Going Over -- soft as a sigh

Charles GD Roberts

 Wilfred Owen wrote of the "doomed youth" of the First World War, but not all soldiers were young.  The oldest known British soldier to die in the war was a man of 67 who had joined to fight with his three sons (this link to the Telegraph tells the full story). 

Charles G.D. Roberts, honored as the father of Canadian literature, was one of the older poets to serve in the war.  Born in 1860, he had to lie about his age to join the army; he served as a troop instructor in Britain and as a war historian on the Western Front. 

His sixteen-line poem "Going Over" repeats two lines in an evocative patterning that alternates between reality and dream.  The poem is a variant of the French verse form the villanelle.    

Going Over, by Charles G.D. Roberts

A girl's voice in the night troubled my heart. 

Across the roar of the guns, the crash of the shells.
Low and soft as a sigh, clearly I heard it.

Where was the broken parapet, crumbling about me? Where my shadowy comrades, crouching expectant? A girl's voice in the dark troubled my heart.  A dream was the ooze of the trench, the wet clay slipping. A dream the sudden out-flare of the wide-flung Verys. I saw but a garden of lilacs, a-flower in the dusk.  What was the sergeant saying? – I passed it along. – Did I pass it along?  I was breathing the breath of the lilacs. For a girl's voice in the night troubled my heart.  For a girl's voice in the night troubled my heart.  Over!  How the mud sucks!  Vomits red the barrage. But I am far off in the hush of a garden of lilacs. For a girl's voice in the night troubled my heart. Tender and soft as a sigh, clearly I heard it.

French WWI postcard The poem speaks with two voices: the soldier in battle and the lover in a garden may be the same man, but the war has put an impenetrable barrier of experience between them.  It is nearly impossible to reconcile the two identities in the body of one person, and so the poem asks us to enter into a world of alternating realities.  We see the gulf between the two worlds open up in the white space that lies between the title "Going Over," with its charge into the clamor of battle, and the first line's faint call of the "girl's voice in the night."  In the second line, the "roar" and "crash" of war again intrude, but fade into background noise when the girl's voice, "low and soft as a sigh," is clearly heard above the din of the fighting. Clearer than the call of war, the girl's voice speaks of a deeper reality, one that causes the "ooze of the trench" and the "wet clay slipping" beneath the soldier's feet to fade into "a dream."  The soldier, as if drunk on the scent of lilacs "a-flower in the dusk," not only cannot hear his commanding officer – "What was the sergeant saying?" but is unable to remember if he has passed on the order to go over the top.  A part of this man has left the trenches and is fully alive in another moment, "breathing the breath of the lilacs."  The war desperately fights to gain the soldier's attention:  in the time it takes to read the poem's thirteenth line, we feel the sucking mud and are deafened by the barrage of artillery and machine gun fire that "vomits red" in a shower of blood and bone.  During the First World War, the noise of the shelling was so loud that historian Paul Fussell notes those in the southern counties of England, "could literally hear the war" in France and Belgium.  Robert Traynor, in his article "Hearing Loss in the Trenches," explains, "During a bombardment the noise was loud enough to split the eardrums, and it quite commonly caused permanent hearing loss."* But the horrific presence of the war lasts merely for a line before consciousness is pulled back to the only thing that can really trouble this man's heart: the voice of a girl in the night.  The poem closes with the repeated refrain.  Like a meditative whisper, the lines attempt to assure both the soldier and the reader that life and hope wait beyond the trenches and going over the top, whether that life and hope lie in this world or the next.  *Francis Itani's World War I novel Deafening is a powerful and poignant book that explores sound and silence in the war.

The Next War

Wilfred Owen

 One-hundred and twenty-two years ago today, on March 18th, 1893, British poet Wilfred Owen was born in Shropshire, England.  Perhaps the most admired poet of the First World War, Owen is best known for the poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est."

A less familiar poem "The Next War," was written at Craiglockhart Hospital, while he was a patient there being treated for shell shock.  Although the poem was revised by Owen in July of 1918, this is the version that was published in September of 1917 in The Hydra, Craiglockhart's magazine written and edited by patients.

