Wrestling with God

It is commonly accepted that the one of the casualties of the First World War was belief in God.  By the second year of the war, the British public was growing to resent Church of England clergy who supported the war and encouraged others to enlist while they remained safe in their pulpits.
The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, was one of the most enthusiastic war promoters, and his hatred of Germany was so vociferous that even Prime Minister Asquith described the bishop’s rhetoric as “jingoism of the shallowest kind.”

However, approximately 3,000 of the 25,000 Church of England clergy did enlist and accompany troops to the front as military chaplains; they were likely as diverse as the men they served.  Some were scorned, others were loved.  Robert Graves, in his memoir Goodbye to All That, accused Anglican chaplains of being cowardly and out-of-touch, while other soldiers wrote admiringly of regimental chaplains who not only lived with their men, but risked everything to go “over the top” with their units and assist with the wounded.

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was one of the beloved chaplains of the war, known to the troops as Woodbine Willy for his habit of offering cigarettes to the men in his care. Serving in France from December of 1915 until 1919, Studdert Kennedy was also a war poet.  His writings frequently grapple with doubts and questions as he attempts to distinguish between clichés of faith and an authentic spirituality.

As the war dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to see the presence of a loving God in the relentless suffering and death. But unlike other war poets who criticized and dismissed the Christian faith as an empty sham, Studdert Kennedy, like Jacob, wrestled with his God for answers that could stand up under harsh scrutiny.

His poem “Solomon in All His Glory” alludes to the brevity of human life, while affirming the dignity and beauty of each individual’s sacrifice that breaks the heart of God.

Solomon in All His Glory

Still I see them coming, coming,
In their ragged broken line,
Walking wounded in the sunlight,

Wounded at the Somme, 1916

Clothed in majesty divine.

For the fairest of the lilies,
That God's summer ever sees,
Ne'er was clothed in royal beauty
Such as decks the least of these.

Tattered, torn, and bloody khaki,
Gleams of white flesh in the sun,
Raiment worthy of their beauty,
And the great things they have done.

Purple robes and snowy linen
Have for earthly kings sufficed,
But these bloody sweaty tatters
Were the robes of Jesus Christ.
--GA Studdert Kennedy


The poem gazes unflinchingly at the suffering of the men at the front: “Still I see them coming, coming.” It bleakly catalogues the bloody wounds, the torn uniforms, and the immensity of misery as evidenced by the ragged line of walking wounded that stretches out of sight.  And yet the poem also dares to speak of beauty and glory.

Sacrifice Charles Sims © IWM (Art.IWM ART 5581)

The war itself is neither beautiful nor glorious; however, the poem honours the men who have been caught up in it, its sacrificial victims. Their endurance in the face of unimaginable horrors transforms their suffering into something to be reverenced. The ugliness they have witnessed makes even the least of them “fairer than summer lilies.” As well, the poem subversively contrasts the wounded soldiers with the men of power and privilege who have ordered and organized the war.  The muddy brown khaki of the foot soldiers’ ragged uniforms is not transformed into snowy linen; their bloodstained and filthy garments put to shame the distant authorities who deck themselves in royal robes and snowy linen.

In his 1918 book The Hardest Part, Studdert Kennedy wrote, “Beside the wounded tattered soldier who totters down to this dressing station with one arm hanging loose, an earthly king in all his glory looks paltry and absurd.” In their agony, the injured men become Christ-like. They, too, are suffering servants, willing to lay down their lives for others, and in this act, they surpass in both beauty and virtue the kings and bishops who live in a sanitized world distant from the agonies of trench warfare.  The poem whispers that each soldier’s sacrifice is as precious in the sight of God as the death of his only son.

Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, states, “The sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ, is at the heart of countless Great War poems” (119). Many modern readers have dismissed such comparisons between soldiers and Christ as a religious cliché that was used both as an emotional crutch and as a propaganda tool. However, Dr. Michael Snape, Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University cautions,

"We have a tendency to be condescending about our forebears. We're tempted to think we are cleverer than they were. Their religious beliefs seem to be part of their fateful and fatal naivety. But we shouldn't be so willing 100 years after the event to muscle in with our own interpretations of the war, to impose our standards and reactions on them."

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was forever changed by his experience at the front.  The war converted the military chaplain to pacifism, and in his 1923 book The Wicket Gate,  he wrote,

“for God, under any provocation whatsoever, hatred is impossible. He simply cannot hate. Nothing justifies it, not even this Crucifixion. This is the Goodness that would bring us back to realities. Nine-tenths of our wars and battles are fought in the land of dreams, with unreal people and unreal nations, which our hatred and our fear create. Germany hates and fears a monster called Britain, which does not exist; and Britain retaliates by hating and fearing an equally unreal Germany.”

Nearly one-hundred years later, his words are more relevant than ever; he cautions us against the temptation to demonize our enemies as we shape their identities out of our own hatred and fear. Studdert Kennedy’s poem “Solomon in All His Glory” continues to remind us of the sobering cost of war etched in the faces of wounded men as still we “see them coming, coming/ In their ragged broken line.”

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

A fatal romance

La Belle Dame sans Merci by JW Waterhouse

A wandering knight, an enchanted forest, and a cold night sleeping under the stars: in his poem “Bivouacs,” Gilbert Waterhouse of the Essex Regiment uses the language of a medieval quest to describe The Great War. 

This blog has featured other poems that recognize moments of beauty in battle:  Leslie Coulson’s “The Rainbow” argues that even in a trench “the stars are beautiful still”; Carola Oman’s “In the Ypres Sector” marvels that soldiers “have left beauty here in everything,” while Richard Aldington’s “Soliloquy II” finds that even the dead are “More beautiful than one can tell.”

But Gilbert Waterhouse’s “Bivouacs” recalls Romantic poet John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci”; the poem uses the song-like rhythms and repetition of a ballad as it transforms war into a mysterious journey toward the unknown.

Bivouacs

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The nightingales sang all night,
The stars were tangled in the trees
And marvellous intricacies
Of leaf and branch and song and light
Made magic stir in Somecourt Wood.

Nightfall, Zillebeke - Paul Nash

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We slithered in a foot of mire,
The moisture squelching in our boots;
We stumbled over tangled roots,
And ruts and stakes and hidden wire,
Till marvellous intricacies
Of human speech, in divers keys,
Made ebb and flow thro’ Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We bivouacked and slept the night,
The nightingales sang the same
As they had sung before we came.
‘Mid leaf and branch and song and light
And falling dew and watching star.
And all the million things which are
About us and above us took
No more regard of us than
We take in some small midge’s span
Of life, albeit our gunfire shook
The very air in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
I rose while all the others slept,
I seized a star-beam and I crept
Along it and more far along
Till I arrived where throbbing song
Of star and bird and wind and rain
Were one – then I came back again –
But gathered ere I came the dust
Of many stars, and if you must
Know what I wanted with it, hear,
I keep it as a souvenir,
Of that same night in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The cuckoo wakened me at dawn.
The man beside me muttered, “Hell!”
But half a dozen larks as well
Sang in the blue – the curtain drawn
Across where all the stars had been
Was interlaced with tender green,
The birds sang, and I said that if
One didn’t wake so cold and stiff
It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And then the man beside me spoke,
But what he said about it broke
The magic spell in Somecourt Wood.

                        --Gilbert Waterhouse

The poem opens in the magical forest of Somecourt Wood, where “stars were tangled in the trees,” and the leaves and branches are shot through with song and light.  The second and third stanzas complicate the vision: the song and light are actually the shot and shell falling into a forest of blasted trees, tangled wire, and mud.

