by Max Egremont
While finishing another commission – This England: An Anthology from her Writers – Thomas wrote ‘Lob’, about the immortal countryman. It was set in Wiltshire, where he had walked in search of Richard Jefferies, and was not nationalistic but a romantic view of a vanishing world. The old life, or Thomas’s idea of it, was what he was mourning, as in ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’, more than the war dead. In This England Thomas put two poems of his own – ‘The Manor Farm’ and ‘Haymaking’ – under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway. Now he was a published poet. A trip to the Cotswolds in July may have banished thoughts of joining Frost in New Hampshire.
Edward Thomas enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles in July 1915. He declared he was fighting for the landscape, for the English earth, as in ‘For These’, completed the day he passed his medical examination (‘An acre of land between the shore and the hills, / Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three, / The lovely visible earth and sky and sea, / Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills…’).
Siegfried Sassoon left the Yeomanry in April, to take a commission in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, fixed for him by a neighbour in Kent. He went that summer for officer training to Cambridge, where he shared rooms with a charming fellow recruit, David Thomas – with whom he fell in love. The war scarcely impinges on Sassoon’s poems of late 1914 and early 1915 which include a retired huntsman’s long farewell to a fading world. At Cambridge he met Edward Dent, who found the young poet ‘curious’ and the possessor of ‘the vitality and artistic enthusiasm of his race and without their bad qualities’. Dent was not impressed by Sassoon’s privately printed verses.
The one war poem he wrote at this time – ‘Absolution’ – has a sense of Brooke’s sonnets. The war came closer at the end of October when Sassoon’s brother Hamo, an officer in the Royal Engineers and Siegfried’s ally because of his homosexuality, was killed at Gallipoli. Sassoon left with his regiment for France on 17 November. In his diary on 28 November he wrote, ‘Walked into Bethune for tea with Robert Graves, a young poet, Captain in the Third Battalion and very much disliked.’
Graves had been out since May 1915, just too late for a failed attack at Aubers Ridge. His battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers was moved to a bad sector near Cuinchy, by some brickstacks where there was constant mining and sniping. In June, in training for Loos, he was near Vermelles, supposedly out of the line yet often shelled. The sceptical Graves, awed by the proximity of death, took Holy Communion in Vermelles church. By the time he met Sassoon, Graves had been through the battle of Loos and, although some nine years younger, could play the old soldier. When Sassoon showed him some poems, Graves said that these would change after his new friend had seen action. Both reported the meeting to their friend Eddie Marsh, each scornful of the other’s verses.
Edmund Blunden, older than Graves but still only eighteen, had joined up in August 1915, cycling into Chichester to enlist in the Royal Sussex Regiment. It must have seemed natural to follow other boys leaving Christ’s Hospital who were doing the same; fighting, and if necessary dying, for your country was part of the public school creed of duty. Such was the shortage of officers that within a fortnight Blunden had a commission, although his only military experience had been in the school Cadet Corps. He would not go to France until the spring of 1916. First there was training at Weymouth in Dorset and Shoreham in Kent (from where he’d walk the forty miles to his parents’ home at Yalding) and in Ireland. Still constantly writing poetry, as he’d done at school, Blunden continued to look to rural England for inspiration. France and Belgium had hitherto lived for him only on maps or in books. He wrote later that ‘I was not anxious to go.’
For the Allies, the year brought few successes. The Dardanelles turned out to be a disaster. The small British Expeditionary Force – Britain’s regular army – had suffered heavy casualties in the west, straining manpower which depended more and more on volunteers. Attacks quickly became bogged down at Aubers Ridge and Festubert. A shell shortage crippled artillery support.
The battle of Loos, pushed by the French General Joffre, who wanted a sign of obvious British involvement, was an attempt to break the German line, across a jagged, easily defended landscape of slag heaps, coal mines and winding towers; Haig, then commander of the British First Army, opposed the plan. There was success at first, with some ground gained, then came the lack of shells, fierce enemy counter-attacks and exhaustion. The British had some 60,000 casualties, including three generals, against the German 20,000. The Allies had used gas for the first time, but wind had spoilt its effect. Bad weather set in after 13 October, preventing further attacks.
An experienced British officer identified flaws. To him, Gallipoli was ‘the vital spot’ (by this time its failure was clear) and Loos ‘a waste’, an attack on the Germans at their strong point to please the French. The Old Army, the BEF, had shown its mettle; and the new volunteers were brave. However, ‘raw enthusiasts are ideal for a dashing attack, but when they’ve got to the limit they don’t know what to do next; seasoned troops do’.
