Front Lines

There were four of us gathered at Mr Morgan’s grave, one icy morning in January 1978. I held my newborn son close, as the sleet-laden wind sliced across the vast west London cemetery. The brief ceremony ended, we turned to leave. The matron of Mr Morgan’s nursing-home remarked that no next-of-kin had been found, and I asked her what would happen to his things. She gave me a sharp look, saying there was nothing but a filthy old envelope he had seemed to cherish: I could have it, if I wanted.

In fact it was all I wanted. A neighbour of ours, Mr Morgan had become a firm friend, and the document in that envelope was the source of his greatest pride. I knew it by heart. Delivered towards the end of May 1915, it is addressed to his parents in Pontypridd. It informs them that their son William, of the Welch Regiment, had died at L’Epinette on 9 May 1915. Included with this is a neatly typed note: ‘The King commands me to assure you of the true sympathy of His Majesty and The Queen in your sorrow.’ The big, bold, black signature reads ‘Kitchener’. Of course it wasn’t true. It is, however, a printed record of (a part of) Mr Morgan’s service in the trenches. A wily young Welsh lad, he’d joined up in 1914 as a private soldier, which position he managed, on and off, to retain throughout the hostilities. Raymond Asquith, roughly fifteen years his senior, joined later, moving straight into the officer class: he left a record of extraordinary cool courage, and some powerfully moving letters, edited and selected by his grandson. Raymond’s father, born 26 years earlier still in 1878, had become Prime Minister by the time the Morgan parents received the dreaded telegram. His own, published letters are the most surprising of the war. When the telegram boy knocked at the Morgans’ door, their son William was in fact hiding upstairs. After enduring hours of incessant shelling during the Battle of Aubers Ridge, he had regained consciousness in a dark, blunted and smouldering forest near Festubert, surrounded by dead comrades. Noticing that two fingers of his left hand were now missing, he decided that he’d had enough. I wish I knew how he managed it but, somehow or other, he made his way back to Wales, buried his uniform in his parents’ garden, and lay low. Had they caught him in France, he would have been shot. As it was, a neighbour alerted the Military Police and he served a spell in the comparative comfort of Reading Gaol, before being returned to his regiment to fight (and survive) many another day. In old age, his attitude to the whole thing was sublimely jaunty and devil-may-care, the stories he told full of sauciness and misadventure, a million miles from any official records. Now only the telegram survives, fragile, torn and filthy but still legible, wrapped in greasy brown paper. Included with it is a note about claiming his effects, if effects there should prove to be. Unusually, there is no personal letter from his commanding officer. It is scarcely surprising. On 9 May 1915, the British Army sustained 11,000 casualties, one of the highest rates of daily loss during that entire appalling war. Those officers who survived could scarcely have been expected to write, immediately, in detail, about every one of the men (presumed) lost in that one day. But they probably did. Perhaps, a little later, someone even started to write to William Morgan’s parents, before realizing the truth. It was an unavoidable duty to write in consolation to the next-of-kin of every man fallen and, though the classic line was that he died a hero, killed instantly in the heat of battle, that was very seldom even part of the true story. However, when the surviving officer had known the dead soldiers well, these letters are their most eloquent obituaries. Letters supported and sustained everyone a century ago. The postal service was never better, and people wrote as often as today they tweet, certain that their letters would be delivered within a few hours. The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, was married to the formidable Margot, but he fell in love with Venetia Stanley. More a serial romantic than a philanderer, he wrote her an astonishing 560 letters between 1912 and 1915, up to four times a day, stopping only when she became engaged to Edwin Montagu. These letters present a fascinating, sidelong view of the government and the characters who peopled it. He wrote to her during Cabinet meetings, at the worst crises of the war; he wrote frequently, lengthily, devotedly. At the time of Mr Morgan’s unscheduled departure from the Western Front, for example, on a calamitous day described by Vera Brittain as ‘the sort of day that made one begin to wonder if it was possible for the world to continue’, a day culminating in the news that the RMS Lusitania had been torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale with the loss of 1,198 lives, Asquith was writing to Venetia about a ‘rather straggling’ kind of Cabinet; about Mr Selfridge coming to lunch; about distracting himself with rereading Measure for Measure; and about the American President who’d been ‘making a speech . . . to “Americans of alien birth” stuffed with even more than the usual allowance of swollen and sterile platitudes’. That was President Wilson, of course. The Prime Minister was blazingly indiscreet, prefacing the most vital secrets of military strategy with such remarks as ‘this is rather private’ and reminding her not to leave the letter lying on the hall table. And his thumbnail sketches of his colleagues are wickedly enjoyable: arguing with Churchill, he wrote, was like arguing with a brass band, but even that was preferable to listening to his eloquence. He heard with chill despair Winston declare that the last thing he’d pray for was peace: ‘having tasted blood, he is beginning, like a tiger, to raven for more’. But Asquith did not write to his son. In the course of that war, the British Army Postal Service delivered around 2 billion letters to the troops. In one year alone, more than 19,000 mailbags crossed the Channel every day, delivering post to soldiers on the Western Front, following them in and out of the front line, support trenches and rest billets, always and remarkably getting through. Yet, as Raymond Asquith wrote to his wife Katherine on 22 August 1916, ‘during my ten months’ exile here the PM has never written me a line, of any description’. He must have regretted it. Raymond was his eldest son, the first child of his marriage to Helen Melland, who had died in 1891 when Raymond was 12. The bright, sensitive boy felt his mother’s loss keenly all his life, as he admitted years later to H. T. Baker, his best friend, and the recipient of many of his letters. Nevertheless, he was to achieve, via Winchester and Oxford, very nearly every possible academic triumph, save only one. As he wrote to his father, his entry came only proxime (second) in the 1900 Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse, which Baker had won outright the previous year. Typically, languidly, he explains: ‘as most of mine was written in a cab driving to Aberlady, I couldn’t expect anything else’. That elegant languor characterizes many of his early letters, mostly written during the famously long, idle, flannelled and fancifully aphoristic sunset of the Edwardian age. ‘Nothing’, he wrote to his father from Balliol, ‘disgusts the average Englishman so much as to see his own methods adopted by another nation’, adding, soon afterwards, ‘I enclose my tailor’s bill for the year, which I hold to be moderate.’ Little wonder that his grandson, introducing a selection of Raymond’s extraordinary letters, remarks that the years he lived ‘sometimes seem as remote from the present as the Middle Ages’. His vocabulary was replete with words such as apolaustic and banausic, about which he would bombinate, but he could also be very funny: his parody of Kipling, beginning ‘The sun, like a bishop’s bottom/ Rosy and round and hot . . .’ doesn’t bear reproducing here in full, but is unforgettable, as is his comment on Alfred Douglas’s heart-rending lines about the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. This is the verse:

Alas I have lost my God My beautiful God Apollo Wherever his footsteps trod My feet were wont to follow.

There is ‘just a reminiscence’, writes Raymond, ‘of Mary had a little lamb . . . which adds a certain piquancy of contrast’. But when he fell in love and, later, when he went to war, the scherzo gave way to a graver and mightier rhythm. His early love-letters to Katherine Horner, whose ‘eyes could draw a limpet from a rock and deaden the conscience of an archangel’, are as elaborate and as yearningly gorgeous as Keats’s. God, he suggests to her, has taken ‘400 years working steadily, with many failures . . . to produce at last in flesh the divine type which Botticelli conceived but could never quite express’. They were married in 1907, and his letters thereafter are evidence of a growing and deepening mutual trust. Many soldiers, of all ranks, chose to spare their families the real horrors of the trenches, but Raymond did not. He tells Katherine of picking over the ruins of Sanctuary Wood: ‘nothing but twisted and blackened stumps and a mesh of shell-holes, dimpling into one another, full of mud and blood, and dead men and over-fed rats which blundered into one in the twilight like fat moths’. Later, he fears that one of the chief effects of war ‘is to make one more callous, short-sighted and unimaginative than one is by nature’. By nature he was none of those things. His was a haunting and profound intelligence, his name a byword for cool courage and commitment, tempered with compassion and characterized by unshakeable integrity. No easy Christian comforts for him on the battlefield: he wrote that he despised those religious people who called themselves worms and were then furious when God did not treat them as emperors. On the death of a dear friend he writes, ‘A blind God butts about the world with a pair of delicately malignant antennae to detect whatever is fit to live and an iron hoof to stamp it into the dust.’ His own turn came on 15 September 1916. Shot in the chest during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, he casually lit a cigarette so that his men would not be disheartened. He died on the stretcher shortly afterwards. A hundred years on, the Great War continues to fascinate and appal. It is a unique phenomenon, capable of being seen or interpreted in innumerable ways. As literary editors know, scarcely a week goes by without another book appearing, always apparently taking a new approach. However, even in such a crowded auditorium, the Asquiths’ letters deserve a fairer hearing than most, informed, frank, intimate and unfiltered as they are, and written, they believed privately, to the women they trusted and loved. But truth is an elusive chimera. Soon after Mr Morgan first showed me his mendacious telegram, I returned from his battlefields and told him about seeing the British cemeteries with their poignant lines of tombstones, each inscribed with the name of some young soldier. As always, he was ready to surprise me. ‘Oh, you don’t want to believe a word of that,’ he said, dismissively: ‘I put three dead Germans in most of those graves myself.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Sue Gaisford 2018