A Blasted Funk

One thing is for sure. Sherriff mentally went downhill in the spring of 1917. His life was ruined by incoming shells, shells yet to be fired, shells that had nearly missed, the shell with his number on it. Nothing could relieve his neuralgia except an escape from the shelling. He kept it to himself in the line. But the tone of his letters is desperate. ‘I feel I would be willing to do anything – resign my commission and work at any kind of work as long as I am only away from the awful crash of explosions which sometimes quite numb me,’ he wrote home on 1 February.

The weather didn’t help. It was snowy. He wrote a short story called The Cellars of the Cite Calonne, his theme being an evening spent with his comrades in good cheer. It was followed by a welcome stint behind the lines training recruits for a fortnight in March. He was back with the battalion on 24 March. The Battle of Arras opened on 9 April with the Canadians storming Vimy Ridge, forcing an urgent retreat by the Germans from the Lens salient. The city was massively hit with gas shells and the 9/East Surrey took over a new front line on 16 April on the outskirts of the town.

Sherriff had reached rock bottom. ‘It is funny that when I get a return of this I always get a return of this nervousness again...it is such a trial specially when you have to conceal it from the men,’ he wrote to his mother on 2 April. Five days later his neuralgia was again bad. ‘I always get this when I get near the guns again, but I am always hoping it will get better in time.’ It didn’t. On 14 April he wrote to his father, ‘I absolutely could not bring myself to face the line again and I went to a doctor and explained everything to him, he has given me a few days rest at the transport.’ On April 17 he again wrote to his father: ‘Naturally doctors are suspicious of these kind of cases as there are no doubt many who try this on... He examined me and said there was no question as to my nervousness and asked if I could think of any reason for it...’. The doctor prescribed Sherriff some tablets and asked him to come back later. ‘I am absolutely in his hands – if he decides I am fit to go up the line I must go – but what I dread is that by going up I should make some serious mistake through lack of confidence.’

Earlier that year, Wilfred Owen sent a letter to his mother. ‘I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell,’ he wrote after being shelled for fifty hours continually.10 During the bombardment the water in his trench rose above his knees and Owen says he nearly gave up and let himself drown in it. Sherriff, too, was very near the end of his tether. He would go to bed reading Marcus Aurelius who told him ‘nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear’. All very well but Marcus Aurelius had never been shelled.

Shell shock was still not a diagnosis that Sherriff ever considered or aired. ‘The suspense of long hours of duty in the line tells upon you... I think nearly everyone gets to this state sooner or later and it is of course a question of their powers of being able to conceal their fear after that’, he wrote to his father on 17 April.

Stanhope is a true to life portrait of the wreckage done by too long in the trenches. He drinks not to evade his responsibilities but so that he is better able to perform them. He is a functioning wreck. Max Hastings in his book Bomber Command writes about Guy Gibson VC, twenty-five-year-old leader of the Dam Busters: ‘Not a cerebral man, he represented the apogee of the pre-war English public schoolboy, the perpetual team captain, of unshakeable courage and dedication to duty, impatient of those who could not meet his exceptional standards.’¹¹ No wonder Sherriff was later drawn to the film of the Dam Busters story. Gibson was like Stanhope minus the drink.

There were men of the 9/East Surrey raid who seemed to like danger, Summers and Thomas for example, and were in their own way freaks. But even the bravest were prone to tears, booze, and, like Stanhope, morbidity. Stanhope complains that when Trotter sees a trench wall he just sees a brown surface. ‘He doesn’t see into the earth beyond – the worms wandering about the stones and roots of trees.’ But maybe what Stanhope sees is the inside of a grave, his mind moving through the earth like fish through water. Body parts were always cropping up in trench walls. The frontline was a vast ossuary. Immediately following that chilling thought, Stanhope orders a bottle of whisky.

Despite the lavish praise of Stanhope in the play by Osborne, both Osborne and Trotter would arguably have been better company commanders by the time the play opens. The actor playing Stanhope is playing an alcoholic martinet who is at the edge of reason. He nobbles the battalion doctor; he threatens a junior officer with his gun, and he talks gibberish. While the army was suspicious of psychiatric problems, good COs were not blind to men who were near cracking point and needed a break. Sherriff refers in his diary Louis Abrams (‘Abey’ from Trinidad), a young officer he arrived in France with, and whom he mentions as continually drinking whisky. It turns out that Abrams had a breakdown and went Absent Without Leave in early 1917. He was court-martialled and cashiered but treated leniently and sent home to Trinidad. It was a fate that Sherriff may have half-envied.