The Next War, by Wilfred Owen

"War's a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true."
- Sassoon

Death Intoxicated, Percy Smith

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death;
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland, –
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, –
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft;
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against his powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death – for Life; not men –  for flags.
                         ------------

"Out there," on the Western Front, death is inconceivably different from anything that can be imagined by those at home in Britain.  On the battlefields, Death is no stranger.  He is an "old chum," with whom men join their voices when his shells sing "aloft."  He is the elderly, phlegmatic uncle who spits and coughs not mucous, but bullets and shrapnel.  He is the trusted servant who performs the most intimate of tasks, shaving men with his scythe, cutting short their beards and their lives.   He is ever-present in the bodies of unburied comrades who shore up the trench walls or who lie in No Man's Land as men eat from their mess-tins.  And as soldiers climb out of their trenches to go over the top, they walk up to Death "quite friendly," despite the "green thick odour of his breath."

Death is a regular member of the company, and the second stanza confidently proclaims that Death is not the enemy of the men who fight.  Who then is the enemy?  Who pays soldiers to submit to death rather than "kick against his powers"?  Who accepts soldiers' death as part of the cost of war?

Canadian Recruiting Poster

Owen's poem is a prophetic voice that warns "better men" of the future against those who will persuade them to fight "greater wars."  The poem warns soldiers against being duped by propaganda to think they are fighting a noble cause for Life, when they are actually only killing men "for flags" – in the service of national interests.

In October of 1917, Owen send a copy of the poem home to his mother.  He wrote that he had included it "to strike a note" and that he wanted his younger brother Colin (who was seventeen at the time) to "read, mark, learn etc it."

Tipperary and the Troops

"It's a long way to Tipperary" is remembered as a song of the First World War, although it was composed before the war in 1912 for British music halls.   In August of 1914, a British news correspondent heard the Irish Connaught Rangers singing the song as they marched through  France on their way to the front lines, and after his report, the popularity of the tune spread, especially after it was recorded by tenor John McCormack (click here for a recording). 

Much like "Keep the Home Fires Burning," another popular song of the First World War, "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" is not a fight song.  As the war wore on, it may have become harder to sing about martial glory, and easier to sing about home and a nostalgia for what the soldiers had given up when they joined the war. 

Chorus:

It's a long way to Tipperary,
It's a long, long way to go.
It's a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know.
Goodbye Piccadilly,
Farewell Leicester Square,
It's a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart lies there.    

According to Imperial War Museum historian Matt Brosnan, the song was catchy enough that it was sung even by French, Russian, and German troops.  William Yorke Stevenson, in his memoir At the Front in a Flivver, describes a 1916 vaudeville show that American ambulance drivers hosted for battle-weary French troops outside Verdun.  He writes, "They asked—no, really begged, us to sing "Tipperary."  Well, we sang it, of course" (149).   The song was everywhere, and so it's not surprising that a poem was written about it.   

Singing 'Tipperary' by William Kersley Holmes

We’ve each our Tipperary, who shout that haunting song,

And all the more worth reaching because the way is long;

You’ll hear the hackneyed chorus until it tires your brain

Unless you feel the thousand hopes disguised in that refrain.

We’ve each our Tipperary – some hamlet, village, town,

To which our ghosts would hasten though we laid our bodies down,

Some spot of little showing our spirits still would seek,

And strive, unseen, to utter what now we fear to speak.

We’ve each our Tipperary, our labour to inspire,

Some mountain-top or haven, some goal of far desire—

Some old forlorn ambition, or humble, happy hope

That shines beyond the doubting with which our spirits cope.

We’ve each our Tipperary—near by or wildly far;

For some it means a fireside, for some it means a star;

For some it’s but a journey by homely roads they know,

For some a spirit’s venture where none but theirs may go.

We’ve each our Tipperary, where rest and love and peace

Mean just a mortal maiden, or Dante’s Beatrice;

We growl a song together, to keep the marching swing,

But who shall dare interpret the chorus that we sing?

Holmes' poem admits that the song has become an earworm that is hackneyed and tires the brain, but beneath its trite sentimentality and bouncing rhythm lie a "thousand hopes disguised."  For the marching soldiers, the song provides a way of giving voice to individual dreams that "now we fear to speak."   "Tipperary" has become a stand-in not only for all the places left behind in the past, but also for the various futures that men despair of never having an opportunity to reach. 

From mountain top to haven, from fireside to star, the poem asserts the differences in the men who have been asked to give up not merely the comforts of home, but their very individual selves.  As they march in step together, it is as a collective noun – a company, a regiment, an army.  Yet the poem invites us to listen beneath the music to the frustration of individuals who must "shout" and "growl" a song together. 

