Winter Warfare

Snow covered ruins on the Western Front,  WFC Holden 1919
© IWM ART 17281

War on the Western Front had always been a grim affair, but the conditions in winter were particularly brutal. Writing home to his wife, Rowland Feilding tells of what the troops endured:

The men are practically without rest. They are wet through much of the time. They are shelled and trench-mortared. They may not be hit, but they are kept in a perpetual state of unrest and strain. They work all night and every night, and a good part of each day, digging and filling sandbags, and repairing the breaches in the breastworks;— that is when they are not on sentry. The temperature is icy. They have not even a blanket. The last two days it has been snowing. They cannot move more than a few feet from their posts: therefore, except when they are actually digging, they cannot keep themselves warm by exercise; and, when they try to sleep, they freeze. At present, they are getting a tablespoon of rum to console them, once in three days.*

Soldier and poet Edgell Rickword also wrote of the merciless conditions in his poem “Winter Warfare.”

Winter Warfare

Colonel Cold strode up the Line

    (Tabs of rime and spurs of ice),

Stiffened all where he did glare,

    Horses, men, and lice.

Visited a forward post,

    Left them burning, ear to foot;

Fingers stuck to biting steel,

    Toes to frozen boot.

Stalked on into No Man’s Land,

    Turned the wire to fleecy wool,

Iron stakes to sugar sticks

    Snapping at a pull.

Those who watched with hoary eyes

    Saw two figures gleaming there;

Hauptmann Kälte, Colonel Cold,

    Gaunt, in the grey air.

Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved

    Glassy eyed, with glinting heel

Stabbing those who lingered there

    Torn by screaming steel.

As men huddle in their trenches, desperate to find warmth in the bone-chilling night, two gleaming figures are seen brazenly marching up the line. They harry the forward observation posts, stalk boldly into No Man’s Land, and menace the men at the front with stabbing knives of frost and ice. The mythic figures of Colonel Cold and Hauptmann Kalte (literally, “Captain Cold” in German) heartlessly torture men on both sides of the Front.

They appear as nightmarish visions of death, gaunt and skeletal, and their glassy eyes betray no human feeling. No one is spared, neither horses, lice, nor men, as the icy commanders leave in their wake toes blackened with frostbite and the searing pain of fingers painfully fused to rifle barrels. While there may be a stern beauty in barbed wire that is frosted like fleecy wool or iron stakes that glisten like sugar sticks, it is a cruel and brittle splendor. 

This is a severe world that is inhospitable to warmth and tender emotions, for in addition to enduring the cold, as the last verse reveals, the men must helplessly watch their comrades who lie wounded between the lines, “torn by screaming steel,” slowly freeze to death. German and British soldiers are united in this: their most implacable enemy is the cold.

Rickword wasn’t assigned to the Western Front until January of 1918; the men who were at the front in the early months of 1917 endured one of the harshest winters of the war. The ground was frozen solid; men slept in their clothing with their boots on under frozen blankets, falling victim to frostbite and trench foot. British soldier Clifford Lane remembers, “The winter was so cold that I felt like crying. In fact, the only time. I didn’t actually cry, but I’d never felt like it before, not even under shell fire.”**

In the midst of these agonizing conditions, one thing that stands out is the courage and endurance of the men who managed to survive.  In another poem, Rickword praised that tenacious spirit that could jest in the midst of war:

In sodden trenches I have heard men speak,

Though numb and wretched, wise and witty things;

And loved them for the stubbornness that clings

Longest to laughter when Death’s pulleys creak...

*Rowland Feilding, letter dated 14 December 1916 from War Letters to a Wife.

**From Podcast 25: Winter 1916-1917, Imperial War Museum’s Voices of the First World War.

An unlikely soldier

Siordet's watercolor of Amara

Gerald Caldwell Siordet was an unlikely soldier. Tall and very thin, he was an aspiring artist, critic, and poet. Friends with John Singer Sargent, Glyn Philpot, and William Morris’s wife, Jane, Siordet also tutored the young Aldous Huxley, preparing him for entry to Oxford. And yet in September of 1914, Siordet volunteered as a soldier, leaving behind his artistic ambitions and his work as an ivories cataloguer at the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Balliol College at Oxford, Siordet’s alma mater, wrote that although he “seemed little suited, either in physique or in temperament, for a soldier’s life, he was probably happier as a soldier than he had ever been before. Both in the poems which he wrote during this period, and in the drawings which were found in his notebooks, there is evidence to show how finely his mind was touched by his new experience.”  

