In July 1970, whilst waiting to hear whether I had been awarded a grant to do a Ph.D. on Chekhov, I worked for six weeks in the male wing of a ‘mental hospital’ near my home. I place the words in inverted commas, because I am sure that is not what it would be called today. The large, Napoleonic buildings had been the local workhouse until after the Second World War. In 1970 the patients included teenagers and adults with Down Syndrome, ‘stable’ schizophrenics, many severe epileptics, and others still described then as ‘mentally subnormal’. It was a remarkably well-run, caring and happy place.
On my early shifts I had to shave some of the patients. Amongst them, incredible to relate, were a few men who had joined the institution when it was a workhouse, had nothing medically wrong with them, and had simply stayed on when it became a ‘mental hospital’. One of these was Ben Hattersley, who was about eighty, lean and fairly limber, with white hair and blue eyes, but going blind. He was, I think, the oldest patient, and I was told early on by one of the nurses that Ben had had been ‘at the Somme’. The nurse said to me, ‘Ask him about the Somme, he’ll tell you about it.’
So one morning when I was giving Ben a shave, I did ask him if he had been at the Somme, and he had no hesitation in telling me his experiences, from the mud, the terror, the comrades killed around him, to the deafening artillery barrages, the exhaustion, the reality of bayonet combat, and his own amazement at surviving. He wanted to tell people of the most terrible experience of his life; he wanted us to know. As I finished shaving him, however, I very clearly remember him saying, in a state of agitation: ‘But the worst thing was the screaming of the horses…I couldn’t stand that.’
I have often thought about it since. I am inclined to think that it wasn’t primarily the thought of the pain the horses were in that Ben found unbearable (after all, there were men out there screaming, groaning, calling), it was that the horses’ screaming was the nec plus ultra; something of a different order; something Apocalyptic.
You are no doubt familiar with Edward Elgar’s comment re. the war horses, written to a friend within days of the start of the First World War:
“Concerning the war I say nothing-the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses-oh! my beloved animals-the men-and women can go to hell-but my horses;-I walk round&round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured-let Him kill his human beings but-how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.”
“There” [says biographer Northrop Moore] “spoke the man….with an overpowering sense that his world was being destroyed. Few indeed saw so far so quickly”
Patrick: Thank you once again for your vivid recollection from your time working in the mental hospital, and Ben Hattersley’s memory of the screaming of the horses. Frustratingly (but not untypically), I can’t lay my hands on my copy right now, to confirm and give the reference, but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter in Barbusse’s Le Feu, pub 1916 (trans as Under Fire 1917) which focusses likewise on the screams of suffering horses; and also the logistical difficulty of dealing with the mountain of horse corpses on the roads. (I’d be glad if someone could confirm this!). Of course, Morpurgo’s War Horse (and the blockbuster film) made much of the horse, in a more sentimentalized way.
Back to the mental hospital: one is relieved to hear that you had a better time there than did Samuel Beckett in his, where his experience led him to identify with the patients (who had, it seemed to him, ‘escaped from a colossal fiasco’) rather than the doctors who were trying to keep the fiasco on the road.
Oh Patrick! However much one thinks one knows about World War One, there really is no end to the horror of it all…
I am glad that Ben Hattersley had kind people looking after him in the last years of his life. This anecdote has reminded me of your post about visiting the Sandham Memorial Chapel (26 October 2015); specifically, your reaction to Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’. [One can see this immense painting online – search on artuk.org – although only through a glass darkly, as it were.] Spencer spent much of the War as a hospital orderly. You can just tell from the faces in his paintings that he treated the maimed and injured servicemen in his care with great tenderness – and surely he listened to them too. How many, like Ben Hattersley, were haunted by the Apocalyptic screaming of the horses?
Spencer’s white crosses and granite blocks are disturbingly reminiscent of the memorial cross and grave markers that extend beneath the Thiepval memorial to the missing of the Somme. You remarked that ‘in the centre [of ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’] are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ.’ But Spencer’s two horses are also white, and for every man rising up from the ground, a fallen horse is stirring too. You quoted from the National Trust brochure, that Spencer’s frescoes ‘celebrate the human companionship of war.’ But the message of this painting has to be more than that – Spencer is representing the equality of men and horses in their soldiering, in their suffering, in their sacrifice – and in the immortality of their souls. No wonder the Bishop suspected Spencer of heresy!
Did Kittie Calderon ever visit the Sandham Memorial Chapel? I guess she knew instinctively what humans who talk about ‘dumb animals’ have forgotten. Her dog Bunty may have been unpleasant and smelly, but I bet nobody understood or comforted Kittie quite so well as she did!
What a terrific trio of Comments. Thank you, Paul, Damian and Clare!
No, I was not aware of Edward Elgar’s reaction to the awful certainty of so many horses being killed in the First World War; it’s most moving, and speaks volumes about him as a person. I may be wrong, but would Elgar be an Edwardian who thankfully is no longer in need of apology or rehabilitation? I sense that his ‘cursing God’ for ‘allowing’ dumb animals to be slaughtered is theologically disingenuous, and he knows that very well, but still his immediate, emotional response to their slaughter is magnificent.
I am very grateful to Clare for sending me back to my post of 26 October last year about visiting Sandham Memorial Chapel. Whilst the Anglican bishop was not being disingenuous by banning Stanley Spencer from the consecration because Spencer’s belief that animals have souls was uncanonical, Spencer’s private theology wasn’t unique to him: if he had been a Russian Orthodox Christian, it would have been perfectly canonical for him to believe that ‘the animals too have a sort of unbaptised soul which will appear in the other world’ (Pierre Pascal, The Religion of the Russian People). There is no evidence that Kittie ever saw Spencer’s masterpiece at the Chapel, despite the fact that it’s only half a dozen miles from the Sutton estate of Benham Valence, where she visited Constance Sutton and Nina Corbet several times during WW1. By the date of the chapel’s completion, 1932, Nina was dead and Constance was living in Herefordshire. But I’m sure you are right about ‘Bunt’, Clare: the dog looks ‘almost human’ and definitely was ‘an other’ to Kittie and even her housekeeper, Elizabeth Ellis!
Damian’s comment points me to two very important themes. First, is there really as little French war poetry as there seems, and if so why? (Barbusse’s prose memoir is evidently worth getting, and I shall.) Second, the whole question of the war horses and sentiment. I started probing this latter question in my post about Ben Hattersley’s memory, but deleted it: tricky, far too tricky, because ‘sentiment’ is so much a matter of personal taste. I have watched some of the film of War Horse, but I felt uncomfortable in a way that I wasn’t when I translated for the National Theatre a Russian stage version of Tolstoi’s story about a horse, ‘Strider’. A friend of mine told me recently that he could ‘just about take War Horse on balance, but not the idea of awards or statues to the fallen horses’…
A very powerful and moving account, Patrick