A good death

What is a good death? For soldiers in the First World War – for soldiers in any war -- the thought is never far away.  They have seen instant death as men disappear into a mist of blood at the burst of an artillery shell; they have witnessed men burned by flame, buried in underground tunnels, shot through the bowels, overcome by poisonous gas. 

Albert-Paul Granier was a French heavy artillery gunner at Verdun and the Somme. His poem “La Fièvre” (translated as “Fever” by Ian Higgins) is an account of one man’s delirious conversation with his own heart as he imagines his death. 

Fever

“Heartbeat, heartbeat, why the rush?

Whither the headlong dash,

where are you taking me,

where is this punishing mad gallop

dragging my disheveled life?”

My heart is racing off, up through the clouds,

over the mountains, across the plains –

not Pécopin* himself, on Satan’s thoroughbred,

flew as swift through all those haunted years

as me, on this runaway heart

careering like a wild stallion.

            “Where are you rushing me, heart?”

            “To a white hospital, in a quiet garden,

women softly rustling through the wards,

and, at nightfall, distant tranquil bells

murmuring a call to evensong;

to a white hospital, and a peaceful death,

a woman’s white hand on your pale brow,

and precious words of comfort on her lips.”

            “No, rampaging heart! No!”

French dead at Verdun

            “Fetch my horse!”

-- Sooner the fierce alarm-cry of guns

announcing torrents of thunder-strikes;

and sooner than the nurses’ soft footsteps,

give me merciless flying splintered steel

whizzing invisible just above our heads!

No, heart…

                        Let me die beside rearing guns,

in the mad triumph of this great Epic,

die lying here, in the mud and the blood,

my eyes filled with sky, my heart with stars,

here, soothed by the moon’s affectionate caress,

with a great chunk of steel in my chest!

                        --Albert-Paul Granier, translated by Ian Higgins

Listening to the soldier’s inner dialogue, we experience the terror of his madly pounding heart. His life, already dirty and disordered, is recklessly dragged forward by the fevered racing of his pulse.  Like a powerless rider on a dangerous runaway horse, the man realizes he has lost all control of his future: “where are you taking me?” he asks the wild stallion that beats ferociously in his chest.

In his feverish imagination, his heart answers his query: his journey’s end will be a place of quiet and tranquility, of white stillness and calm. His runaway heart envisions the soldier’s “peaceful death” in a hospital, blessed by the comforting touch of a woman’s hand as he quietly breathes his last. 

And then the nightmare vision takes an unexpected turn: the soldier spurns the headlong gallop towards tranquility, shouting, “No, rampaging heart! No!” Instead, he recklessly embraces the messiness of death in the front lines of battle.  It is here, amid the mud, blood, and deafening roar of the guns, where the chaos of the Great War is transformed into the mad tragedy of “this great Epic.”  There is an honesty in this death of mutilation and gore – “with a great chunk of steel in my chest.” As unnatural as these battle deaths are, it is better that they not be sanitized. The soldier dies alone, but in his last moments, he is deeply connected to the natural world, his eyes “filled with sky,” his “heart with stars.” 

In December of 1916, Albert-Paul Granier volunteered for the air service as a reconnaissance pilot. His book of poems Les Coqs et les Vautours was published in Paris in 1917; he was killed on August 17, 1917 when his plane was shot down over Verdun. He has no known grave.

Forgotten for nearly 90 years, his poems were discovered in 2008 at a rummage sale in Brittany. The volume has been masterfully translated into English by Ian Higgins in Cockerels and Vultures (2013, Saxon books). In his Foreword to the book, Higgins attributes the power of Granier’s poetry to its “paradoxical child-like vulnerability and gritty toughness of a generous mind attempting to encompass and express the unimagined new sorts of nightmare that the war was flinging at ordinary people day by day” (9).

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* Pécopin, a character in the Victor Hugo novel The Story of the Bold Pécopin, makes a deal with the Devil in hopes of returning to his lover.  The Devil keeps Pécopin from his lover for one-hundred years, compelling him to race around the world on a ghostly horse.   

