The Cheerful Lie

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers"

Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first published as a poet.* Yet during her lifetime, Montgomery published only one poem that explicitly addresses the First World War: “Our Women.”** A cursory reading of “Our Women” is likely to dismiss the poem as naively patriotic, but when read in the context of Montgomery’s other war writings and her personal grief, the poem reveals a complex, ambivalent view of the conflict. In its three short stanzas, Montgomery describes three women, each of whom is grappling with the emotional traumas of war.

"Would some thoughtful hand in this
distant land please scatter some 
flowers for me?" 

Our Women

Bride of a day, your eye is bright,
   And the flower of your cheek is red.
‘He died with a smile on a field of France—
   I smile for his sake,’ she said.

Mother of one, the baby you bore
   Sleeps in a chilly bed.
‘He gave himself with a gallant pride—
   Shall I be less proud?’ she said.

Woman, you weep and sit apart,
   Whence is your sorrow fed?
‘I have none of love or kin to go—
   I am shamed and sad,’ she said.
       —L.M. Montgomery

Each of the bereaved women portrayed in “Our Women” is isolated, walled off within her own stanza, set apart from both the grief and the comfort of others. Each speaks to herself in a private monologue of mourning. 

In the first stanza, a new bride attempts to convince herself that she must appear happy, and so she determinedly represses her grief at the death of her husband. She encourages herself to believe the implausible story that was often written in letters informing women of their husband’s, son’s, and sweetheart’s deaths: the end was quick and painless; he “died with a smile.” Mirroring the action of her husband at the moment of his death, the bride smiles “for his sake,” offering up the arduous task of concealing her own anguish as an act of patriotic service akin to that of her husband’s. Like soldiers who neither speak nor write of the horrors they witness at the front, women are also engaged in the nation-wide practice of telling, selling, and believing what Montgomery refers to in both Rilla of Ingleside and her journals as “the cheerful lie.”***

In the second stanza, a mother persuades herself to feel proud that her son is dead. First World War researchers have argued that the pressure on women to forego public mourning was especially true for mothers: “In many cultures, mothers were expected to disavow their grief and channel it into forms of patriotism and heightened nationalistic pride.”†  Nearly all countries involved in the First World War attempted to harness the political power of the ideals of Mother and Motherhood. Before the 1918 German offensive, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie addressed his troops: “To those who will fall I say, ‘you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons.’”†† Taking pride in a child’s death was one of the ways that mothers were encouraged to find a sense of worth and purpose during the war. 

The only woman who allows herself to weep is the woman who has no one to give to the war. Both the grieving bride and mother define themselves in their relationships to the soldiers they have loved and lost. Both women model their behaviour after that of their soldier, giving smile for smile, pride for pride. The childless woman sits alone and weeps in shame: she does not have a loved one to sacrifice to the war. 

Montgomery’s personal situation was closest to the solitary figure described in the third stanza. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, was forty-four years old when the war began; her eldest son, Chester, had just turned two; and her second son, Hugh, was stillborn on August 13, 1914, just nine days after England declared war on Germany.†††  The loss of her infant son devastated Montgomery. In her thinking and writing, Montgomery’s maternal grief becomes entangled with the dead of the war. Like the women whose sons died far from home, she is haunted by the thought of her son “lying lonely in his little grave” and imagines hearing his cry: “Little Hugh was calling to me from his grave—‘Mother, won’t you come to me?’”†††† For Montgomery, the tragedy of her son’s death at birth is linked to the larger national tragedy of the war. Given this context, the shamed, weeping woman of “Our Women” who has no son to surrender to the state may be read as a disguised expression of the author’s own grief. 

Strikingly and at its core, Montgomery’s “Our Women” subverts the traditional elegy. There is no mourning for soldiers who have died; tears are shed only for the absence of bodies to lie on the altar of sacrifice. Mourning is reserved for the woman who sits apart, shamed and isolated in her own No Man’s Land. This woman feeds on the sorrow of failure, a failure to participate in the womanly patriotism that her culture and her country demand of her. “Our Women” is an anti-elegy that focuses not on men’s deaths, but on women’s interior experiences of war. The poem speaks with an undercurrent of quiet despair as it catalogues women’s limited options for action and emotion during the First World War. 

