Voices of Silence (2 page)

No war in history has produced as much poetry as did the First World War, and with no other war has poetry so much influenced popular perception and understanding of the conflict.

Most anthologies in which we find this poetry have based their selection primarily on literary quality, creating what is now an accepted canon of Great War poetry. This centres on the work of a few important writers whom we think of as the First World War Poets – such men as Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas. Yet these represent only a small part of the nation’s poetic response to the events of those years, and many survivors regretted that the emphasis placed on this work meant that other very different – less literary but, in their view, often more characteristic – responses to the war had been largely ignored. These were the work of less gifted writers who spoke for their own time but in a different way.

A number of excellent general anthologies in recent years have broadened our understanding by including work by these little-known writers – in particular Dominic Hibberd and John Onion’s
Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology
, Martin Stephen’s
Never Such Innocence: Poems of the First World War
and George Walter’s
In Flanders Fields: Poetry of the First World War
. None, however, has concentrated almost exclusively on these poets. It was a wish to redress this imbalance that was the starting point for this book.

My first thought was that perhaps this poetry – much of which could more accurately be described as verse – had been passed over because it was not worth reviving. I soon discovered how wrong I was. Of course, it does not pretend to aspire in quality to the great poetry of the war – to ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ or ‘Strange Meeting’ or ‘At the Team’s Head-Brass’, for example – but what I discovered was a body of rich, exciting, often deeply moving work that complements the established literary canon; the two should be read side by side. Much of the poetry here is the work of men and women who would not normally have considered themselves poets at all, and it is precisely because it does not have to answer to high literary demands that it is often a more immediate, less poetically self-conscious, response to war. Indeed, many of these poems have an even greater immediacy than letters, for they express what was felt without caution or reserve, offering a true insight into the minds of the fighting men.

Typical of this is the characteristic, important and recurring feature that has been little represented in earlier anthologies, and that is humour. Hundreds of comic and comico-tragic poems were written by soldiers to raise the spirits of their comrades and make more bearable the shared tragedy of their suffering. This often juvenile jollity – which, incidentally, reminds us how young so many of these men were – has nothing to do with the much-derided ‘smiling Tommy’ of the newsreels. These verses were not composed to reassure the people at home. They were written by the men for the men. For an outsider, anyone who had not known the full horror of war, to attempt a humorous interpretation of its experience would have been a grotesque insult. For the men themselves, however, such humour was a lifeline, but one established on their own terms. In his poem ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’, Wilfred Owen examines the complexity of this dichotomy, and in its final lines he points to the exclusivity of the soldiers’ brotherhood: ‘These men are worth | Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.’

Sometimes the humour is deeply black, but more often it reflects a determination to make the best of appalling situations. ‘One has to [. . .] hang on to one’s humour like grim death,’ wrote a young officer in August 1915, ‘otherwise I think you are bound to crack.’
¹
Often it is a defence against what Edmund Blunden described as ‘socket-eyed despair’.
²
Those who refused to see what humour could be found, who dragged others down by looking only on the dark side of things, were despised and castigated for lowering morale. It was an approach that soldiers wished to extend beyond the front: ‘the greatest thing you can do for me is to remain cheerful,’ wrote a soldier to his mother.
³
Absurdities of military organisation, farcical situations that erupted even in the midst of battle, are picked up and mocked in a way that any soldier, even today, would immediately recognise. It is, perhaps, the poetical equivalent of Bairnsfather’s Old Bill.

This response to often unspeakable hardship was both a broad characteristic of the British turn of mind of the time and also a particular product of the war itself. Edward de Stein, author of four poems included here, spoke in 1919 of ‘that wonderful spirit of light-heartedness, that perpetual sense of the ridiculous which, even under the most appalling conditions, never seemed to desert the men with whom I was privileged to serve and which indeed seemed to flourish more freely in the mud and rain of the front-line trenches than in the comparative comfort of billets or “cushy jobs”’.
⁴
It is a tribute we find expressed over and over again in contemporary writings; many wondered if it would survive the break-up of the camaraderie that is such an important characteristic of any war.

