Julian Grenfell and the rest of the Royal Dragoons at last embarked today, a century back. They loaded their horses aboard ship during the wee hours, enjoying a “lovely night with blazing moon, which was very lucky.”[1] And Gilbert Frankau received a commission in the East Surrey Regiment–presumably with the help of his Public School bona fides–and began, perforce, gathering material to be loosely fictionalized (largely under the theme of “officers, corrupt and incompetent”) in his next novel.
In Antwerp, Sarah Macnaughtan, serving as an orderly with Mrs. Stobart’s Hospital Unit, was very much in the thick of it. The unit had set up a temporary hospital in a philharmonic hall, which was already filled to capacity.
6 October
I think the last two days have been the most ghastly I ever remember. Every day seems to bring news of defeat. It is awful, and the Germans are quite close now. As I write the house shakes with the firing. Our troops are falling back, and the forts have fallen. Last night we took provisions and water to the cellars, and made plans to get the wounded taken there.All these last two days bleeding men have been brought in.Today three of them died, and I suppose none of them was more than 23.
The guns boom by day as well as by night, and as each one is heard one thinks of more bleeding, shattered men. It is calm, nice autumn weather; the trees are yellow in the garden and the sky is blue, yet all the time one Iistens to the cries of men in pain. Tonight I meant to go out for a little, but a nurse stopped me and asked me to sit by a dying man. Poor fellow, he was twenty-one, and looked like some brigand chief, and he smiled as he was dying.[2]
Let’s again go to Conan Doyle as our semi-official (meaning “rousing, uncritical, and journalistic to a fault”) historian. He reminds us that while the Royal Marines, i.e. the trained professionals of the Naval Division, had now spent two days in the trenches around Antwerp, our first Kitchener-ish units have now arrived (these are not technically New Army formations, but they are similar ad hoc formations of barely trained volunteers–in effect Churchill’s New Land Navy).
On the night of the 5th the two other brigades of the division, numbering some 5000 amateur sailors, arrived in Antwerp, and the whole force assembled on the new line of defence. Mr. Winston Churchill showed his gallantry as a man, and his indiscretion as a high official, whose life was of great value to his country by accompanying the force from England. The bombardment was now very heavy, and the town was on fire in several places. The equipment of the British left much to be desired, and their trenches were as indifferent as their training. None the less they played the man and lived up to the traditions of that great service upon whose threshold they stood. For three days these men, who a few weeks before had been anything from schoolmasters to tram-conductors, held their perilous post. They were very raw, but they possessed a great asset in their officers, who were usually men of long service. But neither the lads of the naval brigades nor the war-worn and much-enduring Belgians could stop the mouths of those inexorable guns…[3]
Oh Good, stereotypical stuff: “play the man,” brave “lads,” the leap from good will and the presence of proud “traditions” to a reasonable hope of military efficiency. Well. It’s difficult to rate the effectiveness of a formation when it has been sent, too little and too late, into the face of the “inexorable” German siege artillery, so perhaps the substitution of general praise for their conduct is less egregious than usual.
Here’s how Rupert Brooke described his day:
So we got out at Antwerp, and marched through the streets, and everyone cheered and flung themselves on us and gave us apples and chocolate and flags and kisses, and cried Vivent les Anglais and ‘Heep! Heep! Heep!’
…Every mile the noises got louder, immense explosions and detonations. We stopped in the town square in Vieux Dieu; five or six thousand British troops, a lot of Belgians, guns going through, transport waggons, motor-cyclists, orderlies on horses, staff-officers, and the rest. An extraordinary and thrilling confusion. As it grew dark the thunders increased, and the sky was lit by extraordinary glares. We were all given entrenching tools. Everyone looked worried. Suddenly our battalion was marched round the corner out of the din through an old gate in the immense, wild, garden of a recently-deserted château. There we had to sleep. The rather dirty and wild-looking sailors trudged over lawns, through orchards and across pleasaunces. Little pools glimmered through the trees, and deserted fountains: and round corners one saw, faintly, occasional Cupids and Venuses–a scattered company of rather bad statues–gleaming quietly. The sailors dug their latrines in the various rose-gardens and lay down to sleep–but it was bitter cold–under the shrubs. It seemed infinitely peaceful and remote. I was officer on guard till the middle of the night…[4]
I have my issues with Rupert Brooke and his fraught and often petulantly hostile way of representing himself and his experiences, but he’s a good writer. So is Conan Doyle, obviously, but in a different way.
Doyle’s great work is invention–and heavily rational invention at that–wherein wit and reason must flash and fire and reality fall back and dig in. Brooke, whatever else he is doing (this is from the same long and intermittently flirtatious letter to Eileen Wellesley that I quoted from yesterday), is describing real experience, and he has the skills for this. As a poet his better poems, like this letter, describe the world justly, yet suggestively. (His more famous, weaker work, is prone to pseudo-philosophical declamation. Oh yes, the sonnets are a-comin’.)
Sure, Doyle, posing as a historian, has a battle to describe, while Brooke can share with us the sights and sounds of subjective experience and the ironic strangeness of entrenching in a garden of love. All I’m saying is that this juxtaposition is why I prefer–why this project dotes upon–literature-describing-personal-experience-of-the-war, and not history per se.