Cannon Fodder

The Thinker, William Orpen (c1918)

As the First World War transformed the world, it also changed the English language. Numerous new words and phrases were added, including tank, cootie, and camouflage.  While the phrase cannon fodder first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary’s supplement of 1891, the term became widely used during the Great War.  Fodder is food given to livestock, and the sense of using men as “food for the cannons” entered English in the late 1800s through a direct translation of the German word kanonenfutter. The concept of regarding men “merely as material to be consumed in war,”* however, is not a new one; as early as the 16^th century in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Falstaff describes common infantry troops as “food for powder.”**

During the First World War, the British frequently used the term to describe German military strategy, as can be seen in this example from a 1916 essay published in Punch Magazine: “The Crown Price has still his laurels to win, and it is clear that no sacrifice of German ‘cannon fodder’ will be too great to deter him from pushing the stroke home.”***

But in his 1918 collection of war poetry, English machine-gunner Alec Waugh applied the term to the British dead. 

Cannon Fodder

Is it seven days you’ve been lying there

Out in the cold,

Feeling the damp, chill circlet of flesh

Loosen its hold

On muscles and sinews and bones,

Feeling them slip

Zonnebeke 1918, William Orpen

One from the other to hang, limp on the stones?

Seven days. The lice must be busy in your hair,

And by now the worms will have had their share

 Of eyelid and lip.

Poor, lonely thing; is death really a sleep?

Or can you somewhere feel the vermin creep

Across your face

As you lie, rotting, uncared for in the unowned place,

That you fought so hard to keep

Blow after weakening blow.

Well.  You’ve got what you wanted, that spot is yours.

No one can take if from you now.

But at home by the fire, their faces aglow

With talking of you,

They’ll be sitting, the folk that you loved,

And they will not know.

O Girl at the window combing your hair

Get back to your bed.

Your bright-limbed lover is lying out there

Dead.

WW1 Bamforth Song Card

O mother, sewing by candlelight,

Put away that stuff.

The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck.

He is warm enough.

Soon, like a snake in your honest home

The word will come.

And the light will suddenly go from it.

Day will be dumb.

And the heart in each aching breast

Will be cold and numb.

O men, who had known his manhood and truth,

I had found him true.

O you, who had loved his laughter and youth,

 I had loved it too.

O girl, who has lost the meaning of life,

 I am lost as you.

And yet there is one worse thing,

For all the pain at the heart and the eye blurred and dim,

This you are spared,

You have not seen what death has made of him.

You have not seen the proud limbs mangled and broken,

The face of the lover sightless and raw and red,

You have not seen the flock of vermin swarming

Over the newly dead.

Slowly he’ll rot in the place where no man dare go,

Silently over the right the stench of his carcase will flow,

Proudly the worms will be banqueting….

This you can never know.

He will live in your dreams for ever as last you saw him.

Proud-eyed and clean, a man whom shame never knew.

Laughing, erect, with the strength of the wind in his manhood—

 O broken-hearted mother, I envy you.

            —Alec Waugh, Flanders. September 1917.

Death Forbids, Percy Smith 1918

Alec Waugh and his regiment participated in the horror at Passchendaele in 1917. Waugh’s direct and brutal description of witnessing a body decay in No Man’s Land was discussed in a review that appeared in The Bookman: “his [Waugh’s] ‘Cannon Fodder’ and ‘The Other Side’ strip the romance of war to the bone and leave it a senseless huddle of mud and blood and putrefaction that no sane man could glorify.”†

Less explicitly, the poem “Cannon Fodder” gives voice to the isolation and alienation that link the experience of the trenches with that of the home front.  Despite the multitude of living things in No Man’s Land – busy lice, creeping vermin, and feasting worms, the dead man is a “poor, lonely thing.” And when the family learn of their soldier’s death, the news enters their home like a snake, leaving a young girl, mother, and all who loved him, in silent, solitary darkness. 

The form of the poem mimics the frustrated search for meaning in a world that no longer makes sense: while there are rhymes, they are unpatterned and unpredictable, and several lines end with words that never find an answering echo (as in line 3, flesh or line 47, broken).  The poem’s stanza lengths also vary widely: the first stanza and its description of the putrefying body is the longest (18 lines). As the poem continues, however, stanzas grow increasingly shorter, until the last four stanzas are limited to four lines, as if mirroring the breakdown and decay of bodies, of understanding, and of meaning. 

 

When The Bookman reviewed the poem in 1918, St. John Adcock noted what made Waugh’s work both disturbing and distinctive:

      We are so accustomed to have our poets pass elusively over ugly truths that it shocks some of us to come across Alec Waugh’s swift statement of bald details in his sharply-contrasted sketches of what is happening simultaneously at home, here, and on the battle-fields at a distance.††

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* Oxford English Dictionary, "cannon fodder." 

** William Shakespeare, 1 Hen. IV, iv. ii. 72.

*** February 1916, Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War, Cassell, 1920, p. 74.

† A. St. John Adcock, “Poets in Khaki,” special supplement to The Bookman, vol. 55, December 1918, p. 98

†† St. John Adcock, “Poets in Khaki,” p. 99.

