A literary trail: from the Somme to JS Bach

The cover of my paperback copy of Guy Chapman’s book, the inspiration for this story

From time to time, I used to 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 especially liked is that every now and again Bennett mentions the book he is reading at the moment. Over the years, this led me to discover books and authors that otherwise I would not have known, and to rediscover old favourites. There is also that special pleasure that even an amateur scholar knows ... being led down a meandering literary trail, as one book, poem, reference or author leads you to another, and so on.

It was through reading one of Bennett's diaries [Endnote 1] 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 [2] is a remarkable book. It is replete with the horrors of trench warfare and the absurdities of army life that we have come to expect from a First War memoir. But at the same time, it is beautifully written in almost poetic prose, and provides glimpses of an understated, sardonic humour. It is also clearly the work of a writer who is familiar with classical English literature and culture.

Guy Chapman after becoming an officer in the Royal Fusiliers in 1915

Having been led by Bennett to Chapman, I was then led by Chapman along several other paths, as I followed-up the many literary and musical allusions in his book. I'll come to these in a minute.

But first to the Passionate Prodigality. The title (I discover from the internet) comes from an inscription on an ancient Persian burial urn, quoted in the writings of the melancholy 17th Century English writer Sir Thomas Browne, a copy of which Chapman carried in his kit throughout the war:

"....to drink of the ashes of dead relations, a passionate prodigality. He that hath the ashes of his friend, hath an everlasting treasure” [3]

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

Subtitled Fragments of Autobiography, and published in 1933, Chapman looks back to the period 1915-1919 during which he 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 a style for his own memoir: the author as both chorus and player; in other words, the author is both storyteller and participant.

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 of the London School of Economics, when in 1915 he joined the Royal Fusiliers, part of the 'New Army' formed after the professional ‘old’ 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 Jubblepore [the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ in India in 1858] 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 raising 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 onto 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.

British infantrymen in the mud of Flanders

 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 barbed wire and the trenches, stood-to at dawn, and performed sentry duty. Every now and again they would participate in an offensive ‘Push’, futile attacks en masse against the opposing German trenches, or they would defend their trenches against a German attack. 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 on the front to another and then back again. They learned the geography of the complex of forward, support and communication trenches, variously named after places like Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square.  No sooner had they arrived, than 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 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 (the Allies suffered 57,000 casualties, including 19,000 killed, in this one battle, one of the most abysmal failures of military strategy in history), Chapman is transferred for a while to Divisional HQ where he works as a staff officer in a General's chateau.

The “Chateaux Generals”, as they were known to the front-line troops

I can never read about those First World War generals without thinking of Siegried Sassoon’s chilling little poem The General which had somehow lodged itself in my memory many years ago:

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,

And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

 In the grand chateaux, far removed from the front, Chapman finds himself surrounded by clerks, "each of whom knew the exact worth, gravity, and distinction of his position to the lightest hair", and the Generals’ servants, chauffeurs and retainers, all of whom regarded themselves as superior to the soldiers doing the fighting at the front. He describes the Divisional HQ as "a monstrous tumour 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 when I was at school and having re-read the play quite recently. Nevertheless, I looked it up, and re-read that wonderful soliloquy by Harry Hotspur, reporting-in after 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 corpse

Betwixt the wind and his nobility ... 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 is devastating in his contempt for the attitudes of those from the ‘Old Professional Army’ towards the volunteer soldiers of New Army, now fighting the war on their behalf.  Years ago, I saw a cartoon from a 1916 edition of Punch that summed this up to perfection:

The old-school Sargeant Major is describing one of his men to his officer: “He’s a good man in the trenches and in a scrap, Sir, but you’ll never make a soldier of him”.

Chapman returns from Divisional HQ to his battalion in the line just in time for the Battle of Arras, another ghastly shambles with appalling casualties. 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 from the Chateaux 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 lay-out 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 [Observation Point]".  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 Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers [4] 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 outside 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,'

Sam Weller, an illustration by PF Sunman from Pickwick Papers

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 decimated. 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. 

War poet Edmund Blunden

Again I sniffed at the spoor of a literary trail. I have a book of poems from the First World War [5], Sassoon, Graves, Owen and others, including Edmund Blunden. I looked it up and found Blunden’s stark masterpiece The Zonnebeke Road, from 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 …

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 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 watchface. 4.45. Now! Like the attack of the orchestra in the 3d 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 3d 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 JS 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 (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 eight hundred 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 World War, and of the ultimate anticlimax of the Armistice [6].

But there are also a positive and a negative to come out of all this, at least 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 War. The negative is my suspicion that the literary culture that enabled a writer like Chapman to sprinkle his writing with literary and classical allusions is fading. He was writing at a time when many readers would have had no trouble recognising them. I don’t write this arrogantly. I was lucky to have had an old-school 1950s education in which we studied Shakespeare, poetry and history … not all that brilliantly, but good bits of it have stuck. With the move away from this sort of education, which my generation was perhaps the last to enjoy, I doubt many young people today would be able, or interested, in following Chapman’s literary trail. It seems to me that they are the poorer for it.

End notes

1.      From The London Review of Books 2nd January, 1997.

2.      Chapman, Guy (1933): A Passionate Prodigality. My copy was republished by Fawcett Crest in 1966

3.      From Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658). I found this at http://mhsteger.tumblr.com/post/1353783672/sir-thomas-browne-born-19-october-1605-died-19.

4.      Charles Dickens published Pickwick Papers in 1836, his first novel. My copy is the Wordsworth Edition, published in 1996.

5.      Blunden, E.C in Parson, I.M. (Ed) (1987): Men Who March Away. Poems of the First World War. The Hogarth Press, London

6.       The reference is to lines from John Bunyon’s  Pilgrims Progress. The full passage is:  “When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the riverside, into which as he went he said, “Death, where is thy Sting?” And as he went down deeper he said, “Grave, where is thy Victory?”  So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.