One Day's List

Soldiers of the Welch Regiment

In early January of 1917, a second lieutenant of the Welch Regiment wrote to a friend about the precarious mental state that, together with his wounds, had landed him in a Red Cross Hospital in Rouen:

I am as stupid as an owl & all night I lie awake & perceive the ward full of Huns of forbidding aspect—except when they give me a sleeping draft. I am in short rather ill still & sometimes doubt my own sanity—indeed, quite frequently I do. I suppose that, really, the Somme was a pretty severe ordeal, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Now, however, I find myself suddenly waking up in a hell of a funk—& going on being in a hell of a funk till morning. And that is pretty well the condition of a number of men here. I wonder what the effect of it will be on us all, after the war—& on national life and the like.‡ 

Just two days later, the soldier, Ford Madox Hueffer (who would later change his name to Ford Madox Ford), wrote “One’s Day’s List,” a poem that tries to make sense of the death of friends, his own survival, and the incomprehensibility of war itself.

London Telegraph, 2 Oct. 1916

One Day's List

[Killed. – “Second Lieutenants unless otherwise stated." 

Arnott, E. E. – Welch Regt.

Jones, E.B.D. – Welch Regt.

Morris, J.H. – Welch Regt.

And 270 other ranks, Welch Regt.

            Died of Wounds.

Knapp, O.R. – 2^nd Lieut. Welch Regt.].

My dears …

The rain drips down on Rouen Town

The leaves drip down

And so the mud

Turns orange brown ….

A Zeppelin, we read, has been brought down.

And the obscure brown

Populace of London town

Make a shout of it,

Clamouring for blood

And reductions in the price of food …

But you – at least – are out of it ….

Poor little Arnott—poor little lad …

And poor old Knapp,

Of whom once I borrowed a map—and never returned it.

And Morris and Jones … and all the rest of the Welch,

So many gone in the twenty-four hours of a day …

One wonders how one can stay…

One wonders ….

For the papers are full of Kelch,

Finding rubbishy news to make a shout of it,

But you at least are out of it.

One wonders how you died …

The mine thunders

Still where you stuck by Welch Alley and turned it ….

The mine thunders

Upwards—and branches of trees, mud, and stone,

Skulls, limbs, rats, thistles, the clips

Of cartridges, beef tines and wire

Belch

To the heavens in fire

From the lips

Of the craters where doubtless you died,

With the Cheshires and Wiltshires and Welch

Side by side.

One wonders why you died,

Why were we in it? …

At home we were late on parades,

Seldom there to the minute,

When “B.” were out on Cathays

We didn't get much of the lectures into the brain ….

We talked a good deal about girls.

We could all tell a story

At something past something, Ack Emma!

But why?  Why?  Why were we there from the Aisne to Mametz,

Well—there's a dilemma ….

For we never talked of glory,

We each thought a lot of one girl,

And waited most days for hours in the rain

Till she came:

But we never talked of Fame ….

It is very difficult to believe

You need never again

Put in for week-end leave,

Or get vouchers for the 1.10 train

From Cardiff to London ….

But so much has the Hun done

In the way of achievements.

And when I think of all the bereavements

Of your mothers and fathers and sweethearts and wives and homes in the West,

And the paths between the willows waiting for your tread,

And the white pillows

Waiting each for a head,

Well … they may go to rest! 

And, God help me, if you meet a Hun

In Heaven, I bet you will say, “Well done,

You fought like mad lions in nets

Down by Mametz.” 

But we who remain shall grow old,

We shall know the cold

Of cheerless

Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting

Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,

And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces,

And the long ranges of comfortless years

And the long gamut of human fears ….

But, for you, it shall be forever spring,

And only you shall be forever fearless,

And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,

And only you, where the water-lily swims

Shall walk along the pathways, thro’ the willows

Of your west.

You who went West,

And only you on silvery twilight pillows

Shall take your rest

In the soft sweet glooms

Of twilight rooms ….

                        No. 2 Red Cross Hospital,

                        Rouen, 7/1/17

                        —Ford Madox Ford

The poem echoes Binyon’s “For the Fallen” (published in September of 1914), asserting that those who are left will “grow old.” But while Binyon’s poem creates a fellowship of purposeful tribute (“We will remember them”), Ford imagines a bleak and cheerless future for Great War survivors. The only certain comfort in the deaths of the young Welch soldiers is that they escaped the mud and misery: “at least you are out of it.” But so much else is uncertain: Why did some men survive? How did others die? For what purpose did they fall? Why were they fighting? And what unkind fate assigned the Welch Regiment to hold the line from the Aisne to Mametz in the late summer and early fall of 1916?

