Yesterday's hero

Stefan Sauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

“Amputation was a daily occurrence in Europe from 1914-18, as modern warfare tore men apart in unprecedented ways,” writes Alex Purcell in “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War.”*  

The Great War tore men apart, both physically and mentally. In France, the military documented over 3.5 million wounded soldiers, an estimated 40% of those who served. Staggeringly, half of those were wounded twice, while an estimated 100,000 French combatants were wounded three or more times.** 

The number of British First World War amputees is estimated to be at least 41,000; German amputees are estimated at 67,000, and French amputees numbered over 70,000.*** 

Marcel Sauvage was a young medical student in Paris when the Great War began. He served as a stretcher bearer, and while tending to the wounded at the Somme, he was seriously injured and gassed. Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; “The Castigation” (translated from the French by Ian Higgins) describes a war that never ended for thousands who had fought and survived. 

The Castigation
To Frédéric Lefèvre

In the street
The carts
On the cobbles, like clacking rattles,
The taxis racing off,
Red, rear ends smoking.
The tramcars squeal
Under their trolleys.
On the pavements
People walking, walking by, walking on.
Life’s strident bellow.
The city: Paris.

1916 French postcard
"School of Glory"

Bowling along came a posh
Limousine.
A beast of burden,
A man,
A sweating man
Dragging a handcart,
Got in its way.
A gentleman leaned out
From the posh limousine,
An elderly gentleman of means,
And shouted the following observation
At the poor poverty-stricken devil
Trapped in the swirl of the street:
‘You blithering idiot,
Serve you right if you got run over.’

I looked at the man
Who was dragging the handcart.
He said nothing, did nothing.
He had a wooden leg,
He was dragging a heavy handcart,
He was sweating,
He had two medals on his dirty lapel,
The Military Cross,
The Military Medal.
This was yesterday’s hero,
A martyr sweating,
Frightened, resigned—yet another
In the swirl of life.
The posh gentleman of means
Should have done him a favour
And run him over,
Poor b—. 
        —Marcel Sauvage, trans. Ian Higgins

What is the “castigation” referred to in the poem’s title? The elderly gentleman in the limousine harshly rebukes the war amputee, but it is the body of the veteran that silently accuses all who ignore him, the “People walking, walking by, walking on.”

© IWM Art.IWM PST 13211

Those who do notice the man with the wooden leg dismiss him as no better than a “sweating man,” a “beast of burden,” and a “blithering idiot.” Yet the silent, sweating martyr who says nothing and does nothing is imagined in the poem as a Christ-like figure. The prophet Isais said of Christ, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”****

Sauvage’s poem extends this one veteran’s suffering to hundreds of thousands of amputees, writing that the man with the wooden leg was “yet another / In the swirl of life.” Just one more of the broken survivors. 

The disfigured and mutilated bodies of the war’s soldiers were painful to confront, and the physical and mental agonies of veterans were typically disregarded by even physicians. Soldiers themselves seldom talked about their suffering: “in this sense, pain remained a family taboo .... The amputees explained, ‘We speak only when we know that we will be heard.’”** 

Not only did the war wound soldiers, but it blinded and deafened entire populations to the repercussions of the violence.
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* Alex Purcell, “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War,” Through Veterans Eyes, 18 Sept. 2017,  https://throughveteranseyes.ca/2017/09/18/amputations-prosthetic-limbs-in-the-first-world-war/
** Sophie Delaport, “Mutilation and Disfiguration (France),”1914–1918 Online, updated 24 Feb. 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/mutilation_and_disfiguration_france
*** Source for number of amputees: British and German, French.
**** Isaiah 53:7, New International Version Bible. 

The Dream, Part I

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us pay closer attention to the nuances of words, sounds, line breaks, and punctuation. 

Roland Leighton, the Great War poet who is perhaps best known for his engagement to the memoirist and writer Vera Brittain, copied poems. Shortly after his enlistment in the British Army in 1914, his mother found in his room an exercise book in which Roland had written out a poem that had recently been published in the Westminster Gazette by the young Cambridge writer Kathleen Montgomery Coates.*

© The Vera Brittain Fonds,
McMaster University Library
The Roland Leighton Literary Estate

The first person who seems to have read Roland’s copy of Coates’ poem was his mother, Marie Connor Leighton.  In the anonymously published memoir that his mother wrote and dedicated to Roland after his death, she writes, “I read the lines through carelessly at first; but when I came to the third or fourth line I knew that if he was to get out to the Front and get killed this poem would haunt me always.”**

A Year and a Day

I shall remember miraculous things you said
        My whole life through –
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
  But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head
   That I loved, that I knew –
Oh, while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!

Vera Brittain

Words which no time can touch are my life’s refrain,
   But each picture flies.
All that was left to hold till I meet you again,
        Your mouth’s deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain—
   And I have forgotten your eyes,
And the way that your hair spun curls in the beating of rain! †
            —Kathleen Coates

Before leaving for the front, Roland talked with his mother about his own efforts at writing poetry and about his admiration for Vera, the sister of his good friend, Edward Brittain. Describing Vera to his mother, he said, “I like her tremendously. You would, too, if you knew her. She’s not like other girls. She’s brilliant and can think for herself. She wants to be a writer some day. But first she’s going to Oxford.”

His mother, “a prolific author of serial fiction and melodramatic novels” replied, “Going to Oxford isn’t the way for a woman to be a writer—except of treatises. But that’s beside the point.”***

Several months later, Roland copied “A Year and a Day” yet again, this time sending his copy to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914. Vera relates the story of the poem in her memoir Testament of Youth, but in her account, Roland sends her the poem in the autumn of 1915. As she tells the story, in mid-August of 1915, Roland was back from the Western Front on leave. They became engaged, and she met his family for the first time. One day, they walked by the sea, and discussed “the callousness engendered by war both at the front and in hospital.” That evening, she told him, “If I heard you were dead ... my first feeling would be one of absolute disbelief. I can’t imagine life without you.”

