by Max Egremont
It was true, however, that the end of the war seemed no nearer. The emphasis, after the French failure of the Chemin des Dames, was again on Haig and the British. At Messines, ground was gained in June and July before the rain came; and by the end of a wet August there’d been some 60,000 casualties. In a dry September there was an advance; then, as autumn drew on, stalemate in the mud of Passchendaele. As on the Somme, Haig, feeling an unreal optimism and obligation to his allies, inflicted on his troops what Edmund Blunden thought was the worst part of the war. It was at Ypres (where, as we shall see, he believed ‘we should all die’) that Blunden read Sassoon. Here at last, he thought, was a poet who told the truth.
It wasn’t pacifism that made Blunden think this. He remained loyal to his regiment, to those he was fighting alongside, and to his colonel, who stayed a friend; never, he thought later, would he meet such kindness again. Wilfred Owen was also no pacifist. In June he told his mother that his ‘aim in war’ was ‘extinction of Militarism beginning with Prussian’. It was necessary to fight for this, even through ‘unnameable tortures’. In Craiglockhart, in August, Owen read a life of Tennyson. He felt that the Victorian laureate was ‘a great child’ and ‘so should I have been, but for Beaumont Hamel’.
By then he’d had a revelation. ‘I have just been reading Siegfried Sassoon, and am feeling at a very high pitch of emotion,’ he told his mother. ‘Nothing like his trench life sketches has ever been written or ever will be written. Shakespeare reads vapid after these. Not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects, I mean. I think if I had the choice of making friends with Tennyson or with Sassoon I should go to Sassoon.’ In the second week of August Owen approached his hero, bringing copies of The Old Huntsman for signature.
Siegfried Sassoon, engaged in polishing his golf clubs, looked at this ‘modest and ingratiating’ visitor, taking in his occasional stammer, ‘border Welsh’ accent and gushing idolatry. ‘The Death Bed’, Owen said, was the finest poem in the book; its author would have liked this, wishing to be known for his lyrical works rather than his satires. The visitor said he too was a poet. What, Sassoon wondered, could this ‘interesting little chap’ have written?
They were together for some two months. Craiglockhart was busy by day – with doctors’ appointments, games and clubs for bee-keeping, photography, acting, music, the running of a magazine (the Hydra, which Owen edited) and debating; but at night the former hydro became a world of nightmares and cries of terror while enfeebled wills fought for calm. News of the war came by post or from visitors. Sassoon heard what his regiment was enduring at Passchendaele. He felt love for these men, and also shame not to be with them, writing in ‘Banishment’, ‘Love drove me to rebel / Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; / And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.’
Dr Rivers – Siegfried Sassoon’s physician and new father figure – seized on these urges. Rivers – a monkish, ruthless man – had heard terrible stories from his patients, like that of a soldier who’d been knocked out by a shell’s blast and regained consciousness to find his mouth full of the contents of a dead German’s stomach. He saw hysteria as a return to infantilism; traumas should be confronted, even if some repression was needed to preserve civilization. War took men back to childhood, to a more primitive life. To Rivers, Sassoon, as an ex-public schoolboy, was prone to guilt about letting his men down, about not protecting them, about being a shirker or failing to be a man. The doctor thought there was one cure. To satisfy himself, Siegfried Sassoon had to go back to the front, possibly to be killed. He had to leave this place of casualties and weakness.
Wilfred Owen told his mother how young Sassoon looked, how he ‘talks as badly as Wells writes’ and often seemed bored; then this changed to reports of a wish to ‘cut capers of pleasure’ in Sassoon’s company even though ‘he is not a cheery dog himself’.
