The Pursuit of Laughter (58 page)

These two books give a lively picture of the missionaries in southern Africa. They complement each other. Mora Dickson’s is interesting; Elspeth Huxley’s brilliant, and
illustrated
with dozens of contemporary photographs and sketches. Undoubtedly the subject of her book is one of the world’s strangest and bravest heroes.

Beloved Partner: Mary Moffat of Kuruman
, Dickson, M.;

Livingstone and His African Journeys
, Huxley, E.
Books and Bookmen
(1974)

About ten years after the end of the First World War two books were published which for the first time described the war truthfully, and enabled people who had not fought in it to understand what it had been like. They were
Goodbye to All That
by Robert Graves, and
Her Privates We
, whose author concealed his identity by putting only his regimental number on the title page, ‘Private 19022’. Nothing written before or since can touch the extraordinary and bitter realism of these books, one written by a great poet and the other by Frederic Manning, described by his publisher Peter Davies as ‘an intellectual of intellectuals—poet, classical scholar… delicate in health and fastidious almost to the point of foppishness…’ who had felt it his duty to enlist in the ranks.

Another writer, R.H. Tawney, also quoted in
The Literature of War
, complained of the stereotype of the ‘Tommy’ as a ‘merry assassin, invariably cheerful, revelling in the excitement of war, rejoicing in the opportunity of a “scrap” in which we know that half our friends will be maimed or killed’, whereas in reality war is for most soldiers ‘a load that they carry with aching bones, hating it… hoping dimly that in shouldering it now, they will save others from it in the future’. The poets who had rejoiced in the
opportunity
for a ‘scrap’—Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell—had the luck to die before the
terrible reality of war could make a mockery of their romantic, boy-scout-like attitude towards it. The poets who came after them, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, evoke the pity and horror. Out of all the millions engaged in the fighting a handful of writers of outstanding talent survived long enough to impress their view upon succeeding
generations
, and the First World War is familiar to us all because of them.

Letters from France
are the letters to his mother of a very courageous soldier; he was awarded the MC and bar, and the DSO. They are extraordinarily brave letters simply because they hardly touch Lancelot Spicer’s actual experiences. He fought in the front line on and off for years and almost all his friends were killed, but apart from an
occasional
grumble about water filling the trenches, and sometimes the mention of the abomination of desolation which was no man’s land with its dead and dying, he spares his family as much as he possibly can. He never fails to pretend to be ‘cheery’, and even when he is wounded he feels perfectly well. He makes the very most of days ‘resting’ behind the lines in a cottage or farmhouse, though he is not particularly kind about ‘
les chers alliés
’. Understatement to this degree shows courage and thoughtfulness of a high order.

One of the vilest scourges of war in the trenches was the plague of rats which gorged on unburied corpses. There is a fearful description of them in Alistair Horne’s history of Verdun,
The Price of Glory
. Lancelot Spicer never mentions them, except that as well as asking his mother to send a cake for the men he also asks for a tin of rat
poison
. His letters are a brave attempt to spare his mother and his family so that they might go on believing in ‘Tommy’ as ‘a character like a nice big fighting pet bear with an
incurable
yearning and whining for cheap cigarettes’ in Charles Sorley’s words. Possibly he partly succeeded.

The Hungry Ones
is a book by another brave young officer who also survived Ypres, Loos and the Somme: C.P. Clayton. It is described as his ‘edited diaries’, the editor being his son, born after the war. If it was indeed written as a diary it is a pity that it could not have been published as such, which would have given it much greater interest and
immediacy
. Whether it was C.P. Clayton or his editor son who wrote in the historic present, it is a tiresome way of writing. This rather shapeless account of the ghastly war will appeal to those who enjoy reading about war, and as publishers’ lists bear witness, there are plenty of them.

Strangely enough both Lancelot Spicer and C.P. Clayton describe having white
feathers
pinned on them by mad old ladies in London; Clayton just after being decorated at Buckingham Palace when he had changed into civilian clothes to go on to a play. These pestilential women patriots did not re-emerge during the second war.

The Literature of War
is very well done; it begins with Kipling and ends with John Le Carré’s cold war spies. Only English writers are discussed, there is no Tolstoy, no Stendhal, no Solzhenitsyn. Andrew Rutherford is an admirer of Evelyn Waugh’s three novels,
Sword of Honour,
far the most brilliant book to come out of the Second World
War. There is a chapter on T.E. Lawrence and
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, once so
extravagantly
praised. Mr Rutherford seems to accept Lawrence’s book as a truthful account of his part in the ‘revolt in the desert’. Not that it greatly matters whether it was true. It made a contrast with Flanders mud, and as such it was acclaimed. Lawrence’s
description
of how he killed a ‘mutineer’, quoted by Andrew Rutherford, is not very attractive, but then like so much that he wrote the episode was most likely a figment of his
imagination
; whether that makes it any more attractive is for the reader to judge. In any case the literature of war is not necessarily the history of war.