Roland replied abruptly, “You’d soon forget.” Vera retorted that she was not “one of the forgetting sort,” but that “if you died I should deliberately set out to marry the first reasonable person that asked me,” because “if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and things one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marry the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep you. My remembrance would live with me always and be my very own.” 

Roland conceded the argument, and Vera writes, “indeed nothing else did seem to matter; for the time being each of us remembered neither the past nor the future, but only the individual and the hour .... Some weeks later he wrote to me from the trenches of that evening, and sent me, copied from the Westminster Gazette, a poem by Kathleen Coates called “A Year and a Day.”

Roland Leighton's grave

Vera Brittain includes the poem in her memoir, then comments, “Reminiscent as the lines were, they embodied my own failure of memory as well as his. Try as I would I could never, once we were apart, recollect his face, nor even in the silence of night hear his voice, with its deep notes and its gay, high laugh. I used to think that if, by closing my eyes or sitting in the dark, I could picture his eyes as they looked when I last saw them, or in imagination listen to him speaking, it would not be so hard to be separated. It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice.”****

In the same season that Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton were becoming engaged and discussing what their future might hold, Kathleen Montgomery Coates’s only brother was killed in France while on patrol. Basil Montgomery Coates died on September 7, 1915.  His sister’s poem “The Dream” expresses the deep sorrow of that loss and will be shared and discussed in the next blog post.

 
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* I have been unable to find the poem in the Westminster Gazette, and it appears that others have also failed in the search, as various sources state that it was written/published “between 1910 and 1913.”
**Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916, pp. 176–177.
† The punctuation used in this version of the poem is that from Roland Leighton’s copy that he sent to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914 (from the First World War Digital Poetry Archive). In Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth, she changes the dash to a comma after vain and ends the poem with a full stop after rain.
***The information on Marie Leighton’s career as a writer is from Wikipedia. Her comments on Oxford as preparation for a woman’s career in writing is from Boy of My Heart, p. 179. 
**** Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, “Learning versus Life,” pp. 162 – 164, Virago, 2014 (first published in 1933). 

The Dream, Part II

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Basil Montgomery Coates was killed on the Western Front on September 7, 1915. He would have turned twenty-two on September 16th.

from Oundle Memorials
of the Great War

Kathleen Coates went to Cambridge in 1909 as a student at Girton College, earning her degree in Modern Languages in 1914. In 1912, she was joined at Cambridge by her younger brother, who was pursuing a degree in medicine at Queens College. When war broke out, Basil volunteered with the Rifle Brigade, arriving at the front in France in the early summer of 1915. He was dead within months.

Basil was shot while on patrol duty; his commanding officer wrote to the boy’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. He was out patrolling with a Corpl. Fenton, crawling about in the crops, was seen by the enemy, fired on and killed, and the corporal crawled home about 300 yards with three bullet wounds .… A young officer called Everard went out with a man, and at very great personal risk got up to your son, but was fired at so persistently that he was unable to do anything towards moving him. As soon as it was dark another party, under Lieut. Sanstone, went out to the place to try to bring the poor boy in, but only found tracks through the corn, showing the way the enemy had taken him into their lines.**

The British were never able to recover his body.

In 1918, Kathleen Montgomery Wallace (she had married in 1917) published a collection of poetry titled Lost City.*** Its dedication note reads Cantabrigiae Mortuisque Carissimus (Cambridge and the beloved dead). The book is divided into two sections: Before and After. This poem appears in the second section of the volume: 

The Dream

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down

I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,

Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,

Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came

To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,

“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”

And stopping down beneath the boughs asway

I found your name, and knew that there you lay.

And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,

While I lay in the grass and spoke to you ....

So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,

“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.

My own, my own, I shall not dream again

You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain ....”

And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see

There, on my pillow, the old agony ....
        —Kathleen Montgomery Wallace

The poem expresses the empty despair of loss and the desperate ache for ritual and burial. Without that closure, like Antigone, the sister is haunted by the image of her beloved brother’s body left to decay in the “pitiless rain.” 

In October of 1918, the Bookman reviewed Lost City:

Youth Mourning, George Clausen
© IWM Art.IWM ART 4655

The war sets more and more poets to singing as over the battlefields the birds sing the louder because of the guns. Some of these poets sing to ease their own pain and bring a bruised sweetness to those who listen .... Here in a bundle of new books of poetry and verse one finds a slender paper-covered volume on which the understanding reviewer will fasten with the thrill of the discoverer.  It is Lost City by Kathleen Montgomery Wallace and to the mind of the present reviewer it 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 ....  This woman’s poetry, haunted by the shades and beauties of the university town, speaks for itself.****

Kathleen Coates Wallace was one of many sisters who lost brothers in the First World War. In the poem “To L.H.B. (1894 – 1915),” Elizabeth Mansfield ’s also recounts a dream of her dead brother. In the dream, her brother appears to her beside a “remembered stream,” offering her berries with the words, “These are my body.  Sister, take and eat.” 

With no known burial place, Basil Montgomery Coates is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial in Belgium, one of over 11,000 names. 
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*Kathleen Coates Wallace's obituary in the London Times (31 March 1958) states she was born in 1891; other sources give the year as 1890.
** From de Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour 1914–1918, http://mrcweb.org.uk/mrc2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Basil-Montgomery-Coates-report-of-death.pdf

*** Kathleen Montgomery Coates Wallace's poem "May Term, 1916" has been shared and discussed in this blog post. The post "The Dream, Part I" examines one of her pre-war poems. 
**** “New Books: The Singing Season,” Bookman, October 1918, No. 325, Vol. LV, pp. 16 – 17.

Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.

Braving the Cooties: Pt 1

 

An Ode to a Cootie, sketch by Pvt. Walter R. Sabel
National WWI museum

The French called them totos; the British called them coddlers; the Americans called them cooties—or more colorfully, pants rabbits or seam squirrels. All the armies of the First World War battled lice infestations, and in the Great War, the louse was as ever present as shellfire, mud, and rats. 

In November of 1918, the newspaper of the AEF, the Stars and Stripes, published a letter written by Jimmy Murrin, serving with the 112th Infantry. Murrin wrote, “Some day when you are looking for space fillers, and you are hard up, you might want to slip this cootie ode and essay it; perhaps you have had enough of that sort of stuff—anyhow, I’ll take a chance.”* 

Up the Line, October 27

Photo from Murrin's memoir

We have slept in barns and barracks,
    In the mud and in the rain;
We have slept in broken buildings,
    Everywhere—in each campaign;
We have bunked with cooties rampant,
    We have slept on lousy straw;
And we’ve slept where shells have whistled
    In dugouts—but, oh, pshaw!
Well, we have hit a new place,
    Since we’ve wiggled up the line;
We are sleeping in a hen-house,
    And, say, the sleepin’s fine!
That is, we sleep when all is quiet
    And shells aren’t overhead;
Be it known, we’ll nap or slumber
    When the cooties aren’t in bed.
For, no matter where you travel,
    And no matter where you roam;
The doughboy’s got a partner—
    There’s a cootie in his home. 
—Jimmy Murrin, Hq. Co., 112th Inf.† 

Murrin’s Stars and Stripes article flatly states that the only soldier who hasn’t encountered the cootie is the man who “was never up the line”: 

Along the hillsides of the Marne, in the valley of the Vesle, in the fastness of the Argonne — where our boys have met the Hun — there the cootie has kept him company. You may not think that is true; but the cooties who are with the doughboys are game, courageous and true; they’ll stick to a man under shellfire — and they’ll keep him in motion when he longs for sleep....  There are some millions of cooties in France; how many are with the AEF the censor will not permit being known, and doughboys are having a hard time finding out. One Yank who has been up the line and who saw plenty of the fireworks very soberly wrote home: “I have not seen a single cootie in France.” He was right. For he added: “They are all married and have large families.” 

In 1918, the National Geographic headlined its June issue with the article “Courage and Cooties: Heroes without Glory.” The author, Herbert Corey, described for those on the home front both the physical and psychological toll of lice infestations. He wrote that researchers had identified lice as disease carriers: 

In the eastern field of war the louse is a typhus carrier and there is no known reason why it shouldn’t carry typhus in the west. Trench fever has been traced home to it. Until a comparatively short time ago this was a mystery, with its recurrent chills and fever and the semi-paralysis that is an occasional result.**

Corey stated that unlike other pests of the trenches that soldiers battled (such as rats), cooties were accompanied by shame and stigma. Soldiers might “know it is not their fault that they are infested, but the effect of years of civilian training persists. They still feel, against all reason, that there is something shameful in their state. They try to assume a joviality they do not feel.”** 

Murrin’s ode to the cootie is an example of that use of humor, but his post-war memoir describes the discomfort and dirt that plagued the men: “Many soldiers had gone through the war with fewer than a dozen baths, and most of these had been in streams or under circumstances where a thorough cleansing was impossible.”*** 

Corey, writing for a civilian audience, defended the doughboys: 

Perhaps the reader thinks there is something repulsive and disgusting in this tale of clean-minded young Americans picking lice out of their clothing and killing them by drops from a burning candle. Perhaps there is.... To my mind the men who can do this and still laugh—bearing in mind their rearing and clean years of their youth—are almost as nearly heroes as those who ‘hop over’ when the whistle sounds the zero hour. The ones are called upon to keep up their courage under a day-long and night-long degradation—a constant, crawling, loathsome irritation—while the others spend themselves freely in one fine burst. I cannot distinguish between brave men.** 

Corey applauded the the cheerful endurance of the American soldiers who disguised their discomfort and repugnance “with a rough form of humor.... Perhaps that is not the courage that seeks a fleeting glory in the cannon’s mouth, but it seems to me it is a fine courage just the same.”** Demonstrating that peculiar courage, one American soldier of the war noted, “ “I don’t mind the hikes now.... for all I have to do is to sort of shoo my shirt along.”**
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* “Not a Single One,” by Jimmy Murrin, Stars and Stripes, 29 Nov. 1918, p. 4.
† Murrin (Corporal James A. Murrin) survived the war and returned home to Pennsylvania, publishing his memoir in 1919: With the 112th in France: A Doughboy’s Story. He returned to work as a journalist, except for a brief interlude when “He returned to France eight years after the war ended as a member of the Battlefield Memorial Commission” (from his obituary, “James Murrin Funeral Is Set for Friday,” Oil City Derrick, 3 Mar. 1971, p. 2).
** “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 501, 498–499, 497, 503, 509.
*** With the 112th in France, by James A Murrin, Lippincott, 1919, p. 385. 

