Their only crime

“Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible.  The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience and for his tendency toward undue familiarity. The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.”

            —“Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops,” sent August 7, 1918 from Colonel J.L.A. Linard with the A.E.F. to the French Army. Later published by W.E.B. DuBois in the Crisis, May 1919, pp. 16-18.

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

Over 350,000 black Americans were inducted into the American Army during the First World War, but units were strictly segregated by race, and black soldiers were assigned to hard labor and low status jobs (such as the grave digging, exhumation, and reburial work of the war). Few black units saw combat; an exception were the units who were assigned to the French military, where they fought with bravery and distinction. In the American Army of the First World War, racism was not only accepted, but often enforced. 

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. has been described as a “forerunner of the African American cultural renaissance of the 1920s,”* and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance notes that his poetry and one-act play On the Fields of France  provide an important contribution to First World War literature.  Cotter’s poem “O Little David, Play on Your Harp” uses a well-known African-American spiritual to frame the oppression and misery of war, genocide, and racism.  You can listen here to a 1919 recording of the song performed by Lt. Noble Sissle and Lt. James Reese Europe of the 369^th Harlem Hellfighters.

O Little David, Play on Your Harp

O Little David, play on your harp,
That ivory harp with the golden strings
And sing as you did in Jewry Land,
Of the Prince of Peace and the God of Love
And the Coming Christ Immanuel.
O Little David, play on your harp.

A seething world is gone stark mad;

And is drunk with the blood,
Gorged with the flesh,
Blinded with the ashes
Of her millions of dead.
From out it all and over all
There stands, years old and fully grown,
A monster in the guise of man.
He is of war and not of war;
Born in peace,
Nurtured in arrogant pride and greed,
World-creature is he and native to no land.
And war itself is merciful
When measured by his deeds.
Beneath the Crescent
Lie a people maimed;
Their only sin—
That they worship God.
On Russia’s steppes
Is a race in tears;

Crisis, June 1918

Their one offense—
That they would be themselves.
On Flanders plains
Is a nation raped;
A bleeding gift
Of “Kultur’s” conquering creed.
And in every land
Are black folk scourged;
Their only crime—
That they dare be men.

O Little David, play on your harp,
That ivory harp with the golden strings;
And psalm anew your songs of Peace,
Of the soothing calm of a Brotherly Love,
And the saving grace of a Mighty God.
O Little David, play on your harp.

            —Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

The celebratory refrain of the Negro spiritual contrasts sharply with a “seething world” that has “gone stark mad.”** Spiraling out of control, the world at war is drunk on blood, sated by the decaying bodies of the dead, and blinded by the ashes of destruction. 

Yet bigger than the war and more terrible than even its slaughter, a monster “of war and not of war” towers over all. This fiend, born in peace, raised by pride, and fed by greed, is a citizen of every nation, and he wears a human disguise. In the Ottoman Empire (“beneath the Crescent”), he has directed the massacre of the Armenians; in Russia’s pogroms, he has murdered thousands of Jews; and he has brutally commanded German atrocities in occupied Belgium. Cotter’s poem unites these victims of deadly prejudice with blacks who are whipped and beaten “in every land”; their only crime is daring to believe themselves fully human. 

Many black Americans hoped the war that was to “make the world safe for democracy” would also address the racism that was prevalent in America. In “O Little David,” Cotter challenges his audience to acknowledge that the enemy within, the “monster in the guise of man,” is as terrible a foe as any to be encountered on the battlefields of Europe. 

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*James Robert Payne, “Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford, 2001, p. 90.

**The subject of the song, however, is relevant to the poem’s message. David’s harp playing was commanded by King Saul, who employed the boy to soothe his mad rages (I Samuel 16), and the young shepherd shocked Israel’s army with his courage and skill in fighting the colossal Goliath (I Samuel 17). 

War Song

La Guerre, Henri Rousseau (1894), Musee d'Orsay

And so, then, for all in time of war, here

are the cockerels, clamouring defiance,

and the vultures, ponderous with hate,

talons stained with the blood of memories.

