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| Australian Division soldiers, 1917 (Frank Hurley) |
For many
soldiers, their first arrival at the front triggers a tangled mix of
emotions: excitement, terror, detachment, awe. Ivor Gurney, a private from
Gloucestershire who had given up his scholarship at the Royal College of Music
to enlist, described his first night in the front line trenches of the Great
War as “one of the notable evenings of my life” and one “of the happiest for
years.”* Gurney was so moved by the experience that he wrote at least five letters describing it to his friends.** In
the account he sent to Catherine Abercrombie, he wrote,
But
we had not long to stay there or anywhere till we were marched here and put in
trenches with another battalion for instruction. They were Welsh, mostly, and personally I
feared a rather rough type. But, oh the joy, I crawled into a dugout, not high
but fairly large, lit by a candle, and so met four of the most delightful young
men that could be met anywhere. Thin faced and bright eyed, their faces showed
beautifully against the soft glow of the candlelight, and their musical voices
delightful after the long march at attention in silence. There was no sleep for
me that night. I made up next day a
little, but what then? We talked of Welsh folksong, of George Borrow, of Burns,
of the RCM [Royal College of Music]; of—yes—of Oscar Wilde, Omar Khayyam,
Shakespeare, and of the war: distant from us by 300 yards. Snipers were continually firing, and
rockets—fairy lights they call them: fired from a pistol—lit up the night outside.
Every now and again a distant rumble of guns to remind us of the reason we were
foregathered. They spoke of their friends dead or maimed in the bombardment a
bad one, of the night before, and in the face of their grief I sat there and
for once self-forgetful, more or less, gave them all my love, for their
tenderness, their steadfastness and kindness to raw fighters and very raw
signalers.
Candle-lit
faces, fairy lights in the sky, softly sung folksongs – all less than 300 yards
from the enemy, where artillery fires and snipers aim to kill. Gurney wrote two poems about his encounter
with the Welsh at the front, giving both the title “First Time In”– this is the
shorter of the two:†
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| Welsh Regiment, WWI |
First Time In
After the dread
tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have
come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought
us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in
sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign
things. Then we were taken in
To low huts
candle-lit shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and
there but boys gave us kind welcome;
So that we looked
out as from the edge of home.
Sang us Welsh
things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful
things. And the next days’ guns
Nor any Line-pangs
ever quite could blot out
That strangely
beautiful entry to War's rout;
Candles they
gave us precious and shared over-rations—
Ulysses found
little more in his wanderings without doubt.
'David of the
White Rock,' the 'Slumber Song' so soft, and that
Beautiful tune
to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung—but
never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.
—Ivor Gurney
Gurney’s ear is
that of a musician tuned to the soundscape of war: he notes the surface noise,
but is struck by the melodies that lie underneath. The poem’s syntactic
inversions (“Candles they gave us precious”) and echoing alliterations suggest
the mood of an ancient fireside, where warriors gather to listen to the bard. And
the deafening roar of the guns cannot mute the quiet beauty that whispers
through the Welsh songs of home, but rather increases their power.
Significantly, Gurney identifies one specific song, “David of the White Rock” (in Welsh, “Dafydd y Garreg Wen”). Tradition has it that on his death bed, the music’s
composer called for his harp and wrote the tune before dying at the age of
twenty-nine. Lyrics were added a century later, relating a tale of beauty that
is heightened by the nearness of death (I’ve included the English translation):
‘Bring me my
harp,’ was David's sad sigh,
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| Ivor Gurney |
Help me, dear
wife, put the hands to the strings,
I wish my loved
ones the blessing God brings.’
‘Last night an
angel called with heaven’s breath:
“David, play,
and come through the gates of death!”
Farewell,
faithful harp, farewell to your strings,
I wish my loved
ones the blessing God brings.’
In the letter in
which he wrote about his encounter with the Welsh to his friend and mentor
Marion Scott, Gurney closes with his own whispered consolation, attempting to
find beauty and meaning in the death that surrounds him:
War’s
damned interesting. It would be hard indeed to be deprived of all this artist’s
material now; when my mind is becoming saner and more engaged with outside
things. It is not hard for me to die, but a thing sometimes unbearable to leave
this life; and these Welsh God makes fine gentlemen. It would seem that War is
one of His ways of doing so.††
Gurney survived
the war, but his sanity did not. He
spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental institutions, and when he
died in 1937, he was buried in a Gloucester churchyard. His original gravestone (later replaced after
damage) simply states that he was “a lover and maker of beauty.”
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* Ivor Gurney,
letters to Herbert Howells and Marion Scott (June 1916).
** Pamela
Blevins, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, Boydell,
2008, p. 98 (footnote 33). Scholars know of letters sent to Marion Scott, Ethel Voynich, Catherine Abercrombie, the Chapman family, and Herbert Howells.
† This version
of the poem follows Marion’s Scott’s handwritten
copy, dated 1920-1922 and shared by the First
World War Poetry Digital Archive.
The original manuscript is held at the Gloucestershire Archives.
†† Ivor Gurney letter
to Marion Scott.
