Image from The Somme, 1916 film |
“Oh that awful journey. The dead and the
dying, lying, crawling along the ground…My God! dear God!”
--Lieutenant John Turner, 1/8 Royal Warwicks,
on his regiment’s retreat through No Man’s Land at the Somme on 1 July
1916 (Turner papers, Imperial War Museum)
“I discovered there were no 8/Warwick
officers or HQ in the trenches…At 11:00 am I found them and was just in time
for a roll call. I cannot describe my
feeling when I discovered that only forty-five soldiers answered their names
out of over 600 men of the battalion.”
--Lance Corporal Williamson, 1/8
Warwicks, 2 July 1916 (Williamson papers, Imperial War Museum).
Clifford Henry
Benn Kitchin was a lieutenant with the 1/8 Royal Warwickshire regiment, a unit
that suffered devastating losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
It’s estimated that 800 men of the regiment went into battle; 343 were wounded, while 232 died
that day.*
London newspaper, 23 Aug. 1916 |
Three years
after the Somme, in 1919 Kitchin published a poem that commented on the movie The Somme, a British documentary propaganda
film released in August of 1916. In the
first months after its premier, an estimated 20 million people viewed the film. The
Somme depicted preparations for the battle, the stockpiling of munitions,
troop movements towards the front lines, artillery bombardments, and a staged “over
the top” attack that was filmed behind the lines before the battle began. Kitchin’s poem is addressed to the dead of
the Somme who, captured on celluloid, perform their exits and their entrances before
the cinema crowds of the world.
Somme Film 1916
There is no
cause, sweet wanderers in the dark,
For you to cry
aloud from cypress trees
To a forgetful
world; since you are seen
Of all twice
nightly at the cinema,
While the
munition makers clap their hands.
--C.B.H. Kitchin
The men who died
are represented as “sweet wanderers in the dark,” a phrase that suggests both ghosts
moving restlessly in the gloom as well as moving images on film, fated to endlessly
repeat their doomed charge in darkened theatres for as long as the film is
shown.
The Somme, 1916 film |
To proclaim their tragic stories, these soldiers have no need to climb the cypress trees (a tree associated with death and
mourning since ancient times). Although the world is a forgetful place and
other soldiers’ deaths may be lost in the mists of time, the twice nightly
showings of the propaganda film guarantee that the memory of those killed at
the Somme will live on.
London newspaper, 2 Sept. 1916 |
And yet the poem implies that the memory created by The Somme is a false
one. The realities of the battle have
been manipulated so as to highlight the grit and glory of the British troops, so that
the soldiers who fell at the Somme are cheered as they charge to their deaths. The
applause of the munition workers is tragically ironic; the workers’ yellowed
hands, tainted by the poisonous chemical TNT, clap with excitement at the
scenes of the battle, while those same hands had manufactured the 1,7000,000 shells
that were fired at the German lines before the attack, shells that were supposed
to guarantee the safety of the men who made the fatal charge.
Like Sassoon’s
poem “Glory
of Women,” the poem’s irony draws a sharp contrast between the fighting men
and those who serve on the home front as they supply the troops with instruments
of death. However, in Kitchin’s poem, the munitions workers can
also be viewed as victims, manipulated by government propaganda and deceived by
the carefully crafted version of war that the film presents as truth.
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*These figures,
along with the quotations from Williamson and Turner, were taken from Robert
David Williams, A Social and Military
History of the 1/8th Battalion, The Royal Warwickshire Regiment in
the Great War (unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Birmingham,
1999). I am indebted to the Geert
Buelens’ article “The Silence of the Somme: Sound and Realism in British and
Dutch Poems Mediating The Battle of the
Somme,” Journal of Dutch Literature, 1.1
December 2010, pp 5 – 27 for providing the reference to Williams’ thesis.
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