The Literature of War
, Rutherford, A.;
Letters from France 1915-18
, Spicer, L.D.;
The Hungry Ones
, Clayton, C.P., ed. Clayton, M.
Books and Bookmen
(1979)

Beautiful, charming, high-spirited and affectionate, a loving sister and a perfect friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was not a perfect wife. She was a compulsive gambler, her debts multiplied year by year until their burden crushed her. She never dared tell the Duke how much she owed, so that though from time to time he paid up, or partly paid up, she was never free from debt. Mr Coutts the banker was dazzled by her charm and prestige, but although he had three daughters to marry and saw what a help it would be if the Duchess would give them a little push, even he jibbed at the size of the loans she asked him for and the fact that the Duke brushed aside his requests that at least the interest on the loans should be paid.

In another way, too, the Duchess seemed as if she might fail as a wife, though this was not her fault. The Devonshires were married in 1774 when the Duke was 25 and Lady Georgiana Spencer 16. Eight years later she had had a couple of miscarriages but no child.

In 1782 Lady Elizabeth Foster came into their lives. The daughter of Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, she had left Mr Foster by whom she had two sons; she was on her own and very short of money. For the Devonshires it was the
coup de foudre
. The Duke, hitherto considered rather cold and lethargic, became a new man. He flirted with Lady Elizabeth, he made jokes and was agreeable to everyone. Georgiana loved her not only for herself but because through her the Duke had become approachable. With Lady Liz as go-between life was in every way easier for the Duchess.

Inevitably there was gossip about grand people who lived in a goldfish bowl, and when the Duchess became pregnant it was thought wise that Lady Liz should go abroad for a while. She took the Duke’s natural daughter by a Miss Spencer, a little girl of seven, with her, and she also took letters of introduction to Queen Marie Antoinette and Mme de Polignac. The Devonshires and Lady Elizabeth corresponded, and she kept a diary, which is why so much is known about ‘Canis’ the Duke, ‘Mrs Rat’ the Duchess and ‘Racoon’, or
Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster. The Duchess wrote to her: ‘God bless you my angel love, I adore and love you beyond description, Canis sends a thousand loves’.

Lady Liz was a fatal charmer, adored and courted, and she did not waste her journey. Kings and Queens, at Versailles, Turin and Naples, received her with kindness, and she had a devoted admirer in Count Axel Fersen. She was having such a lovely time that she
lingered
in Naples long after the Duchess’s daughter was born. Canis implored her to return. He had gone back to Bath for his gout.

‘This place has been very unpleasant to me compared with what it was a year and a half ago. For then I had the Rat and Bess and good health and fine weather, and now I have none of them till a day or two ago the Rat and her young one came down here.’

Three months later Georgiana wrote, saying: ‘As much as I long to see you it is not for me I write. I am certain poor Canis’s health and spirits depend upon your soothing
friendship
’. Could Bess not spend the summer with them at Chatsworth? She could go abroad again for the winter. The Racoon gave in; she left Naples, and in Switzerland on her way home Gibbon described her in a letter to Lady Sheffield as ‘poorly in health but still adorable.’

Did anyone dislike Lady Liz? Lady Spencer abominated her; she feared for her
daughter’s
marriage. Many years later, Georgiana’s daughters disliked her, and they said she was affected. This was obviously jealousy, both their parents being besotted by her. On the other hand Georgiana’s sister, Lady Bessborough, loved her all her life.

Next time the Duchess became pregnant Lady Elizabeth did so too. Their daughters were born within a month of each other, but the circumstances were very different. Appearances had to be kept up, and the unfortunate Lady Liz had to hide herself and her baby. She went to a frightful flea-ridden hole in southern Italy for the birth, helped by her brother, Lord Hervey. She called the child Caroline St Jules and put it out to nurse. Thenceforward her one idea was to get little Caro into the Devonshire House nursery to be brought up with the Duke’s legitimate children. Lady Elizabeth also had a son by the Duke; they called him Augustus Clifford and he became a distinguished Admiral. It was odd to give him the name Augustus since one of Lady Liz’s sons by Foster had that name already.

When the Duchess was expecting her third child she was afraid her money worries might make her miscarry, so she fell in with Bess’s idea that the baby should be born abroad. Undeterred by the French Revolution, which had begun in July 1789, the Devonshires, their daughters, the Duchess’s sister and brother-in-law, accompanied of course by Lady Elizabeth Foster, all gathered at Spa, and Brussels, and finally went to Paris, where in May 1790 Georgiana gave birth to a son, Lord Hartington, always called Hart.

Back in England after this triumph, she was faced once more with her creditors. She totted up her debts, they came to
£
61,000. Worse still, she fell in love with a younger man, Charles Grey, future Lord Grey of the Reform Bill. Soon she was expecting his baby. The Duke was furious, and insisted that she leave England. On her way to the coast she was
forbidden
to stay at Devonshire House or at Chiswick. This makes it clear that had she
produced
a boy the Duke would have divorced her. He would have considered it dishonest to his brother that in the event of Hartington dying childless, Grey’s son should inherit
everything
. Considerations of this sort did not prevent the ladies, Georgiana, her sister and mother, and Lady Elizabeth, who had all gone to France to be with her during this difficult time, from reviling the Duke. Bess said he was a brute and a beast. Fortunately the child, born at Montpellier, was a girl, ‘Eliza Courtney’; the Greys adopted her.