Watching the War in the Dark

Movies and war: nearly all of us are familiar with the World War II movies Saving Private Ryan, The Dirty Dozen, and Schindler's List, but it was the First World War that popularized war films.  Released in the fall of 1916, the British documentary The Battle of the Somme was viewed by over twenty-million people, nearly half of the population of Britain at that time.*  Using actual footage from the front lines, the silent film's graphic images of war were unlike anything those on the home front had seen before.  The Dean of Durham Cathedral, Herbert Henson, wrote to The Times, objecting that as an "entertainment it wounds the heart and violates the very sanctity of bereavement." What did it mean to sit in a darkened room with others and watch the war in black and white? 

A War Film by Teresa Hooley

I saw,

With a catch of the breath and the heart's uplifting,

Sorrow and pride,

   The 'week's great draw'—

The Mons Retreat;

The 'Old Contemptibles' who fought and died,

The horror and the anguish and the glory.

As in a dream,

Still hearing the machine-guns rattle and shells scream,

I came out into the street.

When the day was done,

My little son

Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,

Naked upon my knee.

How could he know

The sudden terror that assaulted me?...

The body I had borne

Nine moons beneath my heart,

A part of me…

If, someday,

It should be taken away

To War. Tortured.  Torn.

Slain.

Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain—

My little son…

Yet all those men had mothers, every one.

How should he know

Why I kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name?

He thought that I was daft. 

He thought it was a game,

And laughed, and laughed. 

The poem begins with the simple phrase "I saw" – and then breaks off, as if the poem's speaker herself must pause to process the moving images she has just viewed.  Sorrow and pride co-mingle with horror and glory, and she cannot easily reconcile the contradictions that the film and the war have produced.  The war is presented as entertainment, the "week's great draw," and in cinemas where Charlie Chaplin plays out comic scenes, now it is "The Old Contemptibles" (the nickname given to the men in the British regular army who survived the slaughter of 1914) who "fight and die."

As she exits the cinema, she finds that the real world has also shifted and now appears dream-like.  The young mother tries to return to normal scenes of domesticity, but haunted by the war film, even her young son's bath-time is an assault as she is seized by "sudden terror."  Remembering the great intimacy of carrying her son "Nine moons beneath my heart," she realizes that he, too, will be renamed "It" if he joins the ranks of soldiers: "If someday,/It should be taken away/To War."

The anguish that she has witnessed on the movie screen is now projected onto the body of her young son as she imagines him in a future war, "Tortured. Torn./Slain./Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain—".   The horrors that mutilate and destroy the bodies of the soldiers are starkly and simply listed.  One-word descriptions of death are punctuated as full sentences, echoing the emptiness and demonstrating the inadequacy of words to convey grief and loss. 

Her actions, as she "kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name" appear as a kind of charm to ward off the imagined horrors of the future, but the young boy "thought it was a game."  In this, the child is linked with the men who direct and propagandize war, often associating it with sports and games, selling it as adventure and competition. 

 The poem is at its most poignant in its implicit realization that the young mother is powerless to break the chain of violence.  For women like the speaker of the poem, the game is averting another war.  Published in 1927, the poem and its argument lost the game a mere twelve years later when Hitler's German armies invaded Poland, beginning World War II.    

 *For more on the film, see the excellent resources on the BBC's website "Why Was the Battle of the Somme film bigger than Star Wars"?  The film that inspired Hooley's poem has been debated, as has the date of the poem's composition.  "The War Film" was published in Hooley's 1927 collection Songs of all Seasons, suggesting that the 1926 film Mons was the inspiration for the poem.  For a fuller discussion, see the excellent post "A War Film" on The Bioscope.  

A healing magic

Killed May 13, 1915

A captain in the Royal Horse Guards, Colwyn  Philipps arrived in the Ypres Salient in early November of 1914.  Less than six months later, at the age of 26, he was killed in an attack on German lines.  He has no known grave: his name is one of the 54,896 listed on the Menin Gate memorial. 

When his belongings were sent home to his mother in Wales, the poem "Release" was found among his possessions.

Release by Colwyn Philipps

(Found in his note-book when his kit came home)

There is a healing magic in the night,
The breeze blows cleaner than it did by day,
Forgot the fever of the fuller light,
And sorrow sinks insensibly away
As if some saint a cool white hand did lay
Upon the brow, and calm the restless brain.
The moon looks down with pale unpassioned ray -
Sufficient for the hour is its pain.
Be still and feel the night that hides away earth's stain.
Be still and loose the sense of God in you,
Be still and send your soul into the all,
The vasty distance where the stars shine blue,
No longer antlike on the earth to crawl.
Released from time and sense of great or small,
Float on the pinions of the Night-Queen's wings;
Soar till the swift inevitable fall
Will drag you back into all the world's small things;
Yet for an hour be one with all escaped things.

