Spring Morning

It’s a Spring Morning

 

It’s a Spring morning, and April, and the world over

Beautiful girls and their lovers wake and laugh with the sun,

And flowers lift their heads, and thrushes call from the gardens,

And the War, the War, is done.

They buried her soldier-lover, heaped the earth over,

Beautiful girls and their lovers wake, but he does not stir,

They buried him cold at night with Love and Youth and Laughter,

And the sad, sad heart of her.

            —May Wedderburn Cannan*

“It’s a Spring Morning” appears in The Splendid Days (1919), the book of poetry May Cannan dedicated to B.B.Q.-C., her fiancé, Bevil Brian Quiller-Couch.  May and Bevil had known each other nearly all their lives, as their fathers were close friends, but they didn’t become engaged until after the war had ended. 

Quiller-Couch had entered the Great War in its early days, and for four years saw some of the heaviest action, fighting with the Royal Field Artillery at Mons, Aisne, the First Battle of Ypres, Festubert, the Somme, the Third Battle of Ypres, and Cambrai. In the first letter he sent to May in early 1915, Bevil wrote, “Things are very quiet now after the strenuous days of the Aisne and Ypres… I hope we shall be dancing together again this time next year.” A year later, he was still in France, and wrote to her from the Somme: “The noise is deafening day and night without even ten minutes peace … we are digging like moles … you should see me, black with dust and dirt, burnt with the sun and always hot.”  In 1917, May sent him a copy of her first published book of poems In War Time, and Bevil replied,

If a heathen can be grateful for a work of art, I feel he must write and thank you for the pleasure it gave to read these poems.  Out here I have read more books than during the rest of my life, not perhaps saying much.

Quiller-Couch’s battery fired their last shots of the war on November 5, 1918. Bevil had earlier written to May, “I shall put in for Paris leave as soon as this is over and just blow into your office”** (she was working with British Intelligence at the War Office in Paris), and on November 13^th, he arrived.  May wrote in her autobiography,

… he fetched me from the Office at one and we walked down to the Pont d’Alma, and there, looking down into the waters of the Seine, hurrying by and having known other wars and other lovers, he asked me to marry him.***

Their reunion lasted five days, during which time they visited Versailles and shared riverside picnics, long walks, and meals in French cafés.  She preserved the memories in the poem “Paris Leave”:

Do you remember, in Paris, how we two dined

On your Leave’s last night,

And the happy people around us who laughed and sang,

And the great blaze of light.

And the big bow-window over the boulevard

Where our table stood,

And the old French waitress who patted your shoulder and

Told us that love was good. 

Bevil confessed to May that he had intended to propose to her before leaving for France in 1914, but after his request for leave was denied, he had come to think the better of it, reasoning that “if my family had to suffer because I was out here it was right that no more should.” May protested his decision, for as she saw it, “In thinking to save me anxiety, dear Heart, he had deprived me of the precious right to be anxious. Going alone to his war he had left me lonely in mine.”º

Required to rejoin his regiment, Bevil marched with them to Germany, where they had been assigned to post-war occupation duty. He wrote of his engagement to his father: “I know one thing—you all love May and will know that I am luckier than I deserve … I was perhaps more in luck in the whole fall of events than any man ought to be.”ºº  As Bevil was scheduled to be demobilised at the end of February, the couple set their wedding date for June 3, 1919.  On February 2, Bevil wrote to May,

I have visions of being with you about the 25^th of this month…. I am writing this in bed as I am very lazy, having caught a small chill.  I have stayed in bed for breakfast; when one lived in holes in the ground I never caught chills which seems rather silly.  It must have been the sudden change.°°°

He died the morning of February 6^th, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic.  May was with his parents in Cornwall at their family home in Fowey when she learned of Bevil's death; she and his father were denied permission to travel to Germany for the funeral.  May wrote,

Fowey War Memorial

I think the whole town mourned for him. They had known him as a small boy in a red beret rowing his dinghy about the harbour, going fishing with Groze the boatman, sailing with his sister and his Oxford friends.  He had a smile, they said, and a greeting for everyone, and in the war when he came on leave, a man grown and with responsibilities heavy upon him and the knowledge of war, there was still the same smile and the same kindly question of how things were with them; the same invincible cheerfulness. 

          The wind blew in salt from the sea, and at night, looking from my window, I could see the riding-lights of the ships in the harbor…. The stars came out and hung above the hill, and dawn came and the ships put out their riding-lights, and the windows went blank and the stars faded—and he would never come home any more.†

Apart from her poem "Rouen," Cannan’s war poetry is seldom included in modern anthologies. Her poems do not bear eye-witness account to combat, nor does she protest the war.  In her autobiography, Cannan explained,

A saying went round, “Went to the war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon.” I had much admired some of Sassoon’s verse but I was not coming home with him.  Someone must go on writing for those who were still convinced of the right of the cause for which they had taken up arms.††

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* Other poems by May Wedderburn Cannan appearing on this blog include “Since They Have Died,” “France,” and “Paris, November 11, 1918.”

** Bevil Quiller-Couch letters cited in Tears of War, edited by Charlotte Fyfe, Cavalier Books, 2000, pp. 39, 54, 67, 88.

*** May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices, Roundwood Press, 1976, p. 139.

º Cannan, Grey Ghosts, pp. 140, 141.

ºº Bevil Quiller-Couch letter cited in Tears of War, p. 92.

ººº Bevil Quiller-Couch letter cited in Tears of War, p. 115.

