. But Gosse’s suggestion, if mistaken in its particulars, proved fruitful as Sassoon continued to meditate what he should write. As he tells his diary late one night in March 1921:

  I walked back from the Reform [Club] under a black but starful sky, feeling dangerously confident in myself and the masterpiece that I’ll be writing five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years hence. That masterpiece has become a perfectly definite object in my existence, but it is curious, and rather disquieting, that I always dream of it as a novel or a prose drama, rather than as a poem or series of poems…. The theme of my “masterpiece” demands great art and great qualities of another kind.

  It’s clear that he’s thinking of writing a book registering subtly and in the process justifying his homosexuality. His masterpiece, he says,

  is to be one of the stepping-stones across the raging (or lethargic) river of intolerance which divides creatures of my temperament from a free and unsecretive existence among their fellow-men…. O, that unwritten book! Its difficulties are overwhelming.

  Eighteen months later he’s still obsessed with this urgent but cloudy project. “My whole life has become involved,” he says, “in an internal resolve to prepare my mind for a big effort of creation. I want to write a book called The Man Who Loved the World, in which I will embody my whole passionate emotionalism toward every experience which collides with my poetic sensitiveness.” But alas, “At present I have not any idea of the architectural plan of this edifice.”

  But finally he got it: he would write a fictionalized autobiography elegizing his young friends killed in the war. “The dead…are more real than the living,” he wrote in his diary in 1922, “because they are complete.” At the same time he would try to understand what the events of 1914–1918 had done to him and his pre-war world, what their relation was, if any, to that pastoral quietude so rudely displaced. Knowing now what he wanted to do, in 1926 he embarked on twenty years of obsessive prose writing. In six volumes of artful memoirs he revisited the war and lovingly recovered the contrasting scene of gentle self-indulgence and pastoral beauty preceding it. At first uncertain of the value of his work, he sent some manuscript pages to Gosse, who replied: “I think you will be anxious for a word from me, and so I write provisionally to say that I am delighted with it so far. There is no question at all that you must go on steadily. It will be an extraordinarily original book….” But as further pages arrived, Gosse was moved to reprehend a part of Sassoon he’s always been uncomfortable with, his impulse to irony and self-distrust: “You are not called upon,” he reminded Siegfried, “to draw a sarcastic picture of a slack and idle young man…. Remember, no satire and no sneering!”

  The first volume, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, was published in 1928, a moment which brought forth two other classics of innocence savaged by twentieth-century events, Blunden’s memoir Undertones of War and, in Germany, Remarque’s novel Im Westen Nichts Neues. Two years later, just as Graves was publishing Good-Bye to All That and Hemingway A Farewell to Arms, Sassoon brought out his second volume, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. And in 1936 Sherston’s Progress completed the trilogy he finally titled The Memoirs of George Sherston.

  The story he tells here is that of a shy, awkward, extremely limited young country gentleman acquainted only with hunting and cricket and golf who learns about the greater adult world the hardest way—by perceiving and absorbing the details of its most shocking war. One irony is that Sherston is removed from the aimlessness of his rural life not by, say, a career in the City, which before the war might have been thought the appropriate antidote to idleness; he’s removed from it by an alternative quite needlessly excessive, the hell of the trenches. The action of The Memoirs of George Sherston is the transformation of a boy into a man, able at last to transfer his affection for horses first to people, and finally to principles. But this transformation is slow and belated. Sherston is over thirty before he begins to master the facts of life, instructed at one point by seeing “an English soldier lying by the road with a horribly smashed head.” Only now is he able to perceive that “life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.” One reason Sherston learns so slowly is that his character is so inconsistent and unfixed. He is never certain what he is. “He varied,” Graves remembers, “between happy warrior and bitter pacifist.” And his company second-in-command, Vivian de Sola Pinto (“Velmore”), notes a similar confusion. “It seemed to me a strange paradox,” he recalls, “that the author of these poems [in Counter-Attack] full of burning indignation against war’s cruelty should also be a first-rate soldier and a most aggressive company commander.” It is out of such queer antitheses and ironies that Sassoon constructs these memoirs.

