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.” 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* 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.