We’ll open today, a century back, with our farthest-forward writer. But even the eager Vivian de Sola Pinto is no longer out in front of the entire B.E.F. It’s all coming together, now, as the negotiations for an armistice are concluding. There was desultory fighting during the day and more assaults are planned for tomorrow, but there will be no eve-of-the-end tragedy for any of our writers.
On the evening of 10th November the Divisional General passed us in his car on the road and shouted that the armistice has been signed. Later that evening a cavalry regiment overtook us. It was the 2nd Dragoon Guards, who were supposed to be our ‘cavalry screen’, but had only just caught us up! They were greeted with ribald shouts from the infantry.[1]
This is still slightly premature, not to mention the fact that armistice provided for continued violence up until the hour of its taking effect. So let that be the last stroke on behalf of those in the B.E.F. who have suffered the most–the fighting infantry. It’s almost too appropriate that a line battalion should be overtaken on the literal eve of victory by staff officers in a big car and an aristocrat-led cavalry division…
We bid farewell to Kate Luard back in the summertime, when her published letters petered out, although I did reserve the hope that we might one day hear more. And so we shall!
Kate Luard’s letter of today, a century back. Essex Record Office (D/DLu 55/13/1), with thanks to Caroline Stevens
Caroline Stevens recently sent me a photograph (and transcription!) of a letter of today, a century back, found in the Essex Record Office. The letter was written from a base hospital in France to two of Kate’s sisters, after which it would have been circulated among other members of their large family.
As always, Sister Luard’s letter includes both a closely-observed scene and her own sharp commentary on the war. and this letter provides us with a terrible segue, too: the war may be ending, but the influenza epidemic is only now reaching its full strength. Kate Luard’s nineteen-year-old niece Joan–the daughter of Frank Luard, killed at Gallipoli in 1915–has just died, apparently very soon after contracting the flu.
Sunday night
Nov 10th
Dear G & N – you have given me the details about Oxford that I was wanting to know – but Ellie must tell me all the heavenly and funny things Joan said one day. Rose’s letter today of her friend who died the day they found it out shows what a treacherous illness it is: just the same happens to me here – while I am writing to the mother to say he is seriously ill, a slip comes from the Ward to say he is dead. And I don’t think any doctoring or nursing has the slightest effect in this virulent pneumonia…
The delirium is one of the most difficult parts when you are short of staff. I stopped one dying Sergt who was getting out of bed with nothing but a pyjama jacket on, because he wanted to get to his men. “No officers?” he kept saying. “Are there no officers? then I must take charge.”
…None of us have ever seen it before in this virulent epidemic form & the mortality is extraordinarily depressing. In one ward 17 out of 21 died in a few days – Everyone in the influenza wards has to wear a gauze mask & we make a point of off duty time for them – So far only 1 Sister & 2 VADs + three orderlies have gone sick with it and they are not pneumonic, several Sisters & 1 VAD have died at the Sick Sisters Hospital…
Now Sister Luard, one of the true veterans of the war, with more time in France than entire platoons of war poets, looks back on what they have all endured. Her patriotism never bottoms out, and her energy and compassion are never exhausted. She is experiencing, naturally, a certain cautious disbelief.
About the War, is this really the last night…?
Is tomorrow morning the last time of ‘standing to’, & listening posts, & firesteps, & swimming canals under machine-gun fire & Zero hours & fractured femurs & smashed jaws & mustard gas & the crash of bombs and all the strange doings of the past 4 years?
It is quite impossible for a war-soaked brain like mine to think in terms of peace: war has come to be natural–peace unnatural…
Unlike either the vicious jingoists who are salivating at the chance to punish the German people for their leaders’ failed militarism or the hopeful internationalists who are worrying about how to secure a just peace rather than a cycle of vengeance, Luard is thinking about the immediate problems of the German people. She has nursed scores of shattered German boys (she discusses yet another one in another section of today’s letter) and she recognizes that their predicament, so similar to those who “sacrificed” themselves for the Allied cause, is in fact worse:
What I feel nervous about is who’s going to be responsible for carrying out our terms if they accept them, now they’ve booted out William… & everyone who has ever run the ship of state?
