John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  In the area of our advance, between Thiepval and Maricourt, the danger was nearly equal in all places. No part of the enemy line was less than a first-class fortress; all parts were well-contested; and over all parts there was a heavy fire of cannon of all kinds and of machine guns. The Leipzig, Ovillers, La Boisselle, Fricourt, Mametz, Trones Wood, Bazentin Woods, Mametz Wood, Contalmaison, Pozières, the Village, Mill, and Cemetery, were all as dangerous and as difficult to storm as the objectives of famous sieges: “Number Four Bastion,” the Redan, “the Green Ridge,” and the rest. At all of them, the attackers moved to the attack knowing that they went to the near certainty of wounds and death. The area of the advance of this first month of the fight is not large. One could walk round the area, visiting all its famous places, in one summer day, for the distance can only be twenty miles all told. Spring and summer have laid their healing hands upon those places since the fighting. The covering of the grass has come to hide the evidence that those slight slopes and tumbles of brick were once terrible both to take and to hold. Men standing in what is left of Delville Wood, or in the wilderness which was once Pozières, will find it hard to believe that for days together fire rained upon those places, and that men by the hundred and the thousand were buried there, and unburied, and killed, and maimed, and blown into little fragments. Our men lie everywhere in that twenty miles circle, sometimes very thickly, in platoons and companies of the recognized and the unknown. They were our men. Men of our race will never walk that field without the thought that the wind blowing there took the last breath of many of our people, and that the dust under foot is our flesh.

  Our own men will never want for praisers. But in this great battle, some came as guests, from many thousands of miles away, to fight what they saw to be the battle of free communities. Many years hence, when the facts and passions of this war are dim, English writers may forget, not what these men did, but the measure of their gift to us. Now, while the facts are fresh, one may give their guests first place.

  Many battalions did nobly in the difficult places of the battle. The field at Gommecourt is heaped with the bodies of Londoners; the London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshires are outside Serre, the Warwicks in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with the Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorsets on the Leipzig. Men of all the counties and towns of England, Wales, and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road to La Boisselle; the Welsh and the Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of the dead of all these places: “Jolly young Fusiliers, too good to die.”

  The places where they lie will be forgotten or changed, green things will grow, or have already grown, over their graves. It may be that all these dead will someday be removed to a National graveyard or Holy Field. There are three places, in that wilderness of the field, which should be marked by us. One is the slope of the Hawthorn Ridge, looking down the Y Ravine, where the Newfoundland men attacked. Another is that slope in Delville Wood where the South Africans attacked. The third is all that great expanse from Sausage Valley to the windmill which the Australians won and held. Our own men lie as it was written for them. But over the graves on these three places it should be graven, that these men came from many thousands of miles away, to help their fellow-men in trouble, and that here they lie in the mud, as they chose.

  Not long ago, on that old battlefield, an Australian said: “In the Maori war once, some English surrounded some Maoris and sent to tell them to surrender, since they could not escape. The Maoris answered: “We fight ‘Akka, akka, akka’ (for ever and for ever and for ever). This makes a good war-cry for us.”

  When, in future time, the Australian Memorial is placed over the mound of the windmill, to stand sentinel over so many splendid bodies which once went with that cry through the Peninsula and up that plateau, those three words will be sufficient dedication, and sufficient story, for ever and for ever and for ever.

  [source: The Battle of the Somme, London: William Heinemann, 1919]

  1919 – 1920: Signs of the Times

  You ask me to write about “the significance of the past year.” I suppose that in many ways, to many people, it has been the happiest year they have known. The losses of the war have been partly atoned for by the joy of peace. That nightmare of horror has been taken from the world. The fever has gone out of the mind. The madness of hatred and suspicion have ceased to rave, and the millions have been given liberty. Whatever troubles the year has brought are as nothing to its mercies, of liberty and peace.

  One of the happiest things of this happy year has been the sight (in term times) of thousands of young men set free from the war, released from the shadow of death, to lives of their own. The delight and joy of these glorious young men, made earnest beyond their years by the war’s hardships, have made one happy for England’s future. Not much can go amiss in a land where such young men are born and bred.

  Many of these young men have been but newly released. It is still too early to expect a new message or inspiration, in art or politics, from them. That may come perhaps next year. The great problem of the past year has been to restart the machine of the world in the ways of peace. Most of us wish those ways to be improved ways and the machine to be a better machine. The attempt to restart and to improve the machine at the same time is now proceeding. The life of England has been altered and her conscience shaken by the war. I do not doubt that her great soul will rise to the peace as nobly as she rose to the war, and that in Blake’s words,

  Jerusalem will be builded here,

  In England’s green and pleasant land.

  Now as to the reforms. I suppose that there are in England today –

  (a.) A small party of obstructionists opposed to any reforms of the existing system.

  (b.) A small party of anarchists, anxious to destroy the existing system at any cost, but with neither the mind nor the power to create anything to take its place.

  (c.) A great many earnest men and women of all classes and all creeds giving their minds and lives to reforming the existing system, and succeeding, beyond our dreams and hopes, each month and day.

  The first and second parties are without any vision of a human State or of human liberty, but this does not make them less likely either to win adherents or to quarrel.

  One of the wonders of this year 1919 has been the triumph of the third party over both the other two. Gradually one sees a finer England shaping and emerging out of the chaos that was. One sees the old system being improved and made human.

  Often one sees and hears bitter attacks upon that old system. It is called the commercial system, or the capitalist system, or the industrial system, and it comes in for much abuse. No doubt it deserves some abuse, and has deserved more, but it is a system which keeps the world going and does the work of the world, and under it the Christian populations using it have doubled or trebled. It has had its triumphs as well as its infamies, and, whatever may be said against it, it remains the system by which we millions live, and no other system exists ready to hand to take its place. A system is a thing of slow growth. Men cannot improvise one. It is wiser to patch a leaky ship than to blow her out of the water with all on board, or to try to sail her with her leak.

  I claim a right to speak about the system. I have served it as a worker for ten years. Under it I have helped to produce food and goods, to load them and carry them by land and sea to their markets, and to distribute them to their users. I have enjoyed the good and suffered from the bad sides of the system. The main thing to be said for it is that it gets the world’s work done.

  Nearly all work is pleasant, but much of it is very hard, some, and this perhaps the most necessary, is both hard and unpleasant. Scavenging of certain kinds, the handling of filthy things of certain kinds (coal is one of them) is hard and unpleasant and dangerous.
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br />   What our workers are demanding is that the very hard and dangerous and unpleasant work should be well-paid, and not practised for too great a part of a man’s day. They claim that the man should not be “subdued to what he works in,” but should have the means and the leisure to be a citizen of the world out of working hours.

  They claim that men and women should have some security of life; that they should not be subject to “unemployment” which means enforced starvation or beggary through no fault of their own.

  They claim, but not with one-tenth the necessary force, that all citizens of a State should have the advantages and the opportunities of the very finest education possible, and access to all professions for which they may be able to qualify.

  They claim, as a part of this previous claim, that their children should not have to begin to work until they have had leisure and mental training to fit them to choose their work, and to enjoy it when chosen.

  Those, roughly, are the claims. Looking back on 1919, one can only think of it as a glorious year in which many of those claims were accepted by our country as the foundation of the England that is to be. I look forward to 1920 with the hope that the regeneration of England may proceed with wisdom and sanity to the ends longed for by her best minds.

  [source: Manchester Guardian, 5 January 1920, p.6]

  Disenchantment

  DISENCHANTMENT. By C.E. Montague. London: Chatto and Windus. Pp. 221. 7s. net.

  Once, during the war, a well-known statesman was heard describing his recent visit to G.H.Q. His visit had not reassured him as to our immediate prospects in the war, but one thing had impressed him deeply, “They’ve got an excellent man there,” he said. “I don’t think they quite realize what an excellent man they’ve got in Montague.”

  “They” did not realize it, though a good many others did. Now that the war is over the excellent man has set down what he realized while “they” were still fumbling.

  Most of Mr. Montague’s book has already appeared in short articles and leaders in the Manchester Guardian. There its component parts have attracted much attention, as Mr. Montague’s work always will. But now that the many scattered articles are drawn together their effect is increased tenfold. Now one can see that the articles were not written one by one, as memory or the mood prompted, but as parts of an ordered and planned unity which begins and grows and ends like a work of art. The book is of a tense and close and masterly structure.

  It is, as an American would say, “Mr. Montague’s reaction to the war.” It is the summing-up by a most gallant and generous mind of the devotion and martyrdom and disillusion of the four years of struggle. No man is better qualified to write of the war as a whole. Mr. Montague took part in much of the fighting, and must have known more of the British line than almost any living man. He was in the trenches in the beginning of the horror and with the army in Germany at the end. He saw the whole thing from the point of view of a very good athlete with a very good brain. Now here is the result and summary of it.

  On the whole, the feeling which the book rouses in the reader is the feeling which G.H.Q. roused in the statesman above-mentioned; that “They,” the powers that were, the politicians and War Office, did not know even till the end of the war what excellent men they’d got. That, on the whole, put with scrupulous fairness, is Mr. Montague’s subject: the pity of the tragedy of the matter. A fine nation, touched and stirred to the quick, did the most generous act in history. Millions of noble and devoted men, the very pick and flower of the race, in brain and body, gave themselves to the freeing of Belgium. They were handled by what was admittedly the least competent of our public offices, by men who were notoriously not the pick and flower of the race. After some years of bungling and slaughtering, when the spirit was out of the war and the sacrifice had been fouled and the devotion soured, the survivors saw their efforts result in the perpetration of much such a Prussianism as they had fought to prevent.

  In describing the progress of a human soul through the purgatory of the war to the disillusion of the peace Mr. Montague has written a very fine book. He has extenuated nothing and set down nothing in malice. I have seen no book about the war so temperate or so human. He was in the war, and being a man of fine intelligence must have suffered more than most from the fools from whom men then had to suffer, but the book is without any littleness or bitterness. Even when describing bits of incompetence, or worse, which are an anguish to read about he has a most generous sense of the incompetent’s difficulty and of the sterling quality which often went with the incompetence. But the book is none the less a record that the manhood of the race, after “designing glorious war,” became “the sport and prey of racking whirlwinds, unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved, ages of hopeless end.”

  It is not easy to be wise, even after the event. Perhaps no other race of men on this earth would have done so well as we did, being taken unprepared as we were in 1914. Even if we had scrapped our existing army-machine at the start and begun again from the beginning things might have been no better. The army-machine and the church-machine and the political-machine and the education-machine had been all untested by life for years. Then the war came and probed them and proved them as no machines were ever tested. They were jolly good: they must have been most jolly good: for they didn’t break, though, as the Australian said, “they gave a darned big creak.”

  Perhaps the sufferers from their inadequacy would not agree that they were jolly good. They were not good enough for the fine fellows whom Mr. Montague describes. What human institutions would have been? What comes out from Mr. Montague’s pages is that man, the patient, common, courageous man, is so infinitely finer than even the very best of the institutions with which he protects and torments himself. All must have seen the caddis-worm crawling about, a little living soul in a house or shell of rags and patches. So were the men in the armies about which Mr. Montague writes so feelingly. Their house or shell of War Office and Church was a thing of shreds and patches, but they were living souls, put to their trumps, living in the depths of themselves. All earth and heaven would have been less than their deserts. What they got was the War Office and the padre. Perhaps all this Disenchantment had to be in order that the reality might be plain, that man is in himself all earth and heaven, a living soul, dragging about an old museum of torment, without which he could not live. When he realizes this he seeks out some new illusion and feeds it with his hopes and feelings. Then accident makes the illusion an obsession, and the fever of the obsession brings him weak and sick to reality again. It may well be that the war came “because a sheep-boy piped in Thessaly,” (or at any rate in the Balkans), but the sheep-boy piping was originally himself an illusion, invented by some blasé courtier in a palace of the Ptolemies. When there are too many illusions in the world something violent happens. “A Last Judgment is necessary,” so “English Blake” says, “because fools flourish.” Perhaps after any Last Judgment the world seems less pleasant than was hoped. The end of a tragedy is not “O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice,” but Edgar’s lifeless solemnity, “The weight of this sad time we must obey.”

  But Mr. Montague’s book is not a piece of pessimism, as this and the title might suggest. It is wise and hopeful, and it grows, as it goes on, “to something like prophetic strain.” Nothing could be better than the chapter “Any Cure?” with the rousing sentence: “Our best friends for a long time to come will . . . find a part of their satisfaction in being nobodies.” That, as Sancho Panza says, “is as good as bread.”

  The book is written in that most apt, happy, witty style which all readers of the Manchester Guardian know. It is one of the very best of the books which have been written about the war.

  [source: Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1922, p.5]

  Preface to the Eighth Edition of Gallipoli

  I wrote this book during the war, at the request of two of His Majesty’s Ministers, in the hope that it might answer certain critics and perhaps change certain fe
elings then common in the United States of America.

  I began to write the book only four months after the end of the adventure of the campaign, when the war had still two and a half years to run. The units and men who had taken part in the campaign were scattered all over three continents, in other campaigns; many of the documents which might have illustrated points in dispute were in Salonika, others were inaccessible, or unsorted (I saw one big store-room filled with bales of them); situation-maps, if any existed, were not to be had; the ground, which might have yielded many secrets, was in the hands of the enemy; the enemy story was not published.