On Earth, Peace

Over one-hundred years ago, on December 23^rd, 1914, the British weekly periodical Punch published a Christmas poem for a nation at war. The anonymous poet dreamed of a return to happier times, pleading, “Take back the blood-stained year again, / Give us the Christmas that we know!”

On Earth -- Peace

Judge of the passionate hearts of men,

God of the wintry wind and snow,

Take back the blood-stained year again,

Give us the Christmas that we know!

No stir of wings sweeps softly by;

US Peace Poster, WWI-era

No angel comes with blinding light;

Beneath the wild and wintry sky

No shepherds watch their flocks tonight.

In the dull thunder of the wind

We hear the cruel guns afar,

But in the glowering heavens we find

No guiding, solitary star.

But lo! on this our Lord's birthday,

Lit by the glory whence she came,

Peace, like a warrior, stands at bay,

A swift, defiant, living flame!

Full-armed she stands in shining mail,

Erect, serene, unfaltering still,

Shod with a strength that cannot fail,

Strong with a fierce o'ermastering will.

 Where shattered homes and ruins be

She fights through dark and desperate days;

Beside the watchers on the sea

She guards the Channel's narrow ways.

Through iron hail and shattering shell,

Where the dull earth is stained with red,

Fearless she fronts the gates of Hell

And shields the unforgotten dead.

So stands she, with her all at stake,

And battles for her own dear life,

That by one victory she may make

For evermore an end of strife.

In this world at war, the comforting figures of the Nativity are nowhere to be found.  The angels are silent, the shepherds are absent, and the guiding star fails to appear in the bitterly cold night sky. Cyril Winterbotham in “A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches” also described the quiet despair of men crouched in the wet, snowy trenches of the Western Front: “In our dark sky no angels sing….Our gifts must bullets be.” 

Yet in the poem a vision appears, breaking through the glowering heavens.  The defiant figure of Peace stands amidst the shattered ruins, a flaming crusader clad in shining armour. Like Joan of Arc, this woman warrior “fights through dark and desperate days.” Calm and confident in the midst of “iron hail and shattering shell,” Peace fiercely protects the unforgotten dead. But her cause is more noble than any military objective: she fights for everyone, for she aims to end all wars. 

This poem that begins with a wistful longing for happier Christmases of the past concludes with a dream of the most extravagant of gifts: world peace forever. To modern readers, the thought of eternal peace on earth is likely to seem as miraculous as that of the virgin birth. What the readers of Punch could not know was that the war that was to have been over by Christmas of 1914 would continue its bloody course for nearly another four years, costing over nine million lives.  By November of 1918, when Peace finally won the day, her arrival seemed nothing short of miraculous. It was a peace that did not last.

Although the poem was published anonymously in Punch, an on-line source recently asserted that it was written by a British officer who was present at the 1914 Christmas Truce.  The claim, however, is unverified, and as “On Earth—Peace” was published in London on December 23^rd –

before the Christmas Truce occurred –  this seems unlikely. A more probable author is the Canadian poet of the Laurentians, F.G. Scott, who volunteered in August of 1914 for overseas service as a military chaplain. Scott is named as the author of the poem by Kate Luard in her memoir Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, published in 1915. Luard’s diary provides a sobering glimpse of Christmas on the Western Front: 

Xmas Eve, 1914_-- And no fire and no chauffage [heating], and cotton frocks; funny life, isn't it? And the men are crouching in a foot of water in the trenches and thinking of "'ome, 'long o' Mother," --British, Germans, French, and Russians …. 

Xmas Day, 1914 -- And this is Christmas, and the world is supposed to be civilised. They came in from the trenches to-day with blue faces and chattering teeth, and it was all one could do to get them warm and fed. 

Kate Luard and Chaplain F.G. Scott survived the war, but Scott’s son Henry Hutton Smith was killed during the battle of the Somme. The world still awaits the coming of Peace eternal. 

