by Peter Parker
One of the reasons for volunteering early to fight in the First World War – at any rate among the officer class – was that it allowed you to select the regiment you wanted to join. Even those who enlisted in the ranks tended to do so locally and therefore, along with their friends and neighbours, joined regiments associated with the area in which they lived. The British Army was based on the old volunteer forces, which had a long history, were raised locally, and often took their names from their locality. The Childers Reforms of 1881 led to a restructuring of infantry regiments, which were given regional names and became known as ‘county regiments’. Some regiments acquired additional names derived from royal patronage or the colours or facings of their uniforms. Among those that emerged from this reorganisation were the West Yorkshire Regiment (The Prince of Wales’s Own), the East Kent Regiment (The Buffs), and the Shropshire Regiment (The King’s Light Infantry), the last drawn from the 53rd (Shropshire) Regiment of Foot, whose soldiers were commemorated in the first poem of A Shropshire Lad. From the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in the extreme south of England to the Border Regiment in the north, these military units had strong ties with local communities and, because they were based on the old volunteer forces, with local history. Housman’s ‘Lads of the fifty-third’, for example, were first raised in 1755 and attached to the county of Shropshire in 1782.
By 1914 further restructuring had taken place, but England was still a country in which people often lived their entire lives in one region rather than move about in the way the population does now. The War Office capitalised on this widespread sense of being rooted in, and belonging to, a particular place to raise what became known as Pals Battalions, encouraging men from the same district to enlist together. It was a policy that in some cases had catastrophic consequences at the front. The Accrington Pals from Lancashire, to take one notorious example, went into battle on the first day on the Somme and suffered over 80 percent casualties within minutes of the attack being launched. It had taken a mere ten days to raise the battalion and around half an hour to destroy it, and the impact upon the soldiers’ home town was both devastating and long-lasting. At a less extreme level, all around the country collective pride and sorrow would draw together local communities after the Armistice as war memorials were unveiled in cities, towns and villages. Next to the war memorial at Snittersfield in Warwickshire a bench would be placed bearing the inscription: ‘The noble expanse visible from this spot was Shakespeare’s favourite countryside. The men whose names are inscribed on the neighbouring monument gave their lives for that England, which never did nor ever shall lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.’
Many soldiers who had volunteered for, or been conscripted into, county regiments felt that they were fighting as much for their particular part of the country as they were for a rather less clearly defined ‘England’. For those who, before joining the army, had rarely strayed beyond their local town or village, these places were England. As Edward Thomas wrote in an article for the English Review in October 1914, wondering whether the thirteenth-century historian Robert of Gloucester would have found England (as he described it in his Chronicle) ‘a right merry land’ had he lived in Sussex or Northumberland: ‘I take it that England then as now was a place of innumerable holes and corners, and most men loved – or, at any rate, could not do without – some one or two of these, and loved all England, but probably seldom said so, because without it the part could not exist […] Throughout English history you have the two elements combined inseparably, love of the place where you “have your happiness or not at all”, and a more fitfully conscious love of the island, and glory in its glories.’
Thomas was at the time reading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler: ‘Since the war began I have not met so English a book, a book that filled me so with a sense of England, as this, though I have handled scores of deliberately patriotic works,’ he wrote. ‘In Walton’s book I touched the antiquity and sweetness of England – English fields, English people, English poetry, all together.’ He cites a passage in which Walton describes sitting in a field watching fish in a stream and looking beyond this to wooded hills and a meadow in which children are gathering wild flowers, as Housman’s young people do in several of his poems. ‘I think England means something like this to most of us,’ Thomas concludes; ‘that all ideas of England are developed, spun out from such a centre into something large or infinite, solid or aëry, according to each man’s nature and capacity; that England is a system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points of home.’
As we have already seen, one soldier who spent much of the war circling in his mind round the minute neighbouring points of home was Private I.B. Gurney of the 5th Gloucestershire Regiment. In his prisoner-of-war camp, Gurney’s friend Will Harvey was similarly thinking and writing about their home county. On the cover and title page of his first volume of poems, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad (1916), the last four words were printed in smaller type, as if they were an afterthought or subtitle (they would subsequently be dropped altogether), and readers would immediately have recognised the allusion to Housman’s volume. Like those of Gurney, Harvey’s poems look back to the landscape of his youth, and while the style of most of them, and indeed their genuflections before the Almighty, set them apart from Housman, echoes of A Shropshire Lad are occasionally detectable, as in these lines from ‘A Gloucestershire Wish at Eastertide’:
Here’s luck, my lads, while Birdlip Hill is steep:–
– As long as Cotswold’s high or Severn’s deep.
Our thoughts of you will blossom and abide
While blow the orchards about Severn side …
Many of Harvey’s poems were first published in the battalion magazine, the Fifth Gloucester Gazette, and in his introduction to the volume the battalion’s commander wrote:
The poems are written by a soldier and reflect a soldier’s outlook. Mud, blood and khaki are rather conspicuously absent. They are in fact the last things a soldier wants to think or talk about.