Battling the Cooties: Part II

How bad were lice infestations in the First World War? One soldier’s shirt “was found to contain 10,428 lice, and more than 10,000 eggs were found under a microscope,” while nurses serving in the 1915 typhus epidemic in Serbia reported “gray patches the size of one’s two hands upon the bodies of men brought into the hospital. The pests were so thick in these patches that from a little distance they presented the appearance of felted cloth.”*

All armies struggled with the problem. The British reported that 95% of men who had served for six months were lousy. On average, they estimated that each man carried 20 lice, but some were super carriers, infested by 100 to 300 insects.*

In addition to examining the severe discomfort and intense itching caused by “cooties,” researchers had begun to learn that lice carried disease. A National Geographic article published in 1918 entitled “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie’” describes a US Army medical research program that recruited 66 healthy volunteers for testing to determine if trench fever was “a germ disease.” Trench fever was a serious threat, causing recurrent chills and fever. It was sometimes accompanied by semi-paralysis, and in the average case, a man diagnosed with trench fever “was unfit as a fighter for six months.”**

In one experiment, healthy soldiers were injected with blood that had been taken from men with trench fever: 23 of the 34 men inoculated developed the disease. In another experiment, researchers collected lice from men with trench fever, then allowed these lice to bite 22 of the healthy recruits. Twelve of them developed trench fever. 

National Geographic celebrated the courage of those who had volunteered for medical experimentation:

The experiments conducted on America’s Sixty-six have fastened the guilt of contagion-bearing upon the body louse.... It is a simple problem in multiplication to appreciate how tremendously America’s Sixty-six may have contributed to the power of our blows against the Huns by giving science the information which will result in keeping our soldiers fit for service.**

Striking a different tone, a poem published in the AEF’s Stars and Stripes imagines weaponizing the cootie: 

If I were a cootie (pro-Ally, of course),
I’d hie me away on a Potsdam-bound horse,
And I’d seek out the Kaiser (the war-maddened cuss),
And I’d be a bum cootie if I didn’t muss
His Imperial hid from his head to his toe!
He might hide from the bombs, but I’d give him no show!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Kaiser,
        Ah, oui.

And after I’d thoroughly covered Bill’s area,
I’d hasten away to the Prince of Bavaria,
And chew him a round or two–under the Linden–
Then pack up my things and set out for old Hinden–
(Old Hindy’s the guy always talking ‘bout strafing)–
To think what I’d do to that bird sets me laughing!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Prince and old Hindy,
        Ah, oui!

I’d ne’er get fed up on Imperial gore–
I might rest for a while, but I’d go back for more.
I’d spend a few days with that Austrian crew,
And young Carl himself I’d put down for a chew;
There’d be no meatless days for this cootie, I know,
They’d all get one jolly good strafing or so.
For if I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat their damnships,
        Ah, oui!
                —A.P. Bowen, Sgt., R.T.O. (published 1 Nov. 1918)

But the US Army was determined to eradicate the pest. Men were swabbed with gasoline, smeared with ointments (vermijelli—a mix of crude oil and melted paraffin—and mercury), and dosed with NCI powder (a mixture of naphthalene, creosote, and idoform). But the most effective way to combat the louse was with boiling water, the only truly effective way to kill the nits or eggs.  

Delousing machines, nicknamed by the troops “cootie mills,” were developed for the field. Jack Campbell, a soldier with the 317th Infantry, wrote in his diary, 

Double-barrelled cootie cannon

 A “cootie-mill” is a wonderful institution.  You go in infested with lice, and in vile shape – you come out sweet and clean. These “mills” are all built pretty much on the same plan and you can get everything – shower, shave, shoe shine. They are long narrow buildings only one room thick.  First you enter “the office” where you give your “case history.” From here you enter the “undressing room” and here all your clothes, except underwear and socks, are tied into a tight bundle with your belt and put into a wire basket which is carried, on a moving belt to the steam chamber – while you, minus your underwear and socks, are given a towel and a piece of soap the size of a loaf of sugar and herded into the showers. Naturally, with hundreds waiting in line each soldier's time under the shower is limited and since these showers “just drip” instead of  “shower” you are lucky if you get wet all over in the time allotted. From the shower you enter the dressing room where you are given clean underwear and socks, and also waiting you are your “deloused” clothes – two sizes smaller from the steaming and very, very wrinkled.”***

By April of 1919, the Stars and Stripes boasted, “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off.” In early November at the time of the armistice, it was estimated that 90% of all AEF troops were “lousy,” but four months later, no more than 10% of American soldiers were infected: “Of the 454,705 troops examined, only 8,820 were found to be harboring cooties.” The aggressive elimination of the disease-bearing pest was attributed to a combination of factors: “Better living conditions, increased facilities for bathing and individual determination not to be infested with cooties, together with the activities of the delousing and bathing outfits.”****

Ah, oui!
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* “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 509.
** “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie,’” National Geographic, June 1918, p. 510.
*** Jack Campbell's Diary, Co. G, 317th Infantry, Virginia Historical Society, 9411.
**** “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off,” Stars and Stripes, 4 April 1919, 3. 

Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun

Many of the posts on this blog have begun as secondhand bookshop finds: worn, slim volumes that bear witness to a war that changed the world. 

Browsing a Cambridge secondhand book shop several months ago, I spied on an upper shelf a faded spine with the title The Life I Love, Verses by WKH. As I reached for the book, I wondered at the identity of the mysterious W.K.H. The only writer I know with those initials is William Kersley Holmes, an obscure First World War poet. Holmes is listed on the Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War as serving with the Royal Horse Artillery and the Royal Field Artillery. 

He published two volumes of war poetry (Ballads of Fields and Billets and More Ballads of Fields and Billets). Two of his poems appear on this blog (“Singing Tipperary” and “The Soldier Mood,” one of my favorites), and both are included in International Poetry of the First World War. Holmes survived the war, publishing Tramping Scottish Hills in 1946, but previously, I could find no other mention of him until his death in 1966. 

