Some Desperate Glory

by Max Egremont

  Robert Graves remained proud that he’d fought. In 1968, he wrote that a compromise peace had been impossible because of German atrocities. The war’s worst horror had been Haig’s 1917 offensive – the third battle of Ypres or Passchendaele – ‘the most unspeakably horrible, pointless, and costly campaign ever fought by British troops’. For Graves, however, the war had ‘given me not only an unsurpassable standard of danger, discomfort, and horror by which to judge more recent troubles, but a confidence in the golden-heartedness and iron endurance of my fellow countrymen (proved again in Hitler’s war), which even the laxity of this new plastic age cannot disturb’. Like Blunden, he remembered the virtues of that terrifying time.

  Siegfried Sassoon wanted people to read the devotional poems inspired by his conversion to Catholicism rather than his writings about the First World War. The others show how hard it was to leave such an ordeal. Nichols never recovered from shell shock and Gurney’s and Blunden’s post-war poetry shows the strength of memory. Graves tried harder to move on. He set up a court in exile, explored myth and feminine power, believing that poetry was magical, that reality and literal truth were not poetic. Avoiding the political themes of the 1930s or social comment, he became dismissive of Goodbye to All That, declaring that it had been written for money: that was why he put in what he thought were commercial subjects – kings, mothers, food, ghosts and poets (‘People like reading about poets. I put in a lot of poets’). The book isn’t an anti-war book, its author said, but a history of what had happened to him during the war.

  Edmund Blunden went back most years to Flanders. On one of his last visits, he sat on a hill above Ancre with his young wife Claire, sensing old terrors behind the now peaceful scene. That year, Blunden represented tradition in an election for Oxford’s professorship of poetry, standing against the American (and favourite of the 1960s) Robert Lowell. It was Blunden who won, Lowell graciously declaring admiration for his opponent’s work. But the new professor was already ill, suffering from the aftermath of wartime gas attacks, and found the lecturing a dreadful burden, so he gave up the post. A year later, he was back on the western front, again with Claire, writing to Sassoon that there had been ‘many thoughts and mentions of you’. He knew that Siegfried Sassoon, one of the few left who understood what the war had been like, was dying.

  In September 1967, after a Roman Catholic funeral, Sassoon was buried at Mells, in an Anglican churchyard, near the medieval manor house, as if to assert the England that pervades much of his later work. Blunden followed seven years later; his grave is at Long Melford, in the cemetery of the church there. In December 1985, Robert Graves died, on Majorca, where he is buried. At his memorial service in London later that month, the last post was played by a bugler from the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

  By then, the poets’ war was seen as the truth, judging by the flood of novels and films about it. This infuriated historians such as John Terraine or Correlli Barnett. Why, they asked, should what had ended in victory for the Allies be shown so often as a series of failed attacks from water-filled trenches across lunar landscapes threaded with barbed wire, in an atmosphere of dread, under the command of stupid, moustachioed, out-of-touch generals sheltering in châteaux miles to the rear? This, they claimed, was the real myth. They protested against vilification of Haig, saying that his task – of satisfying political pressure, of training the flood of volunteers and conscripts, of dislodging an enemy who had the huge advantages given to defenders by modern technology and weapons – was almost impossible.

  Haig was not a great general, although his supporters have worked hard to try to make him one. Not until the last months of the war did British tactics have overwhelming success, demonstrating an exceptionally long time of learning. The war poets saw the earlier failed offensives. Only Owen was at the front for the final surge. And the historians faced a growing wave, of art and emotion. The pacifist Benjamin Britten, a conscientious objector in the Second World War, put Owen’s poems into his War Requiem, first performed (and hailed as a masterpiece) in the new Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. A year later came a new edition of Owen’s poems, edited by Cecil Day Lewis, now a best-seller. Joan Littlewood’s theatrical production Oh, What a Lovely War! followed in 1963, using music and words, including songs from the war, to ridicule the generals and politicians, reaching large audiences six years later as a film.

  Anthologies of war poetry carried the message of early illusion crumbling into the despair. In 1964, Up the Line to Death, the first substantial post-Second War collection, edited by Brian Gardner, took pride in digging out lesser-known poets but was dominated by Owen, Sassoon, Nichols and Rosenberg – with not much by Blunden, Thomas or Brooke and nothing by Gurney. Men Who March Away, published the following year and edited by Ian Parsons, followed this arc as well; again Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, more this time by Thomas, but Gurney in with only three poems. The BBC Great War series – one of the longest-ever television documentaries – came out in 1964. Historians were called in to advise, the commentary was objective and not mocking, the survivors interviewed were dignified, but the solemn music, grainy photographs and flickering film conveyed disaster and doom.

