The ghost of Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley

On October 5^th, 1915, twenty-year-old Charles Sorley wrote to his father describing his time in the trenches outside Loos: “…rain and dirt and damp cold. O for a bath!”  Sorley was known for his love of stormy weather: as a student at Marlborough College, he exulted in wet and windy runs across the trails of Marlborough Downs.   An excerpt from the last stanza of “Song of the Ungirt Runners,” a poem he wrote in early 1915, expresses that passion:

The rain is on our lips,

We do not run for prize.

But the storm the water whips

And the wave howls to the skies.

Eight days after writing his father, on October 13, 1915, in one of the last attacks of the Battle of Loos, Sorley was shot in the head and died instantly.  In the chaos of the battle, his body was never recovered: he is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, along with 20,609 other British and Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave.  His poetry was published three months after his death in the slim volume Marlborough and Other Poems. 

In February 1916, Robert Graves, another soldier poet serving in France, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh that he had “just discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorley” and that “It seems ridiculous to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself doing but he seems to have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having been just my own age.”  In 1918 Graves’ published a volume of his own poems, Fairies and Fusiliers: it includes a poem that remembers Charles Sorley and celebrates a life of action.

Sorley's Weather Shellburst, Zillebeke by Paul Nash When outside the icy rain Comes leaping helter-skelter, Shall I tie my restive brain Snugly under shelter? Shall I make a gentle song Here in my firelit study, When outside the winds blow strong And the lanes are muddy? With old wine and drowsy meats Am I to fill my belly? Shall I glutton here with Keats? Shall I drink with Shelley? Tobacco's pleasant, firelight's good: Poetry makes both better. Clay is wet and so is mud, Winter rains are wetter. Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill, For though the winds come frorley I'm away to the rain-blown hill And the ghost of Sorley.           Robert Graves (1895-1985) Tobacco, firelight, and poetry are pleasant and good, but “Sorley’s Weather” urges readers to put down their books and stride out into rough storms on rain-blown hills.  Experiencing the wildness of nature is far better than retreating to the fireside with the Romantics.  Even Percy Shelly’s meditations on nature (“The wilderness has a mysterious tongue/ Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild”) can be left behind on the window sill.  Sorley’s own poem “Rain,” written in 1912, tells readers where to find him: When the rain is coming down, And all Court is still and bare, And the leaves fall wrinkled, brown, Through the kindly winter air, …. There is something in the rain That would bid me to remain: There is something in the wind That would whisper, "Leave behind All this land of time and rules, Land of bells and early schools. For those mourning the dead and remembering the thousands of every day tragedies of the Western Front, it was windswept hills, mud, and winter rain that were best able to summon the ghosts of the men and boys who would never return.  At the start of the Battle of Loos, torrential rains flooded the trenches, and Graves’ poem calls to mind the conditions of the war, as well as the weather that Sorley loved so well in life.  J.R.R. Tolkien, writing about another rover and warrior, wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  Not long after enlisting, Sorley wrote in a letter home, “Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Powell, A Deep Cry).  For earlier related posts, see Sorley’s “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” and Graves’ “Haunted.”

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead

 What would Charles Sorley and his last poem make of First World War centenary commemorations?  "We will remember them"?  Impossible.  "Lest we forget"?  The dead do not care if they are forgotten.  This sonnet, written in pencil, was found among the twenty-year-old Sorley's personal effects after he was killed at the Battle of Loos, just one of 59, 247 British casualties in the three-week battle.    

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

"Paths of Glory" by CRW Nevinson
(Imperial War Museum)

Mouthless, deaf, gashed, and blind – the poem flatly catalogues the dead of war as a mutilated mass of millions, silenced and cut off from all sight and sound.  The pale battalions that march across survivors' dreams recall Dante's words when he descends into the hell of The Inferno: "I had not thought death had undone so many." 

Each young man once full of life and promise has been transformed into a "spook," and "None wears the face you knew."  The men are no longer linked to loved ones; neither are they their own.  They have been given to "Great death" for evermore. 

And what are survivors to do?  The poem counsels, "Say not soft things," and adds two more negative commands:  do not shed tears for the dead – do not attempt to honour their sacrifice.   Instead, "Say only this, 'They are dead."  The poem asks us to gaze upon the consequences of battle, to search the mutilated faces of the "o'ercrowded mass," and to acknowledge the cost of war without sentimentality and without attaching glory to the loss.  There is nothing new or special in personal grief, in this or in any war, for "many a better one has died before." 

Sorley wrote to his mother in April of 1915 to share his sense that Rupert Brooke's poetry was "overpraised," explaining, "He [Brooke] is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable, and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances…. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude."

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Sorley's poetry evidences an unsentimental view of war, and so it is worth considering how he might wish to be remembered, one of the youngest of the poets who failed to survive the First World War.   His poetry speaks eloquently of the unfulfilled promise of the young man who was shot in October of 1915.  In a letter home, Sorley wrote of his own desires if he were to survive:  "Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth."