Pure Peace

Cadair Idris, Wales (photo by Steve Rabone)

Few people know of the soldier Ellis Evans; he is better known by his Welsh bardic name, Hedd Wyn. The phrase can be translated to mean white, pure or blessed peace, and it was inspired by the landscape of Evans’ home, the misty valleys of Meirionnydd.

Pilckem Ridge © IWM (Q 5730) 

In early 1917 following the introduction of mandatory military conscription, Ellis Evans reluctantly joined the British army. He left the family farm and his shepherding duties to volunteer in place of a younger brother (he was the oldest of eleven children). Just months after he entered the infantry, his unit - the 15^th Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers - was sent to the Western Front to join what became known as the Battle of Passchendaele. 

Ellis Evans was killed on 31 July 1917* at Pilckem Ridge; less than six weeks later, on 6 September 1917, Hedd Wyn was announced as the winner of the Welsh National Eisteddfod’s prestigious poetry chair. When presenters learned that the poet had been killed in Flanders, they draped the chair in black.  Since then, the honour has been referred to as The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair.        

Here is Hedd Wyn’s poem “War”:  

Rhyfel (in original Welsh)                                     War (translated by Gillian Clarke)

Gwae fi fy myw mewn oes mor ddreng, A Duw ar drai ar orwel pell; O'i ôl mae dyn, yn deyrn a gwreng, Yn codi ei awdurdod hell. Pan deimlodd fyned ymaith Dduw Cyfododd gledd i ladd ei frawd; Mae swn yr ymladd ar ein clyw, A'i gysgod ar fythynnod tlawd. Mae'r hen delynau genid gynt, Ynghrog ar gangau'r helyg draw, A gwaedd y bechgyn lond y gwynt, A'u gwaed yn gymysg efo'r glaw

Bitter to live in times like these. While God declines beyond the seas; Instead, man, king or peasantry, Raises his gross authority. When he thinks God has gone away Man takes up his sword to slay His brother; we can hear death's roar. It shadows the hovels of the poor. Like the old songs they left behind, We hung our harps in the willows again. Ballads of boys blow on the wind, Their blood is mingled with the rain.

The poem can be heard here, read in Welsh by A.Z. Foreman.                                              

"Independence calls for our bravest men"

Hauntingly, the poem weaves together nature, faith, and war in a lament not only for the dead, but for all who live in a time of war.  In this time of bitterness and woe, God “declines beyond the seas,” or as AZ Foreman’s translation suggests “God is setting like the sun.” And believing that God is irrelevant, absent, or powerless, humans rush to usurp His authority and impose their violent will upon the world. The vision resembles that expressed by W.B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”: chaos reigns, “the centre cannot hold,” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”  In Louis Flint Ceci’s translation of the first stanza of Hedd Wynn’s poem, “all authority's absurd /When God himself fades from the scene.”

In a world gone wrong, the burdens of death and suffering fall disproportionately upon the poor, and song itself has been silenced. The Biblical allusion to Psalms 137: 1-4 underpins the lament, and the poem resonates with ancient grief:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How shall we sing the Lord’s songs in a strange land? (KJV)

As during the Israelites’ exile to Babylon, men have been carried away captive and wasted by war. How can a poet’s voice sing in a strange land? Ellis Evans, like others who had been ordered to France, despairs at having left behind the traditional guiding melodies of nature and of faith. In all too short a time, he, too, will hang his silent harp on the willows. The wind sighs with dirges of the dead, and the ballads of boys slain “blow on the wind” as their blood falls like rain. 

During his brief time in France, Hedd Wyn wrote home, “Heavy weather, heavy soul, heavy heart. That is an uncomfortable trinity, isn't it?” He had arrived in France in June of 1917 -- he was dead by the end of the next month. Simon Jones, a member of his company who survived, recalled in a 1975 interview,

We started over Canal Bank at Ypres, and he was killed half way across Pilckem. I've heard many say that they were with Hedd Wyn and this and that, well I was with him... I saw him fall and I can say that it was a nosecap shell in his stomach that killed him. You could tell that... He was going in front of me, and I saw him fall on his knees and grab two fistfuls of dirt... He was dying, of course... There were stretcher bearers coming up behind us, you see. There was nothing – well, you'd be breaking the rules if you went to help someone who was injured when you were in an attack.

