Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

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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.* (#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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.

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.’

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.* (#litres_trial_promo)

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.’

To his delight, the parcel of books he had requested from Chute duly arrived: ‘Mass Companion, Keats, Blake, Coriolanus, Michaelangelo, Velasquez, early Flemish painters, box of chocolates …!’ He began drawing his comrades again, and as usual when he felt reconciled to his circumstances, a resurgence of his ‘Cookham-feelings’ occurred.

Such hopes produced by some harmony between myself and my surroundings. … I felt that the hope and the consequent constructive and productive resource in me by simple drawing heads and so forth, the war would melt away like a snake charmer … the snakes would all forget. I had a Gowans and Gray Claude Lorraine and a repro in it of The Worship of the Golden Calf – wonderful pastoral scenes, a lot of vases, and men and women dancing. What has happened, I thought? Why doesn’t everyone chuck it and behave in this way?

Lifting a stretchered patient over barbed wire in the dark on one of his details, Stanley accidentally cut a puttee. The new puttee issued to him was of inferior quality and lacked the elasticity of the original. A painful swelling formed on his leg, gently poulticed for him by a fellow-orderly.

His feelings persisted even when the pain in his leg sent him down the line to hospital. He wrote of the patients there, ‘I do anything for these men. … I cannot refuse them anything, and they love me to make drawings of photos of their wives and children. … An Irishman asked me what I thought of the “afterlife”. I said that as the very being of joy exists in that it is eternal, it is only reasonable to suppose that life which only lives by joy must necessarily be eternal.’ This deeply metaphysical answer, the source from which so many of Stanley’s greatest paintings sprang, must have flabbergasted the questioner, ‘If these men have not gripped the essential, there is one grand thing; they are part of the essential.’

Stanley told Florence that he had heard from Gilbert, whose stint on a hospital ship had now ended and who was serving in a hospital near Alexandria in Egypt: ‘I have had a beautiful letter from Gilbert. He is in Mustapha, Egypt, and he wrote me about the possibility of getting to be with me, but on the day his letter arrived my leg was so painful I was unable to walk. … I had a swelling on my shin and at last it was opened and the matter removed. It was an abscess, but it was deep down under the flesh so that you could not see it. It is healing well now.’

With the leg healing, Stanley assumed he would soon be back with George Dando in his dugout home. But before he could be discharged, he contracted a high temperature, diagnosed as malaria. So at least another three weeks’ hospital sojourn became necessary. The strains of malaria prevalent in the area were not generally fatal to healthy young men, but once in the bloodstream the sickness recurred at intervals and was very debilitating. The usual treatment was seven days in bed with massive doses of quinine, five days as an ‘up’ patient and then ten days or so convalescence, usually at the depot. Weak and exhausted, the victim would then be returned to his unit for temporary light duties.

Stanley must have spent Christmas at the hospital, although he makes no mention of it. At the end of January 1917 he was discharged to the RAMC Base Depot. From there, clutching his movement order, he prepared happily to return to his unit. It was only when he opened the order that he realized it directed him not to the 68th but to the 66th Field Ambulance. Dismayed, he felt a mistake had been made, but it was then too late to correct it. Oddly enough, the 66th FA was stationed at Kalinova, where he had left the 68th. So on arrival he felt even more disorientated: ‘Now I felt I was what I wasn’t. I still felt a lot of unget-at-able me was going on in the 68th’ – the ‘eternal’ quality of experience for Stanley. But ‘I fitted in, became a 66th Field Ambulance man and was pleased to note that families in their nice characteristics are not so dissimilar.’

Being convalescent, he was detailed for ‘light duties’, mainly in his section cookhouse which was simply a limber upended with a tarpaulin over the shafts.

