Bach and the Sentry

Ivor Gurney

A previous post on this blog was titled “Watching the war in the dark.” It featured the poem “War Film” by Teresa Hooley, which imagines a young mother who sits in a theatre and views a documentary about the war, “With a catch of the breath and the heart's uplifting,/ Sorrow and pride.”

Today’s post could also be titled “Watching the war in the dark,” but this poem is written by musician-turned-soldier Ivor Gurney, who before the war was recognized as a prodigy at the Royal College of Music in London.  In "Bach and the Sentry," Gurney  imagines a man who takes his turn on sentry duty, standing on the firestep of the trench and gazing out over No Man’s Land. 

An Observer, E. Handley Read
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 178)

On the Western Front, opposing armies faced each other from distances that typically ranged from 100 – 300 yards, although in some areas, the opposing trenches were separated by less than 20 yards.  Men lived under the constant threat of sniper fire and night surprise attacks, and so all soldiers rotated shifts at sentry duty. Because it was so very easy to fall asleep while staring into the blackness, military regulations required that sentries be relieved every two hours.  The official penalty for sleeping on sentry duty was death by firing squad. 

Bach and the Sentry

Ivor Gurney

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.

When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man's Land again? 

The poem captures the brief moment when remembered notes of classical music sing into the tense and lonely boredom of sentry duty.  Sounding of hope and delight, memories of Bach’s “dearest Prelude” give life to the deadened scene before the sentry:   the mist assumes the form of a pilgrim traveler and lifts its hood to so that it can be seen and known, and the stars grace the night sky with a majestic and dignified presence.   

The music causes the sentry to dare to contemplate survival -- not "if" but "when" he returns to a world where Bach’s Prelude can ring out on instruments, rather than echoing in a solitary man’s mind.  And yet….although the music will be unchanged, the man who has experienced The Great War fears that he will forever hear the notes differently, as the music cannot help but recall the exhaustion and loneliness of nights spent staring into No Man’s Land.    

Gurney did survive the war, but he returned a changed man.  By 1922, four years after the war’s end, he had attempted suicide several times and was committed to a private asylum near his home in Gloucester.  Twice he attempted to escape, and after being recaptured for the second time, he was moved to an asylum near London.  Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward, the dead war poet, visited Gurney at the Dartford asylum and described finding "a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and dressing gown."  Gurney never left the asylum, but died there in 1937.  Buried in his beloved Gloucester, his gravestone reads, “To the Dear Memory of Ivory Gurney, Musician and Poet, A Lover and Maker of Beauty.” 

You can click on the above video to listen to Bach's Prelude in G Minor.  In the spring of 1917, Ivor Gurney wrote that Bach's Prelude in G Minor “sticks to me in solemn moments.”  He added that while it might qualify as the “dearest Prelude,” the poem wasn't written about a specific composition. 

The ghost of Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley

On October 5^th, 1915, twenty-year-old Charles Sorley wrote to his father describing his time in the trenches outside Loos: “…rain and dirt and damp cold. O for a bath!”  Sorley was known for his love of stormy weather: as a student at Marlborough College, he exulted in wet and windy runs across the trails of Marlborough Downs.   An excerpt from the last stanza of “Song of the Ungirt Runners,” a poem he wrote in early 1915, expresses that passion:

The rain is on our lips,

We do not run for prize.

But the storm the water whips

And the wave howls to the skies.

Eight days after writing his father, on October 13, 1915, in one of the last attacks of the Battle of Loos, Sorley was shot in the head and died instantly.  In the chaos of the battle, his body was never recovered: he is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, along with 20,609 other British and Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave.  His poetry was published three months after his death in the slim volume Marlborough and Other Poems. 

In February 1916, Robert Graves, another soldier poet serving in France, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh that he had “just discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorley” and that “It seems ridiculous to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself doing but he seems to have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having been just my own age.”  In 1918 Graves’ published a volume of his own poems, Fairies and Fusiliers: it includes a poem that remembers Charles Sorley and celebrates a life of action.

