Tumult and Tears

by Vivien Newman

All your blue-bells bloom in May-time, and your skies are throbbing blue,

  Here, the streams are streaked with crimson, and red Death is haunting me.

  — England, England! all my hungry heart is yearning back to you !

  My misty sea-girt island in the sunset-laden west!

  I can feel your moorland wind upon my eyes;

  I can hear your sleepy birdeens in their swaying moonlit nest …

  England — England! … with your bluebells and your skies !

  Constance Ada Renshaw

  Renshaw is far from alone in imagining that thoughts of their native land provide soldiers with comfort. British-born Australian-resident Margery Ruth Betts imagined Australian soldiers also dreaming of their distant homeland.

  DEAD MEN’S DREAMS

  Strong as the wings of sea-gulls in their flying,

  Glad as the feet that tread the homeward track,

  So do their dreams wing home when they are dying.

  Daylong and nightlong, so do they come back.

  Like to the incense in the hallowed places,

  All hushed and dim and sweet with faith and prayer,

  So do their thoughts, above the purple spaces,

  Hover — a fragrance in the sunlit air.

  Above the clang of guns and bugles singing,

  There sang your voice, on distant southern sea,

  In dying ears a cry of victory ringing,

  And, hearing, they were conquerors, and free.

  Dear cliffs, by winds and ocean-surges riven.

  Dear sand-dunes, high upheld to star and sun,

  They dreamt of you, and you were far as Heaven,

  And dear as home, when day and work are done.

  You southern sea, and stormy, wind-swept beaches.

  And sand-dunes sunkissed in the sunlit air,

  And distant ridge and purple moorland reaches,

  It is with dead men’s dreams that you are fair!

  Margery Ruth Betts

  Public parks and Zeppelin raids

  Despite the proliferation of poetry about an idealized home country, for the majority of British citizens, the rural idyll did not extend beyond an urban park. These had flourished during the Victorian era – civic dignitaries had hoped that parks would re-connect an increasingly brutalized working population with their rustic roots.

  During the War, women poets used these public spaces to develop the contrast between the safety of the homeland and the horrors unfolding ‘over there’. Edith Mary Cruttwell is one of a number of poets to see the contrast between parks in paradisiacal England, where people can stroll at their will, and the horrors of the Front.

  SUNDAY EVENING IN A PUBLIC PARK

  The people wander to and fro,

  The scarlet tulips nod and glow;

  The church-bells drown the shrilling train

  And laughter heard and lost again.

  . . . .

  It is a pretty patch-work sight,

  And who can look and not delight?

  This Paradise remains the same

  Though Europe writhe in hot hell-flame;

  And still the scarlet tulips glow,

  The people wander to and fro.

  Edith Mary Cruttwell

  By the summer of 1915, the German High Command had decided that a possible way to break down British resistance and morale and secure victory was to use Zeppelins and aerial attacks on the civilian population. For about fifteen months there was a belief that dirigible airships could break England’s insular security through conducting raids over London and other cities. A significant attack was planned over London for 9 August and, although this and the subsequent one on 12 August was unsuccessful, a further attack on 7 September resulted in eighteen fatalities and thirty-eight people injured.

  In terms of total casualties of the War, these numbers of lives lost are infinitesimal, but the shock to civilians was enormous. Now death could rain down from the skies on the most innocent civilians – six children were killed during this attack. Viviane Verne’s peaceful daytime visit to the quintessentially English Kensington Gardens in London, reminded her how even the night-time sky was being violated by Zeppelin attacks.

  KENSINGTON GARDENS (1915)

  Dappling shadows on the summer grass,

  Vernal rivalry among the trees;

  Lovers smiling coyly as they pass,

  Sparrows laughing in the summer breeze.

  Children playing by the placid lake,

  Coaxing ducks, with greedy eyes;

  Sunlight gilding riplets that break

  Where they struggle for a prize.

  Jealous dogs that ‘do delight’

  In frantic grappling for a stick,

  Racing back with ‘bark and bite’.

  To yield a trophy quite historic.

  Lonely ladies dreaming in bath-chairs,

  Old men taking sun baths on their seats,

  Nurses softly talking in prim pairs,

  Telling of their soldier lovers’ feats.

  Medall’d patrols keeping austere guard,

  Over radiant rose and ever-greens,

  Gold-flecked finery and velvet sward,

  And the quiet garden of dead queens.

  Fleecy cloud in limpid blue,

  Smiling down with tender mien;

  Life seems simple, honest, true,

  In this simple open scene.

  Who would think that vault benign

  God’s last area free from vice,

  Initiates the aerial mine,

  With babes below as sacrifice.

  Sitting here on summer morn,

  With the birds and babes at play.

  Who could dream that sky was torn

  Yesternight – with hellish spray

  It is strange that Nature’s lurement

  Waits – unclaimed – for our retrievement,

  While men war in false endurement

  Deeming this life’s great achievement.

  Viviane Verne

  During her November 1915 visit to London, American nurse Helen Mackay poeticizes the contrast between the urban park and the encroaching outside world where searchlights sweep the sky for Zeppelins.

