Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun

Many of the posts on this blog have begun as secondhand bookshop finds: worn, slim volumes that bear witness to a war that changed the world. 

Browsing a Cambridge secondhand book shop several months ago, I spied on an upper shelf a faded spine with the title The Life I Love, Verses by WKH. As I reached for the book, I wondered at the identity of the mysterious W.K.H. The only writer I know with those initials is William Kersley Holmes, an obscure First World War poet. Holmes is listed on the Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War as serving with the Royal Horse Artillery and the Royal Field Artillery. 

He published two volumes of war poetry (Ballads of Fields and Billets and More Ballads of Fields and Billets). Two of his poems appear on this blog (“Singing Tipperary” and “The Soldier Mood,” one of my favorites), and both are included in International Poetry of the First World War. Holmes survived the war, publishing Tramping Scottish Hills in 1946, but previously, I could find no other mention of him until his death in 1966. 

Surprisingly, the volume I had found (and then purchased for £5) was authored by Holmes and labeled “author’s presentation copy.” Published in 1958, the collection was signed by Holmes with a personal note for “Dorothy, a token of friendship.” The inside jacket provides a bit more context: 

The title of this collection is the key-note of the contents. The verses, most of which have appeared in Punch, Country Life and other periodicals, though varying from grave to gay, are alike in expressing the philosophy of a ‘long-term optimist’. In one poem in memory of a friend killed in the First World War, the author records that ‘horses he loved and laughter and the sun’; these, with hills and the comradeship of his fellowmen, are the inspiration of W.K.H. His verse conforms, for the most part, to the long-established standards, for his aim is to share with as many readers as possible his love of nature, his appreciation of what has given him food for thought, and his amusement at what has appealed to his sense of humour.*

The volume’s Introduction, written by Sir William Robieson (former editor of The Glasgow Herald) adds further detail: 

Readers of my generation have savoured with pleasure all their adult lives the light verse which has appeared so consistently in Punch and elsewhere over the initials “W.H.K.”. Those who lived in Scotland have also expected to find—for example in The Glasgow Herald—over the same initials or perhaps over the name “W.K. Holmes’ verses of a more serious kind or descriptive pieces of great charm relating to the countryside. And a select group knew that those initials and that name concealed the pleasant personality of the senior editor of Blackie & Son—with a varied earlier career to his credit as banker, hill-limber, soldier and journalist. 

All these, whatever their degree of acquaintance with him, will welcome this collection of Mr. Kersley Holmes’s fugitive pieces. It shows better than any essay could do the range of his interests, the philosophy he has developed over what is now a long lifetime, and his mastery of a variety of verse forms. ‘W.K.H’ is here in many moods and over a great variety of experience—as a Gunner of the First World War, a connoisseur of Scottish place-names, a lover of the hills, and in his retirement an interested spectator of life.*

Despite being published forty years after the end of the First World War, the collection includes four war poems: “Bran Mash” (subtitled “A Flash-back to 1915”), a tender account of feeding war horses and finding comfort in their companionship; “The Truth about Ulysses,” a poem that relates the long-term effects of outsider status on returning soldiers; “The Ultimate Outrage, 1916,” an ode to a “favourite shirt” that was destroyed by enemy shell fire, and the poem “Killed in Action,” alluded to in the book’s jacket cover. 

© IWM Q 34105

Killed in Action
Messines, 1917

Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun,
     A song, wide spaces and the open air;
The trust of all dumb living things he won,
     And never knew the luck too good to share.

His were the simple heart and open hand
     And honest faults he never strove to hide;
Problems of life he could not understand
     But as a man would wish to die he died.

Now, though he will not ride with us again,
     His merry spirit seems our comrade yet,
Freed from the power of weariness or pain,
     Forbidding us to mourn—or to forget.
               —W.K.H. (William Kersley Holmes)

This simple elegy for a man who died nearly a half-century earlier recalls the depth of friendship soldiers shared in the trenches as well as the heartbreak of losses that returned home with those who served, never to be forgotten. 

