Kenneth James Campbell BA

• Matriculated: 1909

• Born: 4 January 1891

• Died: 10 May 1915

• Regiment: Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

• Grave/Memorial: Ypres Menin Gate Memorial: Panels 42 and 44.

Family background

b. 4 January 1891 in Bombay as the only child of Robert Story Campbell (1850–1918) and Evelyn Rose Campbell (née Stokes) (c.1864–1900) (m. 1889). They later lived in Achnashie, Rosneath, Dumbartonshire.

 

Parents and antecedents

Campbell’s father was a retired Indian merchant and the son of the distinguished Scottish theologian the Reverend John McCleod Campbell, DD (1800–72), who also lived at Rosneath.

Robert Story’s brother, Sir James Campbell (1846–1903), was in the Indian Civil Service from 1869 to 1900; during his time in India he became known as a folklorist.

 

Education

Campbell was educated from c.1898 to 1904 at one of the many preparatory schools that flourished in Rottingdean, Sussex, and then, from 1904 to 1909, at Marlborough College, where, according to President Warren, “he was a leader in the Classical Sixth Form” and, as such, a Prefect.

 

 

He matriculated at Magdalen as a Demy on 13 October 1909 and was exempted from Responsions because he possessed the Oxford & Cambridge Certificate. He took the First Public Examination in Hilary Term 1910 and the Preliminary Examination in Trinity Term 1912, when he was awarded a 2^nd in Modern History. He was awarded a 3^rd class in Literae Humaniores (Classics) in Trinity Term 1914, and he took his BA on 24 October 1914. In February 1913, with W.L. Vince at bow, he stroked the Magdalen’s Torpid VIII when Magdalen went Head of the River at Torpids for only the second time; later in the same year he also rowed in the Coxless Fours. President Warren described him posthumously as:

one of the best-known and most highly esteemed men of his time in College. […] Of all-round ability, and an excellent if not powerful oarsman, he was of a most amiable but at the same time deep and serious nature, whose quiet force and religious example, while absolutely removed from affectation, were of great value to his generation.

 

 

Military service

Campbell joined the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps during his first term at Magdalen, probably served for the whole five years of his time at Oxford, and on 2 September 1914 was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the 1/9^th (the Dumbartonshire) Battalion (Territorial Forces), Princess Louise’s (Argyll and Sutherland) Highlanders (London Gazette, no. 28,886, 1 September 1014, p. 6,915), which had been created at Hartfield, Dumbarton, on 4 August 1914. Campbell joined the 1/9^th Battalion later in August 1914 when it was training at Bedford as part of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Brigade in the (51^st) Highland Division, and was assigned to a platoon in ‘C’ Company.

On 21 December 1914 he wrote a rather rambling and not always readily comprehensible letter from his billet at 7 Merton Road, Bedford, to his close friend, Albert Victor Murray (1890–1967; Magdalen 1909–13). Murray was a prominent member of the Student Christian Movement, both in Oxford and nationally, and already a committed pacifist; when the Military Service Act became law in January 1916, Murray would become a conscientious objector. When Campbell began his letter, he was feeling very unsure of himself in his new role, and assured Murray that he could not “pretend to give a properly worded analysis and description of life here at this job”. But he then tried to explain that Army life had made him realize “how very much Oxford made me live inside out so to speak” and to describe the complex effect that his new life was having – on himself, on his mental image of Oxford, and on his understanding of Christian spirituality: “How dull (for an Oxford Spoilt individual) the routine of [Army] life is and also how very unpractical Oxford life is.” As a result, he was finding it hard to hold on to “all that one dreamed and hoped of”, and while he conceded that he was trying hard to “keep alive this ‘beauty & the dream’”, he also admitted that he was also being forced to maintain a sense of the necessity of the military routine, which, he said, “can only live with the ideal-soul in it”. He then added: “but the ideal-soul will be a poor selfish thing without the [military] routine to stiffen it”. Nevertheless, he continued:

But without the aesthetic – in the widest sense – props of Oxford it is difficult to set one’s mind on high things. One complains that the work is sordid – foolishly enough – & then instead of putting ideals into [word missing – probably ‘practice’,] one finds oneself slipping into being sordid oneself. It’s easy to be stir [sic] the spirit of Oxford[,] but not so here. I find a quite [recte quiet] hour’s dreaming in a chair very nice but a difficulty[, for] instead of giving new life it tends to make on[e] discontented. […] There is no doubt something wrong. The Christian light-heartedness is for every time & place & occupation – when one is taken from the props of congenial friends and surroundings one should all the more feel the Personality of Christ – and the real oneness of the Church which transcends time and place. To put it crudely[,] one feels much [more] inclined after a heavy day to have a “blow out” than [to] say one’s prayers. In fact my feelings in church now are what they were at school – how beastly to have to go out again to the daily round – whereas at Oxford[,] Chapel and the daily round all fitted in like a lyric.

Campbell’s thoughts then returned from his own spiritual discomforts and confusions to the realities of Army life itself:

But no doubt it’s all magnificent training: I’m getting to know the men, now, better & that’s makes [sic] things jollier. […] We all say we are longing to go to France – [and] so we are – but I confess the more it becomes imminent[,] the less lighted [sic] hearted about it do I feel. It’s just another step in the inevitable march of events, & pride dominates and says “for God’s sake don’t make a fool of oneself!” I often long that one was in a Battalion of Oxford fellows with one’s own friends – & then one w[oul]d go for the Germans like a race in toggers [Oxford slang for the Torpid races in which Campbell had distinguished himself]. The Real absolute damnableness of the whole thing seems to paralyze at times but then it sends one feeling [like] a helpless unit to the bed-rock realities – & one can “carry on” – certainly anything that is left now by the “fire order” is “gold” – it’s no good detailing what may happen when war comes […] The world is ill & illness is punishment & waste – I read [the Book of] Job the other day & it seemed to voice a real human feeling just now –.

The 1/9th Battalion left for Southampton on 19 February 1915 and disembarked in Le Havre on the following day as part of 81^st Brigade, 27^th Division. It was then sent by train to Sainte Marie-Cappel, to the north-north-west of Hazebrouck, and thence to Mount Kokerelle, just across the Belgian border. There it rested from 26 February to 16 March before marching via Dickebusch to the trenches near Sint Elooi, at that time a relatively quiet area of the front which Campbell would describe as “an odd kind of war just now – routine work largely”. While the Battalion was there Campbell wrote a second long and not very coherent letter between 23 and 25 March 1915 to Albert Victor Murray in which he tried to say whether he had adapted to military life and in what respects, if at all, he had changed. But although Campbell did his best to reassure his friend that he was getting used to the Army and that he had “felt far more anxious[,] far more worried[,] far sadder & frightened on several occasions during the last 3 or 4 years” than he had ever done “over here”, his disconnected parataxis, uncertain punctuation, sudden asides, missing words, even more indecipherable handwriting, obscure use of vocabulary, and at times questionable logic suggest that Campbell was having considerable difficulty making sense of and talking about what he was going through – even though his Battalion had not seen real action apart from one or two bouts of enemy shelling. Take for example his reflections on the statements quoted above:

is this a “coarsening” or “strengthening”[?] – neither to my mind – only that this is largely a physical game out here with a tremendous morale-boosting – e.g. the “nation” – which for me (& I fancy for everyone) as a practical motiv[ating] force means home and friends – not an ethno-political generalization – one has no conscious qualms about whether one is right. I knew it all before but I know it now for better that the moral struggle – the moral choice – the moral enemy – are the worst – and so the real – real joy and real pain are not physical – in the life out here one has neither – but just that happyness [sic] that came during [illegible word] training – not the blinds – though they have their counterpart out here – not in the same physical sense – but in physical contrasts from heat to cold[,] wet to dry &c. –