It is easy to imagine this man who attempts to forget "the fever of the fuller light" as he gazes into the night sky and searches for peace for his "restless brain."  The poem suggests that the night is able to wash this man from the filth of war with its "cleaner" breezes and the darkness that hides "earth's stain."  The night offers the gift of lightness, a time and space when not only can burdens be dropped, but the soul itself can rise above the ant-like, crawling, underground existence of the trenches and join "the vasty distance where the stars shine blue" to be "one with all escaped things." 

The Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt, William Orpen

As if in an attempt at self-hypnosis, three times the poem chants the words "Be still," recalling Psalm 46 and its meditation on God and war:  "He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;/he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;/he burns the chariots with fire./Be still, and know that I am God.”

Staring up at the distant stars, for "an hour" this man experiences "a healing magic" and a respite from the psychological traumas that go undiagnosed for so many who must simply push on and continue to fight.  Then comes the "swift inevitable fall." As certain as the dropping of shells, the return to grim reality drags him back "into all the world's small things": the pettiness of European politics, the trivial gains made by the sacrifice of repeated "over the top" attacks, and the insignificance of individual lives. 

Several months before his death, Philipps wrote home to his mother and described an early battle experience:  "As we went through the first village, we got heavily shelled by the famous Black Marias; they make a noise just like an express train and burst like a clap of thunder, you hear them coming for ten seconds before they burst.  It was very unpleasant, and you need to keep a hold on yourself to prevent ducking – most of the men duck." 

Phillips' posthumously published book of poetry was described by the Welsh Outlook in May 1916 as "a memorial to a very gallant gentleman" in whose verse "at times he lifts the veil and suffers us  to catch glimpses of his inner self, face to face with life's realities."  His poem "Release" also serves as a memorial to all who have experienced the traumas of war, come"face to face with life's realities," and soldiered on. 

Remembering Jo

If not for the context in which Ernest Rhys' poem originally appeared (more on that later), "Jo's Requiem" would not be easily identifiable as a war poem at all.  The poem offers no description of the First World War:  not of the trenches, nor of the suffering and death that occurred there. 

Instead, this is a poem that is firmly grounded in the English countryside.  There, a man simply named Jo earns his strength behind a plow, watches with sharp-eyed vision for birds that might threaten his newly sown seed, and is so attuned to his land that "He could hear the green oats growing,/and the south-west wind making rain."  I'd like to meet that man. 

XX

Jo's Requiem

by Ernest Rhys

He had the ploughman's strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.

Unknown British soldier*

We learn that Jo has spent a lifetime in learning to read the subtle signs of life that surround him, spotting even "the trout beneath the stone."  His actions are neither noble nor heroic, yet he masters the world around him with skill and honest work, in making and digging. 

And he is dead.  The last line of the poem breaks with all that has gone before and ends as abruptly a sniper's bullet or an artillery shell.  We are not told if Jo fell "straight as stone can fall."  It doesn't matter how it happened:  the details of his death are irrelevant as they will not change the reality of it. 

The poem's bare closing statement heartbreakingly expresses the utter finality of death.  As Robert Frost writes in "Out, Out—", a poem of unexpected death on a farm, "No more to build on there." 

"Jo's Requieum" does not argue with death, nor does it attempt to glorify or justify the cause for which this man died.  The poem deliberately refuses any explicit attempt at making meaning of Jo's death.  What we are asked to see in the poem is one country man and his life, not the scope of the war or the nameless and faceless mass of the millions who died. 

Implicitly, however, there is a sense of injustice underlying the stark contrast of the poem's first eleven lines and its final sentence.  Strength and keen-sightedness were not enough to save Jo, nor were his practical talents, resourcefulness, and listening ear.  The poem doesn't try to explain Jo's death, for no sense can be made of a senseless war in which over nine million died.  The poem only asks us to remember and to mourn, as signaled by its brief title, "Jo's Requiem." 

