The Pageant of War

Parade to War, Allegory by John Steuart Curry (1938)

 In 1916, British author Margaret Sackville published a collection of poems titled The Pageant of War. The 180-line title poem begins, 

Shrilly, exultant, from afar
I heard, and rushing down
Beheld amazed,
The pageant of triumphant War
Come trampling through the town. 

The poem describes a vast parade “Of a million and a million feet” that are led by War, “sitting astride / A pale and neighing horse.” The self-satisfied, glutted leader of the parade wears a mask, for if anyone were to view “That obscene countenance too near,” they would “shrink in loathing and in fear, / And turn upon this thing and slay it there.” But disguising himself, War proudly leads the millions who march. 

Following him  are “The pitiful bright army of the dead,” mourning mothers, war profiteers carrying their bags of gold, and emissaries of peace, all cheered on by a vast crowd of onlookers. 

Yet beneath the feet of those who follow War, the road gleams strangely white, and the poem’s narrator finally realizes why:

I looked again at the white stones;
I saw.
        The dust was trampled bones.

’Twas they that made the road so white.

There were bones of children, bones of men,
Trampled in since the world began.
Road of triumph—road of glory!—
This road conceived by men and then
Built from the ruins of man.
Road which every land has trod
Since the beginning of its story,
And called in turn the road of God;
Road of myriads vowed to rape,
Destruction, mutilation, wrath,
Since there was no escape
And this road was their only path!

Behold! since the world began,
This shining road—man’s gift to man.

The bones which make it are so light
(Children’s bones weigh very little)
You would think the surface of this white
Shining road must be too brittle
To bear the heavy loads which go
Trampling upon it to and fro;
But no—
These bones are ground to such fine dust,
So fine, so firm they form a crust
As firm, as thick as the earth’s crust,
Which all who will may safely tread.
They have no ghosts, these dead!
They are but children, peasants of the soil,
And women—ravished, torn
And murdered at their toil.

It is for this that they were born. 

Bethlehem Steel Parade, 1916
Bill Weiner collection

Since the crowd shouts in its delight
To see along the road so white
The pageant pass in the sunlight.

I will forget the road, the stones
Are less than nothing—dust and bones:
And what has life to do with bones?

Unless they should rise up, these bones!

Meanwhile
They are silent—let them so remain,
These very humble folk, these quiet slain,
And let the living smile—
Until they too shall suffer the same pain.

Whilst the long pageant stretches mile on mile—
As though these innocents had died in vain.

Shrilly, exultant, from afar
I heard, and rushing down
Beheld amazed,
The pageant of triumphant War
Come trampling through the town. 
—Margaret Sackville 

Sackville’s poem can be seen as a companion piece to one of the most famous poems of the First World War: Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Both poems caution against glorified idealizations of war; Owen focuses on the sufferings of soldiers, and Sackville highlights the torment and trauma of noncombatants.

Owen and Sackville warn that children are too often the victims of war, both those who have been told “the old lie” and those whose light bones are ground into dust by the passing Pageant of War.  Sadly and ironically, Sackville's poem ends exactly as it begins, with no alteration in the pace of the marching throng or in the cheers of the crowd that urges them forward. 

A Memory

Armenians, WWI

“War is waged by men only, but it is not possible to wage it upon men only. All wars are and must be waged upon women and children as well as upon men.”

                        -- British journalist Helena M. Swanwick, “Women and War,” 1915.

Contemporary understandings of the First World War have been significantly shaped by the trench poets of the Western Front, particularly the writings of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. However, the effects of World War I were felt far beyond the trenches; this modern, industrialized war also targeted civilians in long-range artillery bombardments, U-boat attacks, zeppelin raids, military reprisals, and trade blockades.  

While it is difficult to precisely account for deaths in the First World War, an estimated 11 million men who served in the military or in military support roles died.  What is less well known is the impact of the war on noncombatants: it is thought that between 6.5 and 7 million civilians died as a result of the war.  These deaths include those who were executed or killed in military actions, as well as those who were the victims of genocide, famine, and disease that were directly related to the war (the statistic does not include those who died as a result of the Spanish flu, the Russian Revolution, or the Turkish War of Independence).  While many know that nearly 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Somme, few are aware that an estimated 30,000 Serbian civilians were executed by Austro-Hungarian forces; nearly 250,000 civilians died in Poland due to famine and disease, and another 300,000 in France – both numbers dwarfed by the 730,000 civilians who perished in Russia as a result of starvation and disease attributed to the conflict.*

The voices of noncombatants and women have often been marginalized in relating the subject and pity of The Great War.  Margaret Sackville’s poem “A Memory” turns its gaze on the civilians whose tragedies blur the boundaries between the war and the home front.   

