Diary of a Dead Officer: Being the Posthumous Papers of Arthur Graeme West

By Arthur Graeme West

Diary of a Dead Officer: Being the Posthumous Papers of Arthur Graeme West are the vivid diaries of British war reporter Arthur West.  It is considered one of the most detailed first hand accounts of trench warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781537807546

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West

INTRODUCTION

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ARTHUR GRAEME WEST WAS BORN in September 1891. The first few years of his life were spent in the country, but before he was ten years old his people moved to London, where they settled in Highgate, Graeme being sent to the Highgate School. At the age of fourteen he went to Blundell’s School at Tiverton, with a scholarship.

His school-days were not particularly happy. He was at that time too shy and retiring to impose himself in any marked degree on his contemporaries, and his complete ineptitude at any kind of game—I have never seen a man so demonstrably and obviously unathletic—meant that at best he would figure very much in the background in a community where skill at games was the only passport to popularity and the only measure of worth. But worse than this, West was clever—at least, he was concerned with books; he was also a naturalist, and concerned with bugs; his study used to crawl with caterpillars, and at that time smelt badly.

These two tastes combined to damn him as a public-school boy. Blundell’s had one universal designation for anyone who regarded books as something other than work, and work as something other than an unpleasant method of wasting boring tracts of time compulsorily inserted in an otherwise interesting existence. This designation was worm.

West was a worm, and there was no more to be said. Being a worm at Blundell’s meant that no one thought of asking your opinion on any matter of importance, and no one went out with you except other worms. As regards his taste for caterpillars, this was unusual, even a little unorthodox, and therefore an object always of suspicion, and sometimes of active suppression.

At school, then, West was a quiet, effaced sort of individual, alternately bullied by big boys when they wanted to evince their superiority to worms, and cajoled when they wanted their exercises done, but on the whole too obscure to be actively disliked.

In July 1910, somewhat to the general surprise, West obtained the School Scholarship to Balliol College, and went up to Oxford for the first time in the autumn of the same year.

At Oxford his personality expanded and developed in a remarkable way. Never in the strict sense of the word a clever man—even by the academic standard (he took only a third in Mods. and a second in Greats, and worked hard for them, too)—he became an extraordinarily well-educated one. His passion for literature was intense. He was one of those rare individuals who actually liked reading the really great men. It is always something of a shock to find a man reading Milton and Spenser, Homer and Lucretius, Shakespeare and Chaucer for fun, but West read them all, and liked them. It was all of a piece with his discriminating literary judgment that he disliked Virgil intensely.

His reading, especially in poetry, was wide, and it was always somehow hitched on to his life. It was not so much that he continually bored you by quoting, as that his comments on people and things always might have been quotations, and weren’t. He caught at once the style and spirit of the writer he reverenced at the moment, and in his conversation could not help unconsciously reflecting it. I never met a man who could talk Meredith conversation so well as he could.

With all this came an indescribable charm of manner. When people were attracted to West—and as time went on they became more and more attracted—they would have found it difficult to say what it was they liked in him. He had no outstanding qualities to win you. He was not pre-eminently witty, generous, genial, or hospitable. He knew few anecdotes, and never told them.

Perhaps it was more than anything else by all the things that he was not that he charmed. He was so devoid of push and advertisement, so quiet, tranquil, and unassuming, so eminently companionable, and above all, such a good listener, that, though these things did not constitute his charm, they went some way to explain it.

He had a. great love for beauty in what ever form it came to him. Before he left Oxford he became a really good judge of most things that attract the eye. He knew much of pictures, furniture, china, and would in time have become a connoisseur.

His early predilection for caterpillars developed into a great liking for the country, for spring, for autumn, and the changing seasons. Summer, however, always seemed to him dull.

I have spoken of him as conspicuously unathletic. He was, but he was a great walker. He prided himself, towards the end of his Oxford time, on his αυτάρκεια, his self-sufficiency, which never became self-complacency, and on his lack of dependence upon others. He would go off for prodigious walks by himself lasting the whole day through, or paddle in a lonely canoe far up the unfrequented upper river. He was, at least until the war came, one of those few people who really liked being alone, not so much because other people bored him, as because he did not bore himself. He was, in fact, sufficiently valuable to be able to stand his own company. But he had none of the more endearing vices: he could never master a pipe, he never got drunk (I am speaking of before the war), beer was a closed book to him, and so were cards. Also he had never heard any music. He was just coming to music when the war took him.

When the war broke out, it left him for some little time untouched. He had got so detached from the world—he scarcely ever read a paper—that it took some time for the war to shake him back into it.

He went back to Oxford for the autumn of 1914, his fifth year, with the intention of reading English literature. He found that all his friends had gone, and that his boasted αυτάρκεια had forsaken him. Oxford was buzzing like a great hive with war preparations, and his poem, The Owl Abashed, shows how even at Oxford the spell began to weave itself around him. In the Christmas vacation the infection took him. He applied for a commission in a rush of enthusiasm, was turned down for his eyes, and enlisted as a private in the Public Schools Battalion.

From that time, until his death in April 1917, his life was a succession of training in England and trenches in France, with short intervals of leave.

In November 1915 he crossed to France; thence to the Front. In four months he was home again and on his way to Scotland, where he was trained for an officer until August 1916, when he had a few weeks’ leave preparatory to going to the Front.

Most of this leave was spent at Box Hill in Surrey, and it was there that the complete change of attitude to the war, described in Part III. of the Diary, took place.

In September 1916 he went to France with a commission, and was out there continuously until his death.

It is difficult to describe with any exactness the effect of the Army on a man like West, nor is it very necessary to do so, for the extracts speak for themselves.

A few things, however, must be said.

West joined the Army from a feeling of duty and, in the best sense of the word, of patriotism. Violence of any kind was abhorrent to his nature. He was one of that numerous body of schoolboys who had never had a fight, and he hardly ever quarrelled. In the words of an old lady who knew him well, Mr. West wouldn’t hurt a fly.

West enlisted, then, convinced of the rightness of his cause, feeling it his duty to help his country, but disliking, as intensely as any man that ever put on khaki, the work he had set out to do.

This feeling of hatred for violence rarely comes out in the Diary. It was always there, but somehow it was taken so much for granted, even by himself, that it rarely finds expression, save perhaps in the general longing for peace that comes to every soldier.

The intense abhorrence of Army life which inspires almost every line of Part II. of the Diary sprang from a different cause. West was a man of marked individuality