Women Demobilized

May Wedderburn Cannan

In her autobiography Grey Ghosts and Voices, May Wedderburn Cannan writes,

The Census for 1921 had found there was in the country a surplus of women who, inconsiderately, had not died in the war, and now there was an outcry and someone christened them “The Surplus Two Million.” The Times suggested that they might seek work abroad; the unemployment figures were swollen with these unnecessary and unwanted persons.*

What was it like for women in the war’s aftermath? During the war, May Wedderburn Cannan had worked in a French railway canteen for British soldiers and in the Paris office of British intelligence. Her fiancé, Bevil Quiller-Couch, survived some of the fiercest fighting on the Western Front, only to die of influenza in February of 1919, while still on active duty in Germany (further details can be read here). 

At the war’s end, surviving soldiers who were demobilised returned as different men to homes that had changed dramatically from those they had left. But women, too, struggled to return “back to the empty world.” 

Women Demobilized
July 1919

Now must we go again back to the world
Full of grey ghosts and voices of men dying,

And in the rain the sounding of Last Posts

And Lovers’ crying—

Back to the old, back to the empty world.

Now are put by the bugles and the drums,
And the worn spurs, and the great swords they     carried,
Now are we made most lonely, proudly, theirs,
The men we married:
Under the dome the long roll of the drums.

Now are the Fallen happy and sleep sound,
Now in the end, to us is come the paying,
These who return will find the love they spend,
But we are praying
Love of our Lovers fallen who sleep sound.

Now in our hearts abides always our war,
Time brings, to us, no day for our forgetting,
Never for us is folded War away,
Dawn or sun setting,
Now in our hearts abides always our war.

        —May Wedderburn Cannan

Cannan includes the first stanza of this poem in her autobiography, prefacing it with the explanation, “Losing one’s world, one still wanders in it, a ghost. It is for long, more real than the new world into which one knows (but does not want to know) one must presently move and live.”**  

She attempted to forget her grief in work, but found it difficult to secure a position. In one job interview, she was asked, “And at which University, Miss Cannan, did you get your degree?”

     I said I had hoped I had made it clear in my application that I had no Degree and the voice said coldly “the other ten candidates have all got Degrees.” 

     I thought, “Well, I’ve lost it,” and I thought “surplus two million”: and I collected my bag and my gloves and I looked at them all sitting round that long table and I said, “If I had got a Degree, it would have been between 1914 and 1918 and I preferred to be elsewhere. And what is more, Gentlemen” —I had got up now and pushed back my chair and made them a little bow— “I still prefer to have been elsewhere.”

     There was a horrid silence and then someone said loudly, “God bless my soul, the young lady’s quite right.”*** 

Cannan got the job. Describing her life at that time she writes, “I slept badly, woke dead tired, went early to work, and in the evenings, pulled the green shaded lamp down over my work and was happy to be alone.”†

Although Cannan suffered immense grief, she did not despair, writing, “I was fortunate because though I had lost everything, I kept so much. I did not believe that the Dead had died for nothing, nor that we should have ‘kept out of the war’ —the Dead had kept faith, and so if we did not grudge it, had we.”††

She explains further, “A saying went round, “Went to the war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon. I had much admired some of Sassoon’s verse but I was not coming home with him. Someone must go on writing for those who were still convinced of the right of the cause for which they had taken up arms.”††† 

Near the end of her life, as she composed her autobiography, May Wedderburn Cannan reflected, “I suppose most of us have the desire to leave something behind us when we go into whatever there is (or is not) beyond the void. I don’t think I ever treasured any extravagant hope of leaving anything that would be remembered, but as the years have gone by and times changed I have been glad to think that at least I wrote a salute to my generation.”°

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With sincere thanks to Mrs. Clara Abrahams, May's granddaughter, for all her support.

* Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices, p. 175.
** Cannan, p. 150. 
*** Cannan, p. 177. 
† Cannan, p. 150. 
†† Cannan, p. 148. 
††† Cannan, p. 113. 
° Cannan, p. 152. 

Spring Morning

It’s a Spring Morning

 

It’s a Spring morning, and April, and the world over

Beautiful girls and their lovers wake and laugh with the sun,

And flowers lift their heads, and thrushes call from the gardens,

And the War, the War, is done.

They buried her soldier-lover, heaped the earth over,

Beautiful girls and their lovers wake, but he does not stir,

They buried him cold at night with Love and Youth and Laughter,

And the sad, sad heart of her.

            —May Wedderburn Cannan*

“It’s a Spring Morning” appears in The Splendid Days (1919), the book of poetry May Cannan dedicated to B.B.Q.-C., her fiancé, Bevil Brian Quiller-Couch.  May and Bevil had known each other nearly all their lives, as their fathers were close friends, but they didn’t become engaged until after the war had ended. 

