Christmas 1918

The Peace Christmas: that’s what many called the holiday season of the winter of 1918.  Just weeks earlier, the Armistice ended the world war that had lasted for over four years, involved thirty-two nations, and killed an estimated 16 million.  Yet though the war was over, most of the fighting men and women volunteers had not yet returned home, but instead continued to serve overseas. 

Carola Oman, daughter of an Oxford military historian, enlisted as a V.A.D. nurse on July 1, 1916.  In December of 1918, she was working at the British rest station in Boulogne, France.

New York Tribune Review, 22 Dec 1918

Christmas 1918

Opposite us across the cobbled square

The trees stand black against the Christmas rain.

The clerk looks up a moment from his pen

In the kit-office, with a vacant stare,

And sees the flags drip grey upon the pain—

Chattering women, shawled and clutching toys,

A few civilians, porters, slouching men,

And shambling smoking youths, and shrieking boys,

Wandering on platforms.  It is noon;

But blue as dusk, and dark as melted snow

Can fill the flooded gutters.  Very soon

The garish lamps will flicker out.  And so

Comes the Peace Christmas to us. Is this all,

To stare and scribble while the shadows fall?

The light burns low. I see the canvas shake

Upon the walls. Now it has passed.  In dark

I rise alone, and my tired footsteps make

Slow progress over a black landscape.  Blank

28 Dec 1918

The sightless sky—a mighty wind—the bark

Of a far-distant dog—the smell of rank

Forgotten country roads.  By my side now

There moves another traveler.  As we walk

Down to the hurried village a high star

Burns with heroic light, and so we talk

Of recent wonders, for if men speak true

Three days the dawning sky has been inflamed.

There have been angels seen above the hills.

Of her eternal loneliness ashamed

The old year withers silently, but still

Listens, though not with hope. Now very wide

The ceaseless wind slashes the clouds apart.

And unprotected lies the countryside

Deserted, feeling for her frozen heart.

But in the village, as we pass near by,

The inn is overcrowded.  We pass on.

The star is stayed above the inn—or gone.

We only hear a new-born infant cry.

            —Carola Oman

This Christmas scene is grey and bleak. Rain-sodden flags drip upon the pain of widows, fatherless children, refugees, and the myriads of others who must now bear the aftereffects of the war. The pervasive mood is one of desolation: now that peace has returned, is this shadowed world the best that can be hoped for?

As dusk falls, the poem’s narrator leaves the shelter of her canvas tent and wanders alone into the night. She makes her exhausted way through the blackness, hearing the distant sounds of village life, until she finds herself in the company of a stranger. They walk together under a star that blazes with “heroic light,” discussing recent rumors of signs and wonders: angels have been seen in the hills. 

The crowded French town, besieged by the burdens of war, blurs and recedes until its skies and inns recall another village in a far-off land, where refugees sought shelter, peasants set out in search of the miraculous, and distant foreigners journeyed to find a new king.

No. 3 Canadian Hospital, Dec 1918

The correspondences between the past and present may hint at a brighter future, but no angel of Bethlehem— nor of Mons—appears with clear reassurance.  Perhaps the strange traveler is an angel; perhaps not.  The inn may shelter a miraculous birth, but the walkers do not stop.  The infant’s cry may be that of a transcendent God who loves beyond reason, or only the wail of another undernourished, impoverished child in a war-torn country.

Four years of brutal war have left the heart of the countryside unprotected and frozen; the mystery is whether the hearts of the men and women who survived can be thawed and healed, can learn again to feel and to believe.

Song of the Ambulance Train

A Red Cross Train, France by Harold Septimus Power, ©IWM Art.1031

In addition to the nine million soldiers who died in the First World War, over twenty million men were wounded. It’s difficult to fully imagine the complex challenges involved in transporting men who had suffered the effects of artillery shelling, grenade explosions, machine-gun fire, gas attacks, frostbite, and shell shock to sites where they could receive medical care. 

The wounded either crawled or were carried behind the lines by stretcher bearers or comrades-in-arms. Taken to an advanced dressing station or poste de secours, those fortunate enough to survive were then driven by ambulances to casualty clearing stations. From there, the most common means of transporting the wounded was the ambulance train. Stretching for as long as one-third of a mile, a typical ambulance train was equipped with a kitchen, rows of bunks for the most seriously wounded, carriages with seats for injured who could sit upright, an operating and pharmaceutical carriage, and housing quarters for the orderlies, nurses, and doctors.   

