December of July

Streatley Mill at Sunset, 1859
George Price Boyce

Summer: the season of fireflies, porch swings, day lilies, and beach strolls.  And yet somewhere even now, a war is raging.

One-hundred years ago, during the summer of 1916, a volunteer nurse in the First World War wrote of the enormous gulf that separated the beauty of summer in the English countryside from the carnage that British troops were experiencing at the battle of the Somme.

 July, 1916

Here in happy England the fields are steeped in quiet,
Saving for larks’ song and drone of bumble bees;
The deep lanes are decked with roses all a-riot,
With bryony and vetch and ferny tapestries.
O here a maid would linger to hear the blackbird fluting,
And here a lad might pause by wind-berippled wheat,
The lovers in the bat’s light would hear the brown owl hooting,

A Copse, Evening, 1918
A.Y. Jackson 

Before the latticed lights of home recalled their lagging feet.

But over there in France, the grass is torn and trodden,
Our pastures grow moon daisies, but theirs are strewn with lead.
The fertile, kindly fields are harassed and blood-sodden,
The sheaves they bear for harvesting will be our garnered dead.

But there the lads of England, in peril of advancing,
Have laid their splendid lives down, ungrudging of the cost;
The record—just their names here—means a moment’s careless glancing,
But who can tell the promise, the fulfilment of our lost?

Here in happy England the Summer pours her treasure
Of grasses, of flowers before our heedless feet.
The swallow-haunted streams meander at their pleasure
Through loosestrife and rushes and plumed meadow-sweet.
Yet how shall we forget them, the young men, the splendid,
Who left this golden heritage, who put the Summer by,
Who kept for us our England inviolate, defended,
But by their passing made for us December of July?
-Winifred Mabel Letts

The poem opens in rural England.  Peace settles over the fields and is broken only by birdsong and “the drone of bumble bees,” while just across the English Channel, the drone is that of incoming shells and aeroplane bombing runs.  Sunken English lanes bloom with roses, a stark contrast to the muddy French trenches littered with bodies of the dead.

The tragedy of the Somme is almost unimaginable, but how much more was it so for those hundreds of miles from the front lines? Awash in the poetry of flowers (“bryony and vetch and ferny tapestries”), those in England who waited for word of their loved ones could barely begin to comprehend the barren, blasted landscape of the Western Front.

Winifred Lett’s poem pays homage to the men who fought on the Somme; they left their “golden heritage,” choosing to “put the Summer by.” For some soldiers, the choice was deliberate and measured; others found themselves caught up in and swept along by the Great War; many were conscripts forced to join the colours. The poem reminds us that each of them surrendered the lush promise of Summer overbrimming with life, exchanging it for the task of keeping England “inviolate.”

The poem strikes a note of deep irony, however, as it comments that with their very sacrifice, the deaths of the men who laid down their "splendid lives" brought to England the bitter chill of December.  The desolation of the battlefields travelled across the English Channel, arriving with the unfathomably long lists of the missing, wounded, and dead of the Somme.  Striking deep into the heart of the summer countryside of rural England, July of 1916 was barren, bleak, and dark.

Winifred Mabel Letts

Clockwork toys

Frederic Manning

It began in August of 1914 and was supposed to be over by Christmas of that year, but the Great War proved to be cruelly obstinate. In peacetime, the rural French village of Guillemont was home to less than one-hundred farmers and their families. By the summer of 1916,  the small hamlet was to become an object lesson on the relentless character of the conflict.

Guillemont before the war

Located in the Somme region, Guillemont was one of the key military objectives for Allied forces during the months’ long Battle of the Somme. From July to early September of 1916, repeated attacks were made on the village. The British launched 90 attacks in the area, while the Germans responded with 72 counter-attacks. Assaults were largely uncoordinated and unsupported, resulting in over 300,000 combined casualties, and heavy rains turned the area into a swamp, adding to the misery of the men.

Before the war, Australian writer Frederic Manning had emigrated to England, where he joined a literary circle that included Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Richard Aldington. In October of 1915, Manning enlisted in the British Army.  He served at the Somme, and his poem "Relieved" describes the exhaustion produced by a war that some now feared might never end.

