The main thing here is not the war but our own share in it. We have our own part of it to take by the throat each day and I think every soul in the hospital staff is sopped with sweat in doing so day in day out. The work is hard all through and four times a day excessively hard, carrying wounded in and out and carrying meals up and down, but I’m very well, and whenever I look at these poor fellows my soul boils. Nothing else in the world matters but to stop this atrocious thing. Blood and intellect and life are simply nothing. Let them go like water to end this crime. You’ve no idea of it, you can’t even guess the stink of it, from the bloody old reeking stretchers to the fragments hopping on crutches, and half heads, and a leg gone at the thigh, and young boys blinded and grey headed old men with their backs broken. I never knew I loved men so much. They are a fine lot, a noble lot, I love them all . . . 29
Collecting the wounded from trains, loading them into cars and carrying them to the hospital was a harrowing experience:
One had been lying out for four days on the battlefield, without tending or food, one had a leg smashed to pieces, and another had been blown by a shell and had bits of rope in his face and no eyes and no nose, and his knee broken and his wrist, and another had been blown by a shell and then blown by a bomb and another had septic diarrhoea and is dying now . . . 30
Against this distress Masefield identified death as a release and freedom from pain:
. . . we’ve had another death, and another, if not two more, are pretty sure to die. I have hated today here, not for the work, nor for the death, for when one sees it here, death does not seem so evil as what precedes it, but because of all the fearful pain I’ve watched and been unable to help.31
Masefield’s reaction to helplessness was to commit to physical work within the hospital, not written work. He confided to Constance, on 17 March:
. . . one must not say ‘O, it is waste, your doing such work, you ought to write’; it is not waste; the real waste is war and spilt life and poor beautiful men bled dead for want of a man to hold them. I could not write, thinking of what goes on in those long slow filthy trains, full of mad-eyed whimpering men . . . 32
and later, on 28 March:
. . . We literary men have been very evil, writing about war. To fight is bad enough, but it has its manly side, but to let the mind dwell on it and peck its carrion and write of it is a devilish, unmanly thing, and that’s what we’ve been doing, ever since we had leisure, circa 1850.33
Masefield’s former editor at the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, contacted Masefield in France at the beginning of April 1915 and invited a contribution to the newspaper. Masefield responded:
Thank you for asking me to write my own impressions – at present it is all much too near for that . . . 34
The poet who had shocked Edwardian England with a drunken poacher’s brawl in The Everlasting Mercy could not express himself in print. The only poem Masefield published concerning these experiences would come two and a half decades later. The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross, published in 1939 with contributions from fifty British authors and artists, included one poem by Masefield. It is simply entitled ‘Red Cross’.
Just over a fortnight into his time at Arc-en-Barrois Masefield had started to formulate a plan with several like-minded colleagues. The intention was to create an open-air hospital close to the front in the area around Vosges. With the arrival of spring weather Arc-en-Barrois was susceptible to widespread infection although there were also fewer wounded arriving. By the second week of April Masefield started the journey home to develop his plans further.
Back at Lollingdon, however, devastating news reached Masefield: Rupert Brooke had died of blood poisoning on the way to Gallipoli. Masefield responded to a letter from Violet Bonham-Carter and wrote:
He was the best of the young men growing up in England, and the gentlest, and the wisest. His death is like a putting back of the time. He would not have lived long, his hold on life never seemed sure, but a nature so beautiful ought to have had everything before being ended like this . . . . . . He will never be dead to any who ever knew him.35
and writing to Edward Marsh on the same day Constance Masefield eulogised:
It is impossible to believe that Rupert is dead. We cared for him very much, and each time we met we seemed drawn nearer to him. Something most beautiful has come out of life . . . 36
Three months later Brooke’s mother sent Masefield a keepsake. A copy of W.B. Yeats’ The King’s Threshold: and On Baile’s Strand (published by A.H. Bullen in 1904) with Brooke’s bookplate and his initials on the inside front cover was cherished by Masefield until own death over half a century later.37
By the end of April 1915 Masefield had started raising funds for his new medical scheme. For about a month he wrote lengthy private letters to friends, relations and acquaintances asking for money. One of the earliest was to C.P. Scott:
While I was in the French Hospital attached to the Army of the Argonne I was terribly impressed by the condition in which many of the wounded reached us. Most of the wounds of this war are torn, smashed, burnt and dirty, but it often happened that the journey from the outer trenches to the hospital took two, or even three days. This delay caused many deaths and untold suffering.
