Return of a Dead Officer's Kit
Vera Brittain's fiancé
Roland Leighton had been expected home on leave just after Christmas 1915.
He died 23 December of wounds received during a night-time wire inspection a
day earlier. What follows here is an extract from a letter written by Vera
to her brother Edward on 14 January 1916 from the London hospital where she
was working as a VAD. She had travelled to Brighton to visit Roland's
family...
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Roland Leighton 1915
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...I arrived at a very
opportune though very awful moment. All Roland’s things had just been sent
back from the front through Cox's; 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, or what the returned kit of which so much has been
written in the papers, really meant. It was terrible. Mrs Leighton and Clare
were both crying as bitterly as on the day we heard of His death, and Mr
Leighton with his usual instinct was taking all the things everybody else
wanted & putting them where nobody could ever find them. (His doings
always seem 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 - another set rather less worn, and
underclothing and accessories of various descriptions. Everything was damp
& worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor
Victor nor anyone else who may some day go to the front was there to see. If
you had been you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without
its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of
those clothes was the smell of graveyards & the Dead. The mud 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 were saturated with dead bodies -
dead that had been dead a long, long time. All the sepulchres and catacombs
of Rome could not make me realise mortality and decay and corruption as
vividly as did the smell of those clothes. I know now what he meant when he
used to write of 'this refuse-heap of a country’ or ‘a trench that is
nothing but a charnel-house’. And the wonder is, not that he temporally
lost the extremest 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 even I 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 on
top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.
The clothes he was wearing when wounded were those in which he came home
last time. We discovered that the bullet was an expanding one. The hole
where it went in 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 back bone 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 khaki waistcoat or vest
(whatever that garment you wear immediately below your tunic in cold
weather) 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 blood-stained too.
He must have fallen on his back, as in every case the back of his clothes
was much more stained & muddy than the front.
The charnel-house smell
seemed to grow stronger and stronger till it pervaded the room and
obliterated everything else. Finally Mrs Leighton said ‘Robert, take those
clothes away into the kitchen, and don’t let me see them again; I must
either burn or bury them. They smell of Death; they are not Roland, they
seem to detract from his memory & spoil his glamour. I won't have any
more to do with them.’ And indeed one could never imagine those things the
same as those in which he had lived & walked. One couldn’t believe
anyone alive had been in them at all. No, they were not Him. So Mr Leighton
took them away; they are going to keep only that blood-stained vest he was
wounded in if it can be sterilized, as I think it can - and his Sam Browne
belt. After the clothes had gone we opened the window wide & felt
better, but it was a long time before the smell and even the taste of them
went away.
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