Winter Warfare

Snow covered ruins on the Western Front,  WFC Holden 1919
© IWM ART 17281

War on the Western Front had always been a grim affair, but the conditions in winter were particularly brutal. Writing home to his wife, Rowland Feilding tells of what the troops endured:

The men are practically without rest. They are wet through much of the time. They are shelled and trench-mortared. They may not be hit, but they are kept in a perpetual state of unrest and strain. They work all night and every night, and a good part of each day, digging and filling sandbags, and repairing the breaches in the breastworks;— that is when they are not on sentry. The temperature is icy. They have not even a blanket. The last two days it has been snowing. They cannot move more than a few feet from their posts: therefore, except when they are actually digging, they cannot keep themselves warm by exercise; and, when they try to sleep, they freeze. At present, they are getting a tablespoon of rum to console them, once in three days.*

Soldier and poet Edgell Rickword also wrote of the merciless conditions in his poem “Winter Warfare.”

Winter Warfare

Colonel Cold strode up the Line

    (Tabs of rime and spurs of ice),

Stiffened all where he did glare,

    Horses, men, and lice.

Visited a forward post,

    Left them burning, ear to foot;

Fingers stuck to biting steel,

    Toes to frozen boot.

Stalked on into No Man’s Land,

    Turned the wire to fleecy wool,

Iron stakes to sugar sticks

    Snapping at a pull.

Those who watched with hoary eyes

    Saw two figures gleaming there;

Hauptmann Kälte, Colonel Cold,

    Gaunt, in the grey air.

Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved

    Glassy eyed, with glinting heel

Stabbing those who lingered there

    Torn by screaming steel.

As men huddle in their trenches, desperate to find warmth in the bone-chilling night, two gleaming figures are seen brazenly marching up the line. They harry the forward observation posts, stalk boldly into No Man’s Land, and menace the men at the front with stabbing knives of frost and ice. The mythic figures of Colonel Cold and Hauptmann Kalte (literally, “Captain Cold” in German) heartlessly torture men on both sides of the Front.

They appear as nightmarish visions of death, gaunt and skeletal, and their glassy eyes betray no human feeling. No one is spared, neither horses, lice, nor men, as the icy commanders leave in their wake toes blackened with frostbite and the searing pain of fingers painfully fused to rifle barrels. While there may be a stern beauty in barbed wire that is frosted like fleecy wool or iron stakes that glisten like sugar sticks, it is a cruel and brittle splendor. 

This is a severe world that is inhospitable to warmth and tender emotions, for in addition to enduring the cold, as the last verse reveals, the men must helplessly watch their comrades who lie wounded between the lines, “torn by screaming steel,” slowly freeze to death. German and British soldiers are united in this: their most implacable enemy is the cold.

Rickword wasn’t assigned to the Western Front until January of 1918; the men who were at the front in the early months of 1917 endured one of the harshest winters of the war. The ground was frozen solid; men slept in their clothing with their boots on under frozen blankets, falling victim to frostbite and trench foot. British soldier Clifford Lane remembers, “The winter was so cold that I felt like crying. In fact, the only time. I didn’t actually cry, but I’d never felt like it before, not even under shell fire.”**

In the midst of these agonizing conditions, one thing that stands out is the courage and endurance of the men who managed to survive.  In another poem, Rickword praised that tenacious spirit that could jest in the midst of war:

In sodden trenches I have heard men speak,

Though numb and wretched, wise and witty things;

And loved them for the stubbornness that clings

Longest to laughter when Death’s pulleys creak...

*Rowland Feilding, letter dated 14 December 1916 from War Letters to a Wife.

**From Podcast 25: Winter 1916-1917, Imperial War Museum’s Voices of the First World War.

Up to their necks in mud, blood, and literature

Before television and radio, there was poetry.  In The Great War and Modern Memory, describing the world of 1914, Fussell asserts, “Except for sex and drinking, amusement was largely found in language formally arranged, either in books and periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one’s friends’ anecdotes, rumors, or clever structuring of words” (158).  In other words, language was entertainment.  Books were the immortal companions of the soldiers in the trenches. 

For one of the first times in history, most of the soldiers were literate, and reading offered men an escape to other worlds removed from the mud and blood, an avenue for self-improvement when the surrounding situation was descending into madness, and a way to battle the boredom of static, entrenched armies.   Fussell claims that “the Oxford Book of English Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been sufficiently appreciated” (159). 

When soldiers tried to make sense out of the senselessness of the war with language, and when ordinary language failed to communicate the realities of the Great War, trench poets often turned to the language of literature, recycling words and images from traditional sources. 

Edgell Rickword, “youngest of the soldier poets” (Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War), took with him to the Front a two-volume edition of the poems of John Donne, a seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet, and with dark humor, Rickword uses Donne to give voice to the horror of watching a friend’s body decay. 

Trench Poets by Edgell Rickword

 

I knew a man, he was my chum,

But he grew darker day by day,

And would not brush the flies away,

Nor blanch however fierce the hum

Of passing shells; I used to read,

to rouse him, random things from Donne—

like ‘Get with child a mandrake root.’

But you can tell he was far gone,

for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed,

and stiff and senseless as a post

even when that old poet cried

‘I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost.’

I tried the Elegies one day,

but he, because he heard me say:

‘What needst thou have more covering than a man?’

grinned nastily, so then I knew

the worms had got his brains at last.

There was one thing I still might do

To starve those worms; I racked my head

for wholesome lines and quoted Maud.

His grin got worse and I could see

he sneered at passion’s purity.

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

It’s a shocking poem the first time you read it -- the speaker irreverently bounces the timeless and elegant poetry of Donne off of the increasingly grotesque body of his “chum,” in a vain attempt to “rouse the dead.”  But what better words can be used?  Poetry and high language are commonly used to cope with grief. 

What is jarring are the colloquial and disturbingly realistic descriptions of a dead body that are interwoven with Donne’s poetry:  “mackerel-eyed,” “stiff and senseless,” and “grinned nastily.”  The excerpts that Rickword chooses from Donne seem to tell their own story:  it begins with an invitation to accomplish the impossible (“Get with child” from Donne’s “Song,”), then moves to longing and the frustration of unrequited love and connection (“I long to talk” from “Love’s Deity”), and ends with a reference to nakedness and seduction (from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”).  The continued unresponsiveness of his friend causes the writer to abandon the sensual immorality of the last Donne reference, and so he reaches for “wholesome lines” and settles upon Maud, Tennyson’s romantic poem of doomed love.  But the putrefying body “sneers” at these Victorian ideals of love and purity; his physical reality seems more in tune with the Metaphysical theme of carpe diem expressed in Marvell’s lines, “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace,” – except that this body has been deprived of even the final dignity and comfort of a private grave. 

The last two lines of Rickword’s poem are perhaps the most disturbing:  abandoning the noble tradition of literary poetry, in a final clumsy couplet that sounds more like a limerick than a sonnet, he also abandons his comrade's corpse.  Poetry itself has failed both the speaker and his friend, and only a trite rhyme is left to signal the utter inadequacy of language to express the horrors of this war.