Quiller-Couch had entered the Great War in its early days, and for four years saw some of the heaviest action, fighting with the Royal Field Artillery at Mons, Aisne, the First Battle of Ypres, Festubert, the Somme, the Third Battle of Ypres, and Cambrai. In the first letter he sent to May in early 1915, Bevil wrote, “Things are very quiet now after the strenuous days of the Aisne and Ypres… I hope we shall be dancing together again this time next year.” A year later, he was still in France, and wrote to her from the Somme: “The noise is deafening day and night without even ten minutes peace … we are digging like moles … you should see me, black with dust and dirt, burnt with the sun and always hot.”  In 1917, May sent him a copy of her first published book of poems In War Time, and Bevil replied,

If a heathen can be grateful for a work of art, I feel he must write and thank you for the pleasure it gave to read these poems.  Out here I have read more books than during the rest of my life, not perhaps saying much.

Quiller-Couch’s battery fired their last shots of the war on November 5, 1918. Bevil had earlier written to May, “I shall put in for Paris leave as soon as this is over and just blow into your office”** (she was working with British Intelligence at the War Office in Paris), and on November 13^th, he arrived.  May wrote in her autobiography,

… he fetched me from the Office at one and we walked down to the Pont d’Alma, and there, looking down into the waters of the Seine, hurrying by and having known other wars and other lovers, he asked me to marry him.***

Their reunion lasted five days, during which time they visited Versailles and shared riverside picnics, long walks, and meals in French cafés.  She preserved the memories in the poem “Paris Leave”:

Do you remember, in Paris, how we two dined

On your Leave’s last night,

And the happy people around us who laughed and sang,

And the great blaze of light.

And the big bow-window over the boulevard

Where our table stood,

And the old French waitress who patted your shoulder and

Told us that love was good. 

Bevil confessed to May that he had intended to propose to her before leaving for France in 1914, but after his request for leave was denied, he had come to think the better of it, reasoning that “if my family had to suffer because I was out here it was right that no more should.” May protested his decision, for as she saw it, “In thinking to save me anxiety, dear Heart, he had deprived me of the precious right to be anxious. Going alone to his war he had left me lonely in mine.”º

Required to rejoin his regiment, Bevil marched with them to Germany, where they had been assigned to post-war occupation duty. He wrote of his engagement to his father: “I know one thing—you all love May and will know that I am luckier than I deserve … I was perhaps more in luck in the whole fall of events than any man ought to be.”ºº  As Bevil was scheduled to be demobilised at the end of February, the couple set their wedding date for June 3, 1919.  On February 2, Bevil wrote to May,

I have visions of being with you about the 25^th of this month…. I am writing this in bed as I am very lazy, having caught a small chill.  I have stayed in bed for breakfast; when one lived in holes in the ground I never caught chills which seems rather silly.  It must have been the sudden change.°°°

He died the morning of February 6^th, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic.  May was with his parents in Cornwall at their family home in Fowey when she learned of Bevil's death; she and his father were denied permission to travel to Germany for the funeral.  May wrote,

Fowey War Memorial

I think the whole town mourned for him. They had known him as a small boy in a red beret rowing his dinghy about the harbour, going fishing with Groze the boatman, sailing with his sister and his Oxford friends.  He had a smile, they said, and a greeting for everyone, and in the war when he came on leave, a man grown and with responsibilities heavy upon him and the knowledge of war, there was still the same smile and the same kindly question of how things were with them; the same invincible cheerfulness. 

          The wind blew in salt from the sea, and at night, looking from my window, I could see the riding-lights of the ships in the harbor…. The stars came out and hung above the hill, and dawn came and the ships put out their riding-lights, and the windows went blank and the stars faded—and he would never come home any more.†

Apart from her poem "Rouen," Cannan’s war poetry is seldom included in modern anthologies. Her poems do not bear eye-witness account to combat, nor does she protest the war.  In her autobiography, Cannan explained,

A saying went round, “Went to the war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon.” I had much admired some of Sassoon’s verse but I was not coming home with him.  Someone must go on writing for those who were still convinced of the right of the cause for which they had taken up arms.††

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* Other poems by May Wedderburn Cannan appearing on this blog include “Since They Have Died,” “France,” and “Paris, November 11, 1918.”

** Bevil Quiller-Couch letters cited in Tears of War, edited by Charlotte Fyfe, Cavalier Books, 2000, pp. 39, 54, 67, 88.

*** May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices, Roundwood Press, 1976, p. 139.

º Cannan, Grey Ghosts, pp. 140, 141.

ºº Bevil Quiller-Couch letter cited in Tears of War, p. 92.

ººº Bevil Quiller-Couch letter cited in Tears of War, p. 115.

† Cannan, Grey Ghosts, p. 146.

†† Cannan, Grey Ghosts, p. 113.

Speak of France with me

Relief worker writes letter for wounded soldier

"The single most characteristic feature of ...women's experience of war was isolation," argues World World War I literary critic Gill Plain.*  Vera Brittain, in her essay “War Service in Perspective,” also describes the “barrier of indescribable experience” that the First World War erected between the men who had fought and the women who loved them. Edmund Blunden wrote of the divide as an “impassable gulf”; Edgell Rickword as “two incommunicable worlds,” and Richard Aldington as “gesticulating across an abyss.”**

Soldiers found it difficult to talk about the war with others who hadn’t been there; their poetry was one way of attempting to understand the Great War and its effects. By the time Brereton’s An Anthology of War Poems was published in 1930, the modern conception of war poetry had emerged: realistic eye witness accounts of combat and its effects, written by soldiers or “trench poets.” Perhaps the best-known example is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” with its vivid and concrete description of the victim of a gas attack “yelling out and stumbling” as blood comes “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.”

But what of the women who observed the war and were forever changed? Female nurses, ambulance drivers, journalists, and aid workers served on the borders of the combat zone, and they also experienced realities of total warfare that were incompatible with the propagandist information disseminated by official sources. Women volunteers who witnessed the effects of the war first-hand also found that their experience cut them off from noncombatants, while cultural expectations of femininity severely constrained what they could share with others about their experiences.  

May Wedderburn Cannan was one of those volunteers. She served in France at a railway canteen for British soldiers in 1915 and returned to Paris in 1918 to work in the British intelligence office. Cannan’s childhood friend Carola Mary Anima Oman worked for three years as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, and in 1918 was assigned to care for the wounded near Boulogne. In Cannan’s poem “France,” we hear a woman trying to break down the barrier of isolation and reach out to someone else who will understand; Cannan dedicated the poem to her friend Oman.

France

(To C. M. A. O.)

You also know

The way the dawns came slow

Over the railway stations out in France;

And you have seen the Drafts entrain

Photo from collection of Pam Mills

By the blurred lanterns in the rain,

And wept the True Romance.

You've also gone,

Dead tired, stumbling on,

Over the pavé when the day was born;

And weary beyond sleep lain down

And heard the clocks strike in the town,

Most young, and most forlorn.

And you have met

On lone roads in the wet

Field Batteries trotting North, and stood aside

And sent your heart with them to fight,

And ridden with them through the night

Until the pale stars died.

And you know too

How a man whistles through

British tear gas victims © IWM (Q 11586) (1)

The dark a line of some forgotten song;

You've seen the Leave Boat in, and then

Gone back to jest with broken men

Who once were swift and strong.

You know how black

The night sea tides surged back

On dock stones where the stretcher bearers kneeled;

And how the fog greyed the men's lips

And the red crosses of the ships,

And how the searchlights wheeled.

You've woke to see

Death hurtle suddenly

On to the hut roofs when the Gothas† came;

And watched a man by Love possessed

Fight through to morning, and go West

Whispering his Girl's name.

Wherefore I know

That you will serve also

The living Vision men call Memory,

And hold to the brave things we said,

And keep faith with the faithful Dead—

 And speak of France with me.

                        --May Wedderburn Cannan

Like many of the soldier poets, Cannan also writes of exhaustion and the numbing effort required to put on a brave face.  The women volunteers also stumble through their duties “dead tired” with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Against the backdrop of a world that is dark, rainy, and blurred with shadow and fog, the women are asked to stand aside as new recruits march past to the killing fields of the front lines and then to care for the endless parade of the injured and dying who return from battle.  Day in and day out, through slow dawns and black nights, the women are asked to lighten the spirits of the endless stream of wounded by jesting “with broken men/ Who once were swift and strong.”

Photo courtesy of Crescy Cannan and Clara M Abrahams
May Cannan is 3rd from the right

Rather than directly describing the carnage, Cannan’s poem uses oblique language and metaphors to veil horrors that were unfit for women’s eyes and could not be communicated in respectable women’s speech. Stretcher bearers kneel by men whose lips are greyed by fog; the maimed and mutilated are “broken”; those slowly dying in agony “go West.”

The impressionistic scenes in the poem are linked by the repeated refrain that reaches across the isolating experience of war towards another woman: “You also know,” “You’ve gone too,” “And you know too.”  There is a quiet poignancy in the restraint of the poem’s last line that underscores how precious will be the gift to “speak of France” with another woman who understands all the war encompassed and all that cannot be directly said. 

*"Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets," Feminist Review, Autumn 1995, p. 41.

**See Claire M. Tylee’s The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, pp. 54-55.

†The Gotha was a German bomber aircraft.