She is diving down
But she is held.
In the very act of determined despair she is held.
Something holds her suspended in anguish.
Shooting head downwards, she hangs there.
The supreme moment of her unbearable agony is fixed there forever, against the sky.
Oh, the poor Virgin!
Mary Borden
Ancient statues and modern-day Christs
A number of soldiers noted in letters and diaries how in Catholic France and Belgium, Calvaries, symbols of Christ’s Passion, dotted the landscape. For the many thousands of personnel who had never left their native shores, this was a very visible reminder that they were ‘abroad’.
In direct contrast to the loving care with which they had previously been maintained, during the War these images often became grotesque, disfigured by bombs, shells and shrapnel. They became part of the physically and metaphorically shattered landscape and for some poets they symbolized the destruction, horror and devastation of the War.
Amongst the bleakest of the poems depicting this process is Martha Foote Crow’s, first published in New York Evening Post and reprinted in in April 1916 in the (anti-war leaning) The Nation.
THE WOODEN CHRIST
At the high ridge
Of a wide war-stricken realm
There stands an ancient wooden Christ.
Hollow the tottering image towers,
Eyeless and rotten, and decrepit there,
His smile a cruel twist.
Within the empty heart of this old Christ
Small stinging insects build their nests;
And iron-hearted soldiers cross themselves
The while they pass
The hollow-hearted figure by.
I think there is no Christ left there
In all those carnage-loving lands
Save only this of hollow wood
With wasps nests Living in its heart.
Martha Foote Crow
Elinor Jenkins also felt that the statues and images of Christ were reminders of His powerlessness. Both the ancient Christ’s and modern-day soldiers’ sacrifices appear ‘fruitless’, pointless in her poem.
ECCE HOMO!
He hung upon a wayside Calvary,
From whence no more the carven Christ looks down
With wide, blank eyes beneath the thorny crown,
On the devout and careless, passing by.
The Cross hath shaken with his agony,
His blood had stained the dancing grasses brown,
But when we found him, though the weary frown,
That waited on death’s long delayed mercy,
Still bent his brow, yet he was dead and cold,
With drooping head and patient eyes astare,
That would not shut. As we stood turned to ice
The sun remembered Golgotha of old,
And made a halo of his yellow hair
In mockery of that fruitless sacrifice.
Elinor Jenkins
[Editor: Pontius Pilate used the words ‘Ecce Homo!’ (Behold the Man), when he presented Christ to the crowd shortly before the Crucifixion – a scene frequently depicted in Christian Art.]
Muriel Stuart also uses the symbols of the Crucifixion, this time to point out the bleakness of humankind’s sacrifice, for strangers.
FORGOTTEN DEAD, I SALUTE YOU
Dawn has flashed up the startled skies,
Night has gone out beneath the hill
Many sweet times; before our eyes
Dawn makes and unmakes about us still
The magic that we call the rose.
The gentle history of the rain
Has been unfolded, traced and lost
By the sharp finger-tips of frost;
Birds in the hawthorn build again;
The hare makes soft her secret house;
The wind at tourney comes and goes,
Spurring the green, harnessed boughs;
The moon has waxed fierce and waned dim:
He knew the beauty of all those
Last year, and who remembers him?
Love sometimes walks the waters still,
Laughter throws back her radiant head;
Utterly beauty is not gone,
And wonder is not wholly dead.
The starry, mortal world rolls on;
Between sweet sounds and silences,
With new, strange wines her breakers brim:
He lost his heritage with these
Last year, and who remembers him?
None remember him: he lies
In earth of some strange-sounding place,
Nameless beneath the nameless skies,
The wind his only chant, the rain
The only tears upon his face;
Far and forgotten utterly
By living man. Yet such as he
Have made it possible and sure
For other lives to have, to be;
For men to sleep content, secure.
Lip touches lip and eyes meet eyes
Because his heart beats not again:
His rotting, fruitless body lies
That sons may grow from other men.
He gave, as Christ, the life he had-
The only life desired or known;
The great, sad sacrifice was made
For strangers; this forgotten dead
Went out into the night alone.
There was his body broken for you,
There was his blood divinely shed
That in the earth lie lost and dim.
Eat, drink, and often as you do,
For whom he died, remember him.
Muriel Stuart
For Christians of all denominations, the service of Holy Communion is the most overt reminder of Christ’s sacrifice. The bread and wine are linked to His Body and Blood and the faithful ‘eat and drink’ in remembrance of Him. These symbols often occur in women’s poetry, nowhere more powerfully or more despairingly than in this example by Margaret Sackville.
SACRAMENT
Before the Altar of the world in flower,
Upon whose steps thy creatures kneel in line,
We do beseech Thee in this wild Spring hour,
Grant us, O Lord, thy wine. But not this wine.
