The Actor-Soldier

 

Red Cross Hospital #6-7, Souilly France (Oct. 1918) 
Library of Congress, Signal Corps

On the night of January 19, 1919, a sentry on the deck of the SS La Lorraine saw two women calmly walk to the ship’s rail, quickly climb over, and plunge into the icy water. By the time the Captain of the Lorraine could be notified, the ship had traveled five miles beyond the place the Cromwell twin sisters were last seen. Their double suicide provoked widespread public debate concerning the mental effects of war work on women volunteers (see previous post “The Extra”).  



Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell had sailed for France to volunteer in the Canteen Service of the Red Cross in January of 1918. For eight months they were stationed at Chalons-sur-Marne, working long shifts in support of the French army, sometimes under enemy fire. Anne Dunn, a former teacher who corresponded with the sisters during the war, writes, “they suffered from the exhaustion that is so acute to those who have never known physical labour; yet no one suspected until the end came that for many months they had believed their work a failure, and their efforts futile.... In September, at their own request, they were transferred to an Evacuation Hospital [because] ... they longed to work with ‘our own boys.’”* 



Gladys is 2nd from the left; Dorothea is far right
Red Cross Evac Hospital #6-7
LOC, SIGNAL CORPS (13 Oct 1918)

Anne Dunn reveals that the horrors of tending wounded and dying men near the Front at Verdun “broke their already overtaxed endurance. In the diaries they left, signs of mental breakdown begin to show as early as October…. but years of self-control and consideration for others made them conceal the black horror in which they lived—the agony through which they saw a world which they felt contained no refuge for beauty and quiet thought.  In such a world they conceived they had no place, and when on their way home, they jumped from the deck of the Lorraine, it was in response to a vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.”*



Gladys Cromwell’s Poems was published posthumously. Here is her first poem in the collection:



The Actor-Soldier

American volunteer at Red Cross Evac Hospital #6-7
Souilly, France (14 Oct 1918)
Library of Congress, Signal Corps

On the grass I’m lying,

My blanket is the sky;

This feeling is called dying.



No one will testify

They saw me suffer this;—

There’s no one passing by.



The wonder of it is,

I’m by myself at last

With plain realities.



No one is here to cast

A part for me to play;

My term of life is past.



No one is here to see

How I can meet and take

This end;—how gallantly—



Though the ice that binds a lake

Must weigh less heavily

Than Death to my soul awake.



I must have thirsted, indeed,

For pity, then love, then praise;

For to win them, in every deed,

I endeavoured all my days.



The Soldier and the Son

Were my seductive parts;

But I could act the clown,—

Draw laughter from dumb hearts.



The Soldier part was my best,—

’Twas my last and my favourite.

Every gift that I possessed

I displayed for their benefit.

Who are They? On my breast

Weighs the infinite.



Ah, yes, I appeared heroic,

Unflinching, true and brave;

I wore the look of a stoic;—

All hurts I forgave.



But now on the grass I turn

To ease a little the pain;

It is not too late to learn.



Last night I lay in the rain

Until  my body was numb,

Hearing like a refrain:

“O Masquerader, come!”

And even like a drum

It beat into my brain:

“O Masquerader, come!”

—Gladys Cromwell



Both the men and the women who experienced the suffering of the First World War often felt the need to repress their feelings of grief and horror. Whether acting as the clown, the hero, or the ministering angel, they numbed themselves to their own pain, believing “No one will testify / They saw me suffer this.”

Anna Ryan, another American volunteer in the Smith College Relief Unit, writes,

“The Cromwell sisters were working devotedly at Chalons-sur-Marne for weeks while I was there—a particularly trying post, as the town was then under bombardment from earth or air almost every day; and from there they went directly to another post of duty at Verdun. Although even robust soldiers must be relieved after six weeks at the Front, no one seems to have ordered these girls to take a rest. At the end, they were undoubtedly suffering from what the French call cafard, a condition of abysmal depression resulting from nerve-exhaustion. Unquestionably, they deserve to be honored among those who have died for their country and the cause.”**

Gladys’ and Dorothea’s bodies were recovered several months after their suicide; they were buried in France with military honors. Gladys Cromwell’s posthumously published Poems won the Poetry Society of America prize in 1920.***

I was fortunate enough to find a copy of Cromwell’s Poems; the inside cover is inscribed from “M.R.” to Rosina Sherman Hoyt.**** Below the inscription are penned the words, “White violets gathered at dawn.”

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* Anne Dunn, “Biographical Note” in Poems by Gladys Cromwell, Macmillan, 1919, pp. 116 – 117.  

** Harriet Monroe, “A Gold Star for Gladys Cromwell,” Poetry, vol. 13, no. 6, Mar. 1919, p. 328. 

*** For further information on the Cromwell sisters, see Jeff Richman’s blog post “A Twin Tragedy,” 23 Jan. 2017.
**** Rosina was a wealthy New York heiress who also wrote poetry and was the great-niece of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. 

Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.

Braving the Cooties: Pt 1

 

An Ode to a Cootie, sketch by Pvt. Walter R. Sabel
National WWI museum

The French called them totos; the British called them coddlers; the Americans called them cooties—or more colorfully, pants rabbits or seam squirrels. All the armies of the First World War battled lice infestations, and in the Great War, the louse was as ever present as shellfire, mud, and rats. 