Ford grieved to read in the Casualty List the names of men he knew, liked, and admired. Here are their stories:

E.E. Arnott: Euan Edward Arnott was the eldest son of Mrs. Mary Morgan from Garth in Monmouth (his mother had remarried after his father’s death). Euan attended Christ College, Brecon, where he was known for his athletic abilities (playing football, cricket, and hockey) and his “frank, good natured comradeship.” With his friend Edward Trevor Akrill Jones, the two young boys “desperate to enlist … left school during the cricket season of 1915—shortly after their sixteenth birthdays.”* He died of wounds on September 23, 1916 and is buried at Warlencourt. His mother chose the grave inscription, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” and his name appears on the war memorial at St. Mary’s Priory Church in Monmouth. 

O.R. Knapp: Oswald Reed Knapp was a Freemason and the son of James and Emily Knapp of Roath, Cardiff.  According to the Regimental War diary, Oswald was wounded at High Wood on September 8^th: “a vigorous bomb fight proceeded with varying success until about 3 a.m., when, before a violent counter-attack our bombers, now very fatigued, were forced to retire. They fought tenaciously but only managed to retain a part of the communication trench which they had dug out to the trench they had taken.”** He died five days later on September 13, 1916. He is buried at Heilly Station Cemetery; his grave inscription reads, “Greater Love Hath No Man Than This That A Man Lay Down His Life For His Friends.”

JH Morris: John Herbert Morris was the youngest son of Watkin and Elizabeth Morris of Cwmavon, Glamorgan and had attended Llandovery College. He served first with the 20^th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was transferred to the 6^th Bn, where his unit was used “to clear the battlefields after the July battles on the Somme, and then to dig forward and communication trenches when the line moved forward.”†  He was twenty-five years old when killed Sept. 21, 1916 (or 22^nd) and is buried at Flatiron Copse Cemetery. The notice of his death in the Mid-Glamorgan Herald and Neath Gazette reported that he “was very popular and well beloved by all in the village. His father is churchwarden of All Saints’, Cwmavon, and had he lived Lieut. Morris would have succeeded his father in these duties.”††

EBD Jones: Neither the Commonwealth War Graves Commission nor the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War have any record of a second lieutenant with these initials. However, it is highly probable that Ford was remembering B.G.D. Jones, who was killed on the same day as Euan Arnott and whose name appears on the same casualty list as Arnott and Morris (2 Oct. 1916 London Telegraph). Basil Gordon Dawes Jones was the son of William and Emily Jones of Worthing.  Born into a military family (his father was a Colonel in the Indian Army), Basil had attended the British military school at Sandhurst. According to the Sulhamstead Parish Magazine, he “was severely wounded in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, and was taken to Lady Carnarvon’s Hospital for wounded officers at Highclere Castle [the setting used for Downton Abbey], where he remained nearly four months. He only recovered sufficiently to return to the front at the beginning of this year, and had not since been home on leave. He was only 19 years of age when he was killed.”††† He was awarded a Military Cross and commended for “fine work in the front line trenches in command of machine guns under very heavy shell fire. He repeatedly made his way through heavy barrages to ensure the good work of his guns.” His regiment’s military diary reports his death on September 21, 1916; however, the Commonwealth War Grave Commission lists his death as occurring on October 23, 1916.  Basil’s body was never recovered: is it possible that men in his unit witnessed his death, but that in the fierce shelling described in the war diary, his body could not be recovered, thus delaying official confirmation? Basil’s name is listed on the British memorial to the missing at Thiepval and also appears on a private memorial in St. Mary’s Church, Goring-by-Sea, Sussex.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

‡ Ford Madox Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Richard Ludwig, Princeton UP, 2015, p. 82.

* The Breconian, vol. IX, no. 6, Dec. 1916 (p. 170 includes a poem dedicated to him) and “Remembrance Dispatch 39 Edward Trevor Akrill Jones,” Christ College Brecon.

** “Second Lieutenant Oswald Reed Knapp,” 2nd Bn Welch Regiment War Diary, 8 Sept. 1916, Lives of the First World War.

† “John Herbert Morris,” Llandovery College War Memorial.