Relieved
(Guillemont)

We are weary and silent;
There is only the rhythm of marching feet;

A Battery Shelled, Percy Wyndham Lewis
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2747)

Though we move tranced we keep it,
As clockwork toys.

But each man is alone in this multitude;
We know not the world in which we move,
Seeing not the dawn, earth pale and shadowy,
Level lands of tenuous grays and greens,
For our eyeballs have been seared with fire.

Only we have our secret thoughts,
Our sense floats out from us delicately apprehensive
To the very fringes of our being,
Where light drowns.
--Frederic Manning

Like wind-up toys, soldiers exhaustedly march in a trance-like state. In this modern industrial war, the men exist in a pale world of grays and muted tones, much like that of the faded photographs by which we now remember them.

Only two flares of light illuminate this shadow world: the fire that has seared the soldiers' eyeballs and the light that drowns at the “very fringes” of their being. The war has cauterized the men's vision, and they apprehensively fumble and “delicately” grasp at reality. Like the blind, troops stumble through darkness.

Although “relieved” (the title of the poem plays on the double meaning of the word, both released from duty and freed from anxiety), each man has learned that he “is alone in this multitude.” The secret thoughts and haunted memories that each soldier harbors threaten to extinguish any brightness that the future might possibly bring.  Amos William Mayse, a Canadian soldier, wrote to his wife,  "I am sure that if spared, I shall wake often with the horror of it all before me & I shall not want to talk much about it either."

The first recorded use of the verb “soldier on” (to doggedly persevere in difficult circumstances) does not occur until 1954, but the infantrymen of the First World War lived out the sense of the idiom. In a letter written in September of 1916 after the village of Guillemont had finally been taken, British officer P.F. Story wrote, “Guillemont was blotted right out, not one brick standing on another – nothing but a sea of crump holes of all sorts and sizes.”*

And yet the war seemed no closer to ending: the Germans fell back and refortified another village, and so it began again.

*Gerald Giddon, Somme 1916: A Battlefield Companion.

The Devil's Grindstone

Recruiting Poster, © IWM (Art.IWM PST 2763)

One of the common myths of the First World War is that nearly all women were strong supporters of the conflict. Contributing to the misunderstanding is the fact that one of the best-known female war poets is Jessie Pope.  A BBC Magazine article has described Pope as “the villain of the war” and “the war poet students love to hate.”  Her often-studied poem, “Who’s for the Game,” encourages men to join the army as it chides, “Who would much rather come back with a crutch/Than lie low and be out of the fun?”*

Yet while there were women writers who supported the war, many others did not. Nosheen Khan, in Women’s Poetry of the First World War, observes that “women were writing protest poetry before Sassoon and Owen” (15). The poem that prompts Khan’s assertion is Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s “He Went for a Soldier,” published in 1916.

He Went for a Soldier

He marched away with a blithe young score of him
With the first volunteers,
Clear-eyed and clean and sound to the core of him,
Blushing under the cheers.
They were fine, new flags that swung a-flying there,
Oh, the pretty girls he glimpsed a-crying there,
Pelting him with pinks and with roses --
Billy, the Soldier Boy!

Not very clear in the kind young heart of him
What the fuss was about,
But the flowers and the flags seemed part of him --
The music drowned his doubt.
It's a fine, brave sight they were a-coming there
To the gay, bold tune they kept a-drumming there,
While the boasting fifes shrilled jauntily --
Billy, the Soldier Boy!

Soon he is one with the blinding smoke of it --
Volley and curse and groan:
Then he has done with the knightly joke of it --
It's rending flesh and bone.

Zonnebeke, by William Orpen
©Tate London T07694

There are pain-crazed animals a-shrieking there
And a warm blood stench that is a-reeking there;
He fights like a rat in a corner --
Billy, the Soldier Boy!