But the soldier in this narrative deliberately separates himself from the war and from his company. Like the falling dew and watching star that take no notice of the fighting, he rises as other men sleep.  Seizing a star beam, he climbs along it until he arrives at a place where “star and bird and wind and rain” mingle into oneness.  There, he gathers up a handful of “the dust/ Of many stars” as a remembrance of his mystical journey and returns to camp. 

In the cold of the dawn as the men awaken from their uncomfortable night without shelter, the soldier who has dreamily detached himself from the war persists in his re-visioning of experience at the Front.  He chants the name of the wood as a charm (“in Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood), and as he listens to the morning calls of the cuckoo and lark, he remarks that if it weren’t for the chill and stiffness of his own body, “It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.”

Gilbert Waterhouse

But as with so many enchantments, the magic fades. A nearby soldier mutters “Hell” and makes comments that dispel any charmed vision of the bivouac camp.  The poem doesn’t tell us what the other soldier says: perhaps he rails against the enemy’s artillery fire, complains of the filth and mud, or curses the slim odds of surviving the coming attack.

The specifics do not matter. The spell has been broken, and the brutality of the conflict reasserts itself.  Accounts of the First World War include many examples of soldiers fantasizing themselves elsewhere to cope with realities that were too horrific to contemplate. In Charles CD Roberts’ poem “Going Over,” a soldier mentally escapes from the barrage and broken parapet, hearing only “a girl’s voice in the night,” seeing only “a garden of lilacs, a-flower in the dusk.” 

Like the wandering knight in Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the soldier in Gilbert Waterhouse’s “Bivouacs” wakes from his dream and finds himself desolate “on the cold hill’s side.” In both poems, soldier and knight lose their illusions and must confront their final journey into the unknown.  War is the seductress without mercy who lures men to their doom, reducing them to pale skeletons whose “starved lips with horrid warning” foretell inevitable death and whose bones are scattered across No Man’s Land. 

Waterhouse's grave at Serre Rd 2
©Louise Heren

Tragically, Waterhouse himself became one of the lost in No Man's Land. He was last seen at about 9:30 am on the first day of the battle of the Somme as he led his men in the attack on Serre.  It is almost certain that Waterhouse died of his wounds sometime during that awful day, but as the Germans held the ground where he lay, his body was not recovered until the summer of 1917. His story and his family’s suffering is not unique: in his regiment alone on July 1st, 1916, 22 of the 24 officers and 414 of the 606 men of other ranks were killed or wounded.  No magical thinking could prevent the loss.

A Marching Cat

Soldier with kitten, Melbourne 1915
Australian War Memorial

Henry Newbolt’s “A Letter from the Front” is a poem for those who don’t particularly like poetry (it’s also a wonderful poem for cat-lovers). Without rhyme and regular meter, the poem is highly conversational. In fact, other than the line-breaks, it appears more as an actual letter and not a poem. Newbolt shares an entertaining and curious story and doesn’t attempt to affix a moral or explain the point.  Instead, the poem relates an anecdote and invites us to make of it what we will.

A Letter from the Front

I was out early to-day, spying about

From the top of a haystack—such a lovely morning—

And when I mounted again to canter back

I saw across a field in the broad sunlight

A young gunner subaltern, stalking along

Soldier with mascot
Illustrated War News, Vol. 7, London, 1918

With a rook-rifle held at the ready, and – would you believe it? –

A domestic cat, soberly marching behind him. 

So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the youngster,
And shouted out “The top of the morning” to him,
And wished him “Good sport!”—and then I remembered
My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing;

And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only suppose

You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s orders

Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies

By hunting and shooting.”

              But he stood and saluted

And said earnestly, “I beg your pardon, sir,

I was only going out to shoot a sparrow

To feed my cat with.” 

              So there was the whole picture,

The lovely early morning, the occasional shell

Screeching and scattering past us, the empty landscape--

Empty, except for the young gunner saluting,

And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement. 

I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly,

But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous.

