‘The Lamp’ (Concluded)

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, 18 April 1915, was a Sunday. Kittie doubtless went to church (we don’t yet know which one), with Nina, Jim Corbet and her god-daughter Lesbia very much on her mind. Perhaps George thought further about what he was going to write to Nina, and he probably tinkered further with his manuscripts…

A few weeks ago someone asked me why I thought his plays had disappeared from the British repertory. I should say immediately that they had a very good run: The Fountain staged 1909-12 in four major productions, one of which toured the country; a full-blown production of Revolt in 1912; a curtain-raiser, The Little Stone House, repeatedly performed in theatres and on radio through to the 1930s; and translations of two Chekhov plays that were used in eminent productions right up to 1950.

But, yes, it was the Look Back in Anger revolution, and the revilement of the Great War nation generally, that put George’s plays and much other Edwardian drama (Pinero, Sutro, Barker, Galsworthy, Hankin, but not Shaw) into mothballs. Even so, as I was walking past one tawdry West End theatre hoarding after another yesterday I found myself thinking that British theatre does not = West End + big subsidised houses (which these days are almost as commercial). British theatre also lives — perhaps is most alive — in regional productions, fringe productions, semi-professional productions, the myriad amateur productions. And in fact it is quite possible that George’s one-acters are still alive and kicking in the amateur world, just as I recently discovered The Maharani of Arakan is. The admirable One-act Play Companion of 2006, for instance, tells its readers that several of George’s short plays are ‘of considerable interest’.

The problem where theatrical realisation of George’s one-acters is concerned is not at all that they are written in ‘Edwardian’ language, it is that each one is written in a special, different language of its own; one that we, with our naturalistic notions, automatically reject as ‘artificial’, but which is actually a product of Calderonian art.

On the face of it, The Little Stone House is written in stiff, plonking English that, quite remarkably, hasn’t a single colloquial short form English verb in it, i.e. not one with an apostrophe on the page! This is actually the opposite of incompetence. What George has very carefully done is produce something that sounds like an Edwardian translation of a Russian play. It is part of getting the audience to suspend their disbelief that they are watching a slice of Russian life. In fact it is even possible that George ‘heard’ the dialogue in Russian first, then translated it as stiffly as he could, to stress the play’s exoticism, rather than bringing it too close to ‘real’, familiar English. The result, if you can hear the Edwardian translationese in the play’s language, is hilarious. I cannot agree that the play is just Grand Guignol, or melodrama, let alone a Chekhov imitation, when you have this outrageous parody/stylisation playing all over it.

Similarly, the language of The Lamp is elevated, formal, intriguingly Biblical, with simple but very vivid images reminiscent of Oriental poetry. Remote though it is from today’s English, it has a strange beauty. It must have taken George ages to craft this effect. It partly explains, no doubt, why the whole play existed in draft but was not entirely ‘finished’: he may have felt he had more honing to do on its language. There are three main characters, and their dialogue has three distinct structures: Theophanes speaks overwhelmingly in single paragraphs, Kolónimos in two paragraphs, and Myrrhina’s speech tends to an elegant, diminishing triple structure. Today, of course, the very idea of presenting dramatic dialogue ‘structured’, in paragraphs, seems bizarre! We do not like the ‘literariness’ of George’s plays.

By the time George wrote The Lamp, Edwardians were used to the verse dramas of playwrights like Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, John Masefield, and they did not expect every play they watched to be written in the same ‘naturalistic’ language.

Well, I believe as firmly as Mikhail Bakhtin that ‘there is nothing absolutely dead: every utterance’s sense will have its festival of rebirth one day’.

Next entry: 20 April 1915

Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

17 April 1915

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Patrick Miles

This morning, at Brinsop Court in Herefordshire, Nina Astley (Lady Corbet by her first marriage) received a telegram from the War Office informing her that her son Sir Roland James Corbet (Jim) had been killed at Givenchy (see my post of 15 April).

The effect on everyone in the house was devastating. Nina was with her ten-year-old daughter Lesbia, her mother, and a relation, and they were staying with Constance Astley (née Corbet) and Hubert Astley, who owned the house. Seventy years later, Lesbia told me that Jim was engaged to marry Elizabeth Hayes, she was to be a bridesmaid, and the bridesmaids’ dresses had already been bought. Crueller still, Jim Corbet was the last in an unbroken male line from Hugo le Corbet, a Norman knight who came to Britain with William the Conqueror. Jim had already inherited the baronetcy and his death eventually caused a dynastic crisis.

For hours everyone was prostrated with grief. In 1986, Lesbia recounted the events to me in almost a whisper, and trailed off. I remember there was a very long silence afterwards in the sunlit winter room where our interview took place.

In the afternoon, Nina sent many telegrams from Hereford, which was six miles away. At about 2.30 p.m. in London a telegram boy delivered the following:

To: Calderon 42 Well Walk Hampstead

The worst has happened Jim was killed in action 15th April Phyllis Mother and Lesbia here pray for us Dina Brinsop Court Hereford Telegrams Burghill

It was a good thing that George was home on leave. The telegram was really addressed to Kittie, as can be seen from Nina signing herself ‘Dina’ — they had called each other this ever since they were teenagers (it was perhaps from the popular music hall song ‘Villikins and His Dinah’). Kittie had known Jim Corbet as a baby, his sister Lesbia was her god-daughter, and his elder brother Vincent (d. 1903) had been a pageboy at her wedding to Archie Ripley in 1895. Kittie was ‘Auntie’ to Jim, and George ‘Uncle’. Nina knew Kittie would pray for them.

At first, perhaps, she prayed that it had not happened. There was no battle in progress on that part of the front and Jim was an experienced professional soldier. In a letter from Flanders to his mother, Constance Astley, Dick Sutton (q.v.) also ‘had a faint hope it wasn’t true, as I didn’t think there had been much fighting in that part of the line’, but added: ‘Really the Coldstream has come to mean certain death.’ On the back of Nina’s telegram, at some point, George drew for Kittie a series of diagrams of trenches, including one that showed there was only 3’6″ between the firing-step and the parapet.

