Sometimes the double restriction military and social decorum–the need, that is, not to write too incautiously of military matters as well as the desire not to alarm loved ones–make it very difficult indeed to puzzle out what is happening. Olaf Stapledon has had a trying week, working behind the beginnings of the new French offensive. But how trying? And compared to what?
SSA 13
21 July 1918We have settled down once more (for the present anyhow) to our usual peaceful existence. I can’t tell you about the last week, or rather I don’t know how much I might tell, and don’t intend to take risks of being sacked or court martialed! Anyhow we had about one tenth of the unpleasantness we had expected, in fact we had a very easy let off. None of our fellows were hurt, and very few cars were hit, and there were few patients to carry, considering. On the other hand for a while it was quite sufficiently dramatic. Of course you will have seen in the papers all about the big battle of these days, and you will have guessed that we had only slight experience of it here. Yet, if you were to be sitting beside me now I should be able to tell you much that would be surprising and thrilling. But anyhow I am tired of it all. . . .
Stapledon doesn’t usually address the problem of representing experience so directly. But this is preamble–he has something specific that he needs to write to Agnes about.
My dear, in the last scrap I did an awful thing for which I don’t see how you will ever forgive me. I left a wounded man in a ditch under shell fire. Of course I thought he was dead. He was horribly smashed up. Of course I ought to have stopped and got out & examined him, but he seemed such a fragment of a man that I only slowed down to look at him and then went on. But subsequently he turned out not to be dead, & I myself finally took him to the rear. It is horrible to be guilty of such a gross piece of carelessness, for it was just carelessness and not blue funk, for I was not in a funk just then. I was too busy avoiding shell holes to be in a funk, and alas too busy to switch off my mind on to an unexpected subject. But never again, never never again. I shall now drive with the expectation of a wounded man at every ten yards, so as to be on the safe side. No one seems to blame me, but that is no criterion. People don’t blame people on the culprit’s own evidence, unless it is obviously an extremely bad case. But I shall remember that man now for many a long day. Poor chap, he must have died very soon after I got him away anyhow. Can you forgive me? I have been honest and told you anyhow. And I have learnt a lesson not easily to be forgotten.
If we might have discounted as mere rhetoric his first linking of this ghastly mistake in France to Agnes–to his hope (or despair) of obtaining forgiveness from the far side of the world, we won’t miss the impact of the repetition.
Can you forgive me? The worst point of course is that the place was getting badly strafed. I have no business to ask you to forgive me.
No, and it’s good that he realizes it. Stapledon is a forward-looking romantic rather than a pseudo-Tennysonian knight–but he still puts his fair damsel on a pedestal. Is it touching that he hopes his beloved will feel that she can forgive his mistake, or another sign of war’s confusion? She loves him, yes, but how can she understand exactly what happened, no matter how much he writes? Why should she have this responsibility, when other experienced ambulance drivers do not blame him?
But this may be too much close-reading: he has made a mistake, and he is wracked with guilt, so he feels he must confess himself to the person whose good opinion he most desires and needs.
Anyhow I am not likely to be guilty of that particular sin again; it has bitten in sufficiently. But I am always doing beastly things like that on the spur of the moment, things I would not dream of doing if I had time to think. Enough of that…
But it’s not enough. Olaf returns to the scene once more before the letter ends:
I did not tell you before because the enormity of the offence had not dawned on me when I sent off the last letter. I was more impressed then at having had all my windows blown in and having crashed into a shell hole, though such events are merely external & unavoidable. It all happened in the same twinkling of an eye. My man must have been laid out by the previous shell. His bike was in the road, & I thought someone had chucked him into the ditch for dead.[1]
It becomes clear at last why this is a traumatic memory that Stapledon cannot simply bury–and perhaps it’s good, then, that he reaches out to her for some sort of solace.
Our other affianced-man-in-France is also back in the thick of it. Duff Cooper‘s diary, which usually records his feelings and social interactions, now takes note of the sounds and sights–and smells–of war. A bombardment two nights ago has left the reserve trenches in a bad state:
…the whole place smelt of gas and explosives and corpses. There are a lot of graves all round us which haven’t been dug deep enough.
Through this shelling Cooper’s company made their way up to the front line:
We are holding a very extended line. We have each section in a separate post and four or five hundred yards between some of the posts….
He got 2 1/2 hours of sleep that night, and woke up this morning, a century back, at 3:00 for “stand-to.”
Stand to at 3 a.m. to 4.15–then breakfast. I was then on duty from 5-8 and then went round the posts. There is one which when visiting by day one is in full sight of the enemy but they don’t seem very pugnacious. It was a wet morning at first but cleared up and was very pleasant–the air smelling fresh and sweet after the rain.
Things are looking up–but the picture is incomplete!
When I got back to Company H.Q. I found that two bottles of port had arrived for me–a very welcome and well timed arrival…
The port–and two letters from Diana Manners–cheer Duff up sufficiently to get him through the day, but by the end he is feeling poorly, with no appetite and rather too-scrupulous notation of just how little sleep he is getting…[2]