Today, Saturday 31 October 1914, George Calderon was presumably travelling in a hospital train to one of the Channel ports. The day is a black hole in his biography, but as Kittie remembered it he arrived in London on 1 November.
It is an unspeakable relief to be off the battlefield. I have been submerged in histories, studies, maps, diaries of the war, since the end of July. The disadvantage of the timeline approach I chose for this blog is that I have come to ‘live’ the war and George’s experience of it, day by day. And it has ‘got’ to me. The massed slaughter and mutilation, the material destruction, the relentless stupidity of it all, begin to depress you, then oppress you. Come last weekend, when we were working on the Battle of Gheluvelt, I literally wanted to shout with Siegfried Sassoon, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’
Then reading and re-reading Calderon’s letters day by day has revealed things about him that I did not know, and certainly was not expecting to discover this late in writing his biography. Of course, as a 45-year-old writer/scholar completely unused to military action, he was under great stress; one should not underestimate that. Within a week of arriving in Belgium he was also displaying a potentially life-threatening medical symptom. Even so, some of the aspects of his character revealed here are challenging.
An historian said to me, ‘I find Laurence Binyon’s war effort far more impressive. Instead of prancing about on a horse like Calderon, he went and washed floors and attended the wounded in a military hospital.’ Indeed, there does seem to be an element of exhibitionism in all George’s military doings since arriving on Salisbury Plain, especially in his hyperactivity 27-29 October. The other officers may have regarded his unilateral efforts to catch snipers as a liability, and himself as a ‘plonker’ when he got shot. As he was being stretchered out of the field ambulance on the night of 29 October, he heard a wounded officer inquire whether it was ‘that cheery cove’. George quotes this as a compliment, but I’m not so sure. What is one to make of his claim (29 October) that interpreting work was ‘too hard’, when he had repeatedly told Kittie he had nothing to do?
Again, we should not forget the stress Calderon was under. But there is more evidence in these letters from Belgium that he was bipolar than anywhere else in the biographical material. I am inclined to think that Kittie suppressed letters both from Belgium and before in which George was specific about his depression. On two occasions, 1904 and 1906, he certainly suffered from acute ‘nervous exhaustion’.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, is the nastiness of some of his language. It occasionally takes a homicidal turn (‘let him be hanged on a high gallows in Whitehall’). In Calderon’s fiction, for example Dwala, one reads this as satiric anger. There is no evidence of intemperate, corrosive language in any other personal letters of his that have survived. However, perceived nastiness was precisely what people did not like about George in the Stage Society and in the anti-suffrage movement — that is well documented.
In my post on 28 October I did not have room to quote a long paragraph in his letter of that day, describing a search that he initiated and led of a neighbouring farmhouse where the peasants were hanging up tobacco in an outhouse. He had become ‘d—–d suspicious about these poor suffering Belges’ in general, and had ‘a telepathic suspicion’ about these ‘nasty shady-looking’ peasants in particular. He believed that a lot of the sniping came from the Flemings themselves. He did not find anything at the farmhouse, but was evidently pleased that they were ‘devilish frightened at my visiting the tobacco shed’. ‘They’re an ignorant selfish boorish crew, all over here’, he told Kittie.
It is tempting to think that Calderon had become paranoid, but as he said earlier ‘nobody in the British army trusts them [the Flemings] an inch’. Some of the local peasants were arrested for spying, but it sounds to me that the suspicion of them sniping at British troops is of a piece with the Germans’ obsession with ‘francs tireurs’, which led them to commit mass executions of civilians in France and Belgium. I do not know that any historian has got to the bottom of whether such snipers ever existed.
Many of George’s actions and pronouncements at the Front I find exasperating. Certainly I can see the historian’s point about comparing him with Binyon. In a word, was Calderon just ‘pissing about’ as a soldier?
It may look like this at times, but I would refer you back to my post of 18 September. The one consistent and impressive thing about the whole period 8-30 October is his writing. As a follower emailed me a few days ago, it is almost incredible how often and how much he wrote to Kittie (and remember that there were other letters, now lost). This could not have been easy. Ranks watching him, and the censor, must have realised he was a professional writer. Towards the end, he was so stressed that he repeated himself in the same sentence and misspelt words, both of which are almost unheard of in him. But he kept writing, and there is plenty of wit, elegance and vivid observation in his letters. You feel in places that he is writing for the record. I have no doubt that if he had come through the war he would have used the letters to write a book.
