Song of the Mud

TW Culbertson's photo of the Western Front

While few have heard of Mary Borden -- a nurse, memoirist, and poet of the First World War --  the mud she writes about is one of the most iconic images of the war.  Born in Chicago, Borden graduated from Vassar and married a Scotsman.  When he joined the British army in 1914, she volunteered her services with the Red Cross and was working in a military hospital in Belgium by January of 1915, despite having three children (the youngest who had been born in November).  

In a series of haunting and richly descriptive short vignettes, she writes of her hospital work in Belgium and on the Somme (where the hospital was so close to the front lines that it was in bombarded by artillery fire).  

She attempted to publish her writing as a short memoir titled The Forbidden Zone in 1917, but British authorities censored the book and halted publication, concerned that it would damage morale.  The Forbidden Zone was finally published in 1929.  Borden explained that the book's fragmentary quality was her attempt to reflect the brokenness of the war experience.  The Forbidden Zone is one of my favorite memoirs of all time -- beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable. In the vignette “Belgium,” Borden writes, “Mud: and a thin rain coming down to make more mud.  Mud:  with scraps of iron lying in it and the straggling fragments of a nation, lolling, hanging about in the mud on the edge of disaster.”  

photo by TW Culbertson

Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory provides soldiers’ accounts of the mud:  Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from his posting at the Somme in early 1917, “The waders are of course indispensable.  In 2 ½ miles of trench which I waded yesterday there was not one inch of dry ground.  There is a mean depth of two feet of water.” Another soldier wrote in his diary, “Water knee deep and up to the waist in places.  Rumors of being relieved by the Grand Fleet” (48).   Borden’s poem "Song of the Mud" communicates the sights, sounds, smells, and agonies of that morass. 

It is a wonderful poem for reading out loud. In the tradition of Walt Whitman and his poem “Song of Myself,” Borden’s “Song of the Mud” strings together phrases that repeat, getting stuck and unstuck as they vividly paint shifting scenes:  the sodden lanes, the sunken trenches, and the sludge of No Man’s Land, viewed from different angles and perspectives. 

The Song of the Mud

This is the song of the mud, 

The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin; 

The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys; 

The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds; 

The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses; 

The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone. 

This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu. 

His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy; 

His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it. 

This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud, 

And his skin is of mud; 

And there is mud in his beard. 

His head is crowned with a helmet of mud. 

He wears it well. 

He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him. 

He has set a new style in clothing; 

He has introduced the chic of mud. 

This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle. 

The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome, 

The slimy inveterate nuisance, 

That fills the trenches, 

That mixes in with the food of the soldiers, 

That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts, 

That spreads itself over the guns, 

TW Culbertson's photo,  ambulance drivers
(Paul Borda Kurtz in foreground)

That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips, 

That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells; 

And slowly, softly, easily, 

Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage; 

Soaks up the power of armies; 

Soaks up the battle. 

Just soaks it up and thus stops it. 

This is the hymn of mud –  the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, 

The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men. 

Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead. 

Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing. 

Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men; 

Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men. 

Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it, 

Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence. 

Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down, 

And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud. 

Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them! 

Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly. 

There is not a trace of them. 

There is no mark where they went down.

 The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.

 This is the song of the mud,

 The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin; 

The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys. 

Mud, the disguise of the war zone; 

Mud, the mantle of battles; 

Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers: 

This is the song of the mud.

There's a strange beauty in the mud: it is “glistening,” “gleaming,” and “silvery,” like satin or ermine.  Sometimes it is playful --“frothing” and “squirting” as it “wiggles,” and sometimes it is as homey and domestic as bread that is “kneaded” and “squeezed.”  

Yet this is the “disguise of the war zone,” for beneath the surface, the mud is a sinister devourer, with “slimy voluminous lips,” a “mute enormous mouth” and a “monstrous distended belly.”  This is the stuff of nightmares. 

There is a dark humor in the poem (the soldiers have “introduced the chic of the mud” as it clings to their hair, their clothing, their bodies), but the poem's somber message is much like Wilfred Owen’s in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Beauty and glory are the mythical appearances of the war, but just underneath the surface of these lies and disguises are suffering,  nightmares, and futile deaths.  

Mary Borden

Remembrance Day and Rewinding the War

Poetry is best when it is heard (and not read):  listen to Carol Ann Duffy’s "Last Post" (read by Vicky McClure).  The text of the poem is posted below for those who want to read while listening.   

Last Post (Carol Ann Duffy)

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.  

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin

that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood

run upwards from the slime into its wounds;

see lines and lines of British boys rewind

back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home--

mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers

not entering the story now

to die and die and die.

Dulce -- No -- Decorum -- No -- Pro patria mori.

You walk away.  

