Some Desperate Glory
Page 11
The names of the trenches amused Blunden (as they had Gurney): not taken from public schools this time but still an attempt to bring England to northern France: Windy Corner, Orchard Road, Queen’s Road, Hatfield Road, one called Ducks’ Bill because of its shape. His colonel revealed that he was a literary man who’d read a good review in the Times Literary Supplement of Blunden’s first book of poems.
Reinforcements were needed to the south on 11 August, in the worst part of the Somme battle. To many of the men it seemed ‘death-news’, as in Blunden’s later poem ‘Two Voices’, and he sought calm again in the summer landscape, reminded of his happy earlier life. He had his worst-yet war experience near Beaumont Hamel, as field-works officer leading bomb-carrying parties. Known as ‘rabbit’ because of his fast pace, alertness and small size, he brought up his bombs in the confusion of battle and saw men break in bursts of terror. Edmund Blunden won the Military Cross for his courage at this time.
His battalion came under shellfire, even after withdrawing into billets. It was back in the front line by 16 September, quiet until an attack on Thiepval, captured by the British eleven days later. Blunden stayed at the front, with breaks of only a few days, through the last Somme offensive – five terrible November days of fighting, through drizzling rain and a barrage when ‘never had shells seemed so torrentially swift, so murderous’. Blunden got lost, until a crucifix loomed between Thiepval and Grandcourt, and he raced with his runner, Private Johnson, through shellfire by the glittering River Ancre back to the British line where they were welcomed ‘as Lazarus was’. The battalion left the Somme two days later, moving to what was to be a place of even greater danger: the land round Ypres.
In England since July, first with fever in hospital and then at the regimental depot in the Liverpool suburb of Litherland or in London or at home in Kent, Siegfried Sassoon had news from his battalion about fighting round Delville Wood and High Wood and the many woundings and deaths. His poetry became more fierce – as in ‘They’ or ‘Blighters’ – influenced by Hardy’s satires, often with a knock-out blow in the last lines, these javelin-like verses sharpened by guilt at not being in the trenches.
To describe pain, Sassoon still used lyricism, as in ‘The Death Bed’. On a visit to Cambridge, he met Professor Sorley, Charles Sorley’s father, and shocked the musical scholar Dent – the friend from Sassoon’s training days at Pembroke College in 1915 who’d scorned Brooke’s emotional patriotism – with stories of rough army life. Like most soldiers, Sassoon had contempt for those on the Home Front, however terrible he found the war.
The Somme had been horrific, for the Germans and for the British. The waves of July had changed into a series of smaller attacks, with not much ground gained. The British had had 82,000 casualties by the end of August; but Haig went on, insisting that the enemy was about to collapse. In September the tactic of the creeping barrage and the introduction of tanks had disappointing results because of technical hitches and too wide-ranging artillery. Rain came in October and November, bringing back the mud. By the end in November the British had had some 450,000 casualties, the French 200,000 and the Germans 400,000.
The enemy had suffered, as the writer Ernst Jünger, a German officer, admitted. Edmund Blunden thought that he’d seen a British ‘feat of arms vying with any recorded’, feeling pride and ‘exaltation’ and the sense that he and the troops could now bear anything. Another young officer, Charles Carrington, not at all a reckless warrior, held that the men’s spirits were much lower away from the sound of guns than in the front line. To Carrington ‘the Somme raised the morale of the British army’ and, although not an outright victory, gave the British a sense of superiority, man to man.
Glorification of patriotic duty hadn’t died with Rupert Brooke. In 1916, Lady Desborough completed her memorial to her two dead sons, Julian and Billy Grenfell. Entitled Pages from a Family Journal 1888–1915, the thick book was produced, appropriately enough, by the Eton College printers and written at the suggestion of one former Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, with an early copy sent to another, Arthur Balfour. Lady Desborough had planned fifty copies; but this was extended to 250, privately printed at a cost of what today would be about £20,000. Consisting principally of extracts from her sons’ letters (Billy had been killed, leading a charge, a few months after Julian) with linking passages by her, it tells of two brilliant boys, wayward sometimes but bound tightly to their background. There was an understandable doctoring of material to show immense filial devotion. As Julian dies, he smiles at his mother in a sunlit hospital room, saying his mysterious last words ‘Phoebus Apollo’.
Balfour, a cool man, wrote admiringly, but not effusively, of the book. There was, however, admiration from many, including Kipling and John Buchan, although others, especially some of the boys’ contemporaries, thought much had been missed out, notably the ambiguity and desperation which had tormented Julian Grenfell. To the pacifists, the book was a nightmare, Lytton Strachey thinking that the boys came across as brave savages who enjoyed killing and Lady Ottoline Morrell, an unconventional aristocrat, seeing contempt for the less fortunate and a sense that, for the Grenfells, joy was a right.