German Christmas Card, WWI

Bethlehem 1915

German Christmas card, 1915

What does the holy season of Christmas have to do with war? Egbert Sandford’s poem “At Bethlehem—1915” re-imagines the nativity in ways more typically found in a gothic horror film or a war propagandist’s appeal. We are invited to see the nativity with fresh eyes: it is no less than a cataclysmic invasion.

British Christmas card, 1915

Courtesy of the National Archives

At Bethlehem—1915.

The travellers are astir—

        Bearing frowns for incense,

Scorns for myrrh.

War flings its sign afar—

        There’s blood upon the Manger,

Blood upon the Star.

Dear Lord:

        Who fain would find the Saviour

Find the Sword.

            --E.T. Sandford

Just where is the Prince of Peace in this manger scene? The three kings have been elbowed aside by angry, scornful troops moving towards battle, and the glow of glory from above has been smeared with blood. Is the poem’s last verse a prayer to the Lord or a challenge to his people? What might it mean to search for the Christ-child with a sword or to find deadly weapons in Bethlehem’s stable?

Sandford, a government-employed warehouse manager at Plymouth, described himself as “just an ordinary working man.” His chief literary influences were the poets William Blake and Francis Thompson, and he credited “a literary class at Blackheath” for having given him the encouragement and inspiration to write. Sandford asserted that the primary aim of his poetry was to “take the common things of life and weave them into song.”* His poem “Bethlehem—1915” may be one of the most unusual Christmas carols ever composed.

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*From the introduction to his book Brookdown & Other Poems, 1916. 

Advent 1916

British Christmas card, 1918

Christmas has always been a time for dreams, whether of angelic hosts, sugar plums, or a softly drifting snow. But at Christmas, what hopes fill the dreams of soldiers at war, and what are the deepest longings of their loved ones who wait?  

By December of 1916, the Great War was entering its third year, and soldiers and civilians alike were reeling after the losses at Verdun and the Somme (the battles' casualties exceeded two million men). In her poem “Advent, 1916,” Eva Dobell, a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse (VAD), dreams not of an infant in the manger, but of Christ’s return to the “grim trenches” and “shell-seared plain” of the First World War.

Advent, 1916

           

 Christ of the Trenches, Neuve Chapelle postcard

I dreamt last night Christ came to earth again
To bless His own. My soul from place to place
On her dream-quest, sped, seeking for His face
Through temple and town and lovely land, in vain.
Then came I to a place where death and pain
Had made of God's sweet world a waste forlorn,
With shattered trees and meadows gashed and torn,
Where the grim trenches scarred the shell-seared plain.

And through that Golgotha of blood and clay,
Where watchers cursed the sick dawn, heavy-eyed,
There (in my dream) Christ passed upon His way,
Where His cross marks their nameless graves who died
Slain for the world's salvation, where all day
For others' sake strong men are crucified.

                        --Eva Dobell

The poet dreams not of peace, but of presence. There appears the dull realization that the war will drag on and that men will continue to be sacrificed, “all day / For others’ sake.” The waste is appalling, and even the dawn is sickened and pale.  

Yet in the midst of death and suffering, Christ comes again to walk through meadows “gashed and torn.” He lingers and passes crosses that mark the nameless dead as His own. The humble carpenter who died a bloody death at Golgotha has not forgotten the strong men who now lie row upon row in the heavy clay, and He comes to bless them. The promise He made to his ragged band of disciples on a mountain in Galilee holds true from Gallipoli to Galacia, from Mametz to the Marne: “and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Dobell donated a portion of the sales proceeds of her volume of poetry A Bunch of Cotswold Grasses to St. Martin’s Gloucestershire Red Cross Hospital for Disabled Soldiers. 

Christmas Prayer from the Trenches

Cyril William Winterbotham

Shortly after recovering from emergency surgery to remove his appendix, Cyril Winterbotham, a young barrister from the Cotswolds, joined the 1^st/5^th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment in September of 1915.  Among the men of his battalion, he had a reputation for being “almost recklessly brave.”  And yet his mother described him as “essentially a man of peace” who “had a horror of war and bloodshed, but when the call came, he did not hesitate – every other feeling gave way to the desire to serve his country, and to deliver the oppressed.” 