            —epigraph from Granier’s Cockerels and Vultures, 1917

French artillery officer Albert-Paul Granier was born in the Atlantic coastal village of Le Croisic in September of 1888. He was raised in a home where he was surrounded by music; Gabriel Fauré was a family friend. Although Granier studied law and qualified as a solicitor, in his spare time he composed music and was an accomplished pianist.  In the years before the Great War, he was also a “Sunday poet,” having “enough leisure time for artistic activity.”*

Albert-Paul Granier

Joining the French army in August of 1914, Granier was assigned to the 116^th Heavy Artillery regiment; in 1916 his unit was stationed at Verdun in support of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. By 1917, Granier had volunteered and been reassigned as an aerial observer, accompanying pilots on reconnaissance missions in the Verdun sector.

Granier recorded his impressions of the war in startlingly modern poetry that has been compared to that of Apollinaire. His only book of poems, Les Coqs et les Vautours (translated as Cockerels and Vultures), was published in Paris in 1917.**

Even his earliest poems, written in 1914, evoke the surreal violence of war in a world gone mad (a video performance of the poem in French can be viewed here).

War Song

Dame Death is joyously dancing,

a drunken, hip-swinging jig,

never a word, just wriggling

and playfully juggling skulls

like so many knucklebones.

Dance of Death, Felicien Rops

Dame Death is glad, and very drunk—

for there’s blood in full flow out there,

a heavy red brookful in every ravine.

Accompanying her weird dancing

is the tom-tom of guns in the distance:

“Tom-tom-tom! tom-tom-tom! Come then, White Lady,

come dance to the sound of the drums!”

Dame Death’s getting drunker and splashing

her sweet little face with blood,

like a child who’s been eating the jam.

Dame Death is paddling in blood,

and slapping down into it with her long hands,

as though she were washing her shroud;

wallowing, and silently sniggering.

Dame Death is flushed, writhing, dancing

like a girl who’s had too much drink.

“Hey, Death, get your hopping in time

with the tom-tom of guns in the distance!”

—Tomtomtom-tomtomtom!

                        The guns in the distance

quicken their murderous presto,

guns laughing together in rhythm;

the guns in the band force the tempo,

whipping her up for The Jubilation Ball:

“Spin on those dainty slim feet,

squirm the meat off those sinuous hips,

get waltzing and whirling, White Lady!
dancing and skipping! waving your arms!

Here’s blood, here’s blood!

And here’s some more, to keep you going!

Come on now, drink up! totter and reel!

This is the start of the Orgy in Red!”

Dame Death is dancing, insanely drunk,

to the tom-tom of guns in the distance.

                        --1914, Albert-Paul Granier, translated by Ian Higgins

Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle
Hartmann Schedel 1440-1514

Granier’s “Chanson de Guerre” is a highly unsettling portrayal of death as both a gleeful child and a drunken, dancing woman.  Death appears not as the Grim Reaper, but as a child whose “sweet little face” is smeared with blood as if it were jam.  Nightmarishly, this vision of Death playfully juggles skulls and blithely paddles in blood.  At the same time, Death appears as a highly sexualized woman, “flushed, writhing, dancing/ like a girl who’s had too much drink.” She wriggles her “sinuous hips” and welcomes “the Orgy in Red.”

What the child and the prostitute share is an eerie, inappropriate, unstoppable laughter. They thrill at the carnage and laugh at the slaughter; to Death, the war is a joyous event (the British trench poet Julian Grenfell writes quite differently about the “Joy of Battle” at which Death “moans and sings”). 

In Granier’s “War Song,” Death celebrates her addiction to bloodshed. She cannot get enough of her favorite brew, and there’s so very much of it – enough blood to wash in, to wallow in, and to guzzle from “the heavy red brookful” that fills every ravine.  Death rhapsodizes, “Here’s blood, here’s blood!/ And here’s some more, to keep you busy!”

French gunner, 1916

What is it that drives Death’s precarious and tottering dance on her “dainty thin heels”?  She wriggles and writhes to the hypnotic drumbeat of the guns that laugh and “quicken their murderous presto.” As a heavy artillery gunner, Granier would have been intimately acquainted with the rhythmic beat of shellfire as he and his unit tuned the music of their artillery batteries.

Granier’s “War Song” might seem to paint an exaggerated picture of death in the First World War, but the statistics are even more shocking. How much blood? How much death?  During the duration of the war, on average, nearly 900 French soldiers were killed every day; of the 8.4 million French soldiers who were mobilized, 1.3 million died and 4.2 million were wounded. Over 73% of the French troops who entered the war became casualties of the war.† 

Less than three weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday, on August 17, 1917 Albert-Paul Granier was killed while flying as an observer over the Verdun battlefield. His plane was hit by a shell, and no trace of his body was ever found. He is honored in the Pantheon in Paris, his name appearing alongside those of 560 other French writers who died in the Great War.