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)

like all your mates do too -- 

Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -- 

and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,

warm French bread

and all those thousands dead

are shaking dried mud from their hair

and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,

a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released

from History, the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.  

You lean against a wall,

your several million lives still possible

and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards, 

then it would.  

Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, wrote this poem in 2009, shortly after the deaths of two of the last surviving British soldiers of WWI:  Henry Allingham and Harry Patch.  The title “Last Post” is the name given to the British military bugle call that signals the end of the day’s activities and is also played at military funerals and ceremonies of remembrance to indicate that a soldier has gone to his final rest (like the American “Taps”). 

Interwoven with Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Duffy re-imagines the past of one hundred years ago with haunting language and imagery.  In her rewinding of time, she references the most famous poem of the war, Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The first lines of “The Last Post” quote from Owen’s poem and recall the haunting sight of a man dying.  In the middle of “The Last Post,” she quotes the title and final words of Owen’s poem.  The Latin justification for war (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) is not just unsaid, but forcefully denied:  Dulce (sweet) – No.  Decorum (fitting or proper) – No.  But “pro patria mori” – to die for one’s country -- that is left unchallenged, as the blood runs up and back into the bodies, as the men rewind back into their trenches.  

Listening to "The Last Post," you hear a steady drumbeat, a repetitive quality, in sound (“bled bad blood”), in rhythm (“to die and die and die”) and in sense (the lists of loved ones’ photographs, the list of soldiers’ names, the list of future possibilities that soldiers’ lives held).  It is these repetitions that undercut the hopeful imagining of the poet, as they inexorably, like a metronome, move the poem forward, relentlessly chaining it to the tyranny of time. 

Perhaps most poignantly, there is the repetition of the opening and closing lines.  “If poetry could tell it backwards” (at the start of the poem) is altered by the addition of the word “truly” at the end:  “If poetry could truly tell it backwards.”  The addition of that one small word pulls us up short and recalls us to the truth that we cannot rewind time, we cannot undo the effects of the war, we can never fully understand the loss of potential that resulted when over sixteen million people died during The Great War.  

But we will remember them.  

We Will Remember Them

From the small Devonshire village of Topsham (population approximately 5,000), 69 men died in the First World War.  (Here's a link to their names and details—the Trout family alone suffered the death of two brothers and their cousin).  

At nearly every British Remembrance ceremony, “The Last Post” is played by a bugler, then the fourth verse of Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” is read, and all in attendance echo, “We will remember them.”

Few today know that Binyon's poem was first published in the London Times on September 21, 1914, just weeks after Great Britain had entered the war—at a time when the number of fallen could scarcely be imagined.  

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

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.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
     --Laurence Binyon

You Make Us Shells

Next to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon is perhaps the most recognized poet of the First World War.  His poem "Glory of Women" was published in his 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems.  On July 6th of 1917, Sassoon sent his statement protesting the war to his commanding officer declaring, "I am fully aware of what I am letting myself in for." 

Glory of Women

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,


Or wounded in a mentionable place.


You worship decorations; you believe


That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.


You make us shells. You listen with delight,


By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.


You crown our distant ardours while we fight,


And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.


You can't believe that British troops “retire”


When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,


Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.


O German mother dreaming by the fire,


While you are knitting socks to send your son


His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

There's a lot of anger in the poem, anger directed at women who in these lines are a faceless, undifferentiated mob possessed by fierce, naïve, and oddly erotic patriotism. 

A few months before composing “Glory of Women,” Sassoon wrote in his diary that soldiers returning home to wives and sweethearts should “ask their women why it thrills them to know that they, the dauntless warriors, have shed the blood of Germans.  Do not the women gloat secretly over the wounds of their lovers?  Is there anything inwardly noble in savage sex instincts?” 

Both Sassoon’s poem and journal seem to create a straw (wo)man, a caricature.  Who are these women who gloat over wounds?  And how many women, by 1917, believed that chivalry redeemed the war's disgrace?  Sassoon himself confessed he found women difficult to understand, writing in a 1916 diary entry that they were “outside my philosophy."  

The words of actual women writing during the war tell a different story,* describing the grief and horror they felt in learning of wounds that maimed and disfigured those they loved.  Vera Brittain’s poem “To My Brother,” says “Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart”; and in “Pluck,” Eva Dobell writes,” “Crippled for life at seventeen,/His great eyes seem to question why;/With both legs smashed it might have been/Better in that grim trench to die/Than drag maimed years out helplessly.” 

Nothing in these poems suggests “delight” or “fondly thrilled” admiration of heroes’ wounds.  

And yet “Glory of Women” has one of my favorite lines in WWI poetry:  “You make us shells.”  The terse four-word sentence is packed with explosive meaning:  women worked in munitions factories assembling the artillery weapons that exploded men’s bodies and ripped apart flesh with horrific shrapnel wounds.  Shells and mortars, rather than bullets or gas, were responsible for the majority of casualties during the war (some sources estimate nearly 60%), and women were the ones who made the weapons.  As well, women’s attempts to support, love, and encourage their soldiers were often wholly inadequate in bridging the immense gap of experience between those who had been at the Front and those who had not. 

The poem also skillfully challenges traditional and dualistic thinking about the war.  Staring at the reality of modern industrial warfare, it mocks the values of chivalry, propriety, and modesty (“mentionable place”).  Its language complicates and blurs the lines between conventional opposites-- heroism and cowardice (the contrast between “decorations” and “disgrace”), glory and horror (to “retire” and to “run”), and British virtue and German evil (the rapid shift of the last three lines turns from attacking British women to disparaging the hopes and efforts of a German mother). 

Yet in the end, despite its challenge to traditional dualistic thinking, the poem seems to fall into the same trap it so harshly criticizes, as it finds only a new enemy to stereotype and demonize:  women. 

*Sassoon isn’t the only one to challenge the cruelty of women’s ardent patriotism:  many women themselves criticized those who had joined The Order of the White Feather.  In her poem “The Jingo Woman,” Helen Hamilton describes her loathing for the “Dealer in white feathers,/Insulter, self-appointed,” saying “Oh! Exasperating woman,/I’d like to wring your neck,/I really would!/You make all women seem such duffers!”

Wilfred Owen's Coming of Age poem

Is it possible that the most iconic poem of the Great War, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is about more than war?  The poem very clearly takes as its subject an episode from  the First World War: it is anchored on the front line of the Western Front, during a gas attack, and it vehemently argues that war is not glorious.   

This is the poem as it is read during Remembrance Day ceremonies and as it is taught in schools, but to see it solely as an account of a battle incident that occurred nearly 100 years ago forces the poem into a strait-jacket. 

For this is also a poem about that moment when the world tilts crazily on its axis.  It’s the moment when we realize that something essential we’ve been told, an absolute we’ve believed in, a conviction we’ve firmly held --  does not fit the reality of our experience. 

The poem poignantly describes that moment of re-visioning:  the “boys” of the attack are transformed and appear as hags and old beggars; events take on a dreamlike quality as if seen from a distance “through misty panes and thick green light,” while everyone else, deaf and blind, marches on “asleep,” moving forward without consciousness or purpose, simply out of habits of conformity.   

All except the voice that speaks in the poem.  It cries out in protest and disbelief:  this is not how war — how life —how death —are supposed to be. 

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Fifty-five years after Wilfred Owen finished his revisions of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in 1973 the American author and screenwriter William Goldman explored the same theme in his novel The Princess Bride: “Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be....The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair.  Forget all the garbage your parents put out."  

Owen would have understood.    

"Dulce et Decorum Est" was published in 1920, posthumously, after Wilfred Owen was killed while trying to cross the Sambre-Oise canal in France in one of the last, futile battles of the Great War.  He died one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the peace treaty that ended the war.  His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as church bells rang out to celebrate the war’s end. 

Here is a link of Christopher Eccleston reading the poem.

It's not all about war

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which “war poetry” and “WWI poetry” are labels that suggest that these poems are only about war and only for those interested in war.  The poems deserve a wider frame of interpretation, a less literal way of listening to their voices, a bigger space in which to breathe. 

Take for example, Wilfrid Gibson’s poem, “The Question.”  It appears almost in the middle of the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2006), sandwiched in between “Ballad of the Three Spectres” and “The Soldier Addresses His Body.”  What is the question that Gibson’s title suggests?  Is he questioning the reasons behind the war?  The meaning of the death and suffering in the trenches?  Whether he will live or die?  Here’s the poem: 

The Question

I wonder if the old cow died or not.

 Gey* bad she was the night I left, and sick.

 Dick reckoned she would mend. He knows a lot--

 At least he fancies so himself, does Dick.

 Dick knows a lot. But maybe I did wrong

 To leave the cow to him, and come away.

 Over and over like a silly song

 These words keep humming in my head all day.

 And all I think of, as I face the foe

 And take my lucky chance of being shot,

 Is this -- that if I'm hit, I'll never know

 Till Doomsday if the old cow died or not.

Is this a war poem?  The question that haunts this man is the fate of an old cow.  Despite the very real possibility of his own looming death and his “lucky chance of being shot,” he’s thinking of the responsibilities and things he left behind.  "The Question" is a war poem, but it’s so much more than that.

The language of the poem explores the difficulty of giving up control:  “Dick knows a lot” and “He knows a lot” are repeated twice in the short poem, suggesting that the speaker doesn’t really believe that Dick is capable and needs the incantatory power of language to make it so.  It’s a poem as much about trust and surrender as about war. 

And it’s also a poem about getting stuck – as the poem begins and ends in the exact same place, with the refrain or “silly song” that won’t come unstuck:  “if the old cow died or not.”  Think back to the last time you had a silly song stuck in your head, or the time you couldn’t stop thinking about whether or not you’d turned off the stove, or the occasion on which you couldn’t stop turning over in your head a casual, hurtful comment that was made.  We’ve all become obsessed with questions and problems that we know are ultimately trivial.  Sometimes, it’s simply because we are shallow and overly concerned with surface details; sometimes, our obsession with the trivial becomes a way of coping with other realities we don’t want to face, or perhaps sometimes we just don’t have the experience or vision to see the full situation.  All we can think about is the fate of the old cow. 

Whatever this man’s reason for his nagging obsession, we recognize its humanness.  And we understand a bit better that even when he faces “the foe,” he cannot stop himself from looking back towards home, a time when he was the expert who could make a difference, the time before his war began.   

*“Gey” is a Northern dialect word from the Scots that describes a considerable quantity of something and can be translated by the word “very.”

Crafty Women and the Great War

The poetry of World War I often caricatures the women at home as naive jingoists: Sassoon’s poem “The Glory of Women” says, “You worship decorations; you believe/That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace,” and an early draft of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.”), is dedicated to Jessie Pope, best known for her poem that encourages enlistment, “The Call”:  Who’s for the trench--/Are you, my laddie?/Who’ll follow French--/Will you, my laddie?/Who’s fretting to begin,/Who’s going out to win?/And who wants to save his skin--/Do you, my laddie?

Because women experienced the war vastly differently from the men in the trenches, however, it surely does not mean that their lives were unaffected.  In fact, there was one aspect of the war that both men at the front and women at home shared:  The Great War was made up of vast stretches of tedious and tense waiting.    

While the deafening sound of shelling and gunfire was the constant background music to life in the trenches, the clickety-clack of knitting needles played quietly underneath the daily life of the women who waited, in public places like church and tearooms, as well as at home by the fireside. 

There are many excellent blog posts and on-line resources on women’s knitting during WWI, but I particularly enjoy Jane Tynan’s insights shared on the University of Oxford’s blog “World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings” as her comments complicate the view of women expressed by well-known male war poets: 

Wartime knitting may have had a feminine image, but it was not timid. What started as a response to small gaps in uniform supply became a mass knitting frenzy, which made government very nervous about the quirky, un-military garments reaching soldiers at the front.... Knitters were doing what the army could not: making a creative intervention in a difficult situation. The problem was that the success of mass war knitting projects highlighted army failures…. 

Knitters were not necessarily conservative. They sought to bring some humanity to a brutal and unpredictable war. On one hand, the mobility of knitting made it the perfect symbol of civilian enthusiasm for the war effort. On the other, when the passion to knit comforts brimmed over, it threatened to become an anti-establishment protest. The sheer scale of the effort, its anarchic spread nationally and internationally, gave wartime knitting political potential, with parallels in the craftist projects of today.

To send something personal, and lovingly homemade, to a relative in real mortal danger, gave knitters the satisfaction of making a direct intervention, but crafting such personal items also meant contemplating fear and loss. This was not what the authorities wanted. Wartime knitting was supposed to be cheerful and optimistic, not dark and ponderous.

I attended a reading of women’s war poetry where Violet Gillespie’s “Portrait of a Mother” was shared.  During the event, I jotted down the title, but it was nearly impossible to find the poem, as it has simply disappeared, another lost voice of the Great War.  Published in Poetry Review in 1918, it seems to have last appeared in 1919 in The Malory Verse book, an American poetry anthology “for school and general use.”  I’ll let the poem speak for itself and respond to the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon: 

Portrait of a Mother by Violet Gillespie

Knit two and purl one;

Stir the fire, and knit again.

And oh, my son, my only son,

I think of you in wind and rain,

In rain and wind, 'neath fire and shell,

Going along the road to hell

On earth, in wind and rain,

My little son, my only son . . .

Knit two and purl one ;

Stir the fire, and knit again.

 

Knit two and purl one ;

Knit again, and stir the fire.

And oh, my son, my only son,

I work for you and never tire ;

I never tire, but work and pray

Every hour of night and day.

Awake, asleep, I never tire,

My little son, my only son . . .

Knit two and purl one ;

Knit again, and stir the fire.

Knit two and purl one;

Stir the fire, and knit again.

And oh, my son, for another’s son

My hands are working. The wind and rain

Are shrill without.  But you are gone

To a quiet land.  I shall come anon,

And find you, out of this wind and rain:

But I’m working now for another’s son.

Knit two and purl one;

Stir the fire, and knit again.