Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze

Am reading Blake and Keats. I love to dwell on the thought that the artist is next in divinity to the saint. He, like the saint, performs miracles.

Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute1

ALTHOUGH in 1916 Salonika with its mosques, narrow streets and polyglot population still had the appearance of a Turkish city, it had long been freed from Ottoman rule. Its importance as a port lay in its situation as the only outlet for Macedonia, the heartland of the Balkans. Possession of this ancient land of mountains, wild terrain, pastoral villages and unsurfaced roads had been disputed by its three neighbours, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia – the latter roughly the southern half of modern Yugoslavia – in the Balkan Wars of 1912. The three contenders, unable to agree on ownership of Salonika, had been persuaded in the 1913 Treaties of London and Bucharest to make it a free port.

The outbreak of war in 1914 set the three contenders glowering at each other again. Serbia allied herself with France in an effort to avoid the fate of her northern neighbour Bosnia, already gobbled up by the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was a Bosnian student protest culminating in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria while on a conqueror’s visit to Sarajevo which had sparked the Great War. Bulgaria on the other hand allied herself with Germany, but hesitated to make any aggressive act for fear of formidable Russian and Romanian armies gathered to her north. Greece, in whose territory Salonika lay, was neutral but split in allegiance, her new King favouring Germany and Austria–Hungary while the Prime Minister, Venizelos, urged support of France, Britain and Russia.

By 1915 everything was changing. Russian military power had been virtually eliminated by the German offensive eastwards in the spring. Austria–Hungary had decided to resume her conquest southwards from Bosnia to annex Serbia. The attempt was not very successful until the Bulgarians, satisfied that there was now little likelihood of serious Russian or Romanian interference, decided to join in. The tough Serbs, able to hold off the Austro-Hungarian attack from the north, could not cope with the additional Bulgarian flank attack from the east. They begged help from France, who in turn demanded support from a not over-enthusiastic Britain. Two French divisions and one British were nevertheless landed at Salonika just in time to learn that the battered Serbian armies had given up and were retreating in bitter winter weather away from them over the mountains into a neutral but suspicious Albania. There the French and Royal Navies rescued them and took them down the coast to Corfu to rest and refit. In the meantime the small French and British expeditionary force, meeting head-on the full panoply of the elated Bulgarian armies, fell back to a defensive line around Salonika and howled for help.

The Greeks to their south remained inactively neutral, still undecided which side to join. Reluctant to provoke their hostility, the Germans persuaded the Bulgarians to halt more or less along the Greek frontier. Given this breathing-space and using the free-port status of Salonika as a pretext, the Allies began landing a motley of reinforcements, French, British, Indian, colonial, even a token brigade of Russians. Over the months more formations arrived, including Italians and the Serbian armies from Corfu re-equipped by the French and with British field support. The line lengthened across the peninsula to the Albanian frontier, and the opposing armies settled into an uneasy confrontation across the formidable hills and valleys which divided them.

This was the complex situation into which Stanley and Budden stepped from their lighter on to the waterfront of Salonika. The sea journey had been a wonder to Stanley: ‘the sea turning a pale delicate green as it shallowed a little before the straits of Gibraltar … the pumice-stone corner of land that is Africa, the sea being a dark-blue lapis colour – a Reckitts blue as Budden called it – and looking west, blood-red as the sun is setting …’2

But so overwhelmingly did the impressions arrive that even at the sedate speed of a sea journey Stanley found himself unable to digest them as he wanted: ‘Change; but more outrage than change. … One is going beyond as a human what one is made by God to do. One should grow with experience, and one does not do that at that artificial speed. Had I walked to Salonika, I could have changed in exact proportion as where I got to on the journey. …’3

There was, however, consolation because he had a companion with whom to share them: ‘It was nice to have Budden. I really did not think [his friendship] was so just what I wanted. It was like discovering yourself.’4 Alas, at Salonika: ‘Maybe because of the law of the army, one of which is tallest on the right, shortest on the left, we became separated beyond all hope. It was our only difference. So we were marched off to different camps. We grinned at each other as we solemnly marched off to our various destinations.’