  PARK

  Beyond the dim wide, mysterious spaces of the park,

  the great somber trees and the gleaming water

  and the few, pale-gold lamps –

  that were not round moons any more, but delicate half-moons –

  beyond the haunting of it,

  there were roofs and chimneys,

  dark in the darkening sky.

  And there was a dimmed, darkened abiding of lights in windows,

  and a dimmed, darkened travel of lights in the streets,

  up and down.

  There were great wide marvellous streamers of white light,

  shafts of white light,

  that swept the city over and over.

  Because, beyond all these things there was war.

  Helen Mackay

  The psychological effects and the fear that the attacks engendered were considerable. For the first time since April 1746 and the Battle of Culloden, war was being waged on British soil. Yet it was not being waged against professional soldiers but against civilians; women and children on the Home Front were the victims. To make matters worse, as the War progressed, the German hit-rate increased. Civilian deaths, and in particular children’s deaths, were seen as particularly outrageous.

  The Home and War Fronts were merging and although soldiers were fighting overseas to keep England safe, they were only partially successful as their own families were targets. Nonetheless, displaying admirable stoicism, mothers and children picked up the pieces of their lives.

  FORTITUDE

  Today down Blank Court East, the children shout,

  And calm faced women hang their washing out.

  Ten days ago a bomb fell in the Court

  And wiped the smile from out a baby’s eyes:

  It wrecked the home o
f Simpkins who had fought

  And still is fighting under foreign skies:

  And blinded little Billy as he brought

  For Mother’s praise his precious drawing prize.

  Today down Blank Court East, the children shout,

  And calm faced women hang their washing out.

  Paula Hudd

  ‘Hell’s Let Loose’: Gardens as sanctuaries

  If many soldiers went to the Front accompanied by The Old Country with its depictions of thatched cottages and rose gardens, those at home also found that gardens could remind them both of what the soldiers were fighting for and what was being lost. In a selection of sonnets entitled Ad Mortuum, a very typically English garden at first comforts and then, with chilling finality, reminds Winifred Letts of all that is being lost.

  HEART’S DESIRE

  My heart’s desire was like a garden seen

  On sudden through the opening of a door

  In the grey street of life, unguessed before

  But now how magic in sun-smitten green:

  Wide cedar-shaded lawns, the glow and sheen

  Of borders decked with all a gardener’s lore,

  Long shaven hedges of old yew, hung o’er

  With gossamer, wide paths to please a queen,

  Whose happy silken skirts would brush the dew

  From peonies and lupins white and blue.

  Enchanted there I lingered for a space,

  Forgetful of the street, of tasks to do.

  But when I would have entered that sweet place

  The wind rose and the door slammed in my face.

  Winifred Letts

  The most unusual selection of wartime garden poems occurs in My Lady’s Garden which, according to its preface, was ‘originally planted [in June 1918] to give pleasure to all who have suffered or are suffering, through the War’ and to serve as a living tribute and memorial not only to the dead but also to the wounded. Each combatant nation, corps and Service has its own poetic garden or, occasionally, patch of scrub ground in this horticultural tour de force. On a first reading, the poems appear full of hyperbolic language, however, there are hints this is intentional, even ironical, serving to increase awareness of the realities of war, and of its aftermath. Even today’s soldiers may be amused by the idea that staff officers are ‘red hot pokers and’ and at another point in the text their wives are referred to as ‘peonies’!

  from MY LADY’S GARDEN

  There’s a wondrous garden, lovingly designed,

  For the flowers immortal in our mem’ry grown:

  The resplendent heroes – Armies we have known –

  Radiant and joyous, fill my Lady’s mind

  With the Spring and Summer of a glory Garden.

  There are shady alleys ’neath the *Maple Tree,

  There’s a corner glowing with the *Rising Sun,

  And a Glade of Laurels made of vict’ries won

  By heroic armies, just across the sea,

  Glory is the fragrance of my Lady’s Garden.

  Rhododendrons purple, crimson ramblers glowing,

  Spread the joy of colour in a vivid hue;

  Pergolas and arbours gather diamond dew

  From the iridescence of the river flowing

  As a jewelled girdle round my Lady’s Garden.

  Just beyond its limits, in a scarlet blaze,

  Gorgeous red-hot pokers lift their lofty heads

  High above the glory of the lesser reds.

  First in rank and splendour, dazzling to our gaze,

  Are refulgent generals of our glory Garden.

  Not within its precincts does their greatness shine,

  But they flame as beacons to the wonder War,

  In whose light we gather from each Army Corps

  Glory, youth and valour for our mem’ry shrine:

  The immortal fragrance of my Lady’s Garden.

  Hackleplume

  [Editor: * The Maple Leaf and Rising Sun represent the Canadian and Australian troops; the ‘lesser reds’ are junior Staff Officers.]

  Most garden poems are based either literally or figuratively on those in England. However, CALT’s ‘May 1915’, published in The Englishwoman, shows that she is deeply aware of the contrast between the relative safety of England and what is happening on the Western Front.

  MAY 1915

  Spring’s in my garden!