Although George was slightly uneasy with Kittie’s high society friends, there can be no doubt that he was extremely fond of Jim Corbet. There was no ‘side’ to Jim; he took his dynastic responsibilities very seriously, but was loved for his humour, gentleness and courtesy. As a cadet, he had been an admirer of a popular London actress, but always took his sister with him when he visited her! His sister adored him.

Although, as Jim had explained at his coming of age celebrations in August 1913, he was unable to reside on his estate at Acton Reynald very often, he was deeply attached to it. In many ways he was a countryman. This would have appealed to George, who himself had walked much of Shropshire and detested cars. Also, Jim was a serious ornithologist, a subject that George was well versed in. For Jim’s coming of age, the Calderons had given him two books by the Edwardian naturalist W.H. Hudson, whom George knew. An entry in Jim Corbet’s war diary for 21 August 1914 reads:

Left ETREUX and marched to OISY. Still very hot and marching very fatiguing. […] I bought a whinchat I found in a tiny little cage, and which had been given a hard dog biscuit to eat! And then let it go. The owner thought I must be mad.

Kittie’s instinct was to go to Nina straightaway, as she had in emergencies before; but it is clear from Nina’s letter of 20 April that Kittie felt she could not. She instead wrote immediately. George needed longer to think about Jim’s death, and wrote the following day, Sunday 18 April, or possibly after returning to Fort Brockhurst on the Monday.

Next entry: ‘The Lamp’ (Concluded)

Posted in Edwardian character, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

15 April 1915

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Jim Corbet, Spring 1915

April 15. 1915 [France]

Dear Mrs Astley — it is with the greatest grief that I write to you to tell you of your son’s death which took place at 8 a.m. this morning. It was very foggy, and your son went down a breastwork to visit some posts along it and I fear that perhaps he may have thought that he could not be seen and have over-exposed himself. He was shot by a sniper through the heart and death was instantaneous. I cannot tell you how very much we all sympathize with both you and his fiancée at his loss and how sad we all are. He was as gallant a soldier as I have ever come across, and absolutely did not know what fear was. On February 6th he led the party which assaulted the brickstacks and led them in the most gallant manner. He was very popular with us all, always cheerful and anxious to help and I feel that in his death I have lost a most excellent officer and a charming fellow. Please accept my heartfelt sympathy, and that of my Battalion. He will be buried tomorrow morning among other soldiers in a little cemetery at the Southern end of Le Plantin.

Yours sincerely

G. Feilding

This letter describing the death of Sir Roland James Corbet at Givenchy today is reproduced from a handwritten copy sent to Kittie Calderon by his mother, her closest friend, Nina Astley (Corbet). Feilding’s letter did not reach Nina until 19 April. Between now and 20 April I will post documents that tell how the terrible news broke over Nina’s and Kittie’s families.

Jim Corbet had been in France with the Coldstream Guards since 13 August 1914. He was wounded at the Battle of the Marne (see my post of 8 September 2014), promoted lieutenant on 9 December 1914, and joined the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards at La Bassée, where he fought in the Battle of the Brickstacks January/February 1915 (see my post of 27 January).

He was twenty-two and Colonel Geoffrey Feilding was his Commanding Officer. The above photograph was taken a few weeks before he was killed. As I shall describe, he held a special place in Kittie and George’s affections.

Next entry: 17 April 1915

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘The Maharani’: A postscript

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Read The Maharani of Arakan yourself to decide whether it is (just) ‘A Romantic Comedy’, as George playfully subtitled it, or a ‘Symbolist Mystery Play’ (allegory)!  Having re-read it over the weekend, I increasingly feel it’s the latter.

If it is a ‘Romantic Comedy’, I can well understand why one reviewer called it ‘a pleasant little excursion’ and another ‘trite’. But The Times was correct to say of it in 1916 that it ‘has many meanings’, and the TLS awarded it those high Edwardian accolades ‘charming and significant’. The Stage, too, called it ‘full of interest and charm from start to finish’. Everyone seemed to agree that it was magical in performance, with its Indian music and its songs written by Tagore specially.

There is, I have noticed now, a very interesting parallel with The Lamp. Amina, the exiled Mogul princess whose father was killed by the father of Dalia, current King of Arakan, is incited by her sister to kill Dalia with her father’s own dagger because Dalia ‘inherits his father’s guilt’. But Amina objects: ‘His son is innocent. […] Does not the Koran also teach us to forgive? […] Allah did not send me here to die, but to live, to breathe — to love.’ Sentiments very reminiscent of Myrrhina’s in The Lamp (see quotation in post of 3 April).

George was sceptical about the political empowerment of women, as were most British women in his lifetime. But always he believed in their self-fulfilment, in equal opportunities, in women’s need for economic and personal independence. Rather like Chekhov in his later works (Lady with Little Dog, Three Sisters, Betrothed), George focussed in The Fountain, The Maharani of Arakan, and The Lamp, on women’s own identity, vitality, and freedom from oppressive uncaring ideas.

Next entry: 15 April 1915

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (2)

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Presumably George was home again at 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, for the long weekend of 9-12 April 1915, so he may have done more work on leaving various literary projects in a publishable state in case he did not come back from active service. These were most likely Tahiti (see posts of 27 February, 1 March, 14 March, 21 March), The Lamp (see 29 March, 3 April), or something called Demon Feasts (post to come). He may have read the copy of Hark to These Three Talk about Style given him by his next door neighbour, Tom Sturge Moore (see 6 April), and chatted about it with him over the back garden fence.

Taking The Lamp, I described what I feel is its primary meaning in my post of 3 April, but there is much more to be said.