Night Bombing, William Orpen
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2994)

A Memory

There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,
Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;
Only behind a wall the low sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog — nothing else.

Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.

Humble and ruined folk — for these no pride of conquest,
Their only prayer: "O! Lord, give us our daily bread!"
Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;
Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead? 

                         --Margaret Sackville

The poem opens on a scene of unnatural quiet. There is neither pity nor mercy in the stillness, but rather a palpable silence, a dense emptiness that bears the weight of absence and loss.  If the silence is soft, it is soft like blood that pools under a corpse. This is a tense quiet; it vibrates with stifled sobs and silent screams as an onlooker stares at bodies torn open and a world ripped apart. 

The troops and the violence have passed on, leaving in their wake the blankness of death and shock. The unburied bodies are not those of soldiers nor the dead of No Man’s Land, but the “humble and ruined folk” whose bodies sprawl unnaturally in the marketplace and lie in the middle of a village street. There has been shellfire, but not all the violence has been delivered anonymously from a safe distance: a woman has been bayoneted -- killed at arm’s length by a soldier.  Her body stares sightlessly at the sky. 

Serbian executions

The war has spilled out beyond its boundaries, and the memory of this “still life” village has the quality of a horrific wound: grotesque, unreal, and unforgettable. And yet, in grim irony, these dead have been largely forgotten.  The poem’s last line asks, “Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?” While it is a rhetorical question, most centenary commemorations of the First World War seek to remember in ceremonies, cemeteries, poems, and public memorials the military men who were killed.  Much less often do we remember the civilians who died, all those who, as described in another Sackville poem, “Quietly… lie beneath your armies’ feet.”**

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*For an overview on the human cost of the war, see “World War I Casualties.”
**From Sackville’s poem “Victory.” For other poems on the war’s effect on civilians, see Margaret Widdemer’s “Homes,” Maria Benneman’s “Visé,” and May Sinclair’s “After the Retreat.”  Marian Allen’s “And what is war?” also uses the image of a door ajar in the wind to suggest the haunted quality of empty homes and villages.

Salonica refugees, WWI

Our mutual dead

French and British women

In 1916, following the death of her older brother, Lt. Gilbert Sackville (killed Dec. 16, 1915), Margaret Sackville wrote a poem imagining a future time when the fighting and killing would cease.  Men had made the war – and now it would be left to the grieving women to make the peace.   

Reconciliation

Youth Mourning George Clausen © IWM ART 4655

When all the stress and all the toil is over,

And my lover lies sleeping by your lover,

With alien earth on hands and brows and feet,

   Then we may meet.

Moving sorrowfully with uneven paces,

The bright sun shining on our ravaged faces,

There, very quietly, without sound or speech,

   Each shall greet each.

We who are bound by the same grief for ever,

When all our sons are dead may talk together,

Each asking pardon from the other one

   For her dead son.

With such low, tender words the heart may fashion,

Broken and few, of pity and compassion,

Knowing that we disturb at every tread

Our mutual dead.

            --Margaret Sackville, published in The Pageant of War, 1916

In this imagined future, soldiers once again become lovers who lie not beside their sweethearts, but in the alien earth beside the men they killed.  At their lovers' graves, the bereft women meet:  German and French, Russian and Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman. 

Margaret Sackville

Quiet and sunshine have returned to the world, but the dead soldiers’ wives and mothers stumble through cemeteries with “ravaged faces,” greeting each other in a language for which there are no words.  Shared tears and gazes acknowledge a pain too great to be fully expressed.  The halting speech and uneven steps of the women are echoed in the poem’s structure, for each stanza begins with three lines of eleven syllables, then ends abruptly with a last terse line of four syllables that mirrors all that is broken, lost, and unspeakable.

Forever separated from the men they have loved, these women from enemy countries find themselves “bound by grief.” Speaking for their “mutual dead,” the women ask one another’s forgiveness:  Your son shot mine. My son gassed yours. I am sorry. 

In the Preface to Margaret Sackville’s Selected Poems (1919), Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote, “Her war poems are not mere experiments in realism, but genuine laments for the pity of such things, the ugliness of rage and the waste of what is noblest.” 

What lessons of peace were learned from the waste and violence of World War I?  The “Reconciliation” imagined in Sackville’s poem failed to occur -- I have fruitlessly searched for any account of former enemies meeting on fields of battle or in cemeteries in the years immediately following the Armistice.  A better predictor of the future, Siegfried Sassoon would write in his poem “Aftermath,” composed just five months after the war ended,

Do you remember the rats; and the stench
            Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
            And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
            Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'