More has been written about the First World War than about any other war in history but, inevitably, many of the questions it raises remain – and will remain – unanswered. It may be appropriate, therefore, to begin an introduction to some of the soldier poets of that war with a question: when and where were the following stanzas from Herbert Cadett’s poem, ‘The Song of Modern Mars’, written?
Three miles of trench and a mile of men
In a rough-hewn, slop-shop grave;
Spades and a volley for one in ten –
Here’s a hip! hurrah! for the brave.
[. . .]
Crimson flecks on a sand-coloured mound,
Like rays of the rosy morn,
And splashes of red on a khaki ground,
Like poppies in fields of corn.
The answer is not London or Flanders, 1915, but London or South Africa, 1900. The war still known – so many wars later – by the epithet ‘Great’ made such an impact on the consciousness of Western Europe that it erased from folk-memory the scars of former conflicts. War poetry ‘began and ended with the First World War’, wrote a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (September 1972). He went on: ‘There were poems written about earlier wars but they were battle-pieces, not war poems in the 1914–18 sense.’ Paul Fussell, the American author of what is, in many ways, the most searching and satisfying study of writing about that war, The Great War and Modern Memory, supports this view. ‘The war will not be understood in traditional terms,’ he says; ‘the machine gun alone makes it so special and unexampled.’ Yet, over the ‘mile of men’ in their South African mass-grave, sounds
[. . .] The rat-tat-tat of the Maxim gun –
A machine-made funeral knell.
In his excellent study of the poetry of the Anglo–Boer War, Drummer Hodge, Malvern van Wyk Smith has shown how in Britain, at the start of that war in 1899, militarist and pacifist doctrines were clearly defined and opposed. Because of the Education Acts of 1870 and 1876, the army that had sailed for South Africa was the first literate army in history, and the British Tommy sent home letters and poems that poignantly anticipate those his sons and nephews were to send back from Gallipoli and the Western Front in the Great War.
British soldiers killed in the battle at Spion Kop, January 1900
Those factual and often bitter accounts of combat had been forgotten by 1914, when the Great War was greeted, in many quarters, with the curious gaiety and exhilaration that Philip Larkin captured so vividly in his poem ‘MCMXIV’ (Roman numerals, as seen on war-memorials, denoting 1914; letters that now seem almost as remote as the hieroglyphs in tombs of the pharaohs). Larkin’s camera focuses on the queues outside the recruiting offices:
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
Rupert Brooke caught the mood of that moment in a sonnet to which he gave the paradoxical title of ‘Peace’. It begins:
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Recruits of the Lincolnshire Regiment in training, September 1914
Brooke’s first line – ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’ – and the ‘hand’ and the ‘hearts’ that follow reveal one of his sources to be the hymn, and ironically a hymn that has been translated from the German, beginning
Now thank we all our God
With heart, and hands and voices.
Men of the Honorable Artillery Company at bayonet practice, 1914
In times of war and national calamity, large numbers of people seldom seen in church or bookshop will turn for consolation and inspiration to religion and poetry. Never was the interaction of these two more clearly demonstrated than in the Great War.
On Easter Sunday 1915, the Dean of St Paul’s preached in the Cathedral to a large congregation of widows, parents and orphans. Dean Inge gave as his text Isaiah 26: 19. ‘The dead shall live, my body shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust.’ He had just read a poem on this subject, he said, ‘a sonnet by a young writer who would’, he ventured to think, ‘take rank with our great poets – so potent was a time of trouble to evoke genius which must otherwise have slumbered.’ He then read aloud Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (see pp. 20–21), and remarked that ‘the expression of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression.’ So Brooke the soldier-poet was canonized by the Church, and many other poets, soldiers and civilians alike found inspiration for their battle hymns, elegies, exhortations, in Hymns Ancient and Modern:
For a Europe’s flouted laws
We the sword reluctant drew,
Righteous in a righteous cause:
Britons, we WILL see it through!
R. M. Freeman, from ‘The War Cry’
Many of the first poets to respond in print to the events of 1914 and 1915 had left their public schools with a second, secular source of poetic inspiration. This was the public-school song, itself derived from the hymnal of the established Church. It can be heard behind R. E. Vernède’s poem ‘The Call’:
Recruits at Whitechapel Recruiting Office, 1914
Military funeral at Poperinghe in August 1917
Lad, with the merry smile and the eyes
Quick as a hawk’s and clear as the day,
You who have counted the game the prize,
Here is the game of games to play.
Never a goal – the captains say –
Matches the one that’s needed now:
Put the old blazer and cap away –
England’s colours await your brow.
Vernède’s lines carry all the poignancy of the period in their imagery: ‘the prize’, ‘a goal’, ‘the captains’, ‘the old blazer and cap’, and, most piercing of all, his final exhortation: ‘England’s colours await your brow’. By ‘colours’, does he mean anything more than the coloured velvet, braided and tasselled, of the football international’s ‘cap’? He may well not have thought of two other meanings: colours in the sense of ‘regimental colours’, the Union Jack that by tradition drapes the British soldier’s coffin; a second to be used three bitter years later by Wilfred Owen, writing of the crippled soldier in his poem ‘Disabled’: ‘He’s lost his colour very far from here.’
Hundreds of what came to be called ‘war poets’ saw their work in print between 1914 and 1918, and others – including some of the best – were not published until after the war. It remains an unsatisfactory label: Freeman and Vernède, for example, have little in common with Owen and Sassoon, whose poems of passionate indignation are a far cry again from Edward Thomas’s bleak and oblique rural ruminations.
Men of the Liverpool Regiment at Church Parade before going into the trenches
W.A.A.C.s tending British graves at Abbeville in February 1918
We can now see that most of the ‘war poets’ – like most ‘peace poets’ before and since – were bad, vapid poets, but there were also a number of good, true poets; and ‘the true Poets’, wrote Wilfred Owen, ‘must be truthful’. The following pages give a brief account of the life and work of twelve who were true to their different forms of experience. There were others: Vera Brittain, May Wedderburn Cannan, E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Daryush, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Nichols, Herbert Read. These should not be forgotten, nor should the speechless millions of whom and for whom they spoke:
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
Siegried Sassoon, ‘Prelude: The Troops’