In November of 1918, the newspaper of the AEF, the Stars and Stripes, published a letter written by Jimmy Murrin, serving with the 112th Infantry. Murrin wrote, “Some day when you are looking for space fillers, and you are hard up, you might want to slip this cootie ode and essay it; perhaps you have had enough of that sort of stuff—anyhow, I’ll take a chance.”* 

Up the Line, October 27

Photo from Murrin's memoir

We have slept in barns and barracks,
    In the mud and in the rain;
We have slept in broken buildings,
    Everywhere—in each campaign;
We have bunked with cooties rampant,
    We have slept on lousy straw;
And we’ve slept where shells have whistled
    In dugouts—but, oh, pshaw!
Well, we have hit a new place,
    Since we’ve wiggled up the line;
We are sleeping in a hen-house,
    And, say, the sleepin’s fine!
That is, we sleep when all is quiet
    And shells aren’t overhead;
Be it known, we’ll nap or slumber
    When the cooties aren’t in bed.
For, no matter where you travel,
    And no matter where you roam;
The doughboy’s got a partner—
    There’s a cootie in his home. 
—Jimmy Murrin, Hq. Co., 112th Inf.† 

Murrin’s Stars and Stripes article flatly states that the only soldier who hasn’t encountered the cootie is the man who “was never up the line”: 

Along the hillsides of the Marne, in the valley of the Vesle, in the fastness of the Argonne — where our boys have met the Hun — there the cootie has kept him company. You may not think that is true; but the cooties who are with the doughboys are game, courageous and true; they’ll stick to a man under shellfire — and they’ll keep him in motion when he longs for sleep....  There are some millions of cooties in France; how many are with the AEF the censor will not permit being known, and doughboys are having a hard time finding out. One Yank who has been up the line and who saw plenty of the fireworks very soberly wrote home: “I have not seen a single cootie in France.” He was right. For he added: “They are all married and have large families.” 

In 1918, the National Geographic headlined its June issue with the article “Courage and Cooties: Heroes without Glory.” The author, Herbert Corey, described for those on the home front both the physical and psychological toll of lice infestations. He wrote that researchers had identified lice as disease carriers: 

In the eastern field of war the louse is a typhus carrier and there is no known reason why it shouldn’t carry typhus in the west. Trench fever has been traced home to it. Until a comparatively short time ago this was a mystery, with its recurrent chills and fever and the semi-paralysis that is an occasional result.**

Corey stated that unlike other pests of the trenches that soldiers battled (such as rats), cooties were accompanied by shame and stigma. Soldiers might “know it is not their fault that they are infested, but the effect of years of civilian training persists. They still feel, against all reason, that there is something shameful in their state. They try to assume a joviality they do not feel.”** 

Murrin’s ode to the cootie is an example of that use of humor, but his post-war memoir describes the discomfort and dirt that plagued the men: “Many soldiers had gone through the war with fewer than a dozen baths, and most of these had been in streams or under circumstances where a thorough cleansing was impossible.”*** 

Corey, writing for a civilian audience, defended the doughboys: 

Perhaps the reader thinks there is something repulsive and disgusting in this tale of clean-minded young Americans picking lice out of their clothing and killing them by drops from a burning candle. Perhaps there is.... To my mind the men who can do this and still laugh—bearing in mind their rearing and clean years of their youth—are almost as nearly heroes as those who ‘hop over’ when the whistle sounds the zero hour. The ones are called upon to keep up their courage under a day-long and night-long degradation—a constant, crawling, loathsome irritation—while the others spend themselves freely in one fine burst. I cannot distinguish between brave men.** 

Corey applauded the the cheerful endurance of the American soldiers who disguised their discomfort and repugnance “with a rough form of humor.... Perhaps that is not the courage that seeks a fleeting glory in the cannon’s mouth, but it seems to me it is a fine courage just the same.”** Demonstrating that peculiar courage, one American soldier of the war noted, “ “I don’t mind the hikes now.... for all I have to do is to sort of shoo my shirt along.”**
_____________________________________________________________________

* “Not a Single One,” by Jimmy Murrin, Stars and Stripes, 29 Nov. 1918, p. 4.
† Murrin (Corporal James A. Murrin) survived the war and returned home to Pennsylvania, publishing his memoir in 1919: With the 112th in France: A Doughboy’s Story. He returned to work as a journalist, except for a brief interlude when “He returned to France eight years after the war ended as a member of the Battlefield Memorial Commission” (from his obituary, “James Murrin Funeral Is Set for Friday,” Oil City Derrick, 3 Mar. 1971, p. 2).
** “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 501, 498–499, 497, 503, 509.
*** With the 112th in France, by James A Murrin, Lippincott, 1919, p. 385. 

