The Cheerful Lie

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers"

Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first published as a poet.* Yet during her lifetime, Montgomery published only one poem that explicitly addresses the First World War: “Our Women.”** A cursory reading of “Our Women” is likely to dismiss the poem as naively patriotic, but when read in the context of Montgomery’s other war writings and her personal grief, the poem reveals a complex, ambivalent view of the conflict. In its three short stanzas, Montgomery describes three women, each of whom is grappling with the emotional traumas of war.

"Would some thoughtful hand in this
distant land please scatter some 
flowers for me?" 

Our Women

Bride of a day, your eye is bright,
   And the flower of your cheek is red.
‘He died with a smile on a field of France—
   I smile for his sake,’ she said.

Mother of one, the baby you bore
   Sleeps in a chilly bed.
‘He gave himself with a gallant pride—
   Shall I be less proud?’ she said.

Woman, you weep and sit apart,
   Whence is your sorrow fed?
‘I have none of love or kin to go—
   I am shamed and sad,’ she said.
       —L.M. Montgomery

Each of the bereaved women portrayed in “Our Women” is isolated, walled off within her own stanza, set apart from both the grief and the comfort of others. Each speaks to herself in a private monologue of mourning. 

In the first stanza, a new bride attempts to convince herself that she must appear happy, and so she determinedly represses her grief at the death of her husband. She encourages herself to believe the implausible story that was often written in letters informing women of their husband’s, son’s, and sweetheart’s deaths: the end was quick and painless; he “died with a smile.” Mirroring the action of her husband at the moment of his death, the bride smiles “for his sake,” offering up the arduous task of concealing her own anguish as an act of patriotic service akin to that of her husband’s. Like soldiers who neither speak nor write of the horrors they witness at the front, women are also engaged in the nation-wide practice of telling, selling, and believing what Montgomery refers to in both Rilla of Ingleside and her journals as “the cheerful lie.”***

In the second stanza, a mother persuades herself to feel proud that her son is dead. First World War researchers have argued that the pressure on women to forego public mourning was especially true for mothers: “In many cultures, mothers were expected to disavow their grief and channel it into forms of patriotism and heightened nationalistic pride.”†  Nearly all countries involved in the First World War attempted to harness the political power of the ideals of Mother and Motherhood. Before the 1918 German offensive, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie addressed his troops: “To those who will fall I say, ‘you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons.’”†† Taking pride in a child’s death was one of the ways that mothers were encouraged to find a sense of worth and purpose during the war. 

The only woman who allows herself to weep is the woman who has no one to give to the war. Both the grieving bride and mother define themselves in their relationships to the soldiers they have loved and lost. Both women model their behaviour after that of their soldier, giving smile for smile, pride for pride. The childless woman sits alone and weeps in shame: she does not have a loved one to sacrifice to the war. 

Montgomery’s personal situation was closest to the solitary figure described in the third stanza. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, was forty-four years old when the war began; her eldest son, Chester, had just turned two; and her second son, Hugh, was stillborn on August 13, 1914, just nine days after England declared war on Germany.†††  The loss of her infant son devastated Montgomery. In her thinking and writing, Montgomery’s maternal grief becomes entangled with the dead of the war. Like the women whose sons died far from home, she is haunted by the thought of her son “lying lonely in his little grave” and imagines hearing his cry: “Little Hugh was calling to me from his grave—‘Mother, won’t you come to me?’”†††† For Montgomery, the tragedy of her son’s death at birth is linked to the larger national tragedy of the war. Given this context, the shamed, weeping woman of “Our Women” who has no son to surrender to the state may be read as a disguised expression of the author’s own grief. 

Strikingly and at its core, Montgomery’s “Our Women” subverts the traditional elegy. There is no mourning for soldiers who have died; tears are shed only for the absence of bodies to lie on the altar of sacrifice. Mourning is reserved for the woman who sits apart, shamed and isolated in her own No Man’s Land. This woman feeds on the sorrow of failure, a failure to participate in the womanly patriotism that her culture and her country demand of her. “Our Women” is an anti-elegy that focuses not on men’s deaths, but on women’s interior experiences of war. The poem speaks with an undercurrent of quiet despair as it catalogues women’s limited options for action and emotion during the First World War. 

I published a more fully developed essay on the subject in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies: “‘I Smile for His Sake’: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Our Women.’”
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* Her poem “On Cape Le Force” appeared in the Charlotte Daily Patriot in 1890, when Montgomery was fifteen years old.
** “Our Women” was published in John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War, McClelland and Stewart, 1918.
*** L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Virago, 2014, p. 160 and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (24 July 1915), p. 200.
† Joy Demousi, “Gender and Mourning” in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.) Gender and the Great War, 2017, p. 213.
†† Arthur Currie, qtd. in Suzanne Evans’ Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, McGill-Queens UP, 2007, p. 77.
††† For further discussion of Montgomery, motherhood, and the death of Hugh, see Rita Bode’s “LM Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 50–66; and Tara K. Parmiter’s “Like a Childless Mother: LM Montgomery and the Anguish of a Mother’s Loss,” in L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, MQUP, 2021, pp. 316–330.
†††† L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (Sept. 3rd and 8th, 1914), pp. 165, 167.

