It has been quite a while since we have checked in with Gilbert Frankau, ex-businessman, future novelist, and swaggering subaltern in Kitchener’s army. He, like more than a handful of our officers (Edward Brittain, for instance), found enough antipathy among the hastily-assembled cadre of senior officers in his ramshackle battalion to seek a transfer. His Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant contains a vicious portrait (evidently quite recognizable–there will be legal action) of the “scheming and incompetent adjutant” who had made life impossible for anyone he perceived as a threat.
So, along with his fictional altar ego, Frankau had escaped, in March, into the artillery. This was not an uncommon course: while Kitchener’s army had added scores of infantry regiments to the army’s strength, it was soon clear that there would need to be proportionally much more new artillery than infantry. Once the guns were manufactured (or borrowed from the French) and the men trained, the new batteries were sent into the line as soon as possible. Today, a century back, the 107th Artillery brigade marched away from its training grounds toward the coast–they will be needed for the Autumn offensive.[1]
Alf Pollard has decided to aim high. His Lady merits an officer, and so an officer he will be. And why not a diligent officer? Nay–why not a hero?
After rest and leave, Pollard returns with his battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company to the nasty, close-in trenches around Hooge, at the southern end of the salient.
With the knowledge that I would soon be an officer, I spent as much time as possible roaming round No Man’s Land. The Huns were now eight hundred yards away and there was plenty to see in the intervening space. On one of these excursions I came across an excellent Burberry with only five small shrapnel holes in it and which I promptly annexed. By it, in the bottom of the shell-hole where I found it, was a solitary head. It stood upright in the centre of the crater and there was no trace of the body to which it belonged anywhere near it. For some reason it fascinated me. It looked so droll and yet so pathetic. To whom had it belonged? …I hoped he was a fighter who had done down with his face to the enemy, his courage high and his mouth set in grim determination. That was how I hoped to die if I had to; though I should have liked one second’s warning so that I could breathe Her name. Afterwards, if my head remained to mark the spot, I should like it to be pointing to the trenches I had never reached.
Yes–he is serious. Deadly earnest.
It’s odd to see what seems to be a sort of schlock horror film aesthetic in a writer who professes his enthusiasm for a chivalric/heroic approach to the world. But then again–unless he strays from grandiloquence into outright falsehood–the severed head is… historical.
Pollard is a brave man, a cheerful killer, a “fire-eater” describing his own motivations… so the bathos, I think, is unintended. Have I, as a reader, gone so far into willed sympathy with the suffering infantry of the trenches that I’m entirely around the bend? Have I turned my reading eyes past any understanding of the emotions happy warriors, toward disdain for this sort of bloodthirstiness, especially when expressed in such clunky prose?
I hope not. Maximum readerly sympathy with all writers who shared in this experience is a worthy goal…
And yet I can’t help but read this description as some sort of unintentionally Python-esque variation on Hamlet. The Great White Man-Hunter contemplates not a skull but a still-fleshed and aggressively idealized head, and sees not so much the meaning of his death but his hopes about its mentionable-in-dispatches circumstances…
Pollard goes on to note that he specially enjoys duty in a “listening post in the middle of this desolation. It was three hundred yards in front of our line.” Naturally, then:
I wrote home on the 29th August whilst actually in the outpost.
“–We ought to have a lively time on this outpost with corpses all around us…. I shall take jolly good care that if the Huns try to surprise us none of my command will have their tails down and the surprisers will be surprised.
Surely he won’t be surprised while in the act of penning a letter… But he closes with a solid (ha!) bit of commentary on the new lows of trench warfare:
I have about a hundred bombs with me so out to make a good show. Talking of bombs, bombers in an attack now carry a mace which consists of a stout handle with a huge lump of iron on the end. One, found on the late battlefield, had a number of large spikes in the end as well. It shows what modern warfare is coming to when we have to go back to the dark age for our weapons. They will be serving out bows and poisoned arrows next…”[2]
Well, the poison, at least, is coming.
Vera Brittain received today Roland Leighton‘s “short but very comprehensive”[3] letter of the 26th. She wrote back immediately.
Buxton, 29 August 1915
No, somehow ‘the memory and the pain and the insatiable longing for Something which one has loved’ doesn’t sound as if you were forgetting quite as soon as one might have supposed you would, even though ‘each picture flies’.
For my part, I find you still elusive, still intangible, and truly in that way it seems to count for so little that you did come back at all. When I get your letters I feel as though I know and understand you much better than when I meet & see the actual you. You yourself always puzzle me. Reverence–reserve–indifference–in their actual manifestation they are so alike, and the more full of emotion you are, the more alike they become. If there weren’t a few physical signs to help me, if the expression you resolutely drive away from your mouth didn’t sometimes betray itself in your eyes, I should never know you at all…[4]