Following a Literary Trail

From time to time I come across one of Alan Bennett’s diaries, either in book form or published as a serial in the London Review of Books. They are good reading. Bennett’s writing is concise and witty, he has an artist’s eye for detail and a dramatist’s ear for dialogue. The diaries seem at first glance to be mere reportage of everyday events, but they are invariably interesting and amusing, and his observations about literature, art, politics, the theatre, and even sport, are acute.

One of the other things I like about the diaries is that every now and again he mentions the books he is reading at the moment. Over the years, this has led me to discover books and authors that otherwise I would not have known, or to rediscover an old favourite. There is also that special pleasure that even an amateur scholar knows—meandering down a literary trail, one book or author suggesting another, and so on.

It was through reading one of Bennett’s diaries that I discovered A Passionate Prodigality by Guy Chapman. Bennett described it as the finest book to come out of the First World War. I had not heard of the book or its author, but I have read many First World War memoirs and, respecting Bennett’s opinion, I sent away for a copy. Now having read it, I can only agree: A Passionate Prodigality is a remarkable book, replete with the horrors of trench warfare and the absurdities of army life that we have come to expect from a First World War memoir, but at the same time beautifully written in almost poetic prose, and providing glimpses of an understated, sardonic humour. It is also clearly the work of a writer who is familiar with classical literature and culture.

Having been led to Chapman by Bennett, I was then led by Chapman along several other paths, as I followed up various of his literary and musical allusions. I’ll come to these in a minute.

But first to A Passionate Prodigality. The title comes from an inscription on an ancient Persian burial urn, quoted in the writings of the melancholy seventeenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Browne:

 

… to drink of the ashes of dead relations, a passionate prodigality. He that hath the ashes of his friend, hath an everlasting treasure.

 

Pondering over this, and failing to understand it, did not delay me long from starting to read.

Subtitled Fragments of Autobiography, the book was published in 1933 and looks back to the period from 1915 to 1919 during which Chapman was a soldier. He was impelled to write it, he explains, by reading the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, which reminded him that he had met Blunden at the front in 1917. Blunden’s book also suggested the style for his own memoir: the author as both chorus and player.

Chapman does not glorify war, but he understands it, and the pull it exerts on its participants. Best of all, he celebrates the comradeship of soldiers, and their stoicism in the face of misery, fear, appalling conditions, death, boredom and officialdom.

 

Chapman was twenty-six, a lawyer and a graduate of Oxford and the London School of Economics, when in 1915 he joined the Royal Fusiliers, part of the “new Army” formed after the professional army had been cut to ribbons in 1914. Thanks to his status and education, he was immediately commissioned as a subaltern. Of his joining-up he writes:

 

I was loath to go. I had no romantic illusions. I was not eager, or even resigned to self-sacrifice, and my heart gave back no answering throb to thought of England. In fact, I was very much afraid; and again, afraid of being afraid, anxious lest I show it.

 

After a few months training in England, with lectures from general staff officers who “seemed happier talking of Jubulpore than of Ypres”, the battalion moved to the Western Front and straight into the trenches. Their arrival was not auspicious:

 

The communication trench was just wide enough to accommodate a man with a full pack, and about seven feet deep, so that one’s vision was limited to a patch of darkening sky and the shoulders of the man in front. Its floor was covered with a foot of tensely glutinous mud. We drove slowly through the morass, wrenching out each foot before putting it down again.

Darkness fell. After what seemed half a night, the guide stopped and said: “There’s a road here. See and hurry over it. There’s a machine gun on it. See? One at a time.”

We tore ourselves singly from the mud and bundled on to the road, diving towards a dark opening in the other bank. The machine gun threw a few desultory shots past us. The bullets cracked sharply overhead. We tumbled into another trench and went on. This one was narrow, too, but shallower and duck-boarded. We moved more quickly. We could see lights rising and falling in front of us, and the noises interpreted themselves as rifles and machine guns firing.

 

Arriving eventually at their destination, Chapman is introduced to the environment and the work that will become his preoccupation in the years ahead:

 

The trench was not a trench at all. The bottom may have been two feet below ground level. An enormous breastwork rose in the darkness some ten or more feet high. All about us there was an air of bustle. Men were lifting filled sandbags on to the parapet and beating them into the wall with shovels. Bullets cracked in the darkness. Every now and then a figure would appear on the skyline and drop skilfully on the firestep.

“Care to see the wire?” said my guide. I followed him gingerly over the edge of the wall, and slid clumsily down a ramp of greasy sandbags. A small party was working swiftly over a tangle of some dark stuff. Two of my own soldiers were being inducted into the ceremony of wiring. “Hold it tight, chum,” growled one figure. He proceeded to smite a heavy bulk of timber with a gigantic maul, the head of which had been cunningly muffled in sandbags.