†† “Scroll of Fame,” Mid-Glamorgan Herald and Neath Gazette, Saturday, September 30, 1916.

††† “Gallant work with Lewis guns,” Berkshire at War, quoting from the Sulhamstead Parish Magazine, Nov. 1916, https://berkshirevoiceswwi.wordpress.com/tag/parsons/.

An early morning love song

Man in Trench, William Orpen
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 3030)

“But I think that, in these sad days and years, we have got to believe in a Heaven….”

                        --Ford Madox Hueffer, 1918 (“Preface,” On Heaven and Other Poems). 

On August 23, 1916, Ford Madox Hueffer (who would in 1919 change his name to Ford Madox Ford, disavowing his German father’s surname, because it was, well, too German) wrote a letter home.  He described his experience of the Western Front as “a dreamy sort of life in a grey green country & even the shells as they set out on their long journeys seem tired.  It is rather curious, the extra senses one develops here. I sit writing in the twilight &, even as I write, I hear the shells whine.”

Two weeks later, on September 7, 1916, the 42-year-old British 2^nd lieutenant wrote the poem “Albade.” The title refers to an early morning love song, specifically a love ballad sung from a window or doorway to a sleeping woman.     

France, 1916: Image ©Tingle Culbertson

Albade

The little girls are singing, "Rin! Ron! Rin!"

The matin bell is ringing "Din! Don! Din!"

Thirty little girls, while it rains and shrapnel skirls

By the playground where the chapel bells are ringing. 

The stout old nuns are walking,

Dance, little girls, beneath the din!

The four-point-ones are talking

Form up, little girls, the school is in!

Seven stout old nuns and fourteen naval guns

All around the playground go on talking. 

Dirty Day in Flanders, David Baxter
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 3245)

And, my darling, you are getting out of bed

Where the seven angels watched around your head,

With no shrapnel and no Huns

And no nuns or four-point-ones…

Getting up to catch the train,

Coming back to tea again

When the Angelus is sounding to the plain

And the statue shells are coming from the plain

And the little girls have trotted home again

In the rain…

Darling, darling, say one funny prayer again

For your true love who is waking in the rain. 

--The Salient, 7/9/16

The poem plays with sound, inviting readers to listen to the absurdities of war. Rain and shrapnel skirl above the chatter of German artillery fire, while civilians desperately strive for normalcy. As the four-point-one guns boom in the distance (four-point one is British slang used to refer to the 10.5 cm German Feldhaubitze guns that fired 4-inch shells a distance of nearly 4 miles), Belgium nuns admonish young school girls, “Dance, little girls, beneath the din!” Seven stout nuns raise their voices to be heard above the roar of fourteen navel guns, encouraging the children to ignore the war that supplies the booming background music of their playground recess.  Adding to the cacophony, church bells call the faithful to the service of Angelus, and gun fire crackles from the field. 

And yet across the Channel in England, a woman (the poet’s “darling”), quietly wakes to a peaceful morning, “With no shrapnel, and no Huns/ And no nuns or four-point-ones.” As shells drop on the Western Front, this beloved Englishwoman returns from her errands to take a tranquil break for tea. 

The poem offers readers a curious grouping: celibate religious women, young school girls, German gunners, a sheltered Englishwoman, and a soldier in the trenches who wakes to rain and begs for prayer.  Despite their differences, all share one thing in common: a deep and heart-felt desire to survive the war. 

Ford Madox Hueffer/Ford

In the preface to his war poetry collection (1918), Hueffer/Ford wrote,

I know at least that I would not keep on going if I did not feel that Heaven will be something like Rumpelmayer's tea shop, with the nice boys in khaki, with the haze and glimmer of the bright buttons, and the nice girls in the fashions appropriate to the day, and the little orchestra playing,“Let the Great Big World. . . ."  For our dead wanted so badly their leave in a Blighty, which would have been like that — they wanted it so badly that they must have it. And they must have just that. For haven't we Infantry all seen that sort of shimmer and shine and heard the rustling and the music through all the turmoil and the mire and the horror ? . . . And dying so, those images assuredly are the last things that our eyes shall see : that imagination is stronger than death. For we must have some such Heaven to make up for the deep mud and the bitter weather and the long lasting fears and the cruel hunger for light, for graciousness and for grace!....

