Wilfred Owen in the Mountains, Siegfried Sassoon’s Cricket Match Interrupted, a Plain, a Weekend Party, an Imagist Dinner, and a Dead Goat

So, readers, we near the end of the beginning: the Great Powers are mobilizing, and even Siegfried knows that war is coming. For the next week, then, this blog is going to be a busy mess–a mobilization less rigidly planned–as I try to give crucial updates on our “main characters,” introduce the soldiers who will first take us into combat, and fail to resist a plethora of interesting writerly tidbits. Bear with the madness, and in a week or so things will have settled down into regular daily posts of assimilable size.

Early in the morning of July 30th, 1914, Wilfred Owen left Bordeaux behind, taking a train south toward the little Pyrénéen town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre and the villa rented by the Léger family, whose daughter he was now to begin tutoring. By mid-morning, then, “for the first time in his life Wilfred saw real mountains.” By mid-afternoon he had also experienced an uphill ride in a donkey cart. As M. Léger was too old for service and there was no son to worry about, the rampant talk of war and mobilization seems hardly to have affected the isolated ménage.^[1]

Meanwhile, in merrie olde England, Reggie Trench, no Orlando, but a rather sharp young accountant with a commission in the Territorial Army and an “ear to the ground,” wrote a letter to Clare Howard, his fiancée, as he prepared for the annual camp on Salisbury plain. Many other young Territorials and the even younger men and boys of the OTC had looked forward to these camps for weeks or months–they were good fun. But Trench was reading the papers, which had begun to acknowledge the gravity of the European crisis, and saw that the camp was likely to have a more serious air than usual, or even be rudely interrupted.

Of Germany, he wrote “If they come in we do inevitably I think, and one must remember that we would not then be fighting for any abstract “Serbian” reason but rather to prevent France being overwhelmed and to protect the neutrality of Belgium and Holland…” Already commissioned, Trench was ahead of the game (given his prophetic surname, he would be) in working out exactly why he should fight.^[2]

That same afternoon, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, was reflecting on the success of his new cigarette company while motoring out through the suburbs of London behind the wheel of his shiny new cabriolet. Sales were climbing and, since “nothing could stop their automatic increase,” the future was rosy and his gambled capital would soon pay off. It was a good time–Thursday afternoon of the August Bank Holiday weekend–to take off early and get away to the house in the country.

Arriving in Wargrave (oh come ON!), Berkshire, at around tea-time, Jackson was met by his wife Patricia and his cousin Francis. The two cousins, fast friends since school days, had each inherited ownership in the family cigar business when their parents died young, but Francis was artsy and intellectual and lived a life of leisure while Peter, a tireless striver, had expanded the cigar business and gambled now on the new concern, Nirvana Cigarettes.

Bad news, upon arrival, however: Patricia’s brother, one Jack Baynet, had wired to say that he couldn’t make the weekend after all. Jack being an army officer, our hero assumes that his brother-in-law is being deployed to ever-restive Ireland.  But never mind: the cancellation is rather a beastly wrench in the works, given how much Peter had been looking forward to doubles tennis and bridge. The fact that a smarmy advertising fellow and his wife are coming instead is hardly a fair exchange. Well, a less than ideal situation–but even a rocky marriage and a half-spoilt weekend will hardly wreck the equilibrium of a conquering capitalist, cigar firmly between his teeth.

Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, is too good to be true. Which makes sense, because he isn’t. Alas, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant is also too trite to be tolerable–but I got this far and noted the dates, so we’ll give him his head and see how he plays. The novel, by Gilbert Frankau, is a bit dull and very self-serious–but it was a successful novel in its day and its protagonist shares so much in the way of personal experience with its author that it may prove to be a valuable addition to the project, in the category of “what certain of our war experiences look like when we freely fictionalize them.” Frankau was, like Peter Jackson, from a wealthy middle class merchant background (Peter had an easier time than his creator in moving his Jewish ancestry firmly into his personal past) and went straight from public school (Eton) into business. He had also over-extended himself with a risky expansion in 1914…  we’ll learn more about Frankau as we follow Jackson into the army, but for now let two facts stand: first, Wargave (no etymological relation!) really exists and is quite a reasonable place for a successful London bourgeois to take a summer cottage; second, I severely doubt that Frankau noticed the homophone or intended any irony. It’s not the subtle-perceptive sort of novel…

At about seven in the evening at Bovington Camp in Dorset a bugle sounded “Company sergeant-majors, at the double.” CSM Boreham duly doubled back to the Orderly Room, where he learned that the orders he had just received–concerning the movement 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers to Salisbury Plain for maneuvers–were entirely countermanded.

This time the Orders were very brief: “Pack up, we march back to Portland to-night.” Then the thought flashed through my mind–War. The men were jubilant, as is usual in such circumstances. I’m not afraid to place it on record that I was not ; the South African [i.e. Boer] War had taught me that there was nothing at all to get jubilant about. It is strange what thoughts pass through one’s mind in times of crisis. The very first thing that came to mine was the recollection of being verminous in South Africa, and the horror of being so again…

CSM Boreham is the first voice in a chorus-within-a-chorus: the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch (yes, that’s [their] preferred spelling) is, from our particular point of view, the most remarkable unit of the war. Several of the most interesting war poets–our central characters–passed through the battalion, and several other major poets and memoirists served in other battalions of the same parent regiment.