Surprisingly, the volume I had found (and then purchased for £5) was authored by Holmes and labeled “author’s presentation copy.” Published in 1958, the collection was signed by Holmes with a personal note for “Dorothy, a token of friendship.” The inside jacket provides a bit more context: 

The title of this collection is the key-note of the contents. The verses, most of which have appeared in Punch, Country Life and other periodicals, though varying from grave to gay, are alike in expressing the philosophy of a ‘long-term optimist’. In one poem in memory of a friend killed in the First World War, the author records that ‘horses he loved and laughter and the sun’; these, with hills and the comradeship of his fellowmen, are the inspiration of W.K.H. His verse conforms, for the most part, to the long-established standards, for his aim is to share with as many readers as possible his love of nature, his appreciation of what has given him food for thought, and his amusement at what has appealed to his sense of humour.*

The volume’s Introduction, written by Sir William Robieson (former editor of The Glasgow Herald) adds further detail: 

Readers of my generation have savoured with pleasure all their adult lives the light verse which has appeared so consistently in Punch and elsewhere over the initials “W.H.K.”. Those who lived in Scotland have also expected to find—for example in The Glasgow Herald—over the same initials or perhaps over the name “W.K. Holmes’ verses of a more serious kind or descriptive pieces of great charm relating to the countryside. And a select group knew that those initials and that name concealed the pleasant personality of the senior editor of Blackie & Son—with a varied earlier career to his credit as banker, hill-limber, soldier and journalist. 

All these, whatever their degree of acquaintance with him, will welcome this collection of Mr. Kersley Holmes’s fugitive pieces. It shows better than any essay could do the range of his interests, the philosophy he has developed over what is now a long lifetime, and his mastery of a variety of verse forms. ‘W.K.H’ is here in many moods and over a great variety of experience—as a Gunner of the First World War, a connoisseur of Scottish place-names, a lover of the hills, and in his retirement an interested spectator of life.*

Despite being published forty years after the end of the First World War, the collection includes four war poems: “Bran Mash” (subtitled “A Flash-back to 1915”), a tender account of feeding war horses and finding comfort in their companionship; “The Truth about Ulysses,” a poem that relates the long-term effects of outsider status on returning soldiers; “The Ultimate Outrage, 1916,” an ode to a “favourite shirt” that was destroyed by enemy shell fire, and the poem “Killed in Action,” alluded to in the book’s jacket cover. 

© IWM Q 34105

Killed in Action
Messines, 1917

Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun,
     A song, wide spaces and the open air;
The trust of all dumb living things he won,
     And never knew the luck too good to share.

His were the simple heart and open hand
     And honest faults he never strove to hide;
Problems of life he could not understand
     But as a man would wish to die he died.

Now, though he will not ride with us again,
     His merry spirit seems our comrade yet,
Freed from the power of weariness or pain,
     Forbidding us to mourn—or to forget.
               —W.K.H. (William Kersley Holmes)

This simple elegy for a man who died nearly a half-century earlier recalls the depth of friendship soldiers shared in the trenches as well as the heartbreak of losses that returned home with those who served, never to be forgotten. 

In June of 1915, the Glasgow Herald reviewed W. Kersley Holmes’ war poems, writing, “They range from the grave to the humorous, from the realistic to the romantic, but something of the brightness of youth is in them all, something of that gallant gaiety which makes a jest of the discomforts of life, yet never thinks of life itself as a jest.”**
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* The Life I Love, Verses by W.K.H, by W. Kersley Holmes, Blackie & Sons, Glasgow, 1958.
**Review qtd. in the Dollar Magazine, vol. 14, no. 54, June 1915, pp. 74–75 (a publication of Dollar Academy, Holmes’s alma mater).

Forgotten deeds of grace in wartime

Thomas Hardy by Jacques-Emile Blanche
1906 Tate N03580 10

In 1917, the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy published a poetry collection titled Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verse. Sixteen of the final poems in that collection appear under the subtitle “Poems of War and Patriotism.” Hardy was seventy-four when the First World War broke out, and his poetry expresses his ambivalence about the conflict. He celebrated the “faith and fire” of the “Men Who March Away,” mourned for the Belgium refugees fleeing “ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end,” but wrote bitterly of national and political interests that had plunged the world into total war. 

Often When Warring

Often when warring for he wist not what,
An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,
And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;

Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot
The deed of grace amid the roar and reek;
Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak
He there has reached, although he has known it not.

For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act
Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thereby muffled victory’s peal of pride,
Rended to ribands policy’s specious page
That deals but with evasion, code, and pact,
And war's apology wholly stultified.

1915.
—Thomas Hardy (from Moments of Vision)

Hardy’s poem contrasts one soldier’s simple act of mercy with the “artificial rage” that governments stir up as they send men to kill one another.  The poem argues that care for a suffering enemy is the “natural mindset,” which exposes the insincere concern for others that is used to justify power-hungry leaders’ codes, pacts, and dissembling policies. 

In Hardy’s vision of the battlefield, soldiers may not understand why they have been tasked to kill, yet often they instinctively feel compassion for others caught up in the same maelstrom. The selfless “deed of grace amid the roar and reek” demonstrates a “larger vision than the tongue can speak.” The act of offering water to a wounded enemy speaks louder than the shrill language of propaganda that calls men to arms.  

In the fall of 1916, Hardy visited “the large camp of some 5000 German prisoners in Dorchester” and the nearby “the English wounded in hospital.” Following the visit, he commented, 

At the German prisoners’ camp, including the hospital, operating room, etc., were many sufferers. One Prussian, in much pain, died whilst I was with him—to my great relief, and his own. Men lie helpless here from wounds: in the hospital a hundred yards off other men, English, lie helpless from wounds—each scene of suffering caused by the other!*

In February of 1917, Hardy wrote to the Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, 

...nothing effectual will be accomplished in the cause of Peace till the sentiment of Patriotism be freed from the narrow meaning attached to it in the past (still upheld by Junkers and Jingoists) and be extended to the whole globe. On the other hand, that the sentiment of Foreignness—if the sense of a contrast be really rhetorically necessary—attach only to other planets and their inhabitants, if any. I may add that I have been writing in advocacy of those views for the last twenty years.**

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* Florence Emily Hardy, Later Years of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1930, p. 173.
** Florence Emily Hardy, Later Years of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1930, p. 174.

