Night Watch

Star Shells over No Man's Land

Much has been written about the comradeship that soldiers found in the trenches of the Great War. In an example shared on this blog, Henry Lamont Simpson writes “Friendship is the greatest gift God sends— /All men were brothers to me,/ Most were my friends….” (“Going In”).  And in Wilfred Owen’s last letter to his mother, Owen assured her, “Of this I am certain --  you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.”

Yet war also intensified soldiers’ sense of estrangement and alienation. Second Lieutenant John Allan Wyeth wrote “Night Watch” sometime between August 25^th and September 5^th of 1918,  while training with the American First Army in France, about forty miles south of Verdun.

Night Watch

(Tronville-en-Barrois)

Autumn and dusk—a band far off plays I—

ain’t got nobo—dy and nobo—dy cares for me.

Already autumn here in this new part

of France—the garden has a bitter reek!

How lonely stars look in a changing sky—

I turn the lights on so as not to see.

Already late for my night watch to start.

Silence too strong for anything to creak.

The night is very wide—the room turns sly,

and things keep still to watch what there may be

back of my tight shut eyes and secret smile.

Are you there?—and like the heart of God my heart

is vast with love and pain and very bleak—

O France, be still in here a little while.

            —John Allan Wyeth

As he readies himself for the long solitude of night watch, the poem’s speaker faintly hears a tune far off in the distance. The popular song “I ain’t got nobody,” also known as “I’m so sad and lonely,” was copyrighted in 1915, and it mirrors the soldier’s mood (it can be listened to here). As others sing, he sits apart in a silence so strong that it forces him even further into himself. 

John Allan Wyeth

Whatever it is that the soldier has seen thus far in the war, he wills himself to forget it and shuts his mind to thoughts that clamor for attention behind his “tight shut eyes and secret smile.” The reality that lies before him can be no worse than what he has already endured, and he projects the desperate loneliness he feels onto everything around him, even the stars in the night sky.

The only thought that escapes is the ambiguous question, “Are you there?” Is the man speaking to God? A friend who died in battle? Someone from home?  No reply is given, and so the soldier answers his own question, asking only for a small moment of stillness, a rest from the bleakness that threatens to overwhelm him. 

Wyeth may be the most underappreciated American poet of the First World War.  Critics who admire his autobiographical war sonnets note his ability to mix tones, textures, languages, and dialects as he writes of the “cultural dislocation of the AEF in its trek across Western Europe.”* Other Wyeth poems shared on this blog include “The Transport,” and “Picnic:  Harbonnières to Bayonvillers.”  A deep loneliness echoes just beneath the surface of nearly all Wyeth's war writing.

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* Dana Gioia, “The Unknown Soldier: An Introduction to the Poetry of John Allan Wyeth,” in John Allan Wyeth’s This Man’s Army, University of South Carolina Press, 2008, p. xxv.

Picnic

The Sunken Road by Frederick Varley © Beaverbrook Collection of War Art
Canadian War Museum, 19710261-0771

“There are two chief reasons why a soldier feels fear: first, that he will not get home to see his loved ones again; but, most of all, picturing himself in the same position as some of the dead men we saw.  They lay there face up, usually in the rain, their eyes open, their faces pale and chalk-like, their gold teeth showing. That is in the beginning. After that, they are usually too horrible to think about.  We buried them as fast as we could—Germans, French and Americans alike. Get them out of sight, but not out of memory.  I can remember hundreds and hundreds of dead men.  I would know them now if I were to meet them in a hereafter.  I could tell them where they were lying and how they were killed—whether with shell fire, gas, machine gun or bayonet.”      

                        — Robert C. Hoffman, US 28^th Division, American Expeditionary Force*

John Allan Wyeth has been credited as “the finest American soldier-poet of World War I.”** His poems tell their stories in a matter-of-fact, neutral tone, as if seen from the vantage point of a neutral observer or documentary film-maker.  In “Picnic: Harbonnières to Bayonvillers,” Wyeth narrates the account of two Americans soldiers riding through the scene of an earlier battle. The poem sketches an unforgettable image of what it was like to work and live amongst the dead.  

