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.