Cold Storage
ILOOKING for something in a drawer the other day, I came across an unopened envelope addressed, in my own handwriting, to myself. To be exact, it was not addressed; it only had my name on it, and 'To await arrival' written in the top left-hand corner. It had clearly been in the drawer for some time.
At first I was puzzled. To receive through the post an envelope with one's own handwriting on it is not an uncommon experience; it is liable to happen whenever one answers an advertisement or takes up a reference. But what could have been the circumstances in which I had sent, presumably by hand, a letter to myself and franked it 'To await return'? And why, when I did return, had I not opened the envelope?
I have a very bad memory; but in it, by this time, something corresponding to the dialling-tone had begun to sound. I held in my hand the blue envelope—once perhaps the colour of a hedge-sparrow's egg but now much faded—and waited for a connection with the past.
The past pressed Button 'A.' It spoke like a blackmailer, allusively and with a muffled voice, omitting many details that I felt I had a right to know; but now I remembered roughly how, and roughly where, 1 had written the letter or letters in the envelope, and why I had addressed it to myself.
I was reminded that it contains a Last Message, or perhaps several Last Messages (though judging by its bulk there cannot be a superfluity of them), written on the eve of a rather far-fetched military operation twelve years ago. Small children shake hands less reluctantly with a forbidding stranger if their spare hand is held while they do this duty; and, apart from everything else, men who think (as I have seldom thought) that they may shortly have to say How d'you do to Death take a certain pride in letting the absent hand-holders know that they faced the encounter, with adequate composure, on their own. In war Death is a grandee, however reluctant we may be to take his livery; and in war Last Messages tend to exhale, together with much pathos, a sense of privilege. I think that anybody who has ever acted as unit censor on the eve of a battle would probably confirm this.
I have forgotten how I sent the blue envelope back to the headquarters to which I hoped, and indeed expected, to return. But my reason for addressing it to myself was a practical one. It cut out the middle man (`You might bung this off if the need arises'); it evaded the need to find a paraphrase for that flat and euphemistic cliche, 'If anything happens to me'; and it more or less ensured that, if I failed to return, the message or messages, being part of my 'personal effects,' would reach their destinations.
I cannot remember what is in them, and I suspect that they might make embarrassing reading today. But I cannot quite bring myself to do what I should have done twelve years ago, which was to destroy the blue envelope. It has gone back, unopened, into the drawer.
* * * Perhaps the most lapidary Last Messages of modern times were (if we may pass from the'ridiculous to the sublime) those written by Captain Scott while, with his two surviving com- panions. he lay in a small tent—his sixtieth camp since turning back from the South Pole—awaiting the arrival of Death. They had made their last march, a short and agonising one, on March 19, 1912. From the 20th until the 29th (the date of the last entry in Scott's diary) they were immobilised by a blizzard within eleven miles of One Ton Depot, where they would have found food and the fuel to cook it with. During these ten days Scott wrote, in a firm, legible script, eleven letters and a 'Message to the Public' of some 800 words. This in itself was remarkable. What I find even more remarkable is the fact that neither of the other two men in the tent wrote anything at all.
Scott's letters (the longest of those which have been pub- lished in full was to J. M. Barrie) were admirable; they were free from self-pity or heroics, and although they all had the same purpose and the same gist, their phrasing was not repetitive. His Message to the Public was a dignified, moving and objective report on the failure of his enterprise, which he ascribed to bad luck (`failure in all risks which had to be undertaken') and to unforeseeably bad weather. It ended : `These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.' Eight months later they did.
The astonishing thing is how un-rough the notes were. All three men were at the limit of their resources, suffering from frost-bite, exhaustion, strain and near-starvation; 'we had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th.' What I have never been able to understand is how it came about that, while Scott wrote so much, the other two—Wilson and Bowers—wrote nothing.
For ten days and nights the three men lay in their sleeping- bags. They had nothing to do but listen to the frightful noise of the wind; if it abated the plan was for Wilson and Bowers, whose feet were less severely frost-bitten than Scott's, to set out on what the diary on March 21 called a forlorn hope. Scott's written evidence contains no suggestion that either of the others had turned his face to the wall and given in to that lassitude which must have been weighing on them all (we know now that the scanty rations on which they had lived for months were seriously deficient in vitamins, which had not been discovered in those days). Scott wrote in happy terms about the party's morale to Barrie : It would do your heart good to be in our,tent, to hear our songs and the cheery conversation as to what we will do when we get to Hut Point. Later. We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer. Yet Wilson did not write to his wife, nor young Bowers to his mother. Scott wrote to both. They are short, warm, comforting letters. The tenses are a bit mixed, for he was writing of men who, although still living, were for the purposes of his letters dead. Of Wilson (the italics are mine); 'He is not suffering. . . . I can do no more to comfort you than to tell you that he died as he lived, a brave, true man.' Of Bowers `He had come to be one of my closest friends. . . . To the end he has talked of you and his sisters.' This slight blurring of focus is the only stylistic blemish on the 'rough notes.' But why did Wilson and Bowers, in those ten days, not respond at all to a natural .impulse which they must have shared with their leader? Why did neither leave even a scrawl of farewell? To me this small, insoluble problem will for ever remain a kind of Marie Celeste, lost without trace in the half-charted depths of human behaviour. `Wilson and Bowers were found' (says the official account) `in the attitude of sleep, their sleeping bags closed over their heads as they would naturally close them. Scott died later. [This seems more than probable, but how could they telll He had thrown back the flaps of his sleeping-bag and opened his coat.' This evidence suggests that perhaps at the end Scott put the killing cold to his breast like a dagger; but it does not explain why, in their last and long-drawn-out extremity, the three heroes produced only one scribe. STRIX
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