  Spring – and the glad rush of life’s resurrection triumphant,

  Bidding all nature awake to the joy of renewal:

  Tossing the fruit-boughs to foam of delicate blossom:

  Spreading her carpet of flow’rs for the feet of the children.

  Fragrant and dewy, the lilac breathes joy with its perfume –

  Rapture’s outpoured in the sweet choirs of birds at the dawning.

  Borders are blazing with splendour – the scarlet of tulips,

  And wallflowers, a glory of gold in the sun – while the chestnut

  Lifts up her white candelabra in silent thanksgiving.

  Heav’ns’ in my garden!

  But Hell’s let loose in the gardens of France and Flanders!

  War, grim and terrible, red-eyed, red-handed stalks naked -

  Followed by all his dread offspring of ruin and famine,

  Madness of battle and slaughter, and ruthless destruction,

  Merciless cruelty and foulness of devils incarnate,

  And brood of a myriad horrors, unspeakable, nameless,

  Nature turns faint at the thunderous crash of the conflict:

  Birds fly affrighted away from the roar of the tumult:

  Tender spring blossoms are drenched in the blood of the dying,

  Hell’s over yonder.

  CALT

  When this poem was published, the civilian population in England had no experience of the ‘roar’ of the guns. A year later, these were increasingly audible throughout parts of Southern England, providing a theme for more than one poet, including famous novelist, Rose Macaulay, whose much anthologized poem ‘Picnic’ depicts a picnic in Surrey in July 1917. On this occasion, the ‘guarding walls’ the picnickers had built around themselves began to crumble as the sound of the guns interrupted their reverie and reminded them of all that was being sacrificed across the Channel.

  In October 1914, Alys Trotter’s 20-year-old son Lieutenant Nigel Trotter was killed near Béthune. Like many mothers she commemorated his short life in verse. Here she remembers the happy pre-war times he and his friends had spent in their Sussex garden. By 1917, the sound of the guns penetrates the security of this idyllic spot and reminds her that a similar destiny and grief to her own awaits countless other mothers and sons.

  SUMMER, 1917

  The garden that I love has roses red.

  Crimson and pink the border hedge is bent

  With blossom. I remember how you went

  With your two schoolboy friends (because we said

  We must have good grey paven paths instead

  Of gravel), on a day like this, intent

  On time’s dead handiwork in stones; and leant

  Them up against the wall, and laughed. Now dead

  And passed is all that laughter, though there bloom

  Flowers as ever, sunburnt and sunlit.

  And, borne along the wind a hollow boom

  Burdens the scented stillness where we sit,

  Canon that sound afar. And someone’s doom

  Is registered as we are hearing it.

  Alys Fane Trotter

  Across the county border in Kent, a much younger poet, Enid Bagnold, could also hear the guns. Their sinister sound permeates the garden and her life. She knows that the War is robbing her generation of their young adulthood and too many of them were becoming old before their time.

  THE GUNS OF KENT

  Though I live as is meant

  Very near, very near,

  Happiness, joy and content,

  And things as they were.

  Yet you see what i
t is:

  When you talk of your Dead

  I can’t sleep in bed!

  I am not languid or tired

  But young and I wear

  Pretty clothes, pretty hats and a band

  At night in my hair.

  I think as an old woman thinks

  That life isn’t much,

  That on each of my pleasures is writ

  Mustn’t touch. Mustn’t touch.

  And my eyes from the star

  I withdraw, and my face from the flowers,

  This isn’t my hour. I withdraw

  My life out of this hour.

  For there comes very faint, very far,

  As such voices are

  A sound I can hear. That I hear

  Every night with my ear.

  And the window shakes at my head

  Over and over

  And each little spring in my bed

  Twangs with its brother.

  And there thumps at the heart of the Hill

  On the house wall – and runs

  In the grass at the foot of the trees,

  The Reminder. The guns.

  Enid Bagnold

  For Celia Congreve, who served overseas with the Red Cross from late August 1914, the imagined sound of Mother Earth herself weeping for her sons, rather than the guns which she heard almost daily, provided inspiration for a poem that appeared in a 1915 anthology, The Fiery Cross, sold in aid of the Red Cross. Press baron Lord Northcliffe had commissioned Stephen Graham, a committed Russophile and extensive traveller in Russia, to write reports from Russia for The Times. On one occasion the exchange between a Russian friend of Graham’s, one Vassily Vassilitch, and a Serbian officer was reported. This article proved to be the catalyst for Congreve’s poem and was printed with it.

  LAY YOUR HEAD ON THE EARTH’S BREAST

  “Have you heard the earth crying?” said Vassily Vassilitch.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Why,” said he, “I’ve heard her crying as I lay in the grass with my ear to the ground. I heard her. Like this, oo--m, oo--m, oo--m. It was the time the soldiers were being mobilised and women were sobbing in every cottage and in every turning of the road, so it may only have been that I heard. But it seemed to me the earth herself was crying, so gently, so sadly that my own heart ached.” – Stephen Graham.

  LAY your head on the Earth’s breast and you will hear her crying,

  Sobbing, softly, hopelessly, for her sons who are dead and dying.

  Splendid and gay they are marching still to the music of bugle and band,

  Bravest and best of my beautiful sons they are going from every land.