Mayo Peace Park, Castelbar, Ireland

In its closing line, the poem goes one step further and cautions against broad interpretations of soldiers' individual motivations and dreams.  It reminds us that each soldier, whether serving in the Somme or Normandy or Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan -- or any other place or time -- deserves to be remembered with dignity as an individual, and not as an idealized or homogenized cog in the machinery of war.   

Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle

Neuve Chapelle Memorial
photo by Andrew Holmes

One-hundred years ago this week, on March 10th through the 13th of 1915, the British attempted to break through the German line of trenches at Neuve Chapelle.  It is estimated that 40,000 Allied troops were involved in the offensive.  Over 11,500 men were casualties of the battle, and no strategic effect was achieved.

Indian soldiers at Neuve Chapelle, 1915.
(Official British Military painting published in "The Great War" Ed. H.W. Wilson, 1916)

The role of the Indian Army in World War has often been forgotten. Over one million Indian troops served in the war: over 70,000 were killed, and nearly that many were wounded.  In the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the 7th Meerut Division of the Indian Corps led the attack, suffering over 4,200 casualties.
Gabbar Singh Negi was one of those who died in the battle; he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for "his conspicuous acts of bravery and devotion to duty." His body was never found, but his name is recorded on the Neuve Chapelle Indian Memorial that lists the 4,742 Indian soldiers of the war who have no known grave.

H.W. Garrod wrote a poem on the battle (published in Worms and Epitaphs, 1919).  It's brevity and directness need no comment: they shape the meaning of the poem.

Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle

Tell them at home, there's nothing here to hide.
We took our orders, asked no questions, died.

Neuve Chapelle Memorial
CWGC photos

Kneeling in the Mud

 Over 5,000 British priests and pastors served as army chaplains or padres during the First World War.  Their job was to provide spiritual guidance for the soldiers and to boost the morale of the men at the front.  The grim realities of the job included scenes they hardly could have imagined. 

Often stationed just behind the lines at first aid posts and casualty clearing stations, padres ministered to wounded and dying men.  In a war in which bodies were often torn apart or abandoned in No Man's Land, padres assisted in retrieving and identifying soldiers' remains and giving them burial.  They frequently had to deliver news of men's death to their comrades-in-arms, and theirs was the gut-wrenching duty of providing solace to men who had deserted and were to be shot by their fellow soldiers at dawn.  The BBC webpage "Why did chaplains end up on the front line in WW1?" tells more of their stories.   

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was not only a padre, but a poet.  His poem "Lighten our Darkness," shares the struggles of a man wrestling with his faith and his God in the midst of war. 

Lighten our Darkness 

Lighten our darkness, Lord, in bygone years,
Oft have I prayed and thought on childish fears,
Glad in my heart that, when the day was dead,
God's four white angels watched about my bed.

Lighten our darkness! Kneeling in the mud,
My hands still wet and warm with human blood,
Oft have I prayed it! Perils of this night!
Sorrow of soldiers! Mercy, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Black upon the mind
Questions and doubts, so many paths that wind,
Worlds of blind sorrow crying out for sight.
Peace, where is Peace? Lord Jesus, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Stumbling to the end,
Millions of mortals feeling for a friend,
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?
Flame through the darkness, Lord, and give us Light.
    --Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

The poem begins with a memory:  in "bygone years," when he was safe at home and in his bed, a man remembers praying for God's light in response to his "childish fears."  The second stanza repeats the prayer, but this time an exclamation point marks the desperate urgency and need in his very different current circumstances:  "Lighten our darkness!"  Three more exclamation points in the stanza communicate the mental anguish that prompts his call to God. 

He kneels in prayer, not at his own comfortable bedside, but rather in mud on a battlefield, his hands "still wet and warm with human blood."  In the muck and gore of the Western Front, in the darkness and dangers of the night, he calls out to God, simply naming him "Mercy." 

The third stanza again repeats the prayer for light.  Darker than the terrors of the battlefield, however, are the bleak, internal struggles of the mind.  The man's "Questions and doubts" are likened to the maze-like paths of the trench system that are estimated to have stretched for over 25,000 miles if laid end-to-end.  Like the zig-zagging trenches that are shored up with dead bodies and are full of misery and fear, the man's doubts are life-threatening.  From the blackness of his thoughts, "Worlds of blind sorrow" cry out for sight.  Each dead man encapsulates a world of his own -- a home, a family, friends, dreams -- and the padre carries with him worlds and worlds of grief that have blinded him with tears and with the inability to see past the losses. 