The name of the ‘ascetic’ protagonist, Theophanes, may be influenced by George’s knowledge of the nineteenth-century Russian saint Feofan Zatvornik (‘Theophan the Recluse’), a monk who had a powerful spiritual effect on a young upper-class woman who eventually became a nun. The name of Theophanes’s young wife, Myrrhina, is the same as the heroine of Oscar Wilde’s fragment La Sainte Courtisane (published 1908), who is also a noblewoman converted by a hermit. But these facts are not strictly relevant to the meaning of the play: the vital point is that there were no real figures Theophanes the Hermit and Myrrhina the Courtesan in the early history of the Christian church, so this is not a ‘history’ play or docudrama. What kind of a play, then, is it?

To Edwardian afficionados of the New Drama, it would be instantly recognisable as a play of ideas. However, the fact that it is set in the distant past suggests that it belongs to a particular species of the play of ideas, namely what Rita Severi, writing of Wilde’s La Sainte Courtisane, calls the ‘Symbolist Mystery play: symbolic characters that embody ethical, philosophical, spiritual ideas’. We can emphathise to a certain degree with Theophanes, Myrrhina, Kolónimos and Yanoula as real people, but their ‘symbolic’ meanings subsume them. Or, I would prefer to say, The Lamp is an allegory.

This and other features mark it out from The Little Stone House (LSH), which I suggested on 29 March resembles The Lamp thematically and structurally. LSH is set as ‘naturalistically’ as possible in Russia as George knew it, and this was one of the things about it that fascinated Edwardian audiences. But the fact that it is set in ‘the real present’ means that it is about 95% un-allegorical: the issues being played out and argued over in front of you are straighforwardly ethical. The ethical issues of the play are apprehended as ‘real live ethical issues’. I should add, perhaps, that The Lamp is almost entirely without humour, whereas it is precisely the wobbly blend of melodrama, parody of Chekhov and Edwardian perceptions of Russia, caricature, and stereotype, that makes LSH difficult to take entirely seriously in the first place.

But if The Lamp is an allegory, it could be an allegory not just of established, fetishistic and totemised religion. It could, for instance, be seen as an allegory of fixation with ideas, of their totemisation and homicidal power, generally. Theophanes has seized on two aspects of the Christian message — its ‘light unto the nations’ and its ‘eternity’ — and objectified them in the lamp which he must collect alms to keep burning forever. He has thereby become an image-worshipper; as Myrrhina realises, the true meaning of Christianity has fossilised in his life and brain. One could compare him with Russian communists mummifying their ideas in Lenin, or with Utopians, fundamentalists, totalitarians, dogmatists, per se. Incidentally, it is the death-dealing consequences of Theophanes’s obsession with an idea that approximates The Lamp to the allegorical 5% of LSH: the last line of LSH is ‘What’s a man [person] compared to an idea?’ and the protagonist is seen as a ‘white raven’ for her rare ‘fidelity to an idea’. It is a fair guess that George was brought face to face with this theme in the years he lived in Russia, whose intelligentsia and underground politics were obsessed with ‘ideas’.

A purely abstract way of looking at The Lamp would be to focus on the respective ‘vows’ that Theophanes and Kolónimos have taken. Many of George’s plays (LSH, Geminae, The Two Talismans, even the full-length Fountain) turn on two sets of circumstances, ideas, or beliefs, that play out as paradox. The circumstances of The Lamp are immediately paradoxical, of course: Theophanes is an ‘ascetic’ in his forties living in a forest hermitage, but married to ‘a beautiful woman of about twenty-eight or thirty’ and they have a child! He has renounced the world, yet he is obsessed with money and sainthood… Particularly characteristic of George, however, is what one might term the ‘antinomial set’ of Theophanes’s and Kolónimos’s vows. Theophanes has vowed to keep the lamp always burning as a duty to God, and Kolónimos has vowed to dedicate his earnings to God by paying for the lamp to burn in perpetuity. They are both members of the set of those who vow/dedicate themselves to God; who want to ‘keep the lamp of God burning’. But it turns out that their vows have sub-clauses that are mutually exclusive: Theophanes cannot accept the money unless Kolónimos renounces his occupation as a slave-trader, and Kolónimos will only part with his money if he retains his occupation. In practice, then, they are both members of the aforementioned set and not members of it.

Usually in George’s plays these paradoxes produce an abstract, noetic deadlock; and this is one of the sources of the disturbing sense of void that his works leave, and are doubtless intended to leave. In The Lamp, however, first Kolónimos breaks the deadlock by stepping outside the terms of the set and appealing to Theophanes’s deluded sense of sacrifice, then Myrrhina shatters it completely by choosing to escape physically with her son from the world of Theophanes and Kolónimos into the ‘true and simple happiness of life’.

I think it is relevant that George was the top mathematician of his year at Rugby and would probably have gone on to read Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Oxford if there had been a comparable scholarship (‘exhibition’) available to the one he won in Classics. It seems to me possible that underlying his dramatic plot-paradoxes is a fascination with Cantorian and Zermelian set theory as it developed in the first decade of the twentieth century, or at least with wagers, games and probability. Unfortunately, though, my own mathematics is not developed enough to pursue this!

The Lamp was premiered at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, on 28 February 1926 — surely an enlightened demonstration that the play is not anti-Christian as such.

Next entry: ‘The Maharani’: A postscript

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

10 April 1915: A professional soldier

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst near Portsmouth was converted from a Service Battalion to a Reserve Battalion. It comes as a shock: George Calderon’s training as a lieutenant was over, and he could volunteer or be drafted to the front at any moment. But this was what he had always wanted. It seems the photograph below was taken around this time. When George sent it on to Kittie, judging from his key stuck on the back, some of the higher officers had already left for active service.

Officers of the 9th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, April 1915.

Officers of the 9th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, 1915.

Reverse of the above photo: George Calderon's key.

Reverse of the above photo: George Calderon’s key.

So George is the man seated extreme right in the second row.

It is quite remarkable (significant? why?) how different Calderon looks in photographs taken at different times in his short life (people have said the same of Chekhov). Particularly striking, I think, is the contrast between him in this photograph and in the middle of the portrait-banner to this blog: there he is an interpreter in a floppy uniform (it was taken just before he left for Flanders in October 1914), here he is very much the smart professional soldier.