Sorley's Weather Shellburst, Zillebeke by Paul Nash When outside the icy rain Comes leaping helter-skelter, Shall I tie my restive brain Snugly under shelter? Shall I make a gentle song Here in my firelit study, When outside the winds blow strong And the lanes are muddy? With old wine and drowsy meats Am I to fill my belly? Shall I glutton here with Keats? Shall I drink with Shelley? Tobacco's pleasant, firelight's good: Poetry makes both better. Clay is wet and so is mud, Winter rains are wetter. Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill, For though the winds come frorley I'm away to the rain-blown hill And the ghost of Sorley.           Robert Graves (1895-1985) Tobacco, firelight, and poetry are pleasant and good, but “Sorley’s Weather” urges readers to put down their books and stride out into rough storms on rain-blown hills.  Experiencing the wildness of nature is far better than retreating to the fireside with the Romantics.  Even Percy Shelly’s meditations on nature (“The wilderness has a mysterious tongue/ Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild”) can be left behind on the window sill.  Sorley’s own poem “Rain,” written in 1912, tells readers where to find him: When the rain is coming down, And all Court is still and bare, And the leaves fall wrinkled, brown, Through the kindly winter air, …. There is something in the rain That would bid me to remain: There is something in the wind That would whisper, "Leave behind All this land of time and rules, Land of bells and early schools. For those mourning the dead and remembering the thousands of every day tragedies of the Western Front, it was windswept hills, mud, and winter rain that were best able to summon the ghosts of the men and boys who would never return.  At the start of the Battle of Loos, torrential rains flooded the trenches, and Graves’ poem calls to mind the conditions of the war, as well as the weather that Sorley loved so well in life.  J.R.R. Tolkien, writing about another rover and warrior, wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  Not long after enlisting, Sorley wrote in a letter home, “Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Powell, A Deep Cry).  For earlier related posts, see Sorley’s “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” and Graves’ “Haunted.”

Back to Rest

CRW Nevinson, Harvest of Battle, ©IWM (Art.IWM ART 1921) 

The Battle of Loos (known to the Germans as Herbstschlacht or Autumn Battle) was the largest British offensive of 1915 on the Western Front.  The battle began at dawn on September 25th, and by the time it ended on October 13th, its story was one that had become horribly familiar: men were ordered to attack heavily fortified machine gun positions, with predictable and tragic results.  The first British use of poison gas killed Germans and British indiscriminately, depending on the direction of the wind, and British attackers suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of whom have no known grave.  A British officer writing after the battle said, “From what I can ascertain, some of the divisions did actually reach the enemy’s trenches, for their bodies can now be seen on the barbed wire.”* 

William Noel Hodgson, youngest child of a vicar and known to his regiment as “Smiler,” was among those who fought at Loos.  In the aftermath of the battle, Hodgson wrote about what the soldiers had endured and how it had changed them. 

Back to Rest

(Composed while marching to Rest Camp

after severe fighting at Loos)

A leaping wind from England,

The skies without a stain,

Clean cut against the morning

Slim poplars after rain,

The foolish notes of sparrows

And starlings in a wood –

After the grime of battle

We know that these are good.

Death whining down from Heaven,

Death roaring from the ground,

Death stinking in the nostril,

Death shrill in every sound,

Doubting we charged and conquered –

Hopeless we struck and stood.

Now when the fight is ended

We know that it was good.

We that have seen the strongest

Cry like a beaten child,

The sanest eyes unholy,

The cleanest hands defiled,

We that have known the heart blood

Less than the lees of wine,

We that have seen men broken,

We know man is divine.

The poem’s opening stanza exults in simply being alive.  With senses acutely aware of the sounds, smells, and sights of life, the poet has cause to marvel at the small miracles of the day.  The wind, weather, birds, and trees rejoice with him, and contrasted with the grime of war, the freshness of rain and the breeze cleanse the men who march to their rest.  Like the Creator of Genesis, they pronounce everything “good.” 

The second stanza is darker; the first four lines lead with the repeated drumbeat of “Death.”  The deafening noise and appalling smells of the battle are overwhelming.  And yet despite horrific conditions, despite the men’s doubts (perhaps in their commanders, perhaps in their own fortitude), and despite their hopelessness (suffering and death seem inevitable), the soldiers attack.  When the fighting has ended and the men realize they have survived, they are able to pronounce even the fighting itself “good.”

The third stanza reveals the horrors of war, as well as its bewildering mystery. Strong and sane before battle, the men returning from the front lines have committed and observed atrocities  that leave them unholy, defiled, and helplessly weeping like children. In his Battalion War Diary, Hodgson writes of finding “six men killed in their sleep by a single shell, a shortfall from their own artillery.  He sees ‘a white hand with a ring on the little finger,’ and, ‘thinking of some girl or wife at home, bends down to recover the ring, and finds that the hand ends abruptly at the wrist.  There is no sign of the owner about’” (Zeepvat’s Before Action** 127).  Men witnessed the brokenness of bodies and minds after battle – and in seeing and surviving even this, they are not diminished, but divine. 

Less than a year later, on July 1, 1916, the opening day of the Somme offensive, Hodgson and the men of the  9^th Devonshires were ordered to attack German trenches near Mametz.  By the end of the day, 159 men of the battalion lay dead in No Man’s Land, including Hodgson, who had been shot through the throat.  The men were buried together in the trench they had left that morning, and the unit’s survivors erected a wooden cross above their graves that read, “The Devonshires held this trench.  The Devonshires hold it still.” 

Devonshire cemetery, Hodgson's grave with wreath

*Rawlinson, quoted in Richard Holmes’ The Little Field-Marshal: A Life of Sir John French, J. Cape, 1981, p. 304.
**Charlotte Zeepvat’s Before Action, is an absorbing and insightful biography of Hodgson.