The Cheerful Lie

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers"

Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first published as a poet.* Yet during her lifetime, Montgomery published only one poem that explicitly addresses the First World War: “Our Women.”** A cursory reading of “Our Women” is likely to dismiss the poem as naively patriotic, but when read in the context of Montgomery’s other war writings and her personal grief, the poem reveals a complex, ambivalent view of the conflict. In its three short stanzas, Montgomery describes three women, each of whom is grappling with the emotional traumas of war.

"Would some thoughtful hand in this
distant land please scatter some 
flowers for me?" 

Our Women

Bride of a day, your eye is bright,
   And the flower of your cheek is red.
‘He died with a smile on a field of France—
   I smile for his sake,’ she said.

Mother of one, the baby you bore
   Sleeps in a chilly bed.
‘He gave himself with a gallant pride—
   Shall I be less proud?’ she said.

Woman, you weep and sit apart,
   Whence is your sorrow fed?
‘I have none of love or kin to go—
   I am shamed and sad,’ she said.
       —L.M. Montgomery

Each of the bereaved women portrayed in “Our Women” is isolated, walled off within her own stanza, set apart from both the grief and the comfort of others. Each speaks to herself in a private monologue of mourning. 

In the first stanza, a new bride attempts to convince herself that she must appear happy, and so she determinedly represses her grief at the death of her husband. She encourages herself to believe the implausible story that was often written in letters informing women of their husband’s, son’s, and sweetheart’s deaths: the end was quick and painless; he “died with a smile.” Mirroring the action of her husband at the moment of his death, the bride smiles “for his sake,” offering up the arduous task of concealing her own anguish as an act of patriotic service akin to that of her husband’s. Like soldiers who neither speak nor write of the horrors they witness at the front, women are also engaged in the nation-wide practice of telling, selling, and believing what Montgomery refers to in both Rilla of Ingleside and her journals as “the cheerful lie.”***

In the second stanza, a mother persuades herself to feel proud that her son is dead. First World War researchers have argued that the pressure on women to forego public mourning was especially true for mothers: “In many cultures, mothers were expected to disavow their grief and channel it into forms of patriotism and heightened nationalistic pride.”†  Nearly all countries involved in the First World War attempted to harness the political power of the ideals of Mother and Motherhood. Before the 1918 German offensive, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie addressed his troops: “To those who will fall I say, ‘you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons.’”†† Taking pride in a child’s death was one of the ways that mothers were encouraged to find a sense of worth and purpose during the war. 

The only woman who allows herself to weep is the woman who has no one to give to the war. Both the grieving bride and mother define themselves in their relationships to the soldiers they have loved and lost. Both women model their behaviour after that of their soldier, giving smile for smile, pride for pride. The childless woman sits alone and weeps in shame: she does not have a loved one to sacrifice to the war. 

Montgomery’s personal situation was closest to the solitary figure described in the third stanza. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, was forty-four years old when the war began; her eldest son, Chester, had just turned two; and her second son, Hugh, was stillborn on August 13, 1914, just nine days after England declared war on Germany.†††  The loss of her infant son devastated Montgomery. In her thinking and writing, Montgomery’s maternal grief becomes entangled with the dead of the war. Like the women whose sons died far from home, she is haunted by the thought of her son “lying lonely in his little grave” and imagines hearing his cry: “Little Hugh was calling to me from his grave—‘Mother, won’t you come to me?’”†††† For Montgomery, the tragedy of her son’s death at birth is linked to the larger national tragedy of the war. Given this context, the shamed, weeping woman of “Our Women” who has no son to surrender to the state may be read as a disguised expression of the author’s own grief. 

Strikingly and at its core, Montgomery’s “Our Women” subverts the traditional elegy. There is no mourning for soldiers who have died; tears are shed only for the absence of bodies to lie on the altar of sacrifice. Mourning is reserved for the woman who sits apart, shamed and isolated in her own No Man’s Land. This woman feeds on the sorrow of failure, a failure to participate in the womanly patriotism that her culture and her country demand of her. “Our Women” is an anti-elegy that focuses not on men’s deaths, but on women’s interior experiences of war. The poem speaks with an undercurrent of quiet despair as it catalogues women’s limited options for action and emotion during the First World War. 

I published a more fully developed essay on the subject in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies: “‘I Smile for His Sake’: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Our Women.’”
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* Her poem “On Cape Le Force” appeared in the Charlotte Daily Patriot in 1890, when Montgomery was fifteen years old.
** “Our Women” was published in John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War, McClelland and Stewart, 1918.
*** L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Virago, 2014, p. 160 and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (24 July 1915), p. 200.
† Joy Demousi, “Gender and Mourning” in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.) Gender and the Great War, 2017, p. 213.
†† Arthur Currie, qtd. in Suzanne Evans’ Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, McGill-Queens UP, 2007, p. 77.
††† For further discussion of Montgomery, motherhood, and the death of Hugh, see Rita Bode’s “LM Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 50–66; and Tara K. Parmiter’s “Like a Childless Mother: LM Montgomery and the Anguish of a Mother’s Loss,” in L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, MQUP, 2021, pp. 316–330.
†††† L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (Sept. 3rd and 8th, 1914), pp. 165, 167.

"To Women" by Laurence Binyon

The Sisters, by Edmund Dulac
IWM ART 2059

One of the best-known English poems of the First World War is one of the earliest written: Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” appeared in the London Times on 21 September 1914, shortly after Britain entered the First World War. The poem’s fourth stanza is still recited today at British and Commonwealth Remembrance ceremonies:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Shortly after the war had ended, in July of 1919, The Quarterly Review praised Binyon as “the mouthpiece of English culture under the duress of war, interpreting its deepest emotions ... in those two immortal poems ‘To Women’ and ‘For the Fallen.’” The reviewer said, “As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so well described before the woman’s part in war?”* 

Today, few readers know of Binyon second “immortal poem,” and it rarely appears in modern anthologies of First World War poetry. 

To Women 

From illustrated poem "To Women"
in The Fallen (1917)

Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts

That have foreknown the utter price.

Your hearts burn upward like a flame

Of splendour and of sacrifice.



For you, you too, to battle go,

Not with the marching drums and cheers

But in the watch of solitude

And through the boundless night of fears.



Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,

Those threatening wings that pulse the air,

Far as the vanward ranks are set,

You are gone before them, you are there!



And not a shot comes blind with death

And not a stab of steel is pressed

Home, but invisibly it tore

And entered first a woman's breast.



Amid the thunder of the guns,

The lightnings of the lance and sword

Your hope, your dread, your throbbing pride,

Your infinite passion is outpoured



From hearts that are as one high heart

Withholding naught from doom and bale

Burningly offered up, — to bleed,

To bear, to break, but not to fail!
        —Laurence Binyon

“To Women” was published in the London Times on 20 August 1914, and it was reprinted in numerous volumes during the war.** In many ways, the poem is highly conventional in its imagery and sentiments as it references symbols of chivalry (such as lances and swords) and talks of “splendor and sacrifice.” The poem repeatedly uses images of fire and flame to depict women’s noble and searing pain as they offer up the men they love. 

In poem’s the last stanza, women are praised for “Withholding naught from doom and bale / Burningly offered up.” The word bale is Old English in origin: it suggests the active operation of evil as “destroying, blasting, injuring, hurting, paining, tormenting,” and although the usage is now obsolete, it also describes “a great consuming fire,” specifically a funeral pyre.*** This word and its associated imagery may suggest that, like Viking or Hindu widows, women give themselves to be consumed by their sacrifice, immolated on pyres of grief and loss. 

Illustration for "To Women"
from The Fallen (1917)

The poem is strikingly modern, however, in describing the effects of modern industrial war that extend far beyond the combat zones. The anguish that women experience precedes even the sufferings of soldiers. The first stanza proclaims that, before all others, women “have foreknown the utter price.” Like military combatants, women also “to battle go,” but “swifter than those hawks of war,” women are in the “vanward ranks.” The poem says of women during war time, “You are gone before them, you are there!” Every artillery shot and “stab of steel” enters “first a woman’s breast” [emphasis mine].