You might even say he is ‘unrecognisable’ here. To me he looks a bit drawn. There is a strange gap at the back of his collar that doesn’t appear on any of the other officers. Frankly, he does not look in the peak of health. What at first appears to be the regulation British Army officer’s walking-stick, which so amused French troops, is probably a sword hung at his left side, as with the three young officers in the front row.

He would now be concentrating on training and exercising his own platoon of about fifty men; one of four making up a company, and there were four companies to the battalion.

Also on this day, Sir Ian Hamilton arrived back at Mudros with his General Headquarters from Egypt. Units of the expeditionary force to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula under his command had begun leaving Alexandria for Mudros on 4th.

Next entry: What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (2)

Posted in Edwardian character | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Arakan ‘mystery’

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Patrick Miles

The other evening, I met a friend at a party who told me she had recently taken part in a reading of George’s ‘Romantic Comedy in One Act’, The Maharani of Arakan. I was amazed, as I had not heard of any presentation of the play since 1916. However, my friend thought it may often be performed by Indian cultural societies — and this appears to be borne out by the number of different print on demand editions available through Amazon, AbeBooks etc. She herself has long been involved with Indian culture and religion, and the reason she recommended the play to her reading group was that it is based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore (I don’t think she had previously heard of George).

Her news gave me an uncomfortable jolt: I had completed chapter 14 (1914-15) in February without mentioning the publication of The Maharani of Arakan in 1915! Admittedly I had discussed the play in chapter 13, ‘Wilder Shores of Translation’, in the context of George’s less conventional ‘translations’ (he did not know Bengali, Tagore’s original story was written in English, yet Tagore himself referred to George’s adaptation as a ‘translation in the form of  a drama’); also in the context of the Edwardians’ reaching out to eastern cultures, and the visit by Tagore to London in 1912 organised by William Rothenstein and others, for which George had made his dramatisation (it was performed at the Albert Hall in Tagore’s presence on 30 July). But on the face of it, The Maharani was George’s only publication in 1915 and the last within his lifetime, so surely I should have mentioned it?

Not only that, if it came out in 1915 George might have been working on it during his ‘Friday-to-Monday’ leave, along with Tahiti and The Lamp, so it ought to have featured on this blog long ago?

The only trouble with that line of reasoning is that there is no mention in the whole of George and Kittie’s correspondence of 1914-15 that he is working on the text for this publication, reading proofs, expecting its appearance in print, and so on. Of course, we don’t, mysteriously, have any letters from George at Fort Brockhurst to Kittie between his arrival there in mid-January and his embarkation for Gallipoli on 10 May, so there could have been mentions of The Maharani in the missing letters. Even so, one might have expected passing mentions in his letters from 10 May onwards, or in Kittie’s memoirs. Could The Maharani have been published after his death?

The encounter with my friend sent me back to the ‘Tagore file’. The deeper I went into it, and the more I searched the Web, the more mysterious the whole business of this play’s performances and publication became.

I have a rare copy of the first edition, bought through AbeBooks some years ago, and I discover that it belonged to Ronald Colman, the future Hollywood heart-throb, who played Rahmat Sheikh in the 1916 production at the Coliseum and dated his copy ‘June 1916’. In this edition, there are numerous photographs and sketches by Clarissa Miles (no relation). The photographs show K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in the lead parts of King Dalia and Princess Amina:

K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?

K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Art and Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913/14?

One might assume these photographs were of the 1912 premiere at the Albert Hall, but no — reviews reveal the cast was entirely different! Obviously they could not be of the 1916 production, as the book, we are told on the title page, was published in 1915, and in any case the cast at the Coliseum, where it ran for a week from 19 June 1916, was different again. We know from a letter to George written by the composer Albert Cazabon on 29 October 1913, regarding the Bengali music for a production, that for that production Cazabon’s own wife, Gladys Curtin, was to play Amina, so presumably the photographs in the published playtext were not of that production, either. What is going on?

It seems a reasonable hypothesis that for the public performances at such grand theatrical venues the producers would want the strongest actors they could get and these would have to be professionals. There were professional British actors, e.g. Sybil Thorndike, associated with the Indian Art and Dramatic Society, but it seems likely that the Society’s own in-house productions would have had amateur actors. K.N. Das Gupta, for example, who looks splendidly authentic in the published photographs, was not a professional actor. Margaret Mitchell looks as though she could have been, but the others do not. Suggestions in various Web articles that K.N. Das Gupta and Sybil Thorndike acted in the 1912/1916 productions are demonstrably untrue.

The simple hypothesis from all this is that there was an original Indian Art and Dramatic Society production before the 1912 Albert Hall performance, and another in 1913/14 before the 1916 Coliseum one (i.e. the one referred to by Cazabon in his letter to George). Presumably Das Gupta and Mitchell played the leads in one or both of these, from which the photographs for the 1915 publication were taken.

I incline to the idea that the photographs were taken nearer to the publication, i.e. in 1913/14, than before the Albert Hall performance. The Society had been in existence only seven months before the latter. Isn’t it more likely that as soon as they knew Tagore was visiting London, George made his dramatisation and the professional theatre people in the society went straight into preparing a production for the Albert Hall?

I also think that the key to the photographs in the published version (which stresses at the front that the play was ‘Staged by the INDIAN ART AND DRAMATIC SOCIETY’) is the ‘irrepressible Das Gupta’, as Rothenstein described him to Tagore in a letter of 1913. Das Gupta was a seamless blend of cultural and commercial entrepreneur. He had founded the Society (later to become the Union of the East and West), was its driving force, and the 1915 publication was evidently his project (Clarissa Miles was the Society’s secretary). Despite its cover and spine declaring it was The Maharani of Arakan by George Calderon, it was more of a celebration of Tagore and Das Gupta. It opened with a twenty-two page ‘Character Sketch of Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Compiled by K.N. Das Gupta’ but actually written by other people including W.B. Yeats. Then followed the play, covering thirty-two pages, then three pages of music to the songs and one of reviews of the Albert Hall production. The play was preceded by a note referring to the publisher for performance rights, and three out of the five photographs featured K.N. Das Gupta.