I published a more fully developed essay on the subject in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies: “‘I Smile for His Sake’: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Our Women.’”
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* Her poem “On Cape Le Force” appeared in the Charlotte Daily Patriot in 1890, when Montgomery was fifteen years old.
** “Our Women” was published in John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War, McClelland and Stewart, 1918.
*** L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Virago, 2014, p. 160 and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (24 July 1915), p. 200.
† Joy Demousi, “Gender and Mourning” in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.) Gender and the Great War, 2017, p. 213.
†† Arthur Currie, qtd. in Suzanne Evans’ Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, McGill-Queens UP, 2007, p. 77.
††† For further discussion of Montgomery, motherhood, and the death of Hugh, see Rita Bode’s “LM Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 50–66; and Tara K. Parmiter’s “Like a Childless Mother: LM Montgomery and the Anguish of a Mother’s Loss,” in L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, MQUP, 2021, pp. 316–330.
†††† L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (Sept. 3rd and 8th, 1914), pp. 165, 167.

"To Women" by Laurence Binyon

The Sisters, by Edmund Dulac
IWM ART 2059

One of the best-known English poems of the First World War is one of the earliest written: Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” appeared in the London Times on 21 September 1914, shortly after Britain entered the First World War. The poem’s fourth stanza is still recited today at British and Commonwealth Remembrance ceremonies:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Shortly after the war had ended, in July of 1919, The Quarterly Review praised Binyon as “the mouthpiece of English culture under the duress of war, interpreting its deepest emotions ... in those two immortal poems ‘To Women’ and ‘For the Fallen.’” The reviewer said, “As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so well described before the woman’s part in war?”* 

Today, few readers know of Binyon second “immortal poem,” and it rarely appears in modern anthologies of First World War poetry. 

To Women 

From illustrated poem "To Women"
in The Fallen (1917)

Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts

That have foreknown the utter price.

Your hearts burn upward like a flame

Of splendour and of sacrifice.



For you, you too, to battle go,

Not with the marching drums and cheers

But in the watch of solitude

And through the boundless night of fears.



Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,

Those threatening wings that pulse the air,

Far as the vanward ranks are set,

You are gone before them, you are there!



And not a shot comes blind with death

And not a stab of steel is pressed

Home, but invisibly it tore

And entered first a woman's breast.



Amid the thunder of the guns,

The lightnings of the lance and sword

Your hope, your dread, your throbbing pride,

Your infinite passion is outpoured



From hearts that are as one high heart

Withholding naught from doom and bale

Burningly offered up, — to bleed,

To bear, to break, but not to fail!
        —Laurence Binyon

“To Women” was published in the London Times on 20 August 1914, and it was reprinted in numerous volumes during the war.** In many ways, the poem is highly conventional in its imagery and sentiments as it references symbols of chivalry (such as lances and swords) and talks of “splendor and sacrifice.” The poem repeatedly uses images of fire and flame to depict women’s noble and searing pain as they offer up the men they love. 

In poem’s the last stanza, women are praised for “Withholding naught from doom and bale / Burningly offered up.” The word bale is Old English in origin: it suggests the active operation of evil as “destroying, blasting, injuring, hurting, paining, tormenting,” and although the usage is now obsolete, it also describes “a great consuming fire,” specifically a funeral pyre.*** This word and its associated imagery may suggest that, like Viking or Hindu widows, women give themselves to be consumed by their sacrifice, immolated on pyres of grief and loss. 

Illustration for "To Women"
from The Fallen (1917)

The poem is strikingly modern, however, in describing the effects of modern industrial war that extend far beyond the combat zones. The anguish that women experience precedes even the sufferings of soldiers. The first stanza proclaims that, before all others, women “have foreknown the utter price.” Like military combatants, women also “to battle go,” but “swifter than those hawks of war,” women are in the “vanward ranks.” The poem says of women during war time, “You are gone before them, you are there!” Every artillery shot and “stab of steel” enters “first a woman’s breast” [emphasis mine].

