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.’9
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!10
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