I submit that the publication was a commercial venture of Das Gupta’s in anticipation of a full professional production. In such circumstances — as today — the play text was published to just precede or coincide with the production. The TLS reviewed it on 16 March 1916. Usually, the TLS reviewed books within a week or two of their publication. A gift copy of the book that I have seen is dated ‘Easter 1916’, which was 23 April. A review of the 1916 production dated 20 June speaks of George’s play having been ‘lately published in book form’, which could hardly refer to the year before.

My presumption is that K.N. Das Gupta had the book printed in 1915, but only brought it onto the market when the Coliseum production was assured in early spring 1916. It was great publicity for the production, the Society, and himself as entrepreneur, impresario and actor. He used the final acting text of 1912, so George had no need to work on it in 1914 or 1915 and therefore never mentions it in those years. If this scenario is correct, George never saw the published result.

Next entry: 10 April 1915: A professional soldier

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two separate biographies

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Patrick Miles

As I have explained on several occasions, apart from his machine gun course on Hayling Island we know nothing specific about George’s training as a lieutenant with the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst from the middle of January 1915. I have tried various lines of inquiry without finding anything that could be described as a ‘course’.

This is an example of how the difference between my full-scale biography and the blog keeps kicking in. For chapter 14 of the biography I did not have space to elaborate on George’s training and that level of detail didn’t fit the scale of the last chapter of his life (which one reader has already said is too long). But the day-by-day biography, aka Calderonia, calls for more detail and above all it makes me speculate in more depth.

It niggles me that we don’t know if George had any realistic training in trench warfare as it was by now practised on the Western Front. The way he refers later to military exercises he was involved in suggests that Kitchener’s Army were still rehearsing ‘open file’ warfare, such as George had experienced himself at Ypres. Attack from established, continuous trench lines (‘going over the top’) was totally different, often suicidal, and the British Expeditionary Force had only recently carried out its first offensive of this kind, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (see my post of 12 March).

The reason I would like to know if George realised how hopeless trench warfare proper was, is that all writers agree the Third Battle of Krithia was the first battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula to be fought under those conditions. Within days of arriving at Helles, George must have seen what was coming. Was he shocked, or was he prepared for trench warfare of this kind? If he wasn’t trained for it, did he feel he had been deceived and had walked into a trap set by the British generals? Was he angry? Was he afraid?

I increasingly feel I am not suffering from bifurcation and chronotopia (see 30 March), I am simply writing two biographies — one on paper spanning 1867 to 1950, and one on the Web spanning a single year of George Calderon’s life, 1914-15.

Next entry: The Arakan ‘mystery’

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biography and the limits of non-fiction

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I keep dipping into Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. It’s very compulsive reading, but I don’t have time at the moment to let it run away with me as I would wish. Nevertheless, I’ve read enough both of the ‘diary’ Scurr has produced and her Introduction to be able to say that they certainly challenge received ideas about biography. I shall try to get to grips with her innovativeness before long, but in the meantime any follower who has read Scurr’s book is very welcome to get the ball rolling by leaving a Comment to this post.

In my post of 6 March I touched on several issues that Ruth Scurr raised in an essay in The Guardian, but underlying them all was my wariness, unease, about bringing biography closer and closer to fiction, in fact novelising it. I fret equally, though, over the opposite question: whether a biography can be one hundred per cent non-fiction — whether it is possible to keep elements of fiction out!

Take my last two posts. They are predicated on the ‘fact’ that George Calderon was home on leave from the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst from Good Friday to Easter Monday 1915. My reasons for believing this are:

1. Kittie in her memoirs says he regularly came home ‘for Friday-to-Monday leave’.

2. I would expect him to want to be home with her at Easter.

3. The very last of George and Kittie’s 247 books to be found (2013) is Thomas Sturge Moore’s Hark to These Three Talk about Style (London, Elkin Matthews, 1915), and in the front is the inscription: To Mr & Mrs Calderon a token of a neighbourly Easter from the author. 1915. For the Calderons’ close relations with their neighbours the Sturge Moore family at 40 Well Walk, see my post of 20 November 2014 and others. It seems unlikely that Sturge Moore could have written this inscription if both George and Kittie were not there to give the book to.

Yet it takes, perhaps, a conscious effort to remind oneself that it is still not a FACT that George was at home at Easter. For that one would need a dated letter or document to say so. Thus non-fiction has here effortlessly drifted into fiction…or fiction effortlessly crept into non-fiction. And it is all too easy for the biographer to let this happen.

Sturge Moore’s book, incidentally, is a veritable repository of Edwardian aesthetics. There is no evidence that George read it, but I would dearly have liked to know what he thought of it. There is evidence that he found the whole notion of ‘style’ dubious. He seems to have felt that the man was the style and the man had to have something to say. In January 1899, when Kittie and he were sharing their critical views in correspondence, he wrote:

I don’t know what beautiful writing means, except that it is a very offensive thing used by affected essay-writers.

Next entry: Two separate biographies

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Easter 1915

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, 4 April 1915, was Easter Day. Kittie Calderon went to church, but we do not know if George did. At Steep, Hampshire, Edward Thomas wrote his poem ‘In Memoriam’:

     The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
     This Eastertide call into mind the men,
     Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
     Have gathered them and will do never again.

Next entry: Biography and the limits of non-fiction

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (1)

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Patrick Miles

In 1915, today was Easter Saturday. For reasons I will give this coming Monday, I think George Calderon was at home over Easter on long weekend leave. This means he may have worked on the possibly four literary works that he wanted to leave in a publishable state if he went to the Front and never returned. One of these would have been his one-act curtain-raiser, The Lamp.

In my post of 29 March I summarised its plot. I would now like to tackle its subject-matter, but in two posts because I think there are two different levels of meaning to the play.

