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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze

You ought to hear the wild geese out here. They fly over us night and day and it is mysterious to hear them in the night.

Stanley Spencer to Florence¹

STANLEY was with the 66th Field Ambulance for only a few weeks before ‘a rotten cold and running nose’ sent him protesting back to hospital. It was a sinus infection. At the 5th Canadian Hospital he found two Hardy novels he had not read, and enjoyed a version of Lycidas which he had handwritten for himself: ‘as for Milton, I rest myself upon him’. There were more portrait drawings, many on the large leaves of a big autograph album with which a Canadian Sister supplied him. He replied to a letter from Florence: ‘I got the London Univ. Coll. Pro Patria and Union magazine today which contained a lot of real interesting news about a lot of my old Slade friends. … Do tell me about Mrs Raverat’s baby! When I heard about it I laughed for sheer joy.’²

At home the war was beginning to bite. The early Zeppelin raids on London and the east coast had given way to pattern bombing by fleets of multi-engined German bombers, the Giants and Gothas, and any who could were seeking refuge outside London. Ma and Pa were on wartime rations. Stanley had allocated them 3s 6d a week from his pay, a considerable proportion, and made them a gift of £5 – perhaps £200 today – from his savings.³ Coal was short; ‘old’ Sam Sandell from The Nest, aged eighty-five, cheerfully sawed them firewood. Gwen Raverat sent sacks of apples. Sydney’s educational ability and his success in achieving high marks in every training course he was sent on – bombing, marksmanship, anti-gas – kept him, to his annoyance, in England as an instructor. Percy was due to be sent to England to train as a staff officer. Harold and Natalie had moved to London, but the unforeseen slaughter in the terrible battles of the Somme in 1916 had introduced conscription; men and unmarried women who had been earlier required to ‘attest’ their willingness to be called up now found their vows invoked. Even the thirty-seven-year-old Harold might be netted (he was, but only for Home Garrison duty). Horace, back in France and promoted to corporal, was periodically pulled out of the line to entertain generals at mess parties.

Recovered and discharged from hospital in the middle of March, Stanley found himself for the third time back at the RAMC Base Depot. Once again he suffered a change of destination, being posted to a newly-formed Field Ambulance, the 143rd, still stationed at Salonika. The mountain snows were melting and warm spring days arriving: ‘The flowers are out – primrose, violet, celandine and many others unknown to me; I passed such wonderful ones today’.⁴ The sudden arrival of spring in the remote Macedonian hills is still an event of beauty. But for the combatants of the British Salonika Army the flowers were more a worrying omen than a joyful harbinger. A spring offensive was being prepared.

The armies along the Allied front were under the command of the French General Sarrail, who had distinguished himself in the anxious days of 1914 in France. A head-on attack up the Vardar valley was the most obvious course, but impracticable in view of the impregnability of the Bulgarian defences there. So Sarrail’s plan was to start an attack with French and Serbian forces inland. They would fight their way across the mountains of the interior so as to reach the upper Vardar valley in the rear of the Bulgarians on the British sector. As this began to achieve success, the enemy facing the British would be compelled to withdraw troops to counter the threat, and at this point the British would attack to catch the Bulgarians in a pincer movement. It was a classically obvious plan, indeed the only feasible one, and the best of the Bulgarian troops with German Jaeger and Mountain battalions were positioned in the hills to prevent it. The reason why Stanley was passing such ‘wonderful’ wild flowers was because 143 FA was on the move to support the coming offensive. However, as a new and untried formation it was evidently being sent to a relatively unimportant sector, the part of the Struma valley about twelve miles east of Lake Doiran where only feint attacks were planned. Its destination was the abandoned village of Todorova.

Stanley, of course, had no idea what was happening. Privates were never ‘told anything’, although the infantry, watching the build-up of gun batteries and field ambulances in their rear, had a shrewd notion of impending events. The journey to Todorova was excruciatingly slow. It took eight days to cover the forty or so miles. The weather was hot. But ‘at least my mind arrived at Todorova with my body’.

The village of Todorova, or such of it as remained from the earlier Balkan Wars, caught Stanley’s imagination as Kalinova had done: ‘It seemed to me to be a place right in the north or north-east … I think some of the flowers there were the remains of private gardens when inhabited; no signs now, no buildings. … A rosebush in the sun, I remember, and I was surprised to see a cloud of dust where it stood one day. The dust blew away and there was the rosebush shaking – a dud shell.’

The French and Serbian offensive in the centre of the Allied line began in early April. But despite initial successes – the capture of Monastir was one – resistance was too strong and the advance petered out. The value of the supporting British attack on the Doiran sector was now in question. Sarrail, indeed, saw no point in it and did not expect it to take place. Nevertheless on 24 April General Milne ordered the assault. The infantry battalions, moving upwards towards their objectives over open ground, were mown down by Bulgarian machine-gun crossfire, and when they sought cover in the ravines of no-man’s land they found themselves caught in pre-registered shellfire of pinpoint accuracy. With great courage a few small gains were made, but most had to be yielded as too exposed. Some of the assault battalions – they included the 7th Royal Berkshires – were decimated. On 8 May the attacks were called off. The result was stalemate. Six thousand men had been lost.

Nothing further was possible. Indents for replacements from home were not welcomed by the War Office. All available manpower was needed for other summer offensives being planned both on the Western Front and in Palestine. The French war leader Clemenceau, asking to know how his ‘Army of the Orient’ was faring, was told that they were consolidating their gains and digging in. ‘Ah!’, he remarked caustically, ‘les jardiniers de Salonique!’ The phrase stuck, and the Gardeners of Salonika they remained. The problem now was to keep up the morale of the troops during the heat and boredom of the coming summer and the misery of the next winter. Offensive patrolling, loathed as futile by the infantry, was ordered to maintain their fighting spirit. But at the same time entertainments and sports were organized, ad hoc theatres built behind the lines, and a soldiers’ newspaper, the Balkan News, was published from Salonika by a spirited Englishwoman.

Not that Stanley saw much of this, although a male-voice choir was organized in his Ambulance, of which he became a member. His life at Todorova was essentially one of killing time. His section was camped in the narrow, steep-sided ravine shown in the frieze at a point where the torrent ran down the edge of the plateau to the Struma below, where Todorova itself was sited. He painted a flowery sign for the sergeants’ latrine and went swimming with a cookhouse orderly whenever flash-floods formed rock pools. His sergeant allowed him, when off-duty, to wander away and he would seek some lonely gully where among the harmless rock-snakes and lizards he could be alone with his thoughts, his letters and books. The Raverats, with a civilian’s incomprehension of a soldier’s lot, were urging him to contact a cousin of Gwen’s, a rising composer who was also an orderly in a Field Ambulance; his name was Ralph Vaughan Williams. Stanley was pleased to have news from Florence of Sydney – ‘Hengy the Henker’ – who had continued during his military service to work diligently towards his academic qualifications, and was in the spring of 1918 to be awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Oxford: ‘Bless his heart, I would love to see him.’⁵

Percy had been posted for his staff-officer training to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Florence’s husband was a don. Stanley was still hoping to arrange for Gilbert to join him, but, as he gently pointed out to the Raverats, the army did not extend itself unduly in the interests of private soldiers. Even Florence was complaining that his letters did not contain much news, to which Stanley replied with some asperity that it was not a fault in him, for nothing was happening. However, he had one piece of good news. Henry Lamb had arrived in Salonika as a medical officer with a Field Ambulance and ‘according to the place where he says he is, I must be quite near him’.

Stanley was, he decided, a ‘different me’ again at Todorova, a more reflective, inward-turning ‘me’: ‘As far as Nature went, I felt on such a personal footing with it, and it had all seemed to have something to do with my individual self, that I forgot the war and the army, and continued to some degree my Cookham life, namely a feeling of integration with my surroundings.’⁶ The Burghclere frieze is obviously intended to convey something of Stanley’s summer calm and waiting, of men ‘forgetting the war and the army’. The figures, in the timeless way of all soldiers, occupy the empty hours by being given something to do. On the left of the picture a line of men pick away at a torrent bed, dislodging the brown and white pebbles of the limestone landscape in order to make a mosaic of regimental badges – the RAMC and Royal Berkshire badges are there – as well as a Red Cross air identity circle. In the river-bed, in the rock pools where Stanley swam when it flooded, more pebbles are collected, used no doubt in the army game of housey-housey played by the little group of men in the centre; it is a form of bingo, and the only gambling game then permitted in the army. Below them a pair of pack mules passes along the watercourse. The figure scrubbing his summer shorts forms a link with the man washing his shirt in the opposite frieze. On the right, an open-shirted orderly, his identity discs dangling about his neck, idly throws a stone at something in the stream. All are dressed in summer kit. These are the days, if not of wine, at least of army tea and roses. For Stanley they celebrate another ‘emergence’ into his precious world of spiritual peace and creativity, his world of harmony, of ‘my integration with my surroundings’.