They showed each other their work: Sassoon’s poems that would make up his next collection Counter-Attack (including the title poem, which Owen found more frightening than battle’s reality), and Owen at first some old verses, then the newer ‘Antaeus’ and ‘Song of Songs’, finally drafts for some of his last poems like ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘The Chances’. Owen took on the need to break from artificial phrases, lush words reminiscent of the 1890s like ‘viols’ and ‘murmurous hearts’ and ‘dawn singing’ – to use everyday language; Sassoon too may have been influenced, by the rich imagery (again a fin-de-siècle throwback) or use of half-rhyme. Both were homosexuals – Owen possibly more experienced than the virginal Sassoon; both were well read, both realistic about the war but not pacifists. Owen told his mother in September, ‘I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate whiskied prussianists.’
It was ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ which made Sassoon urge Owen towards early publication. Robert Graves arrived in Edinburgh to see Siegfried and, characteristically, took this stranger in hand, saying he could be ‘damn fine’ but was too lax in metre, ‘careless … too Sassoonish’. Owen, now more confident, thought he didn’t need instruction from ‘Captain Graves’.
At the start of November, Wilfred Owen left Edinburgh, with money from Sassoon and an introduction to Robert Ross. A week later he told his mother he’d met Ross, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells at the Reform Club. Sassoon had said he would get William Heinemann to publish his new friend. On the last day of 1917, Owen could say ‘I go out of this year a Poet, my dear Mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet.’
Graves, Owen and Sassoon had missed what was happening around Ypres. Of the poets, it was Edmund Blunden who went through this. From July until November Blunden was with his battalion of the Royal Sussex as the fighting crossed the Flemish landscape, by places like Vlamertinge, Van Heule Farm, the River Steenbeek and the ruined Ypres.
Morale and the weather worsened; Blunden had to threaten a mutinous warrant officer with arrest. A move to the Yser canal brought greater safety, then some leave which ended in August and a course at a wireless school at Zuytpeene before a return to the transport lines, where he had to take up the rations: once ‘almost a laughing matter’ but now dangerous in mud and shellfire. For Blunden third Ypres, or Passchendaele, meant sheltering in tunnels and trenches, edging out to reconnoitre through the mud, deep pools and rain of churned-up fields, shattered settlements and blasted trees that showed civilization’s end.
On 1 November, his twenty-first birthday, he supervised trench digging. He felt overcome by ‘the general grossness of the war. The uselessness of the offensive, the contrast in the quality of ourselves with the quality of the year before, the conviction that the civilian population realised nothing of our state, the rarity of thought, the growing intensity and mood of destructive forces – these brought on a mood of selfishness. We should all die, presumably, round Ypres.’
Sent to the Army Signal School for two months, Edmund Blunden missed the end of the Ypres battles and Cambrai – where the success of the new tanks died out in enemy counter-attacks. He came back to his battalion in January 1918. After two days, he went to England on leave, ignoring the suggestion of his battalion’s temporary commander that he should stay in Flanders. Already Blunden’s time in the trenches had been long, and he’d been brave. While in France, he wrote poetry constantly. By May and June 1916 the war started to feature in these as well, seen often through a contrasting pastoral or romantic mood that accentuated the pain. ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau’ (with its first line from Keats emphasizing sacrifice) was written in July. Like Owen, he read Sassoon, finding an astonishing sense of how the war felt, also a resemblance to sketches by Goya and, in the poems’ conversational style, to Hardy and to Browning.
War poetry was, by 1917, an established genre, its best-sellers now mostly forgotten, apart from John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’. A successful grocer called William Dunkerley, writing under the name of John Oxenham, had publi
shed All’s Well in November 1915 and sold 75,000 copies by July 1916. Other Oxenham books, sometimes in pamphlet form, reached hundreds of thousands of readers, his hymn ‘For the Men at the Front’ touching eight million. Christian works, aware of war’s pain, these also had nostalgia for a settled world. Another popular poet was Robert Service, admired by Blunden for his poems about country life.
