We have an extended knowledge of the war. A collection of stuff thrust into our faces that over time has left us in its wake with a very blurry, mixed and confusing collage: some facts from school; a crossover in history and English, overlapping into geography sometimes, art and drama. It is patchy and always changing. We visit museums; we see images, read letters. The media fills in the gaps with the help from our imaginations, but that is merged with cinematic interpretations. The war for my younger brother probably looks like a scene from Call of Duty, where he can lift up a digital computerized barrel and find himself a first-aid pack. And then there’s what my beloved nanna talks to me about, sitting in her chair in her furry slippers, sipping on a teacup and saucer of chalky coffee, the photograph of her father, proud in uniform, by her side. That helps too.
But rarely do we hear a voice. A woman’s voice. A woman voice wanting. Removed but also so clinging. And how I never came across this at school, a girls’ school, is beyond me. Because it says something more personal and immediately political about a war than I have previously been exposed to. I would only have to read: ‘In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting,’ or, my favourite stanza:
Was there a scrap or ploy in which you, the boy,
Could better me? You could not climb higher,
Ride straighter, run as quick (and to smoke made you sick)
. . . But I sit here, and you’re under fire.
to gain a sense of the humans who lived this. I would have identified on a deeper level – the anxiety, the frustration, the loss, the heartache – as someone who has a brother and would have felt exactly the same.
MANY SISTERS TO MANY BROTHERS
When we fought campaigns (in the long Christmas rains)
With soldiers spread in troops on the floor,
I shot as straight as you, my losses were as few,
My victories as many, or more.
And when in naval battle, amid cannon’s rattle,
Fleet met fleet in the bath,
My cruisers were as trim, my battleships as grim,
My submarines cut as swift a path.
Or, when it rained too long, and the strength of the strong
Surged up and broke a way with blows,
I was as fit and keen, my fists hit as clean,
Your black eye matched my bleeding nose.
Was there a scrap or ploy in which you, the boy,
Could better me? You could not climb higher,
Ride straighter, run as quick (and to smoke made you sick)
. . . But I sit here, and you’re under fire.
Oh, it’s you that have the luck, out there in blood and muck:
You were born beneath a kindly star;
All we dreamt, I and you, you can really go and do,
And I can’t, the way things are.
In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting
A hopeless sock that never gets done.
Well, here’s luck, my dear; – and you’ve got it, no fear;
But for me . . . a war is poor fun.
Rose Macaulay
VIRGINIA MCKENNA – Actress, author and wildlife campaigner
Why is it that some poems make you catch your breath? Bring sudden tears? This one does that for me. Each time I read it. Perhaps it defines, describes, in such a poignant, piercing way, that there really is no space between the old and the young. Everyone has a mother, as Teresa Hooley says, and the old veteran was once the child she holds on her knee so tenderly, and with such fearful anticipation of what might lie ahead.
There have been many poems written about war and death and suffering. But this one, in its heart-breaking simplicity, touches my heart beyond imagining.
A WAR FILM
I saw,
With a catch of the breath and the heart’s uplifting,
Sorrow and pride,
the ‘week’s great draw’ –
The Mons Retreat;
The ‘Old Contemptibles’ who fought, and died,
The horror and the anguish and the glory.
As in a dream,
Still hearing machine-guns rattle and shells scream,
I came out into the street.
When the day was done,
My little son
Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,
Naked upon my knee.
How could he know
The sudden terror that assaulted me? . . .
The body I had borne
Nine moons beneath my heart,
A part of me . . .
If, someday,
It should be taken away
To war. Tortured. Torn.
Slain.
Rotting in No Man’s Land, out in the rain –
My little son . . .
Yet all those men had mothers, every one.
How should he know
Why I kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his
name?
He thought that I was daft.
He thought it was a game,
And laughed, and laughed.
Teresa Hooley
KATE MOSSE – Novelist and playwright
At the time of the First World War, Rudyard Kipling was a fabulously successful and popular British writer of short stories and adventure novels for children, such as The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English writer ever to be honoured in this way, and was invited to be the Poet Laureate (though he turned that down!). But Kipling was also a dazzling and imaginative poet, admired for his rhythm and metre, for his outstanding ability to tell a story in verse and for his ability to write about huge issues – war, empire, relationships between people from different parts of the world, faith – and also about very personal emotions.
