The cause is good

 

A relieved platoon of 1/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment
at Hébuterne, France c. 1916 by Fred Roe

Previous posts on this blog have shared Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham’s two anthologized poems, “The Cross of Wood” and “A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches.” Although a posthumous collection of Winterbotham’s poetry was published in 1916 or 1917 (Poems by JJ Bank and Sons of Cheltenham), it was for private distribution, and I have been unable to find a record of any copy that still exists. 

However, while reading the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette (one of the earliest and best-known of the trench journals), I stumbled across a review of Winterbotham’s Poems and was able to identify an additional two of his works. The review quotes the full text of Winterbotham’s “A Casualty” and references another of his poems about a “d...d awful trench” called Marguerite.* After a bit of searching, I found that the poems had each been published anonymously in the trench magazine before Winterbotham’s death: “A Casualty” in the August 1915 issue and “To Marguerite” in the Christmas 1915 issue. As the review in the Fifth Glo'ster Gazette notes of Winterbotham’s poems, “The verses are simple enough, but they ring true.”*

Cyril Winterbotham

A Casualty

“Come for the cause is good. Stout heart, strong hand.”
“England needs now. Death—for your native land?”
“The cause is good.”

Poor hackneyed words. But yet his manhood woke,
And held it true—it matters not who spoke.
         The cause was good.

Poor hackneyed words. We heard them once again
From dying lips, teeth clenched against the pain.
For thus he spoke, and so his loss was gain,
        “The cause is good.”
—Cyril Winterbotham

In the first stanza, the line “The cause is good” is the enthusiastic promise made by an army recruiter, but it does not gain its full meaning until it is whispered by a dying soldier.

During August 1916, of the 1,000 men serving with the 1/5 Gloucesters, over 500 were killed, wounded, or reported missing.** Winterbotham was killed while leading Company C of the 1/5 battalion of the Gloucesters in an attack on a German trench near Ovillers-la-Boiselle on the evening of 27 August 1916. In that attack, every officer was either wounded or killed, and eighteen men gave their lines to secure the trench. The next month, the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette reported, 

"Of those of our Battalion who have been killed or who are missing, it is not possible now to write. For one thing our heart is heavy. For another, we are forbidden to publish that list of those who have laid down their lives, without which we should not be able to do justice to those who have fallen. Meanwhile, we who treasure their memories very dearly, are proud that we have lived among them, known and loved them...."***

Clara Winterbotham, 
The Wilson Collection

Another who loved Cyril Winterbotham was his sister, Clara. During the war, she volunteered as a full-time VAD nurse at the Cheltenham hospital from 1915 to 1919. She attained the rank of Quartermaster for the last eight months of her service, for which she was awarded the MBE.†

In 1918, Clara Winterbotham became the first woman to serve on Cheltenham’s city council, and in 1921 she became the town's first woman mayor, serving until 1923, then again from 1944–1946. In July of 1919 as chair of Cheltenham’s Art Gallery and Museum Committee, Clara led the committee to commission a war painting to honor local soldiers.** Her brother Cyril is the young helmeted officer depicted in the center of the painting (top of this post).  

After his death, those who knew Cyril wrote of his warm-hearted humour in difficult circumstances. Here is his unsigned poem “To Marguerite.” 

To Marguerite

Oh beautiful, I found thee once
    When summer winds blew warm, and sweet.
I said “The fellow is a dunce
    Who does not love my Marguerite.”

A gunner's shelter in a trench, Thiepval
William Orpen, 1917

Thy form symmetrical, and clean,
Made my poor heart with rapture beat;
Birds, mice, and insects—N’ere so mean
A thing but loved by Marguerite.

“And here,” I said “The winter blas
I shall not fear. The snow and sleet
Shall harm me not while I hold fast
Unto my love—My Marguerite.”

I guarded thee with tender pride 
        By day and night, and all too fleet
The summer and the autumn died, 
        And left me still with Marguerite.

Then came the equinoctial gale,
The rain descended like a sheet,
Followed by frost, and snow, and hail,
And Oh, the change in Marguerite!



Her symmetry went with the wind,
Her beauty was a wreck complete,
Be-fouled, disordered, who could find
Ought but disgust in Marguerite?

Thy ruin is beyond repair.
Deep in the mud, a good five feet,
Object of horror, and despair,
I leave thee now, My Marguerite.