The first is expressed quite simply in the action. Having persuaded the ‘ascetic’ Theophanes to sell his own son Yanoula into slavery for money to keep the lamp burning in perpetuity, Kolónimos makes the mistake of leaving the young boy with his parents until the morning. He has not met the boy’s mother, Myrrhina, so he does not know what a strong person she is. She refuses to part with Yanoula for the sake of the lamp:

No, no. The sun of my sky, the moon of my night, for a smoky flame? My child, my life, God’s special voice to me? No. My eyes are opened now. The voice of life speaks in me, drowning the murmurs of your sullen creed.

This world was made for happiness. The sunshine and the trees, the singing birds and water running joyfully, these are the true symbols of God on earth, not lamps that smoke in the dark corners of hermit caves and huts. When I defied my father and left my home, I chose you for your manly courage, not for your gloomy faith; when I left the city and followed you to the forest it was to seek the true and simple happiness of life, and not to say to sorrow: ‘Be my joy.’

I thought you wise, and I made you steersman of my soul, but now I see you are close driving upon the rocks I take the helm. I will not sell my son.

This play was George’s last word on established religion as he had known it in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He was deeply attracted to Christ’s ethical message (indeed Kittie, a regular churchgoer, called him ‘the best Christian I know’), but an unspecified experience as a boy had turned him against what he called ‘the parsonic mind’ and with it established religion. We do not know what this experience was, but it could even have been some form of abuse, since Kittie says in her memoirs that he had ‘suffered cruelly at its [religion’s] hands’ and his mind had been ‘so wounded at the time it was growing’.

Although set around AD 50, The Lamp debunks false asceticism, inverted pride, religious hypocrisy and totemism in the Church. George’s highly successful one-acter The Little Stone House had attacked the last two already, but there the religious hypocrite and totemist had died as the curtain came down, whilst the son she refused to acknowledge was carted back to Siberia. In The Lamp, the religious fanatic does not die, he is left as morally shattered as his lamp, and the believer in ‘Life’ escapes with her son into the world of humane values. But note that she retains her belief in Christ. She believes that the ‘true and simple happiness of life’ is Godly. In this she may appear to speak with a particular Calderonian conviction.

Next entry: Easter 1915

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Phantom flies in amber’ (Concluded)

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Patrick Miles

In my post of 5 January I described what I assume is a bugbear of all biographers: ‘facts’ that you have acquired from somewhere, that stick in your mind like flies in amber, but when you want to use them you can’t find their source for love or money, you end up wondering whether you imagined them, and you can’t use them. I quoted three in my January post and said the theme would be continued.

I now continue and conclude the theme, but with what is not so much a phantom fly in amber as a very large black beetle.

The fact is, when I returned from a year’s research in Russia in the summer of 1973 my great-uncle Tom and great-auntie Lottie came over to visit my grandmother, who was living with us, and they asked me about my experiences in Russia. They listened, and at one point (I can see her now) my aunt simply turned to my uncle and said, ‘Mrs ——–‘s husband went to Russia, didn’t he, Tom?’ To which my uncle, who had a slight stammer, simply replied, ‘Yes…yes he did.’ This seemed to be a private exchange between them, and I didn’t recognise the surname of Mrs ——–, so I didn’t pursue it.

But the thing is, Mrs ——–‘s surname was unusual, not obviously English, and years later, after my aunt and uncle were dead, I could swear that the name was ‘Calderon’, which, of course, meant nothing to me in the year 1973. So the prospect suddenly arose that my own great-aunt and -uncle had met Kittie and even heard her speak about George!

And it’s not impossible. My great-uncle was a long-distance train driver and had lived close to the great Ashford (Kent) railway terminus since about 1925, and in 1934 Kittie Calderon moved from Hampshire to Kennington, only two and a half miles from where my aunt and uncle lived. There is evidence that Kittie was active in Ashford’s social life in the 1930s, as were my aunt and uncle, and that Kittie gave permission for George’s translation of The Cherry Orchard to be used gratis for a production in Ashford during the war, to raise money for the Services Club close to Ashford Station. Perhaps, then, Kittie had also given a ‘talk’ about her husband.

As you can imagine, it is now somewhat mind-boggling to contemplate the possibility that my aunt and uncle ‘knew’ Kittie. Why on earth did I not ask them about ‘Mrs ——–‘?! How much, and what, could they have told me?! Did they even visit her at ‘White Raven’, the house built for her by Violet and Evey Pym’s son Jack and called that because her lifelong friend Nina Corbet (from the Norman knight ‘Corbeau’) was ‘Black Raven’ and Kittie ‘White Raven’ (from the Russian expression for ‘something rare’)? Photographs suggest that Kittie entertained large groups of a women’s organisation at ‘White Raven’ in the garden, so could my aunt have attended?

How-ever… This massive beetle in the amber of memory may be a complete phantom. I may, of course, be imagining I heard the name ‘Calderon’ and, above all, I shall never be able to verify this ‘fact’ in this world. Please be advised, however, that despite today’s date this is not a spoof; I have not made this Cheshire Beetle up.

Next entry: What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (1)

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Bifurcation’ and ‘chronotopia’ again

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Those who have been on my journey since 30 July 1914/2014 will remember that six weeks into it (12 September) I wrote about the problem I was having of holding in my head the two activities of writing the blog every day and writing the continuous narrative of the biography. I felt I was strangely bifurcating, and before the timeline of the book had overtaken the timeline of the blog it produced a couple of months of writer’s block.

Another way of looking at the trouble was to contrast the day-at-a-time real time of the blog with the extended time past that I was writing as a biographer toiling over chapter 14 (1914-15). I simply found it difficult to keep the two apart in my brain. I suggested my brain was suffering from ‘chronotopia’ — the need to manage two different ‘chronotopes’, i.e. time/space forms, simultaneously. Some people might find this easy, but I don’t.

The problem should have been solved when on 6 February 2015 I finished chapter 14 with the events of 4 June 1915, four months ahead of the ‘real time’ of the blog. Unfortunately, I have now ‘lost’ a month on various activities, including the deep research of Kittie’s life June 1915-July 1921, which means that the gap between the blog and the book is narrowing again. I shall probably be able to start chapter 15, dealing with that terrible period of Kittie’s life, after the Easter holiday, so biography-time will never fall behind blog-time. But because my brain is currently filled with the events of Kittie’s life 1915-21 I am already beginning to experience some chronotopia again; to be blunt, interference or confusion between the two times. Also, it intrigues me whether this confusion is just the natural dementia of a 67-year-old!