Unknown British soldiers*

Curiously, the poem at some point was retitled "Lost in France."  First published as "Jo's Requiem" in Rhys' volume of poetry The Leaf Burners (1918), it appeared as the last poem in a series of twenty related verses entitled "The Tommiad." The title of the verse sequence is a play on the Iliad, suggesting an epic about British Tommies, the name given to British infantry soldiers.  But Ernest Rhys was a Welsh writer, and the title of the verse sequence may also be a play on the Welsh word tomi, "to spread dung" or "to bespatter with dirt," suggesting a much less glorious view of the First World War.  

"Jo's Requiem" was retitled "Lost in France" as early as 1945 in a British anthology titled Soldiers' Verse.  For a while, the two titles appeared together, with "Lost in France" as the main title and "Jo's Requiem" as the subtitle.  Most recently, the subtitle has disappeared altogether.  Several years ago, the poem appeared on the London Underground as "Lost in France," marking Remembrance Day. 

But the title change is significant:  it alters the poem from being a tribute to a single, knowable man to a more abstract comment on an enormous and indecipherable war. 

It is said that history repeats itself, and as actually happened in the First World War, the name of this man is being erased from memory. 

Rest in peace, Jo. 

*These photos and others were found several years ago in the loft of a barn in France, discarded as trash.  To read more, visit the Independent's web article "Unseen Photographs."  

The Art of War

Death Awed, by Percy Smith

Drawing on his experiences at the Western Front, Richard Aldington is best known for his 1929 novel Death of a Hero.  Although it has been compared to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Aldington's Death of a Hero "is rarely read today and much of it [Aldington's writing] languishes out of print…For those seeking an overview of the conflict or a chronicle of how it swept up and snuffed out individual lives, here is a graphic, vitriolic and incredibly moving testament" (The National).   

Aldington's novel has recently been republished, but his poetry remains largely forgotten.  His short poem "Soliloquy II" deserves to be read and remembered. 

Soliloquy II 

Aux Eparges, soldats enterrant leurs camarades au clair de lune
GP Leroux, Musee natioinal du Chateau de Versailles

I was wrong, quite wrong;
The dead men are not always carrion.

After the advance,
As we went through the shattered trenches
Which the enemy had left,
We found, lying upon the fire-step,
A dead English soldier,
His head bloodily bandaged
And his closed left hand touching the earth,

More beautiful than one can tell,
More subtly coloured than a perfect Goya,
And more austere and lovely in repose
Than Angelo's hand could ever carve in stone.
               --Richard Aldington, 1918

This soliloquy, the voicing aloud of thoughts that are then overheard by an audience, begins with a stark confession:  "I was wrong, quite wrong."  The soldier of the poem then makes a startling observation about the bodies of the dead:  they are "not always carrion."  He is compelled to assert that the corpses that surround him and that were an ever present feature of the Western Front – do not always resemble the bodies of dead animals, are not always putrefying flesh, unfit for food.  Paul Fussell, describing the front lines, writes "The stench of rotten flesh was over everything….Dead horses and dead men – and parts of both—were sometimes not buried for months and often simply became an element of parapets and trench walls" (The Great War and Modern Memory 49). 

To remain sane at the Front, men had to become numb to death.  They had to learn to see others' bodies as nothing more than "carrion." 

Goncharova's "The Pale Horse"

But after charging the German lines, this soldier finds himself with the other survivors of his company "in the shattered trenches/Which the enemy left."  And there, among the numerous "dead men," he encounters the body of an English soldier, a comrade who has been left behind by the retreating enemy. 

The specific details and unemotional description communicate the cold, material reality of death: the body has been left "lying upon the fire-step" (a shelf-like step cut into trench walls, that enabled men to peer over the top into No Man's Land and to ready themselves for attack).  The English soldier has sustained a head wound that is "bloodily bandaged," most likely by the enemy troops who left him behind, and one hand, his left, lies "closed" yet "touching the earth."  With that final gesture, did the dying soldier seek the comfort of connection with the dust to which he would soon return, or is the closed hand an act of despair and final surrender? 

The speaker cannot provide an answer, but instead turns the poem in an unexpected direction: he proclaims the dead man "More beautiful than one can tell."  Lacking words to describe the scene, the survivor turns to metaphors from art.  This corpse is "more subtly coloured" than a canvas painted by Goya, the early nineteenth-century painter who was considered to be the last of the Old Masters.  It may be significant that Goya is also regarded as the first of the moderns: his paintings bridge the tradition of the past and the ambiguities of the modern world.  Goya's series of prints The Disasters of War are disturbing in their depiction of the suffering of individuals in the face of violence that cannot be controlled.     