Battling the Cooties: Part II

How bad were lice infestations in the First World War? One soldier’s shirt “was found to contain 10,428 lice, and more than 10,000 eggs were found under a microscope,” while nurses serving in the 1915 typhus epidemic in Serbia reported “gray patches the size of one’s two hands upon the bodies of men brought into the hospital. The pests were so thick in these patches that from a little distance they presented the appearance of felted cloth.”*

All armies struggled with the problem. The British reported that 95% of men who had served for six months were lousy. On average, they estimated that each man carried 20 lice, but some were super carriers, infested by 100 to 300 insects.*

In addition to examining the severe discomfort and intense itching caused by “cooties,” researchers had begun to learn that lice carried disease. A National Geographic article published in 1918 entitled “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie’” describes a US Army medical research program that recruited 66 healthy volunteers for testing to determine if trench fever was “a germ disease.” Trench fever was a serious threat, causing recurrent chills and fever. It was sometimes accompanied by semi-paralysis, and in the average case, a man diagnosed with trench fever “was unfit as a fighter for six months.”**

In one experiment, healthy soldiers were injected with blood that had been taken from men with trench fever: 23 of the 34 men inoculated developed the disease. In another experiment, researchers collected lice from men with trench fever, then allowed these lice to bite 22 of the healthy recruits. Twelve of them developed trench fever. 

National Geographic celebrated the courage of those who had volunteered for medical experimentation:

The experiments conducted on America’s Sixty-six have fastened the guilt of contagion-bearing upon the body louse.... It is a simple problem in multiplication to appreciate how tremendously America’s Sixty-six may have contributed to the power of our blows against the Huns by giving science the information which will result in keeping our soldiers fit for service.**

Striking a different tone, a poem published in the AEF’s Stars and Stripes imagines weaponizing the cootie: 

If I were a cootie (pro-Ally, of course),
I’d hie me away on a Potsdam-bound horse,
And I’d seek out the Kaiser (the war-maddened cuss),
And I’d be a bum cootie if I didn’t muss
His Imperial hid from his head to his toe!
He might hide from the bombs, but I’d give him no show!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Kaiser,
        Ah, oui.

And after I’d thoroughly covered Bill’s area,
I’d hasten away to the Prince of Bavaria,
And chew him a round or two–under the Linden–
Then pack up my things and set out for old Hinden–
(Old Hindy’s the guy always talking ‘bout strafing)–
To think what I’d do to that bird sets me laughing!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Prince and old Hindy,
        Ah, oui!

I’d ne’er get fed up on Imperial gore–
I might rest for a while, but I’d go back for more.
I’d spend a few days with that Austrian crew,
And young Carl himself I’d put down for a chew;
There’d be no meatless days for this cootie, I know,
They’d all get one jolly good strafing or so.
For if I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat their damnships,
        Ah, oui!
                —A.P. Bowen, Sgt., R.T.O. (published 1 Nov. 1918)

But the US Army was determined to eradicate the pest. Men were swabbed with gasoline, smeared with ointments (vermijelli—a mix of crude oil and melted paraffin—and mercury), and dosed with NCI powder (a mixture of naphthalene, creosote, and idoform). But the most effective way to combat the louse was with boiling water, the only truly effective way to kill the nits or eggs.  

Delousing machines, nicknamed by the troops “cootie mills,” were developed for the field. Jack Campbell, a soldier with the 317th Infantry, wrote in his diary, 

Double-barrelled cootie cannon

 A “cootie-mill” is a wonderful institution.  You go in infested with lice, and in vile shape – you come out sweet and clean. These “mills” are all built pretty much on the same plan and you can get everything – shower, shave, shoe shine. They are long narrow buildings only one room thick.  First you enter “the office” where you give your “case history.” From here you enter the “undressing room” and here all your clothes, except underwear and socks, are tied into a tight bundle with your belt and put into a wire basket which is carried, on a moving belt to the steam chamber – while you, minus your underwear and socks, are given a towel and a piece of soap the size of a loaf of sugar and herded into the showers. Naturally, with hundreds waiting in line each soldier's time under the shower is limited and since these showers “just drip” instead of  “shower” you are lucky if you get wet all over in the time allotted. From the shower you enter the dressing room where you are given clean underwear and socks, and also waiting you are your “deloused” clothes – two sizes smaller from the steaming and very, very wrinkled.”***

By April of 1919, the Stars and Stripes boasted, “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off.” In early November at the time of the armistice, it was estimated that 90% of all AEF troops were “lousy,” but four months later, no more than 10% of American soldiers were infected: “Of the 454,705 troops examined, only 8,820 were found to be harboring cooties.” The aggressive elimination of the disease-bearing pest was attributed to a combination of factors: “Better living conditions, increased facilities for bathing and individual determination not to be infested with cooties, together with the activities of the delousing and bathing outfits.”****

Ah, oui!
____________________________________________________________________
* “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 509.
** “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie,’” National Geographic, June 1918, p. 510.
*** Jack Campbell's Diary, Co. G, 317th Infantry, Virginia Historical Society, 9411.
**** “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off,” Stars and Stripes, 4 April 1919, 3. 

