by Max Egremont
And he remembered his rifle … rapid fire …
And started blazing wildly … then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans …
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
To the Prussians of England
When I remember plain heroic strength
And shining virtue shown by Ypres pools,
Then read the blither written by knaves for fools
In praise of English soldiers lying at length,
Who purely dream what England shall be made
Gloriously new, free of the old stains
By us, who pay the price that must be paid,
Will freeze all winter over Ypres plains.
Our silly dreams of peace you put aside
And Brotherhood of man, for you will see
An armed Mistress, braggart of the tide
Her children slaves, under your mastery …
We’ll have a word there too, and forge a knife,
Will cut the cancer threatens England’s life.
IVOR GURNEY
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
WILFRED OWEN
To his Love
He’s gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn River
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
You would not know him now …
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers –
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
IVOR GURNEY
I Saw his Round Mouth’s Crimson
I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen as it fell,
Like a sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.
WILFRED OWEN
Photographs (To Two Scots Lads)
Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily;
Watching the candle guttering in the draught;
Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily
Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed
With pity and pride, photographs of all colours,
All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France;
Or mothers’ faces worn with countless dolours;
Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance,
Though in a picture only, a common cheap
Ill-taken card; and children – frozen, some
(Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep
Out of the handkerchief that is his home
(But he’s so shy!). And some with bright looks, calling
Delight across the miles of land and sea,
That not the dread of barrage suddenly falling
Could quite blot out – not mud nor lethargy.
Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O
The pain of them, wide Earth’s most sacred things!
Lying in dugouts, hearing the great shells slow
Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings.
But once – O why did he keep that bitter token
Of a dead Love? – that boy, who, suddenly moved,
Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken,
A girl who better had not been beloved.
IVOR GURNEY
1918
IN JANUARY 1918, Robert Graves married Nancy Nicholson in London, and Wilfred Owen came down from Scarborough for the wedding. Here he met Eddie Marsh and Charles Scott Moncrieff who later put it about that he’d seduced this ‘quiet little person’. Scott Moncrieff tried to fix a home posting for his new friend but the trail to France opened up when a medical board upgraded Owen in early March. He moved to the northern command depot in Ripon, arriving there on 12 March and renting a room in the Yorkshire cathedral city.
Wilfred Owen wrote many of the great poems of his last year at Scarborough and Ripon, perhaps because the front-line traumas of 1917 could be recalled in the comparative calm of a home posting (and a room of his own) alongside the extraordinary stimulation given by Sassoon. Some, like ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘The Dead Beat’ (criticized by Sassoon and later redrafted), ‘The Sentry’ and possibly ‘Insensibility’, were begun in 1917 at Craiglockhart, then worked on at Scarborough and Ripon and, after August 1918, in France. ‘Spring Offensive’ was based on what he’d seen on the western front in April 1917; ‘Strange Meeting’ came in Scarborough and Ripon from January to March 1918. In May, in Ripon, he probably began a draft of the preface that would appear in collections of his poetry.
Such graphic, compassionate work was timely, for the spring brought another huge attack in the west. The treaty of Brest Litovsk with the new Soviet Russia had led to large German gains that reached into the Baltic States and what are now Poland, Belarus and western Ukraine. It also released troops from the eastern front. German strength in the west increased by some 30 per cent after November 1917, and Allied forces declined, after Passchendaele and Cambrai. The German General Ludendorff knew that speed was vital. He chose the British as the weakest point, where they joined the French part of the line.
On 21 March, the Germans attacked along a front of some fifty-five miles, beginning with a creeping barrage and infiltration of infantry through a morning mist. The British retreat fell into chaos, even though the attack had been expected, failing to destroy bridges and roads, letting the enemy surge even faster forward. Ernst Jünger wrote of joyful hysteria, of how ‘the immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.’ The giant rail junction at Amiens was under threat by 25 March, with the British some twenty-four miles back from what four days earlier had been their front line.
Isaac Rosenberg dreamed of getting into a Jewish battalion that was bound for the Middle East. Marsh tried to fix this but failed, and on 8 March – in reserve, repairing roads and bringing up supplies – Rosenberg wrote of his dread of wet weather, for ‘We will become like mummies – look warm and lifelike, but a touch and we will crumble to pieces.’ His ambition was to finish another verse drama, ‘The Unicorn’, that would show war and the forces let loose ‘by an am
bitious and unscrupulous will’ or a pitiless God.
Rosenberg was back in the front line when the Germans attacked. His unit retreated into reserve, then further back, and in the turmoil he wrote ‘Through These Pale Cold Days’. This, his last poem, could refer to the longed-for Jewish battalion: the ‘dark faces’ that ‘burn / out of three thousand years, / and their wild eyes yearn’: the end hinting at a premonition of his own death. Isaac Rosenberg was killed by a sniper or a raiding party at dawn on 1 April. Some words were found among his effects: ‘How small a thing is art. A little pain; disappointment, and any man feels a depth – a boundlessness of emotion, inarticulate thoughts no poet has ever succeeded in imaging. Death does not conquer me, I conquer death, I am the master.’
Siegfried Sassoon was sent to Palestine that spring. The journey went, strangely, through Ireland after Craiglockhart. Stationed with his regiment in Limerick, Sassoon hunted, moved among the gentry, feeling oddly in limbo, and avoided the IRA in a country still simmering after the Easter Rising of 1916. On 11 February, he left for the Middle East to join General Allenby’s Egyptian Expedition Force.
On the voyage out, Sassoon met soldiers from a Jewish volunteer battalion (perhaps the one that Rosenberg had tried to join) at Taranto and, as if forgetting his own Jewish roots, let slip some mild anti-Semitism in his diary. In Palestine, he found desolate hills, a sunlit landscape and, for a change, victory. Jerusalem and Jericho had fallen to Allenby’s forces, ‘Johnny Turk’ was on the run and Sassoon’s commanding officer joked about shooting prisoners. Then reports came of the German offensive on the western front and loss of most of the ground gained since the Somme.
Reinforcements were needed in France. Sassoon went first to Alexandria in Egypt, where he had hoped – but failed – to see E. M. Forster, who was working there for the Red Cross. Forster now dreaded what might happen after the war, for so much jingoism and false feeling, so much hatred, had been released. Any new peaceful Britain must, the novelist felt, be worse than the country he’d known in 1914.
Sassoon and his battalion reached the south of France, leaving Marseilles by train on 9 May to go north to the front. Much had happened since the launch of the German offensive. Harsh terms had been imposed on Romania, giving Germany and Austria-Hungary control over the country’s oil fields for ninety-nine years, again showing how demanding the Germans would be in any peace negotiations. In April, however, an attack on the Lys spread their forces too thinly. On 3 April the Allies rallied with a new unified command under the French Marshal Foch. An officer friend told Ivor Gurney of the improvement: how much better the French staff was than the British. Even the dour Haig rose to the crisis, issuing a stirring statement on 11 April: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.’ The writer Vera Brittain, nursing at the front – and no fan of the High Command – wrote after reading this, ‘I knew I should go on, whether I could or not.’
The German successes of March – 140 square miles seized in only twenty-four hours, with 39,000 casualties, as against 98 square miles gained by the Allies in 1916 on the Somme, over 140 days, with 1.5 million casualties – hid hunger and despair within Germany and dwindling manpower, even with the arrival of troops from the east. American entry into the war led to an intensification of the economic blockade, made worse by bad harvests in 1916 and 1917. German troops on leave were sick of fighting and disheartened by the worsening conditions at home; of those transferring to the west from Russia up to 10 per cent deserted on the way. Industrial unrest spread through the factories. The offensives led to drawn-out supply lines and exhaustion. In July the French began the Allied counter-attack on the Marne.
Wilfred Owen waited to go out. At Ripon in May, he made plans for a post-war world, a traditional vision: blank-verse plays on old Welsh themes, looking to Tennyson and Yeats; a Collected Poems in 1919; Perseus, a volume presumably inspired by myth, and another entitled Idylls in Prose.
There’s a voluptuousness in the Ripon and Scarborough poems, a richness of detail and emotion, which shows the influence not only of Keats and Shelley but of the 1890s. Owen sent some drafts to Siegfried Sassoon who, on the evidence of these, wondered later why at Craiglockhart he’d thought this young man to be merely promising. Perhaps it had been the artlessness of the eager disciple or that effusive ‘border-Welsh temperament’; now he saw the power of ‘my little friend Wilfred’. Later Sassoon doubted if he’d had much effect on Owen, or had achieved anything beyond giving encouragement. Owen might, Sassoon thought, ‘have done just as well if he had never met me. He was a born poet, & had he lived, would have produced some of the most beautiful & original poetry of his time.’ What Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen might have achieved together haunted the survivor.
In May 1918, Sassoon arrived again on the western front. To begin with, he was out of the line, near Crécy, site of an English victory during the Hundred Years War, where he trained troops and felt overcome with sympathy for them. The fighting had moved across the old Festubert line, with the Germans still making gains. Until July Sassoon was in billets near Domvast, among beechwoods, bluebells, orchards and hawthorns, writing fatalistically to Graves to say that he’d left him £250 a year and that Robert Nichols (‘the best poet of the three’) must write an elegy about him if he was killed.
