Somme War Diary [sombre, moving, sentimental]
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
I arrived at a very opportune, very awful moment. All of rulings. Things have just been sent back from the front three. Cox is They had just opened them and they were all lying on the floor. I had no idea before of the after results of an officer's death. What the returned kit of which so much has been written in the papers really meant it was terrible. Mrs. Layton and Claire were both crying as bitterly as on the day we heard of his death. And Mr Layton, with his usual instinct, was taking all the things everybody else wanted and putting them when nobody could ever find them. His doings always seemed to me to supply the slight element of humour which makes tragedy so much more tragic. These were his clothes, the clothes in which he came home from the front. Last time everything was dump and worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone else he may someday go to the front. Was there to see if he had been. You would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only wonder things when living the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the dead. The mother of France which covered them, was not ordinary mud. It had not the usual clean, pure smell of earth. But it was as though it was saturated with dead bodies. Did that had been dead a long, long time. All the supporters and catacombs of room could not make me realise mortality and decaying corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes. And I know what he meant when he used to write of this refuse heap of a country or a trench. There is nothing but a channel house. And the wonder is, and the wonder is not that he temporarily lost the extremist refinements of his personality, as Mrs Leighton says he did, but that he ever kept any of it at all, let alone nearly the whole. He was more marvellous than night ever dreamed. There was his cap bent in and shapeless out of recognition, the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head. With the badge coated thickly with mud. He must have fallen asleep on top of it. or perhaps one of the people who fetched him trampled on it. We discovered that the bullet was an expanding one, the whole where it went in front, well below where the belt would have been. Just below the right hand bottom pocket of the tunic was almost microscopic, but at the back almost exactly where his backbone would have been. There was quite a large rent. The under things he was wearing at the time have evidently had to be destroyed. But they sent back a cocky waistcoat or vest, which was dark and stiff with blood and a pair of khaki breeches also in the same state, which had been slit open at the top by someone in a great hurry, Probably the doctor in haste to get at the wound or perhaps even by one of the men. Even the tabs of his braces were bloodstained. He must have fallen on his back, as in every case, the back of his clothes was much more stained and muddy than the front. The Channel house smells seemed to grow stronger and stronger. Tulip evaded the room and obliterated everything else. Finally, Mrs Layton said, Robert, take those clothes away into the kitchen and don't let me see them again. I must either burn or bury them. The smell of death. They are not Roland. They seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. I won't have any more to do with them. And indeed one could never imagine these things the same as those in which he had lived and walk. One couldn't believe anyone alive had been in them at all. No, they were not him. After the close had gone, we opened the windows wide and felt better. But it was a long time before the smell and even the taste of them went away.