The diary of a nurse assigned to a First World War ambulance train describes a typical scene:

We had 368; a good 200 were dangerously and seriously wounded, perhaps more; and the sitting-up cases were bad enough…. nearly all the men had more than one wound—some had ten; one man with a huge compound fracture above the elbow had tied on a bit of string with a bullet in it as a tourniquet above the wound himself….They were bleeding faster than we could cope with it; and the agony of getting them off the stretchers on to the top bunks is a thing to forget. We were full up by about 2 a.m., and then were delayed by a collision up the line, which was blocked by dead horses as a result. All night and without a break till we got back to Boulogne at 4 p.m. next day (yesterday) we grappled with them….The head cases were delirious, and trying to get out of the window, and we were giving strychnine and morphia all round. Two were put off dying at St Omer, but we kept the rest alive to Boulogne.

                        -- Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915, 24 October 1914  
                           Anonymous (thought to have been written by Kate Luard)

On July 1, 1916, as British troops in France were suffering tremendous casualties on the first day of the battle of the Somme, twenty-year-old Carola Oman joined the British Red Cross as a nurse without pay and served until April of 1919.  She dedicated her small book of poetry, The Menin Road and Other Poems (1919), to four of her friends who were also volunteer nurses tending the never-ending parade of dying and wounded men. Oman's poem “Unloading Ambulance Train” recreates a common scene of melancholy with small, vivid details. 

Unloading Ambulance Train

Into the siding very wearily

She comes again:

Singing her endless song so drearily,

The midnight winds sink down to drift the rain.

So she comes home once more.

Is it an ancient chanty

Won from some classic shore?

The stretcher-bearers stand

Two on either hand.

They bend and lift and raise

Where the doors open wide

With yellow light ablaze.

Into the dark outside

Each stretcher passes.  Here

(As if each on his bier

With sorrow they were bringing)

Is peace, and a low singing.

The ambulances load,

Move on and take the road.

Under the stars alone

Each stretcher passes out.

And the ambulances’ moan

And the checker’s distant shout

All round to the old sound

Of the lost chanty singing.

And the dark seamen swinging.

Far off some classic shore . . .

So she comes home once more.

            Carola Oman, Wimereux, Sept. 1918

Underneath the cries of pain, the shouts of the railway inspector, and the beat of the rain, an ancient song can be heard. It rings in the screeching of the train as she pulls into the berth where she will unload her cargo of suffering.  Its endless tune of dreary loss and struggle have accompanied the homecoming of the wounded since Odysseus fought in the Trojan War.

Carola Oman
photo courtesy Charlotte Zeepvat

There is a mindless rhythm to the repetitive bending and lifting of the stretcher bearers, the repeated comings and goings of the ambulances. Sorrow mingles with peace as the procession of broken men on their stretchers resembles the dead carried on their funeral biers. It has all happened before; it will all happen again as each wounded man passes “Into the dark outside.”

The poem describes a home-coming of sorts, but as Siegfried Sassoon explains in his poem “They,” “When the boys come back / They will not be the same.” As the ambulance train is unloaded in the bleakness of midnight wind and drifting rain, the flickering light illuminates the tragedy of men who will likely bear the scars of the Great War for the rest of their lives.

To the Survivors

"The Homecoming": Cambridge war memorial

At 11:00 am on the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918, the weary, mud-stained soldiers of the Great War put down their weapons. After 1,568 days, the conflict that some had thought might never end finally drew to a close.  Armistice Day (now more commonly known as Remembrance Day) somberly honors the dead of the war, but that first Armistice Day was an occasion for celebration. 

Siegfried Sassoon in “Everyone Sang” writes of the delight and beauty that “came like the setting sun” as “horror/Drifted away.” In Carola Oman’s quietly joyful poem “To the Survivors,” we feel the collective sense of wonder: the war is over, and the journey home has perhaps never been so tenderly imagined.

To the Survivors

They are all given back to you—

Midsummer Warwick woods, at night;

The still

Vision of Sherborne from the hill

Under a sudden rainbow; flight

Of virgin winds above the faithful downs;

The towns

Of Yorkshire; docks that breathe

Old witcheries with smoke and copper dusk;

And morning mists that wreathe

The pale

Towers of Canterbury; and the husk

Of ruined Porchester; the vale

Of Gloucester; Cotswold walls

Loose-stoned and low; waterfalls

Of northern Devon; all the patched

Wonder of field and casual pool, and thatched

Unventilated cottages. By us

Four years avoided, ransomed now, again

(And four times richer thus)

They come; and all this pain

Is past.  Can you believe it true?
They are all given back again to you.