Like Forster, Sassoon wondered what peace might bring. The omens were bad. Robbie Ross’s London had descended into turmoil as Lord Alfred Douglas, once (like Ross) Oscar Wilde’s lover, embarked upon a campaign of public abuse against former friends of Wilde and homosexuals in general. ‘Robbie’ had introduced Sassoon to greater literary and sexual frankness; now this was threatened by intolerance and a home front of attention-seeking and ignorance. In March the police raided Ross’s flat; in June a maverick member of parliament, Noel Pemberton Billing, claimed that the Germans had a black book of some 47,000 British homosexuals whom Billing would name. It seemed to Sassoon, Forster and others that to their own country they were now the enemy within.
As he moved into the front line, Siegfried Sassoon’s second wartime collection of poems was published, entitled Counter-Attack, some of which he’d shown to Owen at Craiglockhart. The print run of 1,500 showed that sales of The Old Huntsman had been good, although not on the scale of Oxenham or even Nichols: that Sassoon was now famous as a rebel hero. The Cambridge academic Edward Dent, who’d loathed the war and its jingo patriotism from the start, thought that the book was devastating; Sassoon’s doctor at Craiglockhart, Rivers, however, worried about the poet’s ‘damned hankering after death’. Thomas Hardy especially liked the title piece and ‘To Any Dead Officer’. In November 1917, Edmund Blunden had left the line near Ypres to go on a signalling course – a routine set up at least partly to give soldiers a useful rest – returning to his battalion in the New Year before going on leave on 13 January 1918. It was in England that Blunden read Counter-Attack, impressed by the collection not only as ‘a portrait of war’ but also because of the ‘recollected charm of peace’: an illustration of how soldiers needed to think of home.
There was some criticism. Middleton Murry said in the Nation that Sassoon’s torment and suffering were more significant than his poetry, which was mere floating verses without deep thought, far from Wordsworth’s classic definition of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. To Bertrand Russell, Murry’s opinions showed the ‘safe smugness’ of the Bloomsbury conscientious objectors who, in contrast to Russell’s time in jail for his anti-war protests, had safe billets working fitfully on farms. ‘Ouf! I hate all the Bloomsbury crew, with their sneers at anything that has live feeling in it,’ he told Lady Ottoline Morrell. ‘Beastly of them to be down on S.S.’
The Murry review came out on 11 July, the day that Sassoon, in the line near Saint Floris, had a direct hit on his dug-out. Having resumed his patrols in no man’s land, he went out the next day with a corporal for over two hours. Returning in the early morning of 13 July, he stood up
to look back and, having been mistaken for a German by a British soldier, was shot in the head. Robert Nichols, typically melodramatic, claimed that the High Command had ordered Siegfried Sassoon’s execution because of his views on the war. Sassoon was taken to the American Red Cross Hospital in London, where he wrote his ‘Letter to Robert Graves’, a disjointed poem of suffering and shock that lets him be claimed for modernism.
Five days after Sassoon had been wounded, on 18 July, the French counter-attacked on the Marne; and on 8 August the British, Australians and Canadians advanced at Amiens. These months of fighting were as hard as any that had gone before, but Haig at last succeeded in combining devastating artillery firepower with carefully measured infantry attacks on a retreating enemy.
Siegfried Sassoon wasn’t the only war poet to suffer from what Russell called Bloomsbury ‘sneers’. Working under the strain of trying to please the poet’s puritanical mother – who gave him the most depressing time of his life – Edward Marsh edited Rupert Brooke’s Collected Poems. This was published in the summer of 1918 – and included his own memoir of Brooke – and, that August, Virginia Woolf reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement. Even those like Woolf who had detested the war (and Rupert Brooke’s attitude to it) remained impressed by the man. Woolf said, however, that Marsh’s memoir was incomplete and gently mocked its occasionally gushing tone while scarcely mentioning the poems. To Brooke’s contemporaries (she added) it didn’t seem to matter that he wrote poetry; the looks, the intellectual vigour and curiosity about writing and life, even his diet and clothes, were much more his point. For Virginia Woolf the question was not what he’d written but ‘what would he have been’. She thought that this ‘most restless, complex and analytic of human beings’ would have become a modern writer of ‘subtle, analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect and full of his keen unsentimental curiosity’. To her diary, however, she was more scathing, calling the book ‘a disgraceful sloppy sentimental rhapsody’ that left its subject ‘rather tarnished’, yet she recorded, while staying with Lytton Strachey, ‘a great deal of talk about Rupert’.