Fading Post Cards

Postcard from Picasso to Apollinaire, 1918*

 War constantly reminds both soldiers and those who love them that life is short and change is constant.  The brief, six-line poem "Post Card," by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, delicately illustrates the beauty and terror of living moment to moment. 

Post Card

I write to you beneath this tent

A Star Shell, CW Nevinson

While summer day becomes a shade

And startling magnificent

Flowers of the cannonade

Stud the pale blue firmament

And before existing fade.

            Translated from the French by Oliver Bernard

Everything in the poem is fleeting: blink and you might miss the moment when twilight turns to night and the summer day becomes a "shade," a punning play on the two meanings of the word, evoking both evening shadows and ghosts. 

Like fireworks, artillery shells light the sky, startling in their unexpected flashes and in the magnificence of the air-born explosions.  Many soldiers wrote home and described the haunting beauty of the deadly shells; Apollinaire condenses the thought into a single image, comparing the cannonade to flowers in bloom. 

The brief poem doesn't march to a conclusion, but rather gently dies out: the illumination fades before it ever really existed.  Only two rhymes are used in the poem, and the poet is sparing even in his use of syllables:  the first three-lines contain eight syllables each, while the last three lines subside to only seven syllables.  It is as if the scene of the poem appears for only a second in the light of a candle before it is snuffed out.  Life in wartime is ephemeral, and ironically, the postcards written during the First World War have become collectible ephemera. 

Apollinaire mailed the poem "Post Card" to his friend Andre Rouveyre on August 20^th, 1915.  Wounded by shrapnel in March of 1916, Apollinaire never fully recovered, and he died of the Spanish flu on November 9^th, 1918, just two days before the war ended. 

Apollinaire, wounded 1916

*An actual postcard sent from Picasso to Apollinaire in 1918 was sold in June of 2015 for the record amount of $188,000.  Ironically, Apollinaire never received the postcard, and it was marked "return to sender." 

Soft and slow in wartime

Ledwidge (on right) with his mother

As I wrote in an earlier post ("It is terrible to be always homesick"), the poetry of Francis Ledwidge is strikingly different from the better-known works of other trench poets.  His imagery yearns towards beauty and serenity, and his poems written on the front lines are pastoral and melancholic, just as true in their own way to the experience of war as anything written by Owen or Sassoon.   

Born on August 19^th, 1887, the "Poet of the Blackbirds," like many men in the muddy trenches of the First World War, coped with the tragedy and tedium of life on the Western Front by dreaming of home and imagining himself returning there. 

Home

Ledwidge memorial 

A burst of sudden wings at dawn,
Faint voices in a dreamy noon,
Evenings of mist and murmurings,
And nights with rainbows of the moon.

And through these things a wood-way dim,
And waters dim, and slow sheep seen
On uphill paths that wind away
Through summer sounds and harvest green.

This is a song a robin sang
This morning on a broken tree,
It was about the little fields
That call across the world to me.

The poem revels in quietness.  Rising above the din of battle, "faint voices" and "mist and murmurings" speak louder than shell bursts and cannon fire.  The trill of a single robin on a blasted tree echoes for hundreds of miles, recalling bird song from across the Irish Sea. 

The poem also moves with deliberate slowness.  The sheep meander on uphill paths, and the leisurely movement of the day shifts from dawn to noon, then from evening to night.  Time will not be hurried, but moves purposefully through the seasons, from "summer sounds" to "harvest green." 

Frances Ledwidge

War and its frenzied tempo seem very far away – and that is the beauty and gift of this poem, written in mid-July of 1917, during a pause in the bombardment that preceded the Third Battle of Ypres.  Ledwidge was killed two weeks later on July 31^st. 

Violets from oversea

"Summer & trenches don't go together somehow," Roland Leighton wrote to his sweetheart, Vera Brittain in April 1915. 

Later that month, Roland wrote to Vera and described a discovery he'd made while walking in Ploegsteert Wood (known to the Tommies as "Plug Street Wood").  Roland had found "the body of a dead British soldier hidden in the undergrowth a few yards from the path.  He must have been shot there during the wood-fighting in the early part of the War.   The body had sunk down into the marshy ground so that only the tops of the boots stuck up above the soil. His cap & equipment beside him were half-buried and rotting away."  Leighton ordered that the body be covered with dirt, "to make one grave more among the many in the wood" (Chronicle of Youth, 25 April 1915). 

The next day, Roland started a poem, and while on leave that August (during which time he and Vera became engaged), he showed Vera the finished villanelle that he had titled and dated: "Violets," April 25, 1915.  Her journal records, "I remembered how on that day he had written me a letter – he was then in Ploegsteert Wood—enclosing some violets from the top of his dug-out which he said he had just picked for me." 