What he does think of is his home.
Many other soldiers thought longingly of the places they had known, places that now seemed so far out of reach. A photograph of a local scene back home sent to Cyril Rawlins, serving in France as a transport officer in the 1st Welsh Battalion, brought to mind blue remembered hills as seen from Staffordshire, a couple of miles from the Shropshire border. ‘How my heart ached when I pulled out your photo of Pottal Corner,’ he wrote to his father, ‘that sweet spot in God’s own country looking just as I have so many times seen it, the long dipping road to Penkridge and far in the distance the blue dome of the Wrekin.’ The photograph released in Rawlins an enormously long, homesick reminiscence of the England he had left behind him, amounting almost to a gazetteer of his home territory:
How it brings back happy memories of the time before the war, when the world was happy and careless: the Golden Age: a summer Sunday afternoon, and I with my cycle, and some food in my saddle bag, passing this spot, cutting down through the cool perfumed plantations after the arduous climb up lovely Penkridge Bank, no sound but the drone of bees in the heather and the whirr of grouse: stopping now often to admire the distant view over the high land beyond Bowley! Swooping down the long grade into sleepy little Penkridge. Gailey; the long blue granite stretches of my favourite Watling Street: up hill and down dale on the whirring ‘wheel’. Ivetsey Bank, with Boscobel away in the trees; Weston-under-Lizard, with its comfortable, respectable ‘model village’ air, all shaded by the tall elm trees behind the grey stone wall of the Park …
… and so on, for several pages. The place-names are almost as numerous as they are in Gurney’s letters, and so detailed that it is possible a century later to follow on a map the bicycle rides Rawlins is remembering.
For other serving soldiers, it was books that brought their own landscapes to mind. ‘I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the light green and dark green of the Ald
bourne Downs in summer,’ Charles Hamilton Sorley wrote to his former headmaster from France in June 1915, recalling the downs above Marlborough College across which he used to run as a schoolboy. The kind of homesickness that Gurney and Rawlins suffered while at the front was clearly understood by Siegfried Sassoon. Billeted in Amiens in March 1917, he wrote in his diary:
I wish I could write a book of ‘Consolations for Homesick Soldiers in the Field’ […] They need someone to refresh the familiar scenes and happenings which they remember and long for. Someone to make them exclaim ‘Damn it, how that takes one back to the dear old times!’ […] I would turn them loose in some dream gallery of Royal Academy pictures of the late-nineteenth century. I would show them bland summer landscapes, willows and meadowsweet reflected in calm waters, lifelike cows coming home to the byre with a golden sunset behind them; I would take them to gateways in garden-walls that they might gaze along dewy walls with lovers murmuring by the moss-grown sundial; I would lead them ’twixt hawthorn hedgerows, and over field-path stiles. To old-world orchards where the lush grass is strewn with red-cheeked apples, and even the wasps have lost their stings. From the grey church-tower comes a chiming of bells, and the village smoke ascends like incense of immemorial tranquillity …
Sassoon’s own homesickness is palpable here, and the scene he paints might well be taken from his own home in the Kentish Weald; but this is also a generic English landscape of the sort Housman wrote about in his poems. The longing in the trenches for reminders of an unspoilt pastoral England is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the kind of landscape over which most men in the front line were looking. More or less continuous bombardment had reduced some areas at the front to a featureless expanse of raw earth, from which trees, hedges, even grass had been obliterated. ‘What is there out here to raise a man’s mind out of the rut?’ asked Second Lieutenant William Ratcliffe in a letter to his parents written a month before he was killed on the Somme at the age of nineteen. ‘The countryside and the beauties of nature, which, as you know, always have a beneficial effect on a man, are all spoilt by the dust and mud of motor lorries and by huge camps.’
Sassoon’s notion of a book of consolations for homesick soldiers more or less, though coincidentally, came to fruition in Ernest Rhys’s anthology The Old Country, published in conjunction with the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1917. During the war the YMCA had established huts and canteens at railway stations, in military camps and at the front where soldiers could get something to eat or relax in relatively comfortable surroundings. The organisation saw its role as supplying spiritual as well as physical sustenance, but its remit was not simply religious: ‘To the average man in our forces [the YMCA] is a bit of England and the home country. It may be a big hut or a marquee, a strafed house, cellar or dug-out – no matter how poor the shanty, the familiar sign reminds him of home […] In his imagination he can see his village home, which is all the world to him.’ It is characteristic of the rhetoric of the war that this generic home should be a village one, and this introduction to Rhys’s anthology, which is accompanied by a vignette of a thatched cottage surrounded by trees, was written by the secretary to the National Council of YMCAs, Sir Arthur Yapp, whose family had for generations farmed at Orleton in Herefordshire, a couple of miles from the Shropshire border. The Old Country was intended to play a similar spiritual role to that of the YMCA clubhouses. Subtitled ‘A Book of Love & Praise of England’, it was assembled by Rhys in response to requests for such an anthology ‘from all sides: from two of our soldiers in France, from an American lady who happened to be an Ambassador’s wife, from a Canadian captain, from an Australian officer with a Welsh name, and from an English Princess’. This list was intended to suggest that ‘England’ was something people understood and valued whichever part of the world or stratum of society they came from.