German counter-attacks throughout the war were startlingly effective. Lack of training was evident. Graves and Brooke were thrown in as officers much too soon; Blunden and Julian Grenfell’s brother Billy got their commissions in weeks, even days; in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, the officer, Mr Jenkins, is only twenty. Loos had been meant to restore the war of movement, to break out of the solidified trenches, and had failed. The experienced observer saw ‘mismanagement at the top, inefficiency in the middle, want of training at the bottom’. To these Robert Graves added the superiority of German equipment: more shells, more artillery, better gas helmets, more telescopic sights for sniping. British flares were so bad that the enemy laughed at them.
Graves had waited in the trenches at Loos. The enemy was 300 yards away; shells crashed around them and they could hear the groans of the wounded and dying. He found a water bottle full of rum and drank about half a pint which soothed his nerves. Comrades fell near him; but he wasn’t sent over the top. That night the dead and wounded were brought in, while the Germans humanely held fire. Gas was launched, and a patrol sent out to observe its effects was blown to bits. Graves drank about a bottle of whisky a day to keep his nerves from breaking. On 3 October, what was left of his unit withdrew from the front line.
Charles Sorley wrote to a friend two days later, ‘on the eve of our crowning hour’. Earlier that year he’d written ‘Such, Such is Death’ and ‘Saints Have Adored the Lofty Soul of You’. The end he saw as ‘a merciful putting away of what has been’: ‘no triumph, no defeat’: certainly now familiar as ‘we see your straight and steadfast signpost there’. Sorley dreaded pain and showing himself to be a coward; to his father he said that he was sure the Germans were on their way home, although the journey would be a long one, through rain, dirt and cold. On 13 October, the British launched another attack. Sorley was killed by a sniper as he led his troops forward. The manuscript of ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ was found on his body – the sort of poem that Rupert Brooke might have written if he’d seen more of the war.
Loos needed a scapegoat. Sir John French, the BEF’s commander, was called home, to be replaced by Haig. The battle broke another poet. Robert Nichols had been writing poetry since joining the army, imitating Brooke with ‘Five Sonnets upon Imminent Departure’, which were printed in The Times in May. He reached France in August 1915, as an officer in the Royal Field Artillery, some days after his elegy to Rupert Brooke had appeared. A publisher accepted Nichols’s first collection, Invocation, at the end of August. He was now launched as a war poet.
Twenty-five years later he described how he’d felt, how he’d looked at death: ‘exaltation. Beyond was a blank. How can a boy consider what he can’t imagine?’ Nichols thought of one ‘decisive’ image: ‘the descent of a great beam of light’ or resplendence. His poetry looked back to a scene in Dedham Vale near the family house, and the sound of church bells across the fields, ‘a golden not
e, so calm so clear’ in an ordered, historic England.
Nichols found incompetence rather than glory in France. Artillery was placed too near the trenches (‘sheer foolery’) so the shells might not even clear the British front line and the attacking enemy couldn’t be fired on for fear of hitting British defenders. He thought of his feelings about the Germans as Loos began. Nichols had little hatred for them, rather a determination to see that British tolerance should outlast Prussian militarism; he was also fighting, he felt, for the men alongside him. He tried to catch this in the poem ‘Battery Moving Up from Rest Camp’. Then his nerve broke in the bombardment and ‘very hard fighting’ around his battery, making him useless, although his commanding officer wrote that ‘your heart was as big as a lion’s’. He was just twenty-two. Nichols’s poems of the war, such as ‘The Day’s March’ and ‘Thanksgiving’, were based on his experience at Loos.
He went back to hospitals in England. In October he was diagnosed as suffering from ‘neurasthenia’; this wasn’t new for he’d had previous mental collapses. But news of the death of a friend that autumn seemed to make his nerves worse, with insomnia and irrational excitement. Nichols had also caught syphilis, either before going to France or after his return. His good looks and his personality – showing desperation, posturing romanticism, hysteria and sexual energy – became inseparable from an impassioned view of his poetic destiny. Later in the war, he was seen as a leader of the new soldier poets. His first book, Invocation, may have made little impression; the 1917 collection Ardours and Endurances, however, led to the idea (admittedly short lived) that Robert Nichols was a genius.