Just weeks into the war, Binyon’s “To Women” anticipated the burden that uncertainty and anxious waiting would lay on women.  In diary entries from 1915, Vera Brittain breathes a horrible kind of life into the sacrifices described in Binyon’s poem. She writes of her sweetheart Roland Leighton, “I can’t help thinking what a terrible nerve-strain it must have been for him—all the long expectation of an attack, & the waiting, waiting for it to come,” and then describes her own ordeal: “It has been a dreadful day—waiting and waiting & able to settle to nothing” (diary 27 Sept. 1915). The next day she writes, “This has been a terrible day—a day of waiting & restlessness & anxiety, of feeling it was impossible for any news of individuals yet, but nevertheless thinking that all the time perhaps news—the worst news—might come” (diary 28 Sept. 1915), and one day later, “Still no news—still waiting & weariness, & a heart growing almost numb with its pain” (diary 29 Sept. 1915). Less than a week later, she writes, “One is always waiting, waiting in this war. It is enough to turn one’s hair grey—is a thousand times worse than hard work” (diary 6 Oct. 1915).****

Today, Binyon is remembered for his poem dedicated to fallen soldiers of the Great War. For his contemporaries, his poem for stricken women who bore the burdens of war was equally as powerful. 

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* Cloudesley Brereton, “The Poetry of Laurence Binyon,” in The Quarterley Review, July 1919, p. 151, 148. 

** It appeared in Binyon’s collection The Winnowing Fan (1915), in his three-war-poem illustrated collection For the Fallen (1917), and it was set to music (along with “For the Fallen” and “The Fourth of August”) by Edward Elgar in 1917. 

*** The Oxford English Dictionary, bale, n1 and n2. The dictionary notes that although obsolete, William Morris used the word in 1876 to refer to a funeral pyre in his Story of Sigurd.
**** Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913–1917. 

Under a Bloodred Sky

 

Austrian troops advancing in the  Carpathians
(image from Library of Congress)

“How many of you have had the pleasure of seeing your own grave dug?” So begins the first story in Avigor Hameiri’s collection Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Dan Hecht).*

Hameiri wrote from the experience of a Jewish soldier fighting for Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front in the First World War. His poetry is “gruesome and unforgiving” as he documents “the slaughter of an entire generation of Europe’s best and brightest young men,” and his work laments that “nobody in authority seemed to care.”**

Under a Bloodred Sky

Come to me now and caress—
In vain, youth’s song has dried:
Here do I stand, my pale beauty,
Under a bloodred sky.

Come to me now and taunt me—
In vain, here all eyes are blind:
I am occupied here, my pale beauty,
within me millions die.

Come to me now, soft as dew—
In vain, I shall not embrace:
I tread your winepress, my pale beauty,
lest I defile your faded grace.

Come to me now and admonish—
In vain, sanity has escaped my mind;
Here I stand, my pale beauty,
under a bloodred sky.
—Avigdor Feuerstein Hameiri

Almost ballad-like in form, the poem is a lament of loss and despair. The horrors of war have killed the caresses and songs of youth, while men blinded in battle see only death endlessly replayed. God’s judgement is inescapable, as alluded to in the poem's third stanza: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel” (Isaiah 63:3). Under the bloodred sky of total war, the narrator stands alone and insane, yet still able to recognize that all is hopeless and futile. 

Echoing throughout the collection is the question Hameiri posed in his 1935 speech “On Facism and Its Goal”: “What do you know of the nature of man’s inhumanity to man?”*** In the same address, he challenged his audience, “you cannot even imagine the war that has passed, or the one that is to come.” Hameiri’s war writings are his attempt to address that failure of imagination. Most of the work in Under a Bloodred Sky has not been published since the First World War, and this volume marks the first time Hameiri’s poetry has been translated into English. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.
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* Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, edited and translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Daniel Hecht, Academic Studies Press, 2023.
** “Introduction” by Appelbaum and Hecht, Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, p. 12. 
*** “On Fascism and Its Goal” in Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, pp. 167 – 173.