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| Cambridge War Memorial |
In October of 1918, in its review of newly published works, The Bookman praised a small volume of
poetry titled Lost City, claiming that the
work
makes a trilogy with Rupert Brooke
and Rose Macaulay. It is a book of Cambridge and the Fen Country and of those
who went from Cambridge, that city of youth, never to return. The poetry has the clear colour, the pure
music, the intensity that entitles it to a place in the trilogy.
The author, Kathleen Montgomery (née Coates) Wallace, was a
graduate of Girton College, Cambridge. Together with Margaret Postgate (Cole) and
three other Girton students, Kathleen Coates had contributed to a small volume
of love poetry, Bits of Things, published
in the spring of 1914. In the halcyon days before the Great War, while earning her degree in English, she was
joined at Cambridge by her younger brother Basil, who studied medicine at
Queens’ College, where their father had served as Bursar and Assistant Tutor before
his death in 1912. When war was declared, Kathleen's brother Basil was an early
volunteer, joining the 10th Rifle Brigade in 1914. Sent to France early in the summer of 1915, he
was killed by a German sniper within sight of his own lines on 7 September
1915, just days before his 22nd birthday. His body was never recovered.*
Lost City, divided
into “Before” and “After,” mourns the death of her brother and struggles to
create a locus for grieving a soldier who has no known grave, as his sister
remembers him in the familiar sights of the university town they shared.
May Term, 1916
I have come back in a rich hour of May
My heart, to this gray town of yours and mine,
To the grave gardens by the river’s line
Where scents rise softly at the end of day
—Back from hot city pavements worlds away,
Where life flows outwards in a ceaseless line,
Where soul treads hard on soul and makes no sign.
—To the dear smell of lawns, and the branches sway.
Gold of the sky, black boughs, and the rooks call
The evening stillness rises like a tide—
Across the cobbled court I hush my tread;
There is your window, lamplight on your wall,
There is a shadow on the blind inside—
But you are dead, my dear, but you are dead.
—Kathleen
Montgomery Wallace
On the home front, life continued, and it is this that tinges
all of reality with a sense of the surreal, as described in the final stanzas
of another of Wallace’s poems “Unreturning”:
Red leaves above your door,
Gray walls and
echoing street
Whose stones will never more
Ring to your
passing feet;
Strange! to think Term is here,
Life leads the same
old dance,
While you lie dead, my dear,
Somewhere in France….
The War Record of 10th
(Service) Battalion records the details of Basil Montgomery Coates’ death
in its entry for 6th - 13th September 1915:
2nd Lieut. B.M. Coates and Corporal
Felton while out on patrol on 7th September were seen by the enemy when about
sixty yards from their trenches and were fired upon. Corporal Felton was hit in
three places, Lieutenant Coates was also hit. Lieutenant Coates told Corporal
Felton he was done for and to go back. Corporal Felton reported the matter and
2nd Lieut. Everard went out immediately and reached the body, but was forced to
return as fire was opened on him. He reported that Lieutenant Coates was in his
opinion dead. At dusk an Officer patrol went out to secure the body, they
reached the spot but found that it had been moved, and from marks on the ground
they formed the opinion that it had been dragged into the German trenches.
Owing to the ground sloping at this spot towards the German trenches it was
impossible to see the ground from our lines. In the evening a German sentry
shouted over to our lines “officer killed.”
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| Ploegsteert Memorial Photo by Andrew Arnold (ww1geek.com) |
Coates’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel S. J. Loftus,
wrote to Basil’s mother, “Your son was killed yesterday (7 Sept.) while on
patrol duty, and unfortunately we were unable to recover his body, which the
Germans have taken into their lines, and which they will no doubt give an
honourable burial.” Another officer, Lieutenant C. Warren, added, “Coates was one
of the bravest men I’ve known. … He had become very keen about day patrolling,
which is risky work and had done several good patrols…. It [Coates’ death] was
a terrible shock to us all, as we were all immensely fond of him. He was so
good-natured and had such a charming manners, and was always cheerful and
considerate.”
In January of 1917, the Cambridge
Independent Press announced the engagement of Kathleen Montgomery Coates to
Major James Hill Wallace, a Canadian officer who was attached to the Canadian
Mounted Rifles and who by the war’s end was serving as Chief
Supervisor of the Canadian YMCA. The
couple were married in February of 1917, and after the Armistice, Kathleen
Montgomery Wallace traveled with her husband to Canada and China, raising four
sons and writing numerous novels and children’s books, among them, Immortal Wheat: An Imaginative
Interpretation of the Lives and Works of the Brontës.
When she died in 1958, the London Times obituary incorrectly provided her age as 76 (she was
only 68) and noted that she was “a novelist of pleasant and
unaffected accomplishment and in later years the author of a number of
attractive books for children…. Though her writing lacked something of
distinction, she was observant and sympathetic, had a nice feminine feeling for
the romantic verities, and was almost always pleasant and easy to read.” The obituary also stated that “among the 20 or so volumes
which she produced, some of them perhaps too much inclined towards the
sentimental.** No mention was made of
Kathleen Montgomery Wallace’s war poetry.
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* Much of the biographical information is taken from the Mill Road
Cemetery website, researched and authored by Dr. Jonathan Holmes, Emma Easterbrook, and Ian Bent.
** London
Times, 31 March 1958, p. 10.
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