Leaves from a Field Note-Book — A Reader’s Guide

The <em>Conte</em> as a Strategy of Self-Effacement

Morgan explicitly frames his literary method in the preface, explaining that he has cast many sketches as contes to keep himself out of the foreground. This is not a modest throwaway line but a deliberate structural choice. The excerpts bear this out: the long anecdote about 'Major Peter' is told with Morgan as a participant-observer, but the focus stays on Peter—his pyjamas, his pocket inventory, his confident piloting of an aeroplane. The narrator's own role is limited to prompting and reacting. Morgan's official duties, he says, were 'neither spirited nor glorious,' and the conte form allows the 'great events' to remain central. This technique creates a tension between the personal witness and the impersonal record, a pattern visible throughout the text.

Domestic Details Amid Military Formalities

The Peter episode is rich with small, concrete details that contrast with the expected gravity of a war memoir. Peter's bedside library includes The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Cock-House at Fellsgarth, and Newbolt's Pages from Froissart—an eclectic mix that Morgan calls 'thoroughly sound.' The nightly pocket inventory lists a Welsh Fusiliers button, cartridge-cases from a Lewis machine-gun, a crumpled miniature aeroplane, a knife, string, a coloured 'alley,' cigarette cards of Kitchener, French, and Smith-Dorrien, a top, and a conglomerate of sweets. Morgan notes dryly that this is 'certainly a peculiar collection' for a field officer, 'few or none of these articles being included in the Field Service regulations.' The juxtaposition of military rank (Peter is addressed as 'Major') with schoolboy possessions creates a quiet humour that runs through the narrative.

The Authority of a Child in a War Zone

Peter's confidence and social ease at the Base are striking. He has been there only a fortnight, yet he is 'familiar and domestic with every one in authority from the Base Commandant downwards.' When he introduces Morgan to a Flying Corps captain, he adds impressively that Morgan is 'attached to the staff at G.H.Q.'—a phrase that reverses the usual adult-child dynamic. Peter's father, T——, participates in the game of military titles, saluting his son, though the paternal authority reasserts itself at bedtime when Peter is 'gravely cashiered from the Army, only to be reinstated without a stain on his character the next morning.' This oscillation between play and discipline, between the child's world and the army's, is a recurring motif. The excerpt ends with Morgan feeling 'great gratification' that Peter thought him worth introducing—a subtle inversion of who is impressing whom.

Readers approaching Leaves from a Field Note-Book should expect a work that moves between official observation and domestic anecdote, often within the same chapter. Morgan's use of the conte form means that the narrator's own judgments are understated, and the reader must attend to the details—the pocket contents, the salutes, the bedtime negotiations—to grasp the texture of life at the Base. The book does not offer a continuous narrative of the war but a series of vignettes, each carrying its own weight of implication.

There is a certain quiet kinship between Morgan’s wartime notebook and the dusty regimental records of a Massachusetts colonel; both are less concerned with grand strategy than with the small, worn objects a soldier carries. That pocket lint of humanity binds them. It made me think of Gen. Cowdin and the First Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers — Key Ideas to Explore, which holds a similar tenderness beneath its official air.