A Strong Man's Agony

 Readers may be familiar with the poem “Villanelle” that Roland Leighton wrote for Vera Brittain in April 1915 before the couple became engaged in August of that year: “Violets from Plug Street Wood, / Sweet, I send you oversea.” But Leighton wrote other war poems that deserve a wider audience. After his death, when his family went through Roland’s returned kit in January of 1916, they found his “private exercise book...containing some poems...in various stages of completeness, mostly written in pencil.”* Vera Brittain remarks in a letter to her brother that many of these poems Roland had apparently “never shown anybody.”*

Roland Leighton © 

Ploegsteert**

Love have I known, and dawn and gold of day-time,
And winds and songs and all the joys that are
Known once, and as a child that tires with play-time,
Leaped from them to the elemental dust of War.

I have seen blood and death, but all has ending,
And even Horror is but made to cease;
I am sickened with Love that lives only for lending,
And all the loathsome pettiness of peace.

Give me, God of Battles, a field of death,
A Hill of Fire, a strong man’s agony...
    —Roland Leighton

The unfinished poem may pose more questions than it answers, but they are good questions.

How are love and war related? The opening line of the poem situates love in the past, in a previous “gold of day-time” when songs and simple joys were woven through the fabric of everyday life. But then the speaker “Leaped from them to the elemental dust of War,” leaving behind childlike things for the desert wastelands of the Western Front. There would be no going back. 

In the second stanza, the speaker writes with first-hand experience of blood, death, and Horror. He is now “sickened with Love that lives only for lending”—perhaps because he has learned that love cannot last, that nothing can survive the war. Even peace is loathsome and petty, for when it comes, it will disappoint. The poem suggests that when the horrors of war cease—whether in the peace of the grave or an armistice agreement—all that was beautiful and whole will have died. In war and its aftermath, love is only for the lending—ephemeral and transient. 

How are faith and war related? The final, unfinished stanza of the poem is a prayer, but it does not address God as Father, Saviour, or Comforter. This prayer is addressed to the God of Battles, and it asks for neither protection or comfort, but for “a field of death, / A Hill of Fire, a strong man’s agony.” In these lines, might Leighton, like Julian Grenfell in his poem “Into Battle,” be claiming that fighting and dying in battle are what give life purpose and meaning? Or do these lines ask simply for strength to endure the agony and death that almost certainly await?  If this is the case, the poem comes nearer to the spirit of “Before Action,” written by William Noel Hodgson in late June of 1916 as he prepared for the first day’s attack at the Somme. 

How does war change a person? One scholar states that the poem is dated April 1915,***  while Anne Powell in A Deep Cry states that the poem was written in November or December of 1915. Both accounts are likely right. A few weeks after Leighton’s unit arrived in Ploegsteert Wood in April of 1915, Roland wrote to Vera of the stark differences that marked his “new life”: 

It is very nice sitting here now. At times I can quite forget danger and war and death, and think only of the beauty of life, and love—and you. Everything is in such grim contrast here. I went up yesterday morning to my fire trench, through the sunlit wood, and found the body of a dead British soldier hidden in the undergrowth a few yards from the path.... The ground was slightly marshy and the body had sunk down in it so that only the toes of his boots stuck up above the soil.****

Leighton’s description of the “grim contrast” between life before the war and his “new life” at the front seems to mirror the abrupt shift the poem enacts between stanzas one and two: the leap into war. Leighton also wrote to Vera of his concern that his courage would fail in battle: “I wonder if I shall be afraid when I first get under fire? (11 April 1915), and again, “Soon perhaps I may see death come to someone near and realise it and be afraid. I have not yet been afraid” (12 April 1915).† This apprehension may be reflected in the poem’s prayer for strength and endurance (if that is what the last lines suggest). By November of 1915, Leighton realized that in coping with death and the ugliness of war, he had become estranged from the man he had been. Roland wrote to Vera (who by this time had begun nursing at Camberwell Hospital), 

I wonder if your metamorphosis has been as complete as my own. I feel a barbarian, a wild man of the woods, stiff, narrowed, practical, an incipient martinet perhaps—not at all the kind of person who would be associated with prizes on Speech Day, or poetry, or dilettante classicism ..... We go back in the trenches tomorrow.††

from FWW Poetry Digital Archive©

Later that month, he wrote to Vera apologizing for his conceit and selfishness in focusing on his own misery, then shared his sympathy for the hardships she must be enduring as a nurse:

It all seems such a waste of Youth, such a desecration of all that is born for Poetry & Beauty. And if one does not even get a letter occasionally from someone who despite his shortcomings perhaps understands & sympathises it must make it all the worse .... until one may possibly wonder whether it would not have been better never to have met him at all or at any rate until afterwards. I sometimes wish for your sake that it had happened that way.†††

Here, Roland seems to echo the oppressive weight of the lines, “I am sickened with Love that lives only for lending, / And all the loathsome pettiness of peace.” If Leighton began the poem in April of 1915, it’s likely that he continued to revise it up until his death. On the night of 22 December 1915, while inspecting wire in front of British lines, Leighton was shot in the abdomen by a sniper. He lived long enough to be carried to the casualty clearing station, dying  the next evening.

