Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  There were few accounts written by a father about his son’s death actually published while the war was being fought, which makes Harry Lauder’s, taken from his A Minstrel in France, so moving. Lauder was in his fifties when the war started, at the height of his reputation as a beloved Scottish music hall comedian and singer, famous for his kilt, his crooked walking stick, his broad Scots dialect, and songs like “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.”

  If you go online, you can see an eight-minute film clip of Lauder and Charlie Chaplin hamming it up before the cameras in Hollywood during the war—Lauder more than holds his own with the Little Tramp.

  Lauder’s son John was a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, wounded twice, and twice sent back to France, only to die on the Somme in 1916.

  Lauder all but collapsed under the pain of this, and it was only by devoting himself to entertaining the troops in France that he was able to find solace. (He was knighted for this after the war.) He performed close to the trenches and, when given the chance, took a measure of revenge.

  “I was swept by an almost irresistible desire to be fighting myself. If I could only play my part! If I could fire even a single shot—if I, with my own hands, could do that much against those who had killed my boy! And then, incredulously, I heard the words in my ear. It was the major.”

  ‘Would you like to try a shot, Harry?’ he asked.

  They showed me my place. After all, it was the simplest of matters to fire even the biggest of guns. I had but to pull a lever. I was thrilled and excited as I had never been in all my life before.

  ‘All ready? Fire!’

  It pleases me to think that the long snouted engine of war propelled that shell, under my guiding hand, with unwonted accuracy and effectiveness! Perhaps I was childish, to feel as I did; indeed, I have no doubt that was so. But I dinna care!”

  It wasn’t just soldiers who suffered in France during the war. Katherine Mansfield, the talented New Zealand short-story writer, had gone there, of all places, for her health; her description of her lonely, desperate battle against tuberculosis and crushing solitude makes for grim reading even today. She wasn’t yet thirty, but already life was proving too much for her, and the last blow was the death of her beloved younger brother Leslie, who died while serving in the trenches as a British officer. It was his death that turned her fiction to reminiscences of their idyllic childhood together back in New Zealand. Her diary wasn’t published until after the war, but includes these poignant passages taken from 1915.

  Paul Claudel was one of those characteristically French figures who combined literature with a career in the foreign service. Forty-six when war broke out, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in South America and helped ensure the delivery of vital foodstuffs to France; after the war, he briefly served as ambassador to the United States. His literary reputation was analogous to T. S. Eliot’s in England—a politically conservative poet whose conversion to Catholicism is commemorated by a bronze plaque set in the floor of Notre Dame in Paris.

  W. H. Auden would later take Claudel to task for his militaristic opinions in a famous stanza, though one suspects it was less for reasons of politics than it was for convenience of rhyme.

  “Time that with this strange excuse

  Pardoned Kipling and his views,

  And will pardon Paul Claudel,

  Pardons him for writing well.”

  And the Bullet Won

  —Richard Harding Davis

  The waste of human life in this war is so enormous, so far beyond our daily experience, that disasters less appalling are much easier to understand. The loss of three people in an automobile accident comes nearer home than the fact that at the battle of Sézanne thirty thousand men were killed. Few of us are trained to think of men in such numbers—certainly not of dead men in such numbers. We have seen thirty thousand men together only during the world’s series or at the championship football matches. To get an idea of the waste of this war we must imagine all of the spectators at a football match between Yale and Harvard suddenly stricken dead. We must think of all the wives, children, friends affected by the loss of those thirty thousand, and we must multiply those thirty thousand by hundreds and imagine these hundreds of thousands lying dead in Belgium, in Alsace-Lorraine, and within ten miles of Paris. After the Germans were repulsed at Meaux and at Sézanne the dead of both armies were so many that they lay intermingled in layers three and four deep. They were buried in long pits and piled on top of each other like cigars in a box. Lines of fresh earth so long that you mistook them for trenches were in reality graves. Some bodies lay for days uncovered until they lost all human semblance. They were so many you ceased to regard them even as corpses. They had become just a part of the waste, a part of the shattered walls, uprooted trees, and fields ploughed by shells. What once had been your fellow men were only bundles of clothes, swollen and shapeless, like scarecrows stuffed with rags, polluting the air.

  Each one had once been physically fit or he would not have been passed to the front; and those among them who are officers are finely bred, finely educated, or they would not be officers. But each matched his good health, his good breeding, and knowledge against a broken piece of shell or steel bullet, and the shell or bullet won.

  From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

  He Loved His Youth

  —John Buchan

  In the Guards’ advance, among many other gallant and distinguished officers, there fell one whose death was, in a peculiar sense, a loss to his country and the future. Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, of the Grenadier Guards, the eldest son of the British Prime Minister, died while leading his men through the fatal enfilading fire from the corner of Ginchy village. In this war the gods took toll of every rank and class. Few generals and statesmen in the Allied nations but had to mourn intimate bereavements. But the death of Raymond Asquith had a poignancy apart from his birth and position, and it may be permitted to one of his oldest friends to pay his tribute to a heroic memory.

