Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

The Greeks to their south remained inactively neutral, still undecided which side to join. Reluctant to provoke their hostility, the Germans persuaded the Bulgarians to halt more or less along the Greek frontier. Given this breathing-space and using the free-port status of Salonika as a pretext, the Allies began landing a motley of reinforcements, French, British, Indian, colonial, even a token brigade of Russians. Over the months more formations arrived, including Italians and the Serbian armies from Corfu re-equipped by the French and with British field support. The line lengthened across the peninsula to the Albanian frontier, and the opposing armies settled into an uneasy confrontation across the formidable hills and valleys which divided them.

This was the complex situation into which Stanley and Budden stepped from their lighter on to the waterfront of Salonika. The sea journey had been a wonder to Stanley: ‘the sea turning a pale delicate green as it shallowed a little before the straits of Gibraltar … the pumice-stone corner of land that is Africa, the sea being a dark-blue lapis colour – a Reckitts blue as Budden called it – and looking west, blood-red as the sun is setting …’ 2

But so overwhelmingly did the impressions arrive that even at the sedate speed of a sea journey Stanley found himself unable to digest them as he wanted: ‘Change; but more outrage than change. … One is going beyond as a human what one is made by God to do. One should grow with experience, and one does not do that at that artificial speed. Had I walked to Salonika, I could have changed in exact proportion as where I got to on the journey. …’ 3

There was, however, consolation because he had a companion with whom to share them: ‘It was nice to have Budden. I really did not think [his friendship] was so just what I wanted. It was like discovering yourself.’ 4Alas, at Salonika: ‘Maybe because of the law of the army, one of which is tallest on the right, shortest on the left, we became separated beyond all hope. It was our only difference. So we were marched off to different camps. We grinned at each other as we solemnly marched off to our various destinations.’

This account to the Raverats – he says the event took place on the quay as they landed – again has a ring of over-dramatization. The losing of Budden was a hurt to his spirit. *At the time, he wrote to Desmond Chute: ‘I had to part with dear Lionel Budden at the rest camp here. I have no idea where he went.’ 6He went in fact to the 36th (Serbian) General Hospital at Vertekop, some forty miles inland, one of the hospitals provided by the British to support the reconstituted Serbian army. He had his violin with him. Another disappointment for Stanley was to discover that while he was on the way there, Gilbert had been transferred from his Field Hospital at Salonika to service as a medical orderly on a hospital ship. The brothers must have passed each other in the Mediterranean.

The feel of an army on active service, with its heterogeneous scatter of signposts, tents, camps, dumps, wagons, traffic and groups of khaki-clad men everywhere about their tasks is very different from that of an army at home. Despite the apparent confusion there is an air of purpose. The British front line was some thirty miles north of Salonika. Veterans back from the front were anxiously interrogated by Stanley’s newcomers: ‘What’s it like up there, chum?’ From the base camp Stanley could see the hills where the opposing armies lay entrenched. To his left rear lay the impressive massif of Mount Olympus, changing in appearance with the seasons and the sunlight, and pointing the way southwards into neutral Greece. On his left ran the valley of the Vardar (modern Axios), debouching into the Gulf south of Salonika but with its northern source deep in enemy territory. It formed the left boundary of the British sector and was the gateway to the Monastir road, the essential supply route for the other Allied armies inland to the west. On his right a rolling plateau gave way in the distance to the valley of the Struma river (today the Strimon), wide and fertile in its main course, but marshy and malarial at its estuary east of Salonika. Beyond the valley rose steeply a long wall of forbidding mountains forming the main Bulgarian defences in this area, the Struma sector. To attack there, the British had to cross the Struma valley in full view of the enemy, a distance of five miles in places, and the main road across it, the shell-swept Seres road, was to become as notorious to the men of the Salonika army serving on this sector as did the Menin road at Ypres.

If Stanley were to face directly north, he would have seen on a cleaf day, rising above the plateau which separated the Vardar and Struma valleys, the rounded summits of two hills, known to the French who first made their unpleasant acquaintance as the Grand and Petit Couronnés. Like Monte Cassino in a later war these seemingly innocuous but highly fortified hills effectively blocked any British advance. Beside them lay Lake Doiran, five miles in diameter. Around its fringes and stretching from the Struma to the Vardar, a distance of about fifteen miles, lay the main British front line, the Doiran sector, a maze of trenches and gun emplacements finding what cover they could among the ravines that seamed the slope. It was on this sector that Stanley was to get his first experience of active service.

Stanley cannot have remained many days at the depot after he had lost Budden. He was reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters , and told Desmond that he was ‘starving for music’:

Write out little scraps of music that I know. … Would it be too much to write out and send me a copy of some of those songs Mrs Daniell used to sing? By Jove, I shall not forget those times! I shall visit Bristol when I come home and we shall have to ‘go our rounds’ once more. I shall have a lot to tell you. Do send me out some little book, a good Dostoevsky that I have not read or something by Hardy. Send me some Milton or Shakespeare. 7

He must have been surprised to find himself posted not to a hospital as he had expected but to the 68th Field Ambulance. This was ‘up the line’ somewhere on the Doiran sector. A twenty-mile train journey took him to the railhead at Karasuli (Polikastron). Sitting on the wooden seats of the carriage and looking out of the window, he had his first real impression of this new land, ‘I was entranced by the landscape – low plains with thin lines of trees looking through trees to further plains of fields, and here and there a figure in dirty white. It was not a landscape, it was a spiritual world.’ ‘A spiritual world’: thus the first intimation of the overpowering grip that these parts of the Macedonian landscape were to have on his imagination, and which were to have such influence on both the future of his war service there and on the paintings at Burghclere. The scenery in its changing seasons from spring green to summer brown to winter snow and starkness; the whitewashed stone buildings; the patient peasants in the fields; the wandering flocks of sheep and goats, and the donkeys of this still backward land – all these intensified his admiration for the early Italian painters he so loved: biblical landscapes in an early Renaissance setting. It was as though so many visions of his youth had become reality. A travelling companion offered him a Horlick’s Malted Milk tablet. He took it casually, lost in his thoughts, until he realized how ‘wonderful’ it was, and was profuse in his thanks.

At Karasuli, where the train journey ended, he assembled with a little group of RAMC men and ‘my life in Macedonia began’. Travelling with painful slowness in ration oxcarts, they were taken along the main supply road, the ‘Karasuli-Kalinova track’. Although busy with traffic and lined with dumps and depots, the road was unmetalled. To Stanley’s countryman eye, all such roads were ‘tracks’. This one ran at the foot of the south-facing slope of a line of low hills to the right of which was Lake Ardzan and reminded Stanley of the road at home along Cockmarsh Hill. Over the crests of the hills and down the northern slopes facing the enemy ran the series of deep front-line ravines, the products of violent summer thunderstorms. These ravines were the principal access routes to the British trenches, and where they made breaks in the crests of the hills travellers came into view of the enemy and offered tempting artillery targets. So part of Stanley’s slow journey was made in the dark: ‘the quiet atmosphere, some man on a horse conducting us to a place in the direction of Kalinova, the oxen swaying from side to side, their heads stretched forward under their yokes, and the grass fire like a huge dragon stretching the length of Lake Ardzan and reflected in it, the wild dogs, and seeing during the night that they did not get at the meat, a heavy stone on the tubs …’. Later, he came to know that ‘most of what was vital to me in Macedonia was felt along that track. Whatever number of kilos it is, ten or twenty, each is part of my soul. When I think of the places along it and the different parts of this continuous hillside, for me to describe them is to describe something of myself.’ Once again Stanley is drawing feeling from his identification with places.