From the time he was young, Hedd Wyn had written poetry and dreamed of being awarded the National Eisteddfod chair. An anthology of his poetry, Cerddi'r Bugail (The Shepherd's Poems), was published posthumously in 1918, and the words Y Prifardd Hedd Wyn (The Chief Bard, Hedd Wyn) were added to his grave’s headstone.

Resistant to the war, Hedd Wyn most likely would not have wanted to be known as a war poet. His poetry can be found, however, in the cemeteries of the First World War in other men’s epitaphs. Lines from his poem Nid A'n Ango (Not forgotten)“Ei aberth nid a heibio / Ei wyneb annwyl nid a'n ango” (His sacrifice will not be passed over / His dear face will not be forgotten)  appear on at least six graves in Belgium and France, and a line from his poem Beddargraff Milwr o Drawsfynydd (Epitaph for a Soldier from Trawsfynydd) appears on a grave at Erquinghem: “Gedy ar ol, oes wen, fer, dlos, anfarwol” (He leaves behind a blessed, short, beautiful, immortal life).*

Ellis Evans (Hedd Wyn) 

* Along with 31,000 Allied soldiers, the Irish poet of the blackbirds, Francis Ledwidge, was also killed that day and he, too, is buried at Artillery Wood Cemetery. Ledwidge’s poem by the same title, “War,” can be read here.

**Thanks to the discussion on The Great War Forum for this information.

Last of the leaves

Autumn Leaves, Millais

Melancholy and beautiful, “The Leaf Burners” is one of my favorites of the lost poems of the First World War.  The poem’s meditative tone, alliterative sounds, and kennings – compound words used to rename nouns, such as “tree-shaker” for the wind – recall the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, a distant warrior culture that found meaning and solace in the natural world.

The Leaf Burners

Under two oak trees

      on top of the fell,

With an old hawthorn hedge

      to hold off the wind,

I saw the leaf burners

      brushing the leaves

With their long brooms

      into the blaze.

Above them, the sky

      scurried along

Pale as a plate,

      and peered thro' the oaks,

While the hurrying wind

      harried the hedge.

But fast as they swept

      feeding the leaves

Into the flame

      that flickered, and fumed,

The wind, the tree-shaker,

      shaking the boughs,

Whirled others down

      withered and wan —

Summer's small folk,

      faded, and fain

To give up their life;

      earth unto earth,

Ashes to ashes,

      life unto death.

Far on the fell,

      where the road ran,

I heard the men march,

      in the mouth of the wind:

And the leaf burners heard

      and leaned down their heads,

Brow upon broom,

      and let the leaves lie,

And counted their kin

      that crossed over sea,

And left wife and wean,

      to fight in the war.

Forth over fell,

      I fared on my way ;

Yet often looked back,

      when the wind blew,

To see the flames coil

      like a curl of bright hair

Round the face of a child —

      a flower of fire,

Beneath the long boughs

      where, lush and alive,

The leaves flourished long,

      loving the sun.

Much I thought then

      of men that went forth,

Or dropt like the leaves,

      to die and to live;

While the leaf burners

      with their long brooms

Drew them together

Connaught Road Cemetery, photo by Julie Thomson

      on the day of their death.

I wondered at that,

      walking the fell —

Feeling the wind

      that wafted the leaves

And set their souls

      free of the smoke,

Free of the dead,

      speeding the flame

To spire on the air —

      a spark that should spring

In me, man of men;

      last of the leaves.

            -- Ernest Rhys

The poem describes a simple country scene as winter approaches: leaf burners use long brooms to push fallen leaves onto a bonfire.  As the leaf-burners work, they are watched by a sky that scurries along, “pale as a plate,” by the hurrying wind, and by a solitary wanderer or fell-walker (fell is a dialect word used in northwest England to refer to a hill or area of high land). 