Easter Day 1917

Church Service before Battle (postcard, WWI)

Captain John Eugene Crombie of the 4th Battalion Gordon Highlanders wrote what was most likely his last poem on April 8th, Easter Sunday of 1917. It was the eve of the battle of Arras.  Crombie was killed two weeks later on April 23, 1917.  He was 20 years old.

Easter Day, 1917 -- The Eve of Battle

John Eugene Crombie

I rose and watched the eternal giant of fire
Renew his struggle with the grey monk Dawn,
Slowly, supreme, though broadening streaks of blood
Besmirch the threadbare cloak, and pour his flood
Of life and strength on our yet sleeping choir,
As I went out to church on Easter morn.

Returning with the song of birds and men
Acclaiming victory of throbbing life,
I saw the fairies of the morning shower
Giving to drink each waking blade and flower,
I saw the new world take Communion then --
And now 'tis night and we return to strife.

The bloody struggle of dawn, the sun's flood of light that pours strength on the soldiers, the joined songs of birds and men, and the fairies of the dew that bathe grass and flowers with water: the poem's images juxtapose blood and war with life and song.

He is risen! Christ is risen indeed!  The joyful chorus of Easter morning gives way to the preparations for battle on Easter eve: "And now 'tis night and we return to strife." On Easter Monday, the battle of Arras begun: by the time it ended on May 16, 1917, over 300,000 men were missed, wounded, or dead.

A month earlier, Crombie had written to his mother, "if we hate all that is Prussian, we shall become all that we hate....It is an extraordinary tangle when you think of it. And I am sorry to be pessimistic, but I doubt if it will have helped us to find God. Among the millions actually fighting it seems only to have increased the drunkenness and vice -- perhaps some among those at home, anxious for dear ones fighting, may have learnt to rely on Him.  It is wonderful to think of Peace, and all this ghastliness ended."*

The inscription Crombie's mother chose for her son's headstone reads, From the Ground There Blossoms Red, Life That Shall Endless Be.  

Burial place of J.E. Crombie,
Duisans British Cemetery, photo by Andy Bailey (Flickr)

*Quoted in Anne Powell's A Deep Cry, pp. 239 - 240.

Litany of war

Alice Corbin Henderson

In September of 1914, shortly after the First World War began, the American magazine Poetry announced a war poetry contest: writers were invited to submit poems addressing the war in Europe; the best poems would be published in the November 1914 issue, and the winning poem would be awarded a $100 prize. In her essay “Poetry and War” that appeared in the November war poetry issue, the magazine’s assistant editor, Alice Corbin Henderson, wrote,

“War has actually lost its illusion and its glamour.…The American feeling about the war is a genuine revolt against war, and we have believed that Poetry might help to serve the cause of peace by encouraging the expression of this spirit of protest.”

Most Americans were initially against their country’s involvement in the First World War, and George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 was often cited as support for American neutrality: “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

However, by the time the United States entered the war in April of 1917, the mood of the country had shifted.  Like many other American writers, Alice Corbin Henderson* had joined the Vigilantes, a writers’ syndicate dedicated to composing and publishing patriotic editorials and poetry for “the current crisis.” With over 300 members pledged to the organization, the Vigilantes included such well-known authors as Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay.

Corbin’s poem “A Litany in the Desert” is a litany for war. With the rhythms of a prayer, its chanted repetitions build lengthy lists that reveal the conflicted, complex feelings many Americans held about the bloodshed that was “to make the world safe for democracy.” 

                        A Litany in the Desert

                                    I

      On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains

there is a great welter of steel and flame. I have read

that it is so. I know nothing of it here.

      On the other side of the water there is terrible carnage.

I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.

      I do not know why men fight and die. I do not know

why men sweat and slave. I know nothing of it here.

Sangre de Cristos, photo by Dave Hensley

                                    II

     Out of the peace of your great valleys, America, out of

the depth and silence of your deep canyons,

     Out of the wide stretch of yellow cornfields, out of the

stealthy sweep of your rich prairies,

     Out of the high mountain peaks, out of the intense

purity of your snows,

     Invigorate us, O America.

     Out of the deep peace of your breast, out of the sure

strength of your loins,

     Recreate us, O America.

