Not a pawn

Békássy at Cambridge

Békássy in uniform

Ferenc Békássy is a poet whose name has been all but forgotten outside his native Hungary.  As a student at King’s College, Cambridge before the war, Békássy competed with Rupert Brooke for the affections of Noël Olivier and was a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. When the First World War broke out in August of 1914, it was Keynes who helped Békássy to return to Austria-Hungary, where he enlisted as a Hussar. Battling against Russian troops on the Eastern Front, Békássy was killed on June 25, 1915,  just days after arriving at the front lines (some sources say he died June 22). He was twenty-two years old.  His poetry was published in 1925 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in the small volume Adriatic and Other Poems. 

Békássy’s poem “1914” recalls Josef Stalin’s quotation, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Over 17 million died in the First World War, a grim statistic. The tragedy of the war is perhaps better understood in stories and poetry. 

1914

He went without fears, went gaily, since go he must,

And drilled and sweated and sang, and rode in the heat and dust

Of the summer; his fellows were round him, as eager as he,

While over the world the gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.

Victorious Assault, R.A. Höger 

  

He fell without a murmur in the noise of battle; found rest

’Midst the roar of hooves on the grass, a bullet struck through his breast.

Perhaps he drowsily lay; for him alone it was still,

And the blood ran out of his body, it had taken so little to kill.

  

So many thousands lay round him, it would need a poet, maybe,

Or a woman, or one of his kindred, to remember that none were as he;

It would need the mother he followed, or the girl he went beside

When he walked the paths of summer in the flush of his gladness and pride,

To know that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled;

Not blood, but the beautiful years of his coming life have been spilled,

The days that should have followed, a house and a home, maybe,

For a thousand may love and marry and nest, but so shall not he.

  

Hungary Landscape Faluszélén Laszlo Neogrady

When the fires are alight in the meadow, the stars in the sky,

And the young moon drives its cattle, the clouds graze silently,

When the cowherds answer each other and their horns sound loud and clear,

A thousand will hear them, but he, who alone understood, will not hear.

His pale poor body is weak, his heart is still, and a dream

His longing, his hope, his sadness. He dies, his full years seem

Drooping palely around, they pass with his breath

Softly, as dreams have an end -- it is not a violent death.

My days and the world’s pass dully, our times are ill;

For men with labour are born, and men, without wishing it, kill.

Shadow and sunshine, twist a crown of thorns for my head!

Mourn, O my sisters! Singly, for a hundred thousand dead.*

Repeatedly, the poem asks us to lay aside our preconceptions and stereotypes so that we may better understand and empathize with the individuals whose lives were forever changed by the First World War. From the first stanza, the young recruit who went to war gaily and eagerly is contrasted with the general mood of the time. We are asked to see his personal reactions as distinct from that time when the “gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.”

This recruit, who set off so gaily, died alone, poignantly isolated from the action around him. Almost in wonder, the poem comments on how little it took to kill this one man, even as thousands lay dead around him in the incomprehensible slaughter of industrial warfare. 

How can such a death be understood? Only by perhaps a poet – or someone who knew and loved the uniqueness of this man. His mother, his sweetheart, his family: they alone would remember his lopsided grin, the tenor of his voice, the mannerisms and moods that were particularly his. Only those who loved him are able to defiantly assert that he was not a unit, not a pawn – he was more than cannon fodder; he was an irreplaceable soul. 

Tragically, not only is the uniqueness of the man gone forever, but also lost is the potential of his particular life, “the days that should have followed.” Carol Ann Duffy also laments this heartbreaking loss of potential in her poem “Last Post,” vainly hoping that time might be rewound and all can be restored.

Hungarian prayer for the fallen

But magical thinking will not rewind the war. The last stanza of Békássy’s “1914” has the feel of a Greek chorus: there is an inevitability to the death of this man and the millions like him, for the “times are ill.” Men kill one another “without wishing it,” while women are left to mourn each of the hundreds of thousands of deaths “singly,” each one a scar upon the heart and an emptiness that can never be filled. 

In his own death, Ferenc Békássy has literally been remembered "singly" at King’s College, Cambridge.  Although he died in the same war as his classmates, Békássy fought with the Central Powers, aligning himself with his home country, England’s enemy. In 1920, British families of those who had lost their sons in the war protested Békássy’s inclusion on the King’s College Chapel Roll of Honour. As a compromise in 1921, his name was inscribed on another wall of the chapel, where he is listed simply as a “Pensioner.” 

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 *To view this poem in Hungarian or to read other Bekassy poems, see this link. 

Clods on the heart

Kathe Kollwitz, Schlachtefeld/After the Battle

In 1915, British journalist, feminist, and pacifist Helena Swanwick wrote, “War is waged by men only, but it is not possible to wage it upon men only. All wars are and must be waged upon women…as well as upon men.” Most of the poetry of the First World War that is remembered, reprinted, and published in anthologies is written by men who were soldiers in the war. But we must also remember that “combat is not the sum total of war.”*  Too often, poetry written by women during the war has been forgotten or marginalized.

Mary Gilmore was an Australian journalist who campaigned to support better living conditions for indigenous people, working women, and children. She was also a poet who expressed her horror at the sufferings caused by "The Great War"; she donated the profits of one of her books to soldiers who had been blinded.

This blog’s previous post included Australian soldier Leon Gellert’s poem “Anzac Cove.” In that poem, Gellert acknowledges the war’s effects on civilians as he describes “the sound of gentle sobbing in the South.” Mary Gilmore’s poem “War” challenges this and other idealized images of grief.  Written from a mother's perspective on the home front,  the poem is laced with barely repressed anger.

War

Australians, Kerry Stokes Collection,
The Louis and Antoinette Thuillier Collection

Out in the dust he lies;
Flies in his mouth,
Ants in his eyes ...

I stood at the door
Where he went out;
Full-grown man,
Ruddy and stout;

I heard the march
Of the trampling feet,
Slow and steady
Come down the street;

The beat of the drum
Was clods on the heart,
For all that the regiment
Looked so smart!

I heard the crackle

Paths of Glory CRW Nevinson © IWM (Art.IWM ART 518)

Of hasty cheers
Run like the breaking
Of unshed tears,

And just for a moment,
As he went by,
I had sight of his face,
And the flash of his eye.

He died a hero's death,
They said,
When they came to tell me
My boy was dead;

But out in the street
A dead dog lies;
Flies in his mouth,
Ants in his eyes.
                 - Mary Gilmore

The poem is framed by a brutal and disturbing comparison: a mother flatly tells us that like the dead dog who lies in the street before her home, her son lies dead in the dust of a battlefield with “flies in his mouth, ants in his eyes.”  Unflinchingly, the bereft woman confronts the grim reality of death and decay.

Butte de Polygon, GE Butler
Archives New Zealand NCWA 456

She recalls watching her son, “ruddy and stout” march past their home as the soldiers left for the war, but even in the midst of others’ cheers, for her the beat of the regimental band foreshadowed the dropping notes of “clods on the heart" at a graveside burial. Where others saw dash and glory, she recognized emptiness and loss.

Although told that her son died as a hero, this mother resists the comfort of nationalistic platitudes.  She knows only that her world is forever changed; her son will never return.  She has been denied the closure of washing her son’s body and deprived of the comfort of preparing him for burial or visiting his grave.  Likening her son’s death to that of a dog’s, she can find no purpose in his sacrifice, no meaning in his loss, no glory in the war.

Jacqueline Manuel, quoting another Gilmore poem, notes, “there has been comparatively little attention accorded the writing of civilian Australian women - those so-called ordinary women who would ‘creep into bed in the dark and weep’** for those sons, husbands, lovers, fathers and friends who would never return.”***  Like so much of Mary Gilmore’s writing, her poem “The War” the poem is deeply subversive as it questions not only the personal tragedy of one man’s death, but the very purpose and meaning of war itself.

Mary Gilmore

________________________________________________________________
 *  Margaret R. Higonnet, Women Writers of World War I, xxi.
 **  Mary Gilmore, "These Fellowing Men" in The Passionate Heart.
***  Jacqueline Manuel, “Australian civilian women's poetic responses to the First World War.”

Anzac Cove

On May 10, 1916, the London Telegraph featured the story “Anzacs in France,” celebrating the arrival to the Western Front of “these splendid fighting men who have survived the heroic tragedy of the Dardanelles.” Leon Gellert had survived Gallipoli.  An Australian who had enlisted with the 10^th Battalion just 18 days after Britain declared war on Germany, Gellert landed at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915, but shrapnel wounds, dysentery, and blood poisoning ended his war.  He was evacuated from the Dardanelles, and due to his injuries and epileptic symptoms, discharged from the military.

The Gallipoli campaign dragged on for another five months.  Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire put up a strong resistance until the British withdrew from the Turkish peninsula on January 8, 1915.  The battle had lasted just over eight months, and neither side could claim a clear victory, but over 100,000 men from both sides of the conflict died, and over 230,000 were injured. Gellert’s poem “Anzac Cove” remembers not only the men who did not return home, but those who loved and would forever miss them.

Anzac Cove by George Lambert, © Australian War Memorial

Anzac Cove

There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks:
There’s a beach asleep and drear:
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley:
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There’s an unpaid waiting debt :
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South. 

 The poem never details the battle, nor does it describe the men who fought there.  Instead, 9 of the 12 lines of the poem narrate the landscape of Anzac Cove, beginning with There’s or There are as they sketch a picture of the scene. There’s a melancholy tenderness in the description, as if a soldier has returned home to tell the family of his dead mate, “Here is where he fought; this is where he lies.” The hills, forts, and beaches bear witness to the lonely desolation of war: what has been left behind is battered, broken, torn, and rotting.  Sunken graves mark the lines of buried bones, and the valley is silent.

