Take Verdun again. For me this prolonged battle has a strange fascination. There is something more terrible and primitive about it than about any other struggle of the War. It was a sort of death-grip between two antagonistic military conceptions.
(The remainder of this letter never came to hand.)
March 31st, 1917.
It must be a singular experience for our troops on the Somme to miss enemy artillery fire, trench mortars, grenades, etc., from the scheme of things. What a huge relief to the Infantry to have a pause from the eternal "Whew-w-w-w-Crash" of the high explosives! I fear, nevertheless, that the British infantrymen will soon resume acquaintance with them, for the War isn't over by a long chalk yet. Meanwhile, however, the sight of an at present comparatively unblemished countryside must be a great joy to men sick of the howling wilderness created on the ground that has been contended for since July, 1916. I know those Somme battlefields—every square yard of soil honeycombed with shell-holes, all traces of verdure vanished, trees reduced to withered skeletons, blasted forests, fragments of houses, with the poor human dead rotting all around. Verily a nightmare country.
You may have remarked in the last Alleynian a poem called the "Infantryman," by Captain E. F. Clarke. It appeared first in Punch some time ago and has had a great vogue. When I read it first, before I knew who the author was, I was greatly taken with this poem. I now see from The Alleynian that it is the work of an O.A., a chap whom I held in high regard, namely, Eric Clarke, whom you cannot fail to remember as King Richard II in the Founder's Day Play, 1913—his superb acting in that rôle was greatly admired. It was he who was to a large extent responsible for my undertaking the editorship of The Alleynian. He was my immediate predecessor in the job.
The poem appeals powerfully to me. To use the words of a Canadian poet, R. W. Service, "it hits me right." It has a swing about it, it has ideas, it has atmosphere. Pervading it through and through is the atmosphere of this Western Front. I have often told you that I had yet to meet the man who could convey that atmosphere in story, book or article. Clarke's poem (along with Bairnsfather's pictures) is one of the very first pieces I have read that really gets this atmosphere. The verse is not particularly polished, but it has life and force. Its simplicity adds to its effectiveness. Such an expression as "the sodden khaki's stench" lives in the memory, for it appeals directly to the soldier's recollection of his experiences—that odour the infantryman must have noticed dozens of times in the wet dawn, when he was waiting to go "over the top." Clarke has undoubtedly made a name for himself by the poem. Decidedly he has lived up to the high reputation he had at school. It looks as if he will make a name in literature. [See p. [240], text and footnote].
These days I am tremendously busy and revelling in it, as the work is so completely congenial. I am muddier and greasier than at any other period of my existence, and gloriously happy withal.
A corporal in our Company lives in the Herne Hill district, and in civil life was a tram conductor for the L.C.C. on the Norwood section. He has been out here two years, and won the Military Medal for gallantry on the Somme. Very interesting to meet one of the "dim millions" from one's own neighbourhood in this fashion, n'est ce pas?
In April Paul Jones, as a Tank Officer, took part in the battle of Arras.