     Not from the smoke and the fever and fret, not from

the welter of furnaces, from the fierce melting-pot of

cities;

     But from the quiet fields, from the little places, from

the dark lamp-lit nights – from the plains, from the

cabins, from the little house in the mountains,

     Breathe strength upon us:

     And give us the young men who will make us great.

The poem begins with a litany of incomprehension: its first short stanza repeats “I know nothing” and “I do not know” five times.  One can read of the war, its steel and flame, its artillery and bombs, and still “know nothing.” The tragedies of the war are so vast as to seem almost unreal. Although this war of “terrible carnage” appears impossibly distant from the mountains of New Mexico, the very name of the mountains – the Sangre de Cristo (Spanish for blood of Christ) -- carries the echo of another brutal sacrifice of innocence.

The second part of the poem looks not to the war, but turns its gaze to the American landscape.

In “The Soldier,” Rupert Brooke contrasts death in war with the life-giving beauties of the English countryside, its flowers, suns, rivers, and rich earth. In “Litany of the Desert,” Alice Corbin measures war against the sweep of America’s prairies, the depth and silence of its canyons, the purity of its snow-covered mountain peaks, and the peace of its great valleys. The immensity and spirit of America are greater than the scope and horrors of the Great War itself. 

What will bring about the end to this modern industrial war? Not the labors of cities, not the furnaces and smoky factories.  The poem asserts that the war will be vanquished by the spirit of the American land that has been born and bred into the young men who come from quiet fields, mountain cabins, and little places. Invigorated and recreated, taking courage and sure strength from roots sunk deep into the landscape, American soldiers will “make us great” as they set off for war fortified by the freedom inherent in the very bedrock of their country. 

Few people remember Alice Corbin Henderson as a poet, writer, or editor: she is, however, known for her advocacy of Native American rights and her support of Native American arts. She and her husband helped to establish the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.  In an essay on the literature of New Mexico written during the Second World War, Corbin Henderson again shared her sacred reverence for the land, asserting, “the soil itself has the power of re-creating the imaginative vision.”** 

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*The author used her maiden name (Alice Corbin) when writing poetry and her married name (Alice Henderson) when writing prose. She is credited with discovering and promoting the work of poets Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters; Ezra Pound and DH Lawrence were her friends and close colleagues. In reviewing her 1921 collection The Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico, Carl Sandburg said Corbin's poetry was "clean and aloof as the high deliberate table-lands where it was written" (Poetry, XVIII, June 1921). 

** Alice Corbin Henderson, “Literature” in New Mexico: A Guide to the Colorful State, 1940, page 135. 

America at War

James Montgomery Flagg, 1918

America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

                                    --Woodrow Wilson, 1917 War Message to Congress

On April 2, 1917, American president Woodrow Wilson, who had won a close election in November 1916 by campaigning on the slogan He kept us out of the war, called a special session of Congress and asked that the United States declare war on Germany. 

Wilson's War Speech to Congress, April 1917

Wilson argued that Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare – showing no mercy even for hospital ships – demonstrated “reckless lack of compassion or principle” and constituted “warfare against mankind.” He condemned the German government for having “filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within and without.”

Mindful of the large number of German-Americans, Wilson asserted, “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship.  It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering upon that war.”  

But he made it clear that American troops would be called upon to kill German soldiers, estimating that the “addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law” would involve “at least 500,000 men.”

 

NY Times, April 1917

Wilson urged Congress to declare war, proclaiming that the fight would be “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples….The world must be made safe for democracy.” And he reassured the country that their allies in the war (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia) shared these goals.  Referring to the recent Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the tsar, Wilson asked, “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?” The American president seems not to have been gifted with prophetic abilities.

In the wake of Wilson’s address to Congress and the declaration of war that was made four days later on April 6, 1917, many Americans wrote poems that commented on the momentous event. Gertrude Smith was a student at Adelphi College; her poem “America at War” was included in the 1917 volume Poets of the Future: A College Anthology. I can find no further record of the poet nor of any future poems she may have written.

