May not alleviate our mortal pain;
They lie quiescent in the hands of God.
Yet we who followed when your footsteps trod
Beyond our Island shores, who knew your quick
Instinctive action for the helpless sick,
Your clear-voiced answer when there came the call
For succour from a Nation like to fall,
Who saw that undulled radiance in your eyes
Given to those with whom ‘the Vision’ lies –
We know that in that Flag-protected cask,
Lies but the weariness of her whose Task
Grown greater than her tired mortal frame,
Bears her beyond the greater strength and fame.
Mary Henderson
Other women mourned poetically for those whose service had inspired them, even if the life lost made little subsequent mark on history. Sister Mary Gray served with the SWH at Royaumont in France from its earliest days. Following an operation for appendicitis in January 1916, she died on 23 January. One can only wonder if her death, like that of American Nurse Helen Fairchild who died in France in January 1918, was caused by her exposure to the gas she would have inhaled when tending patients.
Mary Gray, like most nurses who died on active service, was buried with full military honours. SWH Nurse Mabel Jeffrey was amongst the uniformed mourners and the funeral inspired the poem below.
IN MEMORIAM
In the midst of this time of stress and strife,
We mark the end of a peaceful life.
Filled to oe’r flowing with loving deeds
With selfless efforts for others’ needs.
No mourning crowd with its black array,
But our workaday garb of blue and grey,
As we troop in silence over the crest
Of the hill to take her away to rest.
A simple service of praise and prayer,
The notes of a hymn in the open air,
Her country’s flag, white flowers and green,
Tokens of thanks for the life that has been.
The thunder of guns comes over the hill,
As we march away from the churchyard still,
With faces lifted yet hearts bereft –
Carry on in her footsteps the work she’s left.
Mabel Jeffrey
Like many soldiers, women’s war-related deaths also occurred at home. Many uniformed women exhausted by war service succumbed either to the 1918-1919 Spanish ’flu epidemic or the many complications of the illness. One was Women’s Volunteer Reserve Colonel Lilian Sutherland whose comrades appear to have felt her passing very deeply.
BEREAVED
(on the occasion of Colonel Sutherland’s funeral)
God’s ways are rarely our ways. We bow to his decree
Perforce, while yet we wonder, Lord, why must this thing be?
So well-beloved, so young, so fair ’tis mystery to me
Why we should be bereft of her. Lord, why must this thing be?
Perchance Thine ends are better served by taking her to Thee:
We can but mourn with earth-blind eyes; Lord, why must this thing be?
Still let us strive to “carry on”, it may be she will see,
This discipline may serve to bring and keep us nearer Thee.
March 5 1919
325 Birmingham
Not only individual women’s deaths were poeticized. Agnes S Falconer memorialises her compatriots who, in 1915, were amongst the first to die overseas.
SCOTTISH NURSES IN SERBIA
Their eager, helpful hands, their love and lore
Eastward they carried to War’s frowning keep:
Fever, War’s daughter, met them at the door.
And kissed them to their sleep.
O, sometimes she is tender when she slays!
Haply she lent them, through her drifting dreams.
Loved voices, Scotland’s primrose-blazoned braes,
Cool songs of homeland streams.
Death takes his toll — the young, the bright, the brave —
Europe’s proud nations in his net lie snared:
But these hands — weaponed not to smite but save —
How ill can these be spared!
Agnes S. Falconer
On her way to nursing service in Malta in late 1916, VAD Vera Brittain visited the graves of Canadian Army Nursing personnel, Matron Jaggard and Nurse Munro. They, like so many of their patients had died of sickness whilst stationed at Lemnos, on the Greek island of Mudros, the final resting-place of countless Gallipoli veterans.
THE SISTERS BURIED AT LEMNOS
(“Fidelis ad extremum”)
O golden isle set in the deep blue Ocean,
With purple shadows flitting o’er thy crest,
I kneel to thee in reverent devotion
Of some who on thy bosom lie at rest.
Seldom they enter into song or story;
Poets praise the soldier’s might and deeds of War,
But few exalt the Sisters, and the glory
Of women dead beneath a distant star.
No armies threatened in that lonely station,
They fought not fire or steel or ruthless foe,
But heat and hunger, sickness and privation,
And Winter’s deathly shill and blinding snow.
Till mortal frailty could endure no longer
Disease’s ravages and climate’s power,
In body weak, but spirit ever stronger,
Courageously they stayed to meet their hour.
No blazing tribute through the wide world flying,
No rich reward of sacrifice they craved,
The only meed of their victorious dying
Lives in the hearts of humble men they saved.
Who when in light the Final Dawn is breaking,
Still faithful, though the world’s regard may cease,
Will honour, splendid in triumphant waking,
The souls of women, lonely here at peace.
O golden isle with purple shadows falling
Across the rocky shore and sapphire sea,
I shall not picture these without recalling
The sisters sleeping on the heart of thee!
