An unlikely soldier

Siordet's watercolor of Amara

Gerald Caldwell Siordet was an unlikely soldier. Tall and very thin, he was an aspiring artist, critic, and poet. Friends with John Singer Sargent, Glyn Philpot, and William Morris’s wife, Jane, Siordet also tutored the young Aldous Huxley, preparing him for entry to Oxford. And yet in September of 1914, Siordet volunteered as a soldier, leaving behind his artistic ambitions and his work as an ivories cataloguer at the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Balliol College at Oxford, Siordet’s alma mater, wrote that although he “seemed little suited, either in physique or in temperament, for a soldier’s life, he was probably happier as a soldier than he had ever been before. Both in the poems which he wrote during this period, and in the drawings which were found in his notebooks, there is evidence to show how finely his mind was touched by his new experience.”  

One of those poems was published in the London Times 30 November 1915, under the pen name Gerald Caldwell (I have added stanza breaks in the copy below).

To the Dead

Since in the days that may not come again
The sun has shone for us on English fields,
Since we have marked the years with thanksgiving,
Nor been ungrateful for the loveliness
Which is our England, then tho' we walk no more
The woods together, lie in the grass no more,
For us the long grass blows, the woods are green,
For us the valleys smile, the streams are bright,
For us the kind sun still is comfortable
And the birds sing; and since your feet and mine 
Have trod the lanes together, climbed the hills,

Then in the lanes and on the little hills

Siordet and other officers enroute to Mesopotamia

Our feet are beautiful for evermore.

And you — O if I call you, you will come,

Most loved, most lovely faces of my friends

Who are so safely housed within my heart,

So parcel of this blessed spirit land

Which is my own heart's England, so possest

Of all its ways to walk familiarly

And be at home, that I can count on you,

Loving you so, being loved, to wait for me,

So may I turn me in and by some sweet

Remembered pathway find you once again.

Then we can walk together, I with you,

Or you, or you along some quiet road,

And talk the foolish, old, forgivable talk,

And laugh together; you will turn your head,

Look as you used to look, speak as you spoke,

My friend to me, and I your friend to you.

From Siordet's sketchbook

Only when at the last, by some cross-road,

Our longer shadows, falling on the grass,

Turn us back homeward, and the setting sun

Shines like a golden glory round your head,

There will be something sudden and strange in you.

Then you will lean, and look into my eyes,

And I shall see the bright wound at your side,

And feel the new blood flowing to my heart,

Your blood, beloved, flowing to my heart,

And I shall hear you speaking in my ear—

O not the old, forgivable, foolish talk,

But flames, and exaltations, and desires,

But hopes, and comprehensions, and resolves,

But holy, incommunicable things,

That like immortal birds sing in my breast,

And springing from a fire of sacrifice,

Beat with bright wings about the throne of God.

                                    --Gerald Caldwell Siordet

The poem begins with remembered days of idyllic happiness in the English countryside. And though those days may never return, like Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey, Siordet’s “To the Dead” affirms that landscapes of memory are doubly precious for having been shared with a friend and for the bygone days that they recall.  Men who once wandered rural lanes have died and will never return, but the valleys, woods, and streams are beautiful still, hallowed by memory and by love.  

And whether encased in muddy boots or naked in death, the feet of the dead are also “beautiful forever.” Siordet's poem echoes with religious references, this one from Isaiah 52:7 and Romans 10:15: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.”

Christ and the disciples at Emmaus by Dagnan-Bouveret
Photo by Moira Burke

What are the good tidings that the dead carry? The speaker of the poem trustfully says to those who have died, “if I call you, you will come.” The separation is not permanent. Although they have departed from this life and journeyed ahead, the dead are waiting for those who have loved them until “by some sweet/ Remembered pathway [I] find you once again.”

Once reunited, the men will again find ease in the return of familiar companionship.  At first, the poet imagines that all will be as it once was: there will be shared laughter and “foolish, old, forgivable talk.” Yet as shadows lengthen and night falls, the poem pictures a scene that echoes the story of Christ’s friends on the road to Emmaus immediately after His crucifixion. Although the risen Christ walked and talked with the two disciples, “their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him” (Luke 24:16) until in a moment of epiphany as Christ broke bread, they realized the truth of the resurrection: “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to one another, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road?” (Luke 24: 32-33).

In Siordet’s “To the Dead,” the setting sun casts a halo around the head of his fallen comrade, causing the speaker of the poem to behold “something sudden and strange” in his friend. Leaning close, the dead companion reveals his wounded side (like Christ’s demonstration to the doubting Thomas), and with this revelation, the speaker now hears whispered in his ear not the old foolish talk of youth, but “holy, incommunicable things.” The voice of the dead speaks in “flames and exaltations,” and “like immortal birds,” the good news sings in the speaker’s breast as new blood beats in his heart.  The poem’s allusions to the Holy Spirit and to the tongues of fire that appeared at Pentecost express the wonder of the resurrection and echo the promise of life eternal.

