Hallowe'en

Detail "Menin Gate at Midnight by Longstaff (photo Maria Jintes)

In the fall of 1916, a soldier from the Western Front returned to England on leave and recounted an unsettling experience:

Towards the end of September, I stayed in Kent with a recently wounded First Battalion friend. An elder brother had been killed in the Dardanelles, and their mother kept the bedroom exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, the linen always freshly laundered, flowers and cigarettes by the bedside. She went around with a vague, bright religious look on her face. The first night I spent there, my friend and I sat up talking about the war until past twelve o’clock. His mother had gone to bed early, after urging us not to get too tired. The talk had excited me, and though I managed to fall asleep an hour later, I was continually awakened by sudden rapping noises, which I tried to disregard but which grew louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. Soon sleep left me and I lay in a cold sweat. At nearly three o’clock, I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door. In the passage I collided with the mother who, to my surprise, was fully dressed. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘One of the maids had hysterics. I’m so sorry you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to bed, but could not sleep again, though the noises had stopped. In the morning I told my friend: ‘I’m leaving this place. It’s worse than France.’ There were thousands of  mothers like her, getting in touch with their dead sons by various spiritualistic means.^[i]

The First World War saw a dramatic surge in spiritualism, and in their desperate wish to communicate with the dead, many of the grieving turned to Ouija boards, mediums, and séances.[ii]  It’s no surprise then that many poems of the First World War are also peopled with ghosts. 

HALLOW-E'EN, 1915

Septembre, Francois Cachoud

Will you come back to us, men of our hearts, tonight

In the misty close of the brief October day?

Will you leave the alien graves where you sleep and steal away

To see the gables and eaves of home grow dark in the evening light?

"O men of the manor and moated hall and farm,

Come back to-night, treading softly over the grass;

The dew of the autumn dusk will not betray where you pass;

The watchful dog may stir in his sleep but he'll raise no hoarse alarm.

Then you will stand, not strangers, but wishful to look

Frank Jenkins, died July 1, 1916

At the kindly lamplight shed from the open door,

And the fire-lit casement where one, having wept you sore,

Sits dreaming alone with her sorrow, not heeding her open book.

Forgotten awhile the weary trenches, the dome

Of pitiless Eastern sky, in this quiet hour

When no sound breaks the hush but the chimes from the old church tower,

And the river's song at the weir, -- ah! then we will welcome you home.

You will come back to us just as the robin sings

Nunc Dimittis from the larch to a sun late set

In purple woodlands; when caught like silver fish in a net

The stars gleam out through the orchard boughs and the church owl flaps his wings.

We have no fear of you, silent shadows, who tread

The leaf-bestrewn paths, the dew-wet lawns. Draw near

To the glowing fire, the empty chair, we shall not fear,

Being but ghosts for the lack of you, ghosts of our well-beloved dead.

            --Winifred M Letts

In Letts’ poem, the silent shadows of the men who have died appear not as frightening ghosts, nor as strangers, but as “men of our hearts” who have returned to the places they have loved. The quiet spirits who come “treading softly” are tenderly welcomed.  They are urged to come out of the darkness and into the “kindly lamplight” of home where they may find shelter and solace under familiar gables and eaves.  The beloved ghosts are invited once again to occupy “the empty chair,” and draw near “the glowing fire.”  

In the magical twilight of Halloween, both the dead and the living wish nothing more than to forget for a while  the pain and sorrow of “the weary trenches.”  In this spellbound time, supernatural grace suffuses the natural world too, as stars gleam “like silver fish caught in a net” and the robin sings “Nunc dimittis” like a choir boy at Evensong: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” And most precious of all, in this world of magical thinking is the assurance, “we will welcome you home.”

The poem discloses the deep bond of kinship between the souls of the war dead and those who, “dreaming alone with…sorrow,” grieve for them at home.  All have been transformed into ghosts, and all are united in the empty, lost futures that stretch before them.  With sad confidence, the voice of the poem can say, “We have no fear of you” – for the horror is to be found in the war, not in its dead. 

#WeAreHere, photo by Rachel Dacre

On July 1, 2016, groups of men dressed as First World War soldiers walked the streets and sidewalks of Great Britain in silence.  Appearing in shopping malls, train stations, and parks, the “ghost soldiers” were largely silent except for occasionally joining together to sing the trench song “We’re Here Because We’re Here.”  The commemorative tribute was inspired “in part from tales told during and after the First World War by people who believed they had seen the ghosts of loved ones they had lost.”[iii]

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[i] Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929.  The soldier he visited was Siegfried Sassoon. 

[ii] To learn more about Spiritualism during the war, see “’A solace to a tortured world…’—The Growing Interest in Spiritualism during and after WW1” by Suzie Grogan, published online at World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. 

[iii] “Secrets behind #WeAreHere revealed” by Ann Gripper, Rod McPhee, and Nicola Oakley.  The Mirror, 1 July 2016. 