This poem is a mixture of both. Kipling wrote it after the death of his beloved and only son John (known as Jack) at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. Jack was only eighteen and had been in the British Army for just two weeks when he was reported injured and missing in action. Kipling and his wife went to France and searched desperately, urgently, for their son in local villages and field hospitals. They never found him or discovered what had happened to him. Jack’s name appears on the Loos Memorial, one of 20,000 young men who have no known grave. Later, Kipling became involved with the War Graves Commission, no doubt in part as a way to cope with his grief.
The Battle of Loos took place between 25 September and 14 October 1915, and was one of the largest British-French offensives of the First World War. It was also the first time the British Army used poison gas.
In this beautiful, short poem, Kipling doesn’t write directly of his own experience, but rather imagines another grieving father seeking news of his missing son, perhaps drowned at sea. The emotions are of loss and courage, and the imagery is nautical – the wind and the waves, rather than the mud and gas of the Western Front – but the poem stands as poignant and permanent a memorial as anything built of stone or marble.
MY BOY JACK
‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’
Not this tide.
‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
‘Has any one else had word of him?’
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
‘Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?’
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind –
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
Rudyard Kipling
SHIRLEY HUGHES – Author and illustrator
John Singer Sargent’s terrifying pictu
re of a staggering line of First World War soldiers who had been blinded in a gas attack haunted me as a child. The Great War, as it was called then, cast a long and terrible shadow over our cosy, protected early childhood before the Second World War came to shatter it. To us it was the equivalent of the Holocaust. Many fathers of my school friends had served in it; some had returned without an arm or a leg, or silently struggling with some deep, unhealed scar of the mind.
Yet the imagery of that war fascinated me. There was little explicit horror. In the illustrated magazines that covered the events, old copies of which still lay about, many of the scenes were drawn by war artists rather than photographed. They concentrated on upbeat morale-boosting pictures for the folks at home. The coverage was highly censored. What came to us, in the early 1930s, was a kind of hushed, overwhelming sadness; a terrible thing, better not talked about but always there. During the two minutes of silence on Armistice Day everything, even the traffic in the streets, stopped as people snapped to attention with bowed heads.
The imagery of war memorials was everywhere. There was hardly a village in the British Isles without one. There were the more elaborate ones – monuments with noble memoirs, bandaged heads lifted up heroically over a dead comrade – or a more generalized personification of grief: a mourning Niobe in full Art Nouveau kitsch drapery. Some, by far the most moving, were simply tablets with lists of names, in post offices, in railway stations, in offices, shops and town halls, of local men who had given their lives.
One realistic depiction, which I had never actually seen but knew of from reproduction, was C. Sargeant Jagger’s life-size bronzes of real gunners on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. One is dead, covered with a cape. The others stand; their steadfast and uncharismatic poses make a heart-stopping impact. These are real soldiers and therefore so much more heroic.
Turn to here to see one of Jagger’s memorials.
Even during the Second World War the images of war we saw in newsreels and newspapers were heavily censored. It was thought that the reality would depress morale. Now we see the cruelty and barbarity of war almost daily on television. This saturation is, I imagine, why the most telling and publicly acclaimed monuments to the dead of recent wars are those in which unbearable grief is expressed in stark, abstract simplicity, like Maya Ying Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The wall of black Indian granite on which the names are carved – over 58,000 of them – is so highly polished that the living, filing silently past, are reflected in it like ghosts.
Turn to here to see Gassed
JON SNOW – Journalist
I first had Rupert Brooke’s emblematic poem ‘The Soldier’ read to me on Remembrance Sunday when I was eight years old. I was a chorister at Winchester Cathedral, and that day was my first awakening to the scale of the war that my parents and teachers had lived through.
There was a sombre romance in Brooke’s tragic death of a fever in 1915 on his way to the Gallipoli landings. The discovery that he was only twenty-eight when he died, and yet had written so tellingly of his understanding of death and burial in a foreign field, seized my innocent heart.
The Gallipoli landings took place between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1918. The British attacked Turkish fortresses (Turkey was in alliance with Germany) in the hope of ending their participation in the war. Instead, the campaign was a very bloody and public failure.