Villanelle

by Roland Leighton

From the film Testament of Youth

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head:
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood

Think what they have meant to me--
Life and Hope and Love & You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.

The poignancy of the poem lies in the tension between two voices: a man writing to his sweetheart in a "dear, far, forgetting land," and a soldier talking to himself, trying to puzzle out how the horrors of war can coexist with simple flowers that recall "Life and Hope and Love and You" (this is the voice that speaks in the parenthetical comments). 

The soaked blood and mangled body of the dead man are literally entwined with the violets that are gathered for the "Sweetest" and sent to her in memory.  But in memory of what?  Do the violets recall the golden age of innocence and romance before the war?  Or are they sent in memory of the dead man whose body has lain forgotten for months?  There is a bittersweet irony in the poem's last line as it vows she "will understand." He knows she cannot fully grasp what he faces, because his darling "did not see" where the violets grew, hiding the horror of the neglected corpse. And yet the soldier is grateful for her ignorance:  "Sweetest, it was better so."   

By August of 1915, Roland was having difficulties in finding beauty anywhere on the Western Front.  He wrote to Vera, "I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful.  Modern warfare is merely a trade." In September, he was even more direct about his altered opinion of the war:  "Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden thing…let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand & glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?" 

Roland and Vera were to have been married during his Christmas leave that began December 24th, but while waiting expectantly for his arrival, she  received a telephone call informing her that Roland had died of wounds on December 23^rd.   He was buried in France in the Louvencourt cemetery.  The inscription on his headstone reads, "Goodnight though life and all take flight – Never goodbye."  The lines are a reference to a W.E. Henley poem that Roland had shared with Vera in a letter in May of 1915, describing how as he crossed a field in the starlight, a little poem of W.E. Henley's came into his head:  

            Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!

             Till life & all take flight

             Never goodbye.

He again alluded to the poem as he was returning to the Western Front after his August leave, sending Vera a telegram that read "Till we may live our roseate poem through," and a brief letter that read, "Nearly at Folkestone now.  I am trying not to think of it, but the thought will come.  Oh damn, I know it—

            Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!

            Till life & all take flight

            Never goodbye."

Vera Brittain visited Roland Leighton's grave twice, once in 1921, and again in 1933.  I'd like to think that she left violets.  

Roland Leighton, Louvencourt cemetery

Speak of glory, sing of home

St George, Alston

St. Augustine's, Alston

Nowell Oxland, the son of the vicar of St. Augustine's parish church in Alston, Cumbria, was killed in action in the Gallipoli campaign at Sulva Bay on August 9, 1915.  He is memorialized in the church's painted altar screen, where his face was used as the model for two warrior saints, one of whom appears to be St. George.  

What must it have been like for his father and the other villagers to see Nowell's haloed image as they approached the communion rail each Sunday?

Oxland's memory also lives on in his poetry.  Here is an excerpt from his poem "Outward Bound," written as he was sailing for Gallipoli (verses 1, 4, 7, and 8).  In these verses, he imagines the British troops following the route of ancient warriors, while longing for the English countryside that they may never see again.  

Outward Bound

There's a waterfall I'm leaving
Running down the rocks in foam,
There's a pool for which I'm grieving
Near the water-ouzel's home,
And it's there that I'd be lying
With the heather close at hand,
And the Curlew’s faintly crying
Mid the wastes of Cumberland.

Nowell Oxland

Now the weary guard are sleeping,
Now the great propellers churn,
Now the harbour lights are creeping
Into emptiness astern,
While the sentry wakes and watches
Plunging triangles of light
Where the water leaps and catches
At our escort in the night.

Though the high gods smite and slay us,  
Though we come not whence we go,

As the host of Menelaus*

Came there many years ago;

Yet the selfsame wind shall bear us

From the same departing place

Out across the gulf of Saros

And the peaks of Samothrace.

We shall pass in summer weather, 

We shall come at eventide,

Where the fells stand up together

And all things quiet abide;

Mixed with cloud and wind and river,

Sun-distilled in dew and rain.

One with Cumberland forever

We shall not go forth again.  

The penultimate stanza speaks of glory; the first and the last verses sing of home.  I hope that somewhere in Cumberland today, a walker passes in summer weather and comes at eventide to where "all things quiet abide."  Perhaps he or she will pause to remember the men of the First World War who loved these hills.     

Alston Moor

*The warrior who led the Spartans in the Trojan War (Saros and Samothrace are places in the Aegean associated with the Trojan War).   