The ghost of Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley

On October 5^th, 1915, twenty-year-old Charles Sorley wrote to his father describing his time in the trenches outside Loos: “…rain and dirt and damp cold. O for a bath!”  Sorley was known for his love of stormy weather: as a student at Marlborough College, he exulted in wet and windy runs across the trails of Marlborough Downs.   An excerpt from the last stanza of “Song of the Ungirt Runners,” a poem he wrote in early 1915, expresses that passion:

The rain is on our lips,

We do not run for prize.

But the storm the water whips

And the wave howls to the skies.

Eight days after writing his father, on October 13, 1915, in one of the last attacks of the Battle of Loos, Sorley was shot in the head and died instantly.  In the chaos of the battle, his body was never recovered: he is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, along with 20,609 other British and Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave.  His poetry was published three months after his death in the slim volume Marlborough and Other Poems. 

In February 1916, Robert Graves, another soldier poet serving in France, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh that he had “just discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorley” and that “It seems ridiculous to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself doing but he seems to have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having been just my own age.”  In 1918 Graves’ published a volume of his own poems, Fairies and Fusiliers: it includes a poem that remembers Charles Sorley and celebrates a life of action.

Sorley's Weather Shellburst, Zillebeke by Paul Nash When outside the icy rain Comes leaping helter-skelter, Shall I tie my restive brain Snugly under shelter? Shall I make a gentle song Here in my firelit study, When outside the winds blow strong And the lanes are muddy? With old wine and drowsy meats Am I to fill my belly? Shall I glutton here with Keats? Shall I drink with Shelley? Tobacco's pleasant, firelight's good: Poetry makes both better. Clay is wet and so is mud, Winter rains are wetter. Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill, For though the winds come frorley I'm away to the rain-blown hill And the ghost of Sorley.           Robert Graves (1895-1985) Tobacco, firelight, and poetry are pleasant and good, but “Sorley’s Weather” urges readers to put down their books and stride out into rough storms on rain-blown hills.  Experiencing the wildness of nature is far better than retreating to the fireside with the Romantics.  Even Percy Shelly’s meditations on nature (“The wilderness has a mysterious tongue/ Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild”) can be left behind on the window sill.  Sorley’s own poem “Rain,” written in 1912, tells readers where to find him: When the rain is coming down, And all Court is still and bare, And the leaves fall wrinkled, brown, Through the kindly winter air, …. There is something in the rain That would bid me to remain: There is something in the wind That would whisper, "Leave behind All this land of time and rules, Land of bells and early schools. For those mourning the dead and remembering the thousands of every day tragedies of the Western Front, it was windswept hills, mud, and winter rain that were best able to summon the ghosts of the men and boys who would never return.  At the start of the Battle of Loos, torrential rains flooded the trenches, and Graves’ poem calls to mind the conditions of the war, as well as the weather that Sorley loved so well in life.  J.R.R. Tolkien, writing about another rover and warrior, wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  Not long after enlisting, Sorley wrote in a letter home, “Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Powell, A Deep Cry).  For earlier related posts, see Sorley’s “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” and Graves’ “Haunted.”

Haunted

Robert Graves

If you had to choose:  the excitement of war or three years of  research and study at a prestigious university?   According to Jon Stallworthy, Robert Graves, a young man who had been awarded a scholarship in Classics to Cambridge after having "spent fourteen of his nineteen years studying Latin and Greek" was thankful for the outbreak of the First World War, seeing it as a reprieve from further drudgery in ancient languages.

Nothing was dull about Graves' experiences on the Somme in July of 1916.  A little more than two weeks after the battle had started, Graves was seriously injured in an artillery barrage:  "One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up, near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation.  The wound over the eye was made by a little chip of marble….This and a finger-wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me.  But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder-blade and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple."  So seriously wounded that he was reported dead (his obituary appeared in The Times, and his family received a letter of death on his twenty-first birthday), Graves survived the war. 

But what did it mean to survive The Great War?  The men who returned to their home towns brought with them experiences they could not forget, terrible memories of the war and of the men whom they had left behind. 

Haunted

Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,
Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing
And lay ghost hands on everything,
But leave the noonday's warm sunshine
To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,
Strangers assume your phantom faces,
You grin at me from daylight places,
Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet
Dead men down the morning street. 

    —Robert Graves (Country Sentiment, 1920)

Beckett and Teeuwisse, The Independent (22 May 2014)

In this poem, it is not the survivors who drink to forget, but the ghosts who carouse, gulp wine, roar through darkness," and "stamp and sing."  The life and energy of the dead who "lay ghost hands on everything" stands in sharp contrast to the hesitant survivor who is "ashamed to greet/Dead men down the morning street." 

Robert Graves

Years after the Armistice, Graves wrote, "Not only did I have no experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from school into the army: I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy [Grave's wife] shared it with me….I knew it would be years before I could face anything but a quiet country life."*

For those who lived to see the end of the war, the most mundane circumstances of each day were colored with death and haunted by the shadows and empty places of the nine million who would never return.  Nations and societies were altered forever, not only by those who were lost, but by those who lived on and could not forget. 

*Graves is best known for his war memoir Goodbye to All That; Tim Kendall in Poetry of the First World War says, "In later years, Graves did not greatly value his soldier poetry, suppressing much of it" (192).