`London! London!'

In context, this entry from the diary of Arthur Graeme West, dated September 6, 1916, is unspeakably sad. Read it first, and I will explain:

“I have succeeded in getting leave…We reached London about seven. The sun was setting as I crossed Waterloo Bridge, a red bubble behind the Houses of Parliament, but in Waterloo station the sunlight had still been intense, though of that thick, almost palpable radiance that low sunbeams have from autumn suns seen through glass. After the journey almost the vividest happiness is over: the ever-nearing imminence of London, the outlying commons dotted with children’s figures playing, one I remember standing up amid a bush of dark green gorse, wearing a little read Corot-like cap.

“You approach the wilderness of roofs, see the tall buildings so familiar to you far away over them, the train winds and twists bumpily over points and switches, you lean out of the window and look up the long vertebrate rod of carriages, watch them turn and tail round the curves, you pass Battersea and Vauzhall, more and more widths of line, shunting engines, pointsmen, forests of signals, the signal boxes perched right up above the line; the arch of the great station opens before you dark and gloomy beneath the dirty glass, the ends of the platforms stretch forth to meet you, you wonder which it will be, this side, this side, in you glide past the long line of porters and waiting friends: you alight, everyone is welcomed, you make your way out. London! London! I think the first piece of conscious unhappiness comes when you realize how alone you are.”

West was 25 when he wrote these words almost 90 years ago. He had been educated at Highgate School, Blundells and Balliol College, Oxford. Clearly he knew his Ruskin. His prose is nuanced and highly personal, but without cloying self-regard. He describes a literal twilight but also the twilight of a world already disappearing, though he may not have known this. His eye and mind are shrewd, practiced and attuned to gradations of light and shade but also to gradations of feeling. He knew the comforts and desolations of home, when London was the capital of the civilized world.

In October 1914, still at Oxford, West applied for a commission but was rejected for poor eyesight. He enlisted as a private in the Public Schools Battalion in 1915. He was sent to France that November, became a lance corporal and saw repeated action. The following April, West was accepted for an officer training course in Scotland. In August 1916, the month before we wrote the above passage, West was made a second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He drafted a letter refusing to rejoin the army but did not post it. He returned to France, rose to the rank of Acting Captain, and was killed by a sniper’s bullet near Bapaume on April 3, 1917.

I find West’s diary more poignantly affecting than much of the poetry of such contemporaries and fellow soldiers as Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. Who might Arthur Graeme West have become?