Sea Warfare

Lord Horatio Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mine-sweeper Marksman makes
smokescreen ©IWM ART 735

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

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

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

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

Merchant Seamen Memorial, Tower Hill, London

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

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

A New Zealander's War

Paul Graham Clark and his friend Leslie Averill

Steaming towards war, thinking of home.  Those were the circumstances under which 20-year-old Paul Graham Clark wrote the poem “En Voyage.” Though born in England, Clark had made New Zealand his home, and along with other men of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force 34^th Reinforcements, he left Wellington on the 8th February 1918 aboard the troopship Ulimaroa.  As his great nephew and poet Alan Clark writes, “For many of the young kiwi soldiers this was supposed to be the biggest adventure of their lives.”

En Voyage

They’ve swung her out into the harbour now

And she’s rounded the Heads at last,

While the waves of the briny break over her prow

And New Zealand’s a thing of the past.

We’ve said good-bye to the “missis,”

And kissed all the kiddies, too,

With a note to all that will miss us,

And a special one sent up to you.

We’re a speck in the boundless ocean now,

Just a thousand poor souls, all told;

And feel just like—well, just like how

We felt back in the days of old

When they fitted us out in Bill Massey’s boots,

Dished each one out a spoon and a fork,

Then lined us up like a lot of coots

And told us we couldn’t talk.

Oh, what of the squeamish first few days,

When we’d hardly cleared N.Z.!

The transport ship Ulimaroa leaving Wellington Port, NZ 

How the fellows in hundreds of different ways

Went over and hung the head.

They’d stay there forlorn for hours on end

While they gazed at the ship’s black side,

And swore they were counting the rivets up—

But somehow I think that they lied.

They shove us at night into our six by two’s

In a hole that should only hold ten;

But at somebody’s order—I wish I knew whose—

It’s branded “Two hundred men.”

The air’s none too good of a night time,

But when in the morning we wake,

You could take out your knife and slice it

Then scrape it away with a rake.

The tuckers as good as it always was-

— I don’t think! ” did you say?

Well, what if it isn’t, we’ll eat it because—

Well, if we didn’t it wouldn’t pay.

We’ve not come out on a picnic, boys,

Nor yet on a pleasure trip,

So we’ll have to give up a few of our joys

When aboard the King’s troopship.

New Zealand troops after the capture of Bapaume

So we’re swinging away on our journey still

And we’ve nothing to trouble us yet,

Save our thoughts of the land that knows no ill

And the folks that we can’t forget.

For a life on the ocean waves all right,

And there’s a good time yet to come;

But as sure as the moon shines bright to-night

There’s no place now like home.

We’re steaming ahead for England and France

All willing to do our bit;

We’re willing to live or die, just as

Chance in her uncertain way thinks fit.

But back of the mind of each one of us

Is the land we are longing to see,

Where bush fire and beach are a part of us

Way back in our “ain countree.”

            —Paul Graham Clark

Chance’s uncertain ways intervened. Paul Graham Clark never returned to New Zealand and those he loved; he never again saw the bush fires and beaches that meant so much to him.  Attached to the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, he was killed at the Second Battle of Bapaume on August 26, 1918. 

Paul Graham Clark, Achiet-le-Grand Cmml Cty Ext.