In June of 1915, the Glasgow Herald reviewed W. Kersley Holmes’ war poems, writing, “They range from the grave to the humorous, from the realistic to the romantic, but something of the brightness of youth is in them all, something of that gallant gaiety which makes a jest of the discomforts of life, yet never thinks of life itself as a jest.”**
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* The Life I Love, Verses by W.K.H, by W. Kersley Holmes, Blackie & Sons, Glasgow, 1958.
**Review qtd. in the Dollar Magazine, vol. 14, no. 54, June 1915, pp. 74–75 (a publication of Dollar Academy, Holmes’s alma mater).

Eating chip potatoes

British soldiers at the Somme, Oct. 1916 © IWM (Q 1580)

Historian Paul Fussell, writing in The Great War and Modern Memory, describes the growing sense contemporaries held that the Great War “might be endless”: 

One did not have to be a lunatic or a particularly despondent visionary to conceive quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and attrition would go on infinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience.*

Bruce Bairnsfather:
"Well, Alfred, 'ow are the cakes?"

Yet while it seemed as if the war might last forever, those caught in its grip became increasingly aware of the evanescent quality of human life.  In her memoir Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain explains,

France was the scene of titanic, illimitable death, and for this very reason it had become the heart of the fiercest living ever known to any generation. Nothing was permanent; everyone and everything was always on the move; friendships were temporary, appointments were temporary, life itself was the most temporary of all.** 

For some, fiercely living in the present meant extracting whatever small and simple pleasures might be available in the existing circumstances. William Kersley Holmes was a banker who joined the Lothians and Border Horse Yeomanry regiment and was promoted to the rank of 2^nd Lieutenant with the Royal Field Artillery.  Holmes published two volumes of poetry (Ballads of Field and Billet and More Ballads of Field and Billet) that capture this spirit of determined buoyancy. A reviewer for the Scotsman praised his work, writing, “It may seem a rather doubtful compliment to the verses in this readable book to say that they are pedestrian; but they do not attempt to soar high, to celebrate martial glory.” The Glasgow Herald said of Holmes’ poems,

They range from the grave to the humorous, from the realistic to the romantic, but something of the brightness of youth is in them all, something of that gallant gaiety which makes a jest of the discomforts of life, yet never thinks of life itself as a jest.† 

Holmes’ “The Soldier Mood” captures one such incident in which three friends eat and laugh together, “Defying indigestion and the Germans and the years.”

The Soldier Mood

We were eating chip potatoes underneath the April stars

That glittered coldly and aloof from earth and earthly wars;

We were three good pals together, and the day’s hard work was done,

So we munched our chip potatoes, half for food and half for fun.

Half the world was war’s dominion, but the mutter of the strife

Had come to seem accustomed as the undertone of life;

We were fit and hard and happy, and the future was unknown,

The past—all put behind us; but the present was our own.

We were doing our plainest duty, meant to end what we’d begun;

Why worry for to-morrow till to-day’s big job was done?

So we walked and laughed together like three modern musketeers—

Defying indigestion and the Germans and the years.

We were eating chip potatoes with our fingers, like a tramp,

And the unseen owls were hooting in the trees around the camp;

We were happy to be hungry, glad to be alive and strong;

So—to-morrow might be terror, but to-night could be a song!
                                                —W. Kersley Holmes

In Holmes' poem, the prolonged stalemate of trench warfare and the immensity of the conflict (involving half of the nations of the world) have so normalized violence and death that they have come to be accepted as “the normal undertone of life.”  With an unspoken understanding, the men realize that dwelling on memories of past battles or anticipating terrors of future attacks will lead to fearful paralysis; the only way forward is to claim the present as their own, without ceremony or posturing. The soldiers’ mood –“Happy to be hungry, glad to be alive and strong”—is not a philosophy born out of naïve idealism, but rather a means of coping with the ever-present terrors of the war.

 

In another poem “The Neutral,” Holmes acknowledges that the war has put at risk not only men’s lives, but their sense of themselves:

War, like a restless fever, haunts the air,

Changing the world we knew;

The men we are forget the men we were

In all we think and do.

