By the time the First World War ended in November of 1918,
an estimated 80,000 men serving in the British Army had been treated for shell
shock, and the number of actual sufferers was undoubtedly much higher.*
Rose Macaulay’s 1916 novel, Non-combatants and Others, vividly relates the psychological impact
of the war on both soldiers and civilians. It tells the story of Alix, a young art
student who becomes suddenly and violently ill after witnessing the night
terrors of a shell-shocked soldier. Lying awake, Alix is tortured by the memory
of the man’s moans and sobs:
“‘What they can bear to go through…. But they
can’t, they can’t, they can’t … we can bear to hear about … but we can’t, we
can’t, we can’t….’ It was like the intolerable ticking of a clock, and beat
itself away at last into a sick dream.”**
In her Poem “Picnic,” written a year after the novel’s
publication, Macaulay provides another memorable depiction of the ways in which
civilians attempted to cope with the mental sufferings of the war.
Picnic
July
1917
|
We lay and ate sweet hurt-berries
In the bracken of Hurt Wood.
Like a quire of singers singing low
The dark pines stood.
Behind us climbed the Surrey hills,
Wild, wild in greenery;
At our feet the downs of Sussex
broke
To an unseen sea.
And life was bound in a still ring,
Drowsy, and quiet, and sweet …
When heavily up the south-east wind
The great guns beat.
We did not wince, we did not weep,
We did not curse or pray;
We drowsily heard, and someone
said,
“They sound clear to-day.”
We did not shake with pity and
pain,
Or sicken and blanch white.
We said, “If the wind’s from over
there
Once pity we knew, and rage we
knew,
And pain we knew, too well,
As we stared and peered dizzily
Through the gates of hell.
But now hell’s gates are an old
tale;
Remote the anguish seems;
The guns are muffled and far away,
Dreams within dreams.
And far and far are Flanders mud,
And the pain of Picardy;
And the blood that runs there runs
beyond
The wide waste sea.
We are shut about by guarding
walls:
(We have built them lest we run
Mad from dreaming of naked fear
And of black things done.)
We are ringed all round by guarding
walls,
Runner through the Barrage, His Arm Shot Away, His Mind Gone by American artist Claggett Wilson |
Not all the guns that shatter the
world
Can quite break through.
Oh, guns of France, oh, guns of
France,
Be still, you crash in vain….
Heavily up the south wind throb
Dull dreams of pain, …
Be still, be still, south wind,
lest your
Blowing should bring the rain….
We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,
And sleep once again.
Oh, we’ll lie quite still, not
listen nor look,
While the earth’s bounds reel and
shake,
Lest, battered too long, our walls
and we
Should break … .should break….
—Rose
Macaulay
Under the surface of the poem’s calm, pastoral mood is the
excruciating effort required to keep the horrors of the war at bay. While the picnickers
seek to distance themselves from the war, images in the poem undercut these
attempts and repeatedly draw connections between soldiers and civilians.
Like soldiers, the women lie on the ground and feast on pain.
Hurt Wood is an actual location in rural Surrey, and hurt berries is a folk term used for whortleberries, but both names are
suggestive of the dead and wounded of the Great War. Yet unlike the soldiers amidst
the desolate barrenness of the Western Front, the women are surrounded by lush greenery and the quietude of rural England, broken only by the sounds of
muffled artillery fire.
The war assumes a dream-like quality, and prolonged exposure
to the traumas of war have normalized what was previously unimaginable. The sound of gunfire no longer inspires fear
or pity in the women, but instead prompts composed comments on the wind
direction and weather.
The soldiers and the civilians also share the experience of powerless
vulnerability. The men wait to die; the women wait to learn of their deaths. Both
have learned that uncontrolled emotions can lead to madness, and so they
distance themselves from the central reality of their lives in order to remain
sane.
American sheet music, 1917 |
“Picnic, July 1917” resonates with other women’s war poetry:
Katherine Mansfield’s elegy for her dead brother, “To L.H.B,”
written in 1916, also mixes imagery of dreams and wild berries, as her brother
waits for her beside a stream, extending a handful of fruit and saying “These
are my body. Sister, take and eat.” In both poems, the war has distorted the
pastoral landscape into something alien and threatening. In “The
Dancers,” Edith Sitwell also examines the ways in which ordinary pleasures
and activities on the home front appear callous and grotesque when contrasted
to the nightmare of the ongoing war: “The floors are slippery with blood….We
can still dance, each night.”
Both Sitwell’s and Macaulay’s poems explore the dilemma women faced in dealing with war trauma: patriotism and support for the men at the front seemed to demand the stoic continuation of daily life, but the pretense of normalcy often gave the impression of selfishness, ignorance, and insensitivity.† As Grogan asks in Shell-Shocked Britain, “How far can the term [shell-shocked] be applied not just to the soldiers on the front line, but to the country as a whole? To the communities those soldiers belonged to and the families who had to live through four years of ever more desperate warfare?”††
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Suzie Grogan, Shell
Shocked Britain. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2014, p. 2.
**Rose Macaulay, Non-combatants
and Others. London: Methuen, 1986,
p. 19.
†See Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Glory of Women.”
††Grogan, p. 5.
††Grogan, p. 5.
Another brilliant post - thank you Connie. I love Dame Laura Knight's work and the American artist Clagett Wilson is also extremely interesting.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting! I had a chance to see a Clagett Wilson exhibit during the centenary, and his work is even more haunting in person.
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