                        --Henry Newbolt

It’s a simple tale:  in the midst of war, an officer rides out early on his horse, cantering across the fields and climbing haystacks for a better view of the terrain. As he is preparing to return to the lines, he spies a junior artillery officer artillery crossing the field in front of him, carrying a light rifle designed for shooting birds and accompanied by a house cat. The young soldier and his cat march together soberly, as if forming a small military parade. To see a man hunting with a cat in peace time might appear strange; during war and so close to the front, the scene is absurd and draws from the mounted officer a laugh and a casual greeting: “top of the morning,” and “Good sport!” 

For the moment, the war is forgotten in the “lovely early morning,” but perhaps one of the “occasional shells” that screeches and scatters past recalls the senior officer not only to his rank, but to his duty. He warns the young gunner of the Commander-in-Chief’s order that English officers have been forbidden to “annoy their Allies” by hunting. Earnestly, the young gunner salutes and explains he is only shooting sparrows with which to feed his cat. And as the poem states, “So there was the whole picture.” 

The last two lines of the poem are as strange as the story itself:  they comment that the writer “may be wrong” and may even have “told it badly.” Is the poem unfinished or carelessly crafted? All we are given is the letter writer’s personal opinion that the event was “extremely ludicrous.” We want to shake the author and demand, “What is the meaning of this?” -- and that’s the brilliance of the poem. War is absurd, and nearly everything that happens can only be understood as random and “extremely ludicrous.” 

Almost unbelievably, the jarring contrast between the empty fields of a serene early morning and the “occasional” death-dealing shells that screech and scatter past the men is casually accepted. Both soldiers have become so accustomed to death that the artillery fire is incidental and unremarkable, merely a counterpoint to birdsong. 

Gordon Highlanders (15th Division) with their pet cat "Martinpuich" [IWM]

It’s also highly ironic that the Commander-in-Chief’s order has made it a crime to shoot a sparrow while men are encouraged to kill as many German soldiers as they possibly can. Hunting and shooting that might “annoy” one’s allies is forbidden, while mowing down the enemy with machine gun fire is the duty of every good soldier.

And what of the cat? Soberly marching and anxiously watching, the cat is the only living being that seems to acknowledge the war. It’s estimated that 500,000 cats were sent to the trenches of the First World War.* They provided a valuable service in hunting the mice and rats that infested soldiers’ living quarters; they were used to detect gas; and they became beloved mascots and companions for the troops. Some cats were even credited with saving men’s lives (to read more about cats in the First World War, see this link).   

Henry Newbolt, the author of “Letter from the Front” is most often remembered for his “blind patriotism and poetic propaganda.”** His most famous poem, “Vitai Lampada,” compares battle to a competitive school sporting event. It’s refrain “Play up! play up! and play the game!” was used in World War I recruiting posters. But that poem was published in 1897, and Newbolt grew to dislike both the poem and the attention he received from it, saying on a 1923 speaking tour, “it's a kind of Frankenstein's Monster that I created thirty years ago." 

By 1917 when Newbolt published “Letter from the Front,” he had worked for nearly three years in the British government’s propaganda office.  Perhaps this free-verse poem reveals the emerging consciousness of a writer who, however briefly or obliquely, admits to the absurdity of modern warfare. 

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 *These are the Brave and Fluffy Cats Who Served in World War I, Mark Strauss. 

**The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930, Meredith Martin.

Not a pawn

Békássy at Cambridge

Békássy in uniform

Ferenc Békássy is a poet whose name has been all but forgotten outside his native Hungary.  As a student at King’s College, Cambridge before the war, Békássy competed with Rupert Brooke for the affections of Noël Olivier and was a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. When the First World War broke out in August of 1914, it was Keynes who helped Békássy to return to Austria-Hungary, where he enlisted as a Hussar. Battling against Russian troops on the Eastern Front, Békássy was killed on June 25, 1915,  just days after arriving at the front lines (some sources say he died June 22). He was twenty-two years old.  His poetry was published in 1925 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in the small volume Adriatic and Other Poems. 