Hieroglyphic of silence

The Harvest Moon, Harvey Dunn (Smithsonian AF.25720)

 
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas
To provide an importance for life.
           —Maxwell Bodenheim, from "Sappho Answers Aristotle”* 

In 1914, twenty-two-year old Maxwell Bodenheim published his first work in Poetry magazine. That same year, his poem “The Camp Follower” was one of fourteen chosen for the magazine’s war issue. The magazine’s editor, Harriet Monroe, later recalled Bodenheim as a “blond youth [who] used to appear at the office now and then, bearing innocent young rhymes written out in an incredibly large round babyish hand.”**

Four years later, Bodenheim published his first poetry collection, Minna and Myself. His work was well reviewed, and his poems appeared alongside those of other rising young writers such as Carl Sandburg and TS Eliot. His poem “Soldiers,” first published in the Pagan Magazine Anthology (1918), was included in Minna and Myself.   

Soldiers

Early June morning, Claggett Wilson, Smithsonian

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles ... 

Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence. 
—Maxwell Bodenheim

The poem offers a vivid contrast to lines from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding” (1942),  in which Eliot writes, 

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

In Bodenheim’s “Soldiers,” the dead communicate in messages of opaque distortion that are impossible to decipher. A fantastic creature who has perished in a small pond smiles fiercely, and the twisted lips of a dead man offer a “hieroglyphic of silence” — but the dead speak only in questions and “gravely” mocking sentences. 

In the Foreword to Minna and Myself, Louis Untermeyer wrote, 

Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit.... Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbal nuance. But it is not merely as a word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy.... In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep.***

In 1925, Harriet Monroe reviewed Bodenheim and his work in Poetry magazine. While she praised Minna and Myself, she found less to admire in Bodenheim’s subsequent publications. She wrote, “One watches the development of his art with much the same feeling which a gaping crowd lavishes on a tight-rope athlete dancing over perilous abysses.” By this time, Bodenheim was better known for his boorish arrogance and lechery than his writing; Monroe concludes the review with questions about Bodenheim’s future: 

What drop of poison in this poet’s blood, embittering his thought, threatens to nullify the higher reaches of his art? .... What Freudian tragedy of suppression and deprivation through this poet’s childhood may have turned his blood to gall, and the wine of his satire to vinegar? Will he never work himself free of the inferiority complex which twists his art?† 

Today, Bodenheim may be best known for the circumstances surrounding his death.†† In February of 1954, after Bodenheim and his wife were found murdered in a flophouse, the New York Daily News reported, 

They found him with his mouth open and his eyes staring and a bullet hole in his chest, while near him lay his wife, with four knife wounds in her back. They lay, in the stiff and contorted attitudes of violent death, in a dirty furnished room, tenanted by an idiot and lout with the occasional thunder of a passing El train which, when it passes, drowns all sound, including poetry. ††† 

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* Maxwell Bodenheim, “Sappo Answers Aristotle,” Poetry, vol. 18, no. 2, 1921, p. 63.
** Harriet Monroe, “Maxwell Bodenheim,” Poetry, vol. 25, no. 6 (Mar. 1925), p. 320.
*** Louis Untermeyer, “Foreword,” in Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim, Pagan, 1918.
† Monroe, “Bodenheim,” pp. 324, 326, 327.
†† See previous post on Bodenheim on this blog (“The Camp Follower”), particularly biographer John Strausbaugh’s comments.
††† Kermit Jaediker,“The Last Bohemian,” New York Daily News, 28 Feb. 1954. The full story can be read here. 

Life weeps and shreds her garments

Harvard's First World War memorial 

In May of 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, French general Joseph Joffre visited America with his entourage. Joffre had served as France’s Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front from the start of the war until the end of 1916. He was well-known in America, remembered by his nickname, the “Rock of the Marne.” 

In the spring of 1917, Joffre’s mission was to ensure that American troops would be sent to the Western Front as quickly as possible, and that American military supplies would accompany the troops who would be trained by the French. Historian J.A. Almstrom writes, 

Because her own troops would tolerate no more offensives, France needed the Americans as surrogate soldiers for her generals’ strategic appetites. In order to survive, the French would attempt no less than to capture the soul of an army. As a result of the Joffre visit, and possibly encouraged by his insistence that trench warfare required little training, the War Department decided to dispatch to France a regular division.*

Along with an estimated 22,000 others, American writer Amy Lowell was present at Joffre’s visit to Harvard (her brother was the president of the university). Local newspapers describe the hero’s welcome that was given to Joffre: a chorus of over 1,000 school children sang “The Marseilles”; Boy Scouts accompanied the procession from Cambridge to Harvard; the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, conferred upon Joffre the honorary degree of doctor of laws, and the university’s young recruits showed off their military bearing and discipline in an exhibition of marching and drills.**

Amy Lowell’s description of the event distances itself from the patriotic fervor that thrilled the crowds. Lowell's poem “In the Stadium” highlights the immense gap between parades and combat, between generals who command and young men who are sent to die, “Heaped like sandbags / Against the German guns.” 

In the Stadium
Marshall Joffre Reviewing The Harvard Regiment, May 12, 1917

A little old man
Huddled up in a corner of a carriage,
Rapidly driven in front of throngs of people
With his hand held to a perpetual salute.
The people cheer,
But he has heard so much cheering.
On his breast is a row of decorations.
He feels his body recoil before attacks of pain.