One of those poems was published in the London Times 30 November 1915, under the pen name Gerald Caldwell (I have added stanza breaks in the copy below).

To the Dead

Since in the days that may not come again
The sun has shone for us on English fields,
Since we have marked the years with thanksgiving,
Nor been ungrateful for the loveliness
Which is our England, then tho' we walk no more
The woods together, lie in the grass no more,
For us the long grass blows, the woods are green,
For us the valleys smile, the streams are bright,
For us the kind sun still is comfortable
And the birds sing; and since your feet and mine 
Have trod the lanes together, climbed the hills,

Then in the lanes and on the little hills

Siordet and other officers enroute to Mesopotamia

Our feet are beautiful for evermore.

And you — O if I call you, you will come,

Most loved, most lovely faces of my friends

Who are so safely housed within my heart,

So parcel of this blessed spirit land

Which is my own heart's England, so possest

Of all its ways to walk familiarly

And be at home, that I can count on you,

Loving you so, being loved, to wait for me,

So may I turn me in and by some sweet

Remembered pathway find you once again.

Then we can walk together, I with you,

Or you, or you along some quiet road,

And talk the foolish, old, forgivable talk,

And laugh together; you will turn your head,

Look as you used to look, speak as you spoke,

My friend to me, and I your friend to you.

From Siordet's sketchbook

Only when at the last, by some cross-road,

Our longer shadows, falling on the grass,

Turn us back homeward, and the setting sun

Shines like a golden glory round your head,

There will be something sudden and strange in you.

Then you will lean, and look into my eyes,

And I shall see the bright wound at your side,

And feel the new blood flowing to my heart,

Your blood, beloved, flowing to my heart,

And I shall hear you speaking in my ear—

O not the old, forgivable, foolish talk,

But flames, and exaltations, and desires,

But hopes, and comprehensions, and resolves,

But holy, incommunicable things,

That like immortal birds sing in my breast,

And springing from a fire of sacrifice,

Beat with bright wings about the throne of God.

                                    --Gerald Caldwell Siordet

The poem begins with remembered days of idyllic happiness in the English countryside. And though those days may never return, like Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey, Siordet’s “To the Dead” affirms that landscapes of memory are doubly precious for having been shared with a friend and for the bygone days that they recall.  Men who once wandered rural lanes have died and will never return, but the valleys, woods, and streams are beautiful still, hallowed by memory and by love.  

And whether encased in muddy boots or naked in death, the feet of the dead are also “beautiful forever.” Siordet's poem echoes with religious references, this one from Isaiah 52:7 and Romans 10:15: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.”

Christ and the disciples at Emmaus by Dagnan-Bouveret
Photo by Moira Burke

What are the good tidings that the dead carry? The speaker of the poem trustfully says to those who have died, “if I call you, you will come.” The separation is not permanent. Although they have departed from this life and journeyed ahead, the dead are waiting for those who have loved them until “by some sweet/ Remembered pathway [I] find you once again.”

Once reunited, the men will again find ease in the return of familiar companionship.  At first, the poet imagines that all will be as it once was: there will be shared laughter and “foolish, old, forgivable talk.” Yet as shadows lengthen and night falls, the poem pictures a scene that echoes the story of Christ’s friends on the road to Emmaus immediately after His crucifixion. Although the risen Christ walked and talked with the two disciples, “their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him” (Luke 24:16) until in a moment of epiphany as Christ broke bread, they realized the truth of the resurrection: “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to one another, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road?” (Luke 24: 32-33).

In Siordet’s “To the Dead,” the setting sun casts a halo around the head of his fallen comrade, causing the speaker of the poem to behold “something sudden and strange” in his friend. Leaning close, the dead companion reveals his wounded side (like Christ’s demonstration to the doubting Thomas), and with this revelation, the speaker now hears whispered in his ear not the old foolish talk of youth, but “holy, incommunicable things.” The voice of the dead speaks in “flames and exaltations,” and “like immortal birds,” the good news sings in the speaker’s breast as new blood beats in his heart.  The poem’s allusions to the Holy Spirit and to the tongues of fire that appeared at Pentecost express the wonder of the resurrection and echo the promise of life eternal.

Basra Memorial, Iraq

Siordet was wounded at the Somme and awarded a Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry” in a failed attack that killed one of his closest friends, Geoffrey Smith. Asked to contribute to a memorial book for Smith, Siordet asked that his tribute begin with a verse from the Wisdom of Solomon (3:7): “In the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.” Siordet explained that he had chosen the verse “rather selfishly, because no one but I will really know their significance in his connexion; but in the last moments, before he was hit, while he was running down the line, and came into the shell-hole where I was, he did "shine" with all the grace and keeness of excitement and concentration.”