  A scholar of the ripe Elizabethan type, a brilliant wit, an accomplished poet, a sound lawyer—these things were borne lightly, for his greatness was not in his attainments but in himself. He had always a curious aloofness towards mere worldly success. He loved the things of the mind for their own sake—good books, good talk, the company of old friends—and the rewards of common ambition seemed to him too trivial for a man’s care. He was of the spending type in life, giving freely of the riches of his nature, but asking nothing in return. His carelessness of personal gain, his inability to trim or truckle, and his aloofness from the facile acquaintances of the modern world made him incomprehensible to many, and his high fastidiousness gave him a certain air of coldness. Most noble in presence, and with every grace of voice and manner, he moved among men like a being of another race, scornfully detached from the common struggle; and only his friends knew the warmth and loyalty of his soul.

  At the outbreak of war he joined a Territorial battalion, from which he was later transferred to the Grenadiers. More than most men he hated the loud bellicosities of politics, and he had never done homage to the deities of the crowd. His critical sense made him chary of enthusiasm, and it was no sudden sentimental fervour that swept him into the Army. He saw his duty, and, though it meant the shattering of every taste and interest, he did it joyfully, and did it to the full. For a little he had a post on the Staff, but applied to be sent back to his battalion, since he wished no privilege. In the Guards he was extraordinarily happy, finding the same kind of light-hearted and high-spirited companionship which had made Oxford for him a place of delectable memories. He was an admirable battalion officer, and thought seriously of taking up the Army as a profession after the war, for he had all the qualities which go to the making of a good soldier.

  In our long roll of honour no nobler figure will find a place. He was a type of his country at its best—shy of rhetorical professions, austerely self-respecting, one who h
id his devotion under a mask of indifference, and, when the hour came, revealed it only in deeds. Many gave their all for the cause, but few, if any, had so much to give. He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal.

  From The Battle of the Somme, by John Buchan; Grosset & Dunlap; New York, 1917.

  Demons of the Whirlwind

  —George Santayana

  The Undergraduate Killed In Battle

  Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread

  Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,

  For its still, channelled current constant more,

  His life was, and the few blithe words he said.

  One or two poets read he, and reread;

  One or two friends in boyish ardour wore

  Next to his heart, incurious of the lore

  Dodonian woods might murmur o’er his head.

  Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care

  What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!

  The earth once won, begins your long despair

  That never, never is his bliss for you.

  He breathed betimes this clement island air

  And in unwitting lordship saw the blue.

  From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.

  All Four Lie Buried on the Western Front

  —Gilbert Murray

  Four New College scholars of exceptional intellect and character entered the university in 1905—Arthur Heath, Leslie Hunter, R. C. Woodhead, and Phillip Brown. And now all four lie buried on the Western Front. Each had his special character and ways and aims; but to one who knew them well, there comes from all of them a certain uniform impression, the impression of an extraordinary and yet unconscious high-mindedness. It is not merely that they were clever, hard-working, conscientious, honourable, lovers of poetry and beauty; the sort of men who could never be suspected of evading a duty, or, say, voting for their own interest rather than the common good. It was, I think, that the standards which had become the normal guides of life to them were as a matter of plain fact spiritual standards, and not of the world nor the flesh.

  Such language may sound strained as applied to a group of men who were earning their living among us in perfectly ordinary ways, as teachers, writers, doctors, civil servants, some of them in the law or in business; but it implies nothing strained or specially high-strung in the quality of their daily lives. There is always a religion of some sort at the root of every man’s living. Every man is either willing or not willing to sacrifice himself to something which he feels to be higher than himself, though if he is sensible, he will probably not talk much about it. And men of conscience and self-mastery are fully as human, as varied, and as interesting as any weaklings or picturesque scoundrels are.

  Perhaps the first thing that struck one about Arthur Heath was his gentleness and modesty. “It was fine,” says one of his superior officers, “to see a first-rate intellect such as his applied to a practical matter that was strange of him. And he was so modest about himself, and never dreams how we all admired him.” The last words strike one as exactly true. Another quality was his affectionateness, or rather the large space that affection occupied in his mind. Affection, indeed, is too weak a term to describe the feeling that seems to glow behind the words of his letters home; for instance, the beautiful letter to his mother, written on July 11, about the prospect of death. He was a devoted son and brother, interested in every detail of home life, and not forgetting family birthdays. And the same quality pervaded much of his relations towards friends and acquaintances. He was the sort of man whom people confide in, and consult in their troubles.

  Heath was a bold thinker; he held clear opinions of his own on all sorts of subjects. He often differed from other people, especially people in authority. Yet he was never for a moment bitter or conceited or anxious to contradict. There was no scorn about him; and his irrepressible sense of fun, so far from being unkind, had an element of positive affection in it.

  In comparing him with other men who have fought and fallen in the war, I feel that one of his most marked characteristics was his instinct for understanding. In the midst of strong feeling and intense action his quiet, penetrating intelligence was always at work. Even at the front, where most men become absorbed in their immediate job, he was full of strategical problems, of the war as a whole. His courage was like that of the Brave Man in Aristotle, who knows that a danger is dangerous, and fears it, but goes through with it because he knows that he ought. He liked to understand what he was doing. He was ready, of course, to obey without question, but he would then know that he was obeying without question. He was ready to give his life and all the things that he valued in life, his reading and music and philosophy, but he liked to know what he was giving them for.

  After his first wound: “Fear is a very odd thing. When I was up in the trenches about thirty yards from the enemy, I got over the parapet and crawled out to examine a mine-crater without anything worse than a certain amount of excitement. But when we are back here in Brigade Reserve and the shells start screaming over, I feel thoroughly afraid and there is no denying it.”

  He never groused about hardships, nor yet about the evils of war. The war was something he had to carry through, and he would make the best of it until it killed him.

  On October 8, the end came. It was Heath’s twenty-eighth birthday. The battalion held a series of trenches in front of Vermelles, across the Hulluch road, in that stretch of ghastly and shell-tortured black country which we now think of as the Loos Salient. For the whole day there had been an intense German bombardment, tearing and breaking the trenches, and presumably intended to lead up to a general infantry attack. It was decided, in order to prevent this plan developing, that the Sixth Battalion should attempt an attack on the enemy at “Gun Trench.” This was a very difficult enterprise in itself, and doubly so to troops already worn by a long and fierce bombardment. The charge was made by “A” Company about 6:30 and beaten back. It was followed by a series of bombing attacks, for which a constant supply of bombs had to be kept up across the open. It was during this work that Arthur Heath fell, shot through the neck. He spoke once, to say “Don’t trouble about me,” and died almost immediately.

  His platoon sergeant wrote to his parents: “It will console you to know that a braver man never existed.”

  One after another, a sacrifice greater than can be counted, they go; and will go until the due end is won.

  At the close of the Michaelmas Term of 1914 there was a memorial service at New College, as in other colleges, for members who had fallen in the war. It seemed a long list even then, though it was scarcely at its beginning. And those who attended the service will not forget the sight of the white-haired warden, full of blameless years, kneeling before the altar on the bare stones, and praying that it might be granted to us, the survivors, to live such lives as these young men who had gone before us. His words interpreted, I think, the unconscious feeling of most of those who heard him. It certainly changes the whole aspect of the world, even to a man whose life is advanced and his character somewhat set, when the men who were his intimate friends are proved to have in them, not merely the ordinary virtues and pleasantnesses of common life, but something high and resplendent which one associates with the stories of old saints or heroes; still more when there is burned into him the unforgettable knowledge that men whom he loved have died for him.

  From Faith, War, and Policy, by Gilbert Murray; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1917.

  Eyes Lit with Risk

  —Jean Cocteau

  How the Young Men Died in Hellas

  Antigone went wailing to the dust

  She reverenced not the face of Death like these

  To who it came as no enfeebling peace

  But a command relentless and august.

  These grieved not the beauty of the morn,

  Nor that the sun was on the ripening flower;

  Smiling they faced the sacrif
icial hour,

  Blithe nightingales against the fatal thorn.

  They grieved not for the theatre’s high-banked tiers,

  Where restlessly the noisy crowd leans over,

  With laughter and with jostling, to discover

  The blue and green of chaffing charioteers.

  Nor for the fluted shafts, the carven stones

  Of that sole city, bright above the seas,

  Where young men met to talk with Socrates

  Or toss the ivory bones.

  Their eyes were lit with tumult and with risk,

  But when they felt Death touch their hands and pass

  They followed, dropping on the garden grass

  The parchment and the disk.

  It seemed no wrong to them that they just go.

  They laid their lives down as the poet lays

  On the white page the poem that shall praise

  His memory when the hand that wrote is low.

  Erect they stood and, festally arrayed,

  Serenely waited the transforming hour,

  Softly as Hyacinth slid from youth to flower,

  Or the shade of Cyparis to a cypress shade.

  They wept not for the lost Ionian days,

  Nor liberty, nor household love and laughter,

  Nor the long leaden slumber that comes after

  Life’s little wakefulness.

  Fearless they sought the land no sunsets see,

  Whence our weak pride shrinks back, and would return,

  Knowing a pinch of ashes in an urn

  Henceforth our garden and our house shall be.

  Young men, my brothers, you whose morning skies