![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It was a rotten business working a telephone switchboard with a gas helmet on
Have a post! It's seven months late; I am aware it will be read only by that subset of my friendlist which is not already in transit to Readercon, but I was describing the book to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel the night before last and it just became silly that I had never posted about it, considering how much I remembered writing and then never getting off my desktop. Therefore, read on. The disclaimer paragraph is also from December. I decided to keep it.
One of the reasons I know I haven't been doing well for some time is that my desktop is full of random notes that were never elaborated into posts or thrown out entirely. All that should be visible on there is my hard drive and a couple of alias folders; instead it looks like a cork-board, only without the attractive collage and tactile value. This cannot be helping my state of mind.
I have been meaning to recommend Sapper Martin: The Secret Great War Diary of Jack Martin (2009), ed. Richard van Emden, for two whole years now. I should have taken the opportunity on Armistice Day, but I think I was watching Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989). I haven't written that up, either. The book is exactly what it sounds like, although the subtitle is slightly a misnomer. Both enlisted men and officers during the First World War were forbidden to keep diaries, which didn't stop everybody and Siegfried Sassoon's brother from doing it—there was nothing unusually clandestine about the pages written by Albert John "Jack" Martin (3 September 1884–24 April 1970) between 1916 and 1919, unless you find it of interest that they were discovered almost thirty years after his death, literally in a trash bag in the attic. He had not told his family they existed. He had rarely spoken about the war. His enlistment and discharge papers were gone, casualties themselves of the bombings of the Second World War; he is known to have received medals, but they too have disappeared. His son suspects he simply threw them out. "It was an aspect of his life that he had not exactly turned his back on but wanted to ignore, to forget about . . . He could just close the door on that part of his life," and he held the door closed until he died. And yet: he didn't destroy the diaries. He left them as much to chance as to his heirs, but shortly after he was demobbed he went to the trouble of transcribing the original documents (from some kind of code, the editor speculates; he mentions using one in some of his letters home) so that decades later his son could ring up an interested historian and we could have a fascinating record of life on the Western Front which does not suffer, like most first-person material of the time, from a need to get by the censors, internal or external. It's not an unbiased account. What good would that be? It's as close as we're ever going to get to the inside of Jack Martin's head at the Somme and the Armistice and that lovely afternoon drying the washing in Crocetta del Montello, and that's worth reading.
The other point of interest about the diaries is that they're not an officer's: Martin was a signaller with the Royal Engineers. I have no idea if he's a representative Tommy; I have no idea if such a thing existed. He was a clerk for the Admiralty before the war, entirely self-taught after the age of fourteen. In the trenches, he played the organ and read from Tristram Shandy, won an argument about The Merchant of Venice without resorting to the play ("it was more of a guess than a feat of memory, but I don't admit that to Hamilton") and wrote comedy sketches for the Dickeybirds, the concert party of the 122nd Infantry Brigade; he seems to have been liked by his colleagues and considered a bit of a funny sort, in the way that the two often go together. Very early on, he picks up the nickname "Tin Hat Joe" because he loses his cloth cap and has to wear his helmet everywhere. He decides a little sadly against making a field-collection of soldiers' songs because it's almost impossible to hear more than snatches at any one time and the best ones are too rude to be printed anyway. (Fuck that, say I: it would have been awesome.) He runs amateur astronomy lessons on the front lines, weather and mortar fire permitting. The material of many of his entries is very mundane, not necessarily to his credit, all the more valuable because it is the sort of thing that wouldn't have made it into a letter home. He writes about food, mostly the kind he isn't getting—bread instead of biscuit, anything other than bully beef. He writes about smoking too much and sleeping too little. He writes about having diarrhea. Often, he writes about his clumsiness: at thirty-one, he knows he's too old to make a natural soldier like the young recruits around him; he drops his rifle on parade and falls on his face in trench mud and apologizes to his superior officer for being of a naturally nervous disposition, even though their relationship has been prickly and he