As fast as they sweep, the leaf-burners cannot keep up with the leaves that are continually dropping, whirled by the wind, “withered and wan.”  Fallen leaves, and fallen men on the battlefield -- the poem joins the two.  The brown leaves that were once young and green, “Summer’s small folk,” are now faded, and yet they are willing – even pleased – to “give up their life.” The phrase “ashes to ashes,” although describing the burned leaves, also recalls the Anglican burial rite and reminds us that in the midst of death, there is the promise of resurrection: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12: 7). 

From the hillside, the leaf-burners hear on the nearby road, "in the mouth of the wind," the marching steps of men walking to war.  The sound causes the leaf-burners to pause, resting “brow upon broom,” as they remember their loved ones who have “left wife and wean” to fight in the Great War (wean is a Northern English/Scottish term for an infant).  The lonely hill walker also pauses to remember the millions of missing soldiers who, like the leaves, were once “lush and alive…loving the sun.”  The wanderer likens the men to the leaves, hoping that the countless soldiers’ sacrifice was not meaningless, but that they dropt “to die and to live,” their souls set free from their bodies to soar like sparks above the bonfire.  

Ernest Rhys, a Welsh-English writer, published “The Leaf Burners” in 1918.  Better known as the founder of the Everyman Library, Rhys is largely forgotten as a poet, with the exception of “Lost in France,” (or “Remembering Jo”) a short poem that was included in the 2014 Poems on the Underground.  The only record I can find of “The Leaf Burners” having been reprinted was in the Golden Book of Modern English Poetry (1936) -- and this information was shared with me by a blog reader. The poem has since been included in International Poetry of the First World War (2020). 

Ernest Rhys

Unfamous history

It's not uncommon to read poems about the First World War written from the perspective of fathers, mothers, sisters, or sweethearts of men who had left to fight, but I can think of only two poems written by sons of soldiers.  Ironically, both poets' fathers served with the Lancashire Fusiliers.  One of those poems -- "Six Young Men" – was written by Ted Hughes nearly forty years after the war had ended.  Hughes himself had no memory of the war, as he was born in 1930, twelve years after the Armistice. 

Another lesser known poem – "The Son" – was written by Clifford Dyment when he was just 21 years old.  Dyment was born in January of 1914 to Bessie and William Dyment.  His autobiography, The Railway Game, includes an early memory of his young father in their home in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales, probably shortly before his father enlisted: 

It was my father's job to light the lamp in the evening. To me this was a ritual and a spectacle that invested him with priestly power and glory. He held a match to the wick and the wild wick snatched the flame from his hand and threw it up in the air and bounced it on the floor and hurled it up to the ceiling and flung it from wall to wall: it was a rough and playful exhibition of the eternal conflict between the forces of light and darkness. Majestically my father turned the lamp's brass wheel and the romping flame was hauled instantly back into the lamp like a tiger into its cage: the ceremony, short, brilliant, and daunting, was over. Now a cone of sunshiny radiance hung placidly from the lamp to the floor, and until it was time for me to be put to bed I scrambled about in a bell-tent made of light.

Dyment was just four when his father died; his poem "The Son" was published seventeen years later in 1935. 

The Son

by Clifford Dyment

I found the letter in a cardboard box,
Unfamous history. I read the words.
The ink was frail and brown, the paper dry
After so many years of being kept.
The letter was a soldier's, from the Front—
Conveyed his love and disappointed hope
Of getting leave. 'It's cancelled now,' he wrote.
'My luck is at the bottom of the sea.'

Outside the sun was hot; the world looked bright;
I heard a radio, and someone laughed.
I did not sing, or laugh, or love the sun.
Within the quiet room I thought of him,
My father killed, and all the other men,
Whose luck was at the bottom of the sea.

The first stanza's images of age and decay separate the living son from his dead father and from the past.  In an ordinary cardboard box, the son has found a letter that is "history," a pedestrian, common sort of history that was never widely known and that will be forgotten within a generation.  It seems that the box has been hidden away, and although the letter is precious for having been "kept," this is likely the first time the son has seen his father's handwriting.  Without emotion, the young man tells us flatly that he "read the words."  The poem creates a further emotional distance describing the letter as that of "a soldier's, from the front," as if it could be from any man.  The letter's message is simple and universal, writing of love and longing for home.  The news is of a cancelled leave, and the soldier's resigned despair can be heard in his words:  "My luck is at the bottom of the sea." 