The Other Side

Dance of Death 1919, Claggett Wilson
Smithsonian Museum

When war was declared in July of 1914, many thought it would be over by Christmas.  But by the spring of 1917, as new offensives began yet again on the Western Front, the Great War seemed as if it might never end. 

Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory provides numerous first-hand accounts of those who became known as the Neverendians; in the summer of 1917, one British officer used an elaborate mathematical formula of past battle gains to calculate that at its current rate, the war would continue for another 180 years.*  The size and scope of the war had become incomprehensible.

Alexander (Alec) Waugh was the older brother of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. He trained at the British Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and in 1917 was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Dorset Regiment.  Posted to the Somme and Passchendaele, he was captured near Arras on March 28, 1918 and spent the remainder of the war in German prisoner camps.

Waugh’s poem “The Other Side” argues that perhaps the only ones who can understand war are those who cannot speak of it: the dead.

The Other Side

There are not any, save the men that died,

Whose minds have probed into the heart of war.

Decorated officer commits suicide

Sometimes we stumble on a secret door

And listening guess what lies the other side.

Sometimes a moment’s sudden pain

Flings back the veil that hangs between

Guessing and knowing; then lets it fall again

Before we understand what we have seen.

In and out everywhere,

Distorted in a twisted glass,

Fragmentary visions pass.

We try to fit them one with another,

Like a child putting a puzzle together,

When half the pieces are not there.

Out of a dim obscurity

Certain things stand plain and clear,

Certain things we are forced to see,

Certain things we are forced to hear.

A subaltern dying between the lines,

Wondering why.

A father with nothing left of life

But the will to die.

A young girl born for laughter and spring,

Left to her shame and loneliness.

What is one woman more or less

To men who’ve forgotten everything?

A thin line swinging forward to kill,

And a man driven mad by the din.

Music-hall songs about “Kaiser Bill”

And “the march through the streets of Berlin.”

Grey-beards prattling round a fire

Of the good the war has done.

Three men rotting upon the wire;

And each of them had a son.

A soldier who once was fresh and clean

British paper, May 1916

Lost to himself in whoring and drink,

Blind to what will be and what has been,

Only aware that he must not think.

In the pulpit a parson preaching lies,

Babbling of honour and sacrifice.

Fragments flutter in and out,

Christ! what is it all about?

            --Alec Waugh, Hampstead.  March, 1917

The poem’s first lines suggest that war can never be wholly understood, but can only be grasped in fragmentary glimpses and distorted impressions.  Yet the mood turns in the fourth stanza with the assertion that “out of a dim obscurity” there are truths that must be seen and heard, certain things that “stand plain and clear.”

The poem’s power comes from this list of “certain things” as it presents eight memorable scenes.  A junior officer dies, leaving his father with no reason to live; a young girl is abandoned, likely a victim of rape or a prostitute, used by men who have “forgotten everything.” Men’s bodies rot upon the wire in No Man’s Land, while soldiers who survive either cope with the horrors of war through mindless drinking or lose their minds as they suffer the effects of shell-shock. Meanwhile, elderly men on the home front discuss the “good a war has done”; ministers of the church preach on the glory and honor of the conflict, and soldiers themselves sing choruses that mock the enemy and proclaim their own imminent victory. 

There is no resolution. The last line “Christ! what is it all about?” offers only further ambiguity: does the poem close with a frustrated curse or a plea to God for answers?  

Waugh’s poetry is seldom read today, but in December of 1918, the Bookman published the essay “Poets in Khaki,” which reviewed the work of 44 soldier poets.  Citing “Cannon Fodder” and “The Other Side,” St. John Adock said that Waugh’s poems “strip the romance of war to the bone.” Adock included Waugh as one of “Three poets who I think do represent as faithfully and potently as any the later, essentially modern attitude towards war.” The other two writers singled out for this praise were Gilbert Frankau and Siegfried Sassoon.**

Sassoon also struggled to grasp the purpose and meaning of the war, and his remembrance of the days following the opening of the Somme offensive resonate with Waugh’s ideas in “The Other Side”:

“I leant on a wooden bridge, gazing down into the dark green glooms of the weedy little river, but my thoughts were powerless against unhappiness so huge. I couldn't alter European history, or order the artillery to stop firing. I could stare at the War as I stared at the sultry sky, longing for life and freedom and vaguely altruistic about my fellow-victims. But a second-lieutenant could attempt nothing -- except to satisfy his superior officers; and altogether, I concluded, Armageddon was too immense for my solitary understanding.”

            -- Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 

*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 2000), see pages 71-74. 
**St. John Adock, “Poets in Khaki,” Bookman (Volume 55, Christmas 1918), page 98.  T.S. Eliot also reviewed Waugh’s volume of poetry in the Egoist, but was less impressed, writing, “Mr Waugh…would appear to have been influenced by some older person who admired Rupert Brooke” (August 1918, page 99).