Just weeks into the war, Binyon’s “To Women” anticipated the burden that uncertainty and anxious waiting would lay on women.  In diary entries from 1915, Vera Brittain breathes a horrible kind of life into the sacrifices described in Binyon’s poem. She writes of her sweetheart Roland Leighton, “I can’t help thinking what a terrible nerve-strain it must have been for him—all the long expectation of an attack, & the waiting, waiting for it to come,” and then describes her own ordeal: “It has been a dreadful day—waiting and waiting & able to settle to nothing” (diary 27 Sept. 1915). The next day she writes, “This has been a terrible day—a day of waiting & restlessness & anxiety, of feeling it was impossible for any news of individuals yet, but nevertheless thinking that all the time perhaps news—the worst news—might come” (diary 28 Sept. 1915), and one day later, “Still no news—still waiting & weariness, & a heart growing almost numb with its pain” (diary 29 Sept. 1915). Less than a week later, she writes, “One is always waiting, waiting in this war. It is enough to turn one’s hair grey—is a thousand times worse than hard work” (diary 6 Oct. 1915).****

Today, Binyon is remembered for his poem dedicated to fallen soldiers of the Great War. For his contemporaries, his poem for stricken women who bore the burdens of war was equally as powerful. 

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* Cloudesley Brereton, “The Poetry of Laurence Binyon,” in The Quarterley Review, July 1919, p. 151, 148. 

** It appeared in Binyon’s collection The Winnowing Fan (1915), in his three-war-poem illustrated collection For the Fallen (1917), and it was set to music (along with “For the Fallen” and “The Fourth of August”) by Edward Elgar in 1917. 

*** The Oxford English Dictionary, bale, n1 and n2. The dictionary notes that although obsolete, William Morris used the word in 1876 to refer to a funeral pyre in his Story of Sigurd.
**** Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913–1917. 

Under a Bloodred Sky

 

Austrian troops advancing in the  Carpathians
(image from Library of Congress)

“How many of you have had the pleasure of seeing your own grave dug?” So begins the first story in Avigor Hameiri’s collection Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Dan Hecht).*

Hameiri wrote from the experience of a Jewish soldier fighting for Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front in the First World War. His poetry is “gruesome and unforgiving” as he documents “the slaughter of an entire generation of Europe’s best and brightest young men,” and his work laments that “nobody in authority seemed to care.”**

Under a Bloodred Sky

Come to me now and caress—
In vain, youth’s song has dried:
Here do I stand, my pale beauty,
Under a bloodred sky.

Come to me now and taunt me—
In vain, here all eyes are blind:
I am occupied here, my pale beauty,
within me millions die.

Come to me now, soft as dew—
In vain, I shall not embrace:
I tread your winepress, my pale beauty,
lest I defile your faded grace.

Come to me now and admonish—
In vain, sanity has escaped my mind;
Here I stand, my pale beauty,
under a bloodred sky.
—Avigdor Feuerstein Hameiri

Almost ballad-like in form, the poem is a lament of loss and despair. The horrors of war have killed the caresses and songs of youth, while men blinded in battle see only death endlessly replayed. God’s judgement is inescapable, as alluded to in the poem's third stanza: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel” (Isaiah 63:3). Under the bloodred sky of total war, the narrator stands alone and insane, yet still able to recognize that all is hopeless and futile. 

Echoing throughout the collection is the question Hameiri posed in his 1935 speech “On Facism and Its Goal”: “What do you know of the nature of man’s inhumanity to man?”*** In the same address, he challenged his audience, “you cannot even imagine the war that has passed, or the one that is to come.” Hameiri’s war writings are his attempt to address that failure of imagination. Most of the work in Under a Bloodred Sky has not been published since the First World War, and this volume marks the first time Hameiri’s poetry has been translated into English. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.
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* Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, edited and translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Daniel Hecht, Academic Studies Press, 2023.
** “Introduction” by Appelbaum and Hecht, Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, p. 12. 
*** “On Fascism and Its Goal” in Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, pp. 167 – 173. 

Wonderful, terrible days

Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island

Poetry of the Great War can turn up in the most unlikely of places. 

If you watch the tides of the Northumberland coast and cross to Holy Island, and if you then make your way to Lindisfarne Castle, passing through the rooms redesigned by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1901, you will find on a small desk in the library three volumes: a biography of the Victorian heroine Grace Darling, the novel The Dog Crusoe, and a slim volume of poetry, The Poets in Picardy. The poems were written by Edward de Stein during his service on the Western Front with the Machine Gun Corps and King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles). 

The last poem in the collection is titled Envoi, from the French “a sending forth, specifically, the action of sending forth a poem, the concluding part of a poetical composition.” 

Envoi

How shall I say good-bye to you, wonderful, terrible days
If I should live to live and leave ’neath an alien soil
You, my men, who taught me to walk with a smile in the ways
Of the valley of shadows, taught me to know you and love you, and toil
Glad in the glory of fellowship, happy in misery, strong
In the strength that laughs at its weakness, laughs at its sorrows and fears,
Facing the world that was not too kind with a jest and a song?
What can the world hold afterwards worthy of laughter or tears?
        —Edward de Stein 

Major de Stein survived three years on the Western Front, but never forgot the men he led and those who were left “‘neath an alien soil.” 

He prefaced his only poetry publication with a brief explanation: 


The rhymes in this volume were all jotted down in France during 1916, 1917, and 1918, either in the trenches, in billets, or in the more dignified purlieus of staff offices.  Any merit that may be found in them is due to the influence of that wonderful spirit of light-heartedness, that perpetual sense of the ridiculous which, even under the most appalling conditions, never seemed to desert the men with whom I was privileged to serve and which indeed seemed to flourish more freely in the mud and rain of the front line trenches than in the comparative comfort of billets or ‘cushy jobs,’ so that one was almost tempted to consider ‘humour’ with Asper* — ‘To be a quality of air and water!’

After the war, de Stein became a highly successful banker, serving during the Second World War as director of Finance for the Ministry of Supply (for which he was knighted in 1946). He bought Lindisfarne Castle in 1929, and he and his sister left it to the National Trust in 1944. 

De Stein died 3 November 1965, and his obituary in the London Times remembered his “indefinable flair....and intuitive judgment” as well as his qualities “of imagination and initiative” that made him successful. The charmingly frank obituary concludes:

More than most successful men ... he had a wide range of outside interests. He was a keen musician and was himself responsible for starting a series of chamber concerts. He was a gifted artist who took up water colouring and petit-point. He had a real talent for light verse, graceful and witty, but with no malice. He ran a boys’ club at Shepherd’s Bush, and played a prominent part in a number of other causes, in particular the British Red Cross, of which he was chairman of the finance committee for 14 years. A small, sprightly man, a delightful and amusing conversationalist, he was yet far from rumbustiousness in temperament and preferred to live his life in small groups. He had his vanities and sometimes failed to recognize that in small things his enthusiasms did not always match his skills. He was a keen bird-watcher, but his eye was not unerring. He was welcome at bridge tables, but for his person perhaps rather than his play. When he turned to gardening he was best suited to the role of patron and spectator. But these were but the idiosyncrasies of a genuine individualist. He was unmarried and lived all his life with his sister.** 

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* Slang term in First World War for wild activity or panic

**Edward de Stein: Developer of Companies,” London Times, 4 Nov. 1965, p. 13. 

A singing star in time's abyss

Edward Thomas

On the first day of the battle of Arras, April 9, 1917, Edward Thomas was killed by an artillery shell. He had arrived in France just months before and had been writing poetry for only three years (most of Thomas’s poems, such as “Rain,” were written between 1914 and his death).  Almost immediately following Thomas’s death, other writers wrestled their grief into words. Eleanor Farjeon wrote “Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.),” and Walter De La Mare composed a short poem of heart-aching beauty.  

To E.T.

You sleep too well—too far away,
   For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
   How longed-for a peace you have found.

Else, had not death so lured you on,
   You would have grieved — ’twixt joy and fear—
To know how my small loving son
   Had wept for you my dear.
        —Walter De La Mare (1918)

Four years later, in 1922, Ivor Gurney wrote “The Mangel-Bury,” which opens with a remembrance of Thomas:

        It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras—
        I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things
        As fill his verse with goodness....*

Each of these poems can be read in the collection Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas, compiled by Anne Harvey. One of my favorites is “The Golden Room,” by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, written in 1925. Gibson, Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert Brooke were among the Dymock poets, a group of friends who lived in rural Gloucestershire, meeting for walks and dinners to share ideas, laughter, and poetry.  

The Golden Room

Do you remember that still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed—
Our neighbours from The Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Eleanor and Robert Frost, living in a while
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and one and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?

Wilfrid and Geraldine Gibson 
The Old Nailshop, Greenway

We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked:
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy,
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream.

’Twas in July
Of nineteen-fourteen that we sat and talked;
Then August brought the war, and scattered us.

Now, on the crest of an Ægean isle,
Brooke sleeps, and dreams of England: Thomas lies
’Neath Vimy Ridge, where he, among his fellows,
Died, just as life had touched his lips to song. 

And nigh as ruthlessly has life divided
Us who survive; for Abercrombie toils
In a black Northern town, beneath the glower
Of hanging smoke; and in America
Frost farms once more; and, far from the Old Nailshop,
We sojourn by the Western sea. 

And yes,
Was it for nothing that the little room,
All golden in the lamplight, thrilled with golden
Laughter from the hearts of friends that summer night?
Darkness has fallen on it; and the shadow
May never more be lifted from the hearts
That went through those black years of war, and live.

And still, whenever men and women gather
For talk and laughter on a summer night,
Shall not that lamp rekindle; and the room
Glow once again alive with light and laughter;
And, like a singing star in time’s abyss,
Burn golden-hearted through oblivion?
—Wilfrid Gibson, 1925**

Gibson and his wife, Geraldine, lived in The Old Nailshop, a thatched cottage in Greenway Cross, and Rupert Brooke came to stay with them in July of 1914. Within walking distance were the homes of Edward and Helen Thomas, and Robert and Elinor Frost. Eleanor Farjeon, a friend of the Thomases, relates the story of the night when she “drank all the poets in Gloucestershire under the table”: 

Everyone was wiping his eyes with laughter, and we finished the meal with the cheese. Mrs. Farmer rose. I rose, and Helen rose, and Elinor Frost. Mr. Farmer rose. The Poets attempted to rise, relapsed on to their seats, and regarded each other with comical consternation. They were perfectly sober, though exceedingly gay; but the gallons of strong cider, against which I had been inoculated, had gone to their legs, and not one of them could stand without support. I saw Edward and Robert stagger to their feet, clutch each other, and go down; they rose again with great caution, clinging together. On the other side of the table Gibson and Abercrombie were behaving similarly. Two brace of poets staggered out into the moonlight and went hilariously homeward like two sets of Siamese Twins.***

Gibson’s poem is a memorial to the summer of 1914, and its lines shimmer with repeated references to golden light. Cream-washed walls, clear West Country cider, warm laughter, and the magic of lamplight shine with promise and potentiality. 

Yet by August of 1914, the world had descended into war, darkness, and shadow. 

Gibson wrote “The Golden Room” over ten years after that idyllic summer, reflecting on the grief and loss of the intervening years. Abercrombie had accepted the position of Professor of English at the University of Leeds; Gibson and his family had moved to a coastal town in Wales; Brooke had been dead for a decade, and Thomas nearly that long. 

“And still....” 

So begins the last stanza of “The Golden Room.” In the poem's last lines, Gibson blesses future gatherings of friends and writers, comparing them to “a singing star in time’s abyss.” Bonds of love and comradeship will rekindle the lamp “whenever men and women gather / For talk and laughter on a summer night.”
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* The poem was The Guardian’s “Poem of the Week,” 27 April 2009, accompanied by a rich discussion by Carol Rumens. **
The poem was published in The Atlantic magazine’s February 1926 issue and in Gibson’s 1928 collection, The Golden Room and Other Poems.
*** Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Oxford UP, 1958, p. 94.

Bondage

Arthur Lewis Jenkins
Photo by Auxiliary Portrait Studio, Westminster

Arthur Lewis Jenkins joined the British Army in September of 1914 and was killed a little more than three years later on 31 December 1917 while flying a night patrol mission over Scotland. He was twenty-five years old. An anonymous review published in 1919 in the Times Literary Supplement states that Jenkins had been killed in the war, but had “lived long enough to die a poet.”* The Balliol College War Memorial Book’s tribute to Jenkins writes, “The war gave him a unity which he had not been able to find in earlier days.”** 

Mourners frequently try to find meaning in the war deaths of young men: a reviewer wrote about JH Stables and his poetry, “There could be no better school for a young poet who wants to shed the faults of youth than the trenches.”***

Here is Jenkins’ poem “Bondage,” written the year he died and published posthumously in his book of poetry, Forlorn Adventures. 

Bondage

“O, I am sick of ways and wars,
    And the homeless ends of the earth—
I would get back to the northern stars,
    To the land where I had birth,
And take to me a dainty maid,
    And a tiny patch of ground,
Where I may watch small green things grow,
    As the kindly months come round.”

"Shell Shock!" 
from The Hydra, Dec. 1917

“And shall no memory of old fights
    Of comrades tried and dear,
That sleep so sound in outland soil,
    Come back to mar your cheer?
No thought of sudden marches,
    And swift assaults at morn,
Come back to shake your hard-won ease
    In the land where you were born?”

“The wine of war is bitter wine,
    And I have drunk my fill;
My heart would seek its anodyne
    In homely things and still.
Nor shall my comrades grudge to me
    My lass and my hearthstone,
But come to talk beside my fire,
    Whenas I sit alone.” 

“God help you, friend, if you should find,
    The head you fain would rest
Has pillowed too long on a saddle tree
    To lie on a woman’s breast;
For the sad ends of all the earth,
    Where lightly peril moves,
They shall have power in their own hour,
    To call you from your loves.”
            —Arthur Lewis Jenkins, 1917

In the first and third stanzas, a weary soldier longs for home and dreams of future happiness to be found with a wife and a small garden to tend. But the second and fourth stanzas are spoken by a wiser, more sardonic voice that questions the possibility of ever leaving the war behind. This speaker cautions the young soldier that it will be impossible to purge his memories of trauma and death, for “They shall have power” at any time of their own choosing to disrupt his peace and separate him from those he loves.

Rather than presenting a unified personality, “Bondage” speaks of the division and alienation that many men suffered during and after the First World War. In the memorial volume For Remembrance, Adcock writes that Lieutenant A.L. Jenkins, “was still a dreamer, an idealist, whose ideal of happiness was not of a kind that could ever be won by the sword, but in the strange, sweet, immaterial something that he sighs after in Forlorn Adventures.”**** Yet Jenkins’ poem suggests he knew that whether he lived or died, any pre-war “ideal of happiness” was likely to prove elusive.

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* “Four Young Poets,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 January 1919, cited in J. Goldman’s “Following Bradshaw and Bishop into Jacob’s Room,” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 3, n. 1, 2020.
** Balliol College War Memorial Book, 1914–1918, Robert Maclehose and Co, Glasgow, 1924,  p. 295.
*** Katherine Tynan, “War Poets and Others,” The Bookman, Oct. 1916, p. 22.
**** A. St. John Adcock, For Remembrance: Soldier Poets Who Have Fallen in the War, Hodder and Stoughton, 1920, pp.218–219. 

The cause is good

 

A relieved platoon of 1/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment
at Hébuterne, France c. 1916 by Fred Roe

Previous posts on this blog have shared Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham’s two anthologized poems, “The Cross of Wood” and “A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches.” Although a posthumous collection of Winterbotham’s poetry was published in 1916 or 1917 (Poems by JJ Bank and Sons of Cheltenham), it was for private distribution, and I have been unable to find a record of any copy that still exists. 

However, while reading the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette (one of the earliest and best-known of the trench journals), I stumbled across a review of Winterbotham’s Poems and was able to identify an additional two of his works. The review quotes the full text of Winterbotham’s “A Casualty” and references another of his poems about a “d...d awful trench” called Marguerite.* After a bit of searching, I found that the poems had each been published anonymously in the trench magazine before Winterbotham’s death: “A Casualty” in the August 1915 issue and “To Marguerite” in the Christmas 1915 issue. As the review in the Fifth Glo'ster Gazette notes of Winterbotham’s poems, “The verses are simple enough, but they ring true.”*

Cyril Winterbotham

A Casualty

“Come for the cause is good. Stout heart, strong hand.”
“England needs now. Death—for your native land?”
“The cause is good.”