They are all like this:
Napoleon,
Hannibal,
Great Caesar even,
But that he died out of time.
Sick old men,
Driving rapidly before a concourse of people,
Gay with decorations,
Crumpled with pain.

The drum-major lifts his silver-headed stick,
And the silver trumpets and tubas,
The great round drums,
Each with an H on them,
Crash out martial music.
Heavily rhythmed march music
For the stepping of a regiment.

Parade to War, an Allegory
John S. Curry, Cummer Museum of Art 

Slant lines of rifles,
A twinkle of stepping,
The regiment comes.
The young regiment,
Boys in khaki
With slanted rifles.

The young bodies of boys
Bulwarked in front of us.
The white bodies of young men
Heaped like sandbags
Against the German guns.

This is war:
Boys flung into a breach
Like shoveled earth;
And old men,
Broken,
Driving rapidly before crowds of people
In a glitter of silly decorations.

Behind the boys
And the old men,
Life weeps,
And shreds her garments
To the blowing winds.
—Amy Lowell 

Three-hundred and seventy-three Harvard students, alumni, faculty, and staff died in the war.  

Although she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, Lowell’s writing is frequently overlooked by contemporary readers, and few know of her war poetry. In 1917, Amy Lowell wrote, “It is impossible for any one writing to-day not to be affected by the war. It has overwhelmed us like a tidal wave. It is the equinoctial storm which bounds a period.”*** What readers are more familiar with today are her contemporaries’ dismissive remarks that seem designed to counteract the creativity and influence of Lowell and her poetry: she was accused of appropriating Imagism and reformulating it as “Amygism”; T.S. Eliot denigrated her use of personal wealth to promote contemporary literature, calling her the “demon saleswoman” of modern poetry°; and the writer Witter Bynner sneered that she was a “hippopoetess,” an insult repeated and popularized by Ezra Pound. 

In the preface to her collection of literary essays Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Lowell writes of poets who go unrecognized: “Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.”°°
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* John Albin Almstrom, Learning to Live: Tactical Training for the AEF, 1917–1918, Master’s thesis, Rice U, 1972, p. 32.
** Cambridge Chronicle, 19 May 1917 and Harvard Crimson, 15 May 1917.
*** Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917, Macmillan, p. v.
° T. S. Eliot, qtd in A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode by David Perkins,
°° Lowell, Tendencies, p. xi. 

Let us forget

The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights
The Tate Museum, T05532

Over a century after the end of the First World War, “Lest We Forget” is an often-repeated phrase, urging that the tragedies of war be remembered in commemoration*. But during the war itself, both those on the fields of battle and on the home front often wrote of their deliberate efforts to forget. 

British soldier Ivor Gurney writes in “To His Love” “Cover him, cover him soon! / And with thick-set / Masses of memoried flowers— / Hide that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget,” while the last stanza of Rose Macaulay’s  “Picnic July 1917” describes civilians’ efforts to block thoughts of the conflict:   

Oh, we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,
While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,
Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Should break … .should break….

Mental disassociation from the trauma of war was critical to emotional stability—dwelling on the realities of war could lead to madness.   

Less than one month before peace was declared, American writer Sara Teasdale composed a poem that she never published. “Autumn Night 1918,” dated September 13, 1918, is recorded in Teasdale’s notebooks, now part of the Sara Teasdale collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.**

Autumn Night 1918

Encounter in the Darkness (1919), Claggett Wilson
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1981.163.5

Let us forget! The night smells fresh,
The park is quiet, the stars are white—
They are fighting, the youth of the world are dying—

Let us forget! Kiss me to-night,
It is autumn now the whole world over,
Run down this path with me, let us forget!
Over the sea they are dying—kiss me,
Never mind if my lashes are wet.

In the lamp-light see two scarlet branches!
What is that ghostly thing under the tree?
Only a wild white aster stirring
In a wind blown westward over the sea.

Listen, the wind is moaning in trouble,
It brings what dying soldiers say,
Crying out from the bloody stubble
To women three thousand miles away.
—Sara Teasdale

The speaker’s repetition of “let us forget” signals that this is impossible. Neither a lover’s kisses nor flight down a forested path can erase the news of the war and its millions of dead. Humans have destroyed their connection with the natural world, and the comforts of the pastoral are meaningless in the face of industrial war. Trees, flowers, and the wind itself offer only traitorous reminders of corpses, bloody fields, and dying men’s moans. 

“Autumn Night 1918” offers a fascinating contrast with Teasdale’s better-known poem “There Will Come Soft Rains.” In the latter, the natural world is indifferent to humans, not caring nor deigning to remember whether “mankind perished utterly.” Yet in “Autumn Night 1918,” while the natural world appears to conspire in reminding men and women of the costs of war, an underlying message of the poem suggests that although nature may forget the war, people are incapable of doing so, especially when this is what is most vehemently desired. 

Distance from the battlefield does not protect civilians from the consequences and horrors of the war, and survivors are never discharged from the duty of bearing the burden of loss. 