In his TLS blog post Michael Caines described George as ‘complex, versatile and restless’. One is used to Edwardians being versatile, restless, amateur, or dilettante, say, but complex? It was very perceptive of Caines, after (presumably) a relatively short acquaintance with George, to conclude this. ‘Did one human body ever hold quite so simple yet quite so complex a soul?’, wrote Kittie in her memoirs.
His complexity is a function of his genius.
Next entry: 1 November 1914
Remembrance
I wrote a piece for the parish magazine of my home town, Sandwich in Kent, about Laurence Binyon’s visit there in 1921 (see www.stclementschurchsandwich.org.uk and follow links to ‘The Signal’), and I’ve just received my copy. The issue, for November, is dedicated in a most sensitive and balanced way to Remembrance — mainly of the fallen in the First World War, but in other wars too.
I must confess, though, that when I saw the cover I experienced not so much remembrance as ‘vivid remindment’, or ‘acute revisualisation’, or ‘painful re-enactment’.
The photo shows the beautiful little marble memorial in St Clement’s Church, ‘To the Glory of God and in loving memory of Parishioners and Members of the Congregation of this Church who gave their lives in the Great War 1914-1918.’ I ran my eye down the twenty-seven names and immediately recognised many of the surnames. Of course, I grew up with some of their close relatives. But what made me wince was suddenly recalling being with my grandfather, nearly sixty years ago, when he was talking to a friend he had been with in the First World War and they recalled some of these very men, whom they had known and who had not come back. I remember the silence after they named them, the strange way they looked into the distance, at ‘nothing’. I was too young then to understand, but I now vividly remember that silence and those looks.
I daresay my attitude towards the ‘Great War’ has involuntarily seeped through this blog since I started it in July. Despite David Owen’s fascinating new book, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906-1914, which argues that ‘war in 1914 was far from inevitable, and instead represented eight years of failed [British] diplomacy’, I am with Fritz Fischer, say, or Adrian Gregory, Max Hastings, Jeremy Paxman, Gary Sheffield and others, in believing that the war was unprovoked, planned aggression by the Kaiserreich. If democracy and liberalism were to survive in Europe (that means Britain too), the German army had to be defeated. We owe our freedom now to every single soldier who gave his life in the effort, mismanaged as it sometimes was, to achieve that.
I find their self-sacrifice completely humbling and overwhelming. This is why for me one of the most powerful war poems will always be Owen’s ‘Greater Love’. The ambiguity of the final line — ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ — is almost unbearably beautiful: of course, we cannot touch them physically (they are ‘gone’), but neither can we touch, in the sense of attain to, equal, the greatness of their love for us. The view that this is a ‘homoerotic’ poem is strained. The text behind the title could not be clearer: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (St John 15, v. 13), meaning all ‘others’ whom a person loves. They loved those nearest them, but they also loved their ‘own’, the British people, and by implication, even, the other peoples whose freedom they were fighting for.
I have been away from the blog for a few days, but this reminds me of my post on 31 October (‘Complex, yes’) and Clare Hopkins’ fine comment on it. Remembering now the whole story of George Calderon’s military involvement since 4 August 1914, I see it differently; more objectively, I hope. It was an extraordinary, consciously and brilliantly manoeuvred achievement on George’s part to get from rejection by the Inns of Court Regiment on 3 August to participation as a combatant in the hottest spot on the Western Front on 29 October 1914. That alone deserves admiration. Whether he was an asset there or not, one cannot deny that he put himself directly in the firing line.
Equally, we should recognise that on this occasion ‘someone was looking after him’. He could well have been killed when the fighting began in earnest at Ypres on 20 October, but his medical problem whisked him away in time. Similarly, if he had not been wounded by the sniper on 29 October, but had moved on with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he would almost certainly have been killed with the rest of them when their trenches behind Zandvoorde were shelled next day.
Without wishing to preempt anything, I should perhaps also say that the George Calderon who joined another regiment in January 1915 seems almost a different man from the Interpreter of October 1914, and that was partly because of the experience of battle he had gained at Ypres and the experience of recovering from acute stress disorder — a process to which we must now return.
Next entry: ‘He downright cried’