Winterbotham’s own description of a spring day on the Western Front allows us to see how both accounts of his personality were likely accurate:

It is a strange sight, this firing line.  Imagine two untidy lines of sandbags, looking more like rubbish heaps in the distance and between them straggling lines of wire on rough poles at all sorts of angles with a dead cow here and there and odd articles scattered about.  Then dotted about are ruined houses with tileless roofs and broken walls standing in the remains of their gardens.  Over all, absolutely no sign of life or movement. 

I sat and looked round on Sunday morning.  An aeroplane was being shelled up above and the sky was dotted with little white puffs of smoke.  I couldn’t help trying to reconstruct the scene in peace and imagine all the roofs on and all the mess cleaned up…Waller and I remarked simultaneously that the whole thing is preposterous nonsense and that men ought to leave each other in peace to enjoy the weather and, I added, go fishing.  After which we went off to try and spot a sniper and if possible put a bullet in him. 

--From The Soldier’s War: The Great War through Veteran’s Eyes (Richard van Emden)

Winterbotham wrote two poems while serving on the Western Front.  His “Christmas Prayer from the Trenches” admits to the lonely fear and darkness of Christmas in war time, and yet looks to the hope of the Incarnation and Christ’s comforting presence, promised to even the most battle-hardened of men. 

A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches

Not yet for us may Christmas bring
Good-will to men, and peace;
In our dark sky no angels sing,
Not yet the great release
For men, when war shall cease.

So must the guns our carols make,
Our gifts must bullets be,
For us no Christmas bells shall wake;
These ruined homes shall see
No Christmas revelry.

In hardened hearts we fain would greet
The Babe at Christmas born,
But lo, He comes with pierced feet,

Wearing a crown of thorn,-
His side a spear has torn.

For tired eyes are all too dim,
Our hearts too full of pain,
Our ears too deaf to hear the hymn
Which angels sing in vain,
'The Christ is born again.'

O Jesus, pitiful, draw near,
That even we may see
The Little Child who knew not fear;
Thus would we picture Thee
Unmarred by agony.

O'er death and pain triumphant yet
Bid Thou Thy harpers play,
That we may hear them, and forget
Sorrow and all dismay,
And welcome Thee to stay
With us on Christmas Day. 

The poem is honest about the cruel irony of being ordered to wage war at Christmas.  After the 1914 Christmas Truce, generals on both sides of the battle lines made certain that fraternization would not occur again.  The poem’s opening stanza bleakly states that there will be no peace, no goodwill, and no angel’s song on the Western Front in 1915.  The only songs will be the roar of the guns accompanied by the whistles of the shells; the only gifts will be bullets.

Exhaustion and pain have so numbed the men that they are unable to fathom the news of a holy child’s birth.  The “unmarred” Christ child is a stranger, and yet the men are able to draw near to Christ in agony, his body pitifully mutilated with wounds, his soul wrenched by agony. Praying to the crucified Christ, the hardened soldiers plead for assistance “That even we may see/The Little Child who knew not fear.”

This prayer from the trenches does not ask for an end to the war, but rather for Christ’s presence in the darkest of places, “O’er death and pain triumphant yet,” and for His healing help that at least for one day, the men might forget “Sorrow and all dismay.” 

Cyril Winterbotham would not live to see Christmas 1916.  One of the missing of the Somme, he was killed on 27 August, 1916, near Ovillers, France when his battalion was ordered to attack a German trench.  Although the German position was taken, at least 15 men from the unit were killed, 10 of whose bodies were never recovered due to the continued pounding of heavy artillery on the battlefield.  Cyril Winterbotham’s name is listed on the Thiepval memorial (Pier 5B), just one of the 73,335 British men commemorated there whose remains were never found nor identified. 