Swift and strong and dear

War Cartoon detail, Rothenstein*

For a mother to lose a son in wartime – that is indescribable grief -- and so it's nearly impossible to comprehend the experience of Ettie Grenfell, who lost two of her boys in just over two months.  Her eldest son, Julian, died May 26, 1915; his younger brother Gerald William, known to the family as Billy, was killed July 30, 1915, less than a mile from where his brother had been wounded in Belgium. 

Both sons wrote poems: Julian, best known for the rousing "Into Battle," is one of the sixteen British war poets commemorated in Westminster Abbey.   His younger brother Billy is one of the lost voices of the war: his only poem was published posthumously in the 1917 anthology The Muse in Arms.  A brief note at the front of the book acknowledges that the poem was contributed to the anthology by his parents.  The younger Grenfell's poem was written in response to the death of John Manners, who was killed in the first weeks of the war on September 1, 1914 when his platoon failed to receive the order to retreat.  Manners' body has never been found.  His name is listed on the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre memorial, along with the names of over 3,700 other British soldiers who have become known as the Missing of the Marne. 

To John

(the Hon. John Manners)

by William Grenfell

O heart-and-soul and careless played
Our little band of brothers,
And never recked the time would come
To change our games for others.
It's joy for those who played with you
To picture now what grace
Was in your mind and single heart
And in your radiant face.
Your light-foot strength by flood and field
For England keener glowed;
To whatsoever things are fair
We know, through you, the road;
Nor is our grief the less thereby;
O swift and strong and dear, good-bye.

Grenfell describes the death of his close friend, a boy he played with, a man he grew up with who was like a brother. The poem proclaims that never could any of them have imagined that they would "change our games" for others – for the deadly game of war that ended the life of John Manners with such blunt finality. 

Writing out of an incredulous sense of what has been lost, Grenfell romanticizes and shapes the experience into something he can hold on to: the game has changed, but his friend's strength and speed were not wasted.  Instead, John Manners has won a more noble victory "For England," and through his sacrifice, those who knew and loved him are able to see more clearly the road to "whatsoever things are fair"-- to an afterlife of glory. 

Critics might argue that "To John" is not a particularly good poem: it lacks vivid images and relies on abstract ideas and clichés.  But it is a poem worth remembering, for it honestly shares the emotions of an experience that is heartbreakingly common in wartime.  For the first thirteen lines, the poem seeks to find comfort in recalling memories of a golden past, in celebrating the meaning of the sacrifice, and in affirming the hope of an afterlife.   The last line subtly shifts in tone, and the heartbreak of the loss breaks through.  The poem closes with a personal and final farewell to a dear friend who was "swift and strong and dear" – none of which were enough to save him.

 

Menin Gate

Grenfell himself was killed in action, joining his friend John Manners as yet another of the hundreds of thousands of the dead of the First World War who have no known grave.  Gerald William Grenfell's name is listed among the missing on the Menin Gate outside Ypres, Belgium.  

*War Cartoon:  (L to R) Charles Lister,  John  Manners, Julian Grenfell, Rupert Brooke, G.W. Grenfell, Hugo Charteris,  Yvo  Charteris (University of Southhampton)

Haunted

Robert Graves

If you had to choose:  the excitement of war or three years of  research and study at a prestigious university?   According to Jon Stallworthy, Robert Graves, a young man who had been awarded a scholarship in Classics to Cambridge after having "spent fourteen of his nineteen years studying Latin and Greek" was thankful for the outbreak of the First World War, seeing it as a reprieve from further drudgery in ancient languages.

Nothing was dull about Graves' experiences on the Somme in July of 1916.  A little more than two weeks after the battle had started, Graves was seriously injured in an artillery barrage:  "One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up, near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation.  The wound over the eye was made by a little chip of marble….This and a finger-wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me.  But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder-blade and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple."  So seriously wounded that he was reported dead (his obituary appeared in The Times, and his family received a letter of death on his twenty-first birthday), Graves survived the war. 

But what did it mean to survive The Great War?  The men who returned to their home towns brought with them experiences they could not forget, terrible memories of the war and of the men whom they had left behind. 

Haunted

Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,
Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing
And lay ghost hands on everything,
But leave the noonday's warm sunshine
To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,
Strangers assume your phantom faces,
You grin at me from daylight places,
Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet
Dead men down the morning street. 

    —Robert Graves (Country Sentiment, 1920)

Beckett and Teeuwisse, The Independent (22 May 2014)

In this poem, it is not the survivors who drink to forget, but the ghosts who carouse, gulp wine, roar through darkness," and "stamp and sing."  The life and energy of the dead who "lay ghost hands on everything" stands in sharp contrast to the hesitant survivor who is "ashamed to greet/Dead men down the morning street." 