  Class-baiting intensified the row. Oh, What a Lovely War! portrayed Haig and the generals as privileged, remote and stupid, and the war itself as a colossal error thrust on a guileless Europe by defunct anciens régimes. To others, however, it was the poets, especially those who had been to public schools, who were out of touch. Their nostalgia, their contrasting of idyllic pre-war innocence with the hellish western front, showed glib emotion, particularly when it came from rich rentiers like Siegfried Sassoon who’d learned unreal romantic idealism at their public schools. This was individual suffering rather than general truth, as Yeats had said. The England of Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man may have looked beautiful, but it was reeling from a long agricultural depression that drove the young into the slums of the industrial cities where life was not that much better than in the trenches.

  The barrage thudded on. Defenders of Haig and the High Command said that the war should be seen from October 1918, not from 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme. The Somme was terrible for the Germans as well; even the third battle of Ypres had seen British success in the hot dry spell in September and early October 1917 under General Plumer (who looked like a caricature First War commander). The British were unique in having no pre-war conscription, in having to recruit, equip and train a massive volunteer force after the early high casualty rate suffered by the small regular army. Britain was not prepared for a large continental land war – again not the fault of the generals. It had been thought that the Royal Navy, an economic blockade and generous transfusions of cash could be Britain’s contribution, with the fighting on land left mostly to her allies.

  There were mistakes, not least in Haig’s obstinacy and determination to go on, at the Somme and at Ypres in the autumns of 1916 and 1917. But the British army rallied after Loos in September 1915, then after the Somme’s first day, then after what Blunden thought had been the worst of all, the fighting round Ypres in October and November 1917. The last months of the war, from July until November 1918, saw British victories.

  What the poets wrote was seductive, often spellbindingly good, so much so that it was claimed they contributed to the climate of appeasement in the 1930s: the wish to avoid war at almost any price. It’s hard to prove this; certainly they show sympathy for enemy soldiers – although never for German war aims – and Sassoon and Blunden were drawn to pre–Second World War pacifist movements like the Peace Pledge Union. War memoirs and novels were influential because of their sales, greater than poetry. More effective still was Keynes’s brilliant polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December 1919 and a best-seller all over the world. The book’s argument – that the victorious powers had been much too harsh on Germany – prepared the way for a revulsion against the Treaty of Versailles (and sympathy for the German sense of injustice) a decade
later.

  There’s the claim that Britain should never have fought at all: that by sticking to a treaty with Belgium the British prolonged the fighting (and led later to Hitler) instead of accepting as inevitable what might have been a benign German domination of continental Europe, an early version of the modern European Union. German demands on defeated Russia, and the nature of the Kaiser’s neurotic and feverish regime, show this to be too optimistic.

  So was the war like the 1989 television comedy Blackadder, with the idiotic Haig, dim generals and tragic doomed soldiers? Or was it a question of hanging on against the most powerfully militarized European power that had long prepared for a great European war? James Jack’s view seems sound. Jack, who began the war as a captain and ended it commanding an infantry brigade, was a realist, certainly not a poet. The war, he knew, had been hell; he’d been in all the major battles on the western front and there should be no glorifying of it. But Jack took pride in the ‘complete’ defeat of the German army. ‘The entire manhood of Germany and all her resources’ had been behind the troops whose leaders had been trained to handle vast formations. Allied forces had risen above the lamentable preparations for war. It was the politicians who had put the nation in danger by ‘neglecting its armaments and the training of personnel wanted to handle them’.

  Surely it’s necessary to separate politics, even history, from the poetry. The work of the British First World War poets can be seen as one of the most powerful collective statements not just against what happened on the western front but against all war. But it reflects individual experience rather than objective judgement. How could it do otherwise? Every work of art is restricted by what has inspired it, and war is a more powerful restriction than most. War poetry can’t be isolated from its circumstances – a limitation perhaps and also one that acts against broader historical truth.