By the final parenthetical dash the reader has lost almost any sense of connectedness but has the definite feeling that the heile Welt that Campbell had known at Oxford has become a muddle of barely incomprehensible fragments. Two things are, however, clear: first that Campbell felt very isolated in the Army, not least because he had not made any close friends like those whose company he had enjoyed so much at Oxford. And although he could tell Murray that he was “beginning to take a great interest in my platoon – characters come out under fire and the sharing together & the lapse of time is creating a personal atmosphere about the game which was to me totally absent at Bedford”, he seems to have lacked the common touch – i.e. a natural affinity with and understanding of the “labouring classes”, whom he thought had been “awfully spoilt by a mixture of grandmotherly legislation and rank individualism parading under the name of Trades Unionism!”, commenting: “The Labour troubles at home lately – I get The Times every day – have made one ashamed of one’s country.”

Secondly, like many inexperienced young officers, he was most worried by the thought of showing fear and letting himself down in front of the members of a regiment that had a particular reputation for uncompromising and aggressive toughness. So when he tried to analyse his first experience under fire, he wrote, with much greater clarity:

the first time it was so new [that] one had no room left in one’s consciousness to be what c[oul]d be called afraid – one just wondered – and being with a regular officer – one had no real responsibility – & so no chance of making a fool of oneself – that is what I think I am most afraid of!

 

 

“Campbell was in charge of his Battalion’s machine-guns, and according to an eye-witness he wheeled his gun on a wheel-barrow through ‘a hurricane of shells’ over two hundred yards of open ground, ‘calmly, as if on parade’, positioned it, and then, although dazed and blinded by a gas-shell, continued at his post until he was hit by a shell.”

 

Between 4 and 20 April 1915, Campbell’s Battalion spent periods in the trenches at Herenthage (5–8 April) and Glencorse Wood, to the north of the Menin Road just past Bellewaerde (13–16 April). And when the Second Battle of Ypres began in earnest, on 20 April, the Battalion was back in Glencorse Wood, and it stayed there until at least 30 April. There is no Battalion War Diary for May, but we know from Brigade records that on the night of 3/4 May, the Battalion moved to a new position on the left of a new front line through Sanctuary Wood, where they immediately beat off enemy attacks. On the following day the Battalion was in Zouave Wood, where it suffered a severe artillery bombardment and took heavy casualties: the same thing happened on 6 May but 7 May was quieter. On 8 May the Battalion was taken out of Brigade Reserve, occupied a trench just in front of Brigade Headquarters, and was then ordered to occupy the second line north of Bellewaerde Lake. The following day saw the Battalion back in Reserve in Zouave Wood, where a major German attack was repulsed: there was very fierce fighting all day and both sides suffered heavy losses.

On 10 May 1915 the Germans attacked in force under cover of gas shells. Campbell’s Battalion was fighting north and south of the Menin Road, near Hooge, when he was killed in action by a shell, aged 24, in almost the same place as G. Cadenhead. By then Campbell was the officer in charge of his Battalion’s machine-guns, and according to an eye-witness he wheeled his gun on a wheel-barrow through “a hurricane of shells” over 200 yards of open ground, “calmly, as if on parade”, positioned it, and then, although dazed and blinded by a gas-shell, continued to fire it until he was hit by a high-explosive shell. The death during the same action of his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Clark, MA, LLB, CB (1859–1915), aged 56, a prominent Edinburgh jurist in civilian life, may explain why Campbell was not recommended for a VC for this extraordinary act of bravery. The Battalion lost about 215 of its members killed, wounded and missing in the fighting of 8–11 May and a total of 369 killed, wounded and missing between 22 April and 18 May, after which it numbered c.400 men. On 21 May it was transferred to 10^th Brigade in 4^th Division. It lost another 200 killed, wounded and missing during the fighting of 24–28 May and was then absorbed by the 7^th Battalion until 20 July 1915.

