by Peter Parker
Many of those who volunteered marched off to the front with high ideals that would be confounded by the squalid realities of modern industrialised warfare. Merciful euphemisms persisted, both in the rhetoric of commemoration and in the letters serving men wrote to the families of those killed in action. It was important to believe, both while the war was going on and during its aftermath when the cost was being counted, that the Dead should be Glorious, that they had Fallen in Battle and in doing so made the Supreme Sacrifice. It was necessary to tell families that every dead soldier had been a credit to his regiment, had been both popular and courageous, and had died instantly without suffering. The war poets, and many of those who subsequently wrote war memoirs, felt the need to tell instead what they saw as the truth: that the courage of some men had failed, that some were dangerously incompetent soldiers, that many died ignobly either in ill-planned assaults or stupid and avoidable accidents, that many more were blown to irrecoverable pieces or died in prolonged agony. Housman was not a war poet in this sense, as can be judged by his provocative assertion in 1933 that ‘The Great War cannot have made much change on the opinions of any man of imagination.’ This is more or less a refutation before the event of the generally agreed notion that the First World War changed everything, not least the opinions of those men of imagination such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who became spokesmen for their generation. Housman undoubtedly enjoyed provoking people, but this notorious pronouncement was almost certainly wholly sincere. It is the remark of someone undeceived, someone who already knew the cost of war because his brother had been killed in one, someone to whom, on another front, the worst had already happened but who described himself in general terms as a ‘pejorist’.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man’s deceiver
Was never mine
he wrote with proud defiance in a poem drafted in September 1917, while British troops floundered in the mud of Passchendaele.
Although Housman began this poem, ‘I to my perils’, in 1917, he was still working on it in the 1920s and it remained unpublished during his lifetime. He published only four poems during the First World War, his main contribution to the war effort being financial rather than literary. Too old to fight, he sent £100 to his three nephews to help them equip themselves for the trenches, and the rest of his bank balance to the Exchequer. Only one of the poems he published during the war was written in direct response to it: ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’, which appeared in The Times on 31 October 1917 beneath the day’s leader on ‘The Anniversary of Ypres’. The others were all written before the war. ‘As I gird on for fighting’ first appeared in March 1917 in Blunderbuss, a magazine produced at Trinity College, Cambridge, for military cadets, but it was drafted in 1895. ‘Her strong enchantments failing’ was published in a variant form as ‘The Conflict’ in a supplement to the December 1915 edition of the Edwardian, the magazine of St Edward’s School in Bath, in memory of Kate’s son Lieutenant Clement Aubrey Symons, an alumnus of the school who had been killed in action that September; but it was written in 1894–5. ‘Oh hard is the bed they have made him’ was published (unsigned and as ‘Illic Jacet’) in the same issue of the magazine, but had already appeared, in a slightly different version, in the Academy in February 1900. These poems, like ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose’ and several of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, appear to belong to the period of the First World War and have even been included in anthologies devoted to that conflict. Housman himself evidently thought the poems timeless, applicable to any conflict. When, for example, he received news of Clement’s death, he sent Kate ‘Illic Jacet’, acknowledging that they were ‘some verses that I wrote many years ago’ but evidently feeling they suited the occasion. The poem has been incorrectly supposed to be about Herbert, but it was written and published before his death. Illic jacet, meaning ‘Over there lies’, is a variation on the usual tombstone inscription Hic jacet, ‘Here lies…’, and so suggests death in a far-off place, and this would apply to any soldier who was buried where he fell on a far battlefield. This gave it a particular poignancy during the First World War, since the dead were not repatriated.
The title of Housman’s only true First World War poem, ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’, seems provocative, since he published these verses at a time when the customary rhetoric was of honour, love of country and noble self-sacrifice; but both as a scholar and a poet Housman was always attentive to the exact meanings of words. The poem refers to the original British Expeditionary Force, made up of professional soldiers who were technically mercenaries because they took the king’s shilling in exchange for fighting wherever the army sent them. At the same time, Housman was rebutting German propaganda that dismissed the BEF as nothing but mercenaries. The poem looks back to the autumn of 1914, when this comparatively small army of professional soldiers managed to hold the strategically vital town of Ypres against the Germans but was more or less wiped out in the process.