A Gift of Gentleness

May Wedderburn Cannan is best known for her war poem “Rouen” (one of the most-anthologized war poems written by a woman), but her short poem “Since They Have Died,” written in February of 1916, has one of the most poignant first lines of any poem written during The Great War. 

Since They Have Died 

Since they have died to give us gentleness,
And hearts kind with contentment and quiet mirth,
Let us who live give also happiness
And love, that’s born of pity, to the earth.

For, I have thought, some day they may lie sleeping
Forgetting all the weariness and pain,
And smile to think their world is in our keeping,
And laughter come back to the earth again.
        --May Wedderburn Cannan

This is a war poem that stands in the present moment looking both to the past (“Since they have died”) and to the future (“Let us who live”).  There comes a shock when Cannan juxtaposes  the incredible violence of the first industrial war with the gentleness, contentment, and “quiet mirth” that men fought to preserve (Thomas Kettle’s poem, “For My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God,” describes just one instance of this). 

Like Kettle’s poem, Cannan’s is also about a gift, the gift of the future for which men were dying.  The poem recalls John Maxwells Edmund's famous epitaph, “When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.”  

Cannan’s poem, written in early 1916, makes it clear that the future isn’t certain:  she is able only to hope that “some day they may lie sleeping” and may “smile to think their world is in our keeping.”  She writes from a present in which death is certain, but love and laughter are not.  Her fiancé was fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the Western Front; he survived, only to die in the influenza epidemic of 1919 before returning home. 

In this poem, any future love is "born of pity."  Wilfred Owen wrote, “My subject is War, and the pity of War.  The Poetry is in the pity.”  What do these writers mean by “the pity" of war?  Some argue that Owen meant that the pity of war was the tragedy that war and suffering are ineradicable parts of the human condition.  But that doesn’t seem to be what May Wedderburn Cannan means here.  

In 1915, she volunteered in France for four weeks at a railway canteen for soldiers.  Such canteens were a place for soldiers to experience sympathetic human contact in the midst of horror or impending fear.  It seems likely this experience would have forged in Cannan a strong emotional tie between love and pity, both for the new recruits who were headed to the front lines and for the wounded men who were traveling home.

This poem, however, does more than simply urge us to remember those who have died.  It mingles melancholy with smiles as it challenges each of us to make something beautiful of our lives. Realizing that others have sacrificed their world into “our keeping,” the poem urges readers to generously share happiness and love (perhaps even with those who were once enemies), so that laughter can “come back to the earth again.”  

Singing into the Silence

Paul Nash, The Ypres Salient at Night

In this year of centenary remembrance, many contemporary poets have written about the Great War.  Anthony Wilson, a poet and faculty member at the University of Exeter, has generously allowed me to share his poem on the Christmas truce.

Natalia Goncharova, "The Christian Host"

Truce 

Just who gave the order

no one knew.

They say there wasn’t one.

Stille Nacht in no man’s,

its accordion leaking like gas

across the frost.

One by one came stars,

better to pick out limp rags

of surrender.

What I remember next is nothing,

if absence is what nothing is,

a song into which we sang silence.

Witnesses, we witnessed it.

We were part of that cloud, and lost in it.

     --Anthony Wilson

The poem breaks the silence with “Just who gave the order,” and then changes the landscape of military command in the short line “no one knew.”  No order, only rumor and not knowing – that is what made the miracle of peace possible.  Men stepped out into the no-man’s land of not knowing.  In the absence of hostilities, into the empty space created by the silent guns, the imagined soldier of the poem remembers filling the nothingness with a song “into which we sang silence.”   

Subtly, the poem invites us to compare the first Christmas with the truce of 1914:  the “limp rags of surrender” suggest the swaddling clothes, the stars that appeared “one by one” are reflections of the single star that paused over Bethlehem, and the soldiers who witnessed the truce recall the witness of the shepherds and the cloud of angels that appeared to them. 

December 24^th, 1914 was another kind of holy night, one in which men lost themselves in the miracle of communion with others, as fleeting as a cloud.