Fierce Fighting in a Wood

Percy Smith, Solitude

High Wood, Sanctuary Wood, Delville Wood, Polygon Wood, Belleau Wood – these are some of the best-known sites of the fierce fighting that occurred in wooded areas during the First World War. Thousands of men died in the dense forests of France and Belgium, and thousands of bodies were never recovered. 

In 1921, Teresa Hooley included in her collection Songs of the Open a poem that remembers these sites of conflict and death. 

Primeval 

“Fierce fighting in a wood”—so read

The city placards. Suddenly,

From out dim aeons of the dead

There flashed a memory.

Once more a tree with trees I stood

Where men fought howling in the dark,

And felt the touch of human blood

Hot-spattered on my bark. 

Once more I watched the red dawn rise

Upon a redder solitude,

And dropped dead leaves on sightless eyes....

“Fierce fighting in a wood.”

—Teresa Hooley

It’s a curious poem: the poet imagines herself a tree, a silent witness to the carnage of war.  Hooley was well known for her writings about the natural world. She was raised in rural Derbyshire and volunteered with the Women’s Land Army during the war. Later in life, she collected some of her previously written poems and re-published them in a pamphlet titled Tree Poems.* A review of her Collected Poems (1926) praised her “charming verse” about “birds, rain, leaves and stars, and all the little precious things of home.”**

But “Primeval” is not charming, nor is it concerned with “all the little precious things of home.” Although Songs of the Open does include  poems such as “A Daffodil Day” or “Sea-Foam,” numerous poems are tinged with the tragedy of the First World War. The pastoral poem “Charnwood Hill” closes with the lines “ I look on them with worship, / Because, by land and sea, / Brave men have died in thousands / To keep them safe and free.” 

 
Hooley also includes three poems written for specific soldiers in her 1921 collection. One is for her dead brother, another for “F.H.B.”, likely her husband Frank H. Butler, whom she married in 1920. The third poem is for another lover of nature who died in the war, the soldier and poet Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson.***

In Memoriam 

(Captain T.P.C. Wilson, Sherwood Foresters, killed in action, March 24, 1918).

The larks are happy in the sky,

The little lambs are gay,
And under blossoming orchard trees
The children shout and play.

Hid in the hazel coppice green,
The love-mad thrushes sing:
All Earth’s unheeding things are glad
For glory of the Spring.

Be gay, you silly innocent lambs,
For he who loved you well,
That you may frisk in quiet fields
Has paid the price of hell.

You thrushes, drench with song divine
Your leafy solitudes;
His voice is stilled that you may nest
Unharmed in English woods. 

And you, you little children, play:

How should we wish you sad?

For he was young, and he has given

His life to keep you glad. 

      —Teresa Hooley

The poem echoes with references to woods and trees, and the war diary of the Sherwood Foresters, 10th battalion, details action the day that Wilson was killed. His unit was covering the retreat of other battalions, when “masses of the enemy were now appearing over the high ground from Havrincourt to Velu Wood.” Wilson was killed about 4pm in the fighting. 

How did Hooley know T.P.C. (Jim) Wilson? There are several possibilities: his parents lived in Little Eaton, less than ten miles from Hooley’s home in Risley; he had several sisters close to Teresa Hooley in age, and Hooley’s brother Basil also enlisted with the Sherwood Foresters (although he and Wilson served as  officers in different battalions). 

Wilson’s body was never found; his name is listed on the Arras Memorial to the Missing, and his parents erected a memorial to him in the church at Little Eaton. Teresa Hooley died in 1973; she also has no known grave as she donated her body to medical science. 

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* In the collection of the University of Buffalo’s poetry manuscript collection (Teresa Hooley).
** Thomas Moult, Time and Tide, 3 April 1926, p. 428, cited in Jane Dowson’s thesis, Modern Women’s Poetry 1910 – 1929, U of Leicester, 1998, p. 25. 

*** For more on Wilson’s poetry on this blog, see “What did we know of summer?”, “Poems in their pockets,” and “Ancient alchemy,” and for another poem written in Wilson’s memory, see his sister’s poem “To Tony, Aged 3.”

Poems in their pockets

There’s a holiday for everything: November 27th is Bavarian Cream Pie Day and May 4th marks both Beer Pong Day and International Respect for Chickens Day. And every April, the US celebrates National Poetry Month, with one day set aside as “Poem in your Pocket Day.” According to the National Academy of Poets, it’s a day that encourages everyone to select a poem, carry it, and share it with others.

But what of poems found in the pockets of the dead? They echo like last words, held close by those who wrote them or loved them.

 

Frank Hurley, Dawn of Passchendaele
State Library New South Wales

Heaven

(Found in his pocket after death.)

Suddenly one day

The last ill shall fall away;

The last little beastliness that is in our blood

Shall drop from us as the sheath drops from the bud,

And the great spirit of man shall struggle through,

And spread huge branches underneath the blue.

In any mirror, be it bright or dim,

Man will see God staring back at him.