…All these awakening octogenarians [?] must feel such dupes & fools to have bootlicked the Hohenszollern inflation so long. The brave ones who have died ‘for the fatherland’ will never know that it wasn’t for the Fatherland at all – as far as victory goes…
She’s right, of course: once Germany is punished by the treaty terms, and especially after economic disaster follows, there will be plenty of blame to go around and little political will to resist a horrific reaction to this combination of defeat and perceived betrayal.
But this is not the note that Luard chooses to end what is surely her last letter of the war. Strangely–to my disenchanted eyes, at least–since her compassion for human suffering was so boundless and unflagging, Sister Luard never entirely relinquished her traditional view of war’s merits.
In a way it seems almost a bigger change from War to Peace than it was from Peace to War, perhaps because there was nothing very glorious about our last ten years of peace and everything about our 4 years of War has been very glorious.
Goodnight, love to Father, KEL
1000 thanks for all your letters
The sentiment of the post-script, at least, I can borrow and amplify as best I can. I want to extend 1000–actually, just over 1600–thanks for all your letters, both to those long gone who wrote home during the war (though not for me) and to all of those since who have researched, transcribed, edited, or published those letters (and diaries, and memoirs) so that latter-day historians, writers, and interested civilians could enjoy and make use of them. (This is that moment just before the end of the broadcast when the disembodied voice begins reading out collective thanks…)
My particular thanks, today, go to Kate Luard’s great-niece, Caroline Stevens, and to her great-nephew Tim Luard, for all they have done to bring attention to one of the war’s most fascinating personal chronicles. Caroline tells me that Tim will be speaking about his great-aunt’s letters at the Essex Record Office’s Armistice Day event–this very afternoon between noon and 3:30. Furthermore, extracts from the letters will be read at a Remembrance Concert at Chelmsford Cathedral at 7:30 (also featuring the music of Ivor Gurney‘s friend Herbert Howells). I’m glad to know that more people will shortly come to know the Kate Luard’s letters.
While on the subject of thanksgiving and Cathedral commemorations, let’s hear briefly from one of several of our writers who have converged on Tournai, today, a century back. C.E. Montague‘s published diary entries do not (I believe), mention Charles Scott Moncrieff (nor vice-versa) but they are now in the same city doing more or less the same job. Just a month ago, it was Moncrieff who had charge of the war correspondent Beach Thomas, and now it is Montague.
Nov. 10.—With Nevinson and Beach Thomas to Tournai, captured by us yesterday[2] and everyone radiant. Civilians in streets shake hands and say ‘Merci…’ A battalion of Black Watch march through the town with their pipes playing and crowds cheering. In the Cathedral a great service is going on, with the Bishop on his throne.[3]
Also in Tournai is Rowland Feilding–though not without a highly uncharacteristic show of defiant flair, here at the end.
At 7.15 this morning the battalion marched forward again. I had a slight fever and slept till about nine o’clock. Captain Kilner, one of my Company Commanders, who had been to Lille to take our contribution to the forty-four nuns, returned during the morning, and he and I rode forward to rejoin the battalion.
The battalion, according to orders, had marched round Tournai to the north, avoiding the town. To save time, Kilner and I decided to ride through it. I don’t mind also saying that we had a desire to see Tournai.
Co. Feilding is, however, stopped by a sentry, who is backed by an officer in insisting that they, despite their rank, must have “passes,” since their brigade is not slated to garrison the town. Feilding decides that it is not worth the time and trouble to go and fetch them… and then he makes a most uncharacteristic move.
…it happened that a company of machine-gunners was passing into the town. Thought I to myself, “Why should we be obliged to have passes, and on what grounds should the brigade that garrisons this town put it out of bounds to other troops and so keep all the fun to themselves? So Kilner and I joined on to the passing company, and entered Tournai as machine-gunners.