Obviously, I am desperately impatient to get on with chapters 15 and 16 and finish the book (see my post of 4 March). I am also disturbed by the strange sense of having lost touch with George since he went over the top at the end of chapter 14. I have now to focus on Kittie, the survivor, but it’s a biography of George and I’m afraid of losing my feel of him for good. I can’t wait, then, not just to to finish the book, but to start revising it, because I will then be back in the swim of his life. But the temptation to hurry, and botch, must be avoided. The last two chapters have to be written with exactly the same care as all the others, even though I have a deadline breathing down my neck (a deadline that I have already missed by six months). As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: ‘Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, / But bid for, Patience is!’

The unexpected bonus of all this is that running the blog means I shall have written one book of 160,000 words over three and a half years covering George and Kittie’s lives 1867-1950, and another of about  125,000 words in one year covering their lives from July 1914 to July 1915… So two entirely different ‘works’ with entirely different ‘chronotopes’. I will leave it to other people to discuss whether you can compare a 400-page book with a 12-month blog and call them both ‘works’, or even, as Stuart Kelly did in his TLS piece ‘Enter John Aubrey’, claim that a day-by-day webpage of someone’s life is a new, digital-age form of biography. My blogmaster repeatedly tells me that when it closes down on 30 July 2015 Calderonia will at least be ‘a document that’s always there’.

Next entry: ‘Phantom flies in amber’ (Concluded)

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Weekend work: ‘The Lamp’

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Patrick Miles

If, as I have suggested, George used his long weekend leave to put his literary manuscripts in order, then as well as working on a detailed synopsis of Tahiti (see my posts of 14 and 21 March) he must have done something on his one-act play The Lamp, because when Kittie came to prepare all of George’s one-acters for publication in 1921 she found parts of The Lamp existed ‘only in the form of rough draft’. The draft could not have been that rough, however, as the version Kittie published reads seamlessly.

The British theatre today has a highly problematical relationship with one-act plays. In the 1980s, I seem to remember, Harold Pinter wrote to The Times objecting to a short dramatic work being described in its pages as ‘not a play’. For him, it was a ‘play’ whether it lasted twenty minutes or provided ‘two hours traffic of our stage’. But it is extremely difficult to get such plays staged, because even two of them, with interval, last less than an hour, and as numerous playwrights have discovered (including myself) a programme of shorts is considered too disparate for a modern audience to cope with.

Thus there is no ‘market’ for short plays today, except perhaps in the amateur dramatic world and especially drama festivals (see the first-rate book edited by Rex Walford and Colin Dolley, The One-Act Play Companion).

But it was not always so. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras there was a vast market for one-act plays as curtain-raisers. Not all the audience arrived in time to watch the whole of the curtain-raiser, but by the time it was over they were there and ‘settled’ for the main play. Once a curtain-raiser was in repertory, it could be trotted out over the seasons to precede entirely different plays. This meant that if a dramatist wrote a good one-acter, it might be performed all over the country for years and become a nice little earner for him (as was the case for Chekhov with his ‘vaudevilles’). This is exactly what happened to George’s The Little Stone House, which was premiered by the Stage Society in January 1911, toured Britain and to Canada with the Manchester Repertory Company 1911-13, was performed by numerous other companies, and was still being revived and broadcast on radio in the 1920s. It was so successful that George’s friend Rupert Brooke decided he must cash in by writing his own imitation of it, Lithuania.

As I shall probably discuss next weekend, the subject of The Lamp is similar to that of The Little Stone House — reprising a successful formula is always good commercial sense, of course — but the differences are crucial; fundamental. This was the last play George wrote, and his final emphasis is very significant. Doubtless he was hoping to repeat his success with The Little Stone House, which is why he was taking infinite pains in March 1915 to get such a short play (18 printed pages) right…

THE PLOT

The scene is set in Syria around AD 50 and a stage direction requires ‘soft “Arabian Night” evening sky’. Theophanes has been converted by St Paul and is revered as a hermit. But really he is an idolater, a totemist, because he is fixated on a lamp that he has ‘vowed to keep […] always burning to the glory of God’. He is described as an ‘ascetic of about forty-two or -three’, yet he is married to a ‘beautiful woman of about twenty-eight or thirty’ called Myrrhina and they have a son, Yanoula, ‘a fair, handsome boy of nine or ten’.

When the play opens, the ‘holy lamp’ on an altar in their hut is about to go out for lack of money to buy oil. Myrrhina loves her husband for converting her, but her Christian beliefs enable her to see the lamp in perspective:

If it go out, has not its flame lighted a flame in a thousand bosoms that will never die? […] If God needed your vow, he would send you the means to fulfil your vow. No, though your vow fail, yet shall we still continue in the joys of his blessing, we three together, you and I and our son.

At this point, a ‘sleek and prosperous’ merchant, Kolónimos, appears with a bag of gold. He is a slave-trader and ‘the greatest sinner in Antioch’, but he too has made a vow: he will ‘make restitution to God’ by endowing money to buy oil for the lamp in perpetuity, and he throws the money on the altar. At first Theophanes welcomes this as a miracle, but since Kolónimos will not renounce his calling, the hermit rejects the ‘unclean’ money. As obsessional as Theophanes, the merchant says he cannot break his vow either. He tries to make Theophanes accept the money as payment for ‘some charm or philtre to restore the waning lustiness of youth’, but Theophanes objects: ‘I have nothing to sell.’ Then the slave-trader sees Yanoula and twists the story of Abraham and Isaac to persuade Theophanes that it will be ‘the will of God’ to sell his son into (paedophile) slavery. For the sake of the lamp and in the name of sacrificing ‘earthly joy’ — his own son — Theophanes agrees and the deal is struck. But Kolónimos leaves Yanoula with his parents until morning. When Myrrhina returns and hears what her husband has done, she tries to reason with him, but he is blinded by his belief that he must sacrifice others to attain what he sees as his own glory in heaven. She continues to counter his arguments, implores Theophanes to leave the lamp and their unhappy home, but he will not. She takes Yanoula and as they depart she ‘strikes down the dying lamp’.