This dead body, this canvas, is described as "Austere," a word suggesting that which is reserved, unemotional, plain, and restrained, but also grave, grim, unbending, and cold.  More of a masterpiece than any carved in marble by Michelangelo, the corpse is "lovely in repose," a play on the French term given to rotations of rest behind the lines:  "en repos."

Perhaps the speaker feels envy of the dead man, for his war is over.  Or perhaps in this one moment and in this single body, the living soldier is again able to see death as emotionally moving and very human.  In either case, the poem records the moment of epiphany when his world has turned upside down and that which was dead certain has again become mysterious and revered. 

Other poems (such as Robert Service's "The Mourners") describe the dead as happy; Aldington's poem finds in them a beauty that can only be expressed in art. Timeless and sobering, Death speaks to us wordlessly of the ineffable human condition. 

 

War, by John Moody

Known unto God

Frederick Wm Darvell, missing, presumed killed

One of the tragedies of The Great War are the men who were literally "lost," those who were reported missing.  Over 70,000 British and Commonwealth men were never found after the battle of the Somme, and nearly 55,000 were missing in action after the battles in the Ypres Salient.   Just outside the city of Verdun, the Douaumont Ossuary contains the bones of over 130,000 French and German men who were never identified.  

Men were lost in collapsed tunnels that exploded during mining operations and buried in trenches after heavy artillery fire; others drowned and disappeared in the deep mud of No Man's Land; still others received injuries that were so severe that they couldn't be identified, men who were obliterated by the weapons of modern warfare. 

Anna Gordon Keown's poem "Reported Missing" gives voice to the anguish of not knowing, of not being able to mourn. 

Reported Missing 

My thought shall never be that you are dead:

Who laughed so lately in this quiet place.

The dear and deep-eyed humour of that face

Held something ever living, in Death’s stead.
Scornful I hear the flat things they have said
And all their piteous platitudes of pain.
I laugh! I laugh! – For you will come again 
This heart would never beat if you were dead.
The world’s adrowse in twilight hushfulness,
There’s purple lilac in your little room,

And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom

Small boys are culling summer watercress.

Of these familiar things I have no dread

Being so very sure you are not dead.

                  --Anna Gordon Keown

The poem is framed in denial:  both the first and the last lines refuse to accept that this man "Who laughed so lately" can be dead. 

His remembered laughter is echoed by her present laughter in line 8, repeated twice, as if to convince not only listeners, but the speaker of the poem herself that there is something left in the world to laugh about. 

The beat of her heart, the flowers gathered for his room, the abundance of the rapidly growing summer watercress are held up as evidence of the vitality that surrounds her.  These are set against the "flat things" and "piteous platitudes of pain" that call her to confront a horrible juxtaposition:  familiar things become dreadful when they continue on, as if in blithe indifference to shattering loss and death. 

She cannot allow herself to mourn:  her memory and hope keep him alive, and so instead, the speaker of the poem lives "adrowse in twilight hushfulness," suspended, only half-awake, in the gloom between day and night. 

One-hundred years later, the missing of the Great War are still being found by farmers clearing land and ploughing fields, by construction crews laying roads and digging foundations.  It's sobering to think how long their loved ones endured suspended lives, waiting for closure that failed to come within their lifetimes.  

O, Canada: “I will turn away my head”

Youth Mourning, George Clausen

From its opening image of “the aching womb of night,” exhaustion and pain struggle for breath throughout "The Mourners," a short poem by Canadian poet Robert Service.  The night struggles to give birth, but instead miscarries only the stillborn dead, the broken men who are scattered across the “foul, corpse-cluttered plain” of No Man’s Land. 

The Mourners by Robert Service

Sorrowing Woman, Käthe Kollwitz

I look into the aching womb of night;

    I look across the mist that masks the dead;

The moon is tired and gives but little light,

        The stars have gone to bed.

The earth is sick and seems to breathe with pain;

    A lost wind whimpers in a mangled tree;

I do not see the foul, corpse-cluttered plain,

        The dead I do not see.

The slain I would not see... and so I lift

    My eyes from out the shambles where they lie;

When lo! a million woman-faces drift

        Like pale leaves through the sky.

The cheeks of some are channelled deep with tears;

    But some are tearless, with wild eyes that stare

Into the shadow of the coming years

        Of fathomless despair.

Bamforth Song Card:  "Peace"

And some are young, and some are very old;

    And some are rich, some poor beyond belief;

Yet all are strangely like, set in the mould

        Of everlasting grief.

They fill the vast of Heaven, face on face;

    And then I see one weeping with the rest,

Whose eyes beseech me for a moment's space....

        Oh eyes I love the best!

Nay, I but dream. The sky is all forlorn,

    And there's the plain of battle writhing red:

God pity them, the women-folk who mourn!

        How happy are the dead!

  

In sympathy with those fighting in the trenches, the moon, the earth, and the wind also are “tired,” “sick,” and “whimper” at the death and suffering hidden in the mist and blackness.   The turn of the poem occurs when a vision breaks across the night sky.  Looking heavenward, the voice of the poem sees “a million women-faces drift/Like pale leaves through the sky.”  However, this is not an angelic host singing with joy, but instead a throng of women, young and old, tear-stained and dry-eyed, connected only by their “everlasting grief” and “fathomless despair” as they stare from the depths of night “into the shadow of the coming years.” 

The women, united in mourning, appear to do something that the man speaking in the poem cannot:  they look at the dead, while he repeats three times, in an increasingly powerful incantation, his inability and unwillingness to do so:  “I do not see the foul, corpse-cluttered plain,/The dead I do not see./The slain I would not see.” 

Robert Service was forty-one when war broke out:  he tried to enlist in the Canadian army, but was turned down for varicose veins.  Wanting to contribute to the war effort, Service became a war correspondent for Canadian newspapers while serving as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer.  In one of his news accounts of the war, Service wrote, “The skin of [the burned soldier] is a bluish colour and cracked open in ridges.  I am sorry I saw him.  After this, when they put the things that once were men into my car I will turn away my head” (quoted in Poetry of the First World War by Tim Kendall).   

“I will turn away my head” – for a man at the front to look at the dead is to admit that he may well be the next to be cut to pieces by artillery fire or caught on the barbed wire.  The voice of the poem recognizes this and foresees his own death when he sees “weeping with the rest,” the eyes of the woman he loves “the best.” The men and women who live to see those whom they love die are forever changed and scarred.  Only the dead, released from the horrors of war and the desolation of mourning are happy.   

Robert Service knew what it was to mourn.  His 1916 war poetry collection, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, was dedicated to his brother, Albert, who was killed with the Canadian infantry while fighting in France. 

Perishing things and strange ghosts

Imagining the future has an added poignancy in a time of war.  Rupert Brooke, one of the most famous of the soldier poets of the Great War, is best known for his poem “The Soldier” and its memorable first lines, “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.”  In that poem, he speculates on his own death. 

Brooke’s lesser-known poem “Fragment,” however, imagines the future of others, of soldiers on troop ships headed for the Dardanelles and the battle of Gallipoli in the spring of 1915.  

 Fragment

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night

Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped

In at the windows, watched my friends at table,

Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,

Or coming out into the darkness. Still

No one could see me.

                                          I would have thought of them

—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered …

                                                                        Only, always,

I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,

That broke to phosphorus out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die

To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.
              --Rupert Brooke

The poem’s first stanza creates a mood of eerie tension:  the speaker of the poem is an outsider, a self-imposed exile from the camaraderie of his friends and fellow soldiers.  He haunts the deck unseen and “still.”  Recklessly careless – “heedless”-- the men dining, playing cards, and enjoying the last week before battle are both admired and pitied for their “link’d beauty of bodies” that will soon be “pashed” -- violently thrown and shattered to bits.  Despite their strength, “weight and firmness,” these are men without any control over the future that awaits them.

As fleeting as bubbles, their lives flicker in the lamplight with a wondrous and glowing beauty, made more real by its transience   Seeing them as ghosts, as men about to die, these men linger in memory forever, fixed for all time in this darkly lit moment on a ship quietly moving through the night.   The last lines of the poem capture the randomness of war death – who lives and who dies is also entirely out of anyone’s control. 

It’s a curiously prescient poem, as if Brooke stares into the future and sees not only the brutal losses of the Gallipoli campaign, but also the ways in which war creates its own despairing beauty and consigns survivors to a future that is fixated on memories of a time when “this gay machine of splendour,” was not utterly wrecked and broken.   

Brooke was one of the most popular of the First World War poets. W.B. Yeats is reported to have said he was “the handsomest young man in England,” and Brooke’s early death in April of 1915 transformed him into an iconic figure.  The man was far more complicated than the myth, however, and scholars such as Timothy Kendall have argued that neither Brooke’s views of war and nor his poetry are as naïve or idealistic as often assumed.  “The Fragment” enacts a complexity and subtlety for which Brooke is seldom recognized.