Passchendaele and the Somme A diary of 1917 Hugh Quigley Ian Quigley 9781521211021 Books
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Private Hugh Quigley's first hand account of the battle of Passchendaele 1917. He describes his arrival in Northern France, and life in the regiment, their deployment to Ypres and his involvement in the battle. First published in 1928 the book has been edited by his grandson to include excerpts from the war diaries of the Royal Scots Regiment.
Passchendaele and the Somme A diary of 1917 Hugh Quigley Ian Quigley 9781521211021 Books
Passages from Hugh Quigley's evocative recollections that he sent back home to Lanark in Scotland in 1917, that he very obviously wrote to be preserved, are quoted throughout the big illustrated book "Flanders - Then and Now" by John Giles; one of the best books to keep by you if you ever visit the now cultivated scenes of The First World War. Quigley's words are exquisitely literate in the company of such evocative pictures. Giles quotes him on his page 172: "The pill-box had been used at one time as a charnel house, it smelt strongly of one and the floor was deep with human bones.....While sitting there the odour overcame me and I fainted. Waking up an hour afterwards, I found myself alone without the faintest idea of my whereabouts, uncertain where the enemy's lines were or my own. Some authors practise the description of fear... It went beyond fear, beyond consciousness, a grovelling of the soul itself."So I bought Quigley's book, reprinted by The Naval & Military Press; but after reading half of it nearly threw it out. The early part has perhaps the quality of the juvenile compositions I myself have always been prone to (as an adult!) looking for admiration for the words themselves rather than the story; a Keats like me, conscious of himself turning his best side to the light.
Yet the book's fault, that it is fired with an acute sense of painterly art and literature from Dante to William Morris's "The Well at the End of the World", nonetheless traces a paralysing pilgrimage of a few months. It charts the change in an effete artist, always conscious of his own cowardice and his own words, to a great dark eagle of humanity silhouetted against the sunsets and the dawns he describes so often in colour over the battlefields. Once he really does have something to write about, which was more debased and yet, by this, higher than he could have ever conceived as he started out; his work is touched by a grace that ennobles him even as he tries to share his new insights into war. In the closing pages, written after it was all over for him with a "comfortable wound", there is an informed anger against "carpet soldiers" and politicians; but it is set against his own gratitude for the strange assurances of immortality that he found in the midst of the anguish, suffering and pointlessness of the battles for Passchendaele; the overriding sense of an invincible beauty in the pointlessness of it all; at the heart of it all.
The reflections he sent back home truly describe the course of one who sees himself as an artist, as a litterateur, a familiar of Dante; from the bright "Sunny Prestatyn" dunes of Etaples to the dark desolations at the end. The first half is truly the gauche work of an untried spirit; the last is the informed work of a soul tried beyond endurance to something perdurable that he learned in the war that could be learned nowhere else.
The embarrassing sentimentality ("Morn was a maiden shrouded in mist when we stopped at Ashford" Page 2) is slowly abraded away and we are left with a message of hopes that can only be built upon the foundations of despair.
Billeted in Bertincourt he can describe the swallows that continued to nest in the ruin the soldiers had made habitable; and his delight is obvious in the "the trust placed by the birds in our kindliness"; but from Royaulcourt, he can also say "One gun especially delighted me; it had such a clear hard way of spitting forth its projectiles."
Quigley has the taste of a painter and constantly celebrates the chiaroscuro backcloth provided by star and moonlight, sunrise and sunset. (Thankfully, we can preserve ourselves from ignominy by listening to the word "chiaroscuro" on the pronunciation website "howjsay"). In seeking to get his artistic impressions to take hold, in the early part of the book he is inclined to be sentimental and overwrought. Coming across some works of literature among the ruins, he is touched. "It would be a strange thing to find, not a lovely flower growing from some dead Caesar's head, but a tall grass, pendulous, with graceful awns, nodding and bending above a beautiful page from Sand or France." Such effete charms are the spangles of inexperience, blind obedience to literary form above the interests of the truth; oblivious for a short while to the undertone of words like "sand" or "France".
Yet after the harrowing Quigley has paid the price for being a soul prepared for great battles; and, I stoop to sentimentality myself, there flowers something that sown only in the Scottish peat around Mount Tinto, his homeland.
. "The soldier has a dim sense of shame as at some unnatural, disgraceful thing he was forced to do, which neither instinct, sentiment, nor reason could invest with pride".
"That attempt to answer intuitively the call of the beautiful in nature, even in the bleak horror of shell-holes, seemed the essence of life to me, the only thing worth seeking in the misery of this war....But the final beauty of all lay in the spirit itself, its change, its exaltations and ecstasies, its depressions and griefs, despair and madness; the infinite was touching it to life, and its movements were part of the infinite itself."
On paper there is his own vision on the Square of St Pol which he kept by him till the end and quoted from: "The world is but a finely limned ecstasy of light - radiant, serene, grandly beautiful ; the body droops away, and the eyes see but a shivering haze in a golden beauty ; the senses blur but to that gracious light, and the longings, the passions, the exquisite griefs of the heart vanish ; no sweetness could be more poignant, no happiness so delicately wonderful as that lingering in gleam, the slow drowning in an infinite sea".