There he lies now, like a ghoulish score of him,
Left on the field for dead:
The ground all round is smeared with the gore of him
Even the leaves are red.
The Thing that was Billy lies a-dying there,
Writhing and a-twisting and a-crying there;
A sickening sun grins down on him --
Billy, the Soldier Boy!

Still not quite clear in the poor wrung heart of him
What the fuss was about,
See where he lies -- or a ghastly part of him --
While life is oozing out:
There are loathsome things he sees a-crawling there;
There are hoarse-voiced crows he hears a-calling there,
Eager for the foul feast spread for them --
Billy, the Soldier Boy!

How much longer, oh Lord, shall we bear it all?
How many more red years?
Story it and glory it and share it all,
In seas of blood and tears?
They are braggart attitudes we've worn so long;
They are tinsel platitudes we've sworn so long --
We who have turned the Devil's Grindstone,
Borne with the hell called War!
          - Ruth Comfort Mitchell

The poem begins with the cheerful musicality of a ballad: blithe, bonny, and “blushing under the cheers,” Billy and scores of other eager young recruits march off to war.  Flags wave in celebration, and young women gaily toss flowers as they encourage the departing soldiers. Although Billy himself is not very clear as to why men are fighting, the shrill notes of the marching band are louder than his doubts.

With all the suddenness of Billy’s own initiation into the horrors of war, the poem’s third stanza plunges into a gruesome realm.  No more a “knightly joke,” the war surrounds the boy soldier until he is one with the smoke and stench, reduced to an animal-like state as he fights for survival “like a rat in a corner.” The fourth stanza is a grotesque parody of the first, as Billy again joins scores of other men, though now they lie mutilated and left for dead in a field “smeared with the gore” of their injuries.

Billy the Soldier Boy never reaches manhood; this ironic hero’s journey begins in naïve adolescence, plunges into bestial fear, and concludes as he writhes in No Man’s Land, a ghastly, torn Thing.  The repeated exuberant refrain of “Billy, the Soldier Boy!” rings darkly satirical, and the sing-song rhyme and meter of the ballad jarringly contrast with the grim imagery.

The poem’s final stanza delivers a bitter condemnation of the “tinsel platitudes” and “braggart attitudes” that have fed the war. These attitudes and platitudes provide the energy that is needed to turn “the Devil’s Grindstone,” until the years run red with the blood of Billy the Soldier Boy and the hundreds of thousands like him.

Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the author of “He Went for a Soldier,” was an American writer born in California in 1882.  Married to Sanborn Young (who would become a California Senator in 1925), Mitchell later became involved in conservative organizations. Her best-known novel, Of Human Kindness, is a defense of gentleman farmers that was written in response to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Mitchell’s anti-war anger was voiced before America entered the First World War: it is likely that censorship would have prevented the poem’s publication after April of 1917.**

Ruth Comfort Mitchell

*Even Jessie Pope's views of the war are more nuanced than the unwavering pro-war view that is typically ascribed to her.  A future post on this blog will share one of her lesser-known poems.
**An interesting companion poem is Mary Gilmore’s “War.”  Although it appeared in The Bulletin April 5, 1917 (titled “The Mother”), this bitter anti-war poem was not included in any of Gilmore's published books of poetry until 1932.

After the Offensive

Theipval 1917, William Orpen
©Imperial War Museum ART2377

War statistics can seem numbingly abstract: what does it mean that an estimated thirty-five million people were killed or wounded in the First World War?  In the conflict that lasted four years and three months, 230 soldiers died every hour that the war continued, and one out of every three British soldiers who was mobilized was a casualty of the war.*

The Battle of the Somme lasted for 4 months and 18 days, from July 1, 1916 – November 18, 1916.  During that time, the British Army lost 481,842 men, while French casualties numbered over 250,000 and German over 235,000.  The first day of the Somme offensive was the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army: British troops suffered 57,470 casualties, and 19,240 British men died.

What was it like to survive the Somme? How did men at the Front make sense of the staggering numbers of dead and wounded?  Theodore van Beek was a junior artillery officer with the Royal Artists; his poem “After the Offensive” expresses the shock and loss of those who are left to soldier on. 