 

He begs the question "Peace, where is Peace?" No answer is given, and so he again prays for light, this time addressing Jesus directly.  It is as if the speaker knows that an end to the fighting is nowhere in sight, but if light can be given, he can endure the war.  Light signifies both hope and vision:  he prays for insights that will reveal that the war has purpose or meaning. 

The last stanza extends that prayer: it is not just one man who struggles, but "millions of mortals feeling for a friend" in the darkness.  The double sense of the word "feeling" suggests both emotional attachment and a blind man's reaching out to find the way.     

In the poem's last line, however, the seeker turns from a plea for meaning to a prayer for Presence.  The man asks God to "Flame through the darkness," an image that recalls the pillar of fire that embodied the holy presence of God that led the Moses and the Israelites in their wanderings through the desert.  Like Moses, it is as if the supplicant relinquishes his need for answers and control, saying "If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here" (Exodus 33:14).  Even though he may "stumble to the end," it is possible to move forward if God's flame, whether pillar of fire or candle light, is there with him.   

Studdert Kennedy is one of the best-known and loved chaplains of the First World War. Nicknamed "Woodbine Willie" because he shared cigarettes of that name with soldiers, he was known for his humble willingness to simply stand alongside the fighting men and do what he could to lessen their suffering.  Further details of his life and service can be found here and here. 

When he died on March 8, 1929, as his body lay in state in Liverpool, over 1,700 mourners paid their respects in a single day.  Studdert Kennedy once wrote, "Nobody worries about Christ as long as he can be shut up in churches.  He is quite safe there.  But there is always trouble if you try to let him out."  Studdert Kennedy loved a dangerous God that he wrestled with on the battlefields of the First World War.

Watching the War in the Dark

Movies and war: nearly all of us are familiar with the World War II movies Saving Private Ryan, The Dirty Dozen, and Schindler's List, but it was the First World War that popularized war films.  Released in the fall of 1916, the British documentary The Battle of the Somme was viewed by over twenty-million people, nearly half of the population of Britain at that time.*  Using actual footage from the front lines, the silent film's graphic images of war were unlike anything those on the home front had seen before.  The Dean of Durham Cathedral, Herbert Henson, wrote to The Times, objecting that as an "entertainment it wounds the heart and violates the very sanctity of bereavement." What did it mean to sit in a darkened room with others and watch the war in black and white? 

A War Film by Teresa Hooley

I saw,

With a catch of the breath and the heart's uplifting,

Sorrow and pride,

   The 'week's great draw'—

The Mons Retreat;

The 'Old Contemptibles' who fought and died,

The horror and the anguish and the glory.

As in a dream,

Still hearing the machine-guns rattle and shells scream,

I came out into the street.

When the day was done,

My little son

Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,

Naked upon my knee.

How could he know

The sudden terror that assaulted me?...

The body I had borne

Nine moons beneath my heart,

A part of me…

If, someday,

It should be taken away

To War. Tortured.  Torn.

Slain.

Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain—

My little son…

Yet all those men had mothers, every one.

How should he know

Why I kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name?

He thought that I was daft. 

He thought it was a game,

And laughed, and laughed. 

The poem begins with the simple phrase "I saw" – and then breaks off, as if the poem's speaker herself must pause to process the moving images she has just viewed.  Sorrow and pride co-mingle with horror and glory, and she cannot easily reconcile the contradictions that the film and the war have produced.  The war is presented as entertainment, the "week's great draw," and in cinemas where Charlie Chaplin plays out comic scenes, now it is "The Old Contemptibles" (the nickname given to the men in the British regular army who survived the slaughter of 1914) who "fight and die."

As she exits the cinema, she finds that the real world has also shifted and now appears dream-like.  The young mother tries to return to normal scenes of domesticity, but haunted by the war film, even her young son's bath-time is an assault as she is seized by "sudden terror."  Remembering the great intimacy of carrying her son "Nine moons beneath my heart," she realizes that he, too, will be renamed "It" if he joins the ranks of soldiers: "If someday,/It should be taken away/To War."

