Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915) had been studying German at Jena for six months when war broke out. The Scot immediately joined up and, serving with the Suffolk Regiment, he had reached the rank of Captain when he was killed during the Battle of Loos at the age of 20. His final poem was discovered in the kit bag attached to his lifeless body. Sassoon and Masefield maintained that he would have taken his place amongst the greatest war poets had he lived.
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But, gropers both through fields of thought confined,
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With never-won eyes each other’s truer form,
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm,
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But, until peace, the storm,
The darkness, and the thunder and the rain.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
On the sultry afternoon of 28 June 1914, an 18-year-old terrorist shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife outside a pavement café in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. Few in Britain at that time had heard of the Duke, the city or the province and, for the most part, cared rather less; just another ‘Balkan do’. It wasn’t. This was the spark that lit the world, blowing the fuse that consumed the great empires and dynasties of Europe. Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia and Turkey would be blown clear away. Britons were swept up in a tidal wave of righteous sentiment; the beastly Hun had to be stopped and gallant little Belgium restored. No other nation sustained its war effort relying solely upon volunteers. The stern, commanding face of Herbert Kitchener let every man know what path duty demanded he take. Nobody had any real inkling, except perhaps the general himself, of what consequences would follow. It was all about the glorious crusade.
As sure as God’s in his heaven,
As sure as he stands for right,
As sure as the Hun this wrong hath done,
So surely we win this fight!
Then! –
Then, the visioned eye shall see
The great and noble company,
That gathers there from land and sea,
From over-land and over-sea,
From under-land and under-sea,
To celebrate right royally
The Day of Victory
Not alone on that great day
Will the war-worn victors come,
To meet our great glad ‘Welcome Home’!
And a whole world’s deep ‘Well done’!
Not alone! Not alone will they come,
To the sound of the pipe and the drum;
They will come to their own
With the pipe and the drum,
With the merry, merry tune
Of the pipe and the drum; -
But-they-will-not-come-alone!
John Oxenham
These noble, desperately naïve posturings would not endure. The conflict that ‘would be over by Christmas’ dragged through numerous Christmases to consume blood and treasure at a rate undreamed of. For the British, however, the idea of conscription was anathema: free men enlisted because it was right, not because the state compelled. Never before in history, and probably never again, was the road to war so heavily subscribed.
Would you show your love for freedom?
Would you stand for truth and right?
Would you take the path of wisdom?
Then be ready for the fight!
[Chorus]
For we won’t have conscription,
We all hate conscription,
We don’t want conscription
So we’ll all be volunteers.
Would you keep your homes in safety?
And protect the fatherland?
Have your commerce prosper greatly,
On the sea and on the land
[Chorus]
Have we foes across the water?
Who must be kept at bay?
If we value freedom’s charter,
We’ll be ready e-en than they.
[Chorus]
But should the foe ever threaten,
Or but touch our silver strand,
We will drown him in the ocean,
By the aid of God’s right hand!
[Chorus]
For gold the merchant ploughs the main;
The farmer ploughs the manor;
But glory is the soldier’s prize,
The soldier’s wealth is honour.
The brave, fair soldier ne’er despise,
Nor count him as a stranger
Remember, he’s his country’s stay
In day and hour of danger!
‘Bobby’ Burns, 11 February 1917
Enlist today. (Author’s own)
The editor of In Flanders Fields quotes Edward Thomas when he observes that war poetry does not generally endure. Despite our seemingly endless fascination with the Great War poets, this remains true. How many of us have heard of Colwyn Erasmus Arnold Phillips (1888–1915)? He was killed in action at the age of 26 and his poem, ‘Release’, was found in his kit bag when his belongings were sent 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.
Colwyn Phillips
His brother, Roland, was killed just over a year later in July 1916, also at the age of 26. Colwyn was a racing enthusiast, and here he compares war to racing:
HAVE you felt the joy that is almost fear
As you face the ditch and are two lengths clear,
And you hear the thunder of hoofs in rear?
There is just a second when you may see
Clear out what the consequence will be
If you go too close or take off too far
Comes a rending crash and a sickening jar,
A futile arm that you raise to defend,
And the battering hoofs that bring the end.
You are stride for stride, and you set your lip
As you urge with your heel and raise your whip,
And the moment he feels the whipcord sting
He leaps from the track with a glorious spring.
You hear the crash as the stout birch sunders,
And gain a length as your rival blunders.
Colwyn Phillips