As boys, we revisited that poem often. Winchester Cathedral was, and remains, festooned with memorials to thousands who died in war in foreign fields. Hence Brooke’s thoughts had a poignant resonance as we trooped in cassocks and surplices around the transepts of that exceptional building.
In later life, ‘The Soldier’ and the memory of Brooke have given me a particular perspective on modern wars that I have had to report. Looking at the poem now, I’m struck that a not particularly bright small boy of eight found so much within its lines.
THE SOLDIER
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke
SIR ANDREW MOTION – Poet
MISSING
When my grandfather (my father’s father) died in 1980 he left me his desk – a dark, heavy, Victorian partner’s desk, far too wide for the terraced house I lived in then, and for every house I’ve lived in since. I liked it but it belonged to a different age; it implied expectations I could never share.
But never mind. In the middle drawer, put there by the last and nicest of my grandfather’s girlfriends, was the photograph album he had kept for the first half of his life – from his schooldays in the early 1900s through to the 1950s. This was a much more interesting thing to inherit, a collection of pictures in which difference became a fascination, not a problem.
Most absorbing of all were the pictures he had taken with some kind of Box Brownie immediately after the outbreak of war in August 1914. Tiny deckle-edged things, small enough to make me lean forward and screw up my eyes. To hold my breath so nothing escaped me. There he was sitting beside his father on the steps of their house near Edgehill: my great-grandfather slouched, weary and wary; my grandfather perky and upright in his brand-new uniform. Then in the same uniform, the uniform of the Warwickshire Yeomanry, and this time learning how to dig trenches – in Newbury of all places. Then not him but his beautiful chestnut hunter, the horse he took with him when he was posted to Alexandria, and which drowned when its transport ship was sunk by a torpedo. Then him again: ashore now, on the Egyptian coast where he was billeted. In a village called Glymenopoulo.
But what’s he doing there? Not training – or not in the pictures, anyway. Having fun. Strolling along the sand with a girl on his arm, shielding her from the sun with a pale silk parasol. The girl’s wearing a black bathing costume, and so is he by the look of it – but it’s hard to see properly, the pictures are so small, and so dark. Yes, her hair is wet and so is his. They’ve been swimming together; now they’re sauntering back to a bar for a drink, for a bite of lunch, for some supper.
And what’s the date? ‘Summer 1915’. That’s during the Gallipoli landings, when thousands of Allied troops were killed and thousands more were invalided out – many to Alexandria. On the next page of the album I can see the ships, a procession of them scattered over the shining sea like dots and dashes in a morse code message. And on the page after that: acres of dusty ground covered in triangular white tents, where some of the wounded were treated.
My grandfather went to see these tents and these wounded men; he must have done; these are his pictures. Then he went back to the seaside again and the girl. Or to another girl like her. What did he think? The pictures don’t say. The camera just shut its eye and turned to the next thing. A week later and he was gone himself – into the desert riding a ‘lugger’ he bought from an Australian; into Palestine, where he fought from 1915 until 1917 and the army sent him to Flanders.
I lost the album a few years back; mislaid it, rather, in one of life’s upheavals. But the pictures breathe in my head as if I long ago stepped into them and made them a part of my life. As if I can hear the ships hooting when they come into harbour, and the voices crying as the men are carried ashore, and the silence as my grandfather turns away to walk arm in arm on the sand for a while longer, and p
uts up his parasol to shade the head of his pretty girl, and together they watch the sun go down.
NICHOLAS HYTNER – Theatre director
I’m afraid I’m going to lower the tone, because I can’t get this passage from Marcel Proust’s amazing book In Search of Lost Time out of my head.
Proust never went to the front. He spent the war working on his phenomenally long novel, and in the last of its seven volumes he gives an account of what life was like in Paris, only an hour away from some of the worst of the bloodshed. The reason I’ve chosen this passage is that it puts the pity and the terror of the great literature that emerged from the trenches into sharp perspective.
In Proust’s Paris, the fashionable parties continue throughout the war. People pretend to care, but in the end what really concerns them is their own pleasure. Monsieur de Charlus barely thinks about how close the Germans are, spending most nights up to no good at all. And who can read about Madame Verdurin’s special croissant without a shudder of recognition? A century after the war began, we see new horrors unfold on our television screens almost every day. Our hearts go out to the victims, but how long do we focus on their suffering before we start to think about what we want for breakfast?