"To Women" by Laurence Binyon

The Sisters, by Edmund Dulac
IWM ART 2059

One of the best-known English poems of the First World War is one of the earliest written: Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” appeared in the London Times on 21 September 1914, shortly after Britain entered the First World War. The poem’s fourth stanza is still recited today at British and Commonwealth Remembrance ceremonies:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Shortly after the war had ended, in July of 1919, The Quarterly Review praised Binyon as “the mouthpiece of English culture under the duress of war, interpreting its deepest emotions ... in those two immortal poems ‘To Women’ and ‘For the Fallen.’” The reviewer said, “As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so well described before the woman’s part in war?”* 

Today, few readers know of Binyon second “immortal poem,” and it rarely appears in modern anthologies of First World War poetry. 

To Women 

From illustrated poem "To Women"
in The Fallen (1917)

Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts

That have foreknown the utter price.

Your hearts burn upward like a flame

Of splendour and of sacrifice.



For you, you too, to battle go,

Not with the marching drums and cheers

But in the watch of solitude

And through the boundless night of fears.



Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,

Those threatening wings that pulse the air,

Far as the vanward ranks are set,

You are gone before them, you are there!



And not a shot comes blind with death

And not a stab of steel is pressed

Home, but invisibly it tore

And entered first a woman's breast.



Amid the thunder of the guns,

The lightnings of the lance and sword

Your hope, your dread, your throbbing pride,

Your infinite passion is outpoured



From hearts that are as one high heart

Withholding naught from doom and bale

Burningly offered up, — to bleed,

To bear, to break, but not to fail!
        —Laurence Binyon

“To Women” was published in the London Times on 20 August 1914, and it was reprinted in numerous volumes during the war.** In many ways, the poem is highly conventional in its imagery and sentiments as it references symbols of chivalry (such as lances and swords) and talks of “splendor and sacrifice.” The poem repeatedly uses images of fire and flame to depict women’s noble and searing pain as they offer up the men they love. 

In poem’s the last stanza, women are praised for “Withholding naught from doom and bale / Burningly offered up.” The word bale is Old English in origin: it suggests the active operation of evil as “destroying, blasting, injuring, hurting, paining, tormenting,” and although the usage is now obsolete, it also describes “a great consuming fire,” specifically a funeral pyre.*** This word and its associated imagery may suggest that, like Viking or Hindu widows, women give themselves to be consumed by their sacrifice, immolated on pyres of grief and loss. 

Illustration for "To Women"
from The Fallen (1917)

The poem is strikingly modern, however, in describing the effects of modern industrial war that extend far beyond the combat zones. The anguish that women experience precedes even the sufferings of soldiers. The first stanza proclaims that, before all others, women “have foreknown the utter price.” Like military combatants, women also “to battle go,” but “swifter than those hawks of war,” women are in the “vanward ranks.” The poem says of women during war time, “You are gone before them, you are there!” Every artillery shot and “stab of steel” enters “first a woman’s breast” [emphasis mine].

Just weeks into the war, Binyon’s “To Women” anticipated the burden that uncertainty and anxious waiting would lay on women.  In diary entries from 1915, Vera Brittain breathes a horrible kind of life into the sacrifices described in Binyon’s poem. She writes of her sweetheart Roland Leighton, “I can’t help thinking what a terrible nerve-strain it must have been for him—all the long expectation of an attack, & the waiting, waiting for it to come,” and then describes her own ordeal: “It has been a dreadful day—waiting and waiting & able to settle to nothing” (diary 27 Sept. 1915). The next day she writes, “This has been a terrible day—a day of waiting & restlessness & anxiety, of feeling it was impossible for any news of individuals yet, but nevertheless thinking that all the time perhaps news—the worst news—might come” (diary 28 Sept. 1915), and one day later, “Still no news—still waiting & weariness, & a heart growing almost numb with its pain” (diary 29 Sept. 1915). Less than a week later, she writes, “One is always waiting, waiting in this war. It is enough to turn one’s hair grey—is a thousand times worse than hard work” (diary 6 Oct. 1915).****

Today, Binyon is remembered for his poem dedicated to fallen soldiers of the Great War. For his contemporaries, his poem for stricken women who bore the burdens of war was equally as powerful. 

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* Cloudesley Brereton, “The Poetry of Laurence Binyon,” in The Quarterley Review, July 1919, p. 151, 148. 

** It appeared in Binyon’s collection The Winnowing Fan (1915), in his three-war-poem illustrated collection For the Fallen (1917), and it was set to music (along with “For the Fallen” and “The Fourth of August”) by Edward Elgar in 1917. 

*** The Oxford English Dictionary, bale, n1 and n2. The dictionary notes that although obsolete, William Morris used the word in 1876 to refer to a funeral pyre in his Story of Sigurd.
**** Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913–1917. 

The Actor-Soldier

 

Red Cross Hospital #6-7, Souilly France (Oct. 1918) 
Library of Congress, Signal Corps

On the night of January 19, 1919, a sentry on the deck of the SS La Lorraine saw two women calmly walk to the ship’s rail, quickly climb over, and plunge into the icy water. By the time the Captain of the Lorraine could be notified, the ship had traveled five miles beyond the place the Cromwell twin sisters were last seen. Their double suicide provoked widespread public debate concerning the mental effects of war work on women volunteers (see previous post “The Extra”).  



Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell had sailed for France to volunteer in the Canteen Service of the Red Cross in January of 1918. For eight months they were stationed at Chalons-sur-Marne, working long shifts in support of the French army, sometimes under enemy fire. Anne Dunn, a former teacher who corresponded with the sisters during the war, writes, “they suffered from the exhaustion that is so acute to those who have never known physical labour; yet no one suspected until the end came that for many months they had believed their work a failure, and their efforts futile.... In September, at their own request, they were transferred to an Evacuation Hospital [because] ... they longed to work with ‘our own boys.’”* 



Gladys is 2nd from the left; Dorothea is far right
Red Cross Evac Hospital #6-7
LOC, SIGNAL CORPS (13 Oct 1918)

Anne Dunn reveals that the horrors of tending wounded and dying men near the Front at Verdun “broke their already overtaxed endurance. In the diaries they left, signs of mental breakdown begin to show as early as October…. but years of self-control and consideration for others made them conceal the black horror in which they lived—the agony through which they saw a world which they felt contained no refuge for beauty and quiet thought.  In such a world they conceived they had no place, and when on their way home, they jumped from the deck of the Lorraine, it was in response to a vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.”*



Gladys Cromwell’s Poems was published posthumously. Here is her first poem in the collection:



The Actor-Soldier

American volunteer at Red Cross Evac Hospital #6-7
Souilly, France (14 Oct 1918)
Library of Congress, Signal Corps

On the grass I’m lying,

My blanket is the sky;

This feeling is called dying.



No one will testify

They saw me suffer this;—

There’s no one passing by.



The wonder of it is,

I’m by myself at last

With plain realities.



No one is here to cast

A part for me to play;

My term of life is past.



No one is here to see

How I can meet and take

This end;—how gallantly—



Though the ice that binds a lake

Must weigh less heavily

Than Death to my soul awake.



I must have thirsted, indeed,

For pity, then love, then praise;

For to win them, in every deed,

I endeavoured all my days.



The Soldier and the Son

Were my seductive parts;

But I could act the clown,—

Draw laughter from dumb hearts.



The Soldier part was my best,—

’Twas my last and my favourite.

Every gift that I possessed

I displayed for their benefit.

Who are They? On my breast

Weighs the infinite.



Ah, yes, I appeared heroic,

Unflinching, true and brave;

I wore the look of a stoic;—

All hurts I forgave.



But now on the grass I turn

To ease a little the pain;

It is not too late to learn.



Last night I lay in the rain

Until  my body was numb,

Hearing like a refrain:

“O Masquerader, come!”

And even like a drum

It beat into my brain:

“O Masquerader, come!”

—Gladys Cromwell



Both the men and the women who experienced the suffering of the First World War often felt the need to repress their feelings of grief and horror. Whether acting as the clown, the hero, or the ministering angel, they numbed themselves to their own pain, believing “No one will testify / They saw me suffer this.”

Anna Ryan, another American volunteer in the Smith College Relief Unit, writes,

“The Cromwell sisters were working devotedly at Chalons-sur-Marne for weeks while I was there—a particularly trying post, as the town was then under bombardment from earth or air almost every day; and from there they went directly to another post of duty at Verdun. Although even robust soldiers must be relieved after six weeks at the Front, no one seems to have ordered these girls to take a rest. At the end, they were undoubtedly suffering from what the French call cafard, a condition of abysmal depression resulting from nerve-exhaustion. Unquestionably, they deserve to be honored among those who have died for their country and the cause.”**

Gladys’ and Dorothea’s bodies were recovered several months after their suicide; they were buried in France with military honors. Gladys Cromwell’s posthumously published Poems won the Poetry Society of America prize in 1920.***

I was fortunate enough to find a copy of Cromwell’s Poems; the inside cover is inscribed from “M.R.” to Rosina Sherman Hoyt.**** Below the inscription are penned the words, “White violets gathered at dawn.”

___________________________________________________________________________


* Anne Dunn, “Biographical Note” in Poems by Gladys Cromwell, Macmillan, 1919, pp. 116 – 117.  

** Harriet Monroe, “A Gold Star for Gladys Cromwell,” Poetry, vol. 13, no. 6, Mar. 1919, p. 328. 

*** For further information on the Cromwell sisters, see Jeff Richman’s blog post “A Twin Tragedy,” 23 Jan. 2017.
**** Rosina was a wealthy New York heiress who also wrote poetry and was the great-niece of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. 

The Dream, Part I

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us pay closer attention to the nuances of words, sounds, line breaks, and punctuation. 

Roland Leighton, the Great War poet who is perhaps best known for his engagement to the memoirist and writer Vera Brittain, copied poems. Shortly after his enlistment in the British Army in 1914, his mother found in his room an exercise book in which Roland had written out a poem that had recently been published in the Westminster Gazette by the young Cambridge writer Kathleen Montgomery Coates.*

© The Vera Brittain Fonds,
McMaster University Library
The Roland Leighton Literary Estate

The first person who seems to have read Roland’s copy of Coates’ poem was his mother, Marie Connor Leighton.  In the anonymously published memoir that his mother wrote and dedicated to Roland after his death, she writes, “I read the lines through carelessly at first; but when I came to the third or fourth line I knew that if he was to get out to the Front and get killed this poem would haunt me always.”**

A Year and a Day

I shall remember miraculous things you said
        My whole life through –
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
  But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head
   That I loved, that I knew –
Oh, while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!

Vera Brittain

Words which no time can touch are my life’s refrain,
   But each picture flies.
All that was left to hold till I meet you again,
        Your mouth’s deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain—
   And I have forgotten your eyes,
And the way that your hair spun curls in the beating of rain! †
            —Kathleen Coates

Before leaving for the front, Roland talked with his mother about his own efforts at writing poetry and about his admiration for Vera, the sister of his good friend, Edward Brittain. Describing Vera to his mother, he said, “I like her tremendously. You would, too, if you knew her. She’s not like other girls. She’s brilliant and can think for herself. She wants to be a writer some day. But first she’s going to Oxford.”