This account to the Raverats – he says the event took place on the quay as they landed – again has a ring of over-dramatization. The losing of Budden was a hurt to his spirit.* At the time, he wrote to Desmond Chute: ‘I had to part with dear Lionel Budden at the rest camp here. I have no idea where he went.’6 He went in fact to the 36th (Serbian) General Hospital at Vertekop, some forty miles inland, one of the hospitals provided by the British to support the reconstituted Serbian army. He had his violin with him. Another disappointment for Stanley was to discover that while he was on the way there, Gilbert had been transferred from his Field Hospital at Salonika to service as a medical orderly on a hospital ship. The brothers must have passed each other in the Mediterranean.

The feel of an army on active service, with its heterogeneous scatter of signposts, tents, camps, dumps, wagons, traffic and groups of khaki-clad men everywhere about their tasks is very different from that of an army at home. Despite the apparent confusion there is an air of purpose. The British front line was some thirty miles north of Salonika. Veterans back from the front were anxiously interrogated by Stanley’s newcomers: ‘What’s it like up there, chum?’ From the base camp Stanley could see the hills where the opposing armies lay entrenched. To his left rear lay the impressive massif of Mount Olympus, changing in appearance with the seasons and the sunlight, and pointing the way southwards into neutral Greece. On his left ran the valley of the Vardar (modern Axios), debouching into the Gulf south of Salonika but with its northern source deep in enemy territory. It formed the left boundary of the British sector and was the gateway to the Monastir road, the essential supply route for the other Allied armies inland to the west. On his right a rolling plateau gave way in the distance to the valley of the Struma river (today the Strimon), wide and fertile in its main course, but marshy and malarial at its estuary east of Salonika. Beyond the valley rose steeply a long wall of forbidding mountains forming the main Bulgarian defences in this area, the Struma sector. To attack there, the British had to cross the Struma valley in full view of the enemy, a distance of five miles in places, and the main road across it, the shell-swept Seres road, was to become as notorious to the men of the Salonika army serving on this sector as did the Menin road at Ypres.

If Stanley were to face directly north, he would have seen on a cleaf day, rising above the plateau which separated the Vardar and Struma valleys, the rounded summits of two hills, known to the French who first made their unpleasant acquaintance as the Grand and Petit Couronnés. Like Monte Cassino in a later war these seemingly innocuous but highly fortified hills effectively blocked any British advance. Beside them lay Lake Doiran, five miles in diameter. Around its fringes and stretching from the Struma to the Vardar, a distance of about fifteen miles, lay the main British front line, the Doiran sector, a maze of trenches and gun emplacements finding what cover they could among the ravines that seamed the slope. It was on this sector that Stanley was to get his first experience of active service.

Stanley cannot have remained many days at the depot after he had lost Budden. He was reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and told Desmond that he was ‘starving for music’:

Write out little scraps of music that I know. … Would it be too much to write out and send me a copy of some of those songs Mrs Daniell used to sing? By Jove, I shall not forget those times! I shall visit Bristol when I come home and we shall have to ‘go our rounds’ once more. I shall have a lot to tell you. Do send me out some little book, a good Dostoevsky that I have not read or something by Hardy. Send me some Milton or Shakespeare.7

He must have been surprised to find himself posted not to a hospital as he had expected but to the 68th Field Ambulance. This was ‘up the line’ somewhere on the Doiran sector. A twenty-mile train journey took him to the railhead at Karasuli (Polikastron). Sitting on the wooden seats of the carriage and looking out of the window, he had his first real impression of this new land, ‘I was entranced by the landscape – low plains with thin lines of trees looking through trees to further plains of fields, and here and there a figure in dirty white. It was not a landscape, it was a spiritual world.’ ‘A spiritual world’: thus the first intimation of the overpowering grip that these parts of the Macedonian landscape were to have on his imagination, and which were to have such influence on both the future of his war service there and on the paintings at Burghclere. The scenery in its changing seasons from spring green to summer brown to winter snow and starkness; the whitewashed stone buildings; the patient peasants in the fields; the wandering flocks of sheep and goats, and the donkeys of this still backward land – all these intensified his admiration for the early Italian painters he so loved: biblical landscapes in an early Renaissance setting. It was as though so many visions of his youth had become reality. A travelling companion offered him a Horlick’s Malted Milk tablet. He took it casually, lost in his thoughts, until he realized how ‘wonderful’ it was, and was profuse in his thanks.