Poor hackneyed words. But yet his manhood woke,
And held it true—it matters not who spoke.
         The cause was good.

Poor hackneyed words. We heard them once again
From dying lips, teeth clenched against the pain.
For thus he spoke, and so his loss was gain,
        “The cause is good.”
—Cyril Winterbotham

In the first stanza, the line “The cause is good” is the enthusiastic promise made by an army recruiter, but it does not gain its full meaning until it is whispered by a dying soldier.

During August 1916, of the 1,000 men serving with the 1/5 Gloucesters, over 500 were killed, wounded, or reported missing.** Winterbotham was killed while leading Company C of the 1/5 battalion of the Gloucesters in an attack on a German trench near Ovillers-la-Boiselle on the evening of 27 August 1916. In that attack, every officer was either wounded or killed, and eighteen men gave their lines to secure the trench. The next month, the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette reported, 

"Of those of our Battalion who have been killed or who are missing, it is not possible now to write. For one thing our heart is heavy. For another, we are forbidden to publish that list of those who have laid down their lives, without which we should not be able to do justice to those who have fallen. Meanwhile, we who treasure their memories very dearly, are proud that we have lived among them, known and loved them...."***

Clara Winterbotham, 
The Wilson Collection

Another who loved Cyril Winterbotham was his sister, Clara. During the war, she volunteered as a full-time VAD nurse at the Cheltenham hospital from 1915 to 1919. She attained the rank of Quartermaster for the last eight months of her service, for which she was awarded the MBE.†

In 1918, Clara Winterbotham became the first woman to serve on Cheltenham’s city council, and in 1921 she became the town's first woman mayor, serving until 1923, then again from 1944–1946. In July of 1919 as chair of Cheltenham’s Art Gallery and Museum Committee, Clara led the committee to commission a war painting to honor local soldiers.** Her brother Cyril is the young helmeted officer depicted in the center of the painting (top of this post).  

After his death, those who knew Cyril wrote of his warm-hearted humour in difficult circumstances. Here is his unsigned poem “To Marguerite.” 

To Marguerite

Oh beautiful, I found thee once
    When summer winds blew warm, and sweet.
I said “The fellow is a dunce
    Who does not love my Marguerite.”

A gunner's shelter in a trench, Thiepval
William Orpen, 1917

Thy form symmetrical, and clean,
Made my poor heart with rapture beat;
Birds, mice, and insects—N’ere so mean
A thing but loved by Marguerite.

“And here,” I said “The winter blas
I shall not fear. The snow and sleet
Shall harm me not while I hold fast
Unto my love—My Marguerite.”

I guarded thee with tender pride 
        By day and night, and all too fleet
The summer and the autumn died, 
        And left me still with Marguerite.

Then came the equinoctial gale,
The rain descended like a sheet,
Followed by frost, and snow, and hail,
And Oh, the change in Marguerite!



Her symmetry went with the wind,
Her beauty was a wreck complete,
Be-fouled, disordered, who could find
Ought but disgust in Marguerite?

Thy ruin is beyond repair.
Deep in the mud, a good five feet,
Object of horror, and despair,
I leave thee now, My Marguerite.

Oh, blame me not that rain should quench
They love that throve in summer heat.
You’re known as “That d...d awful trench,” 

—Na poo! Na poo! My Marguerite!††

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*Bishop Frodsham, “The Wings of Life” [book review of Poems by Cyril William Winterbotham, printed for private circulation, J.J. Banks and Son, Cheltenham] in Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, June 1917, no. 19.
** Neela Mann, “The story of Cheltenham’s Official WW1 Memorial Painting,” 2018.
*** “Bricks from the Editor’s Pack,” Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, Sept. 1916, no. 14.
† Clara Frances Winterbotham, VAD Red Cross: https://vad.redcross.org.uk/record?rowKey=230931
†† This poem was published unsigned in the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette’s Christmas 1915 issue, no. 8. The issue also includes Winterbotham’s unsigned but anthologized poem “A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches” and a poem that Anne Powell in A Deep Cry attributes to Winterbotham: “O.C. Platoon Enquiries,” signed C.W.