The second stanza abruptly shifts to the present: the sun, a radio, laughter.  But the young man detaches himself from the present moment, sitting alone and apart in "the quiet room," remembering his father and "all the other men" whose "luck was at the bottom of the sea."  The luckless include not only the men who died in the war, but the men who grew up fatherless.  As well, the repetition of the phrase "luck is at the bottom of the sea" underscores the hopelessness and powerless of ordinary people during war time. 

William Dyment, Clifford Dyment's father, will never be famous, but he need not be forgotten.  He was born September 15, 1888 in Llancarfen, Wales and baptized there as well.  He married Bessie Riding on October 20, 1912 in the Registry Office in Newport.  They moved to Caerleon-on-Usk and lived at 1 Ashwell Terrace in a two-room cottage that has since been destroyed.  William was a carpenter who set himself up in business as a cabinet maker until on May 17, 1917 he joined the Royal Engineers  (later the Lancashire Fusiliers).   In just over a year, on May 22, 1918, he would die outside Amiens, France and be buried in the Varennes Military Cemetery, Section II, Row M, Grave 6.  

In 1919-1920, when British military cemeteries were erecting permanent headstones to commemorate the Commonwealth war dead, relatives were contacted and asked if they wished to purchase a brief epitaph inscription (limited to 66 characters).  Records indicate that a letter was sent to William Dyment's next of kin, B. Dyment, in Nottingham.  Next to his name is noted, "No Reply."   

Visitor book entry for WC Dyment, Varennes.  Handwriting comparison and analysis suggests that his son, Clifford, is the visitor who added personal details. 

A healing magic

Killed May 13, 1915

A captain in the Royal Horse Guards, Colwyn  Philipps arrived in the Ypres Salient in early November of 1914.  Less than six months later, at the age of 26, he was killed in an attack on German lines.  He has no known grave: his name is one of the 54,896 listed on the Menin Gate memorial. 

When his belongings were sent home to his mother in Wales, the poem "Release" was found among his possessions.

Release by Colwyn Philipps

(Found in his note-book when his kit came home)

There is a healing magic in the night,
The breeze blows cleaner than it did by day,
Forgot the fever of the fuller light,
And sorrow sinks insensibly away
As if some saint a cool white hand did lay
Upon the brow, and calm the restless brain.
The moon looks down with pale unpassioned ray -
Sufficient for the hour is its pain.
Be still and feel the night that hides away earth's stain.
Be still and loose the sense of God in you,
Be still and send your soul into the all,
The vasty distance where the stars shine blue,
No longer antlike on the earth to crawl.
Released from time and sense of great or small,
Float on the pinions of the Night-Queen's wings;
Soar till the swift inevitable fall
Will drag you back into all the world's small things;
Yet for an hour be one with all escaped things.

It is easy to imagine this man who attempts to forget "the fever of the fuller light" as he gazes into the night sky and searches for peace for his "restless brain."  The poem suggests that the night is able to wash this man from the filth of war with its "cleaner" breezes and the darkness that hides "earth's stain."  The night offers the gift of lightness, a time and space when not only can burdens be dropped, but the soul itself can rise above the ant-like, crawling, underground existence of the trenches and join "the vasty distance where the stars shine blue" to be "one with all escaped things." 

The Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt, William Orpen

As if in an attempt at self-hypnosis, three times the poem chants the words "Be still," recalling Psalm 46 and its meditation on God and war:  "He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;/he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;/he burns the chariots with fire./Be still, and know that I am God.”

Staring up at the distant stars, for "an hour" this man experiences "a healing magic" and a respite from the psychological traumas that go undiagnosed for so many who must simply push on and continue to fight.  Then comes the "swift inevitable fall." As certain as the dropping of shells, the return to grim reality drags him back "into all the world's small things": the pettiness of European politics, the trivial gains made by the sacrifice of repeated "over the top" attacks, and the insignificance of individual lives. 

