Swindon Isolation Hospital

Thursday July 20/16

Dear Father,

Nurse Collins just brought me a letter from Marion about the trip down to Dalhousie, so I thought I had better get busy and write to some of you to let you know that I am still alive and thriving. It will be two weeks to morrow since I arrived here and I fear that my time will soon be at an end for the doctor let me get up yesterday at noon, though, to tell the truth I haven’t been feeling so well since and got quite a scare this morning thinking that I was going to get Scarlet. I haven’t much appetite, my cata[?] has tightened up (a very bad sign) and I have a funny little pain in my back. What gave me such a scare though was that I thought I had a rash on my chest. Fortunately it has disappeared and my temperature is all right so I think I probably just caught a little cold. I wouldn’t mind getting a light attack of Scarlet in one way because it would mean another six or seven weeks of this delightful loafing – but I don’t want to get it because Dr. Whitley – the medical superintendant has a perfectly natural and righteous indignation at cross infection.

I am at present sitting in a big easy wicker chair with my pad on the June “Westminster” which mother sent me. I am dressed in a suit of blue grey flannel with a flannel shirt of the same material and a red bandana handkerchief which I use as a sort of neck cloth. I have the funniest brown slippers shaped like this [illustration]; they have no uppers around the heel and you have to do a perpetual one step to keep them from coming off. Before Marion’s letter arrived I was reading the “Heart of Midlothian” which I got Dorland to buy for me along with C Brooke’s “Villette” (Everyman’s Library [?]) in Swindon. This morning I finished a letter to Maude Clayson which I hope she won’t take seriously as I took up most of it explaining the meanings of [?]lick words and quoting various Latin authors. This is certainly the life. I am awakened at half past six or a quarter to seven by Nurse Jones, a rather pretty, very vivacious Welsh girl, who brings me a gargle and takes my temperature. A little later she brings me a big basin of water for washing and then my breakfast consisting of tea abominable toast (the cooking’s absolutely rotten here – that’s the only complaint I have to make) soggy and only half toasted and lovely Devonshire butter. After breakfast I take a nap, or else get dressed write a letter, read or do whatever I please. My room opens right on to the ground which separates this war (the Scarlet) from the Diptheria, and now that I have got up I am allowed to walk up and down this side – a distance of about sixty feet! For dinner I get meat, potatoes some extraordinary green stuff which they call ‘cabbage’ but which seems to consist principally of boiled leaves and some kind of milk pudding – rice, soy, or tapioca. In the afternoon Nurse Collins comes on. She is a very nice girl, not pretty but [?] and pleasant to talk to with a pretty, slightly humorous accent. For example she says “OO” for I and in a work like horrible, which she is very fond of using, she pronounces the O very short and slightly trills the r. She has a brother who is a captain in the Shopshire territorials in India and five sisters two of whom are also nursing. After dinner she brings me the ‘Telegraph” and the “Daily Mission”- the less objectionable of those two morning illustrated which consist of pictures and no news. I have sampled nearly all the London newspapers by this time except the Morning Post which I believe is a very good paper, the Westminster Gazette is an excellent paper I think, so is the Telegraph and the old Times is all right too. The ‘Chronicle’ is the best of the morning half penny’s I think, and the ‘News’ next. The ‘Express’ is the most consolatory, and the abominable sheet the ‘Daily Mail’ is the most irritating and pessimistic. Gavin’s paper ‘The Observer’ is by far the best Sunday paper but I only see that when I am in London. It has very good articles on the war and good literary and dramatic departments.