His mother, “a prolific author of serial fiction and melodramatic novels” replied, “Going to Oxford isn’t the way for a woman to be a writer—except of treatises. But that’s beside the point.”***

Several months later, Roland copied “A Year and a Day” yet again, this time sending his copy to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914. Vera relates the story of the poem in her memoir Testament of Youth, but in her account, Roland sends her the poem in the autumn of 1915. As she tells the story, in mid-August of 1915, Roland was back from the Western Front on leave. They became engaged, and she met his family for the first time. One day, they walked by the sea, and discussed “the callousness engendered by war both at the front and in hospital.” That evening, she told him, “If I heard you were dead ... my first feeling would be one of absolute disbelief. I can’t imagine life without you.”

Roland replied abruptly, “You’d soon forget.” Vera retorted that she was not “one of the forgetting sort,” but that “if you died I should deliberately set out to marry the first reasonable person that asked me,” because “if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and things one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marry the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep you. My remembrance would live with me always and be my very own.” 

Roland conceded the argument, and Vera writes, “indeed nothing else did seem to matter; for the time being each of us remembered neither the past nor the future, but only the individual and the hour .... Some weeks later he wrote to me from the trenches of that evening, and sent me, copied from the Westminster Gazette, a poem by Kathleen Coates called “A Year and a Day.”

Roland Leighton's grave

Vera Brittain includes the poem in her memoir, then comments, “Reminiscent as the lines were, they embodied my own failure of memory as well as his. Try as I would I could never, once we were apart, recollect his face, nor even in the silence of night hear his voice, with its deep notes and its gay, high laugh. I used to think that if, by closing my eyes or sitting in the dark, I could picture his eyes as they looked when I last saw them, or in imagination listen to him speaking, it would not be so hard to be separated. It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice.”****

In the same season that Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton were becoming engaged and discussing what their future might hold, Kathleen Montgomery Coates’s only brother was killed in France while on patrol. Basil Montgomery Coates died on September 7, 1915.  His sister’s poem “The Dream” expresses the deep sorrow of that loss and will be shared and discussed in the next blog post.

 
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* I have been unable to find the poem in the Westminster Gazette, and it appears that others have also failed in the search, as various sources state that it was written/published “between 1910 and 1913.”
**Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916, pp. 176–177.
† The punctuation used in this version of the poem is that from Roland Leighton’s copy that he sent to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914 (from the First World War Digital Poetry Archive). In Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth, she changes the dash to a comma after vain and ends the poem with a full stop after rain.
***The information on Marie Leighton’s career as a writer is from Wikipedia. Her comments on Oxford as preparation for a woman’s career in writing is from Boy of My Heart, p. 179. 
**** Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, “Learning versus Life,” pp. 162 – 164, Virago, 2014 (first published in 1933). 

The Dream, Part II

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Basil Montgomery Coates was killed on the Western Front on September 7, 1915. He would have turned twenty-two on September 16th.

from Oundle Memorials
of the Great War

Kathleen Coates went to Cambridge in 1909 as a student at Girton College, earning her degree in Modern Languages in 1914. In 1912, she was joined at Cambridge by her younger brother, who was pursuing a degree in medicine at Queens College. When war broke out, Basil volunteered with the Rifle Brigade, arriving at the front in France in the early summer of 1915. He was dead within months.

Basil was shot while on patrol duty; his commanding officer wrote to the boy’s mother, 

Your son was killed yesterday (7 Sept.) while on patrol duty, and unfortunately we were unable to recover his body, which the Germans have taken into their lines, and which they will no doubt give an honourable burial. He was out patrolling with a Corpl. Fenton, crawling about in the crops, was seen by the enemy, fired on and killed, and the corporal crawled home about 300 yards with three bullet wounds .… A young officer called Everard went out with a man, and at very great personal risk got up to your son, but was fired at so persistently that he was unable to do anything towards moving him. As soon as it was dark another party, under Lieut. Sanstone, went out to the place to try to bring the poor boy in, but only found tracks through the corn, showing the way the enemy had taken him into their lines.**

The British were never able to recover his body.

In 1918, Kathleen Montgomery Wallace (she had married in 1917) published a collection of poetry titled Lost City.*** Its dedication note reads Cantabrigiae Mortuisque Carissimus (Cambridge and the beloved dead). The book is divided into two sections: Before and After. This poem appears in the second section of the volume: 

The Dream

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down

I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,

Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,

Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came

To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,

“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”

And stopping down beneath the boughs asway

I found your name, and knew that there you lay.

And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,

While I lay in the grass and spoke to you ....

So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,

“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.

My own, my own, I shall not dream again

You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain ....”

And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see

There, on my pillow, the old agony ....
        —Kathleen Montgomery Wallace

The poem expresses the empty despair of loss and the desperate ache for ritual and burial. Without that closure, like Antigone, the sister is haunted by the image of her beloved brother’s body left to decay in the “pitiless rain.” 

