John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  As the guns came into battery, they opened intermittent fire, so that, by the 20th of June, the fire along our front was heavier than it had been before. At the same time, the fire of the machine guns and trench mortars in our trenches became hotter and more constant. On the 24th of June this fire was increased, by system, along the front designed for the battle, and along the French front to the south of the Somme, until it reached the intensity of a fire of preparation. Knowing, as they did, that an attack was to come, the enemy made ready and kept on the alert. Throughout the front, they expected the attack for the next morning.

  The fire was maintained throughout the night, but no attack was made in the morning, except by aeroplanes. These raided the enemy observation balloons, destroyed nine of them, and made it impossible for the others to keep in the air. The shelling continued all that day, searching the line and particular spots with intense fire and much asphyxiating gas. Again the enemy prepared for an attack in the morning, and again there was no attack, although the fire of preparation still went on. The enemy said, “Tomorrow will make three whole days of preparation; the English will attack tomorrow.” But when the morning came, there was no attack, only the never-ceasing shelling, which seemed to increase as time passed. It was now difficult and dangerous to move within the enemy lines. Relieving exhausted soldiers, carrying out the wounded, and bringing up food and water to the front, became terrible feats of war. The fire continued and increased, all that day and all the next day, and the day after that. It darkened the days with smoke and lit the nights with flashes. It covered the summer landscape with a kind of haze of hell, earth-coloured above fields and reddish above villages, from the dust of blown mud and brick flung up into the air. The tumult of these days and nights cannot be described nor imagined. The air was without wind, yet it seemed in a hurry with the passing of death. Men knew not which they heard, a roaring that was behind and in front, like a presence, or a screaming that never ceased to shriek in the air. No thunder was ever so terrible as that tumult. It broke the drums of the ears when it came singly, but when it rose up along the front and gave tongue together in full cry it humbled the soul. With the roaring, crashing, and shrieking came a racket of hammers from the machine guns till men were dizzy and sick from the noise, which thrust between skull and brain, and beat out thought. With the noise came also a terror and an exultation, that one should hurry, and hurry, and hurry, like the shrieking shells, into the pits of fire opening on the hills. Every night in all this week the enemy said, “The English will attack tomorrow,” and in the front lines prayed that the attack might come, that so an end, any end, might come to the shelling.

  It was fine, cloudless, summer weather, not very clear, for there was a good deal of heat haze and of mist in the nights and early mornings. It was hot, yet brisk, during the days. The roads were thick in dust. Clouds and streamers of chalk dust floated and rolled over all the roads leading to the front, till men and beasts were grey with it.

  At half-past six in the morning of the 1st of July all the guns on our front quickened their fire to a pitch of intensity never before attained. Intermittent darkness and flashing so played on the enemy line from Gommecourt to Maricourt that it looked like a reef on a loppy day. For one instant it could be seen as a white rim above the wire, then some comber of a big shell struck it fair and spouted it black aloft. Then another and another fell, and others of a new kind came and made a different darkness, through which now and then some fat white wreathing devil of explosion came out and danced. Then it would show out, with gaps in it, and with some of it level with the field, till another comber would fall and go up like a breaker and smash it out of sight again. Over all the villages on the field there floated a kind of bloody dust from the blasted bricks.

  In our trenches after seven o’clock on that morning, our men waited under a heavy fire for the signal to attack. Just before half-past seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up with a roar that shook the earth and brought down the parapets in our lines. Before the blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen the hand of Time rested on the half-hour mark, and along all that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across the No Man’s Land to begin the Battle of the Somme.

  [source: The Old Front Line, London: William Heinemann, 1917]

  America’s Part to Bring Victory and a Real Peace

  I think that in the coming year the United States will play a decisive part in supplying the belligerents while the war continues, and in exercising a sane control upon their councils when the war ends.

  [source: The New York Times, 1 January 1918, p.3]

  Prospect of Labour’s Ruling British Parliament

  [On Gallipoli and the battlefields of France]

  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; there was no time to spare, for I had heard in America rumours about us which would not be well to let grow. No method was too crude, too subtle for the Germans. The Gallipoli book was written and published, and, on the strength of that, the War Office sent me to France to examine more fully the splendid charitable work being done by American organizations.

  I had just completed my observation for the Government, and was one day in Paris, when I met a member of the British Military Mission. He told me that he would like to send me immediately to General Headquarters. Evidently they had been reading my book on Gallipoli and had some further work for me. I was taken before General Haig, and he appointed me to the official post of historian and sent me to the Somme.

  I saw part of the battle in October, 1916, when the forces were at their highest pitch around Wailencourt. But I had no sooner entered the thick of things than I was forced to return to England to make my report on the activity of the American relief work. It was after this job was done that I returned to the Somme, in January, 1917, and remained there until last June. I got a billet in the town of Albert, which was practically in the middle of the battlefield. I used to go out every day and wander around and see what I could pick up in the way of information.

  You know what “booby traps” are; let me give you some idea of the ingenious handiwork of the Germans in these things to deceive. Our soldier is always on the lookout for souvenirs. He prizes especially the brass eagle on the spiked helmet of a German. How often during this Somme campaign have I seen, in German dugouts, such helmets nonchalantly set as bait for our men. How many of our men have taken up these helmets, only to set off a bomb with which they were connected. Sometimes a private has seen a much-coveted revolver resting on the road, and he has picked it up, only to be blown to Kingdom Come. Telescopes left on the parapet of an abandoned trench have, likewise, become devil machines.

  So effective did the German find this work that he would go to every extreme to perfect it. Realizing that our soldier likes his rum jar occasionally, the Germans have even sent men into our lines on hunting expeditions for English rum jars, which they have left in their abandoned trenches, knowing full well that they will do their deadly work. For hope springs eternal in the soldier’s breast when he sees a rum jar, and he has never learned advantageously to what uses the enemy has put it.

  Everyone is in equal danger on the battlefield. I wandered about unarmed. It is easy enough to get weapons at any moment from the dead on the ground. One only has to stoop in order to pick up a hand-grenade that has not gone off. Such are the flowers that bloom on the fields of France.

  I remember when we were at Pozières that I innocently walked into a German barrage, and I assure you I had a lively time. The Germans do not think it necessary to open fire when the horizon reveals to them only one or two men emerging from their dugout. On this occasion I went forward with four or five; had we advanced in single file we probably would not have attracted attent
ion; but because of our being bulked together the Germans thought that such activity meant more than it really did. As soon as the firing began I threw myself down into a shell-hole, and suddenly found that I was gripping a dead Prussian guard. Gruesome though it might appear, I lay there without fear or dread, and without moving, until the weather moderated somewhat above me!

  [On England and Democracy]

  More than ever before, our army is democratic. After this war, I see the possibilities of more kindness and more charity existing between class and class. All of us are in the same boat, and in battle the officer pools supplies with his men. Everywhere there is a greater feeling of equality, and this feeling will result afterward in an equality of opportunity. You know what is taking place in the Labour Party today. I predict that our next Parliament will be a Labour Parliament. It will take unto itself the intellectual workers as well as the hand workers of England. Not many will deny that the pronunciamento of the Labour Party, as published in August, is as fine a document as President Wilson’s declaration of war aims. Our Trade Union Congress was responsible for that.

  A good many of the Lords (I don’t know many) have become democratized. I believe that Henderson will be the controlling factor in the future. England will be saved by the Liberal with his intellect, and the Labour man with his power. Reconstruction committees are now preparing for the remaking of England. I have looked into some of their educational schemes and I cannot say that they go quite far enough to satisfy me. They are not planning to make it sufficiently possible for the clever workingman to get every possible advantage the nation can offer him in the way of intellectual development. The Liberal is still showing class feeling.

  I reckon myself as a Liberal and I regard Gilbert Murray as the very soul of cultivated Liberalism. I am among those who believe that when the time comes for talking over lines of policy it is well to ask what Gilbert Murray thinks. But I also believe that the time is ripe for some leader of the Labour Party to come forward with equally as commanding an intellectual point of view. There is no one in the Labour Party at the present comparable with Parnell. There are such men as Ramsay Macdonald and old Gosling, a fine, calm, and charming man, and I have much admiration for the vigour of Henderson. But it seems to me necessary for the Labour Party to ally itself with what is best in Liberalism – the best of the Asquith-Grey type of mind. That is why we have such confidence in Gilbert Murray as one of our most finished intellects.

  [On German Accomplishments]

  You know, I hear a great deal in America about Germany’s efficiency. I cannot see that the Germans are efficient in any very great sense. They have been inventive in deviltry. But our building up of an army is quite as wonderful as anything the Germans have done. I won’t deny that from relative heights in an airplane the German can take better photographs than we can. If I were asked what is the German’s greatest accomplishment I should say the making of lenses. This war has brought forth, in every direction, the undoubted truth that the German’s power of hand is greater than the German’s power of mind. The Teutonic diplomatic bungles will show that.

  [On Russia and future peace]

  There is one good that I believe has come out of this unstable condition in Russia. It has made all the working population in Europe realize that a peace is possible; that it is not necessary for civilized men to keep on cutting their throats. If individuals in a nation would renounce certain greeds and lusts, the honest on the field of battle might go home again and cultivate gardens. But that point of view is all right for the Russians, who are a nation of saints, until lately governed by a squad of natural devils.

  But the nation next door to Russia is a nation of natural brutes governed by a small clique of unspeakable scoundrels. And it remains to be seen how far the Russian principles and statements will act upon that nation. They may convert that nation or they may not. But the German soldiers will at least have before their eyes in the future the image of one great nation that has decided that war is not good enough nor worth having in a civilized life. Then, too, the German population must be bitterly disappointed at having the cup of a separate peace suddenly dashed from their lips. They must be sorely distressed at realizing that it was their own Government which dashed it from their lips. Surely such a state of things will have its effect. I am trusting that we are in the final stages of this awful conflict.

  Everyone, I believe, now that peace is in the air, must be asking what kind of world will emerge from the ruins of the old one. However difficult it may seem, it is imperative that a means of preventing war by international agreement should be found. For, if it is not found, the old system of competing nationalism, a direct outcome of competing commercialism, will end the world. Man’s invention has gone far beyond his social organizations and his governments. We have the case of the mediaeval idea of competing nations – that is, the mediaeval State – endowed with all the powers of the modern scientist at its disposal, to use unscrupulously. If we do not turn the tide of things we may live to see the true barbarian at heart armed with the most finished intellect of modern times at work in some obsolete and barbarous piece of highway robbery.

  I am serious about this matter of the safety of the world. If we are not awakened by this enormous conflict, in another twenty years the barbarian will be master, unless the finished intellect can find some means of checking him. Who knows but the day may arrive when the barbarian will have at his disposal some scientific secret that can blast a nation to pieces by touching a button? Who knows but the time may come when man discovers how to tap atomic energy, or is able to direct consuming rays against his antagonist and destroy a nation wholesale and accurately, instead of piecemeal and clumsily, as we are doing at present?

  [On feeling in Germany]

  It is my belief that the Socialists in the German Reichstag are becoming more powerful every day. There is discontent in Germany over the continuance of this war. If they do make a supreme effort on the Western Front, it will be next month, and it will be the last struggle of the war, it seems to me.

  [extracted from The New York Times Magazine, 27 January 1918, p.11]

  The War and the Future

  A Lecture given in America January – August, 1918

  TO

  THOMAS W. LAMONT

  I have been sent to you, to speak about the war, and about the future, after the war.

  You know more than I do about the future. No one can doubt that this country holds the future. I will try to tell you about the war. I’ve seen it close to, and I’ve seen its results.

  English people who know America, and who have a pride in the fair fame of England, know, that in the old days, we did this country a great wrong. I, here, am very conscious of that. The best thing I can say of that past is that it is the past. We are now associates in a great work which is a forgetting and a putting by of the past, in an effort to make the future.

  Whatever this war is, it is a getting rid of the past. The past has gone into the bonfire. We are all in the war now, realizing with more or less surprise and shock and bitterness, that the old delights, the old ideals, the old way of life, with its comfortable loves and hatreds, are gone. We have to remake our lives, forget our old hatreds and learn new ones, and ask ourselves the question: “What kind of a new world am I going to help make?”

  This war came gradually to you. You were, as we were, not expecting war, seeing the threat and the preparation of war, but believing, just as we believed, that common sense, or ordinary human sense, and one-thousandth part of goodwill in human intercourse would make war impossible. War to you, as to us, seemed to be out of date in a century which cut the Panama Canal and discovered radium and the wireless telegraph. But it came none the less, and all our ten millions of adults had suddenly to put by their old lives and take on new and dangerous and terrible lives. Now the same thing has happened to you.

  When the threat of this war came suddenly to Europe we had nothing to gain by war, except our own soul. That is a b
ig exception. Short of that, we risked everything to keep the peace, as our friends complained, and our enemies agreed.

  When the war came to us, and the enemy Ambassador was leaving England, a friend of mine went to say goodbye to him. My friend said to him: “I hope you think that we did our best to prevent this war?” The Ambassador said: “You have done everything that mortals could to prevent the war.”

  Now the years before the war were very anxious years to everyone. The threat of war hung over every nation in Europe, and every nation in Europe felt and said and wrote that the threat of war was a German threat. The Germans themselves were frank about it. I often used to see German students and German professors in England. They used to say, quite openly, “Our next war will be with England.” After the Hague Conference nine years ago, the English delegate said to me that the attitude of Germany could only be explained on the supposition that she meant to have a war. Germany was like an athlete trained to the minute; she was spoiling for a scrap. When boxers are trained to the minute, it is said that their friends always prefer to walk behind them, for when a boxer who is very fit and spoiling for a scrap sees a nice chin the temptation to hit that chin is sometimes more than he can bear.

  In the summer of 1914, the European chins looked too tempting to Germany, and she hit out at them. The results are before us.

  This war employs all the strength and all the talent of the nations waging it. One of the weapons used by our enemies has been that of lying. They have spread abroad lies about us, which many repeat and some few, perhaps, believe. I wish here to state and answer some of those lies.