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
The Scottish politician and writer William Darling declared that the poem ‘does in eight lines what the official histories of the war cannot do in volumes’, while Kipling described the two brief stanzas as ‘the finest lines of poetry written during the war’; but it was the poems of A Shropshire Lad which people had taken to their hearts and would take to the trenches.
In Every Pocket
The appeal of Housman’s poetry was particularly strong to those who had been classically educated at public schools, where pupils studied and learned by rote carefully selected poems from The Greek Anthology and would go on to become junior officers in the war. The standard edition of these poems was Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, first published in 1890 with a substantially revised edition in 1906. It was edited by Housman’s friend and fellow scholar J.W. Mackail, who provided parallel prose translations for the general reader; but the book was also available in a pocket edition in which the original Greek and the English translations were placed in different volumes and sold separately. This meant that schoolboys could be given the Greek volume without its English ‘crib’ in order to do exercises, then be referred to the English volume to be shown how it should be done, and Mackail’s edition became one of the key texts of classical education at public schools.
Mackail was the son-in-law of Edward Burne-Jones, and his book not only had a Pre-Raphaelite illustration on its title page, but a Pre-Raphaelite tinge throughout. As Cyril Connolly put it, Mackail’s English translations ‘exhaled pessimism and despair, an over-ripe perfection in which it was always late afternoon or the last stormy sunset of the ancient world, in which the authentic gloom of Palladas was outdone by that attributed to Simonides, Callimachus, or Plato’. As a schoolboy at Eton, Connolly ‘knew all the sceptical epigrams by heart and most of those about love and death and the fate of youth and beauty’. His response to the book had been courted by Mackail in the introduction to his anthology’s revised edition:
For over all life there lay a shadow. Man, a weak and pitiable creature, lay exposed to a grim and ironic power that went its own way careless of him, or only interfered to avenge its own slighted majesty […] Fate seemed to take a sardonic pleasure in confounding expectation, making destruction spring out of apparent safety, and filling life with dramatic and memorable reversals of fortune.
And beside the bolts launched by fate, life was as surely if more slowly weighed down by the silent and ceaseless tide of change against which nothing stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and most beautiful thi
ngs away soonest.
These words might equally apply to A Shropshire Lad, although Housman denied that his poetry had been particularly influenced by The Greek Anthology. ‘Of course I have read it, or as much of it as is worth reading, but with no special heed,’ he wrote in 1933. Regardless of whether or not Housman took special heed of The Greek Anthology, he certainly took heed of its editor. In addition to being a contemporary classical scholar Housman admired (which put him in a fairly rarefied category), Mackail was also a man whose literary taste he trusted. Housman not only sent him copies of his edition of Manilius’s Astronomica for comment, but also consulted him as to the proposed contents of Last Poems.
It is scarcely surprising that with romanticised classical ideas being inculcated at their schools the Edwardians had made a cult of the fleetingness of youth. The literature of the period is suffused with an almost fatalistic sense that boys in particular are teetering upon the edges of both perfection and doom. As J.M. Barrie wrote to Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose son was about to leave Winchester College: ‘An English boy has almost too good a time. Who would grudge it him, and yet he knows too well that the best is past by the time he is three-and-twenty.’ This remark may owe something to Barrie’s own psychology; but the idea of boys reaching their apogee during adolescence was very much in the Edwardian air, reflected not only in the huge popularity of sentimental novels of public-school life, but also (for example) in the comic yet often sinister stories of H.H. Munro, which he published under the pen name of Saki. Readers of Saki’s novel The Unbearable Bassington, that proleptic (1912) anthem for doomed youth, would have nodded in agreement when the protagonist was described by his housemaster as one of those young men ‘who are Nature’s highly finished product when they are in the schoolboy stage’. Saki himself observed that ‘To have reached thirty is to have failed in life.’ Death seemed almost preferable to such a fate and, although well past thirty and very far from having failed in life, Munro would volunteer for active service and be killed on the Somme, his name incised on the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval. This necessarily vast structure had been designed by Edward Lutyens, who poignantly enough had also created the sets for the first production (in 1904) of Peter Pan, Barrie’s play about ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’.
