Tumult and Tears

by Vivien Newman

  We watched their infant cradles — God guard their soldier sleep!

  Anonymous

  ‘I want thee now’: Frustration and condemnation

  In the decades preceding the Great War, young women were expected to remain chaste until marriage. In affluent families, young women’s interactions with the opposite sex were closely monitored and chaperoned. Being seen alone with a young man could cause irreparable damage to a woman’ reputation and even destroy her chances of making a ‘good’ marriage. Whilst it was recognized that a young man would almost certainly be unable to control his sexual urges, that a young woman might also experience desire was to be ignored at all costs.

  One of the most surprising features of women’s grief verse is their poeticization of physical desire. Even as early as 1915, a number of grief poems have a strong sexual subtext:

  REMEMBERING

  Love, sweet & joyous, and laughing came to me,

  Welcomed mid hours of toiling, long and drear,

  Love who had seemed so precious in my sight.

  And oh! He came so near and yet too near

  Perchance, for now the joyless morning light

  Brings toil alone ... that means no time for fear,

  Thank God! Nor time for yearning and regret.

  Oh! all day long I can forget, forget!

  But always I remember in the night.

  The days that were of summer born, and fled

  Too soon; the tenderness, the joy, the faith,

  The purpose, and the longing and the might

  Of youth’s clear passion have made tryst with death.

  Because of blindness where God meant more light,

  Because of following a mocking wraith,

  The sun of love hath swiftly, sadly set …

  Oh, all day long I can forget, forget

  But always I remember in the night.

  All day there is the ardour and the claim

  Of life’s demands, the feverish race to win.

  There is but dark and silence in the night,

  And memories of passion without sin,

  Too sweet for music and too dear for light.

  And there is time to go back and begin

  Remembering all … Love claims so great a debt. …

  Oh all day long I can forget, forget!

  But always I remember in the night.

  Violet Gillespie

  As the war years lengthened and the sexual atmosphere heightened, cases of sexually transmitted diseases (often euphemistically dubbed ‘It’) increased, with significant numbers of soldiers being hospitalized. Women were seen as placing soldiers at risk, draconian laws were introduced via the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and so-called purity campaigners entered the fray. One was a deeply religious middle-aged novelist who used the pen name Beatrice Chase. Bereft of her fiancé, she began campaigning to promote soldiers’ chastity and, naturally, that of the women they left behind. She encouraged men to become ‘White Knights’ and join the Great [Chastity] Crusade, assuring them that she would pray for all those who signed the ‘pledge’ to be ‘pure and noble’ and ‘protect women [who] have fallen too low to protect themselves’.

  Chase’s volume of poems published in 1916 has few offerings that would be termed’ war poetry’, although her underlying feelings about chastity, chivalry and women’s part in a man’s undoing come across in one or two pieces, the most notable in a poem entitled ‘To______’. She advises her subject to ‘refuse to be lured to sin by any siren: this alone is Chivalry.’

  Perhaps feminist Helen Hamilton had heard of this ‘Great Crusade’ and was unimpressed by the perceived hypocrisy of those who expressed concern about the loosening of sexual constraints.

  PRUDES IN A FRIGHT

  “Oh no! We never mentioned It,

  Before the War,

  We prudish folk.

  Too nice-minded I assure you,

  And awfully moral, don’t you know!

  But now we shout it from the roofs,

  We choke it down fastidious throats,

  We chat about it in the home,

  And mention it to Bishops.

  Yes really!

  And boys and girls, young men and maids,

  We hunt with fearful zest,

  To whisper warnings in their ear:

  Beware my dear young innocents,

  Beware we do entreat you,

  Beware of It.

  That dread disease we once ignored,

  And rightly,

  For all its blighting devastation,

  It was too horrid,

  Too improper!

  And more, unyieldingly maintained,

  Stern in our sense of rectitude,

  And strict decorum, sore affronted,

  That those who fell a prey to It,

  Those sexual sinners,

  Worst of sinners,

  Should have no remedy supplied,

  If we could help it!

  Let them suffer,

  The innocent no less than the guilty!

  Assuage the chastisement of God!

  How blasphemous!

  How impious!

  Moreover, we were told that It,

  Destroys to all eternity,

  The Soul immortal.”

  (How though, destroy what cannot die?)

  “Go to!

  Such questions are beside the point.

  We know the truth

  And state it.

  But now as our good allies say,

  Autres temps, autres moeurs,*

  The War, you know –

  What could we do?

  Men who otherwise could die

  For us you understand –

  A noble satisfying fate, you’d think,

  Get It instead.

  Disgraceful!

  Dreadful!

  We must have soldiers,

  Strong defenders,

  Cannon-fodder,

  Whatever happens!

  Suppose the Germans won,

  Where should we be?

  So out with all the remedies,

  Let no-one be without:

  March every woman straight to gaol,

  Seen talking to a soldier!

  Nor will we ever cease to scream

  To scream our very loudest,

  At men and maids,

  At boys and girls,

  Beware, beware,

  Oh do, do, do!