 

 

Campbell has no known grave and is commemorated on Panels 42 and 44 of the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, also in the Memorial Hall, Marlborough College, and on a monument in the Old Graveyard, Rosneath, Dumbartonshire. On 20 February 1917, C.C.J. Webb recorded in his Diary a meeting with Campbell’s father in Wantage: “He was all he had & they were on terms of the closest confidence. He was anxious to talk of him all day. He told me much that greatly interested me about him. […] I liked him extremely.” Campbell died intestate but his will was sealed on 24 September 1915.

On 9 June 1916, Charles Laing Warr (1892–1969) (see below), who was a brother officer of Campbell’s and admired him greatly, published a long obituary in a Scottish local newspaper. It does not tally with the account given above for it is saturated in the conventions of Celtic Twilight and, for the modern reader, highly romanticized. Nevertheless it is worth reprinting in full since it is a very fine example of a writerly attempt to make sense of what might be termed “heroic waste”:

Down the long corridors of time old Rosneath [where the Campbell family lived] has boasted many heroes and many deeds of arms, but no name has ever shone or will ever shine more brightly among the noblest of her sons than that of a young subaltern who a few short weeks ago laid down his life for his fatherland on the blood-drenched plains of Belgium. I speak of Kenneth James Campbell. And I wish that the district which he loved so well should know how he lived and how he died, this gallant officer and perfect Highland gentleman. It is to the far-off wind-swept isles of the misty Hebrides that one must look for the elements which made up his strange, noble nature. He sprang from ancestors who, for centuries dwelling amid the mountain shadows and by the shores of the never-resting sea, had come to know the living reality of the things which are not seen. From them he inherited the dreamy mysticism and the profound belief in the transiency of time and place which made up that wonderful faith which was the most striking part of his nature. From them, too, children of the storm and sons of battle, came to him that heroic bravery and proud hauteur in the face of danger that characterised him through every day of the campaign, and finally gave him strength to die a splendid death. But there were nearer forces still. In the humble kirkyard of Rosneath, within the broken lichen-clad walls of the ancient sanctuary[,] is a little burial ground, where in spring the snow-drop and the crocus peep, and in summer the roses ever diffuse their fragrance on the still warm air. Beneath its mossy mounds two great men lie asleep – two men, great chiefly in this, that their lives were self-sacrifice and unselfishness. John Macleod Campbell, saint and martyr [1800–72, a Scottish theologian who was expelled as a heretic by the General Assembly of the Scottish Church for his universalist views on atonement], and James Macnabb Campbell, who gave his life for his friends [1846–1903, a senior Indian Civil Servant who ruined his health and hastened his own death by his work during the great plague in Bombay of 1897], have had in the third generation one who[,] in the brief span of four-and-twenty years[,] has made his name as great and greater than their own. Young, strong, handsome, richly endowed with the priceless wealth of a brilliant intellect, and having completed a great university career, with all the path of life bright with the rosy promise of coming distinction, Kenneth Campbell answered his country’s call without a moment’s hesitation, although there was ample excuse for his staying at home, for he was serving at the altar of God. And now, far from the blue hills of home, on the battlefield he lies asleep. And though he was my beloved friend, I am well content that it should be so. For by the path of a hero’s death he has won a glorious immortality – and Kenneth Campbell is not dead. He was an ideal officer, and it was surprising that he was so. The brilliant intellect, and massive brain, schooled in the grooves of literature and speculative philosophy, were not those which would be readily adaptable to the strict limitations of the position of a junior officer. But from the very first, because of the high sense of duty which was ever his, he laid aside the old life, and threw himself heart and soul into the irksome monotony of the new. No one could ever find fault with his work, and he never spared himself where his work was concerned. But that which showed forth most what manner of man he was, was the intense love and devotion which he gained from his men. It was ever the same, abroad as in Bedford, they came to him with their troubles and their little sorrows, and no one who ever came went away unlistened to. It might not be strict military discipline, but it was human charity – and Kenneth Campbell loved his fellow-men. I can see him so clearly, the tall, handsome boy, walking about that awful day among the bursting shells, cool and collected, his pipe in his mouth. He had been well trained in a home where the old traditions of Scottish life are still reverenced, and his training showed itself on that day. It was his first time in action as machine-gun officer, and his task might well have appalled many a more experienced man. But Campbell knew what was expected of him, and, though because of the sensitiveness of his nature the load of responsibility must have been to him doubly heavy, he never showed it by word or sign – the imperturbable face was calm and immovable as ever. Through the long hours he bore himself as a Highland officer should, and when the German artillery ranged his gun, and the shells began to burst more thickly round him, it only served to make him face what he must have known was certain death with a curl of the lip and a flash of the eye. They got him at last, and the concussion of a bursting shell robbed him of his sight. He would not leave the field; in vain they pled with him. He stayed by his gun, cheering on his men. Ten minutes later a shell that landed on the top of his gun brought to him his immortality, and painlessly he passed through death to life. Dunbartonshire will never cease to be proud of how her battalion behaved itself that fatal 10^th of May – let her never forget that little machine-gun emplacement, where the burn flows from the sycamore woods and the violets purple the ground and perfume the air. It is only a little hole in the earth, but to Dunbartonshire it must be holy ground, for there brave, dauntless, true, Kenneth James Campbell was faithful unto death. Death such as this is well worth while. And in the coming years, when other generations shall tell the tale of the great war, in the shelling on the hill, and by the clachan fire where the sighing of the waves blendeth with the winds that whisper about the graves wherein his fathers speak, they shall speak in Rosneath of those who went forth at their country’s call, and shall tell of how the first of them all in the fore front of the battle, Kenneth Campbell died.