doesn't take well to authority at the best of times. And he may not have to show this journal to anyone, but he comments on the process of self-censorship, noting three days after the Battle of Messines that he feels physically all right "except that I am a bundle of nerves. Any sudden noise makes me give ridiculous involuntary starts so that I drop anything I happen to be holding" (9.6.17) and that he has not yet answered any of his letters from home, because "[m]y hand still shakes too much to permit of letter writing without causing people to wonder what is the matter with me." (It takes him over a week before he can record, "I wrote half a dozen letters and now feel as if I had removed a load from my conscience.") He's a direct and complicated person. He talks about Fritz, Jerry, Frenchies, Froggies, the Hun. When stationed at Reninghelst, however, Martin writes:
The Belgians are more phlegmatic than the French: they are not so excitable and gesticulatory and to hear them talking casually one might easily think that they were speaking some dialect of our own language. But there is no need to try to understand them for nearly all of them can speak and understand English even though they get all the dialects from Cornwall to Caithness hurled at them. I quite marvel at some of them, particularly one young woman in a book, paper, postcard and general assortment shop for she understands some of the Scotch and North Country dialects better than I do. And little street urchins jabber away indiscriminately in both Flemish and English. All this, I imagine, is due in some measure to the masterful British nature. To us these people are foreigners and therefore our inferiors—why should we stoop to learn their language? It is up to them to understand what we say in our own language. And so, unconsciously perhaps, we impose our will on theirs and take the place of top-sawyer as by divine right. And the natives seem quite content and accept the situation quite placidly. In some districts, we have gone so far as to obliterate all the original street names and replace them by English ones such as Station Road, Carlyle Road, Piccadilly Circus etc. The way of Englishmen with people of other nations, even on the latter's own ground, makes you feel rather proud of your nationality. (28.12.16)
A few months later, into a general description of his hutmates and the system he's worked out for getting his washing done locally, he interjects:
In the camp just mentioned we passed a number of large wooden posts with ropes attached. This is where men, who are fighting for a country in which probably they have no interest except that Fate ordained that they should be born there, are tied up like slaves for two hours a day and in other ways punished for all sorts of trivial offences. Prussianism is not confined to the Germans. Our own military system is out and out Prussianism. I suppose the only way to persuade men to face the horror and vileness of war is to drive them at the point of the bayonet, and mete out to them all manner of cruel punishments, holding over their heads the murderous threat of being shot at dawn. Such is the fierce, brutal discipline under which we live. (17.4.17)
The latter passage did not surprise me; of course there was anti-war sentiment in World War I, or there wouldn't have been anyone to mock in "A Conscientious Objector."1 The former did, especially since it starts out sounding like standard-issue national chauvinism and by the end of the paragraph I wasn't at all sure.2 Sometimes he's observing himself, sometimes he's just thinking on paper. There is a striking passage about silence, about how impossible it is for civilians to understand the terror of silence on the battlefield when the body has gotten used to the noises of battle, the deafening bangs and crashes and shrieks and roars—all their absence means is that at any second they'll break out again. "You know that all this noise is possible and the Silence makes you shudder." (9.1.18) And in the meantime the body is freaking out, trying to be ready; you don't calm down until you come back inside and your hutmates are snoring, which is at least a sound. The longer he writes these entries for himself, the more he becomes aware that their author has become somebody quite different from the man whose first record of his war experience was the brief jotting, "Left Hitchin just before 9 a.m. Saw Elsie at her window as we marched to the station. Embarked at Southampton at 4 p.m." (17.9.16) "We regard ourselves rather as detached personalities. Sapper Martin is not the respectable law-abiding Mr Martin of pre-war days. They are quite distinct personalities and are apt to eye each other rather insolently at times." (24.8.18) And occasionally he just stops being able to deal:
Since quite early this morning, the rain has been rattling down fiercely on the corrugated iron roof of our billet, and the pond just outside the door is filled almost to the brim. At home, if the rain leaks through the roof we get alarmed and send for the builder—it is a serious matter approaching the terrible if it actually drips down onto the bed. But here, of course, things are different. Early this morning I woke up and heard several fellows grousing and grumbling and moving their beds in an endeavour to get into a drier spot. My little corner, fortunately, was quite dry. There is no pleasure in this kind of life despite the alleged humorous sketches and funny tales published in papers and magazines. It is an easy matter to raise a laugh at somebody else's expense. This wretched weather, coupled with a queer tension in the atmosphere, has given me a horrible fit of the blues. Today I am a Socialist, an anarchist, an apostle of downing everything that's up. Here I am, pent up and imprisoned, bound down, gagged, a mere unconsidered cog in the military machine, suffering discomfort, terror, mental and spiritual agony—and to what purpose? Merely that other people may profit—the sleek, bloated capitalists and profiteers, living in luxury and sleeping every night in warm, dry, comfortable beds—the men who started the war, who have run it for their own benefit and who now are afraid to stop it because it has grown into something more terrible than ever they anticipated. For they haven't crushed the mass of the people into the servility they had hoped. They have tried all the brutality of militarism, prussianism and junkerism to reduce the people to serfdom but they have only prevailed in so far as martial law can compel a man to do a thing or take the alternative of being shot at dawn. It's a poor creed that relies on force for its justification. But they have discovered that it is impossible to kill the spirit and they find that the flame of freedom is burning all the more fiercely because of their endeavours to extinguish it. This is why they are afraid to stop the war. They don't know what the men of the nations will do when they get back to civilian life again, and they tremble for the safety of their own miserable skins. And so, being safely delivered of this screed of bitterness, I feel much relieved. (7.5.18)
The fact that he includes the last sentence is very characteristic. He's not exactly toeing the line in the next entry, though: "May the Lord preserve me from ever taking a commission if it is going to have such an effect on me!"
1. A classic piece of anti-antiwar music-hall, ideally performed in as fey and affected a tenor as possible: "Send out the Army and the Navy, send out the rank and file / Send out the brave Old Territorials—they'll face the danger with a smile / Send out the boys of the Old Brigade who made old England free / Send out my mother, my sister and my brother, but for God's sake don't send me!" By World War II at the latest, it had mutated into a genuine soldiers' song—"I don't want a bayonet up me arsehole, I don't want me bollocks shot away, I just want to stay in London, dear old jolly London, and fornicate me bloody life away! Call out the Army and the Navy . . ." Eat folk tradition, party line.
2. Martin never goes into detail about himself, but he seems to have been able to read more languages than he could speak. Late in the war, he enthuses over an unexpected discovery in a nearby attic: "Immediately I heard of it I hastened to the scene and found a wonderful collection of books, mostly theological, in English, French, German, Flemish and Latin. It was delicious to turn over volume after volume, reading a bit here and there." (7.11.18) On the other hand, he admits his conversational French is weak and his attempts to make himself understood in Flemish read like a Monty Python sketch. I thought he might have appreciated the joke about polyglots, with just a small change in nationality: "And what do you call someone who only knows one language?"
Everyone makes narratives inside their heads: I believe that Martin meant it wholeheartedly when he wrote on 3 February 1919, "Oh, it is good to be home once more," but it is also the last line of the diaries. He does not write about being demobbed. He does not write about reintegrating into civilian life. He does not write about his marriage or his son or his jobs as, initially, a clerk for a motor company and later a self-employed accountant. The twelve diaries were for the war: he closed their covers and closed the door. In some ways, that interests me as much as the fact that he started keeping them at all.
But I'm glad he did. And didn't get rid of them with his medals. And his son didn't just throw the trash bags out.
I am off to Burlington.
derspatchel the night before last and it just became silly that I had never posted about it, considering how much I remembered writing and then never getting off my desktop. Therefore, read on. The disclaimer paragraph is also from December. I decided to keep it.One of the reasons I know I haven't been doing well for some time is that my desktop is full of random notes that were never elaborated into posts or thrown out entirely. All that should be visible on there is my hard drive and a couple of alias folders; instead it looks like a cork-board, only without the attractive collage and tactile value. This cannot be helping my state of mind.
