Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.

Last sight

Australian soldiers blinded near Villers-Bretonneux 1918

American writer Helen Mackay was in France when the war broke out. Her diary, later published as Journal of Small Things, records “random memories of a sympathetic friend of France… [and] describes what she saw during the opening stages of the war in Paris and in provincial towns.”*  Struck by the human cost of the war, Mackay describes a dépôt d’éclopés (literally translated as a depot for the lame, the term generally applied to men no longer able to fight). 

            The dépôt d’éclopés is just beyond the town, on the Roman road ….. All day long, and every day, as many of the éclopés as can get about, and do not mind that the road see them, and can find space in the shade of the plane tree, sit there, and look up and down the sunshine and the dust.

            Some of them have one leg, and some of them have one arm. There is one of them who is packed into a short box on wheels. He sits up straight in the box, and he can run it about with his hands on the wheels.  There is another in such a little cart, but that one has to lie on his back, and cannot manage the wheels himself. There is one who lies on a long stretcher, that they fix on two hurdles.

            There are two who are blind. The two blind men sit, and stare and stare…. The two blind men at the gate who stare and stare, they cannot see the golden town or the golden mountains. They cannot see the compassion and the kindness that there is for them in the faces of all those who look upon them.** 

Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt,” alludes to the name of the National Ophthalmology Hospital in Paris; the expression was used in French to refer to a blind person.

           

Quinze Vingt

Their last sight was the red sight of battle,

and they will see no other thing,

down all their lives.

They sit in darkness,

and are very silent.

They are all young,

and all their lives they must sit still,

in darkness.

At the door of their house is hopelessness.

Hopelessness waits at the door of their house.

Hopelessness is thick and dense.

It has no wet of tears.

One could take hopelessness in one’s hands,

and make a bandage of it

to bind about one’s eyes.

It would be dry and stiff,

and hurt one’s eyes.

They are all young and strong.

They will have long to live,

and to be blind.

            —Helen Mackay

It is not only blindness that the soldiers must endure “down all their lives,” but the hopelessness that hangs like a coat by the door of any man who attempts to venture out into a world he cannot see.  Outside their homes, the blind, though young and strong, must endure dependency and pity. Losing their sight, they have stumbled into lives of paralyzing vulnerability that stretch as far as their eyes cannot see.

Despite publishing both her journal and a volume of war poetry (London, One November) Mackay struggled with the incomprehensibility of the war, explaining, “I try not to write. The only things worth saying are the things I do not know how to say.”†

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* W.L. Courtney, “Preface,” Journal of Small Things, by Helen Mackay, Duffield and Company, 1917.
 ** Helen Mackay, Journal of Small Things, pp. 42-44.

† Mackay, Journal, p. 35.