After the Offensive

We Are Making a New World, Paul Nash
©Imperial War Museum ART1146

This is the end of it, this the cold silence

Succeeding the violence

That rioted here.

This is the end of it  – grim and austere.

This is the end of it – where the tide spread,

Runnels of blood

Debris of dead;

This is the end of it:  ebb follows flood.

Waves of strong men

That will surge not again,

Scattered and riven

You lie, and you rot;

What have you not given?

And what – have you got?

                        Theodore H. van Beek

After the terrific noise of the bombardment have ceased, after the shrill whistles signaling the order to attack have sounded, after the rattle of machine gun fire has finally ended– there remains only grim silence.  The spare three-word lines and clipped, emotionless description reflect a world that has been stripped of patriotic rhetoric and glory.  The cold of the silence mirrors the chilled, lifeless bodies strewn across the fields. 

Like a wave that has crashed against the shore at its high mark, the men also have surged forward without effect and are forced to retreat after dissipating their energy. The imagery evokes Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”:  the "waves of strong men" recall Arnold's waves and the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery,” as they sound a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” and faith retreats down “the naked shingles of the world.” 

Perhaps most poignantly, the last stanza of van Beek's poem emphasizes the way in which the dead men are scattered, violently torn both from life and from their comrades. Survivors must live with the knowledge that the men they served with and loved must be left to rot, many without known graves.

The poem doesn’t offer comforting platitudes, but instead concludes with rhetorical questions: could anyone have done any more?  And what was the value of an attack in which so much was given – and so very little was “got”?

Given the poem’s strong anti-war sentiment and its challenge to military authority, it is not surprising that “After the Offensive” was not published until well after the war had ended (it appeared in April of 1919 in the English Republic). However, at some point during the war, van Beek, attired in his military uniform, stood in London and publicly recited his anti-war poetry.  For this act, he was “severely reprimanded.”** His public reading of the poem was another kind of heroic offensive.

 

Percy Smith, Death Marches

*Statistics are taken from Scott Addington’s 2014 book, The Great War 100: The First World War in Infographics. 

**From “Biographical Notes” in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions' The Winter of the World (2008).  

High Wood

London Cemetery and High Wood

The Bois des Foureaux, known to the British as “High Wood,” was the scene of a months-long struggle lasting from July to September of 1916.  Covering an area approximately one-tenth of a square mile (or about 75 acres), High Wood saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Somme.  Over 8.000 British and German men were killed in attacks on the wood. It was called “the rottenest place on the Western Front,” and British Major-General Charles Barter was relieved of his command due to the “wanton waste of men.” 

In 1918, British Lieutenant John Purvis envisioned a time when the war would be over.  Imagining the crowds of tourists who would come to visit the battlefields of the Great War, he wrote of High Wood. 

High Wood

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,
Called by the French, Bois des Furneaux,
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,
July, August and September was the scene
Of long and bitterly contested strife,
By reason of its High commanding site.

Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.
It has been said on good authority
That in the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being....

          Madame, please, 

You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company's property
As souvenirs; you'll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotted off.
Please follow me - this way .....

          the path, sir, please, 

The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched,
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange peel,
There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

—Philip Johnstone (pseudonym for Lt. John Stanley Purvis)

As we mark the centenary of the First World War, it seems appropriate to ask why we visit battlefields. What is it that we hope to achieve or see or feel? Writing in 1942 in the midst of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot composed a poem about another site of pilgrimage, “Little Gidding.” Although written about a seventeenth-century church, Eliot’s words seem strangely appropriate as we reflect today on sites of conflict and remembrance.   

John Stanley Purvis

T.S. Eliot
©National Portrait Gallery,London

      If you came this way, 

     Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
     At any time or at any season,
     It would always be the same: you would have to put off
     Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
     Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
     Or carry report. You are here to kneel
     Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
     Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
     Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
     And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
     They can tell you, being dead: the communication
     Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
     Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
     Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

What did we know of summer?