After recovering from his own injuries of the Somme, Siordet joined the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force in January 1917. He died on February 9, 1917, leading an attack on the Turkish position near Kut-al-Amara. His body was never recovered.  

Nearly all who knew him commented on Siordet's humility and generous spirit, and a fellow officer described him as "one of the bravest men I have known, especially so as this whole ghastly business was possibly more abhorrent to him even than it is to the rest of us."  His name is just one of over forty thousand listed on the Basra Memorial in Iraq, a memorial that remembers British and Commonwealth soldiers of the First World War who died “in the operations in Mesopotamia from the Autumn of 1914 to the end of August 1921 and whose graves are not known.”*  

Siordet's name at Basra, photo 2009

*Soldier and poet J. Howard Stables (The Sorrow that Whistled) is also commemorated at the Basra Memorial.

Eastern Front

Austrians on the Eastern Front, Library of Congress

In his history of the First World War, Winston Churchill titled his account of the battles fought on the Eastern Front The Unknown War.  Largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, the war on the Eastern Front was as strategically important and as deadly as the battles waged in the West.  On the Eastern Front, even conservative estimates state that over 3.5 million soldiers died and as many as 2 million civilians.

Just months after the war began in the early autumn of 1914, Georg Trakl, a young Austrian poet and pharmacist, joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer and was posted to the Austro-Hungarian province of Galacia (what is today part of the Ukraine and Poland). Even before the war, Trakl had battled drug addiction and suicidal tendencies.  What he witnessed on the Eastern Front in Galacia inspired some of the most haunted poetry of the war.

Eastern Front                                                                           Im Osten

The wrath of the people is dark,                                  Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms

Like the wild organ notes of winter storm,                  Gleicht der Volkes finstrer Zorn,

The battle’s crimson wave, a naked                             Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht,

Forest of stars.                                                              Entlaubter Sterne.

With ravaged brows, with silver arms                         Mit zerbrochnen Brauen, silbernen Armen

To dying soldiers night comes beckoning.                  Winkt sterbenden Soldaten die Nacht.

In the shade of the autumn ash                                    Im Schatten der herbstlichen Esche

Ghosts of the fallen are sighing.                                  Seufzen die Geister der Erschlagenen.

Thorny wilderness girdles the town about.                 Dornige Wildnis umgürtet die Stadt.

From bloody doorsteps the moon                               Von blutenden Stufen jagt der Mond

Chases terrified women.                                              Die erschrockenen Frauen.

Wild wolves have poured through the gates.              Wilde Wölfe brachen durchs Tor.

            (trans. Christopher Middleton)

In his book on Trakl’s poetry, James Wright says, “patience is the clue to the understanding of Trakl’s poems. One does not so much read them as explore them. They are not objects which he constructed, but quiet places at the edge of a dark forest where one has to sit still for a long time and listen very carefully.”*

Russian hospital on the Eastern Front, Library of Congress

Listening to the poem, one hears the quiet whimper of fear in the “wild organ notes of winter storm.” The world is shot through with dark anger, and the dim light of moon and stars illuminates scenes of horror: towns overrun by predators, bloody doorsteps, the screams of terrified women, and ghosts of the fallen.  Trakl’s poetry speaks of “luminous terror,”† and if “Eastern Front” conveys a nightmarish, dream-like commentary on the war, Trakl was most likely writing from personal experience.   

Georg Trakl

It is believed that Trakl wrote the poem shortly following the battle of Grodek. In the chaotic aftermath of the carnage, he had been assigned to care for nearly a hundred critically injured soldiers crowded into a barn. Alone with the wounded and dying, as night fell Trakl heard a shot and found that one of the sufferers had shot himself in the head. Seeking to escape the gruesome scene, he fled outside, only to be confronted with the swinging corpses of civilians hanging from the trees.  Shortly after, in early October of 1914, Trakl himself attempted suicide. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and sent to a hospital near Krakow.  Three weeks later, on November 3, 1914, Trakl fatally overdosed on cocaine. 

In a letter written near the end of his short life, Trakl wrote, “It is a nameless unhappiness when one’s world breaks in two.”†† In “Eastern Front” and other poems, Trakl struggles to communicate the unhappiness that cannot be named, the deep sorrows of a world torn apart by war.

*Twenty Poems of George Trakl, James Wright and Robert Bly, p. 4.

†“Review: To the Silenced, Selected Poems of Georg Trakl,” Stephen Watts.

††Quoted in 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, Thomas Harrison, p. 45