Of the more literary writers, it was Robert Nichols who achieved both praise and sales. Declared permanently unfit for military service at home or abroad, he worked for the Ministry of Labour, then the Foreign Office, unable to take anything too demanding because of treatment for neurasthenia. Nichols’s new collection, Ardours and Endurances, published in the summer of 1917, propelled him into the public eye. Some thirty poems tell – romantically yet also in evocations of suffering – what he’d seen in France, how he responded to the war; some pre-war lyrics are also in the book, often about his old subjects such as fauns and love. The best poems include observations of batteries on the move and elegies to the dead, as in a memory of an Oxford contemporary:
I mind how we sat one winter night
While past his open window raced the bright
Snow-torrent golden in the hot firelight …
I see him smiling at the streamered air …
By the time the book came out, Nichols had met Marsh, who was ecstatic about it, comparing the poems to those by his beloved Rupert Brooke and putting eight of them into his latest Georgian anthology, which was published in November 1917. There was much praise; Charles Scott Moncrieff, later the translator of Proust, said that the book defined the times, and Graves, who later mocked Nichols’s short service at the front and taste for prostitutes, joined in, as did the ageing critic Edmund Gosse, writing of Nichols’s ‘mournful passion’. John Masefield wrote that ‘Nichols, Graves and Sassoon are singing together like morning stars.’ The book had a first printing of 1,000, then a second of another 1,000, followed by a third in October of 500 and another 1,000 in early 1918.
Robert Nichols could persuade others of his pain. Blunden recalled Graves claiming that Nichols, he (Graves) and Sassoon were the three most important poets of the war. Sassoon would have hallucinations about the book in his hospital bed in 1918. Its author began a new life as a reciter and lecturer, his performances highflown and theatrical.
In September 1917, Ivor Gurney fell in love with a nurse at Bangour hospital who liked but did not love him. The reviews of Severn and Somme in November were good enough to let Gurney think of himself as a war poet. The book’s last section, entitled ‘Sonnets 1917’, was dedicated ‘To the Memory of Rupert Brooke’, a not entirely ironical tribute to the poet whose work had set him thinking about the best way to write about the war.
Gurney glanced wryly at Brooke’s sales. ‘When Rupert Brooke went abroad,’ he wrote to Marion Scott on 21 November, ‘he left his copyrights equally between Gibson, Abercrombie, and De la Mare. They have had £2,000 each!… Poetry pays – it took a war to make it…’ At Bangour, he wrote ‘To the Prussians of England’, another blast against what was said about the war’s purpose at home when Gurney and others were fighting to make their country a better place.
Robert Graves’s Fairies and Fusiliers was published in November 1917, dedicated to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. It includes a verse letter to Siegfried Sassoon, written ‘from bivouacs at Mametz Wood, July 13th 1916’, and another to Robert Nichols, showing the regard Graves had for him. Graves had a paternalistic feeling for his men and he felt that Sassoon’s protest had let the men down. The two were never so close again. Sassoon told Lady Ottoline Morrell in November, from Craiglockhart, ‘I don’t think R.G. feels things as deeply as some – certainly not as much as Nichols – with all his egotism.’
Owen had been transformed by Craiglockhart. Early in November, his poem ‘Miners’ was accepted by the Nation; later that month he visited his cousin and former literary confidant Leslie Gunston, displaying a new confidence by writing mockingly to Siegfried Sassoon about Gunston’s tame verses and sexual innocence. In November, he rejoined the 5th Battalion, the Manchester Regiment, at Scarborough, still thought capable only of light duties.
Officers were leaving for the front, which made Owen think of his duty as a poet and a man. Living in a tower room in a hotel near the sea, he remembered the look of those in the camp at Etaples, ‘an incomprehensible look’, he told his mother, ‘not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like dead rabbit’s. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.’ Avoiding the interminable games of bridge in the mess, Owen wrote ‘Hospital Barge’ (remembering the casualty clearing station at Gailly), the ninetyish fragment ‘I Saw his Round Mouth’s Crimson’ and ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ (perhaps responding to Graves’s instruction that he should write more optimistically). He heard that Sassoon had rejoined his regiment.
