We know

Rail track at Beaucourt, National Library Scotland, D619

The battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916; the death and misery lasted until November 18^th of that year. Sidney Rogerson, an officer with the 2nd battalion of the West Yorkshires, described conditions on the Somme in November of 1916:

I had not gone twenty yards before I encountered the mud, mud which was unique even for the Somme. It was like walking through caramel. At every step the foot stuck fast, and was only wrenched out by a determined effort, bringing away with it several pounds of earth till legs ached in every muscle. No one could struggle through that mud for more than a few yards without rest. Terrible in its clinging consistency, it was the arbiter of destiny, the supreme enemy, paralysing and mocking English and German alike. Distances were measured not in yards but in mud.*

Cemetery at Beaumont-Hamel

From November 13-18, in what has been called the “last shove of the Big Push,” British troops launched their final offensive: the Battle of Ancre. The week-long bombardment before the attack was staggering, with artillery fire twice as heavy as that preceding the July 1^st offensive. Although the attack was considered a success – the towns of St. Pierre Divion, Beaumont Hamel, and Beaucourt were taken – the gains came at great cost: over 22,000 British troops were killed or wounded. 

A.P. Herbert was a young officer with the Royal Naval Division (RND).  His unit was virtually obliterated in the fighting at Beaucourt: of the 435 men who attacked the village, only 20 escaped serious injury or death and were able to continue the fight the following day.  Herbert was one of the twenty; his poem “Beaucourt Revisited” recounts the haunted memories of a survivor.

Beaucourt Revisited

I wandered up to Beaucourt; I took the river track,
And saw the lines we lived in before the Boche went back;
But Peace was now in Pottage, the front was far ahead,
The front had journeyed Eastward, and only left the dead. 

And I thought, how long we lay there, and watched across the wire,
While guns roared round the valley, and set the skies afire!
But now there are homes in HAMEL and tents in the Vale of Hell,
And a camp at suicide corner, where half a regiment fell. 

Beaumont-Hamel

The new troops follow after, and tread the land we won,
To them 'tis so much hill-side re-wrested from the Hun
We only walk with reverence this sullen mile of mud;
The shell-holes hold our history, and half of them our blood. 

Here, at the head of Peche Street, 'twas death to show your face;
To me it seemed like magic to linger in the place;
For me how many spirits hung around the Kentish Caves,
But the new men see no spirits – they only see the graves. 

I found the half-dug ditches we fashioned for the fight,
We lost a score of men there –  young James was killed that night;
I saw the star shells staring, I heard the bullets hail,
But the new troops pass unheeding – they never heard the tale. 

I crossed the blood-red ribbon, that once was No-Man's Land,
I saw a misty daybreak and a creeping minute-hand;
And here the lads went over, and there was Harmsworth shot,
And here was William lying – but the new men know them not. 

And I said, "There is still the river, and still the stiff, stark trees,
To treasure here our story, but there are only these";
But under the white wood crosses the dead men answered low,
" The new men know not BEAUCOURT, but we are here – we know."

            –  A.P. Herbert

Sober and reflective, the poem tells of a soldier who passes the scene of an earlier battle. In the First World War, trench lines hardly moved at all, and so it was not uncommon for battles to be fought repeatedly over the same ground (Edmund Blunden’s poem “Festubert, 1916” also revisits the site of a previous battle and is a thought-provoking companion piece to Herbert’s poem). 

Ancre British cemetery

Although the Front has moved on, the dead have been left behind, and in a series of disorienting flashbacks, the horrors of the past are superimposed upon the present. The speaker sees again the places where “young James was killed,” where Harmsworth fell under gunfire, and where William lay dying, but these scenes of helpless tragedy are now situated well behind the front. Camp sites, homes, and tents have been erected, and only the rows of grave crosses give any hint of the hell that men endured here.

New recruits have been brought up to replace the dead of the earlier battle, but the fresh troops “pass unheeding,” neither wanting nor needing to know the personal stories of those who will never return home nor join the fight again. But the survivor remembers: he lives alone in a surreal world of memory. 

Edwin Dyett

One of the stories that haunted Herbert was that of a fellow officer who was court martialed for failing in his duty in the attack at Beaucourt.  After the war, Herbert published a novel heavily drawing upon his own experiences, The Secret Battle. The novel tells of Harry Penrose, a young officer whose nerves fail him during an attack. Court-martialed for desertion, Penrose is found guilty and shot at dawn for cowardice. His story is almost certainly based upon the true account of twenty-one-year-old Edwin Dyett, also an officer of the RND who was shot by men from his own unit. Blindfolded and tied to a stake, Dyett's last words were, “Well, boys, goodbye.  For God's sake, shoot straight.” 