America at War

 

J.C. Leyendecker

America,

If thy sons can go to war

Thinking —

If men democracy-trained can fight

And not glory in it
Or be afraid of it

But earnestly regret that war must be —

If they can follow thy banner

And know

That its red does not represent blood

But sunrise,

That its white

Is not death but deliverance,

That its stars

Are not pilots for warships

But makers of poetry —

O America,

Then shall democracy conquer

And war shall never more be.

            —Gertrude Smith

Unlike many of the early British poems of the Great War written by men who had been educated in the classics and taught to reverence the action and honor of battle,* Smith urges a cerebral approach to the war, one centered in the mind and not the heart.  The “democracy-trained” soldiers of America must regret the war even as they train for combat, and the poem urges American soldiers to repudiate aspirations of glory in battle.

Howard Chandler Christy

The colors of the American flag that will go before the men embody values of hope and deliverance, not bloodshed nor death, and the stars of the flag serve as guides not to warships, but to poets. The closing lines of the poem echo the catchphrase of the conflict that had already dragged on for 979 days: with America's help, this would be “the war to end all wars.”

Smith’s poem was reprinted in Poems of the War and of the Peace, published in 1921. Other poems in the anthology included Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier,” Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen,”and Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Attack.”

One-hundred years later, Smith’s poem “America at War” may seem naïve and idealistic to modern ears, but it echoes Wilson’s speech to Congress and reflects the mood of many Americans in 1917, before Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, and the Meuse-Argonne, before anyone had any way of knowing that 116,516 American soldiers would never return home from the war.

*For example, see Julian Grenfell's "Into Battle."

The Fluke

William H. Smith

John C. Squire

John Collings Squire and William Hammond Smith met while at Blundell’s School when they were students in their mid-to-late teens, sometime between 1901 and 1903. Their friendship continued beyond their early school years; both men attended Cambridge University (Squire at St. John’s and Smith at Sidney Sussex). Smith went on to study art at the Slade School of Fine Art, while Squire assumed the duties of literary editor at the New Statesman. 

When the First World War broke out, Squire was exempted from military service due to poor eyesight, while Smith enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery. Stationed on the Western Front, Smith saw action at Festubert, Hohenzollen Redoubt, Hill 60, Zillebeke, Ploegsteert, the Somme (on 1 July1916, he was at Montauban) Longueval, Lorrette Ridge, High Wood, Butte de Warlancourt and Arras. 

Smith survived some of the most ferocious battles of the war, but was killed on 12 April 1917.  With his battery in a support position, William Smith was assigned to an observation post behind the lines. Leaving cover to gain a better view of the action, he was struck in the head by a stray shell splinter, carried back to the dressing station, and died within an hour.  He was thirty-one.

Smith’s friend J.C. Squire wrote a series of poems attempting to make sense of the senseless loss. The following excerpts are from Squire’s memorial poem for Smith “An Epilogue” (the full text appears in Squire’s Poems: Second Series, 1922). 

I. The Fluke

For two years you went

Through all the worst of it,

Men fell around you, but you did not fall.

Gassed and Wounded,  Eric Kennington
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 4744)

On the Somme when the air was a sea

Of contesting flashes and clouds of smoke,
Your gunners fell fast but you got never a scratch.
And once when you watched from a village tower
(At Longueval, was it?) between our guns and theirs
As men fought in the houses below,
A shell from an English battery came
And tore a hole in the tower below you,
But you were not hurt and remained observing.

And now,
A casual shell has come
And pierced your head,
And the men who were with you, uninjured,
Carried you back,
And you died on the way.

IV. The Landscape

 

Ypres Salient at Dawn, Edward Handley-Read 

You said, that first winter,
That the landscape around Ypres
Reminded you of Chinese paintings:
The green plain, striped with trenches,
The few trees on the plain,
And the puffs of smoke sprinkled over the plain.
You said, when the war was over,
That you would record that green desolation
In flat colours and lines
As a Chinese artist would.
That is what you were going to do.
The plain is still there.

