SHERIFF’S DIARY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 863, 6 January 1930, Page 14

SHERIFF’S DIARY

AUTHOR OF “JOURNEY’S END’’ RECORD OF VIMY RIDGE Extracts from the private war diary of R. C. Sherriff, author of “Journey’s End,” including bis first ten days in France, most of which were spent in the front line trenches, were made public for the first time in “The Observer" by G. W. Bishop. Nobody outside of his family had previously read this personal record, kept by a youth of 19, then Second Lieutenant R. C. Sherriff of the Ninth East Surrey, who was ordered to proceed to join his unit on September 30, 1916. Three days after landing in France he was in the front line, his diary commencing with the morning of his departure and ending after his first eight days in the trenches on Vimy Ridge. In the train from Waterloo Station he tried to read “Old Mortality,” one of two books this youth took along—the other being the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius. “But it was difficult to concentrate,” he wrote. There are thumbnail sketches of a fellow officer and other travelling companions, and the first important event was his arrival at Etaples. Within thirty-six hours he was on his way to the trenches, not to the Somme, “where the world’s greatest battle was then raging at its very height, but to Vimy Ridge, then a cushy part of the line.” Leaving St. Pol he saw in the distance the flicker of Verey lights over No Man’s Land, and when the train stopped he heard the sound of guns. Says He Felt Lonely

“I felt very, very miserable,” he wrote of his arrival at Bruay. “A dreadful loneliness came over me. The next day I was going into the line, the very place where friends were so much needed, and yet I had none. 1 knew none of these officers sufficiently to call them friends. Besides, they had all been in it before, and I thought they looked down on me because I had not.”

He was surprised to find that the officers regarded the war as a sort of picnic. “In imagination I had seen some stern, grey-haired captain explaining what our next sector on the line was like, and detailing our duties. Instead of which —he seemed far more concerned in getting his gramophone up the line without breaking any records.”

The loneliness was only momentary. “By degrees C Company became my most perfect ideal, and it would have broken my heart to be transferred to any other company. Here he met several men who inspired the characters of “Journey’s End,” among whom Osborne was tenderly drawn in the diary as a “father” who was drying his socks over a candle when Lieutenant Sherriff first met him. “It seems impertinent to write of a man like- father. Words cannot explain the respect and love I had for him.” C Company set out for the trenches almost immediately. There is this description of the march: “Somewhere from the wood a field gun barked out every few minutes. One solitary gun, it seemed, for there was no other sound.”

Then his first experience of trench warfare, and finally “Journey’s End,” the front line in which he spent eight days and nights within 50 yards of the German trenches.

“I should not take a walking stick with you; it’s in the way,” a fellowofficer remarks to Lieutenant Sherriff on his first duty in the early morning. They inspect a whole sector, arriving ‘at Ersatz Crater. “There was something about Ersatz Crater which still makes me shudder and that still makes my heart beat hard when I think of it.” Then his first duty alone. “I am responsible for 100 yards of the British front line. I think of days at home when I read of this famous ridge in the papers. I recollect pictures of slaughtered Germans and slaughtered French lying on this ridge in awful confusion. I wonder if they are all buried under these sandbags and whether they still have ghastly convulsive expressions on their rotting faces. And I wonder if their souls still float in the air above the ridge —French and German mingled together in one invisible cloud of suspended life. What an eternity this evening is! I think of the other hours of duty I have to do the next eight days and nights, and I shudder when I add them up. I shall never do it. It Is slow torture, in which every minute is eternity.”

There is an entry concerning this young officer’s first experience with death. “The news stunned me when I heard it. Then I felt sick. Never before had death come so intimately, so close as a few hours ago in the grey light of dawn. I had inspected my sections as I stood along the trench, and now C ’s face came vividly to my memory; it had been a stupid, boyish face with receding chin and watery eyes. He had stood up there with rifle held for inspection and his face held down because a thin sprouting beard showed on his chin. I had told him to shave the day before. I asked him why he had not done so and he had just shifted his feet about, stuttering something. Now he was dead, and I had worried him in his last few hours.”

The diary consists of 244 pages and it is hard to realise that it is an account of less than a fortnight in France, ending when C Company returns to the reserve trenches. Lieutenant Sherriff intended to follow it with his experiences during rest time and started another volume, but had to give it up. He never returned to Vimy Ridge, for he was detailed with 20 men to go to Loos to take charge of tunnelling operations. Later he returned to his company, fighting at Lens, Loos and Messines, and was wounded in the battle of Passchendaele by shell fragments which hit him in the arm and head. He was in St. Thomas Hospital for six months, and when convalescent he drafted his diary. “Was it then,” Mr. Bishop asked Mr. Sherriff, “that you first had the idea for ‘Journey’s End’?” “Yes, vaguely,” he replied. “I first thought of a book, and you will see that in a letter to my mother, which is pasted in one of the early pages. I wrote, ‘I should like to write a book about it one day if I can.’ I had quite forgotten that I said this un£JS 4 looked through the diary the otlTbr day. Actually, I planned ‘Journey’s End’ five years before I wrote a word of the play. That is, 1 actually drew up the plan of the dugout and incoherently pictured Stanhope and Raleigh and the clash between them. Then Osborne stepped in. And those three characters were—subconsciously most of the time—with me until I began the first act on a holiday at Selsey Bill in August, 1927.”