Oh, blame me not that rain should quench
They love that throve in summer heat.
You’re known as “That d...d awful trench,” 

—Na poo! Na poo! My Marguerite!††

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*Bishop Frodsham, “The Wings of Life” [book review of Poems by Cyril William Winterbotham, printed for private circulation, J.J. Banks and Son, Cheltenham] in Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, June 1917, no. 19.
** Neela Mann, “The story of Cheltenham’s Official WW1 Memorial Painting,” 2018.
*** “Bricks from the Editor’s Pack,” Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, Sept. 1916, no. 14.
† Clara Frances Winterbotham, VAD Red Cross: https://vad.redcross.org.uk/record?rowKey=230931
†† This poem was published unsigned in the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette’s Christmas 1915 issue, no. 8. The issue also includes Winterbotham’s unsigned but anthologized poem “A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches” and a poem that Anne Powell in A Deep Cry attributes to Winterbotham: “O.C. Platoon Enquiries,” signed C.W. 

Above a shallow grave

One of the missing of the Somme, Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham was killed on 27 August 1916 near Ovillers, France when his battalion was ordered to attack a German trench at a few minutes past 7:00 pm. Although the German position was taken, at least fifteen men from the unit were killed. Nine of them, including Winterbotham, were buried by their fellow soldiers two days later in the German trench.

Winterbotham’s widowed mother received news of her son’s death in a letter written by the battalion’s chaplain. Reverend George Helm wrote, “It may be some consolation to know that I buried him early this morning in the German trench he did so much to win, both by his example beforehand and of his actual leadership on the day … he was the British Officer at his best.”*

At the time of the burial, a wooden cross was erected that named the dead and the six men who remained missing. Shortly before his death, Cyril Winterbotham had written about these wooden crosses, often fashioned out of packing crates or salvaged wood, that marked the graves of thousands upon thousands of soldiers hastily buried by their comrades in arms. Winterbotham’s poem “The Cross of Wood” was published in his hometown paper the day before he died.**

The Cross of Wood

from Lives of the
First World War

God be with you and us who go our way
And leave you dead upon the ground you won.
For you at last the long fatigue is done,
The hard march ended; you have rest to-day.

You were our friends; with you we watched the dawn
Gleam through the rain of the long winter night,
With you we laboured till the morning light
Broke on the village, shell-destroyed and torn.

Not now for you the glorious return
To steep Stroud valleys, to the Severn leas
By Tewkesbury and Gloucester, or the trees
Of Cheltenham under high Cotswold stern.

For you no medals such as others wear—
A cross of bronze for those approved brave—
To you is given, above a shallow grave,
The Wooden Cross that marks you resting there.

Rest you content; more honourable far
Than all the Orders is the Cross of Wood,
The symbol of self-sacrifice that stood
Bearing the God whose brethren you are.
—Cyril Winterbotham

Over two years after her her son's death, in March of 1918 Winterbotham’s mother received a letter from a local man serving with the Army Service Corps who had visited her son’s grave. Corporal Thomas Woolhouse wrote, “Yesterday I went again to the spot where your son lies. His comrades and I shall have to try and get something to grow other than roses as the soil is very chalky.... but I believe that I shall be moving on in a day or so. The cross is firm and stands about 4ft 6in out of the ground, by itself, close to the trench.”*

Undated photo Cheltenham Cemetery

After the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission began the work of identifying and reburying the dead. The original wooden cross grave markers were offered to the families of the fallen soldiers, and in 1925 the Winterbotham wooden cross was returned to Cheltenham and erected in the cemetery.* It joined numerous others, as the people of Cheltenham had raised funds to have as many crosses of local men returned as possible. A “Soldiers’ Corner” was established in the Cheltenham, Gloucestershire cemetery, where the wooden crosses were mounted on specially constructed oak rails. A historian notes, “By 1927 there were 200 wooden crosses in place and a year later the number had risen to 230 crosses. The crosses were not reported on after 1928.”*** Today, only twenty-two crosses remain, but they have been researched, restored, and preserved. 

Despite the wooden cross marker, Cyril Winterbotham’s body, along with those of ten others from his unit, was never recovered due to continued heavy artillery shelling on the battlefield. Winterbotham’s name is listed on the Thiepval monument (Pier 5B), though a replica of his original wooden cross can be visited at Cheltenham cemetery. 

Those wishing more information on the original wooden crosses of the Great War can find a wealth of information at Returned from the Front, a project dedicated to establishing an online resource and database that provides information on the locations of currently existing returned crosses, as well as stories surrounding the people whose graves they marked.
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* This information and many other details on Cyril Winterbotham and Cheltenham in the First World War can be found in Neela Mann’s The story of Cheltenham’s Official WW1 Memorial Painting.
** The poem was first published untitled and unsigned in the July 1916 issue of the 5th Gloucester Gazette: A chronicle, serious and humorous, of the Battalion while serving with the British Expeditionary Force. The poem appeared in August 1916 in the Cheltenham Chronicle the day before Winterbotham was killed.
*** This and other information can be found in Cheltenham Cemetery Great War Crosses, which recounts the history of the crosses, as well as recent efforts to restore and preserve the crosses remaining and to research the stories of the men whose graves they marked. 