HMHS ‘Britannic’ Mudros October 1916
Vera Brittain
Although a few medical women have entered into song and story – poetic silence appears to surround the deaths of all other women, including the countless munitions workers who lost their lives through their service.
‘Brother of mine’: Brothers in sisters’ poetry
By the late nineteenth century, strong bonds were developing between siblings in middle-class families. Wartime writings from this social group corroborate these findings. Poems for lost brothers are frequently poignant.
Mary Boyle was left with a ‘paralysing sense of daily loss’ when her much younger brother David was killed at Le Cateau on 26 August 1914 – one of the very first engagements of the BEF. Having shared a past, she now feels that his death has stolen away her future.
SONNET V
Sometimes I hear your footstep on the stair,
A curious way you scuffled slippered feet,
And am inclined to run halfway and meet
You on my threshold. Waiting in my chair,
Grow cold, whilst thinking you were really there,
There was no pause before you came to greet.
A laugh, an extra scuffle, movement fleet
To silence protest, light pull of my hair
To tilt my face so eyes could laugh at eyes;
The mirror would reflect two faces gay.
Instead it shows a woman staring blank.
Whose ears are traitors, telling wished for lies,
Whose eyes are blinded, looking far away
Unto last August when her youth’s sun sank.
Mary E Boyle
Boyle’s belief that her brother’s death has destroyed a part of her is far from unique. Girton
graduate Kathleen Montgomery Wallace’s brother, Basil Coates, was killed on 7 September 1915. A number of her poems are based upon the Cambridge she will never again explore with Basil and, like Boyle, she anticipates an unshared future in which dreams will never be fulfilled. She is far from alone in finding little comfort in the ubiquitous platitudes offered.
BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD
Because you are dead so many words they say.
If you could hear them, how they crowd, they crowd!
“Dying for England - but you must be proud.”
And “Greater Love” - “Honour” - “A debt to pay.”
And “Cry, dear!” some one says: and some one “Pray!”
What do they mean, their words that throng so loud?
This, dearest, that for us there will not be
Laughter and joy of living dwindling cold;
Ashes of words that dropped in flame first told;
Stale tenderness made foolish suddenly.
This only, heart’s desire, for you and me,
We who lived love will not see love grown old.
We, who had morning-time and crest o’ the wave
Will have no twilight chill after the gleam.
Nor any ebb-tide with a sluggish stream;
No, nor clutch wisdom as a thing to save.
We keep forever – and yet they call me brave! –
Untouched, unbroken, unrebuilt, our dream.
Kathleen Montgomery Wallace
Although we tend to think of Great War as a young man or woman’s war, bereaved siblings were not always young. Sybil Bristowe was forty-seven when her 42-year-old brother Private Vivian, serving with the South Africa Medical Corps, was killed.
TO HIS DEAR MEMORY (APRIL 14TH 1917)
Beneath the humid skies
Where green birds wing, and heavy burgeoned trees
Sway in the fevered breeze,
My brother lies.
And rivers passionate
Tore through the mountain passes, swept the plains
O’er brimmed with tears, o’er brimmed with summer rains,
All wild, all desolate.
Whilst the deep Mother-breast
Of drowsy-lidded Nature, drunk with dreams
Below Pangani, by Rufigi streams,
Took him to rest.
Beneath the sunlit skies,
Where bright words wing, and luxuriant trees
Sway in the fevered breeze,
My Brother lies.
The bending grasses woo
His hurried grave: a cross of oak to show
The drifting winds, a Soldier sleeps below,
– Our Saviour’s cross, I know
Was wooden too.
Sybil Bristowe
[Editor: According to a footnote to the poem, on the night Vivian died, ‘the river Rufigi rose so high that none of his battalion could cross it to attend to his last honours’.]
Like Bristowe, Katherine Mansfield also saw her beloved brother’s death in terms of Christ’s sacrifice. Her grief for Lieutenant Leslie Heron Beauchamp was overwhelming:
TO L.H.B (1894-1915)
Last night for the first time since you were dead
I walked with you, my brother, in a dream.
We were at home again beside the stream
Fringed with tall berry bushes, white and red.
“Don’t touch them: they are poisonous,” I said.
But your hand hovered, and I saw a beam
Of strange, bright laughter flying round your head
And as you stooped I saw the berries gleam.
“Don’t you remember? We called them Dead Man’s Bread!”
I woke and heard the wind moan and the roar
Of the dark water tumbling on the shore.
Where--where is the path of my dream for my eager feet?
By the remembered stream my brother stands
Waiting for me with berries in his hands...
“These are my body. Sister, take and eat.”
Katherine Mansfield
‘My grief untold’: Disenfranchised grief in women’s poetry
An inability to speak about, let alone declare their love in public, lack of official status, or even shame, complicated some women’s grief work. Being neither wife, sister, mother, nor fiancée, these women had sometimes to hide their grief from the world’s prying eyes. They were what grief psychologists call ‘disenfranchised mourners’.