Several months before his death, Philipps wrote home to his mother and described an early battle experience:  "As we went through the first village, we got heavily shelled by the famous Black Marias; they make a noise just like an express train and burst like a clap of thunder, you hear them coming for ten seconds before they burst.  It was very unpleasant, and you need to keep a hold on yourself to prevent ducking – most of the men duck." 

Phillips' posthumously published book of poetry was described by the Welsh Outlook in May 1916 as "a memorial to a very gallant gentleman" in whose verse "at times he lifts the veil and suffers us  to catch glimpses of his inner self, face to face with life's realities."  His poem "Release" also serves as a memorial to all who have experienced the traumas of war, come"face to face with life's realities," and soldiered on. 

Remembering Jo

If not for the context in which Ernest Rhys' poem originally appeared (more on that later), "Jo's Requiem" would not be easily identifiable as a war poem at all.  The poem offers no description of the First World War:  not of the trenches, nor of the suffering and death that occurred there. 

Instead, this is a poem that is firmly grounded in the English countryside.  There, a man simply named Jo earns his strength behind a plow, watches with sharp-eyed vision for birds that might threaten his newly sown seed, and is so attuned to his land that "He could hear the green oats growing,/and the south-west wind making rain."  I'd like to meet that man. 

XX

Jo's Requiem

by Ernest Rhys

He had the ploughman's strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.

Unknown British soldier*

We learn that Jo has spent a lifetime in learning to read the subtle signs of life that surround him, spotting even "the trout beneath the stone."  His actions are neither noble nor heroic, yet he masters the world around him with skill and honest work, in making and digging. 

And he is dead.  The last line of the poem breaks with all that has gone before and ends as abruptly a sniper's bullet or an artillery shell.  We are not told if Jo fell "straight as stone can fall."  It doesn't matter how it happened:  the details of his death are irrelevant as they will not change the reality of it. 

The poem's bare closing statement heartbreakingly expresses the utter finality of death.  As Robert Frost writes in "Out, Out—", a poem of unexpected death on a farm, "No more to build on there." 

"Jo's Requieum" does not argue with death, nor does it attempt to glorify or justify the cause for which this man died.  The poem deliberately refuses any explicit attempt at making meaning of Jo's death.  What we are asked to see in the poem is one country man and his life, not the scope of the war or the nameless and faceless mass of the millions who died. 

Implicitly, however, there is a sense of injustice underlying the stark contrast of the poem's first eleven lines and its final sentence.  Strength and keen-sightedness were not enough to save Jo, nor were his practical talents, resourcefulness, and listening ear.  The poem doesn't try to explain Jo's death, for no sense can be made of a senseless war in which over nine million died.  The poem only asks us to remember and to mourn, as signaled by its brief title, "Jo's Requiem." 

Unknown British soldiers*

Curiously, the poem at some point was retitled "Lost in France."  First published as "Jo's Requiem" in Rhys' volume of poetry The Leaf Burners (1918), it appeared as the last poem in a series of twenty related verses entitled "The Tommiad." The title of the verse sequence is a play on the Iliad, suggesting an epic about British Tommies, the name given to British infantry soldiers.  But Ernest Rhys was a Welsh writer, and the title of the verse sequence may also be a play on the Welsh word tomi, "to spread dung" or "to bespatter with dirt," suggesting a much less glorious view of the First World War.  

"Jo's Requiem" was retitled "Lost in France" as early as 1945 in a British anthology titled Soldiers' Verse.  For a while, the two titles appeared together, with "Lost in France" as the main title and "Jo's Requiem" as the subtitle.  Most recently, the subtitle has disappeared altogether.  Several years ago, the poem appeared on the London Underground as "Lost in France," marking Remembrance Day. 

But the title change is significant:  it alters the poem from being a tribute to a single, knowable man to a more abstract comment on an enormous and indecipherable war. 

It is said that history repeats itself, and as actually happened in the First World War, the name of this man is being erased from memory. 

Rest in peace, Jo. 

*These photos and others were found several years ago in the loft of a barn in France, discarded as trash.  To read more, visit the Independent's web article "Unseen Photographs."