After reading the paper, which usually occupies about an hour, I generally have a nap till tea time – about four or a little after. Tea consists of the beverage, bread and butter again and jam – usually rotten jam which is strange because most English jam is decidedly good. Between tea and supper the time is variously occupied with reading or writing. For supper, at half past seven, I have a cup of cocoa and some b. and b. with sometimes a piece of cheese. About this time the ‘Engineer’ around the place (he attends to the heating apparatus I think, comes in and talks to me. He is a most terrifying specimen of the half-educated English democracy. A young man, about thirty I should imagine, he holds forth with great volubility upon social and industrial problems in a language almost unintelligible by reason both of the accent and the ungrammatical nature. I never heard such a muddle in my life, and there is no stopping him or attempting to discuss anything with him. He evidently reads enormously without understanding the least what he reads, attends University extension lectures, and, I believe, has appeared on a public platform himself! Once he gets started, like the Ancient Mariner, he holds you with his glittering eye and all you can do is gasp feebly, and smile or give a faint assertions or agreement or approval every   now and then. He has given me much food for thought, both in the problems which he presents himself, and in some damning statistics he has given me. A little later along comes Sister Crammach (at least I think that is how you spell her name – it is pronounced Krummik). She is a maiden lady of about two score or a little over, things that socialists came from the infernal regions and believes that people should keep their ‘proper station’ in life – quite a typical example of English middle class respectability I imagine. Nevertheless she is interested in ecclesiastical architecture, Anglo Catholicism and has read quite a bit along certain lines and I have found her very interesting. She is leaving to-morrow to go to a military hospital in South Wales. She came here from Reasling  and says that she can’t stand such a filthy, ill regulated hospital as this is. Coming from camp, as I did, I hadn’t noticed that it was particularly disrespectable but I can see now that it really is a disgraceful place. The matron is away at present and they haven’t a single trained nurse (With the exception of Sister Crammach) and consequently nobody to supervise the wards at all. There aren’t enough probationers to look after all the patients, the poor girls are rushed to death, don’t get enough sleep, or proper food. The maids are either fat and lazy or insane – and the place isn’t kept properly clean. On one side of the ward I am in – there is a ward full of howling infants with diphtheria, on the other an infant Scarlet ward. Yesterday an enteric patient was brought in, the poor fellow – he is a boy of eighteen – is suffering from a combination of typhoid, pneumonia and jaundice. He is in a side ward in the Dipth-House and is so ill that he ought to have a nurse looking after him all the time but, as things are, one of the Dipth. Nurses has to attend to him as well as look after her youngsters.

Well, the Carnival of destruction has assumed such colossal proportions in the last few days that if it keeps up much longer civilization in Europe will really receive its death blow. I am inclined to think now that until a world state can be formed the best policy for a nation to adopt is that of National non-resistance and un-preparedness; and I rather admire the attitude that they United States has taken all through the war. Of course the interests of International Law, Great Britain would not very well have kept out of this business, but the dislocation of everything is so great that one wonders sometimes if the game is worth the candle. Might not the growing power of the people, the advance of Socialism, and the spread of education have silently exerted an influence which would ae counteracted this and finally destroyed the influence and spread of militarism? I often wonder how this war would appear in half a century’s time. You simply can’t see contemporary events in their proper perspective. The casualty list of N.C.O.’s and men in this morning’s Telegraph took up eight columns and the names were in the smallest of print and bunched together in paragraphs, not one under the other, so that there must have been thousands! It is strange, but nearly every day I look for some person I know and find his name. Yesterday I looked for Prof. Weong’s sons, and sure enough there was Lt. H.V. Weong [?]. Families reported missing. This morning I thought of Josh Menzris and found his name among the wounded.

In last Sunday’s ‘Dispatch’ I saw an interesting paragraph by Count De Souza, the author of Germany in Defeat. He claims that by September Germany will have absolutely no reserves and that she must capitulate or retreat. He says that he expects a total collapse of the enemy forces immediately and that he has made every possibly allowance in his calculations. I am more afraid now of Sir Edward Carson and his ilk, the Daily Mail bunch and that type of Englishman which fills me with a perfect fury – I mean the type that wants war with the N.S. and every other country on the face of the earth so that Great Britain as the chosen instrument of the Almighty may extend her beneficent sway over the whole world.

Reading has occupied a considerable amount of my time since coming here. The nurses supply me with unlimited quantities of silly stories of which I have tried to read a few but never get past the middle. Of readable stuff I have read Belzae’s “Engeme Grandet” in French, a very nice story, rather sad but not at all depressing or ill balanced Ian Hay’s “A Knight on Wheels” which is full of real humour, and a very interesting book by Maurice Baring called “What I Saw in Russia”. It tells of his experiences as a War Correspondent in Manchuria during the Russo.Jap. war and in Russia immediately after the war. It is writing in a charmingly simple, almost naive style and, in spite of the fact that part of it is about war, I found it engrossing. One strange thing told was the fact that the most popular book by an English author among all classes was “Paradise Lost”. Almost every peasant has read it in a Russian Translation and at fairs and in village libraries you always find editions of it with pictures. He attributes its popularity to the fact that it combines supernatural happenings with the authority of the scriptures for the Russians like fairy tales and at the same time they “like them to be true”. The thing with which he was most struck in the Russian character was the humaneness and hospitality of the people.