Quite what impact he made on those around him is unclear. Did his other men spot his crisis? The Battalion was getting a break from the front line and on 25 April he wrote to his father again about his neuralgia: ‘...the doctor I had been visiting thought it may be due to a straining of the eye muscles – I don’t care what it is if only someone can cure it for me. The trouble is it comes on for about an hour two or three times a day and while it is on it makes me feel absolutely knotted up – when it is over I feel quite fit again.’

In early May 1917 Sherriff’s battalion marched to Lozinghem, the column showing off to the French villagers all the German trophies they had captured. Early May produced a huge burst of wild flowers and the nearby river reminded Sherriff of the Itchen near Winchester. He sent home a scarlet pimpernel picked from his trench wall. It is today grey-brown and sandwiched in a fold of paper in his diary at his old school. He told his mother that if anything should happen to him, she should use his £50 savings to buy a bungalow.

The battalion trained until 9 May then marched onto Les Ciseaux and finally to some cottage billets. The march was twenty-two miles and four men collapsed. Sherriff had no idea whether they were going into the line or not. He was loath to leave the open countryside for the trenches. By mid-month the battalion entrained for Ypres and then marched to Hooge. This meant more shelling. On 17 May, Sherriff wrote home saying he was back in bed with ‘the same old nagging neuralgia.’ He wanted to talk to the doctor about it, but broaching the subject was hard as ‘it looks as if you are shirking.’ But he was also haunted by a suspicion that what lay behind his symptoms was a terrible character defect – cowardice. Neuralgia was such a feature of his life it is written into his play. Sherriff gave the condition to the officer Hibbert. Young Hibbert doesn’t play rugger or cricket – a bad sign. He is apparently wealthy and keeps pornographic postcards of girls about him. He is about as unlike Sherriff as you could get. Except for his symptoms.

Hibbert: This neuralgia of mine. I’m awfully sorry. I’m afraid I can’t stick it any longer.

Stanhope: No man’s sent down unless he’s very ill. There’s nothing wrong with you. (Act II, 2)

In the play, Stanhope sees these headaches as scrimshanking. He loathes Hibbert and ‘his repulsive little mind’. When Hibbert, who can no longer stand the fear he feels, tries to force his way past him to go down the line to see the doctor, Stanhope bars his way and tells him plainly that if he goes he will be shot in a nasty accident involving Stanhope’s revolver – ‘it often happens out here’.

When the threatened shot doesn’t come, Hibbert lets him have the truth: ‘I’m different to – to the others – you don’t understand. It’s got worse and worse, and now I can’t bear it any longer. I’ll never go up those steps again – into the line – with the men looking at me – and knowing – I’d rather die here.’ Is this Sherriff recalling the humiliation of his own fear?

In the 1930 novel of Journey’s End, co-written by Sherriff, Hibbert has a backstory that’s not in the play. His mother, a widow from a proud army family, lives in penury in Cheltenham having struggled to get her son a public school education and then into the Royal Engineers. But young Hibbert has managed to put off service abroad and has avoided anything dangerous. His mother pathetically invents elaborate yarns for the benefit of the ladies in her sewing circle, of how he almost won the VC.

The play made plain Hibbert’s crisis from his own mouth. ‘Stanhope! I’ve tried like hell – I swear I have. Ever since I came out here I’ve hated and loathed it. Every sound up there makes me all – cold and sick.’ Hibbert, persuaded by Stanhope to stay, joins in the post-operation binge after the raid on which Osborne is killed. He gets tight and boasts how he once took two tarts out for a spin in his motor after drinking too much ‘port and muck’ at Skindles, the Maidenhead dance venue for the in-crowd. Hibbert emerges as sleazy but he is in a way the most real and modern character in the play. Ask any drama teacher working on the text and it is Hibbert who is the one character every student instinctively understands. His fear is far more explicable than the others’ courage.

In an unmade screenplay version in 1939 Sherriff had second thoughts about young Hibbert. He went over the typescript, suggesting the character be removed altogether – ‘Hibbert and his troubles are not a vital part of the story.’ Why on earth did he write that? Of course Hibbert is vital. He is the fly in the ointment, one of the elements that prevent the play becoming just a silly public school yarn in khaki. Sherriff blackens Hibbert in the play. Perhaps because Hibbert’s is a modern mind: he will do whatever it takes to get out of the seemingly suicidal insanity of the position he and the others are in.

