First Time In

Australian Division soldiers, 1917 (Frank Hurley)

For many soldiers, their first arrival at the front triggers a tangled mix of emotions: excitement, terror, detachment, awe. Ivor Gurney, a private from Gloucestershire who had given up his scholarship at the Royal College of Music to enlist, described his first night in the front line trenches of the Great War as “one of the notable evenings of my life” and one “of the happiest for years.”* Gurney was so moved by the experience that he wrote at least five letters describing it to his friends.** In the account he sent to Catherine Abercrombie, he wrote,

But we had not long to stay there or anywhere till we were marched here and put in trenches with another battalion for instruction.  They were Welsh, mostly, and personally I feared a rather rough type. But, oh the joy, I crawled into a dugout, not high but fairly large, lit by a candle, and so met four of the most delightful young men that could be met anywhere. Thin faced and bright eyed, their faces showed beautifully against the soft glow of the candlelight, and their musical voices delightful after the long march at attention in silence. There was no sleep for me that night.  I made up next day a little, but what then? We talked of Welsh folksong, of George Borrow, of Burns, of the RCM [Royal College of Music]; of—yes—of Oscar Wilde, Omar Khayyam, Shakespeare, and of the war: distant from us by 300 yards.  Snipers were continually firing, and rockets—fairy lights they call them: fired from a pistol—lit up the night outside. Every now and again a distant rumble of guns to remind us of the reason we were foregathered. They spoke of their friends dead or maimed in the bombardment a bad one, of the night before, and in the face of their grief I sat there and for once self-forgetful, more or less, gave them all my love, for their tenderness, their steadfastness and kindness to raw fighters and very raw signalers.

Candle-lit faces, fairy lights in the sky, softly sung folksongs – all less than 300 yards from the enemy, where artillery fires and snipers aim to kill.  Gurney wrote two poems about his encounter with the Welsh at the front, giving both the title “First Time In”– this is the shorter of the two:†

Welsh Regiment, WWI

First Time In

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line

Anything might have come to us; but the divine

Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony

Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory

Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in

To low huts candle-lit shaded close by slitten 

Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome;

So that we looked out as from the edge of home.

Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions

To human hopeful things. And the next days’ guns

Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out

That strangely beautiful entry to War's rout;

Candles they gave us precious and shared over-rations—

Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.

'David of the White Rock,' the 'Slumber Song' so soft, and that

Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys

Are sung—but never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.

            —Ivor Gurney

Gurney’s ear is that of a musician tuned to the soundscape of war: he notes the surface noise, but is struck by the melodies that lie underneath. The poem’s syntactic inversions (“Candles they gave us precious”) and echoing alliterations suggest the mood of an ancient fireside, where warriors gather to listen to the bard. And the deafening roar of the guns cannot mute the quiet beauty that whispers through the Welsh songs of home, but rather increases their power. Significantly, Gurney identifies one specific song, “David of the White Rock” (in Welsh, “Dafydd y Garreg Wen”).  Tradition has it that on his death bed, the music’s composer called for his harp and wrote the tune before dying at the age of twenty-nine. Lyrics were added a century later, relating a tale of beauty that is heightened by the nearness of death (I’ve included the English translation):

‘Bring me my harp,’ was David's sad sigh,

Ivor Gurney

‘I would play one more tune before I die.

Help me, dear wife, put the hands to the strings,

I wish my loved ones the blessing God brings.’

‘Last night an angel called with heaven’s breath:

“David, play, and come through the gates of death!”

Farewell, faithful harp, farewell to your strings,

I wish my loved ones the blessing God brings.’

In the letter in which he wrote about his encounter with the Welsh to his friend and mentor Marion Scott, Gurney closes with his own whispered consolation, attempting to find beauty and meaning in the death that surrounds him:

War’s damned interesting. It would be hard indeed to be deprived of all this artist’s material now; when my mind is becoming saner and more engaged with outside things. It is not hard for me to die, but a thing sometimes unbearable to leave this life; and these Welsh God makes fine gentlemen. It would seem that War is one of His ways of doing so.††

Gurney survived the war, but his sanity did not.  He spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental institutions, and when he died in 1937, he was buried in a Gloucester churchyard.  His original gravestone (later replaced after damage) simply states that he was “a lover and maker of beauty.”

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* Ivor Gurney, letters to Herbert Howells and Marion Scott (June 1916).

** Pamela Blevins, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, Boydell, 2008, p. 98 (footnote 33). Scholars know of letters sent to Marion Scott, Ethel Voynich, Catherine Abercrombie, the Chapman family, and Herbert Howells.

† This version of the poem follows Marion’s Scott’s handwritten copy, dated 1920-1922 and shared by the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.  The original manuscript is held at the Gloucestershire Archives.

†† Ivor Gurney letter to Marion Scott.

Bach and the Sentry

Ivor Gurney

A previous post on this blog was titled “Watching the war in the dark.” It featured the poem “War Film” by Teresa Hooley, which imagines a young mother who sits in a theatre and views a documentary about the war, “With a catch of the breath and the heart's uplifting,/ Sorrow and pride.”

Today’s post could also be titled “Watching the war in the dark,” but this poem is written by musician-turned-soldier Ivor Gurney, who before the war was recognized as a prodigy at the Royal College of Music in London.  In "Bach and the Sentry," Gurney  imagines a man who takes his turn on sentry duty, standing on the firestep of the trench and gazing out over No Man’s Land. 

An Observer, E. Handley Read
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 178)

On the Western Front, opposing armies faced each other from distances that typically ranged from 100 – 300 yards, although in some areas, the opposing trenches were separated by less than 20 yards.  Men lived under the constant threat of sniper fire and night surprise attacks, and so all soldiers rotated shifts at sentry duty. Because it was so very easy to fall asleep while staring into the blackness, military regulations required that sentries be relieved every two hours.  The official penalty for sleeping on sentry duty was death by firing squad. 

Bach and the Sentry

Ivor Gurney

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.

When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man's Land again? 

The poem captures the brief moment when remembered notes of classical music sing into the tense and lonely boredom of sentry duty.  Sounding of hope and delight, memories of Bach’s “dearest Prelude” give life to the deadened scene before the sentry:   the mist assumes the form of a pilgrim traveler and lifts its hood to so that it can be seen and known, and the stars grace the night sky with a majestic and dignified presence.   

The music causes the sentry to dare to contemplate survival -- not "if" but "when" he returns to a world where Bach’s Prelude can ring out on instruments, rather than echoing in a solitary man’s mind.  And yet….although the music will be unchanged, the man who has experienced The Great War fears that he will forever hear the notes differently, as the music cannot help but recall the exhaustion and loneliness of nights spent staring into No Man’s Land.    

Gurney did survive the war, but he returned a changed man.  By 1922, four years after the war’s end, he had attempted suicide several times and was committed to a private asylum near his home in Gloucester.  Twice he attempted to escape, and after being recaptured for the second time, he was moved to an asylum near London.  Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward, the dead war poet, visited Gurney at the Dartford asylum and described finding "a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and dressing gown."  Gurney never left the asylum, but died there in 1937.  Buried in his beloved Gloucester, his gravestone reads, “To the Dear Memory of Ivory Gurney, Musician and Poet, A Lover and Maker of Beauty.” 

You can click on the above video to listen to Bach's Prelude in G Minor.  In the spring of 1917, Ivor Gurney wrote that Bach's Prelude in G Minor “sticks to me in solemn moments.”  He added that while it might qualify as the “dearest Prelude,” the poem wasn't written about a specific composition.