Robert Graves

Years after the Armistice, Graves wrote, "Not only did I have no experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from school into the army: I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy [Grave's wife] shared it with me….I knew it would be years before I could face anything but a quiet country life."*

For those who lived to see the end of the war, the most mundane circumstances of each day were colored with death and haunted by the shadows and empty places of the nine million who would never return.  Nations and societies were altered forever, not only by those who were lost, but by those who lived on and could not forget. 

*Graves is best known for his war memoir Goodbye to All That; Tim Kendall in Poetry of the First World War says, "In later years, Graves did not greatly value his soldier poetry, suppressing much of it" (192). 

What may quiet us

WWI grenades in the forests of the Argonne

It's difficult to imagine the destruction that laid waste to the lands and villages where the First World War was fought.  Farmers in France and Belgium continue to unearth bodies and weapons of war, and school children are instructed to avoid unexploded shells and grenades that are found in forests and fields.  Estimates say it will take at least seven hundred years to clear the land from the toxins, weapons, and bodies that remain. 

Leslie Coulson, courtesy of
firstworldwar.com

Leslie Coulson, the son of a London journalist, wrote only one short book of poetry:  From an Outpost was published by his father the year after Coulson's death in 1917.  The poem "Who Made the Law," discovered among his belongings at his death has been reprinted in several anthologies.  The rest of his work is largely unknown.   

In the summer of 1916, billeted near one of the devastated villages of France, Coulson wrote, "I have seen men shattered, dying, dead – all the sad tragedy of war.  And this murder of old stone, and lichened thatches, this shattering of little old churches and homesteads brings the tragedy home to me more acutely.  I think to find an English village like this would almost break my heart."  The heartbreak of a world destroyed echoes in the lines of Coulson's poem "The Rainbow," as it contrasts the ugliness of war with the beauty of nature, considering the ways in which both can be found in the men who fight.    

The Rainbow

Leslie Coulson

I watch the white dawn gleam,

To the thunder of hidden guns.

I hear the hot shells scream
Through skies as sweet as a dream
Where the silver dawn-break runs.
And stabbing of light
Scorches the virginal white.
But I feel in my being the old, high, sanctified thrill,
And I thank the gods that the dawn is beautiful still.

From death that hurtles by
I crouch in the trench day-long,
But up to a cloudless sky
From the ground where our dead men lie
A brown lark soars in song.
Through the tortured air,
Rent by the shrapnel's flare,
Over the troubleless dead he carols his fill,
And I thank the gods that the birds are beautiful still.

Where the parapet is low
And level with the eye
Poppies and cornflowers glow
And the corn sways to and fro
In a pattern against the sky.
The gold stalks hide
Bodies of men who died
Charging at dawn through the dew to be killed or to kill.
I thank the gods that the flowers are beautiful still.

When night falls dark we creep
In silence to our dead.
We dig a few feet deep
And leave them there to sleep -
But blood at night is red,
Yea, even at night,
And a dead man's face is white.
And I dry my hands, that are also trained to kill,
And I look at the stars - for the stars are beautiful still.

The screams of the shells and the stabbing light of the artillery scorch all before them, yet they cannot fully obliterate the skies "sweet as a dream" or the "silver dawn-break."  The air is torn and tortured by the sounds of battle, and yet above the shrapnel's whine and the bodies of the unburied, the lark still "soars in song" and "carols his fill."  Over death-strewn fields, poppies, cornflowers, and fields of wheat continue to grow and blossom.  The poem is unflinching in its vivid depiction of the horrors of war, and yet it searches to find and praise the beauties that somehow endure. 

In the last stanza, as darkness and silence descend, the soldier himself appears as both a thing of beauty and horror.  There is something beautiful about the man who sacrifices his own safety to crawl into No Man's Land and tenderly bury his friends who have died.  He looks to the heavens and his gaze brings the beauty of the stars to the moment.  Yet even the darkness cannot hide the blood and ghastly paleness that mark their bodies, and he recognizes that his own hands "are also trained to kill" and are likely responsible for the death of others.    

Leslie Coulson, Grove Town cemetery

Coulson spent five months on the Somme in 1916, until on October 7^th, his company was ordered to make yet another of the costly attacks along the Western Front, this one at Transloy Ridges.  In the first wave of the assault, Coulson was shot in the chest.  He was carried to a nearby first aid station, then "thanked the stretcher bearers and sent a last message home to his family" (Powell, A Deep Cry).  He died the next day at Grove Town casualty clearing station, south of Albert, France.  No trace of the first aid station remains today, except the British cemetery where 1,392 men are buried. 

 In the early fall of 1916, Coulson wrote to his father, "If I should fall, do not grieve for me.  I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers."  The epitaph that the family paid to have inscribed on his headstone reads "Nothing but well and fair and what may quiet us in a death so noble."  He was twenty-seven years old.