Ghosts of War E-Book

Andrew Ferguson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 433

Beschreibung

The First World War produced a unique outpouring of prose and poetry depicting the stark realism of a brutal and futile war; no war before or since has been so extensively chronicled nor its misery so exposed. First-hand experiences in the trenches compelled poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to write with a resolute honesty, describing events with more feeling and sincerity than the heavily censored letters that were sent home. Accounts of the Great War are typically written from an English perspective, but Ghosts of War encompasses a selection of contributions from across Europe and America, with an emphasis on the Scottish involvement. Using the words of over one hundred poets and writers, Andrew Ferguson recounts the war from its optimistic beginning to its sombre conclusion, bringing the conflict to life in a dramatic, emotive and, at times, humorous way.

Leseprobe

GHOSTS OF WAR

ANDREW FERGUSON

GHOSTS OF WAR

A HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I IN POETRY AND PROSE

This book is dedicated to my father, James Duncan Ferguson, who fought in the First World War, and to all those who served.

Front cover illustration: An infantry attack on the Somme. (© IWM, Q 65408)

First published in 2016

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved © Andrew Ferguson 2016

The right of Andrew Ferguson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 6971 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Nicola Sturgeon

Acknowledgements

Ghosts of War

Maps

Introduction

The War Poets

1 Setting the Scene

The Three Cousins

Growing Tension

Choosing Your Partner

The Simmering Brew

2 The Overture

Stirring the Ethnic Soup

Sarajevo: June 1914

The Austrian Ultimatum

The Schlieffen Plan: Germany Declares War

3 The Curtain Rises

Germany Invades Belgium: Britain Declares War

‘Your King and Country Want You’

Kitchener’s Army

The Human Cost

4 Act One: The Opening of Hostilities

The British Expeditionary Force

The British Arrive in France

The First Battle of Ypres (19 October–22 November 1914)

Life in the Trenches

The Battle of the Falklands (8 December 1914)

The Christmas Truce (24 December 1914)

Austria’s Wars

The Russian Campaign

5 Act Two: The War in 1915

The Western Front

The Weapons of War

The Second Battle of Ypres (22 April–27 May 1915)

The Eastern Front

Italy (Eventually) Enters the War (23 May 1915)

War by Proxy – The War in the Colonies

The Dardanelles Campaign (19 February 1915–9 January 1916)

The War in the Air

The Sinking of RMS Lusitania (7 May 1915)

Aubers Ridge and the Battle of Festubert (9 May and 15–25 May 1915)

No Man’s Land

Such is Death – A Sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley

The Poppies in Flanders Fields

The Battle of Loos: The ‘Scottish Battle’ (5 September–7 November 1915)

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead – Charles Hamilton Sorley

The Meeting of Graves and Sassoon

Christ in Flanders

The Care of the Wounded

The Defeat of Serbia

Snow in France

6 Act Three: Haig Takes Command

The Battle of Verdun (21 February–18 December 1916)

In Memoriam: Private D. Sutherland

The Battle of Jutland (31 May 1916)

The Battle of the Somme (1 July–18 November 1916)

The Baleful Bard – Ewart Alan Mackintosh

The Arab Revolt (5 June 1916)

7 Act Four: The War in 1917

The Winter of 1916–1917

The Tsar Abdicates (15 March 1917)

The United States Declares War on Germany (6 April 1917)

The Battle of Arras (9 April–16 May 1917)

‘A Soldier’s Declaration’

‘Dottyville’: Craiglockhart Hospital

The Third Battle of Ypres: The Battle of Passchendaele (31 July–10 November 1917)

The Battle of Cambrai (20 November–7 December 1917)

Ewart Alan Mackintosh

8 The Last Act

The Michael Offensive (21 March 1918)

The Battle of Amiens: The Allies Advance (8 August 1918)

The Final Assault (26 September 1918)

The Armistice is Signed (11 November 1918)

9 The Curtain Falls

The Treaty of Versailles

Britain After the War

The Impact of the War on Scotland

‘The Pity of War’

Sources

It can but end in the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen the continent of Europe at one blow.

Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, The Times, 1 August 1914.

FOREWORD

There are many histories of the First World War which focus in depth upon the causes, the strategy and the action. Ghosts of War takes a different approach, telling the story of the global war in an accessible and moving way, bringing the conflict to life in a vivid, dramatic and even sometimes humorous manner through an anthology of poetry and prose.

Most British accounts of the First World War are written from an English perspective. This book restores the balance, recognising and remembering the Scottish contribution to both the fighting and the poetry.

I commend Ghosts of War as essential reading for all those who have an interest in the First World War and its poetry, and in particular for those who respect and honour the Scottish contribution.