Békássy’s poem “1914” recalls Josef Stalin’s quotation, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Over 17 million died in the First World War, a grim statistic. The tragedy of the war is perhaps better understood in stories and poetry. 

1914

He went without fears, went gaily, since go he must,

And drilled and sweated and sang, and rode in the heat and dust

Of the summer; his fellows were round him, as eager as he,

While over the world the gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.

Victorious Assault, R.A. Höger 

  

He fell without a murmur in the noise of battle; found rest

’Midst the roar of hooves on the grass, a bullet struck through his breast.

Perhaps he drowsily lay; for him alone it was still,

And the blood ran out of his body, it had taken so little to kill.

  

So many thousands lay round him, it would need a poet, maybe,

Or a woman, or one of his kindred, to remember that none were as he;

It would need the mother he followed, or the girl he went beside

When he walked the paths of summer in the flush of his gladness and pride,

To know that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled;

Not blood, but the beautiful years of his coming life have been spilled,

The days that should have followed, a house and a home, maybe,

For a thousand may love and marry and nest, but so shall not he.

  

Hungary Landscape Faluszélén Laszlo Neogrady

When the fires are alight in the meadow, the stars in the sky,

And the young moon drives its cattle, the clouds graze silently,

When the cowherds answer each other and their horns sound loud and clear,

A thousand will hear them, but he, who alone understood, will not hear.

His pale poor body is weak, his heart is still, and a dream

His longing, his hope, his sadness. He dies, his full years seem

Drooping palely around, they pass with his breath

Softly, as dreams have an end -- it is not a violent death.

My days and the world’s pass dully, our times are ill;

For men with labour are born, and men, without wishing it, kill.

Shadow and sunshine, twist a crown of thorns for my head!

Mourn, O my sisters! Singly, for a hundred thousand dead.*

Repeatedly, the poem asks us to lay aside our preconceptions and stereotypes so that we may better understand and empathize with the individuals whose lives were forever changed by the First World War. From the first stanza, the young recruit who went to war gaily and eagerly is contrasted with the general mood of the time. We are asked to see his personal reactions as distinct from that time when the “gloomy days of the war dragged heavily.”

This recruit, who set off so gaily, died alone, poignantly isolated from the action around him. Almost in wonder, the poem comments on how little it took to kill this one man, even as thousands lay dead around him in the incomprehensible slaughter of industrial warfare. 

How can such a death be understood? Only by perhaps a poet – or someone who knew and loved the uniqueness of this man. His mother, his sweetheart, his family: they alone would remember his lopsided grin, the tenor of his voice, the mannerisms and moods that were particularly his. Only those who loved him are able to defiantly assert that he was not a unit, not a pawn – he was more than cannon fodder; he was an irreplaceable soul. 

Tragically, not only is the uniqueness of the man gone forever, but also lost is the potential of his particular life, “the days that should have followed.” Carol Ann Duffy also laments this heartbreaking loss of potential in her poem “Last Post,” vainly hoping that time might be rewound and all can be restored.

Hungarian prayer for the fallen

But magical thinking will not rewind the war. The last stanza of Békássy’s “1914” has the feel of a Greek chorus: there is an inevitability to the death of this man and the millions like him, for the “times are ill.” Men kill one another “without wishing it,” while women are left to mourn each of the hundreds of thousands of deaths “singly,” each one a scar upon the heart and an emptiness that can never be filled. 

In his own death, Ferenc Békássy has literally been remembered "singly" at King’s College, Cambridge.  Although he died in the same war as his classmates, Békássy fought with the Central Powers, aligning himself with his home country, England’s enemy. In 1920, British families of those who had lost their sons in the war protested Békássy’s inclusion on the King’s College Chapel Roll of Honour. As a compromise in 1921, his name was inscribed on another wall of the chapel, where he is listed simply as a “Pensioner.” 

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 *To view this poem in Hungarian or to read other Bekassy poems, see this link.