When writing a biography, you can go for months in its subject’s life without hearing a word from them, as it were: no letters from them to anyone have survived, they are not recorded as having said anything to anyone else, indeed as having ‘been anywhere’ at all.
On the other hand, when long letters have survived from them every day and when they are caught up in cataclysmic events that are also affecting their friends and the whole nation, there is an almost overwhelming abundance of connections between their life and others’ and the whole country’s. How does the biographer select from this thickness of events? Someone told me that he thought the story of George Calderon in World War 1 was a book in itself (maybe, but not yet, please!).
Here are some strands in George Calderon’s life over the last four days that I doubt whether I could find space to weave into the biographical narrative.
On 19 September Calderon received news from Kittie that Jim Corbet had been badly wounded at the Marne (see my post of 8 September). ‘Perhaps “badly” means half an arm or a leg gone; but I am sure it must be less than “dangerously”’, he replied to Kittie, and enclosed a letter for her to send on to Jim’s mother. The day after, he heard from Kittie that Jim was better than expected. In fact, we know from Jim Corbet’s diary that five days after he was wounded by shrapnel in three places the wounds were ‘healing nicely’, and eight days after the event an X-ray showed that he did not have a bullet in his stomach after all. He arrived back in London twelve days after being wounded, ‘wearing the same pyjamas and dressing-gown together with a pair of khaki knickers and the woolly I was wearing when I had been hit.’ He was sent to Sister Agnes Hospital, Grosvenor Gardens.
I am told that most people do not post or read blogs on a Sunday, so I was going to take the day off myself, but today is such an important literary and national anniversary that I would anyway have had to mention it. On this day, 21 September 1914 (a Monday), Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’ was published in The Times. It was written a while before at Polzeath, in response to the publication of the first B.E.F. casualty lists, and in effect contains the most-read lines of any of our War poets. Binyon was a close friend of Calderon’s from their days together at Trinity College, Oxford.
Units of the Blues had seen action at Mons, Le Cateau and the Marne, and were now engaged in the chaotic Battle of the Aisne. At Windmill Hill Camp officers received letters from their comrades at the Front, so they were well aware of who was being killed. This led George Calderon to return to a theme that obviously preoccupied him — how men behaved when they actually went into battle:
Those Germans are piling up a big debt of vindictiveness; great slabs of conversation are concerned with casualties and rumoured casualties; ‘poor old Jimmie’s been killed’, ‘So and so’s other son is wounded’ and the like. These things will be remembered when they charge; not in a terrifying silence, but with a sudden spontaneous cheer.
Amusingly, the ‘Russian theme’ suddenly pops up in George’s letter of 19 September. ‘Amusingly’, because his knowledge of Russian was totally irrelevant in his new role, he seemed to have bundled all that into a cupboard and slammed the doors, but he was after all one of the top Russianists in the country and couldn’t forget it.
He observes the officers around him and compares them with War and Peace, one of his and Kittie’s favourite books:
[Tolstoy’s] types are here; one young commander (the young rule the old) is a bristly hairy ruddy Denisof, with black deep shining jolly eyes. Another impudent faced Dolokhof commands another squadron, and spends a lot of time chaffing and ragging, with a serious face, a very tall fair lad, Lord Alastair something, who is an object of general sport, though not at all ridiculous, but, for all his youth, able to take care of himself, good humouredly, in simple philosophic phrases.
The last sentence has a rather Tolstoyan syntax, and in the same letter George even refers to the Ballets Russes, with whom he had been working in London up to the end of July:
In the sun today, the mellow autumn sun, the camp looks like the Polovtsian camp in ‘Prince Igor’, with tents and hills in groups, fading away into the distance; but no Polovtsiennes to dance among them to cheer your little Prince Igor. The greyhounds [belonging to an officer] give a feminine touch. Ladies come in motorcars in the afternoon, a few, mothers and wives of officers, and walk about and have tea.
The ‘Polovtsian Dances’, choreographed by George’s friend Fokine, had created a sensation in London during Ballets Russes’ first, 1911 visit. But what George is really hinting at here is his lack of female company and his own irresistible urge in female company to charm and lightly flirt. As he wrote to Kittie in 1899: ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience.’
Soon after the Fokines had arrived back in Paris, war was declared. Usually they would now have returned to St Petersburg to perform in the winter season, but they were wondering how, with Russia at war as well, they were going to get there. George was in touch with them by letter.
Next entry: 22 September 1914
Status
There are no letters from George to Kittie on 23 or 24 September 1914. At first this seems odd, since he had been writing to her every day. They were a Wednesday and a Thursday, and you would expect him to get leave only at the weekend. However, in his letter of 22nd he had said that there was a rumour the ‘Blues’ were going on a weekend exercise near Southampton. The beginning of his letter of 25 September, which I shall give almost in full tomorrow, confirms that he had indeed returned to Hampstead for the 23rd to 24th.
But since he was at home, he did not write any letters. So what happened? One can be fairly sure that he visited Coote Hedley (see blog for 16 August) to relate his recent experiences and promotion to Second Lieutenant. That, however, would inevitably raise the question of when he was going to become ‘combatant’… At what point would he be regarded as a fighter rather than an interpreter?
The status of interpreters was indeed ill-defined. Preparations had been made years before in British-French military agreements, for the French to supply the interpreters to liaise between the armies once the B.E.F. arrived on French soil, and thousands had been recruited in France. As Franziska Heimburger has described in a fascinating article (‘Fighting Together: Language Issues in the Military Coordination of First World War Allied Coalition Warfare’, in Languages and the Military, eds Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, 2012), these French military interpreters were put into ‘the position which the British Army had reserved for its orderlies’, who were used for carrying messages when communication by signal was not possible.
This probably explains why in his letter to Kittie of 22 September George wrote that during ‘two fancy battles’ on Salisbury Plain, ‘trotting and galloping all over the shop’,
According to Heimburger, in the field the interpreters’ duties were mainly liaising with civilians over billeting, food, and compensating damages. At this point in time George was still the only interpreter the Blues had. As he mentions elsewhere, Colonel Wilson was also ‘always impressing the study of billeting on me’.
All this did not augur well for George’s ‘status’ on the field and his plans to fight in the front line. It must have been a subject of discussion, therefore, with Hedley, if not with Kittie too. His next letter home suggests he was preoccupied with it, and perhaps it explains the sense of irritation near the surface.
Next entry: 25 September 1914