  By 1914, in Britain, poetry had become more suited to what it would need to express. The new realism of the Georgians, alongside their romance with rural life, let poets treat war and its pain realistically, without bombast, after the early burst of patriotic feeling, with the added emotional power of nostalgia. Among the downland, fields and woods of the Somme, Flanders and Picardy, the soldiers thought of the gentle rolling lands of southern England, although Graves hankered after north Wales. Dreams of pastoral calm could lessen the shock of industrial war and make its poetry stronger through contrast and emotion.

  It was not only what the poets saw that raised them above the Georgians. Their pre-war and post-war lives show them as extraordinary: often tormented casualties of their age, not typical of it. But they were strong enough to make a world that stands alone, bound by the feelings and vision of eleven fragile young men who were unlikely warriors.

  AFTERMATH POEMS

  ‘Everyone Sang’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘Laventie’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘1916 Seen from 1921’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘The Mangel-Bury’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘It is Near Toussaints’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘The Rock Below’ – Robert Graves

  ‘The Zonnebeke Road’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘First Time In’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘Poem for End’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘The Bohemians’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘The Watchers’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘The Silent One’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘I Saw England – July Night’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘The Interview’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘Two Voices’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘Gouzeaucourt: The Deceitful Calm’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘War Books’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘A Fallodon Memory’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘The Last Day of Leave (1916)’ – Robert Graves

  ‘Report on Experience’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘Recalling War’ – Robert Graves

  Everyone Sang

  Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

  And I was filled with such delight

  As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

  Winging wildly across the white

  Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

  Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;

  And beauty came like the setting sun:

  My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

  Drifted away … O, but Everyone

  Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON

  Laventie

  One would remember still

  Meadows and low hill

  Laventie was, as to the line and elm row

  Growing through green strength wounded, as home elms grow.

  Shimmer of summer there and blue autumn mists

  Seen from trench-ditch winding in mazy twists.

  The Australian gunners in close flowery hiding

  Cunning found out at last, and smashed in the unspeakable lists.

  And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and griding.

  The letters written there, and received there,

  Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine,

  And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning.

  The crater, and carrying of gas cylinders on two sticks

  (Pain past comparison and far past right agony gone)

  Strained hopelessly of heart and frame at first fix.

  Café-au-lait in dug-outs on Tommies’ cookers,

  Cursed minniewerfs, thirst in eighteen-hour summer.

  The Australian miners clayed, and the being afraid

  Before strafes, sultry August dusk time than death dumber –

  And the cooler hush after the strafe, and the long night wait –

  The relief of first dawn, the crawling out to look at it,

  Wonder divine of Dawn, man hesitating before Heaven’s gate.

  (Though not on Coopers where music fire took at it.

  Though not as at Framilode beauty where body did shake at it)

  Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven gate

  Lovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillate

  Strangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –

  Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy’s delight.

  Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;

  Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens

  Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving

  For bread, the pure thing, blessed beyond saving.

  Canteen disappointments, and the keen boy braving

  Bullets or such for grouse roused surprisingly through

  (Halfway) Stand-to.

  And the shell nearly blunted my razor at shaving;

  Tilleloy, Fauquissart, Neuve Chapelle, and mud like glue.

  But Laventie, most of all, I think is to soldiers

  The town itself with plane trees, and small-spa air;

  And vin, rouge-blanc, chocolat, citron, grenadine:

  One might buy in small delectable cafés there.

  The broken church, and vegetable fields bare;

  Neat French market town look so clean,

  And the clarity, amiability of North French air.

  Like water flowing beneath the dark plough and high Heaven,

  Music’s delight to please the poet pack-marching there.

  IVOR GURNEY

  1916 Seen from 1921

  Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,

  I sit in solitude and only hear

  Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,

  The lost intensities of hope and fear;

  In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

  On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,

  The very books I read are there – and I

  Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

  Its wounded lengt
h from those sad streets of war

  Into green places here, that were my own;

  But now what once was mine is mine no more,

  I seek such neighbours here and I find none.

  With such strong gentleness and tireless will

  Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,

  Passionate I look for their dumb story still,

  And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

  I rise up at the singing of a bird

  And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,

  I dare not give a soul a look or word

  Where all have homes and none’s at home in vain:

  Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,

  The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,

  In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,

  The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

  Sweet Mary’s shrine between the sycamores!

  There we would go, my friend of friends and I,

  And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,

  Whose dark made light intense to see them by.

  Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots

  Spun from the wrangling wire; then in warm swoon

  The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,

  We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.