Helpless, we, praying by Thy shimmering seas,
Beside Thy fields, whence all the world is fed,
Thy little children clinging about Thy knees,
Cry: ‘Grant us, Lord, Thy bread!’ But not this bread.
This wine of awful sacrifice outpoured;
This bread of life — of human lives. The Press
Is overflowing, the Wine-Press of the Lord!
Yet doth he tread the foamings no less.
These stricken lands! The green time of the year
Has found them wasted by a purple flood,
Sodden and wasted everywhere, everywhere; —
Not all our tears may cleanse them from that blood.
The earth is all too narrow for our dead,
So many and each a child of ours – and Thine
This flesh (our flesh) crumbled away like bread,
This blood (our blood) poured out like wine, like wine.
Margaret Sackville
Far from providing comfort through associations with Holy Communion and Christ’s sacrifice, Vivien Ford is one of a number of poets who felt that such constructions offend the Lord, along with the suggestion that this was a Holy War. She provides a powerful indictment of those who misappropriate Christian liturgy.
THE WORLD’S CHALICE
As if in His still sanctuary He heard
The distant rolling drum,
Upon His carven crucifix the dumb
Stone Jesus stirred.
Stirred, with the everlasting arms out flung
To heal a stricken world,
And wondering, heard the battle challenge hurled
From every tongue.
Then He whose ten
der side was pierced and torn
On newer wounds looked down,
And saw vast herds in conflict for a crown
That was not thorn.
He for Whom Simon Peter drew the sword
And bidden, put it up,
Beheld again the precious blood outpoured
Into His cup.
‘This do’ - into His eyes a horror crept –
‘In Memory of Me.’
And, as of old in far-off Bethany,
Christ Jesus wept.
Vivien Ford
Conclusion: ‘Nearer my God to Thee’
Women who used religion in their war poetry shared a similar background, intimately familiar with the teachings and stories of Christianity. However, the commonality of these tropes and themes does not mean that the women deliver the same messages. One woman’s gateway to Heaven is for another a Via Dolorosa; what for one nurse is a sacred service for another is complicity in a house of agony.
Religion helped some women to believe that this was a Holy War. They acknowledged that whatever its cost in human suffering and grief, it would cleanse the nation, and would return apostates to the Christian fold. The outpouring of her sons’ sacrificial blood would allow Britannia to rise again, newborn and purified. For ‘mothers’ who sought to understand the roles that gender forced upon them and their ‘sons’, religion and especially comparisons with the Holy Family provided a frame of reference.
Irrespective of whether they privileged Her maternity or Her sanctity, women took comfort from knowing that Mary had trodden this very path. Her sufferings gave them strength. By comparing their own and their generation’s experience to the Christian story, many poets believed they and their formerly godless nation were moving in the words of the nineteenth century hymn, ‘Nearer my God to Thee’.
Other poets, be they nurses or civilians, found little succour in Christianity; they used religious discourse and images to question, even deny their faith. For them, this ‘Unholy’ War was waged not by new crusaders but by brutalised ‘ordinary men’ for whom Christianity had become and would remain meaningless. Rather than precious and cleansing, blood was merely effluvia, spilled pointlessly and with profligacy. By their sufferings in the trenches, young men would not rise to eternal life but would rot forever in the Flanders clay.
Just like the hapless ‘Virgin of Albert’, their mothers, sweethearts, wives had been, ‘abandoned’, ‘betrayed’. The New Testament God of Love did not exist, He was quite simply the Old Testament God of Wrath.
Far from comforting and consoling, Christianity frequently failed to offer solace for a world in which thousands of young men had gone forever. Unable to staunch the blood that Christians were spilling in this so-called Holy War, in Vivien Ford’s words even ‘Christ Jesus wept’.
Chapter 3
‘Lay Your Head on the Earth’s Breast’:
Nature in Women’s War Poetry
Poems about the English countryside, generally extolling its beauty, occasionally expressing despair at increasing industrialisation or creeping urbanism, date back to medieval times. The Education Acts of the late nineteenth century had led to an increasingly literate society – and much literacy was taught through poetry, ideally poetry that reinforced a sense of nationalism.
In the early twentieth century, this type of poetry, often referred to as ‘Georgian’, had become so popular that many soldiers popped anthologies featuring ‘nature poetry’ into their kit bags before they went overseas. In 1917, the YMCA went so far as to commission an anthology with the telling title, The Old Country: A Book of Love and Praise of England, in the hope that poems, prose texts and pictures of thatched cottages with roses round the door, would, in the words of the editor Ernest Rhys, ‘hearten home-sick men’. The service-green volume was designed to be the ideal size for a soldier’s knapsack.
Little matter that the majority of soldiers hailed from the urban sprawls and slums of industrialised England, the Old Country was assumed to exist in their imaginations and their hearts. This point was not missed by Leicestershire vicar’s wife Emily Orr.