 

The battalion soon “settled” into the routine of life for infantrymen on the Western Front. Up in the line they were shelled, undertook raids, patrols and search parties, maintained the wire and the trenches, stood to at dawn, and performed sentry duty. Out of the line there were interminable marches to billets in the cellars of ruined villages, occasional visits to an estaminet or bath house, training, rehearsals for raids or offensives and prolonged train journeys as the battalion was shuttled from one position to another and then back again. They learned the geography of the complex of front, support and communication trenches, variously named after places like Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square. And they began to suffer casualties.

Horrible events are described dispassionately. Chapman was asked one day by a fellow-officer:

 

“Do you remember a corporal with the Messina medal?”

“Oh, yes; a dark stocky man.”

“He went off with [a German] officer we’d caught. Presently I found him back in the trench. I knew he couldn’t have got down to the cage and back; so I asked him what had happened. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a very hot day. We sat down in a shell hole and he gave me his watch and his field-glasses and his money. It’s a very hot day and a long way down. So I shot him.’”

“What did you do?”

“There wasn’t any need to do anything,” said Vaughan with a curl of his thin lips; “he was killed that afternoon.”

 

Worse is to come. During a desperate defence by Chapman’s troops against a German offensive, his colleague Whitehead recalled:

 

… how in the early hours before the attack he had heard a voice up the trench shouting “Over the top! Over the top! We are coming over for you!” The man had somehow got at the rum and was drunk. I said to someone, “Keep that man quiet”. And presently the noise stopped. When I went along next day, I found him quite quiet. Someone had stuck a bayonet into him.

 

In the wake of the ghastly mess and shocking losses at the battle of the Somme, Chapman is transferred for a while to Divisional HQ where he works as a staff officer in a general’s chateau. Here, far removed from the front, he finds himself surrounded by clerks, “each of whom knew the exact worth, gravity, and distinction of his position to the lightest hair”, and the general’s servants, chauffeurs and retainers, all superior to the “mere batmen of hangers-on like me”. The Divisional HQs he describes as “monstrous tumours swelling with supernumerary officers and self-importance”.

Chapman comes to perceive that the appalling failure of the Somme offensive had:

 

bred in the infantry a wry distrust of the staff; and there was a fierce resentment when brass hats descended from their impersonal isolation to strafe platoon and company commanders for their alleged shortcomings in the line. The Old Army could not grasp that the New Army cared nothing for soldiering as a trade, thought only of it as a job to be done and the more expeditiously the better. The man in the line … resented the staff’s well-meant but frequently out-of-date admonitions. It made him mad to see “him shine so brisk and smell so sweet, and talk so like a waiting gentlewoman, of guns and drums and wounds …”

I knew that quotation, having studied Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 when I was at school and having re-read it quite recently. Nevertheless I looked it up, and re-read with pleasure that wonderful soliloquy by Harry Hotspur, reporting in after a battle:
I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped
Showed like a stubble land at harvest time.
He was perfumèd like a milliner,
And twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose, and took’t away again;
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in your majesty’s behalf.
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popingay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly, I know not what—
He should, or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds …

Chapman returns from Divisional HQ to his battalion in the line just in time for the Battle of Arras, another ghastly shambles. It was during that time that he experienced his own Hotspur moment. He had been sent one evening to Brigade HQ, where he found there was nothing for him to do except doze away the night, but when he returned to his company the next morning he found himself in trouble. A Brass Hat had called in while he was away to get him to go out and “find the front line” and report back on the number and layout of the trenches and other information. The Brass Hat stormed at Chapman for not being able to give him the exact information on the forward trench system that he sought. In response:

 

“Well, Sir,” I objected, after I had been cursed for not coming back in time to be sent out again, “if the Battalion commanders can’t tell you where their line is, I don’t see how I can. I can only tell you what I saw from the OP.” I thought of Sam Weller’s reply to Sergeant Buzfuz, but forbore to quote it.

 

I knew Sam Weller and Sergeant Buzfuz, and again I set off down a literary byway. This led to my tattered copy of The Pickwick Papers, where I turned to a well-remembered scene. Poor old Pickwick has been accused of misleading the cunning Widow Bardell, and the business finally ends up in court. The prosecutor, Sergeant Buzfuz, is cross-examining Sam Weller (Mr Pickwick’s wonderful manservant). Sam denies having seen Mrs Bardell in Mr Pickwick’s arms, where she had deliberately “fainted” to trap Pickwick into marrying her. When this happened, Sam says, he was waiting in the house passage. Buzfuz is sceptical and jeers at Sam’s professed blindness.

 

“Have you a pair of eyes, Mr Weller!” he cries.

“Yes [Sam replies] I have a pair of eyes and that’s just it. If they was a pair of double million magnifying glass microscopes of hextra power I might be able to see through a deal door and a flight of stairs. But being only Eyes, you see, my vision is limited.”