I and some of my fellow workers want to prevent some of this death and pain by establishing (to begin with) a travelling Field Hospital, in tents and huts, close to the front, behind the Army of the Argonne, in which fifty men may be treated at one time within, at most, a few hours of their being wounded. This Hospital would be managed by English men and women under the French Military Service de Sauté. We feel that such a Hospital could be fully equipped for £3500.
I am trying to get conditional promises of money towards this sum so that I may prove that I have support when I ask M. Millerand for his sanction to the scheme. Will you promise to help with a gift of money? We have been promised a fine motor ambulance, and we have the nucleus of a strong experienced volunteer staff of workers . . . 38
The intention was to raise the money, gain the support of the French Minister of War and then launch a public appeal. Recipients of letters included Max Beerbohm, Edward Carpenter, Edward Clodd, Sydney Cockerell, Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, E.V. Lucas, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Gilbert Murray, Sir William Ramsay, Charles Ricketts, Lady Anne Ritchie and William Rothenstein. Later letters noted the anticipated cost as £4000. By the end of May, Masefield was beginning to get frustrated. He confided in his sister, Ethel, his irritation in ‘having to be in England with only one pair of hands, and having to get one’s news from the despicable English press’.39
At the beginning of the second week of June, Masefield could report to his brother, Harry, that:
We have raised about £3000 from private friends and are now waiting for the French to sanction us. We may be asked to go to the Dardanelles, instead of to the Argonne, as the need may be greater there . . . 40
Masefield kept the potential new theatre of war quiet. Writing to The New York Times he offered to ‘sell manuscripts, typescripts and autograph copies of my books and poems to any of my American readers who may wish to buy them’ to raise funds for his mobile hospital. A letter to Mary Cabot Wheelwright (1878 – 1958), dated 27 July 1915, reveals that Masefield parted with ‘my autograph of the Wanderer’ in exchange for a gift to the fund.41
By the middle of July, Masefield was requested to visit the West and South of France to assess military hospitals. His trip lasted about a fortnight and was chiefly in the Tours area. He wrote to Constance of the horrors:
Today, I drove out and saw over one huge hospital and called on two others before 10 a.m. The big place was filled mainly with cases of lunacy and idiocy, dumbness, deafness etc, men whose minds had given way in the trenches, and who are now being taught ABC and begin at the beginning again. Most of the cases were down doing mecano-therapy in the city, so I did not see them, but I saw one huge dark crowded ward, with the beds all jammed together and many men in them, and wondere
d rather that they should be kept so, and on asking, was told that it was the cell of the malingerers, who pretended to be mad, so as not to go again to the trenches, and were fed on bread and milk, only twice a day and were kept in complete boredom till they had had enough . . . 42
and one day later he wrote that
I know what the French want and do not want now . . . It has been hateful stopping so long here . . . I have hated this job more than words can say; still, I have seen a little, and drawn a few conclusions. 43
It was an abortive trip for, eventually, the French decided not to accept any additional foreign units and Masefield was asked to divert his attentions to Gallipoli.