In October of 1918, the Bookman reviewed Lost City:

Youth Mourning, George Clausen
© IWM Art.IWM ART 4655

The war sets more and more poets to singing as over the battlefields the birds sing the louder because of the guns. Some of these poets sing to ease their own pain and bring a bruised sweetness to those who listen .... Here in a bundle of new books of poetry and verse one finds a slender paper-covered volume on which the understanding reviewer will fasten with the thrill of the discoverer.  It is Lost City by Kathleen Montgomery Wallace and to the mind of the present reviewer it makes a trilogy with Rupert Brooke and Rose Macaulay. It is a book of Cambridge and the Fen Country and of those who went from Cambridge, that city of youth, never to return ....  This woman’s poetry, haunted by the shades and beauties of the university town, speaks for itself.****

Kathleen Coates Wallace was one of many sisters who lost brothers in the First World War. In the poem “To L.H.B. (1894 – 1915),” Elizabeth Mansfield ’s also recounts a dream of her dead brother. In the dream, her brother appears to her beside a “remembered stream,” offering her berries with the words, “These are my body.  Sister, take and eat.” 

With no known burial place, Basil Montgomery Coates is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial in Belgium, one of over 11,000 names. 
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*Kathleen Coates Wallace's obituary in the London Times (31 March 1958) states she was born in 1891; other sources give the year as 1890.
** From de Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour 1914–1918, http://mrcweb.org.uk/mrc2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Basil-Montgomery-Coates-report-of-death.pdf

*** Kathleen Montgomery Coates Wallace's poem "May Term, 1916" has been shared and discussed in this blog post. The post "The Dream, Part I" examines one of her pre-war poems. 
**** “New Books: The Singing Season,” Bookman, October 1918, No. 325, Vol. LV, pp. 16 – 17.

Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.

How alone

“Undaunted April crept and sewed
    Her violets in dead men's faces...”*

A previous post on this blog has shared Muriel Stuart’s “It’s Rose-Time Here, 1918,” a poem that mingles images of fragrant flowers with the wet blood of fallen soldiers and “things are not men— / Things shapeless, sodden, mute.” 

In her same collection (The Cockpit of Idols, 1918), Stuart included another poem that explores the burden of loss that those on the home front continued to bear, long after the war had ended. 

From World's Work
June 1922

When I grow old and my quick blood is chilled,
And all my thoughts are grey as my grey hair,
When I am slow and dull, and do not care,
And all the strife and storm of Life are stilled;
Then if one carelessly should speak your name
It will go through my body like swift spears
To set my fireless bosom in a flame,
My faded eyelids will be bright with tears;
And I shall find how far my heart has gone
From wanting you, how lost and long ago
That love of ours was: I shall suddenly know
How old and grey I am . . . and how alone.
—Muriel Stuart

Upon first reading, the poem seems to mourn the death of a soldier. But the war birthed another kind of loss: In his poem “They,” Siegfried Sassoon asserts that every man who has served “will not be the same.” And Vera Brittain, in her essay “War Service in Perspective,” also describes the “barrier of indescribable experience” that the First World War erected between the men who had fought and the women who loved them.  

Muriel Stuart Irwin married Guy Neville Minnitt in 1912. Little is known of Guy Minnitt’s war experience except that he served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and survived the war. In 1923, Harriet Monroe wrote of meeting Muriel Stuart in London, noting that the writer is “the most interesting of the younger English poets. Her first adventure in motherhood—in private life she is Mrs. Minnitt—had just been successfully passed when I reached London; she was not sure whether a book or a baby was the more important achievement.”** 

In 1926, Guy Minnitt and Muriel Stuart divorced. She remarried Arthur William Board in September of 1927 and never published another book of poetry. 

A biography of Stuart published on the Persephone Books website states,

Muriel Stuart was a successful and well-known poet during and just after the First World War (she is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography because of her poems). She then had two children, gave up writing poetry and took to gardening with enormous enthusiasm and dedication. She wrote only two books, Fool’s Garden (1936), about creating a garden in Surrey, and the one we have chosen to reprint, Gardener’s Nightcap. After the war, for thirty years, she was a well-known columnist for gardening magazines. Although a great beauty, Muriel Stuart was shy and self-contained – and happiest in her garden.

What caused Muriel Stuart to exchange poetry for gardening? We will probably never know why one of the most promising young women writers, a poet whom Thomas Hardy described as “superlatively good” turned from poetry that reflected on “the weight of social expectations on women” (see for example her poems “Words” and “The Bastard” ) to prose and perennials.
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*from “Thèlus Wood” by Muriel Stuart, in Miscellany of Poetry, 1919, edited by W. Kean Seymour.
** “The Editor in England” by Harriet Monroe, Poetry, Oct. 1923, v 23, n. 1 p. 38.

Surplus Women

Vestal Virgin, by Antonio Canova (Getty Museum)

In the podcast episode “Surplus Women,” Caroline Campton says, 

In 1921, the British government published the results of a census. It recorded that there were just over 44 million people in total in the country, an increase of around two million from a decade before, despite the loss of life during the First World War. The figure that attracted the most attention at the time, though, was a striking disparity between the numbers of men and women. For every 1,000 men, there were 1,100 women, or “an excess that amounts to 1,906,284,” as one newspaper put it at the time. At this point, the First World War had been over for three years. 700,000 British men had been killed. The casualties were disproportionately young, unmarried and from the middle or upper classes.*

Campton continues, “Some characterised these women as ‘imaginary widows’, unmarried yet mourning the husbands they should have had.” Perhaps the best-known poem on the subject was written by Vera Brittain: “The Superfluous Woman.”  It opens with the lines, “Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years” and closes with the cry of “But who will give me my children?”

Irish author Katharine Tynan (m. Hinkson) was a generation older than Vera Brittain. Her reputation as a poet had been established years before, and she was a friend of WB Yeats, Christina Rossetti, and Alice Meynell. At the start of the Great War, Tynan was married with three children, two of them grown sons. Her sons enlisted with the British Army, Theobald (“Toby”) serving in Macedonia and Palestine, while Giles (“Bunny/Patrick”) was in France. Both survived the war, but Tynan knew many men who did not. In her autobiography, she recalls that during the First World War, “at one time, I was writing a hundred letters a week to the bereaved of the war.** 

Tynan’s youngest child, her daughter Pamela, grew to adulthood during the war: she was a 14-year-old child when war was declared, and an 18-year-old young woman when peace was settled. During the war and the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916, Pamela Hinkson lived in a world of anxious uncertainty, reading casualty lists and waiting for news of her brothers. Before the war ended, Katharine Tynan realized that the Armistice and the return of the surviving soldiers would not end women’s experience of war. Her poem “The Vestal” appears in Herb O’ Grace (1918).  

The Vestal

She goes unwedded all her days
   Because some man she never knew,
Her destined mate, has won his bays,

   Passed the low door of darkness through.

Sometimes she has a wild surmise
   Of what dear name he used to have,
And what the colour of his eyes,
   And was he gay, or was he grave.

Or if his hair was brown or gold,
   Or if his voice was low and clear
To tell his love with, never told
   To hers or any woman's ear.

His voice is lost upon the wind
   And when the rain beats on her heart
His eyes elude her, warm and kind,
   Where the dim shadows steal apart.

What of their children all unborn?
   What of the house they should have built?
She wanders through her days forlorn,
   The untasted cup of joy is spilt.

She lives unwedded, — as for him
   He sleeps too sound for any fret
At their lost kisses, or the dream
   Of the poor girl he never met.

            —Katharine Tynan

Pamela Hinkson

In a letter to a friend, Tynan had written, “My Pam sometimes goes to bed & turns her face to the wall for comfortlessness. Only this week we have heard of the death of a dear friend, captain Johnston.... He was a dear big simple boy.” In another letter Katharine wrote, “All our hearts are opposed with this nightmare war, dragging on & on. I am going to be a Suffragist after the war, for women must never again permit such a horror as this. Every day the young, the beautiful, the brave, are falling around us like the leaves of Autumn.”***

Like her mother, Pamela Hinkson became a writer; her novel The Ladies Road (1932) was a popular success as it “explores with delicacy... the predicament of that lost generation who... came into youth during the War.”† In 1995, research identified her as the author of two additional post-war novels, The Victors (1925) and Harvest (1927), written under the pseudonym of Peter Deane. She never married. 

The Sydney Morning Herald published this review of Harvest in 1927: 

“Harvest” is a collection of powerful short stories by Mr. Peter Deane. The title is symbolical; the miseries of war do not end with the war itself; there is a grim aftermath to be reaped. The setting of several of these stories is the occupied zone in Germany, where, we understand, the author himself served with the British force, and he skillfully communicates the atmosphere of tension and suspicion.... Other stories deal with conditions in post-war Germany, and paint a dark picture of poverty and distress. In most of them women are the chief sufferers. As one of the characters ironically remarks: ‘War would be much simpler without women.”††

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* Caroline Campton, transcript of “Surplus Women,” SheDunnit, 13 Oct. 2018, https://shedunnitshow.com/surpluswomentranscript/

** Katharine Tynan, Years of the Shadow, Constable and Company, 1919, p. 176. 

*** Katharine Tynan, The Selected Letters, edited by Damian Atkinson, Cambridge Scholars, 2016, pp. 413, 425. 

† John Wilson Foster, “Postscript: ‘The Ladies Road’: Women Novelists 1922–1940,” in Irish Novels 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction, Oxford UP, 2008. 

†† “New Fiction,” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 March 1927, p. 10

Image of Tynan from New York Times, 2 Nov. 1913. 

Christmas 1917: What our weary hearts desire

Aline Kilmer with Kenton, c. 1909
(Joyce Kilmer House & New Brunswick Historical Society)

Joyce Kilmer was a rising American poet, famous for his 1913 poem “Trees” when he decided to leave his writing career, volunteering to fight in the First World War. Thirty-years-old with four small children and a fifth on the way, Kilmer enlisted in April 1917, despite being exempt from service due to his status as a family man. According to biographer John Covell, when Kilmer was asked how his wife Aline felt about his decision to join the fight, he answered, “She’s game.”*

Aline Kilmer, alone and expecting their fifth child, was left to care for their four young children, one of whom was dying. Their daughter Rose Kilmer, born November 15, 1912, had “suffered an attack of infantile paralysis” as a very young child, and despite the care of specialists, the little girl died at home, on September 9, 1917, just shy of her fifth birthday. According to a published obituary, the tragedy occurred “as her father was preparing to go South with his regiment.”**

Less than three weeks later, on September 29, 1917, Aline gave birth to their third son, Christopher. Her husband set sail for France with his regiment on October 31, 1917. 

As Aline Kilmer prepared for Christmas that year, she wrote a poem that describes quiet moments of melancholy and memory, juxtaposed with a season of bustling good cheer. 

Rose Kilmer's grave,
Elmwood Cemetery, New Brunswick NJ

Christmas

“And shall you have a Tree,” they say,
“Now one is dead and one away?”

Oh, I shall have a Christmas Tree!
Brighter than ever it shall be;
Dressed out with coloured lights to make
The room all glorious for your sake.
And under the Tree a Child shall sleep
Near Shepherds watching their wooden sheep.
Threads of silver and nets of gold,
Scarlet bubbles the Tree shall hold,
And little glass bells that tinkle clear.
I shall trim it alone but feel you near.
And when Christmas Day is almost done,
When they all grow sleepy one by one,
When Kenton’s books have all been read,
When Deborah’s climbing the stairs to bed,

I shall sit alone by the fire and see
Ghosts of you both come close to me.
For the dead and the absent always stay
With the one they love on Christmas Day.
—Aline Kilmer

The poem continues to resonate with those who suffer the loneliness of the season, whether because of the absence or death of loved ones. “Christmas” was first published in the Catholic periodical Messenger of the Sacred Heart in January of 1918 and was included in Aline Kilmer’s first book of poetry, Candles That Burn (1919). That volume is dedicated “To Joyce” — her husband was killed by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne on July 30, 1918. 

Aline Kilmer lived until 1941. On her gravestone in Stillwater, New Jersey, are inscribed lines from her poem “Sanctuary”: 

Kilmer's original grave is on the right

There all bright passing beauty is held forever
Free from the sense of tears, to be loved without regret
There we shall find at their source music and love and laughter,
Colour and subtle fragrance and soft incredible textures:
Be sure we shall find what our weary hearts desire.

Joyce Kilmer is buried in France at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery.  

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* Cited in Peter Molin’s “Aline Kilmer: When the War Poet’s Wife is a Poet Too,” in Beyond Their Limits of Longing, Milspeak, 2022, p. 111.

** “Dr. F.B. Kilmer Loses His Granddaughter” on the Find A Grave website (article most likely from a New Brunswick, NJ newspaper). 

To Tony, Aged 3

The Great Offensive, Samuel Begg (Illustrated London News, 1916)

In 1918, shortly after the death of her brother on the Western Front, Marjorie Wilson wrote an elegiac poem that tried to make sense of the tragic loss. The poem was published in the Spectator on October 26, 1918, just seven months and three days after Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson was killed during his unit’s withdrawal from Hermies. 

To Tony—Aged 3
In Memory (T.P.C.W.)* 

Gemmed with white daisies was the great green world
Your restless feet have pressed this long day through—
Come now and let me whisper to your dreams
A little song grown from my love for you.
. . . . . . .
There was a man once loved green fields like you,
He drew his knowledge from the wild birds' songs,
And he had praise for every beauteous thing,
And he had pity for all piteous wrongs ....

T.P. Cameron Wilson 

A lover of earth's forests—of her hills,
And brother to her sunlight—to her rain—
Man, with a boy's fresh wonder. He was great
With greatness all too simple to explain.

⁠He was a dreamer and a poet, and brave
To face and hold what he alone found true.
He was a comrade of the old—a friend
To every little laughing child like you.
. . . . . . .
And when across the peaceful English land
Unhurt by war, the light is growing dim
⁠And you remember by your shadowed bed
All those—the brave—you must remember him;

⁠And know it was for you who bear his name
And such as you that all his joy he gave—
His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life,
To win that heritage of peace you have.
                —Marjorie Wilson

The love and admiration that Marjorie Wilson feels for her brother is evident in references to his vocation as a school teacher and to his poetry (Magpies in Picardy was published posthumously by the Poetry Bookshop in 1919). And the poem shimmers with tenderness for the young boy Tony, as she whispers to his dreams “A little song grown from my love for you.” 

Many readers have assumed that Tony is Marjorie’s son, but she served during the war as VAD nurse (unlikely if she had a young son), and she never married. She is buried in Blaxhall, Suffolk, where her father was a rector from 1928 until Marjorie’s death in 1934.**

Marjorie Wilson Memorial,
Blaxhall, Suffolk

Perhaps Tony was the son of another of TPC Wilson’s five siblings? His sister Alice (born in 1889) served during the war with the Duchess of Sutherland’s nursing staff in France, making it unlikely that she was married or a mother at the time of her brother’s death (although she later married Arthur Thorne). And Charles, born in 1899, was most probably too young to have had a son born in 1914 or 1915.  Yet it is possible that either Christopher (born in 1883) or John (born in 1890) named a son after their brother.***

But there is another possibility suggested by a manuscript written in pencil that was found with TPC Wilson’s effects after his death and published in 1920 as Waste Paper Philosophy. The philosophical musings left behind by the twenty-eight-year-old soldier were dedicated “To my son.” In the introduction to Waste Paper Philosophy, Robert Norwood writes, “Like Rupert Brooke, who held it his greatest loss to die without a son, Wilson lets the world feel his longing for the boy to come after him in these last words” (viii). 

Yet in Waste Paper Philosophy, Wilson repeatedly and directly addresses his son, at times noting that the child is young: “Go on building, my son, go on building, for nothing on earth begins or ends suddenly” (29); “An uncle of yours once lived to tell the Scotch Manager of a Sugar Plantation exactly what he thought of him” (32); “God help you, little son, if you are trodden under those well satisfied hoofs of authority” (32); “Look for the soul of things, son” (40). 

One of the poems published in Magpies in Picardy also addresses a “little son” (“The Mathematical Master to His Dullest Pupil”). Additionally, several previously unpublished poems of Wilson’s are added to Waste Paper Philosophy, including “The Silver Fairy.” This poem begins, “Listen to me, my son,” and proceeds to conversationally share a vision the soldier in the field experiences: 

Peter Pan, Arthur Rackham

Well, yesterday night when work was done,
And I was smoking a pipe in the sun,
I saw you breasting the bank at a run
I mean the band where the turf goes down
Goes down and up till it ends in a crown
Of yellow chrysanthemums nodding their heads
Over the last of the garden beds,
I saw the last because just beyond
Is weeds and snails and the duckety pond.

It’s a fantastical vision, as the boy is accompanied by a silver fairy astride his neck, but there is a charming specificity in the description of a young child’s running play. 

Perhaps Wilson’s philosophical writings were dedicated to an imagined son he might have had one day, but it’s not impossible that the child was real. In the final philosophical musing of the penciled manuscript, Wilson writes,

I think that sometimes the most loyal of women must doubt her man, must think herself false to his memory because she cannot fit a halo to his funny old head. I know those who live among the naked truths of war cannot pretend that the man they have loved and who has been killed by their side was a saint because he was dead.... Think of your dead friend (of your dead father, my son, when the time comes) as moving, sweating, struggling always, his sins, his laughter, his nastiness, his kindness, his stupidities as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes. Never complete, always developing in one direction or another, moving, moving, moving. ‘Working out his own salvation.’ .... Expect no man to be a saint, but when you find a saint reverence him as you love the sun. And because death has closed his hand over a sinner do not think that his sins have been frozen on him for eternity. He is not petrified like the corpses of Pompeii. He goes on, my son,—surely he goes on. 

His sister’s poem “To Tony, Aged 3” is the last poem in Waste Paper Philosophy, and to it has been added the title “L’Envoi,” a title often used for the last poem in a collection that adds explanatory or concluding remarks.
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*This is the version of the poem that appears in T.P.C Wilson’s Waste Paper Philosophy (1920). In that publication, the title “L’Envoi” has been added.
**Those wishing to know more about Marjorie Wilson's last days can read Arthur Mee’s account in The King’s England: Enchanted Land (Hodder and Stoughton, 1936, pp. 182–184).
***I’d be grateful if anyone with knowledge of the family could provide further information.  

And what is war?

Lt. Arthur Greg, Quarry Bank archive, NT

On April 23, 1917, 2Lt Arthur T. Greg was killed in aerial combat over St. Quentin, France. He was twenty-two. Assigned to the 55th Squadron Royal Flying Corps, Greg was returning from a bombing raid when his DH4 bomber was attacked by German Albatros DIII scouts (it is likely that one of the German pilots was Hermann Göring). Greg’s plane crashed behind British lines at Ervillers, but he had been fatally wounded, and his observer Robert William Robson died of wounds nearly a month later.*

Upon receiving the news of Greg’s death, his fiancée, Marian Allen, began to write of her grief and loss. In 1918, she published a short collection of poems, The Wind on the Downs, dedicating it to “A.T.G.” Her poem “And what is war” appears near the end of the volume.

 And what is war? one said; what of its story?
    A mustered host, a noble battle-throng,
A tale of valour, and a tale of glory,
    Of vanquished enemies and righted wrong?

That is war, we say, but not that only; 

    It is a rising water, deep and wide,
Which washes some away, and leaves some lonely, 

Greg's grave in France,
Quarry Bank archive, NT

    Like driftwood, stranded by the ebbing tide.

War is the passing gleam of eager faces,
    An understanding that makes young men wise
A growing stillness, many empty places,
   A haunted look that comes in women’s eyes;

Unquestioned duty, youthfulness and laughter,
    Sometimes a sudden catching of the breath,
A sure, swift knowing what may follow after—
   Withal a gay indifference to death;

The sound of laughing voices disappearing,
    The marching of a thousand eager feet,
Passing, ever passing out of hearing,
    Echoing, ever echoing down the street;

A sudden gust of wind, a clanging door,
And then a lasting silence—that is war.
              —Marian Allen

 Most of the poems in Allen’s The Wind on the Downs are melancholy and ache with loss, but they attempt to resolve grief into hopeful purpose with lines such as “Beautiful in death as life” (“May-flies”), “Crossing the silent river, there to find / Host upon host their comrades glorified, / Saluting them upon the other side” (“Charing Cross”), and “For you death was a sudden-passing glory” (“Beyond the Downs”).

But “What is war?” questions traditional reassurances that link combat deaths with courage and glory. War may be valorous and noble, but we are reminded that it is also a dark and drowning flood that sweeps all before it. War leaves in its wake empty places, haunted eyes, barred entries, and interminable stretches of silence.

In August of 1918, Irish poet Katharine Tynan, writing for the Bookman, offered a short review of Wind on the Downs, describing it as “a collection of poems of a wistful beauty. It has scarcely outstanding qualities, but it cries its sorrowful music at your ear and you are fain to listen. It is drenched with the colours and fragrance of English country.”**

For Marian Allen, the river gliding beneath the trees, the song of the lark, still pools of water, and winds from the sea were all reminders of the love she had lost.

Marian Allen and Arthur Greg,
Quarry Bank archive, NT

For more on Marian Allen and her poetry, see the post on this blog "Stronger than Death."

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* “Arthur Tylston Greg, Cross & Cockade International Forum, post by NickForder, 22 June 2009, https://www.crossandcockade.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=58&title=arthur-tylstOn-greg
** Katharine Tynan, “Songs in War Time,” Bookman, August 1918, pp. 152–153.