Second Lieutenant Hueffer/Ford did survive the war. His novels The Good Soldier and Parade’s End are recognized as some of the finest fictional accounts of the First World War.  His war poetry, however, has been largely forgotten.*

*An excerpt from Hueffer/Ford's poem "Footsloggers" appeared earlier on this blog.    

Slogging towards glory

Where do the myths of glorious war come from?  How are mud and bloated death transformed into heroic action?  As the war dragged into it fourth year, Ford Madox Ford wrote the poem "Footsloggers," attempting an answer to these questions as men, armies, and nations continued to stumble forward, hoping for an end to the horrors. 

 Ford Madox Ford (whose real name was Ford Madox Hueffer, and under which name he published his volume of war poetry) is best known as the novelist who wrote Parade's End, a four-volume fictional account of the war and its effects.  Brendan Ball has written, "Ford the novelist at least has some sort of name; Ford the war poet has none whatsoever.  The face, as the saying has it, simply did not fit.  World War I was the stage for the Flower of the Nation, the young bloods of birth and breeding tragically cut down in their prime, and Ford on joining the infantry was already a pudgy 41-year-old with a face to which no camera angle nor any degree of light or darkness could give romance."  

An unromantic face, a lost voice, and a poem with an odd title – the deck seems stacked against this poet and literary effort, but "Footsloggers" is a poem worth reading.  It is lengthy, so I’ve included only a short excerpt, but for those wanting to read the entire poem, the volume in which it was published in 1918, On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service, is available online ("Footsloggers" appears on pages 58 – 76). 

An excerpt from "Footsloggers"

by Ford Madox Ford

                                    So, in the Flanders mud,

We bear the State upon our rain-soaked backs,

Breathe life into the State from our rattling lungs,

Anoint the State with the rivulets of sweat

From our tin helmets. 

                        And so, in years to come

The State shall take the semblance of Britannia,

Up-bourne, deep-bosomed, with anointed limbs…

Like the back of a penny. 

VI

                                    For I do not think

We ever took much stock in that Britannia

On the long French roads, or even on parades,

Or thought overmuch of Nelson or of Minden,

Or even the old traditions….

                                                I don't know,

In the breathless rush that it is of parades and drills,

Of digging at the double and strafes and fatigues,

These figures grow dimmed and lost:

Doubtless we too, we too, when the years have receded

Shall look like the heroes of Hellas, upon a frieze,

White-limbed and buoyant and passing the flame of the torches

From hand to hand….But today it's mud to the knees

And khaki and khaki and khaki….

                        And the love of one's land

Very quiet and hidden and still….

The images that open this excerpt are stunningly pictorial:  the entire British Empire has been shrunk into the body of one wounded soldier who is being carried on the back of a mate, resuscitated by the "rattling" breath of a comrade-in-arms, and anointed in a last rites ceremony "with the rivulets of sweat/From our tin helmets."  The men's care for "Britannia" in the mud of the trenches is what will allow her to rise from the war, phoenix-like, once again gloriously whole and serene. 

Yet the poem confesses that the men who give so much to keep Britannia alive "never took much stock" in the noble image of the Empire, never thought much about the long-dead heroes of past wars such as Lord Nelson, nor of long-ago military victories such as the 1759 Battle of Minden. 

For the men in this war, memories of war and glory have been "dimmed and lost" by the "breathless rush" of drilling for battle, being strafed by machine guns, and digging trenches so as to avoid the murderous artillery shells.  There's neither time nor place for the glorious military traditions of Britannia in "mud to the knees/And khaki and khaki and khaki."  What keeps the men fighting, what helps them to endure is "the love of one's land/Very quiet and hidden and still." 

The excerpt closes with a final ironic twist: the soldier knows "doubtless" that his war, when remembered, will bear little resemblance to its gruesome reality, but instead, like Britannia itself, will be idealized.  The muddy, mutilated and exhausted men in khaki shall be transformed until they resemble the carved ancient Greek heroes that decorate columned temples.  Restored to health and sanity in the memorials of the nation, the soldiers of the Great War will be remembered as "passing the flame of the torches/From hand to hand." 

Where do the myths of glorious war come from?  From memory that needs to find a purpose in the pain and suffering. 

As Hall argues, Ford is unusual among First World War poets because "he brought to the trenches the full perceptive power and skill set of a mature man and accomplished writer, and he survived to bring them home again."