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.”