On the first day of July 1916, my grandfather was aged 17. He would be 18 the following month.
If he survived.
He was five-foot three, the product of malnourishment in Ireland where he was born: in County Meath.
And he was a private in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
He was deployed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, that terrible day when the British Army suffered its highest ever casualties, 57,470 men, including 19,240 killed. My grandfather was at the village of Thiepval, his battalion having held the forward trench there from 26 June. They were relieved on 30 June but held in reserve, until they found themselves sent back the next morning when fierce machine gun fire from the Thiepval Fortress had pinned down their comrades trying to take it. The attack failed, but they held the new line, modest as it was, and were relieved on 3 July.
They were fighting again on 9 July, capturing enemy trenches, beating off a counter-attack and strengthening the new positions while engaged in ‘severe hand-to-hand-fighting’ in resisting two counter-attacks. They left the front line on 14 July, by which time the operations:
“had cost heavily in casualties: two officers killed and five wounded; of other ranks, 34 killed, 163 wounded and 63 missing.”
My grandfather was part of an unsuccessful rescue mission a couple of weeks later. He was wounded in the leg and repatriated.
He never returned.
He never spoke of these horrors.
I learned of them from his Army records.
The Battle of the Somme continued until mid-November, when the allied attack was abandoned. Only five miles of territory had been gained at a cost of 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French.
I am not sure now when I first understood the Great War. For decades, thinking of it has dismayed and disturbed and angered me. So many men and boys suffered, pointlessly, died horribly, or lived on horribly, because the men in power could not maintain or find peace. The pain of the mothers, sisters, fiancées, wives, who lost their beloveds or who themselves served in ambulances, in nursing.
I am not going to write about “war poems” because they are too well-known and their writers are numerous: Owen and Rosenberg, Sassoon and Graves, Brooke and Blunden, Ledwidge and Nicholls.
Instead, let’s start with Six Young Men by Ted Hughes, the contemplation of a happy photograph of the six youngsters, followed by the punch:
“Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile,
One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,
One is ridiculous with cocky pride –
Six months after this picture they were all dead.”
After a meditation on the beauty of their country home – where “You hear the waters of seven streams fall/To the roarers in the bottom,” we hear of three deaths: one shot in an attack, another killed when he went to rescue him, a third risking practice pot-shots, head exposed over the trench, “Fell back dead with his rifle sights shot away.” The others are simply lost.
Hughes ends with how the photograph, combined with the deaths, will hit the viewer, suggesting that this “might well dement” them and “shoulder out/One’s own body from its instant and heat.”
The fierce focus here is on the personal, the beauty of young men, their violent deaths. In prose, the novel John Harris’s Covenant with Death widens the concern by quietly illustrating the inexorable procession to war and the Front. For many, the Great War tragedy is underpinned with sorrow that workers found it impossible to unite and refuse to fight the aristocrats’ war for them. Imagine if the German, French, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British and Ottoman workers had just said, No, we will not kill our comrades.
Decades later, Philip Larkin captured the whole in perfect concision. His poem MCMXIV, meaning 1914, ponders the enthusiasm for war, war as a lark. His comparison of (1) lads in queues signing-up to die with (2) those waiting outside The Oval and Villa Park to see cricket or football, grounds the scene for English people, iconic venues of the national sports, symbolic of peaceful enjoyment.
Were the young men joining the Army expecting the fair play of cricket?
The safe mud and bloodied knees of football?
Probably, but there was no such innocence again. Larkin lovingly recreates the times, “the shut shops, the bleached/ Established names on the sunblinds”, “farthings and sovereigns”, kids named after Royalty, the high tin advertisements nailed to walls, the ancient “fields/ Shadowing Domesday lines”.
To end, he turns to the universal, “Never such innocence, Never before or since”, and to the touching family details, the departing men “leaving the gardens tidy”, and a subtle stiletto to the heart, stealthily bringing in the time that will elapse before the men die and the women suffer their lasting pain:
“The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.”
