La Belle Dame sans Merci by JW Waterhouse |
A wandering knight,
an enchanted forest, and a cold night sleeping under the stars: in his poem “Bivouacs,”
Gilbert Waterhouse of the Essex Regiment uses the language of a medieval quest to
describe The Great War.
This blog has
featured other poems that recognize moments of beauty in battle: Leslie Coulson’s “The
Rainbow” argues that even in a trench “the stars are beautiful still”; Carola
Oman’s “In
the Ypres Sector” marvels that soldiers “have left beauty here in
everything,” while Richard Aldington’s “Soliloquy
II” finds that even the dead are “More beautiful than one can tell.”
But Gilbert
Waterhouse’s “Bivouacs” recalls Romantic poet John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans
Merci”; the poem uses the song-like rhythms and repetition of a ballad as it transforms
war into a mysterious journey toward the unknown.
Bivouacs
In Somecourt
Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The nightingales sang all night,
The stars were tangled in the trees
And marvellous intricacies
Of leaf and branch and song and light
Made magic stir in Somecourt Wood.
The nightingales sang all night,
The stars were tangled in the trees
And marvellous intricacies
Of leaf and branch and song and light
Made magic stir in Somecourt Wood.
Nightfall, Zillebeke - Paul Nash |
In Somecourt
Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We slithered in a foot of mire,
The moisture squelching in our boots;
We stumbled over tangled roots,
And ruts and stakes and hidden wire,
Till marvellous intricacies
Of human speech, in divers keys,
Made ebb and flow thro’ Somecourt Wood.
We slithered in a foot of mire,
The moisture squelching in our boots;
We stumbled over tangled roots,
And ruts and stakes and hidden wire,
Till marvellous intricacies
Of human speech, in divers keys,
Made ebb and flow thro’ Somecourt Wood.
In Somecourt
Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We bivouacked and slept the night,
The nightingales sang the same
As they had sung before we came.
‘Mid leaf and branch and song and light
And falling dew and watching star.
And all the million things which are
About us and above us took
No more regard of us than
We take in some small midge’s span
Of life, albeit our gunfire shook
The very air in Somecourt Wood.
We bivouacked and slept the night,
The nightingales sang the same
As they had sung before we came.
‘Mid leaf and branch and song and light
And falling dew and watching star.
And all the million things which are
About us and above us took
No more regard of us than
We take in some small midge’s span
Of life, albeit our gunfire shook
The very air in Somecourt Wood.
In Somecourt
Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
I rose while all the others slept,
I seized a star-beam and I crept
Along it and more far along
Till I arrived where throbbing song
Of star and bird and wind and rain
Were one – then I came back again –
But gathered ere I came the dust
Of many stars, and if you must
Know what I wanted with it, hear,
I keep it as a souvenir,
Of that same night in Somecourt Wood.
I rose while all the others slept,
I seized a star-beam and I crept
Along it and more far along
Till I arrived where throbbing song
Of star and bird and wind and rain
Were one – then I came back again –
But gathered ere I came the dust
Of many stars, and if you must
Know what I wanted with it, hear,
I keep it as a souvenir,
Of that same night in Somecourt Wood.
In Somecourt
Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The cuckoo wakened me at dawn.
The man beside me muttered, “Hell!”
But half a dozen larks as well
Sang in the blue – the curtain drawn
Across where all the stars had been
Was interlaced with tender green,
The birds sang, and I said that if
One didn’t wake so cold and stiff
It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.
The cuckoo wakened me at dawn.
The man beside me muttered, “Hell!”
But half a dozen larks as well
Sang in the blue – the curtain drawn
Across where all the stars had been
Was interlaced with tender green,
The birds sang, and I said that if
One didn’t wake so cold and stiff
It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
And then the man
beside me spoke,
But what he said about it broke
The magic spell in Somecourt Wood.
But what he said about it broke
The magic spell in Somecourt Wood.
--Gilbert Waterhouse
The poem opens
in the magical forest of Somecourt Wood, where “stars were tangled in the trees,”
and the leaves and branches are shot through with song and light. The second and third stanzas complicate the
vision: the song and light are actually the shot and shell falling into a
forest of blasted trees, tangled wire, and mud.
But the soldier in
this narrative deliberately separates himself from the war and from his
company. Like the falling dew and watching star that take no notice of the fighting,
he rises as other men sleep. Seizing a star
beam, he climbs along it until he arrives at a place where “star and bird and
wind and rain” mingle into oneness.
There, he gathers up a handful of “the dust/ Of many stars” as a remembrance
of his mystical journey and returns to camp.
In the cold of
the dawn as the men awaken from their uncomfortable night without shelter, the
soldier who has dreamily detached himself from the war persists in his re-visioning of experience
at the Front. He chants the name of the
wood as a charm (“in Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood), and as he listens to
the morning calls of the cuckoo and lark, he remarks that if it weren’t for the
chill and stiffness of his own body, “It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.”
Gilbert Waterhouse |
The specifics do
not matter. The spell has been broken, and the brutality of the conflict
reasserts itself. Accounts of the First World
War include many examples of soldiers fantasizing themselves elsewhere to
cope with realities that were too horrific to contemplate. In Charles CD
Roberts’ poem “Going
Over,” a soldier mentally escapes from the barrage and broken parapet,
hearing only “a girl’s voice in the night,” seeing only “a garden of lilacs,
a-flower in the dusk.”
Like the
wandering knight in Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the soldier in Gilbert
Waterhouse’s “Bivouacs” wakes from his dream and finds himself desolate “on
the cold hill’s side.” In both poems, soldier and knight lose their
illusions and must confront their final journey into the unknown. War is the seductress without mercy who lures
men to their doom, reducing them to pale skeletons whose “starved lips with horrid
warning” foretell inevitable death and whose bones are scattered across No Man’s Land.
Waterhouse's grave at Serre Rd 2 ©Louise Heren |
From another soldier of the Great War, who was also at the Somme:
ReplyDelete"Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo's hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had
been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master's, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep."
Ah -- this is special, Tom. Just two weeks ago, we visited the graves of two of Tolkien's close friends: Gilson and Smith. It was a very sobering experience -- achingly beautiful.
ReplyDeleteSo sad that beautiful woods were so often turned into filthy killing grounds in the Great War. They are of course beautiful again but to my mind they remain tainted. I particularly find Mametz Wood pretty much impossible to visit and of course it inspired very great poetry associated with the Welsh sacrifice there
ReplyDeleteToo many stories to count of horrific attacks in the woods: Trônes Wood, High Wood, Bois des Ogons, Mametz... That's what make this poem so memorable for me.
ReplyDelete