I have been meaning to recommend Sapper Martin: The Secret Great War Diary of Jack Martin (2009), ed. Richard van Emden, for two whole years now. I should have taken the opportunity on Armistice Day, but I think I was watching Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989). I haven't written that up, either. The book is exactly what it sounds like, although the subtitle is slightly a misnomer. Both enlisted men and officers during the First World War were forbidden to keep diaries, which didn't stop everybody and Siegfried Sassoon's brother from doing it—there was nothing unusually clandestine about the pages written by Albert John "Jack" Martin (3 September 1884–24 April 1970) between 1916 and 1919, unless you find it of interest that they were discovered almost thirty years after his death, literally in a trash bag in the attic. He had not told his family they existed. He had rarely spoken about the war. His enlistment and discharge papers were gone, casualties themselves of the bombings of the Second World War; he is known to have received medals, but they too have disappeared. His son suspects he simply threw them out. "It was an aspect of his life that he had not exactly turned his back on but wanted to ignore, to forget about . . . He could just close the door on that part of his life," and he held the door closed until he died. And yet: he didn't destroy the diaries. He left them as much to chance as to his heirs, but shortly after he was demobbed he went to the trouble of transcribing the original documents (from some kind of code, the editor speculates; he mentions using one in some of his letters home) so that decades later his son could ring up an interested historian and we could have a fascinating record of life on the Western Front which does not suffer, like most first-person material of the time, from a need to get by the censors, internal or external. It's not an unbiased account. What good would that be? It's as close as we're ever going to get to the inside of Jack Martin's head at the Somme and the Armistice and that lovely afternoon drying the washing in Crocetta del Montello, and that's worth reading.
The other point of interest about the diaries is that they're not an officer's: Martin was a signaller with the Royal Engineers. I have no idea if he's a representative Tommy; I have no idea if such a thing existed. He was a clerk for the Admiralty before the war, entirely self-taught after the age of fourteen. In the trenches, he played the organ and read from Tristram Shandy, won an argument about The Merchant of Venice without resorting to the play ("it was more of a guess than a feat of memory, but I don't admit that to Hamilton") and wrote comedy sketches for the Dickeybirds, the concert party of the 122nd Infantry Brigade; he seems to have been liked by his colleagues and considered a bit of a funny sort, in the way that the two often go together. Very early on, he picks up the nickname "Tin Hat Joe" because he loses his cloth cap and has to wear his helmet everywhere. He decides a little sadly against making a field-collection of soldiers' songs because it's almost impossible to hear more than snatches at any one time and the best ones are too rude to be printed anyway. (Fuck that, say I: it would have been awesome.) He runs amateur astronomy lessons on the front lines, weather and mortar fire permitting. The material of many of his entries is very mundane, not necessarily to his credit, all the more valuable because it is the sort of thing that wouldn't have made it into a letter home. He writes about food, mostly the kind he isn't getting—bread instead of biscuit, anything other than bully beef. He writes about smoking too much and sleeping too little. He writes about having diarrhea. Often, he writes about his clumsiness: at thirty-one, he knows he's too old to make a natural soldier like the young recruits around him; he drops his rifle on parade and falls on his face in trench mud and apologizes to his superior officer for being of a naturally nervous disposition, even though their relationship has been prickly and he doesn't take well to authority at the best of times. And he may not have to show this journal to anyone, but he comments on the process of self-censorship, noting three days after the Battle of Messines that he feels physically all right "except that I am a bundle of nerves. Any sudden noise makes me give ridiculous involuntary starts so that I drop anything I happen to be holding" (9.6.17) and that he has not yet answered any of his letters from home, because "[m]y hand still shakes too much to permit of letter writing without causing people to wonder what is the matter with me." (It takes him over a week before he can record, "I wrote half a dozen letters and now feel as if I had removed a load from my conscience.") He's a direct and complicated person. He talks about Fritz, Jerry, Frenchies, Froggies, the Hun. When stationed at Reninghelst, however, Martin writes:
The Belgians are more phlegmatic than the French: they are not so excitable and gesticulatory and to hear them talking casually one might easily think that they were speaking some dialect of our own language. But there is no need to try to understand them for nearly all of them can speak and understand English even though they get all the dialects from Cornwall to Caithness hurled at them. I quite marvel at some of them, particularly one young woman in a book, paper, postcard and general assortment shop for she understands some of the Scotch and North Country dialects better than I do. And little street urchins jabber away indiscriminately in both Flemish and English. All this, I imagine, is due in some measure to the masterful British nature. To us these people are foreigners and therefore our inferiors—why should we stoop to learn their language? It is up to them to understand what we say in our own language. And so, unconsciously perhaps, we impose our will on theirs and take the place of top-sawyer as by divine right. And the natives seem quite content and accept the situation quite placidly. In some districts, we have gone so far as to obliterate all the original street names and replace them by English ones such as Station Road, Carlyle Road, Piccadilly Circus etc. The way of Englishmen with people of other nations, even on the latter's own ground, makes you feel rather proud of your nationality. (28.12.16)