                        --Carola Oman*

(Oxford Magazine, December 1918)

The English landscape that featured so largely in the imagination of the trench poets** is lovingly listed in all its variety in Oman's poem: mysterious nights in Warwickshire’s woods and rainbows shining over the market town of Sherborne; smoky city docks and the waterfalls of the West Country; Canterbury’s holy towers and the loose-stoned walls of the Cotswold fields; the medieval ruins of Porchester Castle and humble thatched cottages: “They are all given back to you.”

Oman’s “To the Survivors” promises that everything has been preserved just as it was in the halcyon summer of 1914, and the poem imagines the returning soldiers stepping right back into that golden past (Carol Anne Duffy shares a similar vision in her poem “Last Post”). Like captives who have been ransomed, the memory and ideal of home have been returned to those who missed them so dearly, “and all this pain/Is past.”

The poem’s mood is fantastically optimistic (as is Sassoon’s poem with its closing line “the singing will never be done”).  It avoids mention of the wounded who will return with scars both visible and unseen, and the magical thinking of Oman’s poem is  altogether silent about the dead who will never return home. 

But this is a poem for the survivors, and it seems only right to allow them this one moment of pure, unadulterated joy. Sometimes incredible and improbable visions are needed, for they may show the way forward to peace and give perspective to the sufferings of the past.

*See also Carola Oman’s poem “In the Ypres Sector.”

**Other examples of war poems that reference the landscape of home include Gibson’s “Retreat,” Oxland’s “Outward Bound,” Lett’s “July, 1916,” and Ledwidge’s “Home.”

Beauty in everything

First Glimpse of Ypres, Lt. C.H. Barraud, Canadian War Museum

As war poet Richard Aldington wrote, some aspects of the Western Front were “More beautiful than one can tell.”  Carola Oman, a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, wrote poetry that offers a woman’s perspective, describing the beauty she found in the landscape of war.   

In the Ypres Sector

Near Zillebeke, © IWM (Q 109521)

You have left beauty here in everything,

And it is we that are both deaf and blind.

By coarse grass mounds here the small crosses rise

Sunk sideways in the ditch, or low inclined

Over some little stream where waters sing

By shell holes blue with beauty from the skies.

Even the railway cutting has kind shade

And colour, where the rusty wire is laid

Round the soft tracks. Because you knew them thus

The dark mouthed dug-outs hold a light for us.

And here each name rings rich upon our ears

Which first we learnt with sorrow and with tears. 

            --Carola Oman

The first line opens with the tenderness of a love poem: “You have left beauty here in everything.”  Who does the poem address?  The beauty has been left by each soldier who has known the “dark mouthed dug-outs,” and every man buried under the “small crosses [that] rise/ Sunk sideways in the ditch.”  The dead of the Ypres Sector imbue the land with beauty, from the watery shell holes that reflect the blue of the sky, to the shade and colour of the barbed wire stretched along the Western Front. 

And what are the names that ring “rich upon our ears”?  Messines, Langemarck, Zonnebeke, Zillebeke, Hill 60, Polygon Wood, and Passchendaele – these are the names of the places where the sheer volume of death and suffering threatened to overwhelm the imagination. 

How can Oman possibly describe these places of sorrow and tears as “rich”?  The poem reveals that the names have achieved their reverent power not because of the military objectives that were won or lost there, but because “you knew them thus.”  The battles’ names have been sanctified by the presence of those who fought and died there: men who were dearly loved – husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, and sweethearts. 

Over fifty years earlier, Abraham Lincoln dedicated the American Civil War cemetery at Gettysburg, saying, “We cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”  In a similar vein, Carola Oman, in her poem “The Menin Road, March 1919,” looked out over the “flat dim land,” and asked, “I wonder are you wholly gone?”  A sense of the courage and spirit of the men of the Ypres Sector still lingers at the battle sites, one-hundred years later.  

 

Casualty Clearing Station at Gezaincourt, © IWM (Q 8734)

Oman’s small book of poetry, The Menin Road and Other Poems (1919), is dedicated to four of her friends who were also V.A.D.s working in the hospitals and casualty clearing stations of the war as they tended the never-ending parade of dying and wounded men.  Her poems are dedicated to Lillian Chapman, Janet Dundas Allen, Una Barron, and May Wedderburn Cannan, “In memory of days we served together in England and France.”

This post also attempts to honor the V.A.D.s and nurses of the First World War, who fought their own battles and who warred against suffering and despair to find “beauty in everything.”