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* "Lest We Forget" was first used in Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem "Recessional."
** This post is deeply indebted to Melissa Girard’s research on Teasdale’s First World War poetry. Girard’s compelling scholarship deserves a much wider audience; her essay “‘How Autocratic Our Country Is Becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War” can be read online. It is drawn from her dissertation Lines of Feeling: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality (U of Illinois, 2009). 

Verses to a Mule

Missouri Digital Heritage, Springfield Greene County Public Library 

In her essay “A stupid mule is still smarter than a good horse, or a bad man,” Great War historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson writes,  “Yet whilst the contribution of the horse is undoubtedly fascinating … it is his less glamorous cousin, the mule, who was the real equine hero of the Great War.” She continues, “what sets the mule apart from the horse and the donkey are his physical attributes combined with his personality. He is both more intelligent and diligent than the horse, in addition to being tougher and more resistant to illness and disease. It is these characteristics which made the mule an invaluable resource during the Great War.”*

Some soldier-poets even wrote poems honoring the army mule: 

Verses to a Mule**

I’d like to sing the virtues of a mule, brown, black, or gray;
To paint his personality in quite a pleasing way,
But Jim declares a mule’s beneath such eloquent respect,
And, saying which, his diction’s more emphatic than correct.

A mule-skinner is Jim, and you ought to see him drive:
The wheelers balk and, statue-like, they scarcely seem alive;
The leaders semi-circle  ’til they prance at Jimmy’s feet,
And Jimmy leaps politely up to tender them his seat.

A mule is nothing beautiful; no hymn or work of art.
It’s Jim’s belief he’s only ears and hoofs, without a heart,
Unkempt, a shaggy animal, who shies at every shack,
Who always waits his chance and kicks you just below the back.

Now, only beasts can sweat, they say, for gentlemen perspire,
But bless the tugging mules that pull your auto from the mire.
’Tis true, by conscience they object to backing where they stand—
That’s not a vicious habit in a military land.

Oh, he’s the brute who lugs your heavy rations to the door,
The brute who labors, hauling, from the quartermaster’s store,
The one who stumbles through the mud and always finds his feet,
With loads of hay and wood and coal and clothing, bread, and meat.

He looks at you as if his soul lay sleeping in his eyes,
He plods the roads as if the world for him held no surprise,
He pulls the combat wagons over ruts as high as trees,
He wallows where the others shrink and dirties up his knees.

So talk to him more gently, Jim, this homely beast of toil,
For he’s the only one can swim through Carolina soil;
And tuck him safe in bed at night and kiss him on the cheek—
And maybe, then, he’ll never kick you—more than once a week.
—Charles S. Divine*** 

British soldier & mule © IWM Q 16181

All combatant nations relied heavily on horses and mules, quickly learning that mules were more adaptable to the conditions of the First World War. From the mud of the Western Front to the barren landscapes of Gallipoli, mules transported supplies, carried the wounded, and hauled heavy artillery. The primary supplier of mules was the United States, exporting 180,000 mules to Britain alone during the war.†

When the U.S. entered the war, mules joined American troops in overseas service and proved indispensable; Pershing commented that one of the most significant logistics problems faced by the AEF was the shortages of animals. On several occasions, the service of mules and their handlers was nothing short of heroic: 

© IWM Q5773 John Warwick Brooke 

On 4 October 1918 [at Ergemont during the Meuse-Argonne offensive] all communication with artillery in the rear had broken down, and the commander sent for new telephone wire. All division trucks were bogged down in mud, and wagon horses faltered in their traces. So Sgt. Laurence M. Lumpkin loaded ten pack mules with the needed wire and headed for the forward position. German artillerymen spotted the animals and laid down a barrage that killed five of them. The remaining mules with Lumpkin did not panic, and they delivered the wire. After unloading them, Lumpkin galloped the five animals back to the point where the other mules had fallen, removed the loads from the dead mules, repacked his remaining five and brought back the rest of the wire. For this dangerous act he received the DSC, but the mules were given no official recognition. “Their behavior under fire, however, endeared them to the First Division.” ††

To learn more about military mules, see Betteridge-Dyson’s essay at this site, which also includes another example of mulish war poetry, “Musings of a Mule.”
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*Lucy Betteridge-Dyson, “A stupid mule is still smarter than a good horse, or a bad man,” Oh What a Ladylike War. Betteridge-Dyson’s article is a superb introduction to military mules.
**“Verses to a Mule” was first published in the Wadsworth Camp (Spartanburg, SC) newspaper, Gas Attack, March 2, 1918. This version appears in Charles Divine’s City Ways and Company Streets, Moffat and Yard, 1918.
***For more on Charles Divine and his war poetry, see “When Private Mugrums Parley Voos” on this blog.
†Emmett M. Essin, Shavetails and Bell Sharps: The History of the U.S. Army Mule, U of Nebraska, 2000, p. 147.
††Essin, p. 155. 

A Belgian Letter

Kenneth MacLeish, c. 1917

On October 14, 1918, American aviator Kenneth MacLeish, attached to British Squadron 213, was on patrol over Belgium. The squadron encountered German planes, and in the air battle that followed, MacLeish shot down at least one German plane, but he and his Sopwith Camel failed to return to base. For months, no trace of MacLeish nor his plane were found. The squadron and MacLeish’s family and friends held out hope that he had crash landed and been taken prisoner by the retreating German army.