In his novel, Herbert writes,

Dyett's grave: "If Doing Well Ye Suffer,
This is Acceptable with God"

And if the Court had been able to imagine themselves in Harry’s condition of mind and body, crouching in the wet dark under that bank, faint with weariness and fear, shaken with those blinding, tearing concussions, not knowing what they should do, or what they could do, perhaps they would have said in their hearts, ‘I will believe that story.’ But they could not imagine it.  For they were naturally stout-hearted men, and they had not seen too much war. They were not young enough.**

As Herbert so poignantly argues in his novel and in the poem “Beaucourt Revisited,” perhaps it is only the young and the dead who can fully grasp the hard truths of war.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Rogerson,  Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916.  Mary Borden’s “Song of the Mud” is another source that vividly describes the mud on the Western Front as a hungry, living thing. 

**Herbert, The Secret Battle, pp. 250-251.

Love go lonely

Paris celebrates the Armistice 1918

As the church bells of Shrewsbury rang out on November 11^th, 1918 jubilantly announcing the end of the Great War, a telegram was delivered to an address on Monkmoor Road.  While others celebrated, Tom and Susan Owen received the tragic news that their son Wilfred had been killed just one week before peace was declared.* For all who had lost friends, sons, husbands, brothers, and sweethearts, news of the Armistice was bittersweet.  The war had ended, but the long and lonely work of adjusting to a world irrevocably changed by grief and loss had just begun.**

On the morning of the Armistice, twenty-five-year-old May Wedderburn Cannan was “doing her bit” as a clerical worker in the British War Office located in Paris. As acting head of the women’s espionage section in Paris (a branch of MI5), Cannan recalls that day:

I was called into the Colonel's room ‘to take some notes from the telephone’.... A voice, very clear, thank God, said ‘Ready?’ and began to dictate the Terms of the Armistice. They muttered a bit crowding round me and I said fiercely ‘Oh, shut up, I can't hear’ and the skies didn't fall.
I wrote in my private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could feel my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room round me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically ‘understood’ and got up. I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.†

Sometime soon after, she captured the mood of that first Armistice day in a poem.

Paris, November 11, 1918

Army chaplain tends graves, Carnoy Valley
©IWM (Q4004)

For G.A.H.

Down on the boulevards the crowds went by,
The shouting and the singing died away,
And in the quiet we rose to drink the toasts,
Our hearts uplifted to the hour, the Day:
The King – the Army – Navy – the Allies –
England – and Victory.

And then you turned to me and with low voice
(The tables were abuzz with revelry),
‘I have a toast for you and me,’ you said,
And whispered ‘Absent,’ and we drank
Our unforgotten Dead.
But I saw Love go lonely down the years,
And when I drank, the wine was salt with tears.

                        --May Wedderburn Cannan

As Paris celebrates, two women sit in a café. Throughout the day, they have listened to the boisterous songs and shouts of the crowds, until the deafening celebrations finally begin to die away.  The hour is most likely late, but as the day winds to a close, the women rise from their seats to toast the momentous, world-changing occasion.  Raising their glasses, they list seven abstractions, perhaps echoing the shouts they have heard throughout the day. Acknowledgements and praise are offered to the King, the various branches of the military, the countries of the Allies, their victory, and the day of peace. Even though the surrounding tables are “still abuzz with revelry” the two women stand apart, walled off from the boisterous mood of joy.

May Wedderburn Cannan

And yet resonating down through the years above the shouting and singing of that day is this one private toast: “Absent.”  The women whisper the word, perhaps because the mention of their lost loved ones might spoil others’ joy or taint the peace. Then, quietly and reverently, as if enacting a rite of communion, the women drink their “unforgotten dead.”

The last two lines of the poem are italicized, perhaps to distance them from the celebrations that surround this private scene of grief. Against the backdrop of Parisian gaiety, Love stands alone, gazing into a future of dark emptiness, and the wine has become a cup of bitter passion, brimming with tears. This is a toast not only to the dead, but also to lost futures, dreams never realized, marriages never consummated, children never born, joys never shared. 

Cannan dedicated the poem to “G.A.H.” While the identity of this person is unknown, the poet’s account of her time in France frequently mentions “G.”, a co-worker in the British War Office and fellow lodger at a Paris boarding house. The two women became friends, and in her autobiography, Cannan describes the evening of the Armistice and her return to the small hotel they shared:  

“The Pension produced some champagne at dinner and we drank the loyal toast. And then across the table G. lifted her glass to me and said “Absent.” I did not know her story nor she mine, but I drank to my friends who were dead and to my friends who, wounded, imprisoned, battered, shaken, exhausted, were alive in a new, and a terrible world.”††

________________________________________________________

^*Wilfred Owen, by Guy Cuthbertson.  Yale University Press, 2014.

^**Other poems on the subject include Margaret Sackville’s “Reconciliation,” Marian Allen’s “Out in a gale of fallen leaves,” Mary J. Henderson’s “The Seed Merchant’s Son,” and Anna Gordon Keown’s “Reported Missing.”

†From Cannan’s autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices. Roundwood Press, 1976.

††From Cannan’s autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices. Roundwood Press, 1976.