A Howitzer in Action, William Orpen
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2957)

A wall of sound. A deafening roar. A ceaseless rain of shells. These were soldiers' impressions as they described one of the greatest artillery actions the world had ever seen, the British bombardment that preceded the July 1^st 1916 attack at the Somme. “The din of hundreds of shells whizzing over our heads was like several ghost-like express trains hurtling through the sky,” said Corporal George Ashurt of the Lancashire Fusiliers.

The shelling began on June 24^th and could be heard over 240 miles away in London. For the next six days, more than 1500 heavy guns, often spaced at intervals of less than 30 yards, fired over 1,500,000 artillery and gas shells at German positions. British General Sir Henry Rawlinson is reported to have said, “nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it.”

Rawlinson was quite wrong about the bombardment’s effectiveness at eliminating enemy opposition. British soldiers attacked the German lines on July 1, 1916 , and 20,000 British men were killed, most dying in the first hours of the attack. While bombardments did not kill every man in the trenches, they were a horrific torture to endure. In a letter dated April of 1916, British soldier-poet T.P. Cameron Wilson wrote, “a real bombardment, where the sky is one screaming sheet of metal, is hell indescribable.”  His poem “During the Bombardment,” attempts to communicate the experience. 

During the Bombardment

What did we know of birds?

A Crump, H.S. Williamson

Though the wet woods rang with their blessing,

And the trees were awake and aware with wings,

And the little secrets of mirth, that have no words,

Made even the brambles chuckle, like baby things

Who find their toes too funny for any expressing.  

What did we know of flowers? 

Though the fields were gay with their flaming

Poppies, like joy itself, burning the young green maize,

And spreading their crinkled petals after the showers — 

Cornflower vieing with mustard; and all the three of them shaming

The tired old world with its careful browns and greys.  

What did we know of summer,

The larks, and the dusty clover,

And the little furry things that were busy and starry-eyed?

Each of us wore his brave disguise, like a mummer,

Hoping that no one saw, when the shells came over,

The little boy who was funking — somewhere inside!
     —Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson

The roar and reverberations of an artillery bombardment consume the soldiers who must endure it. During the crash of exploding shells, men become oblivious to the sights and sounds of the world around them, blind to the fields of poppies and cornflowers, deaf to the sounds of birds and wind and woods. 

How loud is a bombardment that can be heard over 200 miles away? First World War bombardments were estimated to reach noise levels of at least 140 decibels, louder than a jackhammer at 50 feet (95 dB), louder than a power mower at 3 feet (107 dB), louder than sandblasting or a rock concert (115 dBs), and well past the point of pain that begins at 125 dBs. Even with hearing protection (which was not issued to men at the Front), 140 decibels is the loudest recommended noise exposure, and short-term exposure at this level is likely to result in permanent damage. 

An experience of this kind alters reality: the poem asks, what did we know of birds, of flowers, of summer? Only the rain of shells and the engulfing noise are real: even a sense of time and of the season are lost in the barrage of death.

Most terrifying of all, the men lose themselves. While their outward appearance remains that of men under fire, they know that this is only a disguise.  Like actors in a drama gone horribly wrong, the soldiers feel themselves to be no more than small boys "funking" — overwhelmed by fear, paralyzed, unable to do what is demanded of them. 

Recent research reported in the New York Times on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (known during World War I as “shell shock”) has revealed startling changes in the brains of those who have survived blast sites. The researchers have concluded, “modern warfare destroys the brain.” 

It is nearly impossible to imagine what men experienced and endured in the trenches of the First World War.  In April of 1916, T.P Cameron Wilson wrote,

“War is about the most unclean thing on earth. There are certain big clean virtues about it – comradeship and a whittling away of non-essentials, and sheer stark triumphs of spirit over shrinking nerves, but it’s the calculated death, the deliberate tearing of young bodies – if you’ve once seen a bright-eyed fellow suddenly turned to a goggling idiot, with his own brains trickling down into his eyes from under his cap – as I’ve done, you’re either a peace-maker or a degenerate.”

T.P. Cameron Wilson did not live to see the peace; he was killed in the German spring offensive of 1918, his body never found.     

T.P. Cameron Wilson