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*Jean Leclercq, “Albert-Paul Granier, the unknown soldier poet,” Le Mot Juste en Anglais, posted 5 April 2015.

**Despite receiving a commendation from the Académie française in 1918, the book was soon forgotten and only rediscovered in 2008 after a copy was found at a French flea market. Further discussion of Granier and his poetry can be read on this blog at the post “A good death.”

†The average number of French killed each day of the First World War is taken from “War Losses (France), 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. The statistics on French total casualties during the war are from C.N. Trueman, “First World War Casualties,” The History Learning Site, posted 17 April 2015.  

Lost at sea

RMS Alcantara, former ocean liner, sunk in combat 1916
Charles Edward Dixon

While images of the First World War are inextricably linked to the trenches of the Western Front, over 44,000 British men lost their lives at sea, and an estimated 35,000 German sailors died in the war.* The war at sea was more important than most realize: Germany’s attempt to build a powerful navy and threaten Britain’s domination of the seas was a key factor leading to the outbreak of war, and Britain’s naval blockade of Germany was critical in ending the conflict.      

RMS Baltic, before conversion to military transport ship

Dreadnought battleships, developed at the start of the century, were equipped with guns that fired at ranges of nearly 20 miles, while submarines launched torpedo attacks with devastating results (the best known sinking was that of the RMS Lusitania in 1915, in which 1,198 passengers died).  But in the race for naval supremacy, many civilian ships, including luxury ocean liners, were also requisitioned and re-fitted for military service. The “Big Four” of the White Star Line (the RMS Celtic, RMS Cedric, RMS Baltic, and RMS Adriatic) –some of the world’s largest ships— all served in the British Navy in the First World War. 

Henry Smalley Sarson was born in London, but emigrated to Canada and was working as a farmer when war broke out in 1914.  On September 25, 1914, he enlisted in the army and pledged “to serve in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force, and to be attached to any area of the service therin, for the term of one year, or during the war now existing between Great Britain and Germany should that war last longer than one year.”** Sarson was wounded in 1916 while serving with the Canadian Field Ambulance; he published a small volume of poetry From Field and Hospital that same year.

The Armed Liner

The dull gray paint of war

Covering the shining brass and gleaming decks

That once re-echoed to the steps of youth.

That was before

The storms of destiny made ghastly wrecks

Of Peace, the Right and Truth.

Impromptu dances, colored lights and laughter,

Lovers watching the phosphorescent waves,

Now gaping guns, a whistling shell; and after

So many wandering graves.

                        —H. Smalley Sarson

Those who lived during the Great War were gripped by a sense of the catastrophic changes it caused.  What once was bright and shining is now coated with the “dull gray paint of war.” Decks that previously echoed with the steps of spirited young men and women have been swamped by “the storms of destiny,” leaving in ruins the abstract ideals that had provided hope and stability. Gone are the luxury ocean liners, the leisurely lovers, and the light-hearted dancers; ugliness and impermanence now mark the world.† 

Philip Genders, killed at Jutland
 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 

The final lines of the poem offer a bleak picture of the future: muzzles of the ship’s guns gape with an insatiable appetite for yet more blood and death, while the bodies of those who die at sea can find no final resting place. Their graves wander with the ocean currents, denying their loved ones the opportunity of choosing an inscription, making a visit, or marking the burial site.   

After the First World War, the British built memorials at Plymouth, Chatham, and Portsmouth for their sailors who have no known grave but the sea.  In 1936, Germany completed its World War I naval memorial at Laboe, but in 1952, the memorial’s purpose was expanded to “commemorate fallen sailors of all nations.” While the change was made due to political pressures following the Second World War, it is in keeping with George Bruce’s 1884 reflection on those who die at sea:

The sea is the largest cemetery, and its slumberers sleep without a monument. All other graveyards show symbols of distinction between great and small, rich and poor: but in the ocean cemetery, the king, the clown, the prince, and the peasant are alike undistinguishable.††

Portsmouth Naval Memorial

*British naval casualties figures appear in the article published on Ancestry’s website, “Revealed: 1-in-3 British Naval Heroes Were Underage.” The figure for German naval deaths can be found in Alison Smale’s, “Militarism and Humiliation Cast Shadow on Germany,” published online by the New York Times, 26 June 2014.   