Being Sunday, all the people were in the streets and squares, dressed in their best clothes, and they gave us a great reception. Compared to this, we were comparatively unwanted when we marched through Lille… Charming ladies and children squandered flags and flowers upon us. We could have collected enough to stock a shop.[4]
Olaf Stapledon, who has recently been uncharacteristically preoccupied with practicalities, had news of the armistice this morning. But by the time he put pen to paper, he could hardly form sentences, so great was his happiness and his anticipation. The end of the war means no more suffering, no more killing, no more parsing of what a decent man owes to his country and to his conscience as the war machine grinds on–but it mostly means no more travel restrictions, and no more obstacles to love.
Vive I’armistice!
The telegram came through in English to this little French town, and one of us had to go to the post office and translate it. Personally I was taking a morning chauf-pieds along the canal when I met an elated artilleur who said, “C’est fini, la guerre.”
—“Mais, c’est dans la communique?”
—“Oui.”
—“Bon.”
We are taking a holiday from car repairs etc. to celebrate it. Oh praise the lord for Peace!
Come to England soon, Agnes mine. I am all impatience. I can wait not a moment longer than is absolutely necessary. Come, come, come.
Agnes, come to Olaf,
COME.[5]
Wouldn’t that be a lovely note to end on, this penultimate day? But I’m not about to start making sensible editorial decisions now. I want to end, instead, with a scene from a novel–a novel that sprawls over the entire war, but does today, a century back, very nicely indeed.
I regret never really having found a way to work Ralph Mottram‘s calm, humane, atmospheric, and intelligent The Spanish Farm Trilogy into this project. It’s an important treatment of life in the army’s middle ranks and middle jobs–the officers who do the inevitable mediation and paper work and are neither rear-echelon you-know-whats nor martinets manqué nor thieves nor utter incompetents. But Mottram didn’t put in enough dates, and the plot and characters and thrice-repeated story do not reduce well to summary. I hope, though, that today’s quotation will work nevertheless.
Skene, the English protagonist of the book, is neither killed nor mutilated nor ruined by the war. He’s not prone to operatic despair or utter self-absorption. But he’s having a hard time, tonight, a century back, even though his frustrating and unheroic work as a Corps-level middle manager has at last come to an end. (Skene’s good French and his experience as a banker make him too valuable as an administrator and mediator with the local population to be allowed to do other, less frustrating work.)
We begin with a liberation scene much like the ones enjoyed so much by Rowland Feilding, now transformed into a lighthearted optimist. But Skene can’t enjoy it in the same way: he hears the victory not as a triumphant fanfare, but as a series of diminished chords fading into an uncertain future.
The Umpteenth Corps did not share the Allied entry into Lille. Instead they had an entry of their own into a Flemish manufacturing town, with a core of old market-place, cathedral and town hall, and an old bridge with dropsical flanking towers, surrounded by a rind of new red-brick suburbs. For a moment the old enthusiasm flared up. Flemish mechanics and shop-keepers and womenfolk, who had heard but never seen the English soldiers fighting for them all these four years, suddenly saw in their own streets khaki and tin helmets, and a young officer of the Intelligence collecting municipal officials. Sober twentieth-century people, from offices and shops, wearing the shawls of mill-hands, the bowlers and black coats of a laborious life, danced, shouted, wept and wrung the hands of officers and men. Ladies with every appearance of invincible propriety kissed perspiring R.E.S putting up the bridges the Bosche had destroyed, and dragged out materials for their work from unsuspected hiding-places.
Skene, borrowed by Intelligence to help straighten things out, sat in the magnificent “Salle des Chevaliers” of the Town Hall, interrogating and docketing batches of Bosche prisoners. When he came out he was set on by troops of children who clung all over him, demanding to be kissed, and would soon have left him buttonless in their thirst for souvenirs. Struggling to his billet in the front room of a miner’s cottage, he sat with Uncle over a bottle of whisky, waiting for news of the Armistice terms that had been sent to the Bosche. It was the evening of November the tenth.