Nicola Sturgeon First Minister of Scotland

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to give his very sincere thanks to Chrissy McMorris, Managing Editor for Military and Transport at The History Press, for her whole-hearted support, to the editor Rebecca Newton for her patience and dedication in translating Ghosts of War from a manuscript to the printed book and, indeed, to all the staff of The History Press.

Tribute should also be made to the staff at the Imperial War Museum for their unfailing support and, in particular, to Caitlin Flynn for her invaluable assistance in the procurement of copyright material and to Neera Puttapipat for her assistance in securing the copyright approval for the images selected from the IWM library of photographs.

Credit and thanks are also due to Dr John MacAskill who read a draft of the manuscript and made helpful changes.

The author would also like to express his deep gratitude to his wife Liz for her continued support and encouragement through the conception and birth of Ghosts of War.

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. In the event of an inadvertent omission or error please advise the author c/o The History Press, The Mill, Brimscombe Port, Stroud GL5 2QG. The author wishes to thank the following writers, publishers and literary representatives for their permission to use copyright material.

Poems and Prose Extracts

Vera Brittain: Poems and quotations from the works of Vera Brittain are sourced from the collection of her poems and prose Because You Died and from her autobiography Testament of Youth and are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and T.J. Brittain-Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970.

W.D.Cocker: The poem The Sniper by W.D. Cocker is included by permission of Brown, Son and Ferguson.

Robert Graves: The poems Corporal Stare, November 11, Through the Periscope and Two Fusiliers and extracts from Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves are included by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

Violet Jacob: The poem To A.H.J. by Violet Jacob is included by permission of Malcolm Hutton.

John Keegan: The extracts from The First World War by John Keegan are included by permission of The Random House Group.

Joseph Lee: The poem German Prisoners by Joseph Lee is included by permission of the University of Dundee Archive Services.

Christopher Middleton: The translation by Christopher Middleton of the poem The Dead by René Arcos is reproduced with the kind permission of Miranda Middleton and Sarah Poulain-Middleton.

Wilfred Owen: The poems of Wilfred Owen are sourced from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems by Jon Stallworthy, published by Chatto and Windus, 1994, and are published with the approval of the Trustees of the Wilfred Owen Estate. The letters of Wilfred Owen are published by permission of the Wilfred Owen Royalties Trust.

Siegfried Sassoon: The poems of Siegfried Sassoon and the extracts from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston are copyright Siegfried Sassoon and included by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon.

Photographs and Maps

Other than those specifically acknowledged, all photographs have been sourced from the extensive collection of the Imperial War Museum and are published with their approval. The maps have been provided by Nick Rowland FRGS.

GHOSTS OF WAR

When you and I are buried

With grasses over head,

The memory of our fights will stand

Above this bare and tortured land,

We knew ere we were dead.

Though grasses grow on Vimy,

And poppies at Messines,

And in High Wood the children play,

The craters and the graves will stay

To show what things have been.

Though all be quiet in day-time,

The night shall bring a change,

And peasants walking home shall see

Shell-torn meadow and riven tree,

And their own fields grown strange.

They shall hear live men crying,

They shall see dead men lie,

Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,

And see by broken twists of wire

Gold flares light up the sky.

And in their new-built houses

The frightened folk will see

Pale bombers coming down the street,

And hear the flurry of charging feet,

And the crash of Victory.

This is our Earth baptized

With the red wine of War.

Horror and courage hand in hand

Shall brood upon the stricken land

In silence evermore.

(Ewart Alan Mackintosh. Sent from France, October 1917)

INTRODUCTION

The Great War is, for many, defined by the horror of the stalemate in the trenches dug in the mud of Flanders, but the fighting spread much wider than that. British troops were heavily involved not just in Flanders but also in the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition targeted against the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Mesopotamia and Salonica. The Royal Navy experienced action in the North Sea and in the South Atlantic while also countering the worldwide threat from German U-boats. The countries of the British Empire gave their support, with troops from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa joining Britain in the fighting, while Indian troops fought in both Flanders and the Middle East.

Germany and Russia became embroiled in a fierce and costly war on Germany’s Eastern Front, which would lead to the overthrow of the tsar, while on the southern border of the Central Powers, Austria fought a bitter battle with Serbia before later becoming locked in a protracted struggle with Italy. Even Africa became involved, as a ‘proxy’ war was fought by the African colonies of the Great Powers.

In 1917 the United States of America joined the conflict, abandoning its neutral stance and declaring war against Germany and, through the size of its forces and its immense industrial capacity, tipping the balance inexorably against a German victory.

The Great War was indeed global. This book, however, aims to highlight the works of the war poets and, in particular, the contribution both to the war and to its poetry made by the Scots. Therefore, it primarily considers the war in Europe – the source of the majority of the war poems – although the conflicts in other parts of the world in what we now call the First World War have not been forgotten.