It is tempting, in a more cynical age, to regard such humour as blind folly, a way of white-washing the truth, something akin to Karl Marx’s opium of the people. But that is to misinterpret its nature. These men knew and understood the reality. They did not take the experience of war lightly. But those who employed humour – and many did not – found in it an almost instinctive mechanism for spiritual and emotional survival. Often it masked fear. Captain, later Lieutenant-Colonel, F.J. Roberts, MC, founding editor of the most famous trench newspaper, the
Wipers Times
, cautioned that the ‘hilarity was more often hysterical than natural’.
⁵
For all its apparent absurdity, it reached into the deep tragedy of war, throwing powerful light on our understanding of how they were able to endure.

Beyond the humour, there are here many expressions of the suffering the men both witnessed and experienced, and of the deep anger many of them felt. By and large, the general disillusionment that we now associate with the First World War was a product of the peace rather than of the war, of broken promises and a sense of betrayal, of a growing realisation of incompetence and of the empty futility of so much of the sacrifice. Many people now find this difficult to understand, but most of those who have worked through contemporary documents – particularly personal documents such as letters and diaries – will endorse this view, as do many modern historians. As I searched through poems written during the war, I found much mockery of the Staff with their insensitive remoteness from the line, but little criticism of the actual military conduct of the war – even Sassoon was careful to exclude this from his protest.
⁶
And there is overwhelming evidence that most men, even as late as 1918, felt that they were fighting for something worthwhile, a cause in which they still believed.

But there was anger that war, with all its suffering, should be accepted as a means of settling international dispute, and against those whose follies and vanities had led to this particular war. And there was a sense of bitterness against those at home who were responsible for its prolongation, who profited from the rich business opportunities it offered and were so often unwilling even to try to understand what they were asking of the serving man and the price that the ordinary soldier was paying for these follies. There was much resentment, too, of conscientious objectors, the despised ‘conshies’ who refused to kill their fellow men and who were seen by many of the soldiers as contemptible shirkers who would live to enjoy freedoms that others had died to achieve. A group of poems in this book is the work of these pacifists, explaining their beliefs and their punishment.

In selecting the poems, I have searched through trench newspapers and hospital gazettes, private scrapbooks and autograph albums, old newspapers, magazines and journals, gift books and collections of poems published in aid of a particular cause, and many slim volumes of single poets’ work that were published during or shortly after the war. I have looked at advertisements, at postcards that were sold on the streets by unemployed ex-servicemen, at In Memoriam notices in local newspapers and at the headstones of war graves. It was my privilege to handle an illicit, handwritten magazine literally sewn together before being passed from cell to cell by jailed conscientious objectors. In the decades since the war, most of these works have been unavailable to the general reader, out of print and accessible only in specialist libraries, museums or newspaper archives.

With a handful of exceptions, I have not knowingly selected any work that describes an event not witnessed or experienced by the writer, give or take the considerations of fantasy and humour – I doubt if anyone ever actually saw a Sentry-pede, and I do not think that Harold met his maker because of the abundance of souvenirs he brought home with him. Gilbert Frankau’s ‘Eyes in the Air’ is a first-person account of aerial combat over the line; Frankau was not in the Royal Flying Corps, but from the trenches he was able to watch dog-fights at first hand. Wilfrid Gibson served in the army in England but did not go overseas; despite this, his response to the accounts of front-line experience that he heard from his fellow-soldiers is so acute that he is thought to be one of the most significant poets of the war. A.A. Milne was not wounded at Loos but he saw active service with those who were – whether or not they were greengrocers from Fulham is open to speculation. C. Fox-Smith’s ‘The Call’ is written by a woman, but accurately expresses the thoughts of many of the men as the end of the war approached. Readers must make up their own minds about the chapter entitled ‘L’Envoi’.

There are poems by writers whom we do not usually associate with war poetry – Gordon Bottomley, John Drinkwater and J.B. Priestley, for example. Sometimes the poet may be well known, but the poem I have chosen is not: Alan Seeger’s ‘I have a Rendezvous with Death’ is found in most anthologies but his ‘On Returning to the Front after Leave’ is not, nor is Geoffrey Dearmer’s fine poem ‘Gommecourt’. There is a single poem, ‘Noon’, by Robert Nichols, a poem I have not found in any other anthology.

The use of Robert Nichols’s poem leads me on to an explanation of the general arrangement of the work. As I began to sort and order the poems I had chosen, it became clear that the most sensible way to assemble them would be to follow a broadly chronological pattern built round times and battles or particular themes: it is within the description of daily life in the trenches that ‘Noon’ finds its place. Gradually the material evolved into the story of the experience of the Great War told in verse by those who were there. Although, as an anthology, it lends itself to dipping, it has been designed as a whole. A few rather better-known poems, like ‘Beaucourt Revisited’ and ‘The General’, have been included for narrative reasons within this design, and a handful of works of a less obvious poetical standard than the rest, such as the text of postcards, are included because they speak powerfully of their time.

One of the richest, and certainly the most fascinating, sources was trench newspapers. We cannot now know how many of these ephemeral publications there were, but most units produced something that was written, sometimes illustrated, and then assembled by their men, often in the most impossible conditions. Fortunately, a number have survived, in the British Library, in regimental museums or in private ownership, but many more must have been lost.

One of the earliest of these was the remarkable
Fifth Gloucester Gazette
, published between 1915 and 1919. As with other notably successful trench publications, a single poet contributed work of remarkable quality – in this case, F.W. Harvey. But the most famous, and most lasting, of these publications was the
Wipers Times
and the newspapers – such as the
Somme-Times
and the
‘Better Times’
– that were its sequels, published between February 1916 and December 1918. A facsimile edition first appeared in 1930 and has been followed by others since. Here, it is Gilbert Frankau who has made the most enduring contribution.

Compared to others, the
Wipers Times
was a relatively sophisticated production. In his Preface to the 1930 facsimile, written in the spring of 1918, the editor tells us that the first number was produced in a wrecked printing house near to the Cloth Hall in Ypres – pronounced Wipers by the British soldiers – which had been discovered by a sergeant who had been a printer in civilian life. ‘There were parts of the building remaining, the rest was on top of the press. The type was all over the country-side. [. . .] Paper was there, ink in plenty, everything in fact except “copy” ’, which the men then set about providing. The editorial ‘den’ was in a rat-infested, water-logged cellar in the old Ypres ramparts. The twelve pages had to be printed one by one, as there were not enough ‘y’s’ and ‘e’s’ to do more than a page at a time. When this original press was shattered by a 5.9 shell, a replacement, ‘a lovely little hand-jigger and a lot more type’, were found near Hell-fire Corner (of all places) and brought back into Ypres so that production could continue. This new, lighter press moved with them wherever they went, the newspaper changing its name as they moved. All but the final number were printed close to the front, on one occasion above ground within 700 yards of the line. ‘Have you ever sat in a trench in the middle of a battle and corrected proofs?’ asked Roberts. ‘Try it.’
⁷
Only the edition that was in production at the opening of the March offensive of 1918 had to be abandoned, because of thoughtless enemy activity.

Other trench newspapers were more primitive – often no more than a single folded sheet.
The Spud
was typed and then duplicated, as was
Depot Review
, which was entirely the work of private soldiers. The altogether more ambitious compilation,
The Anzac Book
, was written and drawn, again largely by private soldiers, during the closing weeks of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Unusually, the idea for this publication had come from a member of the Staff who set up a production committee on the peninsular and then asked for contributions. It was also unusual in being intended for a broader readership – not only the men in the trenches but also those at home. The editor was Australia’s official war correspondent, the noted C.E.W. Bean of the
Sydney Morning Herald
. What was grandly described as his editorial office was situated in a dug-out overlooking Anzac cove.