Our mutual dead

French and British women

In 1916, following the death of her older brother, Lt. Gilbert Sackville (killed Dec. 16, 1915), Margaret Sackville wrote a poem imagining a future time when the fighting and killing would cease.  Men had made the war – and now it would be left to the grieving women to make the peace.   

Reconciliation

Youth Mourning George Clausen © IWM ART 4655

When all the stress and all the toil is over,

And my lover lies sleeping by your lover,

With alien earth on hands and brows and feet,

   Then we may meet.

Moving sorrowfully with uneven paces,

The bright sun shining on our ravaged faces,

There, very quietly, without sound or speech,

   Each shall greet each.

We who are bound by the same grief for ever,

When all our sons are dead may talk together,

Each asking pardon from the other one

   For her dead son.

With such low, tender words the heart may fashion,

Broken and few, of pity and compassion,

Knowing that we disturb at every tread

Our mutual dead.

            --Margaret Sackville, published in The Pageant of War, 1916

In this imagined future, soldiers once again become lovers who lie not beside their sweethearts, but in the alien earth beside the men they killed.  At their lovers' graves, the bereft women meet:  German and French, Russian and Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman. 

Margaret Sackville

Quiet and sunshine have returned to the world, but the dead soldiers’ wives and mothers stumble through cemeteries with “ravaged faces,” greeting each other in a language for which there are no words.  Shared tears and gazes acknowledge a pain too great to be fully expressed.  The halting speech and uneven steps of the women are echoed in the poem’s structure, for each stanza begins with three lines of eleven syllables, then ends abruptly with a last terse line of four syllables that mirrors all that is broken, lost, and unspeakable.

Forever separated from the men they have loved, these women from enemy countries find themselves “bound by grief.” Speaking for their “mutual dead,” the women ask one another’s forgiveness:  Your son shot mine. My son gassed yours. I am sorry. 

In the Preface to Margaret Sackville’s Selected Poems (1919), Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote, “Her war poems are not mere experiments in realism, but genuine laments for the pity of such things, the ugliness of rage and the waste of what is noblest.” 

What lessons of peace were learned from the waste and violence of World War I?  The “Reconciliation” imagined in Sackville’s poem failed to occur -- I have fruitlessly searched for any account of former enemies meeting on fields of battle or in cemeteries in the years immediately following the Armistice.  A better predictor of the future, Siegfried Sassoon would write in his poem “Aftermath,” composed just five months after the war ended,

Do you remember the rats; and the stench
            Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
            And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
            Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'