Some Desperate Glory (13 page)

Siegfried Sassoon's letter to his mother of 9 December 1915 showed exhaustion. Written eighteen miles from Amiens (‘very fine country … rather like parts of East Kent'), a few weeks after his first sight of trench warfare, it said, ‘We had an awful time moving: 10 hours in the train, & then 16 mile march & got here at 7 am, dead beat. Love from Sig. Send a pair of slippers & a plum pudding. Don't want any more underclothes.'

Sassoon thought later that Robert Graves was his greatest influence during the next year; for Graves it was Charles Sorley's
Marlborough and Other Poems
, published posthumously early in 1916 and giving a cool view of the war. ‘It seems ridiculous to fall in love with a dead man, as I have found myself doing,' Graves wrote of Sorley, ‘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…'

The war released more of Sassoon's poetry, first in excitement, then in anger. In March 1916, the death of David Thomas, whom he'd loved, brought a change: ‘since they shot Tommy,' Sassoon wrote, ‘I would gladly stick a bayonet into a German by daylight'. But in May he told his uncle, ‘These six months have been miles the best I have ever struck. In fact I find it very hard to take it all in; there is so much, and it is mostly beautiful or terrifying, or both. And the excitement of things bursting is positively splendid: I had no idea I should enjoy it so much.'

This was Sassoon's dilemma – his wish to be a good officer and his revulsion at the war. ‘The Redeemer', his first realistic war poem, was written in November 1915, yet in January 1916 he had the euphoric ‘To Victory' published in
The
Times
and was writing similar verses that month. Graves may have directed him to Charles Sorley. By May Sassoon had read and admired his fellow old Marlburian's poems.

After leave at the end of February – some of it spent hunting, some in London with his new friend, Oscar Wilde's former lover Robbie Ross – Sassoon returned to France. Graves told Marsh, ‘I think S.S.'s verses are getting infinitely better than the first crop I saw, much freer and more Georgian. What a terrible pity he didn't start earlier!' It was Graves's sharp-edged opinions, not his poetry, which influenced Sassoon, who let Marsh know that he found this new friend's poems disappointing.

Graves, his nerves shredded by Loos, left the trenches in January 1916 to be an instructor at base camp and in March went to England, to have an operation on his nose. Time in hospital and at the regimental depot and leave let him miss the start of the Somme. Some fellow officers, who disliked his tactlessness and German blood, remarked caustically on this.

In March 1916, Siegfried Sassoon began his forays, often alone, into no man's land. He claimed that these expeditions were partly to get poets a good name; but after David Thomas's death there was also ‘hate' and ‘the lust to kill'. His poems began to be published by the anti-militarist
Cambridge Magazine
: first ‘The Redeemer' and then the bloodthirsty ‘The Kiss', distinctly (although Sassoon denied this) sado-masochistic in tone.

He told Marsh how the trenches had changed him. ‘O yes, this is some life – the men almost make me weep sometimes, so patient and cheery & altogether dear. And chasing Germans in the moonshine with bombs is no mean sport, & has brought me prestige…' In May, Sassoon was in the line, near Fricourt, after a month away on a course. Disobeying his commanding officer, he took part in a raid, winning the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded man from a crater. He had joined Julian Grenfell as a hero poet.

The western front was now full of rumours about the coming offensive. Constant activity was thought to be vital and officers led parties to reconstruct damaged trenches, repair wire and bury the dead. This was what Edmund Blunden found when he arrived in France in May.

Blunden was already a poet of immense fluency. One long pre-trench poem, finished in March, was a disquieting account of cruelty's consequences called ‘The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill'. A dark atmosphere threatens an English churchyard, stream and wood in the kind of Georgian scene that always inspired Blunden. Early in 1916, with artillery rumbling from across the Channel, death must have seemed near, even in the tranquil Kentish fields.

After some training in the camp at Etaples – where a sergeant major was killed by a faulty grenade – Blunden joined his battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment at La Touret, not far from Béthune. It could seem idyllic until heavy guns and mines exploded, let off by both sides. Festubert was within reach, where Sassoon and Graves had been at the end of 1915, and Blunden looked for the local orchards, finding a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a peaceful place away from the guns. Like Sassoon, he went off on a course; then saw the La Bassée canal, a Red Cross barge on it, the rich summer landscape and the now ruined village of Cuinchy, near the treacherous brickstacks. He was close to Neuve Chapelle by the end of June.