A few months later, into a general description of his hutmates and the system he's worked out for getting his washing done locally, he interjects:
In the camp just mentioned we passed a number of large wooden posts with ropes attached. This is where men, who are fighting for a country in which probably they have no interest except that Fate ordained that they should be born there, are tied up like slaves for two hours a day and in other ways punished for all sorts of trivial offences. Prussianism is not confined to the Germans. Our own military system is out and out Prussianism. I suppose the only way to persuade men to face the horror and vileness of war is to drive them at the point of the bayonet, and mete out to them all manner of cruel punishments, holding over their heads the murderous threat of being shot at dawn. Such is the fierce, brutal discipline under which we live. (17.4.17)
The latter passage did not surprise me; of course there was anti-war sentiment in World War I, or there wouldn't have been anyone to mock in "A Conscientious Objector."1 The former did, especially since it starts out sounding like standard-issue national chauvinism and by the end of the paragraph I wasn't at all sure.2 Sometimes he's observing himself, sometimes he's just thinking on paper. There is a striking passage about silence, about how impossible it is for civilians to understand the terror of silence on the battlefield when the body has gotten used to the noises of battle, the deafening bangs and crashes and shrieks and roars—all their absence means is that at any second they'll break out again. "You know that all this noise is possible and the Silence makes you shudder." (9.1.18) And in the meantime the body is freaking out, trying to be ready; you don't calm down until you come back inside and your hutmates are snoring, which is at least a sound. The longer he writes these entries for himself, the more he becomes aware that their author has become somebody quite different from the man whose first record of his war experience was the brief jotting, "Left Hitchin just before 9 a.m. Saw Elsie at her window as we marched to the station. Embarked at Southampton at 4 p.m." (17.9.16) "We regard ourselves rather as detached personalities. Sapper Martin is not the respectable law-abiding Mr Martin of pre-war days. They are quite distinct personalities and are apt to eye each other rather insolently at times." (24.8.18) And occasionally he just stops being able to deal:
Since quite early this morning, the rain has been rattling down fiercely on the corrugated iron roof of our billet, and the pond just outside the door is filled almost to the brim. At home, if the rain leaks through the roof we get alarmed and send for the builder—it is a serious matter approaching the terrible if it actually drips down onto the bed. But here, of course, things are different. Early this morning I woke up and heard several fellows grousing and grumbling and moving their beds in an endeavour to get into a drier spot. My little corner, fortunately, was quite dry. There is no pleasure in this kind of life despite the alleged humorous sketches and funny tales published in papers and magazines. It is an easy matter to raise a laugh at somebody else's expense. This wretched weather, coupled with a queer tension in the atmosphere, has given me a horrible fit of the blues. Today I am a Socialist, an anarchist, an apostle of downing everything that's up. Here I am, pent up and imprisoned, bound down, gagged, a mere unconsidered cog in the military machine, suffering discomfort, terror, mental and spiritual agony—and to what purpose? Merely that other people may profit—the sleek, bloated capitalists and profiteers, living in luxury and sleeping every night in warm, dry, comfortable beds—the men who started the war, who have run it for their own benefit and who now are afraid to stop it because it has grown into something more terrible than ever they anticipated. For they haven't crushed the mass of the people into the servility they had hoped. They have tried all the brutality of militarism, prussianism and junkerism to reduce the people to serfdom but they have only prevailed in so far as martial law can compel a man to do a thing or take the alternative of being shot at dawn. It's a poor creed that relies on force for its justification. But they have discovered that it is impossible to kill the spirit and they find that the flame of freedom is burning all the more fiercely because of their endeavours to extinguish it. This is why they are afraid to stop the war. They don't know what the men of the nations will do when they get back to civilian life again, and they tremble for the safety of their own miserable skins. And so, being safely delivered of this screed of bitterness, I feel much relieved. (7.5.18)
The fact that he includes the last sentence is very characteristic. He's not exactly toeing the line in the next entry, though: "May the Lord preserve me from ever taking a commission if it is going to have such an effect on me!"