The anguish that she has witnessed on the movie screen is now projected onto the body of her young son as she imagines him in a future war, "Tortured. Torn./Slain./Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain—".   The horrors that mutilate and destroy the bodies of the soldiers are starkly and simply listed.  One-word descriptions of death are punctuated as full sentences, echoing the emptiness and demonstrating the inadequacy of words to convey grief and loss. 

Her actions, as she "kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name" appear as a kind of charm to ward off the imagined horrors of the future, but the young boy "thought it was a game."  In this, the child is linked with the men who direct and propagandize war, often associating it with sports and games, selling it as adventure and competition. 

 The poem is at its most poignant in its implicit realization that the young mother is powerless to break the chain of violence.  For women like the speaker of the poem, the game is averting another war.  Published in 1927, the poem and its argument lost the game a mere twelve years later when Hitler's German armies invaded Poland, beginning World War II.    

 *For more on the film, see the excellent resources on the BBC's website "Why Was the Battle of the Somme film bigger than Star Wars"?  The film that inspired Hooley's poem has been debated, as has the date of the poem's composition.  "The War Film" was published in Hooley's 1927 collection Songs of all Seasons, suggesting that the 1926 film Mons was the inspiration for the poem.  For a fuller discussion, see the excellent post "A War Film" on The Bioscope.  

A healing magic

Killed May 13, 1915

A captain in the Royal Horse Guards, Colwyn  Philipps arrived in the Ypres Salient in early November of 1914.  Less than six months later, at the age of 26, he was killed in an attack on German lines.  He has no known grave: his name is one of the 54,896 listed on the Menin Gate memorial. 

When his belongings were sent home to his mother in Wales, the poem "Release" was found among his possessions.

Release by Colwyn Philipps

(Found in his note-book when his kit came home)

There is a healing magic in the night,
The breeze blows cleaner than it did by day,
Forgot the fever of the fuller light,
And sorrow sinks insensibly away
As if some saint a cool white hand did lay
Upon the brow, and calm the restless brain.
The moon looks down with pale unpassioned ray -
Sufficient for the hour is its pain.
Be still and feel the night that hides away earth's stain.
Be still and loose the sense of God in you,
Be still and send your soul into the all,
The vasty distance where the stars shine blue,
No longer antlike on the earth to crawl.
Released from time and sense of great or small,
Float on the pinions of the Night-Queen's wings;
Soar till the swift inevitable fall
Will drag you back into all the world's small things;
Yet for an hour be one with all escaped things.

It is easy to imagine this man who attempts to forget "the fever of the fuller light" as he gazes into the night sky and searches for peace for his "restless brain."  The poem suggests that the night is able to wash this man from the filth of war with its "cleaner" breezes and the darkness that hides "earth's stain."  The night offers the gift of lightness, a time and space when not only can burdens be dropped, but the soul itself can rise above the ant-like, crawling, underground existence of the trenches and join "the vasty distance where the stars shine blue" to be "one with all escaped things." 

The Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt, William Orpen

As if in an attempt at self-hypnosis, three times the poem chants the words "Be still," recalling Psalm 46 and its meditation on God and war:  "He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;/he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;/he burns the chariots with fire./Be still, and know that I am God.”

Staring up at the distant stars, for "an hour" this man experiences "a healing magic" and a respite from the psychological traumas that go undiagnosed for so many who must simply push on and continue to fight.  Then comes the "swift inevitable fall." As certain as the dropping of shells, the return to grim reality drags him back "into all the world's small things": the pettiness of European politics, the trivial gains made by the sacrifice of repeated "over the top" attacks, and the insignificance of individual lives. 

Several months before his death, Philipps wrote home to his mother and described an early battle experience:  "As we went through the first village, we got heavily shelled by the famous Black Marias; they make a noise just like an express train and burst like a clap of thunder, you hear them coming for ten seconds before they burst.  It was very unpleasant, and you need to keep a hold on yourself to prevent ducking – most of the men duck." 

Phillips' posthumously published book of poetry was described by the Welsh Outlook in May 1916 as "a memorial to a very gallant gentleman" in whose verse "at times he lifts the veil and suffers us  to catch glimpses of his inner self, face to face with life's realities."  His poem "Release" also serves as a memorial to all who have experienced the traumas of war, come"face to face with life's realities," and soldiered on.