Ivor Gurney was near by. The comradeship of the army impressed Gurney, who suffered all his life from a sense of isolation, because of his extraordinary gifts and difficult personality. When, soon after enlisting, he arrived at Northampton in February 1915 with his unit, the 2/5th Gloucesters, to find a whole division assembled, others from Gloucestershire crowded round and ‘it gave me a thrill such as I have not had for a long time'. They moved to Chelmsford in April, for training and work on the trench system meant to protect London; ‘nowhere', he wrote to a friend from his days as a music student, ‘could I be happier than where I am (except perhaps at sea)'. A torrent of letters began, to friends like Marion Scott and the composer Herbert Howells.

Like the painter and poet Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney practised two arts: poetry and music. Already he'd written
Five Elizabethan Songs
and hoped to match Schubert or Mozart – and Rupert Brooke's war sonnets made him think that he could improve on these as well. Like Brooke, Ivor Gurney was moved to warrior-like emotion, in the martial sonnet ‘To the Poet Before Battle' and in a Hilaire Belloc-like ballad of the Cotswolds. Gloucestershire became a sacred place for this lonely man, the names of its villages, towns, rivers and hills as consoling as prayer.

By February 1916, still in training, Gurney was thinking of death, of which ‘I am not greatly afraid'. He felt that one should submit to destiny, as Tolstoy had taught in
War and Peace
. He trained on Salisbury Plain, in mud like Flanders, on route marches sometimes twenty miles long and nights spent in trenches. He walked across the Malvern Hills during some leave in April, reaching Ryton near Dymock, searching in vain for the poet Lascelles Abercrombie who was by then working in a Liverpool munitions factory. Gurney sent a postcard to Herbert Howells on the evening of 23 May: ‘We go tomorrow.'

Gurney's unit was sent south-west of Ypres. They learned trench skills from the London Welsh near Riez Bailleul, coming up through the fretwork of paths within sight of Neuve Chapelle. Gurney was amused that these and the trenches were named after public schools: ‘curious names … Eton Road, Cheltenham Road, Rugby Road…' . On 15 June, near Laventie, the battalion was in the front line for five days, in danger from snipers, raids and shells that reached the support trenches, even the rest areas. Gurney missed the start of the Somme.

Isaac Rosenberg was out of it as well. Unlike Gurney, Rosenberg had come to dislike this new world of the army (although he admitted he felt well). He'd told Schiff in December 1915, while training at Bury St Edmunds, ‘This kind of life does not bother me much. I sleep soundly on boards in the cold; the drills I find fairly interesting…' But in the spring of 1916 Rosenberg wrote, ‘Believe me the army is the most detestable invention on this earth and nobody but a private in the army knows what it is to be a slave.'

He complained about the food and the anti-Semitism, telling his Jewish patron Schiff that ‘my being a Jew makes it bad among these wretches'; the poet's awkward manner and scruffiness (remembered later by other soldiers) didn't help. Rosenberg's lack of illusions or romantic patriotism meant that he had no dramatic fall into bitterness. At the end of 1915, some of the bantam unit were transferred from the 12th Suffolks to the 12th South Lancashires in preparation for France. There was more training at Blackdown Camp in Surrey where protests against the conditions verged on mutiny and were put down by troops using bayonets.

Marsh had sent Rosenberg's work to Lascelles Abercrombie, who wrote to its author that although ‘not quite certain of themselves' some poems had ‘remarkable' phrases which no poet could ‘help envying'. Marsh and Abercrombie were smooth Georgians, keener on clarity than Rosenberg with his sense of chaos and implacable power, but they felt awe at the unique vision. The war seemed yet more justification of the existence of a malign God. The poetry reflects this – the verse drama ‘Moses', and the poem ‘Spring 1916' which challenges the idea of the season as a time of hope.

