Margaret Sewell (1927) by John Moody On the 10-year anniversary of her husband's death (from Liss Llewelyn website) |
The Great War ended on November 11, 1918, but its effects were felt for years to come. Louis Golding,
the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia who had settled in Manchester, was rejected
from British army service for medical reasons: poor vision, inflamed tonsils, and diseased lungs.* Wanting to contribute in some way, Golding volunteered as a
hospital orderly and canteen worker, serving in England,
Salonika, and France.* His first book of
poetry, Sorrow of War, was published
in 1919 and draws upon his experiences in tending the wounded.
Broken Bodies
Not for the
broken bodies,
When the War is over and done,
For the miserable eyes that never
Again shall see the sun;
Not for the broken bodies
Crawling over the land,
The patchwork limbs, the shoddies,
Not for the broken bodies
Dear Lord, we crave Your hand.
Not for the broken bodies,
We pray Your dearest aid,
When the ghost of War for ever
Is levelled at last and laid;
Not for the broken bodies
That wrought their sorrowful parts
Our chiefest need of God is,
Not for the broken bodies,
Dear Lord—the broken hearts!
When the War is over and done,
For the miserable eyes that never
Again shall see the sun;
Not for the broken bodies
Crawling over the land,
The patchwork limbs, the shoddies,
Not for the broken bodies
Dear Lord, we crave Your hand.
Not for the broken bodies,
We pray Your dearest aid,
When the ghost of War for ever
Is levelled at last and laid;
Not for the broken bodies
That wrought their sorrowful parts
Our chiefest need of God is,
Not for the broken bodies,
Dear Lord—the broken hearts!
—Louis Golding
Though Golding’s
poem “Broken Bodies” bears witness to his medical work during the war, it also likely draws upon a more personal tragedy: Golding’s younger brother, Jack, a soldier with the 1/7th Manchester Regiment, was killed in one of the last German offensives of the war on April
5, 1918.
In 1940, Golding
published his memoir, The World I Knew. In
it, he describes the sadness and unease that characterized life after the Armistice:
Louis Golding, 1917 |
The
war came to an end. I returned to
Oxford, in the autumn of 1919. It was
not, as I had sometimes hoped it might be, a gay season. There was something a little husky, a little
wild in the voices of the autumnal city, as if they told of Death departing
from his covenant, of his coming not when the fruit had been gathered, but when
the sap rose through the trees. That
year, when the flush of red washed flame-like over the creepers, there were many
to whom the colour spoke too vividly of the flush of red that had washed over
the green fields of France that did not always remain green.**
Golding also became
increasingly concerned with anti-Semitism following the war, and in 1932, Hogarth
Press published his short work A Letter to
Adolf Hitler. Golding had spent time in Europe in the interwar years, and he describes a visit to Berlin in
1931, where he witnessed
Jack Golding |
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* Louis Golding,
The World I Knew, Hutchinson &
Co., 1940, p. 27.
** Golding, The World I Knew, p. 35.
*** Golding, The World I Knew, p. 216.
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