THE WAR POETS

The First World War is uniquely defined by the number of poets who recorded their thoughts and experiences, providing a moving record of the horrors experienced by the troops in the mud-filled, rat-infested trenches. No war before or since has been so extensively chronicled nor its misery so exposed. There was, of course, no nightly television report to chart the suffering or indeed to record the courage of those who fought, although some poignant cinematic films were taken and, suitably edited, shown in cinemas at home.

The picture portrayed by the war poets is of the folly of war and of the braveness of soldiers asked again and again to ‘go over the top’ on the orders of unimaginative staff officers who were safely situated in their comfortable billets well behind the lines.

When reading the poems it should always be remembered that poets such as Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were just that – poets. Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before his death, tragically on 4 November 1918 just one week before the Armistice, ‘My Subject is War, and the Pity of War’, words which would later be inscribed on the monument to the war poets in Westminster Abbey. They did not report on the war nor, indeed, examine its justification – they did, however, portray its pity.

But it was not like this at first. The early poems showed an optimistic patriotism only later replaced by cynicism and despair. This mood was a reflection of that in the country. The chance to enlist was seen as an opportunity for excitement and adventure for many young men, who otherwise faced the prospect of a life of hard work and low pay.

The truth would be somewhat different.

WHO WERE THE WAR POETS?

A number of writers and poets, including John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges and Rudyard Kipling, were recruited by Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) and David Lloyd George (Chancellor) shortly after the outbreak of the war to form a Propaganda Bureau, with offices at Lancaster Gate in London. These poets wrote about the war and so, technically, could be considered ‘war poets’. For the purposes of this book, however, the generic definition of the term ‘war poets’ is by and large restricted to those who experienced active service during the war, either as infantry in the trenches or in other branches of the services.

Within this definition, the typical war poet was an officer – middle class, public-school educated and English – and they wrote initially of an England of the leisured class, of tea on manicured lawns and English lanes.

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke, described memorably by Yeats as ‘the handsomest young man in England’, wrote most of his poems before the war, perhaps achieving fame more through his good looks and his ambivalent sexuality than through the sometimes trite and pretentious sentiments expressed. Brooke only participated briefly in active service in the unsuccessful defence of Antwerp when Churchill, in a typically idiosyncratic gesture, had despatched 8,000 untrained men from the Royal Naval Division to defend the city from the advancing German troops.

Brooke, therefore, has only a tenuous claim to be considered a war poet, although he was amongst the First World War poets to be commemorated in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Of the sixteen poets thus honoured, just one, Charles Hamilton Sorley, was a Scot. Six of the sixteen died in the war.*

In the first of his five war sonnets, Peace, Brooke glorifies war and possible death paradoxically as an opportunity to taste life to the full:

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! We, who have known shame, we have found release there,

Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

But only agony, and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

(August 1914)

In poems such as The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (written while he was in Berlin and evidently full of nostalgia for Cambridge life), with its oft parodied final couplet – ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?’ – Brooke portrayed a picture of an England which existed before the outbreak of war, but only for a favoured minority. It was a way of life which would have been unrecognisable to the Scots who would later enlist in vast numbers to fight for their country and an equally alien world to those English recruits who served in the ranks, if not to their officers.

For these men life would be very different from Brooke’s idyll. Men who worked on the farms or in the industrial factories and the many women in domestic service endured a life of hard, manual labour, working long hours for low pay, with little prospect of escape.

There were, however, already signs of burgeoning unrest. Britain had one of the most restrictive democratic franchises of all the European countries and issues such as the extension of the vote to all adult males, the rise of trade unionism, the increasing militancy of the suffragettes and the Irish Home Rule Movement were threatening the established order. The war would bring about profound social changes, particularly in the role and status of women.

Brooke’s sonnets elegantly expressed the concept of self-sacrifice and the seemingly noble act of patriotism in dying for one’s country but not, ironically, in living for it. He captured the initial mood of the country and his fulsome patriotism was a gift to the government propaganda machine.

In February 1915 Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to take part in the Gallipoli landings. He was delighted at the prospect of fighting near the site of ancient Troy but, somewhat anti-climactically, he was bitten by a mosquito during the voyage, developed sepsis and died on 23 April 1915. He was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

The imminence of action and the prospect of possible death had changed his view of war, reflected in a poem he had begun in April 1915 while on board a ship to Gallipoli in which he shows an appreciation that death is not the glorious achievement of self-sacrifice but a tragic waste of human life:

I Strayed About the Deck

I strayed about the deck, an hour, tonight

Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped

In at the windows, watched my friends at table,

Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,

Or coming out of the darkness. Still

No-one could see me.

