Fierce Fighting in a Wood

Percy Smith, Solitude

High Wood, Sanctuary Wood, Delville Wood, Polygon Wood, Belleau Wood – these are some of the best-known sites of the fierce fighting that occurred in wooded areas during the First World War. Thousands of men died in the dense forests of France and Belgium, and thousands of bodies were never recovered. 

In 1921, Teresa Hooley included in her collection Songs of the Open a poem that remembers these sites of conflict and death. 

Primeval 

“Fierce fighting in a wood”—so read

The city placards. Suddenly,

From out dim aeons of the dead

There flashed a memory.

Once more a tree with trees I stood

Where men fought howling in the dark,

And felt the touch of human blood

Hot-spattered on my bark. 

Once more I watched the red dawn rise

Upon a redder solitude,

And dropped dead leaves on sightless eyes....

“Fierce fighting in a wood.”

—Teresa Hooley

It’s a curious poem: the poet imagines herself a tree, a silent witness to the carnage of war.  Hooley was well known for her writings about the natural world. She was raised in rural Derbyshire and volunteered with the Women’s Land Army during the war. Later in life, she collected some of her previously written poems and re-published them in a pamphlet titled Tree Poems.* A review of her Collected Poems (1926) praised her “charming verse” about “birds, rain, leaves and stars, and all the little precious things of home.”**

But “Primeval” is not charming, nor is it concerned with “all the little precious things of home.” Although Songs of the Open does include  poems such as “A Daffodil Day” or “Sea-Foam,” numerous poems are tinged with the tragedy of the First World War. The pastoral poem “Charnwood Hill” closes with the lines “ I look on them with worship, / Because, by land and sea, / Brave men have died in thousands / To keep them safe and free.” 

 
Hooley also includes three poems written for specific soldiers in her 1921 collection. One is for her dead brother, another for “F.H.B.”, likely her husband Frank H. Butler, whom she married in 1920. The third poem is for another lover of nature who died in the war, the soldier and poet Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson.***

In Memoriam 

(Captain T.P.C. Wilson, Sherwood Foresters, killed in action, March 24, 1918).

The larks are happy in the sky,

The little lambs are gay,
And under blossoming orchard trees
The children shout and play.

Hid in the hazel coppice green,
The love-mad thrushes sing:
All Earth’s unheeding things are glad
For glory of the Spring.

Be gay, you silly innocent lambs,
For he who loved you well,
That you may frisk in quiet fields
Has paid the price of hell.

You thrushes, drench with song divine
Your leafy solitudes;
His voice is stilled that you may nest
Unharmed in English woods. 

And you, you little children, play:

How should we wish you sad?

For he was young, and he has given

His life to keep you glad. 

      —Teresa Hooley

The poem echoes with references to woods and trees, and the war diary of the Sherwood Foresters, 10th battalion, details action the day that Wilson was killed. His unit was covering the retreat of other battalions, when “masses of the enemy were now appearing over the high ground from Havrincourt to Velu Wood.” Wilson was killed about 4pm in the fighting. 

How did Hooley know T.P.C. (Jim) Wilson? There are several possibilities: his parents lived in Little Eaton, less than ten miles from Hooley’s home in Risley; he had several sisters close to Teresa Hooley in age, and Hooley’s brother Basil also enlisted with the Sherwood Foresters (although he and Wilson served as  officers in different battalions). 

Wilson’s body was never found; his name is listed on the Arras Memorial to the Missing, and his parents erected a memorial to him in the church at Little Eaton. Teresa Hooley died in 1973; she also has no known grave as she donated her body to medical science. 

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* In the collection of the University of Buffalo’s poetry manuscript collection (Teresa Hooley).
** Thomas Moult, Time and Tide, 3 April 1926, p. 428, cited in Jane Dowson’s thesis, Modern Women’s Poetry 1910 – 1929, U of Leicester, 1998, p. 25. 

*** For more on Wilson’s poetry on this blog, see “What did we know of summer?”, “Poems in their pockets,” and “Ancient alchemy,” and for another poem written in Wilson’s memory, see his sister’s poem “To Tony, Aged 3.”

Sea Warfare

Lord Horatio Nelson

British maritime poems of the First World War frequently called upon the  naval heroes of Britain’s past to inspire the country and its navy.  In “Called Up” by Dudley Clark (1916), the poem directly addresses both Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson in repeated refrains, closing with the lines

Art thou ready, good Sir Francis? See they wait upon the quay!
Praise be to God, Lord Nelson,  they ha’ thought of you an’ me!

Evelyn Underhill’s poem “The Naval Reserve” (1916) also envisions the supernatural aid that Britain’s past heroes might contribute to the modern war effort:

Back they come, the mighty dead,
Quick to serve where they have led.
..........

Rank on rank, the admirals
Rally to their old commands:
Where the crash of battle falls,
There the one-armed hero stands.
Loud upon his phantom mast
Speak the signals of the past. 

But British maritime poetry of the First World War is often Janus-faced, looking both to the past and the future, as it attempts to forge ties between the tradition of historic naval victories and the operations of the British navy in the first industrial world war. 

Rudyard Kipling in his book Sea Warfare (1916) closes the section on submarine warfare with his untitled poem (later named “Tin Fish”). The poem explores the menace of unseen weapons of war, a new kind of sea warfare that does not neatly fit the previous conventions of naval heroism: 

The ships destroy us above
   And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move
   In the belly of Death.
The ships have a thousand eyes
   To mark where we come...
And the mirth of a seaport dies
   When our blow gets home. 

“Tin Fish” depicts a monstrous, modern warfare that destroys and ensnares the ships it targets as well as the submarine crew members who arise, lie down, and move “in the belly of Death.” 

Mine-sweeper Marksman makes
smokescreen ©IWM ART 735

Another poem that acknowledges the gulf between the First World War’s engagements at sea and Britain’s heroic past is “Mine-sweeping Trawlers” by Edward Hilton Young, who served with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Written aboard the HMS Iron Duke in 1914, the poem begins,

Not ours the fighter’s glow
The glory, and the praise.
Unnoticed to and fro
we pass our dangerous ways.
We sift the drifting sea,
And blindly grope beneath;
Obscure and toilsome we,
the fishermen of death. 

Poems like these acknowledge that the crews of the mine-sweepers will never earn the glory and praise that Drake and Nelson enjoyed. In the First World War, Britain’s maritime supremacy did not bring a rapid end to the war that slogged on in the trenches, and the bravery and sacrifices of the blind “fishermen of death” often went unnoticed. 

Shortly after the war ended, there were those who worried that Britain’s maritime fighters would be forgotten in the histories of the Great War. In 1920, Guy N. Pocock, an instructor at the Dartmouth’s Royal Naval College published the poem “Years Ahead.” Even though many of the bodies of those fighting the land war were never identified, the poem laments for those who died at sea, their resting places unmarked, with not even a “cross of wood, or a carven block,/ A name-disc hung on a rifle-stock.” The key question of the poem is Who shall honour the sailor dead? The poem concludes, 

Merchant Seamen Memorial, Tower Hill, London

Days to come, days to come—
But who shall ask of the wandering foam,
The weaving weed, or the rocking swell,
The place of our sailor-dead to tell?
From Jutland reefs to Scapa Flow
Tracks of the wary warships go,
But the deep sea-wastes lie green and dumb
All the days to come.

Years ahead, years ahead,
The sea shall honour our sailor-dead!
No mound of mouldering earth shall show
The fighting place of the men below,
But a swirl of seas that gather and spill;
And the wind’s wild chanty whistling shrill
Shall cry “Consider my sailor-dead!”
In the years ahead.