Basra Memorial, Iraq

Siordet was wounded at the Somme and awarded a Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry” in a failed attack that killed one of his closest friends, Geoffrey Smith. Asked to contribute to a memorial book for Smith, Siordet asked that his tribute begin with a verse from the Wisdom of Solomon (3:7): “In the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.” Siordet explained that he had chosen the verse “rather selfishly, because no one but I will really know their significance in his connexion; but in the last moments, before he was hit, while he was running down the line, and came into the shell-hole where I was, he did "shine" with all the grace and keeness of excitement and concentration.”

After recovering from his own injuries of the Somme, Siordet joined the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force in January 1917. He died on February 9, 1917, leading an attack on the Turkish position near Kut-al-Amara. His body was never recovered.  

Nearly all who knew him commented on Siordet's humility and generous spirit, and a fellow officer described him as "one of the bravest men I have known, especially so as this whole ghastly business was possibly more abhorrent to him even than it is to the rest of us."  His name is just one of over forty thousand listed on the Basra Memorial in Iraq, a memorial that remembers British and Commonwealth soldiers of the First World War who died “in the operations in Mesopotamia from the Autumn of 1914 to the end of August 1921 and whose graves are not known.”*  

Siordet's name at Basra, photo 2009

*Soldier and poet J. Howard Stables (The Sorrow that Whistled) is also commemorated at the Basra Memorial.

The Sorrow that Whistled

J. Howard Stables

In 1916, a reviewer wrote about J. Howard Stables' volume of poetry,  "The Sorrow that Whistled is an unusual little book, as suits with its name.  The writer, whom one takes to be young, revels in Eastern colour and fragrance.  He can do something quite good and simple...On the other hand, he can do something extremely bad...Yet there is here a promise, and, not unconnected with it, indications that J.H. Stables is a young soldier.  There could be no better school for a young poet who wants to shed the faults of youth than the trenches."  

Stables enlisted early in the war and served with the 15^th Gurkha Rifles in India, Northeastern Pakistan, and what was then Mesopotamia and is now modern Iraq. His poem “High Barbary” reminds us that the Great War extended far beyond the Western Front: some of the fiercest fighting occurred at sea, on Turkish beaches in the Gallipoli Campaign, in the high Alps between Italy and Austria-Hungary, and in the Middle East. 

“Barbary” is the romantic name given to the coast of North Africa, and at a first reading, the poem appears to romanticize wars of the past, when Barbary pirates attacked merchant ships, raided cattle (“harried kine”), and pillaged Italian villages.  The choice of the word “pillaged” itself is subtle and apt, for it has become a euphemism for the violence and terror that armies inflict on civilians during war, associated mainly with the distant past. 

High Barbary

The distant mountains’ jagged, cruel line

Cuts the imagination as a blade

Of dove-grey Damascene.  In many a raid

Here Barbary pirates drave the ships of wine

Back to Sicilian harbours, harried kine,

Pillaged Calabrian villages and made

The land a desolation; here they played
On Glamour's passioned gamut at Lust's sign. 

Saracens, Moors, Phoenicians—all the East,

Franks, Huns, Walloons, the pilgrims of the Pope,

All, all are gone.  The clouds are trailing hence;

So goes to Benediction some proud priest

Sweeping the ground with broidered golden cope.

--Go, gather up the fumes of frankincense. 

            —J. Howard Stables

The poem invites us to look out over an alien landscape, but to see deeper with the eyes of the imagination that cut “as a blade/Of dove-grey Damascene.”  Damascus steel was famous for its use in swords and knives, but when used as an adjective, “Damascene” refers to a moment of insight that transforms one’s beliefs and attitudes – an epiphany. 

That transformation from romanticism to emptiness and loss occurs in the last line of the first stanza of this short poem:  the ellipsis and stanza break demand that we pause and consider the consequences of the raids that have made the “land a desolation.”  The second stanza continues the shift, as names of past and present combatants and victims are jumbled together in a Whitmanesque catalog of war (“Huns” was the derogatory term used for Germans and “Walloons” are French-speakers of Belgium).  Linked by their absence, “All, all are gone.”  The words seem almost prophetic in naming the “Lost Generation” who were killed during The Great War (an estimated 17 million dead).

The clouds of death (perhaps also evoking the deadly gas that was used in the war) are “trailing hence,” while a “proud priest” in his finery seems to indifferently continue the ritual of blessing. What are we to do or think?  The poem commands us to do the impossible, as if no rational response to war can be made:  we are to “gather up the fumes of frankincense.”  More than anything, the poem is saturated with images of impermanence, of things that fade and are lost forever.  

Basra Memorial

Like so many others, Stables did not survive the war but died at age 21 in a battle near Baghdad in early 1917.  He has no known burial place, as his body was never found.  Wounded and left behind when the British troops withdrew, he is presumed to have died in enemy hands. His name, however, is on the BASRA memorial in modern Iraq.  Due to recent wars and tensions in that country, the entire memorial was moved in 1997 from its original location to the middle of what was a major battleground during the first Gulf War.