In late January of 1919, two months after the war had ended and more than three months since Kenneth had disappeared, the family received information that had come from a Belgian landowner. Kenneth’s brother Archibald MacLeish wrote of the impact of that news:

A Belgian Letter

Madame, it is my duty to make known
The brave death of a soldier. I had gone
Today, the Christmas morrow, to my farm
Hard by the town of Bruges, to see what harm
This wind of war had made among my walls
And in my garden, where the blackbird calls
First always in the spring. Madame, I went
With two old friends, an architect of Ghent
And one that had a factory of cloth
At Bruges before the war, true Belgians both
And truer friends to me: they'd not endure
That I should go alone. ‘You're never sure,’
They said, ‘what thing the Boche has left behind,’
And so they came. The road was hard to find
Even for me that sixty years or more
Have trudged each market day from Bruges to Schoore,
And all the farm was ruin, and a pool
Of horrid water — not a cart or tool
Nor any wall upstanding, save the stack
That shivered in the wind and warned us back.
In all that place there was no living thing

From The First Yale Unit, by David Paine

Save that the sudden gusts made stir and ring
Within the stark door frame the summons bell,
And on the hearth the water dripped and fell.
We went about the house to where the barn
Had fallen inward and the earth was torn
With shreds of iron; there both the stave
Of broken wood we found — you must be brave,
Madame — we found the body of a man,
An officer, and on his breast the span
Of golden eagle wings. There was a case
With papers and your name, and then the place,
The other side of the world, whence he had come,
And pictures that we thought must be his home.
Madame, we made a casket out of boards
And buried him — the merchant has the words
In Flemish, of the service for the dead,
For all his sons were killed, and these he said,
And then we made a grave above the foss
Within the garden wall, and set a cross
Marked with his name, and when the spring comes North
To heal the land with flowers, and the earth
Is clean again of the war, it will be good
To lie there by the wall, and feel the blood
Of rose and currant stirring in the loam,
And know that in the earth he has come home
Whatever home he sought; and where, one time,
Within his brain old questionings did climb,
Now will th’ unwondering roots of summer’s rose
Thrust, — and the beauty of the world unclose.
        —Archibald MacLeish (1920)

The British authorities who received the news wrote to the eldest MacLeish son that M. Rouse, the Belgian farmer, “had presented the plot on which the grave was situated to your mother, in case she desires to allow the body to remain in its present location…. One of your brother’s former classmates, Lieutenant John C. Menzies, is installing to-day a small headstone, properly marked, which we obtained in Calais. I can assure you that everything that can possibly be done is being done.”*

But everything possible would not bring back Kenneth MacLeish. His brother Archibald MacLeish, who served in the First World War as a field artillery officer with the American army, would go on to become one of America’s prominent 20th-century writers and a three-time awardee of the Pulitzer Prize. But he never forgot his younger brother’s death. In interviews conducted in the last years of his life and published in Reflections (1986), MacLeish shared his personal views of the First World War: 

Archibald MacLeish

What happened in the middle of the twenties was that it became pretty apparent, even to people my age and even to the people who had been involved in the war as I had, that the war, the Wilsonian rhetoric, and the British propaganda which my brother bought, was all an enormous fraud and fabrication; the war was nothing but a commercial war. There was no reason for it except reasons of commercial competition. There were no moral reasons, no humanitarian reasons, no humane reasons. Nothing. It killed millions of men. It slaughtered an entire generation. It's the most disgusting thing that has happened really in the history of this planet. Vietnam is just a smear beside it.**

Poetry helped MacLeish to make sense of his family’s tragedy. In the same end-of-life interviews, Archibald MacLeish spoke of what poetry meant to him: 

…poetry is the inward of the thing that history is the outward of. Poetry is constantly examining the human possibility. It is constantly examining the emotional life, which is by far the most moving part of human life. It's constantly in search of the question of man. What is man? What is man? What is man? History sees the end result. It sees what happens when a Franco collapses power down on a country like Spain. Poetry is inside that and sees what the destroyed possibility would have been, because a great part of our past is the past of failures.*** 

Flanders Fields American Cemetery, 
photo from Beinecke Library, Yale

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*Ralph D. Pain,“Kenneth MacLeish’s Path to Glory” in The First Yale Unit: A Story of Naval Aviation, 1916–1919, v. 2, Riverside Press, 1925, p. 363. Kenneth MacLeish was reburied in the Flanders Fields American Cemetery in Belgium. 
**Archibald MacLeish, Reflections, U of Mass P, 1986, p. 232.
***Archibald MacLeish, Reflections, p. 142.

Their Strange Eyes

AEF soldier of the 319th 

In October of 1918, the First World War was entering its fifth year and the influenza pandemic was killing millions. The October issue of Poetry magazine, edited by Harriet Monroe, published numerous war poems and a tribute to dead soldier poets (Lola Ridge’s “The Song,” shared earlier on this blog, also appeared in the October 1918 issue.)

One poem, with the haunting title “Their Strange Eyes Hold No Vision,” writes of the toll that the war was taking not only on bodies, but on minds.

