Open Writing

1915 continued

No amount of chaff could upset Frank’s cheerfulness which seemed to exude from him and many were the jests which he bore with imperturbable good humour. I remember his telling how that in camp he always drank Apollinaris Water while his fellow-officers sipped their whiskey, and a laugh was often raised at the expense of him and his ‘dear Polly.’

There is nothing of special interest to record of these months of Frank’s training between September last year and June this year. There was the usual routine, the monotony broken from time to time by a move from one part of the Plain to another, and as the summer came on by several false alarms that ‘this move did really mean France this time.’ At last, at the end of June, about two weeks after Charlie's departure, Frank went to France. It was there, of course, that he received the news of Charlie's death. He must have felt it keenly, for they had been exceptionally good friends, and to have received the news and to have to carry on in such surroundings as though nothing had happened must have been excessively hard.

We can guess something of how he felt it from the letter which he wrote to father and mother about this first sorrow.

‘I have just heard the news of Charlie,’ he writes. ‘I am afraid it has come as a most terrible and cruel blow to you both, and I would that in this moment of your agony I could by some words or thoughts repay a tithe or fraction of that which you have throughout my life given to me.

‘He indeed showed his unswerving desire to answer the call of duty which he felt cast upon him at the very first opportunity. He did not waste time in weighing the pros and cons, in thinking of self, but went straight before him to a task that he knew must prove wearisome and irksome, so much being foreign to his nature; but he went straight forward to fulfill what he believed to be his task.

‘Is this a matter of sorrow? I believe not, at least I hope and trust that this may be a source from which you may be able to find some solace and comfort, to be able to think that you have tended and cared for and guided one who was ready to give all for the sake of duty.

‘You do not know, perhaps, that part of mine and Lucy's creed is contained in Browning's Epilogue? May you be able ‘to greet the unseen with a cheer,’ and to you who believe in the life after death I trust you can find something to help you to look forward.

‘I know this is one of the very worst letters I have ever written, when you know I would give you of my best; but I want you to get this at the first possible moment, and I am afraid I have found it somewhat hard to collect and express my thoughts. My love and all my prayers come with this letter.’

A keen desire for the service of mankind. was, as it were, the bed-rock on which his life-work was built, and this thought comes out in this other letter written at a time of personal sorrow, just after Charlie's death.

In reply to a letter from Margaret he wrote: ‘I don't feel that there is much I can say in response to your letter. There is one point you touch on in which I think you take a wrong view of things, and that is in saying that you feel somewhat small. But why? Surely the purpose of life is to do that which lies straight ahead of us, to serve faithfully and fully whatever one's lot may be. I suppose there are very few men who do not realise that by far the harder lot in this catastrophe is being played by those who are compelled either by sex or physical reasons to remain at home. I believe the fact that there is a risk of one's life ending before it has run its ordinary course is far more readily given if it be known that those who remain behind will not grieve and fret; and so it seems to me that you and all of you have received the news of Charlie's death in the way that he would have had it.’

The 10th battalion, that Frank was a part of, spent those summer months in the neighbourhood of Bethune, and had on the whole a fairly quiet time. However, in October he managed to get what every soldier covets, ‘a blighty’, not in action, but from one of those shells that drop from time to time all day long almost haphazard in the hope of catching somebody. A bit of the shell hit him in the arm, cutting an artery, and had it not been for the splendid first aid rendered he would certainly have bled to death. The wound proved to be all that could be desired, not severe enough to confine him to long months of boredom in hospital, but just severe enough to keep him in England for six months. After a very brief stay in Millbank Hospital he was sent home.

I shall never forget being in the office on the afternoon of the day on which it was known he had been wounded. One after another came in, in quick succession, policemen, clients, private friends. ‘Is it true Mr. Frank's wounded? Not seriously, I hope. We can not spare him,’ and so forth, all showing with what affection he was viewed by all sections of the community.