The planning for Gallipoli had apparently failed to anticipate adequate medical facilities. John North in Gallipoli – The Fading Vision reveals that, according to the Australian official historian:
. . . less than two days before the troops were to start for the Peninsula the medical arrangements were ‘entirely in the air’, and after the first landings, ‘dirty, verminous transports’, without doctors or stores, carried their cargoes of the dying and the dead from ship to ship in an effort to find accommodation. At the Anzac landing only one hospital ship was ready to receive the wounded, and within three hours it had left for Alexandria. There followed a breakdown of all medical arrangements . . . 44
Masefield was asked to apply his funds to organising a motorboat ambulance service and started writing to all his contributors telling of the change in plan. So it is that Masefield’s service card for The British Red Cross Society shows July 1915 as the date of engagement and notes he was in charge of a motor launch at Mudros. On 13 August he left for Gallipoli writing to Harry Masefield, that ‘of all the damnable blind stupid follies in God’s earth war is about the worst and the most criminal’.45 He arrived around the second week of September 1915.
The Times reported that Masefield ‘found the money for the picket and also for a barge’ causing Constance to write to the editor. She corrected the record and stated that ‘the money has been most generously given by some 40 of our personal friends . . .’46
The launches took casualties from base hospitals in Gallipoli to Mudros, the hospital being on the harbour of the island of Lemnos. (From there, wounded were taken by hospital ship to Malta or Alexandria if necessary.) The names of the launches were Doreen, Griffin, Miaou, Lytham and the Agnes. Masefield was in charge of the latter. A barge was named the John and Ada and it is possible Masefield had some role in naming a launch after his wife’s friend’s sister, Agnes Fry, and a barge after the Galsworthys.
On the journey to Gallipoli, Masefield passed Skyros, the burial place of Brooke. As the day faded ‘a freak of light shewed us Skyros, very far away, just before dark, against a pink stretch of sky’.47 Then ‘at midnight, as we passed it, I saw it as a black bulk with a light on it’.48 In February 1916 Masefield published two sonnets associated with Brooke within Good Friday and other poems, both untitled. The second sonnet had been first written in a letter to Edward Marsh. It claimed ‘From one grave that island talked to me’ and was originally entitled ‘Skyros’.49
Describing his experiences to Harry, Masefield noted:
Gallipoli was a crowded and disappointing time, and I got dysentery there, which lost me about a stone . . . I was at Anzac with the Australians, and had in a brief time a full experience of war; lice, fleas, dysentery, shells, bombs, shrapnel, sniping and a chase by a submarine . . . 50
and to Florence Lamont he later recalled:
I was under very heavy fire (as we called it) in Gallipoli, but there there was the sea and one could not run away.51
By mid October, Masefield was back in England and, after writing to his subscribers about the ‘motor-boat and lighter for use in the Dardanelles in Red Cross work’,52 considered his next contribution to the war effort.
Gilbert Parker (1862 – 1932), one of the leading figures at the secret propaganda and intelligence department known as ‘Wellington House’, had American publicity in his charge for over two and a half years after war was declared. For Parker it was crucial to assess attitudes in the United States and counteract German propaganda. Masefield had been invited as early as May 1915 by the J.B. Pond Lyceum Bureau to present a lecture series and Parker saw this as an opportunity. By November 1915 the Bureau had announced the ‘first American tour of John Masefield, the Sailor Poet, in Lectures of Literary Interest’.53 Masefield later admitted to the American press that ‘he was, in a way, a sort of official detective’.54 Parker had found his latest recruit to the cause. On 1 January 1916 Masefield wrote to Edmund Gosse ‘I am just off to America, on a mission . . .’55
Pond advertised four subjects upon which Masefield would lecture: ‘William Shakespeare’, ‘English Tragedy’, ‘English Poetry’ and ‘Chaucer’ although his prospectus also notes ‘Where specially desired, Mr. Masefield may be willing to talk on his recent experiences in France and at the Dardanelles while engaged in Red Cross work’.56 Masefield was in the United States for three months between 12 January and 18 March 1916 visiting over thirty towns or cities on the East Coast, the Mid-West and the South.