Well-known poet Eleanor Farjeon was one whose grief could be termed ‘disenfranchised’. She had kept secret her love for Edward Thomas and appeared to be little more than a close family friend. When she received news of Edward’s death from his widow Helen, she had naively hoped that Helen would be able to comfort her. The two women met in London before travelling together to the Thomas home in Epping Forest. Eleanor realised that she would need to be strong for Helen’s sake and in a poem called ‘The Outlet’ she explores how she spent a considerable amount of time with the grieving family, before going ‘away my grief untold.’ It would be several weeks before Farjeon could begin her own grief work, much of which she captured in a series of elegiac sonnets – although Thomas is never explicitly named.
The relationship depicted in Olive Downes’ ‘Friends Only’ appears less complicated than the Farjeon/Thomas one, nevertheless the speaker realises that her mourning will be overlooked by those with a more obvious claim to the deceased’s memory. This lack of status places additional burdens on those forced to grieve silently and alone.
FRIENDS ONLY
We were just good pals together, and partners, you and I
At tennis, dancing, badminton, in days now long gone by;
Stage lovers too we often played but as friends and nothing more,
We parted when you went away to play the game of war!
I do not think you kissed me, even, I wish you had, my dear!
’Twould have helped me keep my courage through this long and lonely year
For ah! I knew
I loved you then; yet had to see you go
Without one word to tell me if you loved me too, or no!
Now where grey ships keep silent guard across the northern sea,
Somewhere you lie and with you there, the dearest part of me!
But I’m neither wife nor sweetheart, so I may not weep, my dear,
Or seem as if I missed you, even, when other folks are near.
Olive Downes
Another group of women whose grief had to remain totally concealed were mistresses. In the sexually-charged atmosphere of the war years, there would, inevitably, have been a number of them. This ‘courtesan’ is jealous of the wife who has the right to grieve, and although she acknowledges she has ‘wronged’ the wife, she experiences despair at the loss of the man she too loved.
Although this courtesan may be imaginary, similar sentiments have been found within very personal papers in archives such as the Peter Liddle Archive at the University of Leeds.
COURTESAN
This thing is theirs.
Those other women,
they have it for their own.
Theirs is the right to pride,
the right to grief.
Those other women, women of men’s houses,
Where children may be —
I have made mock of them.
And now this thing is theirs.
Theirs is the road and theirs the field,
as always was the house.
For them the men go out upon the road.
And to each one of them
if her man fall,
belongs the field wherein he lies.
The burden of the war is theirs to bear,
and bearing it they have a right to sing
of love and death and glory,
honour and faith and sacrifice,
exultantly.
Is the house fallen?
Theirs was the right to fall with it.
The men go out to battle.
to laugh them off
and weep for them after.
And I, I have no right
to even look upon it.
Helen Mackay
Other contenders for soldiers’ love have also seemingly been written out of family history and poetic record. In their idealised published memoirs, a number of mothers from socially privileged backgrounds portray themselves not as the remote, hierarchical figures they would have been in their sons’ lives but as their constant companions. Nannies, entrusted with the care of sons and, of course daughters, are unmentioned, yet the grief these women felt would have been deep, as this anonymous poem found in a scrapbook, makes poignantly plain.
THEIR NURSES
We rocked their blue-lined cradles, we watched their smiles and tears;
With toil-worn hands we led them along the helpless years;
They brought to us their sorrows, to us their broken toys;
We were their first fond mothers, they – just our baby boys.
The years went by. From Sandhurst, clean-limbed broad-shouldered men,
To us in lodge and cottage would come our boys again,
In from a long day’s hunting or wet walk with the guns,
To take their tea with “Nana”. These were our grown-up sons.
Then came the calling bugles that drew them as with chords;
Our boys came home as soldiers in buckled belts and swords;
’Twas “Wish me luck, then, Nan; I’m off to join the crowd!”
What luck we did not wish them! And oh, but we were proud.
We shared their every hardship; we knew, we knew how well
The boys we nursed would bear them in face of shot and shell;
By Memory’s fireguard shadow flung o’er a white cot’s fold,
We with the hearts of mothers, knew when our boys slept cold.
We shared their every triumph admired as from afar
Each new toy as they showed it — each medal, clasp and bar;
Our babes were grown to Captains; we saw them crowd the lists
With wooden swords of boyhood held firm in dimpled fists.
At last, long feared and waited, the casual word came through:
We knew them “killed in action”; no more their mothers knew;
The world may speak of motherhood; we felt its pangs for these
Who learned to play at soldiers long since beside our knees.
Their medals to their mothers — the honour and the pride;
We, too, with arms as empty, remembering, have cried;
They were our dimpled babies whose laugh and lisp we keep;
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