Christmas Prayer from the Trenches

Cyril William Winterbotham

Shortly after recovering from emergency surgery to remove his appendix, Cyril Winterbotham, a young barrister from the Cotswolds, joined the 1^st/5^th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment in September of 1915.  Among the men of his battalion, he had a reputation for being “almost recklessly brave.”  And yet his mother described him as “essentially a man of peace” who “had a horror of war and bloodshed, but when the call came, he did not hesitate – every other feeling gave way to the desire to serve his country, and to deliver the oppressed.” 

Winterbotham’s own description of a spring day on the Western Front allows us to see how both accounts of his personality were likely accurate:

It is a strange sight, this firing line.  Imagine two untidy lines of sandbags, looking more like rubbish heaps in the distance and between them straggling lines of wire on rough poles at all sorts of angles with a dead cow here and there and odd articles scattered about.  Then dotted about are ruined houses with tileless roofs and broken walls standing in the remains of their gardens.  Over all, absolutely no sign of life or movement. 

I sat and looked round on Sunday morning.  An aeroplane was being shelled up above and the sky was dotted with little white puffs of smoke.  I couldn’t help trying to reconstruct the scene in peace and imagine all the roofs on and all the mess cleaned up…Waller and I remarked simultaneously that the whole thing is preposterous nonsense and that men ought to leave each other in peace to enjoy the weather and, I added, go fishing.  After which we went off to try and spot a sniper and if possible put a bullet in him. 

--From The Soldier’s War: The Great War through Veteran’s Eyes (Richard van Emden)

Winterbotham wrote two poems while serving on the Western Front.  His “Christmas Prayer from the Trenches” admits to the lonely fear and darkness of Christmas in war time, and yet looks to the hope of the Incarnation and Christ’s comforting presence, promised to even the most battle-hardened of men. 

A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches

Not yet for us may Christmas bring
Good-will to men, and peace;
In our dark sky no angels sing,
Not yet the great release
For men, when war shall cease.

So must the guns our carols make,
Our gifts must bullets be,
For us no Christmas bells shall wake;
These ruined homes shall see
No Christmas revelry.

In hardened hearts we fain would greet
The Babe at Christmas born,
But lo, He comes with pierced feet,

Wearing a crown of thorn,-
His side a spear has torn.

For tired eyes are all too dim,
Our hearts too full of pain,
Our ears too deaf to hear the hymn
Which angels sing in vain,
'The Christ is born again.'

O Jesus, pitiful, draw near,
That even we may see
The Little Child who knew not fear;
Thus would we picture Thee
Unmarred by agony.

O'er death and pain triumphant yet
Bid Thou Thy harpers play,
That we may hear them, and forget
Sorrow and all dismay,
And welcome Thee to stay
With us on Christmas Day. 

The poem is honest about the cruel irony of being ordered to wage war at Christmas.  After the 1914 Christmas Truce, generals on both sides of the battle lines made certain that fraternization would not occur again.  The poem’s opening stanza bleakly states that there will be no peace, no goodwill, and no angel’s song on the Western Front in 1915.  The only songs will be the roar of the guns accompanied by the whistles of the shells; the only gifts will be bullets.

Exhaustion and pain have so numbed the men that they are unable to fathom the news of a holy child’s birth.  The “unmarred” Christ child is a stranger, and yet the men are able to draw near to Christ in agony, his body pitifully mutilated with wounds, his soul wrenched by agony. Praying to the crucified Christ, the hardened soldiers plead for assistance “That even we may see/The Little Child who knew not fear.”

This prayer from the trenches does not ask for an end to the war, but rather for Christ’s presence in the darkest of places, “O’er death and pain triumphant yet,” and for His healing help that at least for one day, the men might forget “Sorrow and all dismay.” 

Cyril Winterbotham would not live to see Christmas 1916.  One of the missing of the Somme, he was killed on 27 August, 1916, near Ovillers, France when his battalion was ordered to attack a German trench.  Although the German position was taken, at least 15 men from the unit were killed, 10 of whose bodies were never recovered due to the continued pounding of heavy artillery on the battlefield.  Cyril Winterbotham’s name is listed on the Thiepval memorial (Pier 5B), just one of the 73,335 British men commemorated there whose remains were never found nor identified.