The New York Times reported, on 13 January 1916 that Masefield ‘said that this was his first visit to New York for twenty years, and judging from the glimpses he obtained coming up the harbor it was a very different city to the New York he saw in 1896 . . .’57 With tales of Masefield’s work as a bartender and in a carpet factory the press were apparently keen to portray Masefield as a distinguished visitor who had experienced American life and was able to identify significant progress made over an absence of twenty years. In 1908, before publication of his first novel, Masefield had asked his publisher
. . . not to mention my unhappy past, in America and elsewhere to people connected with the Press. Those squalid hours, and my early work based upon them, have given me a picaresque reputation which is in the way of the serious reputation I now seek . . . 58
Now the squalid hours might win friends and the press reported them with gusto. Asked about his experiences of war Masefield stated that ‘When you have served some time in the ambulance corps your feeling for the wounded becomes so intense that you would sooner lose your right arm than drop the stretcher.’59
New York and the East Coast were ‘very generally pro-Ally’60 and Masefield apparently enjoyed Boston, Bridgeport, Stamford, Philadelphia and New York itself. Upon arrival in New York he noted:
There is a rather angry feeling that the solid, well-organised German element should have such power here and a still angrier feeling that it should have taken American citizenship and yet talk of a Fatherland. This no doubt will lead to a good deal of talk and legislation in the future. As a whole, the place is strongly pro-Ally, and I notice in all sorts of ways among the nicer people a fear that Europe (the Allied Europe) despises America, for not having done something for Belgium, humanity, or even for herself. There is a fear too, that America has lost spiritually, and will miss the great spiritual awakening which perhaps all people expect from the Allied nations after the Victory.61
In the South Masefield included Memphis and Nashville in his itinerary and reported to Gilbert Parker that the region was ‘more generally pro-Ally, the people being more impulsive, more kindly towards English ideals’.62 However, experiences in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St Louis suggested to Masefield that ‘German influence dominates and cowes the Middle West’.63 He particularly loathed Chicago:
It is a terrible city . . . Truly for dingy grubby dirty don’t care ruination this town would take some beating. I never saw any place so truly stamped with the legend ‘This is what you come to if you sell your soul to the devil’ . . . 64
‘Four slimy female reporters’ who approached him at Grand Rapids were ‘all dirty and evil looking, like retired whores . . . ’65 The Germans were ostracised, wrote Masefield, ‘since the swine sank the Lusitania’66 but were skilfully manipulating the Mid-West press and infiltratin
g the universities. By the middle of February Masefield had begun to despair:
Of course the German organisation cannot fail to succeed in a nation so . . . apathetic and prone to believe what it is told. The Bosche have their task made easy for them here, it is handed to them, as they say here, with parsley round it.67
But what of the Americans on Masefield? One reporter rather savaged his lecturing style but then concluded:
. . . one could have wept aloud with gratitude that in this day of shallowness and pose there could be anything so honest and genuine – and a great poet, too – as John Masefield. One adored him!68
On 28 February 1916 Masefield delivered his lecture on ‘The Tragic Drama’ and met, for the first time, Florence Lamont, wife of the well-known banker Thomas W. Lamont. The Lamonts were, according to their son, ‘in the forefront of notable Americans supporting the Allied cause’.69 The friendship between the Masefield and Lamont families would last until the death of the Masefields’ daughter, Judith, in 1988, and Masefield had found an influential American ally. He wrote to Florence Lamont as he returned to England that ‘. . . we must set to work, we two, to make England and America tremendous friends . . . ’70
Upon Masefield’s return to England – he was home by the end of March 1916 – his report and recommendations to Gilbert Parker were printed for the use of the Foreign Office as ‘an official paper’ and Parker noted that ‘your brief reports have been the joy of us all’.71 It is significant that Masefield urged the use of writers to counter German lies, publishing, for example, ‘in the big American monthlies’. He also noted that ‘the failure in the Dardanelles has damaged us in America in many ways’ and suggested that, given his experiences in Gallipoli and America he might ‘be allowed to prepare an article upon the venture, for publication in America’.72 Masefield’s Gallipoli became a book, published in both England and America but it is now obvious that Masefield was not intending to write a well-balanced historical analysis. Masefield’s pen had been turned to war propaganda.
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 2