Barrie owed the idea for Peter Pan to his brother, who had died in a skating accident on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. Their mother had consoled herself with the thought that her lost boy would never grow old. A more immediate inspiration for the play was Barrie’s friendship with the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. He had first encountered the two eldest, George and Peter, as small boys in Kensington Gardens, and he gradually befriended the entire family. When their parents died young in quick succession, Barrie adopted the boys. George would be killed in the trenches and Michael, the other son to whom Barrie was especially close, drowned with a friend when they were both undergraduates in what may have been a homosexual suicide pact or simply an accident. It is a small step from boys who wouldn’t grow up to lads that will never be old, and it is no surprise to discover that Barrie read A Shropshire Lad ‘year in, year out – over and over again’.
This fact is reported by Barrie’s long-time secretary, Cynthia Asquith, in her biography of the playwright. Cynthia Asquith had herself suffered catastrophic losses in the First World War. Among the dead were her eldest and youngest brothers, Ego and Yvo Charteris, her first cousins George Wyndham, Perf Wyndham and Bim Tennant, and her brother-in-law Raymond Asquith. Her mother, Mary Elcho, had been the best friend of Frances Horner, the chatelaine of Mells, where Winston Churchill had recalled Housman’s lines in the summer of 1911. One of Frances’s daughters had been married to Raymond Asquith, and her elder son, Edward, was also killed in the war, along with most of the close circle of friends he had made at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford: Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Charles Lister, and Julian and Billy Grenfell. Many of these young men were the children of the Souls, a coterie of high-minded and self-regarding aristocrats and plutocrats – including the Wyndhams, the Lytteltons, the Elchos, the Tennants and the Grenfells – who congregated around the politician Arthur Balfour, and were connected by marriage, friendship, decorous flirtation and a certain amount of personal tragedy. The deaths in their early twenties of May Lyttelton (who may or may not have been secretly engaged to Balfour) and her sister-in-law Laura (née Tennant, and one of Mary Elcho’s closest friends) had a profound effect on the circle, which consoled itself with frequent references to the beauty and blessedness of death and the radiance with which the expiring greeted and embraced it. The fact that May had died unprettily of typhoid and Laura as a result of giving birth to a child who succumbed to tubercular meningitis while still an infant seems not to have shaken this idealised view of death, and the slaughter of the next generation in the First World War was bathed in a similarly refulgent light. These young men may not have been the kind of lads Housman had in mind, but the notion that they had died in their glory and would never be old was one the Souls embraced wholeheartedly. Writing to Ettie Desborough about the death of her son Julian Grenfell, Cynthia Asquith commented: ‘You were able to ensure him a supremely happy childhood and youth, and – in spite of the aching loneliness – it must be wonderful to think of him and all his glamour as so utterly unassailable – to know that he “carries back bright to the Coiner the mintage of man” and yet to feel that he had already found time to fulfil himself as the perfect Happy Warrior.’ The line is Housman’s – though it hardly needs saying that he did not allot the coiner a capital initial. It was presumably Cynthia who chose the full line (‘They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man’) to inscribe on the gravestone in the war cemetery at Sailly-Labourse of her brother Yvo, who was killed in action shortly after his nineteenth birthday having spent just five weeks at the front.
