Some Desperate Glory (16 page)

Your hills not only hills, but friends of mine and kindly,

Your tiny knolls and orchards hidden beside the river

Muddy and strongly flowing, with shy and tiny streamlets

Safe in its bosom.

 

Now these are memories only, and your skies and rushy sky-pools

Fragile mirrors easily broken by moving airs …

But deep in my heart for ever goes on your daily being,

And uses consecrate.

 

Think on me too, O Mother, who wrest my soul to serve you

In strange and fearful ways beyond your encircling waters;

None but you can know my heart, its tears and sacrifice;

None, but you, repay.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

The Death Bed

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped

Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;

Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,

Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.

Silence and safety; and his mortal shore

Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

 

Someone was holding water to his mouth.

He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped

Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot

The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.

Water – calm, sliding green above the weir.

Water – a sky-lit alley for his boat,

Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers

And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,

He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

 

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,

Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.

Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars

Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;

Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,

Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

 

Rain – he could hear it rustling through the dark;

Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;

Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers

That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps

Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,

Gently and slowly washing life away.

 

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain

Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore

His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.

But someone was beside him; soon he lay

Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.

And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.

 

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.

Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.

Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.

He's young; he hated War; how should he die

When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

 

But death replied: ‘I choose him.' So he went,

And there was silence in the summer night;

Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.

Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

The Trumpet

Rise up, rise up,

And, as the trumpet blowing

Chases the dreams of men,

As the dawn glowing

The stars that left unlit

The land and water,

Rise up and scatter

The dew that covers

The print of last night's lovers –

Scatter it, scatter it!

 

While you are listening

To the clear horn,

Forget, men, everything

On this earth newborn,

Except that it is lovelier

Than any mysteries.

Open your eyes to the air

That has washed the eyes of the stars

Through all the dewy night:

Up with the light,

To the old wars;

Arise, arise!

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.

 

Many a road and track

That, since the dawn's first crack,

Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers,

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

 

Here love ends,

Despair, ambition ends,

All pleasure and all trouble,

Although most sweet or bitter,

Here ends in sleep that is sweeter

Than tasks most noble.

 

There is not any book

Or face of dearest look

That I would not turn from now

To go into the unknown

I must enter and leave alone,

I know not how.

 

The tall forest towers;

Its cloudy foliage lowers

Ahead, shelf above shelf;

Its silence I hear and obey

That I may lose my way

And myself.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Bach and the Sentry

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood

On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.

The low-lying mist lifted its hood,

The October stars showed nobly in clear night.

 

When I return, and to real music-making,

And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?

Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,

With a dull sense of No Man's Land again?

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

1917

 

 

 

T
O THE POET
David Jones, ‘the wholesale slaughter' and impersonality of the war's later years began with the Somme. Previously there'd been a sense of tradition stretching back to the Peninsula, to Marlborough's campaigns, even to Agincourt. Now the war became more mechanical, harder, more horrifically modern.

The direction of Britain's war changed in December 1916 when David Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeded Asquith – never a natural war leader – as Prime Minister. It was a huge leap for the country to be led by a man who'd not been to a public school or university. Having grown up in a cottage in north Wales, where his uncle was a cobbler, Lloyd George had made a virtue out of this, even exaggerating his early poverty, proclaiming his mission to aid the poor, particularly at the expense of inheritors of great wealth. He owed his advancement not only to his own dynamism but also to a deadlocked war.

Gallipoli had failed; the Somme battles had gained only a few miles; the Royal Navy had been brought to a dead heat, arguably a defeat, at Jutland; U-boats were menacing British supply routes; the Russians, effective against the Austrians, couldn't match the Germans who'd conquered Romania and still occupied Belgium and much of northern France. The cold winter further sapped morale.

The new Prime Minister was not impressed by Douglas Haig and the British High Command, particularly after the Somme. For the planned 1917 spring offensive, Lloyd George infuriated Haig by putting the British army under the temporary control of the persuasive, English-speaking French General Nivelle who'd done well at Verdun.

The British role was to advance on a front stretching from Bapaume in the south up to Arras. The main force would come from a massive French attack on the Chemin des Dames, a surge uphill against well-dug-in German machine guns. The Germans, through captured papers, knew of the plan. There followed, in March 1917, what seemed like a retreat, as the Germans withdrew, wrecking the country that they left behind, taking up positions in the well-fortified so-called Hindenburg Line. This was a strategic move, not a flight. It determined the fate of the Allies' spring offensive that was meant to win the war.

