Wonderful, terrible days

Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island

Poetry of the Great War can turn up in the most unlikely of places. 

If you watch the tides of the Northumberland coast and cross to Holy Island, and if you then make your way to Lindisfarne Castle, passing through the rooms redesigned by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1901, you will find on a small desk in the library three volumes: a biography of the Victorian heroine Grace Darling, the novel The Dog Crusoe, and a slim volume of poetry, The Poets in Picardy. The poems were written by Edward de Stein during his service on the Western Front with the Machine Gun Corps and King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles). 

The last poem in the collection is titled Envoi, from the French “a sending forth, specifically, the action of sending forth a poem, the concluding part of a poetical composition.” 

Envoi

How shall I say good-bye to you, wonderful, terrible days
If I should live to live and leave ’neath an alien soil
You, my men, who taught me to walk with a smile in the ways
Of the valley of shadows, taught me to know you and love you, and toil
Glad in the glory of fellowship, happy in misery, strong
In the strength that laughs at its weakness, laughs at its sorrows and fears,
Facing the world that was not too kind with a jest and a song?
What can the world hold afterwards worthy of laughter or tears?
        —Edward de Stein 

Major de Stein survived three years on the Western Front, but never forgot the men he led and those who were left “‘neath an alien soil.” 

He prefaced his only poetry publication with a brief explanation: 


The rhymes in this volume were all jotted down in France during 1916, 1917, and 1918, either in the trenches, in billets, or in the more dignified purlieus of staff offices.  Any merit that may be found in them is due to the influence of that wonderful spirit of light-heartedness, that perpetual sense of the ridiculous which, even under the most appalling conditions, never seemed to desert the men with whom I was privileged to serve and which indeed seemed to flourish more freely in the mud and rain of the front line trenches than in the comparative comfort of billets or ‘cushy jobs,’ so that one was almost tempted to consider ‘humour’ with Asper* — ‘To be a quality of air and water!’

After the war, de Stein became a highly successful banker, serving during the Second World War as director of Finance for the Ministry of Supply (for which he was knighted in 1946). He bought Lindisfarne Castle in 1929, and he and his sister left it to the National Trust in 1944. 

De Stein died 3 November 1965, and his obituary in the London Times remembered his “indefinable flair....and intuitive judgment” as well as his qualities “of imagination and initiative” that made him successful. The charmingly frank obituary concludes:

More than most successful men ... he had a wide range of outside interests. He was a keen musician and was himself responsible for starting a series of chamber concerts. He was a gifted artist who took up water colouring and petit-point. He had a real talent for light verse, graceful and witty, but with no malice. He ran a boys’ club at Shepherd’s Bush, and played a prominent part in a number of other causes, in particular the British Red Cross, of which he was chairman of the finance committee for 14 years. A small, sprightly man, a delightful and amusing conversationalist, he was yet far from rumbustiousness in temperament and preferred to live his life in small groups. He had his vanities and sometimes failed to recognize that in small things his enthusiasms did not always match his skills. He was a keen bird-watcher, but his eye was not unerring. He was welcome at bridge tables, but for his person perhaps rather than his play. When he turned to gardening he was best suited to the role of patron and spectator. But these were but the idiosyncrasies of a genuine individualist. He was unmarried and lived all his life with his sister.** 

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* Slang term in First World War for wild activity or panic

**Edward de Stein: Developer of Companies,” London Times, 4 Nov. 1965, p. 13.