The play ends with the direction: ‘The man stays with the money about him, and the lamp broken, weeping.’

Next entry: ‘Bifurcation’ and ‘chronotopia’ again

Posted in Edwardian literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Time and the biographer

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I have received a long and very interesting letter from John Dewey, author of the superb Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), commenting on my various posts over the last three months that touch on biographical matters. For information on this biography and John Dewey’s translations of Tyutchev, go to www.tyutchev.org.uk .

There is a resemblance between Dewey’s predicament as a biographer and mine in that ‘nobody knows who Fyodor Tyutchev is’, just as ‘nobody knows who George Calderon is’. There the resemblance ends, however, since Fyodor Tyutchev is actually Russia’s greatest poet after Pushkin! It is only in the West that comparatively few people have heard of him. Amazingly enough, now I think of it, in 1971 I was going to do a Ph.D. comparing Tyutchev with Samuel Coleridge, before Chekhov’s plays grabbed me.

On the question of how long one should take writing a full-length biography, Dewey writes: ‘Like you, when I started on the Tyutchev biography in earnest in 1999 I was aiming to complete in time for a significant anniversary (the 2003 bicentenary of his birth). This proved to be hopelessly optimistic, and in the event the project took the decade which, as you point out, Park Honan customarily found necessary’ (see my post of 21 December 2014). Most interesting!  But Mirror of the Soul is magisterial, exhaustive, and looks pretty definitive to me, which I can’t possibly claim for my biography of George. Dewey explains the stretching of his biographer’s clock thus: ‘It was not only because the material seemed to grow and grow, but because there were several frustrating unknowns regarding Tyutchev’s life and certain individual poems which I became obsessively determined to solve if at all possible. And I’m sure you’d agree that detective work of this kind is actually one of the secret pleasures of writing a biography.’

Certainly. However, I simply have to say that my biographer’s clock, or fuse, is shorter. I couldn’t contemplate spending ten years writing a biography, mainly for the reason I gave in my post about Honan: I need my own self back. I have written academic books, which generally took three years from start to publication, but I couldn’t face ten years and that is why George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is not footnoted, and not told as a scholarly linear narrative. I suppose what always made me want to write about George was his extraordinary life and personality, his ‘otherness’, and that’s really what drives me on to tell his and Kittie’s story. In a way, my book is not so much a chronology as a psychology. I will write more about this on another day, in connection with Ruth Scurr’s self-avowed ‘deep fascination with how and why we tell the stories of earlier lives’.

John Dewey also writes: ‘I was particularly struck by your discussion of a biographer’s feelings on reaching the death of his/her subject. Like you I experienced a mixture of relief and sadness at that point, and have often wondered since if this is typical. […] Your identification of the different “times” involved hadn’t occurred to me and is most illuminating’ (see my post of 9 February). If only! I still can’t rationalise this experience, but was extremely interested to read of Dewey’s own. I keep wondering if the most obvious explanation isn’t the most plausible: that we have grown very close to this person we have been writing about, and when he/she dies in the text one part of our brain triggers the ‘grief response’ but another part of the brain knows the person hasn’t ‘really’ died… I shall say more about the problem next week.

Finally, Dewey has just read A.N. Wilson’s ‘magnificent biography of Tolstoy, having thought beforehand that as a novelist he might take a novelistic approach [see my post of 6 March on Ruth Scurr’s essay “Lives, some briefer than others”]. In fact he does not, but rather deals with Tolstoy as one novelist discussing the life and work (incomparably greater, as he would be the first to admit) of another. It’s full of brilliant insights and delightfully ironic comments — highly recommended’. Wilson has to deal with what Stuart Kelly in his TLS piece about Ruth Scurr’s Aubrey ‘biography’ called the ‘Damascus Quandary’, i.e. why a person (in this case Tolstoy) suddenly rejects their past and radically reorients themselves. ‘Wilson gives some very convincing answers’, writes Dewey. ‘I had to confront a similar problem with Tyutchev, who seems eventually to have prized his Panslavist political writings above his lyrical verse, but I can’t say I managed to come up with a coherent explanation.’

There are ‘nervous prostrations’ in George Calderon’s life but not, I think, a single ‘Damascene Moment’, and hence no ‘Quandary’ for me as his biographer. Rather, most people seem to feel that the quandary is: why does Calderon appear to have radically reoriented himself so many times — from barrister to Russianist to short-story writer to novelist to anthropologist to dramatist to political activist to balletomane to soldier to… death? What, to rephrase Virginia Woolf in The Waves, is ‘the thing that lies beneath the difference of the thing’? That is the mystery in George’s case.

I am extremely grateful to John Dewey for such a stimulating letter.

Next entry: Weekend work: ‘The Lamp’

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gallipoli: the beginning of the end

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, 25 March 1915, Field Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders left Constantinople for Gallipoli to take command of the Turkish forces at the Dardanelles. He was not a brilliant Prussian general, but many consider him first-rate. Upon arriving, he said to one of his colonels: ‘If the English will only leave me alone for eight days…’ In fact the naval attack of 18 March was never repeated and the Allied landings did not happen for another month.

At the end of February 1915 it seems the Turks had only 15,000 troops on the Peninsula. By mid-March there were about 70,000 at the Dardanelles in toto. This was almost equal to the maximum force Kitchener could allow Hamilton for the Gallipoli campaign. More kept arriving and ‘the scheme of defence improved out of all recognition’ (Official History). Liman von Sanders now put his men into intensive training.

Frankly, the Gallipoli campaign was already lost. But the Edwardians were never people to shirk a task, especially a hopeless one.

Next entry: Time and the biographer

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment