Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
8 war prose imagines the German looking at him through his gun-sight. He spent a weekend in Paris for the publication of a translation of his second ‘propaganda’ book, Entre Saint Denis et Saint Georges, and was thanked by the Minister of Instruction. The leave was scarcely less stressful than the line. Ford worked so hard revising the translation that he collapsed, and was told he was ‘suffering from specific shell-shock & ought to go to hospital’. But he wouldn’t go. He was back in the Salient by 13 September. None of this stopped him writing about the episode, in the article ‘Trois Jours de Permission’.11 Soon after this he was sent back to the 3rd Battalion’s home base in North Wales, at Kinmel Park, near Rhyl. Ford found his new posting a new waste of his abilities, and – without overseas pay – a strain on his financial resources. When the War Office did eventually order him back to France at the end of November, he tried without success to avoid being re-attached to Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke’s 9th Welch. He was given ‘various polyglot jobs’ such as ‘writing proclamations in French about thefts of rations issued to H. B. M.’s forces & mounting guards over German sick’. But he fell ill himself in December. ‘As for me, – c’est fini de moi, I believe, at least as far as fighting is concerned,’ he told Conrad: ‘my lungs are all charred up and gone’. The Medical Board wanted to send him home, but he protested that he ‘didn’t in the least want to see Blighty ever again’.12 Ford said his respiratory illness was due to ‘a slight touch of gas I got in the summer & partly to sheer weather’.13 He has been accused of lying about being gassed; not least because he elaborated the story later, telling a marvellous tale about how, while on leave in a Paris hotel, he opened his portmanteau and inadvertently released gas trapped there since he had begun packing during an attack. But there may be some truth in this. Clothes do give off yesterday’s fumes, and someone with breathing difficulties would have been sensitive to even a hint of the lethal chemicals. However, the fictionalised version given in one of the pieces here, ‘True Love 11 Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 13 Sept. 1916: Letters, p. 76. ‘Trois Jours de Permission’, Nation, 19 (30 Sept. 1916), pp. 817–18. 12 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81–3. Ford to Conrad, 19 Dec. 1916: The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 177–8; Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 15 Dec. 1916: House of Lords Records Office. 13 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, p. 82.
page 17
introduction 9 and a GCM [General Court Martial]’, suggests another possibility. The protagonist, Gabriel Morton, is so furious after being accused of cowardice by his CO that he walks through a low gascloud in a shelled building. He is only subliminally aware that it is gas, and his repression of the fact makes the gesture virtually suicidal. Ford was certainly ill enough for the army to send him to No. II Red Cross Hospital at Rouen, whatever the cause. As he knew, the damage wasn’t only physical. ‘I wasn’t so much wounded as blown up by a 4.2 and shaken into a nervous breakdown,’ he told his daughter Katharine, adding that it had made him ‘unbearable to myself & my kind. However, I am better now & may go up the line at any moment – tho’ I shd. prefer to remain out of it for a bit [...]’. Two days later the Medical Board said he was too unwell to return to the Front before the summer: ‘the gas of the Huns has pretty well done for my lungs – wh. make a noise like a machine gun,’ he told her: Of course it is rather awful out here – for me at least. Of the 14 off[ice]rs who came out with me in July I am the only one left here – & I am pretty well a shattered wreck – tho’ they say my lungs will get better in time. And I sit in the hut here wh. is full of Welsh officers all going up – and all my best friends – and think that very likely not one of them will be alive in a fortnight. I tell you, my dear, it is rather awful.14 Survivor’s guilt only exacerbated his despair. ‘It wd. be really very preferable to be dead,’ he wrote to his mother: ‘but one isn’t dead – so that is all there is to it.’15 When he had a relapse on Christmas Eve, the terror he had experienced in the Casualty Clearing Station returned: all night I lie awake & perceive the ward full of Huns of forbidding aspect – except when they give me a sleeping draft. I am in short rather ill still & sometimes doubt my own sanity – indeed, quite frequently I do. I suppose that, really, the Somme was a pretty severe ordeal, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Now, however, I find myself suddenly waking up in a hell of a funk – & going on being in a hell of a funk till morning. And that is pretty well the condition of a number of men here. 14 Ford to Katharine Hueffer, 10 and 12 Dec. 1916: Cornell. 15 Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 15 Dec. 1916: House of Lords Record Office.

Page Text

View plaintext

8

war prose imagines the German looking at him through his gun-sight.

He spent a weekend in Paris for the publication of a translation of his second ‘propaganda’ book, Entre Saint Denis et Saint Georges, and was thanked by the Minister of Instruction. The leave was scarcely less stressful than the line. Ford worked so hard revising the translation that he collapsed, and was told he was ‘suffering from specific shell-shock & ought to go to hospital’. But he wouldn’t go. He was back in the Salient by 13 September. None of this stopped him writing about the episode, in the article ‘Trois Jours de Permission’.11

Soon after this he was sent back to the 3rd Battalion’s home base in North Wales, at Kinmel Park, near Rhyl. Ford found his new posting a new waste of his abilities, and – without overseas pay – a strain on his financial resources.

When the War Office did eventually order him back to France at the end of November, he tried without success to avoid being re-attached to Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke’s 9th Welch. He was given ‘various polyglot jobs’ such as ‘writing proclamations in French about thefts of rations issued to H. B. M.’s forces & mounting guards over German sick’. But he fell ill himself in December. ‘As for me, – c’est fini de moi, I believe, at least as far as fighting is concerned,’ he told Conrad: ‘my lungs are all charred up and gone’. The Medical Board wanted to send him home, but he protested that he ‘didn’t in the least want to see Blighty ever again’.12

Ford said his respiratory illness was due to ‘a slight touch of gas I got in the summer & partly to sheer weather’.13 He has been accused of lying about being gassed; not least because he elaborated the story later, telling a marvellous tale about how, while on leave in a Paris hotel, he opened his portmanteau and inadvertently released gas trapped there since he had begun packing during an attack. But there may be some truth in this. Clothes do give off yesterday’s fumes, and someone with breathing difficulties would have been sensitive to even a hint of the lethal chemicals. However, the fictionalised version given in one of the pieces here, ‘True Love

11 Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 13 Sept. 1916: Letters, p. 76. ‘Trois Jours de Permission’,

Nation, 19 (30 Sept. 1916), pp. 817–18. 12 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81–3. Ford to Conrad, 19 Dec. 1916: The

Presence of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 177–8; Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 15 Dec. 1916: House of Lords Records Office. 13 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, p. 82.

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content