1. A classic piece of anti-antiwar music-hall, ideally performed in as fey and affected a tenor as possible: "Send out the Army and the Navy, send out the rank and file / Send out the brave Old Territorials—they'll face the danger with a smile / Send out the boys of the Old Brigade who made old England free / Send out my mother, my sister and my brother, but for God's sake don't send me!" By World War II at the latest, it had mutated into a genuine soldiers' song—"I don't want a bayonet up me arsehole, I don't want me bollocks shot away, I just want to stay in London, dear old jolly London, and fornicate me bloody life away! Call out the Army and the Navy . . ." Eat folk tradition, party line.
2. Martin never goes into detail about himself, but he seems to have been able to read more languages than he could speak. Late in the war, he enthuses over an unexpected discovery in a nearby attic: "Immediately I heard of it I hastened to the scene and found a wonderful collection of books, mostly theological, in English, French, German, Flemish and Latin. It was delicious to turn over volume after volume, reading a bit here and there." (7.11.18) On the other hand, he admits his conversational French is weak and his attempts to make himself understood in Flemish read like a Monty Python sketch. I thought he might have appreciated the joke about polyglots, with just a small change in nationality: "And what do you call someone who only knows one language?"
Everyone makes narratives inside their heads: I believe that Martin meant it wholeheartedly when he wrote on 3 February 1919, "Oh, it is good to be home once more," but it is also the last line of the diaries. He does not write about being demobbed. He does not write about reintegrating into civilian life. He does not write about his marriage or his son or his jobs as, initially, a clerk for a motor company and later a self-employed accountant. The twelve diaries were for the war: he closed their covers and closed the door. In some ways, that interests me as much as the fact that he started keeping them at all.
But I'm glad he did. And didn't get rid of them with his medals. And his son didn't just throw the trash bags out.
I am off to Burlington.
no subject
"The masterful British nature"; that made me shudder. I had to read that passage a few times.
Priestley writes about Prussianism, or something like it, in "Margin Released"; he's vague, but attacks the bureaucrats that flourished during the Great War quite as much as the battlemongers. My copy's at Martin's so I cannot ferret out a quote.
Enjoy Readercon! Seems that most of my f-list will be there. I've never been part of a subset before!
no subject
You should be able to—I'm sure it's out in this country by now, but the edition I got three years ago I ordered from the UK.
Enjoy Readercon! Seems that most of my f-list will be there. I've never been part of a subset before!
Come next year! The mainstream's not all it's cracked up to be!
no subject
I hope you have a wonderful time in Burlington. One of these years, I think I'll try to get to Readercon, myself. If it keeps on being the weekend before Catskills Irish Arts Week, if I can get everything lined up so this week isn't a mad dash to get things ready as it always is, if the stars go right and the horse learns to sing...
no subject
I'd try libraries. I don't think it's very obscure.
if the stars go right and the horse learns to sing...
Heh.
no subject
I suppose he meant that with the sending of the letters, the obligation of reassuring his friends and family was off him for another few weeks; but it also makes me wonder if he later felt a need to complete, transcribe and put away the diaries as his way of permanently separating himself from Sapper Martin.
no subject
No, I think so, or his son would have known the diaries existed before he died; he left a record of himself, but not so that he would ever have to answer questions about it. He would never have to open the door.
no subject
«Both enlisted men and officers during the First World War were forbidden to keep diaries ...»
I actually didn't know this—what a truly pervasive level of [attempted] censorship! The thought of writing one's diary entries in code is crazy to me, that sounds like a complexity I couldn't manage at the best of times, never mind under battlefield conditions.
no subject
You're welcome! I found it invaluable.
The thought of writing one's diary entries in code is crazy to me, that sounds like a complexity I couldn't manage at the best of times, never mind under battlefield conditions.
He was a signaller, so he might have had practice? But still, seriously.