It would have been much easier for Sherriff to have written a rather different ending for the character and it might go something like this: Hibbert breaks down, admits to Stanhope his neuralgia is a damn lie and having faced up to his own disgrace he at last finds his courage, straightens his tie and departs the dugout with a brief word of excuse. Then he goes over the top in and walks into no-man’s-land, a burst of machine gun fire signalling his end. Sherriff rightly resists any such noble cheesiness. It is the integrity of the group, the company dynamic, the play is interested in, and Hibbert stays because Stanhope lends him sufficient self-respect to face the others. Sherriff knew that king and country are on no one’s mind when the shrapnel is flying. Under fire, at mud level, men will only die for their mates or an officer in whom they can find some sort of inspiration.

That is maybe one reason the play doesn’t ask questions. The drama is too in the moment to take stock. Sherriff at the front wrote what he saw and what he saw was his fellow men bonded together with the superglue of shared danger. The bond was unstated, class-based and unquestioned. For Sherriff this was part of the emotional appeal of the Front – the thing that no rowing eight or rugby team or workplace could ever match. But it had a terrible price. Letting down the group whose members would be prepared to die saving him, was his greatest worry. Hibbert is unloved and untrusted by the men. Hibbert’s platoon in the novel version is described as ‘sullen’ because his men know he’ll go absent in an attack. As Sherriff piercingly wrote, ‘the men with childlike simplicity, looked to their officer, their sergeant, or to one of themselves, to give them the example how to die.’ The extraordinary grimness of that sentence haunts the story.

Sherriff could not entirely control his fear of shells and he was terrified of jeopardising his own men through befuddled thinking. There is something easily forgivable about his insecurity. He was also clearly a much better officer than he realised. Nobby Clark, his CO, later, when they were friends, recalled him as ‘a steady unassuming young fellow of good presence. Carried a warm charm in his personality and had a certain calm, quiet air of distinction. Much respected by his men.’12 Sherriff was too shell-battered to ever believe it. For the fictional Hibbert neuralgia was a means of escape. For Sherriff, his own very real neuralgia was the upshot of his titanic struggle to do his duty. In the play it’s depicted as a transparent con. ‘Neuralgia’s a splendid idea. No proof, as far as I can see’, says Stanhope. (Act I)

In June 1917 the battalion marched to Mic Mac Camp, on the eve of the Battle of Messines. Sherriff was organising working parties, unloading trucks and so on. He was reading The Magnetic North, a book by the eccentric actress Elizabeth Robins, known as ‘Ibsen’s High Priestess’, about her experiences wandering about the Yukon. It must have made a change from the winding, trench-long sentences of Walter Scott. He turned twenty-one years old on 6 June and received an engraved matchbox from his parents. His sister Beryl sent him The Thirty-Nine Steps, which she recommended as ‘frightfully thrilling’. From her few surviving letters Beryl sounds good value. She worked during the war as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, first in London then in Southend-on-Sea (‘a dreadful place really, about as bad as Brighton!’, she wrote) at the Royal Naval Hospital. She reminded him that back home they were still laughing at the same old jokes – ‘one has to find something to laugh at in these times.’

His real birthday present, however, was a stay in a very modest French hotel from 9 June. By day he learnt about ‘the manners & habits of the Huns’ on a twelve-day sniping and intelligence course at Mont des Cats. It is the last we hear of him until July. This is because he finally got some leave or, as he calls it in a letter, ten days of ‘uninterrupted happiness’ in Hampton Wick. The leave was an immense relief. No shells, no neuralgia.

Behind the lines, British troops behaved as if they were at a village fête whenever the sun came out. Sports day activities featured a three-legged race, a tug of war, tilting the bucket and sundry japes. By 22 July they were back in the trenches, C and D Companies in the front line at Klein Zillebeke. Sherriff had still to face his biggest test yet – Passchendaele, known to historians as ‘Third Ypres’ – the campaign of infinite misery, fought in a constant downpour in a sea of mud, that would define the war for generations to come.

10    Letter 16 January 1917, Owen: Collected Letters by Wilfred Owen

11    Max Hasting, Bomber Command, p.256

12    Michael Lucas, The Journey’s End Battalion, p.97