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."