Beginning early in the morning I would cook rashers for sixty men, two each. On my left as I knelt in a little groove cut in the ground for a wood fire, I had a wooden box full of rashers. On the fire was a dixie lid in which the rashers were fried. In my hand I had two flat pieces of wood with which I picked out bunches of rashers. … The cookhouse had a cook called The Black Prince, a grim-looking man who … Arabian Genie-wise, usually appeared when one had done something wrong. One day I was reading Paradise Lost and supposed to be watching a side of bacon that was simmering in the dixie. I smelled faint burning, but I was too late. He loomed out of the darkness with his black dog, gave a kick at the dixie and sent the lid flying, and up rose a column of smoke. …

Despite this King Alfred episode, Stanley found the sergeants and men to be as friendly as those of the 68th and settled to enjoying their banter and their different personalities. He spent much time on picket-duty, guarding the camp at night. For him, this was no hardship; he never needed long sustained spells of sleep. His graphic memories of the sights and sounds of the night – the dark shadows of pye-dogs scavenging among the tents, the hooting of owls – remained stored in his mind with the hundreds of others of these war years which were to erupt in such glory at Burghclere.

Many of these memories are incorporated in the left wall frieze. On the left, a solitary figure washes a shirt, using water heated in a couple of mess tins over an alfresco fire of twigs: ‘a more ideal means for scrubbing shirts than one of these smooth shiny granite boulders could not be found’. Stanley jokingly described to Florence how he would wash his shirt ‘by numbers’ – in army drill fashion – so that none remained unsoaped. Above the bell-tent, the upended limber with its tarpaulin cover shelters the section kitchen where the Black Prince reigned and where Stanley, concentrating on his Milton, dreamily burned the bacon. The ritual washing-up of mess tins is adjacent, and at the first line of bivouacs the cooked bacon and fried bread is being doled out. Towards the foreground, Stanley – all the figures are emotionally Stanley – his mess tin prudently fastened through his epaulette, uses an acquired bayonet to pick up litter; RAMC personnel were unarmed. In the angles of the arches below, a pye-dog scavenges among the heaps of discarded tins waiting to be buried, and the heads of mules, penned into a gully, are visible. The men in the right-hand line of bivvies are receiving a welcome issue of fresh bread. Stanley had few complaints about the food, but fresh bread – which reminded him of bread, butter and jam at tea at Fernlea – was a welcome substitute for the more usual army biscuit. But ‘I do not pine for anything now that I’ve got Shakespeare. He beats the best bread ever baked.’

On the right of the bivouacs some of the section are at work on a fatigue, humping stones to reinforce a track. It may have been the recollection of such a fatigue which prompted one of Stanley’s lighthearted letters to Florence, who always insisted that whatever the circumstances, his letters should amuse her:

The other day I was having a rest after working … and I was thinking and thinking and pursuing this exercise in the same sort of way that our brother-in-distress the tortoise does. I say ‘in distress’ because he is so distressful – he is always trying to do the most impossible things. Well, when I had not got any Think – noun substantive – left [the interpolation is a gentle jest to Florence about her grammar lessons in his schooldays] I began reading Joshua, goodness knows why! Well, I saw the High Priests and the mighty men of valour going round the walls of Jericho and blowing on their rams’ horns, and then I heard the sound of falling walls and buildings, and then I saw men rushing in on every side massacring men, women and children. Well, I thought, this seems all very nice [he is either being ironic or he means ‘nice’ in the sense of a picture building in his mind] but something very nearly stopped me getting to this ‘very nice’ part; it was the part where God commands Joshua to detail one man out of every tribe to carry a stone from out of the centre of Jordan where the Priests’ feet stood firm and to take them to where they would lodge that night. Oh, I thought if God’s going to be detailing fatigue parties, I’ll be a Hun!

In the angle on the right, one of the party is using an improvised tamp – it appears to be a broken travoy shaft – weighted at the top with a padded stone and rammed down by blows from another tamp. The objective, Stanley says, was to break up the large stones into smaller pebbles, which were then set vertically like cobbles and rammed down to make the surface. The entire scene is a composite of Stanley’s recollections of the 68th and 66th Field Ambulances. The orderlies wear winter service dress. There is a preoccupation with purposeful activity, keeping warm and fed, maintaining tidiness and organization – all attributes of Fernlea homeliness, his indication that he had found in the landscape and atmosphere of the Vardar hills another home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_d3ca1dff-4717-511d-a4b6-096e7479cd78)

The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze (#ulink_d3ca1dff-4717-511d-a4b6-096e7479cd78)

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 Florence

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.’

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.

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’.

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.’

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.’

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’.