A RECRUIT FROM THE SLUMS
‘What has your country done for you,
Child of a city slum,
That you should answer her ringing call
To man the gap and keep the wall
And hold the field though a thousand fall
And help be slow to come?
“What has your country given to you,
Her poor relation and friend?
‘Oh, a fight like death for your board and keep,
And some pitiful silver coins per week
And the thought of the ‘house’ at the end.
‘What can your country ask from you,
Dregs of the British race?’
‘She gave us little, she taught us less,
And why we were born we could hardly guess
Till we felt the surge of the battle press
And looked the foe in the face.’
‘Greater love hath no man than this
That a man should die for his friend.’
‘We thought life cruel, and England cold;
But our bones were made from the English mould,
And when all is said, she’s our mother old
And we creep to her breast at the end.’
Emily Orr
[Editor: The ‘house’ is the dreaded workhouse, where many of England’s poor feared ending their days.]
A ‘Misty Sea-Girt Island’: Visions of home
Although the pieces selected for The Old Country were invariably positive and uplifting, throughout the War both male and female poets used the beauty of their native land as a vehicle to express their thoughts about the conflict. Rural poetry lent itself to pain and anguish, as well as patriotism and the affirmation that the War was a just one and God was on the Allies’ side.
On 10 October 1914, Alice Meynell became the first woman to have a war poem published in The Times. She, like so many poets who used nature to deliver their message, contrasted the last long hot summer of the peace with events unfolding across the Channel:
SUMMER IN ENGLAND 1914
On London fell a clearer light;
Caressing pencils of the sun
Defined the distances, the white
Houses transfigured one by one,
The “long, unlovely street” impearled.
O what a sky has walked the world!
Most happy year! And out of town
The hay was prosperous, and the wheat;
The silken harvest climbed the down;
Moon after moon was heavenly sweet,
Stroking the bread within the sheaves,
Looking twixt apples and their leaves.
And while this rose made round her cup,
The armies died convulsed; and when
This chaste young silver sun went up
Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain.
Flower following tender flower, and birds,
And berries; and benignant skies
Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.
Yonder are men shot through the eyes,
And children crushed. Love, hide thy face
From man’s unpardonable race.
A Reply
Who said “No man hath greater love than this
To die to serve his friend?”
So these have loved us all unto the end.
Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed!
The soldier dying dies upon a kiss,
The very kiss of Christ.
Alice Meynell
The final stanza, printed either as an ellipsis or with the words ‘A Reply’, suggests Meynell found her own vision intolerable, she orders non-combatants, the ‘unsacrificed’, to accept the soldiers’ sacrifice – and their own passive roles. Sacrifice for the preservation of England is a recurring theme in na
ture poetry; some poets see it as worthwhile whilst others question, sometimes cryptically, whether any ideal warrants the spilling of so much blood. This tension is a constant feature of women’s more sophisticated pastoral poems.
Whilst some of Meynell’s imagined ‘thousand shattered men’ would have been killed, others would have been more or less seriously wounded, the majority clinging to the hope of a ‘Blighty ticket’ sending them home for hospital treatment. Staff Nurse Beatrice Hopkinson, a member of the Territorial Forces Nursing Service, is among the many nurses who wrote of how patients who had lost a limb or suffered serious injury would remark that they had got ‘a nice Blighty one’.
Many nurses and volunteers working in hospitals overseas frequently comment on their patients’ overwhelming desire to see England again. This may lie behind Sheffield poet Constance Ada Renshaw’s ‘The Lure of England’. Superficially, the poem might seem to be a maudlin attempt to sanitize the soldier’s sufferings using popular pastoral tropes; a closer reading both of the poem and even the word ‘Lure’, reveals layers of meaning. Renshaw may be implying that the ‘boys’ have been duped into sacrificing their sight, their health, their lives.
The ‘broken thing’ has been emasculated and permanently dislocated by war. All that is left to him is the possibility that he can be returned to and healed by the idealized country he bled for.
THE LURE OF ENGLAND
There’s a misty sea-girt island in the sunset-haunted west;
I can see it in my wounded dreams of home.
I can see the dwindling hedgerows where the sparrow builds her nest,
And the grass-land with its throw of daisied foam.
Oh! there’s Spring upon the island, and the greening lures me back
To mysterious meres and woodways in the west.
They have stripped my manhood from me, they have stretched me on the rack,
Take me home, a blinded broken thing, to rest!
I can never see the island with its fields of sheeted gold,
And the wisps of sunset drifting in the west.
Darkness drowns the dim green valleys and the silent hills of old,
And the hedges where the sparrow builds her nest.
Let me put my blind eyes down among the bluebells and the grass.
Let me feel the brimming coolness on my brow.
Let me touch the dewy bracken where the dreamful shadows pass.
I have bled for England! … Let her heal me now!
England, misty England, grey and vague across the sea!
Tumult and Tears Page 7