Given the losses suffered by this circle, it is hardly surprising that the legacy of the First World War is particularly palpable at St Andrew’s Church at Mells. An equestrian statue of Edward Horner, modelled by Alfred Munnings on a plinth designed by Lutyens and originally intended to be placed in the nave, stands in a side chapel. Mounted on one end of the plinth is Horner’s original and much-worn wooden grave-marker, brought back from the battlefield. Nearby is a memorial to Raymond Asquith consisting of a bronze wreath, also designed by Lutyens, above a Latin inscription cut into the stones of the wall by Eric Gill; Asquith’s own original grave-marker hangs above a door. In the churchyard, dominated by an avenue of clipped yews again designed by Lutyens, is the grave of one of the war’s leading poets, Siegfried Sassoon, buried at his request next to his spiritual advisor Ronald Knox, who had spent the last ten years of his life at the neighbouring manor house.
Before the First World War, Ronald Knox had been part of the Horner–Grenfell–Lister set at Eton and Balliol, and was particularly close to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, whose biography he wrote in 1920. Shaw-Stewart was, like Housman, widely considered one of the finest classical scholars of his generation. He was also one of those young soldiers who marched off to war with a copy of A Shropshire Lad in his pocket. He had long been a champion of Housman’s poems, writing to a woman friend in March 1911: ‘I implore you not to go about calling Housman “pretty” – all the great men wear him next to their heart, I assure you.’ He served alongside another of Housman’s great admirers, Rupert Brooke, in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division and, like many classically educated young men bound for Gallipoli, felt that he was following in the footsteps of the ancients. As Knox observed, ‘the country he was going to was the scene of the campaign about which he probably knew more details than about any other in history’, and shortly before boarding the Grantully Castle Shaw-Stewart wrote to a friend: ‘It is the luckiest thing and the most romantic. Think of fighting in the Chersonese (hope you got the allusion from the Isles of Greece about Miltiades), or alternatively, if it’s the Asiatic side they want us on, on the plains of Troy itself! I am going to
take my Herodotus as a guide-book.’ He had also packed his copy of the Iliad, and his letters home are filled with references to the classical world. It was while staying at the base camp on the island of Imbros, where he was able to look across to the site of Troy and see the sun set over Samothrace, that Shaw-Stewart would compose his only war poem. Written on the back flyleaf of his copy of A Shropshire Lad, which was found among his effects after his death, it has become one of the best known and most frequently anthologised poems of the First World War. Addressed to Achilles and inspired by the Iliad, it also clearly carries Housman’s impress, as in these opening lines:
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die:
I ask and cannot answer,
If otherwise wish I.
Next to their hearts, preferably in the breast pocket of their uniforms, was where Housman thought soldiers ought to carry their copies of his poems. The doubling in price of the book during the war, he complained to his publisher, ‘diminishes the sale and therefore diminishes my chances of the advertisement to which I am always looking forward: a soldier is to receive a bullet in the breast, and it is to be turned aside from his heart by a copy of A Shropshire Lad which he is carrying there. Hitherto it is only the Bible that has performed this trick.’ Although Housman would have needed to have published a considerably thicker volume in order for it to deflect a bullet, by 1914 those who had read and grown to love his poems far exceeded the few young men for whom he said he had written them, and if Robert Nichols’s assertion that A Shropshire Lad was ‘in every pocket’ was something of an exaggeration, it nevertheless has some anecdotal support. ‘We all had a copy of The Shropshire Lad in our pockets,’ remembered Thomas Armstrong, the future director of the Royal Academy of Music who had served on the Western Front from 1917 onwards. Paying tribute in 1976 to his friend the composer Willie B. Manson, he wrote: ‘Like many of our generation we were obsessed by A Shropshire Lad, and I have the copy that Manson gave me in 1914. The copy that I gave him was never found after his death. It must have been blown up with him.’ In his chapter on ‘War Books’ in The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller (1931), William Darling described A Shropshire Lad as ‘a favourite pocket-book’. His own copy was in fact a spoil of war, acquired at the front: