John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  During the afternoon the enemy counter-attacked from the south, and, later in the day, from the north as well. Our men had not enough bombs to hold back the attackers, and were gradually driven back, after very severe hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches, to an evil little bend in the front line directly to the south of Gommecourt Cemetery. At about 11 p.m., after sixteen hours of intense and bitter fighting, they were driven back from this point to their own lines.

  Mr. Liveing’s story is very well-told. It is a simple and most vivid account of a modern battle. No better account has been written in England since the war began. I hope that so rare a talent for narrative may be recognised. I hope, too, that Mr. Liveing may soon be able to give us more stories as full of life as this.

  JOHN MASEFIELD.

  [source: Edward G.D. Liveing, Attack – An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916, New York: Macmillan, 1918, pp.7 – 19]

  What Britain Has Done

  Put Nearly 8,000,000 in Army and Navy – Losses Over 2,500,000

  To the Editor of The New York Times:

  In your issue of today, in the leading article, headed “Changing the Draft Ages,” your leader writer uses the following words:

  “Great Britain, which has put 7,000,000 men into uniform and into war work at home, and must have lost a good many more than a million men at the front,” etc.

  Will you allow me to say that your leader writer would have been more accurate had he written, “Great Britain, which has put nearly eight million men into the armies and navy, and hardly less than another eight million men and women into war work at home and abroad, and has actually lost in the field and at sea more than two and a half million men, besides some hundreds of thousands incapacitated through sickness,” etc.?

  JOHN MASEFIELD.

  New York, June 21, 1918.

  [source: The New York Times, 22 June 1918, p.8]

  The Common Task

  I thank you all very much for the great honour you have given me today, and for the very kind way in which you have received my name. I can only hope that this University, which has been the first to discover me, will be quite the last.

  I must speak a few words to you about literature, which is the only subject I know anything about. You take to literature quite early in life and you look out upon the world. It is a very attractive place for a young man. There are all sorts of glorious and entertaining things there. You put a few of them into a story, or into a song, and you think you have discovered something about life. And then in a year or two you look at those things again, and you see that you know nothing at all about life, but that you have looked into your own heart a little.

  Then after a few years you try again. The years seem to have brought you wisdom, and the whole world seems very much more interesting, and you seem to be able to deal with your material with greater power. The colours are intenser, and you think you see behind the working and shifting of men and women in the world some kind of law, some kind of impulse working itself out, and you think you have realized something.

  Then after a few years you look at your work again, and you see that you know nothing about life, and that you know nothing about your own heart, but that you have followed a few butterflies somewhere. And then you try again, and you say to yourself, “Surely, those butterflies come up from some spiritual country which lies outside this life of men. They must come from some land where the flowers of thought grow upon the trees.”

  And you determine that you will follow these butterflies until you come to that land and live there forever.

  And then war breaks out.

  You give up that search, and you put literature and all connected with it to one side, and you go out upon a difficult – perhaps a dangerous – road which leads to an end that no man can see even after three and a half years.

  The War’s Effect on Literature

  Men have asked me what effect this great war has had upon literature. Well, it has had a great many. It has burned up in its great flame a great deal of nonsense and a great deal of rubbish and a great deal of unreality. But it is useless to expect literature while this world is being torn in pieces. We shall not get the literature of this war until many years after it is over and its passions are all still and its numbers now engrossed have leisure once more. Until that time literature must take a back seat.

  I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to me who was brought up in this great country to realize that it is looking with friendly eyes upon my own country. I think you must realize that there is no man standing in the trenches today in either the English or the French army who is not standing steadier there from the knowledge that this country is behind them and that the men in this country are standing at their side helping to fight this great quarrel. On the day on which I first went to the Battle of the Somme – and it was a great day – on my way up I passed a battalion that was being played up by the band. The band was playing a tune, a song which was made by a Yale man and the music of which was made by a Yale man. It was that song, “It’s a Long, Long Trail.” Well, that song is by much the most popular song in the British army today, and the British army today knows that it is a long, long trail, possibly a winding trail, to the land of our dreams. But I tell you, all know that no matter how long, nor how winding that trail will be, nor how bitter, nor how bloody, they will stick at your side to the end.

  About fourteen months ago I was going through a ruined city in France. There was at one place a ruined factory full of broken sewing-machines at my right, and then at my left was a hospital filled with broken men. And then as I walked in the midst of these ruins I came upon an old French woman sitting at a table selling newspapers to the troops, for hundreds of men came up from the front lines to get the daily papers. As I came out into that square, I heard a soldier shout, “Hurrah, America has declared war on the blackguards!” Another soldier who was older and more thoughtful and more thankful, said, “Thank God! Now perhaps we may have a decent world again.” Well, we must think a little about what that land of our dreams is going to be.

  I was reading the other day that story of King David, who was a very generous and noble and bloody man, and very fond of war. David was besieging a city one time, and it was intensely hot, and he was faint with thirst. As he was sitting there looking toward the city, he could see the fish pond near the city gate, and he said, “Oh, I wish I had some water from that fish pond.” Three soldiers nearby heard him express that wish, and, taking their water bottles, they dashed across the enemy’s lines to the fish pond and filled their water bottles and brought them back to David. As they gave it to him, they said, “There is the water. Drink.” But David stood up and said, “I am not going to drink that water which you brought to me. That water you brought at the risk of your lives. It would be like drinking blood to drink that water.” So he poured it out.

  Need for the World’s Re-Making

  Well, there are those men standing in the trenches today. They are bringing us peace, the water of peace, the peace which passeth all understanding, peace by which we may take up our lives again, and our loves again, and do our work again; but if we use that peace to remake the world on anything like the lines that it was before this war, it will be like drinking blood, the blood of those men in the trenches. We must remake the world a little nearer to the heart’s desire.

  And I think the only means to do that adequately and conclusively will be for this great country and my own country, the English-speaking peoples, to stand together, determined that the world shall be a better and cleaner and finer place for this war that has broken the world in pieces four long years. Somebody has said that the English-speaking people are a very war-like people but not at all a military people. Well, they are very war-like, and they seem to have a genius for family differences. But I want you to put out of your minds the memory of those family differences. After all, Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “That is not quarrelling; that is English family life.” When this war is ov
er I hope you will put out of your minds the memories of our little family misunderstanding of so many years ago, and put out of your memories any quarrels that have come up, or any misunderstandings that we have experienced since that time. Let us work together whole-heartedly to remake the world more in accordance with man’s place in the universe. Let us make it a place in which the little peoples of the world will be able to work out their destinies unthralled; let us make it a place in which democracy may come to be a living thing wherever English is spoken.

  [source: “from stenographic notes”, Yale Alumni Weekly, 5 July 1918, pp.1014 – 1015]

  London Street Women

  To the Editor of The Times

  Sir, – I have read with interest Mr. Edward Bok’s statement in your issue for today. He does not overstate his case.

  I have been in nearly all the big camps, barracks, and naval and flying stations in the United States, and have seen the steps taken by the United States Government to prevent drunkenness and immorality among their soldiers and sailors. They have made it nearly impossible for any man in uniform in the United States to obtain drink or to consort with a prostitute. As a result, their men come here in the condition of trained athletes. There can be no finer body of men in the world.

  When they land they find it easy to obtain intoxicants, and almost impossible to avoid solicitation by young women. As a result many, even very many, of their men are infected with contagious diseases before they proceed to France. The matter has caused the liveliest concern among American officers. When known in America there will be, as Mr. Bok says, “an outcry . . . in volume and quality . . . extremely unpleasant to the people of Great Britain.”

  It frequently happens in war that the standards of life deteriorate under the strain. In this war the strain has been intense for more than four years. Very large numbers of young women, all subject, as we all are, to the strain of the war, have been removed by the events of war from the influences of home; their fathers, brothers and husbands have gone to the front, and they themselves have been left in easy circumstances with every temptation to take what pleasure they can. This condition of things exists in other belligerent countries in Europe, perhaps in all: for in all there are many young people saying, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” In this country it is more open and more easy to see than in others.

  As it is a condition of things which will most surely harm our prospects (to put the matter on its lowest side first) in this war, by making countless casualties, and make it difficult, after this war to cooperate, as we all hope, in deep and lasting friendship with the United States for the maintenance of the peace of the world, I hope, with Mr. Bok, that “the evil” may “be stamped out.”

  Yours sincerely,

  JOHN MASEFIELD.

  Oxford, Sept. 24.

  [source: The Times, 26 September 1918, p.3]

  The Most Heroic Effort

  The Dardanelles campaign was the strangest, most difficult, and most heroic effort ever made by the men of our race. It was unlike most of the campaigns in our history in that it was conceived by genius. It was unlike all others in that its failure (redeemed, like all other British failures, by courage and endurance) was relieved by a quality or glamour which lays over all memories of it a glow of beauty. Even now, less than three years after the evacuation, those who were there in the months of exultation, misery, and despair, from April to December, 1915, think of the place and the time as things apart, consecrated for ever by passion, agony, and bloody sweat, but also by another thing, difficult to define yet felt by all as the very heart of romance.