Grasping at simple pleasures that were connected with their past lives—“eating chip potatoes”—gave soldiers a tangible way of preserving personal identities that many felt were slipping away with each day the war dragged on.††

Holmes survived the war and returned to Scotland. He continued to write poetry and published Tramping the Scottish Hills, as well as working as editor for the popular Blackie's children's book annuals. More on Holmes' life can be read at this link from the Scottish poetry library. 

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*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, 2000, page 71.  For more on the Never-Endians, see also this blog's post “The Other Side” (Alec Waugh). 

**Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, Virago Press, 2004, pages 338-339.

†Both reviews are quoted in the Dollar Magazine, Vol XIV, No. 54, June 1915, pages 74-75 (the magazine was a publication of Dollar Academy, Holmes’ alma mater).

††Holmes’ poem “Singing ‘Tipperary’” also explores soldiers’ struggles to retain a sense of their individuality while caught up in the larger forces of the war.

Tipperary and the Troops

"It's a long way to Tipperary" is remembered as a song of the First World War, although it was composed before the war in 1912 for British music halls.   In August of 1914, a British news correspondent heard the Irish Connaught Rangers singing the song as they marched through  France on their way to the front lines, and after his report, the popularity of the tune spread, especially after it was recorded by tenor John McCormack (click here for a recording). 

Much like "Keep the Home Fires Burning," another popular song of the First World War, "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" is not a fight song.  As the war wore on, it may have become harder to sing about martial glory, and easier to sing about home and a nostalgia for what the soldiers had given up when they joined the war. 

Chorus:

It's a long way to Tipperary,
It's a long, long way to go.
It's a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know.
Goodbye Piccadilly,
Farewell Leicester Square,
It's a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart lies there.    

According to Imperial War Museum historian Matt Brosnan, the song was catchy enough that it was sung even by French, Russian, and German troops.  William Yorke Stevenson, in his memoir At the Front in a Flivver, describes a 1916 vaudeville show that American ambulance drivers hosted for battle-weary French troops outside Verdun.  He writes, "They asked—no, really begged, us to sing "Tipperary."  Well, we sang it, of course" (149).   The song was everywhere, and so it's not surprising that a poem was written about it.   

Singing 'Tipperary' by William Kersley Holmes

We’ve each our Tipperary, who shout that haunting song,

And all the more worth reaching because the way is long;

You’ll hear the hackneyed chorus until it tires your brain

Unless you feel the thousand hopes disguised in that refrain.

We’ve each our Tipperary – some hamlet, village, town,

To which our ghosts would hasten though we laid our bodies down,

Some spot of little showing our spirits still would seek,

And strive, unseen, to utter what now we fear to speak.

We’ve each our Tipperary, our labour to inspire,

Some mountain-top or haven, some goal of far desire—

Some old forlorn ambition, or humble, happy hope

That shines beyond the doubting with which our spirits cope.

We’ve each our Tipperary—near by or wildly far;

For some it means a fireside, for some it means a star;

For some it’s but a journey by homely roads they know,

For some a spirit’s venture where none but theirs may go.

We’ve each our Tipperary, where rest and love and peace

Mean just a mortal maiden, or Dante’s Beatrice;

We growl a song together, to keep the marching swing,

But who shall dare interpret the chorus that we sing?

Holmes' poem admits that the song has become an earworm that is hackneyed and tires the brain, but beneath its trite sentimentality and bouncing rhythm lie a "thousand hopes disguised."  For the marching soldiers, the song provides a way of giving voice to individual dreams that "now we fear to speak."   "Tipperary" has become a stand-in not only for all the places left behind in the past, but also for the various futures that men despair of never having an opportunity to reach. 

From mountain top to haven, from fireside to star, the poem asserts the differences in the men who have been asked to give up not merely the comforts of home, but their very individual selves.  As they march in step together, it is as a collective noun – a company, a regiment, an army.  Yet the poem invites us to listen beneath the music to the frustration of individuals who must "shout" and "growl" a song together. 

Mayo Peace Park, Castelbar, Ireland

In its closing line, the poem goes one step further and cautions against broad interpretations of soldiers' individual motivations and dreams.  It reminds us that each soldier, whether serving in the Somme or Normandy or Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan -- or any other place or time -- deserves to be remembered with dignity as an individual, and not as an idealized or homogenized cog in the machinery of war.