Rosenberg was transferred again, this time to the King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment). Rumours of departure grew. On leave in May 1916, he attended to the publication of his new book of poems, entitled
Moses
and printed by a long-time supporter, the East End printer Reuben ‘Crazy' Cohen. By far the longest poem in this (taking up eighteen of the book's twenty-six pages) is the verse drama ‘Moses', not obviously influenced by the First World War – and begun before it – but depicting God as ‘a rotting deity' and also celebrating brave resistance to state power. ‘Marching' is among the eight other works; the book is too early for Rosenberg's other great poems about the war. Marsh had doubts about ‘Moses', as did Laurence Binyon and the poet Gordon Bottomley, criticizing the shapelessness but praising its ambition. A bleak epic tone – evident in ‘Marching' – suffuses the poet's more recent work (not in the 1916 book), ‘A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth', that compares England's likely fall with dead empires, her power like a corpse fed on by worms.

Isaac Rosenberg arrived in France on 3 June 1916. His poem ‘The Troop Ship' evokes soldiers packed in, sleepless in the ‘wet wind' or dozing until woken by the cold or a man's feet in your face. Rosenberg still hadn't told his mother where he was going, and when he did, while writing to ask her for socks, she wept. He still drew in France; a self-portrait shows a tough-eyed warrior in a steel helmet.

Rosenberg was sent to trenches near Loos, which kept him from the first weeks of the Somme. As a private soldier, he shared rat-infested, water-logged dug-outs, with much less privacy than the officers, less likely too to get food parcels from home, yet not expected to go first over the top so in less danger although always vulnerable to shelling. At this time came the ironical ‘Break of Day in the Trenches' where a rat roams across both sides, like Donne's flea which thoughtlessly took blood from anyone. The poppy held by the poet shows renewal that even industrial warfare couldn't stop. Rosenberg moved to a Salvage Office in August, working to retrieve what was left in the wreckage. The rest of his battalion went to another sector, among slag heaps near Lens.

Robert Graves's first book of poems,
Over the Brazier
, had come out in May 1916, just before the Somme. Published by Monro's Poetry Bookshop, it had a cover illustration by Claud Lovat Fraser of the Menin Gate at Ypres. The title poem is a meditation on what to do in peacetime: for the poet a cottage in Wales ‘full of books'; for others gathered round the brazier a new start in Canada or on a southern island: then death wrecks these dreams. ‘It's a Queer Time' showed, as Graves admitted later, how soldier poets could exaggerate. This ‘realistic' poem had been written at the regimental depot in Wales ‘some weeks before I had a chance of verifying my facts'.

The origin of the Allies' Somme offensive lay in the plan to draw the enemy away from Verdun, on France's eastern frontier, where the Germans hoped to break the French army. Reluctant to attack at least until August – because he believed that the new British troops weren't ready – Haig gave way to the War Cabinet who felt pressure from the French. He planned the July launch with Henry Rawlinson, the commander of the Fourth Army. The heaviest possible artillery barrage would precede the greatest British offensive of the war, first by infantry and then by cavalry to exploit an inevitable breakthrough. The troops were told that the artillery had already blasted the German defences apart.

Haig ordered a front of twenty miles; Rawlinson had wanted more limited attacks. But the artillery wasn't sufficiently concentrated, or given enough shells, to break up the strong defences. The German machine-gun emplacements, well dug in, stayed comparatively intact, ready for the infantry that came across no man's land on 1 July. Haig believed the untried troops were not ready for fast movement – or attacks in conjunction with artillery – and might break into disconnected groups, so he insisted on a slow walk forward, without covering shellfire. In the south, the French, moving faster and using artillery, made greater gains.

In reserve, Siegfried Sassoon watched the attack on 1 July as if, he thought, from an opera box. The day was sunny but confusing; there were rumours of success, that the village of Fricourt had been taken.

Sassoon moved with his battalion into the front line on 3 July, to a trench opposite Mametz Wood, passing a mass of corpses. By 4 July, rain had come and mud; and Sassoon saw panic (he threatened to shoot an officer who was hysterical) and men killed. In an act of solitary courage – like Julian Grenfell's war – he charged a German trench in daylight, throwing bombs and shouting hunting cries at fifty or sixty retreating enemy and then sat on the trench's fire step before going back to report.

His commanding officer was furious. Why hadn't Sassoon reported earlier so that the captured trench could be consolidated? The artillery bombardment had been held up for three hours as it was thought that his patrol was still out there – so the charge had been what Graves called ‘a pointless feat'. Sassoon and his badly hit battalion were withdrawn to marshy ground by the River Ancre. Then he was moved again, to look after the transport near Meaulté, with time to read Thomas Hardy.