Slow Madness of Annihilation

Poster © IWM Art.IWM PST 12052

On the night of January 19, 1915, the first German zeppelin attacks in England targeted cities and towns on the Norfolk coast. London’s first zeppelin attack occurred on May 31, 1915 when 90 incendiary bombs and 30 grenades fell on the city. Seven people were killed and thirty-five were wounded. By war’s end, the death toll in London from zeppelin raids neared 700, and an estimated 2,000 people had been seriously wounded. Nancy Cunard’s poem “Destruction” speaks of the devastating powerlessness felt by many.

Destruction*

I saw the people climbing up the street

Maddened with war and strength and thought to kill.

And after followed Death, who held with skill

His torn rags, royally, and stamped his feet.

The fires flamed up and burnt the serried town

Most where the poorer, humbler, houses were;

Death followed with proud feet and smiling stare,

And the mad crowds ran madly up and down.

And many died and hid in unfound places

In the black ruins of the frenzied night.

Yet Death still followed in his surplice, white

And streaked, in imitation of their faces ….

But in the morning, men began again

To mock Death—laughing at their bitter pain.

            —Nancy Cunard (from Wheels, second edition, 1917)

Iris Tree, Nancy Cunard’s friend, wrote that during the war the two women were bound by “loneliness and death”:

Together we had braved the panic of first bombings over London, and watched their fires redden on sky and river, ourselves burnt out by the terrible gaieties of last encounters, now made unreal by the unrealities of war—all the metal and struggle, trains, ships, mourning, noise of unknown distances from which we were excluded as figures of illusion—a theme that left its shadow on us both in different ways.**

A VAD nurse living in north London remembers being awakened in the night by her landlady’s cry “For the love of God, Miss McAllister, get up!” Agnes McAllister recalls, “you could see for miles around and with all the searchlights there it looked like a big silver cigar in the sky. And it fascinated me beyond everything.” With her son, Agnes’s landlady crawled under the bed and pleaded with Agnes to come away from the window, but she refused saying, “‘If anything’s happening to me, I’d rather see it coming.’ And then as it got near, it was like an express train over your head it was the incredible noise that it made. But, you know, they were fascinating with the light on them like big silver cigars coming along.”***

The first lines of Cunard’s poem “And If the End Be Now?” express the surreal changes that confronted civilians at war:   

The rooms are empty and the streets are bare,

No lovers meet at midnight under the stars,

And the past pleasures of congenial hours

Forgotten lie; yet now these flowers that fade

Once dressed the gardens with gay delight.

Ah, patiently we must grow friends with grey,

Put out of mind the colour of the flame

And the triumphant songs of inspiration;

Obliterate adventure, memory.

The silence of desertion has begun

And the slow madness of annihilation….

By 1916, at least seven of Nancy Cunard’s friends had been killed in battle, among them Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Julian and William Grenfell. She struggled with survivor’s guilt, and by 1919 “her intense awareness of the war and its costs in human lives … led to a nervous breakdown.”****

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* The poem, with alterations, was later published as “Zeppelins” in Cunard’s 1921 collection, Outlaws.

** Iris Tree, We Shall Not Forget, p. 21, cited in Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist by Lois Gordon, Columbia UP, 2007, p. 59.

*** “Voices of the First World War: Zeppelins over Britain,” Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-zeppelins-over-britain.

**** Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, Columbia UP, 2007, p. 52.