FROM ‘THE KING’S PILGRIMAGE’
And there was neither paved highway,
Nor secret path in the wood,
But had borne its weight of the broken clay
And darkened ’neath the blood.
Father and mother they put aside,
and the nearer love also –
An hundred thousand men who died
whose graves shall no man know.
Rudyard Kipling
BALI RAI – Author
Often, as writers, we come across inspiration by accident. That’s what happened before I wrote my novel City of Ghosts (2009), which is partly set during the Great War. I was reading a book called Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder and came across a passage that surprised me. The author stated that one third of all the troops that fought for Britain during the First World War were from India. I was so shocked that I immediately started to research the topic. Not only was Mr Winder correct; apparently it was common knowledge. Not for me, it wasn’t.
Back at school, we studied the Great War in history lessons, and the fantastic work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in English. I was particularly taken by Sassoon’s poem ‘Dreamers’ – a piece that opened my eyes to the everyday human tragedy of war. However, the one thing I wasn’t taught about was the involvement of so many Indian troops – particularly Sikhs, which is my family’s religion. I read letters from troops, learned all about the horrors of trench warfare, yet not once was I shown pictures of men who resembled my grandfather, walking into battle along French roads.
So, on commencing my research, I discovered two photographs that, in particular, inspired me to write my novel. The first was of Sikh troops marching in formation along a road in north-eastern France, close to Lille.
This image shows a local woman reaching across a Sikh soldier, possibly pinning something to his uniform. The man in question reminded me of my maternal grandfather, and so many other Sikh men. How strange a meeting it must have been – both for the Indian soldier and the local woman. How odd for her to see so many turban-wearing, bearded Sikhs marching through her town.
The image directly inspired passages in my novel, and a romance between my injured Sikh protagonist and his English nurse. It made me consider the everyday interaction between foreign troops and local people, much as Sassoon’s poem framed soldiers on a more personal, human level in my mind.
The second image I found was equally important. It shows the town of Neuve Chapelle after a battle during March 1915. Most of the centre is desolate, charred and broken. Amidst the ruins, however, stands a crucifix – the church that once housed it completely destroyed.
This photograph inspired one of my favourite passages in City of Ghosts. The crucifix astounds my protagonist, Bissen Singh, weary after battle and charged with clearing out any remaining enemy troops. He wonders at its significance – and is reminded of his half-crazed grandmother and her tales:
There were signs of God in everything, she said: in the warmth of a stranger’s smile, and the flight of birds and the taste of a mango. In the waves of butterflies that erupted during the spring, and in the fat, life-giving droplets of rain that soaked you to the skin and made the gulleys and paths run with water.
Indian culture and Indian religions are, at their heart, fatalistic. The everyday things in life, and those bigger events such as birth, death and war, are meant to be – they are fate. For religious Indians, all incidents in life are the will of God. In that sense, the crucifix image linked directly to my protagonist’s way of thinking and his belief system. In the midst of senseless slaughter and unprecedented destruction, Bissen saw a sign of hope. A sign that his God was watching over him and those he fought alongside. The image helped to shape my character. Without it, I’m not sure I would have written about Bissen at all.
Both these photographs, and others, encouraged me to reconnect with the First World War. I left school a long time ago, and it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in writing about. That changed when I encountered these photographs. They lit a passion inside me, and pushed me to write about this shared British and Indian heritage – a period overlooked by far too many people. The historical link between India and Britain may be complex and multilayered, but it is also strong. The involvement of so many Indian troops during the war proved it. My British Asian (rather than Indian) heritage and culture, today, proves it. To have the chance to write about and explore that link, and to introduce a bit of hidden history to young-adult readers, was very welcome. That photographs taken in 1915 motivated me was serendipitous. Funny old thing, this inspiration malarkey . . .
SIR ROGER BANNISTER – Athlete and neurologist
My wife’s mother joined the Queen Alexandra’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and her first task was to take a troop of women around the country to commandeer hay from the farmers for the horses in France. Some tried to trick her by selling her straw.
She had a horse called Petrushka, and it could allegedly distinguish the difference in sound between an enemy aircraft and ours, and so the horse would come off the road towards the trees if the planes were German.
Kitchener’s personal message to each British soldier
This clipping was found amongst her papers, cut from a Toronto newspaper in 1914. She had been working there, but then returned to England and became Captain – a deputy administrator in Queen Alexandra’s Army Auxiliary Corps.
My mother-in-law was later awarded the MBE; her brother became Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, second only to Alan Brooke, having survived the First World War. Her other brother was killed on the Somme in August 1916.
MICHELLE MAGORIAN – Author
Sadly, many young boys had for years been encouraged to believe that the pinnacle of glory was to kill ‘the enemy’ for their country. Rudyard Kipling powerfully sums up this brainwashing in an epitaph:
COMMON FORM
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
Their deaths were far from glorious. Many of them, some only teenagers, died alone in the darkness of a muddy field, while in England children were encouraged to buy a tonic called Phosferine to send to the soldiers:
Gunner R. Mackintosh of the Heavy Branch Machine – Gun Corps, British Expeditionary Force, who was in the first advance of the tanks into the German lines
Taken from the December 1915 copy of My Magazine, a children’s paper edited by Arthur Mee
Meanwhile, thousands of these same soldiers were being used as decoys so that the enemy’s attention was occupied while other troops manoeuvred themselves to a different area unchallenged. Carl Sandburg, in his poem ‘Buttons’, couldn’t have put it more bluntly:
BUTTONS
I have been watching the war map slammed up for
advertising in front of the newspaper office.
Buttons – red and yellow buttons – blue and black buttons –
are shoved back and forth across the map.
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one
inch west.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
death in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
to us?