In mid-1916, Warr also published The Unseen Host: Stories of the Great War, an anthology of war stories that was based on personal experience when he was serving as an officer in Campbell’s Battalion between August 1914 and May 1915. Warr was dangerously wounded during the battle in which Campbell was killed in action, and while recovering in hospital, he underwent a spiritual experience that caused him to become a minister of religion in the Church of Scotland after leaving the Army. The Unseen Host, which became a best-seller and went into ten editions by 1928, is dedicated to Campbell and his Commmanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Clark, “who made the supreme sacrifice at Hooge, near Ypres, on the 10^th May 1915, and died with their face to the enemy”. The dedication continues in the same vein as the obituary: “Though so dissimilar in years they were strangely alike: one in simpleness of heart, in childlike faith, in consecration of life, in devotion to duty. They were gallant soldiers, perfect Scottish gentlemen, saints of God.” The book’s intention is clearly stated in Warr’s Preface to the first edition:

And so perhaps some of the pages in this book may afford a sense of security to a few who are going forth to take up the sword which has fallen from the hands of others. It may help them to trust in the presence of an “Unseen Host” about their daily path. It may assist those of them to whom the call shall come, to enter, like true British soldiers, with level eyes and laughing lips, the valley of the shadow of death. (pp. x–xi)

Warr subsequently became a well-loved parish priest and an extremely successful and influential churchman in Scotland. He was Dean of the Chapel Royal there, one of George V’s chaplains, and an intimate of the royal family, including Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II. In 1953, he declined the unanimous nomination for the Moderatorship of the Church of Scotland.

After Campbell’s death, Albert Victor Murray wrote the following memoir, which is reproduced here by kind permission of his son, John S. Murray. Murray was also a close friend of K.C. Goodyear, and the initials of both Campbell and Goodyear are inscribed in Murray’s Bible.

 

In no strange land

K[enneth] and I went up to Oxford together from two very different homes. My father was a greengrocer, – and a very good one too. Although he had tried various things before he came to that. He was a grocer originally, – “master grocer” as he is described on my birth certificate, not that the adjective made much difference in the Northumbrian mining village where we lived. He was a modest man and inoffensive, and there are other men to whom that type of quietness is more galling than downright aggressiveness, and my father was removed from his business and had to find something new to do.

