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).