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