Rhys went on to explain that ‘The practical use of such a kit-book or hut-book lies in its pocketable size and its effect as golden remembrance’, and it was illustrated to this effect. The numerous illustrations, he wrote, were ‘chosen chiefly as famous landmarks or familiar reminders. Westminster, Canterbury, St Paul’s, Salisbury, Oxford and Cambridge, the Thames near its source, the Tower and Tower Bridge; the village shop; and the Tranter’s cart that you read of in Hardy’s Wessex Tales’. It is notable that these familiar reminders do not extend to the kind of urban streets that most of the serving men called ‘home’. It is not known whether Housman was asked permission to reprint any of his poems in the anthology, and he would almost certainly have refused, as was his custom. There is, however, a coloured plate of a thatched timber-framed cottage, with a woman leaning over the gate looking out onto a lane along which a man is leading a horse and cart. The original watercolour was painted by A.R. Quinton, a hugely popular recorder of the English scene, many of whose paintings were reproduced as postcards. This example looks entirely generic, but it is captioned ‘A Homestead under the Bredon Hills’.*
Rhys’s anthology had been anticipated by The Times’s Broadsheets. Many serving soldiers, particularly those in the ranks, could not afford to have books such as The Old Country sent to them at the front, and would in any case have no time to read them ‘from cover to cover’. So from 1915 The Times produced a series of so-called ‘Broadsheets’, in fact single sheets of ordinary notepaper on which were printed ‘Six Selected Extracts from Great English Writers’, as chosen by Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford. The sheets were inexpensive, retailing at 1d each, and could be folded into an ordinary envelope or enclosed with a letter without incurring additional postal charges. Once received at the front, they could be tucked into the pocket of a uniform, to be brought out and read during lulls in the fighting or rest periods behind the line. Explaining the scheme in a letter to The Times, Raleigh wrote that it had already been ‘warmly welcomed and commended by many officers and men’, who recognised ‘that the appeal of the best things ever written, in verse and prose, is not diminished but enhanced by the new setting lent to them in war. Our fighting troops think more of England now than they thought of her when they were at home, and the familiar delights of peace have a new meaning for them. Mr Lionel Curtis, who, I believe, first suggested your scheme, has told me that for him one of the great moments of the South African War was the reading of Bacon’s Essay on Gardens, from a copy of the essays which someone chanced to have by him.’ There is something quintessentially English in the suggestion that one of ‘the great moments’ of a war was settling down to read about gardening – and indeed about serving, as Curtis did, as a bicyclist in the City Imperial Volunteers.
Raleigh thought that in addition to giving soldiers the best of English literature in portable form, the series would ‘symbolize the cause for which we are fighting […] There is no better expression of freedom, in all its senses, than English literature. I can almost imagine an intelligent German officer trembling and growing pale when he finds it in our trenches. Here is the explanation, which he has so long sought in vain, of why it is that our brothers from all the English-speaking world are at one with us, heart and soul. Here is their inheritance; why should they give it up for the bribes of a foreign drill-sergeant? By this token we shall conquer.’
As it turned out, English literature got a helping hand from other cultures and languages. Among the ‘numerous and varied selection of the best passages, grave and gay, of English verse and prose’ in the first series, for example, Pericles’ speech to the Athenians from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, ‘The Song of Deborah’ from the biblical book of Judges, Froissart’s description of the Black Prince in Spain, and Tolstoy’s ‘The Future Life’ from War and Peace were included alongside extracts from Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler and John Nyren’s The Cricketers of My Time. The Times nevertheless felt that the distribution of such literature in the trenches would ‘carry the message of English freedom, of English spontanei
ty, of English culture, of the great English inheritance for which England and her daughters [i.e. the colonies] are fighting’.
Although the Broadsheets were ‘not designed to instruct, or to improve; but merely to give recreation to those who, in the drudgery no less than the danger of war, so sorely need rest and distraction’, there was something admirably high-minded and democratic about this initiative. Not that this was appreciated everywhere. In With Manchesters in the East (1918), Gerald B. Hurst writes of those serving at the front in the Manchester Regiment: ‘Old magazines and football editions of Saturday evening papers, published a month or two earlier in England, sufficed for their literary appetites. Lancashire boys were not brought up to read […] When I once came upon a man reading the Golden Treasury, in Hardship Avenue, I knew he could not be a Manchester man. He was not. He came from the Isle of Man, and had joined our reserves at Southport. I found about half-a-dozen men who could enjoy The Times broadsheets. I am afraid John Bull was much more popular.’ (Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was popular trench reading among the officer class, and John Bull was Horatio Bottomley’s populist and xenophobic weekly magazine.)