After reading and transcribing “Ploegsteert,” in January of 1916, Vera sent a copy of Roland’s poem to their friend Victor. Victor had earlier told Vera that while at school before the war, Roland had declared that “death in War [was] his ideal.”º Victor answered Vera’s letter, trying to make sense of Roland’s unfinished poem: 

‘And all the loathesome pettiness of peace’ is a theme he often ... discussed with me. All through the last part of his time at Uppingham he seemed to look and long for the stern reality of War and the elemental principles that War involves. He considered that in War lay our one hope of salvation as a Nation, War where all the things that do no matter are swept rudely aside and one gets down to the rock-bottom of the elementary facts of life.ºº

But just over a month later, Vera wrote to her brother that they had learned more of the specifics of Roland’s death: “It was anything but a clean bullet wound straight through, as we have been thinking; it was a terrible affair. ” Col. Harman ... did say that ‘the bullet exploded inside him & literally blew out his back.’” Roland was given "a very large dose of morphia indeed” before he was moved to the nearest casualty clearing station. There, medics “simply looked at one another & gasped ... they could not remember any wound quite so terrible. Under the surface the whole of his back was literally smashed to pulp, so that the different organs were barely recognizable.”ººº 

As further details of Roland’s excruciating death emerged, Vera again wrote her brother: ‘We know now that in those few minutes of sensible consciousness, he faced the Truth—faced the fact that He was wounded in a vital spot, faced agony, more than probably faced death itself. He got with grim exactness the answer to the prayer-poem for 'a strong man's agony.’ºººº
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© Photograph of Leighton is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © The Literary Executors for the Vera Brittain Estate, 1970 and The Vera Brittain Fonds, McMaster University Library. 
* Letters from a Lost Generation, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, Vera to Edward Brittain, 14 Jan. 1916, pp. 213–214.
** “Ploegsteert,” by Leighton, Roland (1895-1915). The Vera Brittain Fonds, McMaster University Library / The Roland Leighton Literary Estate via First World War Poetry Digital Archive, accessed April 24, 2023, http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/5614. There are two versions of the poem that appear on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, and these differences raise still further questions. The typed version that appears on the Digital Archive is the version that I have shared and the one that appears in the few publications that include the poem (such as Anne Powell’s A Deep Cry). But the FWW Poetry Digital Archive also includes a version “transcribed in an unknown hand” from the Roland Leighton Literary estate. This version includes two significant changes in the last stanza: the adjective good is inserted to describe the “God of Battles,” and the speaker requests a Hell (rather than Hill) of Fire. There are also three additional differences in punctuation in the hand-copied version. Two appear in the second stanza: the first line of the stanza has no end punctuation, and the second line closes with a full-stop (or period), rather than a semi-colon. The other difference is in the ellipses that close the fragment: in the hand-copied version, the ellipsis extend across the page and continue even to the next line.
*** “Roland, part 2,” testamentofyouth, https://testamentofyouth.wordpress.com/nameless-glamour-2/roland-part-2/. This blog is an excellent source for those wishing to read more about Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain, and the historical context of the First World War.
**** Letters from a Lost Generation, 20–21 April 1915, Roland to Vera, pp. 86–87
† Letters from a Lost Generation, Roland to Vera, pp. 77, 79.
†† Letters from a Lost Generation, 3 Nov. 1915, Roland to Vera, pp. 182–183.
††† Letters from a Lost Generation, 26 Nov. 1915, Roland to Vera, p. 190.
º Letters from a Lost Generation, 14 Jan. 1916, Vera to Edward Brittain, p. 214. 
ºº Letters from a Lost Generation, 19 Jan. 1916, Victor to Vera, p. 216. 
ººº Letters from a Lost Generation, 23 February 1916, Vera to Edward, pp. 233–234.
ºººº Letters from a Lost Generation, 27 Feb. 1916, Vera to Edward, p. 238.
© Image of “Ploegsteert,” The Vera Brittain Fonds, McMaster University Library / The Roland Leighton Literary Estate via First World War Poetry Digital Archive,  http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/5614.

How alone

“Undaunted April crept and sewed
    Her violets in dead men's faces...”*

A previous post on this blog has shared Muriel Stuart’s “It’s Rose-Time Here, 1918,” a poem that mingles images of fragrant flowers with the wet blood of fallen soldiers and “things are not men— / Things shapeless, sodden, mute.” 

In her same collection (The Cockpit of Idols, 1918), Stuart included another poem that explores the burden of loss that those on the home front continued to bear, long after the war had ended. 

From World's Work
June 1922

When I grow old and my quick blood is chilled,
And all my thoughts are grey as my grey hair,
When I am slow and dull, and do not care,
And all the strife and storm of Life are stilled;
Then if one carelessly should speak your name
It will go through my body like swift spears
To set my fireless bosom in a flame,
My faded eyelids will be bright with tears;
And I shall find how far my heart has gone
From wanting you, how lost and long ago
That love of ours was: I shall suddenly know
How old and grey I am . . . and how alone.
—Muriel Stuart

Upon first reading, the poem seems to mourn the death of a soldier. But the war birthed another kind of loss: In his poem “They,” Siegfried Sassoon asserts that every man who has served “will not be the same.” And Vera Brittain, in her essay “War Service in Perspective,” also describes the “barrier of indescribable experience” that the First World War erected between the men who had fought and the women who loved them.  

Muriel Stuart Irwin married Guy Neville Minnitt in 1912. Little is known of Guy Minnitt’s war experience except that he served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and survived the war. In 1923, Harriet Monroe wrote of meeting Muriel Stuart in London, noting that the writer is “the most interesting of the younger English poets. Her first adventure in motherhood—in private life she is Mrs. Minnitt—had just been successfully passed when I reached London; she was not sure whether a book or a baby was the more important achievement.”** 

In 1926, Guy Minnitt and Muriel Stuart divorced. She remarried Arthur William Board in September of 1927 and never published another book of poetry. 