The field telephone stood on the treadle sewing machine in the window. Corps Signals had been duly bribed.
The man of the house came in from work, and passed by them, with doffed cap, to the back kitchen where his family were collected round the stove.
“Have ye explained to him about the billeting?” said Uncle, doctrinaire in his cups.
Skene called the man back. The Frenchman protested. It was payment enough to have English in the house: but his wife struck in. It was too good, no doubt, but acceptable. “Give ’im a drink!” said Uncle.
Man, wife, old aunt, and little daughter Simone all came, and from liqueur glasses drank “to our deliverers” with tears and smiles, partly joy, partly unaccustomed whisky.
In the pitiful bare respectability of the little room, a cheap clock ticked, Uncle snored; Skene sat with his hand on the field telephone.
Before his tired eyes came faces from the great training camps, peopled by happy boys, now dust and decay in any corner from Dunkirk to Baghdad — visions of fine light-hearted mornings, or wet benumbing twilight in Bailleul and Villers Brettonneux, of which no stone now rested on another — visions of the waste of No Man’s Land, in the dreary machine-gun-punctuated dawn, of Christmas dinners in the Officers’ Restaurant at Amiens, when a hundred and fifty officers from all corners of the world with hands crossed sang “Auld Lang Syne” — visions of all that great cataclysm which had turned the ease-loving, sport-following manhood of England into the New Armies — turned the New Armies into Armed and Fighting England stretching through France and Italy, half across Asia and the oceans of the world — the cataclysm which had caught him, Skene, like a straw, whirled him out of the quiet certainty of his office life in the Close of an English cathedral town — bumped him against this and that until he had become a person unrecognizable to himself, with all the landmarks of his existence changed; caught him too against Madeleine and wrenched the heart out of him.
The telephone bell buzzed. He took up the receiver.
“Umpteenth Corps Clearance Officer!”
“Speaking! Who are you?”
“Corps Signals. Is that Mr. Skene?”
“Speaking!”
“We’ve just intercepted Bosche wireless, sir. They are going to sign in the morning!”
“Thanks! Good night!”
Reaching over the little table, he shook Uncle. The old man opened his eyes, owl-like, and sat up.
“They’re going to sign!”
“Who? — what? — oh! the Bosche!”
The old man looked at Skene and then away.
“Well, that’s the end of it then!” he said.
“That’s the end of it!” repeated Skene.
And suddenly he could not look at Uncle. He could only struggle with an emotion not admissible in an officer. The end of it! This little mean room, in a Flemish slum! The laconic printed “Order” that would appear on the morrow. Victory!
Rounds! He went outside into the chill and darkness of that November night. At the small factory where his men were billeted, he found his sentry; in the little pay-office, his superior New Army Corporal, reading a paper-covered novel over a brazier; — beyond, in the low sheds where his men were sleeping, his mules tied up and his carts stacked, all was in darkness and silence. “Celebrations!” he thought. Emerging again into the little paved street, he met what to him was typical of war as he had waged it. In the lampless glimmer of the night, a string of square boxes on wheels, known as limbers, was being drawn with a springless rattle over the pavé, by weary mules, beside whom were men just sufficiently awake to guide them. At the head a muffled figure, for all the world like the leader of some North Pole Expedition, was plodding beside a somnambulistic horse.
Abreast of Skene he muttered: “This’ll get me to Werlies, I s’pose! Is it true they’ve chucked it?”
Skene nodded. “I believe the Bosche are going to sign the Armistice terms in the morning!”
“Good job. We should have chucked it, if they hadn’t!”
And he stumped on.
Skene pulled off his boots and got into his blankets. “Too long,” he thought. “Who cares now?”
He had forgotten that this was Victory.[6]
References and Footnotes
- The City that Shone, 243. ↩
- Vivian de Sola Pinto would disagree with this dating, however... ↩
- Elton, C.E. Montague, 225. ↩
- War Letters to a Wife, 351. ↩
- Talking Across the World, 339-40. ↩
- The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 531-35. ↩