Picnic:  Harbonnières to Bayonvillers

A house marked Ortskommandantur—a great

sign Kaiserplatz on a corner of the church,

and German street names all around the square.

Troop columns split to let our sidecar through.

“Drive like hell and get back on the main road—it’s getting late.”

“Yessir.”

                        The roadway seemed to reel and lurch

through clay wastes rimmed and pitted everywhere.

“You hungry? – Have some of this, there’s enough for two.”

We drove through Bayonvillers—and as we ate

men long since dead reached out and left a smirch

and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam.

“Want any more?”

                        “Yes sir, if you got enough there.”

“Those fellows smell pretty strong.”

                                    “I’ll say they do,

but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.”

                        —John Allan Wyeth

Field Marshal Haig, Oct. 1918, AEF Signal Corps 28254 

The Battle of Amiens began on August 8, 1918.  By the close of the day, the Germans had lost an estimated 30,000 men (12,000 of whom had surrendered); German Commander-in-Chief Erich Ludendorff described it as “the black day of the German Army.” By the end of the battle, German casualties totaled 75,000, but the Allied losses were also staggeringly high: 44,000 men had been lost.  As the Allied troops pushed forward in the heat of summer, they moved through a charnel house of corpses.

The poem’s title “Harbonnières to Bayonvillers” names two small villages, approximately 3 miles apart, that were both taken by the Allies on August 8^th.  Eyewitness accounts describe a landscape littered with bodies and wreckage left in the wake of the attack. It’s an ironic setting for a picnic. The title is also ironic as picnic is an American slang term used since the 1870s to refer to something as “easy or straightforward… a pushover.”

Nothing about the scene described is ordinary or straightforward, however.  The roadways “reel and lurch” like a drunkard; bomb craters scar the land, and the dead seem to reach out in a macabre gesture of supplication.

Morning at Passchendaele, Frank Hurley 1917 

But while the scene is surreal, the men’s response to it is casual and laconic.  Amidst the gagging smell of decay that leaves a taste like “gas and rotten jam,” they share a meal. These men are not unwittingly callous – they are aware of the eerily unnatural situation; they comment on the dead that surround them, call them “fellows,” and note the repugnant stench of rotting bodies.  But the horror is not enough to dispel their hunger. They are alive with work to do, and “in this stripped-to-the-bare-essentials world, food, water, clothing, shelter, warmth, and sleep become the all-encompassing obsession.”†

In his memoir I Remember the Last War, AEF Sergeant Bob Hoffman writes,

Der Krieg no 13: Mealtime in the Trenches by Otto Dix

Did you ever smell a dead mouse? This will give you about as much idea of what a group of long dead soldiers smell like as will one grain of sand give you an idea of Atlantic City’s beaches…. It was hard to touch these dead men at first.  My people at home, hearing of what I was passing through, expected me to come back hard, brutal, callous, careless.  But I didn’t even want to take a dead mouse out of a trap when I was home. Yet over there I buried seventy-eight men one morning…. They were shot up in a great variety of ways, and it was not pleasant, but I managed to eat my quota of bread and meat when it came up with no opportunity to wash my hands.”††

Wyeth’s poem distills an important lesson of the Great War: learning to live with death was often the key to survival.

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*Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War, Strength & Health, 1940, pp. 163-164.

**Dana Gioa, “The Obscurity of John Allan Wyeth.” Dana Gioa, danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/the-obscurity-of-john-allan-wyeth/. Accessed 18 Oct. 2017.

† Richard S. Faulkner, Pershing’s Crusaders: The American Soldier in World War I. University of Kansas, 2017, p. 100.

†† Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 162, 165-166.