He then started to manufacture lemonade. He knew nothing about this kind of thing but he learned it as he went along and became good at this too. Here he had to endure a mild measure of publicity and to condone certain artifices which were doubtful in his eyes. His lemonade was described as “celebrated” before ever the public had had sight of a single bottle. All went well until he was enticed to remove his growing business to a seaside resort where presumably people would drink more lemonade. At great cost he got himself established, and but for one thing might again have done well. That one thing was the water. It had not been previously tested and it was now found to be useless for aeration. So my father had to leave all that and he became a greengrocer, a less adventurous but more certain trade.

K’s father had a seat in Scotland on the edge of a lovely salt-water loch and almost in sight of Ben Lomond. The garden was the loveliest I have ever seen, – nothing but roses, three hundred and sixty-five varieties of them. It was a garden of glory in the summer-time. At the foot of the garden was a jetty and here was moored a motor yacht – the Kittiwake. Once on an August day I was at her tiller while we watched the Kileregan regatta, and I was so entranced that I steered her right amongst the sailing ships.

His father was a fine type of clansman. He was a widower for K’s mother had died twenty years before. He had been out in India as a merchant, while his brother, K’s uncle, had been a government official. The brother had got a well-earned knighthood, but a still better earned title among the common people of “the Collector with the divinely-lighted countenance”. K’s father was like that too. And every week while K was at an English public school he had sent him a pen-and-ink drawing of some bird found in the region of his Scottish home. K was more proud of his father for making this collection of drawings than he was of the fact that he was related to a ducal family.

We met at Oxford and we read History. For me it was a grind and I knew no more about study than laboriously to underline every textbook I read and then copy out the underlined words into a notebook. It was a useless process and I have learned better since. But K did it all so easily, with his feet up against the wall and a pipe in his mouth, he tackled Stubbs’ Charters with a nonchalance that amazed me. Soon he felt he ought to take me in hand, and he did so. We worked a good deal in each other’s rooms and he discussed the problems as we went along. To me history had not hitherto been a matter of problems at all. It had been a deposit of fact once delivered, and had to be “learned”. With him I found it begin to live.

In our last year we started Italian together. In those days there was in the Oxford History School syllabus an “Italian special period”, 1496–1509, for which there were four contemporary authorities to be read in the original. K was certain that in Guicciardini’s account of Florence there was preserved the very text of many of Savonarola’s sermons, and we used to read him with this clue.

At Easter it was arranged for K to go to Italy with some friends, and there he was going to study the “special period” on the spot. I, of course, could not go, and so we went through our texts again, making note of everything which a knowledge of the topography might help us to understand. When he came back we used Baedeker as a text-book and K went over the ground with me until I knew Florence and Venice almost as well as if I had been there myself. It was through his eyes I saw these places and it was no mean way of seeing them.

The thing that impressed him most was the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni [1400–75], – [Andrea del] Verrocchio’s [c.1435–88] equestrian memorial at Venice. That, he told me, represented the very spirit of the age we were studying. There is in it both beauty and ruthlessness, a hearty, care-free attitude to life and a determination to crush out everything which was disapproved. He had a photograph of it from Alinari’s, and it certainly is a striking figure. We should understand why, according to Guicciardini, the Italians disliked the new type of warfare-in-earnest. There was an end to the picnic days when battles were carried on with great sound and fury and no one was killed or even injured. So much had Charles VIII’s invasion done for Italy.    

Not long after we had gone down from Oxford we had our own experiences of warfare-in-earnest. The picnic days with the [OU]OTC were gone, and men were moving across to France and not coming back again. K joined up with a Highland Regiment, and very fine he looked in all the panoply of war. Yet I never saw him like that, and when he was killed – blinded first, then killed – I still thought of him in mufti puffing his pipe as we meditated over Baedeker.

His father did not long survive. I went up to Scotland and stayed with the old man for a while. We pottered about the garden and looked at the deserted jetty. K’s books were all in his room and he had his father’s drawings bound handsomely in red morocco, – the pride of the collection. We went to the Parish Church on Sunday and K’s memorial looked down upon us from the wall. There was no one in the house but the old man himself, the last of his line. Within a very few weeks he too had gone and the place became utterly silent save for the lapping of the water against the stones.