  Each of the other,

  Lest It …”

  “Oh dear, but will they listen?

  We must have soldiers,

  Strong defenders …”

  Must you?

  But why?

  Helen Hamilton

  [Editor: * Translation: ‘Other times, other customs’]

  Despite the best efforts of Chase and others, sex remained in the air and one of the most surprising features of women’s grief verse is their poeticization of physical desire. A considerable corpus of poems admit more or less openly to sexual frustration. QMAAC Brenda Bartlett’s poetry is at times erotic, as she combines sex and death in a frenetic danse macabre and appears to criticize those who advocate chastity. In wartime’s heightened sexual atmosphere, Venus willingly becomes the lover of Mars, the relationship is consummated joyfully:

  TOO WELL

  And so they tell us we have loved too well,

  Too well! Not even the meaning of the words

  Is known to those who glibly cast them at

  Our joy-crowned heads, O dearest heart of mine!

  Their little puny souls will never know

  One tithe of the passion that has held

  Up to the level of the ancient stars

  Our feeble clay, and brought us to the moon

  High-swinging in the sky, and got beyond

  The barriers of time and space,

  Because we loved – too well!

  And yet they tell us we have loved too well,

  And go upon their placid blameless way,

&n
bsp; And thank their God they are not such as we.

  Our gods are wind and ocean, stars and sky,

  And all familiar, unfamiliar things,

  And we in turn will bless them, hands upraised

  In thankfulness, that come what may, we’ve lived!

  We who have known the glory of the gods

  And in one night have tasted Hell and Heaven

  Because we loved – too well!

  And so they tell us we have loved too well,

  And Hell will be our portion after death –

  But if together surely Hell were heaven,

  And if we’ve sinned, then both have sinned alike.

  And we will face them proudly, knowing that,

  If still together we can bravely face

  The worst Hell knows with jest upon our lips!

  But we have only sinned in loving deep,

  And yet may see the shining courts of Heaven

  Because we loved – so well!

  Brenda Bartlett

  A few bolder poets are prepared to admit, unashamedly, to sexual longings; the more inhibited ones nevertheless hint at these. One modest touch remains in much of the poetry that suggests sexual frustration, many women only refer to their soldier lover by his initials. In one of the War’s many gender inversions, they may be protecting his reputation as much as their own.

  Margaret Furse married weeks before war was declared. Several of her poems show that she is aware of how the newly bereaved can be caught up in what grief psychologists term ‘bondage’ to the dead.

  CAPTIVITY

  Once it was freedom that you gave,

  And then your eyes

  Were as lake waters, deep and grave,

  Holding the skies.

  I leaned to drink and had no fear

  Or thieving doubt;

  Loving thee so brought heaven near,

  Shut sadness out.

  Now when the passionate inward fire

  No longer sleeps,

  Fain would I stir with fierce desire

  Those silent deeps.

  Fain would I drink – and yet I stand

  A prisoner here –.

  Myself withholds my eager hand,

  I go not near.

  Margaret Furse

  Several bereaved women wrote in diaries and memoirs of their attempts to move on with their lives following war bereavement, accepting that they had a life or at least a half-life of their own to live. Popular novelist May Aldington poeticizes a young woman who holds her feelings at bay by day, but in the silence of the night, finds controlling her emotions harder to achieve.

  AFTER

  It has taken so long to forget you –

  So long to put out the flame

  Shall I ever forget your kisses

  Or cease to thrill at your name?

  Thro’ the day not a thought will I give you,

  The passion of work is my all.

  I will heed not the sea waves murmur,

  I will hear not the Spring bird’s call.

  But oh! There’s the night to follow

  The spark of the flame alarms;

  And I ache in a speechless sorrow,

  For the memoried touch of your arms.

  And I pray in the silent darkness

  Which hides my love in its shame,

  That God will let me forget you,

  The prayer is a sob – and your name.

  May Aldington

  A much younger poet, Joan Rundall, is not alone in hoping that however overwhelming her grief, memories might sustain her should the worst happen through the long years ahead.

  THE FARM OF THE APPLE TREE

  I saw you standing by the gate,

  I heard you call to me

  With the wind cry and the bird cry and the far-off cry of the sea.

  Was there fire in your eyes that they could light

  Such a fire in the heart of me,

  When the young moon sailed from amber clouds

  O’er the Farm of the Apple Tree?

  A light from the window flashed and leapt

  Through the night in a golden stream,

  With the moonfire and the starfire and the fire of a world a-dream;

  But I only saw your burning eyes

  Implore me silently,

  And felt your hands upon my own

  By the Farm of the Apple Tree.

  A night, a day, a night

  You gave your love to me

  With the wind love, the bird love and the wandering love of the sea;

  You left me roaming a world of pain,

  With a space alone set free

  Where my remembered fires for ever sleep

  In the Farm of the Apple Tree.

  You woke the life within my life,

  My soul from her sleep of years.