  Apart from the beauty which comes with man’s courage and sorrow and high resolve, this campaign, above all other campaigns, was set in beauty. Men came to it in ships across a sea glorious with beauty. The light, the mountains and the islands, the plants and flowers, the immense expanse of the Ægean decked the stage for our men as it has never been decked for any campaign in the past. Then, the campaign was not visibly successful, and a man has a tenderness for the fine things which failed. Sir Ian Hamilton may yet see the 25th of April, which some call “Australia’s Birthday,” a national holiday and day of remembrance.

  This book of Mr. Nevinson’sa is the first considered and critical history of the campaign. Mr. Nevinson is specially fitted to be the historian of such a venture. He was an eye-witness of the more tragic part of the fighting and the endurance. Beyond all living writers he is qualified by powers of sympathy and of style to understand and to tell of some such struggle as this, where right and wisdom were matched against might and power. The time is ripe for such a book by such a man. In the last three years the official passion for secrecy has been lessened, so that he may say things, and the public lust for the blood of a scapegoat has been sated, so that he may be heard. Mr. Nevinson’s book comes when both official terror and public fury permit much of the truth to be known. Not all is yet revealed, nor is full justice yet done. When all the Reports of the Dardanelles Commission are published, if they ever are, the truth will be fully known. Meanwhile Mr. Nevinson’s book gives more of the truth of that campaign than any book which has appeared. It is not likely that any other book will supersede it or upset his conclusions.

  His story is well-ordered, well-arranged, and well-balanced. His descriptions are just, terse, and full of colour, his descriptions of battlefields are as precise and as perceiving as good landscape-painting. In the moving passages of that great tragical drama he is both eloquent and austere. In all his criticism he is careful and wise. His book comes not only from a great experience of the peninsula, but from a wide information. Few men, perhaps no single man, saw so much of the peninsula as he. Very few (of those who were there) landed and lived as he did at all three positions – Helles, Anzac, and Suvla, as well as at the advanced bases. Perhaps no man can have talked of the operations with so many of the soldiers and sailors who led them and took part in them. Certainly no single man there had better opportunities for seeing and knowing.

  And to what conclusion does this rarely gifted, just, and most eloquent writer come, from the depth of his knowledge and fullness of observation? What caused the failure of the campaign? “The ultimate burden of failure,” he writes, “lies on the authorities at home.” They, “the authorities at home,” not any soldier, flung away the certainty of success long before the troops left England. Napier says somewhere that we are “a very warlike race, but not at all a military one.” Somewhere in that very just summary of our people may be found the reason of our failure. “The authorities at home” were warlike but not at all military. They had no knowledge of the strength of our enemy, they showed our enemy what we intended to do, they waited till our enemy was thoroughly prepared, and then launched against them an inadequate force without support. Presently they launched another inadequate force, and then stopped the campaign. Perhaps, finally, it comes down to this, that when this war began we were quite unprepared for war, so that we had neither the men nor the guns for an expedition of the kind.

  Some will say: “In that case, ‘the authorities at home’ ought not to have sent the expedition at all.” They ought not to have sent it when and how they did send it, giving full advertisement to the enemy to prepare, and (later on) full time to recover. But the campaign was conceived by genius, and though it had no immediate effect that was not disastrous its real results were profound and beneficial. While I write this the news comes that the Kaiser has abdicated, and that the ships of the Allies are preparing to pass through the Narrows. There is general joy and thanksgiving for these things. And who, in the general joy, thinks for a moment of the part played by the Dardanelles campaign in bringing the war to an end? The campaign was an heroic feat of arms. No thinking man will withhold honour in his heart from Sir Ian Hamilton and those whom he led on that forlorn hope. But how many realise that it was Sir Ian Hamilton and his merry men who broke the power of the Turk for ever? There, in the dust and scrub and stink of Gallipoli, Mesopotamia was freed, the
Caucasus relieved, Egypt made safe, and Palestine ours. The Turk was not only broken by us in Gallipoli but he was there sickened of his allies, so that very much of the present happy state of the war is due to this expedition – “equal,” as Mr. Nevinson writes, “in splendour of conception, heroism, and tragedy.”

  This war has shown the world, what the poets have shown to the few, that life, destiny, or the powers which direct man work with irony but with justice. In our seeming failure, which brought in Bulgaria against us, sealed the fate of Kut, and made the collapse of Russia only a matter of time, there was still the seed of victory. Our blow in Gallipoli went home to the Turkish heart, and from that time our enemy’s chief ally was a dying man. These things will someday be recognised by the world. Mr. Nevinson’s book is worthy of his subject. It is by much the best and most thoughtful history that has appeared about any part of this war.