At Karasuli, where the train journey ended, he assembled with a little group of RAMC men and ‘my life in Macedonia began’. Travelling with painful slowness in ration oxcarts, they were taken along the main supply road, the ‘Karasuli-Kalinova track’. Although busy with traffic and lined with dumps and depots, the road was unmetalled. To Stanley’s countryman eye, all such roads were ‘tracks’. This one ran at the foot of the south-facing slope of a line of low hills to the right of which was Lake Ardzan and reminded Stanley of the road at home along Cockmarsh Hill. Over the crests of the hills and down the northern slopes facing the enemy ran the series of deep front-line ravines, the products of violent summer thunderstorms. These ravines were the principal access routes to the British trenches, and where they made breaks in the crests of the hills travellers came into view of the enemy and offered tempting artillery targets. So part of Stanley’s slow journey was made in the dark: ‘the quiet atmosphere, some man on a horse conducting us to a place in the direction of Kalinova, the oxen swaying from side to side, their heads stretched forward under their yokes, and the grass fire like a huge dragon stretching the length of Lake Ardzan and reflected in it, the wild dogs, and seeing during the night that they did not get at the meat, a heavy stone on the tubs …’. Later, he came to know that ‘most of what was vital to me in Macedonia was felt along that track. Whatever number of kilos it is, ten or twenty, each is part of my soul. When I think of the places along it and the different parts of this continuous hillside, for me to describe them is to describe something of myself.’ Once again Stanley is drawing feeling from his identification with places.

The 68th Field Ambulance was located at ‘a place called, I think, Corsica.’ Almost certainly this is a soldier’s corruption of Chaushitsa, a small, abandoned village some eight miles from Karasuli. ‘I slept on the side of the hill with another man, stars overhead, grass fields, and Lake Ardzan twinkling below. … Quiet, and murmuring of men’s voices, rather comforting. It was dark when I arrived and I had the feeling of not knowing what world I would wake up in. I peered into the hillside and seemed to discern the white objects of bivouacs, or the glowing object of a tent with a candle or hurricane lamp.’8

What he awoke to was, of course, his section of 68 Field Ambulance, and the atmosphere of his first impressions is captured in the Burghclere frieze. The bivouac lines are on the right. Each soldier was issued with a waterproof cape eyeletted down the sides. Two of these, lashed together down the ridge and supported like a small tent, made a simple shelter for the two owners. The ‘glowing’ tents were bell tents reserved for more official or medical purposes. The one in the painting into which an orderly is entering with a cluster of the canvas buckets in which bread was carried, was probably the ration tent. The scene is viewed from high above Lake Ardzan, looking northwards across the Karasuli-Kalinova track towards the hillside which rises to the crest of the slope and then disappears down the ravines to the British front line and enemy-held hills beyond.

It was now September. The front was relatively quiet. Much of Stanley’s training on active service revolved around new ways of handling patients. In such broken country, wheeled transport was limited to the few main tracks, and stretcher-bearing was prohibitively fatiguing except where unavoidable. The accepted method of conveying wounded in the forward areas was the ‘travoy’ or French travoi. Two long flexible shafts of wood were fastened each side of a mule. The rear ends, steel-tipped, were left free to drag along the ground. The stretcher with its patient was strapped between the shafts. One shaft was longer than the other to minimize bumping over potholes, but as the patient was then tipped sideways and in any case tended to slide down the stretcher, the orderly had the tiring task of holding him under the armpits if he could not keep himself on. An Army Service Corps driver led the mule.

