Christ in Flanders

"The Great Sacrifice" by James Clark

In the valley of the shadow of death that was the Great War, soldiers and civilians across Europe found comfort in assuring themselves that God was on their side.  Writing long after the war, British soldier-poet Robert Graves recalled that

Christ was being evoked alike by the Germans and the Allies for victory in a new sort of total war. This paradox made most of us English soldiers serving in the purgatorial trenches lose all respect for organized Pauline religion, though still feeling a sympathetic reverence for Jesus as our fellow-sufferer. Cross-road Calvaries emphasized this relationship.”*

As evidence of this common connection forged between Christ and soldiers, Graves quotes an excerpt from Wilfred Owen’s poem “At a Calvary near the Ancre”:

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.

In this war He too lost a limb,

But His disciples hide apart;

And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

In his poem “Solomon in All His Glory,” First World War military chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy likens the “bloody sweaty tatters” of the wounded to “the robes of Jesus Christ,” and Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, writes, “The sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ, is at the heart of countless Great War poems.”**

But perhaps the best-known poem of the war that linked Christ and front-line soldiers was written by a woman on the home front. “Christ in Flanders” was written by Lucy Whitmell, former president of the Leeds Astronomical Society, wife of astronomer Charles Whitmell, and sister of a war nurse.  The poem first appeared in London’s Spectator on September 11th in 1915, and it was reprinted as a leaflet, card, and gospel tract, selling over 50,000 copies.***

Christ in Flanders

British WWI postcard

We had forgotten You, or very nearly —

You did not seem to touch us very nearly — 

Of course we thought about You now and then;

Especially in any time of trouble —

We knew that You were good in time of trouble —

But we are very ordinary men.  

And there were always other things to think of —
There’s lots of things a man has got to think of —
His work, his home, his pleasure, and his wife;
And so we only thought of You on Sunday —
Sometimes, perhaps, not even on a Sunday —
Because there’s always lots to fill one’s life.

And, all the while, in street or lane or byway —
In country lane, in city street, or byway —
You walked among us, and we did not see.
Your feet were bleeding as You walked our pavements —
How did we miss Your footprints on our pavements? —
Can there be other folk as blind as we?

Now we remember; over here in Flanders —

(It isn't strange to think of You in Flanders) —

German WWI postcard

This hideous warfare seems to make things clear.

We never thought about You much in England —

But now that we are far away from England,

We have no doubts, we know that You are here. 

You helped us pass the jest along the trenches —
Where, in cold blood, we waited in the trenches —
You touched its ribaldry and made it fine.
You stood beside us in our pain and weakness —
We're glad to think You understand our weakness —
Somehow it seems to help us not to whine.

We think about You kneeling in the Garden —
Ah! God! the agony of that dread Garden —
We know You prayed for us upon the cross.
If anything could make us glad to bear it —
’Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it —
Pain — death — the uttermost of human loss.

Though we forgot You — You will not forget us —
We feel so sure that You will not forget us —
But stay with us until this dream is past.
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon —
Especially, I think, we ask for pardon —
And that You'll stand beside us to the last.

          —Lucy Whitmell

Contemporary critics have accused the poem of sentimentality, yet “Christ in Flanders” was deeply comforting to many. As literary scholar Amy Helen Bell explains,

Rather than using abstract concepts of Christian spiritual belief, like “glory,” Whitmell imagines how thoughts of Christ help comfort the men in the trenches …. Christ becomes a comrade, a sharer in trench life and its jests.  Though wartime suffering and death is still portrayed as the will of God, it is the will of God humanized, prayed for by a man suffering on his own, personal cross.†

Two years after the poem was first published, the Spectator published another poem, presumably written by a soldier, entitled “To the Writer of ‘Christ in Flanders:’”††

On the battlefields of Flanders men have blessed you in their pain:

For you told us Who was with us, and your words were not in vain.

All you said was very gentle, but we felt you knew our ways;

And we tried to find the Footprints we had missed in other days.

When we found Those blood-stained Footsteps, we have followed to the End;

For we know that only Death can show the features of our Friend.

In the Mansions of the Master, He will make the meaning plain

Of the battlefields of Flanders, of the Crucifix of Pain.

            —E.M.V.

Lucy Whitmell did not live to see the end of the war, but died in May of 1917 and is buried at Lawnswood Cemetery in Adel, a suburb of Leeds.  The inscription on the side of her headstone reads, “She wrote ‘Christ in Flanders.’”

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* Robert Graves, 5 Pens in Hand, Doubleday, 1958, p. 123.

** Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford UP, 2000, p. 119. 

*** “By the Way,” New Outlook, vol. 113, 9 Aug. 1916, p. 878. Additionally, a notice in the Spectator appearing on 14 Sept. 1918 advertised, “Mrs. Whitmell’s poem ‘Christ in Flanders,’ which, since its first appearance in the Spectator for September 11, 1915, has found appreciative readers throughout the English-speaking world, has been set to music by Mr. Henry Guise (Novelle, 2s. net).”

† Amy Helen Bell, “Nought were we spared”: British Women Poets of the Great War, Master’s Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1996, p. 169.

†† E.M.V., “To the Writer of ‘Christ in Flanders,’” Spectator, 13 Jan. 1917, p. 45.  The poem appeared next to another poem featured in this blog: Mary Adair Macdonald’s “Epiphany Vision.”

The Other Possibility

Freiheit (Freedom)
by Constantin von Mitschke-Collande, 1919 ©LACMA 

In his multi-volume novel November 1918, German author Alfred Döbler describes the return of the defeated German army to Berlin in December of 1918:

And then came the sight that caused many in the crowd to weep.  Men as well as women, moved by the feeling of humanity’s common fate, remembering the long war and all the dead.  Did the people see the troops? They were looking at the long war, at victories and at the defeats.  Before them a piece of their own life was marching past, with wagons and horses, machine-guns and cannons.*

Everywhere in Europe, the old life was gone, never to be recovered, but perhaps nowhere was this more evident and mourned than in Germany. An estimated two million German soldiers died in the war, and Germans on the home front endured years of hunger and disease. The German national debt, which stood at 5 billion marks in 1913, had soared to 153 billion marks by the war’s end.**

I can give him another injection; in the state he's in,
he won't notice anything at all. 

In Germany after the First World War, Richard Bessel notes, “Post-war German governments, whatever their political complexion, faced the task not of how ‘to bring culture and prosperity to the working people’ but of how, in effect, to distribute poverty.”° The Versailles Treaty had assigned Germany and its allies blame for the damages caused by their war of “aggression,”°° and in 1921, the Allies presented Germany with the bill for reparations: 132 billion gold marks.  In practice the figure was adjusted to 50 billion marks over thirty-six years—still an enormous sum.°°° British economist John Maynard Keynes protested that the terms of peace were in actuality a “policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation” thereby causing “the decay of the whole civilised life of Europe,”† while a German official labeled the reparations as “the continuation of the war by other means.”††

In 1929, amidst soaring unemployment, social unrest, and political instability, German author Erich Kästner wrote a poem that imagines a different version of reality.

The Other Possibility

If we had won the war with waving

of flags and roaring, if we had

then Germany would be past saving,

then Germany would have gone mad.

One would attempt to make us tame

like savage tribes that one might mention.

We’d leave the sidewalk if a sergeant came

and stand attention.

If we had won the war of late

we’d be in a proud and headstrong state

and press in bed in our dreams

our hands to our trouser seams.

Women must bear, each woman serves

a child a year. Or calaboose.

The state needs children as preserves,

and it swills blood like berry juice.

If we had won the war, I bet

that heaven would be national,

the clergy would wear epaulets,

God be a German general.

Trenches would take the place of borders.

No moon, insignia instead.

An emperor would issue orders.

We’d have a helmet and no head.

Berlin bookburning, 1933

If we had won, then everyone

would be a soldier; the entire

land would be run by goon and gun,

and all around would be barbed wire. 

On order, women would throw twins,

for men cost hardly more than stone,

and above all one cannot win

a war with guns alone.

Then reason would be kept in fetters,

accused and always on the spot.

And wars would come like operettas.

If we had won the last war—but

we were in luck and we did not.

            —Erich Kästner, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Kästner’s alternate version of events produces a fiercely nationalist, militaristic, rigidly patriotic country, a German society in which everyone is always under orders and no one is valued, for “men cost hardly more than stone” – they are cultivated like cabbages for cannon fodder. Kästner had fought in the First World War as a young artillery gunner, an experience that shaped his pacifist views.  His poem re-invents the close of the Great War while simultaneously anticipating and warning against future threats. 

Erich Kästner

Just three years after “The Other Possibility” was published in the collection Ein Mann gibt Auskunft (A Man Gives Information), Kästner stood in Berlin’s Opernplatz Square and watched as a mob of over 40,000 people burned the books of fourteen undesirable authors. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Erich Maria Remarque were among the banned authors – as was Kästner himself, who had chosen not to flee Germany, but to remain and chronicle events.  During the Second World War, he was refused admission to the compulsory Nazi writers’ association and interrogated several times by the Gestapo; his career never recovered from the self-censorship required for his personal survival.  Shortly before Kästner’s death in 1974, his friend Marcel Reich-Ranicki described him as “Germany’s most hopeful pessimist,” writing that “he belonged to the moralists that are at the same time jesters.†††

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* Alfred Döblin, November 1918, iii, Heimkehr der Frontruppen, Deutscher Taschenbuch Vergag, 1978, pp. 152-153, cited in Richard Bessel’s Germany after the First World War, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. v.

** Philipp Blom, Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938, Basic Books, 2015, p. 75.

° Richard Bessel’s Germany after the First World War, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 102.

°° Article 231 of the treaty specified: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

°°° David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, WW Norton & Company, 2014, p. 131.

† John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, Macmillian and Company, 1920, p. 209.

†† The Long Shadow, p. 133.

††† Marcel Reich-Ranicki, quoted by Jacob Comenetz, “German Embassy’s ‘Erick Kästner Days’ Celebrate Beloved Author,” archive.li/8vZ0P, Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.