**Sarson’s attestation papers can be found at the Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War, “Henry Smalley Sarson.”

†For other poems on ships and ghosts of the dead, see Rupert Brooke’s “Fragment” and John Allan Wyeth’s “The Transport.”

††George Bruce, Wrecks and reminiscences of St. Andrews Bay, John Leng & Company, 1884, p. 413.

Eating chip potatoes

British soldiers at the Somme, Oct. 1916 © IWM (Q 1580)

Historian Paul Fussell, writing in The Great War and Modern Memory, describes the growing sense contemporaries held that the Great War “might be endless”: 

One did not have to be a lunatic or a particularly despondent visionary to conceive quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and attrition would go on infinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience.*

Bruce Bairnsfather:
"Well, Alfred, 'ow are the cakes?"

Yet while it seemed as if the war might last forever, those caught in its grip became increasingly aware of the evanescent quality of human life.  In her memoir Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain explains,

France was the scene of titanic, illimitable death, and for this very reason it had become the heart of the fiercest living ever known to any generation. Nothing was permanent; everyone and everything was always on the move; friendships were temporary, appointments were temporary, life itself was the most temporary of all.** 

For some, fiercely living in the present meant extracting whatever small and simple pleasures might be available in the existing circumstances. William Kersley Holmes was a banker who joined the Lothians and Border Horse Yeomanry regiment and was promoted to the rank of 2^nd Lieutenant with the Royal Field Artillery.  Holmes published two volumes of poetry (Ballads of Field and Billet and More Ballads of Field and Billet) that capture this spirit of determined buoyancy. A reviewer for the Scotsman praised his work, writing, “It may seem a rather doubtful compliment to the verses in this readable book to say that they are pedestrian; but they do not attempt to soar high, to celebrate martial glory.” The Glasgow Herald said of Holmes’ poems,

They range from the grave to the humorous, from the realistic to the romantic, but something of the brightness of youth is in them all, something of that gallant gaiety which makes a jest of the discomforts of life, yet never thinks of life itself as a jest.† 

Holmes’ “The Soldier Mood” captures one such incident in which three friends eat and laugh together, “Defying indigestion and the Germans and the years.”

The Soldier Mood

We were eating chip potatoes underneath the April stars

That glittered coldly and aloof from earth and earthly wars;

We were three good pals together, and the day’s hard work was done,

So we munched our chip potatoes, half for food and half for fun.

Half the world was war’s dominion, but the mutter of the strife

Had come to seem accustomed as the undertone of life;

We were fit and hard and happy, and the future was unknown,

The past—all put behind us; but the present was our own.

We were doing our plainest duty, meant to end what we’d begun;

Why worry for to-morrow till to-day’s big job was done?

So we walked and laughed together like three modern musketeers—

Defying indigestion and the Germans and the years.

We were eating chip potatoes with our fingers, like a tramp,

And the unseen owls were hooting in the trees around the camp;

We were happy to be hungry, glad to be alive and strong;

So—to-morrow might be terror, but to-night could be a song!
                                                —W. Kersley Holmes

In Holmes' poem, the prolonged stalemate of trench warfare and the immensity of the conflict (involving half of the nations of the world) have so normalized violence and death that they have come to be accepted as “the normal undertone of life.”  With an unspoken understanding, the men realize that dwelling on memories of past battles or anticipating terrors of future attacks will lead to fearful paralysis; the only way forward is to claim the present as their own, without ceremony or posturing. The soldiers’ mood –“Happy to be hungry, glad to be alive and strong”—is not a philosophy born out of naïve idealism, but rather a means of coping with the ever-present terrors of the war.

 

In another poem “The Neutral,” Holmes acknowledges that the war has put at risk not only men’s lives, but their sense of themselves:

War, like a restless fever, haunts the air,

Changing the world we knew;

The men we are forget the men we were

In all we think and do.

Grasping at simple pleasures that were connected with their past lives—“eating chip potatoes”—gave soldiers a tangible way of preserving personal identities that many felt were slipping away with each day the war dragged on.††

Holmes survived the war and returned to Scotland. He continued to write poetry and published Tramping the Scottish Hills, as well as working as editor for the popular Blackie's children's book annuals. More on Holmes' life can be read at this link from the Scottish poetry library. 