I would have thought of them –

Heedless, within a week of battle – in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered …

Only always

I could but see them – against the lamplight – pass

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,

That broke to phosphorous out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts – soon to die

To other ghosts – this one, or that, or I.

The war poets such as Sassoon, Graves and Owen personally experienced the horror of war and, therefore, were able to graphically portray its misery and futility in their writing. Less well known are the Scottish war poets such as Ewart Alan Mackintosh, W.D. Cocker, Roderick Watson Kerr, Joseph Lee, J.B. Salmond, Charles Hamilton Sorley and others who give a Scottish perspective on the war. Of these, arguably the greatest was Sorley, although he was killed too early in the war to leave more than a tantalising glimpse of a poet who could have rivalled Wilfred Owen. Alongside him, as an outstanding but often unrecognised war poet, stands Ewart Alan Mackintosh, whose works encompassed both the tragedy and the ‘trench humour’ of war.

Ewart Alan Mackintosh

Ewart Alan Mackintosh was born on 14 March 1893 to Scottish parents. He was brought up near the South Downs but often visited Scotland with his father, developing a great love for his homeland. He read Classics at Oxford University and during the holidays would fish the waters and walk the hills of Scotland with his friends. In his poem Mallaig Bay, written in 1912, he contrasts unfavourably the soft contours of the Downs with the ruggedness of Skye:

Mallaig Bay

I am sickened by the south and the kingdom of the downs,

And the weald that is a garden all the day.

And I’m weary for the islands and the Scuir that always frowns,

And the sun rising over Mallaig Bay.

I am sickened of the pleasant down and pleasant weald below,

And the meadows where the little breezes play,

And I’m weary for the rain-cloud over stormy Coolin’s brow,

And the wind blowing into Mallaig Bay.

I am sickened of the people that have ease in what they earn,

The happy folk who have forgot to pray,

And I’m weary for the faces that are sorrowful and stern,

And the boats coming into Mallaig Bay.

Mackintosh wrote poetry before the war but, as with Owen, his later poetry gained an edge, tempered by his experience in the trenches. Also like Owen, he believed, tragically correctly, that he would die young, writing his disturbing poem In the Night in 1912 while at Oxford:

In the Night

Gallant fellows, tall and strong,

Oh, your strength was not for long,

Now within its bed alone

Quiet lies your nerveless bone.

Merry maidens, young and fair,

Now your heads are bleached and bare,

Grinning mouths that smiled so sweet,

Buried deep the dancing feet.

Men and maidens fair and brave

Resting in your darkened grave,

Have you left the light behind,

Will you never feel the wind?

Oh I know not if you may,

But from eve till dawn of day

Terror holds me in my bed,

Terror of the living dead.

Mackintosh volunteered as soon as war broke out, but was initially rejected because of poor eyesight. He applied again and on 31 December 1914 was commissioned as a second lieutenant serving with the 5th Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders. In July 1915 he was posted to France where the 5th Seaforth formed part of the 51st Highland Division.

Mackintosh had his first experience of the front line in August 1915 when he was inspired to write nostalgically of his time at Oxford:

Oxford from the Trenches

The clouds are in the sky, and a light rain falling,

And throughout the sodden trench splashed figures come and go,

But deep in my heart are the old years calling,

And memory is on me of the things I used to know.

Memory is on me of warm lit chambers,

And the laughter of my friends in the huge high-ceilinged hall,

Lectures and the voices of the dons deep-droning,

The things that were so common once – O God, I feel them all.

Here are the great things, life and death and danger,

All I ever dreamed of in the days that used to be,

Comrades and good-fellowship, the soul of an army,

But, oh, it is the little things that take the heart of me.

For all we knew of old, for little things and lovely,

We bow us to a greater life beyond our hope or fear,

To bear its heavy burdens, endure its toils unheeding,

Because of all the little things so distant and so dear.

(Bécourt, 1915)

Mackintosh was appointed battalion bombing officer shortly after his arrival at the front line. He was responsible for leading raids at night into no man’s land to lob a few bombs into the German trenches, or into the listening posts where two or three Germans would be lying in a hole outside the barbed wire attempting to locate British patrols. He wrote of bombing in a pastiche of the Gilbert and Sullivan song, ‘A Policeman’s Lot is Not a Happy One’:

A Bomber’s Life

When our enterprising bombers are not bombing,

And our rifles are not throwing their grenades,

We get tidings that the Gilded Staff are coming,

And we get the men to work with picks and spades.

When our bombing posts at night-time we’re alarming

For surprises by the ever-ready Hun,

And it’s raining and the weather isn’t charming,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

Chorus:–

When he’s scheming out surprises for the Hun,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

First our bombing post in trenches we are placing

Where the enterprising German might creep in,

Then back homeward for a memo we are chasing

On a hand grenade deficient of a pin.

When our parties we are personally taking

Through a salient that’s like a rabbit-run,

And our knees with fear of oil-cans both are quaking,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

Chorus:–

When he’s scheming out surprises for the Hun,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

When we contemplate a little mild aggression,

Other officers all gather round and say

In tones of unmistakable depression,

That they’d much prefer it if we’d go away.

When at last, by dint of infinite intriguing,

They allow a little bombing to be done,

And we find that all our men are off fatiguing,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

Chorus:–

When he’s scheming out surprises for the Hun,

Oh, a bomber’s life is not a happy one.

Mackintosh’s first collection of poems, A Highland Regiment, which he dedicated to the officers and men of the 5th Seaforth Highlanders, was published in 1917. Ghosts of War was written shortly before he was killed in action on the second day of the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. In his poem Anns an Gleann’san Robh Mi Og, written at the outbreak of war, Mackintosh foretells his own future, as he writes of a soldier on the point of death recalling the boyhood he has left behind:

Anns an Gleann’san Robh Mi Og

In the glen where I was young

Blue-bell stems stood close together,

In the evenings dew-drops hung

Clear as glass above the heather.

I’d be sitting on a stone,

Legs above the water swung,

I a laddie all alone,

In the glen where I was young.

Well, the glen is empty now,

And far I am from them that love me,

Water to my knees below,

Shrapnel in the clouds above me;

Watching till I sometimes see,

Instead of death and fighting men,

The people that were kind to me,

And summer in the little glen.

Hold me close until I die,

Lift me up, it’s better so;

If, before I go, I cry,

It isn’t I’m afraid to go;

Only sorry for the boy

Sitting there with legs aswung

In my little glen of joy,

In the glen where I was young.

(August 1914)

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley was possibly the greatest Scottish war poet but was killed at the age of 20 before he had fulfilled his potential. A collection of his work was published posthumously in 1916.

Sorley was born in Aberdeen in 1895, but when he was 5 years old his father was appointed Professor of Moral Sciences at the University of Cambridge and the family moved south to England. Unsurprisingly, Sorley was not enchanted by the flat Cambridgeshire countryside which contrasted poorly with Aberdeenshire.

He was educated in England at Marlborough College and was an avid student, reading the works of English writers such as Thomas Hardy and John Masefield and also the Greek Classics such as Homer’s Odyssey, which he read in the original Greek. He felt an affinity with the Wiltshire Downs, appreciating the prominent role they had played in the history of ancient man, as shown in his poem Stones:

Stones

This field is almost white with stones

That cumber all its thirsty crust.

And underneath, I know, are bones,

And all around is death and dust.

And if you love a livelier hue –

O, if you love the youth of year,

When all is clean and green and new,

Depart. There is no summer here.

Albeit, to me there lingers yet

In this forbidding stony dress

The impotent and dim regret

For some forgotten restlessness.

Dumb, imperceptibly astir,

These relics of an ancient race,

These men, in whom the dead bones were

Still fortifying their resting-place.

Their field of life was white with stones;

Good fruit to earth they never brought.

O, in these bleached and buried bones

Was neither love nor faith nor thought.

But like the wind in this bleak place,

Bitter and bleak and sharp they grew,

And bitterly they ran their race,

A brutal, bad, unkindly crew:

Souls like the dry earth, hearts like stone,

Brains like that barren bramble-tree:

Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown –

But bold, O, bolder far than we!

(14 July 1913)

Sorley was expected by his parents to join the Indian Civil Service, but he developed a social conscience and in January 1913 wrote to them saying that he had decided ‘to become an instructor at a Working Man’s College or something of that sort’ (letter to Professor and Mrs Sorley, quoted in Hilda Spear (ed.), The Poems & Selected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, p.84).

In December 1913 he won a scholarship to Oxford University, but as he was not due to take up his place until the following October he decided to leave school early and go to Germany to improve his German. When war came he was studying at the University of Jena, where he was arrested and briefly imprisoned before returning to Britain and enlisting. He applied for a commission in the Territorials, writing, ‘Compromise as usual. Not heroic enough to do the really straight thing and join the regulars as a Tommy’ (letter to A.E. Hutchison, a school friend, quoted in Spear, Poems & Selected Letters, p.91).

His Scottish birth had, from the outset, given him an independent view of the war, and his time in Germany had given him an empathy with the Germans. In his poem To Germany, Sorley emphasised the irony that the German on the ‘Berlin tram’ no more wanted war than his British counterpart on the ‘Clapham omnibus’:

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind.

And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other’s truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

In August 1914 Sorley was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment. He stayed in England until May 1915, enervated by the monotony of army life, but was then posted to France and in August was promoted to captain. As a result of this promotion his leave was postponed and he was instead posted to the front line. The delay would cost him his life; he was killed by a sniper at the Battle of Loos on 13 October 1915.

His premature death came just as he was reaching maturity as a war poet. As a result, he has left as his legacy only a small collection of war poems. He was described by Robert Graves as ‘one of the three poets of importance killed during the war’* (Spear, Poems & Selected Letters, Preface, p.9).

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886. He was the second of three sons of Alfred Sassoon, a member of a wealthy Jewish family, and of Theresa, an Anglo-Catholic member of the Thornycroft family of sculptors. There was no German background – he was named Siegfried because of his mother’s passion for the operas of Wagner. However, because of his Germanic name and the prejudice it aroused he would later write under the name George Sherston.

Sassoon had a troubled childhood; his parents separated when he was 4 years old and he was sent away to preparatory school, then Marlborough College, before completing his education at Clare College, Cambridge, where he did not graduate. He was sexually confused and it may have been the combination of suppressed homosexuality and his perceived rejection by his parents which drove Sassoon to continually seek to prove himself, firstly in the hunt and later on the battlefield. As he wrote, he ‘had serious aspirations to heroism’ (Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, p.244).

Sassoon did not pursue a career. His father had bequeathed him a small income – enough, but barely enough, for Sassoon to fund his chosen life, which he divided between winters spent fox hunting and summers as a no-more-than-average batsman in the cricket team of the village where he lived with his aunt, a life which he colourfully portrayed in his book Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

With the outbreak of war, Sassoon was caught up in the wave of patriotism and enlisted in the army a few days before war was declared, but was then injured in a riding accident. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 29 May 1915.

Initially, his war poems reflected the general feeling of patriotism, the belief that it was a just war, that it was a duty – even heroic – to join the fight against aggression. His poem Absolution expresses these ideals:

Absolution

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes

Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,

And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,

And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

We are the happy legion, for we know

Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

There was an hour when we were loth to part

From life we longed to share no less than others.

Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,

What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

(Written April–September 1915)

Sassoon was exceptionally (perhaps perversely) brave, even foolhardy, and was determined to prove his courage, often going out alone on patrol in no man’s land. In Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (p.18), he wrote:

Six years before I had been ambitious of winning [horse] races because that had seemed a significant way of demonstrating my equality with my contemporaries. And now I wanted to make the World War serve a similar purpose, for if only I could get a Military Cross I should feel comparatively safe and confident.

Sassoon records that before one attack he was instructed to improve gaps which had been cut in the British barbed wire to enable the troops to pass through in the intended attack. It must be done that night. One problem was that the standard-issue British Army wire cutters were moderately ineffective when used to cut a path through British wire, but totally ineffective against the more substantial German barbed-wire defences. Sassoon had his own wire cutters, recording how while on leave he ‘had invaded the Army and Navy Stores and procured a superb salmon, two bottles of old brandy, an automatic pistol and two pairs of wire cutters with rubber-covered handles’ (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, p.38). He writes:

When we did get started I soon discovered that cutting tangles of barbed wire in the dark in a desperate hurry is a job that needs ingenuity, even when your wire-cutters have rubber-covered handles and are fresh from Army and Navy Stores. More than once we were driven in by shells which landed in front of our trench (some of them were our own dropping short); two men were wounded and some of the others were reluctant to resume work. In the first greying of dawn only three of us were still at it. Kendle (a nineteen year old lance-corporal from my platoon) and Worgan (one of the tough characters of our company) were slicing away for all they were worth; but as the light increased I began to realize the unimpressive effect of the snippings and snatchings which had made such a mess of our rubber gloves. We had been working three and a half hours but the hedge hadn’t suffered much damage, it seemed. Kendle disappeared into the trench and sauntered back to me, puffing a surreptitious Woodbine. I was making a last onslaught on a clawing thicket which couldn’t have been more hostile if it had been put there by the Germans. ‘We can’t do any more in this daylight,’ said Kendle.

But Sassoon was unconvinced. He continued:

I had made up my mind to have another cut at the wire, which I now regarded with personal enmity, enjoying at the same time a self-admiring belief that much depended on my efforts. Worgan stayed behind with me. Kendle was unwilling to be left out of the adventure, but two of us would be less conspicuous than three, and my feeling for Kendle was somewhat protective. It was queer to be in an empty front-line trench on a fine morning, with everything quite peaceful after a violent early bombardment. Queerer still to be creeping about in the long grass (which might well have been longer, I thought) and shearing savagely at the tangles which had bewildered us in the dark but which were now at our mercy. As Worgan said, we were giving it a proper hair-cut this journey.

He concluded that eventually prudence prevailed and he was ordered back into the trenches:

Soon afterwards we dropped into the trenches and the Manchesters began to arrive (for the intended attack). It had been great fun, I said, flourishing my wire-cutters. (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, pp.49–52)

His diaries record that he was inspired by the desire to avenge the death of his brother, wounded at Gallipoli, and of brother officers killed in action, to commit almost suicidal acts of courage such that he became known as ‘Mad Jack’ by his men. In Sherston’s Progress (p.791), he reflected:

It was the old story; I could only keep going by doing something spectacular. So there was more bravado than bravery about it, and I should admire that vanished self of mine more if he had avoided taking needless risks. I blame him for doing his utmost to prevent my being here to write about him. But on the other hand I am grateful to him for giving me something to write about.

On 27 July 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross. The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in the wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in.

Sassoon later had doubts as to the morality of the war and would become famous as the war poet who, wracked by self-doubt, made a political statement of his concerns.

He survived the war and became literary editor of the Daily Herald. In his published books he wrote only of his wartime experiences, as if with the coming of peace his life had ended. After the war he had a number of homosexual affairs before he eventually married and fathered a son. He finally resolved his religious searching by becoming a Catholic.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon. His full name was Robert von Ranke Graves, the von Ranke coming from his mother Amalie von Ranke who was the eldest daughter of a German Professor of Medicine at the University of Munich and had come to England at the age of 18 to act as companion to an appropriately named Miss Britain. When she died she left her estate to Amalie who, despite sharing it with her four siblings, retained enough to become an heiress. Amalie had been determined to go to India as a missionary but, on the principle that charity begins at home, married Graves’ father, who was a widower with five children. Despite Amalie’s principal task being to help with the existing children, she rather improvidently added to her responsibilities by having five children of her own – two girls, then Robert when she was 40, followed by two more boys (Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, p.17).

Graves was educated at a number of prestigious preparatory schools before winning a scholarship to Charterhouse, where he was bullied because of his German name and his unfashionable taste for scholarship, which was abhorrent to the public-school ethos. In reaction to this, he took up boxing and became school welterweight champion. One of the masters at Charterhouse was George Mallory (later to die in an attempt to climb Everest), who introduced Graves to mountain climbing on Snowdon. While at Charterhouse, Graves, more in tune with the public-school ethos, formed a close attachment with a younger boy, Dick, and they corresponded regularly during the early years of the war.

Graves enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the outbreak of war. His first collection of poems was published in 1916, written with the realism gained through his experience of war. In Through the Periscope, Graves wrote fatalistically of life in the trenches:

Through the Periscope

Trench stinks of shallow buried dead

Where Tom stands at the periscope,

Tired out. After nine months he’s shed

All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.

Sees with uninterested eye

Beyond the barbed wire, a gay bed

Of scarlet poppies and the lie

Of German trench behind that red –

Six poplar trees … a rick … a pond

Ruined hamlet and a mine …

More trees, more houses and beyond

La Bassée spire in golden sunshine.

The same thoughts always haunt his brain,

Two sad, one scarcely comforting,

First second third and then again

The first and second silly thing.

The first ‘It’s now nine months and more

That I’ve drunk British beer,’ the second

‘The last few years of this mad war

Will be the cushiest, I’ve reckoned,’

The third ‘The silly business is

I’ll only die in the next war,

Suppose by luck I get through this

Just ‘cause I wasn’t killed before.’

Quietly he laughs, and at that token

The first thought should come round again

But crack!

The weary circle’s broken

And a bullet tears through the tired brain.

Graves was seriously injured in the Battle of the Somme by a shell fragment which passed through his lung. He was thought to be dead and a letter was sent to his mother saying he had been wounded and had died of his injuries. However, he survived and was invalided back to Britain. A correction to the earlier and, as it proved, premature announcement of his death was printed in The Times very properly ‘without charge’.

He returned to France in November but shortly afterwards was diagnosed with bronchitis and was once again invalided home. He recovered physically but had been damaged psychologically and did not return to active service in France. He wrote:

I thought of going back to France but realised the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me; any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car backfiring was enough to send me flat on my face, or running for cover. (Goodbye to All That, pp.219–20)

After the war and a failed first marriage Graves settled in Majorca where he wrote his autobiography Goodbye to All That, in which he gives an evocative account of his experiences in the First World War, the immensely successful I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God, classically portrayed on television, and many other books and poems. He died in 1985.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen came from a less favoured background than some of his fellow war poets. He was born in 1893, the son of a stationmaster, and his first two years were spent in relative comfort in his grandfather’s house in Oswestry; however, on his grandfather’s death Owen’s parents were forced to move to relatively mean lodgings in Birkenhead. Fortunes for the family gradually improved over the years and in 1907, when his father Tom Owen was appointed assistant superintendent of the Joint Railways, the family moved to Shrewsbury. His life was still far removed from the privileged upbringing of Sassoon and Graves, and although Owen passed the examination for entry to the University of London he did not take up his place as the family could not afford to support him through university.