Their Strange Eyes Hold No Vision

Their strange eyes hold no vision, as a rule;
No dizzy glory. A still look is theirs,
But rather as one subtly vacant stares,
Watching the circling magic of a pool.

Blown Up by William Orpen
© IWM ART 2376

Now when the morning firing becomes tame,
Out in the warming sun he tries to guess
Which battery they’re after. “Let me see;
Which battery is there? which battery?
I wonder which…..” Again, again, the same
Returning question, idle, meaningless.
Startled, he sighs—or laughs—or softly swears;
Mutteringly something of dear names declares
In the bitter cruelty of tenderness.

The planes drift low, circling monotonously,
Droning like many a drowsy bumble-bee
Some summer morning. Only now and then
A whining shell, the mere formality
Of stupid war, calls back his thoughts again.

Suddenly near the unseen death swoops low,
Laughing and singing; and full pitifully
The startled eyes stare wide, but do not see
The whirling features of the genie foe,
Safe in his summoned cloud. The quiet skies
Tell not his surest comings. With waved wands
A mist springs from the earth, and swaying stands
A veiling moment ….. sinks …..
And there he lies
Face down, clutching the clay with warm dead hands.
            —Howard Buck

Howard Buck, a volunteer with the Norton-Harjes ambulance corps in France, describes the detachment of a desensitized and confused soldier. The man’s attempts to determine the enemy’s firing range are framed as meaningless, dreamy questions, far out of the soldier’s control. He can only stare vacantly at the “stupid war,” hypnotized by the drone of unseen circling planes that appear as “genie foe,” unaware that he will soon lie dead, “clutching the clay with warm dead hands.”

Howard Buck

Howard Buck was an eyewitness to the ghastly effects of war. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for his actions on 7 September 1917, when he and fellow ambulancier Donald Jordan rushed to where “a shell had claimed many victims” and “resolutely came to the aid of the wounded who were brought back to the aid station under the continuing violent bombardment.”* In his poem “September 7,” Buck writes,

We lifted them, the broken, moaning men,
And those that never spoke,
And staggered back that glaring way again.

A bleeding brother ever, ever nigh,
Days, days and nights. The curious gold ring;
His hand’s strange warmth: until the day I die
I know I shall remember everything.

Howard Buck returned to his literature studies at Yale in 1918. His war poems were awarded the Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize and were published as the first volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets (1919), titled The Tempering.

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*Frederick Sumner Mead, ed., Harvard’s Military Record in the World War, Harvard Alumni Association, 1921, p. 520. 

Peasant and King

Royal Irish Rifle Troops at the Somme, July 1, 1916

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

                        —Shakespeare’s Henry V

Kings, emperors, industrialists and aristocrats: the wealthy and powerful have always needed the poor to fight in their wars and have promised rewards and honors for that service. In October of 1914,  American poet Christopher Morley wrote of the disparity between rich and poor, starkly contrasting the burdens each were expected to shoulder in the First World War.

Peasant and King

What the Peasants of Europe are Thinking

 

Belgium refugees

You who put faith in your banks and brigades,

      Drank and ate largely, slept easy at night,

Hoarded your lyddite and polished the blades,

      Let down upon us this blistering blight—

         You who played grandly the easiest game,

         Now can you shoulder the weight of the same?

            Say, can you fight?

Here is the tragedy: losing or winning

      Who profits a copper? Who garners the fruit?

From bloodiest ending to futile beginning

      Ours is the blood, and the sorrow to boot.

         Muster your music, flutter your flags,

         Ours are the hunger, the wounds, and the rags.

            Say, can you shoot?

Down in the muck and despair of the trenches

Tsar and Russian troops

      Comes not the moment of bitterest need;

Over the sweat and the groans and the stenches

      There is a joy in the valorous deed—

         But, lying wounded, what one forgets

         You and your ribbons and d——d epaulettes—

            Say do you bleed?

This is your game: it was none of our choosing—

      We are the pawns with whom you have played.

Yours is the winning and ours is the losing,

      But, when the penalties have to be paid,

         We who are left, and our womenfolk, too,

         Rulers of Europe, will settle with you—

            You, and your trade.

                        October, 1914.

                        —Christopher Morley

The poem appeared in Morley’s Songs for a Little House (1917). Similar sentiments are voiced in Siegfried Sassoon’s “They” and Grace Isabel Colbron’s “The Ballad of Bethlehem Steel.”

                       

Christopher Morley

Morley was one of the most prolific writers of the early twentieth-century, author of more than 100 novels, essay collections, and poetry volumes. He was perhaps best known for his 1939 novel Kitty Foyle, which was made into a popular film. When Morley died in 1957, his obituary in the New York Times recalled that he was “Known for his whimsy—a word he loathed to hear in reference to his works” and that he “preferred to regard himself as a poet above all else.”*

Several years before his death, Morley offered this advice: “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.**

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* “Christopher Morley, Author, 66, Is Dead,” New York Times, 29 March 1957.

** Christopther Morley, “Brief Case; or, Every Man His Own Bartlett,” The Saturday Review of Literature,  6 Nov. 1948, p. 20.