Nineteen-seventeen brought two new anthologies. The Muse at Arms, edited by E. B. Osborne (‘an attempt to show the British warrior’s soul’), offered a conventional view, with stirring verses and not much to stir the thoughts; Sassoon was represented by ‘Absolution’ (a call to arms of 1915) and ‘The Redeemer’, a front-line work but less sharp than the later ‘Blighters’. Osborne gave Robert Nichols more poems than any other writer, reflecting the view that this was the new Rupert Brooke.
Edward Marsh’s new Georgian Poetry was more adventurous. His 1915 volume, too early for war poetry, had sold 19,000 copies, a startling amount, and was dedicated to two poets who had died that year, Brooke and James Elroy Flecker. In 1917 the editor’s taste for verse drama is shown in an extract from ‘Moses’ by Isaac Rosenberg, and there were also war poems by Sassoon, Graves and Robert Nichols, the Sassoon selection including ‘They’, ‘The Kiss’, ‘The Death Bed’ and ‘In the Pink’ and only one ‘happy warrior’ work, ‘To Victory’. Marsh showed his reverence for rank with an embarrassingly bad poem by the former Prime Minister’s son Raymond Asquith, who’d been killed on the Somme.
The poets began to be lionized. Sassoon and Nichols read in November in the drawing room of the London hostess Mrs Colefax, the poems interspersed by Ivor Novello at the piano; and in December, Nichols read at Mrs Colefax’s again, this time with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. A young officer in the audience, Bernard Freyberg, who’d won the Victoria Cross, disapproved; it was ‘offensive,’ Freyberg declared, for Siegfried Sassoon ‘to come back and say, I can’t lead men to their death any more’, which claimed ‘a monopoly of virtue, as if other officers liked doing it, because they acquiesced in their duty’. Nichols, by this time an experienced and keen reader, didn’t always impress. Huxley was scathing, declaring that he ‘raved and screamed and hooted his filthy war poems like a lyceum villain who hasn’t learnt how to act’.
Aldous Huxley was moving towards pacifism; Nichols, Sassoon and Owen weren’t pacifists. All, however, wanted the war to end. In Britain there was some movement towards this. H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling pleads for some form of world government, or at least an understanding of German demands. In August 1917, Professor Alfred Pollard, an eminent constitutional historian, said that wartime controls were making Britain as regimented as Prussia. In November, Lord Lansdowne, a former Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Lords and Viceroy of India, wrote to the Daily Telegraph calling for a negotiated peace.
For peace, there had to be a response from the other side. Germany seemed strong at the end of 1917, with all her troops fighting on foreign soil. After the Bolshevik revolution of October the Germans began negotiations for a treaty with the new Soviet Russia that would take vast swathes of land and release the armies from the eastern front. In the Middle East, the Turks had humiliated the British; in Flanders, the Ypres and Passchendaele offensive had ended inconclusively at huge cost. The military dictators that ruled Germany – Hindenburg, Ludendorff and their ciphe
r the Emperor – still thought the war could be won before enough Americans came over. The quickest and surest way for the Allies to end the fighting was to surrender.
The war was becoming a test of endurance, with the grind at the front ever more relentless. In November, Isaac Rosenberg was at Cambrai, back with the 11th King’s Own, which attacked Bourlon Wood when flu kept the poet in hospital. He read Marsh’s new Georgian anthology, with his piece from ‘Moses’ and eight poems by Siegfried Sassoon, and reflected that ‘Sassoon has power.’ From his sick bed, Rosenberg asked for watercolours so that he might paint; and wrote ‘Girl to Soldier on Leave’ and a fresh version of a verse play. By the start of January 1918, he was well enough to return to the line. ‘I am back in the trenches which are terrible now,’ he told Marsh. ‘We spend most of our time pulling each other out of the mud. I am not fit at all.’ Christ, he thought, had not suffered as much as this.
1917 POEMS
‘After-Glow’ – Ivor Gurney
‘Song’ – Ivor Gurney
‘Soldier: Twentieth Century’ – Isaac Rosenberg
‘Blighters’ – Siegfried Sassoon
‘Ballad of the Three Spectres’ – Ivor Gurney