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*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, 2000, page 71.  For more on the Never-Endians, see also this blog's post “The Other Side” (Alec Waugh). 

**Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, Virago Press, 2004, pages 338-339.

†Both reviews are quoted in the Dollar Magazine, Vol XIV, No. 54, June 1915, pages 74-75 (the magazine was a publication of Dollar Academy, Holmes’ alma mater).

††Holmes’ poem “Singing ‘Tipperary’” also explores soldiers’ struggles to retain a sense of their individuality while caught up in the larger forces of the war.

To One Dead

Francis Ledwidge was an Irish nationalist who joined the British Army in October of 1914 to defend Ireland and further the cause of Irish Home Rule. With the 10^th Irish Division, he fought in Gallipoli and was injured in Serbia. Known as “the Poet of the Blackbird,” Ledwidge lived to see only one volume of his poetry published: Songs of the Fields (1915).  

In the spring of 1916, Ledwidge was on leave, passing through Manchester on his way home to Ireland, when he received news of the 1916 Easter Rising and the execution of his friend, fellow poet, and Easter Rising leader, Thomas MacDonagh. Ledwidge extended his stay in Ireland without permission, spoke out in favor of the Easter Rising, and was court-martialed upon his return to the Western Front.

Although he continued to serve with the British Army and was eventually promoted to the rank of lance corporal, the events of the First World War and the Easter Rising intensified Ledwidge’s allegiance to Ireland, and in his writings, the Irish countryside is poignantly imagined as a symbol of hope and of peace.

In early 1917, he wrote to another Irish poet, Katharine Tynan, “If I survive the war, I have great hopes of writing something that will live.  If not, I trust to be remembered in my own land for one or two things which its long sorrow inspired.”* Ledwidge’s second volume of poems, Songs of Peace, was in press when he was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. 

To One Dead

Ledwidge memorial

A blackbird singing
On a moss-upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
A song in the wood,
A ship on the sea.
The song was for you
and the ship was for me.

A blackbird singing
I hear in my troubled mind,
Bluebells swinging
I see in a distant wind.
But sorrow and silence
Are the wood's threnody,
The silence for you
And the sorrow for me. 

--Francis Ledwidge

Much like Ledwidge’s short life, the repressed energy of the poem comes from holding together and balancing contradictory ideas. Set against the swinging movement of the bluebells and the wild blowing of the wind, a blackbird sits on a moss-covered stone and sings in the stillness of a wood.  The bird’s sorrowful song for the dead (the “wood’s threnody”) dies into a silence that echoes with the pain of division.

Vast is the distance between sea and wood, and nothing can bridge the chasm that separates the voice of the poem’s speaker from the poem’s subject – the dead. Even the rhymes of the poem echo the theme of estrangement: the first line of the poem delays in finding its rhyming pair until the second stanza, leaving the rhymed sounds separated by five intervening lines.  Ledwidge’s melancholy poem accepts and wrings patterns of beauty from tragedies of life and of war that cannot be changed.

During the summer of 1917, Ledwidge waited for the publication of his second volume of poetry as his unit prepared for another major battle on the Western Front. In one of his last letters to Katharine Tynan, Ledwidge reminisced about Ireland and home:

“I would give £100 for two days in Ireland with nothing to do but ramble on from one delight to another. I am entitled to a leave now, but I’m afraid there are many before my name in the list. Special leaves are granted, and I have to finish a book for the autumn. But, more particularly, I want to see again my wonderful mother, and to walk by the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the brown and grey rocks of Crocknaharna. You have no idea of how I suffer with this longing for the swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to hear coming over the low hills of Currabwee. Say a prayer that I may get this leave, and give as a condition my punctual return and sojourn till the war is over. It is midnight now and the glow-worms are out. It is quiet in camp but the far night is loud with our guns bombarding the positions we must soon fight for.”**

On July 31, 1917, Francis Ledwidge and five other men of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were killed by a stray artillery shell that landed behind the lines.  Ledwidge is buried at Artillery Wood Cemetery in Belgium; his grave is only steps away from that of the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who also died that day. The silence and sorrow can still be felt in the small cemetery outside Ypres. 

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*Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet. Martin Brian and O'Keeffe, 1972, p. 170.