Owen was very close, perhaps obsessively close, to his mother. He wrote poetry from an early age and, inspired by John Keats, believed that he too would die young. In this, he would be proved right, as he was killed in action at the age of 25, the same age as Keats when he died in Rome from tuberculosis.

Owen was living in France at the foot of the Pyrenees when war broke out, working as an English tutor. He was 21 years old. Perhaps because of the distance, he was initially unaffected by the war, writing, ‘I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter … I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe’ (Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen, p.109).

A visit to England in May 1915, however, brought him face to face with the moral pressure to volunteer, and after returning briefly to France he eventually enlisted on 21 October 1915 in the Artists’ Rifles. In June 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 5th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment.

His initiation to life in the trenches was swift and brutal. Just twelve days after arriving in France he wrote a letter to his mother describing his experience when he had led his platoon not to the front but beyond to hold an advanced post – effectively a dugout in the middle of no man’s land:

We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. Many stuck in the mud & only got on by leaving their waders, equipment, and in some cases their clothes.

High explosives were dropping all around, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes. But it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us.

Three quarters dead … we reached the dug-out and relieved the wretches therein …

My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.

One entrance had been blown in & blocked.

So far, the other remained.

The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t.

Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.

Every ten minutes on Sunday afternoon seemed an hour.

I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees.

Towards 6 o’clock, when I suppose you would be going to church, the shelling grew less intense and less accurate: so that I was mercifully helped to do my duty and crawl, wade, climb and flounder over No Man’s Land to visit my other post. It took me half an hour to move about 150 yards …

In the Platoon on my left the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing … I kept my own sentries half way down the stairs during the most terrific bombardment. In spite of this, one lad was blown down and, I am afraid, blinded. (16 January 1917, quoted in Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen, pp.156–7)

Owen was injured a number of times – concussed after falling into a shell hole, blown up by a trench mortar – and spent several days sheltering from enemy fire alongside the dead remains of a fellow officer. Perhaps not surprisingly, he suffered from shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital where he met Siegfried Sassoon, whose criticism brought the hardened edge to his poetry that now ranks amongst the finest written by the war poets. Owen used his early experience in his poem The Sentry, written at Craiglockhart:

The Sentry

We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,

And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell

Lit full on top, but ever quite burst through.

Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,

Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,

And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.

What murk of air remained stank old, and sour

With fumes from whizz-bangs, and the smell of men,

Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,

If not their corpses …

There we herded from the blast

Of whizz-bangs; but one found our door at last,

Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles,

And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping

And sploshing in the flood, deluging muck,

The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles

Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.

We dredged it up, for dead, until he whined,

‘O sir my eyes, – I’m blind, – I’m blind, – I’m blind.’

Coaxing I held a flame against his lids

And said if he could see the least blurred light

He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.

‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,

Watch my dreams still, – but I forgot him there

In posting Next for duty, and sending a scout

To beg a stretcher somewhere, and flound’ring about

To other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,

And one who would have drowned himself for good –

I try not to remember these things now.

Let Dread hark back for one word only: how,

Half-listening to that sentry’s moans and jumps,

And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,

Renewed most horribly whenever crumps

Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath –

Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout

‘I see your lights!’ – But ours had long gone out.

On a lighter note, he wrote amusingly, but bitterly, of being an officer in his poem Inspection, clearly influenced by Sassoon:

Inspection

‘You! What d’you mean by this?’ I rapped.

‘You dare to come on parade like this?’

‘Please, Sir, it’s –.’ ‘’Old yer mouth,’ the sergeant snapped.

‘I takes ’is name, sir?’ – ‘Please, and then dismiss.’

Some days ‘confined to camp’ he got,

For being ‘dirty on parade’.

He told me, afterwards, the damned spot

Was blood, his own. ‘Well, blood is dirt,’ I said.

‘Blood’s dirt,’ he laughed, looking away,

Far off to where his wound had bled

And almost merged for ever into clay.

‘The world is washing out its stains,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t like our cheeks so red:

Young blood’s its great objection.

But when we’re duly white-washed, being dead,

The race will bear Field Marshal God’s inspection.’

(Written while a patient in Craiglockhart Hospital, August/September 1917)

Owen returned to France and was awarded the Military Cross in October 1918. He was killed in action on 4 November 1918 in the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, just one week before the end of the war. In an ultimate irony, his mother was listening to the church bells ringing to celebrate the Armistice when she received the telegram informing her of her son’s death.

__________

* The sixteen were: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nicholls, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.

* The others were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.