Richard Aldington’s Life is Ruined; Olaf Stapledon’s Future Gets a Decorative Boost; Lord Dunsany’s Dirge of Victory

As the end draws near, we have three veterans in three very different situations today, a century back. One stands at the beginning of the end, another at the cusp of the beginning, and the third in the closely-coordinated middle. And that’s just their marriages…

Richard Aldington’s is falling apart. His marriage, that is: his part in the fighting of November Fourth went far more smoothly than that of his future protagonist, and the Germans are now giving way on every front. But the post from home keeps up even with the advancing troops, and he has received a disquieting letter from his wife, the poet H.D. She is now heavily pregnant, and receiving no support from the father of the child, Cecil Grey (“G.” below), who is either very ill or caddishly hiding behind an illness to avoid involving himself in the pregnancy and birth. Aldington musters scant sympathy.

8 November 1918

Dear Astraea/

I am very sorry you feel that way about things… I scarcely know what to say about it. We are fighting & advancing all the time–no rest, but we don’t mind if only it’s ending the bally business.  So you see I’m not very clear as to the best thing to say.

No doubt I have changed. It is not my fault, but a misfortune over wh: I’ve no control. As to G. — I don’t blame him. Influenza is rotten–had it myself in July.

And will Aldington be there–the husband if not the father?

I shan’t be back until the end of the month, & don’t want to come specially. This is very interesting & exciting–new towns & villages every day, enthusiastic welcomes by French people, &c &c. And then what have I to come home to? I arrive at Victoria — where am I to go? What am I to do? Arabella puts one part of London ‘out of bounds’ to me–old sentiment puts another. You are hurt and unfortunate, I know; I sympathise deeply & do all I can. But my life also is ruined. I am the only man in this battalion who is not anxious about leave!

So it seems that everyone is a victim here.

…Don’t let me hurt you. Keep proud. As to money it is not worth being proud about.

In great haste

Richard^[1]

Olaf Stapledon, by contrast, is all done with the war, and on the cusp of marriage. Generally the most starry-eyed of all our correspondents, the stars in his eyes today are unusually earthly ones. With the months-long lag in their correspondence, Olaf does not know that Agnes Miller is preparing to set out and join him. But he hopes she will, and knows he must be ready for post-war life. So today he thinks of the future in other than purely Romantic terms: he will go home soon, but as a pacifist returning from foreign service, not a conquering hero. Will this leave him scorned, pushed aside, unemployable? He won’t be able to rest on his laurels, but perhaps a new start might be aided by some shiny stars and crosses…

8 November 1918

Did I tell you the whole Convoy has been cited again, for work during Sept. & Oct.? This time it is a divisional citation, which entitles us to a silver star alongside the gold one on the croix de guerre on the cars. Many drivers have also been given the croix de guerre, including me. Most of them have divisional citations. Sparrow’s name & mine were sent in (I am told) on the original list for divisional citation but were cut off because there were too many on the list. ‘That is what comes of spelling one’s name with a letter S instead of, say, a B or a D!

…The whole matter is a questionable institution, for it causes awful jealousies in our happy home. Decorations are bad in principle, but on the other hand they are useful assets to some people afterwards. For instance one FAU man who got a croix de guerre was delighted to receive, a bit later on, a letter raising his screw from his firm!! Moreover the general public, especially in England, where the croix de guerre seems a strange and distinguished decoration, thinks that if you have a croix de guerre you can’t have joined the FAU merely to shirk!^[2]

Finally, today, we will hear from both members of an older couple in the contented middle of their married life.^[3] Beatrice, Lady Dunsany, has not paid the tax of quick alarm in some time: her husband has returned from his own sojourn (undated, alas) as an intelligence officer working behind the advancing Allied lines, and, now that he is ensconced in the War Office, they are privy to advance news of the armistice.^[4]

8th November 1918

Eddie came home last night with War Office news that the war is over. I would give so much to feel joyous and elated, but instead I feel like crying when I think of it. Eddie said he had been depressed all day too. If we had been able to prophesy such a complete victory a year ago we should have been happy. But it is no use. It was too terrible; and they are all dead, Tom, John, Channy, Ledwidge and all the rest, and it is over, and we can look back on the four and a half greatest years in history and feel that nothing can atone for them.

Eddie woke in the middle of the night, Nov 7/8 , and wrote part of his dirge of Victory and finished it at the W.O. next day.

 

A Dirge Of Victory

Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
But over hollows full of old wire go,
Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
Who waited for thy coming, Victory.

It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
They waited there among the towering weeds.
The deep mud burned under the thermite’s breath,
And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
And thou last come to them at last, at last!

 

Don’t skim the sonnet! It’s very good, despite–or possibly because of–the formal diction. Dunsany, a fantasist with aestheticist leanings, is no Owen, and still less a Sassoon. He’s a disillusioned officer, but he’s also an Anglo-Irish baron, deeply invested in a particular strain of traditional literary culture in which the horns of Elfland sound louder than the trumpets of victory.

In this context, then, it’s striking how the sestet plays out: towering weeds, deep mud (and, yes, a rhyme, after that jarring thermite, that goes rather hard), and a refusal to look decently away and shroud the Dead Marshes in mist and mystery. No, the men who were lost in the waste do not rest in their unmarked graves: they are burned by man-made fire and cracked into pieces by nature’s indifference.

It’s as close to Hardy as Dunsany might come.

Lady Dunsany’s second diary for today, a century back, is in a very different register. But the story she tells is perhaps more powerful.

Evening

Bells ringing…

…I travelled by train… (news not official yet) and there was a private soldier in the carriage wild with excitement, and telling us all what he’d do when the news came. ‘I have a bottle of 3-star at home–I shan’t stop to draw the cork, I’ll knock the neck off, I’ll have a week’s leave and if they don’t give it to me I’ll take it.’ Then, with a sudden jerk, ‘there’ll be aching hearts today–my old mother for one–I am only one left out of five.’ Somehow his jumbled confidences were so like what everyone felt.^[5]