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.