But all were to come to naught. The times were too troubled. Rupert Brooke, due with Jacques Raverat to join friends on a camping holiday at Helston in Cornwall, sends Stanley (‘Dear Cookham’) a letter which sums up the feelings of the perplexed young men:
I wish I knew about painting. I’ve left Raymond Buildings for months. I don’t know when I shall be back. I’m glad I was there when you came. I’m going sailing and walking with Jacques for ten days or so. At least I want to. But this damned war business. … If fighting starts I shall have to enlist or go as a correspondent, I don’t know. It will be Hell to be out of it; and Hell to be in it. I’m so depressed about the war that I can’t talk, think or write coherently. God be with you.26
He never made his trip to Cornwall.
Here we part with the year 1913 which has had many joys for me and few sorrows. What has 1914 got locked up in its bosom for me and mine? We shall see in time.
Sydney Spencer, 31 December 19131
TUESDAY 4 AUGUST 1914 was Florence’s birthday. She had come to Cookham to enjoy a celebration party at Fernlea. During the afternoon, Herbert Henry Asquith, long-serving Prime Minister in the Liberal Government, announced in the House of Commons the delivery of an ultimatum to Germany demanding the withdrawal of her troops from Belgium, to whose neutrality Britain was committed. Florence had cause to remember that day:
On the afternoon of August 4th – my birthday – 1914 I was pacing the Causeway at Cookham with my brother Percy, gravely discussing with him the family scene, when he said: ‘Of course, I shall have to go.’ ‘Not you!’ I cried sharply. ‘A family of seven sons’, he replied, ‘could not stand aside, and if I went, perhaps the younger sons will not have to go.’ I listened dumb-stricken …2
The ultimatum expired at midnight. There was, as expected, no response. On Wednesday the 5th, the recruiting offices opened.
Joining the forces was voluntary. The older married brothers, pianist Will and violinist Harold, seemed unlikely to be affected, except that Will now found himself trapped in England, his wife Johanna in Germany. In the patriotic fervour which swept the nation, Sydney in Oxford dismayed his parents by joining the Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet. The rolling-stone brother Horace was trying to get home from West Africa, having suffered a shipwreck from which he escaped with his life only because he was a strong swimmer. Percy stuck to his resolve and joined the Warwickshire Regiment.
Henry Lamb put his medical training to use by becoming a volunteer dresser in a private military hospital in France. Darsie Japp, an excellent horseman, was proposed for a commission in the Royal Artillery; field guns were still pulled by teams of horses. Rupert Brooke joined Churchill’s recently formed Naval Division – a forerunner of today’s Marine Commandos – as a platoon commander. Gaudier-Brzeska went back to France to join his infantry regiment. Jacques Raverat too crossed over to France and was both chagrined and alarmed to be rejected for military service as medically unfit.
Stanley, like most young men then, had no idea of the meaning of warfare and was attracted to the notion of joining the Royal Berkshires as an infantryman. But it is unlikely that he would have been accepted, on account of his slight stature; he was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 6 stone 12 pounds. In those early days of the war, recruiting followed peacetime standards and the minimum requirements for infantrymen precluded Stanley. However, he and Gilbert compromised by joining the Maidenhead branch of the Civic Guard, an unauthorized but encouraged pre-recruitment training organization, the activities of which consisted mostly of marching and drill. Such team activity required a suppression of self to corporate perfection which appealed to the metaphysical in Stanley, and with the rest of the Cookham contingent he would return at night exhausted but exhilarated. He and Gilbert also joined the Bray brigade of the St John’s Ambulance Corps. Provided they could acquire the First Aid Certificate, they would be eligible to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as medical orderlies in the Home Hospital Service, the only basis on which Pa and Ma would consider letting them go.
But if such was their outward behaviour, internally the shock reverberated. It was not so much the danger of going to war which troubled Stanley, for he was seldom concerned for his physical circumstance. Rather it was the spiritual dilemma which disturbed him; the question whether he should offer up his painting, his creative destiny, to the unheeding Behemoth of military service which had no need for it. If he joined up, would he, in his words, ‘commit a sin against the Holy Ghost’?
It is possible to deduce several hints in Stanley’s work during 1914 of the seriousness to him of his perplexity. In The Betrayal, painted in that year, Stanley used St Mark’s account of the arrest of Christ in which a young man who ‘lay hold on Christ’ – Stanley shows him holding Christ’s hand – is so startled by the violence of the proceedings that he tears himself from Christ’s clasp, loses his robe in his haste, and flees from the scene naked. Stanley set the main figures in the back garden of Fernlea against a black wall and makes the young man pale in tone, so that he glows white. So intensely did Stanley feel about the painting that he sent the Raverats an annotated sketch. Even after the painting was finished, he continued to be preoccupied with the theme and made a subsequent pencil-and-wash study in which the wall is rendered lighter in tone. Against it he inserted another of his pronounced shadows; it is that of the young man fleeing, and emphasizes his being torn from the handhold of Christ. That the subject reflects Stanley’s disturbed feelings about the war is apparent from the unusual way he has in the study shown Peter drawing his sword to strike off the ear of the High Priest’s bailiff. The scabbard has been rotated until it points upwards. He later told a confidante that he based the image on the army drill for unsheathing a bayonet; this was to rotate the scabbard in its belt-holder or ‘frog’ and withdraw the bayonet downwards, a drill he must have learned from his Civic Guard training and incorporated into the study.
Stanley is surely indicating that he sees himself, like the young companion of Christ in the Bible version, as forced to flee naked from the handholder of his creativity. He is in shock, being compelled to betray his destiny. In a letter to Gwen Raverat he desperately asks her: ‘What ought Gilbert and I to do in this war? My conscience is giving me no peace … advice from you would greatly relieve me, even if you said I ought to go to the Front. … I have been so disturbed that I have not been able to concentrate.’3 Sydney, at home for the Christmas vacation of 1914, records in his diary the unusual fact that ‘Stan made a bad bed companion last night, he kept rolling over and pulling the bedclothes with him.’4
In the same vein, Stanley writes to Henry Lamb: ‘When you see how Gil’s painting is getting on, you will say to yourself “Oh! He must not go to the war!”’5 Gilbert’s painting was The Crucifixion. In stark, angular composition it shows the Cross in process of being raised from the horizontal to the vertical. But the figure outstretched on it is Pa, and those hauling him up are five round-faced, dark-haired young men uncannily like the Spencer boys; from which we may suspect that Gilbert is telling of his sympathy for the old man, whose headstrong sons, so anxious to go to war, are emotionally crucifying him. Is then Stanley’s The Centurion’s Servant a comparable allegory, the visual equivalent of a personal nightmare or sleepwalk? Arguably so. Not only is this the first occasion on which Stanley places himself recognizably as the subject of a visionary painting, but even more decisively he stands back to watch himself in his experience by placing himself as the centre onlooker of the kneeling figures, the one who seems to show no emotion but curiosity or contemplation.
Stanley had begun to think about the biblical story (Luke 7, Matthew 8) in 1913, conceiving it as a double picture, one section showing the messenger running to Christ, the other Christ’s miracle in healing from a distance