  You lighted a lamp in the World for me that is blinding my eyes with tears,

  But you left a dream I cannot lose

  Of fire in the heart of me,

  And in the touch of your hands upon my own

  In the Farm of the Apple Tree

  Joan Rundall

  One woman whose tragically short-lived marriage was soon only a dream was Elsie Paterson Cranmer. Her poem ‘Premonition’ proved prescient:

  PREMONITION

  Suddenly out of the cold and mist and gloom,

  A gleam of silver moonlight –you were there

  Beside me in the little narrow room

  Smiling your old glad familiar smile

  Full of sweetness.

  With a secret fear

  That this was some poor shadowy wraith of you

  I touched your eyes … and then we mutely kissed,

  Not with the fiery kisses as of old,

  But a sad dumb pitiful clinging.

  For a while

  No word was said until you suddenly drew

  Yourself away from me. Your eyes grew cold

  Your mouth implacable …….

  Strangely you fled

  Away into the cold and gloom and mist,

  And then I knew – I knew that you were dead.

  Elsie Paterson Cranmer

  Widowed within three weeks of her marriage, Cranmer recognizes how, to the sexually innocent, her grief has an incomprehensible dimension.

  MAID VIRTUE*

  Fragile and slim and pale is she,

  And cold as cold virginity.

  She cannot feel the passionate pain

  Of dreaming hearts, that dream in vain.

  The crimson pleasures of the Wise

  Only fill her with soft surprise.

  Fragile and slim and pale is she

  And cold, as cold virginity.

  Elsie Paterson Cranmer

  [Editor:* Almost certainly her betrothed but unmarried sister.]

  Cranmer herself is amongst The Living Dead, – the title of her deeply moving collection. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had memorably termed ‘Death-in-Life’ was now Elsie and the approximately 160,000 War-widows’ mate.

  REMEMBRANCE

  I shall remember. When the years have flown

  Away, and left no single visible trace

  Of all your beauty and your body’s grace

  And you are one with the earth and sky and air.

  I shall remember how my heart grew cold

  Beneath the sea-cold chilliness of your own,

  And dumb, with the sick dumbness of despair.

  And when the last faint, shadowy evening light

  Of life departs from me – when comes the night,

  And I am feeble grown, and frail and old,

  I shall be taken from the haunts of men;

  Oh, heart I loved, I shall remember – then.

  Elsie Paterson Cranmer

  Whilst we associate war widows with young women, older women were, of course, also bereaved. Just occasionally, a middle-aged wife lifted the veil on her mourning and hinted that she too was suffering the loss o
f her sexual partner as well as, in Alexandra Grantham’s case, needing her husband to comfort her after the loss of their eldest son.

  SONNET IV

  My dead, my dead, O my beloved dead!

  What gifts would I not bring to fate to hold

  Your strong warm hands again, to enfold

  You in my arms, soothe the wounds from which you bled,

  Hear the rich music of your voice, see

  The kindling happiness of your old smile,

  Speak with you ’twixt lingering sobs and laughter, while

  You kiss’d my tears away, and comfort me.

  My dead, my dead, O my beloved dead!

  Each night I long for you on lonely bed,

  That in bright spirit-land of sleep my pain

  Be ended, you living in my dreams again.

  You never come – Can you not hear me weep,

  You loved ones, or is your slumber all too deep.

  Alexandra Grantham

  Most of these poets were writing and grieving on the Home Front. In one of a series of untitled, unpublished sonnets, written at her hospital in France, Mary Borden’s perspective is different. How can she, as a blood-spattered nurse working so close to the front line and dealing with the most horrifically injured men, remain attractive to her soldier-lover?

  No, no! There is some sinister mistake.

  You cannot love me now. I am no more

  A thing to touch, a pleasant thing to take

  Into one’s arms. How can a man adore

  A woman with black blood upon her face,

  A cap of horror on her pallid head,

  Mirrors of madness in the sunken place

  Of eyes; hands dripping with the slimy dead?

  Go. Cover close your proud untainted brow.

  Go quickly. Leave me to the hungry lust

  Of monstrous pain. I am his mistress now.

  These are the frantic beds of his delight—

  Here I succumb to him, anew, each night.

  Mary Borden

  Although for some war bereaved, comforting words assisted them in coping with, even accepting the death of the beloved, others found the euphemisms insulting. They yearned for the beloved’s strong, virile body and words gave little solace. However asexual the public representations of war grief, in their poetry many women moved beyond chaste love, giving us insight into the sexual reality of female war bereavement. These intensely private, intimate poems differ from the public face of grief, with its asexual love for virtuous knights and from the need for public remembrance.

  ‘It’s over, over, it’s the end’

  News of the Armistice was greeted by many with jubilation; for others it was a bleak reminder of all that they had lost. In a diary entry for 28 September 1918, Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, notes that now that the ‘world has stopped spinning’, it would be hard for the bereaved to come to terms with the fact that the ‘dead were not only dead for the duration of the War but forever’.