Masefield started writing Gallipoli in April 1916. Commenting later to The New York Times, he noted:
The Government put me on the job, inasmuch as I had been through part of the campaign, and placed before me all the official records. The book had to be written quickly . . . 73
The text was completed on 19 June, with the English and American publishing contracts signed on 20 July and 4 August respectively. The book was an immediate success: the first English edition of 10,000 copies was published in September 1916 and exhausted within a month of publication – new impressions were required for the next four consecutive months and the book remained in print until the mid 1930s. Before the end of September the publishers, Heinemann, advertised the book with a review from the Daily Telegraph:
. . . told in noble and powerful prose, it grips the mind of the reader with an intensity and an enthusiasm which no other war book has achieved . . . Mr. Masefield has written a masterpiece.74
Heinemann advertisements noted ‘In Enormous Demand’ during October 1916 and proudly stated that the edition had reached its ‘50th Thousand’ by March 1917.75
Throughout Masefield’s literary career his fictional heroes were invariably defeated. Concluding his poem ‘The Wanderer’ in 1914 Masefield wrote:
Life’s battle is a conquest for the strong; The meaning shows in the defeated thing.76
and, consequently, he was a writer perfectly suited to writing of Gallipoli. The theme of glory in defeat touched a national consciousness and Masefield convinced his audience to view the campaign as a celebration of the common soldier. His prose conveys a sense of drama, physicality and movement. He provides detailed descriptions with insight. Above all, with prefatory quotations translated from the eleventh or twelfth century Song of Roland, based on the slaughter of the Franks by the Basques in 778, Masefield provided a sense of epic. In his study of Masefield, published in 1977, Sanford Sternlicht stated:
No lover of English language and literature should ignore this book, for Gallipoli is the masterpiece of its own sub-genre: battle history. As Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is the great work of fiction of World War I and as Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That is the finest biography of a solider in that war, so Gallipoli is the best battle history that emerged from the holocaust of 1914 – 1918.77
Contemporary applause included that of H.W. Nevinson who described the work as an ‘accurate, brilliant and poetic sketch’.78 Yet for a new edition in 1923 Masefield wrote of the difficulties the book presented: it needed to counteract enemy criticism and was hampered by inadequate research opportunities and censorship. Ian Hamilton had been consulted by the author (and provided useful statements such as ‘The fact is we shan’t know the real truth about it until the Turks tell their own story at the end of the war’.)79 Masefield wrote to William Rothenstein in November 1916 to state:
I am very glad indeed to think that you like Gallipoli. Some day, perhaps fairly soon, the truth about that affair will be known, and then some measure of justice will be done perhaps.80
and to Harry Masefield he noted:
. . . Getting things through to France is probably a lot easier than getting them through to Gallipoli, where there was always much trans-shipment and more theft than you would believe. I never got any of my own things, and only about half my letters, and I met one poor Colonel who had been out there five months and had only received one tin of boot polish and said he would never have had that but that it leaked, and shewed the thieves what it was. All his other things had been bagged. I met a General, too, who had had his case of whiskey opened, and all the bottles taken, and stones substituted. Still, somebody, I suppose, profited, though it was cruel enough at the time on that god-forgotten peninsula.
I’ve written a little tale of the campaign and it should be out fairly soon, both here and in America. I discreetly pass over all these little things in what I say, and over a lot more big things, which will some day be known and will rouse a pretty fury.81
Wellington House was presumably satisfied and, before publication of Gallipoli, devised a new use for Masefield. On 18 August 1916 C.F.G. Masterman (1874 – 1927), then in charge of operations, wrote to M.W. Lampson (presumably Miles Lampson, 1880 – 1964, later minister to Peking and high commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan). The letter noted:
. . . You know probably about his mission. He is going into the American Red Cross hospitals deliberately as an orderly in the humblest position in order to write his experiences for the American press. Although a poet, he is first class, and I think we should do everything for him we can . . . 82
A septic arm delayed departure, but by the end of August Masefield had left for France. Constance Masefield, having lapsed once again in writing her diary, provided a succinct summary in December 1916 of important events:
In August Jan having finished Gallipoli went out to France in order to inspect American hospitals and ambulance work. For a fortnight he worked in a motor ambulance in the Verdun district. Then he went back to Paris and besides inspecting hospitals was sent for by Sir Douglas Haig to British Head Quarters. A plan was suggested by Lord Esher of his going out to write the history of the Somme battle, and since his return in November that plan has been gradually developed though even now he only knows that he has been given the rank of Hon. Sec. Lieut. and is to go out sans pay to do what he can.83
Lord Esher (Reginald Baliol Brett, 1852 – 1930) was, at the time, head of British Military Intelligence in France. As a supporter of Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli would not have escaped his attention and there is also a suggestion that Esher was acting for Douglas Haig in a public relations role. Masefield had lunch with Haig around 20 October:
My second day began with the terror of an invitation (or royal command) to lunch with Sir Douglas.