**Ibid, pp. 185-186.

***For other Ledwidge poems, see the posts “It is terrible to be always homesick” and “Soft and slow in wartime.”

The Cost of Killing

Attack through No Man's Land

In the First World War, the most frequent cause of death was from artillery missiles aimed and fired from a distance.  French soldier Guilliaume Apollinaire captures the detachment of long-range gunners in this excerpt from his poem “Nothing Much”:

How many d’you reckon we’ve killed

Christ

It’s weird it doesn’t affect us….

Each time you say fire! the word becomes steel that explodes far off….

Captain Reginald James Young,
 winning Military Cross 1916
by Stanley L. Wood 

But what is the psychological toll for infantry soldiers who kill a man at close range? In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes, “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt” (93).

Researchers who study Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have long understood that distance plays a key role in the trauma of taking another life: “if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim” (Grossman, 128).  Close-quarters killing of the enemy may be one of the least understood horrors of war. 

While it is indescribably traumatic to see one’s fellow soldiers and friends die, the psychological damage that results in taking a life may be just as great. A mental health counselor from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says, “When your friends are dead, it’s a real loss. It’s a loss of your friend that you trusted and you loved in a very intense way.  When you personally take another life and you go up to that lifeless body with a hole in it and you look down on it, and you say, ‘I did that,’ I think it is a loss of yourself at the same time.”*

Frederic Manning, fighting with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, saw some of the most brutal fighting of the Great War at the Battle of the Somme in the fall of 1916.  His poem “The Face” describes a close encounter with a young German soldier. 

The Face

(Guillemont)

German soldier, WWI

Out of the smoke of men's wrath,
The red mist of anger,
Suddenly,
As a wraith of sleep,
A boy's face, white and tense,
Convulsed with terror and hate,
The lips trembling. . . .

Then a red smear, falling. . . .
I thrust aside the cloud, as it were tangible,
Blinded with a mist of blood.
The face cometh again
As a wraith of sleep:
A boy's face, delicate and blond,
The very mask of God,
Broken.

Caught up in the blood-lust of battle, the speaker of the poem blindly charges forward through the smoke of the attack. He is startled by the sudden appearance of an enemy soldier emerging out of the fog, and instinctively, the soldier shoots to kill.  Almost simultaneously, he recognizes that the “red smear, falling” is a blond boy whose face mirrors his own: angry, tense, and terrified. 

Frederic Manning

The short, fragmented lines of the poem capture the disjointed chaos of combat and the recurring horrific memory: the delicacy of the young boy’s face marred by wounds resembles that of the crucified Christ. The last line of the poem – a single word – sums up the tragedy that affects every soldier: all is forever broken. 

Frederic Manning survived the war, and in 1929 published a novel that drew heavily upon his own war experiences, The Middle Parts of Fortune (later expurgated and republished as Her Privates We).  In the book’s Prefatory Note, Manning writes, “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity.  To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.”**

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*Jim Dooley, quoted on website from American PBS Frontline documentary The Soldier’s Heart.

**Another Manning poem “Relieved” is featured on this blog at this link. 

Picnic July 1917

On the Cliffs (1917), Dame Laura Knight

By the time the First World War ended in November of 1918, an estimated 80,000 men serving in the British Army had been treated for shell shock, and the number of actual sufferers was undoubtedly much higher.*

Rose Macaulay’s 1916 novel, Non-combatants and Others, vividly relates the psychological impact of the war on both soldiers and civilians. It tells the story of Alix, a young art student who becomes suddenly and violently ill after witnessing the night terrors of a shell-shocked soldier. Lying awake, Alix is tortured by the memory of the man’s moans and sobs:

 “‘What they can bear to go through…. But they can’t, they can’t, they can’t … we can bear to hear about … but we can’t, we can’t, we can’t….’ It was like the intolerable ticking of a clock, and beat itself away at last into a sick dream.”**

In her Poem “Picnic,” written a year after the novel’s publication, Macaulay provides another memorable depiction of the ways in which civilians attempted to cope with the mental sufferings of the war.    

Picnic July 1917

We lay and ate sweet hurt-berries

In the bracken of Hurt Wood.

Like a quire of singers singing low

The dark pines stood.

A Battery Shelled, Percy Wyndham Lewis
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2747) 

Behind us climbed the Surrey hills,

Wild, wild in greenery;

At our feet the downs of Sussex broke

To an unseen sea.

And life was bound in a still ring,

Drowsy, and quiet, and sweet …

When heavily up the south-east wind

The great guns beat.

We did not wince, we did not weep,

We did not curse or pray;

We drowsily heard, and someone said,

“They sound clear to-day.”

We did not shake with pity and pain,

Or sicken and blanch white.

We said, “If the wind’s from over there

Crashed Aeroplane,  John Singer Sargent
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 1610) 

There’ll be rain tonight.”

Once pity we knew, and rage we knew,

And pain we knew, too well,

As we stared and peered dizzily

Through the gates of hell.

But now hell’s gates are an old tale;

Remote the anguish seems;

The guns are muffled and far away,

Dreams within dreams.

And far and far are Flanders mud,

And the pain of Picardy;

And the blood that runs there runs beyond

The wide waste sea.

We are shut about by guarding walls:

(We have built them lest we run

Mad from dreaming of naked fear

And of black things done.)

We are ringed all round by guarding walls,

Runner through the Barrage,
His Arm Shot Away, His Mind Gone
by American artist Claggett Wilson

So high, they shut the view.

Not all the guns that shatter the world

Can quite break through.

Oh, guns of France, oh, guns of France,

Be still, you crash in vain….

Heavily up the south wind throb

Dull dreams of pain, …

Be still, be still, south wind, lest your

Blowing should bring the rain….

We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,

And sleep once again.

Oh, we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,

While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,

Lest, battered too long, our walls and we

Should break … .should break….

                                    —Rose Macaulay

Under the surface of the poem’s calm, pastoral mood is the excruciating effort required to keep the horrors of the war at bay. While the picnickers seek to distance themselves from the war, images in the poem undercut these attempts and repeatedly draw connections between soldiers and civilians.

Like soldiers, the women lie on the ground and feast on pain. Hurt Wood is an actual location in rural Surrey, and hurt berries is a folk term used for whortleberries, but both names are suggestive of the dead and wounded of the Great War. Yet unlike the soldiers amidst the desolate barrenness of the Western Front, the women are surrounded by lush greenery and the quietude of rural England, broken only by the sounds of muffled artillery fire.

The war assumes a dream-like quality, and prolonged exposure to the traumas of war have normalized what was previously unimaginable.  The sound of gunfire no longer inspires fear or pity in the women, but instead prompts composed comments on the wind direction and weather.  

The soldiers and the civilians also share the experience of powerless vulnerability. The men wait to die; the women wait to learn of their deaths. Both have learned that uncontrolled emotions can lead to madness, and so they distance themselves from the central reality of their lives in order to remain sane. 

American sheet music, 1917

Secluded behind "guarding walls" that shield them from the real world, the women are confined to a fairy tale world where they play the role of Sleeping Beauty. The walls are high and impenetrable, constructed by government propaganda, newspapers’ false optimism, and the women’s own mental efforts to avoid listening to or looking at the war and the “black things done” there.  

“Picnic, July 1917” resonates with other women’s war poetry: Katherine Mansfield’s elegy for her dead brother, “To L.H.B,” written in 1916, also mixes imagery of dreams and wild berries, as her brother waits for her beside a stream, extending a handful of fruit and saying “These are my body. Sister, take and eat.” In both poems, the war has distorted the pastoral landscape into something alien and threatening. In “The Dancers,” Edith Sitwell also examines the ways in which ordinary pleasures and activities on the home front appear callous and grotesque when contrasted to the nightmare of the ongoing war: “The floors are slippery with blood….We can still dance, each night.” 

Both Sitwell’s and Macaulay’s poems explore the dilemma women faced in dealing with war trauma: patriotism and support for the men at the front seemed to demand the stoic continuation of daily life, but the pretense of normalcy often gave the impression of selfishness, ignorance, and insensitivity.† As Grogan asks in Shell-Shocked Britain, “How far can the term [shell-shocked] be applied not just to the soldiers on the front line, but to the country as a whole?  To the communities those soldiers belonged to and the families who had to live through four years of ever more desperate warfare?”††

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* Suzie Grogan, Shell Shocked Britain. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2014, p. 2.

**Rose Macaulay, Non-combatants and Others.  London: Methuen, 1986, p. 19.

†See Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Glory of Women.”
††Grogan, p. 5.