After the war was well over my business led me out to the Balkans. I went at very short notice and caught the Orient express to Bucharest. I noticed that the way led through Venice and I resolved to stay off there on the homeward journey if I could. Meanwhile there was plenty to do and to think about. The land had not yet recovered from devastation and even the pleasant woods of Sinaia were full of deserted corpses. Serbia was still worse and trains crawled over hastily constructed bridges where formerly the traffic had sped along. “Finality” was written on everything. The war had made an end, and the world we knew would never come back again.

The homeward train got into Venice at five in the morning. I took a gondola and went to the Piazza San Marco. After the clatter of the train the gliding of the boat through the silent waterways was a benediction, although it made me feel terrible loneliness. When we arrived I did not know what to do. I could not keep the sleep out of my eyes as I sat down on a café chair in the Piazza and looked at St. Mark’s. After an hour or so people began to stir and a waiter came up to me for my order. I then made an alarming discovery, for I found I could not speak Italian! My knowledge of the language was purely literary and I had never spoken it at all. I had to fall back on French and felt more in a strange land than ever. The street signs and posters were intelligible, but I could not communicate with my fellow-men as I wished. A sense of desolation fell upon me and I was sorry I had come.

Suddenly as I pottered about the quays in the early morning and crossed the little bridges I turned a corner and there in front of me stood the swaggering figure of Bartolomeo Colleoni. 

As I gazed upon it in admiration K whispered to me: “didn’t I tell you? It is the very spirit of the age, isn’t it?” It was long before I could leave it, and when I did so we left together.

We had a glorious day. My lack of Italian did not matter for it was no longer necessary. We did St. Mark’s thoroughly. As we were entering, K pointed out that the famous horses had been restored. We marvelled together that so modest an exterior should be all glorious within, and scarce a stone of the building was left unnoticed. The Doge’s Palace thrilled us most, – after Verrocchio’s statue, – sculpture, painting, design, and the old names came back again, – Thommaso Mocenigo [1343–1423] and the black spot on the wall where [his?] portrait had been painted out. The water sparkled in the sunlight as we looked out across the lagoon and decided not to cross to San [there follows a blank: he means San Giorgio Maggiore which can be seen across the water from the Doge’s Palace) but to stay where we were and we turned back into the Palace again. It was a day of perfect fellowship and unwearied conversation, and of deep untold bliss.

Nearly at midnight on my way to the station we went back to Bartolomeo Colleoni and there we said goodbye. K was right. Verrocchio had caught the spirit of the age, – the age that had long gone and the age that had come again. And it was K who interpreted them both.

A[lbert] V[ictor] M[urray]

 

 

Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

 

Printed sources:

[Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 33, no. 20 (21 May 1915), p. 321.

Charles L[aing] Warr, ‘Kenneth James Campbell’ [obituary], The Helensburgh and Gareloch Times, no. 1,828 (9 June 1915), p. 3.

Charles Laing Warr, The Unseen Host: Stories of the Great War (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1916); 10^th Impression (Edinburgh: Robert Grant & Son, 1928).

Leinster-Mackay (1984), pp. 39, 96, 154, 296, 330.

Clutterbuck, ii (2002), p. 77.

Ronald Selby Wright, ‘Warr, Charles Laing (1892–1969)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 57 (2004), pp. 462–3.

 

Archival sources: 

MCA: PR32/C/3/229 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to K.J. Campbell [1915]), includes a cutting of Warr’s obituary).

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 1.

OUA: UR 2/1/68.

OUA (DWM): C.C.J. Webb, Diaries, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1161.

Albert Victor Murray (1890–1967), ‘In no strange land’, The Murray Papers, Liddle Collection, Leeds University: CO 066 (File 5).

Kenneth Campbell, two letters to Albert Victor Murray dated 21 December 1914 and 23[–25] March 1915, The Murray Papers, Liddle Collection, Leeds University: CO 066 (File 5).

WO95/1481.

WO95/2263/3.

WO374/12114.