I am continuing this Friday evening at 7:30. To day, as yesterday has been very close and hot, and I think that accounts for my having felt more poorly than any day I have been in the hospital. I still have the pains in my back and a slight headache but have no temperature and the doctor looked at my chest this morning and said there was no indication of a rash so I must be all right. Was reading most of today and finished the Heart of Midlothian. It certainly is a fine story but South is not ‘modern’ enough to suit me.

Is it any wonder that the inglorious young writers of to day go in for ‘realism?”. In other ages people had to endure many discomforts, disease was commoner and more fatal and manners more cruel, but the pain misery and wretchedness of human life were more equally distributed. I don’t think there ever was a time when there was such a distinct gulf between those who live in comfort and pleasant surroundings and the immense multitudes which as Heath the “Engineer” says, live in misery and degradation. He says that here in Swindon before the war employes of the G.W.Roy works were bringing up large families on 10S.a week! He also told me of many pitiful causes he had seen as for example hundreds of ragged barefoot children in the middle of winter fighting for a piece of bread or a lump of coal in some of the midland Towns. In London I myself have seen cares which make one wonder whether Alfred Russell Wallace wasn’t right when he said that our present day society was the most immoral and unjust that has ever existed.

And then the war! One cannot help but be struck by the sardonic humour, the absurdity of the whole business. Six million pounds a day now and slaughter on an almost innedible scale, and when it comes to an end the amount of distress that will follow in the period of reconstruction when half the population of England returns maimed and the other half out of work, with  the cessation of the [?] in dust up, the lack of capital and the frightful dislocation of all production industries is terrible to contemplate. To say that “all’s right with the world” now seems like a stupid insult to the sufferings of humanity; it offends common sense and outrageous human feeling.

I can’t help thinking how very, very fortunate I have been since leaving home. Every time when things seemed hopeless something has always turned up to make life seem brighter and to give me a new point of view. For this I feel deeply thankful but i can’t help feeling as though I am offering thanks that it was the other fellow who had to endure pain and horror and mutilations and not me. I don’t want to blaspheme but it does seem a little bit like deserting one’s fellows and acting the part of an odious favourite and to thank God that, since there was only enough to go half way round the left the others sat in the cold and gave you the beautiful home, the favourable environment, loving friends, congenial work, nest, leisure and the chance to enjoy the pleasures of life. Have you ever felt that way? I have, for a long time, but never so acutely as now. It has not shaken y faith in the moral order of the universe or in the power of prayer to strengthen and comfort but it has perplexed me terribly and I am one of those who can’t be content to have such a vital problem and one that stares one in the face all the time, [?] and trust that all will come right in the end. Things are so palpably wrong and there are so many unfortunate people who have every reason to curse the day they were born.

Well I must come to a halt. I don’t know how I managed to run on like this except that I have been fairly aching lately to talk talk talk. There’s a whole lot more stuff I want to talk to somebody about because i have had a lot of time to think lately and it make’s one kind of wild, not to be able to thrash it out. I am aging the arguments with which are opponent would meet my propositions, answer them and then look for new arguments and try to defeat myself. Sometimes I get quite indignant and impatient with an imaginary opponent!

I don’t know how I’ll get on at camp after this life of luxury and ease. Letters have been coming in nearly every morning and I read them and then read them all over again. To day I got a card from mother, and a letter enclosing letters for you and Marion written in Dal. Also one from Haddow the indefatiguable. The regularity with which that boy has cheerfully written without getting any answers is beyond praise! However I have [line folded over] that death has caused not by Typhoid. Lately some complications of liver trouble. It is still quite light although twenty to nine. The rain storm has apparently blown over and it is very close. We need a thunder shower to clean the air. I had a card from Miss Des Brissay the other day in which she asked me to come and see her when I come to ‘Lummon’. I answered it and said I would be glad to. I guess this letter is about long enough and it is about time for me to be going to bed. Am enclosing a snap taken in rotten row. It is a vile print, but the negative is quite good so I shall get some better ones printed when I get out of here. Nurse Collins took it to one of the town photographers and he evidently put one over on her. I suppose you are back in the old town by this time so am addressing the letter to your office. I hope that you had an extremely pleasant and restful holiday. Was glad to hear that all are so well at B.B.

With much love to all my dear family and friends everywhere in Canada,

George