William Hammond Smith is buried in the Athies Communal Cemetery Extension, Pas de Calais, France.  His commanding officer wrote, " I feel his loss very keenly, not only as the loss of a capable officer, but as the loss of a friend whose charming manners had endeared him to all of us, officers and men. No one could have thought less of personal danger than he did, and I cannot help wishing that he had been a little more careful of himself, even at the expense of the observation he was engaged in, for he had been exposing himself fearlessly in an attempt to locate the position reached by our infantry, and this undoubtedly drew the fire which was the cause of his death.” A Cambridge local paper reported, “His death will be deeply regretted by a wide circle of friends at Cambridge and elsewhere, for he was a man of a lovable disposition, combined with high intellectual attainments and lofty ideals."*

J.C. Squire and bulldog believed to be Mamie
c. 1917
(courtesy Squire family)

In addition to “An Epilogue,” Squire remembered his friend William Smith in “To a Bull-dog,” a poem addressed to Smith’s dog, Mamie. The poem has been criticized for its sentimentality, but the excerpt below exposes the grief of a friendship and a future that were stolen by the Great War:

But now I know what a dog doesn't know,
Though you'll thrust your head on my knee,
And try to draw me from the absent-mindedness
That you find so dull in me.

And all your life, you will never know
What I wouldn't tell you even if I could,
That the last time we waved him away
Willy went for good. 

….

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,
While you lie asleep on the floor;
For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of,
And he won't be coming here any more.

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*From the Tonbridge at War web site.

Lovely and absurd

Frances Cornford

How does one make sense of the death of a friend in war?  Frances Cornford shaped her pain into poetry. Cornford was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin and had written poems from a young age.  She was twenty-eight when war broke out in August of 1914 and twenty-nine when she received news of the death of her friend Ferenc Békássy.

A Hungarian scholar and poet who had entered Cambridge in 1911, Békássy left England and his Cambridge friends to join the Austro-Hungarian army soon after war was declared. In a letter dated May 1915, shortly before riding to the Eastern Front, Békássy wrote, “Do you know I think there’s a difference between poets (who write poetry) and other people, that poets take hold of the feelings they have and won’t let go; and other people let feelings have their natural effects and so don’t write poems.”*

Frances Cornford’s poem "Féri Bekassy" was originally titled simply “Féri Dead 1915.”**

We, who must grow old and staid,

Full of wisdom, much afraid,

In our hearts like flowers keep

Love for you until we sleep.

You the brave, and you the young

You of a thousand songs unsung,

Burning brain, and ardent word,

You the lovely and absurd.

Say, on that Galician plain,

Are you arguing again?

Does a trench or ruined tree

Hear your – ‘O, I don’t agree!’

We, who must grow staid and old,

Full of caution, worn and cold,

In our hearts, like flowers keep

Your image, till we also sleep.

In the introduction to Cornford’s Selected Poems, Jane Dowson notes that readers may miss the depths of Cornford’s poetry as they “take the simplicity at face value and miss the undertow,” for nearly all of Cornford’s work is infused with a “sense of the impermanence of all human relationships” (xv-xvi). This poem is simple in its communication of loss and waste, the “thousand songs unsung,” but it touches upon more complex emotions in refusing to idolize the dead. It offers a gentle mockery of Békássy's incautious and ardent intensity and his penchant for philosophical argument. These were the lovely absurdities that made him a dear friend; he is remembered as a man and not as an idealized warrior.

In May of 1915, Békássy wrote what would be his last letter to Noel Olivier, a young woman he had courted: “I am going to the front in five days’ time, and am already feeling quite detached from everything so that nothing interests me very much and the only vivid remembrances are: people.... I’m going gladly, I know it’s very worth taking the risk, and I am sure to get something good out of the war unless I die in it. It’s part of “the good life” just now, that I should go: and the sooner one gives up the idea that the world can be made better than it is, the better. I daresay one can make it happier, but then happiness isn’t the main point, is it?”*

Békássy was killed in action four days after arriving at the Eastern Front on June 22, 1915.  His war poem “1914” can be read on an earlier post on this blog.

Frances Cornford's grave, Cambridge

* Letter excerpted from George Gömöri’s “Ferenc Békássy, Rupert Brooke, and Noel Olivier,” The Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 199, pp. 105-113.

**Originally published in Different Days (1928), the poem was slightly revised, and the version shared in this post is from Cornford’s Collected Poems (1954).