A brief word on regiments and battalions (skip ahead a bit, ye initiates): most British regiments at this time had two service battalions, called the 1st and 2nd–so we’re here with the 2/RWF–plus a “depot” formation and a number of territorial and/or special reserve battalions. The battalion was the very-roughly-a-thousand-strong basic operational unit, and battalions of various regiments were combined (moving up the scale of formation size) into brigades, divisions, corps, and armies. These were building blocks; but Britain being Britain, and old armies being old armies, each block was stamped with the special mark of the regiment that produced it. The army will soon expand, and battalion numbers will fly up into the twenties–but all battalions of the Royal Welch, be they ever so amateur and not so very Welsh, will get a little bit of regimental history and tradition, a little bit of esprit de corps, a little bit of a sense that, before they get to killing Germans, they might consider a fist-fight with a member of some inferior regiment, just to show who’s really part of the best old regiment in the army.

A lot to learn, here, but there are only two really important bits: first, “regimental” loyalty represents the old, traditional, conservative elements of military life–many of the things that soldiers value and have always valued–while the constant expansion and reshuffling of battalions represents the work of foolish or hard-hearted generals and governments producing and expending so much cannon fodder; second, in the opening months and years of the war, the first and second battalions of any regiment were the “regulars”–career officers and men who were hardened to military life and usefully trained, particularly in “musketry.”^[3]

Now back to the 2/Royal Welch: not only did they host a number of poets (reasonably good poets among the actual professional army, as opposed to wartime volunteers, were much more limited in number–that number being approximately Julian Grenfell, himself a Royal Dragoon) but they also eventurally acquired a remarkable doctor, J.C. Dunn, who later engineered a collective history of the unit, a sort of human and polyvocal version of the usually staid and unprotesting battalion war diary.^[4] So we will be seeing a lot of this battalion, and paying more than usual attention even to the other battalions of the RWF, which share traditions and, often enough, personnel with the second battalion.

And about those traditions: we will learn about the “flash” and St. David’s Day and Albuera in good time. For today, I only want to note that the Royal Welch, as a matter of ancient (some decades, to be sure) tradition, had a regimental goat. Not a pet mind you, but a Regimental Goat, born on the official strength of (at least the 2nd) battalion.

Today, a century back, the regimental goat died. “He must have known something.”^[5]

At around the same time, at the Berkeley hotel in London, Amy Lowell was making some important connections over dinner.^[6] The influential American poet and critic is only two days removed from hating on/heckling poor young Rupert Brooke, but tonight she dines with her own people. These are the “imagists,” self-declared vanguard of the Modernist movement, roaring poetic engines primed to race screaming down the highway of the literary future, hauling the twentieth century willy nilly into their slipstream and leaving the Georgian poets wandering dazedly amid the roadside wildflowers, coughing dazedly in the dust. We have yet to meet Richard Aldington, whose acid Death of a Hero is one of the most important (and least Roman-a-Clef-y) angry novels of the war, but we mention him today because he and his wife–the probably-more-significant modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)–were introduced, at this dinner, to the much-more-significant-indeed novelist D.H. Lawrence.

Lawrence owed his first break to none other than Ford Hermann Hueffer (a.k.a Ford Madox Ford) and was influenced by T.E. Hulme (the Modernist poet and philosopher we keep mentioning, but have yet to really meet) will exercise a huge influence on Aldington. He would never completely throw in his lot with the angry/radical Modernists or Vorticists (recall Blast) and was published in both Lowell’s Imagist anthologies and Eddie Marsh’s Georgian anthologies. But Lawrence never served–he was a committed anti-militarist and spent the war being harassed by the English authorities for his supposed pro-Germanism. So, despite his eminence, he is for us a great crumping blast from a big gun–but an “over,” a near-miss behind and away somewhere else. The Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, and the angry modernists Aldington and Ford, will reach the trenches, and we will see more of them…  Ah, I remember when I reassured myself that, even if the project seemed to be getting out of hand, at least I wouldn’t bother dealing with the Modernists… never such innocence…

Finally, in a lovely old house in rural Kent, after an afternoon on the cricket pitch, doing “quite a decent bit of defensive batting” for the Blue Mantles, a future subaltern of the 2/RWF struggled–awkwardly as ever–with a new complex of feelings. The cricket match had broken up as several players with military affiliations learned that they had been recalled to their stations. “That evening I played Prince Igor with more expressiveness than ever, while Mrs. Anely sat on the sofa by the window, appreciative of my performance, but unable to conceal her opinion that God alone knew what we should all be doing in a month’s time. My mother, whose courage was unshakeable, did her best to ‘change the subject’; but she couldn’t change the look in her own face.”^[7]

And really finally, for today, Sometime earlier, in both absolute and solar-relative time, also at about tea-time–although presumably and despite his fondness for cousin George, he was not thinking of it as such–Tsar Nicholas signed Russia’s mobilization order. This was to take effect the next morning, although some troops in Moscow began immediately entraining for the West. A general war is now (even more) inevitable.