 

Chapman’s humour is swamped by the terrible events of the succeeding months in 1917 and into 1918, especially the debacle of the Ypres Salient in which his battalion was just about eliminated. Increasingly he hears “tired, desperate voices” from the men in the line:

 

“E’e cawn’t do it Ser’eant; ’e’s finished”. “The platoon’s all in, old boy, we’ll only make a balls of it”. “I’ve only sixty men left in the company, Sir, it’s too few for the job”. “My battalion’s been in the line for ten days, General. It’s had 80% casualties; we no longer exist”. “Unless my Brigade’s relieved, I’ll not answer for the consequences”.

These desperate voices never reached England, or if they did they were bawled out by such safe patriots as Lord Northcliffe …

 

Later, one evening, a new subaltern, “very young, very fair and very shy”, part of an incoming battalion relieving the Fusiliers, arrived in Chapman’s dug-out. He was made welcome, shown around. As Chapman bade him goodbye the next morning, the young man shyly put a slim paper-covered book in his hands. It was a copy of The Harbingers, poems by E.C. Blunden.

Again I sniffed at the spoor of a literary trail. I have a book of poems from the First World War, Sassoon, Graves, Owen and others, including Edmund Blunden. I looked it up and found “The Zonnebeke Road”, of which the following is an extract:

 

               … now where Haymarket starts,

That is no place for soldiers with weak hearts;

The minenwerfers have it to the inch.

Look, how the snow-dust whisks along the road,

Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch

In this east wind; the low sky like a load

Hangs over—a dead-weight. But what a pain

Must gnaw where its clay cheek

Crushes the shell-chopped trees that fang the plain—

The ice-bound throat gulps out a gargoyle shriek.

The wretched wire before the village line

Rattles like rusty brambles or dead bine,

And then the daylight oozes into dun;

Black pillars, those are trees where roadways run.

Even Ypres now would warm our souls; fond fool,

Our tour’s but one night old, seven more to cool!

O screaming dumbness, O dull clashing death,

Shreds of dead grass and willows, homes and men,

Watch as you will, men clench their chattering teeth

And freeze you back with that one hope, disdain.

 

The final year of the war brings the great offensives, first the German and then the final drive by the British, Australians and Americans that ended in the Armistice. Here Chapman describes the opening moments of one of the final attacks:

 

We moved up after dusk, and as soon as we had crossed Pigeon Wood, we became aware that we were in the midst of an invisible army. We blundered into a gun with its team. All round us where that afternoon had been lawn, bare for the intersecting trenches, now stood batteries in their masses, almost wheel to wheel it seemed. A tank, then several more came nosing by. A column of infantry, with emblems of another division, crossed our path. The comp dugout in the front line, which was to be battalion HQ for this show, was surrounded by recumbent soldiers. All space between the trenches was occupied. Shelling had died away almost to silence. By 4.40, when the light was beginning to filter through, there was a thick mist. Packs of men crouching in the grass could just be seen on knees, ready to move. The hands crept over the watch face. 4.45. Now! Like the attack of the orchestra in the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, the guns of the corps on the right started. A second later those on the left. Then our own let loose their flood of steel, poured it above our heads. A few lights flickered up; a few enemy guns dropped shells: they were scarcely noticed. The companies moved forward …

 

The 3rd Brandenburg! It is typical of Chapman that this analogy sprang to his mind, and again I was impelled to follow up his reference. I know and love all of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but I can never remember which is which. Where is that CD with Number 3 on it! It can’t be found, but the internet has the answer and I listen to (and watch) a glorious rendition, marvelling once again at “the attack of the orchestra”, especially in the final movement.

 

Despite being gassed and suffering severe damage to his eyes, Chapman is there right to the end of the war and beyond, staying on with the Army of Occupation in Germany into 1919. Over the succeeding post-war years it is the “tender nostalgia” for his former comrades and the loss of friends that he remembers most vividly. His battalion alone lost 800 men killed in action, including thirty-two officers, and hundreds more were ruinously injured. But he also acknowledges the “enormous fascination of war, the repulsion and attraction, the sharpening of awareness, and as one became familiar with one’s surroundings an apprehension that was not fear—a quickening rather”.

At the end, we see Chapman waking up from a fogged sleep in a troop train:

 

The train was standing still. I drew back the door and peered out. There was a damp platform and the name HERBESTAHL, the frontier station of Germany. Beyond a dark grey morning, windless with a hint of drizzle, colourless trees and hedges, and no sound but the steam from the engine. The train jerked into movement. We passed over into Germany. No trumpets sounded.

No trumpets sounded.

It is an unforgettable evocation of the disaster and tragedy of the First Wold War, and of its ultimate anticlimax.

But there are also a positive and a negative to come out of all this for me. The positive has been the opportunity to read and discuss a forgotten classic. I confirm Alan Bennett’s summation of A Passionate Prodigality; to me also it is one of the finest books to come out of the First World War. The negative is the fading of the literary culture that enabled a writer like Chapman to sprinkle his writing with literary and classical allusions, at a time when many readers would have had no trouble recognising them. I doubt this would be the case today.