Carl Sandburg
Risking their lives to care for these mutilated and shell-shocked men were the nurses. Under fire, they brought the wounded to the hospital ships off the coast of Gallipoli, worked on the front line and in casualty stations in France, or endured excessive temperatur
es in filthy disease-ridden tents in Salonika and the Middle East. They carried out new medical treatments on the survivors and comforted the dying, and they did it with calmness and dignity.
One of the most famous of these nurses was Edith Cavell. Her last words before she was executed were: ‘I realize that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’
MARIELLA FROSTRUP – Journalist
These days we are far more familiar with images on screens than words on a page, and in this devastating poem Carol Ann Duffy uses a familiar device, the rewind button, to miraculously breathe life back into the millions of young lives lost in that terrible war. By refocusing us on what could have been, zooming in, not on the all too familiar images of slaughter but on the bittersweet possibilities of those lives unlived, she creates a heartbreaking vision of what should have been their destiny.
Turn to here for another poem by Carol Ann Duffy.
I’m particularly compelled by women’s perspective on war; seldom instigators, or until recently active combatants, they have the capacity to shed a bright, unforgiving light on the hidden corners of the human tragedy. The fate of those brave young men on the battlefields is one cost of war, but also the millions of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, wives and girlfriends left wringing their hands, mourning boys they loved and trying to keep alive the memory of the sacrifices made in our name.
LAST POST
This is a line from Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Turn to here to read the whole poem.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud . . .
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home–
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too–
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert–
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer,
good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.
Carol Ann Duffy
JOHN BOYNE – Novelist
I’ve written two novels set during the First World War: The Absolutist (2011) and Stay Where You Are and Then Leave (2013), the former written for adult readers, the latter for younger.
It’s a period that continues to fascinate me, perhaps because I still understand it less than I do the Second World War, which has a recognizable evil in the form of Adolf Hitler and an unparalleled atrocity in the Holocaust. The First World War, however, is not as easy to define or understand; I think most people would struggle even to name the main antagonists.
When we think of the First World War, we think of location more than politics. We think of the trenches and the barbed wire. We think of poppies and dead young bodies scattered across no man’s land. And, if we are truly concerned with acts of bravery, we think of conscientious objectors.
Between researching and writing these two novels, I came across a poem by the former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, titled ‘The Death of Harry Patch’.
Turn to here for Sir Andrew Motion’s own selection.
Patch, the last fighting Tommy, was conscripted in 1916, fought at the Battle of Passchendaele and died, the final surviving British soldier from the First World War, at the age of 111 in 2009.
Motion’s poem achieves its great power through the image of hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers rising from the ‘ruined ground’, falling into line with each other while leaving a single space to complete their number: Harry Patch – ‘but this is him now, running quick-sharp along the duckboards’. There’s a sense that when all the soldiers are finally reunited, unity is achieved. And completeness. And even, perhaps, peace.
THE DEATH OF HARRY PATCH
When the next morning eventually breaks,
a young Captain climbs onto the fire step,
knocks ash from his pipe then drops it
still warm into his pocket, checks his watch,
and places the whistle back between his lips.
At 6.00 hours precisely, he gives the signal,
but today nothing that happens next happens
according to plan. A very long and gentle note
wanders away from him over the ruined ground
and hundreds of thousands of dead who lie there
immediately rise up, straightening their tunics
before falling in as they used to do, shoulder
to shoulder, eyes front. They have left a space
for the last recruit of all to join them: Harry Patch,
one hundred and eleven years old, but this is him
now, running quick-sharp along the duckboards.
When he has taken his place, and the whole company
are settled at last, their padre appears out of nowhere,
pausing a moment in front of each and every one
to slip a wafer of dry mud onto their tongues.
Andrew Motion
HOWARD GOODALL – Composer
I chose this beautiful, haunting poem by Canadian military doctor and poet John McCrae as the text of the sixth movement, Dies Irae, in my Eternal Light: A Requiem (2008); I did so, not just because it is full of a deep and personal compassion for the fallen (it was written just after McCrae had buried a friend), but because, unusually, it is written as if the dead themselves are speaking from beyond their graves.
It seemed to me that singing would be a perfect way to give them voice a century or so later. This poem is one of the origins of the tradition of commemorating the huge human losses of that and subsequent wars with poppies, as McCrae was one of many at the time who noticed that poppies grew so quickly from the graves of soldiers in First World War Flanders. When Eternal Light: A Requiem was first performed in its dance version by Rambert, the dance company, it was portrayed with astonishing delicacy in a deep, red glow of light, the bodies of the dancers representing not just the souls of the departed but the gently swaying poppies above their resting place.
IN FLANDERS FIELDS
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUCHESS OF CORNWALL
My three great-uncles were all killed at the Somme within six weeks of each
other. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for my great-grandparents to receive such devastating news. It is so hard for us, a century later, to understand what the soldiers of the Great War and their families went through.
For this anthology I have chosen ‘The Christmas Truce’ by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. It is about the spontaneous, unofficial ceasefire between British and German troops along the Western Front on Christmas Day. Huddled in flooded, freezing trenches; facing each other over the hideous shell-holes and barbed wire of no man’s land, it was a moment when both sides recognized what united them as men, rather than what divided them as soldiers.
Poetry is like time travel, and poems take us to the heart of the matter. This poem made me cry. It is such a touching and perceptive evocation – through its deceptively simple language and powerful imagery – of the truth of life in the trenches, and of that moment of hope when the sounds of war were silenced.
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE
Christmas Eve in the trenches of France,
the guns were quiet.
The dead lay still in No Man’s Land –
Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank . . .
The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.
Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel,
sparkled and winked.
A boy from Stroud stared at a star
to meet his mother’s eyesight there.