The War Office Regrets

Father and son, Royal Engineers
Image from @QMGS191418

Many poems of the First World War recount a soldier’s imagining of his own death (see, for example, Schnack’s “Standing To” or Albert-Paul Granier’s “Fever”). Other poems, often written by noncombatants, imagine the family receiving news of their soldier’s death (such as “His Latch-Key” or “The Mother”). Theodore van Beek’s “The Soldier’s Son” is strikingly original; it imagines a young boy praying for his father at war, unaware that his father lies dead, his body food for vermin and flies.

Family group,
from @QMGS191418

The Soldier’s Son

The little boy whose innocent yellow head

Has bobbed among the buttercups all day,

The earth being silent now and the light shed,

Kneels down to pray.

And, full of faith, he knows that God will keep

Safe one who lies

Feeding the rats that with the shadows creep

And husbanding the flies.

                        1917

            —Theodore van Beek

“The Soldier’s Son” bitterly contrasts the clean faith of a child with the indignities of death on the battlefield. Van Beek’s disillusionment with the war is also evident in his poem “After the ‘Offensive.’”

Born in South Africa, Theodore van Beek emigrated to Scotland in 1908 to attend the University of Edinburgh. He married Katherine Fairbairn, a young woman from Edinburgh, and by the time war was declared in 1914, the couple had three young sons. Enlisting in the British army, van Beek served first with the Artists Rifles and later with the Royal Field Artillery.*

While on active duty in 1917, van Beek received the news that his youngest son, James, had died. Soldiers of the First World War were frequently witnesses to ugly, messy deaths. What we often forget is that these men were not immune from the loss of loved ones on the home front. What must it have been like for a man at war to receive word of the death of a mother, father, wife, daughter, or son? Many of van Beek’s war poems juxtapose the grim realities of war with the loss of his fair-haired toddler (James was approximately three years of age when he died).

The War Office Regrets…..

Theo van Beek, c. 1914

I was dreaming in the firelight when it came

With its few, blurred lines and vividly, a name.

First I felt a little hand on my own;

Then I heard an eager voice;

Then a flame,

Bright and yellow, danced before me

And was blown into the gloom.

Come to me, my little boy,

Fill with living sound my room,

Run about to your heart’s joy,

I will never scold you.

I will never sigh or frown,

I will never put you down.

Come to me, my little boy,

I will hold you….hold you.

                        1917

            —Theodore H. van Beek

Although van Beek survived the war, his marriage did not. Before the war ended, his wife emigrated to Canada with their two surviving sons, boys that van Beek may not have ever seen again. After the war, Van Beek remarried Isabella Hamilton Kyle in 1920 and began a new family, but suffered bankruptcy in the 1920s. He adopted the pseudonym Martin Mayne and turned his talents to song writing, composing the lyrics to the Bennie Goodman tune “I Sent You a Kiss in the Night" as well as “I Remember the Cornfields,” recorded by both Evelyn Knight and Anne Shelton.

During the Second World War, van Beek and his family were bombed from their rented home in Blackheath. Their son, Theodore M. van Beek had volunteered for service with the British Army and fought at the Battle of El Alamein and in the Italian campaign. In December of 1943, van Beek's son was reported “Missing in Action — believed Dead,” but escaped from a POW camp and walked over one-hundred miles through enemy-held territory to cross the front lines and rejoin the British Army. Throughout the uncertainties and challenges of life, van Beek continued to write poetry, and in 1986, it was collected by his son and published in the small volume The Day of Love. Van Beek died in 1958; his last poem in the collection published posthumously by his son is the poem “Epitaph”:

When the last clod is thrown into my grave

And I am sealed in the night, remember me

For nothing I achieved, but for my dreams—

Sparks in the darkness of Eternity.**

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*From biographical foreword written by van Beek’s son Theodore for The Day of Love and Other Poems by Theo van Beek, Rock Press, 1986.

** Sincere thanks to Kate and Lucy van Beek and Stephanie Blaquiere for sharing family photos and memories of Theo van Beek.

After the Offensive

Theipval 1917, William Orpen
©Imperial War Museum ART2377

War statistics can seem numbingly abstract: what does it mean that an estimated thirty-five million people were killed or wounded in the First World War?  In the conflict that lasted four years and three months, 230 soldiers died every hour that the war continued, and one out of every three British soldiers who was mobilized was a casualty of the war.*

The Battle of the Somme lasted for 4 months and 18 days, from July 1, 1916 – November 18, 1916.  During that time, the British Army lost 481,842 men, while French casualties numbered over 250,000 and German over 235,000.  The first day of the Somme offensive was the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army: British troops suffered 57,470 casualties, and 19,240 British men died.

What was it like to survive the Somme? How did men at the Front make sense of the staggering numbers of dead and wounded?  Theodore van Beek was a junior artillery officer with the Royal Artists; his poem “After the Offensive” expresses the shock and loss of those who are left to soldier on. 

After the Offensive

We Are Making a New World, Paul Nash
©Imperial War Museum ART1146

This is the end of it, this the cold silence

Succeeding the violence

That rioted here.

This is the end of it  – grim and austere.

This is the end of it – where the tide spread,

Runnels of blood

Debris of dead;

This is the end of it:  ebb follows flood.

Waves of strong men

That will surge not again,

Scattered and riven

You lie, and you rot;

What have you not given?

And what – have you got?

                        Theodore H. van Beek

After the terrific noise of the bombardment have ceased, after the shrill whistles signaling the order to attack have sounded, after the rattle of machine gun fire has finally ended– there remains only grim silence.  The spare three-word lines and clipped, emotionless description reflect a world that has been stripped of patriotic rhetoric and glory.  The cold of the silence mirrors the chilled, lifeless bodies strewn across the fields. 

Like a wave that has crashed against the shore at its high mark, the men also have surged forward without effect and are forced to retreat after dissipating their energy. The imagery evokes Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”:  the "waves of strong men" recall Arnold's waves and the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery,” as they sound a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” and faith retreats down “the naked shingles of the world.” 

Perhaps most poignantly, the last stanza of van Beek's poem emphasizes the way in which the dead men are scattered, violently torn both from life and from their comrades. Survivors must live with the knowledge that the men they served with and loved must be left to rot, many without known graves.

The poem doesn’t offer comforting platitudes, but instead concludes with rhetorical questions: could anyone have done any more?  And what was the value of an attack in which so much was given – and so very little was “got”?

Given the poem’s strong anti-war sentiment and its challenge to military authority, it is not surprising that “After the Offensive” was not published until well after the war had ended (it appeared in April of 1919 in the English Republic). However, at some point during the war, van Beek, attired in his military uniform, stood in London and publicly recited his anti-war poetry.  For this act, he was “severely reprimanded.”** His public reading of the poem was another kind of heroic offensive.

 

Percy Smith, Death Marches

*Statistics are taken from Scott Addington’s 2014 book, The Great War 100: The First World War in Infographics. 

**From “Biographical Notes” in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions' The Winter of the World (2008).