Characteristically, Thom Gunn came from another angle, and he was writing about the Second World War. His ironically titled Innocence is a meditation on the evil of Nazis, very likely the SS in particular, beginning with the training and honing of fit – “the egotism of a healthy body” – young men’s bodies and minds, in this chilling stanza:
“The Corps developed, it was plain to see,
Courage, endurance, loyalty and skill
To a morale firm as morality,
Hardening him to an instrument, until”
Until… he is fully indoctrinated into “a compact innocence… No doubt could penetrate, no act could harm.”
This enables the SS man to watch a man burned alive and be disgusted not by the cruel act but by the smell he himself has to endure, as the body liquefies and falls by his boots.
The Irish poet Michael Longley is one of the best writers on the Great War. His father was wounded, awarded the Military Cross, and suffered for decades before dying of that wound. Longley approaches war from different, agonising angles. His Ghetto is a devastating picture of the treatment of Jews by the Germans, made ever more painful by the perspective of children:
“Lessons were forbidden in that terrible school.
Punishable by death were reading and writing
And arithmetic, so that even the junior infants
Grew old and wise in lofts studying these subjects.”
There is genius in this, the placing of routine life – reading and writing and arithmetic; the junior infants; studying these subjects – against punishment by death; and that desperately sad image of small children understanding the horror, slyly calibrated as being “old and wise”. We want our children to be young and innocent.
Longley concludes with an image familiar to us from traumatised children: their troubled drawings. They draw the usual: farms, butterflies, animals, but this twists into the ugly truths, colourful crayon into monochrome ink, joyous animals replaced by barracks and latrines, and their final cutting-off from life. Still drawing, but now their
“…mothers, fathers
Who survived in crayon until in pen and ink
They turned into guards at executions and funerals
Torturing and hanging even these stick figures.
They were drawings of barracks and latrines as well
And the only windows are the windows they drew.”
Longley’s main focus is on his father. An early poem, In Memoriam, subtly yet perfectly summons up the young man who went to war, while starting with his death, imagined as re-enlisting with dead comrades:
“I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory.”
Longley can see his father in France, “in close-up, in my mind’s eye, / The cracked and splintered dead for pity’s sake” and:
“You, looking death and nightmare in the face
With your kilt, harmonica and gun,
Grown older in a flash, but none the wiser”
Poems involving his father are numerous. In Wounds, we hear of the Ulster Division being “Wilder than the Gurkhas”, going over the top to death “Screaming, ‘Give ‘em one for the Shankill!’”
And the conclusion, the death after fifty years:
“At last, a belated casualty,
He said – lead traces flaring till they hurt –
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’”
Wounds is in two parts. The first concerns Longley’s father, the second is a distressing account of sectarian murder in modern Belfast. This reminds us of the complex relationship, the ambiguities, in Irishmen enlisting in the British Army to fight on the Western Front – dying for King and Country – at a time when Ireland was part of the Empire and a rage for independence had boiled over in the Easter Rising of 1916. W.B. Yeats famously declined to write a poem about the war and, as for his even more famous, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death “nothing in the poem necessarily locates Gregory’s death in the First World War”.[1]
These complexities are analysed in Fran Brearton’s The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley, including several pages on the traumas of the Ulster Division on the Somme.[2] They are familiar to me. How do I deal with the mixed Protestant/ Catholic marriage of my parents, the Catholics refusing to attend the church wedding, the arguments about whether I should go to Catholic school, my Irish grandfather’s favourite album Irish Rebel Songs, my Scottish grandfather’s reported prejudice against the Irish? Celtic/Rangers? I was born in Scotland of Irish and Scots. Protestant or Catholic? Neither now. And here is my uncle, son of my Catholic Irish grandfather, another in the British Army, serving, of all places, in Northern Ireland. How? Auden told us in September 1, 1939: “We must love one another or die.”
Longley often returns to the Great War, most notably in several poems in his A Hundred Doors collection, including Gunner Longley and the well-known Citation which is based on the official account of how his father earned the Military Cross. (There is an excellent documentary film about Longley available on BBC iPlayer and, apparently, Apple+: Michael Longley: Where Poems Come From.)
I’ll share a recent discovery (for me): Mary Borden. An eyewitness, intelligent, gifted, observant, worked as a nurse at the Somme; daughter of a Chicago millionaire, she had also paid for the hospital to be constructed. There are five poems about the War in her book The Forbidden Zone.[3] The first, The Hill, begins with what we quickly realise is a destabilising sarcasm:
“From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the gorgeous, the superhuman and monstrous landscape of the superb exulting war.
There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy creatures.
There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels or men.
The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.”
She sees tanks, “Obscene crabs, armoured toads, big as houses,” and a turbaned black man riding a horse while driving a German prisoner “as one drives an animal to market”. The three creatures pass in silence into a shadowed valley
“… where the panorama of invisible phantom armies moved, as if swimming.
And as I watched I heard the faint music of bagpipes, and thought that I heard the sound of invisible men marching.”
From her eyrie-like overview, she descends into The Song of the Mud, emphasising her affinity with Walt Whitman and his various Songs, and vivifies the “invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.” This is the mud that gets everywhere, “a slimy inveterate nuisance”, that pollutes food, engines, and guns, and, she asserts, “soaks up the power of armies” and stops the battle (which perhaps it did in the end). The song becomes the hymn:
“This is the hymn of mud; the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies.
It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!”
There is a towering empathy in Borden’s work.
Although he disliked it and considered it dishonest, W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939 resonates with the corrupt atmosphere of the time (and now) and with the evil of impending war. And his Epitaph on a Tyrant is a small masterpiece. But in these days of millions of people in flight, we must turn to Refugee Blues, a chilling evocation of how the vulnerable – particularly at the time (March 1939) – the existentially vulnerable, are rejected:
“Came to a public meeting; speaker got up and said;
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.”
These poor, fleeing people sense Hitler saying that they must die, “O we were in his mind, my dear…”
I started to write above that Mary Borden showed a towering humanity… but, to me, that last word is no longer a symbol of empathic behaviour.
Humanity is a murderous species.
Auden was well ahead of me. He heard birds in the trees, singing easily – “They had no politicians” and
“They weren’t the human race my dear, they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.”
You may be asking: how do these vividly painful poems light up my life?
It’s the wisdom, the understanding.
Hughes imagining a reader demented with the horror.
Larkin warning of innocence and naivety, conjuring a doubly lost world.
Thom Gunn acutely analysing the evil man, giving us his own warning.
Michael Longley living the predicament of ghetto-ised children, taking us to France with his father’s kilt and harmonica, quietly recording the – what? Irony, ambiguity? – of his father’s death for King and Country.
Mary Borden gives us almost surreal yet sharp and graphic reactions to the miserable war-cursed landscape, and to the grotesque, routine, horrifying terror of so many young men drowned in mud. No wonder her next poem questioned Jehovah.
And Auden. A difficult man, yet a gay man who married a woman to help her escape the Germans.
Refugee Blues is wholly transparent, focused, a shattering indictment told with strange, haunting gentleness. We should learn from it.
Gally Maxwell
6 May 2024, updated 7 May.
[1] Fran Brearton (2000) The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley. Oxford, OUP, 56. I wonder a little about this conclusion because the poem makes clear that the airman is not fighting for the country of the Air Force in which he serves, and, as it was for neutral Ireland, the outcome of the war would not directly effect the Irish people: “Those that I guard I do not love; / My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, / No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before.”
[2] Fran Brearton (2000) 26 et seq.
[3] Mary Borden (1929) The Forbidden Zone. London: William Heinemann, Ltd. Poems begin at 75.
See also: W.H. Auden ed. Edward Mendelson (1979) Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber; W.H. Auden (1969) Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber; Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (1963) Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Michael Longley (2006) Collected Poems. London: Cape Poetry. Michael Longley (2011) A Hundred Doors. London: Cape Poetry.
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