  Of course every account of front-line experience in the First World War is necessarily ironic because such experience was so much worse than anyone expected. If in Good-Bye to All That Graves’s irony is broad and rowdy, in The Memoirs of George Sherston Sassoon’s is quiet and subtle. An example is the way he deals with the theme of horses and warfare, which is to say the way he relates the war part of his memoirs to the earlier pastoral part. In a quiet way, the memoirs become an ironic disclosure of the fate of cavalry—the traditional important military arm in the world before the war—in the new, quite unanticipated war of static confrontation across a pocked, pitted, and impassable No Man’s Land. In Sherston’s youth the cavalry was virtually the equivalent of the Army. But the machine gun and massed artillery changed all that, and almost all the one million horses used by the British army were put to work ignominiously behind the lines only, hauling rations and ammunitions. And a half-million were killed even then. What happened to the pre-war cavalry tradition for both Allies and Central Powers can be inferred from the production figures for machine guns. In 1915, the British manufactured 1,700. In 1916, 9,600. In 1917, 19,000. The war was inexorably becoming a heavy-duty enterprise, and the swank of cavalry was only one of the colorful things it swept away.

  Once this trilogy of memoirs was finished, Sassoon began another set. As if di
ssatisfied now with the degree of fiction he’d imposed on his experience, he began reviving the past all over again, writing now what he calls his “real auto-biography,” this time as “Siegfried Sassoon” rather than “George Sherston.” The result was a second trilogy, more true to fact this time, comprising The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried’s Progress (1945). But remote from fact as here and there it may be, the earlier trilogy seems the more persuasive of the two attempts to capture the past. “I am a firm believer in the Memoirs,” Sassoon once said.

  If Sherston was depicted as an athletic, non-literary youth, in the second trilogy Sassoon reveals himself more accurately as a poet extremely ambitious of success among the artistically powerful of London. “Sherston,” he says, “was a simplified version of my ‘outdoor self.’ He was denied the complex advantage of being a soldier poet.” But both characters, representing the two sides of himself he was never sure cohered into a whole, are notable for modesty and understatement, as well as a certain “chuckle-headed inconsistency,” as he puts it. But smile as he may with amusement and pity at his former self, Sassoon’s lifetime devotion to the young man he once was has something undeniably narcissistic about it, and in this he resembles another cunning twentieth-century memoirist, Christopher Isherwood. Both have created careers by plowing and re-plowing their variously furtive pasts, revealing something different with each rendering. Isherwood’s shameful-proud relation to “Christopher” is similar to Siegfried’s relation to “George.” Thus Sassoon writes in his diary, “What it amounts to is this, that I must behave naturally, keeping one side of my mind aloof, a watchful critic. One part of me…is the player on the stage. But I must also be the audience, and not an indulgent one either.” It is this very self-conscious awareness of himself as a performer uttering lines that gives much of The Memoirs of George Sherston its special quality, as in the scene in the hospital where he indicates the different things appropriate for him to utter in front of various audiences.

  Aesthetes and hearties: that opposition, still a popular jocular way for university students to divide each other up, seemed in Sassoon’s day a significant set of polar categories, and it was natural for him to conceive of the range of his own character by means of that formula. The polarities of horseman and artist are nicely indicated by two adjacent diary entries he made in 1920:

  Oct 20 Bought mare.

  Oct 27 Bought Pickering Aldine poets (53 vols)

  and a little later he writes, “Inconsistency—double life—as usual….” What he has done in The Memoirs of George Sherston is to objectify one-half of the creature leading this double life, the half identifiable as the sensitive but mindless athlete, and separate it from the other half, that of the much-cossetted aspirant poet, taken up by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Robert Ross, and other useful figures of the salons. Aestheticism, the actual milieu of his family and friends, vanishes from George Sherston’s story. Hence the unsophisticated Aunt Evelyn replaces his actual mother and aunt and uncle, respectively painter, editor, and sculptor. Why does he jettison this Pateresque aspect of himself and his environs? Because, I think, he hopes to show the effect of the war on a more representative and ordinary man, not the man of sensibility and privilege he actually was—rich, literary, musical, arty, careerist. The Memoirs is in part a thirties pacifist document, like Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933); and for it to work it must persuade the reader that the condition of the protagonist is not excessively distant from his own.

  During the thirties Sassoon, active in pacifist causes, was distressed to witness Europe moving steadily toward war again. In 1933, at the age of forty-seven, he married and had one son, George. He continued to write poetry, but most critics found this later work feeble compared with his performance as a “war poet.” “My renown as a W.P.,” he observed, “has now become a positive burden to me.” In 1957 he became a Roman Catholic, and in 1967 he died at the age of eighty. But as he seemed to recognize himself, the interesting part of his life was the earlier part, which he revisited repeatedly, recalling twice over in superb prose the Edwardian and Georgian world of his youth and the war that shattered it forever.