† Cannan, Grey Ghosts, p. 146.

†† Cannan, Grey Ghosts, p. 113.

Christ in Flanders

"The Great Sacrifice" by James Clark

In the valley of the shadow of death that was the Great War, soldiers and civilians across Europe found comfort in assuring themselves that God was on their side.  Writing long after the war, British soldier-poet Robert Graves recalled that

Christ was being evoked alike by the Germans and the Allies for victory in a new sort of total war. This paradox made most of us English soldiers serving in the purgatorial trenches lose all respect for organized Pauline religion, though still feeling a sympathetic reverence for Jesus as our fellow-sufferer. Cross-road Calvaries emphasized this relationship.”*

As evidence of this common connection forged between Christ and soldiers, Graves quotes an excerpt from Wilfred Owen’s poem “At a Calvary near the Ancre”:

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.

In this war He too lost a limb,

But His disciples hide apart;

And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

In his poem “Solomon in All His Glory,” First World War military chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy likens the “bloody sweaty tatters” of the wounded to “the robes of Jesus Christ,” and Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, writes, “The sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ, is at the heart of countless Great War poems.”**

But perhaps the best-known poem of the war that linked Christ and front-line soldiers was written by a woman on the home front. “Christ in Flanders” was written by Lucy Whitmell, former president of the Leeds Astronomical Society, wife of astronomer Charles Whitmell, and sister of a war nurse.  The poem first appeared in London’s Spectator on September 11th in 1915, and it was reprinted as a leaflet, card, and gospel tract, selling over 50,000 copies.***

Christ in Flanders

British WWI postcard

We had forgotten You, or very nearly —

You did not seem to touch us very nearly — 

Of course we thought about You now and then;

Especially in any time of trouble —

We knew that You were good in time of trouble —

But we are very ordinary men.  

And there were always other things to think of —
There’s lots of things a man has got to think of —
His work, his home, his pleasure, and his wife;
And so we only thought of You on Sunday —
Sometimes, perhaps, not even on a Sunday —
Because there’s always lots to fill one’s life.

And, all the while, in street or lane or byway —
In country lane, in city street, or byway —
You walked among us, and we did not see.
Your feet were bleeding as You walked our pavements —
How did we miss Your footprints on our pavements? —
Can there be other folk as blind as we?

Now we remember; over here in Flanders —

(It isn't strange to think of You in Flanders) —

German WWI postcard

This hideous warfare seems to make things clear.

We never thought about You much in England —

But now that we are far away from England,

We have no doubts, we know that You are here. 

You helped us pass the jest along the trenches —
Where, in cold blood, we waited in the trenches —
You touched its ribaldry and made it fine.
You stood beside us in our pain and weakness —
We're glad to think You understand our weakness —
Somehow it seems to help us not to whine.

We think about You kneeling in the Garden —
Ah! God! the agony of that dread Garden —
We know You prayed for us upon the cross.
If anything could make us glad to bear it —
’Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it —
Pain — death — the uttermost of human loss.

Though we forgot You — You will not forget us —
We feel so sure that You will not forget us —
But stay with us until this dream is past.
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon —
Especially, I think, we ask for pardon —
And that You'll stand beside us to the last.

          —Lucy Whitmell

Contemporary critics have accused the poem of sentimentality, yet “Christ in Flanders” was deeply comforting to many. As literary scholar Amy Helen Bell explains,

Rather than using abstract concepts of Christian spiritual belief, like “glory,” Whitmell imagines how thoughts of Christ help comfort the men in the trenches …. Christ becomes a comrade, a sharer in trench life and its jests.  Though wartime suffering and death is still portrayed as the will of God, it is the will of God humanized, prayed for by a man suffering on his own, personal cross.†

Two years after the poem was first published, the Spectator published another poem, presumably written by a soldier, entitled “To the Writer of ‘Christ in Flanders:’”††

On the battlefields of Flanders men have blessed you in their pain:

For you told us Who was with us, and your words were not in vain.

All you said was very gentle, but we felt you knew our ways;

And we tried to find the Footprints we had missed in other days.

When we found Those blood-stained Footsteps, we have followed to the End;

For we know that only Death can show the features of our Friend.

In the Mansions of the Master, He will make the meaning plain

Of the battlefields of Flanders, of the Crucifix of Pain.

            —E.M.V.

Lucy Whitmell did not live to see the end of the war, but died in May of 1917 and is buried at Lawnswood Cemetery in Adel, a suburb of Leeds.  The inscription on the side of her headstone reads, “She wrote ‘Christ in Flanders.’”

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* Robert Graves, 5 Pens in Hand, Doubleday, 1958, p. 123.

** Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford UP, 2000, p. 119. 

*** “By the Way,” New Outlook, vol. 113, 9 Aug. 1916, p. 878. Additionally, a notice in the Spectator appearing on 14 Sept. 1918 advertised, “Mrs. Whitmell’s poem ‘Christ in Flanders,’ which, since its first appearance in the Spectator for September 11, 1915, has found appreciative readers throughout the English-speaking world, has been set to music by Mr. Henry Guise (Novelle, 2s. net).”

† Amy Helen Bell, “Nought were we spared”: British Women Poets of the Great War, Master’s Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1996, p. 169.

†† E.M.V., “To the Writer of ‘Christ in Flanders,’” Spectator, 13 Jan. 1917, p. 45.  The poem appeared next to another poem featured in this blog: Mary Adair Macdonald’s “Epiphany Vision.”