Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

BY GERALD CUMBERLAND
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.” Walt Whitman.
BRENTANO’S NEW YORK MDCCCCXIX
Very many of the following pages were written in the trenches and dug-outs of Greece and Serbia. I added a chapter or two in Port Said, Alexandria and Marseilles. That is to say, I wrote far away from books and without reference to documents, and I wrote to refresh a mind dulled by the conditions of Active Service in the Near East. A few chapters were written in London and a few in Winchester.
Here and there may be found factual inaccuracies, though if these exist I am not aware of them. But the spirit of the book is as near the truth as I can bring it.
Gerald Cumberland
Winchester 2 nd June 1918
It was when I was a very young man indeed that I caught and succumbed to my first attack of Shaw-fever. I do not remember how I caught it; something in the Manchester air, no doubt, was responsible for my malady, for a handful of “intellectual” Manchester people had most daringly produced a complete Shaw play, and, though I had not witnessed the play, I had read it, and it was with delight that I saw The Manchester Guardian saying about You Never Can Tell just the very things I had myself already thought. I found that in my suburban circle of friends I was regarded as harbouring “advanced” ideas. Shaw, I was told, was “dangerous.” This bucked me up enormously, and I thereupon wrote a long essay on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and, desiring further to astonish and bewilder my friends, got into communication with Bernard Shaw with a view to having the essay published in pamphlet form. When it was known in Manchester suburbia that Shaw had written to me, a boy still at school, my friends could not decide whether I was cleverer than they had hitherto supposed or Mr Bernard Shaw more foolish than seemed possible.
I have never completely recovered from that first attack of Shaw-fever; like ague, it sleeps in my bones and, from time to time, makes its presence known by little convulsions that are disturbing enough while they last, but which generally die pretty quickly.