Over marshy ground, two mules were used, with the shafts slung between them. This was the doolie, or ‘dooley’ as Stanley calls it, a term possibly derived from the French in India: douillet means ‘gentle’, especially in relation to the sick. When he arrived, Stanley’s section was testing a ‘cacklet’ – French cacolet – which comprised two chairs slung in makeshift manner each side of a mule, with a more lightly wounded patient in each. Being light, Stanley was given the part of the patient. He noticed that the harness was chafing the mule and was gratified that his officer took immediate remedial action. Mules, which came mostly from the Argentine, were expensive and Stanley had great sympathy, as he did with all animals, for the hardships imposed on them by man’s unnatural demands, even though he frequently complained of their obstinacy – ‘my arms used to ache trying to pull them round during turn-out rehearsals.’ Although alert and sure-footed when the going was difficult, they had the maddening habit of simply lying down and dozing off when the weather was hot and the going easy, greatly to the amusement of the lightly wounded occupant of a doolie who sank slowly to the ground while Stanley and the mule driver struggled in vain.

From Corsica it was a relatively short journey northwards over the crest into the ravines leading to the firing line. Periodically the section was called forward to retrieve wounded from the battalion aid posts and take them to field dressing stations. The largest of these ravines was the Sedemli (or Cidemli) ravine, which led to a dressing station in the ruined mosque at Smol, an abandoned village near the entry to the ravine. A local attack by units of 22 Division on an enemy position called Machine Gun Hill had taken place in mid-September, soon after Stanley joined the ambulance, and the shock of the incident and the scene at the Smol dressing station printed themselves on his mind. Often his duties were carried out at night, the stretcher party groping its way in the darkness past ammunition dumps, gun batteries, supply columns of mules and army signallers mending their broken telephone wires. Sometimes, in the confusing maze of side ravines and gullies the simplest method of moving in a consistent direction was to leave the tracks and keep to the watercourses, splashing along in the streams and stumbling among the boulders. Even so, one of their officers – the officers were of course doctors – one night nearly led Stanley’s party into the Bulgar lines. The clatter of steel-shod travoys was a sound Stanley never forgot, and all through his life any sudden metallic noise would recall the memory. Artillery fire would sometimes harass them: ‘The little man I was with up the Cidemli ravine said he thought he could smell something [poison gas shells] and then became silent. He was in hospital next day and remained silent [shell-shock]. I don’t know if he recovered.’

Odd items fascinated Stanley on these journeys – the white shells of tortoises burned in grass fires, or Bulgarian letters, photographs and picture postcards scattered about the ravines from an early French counter-attack of 1915. These abandoned mementoes of another life, of a ‘homeliness’ even though foreign, seemed to Stanley a link with the universal in man. He ‘liked the feel of the Bulgar’. Sometimes, the journeys were even less enviable. He and a corporal were detailed to open up a new burial ground and chose a spot beside the Kalinova track. They had to bring those who had died of wounds at the dressing station back for burial, doing their best to mark the graves with issue crosses, not always available.*

After a few weeks, Stanley’s section of 68 FA moved from Corsica a few miles along the track to Kalinova itself, a former Graeco-Turkish walled village long since abandoned. Stanley loved to wander round the empty streets imagining the life that had been lived there. No longer the raw inexperienced ‘rookie’ he had been at Corsica, shaken by the first brutal realities of war and gently ribbed by his comrades, Stanley now began to feel himself ‘that special being, a soldier on active service.’ He was among friendly comrades, accepted as an equal. Emotionally he had ‘emerged’ from the confusions of his first impressions and had made himself ‘cosy’; quite literally so in the physical sense, for as the autumn weather grew colder he and a companion, George Dando, made themselves a comfortable dugout roofed with flattened petrol tins, with even ‘a fireplace and a little mantelpiece with a chimney stack’. ‘As I look back, I think what a different “me” it was to the “me” at Corsica.’