A biography of Stuart published on the Persephone Books website states,

Muriel Stuart was a successful and well-known poet during and just after the First World War (she is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography because of her poems). She then had two children, gave up writing poetry and took to gardening with enormous enthusiasm and dedication. She wrote only two books, Fool’s Garden (1936), about creating a garden in Surrey, and the one we have chosen to reprint, Gardener’s Nightcap. After the war, for thirty years, she was a well-known columnist for gardening magazines. Although a great beauty, Muriel Stuart was shy and self-contained – and happiest in her garden.

What caused Muriel Stuart to exchange poetry for gardening? We will probably never know why one of the most promising young women writers, a poet whom Thomas Hardy described as “superlatively good” turned from poetry that reflected on “the weight of social expectations on women” (see for example her poems “Words” and “The Bastard” ) to prose and perennials.
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*from “Thèlus Wood” by Muriel Stuart, in Miscellany of Poetry, 1919, edited by W. Kean Seymour.
** “The Editor in England” by Harriet Monroe, Poetry, Oct. 1923, v 23, n. 1 p. 38.

A Forest Offering

Attack Developing in the Champagne, Blanc Mont Sector 
Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919 Smithsonian American Art Museum

Soldiers’ accounts of the First World War are rich in descriptions of trees and woods, such as those at Ploegsteert, Delville, Mametz, Belleau, and High Wood. Lieutenant Richard Talbot Kelly fought at Loos, the Somme, and Arras, and he recalled, “To me, half the war is a memory of trees: fallen and tortured trees, trees untouched in summer moonlight, torn and shattered winter trees, trees green and brown, grey and white, living and dead.”*

Private Norman Edwards, serving with the 1/6th Gloucestershires, was also haunted by the woods of the Great War:

Thou Shalt Not Steal
John Singer Sargent, 1918

How can I describe the spell at Ploegsteert Wood, not the horrors of which I have just written, but the living impalpable beauty of that place? To the men of the 4th Division who captured it and held it in the winter it was doubtless a place of evil memory, but to us who were fortunate enough to occupy it in May when the earth was warm with spring and the enemy comparatively quiet, it was a peaceful spot. To turn one’s back to the parapet and watch the edge of the wood take on the pale golden glow of dawn, later to lie down amid the forget-me-nots in the warm sun or stand naked and bathe in a shell-hole filled with water, were experiences that aroused one’s aesthetic facilities to a high pitch. One realised how close one was living to nature ... and the thought that possibly each dawn might be the last accentuated the delight.** 

Before the war, F.W. Harvey roamed the hills and woods of Gloucestershire with his school friend Ivor Gurney. Both enlisted and served on the Western Front, and both were witnesses to trauma and death. Each man struggled in the war’s aftermath. Gurney was declared insane in 1922, living the next fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals until his death in 1937. Harvey married, had children, and continued to write poetry, but as his physician noted, “His years in the prisoner of war camp had inflicted psychic trauma from which he never really recovered. He had been permanently scarred. He was a war casualty although he would have been the last to admit it.”*** 

Ten years after the war’s end, Harvey composed a poem for those whom he had loved and lost to the war. According to researcher J.G. Repshire, Harvey recited the poem at the local Yorkley Armistice Day ceremony each year,† but the poem wasn’t included in any of Harvey’s subsequent poetry collections. Harvey died in 1954; the poem, along with letters, scrapbooks, and numerous other unpublished works, was found in 2010 in his home overlooking the Forest of Dean.****

To Old Comrades, A Forest Offering

Knowing that war was foul, yet all a-hunger

For that most dear companionship it gave,

Dirleton Memorial, East Lothian Courier

I wished myself once more on lousy straw;
And in a trice was there; and ten years younger, 
With singing soldiers scornful of the grave:
The tough mates, the rough mates that lay on lousy straw,
And since have laid them down in earth ...
                    I saw
Again their faces flicker in the light
Of candles fixed most dangerously in rings
Of bayonets stabbed in wooden beams, or stuck
Down into the floor’s muck ...     
                    The woods are bright  
With smouldering beech. Only a robin sings.
Alone to-day amid the misty woods,
Alone I walk gathering fallen leaves,
For it is Autumn and the day of the dead.
I come to where in solemn silence broods
A monument to them whose fame still rings
(Clear as a bugle blown) to him that grieves,

And lay my leaves for crown upon each head
Here, my old Forest friends, are your flowers!
Beautiful in their death as you in yours;
Symbol of all you loved, and were, and are.
Beautiful now as when you lived among us!
And in their heart I place this spotted fungus,
Symbol of war that slayeth all things fair.
    —F.W. Harvey

In the spring of 1930, Harvey published a newspaper article titled “Robbing the Soldier of His Treasured Memories,” in which he wrote, “The most lonely man in the world today is the old soldier. Most of his friends were killed. The newer generation growing up knows not him or his.”††  

In Gloucestershire, the county he loved, Harvey is still remembered as “The Laureate of Gloucestershire” or more simply, “The Forest Poet.” 

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* Richard Talbot Kelly, A Subaltern’s Odyssey: A Memoir of the Great War, 1915–1917, Kimber, 1980. 

** Norman Edwards, quoted in Richard van Emden’s Tommy’s Ark, Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 84. 

*** Bill Tandy, A Doctor in the Forest, quoted in Anthony Boden’s FW Harvey: Soldier, Poet, History Press, 2016, p. 413. 

**** With thanks to the family of FW Harvey and the Harvey Society for permission to share this poem. 

† James Grant Repshire, F.W. Harvey and the First World War: A biographical study of F.W. Harvey and his place in the First World War literary canon, dissertation 2016, Univ. of Exeter., p. 262. 

†† Cited in Repshire, p. 265.