The only sound that breaks the silence is that of “gentle sobbing in the South – the grief of the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, wives and sweethearts who loved the men who fell at Gallipoli. 

Despite his efforts to rejoin the Australian Imperial Forces, Gellert was not among the Australians sent to France in the preparation for the battle of the Somme in July of 1916.  The London paper, in describing the Australian troops who arrived in France in the spring of 1916, characterized Gallipoli as a heroic tragedy, and it described the survivors as “hard fellows….with Homeric fighting qualities.”  As the Australians marched through a French market town, London correspondent Philip Gibbs noted,

Leon Gellert

“They had merry eyes (especially for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle as though born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman’s table of coloured ribbons.  These clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered boys who had come out of the hell-fire of the Dardanelles…looked wonderfully fresh in France.  Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street….For tough as they are, and keen as they are, many of the Australian soldiers are but grown-up children, with a splendid simplicity of youth, and the great gift of laughter.”

In less than six weeks, much of that youth and laughter would again be silenced and replaced yet once more by “a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.”   

Fifty sons

The night of May 16, 1916, Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh’s actions earned him the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry.”  As he led his Seaforth Highlanders in a raid on German trenches near Arras, sixteen of his men were wounded, two seriously.  Mackintosh carried one of the wounded, Private David Sutherland,* over one-hundred yards through German trenches, with German troops in close pursuit.  Nineteen-year-old David Sutherland “died of his wounds as he was hoisted out of the trench and had to be left at the enemy front line” (Powell, A Deep Cry).  His body was never recovered, and Sutherland has no known grave.  He is just one of the nearly 35,000 men commemorated on the Arras Memorial to the Missing at Faubourg d'Amiens military cemetery.   

Shortly after that night, Mackintosh wrote and dedicated the following poem to Private David Sutherland and other men under his command who had died in the war.  

In Memoriam
Private D. Sutherland Killed in Action in the German Trench,
May 16, 1916, and the Others Who Died

So you were David's father, 
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting

Scottish Highlands, near Thurso

And the work is left undone,

Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting,
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year get stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.

You were only David's father,

But I had fifty sons

Private David Sutherland,
from IWM Lives of the First World War

When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns,
And we came back at twilight - 
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers’,
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed “Don’t leave me, sir”,
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer. 
                      -- by EA Mackintosh**

The poem opens with “So you were David’s father” – putting us right in the moment at which the officer sits down to write an official letter of condolence.  Rather than an official letter, however, what Lieutenant Ewart Mackintosh writes is a poem that tries to make meaning out of the senseless death of a young man he had desperately tried to save.   

As an officer, Mackintosh would have had to read his men’s letters home, censoring all correspondence to ensure that no operational information was shared that could fall into enemy hands.  No letter could be mailed without first having been reviewed by an officer, and so Mackintosh would have known about his men’s homes and their families.  He recalls David’s reticence in sharing the hardships and dangers of battle with his family; instead, Private Sutherland was worried about his father alone on the farm, attempting to care for both sheep and crops without his son by his side. 

The officer tries to focus on the father’s sorrow – “just an old man in pain” – but his own grief overwhelms him and interrupts thoughts of Scottish crops and Highlands storms with the wrenching lines,

And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.

E.A. Mackintosh

Like a father with fifty sons under his command, Mackintosh vows, “never will I forget you,/ My men that trusted me.”  Unlike their fathers, however, Mackintosh’s last view of the young men who were like sons to him wasn’t as they appeared “in their pride” leaving to join the war, “happy and young and gallant.”  Instead, he witnessed and bore responsibility for “the beautiful men brought low,” the “strong limbs broken.”  It was Mackintosh who heard their screams, “Don’t leave me, sir,” and held their “piteous writhing bodies” as they died.  

This is a poem that Mackintosh never intended to send to David Sutherland’s father.  The officer knew how much the young private had shielded his father from the horrors of war, and he would have seen it as his duty to save David’s father from learning of his son’s last minutes of agony.†

Who, then, is the audience for the poem?  While the opening stanza begins by addressing David’s father, the last two verses of the poem shift, this time directly addressing the dead men of the Seaforth Highlanders.  In these stanzas, Mackintosh voices his personal grief, and the poem’s last line speaks directly to David Sutherland and the others who died: “I was your officer.”  It is a haunting conclusion, communicating Mackintosh’s love and grief tinged with his guilt at being powerless to save them.  By the spring of 1916, powerlessness was the central emotion that was shared by nearly everyone whose lives were touched by the Great War. 
_____________________________________________________________________________

*David Sutherland enlisted in the town of Reay (Caithness), and his family’s farm was in Achreamie, a village in the far north of Scotland.
** Another Mackintosh poem “I Really Can’t Shoot a Man with a Cold” appeared on this blog 3 February, 2016. 

† For another poem about a father who has lost his son, see MJ Henderson’s “The Seed Merchant’s Son,” posted on this blog 26 November, 2014.