I polished myself till I shone and . . . going on to GHQ we stuck in the mud, and had to get soldiers to pull us out, so that we arrived 40 mins late and covered with filth. Owing to this, I barely saw Sir Douglas, but he was like Ian and Lord Methuen and these other wonderful men, rolled into one. No enemy could stand against such a man. He took away my breath.
I don’t know what it is in such men. It is partly a very fine delicate gentleness and generosity, and then partly a pervading power and partly a height of resolve . . . He is a rather tall man, with grey hair, a moustache, and a delicate fine resolved face, and a manner at once gentle and eager. I don’t think anybody could have been nicer . . . 84
In another letter to his wife Masefield reported:
Sir D.H. says that I may go to the front, stay there as long as I like and do the story of the battle.
One of his staff says that I may have a car and a guide, whenever one of each kind may be to spare . . .
Lord Esher kindly says that he will represent these things to those in power and will try to get me given a commission . . . 85
The new project filled Masefield with enthusiasm, especially since his work for Wellington House was not going well. Although he had seen American skill with facial surgery at Neuilly and accompanied different sections of the Field Service at Verdun he lamented ‘I do not find the Americans as helpful as I could wish. They seem not centrally organised, but working in independent, unrelated groups’.86 Gilbert Parker apparently expected Masefield to visit as many American hospitals as possible but information was unreliable. The number of places to visit kept increasing and Masefield’s frustration is apparent in a letter from 9 October:
I’ve had a dreadful marching to and fro in Paris getting information. I’ve walked at least 11 miles and had little to shew for it. This is the sort of thing.
Responsible A[merican]s give me a list of American Paris hospitals in the nearer suburbs. I go to one, say at Swiss Cottage, and find it closed. I go to the next, say at Clapham, and find that it is not American, but a French military establishment in a house left by an American, a very different thing. I go to a third, say at Greenwich, and find it closed 18 months ago. I
go to a fourth, say at Lewisham, and find that it is not a hospital at all, but a big office of the French Government in which the accounts of all Foreign hospitals are kept and audited . . . 87
As at Arc-en-Barrois Masefield was subjected to the harrowing nature of Great War injuries. On 12 October he wrote to his wife:
As you know, I’ve seen pretty nearly every kind of wound, including some which took a stout heart to look at, but the burns easily surpassed anything I’ve ever seen. There were people with the tops of their heads burnt off and stinking like frizzled meat, and the top all red and dripping with pus, and their faces all gone, and their arms just covered with a kind of gauntlet of raw meat, and perhaps their whole bodies, from their knees to their shoulders, without any semblance of skin. One can’t describe such wounds . . . 88
And, presumably, Constance started to wish her husband would stop trying. Masefield’s experiences were, it seems, beginning to change his pro-American stance. At the beginning of October he wrote:
I am beginning to open my eyes, and to say to myself, that America, as a nation, has done Nothing, and that all that is being done is done by people who live and make their living in France, and by a few generous young men in search of adventure.
The enemy fire a good many duds, or shells that don’t burst, and these the soldiers call ‘Yanks’ (or too proud to fight) . . . 89
A few weeks later Masefield decided that he would find it difficult to write pieces for Gilbert Parker and Wellington House praising the Americans:
My general impression of the A[merican]s now is, that by all means they want to keep out of the war, that they will keep neutral by making money out of either party and by being always ready to betray either, and by criticising both. Some little sop of conscience money they will dribble out here and there; and for the rest, they want to spare themselves a little unpleasantness and so yield to any pressure applied. I really have very little enthusiasm left for them, and the thought that I am to praise them and to let their dirty vanity be swelled by what I say is exceedingly repugnant. I can praise the young men and (to a less extent) the big hospital and a little of the individual effort, but glorify them I will not, and so I shall tell G[ilbert] P[arker] . . . 90
Parker did eventually receive two articles on the American Ambulance Service: ‘The Harvest of the Night’ and ‘In the Vosges’. Both are included in this present collection more for the sake of completeness than for any great insight they provide. The writing is at times remarkably bad and one gets a sense that the writer was producing work to fulfil an obligation. Masefield’s attentions had anyway been turned, at the invitation of the British Commander in Chief in France, to other matters.
Masefield first saw the Somme battlefield towards the end of October 1916. After a brief description of the Virgin and child precariously hanging over the town of Albert, Masefield once again attempted the indescribable for his wife:
To say that the ground is ‘ploughed up’ with shells is to talk like a child. It is gouged and blasted and bedevilled with pox of war, and at every step you are on the wreck of war, and up at the top of the ridge there is no ground, there is nothing but a waste of big grassless holes ten feet deep and ten feet broad, with defilement and corpses and hands and feet and old burnt uniforms and tattered leather all flung about and dug in and dug out again, like nothing on God’s earth . . . 91
The following day Masefield turned to the mud:
It rained very hard one day, and the mud was worth a visit for itself alone . . . To call it mud would be misleading. It was not like any mud I’ve ever seen. It was a kind of stagnant river, too thick to flow, yet too wet to stand, and it had a kind of a glisten or shine on it like reddish cheese, and it looked as solid as cheese, but it was not solid at all and you left no tracks on it, they all closed over, and you went in over your boots at every step and sometimes up to your calves. Down below it there was a solid footing, and as you went slopping along the army went slopping along by your side, and splashed you from head to foot . . . 92
After a few months at home from November 1916 to February 1917 (during which Masefield wrote to J.B. Pond to suggest another American tour and to the Daily Chronicle about America’s role in the war), he returned to France to start his research.