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Passchendaele and the Somme A diary of 1917 Hugh Quigley Ian Quigley 9781521211021 Books Reviews
Passages from Hugh Quigley's evocative recollections that he sent back home to Lanark in Scotland in 1917, that he very obviously wrote to be preserved, are quoted throughout the big illustrated book "Flanders - Then and Now" by John Giles; one of the best books to keep by you if you ever visit the now cultivated scenes of The First World War. Quigley's words are exquisitely literate in the company of such evocative pictures. Giles quotes him on his page 172 "The pill-box had been used at one time as a charnel house, it smelt strongly of one and the floor was deep with human bones.....While sitting there the odour overcame me and I fainted. Waking up an hour afterwards, I found myself alone without the faintest idea of my whereabouts, uncertain where the enemy's lines were or my own. Some authors practise the description of fear... It went beyond fear, beyond consciousness, a grovelling of the soul itself."
So I bought Quigley's book, reprinted by The Naval & Military Press; but after reading half of it nearly threw it out. The early part has perhaps the quality of the juvenile compositions I myself have always been prone to (as an adult!) looking for admiration for the words themselves rather than the story; a Keats like me, conscious of himself turning his best side to the light.
Yet the book's fault, that it is fired with an acute sense of painterly art and literature from Dante to William Morris's "The Well at the End of the World", nonetheless traces a paralysing pilgrimage of a few months. It charts the change in an effete artist, always conscious of his own cowardice and his own words, to a great dark eagle of humanity silhouetted against the sunsets and the dawns he describes so often in colour over the battlefields. Once he really does have something to write about, which was more debased and yet, by this, higher than he could have ever conceived as he started out; his work is touched by a grace that ennobles him even as he tries to share his new insights into war. In the closing pages, written after it was all over for him with a "comfortable wound", there is an informed anger against "carpet soldiers" and politicians; but it is set against his own gratitude for the strange assurances of immortality that he found in the midst of the anguish, suffering and pointlessness of the battles for Passchendaele; the overriding sense of an invincible beauty in the pointlessness of it all; at the heart of it all.
The reflections he sent back home truly describe the course of one who sees himself as an artist, as a litterateur, a familiar of Dante; from the bright "Sunny Prestatyn" dunes of Etaples to the dark desolations at the end. The first half is truly the gauche work of an untried spirit; the last is the informed work of a soul tried beyond endurance to something perdurable that he learned in the war that could be learned nowhere else.
The embarrassing sentimentality ("Morn was a maiden shrouded in mist when we stopped at Ashford" Page 2) is slowly abraded away and we are left with a message of hopes that can only be built upon the foundations of despair.
Billeted in Bertincourt he can describe the swallows that continued to nest in the ruin the soldiers had made habitable; and his delight is obvious in the "the trust placed by the birds in our kindliness"; but from Royaulcourt, he can also say "One gun especially delighted me; it had such a clear hard way of spitting forth its projectiles."
Quigley has the taste of a painter and constantly celebrates the chiaroscuro backcloth provided by star and moonlight, sunrise and sunset. (Thankfully, we can preserve ourselves from ignominy by listening to the word "chiaroscuro" on the pronunciation website "howjsay"). In seeking to get his artistic impressions to take hold, in the early part of the book he is inclined to be sentimental and overwrought. Coming across some works of literature among the ruins, he is touched. "It would be a strange thing to find, not a lovely flower growing from some dead Caesar's head, but a tall grass, pendulous, with graceful awns, nodding and bending above a beautiful page from Sand or France." Such effete charms are the spangles of inexperience, blind obedience to literary form above the interests of the truth; oblivious for a short while to the undertone of words like "sand" or "France".
Yet after the harrowing Quigley has paid the price for being a soul prepared for great battles; and, I stoop to sentimentality myself, there flowers something that sown only in the Scottish peat around Mount Tinto, his homeland.
. "The soldier has a dim sense of shame as at some unnatural, disgraceful thing he was forced to do, which neither instinct, sentiment, nor reason could invest with pride".
"That attempt to answer intuitively the call of the beautiful in nature, even in the bleak horror of shell-holes, seemed the essence of life to me, the only thing worth seeking in the misery of this war....But the final beauty of all lay in the spirit itself, its change, its exaltations and ecstasies, its depressions and griefs, despair and madness; the infinite was touching it to life, and its movements were part of the infinite itself."
On paper there is his own vision on the Square of St Pol which he kept by him till the end and quoted from "The world is but a finely limned ecstasy of light - radiant, serene, grandly beautiful ; the body droops away, and the eyes see but a shivering haze in a golden beauty ; the senses blur but to that gracious light, and the longings, the passions, the exquisite griefs of the heart vanish ; no sweetness could be more poignant, no happiness so delicately wonderful as that lingering in gleam, the slow drowning in an infinite sea".
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