In January 1917, Wilfred Owen was with the 2nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment in the transit camp at Etaples. Here he was hit, during bombing practice, by a fragment which grazed his thumb, letting him coax out one drop of blood, a glimpse of what it was to be a warrior. ‘There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France,' Owen told his mother on New Year's Day, ‘and I am in perfect spirits. A tinge of excitement is about me, but excitement is always necessary to my happiness.' He wrote again ten days later, ‘Have no anxiety. I cannot do a better thing or be in a righter place…'

He'd been under shellfire in the snow at Bertrancourt by 4 February. The ugliness of the trenches cut into the crimson aestheticism, nurtured by Tailhade and the reading of Wilde. ‘I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal perversion of
Ugliness
,' he told his mother. ‘Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one's own mouth (for all are devilridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.' Owen claimed that he'd been too busy surviving to be frightened: ‘I cannot say I felt any fear.' That day he arrived at Abbeville to take a transport course. Another offensive was only two months away.

Edward Thomas had his last leave in England over the weekend of 6 January. There was snow and mist round the cottage that his family had taken near High Beech Camp in Essex. He read stories to his children, bathed them in a tub in front of the fire and sang folk songs, showing great tenderness to them yet impatient with Helen his wife, talking briskly about life assurance documents, arguing over possible improvements to the house. After a day in London – away from her – he was loving on their last night, carrying Helen to bed in his greatcoat and saying ‘remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever'. As Edward strode away the next morning, soon invisible in the mist, he called out, ‘Coo-ee!' and she answered, before running up a hill, hoping to see him but, as she wrote later, ‘There was nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death.' He was in France as an artillery officer by the end of January, near the guns and regretting the absence of birdsong.

Thomas's poetry was starting to be noticed. Harriet Monroe, an American patron of writers, took three of his poems for her Chicago magazine
Poetry
in February; by then he knew that his first collection had been accepted by publishers in the United States (pushed by Frost) and in Britain. But the war cut into Thomas's writing and he could read only sporadically, finding it hard to concentrate on a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets given to him by Helen.

His battery was outside Arras by the second week of February 1917, in snow and only a mile from the Germans. A fortnight later he was sent to the headquarters of the Heavy Artillery Group, three miles back, where, as a skilled map-reader, he worked on reconnaissance reports and photographs. ‘Am I to stay on here and do nothing but have cold feet?' Thomas wrote in his diary.

As if in answer, the enemy fired in his direction while he was out inspecting a gun position; then a British shell narrowly missed him. Thomas told Frost he was happy but confided his confusion to his wife. How hard it was to think about anything other than this new world, although he felt strangely detached from it, as if sitting in a railway waiting room. To Walter de la Mare he wrote that he doubted his chances. Danger came when at a crossroads near Arras he climbed a disused factory chimney to use it as an observation post, moving slowly up rickety steps until shells bursting near by sent him back down. That earlier failure returned. ‘It was', he told Frost, ‘just another experience like the gamekeeper.'

Siegfried Sassoon returned to France in February. While in England, he'd seen much of Robbie Ross, Wilde's friend who scorned jingoism, and it was to Ross that Sassoon wrote from a Rouen hospital, while recovering from German measles, that ‘I haven't met anyone yet who has any faith in “the purpose of war”…' He moved up with the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and passed through country destroyed by the retiring Germans, seeing futile discipline when a general publicly humiliated the battalion's colonel. Encouraged by new friends that his poetry had brought him – by Ross and the pacifists Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell – doubt seeped into Sassoon about the war.

The battle of Arras, the British part of the Nivelle offensive, began on Easter Monday, 9 April, following a five-day bombardment. As on the Somme's first day, good news drifted back to Sassoon who was still out of the line; a huge mining operation had stunned the enemy. On 8 April, a dud shell had fallen near Edward Thomas and he was teased, one man saying that this meant Thomas's luck would always hold. But the next day he fell, the breath sucked out of him by a blast that left no mark on his body.

Among the last words in his diary were ‘I never understood quite what was meant by God'; also a sentence about the air and the landscape: ‘The morning chill and clear hurts my skin while it delights my mind.' Then a sketch of a French village scene: ‘Neuville in early morning with its flat straight crest with trees and houses – the beauty of this silent empty scene of no inhabitants and hid troops, but don't know why I could have cried and didn't.' Edward Thomas's last three lines of verse were:

Where any turn may lead to Heaven

Or any corner may hide Hell

Roads shining like river up hill after rain.

Siegfried Sassoon was in peril some seven days later. His company entered the front line on 15 April and General Pinney, a later target of Sassoon's satire, ordered a suicidal attack of a hundred bombers. Sassoon was told to take command of this and, after rallying the troops in dark, hellish, corpse-filled trenches, he looked over the parapet and was shot by a German sniper. The wound, between the shoulders, narrowly missing the jugular vein and the spine, was bad enough for him to be sent back to England, though he'd wanted to go on, feeling ‘capable of the most suicidal exploits'.