The army, at least initially, brought exhilaration to most of the poets. Ivor Gurney said that after joining the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915 he was in a better state of mind than he had been for years. Gurney felt later that it would have been much worse not to have fought, cherishing particularly the comradeship of his fellow soldiers as an affirmation of human goodness. In April 1915, he said he couldn’t have been happier anywhere else, although life was hard. He declared that autumn, ‘I cannot remember a time when my health was better…’
Gurney read Edward Thomas’s review of Rupert Brooke’s poems. He doubted if the poet would have improved had he lived, for the lines had come much too quickly from events not fully experienced. ‘Rupert Brooke soaked it in quickly and gave it out with as great ease.’ His own ‘To the Poet Before Battle’, written in July or early August, is Brooke-like. But Gurney read adventurously, ranging far. ‘Have you read the Undying Past by Sudermann…?’ he asked a friend about a book by the nationalistic German writer Hermann Sudermann. ‘I doubt whether any of our young men could touch it. It is German … everything so intense and volcanic and half-mad…’
Edward Thomas felt happy at Hare Hall Camp in Essex – where Wilfred Owen had also been sent for training, although there’s no record of them meeting. Thomas wrote ‘Cock-Crow’ soon after his enlistment in July, comparable to Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’. At Hare Hall, he said that he’d never been ‘so well’. His first poem in the camp was ‘There’s Nothing Like the Sun’ about the sun’s kindness to all things that it touched, except snow, ending with the words ‘till we are dead’. Owen wrote similarly in ‘Futility’, during the last spring of his life. ‘This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’, which Thomas wrote in December 1915, has ‘God save England’ not as a cry that might be made by ‘one fat patriot’ but as a celebration of the land: ‘an England beautiful’.
Isaac Rosenberg joined the army not from pure patriotism but at least partly to bring financial help to his family. In October 1915, when he enlisted at a Whitechapel recruiting station, he felt that he was doing ‘a criminal thing’ in becoming part of the killing. When he told his mother he had joined up, she was upset. He wanted to escape poverty and, as he told Marsh in 1918, ‘I thought if I’d join there would be a separate allowance for my mother.’ This was never paid, although by January 1916 his mother was receiving half of Isaac’s wages. Rosenberg had hoped not to be part of the fighting machine. But he was too short for the Royal Army Medical Corps and had to join a so-called bantam battalion that was part of the Suffolk Regiment.
The war of Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg was the private soldier’s war, with worse food, worse conditions, worse pay, than the other poets who were officers. But officers went first over the top and were more likely to be killed. Rosenberg was bullied because of his Jewishness. At first, however, as with Gurney, the training and exercise made him healthier than he’d been in the Whitechapel smog. His apocalyptic imagination turned to the future, in the December poem ‘Marching’. The vision is of machine-inflicted carnage, of a mythical war – the field of Mars and charging cavalry – turned into ‘an iron cloud’ that rains ‘immortal darkness’. This wasn’t the poetry through which the public, or most poets, saw the war in 1915. The dominant spirits were still those of Brooke and Grenfell. Sassoon hadn’t yet written his satires. Owen wasn’t yet in France. The huge offensive of the next year, 1916, would change everything.
1915 POEMS
‘The Unknown Bird’ – Edward Thomas
‘Absolution’ – Siegfried Sassoon
‘To the Poet Before Battle’ – Ivor Gurney
‘Home’ – Edward Thomas
‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’ – Edward Thomas
‘Fragment’ – Rupert Brooke
‘Thanksgiving’ – Robert Nichols
‘The Owl’ – Edward Thomas
‘Prayer for Those on the Staff’ – Julian Grenfell
‘A Private’ – Edward Thomas
‘Into Battle’ – Julian Grenfell
‘Battery Moving Up to a New Position from Rest Camp: Dawn’ – Robert Nichols
‘Marching – As Seen from the Left File’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘Such, Such is Death’ – Charles Sorley
‘Cock-Crow’ – Edward Thomas
‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ – Charles Sorley
‘The Redeemer’ – Siegfried Sassoon
‘This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’ – Edward Thomas
The Unknown Bird
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off –
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is – I told men
What I had heard.
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
’Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
EDWARD THOMAS
Absoluti
on
The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Till beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.
Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,
And loss of things desired; all these must pass.
We are the happy legion, for we know
Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass.
There was an hour when we were loth to part
From life we longed to share no less than others.
Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,
What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
To the Poet Before Battle
Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes;
Thy lovely things must all be laid away;
And thou, as others, must face the riven day
Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums,
Or bugles’ strident cry. When mere noise numbs
The sense of being, the sick soul doth sway,
Remember thy great craft’s honour, that they may say
Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs
Of praise the little versemen joyed to take
Shall be forgotten; then they must know we are,
For all our skill in words, equal in might
And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make
The name of poet terrible in just war,