  PAUL FUSSELL

  Princeton

  July 1983

  PART ONE

  AT THE ARMY SCHOOL

  1

  I have said that Spring arrived late in 1916, and that up in the trenches opposite Mametz it seemed as though Winter would last for ever. I also stated that as for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die because in the circumstances there didn’t seem anything else to be done. Well, we came back to Morlancourt after Easter, and on the same evening a message from the Orderly Room instructed me to proceed to the Fourth Army School next morning for a month’s refresher-course. Perhaps Colonel Kinjack had heard that I’d been looking for trouble. Anyhow, my personal grievance against the Germans was interrupted for at least four weeks, and a motor-bus carried me away from all possibility of dying a murky death in the mine-craters.

  Barton saw me off at the crossroads in the middle of the village. It was a fine day and he had recovered his good spirits. ‘Lucky Kangaroo – to be hopping away for a holiday!’ he exclaimed, as I climbed into the elderly bus. My servant Flook hoisted up my bulging valise, wiped his red face with his sleeve, and followed me to the roof. ‘Mind and keep Mr Sherston well polished up and punctual on parade, Flook!’ said Barton. Flook grinned; and away we went. Looking back, I saw Barton’s good-natured face, with the early sun shining on his glasses.

  There were several of us on board (each Battalion in our Brigade was sending two officers) and we must have stopped at the next village to pick up a few more. But memory tries to misinform me that Flook and I were alone on that omnibus, with a fresh breeze in our faces and our minds ‘making a separate peace’ with the late April landscape. With sober satisfaction I watched a train moving out of a station with rumble and clank of wheels while we waited at the crossing gates. Children in a village street surprised me: I saw a little one fall, to be gathered, dusted, cuffed and cherished by its mother. Up in the line one somehow lost touch with such humanities.

  The War was abundantly visible in supply-convoys, artillery horse-lines, in the dirty white tents of a Red Cross camp, or in troops going placidly to their billets. But everyone seemed to be off duty; spring had arrived and the fruit trees were in blossom; breezes ruffled the reedy pools and creeks along the Somme, and here and there a peaceful fisherman forgot that he was a soldier on active service. I had been in close contact with trench warfare, and here was a demonstration of its contrast with cosy civilian comfort. One had to find things out as one goes along, I thought; and I was whole-heartedly grateful for the green grass and a miller’s wagon with four horses, and the spire of Amiens Cathedral rising above the congregated roofs of an undamaged city.

  The Fourth Army School was at Flixécourt, a clean little town exactly halfway between Amiens and Abbeville. Between Flixécourt and the War (which for my locally experienced mind meant the Fricourt trenches) there were more than thirty English miles. Mentally, the distance became immeasurable during my first days at the School. Parades and lectures were all in the day’s work, but they failed to convince me of their affinity with our long days and nights in the Front Line. For instance, although I was closely acquainted with the mine-craters in the Fricourt sector, I would have welcomed a few practical hints on how to patrol those God-forsaken cavities. But the Army School instructors were all in favour of Open Warfare, which was sure to come soon, they said. They had learnt all about it in peace-time; it was essential that we should be taught to ‘think in terms of mobility’. So we solved tactical schemes in which the enemy was reported to have occupied some village several miles away, and with pencil and paper made arrangements for unflurried defence or blank-cartridged skirmishing in a land of field-day make-believe.

  Sometimes a renowned big-game hunter gave us demonstrations of the art of sniping. He was genial and enthus
iastic; but I was no good at rifle-shooting, and as far as I was concerned he would have been more profitably employed in reducing the numerical strength of the enemy. He was an expert on loopholes and telescopic-sights; but telescopic-sights were a luxury seldom enjoyed by an infantry battalion in the trenches.

  The Commandant of the School was a tremendous worker and everyone liked him. His motto was ‘always do your utmost’, but I dare say that if he had been asked his private opinion he would have admitted that the School was in reality only a holiday for officers and N.C.O.s who needed a rest. It certainly seemed so to me when I awoke on the first morning and became conscious of my clean little room with its tiled floor and shuttered windows. I knew that the morning was fine; voices passed outside; sparrows chirped and starlings whistled; the bell in the church tower tolled and a clock struck the quarters. Flook entered with my Sam Browne belt and a jug of hot water. He remarked that we’d come to the right place, for once, and regretted that we weren’t there for the duration. Wiping my face after a satisfactory shave, I stared out of the window; on the other side of the street a blossoming apple-tree leant over an old garden wall, and I could see the friendly red roof of a dovecot. It was a luxury to be alone, with plenty of space for my portable property. There was a small table on which I could arrange my few books. Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd was one of them. Also Lamb’s Essays and Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour. Books about England were all that I wanted. I decided to do plenty of solid reading at the Army School.