Masefield arrived in France by 26 February. His research would form two parts. He was, firstly, to visit the battlefields and become familiar with the geography of the land. He would then return to London via Paris where he hoped to gain access to written archives. The promised car and guide did not, it seems, materialise and Masefield was at first rather lost. It appears that Neville Lytton (1879 – 1951), then a press liaison and press officer, came to his assistance. Writing in his The Press and the General Staff, Lytton noted:
. . . I found [Masefield] wandering about . . . like a soul in distress; no one seemed to be looking after him and his opportunities of getting into touch with the war appeared to me to be nil. The ignorance and irreverence that professional soldiers have in regard to the great men of other professions is astounding. Directly I found out Masefield’s identity, I applied to have him attached to my mission and my request was granted . . . 93
Masefield appreciated Lytton’s efforts – and presented to him a copy of his Sonnets and Poems.94 Writing to his wife, Masefield noted:
I cannot tell you what a charming person NL is. It is wonderful to be in this accursed kind of life with one of one’s own kind. He is a most winning attractive person, and if you can, without trouble, send me a Sonnets, I should like to give it to him.95
When published in 1917, Masefield dedicated The Old Front Line not to Douglas Haig but to Lytton, whom he described to Constance as ‘extraordinarily helpful and nice’.96
Masefield’s days were, it appears, spent walking across the battlefield. In a letter to Constance, dated 3 March, Masefield wrote:
The work is very interesting, but hard, for I am walking all day long from directly after breakfast until tea. Today, my second day of full walking, I went 15 miles . . . 97
and in a letter dated 20 March he wrote:
. . . I had a gruelling day yesterday, walking from Le Sars to Le Barque, from there to Bois de Delville, across the battlefield, and from the Bois to Albert, some 25 or 30 Kiloms all told, with the necessary divagations; for there is no walking direct . . . 98
These are typical of Masefield’s routine, for his letters home record the places he visited and the distance walked. On 23 March he noted that ‘I get from these walks a far more vivid sense of what the Boche fortifications were’99 although by the end of the month he started to despair:
. . . The field is really a vast one, and very very confusing, being, in a way, so like, now that it has been so devastated . . . 100
A fortnight later familiarity with the battlefield was merely one factor in Masefield’s sense of understanding:
I don’t believe that anyone can have a clear idea of what the Somme fighting really was. I am beginning to grasp the ground now, and to see clearly the enemy’s theories, and the depth of our own supineness and stupidity before the war, and the inadequacy of our thought . . . 101
The work was beginning to become protracted and Masefield slowly realised that he could not rely on the type of assistance he had received when writing Gallipoli. On 18 April he wrote to Constance:
. . . If I only had a car, or a billet in Albert again, I could finish this month; but I can’t possibly as things are. Getting to and from takes such ages, and then the mud is so fearful it is impossible to walk a mile on the field in less than an hour, and the actual field is about 20 miles by 6 miles . . . and the roads are foul and the land is shell holes. I go out every day and try to get done, but I have still a whole heap of places to try to get the hang of. You see, in G[allipoli] I had Ian, and could go ahead, but here I am not going to have anybody, and must depend solely on what I can pick up here by myself. It is the devil, and damnably costly, and my boots have gone in the mud . . . 102
Time s
pent with soldiers helped to confirm Masefield’s opinions. ‘Our soldiers are wonderfully kind gentle men’103 he wrote and he had an especially high regard for Australians who were
. . . jolly good fellows; though I fear they all think that we let them down at Suvla. The truth is, I’m afraid we did. It is heartbreaking to say it, but we did. We sold them a pup as they put it, that is, did not deliver a full sized dog.104
and, as this suggests, Masefield was starting to be highly critical. Writing about machine guns on 29 April he stated:
One gun has as big a fire as 500 men; as I should think was plain to anybody, not a professional soldier. Yet at the beginning of the war, when Wells wrote on this point, a professional soldier replied, that Wells should write about things of which he really knew, and leave the use of machine guns to soldiers, who knew their limitations, etc. I don’t know why; but that kind of a critical ass has more power in England than in other countries.105
Masefield increasingly felt the British to be unimaginative and backward in employing the potential advantages that modern technology allowed. He confided to Constance that ‘it is terrible to see that the world has gone on 100 years without the soldier noticing’.106 Only the tank, Masefield conceded, showed imagination but was flawed in the execution:
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 3