            —T.P. Cameron Wilson

T.P. Cameron Wilson was killed in the First World War on March 23, 1918. The introduction to his posthumously published book of poems, Magpies in Picardy, relates that he was “extremely shy about his verse, and, unlike most youthful poets, was always disinclined to let it be seen, or discussed, by his friends.” Before joining the British Army, Wilson had been a schoolteacher in rural Derbyshire. In a letter dated May of 1916, he wrote,

Do teach your dear kids the horror of responsibility which rests on the war-maker … We’ve been wrong in the past. We have taught schoolboys “war” as a romantic subject … And everyone has grown up soaked in the poetry of war—which exists, because there is poetry in everything, but which is only a tiny part of the great dirty tragedy … All those picturesque phrases of war writers … are dangerous because they show nothing of the individual horror, nothing of the fine personalities smashed suddenly into red beastliness, nothing of the sick fear that is tearing at the hearts of brave boys who ought to be laughing at home.*

T.P.C. Wilson

And in his war-time notebook of “waste paper philosophy,” Wilson wrote a reflection on prayer:

When you pray I dare advise you break away from arranged titles, such as the Church has hung round the neck of its God … I have prayed to Him as the Great Calm Spirit, as Father, as King, as Friend, and all the titles mean nothing, and fluttered like dead leaves on the moving stream of love … Once as I walked along a road I spoke to Him as the Splendid Friend, and saw the huge sea, green and silent against the clouds, and near me the laughing pines, and very far away a sail like a speck of foam but which was a great ship, full of men. And I knew I was a fool, and could not call Him anything, but said, “Make me big, and less a fool,” and then I ran, and met my friends and linked an arm through the warm arm of one and sang a silly song.**

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*T.P. Cameron Wilson from War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, E.P. Dutton, 1930, pp. 299-300.

** T.P. Cameron Wilson, Waste paper philosophy, to which has been added Magpies in Picardy, George H. Doran, 1920, p. 31.

What did we know of summer?

A Howitzer in Action, William Orpen
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2957)

A wall of sound. A deafening roar. A ceaseless rain of shells. These were soldiers' impressions as they described one of the greatest artillery actions the world had ever seen, the British bombardment that preceded the July 1^st 1916 attack at the Somme. “The din of hundreds of shells whizzing over our heads was like several ghost-like express trains hurtling through the sky,” said Corporal George Ashurt of the Lancashire Fusiliers.

The shelling began on June 24^th and could be heard over 240 miles away in London. For the next six days, more than 1500 heavy guns, often spaced at intervals of less than 30 yards, fired over 1,500,000 artillery and gas shells at German positions. British General Sir Henry Rawlinson is reported to have said, “nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it.”

Rawlinson was quite wrong about the bombardment’s effectiveness at eliminating enemy opposition. British soldiers attacked the German lines on July 1, 1916 , and 20,000 British men were killed, most dying in the first hours of the attack. While bombardments did not kill every man in the trenches, they were a horrific torture to endure. In a letter dated April of 1916, British soldier-poet T.P. Cameron Wilson wrote, “a real bombardment, where the sky is one screaming sheet of metal, is hell indescribable.”  His poem “During the Bombardment,” attempts to communicate the experience. 

During the Bombardment

What did we know of birds?

A Crump, H.S. Williamson

Though the wet woods rang with their blessing,

And the trees were awake and aware with wings,

And the little secrets of mirth, that have no words,

Made even the brambles chuckle, like baby things

Who find their toes too funny for any expressing.  

What did we know of flowers? 

Though the fields were gay with their flaming

Poppies, like joy itself, burning the young green maize,

And spreading their crinkled petals after the showers — 

Cornflower vieing with mustard; and all the three of them shaming

The tired old world with its careful browns and greys.  

What did we know of summer,

The larks, and the dusty clover,

And the little furry things that were busy and starry-eyed?

Each of us wore his brave disguise, like a mummer,

Hoping that no one saw, when the shells came over,

The little boy who was funking — somewhere inside!
     —Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson

The roar and reverberations of an artillery bombardment consume the soldiers who must endure it. During the crash of exploding shells, men become oblivious to the sights and sounds of the world around them, blind to the fields of poppies and cornflowers, deaf to the sounds of birds and wind and woods. 

How loud is a bombardment that can be heard over 200 miles away? First World War bombardments were estimated to reach noise levels of at least 140 decibels, louder than a jackhammer at 50 feet (95 dB), louder than a power mower at 3 feet (107 dB), louder than sandblasting or a rock concert (115 dBs), and well past the point of pain that begins at 125 dBs. Even with hearing protection (which was not issued to men at the Front), 140 decibels is the loudest recommended noise exposure, and short-term exposure at this level is likely to result in permanent damage. 

An experience of this kind alters reality: the poem asks, what did we know of birds, of flowers, of summer? Only the rain of shells and the engulfing noise are real: even a sense of time and of the season are lost in the barrage of death.

Most terrifying of all, the men lose themselves. While their outward appearance remains that of men under fire, they know that this is only a disguise.  Like actors in a drama gone horribly wrong, the soldiers feel themselves to be no more than small boys "funking" — overwhelmed by fear, paralyzed, unable to do what is demanded of them. 

Recent research reported in the New York Times on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (known during World War I as “shell shock”) has revealed startling changes in the brains of those who have survived blast sites. The researchers have concluded, “modern warfare destroys the brain.” 

It is nearly impossible to imagine what men experienced and endured in the trenches of the First World War.  In April of 1916, T.P Cameron Wilson wrote,

“War is about the most unclean thing on earth. There are certain big clean virtues about it – comradeship and a whittling away of non-essentials, and sheer stark triumphs of spirit over shrinking nerves, but it’s the calculated death, the deliberate tearing of young bodies – if you’ve once seen a bright-eyed fellow suddenly turned to a goggling idiot, with his own brains trickling down into his eyes from under his cap – as I’ve done, you’re either a peace-maker or a degenerate.”

T.P. Cameron Wilson did not live to see the peace; he was killed in the German spring offensive of 1918, his body never found.     

T.P. Cameron Wilson