The book became a pattern for later memoirs of dead aristocratic sons – but never, after what had happened under the leadership of the old governing class, could this world be quite so admired again. More bitter poets like Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg – not the exultant Grenfell – came to be seen as the true voices of the war.
In August 1916, Isaac Rosenberg was near Loos, out of the front line but within range of shells. He took the wounded to hospital in handcarts, telling Gordon Bottomley, ‘It’s a toss up whether you’re going to be the carried or the carrier.’ Poetry came painfully and included the jingoistic ‘Pozières’, which he submitted as the divisional Christmas card, but it was rejected.
Rosenberg was back in the line by the last half of August. He marched with his brigade to an area near Beaumont Hamel on 11 November, to cold and wet trenches. There was a break for training in December, then back to the Somme area, near Bray, into land devastated by shellfire, with mud and broken trenches and excreta left unburied by the French. The historian of Rosenberg’s division wrote later, ‘Now began three months in the most Godforsaken and miserable area in France, bar, possibly, the salient of Ypres. The whole country-side was a churned-up, yeasty mass of mud, as a result of the vile weather and of the battle which even yet had not petered out. The weather was awful. Constant rain was varied by spells of intensely cold weather and some very heavy snowfalls. Mud and dirt were everywhere…’
Isaac Rosenberg would be taken out of the line early in 1917, probably after Marsh had written to the War Office about this ‘budding genius’. This meant that, aged twenty-six, he would go to a works battalion, mending roads, still under shellfire. The private soldier’s war was one of drudgery. It was luck what officer you had, if he cared for your welfare (as Siegfried Sassoon did) and avoided dangerous adventures. Rosenberg in 1915 wrote that ‘we have pups for officers’.
There was brutality; a Coldstream Guards corporal who had been in the fighting since Mons in the first month of the war, told Ivor Gurney in May 1916 that you should never take prisoners for all Germans should be killed. Gurney had been in Laventie, away from the Somme. Here, though, he could be in trenches only a few yards away from the enemy, near enough for bombs to be thrown. No man’s land was full of the stinking dead. The men brought him happiness. He liked watching the French children in the villages, the women’s faces etched with character; and the country could look like the Stroud valley. Some June days in a dug-out with Welsh soldiers whom his battalion was relieving were ‘the happiest for years’, with good talk; ‘war’s damned interesting’, Gurney thought, and this brought the post-war poem ‘First Time In’. He heard a cuckoo; ‘what could I think of but Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts of home?’ A Welshman said that the ‘damned bird’ had sung constantly during the bombardment.
Gurney endured mortar and shell attacks and saw the deaths of comrades but wrote again in June, ‘Floreat Gloucestriensis! It was a great time; full of fear of course, but not so bad as neurasthenia…’ A rumour came that he’d been recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal (‘my dear lady,’ he told Marion Scott, ‘I am pleased with myself’). There was exasperation, as when he exploded that ‘the Army is an awful life for an artist, even if he has such experiences as we had with the Welsh. Either it is slogging along uselessly with a pack or doing nothing but hang about after – or boredom and hell in the trenches. Very little between.’ He thought, however, that ‘it is much better out here than in England…’
Gurney dreamed of finding a profitable line in Brooke- or Grenfell-like verses: ‘a delight of rolling country, of a lovely river, and trees, trees, trees. Après la guerre, it must be that I write piffle under the name of Rupert de Montvilliers Fortescue-Carruthers or some such name, to rake in the good gold in exceeding abundance, to see the earth and the glories thereof and develop a paunch…’ He set five songs to music in the trenches: one by Masefield, others by his friend F. W. Harvey, by Raleigh, by Yeats, and then his own ‘Song’ (‘Only the wanderer knows’).
Marion Scott cherished the poems that he sent her; and in 1917 she and others persuaded Sidgwick and Jackson, Rupert Brooke’s publisher, to take Gurney’s first collection Severn and Somme. In this were ‘Requiem’, written east of Laventie in November 1916; ‘Strange Service’, a hymn to Gloucestershire, from the summer; and ‘Bach and the Sentry’, about memories of a Bach prelude as fog lifted across no man’s land.
In October 1916, Gurney’s battalion marched through Albert, where a damaged statue of the Virgin and Child was poised precariously on the church’s tower; by 22 November they were in the line, in mud and shelling so bad that he told Marion Scott, ‘We suffer pain out here, and for myself it sometimes comes that death would be preferable to such a life.’ But he thought, ‘It is better to live a grey life in mud and danger, so long as one uses it – as I trust I am doing – as a means to an end…’ Not until 30 December was Ivor Gurney safe, out of the line and training in biting cold.
That day Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen reached the base camp at Etaples. Owen’s military career had strangely prospered, first at Hare Hall Camp in Essex, then at the officers’ school at Romford and on a course in London, after which he’d been offered a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Losses brought about by Loos and the relentless shelling on the western front had opened up the class structure of the military. At first he’d refused promotion, thinking that he hadn’t enough experience, but he soon changed his mind, becoming an officer in the Manchester Regiment in June. A camp at Milford in Surrey and courses at Aldershot, Oswestry, Southport and Fleetwood followed. At intervals there’d been leave, at home in Shrewsbury or in London, where in March 1916 he took a room in the Poetry Bookshop and gave his poems to Harold Monro. After some anxious days, Monro responded, with criticism and praise. Wilfred Owen was at the Hotel Metropole in Folkestone in December, awaiting embarkation for France.
Owen could seem vulnerable. In February 1916, his younger brother Harold thought ‘how physically unsophisticated, almost helpless he seemed … I could feel only a desperate sort of protective urge towards him, not pity – he never engendered that – but a compelling wish that I might somehow help this hunched-up little figure sitting next to me…’ But Owen coped well when pitched into military life, noting that class distinction in the army could be banished by only two things, ‘animal sports and mortal danger’, and ‘neither religion, nor Love, nor Charity, nor Community of Interests, nor Socialism, nor Conviviality can do it at all…’.
Edward Thomas was still in England. The artist Paul Nash was with him at Hare Hall and remembered the ‘always humorous interesting and entirely loveable’ poet, and Thomas wrote of the kindness that he found there, made even better by visits to a literary admirer, Edna Clark Hall, who lived near by. Others, however, recalled ‘the most depressed man they ever met’, showing how fast his mood could change.
‘Rain’ was written in a hut in the camp, conveying fear of a ruined land and culture and also the power of memory to keep goodness alive. In March came ‘Home’, about his life as a soldier. In May the poem ‘The Sun Used to Shine’ evokes escape into a rosy past; ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’ tells how the war touched each field and village. Thomas decided to take a commission; and in July, in spite of his occasional diabetes, was accepted by the artillery. Looking back, he told Frost that ‘I don’t believe I often had as good times as I have had, one way and another, these past 13 months.’
Thomas now wanted to be at the war: to ‘run risks, to be put through it’, for (as he told Frost) ‘this waiting troubles me’. An officer cadet in the Royal Artillery, he went to Bloomsbury for training, then in September to Trowbridge barracks in Wiltshire, where he wrote ‘The Trumpet’, worthy of Rupert Brooke. Helen and the younger children moved to Essex – after Thomas had left. By November 1916, the month of ‘Lights Out’ with its title taken from a bugle call, he knew that he wanted to risk his life.
1916 POEMS
‘August 1914’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘Rain’ – Edward Thomas
‘The Troop Ship’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘Home’ – Edward Thomas
‘The Kiss’ – Siegfried Sassoon
‘The Festubert Shrine’ – Edmund Blunden
‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’ – Edward Thomas
‘The Sun Used to Shine’ – Edward Thomas
‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘Strange Service’ – Ivor Gurney
‘The Death Bed’ – Siegfried Sassoon
‘The Trumpet’ – Edward Thomas
‘Lights Out’ – Edward Thomas
‘Bach and the Sentry’ – Ivor Gurney
August 1914
What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?
Three lives hath one life –
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone –
Left is the hard and cold.
Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.
ISAAC ROSENBERG
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
EDWARD THOMAS
The Troop Ship
Grotesque and queerly huddled
Contortionists to twist
The sleepy soul to a sleep,
We lie all sorts of ways
And cannot sleep.
The wet wind is so cold,
And the lurching men so careless,
That, should you drop to a doze,
Wind’s fumble or men’s feet
Is on your face.
ISAAC ROSENBERG
&n
bsp; A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth
A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome.
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung.
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.
ISAAC ROSENBERG
Home
Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and
We had seen nothing fairer than that land,
Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made
Wild of the tame, casting out all that was
Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.
Fair, too, was afternoon, and first to pass
Were we that league of snow, next the north wind.
There was nothing to return for, except need,
And yet we sang nor ever stopped for speed,
As we did often with the start behind.
Faster still strode we when we came in sight
Of the cold roofs where we must spend the night.
Happy we had not been there, nor could be,
Though we had tasted sleep and food and fellowship
Together long.
‘How quick’, to someone’s lip
The words came, ‘will the beaten horse run home.’
The word ‘home’ raised a smile in us all three,
And one repeated it, smiling just so
That all knew what he meant and none would say.
Between three counties far apart that lay
We were divided and looked strangely each
At the other, and we knew we were not friends
But fellows in a union that ends
With the necessity for it, as it ought.
Never a word was spoken, not a thought